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Weekend Roundup [150 - 159]

Sunday, December 25, 2016

A day late from the usual Sunday, but having missed last week, I figured the exercise would be worthwhile. Like our trash collection, we're running a day late this week.

Growing up we always had a special dinner on Christmas Eve, then gathered around the tree in the living room and opened presents. I gave up on shopping and presents after my parents died in 2000 -- partly, I suppose, because we moved to Wichita in 1999 to be closer to my family, but after doing serious shopping I got sick and missed that last Christmas. We tried to keep the tradition going, but it fizzled out when my brother and his family moved away. The only thing I kept was the Christmas Eve dinner, which I've ever since subjected my sister and her son to. I rustled up a bit pot of paella last night, with a lobster, some shrimp and scallops instead of the usual clams. I figured I'd do some tapas on the side, but didn't come up with much: potatoes with tuna and egg, a white bean salad, a pisto (onions, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, cooked down to a paste), sauteed mushrooms in garlic sauce, some olives, a loaf of "bake it yourself" garlic bread. Per a tradition that only started after we returned to Wichita, I made date pudding (topped with caramel sauce and whipped cream) for dessert. I was feeling pretty depressed, but the sensation vanished as soon as I started cooking. That's pretty much all I have to show for 2017, but it feels like I'm accomplishing something when I do it.

Biggest story from the last couple weeks were the Republican tax bill: a massive giveaway to corporations, proprietors who can take advantage of the "pass-through income" provisions, and to the growth and consolidation of aristocracy, and eventually a drain on the economy and an excuse for cutting back on actually useful services the government provides. But also very important are the end of FCC "net neutrality" rules and the latest round of sanctions against North Korea. Of course, the latter could instantly jump to the head of the list.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important political stories of the week [Dec. 22]: Congress passed a major tax cut; The government won't shut down for Christmas; Affordable Care Act signups remained robust; Republicans turned on Robert Mueller; and The 4 biggest policy stories of the week, explained [Dec. 15]: A Democrat won a Senate election in Alabama: Doug Jones; Republicans wrote their tax bill; Sexual harassment accusations kept rolling Congress; Net neutrality. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • The real cost of the Republican tax bill: Argues that the models showing revenues down by $1-1.5 trillion will likely be proven low, not least because IRS enforcement under Trump is likely to be slack. I would add that actual revenues in Kansas have consistently fallen short of expectations, because the Brownback cuts allowed unanticipated scams.

  • The tax cut expectations game.

  • What "affordable housing" really means.

  • We're witnessing the wholesale looting of America:

    Throughout the 2016 campaign, the political class talked a lot about "norms" and how Donald Trump was violating them all. He brushed off fact-checkers, assailed the media, went on Twitter tirades against his critics, and dabbled in racism. Since taking office, his norm busting has spread. Members of Congress who under other circumstances might be constrained by shame, custom, or the will of their constituents have learned from Trump's election that you can get away with more than we used to think.

    Norm erosion is real, and it matters. . . . These scholars are all considering deep, long-lasting differences in cultural norms, but we also know from experience that norms can sometimes shift dramatically in unusual circumstances. Sometimes a blackout or other disaster prompts a few people who would ordinarily be too cautious to break store windows in broad daylight to become more brazen. And the normal course of ordinary life flips into reverse, as those with some inclination toward bad acts recognize a moment of impunity and grab what they can, while those who would ordinarily be invested in upholding order are afraid and stay inside. The sheer quantity of bad acts makes it impossible for anyone to hold anyone accountable. Soon, a whole neighborhood can be in ruins.

    Or a whole country. . . .

    It takes a lot more than Donald Trump to orchestrate the kind of feeding frenzy that's currently playing out in Washington. Nothing about this would work if not for the fact that hundreds of Republican Party members of Congress wake up each morning and decide anew that they are indifferent to the myriad financial conflicts of interest in which Trump and his family are enmeshed. Moral and political responsibility for the looting ultimately rests on the shoulders of the GOP members of Congress who decided that the appropriate reaction to Trump's inauguration was to start smashing and grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their donors rather than uphold their constitutional obligations.

  • Why Trump's tax cuts won't be repealed.

  • Republicans are on tilt with their super-unpopular tax bill.

  • Collective ownership of the means of production.

• Dean Baker: Bubbles: Are They Back?

  Should we be concerned about a bubble now? Stock prices and housing prices are both high by historical standards. The ratio of stock prices-to-trend corporate earnings is more than 27-to-1; this compares to a long-term average of 15-to-1.

  House prices are also high by historic standards. Inflation-adjusted house prices are still well below their bubble peaks, but are about 40 percent above their long-term average.

  Baker also wrote: Diverting Class Warfare Into Generational Warfare: Round LVIII; e.g.:

  It is also important to understand that government action was at the center of this upward redistribution. Without government-granted patent monopolies for Windows and other Microsoft software, Bill Gates would probably still be working for a living.

  We spent over $450 billion on prescription drugs in 2017. Without government-granted patent monopolies we would probably have spent less than $80 billion. The difference of $370 billion is equal to an increase of a 5.0 percentage point increase in the Social Security payroll tax. But the generational warriors don't want anyone talking about how much money our children to pay drug companies with government-granted patent monopolies.

  Baker is a bit confused about Microsoft -- patents played at most a small role in building its monopoly -- the late 1990s antitrust case which Microsoft lost covered much of this -- but copyrights are essential for maintaining it.

• Zack Beauchamp: We are sleepwalking toward war with North Korea.

• Sean Illing: How the baby boomers -- not millennials -- screwed America: Interview with Bruce Gibney, author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, which looks to be pretty awful. I don't doubt that various age cohorts grow up with different experiences, but there has always been more variation within a generation than change from one to the next. It's not that Gibney is unobservant -- he identifies Ronald Reagan's 1980 election as the turning point from which today's rot stemmed -- but he pairs his superficial groupings with clichéd analysis and bogus measures (especially the growth of debt). Gibney, like so many reactionaries from the 1950s on, blamed postwar affluence for breeding a generation of selfish ingrates who lack the social solidarity bred in their parents by depression and war. As Gibney puts it:

  I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.

  This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.

  Gibney's argument might be more interesting if he focused on things that were truly new and widespread, like that "boomers" were the first cohort to grow up with television and its mass consumer advertising, with news presented more in images than in words, with world travel reduced from months or weeks to hours, with science promising greater control of nature but also raising the spectre of extinction. Maybe some people responded to such sweeping change by becoming sociopaths, but (for a while, at least) the opposite seemed to be happening: in the late '60s and early '70s, the "boomers" were in the forefront of movements for the environment, sexual equality, for consumer rights, for civil rights and against war. You can argue that the new left was too individualistic and too nonchalant about power, and that those weaknesses made it easier for conservative reaction to seize power -- and beset the country with all the ills Gibney decries. But the fact that Bill Clinton, GW Bush, and Donald Trump were all born in 1946 doesn't make them representative of a generation. Indeed, they were clearly exceptional, carefully selected by unrepresentative powers.

  Nothing actual in this piece about "millennials" -- one's political hopes for them (e.g., Steven Olikara: Here's one reason to be optimistic about politics: Millennials in office) lie not in generational change but in the fact that thanks to the conservative reaction they've been so severely screwed. But that only changes if they recognize the real culprits.

• Ezra Klein: "An orgy of serious policy discussion" with Paul Krugman.

• Mike Konczal: "Neoliberalism" isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. Good explanation of the word, if you wind up stuck needing to use it.

• Kevin M Kruse: The Second Klan: Review of Linda Gordon's book, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition.

• German Lopez: The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment: Three charts here, mapping the tendencies of people "least satisfied" with economics, "most sexist," and "most denying of racism" to vote for Trump. The latter two are highly polarized, as well they should be: Trump was blatantly racist and sexist, especially compared to his opponent, and his campaign actively polarized people on those issues, so of course sexists and racists (not uncommonly the same people) voted for him overwhelmingly. Still, to say he won because he appealed to racism you have to quantify how large that voter share was. Given that racists were already highly aligned with the Republican Party it's hard to see a lot of movement on that score, not that were was none. "Economic dissatisfaction" is another story: that the "least satisfied" tilted toward Trump at all is the surprise -- really, a complete breakdown in the Democratic Party's messaging, all the more damning given how easy it should have been to depict Trump as the poster boy for exorbitant greed and privilege. The underlying facts have never been in doubt. That we keep rehashing them has more to do with politics. Sanders supporters were quick to identify the failed economic hopes of the white lower classes because that's one thing their program addressed and could convert into the additional votes necessary to beat Trump and the Republicans. Diehard Clinton supporters like the racism narrative, because it shifts blame from the candidate to the "deplorable" voters.

• Premilla Nadasen: Extreme poverty returns to America.

• Rebecca Solnit: Don't let the alt-right hijack #MeToo for their agenda.

• Matt Stoller: What is net neutrality? It protects us from corporate power.

• Matt Taibbi: Bob Corker Facing Ethics Questions? What a Surprise: "The Tennessee senator's financial success has been one of Washington's open questions for years." Corker flip-flopped on the tax bill, first voting against it because it would increase the deficit, then voting for it even though its impact on the deficit hasn't changed (but the joint committee added a break on real estate taxes that evidently saves Corker millions of dollars). More on Corker: Mary Papenfuss: #CorkerKickback Turns Up the Flame Under Senator for His Tax Vote Switch. Paul Krugman, in Passing Through to Corruption, also mentions Corker:

  Senator Bob Corker, citing concerns about the deficit, was the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill. Now, however, he says he will vote for a final version that is no better when it comes to fiscal probity. What changed?

  Well, one thing that changed was the insertion of a provision that wasn't in the Senate bill: Real estate companies were added to the list of "pass-through" businesses whose owners will get sharply lower tax rates. These pass-through provisions are arguably the worst feature of the bill. They will open the tax system to a huge amount of gaming, of exploiting legal loopholes to avoid tax.

  But one thing they will also do, thanks to that last-minute addition, is give huge tax breaks to elected officials who own a lot of income-producing real estate -- officials like Donald Trump and, yes, Bob Corker.

• Todd VanDerWerff: Disney acquiring Fox means big, scary things for film and TV: "Here are five reasons the deal is terrifying -- and only one of them is increased media consolidation."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

The Democrats in Congress, especially the leadership, have had a really bad week, and I fear they've inflicted grave wounds on themselves. John Conyers and Al Franken have resigned after enormous pressure from the party leadership, leaving the party with fewer votes, summarily ending two notable careers. I especially blame Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer. Back in 2016 Hillary Clinton like to posit a "Commander-in-Chief Test," figuring she'd compare favorably to Donald Trump by emphasizing her own fondness for military adventures -- I think her hawkishness was a big part of why she lost, but my point isn't to rehash her delusions. Rather, what we saw last week was a "Shop Steward" test, which Pelosi and Shumer utterly failed. They let a little media pressure blow them over. More importantly, they failed to insist on due process, on the most basic principles of traditional American justice, and in doing so they sacrificed political standing and insulted and demeaned the voters who had elected Conyers and Franken.

Supposedly, one thing the Democrats hope to achieve in sacking Conyers and Franken is "the moral high ground" -- demonstrating their superior sensitivity to and concern for victims of sexual misconduct (pretty broadly defined). In theory, this will pay off in defeating Roy Moore in next week's Alabama Senate race and/or in putting pressure on Donald Trump to resign. In fact, Trump was elected president after 19 women accused him of various shades of assault, and after he bragged about as much. While Moore is facing a closer election than Alabama Republicans are used to, he remains the favorite to win Tuesday. And while some Democrats imagine that if Moore wins the Senate will refuse to seat him, I can't imagine the Republicans sacrificing power like that. Nor, quite frankly, should they. (The only duly elected member I can recall either branch of Congress refusing to seat was Adam Clayton Powell, in a shameful travesty -- although, come to think of it, they did take months before allowing Al Franken to enter.)

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered in politics this week: The tax reform hit some snags ("Senate Republicans appear to have written a corporate AMT provision that they intended to raise a little bit of revenue in a sloppy way that actually raises a ton of revenue and alienates the businesses who were supposed to benefit from a big tax cut"); President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital; Al Franken announced he'll resign; The government will stay open for a couple of weeks. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • We have a trial date: March 19, "the beginning of the trial at which the Justice Department will seek to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner." There is no shortage of good reasons for blocking this merger, and indeed for untangling all of the past mergers between data transit and content companies, although it's surprising to see Trump's DOJ lifting a finger to prevent the further concentration of predatory corporate power.

  • Apple could get a staggering $47 billion windfall from the tax bill:

    What's particularly striking about this windfall is that though Apple has been a fierce advocate for corporate tax reform -- $47 billion is a lot of money after all -- Apple CEO Tim Cook has explained over and over again that shoveling billions into his corporate treasury won't boost his investment spending.

    He already has plenty of cash, but beyond that, when Cook wants Apple to invest more, he borrows the money.

  • Tomorrow's financial crisis today: Points out that less than ten years after the worst recession since the 1930s Trump's administration is working to undermine the Treasury's Office of Financial Research and "let banks take on more risky debt:

    The nature of a banking crisis is you probably won't have one in any given year, regardless of how shoddy your regulatory framework is. As long as asset prices are trending upward, it just doesn't matter. In fact, as long as asset prices are trending upward, a poorly regulated banking sector will be more profitable than a well-regulated one.

    It's all good. Unless things blow up. But if your bad policymaking takes us from a one-in-500 chance of a blow-up in any given year to a one-in-20 chance, you're still in a world where things will probably be fine across even an entire eight-year span in office. Probably.

    Trump has taken a lot of risky bets in his life. And though he's often lost, he's usually been insulated by his inherited wealth and by his very real skill at structuring deals so other people end up holding a lot of the downside. Any presidency inherently has that kind of structure with or without skill. Presidents suffer when they make mistakes, but other people suffer more.

    ?he key phrase here is "as long as asset prices are trending upward." The surest way to keep asset prices rising is to let rich people make and keep more money, which is what happened from the Bush tax cuts forward to 2007-08. What broke then turned out to be pretty simple: a big chunk of those assets were built on subprime mortgages, and the people who signed up for the mortgages weren't able to grow their incomes enough to cover their debts, so they defaulted; meanwhile, the banks had leveraged themselves so much they couldn't cover their losses, so they started to fail in a cascade that threatened to make the "domino theory" look like small potatoes. But the government, especially the Fed, stepped in and pumped several trillions of dollars into the banks to prop them up so they could unwind their losses more gracefully, while the government did very little to help the little people who suffered the brunt of the recession. (I was going to say "virtually nothing," but things like extended unemployment benefits did help keep the recession from matching the desolation caused by the Great Depression.) We're already seeing asset bubbles in things like the stock market. The whole point of Trump's tax cuts and deregulation is to feed this bubble, even though there is no clear way to sustain the trend or to appease the financier's appetite for ever greater profits. Coupled with a massive collapse of business ethics -- this has been growing since the "greed is good" Reagan era, but Trump is an even more shocking role model -- it's only a matter of time before the whole edifice collapses.

  • We need a healthier conversation about partisanship and sexual assault.

  • The tax bill is a tax cut, not a culture war: Pushes back against the idea that Republicans chose targets to "reform" by how much they would hurt "blue states" (the SALT deduction being the obvious example). Shows that the overriding reasoning behind the cuts/reforms is to favor the rich over the poor, regardless of where they may live or do business. Of course, the real cost to poor and working Americans won't appear in scoring the bill -- it will come later in the form of service cuts and the ever-widening chasm between "haves and have-nots."

  • Republicans need Roy Moore to pass their tax bill.

  • Groundbreaking empirical research shows where innovation really comes from.

  • Democrats need to get a grip about the budget deficit: "The tax bill is bad, the debt is fine." ARgues that "Bush's deficits were fine and Trump's will be too" and that "Obama's deficits were way too small."

  • Don't worry about the debt.

• Matthew Cole/Jeremy Scahill: Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter "Deep State" Enemies: Evidently one of Erik Prince's schemes, notably backed by Oliver North. One suspicious point is that the scheme would still report to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, figuring him more loyal to Trump than to the "Deep State" he nominally manages a big chunk of. Also see Aram Roston: Private War: Erik Prince Has H is Eye on Afghanistan's Rare Metals. Evidently the mercenary leader is trying to turn his private army into some sort of modern British East India Company colossus.

• Juliet Eilperin: Uranium firm urged Trump officials to shrink Bears Ears National Monument: Helps explain why Trump and Zinke radically shrunk the borders of the National Monument (see maps). The land still belongs to the federal government, but will now be managed by the Bureau of Land Management. For info on what that means, see Adam Federman: This Is How the Trump Administration Gives Big Oil the Keys to Public Lands.

• Tara Golsham: Rep. Trent Franks, who is resigning immediately, offered staffer $5 million to be his baby surrogate: One of the more bizarre stories of recent weeks: Arizona Republican, "a deeply conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the most pro-life members of Congress. Evidently he has that kind of money, and assumes it entitles him to run roughshod over others.

• Jim Kirby: Hillary Clinton's emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69: An analysis of New York Times -- your newspaper or preferred media source may vary (with some never matching that 6-day email window), but for a supposedly sober and serious news source, that's pretty disgusting. One might argue that Hillary's email controversy speaks to her character, but no more so than hundreds or thousands of Donald Trump anecdotes. Even so, you'd think it sensible that news coverage of an election would focus more on likely policies and future scenarios than on past personal quirks. The only excuse I can think of is that today's campaigns are often as shallow as the media covering them -- or at least try to be.

