Weekend Roundup [190 - 199]

Friday, January 22, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Just brief links this week. For what it's worth, about 3,000 people showed up for Wichita's edition of the anti-Trump Women's March. As someone who's always wanted politics to be boring and irrelevant, I'm clearly not going to enjoy the next four years. On the other hand, I voted for Hillary Clinton knowing full well that she, too, would bring us four years or war and financial mayhem to protest against. But she's boring enough we'd be hard pressed to get 30 people out to a march. Whatever else you think, Trump is much more effective at moving us to opposition.

Again, very important for readers to contribute to the project to Help Us Save the Elizabeth M. Fink Attica Archive. Please go there, read about what's being done, and contribute some money. And pass this note on to other people who might. Thanks.

Also a reminder that you can read Dean Baker's new book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer free, on-line.

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Sunday, January 15, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Odd that this week intellectuals promoting Trump had more interesting things to say than intellectuals still defending Hillary Clinton. Not necessary truer things, but less hackneyed and disturbing, even if the overall trend is a race toward complete stupor.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Michelle Goldberg: Democrats Should Follow John Lewis' Lead: I have considerable respect for Lewis, a long-time civil rights leader before he became (thanks to gerrymandering) Georgia's token black Democrat in the House, and it doesn't bother me in the least that he's decided not to attend Trump's inaugural. I don't see why his presence is in any way necessary, and I sure can't think of anything more stupefying a person can do on that day than attend. But according to Goldberg, this all turns on the Clinton Democrats' favorite scapegoat, Vladimir Putin:

    Lewis was speaking for many of us who are aghast at the way Trump benefited from Russian hacking and now appears to be returning the favor by taking a fawning stance toward Putin. He spoke for those of us who are shocked by the role of the FBI, which improperly publicized the reopening of its investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails but refuses to say whether it is investigating Trump's ties with Russia. Trump lost the popular vote; he is president-elect only because the country values fidelity to the democratic process over popular democracy itself. (The Constitution, it turns out, may in fact be a suicide pact.) If the process itself was crooked -- if Trump's campaign colluded in any way with Russia -- his legitimacy disappears. If he scorns the Constitution by, say, violating the Emoluments Clause, it disappears as well. A president who lost the popular vote, who may have cheated to win the Electoral College, and who will be contravening the Constitution the second he's sworn in is due neither respect nor deference.

    I suppose there's a focus group somewhere that says anti-Putin rants are politically effective, but really, this has got to stop. The fact is Hillary Clinton lost for dozens of reasons, and the fact that WikiLeaks (with or without Russian help) exposed John Podesta and Donna Brazile as political hacks didn't help but is surely way down the list. They must realize as much because they never mention the substance of Russian interference: they focus on Putin as an evil manipulator who will wind up dominating a submissive US president because Trump owes his election not to the millions of Americans who voted for him but to a foreign ogre who orchestrated some dirty tricks -- a ruse they can only get away with by replaying cold war stereotypes (e.g., Putin is a dictator, although he's been elected several times by large margins in reasonably fair and competitive elections, and his background in the KGB proves he's always been anti-US); and secondly, they posit Trump as a dissenter from the consensus views of the American "intelligence community" -- the secret clan of spooks who have one of the world's worst track records for truth and accuracy.

    Worse still, I think, are the practical consequences: they are demanding that the US ramp up its hostility toward Russia, including sanctions that were previously in place for other supposed affronts, threatening a war that unlike America's recent attacks on marginal or failed states could be genuinely disastrous. And why should we risk world peace? To revenge Podesta's tarnished reputation? Because Clinton Democrats can bear to take responsibility for blowing the election to Donald Trump? There's plenty of blame to go around for the latter, and it's well nigh time for Clinton and her career to admit that they should have done a better job campaigning. And when they do so, they should realize that obsessing over the Trump-Putin connection was one of the things they did wrong. The first fact is that people don't care. The second is that it's not healthy for Democrats to be seen as the war party (and bear in mind that Hillary, given her past hawkishness, is already so tainted).

    Still, if you have to blame someone else, there are real ogres much closer to home. Look first at the Republican laws aimed at suppressing the vote, and gerrymandering congress. Look especially at the billion dollars or so that the Koch network and other GOP mega-financiers spent on getting their vote out. I think it's quite clear that there was a sustained, methodical effort to undermine democracy in 2016, but it wasn't the Russians who were behind it. It was the Republicans. Maybe if you hack some emails -- seems like fair play at this point -- you might even find a smoking gun showing that the Russians were working for the Republicans (a much more credible story than vice versa; it would, in fact, be reminiscent of finding out that Nixon interfered with the talks to end the Vietnam War, or that Reagan kiboshed Carter's efforts to negotiate the release of hostages in Tehran).

    And by all means, note that Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by nearly three million votes, yet through a 227-year-old quirk in the constitution is being allowed to install the most extreme right-wing oligarchy ever. Then, if you like, you can point out that Putin enjoys a similar relationship to Russia's oligarchy -- I never said he was beyond reproach, let alone a saint, but has to be respected as leader of a major nation, and (unlike Trump) a democratically-elected one at that.

    As for John Lewis, bless him: after spending his life working hard to make this country a better place for all who live here, he's earned the right to take a day off, especially when the alternative is having to witness such tragedy.

    Relevant here: Patrick Lawrence: Trump, Russia, and the Return of Scapegoating, a Timeless American Tradition.

  • Tony Karon: The US media is not equipped to handle a Trump White House: There's an old adage that generals always prepare to refight the last war, and as such are always surprised when a new war happens. Something similar has been happening in media coverage of politics, but in many ways the media landscape has changed over the last 4-8-16 years, yet veterans of past campaigns (and clearly HRC fits this mold) still seem to believe that what worked in the past must still work today. Not clear whether Trump was smart or lucky -- I'd say he was selected from the large Republican field because he fit the evolving right-wing media model remarkably well, and he merely lucked out over Clinton due to a wide range of factors, including an electoral structure which allowed him to squeak out a win despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Still, his election was especially astonishing to those of us who thought, based on long experience, we understood how the system works. In the end, his biggest assets were a vast electorate willing to believe anything and the opportunistic and unscrupulous media that indulged them with all manner of fantastic innuendo.

    Mr Trump emerged as a public figure by mastering this fractured landscape, where distinctions between news and entertainment were increasingly blurred and where the business model's reliance on "click-bait" favours provocation. He connects instinctively with a public likely to judge the veracity of information not on its own merits, but according to existing attitudes towards the news outlets publishing it. Thus the logic behind his off-the-cuff remark last summer that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

    But while painting him as a pawn of Moscow is certainly unlikely to weaken Mr Trump's political base, his empty promises on health care and job creation are a real weakness, because failure to deliver will increase the pain of many people who voted for him.

    It's critically important, therefore, for the media to focus on what Mr Trump's government and their allies on Capitol Hill are actually doing -- not simply what they say about what they're doing.

    The problem is that sort of journalism hardly exists anymore, anywhere, and certainly not on the 24-hour news torrents. And while the election seemed to set new qualitative lows practically every week, post-election coverage has been even lamer: even for "reporters" who never delve any deeper than sifting quotes for gotchas, the only Washington source sure to get reported on is Trump's latest tweetstorm -- and that's more for entertainment than insight. You'd think that as America goes to hell the vested interests that own big media would realize that they actually need to better know and understand what's happening, but recent experience suggests that groupthink (the Bushies used to call it "message discipline") breaks hard.

  • Paul Krugman: There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement: Read past the snark about Comey and Putin, and look at the policy analysis.

    From the beginning, those of us who did think it through realized that anything like universal coverage could only be achieved in one of two ways: single payer, which was not going to be politically possible, or a three-legged stool of regulation, mandates, and subsidies. [ . . . ]

    It's actually amazing how thoroughly the right turned a blind eye to this logic, and some -- maybe even a majority -- are still in denial. But this is as ironclad a policy argument as I've ever seen; and it means that you can't tamper with the basic structure without throwing tens of millions of people out of coverage. You can't even scale back the spending very much -- Obamacare is somewhat underfunded as is.

    Will they decide to go ahead anyway, and risk opening the eyes of working-class voters to the way they've been scammed? I have no idea. But if Republicans do end up paying a big political price for their willful policy ignorance, it couldn't happen to more deserving people.

    I have little faith that sanity will save the Republicans at this late date, but to destroy Obamacare they're going to run afoul of some powerful special interests, and while they may try to assuage them by permitting them to operate even more fraudulently than before the ACA was passed, the result will be millions of people screwed, and most likely the health care industry itself will lurch into contraction.

    Also see: David Dayen: Trump Just Stumbled Into a Canyon on Obamacare.

  • Kelefa Sanneh: Intellectuals for Trump: I must admit that I never liked the idea of intellectuals -- I always thought that learning and reasoning were things that everyone did, so dividing people between a self-defining intellectual elite and the ignorant masses never set well with my democratic instincts (not to mention that those same self-identified intellectuals tended to exclude me, not because I didn't know or think but because I often knew and thought the wrong things -- elites, as ever, being jealous guardians of their ranks). But I was also quick to realize that thinking doesn't always work out right: indeed, that clever people could contort their command of history, logic, and rhetoric to justify almost anything, most often whatever their interests and upbringing (which is to say, class identity) favored. So perhaps we're best off characterizing intellectualism as a style with no intrinsic merit. Throughout history, political leaders have had little trouble gaining the rationalizing support of intellectuals, just as intellectuals have struggled to raise their baser instincts to fine principles.

    Donald Trump makes for a fine case in point. He has so little cred and rapport with liberal intellectuals that some scurried off to re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life for a refresher course on how willfully stupid the people can be. Even conservatives with intellectual pretensions were almost unanimous in their dismay over Trump: his early vocal supporters were almost exclusively limited to professional bigots like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. Still, what finally made Trump palatable to Republican elites was the only thing they really cared about: winning. So, as Sanneh chronicles, of late right-wing intellectuals have started flocking to Trump. Two varieties have emerged. One, including Heritage Foundation chief honcho Jim DeMint and his crew, are ordinary conservatives continuing to spout their usual nostrums while claiming validation by Trump's victory. The others, including an anonymous group which evidently started "The Journal of American Greatness" as "'an inside joke,' which in the course of a few months, attracted a large following, and 'ceased to be a joke.'" The website was subsequently deleted, but blogger Publius Decius Mus, the main subject of Sanneh's piece, is still attempting to develop a coherent intellectual Trumpism:

    Decius is a longtime conservative, though a heterodox one. He had grown frustrated with the Republican Party's devotion to laissez-faire economics (or, in his description, "the free market über alles"), which left Republican politicians ill-prepared to address rising inequality. "The conservative talking point on income inequality has always been, It's the aggregate that matters -- don't worry, as long as everyone can afford food, clothing, and shelter," he says. "I think that rising income inequality actually has a negative effect on social cohesion." He rejects what he calls "punitive taxation" -- like many conservatives, he suspects that Democrats' complaints about inequality are calculated to mask the Party's true identity as the political home of the cosmopolitan élite. But he suggests that a government might justifiably hamper international trade, or subsidize an ailing industry, in order to sustain particular communities and particular jobs. A farm subsidy, a tariff, a targeted tax incentive, a restrictive approach to immigration: these may be defensible, he thought, not on narrowly economic grounds but as expressions of a country's determination to preserve its own ways of life, and as evidence of the fundamental principle that the citizenry has the right to ignore economic experts, especially when their track records are dubious. (In this respect, Trumpism resembles the ideologically heterogeneous populist-nationalist movements that have lately been ascendant in Europe.) Most important, he thinks that conservatives should pay more attention to the shifting needs of the citizens whom government ought to serve, instead of assuming that Reagan's solutions will always and everywhere be applicable. "In 1980, after a decade of stagnation, we needed an infusion of individualism," he wrote. "In 2016, we are too fragmented and atomized -- united for the most part only by being equally under the thumb of the administrative state -- and desperately need more unity."

    Decius takes perverse pride in having been late to come around to Trump; as a populist, he likes the fact that everyday American voters recognized Trump's potential before he did. When Decius started paying serious attention, around January, he discerned the outlines of a simple and, in his view, eminently sensible political program: "less foreign intervention, less trade, and more immigration restrictions." [ . . . ] In his "Flight 93" essay, Decius called Trump "the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey," and he didn't mean it as an insult. Trump argues that the government should do more to insure that workers have good jobs, speaks very little about religious imperatives, and excoriates the war in Iraq and wars of occupation in general. Decius says that he isn't concerned about Trump's seeming fondness for Russia; in his view, thoughtless provocations would be much more dangerous. In his telling, Trump is a political centrist who is misconstrued as an extremist.

    Emphasis added, the rare insight a conservative's focus on social order is likely to latch onto that liberals, whether individualistic or utilitarian, tend to miss. Of course, what pushes conservatives in that direction is the belief that cohesion involves acceptance of the traditional pecking order.

    The "Flight 93" post, by the way, comes off as a sick joke: he's arguing that folks should vote for Trump for the same reason that Flight 93 passengers committed suicide by rushing their hijackers rather than wait for the hijackers to kill them (and presumably others). No rational person can claim that Obama or Hillary would affect much change, much less destroy the country, and no Republican (much less a Trump partisan) can plausibly claim to care about the effects of America's self-destruction on the rest of the world. The post tacitly admits that electing Trump would be suicidal, yet like suicide bombers all around the world (indeed, like their old "better dead than red" slogan) were so convinced of their righteousness they no longer cared about the consequences.

    The rest of Decius' argument is more interesting, but still deeply confused. He's not the first Republican to recognize that inequality is a serious problem, not just because it hurts the people who get pushed aside and makes the so-called winners look callous and unjust, but because it threatens to undermine the entire fabric of society. Kevin Phillips, who back around 1970 plotted out The Emerging Republican Majority, wrote three remarkable books in 2004-08 -- American Dynasty, American Theocracy, and Bad Money -- which recognized the problem squarely. And there have been others, but the only policies that would mitigate inequality are ones that move the nation to the left, and the mindset of the conservative movement is constructed like a valve which only permits policy to flow ever further to the right.

    I think the key to Trump's primary victory was in how he reinforced the party base's prejudices, thus showing he was one with them, without embracing the slashed earth destruction of the liberal state which has become unchallenged gospel among conservatives -- therefore the base didn't find him either alarming (like Ted Cruz) or callow (like Marco Rubio). On the other hand, to win the election Trump had to keep the support of dogmatic conservatives and moneyed elites, which he paid for by basically delivering the administration to their hands (cf. Pence and the cabinet of billionaires and their hired guns). The dream that Trump might blaze a new path that breaks from conservative orthodoxy while avoiding the taint of liberal-baiting, even assuming he had the imagination and desire to do so, has thus been foreclosed. The only question is the extent to which he can act as a brake on the damage his administration might cause, not least to him. And he really doesn't strike me as sharp enough to keep himself out of trouble, much less to help anyone else out.

    Yet "intellectuals" will keep constructing fantasies about what a truly Trumpist Trump might do, and in the end will wind up blaming his failures on him not being Trumpist enough. After all, nothing defines an intellectual like one's commitment to pursue unfounded assumptions to ridiculous ends.

