Weekend Roundup [170 - 179]

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Might as well go back to my original title, since this week I have more comments (albeit fewer than usual links), and "Week Links" never was a very good title. Browser limits are still keeping me from seeing as much as I used to, but now that I've figured out how to work around a couple serious bugs in Chromium I'm getting more done. Mostly rounded these up on Saturday -- good thing since I chewed up most of Sunday cooking a small dinner-for-two (a cut-back version of jambalaya) and doing some tree trimming (much too hot here to do that).

Getting very close to the end of Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. First half is a campaign journal where it turns out he was as delighted meeting us as we were finding him. Second is a policy manual which doesn't venture as far as I would but strikes me as a well-reasoned merger of the viable and the practical. I really don't get people who see him as too idealistic, or as too compromised. One thing that's missing is any real treatment of foreign policy. Some ambitious Democrat needs to stake out a radical shift there, returning to the belief in international law that Wilson and Roosevelt advocated, while paring back America's penchant for military and/or clandestine intervention. But while he touches most other bases, I do believe that Bernie is correct that inequality is the central political issue of our times, and the more we do on that, the better most other things will become.

Scattered links:

  • Dean Baker: Obamacare is only 'exploding' in red states: Most of the problems with ACA private insurance exchanges are concentrated in states with Republican governors/legislatures, who were also culpable for failing to expand Medicaid, leaving millions of poorer Americans without health care insurance. "Where Republican governors have sought to sabotage the program, they have largely succeeded. Where Democratic governors have tried to make the ACA work, they too have largely succeeded." That Trump thinks ACA is a disaster says more about the bubble he gets his information from.

  • Dean Baker: How Rich Would Bill Gates Be Without His Copyright on Windows? Gates' personal fortune is estimated at $70 billion, and the copyright is at the root of that, followed by various patents and business practices that led to Microsoft's conviction for violating antitrust laws -- the last major antitrust case any administration in Washington bothered to prosecute. As so-called intellectual property goes, copyright is a minor problem, as long as we're talking about works of art -- the latest extended terms are way too long, and we would be better off with a program to buy up older copyrights and move work into the public domain. Copyright of software code has rarely proved a problem: what killed Novell's efforts to produce a compatible DOS wasn't copyright: Microsoft's illegal/predatory business practices protected their monopoly. The real alternative is free software, which has been very successful even without public funding -- fairly modest investments there would pay huge dividends to the public. Baker also talks about patents, which are a much more daunting problem, even beyond their obvious costs. ("The clearest case is prescription drugs where we will spend over $440 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell for less than $80 billion in a free market.") Patents allow owners to stake out broad claims and sue others for infringement even when the latter developed innovations completely independently. Patents made more sense when they protected capital investments for manufacturing, but that's never the case for software patents -- they exist purely to line corporate pockets by harassing potential competition (including from free software).

  • Cristina Cabrera: Poll: Majority of Republicans Now Say Colleges Are Bad for America: The poll question is are colleges and universities having a "negative effect on the way things are going in the country." In 2015, 37% of Republicans thought that; today 58%. Before 2015, the Republican figures were relatively stable (56% favorable in 2010, 54% in 2015), and Democrats have become slightly more favorable, 65% in 2010, 72% today. The shift in Republican views coincided with the realization that the Republican presidential primaries would turn into contests between dumb and dumber, where candidates competed to show how little they understood the modern world and how everything worked (or, increasingly often, didn't work). As I recall, the first to stake out an anti-college position was Rick Santorum, and at the time I found his position shocking. For starters, it ignores the fact that we completely depend on science and advanced technology for nearly every aspect of our way of life -- what happens to us when we stop educating smart people to develop and maintain that technology? Nor is it just technology: the right's prejudices have a tough time surviving any form of open debate -- which is why conservatives have increasingly retreated into their own private institutions. Still, this is anomalous: colleges have always been institutions of, by, and for the elites, dominated by old money while occasionally opening the doors to exceptionally talented outsiders -- especially ones eager to join the system (Clinton and Obama are obvious examples, ones that have left an especially bitter taste for Republicans). And while the post-WWII expansion opened those doors wider for middle class Americans, if anything the trend has reversed lately, as prohibitive pricing is making college more elitist again. Still, this shows an increasingly common form of disconnect between Republican elites and masses: the latter are driven mostly by pushing their hot buttons, and all they have to do is get people so worked up they won't realize the incoherency of anti-elite and anti-diversity positions, or the fact that the rich still have their legacy privileges, so will be the last to be deprived of higher education's blessings.

  • Jason Ditz: House Approves $696 Billion Military Spending Bill: Includes $75 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations, which is subject to change if Trump approves more "surges." Of all Trump's budget changes, more Defense spending struck me as the easiest to pass, because the War Lobby extends beyond Republicans and well into the Democratic Party. More Ditz pieces: House NDAA Amendments Would Limit US Participation in Yemen War; Trump Wants Authority to Build New Bases in Iraq, Syria.

  • Dahlia Lithwick: Trump's election commission has been a disaster. It's going exactly as planned.

    As Kobach put it to Ari Berman last month, his whole master plan for world dominion was so simple: to create in Kansas -- where he is running for governor and has been secretary of state for a number of years -- a template for programmatic vote suppression nationwide. If he created "the absolute best legal framework," other states and the federal government would follow. Somehow, though, Trump's "election integrity" commission turned into one of the most colossal cockups in an administration already overflowing with them.

  • Marc Lynch: Three big lessons of the Qatar crisis.

  • Reza Marashi/Tyler Cullis: Trump Is Violating the Iran Deal

  • Josh Marshall: A Theory of the Case [07-08]:

    During the election I frequently referenced one of my favorite quotes and insights from the insight, which came from Slate's Will Saletan: "The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord." To me this clever turn of phrase captures at a quite deep level why Trump was able to take over the GOP. The key though is that once Trump secured the Republican nomination, once he became the Republican and Hillary Clinton the Democrat, all the forces of asymmetric partisan polarization kicked into place and ensured that essentially all self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents fell into line and supported Trump. . . .

    Trump embodies what I've come to think of as a "dominationist" politics which profoundly resonates with the base of the GOP and has an expanding resonance across the party. Party leaders made the judgment that since they couldn't defeat Trump they should join him, hoping he would deliver on a policy agenda favoring money and using public policy to center risk on individuals. That hope has been entirely confirmed.

  • Jack O'Donnell: Trump put family first when I worked for him. It was disastrous.

  • Julianne Schultz: The world we have bequeathed to our children feels darker than the one I knew

  • Tim Shorrock: Kushner and Bannon Team Up to Privatize the War in Afghanistan: Also Erik Prince and Stephen Feinberg, who stand to make most of the money in the deal.

  • Tierney Sneed: Insurers Torch New Cruz Provision in TrumpCare: 'Simply Unworkable': The Cruz amendment that was supposed to save McConnell's Obamacare repeal/replace bill would allow insurance companies to offer lower-priced plans that don't meet minimal federal guidelines for health insurance. Of course, what makes such plans cheaper is that they don't adequately insure the people who buy them.

  • Timothy Snyder: Trump is ushering in a dark new conservatism: A historian stuck in Eastern Europe's "Bloodlands" between Hitler and Stalin tries to drive a wedge between conservatives and Trump:

    In his committed mendacity, his nostalgia for the 1930s, and his acceptance of support from a foreign enemy of the United States, a Republican president has closed the door on conservatism and opened the way to a darker form of politics: a new right to replace an old one.

    Conservatives were skeptical guardians of truth. . . .

    The contest between conservatives and the radical right has a history that is worth remembering. Conservatives qualified the Enlightenment of the 18th century by characterizing traditions as the deepest kind of fact. Fascists, by contrast, renounced the Enlightenment and offered willful fictions as the basis for a new form of politics. The mendacity-industrial complex of the Trump administration makes conservatism impossible, and opens the floodgates to the sort of drastic change that conservatives opposed.

    Pace Snyder, I'm not inclined to equate Trump with Hitler, but I'm also unwilling to credit "conservatives" with the moral or intellectual conscience or coherence to oppose either. The one constant in the whole history of conservatism is the belief that some people should rule over others, and more often than not they're willing to discard any principles they may previously have found convenient to accomplish their goal. You see that in how willingly pretty much the whole right, and not just in Germany and Italy, admired Hitler and Mussolini. Trump, too, captured the right by offering the one thing it most wished for: victory. But there is a difference: Hitler had his own agenda, one rooted in the smoldering resentments of the Great War and the collapse of Germany's Empire. Trump's notion of America the Great may not be much different, but his ideas and plans are strictly derivative, a parroted, almost cartoonish distillation of recent conservative propaganda -- a bundle of clichés and incoherent rage, selected purely because that's what seems to work. No doubt some Trump supporters, especially among the "alt-right" white nationalists, can dress this up darkly. One thing we can be sure of is that we won't be saved by conservatives.

  • Jeff Stein: The Kodiak Kickback: the quiet payoff for an Alaska senator in the Senate health bill: Looks like the fix is in for "moderate" Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski:

    Buried in Senate Republicans' new health care bill is a provision to throw about $1 billion at states where premiums run 75 percent higher than the national average.

    Curiously, there's just one state that meets this seemingly arbitrary designation: Alaska. . . .

    Republicans' health care bill will cost Alaska Medicaid recipients about $3 billion. In exchange, they're trying to buy off Murkowski with far less in funding for the Obamacare exchanges. We'll know soon if it worked.

  • Jonathan Swan: Scoop: Bannon pushes tax hike for wealthy: Technically, Bannon fills the same role as Karl Rove, but I've never seen anyone refer to him as "Trump's Brain," even though Trump clearly needs one. Rove was a political strategist in the conventional sense, a role that became more prominent under Bush than under Clinton or Obama because it was clearer that Bush needed one. So does Trump, but whereas Rove had a pretty good sense of public opinion even if only to manipulate it, Bannon seems to pull his ideas straight out of his arse. Besides, Trump's subcontracted every policy issue to his straight conservative fellow travelers, leaving Bannon isolated. So that Bannon wants something doesn't clearly mean a thing. Still, higher taxes on the superrich would be a popular (and for that matter populist) move, but don't stand a chance in a Republican Congress almost exclusively dedicated to the opposite. Besides, as this piece makes clear, Trump has others -- Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin are prominent names here -- pulling in the other direction. Biggest non-surprise in the article: "They're becoming far less wedded to revenue neutrality."

  • Matt Taibbi: Russiagate and the Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again: Much interesting background on the Magnitsky thing, which goes a long way to explaining why Putin remains so suspicious and ominous even if you reject the neocons' "new cold war" aspirations. I personally think the Trump Jr. meeting/emails are "no big deal" but also suspect that the Trumps would love to get in on Putin's corruption scams.

  • Jonathan Taplin: Can the Tech Giants Be Stopped? WSJ story, but you can read more of it in the link I provided. E.g.:

    The precipitous decline in revenue for content creators has nothing to do with changing consumer preferences for their content. People are not reading less news, listening to less music, reading fewer books or watching fewer movies and TV shows. The massive growth in revenue for the digital monopolies has resulted in the massive loss of revenue for the creators of content. The two are inextricably linked.

    The numbers cited for internet ad revenue are much larger than I expected, and seem to be almost exclusively concentrated in a handful of companies. Meanwhile, we need a new and different model, both for content creation and for internet services. What we have now is little more than a siphon for draining our money and concentrating it in the hands of a few vultures. I suppose WSJ thinks they're fighting this with their paywall, but they're just adding to the problem.

  • Kenneth P Vogel/Rachel Shorey: Trump's Re-Election Campaign Doubles Its spending on Legal Fees: So does this mean the campaign is at this stage mostly a slush fund to defray Trump's legal costs? Too bad Clinton couldn't run in 2000 when he needed something like to handle that sordid impeachment affair. As it was, he had to go bankrupt, then recoup his losses making post-presidential speeches.

  • Melissa Batchelor Warnke: Democrats are doubling down on the same vanilla centrism that helped give us President Trump.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: Senate Republicans released a new health bill; Donald Trump Jr. has a problem; Christopher Wray is set to be the next FBI director; the CBO scored Trump's budget. Yglesias previously covered the same stories in greater depth: The revised health bill cuts taxes less without doing anything to boost coverage; I don't believe Donald Trump Jr., and neither should you; and CBO: Trump plan won't balance the budget even with his fake revenue-neutral tax reform.

  • Poddy looks into the Kristol Ball of Counterfactuals [No More Mister Nice Blog]: Attempts to counter an op-ed from John Podhoretz (link in article) called "Hillary's White House would be no different from Trump's," which argues:

    Trump hasn't done anything in office, other than nominating a Supreme Court justice and sending a raid to Syria, and Clinton wouldn't have been able to do anything either, with both Houses of Congress run by Republicans. Of course she would be more boring than Trump, since she is evil but not a sower of chaos, but we wouldn't know what we were missing. The Clinton family melodrama would resemble that of the Trumps in its ethical compromises, with Clinton Foundation donors hovering around the White House, which is identical to President Trump spending every weekend hovering around the golfers and hotel guests filling his personal coffers.

    Podhoretz has one valid point here: that Clinton was going to have a hard time separating herself and her administration from the taint of corruption surrounding the Clinton Foundation. Nor can we really credit much her promises to do so, given how Trump has found it impossible to fulfill his own promises to isolate himself from his business interests. Even so, with Clinton the thicket of corruption complaints would be mostly laughable, blown up by the hysterical "right-wing noise machine," whereas Trump's numerous conflicts of interest alrealdy seem to try the patience of mainstream journalists who'd rather play "gotcha" with Russia. As for everything else, what Trump has actually managed to do -- even discounting things that Clinton might also have done, like escalating the wars in Syria and Afghanistan -- has actually been pretty astonishing. Trump has signed dozens of executive orders reversing hard-won gains from Obama. He's signalled that the US government won't be enforcing its civil rights laws anymore. He's reversed some key openness protections for the Internet. He's launched a monstrous commission on "voting fraud" that's already having the effect of reducing voter registration. He's raising money for a "re-election campaign" four years off, and using that money to pay his legal bills. His Supreme Court pick is already paying dividends for the extreme right. He may not have a lot of legislative accomplishments yet, but he's perilously close on a measure to repeal Obamacare that will cost more than 20 million Americans their health insurance, while making health care more expensive and less accessible for pretty much everyone. That measure would be a tax bonanza for the very rich, and Republicans are working on more of those.

    The article also posits that a Clinton win would also have tipped the Senate to the Democrats. Perhaps, but I'd shift the focus a bit: a Democratic win in the Senate (and even more so one in the House) would have tipped the presidential election to Clinton. Perhaps she should have run on that, instead of trying to appeal to suposedly moderate suburban Republicans to split their ballots and let Clinton save us from that ogre Trump. Turns out Republicans are too shameless to care -- anything to get their tax breaks and patronage favors and to grind workers and their spouses and children to dust.

    Still, one lesson Democrats should draw is to never again nominate anyone so easily viewed as compromised and corrupt.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

No Weekend Roundup

I'm going to suspend Weekend Roundup. Part of the reason is technical, which I may (or may not) explain in Music Week tomorrow. Suffice it to say that it's nearly impossible for me to search out the various links that the posts are based on. But also I find myself wanting to give in to depression, which has both personal and political dimensions. Maybe I'll write about the personal sometime -- I've been toying with a plan to write an autobiography, and it looms large there -- but my political despair got a huge boost on Tuesday when Georgia voters turned against Jon Ossoff in the GA-6 congressional election to replace Tom Price. At the time, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Democrat Jon Ossoff lost the GA-6 race (48.1% to 51.9%), possibly losing ground from his primary showing (where he got 48.12%). Both candidates spent a lot of money -- not sure much, but Ossoff spent $8 million in primary, and I've seen this described as the most expensive House election ever.

[Hillary] Clinton famously trailed Trump by only 2% in the district, so DNC thought they had a real chance with a Clinton-esque candidate. FiveThirtyEight, however, considers the district R+9.5, and Tom Price ran better than that in 2016. Given that district is upscale and suburban, it is credible that a pro-Sanders Democrats might not have done as well in this particular district, but pro-Sanders Democrats did much better than district expectations in recent contests in Kansas and Montana, with embarrassingly slim support from DNC/DCCC.

I also tweeted:

Ossoff loss tells me that Democrats failed to make case that it's not just Trump but all Republicans out to hurt the majority of Americans.

Also, a second tweet I thought then but only posted today:

It would be easier to resist Trump if Republicans are getting beat at the polls; otherwise all R's have to fear is their own right flank.

I'm not an ideological purist, so I'm not much bothered when a Democrat (or, more rarely, a Republican) tries to tailor his/her message to the prejudices of his/her district. Still, one worries that Democrats too readily give up not just principles but any sort of vision that life could be made better for their voters, and in doing that they lose credibility -- both that they know what to do and that they even care.

Still, one suspects that the problem with Ossoff's campaign wasn't that he tailored his message to voters so much as to the constituency he clearly cared most about: donors. He wound up raising and spending (and, given the results, wasting) some $26 million -- about 70 times as much money as James Thompson had to work with here in Kansas. Obviously, there are limits to what money can buy in an election, but there is also a lesson: when Democrats focus more on donors than on voters, they lose -- even if they're fabulously successful with donors (as Ossoff and Hillary Clinton undeniably were). And while their campaign compromises undermine voter trust, their de facto losses are destroying a second credibility front: the notion that those of us who lean further left have to support cowardly Democrats because they're the only ones who can win and protect us from the ever more vile Republicans.

Still, no matter how much those centrist, donor-supplicant Democrats demand allegiance from left-leaning voters, somehow they can't bring themselves to critique Republicans with even a tiny fraction of the vitriol Republicans heap on them. For example, Republicans have run attack ads in every House race trying to link the Democrat to Nancy Pelosi and her "radical agenda." I can't even imagine what they mean by that -- as far as I've been able to tell, she's an utterly conventional hack, her "leftist" more due to her representing San Francisco, a district which could certainly to better. But they've worked for years turning her into a bait word. So why don't Democrats turn the tables on Paul Ryan, who really does have an agenda? (By the way, I'd say that from a purely tactical view, Pelosi is done. Sure, they did the same thing to Tom Daschle and Harry Reid, but why not make them work a little?)

Or to pick another current example, Hillary Clinton tweeted: "If Republicans pass this bill, they're the death party." Why wasn't writing the bill reason enough for that tag? Does she still think that by leaving the door open enough Republicans will come to their senses to make a difference? Wasn't it true that thousands of people died needlessly in the years before they gained insurance through the ACA? Weren't the Republicans "the death party" when every single one (ok, except for the guy who won a freak election in New Orleans) voted against it? I do have quibbles about "death party" -- "pro-life" Republicans use that against Democrats who defend abortion rights, and both parties are tainted by their kneejerk support of war and arms sales.

I'm not advocating a coarsening of political discourse, but one needs to recognize that it's already happened, and that it's been remarkably successful for Republicans, getting many (if not most) Americans to turn their backs on everything that's worked to make this a decent country, as well as to ignore (or worsen) the many bad things we've done. I doubt there's a single solution to this, but Democrats need to develop some backbone, and start breaking through the shells that right-wing media have constructed to shelter the Republicans from the effects of their actions.

