Weekend Roundup [200 - 209]

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Weekend Roundup

When I woke up this morning, I didn't have the slightest notion that today was the 15th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda hijackings that brought down the World Trade Center. It's not that I don't remember waking up in a Brooklyn apartment fifteen years ago, looking out the window to see blue skies with a toxic white streak across the middle, emanating from the still-standing towers. I looked down and watched tired people trekking east with the subway system shut down. We watched the towers fall on TV. We saw interviews with John Major and Shimon Peres about how Americans now know what terrorism feels like, barely containing their gloating. We went out for lunch in an Arab restaurant not yet covered in American flags. That was a bad day, but also one of the last days before we went to war. For make no mistake: Bin Laden may have wanted to provoke the US into an act of war, but Al-Qaeda didn't start the war. That was George W. Bush, with the nearly unanimous support of Congress, to the celebration of vast swathes of American media. They made a very rash and stupid decision back then, and much of the world has been suffering for it ever since. Indeed, Americans less than many other people, as was shown by my ability to wake up this morning without thinking of the date.

OK, so this is a typical day's news cycle in this election: Hillary Clinton commits a run-of-the-mill gaffe: Clinton Describes Half of Trump Supporters as 'Basket of Deplorables', by which she means "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it." Sort of true, but you're always on shaky ground when you start making generalizations about arbitrary groups of people, but that didn't stop her from making an appeal to the other half: "people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures . . . Those are people who we have to understand and empathize with as well." Of course, coming from her that all sounds smug and condescending and, let's be realistic here, pretty hollow.

Of course, the Trump campaign tried to make what they could of this, partly because they don't have anything real to offer. Still, what did they focus on: well, putting people into baskets, of course. First, there was Pence Blasts Clinton: Trump Backers 'Are Not a Basket of Anything', then there's Trump Campaign Goes After Clinton for 'Basket of Deplorables' Remark. One thing for certain, you can't slip a metaphor past these guys. But they also have a point, which is that when you start dividing people into arbitrary groups and making gross generalizations about them you dehumanize and disrespect them -- and that is as true of the "other half" as it is of the "deplorables." (Contrast Trump's own description of his supporters: "millions of amazing, hard working people.")

Of course, in the Kabuki theater of American politics, every insult demands an apology, so whether she would or should not became the next anticipated story. Josh Marshall fired off This Is Critical: Hillary Can't Back Down, arguing:

Donald Trump has not only brought haters into the mainstream, he has normalized hate for a much broader swathe of the population who were perhaps already disaffected but had their grievances and latent prejudices held in check by social norms. . . . This election has become a battle to combat the moral and civic cancer Trump has [been] injecting into the body politic. (I know that sounds like florid language but it is the only fitting and valid way to describe it.) Backing down would make Clinton appear weak, accomplish nothing of value and confuse what is actually at stake in the election.

Clinton, of course, immediately apologized; see Clinton Regrets Saying 'Half' of Trump Backers Are in 'Basket of Deplorables', where she conceded, "Last night I was 'grossly generalistic,' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' -- that was wrong." In other words, she admitted to a math error, realizing (unlike Marshall) that it doesn't matter how many Trump supporters are racist, sexist, etc. -- a point she made clear enough by repeating "deplorable" a many times in the next paragraph, all directed squarely where they belong, at Donald Trump. She also said, "I also meant what I said last night about empathy, and the very real challenges we face as a country where so many people have been left out and left behind. As I said, many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don't feel like the economy or our political system are working for them."

She still needs to find an effective way to communicate that, especially to people who are conditioned not to believe a single thing she says, who view her as deeply corrupt, part of a status quo system that is rigged against everyday people. Needless to say, these are problems that Bernie Sanders wouldn't be having.

PS: Just when Trump was enjoying this news cycle, this story pops up: Crazed Trumper Assaults Muslim Women in Brooklyn. I guess there are some Trump supporters who are . . . well, isn't "deplorable" a bit more polite than they deserve? Also note: Trump: Clinton Could 'Shoot Somebody' and Not Be Prosecuted. Trump previously said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" What's this obsession he has with shooting people?

Five-Thirty-Eight currently gives Clinton a 70.0% chance of winning, with a 3.5% edge in the popular vote and 310-227 in electoral votes. Iowa, which had a recent poll showing Trump leading, has inched back into Clinton's column, and she's less than a 60% favorite in North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, and Nevada. Meanwhile, the only red states where Trump is less than an 80% favorite are Arizona (65.7%), Georgia (73.0%), and Alaska (79.9%).

Some scattered links this week:

  • Chuck Collins: Long Live the Estate Tax: Wallace Stegner referred to the National Park Service as the nation's best idea. Collins argues that the estate tax (what Republicans like to call the "death tax") is a close second: "The estate tax is a fundamentally American notion, an absolutely democratic intervention against a drift toward plutocracy and extreme wealth imbalances." Of course, it would work better if it was stricter and stiffer -- if, for instance, the wealthy couldn't hide money in foundations. (Ever wonder why one-percenters down to the level of Bill Clinton have all those foundations? "For example, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dodged over $2.3 billion in estate taxes using a complicated trust called a GRAT to transfer $8 billion in wealth to his heirs in 2013.") Reason enough to vote against him is that Trump has made abolishing the estate tax the centerpiece of his tax agenda. After all, he has billions, and three children who have proved unable to hold a job not on his payroll. How can you not feel for them?

  • John Judis: The US Treasury should be cheering the EU Case against Apple. It's not. The basic fact of the matter is that Apple cut a deal to run its European market operation out of Ireland, which claims several thousand jobs there, in exchange for Ireland capping Apple's tax liability to 2%, way below the going tax rate anywhere in Europe. In doing so Ireland violated EU regulations which prohibit special deals with individual companies like that, so the EU wants to collect the taxes Apple has thus far avoided paying. The Obama administration is backing the guys at Apple who contributed to their poilitical campaigns -- not necessarily "quid pro quo" but the sort of chummy alliances America's system of campaign finance breeds. However, we should be happy that Apple's scam is up, because for years now they've been cooking their books to make profits that should be taxed in the US vanish into their Irish tax haven. Judis doesn't mention this, but we should also similar regulations here in the US, to keep companies from auctioning their plants and to whichever state/local government gives them the sweetest tax deal. We run into this problem all the time here, and companies have gotten so spoiled that they never invest without first shaking down the local politicians. The most notorious case was Boeing, long the largest employer in Wichita but totally gone now that they've gotten more lucrative deals in Texas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina (after, by the way, shaking down Kansas for over a billion dollars, not counting the Feds building their main plant and an Air Force Base next door).

    Dean Baker has a different approach to the same problem: The Simple Way to Crack Down on Apple's Tax Games.

  • David E Sanger/William J Broad: Obama Unlikely to Vow No First Use of Nuclear Weapons: US foreign policy is wrapped in a cloak of tone-deafness and hypocrisy as transparent yet as desperately clung to as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. By not disavowing first use of nuclear weapons, Obama is practicing exactly the same nuclear blackmail that American fears used as excuses for invading Iraq and sanctioning Iran and North Korea. America's foreign policy mandarins are incapable of seeing themselves as others see us.

    The United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in 1945 -- the only example in history of a first use, or any use, of nuclear weapons in warfare. Almost every president since Harry S. Truman has made it clear that nuclear weapons would be used only as a last resort, so the pledge would have largely ratified unwritten policy.

    Administration officials confirmed that the question of changing the policy on first use had come up repeatedly this summer as a way for Mr. Obama to show that his commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American strategy -- and thus the risk of nuclear exchanges -- was more than rhetorical.

    But the arguments in front of the president himself were relatively brief, officials said, apparently because so many senior aides objected. Mr. [Ashton] Carter argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, could interpret a promise of no first use as a sign of American weakness, even though that was not the intent.

    Of course, Putin and Kim could just as well view "no first use" as a sign of sanity, one that encourages the notion that they might resolve their differences with the US through rational dialogue instead of macho posturing. But the "madman theory" has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy since Nixon, and no subsequent American emperor wants to be viewed as less crazed. It is, after all, a theory of self defense that has been proved to work against subway muggers. What further proof of its efficacy do you need?

    By the way, Obama is missing a nice political play here. If he made "no first use" official policy -- he should also end the current "launch under attack" policy and adopt some sort of checklist where key subordinates can veto a presidential decision to use nuclear arms -- Trump would throw a fit and vow to reverse Obama's policies, revealing himself as a dangerous maniac. Sounds like win-win to me.

  • Matt Taibbi: How Donald Trump Lost His Mojo: It's that teleprompter:

    The primary-season Donald Trump would never have been able to remember five things. Even more revealing is his rhetorical dismount: "But these examples," he shouts, "are only the tip of the Clinton-corruption iceberg!"

    The real Donald Trump does not speak in metaphors, let alone un-mixed ones. The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla ("China - money - bad!").

    The funny thing is despite "losing his mojo" Trump's poll numbers have actually inched up. This is mostly because the "Clinton = corrupt" meme isn't something most people can dismiss out of hand -- unlike, say, his "what do you have to lose?" pitch to African-Americans, a people who through supporting politicians unlike Trump have escaped from slavery, Jim Crow laws, and ad hoc lynching. But it also helps that Trump set the bar so low all he has to do to "look presidential" is read from a teleprompter -- indeed, he's becoming almost Reaganesque.

  • Miscellaneous election links:

    • Katherine Krueger: NYT Scrambles to Rewrite Botched Story on Trump's Immigration Speech: Evidently the New York Times decided to get a jump on Trump's Phoenix "immigration speech" and report what they expected (or wanted) to hear: they "hailed Trump's address as 'an audacious attempt' to transform his image and reported that he shelved his proposal for a massive effort to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally." Of course, the actual speech baldly reiterated Trump's previous hard-line stands, suggesting that the rumors of a "softening" were nothing more than hype for the speech.

    • Annie Rees: In NYT's Hillary Clinton Coverage, An Obsession With 'Clouds' and 'Shadows': Not sure whether this is just blatant anti-Clinton prejudice or just really hackneyed writing -- Adam Nagourney, who made it to the round-of-four in Matt Taibbi's 2004 Wimblehack, was one of the writers called out here, as was Maureen Dowd. But casting every rumor as a "shadow" suggests an explanation as to why Clinton is continually dogged by "scandals" that never seem to afflict other politicians.

    • Paul Krugman: Hillary Clinton Gets Gored: Given a choice between reporting on a Trump scandal or a Clinton scandal, much of the press jumps at the latter, even though time and again there's been virtually nothing to it. Same for "lies." And as for innuendo, why tar Hillary as a self-seeking, egomaniacal greedhead when she's running against Donald Trump? Krugman's seen this kind of media bias before, in 2000:

      You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration -- an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

      Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore -- whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate -- as slippery and dishonest.

      Of course, there are big differences between Bush and Trump, just not important ones. Bush at least worked hard to conceal his agenda, describing his conservatism as "compassionate" and disavowing any efforts at "nation building." Indeed, many of the programs he got passed were clever cons, like "no child left behind." On the other hand, Trump makes so little effort to gloss over the sheer meanness of his policy bullet points that many people can't imagine how awful life under him would be. He's like the Douglas Adams concept of the SEP ("someone else's problem," a thing so hideous the only way you can cope is to pretend it doesn't exist). Or the mantra of a guy I used to work with: "if you can't dazzle them with logic, baffle them with bullshit."

    • Paul Krugman cited this piece, adding:

      Matt Lauer may have done us all a favor with his catastrophically bad performance. By devoting so much time to emails and rushing through Clinton on ISIS, on one side, while letting Trump's Iraq lie slide by unchallenged, on the other, Lauer offered a demonstration of the prevailing double standard so graphic that it was hard to ignore. But it wasn't just Lauer: I think the accumulation of really bad examples, of failing to cover the Bondi bribe, of making an unsuccessful request for passports -- to rescue imprisoned journalists! -- a supposed scandal, even some of the botched initial reaction to the Lauer debacle, may have finally reached a critical mass.

      Maybe I'm just cynical, but I doubt that collective embarrassment has had any effect on how the media covers Trump and Clinton. More likely is that when Clinton surged so far ahead, they feared they might lose their horse race coverage so tried to even things up. Now that the race is more even they be having second thoughts. I mean, they can't be so stupid they want Trump to win?

    • Paul Waldman: Trump's history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one? Without reading the article, I'm tempted to say it's the same reason prostitutes are more likely to be busted than Johns. Or that we expect our politicians to be selfless public servants, while we expect our businessmen to be voracious wolves, whose greed is part of their charm. Still, markets for influence, like sex, only exist because there are both buyers and sellers. The article includes the usual list of Trump's scandalous behavior. It's hard to tell whether he's exceptionally vile or just par for the course, because we don't usually look that closely at how the rich got on top. Otherwise we might have second thoughts about what kind of people they are.

    • Michelle Goldberg: Why Isn't It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes? Well, there are so many "big deals" about Trump that they all sort of diminish proportionately, if not in some objective measure of import at least in our ability to get worked up about them. "Perhaps the involvement of a disgraced sexual sadist is low on the list of things that are wrong with the Trump campaign. That's not a reason to ignore it."

    • Jamelle Bouie: What Trump's Black Church Appearance Is Really About: "A leaked script reveals his intended audience: white Republicans."

    • Peter Beinart: Fear of a Female President: This makes me wonder how a more overtly racist Republican would have fared against Obama -- at least with Trump we can't say that prejudice isn't getting its chance:

      Why is this relevant to Hillary Clinton? It's relevant because the Americans who dislike her most are those who most fear emasculation. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Americans who "completely agree" that society is becoming "too soft and feminine" were more than four times as likely to have a "very unfavorable" view of Clinton as those who "completely disagree." And the presidential-primary candidate whose supporters were most likely to believe that America is becoming feminized -- more likely by double digits than supporters of Ted Cruz -- was Donald Trump.

      The gender backlash against Clinton's candidacy may not defeat her. But neither is it likely to subside if she wins.

      Indeed, one might argue that America has become more overtly racist after two terms of a black president, and that a female president is likely to produce a similar backlash. I doubt that will be true in the long run. Right now it seems to mostly be the result of the right-wing media, which deliberately or not has encouraged blind partisan hatred among small numbers already so inclined. On the other hand, maybe having a candidate as repugnant as Trump will discredit such backlash.

    • Adam Davidson: Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax: "A few of Donald Trump's claims about the labor force might generously be considered gross exaggerations, but the unemployment numbers he cites appear to be wholesale inventions." The latest in a series that include Eyal Press: Immigration and Crime, and David Remnick's Introducing a New Series: Trump and the Truth.

    • Steve Chapman: The worst case for Republicans: Donald Trump wins: Well, sure. For example, when Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, Republicans could forget about him practically forever instead of having to live with his legacy, as the Democrats did with Lyndon Johnson's stupid war. But the people who nominated him didn't disappear: they kept coming back in other guises, supporting Reagan, Bush, some even Trump (e.g., Phyllis Schlafly, who died last week at 92). Orthodox conservatives, through their donor network, think tanks, and media outlets, thought they had the Republican Party in their pocket before Trump roused their sheepish followers to revolt. If Trump loses they figure they'll resume control, their own dysfunctional ideology still untested so not yet discredited. On the other hand, if Trump wins, he'll turn their dream agenda into a flaming disaster, either by rejecting it or by implementing it (hard to know which would be worse for them). On the other hand, one could write pretty much the same piece about the Democrats. If Clinton loses (to Trump no less!) the dynasty is finished, the enemy becomes crystal clear, and the Democrats sweep Congress in 2018, which frankly I find a lot more exciting than slogging through eight years of an ineffective, powerless Hillary Clinton as president saddled with Republicans in control of Congress, holding the whole country hostage.

    • Zaid Jilani/Alex Emmons/Naomi LaChance: Hillary Clinton's National Security Advisers Are a "Who's Who" of the Warfare State: Despite which, they are on average markedly saner than Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn.

    • Andrew Kaczynski/Christopher Massie: Trump Claims He Didn't Support Libya Intervention -- But He Did, on Video: Makes me wonder if there has ever been an instance when the hawks tried to lure the US into a foreign war that Trump didn't buy into? What makes Trump so representative of today's Republican Party is how readily he falls for any crazy scam the party's propagandists put out. He isn't any sort of leader because that would require independent, critical thought. He's a follower, and you never know who's yanking his chain, or where they're dragging him.

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

    • Patrick Cockburn: Turkey May Be Overplaying Its Hand with Syria Ground Offensive: One side-effect of the failed coup in Turkey is that it's allowed Erdogan to purge the army not only of plotters but of officers who might resist his designs on Syria. Hence, Turkey has escalated its interference with Syria, like the United States choosing to fight both Assad and Assad's enemies, although not necessarily the same anti-Assad forces the US is schizophrenically warring. As usual, Turkey's primary consideration is their own domestic Kurdish problem, which their warmaking is only likely to exacerbate. And as usual, the US is too caught up in weighing pluses and minuses to confront a nominal ally on the principle of the thing, or what blowback it's likely to cause.

    • Tom Engelhardt: A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington's 15-Year Air War: "Perhaps this September 11th, it's finally time for Americans to begin to focus on our endless air war in the Greater Middle East, our very own disastrous Fifteen Years' War. Otherwise, the first explosions from the Thirty Years' version of the same will be on the horizon before we know it in a world possibly more destabilized and terrorizing than we can at present imagine."

    • Robert Fares: The Price of Solar Is Declining to Unprecedented Lows: "Despite already low costs, the installed price of solar bell by 5 to 12 percent in 2015." Indeed, it's been doing that pretty regularly, as is clear from the chart (2010-15). Furthermore, there is no reason to think this trend won't continue for decades. The result will be that solar will take an ever larger chunk of the energy market, diminishing the demand for fossil fuels. Another consequence is that oil and coal companies will become even more desperate to exercise political power to hang on to their declining market shares and stock prices -- indeed, Trump's emphatic support for coal companies seems to be their final great white hope. Political influence may nudge the trend a bit up or down, but it won't change it. The article sees a "tipping point where [solar] becomes more economical than conventional forms of electricity generation."

    • Rebecca Gordon: Making Sense of Trump and His National Security State Critics: Background on many of those 50 prominent Republicans who signed a letter declaring Trump unfit to be president, by a writer who's been studying them and their friends for years, researching her book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.

    • Corey Robin: Phyllis Schlafly, 1924-2016: I suppose if I wanted to read anything on the late, "longtime conservative anti-feminist," I'd start with the author of The Reactionary Mind. Just not ready to yet.