  • Justin Talbot-Zorn: Will Donald Trump Be the Most Pro-Monopoly President in History? Given the competition, it's going to be hard to tell. I can't recall any big cases either for Bush or Obama. The Clinton DOJ mounted (and won) a case against Microsoft, which Ashcroft settled as soon as he took over, achieving virtually nothing. But it's becoming more widely recognized that mergers and lack of competition not only drive profits up, increasing inequality, but also kill jobs.

    While Republicans have been skeptical of antitrust enforcement since Robert Bork came on the scene in the late 1970s, Democrats have been part of the problem too. Bill Clinton took antitrust out of the party platform in 1992, and, only in 2016 -- with a push from Bernie Sanders -- was the plank restored.

    This also ties into Brian S Feldman: How to Really Save Jobs in the Heartland.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

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Sunday, January 8, 2017

Weekend Roundup

After a couple weeks I had enough open tabs to think I should hack out another links-plus-comments column. Nothing systematic here, just a few things that caught my fancy.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Jamelle Bouie: The Most Extreme Party Coalition Since the Civil War: The first book I read on alternative politics back in the 1960s was called The New Radicals, a survey of various thinkers and activists on the New Left. In it, radicals were people who looked for root causes and core principles, as opposed to those who casually wandered from one compromise to another. While it's certainly true that radicals can be wrong, and that they can become obsessed by their insights and oblivious to consequences, the problem there is picking bad principles, not radical ones. In fact, the only other time when "radical" was commonly used to describe politics was after the Civil War, when the GOP was dominated by so-called radicals like Thaddeus Stevens who advocated a deep-seated reconstruction of the former Slave South. Bouie is right that today's GOP is chock full of folks who hold very dangerous views, but those people are not radicals -- they're just wrong. Indeed, in terms of their eagerness to impose their ideology on a world that has moved way past it, they share much more than attitude with pro-slavery activists like John Calhoun than with Republicans like Stevens. But as Corey Robin has pointed out, the proper term for Calhoun and his ilk isn't radical -- it's conservative. The first thing Bouie must do to get smarter is to disabuse himself of the notion that conservatism is a respectable political philosophy. Leftists learned this lesson long ago, which is why they readily identify people who are willing to wreck the world to save the rich -- people like Trump, Pence, and Ryan -- as fascists. That may seem reflexive and excessive, but it serves us well.

  • Gorbachev: US Was Short-Sighted After Soviet Collapse: So true, but America's effective policy toward the former Soviet Union was to rub their faces in the dirt. We helped turn their collectivist economy into a Mafia-run kleptocracy. The result was near-total economic collapse -- so severe that even life expectancy dipped by as much as a decade. And to add insult to injury, the US started picking off former satellite nations and SSRs that formerly propped up the Russian economy and turned them westward, hugely expanding both NATO and the EU. This produced a huge backlash in Russia, and its face is Vladimir Putin, a guy we fear and loathe as a nationalist strongman, but who Russians flock to precisely because he doesn't look like as an American flunky. Sure, it's not clear why the US didn't handle the situation more adroitly, but from the start American Cold Warriors did everything they could to prevent any form of free/open/humane socialism from securing a foothold anywhere. Americans always preferred to work through corrupt strongmen, and even if Yeltsin didn't qualify as strong, he more than made it up as corrupt. Those who complain so much about Putin today should bear this history in mind, but the lesson they draw is inevitably wrong, because we are incapable of considering what would be good for the welfare of people in other nations -- Republicans, especially, don't even care about people living here. And the only thing the foreign policy mandarins consider is whether foreign leaders follow or challenge America's power dictates.

  • Bradley Klapper/Josef Federman/Edith M Lederer: US Rebukes and Allows UN Condemnation of Settlements: Widely interpreted as a "parting shot" rebuke of Netanyahu by the Obama administration, the fact is that it's been US policy since 1967 that Israel must retreat to its pre-1967 armistice borders as part of a "land-for-peace" deal, a scheme which later came to be described as "the two-state solution." That was, after all, the basis for George Mitchell's mission to restart final status talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and before that was the official expectation for Bush's Roadmap, for the Clinton-era Oslo Accords, and for Carter's peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Mitchell himself spent most of his mission time trying to convince Israel to halt settlement construction, and his complete failure to limit Israel destroyed any hope for an American-brokered peace. In past years, the intransigence of an Israeli PM like Yitzhak Shamir would have led to a breach with the US, rectified by Israel electing a more flexible leader (Yitzhak Rabin). Even GW Bush was able to put pressure on Israel, at the time led by Ariel Sharon (not a pushover), to dismantle settlements as part of his poisoned Gaza withdrawal. But Obama never did anything like that, and over eight years Netanyahu discovered he could walk all over Obama, ensuring that the US would never challenge Israel in an international forum. Given that the UNSCR resolution does nothing more than reiterate four decades of US policy, the real question isn't why Obama didn't veto it. It's why Obama didn't direct his ambassador to vote for it, indeed why he didn't sponsor the resolution eight years ago, when it might have been more effective -- when at least it would have served notice that the US is serious about peace and justice in the Middle East. Rather, Obama wasted eight years digging ever deeper holes in the region, obliterating any doubts that the US could ever be a force for peace, security, and equitable prosperity.

    Of course, Netanyahu and his American political lackeys and allies have gone ballistic over Obama's affront to Israeli power, but that is less to punish him than to threaten Trump, who despite his vaguer "America first" rhetoric has promised to be the most servile American president ever. The vote stands, and hopefully will help Palestinians seek justice in the international courts system, but the intensity of the political rebuke that Obama's belated gesture has raised, along with the imminent inauguration of Trump, only goes to show how far the United States has strayed from the ideals of international law and order, and cooperation, that were once our best hope for world peace and prosperity. Trump has, for instance, vowed to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, in flagrant disregard for international law -- although that's pretty minor compared to the practices Jeremy Scahill documents in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield -- his big book on how Bush and Obama ran roughshod over international law to prosecute their misguided "war on terror." The significance of the 14-0 UNSCR vote isn't just that it shows how isolated and delegitimized Israel has become in the eyes of the world. It also shows how marginal the US has become after decades pursuing policies Israel has pioneered. One clear conclusion must be that any notion the US might once have had of being an "honest broker" for peace have vanished. If Europe, Russia, China, etc., really want to do something to bring peace and justice to Israel-Palestine, they're going to start with the recognition that the US is a big part of the problem and no or little part of the solution. Obama, Trump, and Netanyahu, each in his own way, have helped clarify that point.

    Also see: Richard Silverstein: Kerry's Speech: America Lost in Two-State Ether, Israel Spied on Nations Supporting UN Vote.

  • Dennis Laumann: The first genocide of the 20th century happened in Namibia: The party responsible was Germany, the time 1904-07, the territory South-West Africa, the target the Herero, a tribe of herders who got on the colonial power's wrong side mostly by just being in the way. Laumann describes the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians in 1915 as "indisputable" but it was nowhere near as clear cut as Lt. Gen. Lothar von Trotha's Vernichtungsbefehl, which specified: "Within the German borders, every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, shall be shot." Oddly enough, I first learned about this event from a novel, Thomas Pynchon's V., where it appears as a key link in a chain of increasingly mechanized slaughter. Also worth seeking out is Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, which puts the Herero genocide into the broader context of European colonial brutality, making it more the culmination of the 19th century than a harbinger of the 20th.

  • Reihan Salam: Will Donald Trump Be FDR or Jimmy Carter? Sub-hed: "We're on the cusp of either a transformative presidency or a party-killing failure" -- oddly conflating Ronald Reagan with the former and Herbert Hoover with the latter. I've never doubted that it's important to know of and learn from history, but this sort of muddying makes me wonder. The pairings suggest that Salam is uncertain whether Trump will be seen as a winner (like Roosevelt-Reagan) or a loser (Hoover-Carter), so that's one level of ignorance he brings to the table. Another is that while Roosevelt is properly viewed as "transformational" that status is rooted in his unique time period (the depression, which forced the state to become a major economic factor, and the war, which transformed the state into empire). On the other hand, there was nothing distinctive about the Carter-Reagan years, and the myth of Reagan's success was largely based on ignoring reality and engaging in fantasy -- the bankruptcy of which would have long been obvious had not Democrats like Clinton, Gore, and Obama not built their own careers on indulging that same fantasy. At most, this article might have exposed the hollowness of this PoliSci paradigm, but Salam rarely offers more than lines like "Trump will put a candy-covered nationalist shell over Reaganism's chocolate-covered peanut." Peanut? Wasn't Carter the peanut guy? Wasn't Reagan more into jelly beans?

    Actually, Salam does try to make a case that some sort of Trumpian nationalism might be politically successful enough to move Trump into the winners column, but this would involve building on ideas from the center-left, including embracing and defending the safety net. Whether even such a hypothetical program might work isn't analyzed, but the more obvious problems are touched on: that Republican regulars would sabotage any gestures he might make toward the center, and that Trump himself isn't really serious about the platform he ran on (as evidenced, for instance, by his cabinet). Of course, someone who knows a little history might help out here. One might argue that Hoover, for instance, would actually have preferred to move toward what became the New Deal but that he was checked at every step by the dead-enders within his own administration (e.g., Andrew Mellon). One might equally argue that Carter wanted to move toward what eventually became Reaganism -- he did in fact start the recession that broke the back of the American labor movement, and his anti-regulation schemes and anti-communist militancy paved the way for Reagan, but he too faced a debilitating revolt from his own party. Whatever people thought when they voted for Trump, what they wound up with was a politician deep in hock to his party and the insatiable greed of their donors, and that's more or less the only thing he'll ever be able to deliver. If you think that's going to be some kind of booming, transformational success, well, you're fucking nuts.

  • Steven Waldman: The Strangest Winner on Election Night Was Not Trump: He means the Republican Congress, enjoying an approval rating of just 15%, yet they only lost two Senate and six House seats, retaining a thin but anomalous and ominous majority.

    And yet the Republican Party has more power now than it has in decades, and is acting as if the party received a tidal-wave mandate.

    How did this happen? While Trump occasionally clashed with Republican leaders during the campaign -- leading to the impression that he was at war with the GOP establishment -- it was always over lack of fealty more than policy. The main exception was trade but so as long as the Republican's are "saying nice things" to Trump, he was perfectly happy to embrace almost all of their policies. The rift with the GOP establishment was always less than advertised.

    Second, as has been often noted, Trump's lack of knowledge and curiosity about policy has meant he is totally reliant on the people who have the plans -- who are congressional republicans, K street lobbyists and industry groups. There is no shadow world of public policy centers crafting a Trumpian alternative to Republican orthodoxy. With the exception of trade and immigration, Trump's views are standard issue Republican policies, albeit sprinkled with extra bile.

    Finally, because so much of the GOP power is safeguarded by gerrymandering, congressional Republicans can act like they have a mandate without much fear that swing voters will punish them.

    All in all, it adds up to an odd situation: the Republican party is less popular than its been in ages -- and has more power.

    One part of why this happened was that the GOP donor network focused on down-ballot races, which had the effect of lifting Trump up without having to bear all his dead weight. Indeed, all they needed to close the deal was to convince their voters that Hillary was a tad worse, or that they had nothing to lose by giving Trump a chance. Indeed, they seemed to understand that in the end Trump would turn into the party toady he's since become. The other part is that the Democrats focused on supporting Hillary over, and free from, their party -- all those appeals to "moderate suburban Republican housewives" and neocons and other chimerical groups. The biggest gripe I've had against Obama and the Clintons is how they've neglected building a party to compete with the Republicans, instead usurping the party apparatus for their own cult of personality (and appeals to elite donors).

Also, a few links very briefly noted:

Laura Tillem forwarded one of those Facebook image/memes that I can't share anywhere else due to devious Facebook programming, but it's all text so I'll just retype it (originally from The Other 98%):

TOP 10 REASONS FOR SINGLE PAYER

  1. Everybody in, nobody out
  2. Portability: Change jobs, get divorced, lose your job, etc. - won't lose coverage
  3. Uniform benefits for everyone
  4. Enhance Prevention
  5. Choose your physician
  6. Ends insurance industry interference with care
  7. Reduces administrative waste
  8. Saves money
  9. Common Sense Budgeting - set fair reimbursements and apply them equally
  10. Public oversight, public ownership

This could be spelled out a little better, but is all basically true, and for sound reasons. However, single-payer only gets at part of the problem -- basically the easy one, as insurance companies are mostly parasitical, hence it's easy to imagine a scenario where everything is better once they're gone. The bigger piece of the problem is for-profit health care providers, and dealing with their conflicts of interest and inefficiencies is more complex.

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Sunday, December 18, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I have better things to do than to continue documented this entirely predictable trainwreck. Still, a few links and brief notes if you're still transfixed:

  • David Atkins: Democrats Should Hope the Economic Populists Are Right:

    • More than a month after the election, a war of words and ideas still rages on the left between the Sanders-leaning economic populists and the more establishment defenders of the Clinton campaign. Broadly speaking, the contours of the argument center around whether Clinton could have done more from a populist messaging standpoint to appeal to white working class Rust Belt voters and to disaffected voters who stayed home, or whether Clinton's overall approach was good, but that she was overwhelmed by the prejudices of white voters and stabbed in the back by Comey, Russia, and various parts of the progressive left.

    I suppose I quoted this because the last clause led me to react: well, the progressive leftists I know gave her a lot more support than she would have given us over the next four years had she won. And I say that even though I know a few Stein supporters (probably, even, a couple folks who voted for Johnson), and I know a lot of people who voted for Clinton but weren't happy with her. I voted for her, fully understanding that we'd wind up spending the next four years protesting and organizing against much of her platform, because I was also every bit as aware that putting the Republicans into power would be far worse for virtually all of us. That's what we call a rational decision, and that's something we on the left weigh carefully and practice more or less consistently. Clinton's problem in the 2016 election wasn't with rational people, ergo it wasn't with "progressive leftists." Her problem was with crazy people, or effectively the same thing, people who were willing to put aside reason and vote on some emotional whim, a belief backed with no more than a scintilla of evidence.

    There are, of course, two approaches to this problem: one is to make voters more conscious of real problems and to better articulate real solutions. The other is to do a better job of identifying the emotions that can be made to work for you, and to hit them in ways that move voters to your side. (The Republicans are quite good at the latter, and have the much easier job doing the opposite of the former: all they need to do is to convince voters that problems are beyond political remedy, and ignorance helps as much as mendacity there.) As much as we'd like to see reason win out, that's a long term project. For right now, suffice it to say that wasn't especially effective at picking her issues, and was vulnerable to precisely the sort of attacks Republicans specialize in.