Somehow I didn't even notice the House election in South Carolina to fill Nick Mulvaney's seat. It was expectedly won by a Republican, but it turns out the race there was as close as in Georgia, with Democrat Archie Parnell losing 47.9-51.1%. In 2016, Trump won this district by 18.5%, and Mulvaney won by 20%. One might argue that the four House elections so far show the Democrats running better than in 2016, but it still hurts that all four elected Republicans. (Actually, the Democrats did win one: Jimmy Gomez in CA-34, but it was a solidly Democratic seat and the "top two" primary led to a runoff between two Democrats.)

Since Tuesday's election debacle, following several weeks of Russia nonsense (which despite the media obsession doesn't seem to bother voters much), political news took a remarkable turn toward reality with the publication of Mitch McConnell's health care bill. Crafted behind closed doors, given a new name (the "Better Care Reconciliation Act" to avoid the stink of the House AHCA bill -- although it shares an acronym with the "breast cancer gene"), with McConnell promising a vote before Congress goes into recess for July 4. The secrecy did manage to keep it out of the news, but now that we can see what's in it's still time to panic.

Some details vary, but the overall outline is the same as the House bill, which Trump initially applauded then admitted was "mean, mean, mean." It starts with a massive tax cut for the rich, which is balanced out by cutting subsidies and Medicaid, and it's stacked so that the tax breaks are retroactive while the service cuts are phased in over several years -- maybe you'll forget who caused them? While the CBO hasn't had time to score it yet, the advertised hope was that the number of people losing their insurance could be reduced from 23 to 20 million. Trump's campaign promises of cheaper policies, lower deductibles, and better coverage are still jokes.

Not surprisingly, the far right attacked the bill first, wanting to make it even meaner. I read one piece that said AFP (the Koch network campaign operation) was angling for two amendments: one is to free insurance companies from minimum coverage regulation -- the effect will be to let them sell fraudulent policies which don't cover many costs so will lead to many more bankruptcies; the other is for more "health savings accounts" -- a tax dodge only of interest to the rich. As you may recall, Ryan's House bill originally failed to get a majority, but while you heard some grumbling from "moderates" that the bill went too far, the winning margin actually came from the far right after Ryan agreed to make the bill more draconian. The Kochs are looking for the same dynamic in the Senate.

This should be a field day for the Democrats, but as Matthew Yglesias points out, The health bill might pass because Trump has launched the era of Nothing Matters politics. I've found two things especially disturbing in the last week: one is how shamelessly Republicans are lying about their bill; the other is how the media has been falling for the line that this bill is a test of whether Trump and the Republicans are able to deliver on their campaign promises. The obvious counter to the latter is that there are a lot of very dumb things Trump campaigned for that he cheerfully forgot once elected.

When I started this I didn't plan on writing this much, least of all about McConnell-Miscare, though I thought I might mention something about Russia -- not the hacking scandal (which regardless of how bad it was pales in comparison to what the Republicans have been doing in state legislatures to suppress votes) but about the dangerous games of chicken our respective air forces have been playing (for some on this, and more on health care, see Yglesias' The most important stories of the week, explained). I should also point you to Seymour M Hersh: Trump's Red Line, on Trump's escalation of the Syria War, which directly led to the later conflicts with Russia.

I have little doubt that had technology permitted I could have built a list of links to major Trump scandals and other misdemeanors this week, as I have every week since inauguration. If you need a reminder of the price Americans are paying for having hated Hillary Clinton and the Democrats so much that they figured they had nothing to lose by turning the federal government over to a bunch of con men and crooks, you're free to look at my posts (most of which portend the future more than they examine the past):

I don't know whether the Roundup will continue (although I'll probably file some links in the notebook for possible future reference). Feels like I'm shouting into the void. I often think back to an essay I read as a teenager, by R.D. Laing, called "The Obvious": his point was that everyone has their own idea of what's obvious, a condition which in no way undermines our conviction of its obviousness. My writing starts with a number of principles which I think I can justify but really just seem obvious to me. If you share them, you will like what I have to say, and if not, you won't. Clearly, a lot of people don't, and I have no idea how to get to them. And while I'm not necessarily writing for those who don't understand (or care), it's not very gratifying when they don't.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I thought I'd start with some comments on the Trump-Russia mess. As far as I can tell (and this isn't very high on the list of things I worry about these days), there are four separate things that need to be investigated and understood:

  1. What (if anything) Russia did to affect the course and outcome of the 2016 elections, and (harder to say) did this have any actual impact on the results. You might want to delve deeper and understand why they did what they did, although there's little chance they will be forthcoming on the subject, so you're likely to wind up with little but biased speculation. [I suspect the answer here is that they did a lot of shit that ultimately had very little impact.]

  2. Did the meetings that various people more/less tied to the Trump campaign had with various Russians (both officials and non-officials with ties to the Russian leadership) discuss Russian election ops. In particular, did Trump's people provide any assistance or direction to the Russians. [Seems unlikely, but hard to tell given that the people involved have repeatedly lied, and been caught lying, about meetings, so what they ultimately admit to isn't credible -- unless some sort of paper trail emerges, such as Sislyak's communiques to Moscow.]

  3. Did Trump's people, in their meetings with various Russians, make or imply any changes in US policy toward Russia that might reward or simply incline the Russians to try to help Trump's campaign and/or hinder Clinton's campaign? [This seems likely, as the campaign's public statements imply a less punitive tilt toward Russia, but it could be meant for future good will rather than as any sort of quid pro quo for campaign help. The Russians, of course, could have found this reason enough to help Trump vs. Clinton. Again, we don't know what transpired in the meetings, and the fact that Trump's people have lied about them doesn't look good.]

  4. Did Trump and/or his people seek to obstruct the investigation, especially by the Department of Justice, into the above? [It's pretty clear now that they did, and that Trump was personally involved. It's not clear whether this meets the usual requirements for prosecution -- for instance, it's not clear that there has been any fabrication of evidence or perjury, but there clearly have been improper attempts to apply political pressure to (in the quaint British phrasing) pervert the course of justice.]

The problem is that even though these questions seem simple and straightforward, they exist in a context that is politically highly charged. Again, there are several dimensions to this:

  1. Clinton and her supporters were initially desperate to find any reason other than their candidate and campaign to explain her surprise loss to one of the most unappealing (and objectively least popular) major party candidates in history, so they were quick to jump on the Russian hacking story (as well as Comey's handling of the email server fiasco). Early on, they were the main driving force behind the story. [This made it distasteful for people like me who thought she was a bad candidate, but also helped turn it into a blatantly partisan issue, where Trump supporters quickly became blindered to any attacks on their candidate.]

  2. A second group of influential insiders had reason to play up a Russia scandal: the neocon faction of the security meta-state, who have all along wanted to play up Russia as a potential enemy because their security state only makes sense if they can point to threats. If Trump came into office thinking he could roll back sanctions and reverse US policy on Russia, they would have to hustle to stop him, and blowing up his people's Russia contacts into a full-fledged scandal helped do the trick. [This is pretty much fait accompli at this point, although Trump himself isn't very good at sticking to his script. But while some Republicans chafe, the Democrats have been completely won over to a hard-line policy on Russia, even though rank-and-file Democrats are overwhelmingly anti-war. One result here is that by posturing as hawks Democrat politicians are losing their credibility with their party's base -- recapitulating one of Clinton's major problems in 2016.]

  3. As the scandal has blown up, Democrats increasingly see it as a way of focusing opposition to Trump and disrupting the Republican agenda. Meanwhile, Republicans feel the need to defend Trump (even to the point of crippling investigation into the scandal) in order to get their agenda back on track. Thus narrow legal matters have become broad political ones, turning not on facts but on opinions. [This makes them impossible to adjudicate via normal procedures, and guarantees that whatever investigators find will be dismissed to large numbers of people who put their allegiances ahead of the facts. Ultimately, then, the issues will have to be weighed by the voters, who by the time they get a chance will have plenty of other distractions. Meanwhile the Democrats are missing countless scandals and even worse policy moves, while Republicans are getting away with -- well, "murder" may not be the choicest word here, but if Republicans pass their Obamacare repeal many more people will die unnecessarily than even America's itchy trigger-fingers can account for.]

Here are some links on subjects related to Trump/Russia:

Someone named James T Hodgkinson took a rifle to a baseball field in Arlington, VA where several Republican members of Congress (and a few hangers-on) were practicing for a charity baseball game, and started shooting. He wounded five, most seriously Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) before he in turn was shot and killed by police. Hodgkinson had a long history of writing crank letters-to-the-editor, as well as a history of run-ins with the law, including complaints of domestic abuse and shooting guns into trees, but he was also virulently anti-Trump, so right-wing talking heads had a field day playing the victim. Still, it's doubtful that this brief experience of terror will move any of the Republicans against the wars we export abroad, let alone question their vow of allegiance to the NRA. Some relevant links:

  • Angelina Chapin: The Virginia gunman is a reminder: domestic abusers are a danger to society

  • Esme Cribb: Steve King Partly Blames Obama for Divisive Politics That Led to Shooting

  • David Frum: Reinforcing the Boundaries of Political Decency: He declares that "across the political spectrum, there is only revulsion" to acts like the shooting members of Congress, he notes that we're much less repulsed when our politicians and commentators threaten violence:

    In the wake of this crime, as after the Gabby Giffords attack in 2011, we'll soon be talking about whether and when political rhetoric goes too far. It's an important conversation to have, and the fact that the president of the United States is himself the country's noisiest inciter of political violence does not give license to anyone else to do the same. Precisely because the president has put himself so outside the boundary of political decency, it is vitally important to define and defend that border. President Trump's delight in violence against his opponents is something to isolate and condemn, not something to condone or emulate.

    What Frum doesn't note is that while assassination is still frowned on here inside America, it is official government policy to hunt down and kill select people who offend us abroad, as well as anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity of one of our targets.

  • Charlie May: Trump's favorite right-wing websites aren't listening to his calls for unity following GOP shooting: As Alex Jones put it: "The first shots of the second American Civil War have already been fired." Nor was it just the alt-right that wanted to jump on the shooting to score cheap shots against the left: see Brendan Gauthier: New York Times tries, fails to blame Virginia shooting on Bernie Sanders.

  • Heather Digby Parton: Don't miss the point on Alexandria and San Francisco: There is a solution for mass shootings: The San Francisco shooting didn't get anywhere near the press of the one in Alexandria, despite greater (albeit less famous) carnage: "an angry employee went into a UPS facility and opened fire, killing three co-workers and himself."

    Mother Jones gathers data on mass shootings and has pretty strict criteria for inclusion: The shooting must happen in a public place and result in three or more deaths. This leaves out many incidents in which people are only injured, such as the shooting of 10 people in Philadelphia last month, or those that take place on on private property, such as the recent killing of eight people in Mississippi during a domestic violence shooting spree. (The Gun Violence Archive collects incidents that involve the shooting of two or more victims. It is voluminous.)

    According to the Mother Jones criteria, yesterday's Virginia shooting doesn't even count since it didn't meet the death threshold. The San Francisco UPS shooting does, bring the total of such mass shootings to six so far this year. . . .

    Meanwhile, 93 people on average are shot and killed every day in America, many of them in incidents involving multiple victims. More than 100,000 people are struck by bullets every year. President Donald Trump was right to speak about "carnage" in America in his inaugural address. He just didn't acknowledge that the carnage is from gun violence.

    OK, another boring gun control piece ensues. And no doubt fewer guns (better regulated, less automatic) would reduce those numbers. Still, there are other reasons why America is so trigger-happy, and change there would also help. For starters, we've been at war almost continuously for seventy-five years, with all that entails, from training people to kill to cheering them when they do, and making it easier by dehumanizing supposed enemies. We've internalized war to the point that we habitually treat projects or causes as wars, which often as not leads to their militarization (as in the "war on drugs"). We've increasingly turned politics into a bitter, no holds, drag out brawl; i.e., a war. And we've allowed corporations to be run like armies, which is one reason so many mass shootings are job-related (or loss-of-job-related). Another is that we've increasingly shredded the safety net, especially when it comes to getting help for mental health problems. (Veterans still get more help in that regard, but not enough.) It might help to require companies to provide counseling to laid-off workers (or if that's too much of an imposition, let the public pick up the tab). Free (or much cheaper) education would also help. Decriminalizing drugs would definitely help. And then there's this notion, from a tweet by Sen. Rand Paul:

    Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!

    That notion proved impractical as early as the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. The Second Amendment actually spoke of well-regulated militias, which the various states maintained up to the Civil War. Once that was over, the role for such militias (and as such the Amendment) vanished, until it was refashioned by opportunistic politicians and activist judges to give any crackpot a chance to kill his neighbors. As Alexandria shows, that right doesn't help anyone. But then the left half of the political spectrum already knew that, partly because they've much more often been the targets of crackpots, and partly because they've generally retained the ability to reason about evidence.

  • Charles Pierce: When White People Realize American Politics Are Violent: "It's not news to anyone else." He notes America's long history of political violence, including lynchings and a couple of wholesale racist massacres, but also mentioning an attack on miners in Colorado. Pierce then turned around and wrote: This Is Not an Ideal Time to Have White Supremacists Infiltrating Law Enforcement. Come on, is there ever a time when it was harmless much less ideal? I recalled a prime example from fifty-some years ago, a guy named Bull Connor. (By the way, when I went to check the name, I also found this story: Deputy shoots dog after many loses everything in trailer fire. The man was then charged with disorderly conduct, but acquitted. One of many understatements: "The Madison County Sheriff's Department has seen greater problems than the shooting of a dog.")

Some scattered links this week in Trump's many other (and arguably much more important) scandals:

And finally some other items that caught my eye:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Started this on Saturday and finished before midnight on Sunday, so quick work given all the crap I ran into. If I had to summarize it, I'd start by pointing out that as demented as Trump seems personally, the real damage is coming from his administration, his executive orders, and the Republican Congress, and all of that is a very logical progression from their rightward drift since the 1970s. To paint a picture, if you're bothered by all the flies buzzing and maggots squirming, focus first on the rotting carcasses that are feeding them. Secondly, America's forever war in the Middle East seems to have entered an even more surreal level, which again can be traced back to a bunch of unexamined assumptions about friends and enemies and how we relate to them that ultimately make no sense whatsoever. The simplest solution would be to withdraw from the region (and possibly the rest of the world) completely, at least until we get our shit together, which doesn't seem likely soon. That's largely because we've come to tolerate a political and economic system of all-against-all, where we feel no social solidarity, where we tolerate all kinds of lying, cheating, and gaming -- anything that lets fortunate people get ahead of and away from the rest of us. Last week's UK election suggests an alternative, but while the votes there were tantalizingly close, the resolution is still evasive -- probably because not enough of us are clear enough on why we need help.

Meanwhile. this is what I gleaned from the week that was, starting with a summary piece I could have fit several places below, but it works as an intro here: Matthew Yglesias: The week, explained: Comey, Corbyn, Qatar, and more -- Obamacare repeal, debt ceiling. I don't doubt that the section on Qatar is true, but still don't really understand it (nor, clearly, does Trump: see Zeshan Aleem: Trump just slammed US ally Qatar an hour after his administration defended it; also Juan Cole: Tillerson-Trump Rumble over Qatar shows White House Divisions; Richard Silverstein: All's Not Well in Sunnistan; also Vijay Prashad: ISIS Wins, as Trump Sucks Up to the Saudis, and Launches Destructive Fight with Qatar; and perhaps most authoritatively, Richard Falk: Interrogating the Qatar rift; more on Qatar below).

The UK held its "snap election" on Thursday, electing a new parliament (House of Commons, anyway) and, effectively, prime minister. Conservative (Tory) Party leader Theresa May called the election, hoping to increase her party's slim majority -- a result that must have seemed certain given polls at the time. But after a month or so of campaigning -- why can't we compress American elections like that? -- the Tories lost their majority, but will still be able to form a razor-thin majority by allying with the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party, a right-wing party which holds 10 seats in Northern Ireland). The results: 318 Conservative (-12), 262 Labour (+30), 35 SNP (Scottish National Party, -21), 12 Liberal Democrats (+4), 10 DUP (+2), 13 others (-2). The popular vote split was 42% Conservative, 40% Labour (up from 30% with Ed Miliband in 2015, 29% with Gordon Brown in 2010, and 35% for Tony Blair's winning campaign in 2005 -- almost as good as Blair's 40.7% in 2001).

As victory margins go, the Tories are no more impressive than Trump's Republicans in 2016, but like Trump and the Republicans they've seized power and can do all sorts of horrible things with it. Still, this is widely viewed as a major, perhaps crippling setback for May and party. And while it doesn't invalidate last year's Brexit referendum, it comes at the time when the UK and EU are scheduled to begin negotiations on exactly how the UK and EU will relate to each other during and after separation.

Perhaps more importantly, the gains for Labour should (but probably won't) end the charges that Jeremy Corbyn is too far left to win an election. At the same time the business-friendly New Democrats (e.g., Clinton and Gore) took over the Democratic Party in the 1990s, the similarly-minded Tony Blair refashioned New Labour into a neoliberal powerhouse in the UK. Both movement proved successful, but over the long haul did immense damage to the parties' rank-and-file, who were trapped as opposition parties moved ever further to the right. After New Labour finally crashed, Corbyn ran for party leader, won in a stunning grassroots campaign, and faced down a mutiny by surviving Labour MPs by again rallying the rank-and-file. The result is that this time Labour actually stood for something, and the fact that they improved their standing rebukes the Blair-Clinton strategy of winning by surrendering. We, of course, hear the same complaints about Bernie Sanders. It may well be that the majority is not yet ready for "revolution," but voters (especially young ones) are getting there, and many more are rejecting the NDP/NLP strategy appeasement.

Some scattered UK election links:

And the usual scattered links on this week's Trump scandals:

  • Dean Baker: Trump Versus Ryan: The Race to Eliminate the Federal Government: Another piece on Trump's budget. It bears repeating that the real reason conservatives seek to shrink government is that they want people to forget that the government is there to serve them, and that with integrity and a sense of public service government can make their lives better. So anything they can do to make government look bad works to their favor. And, of course, they don't apply their pitch lines to the parts of government they not only like but depend on to maintain their privilege. On a related issue, see William Rivers Pitt: We Are Not Broke: Trashing the Austerity Lies. One of their favorite pitches is that we can't afford to do things (yet somehow we manage to spend a trillion dollars on a war machine that does little but blowback).

  • Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump Grows Discontented With Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Trump may have thought he was appointing a loyalist who would make his legal problems go away, but all he got was a racist/right-wing ideologist who recognizes there are still some limits to how much he can undermine America's system of justice.

  • Moustafa Bayoumi: Trump's Twitter attacks on Sadiq Khan reveal how pitiful the president is

  • Mohamad Bazzi: The Trump Administration Could Provoke Yet Another Mideast War: "Trump has emboldened a recklessly aggressive Saudi government, which is now destroying Yemen, imposing a blockade on Qatar -- and could even stumble into a war with Iran." Long piece on how "the Saud dynasty views itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim world" and how that view leads them into conflicts with Iran, all secular Arab nationalists, and challengers (like the Muslim Brotherhood) and pretenders (like ISIS). A little short on exactly why the Saudis turned on Qatar, another rich autocracy which has turned into a rival by becoming even more prone to intervention:

    Aside from their anger toward Iran, the Sauds were also enraged by Qatar's support for the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and especially Egypt, where Qatar became a primary backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in 2012 won the first free elections in Egypt's modern history. (Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates later backed an Egyptian military coup, in July 2013, against the government of President Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader.) The Sauds were already irritated at Qatar for pursuing an independent foreign policy and trying to increase its influence after the regional turmoil unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq. And, like other Arab monarchs and autocrats, the Sauds disdained Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite network, which was critical of the monarchies and supported the uprisings in 2011.