    • Ron Unz: Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s? Uh, yes, specifically in July 1961. James Galbraith, who has written about this before, adds a comment here that President Kennedy "would have never considered accepting the nuclear strike plan presented to him" and that Lyndon Johnson later held as "a first consideration . . . to prevent any situation from arising -- in Vietnam especially -- that might force the use of nuclear weapons." Of course, neither nor any subsequent US president has publicly disavowed first use of nuclear weapons -- evidently preferring to keep possible enemies wondering whether or not we're really insane.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, August 28, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Not very happy with all that follows, let alone all that I haven't gotten to, but it looks like there's enough to chew on for now. Latest odds at 538 show Clinton as having slipped to a 80.9% chance of winning as Georgia and Arizona have tilted back in Trump's favor. Clinton's big problem is that she's still unable to crack 50% of the popular vote -- seems like an awfully flawed, weak candidate given that all she has to beat is Trump, and he's pretty handily beating himself. I suspect the media deserves much of the blame for normalizing and legitimizing Trump, and also for tarring Clinton with an endless series of silly scandals -- the biggest eye-opener for me was to discover that GW Bush's Foundation, even with no prospects of future dynasty, has been raking in even more money than the Clinton Foundation. While I don't doubt the corruption inherent in the latter, I find it curious that no one ever mentions the former. Matt Taibbi attacked the media this year in a piece called The Summer of the Shill, lamenting especially the partisanship of news channels like Fox and MSNBC, where one airs nothing but Hillary "scandals" and the other little but Trump "gaffes." Still, it's not clear to me that the quality has dropped much since Taibbi wrote up his brilliant Wimblehack series in 2004 (cf. his book Spanking the Monkey), and at least there's more parity now. Still, I guess you have to make do with the candidates you got.

    Some scattered links this week:

    • Michelle Goldberg: Hillary Clinton's Alt-Right Speech Isolated and Destroyed Donald Trump: Trump's hiring of Steve Bannon has brought the "alt-right" brand to the mainstream media's attention, making it possible for centrists to draw a line between Trump and run-of-the-mill conservatives, neocons, and/or Republicans -- letting the latter off the hook if they can somehow see clear to cut themselves loose from Trump.

      But the killer in Hillary came out on Thursday, delivering a devastating indictment of Donald Trump's associations with the far-right fringe, one meant to permanently delegitimize him among decent people. "A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military," she said, daring Republican officials to disagree.

      With Trump already trailing badly in most polls, Clinton could have tried to yoke him to the Republican Party so he would drag it down with him. Instead, she sought to isolate and personally destroy him.

      Let me interject here that I would much prefer that she "yoke him," since I personally find mainstream Republican apparatchiks even more odious than fringe personalities like Trump, and since her ability to do anything positive as president depends on beating the Republicans down in both houses of Congress. Continuing:

      First came her campaign's Twitter video earlier today about Trump's white-supremacist admirers. Usually, a politician trying to link her opponent to the KKK would come dangerously close to the Godwin's Law line, but Clinton appears to have calculated that few Republicans would rally to their nominee's defense. Her speech, in Reno, further painted Trump as a creature from the fever swamps, one who has nothing to do with legitimate conservatism. It was able to briskly explain some of the crazier figures and theories Trump has associated with, without getting bogged down in obscure detail. Her list of Breitbart headlines, including "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" and "Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement's Human Shield," tells you much of what you need to know about Trump's new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, the former head of the site.

      Given such a ripe target, Clinton's pitch can get yucky, as when she said (quoted in this article):

      Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the party to get out. . . . The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims "love America just as much as I do." . . . We need that kind of leadership again.

      Uh, no, we don't need or want that kind of leadership again, and if that were all Hillary has to offer we'd be having second thoughts about her, too. Goldberg obviously considers that a stinging rebuke to Trump (else why quote it?), and she admires the way Hillary strung so many of Trump's outrages together, without noticing that in doing so Hillary is making her move on high center ground, intent on establishing herself as the blandest, most conventional establishment candidate ever. That will probably work for her, and given her other handicaps that may be her safest route to the presidency. But in her self-conceit, she's also missing a golden opportunity to help her party and her people.

      For more, see: Lincoln Blades: Call the 'Alt-Right' Movement What It Is: Racist as Hell; Nancy LeTourneau: Quick Takes: Clinton's Speech in Reno.

    • Rochelle Gurstein: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump's Thuggery: "His refusal to prosecute torturers and his Wild West assassination of bin Laden show how moral complacency can all too easily degenerate into full-blown corruption." I would shift the focus a bit here: by failing to end America's involvement in the wars in the Middle East, and by failing to embrace a consistent doctrine of democracy and justice in the region, Obama has kept those wars and their side effects -- like Guantanamo and the plight of Syrian refugees -- central to American political discourse. So now we're forced to choose between Trump's incoherent bluster and Clinton's bumbling continuity. Still, it's flat-out wrong to say that Obama was the one responsible for laying this groundwork. He inherited that entire foundation from GW Bush, who actually was in a position where he could have ordered the military and CIA to stand down and seek justice for 9/11 through international law. He pointedly did not do that, leading to one disaster after another, many only becoming obvious after he left his mess to Obama.

    • Adam H Johnson: Pundits, Decrying the Horrors of War in Aleppo, Demand Expanded War: Nicholas Kristof, Joe Scarborough, presumably many others unnamed, but you know the types as America's punditocracy is rife with them:

      This is part of the broader problem of moral ADD afflicting our pundit class -- jumping from one outrage in urgent need of US bombs to the next, without much follow-through. Kristof, for example, was just as passionate about NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, writing several op-eds that called for bombing in equally moralistic terms. Yet as Libya descended into chaos, the country faded into the background for him. His last post on the subject? September 2011. The plight of Libyans was urgent for the Times columnist when it involved selling war to weary liberals, but once the smoke cleared, his bleeding heart dried up and he moved on to the next cause.

      OK, let's think about this for a moment. Civil Wars, such as Libya in 2011 and Syria from then to now, and you could throw in dozens more (including our own in 1861-65), occur when you have two (or more) groups fighting to seize power and to dominate the other. Civil Wars end two ways: one side "wins" exacting its toll on the others, the "losers" bearing grudges for generations, so in some sense those wars never really end -- they just become relatively quiescent; or both sides agree to share power somehow. The latter is vastly preferable -- in fact, arguably the only thing that works. (The Soviets, for instance, clearly "won" the Russian Civil War by 1922, but the repression they instituted crippled the country for generations. Franco clearly "won" the Spanish Civil War, but was troubled by Basque "terrorists" until his death, when the king he installed allowed democratic elections to move the country far to the left.)

      When outside nations intervene in civil wars, they invariably tilt the tables one way or another, allowing their favored groups to escalate the violence and making them less inclined to compromise. Intervention also resupplies the war, usually extending it, and may cause it to lap into neighboring countries and/or draw in others -- the US intervention in Vietnam's civil war extended the war by ten years, cost millions of lives, destroyed Cambodia and Laos, and led to Nixon's "madman" nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union's insertion of troops into Afghanistan to support a friendly coup led the US and Saudi Arabia to recruit and arm a jihadist insurgency that is still active more than 35 years later, having lapped into Pakistan and inspired acts of terror around the globe.

      One thing that has made recent civil wars in the Middle East especially destructive is that opposition groups have often been fractured and divisive. We saw this in Afghanistan, where following the Soviet withdrawal the jihadist groups continued to fight each other for over a decade, with the Northern Alliance still holding territory from the Taliban when the US invaded in 2001. Again, in Libya the NATO intervention degraded forces loyal to Ghadaffi but left the spoils to be fought over by numerous clans and schisms. Syria is even worse, with dozens of anti-Assad groups unable to unite into a coherent opposition, not least because foreign powers have chosen to intervent in often contradictory ways. For instance, the US is funneling weapons to so-called moderate groups to fight against Assad (weapons that are quickly resold to less friendly groups) while at the same time the US bombs ISIS, perhaps the most formidable of the anti-Assad groups. Turkey too is opposed to Assad, also to ISIS, and even more so to the anti-Assad, anti-ISIS Kurdish militia.

      Recent calls by Kristof and others mostly focus on "establishing a no-fly zone" over Syria -- a tactic which short and shallow memories recall as working so well in Iraq and Libya -- although the task is rather more complicated in Syria. For one thing, would the US also guard against anti-Assad forces flying over Syria (not just NATO allies but also Turkey, Jordan, and Israel). Moreover, Syria's air force is augmented by Russian planes and pilots, and those forces at least occasionally attack ISIS. I don't see how the US can negotiate this, but even if it works you're left with something like Libya but many times as much firepower left on the ground, with Assad weakened to where he cannot win but no other group strong enough to prevail except locally. A subsequent ground assault on ISIS might break it up, with splinters retreating into Iraq or going underground -- but the idea that an Islamic caliphate is needed to save the Muslim world isn't going away anytime soon.

      Seems like it would be easier to negotiate a truce, if not between the local warlords then between the foreign powers, and much better for all in the long run. I could even imagine a military intervention helping here, but only if it was done by a neutral party with the sole interest of disarming all parties, with preference or malice toward none (even ISIS, even Assad, even everyone) -- by disarming I'm not just talking about the big stuff like mortars and RPGs; I'm talking about total NRA nightmare. As areas are cleared of arms, another international group can move in and organize local elections and aid. Over time this would lead to a loose federalism, but most power would remain local and representative. Both the military and the international group would have to rigorously police themselves against corruption, and function with the scrutiny of a free press. No foreign power would have any claim to local property or privilege. All foreign powers have to agree to let Syria manage itself, except for three restrictions: no guns; corruption to be prosecuted in international courts; and prisoners have the right to appeal to insure no discrimination against minorities (needless to say, this also means no capital punishment).

      It should be obvious that the US cannot intervene like this -- it's simply not in the military or political culture to go into a country and not pursue some probably misguided sense of national interests (usually the military's own interest, above all in their own survival). One indication of the problem is that when the US had the opportunity to stand up governments in Afghanistan and Iraq -- two countries with distinct local ethnic and religious communities with longstanding grudges -- US politicians insisted on setting up very centralized governments that would inevitably run up against local dissent, and to arm those governments against the people they may or may not represent. That immediately labeled the natives put into nominal positions of power as Quislings and made the Americans foreign occupiers. That proved disastrous yet the US never wavered from that model: it simply kept training and arming more police and buying friends through calculated corruption, and that, too, never worked, no matter how much "hearts and minds" gibberish was added.

      The best choice for the ground disarmament force is probably the Chinese because they have no hidden agenda -- indeed, they would have to be well-paid mercenaries, barred from plunder -- supplemented by Arabic speakers (also hired from abroad so they have no clan ties). The ground force can be supplemented by US and Russian surveillance and air power which can be called in to pulverize any armed resistance to the ground troops. They would, of course, commit the occasional atrocity -- that is what they do, and why they should be feared. But they won't attack anyone who is not firing back, and should vanish as areas are disarmed.

      The international relief groups should be organized by the UN. Once they organize local governments, they should step back and function as resources for those governments. They may initially depend on ground forces for security, but as security is met the ground forces should move on and out of the country. Border control will probably be their last role, as, alas, the rest of the neighborhood is awash in guns and corruption.

      Americans need to realize that their true national interest is in a peaceful world where all people are respected and treated fairly. This isn't a new idea -- Franklin Roosevelt sketched it out in his "Four Freedoms" speech, and it was the basis for the United Nations, but it got lost in America's post-WWII pursuit of profit and empire. But for now the United States military is only good at one thing: killing. Better to focus that skill set on other people killing than to give the military missions it cannot possibly fulfill, like "winning hearts and minds" and projecting US power as anything other than the terror it is. Of course, better still to set an example and stop the killing altogether. Until we learn better the one thing the US shouldn't be doing is entering into wars. Of course, if we knew better we wouldn't be doing it anyway.

    • Paul Krugman: No, Donald Trump, America Isn't a Hellhole:

      Back when the Trump campaign was ostensibly about the loss of middle-class jobs, it was at least pretending to be about a real issue: Employment in manufacturing really is way down; real wages of blue-collar workers have fallen. You could say that Trumpism isn't the answer (it isn't), but not that the issue was a figment of the candidate's imagination.

      But when Mr. Trump portrays America's cities as hellholes of runaway crime and social collapse, what on earth is he talking about?

      Krugman answers "race" -- indeed, for Trump's followers, all it takes to constitute a hellhole is non-white skin and/or non-American accents. Krugman explains "Trump's racial 'outreach'" as meant "to reassure squeamish whites that he isn't as racist as he seems." I think it's more like he wants to reassure whites that blacks will welcome his draconian law enforcement fantasy once they see how much safer it makes them (the "good ones," anyhow). And besides, living in the hellholes of their own skin, what do they have left to lose?

      Still, it's a pretty ridiculous pitch, but even sympathetic white people tend to underestimate how much progress blacks have made over the last 50-70 years, and therefore how much they stand to lose if white supremacists like Trump regain power. (One is tempted to credit the civil rights acts of the 1960s for those gains, but to some extent they simply codified and consolidated gains made in the early postwar era.

    • Jim Newell: Why Is the Trumpish Right Inept at Hardball Politics? Case study is "making stuff up about their opponents' health," as in claims by Rudy Giuliani and other Trumpsters that Hillary Clinton is covering up a secret debilitating illness (presumably somewhere under a blanket of traitorous emails and Clinton foundation favors). Newell spends much too much time investigating a similar line of attack used by Sen. John McCain's primary opponent, Tea Party partisan Kelli Ward, and probably not enough on everything else -- after all, didn't "the big lie" work just fine for Goebbels (although I guess it was never really tested in a general election)?

      Conservative media has been the lifeblood of Ward's campaign, and with Trump's hiring of Steve Bannon, it is in direct operational control of the Republican presidential nominee's campaign. And so crappy attacks, workshopped inside the conservative tabloid media bubble, get greenlit even if they confuse 70 percent of the electorate. Trump was able to say a lot of stupid things and get away with them in the Republican primary, but the lesson from that shouldn't have been that the idea was replicable: He was in a 17-person field, against a group of mostly undefined opponents, depriving them of oxygen. And he could at least be funny. John McCain and Hillary Clinton have total name recognition and well-known histories. It doesn't convert anyone new to suggest, sans evidence, that they're near death. It just hastens the death of the campaigns suggesting it.

    • Ben Norton: No, they don't support Trump: Smeared left-wing writers debunk the myth: "Clinton-supporting neoconservative pundit James Kirchick published an article in the Daily Beast this week titled "Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left." Norton did some checking and none of the named writers, no matter how much they loathed Hillary, supported Trump. OK, one writer -- all fifteen are quoted here, making for entertaining reading -- somename I had never heard of named Christopher Ketcham, said he would vote for Trump, who he described as "an ignorant, vicious, narcissistic, racist, capitalist scumbag, and thus an accurate representative of the United States." There have always been a tiny number of leftists who hold a romantic idea of revolution erupting as conditions deteriorate unbearably. I think those people are out of touch, especially with the people they think their revolution would help, but they're also very marginal -- "idiots," perhaps, but not useful to anyone. I'm tempted to retort that the real "useful idiots" are the neocons supporting Hillary (like Kirchik, although he's small fry compared to Max Boot and the Kagans) as they actually represent a faction with real money and clout and they give her an air of legitimacy in a domain Republicans like to think they own, but for the most part they at least are making rational choices to advance their most cherished goals -- not so much that Hillary will plunge the country into more wars than Trump but that she will more reliably parrot the neocon line, which in turn legitimizes the neocons. Kirchik, on the other hand, is merely doing what he habitually does: slandering the left, which is still America's best hope for peace.

    • Mark Oppenheimer: 'Blood in the Water,' a Gripping Account of the Attica Prison Uprising: A review of Heather Ann Thompson's new book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon) -- easily the most definitive history of the famous prison revolt, the brutal assault on the prison ordered by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and the long legal struggle that ensued. I'll also add that what made this picture so clear was the trove of documents and testimony elicited by defense lawyers, especially the late Elizabeth Fink. Also, that the one underlying theme from each step of the history -- the reason the revolt started, and the reason the state protracted the legal fight so long -- was the state's dogged refusal to grant or acknowledge even basic human rights to prisoners; in short, to see prisoners as people. Rather, the state felt free to punish prisoners virtually without limit. For more on this, including how little has changed, also see: Michael Winerip/Tom Robbins/Michael Schwirtz: Revisiting Attica Shows How New York State Failed to Fulfill Promises.

    • Scott Shane: Saudis and Extremism: 'Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters': The al-Saud clan made a deal with al-Wahhab back in the late 18th century where the latter would bless the Saudis' expansion from the Arabian Desert into the Holy Cities and the Wahhabis would control religious doctrine in the Kingdom. I'm not sure when the Saudis started proselytizing Wahhabism outside of Saudi Arabia: probably in the 1960s when they bankrolled a war with Egypt over Yemen and coincidentally adopted Egyptian Sayyid Qutb -- the subject of the first chapter of Lawrence Wright's 9/11 pre-history, The Looming Tower. [Shane dates this from 1964, when King Faisal ascended to the Saudi throne.] But the Saudis spent more in the 1970s and more still in the 1980s when the US decided that militant Islamist Jihadis would be useful against the Soviets in Afghanistan. And they've kept it up, even as virtually every Sunni terrorist you can think of traces religious doctrine back through the Saudi-Wahhabis to the medieval Salafists. As Shane explains, in the 1980s the US was completely complicit in this:

      Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the United States worked together to finance the mujahedeen in this great Afghan war, which would revive the notion of noble armed jihad for Muslims worldwide. President Ronald Reagan famously welcomed to the Oval Office a delegation of bearded "Afghan freedom fighters" whose social and theological views were hardly distinguishable from those later embraced by the Taliban.

      In fact, the United States spent $50 million from 1986 to 1992 on what was called a "jihad literacy" project -- printing books for Afghan children and adults to encourage violence against non-Muslim "infidels" like Soviet troops. A first-grade language textbook for Pashto speakers, for example, according to a study by Dana Burde, an associate professor at New York University, used "Mujahid," or fighter of jihad, as the illustration: "My brother is a Mujahid. Afghan Muslims are Mujahedeen. I do jihad together with them. Doing jihad against infidels is our duty."

      The US government still loves the Saudis: they are big business, especially to the oil, defense, and banking sectors which have so much clout over American foreign policy. On the other hand, large segments of the American public are beginning to wonder about Saudi Arabia, especially since King Salman was crowned last year and immediately attacked Yemen (with America's tacit blessing). Those segments include the Islamophobes which have been a predictable result of 15 years of American wars targeting Muslims (or 25 or 35 years, pick your starting date), but they also include, well, me: it looks to me like Saudi Arabia is the real Islamic State ISIS wants to grow up to be, the differences mostly explained by ISIS having been created in a war zone with the US, NATO, Russia, and Iran joining the attack (despite all their various differences). As Shane notes, Saudi Arabia's cleric Saad bin Nasser al-Shethri has condemned ISIS as "more infidel than Jews and Christians," but, you know, he would say that -- doing so protects the Saudi's exclusive claim to rightful jihad, but it perpetuates the Salafi habit of declaring their enemies takfir (impure, false Muslims).

      I'm afraid that the instinctive American response to ISIS is tantamount to genocide -- and it's not just the Islamophobic right that insists that ISIS must be crushed and destroyed. On the other hand, the US has proved that we can live with an Islamic State, even one that insists on dismembering or even beheading subjects it deems to be criminals, one that joins in foreign wars just to assert its religious dogma (the Saudis like to describe their opponents in Yemen as proxies of Iran, but the real problem is that they're Shiites). Of course, it helps that the Saudis have huge oil reserves and a deep appetite for American arms, but even if ISIS can never become as lucrative as Saudi Arabia, that still suggests that the US should be willing to make some sort of accommodation to ISIS, especially one established by votes as opposed to arms.