  • Lauren Fox: Obama: 'Reagan Would Roll Over in His Grave' Over GOP Support for Russia: One of Obama's strangest quirks is his continuing affection for Ronald Reagan, even to the point of imagining he's some sort of kindly national father-figure far removed from his actual history and legacy. It's not as if Obama wasn't conscious during the Reagan administration -- he was 18 when it started -- but he didn't have the Vietnam War to inform his politics at that age (like I did), so maybe he's normalized his memory in some way those of us who can recall Reagan from his days as governor of California in the 1960s cannot. (Maybe he's conflated Reagan with his first experiences of getting high and getting laid?) In any case, his comment reflects a simpler misunderstanding. Reagan's wailing about the Soviet Union was purely ideological -- even when he framed it as some sort of Manichaean struggle between good and evil -- he never went off on nationalist rants against the Russians, nor did he grasp the neoconservative doctrine that seeks to punish any nation that isn't sufficiently obsequious to American power. Moreover, like all conservatives of his era (and for that matter today), he appreciated the efficient order that dictators abroad offered -- one might even say he preferred them to the risks of unruly democracy America itself posed. So why on earth would Reagan be disturbed by Trump's fondness for Putin? -- a fellow plutocrat who's willing to cut corners when it comes to democratic niceties to consolidate the power of his favored cronies? It's not like conservatives care any more about ordinary Russians than they do about ordinary Americans.

    Liberals (and leftists), at least, can offer a plausible claim to caring about iniquities around the world, because they care about them at home, and recognize that the rest of the world isn't that different. Still, nothing Obama (nor any of the Democrats who have lately been obsessed with Russian meddling in our election) has said indicates any concern for the Russian people. Rather, he has simply fallen for the post-Cold War neoconservative line that demonizes any nation outside of America's "security" umbrella -- especially any political leaders who think they have any interests beyond their own borders (as Russia does with Syria and Ukraine). The neocons motives are pretty transparent: they like to puff up Russia and China as rivals and enemies to justify America's expensive indulgence in world-threatening arms. On the other hand, it's just plain ignorant and lazy for Democrats like Obama (and the Clintons) to take up the neocon cudgel against Russia. It leads to greater militarization, less diplomacy, a world torn into hostile camps where America rules by brute intimidation, and has ceded any motivation except for self-interest.

    As for the "Russian hack" of the election, which is presumably the imagined (if not the real) inspiration for Obama's attempt at wit, see Sam Kriss: The Rise of the Alt-Center, or as the subhed put it, "Why did establishment liberals fall in love with a deranged Twitter thread?" Or as the link I followed read: "Establishment Liberals Have Lost Their Damn Minds." The tweet thread was by Eric Garland, and Kriss adds a full paragraph of liberal praise, including "if there were a Pulitzer for tweeting -- this thread would be the updisputed winner of 2016." Kriss continues:

    Clearly something horrifying has happened to America's great liberal intellects. One moment they were yapping along in the train of a historic political movement; now, ragged and destitute, they wander with lolling tongues in search of anything that might explain their new world to them. This is, after all, how cults get started. Cultists will venerate any messianic mediocrity and any set of half-baked spiritual dogmas; it's not the overt content that matters but the security of knowing. If Trump's devoted hype squad of pustulent, oleaginous neo-Nazis can now be euphemized as the "alt-right," the Eichenwalds and Jefferys of the world might have turned themselves into something similar: an alt-center, pushing its own failed political doctrine with all the same vehemence, idiocy, and spleen. So it's strange, but not surprising, that so many people would sing the praises of Garland's masterpiece, because it is absolutely the worst piece of political writing ever inflicted on any public in human history. [ . . . ]

    Whatever Russia did or didn't do, the idea that its interference is what cost Hillary Clinton the election is utterly ludicrous and absolutely false. What cost Hillary Clinton the election can be summed up by a single line from Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon to be the country's highest-ranking Democrat: "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." As it turned out, he was fatally wrong. It wasn't the Russians who told the Democratic Party to abandon the working-class people of all races who used to form its electoral base. It wasn't the Russians who decided to run a presidential campaign that offered people nothing but blackmail -- "vote for us or Dangerous Donald wins." The Russians didn't come up with awful tin-eared catchphrases like "I'm with her" or "America is already great." The Russians never ordered the DNC to run one of the most widely despised people in the country, simply because she thought it was her turn. The Democrats did that all by themselves.

  • Barack Obama's presidency will be defined by his failure to face down Assad: No, Obama's presidency has been defined by his failure to face down the real threat to the security and welfare of the American people: the Republicans. He's done this by not blaming them for their misdeeds. He's done this by not breaking with their failed policies -- above all the wars against Muslims, but also much of their domestic policy. And he's done this by not offering real alternatives, and by not supporting his party or its voters. As for Syria, sure, he screwed up, but not for backing away from the "red line" over chemical weapons -- pace, the author, he won the only meaningful resolution of that issue, and did it diplomatically (the only way that would stick). But in his early rejection of Assad, his congenital antipathy to Russia and Iran, his willingness to give supposed allies (like Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia) a free hand to pursue radically opposed goals), and his general belief in the effectiveness of military might (and his continued support for the most clandestine and irresponsible American warmakers), he made sure the US would be a much bigger part of the problem than of the solution.

And briefly noted:

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Sunday, December 11, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I woke up yesterday morning thinking about how America, if little else, has become something of a consumer paradise over the last 30-40 years. I often wonder why it is that so many people are so uncritical of the established order, and that seems to be a big part of why. Sure, one can nitpick, and if you know much about how business, marketing in particular, works, you'll realize that the real gains still fall way short of what's possible or desirable. You may also may feel some qualms about what has actually been achieved by all this consumption. And, of course, like everything else the gains have not been equally distributed. But for those who can afford today's markets, life has never been better.

I count Trump's voters among them. Sure, many gripe about economic fears, some even about hardships, but somehow they overlook their own bosses and the businesses who take most of their money while perceiving others as threats. I'm aware of lots of reasons why they think that, but I can't say that any of them make real sense to me. What I am sure of is that the incoming Trump administration isn't going to solve any of their imaginary (let alone real) problems. Trump's cabinet is going to have more ultrarich (say, half-billionaires and up) than any other in history. In fact, this represents a new plateau in the history of American plutocracy: even as recently as the Shrub administration, titans of industry and finance were happy to stock the government with their lobbyists and retainers, but Trump is tapping "the doers, not the talkers" -- people who don't just take orders but who intimately know how to convert public influence into private gain. In the past, the most notoriously corrupt administrations (Grant, Harding, Reagan) combined indifferent leadership with underlings imbued in a culture of greed. Yet today, Trump not only hasn't divested himself of his business entanglements; he's actively continued to work his deals, nakedly using his newly acquired leverage. Unlike the others, he won't just turn a blind eye to corruption; he's ideally positioned to be the plunderer-in-chief.

One thing Trump's election has spared us was being plagued with four years of non-stop Clinton scandals -- sure, mostly likely as bogus and conflated as the ones she's endured for 24 years, but still catnip to the press. Instead, Trump promises to give us real scandals, huge scandals, the kind of scandals that expose the rotten core of American Greatness. One hardly knows where to begin, or when to stop, but this will necessarily be brief.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Peter Beinart: Trump Excuses the White Working Class From the Politics of Personal Responsibility: The author has been reading JB Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and detects some manner of irony:

    Under Reagan, Republicans demanded personal responsibility from African Americans and ignored the same cultural problems when displayed by whites. Under Trump, Republicans acknowledge that whites exhibit those same pathologies. Trump, for instance, spoke frequently during the campaign about drug addiction in white, rural states like New Hampshire. But instead of demanding personal responsibility, Trump's GOP promises state protection. Unlike Vance, who speaks about his poor white neighbors in the way Reagan-era conservatives spoke about poor blacks, Trump-era conservatives describe the white working class as the victims of political and economic forces beyond their control. Sounding a bit like Jesse Jackson defending the black underclass in the 1980s, Trump Republicans say that what the white underclass needs today is not moralistic sermonizing but government assistance and cultural respect.

    Of course, there is a simpler reason why Republicans would present different sets of standards and prescriptions for white and blacks: it's called racism. Such double standards are hardly novel. Nor was "separate but equal" merely ironic. But Beinart is also wrong when he thinks Trump intends to solve the problems of poor whites through state actions. Like all Republicans since Reagan, his solution is to reduce the political options of the state, reserving it for violence against any challenges to authority, while allowing the private sector to expand its power over workers, customers, and mere bystaders.

  • Rosa Brooks: Don't Freak Out About Trump's Cabinet Full of Generals: I doubt I'd take Brooks seriously without knowing that her mother is the brilliant left journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, as Brooks' own resume paints her as an insider in Washington's foreign policy establishment, a perch from which she's observed the creeping hegemonic encroachment of military brass (her recent book is How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon). So, yeah, she's uncommonly comfortable with generals and admirals running things, even respects and admires them. Still, she may be right that the problem with all Trump's generals isn't that they'll upset the intricate checks and balances the founding fathers devised, but she misses the real point: that Trump's generals consummates a steady drift that started back in WWII transforming the US military from a rarely-used last resort to an everyday implement of world-hegemonic imperial policy. And sure, all that (so far) happened before Trump, but in hiring those generals Trump is demonstrating that his own foreign policy thinking is nothing more than an echo of that long (and frankly disastrous) drift. Of course, that should come as no surprise to anyone who paid attention to him during the long campaign. They only thing that doesn't alarm me about the generals is the fact that I can think of even worse civilians to hand power over to. (Brooks herself contrasts State candidates Rudy Giuliani and David Petraeus, and she's got a point there, but I'm still drawing a blank on who Michael Flynn is saving us from.)

  • Martin Longman: Breitbart Does Not Like Trump's Labor Pick:

    So, if you go look at the Breitbart website right now, you'll see an anti-Trump headline that accuses him of nominating a Labor Secretary that prefers foreign labor to American workers. And if you actually go ahead and read the article, you'll see that it lashes out at Andy Puzder for standing "diametrically opposed to Trump's signature issues on trade and immigration."

    As an example, they cite his decision to "join forces with Michael Bloomberg, Bob Iger, and Rupert Murdoch's open borders lobbying firm, the Partnership for a New American Economy, to call for 'free-market solutions' to our immigration system." They also question Puzder's support for "amnesty" and overall view him as a poster-boy for what they oppose, which is bringing in low-wage immigrants that take jobs from white Americans and suppress their wages.

    The man Trump nominated to be Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder, is CEO of a chain of fast food restaurants (Hardee's, Carl's Jr.), so his labor expertise is in how to hire minimum wage, no benefit workers. (His business experience includes taking his firm through a private equity deal valued at more than $1 billion. The company generates $1.4 billion in revenues, operating in the US and 40 foreign countries.) I'm not sure whether Puzder counts as one of Trump's billionaires, but he comes pretty close.

    One thing that worried me about the prospect of Sanders becoming president was that the Democratic Party regulars -- the people he'd have to draw on for appointments and support -- weren't ready to back his "revolution." I never believed that Trump would veer significantly from Republican Party orthodoxy, but I can see how those who did think he offered something different -- notably the Breitbart crowd, and as many "white populists" as you can count -- are likely to belatedly discover the same problem. Much as Trump went with impeccably demented Mike Pence as his VP, he's stocking his cabinet from the same stock of utter reactionaries.

  • Daniel Politi: Trump Explains Why He Rejects Daily Intelligence Briefings: "I'm, Like, a Smart Person": I saw Michael Moore on Seth Myers the other night making a big stink about how Trump has sloughed off going to CIA briefings, and for once I thought, "good for Trump." As far as I know, the first president to receive daily briefings was Shrub, and the chemical reaction of misinformation-meets-ignorance there didn't do anyone any good. Supposedly Obama tried to fix this by laying down a rule -- "don't do stupid shit" -- but his own daily briefings allowed all sorts of loopholes to that rule, backed by presidential authority. The fact is that the "war on terror" isn't important enough to require daily input and direction from the so-called Commander-in-Chief. A sane president would simply, quietly wind it down, mostly by not encouraging "stupid shit" to happen. The fact that Trump isn't a reasonable person, that he pretty much campaigned on doing "stupid shit" all the time, makes it even more important to steer him away from meetings about killing people and embarrassing the country.

  • Nomi Prins: The Magnitude of Trump's Cronyism Is Off the Charts -- Even for Washington: "The President-elect's incomplete cabinet is already the richest one ever."

    There is, in fact, some historical precedent for a president surrounding himself with such a group of self-interested power-grabbers, but you'd have to return to Warren G. Harding's administration in the early 1920s to find it. The "Roaring Twenties" that ended explosively in a stock market collapse in 1929 began, ominously enough, with a presidency filled with similar figures, as well as policies remarkably similar to those now being promised under Trump, including major tax cuts and giveaways for corporations and the deregulation of Wall Street. . . .

    Harding's other main contributions to American history involved two choices he made. He offered businessman Herbert Hoover the job of secretary of commerce and so put him in play to become president in the years just preceding the Great Depression. And in a fashion that now looks Trumpian, he also appointed one of the richest men on Earth, billionaire Andrew Mellon, as his treasury secretary. Mellon, a Pittsburgh industrialist-financier, was head of the Mellon National Bank; he founded both the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), for which he'd be accused of unethical behavior while treasury secretary (as he still owned stock in the company and his brother was a close associate), and the Gulf Oil Company; and with Henry Clay Frick, he co-founded the Union Steel Company.

    He promptly set to work -- and this will sound familiar today -- cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations. At the same time, he essentially left Wall Street free to concoct the shadowy "trusts" that would use borrowed money to purchase collections of shares in companies and real estate, igniting the 1929 stock market crash. After Mellon, who had served three presidents, left Herbert Hoover's administration, he fell under investigation for unpaid federal taxes and tax-related conflicts of interest.

    Prins goes on to run down the wealth and interest conflicts of several Trump picks, including Wilbur Ross ($2.9 billion, Commerce), Betsy DeVos ($5.1 billion, Education), and Steven Mnuchin (up to $1 billion, Treasury, from Goldman Sachs). If, as reported, Trump picks Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State, he's not going to lower the average much.

  • Theda Skocpol/Alexander Hertel-Fernandez/Caroline Tervo: Behind "Make America Great," the Koch Agenda Returns With a Vengeance: The Koch network spent about $750 million on the 2016 elections, mostly on down-ballot races that saved and shaped the Republican Congress, and that is rapidly becoming the framework that shapes the Trump presidency, even on issues where Trump publicly differed from the Kochs and their cronies (like Scott Walker and Mario Rubio).

    Publicly available numbers suggest that AFP's grassroots organizing made a real difference -- and indirectly helped Trump, who had little campaign capacity of his own. In Wisconsin, for instance, AFP claims that it reached over 2.5 million voters in phone banking and canvassing efforts. In North Carolina, AFP claimed over 1.2 million calls and 120,000 door-to-door efforts, or nearly the entire reported margin of victory for Trump. And in Pennsylvania, AFP claims it made over 2.4 million phone calls and knocked on over 135,000 doors, more than twice Trump's margin of victory in that state. AFP's grassroots efforts were especially pronounced in Florida, where AFP boasts that its people knocked on a record-breaking one million doors throughout the state to help re-elect Senator Marco Rubio. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just over 100,000 votes. In all four of these states AFP helped to re-elect the incumbent Republican Senator and make important down ballot gains. Obviously, given what we know about the decline of split ticking voting, most of the same citizens AFP mobilized for state and Congressional contests also cast ballots for Donald Trump.