• Rashid Khalidi: After Jerusalem, the US Can No Longer Pretend to Be an Honest Broker of Peace: Actually, that was clear even before Trump ordered the US embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as Khalidi knows damn well -- he's even written a whole book about it: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. What I've yet to see anyone comment on is why the US didn't move the embassy earlier. The basic reason is respect for international law, which as this week's announcement shows has sunken to new lows in Washington. The 1947 UN resolution proposing partition of the British Mandate in Palestine -- a resolution that David Ben-Gurion lobbied fervently for -- called for dividing the Mandate into two states, but keeping Jerusalem separate as an international area. Immediately on declaring independence in 1948, Israel launched a military offensive aimed at expanding on the borders the UN prescribed. The main target of that offensive was Jerusalem, which wound up divided between Israeli and Jordanian forces. In 1967 Israel launched another war and drove Jordan from East Jerusalem and the West Bank -- territories that the UN ordered Israel to return, despite Israel's almost immediate annexation of Jerusalem and environs. Israel's de facto control of Jerusalem has never been squared away with the rulings of international law, so no country with respect for international law has conceded Israel's claim. "Until now," you might say, but the US has increasingly shown contempt for international law, and this is just one more example.

  By the way, a headline in the Wichita Eagle today: "After US decision on Jerusalem, Gaza protests turn deadly." First line of article explains how: "Two Hamas militants were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Saturday after rocket fire from the enclave hit an Israeli town, as the death toll in violence linked to President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital rose to four." No damage was reported from the Gazan rockets. For info about the other two deaths, see: Peter Beaumont/Patrick Wintour: Two Palestinians shot dead and one critical in riots after Trump speech. Also: Raja Shehadeh: I have witnessed two intifadas. Trump's stance on Israel may ignite a third.

• Sarah Kliff: Obamacare sign-ups defy Trump's sabotage campaign.

• German Lopez: Roy Moore: America "was great at the time when families were united -- even though he had slavery." Anyone who thinks that the problem with Moore is his fondness for underaged girls clearly hasn't paid any attention to his politics or to his political legacy. More worrying is Moore's unwavering contempt for the law -- after all, Moore has been stripped of his position on the Alabama Supreme Court for failing to submit to federal law, specifically the First Amendment. When Donald Trump tries to tout Moore as the "law and order candidate" he does little more than expose his own flimsy and dicey relationship to the law. (Meanwhile, Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, has a distinguished record as a federal prosecutor, credentials that only someone as reality-challenged as Trump can readily dismiss.) I wish I could say that Moore's casual endorsement of slavery is even more shocking, but we've always known him to be a racist. After all, Alabama's given us George Wallace and Jeff Sessions, so how much worse can Moore be? Well, this statement is a pretty good example: "I think it [America] was great at the time when families were united -- even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction." The most obvious problem is that slavery was a system which denied family life and bonds, one that allowed slaveowners to prevent or break families by selling members. He could hardly be clearer that he doesn't regard blacks as people -- as Lopez notes, only one of many blind bigotries Moore espouses. Still, I detect another curious note in the quote: it's like he's trying to channel ideologues like George Fitzhugh who tried to defend slavery as anti-capitalist -- an alternative to the coarse materialism that Bible-thumpers like Moore so despise.

  More on Moore:

  • Jane Coaston: Inside the bubble: why Roy Moore has conservative media on his side.

  • Brian Resnick: Official Roy Moore campaign talking points "debunking" sex abuse allegations against him.

  • Campbell Robertson/Jonathan Martin: Alabama, Despite History of Unruly Politics, Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'.

  • Kenneth P Vogel: James O'Keefe, Practitioner of the Sting, Has an Ally in Trump: O'Keefe, who runs a Mercer-backed dirty tricks operation that recently tried to muddy the waters by staging a false accusation against Roy Moore. Thankfully, this one was exposed before it did any harm, but the more gullible Democrats and the liberal media are, the more "disrupters" like O'Keefe will take advantage of them.

• Andrew Prokop: Michael Flynn's involvement in a plan to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East is looking even shadier: More "Russia" scandal this past week, but one should recall that Russian schemes under Putin have nothing to do with fomenting world revolution or curtailing US imperial ambitions: they're founded on pure oligarchic greed, which isn't at all unlike the Trump approach to business. E.g., this piece summarizes a "whistleblower" report about a deal Flynn was working on:

  According to the whistleblower, [Alex] Copson flat-out said the following things:

  • That he "just got" a text message from Flynn saying the nuclear plant project was "good to go," and that his business colleagues should "put things in place"
  • That Flynn was making sure sanctions on Russia would be "ripped up," which would let the project go forward
  • That this was the "best day" of his life, and that the project would "make a lot of very wealthy people"
  • That the project would also provide a pretext for expanding a US military presence in the Middle East (the pretext of defending the nuclear plants)
  • That citizens of Middle Eastern countries would be better off "when we recolonize the Middle East"

• David Roberts: A moment of truth arrives for Rick Perry's widely hated coal bailout: Long article, really should be a much bigger scandal than anything having to do with "sexual misconduct" -- with billions of dollars of benefits going to five coal companies, paid for by rate hikes from millions of consumers, and championed by a moron like Rick Perry, it wouldn't even take much of a stretch from the media to blow this up, but evidently they're too lazy to care.

• Aja Romano: MSNBC won't cut ties to Sam Seder after all: succumbing to alt-right outrage was a "mistake": Another cautionary tale, showing you can't trust anything reported on right-wing media, and that the kneejerk "zero tolerance" reactions of "liberal" media combines are set up perfectly to be scammed. More: Ryan Grim: MSNBC Reverses Decision to Fire Contributor Sam Seder.

• Mark Joseph Stern: The Trump Administration Just Declared War on Public Sector Unions.

• Corey Williams/David Eggert: Conyers' Congressional Seat Won't Be Filled for Nearly a Year: So, Nancy Pelosi browbeat Conyers into resigning his seat, certain that a Democrat would replace him -- the current gerrymander of Michigan concedes that -- but evidently the Republican governor of Michigan can simply hold the seat open for a whole year?

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, December 3, 2017

I spent literally most of last week trying to cook for 60 at the Wichita Peace Center Annual Dinner on Friday, and I've been sore and tired ever since. Thought compiling this post might feel like a return to normalcy, but nothing's normal any more.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories of the week, explained: Senate Republicans are on track to pass their tax cut (as, indeed, they did); We found our about more sexual harassers (especially Matt Lauer); After Rexit (Rex Tillerson, rumored gone but hanging on); North Korea launched a long-range ICBM (one that could theoretically hit anywhere in the continental United States). Other Yglesias posts:

  • Republicans may regret this tax bill: This seems intuitively right. The biggest political issue in America today is increasing inequality and its various effects, including the binding of political power and personal security to private wealth. Moreover, this is an issue with a strict partisan divide: Republicans are doing everything they can to concentrate wealth and power in the donor class, and Democrats are more or less opposed to this and more or less in favor of a more equitable society (at least like the ones of the New Deal/Great Society era, but with less racism). To the extent people understand the tax bill, it is wildly unpopular, so it's something Democrats can and will run on. It also goes a long ways toward absolving the Democrats' own culpability for increasing inequality: that the Republicans would, strictly through a party-line vote, do something this brazen when inequality is already so severe (and so unpopular) -- and Trump's deregulation program and blatant surrender of the people's government to business interests -- should expose them for all to see. Yglesias cites Josh Barro: The Republican tax plan creates big long-term opportunities for Democrats. By the way, one thing Barro argues that I don't for a moment believe is: "a corporate tax cut should tend to cause wages to rise a little bit, because a lower corporate tax rate makes the US a more attractive location to employ people."

  • We're all in Kansas now: A reference to Gov. Sam Brownback's notorious tax cuts, the enormous fiscal damage they caused, the slower degradation of infrastructure and services, and their near-zero boost to the economy (possibly sub-zero compared to nationwide economic growth during the same period). The only real difference between what Brownback passed and what the Senate just passed is that the US government is able to float much more debt, and thereby soften the degradation. By the way, Brownback, anticipating confirmation as Trump's Ambassador at Large for Religious Liberty, recently gave a "farewell address," not to the public but to the Wichita Pachyderm Club, where the only advice he could offer to his successor is pray.

  • Trump's Treasury Department is lying about its own analysis of the tax bill

  • The tax bill's original sin: The idea that the corporate tax rate must be reduced from 35% all the way to 20%, a much steeper cut than anyone was even agitating for a few years ago (e.g., the Business Roundtable was proposing 25% as recently as 2015). One thing I don't understand is why no one is pushing a progressive tax on business profits: maybe 10% for the first $1M, 15% for $1-10M, 20% for $10-50M, 25% for $50-250M, 30% for $250M-$1B, 35% for $1-5B, 40% above $5B. Probably those rates should be a bit higher, and various loopholes should be filled -- I'd like to see the overall reform on corporate tax rates produce more (not less) revenue. But something like this would benefit most companies while only penalizing companies that use their sheer size and/or monopoly positions to reap huge profits. And slowing them down would be good for everyone.

  • Matt Lauer totally blew it on Trump's blatant lying about Iraq and Libya

  • The rules of "how Congress works" have changed: Points out that the Senate tax bill faced concerted opposition from many special interest lobby groups ("the National Association of Realtors, the National Association of Homebuilders, the AARP, police unions, hospital associations and the AMA, and the higher education lobby"), as well as polling poorly among the public, yet Republicans stuck to their partisan ideology and passed it anyway. That's not how interest group politics has generally worked in Washington. Yglesias doesn't say this, but it more generally fits the model of class warfare. He does note that the Democrats could have crafted a more viable ACA had they not catered to special interest groups, in the vain hope that selling out to lobbyists would rally Republican support for a bipartisan bill.

    Had Democrats gone down a different path and pushed a bill with a strong public option with payment rates linked to Medicare, we would have seen a very different health policy trajectory over the past few years.

    Premiums would have been lower, which would have meant federal subsidy outlays would have been lower, which would have made it affordable for Congress to make the subsidies more generous. Enrollment in ACA exchanges would have been higher; there would have been no issue with "bare counties"; and, because of lower premiums, the "just pay the fine" option would have been less attractive, leading to more stable risk pools.

  • A deficit trigger can't fix the GOP tax plan

  • Crisis at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Also on this, see Matt Taibbi: Trump's Consumer Victory Officially Makes a Joke of Financial Reform.

  • New dynamic score shows the Senate tax bill raises debt by more than advertised

  • The theory behind Trump's tax cuts is exactly what gave us the failed Bush economy: "An influx of foreign hot money isn't what we need." A lot of meat here, but one could dig deeper. Foreign money will drive up asset prices, which will be a windfall for business owners, but once they sell out those businesses will no longer be rooted in the owners' communities. Foreign ownership of American companies has been a mixed blessing: some have gone easier on depressing labor costs, but most wind up operating as American companies do -- as, indeed, whatever they can get away with here -- and they're ultimately as likely to export or automate jobs away as any other capitalists. As Yglesias notes, much of the influx will eventually be converted into bidding up real estate prices (he calls this "housing boom 2.0" but I'm more skeptical that the subprime boom is repeatable, and unless average Americans start making more money -- inconceivable under Republican rule -- we're all stuck in the subprime market). His other point is that the expected influx will strengthen the dollar, hurting exports and manufacturing jobs, so while the rich get richer, the workers get stiffed.

  • If the GOP tax plan is so good, why do they lie so much about it? Partly, I suspect, it's just force of habit, but they really don't have anything potentially popular to offer -- they're just scamming for the donor class, and they'll make the suckers pay for it.

• New York Times Editorial Board: A Historic Tax Heist:

  With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders' primary goal is to enrich the country's elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

  The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

  Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

  Other links on the tax bill:

  • Steven Greenhouse: America is in crisis. The Republican tax plan will make that worse.

  • Ezra Klein: "The hypocrisy is astounding": this tax bill shows the GOP's debt concerns were pure fraud: Didn't we already know that from the Bush years (Cheney: "deficits don't matter")? Or for that matter from the Reagan tax cuts, when US debt exploded faster than any time since WWII? Wasn't it clear that when McConnell railed about the debt and tried to cut spending programs that would help rebuild the economy that his real motive was to "make Obama a one-term president"? Klein isn't satisfied to call this hypocrisy; he chalks it up to nihilism, also noting:

    The nihilism extends to process too. Republicans complained bitterly during the Obama administration that Democrats weren't holding enough hearings, that they weren't leaving sufficient time to read final bill text, that they were passing important legislation on party-line votes, that they were using the budget reconciliation process improperly. Now they are passing sweeping tax reform through the budget reconciliation process with no hearings, no effort at bipartisan compromise, and bill text that was not made public until hours before the final vote. In a darkly comic twist, changes were handwritten into the legislation in the final hours:

  • Sarah Kliff: The tax bill is the start of Obamacare collapse: It repeals the "individual mandate," which requires individuals to buy some form of acceptably adequate health insurance or face a tax penalty. The mandate helps to make risk pools more equitably representative of the general population, but it also reduce the uninsured population, some of which wind up being treated at the expense of everyone else. Without the mandate, insurance policy rates will rise to cover the increased risk of adverse selection, and hospital charges will rise to cover emergency treatment of the uninsured (some 41 million people by current estimates).

  • Robert S McElvaine: I'm a Depression historian. The GOP tax bill is straight out of 1929.

  • Ella Nilsen: "Lots of outrageous things in the bill aren't getting the kind of attention they ought to"

  • Dylan Scott/Alvin Chang: The Republican tax bill will exacerbate income inequality in America: Of course, you know this, but here are more charts. Most striking, perhaps because least commonly understood, are the figures for "pass-through income" -- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI, or do I mean Koch?) withheld his vote until the bill cut this even more. The chart that shows how 69% of all "pass-through income" goes to the top 1% explains why. The main thing that's missing here is the effect of ending the estate tax on the concentration of wealth into an aristocracy of heirs. One can also note that the political right has largely been funded not by entrepreneurs but by heirs -- Richard Mellon Scaife is a prime example, although you can also count the Kochs and Trump.

  • Emily Stewart: GOP Senator says it's hard to fund $14 billion children's health care program -- then advocates for $1 trillion tax cut: after which it will be even harder, no doubt. Republicans can always think of excuses for not doing what they don't want to do; even more so, they can always come up with idiotic rationales to do what they always want to do, which is mostly to make rich people even richer.

  • Matt Taibbi: New Tax Plan Contains Even More Bad News for Student Borrowers.

• Gordon G Chang: Is Donald Trump Getting Ready to Attack North Korea? One theory floated here is that the US could disable North Korea by bombing the pipeline that delivers oil from China and/or their one oil refinery. Or, better still, the US could intimidate China into shutting down the pipeline. I don't see how North Korea's leadership does not take the former as an opening salvo in a war, one that forces them to retaliate. As for China, they probably understand that keeping their oil lifeline open is necessary to keeping the peace. And there are real limits to how much the US can push China around without hurting American investments in China (or much worse). At some point Trump's people need to decide whether North Korea having a deterrent against an American attack that no one in the US military wants to launch is really such a big problem. At present it mostly seems to be an affront to the egos of those who still believe the neocon sole-superpower promise of world domination. Sadly, most of the writers in this "War in Asia?" issue of The National Interest seem to buy into such delusions.

• Thomas B Edsall: The Self-Destruction of American Democracy: After raising the question of whether Putin backed Trump out of pure malice for the American people, and quoting Henry Aaron (Brookings senior fellow, presumably not the Hall of Famer) that "Trump is a political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy -- for its norms, for its morality, for sheer human decency," he has to admit that "we Americans created this mess." Then he starts worrying about America's declining influence and esteem in the world, offering a chart showing only two (of 37) other countries with higher approval numbers for Trump than for Obama: Israel (up to 56 from 49) and Russia (way up to 53 from 11). I think the biggest drop was in Sweden (93 to 10), followed by Germany (86 to 11), Netherlands (92 to 17, South Korea (88 to 17), and France (84 to 14). Britain and Canada dropped down to 23, from 79 and 83 respectively. Still, loss of approval hasn't yet done much damage to the empire (although Egypt's decision to allow Russian air bases is perhaps a harbinger). But this is more to the point:

  Add to Trump's list of lies his race baiting, his attacks on a free press, his charges of "fake news," his efforts to instigate new levels of voter suppression, his undermining of the legitimacy of the electoral process, his disregard for the independence of the judiciary, the hypocrisy of his personal posture on sexual harassment, the patent lack of concern for delivering results to voters who supported him, his contempt for and manipulation of his own loyalists, his "failure of character" -- and you have a lethal corruption of democratic leadership. . . .

  At the moment, Trump's co-partisans, House and Senate Republicans, have shown little willingness to confront him. The longer Trump stays in office, the greater the danger that he will inflict permanent damage on the institutions that must be essential tools in any serious attempt to confront him.

  Edsall's error is that he doesn't recognize that those Congressional Republicans are every bit as contemptuous of democracy as Trump. Indeed, he gives Trump too much credit, and Charles Koch and Paul Ryan not nearly enough.

• Jill Filipovic: The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election: I'm not so sure about the headline, but is there something more than coincidence going on here?

  Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official "commander-in-chief forum" for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer's with Mrs. Clinton -- talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton's 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.

  A pervasive theme of all of these men's coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn't that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status. . . .

  It's hard to look at these men's coverage of Mrs. Clinton and not see glimmers of that same simmering disrespect and impulse to keep women in a subordinate place. When men turn some women into sexual objects, the women who are inside that box are one-dimensional, while those outside of it become disposable; the ones who refuse to be disposed of, who continue to insist on being seen and heard, are inconvenient and pitiable at best, deceitful shrews and crazy harpies at worst. That's exactly how some commentary and news coverage treated Mrs. Clinton.

