Weekend Roundup [220 - 229]

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Not much time to collect things today, but here are a few links on the week's newsk:

  • Julie Turkewitz/Jack Healy: 3 Are Dead in Colorado Springs Shootout at Planned Parenthood Center: A gunman, identified as Robert Lewis Dear, entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, shot some people, and shot at police when they arrived on the scene. He was captured alive and unhurt after killing three people and wounding nine others. This link provides some preliminary reporting. Note especially:

    Since abortion became legal nationally, with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, many abortion clinics and staff members across the country have been subjected to harassment including death and bomb threats, and hundreds of acts of violence including arson, bombings and assaults and eight murders, according to figures compiled by the Naral Pro-Choice America Foundation.

    Planned Parenthood's Colorado Springs center was one of many locations around the country that became the site of large anti-abortion protests over the summer after abortion opponents released surreptitious videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing using fetal organs for research. On Aug. 22, the day of nationwide protests to defund Planned Parenthood, more than 300 people protested outside the clinic here, according to local news reports.

    The campaign not just to stigmatize Planned Parenthood but to put it out of business was led this summer by all 16 Republican presidential candidates, while most Republicans in Congress (especially in the House) were so agitated over the issue that they wanted to shut down the federal government if Congress and the President didn't bow to their extortion. Such politicians are casually given the benefit of the doubt when they try to distance themselves from vigilante-terrorists who take their words so seriously they translate them into criminal acts. But in fact most of those politicians do support extra-legal murder and mayhem when the US practices it abroad (e.g., from drones). And one hardly need add that virtually every one of them is equally committed to making sure that vigilante-terrorists here in America have unfettered access to all the guns they can handle. So why excuse them from complicity in murders that are known to have a chilling, and sometimes devastating, effect on the constitutional rights of American women to private health care? (Indeed, see this report: GOP Presidential Candidates Sharing Stage With Pastor Who Hailed Murder of Abortion Provider. The article specifically mentions Cruz, Huckabee, and Jindal. Cruz subsequently received the endorsement of Troy Newman, the leader of Operation Rescue, a group which has been closely aligned with anti-abortion criminals.)

    A few more links on the shooting:

  • DR Tucker: Emma's World: Part III: The first two parts were an attempt to put a human face on one of the casualties of the Paris ISIS attack: specifically, a tourist from Tasmania named Emma Parkinson. This one quotes from a piece written on the occasion of an earlier gun massacre, about a still earlier gun massacre: Will Oremus: After a 1996 Mass Shooting, Australia Enacted Strict Gun Laws. It Hasn't Had a Similar Massacre Since. You may recall that the intermediary massacre, the slaughter of elementary school children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, was followed by a loosening of gun regulation, and a few dozen only marginally less shocking mass shootings. Following the 1996 Australian shooting, over 90% of all Australians agreed on the need for much stricter gun control. As I recall, polling showed that after Newtown a majority of Americans also desired stricter gun control, but opinion was far less united, and various institutional factors allowed the gun industry to prevail. A lot of factors differ between Australia and America here. One might, for instance, point to the cultural import of the old west in America, or to the fact that the US since WWII has fought far more wars than anyone else, and that the US government spends more money on arms than the rest of the world does. Still, two factors stand out: one is that Americans care very little about the welfare of their fellow Americans; the other is that Americans have very little understanding of the actual effects of mass gun proliferation. In particular, they don't realize that Australia provides a very relevant case study of the effects of strict gun regulation. Oremus writes:

    What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post's Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here's the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn't been a single one in Australia since.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

  • Phyllis Bennis: After the Paris Attacks, a Call for Justice -- Not Vengeance. Recapitulates a similar statement made after 9/11, predicting no good would come of responding to the attacks with a "war of vengeance." Indeed. Also cites the common French response to 9/11: "nous sommes tous Américains" -- showing then as now that the French can't shake their self-gratifying identity as colonial masters, even long after their empire went bankrupt.

  • Lauren Fox: Why the Paris Attacks Unleashed a New Level of Anti-Muslim Vitriol in the US: Certainly did, but I'm not sure the author here got the reasons right. For one thing, the US has been fighting several wars against Muslims for 14 years -- and arguably a good deal longer, with 1990 and 1979 key moments of escalation, on top of America's increasing support of Israel, especially coming out of the 1967 and 1973 wars. For another, while the Bush administration was fairly conscientious about positing a battle between "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims," Obama has largely dropped that ball, partly as a result of disengaging from major theatres like Iraq, and partly because the picture itself has become increasingly murky. Also, I think, because the wars have been so unsatisfying that we've lost the commitment that most imperial powers feel to the natives who aligned with them, and are increasingly in trouble because of that -- although this point may just be swamped by the rising tide of nativism stirred up by demagogues like Trump, and the general meanness of the American electorate.

  • Rebecca Gordon: Corruption USA: Doesn't review so much as jump off from Sarah Chayes' book about corruption in Afghanistan, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. Raises the question of whether the US is similarly beleaguered by corruption. Spends a lot of time on Ferguson, Missouri, which while pretty clear (and graphic) is small potatoes -- compared to, say, oil and finance.

  • John B Judis: The Paradoxical Politics of Inequality.

  • Nomi Prins: The American Hunger Games: "Six top Republican Candidates Take Economic Policy Into the Wilderness." Looks at the proposed economic policies of Bush, Carson, Cruz, Fiorina, Rubio, and Trump.

  • Abba Solomon: Golem and Big Brother: A review of Jeff Halper's new book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (Pluto Press). Halper founded the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and wrote an essay called "The Matrix of Domination" which was one of the first expositions to show how Israel's many mechanisms for controlling Palestinians work together. The new book shows how Israeli businesses are taking technology developed for controlling Palestinians and marketing it to the rest of the world. If you don't yet think that the conflict over Israel-Palestine concerns you, this book should prove eye-opening.

  • Philip Weiss: Trump's claim of 9/11 celebration in New Jersey is based on arrest of 5 'laughing' Israelis: A story to file away for a possible footnote, if that's what it is. I do clearly recall Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres smiling on 9/11 and bragging about how good the terror attacks was for Israel -- a faux pas that John Major also made, one that combines "now you know what it feels like" with "with our vast experience in these things we can help you." It should have occurred to people then that the US was being attacked because it had usurped Britain's colonial role in the Middle East and had doubled down on its alliance with Israel against any reasonable alternative. I also recall that Israel almost instantly released stock video that purported to show Palestinians celebrating and burning American flags -- an image that did its intended damage before anyone could soberly think about it.

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Sunday, November 22, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Much blather this week about the existential threat posed to the United States by the prospect of allowing 10,000 Syrian refugees to resettle here. Some demagogues like Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush insisted that we only allow Syrian Christians to enter (7.8% in 1960, the last Syrian census to bother to count sectarian identity, although a 2006 estimate bumps this up to 10%). Others insisted on a vetting process to weed out terrorist infiltrators, evidently unaware that a rather onerous one already exists. Dozens of Republican governors, including our own Sam Brownback (who recently displaced Bobby Jindal as the least popular sitting governor in the US), issued executive orders to help stanch the deluge of Syrian/Arab/Muslim immigrants. Donald Trump not only opposed all immigration, but went further to entertain the idea of a federal registry of Muslims in America. He finally received some backlash for that (rather casual) statement, but it appeals to a base distinguished only by the depths of their ignorance. I'm seeing reports that "only 49% of GOP voters in Iowa think that the religion of Islam should even be legal."

Reading Wikipedia's piece on Islam in the United States would help alleviate this ignorance. You will find, for instance, that about 1% of the American population is Muslim (2.77 million). Also, Muslims are immigrating to the US at a rate of about 110,000 per year. So 10,000 extra Syrians represents less than 10% of the current immigration rate, about 0.36% of the total Muslim population (1 in 277). If everyone shut up and just let this happen, no one would ever notice anything. The problem, though, is that by making a big stink about it, you're not just barring 10,000 Syrians, you're sending a message of hate and fear to 2.77 million Americans. How does that help?

About one-fourth of the Muslims in America are African-Americans, notably political leaders (including two members of Congress) and many prominent athletes and musicians. Most others are first or second generation immigrants, but some date back to immigrants from the 1880-1910 era, and some can trace their families back to the colonial era. The piece has numerous examples, plus a section on "Religious freedom" that shows that Americans were aware of Islam when they declared freedom of religion in the US Constitution.

One minor point I wasn't aware of is that the first country to recognize the United States as an independent country was the Sultanate of Morocco. It's worth adding that the US had generally good relationships in the Arab world up through WWII. In the first world war, Woodrow Wilson had refused to join Britain and France in declaring war on the Ottoman Empire, and he later declined an Anglo-French proposal that the US occupy Turkey when they were divvying up the spoils of war. Before then, the US was primarily known for its missionary schools like the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo. (The Presbyterians who founded those schools restricted their missionary work to Christians so as not to offend Muslim authorities, but welcomed Muslims to study and respected them, allowing the Universities to develop as intellectual centers of liberal, nationalist, and anti-colonial thinking.) Arab/Muslim respect for America only eroded after the US sided with Israel's colonialist project and replaced Britain as the protector of the aristocracies that claim personal ownership of the region's oil wealth.

US good will in the Arab world was built on a reputation for fairness and mutual respect, but has since been squandered in an anachronistic, foolhardy attempt to grab the spoils of empire. In some sense, we've gone full circle. The first significant number of Muslims to appear in colonial America were brought here from Africa, and they proved to be especially difficult to manage as slaves. Islam was then and now a religion that stood for justice and fought back against injustice. It should not be surprising that today's right-wing sees imposing Christianity on Muslims as key to ending their disobedience, as that was precisely what their forebears the slaveholders had done. After all, the prime directive of conservatism is to defend hierarchy by forcing everyone into their "proper" place. Of course, that was easier to do before conservative institutions like slavery and the inquisition were discredited, but the more we live in a world where people with money think they can buy anything, the more we see even the hoariest fantasies of conservatism come back to haunt us.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Richard Silverstein: Why "Reform" Islam?: This is mostly a response to a NY Times piece, Tim Arango: Experts Explain How Global Powers Can Smash ISIS. (If I may interject, my own response is that the piece shows how low the bar is to qualify as an "expert" on this subject.) Arango writes:

    Talking to a diverse group of experts, officials, religious scholars and former jihadis makes clear there is no consensus on a simple strategy to defeat the Islamic State. But there are some themes -- like . . . pushing a broader reformation of Islam -- that a range of people who follow the group say must be part of a solution.

    Some of those "experts" go further in insisting that terrorism is so intimately tied to Islam that only by "reforming" the latter can it be purged of such instincts. Silverstein replies:

    But even if we concede for argument's sake that there is some correlation, no matter how tenuous, why do we blame an entire religion? Why do we blame an entire sacred book when a tiny minority of a religion misinterpret it? Why do we say the religion is at fault rather than the human beings who betray or distort it?

    Baruch Goldstein was a mass murderer who killed 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers at a religious shrine. He did this in the name of his twisted form of Judaism (which I prefer to call settler Judaism to distinguish it from normative Judaism). Did I hear Tim Arango or anyone else wring their hands about the correlation between Torah and mass murder? Even if I did, should I have?

    There is nothing wrong with Torah. Just because Jews misread their sacred text, must I blame the text itself?