Briefly noted:

One last note: I just finishing reading Peter Frase's Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Verso). He sets up a 2x2 matrix, one axis determined by plenty/scarcity, the other inequality/equality. Needless to say, only one quadrant reads like something we're already in the midst of: scarcity/inequality, the one he calls "exterminism" -- not a very euphonious term, but one which underscores how the rich, as they increasingly automate labor come to view the workers they discharge as expendable, and ultimately as threats. (Frase never uses the term "useless eaters" but you may recall how that terminology paved the way for the Nazi genocide.) Needless to say, aside from branding, "exterminism" sounds more than a little like the Trump agenda. More blatantly, there's increasing inequality while progressively stripping the poor and marginal of any semblance of rights.

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Sunday, November 27, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I didn't really plan on posting a Roundup this week, but when I looked at Salon's politics section way too may red flags jumped out at me. I'm generally inclined to give Trump a little rope to hang himself, but I'm surprised by the speed with which he's set about the task. I realized that Trump was a guy who spent every waking moment conniving to make money (well, aside from the time spent plotting sexual conquests), and thought it unlikely that he'd change for a moment. But these pieces are mostly self-explanatory, so at least I don't have to annotate them.

Some scattered links this week on all things Trump:

Also a couple things not exactly on the incoming disaster, although not exactly unrelated either:

I don't have much to say about Fidel Castro. I've never held any romantic attachment for Cuba's communist regime, and I don't doubt that it has sometimes been repressive and that its planned economy could have been more dynamic. However, I can't begrudge their early expropriation of foreign (mostly American) assets, and must admit that they've built a literate, highly educated, and for the most part egalitarian society, while maintaining a vibrant culture, all despite cruel economic hardships imposed variously by America and Russia. It's worth remembering that Cuba was the last slaveholder society in the Americas, and the last of Spain's colonial outposts, and after the US seized it in America's 1898 imperialist expansion was only granted "independence" because it was thought easier to run it through local puppet strongmen -- a scandalous series that was only ended by Castro's revolution.

I've long thought that the vitriolic reaction of American politicos to Cuba's real independence and defiance reflected a deep-seated guilt (and embarrassment) about how badly we had mishandled our power there. But it manifested itself as sheer spite, ranging from the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion and numerous assassination plots the CIA tried to mount against Castro to the long-running blockade -- all of which reinforced Castro's anti-Americanism and made him a hero for underdogs all around the world. Obama's recent normalization of US-Cuban relations finally gives us a chance to be less of an ogre -- although the reflexive instinct is still apparent in recent comments by Trump, Rubio, and others. Hopefully they'll blow this jingoistic thinking out of their systems.

Here are a few scattered comments on Castro from: Tariq Ali; Greg Grandin; Tony Karon (2008); also: Stephen Gibbs/Jonathan Watts: Havana in mourning: 'We Cubans are Fidelista even if we are not communist'; Kathy Gilsinan: How Did Fidel Castro Hold On to Cuba for So Long?.

One quote, from the Karon piece above:

There's been predictably little interesting discussion in the United States of Fidel Castro's retirement as Cuba's commandante en jefe, maximo etc. That's because in the U.S. political mainstream, Cuba policy has for a generation been grotesquely disfigured by a collective kow-towing -- yes, collective, it was that craven Mr. Clinton who signed into law the Draconian Helms-Burton act that made it infinitely more difficult for any U.S. president to actually lift the embargo, and the equally craven Mrs. Clinton appears to pandering to the same crowd -- to the Cuban-American Ahmed Chalabi figures of Miami, still fantasizing about a day when they'll regain their plantations and poor people of color will once again know their place. [ . . . ]

What fascinates me, however, is the guilty pleasure with which so many millions of people around the world revere Fidel Castro -- revere him, but wouldn't dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. People, in other words, who would not be comfortable actually living in Castro's Cuba, much as they like the idea of him sticking it the arrogant yanqui, his physical and political survival a sure sign that Washington's awesome power has limits -- and can therefore be challenged.

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Sunday, November 6, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I was sorely tempted to write nothing more about the election until it's all over. I doubt I'll write much below, but when I start out I never know. Part of this is just plain disgust at how the last couple weeks have played out. Part is that I've been sick, and that hasn't helped my mood one bit. A big part of the disgust is simply that Hillary Clinton seems to have blown a huge lead: FiveThirtyEight gave her an 88.1% chance of victory on October 17, 81.5% as late as October 28. Today that's down to 64.5%. In terms of states that posits her as losing six states she was previously leading in: Arizona (her odds there are now down to only 25.8%), Iowa (27.1%), Ohio (32.9%), Florida (47.4%), Nevada (48.0%), and North Carolina (48.4%). That's still based on a 2.8% popular vote margin. Some polls are closer than that, with at least one showing Trump ahead. TPM had a narrower spread yesterday (2.4%) but a larger one today (3.9%, despite Clinton dropping to 45.9% of the vote).

Throughout most of the election, the median state (as far as the electoral college is concerned) has been New Hampshire: if Clinton wins New Hampshire and every other state she's been polling better in, she gets 272 electoral votes and wins the election. She's still given a 61.2% chance in New Hampshire. Trump could win the election by capturing New Hampshire, unless he loses a larger state he holds a slim lead in (Nevada, North Carolina, and Florida are all very close, and early voting looks especially good for Clinton in Nevada). On the other hand, Trump could lose New Hampshire and still win if he pulls an upset in Colorado (where he's currently givens a 26.9% chance) or Pennsylvania (25.9%).

At this stage, the presidential race has been reduced to these nine "battleground" states. Kansas (97.5% R) isn't one of them. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single street sign for either Trump or Clinton. I did see two Trump advertisements last week, and thought they hit an effective note: it is, after all, easy to tag Clinton as the candidate of the status quo, without suggesting how attractive more status quo would be compared to Trumpian change. I haven't seen any Clinton ads, but am haunted by at least one of her soundbytes, where she warns us of the danger of entrusting "America's nuclear codes" to someone as "thin-skinned and impulsive" as Trump. That's probably as carefully phrased as could be, but it mostly reminded me that she is decidedly hawkish, someone who believes strongly in flaunting America's military power, and someone who views the presidency as almost a secondary role to being Commander-in-Chief. Isn't it odd that the numerous "checks and balances" that limit what a president can do aren't sufficient to keep a mad person from blowing up the world? I've said all along that the surest way Clinton could lose would be to remind us of her appetite for war, and she's found an inadvertent way of doing that. I figure that must be part of her blown lead, even though the emails and her linkage to Anthony Weiner (perhaps the most universally reviled man in America right now) have gotten more attention.

By the way, as I was preparing this, FBI Director Comey says agency won't recommend charges over Clinton email, admitting, in his usual backhanded way, that his previous letter about re-opening the Clinton email investigation -- the event that precipitated Clinton's polling losses -- had come to nothing. Too bad we can't inspect the internal FBI emails discussing why he exposed this baseless innuendo in the first place. The FBI has a terrible legacy of politically-minded "investigations" but they've rarely set their sights on someone as mainstream as Hillary Clinton. Once again they've embarrassed themselves.

More I could write about here, but let's wind up this intro with Seth Meyers' "closer look" at the Major Clinton and Trump scandals:

That's a problem for a lot of Americans: They just don't love the two choices. Do you pick someone who's under federal investigation for using a private email server?

Or do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn't a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier, bragged about committing sexual assault, was accused by 12 women of committing sexual assault, said some of those women weren't attractive for him to sexually assault, said more countries should get nukes, said that he would force the military to commit war crimes, said a judge was biased because his parents were Mexicans, said women should be punished for having abortions, incited violence at his rallies, called global warming a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, called for his opponent to be jailed, declared bankruptcy six times, bragged about not paying income taxes, stiffed his contractors and employees, lost a billion dollars in one year, scammed customers at his fake university, bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself with money from his fake foundation, has a trial for fraud coming up in November, insulted an opponent's looks, insulted an opponent's wife's looks, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy?

How do you choose?

Problem here is that Meyers is still reducing the election to a choice between two celebrity personalities, as opposed to the real differences between the parties and interests they represent. Not that there are no real issues buried in the Trump litany, nor that some of the personal traits (like his seething contempt for women and non-whites, and for that matter workers) don't portend policy dangers, but one thing this campaign has spared (or cheated) us was an opportunity to debate and vote on two radically different political visions. Imagine how much different this election might be if the choice was Bernie Sanders vs. Ted Cruz? One might learn something there, and emerge from the election with a mandate and a direction. But with Clinton vs. Trump we're stuck with muddled results -- both candidates are widely viewed as crooked, greedy, deceitful, treacherous, untrustworthy, pompous, arrogant, and full of ungrounded bluster -- their few differences attributable to irreconcilable identity allegiances. And even if Clinton wins, her margin isn't going to be nearly large enough to win Congress as well and to force a rethinking of those divisions. Republicans running for Congress have pledged to block her every appointment, to stalemate government and disable her administration from day one. Trump has already convinced most of his supporters that the only way he can lose is if the system is rigged against them.

It's fair to say that America is more divided now than at any election since 1860, which precipitated the Civil War. In terms of ideas and policies, those divisions have been growing since the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, with conservatives demanding ever more complete domination of government and business, making the state a tool of the rich while eliminating any countervailing support government might provide for working people. Of course, conservatives rarely argue their agenda coherently -- they prefer to describe clear-cutting as their "healthy forests" initiative -- because they're aware that they'd lose. What Trump adds here is an unprecedented degree of paranoia, and a demagogic style that insists on degrading and dehumanizing his opponent and all of her supporters, and that's what's made him so vile and dangerous.

Some scattered (election) links this week:

  • Nate Silver: Election Update: The Campaign Is Almost Over, and Here's Where We Stand

  • Spencer Ackerman: 'The FBI is Trumpland': anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaks, sources say:

    This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

    The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is "the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," and that "the reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

    The agent called the bureau "Trumplandia," with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party's national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.

  • David Atkins: Trump Would Be a Radical Policy Disaster:

    This dyspeptic election is finally coming to an end in just a few days amid ugliness the likes of which has not been seen in modern American history. This nastiness has focused on the personal and the irrelevant, from the ridiculous non-scandal of Clinton's emails to the revolting but ultimately superficial fact that Donald Trump apparently carried on an affair for years that we're only just learning about.

    Follow the article if you want the affair link. Read everything else. Still, he missed the policy proposal that bothers me most: one that would make it easier for rich guys like Trump to sue anyone and everyone who said anything negative about them.

  • Jonathan Blitzer: A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That's Familiar With Trump:

    [Ruth] Ben-Ghiat has been broadening her studies ever since the primaries, and is now considering a book-length examination of strongmen, from Mussolini to Trump, with stops in Franco's Spain, Erdogan's Turkey, and Qaddafi's Libya. In the speech of Mussolini, Putin, Trump, and also Berlusconi, Ben-Ghiat notes a pattern: they are at once transparent about their intentions and masters of innuendo. "Trump trails off. He uses ellipses and coded language. He lets his listeners fill in what they want." When Trump seemed to suggest that gun owners should deal with Hillary Clinton themselves, or when he talked about needing to "watch" certain communities out to steal the vote on Election Day, his statements were more powerful for their ambiguity. "It's all about letting listeners convince and mislead themselves," she said.

  • Amy Davidson: Bernie Sanders's Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton: Seems like the Obamas and Joe Biden get all the media notice, but did you know?

    The truth is that Bernie Sanders is very, very angry -- at Donald Trump. He is angry enough to have spent weeks traveling on behalf of Hillary Clinton, speaking for her in union halls and arenas, to students and activists. When he talks, he is entirely Bernie -- "We are going to fight for that democracy; we are not going to become an oligarchy" -- and he hints strongly that he has done some negotiating with her before getting on the stage, and will continue to do so after, as he hopes, she is elected. When praising her positions, he often says "Secretary Clinton has told me" or "Secretary Clinton has promised," as though he knows that it might not work, with the sort of swing audiences he is dispatched to persuade (students, working-class voters), simply to declare that taking these stands is in her nature. But he knows what he wants: for her to win. [ . . . ]

    "There are many, many differences between Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump," Sanders told the crowd. "But there is one that is very, very profound. Are you ready for a very radical thought right now? I don't want anyone to faint! I think we have some paramedics here" -- "paramedics here" is, it turns out, an excellent phrase for demonstrating a Brooklyn accent -- "but I do want to make this announcement. Are you ready for it?" The crowd indicated that it was. "All right. Madam Secretary, you correct me if I'm wrong here; I don't want to misspeak for you -- Secretary Clinton believes in science!" [ . . . ]

    A few hours later, Sanders was off on his own to Iowa. Trump is ahead in that state, in the latest average of polls, by about two and a half points. Sanders had three events scheduled for Friday -- Cedar Falls, Iowa City, Davenport. On Saturday, there would be more.

  • Kerry Eleveld: Latino electorate both on track for historic turnout and routinely undercounted in polls: One tidbit: in 2010, polls showed Republican Sharon Angle leading Harry Reid by 3-5 points, but Reid wound up winning 50.3-44.5%, largely due to a huge 90-10 Latino vote split.

  • Ron Fournier: Hillary Has No One to Blame but Herself: Concerns itself with trivial pursuits like that email server. For insight into the deeper Clinton problem, see: Matt Stoller: How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. Or Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? -- although I don't recommend reading the latter until Wednesday (either way).

  • Charles Franklin: Party Loyalty and Defection, Trump v Clinton: Chart tracking polls so both parties with identically high (86.8%) support for their candidates, after Republicans had trailed all year. Defection rates similarly low, although Democrats (6.8%) more so than Republicans (5.2%), the margin growing lately. Billmon's conclusion: "The November non-surprise. The zombies came home."

  • Neil Irwin: A New Movement in Liberal Economics That Could Shape Hillary Clinton's Agenda: The concept is "labor market monopsony," which has to do with how monopoly businesses are not only able to charge rents (fix prices), they're able to use their power to depress labor markets (wages). Ways to ameliorate this problem include higher (and more comprehensive) minimum wages and stronger antitrust action (something Democrats have not been good at, while Republicans have abandoned any pretense of enforcement).

  • Ann Jones: Nasty Women:

    In his own telling, he, not the women he's demeaned or assaulted, is the abused one and he's taking it for us, for America. It's quite a self-portrait when you think about it and should make us appreciate all the more those women who stepped before the cameras, reported his sexual assaults, and left themselves open to further abuse from Trump and his supporters. They have done something rare and brave. [ . . . ]

    On the dark side, you never know what a sore loser and his loyal, bullying, misogynist followers might do. Say, for example, followers of the type who show up outside Hillary rallies with banners reading "Trump that Bitch!"

  • Paul Krugman: Conservative Intellectuals: Follow the Money:

    We're supposed to think back nostalgically to the era when serious conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol tried to understand the world, rather than treating everything as a political exercise in which ideas were just there to help their team win.

    But it was never like that. Don't take my word for it; take the word of Irving Kristol himself, in his book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Kristol explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities." This justified a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or financial problems," because "political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

    In short, never mind whether it's right, as long as it's politically useful. When David [Brooks] complains that "conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else," he's describing something that happened well before Reagan.

  • Paul Lewis/Tom Silverstone: Trump rally protester: I was beaten for a 'Republicans against Trump' sign

  • Martin Longman: Chris Christie Convicted By Proxy in Federal Court: Would be a bigger story if Trump had picked Christie as his running mate, but still . . . for anyone who wants to talk about locking people up, we can start with "two of Chris Christie's 'loyal lieutenants' who were taken down by Section 666 of Title 18 of the United States Code," who now "each theoretically face 20 years in prison (although nothing close to that will be imposed)."