  Of course, it's possible that an individual's hostility to Hillary has more to do with her being a Clinton than a woman. There's no doubt that many in the media treated her unfairly. Still, I'm more struck by how gingerly they treated dozens of more damning scandals, especially Trump's own sexual abuse history. Filipovic also wrote: Matt Lauer is gone. He's left heartbreak in his wake.

• Susan Hennessey et al: The Flynn Plea: A Quick and Dirty Analysis. One recalls that from early on Flynn was offering testimony for immunity. One thing the guilty plea suggests is he does indeed have something to further Mueller's investigation as it closes in on Trump's inner circle. Also note that while investigations into foreign interference in American elections has always focused on Russia, the incident Flynn pleaded guilty to involved lobbying Russia for Israel: see Philip Weiss: Flynn's plea on Russia influence reveals . . . Israel's influence!; also Richard Silverstein: Flynn Pleads Guilty to Lying About Trump Sabotage of Security Council Resolution Against Israeli Settlements. Trump's reaction, of course, was to turn up the crazy: Dana Milbank: Get ready for Trump's fireworks:

  I tried to ignore the Trump shenanigans this week, instead writing about the drug industry executive Trump tapped to oversee drug pricing and about the administration lawyer who orchestrated Trump's takeover of the CFPB after serving as lawyer for a payday lender cited by the CFPB for abuses. But such pieces generate only a fraction of the clicks of pieces I and others write about Trump's pyrotechnics.

  Those pyrotechnics are going to increase now that Mueller has turned Flynn. Trump's distractions will be impossible to ignore. But we -- lawmakers, the media and the public -- need to keep our focus on the real damage Trump is doing.

• Shira A Scheindlin: Trump's new team of judges will radically change American society:

• Paul Woodward: Have we been lied to about the Kate Steinle case? Steinle was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, Garcia Zarate, who was acquitted of murder charges last week. Zarate had been deported five times, which "made him a very effective villain for Trump's border security campaign messages." The shooting was clearly an accident, and it's pretty unlikely the case would ever have been prosecuted had Zarate been a card-carrying NRA member. But Trump (aka "the xenophobic, racist, bigot, defiling the Oval Office") went ballistic over the verdict.

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Sunday, November 19, 2017

I've often heard that "politics is the art of the possible" -- the quote is most often attributed to Otto von Bismarck, who continued: "the attainable -- the art of the next best." Bismarck is best known now as the architect of the modern welfare state, something he achieved with autocratic Prussian efficiency, his generally satisfactory answer to the threat of proletarian revolution. But the earlier generations he was better known as the founder of German militarism, a bequest which less pragmatic followers parlayed into two disastrous world wars. Then, as now, the "possible" was always limited by preconceptions -- in Bismarck's case, allegiance to the Prussian nobility, which kept his innovations free of concessions to equality and democracy.

After immersing myself into the arcana of mainstream politics in the 1960s -- I used to trek to the library to read Congressional Quarterly's Weekly Reports, I subscribed to the Congressional Record, and I drew up electoral maps much like Kevin Phillips -- I pivoted and dove into the literature of the politically impossible, reading about utopian notions from Thomas More to Ignatius Donnelly to Paul Goodman (whose Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals is a title I still fancy recapitulating). But I never really lost my bearings in reality. In college I worked on the philosophy journal Telos, which taught one to always look toward ends (or goals) no matter the immediate terrain, and I studied neo-Kantians with a knack for making logic work to bridge the chasm. Later I turned into an engineer, and eventually had the epiphany that we could rationally think our way through complex political and economic problems to not necessarily ideal but much more viable solutions.

From the start I was aware of the standard and many other objections to "social engineering." No time to go into them now, but my background in engineering taught me that I have to work within the bounds of the possible, subject to the hard limits of physics and the slightly messier lessons I had learned from my major in sociology. Without really losing my early ideals -- my telos is equality, because that's the only social arrangement that is mutually agreeable, the only one that precludes scheming, strife, and needless harm -- I came to focus on little steps that nudge us in the right direction, and to reject ideas that couldn't possibly work. Thinking about this has made me a much more moderate person, without leading me to centrism or the notion that compromise is everything.

A good example of a political agenda that cannot be implemented -- indeed, one that offers nothing constructive -- was provided a while back by Alan Keys, a Republican presidential candidate whose entire world view revolved around teenagers having sex and how society needs to stop them. Maybe his analysis has some valid points, and maybe there are some paternalistic nudges that can trim back some of the statistical effects (like the rate of teen pregnancy), but nothing -- certainly no tolerable level of coercion -- can keep teenagers from being interested in sex. Of course, Keys was an outlier, even among Republican evangelicals. Only slightly more moderate is Roy Moore, who's evidently willing to carve out an exception for teens willing to have sex with himself. You might chalk that up to hypocrisy, which is common among all Americans, but is especially rife among conservatives (who regard it as a privilege of the virtuous rich) and evangelicals (who expect personal salvation for the fervor with which they damn all of you). But Moore's own agenda for making his peculiar take on Christianity the law of the land is every bit as dangerous and hopeless as Keys' obsession with teen sex.

The most chilling thing I've read in the last week was a column by Cal Thomas, Faith in Politics, where he urges conservative evangelicals to put aside their frivolous defenses of Roy Moore and go back to such fundamentals as Martin Luther's 95 Theses, where "Luther believed governments were ordained by God to restrain sinners and little else." The striking thing about this phrasing is how cleverly it forges an alliance with the libertarian right, who you'd expect to be extremely wary of God-ordained governmental restraint. But sin has always been viewed through the eyes of tyrants and their pet clergy, a "holy alliance" that has been the source of so much suffering and injustice throughout world history.

News recently has been dominated by a seemingly endless series of reports of sexual misconduct, harassment and/or assault, on all sides of the political spectrum (at least from Roy Moore to Al Franken), plus a number of entertainers and industry executives. Conservatives and liberals react to these stories differently -- aside from partisan considerations (which certainly play a part when a Senate seat is at stake), conservatives are hypocritically worked up about illicit sex, while liberals are more concerned with respecting the rights of women. Yet both sides (unless the complaint hits particularly close to home) seem to be demanding harsh punishment (see, e.g., Mark Joseph Stern: Al Franken Should Resign Immediately Michelle Goldberg and Nate Silver agree, mostly because they want to prove that Democrats are harsher and less hypocritical on sexual misconduct; indeed, instant banishment seems to have been the norm among entertainers, which Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, and Jeffrey Tambor having projects canceled, as well as more delayed firings of Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and Harvie Weinstein). This drive to punish, which has long been a feature of America's notion of justice, can wind up making things worse (and not just because it could trigger a backlash, as Isaac Chotiner and Rebecca Traister discuss).

I'm sure many women have many things to object to here -- the Weinstein testimonies seem especially damning, and I suspect the hushed up Ailes and O'Reilly legacies are comparable -- but I'm finding some aspects of the whole brouhaha troubling. Sex is a messy subject, often fraught and embarrassing to negotiate, subject to wildly exaggerated hopes and fears, but inevitably a part of human nature -- I keep flashing back on Brecht's chorus: "what keeps mankind alive? bestial acts." On the other hand, we might be better off looking at power disparities (inequality), which are clearly evident in all of these cases, perhaps even more so in entertainment than in politics. I can't help but think that in a more equitable society, one that valued mutual respect and eased up a bit on arbitrary punishment, would be bothered less by these problems.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest stories in politics this week: The House passed a major tax bill ("but the House bill, as written, doesn't conform to Senate rules and clearly can't pass"); Senate Republicans drafted a tax bill ("that does conform to Senate rules at the expense of creating an even starker set of financial tradeoffs"); Bob Menendez isn't guilty (I would have said something more like "dodged conviction via mistrial"); Things are looking worse for Roy Moore. Other Yglesias posts last week:

  • Senate Republicans' tax plan raises taxes on families earning less than $75,000. The chart, clearly demonstrating how regressive the plan is, is for 2027, without showing how one gets there. To satisfy the Senate's "budget reconciliation" rules many of the tax cuts have to expire in less than ten years, so this is the end state the bill aims for, probably with the expectation that some further cuts will be renewed before they run out (as happened with the Bush cuts). So on the one hand, this exaggerates the "worst case" scenario, it also clarifies the intent behind the whole scam.

  • Watch CEOs admit they won't actually invest more if tax reform passes: Gary Cohn feigns surprise that so few CEOs raised their hands.

    The reason few hands are raised is there's little reason to believe that the kind of broad corporate income tax cut Republicans are pushing for will induce much new investment. . . . The biggest immediate winners, in fact, would be big, established companies that are already highly profitable. Apple, for example, would get a huge tax cut even though the company's gargantuan cash balance is all the proof in the world that the its investments are limited by Tim Cook's beliefs about what Apple can usefully take on, not by a limited supply of cash or a lack of profitability.

  • Bill Clinton should have resigned: "What he did to Monica Lewinsky was wrong, and he should have paid the price." I've sympathized with versions of this argument -- Gary Wills has written much on how Clinton should have resigned, and I'm on record as having said that Had I been in the Senate I would have voted to convict him (less because I agreed with the actual charges than because I felt he should "pay the price" for other things he did that were wrong -- at the time I was most upset about Clinton's bombing of Iraq, something his Republican inquisitors applauded, prefiguring the 2003 Bush invasion). However, I was under the impression that whatever he did with Lewinsky was mutually consented to and should have remained private. Indeed, before Clinton (or more specifically, before the Scaife-funded investigation into Clinton) politicians' private affairs had hardly ever become objects of public concern. (I suppose Grover Cleveland, America's only bachelor president, is the exception.) Given that all US presidents have been male, you can argue that this public nonchalance is part of a longstanding patriarchal culture, but there's no reason to think that the right-wingers who went after Clinton were in any way interested in advancing feminism. Perhaps Clinton himself could have turned his resignation into a feminist talking point: Yglesias insists, "Had Clinton resigned in disgrace under pressure from his own party, that would have sent a strong, and useful, chilling signal to powerful men throughout the country." Still, I doubt that's the lesson the Republicans would have drawn. Rather, it would have shown to them that they had the power to drive a popular, charismatic president from office in disgrace using pretty flimsy evidence. While there's no reason to doubt he did it for purely selfish reasons, at the time many people were delighted that Clinton stood firm and didn't buckle under right-wing media shaming (e.g., that was the origin of the left-Democratic Move On organization). As for long-term impact, Yglesias seems to argue that had Clinton resigned, we wouldn't have found ourselves on the moral slope that led to Trump's election.

  • The tax reform debate is stuck in the 1970s: "The '70s were a crazy time," but he could be clearer about what the Republican tax cut scheme was really about, and vaguer about the Democrat response -- worry about the deficit came more after the damage was done (until they Democrats were easily tarred as advocates of "tax-and-spend"). And even though he's right that the situations are so different now that allowing companies and rich investors to keep more after-tax income is even less likely to spur job growth now, the fact is it didn't really work even when it made more sense. Here's an inadvertently amusing line: "The politics of the 1970s, after all, would have been totally different if inflation, unemployment, interest rates, and labor force growth were all low while corporate profits were high." I'd hypothesize that if corporate profits were artificially raised through political means (which is pretty much what's happened starting with the Reagan tax cuts in 1981) all those other factors would have been reduced. Increasing corporate profits even more just adds to the burden the rich already impose on us all.

• Sean Illing: "The fish rots from the head": a historian on the unique corruption of Trump's White House: An interview with Robert Dallek, who "estimates that historical examples of corruption, like that of the Warren G. Harding administration, don't hold a candle to how Trump and his people have conducted themselves in the White House." One thing I noticed here is how small famous scandals were in comparison to things that are happening every day under Trump: e.g., Teapot Dome ("in which Harding's secretary of the interior leased Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to private oil companies at incredibly low rates without a competitive bidding process"). Isn't that exactly what Zinke is trying to do with Alaska's oil reserves? Wasn't that Zinke's rationale behind reducing several National Monuments? And how does that stack up against the monetary value of various deregulation orders (especially those by the EPA and FCC)? To get a handle on corruption today, you have to look beyond first-order matters like Trump family business and direct payoffs to the windfalls industries claim from administration largess and beyond to corporate predation that will inevitably occur as it sinks in that the Trump administration is no longer enforcing regulations and laws that previously protected the public. Even short of changing laws to encourage further predation (as Bush did with his tax cuts and "tort reform"), the Trump administration is not just profiting from but breeding corruption. Curiously, Dallek doesn't even mention the closest relatives: the Reagan administration, with its embrace of "greed is good" leading to dozens of major scandals, and the second Bush, which imploded so utterly we wound up with the deepest recession since the 1930s.

• Cristina Cabrera: Trump Puts on Hold Controversial Rollback of Elephant Trophy Ban: In the "could be worse" department:

  The U.S Fish & Wildlife Service announced on November 16 that it was rolling back an Obama-era ban preventing the import of hunted elephants in Zimbabwe. A similar ban had also been lifted for hunted elephants in Zambia.

  The decision was met with overwhelming backlash, with both liberals and conservatives slamming the move as needlessly cruel and inhumane. The notorious photos of the President's sons posing with a dead leopard and a dismembered tail of a elephant from their hunting expeditions didn't help.

  According to the Service, it can allow such imports "only when the killing of the animal will enhance the survival of the species." African elephants are protected as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act, and critics questioned the Interior Department's defense that allowing hunters to kill more of them would enhance their survival.

  To be fair to the Trump administration, "allowing hunters to kill more of them would enhance their survival" is also the common logic that binds together most key Republican initiatives, like their "repeal and replace Obamacare" and "tax cuts and jobs" acts. It's also basically why they made Betsy De Vos Secretary of Education. For more, see Tara Isabella Burton: Trump stalls controversial decision on big game hunting.

• Alvin Chang: This simple chart debunks the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton sold uranium to Russia: The latest "lock her up" chorus, cheerleadered by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). I can't make any sense of his chart, but the simplified one is easy enough to follow (although it could use a dateline). Still, a couple of troubling points. One is why Russian state-owned Rosatom would buy a Canadian uranium country with operations in the US. Presumably it's just business, and Uranium One still sells (as well as produces) uranium in the US market. The other point is that the Clinton Foundation never has and never will cleanse itself of the stench of operating as an influence peddler with ties into the US government -- although it helps that Hillary is no longer Secretary of State or otherwise government-employed, and it will help more as Clinton's numerous political cronies move away from the family and its foundation.

• Adam Federman: The Plot to Loot America's Wilderness: Meet Jim Cason, who "seems to be running the show" under Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior, where he's actively cultivating what promises to be a hundred Teapot Dome scandals.

• Brent D Griffiths: Trump on UCLA basketball players: 'I should have left them in jail': If run in The New Yorker, this article would have been filed under "Annals of Pettiness."

• Gregory Hellman: House declares US military role in Yemen's civil war unauthorized: Vote was 366-30, declaring that intervention in Yemen is not authorized under previous "authorization of force" resolutions, including the sweeping "war on terror" resolution from 2001. The US has conducted drone attacks in Yemen well before the Saudi intervention in a civil war that grew out of Arab Spring demonstrations (although the Houthi revolt dates back even further). The US has supported the Saudi intervention verbally, with arms shipments, and with target intelligence, contributing to a major humanitarian disaster. Unfortunately, the new resolution seems to have little teeth.

• Cameron Joseph: Norm Coleman: I'd Have Beaten Franken in '08 if Groping Photo Had Come Out: Probably. The final tally had Franken ahead by 312 votes, so Coleman isn't insisting on much of a swing. On the other hand, I don't live in Minnesota, so I don't have any real feel for how the actual 2008 campaign played out. Coleman won his seat in 2002 after Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash and was replaced by a shockingly tone-deaf Walter Mondale -- inactive in politics since 1984. Coleman's win was a fluke, and he was never very popular, but Franken had a very tough job unseating him in 2008 -- I suspect his real problem was Upton Sinclair Complex (the famous novelist ran for governor of California in 1934 and lost, in no small part because opponents could pick strange quotes from his novels and present them out of context). Franken's comedy career must have presented Coleman's handlers with a treasure trove of bad jokes and faux pas, so many that the "groping picture" might even have gotten lost in the noise. For his part, Franken bent over backwards to present himself as serious and sober, and six years later was reelected easily, by 10.4 points, an improvement suggesting many of the voters' doubts have been answered. I've never been much of a fan, either of his comedy or of how he cozied up to the military to gain a mainstream political perch. Still, I've reluctantly grown to admire his dedication and earnestness as a politician, a vocation that has lately become ever more precarious for honest folk. So I was shocked when the photo/story revealed, not so much by the content as by how eagerly the media gobbled it up. In particular, TPM, which I usually look at first when I get up for a quick summary of the latest political flaps, filed eight straight stories on Franken in their prioritized central column, to the exclusion of not just Roy Moore (who had the next three stories) but also of the House passing the Republican tax scam bill.

  A couple more links on Franken:

  • Jill Abramson: Have we reached zero tolerance for sexual misconduct?

  • Kate Harding: I'm a feminist. I study rape culture. And I don't want Al Franken to resign.

  • Erin Gloria Ryan: After Al Franken and Roy Moore, We Are Dangerously Close to Botching the #MeToo Moment.

  In addition to Yglesias above, I'm running into more reconsiderations of Bill Clinton, basically showing that the atmosphere has changed between the 1990s and now, making Clinton look all the worse. For example:

  • Michelle Goldberg: I Believe Juanita.