      As it is, the US insistence on destroying ISIS makes it impossible to negotiate an end to the Syrian Civil War, as does other irrational American impulses, such as simultaneous opposition to Assad. On the other hand, uncritical support for Saudi Arabia creates and deepens regional conflicts, including Syria and Yemen, in ways that have and will continue to blow back on America. The fact is that American support for Saudi jihad was never just a shortsighted policy. It was from the beginning a schizophrenic assault on world piece, order, and justice.

      For more on the Saudi assault on Yemen, see: Daniel Larison: 'The Administration Must Stop Enabling This Madness' in Yemen, and Mohamad Bazzi: Why Is the United States Abetting Saudi War Crimes in Yemen? Note how US arms sales to Saudi Arabia have continued and even increased even though Clinton is no longer in the State Department:

      On August 9, the State Department approved the latest major US weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, mainly to replace tanks that the kingdom has lost in its war in Yemen against Houthi rebels and allies of the former president. The $1.15 billion deal highlights the Obama administration's deepening involvement in the Saudi-led war, which has escalated after four months of peace talks broke down on August 6. Since then, warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition have bombed a Yemeni school, a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, and a potato-chip factory, killing more than 40 civilians, including at least 10 children.

      Also note Trita Parsi's tweet: "Fun fact: When ISIS established its school system, it adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools."

    • David Sirota/Andrew Perez: Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department: At some point I should look for a good article by a reputable investigative journalist to explain what the Clinton Foundation does and where all the money went -- looks like a big chunk went into the Clinton's own pockets (their personal income was $11.2 million last year; if memory serves about 2/3 of that came from the Foundation) which is a funny way to run a non-profit charitable institution. Actually, it looks more like a political slush fund, one that's even more free of regulation than Clinton's PAC. I wonder, for instance, whether having the ability to launder so much corporate and foreign money through the Foundation wasn't a big part of the reason virtually no other mainstream Democrats ran against Hillary for president this year.

      Sirota and Perez plumb the more obvious question, which is where the money came from and whether it maps to political favors, and they conclude that at least in the area of American arms sales to foreign countries -- something that the State Department, headed by Hillary from 2009-13, has to sign off on -- lots of things look suspicious. Clinton (and Obama) sure approved a lot of weapons deals. I suppose it's possible that Obama, like presidents going back to Truman and Eisenhower, saw foreign arms sales as a cheap, politically safe jobs program (and following the financial meltdown of 2008 Obama desperately needed one of those). Or maybe you can just chalk it up to Hillary's notorious hawkishness. None of those explanations are really very calming.

      Still, see, for instance, Kent Cooper: 16 Donors Gave $122 Million to George W. Bush Foundation, which notes among other things that Bush's Foundation raised $341 million in 2006-2011, a period that overlaps Bush's presidency. Maybe the Clintons weren't so unique in monetizing their political "service"?

      As for all those weapons sales, see: CJ Chivers: How Many Guns Did the US Lose Track of in Iraq and Afghanistan? Hundreds of Thousands. It's been absurd to listen to Trump claim that Obama and Clinton "founded ISIS," especially given that most of ISIS's guns were delivered to the region by the Bush administration. For example:

      One point is inarguable: Many of these weapons did not remain long in government possession after arriving in their respective countries. In one of many examples, a 2007 Government Accountability Office report found that 110,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 80,000 pistols bought by the United States for Iraq's security forces could not be accounted for -- more than one firearm for every member of the entire American military force in Iraq at any time during the war. Those documented lapses of accountability were before entire Iraqi divisions simply vanished from the battlefield, as four of them did after the Islamic State seized Mosul and Tikrit in 2014, according to a 2015 Army budget request to buy more firearms for the Iraqi forces to replace what was lost.

    • Sean Wilentz: Hillary's New Deal: How a Clinton Presidency Could Transform America: A distinguished historian -- I learned a lot from his The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln -- but less than reliable when it comes to putting recent political movements into historical perspective (e.g., The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008). A historian should be able to bring some perspective to a campaign, but Wilentz does little more than regurgitate campaign hype:

      Hillary Clinton has already indicated what she would pursue in her first 100 days in office: launching her infrastructure program; investing in renewable energy; tightening regulation of health-insurance and pharmaceutical companies; and expanding protection of voting rights. She has also said that she will nominate women for half of her Cabinet positions. And not far behind these initiatives are several others, including immigration reform and raising the minimum wage.

      Even without a unifying title, it is a sweeping agenda, the latest updating of Democratic reformism. Democratic politics at their most fruitful have always been more improvisational than programmatic, more empirical than doctrinaire, taking on an array of issues, old and new, bound by the politics of Hope pressing against the politics of Nostalgia. So it was with FDR and Truman, so it has been with Barack Obama, and so it would be with Hillary Clinton.

      Still, a historian should recall that FDR's remarkable first 100 days -- the since-unequaled model for that concept -- was accomplished mostly due to conditions Clinton, even if she scores a personal landslide, will not enjoy: Roosevelt had an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress (and for that matter a large percentage of surviving Republicans were progressives), and in throwing out Hoover and Mellon the voters had sent a clear message that the new administration should do something about desperate times. Clinton has yet to do anything significant to elect a Democratic Congress -- indeed, she seems preoccupied with capturing anti-Trump Republicans for her campaign only. Moreover, historians should recognize that the last two Democratic presidents -- Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for whom she represents nothing if no continuity -- delivered very few of their campaign promises, even when they had Democratic majorities before they squandered them away through inaction. Hillary may think she wants to do wonders as president, but unless Congress changes she won't be able to. Indeed, if the Republicans hold onto the Senate, she may have trouble even getting those women confirmed to cabinet posts.

      For a more serious example of a historian looking at present politics, see Corey Robin: Donald Trump is the least of the GOP's problems, where he argues that it's not just Trump's gaffes that are dragging the party and the conservative movement down: both are also "victims of their success." Robin argues that reactionary movements lose their "raison d'être" as they become successful. I'd argue that success leads to them overshooting their goals in ways that turn destabilizing and self-destructive. On the other hand, I don't really believe that there is some sort of left-right equilibrium that needs to be periodically recentered. Rather, I believe that there is a long-term liberalizing drift to American politics, which is occasionally perverted by the corruption of business groups. We are overdue for a course correction now, but it's only happening fitfully due to the Republican focus on rigging the system and the generous amnesia of Democrats.

    • Miscellaneous election tidbits:

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, August 14, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    First a few loose ends left over from yesterday's Trump post:

    1. For more on populism, see Russell Arben Fox: Ten Theses on Our Populist Moment: He quotes Damon Linker's monumentally stupid claim that "Trump may be the purest populist to receive a major-party presidential nomination in the nation's history," but the Linker also argues that:

      Populism doesn't have a fixed agenda or aim toward any particular policy goal, like liberalism, progressivism, conservatism, libertarianism, or socialism. It's a style -- one that favors paranoia and conspiracy-theorizing, exaggeration of problems, demonization of political opponents (politicians but also private citizens), and most of all extravagant flattery of "the people" (which the populist equates with his own supporters, excluding everyone else).

      In other words, Linker has his own private definition of Populism. To most other people, what he's describing is the propaganda pitch of fascism to the masses (as opposed to the pitch made behind closed doors to the oligarchy). So it shouldn't be surprising that recent examples are mostly Republican ("From Newt Gingrich . . . to Sarah Palin . . . and Donald Trump") as the Republican conservative project is so similar in intent to the fascist project. Fox himself comes up with a more sensible definition ("whatever articulation of economic justice, community protection, and local democracy one comes up with"), but he's ambivalent about calling it Populism. I haven't researched this, but I suspect part of the problem is that Populism has always been a label to attack the movement -- the proper name back in the 1890s was the People's Party -- and it was chosen by high-handed snobs who despised the people even more than the dead-end thinking of isms. Even today, I suspect that most of the people who regard Trump as a Populist do so because they regard "the people" as too ignorant, too intemperate, too irrational even to look out for their own interest. Of course, many of those same people also decry true economic populism as well, hoping that by linking Trump and Sanders they can dispose of both.

    2. If you take one thing away from the Trump post, it should be that Trump's real problems are endemic to the Republican Party and its conservative ideologues and propagandists. Sure, Trump lacks the message discipline of a GW Bush and the ideological fervor of a Dick Cheney, but in the end he always retreats to the orthodox party line. And that's what doesn't work, and that's what you should really fear about him or any of the other party leaders.

    3. On the other hand, what the party leaders hate about Trump is his loose mouth. They understand that belief in their economic ideas and their foreign policy doctrine depends on strict repetition, on never allowing a morsel of doubt to creep into the discussion. If you ever stop and think about whether the free market optimally solves all economic equations or whether the world would descend into chaos if the US ever stopped projecting its global superpowerness, you might realize that those doctrines, upon which rests so much privilege and luxury for the fortunate few, are in fact remarkably flawed. Trump is so ignorant and so uninhibited that he simply can't be trusted to keep those cherished myths inviolate.

    4. One thing that the Trump debacle should impress upon people is that the idea that successful businessmen are really great problem solvers and managers, and especially that those are skills that can be transferred to politics and government, is sheer nonsense. Could be that some are, but circumstance and luck count for a lot, as does starting out with a fortune, as Trump did.

    Some scattered links this week:

    • Andrew Bacevich: The Decay of American Politics: "An Ode to Ike and Adlai," major party nominees of sixty years ago -- the author's "earliest recollection of national politics," somewhat more vaguely mine as well (I turned six just before the election). I'm not quite as nostalgic about this pair, but Eisenhower was a centrist who, like previous Republican nominees Thomas Dewey and Wendell Wilkie, had no desire much less delusions of rolling back the redefinition of what the federal government meant and did known as the New Deal. And Eisenhower was so respected that if in 1952 he had declared his party differently he might most likely would have been nominated by the Democrats. Stevenson was an eloquent, highly respected liberal, no less adored albeit by a narrower base. From his conservative perch, Bacevich underrates Stevenson, and Hillary Clinton as well, although as a long-time critic of American foreign policy and militarism he has no trouble marshalling his arguments against the latter:

      When it comes to foreign policy, Trump's preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose his staggering ignorance.

      By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized "Washington playbook" that President Obama himself has disparaged -- a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs. [ . . . ]

      So while a Trump presidency holds the prospect of the United States driving off a cliff, a Clinton presidency promises to be the equivalent of banging one's head against a brick wall without evident effect, wondering all the while why it hurts so much.

      Bacevich at least concedes that both candidates are representative of their parties, each having mastered what it takes to get nominated. And as such, he regards them less as flukes than as symptoms of some underlying shifts. He blames "the evil effects of money," and "the perverse impact of identity politics on policy." He doesn't unpack these points nearly well enough, so let me take a shot:

      • Money seems pretty obvious: he links to Lawrence Lessig's "brilliant and deeply disturbing TED talk. Of course, money has bought political influence in America for a long time -- Karl Rove's hero William McKinley would never have been elected president without the backing of wealthy patrons -- but Eisenhower was sought out by backers of both parties because he was already hugely popular, and because in the 1950s popular appeal was still worth more than money. That's changed over the years, utterly so in 2016. The Republican candidates were all selected by their billionaire backers -- Trump, of course, had an advantage there in being his own billionaire, which made him look a little less shady even though his own business history was plenty suspect. Clinton, on the other hand, cornered all the party's big money donors, so she would have ran unopposed had Sanders not come up with a novel way of financing a competitive campaign.

      • The matter of identity politics is somewhat subtler. In a sense it's always existed -- indeed, it seems to be the dominant factor in "third world" countries with weak democratic traditions, like Pakistan and post-Saddam Iraq. If you've read Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), you'll recall that most of his arguments about shifting political alignments were based on demographics. Early in the 20th century the Republican Party was preponderately northern and protestant, mostly white but most blacks who could voted Republican, while the Democratic Party represented a mix of northern Catholics and Jews along with southern whites. Economic factors occasionally appeared, but were often secondary: northern farmers shifted to the Democrats with Bryan, while labor more slowly shifted from R to D, especially with the New Deal. Phillips' scheme was for the Republicans to capture southern whites and northern Catholics -- Nixon started the former with his "southern strategy" and the latter came to be known as "Reagan Democrats." Still, I think Bacevich is getting at something more. Back in the 1950s America was, in self-concept if not quite reality, a homogeneous middle-class nation with a single mass market. Since then, America has become a good deal less homogeneous: immigration, which was suppressed in the 1920s, has greatly increased, as has inequality. But just as importantly, advertisers and media programmers have learned to target specific niche audiences, and politicos have followed their lead -- to the extent that even news and political opinion shows are now targeted to specific factions. In this atmosphere, identity has taken on increased significance.

        Still, political parties have to distinguish themselves somehow, and the main alternative to identity is class, something that became clearer when Franklin Roosevelt sided with the labor movement in the 1930s. Nixon and Reagan tried to counter this by pushing identity to the fore, which should have sharpened the class division of parties, but Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton went out of their way to screw over their labor supporters, and were able to get away with that as labor unions lost membership and clout, and as Republican hostility to non-whites, immigrants, gays, and anyone of a liberal disposition pushed those groups toward the Democrats. That the result appears to be "identity politics" mostly speaks to the fact that the sense of national unity that was forged during the New Deal and World War II has been fractured, most emphatically by economic inequality.

      Bacevich skips over here because he wants to move to say this:

      The essential point here is that, in the realm of national security, Hillary Clinton is utterly conventional. She subscribes to a worldview (and view of America's role in the world) that originated during the Cold War, reached its zenith in the 1990s when the United States proclaimed itself the planet's "sole superpower," and persists today remarkably unaffected by actual events. On the campaign trail, Clinton attests to her bona fides by routinely reaffirming her belief in American exceptionalism, paying fervent tribute to "the world's greatest military," swearing that she'll be "listening to our generals and admirals," and vowing to get tough on America's adversaries. These are, of course, the mandatory rituals of the contemporary Washington stump speech, amplified if anything by the perceived need for the first female candidate for president to emphasize her pugnacity.

      Bacevich then adds a third explanation: "the substitution of 'reality' for reality" -- the idea, facilitated by mass media and the PR industry, that well-managed perceptions count for more than what actually happens. Bacevich cites Daniel Boorstin's 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseydo-Events in America, written a mere decade after Americans started learning to see the world through the selective images beamed to their television screens. He could also have mentioned Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 (1969), on Richard Nixon's PR campaign.

    • John Holbo: Is the Cato Institute a, Your Know, Libertarian Think-Tank? Article about libertarians bitching about the Libertarian Party ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. That's not a fight I care to get into, but I will say that, regardless of their stands on issues, Johnson and Weld were two of the more decent and respectable Republican governors of the last few decades. I have less sense of Johnson, but Weld did one commendable thing that I don't think any other politician of either party has done, which is to (admittedly only partially) free up a toll road. I'd like to see a national program established to convert toll roads and bridges to the (free) interstate highway system, and to outlaw the construction of new toll roads. As far as I know that's on no political agenda -- I'm not even sure libertarians would support it, but they should. But that aside, I linked to this piece to quote a comment from "derrida derider" which seems about right:

      When thinking of libertarians I always think of Lenin's aphorism about anarchists -- "fine people, but an ideology for children."

      Because the hook libertarianism always get stuck on is that we are social animals where every action we take affects someone else. So the JS Mill stuff that "you are free to do what you like so long as you don't hurt anyone else" in practice comes down to a choice of "you are free to do lots of stuff which will really hurt other people" or "you are free to anything I judge will not hurt me."

      The first is so obviously untenable that actually existing "libertarians" adopt the second -- that is, they are in fact conservatives engaged in JK Galbraith's conservative project throughout the ages -- to find a higher justification for selfishness. So it's no surprise to find that they are usually in the same political bed as conservatives.

      E.g., the Kochs may think they're for freedom in the abstract, but they're mostly for freedom for themselves, to make money at everyone else's expense. It was libertarians like the Kochs that led Mike Konczal to write We Already Tried Libertarianism -- It Was Called Feudalism.

    • David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: 50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation's Security 'at Risk':

      Fifty of the nation's most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump "lacks the character, values and experience" to be president and "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being."

      Mr. Trump, the officials warn, "would be the most reckless president in American history."

      The letter says Mr. Trump would weaken the United States' moral authority and questions his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. It says he has "demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding" of the nation's "vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances and the democratic values" on which American policy should be based. And it laments that "Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself."

      "None of us will vote for Donald Trump," the letter states, though it notes later that many Americans "have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us."

      You'd think this would be good news for Clinton, but what they're accusing Trump of not understanding is the unexamined foundation of every foreign policy disaster of recent decades. Trump half discerns this, but in the end he decides they're only doing this for spite and personal gain -- i.e., the reasons Trump himself would use:

      Late Monday, Mr. Trump struck back. The signatories of the letter, he said in a statement, were "the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place." He dismissed them as "nothing more than the failed Washington elite looking to hold onto their power."

      Mr. Trump correctly identified many of the signatories as the architects of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. But he also blamed them for allowing Americans "to die in Benghazi" and for permitting "the rise of ISIS" -- referring to the 2012 attacks on the American mission in Libya and the spread of the Islamic State, both of which occurred during the Obama administration. At the time, most of Mr. Trump's Republican foreign policy critics were in think tanks, private consultancies or law firms, or signed on as advisers to the Republican hopefuls Mr. Trump beat in the primaries.

      If Trump was smarter he'd figure out a way to turn the tables and cast Hillary as the intemperate, dangerous warmonger and point to the hawks who are abandoning him and (in many cases) embracing her as further proof. It's not happening because he's fully absorbed the party line that all of America's problems abroad are because Obama is weak (or some kind of America-hating traitor), so he feels the need to continually reassert his own toughness, even though he's so shallow and erratic this comes across as recklessness. A good recent example is his refusal to concede that there are any conditions where he'd rule out the use of nuclear weapons.

      Meanwhile, many neocon hawks have moved past dissing Trump and on to supporting Clinton. In particular, see:

    • Some campaign-related links:

      • Sedgwick County Republican chairman: 'Hold your nose' and vote Trump: Catchy new slogan here in Wichita. Latest SurveyUSA poll shows Trump still leading in Kansas, 44-39%, close enough for 538 to give Clinton a 17.3% chance of winning Kansas. In related Wichita Eagle articles, Governor Sam Brownback reiterated his firm support for Trump (he does, after all, have a lot of experience holding his nose). Also Sen. Pat Roberts was named as a Trump adviser on agriculture (i.e., agribusiness, in whose pocket Roberts has spent much more time than he has in Kansas).

      • John Cassidy: Why Trump's Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters: More hectoring on "right-wing populist movements," charging that Trump is out to create a neo-fascist America First movement that will outlive his own scattershot candidacy. I agree with Steve M's critique, No, he's just parroting what he's heard from Fox and the GOP. But as I pointd out the other day, Trump not only hears Republican "dog whistles," he responds to them like a dog (apologies, of course, to anyone who thinks I just insulted their best friend).