  • Caitlin MacNeal: With the End in Sight, Trump Goes All In on Criminalizing Hillary Clinton

  • John Nichols: Republicans Won't Stop Talking About Impeaching Clinton: Specifically, Sen. Ron Johnson, likely to be defeated in his reelection bid in Wisconsin. But that's only one example.

  • Amir Oren: Comey's Revenge: The Real Reason the FBI Intervened in the Campaign:

    The large spoke [Comey] put into the Hillary Clinton's wheels of victory won't be enough to stop her but could well reduce her coattails enough to keep the Democrats from regaining control of Congress, leaving Washington paralyzed by the warring branches of government. His motive was a personal grudge that Comey has held against Bill Clinton for a decade and a half, along with fresh residue from the investigation he closed this summer against Hillary.

    Oren dates that grudge from Bill Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich and Pinchas Green, financiers who "fled the country as they were about to be indicted for tax evasion and doing business with Iran during the hostage crisis," but who found advocates in Israel's government. But Oren also points out that Comey is a Republican, a deputy attorney general under Bush, but he supported Obama's nomination of Eric Holder as attorney general, and was himself nominated by Obama to be FBI director.

    Also: Yochi Dreazen: The anti-Clinton insurgency at the FBI, explained.

  • Daniel Politi: Key to Trump's More Disciplined Campaign? He No Longer Controls His Twitter Account:

    Although Trump may be keeping some of his thoughts away from the public spotlight, the Times also paints a scary picture of a candidate who is obsessed with getting revenge from those he feels have wronged him. "Offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a 'super PAC' with vengeance as its core mission," notes the Times.

    The Times piece: Inside Donald Trump's Last Stand: An Anxious Nominee Seeks Assurance.

  • John Quiggin: Trump voters are (mostly) Romney voters: Who in turn were mostly Bush voters:

    Trump is getting overwhelming support from self-described Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and almost none from Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. The same was true for Romney four years ago, and for Bush before him. [ . . . ]

    This makes nonsense of much of the discussion of Trump voters as the dispossessed, protesting against globalisation, predatory capitalism and the destruction of American manufacturing. Conversely, it turns out that the discussion of Romney's "dog whistle" appeals to racism was misconceived. Replacing the dog whistle with a bullhorn has turned out to be no problem for the great majority of those who voted for Romney. [ . . . ]

    Corey [Robin] here at CT and elsewhere has probably been the most consistent exponent of the view that Trump is a traditional Republican, in the line of Goldwater and Reagan. I broadly agree, though I'd put more stress on new developments over the past 20 years or so. Trump's complete disregard for truth, norms of decency and so on, is an extrapolation of a process that's been going on for quite a while, at the popular level with Fox News, birtherism and so on and in the Republican intellectual apparatus with climate denial, zombie economics and attacks on "political correctness."

    The links are to pieces in Jacobin by Corey Robin. They're both worthwhile, but an even better title is Robin's The Conservative Movement Has No Decency. This piece, of course, is mostly about Joseph Welch's 1954 rebuke of Joe McCarthy, but ties in to Trump's denunciation of Khizr Khan after his speech at the Democratic Convention. Still, Trump's outburst wasn't isolated or even uniquely his own. Robin offers many other examples without ever mentioning the abuse conservatives have heaped on Hillary Clinton -- a subject for whole books, likely to sprawl into multiple volumes if she wins.

    Robin titled his latest thoughts on the election Viva Las Vegas! In it he includes a Brecht quote from 1942:

     . . . to present Hitler as particularly incompetent, as an aberration, a perversion, humbug, a pecuilar pathological case, while setting up other bourgeois politicians as models, models of something he has failed to attain, seems to me no way to combat Hitler.

  • Joe Romm: Trump just proposed ending all federal clean energy development

  • Alexis Sottile: The Trump Effect: How Hateful Rhetoric Is Affecting America's Children: Solar, wind, efficiency, batteries, clean cars, and climate science, too.

  • Matt Taibbi: The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump:

    The best argument for a Clinton presidency is that she's virtually guaranteed to be a capable steward of the status quo, at a time of relative stability and safety. There are criticisms to make of Hillary Clinton, but the grid isn't going to collapse while she's in office, something no one can say with even mild confidence about Donald Trump.

    But nearly two-thirds of the population was unhappy with the direction of the country entering the general-election season, and nothing has been more associated with the political inside than the Clinton name. [ . . . ]

    The "scandal" of the Wiki papers, if you can call it that, is that it captured how at ease Clinton was talking to bankers and industrialists about the options for the organization of a global society. Even in transcript form, it's hard not to realize that the people in these rooms are all stakeholders in this vast historical transformation.

    Left out of the discussion over the years have been people like Trump's voters, who coincidentally took the first hit along the way in the form of lowered middle-class wages and benefits. They were also never told that things they cared about, like their national identity as Americans, were to have diluted meaning in the more borderless future.

    This is why the "basket of deplorables" comment rankled so badly. It's not like it was anywhere near as demeaning or vicious as any of 10,000 Trump insults. But it spoke to a factual disconnnect.

  • Matthew Yglesias: The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign

  • Matthew Yglesias: Melania's illegal immigration problem reminds us what Trump's campaign has always been about: OK, now we have proof that she entered the country to work illegally. American nativists should be up in arms: isn't a big part of their spiel how we shouldn't offer amnesty to people who don't follow the rules? Yet if they're so devoted to deep American roots, why are they backing a guy who has only one native-born American ancestor? Unless it matters what kind of immigrants we're talking about?

    Indeed, going back to when the Nixon administration sued Trump for discriminating against black and Latino tenants, Trump's long record of racism isn't really disputable.

    So there's really nothing so surprising about the Melania story. Trump doesn't like immigrants who change the American cultural and ethnic mix in a way he finds threatening and neither do his fans. Europeans like Melania (or before her, Ivana) are fine. I get it, David Duke gets it, the frog meme people get it, everyone gets it.

    But it does raise the question of why mainstream press coverage has spent so much time pretending not to get it. Why have we been treated to so many lectures about the "populist appeal" of a man running on regressive tax cuts and financial deregulation and the "economic anxiety" of his fans?

PS: Just shook up by a 5.3 earthquake centered 3 miles west of Cushing, Oklahoma. Fairly sharp for about 15 second here, unsettled for another 20-30 seconds, but I doubt we suffered any damage. On the other hand, Cushing bills itself as the "pipeline capital" of America, so they have a lot of dangerously fragile infrastructure real close to the epicenter. Happened at 7:44:25 local time.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Realizing I wasn't going to find much time, I started this early in the week, and added things when I noticed them without making much in the way of a systematic search. Since my last Weekend Roundup, much as happened, including a debate of the vice-president candidates (which failed to convince me that Tim Kaine was the smart choice), a second presidential debate (which further cemented Trump's decline), and major exposés of both candidates' dirty laundry (where Trump's smelled much fouler).

At the moment, FiveThirtyEight gives Hillary a 86.2% chance of winning based on a 6.5% popular vote advantage, with Arizona tilting slightly toward Hillary (51.0%), and progressively better odds in Iowa (62.1%), Ohio (64.8%), North Carolina (69.2%), Nevada (74.4%), Florida (74.5%), and New Hampshire (the state which for most of this election was the one that would secure an electoral college win for either candidate, now 83.7% for Hillary). Trump still looks to be solid elsewhere, although a third party candidate named Evan McMullin is polling well enough in Utah that he's given a chance of picking up the state's electoral votes (Trump's chances there are 92.7%, Clinton 4.6%, so that could leave McMullin with 2.7%). Trump's weakest leads are currently: Alaska (68.4%), Georgia (73.7%), Missouri (77.8%), South Dakota (81.2%), South Carolina (83.6%), Texas (86.1%), Indiana (86.2%), Kansas (87.3%), and Montana (87.4%).

I work out much of the logic under the Christgau link below, but to cut to the chase, I plan on voting for Hillary Clinton in November, and urge you to do so too. More importantly, I plan on voting for Democrats down ballot (even though the ones in Kansas running against Moran and Pompeo have less chance than Gary Johnson does), and hope for big gains for the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere -- in many ways that's even more important than the presidency. One thing I was especially struck by this past week was interviews with Moran and Pompeo where they casually referred to "the disaster of the Obama administration." Do these guys have any fucking idea what they're talking about? Or do they just mean Obama's been bad for them personally, like by cutting into their graft and perks? Sure, Obama has been disappointing, but mostly because he's been crippled by Republicans -- who clearly live in their own fantasy world these days.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Russell Berman: What Bill Clinton Meant When He Called Obamacare 'Crazy': Actually, there's nothing in his specific critique that couldn't be fixed by rejiggering the subsidy tables to help people with a bit more income than the current schedules allow -- but that also rewards the insurance companies for pushing premiums up. The other approach that is commonly talked about is trying to drive premiums back down by providing a non-profit "public option" to compete with the private insurers. What was really crazy about Obamacare was thinking that you could solve the problem of a growing number of uninsured people while keeping the profits of all the parts of the industry propped up, and that problem isn't going to be countered until you find a way to blunt or eliminate those profit-seeking opportunities. And the truth is that the private insurance racket, which could easily be obsoleted by a single-payer system, is just the tip of that iceberg. We may not be as far away from coming to that realization as many pundits think -- in large part because we have the examples of so many other countries that have figured that out and made health care a public service and a universal right.

    On the other hand, just because Obamacare is crazy doesn't mean it wasn't a big improvement over the previous system. And while is hasn't succeeded in making sure everyone is insured, it reversed a longstanding trend that was stripping health insurance from millions of Americans. The Republicans never had an answer to that problem, and while they conceivably could make good on their promise to repeal Obamacare, they have no clue how to fix it. Berman talks a bit about various tinkerings that might help a bit -- the sort of things that Hillary Clinton is likely to push for. Still, I take Bill's "crazy" comment as good news: mostly, it shows he's moved beyond his own even lousier 1990s health care scheme.

  • Robert Christgau: Confessions of a Hillary Supporter: 'It's Not Like We Can Breathe Easy': Returns to the Voice with a political screed, much of it rehashing Nader's role in Gore's fateful 2000 loss to Bush, as well as his still snippy attitude toward Sanders:

    I know, you can't stand [Trump] either. For you, Hillary is the hard part. . . . Hillary lacks daring as well as grace, and from Libya to Honduras, her instinct in foreign policy has always been to fetishize "democracy" in an obtusely formalistic way. But she has a long personal history of doing good for people, an unmatched grasp of policy, thousands of exploitable relationships, and a platform where Sanders taught her plenty about the expanding limits of what's progressive and what's politic.

    • Best part of the piece is his recounting past efforts to dive into the political weeds and call on voters. He urges you to do the same this year: "we don't just want to win -- we want to win so big across the board that Clinton will feel obliged to activate her platform and that Trump's racist, xenophobic chauvinism will seem a perilous tack even to the saner Republicans who are right now scheming to deliver the U.S. to Big Capital in 2020."

    I don't want to relitigate Nader in 2000, but I find it odd that Christgau singles out Lieberman as the reason he voted for Nader over Gore. I've never been a Lieberman fan, but I don't think I gave Gore's VP pick any thought at the time. It was only later, after Sharon came to power in Israel and put an end to the Oslo Peace Process, and after 9/11 and Bush launched his Crusade (aka Global War on Terror) that Lieberman transformed into a conspicuously monstrous hawk. I don't doubt that he had long harbored that stance, just as I don't doubt that he had always been in the pocket of the insurance industry, but it's not like Gore saw those things as problems. I suspected that Gore would have tilted against peace in Israel/Palestine, and I never doubted that he would have gone to war in Afghanistan and elsewhere (including Iraq) in response to 9/11. He may have done so less crudely and less carelessly than Bush did, but those were pretty low bars. It's tempting to look back on this history and think that Gore would have avoided the many mistakes that Bush committed, but the whole DLC pitch in the 1990s (which Gore was as much a part of as Clinton) was to cut into the Republican alignment with oligarchy by showing that the Democrats could be even better for business, and they picked up a lot of conservative baggage along the way. That was Gore in 2000, and while we certainly underestimated how bad Bush would turn out, that was a pretty good reason to back Nader in 2000.

    On the other hand, I now think that Nader made a major mistake running as a third party candidate in 2000 (and 2004). We would have been much better served had he ran in primaries as a Democrat. He wouldn't have come close to beating Gore, but he would have been able to mobilize a larger protest vote, and he would have drawn the discussion (and maybe the party platform) toward the left. But then we don't get to choose our options, just choose among them. What persuaded me to give up interest in third party efforts was the fact that even in 2000, even with no campaign visibility, Gore outpolled Nader in Kansas by a factor of ten: 37.2-3.4%. I realized then that the people we wanted to appeal to were stuck in the Democratic Party. Sometimes part of that appeal means you have to vote for a poor excuse for a Democrat.

    The Nation recently ran a pair of articles on Stein vs. Clinton: Kshama Sawant: Don't Waste Your Vote on the Corporate Agenda -- Vote for Jill Stein and the Greens, and Joshua Holland: Your Vote for Jill Stein Is a Wasted Vote. I don't care for the thinking behind either of these articles, but only one has a clue what "waste" means and it isn't Sawant. If you want your vote to be effective, you should vote either for or against one of the two leading candidates, and it really doesn't make any difference whether you're positive or negative, just so you can tell the difference. On the other hand, sure, vote for a third party candidate if the following is the case: you can't distinguish a difference you really care about, and both leading candidates are objectionable on something you really do care about.

    Sawant may well be right if the one issue you really care about is "the corporate agenda" -- assuming you can define that in terms where Trump and Clinton are interchangeable, which I'm not sure you can do. (For instance, Trump wants less regulation of corporations but Clinton sometimes wants more; Trump wants the rich to pay less in taxes but Clinton wants the rich to pay more; Clinton favors a higher minimum wage but Trump doesn't.) But personally, I don't see "the corporate agenda" (or its more conceptual proxy, "capitalism") as something to get bent out of shape about. I don't have a problem with corporations as long as they are well regulated and we have countervailing mechanisms to balance off problems like inequality. Clinton doesn't go as far in that direction as I'd like, and she's much to comfy in the company of billionaires, but Trump is a billionaire (one of the worst of the breed), and he clearly has no concern for the vast majority of Americans. I can think of several issues I am so deeply concerned about that I might base a decision on them: war is a big one, racism another, inequality all-pervasive, and environmental degradation. Trump is clearly unacceptable on all four accounts (as is the political party for which he stands). Clinton is clearly better on all of those except war, and she's probably more temperate and sensible there than Trump is. Perhaps if Stein ran a campaign specifically against war and empire I might find her candidacy more compelling, but "corporate agenda" doesn't do the trick.

    Sawant's other argument is that you can only build an alternative to "the corporate agenda" by staying outside of the Democratic Party. I don't see that working for three reasons: almost all of the people who might be sympathetic are already invested as Democrats (and more all the time are being driven to the Democrats by the Republicans); your separatism demonstrates a lack of solidarity, and possibly even an antipathy to the people you're supposedly trying to help; and you're denying that reform is possible within the Democratic Party, which given the existence of primaries and such would seem to be false.