  • Chris McGreal: Bill Clinton's past re-examined in light of Weinstein and Trump.

  • Yolanda Wu: I saw how we failed Bill Clinton's accusers. We can't do that again.

• Fred Kaplan: Trigger Warning: "A congressional hearing underlines the dangers posed by an unstable president with unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons."

• Azmat Khan/Anand Gopal: The Uncounted: Long and gruesome article on the air war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, who and what got hit, paying some attention to the mistakes that are never expected but somehow always occur whenever the US goes to war.

  Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike -- 103 in all -- in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014. . . .

  We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent. Those who survive the strikes, people like Basim Razzo, remain marked as possible ISIS sympathizers, with no discernible path to clear their names.

• Mike Konczal: Republicans are weaponizing the tax code: Key fact here: "Corporations are flush with cash from large profits and aggressively low interest rates, yet they aren't investing." This belies any pretense that cutting corporate tax rates. Without any real growth prospects, the cuts not only favor the rich, the other changes are meant to penalize everyone else, moving into the realm of class war ("capital is eating the economy").

  The crucial thing to realize is that this tax reform effort reflects more than the normal conservative allergic reaction to progressive taxation -- going far beyond undoing the modest progressive grains achieved by Presidents Obama and Clinton. Three major changes stand out: These taxes are far more focused on owners than on workers, even by Republican standards. They take advantage of the ambiguity of what counts as income, weaponizing that vagueness to help their friends and hurt their enemies.

  And after years of pushing for a safety net that works through the tax code, in order to keep more social democratic reforms at bay, Republicans now reveal their willingness to demolish even those modest protections. Their actions make clear that a welfare state based on tax credits and refunds, rather than universal commitments, is all too vulnerable.

  More links on taxes:

  • Robert L Borosage: Republicans in Congress Think You're an Idiot.

  • Jim Newell: Democrats Find a Weapon in the Senate Tax Bill.

  • Dylan Scott/Sarah Kliff: Obamacare's individual mandate, the new target in the GOP tax plan, explained.

• Josh Marshall: There's a Digital Media Crush. But No One Will Say It: The key sentence here is "The move to video is driven entirely by advertiser demand." The reasoning behind this is left unexplained, but obviously it's because advertising embedded in videos is more intrusive than static space advertising. Part of this is that it's harder for users to block as well as ignore, for the same reason radio and television advertising are more intrusive than print advertising. They're also dumber, because they don't have to offer something useful like information to catch your attention. If past experience is any guide, it also leads to a dumbing down of content, which eventually will make the content close to worthless. This is all bad news for media companies hoping to make bucks off the Internet, and more so for writers trying to scratch out a living from those companies. But more than anything else, it calls into question the public value of an information system based on advertising. From the very beginning, media dependent on advertising have been corrupted by it, and that's only gotten worse as advertisers have gained leverage and targeting data. Concentration of media business only makes this worse, but even if we could reverse the latter -- breaking up effective monopolies and monopsonies and restoring "net neutrality" rules -- we should be questioning the very idea of public information systems built on advertising.

• Dylan Matthews: Senate Republicans are making it easier to push through Trump's judge picks: Technically, this is about "blue slips," which is one of those undemocratic rules which allow individual Senators to flout their power, but few things in the Republican agenda are more precious to them (or their donors) than packing the courts with verified movement conservatives.

• Andrew Prokop/Jen Kirby: The Republican Party's Roy Moore catastrophe, explained. A couple impressions here. For one, their listing of Moore's "extremist views" seem pretty run-of-the-mill -- things that some 15-20% of Americans might if not agree with him at least find untroubling. I suspect this understates his extremism, especially on issues of religious freedom, where he has staked out his turf as a Christian nationalist. Second, I've been under the impression that his sexual misdeeds were in the range of harassment (compounded by the youth of his victims, as young as 14), but at least one of the complaints reads like attempted assault -- the girl in question was 16, and when Moore broke off the attack, he allegedly said to the girl: "You are a child. I am the Dictrict Attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you." I reckon it as progress that such charges are highly credible now. As for the effect these revelations may have on the election, note: "A recent poll even showed that 29 percent of the state's voters say the allegations make them more likely to vote for Moore."

  Also on Moore:

  • Dahlia Lithwick/James Sample: We've Always Known Roy Moore Is Lawless: "It's why Alabama Republicans voted for him."

  • Charles P Pierce: Roy Moore Is Exactly What the Republican Party Is All About.

• Corey Robin: Trump's Fantasy Capitalism: "How the president undermines Republicans' traditional economic arguments." Robin, by the way, has a new edition of his The Reactionary Mind book out, the subtitle Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump as opposed to the original Sarah Palin. For reviews, see John Holbro and Paul Rosenberg.

• Grant Schulte/James Nord: Oil Leak Will Not Factor Into Decision to Expand Keystone Pipeline: Of course, because right after a 250,000 gallon oil leak time is no time to talk about how approving a pipeline could lead to more oil leaks. Also, note how the authors had to walk back one of their more outrageous claims:

  This version of the story corrects that there have been 17 leaks the same size or larger than the Keystone spill instead of 17 larger than this spill. One of the spills was the same size.

• Matt Taibbi: RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That's Now More Important Than Ever: The book, co-authored by Noam Chomsky, is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, originally published in 1988.

  The really sad part about the Herman/Chomsky thesis was that it didn't rely upon coercion or violence. Newspapers and TV channels portrayed the world in this America-centric way not because they were forced to. Mostly, they were just intellectually lazy and disinterested in the stated mission of their business, i.e., telling the truth.

  In fact, media outlets were simply vehicles for conveying ads, and a consistent and un-troubling view of the political universe was a prerequisite for selling cars, candy bars, detergent, etc. Upset people don't buy stuff. This is why Sunday afternoon broadcasts featured golf tournaments and not police beatings or reports from cancer wards near Superfund sites.

  The news business was about making money, and making money back then for big media was easy. So why make a fuss?

  It occurs to me that the big money isn't so easy any more, which helps explain the air of desperation that hangs over cable and internet news outlets these days -- their need to provoke fear and stoke fights, building up an air of loyalty. One even suspects that Fox gravitated to right-wing politics less because of its sponsorship than due to a psychological profile of a sizable audience that could be captured. As Taibbi concludes, "It's a shame [Herman] never wrote a sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing Consent."

  By the way, while Herman and Chomsky identified "anti-communism" as their "fifth filter," that should be generalized to denigrating anyone on the US list of bad countries or movements -- especially the routine characterization of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela as non-democracies, even though all three have elections that are arguably fairer and freer than America's 2016 election. One consequence of this is that American media has lost all credibility in many of these nations. For example, see Oleg Kashin: When Russians stopped believing in the Western media.

• Zephyr Teachout: The Menendez trial revealed everything that's gone wrong with US bribery law: The corruption case against Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) ended in a hung jury mistrial, even short of the appeals process which has severely weakened most anti-corruption laws.

  I'm with the jury: Even after closely following the trial, I have no strong view on Menendez's guilt or innocence, given the laws they have to work with. I do have a view, however, that the Supreme Court has been playing a shell game with corruption laws. It has stripped anti-corruption legislation of its power in two areas: campaign finance laws and anti-bribery laws. The public is left with little recourse against a growing threat of corruption. Whatever happens with this particular case, this is no way to do corruption law. . . .

  It is fitting that the trial ended with a hung jury. The Court has struck down so many laws that would have made this case easier. If laws prohibiting Super PACs were still in place, we'd have no $600,000 donation. But in the very case enabling Super PACs, Citizens United, the Court suggested that bribery laws would be powerful tools to combat corruption threats -- and then went ahead and weakened those laws. . . .

  Was it friendship? Was it corrupt? Or was it our fault for creating a system that encourages "friendships" that blur the line?

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Matt Taibbi is a dedicated, insightful journalist and a terrific writer, but ever since the 2016 campaign started he's repeatedly gotten tripped up by having to meet advance deadlines for Rolling Stone that have left many of his pieces dated on arrival. His latest is especially unfortunate: A Year After Trump's Election, Nothing Has Changed. The factoid he chose to build his article around was a recent poll arguing that 12 months later, Trump would probably still win the 2016 election. The assumption is that Trump is still running against Hillary Clinton. Trump, of course, has been in the news every day since the election, and is already raising money for 2020 and making rally appearances in active campaigning mode. Aside from her self-serving, self-rationalizing book tour Clinton has largely dropped out of site, conceding she's not running again, and not scoring any points attacking Trump -- not that Trump's stopped attacking her, most recently accusing her of being the real "Russia colluder." Still, the poll in question shows Trump and Clinton in a dead 40-40 tie -- i.e., both candidates are doing worse than they did one year ago, but in the interest of sensationalism, the author gives Trump the tiebreaker ("Given that Trump overperformed in key, blue-leaning swing states, that means he'd probably have won again.")

As it happens, Taibbi's article was written before and appeared after the 2017 elections where Democrats swept two gubernatorial races (in VA and NJ), and picked up fairly dramatic gains in down-ballot elections all over the country. For details, start with FiveThirtyEight's What Went Down on Election Night 2017. Nate Silver explains further:

Democrats had a really good night on Tuesday, easily claiming the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, flipping control of the Washington state Senate and possibly also the Virginia House of Delegates, passing a ballot measure in Maine that will expand Medicaid in the state, winning a variety of mayoral elections around the country, and gaining control of key county executive seats in suburban New York.

They also got pretty much exactly the results you'd expect when opposing a Republican president with a 38 percent approval rating.

That's not to downplay Democrats' accomplishments. Democrats' results were consistent enough, and their margins were large enough, that Tuesday's elections had a wave-like feel. That includes how they performed in Virginia, where Ralph Northam won by considerably more than polls projected. When almost all the toss-up races go a certain way, and when the party winning those toss-up races also accomplishes certain things that were thought to be extreme long shots (such as possibly winning the Virginia House of Delegates), it's almost certainly a reflection of the national environment.

Silver also notes:

• President Trump's approval rating is only 37.6 percent.
• Democrats lead by approximately 10 points on the generic Congressional ballot.
• Republican incumbents are retiring at a rapid pace; there were two retirements (from New Jersey Rep. Frank LoBiondo and Texas Rep. Ted Poe) on Tuesday alone.
• Democrats are recruiting astonishing numbers of candidates for Congress.
• Democrats have performed well overall in special elections to the U.S. Congress, relative to the partisanship of those districts; they've also performed well in special elections to state legislatures.
• The opposition party almost always gains ground at midterm elections. This is one of the most durable empirical rules of American politics.

The thing I find most striking about these election results is the unity Democrats showed. Mainstream Democrats still bitch about lefties who defected to Ralph Nader in 2000, but as someone who remembers how mainstream Democrats sandbagged McGovern in 1972 (and who's read about how Bryan was repeatedly voted down after 1896), I've long been more concerned about how "centrists" might break if anyone on the left wins the Democratic Party nomination. Yet last week saw a remarkably diverse group of Democrats triumphant. The lesson I take away from the results is that most voters have come to realize is that the problem isn't just Trump and some of his ilk but the whole Republican Party, and that the only hope people have is to unite behind the Democrats, regardless of whether they zig left or zag right. Especially after last week's flap over Donna Brazile's book Hacks, that's good news.

It's also news that belies Taibbi's main thesis: not so much that nothing has changed in the year since Trump's shocking election win as the charge that we're still responding as stupidly to Trump as we did during the campaign. On the former, the administration's worker bees have torn up thousands of pages of regulations meant to protect us from predatory business, major law enforcement organizations have been reoriented to persecute immigrants while ignoring civil rights and antitrust, and the judiciary is being stock with fresh right-wingers. The full brunt of those changes may not have sunk in -- they certainly haven't hit all their intended victims yet -- but even if you fail to appreciate the threats these changes have a way of becoming tangible very suddenly. And given how Republican health care proposals polled down around 20%, you may need to rethink your assumptions about how dumb and gullible the American people are.

Republican proposals on "tax reform" are polling little better than their effort to wreck health care. This polling is helping to stall the agenda, but Republicans in Congress are so ideological, and so beholden to their sponsors, that most are willing to buck and polls and follow their orders. What we've needed all year has been for elections to show Republicans that their choices have consequences, and hopefully that's started to happen now.

But whereas the first half of Taibbi's article can be blamed on bad timing, the second half winds up being even more annoying:

Despising Trump and his followers is easy. What's hard is imagining how we put Humpty Dumpty together again. This country is broken. It is devastated by hate and distrust. What is needed is a massive effort at national reconciliation. It will have to be inspired, delicate and ingenious to work. Someone needs to come up with a positive vision for the entire country, one that is more about love and community than blame.

That will probably mean abandoning the impulse to continually litigate the question of who is worse, Republicans or Democrats. . . . The people running the Democratic Party are opportunists and hacks, and for as long as the despicable and easily hated Trump is president, that is what these dopes will focus on, not realizing that most of the country is crying out for something different.

Well, I'm as eager as the next guy for a high-minded conversation about common problems and reasonable solutions, but that's not what politics is about these days (and probably never was). But let's face it, the immediate problem is that one side's totally unprincipled and totally unreasonable, and the only way past that is to beat that side down so severely no one ever dares utter "trickle down" again. They need to get beat down as bad as the Nazis in WWII -- so bad the stink of collaboration much less membership takes generations to wash off. Then maybe we can pick up the pieces.

As for the "hacks and opportunists," sure they are, but they're approachable in ways the Republicans simply aren't. I've seen good people, hard-working activists, come into Wichita for years and urge us to go talk to our Congressman, as if the person in that office (remember, we're talking about Todd Tiahrt, Mike Pompeo, and Ron Estes) was merely misinformed but fundamentally reasonable. I've met plenty of hacks and opportunists who are at least approachable, but not these guys. They've sold their souls, and they're never coming back.

By the way, Thomas Frank's article on the Trump Day anniversary runs into pretty much the same problem: We're still aghast at Donald Trump -- but what good has that done? Well, the American political system doesn't give you a lot of latitude to repair a botched election -- everyone in office has fixed terms, the option of signing recall petitions is very limited (and doesn't apply to Trump), impeachment is virtually impossible without massive Republican defections -- so sometimes being constantly aghast is all one can do. And while the last three US presidents had their share of intractably obsessive opponents, they pale to the numbers of people constantly on Trump's case. Frank wants to minimize our effect, not least because he wants us to consider bigger, wider, deeper, older faults that Trump makes worse but isn't uniquely responsible for.

Trump's sins are continuous with the last 50 years of our history. His bigotry and racist dog-whistling? Conservatives have been doing that since forever. His vain obsession with ratings, his strutting braggadocio? Welcome to the land of Hollywood and pro wrestling.

His tweeting? The technology is new, but the urge to evade the mainstream media is not. His outreach to working-class voters? His hatred of the press? He lifts those straight from his hero Richard Nixon. His combination of populist style with enrich-the-rich policies? Republicans have been following that recipe since the days of Ronald Reagan. His "wrecking crew" approach to government, which made the cover of Time magazine last week? I myself made the same observation, under the same title, about the administration of George W Bush.

The trends Trump personifies are going to destroy this country one of these days. They've already done a hell of a job on the middle class.

But declaring it all so ghastly isn't going to halt these trends or remove the reprobate from the White House. Waving a piece of paper covered with mean words in Trump's face won't make him retreat to his tower in New York. To make him do that you must understand where he comes from, how he operates, why his supporters like him, and how we might coax a few of them away.

The parade of the aghast will have none of that. Strategy is not the goal; a horror-high is. And so its practitioners routinely rail against Trump's supporters along with Trump himself, imagining themselves beleaguered by a country they no longer understand nor particularly like.

As an engineer, I've long related to the idea that you have to understand something to change it -- at least to change it in a deliberate and viable way -- but politics doesn't seem to work that way. For nearly all of my life, the most powerful political motivator has been disgust. And while that may seem like a recent bad trend, I pretty clearly remember characters like Dick Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace. So it really doesn't bother me when people are simply aghast at Trump without understanding the fine points. Sure, at some point we need to get a better idea of what to do, but all the present situation demands is resistance, and as people line up to defend and demean Trump, those connections Frank wants us to learn are getting made.

My tweet for the day:

Wasn't #VeteransDay originally Armistice Day (a celebration of peace at the end of an unprecedentedly horrific war)? I guess when the US went to a permanent war footing, they had to rename it.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 most important stories in politics this week: Democrats won a landslide in Virginia; New allegations surfaced about Roy Moore; The House moved ahead with a tax bill; Senate Republicans unveiled a different bill. Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • Democrats ought to invest in Doug Jones's campaign against Roy Moore. I agree, but less because I think "Roy Moore is dangerously unfit for office" -- true enough, but he's angling to replace Jeff Sessions, who was dangerously unfit himself -- than because I think Democrats should challenge everywhere a reversal of the slide toward oligarchy would help most of the people. There's a risk, of course, that Democrats may focus so much on Moore's peculiar degeneracy they fail to make their best case, but as Yglesias concludes, "hey, you never know."

  • Gary Cohn explains the GOP tax plan: "The most excited group out there are big CEOs": easy to see why, as the main effect is to shore up the already booming stock market, but Cohn sees more benefits in "the whole trickle-down through the economy."

  • It's not just Virginia: Maine has a crucial lesson for Democrats: "Medicaid expansion ran well ahead of Hillary Clinton, and that serves as a potent reminder that the Democratic Party's basic bread-and-butter promise of taxing rich people to provide useful public services is more popular than the broader Democratic gestalt."