      • Maureen Dowd: The Perfect GOP Nominee: Hillary Clinton, of course: "They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up -- unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else."

      • Lisa Lerer/Ken Thomas: What Have We Learned From Hillary Clinton's Tax Returns? She released them for 2015 last week, presumably to taunt Trump. Headline figure was that Bill and her reaped $10.6 million, which seems like quite a bit for run a foundation and get most of their money (some $6 million) from speaking fees. They've also released earlier tax returns, showing that they've made $139 million from 2007-2014 -- I suspect that's more than any other ex-president has owned, a remarkable reward (not that Clinton, as president, didn't make other people even more money). These figures put them in the lower rungs of the 1%, so one may wonder where their allegiances actually lie.

      • Ryan Lizza: What We Learned About Trump's Supporters This Week: The main thing is that Jonathan Rothwell, a researcher at Gallup, did a deep dive into their polling database to see whether Trump's base of support comes from economic distress caused by trade deals and immigration, and finds that it doesn't. He finds that Trump's supporters "are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and perhaps the contradiction there leads to economic anxiety. They're also socially isolated: it's easier to hold stereotyped views of immigrants if you don't know any. No real news here for anyone who's been paying attention.

      • Mark Joseph Stern: "Second Amendment People" Solutions: Argues "Trump's Clinton 'joke' was no coincidence. The GOP espouses a right to bear arms whose logical conclusion is political assassination."

      • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton's E-Mails: Well, to save you some scanning, it's that there is none, other than the cozy access donors have to politicians for decades now.

    Finally, a few links for further study (ran out of time to comment):

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, August 7, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    I want to start with a paragraph from John Lanchester: Brexit Blues:

    Immigration, the issue on which Leave campaigned most effectively and most cynically, is the subject on which this bewilderment is most apparent. There are obviously strong elements of racism and xenophobia in anti-immigrant sentiment. All racists who voted, voted Leave. But there are plenty of people who aren't so much hostile to immigrants as baffled by them. They feel left behind, abandoned, poor, ignored and struggling; so how come immigrants want to come here, and do so well when they get here? If Britain is broken, which is what many Leave voters think, why is it so attractive? How can so many people succeed where they are failing? A revealing, and sad, piece in the Economist in 2014 described Tilbury, forty minutes from London, where the white working class look on resentfully as immigrants get up early and get the train to jobs in the capital which, to them, seems impossibly distant. 'Most residents of the town, one of England's poorest places, are as likely to commute to the capital as fly to the moon.'

    The evidence on immigration is clear: EU immigrants are net contributors to the UK's finances, and are less likely to claim benefits than the native British. The average immigrant is younger, better educated and healthier than the average British citizen. In other words, for every immigrant we let in, the country is richer, more able to pay for its health, education and welfare needs, and less dependent on benefits. They are exactly the demographic the UK needs.

    Not sure of the numbers, but offhand this sounds like a pretty fair description of immigrant America as well -- maybe there is a slightly larger slice of unskilled immigrant workers because the US has much more agribusiness, but a lot of the immigrants I know are doctors and engineers, and I suspect that immigrants own a disproportionate share of small businesses. One widely reported figure is that Muslims in America have a higher than average per capita income, so it's hard to see them as an economic threat to the middle class -- they're part of it. One thing we do have in common with Britain is that anti-immigrant fervor seems to be greatest in places with damn few immigrants. (Trump's third strongest state -- see below -- is the formerly Democratic stronghold of West Virginia, which is practically hermetically sealed from the rest of the US.) Whether that's due to ignorance and unfamiliarity or because those areas are the ones most left behind by economic trends -- including the ones most tied to immigration -- isn't clear (most observers read into this picture what they want to see).

    Lanchester makes another important point, which is that the Brexit referendum succeeded because the single question cut against the grain of the political party system: "To simplify, the Torries are a coalition of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out." I suspect that if we had a national referendum on TPP you'd see a similar alignment against it (and it would get voted down, although the stakes would be far less). On the other hand, Trump vs. Clinton is going to wind up being a vote along party lines, not an alignment of outsiders against insiders or populists against elitists or any such thing.

    Some scattered links this week:

    • David Auerbach: Donald Trump: Moosbrugger for President: Long piece, finds an analogue for Trump in Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities, left incomplete by the author's death in 1942:

      The character who concerns us is Christian Moosbrugger, a working-class murderer of women who becomes an object of fascination for many of the characters in the novel and of the Vienna they inhabit. During his trial for the brutal murder of a prostitute, he becomes a celebrity, due to his cavalier and eccentric manner. [ . . . ] His "discipline" is akin to Trump's nebulous "art of the deal," not a teachable trade but an esoteric, innate property that makes him better than others -- a Macguffin. Trump is not a murderer; unlike Moosbrugger, he does not need to be. Trump was fortunate enough to begin with his father's millions and the ability to achieve dominance without physical violence. For Moosbrugger, violence was the only option available to him. Moosbrugger is no more a "murderer" than Trump is a "politician." They perpetrate amoral (not immoral) acts not out of their characters but out of a lack of character.

      Of course, if Trump becomes president, he will become a murderer -- much like Obama before him, by signing off on the assassination of alleged enemies (and, to use a time-worn phrase, fellow travelers). GW Bush and Bill Clinton too, but they had a head start as governors signing death warrants for condemned felons.

      I also like Auerbach's line:

      Trump's political rise is a product of the commodification of attention. As the ballooning of new media and analytics have facilitated the microscopic examination of consumer attention, the analysis has been performed with indifference to the consequences of that attention. Just as Donald Trump does not care why he is loved, worshipped, and feared -- no matter what the consequences -- we have seen massed content production turn to clickbait, hate clicks, and propaganda in pursuit of viewer eyes. By mindlessly mirroring fear and tribalism, the new media machine has produced a dangerous amount of collateral damage.

      It seems like it took a couple years after he became president before psychologists started probing the mind of GW Bush, but now we are already blessed with Dan P McAdams: The Mind of Donald Trump -- better safe than sorry, I suppose. Here he is just getting warmed up:

      Researchers rank Richard Nixon as the nation's most disagreeable president. But he was sweetness and light compared with the man who once sent The New York Times' Gail Collins a copy of her own column with her photo circled and the words "The Face of a Dog!" scrawled on it. Complaining in Never Enough about "some nasty shit" that Cher, the singer and actress, once said about him, Trump bragged: "I knocked the shit out of her" on Twitter, "and she never said a thing about me after that." At campaign rallies, Trump has encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters. "Get 'em out of here!" he yells. "I'd like to punch him in the face." From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents "disgusting" and writes them off as "losers." By the standards of reality TV, Trump's disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.

    • Gabriella Dunn: Bipartisan frustration over Kansas disability system: 'Legislature be damned': Part of Gov. Brownback's program for making Kansas a model state for emulation all across America and for resuscitating his presidential ambitions was his program to harness the magic of private enterprise to "reform" the moribund bureaucracy of the state's Medicaid program. He called this stroke of genius KanCare. Now, well, it's worked about as well as the rest of his programs:

      The Medicaid system has been riddled with problems recently. More than 3,000 disabled Kansans are on waiting lists for services, and the state says a seven-year wait is typical.

      The state also has a backlog of applications for Medicaid that started mounting a year ago when the state switched the computer system used to process the applications. The committee was told on Thursday that nearly 4,000 Kansans have been waiting more than 45 days for their applications to be processed. In mid-May that number was above 10,000.

      Part of the art of shrinking government "to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub" is to pick on areas that most people don't immediately recognize what's happening. Slacking off on maintenance is one such area, and helping people with disabilities is another. Things have to get pretty bad before they get noticed, and even then the full impact is hard to absorb. Still, even Kansans have started to wise up. For one thing, see GOP Voters Stage Major Revolt Against Brownback's Kansas Experiment. Not really as "major" as one might hope, but until this year Republican primaries have been killing fields for our so-called moderates. This year six Brownback-affiliated state senators, including Majority Leader Terry Bruce, got axed, as did Tea Party favorite Rep. Tim Huelskamp, one of the few "small government" conservatives in Congress to oppose such real government threats as NSA's domestic spying programs -- but his real problem was agribusiness, who flooded the primary with some $3 million in mostly out-of-state dark money. (Huelskamp spent a couple million himself, largely from the Koch network.) Not mentioned in the article is that Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn, who unlike Huelskamp has no redeeming virtues, was also knocked off -- again, his ideological fervor ran afoul of local business interests. On the other hand, the Democratic primary was a very depressing affair, with hardly any competent candidates rising to challenge the unmitigated disasters wrought by Brownback and company.

    • Diana Johnstone: Hiroshima: The Crime That Keeps on Paying, but Beware the Reckoning: Each August 6 marks yet another anniversary of our bloody inauguration of the age of nuclear destruction. I found this bit, following an Eisenhower quote expressing misgivings about dropping the atom bomb, interesting:

      As supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower had learned that it was possible to work with the Russians. US and USSR domestic economic and political systems were totally different, but on the world stage they could cooperate. As allies, the differences between them were mostly a matter of mistrust, matters that could be patched up.

      The victorious Soviet Union was devastated from the war: cities in ruins, some twenty million dead. The Russians wanted help to rebuild. Previously, under Roosevelt, it had been agreed that the Soviet Union would get reparations from Germany, as well as credits from the United States. Suddenly, this was off the agenda. As news came in of the successful New Mexico test, Truman exclaimed: "This will keep the Russians straight." Because they suddenly felt all-powerful, Truman and Byrnes decided to get tough with the Russians.

      In his book Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, Gar Alperovitz argued that the US used the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to intimidate Russia. This twist is more plausible: that having used it for whatever reason, it then installed an arrogance in Truman and his circle that made them more aggressive in postwar diplomacy, and that made Stalin more defensive (which in turn, in some cases, made him more aggressive -- e.g., in Berlin and Korea, although in both cases he was largely provoked to lash out).

      Also on Hiroshima, see Ward Wilson: The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan . . . Stalin Did. By the way, I wrote more about Hiroshima in May 2016 and August 2015, and several times earlier (e.g., August 2008).

      Of course, the question of presidential control of "the nuclear launch codes" came up with respect to the notoriously thin-skinned and impulsive Donald Trump, who's been quoted as repeatedly asking his "security advisers" why we can't use nuclear weapons, and who's clung to the "never take options off the table" cliché so tenaciously it's hard to rule out any place he might not bomb. Relevant to this is Jeffrey Lewis: Our Nuclear Procedures Are Crazier Than Trump, arguing against the current "launch under attack" strategy which gives a president "a four-minute window to decide whether or not to initiate an irreversible apocalypse." I would add that I think that the only nation that has ever actually used nuclear weapons against civilian targets, the US should be going out of its way to reassure the world that won't happen again. Instead, Trump and his ilk are so insecure they feel to need to remind the world how terrifying they really are.

    • Seth Stevenson: If Sean Penn Were the Democratic Nominee: Possibly the dumbest political article of the year, and that's saying something. The whole idea is counterfactual, counterlogical even: "Imagining a world where the wackadoo candidate is in the other party" -- I guess they can dream, but the fact is that the Republican Party has actively embraced fantasy and myth and carefully channeled rhetoric while decrying science and, you know, that "reality-based" stuff, like facts, so there's little there to guard against unhinged candidates -- indeed, at least half of the original field of sixteen qualified. The closest thing to "wackadoo" on the Democratic side was Jim Webb, who didn't even make it to Iowa. As for Penn, you can look at his Wikipedia page to get a thorough list of his political activism, but as far as I can tell his main transgression against political correctness has been a tendency to get too close to officially despised foreign leaders like Hugo Chavez. I can't say as that sort of thing bothers me (in which case he suggests Kanye West, or "Ben from Ben and Jerry's") -- the point is he assumes there must be some balance on the Democratic side no matter how wacko the Republicans get, and second, he wants to show that a great many Democrats would follow that "unfit, paranoid, unstable Democratic nominee" as blindly as most Republicans are following Trump.

      Of course, this article assumes other fallacies. One is that the individual at the head of the ticket should matter much more than the party the ticket represents. I think nowadays that's largely due to the Commander in Chief fetish, itself due to the fact that the US is (and has been for 75 years now) a state perpetually at war all around the world. We tend to assume that having a decisive Commander in Chief has a huge effect on how effectively those wars are prosecuted, where in fact the built-in, unquestioned forces behind those wars usually winds up dictating how tragically foolish presidents wind up. An older view is that the personal moral character of the president matters a lot, whereas it rarely counts for anything. What we get instead are parties -- each president brings a whole layer of administration into power, and leaves behind a cohort of judges, and those choices are mostly tied to party. So to the extent that parties represents blocks of voters, why is it so strange that those voters would back their party regardless of how qualified and capable the ticket head is? Obviously, a lot of people who vote for Trump will really be voting for their party, some in spite of the candidate, but that applies (perhaps even more than usual) to the Democratic side as well. In neither case does it represent a serious misjudgement. However, only on the Republican side does it reflect a belief in complete nonsense and hysteria unrooted in interests or even reality.

    • Some more election links noted:

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, July 24, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    First, some leftover (or late-breaking) links on Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and last week's Republican National Convention:

    • Matt Taibbi: Trump's Appetite for Destruction: That was the week that was. Some highlights, but not necessarily the best jokes:

      It wasn't what we expected. We thought Donald Trump's version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess.

      We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of "New York, New York" while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald's acceptance speech . . .

      But nah. What happened instead was just sad and weird, very weird. The lineup for the 2016 Republican National Convention to nominate Trump felt like a fallback list of speakers for some ancient UHF telethon, on behalf of a cause like plantar-wart research. [ . . . ]

      That the press seemed let down by the lack of turmoil on the streets was odd, given that the Trump convention itself was, after all, a historic revolt.

      Thirteen million and three hundred thousand Republican voters had defied the will of their party and soundly rejected hundred-million-dollar insider favorites like Jeb Bush to re-seize control of their own political destiny. That they made perhaps the most ridiculous choice in the history of democracy was really a secondary issue.

      It was a tremendous accomplishment that real-life conservative voters did what progressives could not quite do in the Democratic primaries. Republican voters penetrated the many layers of money and political connections and corporate media policing that, like the labyrinth of barricades around the Q, are designed to keep the riffraff from getting their mitts on the political process.

      But it wasn't covered that way. What started a year ago as an amusing story about a clown car full of bumbling primary hopefuls was about to be described to the world not as a groundbreaking act of defiance, but as a spectacular failure of democracy. [ . . . ]

      We could never quite tell what [Trump] was: possibly the American Hitler, but just as possibly punking the whole world in the most ambitious prank/PR stunt of all time. Or maybe he was on the level, birthing a weird new rightist/populist movement, a cross of Huey Long, Pinochet and David Hasselhoff. He was probably a monster, but whatever he was, he was original.

      Then came Thursday night.

      With tens of millions of eyes watching, Trump the Beltway conqueror turtled and wrapped his arms around the establishment's ankles. He spent the entirety of his final address huddled inside five decades of Republican Party clichés, apparently determined to hide in there until Election Day. [ . . . ]

      But it wasn't new, not one word. Trump cribbed his ideas from the Republicans he spent a year defaming. Trump had merely reprised Willie Horton, Barry Goldwater's "marauders" speech, Jesse Helms' "White Hands" ad, and most particularly Richard Nixon's 1968 "law and order" acceptance address, the party's archetypal fear-based appeal from which Trump borrowed in an intellectual appropriation far more sweeping and shameless than Melania's much-hyped mistake. [ . . . ]

      In the end, Trump's populism was as fake as everything else about him, and he emerged as just another in a long line of Republican hacks, only dumber and less plausible to the political center.

      Which meant that after all that we went through last year, after that crazy cycle of insults and bluster and wife wars and penis-measuring contests and occasionally bloody street battles, after the insane media tornado that destroyed the modern Republican establishment, Trump concluded right where the party started 50 years ago, meekly riding Nixon's Southern Strategy. It was all just one very noisy ride in a circle. All that destruction and rebellion went for nothing. Officially now, he's just another party schmuck.

    • Rick Perlstein: Mr. Trump, You're No Richard Nixon: Paul Manafort promised that Trump's acceptance speech would be based on Nixon's 1968 speech, but as Perlstein says, "I've studied Richard Nixon. And you're no Richard Nixon." He goes on to explain:

      And, contra Manafort, there was a hell of a lot of "happy talk" in Nixon's speech. That was the soul of its success. Nixon was fond of a spiritual ideal he learned in his Quaker youth: "peace in the center." This speech's very logic was saturated by it -- that a God-spark of grace lay buried underneath America's currently, temporarily degraded circumstances: the "quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting," heirs to "world's oldest revolution, which will never grow old."

      Sure, it was in some respects a rhetorical con: Nixon identified that quiet voice with a certain type of American, the "good people," the "decent people; they work and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care." But his conception of this core -- which he later, with a more snarling tinge, tagged the "Silent Majority" -- was considerably more gracious than the angry, cornered victims, straining to lash out at their tormenters, that Trump had in mind last night. Nixon stepped back from that brink, granting them a charitable core and calling them to further charity: "They know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in." Later, he said, "Just to be alive in America, just to be alive at this time, is an experience unparalleled in history. Here is where the action is."

      Try imagining those words coming out of Donald Trump's mouth. Try to imagine them getting the warm, extended applause that they got from the Republicans of 1968. [ . . . ]

      But the single most telling divergence between Trump's acceptance speech and its Nixonian model, and the easiest to forget, comes down to this: Nixon never said it would be easy. Trump says nothing else. It was the theme of his convention.

      Nixon: "And so tonight I do not promise the millennium in the morning. I do not promise that we can eradicate poverty and end discrimination, eliminate all danger of war in the space of four or even eight years."

      Trump: "I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end." (That was what the teleprompter said. Trump spontaneously added, "and I mean very soon.") "Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored."

      Trump, again: "We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS." (Again, that was the teleprompter version; he added, "And we're going to defeat them fast.") And then these words on the teleprompter -- "we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terror" -- followed by his own hasty interposition: "Doing it now, doing it quickly, we're going to win, we're going to win fast!" [ . . . ]

      It all came down to Donald Trump's own patented brand of alchemical magic: turning coal into diamonds, bending steel with his mind. After all, "Our steelworkers and miners are going back to work. With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country. This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans."

    • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Strangely Quiet Streets of Cleveland: As Taibbi pointed out in the piece above, protesters and counter-protesters in Cleveland for the RNC were vastly outnumbered by journalists, many evidently hoping for some street-fighting to fuel the notion that Trump's 1968 Nixon rip-off had some relevance to the real world. The fact is not many people showed up, and nothing much happened.

      One feature of American politics right now is a sensitivity to the influence of the fringe. The campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the angry call-and-response of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, have raised the possibility of new forces at work, and a popular anthropology has followed. People like the young white nationalist writers Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos have become ubiquitous, because they fit the general story and because they suggest something new. But in Cleveland the people who embraced the racial grievances of the Convention were not the bearded conspiracists of the fringe but the delegates themselves.