  • Shawn Boburg: Trump's lawyer in Russia probe has clients with Kremlin ties

  • Gilad Edelman: Trump's Plan to Make Government Older, More Expensive, and More Dysfunctional: "Slashing federal employees doesn't save money. It just makes the government more dependent on private contractors and more prone to colossal screw-ups."

  • Robert Greenwald: Trump Is Sending a Murderer to Do a Diplomat's Job: "Trump just put Michael D'Andrea -- the man who invented so-called 'signature drone strikes' -- to head up intelligence operations in Iran. Probably pure coincidence that almost immediately Tehran was hit by an ISIS terror bomb attack (see Juan Cole: ISIL Hits Tehran; Trump Blames Victim, Iran Hard-Liners Blame Saudis -- who probably blame Qatar, a country they've broken relations with while suggesting they have ties to Iranian terrorists). Also, Richard Silverstein asks Iran Terror Attack: Who Gains? And then there's this: US Congressman suggests his country should back ISIS against Iran following Tehran attacks: That's Dana Rorhbacher (R-CA).

  • Mark Karlin: Organizations Representing Corporations Pass Regressive Legislation in the Shadows: Interview with Gordon Lafer, who wrote The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time. One reason Republicans have spent so heavily at taking over state legislatures is that they can use that power base for cultivating corporate favors. For an excerpt from Lafer's book, see Corporate Lobbies Attack the Public Interest in State Capitols.

  • Anne Kim: Deconstructing the Administrative State: "Donald Trump promises that his deregulatory agenda will lead to a boom in jobs. The real effect will be the opposite."

  • Naomi Klein: The Worst of Donald Trump's Toxic Agenda Is Lying in Wait -- A Major US Crisis Will Unleash It: Long piece, adapted from Klein's new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.

  • Paul Krugman: Wrecking the Ship of State: Also see Jacob Sugarman's more pointed comments: If You Think the United States Is a Disaster Now, Just Wait.

  • Mike Ludwig: Pulling Out of the Paris Climate Pact, Trump Is Building a Wall Around Himself

  • Josh Marshall: Trump's Saudi Arms Deal Is Actually Fake: $110 billion in arms sales -- think of all the jobs (well, actually not that many, and not working on anything valuable in itself, like infrastructure). But:

    The $110 price tag advertised by the Trump White House includes no actual contracts, no actual sales. Instead it is made up of a bundle of letters of intent, statements of interest and agreements to think about it. In other words, rather than a contract, it's more like a wishlist: an itemized list of things the Saudis might be interested in if the price of oil ever recovers, if they start more wars and things the US would like to sell the Saudis. . . .

    As I said, it's remarkably like the Trump-branded phony job announcements: earlier plans, themselves not committed to, rebranded as new decisions, with the Saudis happy to go along with the charade to curry favor with the President who loves whoever showers praise on him.

    Also, as the Bazzi piece above notes, "From 2009 to 2016, Obama authorized a record $115 billion in military sales to Saudi Arabia, far more than any previous administration. (Of that total, US and Saudi officials inked formal deals worth about $58 billion, and Washington delivered $14 billion worth of weaponry from 2009 to 2015.)"

  • Ruth Marcus: Why Comey's testimony was utterly devastating to Trump: This was the story Washington insiders obsessed about all week. Everyone has an opinion, so I should probably just drop into second-tier bullets and let you figure it out (if you care):

  • Jim Newell: Trumpcare Is on the March: "GOP Senators have quietly retooled a Trumpcare bill that could pass." This was also noted by Zoë Carpenter: Senate Republicans Hope You Won't Notice They're About to Repeal Obamacare. Also, in case you need a refresher: Alex Henderson: 9 of the most staggeringly awful statements Republicans have made about health care just this year:

    1. Raul Labrador claims that no one dies from lack of health insurance in the U.S.
    2. Rep. Jason Chaffetz compares cost of health care to cost of iPhones
    3. Warren Davidson's message to the sick and dying: Get a better job
    4. Mo Brooks equates illness with immorality
    5. Mick Mulvaney vilifies diabetics as lazy and irresponsible
    6. Roger Marshall claims that America's poor "just don't want health care"
    7. President Trump praises Australian health care system, failing to understand why it's superior
    8. Steve Scalise falsely claims that Trumpcare does not discriminate against preexisting conditions
    9. Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan claim Canadians are coming to U.S. in droves for health care, without a shred of evidence

  • Ben Norton: Emails Expose How Saudi Arabia and UAE Work the US Media to Push for War

  • Jonathan O'Connell: Foreign payments to Trump's businesses are legally permitted, argues Justice Department: Something else Trump "hoped" the DOJ would see his way.

  • Daniel Politi: Afghan Soldier Opens Fire on US Troops, Kills Three Service Members: I first heard this story from a TV report, where VP Mike Pence was proclaiming the dead soldiers "heroes" and no one mentioned that the shooter was a supposed ally. Now we hear that the shooter was a Taliban infiltrator. However, note another same day report: US Air Raid Kills Several Afghan Border Police in Helmand. "Several" seems to be 10, and they were "patrolling too close to a Taliban base."

  • Nomi Prins: In Washington, Is the Glass(-Steagall) Half Empty or Half Full? Republicans in Congress are hard at work tearing down the paltry Dodd-Frank reforms that Congress put in place to make a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown less likely -- it was, quite literally, the least they could do. The Wichita Eagle ran an op-ed today by our idiot Congressman Ron Estes and it gives you an idea what the sales pitch for the Finance CHOICE Act is going to be: Repealing Obama's regulatory nightmare. Republicans seem to think that all they have to do to discredit regulations is count them (or compile them in a binder and drop it on one's foot). As Estes put it, "The scale of regulations added is incredible. Dodd-Frank added almost 28,000 new rules, which is more than every other law passed under the Obama administration combined." He may be right that some of those regulations "hinder smaller local lenders" -- the Democrats' Wall Street money came from the top, and while they weren't fully satisfied (at least after they got bailed out), they did get consideration. Beyond that Estes spools out lie after lie -- the baldest is his promise that "consumers must be protected from fraud." (The first bullet item on Indivisible's What is the Financial CHOICE Act (HR 10)? says the act would: "Destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and obliterate consumer protections as we currently know them, including allowing banks to gouge consumers with credit card fees." One reason Dodd-Frank needed so many regulations was how many different ways banks could think of to screw consumers.

    Prins' article doesn't mention Financial CHOICE, but does mention a couple of mostly-Democratic bills to restore the separation concept of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Arguably that isn't enough, but one can trace a direct line from the 1999 Glass-Steagall repeal (which was triggered by Citibank's merger with Traveler's Insurance -- a much smarter response would have been to prosecute Citibank's CEO and Board) to the 2008 meltdown and bailouts. Also see Paul Craig Roberts: Without a New Glass-Steagall America Will Fail.

  • Ned Resnikoff: Trump ends infrastructure week with some binder-themed prop comedy

  • Chris Riotta: Donald Trump Is Sputtering with Rage Behind the Closed Doors of the White House

  • Mica Rosenberg/Reade Levinson: Trump targets illegal immigrants who were given reprieves from deportation by Obama

  • Bill Scheft: Who in the hell is Scott Pruitt?! Everything you were afraid to ask about this suddenly important person

  • Derek Thompson: The Potemkin Policies of Donald Trump: Last week was "Infrastructure Week," during which he unveiled a plan to privatize air traffic control that the big airlines have been lobbying for quite a few years, and something about reducing environmental impact studies to no more than two pages, presumably by eliminating the study part. Trump has also been heard complaining that all the Russia investigations have gotten in the way of doing important work, like jobs, or terrorism, or something like that.

    The secret of the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. More than 120 days into Trump's term in a unified Republican government, Trump's policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.

    The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.

    To be sure, this void has partially been filled up with Paul Ryan's various plans -- wrecking health care, tax giveaways to the rich, undoing regulation of big banks, etc. -- which is the point when people finally realize just how much damage Trump and the Republicans are potentially capable of. So much so that the one thing I'm not going to fault Trump on is the stuff he's threatened but never tried to do. There's way too much bad stuff that he's done to shame him for not doing more. It used to be said that at least Mussolini got the trains to run on time. About the best Trump can hope for is to destroy all the schedules so no one can be sure whether they're on time or not.

  • Trevor Timm: ICE agents are out of control. And they are only getting worse.

  • Paul Woodward: Whatever we call Trump, he stinks just as bad: Reports that CNN fired Reza Aslan after a tweet about Trump, then hired former Trump campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski. For the record, here is Aslan's tweet:

    This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He's an embarrassment to humankind.

    Woodward comments:

    Donald Trump is the embodiment and arguably purest distillation of vulgarity and yet the prissy gatekeepers of American mainstream-media civility have a problem when vulgar language is used to describe a vulgar man.

    What other kind of language is in any sense appropriate?

    There's no good answer to this. The fact is it's impossible to convey the extent and intensity to which I'm personally disgusted by Trump both in word and action, and I'm not alone. Sometimes I erupt with vulgarity. Sometimes I try to be clever. Most of the time I try to explain with some factual reference which should be self-evident. But nothing seems to break through the shell his supporters wear. Still, I can't blame anyone for trying. I can't blame Kathy Griffin for her severed head joke. (Actually, I smiled when I saw the picture, and that doesn't happen often these days. Then my second thought was, "that's too good for him.") But I don't like getting too personal about Trump, because regardless of how crass he seems, the real problems with his politics are much more widespread, and in many cases he's just following his company around. So that's why I'd object to Aslan's tweet: it narrows its target excessively. Still, I wouldn't fire him. He's got a voice that's grounded in some reasonable principles -- more than you can say for "the tweeter-in-chief."

  • Stephen M Walt: Making the Middle East Worse, Trump-Style: I've lodged a number of links on the Saudi-Qatari pissfest, the ISIS-Iran terror, and the long-lasting Israel-Palestine conflict elsewhere in this post, and apologize for not taking the time to straighten them out. But this didn't fit clearly as a footnote to any of those: it's more like the core problem, so I figured I should list it separately. Walt continues to be plagued by his conceit that the US has real interests in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world other than supporting peace, justice, and broad-based prosperity, so what he's looking for here is a "balance of power" division, something Trump is truly clueless about.

    I don't think Trump cares one way or the other about Israelis or Palestinians (if he did, why would he assign the peace process to his overworked, inexperienced, and borderline incompetent son-in-law?) but jumping deeper into bed with Saudi Arabia and Egypt isn't going to produce a breakthrough.

    The folly of Trump's approach became clear on Monday, when (Sunni) Saudi Arabia and five other Sunni states suddenly broke relations with (Sunni) Qatar over a long-simmering set of policy disagreements. As Robin Wright promptly tweeted, "So much for #Trump's Arab coalition. It lasted less than two weeks." Trump's deep embrace of Riyadh didn't cause the Saudi-Qatari rift -- though he typically tried to take credit for it with some ill-advised tweets -- but this dispute exposed the inherent fragility of the "Arab NATO" that Trump seems to have envisioned. Moreover, taking sides in the Saudi-Qatari rift could easily jeopardize U.S. access to the vital airbase there, a possibility Trump may not even have known about when he grabbed his smartphone. And given that Trump's State Department is sorely understaffed and the rest of his administration is spending more time starting fires than putting them out, the United States is in no position to try to mend the rift and bring its putative partners together.

    One completely obvious point is that if the US actually wanted to steer the region back toward some sort of multi-polar stability the first thing to do would be to thaw relations with Iran, and to make it clear to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Israel that we won't tolerate any sabotage on their part. The US then needs to negotiate a moderation of the efforts of all regional powers to project power or simply meddle in other nations' business (and, and this is crucial, to moderate its own efforts). Obviously, this is beyond the skill set of Trump, Kushner, et al. -- they're stuck in kneejerk reaction mode, as has been every American "tough guy" since (well before) 2001. But this isn't impossible stuff. All it really takes is some modesty, and a willingness to learn from past mistakes. Would Iran be receptive? Well, consider this:

    Last but not least, Trump's response to the recent terrorist attack in Tehran was both insensitive and strategically misguided. Although the State Department offered a genuine and sincere statement of regret, the White House's own (belated) response offered only anodyne sympathies and snarkily concluded: "We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote." A clearer case of "blaming the victim" would be hard to find, and all the more so given Trump's willingness to embrace regimes whose policies have fueled lots of terrorism in the past.

    Contrast this with how Iranian President Mohammad Khatami responded after 9/11: He offered his "condolences" and "deepest sorrow" for the American people and called the attack a "disaster" and "the ugliest form of terrorism ever seen." There was no hint of a lecture or snide schadenfreude in Khatami's remarks, even though it was obvious that the attacks were clearly a reaction (however cruel and unjustified) to prior U.S. actions. It is hard to imagine any modern American presidents responding as callously as Trump did.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The Bulshitter-in-Chief: "Donald Trump's disregard for the truth is something more minister than ordinary lying." Quotes philosopher Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit" for authority when making a distinction between bullshitting and lying, then gives plenty of examples (most familiar/memorable). One interesting bit here comes from Tyler Cowen: Why Trump's Staff Is Lying:

    By asking subordinates to echo his bullshit, Trump accomplishes two goals:

    • He tests the loyalty of his subordinates. In Cowen's words, "if you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid."
    • The other is that it turns his aides into members of a distinct tribe. "By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration."

    Sounds to me like how cults are formed. Yglesias continues:

    But the president doesn't want a well-planned communications strategy; he wants people who'll leap in front of the cameras to blindly defend whatever it is he says or does.

    And because he's the president of the United States, plenty of people are willing to oblige him. That starts with official communicators like Spicer, Conway (who simultaneously tries to keep her credibility in the straight world by telling Joe Scarborough she needs to shower after defending Trump), and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. But there are also the informal surrogates. . . .

    House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes embarrassed himself but pleased Trump with a goofy effort to back up Trump's wiretapping claims. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who certainly knows better, sat next to Trump in an Economist interview and gave him totally undeserved credit for intimidating the Chinese on currency manipulation. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross hailed a small-time trade agreement with China consisting largely of the implementation of already agreed-upon measures as "more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade."

    This kind of bullshit, like Trump's, couldn't possibly be intended to actually convince any kind of open-minded individual. It's a performance for an audience of one. A performance that echoes day and night across cable news, AM talk radio, and the conservative internet.

Plus a few other things that caught my eye:

  • Patrick Cockburn: Britain Refuses to Accept How Terrorists Really Work: After ISIS-claimed attacks in Manchester and London:

    When Jeremy Corbyn correctly pointed out that the UK policy of regime change in Iraq, Syria and Libya had destroyed state authority and provided sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and Isis, he was furiously accused of seeking to downplay the culpability of the terrorists. . . .

    There is a self-interested motive for British governments to portray terrorism as essentially home-grown cancers within the Muslim community. Western governments as a whole like to pretend that their policy blunders, notably those of military intervention in the Middle East since 2001, did not prepare the soil for al-Qaeda and Isis. This enables them to keep good relations with authoritarian Sunni states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, which are notorious for aiding Salafi-jihadi movements. Placing the blame for terrorism on something vague and indefinable like "radicalisation" and "extremism" avoids embarrassing finger-pointing at Saudi-financed Wahhabism which has made 1.6 billion Sunni Muslims, a quarter of the world's population, so much more receptive to al-Qaeda type movements today than it was 60 years ago.

  • Eric Foner: The Continental Revolution: Review of Noam Maggor: Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age, about economic development following the US Civil War.

  • Thomas Frank: From rust belt to mill towns: a tale of two voter revolts: The author of What's the Matter With Kansas?, The Wrecking Crew, and Listen, Liberal tours Britain on the eve of the election. He doesn't predict the election very well, but he does notice things, like this:

    When I try to put my finger on exactly what separates Britain and America, a story I heard in a pub outside Sheffield keeps coming back to me. A man was telling me of how he had gone on vacation to Florida, and at one point stopped to refuel his car in a rural area. As he was standing there, an old man rode up to the gas station on a bicycle and started rummaging through a trash can. The Englishman asked him why he was doing this, and was astonished to learn the man was digging for empty cans in order to support his family.

    The story is unremarkable in its immediate details. People rummaging through trash for discarded cans is something that every American has seen many times. What is startling is that here's a guy in Yorkshire, a place we Americans pity for its state of perma-decline, relating this story to me in tones of incomprehension and even horror. He simply couldn't believe it. Left unasked was the obvious question: what kind of civilisation allows such a fate to befall its citizens? The answer, of course, is a society where social solidarity has almost completely evaporated.

    What most impressed me about the England I saw was the opposite: a feeling I encountered, again and again, that whatever happens, people are all in this together. Solidarity was one of the great themes after the terrorist bombing in Manchester, as the city came together around the victims in a truly impressive way, but it goes much further than that. It is the sense you get that the country is somehow obliged to help out the people of the deindustrialised zones and is failing in its duty. It is an understanding that every miner or job-seeker or person with dementia has a moral claim upon the rest of the English nation and its government. It is an assumption that their countrymen will come to their rescue if only they could hear their cries for help.

  • John Judis: What's Wrong With Our System of Global Trade and Finance: Interview with economist Dani Rodrik, who has written several books on globalization. The main thing I've learned from him is that when nations open up trade (and/or capital and/or labor flows), sensible ones recognize that there will be losers as well as winners and act to mitigate losses. The US, of course, isn't one of the sensible ones. And while Trump seems to recognize some of the losses, he doesn't have anything to offer that actually helps fix those problems. Still, he offers that some sort of real change needs to come:

    I think the change comes because the mainstream panics, and they come to feel that something has to be done. That's how capitalism has changed throughout its history. If you want to be optimistic, the good news is that capitalism has always reinvented itself. Look at the New Deal, look at the rise of the welfare state. These were things that were done to stave off panic or revolution or political upheaval. . . .

    So I think the powerful interests are reevaluating what their interest is. They are considering whether they have a greater interest in creating trust and credibility and rebuilding the social contract with their compatriots. That is how to get change to take place without a complete overhaul of the structure of power.

  • Christopher Lydon: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy: An interview with Noam Chomsky.

  • Ed Pilkington: Puerto Rico votes again on statehood but US not ready to put 51st star on the flag; also Michelle Chen: The Bankers Behind Puerto Rico's Debt Crisis.