    The problems here are so ridiculous it's hard to enumerate them. One, of course, is scale: there are over a billion Muslims in the world today, and hardly any of them present a "terrorist" threat, so why try to discredit the majority's religion? And who are we to decide to reform what they believe? Religions are changed by prophets, not by academics or politicians, and for lots of reasons it's ever getting harder to do that. Established religions like Christianity are certain non-starters, as they've already been rejected. Doubt is easier than replacement, so maybe atheism, secular humanism, or Marxism might make a dent, especially if one attempted to apply such "reform" here as well as there -- but even the Soviets weren't very effective at banishing old religions. So why even talk about such impractical nonsense?

    Well, it's mostly transference: our way of saying that they're the problem. The facts rather argue differently. At the simplest level, you can compare the frequency and size of acts of violence by Muslims that occur in Europe and the US -- what we like to call "terrorism" -- with the same measure of acts of violence by the US and Europe in the Muslim world, and you'll find that there are far more of the latter than the former. Also, if you put them on a timeline, you'll find that the latter predate the former (at least for any time after the early 8th century). Maybe the religions or the ideologies of the west are the ones that should be reformed? A more promising route might be to find a sense of justice that is acceptable to both (or all) religions, and build on that. But the key to doing so isn't dominating the other into submission. It is looking into oneself to find something that might work as common ground. Unfortunately, you don't get to be an "expert" on ISIS by understanding that.

    Also see another of Silverstein's pieces: "Remember the Stranger, for You Yourselves Were Strangers:

    This could just as well be the motto of the United States as one of the cardinal verses in the Torah. It should be stamped on Bibi Netanyahu's forehead since he violates this precept virtually every day that he maintains prison camps for African refugees, who he refuses to grant asylum or even an application process. For those who take the passage to heart, it means be humble, remember the refugee, show kindness and hospitality to the less fortunate. The Republican presidential candidates apparently don't read their Bibles. Or if they do, they're reading the wrong passages.

    The GOP is now making hay out of the Paris terror attacks. Each candidate falls all over himself to be more punitive, more intolerant than the next. 23 governors, including one Democrat, have said they will refuse to accept Syrian refugees within their states. This, despite the fact that governors have no say in immigration matters and may not expel legal refugees. That's the job of the federal government. But don't tell the governors that. It might educate them about the separate powers delegated to the states and federal government. A little something called the Constitution.

    Another historical fact worth mentioning: in 1938, 937 European Jews boarded the S.S. St. Louis en route to America where they hoped to find refuge from Hitler's encroaching hordes. They waited for months in Cuba and other sites while their supporters sought a safe haven in this country. At long last, they gave up and sailed back to Europe. Where 250 of them were swallowed in the Holocaust and exterminated along with 6-million other European Jews.

    There is a catastrophe enveloping Syria in which nearly 200,000 civilians have died. 500,000 Syrians have fled toward Europe and any other safe harbor they might find. These are not terrorists, not ISIS, though most are Muslim. There is nothing criminal in being either Syrian, a Muslim or a refugee. Despite what viewers saw on this FoxNews panel which quoted approvingly Winston Churchill's bit of colonial Islamophobia: "Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog." It would take FoxNews to dredge up 19th century British religious-cultural imperialism, spoken by the leader who epitomized empire in all its worst forms.

  • Yousef Munayyer: There Is Only One Way to Destroy ISIS: This says pretty much what I said last week, except that I didn't feel the need to cast the optimal outcome as the destruction of ISIS. I think it's clear that ISIS will adapt to conditions, so I'd say that the thing to do is to change the conditions to render ISIS much less malign. Munayyer is aiming at the same result, but he's pitching it to people who assume that destroying ISIS is a necessity, but who are flexible and sensible enough to comprehend that just going into ISIS territory and killing (or as we like to call it, liberating) everyone won't do the trick (even if it is possible, which isn't at all clear). Munayyer draws the picture this way:

    I've found that the best way to think about comprehensive counter-terror strategy is the boiling-pot analogy. Imagine that you're presented with a large pot of scalding water and your task is to prevent any bubbles from reaching the surface. You could attack each bubble on its way up. You could spot a bubble at the bottom of the pot and disrupt it before it has a chance to rise. Many bubbles might be eliminated in this way, but sooner or later, bubbles are going to get to the surface, especially as the temperature rises and your counter-bubble capabilities are overwhelmed.

    The other pathway is to turn down, or off, the flame beneath the pot -- to address the conditions that help generate terrorism. When it comes to the question of ISIS in particular and broader terrorism in general, Western counter-terror strategy has focused on the bubbles and not the flame. While significant resources have been invested in intelligence and homeland security, too few have been invested in resolving the conditions that generate terrorism. In fact, too often, the West has contributed significantly to those conditions.

    Munayyer blames the US for invading Iraq, but while key leadership of ISIS came from the anti-American resistance in Iraq, the context which allowed them to claim statehood was the civil war in Syria. End that civil war and ISIS can no longer claim statehood and caliphate. That still leaves the concept, and we've seen that the concept can inspire guerrilla groups and lone wolves elsewhere, but concepts are a poor substitute for reality. Ending that civil war is no easy task, partly because every belligerent group believes they can ultimately impose their will by force -- a fantasy fueled by foreign support -- and partly because every group fears that the others will treat it unjustly. To turn the heat down, you have to phase out the foreign interests, convince each group that its cause is futile, and get each group to accept a set of strictures that will ensure fair and equal treatment for all. ISIS might well be the last group to join into a peace agreement, and it may take force to get the leaders of ISIS to see that their war is futile, but the vow to destroy them is premature: a peace which includes them is much sounder than the perpetual war you get from excluding them or the stench of martyrdom that remains even if you manage to kill them all. Moreover, as you reduce the heat, the popular support that the leaders depend on will fade away.

    After Paris, no one wants to speak about ISIS in terms other than its unconditional destruction, yet when they do so, they reveal how little they understand ISIS, and how little they know about themselves. France and Britain still like to think of their recent empires as some sort of blessing to mankind, but their actual history is full of contempt, repression, racism, and bloody violence. The former colonial master of Syria was no arbitrary target for ISIS, a point which was underscored by how quickly Hollande was able to reciprocate by bombing Raqqa. Similarly, New York and Washington were not picked for 9/11 because they would look good on TV. The US was cited for specific offenses against the Muslim world, and Bush wasted no time proving America's culpability by doing exactly what Bin Laden wanted: by sending his army in to slaughter Muslims in foreign lands, starting with Afghanistan. Bush did that because was locked into an imperial mindset, believing that America's power was so great he could force any result he wanted, and that America's virtue was so unquestioned that he never needed to give a thought to why or how. And Hollande, ostensibly a man of the left, proved the same. (Indeed, so does Bernie Sanders -- see the link below -- even though he's neither as careless nor as cocky as Bush.)

  • Protester gets punched at Trump rally. Trump: "Maybe he deserved to get roughed up": Billmon has been obsessed this week with Trump-as-Fascist analogies (see his Twitter feed), but this is one story that brings the point home. The thing that distinguished Mussolini and Hitler was not that they held conservative views but that they were so bloody minded about it: they were bullies, eager to fight, anxious to draw blood, and they started with beating up bystanders who looked at them funny. They celebrated such violence, and the more power they grabbed the more they flaunted it. Trump may not be in their league, but he's doing something more than merely condoning this "roughing up" -- he's feeding his crowd's frenzy of hate. I thought Jim Geraghty was onto something when he described Bush's supporters as "voting to kill." Trump's fans are basically the same folks, but now he's offering them something more visceral.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

  • David Atkins: White Resentment of Welfare Is More Than Just About Racism Now: Builds on a NY Times piece on Kentucky, Alec MacGillis: Who Turned My Blue State Red?, noting that Republican voters are as harsh and unforgiving of the white poor as they are of blacks, etc. I can think of anecdotal evidence that confirms this, and it revolves around shame: the belief that we are each personally responsible for our success and failure. Part of the trick is to get the "failures" to blame themselves and drop out of the political process -- the only way poorer states vote red is when poor people give up on voting their own interest. And part of it is that marginally successful people think they're immune from failure thanks to their superior characters.

  • Benjamin Balthaser: Jews Without Money: Toward a Class Politics of Anti-Zionism: Starts by noting the class divide between the rich patrons of the Jewish National Fund and the middle class Jewish Voice for Peace protesters outside. I figured he would expand on this by noting how often rich Jews have supported Zionism almost as a way of shuttling their poor brethren from Russia to Israel -- Lord Balfour, after all, addressed his Declaration to Baron von Rothschild, the richest Jew of his time and the one he most wanted to ingratiate himself with. Instead, Balthaser goes off in other directions, all interesting.

  • Tom Boggioni: Ex-CIA director: White House ignored months of warnings about 9/11 to avoid leaving 'paper trail' of culpability: Some of these stories are familiar, although Tenet used to be more dedicated to sucking up to Bush, whose indifference to Al-Qaeda before 9/11 was exceeded only by his demagogic opportunism after.

  • Daniel Marans: How Wall Street's Short-Term Fixation Is Destroying the Economy: The business management motto at the root of short-termism is "make your quarters, and you'll make your year." Of course in the real world businesses stumble from time to time, so managers have learned to adjust, packing the quarters they blow with all the losses they've been hiding to make it easier to make new quarters, the year be damned. Marans notes that corporate reinvestment of profits averaged 48% from 1952-84 but dropped to 22% from 1985-2013. The obvious reason is that high pre-Reagan taxes favored reinvesting profits, whereas low taxes made it less painful to extract those profits and put them elsewhere -- indeed set up a dynamic of owners devouring their companies (a practice which vulture capitalists soon perfected). There are a couple more epicycles to this diagram: tying CEO compensation to the stock market helped to ween top management from the workforce and turn them into stock manipulators, opening up all sorts of opportunities for insider trading scams. This, in turn, makes the stock market more volatile, an opportunity for quick traders to trample over ordinary investors, reducing the quantum of short-term thinking from the quarter to weeks, days, minutes.

  • Ben Railton: For More Than 200 Years, America Has Shunned a 'War on Islam': Looks like Railton has read the Wikipedia article I opened with, although he adds a little more on the Barbary Wars (which gave the Marines that "shores of Tripoli" stanza). Along similar lines, see John Nichols: Muslims Have Been Living in America Since Before the Revolutionary War.

  • Rich Yeselson: The Decline of Labor, the Increase of Inequality: Useful, informative piece on the decline of labor unions in recent decades.

  • Senator Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism in the United States: Fairly major speech by Sanders attempting to establish a "democratic socialism" brand name that is so modest and reasonable it's as American as apple pie. I haven't read this closely: if I did, I'd probably find much to second guess (and some things to outright oppose, minimally including much of the end section on ISIS). On the other hand, as I get older and more modest in my ambitions, I find myself gravitating more toward Keynes than Marx, and more to FDR's "second bill of rights" than more radical manifestos, and those are things that are central to this speech.

    By the way, I backed into this link from Mike Konczal: Thoughts on Bernie Sanders's Democratic Socialism and the Primary. Also note that one thing Konczal cites is a new book by Joseph Stiglitz: Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (he mentions hardcover and Kindle, but a paperback is also available) -- a book I intend to pick up ASAP. He also mentions Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, which makes the case for increasing government spending up toward Scandinavian levels -- an argument I have some sympathy for, but I wouldn't neglect the smarter rules Stiglitz (and others like Dean Baker) argue for, and I can think of some times the Scandinavians haven't managed to do yet. (Kenworthy also has an outline and parts of a future book, The Good Society, here.) Konczal doesn't mention this, but there is at least one more "vision of left-liberalism": see the pro-union books of Thomas Geoghegan: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life and Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement.