    • David Frum: Donald Trump's Bad Bet on Anger: Compares Trump's speech to Nixon's from 1968 and also mentions Pat Buchanan's in 1992, citing Michael Barone's observation that "Buchanan would no nowhere in politics because Americans aren't angry people, and they don't trust angry people with power." That observation will certainly be tested this year.

      But unlike Richard Nixon, Donald Trump is not speaking for a silent majority. He is speaking for a despairing minority.

      The range and reach of Trump's voice will be inescapably limited by all the people he does not speak to. He does not speak to those rising and thriving in today's America. He does not speak to entrepreneurs and business owners. He does not speak to people who work in creative industries or the sciences or technology. He does not speak to those who feel emancipated by the lifting of inherited cultural and physical limits. He does not speak to those who feel that this modern age, for all its troubles, is also a time of miraculous achievement and astonishing possibility.

      I've compared Donald Trump to William Jennings Bryan, who forfeited the chance in 1896 to build an alliance of all those discontented with industrial capitalism because he only truly felt at home with rural people -- and could not refrain from inflammatory language about cities and city people. Tonight this comparison seems even more valid than ever. Trump's right about the shock of globalization and the disruption of migration. But it's not enough to be right to become president, as Henry Clay famously quipped. You have to be right in the right way and at the right time. You have to be the right messenger to carry the right message.

      Actually, Trump's not even very right on "the shock of globalization and the disruption of migration" -- those are fairly minor problems (to the extent they are problems at all), ones that could have been handled by more sensible policies and a greater commitment to a "safety net" to help out those few people who were hurt. (Same for those unemployed coal miners and their depressed communities, although their plight was caused by something else entirely.) Still, one has to wonder how many people actually believe the Republicans' endlessly repeated message of America's economic and cultural and political decline under Obama. Compared to Bush, I can't find a single objective indicator of such decline: the economy has grown steadily, (as has been much commented on) crime rates continue to decline, and the number of American soldiers killed or maimed abroad is also down. Sure, none of these metrics are as good as they should be, but much of the blame there belongs with the Republican stranglehold on Congress (and so many state governments -- Wisconsin vs. Minnesota is an especially telling example).

      This is the first I've seen of the Bryan comparison, and there is something interesting to it, but it's also a bit misleading. For one thing, the two major political parties in the 1890s weren't polarized by class like they are now: there were progressive movements in both parties, struggling against oligarchic control of each. Bryan led a revolt in the Democratic Party against extreme conservatives like Grover Cleveland, and the conservatives got their revenge by throwing the election to McKinley (something they repeated in 1972, and would have been tempted to do this year had Sanders won). So, sure, it's interesting that Bryan didn't have the temperament to rally urban workers and blacks (most of whom voted Republican back then). And, sure, neither does Trump, but one other similarity is that both embraced simplistic and ultimately non-credible solutions: silver for Bryan, and walls and barricades for Trump. Also, Bryan was a heroically decent politician (not unlike McGovern later, but much preachier), whereas Trump is a greedy self-centered asshole -- and while the latter may be a better fit for our times, it's still not clear how many people have sunk to his level.

    • Corey Robin: Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry: Feedback from Trump's foreign policy interview (which I wrote about last time) included a tweet from Peter W. Singer: "It is the most irresponsible foreign policy statement by a presidential nominee of any party in my lifetime." Robin notes that "Barry Goldwater said the US should consider using tactical nukes in Vietnam," but that was before Singer was born, so he concentrated on various outrageous Ronald Reagan pronouncements. Robin goes on to make some generalizations about "the Vox generation of pundits" that may (or may not) be insightful (I'm not sure), but his "Update" is worth quoting. There he's responding to Matt Yglesias attacking Trump for having "proven time and again he's much too lazy to do the job." Robin responds with four bullet items from Ronald Reagan, then adds:

      Yglesias's complaint is a frequently heard among liberals. As Alex Gourevitch reminded me, they said the same thing about George W. Bush. Remember all those vacations he took? (879 days, or 30% of his time in office.)

      But here's the thing: Ronald Reagan (or George W. Bush] wasn't terrifying because he was lazy. Do we honestly think that if he had worked harder he would have been less terrifying? When your entire belief system is jackboots and smiles, it doesn't get less scary because you work harder; the opposite, in fact. Honestly, I'm thankful Reagan was as lazy as he was. God only knows how much more havoc he might have wreaked had he been awake during those precious afternoon nap hours.

      Likewise, Donald Trump. The notion here is that if he had more knowledge of the things he talks about, if he just worked harder at his job, his positions would be moderated. Like Ted Cruz?

      On the other hand, laziness at the top allowed those they had (perhaps carelessly) appointed to lower positions to do considerable damage (as bit Reagan in the HUD and Iran-Contra scandals, although the machinations of Ed Meese's Justice Department were probably more damaging in the long run; Bush may have been the primary instigator of his war and terror regime, but he stocked his administration with people who would not only go along but would push him further). There is no reason to think Trump will pick better underlings. Exhibit A: Mike Pence.

    As for the rest of the world, some scattered links:

    • John Quiggin: Anti-militarism: A short piece on definitions.

      My case for anti-militarism has two main elements.

      First, the consequentialist case against the discretionary use of military force is overwhelming. Wars cause huge damage and destruction and preparation for war is immensely costly. Yet it is just about impossible to find examples where a discretionary decision to go to war has produced a clear benefit for the country concerned, or even for its ruling class. Even in cases where war is initially defensive, attempts to secure war aims beyond the status quo ante have commonly led to disaster.

      Second, war is (almost) inevitably criminal since it involves killing and maiming people who have done nothing personally to justify this; not only civilians, but soldiers (commonly including conscripts) obeying the lawful orders of their governments.

      Quiggin allows an exception for "humanitarian intervention" which is neither well-developed nor well-critiqued. Most actual wars justified on "humanitarian" grounds have turned out to have bad consequences -- Iraq and Libya are pretty clear recent examples -- often because the motives of the "humanitarians" are never quite pure but also because no amount of good intentions ever really compensates for the criminal killing inextricably bundled into war. (As I recall, Noam Chomsky has cited two wars that he approved of: India's 1971 war with Pakistan which spun Bangladesh off as an independent country, and the 1999 UN defense of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor against forced annexation by Indonesia. Both resulted in independent states which were not subsequently controlled or dominated by interveners -- which isn't to say they didn't have their own reasons that were only loosely cloaked in "humanitarian" rhetoric.)

      Advocates of "humanitarian intervention" point to the high death tolls in places like Rwanda where no military jumped in, or to Syria now (although how anyone could think there's been no intervention in Syria is way beyond me). The fact is that nobody knows whether fewer people would have died in Rwanda had outside powers intervened, because no one know what the effect would be of Euroamericans, with their long histories of racism and colonialism, coming in and shooting up the place, killing people on both sides ostensibly to keep them from killing each other. Nor does anyone have any idea what the invaders would have done after the shooting stopped (although with the US, UK, France and others, the temptation would have been to set up shop and recoup expenses; i.e., neocolonialism).

      It's easy enough to conjure up a fantasy that some omnipotent foreign force could march through Syria and end the civil war there by killing anyone who resists (assuming, of course, you could keep all the other foreign forces from supporting their own favorite factions), but would such a force be willing to turn the spoils over to the Syrian people and let them decide to do whatever they wished with their country -- just without the resort to violence. We've seen the US in a position to do just that at least twice (in Afghanistan and Iraq) and neither time the US was capable of even feigning neutrality. The odds the US might do the right thing in Syria are even slimmer, given that the Americans who plot wars (and imagine them to be humanitarian) already see Syria as a microcosm of region- and world-wide rivalries with "enemies" like Russia and Iran and both Islamist and secular (socialist) tendencies in all Arab nations and "allies" having as many conflicting views and aims as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, France, the UK, and its former (but still reigning) emirates and vassals.

      As Quiggin notes, we are now well into the hundredth anniversary of the original Great War. The reaction to that horror was to demilitarize, but that world was still driven by dreams of empire, and the inequitable settlement left Germany hungering for another shot and Japan and Italy thinking they were still on the rise, so there followed another, even more devastating and frightful war, capped by the emergence of a bomb capable of devastating whole cities in seconds. Again, nearly everyone hoped to render war obsolete and impossible. Some measures were taken, starting with declaration of a universal "rights of man" that if truly honored would render the old reasons for war -- chiefly, empire and plunder -- obsolete. It would be smart to revisit those ideas and try to reinvigorate them. Because clearly piling one armed outrage on top of another isn't working.

    • Matt Taibbi: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie: This came out after the California and New Jersey primaries in early June. I don't recall whether I saw it at the time, but it's still timely with the Democratic National Convention up this coming week.

      Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.

      Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

      This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.

      But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.

      Since then we have seen Sanders having some influence on the Democratic Party platform, although many issues remained firmly within Clinton parameters (Israel, for one). Clinton has even moved a bit toward free college, but with numerous caveats. On the other hand, picking Tim Kaine as her running mate showed no desire to reward or even acknowledge Sanders' voters -- not that Kaine is so awful, just that he offers nothing Clinton doesn't already have.

    • Michael Tomasky: Can the Monster Be Elected? It may seem like I should have filed this under Trump, but on the cover of The New York Review of Books this was titled "Will She Win?" with a less than flattering picture of Hillary Clinton. Inside it's nominally a review of two books: John Sides/Lynn Vavreck: The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, and Christopher H. Achen/Larry M. Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, not that he has much to say about either. Nor does he make a case that either candidate is a monsters (although Trump, and for that matter Clinton, are vivid enough you can confirm your own conclusions. Rather, his main argument is that not much actually changes in an election. He points out, for instance, that in December 2011 Obama was leading Romney in the polls by four points, and eleven months later Obama won by the same four points. "Nothing that happened seems to have made any difference. [ . . . ] The whole race, and all those billions of dollars spent on it, might as well never have happened." He attributes most of this to polarization, the process by which most people have locked themselves into one party/worldview regardless of candidate. One could take such an analysis and argue that Trump, at least, is something different, but Tomasky doesn't go there. He sees Clinton winning, narrowly but solidly, for the usual reason: there's just not so much so wrong that most people will risk such a seemingly radical change. Indeed, Sides and Vavreck argue that "Mitt Romney's crucial error was his relentless hammering away at the terrible economy," because that message then strayed so far from reality. Yet they don't draw the obvious conclusion, that Trump is painting a far more extreme picture, even farther from reality, and offering "solutions" that can hardly be described as anything but magic. So for me a key question is why so many on the left are so terrified by Trump. By all evidence, he is less trigger-happy than McCain, and less of an economic royalist than Romney -- those two were my idea of really scary candidates -- but he is racist like we've rarely seen in recent years, he seems excited by violence, he has extraordinary delusions of grandeur, but those are all things sensible candidates would ridicule, not fear. Those who fear him seem to think he has some special yoke on the white working class, a group they seem to fear and despise as if they've been locked in a theatre and force fed Richard Nixon speeches -- but also a group that they know New Democrats have screwed over and abandoned, something they should feel guilty for.

    • Several pieces on Turkey:

      • Mustafa Akyol: Who Was Behind the Coup Attempt in Turkey? Argues that it was, indeed, followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, so Erdogan's insistence that the US arrest Gulen and turn him over to Turkey isn't so far-fetched.

        The Gulen community is built around one man: Fethullah Gulen. His followers see him not merely as a learned cleric, as they publicly claim, but the "awaited one," as I have been told in private. He is the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the Messiah, who will save the Muslim world, and ultimately the world itself. Many of his followers also believe that Mr. Gulen sees the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams and receives orders from him.

        Besides Mr. Gulen's unquestionable authority, another key feature of the movement is its cultish hierarchy. The Gulen movement is structured like a pyramid: Top-level imams give orders to second-level imams, who give orders to third-level imams, and it goes on like that to the grass roots.

        What does the group do? Its most visible activities include opening schools, running charities that provide social services to the poor and maintaining "dialogue centers" that preach love, tolerance and peace. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. I personally have spoken many times at Gulen institutions as a guest, and met modest, kind, lovable people.

        But, as one disillusioned Gulenist told me last year, "there is a darker side of the movement, and few of its members know it as it is." For decades, the movement has been infiltrating Turkey's state institutions, like the police, judiciary and military. Many believe that some Gulenists, taking orders from their imams, hide their identities and try to rise through these institutions in order to capture state power.

        The Turkish army has long been a bastion of Kemalist secularism, but Akyol argues that an alliance of Erdogan and the Gulenists effectively purged the armed forces of secularists, and that the coup itself was precipitated by Erdogan's efforts to purge the Gulenists from the military.

      • Dov Friedman: The Causes of the Coup Attempt in Turkey: A History of the Usual Suspects: Much more on the history of Islamist movements in Turkish history, including the 1997 "postmodern coup" which deposed Welfare Party Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and send Fethullah Gulen into exile. When democracy was restored, Erdogan's AKP rose to power, and formed an alliance with the Gulenists to counter the secular bias in the military and government bureaucracy. That alliance fell apart after 2012:

        The rift only widened. Gulen himself voiced criticisms of the government's handling of the May 2013 Gezi protests, when the government's grip on power momentarily appeared to wobble. In October of that year, the government proposed legal changes to close university entrance exam prep schools -- a key source of Gulenist revenue and youth recruitment.

        In December 2013, the Gulenists revealed evidence of large-scale corruption that reached all the way to the highest ranks of the AK Party, implicating Erdogan himself, his family, and key ministerial allies. The attempted coup de grace failed. Erdogan survived the crisis and unleashed a backlash of sustained intensity that continues to this day. He purged Gulenist sympathizers from every part of the bureaucracy, closed Gulenist media organizations, punished Gulenist-owned companies, and orchestrated the insolvency and takeover of the formerly Gulenist-aligned Bank Asya. Since this eruption, Erdogan has taken every opportunity to accuse the Gulenist movement of functioning as an illegal parallel state subverting institutions and engaging in terrorism.

        Another factor here is the breakdown of peace talks with the Kurds, increasing aggressiveness of the Turkish military against Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, and Turkey's own rather schizophrenic approach to Syria (promoting anti-Assad forces, allowing the US to bomb ISIS from Turkey, trying to undermine Syria's Kurds, and finding itself targeted by ISIS terrorists). It's just not clear how these factors play out, in part because the main effect of the coup attempt has been to allow Erdogan to greatly accelerate his power grab within Turkey.

        Ever the opportunist, Erdogan has recognized an opening to amass the formalized broad powers he seeks -- and long sought, even before the failed coup. This is why the Erdogan loyalist-controlled judicial appointments board sacked 2,745 judges within hours of the coup. The government has been in the slow process of remaking the judiciary -- one of the last state institutions not entirely under thumb. The purges have only deepened -- with more than 50,000 suspended or detained, among them teachers, civil servants, and university administrators. The AK Party government has accelerated the process in a way that would not have been possible without the coup attempt.

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, July 17, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    July is a month I can hardly wait to get done with, even though it leaves six or seven weeks of brutal heat to come. This year is about average for Kansas, aside from a surplus of rain that more than wiped out the spring deficit. Fitting that the major party conventions will also be dispatched during this month, although as I'm writing this they still loom: the candidates are settled, so no suspense there, and one of the veeps was revealed this week -- the utterly repugnant Mike Pence -- so the only remaining question is how to what extent each party embarrasses itself in trying to put forth its best face. Most years there is a post-convention bump in the polls. This year there's a fairly good chance for a post-convention slump.

    Some prominent news items from this past week:

    • Bernie Sanders gave up his presidential campaign, acknowledging that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, and endorsed her, vowing to do everything in his power to defeat Donald Trump in November -- mostly by repeating the planks of his "political revolution" platform, which Hillary is increasingly obliged to cozy up to.
    • Donald Trump, on the other hand, boxed himself into a corner and got stuck with Cruz-supporter Pence as his VP nominee. Pence is considered a sensible mainstream choice because he rarely initiates the right-wing lunatic programs he invariably winds up supporting. He's acceptable to Trump because he's so pliable he's already reversed himself on all of Trump's campaign platform, setting a fine example for all the other Republicans who had opposed Trump by showing them how a good puppy can roll over and play dead.
    • The UK has a new Prime Minister, Theresa May, committed to carrying out the Brexit referendum, in her own sweet time (and without the possible complication of electing a new parliament). She then picked the more flamboyant and demagogic Boris Johnson as Foreign Minister.
    • Factions of the Turkish military attempted a coup to seize power and oust democratically elected president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been widely criticized lately for recent laws that have restricted popular rights -- a power grab occasioned by worsening relations with Turkey's Kurdish minority and several "terrorist incidents" blamed on ISIS. The coup appears to have failed, with various members of the military being arrested in what threatens to turn into a large-scale purge.
    • Obama decided against a planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, changing their engagement orders to initiate offensive operations against the Taliban, thus widening and extending the war there. Escalations against Syria and Iraq continue, putting the US on its most aggressive military stance in years. At the same time, Obama is committing more US/NATO troops to the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe, increasing "cold war" tensions.
    • Eighty-four people were killed by a truck plowing through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, France. The driver was Tunisian, so this is being played up as a "terrorist attack" although there doesn't seem to be any indication that he was politically or religiously motivated. (Which isn't to say the ISIS folks don't dig what he did.)
    • Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, a little over a week after Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling, starting off a round of Black Lives Matter protests. Early reports show that the shooter was another ex-Marine (like the shooter in Dallas).

    Meanwhile, some scattered links this week:

    • Julie Bosman: Public Schools? To Kansas Conservatives, They're 'Government Schools': And like conservatives everywhere, they understand that the first step in demonizing someone or something is establishing what it's called. Until recently, Kansans prided themselves on their public school system (not that my own experience was very positive). That started to change as home schooling became popular for Christian fundamentalists, and turned into something more vicious when Republicans discovered that school teachers might pose a political threat, and more generally that education in the liberal arts and sciences might work against their dogmatically cultivated interests. And lately, of course, it has come down to money: public spending on education adds to deficits and/or taxes.

    • Patrick Cockburn: A Hillary Clinton Presidency Could End Up Letting Isis Off the Hook: Cites a paper by Michele Flournoy, widely considered to be Hillary's likely pick as Secretary of Defense, arguing that the US should refocus its Syria efforts against Assad rather than against ISIS. Still, it's not like she'd switch sides and back ISIS against Assad -- something that might actually work (distasteful as it may be; it's not as if the US has never supported Islamist fanatics before). No, she wants to buck up the pro-American Syrian rebels, the least effective group in the long civil war. Still, that doesn't justify Cockburn's provocative headline: Hillary is enough of a hawk she'd be happy to pound ISIS and Assad alike, and for however long it takes. Cockburn also implies that Hillary would forget the lessons Obama had learned about the futility of war in the Middle East (giving Obama far more credit than he deserves):

      The world may soon regret the passing of the Obama years as a Clinton administration plunges into conflicts where he hung back. He had clearly learned from the outcome of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in a way that she has not. He said in a speech on terrorism in 2013 that "any US military action in foreign land risks creating more enemies" and that the Washington foreign establishment's tendency to seek ill-considered military solutions was self-defeating. [ . . . ]

      All this is good news for Isis and al-Qaeda, whose spectacular growth since September 11 is mainly due to the US helping to spread the chaos in which they flourish. Obama could see the risks and limitations of military force, but Clinton may play straight into their hands.