  • 2 ways of reading Trump's objections to the AT&T/Time Warner merger: Some hints that the Trump administration has surprisingly found an antitrust case to get interested in, mostly because it involves their arch-nemesis CNN. Still, would be a good thing if the merger didn't go through. Last section subtitled "It would be nice to have a trustworthy president":

    But we don't have a president like that. We have a president who lies constantly, who disregards the norms of American government, who's openly disdainful of the social function of a free press, and who's set up his administration in a way that seems to generally sideline expertise while opening the door to massive financial conflicts of interest.

  • A simple, boring lesson from Democrats' landslide in Virginia and beyond: "There is no microtargeting magic -- when you win you do better everywhere."

    Being out of power has boosted Democratic enthusiasm, making it easier to recruit more and better candidates and easier to turn voters out for lower profile elections. At the same time, Trump is broadly unpopular nationwide which flips some voters into the D column while anti-inspiring others to stay home. In an atmosphere like that, a lot of different kinds of candidates using a lot of different kinds of strategies can win in a lot of different kinds of places.

  • Democrats picked up 2 seats in the Georgia state legislature, too. Notable fact here is that both seats were not only previously held by Republicans, they were uncontested in 2016. Shows Democrats do better when they actually run candidates.

  • Northam's win in the Virginia governor race shows the GOP is in big trouble.

  • What's really at stake in Tuesday's elections.

  • The real fix for gerrymandering is proportional representation.

  • The Republican tax plan's original sin: The big corporate tax cut, especially the idée fixe of reducing the rate from 35% to 20%. There's simply no way to make that work -- even with what amounts to a long-term tax increase on middle incomes, which seems to be what "reform" is adding up to.

• Anne Applebaum: Trump is part of the Saudi story: As Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman consolidates his power base, he's arrested rivals and charged them with "corruption" -- Applebaum notes that Putin and Xi have leveled that same charge against their own rivals, and also:

  But Trump is also part of the story. By his own example -- through his disdain for courts and for the media, through his scorn for ethical norms -- Trump has cast doubt on the Western model. He may even have encouraged the Saudi prince more directly. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, a living embodiment of American nepotism, visited Riyadh for long talks -- officially to promote Mideast peace, but perhaps business and politics came up, too -- in the days before the arrest. The image of two princelings, scheming late into the night, makes a textbook illustration of the decline of American prestige and American values, even in a country that is closely allied to the United States.

  Still, Saudi Arabia seems to have graduated from the allies that follow America's lead to become (like Israel) an ally that "wags the dog" according to its own peculiar logic. See several recent pieces:

  • Anne Barnard: Saudi Arabia Orders Its Citizens Out of Lebanon, Raising Fears of War.

  • Ben Hubbard: Saudi Prince, Asserting Power, Brings Clerics to Heel.

  • Ben Hubbard: Saudi Arabia Says 200 Detained in Anti-Corruption Crackdown.

  • David D Kirkpatrick: Saudi Arabia Arrests 11 Princes, Including Billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal.

  • David D Kirkpatrick: Saudi Crown Prince's Mass Purge Upends a Longstanding System.

  • David D Kirkpatrick: Saudi Arabia Charges Iran With 'Act of War,' Raising Threat of Military Clash.

  • Robin Wright: The Saudi Royal Purge -- With Trump's Consent.

• Dean Baker: Blaming Inequality on Technology: Sloppy Thinking for the Educated. Also by Baker (from Sept. 15), a review of Yanis Varoufakis' book: Adults in the Room: The Sordid Tale of Greece's Battle Against Austerity and the Troika.

• Katheryn Brightbill: Roy Moore's alleged pursuit of a young girl is the symptom of a larger problem in evangelical circles.

• Nancy Cook: How Flynn -- and the Russia scandal -- landed in the West Wing: This is amusing:

  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the early transition chief for a newly elected Donald Trump, and his team had deep reservations about Flynn, fearing the retired three-star Army general who had been ousted from the Obama administration suffered from poor judgment and espoused far-out ideas on foreign policy. . . .

  But when Christie was fired from his transition perch on Nov. 11 -- replaced by soon-to-be Vice President Mike Pence -- Flynn and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks, carefully culled by Christie's team, into trash bins with a sense of ceremonial glee.

  Note that Christie's shortlist was long on generals -- in fact, it doesn't appear he considered anyone else.

• Cora Currier/Danielle Marie Mackey: Trump Administration Suddenly Cancels Refugee Program That Saved Lives of Central American Children.

• Peter Dreier: Most Americans Are Liberal, Even If They Don't Know It: A lot of polling data, on issues rather than policies, e.g.: "78 percent of Americans say we need sweeping new laws to reduce the influence of money in politics"; "76 percent believe the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes."

• Thomas Frank: Why have we built a paradise for offshore billionaires?

• Jacob Greene/Allison McManus: Mysterious Deaths and Forced Disappearances. This is Egypt's U.S.-Backed War on Terror.

• Gardiner Harris: State Department to Offer Buyouts in Effort to Cut Staff. Well, what would Exxon do? Still, I find it incomprehensible that all of Tillerson's efforts to eliminate useless State Dept. jobs have still left an appointment in the works for Sam Brownback. Still, note this:

  Some employees will not be eligible for the buyouts, including many members of the security, information technology, medical and building staffs, areas in which the department is trying to hire more people or is offering bonuses for them to stay.

• Fred Kaplan: Lost in Asia: "Trump's trip shows what happens when a world leader is set adrift in the world with no strategy or goals."

• Sarah Kliff: Obamacare just had its best week in months: Sign-ups during the first week of open enrollment are up, despite Trump executive orders to cut advertising and support. Maine approved a referendum to expand Medicaid, and Virginia will lean more toward expanding.

• Paul Krugman: Leprechaun Economics and Neo-Lafferism: One of a series of posts on economist claims about growth under the Republicans' "tax reform" bill. Due to several assumptions I don't begin to buy, the theory is that lower corporate taxes will be matched by a massive capital inflow that will increase GDP. Since such investment will return profits abroad, Krugman argues that GNI (Gross National Income) is the more relevant measure, and that will be much less than growth in GDP (again, assuming that any such thing happens). "Leprechaun" refers to Ireland, which has attracted a lot of foreign investment with low corporate tax rates, so is the most relevant example (but a very small country compared to the US, so effects are likely to be much less notable here). Lafferism is the theory that tax cuts generate such enormous economic growth they actually increase tax revenues. Neo-Lafferism is the next formulation after Lafferism itself has been proven to be total horseshit.

• Dara Lind: Thousands of immigrants are losing their DACA protections already.

• Robinson Meyer: Syria Is Joining the Paris Agreement. Now What? Well, that leaves the United States as the only country to reject the climate accord.

• Charlie Savage: Trump Is Rapidly Reshaping the Judiciary. Here's How.

• Jon Swaine: Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon's attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Again, a very late start, so this is very catch-as-catch-can.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that drove politics this week: I moved Yglesias' weekly summaries up top a couple weeks ago as I've found lately that he's become a pretty good chronicler of the Trump travesty, which especially as I've started to tune out myself makes for a useful intro to whatever happened recently. This week's stories: We finally saw the GOP's tax bill; Mueller revealed indictments -- and a guilty plea; Jeff Sessions is back in the spotlight: specifically, for Russia stuff, going back to his false testimony during his confirmation hearings; and, Jerome Powell will be the next Federal Reserve chair. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • Republicans should admit to themselves they mostly don't want big change: "It's a cranky old person party, not a policy visionary party."

  • The Republican tax plan, in one chart:

    Big-picture summary is that over the first 10 years, the bill has:

    • $1 trillion net tax cut for business owners
    • $172 billion tax cut for people who inherit multi-million dollar estates
    • $300 billion net tax cut for individuals.

  • Republicans changed their minds and now want to cut the mortgage deduction.

  • Jerome Powell, President Trump's reported choice to head the Federal Reserve, explained: "Good news for people who like lax bank regulation."

  • Republicans promised a tax reform bill by today. Here's why they don't have one: November 1. "Nobody knew taxes were so complicated."

  • Booker calls on antitrust regulators to start paying attention to workers. Key word to add to your vocabulary is "monopsony":

    Antitrust law normally comes up in the context of monopoly power, the prospect that a company will control such a large share of output that it can raise prices or reduce quality. But it also applies to situations of monopsony power, in which market concentration offers undue leverage over workers or upstream suppliers. Antitrust regulators have consistently recognized the importance of the monopsony issue when it comes to cartels between separate companies -- suing a number of big Silicon Valley companies that had reached an illegal "no poaching" agreement to depress engineers' wages -- but has not in recent years appeared to recognize such concerns when conducting merger review. . . .

    Booker's letter starts with a premise that's now become common in progressive circles: that the American economy is becoming broadly more concentrated across a range of sectors. . . . At the same time, corporate profits as a share of the overall economy are at an unusually high level, the stock market is booming, and wage growth has been incredibly restrained even as the economy has recovered from the depths of the Great Recession.

  • Congressional Republicans are helping Trump with a big cover-up: Several things here, including:

    George W. Bush put his personal wealth in a blind trust. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm. Barack Obama held all his assets in simple diversified index funds. There is a way in which a modern president with a modicum of integrity conducts himself, and Trump has refused to do it.

    Rather than liquidate his assets and put the proceeds in a trust, Trump has simply turned over day-to-day management of the family business to his two older sons -- sons who continue to serve as surrogates and part of his political operation, even while his oldest daughter and her husband serve as top White House aides. Ivanka Trump is reeling in Chinese trademarks while Eric and Donald Jr. do real estate deals in India. Trump is billing the Secret Service six figures for the privilege of renting golf carts at his golf courses. People with interests before the government can -- and do -- pay direct cash bribes to the president by joining his Mar-a-Lago club or holding events at his hotel in Washington, DC. . . .

    There's an interesting lesson in the fact that Paul Manafort is being brought down by criminal money laundering and tax evasion charges that are at best tangentially related to his work for Trump's campaign -- there's a lot of white-collar crime happening in America that people are getting away with. . . .

    Manafort's criminal misconduct only came to light because he happened to have stumbled into massive political scandal that put his conduct under the microscope in a way that most rich criminals avoid.

    By the same token, over the years Trump has been repeatedly fined for breaking federal money laundering rules, been paid millions in hush money to settle civil fraud claims, been caught breaking New Jersey casino law, been caught violating the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, been caught violating federal securities law, been caught violating New York nonprofit law, and -- of course -- been accused of multiple counts of sexual assault.

    Yet throughout this storied history of lawbreaking, Trump has never faced a major criminal charge. He gets caught, he pays a civil penalty, and he keeps on being a rich guy who enjoys rich-guy impunity -- just like Manafort.

  • Paul Ryan won't let indictments stop him from cutting taxes on the rich.

  • Trump's response to indictments: "why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????"

  • The question that matters now: what will Republicans do when Trump fires Mueller? "Probably nothing."

• Tom Engelhardt: Doing Bin Laden's Bidding: I read (or maybe misread) a turn of phrase today that describes America's "War on Terror" aptly: "flailing forward." I always thought freedom meant you can choose what to do, and therefore free people can refuse to do stupid things just because they get taunted. Maybe Bin Laden didn't appreciate how much destruction the US would wreak when he challenged the insecure egos of American power, but he was certainly baiting the giant to blunder into "the graveyard of empires" -- as Afghanistan was known even before 2001.

  Looking back, 16 years later, it's extraordinary how September 11, 2001, would set the pattern for everything that followed. Each further goading act, from Afghanistan to Libya, San Bernardino to Orlando, Iraq to Niger, each further humiliation would trigger yet more of the same behavior in Washington. After all, so many people and institutions -- above all, the U.S. military and the rest of the national security state -- came to have a vested interest in Osama bin Laden's version of our world. . . .

  After all, Osama bin Laden managed to involve the United States in 16 years of fruitless wars, most now "generational" conflicts with no end in sight, which would only encourage the creation and spread of terror groups, the disintegration of order across significant parts of the planet, and the displacement of whole populations in staggering numbers. At the same time, he helped turn twenty-first-century Washington into a war machine of the first order that ate the rest of the government for lunch. He gave the national security state the means -- the excuse, if you will -- to rise to a kind of power, prominence, and funding that might otherwise have been inconceivable. In the process -- undoubtedly fulfilling his wildest dreams -- he helped speed up the decline of the very country that, since the Cold War ended, had been plugging itself as the greatest ever.

  That, of course, is old news. The new news here concerns Niger, where four US special forces soldiers were recently killed despite hardly anyone in America realizing they were there. What's happened since is a recapitulation of the Afghanistan-Iraq-Libya disaster:

  And suddenly U.S. Africa Command was highlighting its desire for more money from Congress; the military was moving to arm its Reaper drones in Niger with Hellfire missiles for future counterterrorism operations; and Secretary of Defense Mattis was assuring senators privately that the military would "expand" its "counterterrorism focus" in Africa. The military began to prepare to deploy Hellfire Missile-armed Reaper drones to Niger. "The war is morphing," Graham insisted. "You're going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you're going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you're going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field."

  Rumors were soon floating around that, as the Washington Post reported, the administration might "loosen restrictions on the U.S. military's ability to use lethal force in Niger" (as it already had done in the Trump era in places like Syria and Yemen). And so it expectably went, as events in Niger proceeded from utter obscurity to the near-apocalyptic, while -- despite the strangeness of the Trumpian moment -- the responses came in exactly as anyone reviewing the last 16 years might have imagined they would.

  All of this will predictably make things in central Africa worse, not better, leading to . . . well, more than a decade and a half after 9/11, you know just as well as I do where it's leading. And there are remarkably few brakes on the situation, especially with three generals of our losing wars ruling the roost in Washington and Donald Trump now lashed to the mast of his chief of staff.

  Our resident expert on US Africa Command is Nick Turse, but while this was happening, he was distracted by A Red Scare in the Gray Zone.

• Juliette Garside: Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth. Also: Jon Swaine/Ed Pilkington: The wealthy men in Trump's inner circle with links to tax havens.

• William Greider: What Killed the Democratic Party? Cites a recent report: Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis. This appeared before publication of Donna Brazile: Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC, which details the remarkable extent the Clinton campaign controlled the DNC all through the primary season. Brazile's revelations are further monetized in her book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. Josh Marshall attempts to mount a counterattack in Donna Brazile Needs to Back Up Her Self-Serving Claims, insisting that "There's zero advantage to re-litigating the toxic 2016 primaries." Personally, I felt that Hillary Clinton had earned the right to tell her side of the story in What Happened, so I see no further harm in Brazile's Hacks. (I suppose I might draw a line if Debby Wasserman-Schultz manages to find a publisher.) Still, the one thing that keeps bugging me about all of the 2016 Democratic autopsies -- especially the Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign -- is the nagging question: where did all of the money Clinton raised go? And why didn't she use more of it to build up the party she supposedly was the leader of?

• Mike Konczal: Trump Is Creating a Grifter Economy.

  

• German Lopez/Karen Turner: Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting: what we know: "At least 26 people were killed . . . The shooter is also dead following a brief chase." Also: Texas church shooting: suspect named as at least 26 confirmed dead -- as it happened.

• Noam Maggor: Amazon wants goodies and tax breaks to move its HQ to your city. Say no thanks. I want to underscore that the practice of giving tax breaks and incentives to companies that promise jobs is actually far worse than a zero-sum "race to the bottom." For evidence specific to Amazon, look no further than the perks they received to open a distribution center in Coffeyville, KS. Then try to find it. They've already closed it, moving on to greener pastures.

• Mike McIntire/Sasha Chavkin/Martha M Hamilton: Commerce Secretary's Offshore Ties to Putin 'Cronies'. Also, Jesse Drucker: Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire's Twitter and Facebook Investments.

• Simon Tisdall: Trump's Asia tour will expose his craving for the approval of despots: Not just despots. I got stuck watching Japan's Prime Minister blowing smoke up Trump's ass in their first press appearance. Trump's vanity clearly hasn't escaped the notice of world leaders.

• Alex Ward: Bowe Bergdahl isn't going to prison. But he is getting a "dishonorable discharge" -- you know, like the shooter in Texas got. Among those who thought the sentence too lenient:

  Donald Trump made it a campaign issue in 2016, calling Bergdahl a "traitor," even suggesting that he should be executed. About an hour after the ruling by a military judge, Trump tweeted his thoughts: "The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military."

  Of course, Bergdahl isn't the only soldier Trump has disparaged for "getting captured."

• Sarah Wildman: Saudi Arabia announces arrest of billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Without specifically commenting on Prince Alwaleed, Trump evidently approves: Mark Landler: Trump Tells Saudi King That He Supports Modernization Drive. Also by Wildman: Mueller has enough evidence to charge Michael Flynn.

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Sunday, October 29, 2017

Just the bare bones this week.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered this week: Congressional Republicans passed a budget; More sexual harassment shoes dropped; Retiring Republicans blasted Trump; Opioid abuse is officially an emergency. Other Yglesias posts:

  • There's less than meets the eye to the Trump stock rally: "German, French, and Japanese stocks are all doing way better."

  • Lou Dobbs's Trump interview is a masterpiece of sycophancy and nonsense: "precisely because the softball format leads to such easy questions, Trump's frequent inability to answer them reveals the depths of his ignorance better than any tough grilling possibly could."

  • Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and John McCain need to start acting like senators, not pundits.

  • Trump and a key Senate Republican are fighting on Twitter.

  • The real stakes in the tax reform debate:

    Democrats have grown more critical of inequality in recent years with Barack Obama proclaiming economic inequality to be the "defining challenge of our time." Energy in the party shifted even-further-left and fueled an unexpected level of support for Bernie Sanders and an unprecedented level of skepticism about the basic fundraising model of American politics.