  • Finally, several pieces to file under "Americans Acting Like Jerks":

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Sunday, November 15, 2015

Weekend Roundup

It's been a good week for warmongering anti-Islamist bigots, what with the Kurdish "liberation" of ISIS-held Sinjar, the ISIS-blamed bombing of a Russian airliner, the drone-murder of reality TV star "Jihadi John," and ISIS-linked murderous assault in Paris on the innocent fans of a band called Eagles of Death Metal. Ann Coulter was so thrilled she tweeted that America just elected Donald Trump as its next president. Shell-shocked post-Benghazi! Democrats were quick to denounce it all as terrorism, using the precise words of the Republican thought police. Someone even proposed changing the Freedom Fries to "French Fries" in solidarity. French president François Hollande declared that the Paris attacks meant war, momentarily forgetting that he had already started the same war when France joined the anti-ISIS bombing party in Syria. He and other decried this "attack on western civilization." Gandhi could not be reached, but he's probably sticking to his line that western civilization would be a good idea.

I'll return to this subject below, but the main point to make up here is that this is above all a time to keep your cool. In fact, take a couple steps back and try to recover some of the cool we've lost ever since demonizing ISIS became so ubiquitous nobody gives it a second thought. I have no wish to defend them, but I will point out that what they're accused of is stuff that virtually all armies have done throughout history. Also that they exist because governments in Damascus and Baghdad became so violently oppressive that millions of people (who in normal times want peace and prosperity as much as everyone else does) became so desperate as to see them as the lesser evil. No doubt ISIS can be brutal to those under their thumb, but ISIS could not exist without some substantial measure of public support, and that means two things: one is that to kill off ISIS you'd have to kill an awful lot of people, revealing yourself to be an even more brutal monster; the other is that you can't end this by simply restoring the old Damascus and Baghdad powers, because they will inevitably revert to type. Yet who on the US political spectrum has a plan to do anything different?

Before this flare up I had something more important I wanted to write about: inequality. Admittedly, war is more urgent: it has a way of immediately crowding out all other problems. But the solution is also much simpler: just don't do it. All you need to know about war has been said many times, notably by people like A.J. Muste and David Dellinger. It might be argued that inequality is the root of war, or conversely that equitable societies would never have any reason to wage war. The ancient justification for war was always loot. And while we've managed to think of higher, more abstract and idealized concepts for justifying war, there's still an awful lot of looting going on. In America, we call that business.

The piece I've been thinking about is a Bloomberg editorial that appeared in the Wichita Eagle: Ramesh Ponnuru: Is income inequality a big deal? He starts:

We conservatives tend to get less worked up about economic inequality than liberals do, and I think we're right about that.

We should want most people, and especially poor people, to be able to get ahead in absolute terms. We should want to live in a society with a reasonable degree of mobility rather than one where people are born into relative economic positions they can never leave.

But so long as those conditions are met, the ratio of the incomes of the top 1 percent to the median worker should be fairly low on our list of concerns; and if those conditions aren't met, we should worry about our failure to meet them rather than their effects on inequality.

If you take "worked up" in the sense of bothered, sure, but if you mean concerned, his disclaimer is less true. The bare fact is that virtually every principle and proposal conservatives hold dear is designed to increase inequality. Cutting taxes allows the rich to keep more income and concentrate wealth, lifting them up further. Cutting food stamps and other "entitlements" pushes the poor down, also increasing inequality. Maybe desperation will nudge some people off welfare into low wage jobs, further depressing the labor market and allowing savvy businessmen to reap more profits. Of course, making it harder for workers to join unions works both ways -- lower wages, higher profits -- and conservatives are in the forefront there. They're also in favor of deregulating business -- never deny the private sector an opportunity to reap greater profits from little things like pollution or fraud. They back "free trade" agreements, designed mostly to protect patent (property) owners and let businesses expand into more profitable markets overseas, at the minor cost of outsourcing American jobs -- actually a double plus as that outsourcing depresses the labor market, meaning lower wages and higher profits. Sandbagging public education advantages those who can afford private schools. Saddling working class upstarts with college debt helps keep the children of the rich ahead. And the list goes on and on. Maybe you can come up with some conservative hot list items that don't drop straight to the bottom line (abortion? guns? drug prohibition? gambling? war? -- one could argue that all of those hurt the working class more than the rich, but I doubt that's really the point). Still, you won't find any conservative proposals to counter inequality.

From time immemorial the very purpose of conservatism has been to defend the rulers against the masses. From time to time that's required some adjustments to conservative thinking: in America at least, cons no longer defend the prerogatives of kings and titled aristocracy (not that they have any problems with the Saudis or Hashemites, or nearly any tin-pot dictator who lets their companies profit); and they've given up on slavery (and the most overt expressions of racism), but still can't stand the idea of unions, and they never have trusted democracy. For a while they liked the idea that America offered a chance for equal opportunity (without guaranteeing equal results), an idea Ponnuru is still fond of, not that he'd actually cross any of his betters by suggesting we do something about it. For one thing they'd probably point out that equal opportunity is how we wound up with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whereas the worst you'd have to put up with in a closed oligarchy is someone like Jeb Bush (or, pick your poison, Donald Trump).

Ponnuru refers to an article by George Packer: The Republican Class War, probably because the article starts off a "reformocon" conference organized by Ponnuru's wife April (high among the Republican Party's "family values" is nepotism). The reformocons have a book full of policy proposals that allegedly help the middle if not the lower class, but none of the things Packer mentions looks promising. Ponnuru cites a study on opportunity mentioned by Packer then dismisses it with another study on something else. He continues:

When he moved to macroeconomics, Packer was on even shakier ground: "Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the overall economy. (Critics call this the "financialization" of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession."

Saying that "inequality" has caused income stagnation is question-begging. If most Americans are experiencing stagnant incomes, that would cause difficulties regardless of how the top 1 percent is doing. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, income growth for most people coincided with rising inequality. And the theory that inequality leads to financial crises has a weak evidentiary basis.

Uh, 1907? 1929? 2008? That's a pretty strong series. Maybe some lesser recessions don't correlate so well: 1979-81 was induced by the Fed's anti-inflation hysteria, so the recovery was unusual as well. Income stagnation also started with the early 1980s recession, as did the first major tax cuts for the rich, although even larger sources of inequality that decade were trade deficits (resulting in a major sell-off of assets to foreign investors) and real estate fraud (bankrupting the S&L industry, resulting in a recession). In the 1990s the main sources of inequality were the massive bid-up of the stock market and a loosening of bank regulations, and they too led to a recession in 2001. The labor market did tigheten up enough in the late 1990s for real wages to rise a bit, but that was wiped out in the following recession, and the "Bush recovery" was the worst to date at generating new jobs, as it was fueled almost exclusively by debt and fraud.

Packer finally splits from the reformocons, and Ponnuru's reaction is basically a hand wave.

"The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence, don't grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished middle-class Americans actually live," Packer said. "They can't face its heartlessness."

I don't mean to sound heartless myself when I say that no sensible policy agenda is going to protect all towns and industries from the effects of global competition and technological change. But most members of the vast American middle class aren't looking for work in the steel mills or wishing they could be.

Ponnuru may not relish it, but being heartless is part of what it takes to be a conservative these days. So is being a devious little prevaricator. Let me close this section with a couple paragraphs from Packer (starting with the one on macro that Ponnuru thinks he disproved, because it's so very succinctly stated):

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care. At the top, it creates deep pools of wealth that have nowhere productive to go, leading to asset bubbles in capital markets bearing little or no relation to the health of the over-all economy. (Critics call this the "financialization" of the economy.) These fallouts from inequality were among the causes of the Great Recession.Inequality is also warping America's political system. Greatly concentrated wealth leads to outsized political power in the hands of the few -- even in a democracy with free and fair elections -- which pushes government to create rules that favor the rich. It's no accident that we're in the era of Citizens United. Such rulings give ordinary Americans the strong suspicion that the game is rigged. Democratic institutions no longer feel legitimate when they continue to produce blatantly unfair outcomes; it's one of those insights that only an élite could miss. And it's backed up by evidence as well as by common sense. Last year, two political scientists found that, in recent times, policy ideas have rarely been adopted by the U.S. government unless they're favored by corporations and the wealthy -- even when those ideas are supported by most Americans. The persistence of the highly unpopular carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers is simply the most unseemly example.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Dan Sanchez: On Veterans Day, Who Should Thank Whom?:

    Randolph Bourne famously wrote, "War is the health of the State." By that he meant that foreign wars nourish domestic tyranny because they place people into a siege mentality that makes them more apt to give up their freedoms for the sake of the war effort. And indeed, the American national security state, from militarized cops to domestic spying, has metastasized under the cover of the War on Terror.

    So, no, the activity of U.S. soldiers has not secured our freedoms, but eroded them. More specifically, contrary to the common argument discussed above, the troops are not busy protecting freedom of speech for all Americans, including those who are anti-war. Rather, by contributing to foreign wars, they make it more likely that someday the country's siege mentality will get so bad that speech (especially anti-war speech) will be restricted.

    Since foreign wars are inimical to domestic freedom, it is those who strenuously oppose war who are actually fighting for freedom. If not for opponents and skeptics of war, we would have even more war than we do. And in that case, individual freedoms would have been even more infringed upon.

    I grew up visiting houses that had pictures of young men in uniform on their shelves and mantles, mostly from WWII, some from Korea. My grandfather went to Europe for the Great War: I don't recall any photos but he came back with a couple ribbons and medals. Some relatives posted a couple of those photos on Facebook, and I found them touching -- not so much that I thought they did anything worthwhile as because they were just ordinary Americans who happened to get caught up in America's last popular war. On the other hand, we had no such photos in my house, not because my father didn't get drafted into the war but because he considered the experience so pointless. That probably contributed to my skepticism about the army, but Vietnam sealed my opposition. Ever since my opposition to war has only grown. I know a handful of people who went to Iraq, and I have nothing to say to them: I can't thank them because they did nothing worthwhile, and I can't apologize to them because I did everything I reasonably could to keep them from going. So for me all Veteran's Day does is remind me of old (and in many cases now dead) men, who thankfully survived the holocaust and returned to live relatively normal lives -- no one in my family perished in that war -- something I can't say for the atrocities that came later. The only heroes from those wars are the people who opposed them.

  • David Atkins: The Morning After Paris: What Do We Do Now?: A generally thoughtful piece, although sometimes he thinks himself into odd positions, especially when he tries to counter straw puppets from the left, but this bit of equivalence with the right resonates:

    Ultimately, what drives both domestic jingoist conservatism and ISIL's brand of extremism is a commitment to violent aggression beyond its own borders, a weird fetishization of guns and gun violence, a misogynistic hatred of sexual freedom for women and non-traditional relationships of all kind, and a deep commitment to conservative religious fundamentalism and patriarchal gerontocracy as the organizational structures of society.

    Earlier he wrote:

    The immediate reaction from many on the left is to simply blame the problem on blowback, insisting that if Western powers simply stopped trying to exert influence on the Middle East, terrorism would not reach Western shores. Many liberals further argue that the social problems in most middle eastern countries suffering from extremist violence are the direct result of a history of imperialism and colonialism.

    These are thornier arguments to dismiss, not only because they contain a great deal of truth, but also because unlike conservative claims that are testable and false, the blowback argument is unfalsifiable.