  • Matthew Rozsa: Kris Kobach, "voter fraud" vigilante, is now running for Kansas governor: He's been Kansas' Secretary of State since 2011, a fairly minor position whose purview includes making sure elections are run fairly, and to that end he's managed to get a "voter ID" bill passed, purge thousands of voters from the registration rolls, and prosecute perhaps a half dozen people for voting twice. Earlier he was best known as author of several anti-immigration bills, and he's continued to do freelance work writing far right-wing bills -- by the way, virtually all of the ones that have been passed have since been struck down as unconstitutional. He is, in short, a right-wing political agitator disguised as a lawyer, and is a remarkably bad one. He was the only Kansas politician to endorse Donald Trump, and he wrangled a couple job interviews during the transition, but came up empty. It's not clear whether Trump worried he might not be a team player (i.e., someone who sacrifices his own ideas to Trump's ego), or simply decided he was an asshole -- the binders he showed up with suggest both. Kobach launched his gubernatorial campaign with a ringing defense of Sam Brownback's tax cuts, which the state legislature had just repealed (overriding Brownback's veto). Rosza asks, "have the people of Kansas not suffered enough under Sam Brownback?" Good question. Although he's by far the most famous (or notorious) candidate, and he ran about 4 points above Brownback in their 2014 reëlection campaigns, I think it's unlikely he will win the Republican primary. For starters, his fanatical anti-immigrant shtick doesn't play well in western Kansas where agribusiness demands cheap labor and hardly anyone with other options wants to live. But also, most business interests would rather have someone they can keep on a tighter leash than a demagogue with national ambitions (a trait Kobach shares with Brownback). Still, either way, I doubt the state's suffering will end any time soon.

  • Reihan Salam: The Health Care Debate Is Moving Left: "How single-payer went from a pipe dream to mainstream." The author isn't very happy about this, complaining "that Medicare has in some ways made America's health system worse by serving the interests of politically powerful hospitals over those of patients." Still:

    If faced with a choice between the AHCA and Medicare for all, Republicans shouldn't be surprised if swing voters wind up going for the latter. The AHCA is an inchoate mess that evinces no grander philosophy for caring for the sick and vulnerable. Single-payer health care is, if nothing else, a coherent concept that represents a set of beliefs about how health care should work. If Republicans want the single-payer dream to go away, they're going to have to come up with something better than the nothing they have now.

  • Sabrina Siddiqui: Anti-Muslim rallies across US denounced by civil rights groups: On Saturday, a group called Act for America tried to organize "anti-Sharia law" rallies in a number of American cities ("almost 30"; I've heard 28). They seem to have been lightly attended. (My spies here in Wichita say 30 people showed up. There wasn't a counter-demonstration here, although in many cases more people came to counter -- needless to say, not to defend Sharia but to reject ACT's main focus of fomenting Islamophobia.)

  • Ana Swanson/Max Ehrenfreund: Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas: The overwhelmingly Republican Kansas state legislature finally managed to override Gov. Sam Brownback's veto of a bill that raised state income taxes and eliminated a loophole that allowed most businessmen to escape taxation altogether. The new tax rates are lower than the ones in effect before Brownback's signature "tax reform" became law and blew a hole in the state budget, leading to a series of successful lawsuits against the state over whether education funding was sufficient to satisfy the state constitution. Republicans have done a lot of batshit-insane stuff since Brownback took office in 2011, but the one that kept biting them back the worst was the Arthur Laffer-blessed tax cut bill. One can argue that this represents a power shift within the Republican Party in Kansas: in 2016 rabid right-wingers (including Rep. Tim Huelskemp) actually lost to "moderate" challengers, whereas earlier right-wingers had often won primaries against so-called moderates. But as this article points out, right-wingers like Kris Kobach and their sponsors like the Koch Brothers are pissed off and vowing civil war. Meanwhile, the Ryan-Trump "tax reform" scam looks a lot like Brownback's, with all that implies: e.g., see Ben Castleman et al: The Kansas Experiment Is Bad News for Trump's Tax Cuts.

  • Mark Weisbrot, et al: Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Update After 23 Years: Executive summary to a longer paper (link within):

    Among the results, it finds that Mexico ranks 15th out of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards; Mexico's poverty rate in 2014 was higher than the poverty rate of 1994; and real (inflation-adjusted) wages were almost the same in 2014 as in 1994. It also notes that if NAFTA had been successful in restoring Mexico's pre-1980 growth rate -- when developmentalist economic policies were the norm -- Mexico today would be a high-income country, with income per person comparable to Western European countries. If not for Mexico's long-term economic failure, including the 23 years since NAFTA, it is unlikely that immigration from Mexico would have become a major political issue in the United States, since relatively few Mexicans would seek to cross the border.

  • Lawrence Wittner: How Business "Partnerships" Flopped at the US's Largest University

I've also collected a few links marking the 50th anniversary of Israel's "Six-Day War" and the onset of the 50-years-and-counting Occupation:

  • Ibtisam Barakat: The Persistence of Palestinian Memory: "Growing up under occupation was like living in a war zone, where people were punished for wanting dignity and freedom."

  • Omar Barghouti: For Palestinians, the 1967 War Remains an Enduring, Painful Wound

  • Neve Gordon: How Israel's Occupation Shifted From a Politics of Life to a Politics of Death: "Palestinian life has become increasingly expendable in Israel's eyes." The piece starts:

    During a Labor Party meeting that took place not long after the June 1967 war, Golda Meir turned to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, asking, "What are we going to do with a million Arabs?" Eshkol paused for a moment and then responded, "I get it. You want the dowry, but you don't like the bride!"

    This anecdote shows that, from the very beginning, Israel made a clear distinction between the land it had occupied -- the dowry -- and the Palestinians who inhabited it -- the bride. The distinction between the people and their land swiftly became the overarching logic informing Israel's colonial project. Ironically, perhaps, that logic has only been slightly modified over the past 50 years, even as the controlling practices Israel has deployed to entrench its colonization have, by contrast, changed dramatically.

    By the way, the bride/dowry metaphor is the organizing principle for Avi Raz's important book on Israel's diplomatic machinations following the 1967 war: The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordaon, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War (2012, Yale University Press). Based on recently declassified documents, the book shows clearly how Israel's ruling circle (especially Abba Eban) weaved back and forth between several alternative post-war scenarios to make sure that none of them got in the way of Israel keeping control of its newly conquered territories.

  • Mehdi Hasan: A 50-Year Occupation: Israel's Six-Day War Started With a Lie

  • Rashid Khalidi: The Israeli-American Hammer-Lock on Palestine

  • Guy Laron: The Historians' War Over the Six-Day War: Author of a recent book, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (2017, Yale University Press). Surveys a number of earlier books on the war, including works by Randolph Churchill, Donald Neff, Michael Oren, and Tom Segev (1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East -- the one of those four I've read, but far from the only thing).

  • Hisham Melhem: The Arab World Has Never Recovered From the Loss of 1967: I'm reminded here of Maxime Rodinson's late-1960s book, Israel & the Arabs, which was written at a time when many Arab countries were palpably moving toward modern, secular, socialist societies. The 1967 war didn't in itself kill that dream, but it tarnished it, with Egypt, Syria, and Iraq soon calcifying into stultifying militarist (and hereditary) dictatorships, sad parodies of the monarchies Britain left in its wake. The US Cold War embrace of salafist-jihadism (and the ill-fated Shah in Iran) further clouded the picture, turning Islam into the last refuge of the downtrodden.

  • Jonathan Ofir: The issue isn't 'occupation,' it's Zionism:

    The status of Palestinian citizens within Israel has likewise not been regulated into equal status, as one might expect from a democratic country when it finally offers citizenship. This community is subject to some 50 discriminatory laws, as well as -- and this deserves special attention -- ethnic cleansing, as we have seen recently in the case of Umm Al-Hiran [a Bedouin village razed in 2015].

    We must therefore see Israel's 'occupation' as an all-encompassing paradigm, reaching beyond isolated localities and beyond this or that war or conquering campaign. Occupation is simply what we DO, in a very broad sense.

  • Philip Weiss: How 1967 changed American Jews: Weiss gives many other telling examples, but the one I most vividly recall was that of M.S. Arnoni (1922-1985), who edited and largely wrote a very pointed antiwar (or at least anti-Vietnam War) publication called A Minority of One. I found this magazine early on as I found my own antiwar views, but after the 1967 Six-Day War Arnoni shifted gears and from that point on wrote almost exclusively about Israel and its valiant struggle against the exterminationist Arab powers. I recall that even before I bailed, Bertrand Russell resigned his honorary seat on the editorial board. At the time I was generally sympathetic to Israel -- I hadn't read much about it, but had read a number of things on the Holocaust, including Simon Wiesenthal's The Murderers Among Us. Still, this struck me as a bizarre personal change, which only many years later started to fit into the general pattern Weiss writes about. I do recall watching all of the UN debates on the war, and being impressed both by Israeli ambassador Abba Eban and by whoever the Saudi ambassador was. The event which really made me rethink my sympathy to Israel was the 1982 Lebanon War, although I didn't read Robert Fisk's 1990 book Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon until after 2001. Since then I've read a lot on the subject -- most recently Ilan Pappe's Ten Myths About Israel, a very useful short primer. Still, the single best book is probably Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (2004), because it makes clear the subtle self-deceptions that success and power breed, how the quest for safety morphed into an addiction to war. And that ties back around to how Arnoni (and many other American Jews) got lost in identity and paranoia and gave up what they once understood about peace and justice.

  • Philip Weiss: 'The greatest sustained exercise in utterly arbitrary authority world has ever seen' -- Chabon on occupation: On a recent book edited by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, Kingdom of Olives and Ash.

  • Charlie Zimmerman: Dispatch from 'the most ****ed up place on Earth,' Hedron's H2 quarter: And this is what the Occupation has come down to.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, June 5, 2017

Weekend Roundup

These weekend posts are killing me. I didn't even make it through my tabs this time -- nothing from Alternet, the New Yorker, Salon, TruthOut, Washington Monthly, nor much of what I was tipped off to from Twitter. Just one piece on the upcoming UK elections, which would be major if Jeffrey Corbyn and Labour pull an upset. Just a couple links on Israel, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of their great military land grab in 1967, which is to say 50 years of their unjust and often cruel occupation. A couple of uncommented links on the problems Democrats face getting out of their own heads and into the minds of the voters. And only a mere sampling of the Trump's administration's penchant for graft and violence. Just an incredible amount of crap to wade through.

Big story this week was Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change deal, joining Nicaragua and Syria as the only nations on record as unwilling to cooperate in the struggle to keep greenhouse gases from pushing global temperatures to record highs. One might well criticize the Paris accords for not going far enough, but unlike the previous Kyoto agreement this one brought key developing nations like China and India into the fold.

Here are some pertinent links:

  • Vicki Arroyo: The US is the biggest loser on the planet thanks to Trump's calamitous act:

    The Paris agreement was a groundbreaking deal that allowed each country to decide its own contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Even though it is non-binding, the agreement puts the world on the path to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2C, which scientists warn would be disastrous for our planet.

    By abandoning the agreement, we are not only ceding global leadership but also effectively renouncing our global citizenship. The US is joining Nicaragua (which felt the agreement did not go far enough) and Syria (in the midst of a devastating civil war) as the only nations without a seat at the Paris table. As an American, I am embarrassed and ashamed of this abdication of our responsibility, especially since the US has been the world's largest contributor of carbon emissions over time. We have become a rogue nation.

  • Perry Bacon Jr/Harry Enten: Was Trump's Paris Exit Good Politics? They look at a lot of polling numbers, and conclude it was fine with the Republican base, but unpopular overall. Key numbers:

    Only a third of Republicans rate protecting the environment from the effects of energy production as a top priority. Polling from Gallup further indicates that 85 percent of Republicans don't think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime. Education was a major dividing line in the 2016 election, but Republicans of all education levels think the effects of global warming are exaggerated. . . .

    An overwhelming majority of Democrats (87 percent) and a clear majority of independents (61 percent) wanted the U.S. to stay in the climate agreement, according to a poll that was released in April and conducted jointly by Politico and Harvard's School of Public Health. Overall, 62 percent of Americans wanted the U.S. to remain part of the accord (among Republicans, 56 percent favored withdrawal). . . .

    It's also possible that Trump gave a win to his base on an issue they don't care that much about while angering the opposition on an issue they do care about. Gallup and Pew Research Center polls indicate that global warming and fighting climate change have become higher priorities for Democrats over the past year.

    As of this writing, 538's "How Popular Is Donald Trump?" is at 55.1% Disapprove, 38.9% Approve, so down a small bit since the announcement.

  • Daniel B Baer, et al: Why Abandoning Paris Is a Disaster for America:

    The president's justifications for leaving the agreement are also just plain wrong.

    First, contrary to the president's assertions, America's hands are not tied and its sovereignty is not compromised by the Paris climate pact. The Paris agreement is an accord, not a treaty, which means it's voluntary. The genius (and reality) of the Paris agreement is that it requires no particular policies at all -- nor are the emissions targets that countries committed to legally binding. Trump admitted as much in the Rose Garden, referring to the accord's "nonbinding" nature. If the president genuinely thinks America's targets are too onerous, he can simply adjust them (although we believe it would be shortsighted for the administration to do so). There is no need to exit the Paris accord in search of a "better deal." Given the voluntary nature of the agreement, pulling out of the Paris deal in a fit of pique is an empty gesture, unless that gesture is meant to be a slap in the face to every single U.S. ally and partner in the world.

    The second big lie is that the Paris agreement will be a job killer. In fact, it will help the United States capture more 21st-century jobs. That is why dozens of U.S. corporate leaders, including many on the president's own advisory council, urged him not to quit the agreement. As a letter sent to the White House by ExxonMobil put it, the agreement represents an "effective framework for addressing the risk of climate change," and the United States is "well positioned to compete" under the terms of the deal.

    Action on climate and economic growth go hand in hand, and are mutually reinforcing. That is why twice as much money was invested worldwide in renewables last year as in fossil fuels, and why China is pouring in billions to try to win this market of the future. A bipartisan group of retired admirals and generals on the CNA Military Advisory Board is about to release a report that will also spell out the importance of competitiveness in advanced energy technologies -- not just to the economy, but also to the country's standing in the world. Pulling out of climate will result in a loss of U.S. jobs and knock the United States off its perch as a global leader in innovation in a quickly changing global economic climate.

    The article especially harps on "Trump is abdicating U.S. leadership and inviting China to fill the void." As you may recall, China pretty much torpedoed the Kyoto accords in the 1990s by insisting on building their burgeoning economy on their vast coal reserves, but lately they've decided to leave most of their coal in the ground, so agreeing to the Paris accords was practically a no-brainer. The same shift has actually been occurring in the US, admittedly with Obama's encouragement but more and more it's driven by economics, even without anything like a carbon tax to factor in the externalities. And unless Trump comes up with a massive program to subsidize coal use, it's hard to see that changing, and even then not significantly.

    Another point they make: "Pulling out of Paris means Republicans own climate catastrophes." Over the last several decades, we've all seen evidence both of climate drift and even more so of freakish extreme weather events, and the latter often trigger recognition of the former, even when they are simply freakish. But also, despite the popularity of Reagan's "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" joke, when disaster strikes, no one really believes that. Rather, they look immediately (and precisely) at the government for relief, and they get real upset when it's not forthcoming, even more so when it's botched (e.g., Katrina).

  • Coral Davenport/Eric Lipton: How GOP Leaders Came to View Climate Science as Fake Science: Trump's decision shows how completely his mind has been captured by a propaganda campaign orchestrated by "fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil." The Kochs run Americans for Prosperity, perhaps the single most effective right-wing political organization (e.g., they've been critical in flipping Wisconsin and Michigan for Trump). One of their major initiatives has been to get Republicans they back to sign their "No Climate Tax Pledge," which appears here:

    Americans for Prosperity is launching an initiative to draw a line in the sand declaring that climate change legislation will not be used to fund a dramatic expansion in the size and scope of government. If you oppose unrestrained growth in government at taxpayer's expense and hidden under the guise of environmental political correctness, then sign the pledge at the bottom of this page and return it to our office, or visit our website at www.noclimatetax.com.

    Regardless of which approach to the climate issue you favor, we should be able to agree that any climate-change policy should be revenue neutral. Revenue neutrality requires using all new revenues generated by a climate tax, cap-and-trade, or regulatory program, dollar for dollar, to cut taxes. There must also be a guarantee that climate policies remain revenue neutral over time. . . .

    Any major increase in federal revenue should be debated openly on its merits. We therefore encourage you to pledge to the American people that you will oppose any effort to hide a revenue increase in a feel-good environmental bill.

    Thus they ignore any substantive environmental impacts while tying the hands of lawmakers, preventing the people from using government to do anything for our collective benefit. That's one prong of their attack. Denying climate science is another, and a third is their long-term effort to undermine collective efforts through international organizations -- a complete about-face from the 1940s when the US championed the UN and the Bretton-Woods organizations as a way of opening the world up and making it more hospitable to American business. Back then Americans understood that they'd have to give as well as take, and that we as well as they would benefit from cooperation. That's all over now, thanks to the right-wing propaganda effort, itself based on the premise that dominant powers (like corporate rulers) can impose dictates to mold their minions to their purposes.

    When I opened the opinion page in the Wichita Eagle today, I found an op-ed piece, Withdrawing from Paris accord is a smart decision by Trump. The contents were total bullshit. And the author, Nicolas Loris, was identified is "the Morgan Research Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at The Heritage Foundation."

    By the way, the Eagle's other op-ed was by Sen. Jerry Moran: A strong national defense also means a strong economy, which was almost exclusively taking credit for some work on the B-21 ("the world's most advanced stealth bomber") will be done in Spirit's Wichita plant. Evidently no problem with spending precious taxpayer money to better threaten a world that Trump has clearly shown nothing but contempt for.

  • Geoff Dembicki: The Convenient Disappearance of Climate Change Denial in China: "From Western plot to party line, how China embraced climate science to become a green-energy powerhouse." The transition seems to have occurred in 2011, when the leadership stopped publishing tracts decrying climate change as a Western plot and started investing heavily in renewables. One thing that helped tip the balance was air pollution in Chinese cities. Another was a purge of corrupt managers in the oil industry.

    Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency, Xi told him in a call that China will continue fighting climate change "whatever the circumstances." Though the new U.S. president has staffed his administration with skeptics such as Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, China released data suggesting it could meet its 2030 Paris targets a decade early. "The financial elites I talk with," Shih said, "they think that the fact that the Trump presidency has so obviously withdrawn from any global effort to try to limit greenhouse gases provides China with an opportunity to take leadership."

    The paths both countries are taking couldn't be more divergent. While Trump rescinded Obama's Clean Power Plan with a promise to end America's "war on coal," China aims to close 800 million tons of coal capacity by 2020. The U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy is facing a budget cut of more than 50 percent when China is pouring over $361 billion into renewable energy. All this "is likely to widen China's global leadership in industries of the future," concluded a recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

  • Michael Grunwald: Why Trump Actually Pulled Out of Paris: "It wasn't because of the climate, or to help American business. He needed to troll the world -- and this was his best shot so far."

    No, Trump's abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: It was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal. He was thrusting the United States into the role of global renegade, rejecting not only the scientific consensus about climate but the international consensus for action, joining only Syria and Nicaragua (which wanted an even greener deal) in refusing to help the community of nations address a planetary problem. Congress doesn't seem willing to pay for Trump's border wall -- and Mexico certainly isn't -- so rejecting the Paris deal was an easier way to express his Fortress America themes without having to pass legislation. . . .

    The entire debate over Paris has twisted Republicans in knots. They used to argue against climate action in the U.S. by pointing out that it wouldn't bind China and other developing-world emitters; then they argued that Paris wouldn't really bind the developing world, either, but somehow would bind the United States. In fact, China is doing its part, dramatically winding down a coal boom that could have doomed the planet, frenetically investing in zero-carbon energy. And it will probably continue to do its part even though the president of the United States is volunteering for the role of climate pariah. It's quite likely that the United States will continue to do its part as well, because no matter what climate policies he thinks will make America great again, Trump can't make renewables expensive again or coal economical again or electric vehicles nonexistent again. California just set a target of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, and many U.S. cities and corporations have set even more ambitious goals for shrinking their carbon footprints. Trump can't do much about that, either.