      As for Hillary, what I find more worrying is that she still doesn't seem to be totally onboard with Obama's Iran Deal; see Philip Weiss: Iran deal is still imperilled by deep state -- hardliners, Israel lobby, Hillary Clinton. Part of the problem here is that Democrats and GOP are in a race to the bottom on Israel.

    • Donald Johnson: The iron law of institutions versus Bernie Sanders: Cites various editorials at the New York Times, finding them consistently obsessed with demonizing Sanders.

      Clinton supporters at the NYT have been almost uniformly nasty -- they hate Sanders and don't bother concealing it. Ultimately his policy based critiques of Clinton terrifies them and they don't want him or the movement he represents to have any credibility even if he endorses Clinton, because he hasn't retracted his critique. And yes, this does tie in with the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Clinton support for Benjamin Netanyahu flatly contradicts liberal ideals, so she either does this for the money or because she is a militarist like Netanyahu or both. (I think both). They tiptoe around that.

      This is a quibble, but I think Netanyahu is much more racist than militarist, not that they don't share an abiding belief in their respective nation's exceptionalism, especially as exemplified through military prowess (in both cases long in moral decline). But then I guess I'm leaning toward the "money" explanation for Hillary. Despite a term as Secretary of State which should have opened her eyes a bit, she seems completely in thrall to the donor class, which has in turn been completely cowed by Netanyahu, rendered blind to the racism which pervades Israeli political culture.

      It's not just institutions that are bitter over Sanders. Consider this Robert Christgau tweet: "This is more than I thought the progressives would get and has cut into how personally dislikable I find Sanders." "This" is Heather Gautney: How Bernie Sanders Delivered the Most Progressive Platform in Democratic Party History. Christgau is clearly closer on the issues to Sanders than to Hillary but supported the latter, I guess because he found Sanders "personally dislikable" -- I doubt that the two ever met, yet this seems to matter more to him more than, say, the Iraq War vote. There are others I know and respect politically who have directed even worse snark at Sanders, a personal bitterness I find unfathomable -- I certainly can't rationalize it like Johnson does for those New York Times flacks.

    • Martin Longman: Mike Pence Is Not a Conventional Politician: On Trump's Veep:

      Let's start with some things that are being said that simply aren't true. Writing for the BBC, Anthony Zurcher says "In a year that has defied political conventions, he was a very conventional choice."

      But there's absolutely nothing "conventional" about Mike Pence. He is a man who cannot say if he believes in the theory of evolution and has spent twenty years spreading doubt about climate change. He's a man who wants teenage girls (including victims of incest) to get parental consent to use contraceptives, who has done all he can to deny contraception to women of every age, who signed a law mandating that all aborted fetuses should receive proper burials, who supports discrimination against gays and wants to withhold federal funding from any organization that "encourage(s) the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus." [ . . . ]

      Obviously, I could go on for a long time highlighting things about Pence that are alarming or ridiculous, but I'm trying to focus on things that set him apart from even mainstream conservatives. I mean, it matters that he loved the idea of fighting in Iraq or that he has rigorously supported the same kinds of free trade agreements that Trump opposes, but he's not alone in those things.

      To the degree that it can be legitimately argued that Pence is "conventional," it's an enormous testimony to how far right the party has drifted since the time of Jack Kemp and Dan Quayle and Poppy Bush and Gerald Ford. But it's actually not true that we've seen someone this far right nominated before. No, not even Palin or Cheney were this radical across the board.

      For more, see Longman's pre-pick Mike Pence Makes Zero Sense as Veep:

      If Trump is using the same theory of the case that McCain used in picking Sarah Palin, that it was necessary to shore up weak support from the Christian conservative base, then we already saw that this is a losing strategy.

      Selecting Pence will drive responsible business leaders even further into Clinton's camp. It will severely alienate women and moderates on social issues. Millennials will flee in panic. And, once the press picks over Pence's congressional record, any reassurance that Trump will have a steady hand to deal with Congress will be completely undermined.

      Pence has actual negative charisma, so he won't win over anyone by being smart or funny or charming.

      Other pieces on Pence: Sean Illing: The sad incurious case of Mike Pence; Nico Lang: Mike Pence is even worse than you think; John Nichols: Trump Pick Pence Is a Right-Wing Political Careerist Who Desperately Wants Out of Indiana; Charles Pierce: Of Course, Donald Trump's Vice Presidential Announcement Was All About Trump; Mike Pence Is a Smooth-Talking Todd Akin; George Zornick: Vice President Pence Would Be a Dream for the Koch Brothers.

    • Ron Paul: Fool's Errand: NATO Pledges Four More Years of War in Afghanistan: Obama may be a "lame duck" as far as appointing new judges is concerned, but no one seems to be using the term as he's laying out the framework that will tie up his successor in hopeless wars through that successor's term: adding troops in Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria (and on the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe). I don't often cite Paul because I don't generally approve of his snark, but this isn't terribly off base:

      President Obama said last week that the US must keep 3,000 more troops than planned in Afghanistan. The real reason is obvious: the mission has failed and Washington cannot bear to admit it. [ . . . ] Where else but in government would you see it argued that you cannot stop spending on a project because you have already spent so much to no avail? In the real world, people who invest their own hard-earned money in a failed scheme do something called "cut your losses." Government never does that. [ . . . ]

      The neocons argue that Iraq, Libya, and other US interventions fell apart because the US did not stay long enough. As usual they are wrong. They failed and they will continue to fail because they cannot succeed. You cannot invade a country, overthrow its government, and build a new country from the ground up. It is a fool's errand and Washington has turned most Americans into fools.

      Paul underestimates the ingenuity of the war crowd. For instance, Mark Perry: How Islamic State Is Getting Beaten at Home -- and Taking Terror Abroad argues that events like Nice show how much progress Obama is making against ISIS in Syria. Perry confuses killing people, which the US is quite proficient at, with providing a viable, peaceful alternative, something the US evidently has no clue how to do. He could have noted that the recent shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge are at least as much a part of the war coming home as the "sudden radicalization" of the truck driver in Nice.

    • Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: An important economist on globalization issues faults the left in Northern Europe for failing to respond coherently to the negative repercussions for their countries:

      Latin American democracies provide a telling contrast. These countries experienced globalization mostly as a trade and foreign-investment shock, rather than as an immigration shock. Globalization became synonymous with so-called Washington Consensus policies and financial opening. Immigration from the Middle East or Africa remained limited and had little political salience. So the populist backlash in Latin America -- in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, most disastrously, Venezuela -- took a left-wing form.

      The story is similar in the main two exceptions to right-wing resurgence in Europe -- Greece and Spain. In Greece, the main political fault line has been austerity policies imposed by European institutions and the International Monetary Fund. In Spain, most immigrants until recently came from culturally similar Latin American countries. In both countries, the far right lacked the breeding ground it had elsewhere.

      But the experience in Latin America and southern Europe reveals perhaps a greater weakness of the left: the absence of a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century. From Greece's Syriza to Brazil's Workers' Party, the left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. [ . . . ]

      A crucial difference between the right and the left is that the right thrives on deepening divisions in society -- "us" versus "them" -- while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them. Hence the paradox that earlier waves of reforms from the left -- Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state -- both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous. Absent such a response again, the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups, who will lead the world -- as they always have -- to deeper division and more frequent conflict.

      We in America have far too little appreciation for the destructiveness of the right's conflicts, not just because we fight our wars far away -- not that US policy in Central America and Haiti hasn't sent waves of emigrés our way, but refugees from US wars in the Middle East mostly head for Europe -- but also because we are reluctant to credit our wars with the right's division and depradation of the middle class here, let alone the growing frequency of sporadic violence.

    • David Smith: Donald Trump: the making of a narcissist: Long profile on a guy you probably think you already know too much about. Still, some of his key insights are based on a profile and book by Mark Singer:

      In the nine years since, Singer has seen nothing to alter his view of Trump as unburdened by a hinterland. "People talk about a private Trump and a public Trump," he says in his Manhattan apartment. "I'm not so convinced because I've seen both and the bombast is there, the obvious extreme self-involvement has always been there. He doesn't have a sense of irony. He's a terrible listener but that's a characteristic of narcissistic people. They're not engaged with anybody else's issues."

    • Tierney Sneed: Forget Trump! The GOP's Convention Platform Makes It the Party of Kris Kobach: Kobach's day job is Secretary of State in Kansas -- i.e., the guy in charge of making sure that undesirables can't vote -- but he's also a notorious moonlighter, crafting dozens of pieces of legislation for Republican state legislatures, most of which are subsequently declared unconstitutional. He was the only Republican of note in Kansas who endorsed Trump before the caucuses (Brownback, Roberts, and Pompeo lined up for Rubio, while Huelskamp -- locked in another primary challenge by farmers who don't appreciate his opposition to farm subsidies -- is still proud to be known as a Cruz supporter), so he had an inside track on Trumpifying the GOP platform, and as usual he's first in line to take credit for feats normal lawyers would find embarrassing. One peculiarly Kansas touch was "language opposing the inclusion of the prairie chicken and sage grouse on the endangered species list" -- oil people find those birds annoying, and Kansas Republicans can hardly wait for them to become extinct, and therefore no longer a threat to the oil bidness.

      For more on the platform, see Donald Trump's weaponized platform: A project three decades in the making. I seriously doubt that Trump came up with any of his idea by reading William S. Lind and/or Paul Weyrich or that he's come up with anything as coherent (if that's the word).

    • Sophia Tesfaye: Will Republicans listen to one of their own? The Senate's only black Republican reveals his own experiences with racial profiling: I've seen reports that the late Philando Castile (shot dead by police in Minnesota) had been repeatedly pulled over by police for minor or imaginary infractions, but it's worth noting that wealth or ideology doesn't prevent this sort of profiling from happening, as Scott's story makes clear.

      But during his speech, the second on policing and race this week, Scott also shared the story of a staffer who was "pulled over so many times here in D.C. for absolutely no reason other than driving a nice car." The staffer eventually traded in his Chrysler for a "more obscure form of transportation" because "he was tired of being targeted."

      He asked his Senate colleagues to "imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity that accompanies each of those stops."

      "I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell no matter their profession. No matter their income, no matter their disposition in life," he said. "There is absolutely nothing more frustrating, more damaging to your soul than when you know you're following the rules and being treated like you are not."

      "Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist," the Republican reminded his fellow conservatives.

    • Some links on the Turkish coup:

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    Sunday, July 10, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    The biggest story in the US last week involved the fatal shootings of seven people in three separate incidents: one each in Louisiana and Minnesota (Alton Sterling and Philando Castile), and five in Dallas. All of the shootings involved police and race, and appear to be unjustifiable by any conceivable criteria. Needless to say, they all involved guns, but one thing they had in common point been little commented on: all eight victims were armed, and their guns worthless for self-defense. (Remind me again how safe we would all be if everyone had guns for self-defense.) As a practical matter, carrying guns not only failed to save the victims, but probably contributed to their deaths. The Louisiana and Minnesota incidents may have occurred because police panicked when they discovered that the black people they were harrassing were armed. The Texas incident came later, when an ex-army soldier snapped and decided to shoot some white police -- perhaps as indiscriminate revenge (isn't that how he was trained to respond to "the enemy" in Afghanistan?), the sort of warped injustice self-appointed vigilantes are prone to.

    For some time now, I've felt that as long as people legimately believe that they need to own and carry a gun for their own protection it would be unwise and unfair for government to deny them that option. However, I've always wondered whether carrying a gun actually made anyone safer: has anyone ever studied this, putting such (probably rare) events in statistical context against all the other things that can go wrong with guns?

    There are other ways one can approach these tragic events. One I think should be given more weight is that the Dallas shooter learned his craft in the US military, which no doubt considered him a hero until the moment he started shooting at white American cops. Not all killers were trained by the US military, but they do pop up with some frequency. I'm reminded of a scene in Full Metal Jacket where the Marine Gunnery Sergeant lectures his boot camp trainees on "what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do," offering a few examples: Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Whitman, Richard Speck. Should we be surprised that a country that is so invested in celebrating its heroic killers abroad should more than occasionally encounter the same at home? And not infrequently by the same hands?

    Of course, another way to approach this is to note that last week's bombing in Baghdad killed over 175 -- more than twenty times the death toll discussed above. But that scarcely registers here, even though the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq is still most responsible for continued bloodshed there. As bad as gun violence has become here, it still pales against the violence of US forces and the rivals they stir up abroad.

    I suppose the second biggest story last week was the FBI decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for risking classified data by running a private email server while she was Secretary of State. FBI Director Comey went out of his way to scold Clinton for being "extremely careless" regarding state secrets before admitting that they couldn't come up with a credible criminal case against her. The way Comey put it allowed Republicans to reiterate their talking points, adding they couldn't understand the decision not to indict based on Comey's exposition.

    As I understand the "scandal" (see Wikipedia for a long rundown, and perhaps also Clinton's own The Facts About Hillary Clinton's Emails [PS: broken link]), the problem with running a non-government server is that it doesn't allow for efficient collection of emails that are considered to be public records (under the Federal Records Act). To comply with the FRA, Clinton had to sort through her emails and turn over the ones she considered to be State Department business while retaining ones she considered to be personal -- i.e., the two had been mixed. A better solution might have been to turn all the emails over and let the Department sort out which ones were personal -- at least then she couldn't be accused of hiding emails that should have gone into the public record. On the other hand, had she kept separate public and private email accounts, there still would likely have been cross-contamination. (There is a similar controversy here in Kansas, where a member of Gov. Sam Brownback's staff was found to be communicating with lobbyists via his personal account, thereby avoiding public records disclosure.)

    Still, one wonders why the FRA issue didn't arise while Clinton was actually Secretary of State. It only seems to have been recognized as a problem several years after she left office, when the Republican Benghazi! witchhunt got under way. Further complicating things is the question of whether Clinton's emails contained classified material. Clinton, of course, had a top security clearance, but her private email server wasn't fully secured for handling "secret" missives, so it could have been, well, I'm not sure what, some form of breach in the security state. Again, this seems not to have bothered anyone until well after the fact. And curiously, the audits revealed that some emails contained material that was classified only after it was sent, so most of this charade has been focused on Clinton's threat to national security. Frankly, I'd respect her more if she had been a source of leaked data. But all this episode really shows is her knack for getting caught up in trivial scandals.

    I'd be happy to never hear of the email matter again, but there's little chance of that. Instead, I expect the Republicans to flog the matter on and on, much as they did every conjured taint from Whitewater to Benghazi, even though their complaints will fail to impress anyone but themselves, and in the end prove counterproductive. In particular, those of us who consider Hillary at best a lesser evil will wonder why they don't attack her with something she's truly guilty of, like voting for Bush's Iraq War.

    Some scattered links this week:

    • Phyllis Bennis: What the Democratic Party Platform Tells Us About Where We Are on War: Unwilling to break with a past that has caused us nothing but grief, of course. "The draft asserts that the United States 'must continue to have the strongest military in the world' and criticizes the 'arbitrary cuts that the Republican Congress enacted as part of sequestration.'"

    • Carl Bialik: The Police Are Killing People As Often As They Were Before Ferguson: "The deaths [of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile] have driven renewed attention to the more than 1,000 people killed each year by police officers." I have to admit that's a higher number than I would have expected, but maybe I was just being naïve. For instance, see: Ben Norton: Before Alton Sterling, Louisiana police killed mentally ill black father Micahel Noel -- and 37 others since 2015.

    • Jessica Elgot: Tony Blair could face contempt of parliament motion over Iraq war: Not quite a full hearing at the Hague, but the Chilcot Report makes clear what we already pretty much knew -- that Blair lied to Parliament and the public to join Bush in invading and occupying Iraq in 2003 -- and a public rebuke is in order. Public opinion in the US is if anything even more unanimous in recognizing Bush's scheming to launch that war, yet the prospect of Congress acknowledging this with a similar resolution is, well, unthinkable.

    • Harry Enten: Is Gary Johnson Taking More Support From Clinton or Trump?: Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, is the Libertarian candidate for president this year. In theory a larger than usual slice of Republicans should lean Libertarian given that the GOP candidate is basically a Fascist. A Libertarian should have less appeal to Democrats, especially on economic issues, but Hillary is exceptionally weak on two issues that many Democrats care about, ones Johnson could exploit: drug prohibition and global warfare. Enten's research doesn't shed much light here, but polls that bother to list Johnson show him gathering close to 10% in western states like Arizona and California (also Vermont). I have a friend who thinks that Trump will destroy the Republican Party and Johnson's Libertarians will rise to take the GOP's place. I think the chances of that happening are nil. For one thing, more of the Republican base leans fascist than libertarian, and for another, the Kochs have pretty clearly shown that no matter how much they may philosophize about freedom, they put their money on the party of graft. On the other hand, given that both major party candidates have extremely low favorability ratings, this will likely be a good year to be "none of the above."

    • Stephen Kinzer: Is NATO Necessary?: I would have preferred that the UK vote on leaving NATO over quitting the EU, but I have seen a number of (admittedly left-wing) Brexiters touting their win as a rebuke of NATO. Indeed, any Englishman worried about loss of sovereignty to the EU should be apoplectic about NATO, which the US regularly uses to consign British soldiers to fight and die in America's imperial wars.

      Britain's vote to quit the European Union was a rude jolt to the encrusted world order. Now that the EU has been shocked into reality, NATO should be next. When NATO leaders convene for a summit in Warsaw on Friday, they will insist that their alliance is still vital because Russian aggression threatens Europe. The opposite is true. NATO has become America's instrument in escalating our dangerous conflict with Russia. We need less NATO, not more. [ . . . ]

      This week's NATO summit will be a festival of chest-thumping, with many warnings about the Russian "threat" and solemn vows to meet it with shows of military force. The United States plans to quadruple spending on NATO military projects on or near Russia's borders. In recent weeks NATO has opened a new missile base in Romania, held the largest military maneuver in the modern history of Poland, and announced plans to deploy thousands more American troops at Baltic bases, some within artillery range of St. Petersburg. Russia, for its part, is building a new military base within artillery range of Ukraine and deploying 30,000 troops to border posts. Both sides are nuclear-armed.

      Ever since the Brexit vote the US has been escalating its focus on Russia, inflating the threat by provoking it, all the better to keep Europe subservient to US schemes in Africa and the Middle East.

    • Nancy LeTourneau: Some Things You Need to Know About the Dallas Police Department: Evidently before last week's shootings, Dallas Police Chief David Brown had made notable progress on reducing complaints of excessive police force, including "a 30 percent decline in assaults on officers this year, and a 40 percent drop in shootings by police."

    • Conor Lynch: Paranoid politics: Donald Trump's style perfectly embodies the theories of renowned historian: Reference is to Richard Hofstadter's 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Lynch is part wrong: the book was written at a time when McCarthyite paranoia could be viewed as history, which is part of the reason Goldwater seemed so ridiculous. Hofstadter's examples go further back in history, and it is true that had he not died he could update with a new chapter on Trump, with Roy Cohn and Glenn Beck key intermediaries. (Indeed, the Cohn connection is almost too karmic to be believed.)