    He also charges liberals with "special pleading," which he tries to disprove by comparing the CIA coups in Iran and Chile, noting that the latter "has not led to decades of Chilean anti-American terrorism." He doesn't bother adding that even after Pinochet fell the US didn't impose sanctions on Chile, or shoot down Chilean air liners, or blow up Chilean oil rigs -- clear instances of American belligerence, some of which if done by anyone else would meet our definition of terrorism. Nor does he admit that there's not much if any case that Iran has actually committed any acts of anti-American terror. Anti-American sentiment? Sure, but that's not unknown in Chile either. But these are minor quibbles, and clearly the effects of colonialism, imperialism, and cronyism on the Middle East are more layered and more complex than this caricature. (Also note that "blowback" isn't always so indirect: when the US armed the Afghan mujahideen and Hekmatyar and Bin Laden later turned on the US, that wasn't "unfalsifiable.") Atkins carries his confusion forward:

    One could step back and remove all Western influence from the region, both in Syria and in Iraq. One could simply let the Shi'ites, Kurds, Syrian Assad loyalists and Syrian anti-Assad moderates (if any exist) battle it out themselves and hope that some combination of the above emerges victorious, trying not to draw any of their ire and taking in as many refugees from the war-ravaged conflict zones as possible. But it's highly unlikely that the attacks against the West would stop, it's likely that their propaganda would be increasingly successful at radicalizing young men in the West, and it's certainly true that populations across Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East would be greatly harmed by allowing ISIL to expand. Even if America and its allies immediately abandoned all conflict in the Middle East, terrorism would likely continue -- and even 30 years from now the Glenn Greenwalds of the world would still say any such attacks were just so much blowback. Those outcomes and that ideology are not acceptable at a moral or a practical level.

    Atkins' conjecture here (and it's really nothing more) -- that Islamic groups will continue to commit acts of terror in the West even if the US and its allies cease all provocations -- is unfalsifiable as well, because it's not going to be tested: US business has too much money at stake to back away, and US military power has too much ego at stake to back down. (One might imagine a political challenge to the latter, but it's hard to see where it might come from: clearly not Clinton, and even nominal critics of US war policy Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are pretty compromised.) But one reason to doubt Atkins is that no less an authority than Bin Laden has stated that if the provocations cease, so will the attacks in the West. I'm not sure that the anonymous intellects behind ISIS have thought this through so rigorously, but Atkins seems to have bought the whole party line on their inhumanity -- "an active group of murderous, barbaric theocratic cutthroats who adore violence, desire and rape women as a matter of official policy, desecrate and destroy monuments that have stood for thousands of years, and seek to establish a regional and global caliphate with the goal of a final battle against the Great Satan" -- a definition that is far outside the bounds of any group in the history (and not just of Islam). It clearly serves the interest of Americans who want to escalate the war against ISIS to inflate such visions of evil, and I fear Atkins' repetition of these claims just helps them out.

    My own prescription for what the US should be doing is straightforward:

    1. We should eschew the use of force to settle any and all disputes in the region (or anywhere else, really, but let's focus here on the Middle East). Consequently, we should negotiate a multilateral arms embargo for the entire region (including Egypt, Israel, the Arabian peninsula, Iran, and Turkey), and we should move toward this unilaterally as long as doing so doesn't create a vacuum to be filled with other arms suppliers.
    2. We should promote and facilitate negotiations aimed at resolving all conflicts and protecting minority and individual human rights in accordance with well-established international standards (like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
    3. We should negotiate an international treaty which establishes a new human right: to exile, which allows anyone jailed or otherwise endangered anywhere to appeal to be granted asylum elsewhere.
    4. We should be willing to grant amnesty to anyone (including ISIS) that agrees to participate in peaceable democratic conflict resolution. We should recognize that disarmament is a goal of this process, not a prerequisite.
    5. We should back up these diplomatic appeals with economic aid. Conversely, any nations that persist in using violence against their own people and/or exporting violence abroad should be ostracized with economic sanctions. (The BDS campaign against Israel is a start here.)

    How hard can that be to understand? But in today's media heat, who's talking like that?

    • Some more related ISIS links:

    • Why John Kerry and the French president are calling ISIS "Daesh": A little history on the ever-shifting arts of naming yourself and your enemies. Kerry et al. don't like Islamic State (or IS) because it suggests at least the potential of a single state representing all Muslims, something they want to nip in the bud. So they've come up with something meaningless and slightly exotic, DAESH (or Daesh) derived from the transliterated Arabic initials (like Hamas). Still, ISIS makes more sense to the rest of us, since it spatially delimits the Islamic State within Iraq and Syria (actually more accurate than the broader al-Sham they used to use, which got translated as Levant). My takeaway is to use ISIS, since I think it is very important to understand that their rump state is an artifact of the lost control of the governments in Damascus and Baghdad. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the aspiring but still pre-state groups in Libya, Yemen, etc., are all that linked with ISIS. Still, Islamic State is clearly a concept (and increasingly a brand name) that resonates with a good many people outside Syria and Iraq. That matters mostly because it means that even if the West smashes (or as Sarkozy put it "exterminates") ISIS the concept will continue to inspire terror groups indefinitely. Obama probably understood this when he talked about "containing and degrading" ISIS -- words that now test as namby-pamby (compared to defeat and exterminate).

    • DR Tucker: And That's the Way It Is: Live-Blogging the CBS Democratic Debate: Bad timing, the evening after the Paris attacks. And, no big surprise, the Democrats all vow to wage war:

      In his opening statement, Sanders condemns the attacks and vows to "rid this planet of ISIS" as president, before decrying income inequality, the broken campaign finance system, and calling for a political revolution. Clinton says prayers are not enough for Paris; we need resolve to bring the world together to combat jihadist radicals. Clinton vows to fight terrorism aggressively as president. O'Malley says his heart goes out to the people of France, and says the US must work collaboratively with other nations to thwart terrorism.

      Sanders seems to prefer using Arab proxies in the war against ISIS, calling this a "war for the soul of Islam." He doesn't that if this metaphorical war is fought with real arms, armed warfare will be the only winner. Clinton insists that ISIS "cannot be contained; it must be defeated." She doesn't wonder what an American "victory" might mean for the vanquished, or whether indeed there will be any. David Atkins has a follow-up post to the one quoted above: The Right Will Win if the Left Doesn't Forcefully Confront ISIS. He applauds Hollande and Sanders for "sounding aggressively militaristic in response." The idea is that leftish politicians should deliberately act stupid and malicious in order to save electorates from electing right-wingers who would act stupid and malicious, and in the process really screw everything up. In the debate, at least, Sanders was able to scold Clinton, reminding her that her Iraq War vote was profoundly wrong. Atkins wants to squelch that dissent, and Sanders seems willing to throw his career away going along. Indeed, it's reasonable to argue that had the 2003 Iraq War not happened, ISIS would never have come around. On the other hand, it did, and we're here. Still, that doesn't make bowing to a flare-up of war fever right just because it is (for the moment) popular. Saddam Hussein was painted as every bit as evil then as ISIS is now. But it really doesn't matter how evil the enemy is if you can't do anything constructive about it, and we've proven that we can't. One more thing: while Sanders voted against Iraq, he did vote for the post-9/11 Afghanistan War -- in the heat of the moment, you might say. To my mind, that was the real strategic blunder.

    • Alissa J Rubin/Anne Barnard: France Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria in Retaliation for Attacks: Hollande, having vowed to be "unforgiving with the barbarians," takes the path with the least mental effort, not to mention conscience, and goes straight after command headquarters in Raqqa. Of course, they wouldn't have been able to react so quickly except that they were already bombing Syria. The article also quotes Nicolas Sarkozy saying, "We need everybody in order to exterminate Daesh." Grammar isn't totally clear there, but the genocide word is.

    • Peter Beinart: ISIS Is Not Waging a War Against Western Civilization: Mostly critiques some particularly dumb things Marco Rubio said. Beinart, who has a checkered history of first supporting and then having second thoughts about America's wars in the Middle East -- he wrote one book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror which can be read as why conservatives are clueless, and another The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. He concludes here that "both morally and strategically, limiting -- and ultimately eliminating -- the Islamic State's nightmarish dominion over millions of human beings justifies war," but he also argues that it's mostly geopolitics and not some clash of civilizations. One thing I will add is that even if you accept Beinart's conclusion that war against ISIS is justified, it doesn't follow that the US is the one that should be fighting that war. Given Beinart's track record, he'll figure that out . . . eventually.

      Beinart's pre-Paris piece is better: The Mindless Logic of Republican Foreign Policy: Sure, it's like shooting sitting ducks. But at least he's still skeptical on Syria:

      The experience of the last 15 years offers little reason to believe that waging a larger war in Syria will make Syria more stable or America more safe. But for most of the GOP presidential contenders, that's irrelevant. It doesn't really matter where American foreign policy leads, as long as America leads.

    • Peter Van Buren: Paris: You Don't Want to Read This:

      But I do have this: stop what we have been doing for the last 14 years. It has not worked. There is nothing at all to suggest it ever will work. Whack-a-mole is a game, not a plan. Leave the Middle East alone. Stop creating more failed states. Stop throwing away our freedoms at home on falsehoods. Stop disenfranchising the Muslims who live with us. Understand the war, such as it is, is against a set of ideas -- religious, anti-western, anti-imperialist -- and you cannot bomb an idea. Putting western soldiers on the ground in the MidEast and western planes overhead fans the flames. Vengeance does not and cannot extinguish an idea.

    • Chris Floyd: Age of Despair: Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence:

      Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq -- which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead -- there would be no ISIS, no "Al Qaeda in Iraq." Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let's go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no "War on Terror" -- and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight. [ . . . ]

      I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators -- and again, again and again -- supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.

    • Jason Ditz: Yazidis Burn Muslim Homes in 'Liberated' Iraqi City of Sinjar: What goes around comes around.

      ISIS carried out several bloody attacks against the Yazidis early in their takeover of the region, and labeled the homes of Sinjar's Sunni residents as such, apparently to advise their forces to leave them alone in their various crackdowns. Now, the homes labeled Sunni are a target.

      Sunnis are often the targets of violent recriminations after ISIS loses control of cities and towns, under the presumption that anyone ISIS wasn't persecuting (or at least was persecuting less publicly) must've been secretly collaborating with them.

    • Patrick Cockburn: Paris Terror Attacks: No Security Can Stop ISIS -- the Bombers Will Always Get Through, and Paris Attack: ISIS Has Created a New Kind of Warfare.

    • Graeme Wood: What ISIS Really Wants: This is evidently the source of the notion that ISIS is obsessed with hastening the apocalypse that Atkins cites in his pieces. I have no way of judging such views, but I am skeptical that there is a single idea and a single motivation behind a group the size of ISIS. I'll also note that there are plenty of Christians who are similarly obsessed with end times, and while we don't often talk about them, some have even had an inordinate amount of influence when it comes to the Middle East. (One I am aware of was David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister who oversaw the Balfour Declaration, which announced Britain's intention to facilitate the return of the Jews to Palestine, as foretold in the Book of Revelations. Another, who's been very vocal on the subject of late, is former GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann.)

    • Scott Atran: Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse: Another attempt to probe the ISIS mind, this one focusing on the psychological appeal of jihad to young Western Muslims -- the recruiting grounds for attacks like the ones in Paris. One lesson I draw from this is the importance of establishing the perception that the West treats the Muslim world fairly and justly. Another is that the rising racism and bigotry that prevents Muslims from assimilating in the West helps drive them against us.