    But let's throw one more argument into the mix. Voting is at best a rare and limited option, whereas there are other forms of political action that are more direct, more focused, and more viable for people who don't start with majority consensus: demonstrations, speeches, boycotts. In these cases what may matter more isn't having politicians to lead your side but having politicians willing to listen and open to persuasion, especially based on traditionally shared values. One instance that made this clear to me was when organizers who were opposed to Israeli apartheid and occupation came to Wichita and urged us to talk to our representative and senators. They pointed out how they gained a receptive audience from longtime Israel supporters like Ted Kennedy, but all we had to work with was Sam Brownback and Todd Tiahrt -- bible-thumping end-of-times Zionists who regard us less as constituents than as intractable enemies. So while it may not be possible to turn Clinton against American imperialism and militarism in principle, at least her administration will see a need to talk to us -- if she's our leader, we're her people, and that's not something I can imagine with Trump and the Republicans. (Also not something that seems likely with today's crop of third parties, which are almost anti-political and anti-social by design.)

    Some other more or less leftish opinions:

  • Fred Kaplan: How Does Obama Respond to Russia's Cyberattacks? The Obama administration has gone on record not only declaring that Russia is responsible for recent hacks apparently meant to influence US elections, but that the US will retaliate against Russia somehow. Perhaps I'm being dense, but I've never understood what constitutes cyberwarfare, let alone what the point of it is. I was hoping Kaplan, who has written a recent book on the subject, might enlighten me, but about all I've gathered from this article is that a picking a fight here is only likely to hurt everyone. As Kaplan writes:

    If the cyberconflict escalated, it would play into their strengths and our weaknesses. Again, our cyberoffensive powers are superior to theirs, as President Obama recently boasted; but our society is more vulnerable to even inferior cyberoffensives. We have bigger and better rocks to throw at other houses, but our house is made of glass that shatters more easily.

    What's implied here but rarely spelled out is that the US does everything we've accused Russia of doing, and probably does it better (or at least does it on a much more massive scale). I don't know, for instance, to what extent the US has tried to influence Russian elections, but clearly we have a long history of doing things like that, from the CIA operations in post-WWII Italy to keep the Communist Party out of power to the recent toppling of a pro-Putin government in Ukraine.

  • Daniel Politi: Kansas Terrorists Wanted Anti-Muslim Attack to End in "Bloodbath":

    They called themselves the "Crusaders" and had a clear purpose: launch an attack against Muslims that would lead to a "bloodbath." With any luck that would help spark a religious war. But their plans were thwarted as three Kansas men were arrested on Friday for planning an attack on a Garden City, Kansas apartment complex filled with Somali immigrants that is also home to a mosque. They planned to carry out the attack one day after the November election. . . .

    The complaint also notes that during one conversation Stein said that "the only fucking way this country's ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back . . . we might be too late, if they do wake up . . . I think we can get it done. But it ain't going to be nothing nice about it." At one point Stein made it clear he was ready to kill babies: "When we go on operations there's no leaving anyone behind, even if it's a one-year old, I'm serious."

    Police say they found "close to a metric ton of ammunition in Allen's residence," which is what led authorities to believe the attack could be imminent. "These individuals had the desire, the means, the capability to carry out this act of domestic terrorism," an FBI official said.

    The article notes that "There has been an incredible increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment over the past few years." The article didn't note the Donald Trump campaign, nor America's seemingly endless war in Somalia. On the latter, see Mark Mazzetti/hjeffrey Gettleman/Eric Schmidt: In Somalia, U.S. Escalates a Shadow War:

    The Pentagon has acknowledged only a small fraction of these operations. But even the information released publicly shows a marked increase this year. The Pentagon has announced 13 ground raids and airstrikes thus far in 2016 -- including three operations in September -- up from five in 2015, according to data compiled by New America, a Washington think tank. The strikes have killed about 25 civilians and 200 people suspected of being militants, the group found.

    The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, an American airstrike killed more than 150 Shabab fighters at what military officials called a "graduation ceremony," one of the single deadliest American airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.

  • Derek Thompson: No, Not Gary Johnson: It's unfortunate that the Libertarian candidate isn't as articulate about foreign policy and war someone like Ron Paul. For one thing, that might spare us some gaffes like "what is a leppo?" or "when he failed to name a single world leader in a televised town hall" (actually, he was asked for the name of a foreign leader he admired, which frankly would have stumped me -- my response would have been that it's inappropriate for US politicians to render judgment on foreign politicians, as indeed it was for Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte to defame Obama). Thompson concludes that Johnson "suffers from an Aleppo mindset, a proud lack of curiosity about foreign affairs lurking behind an attractively simplistic rejection of military interventions." It never occurred to Thompson that if you reject in principle the whole idea of military interventions, you really don't need to know a lot of detail about places hawks want to intervene in, or the trumped up causes they think they're advancing. Still, it would have been better to have smarter answers handy -- it's not like candidates can assume that pundits won't ask stupid questions.

    Thankfully, Thompson moves past his dedication to preserving the American empire to grill Johnson over issues where his muddle-headedness is more glaring, such as the role of government in the economy, increasing the contrast by comparing Johnson to Sanders:

    But on policy, the two could not be more opposite. Sanders, a democratic socialist, proposed to raise taxes by historic sums and spend hundreds of billions of dollars to nationalize health insurance and make college free. Johnson's plans are the complete reverse: He has proposed to eliminate the federal income tax code, unwind 100 years of anti-poverty and health-insurance programs, and shutter the Department of Education. His plan would almost certainly raise the cost of college for many middle-class teenagers and 20somethings who rely on federal loans and grants, and his repeal of Obamacare would immediately boot tens of thousands of them off their parents' health plans.

    Beyond his jovial demeanor and admirably passionate anti-interventionist position, Johnson puts a likable face on a deeply troubling economic policy. Scrapping the Federal Reserve while cutting federal spending by 40 percent, while eliminating federal income taxes and trying to institute a new consumption tax would have a predictable effect: It would take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy, likely triggering a recession, while shifting the burden of paying for what's left of the federal government to the poor just as unemployment started to rise, all the while shutting off any possible monetary stimulus that could provide relief to the ailing economy.

    Thompson's numbers are probably understated -- certainly the number who would lose their insurance if Obamacare is repealed would be well into the millions, and the economic collapse is probably more like trillions. But these examples do help remind us how naïve and foolish libertarian economic theory is. Still, without their crackpot notions of economic freedom libertarians would just be liberals. On the other hand, if liberals gave up the war on drugs and their defense of empire, libertarians wouldn't have a prayer of siphoning off votes, as Johnson does this year.

    For a longer critique of Johnson, see Nick Tabor: Gary Johnson's Hard-Right Record.

  • Miscellaneous election links:

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

  • Dean Baker: Apologies for Donald Trump:

    The white working class is right to feel that those in power are not acting in their interests. Of course they are not acting in the interests of the African American or Hispanic working classes either. Unfortunately, unless mainstream politicians stop doing the bidding of the wealthy, the white working class will continue to look to political figures who blame non-whites for their problems, since that will be the only answer they see.

  • Robert L Borosage: Inequality Is Still the Defining Issue of Our Time: Title is clearly right, worth repeating at every opportunity. Another way to make the case is to point out that the entire purpose of conservativism is to defend and secure the privileges of the rich and make them richer.

  • Patrick Cockburn: Talk of a No-fly Zone Distracts from Realistic Solutions for Aleppo

  • Jonathan Cohn: The Future of America Is Being Written in This Tiny Office: Long piece on Hillary Clinton's "policy team."

    When it came to formulating her own ideas, Clinton wasn't starting from scratch, obviously. But since her last run for the White House, the Democratic Party had undergone a minor metamorphosis -- and in ways that didn't seem like a natural fit for Clinton, at least as she was perceived by most voters. The progressive wing was clearly ascendant, with groups like Occupy Wall Street and Fight For 15 harnessing populist anger at the financial system, and Black Lives Matter turning an unrelenting spotlight on racial injustice. Minority voters had come to represent a larger proportion of both the party and the population, giving Democrats an electoral-college advantage whose influence was still unclear when Obama ran for office. And there was another trend at work -- one that was less obvious, but no less important: In just a few years, the Democratic elite had quietly gone through a once-in-a-generation shift on economic thinking.

  • Thomas Geoghegan: 3 Ways Hillary Clinton Can Inspire Americans Without a College Degree: Lots of good ideas here, like "co-determination" (giving workers a vote on corporate boards). Third point lumps a bunch of good things into one:

    Third, unlike Trump, Hillary can promise to use the welfare state to make us more competitive. How? Consider what would happen if we expanded Social Security. If we get more workers over age 65 to retire, instead of hanging on because they lack a decent private pension, we could employ more middle-aged and young workers now sitting at home, or promote them sooner. We need the government to assume more of the private sector's "non-wage" labor costs. There are yet other examples where the welfare state could make us more competitive: Expand Medicare to workers between ages 55 and 65, so employers can stop avoiding payment for working people who have higher skills. Or have a fair federal system of worker compensation, instead of states' using it to bid against each other. Or have the federal government offer to take over state Medicaid in those states that promise to use the savings for public education and worker training. And isn't publicly funded childcare a way of ensuring that we use human capital more efficiently instead of trapping highly educated women at home?

  • Mark Mazzetti/Ben Hubbard: Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition: The new power in Saudi Arabia is 31-year-old Prince bin Salman, seen here as extravagant and reckless, especially with his war in Yemen which has lately dragged the US into missile exchanges.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israel's Stern Gang Mailed Letter Bomb to White House, President Truman: In 1947, when LEHI was commanded by future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

  • Cass R Sunstein: Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds: Tries to pick out books that liberals can take seriously, as opposed to, say, the partisan paranoid crap published by Regnery. The books are:

    1. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed
    2. Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation
    3. Casey Mulligan, Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform
    4. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
    5. Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes

    The Scalia book came out in 1997, when he still had a reputation as a serious (albeit flawed) thinker, as opposed to the partisan crank you remember him as. Scott and Ellickson would seem to be libertarians, perhaps even anarchists. Haidt's book is a respectful probe into how conservatives think (I bought a copy, but haven't read it.) Mulligan complains that Obamacare disincentivizes work, and as such is a drag on GDP. That makes sense but doesn't strike me as such a bad thing. Moreover, it's not like there aren't any countervaling incentives to work (though it doesn't help that so many jobs suck).

  • Matthew Yglesias: This is the best book to help you understand the wild 2016 campaign: The book is Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, and it's a depressing slog if you've ever fancied the idea that rational arguments based on real interests might persuade voters to choose candidates and parties that actually advance those interests. One argument, for instance, is that party allegiance is based on some unknowably primordial force (probably identity), and that people pick up the views of their party rather than the other way around. Another is that fluctuations in voting results are due to factors beyond any party's control, ranging from economic performance to the shark attacks and football games. I'm not sure how much of this I buy, let alone care about. One of the problems with the social sciences is that every piece of insight they reveal about anonymous behavior becomes a lever for manipulation by some interest group. That's one reason why when I was majoring in sociology, I spent virtually all of my efforts trying to expose how research incorporates biases, and thereby to increase the doubt that findings could be usurped. That's also a reason why I quit sociology. Also why I have no interest in reading this particular book, or any of the other books on how voters think -- books that I'm sure both parties (if not necessarily both presidential candidates) have been diligently studying for whatever tricks they can find.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Weekend Roundup

I don't plan on watching Monday's first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I'm not someone still trying to figure out where I stand on those two, and I can't conceive of anything either might say that might make a difference to me -- although I do harbor a fear that Hillary might come off as so hawkish she makes Trump look sane (at least relatively, for the moment). Besides, if I did watch, I'd probably be preoccupied with trying to figure out how each nuance and tick affects other folks' views -- you know, the people who don't know enough to know any better. I'm still haunted by that 1984 debate where Walter Mondale ran circles around Ronald Reagan -- the most one-sided debate I ever saw, yet 32 years later the only thing other people remember about it was Reagan's quip about not holding his opponent's "youth and inexperience" against him. Reagan won in a landslide that year -- one of the stupidest decisions the American people ever made (and there's plenty of competition for that title).

Besides, I'll read plenty about it. And I'll probably tune in Steven Colbert's after-debate Late Show. Meanwhile, no comments on the political links below. The current 538 odds favor Clinton at 57.5%, popular vote 46.7-44.8%, the electoral college teetering on Colorado, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania -- those currently favor Clinton (62.7%, 63.0%, 68.2%) but Trump can win by tipping any one of those three (or Wisconsin or Michigan). The "chances" exaggerate much smaller percentage edges (D+ 2.2%, 2.7%, 3.1%), but all three (and the election) would remain Democratic if the votes were equal (on the other hand, Trump is less than 2.0% ahead in Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio).

Some scattered links this week:

  • Natalie Nougaryède: The devastation of Syria will be Obama's legacy: I don't agree with this piece, but want to quote a couple paragraphs as examples of the flawed thinking that surrounds this horrific and tragic war. First:

    There have long been two takes on Syria. One is the geopolitical realism line, which Barack Obama has chosen to follow largely because it fits with his reluctance to get involved in another war. The line is that US or western security interests are not at stake in an intractable, far-flung civil war that can more easily be contained than solved. The other is the moral imperative line that Power has repeatedly advocated within the administration. It refers to the doctrine of "responsibility to protect," according to which a state's sovereignty can be violated when a regime slaughters its own citizens.

    It's always a conundrum when you limit the options to two choices that are both flat-out wrong. The problem with "geopolitical realism" isn't that "western security interests are not at stake." It's that the US doesn't know what its true interests are, because the US has stumbled blindly through seventy years of blunders in the Middle East based on three faulty precepts: what seems like good opportunities for a few dozen multinational corporations, a set of heuristics that like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and a growing conviction that the only way the US can act abroad is through military force (which has its own institutional interests, ranging from budget to political influence but mostly focused on preserving its air of omnipotence).

    There can be no doubt that "geopolitical realism" has contributed to the devastation of Syria, but that fault goes back way before the civil war started. The US missed an opportunity in 1951 to broker a peace treaty between Syria and Israel which would have settled the border and committed Syria to absorb a large number of Palestinian refugees. When that Syrian missive failed, a series of coups led to Assad seizing power, and turning to the Soviet Union for arms to defend against Israel (which after many border skirmishes snatched the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967). Through those long years the US came to reflexively think of Assad as an enemy (despite Syrian support for the US in the 1990 Gulf War against Iraq), so when the Arab Spring protests broke out, Obama didn't hesitate to offer his opinion that "Assad should go" -- implicitly aligning the US with Assad's jihadi opposition (more explicitly backed by US "allies" Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE -- monarchies set up by British imperialism and maintained by global business interests). By now "realists" are split on Syria, with some recognizing that nothing the US has done so far has worked in any tangible way to further "American interests," while others (blending into the delusional "neocons") see that same failure as undermining America's true interest, which is projecting power so demonstrably that the rest of the world is humbled into submission.