    • Sean D Naylor: Out of Uniform and Into the Political Fray: A profile of former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who appears to be a leading candidate as Trump's running mate. Flynn's name was familiar to me mostly due to Michael Hastings' book The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan. Flynn was deputy to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired by Obama for insubordination and/or his monumental cock up of command -- Flynn, of course, was a key factor in both. Flynn was subsequently head of the DIA, then retired to become Trump's "military adviser." The US has a long history of nominating ex-generals for president, but unlike Flynn all the previous ones achieved distinction in wars the US won -- most recently Eisenhower. (Since then George Wallace selected a general for his running mate, and Ross Perot picked an admiral -- precedents, sure, but not the sort that make Trump look better. Flynn, by the way, has a book coming out, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, written with neocon Michael Ledeen, one of the dumbest fucking assholes in America.)

    • Heather Digby Parton: Following the Trump money: He's running his campaign just like his casinos -- as a big scam: "If it's true that they've collected somewhere between $25 and $50 million for the campaign in the last month then the real grift is just about to kick in. Remember, Trump told Fortune magazine back in 2000, 'It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.'"

    • Nomi Prins: Donald Trump's Anti-Establishment Scam: "After all, he's brought his brand to a far broader global audience on a stage so much larger than any Apprentice imaginable. He could lose dramatically, blame the Republican establishment for being mean to him, and then expand the Trump brand into new realms, places like Russia, where he's long craved an opening."

    Ask a question, or send a comment.

    2-July-2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Started this more than a week ago, but things dragged out, making me late, or perhaps now I should say early?

    After last week's referendum when 52% of the UK's voters decided to chuck it all and take Britain out of the European Union, David Eversall sent me this clipping from the Financial Times, adding "Probably has relevance for the Presidential election especially the last point."

    A quick note on the first three tragedies. Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term from the dearth of jobs and investment. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another one. Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Micahel Gove said 'the British are sick of experts' he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has lead to anything other than bigotry?

    Aside from the quibble that I suspect it's bigotry that leads to anti-intellectualism rather than the other way around, my reaction to the third point was "welcome to my world." Politics in America went counterfactual in the 1980s when Reagan came up with his "Morning in America" con (more on that at the end).

    I'm afraid I didn't know much about Brexit before plodding through the links below. Let me try to summarize what I've learned:

    1. Many in England never liked Europe, or thought of themselves as being part of Europe. They grew up on stories of how Britain won the great European wars of the last two centuries and built the largest empire the world has seen, and they never got over the loss of that empire or of their exceptional status in the world. They never lost their righteousness or their racism. They skew right -- always have -- and they formed the core of the Leave block, as they always would be.

    2. The EU was originally a center-left concept, intent on erasing borders, on entangling the many separate nations of a rather small continent into a cohesive entity that would render impossible the myriad wars of recent centuries. This entity would be built on basic human rights and would advance political and economic equality. But this idea was repeatedly corrupted by business interests, knee-jerk appeals to nationalism, and the parallel cloak of war known as NATO -- which since 2001 has mostly served to exacerbate the divides between north and south, west and east, Crusader (for lack of a better term) and Muslim. One result was that the core for Remain was tepid and in many cases disillusioned.

    3. In the 1980s Thatcher laid waste to industrial Britain while opening Europe to British capital, and later Blair delivered Labour to the financiers while committing the UK to Bush's disastrous "terror" wars. Britain hasn't had a credible leftist government since Wilson's in the 1970s (if not Attlee's in the 1940s), so Britain's experience of the EU has skewed horribly right.

    4. The EU's bravest policy was the insistence on labor mobility. This didn't have a huge impact as long as the national economies were rich and relatively equal, but the EU was easily pressured to expand into less developed countries, and transfers to rebalance the economies have never been adequate. When this happened capital flowed out while cheaper labor flowed in -- the latter easily scapegoated by the right for depressed areas actually caused by capital flight. One result has been the growth of racist right-wing parties throughout Europe (like the anti-EU UKIP in Britain).

    5. The rise of the right, both in Europe and in the US, has pushed immigrants and minorities into the hands of the left-center parties, often becoming significant stakeholders in those parties. This has tended to defocus the traditional class-schism between left and right -- perhaps more so in the US, where Democrats have few qualms about shafting labor in favor of liberal businesses, knowing that minorities have no choice but to vote for them. As this happens, older/whiter workers can lash back against the left-center. Conversely, liberals tend to focus on opposing racism and xenophobia rather than actually working for more equitable prosperity.

    6. After the global finance bubble burst in 2008, the bankers and their politicians conspired to save themselves at the expense of everyone else. They controlled the EU, which ceased to be a reform movement and became an instrument for denying democracy and imposing austerity across the entire continent. This was perhaps worse in the Eurozone, but the UK, which had the flexibility of its own currency, followed suit with a crippling austerity program benefitting no one but the London banks. The right, which had caused most of this pain, found it easy to blame Europe, and many (even some on the left) readily bought that line.

    7. Then there was sheer political opportunism. Tory leader Cameron promised to hold a referendum on leaving the EU during the last elections in a crass move to prevent conservative voters from defecting to UKIP. He assumed a referendum would be harmless, as all three major parties were committed to staying in the EU. Still, the Conservatives had long had a sizable anti-EU core, and Labour had recently revolted against the Blairites and elected leftist Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (who post-facto was charged as ineffective, possibly even uncommitted to the Remain cause). One result was that the campaign for Remain spanned the entire ideological spectrum without having any coherent vision or much commitment. (As I note below, "remain" itself is a remarkably passive and for that matter nonchalant verb.) Another was that it was practically defenseless against misleading and often ridiculous charges, the stock-in-trade of the right-wing tabloid press.

    8. After the vote, the markets panicked, as markets tend to do. Still, nothing has happened yet, and separation will by all accounts take at least two years from whenever it starts, which isn't now because Cameron resigned and Parliament isn't actually required to pull the suicide trigger. Most likely there will be new elections and prolonged negotiations while nothing much actually happens -- other than continuation of the current rot -- and the folks who pull strings behind curtains get their ducks lined up.

    9. One thing that's little commented on is the pernicious effect of NATO on Europe. Through NATO, the US sucked Europe into its Global War on Terror (most specifically its parochial war against Islam in Afghanistan), and also into its rekindled Cold War against Russia. The EU expanded aggressively into Eastern Europe, thereby unbalancing the equality of member states, mostly because NATO led the way. NATO aggression in North Africa and the Middle East then triggered a refuge crisis on top of Europe's previous immigration problem. One terrible result is that Europe has become targeted by ISIS-affiliated (a very loose definition) terrorists, which mostly serves to provoke hatred and backlash. The right builds on this, even though you'd think that anyone who frets over sovereignty worry more about the US/NATO.

    10. I suspect that eventually we'll find that the EU has spun such a thick institutional web that it will prove impossible to disentangle it all. That is to say, the core nations are stuck with it, regardless of whether their people understand why. Still, movements to exit and hoist up renewed national borders will continue until the EU reforms into something that actually benefits most of the people pretty much everywhere, and their failure will continue to embarrass leaders of all parties but the most fringe. To do this, the EU needs to move left, if anything out ahead of the national parties. And it needs to do this not just to deliver on its original concept but to give people all across the continent reason to support it, and through it each other. These are things your center-right neo-liberals, dedicated as they are to making the rich richer and otherwise letting the chips land where they might, just can't do. Unfortunately, the center-left isn't able to either, especially when faced with the sort of "scorched earth" opposition the Republicans excel at in the US.

    11. One last point: I cite several anti-EU leftists below, who are right to blame the US/NATO and who are not wrong to see the referendum as a broad rejection of neoliberal consensus. It's not clear that they also believe that the UK is more likely to move left without the EU than within, but I imagine they can make a fair case to that effect -- just now sure if that's because recession will make voters more desperate, because a nation not in the EU has more options, or both. Still, I can't share their enthusiasm for Brexit. I just can't see how a retreat into narrow-minded prejudice advances a more equitable society and a more humane economy.

    In what follows, it may be tempting, sobering, even chilling to think of Leave as Trump and Remain as Clinton. I think that's probably why we often take away the notion that Leave was primarily racist/xenophobic and Remain as liberal/integrationist, even though there were many more nuances to each. But working that angle out should really be another exercise. I suspect we'll find many more angles there too (with Trump it's hard to think of anything as a nuance).

    Some Brexit links:

    • Post-Brexit global equity loss of over $2 trillion -- worst ever.

    • Anne Applebaum: What the media gets wrong about Brexit: "The leave campaign does not have a common vision and does not have a common plan because its members wouldn't be able to agree on one."

    • Torsten Bell: The referendum, living standards and inequality: Several charts show that recent changes to income have little bearing on the vote. Rather, look at 1980s Thatcherism: "The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows."

    • Mike Carter: I walked from Liverpool to London. Brexit was no surprise: "Thatcherism devastated communities throughout industrial England that have never recovered. Their pain explains why people voted to leave in the EU referendum."

    • John Cassidy: Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote: Cites, and agrees with, Torsten Bell (above). Then notes how uninspiring the Remain campaign, backed lamely by leaders of all three major political parties, was: "The Remain side argued, in effect, that while the E.U. isn't great, Britain would be even worse off without it. That turned out to be a losing story." It occurs to me that "remain" is probably the most passive word in the English language. Why would anyone pick it as a slogan? In 2004, when the Iraq War had gone sour, Bush (or Rove or whoever) didn't campaign to Remain in Iraq. They opted for Stay, or more often Stay the Course, suggesting that there is a plan that will eventually pan out if only we don't lose our will. European Union, frankly, was a lot more promising idea than the Iraq War ever was, yet its so-called defenders seem to have lost faith in it or understanding of it and are left with nothing more to offer than the threat that if we fail to accept the status quo, things will only get worse.

      Cassidy also wrote Why Brexit Might Not Happen at All and Sunderland and the Brexit Tragedy. I don't find the former very convincing, although I wouldn't be surprised if somehow the Leave win gets circumvented. There are a number of ways Britain's elites might go about ignoring the referendum results, with Cameron's resignation a first step, and Boris Johnson's reluctance to replace him a second. The former shipbuilding city Sunderland is another example: industry was shut down there during the Thatcher years, depressing the region to the point where the EU actually helps out, they still voted Leave. "Unless the Brexit vote is somehow reversed, the residents of places like Sunderland will most likely be left to fly the Union Jack and fester."

    • Amy Davidson: Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump: In particular, it reminds us that there are people who will vote for Trump not because of who Trump is but because of their own jaundiced worldview. I know a Trump supporter whose only explanation is "chaos" -- I suspect he'd vote for Charles Manson if given the chance. After all, what is Brexit other than a vote for chaos? Davidson quotes Hillary's response: "This time of uncertainty only underscores the need for calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House." And she thinks that's a winning argument against a clown who promises unpredictable entertainment?

    • Tom Ewing: Obsolete Units Surrounded by Hail: "An A to Z of Brexit. Cathartic fragments, pessimistic conjectures." Encyclopedic, but let's single out: "David Cameron is the worst post-war Prime Minister, a gambler without even the spine to bet his reputation (and the country's economy) on something he believed in."

    • Tony Karon: It's the end of the world as we know it -- again: "The Brexit result -- a vote of no-confidence in the elites of London and Brussels by an English working class that has been steadily marginalised over three decades -- underscores the peril that the system that has aggrandised those elites now faces through its failure to deliver economic security and dignity to millions of citizens." He mentions that economists have largely turned against austerity, and notes some opportunities for fruitful spending like the $3.6 trillion needed "to restore and modernise crumbling infrastructure [in the US] by 2020," adding that "Hillary Clinton proposes an infrastructure spend less than 10 per cent of what the Civil Engineers recommend; Mr Trump has offered no plan."

    • Paul Krugman: Brexit: The Morning After: "It seems clear that the European project -- the whole effort to promote peace and growing political union through economic integration -- is in deep, deep trouble." Also: The Macroeconomics of Brexit: Motivated Reasoning? "Economists have very good reasons to believe that Brexit will do bad things in the long run, but are strongly tempted to sex up their arguments by making very dubious claims about the short run." Still, Dean Baker has some quibbles about Krugman's claims (see Paul Krugman, Brexit, and Bubbles): namely, he suspects London is enjoying a real estate bubble that Brexit is likely to pop . . . and, well, you know how that goes.

    • Alex Massie: Is Brexit the beginning of the End of Britain?: Focuses mostly on Scotland, which voted against independence when threatened with exile from the UE, and voted heavily to remain in the EU. There are also similar feelings in Northern Ireland (where unification with Ireland would keep them in the EU) and even in Wales. But breaking up the UK may not be the only way out for Scotland; see Nicola Sturgeon: Scottish parliament could block Brexit.

    • Chris Patten: A British Tragedy in One Act: Quotes Churchill: "The trouble with committing political suicide is that you live to regret it."

    • John Pilger: A Blow for Peace and Democracy: Why the British Said No to Europe: "The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media." Depends on your point of view, but when you say no to the entire establishment, you're not necessarily just voting for a narrow flag-waving anti-immigrant platform (although Pilger ignores those who did just that).

    • Norman Pollack: Fissures in World Capitalism: The British Vote: "The elephant in the room is NATO. Obviously, the EU is its economic counterpart, and was never conceived in isolation as a mere trading bloc. With Britain out, hopefully others will follow, the EU will tighten its ship as an economic union and NATO, now presently at Russia's borders, will be forced to rethink its dangerous course." A referendum on British membership in NATO would have been more interesting, and indeed might have started a dissolution of an organization that these days serves mostly to entangle Europe in America's post-imperial wars. But my initial reaction was opposite of Pollack's: Brexit will push Britain even more into the US orbit, increasing its stake in subduing the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. One might hope that "old Europe" would respond by ditching NATO, but the EU has already followed NATO deep into "new Europe" and the latter are keen on poking the Russian Bear.

    • Randeep Ramesh: Racism is spreading like arsenic in the water supply: "The far right preys on the weakest members of society and by letting anti-immigrant rhetoric bed in we are eroding civil rights not strengthening them." I.e., a spike in such incidents led to Cameron condemns xenophobic and racist abuse after Brexit vote.

    • Jeffrey D Sachs: The Meaning of Brexit: "In Europe, the call to punish Britain pour encourager les autres -- to warn those contemplating the same -- is already rising. This is European politics at its stupidest (also very much on display vis-à-vis Greece)." Also, he points out that US foreign policy viz. Syria and Ukraine are much to blame for the crisis, and just falls short of pointing out that NATO is what Europe should be exiting. For more on "stupidest" politics, see European leaders rule out informal Brexit talks before article 50 is triggered.

    • George Soros: Brexit and the Future of Europe: "Now the catastrophic scenario that many feared has materialized, making the disintegration of the EU practically irreversible."

    • Andre Vltchek: Brexit -- Let the UK Screw Itself!: "Almost no commentator bothered to notice what was truly shocking about the entire referendum process: an absolute lack of progressive ideology, of internationalism and concern for the world as a whole. Both sides (and were there really two sides there) presented a fireworks of shallow selfishness and of pettiness. The profound moral corruption of the West was clearly exposed."

    • Paul Woodward: Who gets democracy?: A number of interesting points here. One that especially struck me: "Last Thursday, 2.7 million people who have made Britain their home were not allowed to vote because although they are EU citizens resident in an EU country, they are not British citizens." Don't you think people who are so affected by a vote should get to vote? Good chance that bloc would have swung the election. (FWIW, I also think that immigrants, at least the ones with legal jobs, should be able to vote in US elections: if you live and work somewhere, you are part of the public, and therefore a stake holder.)

    • Simon Wren-Lewis: The triumph of the tabloids: "Of course we should blame Johnson and Farage and the rest: the UK has paid a very high price to facilitate political ambition. Of course we should blame Cameron and Osborne for taking the referendum gamble and stoking anger with austerity. But a few politicians alone are not capable of fooling the electorate so consistently. To do that they need to control the means of communicating information."

    Meanwhile, some short links on other subjects:

    • Patrick Cockburn: An Endless Cycle of Indecisive Wars: Tom Engelhardt's introduction cites a statistic that should help you understand Brexit: "If you want a single figure that catches the grim spirit of our moment, it's 65 million. That's the record-setting number of people that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates were displaced in 2015 by 'conflict and persecution,' one of every 113 inhabitants of the planet." Most of them result from the US/NATO wars against Islam, and I include Syria in that list, and as Cockburn shows, they keep getting worse because the US/NATO can't manage to bring them to any sort of conclusion, diplomatic or otherwise. And yes, here's another Brexit quote, restating what should by now be obvious:

      The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have parallels with the Middle East: the free-market economic policies pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst for protest against the status quo. The anger of the "Leave" voters has much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United States.

    • Donald Cohen: The History of Privatization: Part 1 (of 4).

    • Thomas Frank: Worshipping Money in DC: Author of the best political book of 2016, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People, although you might consider holding off until after you vote for Hillary in November -- it offers few inducements to support her now, but will help you understand what went wrong after she's inaugurated. This piece is more on lobbying -- the principal subject of Frank's equally worthy 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, and of the newsletter Influence, extensively cited here. Conclusion: "This is not an industry, Influence's upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community -- a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class." I'll add that American politicians have always been easy to bribe, because they've never been very skeptical of hustlers out to make money -- that's just part of America's boom ethic. The only thing that's changed is the scale of the graft and how systematic it's become, plus how our campaign system selects for the best moneygrubbers.

    • Henry Grabar: Kansas' Insane Right-Wing Experiment Is About to Destroy Its Roads: Well, it is true that Kansas has been raiding the highway fund ever since Brownback blew a hole in the budget with his massive tax giveaways, and consequently new roads aren't being built and old roads aren't being maintained -- at least not at prudent levels. This is the sort of short-sighted policy that doesn't fully impact you right away: it takes time for weather and wear to break down those roads, but the toll accumulates until it does become catastrophic, at which point debt will make it even harder to address.

    • John Feffer: Donald Trump and America B: Actually, starts with recent elections in Poland which brought the reactionary PiS to power, arguing that shows a backlash by those left behind ("Poland B") by the urban neoliberals who have dominated Polish politics ("Poland A") -- a dynamic that is sweeping across Europe and finds an analog in the Trump bandwagon here. I don't know about Poland, but in the US I doubt Trump's supporters are that poor -- I've seen surveys that show them averaging about $20K above average US family income (whereas Sanders and Clinton run about even). This also ignores the growth of leftist parties in non-ex-communist states, especially ones crushed by austerity measures like Greece and Spain (but also within left-center parties, like Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US).

    • Elizabeth Kolbert: Drawing the Line: On gerrymandering old and new, especially the REDMAP project which was so successful for Republicans in 2010, as detailed in David Daley's Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. "In House races in 2012, 1.7 million more votes were cast for Democrats than for Republicans. And still, thanks to the way those votes were packed and cracked, Republicans came away with thirty-three more congressional seats."

    • Elizabeth Kolbert: Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change: Piece from May 5 -- a lot more burnt since then. More generally: "In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record."

    • Evan Osnos: Making a Killing: Useful brief history of (as the sub puts it) the business and politics of selling guns.