If I stayed up a few more hours I could collect many more ISIS links, but this will have to be enough for now. I doubt that my main points will change any. And I don't mind the occasional pieces that show you how maniacal ISIS can be. None prove that the US military is the answer.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Nothing from Crowson this week: he wasted his editorial space with a celebration of the World Series victors. I enjoyed the Kansas City Royals' wins, too -- even watched a couple innings of Game 2, where I didn't recognize a single name but had no problem understanding the many nuances of the game. At least that much doesn't change much, or fade away.

The main topic this week is the mental and moral rot that calls itself conservatism, also known as the Republican Party. Scattered links:

  • Anne Kim: The GOP's Flat Tax Folly: It seems like every Republican presidential candidate has his own special tax jiggering plan, although they all have common features, namely letting the rich pay less (so they can save more) and increasing the federal deficit (hoping to trim that back a bit by cutting spending, although not on "defense" or on privatization schemes or on putting more people in jail). And those who lack the staff or imagination to come up with signature schemes fall back on the so-called "flat tax" scam (even more euphamistically called "the fair tax" -- as spelled out in Neal Boortz's The Fair Tax Book): Kim's list of flat-taxers includes Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson, who likens the tax to a tithe. One thing flat-taxers always claim is that a single rate would greatly simplify the income tax code, but today's "complicated" rate chart is maybe two pages of the code. Reducing that to one line in an age where everything is computerized is nothing. All the rest of the complexity addresses the many questions of what is (or is not) income, at least for taxability purposes. For individuals who don't have many itemizable deductions that's already been simplified, but for businesses that's where all the complexity comes in. The loopholes for any given business may vary, but the bottom line is that businesses (including self-employed individuals) get to deduct many expenses that the rest of us cannot. The flat-taxers may think they're going to cut through a lot of special cases, but it's often hard to separate perks out from necessary expenses, to take one example. Another complicating factor is that we often implement policy through tax incentives. For instance, the tax code favors property owners over renters, married people over single, and families with dependent children over those without (although not nearly as much as the actual increased cost of maintaining those children). The tax code has long favored private health insurance (effectively subsidizing it), and since ACA added penalties for those who are uninsured (who are, after all, not only hurting themselves but becoming public liabilities). And this list could go on and on, from things that seem eminently reasonable to others that are truly perverse (like the oil depletion allowance).

    If the economy itself were totally fair -- if all markets were optimally transparent and competitive, and if had enough leverage they could fully share in productivity gains and profits -- then a flat income tax might also be a fair tax (although it would be easier to account for and collect a business-only tax like a VAT). However, virtually everything in the private sector economy is unbalanced in ways that favor property owners and limit potential competitors. The result, as we plainly see today, is vast and increasing inequality, which at its current stage is undermining democracy and tearing at the social fabric. Indeed, this is happening despite a current tax system which is still progressive: which taxes the rich more than it taxes the poor, and which provides some redistribution from rich to poor. In this context, the flat tax does three things, all bad: it reduces the tax on the rich, increasing inequality; it increases taxes on the poor and at least half of all working Americans, in many cases pushing them into (or deeper into) poverty; and it kills the critical idea of progressivity in tax collection. If anything, we need to extend the notion of progressivity throughout the tax system. For instance, we currently have a flat tax on capital gains and dividends -- almost exclusively a favor to the rich -- but both are forms of income. If anything, as unearned income you can make a case for taxing them more progressively -- since they contribute more to inequality, and since the tax rate has no disincentive. (A higher tax rate offers more incentive to hide income through fraud, but not to gain the income in the first place. I've argued in the past that the proper framework for calculating a progressive scale for unearned income should be the lifetime, which would encourage saving by the young and/or poor.) I'd also like to see progressive taxes on corporations, which would help even the playing field between small and large companies. (At present the latter tend to use their scale advantage to crowd out competition.) Of course, it's not true that every tax should be progressive. But some taxes have to be progressive enough to counter the economic system's built-in bias toward inequality.

    As a rule of thumb, any time you hear "flat-tax" or "fair-tax" you should automatically reject its advocate. Most likely they don't know what they're talking about, but to the extent that they do they are out to trash society, the economy, and the public institutions that make them possible.

  • Paul Krugman: The Conspiracy Consensus:

    So, are we supposed to be shocked over Donald Trump claiming that Janet Yellen is keeping rates low to help Obama? Folks, this is a widely held position in the Republican Party; Paul Ryan and John Taylor accused Ben Bernanke years ago of doing something dastardly by preventing the fiscal crisis they insist would and should have happened under Obama. If Trump's remarks seem startling, it's only because the press has soft-pedaled the conspiracy theorizing of seemingly respectable Republicans.

    Uh, doesn't this mean that Trump understands that low interest rates are the right thing for the economy? Sure, he's pissed that Obama gets credit for the stimulated growth, but if he were president he'd want the same low rates so he could get credit for the growth. Maybe he thinks that Yellen is such a partisan hack that if a Republican were president she's raise interest rates just to get them blamed for the downturn. On the other hand, what does that say about Republicans calling for higher interest rates? That they're willing to harm the economy as long as they think a Democrat will be blamed for it? On the other hand, when they were in power, you have Nixon saying "we are all Keynesians now" and Cheney "deficits don't matter."

  • Nancy LeTourneau: The Effects of Anti-Knowledge on Democracy: Starts with a long quote from Mike Lofgren: The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge -- worth checking out on its own, among other things because the first thing you see after a quote attributed to Josh Billings ("The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so.") is a picture of Ben Carson. Lofgren writes about Carson (evidently before last week's revelations about pyramids and arks):

    This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author's note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn't). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.

    It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes. [ . . . ]

    This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn't agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government's attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.

    Perhaps Lofgren was trying to burnish his conservative bona fides with that Soviet Union example: one closer to the mark would be the Salem witch trials.

    LeTourneau adds:

    That's why I'd suggest that the root cause of an attraction to anti-knowledge was the creation of Fox News. What Murdoch managed to do with that network was to pose the proposition that facts were merely the liberal media at work. So on one side of the "debate" you have the conservative garage logic and on the other you have liberal facts. The rest of the media -- in an attempt to prove they weren't liberal -- accepted this frame, giving credence to anti-knowledge as a legitimate position. That traps us into things like having to argue over whether the science of human's contribution to climate change is real because denialism is given credence as the opposing conservative view.

    I've seen an argument that right-wing opposition to climate science is based on the perception (or maybe just intuition) that the whole thing is just an excuse to promote government regulation; i.e., that because we reject the solution, we have to deny the problem and all the science behind it. That only works if the problems aren't real, which is to say never -- although global warming has had an unusually long run because people readily confuse the variability of everyday weather with the uniformity of climate, and because the latter is a bit too stochastic for certainty. There are many other examples of this -- taxes, stimulus spending, military intervention, defense spending, personal guns: all cases where the right-wing holds to a position based on political conviction regardless of the facts. Part of the problem here is that right-wingers have taken extreme stands, based on pure rhetoric, that have seized their brains like prime directives: like the notion that all government regulation is bad, or that government is incompetent to act. Part is that when right-wing "think tanks" have taken problems seriously and tried to come up with conservative solutions, they've sometimes been adopted by their enemy (leading one to doubt their sincerity: cap-and-trade and Obamacare are examples). As the right-wing has lost more and more arguments, it's only natural that they'd start to flail at the facts and science that undermines their ideological positions. From there it's a slippery slope. For many years, the right has complained about leftists in academia poisoning young minds, but in 2012 Rick Santorum broke new ground in arguing that people shouldn't go to college because the very institutions teach people to think like liberals. Since then the GOP's struggle against science, reason, and reality has only intensified. That leads us guys like Carson, and he's far from alone (see, e.g., the flat-tax brigade, above).

    Also see LeTourneau's "Who's to Blame for This Mess?". Most of the post is a quote from a Robert Reich post, where Reich is interviewing "a former Republican member of Congress," who starts out with "They're all nuts" then goes down the presidential lineup, starting with Carson and Trump ("they're both out of their f*cking minds") and ending with Bush and Christie ("they're sounding almost as batty as the rest"). He places blame: "Roger Ailes, David and Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh. I could go on. They've poisoned the American mind and destroyed the Republican Party").

    LeTourneau has yet another piece, The Policy Vacuum of Movement Conservatism, where she quotes Michael Lind:

    Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of "rollback" in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment. In the 1960s, Reagan denounced Social Security and Medicare as tyrannical, but as president he did not try to repeal and replace these popular programs. When he gave up the confrontational evil-empire rhetoric of his first term toward the Soviet Union and negotiated an end to the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev in his second term, many conservatives felt betrayed . . .

    Indeed, it's fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right -- repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution -- have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

    On the other hand, Lind omits the one project that Reagan and successors succeeded spectacularly at: tilting the economy to favor the well-to-do, especially at the expense of organized labor. One might argue -- I would emphatically disagree -- that Reagan offered a necessary correction to the liberal/egalitarian tilt of the previous five decades, but what's happened since then has tipped the nation way too far back toward the rich. And it's clear that the right, like the rich, has no concept of too much and no will to turn their rhetoric back toward center. Still, they can only keep pushing their same old nostrums, even having watched them fail so universally under Bush. Lind's generation of conservatives may have mellowed as he claims, but there have been at least two later points when the Republicans turned starkly toward the right -- in the 1990s under Gingrich continuing through the Bush administration, and after 2009 with the Tea Party doubling down in the wake of failure. Moreover, they haven't given up on the defeats Lind identified, even though they continue to look like losing propositions. Indeed, it's hard to see that they have any viable policy options, leaving them with little beyond their conviction that all they really need is the right character -- maybe a Trump or maybe a Carson. After all, they wrap themselves so ostentatiously in piety and patriotic jingoism that they feel entitled to rule, even when they lose as bad as McCain did to Obama.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

  • Olga Khazan: Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair: One of the most disturbing discoveries of the last twenty years: the average life expectancy in Russia took an alarming downturn after the fall of communism. When I was growing up, one thing we could take for granted was that we were making progress on nearly all fronts, one being that we could expect to live longer lives, and our children longer still. Russia showed that politically-engendered economic despair could end and even reverse that progress. But who thought it could happen here? I first read these reports a year ago and did a quick inventory. On my mother's side of the family, I have a cohort of 20 cousins, b. 1925-43. The first of those cousins to die was in 2003 (emphysema, i.e. cigarettes). The youngest to die was 71, in 2011, and the youngest still alive has beat that. The oldest still alive is 89. But a number of their children are already gone: the first a victim of the Vietnam War, one to a car wreck, one to cancer in her 30s, several more (and my records are incomplete). Perhaps the most striking was one who died at 64, just three days after his father died at 88. I'm pretty sure all of my cousins did better economically than their parents, but despite more education that's less true for the next generation. Just some data, but it fits, and makes the stats more concrete. Khazan cites the work of two economists who blame inequality. That's right, but we need a better way to explain how that works.

    PS: Paul Krugman also has a comment on this, including this chart which shows a downward trend in deaths for all the charted wealthy countries (plus US Hispanics), compared to a slight rise among US whites:

    The Anne Case/Angus Deaton paper both posts refer to is Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.

  • Gareth Porter: The New Yorker Doesn't Factcheck What 'Everyone Knows' Is True: Examines a New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins on the shooting of Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had tried to make a case that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. I've long be skeptical about Hezbollah's (and Iran's) guilt here, mostly because it seems out of character, but it's become such a propaganda point for Israel and the US that most western journalists (like Filkins) take it for fact. Nisman's indictment of prominent Iranian and Hezbollah added fire to the charges, but as Porter points out there is little substance in the indictment -- the main source is the MEK, an anti-Iranian terrorist organization originally set up by Saddam Hussein but lately primarily used by Israel to disseminate disinformation about Iran's nuclear program. Nisman further charged that Argentine presidents Carlos Menem and Cristina Kirchner conspired with Iran to cover up the bombing, but again his evidence is suspicious. As is Nisman's death, apparently a suicide but still, like the bombing, unresolved.