  • Mark Hertsgaard: Donald Trump's Withdrawal From the Paris Accords Is a Crime Against Humanity; also Sasha Abramsky: Trump Echoes Hitler in His Speech Withdrawing From the Paris Climate Accord.

  • Zachary Karabell: We've Always Been America First: "Donald Trump is just ripping off the mask."

    Also cites l David Frum: The Death Knell for America's Global Leadership. Frum was actually talking more about Trump's refusal to commit to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, but the two go hand-in-hand. Karabell also wrote: Pay attention to Donald Trump's actions, not his words.

  • Naomi Klein: Climate Change Is a People's Shock: Long piece, prefigured by her 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Also includes a link to Chris Hayes' 2014 piece The New Abolitionism, about "forcing fossil fuel companies to give up at least $10 trillion in wealth" (by leaving that much carbon in the ground).

  • Tom McCarthy: 'Outmoded, irrelevant vision': Pittsburghers reject Trump's pledge: "The president said he was exiting the Paris climate deal on behalf of Pittsburgh -- but his view of the environmentally minded city is off by decades, residents say." Also: Lauren Gambino: Pittsburgh fires back at Trump: we stand with Paris, not you; and Lucia Graves: Why Trump's attempt to pit Pittsburgh against Paris is absurd.

  • Daniel Politi: John Kerry: Trump Plan for Better Climate Deal Is Like OJ Search for "Real Killer"

  • Joseph Stiglitz: Trump's reneging on Paris climate deal turns the US into a rogue state

  • Hiroko Tabuchi/Henry Fountain: Bucking Trump, These Cities, States and Companies Commit to Paris Accord

  • Katy Waldman: We the Victims: "Trump's Paris accord speech projected his own psychological issues all over the American people."

  • Ben White/Annie Karni: America's CEOs fall out of love with Trump: An amusing side story is that several corporate bigwigs have started to distance themselves from Trump, especially over the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords. As the US evolves from hegemonic superpower to tantrum-prone bully, laughing stock, and rogue state, America's global capitalists have ever more to disclaim and apologize for, and it won't help them to be seen as too close to Trump. On the other hand:

    Trump regularly touts himself as a strongly pro-business president focused on creating jobs and speeding up economic growth. But both of those depend in part on corporate confidence in the administration's ability to deliver on taxes and regulation changes. . . .

    One corporate executive noted that Trump is often swayed by the last person he talks to, so, the executive said, remaining in the president's good graces and keeping up access is critical. The senior lobbyist noted that next week is supposed to be focused on changing financial regulations with the House expected to pass a bill rolling back much of the Dodd-Frank law and Treasury slated to release a report on changing financial laws.

    One problem here is that so many of the things corporations and financiers want from Trump come at each other's expense, Thus far, Republicans have been remarkably sanguine about letting business after business rip each other (and everyone else) off, because few businesses look at the costs they incur, least of all externalities like air and water, but those costs add up. For instance, one reason American manufacturing is at a disadvantage compared to other wealthy countries is the exorbitant cost of health care and education, and making up the difference by depressing wages isn't a real solution. There are corporations that love Trump's Paris decision -- ok, the only one I'm actually sure of is Peabody Coal -- but they're actually few and far between. Most don't care much either way, or won't until the bills come due.

    By the way, this piece also includes this gem:

    From a purely political perspective, the distancing of corporate CEOs may not be especially bad for Trump. He won as a populist railing against corporate influence, specifically singling out Goldman Sachs.

    Since the election, he has continued to single out Goldman Sachs: he's tapped more of their executives for key administration jobs than any other business.

  • Richard Wolffe: Trump asked when the world will start laughing at the US. It already is

  • Paul Woodward: Trump believes money comes first -- he doesn't care about climate change

Plus more on the Trump administration's continuing looting and destruction:

  • Daniel Altman: If Anyone Can Bankrupt the United States, Trump Can

  • Bruce Bartlett: Donald Trump's incompetence is a problem. His staff should intervene: The author is a conservative who worked in the White House for Reagan and Bush I, though he was less pleased with Bush II. Still, his prescriptions hardly go beyond what was standard practice for Reagan: "He should let his staff draft statements for him and let them go through the normal vetting process, including fact-checking. And he must resist the temptation to tweet or talk off the top of his head about policy issues, and work through the normal process used by every previous president." Of course, what made that work for Reagan was that he was used to being a corporate spokesman before he became president -- after all, he worked for GE, and he was an actor by trade. Trump has done a bit of acting too, but he's always fancied himself as the boss man, and bosses in America are turning into a bunch of little emperors. On the other hand, Reagan's staff were selected by the real powers behind the throne to do jobs, including keeping the spokesman in line. Trump's staff is something altogether different: a bunch of cronies and toadies, whose principal job seems to be to flatter their leader. And that's left them sadly deficient in the competencies previous White House staff required -- in some cases even more so than the president himself.

  • Jamelle Bouie: What We Have Unleashed: "This year's string of brutal hate crimes is intrinsically connected to the rise of Trump."

  • Juliet Eilperin/Emma Brown/Darryl Fears: Trump administration plans to minimize civil rights efforts in agencies

  • Robert Faturechi: Tom Price Bought Drug Stocks. Then He Pushed Pharma's Agenda in Australia

  • David A Graham: The Panic President: "Rarely does a leader in a liberal democracy embrace, let alone foment, fear. But that's exactly what Donald Trump did in response to attacks in London, as he has done before." Graham starts by showing how London mayor Sadiq Khan responded to the attack, then plunges into Trump's tweetstorm. Also see: Peter Beinart: Why Trump Criticized a London Under Attack; and David Frum: What Trump Doesn't Understand About Gun Control in Great Britain.

  • Matthew Haag: Texas Lawmaker Threatens to Shoot Colleague After Reporting Protesters to ICE

  • Whitney Kassel/Loren De Jonge Schulman: Donald Trump's Great Patriotic Purge: "The administration's assault on experts, bureaucrats, and functionaries who make this country work isn't just foolish, it's suicidal." The most basic difference between Republicans and Democrats is how they view the government bureaucracy: Republicans tend to view everything government does as political, so they insist on loyalists consistent with their political views; Democrats, on the other hand, see civil servants loyal only to the laws that created their jobs. Republicans since Nixon have periodically tried to purge government, but those instincts have never before been so naked as with Trump, nor has the Republican agenda ever before been so narrow, corrupt, or politically opportunistic. Moreover, instilling incompetency doesn't seem to have any downside for Republicans, as they've long claimed that government is useless (except for lobbyists).

    In a signature theme of its first 100 days, the Trump administration, encouraged by conservative media outlets, has launched an assault on civil servants the likes of which should have gone out of style in the McCarthy era. Attacks on their credibility, motivations, future employment, and basic missions have become standard fare for White House press briefings and initiatives. In doing so, the administration and its backers may be crippling their legacy from the start by casting away the experts and implementers who not only make the executive agenda real but provide critical services for ordinary Americans. But in a move that should trouble all regardless of political affiliation, they also run the risk of undermining fundamental democratic principles of American governance.

    Searching for policy-based or political rationale for these moves overlooks a key point: that the United States civil service can be an enormous asset for presidential administrations regardless of party, and undermining it belies a misunderstanding of what public servants actually do. These good folks, the vast majority of whom do not live in Washington, get up in the morning to cut social security checks, maintain aircraft carriers, treat veterans, guard the border, find Osama bin Laden, and yes, work hard to protect the president and make his policies look good. Many of them earn less than they would in the private sector and are deeply committed to serving the American people. Any effort to undercut them is irrational on its face.

  • Mark Mazzetti/Matthew Rosenberg/Charlie Savage: Trump Administration Returns Copies of Report on CIA Torture to Congress

  • Daniel Politi: Democratic Challenger to Iowa Lawmaker Abandons Race Due to Death Threats

  • CIA Names the 'Dark Prince' to Run Iran Operations, Signaling a Tougher Stance: Michael D'Andrea.

  • Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump: "On the corrosive privilege of the most mocked man in the world." She cites a Pushkin fable on green, and is surely not the first to apply F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic line to Trump: "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." She goes on, adding to the mocking of "the most mocked man in the world":

    The American buffoon's commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune's fool.

    Still, if someone made him read this, he would surely respond, "but I'm president, and you aren't." And while he goes about his day "making America great again," he gives cover to a crew that is driving the country into a ravine. When they succeed, all this mockery will seem unduly soft and peculiarly sympathetic. On the other hand, I suspect that treating Trump and the Republicans as badly as they deserve will provoke a kneejerk reaction to defend them. Even now, the scolds are searching hard for instances where they can argue that satire has crossed hypothetical boundaries; e.g., Callum Borchers: Maher, Griffin, Colbert: Anti-Trump comedians are having a really bad moment. I found the Griffin image amusing -- not unsettling like the first time I saw an image of one person holding up the severed head of another, because this time the head was clearly fake and symbolic. The other two were jokes that misfired, partly because they used impolite terms but mostly because they made little sense. That's an occupational hazard -- no comedian ever hits all the time -- but singling these failures out reveals more about the PC squeamishness of the complainers. (Where were these people when Obama was being slandered? Or were they just overwhelmed?) And note that Maher is often a fountain of Islamophobic bigotry, but that's not what he's being called out for here.

  • Lisa Song: Trump Administration Says It Isn't Anti-Science as It Seeks to Slash EPA Science Office

  • John Wagner: Trump plans week-long focus on infrastructure, starting with privatizing air traffic control: During his campaign one of Trump's most popular talking points was on the nation's need for massive investment in infrastructure. After the election, Democrats saw infrastructure investment as one area where they could work with Trump, but as with health care the devil's in the details. Since he took office, it's become clear that Trump's infrastructure program will be nothing but scams fueling private profit with public debt.

    It's worth noting that the scam for "privatizing" air traffic control has been kicking around for years, backed by big airlines, but it's very unpopular here in Kansas because it portends higher charges to general aviation users. That should cost Trump two votes, so his only hope of passing the deal is to pick up Democrats, who should know better.

  • Paul Woodward: Donald Trump plays at being president. He doesn't even pretend to be a world leader:

    At this stage in his performance -- this act in The Trump Show which masquerades as a presidency -- it should be clear to the audience that the motives of the man-child acting out in front of the world are much more emotive than ideological.

    Trump has far more interest in antagonizing his critics than pleasing his base.

    No doubt Trump came back from Europe believing that after suffering insults, he would get the last laugh. A senior White House official (sounding like Steve Bannon) described European disappointment about Trump's decision on Paris as "a secondary benefit," implying perhaps that the primary benefit would be the demolition of one of the key successes of his nemesis, Barack Obama.

    Thus far, The Trump Show has largely been ritual designed to symbolically purge America of Obama's influence.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump has granted more lobbyist waivers in 4 months than Obama did in 8 years; also by Yglesias: An incredibly telling thing Trump said at today's Paris event wasn't about climate at all ("He simply has no idea what he's talking about on any subject"); and Jared Kushner is the domino Trump can least afford to fall in the Russia investigation ("His unique lack of qualification for office makes him uniquely valuable").

And finally a few more links on various stories one or more steps removed from the Trump disaster:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Three fairly prominent figures died in the last couple days -- at least prominent enough to warrant articles in the Wichita Eagle: Jim Bunning, Greg Allman, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Naturally, I go back furthest with Bunning. I became conscious of baseball in 1957, when I was six, and for many years I could recite the all-star teams from that (and practically no other) year. Bunning was the starting pitcher for the AL, vs. Curt Simmons for the NL. That was the year Cincinnati stuffed the ballot boxes, causing a scandal by electing seven position players to the NL team. Commissioner Ford Frick overruled the voters and replaced Gus Bell and Wally Post with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. In my memory, he also picked Stan Musial over Ted Kluszewski at 1B and Eddie Matthews over Don Hoak at 3B, but he stopped short and didn't pick the equally obvious Ernie Banks vs. Roy McMillan. According to the Wikipedia page, Musial actually won, and Hoak (and McMillan and 2B Johnny Temple and C Ed Bailey) started. My memory of the AL team somehow lost 1B Vic Wertz (no idea who played there, since I was pretty sure it wasn't Moose Skowron, on the team as a reserve) and 2B Nellie Fox (I thought Frank Bolling, who didn't make the team -- Casey Stengel liked to stock his bench with Yankees, so he went with Bobby Richardson).

Bunning won the game, pitching three scoreless innings while Simmons walked in two runs. Biggest surprise from the game summary was that Bell pinch-hit for Robinson (no doubt the only time that ever happened, despite being teammates for many years) and came up with a two-run double. Bunning had his best season in 1957, going 20-8, although he also won 19 in 1962, and after he was traded to Philadelphia in 1964 had three straight 19-win years, winding up with a 234-184 record and a lot of strikeouts (2855). He played during a period (1955-71) when W totals were especially depressed -- I worked out a system for adjusting W-L totals over the years but don't have the data handy (one significant result was that Cy Young, Walter Johnson, and Warren Spahn came out with almost identical adjusted W-L totals). But also Bunning spent most of his career as the star on losing teams, so that also reduced his career standing. Still, a marvelous pitcher. He was also one of the more militant leaders in the baseball players union, but after he retired he turned into an extreme right-wing crank and got elected to the Senate from Kentucky, where his two terms went from dismal to worse. If there was a Hall of Fame for guys kicking the ladder away after they used it, he'd be in.

I have far less to say about Allman, but nothing negative. His most recent albums were engaging and enjoyable, and early in his career he contributed to some even better ones.

People much younger than me might remember Brzezinski for his biting criticism of GW Bush's Iraq fiasco. He was the Democrats' original answer to Henry Kissinger, a foreign policy mandarin with a deep-seated hatred of the Soviet Union and anything even vaguely communist, and he seemed to be the dominant force that bent Jimmy Carter's his initial foreign policy focus on human rights toward an unscrupulously anti-communist stance. Still, decades later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, even after Carter wrote his essential book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, Carter stuck to his line that his signature peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was driven primarily by his desire to curtail Soviet influence. It's not that Brzezinski offered any real break from the rabid anti-communism of previous administrations so much as he kept Carter from changing course, and in their Iran and Afghanistan policies they set the stage for everything the US has butchered and blundered ever since -- including Trump's "Arab NATO" summit last week.

Last week when I was reading John D Dower's new book The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II I ran across a paragraph I wanted to quote about how Reagan both adopted and extended policies begun under the Carter administration, while simultaneously belittling and slandering Carter. It seemed to me that we are witnessing Trump making the same move. But since then Zbigniew Brzezinski died, so I figure in his honor I should start with the previous paragraph:

Although Carter failed in his bid for a second term as president his "doctrine" laid the ground for an enhanced US infrastructure of war, especially in the Greater Middle East. Less than two months after his address, Carter oversaw creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force that tapped all four major branches of the military (army, navy, air force, and marines). Within two years, this evolved into Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for operations in Southwest Asia, Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, initiating what one official navy historian called "a period of expansion unmatched in the postwar era. Simultaneously, Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski launched the effective but ultimately nearsighted policy of providing support to the Afghan mujahedeen combating Soviet forces in their country. Conducted mainly through the CIA, the objective of this top-secret operation was in Brzezinski's words, "to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible."

Carter's successor Ronald Reagan inherited these initiatives and ran with them, even while belittling his predecessor's policies. In his presidential campaign, Reagan promised "to unite people of every background and faith in a great crusade to restore the America of our dreams." This, he went on -- in words that surely pleased the ghost of Henry Luce -- necessitated repudiating policies that had left the nation's defense "in shambles," and doing "a better job of exporting Americanism."

If Trump seems less committed to "exporting Americanism" than Reagan (or Luce, who coined the term/slogan "American century"), it's not for lack of flag-waving bluster, arrogance, or ignorance. It's just that decades of excoriating "weak leaders" like Carter, Clinton and Obama, and replacing them with "strong" but inept totems like Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump have taken their toll. The lurches toward the right have weakened the once-robust economy and frayed social bonds, and those in turn have degraded institutions. And while it's easy to put the blame for this decay on a right-wing political movement dedicated to the aggrandizement of an ever-smaller circle of billionaires, the equally important thing I'm noticing here is how completely Carter, Clinton, and Obama internalized the logic of their/our enemies and failed to plot any sort of alternative to the right's agenda, which ultimately has less to do with spreading "the American way of life" than with subjugating the world to global capital. Indeed, it appears as though the last people left believing in Luce's Americanism are the hegemonic leaders of the Democratic Party.

I wound up completely exhausted and disgusted from last week's compilation of Trump atrocities (see my Midweek Roundup). I know I said, shortly after Trump's inauguration, that "we can do this shit every week," but I'm less sure now -- not to mention I'm doubting my personal effectiveness.

In particular, the Montana election loss took a toll on my psyche. Then I saw the following tweet (liked by someone I thought I liked): "I wonder what Bernie has learned from his massive loss and that of his scions, Mello, Feingold, Teachout, Thompson, Quist. Probably nothing." Quist, in Montana, ran anywhere from 6-12% ahead of Clinton (at least in the counties I've seen). So did Thompson here in Kansas. They lost, but at least they ran, they gave voters real choices, and they got little or no support from the Clinton-dominated national party (which has made it their business to reduce party differences to a minimum, even as the Republicans stake out extreme turf on the right). The others I haven't looked at closely, but Bernie wasn't the one who lost to Donald Trump. What lessons should he learn from those defeats? Offer less of an alternative? Take his voters for granted? Further legitimize the other side? Clinton Democrats have been doing those things for 25 years now, and look where they've gotten us.

Meanwhile, a few quick links, probably little commentary -- but these things pretty well speak for themselves.

Some scattered links this week in Trump world:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though mostly still to America's bout of political insanity:

What a bummer this is all turning into. Nor can I say it's different than I expected. And it's really unhealthy to go through life with so many occasions to say "I told you so."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Arthur Protin asked me to comment on a recent interview with linguist George Lakoff: Paul Rosenberg: Don't think of a rampaging elephant: Linguist George Lakoff explains how the Democrats helped elect Trump. Lakoff has tried to promote himself as the liberal alternative to Frank Luntz, who's built a lucrative career polling and coining euphemisms for Republicans. I first read his 2004 primer, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, which consolidated ideas from his earlier Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think -- a dichotomy he's still pitching as "the strict father/nurturent parent distinction." I've never liked this concept. I'll grant that conservatives like the flattering "strict father" construct, not least because it conflates family and society, in both cases celebrating hierarchical (and, sure, patriarchal) order, and there's something to be said for recognizing how they see themselves. But the alternative family model isn't something I'd like to see scaled up to society, where nurturing morphs into something patronizing, condescending, and meddlesome, and worse still that it grants the fundamentally wrong notion that what's good for families is equally good and proper for society and government. This is just one of many cases where Lakoff accepts the framing given by Republicans and tries to game it, rather than doing what he advises: changing the framing. I don't doubt that his understanding of cognitive psychology yields some useful insights into how Democrats might better express their case -- especially the notion that you lead with your values, not with mind-numbing wonkery. But it's not just that Democrats don't know how best to talk. A far bigger problem is that Democrats lack consensus on values, except inasmuch as they've been dictated by the need to collect and coalesce all of the minorities that the Republicans deplore.