      More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others -- the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.

      None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events -- mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control -- gun sales have broken records. "You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there's a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy," Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.

    • Jeffrey Toobin: Clarence Thomas Has His Own Constitution: "The abortion dissent explains why Thomas is so cut off on the Court, even from his fellow-conservatives. He doesn't respect the Court's precedents. He is so convinced of the wisdom of his approach to the law that he rejects practically the whole canon of constitutional law." Toobin also quotes Scalia on how his judicial philosophy differed from Thomas's: "I'm an originalist," Scalia said, "but I'm not a nut."

    • Paul Waldman: Trump's response to terrorism is both weak and barbaric: "It seems that nothing is more horrifying to Donald Trump than the idea that somebody might be laughing at us, or more specifically, at him." Too much after that trying to cast GW Bush as an enlightened alternative ("a fatherly reassurance that their president would keep them safe"), but it's a measure of Trump's instability that makes such comparisons possible.

    • Julia Carrie Wong/Danny Yadron: Hillary Clinton proposes student debt deferral for startup founders: Worst faux pas (of its type) since Paul Ryan took Labor Day as an occasion to tout "America's job creators" deprecating the people who actually do the work to keep everything running. What was she thinking? That the people most able to repay their debts should be spared? That tomorrow's business leader should get a head start on sucking the public tit? That the people should subsidize MBA programs that teach young people to become sociopaths? Or just that, to agree with Ryan and Ayn Rand, entrepreneurs are so much better than everyone else? Surely she can't imagine that this will be a universal benefit, that it will lead to a world where everyone is an entrepreneur and no one actually has to do any work? Or maybe she just sees it as a cheap sop, as a way of shaming all those poor sods who went to college just to learn a trade, or worse still to learn liberal arts, to become more knowledgeable citizens, to contribute a little something to what we used to call civilization?

      The authors quote Hillary: "I disagree with free college for everybody. I don't think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump's kids to college." Well, maybe Trump's kids should go to college -- especially if college meant something other than rubberstamping credentials (like, you know, learning how to get along and now just how to get ahead). And maybe if the public paid for it, Trump wouldn't be so motivated to grab money for his own personal aggrandizement (or if he still was, we'd be less relucatant to tax it back). A world where everyone, regardless of how rich or poor they start out, has the same opportunity to learn as much as they can would likely be much better than the one we live in now.

      For more, see Rana Foroohar: Why Hillary Clinton's Student Debt Idea Is Smart, one of those pieces that exposes how ridiculous Clinton's program is by assuming it's brilliant. In particular:

      Start-ups are a key driver of productivity. But the birthrate of startups has been in decline since the 1970s. Since then, it has dovetailed with a shift in how the financial sector business model works -- it no longer invests primarily in new business, but rather buys up and trades existing assets, and funding for small and mid-sized start ups is still scarce (while increasing monopoly power on the part of large firms squashes new ones, as Robert Reich and others have recently written.)

      And how exactly is a modest tax incentive (debt deferral) going to fix these problems? If monopoly power is the problem (and it's certainly a big one), the classic remedy is antitrust enforcement, and I'd add that it's also important to open up ways to provide financing and build capital that bypass the exclusive control of predatory financiers. You also need to look hard at what finance does, and undercut the rewards of bad short-term behavior even if you can't figure out how to reward long-term productive investment -- as it is the financial sector is sucking up far too much money, so you need to both that less likely and tax it away when it happens. Also, another thing that has been driving productivity down "since the 1970s" has been the decline of worker control, so that, too, is something to direct policy at promoting. Clinton's proposal hardly even amounts to a gesture against these problems. Rather, it hints that she's still in thrall to the high-tech is going to save the world from endemic corruption. This is actually a common myth in New Democratic circles -- a major theme in Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal.

      Meanwhile, the evidence on using tax incentives to influence business behavior is pretty damning. This came as no surprise to me. From the beginning I thought that every "incentive" was a distortion leading to warped thought. In 1984 I was looking for a job. I recall driving up I-93 from Boston with a headhunter who pointed out Compugraphic's various buildings along the route and explained the tax advantages of each. When I arrived at corporate headquarters I found that most of the managers actually lived in "tax-free New Hampshire," and several explained that matters most isn't income, it's after-tax profits. I knew then the company was doomed, and indeed it was. But they were spouting "truths" that were clichés at the time, spread hither and yon by the business press, so my judgment wasn't just limited to this one company: I figured the whole economy was doomed, if not to the tragedy of the Great Depression then at least to the farce we've lived through ever since the 1980s, occasionally propped up then blown apart by increasingly desperate bubbles.

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    Sunday, June 19, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    Travel disrupts my normal news browsing. I'm lucky to keep up with my email, find it hard to write on notebook keyboards, never listen to the radio, only watch TV when that's happening somewhere I'm staying (which did get me some History Channel in CT, CNN in Buffalo, and Weather Channel in AR). So I'm catching up here, and this week's links and comments are pretty hit-and-miss.

    • David Atkins: Gun Violence Research: If Republicans in Congress Won't Do It, California Will: One of the major problems with debates over gun control is the general lack of serious research into the problem. We have some rough numbers about total shootings but little else, in large part because the NRA has worked very hard to keep any research from getting funding. So if California does this, it will be a big help to anyone who wants to base policy on real data.

    • Andrew Cockburn: Victory Assured on the Military's Main Battlefield -- Washington: Back in the 1980s the "star wars" program was originally dubbed SDI, but I recall someone quipping that it should have been SFI, for Strategic Funding Initiative. It is one of the Pentagon's more famous multi-billion-dollar boondoggles, but far from alone. The military may or may not get the wars they lobby for, but somehow they always manage to get extravagant funding:

      Inside the Pentagon, budget planners and weapons-buyers talk of the "bow wave," referring to the process by which current research and development initiatives, initially relatively modest in cost, invariably lock in commitments to massive spending down the road. Traditionally, such waves start to form at times when the military is threatened with possible spending cutbacks due to the end of a war or some other budgetary crisis. [ . . . ]

      The latest nuclear buildup is only the most glaring and egregious example of the present bow wave that is guaranteed to grow to monumental proportions long after Obama has retired to full-time speechmaking. The cost of the first of the Navy's new Ford Class aircraft carriers, for example, has already grown by 20% to $13 billion with more undoubtedly to come. The "Third Offset Strategy," a fantasy-laden shopping list of robot drones and "centaur" (half-man, half-machine) weapons systems, assiduously touted by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, is similarly guaranteed to expand stunningly beyond the $3.6 billion allotted to its development next year.

    • Steve Fraser: How the Age of Acquiescence Came to an End: Author of last year's The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, now admits that:

      So consider this essay a postscript to that work, my perhaps belated realization that the age of acquiescence has indeed come to an end. Millions are now, of course, feeling the Bern and cheering The Donald. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the first signs of what was to come as I was finishing my book: the Tea Party on the right, and on the left Occupy Wall Street, strikes by low-wage workers, minimum and living wage movements, electoral victories for urban progressives, a surge of environmental activism, and the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement just on the eve of publication.

      Also, after noting that not just the left but also the right has rediscovered the class struggle of the 1930s:

      Hillary Clinton is broadly distrusted. Sanders has consistently outpolled her against potential Republican opponents for president because she is indeed a limousine liberal whose career has burned through trust at an astonishing rate. And more important than that, the rebellion that has carried Sanders aloft is not afraid to put capitalism in the dock. Trump is hardly about to do that, but the diseased state of the neoliberal status quo has made him, too, a force to be reckoned with. However you look at it, the age of acquiescence is passing away.

      It should be added that while both right and left seek to build on mass disposession, the left offers programs that appeal to those without power, whereas the right seeks to redirect that fear and anger against others, thereby insulating the wealthy from the wrath of the masses -- if not from the consequences of their own lust for violence.

    • Paul Krugman: Notes on Brexit: Eleven of them, concluding that Britain would be slightly better off if they vote down the referendum threatening to part company with the European Union. Still, the biggest point is that exit would be bad for the City's financiers, which probably means as little to the average Briton as Wall Street bonuses mean to most Americans. Beyond that, he dismisses "claims that Britain, freed from EU rules, could achieve spectacular growth via deregulation." I haven't read much on this topic and don't have much to offer, other than the thought that exit might be preferable if Britain was solidly to the left of Europe -- and therefore able to use its independence to further equality -- but with the Tories controlling Parliament that pretty clearly isn't the case. (On the other hand, Scottish independence would likely have moved Scotland to the left, although that wouldn't have been good for English Labour.)

      The Brexit thing took a nasty turn with the assassination of Jo Cox, a Labour MP who strongly opposed Brexit, by a right-winger who shouted "Britain first" while attacking her. It would be fitting if her martyrdom swings the vote to no, but I can think of more than a few strategic assassinations that, often despite initial sympathy, did the job. As for the killer, there is much available, like Ben Norton: Suspected killer of British lawmaker is neo-Nazi -- but media blamed mental illness, like Charleston 1 year ago.

    • Stephen Kinzer: Don't mythologize Ali's rage: Probably much more worth reading on the late Muhammad Ali, but this is a good start, focusing on his courageous political stances against racism at home and imperialism abroad, and how recent eulogies tend to sanitize him in a time when "his message is every bit as urgent today as it was when he first began preaching it."

    • Ronald B Rapoport/Alan I Abramowitz/Walter J Stone: Why Trump Was Inevitable: Nothing deep or surprising or even very informative here. The authors merely did some polling among likely Republican voters and found out that Trump was the most popular candidate, beating all the others in one-on-one contests with Cruz (48%), Rubio (43%), Carson (42%), Paul (37%), and Fiorina (36%) his closest challengers -- the most notable finding is that among ten contenders (the polling was done around Iowa caucus time) the lowest rating belonged to Jeb Bush (31%), with Kasich and Christie just a whisker better (32%). Another chart shows that Republicans thought Trump was more likely to win in November than any other candidate (56%, vs. 44% for Cruz, 39% for Rubio, and a mere 13% for Bush). Other charts show that Trump's signature issues (banning Muslims, building his wall) were widely favored not just among Trump supporters but among all Republicans. As I said, nothing revealing there (except perhaps how doomed the Bush campaign was from the beginning).

    • Aaron Rupar: Senator Who Has Received More NRA Suport Than Anyone Blames Obama for Orlando Shooting: John McCain, $7.7 million, although most of that came during his 2008 presidential campaign, an unfair advantage compared to all the other NRA stooges in Congress. McCain's thinking here is that Obama opened the door for ISIS when he oversaw the withdrawal of US occupation forces from Iraq. The implication is that were it not for Obama's folly no one would have heard of ISIS, so no deranged westerner could pledge allegiance to the group in the midst of a killing spree. McCain may be one of the last true believers in the magical powers of American military power, or he may just have wanted US troops to stay in Iraq because their presence sustains the war he so dearly loves. If one has to blame Obama for this, it would make more sense to question his decision to send troops back to Iraq (and on to Syria) to fight ISIS, reinforcing the view that America is at war with Islam and has callous disregard for anyone who gets in the way. Clearly, America's long and seemingly intractable involvement in the Middle East's wars is leading to both sides disrespecting and dehumanizing the other. I don't think either Bush or Obama ever wished to paint their wars with racism but as those wars drag on, with us and them killing the other, their remonstrations are lost on demagogues like Trump. McCain, at least, has started to walk back his charges. Still, he hasn't betrayed his sponsors.

      Of course, what actually happened in Orlando doesn't fit at all well with the preconceived notions of someone like McCain. That the shooter was born a Muslim and had heard of ISIS seems almost incidental, even as that he was so filled with rage and armed with an assault rifle is so quintessentially American. For a profile, see 'Always Agitated. Always Mad': Omar Mateen, According to Those Who Knew Him.

    • Some light reading on Donald Trump:

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

    Continue reading . . .

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    Sunday, May 22, 2016

    Weekend Roundup

    No real time for this today, so I'll just try to note a few brief links without providing much in the way of commentary. Main thing that chewed up time today was my sister's birthday. She wanted a party in the new/very old house, although circumstances pretty much restricted us to the living room (repainted bright blue, wood floors refinished). She set up a table on my sawhorses, and I brought over a large pot of jambalaya and a spice cake -- two old never-fail standbys. Only work on the house today was to reinstall the toilet, but after rebuilding the bathroom floor and covering it with vinyl sheet that feels like a milestone.

    One minor piece of housekeeping: Laura Tillem urged me to send an excerpt from last week's Blowing Smoke post on Hiroshima and Obama, and something like it was published in the Wichita Eagle's Letters to the Editor today:

    Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., who normally is sensitive to racial affronts, insists that we not apologize for killing 200,000 Japanese with atom bombs -- the only time such weapons have been used on civilians -- because it was war ("Obama not apologizing for Hiroshima, nor should he," May 16 Opinion). So war means never having to say you're sorry?

    I get that "war is hell," but I don't see that one should deny regrets after a war, or that there's no value in the simple decency of an apology, however paltry.

    I fear that refusing to apologize for Hiroshima implies that atomic bombing of cities is something we can excuse doing again -- that it's one of those "options" that our political leaders insist they won't ever "take off the table." Indeed, current plans to spend more than $1 trillion to upgrade America's nuclear arsenal suggest that America's leaders are more committed than ever to threatening what we're repeatedly told is "a dangerous world" with instant destruction.

    On the other hand, if we started to apologize for the atrocities that even Pitts admits America committed, maybe we'd be less prone to repeat them going forward.

    OK, one big piece and long quote and comment:

    • Matt Taibbi: RIP, GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party: Just riffing on the headline, my initial reaction is that he's got it totally wrong. The Republican Party has been intellectually and morally dead for some time now. The Bush administration proved that any pieces of their agenda that they managed to implement rebounded disastrously, they've continued to perform similarly awful at the state and local levels, and under Obama congressional Republicans (even with their recent majority control) have failed to offer a single constructive proposal -- all they seem capable of doing is jeering and obstructing. So they're already brain dead, not that the media -- so fascinated with their spastic twitching -- has noticed let alone certified. Still, one thing Trump has going is that he's pretty clearly not implicated in their past failures, so how can one accuse him of killing the party? The more apt metaphor is that the party is already dead, and Trump is reanimating it, much like Dr. Frankenstein animated his monster. (I'm not current enough on the relevant pop culture to judge whether some sort of zombie trope might fit better, but John Quiggin's critique of "zombie economics" -- "how dead ideas still walk among us" -- applies to most of the rare occasions when Republicans attempt to present us with their version of thinking.)

      The main argument against the death of the Republican Party is that Republicans keep polling well and winning elections, despite a track record of unmitigated horror. While some pundits argue that Trump is so repugnant and reviled that he may drag the whole party down to a calamitous defeat this fall, I don't see how adding palpable energy (and a soupçon of deniability) hurts the GOP. Taibbi's article is more nuanced than his headline, partly because it's more about Ted Cruz's failures than Trump's successes:

      This led to the hilarious irony of Ted Cruz. Here was a quintessentially insipid GOP con man culled straight from the halls of Princeton, Harvard, the Supreme Court, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to smooth-talk the yokels. But through a freak accident of history, he came along just when the newest models of his type were selling "the Republican establishment sucks" as an electoral strategy.

      Cruz was like an android that should have self-destructed in a cloud of sparks and black smoke the moment the switch flipped on. He instead stayed on just long enough to win 564 delegates, a stunning testament to just how much Republican voters, in the end, hated the Republican kingmakers Cruz robotically denounced.

      All of these crazy contradictions came to a head in Indiana, where Cruz succumbed in an explosion of hate and scorn. The cascade started the Sunday night before the primary, with a Cruz stump speech in La Porte that couldn't have gone worse.

      Things went sideways as Cruz was working his way into a "simple flat tax" spiel, a standard Republican snake-oil proposal in which all corporate, estate and gift taxes would be eliminated, and replaced with a 10 percent flat tax and a 16 percent consumption tax. Not because the rich would pay less and the poor would pay more, but because America and fairness, etc. He was just getting to his beloved money line, claiming, "We can fill out our taxes on a postcard," when a 12-year-old boy interrupted with cries of "You suck!" and "I don't care!"

      Cruz couldn't quite handle the pressure and stepped straight into the man-trap the moment presented. He lectured the kid about respecting his elders, then suggested the world might be a better place if someone had taught a young Donald Trump that lesson. It was a not-half-bad line of the type that the Harvard lawyer is occasionally capable. But Cruz couldn't help himself and added, "You know, in my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a spanking."

      Boom! Within hours the Internet was filled with headlines about how Ted Cruz had suggested spanking someone else's 12-year-old for telling him he sucked.

      This was on top of the ignominy of having already called a basketball hoop a "ring" while giving a speech on the gym floor in Knightstown, the home of the fictional Hickory team from Hoosiers. No American male would call a basketball hoop a ring, and even a French immigrant would know better than to do so in Indiana, but this was the kind of run he was on.

      The rest of the race was a slapstick blowout. Carly Fiorina fell off a stage, and Cruz's wife, Heidi, actually had to answer a question from a Yahoo! reporter about her husband being called the Zodiac Killer. Heidi Cruz calmly responded that she'd been married to Ted for 15 years and "I know pretty well who he is." This, of course, was exactly what the wife of the actual Zodiac Killer would say, making for a perfectly absurd ending to a doomed campaign. [ . . . ]

      Finally, on the morning of the Indiana primary, Cruz woke up to hear opponent Trump babbling that Cruz's own father had been hanging out with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a bizarre take on a ridiculous National Enquirer story that Trump, of course, believed instantly. Trump brought this up on Fox and Friends, which let him run the ball all the way to the end zone. "I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death -- before the shooting?" Trump asked. "It's horrible."

      American politics had never seen anything like this: a presidential candidate derided as a haggardly masturbating incarnation of Satan, the son of a presidential assassin's accomplice, and himself an infamous uncaptured serial killer.

      Despite the media humiliations, Cruz talked passionately of his supporters' resolve. "Just a few days ago, two young kids, ages four and six, handed me two envelopes full of change," he said. "All of their earnings from their lemonade stand. They wanted the campaign to have it."

      The crowd cooed: Awwww! There was no way he could quit now and let those kids down. Except that moments later, Cruz did just that, announcing he was suspending his campaign because "the path to victory has been foreclosed." Then he fled the stage like he was double-parked.

      Didn't initially plan to quote all of that, but it kept coming, and helps explain why Cruz, who had long been favored to win Indiana, and who supposedly cinched the win with a deal to get Kasich to skip the state and not split the anti-Trump vote, imploded so suddenly. But the key word there was "foreclosed": precisely the sort of word a Harvard lawyer would choose to indicate that he was quitting not because he had lost face with the voters or had decided that the principled differences he claimed against Trump had ceased to matter; rather, the moneyed interests behind his campaign decided to cut their losses and live with the consequences. Then, less than a week later, Kasich -- who after his deal with Cruz had nothing riding on the Indiana results -- dropped out as well, conceding the nomination and obviating the rest of the primary schedule. Clearly, the folks with the money decided that whatever uncertainty Trump posed wasn't enough of a threat to keep fighting against.

    And a few real brief links:

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