  • David Waldman: Good guy with a gun takes out a theater shooter! GunFAIL CLXIII: What's that, 168? Looks like Waldman's been collecting stories of gun mishaps for a while now, and this is about one week's worth (Oct. 11-17, 2015): 47 events. The title refers to a guy in Salina, KS who was watching a movie and fidgeting with a gun in his pant-pocket, finally shooting himself in the leg (i.e., the "theater shooter" he "took out" was himself).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

  • Gary Legum: Sam Brownback is a harbinger of national doom: Bleeding Kansas' scary lesson for America: Brownback's approval ratings are down to 18%, about where Bush's were when his presidency ended. Crowson put it like this:

    Of course, Brownback wasn't much more popular when he was reëlected governor in 2014, but the trick there is to play up the fear of the unknown Democrat -- that plus a mysterious shift where Republicans across the board ran about five points higher than the polls predicted. Brownback's income tax cuts, including a free ride for business owners, passed early in his first term, and immediately blew a $600 billion hole in the state budget, leading to massive spending cuts and tax increases (both state and local, all regressive) to keep government marginally functional. Kansas had gotten through the early stages of the Great Recession relatively well, mostly because there was relatively little real estate bubble to pop, but since Brownback became governor economic growth has lagged in every comparison. This should be no surprise to anyone who knows the first thing about macroeconomics: just as more government spending stimulates more economic growth, less undermines growth (or worse). What's harder to calculate is how much long-term damage this level of economic strangulation will cause -- especially the hardships to be inflicted on a whole generation of students -- but there can be no doubt that harm is being done.

    Legum properly sees Kansas as a warning to the nation of what happens when Republicans get too much (or actually any -- his other example is Wisconsin) power, especially when led by an ambitious ideologue. Legum quips: "The biggest mystery about Brownback at this point is that he has been such an awful governor, it's a wonder he's not running for president." Brownback did run for president in 2008 and quit after he couldn't top 2% in Iowa polls. He then decided to give up his Senate seat and run for governor to prove himself as an executive and, well, he simply hasn't done that yet -- in fact, his unwillingness to compromise on rolling back some of his income tax cuts last year shows he's still convinced that they'll pan out eventually. Besides, the early field for governors with hideous records was already overfull with Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal (whose approval rates in Louisiana are even worse), plus his Bible buddy Rick Perry was running -- sure, that niche has opened up with Perry and Walker the first dropouts, but nothing suggests that Brownback would do any better.

  • Paul Krugman: The Hamptons Hyperinflation Endorsement:

    As a public service, some background to Marco Rubio's latest campaign coup. As the Times reports, Paul Singer -- a huge contributor to Republican causes -- has thrown his support behind Rubio.

    What it doesn't mention are two facts about Paul Singer that are, I think, relevant.

    First, he's most famous for his practice of buying up distressed debt of Third World governments, then suing to demand full repayment.

    Second, he's an inflation truther -- with an unusual twist. [ . . . ] But Singer has taken a different tack: he knows, just knows, that inflation is running away because of what it's doing to the prices of the things he cares about:

    Check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like.

    Even if you only know one thing about economics, it's probably that prices rise on fixed goods when buyers have more money to spend. If the price of Aspen real estate is going up faster than the general rate of inflation, it's because the people who are in the market to buy that real estate are bidding each other up, and what makes that possible is that they have more money to spend. That would be obvious for a commodity, but real estate and fine art are also thought of as assets, so it's easy for buyers to fool themselves into thinking they're worth all they paid. One sign of increasing inequality is asset inflation, and the more the merrier.

    Also see Richard Silverstein on Singer: Pro-Israel Hedge Fund Billionaire, Paul Singer, Buys Large Stake in Rubio Inc.. Rubio also appears in Policy and Character, but more importantly Krugman gets to remind you of how prescient he's been in the past, and it's a case worth repeating:

    My view here is strongly influenced by the story of George W. Bush. Younger readers may not know or remember how it was back in 2000, but back then the universal view of the commentariat was that W was a moderate, amiable, bluff and honest guy. I was pretty much alone taking his economic proposals -- on taxes and Social Security -- seriously. And what I saw was a level of dishonesty and irresponsibility, plus radicalism, that was unprecedented in a major-party presidential candidate. So I was out there warning that Bush was a bad, dangerous guy no matter how amiable he seemed. [ . . . ]

    And proposing wildly unaffordable stuff is itself a declaration of priorities: Rubio is saying that keeping the Hair Club for Growth happy is more important to him than even a pretense of fiscal responsibility. Or if you like, what we've seen is a willingness to pander without constraint or embarrassment.

  • Tom Engelhardt: Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle: No less than a short history of post-WWII America pivoting around the question of when and where the American public is actively engaged ("mobilized") in public affairs, or not. For instance, he quotes Bernie Sanders: "We need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money." He ten adds a telling example: "We do, of course, have one recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008 election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory, only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office." He doesn't mention the Tea Party, but that's another reflection of the sense that the government has turned into an alien entity that needs to be "taken back" (perhaps because they view it as something to be destroyed rather than restored as an instrument of the public interest).

    The desire to take the American public out of the "of the people, by the people, for the people" business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen's army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army.

    Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result, on January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, and so the citizen's army. With it went the sense that Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and peace).

    From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be considered demobilizing trends.

    The line that stands out there is "No more antiwar movements!" -- most likely because antiwar movements question not just the strategy of a particular war but the material basis that makes it possible to fight wars, and the very morality of starting wars. Also, in the case of the United States, it is very easy to uncover a long list of dubious choices that led to war -- many taken in secret and covered up by the self-perpetuating security state.

  • Robert Parry: A Glimmer of Hope for Syria: For many years one of the best sources on the Middle East has been Paul Woodward's War in Context blog, but something unfunny happened a few years back when he started giving half or more of his blog to articles that seemed to be promoting western intervention in the Syrian Civil War. That didn't render the blog worthless, but it gave it an off odor. (An example today is Syria's horror shows the tragic price of Western inaction. I wouldn't call any of these things inaction: Obama's speech telling Assad he had to step down, the CIA's many attempts to train and arm "moderate" opposition groups, the "red line" ultimatum on chemical weapons, the arming of Kurdish troops operating in Syria, the bombing of all things ISIS, last week's insertion of Special Forces into Syria. And while I'm not sure what Woodward means by "Western" the US, at least, is at least partly complicit in the acts of its allies like Israel, Turkey (above and beyond NATO), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar -- the first three have bombed Syria, and the latter two have at least shipped arms and money into the war. If anything there's been way too much action -- a charge I don't exempt Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah from.) Woodward doesn't flinch from the human tragedy the war has wrought, but the notion that some "action" is what's needed to bring the war to a just (or merely sane) close is magical thinking of the most fantastical sort. The only thing that can work is some form of agreement where all sides give up the war. Parry's article gives you some background, and a bit of hope. (The part I don't see as hopeful is that while he posits that Russia and Iran may press Assad to compromise, which is indeed essential, I don't see any comparable pressure to get the US to step down. Indeed, it seems to be a common hope that an agreement on Damascus will make it possible for the US, Russia, and Iran to join forces in demolishing ISIS, which is to say in not ending the war.) Also worth reading along these lines is Jimmy Carter: A Five-Nation Plan to End the Syrian Crisis. Still, even Carter's endgame leaves ISIS fighting:

    Mr. Assad's governing authority could then be ended in an orderly process, an acceptable government established in Syria, and a concerted effort could then be made to stamp out the threat of the Islamic State.

    Scaling the civil war back to just ISIS vs. the world would be preferable to the status quo, but certainly isn't optimal.

  • The US Spends $35 Billion Helping Out the World . . . But Where Does All This Money Really Go?: Well, the graphic says it all:

    I doubt this factors in the money the Defense Department and the CIA spend -- Afghanistan would be much larger -- but it does seem to count some money not destined for established governments (e.g., Syria, but where is Libya?). Of course, Israel you know about, and its two neighboring dictatorships, primarily tasked with keeping Palestinians pent up on their reservations in Gaza and the West Bank. One thing this shows is the extent to which "economic aid" has been reduced to a slush fund for America's imperial ventures. Another is that the US is becoming increasingly entangled in Africa.

  • DR Tucker: The Dawn of Darkness:

    This Wednesday marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the great tragedies in American history, a moment of indelible shame, a choice that harmed so many in this country and around the world: the defeat of President Jimmy Carter at the hands of right-wing former California Governor Ronald Reagan. [ . . . ]

    Reagan's economic agenda literally took from the poor and gave to the rich. His race-baiting on the 1980 campaign trail and his demonization of civil rights as president laid the foundation for reckless Republican rhetoric on race during the Obama era. His illegal wars in Central America and his irresponsible invasion of Grenada served as the model for George W. Bush's Iraq misadventure. His scorn of environmental concerns put us on the painful path to a climate crisis.

    Amen. I'll add that while the full horror of those points only became clear over time, even back when Reagan was president I frequently noted that under him the only growth industry in America is fraud.

  • David Atkins: Will the Press Recognize the Existential Threat and Fight Back, or Buckle Under?:

    It should astonish even the jaded that Republicans are calling CNBC, that stodgy home of supply-side Wall Street cheerleading, an agent of the left.

    Still apoplectic at being asked some basic questions at the debate, Republican candidates are doubling down on their freakout.

    Ted Cruz is flat-out calling CNBC debate moderators "left-wing operatives" and demanding that right-wing radio hosts moderate their debates, instead.

    Donald Trump, who openly lied during the debate about what is on his own website, called debate moderator John Harwood a "dope" and a "fool."

    All of this after Republican candidates spewed forth one of the most embarrassing explosion of lies ever witnessed during a television presidential debate.

    The press is facing an existential threat. With Republicans increasingly unashamed to tell grandiose lies and respond to any press criticism with derogatory insults and whines about media bias as well as blackmail threats to cancel appearances if the questions are too tough, the press must decide how to respond on two fronts. First, it must decide how to present an objective face while acknowledging that both sides do not, in fact, behave equally badly. Second, it must determine whether it will continue to ask the tough questions that need answers regardless of the threats made by the GOP, or whether it will meekly submit to the demands for kid-glove treatment.

    Atkins also argues that Debate Questions Naturally Lean Left Because Mainstream Voters and Reality Do. One piece of evidence here is how often the right starts to dissemble when they plan on doing something unpopular -- like when Bush dubbed his giveaway bill to the timber industry the "health forests initiative." Brownback moved heaven and earth in 2014 to try to convince Kansans that he was the education governor, after years of underfunding schools and attacking teacher rights. This doesn't necessarily mean that voters lean that far left -- all they need to do is come in left of the Republicans, which isn't hard to do: a little decency and integrity suffices.

    The fact that Republicans have more unpopular positions and a weaker track record of success isn't the fault of debate moderators. It's the fault of Republican candidates and their ideology.

  • Israel links:

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

  • Rebecca Gordon: How the US Created Middle East Mayhem: Provides an explanation why Tunisia alone among the "Arab Spring" countries seems to have developed into a viable democracy -- while there are some local factors of note, one big one is that the US hadn't had much involvement or interest in Tunisia, especially its military. Gordon goes on to report on the region's "Arab Spring" failures: Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria -- each of those are nations the US and/or its so-called allies have repeatedly interfered in. Supposedly these are all nations the US state and defense departments regard as "vital national interests" -- yet somehow stability, popular democratic rights, and social justice aren't reckoned as things that matter.