    Even more surprisingly, in the GOP camp Donald Trump ran hard to the right on culture war issues while also promising a more egalitarian form of economics -- promising to be a champion of working class interests.

    But in office, while Trump has continued to obsessively feed the culture war maw, he is pushing a policy agenda that would add enormous fuel to the fire of inequality -- enormous, regressive rate cuts flying under the banner of "tax reform."

    Yglesias touts a report by Kevin Hassett, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, as "crucial because it's honest," but even "honesty" doesn't help much when you're extraordinarily full of shit:

    Hassett's contention, in essence, is that the best way to benefit the American worker is to engage in a global version of this subsidy game. Instead of targeted subsidies for new investments from one particular company, he and Trump want to offer a broad subsidy to all investment profits -- old profits and new profits, real returns on productive investments and returns on monopoly rents -- in the hopes of maximally catering to investor interests. By catering to the interests of the global investor class in this way, he thinks, we can do so much to boost the growth of the American economy that almost everyone will end up better off.

    Even if "almost everyone will end up better off" by cutting the taxes that rich people pay, that doesn't mean that tax cuts are "the best way to benefit the American worker." Direct redistribution to workers would be much more efficient. So would less direct approaches such as increasing labor's leverage. But the supposition that "almost everyone will end up better off" is itself highly suspect. The only way giving the rich more money "trickles down" is when the rich spend it to increase demand (which they don't do much of, although that does account for a few jobs here in Wichita building private jets) or when the rich invest more in productive capacity. The problem here is that even at present -- before Trump's tax cuts kick in -- the rich have more money than they know how to productively invest. A big part of the problem here is that by sucking up money that working folks and the government would be spending, their hoarding reduces aggregate demand, and as such reduces the return on investments in productive capacity. This effect is so large one has to wonder whether tax cuts generate any tangible growth at all, much less growth so substantial that "almost everyone benefits."

    Yglesias goes further and notes that "Doug Holtz-Eakin, a well-regarded former Congressional Budget Office director and current think tank leader, believes that eliminating the estate tax will create lots of jobs." The piece cited was written for the American Family Business Foundation, a political front group founded to promote repeal of estate and gift taxes, and is typical of the hackwork Holtz-Eakin has made a career out of.

  • Trump's latest big interview is both funny and terrifying: Before the Lou Dobbs interview, this one with Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox Business Channel. Subheds include: "Trump doesn't know anything about any issue"; "Bartiromo keeps ineptly trying to cover for Trump"; and "Trump gets all kinds of facts wrong."

    Over the course of the interview, Trump also claims to be working on a major infrastructure bill, a major welfare reform bill, and an unspecified economic development bill of some kind.

    Under almost any other past president, that kind of thing would be considered a huge news-making get for an interviewer. But even Fox didn't tout Bartiromo's big scoops on Trump's legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, "We're doing a big infrastructure bill," means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.

• Dean Baker: The problem of doctors' salaries.

• Julian Borger: Trump team drawing up fresh plans to bolster US nuclear arsenal.

• Alastair Campbell: The time has come for Theresa May to tell the nation: Brexit can't be done: Fantasy from Tony Blair's former director of communications, but the facts are sound enough, just the political will is weak. Campbell has also written: My fantasy Corbyn speech: 'I can no longer go along with a ruinous Brexit'.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Nurses returning from Puerto Rico accuse the federal government of leaving people to die.

• Danica Cotto: Puerto Rico Says It's Scrapping $300M Whitefish Contract: Not clear how a 2-year-old company from Interior Secretary's Ryan Zinke's home town managed to win a $300M no-bid contract, but the more people look into it the more suspicious it seems. For instance: Whitefish Energy contract bars government from auditing deal. For more: Ken Klippenstein: $300M Puerto Rico Recovery Contract Awarded to Tiny Utility Company Linked to Major Trump Donor; also Kate Aronoff: Disaster Capitalists Take Big Step Toward Privatizing Puerto Rico's Electric Grid.

• Thomas Frank: What Harvey Weinstein tells us about the liberal world: I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about political philosophy from someone like Weinstein, who more than anything else testifies that people with power tend to abuse it, regardless of their professed values. Still, this is quasi-amusing:

  Perhaps Weinstein's liberalism was a put-on all along. It certainly wasn't consistent or thorough. He strongly disapproved of Bernie Sanders, for example. And on election night in November 2008, Weinstein could be found celebrating Barack Obama's impending victory on the peculiar grounds that "stock market averages will go up around the world."

  The mogul's liberalism could also be starkly militaristic. On the release of his work of bald war propaganda, Seal Team Six, he opined to CNN as follows:

  "Colin Powell, the best military genius of our time, supports the president -- supports President Obama. And the military love him. I made this movie. I know the military. They respect this man for what he's done. He's killed more terrorists in his short watch than George Bush did in eight years. He's the true hawk."

• Ronald A Klain: He who must be named:

  For decades, conservatives labored to make their movement more humane. Ronald Reagan put a jovial face on conservative policies -- more Dale Carnegie than Ayn Rand; George H.W. Bush promised a "kinder, gentler" tenure; George W. Bush ran on "compassionate conservatism." . . .

  That was then. Today, we are living the Politics of Mean. In the Trump presidency, with its daily acts of cruelty, punching down is a feature, not a bug. And the only thing more disquieting than a president who practices the Politics of Mean are the voters who celebrate it. . . .

  Since Trump's victory, his meanness has been infectious. We have seen it in neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and elsewhere, students chanting "build that wall" at Hispanic peers, and a rise of racial epithets and anti-Semitic graffiti on college campuses. Puerto Rico, again, provides a current example. As The Post's Jenna Johnson recently reported, countless Trump supporters -- including some in Texas, who themselves took Federal Emergency Management Agency aid after Hurricane Harvey -- back the president's proposal to limit aid to Puerto Rico and believe that fellow Americans there should "fix their own country up."

  The obvious difference between then (1980-2000) and now is sixteen years of endless war, although it's worth noting that conservatism has always prided itself on being a hard way of life, a stance which never took much prodding to tip over into meanness. Indeed, even while feigning compassion conservative political pitches always started with playing on people's prejudices -- primordially racism, as Reagan made clear when he launched his 1980 campaign over the graves of slain civil rights workers. Klain calls for a list of recent presidents and wannabes to stand up to Trump's Politics of Mean. They should, of course, but it would be even more helpful if they owned up to how their own errors got us here.

• Julia Manchester: National Weather Service 'on the brink of failure' due to job vacancies.

• Rupert Neate: World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires' wealth swells to $6tn.

  Billionaires' fortunes increased by 17% on average last year due to the strong performance of their companies and investments, particularly in technology and commodities. The billionaires' average return was double that achieved by the world's stock markets and far more than the average interest rates of just 0.35% offered by UK instant-access high street bank accounts.

• John Nichols: Trump's FCC Chair Moves to Undermine Journalism and Democracy.

• Mark Perry: Are Trump's Generals in Over Their Heads? "For many in Washington, they're the only thing standing between the president and chaos. But their growing clout is starting to worry military experts." One problem is that as more generals move into politics, the military itself (at least at the top) becomes increasingly politicized. I would add that the competency and maturity they supposedly possess are traits with little real evidence to back them up. Paul Woodward also adds:

  The problem with viewing the former and current generals in this administration as the indispensable "adult supervision" Trump requires, is that these individuals are the sole source of legitimacy for his presidency -- exactly the reason he surrounded himself with this kind of Teflon political protection.

  Instead of seeing Mattis et al as the only thing that stands between us and Armageddon, we should probably see them as the primary obstacle to the outright exposure of the fraud that has been perpetrated by Trump and the cadre of visibly corrupt cronies he has installed in most of the executive branch of government.

  Speaking of the alleged competence of generals, see Senior military officials sanctioned for more than 500 cases of serious misconduct: That just since 2013.

• Andrew Prokop: 6 charts that explain why American politics is so broken: "The Pew Research Center's political typology report, explained." Actually, I'm not sure he charts do explain "why American politics is so broken" -- for one thing, nothing here on the influence of money, which is by far the biggest breaker. They do show several disconnects, including "Most Americans -- including a good chunk of Republicans -- want corporate taxes raised, not lowered" and "It's only a vocal minority of Americans who are anti-immigrant." Nor do most of the typology groups make much sense, although "Country-First Conservatives" are defined exclusively by their hatred for immigrants. Still, worth noting that "Solid Liberals" are more numerous than "Core Conservatives" (16-13% among the general public, 25-20% among "politically engaged."

• Charlie Savage: Will Congress Ever Limit the Forever-Expanding 9/11 War?

• Joseph E Stiglitz: America Has a Monopoly Problem -- and It's Huge.

• Nick Turse: It's Not Just Niger -- U.S. Military Activity Is a "Recruiting Tool" for Terror Groups Across West Africa.

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Sunday, October 22, 2017

I didn't get a head start on this -- in fact, started after dinner on Sunday, so it's pretty quick and dirty, with a limited set of sources. Still, it's so easy to find such appalling stories that posts like this practically write themselves.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 political stories that actually mattered this week: We got a bipartisan insurance stabilization deal: thanks to Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), but: Republican leaders don't seem to want a deal, like Paul Ryan, with Trump both waxing and waning; The administration tested some new tax arguments, like "corporate tax cuts boost wages" and "math forces tax cuts for the rich"; Nobody knows what's happening with NAFTA, hence no real story here, but Trump's folks are blowing some smoke. Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • The raging controversy over Trump and the families of fallen soldiers, explained: well, more like summarized, as it's hard to explain how tone-deaf Trump is in human interactions as straightforward (albeit no doubt unpleasant) as issuing condolences.

    Yet Trump has managed to completely and utterly botch this relatively simple job less than a week after creating a major diplomatic crisis with Iran for no particular reason. The humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico appears to be, if anything, intensifying as citizens cope with a chronic lack of safe water. The president has willfully destabilized individual health insurance markets without any clear plan and is actively scuttling congressional efforts to stabilize the situation.

    Other serious challenges are lurking out there in the world, yet the Trump administration seemed incapable of issuing a simple condolence statement or answering a question about it without unleashing a multi-front political fiasco.

  • Trump aide says manufacturing decline increases abortions, death, and drug abuse: "He might be right." Reviews research on "China shock" -- what happens to areas hard hit by job losses due to cheaper imports. You can blame this on trade deals, but it's also indicative of the frayed safety net all across the country.

  • Republians say they can't figure out how to not cut taxes for the rich: "It's really not very hard." If, say, you wanted to lower rates on the first $100k of income, that would reduce taxes on those who make more too, but you could offset that by increasing the rate further up the income scale. Or you could do it lots of other ways. And don't bother cutting the estate tax, something no one in the middle class has to pay -- that's only a benefit for the very rich.

  • Trump says a big corporate tax cut will boost average incomes by $4,000 a year.

• Sarah Aziza: How Long Can the Courts Keep Donald Trump's Muslim Ban at Bay? Two federal judges issued injunctions against the third iteration of Trump's travel ban last week.

• Julia Belluz: White House officials think childhood obesity is not a problem. Have they seen the data? Their campaign to wipe out Obama's legacy (in this case, Michelle Obama's) continues apace.

• Aida Chavez: House Republicans Warn Congress Not to "Bail Out" Puerto Rico.

• Jason C Ditz: What Are U.S. Forces Doing in Niger Anyway?: Four US Special Forces were killed in an ambush a couple weeks ago, finally pointing a spotlight on US intervention there (much like the Benghazi fiasco).

  Turns out that for five years Niger has been a toe in the expanding American footprint in Africa, and has become a hub of U.S. military activity (about 800 soldiers are serving as advisors and training local forces there now) and, according to Nick Turse, the location of a brand new $100 million drone base. Meanwhile, the region has become a crossroads of Islamist activity, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb across the Sahel. And now, apparently, ISIS. . . .

  Niger is far from the exception. In March 2012, the Pentagon confirmed that U.S. troops were attacked in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, and that a CIA officer was killed. This was the first time officials confirmed that the U.S. had ground troops operating inside Yemen at all. The revelation is even more stunning when one recalls that the White House publicly ruled out sending ground troops to Yemen several times in the years leading up to this admission.

  More war news from around the world:

  • Iraqi Forces Seize Kirkuk Province From Kurds

  • Niger Ambush the Result of 'Massive Intel Failure'

  • 30 Police Killed in Shootout in Egypt's Western Desert

  • Suicide bomb attack kills 15 army trainees in Kabul

  • Death toll from Somalia bombings rises to 358

• Lee Fang/Nick Surgey: Koch Brothers' Internal Strategy Memo on Selling Tax Cuts: Ignore the Deficit: After all, deficits only matter when a Democrat is president and might use deficits for expanding services and/or growing the economy -- things Republicans oppose and, especially, want to make sure no Democrat gets credit for. But when Republicans are in power, well, as Dick Cheney said, "deficits don't matter."

• Sarah Kliff: Medicare X: the Democrats' supercharged public option plan, explained: Specifically, Sens. Bennet and Kaine, a plan that makes less sense than Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all but would involve less turmoil by adding a Medicare-based plan to the Obamacare exchanges as a public option, increasing competition for private insurance plans.

• Paul Krugman: Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies: A propos of the Trump's "new" arguments for slashing taxes, Krugman explains:

  Modern conservatives have been lying about taxes pretty much from the beginning of their movement. Made-up sob stories about family farms broken up to pay inheritance taxes, magical claims about self-financing tax cuts, and so on go all the way back to the 1970s. But the selling of tax cuts under Trump has taken things to a whole new level, both in terms of the brazenness of the lies and their sheer number. Both the depth and the breadth of the dishonesty make it hard even for those of us who do this for a living to keep track.

  He then comes up with a list of ten (see the article for details, although you're probably familiar with most of them already):

  1. America is the most highly-taxed country in the world
  2. The estate tax is destroying farmers and truckers
  3. Taxation of pass-through entities is a burden on small business
  4. Cutting profits taxes really benefits workers
  5. Repatriating overseas profits will create jobs
  6. This is not a tax cut for the rich
  7. It's a big tax cut for the middle class
  8. It won't increase the deficit
  9. Cutting taxes will jump-start rapid growth
  10. Tax cuts will pay for themselves

  One thing that's missing in this debate is what do we need taxes for. Some people argue that taxes should be limited to a certain percentage of GDP -- often the same people who don't understand why government spends more now than it did under Coolidge or McKinley. I think it's obvious that a lot of things that we need in today's economic world are necessarily more expensive than they were in past eras (especially things that didn't really exist back then). To figure this out, one needs some kind of multifactor analysis, and I think especially one has to ask what things are most efficiently produced and distributed through public channels. I think this list is large and growing, and may include things that surprise you. If this list is as large as I think, we need to be looking not at ways to cut taxes but at ways to grow them, and how to do so fairly and efficiently. As it is, the relentless focus on cutting taxes is an attack on public spending, and ultimately on the public taxes are meant to serve.

• Jane Mayer: The Danger of President Pence: A profile of the vice president, one which raises plenty to be alarmed about, not least because his odds of being elevated to the presidency via the 25th amendment (the one that says all it takes is a majority of the cabinet to find Trump incompetent -- perhaps something Trump should have considered before giving Pence so much say in picking nominees). For more on the 25th, see Jeannie Suk Gersen: How Anti-Trump Psychiatrists Are Mobilizing Behind the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

• Anna North: A detained 17-year-old immigrant wants an abortion. The government went to court to stop her. Here's a case where the Trump administration isn't being run like a business -- try finding an angle where it makes sense for the government to prevent a detained emigrant from obtaining an abortion -- but more like a shady religious cult. For more cultlike behavior:

  Doe is not the only minor who's been affected by the policy, according to the ACLU. In March, according to court documents filed by the group, another minor at a shelter in Texas chose to have a medication abortion after getting a judge's permission for the procedure. After she had taken the first dose of the medication, ORR officials forced her to go to an emergency room to see if the abortion could be reversed. Ultimately, she was allowed to proceed with the abortion and take the remaining dose of the medication. In another case, the ACLU said, Lloyd traveled from Washington, DC, to meet personally with a young woman to try to convince her not to have an abortion.

• Jon Schwartz: It Didn't Just Start Now: John Kelly Has Always Been a Hard-Right Bully: The former Marine General has had a tough week, not only failing repeatedly to keep Trump from embarrassing himself, but having his own Trumpian moment making baseless charges against Rep. Frederica Wilson. The best Trump mouthpiece Sarah Sanders came up with in Kelly's defense was It's "highly inappropriate" to question John Kelly -- because he's a general. Schwartz compresses "Kelly's worldview, as expressed in 2010" into this short list:

  1. No one outside of the military can legitimately question any of America's wars.
  2. No one who is in the military ever questions any of America's wars.
  3. America and its wars are and have always been good.
  4. America is under terrifying threat from incomprehensible lunatics.
  5. Our country is hamstrung by its sniveling "chattering class."

  I've run across many more links on Kelly and Wilson, but I'd rather point out this one: Alice Speri: Top Trump Official John Kelly Ordered ICE to Portray Immigrants as Criminals to Justify Raids.

• Matt Shuham: Forbes: Trump Drops on 'Richest Americans' List as Net Worth Takes a Hit: Down $600 million to $3.1 billion, dropping 92 spots (from 156 to 248). No real analysis here as to why. Certainly, it's not because he's resolved his conflicts-of-interest and made it impossible to use his office to feather his own nest. And this looks extra bad with the stock market setting new record highs. On the other hand, leaving his day-to-day business decisions in the hands of Jr. and Eric may not ave been the smartest idea. And naming so many properties after himself has politicized them, which makes their value at least partly subject to his extraordinarily low popularity.