    One problem that "geopolitical realists" have is that they pride themselves on their unsentimental rejection of anything that smacks of idealism -- notably democracy, free speech, human rights, equality, economic justice -- so they unflinchingly embrace some of the world's most greedy and cruel regimes. However, this lack of principle makes it possible for "humanitarian interventionists" like Power -- the author's second group -- to shame them into acts of war (better described as "crimes against humanity"). It's hard to encapsulate everything that's wrong with Power's analysis in a single paragraph -- one could fill a whole book, which in Power's honor should be titled A Solution From Hell.

    The very phrase "responsibility to protect" is shot full with puzzling nuances, but at a practical level, the US Military is not designed to protect anyone. Its purpose is to intimidate, a bluff which is backed up by extraordinary killing power and the logistics to project that force anywhere. But once it's engaged, the army is hard-pressed even to protect itself. (A typical tactic is whenever an IED goes off they shoot indiscriminately in a full circle, just in case there are any innocent bystanders.) In short, they "protect" by killing, or as one Army officer put it, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." As Rumsfeld put it, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." At least in the short term, US intervention in Syria would kill more people and destroy more property. Given all the evidence we have in recent years, there is no way to paint this as "responsibility to protect."

    As for the longer term, it's also pretty clear that the US isn't any good at setting up stable, representative governments to move forward. Part of this is that the US, whether representing tangible (business) or ideological (neocon) interests, can't help but choose sides and favor some at the expense of others, who will inevitably view their losses as unjust. Part is that once you've invested blood and treasure to conquer a country, you inevitably feel like you're entitled to some reward -- not least gratitude from the people you "saved" (at least those still alive, living in the wreckage of your bombs and shells).

    The other paragraph I wanted to quote:

    A key problem with the ceasefire deal was the plan to set up a US-Russia "joint implementation centre" to coordinate strikes against Islamic State. This was meant as an incentive, as Putin had long sought to be accepted as a coalition partner alongside the United States. But if implemented, such a coalition could make the US complicit in Russian airstrikes, which have been designed to strengthen Assad. The US would endorse a Russian intervention premised on the notion that there are only two actors in Syria: Assad and the jihadis.

    The key problem with the "ceasefire deal" is that it didn't require all sides to stop firing. Carving out an exemption for the US and Russia to bomb IS not only gave the latter no reason to join in, it set up a debilitating round of excuses: almost immediately the US bombed Assad forces mistaking them for ISIS, then Russia bombed a UN convoy, perhaps thinking the same. (For more on this, see Patrick Cockburn: Russia and US Provide a Lesson in Propaganda Over Syrian Ceasefire.)

    Nougaryède then draws two conclusions. One is to blame Obama not so much for Syria as for letting Russia show up American power ("Putin is celebrated by populists around the world for having outmanoeuvred the US by pulling himself up to the ranks of a leader whose cooperation is almost begged for"). The other is to regurgitate Power's story of how Clinton (having belatedly realized that Bosnia "had become a cancer on our foreign policy and on his administration's leadership") "ordered targeted strikes on Serbian forces, which forced Slobodan Milosevic to the negotiating table" -- a fable of the magic of US intervention that never stood a chance in Syria.

  • David Hearst: Sisi is a dead man walking: Presents a pretty grim picture of Egypt under the post-coup leadership of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi:

    Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's rule has indeed become torture and suffering for Egypt.

    He has lurched from one promise to another, each one a glittering bauble dangled over a credulous and fearful nation. The first was the untold billions that Egypt would continue to get from the Gulf states who bankrolled his military coup. He boasted to his aides that their money was so plentiful it was "like rice," a judgment that now looks dated after the collapse in the price of oil and the Yemen war. He burnt his way through up to $50bn of their cash, loans and oil guarantees. [ . . . ]

    Now salvation comes, we are told, in the form of a $12bn IMF loan. For Egypt's currency market, its more life support than loan. In July, foreign reserves dropped to their lowest level in 16 months, Bloomberg reported, and constitute only three months of imports. There is no such thing as a free IMF loan. They are expected to demand a devaluation of the Egyptian pound, phasing out of subsidies, and the imposition of VAT, reforms much talked about, but never implemented. The only salaries Sisi has raised are those of the army, police and judges. As it is, spending on public wages, salaries, subsidies and servicing debts represent 80 percent of the budget. This leaves little room for cuts. The only option is to squeeze more out of those who cannot afford to pay. [ . . . ]

    The truth is that Sisi is failing despite the overwhelming financial and military support of the Gulf and the West. Confidence in him as a leader is imploding. His remaining weapons are paranoia and nationalist fear. The question then is not whether Sisi can fight on through the miasma of doubt which now surrounds him. Most people already know the answer to that. The real question is how long has he got.

    The article concludes with a list of possible successors, mostly by coup. Meanwhile, al-Sisi and Donald Trump have been saying nice things about one another. See Cristiano Lima: Trump praises Egypt's al-Sisi: 'He's a fantastic guy'. Trump's fondness for authoritarian leaders has often been noted -- most often Russia's popularly elected Vladimir Putin, but al-Sisi is a real dictator, one who seized power by force to end Egypt's brief experiment with democracy, who outlawed his opponents and killed "thousands of dissidents and protestors." Trump thinks he's "a fantastic guy," but what he really likes is: "He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it." Pretty much what Trump wants to do to America.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Republican senators outraged by Wells Fargo's fraud want to eliminate the agency that uncovered it: More important this year than deciding who will be the next Commander in Chief is the more basic political decision whether we'll expose the country to ever more blatant forms of predatory business behavior, or whether we'll cling onto the modest levels of regulation that still provide some degree of protection for consumers and the environment.

    A funny thing happened in the United States Senate today, as a chorus of cross-party agreement broke out during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on revelations that Wells Fargo employees created hundreds of thousands of fraudulent bank accounts and credit cards in order to meet company targets for cross-selling new products to existing customers. The targets were extremely aggressive -- so aggressive that they couldn't actually be met -- so thousands of employees responded by faking it.

    Wells Fargo is paying $185 million in fines and fired more than 5,000 rank-and-file employees, but so far nothing has been done to personally punish the high-level executives who reap the rewards when the company performs well.

    Senators today weren't having it, with banker scourge Elizabeth Warren telling Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf that he ought to resign and face personal investigation. [ . . . ] But it featured a surprising level of bipartisan agreement, with committee chair Richard Shelby, a hard-right Alabama Republican, accusing Stumpf in his opening statement of personally fostering "a corporate culture that drove company 'team members' to fraudulently open millions of accounts using their customers' funds and personal information without their permission." [ . . . ]

    But even while Republicans are outraged by Wells Fargo's wrongdoing, all the Republican senators who spoke against the bank at today's hearing have gone on record at various times in calling for the full repeal of President Obama's financial regulation law -- which would mean eliminating the agency that uncovered the wrongdoing and levied the biggest fines.

    Several big things started happening in the 1980s. One is that major steps were taken to reduce regulation of many industries, which allowed some businesses to play fast and loose with their ethics. Another is that marginal tax rates on the wealthy were reduced, which gave business owners more incentive to make money any way they could. The result was, as I said many times at the time, that America's fastest growth industry became fraud. That didn't end late in the decade when the Savings & Loan banks blew up. At most, they took a little breather before the stock market bubble of the 1990s burst to reveal star companies like Enron as built on little but fraud. Then there was another bubble in the mid-2000s, which like the others burst to reveal even more fraudulent activity, this time infecting the entire financial sector. So now we have thirty-some years of experience showing that deregulation and tax breaks lead to nothing more than ever more destructive episodes of fraud -- as well as inequality, inequity, austerity, poverty, and hardship -- but the only remedy Republicans can imagine is more deregulation and more tax breaks. They're so pathetic you'd think Democrats would make an issue of this.

    For some more in-depth reading: Alana Semuels: Finance Is Ruining America. For example:

    But as GE Capital was making money, GE was laying off staff, outsourcing jobs, and shifting more costs onto employees. Welch laid off 100,000 in five years and cut research-and-development spending as a percentage of sales by half, according to Foroohar. GE closed an Indiana refrigerator plant and relocated some of the production of models to Mexico. It cut 2,500 jobs in a turbine division to save $1 billion. In 2007, it shuttered a 1.4 million-square-foot plant in Bridgeport that had once, in the heyday of American manufacturing, made clocks, fans, radios, washing machines, and vacuums, and employed thousands of people. In short, investors were getting wealthy, but working class-people weren't sharing the rewards. Instead, they were losing their jobs.

    "The stereotype of what finance is supposed to do is take the income of savers and channel that to productive investments," Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, told me. "That's not what finance does now. A lot of finance goes in the opposite direction, where essentially they are taking money out of productive corporations and sending it back to investors."

  • Emma Green: Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel? In one of his "lame duck" acts, Obama signed a Memorandum of Understanding stating that the US will give Israel $38 billion over the next ten years, "an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007." Most (or maybe all) of this is for arms, pretty much the last thing Israel actually needs. One plus is that all the money comes back to Americans arms merchants (under the old agreement Israel could spend about one-quarter of the grants on their own industry) so one could look at this as an American jobs program -- indeed, Obama's record-setting arms sales have been the only sort of jobs program Congress has allowed him. Not much analysis of why. Support for Israel is eroding, especially among young Democrats, and foreign aid for anyone has never been popular. Still, in Washington lining up to pay homage to Israel is still the safe choice -- heavily lobbied for, scarcely lobbied against.

    Also see Nathan Thrall: Obama & Palestine: The Last Chance, briefly reviewing how little Obama accomplished in two terms, or how easily Netanyahu has manage to deflect Obama's spineless ambivalence. Still, most of the article is about something minor Obama could still hope to pull off:

    This leaves only one option that isn't seen as unrealistic, unpalatable, or insignificant: to set down the guidelines or "parameters" of a peace agreement -- on the four core issues of borders, security, refugees, and Jerusalem -- in a US-supported UN Security Council resolution. Once passed, with US support, these Security Council-endorsed parameters would become international law, binding, in theory, on all future presidents and peace brokers.

    Top US officials see a parameters resolution as Obama's only chance at a lasting, positive legacy, one that history might even one day show to have been more important to peace than the achievements of his predecessors. Once Kerry's efforts extinguished the administration's last hopes of an agreement on their watch, a parameters resolution became their brass ring; since then, Israel-Palestine policy has largely been at a standstill in Washington and capitals throughout Europe, hanging on the question of whether Obama will decide to grab it.

    If he doesn't grab it, and that's the bet I'd put my money on, all he'll have to show for eight years of trying to reconcile Israel and the Palestinians is a record-smashing arms deal -- munitions Israel has used for a series of murderous assaults on Gaza "on his watch."

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates: What O.J. Simpson Means to Me: I did my best to avoid the murder case news when it happened, viewing the grotesque public focus with celebrity as just another of those ways television perverts our sense of reality. I had followed the NFL back in his day, watched him emerge on television and in advertising, thinking him a little bland but likable enough, while not even curious about his personal life. I do remember that during the trial my mother -- not a racist but also not someone who felt any qualms about voting for George Wallace -- thought he couldn't possibly be guilty. I did get a refresher course in watching the FX drama series (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, although I bailed out midway through the documentary O.J.: Made in America). That the story has resurfaced in such a big way this year says something about the heightened consciousness now of how fallible the justice system remains -- not that it continues as it's always been, but old stories have a way of becoming new again. Coates has much on the complex racial dynamics surrounding Simpson, but the following stands out:

    How many black men had the LAPD arrested and convicted under a similarly lax application of standards? "If you can railroad O.J. Simpson with his millions of dollars and his dream team of legal experts," the activist Danny Bakewell told an assembled crowd in L.A. after the Fuhrman tapes were made public, "we know what you can do to the average African American and other decent citizens in this country."

    The claim was prophetic. Four years after Simpson was acquitted, an elite antigang unit of the LAPD's Rampart division was implicated in a campaign of terror that ranged from torture and planting evidence to drug theft and bank robbery -- "the worst corruption scandal in LAPD history," according to the Los Angeles Times. The city was forced to vacate more than 100 convictions and pay out $78 million in settlements.

    The Simpson jury, as it turned out, understood the LAPD all too well. And its conclusions about the department's inept handling of evidence were confirmed not long after the trial, when the city's crime lab was overhauled. "If your mission is to sweep the streets of bad people . . . and you can't prosecute them successfully because you're incompetent," Mike Williamson, a retired LAPD officer, remarked years later about the trial, "you've defeated your primary mission."

    Also see Rob Sheffield: What 'O.J.: Made in America' Says About America Right Now, where he notes, "The O.J. trial is a nightmare America has kept having about itself for decades." That may be giving America too much credit. Sheffield also wrote about American Crime Story.

  • Miscellaneous election links:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Weekend Roundup

Mostly writing this today because I have various tabs opened to possibly interesting articles, and it's only a matter of time before my antiquated browser crashes. Better, I think, to note them briefly than to lose them forever.

I wrote some on the campaign horserace a couple days ago (see Looks Like She Blew It), and nothing much has changed on that front -- TPM still has Trump ahead by 0.1%, but 538 shows Clinton with slightly better chance of winning (61.3%, up from 60.0%). So she may still pull this out, but if she does she'll still wind up with the lowest share of popular vote since 1992, when someone else named Clinton won.

Some scattered links this week:

  • David Dayen: How Democrats Can Overcome Their Self-Defeating Cynicism: By "pushing actual policies"? Dayen proposes adding a "public option" to Obamacare as a good place to start. That's actually fairly non-controversial, at least with mainstream Democrats. It was part of the original ACA, and was dropped mostly because the bill couldn't be passed without 60 votes in the Senate, and a couple of them were willing to wreck the whole thing to spare private insurance companies from competition. He notes that Sen. Jeff Merkley (Oregon) has a resolution backed by 27 other senators, and that Obama and Clinton favor it. As for "cynicism" the more apposite term Dayen uses is "defensive crouch" (although if you want an example of cynicism, there's the attempt to bundle gun control on top of the rather arbitrary, putatively anti-terror, "no fly list").

    In their defensive crouch, Democrats have forgotten to explain why they consider it important that "no family have the American dream ripped out from under them because they can't afford medical care," as Merkley said on the call. They forget to explain why health care ought to be a right for every American, not a privilege only available to those who can buy it at a high price.

    This was actually the logic of the Sanders campaign, and a reason for its unlikely success. Contrary to the political science pros, it was his ideas, and more to the point his willingness to say them, that animated his candidacy. It also pushed Clinton to outline a bolder agenda than she might have been comfortable with in Sanders's absence. When the Democratic primary pitted ideas against one another, rather than amplifying criticisms, it let Americans know what Democrats stand for.

    The bloodless technocracy that has ruled the Democratic Party has forgotten how to inspire the body politic. After riding a wave of enthusiasm to power in 2008, the last couple midterms and even Obama's 2012 campaign were nervy exercises in protecting the tentative gains Democrats had made -- and seemed half-embarrassed by. Democrats too often define themselves by who they oppose rather than their own principles. Not only is this self-defeating for a party that promises activist government, it makes governing itself harder down the road.

    Of course, it's not just the emergence of a bit of political backbone that's bringing the public option back into play. It's also that the insurance companies have been conspiring to prevent the competition that the ACA promised from eating into their profits -- most egregiously by trying to merge the four largest private health insurers into two companies (the first mergers I'm aware of the Obama administration actually opposing). Even short of that they're cutting back on plan availability, so many Americans will have no choices.