  • James George Jatras: Benghazi: What Neither Hillary Nor the Republicans Want to Talk About: I'm afraid I'm not following all of this, but it is clear that the ending of the Gaddafi regime put a large amount of weapons into circulation, and it seems not unlikely that the CIA was in Benghazi to help direct some of those weapons to supposed allies/clients in Syria and possibly elsewhere.

  • Dylan Matthews: Ben Carson accidentally stumbled on a great idea for improving education: James Hamblin quotes Carson: "Wouldn't it make more sense to put the money in a pot and redistribute it throughout the country so that public schools are equal, whether you're in a poor area or a wealthy area?" Carson eventually walked part of that back, but he stumbled onto a basic truth: the federal government has much stronger tax authority than state/local government, plus has the ability to run deficits, but most government spending, especially on things that (unlike the military) directly affect Americans, is done at the state and local level. Figuring out a scheme to redistribute tax receipts from the federal level down would eliminate a lot of inequities -- especially the current race-to-the-bottom of giving tax subsidies to businesses -- and provide more robust support for essential government spending.

  • George Monbiot: Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away? Massive forest fires in the US have been a news staple, but this one is new to me:

    A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century -- so far.

    Well, it is far away from here, but it's still the same planet, and ultimately the same atmosphere:

    Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn't require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone's front page. It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here's a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany. [ . . . ]

    It's not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases such as ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.

  • Thomas Schaller: 55-45 Politics in a 50-50 Country: This looks into various areas where the Republicans have built-in advantages which skew power in their favor -- something which includes but extends beyond the gerrymandered House districts. Then there's also the peculiarity that Republicans ("the party of no") are more often satisfied simply to obstruct Democratic initiatives -- a task that the system's numerous checks and balances favors, as do historical quirks like the Senate filibuster.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Weekend Roundup

No real time to write this week's roundup -- it's my birthday and I'm busy cooking (see the notebook for the menu). But I do have a bunch of links open in various tabs and I thought I might share them before they become stale. In no particular order:

  • Uri Avinery: The Settler's Prussia: In the 19th century, Germany was, fatefully, taken over by a marginal state on its far northeastern border, Prussia. Avinery sees the settler movement doing something like that in Israel. Also see Avinery's Weep, Beloved Country.

  • Andrew J Bacevich: Yes, the US can leave Afghanistan:

    What we have here is temporizing dressed up in policy drag. It is a gesture designed to convey an appearance of purposefulness to an enterprise whose actual purpose has long since vanished in the mists of time.

    Having inherited from his predecessor two wars begun in 2001 and 2003, respectively, Obama will bequeath those same two wars to the person who will succeed him as president in 2017. It is incumbent upon Americans to contemplate the implications of this disturbing fact. By their very endlessness, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq constitute a judgment on American statecraft, one further compounded by the chaos now enveloping large swaths of the Islamic world. Here are the consequences that stem from misunderstanding military power and misusing a military instrument once deemed unstoppable.

    Only by owning up to the mindless failure of U.S. military efforts since 9/11 does it become possible to restore real choice. Alternatives to open-ended war waged on the other side of the globe do exist. Contrary to Carter's lame insistence, the United States can leave Afghanistan. Protecting Americans from the relatively modest threat posed by the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Islamic State -- or all three combined for that matter -- does not require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces in the Islamic world, especially given the evidence that the presence of American troops there serves less to pacify than to provoke.

    Bacevich also wrote a more substantial piece at TomDispatch, On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail).

  • Peter Beinart: Trump Is Right About 9/11: As was well known if not at the time then shortly after, there were a number of concrete things the Bush administration could have done that might have kept 9/11 from happening. Terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke was especially unhappy about how Bush's neocons dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda, and Beinart dredges up all that story -- one that few in the press seem to recall, but which makes Trump's reminder that 9/11 happened during Bush's presidency appear to have more weight. Beinart could have made an even stronger case had he pointed out some of the things Bush did to aggravate tensions in the Middle East, such as his Clinton-esque bombing of Iraq and his support for Sharon's Counter-Intifada in Palestine. One might counter that Trump has unrealistic notions about what presidents can do, but that's a big part of his charm (or absurdity).

  • Tom Carson: 'Spies' Like Us: Steven Spielberg and the Cold War's Forgotten Battles: Review of Bridge of Spies and the Cold War it illuminates, for once.

  • Kathleen Frydl: Donald Trump and the Know-Nothings: More useful as an historical excursion into the short-lived 1850s nativist party than as an analysis of Trump himself, but that's because the "Know Nothings" were more colorful and their ignorance was more florid. One of history's great truisms: stupid people in the past could be interesting, but stupid people today are just tiresome.

  • Assaf Gavron: Confessions of an Israeli traitor:

    The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it -- to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus -- are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not "supporting our troops" are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government's policies and actions are seen as demoralizing. [ . . . ]

    The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what's happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East -- those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

  • Ed Kilgore: The Cult of the Second Amendment:

    And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it's based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.

    This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government's use of lethal force against criminals. [ . . . ]

    Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates. Mike Huckabee, a sunny and irenic candidate for president in 2008, all but threatened revolutionary violence in his recent campaign book for the 2016 cycle, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy:

    If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling "Sugar Daddy," I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big Government's overreach. They've been conditioned to just bend over and take it like a prisoner [!]. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.

    Dr. Ben Carson, another candidate thought to be a mild-mannered Christian gentleman, recently disclosed that he used to favor modest gun control measures until he came to realize the importance of widespread gun ownership as a safeguard against "tyranny."

    "When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns," Carson told USA Today. [ . . . ]

    Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary.

    My own view is that the second amendment was meant to ensure that state militias would be able to fight the Civil War, although the other obvious reading had to do with fighting Indians. Both meanings had become obsolete by 1900, and civilians have never had a significant role in fighting against criminals. The second amendment wasn't repealed then because it didn't seem to be all that harmful -- no least because the courts consistently ruled against an individual right to guns. That's only changed recently, and the full impact has yet to be felt, but what's disturbing about it isn't just the increase in the number of guns out there and the number of (often incompetent) people carrying them, but the sheer nonsense gun advocates wind up spouting. One stupid idea is that if everyone was armed we'd all wind up treating each other with more proper respect. A deeper one is that we're shifting responsibility for managing conflict from law and the courts to the streets. Then there's the notion Kilgore dwells on, that because individuals have a right to own guns they have a right to use them to oppose the rule of law when they (alone) find it unjust. The latter is often used not just to rationalize gun ownership but to permit individuals to own ever more powerful firearms because that's what it would take to neutralize the power of the state. The problem here is not just practical -- after all, we're talking about a state that owns AC-130 gunships that can fire thousands of rounds of depleted uranium per minute, and that's not even the scariest example. The real problem is that it gives up on making sure the state is responsible to the public in a fair and equitable way.

  • Nancy LeTourneau: What I Learned From Watching the Benghazi Hearing: Mostly, that Clinton kept her cool through eleven hours of idiots trying to rile her. But also it has something to do with the word preferences between Republicans and the administration, not that I get all the nuances there. For example, I tire of hearing the word "terrorist" used so indiscriminately: partly because it seems to be all it takes to gain license to kill someone (and perhaps a few others in the vicinity), partly because it seems like much (if not most) of the real terror is perpetrated by the so-called anti-terrorists. Still, lest the Republicans turn Clinton into some sort of heroic figure, see Jason Ditz: Bizarre Revisionism: Hillary Claims Libya Shows Consequences of US Military Withdrawals.

  • Mark LeVine: The tide is turning against Zionist extremism:

    As the inherent contradiction between Israel's self-image as a modern, democratic and progressive country and the reality of a half-century-long brutal occupation become clear to all, the erosion of support for Israel by the emerging generation of American Jews will continue and likely increase, with profound consequences not just for Israel but also for the future of the American Jewish community.

    For an example LeVine didn't cite, see Two establishment Jews (Harvard and Microsoft) endorse boycott of Israel and 'single state' in Washington Post.

  • Josh Marshall: Netanyahu Reduced to Defending Hitler, Really . . .: This is the first piece I saw on Netanyahu's speech to the World Zionist Congress, where he argued that Hitler "just wanted to deport the Jews" until he met exiled Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose answer to Hitler's "So what should I do with them?" was "Burn them." With the Palestinian Revolt of 1937-39 failed, al-Husseini went into exile and spent WWII in Nazi Germany. It is known that he met with Hitler once, in 1941, and Israelis have been trying to make mountains out of that mole hill ever since. Still, it seems bizarre that any Israeli, much less the Prime Minister, would try to make Hitler seem less horrific just to blame some Palestinian -- anything, I guess, to distract from all of Israel's self-inflicted problems. More links on this:

  • Gareth Porter: Why the US Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster:

    The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow.

    The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a "pressure cooker for extremism." It was during their confinement in that camp during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior al-Qaida military cadres planned the details of how they would create Islamic State.

  • Gareth Porter: The US Could End Saudi War Crimes in Yemen -- It Just Doesn't Want To:

    According to a joint report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2,682 civilian deaths and injuries resulted from air bombardment in Yemen from late March to the end of July 2015 -- more than anywhere else in the world during the first seven months of the year.

    The Saudis have also imposed a tight blockade on Yemen by air, land and water, to prevent not only weapons, but also food, fuel and medicine from reaching millions of Yemenis, creating a humanitarian disaster. Doctors Without Borders declared in July that the Saudi blockade was killing as many people in Yemen as the bombing. US Navy ships have been patrolling alongside Saudi ships to prevent arms from entering Yemen, while disclaiming any involvement in the Saudi-led blockade of food, fuel and medical supplies.

    The Amnesty report points out that the United States has a legal obligation under the Arms Trade Treaty not to provide weaponry it knows will be used in the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen. Article 6 of that treaty, which entered into force in October 2014, forbids the transfer of arms and munitions to a party to an armed conflict if it has knowledge that the weaponry will be used for "attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a party."

    I suspect one reason for Obama's reluctance to criticize Saudi Arabia for killing civilians in Yemen is that the US had been doing exactly that through its drone program for many years now. Some details of that (plus much more) appear in Cora Currie: The Kill Chain: The Lethal Bureaucracy Behind Obama's Drone War.

  • Jon Schwarz: A Short History of US Bombing of Civilian Facilities, and Tom Engelhardt: The US Has Bombed at Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001: Two immediate (and rather obvious) responses to the US bombing of a Médicins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan. The Schwarz piece includes a cartoon with a quote from Obama's then-latest mass shooting speech (the one in Oregon).

  • Nathan Thrall: The End of the Abbas Era:

    For Abbas, political survival depended on making significant gains before any of this occurred. His strategy entailed several gambles. First, that providing Israel with security, informing on fellow Palestinians, and suppressing opposition to the occupation would convince Israel's government that Palestinians could be trusted with independence. Second, that after Palestinians had met US demands to abandon violence, build institutions and hold democratic elections, the US would put pressure on Israel to make the concessions necessary to establish a Palestinian state. Third, that after being invited to participate in legislative elections, Hamas would win enough seats to be co-opted but too few to take over. Fourth, that by improving the Palestinian Authority economy and rebuilding its institutions, Abbas would buy enough time to achieve Palestinian statehood.