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Sunday, October 15, 2017

Every week since January has featured multiple stories about how Donald Trump (and/or the Republicans) are corrupting government, undermining democracy, degrading our short- and long-term economic prospects, and quite often endangering world peace. Still, most of those stories could be understood as some combination of the greed, demagoguery, and narrow-minded ignorance that constitutes what passes as the conservative world-view. But some things happened this week that makes me think Trump has crossed a previously unknown line into a qualitatively new level of, well, I'm groping for words, trying to avoid "evil," so let's call it derangement. The US withdrawal from UNESCO was the first such story, followed by the trashing of the agreement with Iran to terminate their "nuclear program," but then there was Trump's executive order to undermine Obamacare -- an act of pure spite following the Republican failure to repeal the ACA. As Ezra Klein's tweet explains:

Trump's new policy will increase premiums by 20%, cost the government $194 billion, increase the deficit, destabilize insurance markets, and increase the number of uninsured Americans. There is nothing it makes better; it's pure policy nihilism.

Sure, I've often felt like Republicans generated their policy ideas from a deep well of spite and vindictiveness, with scant concern for consequences because deep down they really didn't give a shit about anyone other than themselves (actually, a small subset of the fools they manipulating into voting for them). But usually you could also discern a positive slant, like their fondness for helping predatory businesses rip everyone else off. Trump certainly isn't beyond that, especially for his own businesses, but he mostly leaves such matters to his subordinates -- after all, their experience in business and lobbies gives them a command of detail he lacks, as well as motives he doesn't disapprove of.

That's should have left Trump free to focus on "big picture" items, but not understanding them either, he's been preoccupied with petty feuds and tone-deaf publicity stunts, but his hatred for Obama is so great that he'll gladly sign any executive order that wipes out any hint of his predecessor's legacy. That's the source of much of his policy nihilism, although he's occasionally broken new ground, as with his UNESCO withdrawal -- ending 72 years of more/less trying to work with the rest of the world's nations for the common good.

I suppose what this really means is that for the first time since he took office, I've come around to the view that Trump is actually worse than the run-of-the-mill Republicans in Congress and now in his cabinet and office. I've long resisted that view, partly because the media bend over backwards to excuse and legitimize the latter, and partly because even though I disapprove of Trump's obvious character flaws (e.g., racism, sexism, xenophobia, vanity, violence, mendacity, ostentatiousness, sheer greed) I prefer to judge people on what they do rather than what they think or believe. (Indeed, those flaws are pretty common in America, but most people have enough of a superego to try to limit their exposure and maintain social decorum -- Trump, as is becoming more obvious every day, does not.)

On the other hand, let's not forget that Trump started to wander off after giving his little rant about Obamacare, and it was Mike Pence who grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him back to actually sign the executive order. That's an image to keep in mind if, say, Trump is finally dispatched as too much of an embarrassment -- and here I have to agree with Steve Bannon that the odds favor a cabinet coup using the 25th amendment to Congress taking the more arduous road to impeachment.

Some scattered links this week:

• Aaron Blake: Almost half of Republicans want war with North Korea, a new poll says. Is it the Trump Effect? Actually, a plurality, 46-41% in favor of a preemptive strike against North Korea. Other polls produce different results, possibly depending on how the question is phrased. I doubt if even 1% of the Republicans polled have any understanding of North Korea's preparations for responding to such an attack, hence of the risks and likely costs of starting a war there. On the other hand, one may expect Mattis, Tillerson, and the upper ranks of the uniformed to at least have some idea: thousands of pieces of artillery that can reach Seoul (population 10 million, metro area 25 million), the range of rockets that can reach further (up to the US mainland), a few dozen nuclear warheads (some with hydrogen boost), the vast array of defensive tunnels, one of the largest military forces in the world. The latest assessment I've seen is that the US would prevail in such a war (assuming China does not intervene, as it did in 1950), but it wouldn't be easy and the costs would be great. Tillerson was recently quoted as saying he'll continue negotiating "until the first bomb falls" -- it's hard to take much comfort in that given that Trump's been quoted as saying his Secretary of State is wasting his time. Moreover, see Choe Sang-Hun: North Korean Hackers Stole U.S.-South Korean Military Plans, Lawmaker Says, including a "decapitation plan" for an attack targeting Kim Jong-Un. Also note the report that Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in U.S. Nuclear Arsenal -- while beyond ridiculous, such a report would play directly into North Korea's paranoia. Indeed, Trump is playing Nixon's Madman theory much more convincingly than the Trickster ever did. (For a recent review, see Garrett M Graff: The Madman and the Bomb. Among other things, this article points out how elated Trump was in ordering the "Mother of All Bombs" dropped in Afghanistan, adding "All the previous worries about the potential of a deranged president to use a nuclear button irrationally have been multiplied.") Lately Trump has made a number of bold unilateral moves, evidently meant to reassure his base that he can act dramatically on their prejudices. The more he senses support for striking North Korea, the more likely he is to do it.

• Tina Brown: What Harvey and Trump have in common: Harvey is Weinstein, the movie mogul and current poster boy for serial sexual abuse. Brown left her job at The New Yorker to work for him, and this is what she found out:

  What I learned about Harvey in the two years of proximity with him at Talk was that nothing about his outward persona, the beguiling Falstaffian charmer who persuaded -- or bamboozled -- me into leaving The New Yorker and joining him, was the truth. He is very Trumpian in that regard.

  He comes off as a big, blustery, rough diamond kind of a guy, the kind of old-time studio chief who lives large, writes big checks and exudes bonhomie. Wrong. The real Harvey is fearful, paranoid, and hates being touched (at any rate, when fully dressed).

  Winning, for him, was a blood sport. Deals never close. They are renegotiated down to the bone after the press release. A business meeting listening to him discuss Miramax deals in progress reminded me of the wire tap transcripts of John Gotti and his inner circle at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens. "So just close it fast, then fuck him later with the subsidiary rights." . . .

  Harvey is an intimidating and ferocious man. Crossing him, even now, is scary. But it's a different era now. Cosby. Ailes. O'Reilly, Weinstein. It's over, except for one -- the serial sexual harasser in the White House.

  For more Weinstein dirt, see Ronan Farrow: From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein's Accusers Tell Their Stories. As for Trump, see: Jessica Garrison/Kendall Taggart: Trump Given a Subpoena for All Documents Relating to Assault Allegations.

• Daniel José Camacho: Trump's marriage to the religious right reeks of hypocrisy on both sides: Well, sure, but hypocrisy is an old friend of Christianity in every stage of American history, and you can probably find prime examples at least as far back as Constantine, who realized how useful the religion could be for sanctifying his own political power. Christianity is, above all else, a remarkably forgiving religion, as long as you attest to its power by begging for its mercy. In country music, for instance, whatever you do on Saturday Night can be atoned for and made right on Sunday Morning, and the latter is all that really matters to the clergy -- after all, confession confirms their authority. The political right has never had a problem with that. They love the idea of hierarchy so much they strive to emulate it on earth, ruled, of course, by themselves, conferring favors upon their favored clergy. Of course, if you don't buy into this arrangement, your cynicism may lead you to charge them with hypocrisy. Indeed, the whole scam is as easy to see through as "The Emperor's New Clothes," but that only makes the believers more angry and vindictive -- hence, the rise of the Religious Right parallels liberal secularization, with its increasing militancy (and, looking at Trump, I'm inclined to add desperation) bound up with a feeling of embattled isolation that right-wing media and politicians have cynically encouraged. Still, the problem is less Christian backlash against secular culture -- something that is real but deeper and more complex than the political backlash it is often confused with[*] -- than that con artists from Reagan to Trump have often managed to wrap their scams up in various traditional pieties, as if that excuses otherwise shameless behavior.

  [*] Note that Christianity predates capitalism, so contains a strain of anti-materialist sentiment that has never been fully reconciled with modern commerce. It even predates Constantine's state religion, before which it was resolutely anti-state and anti-war, so even today a large segment of the peace movement finds its inspiration in religion (and not just Christianity).

• William D Hartung: Here's Where Your Tax Dollars for 'Defense' Are Really Going:

  The answer couldn't be more straightforward: It goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won't even perform as promised. Too often the result is weapons that aren't needed at prices we can't afford. If anyone truly wanted to help the troops, loosening the corporate grip on the Pentagon budget would be an excellent place to start.

  The numbers are staggering. In fiscal year 2016, the Pentagon issued $304 billion in contract awards to corporations -- nearly half of the department's $600 billion-plus budget for that year. And keep in mind that not all contractors are created equal. According to the Federal Procurement Data System's top 100 contractors report for 2016, the biggest beneficiaries by a country mile were Lockheed Martin ($36.2 billion), Boeing ($24.3 billion), Raytheon ($12.8 billion), General Dynamics ($12.7 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($10.7 billion). Together, these five firms gobbled up nearly $100 billion of your tax dollars, about one-third of all the Pentagon's contract awards in 2016. . . .

  The arms industry's investment in lobbying is even more impressive. The defense sector has spent a total of more than $1 billion on that productive activity since 2009, employing anywhere from 700 to 1,000 lobbyists in any given year. To put that in perspective, you're talking about significantly more than one lobbyist per member of Congress, the majority of whom zipped through Washington's famed "revolving door"; they moved, that is, from positions in Congress or the Pentagon to posts at weapons companies from which they could proselytize their former colleagues.

  The weapons systems are the big ticket items, but there is much more, including some 600,000 private contractors doing all sorts of things, with little effective management, while companies like Erik Prince's Blackwater lobby to privatize more combat jobs.

• Sean Illing: 20 of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared. Many interesting idea here; e.g.:

  Nancy Bermeo, a politics professor at Princeton and Harvard, began her talk with a jarring reminder: Democracies don't merely collapse, as that "implies a process devoid of will." Democracies die because of deliberate decisions made by human beings.

  Usually, it's because the people in power take democratic institutions for granted. They become disconnected from the citizenry. They develop interests separate and apart from the voters. They push policies that benefit themselves and harm the broader population. Do that long enough, Bermeo says, and you'll cultivate an angry, divided society that pulls apart at the seams. . . .

  Due to wage stagnation, growing inequalities, automation, and a shrinking labor market, millions of Americans are deeply pessimistic about the future: 64 percent of people in Europe believe their children will be worse off than they were; the number is 60 percent in America.

  That pessimism is grounded in economic reality. In 1970, 90 percent of 30-year-olds in America were better off than their parents at the same age. In 2010, only 50 percent were. Numbers like this cause people to lose faith in the system. What you get is a spike in extremism and a retreat from the political center. That leads to declines in voter turnout and, consequently, more opportunities for fringe parties and candidates. . . .

  Consider this stat: In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats objected to the idea of their children marrying across political lines. In 2010, those numbers jumped to 46 percent and 33 percent respectively. Divides like this are eating away at the American social fabric. . . .

  But for all the reasons discussed above, people have gradually disengaged from the status quo. Something has cracked. Citizens have lost faith in the system. The social compact is broken. So now we're left to stew in our racial and cultural resentments, which paved the way for a demagogue like Trump.

  One thing I would stress here is that "the erosion of democratic norms" -- voter suppression, gerrymandering, obstruction tactics, tolerance for "dirty tricks," the ever-increasing prerogatives of money -- has largely been spawned within the Republican Party, which is to say the party most desperately committed to inequality, order, privilege, and hierarchy. The article offers stats about the growing number of Americans who look favorably on a military dictatorship, but neglects to break them down by party. Still, it's worth noting that Democrats have often played into the hands of anti-democratic forces, especially those who have been most successful at toadying for donors. Although Obama, for instance, campaigned against the baleful influence of money in 2008, he managed to raise so much more of it than McCain, so Democrats didn't bother to use their majorities to address the issue.

• Sarah Jaffe: Bernie Sanders Isn't Winning Local Elections for the Left:

  "Bernie Wins Birmingham" is convenient shorthand for those who have no idea what actually goes on in Birmingham. But Bernie Sanders and the group his 2016 campaign inspired, Our Revolution, are not winning elections in places like Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi, which in June elected a mayor who's promised, "I'll make Jackson the most radical city on the planet." Activists in Birmingham and Jackson and Albuquerque and Long Island are winning them -- left-wing activists who've toiled for years in the trenches, working with a new wave of organizers from Black Lives Matter and other insurgent groups, who bring social-media savvy and fired-up young voters into the mix.

  Still, the title leans too hard the opposite way. Bernie is helping, especially to provide a nationwide support framework. Conversely, helping build local power bases helps build the nationwide movement, either for Bernie (who certainly could have used some local help in Mississippi and Alabama during the 2016 primaries) or whoever vies most successfully for his movement. Conversely, although Hillary may have given up her dream of running in 2020, her crowd is still more focused on containing (or combatting) the left than on winning elections: see Bob Moser: Clintonian Democrats Are Peddling Myths to Cling to Power. Anyone who bothers to remember McGovern's tragic 1972 loss to Nixon should heap shame on those Democrats who betrayed their party's nominee for the most devious and crooked politician in American history -- much more numerous than the tiny fraction of Sanders supporters who couldn't stomach Clinton in 2016. The so-called New Democrats have discredited themselves doubly: first by repeatedly surrendering the Party's New Deal/Great Society legacy to increasingly regressive Republicans in the name of political expediency, then by losing to the vilest candidate the GOP could muster.

• Fred Kaplan: Certifiable Nonsense: As usual with Slate, the link title is better: "President Trump's Most Dishonest Speech Yet," adding "His announcement on the Iran deal might also be his most dangerous speech yet." Certainly true about his dishonesty, even though there's lots of competition. But most dangerous? More dangerous than his taunting of North Korea, which actually has nuclear warheads as well as more powerful missiles? Well, the two are related:

  Pulling out would also damage our posture, and possibly trigger catastrophe, in other global hot spots. If our face-off with North Korea is to end without war, it will require some sort of diplomatic settlement. But who will want to negotiate with the United States, and who would believe any deal Trump would sign or guarantee he would make, if he pulls out of the Iran deal, even though Iran is abiding by its terms?

  Also see:

  • Stephen Castle/Thomas Erdbrink: European Leaders Criticize Trump's Disavowal of Iran Deal.

  • Amir Handjani: Trump Aims at Iran, Hits the U.S..

  • David M Herszenhorn/Jacopo Barigazzi: EU: US has no right to terminate Iran accord.

  • Rick Noack/Erin Cunningham: Why every other country in the Iran nuclear deal is standing by it.

  • Philip Weiss: Trump's speech on Iran deal is an orgy for Israel and its US friends.

• Sarah Kliff: Trump's acting like Obamacare is just politics. It's people's lives. This is the piece Klein linked to in his tweet above, so it starts by spelling out the bottom line. One key thing Trump's order does is to end payments to insurance companies protecting against losses due to adverse selection. This wouldn't be a problem in a single-payer system with truly universal coverage, but splitting the market into multiple segments means that some will be cost more than others. If insurance companies had to bear that risk, some would drop out and the rest would raise their prices. And that's exactly what they will do under Trump's executive order.

  Ending these payments raises premiums for anyone who uses Obamacare: older people, younger people, sicker people, and healthy people. And it puts an already fragile Obamacare marketplace at greater risk of a last-minute exodus by health plans who assumed that the government would pay these subsidies -- and don't think they can weather the financial hit.

  The Trump administration has, since taking office, cut the Obamacare open enrollment period in half. Instead of 90 days to sign up, enrollees will now get 45. The Trump administration has cut the Obamacare advertising budget by 90 percent -- and reduced funding for in-person outreach by 40 percent. Regional branches of Health and Human Services abruptly pulled out of the outreach events they have participated in over the last four years. . . .

  Trump's larger presidential agenda has focused on unwinding Barack Obama's legacy. He's more focused on destroying his nemesis than trying to replace, to fix, or to improve Obama's biggest accomplishments from the Iran deal to environmental regulation.

  On health care, there are going to be immediate and very real consequences for Americans. There are real people who stand to be hurt by an administration that has actively decided to make a public benefits program function poorly.

  Also see:

  • Alvin Chang: Trump is bragging that his executive order caused health care stocks to drop.

  • Dylan Scott: Who's going to be hurt by Trump's new attack on Obamacare.

  • Jeff Stein: "It's going to hurt everybody": Nevada's GOP governor rips Trump over ACA sabotage.

• Michael Kruse: The Power of Trump's Positive Thinking: Yet another attempt to plumb Trump's psyche, trying to impose order on a mental process that strikes most of us as supremely chaotic:

  "I've had just about the most legislation passed of any president, in a nine-month period, that's ever served," he said this week in an interview with Forbes, contradicting objective metrics and repeating his frequent and dubious assertion of unprecedented success throughout the first year of his first term as president.

  The reality is that Trump is in a rut. His legislative agenda is floundering. His approval ratings are historically low. He's raging privately while engaging in noisy, internecine squabbles. He's increasingly isolated. And yet his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false. They are something much more elemental. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. This is not his mother's flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale's "power of positive thinking," the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic assertion can lead to actual achievement. . . .

  What Peale peddled was "a certain positive, feel-good religiosity that demands nothing of you and rewards you with worldly riches and success," said Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse, the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. "It's a self-help gospel . . . the name-it-and-claim-it gospel." . . .

  Peale, then nearly 80 years old, officiated Trump's wedding in 1977. In 1983, shortly after the opening of Trump Tower, Trump credited Peale for instilling in him a can-do ethos.