  • Eric Lichtblau: Hate Crimes Against American Muslims Most Since Post-9/11 Era: "up 78 percent over the course of 2015. Attacks on those perceived as Arab rose even more sharply. . . . That was the most since the record 481 documented hate crimes against Muslims in 2001, when the Sept. 11 attacks set off waves of crimes targeting Muslims and Middle Easterners, Mr. Levin said. The huge increase last year was also the biggest annual rise since 2001, he said." It's tempting to blame this on Trump, whose anti-Muslim positions are based on and seem to legitimize more blatant threats: "A number of experts in hate crimes said they were concerned that Mr. Trump's vitriol may have legitimized threatening or even violent conduct by a small fringe of his supporters. In a few cases, people accused of hate crimes against Muslims and others have even cited Mr. Trump." On the other hand, it's impossible to go to war against a people for fifteen years and not engender hatred -- something Bush and Obama have worked hard to cap because it so subverts their war aims, although Obama had a big disadvantage in that those most inclined to hate Muslims started off by hating him.

  • Derek Thompson: America's Monopoly Problem: As I noted above, the Obama administration has done a remarkably poor record of maintaining competitiveness within supposedly free markets, scarcely even bothering to use the rather antiquated antitrust laws that are still on the books. Those laws, dating to the 1880s, targeted absolute monopolies where a single company sought to gain complete control of a market. While such combines are still a threat, the bigger problem now is what we might call consensual monopoly blocks, where two or three large companies effectively divvy up a market, crowding out competitors and focusing more on growing their profit margins than cutting into one another's market share. The net effect looks like this:

    In the past few decades, however, the economy has come to resemble something more like a stagnant pool. Entrepreneurship, as measured by the rate of new-business formation, has declined in each decade since the 1970s, and adults under 35 (a/k/a Millennials) are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation on record.

    This decline in dynamism has coincided with the rise of extraordinarily large and profitable firms that look discomfortingly like the monopolies and oligopolies of the 19th century. American strip malls and yellow pages used to brim with new small businesses. But today, in a lot where several mom-and-pop shops might once have opened, Walmart spawns another superstore. In almost every sector of the economy -- including manufacturing, construction, retail, and the entire service sector -- the big companies are getting bigger. The share of all businesses that are new firms, meanwhile, has fallen by 50 percent since 1978. According to the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank dedicated to advancing the ideals of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, "markets are now more concentrated and less competitive than at any point since the Gilded Age."

    Even where there are entrepreneurs, as in high-tech, their typical business plans focus on building companies to the point where they be sold profitably to larger companies. For instance, have any of the biotech startups that were spun up in the 1990s not been sold off to pharmaceutical giants? Much of this is driven by financial firms, who can overpay for a startup knowing that it's worth more as part of a monopolistic conglommerate. Joseph Stiglitz cites monopoly rents as a major source of increasing inequality, and this is what he means. A big part of the reason inequality is spiraling out of control is that government, influenced (as you well know) by those profiting from monopoly rents, has abdicated its responsibility to ensure that markets are free, open, transparent, and therefore efficient. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this issue, so this piece is one you need to read.

  • Maggie Koerth-Baker: How the Oil and Gas Industry Awakened Oklahoma's Sleeping Fault Lines: The first recorded earthquake in Oklahoma occurred in 1882, before the first oil well was drilled in 1897. This piece has a map of the known fault lines crossing Oklahoma, and they are numerous, especially in the southeast corner of the state, home of what's left of the Ouchita Mountains (high point 2681 feet above sea level). Still, earthquakes remained rare until less than a decade ago, rising to more than 900 earthquakes (3.0 or stronger) in 2014 -- the most of any state in the nation. As another map shows, those earthquakes are located not where most of the faults are, but rather in the north-central part of the state: relatively flat prairie west of the Arkansas River, bisected by the Canadian River. This has been oil country since way before I was born -- indeed, the main tourist attractions in Ponca City are tours of the mansions of pioneering oil barons. The yields of those oil wells have long been declining -- a chart here shows that Oklahoma pumps up five barrels of wastewater for every barrel of oil (or equivalent natural gas, at this point 80% of Oklahoma's hydrocarbon production). That would have been uneconomical back when oil was cheap, but the high prices of the Bush years urged marginal producers to invest in injection wells -- there are now more than 4000 across the state -- as they seek to slurp up the last of their remaining oil. (By contrast, the water/fuel ratio in the newer fields of North Dakota is currently running just slightly above 1/1.) The injected wastewater, along with techniques like fracking, may help increase oil production, but it also lubricates often unseen faults, which then slip to produce earthquakes. The largest to date, a 5.8 centered between Pawnee and Ponca City, was felt as far away as Omaha and Austin. Here in Wichita, about 110 miles away, it woke us up as the house shook for nearly a minute. I've been following this story since it started to break -- oil geology is one of those subjects I read for pleasure -- and this is one of the better pieces on it. So now, in addition to anthropogenic climate change, the oil industry has brought us anthropogenic earthquakes. You'd think they'd be the least bit embarrassed, but even before they proved to be so ingenious at creating "natural" disasters, their sudden riches spawned many of America's most reactionary political entrepreneurs, from H.L. Hunt to the Kochs to Dick Cheney. The biggest mistake this country ever made was letting individuals own the nation's mineral resources.

  • Miscellaneous election links:

    • Charles V Bagli: A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks: How to get ahead by starting there. Of course, Trump isn't the only businessman who taken advantage of "what he calls the pay-to-play culture of politics and a 'rigged' system of government." Pretty much everyone does it, a relationship so symbiotic neither side dares question it even though practically everyone else thinks it stinks to high hell. Long article with lots of details, mostly on New York real estate.

    • John Cassidy: Does Donald Trump Pay Any Income Taxes at All? Well, if he doesn't, that would be one reason he might have for withholding his tax returns. Cassidy quotes James Stewart: "No one should be surprised, though, if Donald J. Trump has paid far less -- perhaps even zero federal income tax in some years. Indeed, that's the expectation of numerous real estate and tax professionals I've interviewed in recent weeks." That just reflects the numerous loopholes that benefit real estate developers, just part of a crooked system. Also quotes David Cay Johnston, who "pointed out that Trump paid no income tax in 1978, 1979, 1992, and 1994" and "several times received a type of tax rebate that is restricted to property owners who report taxable income of less than half a million dollars."

      Also by Cassidy: Birtherism, Bombs, and Donald Trump's Weekend.

    • Russel Berman: Hillary Clinton Has a Lot of Money: She raised $143 million in August, and seems to have been more concerned with raking in contributions than with winning over voters. The good news there is that $81 million goes to the DNC and state parties. How successful she is as president depends on how successful the Democratic Party is in state and local elections, especially for Congress -- a point that neither her husband nor Obama learned as president. Still, she lost ground in the polls while catering to wealthy donors. We'll see if she can use their money to turn the election around.

    • Amy Davidson: Clinton's Sick Days: At least she got some help to make up for her down time -- from Obama, his wife, Biden, her husband. Still, Davidson's best line was parenthetical: "(Why, at this stage, her schedule includes so many travel-intensive fund-raisers, when she is suffering from a shortage not of funds but of voter rapport, is one of many side questions that her illness raised.)"

    • David A Graham: Just Why Does Hillary Clinton Want to Be President? First thought on seeing this is that it reminded me of the unhealthy obsession the press in 2000 had with Gore's supposed obsession with running for president, suggesting that if he failed he might as well kill himself because his whole life would have been wasted. In point of fact, after he lost he got a job as a venture capitalist, he got rid of his wife, he wrote a book that wasn't about himself, he made a movie about global warming, he won an Oscar for the movie, he won a Nobel Prize. If he was so obsessed with becoming president, why did he never run again? He's 68 now, but he's still a few months younger than Hillary Clinton. So I don't have much interest in psychological speculation about "what makes Hillary run?" -- I would, however, find a credible explanation for Trump interesting. Or maybe just amusing.

      Then there's Clare Foran: The Curse of Hillary Clinton's Ambition. Foran catches a lot of flying innuendo in her net, and seems willing to give credence to all of it. She quotes one "man" as saying, "This has been her entire life's work, it seems like, has been building up to this moment, so she doesn't have any shots left." Just like Gore in 2000, except she's even more of a crone. Foran adds, "But some voters also seem to distrust Clinton because they believe she wants to win at any cost." This is a journalist? She wouldn't have to search very hard to find Trump supporters who see that very same trait in their man and admire him for it.

    • Harry Enten: Why Clinton's Electoral Map Isn't as Good as Obama's: Had Obama and Romney received the same number of votes (basically, by moving 3.9% from D to R in every state), Obama would still have been elected president by the electoral college. The map this year looks to me to be much the same, but Enten argues that it has shifted in such a way that Trump has "a better shot of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote (at 6.1 percent) than Clinton (1.5 percent)." Of course, there's a chart, showing that 11 of 14 battleground states have "moved right relative to the country" --Iowa and Nevada enough to switch sides. Part of this is that Clinton is leading Obama in some states she'll still lose (Enten mentions Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming). But I also suspect part of this is that they're comparing Clinton's current polls to Obama's actual votes, so they haven't yet factored in the intense battleground state "ground game."

    • Todd S Purdum: What's Really Ailing Hillary: "A long time ago, Clinton was far more transparent, emotional and open than she is today. Then the media began slamming her -- and didn't stop."

    • Matt Taibbi: Stop Whining About 'False Balance': Mostly this is a rant about the overwhelming banality (not to mention stupidity) of the mass media, arguing that those are worse problems than bias which knowledgeable people can see through anyway. Also points out:

      The irony is, the Clinton Foundation thing is a rare example of an important story that is getting anything like the requisite attention. The nexus of elite connections that sits behind tales like Bill Clinton taking $1.5 million in speaking fees from a Swiss bank (and foundation donor) while that same bank is seeking relief from Hillary Clinton's State Department is exactly the kind of thing that requires the scrutiny of reporters.

      Yeah, sort of, but those reporters are often so wrapped up in their preconceived notions they wind up shilling for campaign narratives that don't clarify anything.

    • Brian Mittendorf: Clinton charities 101: What do they actual do and where does their money go? Fair amount of detail here on the structure and organization of Clinton's various foundations/charities. Much less on the direct involvement of the Clintons: they put some money in at one end, but that's dwarfed by money raised from others; they put their name out, which is both used for raising money and for whatever "good works" the Foundation ultimately does. Clearly, they must benefit somehow, if only in good will. The benefits to other donors are unclear, which is perhaps inevitable, and certainly open to suspicion. I've never been a fan of foundations, which even at best seem like arbitrary penance for lives of avarice and shoddy providers of social goods, but given the inequities of the present I also doubt that any of this would be suspect but for Hillary running for president, once again making her the target of people much more greedy and careless than herself.

    • Heather Digby Parton: The general of gossip: Colin Powell's leaked emails depict a juvenile busybody rather than an elder statesman: how devious of him to talk Hillary into using that private email server!

      Colin Powell has a long history of being in the middle of scandals and wriggling out of any responsibility for them. From his involvement in the My Lai massacre, to Iran Contra, to personally blocking President Bill Clinton's promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, to his infamous testimony before the UN that led to the Iraq war, Powell's fingerprints are on the wrong side of history and the truth time and again and he's always got some excuse as to why it wasn't his fault.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted:

  • 'Hunting of Hillary' Author on Clinton Conspiracies and Conservative Attacks: Interview with Joe Conason, who has a new book on what Bill Clinton's been up to since leaving the White House: Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, following up on his 2001 book The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton. He's a reliable fan, eager to point out all the good the Clintons have done, as well as how shabbily they've been treated by that vast right-wing conspiracy thing.

  • Patrick Cockburn: The US and Russia Have Less Influence in Syria Than They Think: True, no doubt, as it's often the case that in what you think of as a proxy war the tail winds up wagging the dog. Russia can bring Assad a cease fire but getting his forces to stick with it has never been easy. And the US doesn't even have the luxury of backing a significant force on the ground. Rather, they have multiple enemies, making it possible to inadvertently help one at the expense of the other. Cockburn offers a good example here: the US misidentified a target as ISIS and bombed it, killing at least 62 Syrian soldiers, after which ISIS was able to capture the territory the US had cleared out.

  • Atul Gawande: Overkill: On how "an avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially." This is an old story, something whole books have been written on -- Shannon Brownlee's 2007 book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer is probably the classic -- but the author adds his usual insights and nostrums. He could be more explicit that the core cause is the focus on profits that turns it all into such a tug of war.

  • Greg Grandin: The Free-Marketeers Take Over in Brazil -- and the US Applauds:

    The Obama administration was less confrontational than its predecessor, but no less ideological in its preference for Latin America's free-marketeers. . . . But with a new round of economic shock therapy being applied in Latin America, Washington is preparing for the inevitable "social explosions" the way it does best: According to the Washington Office on Latin America, the Pentagon has, since 2007, tripled its special-ops training in the region.

  • Fred Kaplan: China Won't Stop Kim Jong-un. The US Must Stand Up to Both of Them: "Sanctions won't work. We can't destroy his nukes. We can rattle a few sabers, however." Really, very disappointing piece. We should remind Kim that if the North invades the South, even having some sort of "nuclear umbrella," we'll come to South Korea's defense and annihilate North Korea. Really? You think he somehow doesn't understand that already? You think rattling sabers will make him less touchy? Less defensive? Less desperate? What should happen is that the US needs to focus less on muscling North Korea around and more on figuring out a sane posture which would allow both Koreas and the US to coexist without threats. Once the US is willing to live with North Korea -- to formally end the 1950 war, to normalize relations, to open trade, to proportionately dial back military readiness -- we can worry about getting China, Japan, the South, and everyone else to buy in.

  • Mike Konczal: These Policies Could Move America Toward a Universal Basic Income: Three "simple policies": children's allowance, $12-an-hour minimum wage, 12 weeks' paid medical leave and 2 weeks' paid annual leave.

  • Peter Van Buren: Class of 2017 -- So Sorry!: Subtitle: "Apologizing to My Daughter for the Last 15 Years of War."

    Terrorism is a nearly nonexistent danger for Americans. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning, but fear doesn't work that way. There's no 24/7 coverage of global lightning strikes or "if you see something, say something" signs that encourage you to report thunderstorms. So I felt no need to apologize for lightning.

    But terrorism? I really wanted to tell my daughter just how sorry I was that she would have to live in what 9/11 transformed into the most frightened country on Earth.

    Want the numbers? Some 40% of Americans believe the country is more vulnerable to terrorism than it was just after September 11, 2001 -- the highest percentage ever.

    But there is one difference between terrorism and lightning, which is that much terrorism can be prevented by eliminating the motivations. Both before and after 9/11 the US became a target by targeting the Middle East with injustice and violence.

    I read the introduction to Ira Katznelson's big book on the 1930s, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, where he makes the point that FDR's famous line "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" was aimed to preserve democracy, which at the time was under attack from fearmongers who insisted we needed a strongman to run the country, Il Duce in Italy and Der Führer in Germany. Fear continues to be a potent cloak for the right. For example, see Daniel Politi: Trump Tells Crowd "Bomb" Went Off in New York, Proceeds to Brag About Polls. Trump quote: "We better get very tough, folks. We better get very, very tough."

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