You see, back in Nixon days, with Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan doing the nerd-work, Republicans started strategizing how to build a post/anti-New Deal majority. They started with the GOP's core base (meaning business), whipped up a counterculture backlash (long on patriotism and patriarchy), and lured in white southerners (with various codings of racism) and Catholics (hence their about face on abortion), played up the military and guns everywhere. The idea was to move Nixon's "silent majority" to their side by driving a wedge between them and everyone else, who had no options other than to become Democrats. The Democrats played along, collecting the votes Republicans drove their way while offering little in return. Rather, with unions losing power and businesses gaining, politicians like the Clintons figured out how to triangulate between their base and various moneyed interests (especially finance and high-tech).

Lakoff is right that Clinton's campaign often played into Trump's hands. While some examples are new, that's been happening at least since Bill Clinton ran first for president in 1992. Clinton adopted so many Republican talking points -- on crime and welfare, on fiscal balance, on deregulating banks and job-killing trade deals -- that the Republicans had nowhere to go but even further right. For more on Clinton and his legacy, see Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal! Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? The key point is that Clinton almost never challenged the values Republicans tried to put forth. Rather, he offered a more efficient (and slightly less inhumane) implementation of them. Indeed, his administration oversaw the largest spurt of growth in the wealth of the already rich. If the rich still favored Republicans, that was only because the latter promised them even more -- maybe not wealth, but more importantly power. That Clinton left the rich unsatisfied was only part of the problem his legacy would face. He also left his voters disillusioned, and his post-presidency buckraking left him looking even more cynical and corrupt, in ways that could never be spun or reframed.

So Hillary Clinton's own political career started with two big problems. One was that she was viewed as a person whose credentials were built on nepotism -- not on her own considerable competency, except perhaps in marrying well -- and even when she seemed to be in charge, he remained in her shadow. The second was that she couldn't separate herself from the legacy of ashes -- the demise of American manufacturing jobs, the concentration of wealth for a global financial elite. Indeed, with her high-paid speeches to Wall Street, she seemed not just blind but shameless. Her husband had refashioned the Democratic Party into a personal political machine, both by promoting personal cronies and by losing control of Congress (a source of potential rivals), leaving her with a substantial but very circumscribed fan base.

As for Hillary's campaign, as Lakoff says, the focus was against Trump:

The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that's exactly what his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what actually was helping Trump with his supporters.

Lakoff doesn't say this, but the lesson I draw was that Clinton's big failure was in treating Trump as an anomalous, embarrassing personal foe, rather than recognizing that the real threat of a Trump administration would be all of the Republicans he would bring into government. She thought that by underplaying partisan differences she could detach some suburban "moderates" to break party ranks, and that would make her margin. Her indifference to her party (and ultimately to her base) followed the pattern of her husband and Barack Obama, who both lost Democratic control of Congress after two years, after which they were re-elected but could never implement any supposed promises. You can even imagine that they actually prefer divided power: not only does it provide a ready excuse for their own inability to deliver on popular (as opposed to donor-oriented) campaign promises, it makes them look more heroic staving off the Republican assault (a threat which Republicans have played to the hilt). When Harry Truman found himself with a Republican Congress in 1946, he went out and waged a fierce campaign against the "do-nothing Congress." That's one thing you never saw Clinton or Obama do.

So, sure, you can nitpick Clinton's framing and phrasing all over the place. A popular view in my household is that she lost the election with her "deplorables" comment, but you can pick out dozens of other self-inflicted nicks. I saw an interview somewhere where a guy said that "everything she says sounds like bullshit to me" where Trump "made sense." Maybe she could have been coached into talking more effectively, but the subtext here is that the guy distrusts her and (somehow) trusts Trump. Lakoff is inclined to view Trump as some kind of genius (or at least idiot savant) for this feat, but my own take is that Hillary was simply extraordinarily tarnished goods. Democrats have many problems, but not recognizing that is a big one.

Lakoff has a section on "how Trump's tweets look":

Trump's tweets have at least three functions. The first function is what I call preemptive framing. Getting framing out there before reporters can frame it differently. So for example, on the Russian hacking, he tweeted that the evidence showed that it had no effect on the election. Which is a lie, it didn't say that at all. But the idea was to get it out there to 31 million people looking at his tweets, legitimizing the elections: The Russian hacks didn't mean anything. He does that a lot, constantly preempting.

The second use of tweets is diversion. When something important is coming up, like the question of whether he is going to use a blind trust, the conflicts of interest. So what does he do instead? He attacks Meryl Streep. And then they talk about Meryl Streep for a couple of days. That's a diversion.

The third one is that he sends out trial balloons. For example, the stuff about nuclear weapons, he said we need to pay more attention to nukes. If there's no big outcry and reaction, then he can go on and do the rest. These are ways of disrupting the news cycle, getting the real issues out of the news cycle and turning it to his advantage.

Trump is very, very smart. Trump for 50 years has learned how to use people's brains against them. That's what master salesmen do.

The three things may have some validity, but Lakoff lost me at "very, very smart." Much empirical observation suggests that he's actually very, very stupid. Indeed, much of the reason so many people (especially in the media) follow him is that they sense they're watching a train wreck. But also he gets away with shit because he's rich and famous and (now) very powerful. But can you really say tweets work for Trump? As I recall, his campaign shut down his Twitter feed the week or two before the election, just enough to cause a suspension in the daily embarrassments Trump created.

Lakoff goes on to talk about how advertisers use repetition to drum ideas into brains, giving "Crooked Hillary" as an example. Still, what made "Crooked Hillary" so effective wasn't how many times Trump repeated it. The problem was how it dovetailed with her speeches and foundation, about all the money she and her husband had raked in from their so-called public service. It may have been impossible for the Democrats to nominate an unassailable candidate, but with her they made it awfully easy.

For a more detail exposition of Lakoff's thinking, see his pre-election Understanding Trump. There is a fair amount to be learned here, and some useful advice, but he keeps coming back to his guiding "strict father" idea, and it's not clear where to go from there. As someone who grew up under a strict (but not very smart or wise) father, my instinct is to rebel, but I wouldn't want to generalize that -- surely there are some fathers worthy of emulation, and I wouldn't want to condemn such people to rule by the Reagans, Bushes, and Trumps of this world. The fact is that I consider conservative family values as desirable, both for individuals and for society. On the other hand, such family life isn't guaranteed to work out, nor is it all that common, and I've known lots of people who grew up just fine without a "strict father." But more importantly, the desired function of government isn't at all analogous to family. This distinction seems increasingly lost these days -- indeed, important concepts like public interest and countervailing power (indeed, checks and balances) have lost currency -- but that's in large part because the Democrats have followed the Republicans in becoming whores of K-Street.

Still, I find what Lakoff and, especially, Luntz do more than a little disturbing. They're saying that we can't understand a thing in its own terms, but instead will waver with the choice of wording. It's easy to understand the attraction of such clever sophistry for Republicans, because they often have good reason to cloak their schemes in misleading rhetoric. Any change they want to make is a "reform." More underhanded schemes get more camouflage -- the gold standard is still Bush's plan to expedite the clearcutting of forests on public lands, aka the "Healthy Forests Initiative." Similarly, efforts they dislike get labels like Entitlement Programs or Death Taxes or Obamacare. And so much the better when they get supposedly neutral or even opposition sources to adopt their terminology, but at the very least they make you work extra hard to reclaim the language.

Republicans need to do this because so much of their agenda is contrary to the interests of many or most people. But I doubt that the answer to this is to come up with your own peculiarly slanted vocabulary. Better, I think, to debunk when they're trying to con you, because they're always out to con you. Even the "strict father" model of hierarchy is a con, originating in the notion that the social order starts with the king on top, with its extension to the family just an afterthought. But they can't very well lead with the king, given that we fought a foundational war to free ourselves from such tyranny. Indeed, beyond the dubious case of "strict fathers" it's hard to find any broad acceptance of social hierarchy in America -- something Democrats should give some thought to.

On the other hand, Democratic (or liberal) euphemisms and slogans haven't fared all that well either, and to the extent they obfuscate or distort they undermine our claims to base our political discourse in the world of fact and logic. Aside from "pro-choice" I can't think of many examples. (In contrast to "right-to-life" it actually means something, but I believe that a more important point is that entering into an extended responsibility requires a conscious choice -- pregnancy doesn't, but the free option of an abortion makes parenthood a deliberate choice. But I also think that deciding to continue or abort a pregnancy is a personal matter, not something the state should involve itself in. So there are two reasons beyond the frivolous air of "choice.")

There is, by the way, a growing body of literature on the low regard reason is held in regarding political matters. One book I have on my shelf (but somehow haven't gotten to) is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012); another is Drew Westen's The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (2007). These books and similar research provide hints for politicians to try to scam the system. They also provide clues for honest citizens trying to foil them.

The big news story this week was Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. This has forced me to revisit two positions I have tended to hold in these pages. The first is that when people would warn of some likely coup, I always assumed they meant that some organization like the US military might step in to relieve Trump of his power. This, pretty clearly, was not going to happen: (1) the US military still has some scruples about things like this; and (2) Trump is giving them everything they want anyway, so what reason might they have to turn on him? Trump's firing of Comey isn't a coup, because Trump was already in power. It was a purge, and not his first one -- he fired all those US Attorneys, and several other people who dared to question him. But those were mostly regular political appointees, so to some extent they were expected. As I understand it, the FBI Director enjoys the job security of a ten-year term, so Trump broke some new ground in firing Comey. It seems clear now that Trump will continue to break new ground in purging the federal government of people he disagrees with -- to an extent which may not be illegal but is already beyond anything we have previously experienced.

Second, I tended to disagree with the many people who expected Trump not to survive his 4-year term. I would express this in odds, which were always somewhat a bit above zero. I still don't consider a premature termination of some sort to be likely, but the odds have jumped up significantly. I don't want to bother with plotting out various angles here. Just suffice it to say that he's become a much greater embarrassment in the past week. In particular, I don't see how he can escape an independent prosecutor at this point. Sure, he'll try to stall, like he has done with his tax returns, but I think the Russia investigation will be much harder to dodge. Also, I think he's dug a deeper hole for himself there. It seems most likely that Comey would have done to him what he did to Hillary Clinton: decide not to prosecute, but present a long list of embarrassments Democrats could turn into talking points (after all, he's a fair guy, and that would balance off his previous errors). Hard to say whether an independent prosecutor would do anything differently. Probably depends on whether he draws some partisan equivalent of Kenneth Starr.

Meanwhile, some links on the purge:

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, May 8, 2017

Weekend Roundup

I originally planned on writing a little introduction here, on how bummed I've become, partly because I'm taking the House passage of Zombie Trumpcare hard -- my wife likes to badmouth the ACA but it afforded me insurance for two years between when she retired and I became eligible for Medicare, and it's done good for millions of other people, reversing some horrible (but evidently now forgotten) trends -- and partly because the 100 days was just a dry run for still worse things to come. But I wound up writing some of what I wanted to say in the Savan comment below.

One thing that's striking about the Trumpcare reactions is how morally outraged the commentators are ("one of the cruelest things," "war on sick people," "moral depravity," "sociopathic," "hate poor and sick people," "homicidal healthcare bill"). If you want more details, follow the Yglesias links: he does a good job of explaining how the bill works. It's also noteworthy how hollow and facetious pretty much everything the bill's supporters say in defense of it is. I've offered a few examples, but could easily round up more. I've added a link on Democrats-still-against-single-player (a group which includes Nancy Pelosi and Jon Ossoff, names mentioned below). Let me try to be more succinct here: single-payer is the political position we want to stake out, because it's both fairly optimal and simple and intuitive. If you can't get that, fine, compromise with something like ACA plus a "public option" -- an honest public option will eventually wind up eating the private insurance companies and get you to single-payer. But you don't lead with a hack compromise that won't get you what you want or even work very well, because then you'll wind up compromising for something even worse. We should remember that Obama thought he had a slam dunk with ACA: he lined up all of the business groups behind his plan, and figured they'd bring the Republicans along because, you know, if Republicans are anything they're toadies for business interests. It didn't work because the only thing Republicans like more than money is power. (They're so into power they were willing to tank the economy for 4 or 8 years just to make Obama look bad. They're so into power they held ranks behind Trump even though most of the elites, at least, realized he was a hopeless buffoon.)

On the other hand, the shoe is clearly on the other foot now: it's the Republicans who are fucking with your health care, and they're doing things that will shrink insurance rolls by millions, that will raise prices and weaken coverage, that will promote fraud and leave ever more people bankrupt. Those are things that will get under the skin of voters, and Republicans have no answer, let alone story. The other big issue noted below is the environment. The EPA is moving fast and hard on policies that will severely hurt people and that will prove to be very unpopular -- maybe not overnight, but we'll start seeing big stories by the 2018 elections, even more by 2020, and air and water pollution is not something that only happens to "other people."

I didn't include anything on how these changes have already affected projections for 2018 elections, because at this point that would be sheer speculation. To my mind, the biggest uncertainty there isn't how much damage the Republicans will do (or how manifest it will be) but whether Democrats will develop into a coherent alternative. That's still up for grabs, but I'll see hope in anything that helps bury the generation of party leaders who were so complicit in the destruction of the middle class and in the advance of finance capital. To that end, Obama's $400,000 Wall Street speech clearly aligns him with the problems and not with the solutions.

[PS: This section on the French election was written on Saturday, before the results came in. With 98% reporting, Emmanuel Macron won, 65.8% to 34.2% for Marine Le Pen. TPM's post-election piece included a line about how the election "dashed [Le Pen's] hopes that the populist wave which swept Donald Trump into the White House would also carry her to France's presidential Elysee Palace." I don't see how anyone can describe Trump's election as a "populist wave" given that the candidate wasn't a populist in any sense of the word -- not that Le Pen is either. Both are simple right-wingers, who advance incoherent and mean-spirited programs by couching them in traditional bigotries. While it's probable that the center in France is well to the left of the center in the US, a more important difference is that Trump could build his candidacy on top of the still-respected (at least by the mainstream media) Republican Party whereas Le Pen's roots trace back to the still-discredited Vichy regime. But it also must have helped that Macron had no real history, especially compared to the familiar and widely-despised Hillary Clinton. (Just saw a tweet with a quote from Macron: "The election was rly not that hard I mean . . . how despised do you have to be to get beaten by a fascist am I right?" The tweet paired the quote with a picture of Hillary.)

[More reaction later, but for now I have to single out Anne Applebaum: Emmanuel Macron's extraordinary political achievement, especially for one line I'm glad I never considered writing: "Not since Napoleon has anybody leapt to the top of French public life with such speed." She goes on to explain: "Not since World War II has anybody won the French presidency without a political party and a parliamentary base. Aside from some belated endorsements, he had little real support from the French establishment, few of whose members rated the chances of a man from an unfashionable town when he launched his candidacy last year." She makes him sound like Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the president in the TV series Designated Survivor -- which despite much centrist corniness is a pleasing escape from our actual president.]

France goes to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president. The "outsider" centrist Emmanuel Macron is favored over neo-fascist Marine Le Pen -- the latter frequently described as "populist" in part because Macron, a banker and current finance minister, is as firmly lodged in France's elites as Michael Bloomberg is here. The polls favor Macron by a landslide, less due to the popularity of the status quo than to the odiousness of Le Pen. One interesting sidelight is how foreigners have weighed in on the election -- one wonders whether the French are as touchy as Americans about outside interference. For instance, Barack Obama endorsed Macron -- Yasmeen Serhan: Obama's Endorsement of Macron -- as did, perhaps more importantly, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis -- Daniel Marans: Top European Economist Makes the Left-Wing Case for Emmanuel Macron, or in Varoufakis' own words, The Left Must Vote for Macron. On the other hand, Le Pen's foreign supporters include Donald Trump -- Aidan Quigley: Trump expresses support for French candidate Le Pen -- and Vladimir Putin -- Anna Nemtsova/Christopher Dickey: Russia's Putin Picks Le Pen to Rule France. And while Putin tells Le Pen Russia has no plans to meddle in French election, on the eve of the election the Macron campaign was rocked by a hacked email scandal: see, James McAuley: France starts probing 'massive' hack of emails and documents reported by Macron campaign, and more pointedly, Mark Scott: US Far-Right Activists Promote Hacking Attack Against Macron. [PS: For a debunking of the "leaks," see Robert Mackey: There Are No "Macron Leaks" in France. Politically Motivated Hacking Is Not Whistleblowing. Evidently a good deal of this isn't even hacking -- just forgery meant to disinform.]

One likely reason for Putin to support Le Pen is the latter's promise to withdraw France from NATO. The interest of Trump and US far-right activists is harder to fathom -- after all, even fellow fascists have conflicting nationalist agendas, and nationalist bigots ultimately hate each other too much to develop any real solidarity, even where they share many prejudices. For instance, why should Trump applaud Brexit and further damage to European unity? Surely it can't be because he gives one whit about anyone in Europe.

John Nichols argues that Obama's endorsement of Macron Is an Effort to Stop the Spread of Trumpism, but while right-wing nationalist movements have been gaining ground around much of the world, it's hard to see anything coherent enough to be called Trumpism, much less a wave that has to be stopped anywhere but here. Obama may have good reasons for publicizing his endorsement, and may even have enough of a following in France to make his endorsement worth something, but given his recent buckraking it could just as well be meant to solidify his position among the Davos set. Besides, I haven't forgotten his proclamation that "Assad must go" -- his assumption of America's right to dictate the political choices of others, which had the effect of tying America's diplomatic hands and prolonging Syria's civil war. At this stage I'm not sure I even want to hear his position on any American political contest -- least of all one having to do with leadership of the major political party he and the Clintons ran into the ground.

Big news this week is that the Republicans passed their "health care reform" bill -- most recently dubbed "Zombie Trumpcare 3.0" -- in the House. They had failed a while back because they couldn't get enough votes from the so-called Freedom Caucus, but solved that problem by making the bill even worse than it was. Some links:

Some scattered links this week directly tied to Trump:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • David Atkins: The Argument Over Why Clinton Lost Is Over. Bernie Was Right. Now What?

    It has been a long, knock-down drag-out battle, but the ugly intramural conflict over why Clinton lost to Trump is finally over. New polls and focus groups conducted by Clinton's own SuperPAC Priorities USA shows that while racism and sexism had some effect, the main driver of Trump's victory was economic anxiety, after all. The data showed that voters who switched from Obama to Trump had seen their standards of living decline and felt that the Democratic Party had become the party of the wealthy and unconcerned about their plight. . . .

    fThose who try to win elections for a living also aren't looking forward to fighting the full power of the financial and pharmaceutical interests in addition to the regular armada of right-wing corporate groups. It would be much easier for electoral strategists if Democrats could unlock a majoritarian liberal bloc with a "rising tide lifts all boats" ideology that doesn't greatly inconvenience the urban donor class. Consultants aren't exactly looking forward to trying to win elections against interest groups angered by arguing for renegotiating NAFTA, punishing corporations for sending jobs overseas, raising the capital gains tax rate, and cutting health insurance companies out of the broad American marketplace. But that's exactly what they're going to have to do if want to win not only the presidency, but the congressional seats and legislatures dominated by increasingly angry suburban and rural voters. Not to mention angry young millennials of all identities who have essentially been locked out of the modern economy by low wages combined with outrageous cost of living, especially in the housing market that has uncoincidentally been such a major investment boon for their lucky parents, grandparents, and the financial industry.