  The piece cites various critiques of various self-help pitches, some of which fit Trump to a tee, then notes that no one who has been studied has anywhere near the power Trump has, so "the Trump presidency is uncharted territory." Of course, Peale is only one significant influence on Trump's thinking and behavior. There's also Roy Cohn, a very different and much more nefarious mentor. And there's Trump's Nazi/KKK-aligned father, and probably a few more. Some writer could build a great novel out of such clay. Unfortunately, the real thing isn't a work of fiction.

• Dara Lind: Leaked memos show Jeff Sessions's DOJ aims to undermine due process for immigrants. Sessions is one of those "public servants" in the Trump administration that's willing to overlook getting tweet-slapped by Trump because he has important agenda work to do. This is one prime example (others include ending civil rights and antitrust enforcement).

• James Mann: The Adults in the Room: A piece on how the generals (Kelly, Mattis, McMaster) and Boy Scout (Tillerson) Trump has surrounded himself with are keeping the ship of state afloat, their "maturity" in sharp contrast to the president's lack thereof:

  Following the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, the meaning of the words "adult" and "grownup" has undergone a subtle but remarkable shift. They now refer far more to behavior and character than to views on policy. This is where Kelly, McMaster, Mattis, and (to a lesser extent) Tillerson come in; "grownup" is the behavioral role that we have assigned to them.

  For the first time, America has a president who does not act like an adult. He is emotionally immature: he lies, taunts, insults, bullies, rages, seeks vengeance, exalts violence, boasts, refuses to accept criticism, all in ways that most parents would seek to prevent in their own children. Thus the dynamic was established in the earliest days of the administration: Trump makes messes, or threatens to make them, and Americans look to the "adults" to clean up for him. The "adults," in turn, send out occasional little public signals that they are trying to keep Trump from veering off course -- to educate him, to make him grow up, to keep him under control. When all else fails, they simply distance themselves from his tirades. Sometimes such efforts are successful; on many occasions, they aren't.

  Leaving aside the question whether Trump's immaturity is a matter of his spoiled upbringing, sociopathy, or some kind of dementia (what we usually mean when we speak of people his age undergoing "a second childhood"), what I find most incongruous here is the notion that we should consider generals to be grown-ups. We are, after all, talking about people who dress up in uniforms with flashy medals, who prance about and play with guns or, at their rank, maneuver soldiers around battlefields. Those are all things that I enjoyed in my pre-teens but rapidly grew out of, especially as I became conscious of the very grim and senseless war my country was fighting in Vietnam. Ever since then, I figured those who pursued military careers to be stuck in some kind of adolescence, at least until PTSD disabuses them of their fantasies. Maybe generals are different, although I don't see why, and I doubt they often function well outside of the closed system that selected them. (Tillerson, of course, didn't fall for the military fantasy, but he got a taste of the worldview in the Boy Scouts, and his advancement through the ranks of Exxon was every bit as cloistered -- something we see in his performance as Secretary of State.)

  I also couldn't help but notice this piece: Eric Scigliano: The Book Mattis Reads to Be Prepared for War With North Korea. The book is T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War, originally published in 1963, evidently focused on the importance of putting "boots on the ground" while recognizing how little America's scorched earth air bombardment had accomplished. No idea what lessons Mattis draws from this, other than ego-stroking from a fellow Marine. As I recall, the first thing I read about Mattis (back in early Iraq War days) stressed what an intellectual he was, with his vast library of war books. I flashed then on Robert Sherrill's book title, Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music, and figured "military intellectuals" were likely to be similarly debased.

• Donald Macintyre: Tony Blair: 'We were wrong to boycott Hamas after its election win': Only eleven years too late. I don't recall whether Blair has issued his mea culpa for the Iraq War or any of the dozens of other things he's famously screwed up, but it's worth noting this one. One thing we should always work toward is getting groups to lay down their arms and work to advance their cause through an electoral framework. The Hamas electoral victory in 2006 offered an opportunity to restart the "peace process" that Barak and Sharon aborted in 2000, with broader Palestinian representation than was ever possible under Arafat. Of course, Sharon wanted no part in any peace process, and Blair and Bush sheepishly went along, not simply adding more than a decade to the conflict but allowing Israel's illegal settlement actions to sink ever deeper roots into the West Bank.

• Andrew Restuccia: Bannon promises 'season of war' against McConnell, GOP establishment: Specifically, "to challenge any Senate Republican who doesn't publicly condemn attacks on President Donald Trump." On the one hand, I'm tempted to say, "let the bloodletting begin"; on the other, while it will be easy to characterize Bannon's insurgents as extremists, his willingness to challenge oligarchy gives him a potential popularity that establishment Republicans as Mitch McConnell lack. Bannon argues here that "money doesn't matter anymore" -- while that's certainly not true, his "grass roots organizing" was able to negate Hillary's huge fundraising advantage. Seemingly unrelated, also note that:

  [Bannon] also appeared to hint that the administration was planning to soon declare that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization and move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, perhaps as soon as next week.

  But a senior administration official disputed that such an announcement was in the works for next week.

• Philip Rucker/Ed O'Keefe: Trump threatens to abandon Puerto Rico recovery effort: Among the many things Trump has threatened to blow up this past week, one of the most vexing is the quasi-colonial relationship of the US to Puerto Rico. Trump has vacillated between taking responsibility for recovery and attempting to disown the island, to write it off like one of his bad debts. Here he declares Puerto Rico's infrastructure a disaster before the storm. There he lectures on the sanctity of debts accured by state and local government there. Political sentiment in the US generally favors aid, but I suspect his base is more antagonistic. The banks, on the other hand, would probably prefer a bailout before anything drastic happens. Puerto Ricans recently voted for statehood, which Republicans in Congress are likely to block if they think there's any reason -- like a racist, xenophobic president -- doing so might not add to the GOP majority. Indeed, Trump has already started to follow through on his threats to withdraw aid by allowing a temporary waiver to the Jones Act to expire.

  Meanwhile, a couple recent reports from Puerto Rico:

  • Eliza Barclay/Alexia Fernández Campbell: Evlerything that's been reported about deaths in Puerto Rico is at odds with the official count.

  • Manuel Roig-Franzia/Arelis R Hernández: Three weeks since Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico still dark, thirsty and frustrated.

• Gabriel Sherman: "I Hate Everyone in the White House!": Trump Seethes as Advisers Fear the President Is "Unraveling": Stephen Colbert's comment on this headline was: "This means up until now, he's been raveled." Inside you get lines like "One former official even speculated that Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have discussed what they would do in the event Trump ordered a nuclear first strike." And: "According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term." All very gossipy. Too much smoke to tell where the fire actually is.

• Emily Shugerman: US withdraws from Unesco over 'anti-Israel bias': "The US helped found Unesco in the wake of the Second World War, with the aim of ensuring peace through the free flow of ideas and education." I found this shocking, even though it's long been clear that the US has its most anti-education and anti-free speech administration in history, and possibly its most anti-peace one as well. The most disturbing thing here is the extent to which anti-UN prejudice has permeated Republican ideology (and make no mistake about it, this is a purely partisan view). But even as a go-it-alone (i.e., isolationist) "America first" stance, it's pretty self-deprecating: if the stated rationale is true, this as much as admits that tiny Israel has taken charge of US foreign policy; the alternative theory, that "Mr Tillerson simply wanted to stem outgoings," also reflects poorly on the US, as much as admitting that "the richest country in the world" can't afford to contribute to preserving heritage and supporting education in poorer countries.

• Pieces by Matthew Yglesias this week:

  • The incredibly boring reason Trump is on track to win in 2020: "The incumbent usually wins." At least that's Doug Sosnik's rationale in Trump is on track to win re-election. But "nothing matters this far out," including that Trump already has record low approval numbers, before his numerous unpromising policy changes have had any real chance to piss lots of people off.

  • The Jones Act, the obscure 1920 shipping regulation strangling Puerto Rico, explained

  • The GOP's tax reform Bermuda triangle: "Their three core goals are totally incompatible": big cuts to taxes on investment income, a tax cut to the middle class, and avoiding increased deficits (just kidding).

  • The real fix for gerrymandering is proportional representation

  • Trump threatens to cancel NBS's broadcast license over critical reporting: "Another day, another casual threat from the president of the United States to abuse the powers of his office in order to stymie reporting that he doesn't like."

  • Establishment Republicans mystified by their base should look at Ed Gillespie's campaign

  • Ed Gillespie's demagogic nonsense on immigrant crime has spread to New Jersey

Special bonus link: Dalia Mortada: A Taste of Syria: A recipe for a Syrian dish, fatteh, "a hearty dish of crispy pita bread beneath chickpeas and a luscious garlic-yogurt-tahini sauce." I should note that the picture appears to have a sprinkling of ground sumac (or maybe Aleppo pepper) not listed in the recipe.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Very little time to work on this, but here are a few things I noted. The big story of the week probably should be Puerto Rico, especially how poorly America's quasi-benevolent gloss on colonialism has wound up serving the people there, but that would take some depth to figure out -- much easier to make fun of Trump pitching paper towels. Aside from the Las Vegas massacre, the media's favorite story of the week was Tillerson calling Trump a "fucking moron," then quasi-denying it, followed by reports of his "suicide pact" with fellow embarrassed secretaries Mattis and Mnuchim. Meanwhile the Caribbean cooked up another hurricane, Nate, which landed midway between Harvey and Irma, reported almost cavalierly after the previous panic stories. How quickly even disaster becomes normalized these days!

Obviously, many more stories could have made the cut, if only I had time to sort them out. Still, this is enough bad news for a taste, especially since so much of it traces back to a single source.

Some scattered links this week:

• Harry Enten: Trump's Popularity Has Dipped Most in Red States.

• Thomas Frank: Are those my words coming out of Steve Bannon's mouth? "My critique of Washington is distinctly from the left, and it's astonishing to hear conservatives swiping it." I've long been bothered by how Frank's taunting of the right-wing base got them to demand more from their political heroes. It's also true that Frank's exposure of the neoliberal rot in the heart of Washington's beltway has played into Trump rhetoric. Indeed, it's probable that Frank's Listen, Liberal undercut Hillary much worse than anything Bernie Sanders ever said or did -- a distinction that Hillary's diehard fans don't make because most of Frank's readers supported Bernie. Frank points out that Republicans offer no real fixes for his critiques. So why don't Democrats pick up the same critique and flesh it out with real solutions? Probably because Hillary and company were so content with sucking up to their rich donors, but now that we know that doesn't work, why can't they learn?

• Josh Marshall: More Thoughts on the Externalities of Mass Gun Ownership: This in turn cites David Frum: The Rules of Gun Debate, which points out a basic truth that hardly anyone wants to admit:

  Americans die from gunfire in proportions unparalleled in the civilized world because Americans own guns in proportions unparalleled in the civilized world. More guns mean more lethal accidents, more suicides, more everyday arguments escalated into murderous fusillades.

  Marshall goes on to point out that the sheer popularity of guns is making the problem worse for everyone -- he speaks of "externalities," although the game model is closer to an arms race. But Frum also notes:

  o in a limited sense, the gun advocates are right. The promise of "common sense gun safety" is a hoax, i.e. Americans probably will not be able to save the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence -- and the many more thousands maimed and traumatized -- while millions of Americans carry guns in their purses and glove compartments, store guns in their night tables and dressers. Until Americans change their minds about guns, Americans will die by guns in numbers resembling the casualty figures in Somalia and Honduras more than Britain or Germany.

  It's truly hard to imagine that this change will be led by law. . . . Gun safety begins, then, not with technical fixes, but with spreading the truthful information: people who bring guns into their homes are endangering themselves and their loved ones.

  Specifically on Las Vegas, note I'm not going to criticize Caleb Keeter -- the guitarist who "has had a change of heart on guns."

• Dylan Matthews: Trump reignites NFL protest controversy by ordering Mike Pence to leave a Colts game: Pence showed up for a Colts game to stand for the national anthem, then left in protest of players who took a knee during the anthem. Pure PR stunt, and a huge insult to NFL fans, who pay good money to watch the game, even if that means enduring the pre-game pomp. Worse, Trump is so locked into his echo chamber he thinks he's making a winning point.

• Jeremy W Peters/Maggie Haberman/Glenn Trush: Erik Prince, Blackwater Founder, Weighs Primary Challenge to Wyoming Republican: Billionaire brother of Betsy DeVos, like her made his money inheriting the Amway fortune but built a lucrative side business providing mercenaries for the Global War on Terror, most recently in the news lobbying the Trump administration to privatize the war in Afghanistan -- if you wanted to write a new James Bond novel about a megalomaniacal privateer, you wouldn't have to spruce his bio up much. He hails from Michigan, but isn't the first to think Wyoming might be a cost-effective springboard to the Senate and national politics (think Lynne Cheney). Behind the scenes here is Steve Bannon, who's looking for Trump-like candidates to disrupt the Republican Party. He's likely to come up with some pretty creepy ones, but Prince is setting the bar awful high.

• Andrew Prokop: Trump's odd and ominous "calm before the storm" comment, not really explained: This followed Trump's dressing down of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for trying to talk to North Korea (not to mention Tillerson's description of Trump as a "fucking moron"). As Prokop admits, there is no real explanation for Trump's elliptical remarks, but as I see it, he's doing a much more convincing act of Nixon's Madman Theory than the Trickster ever managed.

• David Roberts: Friendly policies keep US oil and coal afloat far more than we thought.

• Dylan Scott: How Trump is planning to gut Obamacare by executive order.

• Matthew Yglesias: Puerto Rico is all our worst fears about Trump becoming real:

  To an extent, the United States of America held up surprisingly well from Inauguration Day until September 20 or so. The ongoing degradation of American civic institutions, at a minimum, did not have an immediate negative impact on the typical person's life.

  But the world is beginning to draw a straight line from the devastation in Puerto Rico to the White House. Trump's instinct so far is to turn the island's devastation into another front in culture war politics, a strategy that could help his own political career survive.

  One problem Trump has, even if it doesn't explain his administration as a whole, has been the relative shortfall of news on Puerto Rico -- especially from the Trump whisperers at Fox (see Druhmil Mehta: The Media Really Has Neglected Puerto Rico). A lot of people, and not just immigration-phobes like Trump, have is seeing Puerto Rico as part of the USA, even though everyone there has American citizenship and are free to pick up and move anywhere in the country. Also see: Harry Enten: Trump's Handling of Hurricane Maria Is Getting Really Bad Marks.

  The notion that Trump hasn't done a lot of damage to the country yet is mostly delayed perception. His regulatory efforts have allowed companies to pollute more and engage in other predatory practices, but it takes a while to companies to take advantage of their new license. The defunding of CHIP (the Children's Health Insurance Program) didn't immediately shot off insurance, but it will over several months. Those who lose their insurance may not get sick for months or years, but across the country these things add up. Trump's brinksmanship with North Korea hasn't blown up yet, but it's made a disaster much more likely. Some of these things will slowly degrade quality of life, but some may happen suddenly and irreversibly. That people don't notice them right away doesn't mean that they won't eventually. One thing politicians hope, of course, is that bad things happen they won't be traced back to responsible acts. Indeed, Republicans have been extraordinarily lucky so far, to no small extent because Democrats haven't been very adept as explaining causality. Yglesias returns to this theme in Trump's taste for flattery is a disaster for Puerto Rico -- and someday the world;

  The scary message of Puerto Rico -- like of the diplomatic row between Qatar and Saudi Arabia before it -- is that a man who often seemed like he wasn't up to the job of being president is, in fact, not up to the job of being president.

  At times, of course, his political opponents will find this comforting or even to be a blessing. His inability to involve himself constructively in the Affordable Care Act debate, for example, likely saved millions of people's Medicaid coverage relative to what a more competent president might have pulled off.

  But when bad luck strikes, the president's problems become everyone's problems. And in Puerto Rico we're seeing that the president's inability to listen to constructive criticism -- and his unwillingness to incentive people to give it to him -- transforms misfortune into catastrophe.

  This tendency to cut himself off from uncomfortable information rather than accept frank assessments and change course has impacted Trump's legislative agenda, peripheral aspects of his foreign policy, and now a part of the United States of America itself.

  If we're lucky, maybe the global economy will hold up, we won't have any more bad storms, foreign terrorists will leave us alone, and somehow we'll skate past this North Korea situation. Maybe. Because if not, we're going to be in trouble, and the president's going to be the last one to realize it.

  Yglesias says "we'd better hope Trump's luck holds up," but he doesn't sound very hopeful. I'm reminded of the famous Branch Rickey maxim, "luck is the residue of design." Rickey was talking about winning baseball games, but losing is the residue of its own kind of design. It was GW Bush's bad luck that the economy imploded on his watch, but his administration and his party deliberately did a lot of things that hastened that collapse, so it's not simply that they were unlucky.

  Other pieces by Yglesias last week: The 4 stories that defined the week: Dozens were massacred in Las Vegas; Trump flew to Puerto Rico; Tax reform is looking shaky; and Morongate rocked the Cabinet. One aspect of the latter story: "due to the structure of his compensation and certain quirks of tax law, [Tillerson will] be hit with a $71 million tax bill on the proceeds [of cashing out his Exxon stock] unless he stays with the government for at least a year." Other pieces: Meet Kevin Warsh, the man Trump may tap to wreck the American economy: to replace Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve; After Sandy Hook, Trump hailed Obama's call for gun control legislation; Trump's reverse Midas touch is making everything he hates popular; After a year of work, Republicans have decided nothing on corporate tax reform.

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