  • Patrick Cockburn: Fall of Raqqa and Mosul Will Not Spell the End for Isis: One should recall, first of all, that Raqqa and Mosul weren't conquered by Isis so much as abandoned by hostile but ineffective central governments in Damascus and Baghdad. Before, pre-Isis was just another salafist guerrilla movement, as it will remain once its pretensions to statehood have been removed. And the Iraqi government is no more likely to be respected and effective in Mosul than it was before. (I have no idea about what happens to Raqqa if Isis falls there -- presumably not Assad, at least not right away.)

  • Richard Eskow: Who's Behind the Billionaire PAC Targeting Elizabeth Warren? Well, not just Warren. They're looking to muddy the waters for any Democratic candidate conceivable in 2020. The group is America Rising:

    America Rising was formed in 2013 by Matt Rhoades, the director of Mitt Romney's failed 2012 presidential campaign, and it represents the worst of what our current political system offers. Its goal is not to debate the issues or offer solutions to the nation's problems. Instead, the PAC gets cash from big-money donors and spends it trying to tear down its political opponents.

    The Republican National Committee's "autopsy" of its 2012 presidential loss reportedly concluded that the party needed an organization that would "do nothing but post inappropriate Democratic utterances and act as a clearinghouse for information on Democrats."

  • Mehdi Hasan: Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason -- They Remember the Korean War. Bigger problem: they don't remember it ending, because for them it never really did: they're still stuck with the sanctions, the isolation, the mobilization and felt need for constant vigilance. One might argue that the regime has used these strictures to solidify its own rule -- that in some sense they're more satisfied with a continuing state of crisis than anything we'd consider normalcy, but we've never really given them that option. America's failure to win the Korean War was an embarrassment, and no one since then has had the political courage to admit failure and move on. Hence, we're stuck in this cycle of periodic crises.

    In Terror Is in the Eye of the Beholder, John Dower wrote a bit about Korea, after noting how the US dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs in Europe and 656,400 tons in the Pacific:

    The official history of the air war in Korea (The United States Air Force in Korea 1950-1953) records that U.S.-led United Nations air forces flew more than one million sorties and, all told, delivered a total of 698,000 tons of ordnance against the enemy. In his 1965 memoir Mission with LeMay, General Curtis LeMay, who directed the strategic bombing of both Japan and Korea, offered this observation: "We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both . . . We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue."

    Other sources place the estimated number of civilian Korean War dead as high as three million, or possibly even more. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war who later served as secretary of state, recalled that the United States bombed "everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another."

    Americans killed in the Korean War totaled 33,739, a little more than 1% of the number of Koreans killed, so sure, we remember the war a bit less ominously. Dower's new book is The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two.

  • Michael Howard: Let's Call Western Media Coverage of Syria by its Real Name: Propaganda: Starts off with two paragraphs on Ukraine -- same story. The bottom line is that all parties work hard to control how news is reported, and the country is too dangerous for journalists not aligned with some special interest to search out or verify stories. Howard also cites Stephen Kinzer: The media are misleading the public on Syria, who explains:

    Reporting from the ground is often overwhelmed by the Washington consensus. Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra, is made up of "rebels" or "moderates," not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise. Saudi Arabia is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS. Turkey has for years been running a "rat line" for foreign fighters wanting to join terror groups in Syria, but because the United States wants to stay on Turkey's good side, we hear little about it. Nor are we often reminded that although we want to support the secular and battle-hardened Kurds, Turkey wants to kill them. Everything Russia and Iran do in Syria is described as negative and destabilizing, simply because it is they who are doing it -- and because that is the official line in Washington.

  • Mark Karlin: Government Has Allowed Corporations to Be More Powerful Than the State: An interview with Antony Loewenstein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, so it focuses on corporations profiting from disasters around the world. That's interesting and revealing, but I would have taken the title in a different direction. What I've found is that we've allowed corporations so much control over their workers that a great many people are effectively living under totalitarian rule, at least until they quit their jobs (and in some cases beyond -- I, for instance, was forced to sign a no-compete agreement that extended for years beyond my employment). And that sort of thing has only gotten worse since I retired.

  • Jonathan Ohr: 100 senators throw their bodies down to end UN 'bias' against Israel: including Bernie Sanders, although his line about not writing the letter (just signing on) was kind of funny.

  • Nate Silver: The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton the Election: FBI czar James Comey spent a couple days last week testifying before Congress on his strategic decision to announce, on October 28 before the November 8 election, that the FBI was investigating a fresh batch of Hillary Clinton's emails, reopening a case that had been closed several months before. As Silver notes, "the Comey letter almost immediately sank Clinton's polls," starting a spiral that cost her a polling lead she had held all year long. There are, of course, lots of factors which contributed to her loss, but this is one of the few that can be singled out, precisely because the "what if" alternative was itself so clear cut -- Comey could simply have held back (which would have been standard FBI policy) and nothing would have happened. Many people have made this same point, not least the candidate herself, but Silver backs it up with impressive data and reasoning. He recognizes that the swing was small, and shows how even a small swing would have tilted the election. He also makes a case that somewhat larger swing (what he calls "Big Comey") was likely. The way I would put this is: Clinton has been dogged by scandals constantly since her husband became president in 1993 -- the first big one was "Whitewater" and there had been a steady drumbeat of them all the way through Benghazi! and the emails and speaking fees and Clinton Foundation. Clinton had somehow managed to put those behind her by the Democratic Convention, when she opened up her largest polling lead ever (although, something I found troubling at the time, she never seemed able to crack 50% -- her 10-12% leads were more often the result of Trump cratering). What the Comey letter did was to bring all the fury and annoyance of her past scandals back into the present. Trump's final ad hit that very point: maybe we have lots of difficult problems, but voters had one clear option, which was to get rid of Clinton and all the scandals, both past and future. And that was the emotional gut reaction that swung the election -- even though a moment's sober reflection would have realized that Trump is far worse in every negative respect than Clinton.

    Silver points his piece toward a critique of the media, which consistently played up Clinton scandals while laughing off Trump's, and I think more importantly made no effort to critique let alone to delegitimize the right-wing propaganda machine. Still, he doesn't really get there. For more on this, see: Richard Wolfe: James Comey feels nauseous about the Clinton emails? That's not enough

  • John Stoehr: Nancy Pelosi Is the Most Effective Member of the Resistance: News to me. One thing I do know is that Republicans still get a lot of mileage out of slamming Pelosi and smearing anyone remotely connected to her. I can see where that's unfair and even horrifying, but writing a puff piece about her doesn't help. Moreover, it's not as if she's all that dependable. When Trump launched all those cruise missiles at a Syrian base, she jumped up and applauded. And she's as blind a devotee of Israel as anyone in Congress. Maybe she does have a keen sensitivity to injustice, but it's never interfered with her realpolitik. Less impressed with Pelosi is Klaus Marre: Dems Have Difficult Time Capitalizing on Trump Presidency of Blunders; also: Sam Knight: Pelosi Refuses to Back Single Payer, Despite GOP Deathmongering Suddenly Taking Center Stage.

  • Steve W Thrasher: Barack Obama's $400,000 speaking fees reveal what few want to admit: "His mission was never racial or economic justice. It's time we stop pretending it was." It does, however, suggest that his real mission -- what many people take to be the real meaning of the phrase "American dream" -- is not just to be accepted and respected by the very rich, but to join them. As the Clintons have shown, one way to become rich in America is to get yourself elected president. And as has been pretty convincingly demonstrated, anything the Clintons can do, Obama can do much better.

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Sunday, April 30, 2017

Weekend Roundup

One-hundred days after Trump became President of the United States, about the best you can say is that he could have done even worse than he did. People make fun of him for only appointing a few dozen of the thousand-plus presidential appointees, but he's hit most of the top positions, including one Supreme Court justice, and he's picked some of the worst nominees imaginable -- in fact, a few way beyond anything rational fears imagined. But one of his worst picks, former General Michael Flynn as National Security Director, has already imploded, and another notorious one, Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, looks like he's been consigned to the dog house.

Despite having Republican congressional majorities, Trump has yet to pass any major legislation -- although he's proposed some, and/or bought into Paul Ryan's even more demented schemes. So thus far the main thing Trump has done has been to sign executive orders -- dozens of the things, nearly all aimed at undoing executive orders Obama had started signing once he realized he wasn't going to get any help from the Republican-controlled Congress. While Trump's orders are truly disturbing, that's not so much what they do -- even the ones that aren't promptly blocked by the courts -- as what they reveal about the administration's mentality (or lack thereof).

Trump has also had a relatively free hand when it comes to foreign policy -- especially the prerogatives that Congress has granted the president to bomb other countries. His first acts were to escalate American involvement in Yemen, although he's followed that up with attacks against America's usual targets in the Middle East: Syria, Iraq, and Libya. But while nothing good ever comes from America flexing its military muscles in the Middle East, a more dangerous scenario is unfolding with North Korea, with both sides threatening pre-emptive attacks in response to the other's alleged provocations. By insisting on an ever-more-constricting regime of sanctions, the US has cornered and wounded North Korea, while North Korea has developed both offensive and defensive weapons to such a point that an American attack would be very costly (especially for our ostensible allies in South Korea).

There are many reasons to worry about Trump's ability to handle this crisis. There's little evidence that he understands the risks, or even the history. On the other hand, he's spent eight years lambasting Obama for being indecisive and weak, so he's come into office wanting to look decisive and strong. Moreover, when he ordered an ineffective cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base he was broadly applauded -- a dangerous precedent for someone so fickle. Maybe he has people who will restrain him from ordering a similar attack on Korea, but he often resembles the "mad man" Nixon only feigned at. Nor does Kim Jong Un inspire much confidence as a well-grounded, rational leader (although see Andrei Lankov: Kim Jong Un Is a Survivor, Not a Madman).

First, some 100-day reviews:

Some more scattered links this week in Trump world:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Amanda Erickson: Turkey just banned Wikipedia, labeling it a 'national security threat'

  • Thomas Frank: The Democrats' Davos ideology won't win back the midwest: Like Frank, I have a soft spot for the midwest -- its farms still productive even as the small towns and factories have decayed and been depopulated. Still, the Democrats' problem isn't regional. It's about class, something the Democrats regard as taboo. Nore are they attracted to "Davos ideology" -- just Davos money, or any money flexible enough to support a party which seeks to be all things to all people while never really satisfying anyone. If they ever want to come back, they have to settle on some vision they can campaign on and deliver -- something that, if not revolution a la Bernie, at least makes spreads the wealth Davos promises much more broadly and equitably. Meanwhile, they're vulnerable to critiques like this one: Cornel West: The Democrats delivered one thing in the past 100 days: disappointment; and Trevor Timm: Everyone loves Bernie Sanders. Except, it seems, the Democratic party.

  • Edward Helmore: Whole Foods Is Tanking -- High-Priced Luxury Foods Don't Jibe With Our Times: I don't see much evidence that the analysis is valid. In times of increasing inequality, there's certainly a niche market selling high-priced food to the wealthy, and there's plenty of evidence of that. Last couple times I was in New York I saw relatively new high-end food stores everywhere. And we've had several, including a Whole Foods, open here in the last couple years. Fresh Market closed, but less for lack of customers than some corporate decision to reduce their distribution area. Whole Foods hangs on -- my impression is with fewer customers, but having gone there several times and walked out empty-handed I rarely bother. Sure, their prices are a big part of the problem, but I hardly ever find anything there I want, much less that I can't find cheaper elsewhere. I really lamented the loss of Fresh Market, but I could care less if these guys go under.

  • Amy Renee Leiker: More than 400 guns stolen from autos in Wichita since 2015: A rather shocking number, I thought, when I read this in our local paper -- especially given how cheap and easy it is to legally buy a gun in this town. Seems to be a nationwide trend: Brian Freskos: Guns Are Stolen in America Up to Once Every Minute. Owners Who Leave Their Weapons in Cars Make It Easy for Thieves.

  • Conor Lynch: Obama's whopping Wall Street payday: Not a freat look for the Democratic Party brand: After raising $60 million in book advances, Obama "agreed to give a speech in September for the Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald. His fee will be $400,000." Stephen Colbert's comment: "Hillary wasn't able to continue Obama's legacy -- but at least Obama was able to continue hers." Their interchangeability may have once seemed like a political plus but is starting to look like a curse. The more buckraking Obama does, the more tarnished he will look to those of us who can't fathom their rarefied world, and the easier it will be for Republicans to tar them. As Lynch writes:

    As the Trump administration's recently unveiled tax plan reminds us, the Republican Party is and always will be committed to serving corporations and the billionaire class. Yet this hasn't stopped Republicans from effectively portraying their Democratic opponents as a bunch of snobby, out-of-touch elites over the past 30 years or so. According to a recent Washington Post survey, this rhetoric has paid off: Only 28 percent of respondents believed that the Democratic Party is "in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States."

  • David Marcus: Marxism With Soul: Review of a new collection of essays (Modernism in the Street: A Life and Times in Essays) by the late Marshall Berman.

  • Jonathan Martin: At a 'Unity' Stop in Nebraska, Democrats Find Anything But: An old friend of mine linked to this and tweeted: "Anyone surprised that Bernie-O don't care about a woman's right to choose, when it comes right down to it? Not me!" I'd be surprised if there was any basis for this charge, but that would require several leaps of imagination beyond even what the article claims. The back story is that Sanders and Keith Ellison campaigned for Democrat Heath Mello running for mayor of Omaha, and were attacked by the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America because in Nebraska's state legislature some years ago Mello had voted for several anti-abortion bills. For more background on Mello, see DD Guttenplan: Why Was Heath Mello Thrown Under the Bus? The upshot is that Mello had moved away from his early anti-abortion stance, much like Hillary Clinton's VP pick, Tim Kaine, had done. Even if he hadn't, it's not like I've never supported a Democrat I didn't see eye-to-eye with. It wouldn't bother me if NARAL, as a single-issue lobby, endorsed a Republican candidate with a much better track record on abortion, but those are few and far between out here, and as I understand it local pro-choice people are fine with Mello -- so who's NARAL trying to impress? I suspect that's the anti-populist faction of the national party, which could hardly care less about losing in Nebraska but regards Sanders as a threat. (Remember that the DCCC didn't lift a finger to help a pro-Sanders Democrat run for Congress here in Kansas, even though he had an impeccable pro-choice record which featured heavily in Republican hate ads.) And it's yet another leap of imagination to imply that the reason Sanders supports Mello has anything to do with his lack of interest in abortion rights.

  • DD Guttenplan: Why Was Heath Mello Thrown Under the Bus?: I've seen several complaints from Hillary Democrats about Bernie Sanders supporting Heath Mello's campaign for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. The charge is that Mello is anti-choice

  • Steve Phillips: Democrats Can Retake the House in 2018 Without Converting a Single Trump Voter: The trick is mobilizing their base, while Trump voters get bored or lazy or disenchanted: "there are 23 Republican incumbents in congressional districts that were won by Hillary Clinton in November. There are another five seats where Clinton came within 2 percent of winning." Phillips is author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority, so one of those guys who thinks Democrats can ride a demographic backlash against Republican racism without actually having to come up with populist positions. That strikes me as unlikely until they establish some credibility, which was something the Clinton-Kaine ticket had little of in 2016. Along these lines, see the John Judis interview with Ruy Teixeira, an early proponent of The Emerging Democratic Majority, Why the Left Will (Eventually) Triumph. He attributes Trump's win to "the declining group, the white non-college voters," who suddenly lunged away from the Democrats in 2016. Asked why:

    They do not have any faith that the Democrats share their values and are going to deliver a better life for them and their kids, and I think Hillary Clinton was a very efficient bearer of that meme. Whether she wanted to or not, the message she sent to these voters is that you are really not that important and I don't take your problems seriously, and frankly I don't have much to offer you. And that's despite the fact that her economic program and policies would have actually been very good for these people. There was a study of campaign advertising in 2016 that showed Hillary outspent Trump significantly and that almost none of her advertising was about what she would actually do. Almost all of it was about how he was a bad dude.

    Voters were fed up with stagnation and with the Democrats and they turned to someone who thought could blow up the system. The way the Democrats and the left could mitigate that problem is to show these voters that they take their problems seriously and have their interests in mind, and could improve their lives.

  • Matthew Rosza: Sam Brownback pushed for concealed carry in Kansas -- now the governor wants to spend $24 million to ban concealed weapons from hospitals: The 2013 law was written to make it prohibitively expensive for any institution to exclude guns from its premises. Turns out that includes psychiatric hospitals, and turns out Brownback finally decided that wasn't such a great idea. Of course, it doesn't help that Brownback's Laffer-inspired tax scheme has forced across-the-board spending cuts while leaving Kansas in a huge fiscal hole.

  • Joe Sexton/Rachel Glickhouse: We're Investigating Hate Across the US. There's No Shortage of Work. Also: Ryan Katz: Hate Crime Law Results in Few Convictions and Lots of Disappointment.

  • Clive Thompson: Gerrymandering Has a Solution After All. It's Called Math

Started this Saturday afternoon (the intro), and the hits just kept on coming.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Weekend Roundup

We're approximately 100 days into the Trump administration, which only leaves 1360 more days to go until he's gone -- assuming American voters don't get even stupider along the way. If you've been hiding in a cave somewhere, you might check out David Remnick: A Hundred Days of Trump as a quick way of getting up to speed, although Remnick's piece is long on style and short on substance. If you're really masochistic you can dig up my Weekend Roundups (and occasional Midweek Roundups) since January. Indeed, one could write a whole book on Trump's first 100 days -- probably for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt made that timespan historic (see Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America), although in this case the "accomplishments" are all negative, and the real damage Trump has sown in this fertile period has (mostly) yet to play itself out. As Bill McKibben notes, below, things that we do to the environment now will continue to drive changes well into the future. That's also true for society, culture, politics, and the economy.

How much damage Trump ultimately does will depend on how effectively the resistance (not just the Democrats, although they have much to prove here) organizes and how coherently we can explain and make people aware of what's so wrong with the Republican agenda. One thing that has probably helped in this regard is that the false dichotomy between "populist" Trump and "conservative" Republicans has faded away -- Trump is still harshly anti-immigrant in all forms (not just "illegals" but he's also turned against perfectly legal H-1B visa holders), but everywhere else he's fallen into line with orthodox (and often extremist) conservatives. This not only means that Trump and the rest of the Republicans will share blame for everything that breaks bad on their watch, it will force Democrats to refashion their platform into one that counters those disasters. We no longer have to argue what bad things might happen if hawks run wild, if corporate moguls are freed of regulation, if the courts are packed with right-wing ideologues, if any number of previous hypotheticals happen, because we're going to see exactly what happens. In fact, we're seeing it, faster than most of us can really process it.

Some scattered links this week in the Trump World:

  • Robert L Borosage: The Stunning Disappearance of Candidate Trump: It's arguable whether Trump's "economic populism" ever amounted to anything that might actually help his white working class fans, but he's so completely abandoned that part of his platform that we'll never know. He's setting records for how quickly and how completely he's breaking campaign promises. Wonder whether the Democrats will call him on it?

  • Christina Cautenucci: What It Takes: "O'Reilly, Ailes, Cosby, Trump: Three alleged sexual preditors found disgrace. A fourth became president. What made the difference?"

  • David S Cohen: How Neil Gorsuch Will Make His Mark This Supreme Court Term: Also, for instance, Sophia Tesfaye: Neil Gorsuch's first Supreme Court vote clears the way for Arkansas to begin its lethal injection spree.

  • Justin Elliott: Trump Is Hiring Lobbyists and Top Ethics Official Says 'There's No Transparency'

  • Tom Engelhardt: The Chameleon Presidency: Quotes Trump: "If you look at what's happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what's happened over the past eight years, you'll see there's a tremendous difference, tremendous difference." Actually, Trump doesn't seem to be capable of actually seeing either recent history or today's news. His bombing missions in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia don't even hint at a break with Obama -- they were all in the Pentagon playbook he inherited. Of course, if he starts a nuclear conflagration in Korea, that would be his own peculiar mark on history. But thus far his shift from Obama in foreign policy (aka warmaking) is little different than the shift from Kennedy to Johnson: as McGeorge Bundy put it, whereas Kennedy wanted to be seen as making smart moves, Johnson preferred to be seen as tough. Still, neither were as explicit or dramatic about their needs as Obama ("don't do stupid shit") and Trump, who seems eager to green light anything the Pentagon brass offers. And Trump is so forthright about this it's almost as if he's hard at work on his Nuremberg defense:

    Above all, President Trump did one thing decisively. He empowered a set of generals or retired generals -- James "Mad Dog" Mattis as secretary of defense, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security -- men already deeply implicated in America's failing wars across the Greater Middle East. Not being a details guy himself, he's then left them to do their damnedest. "What I do is I authorize my military," he told reporters recently. "We have given them total authorization and that's what they're doing and, frankly, that's why they've been so successful lately."

    Successful? The explosions are bigger and the casualty reports are up, but I haven't seen anything that suggests that he's moved any of his wars one iota. Granted, his recklessness has gotten the neocons to turn around and start singing his praises -- they had been worried that he might actually have meant some of the things he said on the campaign trail, like regrets over Bush's Iraq War or his reluctance to get involved in Syria. Still, neither the generals nor the neocons have a clue how to extricate themselves from the wars they wade ever deeper into. Engelhardt speculates:

    Here's the problem, though: there's a predictable element to all of this and it doesn't work in Donald Trump's favor. America's forever wars have now been pursued by these generals and others like them for more than 15 years across a vast swath of the planet -- from Pakistan to Libya (and ever deeper into Africa) -- and the chaos of failing states, growing conflicts, and spreading terror movements has been the result. There's no reason to believe that further military action will, a decade and a half later, produce more positive results.

    Engelhardt seems to think Trump will eventually turn on his generals. I think it's more likely that, like Johnson (or for that matter Truman), he will find himself stuck, buried under his own hubris, unable to back out or find any other solution.

  • Maggie Haberman/Glenn Thrush: Trump Reaches Beyond West Wing for Counsel: His rogues gallery.

  • Dahlia Lithwick: Jeff Sessions Thinks Hawaii's Not a Real State. We Shouldn't Be Surprised. Reminds me that the reason Hawaii became the 50th state, waiting well past Alaska, was that southern Senators filibustered to delay the likelihood of a non-white joining them in the US Senate. Sessions is evidently still of that mindset.

  • Jonathan Marshall: Neocons Point Housebroken Trump at Iran: Trump's latest bombing exploits in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have only served to gin up the "real men go to Tehran" brigade. Also: William Rivers Pitt: The Looming Neocon Invasion of Trumpland.

  • Josh Marshall: To Scare Dems, Trump Threatens to Light Himself on Fire: Looks like we're in the midst of another round of government shutdown extortion, where Republicans are holding Obamacare subsidies hostage, hoping to trade them for Democratic support on funding the "big, beautiful wall" that Trump originally expected Mexico to pay for. Evidently the catch is that even though the Republicans control Congress funding for the wall would have to break a Democratic filibuster (so 60 votes in the Senate). This all seems pretty stupid: Obamacare is suddenly pretty popular, polling on building that wall is currently 58-28% against, and the most immediate effect of shutting down the government will be to hold up Social Security checks.

  • Bill McKibben: The Planet Can't Stand This Presidency:

    What Mr. Trump is trying to do to the planet's climate will play out over geologic time as well. In fact, it's time itself that he's stealing from us.

    What I mean is, we have only a short window to deal with the climate crisis or else we forever lose the chance to thwart truly catastrophic heating. . . .

    The effects will be felt not immediately but over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet's reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won't mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won't sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink. No president will be able to claw back this time -- crucial time, since we're right now breaking the back of the climate system.

    We can hope other world leaders will pick up some of the slack. And we can protest. But even when we vote him out of office, Trumpism will persist, a dark stratum in the planet's geological history. In some awful sense, his term could last forever.

    This link picks up a number of other interesting pieces on the environment.

    Related: Dave Levitan: The March for Science has a humble aim: restoring sanity; David Suzuki: Rivers vanishing into thin air: this is what the climate crisis looks like; Michael T Klare: Climate change as genocide.

  • Leon Neyfakh: How Trump Will Dismantle Civil Rights Protections in America: "The same way Bush did: by politicizing the DOJ."

  • Heather Digby Parton: Trump's First 100 Days: More Frightening, or More Pathetic? Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days were the benchmark, but he came into office with a huge margin of support in Congress, and a shocked and battered population that was willing to try anything. Plus his bank holiday/fireside chat was probably the most brilliantly executed act of any president ever. Trump had none of that going his way. In fact, about all he actually did was to make some spectacularly bad appointments, sign a bunch of executive orders (mostly countering Obama's executive orders), meet with a few foreign leaders (often to embarrassing effect), and blow up shit. So, yeah, both pathetic and terrifying.

  • Sarah Rawlins: Costs and Benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments: Could use some more political context, but clearly the positive payback for the relatively small costs imposed by these regulations has been huge -- they estimate $30.77 for every dollar spent. Of course, you don't need that sort of ROI to justify doing something right, but this is a pretty resounding answer for flacks who tell you we can't afford to have cleaner air or water.

  • Nelson D Schwartz: Trump Saved Carrier Jobs. These Workers Weren't as Lucky

  • Matthew Yglesias: Today's executive orders are the nail in the coffin of Trump's economic populism: Well, it was starting to stink anyway. For more (especially on "shadow banking"), see Mike Konczal: Now Republicans want to undo the regulations that helped consumers and stabilized banking.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Matt Apuzzo et al.: Comey Tried to Shield the FBI From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election: Fairly in-depth reporting on Comey's political ploy which did much to throw the election to Donald Trump.

    But with polls showing Mrs. Clinton holding a comfortable lead, Mr. Comey ended up plunging the F.B.I. into the molten center of a bitter election. Fearing the backlash that would come if it were revealed after the election that the F.B.I. had been investigating the next president and had kept it a secret, Mr. Comey sent a letter informing Congress that the case was reopened.

    What he did not say was that the F.B.I. was also investigating the campaign of Donald J. Trump. Just weeks before, Mr. Comey had declined to answer a question from Congress about whether there was such an investigation. Only in March, long after the election, did Mr. Comey confirm that there was one.

  • John Cassidy: The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business

  • Ira Chernus: It's Time to Resurrect the Counterculture Movement: "The largest mobilization for progressive politics since the Vietnam era offers a unique opportunity to go beyond simply treating symptoms to start offering cures for the underlying illness." I'm not sure I'd call that "counterculture" -- what I think of by that term has perhaps been the deepest, broadest, and most persistent outgrowth from the political and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s. Rather, what we need to bring back is the New Left -- the political critique of war, empire, the security state, sexism, racism, consumption, the despoilment of the environment, and various related cultural mores -- only we need to bring back the Old Left focus on inequality and we need to come up with a better solution for securing political gains. I've long felt that the New Left was a huge success in changing minds, but the intrinsic distrust of political organizations has left those gains vulnerable to a right-wing counterattack focused on securing narrow political power. The latter has in fact become so pervasive we need a refresher course in basic principles, which is I think where Chernus is heading.

  • Patrick Cockburn: America Should Start Exploring How to End All the Wars It's Started

  • Paul Cohen: Could Leftist-Jean-Luc Mélenchon Win the French Presidency? First round of France's presidential election is Tuesday, with centrist Emmanuel Macron and "Thatcherite" François Fillon the fading establishment candidates, Marine Le Pen on the far right, and Mélenchon "surging" from the left. This gives you some background on the latter. As for the horse race, see Harry Enten: The French Election Is Way Too Close to Call: the chart there shows Macron barely ahead of Le Pen, a couple points ahead of Fillon, in turn barely ahead of Mélenchon -- who has the sole upward trajectory, but it's mostly been at the expense of Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon. Meanwhile, Robert Mackey: Trump Hopes Paris Attack Boosts Le Pen, One Day After Obama Calls Macron. Clearly, Americans have few if any qualms about interfering in someone else's election. (As for Russian interests, well, Le Pen-Putin friendship goes back a long way.)

    [PS: Projected votes as of 4:13PM CDT: Macron 23.8%, Le Pen 21.7%, Fillon 19.8%, Mélanchon 19.2%, Hamon 6.5%. So there will be a runoff between Macron and Le Pen, with Macron heavily favored.]

  • Michael Hudson: Running Government Like a Business Is Bad for Citizens: The latest idiot to express the cliché is Jared Kushner, although the Trump administration is so weighted toward business résumés that it was pretty much in the air (or should I say Kool Aid?). The idea is, of course, ridiculous, even before we signed off on the notion that the only reason behind business is to extract and return profits to investors (something less obvious back in the days when companies could afford loftier goals, like offering useful goods/services), and before we forgot the idea of there being a public interest, which includes providing services to people who have difficulty getting by on their own. When asked for historical examples of governments run like businesses, Hudson mentioned Russia under Boris Yeltsin -- a kleptocracy run through the Kremlin. If Trump admires Putin, that's probably why.

  • Mark Karlin: Israeli Government Is Petrified of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement: Interview with Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace and editor of On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice. I spent a couple days last week with Palestinian civil rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab: he gave several presentations here in Kansas in Mennonite churches in support of a BDS resolution they will be voting on later this year, which is itself an indication of how much progress BDS is making. (Another indication is that the Kansas legislature is likely to pass a law prohibiting the state from contracting with any companies which support BDS.) Last year's resolution was tabled for fear it might seem anti-semitic, so Kuttab reached out to JVP for support on that count, and they arranged for Laura Tillem to join Kuttab (she started by reading her poem).

    Meanwhile, you might note Richard Silverstein's recent posts: Former Israeli Defense Minister Confirms Israeli Collaboration with ISIS in Syria; Israel Criminalizes Palestinian Muslim Activism; and Justice Department to Prosecute Israeli-American Teen Who Masterminded Wave of Threats Against Jewish Institutions. The latter may have been a prank, but it reminded me of the Lavon Affair (the most notorious of Israeli "false flag" operations). With the alt-right providing cover, Michael Kaydar's phone threats helped raise the profile of anti-semitism in America, which played into the hands of anti-BDS hysterics. For a reminder of what's actually happening in Israel/Palestine, it's worth your while to check up every now and then on Kate's regular compendiums of news reports. The latest is called Settlers from Kushner family-funded community attack 3 Israeli grandmothers, but that's only the lead story, with much more outrage following.

  • Paul Krugman: Why Don't All Jobs Matter? He asks the question, why only focus on lost mining and manufacturing jobs (so dear to Trump voters, if not necessarily to the boss-man himself), when we're also seeing major job losses in sectors like department stores:

    Over the weekend The Times Magazine published a photographic essay on the decline of traditional retailers in the face of internet competition. The pictures, contrasting "zombie malls" largely emptied of tenants with giant warehouses holding inventory for online sellers, were striking. The economic reality is pretty striking too.

    Consider what has happened to department stores. Even as Mr. Trump was boasting about saving a few hundred jobs in manufacturing here and there, Macy's announced plans to close 68 stores and lay off 10,000 workers. Sears, another iconic institution, has expressed "substantial doubt" about its ability to stay in business.

    Overall, department stores employ a third fewer people now than they did in 2001. That's half a million traditional jobs gone -- about eighteen times as many jobs as were lost in coal mining over the same period.

    Dean Baker's response: Paul Krugman Gets Retail Wrong: They Are Not Very Good Jobs. Still, Krugman's end-point is right on:

    While we can't stop job losses from happening, we can limit the human damage when they do happen. We can guarantee health care and adequate retirement income for all. We can provide aid to the newly unemployed. And we can act to keep the overall economy strong -- which means doing things like investing in infrastructure and education, not cutting taxes on rich people and hoping the benefits trickle down.

    I recall Dani Rodrik, I think, arguing that the problem with free trade wasn't trade -- it was the failure of some countries (e.g., the United States) to recognize that trade deals inevitably have losers as well as winners, and to help minimize the hurt imposed those who lose out. Another bigger picture point is that these losses of retail jobs aren't caused by lower demand; they're being driven by the more efficient service that online retailers offer. As a society we could just as well convert those efficiencies into fewer work hours, and all be better off for that. But we don't, largely because politically we insist that even the least productive workers toil at minimum wage jobs while allowing companies to extract ever more hours from their more productive employees.

  • Eric Margolis: What Would Korean War II Look Like? The illustration is a nuclear mushroom cloud, and that's certainly within the realm of possibility -- both sides possessing such weapons. The US, of course, fears that North Korea might some day use their growing stock of atomic warheads and long-range missiles, but the immediate danger is that the US will precipitate such at attack with some arrogant ultimatum or more overt act. The result would be awful messy: beyond the kill zone any nuclear exchange would "cause clouds of lethal radiation and radioactive dust to blanket Japan, South Korea and heavily industrialized northeast China, including the capital, Beijing." (Actually, given that prevailing winds blow east, the radioactive cloud wouldn't take long to blow over America.) Even if both sides restrain themselves, North Korean artillery aimed at Seoul threaten to turn the city (pop. 10 million) "into a sea of fire." Presumably the US military could invade and conquer North Korea, but the latter has a large conventional army and has long been obsessed with preparing to repel an invasion. No one thinks it would be easy, or painless. Margolis counters that "All this craziness would be ended if the US signed a peace treat with North Korea ending the first Korean War and opened up diplomatic and commercial relations." That hasn't happened because Americans are petty and vindictive, still harboring a grudge over their inability to rid Korea of Communism in the extraordinarily brutal 1950-53 war. And because neocons are so wrapped up in their own sense of omnipotence they refuse to acknowledge that any other country might be able to present a credible deterrence against American aggression. The fact is that North Korea, like China and Russia (and probably Iran, even without nukes) has one, and the only way to counter that is to decide that the old war is over and that we're never going to restart it. You don't have to like Kim Jong Un or his very strange, isolated and paranoid country, to decide to stop hurting yourself and endangering the world -- which is really all Trump's Korea policy amounts to. You might even find they become a bit more tolerable once you stop giving them so much reason to be terrified.

    Alao see: Robert Dreyfuss: Trump's Terrifying North Korea Standoff; Mike Whitney: The US Pushed North Korea to Build Nukes: Yes or No?; Richard Wolffe: Donald Trump's 'armada' gaffe was dangerous buffoonery.

  • Sophia A McClennan: Bill O'Reilly Ruined the News: 10 Ways He and Fox News Harassed Us All; also Justin Peters: The All-Spin Zone.

  • Robert Parry: Why Not a Probe of 'Israel-gate'? After all, far more than Russia, no other nation has so often or so profoundly tried to influence American elections and political processes for its own interests. This piece reviews a fair selection of the history, not least Israel's 1980 efforts to defeat Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Israel's influence has become so exalted that both Trump and Clinton prostrated themselves publicly before AIPAC -- and who knows what they did behind the closed doors of Israel-focused donors like Abelson and Sabin.

  • Margot Sanger-Katz: Bare Market: What Happens if Places Have No Obamacare Insurers? Even though the ACA is basically a "safety net" for insurance industry profits, the marketplace is failing -- mostly, I think, due to concentration in the industry, but also because the ACA not only subsidizes profits, it limits them. In Kansas, when I applied for Obamacare when it opened for business, there were many plans, but only two providers, and one of them was, frankly, worthless, so the much vaunted "choice" devolved to a maze of deductible variations -- as usual, insurance company profits depended mostly on their ability to dodge paying for anything. Now we're finding some states (or counties within states) with even fewer choices -- potentially none. One way to fix this would be to throw even more money at the insurance companies. Another would be to provide a "public option" -- a government guarantee which could compete with private plans. Or we could bow to the inevitable and extend medicare and/or medicaid to undercut the private insurance industry altogether. The problem is, any such solution depends on a political will that Trump and the Republicans don't have and can't muster, so the failure of Obamacare they've been predicting will most likely be hastened by their own hands. Also by the author: No, Obamacare Isn't in a 'Death Spiral', and Trump's Choice on Obamacare: Sabotage or Co-opt? And from Charles Pierce: House Republicans Have a New Plan to Make Your Healthcare Worse.

  • Matt Taibbi: Yikes! New Behind-the-Scenes Book Brutalizes the Clinton Campaign: Review of Jonathan Allen/Arnie Parnes: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign (Crown), a first draft on what's already turned out to be a fateful slice of history. The insider dirt ("sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign") focuses on the mechanics of running the campaign, with Taibbi singling out the vexing question of why she was running in the first place:

    The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.

    In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters' need to understand why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as little more than an annoying problem.

    In the Clinton run, that problem became such a millstone around the neck of the campaign that staffers began to flirt with the idea of sharing the uninspiring truth with voters. Stumped for months by how to explain why their candidate wanted to be president, Clinton staffers began toying with the idea of seeing how "Because it's her turn" might fly as a public rallying cry.

    The authors quote a campaign staffer explaining, "We were talking to Democrats, who largely didn't think she was evil." But the number of people who did think she was evil mushroomed beyond the cloistered party ranks, and her campaign to continue a status quo that seemed to work only for the donors she preferred to spend time with (especially when wrapped up in vacuous clichés like "America's always been great") offered nothing but negatives even to voters who Republicans would only prey on. As I recall, back in 1992 when Bill Clinton first ran, he made all sorts of populist promises. Hillary was doubly damned: not only did she fail to deliver Bill's "man from Hope" shtick, she started out handicapped by the legacy of his broken promises. (But since he won, she probably counted that as an asset -- it certainly did help introduce her to the powers he sold out to.)

    One story in the book is about how Hillary scoured her 2008 campaign email server for evidence of staffers who betrayed her, so this story seems inevitable: Emily Smith: Hillary camp scrambling to find out who leaked embarrassing info.

  • Glenn Thrush, et al.: Trump Signs Order That Could Lead to Curbs on Foreign Workers: Specifically, legal, documented workers under the H-1B Visa program, which is widely used by American companies to hire skilled technical workers (admittedly, at below open market wages). Also see: EA Crunden: Trump's crackdown on H-1B visas goes far beyond tech workers; also Max Bearak: Trump and Sessions plan to restrict highly skilled foreign workers. Hyderabad says to bring it on -- the implication here is that if companies can't hire foreign labor to work here, they'll send the work to offshore firms.

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