    In all four respects, he came up short. Israel took his security co-operation for granted and the Israeli public did not demand that its government reward Abbas for his peaceful strategy. The US did not apply the necessary pressure to extract significant concessions from Israel. Hamas won the legislative elections, took over Gaza, and refused to adopt Abbas's political programme (though Hamas's victory also strengthened international support for Abbas, as the international community shifted from democracy promotion to democracy prevention). And West Bankers, though dependent on the jobs and economic infrastructure provided by the PA, also resent it, and have lost whatever faith they once had that Abbas's strategy could succeed. According to an opinion poll taken last month, two-thirds of West Bankers and Gazans want him to resign.

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Sunday, September 27, 2015

Weekend Roundup

With the weekend approaching, I had one entry (on drug pricing) in the draft file. Don't have time to add much, but I do have some open tabs I want to take note of before I go offline:

  • Paul Krugman: Religions Are What People Make Them:

    The current crop of Republican presidential candidates is accomplishing something I would have considered impossible: making George W. Bush look like a statesman. Say what you like about his actions after 9/11 -- and I did not like, at all -- at least he made a point of not feeding anti-Muslim hysteria. But that was then.

    Reason probably doesn't do much good in these circumstances. Still, to the extent that there are people who should know better declaring that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, or science, or good things in general, I'd like to recommend a book I recently read: S. Frederick Starr's Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. It covers a place and a time of which I knew nothing: the medieval flourishing of learning -- mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy -- in central Asian cities made rich by irrigated agriculture and trade.

    As Starr describes their work, some of these scholars really did prefigure the Enlightenment, sounding remarkably like Arabic-speaking precursors of David Hume and Voltaire. And the general picture he paints is of an Islamic world far more diverse in its beliefs and thinking than anything you might imagine from current prejudices.

    Now, that enlightenment was eventually shut down by economic decline and a turn toward fundamentalism. But such tendencies are hardly unique to Islam.

    People are people. They can achieve great things, or do terrible things, under lots of religious umbrellas. (An Israeli once joked to me, "Judaism has rarely been a religion of oppression. Why? Lack of opportunity.") It's ignorant and ahistorical to claim unique virtue or unique sin for any one set of beliefs.

    A couple quick points: Bush understood that American intervention in the Middle East wouldn't work without local allies, which the US at least had to go through the motions of cultivating. One side effect of this is that Americans and Arabs would develop attachments which would eventually result in many of the latter coming to the US (much as had happened with Cuba and Vietnam). Islamophobes should have understood this dynamic from the beginning, and as such should have resisted Bush's imperial ventures. Of course, they didn't do that -- they're not very bright, but at least they understood that Bush's wars in the Middle East were wars against the people there. Not so clear that either side understood that long-term wars there would only increase intrinsic Islamophobia among Americans, but that's probably the easiest lesson one could have deduced from a study of America's wars.

    The ending of the Arab enlightenment didn't correspond to economic downturn so much as military defeat, primarily by the Mongols and Turks. (A similar thing happened in Spain, first with the Moors then the Christians.) Of course, once the Mongols sack Baghdad it's hard to rebuild the economy. We've seen that in real time with the American occupation, which by most accounts was considerably less brutal.

    In Israel, Jewish military power has turned Judaism into a religion of oppression -- indeed a remarkably nasty one. Perhaps that "lack of opportunity" has prevented any safeguards from evolving. Indeed, one can point to episodes where Christian rule was at least as brutal -- the Spanish Inquisition, for one.

  • Andrew Pollack: Drug Goes From $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight: The drug is Daraprim, a 62-year-old generic which was acquired by "Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager." The first thing you learn in MBA school is that the price of something has nothing to do with its cost: it's simply what the market will bear. For a drug that can be the difference between life and death, a seller can get away with a pretty steep price. Under such circumstances, there's little difference between "smart business" and the highwayman's motto, "your money or your life." What's unusual here is that the drug is generic, so in principle there's nothing to stop other companies from competing, and competition should bring the price down to something related to costs. However, as the article shows, there are ways an operator can create and exploit a temporary monopoly -- even where none should exist. One the article doesn't mention goes back to MBA school doctrine: if all the smart operators look for is huge margin opportunities, they'll never bother to compete a price down -- which leaves the first mover with monopoly rents.

    The article gives several other examples of extortionate price increases. I've seen other reports that couple of them have been rolled back, basically by shaming the companies, although I suspect that the real leverage is that a few large insurance companies and, ultimately, the government are the main buyers of pharmaceuticals -- and while you may be powerless, they less committed to your health than to their own bottom line.

    Dean Baker tweeted: "We don't negotiate firefighters' pay when they show up at the burning house, why would we pay for drugs this way?" Baker argues that we should End Patent Monopolies on Drugs. I agree with everything Baker says here:

    The United States stands out among wealthy countries in that we give drug companies patent monopolies on drugs that are essential for people's health or lives and then allows them to charge whatever they want. Every other wealthy country has some system of price controls or negotiated prices where the government limits the extent to which drug companies can exploit the monopoly it has given them. The result is that we pay roughly twice as much for our drugs as the average for other wealthy countries. This additional cost is not associated with better care; we are just paying more for the same drugs. [ . . . ]

    A monopoly that allows drug companies to sell their drugs at prices that can be hundreds of times the free market price has all the problems economics predicts when governments interfere with the market. Drug companies routinely mislead doctors and the public about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs to increase sales. The cost in terms of bad health outcomes and avoidable deaths runs into the tens of billions of dollars every year.

    Drug companies also spend tens of millions on campaign contributions and lobbying to get [even] longer and stronger patent protection. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the main forces behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and its demands for stronger patent protections is one of the main obstacles to reaching an agreement with the other countries.

    We don't need patent monopolies to support research. We already spend more than $30 billion a year financing research through the National Institutes of Health. Everyone, including the drug companies, agrees that this money is very productive. We could double or triple this spending and replace the patent supported research done by the drug companies. With the research costs paid upfront, most drugs would be available for the same price as a bottle of generic aspirin.

    Still, as Pollack's article proves, the problem with drug pricing isn't just patents. Purchasers also need more leverage in negotiating prices -- by consolidating their purchasing power and by promoting more competitive options.

Also, a few links for further study (briefly noted; i.e., I don't have time for this shit right now):

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Sunday, September 20, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Short post this week. Got a late start, and didn't get beyond the usual US political campaign grist. Rest assured though that the Middle East remains as fucked as ever, that Europe is struggling with a refugee crisis, that Greece is stuck with a choice between two defeatist parties, that the rich still aren't satisfied, and environmental disasters are still multiplying. Meanwhile, our "best and brightest" reporters are mired in what Matt Taibbi calls "the stupid season."

  • David Atkins: Why Does the Press Continue to Get It So Wrong on Donald Trump?: Why do pundits, and for that matter pretty much all of the mainstream press, keep getting popular political opinions wrong?

    Conservatives will claim that journalists are liberal and don't understand Republican politics. Perhaps, but progressives have made equally scathing critiques of the press for years in their underestimation of progressive populist sentiment and elevation of centrist candidates. It's less that the political press is liberal, and more that it is trapped' in a bubble inhabited by the wealthy and powerful. [ . . . ]

    But more importantly, there is a bias in the press toward political neutrality and the perception of balance. After a debate in which Republican candidates peddled an endless string of falsehoods and fantasies, the political press has a crisis on its hands: let it all slide and simply transcribe the lies without challenge, or contribute to a perception of "liberal bias" by actually calling out the falsehoods and holding the candidates accountable?

    Trump presents a similar problem. Trump's extremist positions on immigration and foreign policy, combined with his vulgar, racist and sexist remarks, are so obviously appalling that for him to continuously lead the GOP field not only proves the Mann/Ornstein thesis that the Republican Party has grown uniquely extreme, but also shows that problem extends beyond Republican Party leadership to the actual voters themselves. Even more, the fact that Trump's apostasy on taxes and healthcare has not significantly damaged him is a demonstration that GOP voters are not actually so committed to the libertarian supply-side economics of the Republican Party as they are to using the power of government to benefit traditionally powerful whites at the expense of women and minorities.

    This a problem for the press. As long as Trump leads, it's impossible to maintain the fiction of equally extreme "both sides do it" partisanship. As long as Trump rules (and, to a lesser extent, that Bernie Sanders continues to rise on the left) it's also increasingly difficult to pretend that "moderates" in either party are actually the center of public opinion, rather than caterers to a unique brand of corporate-friendly upper-class comfort that labels itself as moderate without holding any legitimate claim to the title.

    Acknowledging those realities would force the press to start reporting the fundamentals of American politics as they stand today:

    First, that the Republican base wants a rebel leader to take their country back from the inconvenience of being nice to women, gays and minorities;

    Second, that the wealthy Republican establishment and its center-right Third Way Democratic counterparts don't actually have a legitimate base of voters, but rather illegitimate institutional capture of government via legalized bribery; and

    Third, that the rest of the country wants liberal public policies that would resemble a Scandinavian government, but most of them are so turned off by the futility of the American political process that not enough of them turn out to vote to make a real difference outside of the bluest states.

    The first two of these points could be phrased better but are pretty self-evident. The Republican Party is an uneasy coalition of leaders and followers: the former that segment of the wealthy that seeks to gain through zero-sum strategies (reducing taxes, suppressing wages, growing monopolies, exchanging wealth for debt, arbitrage); the latter various segments of gullible single-issue voters (racists, religious bigots, anti-abortion, pro-gun, flag wavers, anything that distracts one from class). The appeal to the latter is a combination of flattery (you're the real Americans) and demagoguery (they're hell-bent on destroying your life). That coalition is unstable because the leaders are actively undermining the followers' material basis, and this fracturing only increases as the leaders gain power. It may be possible for a politician to crack this coalition by running against the elites, but I don't see any reason to expect Trump will do that. Rather, as his own billionaire sponsor, his potential independence worries the elites and offers some hope to the gullible followers. Still, I don't see it panning out: even if his understanding of class never extends beyond his own bottom line, you know where he's going to land on every significant issue.

    The third point is the controversial one, because the main obstacle a significant extension of social democratic policies faces comes not from the Republicans -- who would cut their base's throats to achieve their goal of reducing government -- as from the mainstream Democrats, who chase after campaign money with the avarice of Republicans but at least have some scruples against wrecking the status quo (not that they always have the wisdom, as shown by their support for wrecking Carter-Glass banking regulation). The public may very well want more than the Democrats are offering, but without unions or other groups pressuring the Democrats to deliver, they'll keep playing defense (with the occasional fumble).

  • Josh Marshall: The War Party: Responding to the Republican dog and pony show, Marshall points out that when foreign policy issues came up, "Trump may have been silent because he just doesn't know enough details or doesn't care enough about them to engage," while the others "turned not so much to foreign policy as to each candidate trying to outdo the other in embracing the sort of petulant unilateralism that made the aughts such a disaster for the United States. It was, to put it simply, a race to embrace Bush foreign policy on steroids." I wouldn't give Trump much of a pass here -- he has, after all, claimed he's "the most militaristic person there is" (see Scott Eric Kaufman and Glen Healy -- the latter defending Trump by arguing that his boast is the "biggest lie" of a pathological braggart). Still, Marshall is right to focus on Rubio and Fiorina, who pundits like to praise for their ability to spew this shit with a straight face.

    Let's start with Marco Rubio, who has tried to carve out a space as the candidate of the neoconservatives in exile. Joe Klein saw him as the clear winner of the debate with a crisp and incisive command of national defense policy. "To my mind, Marco Rubio won that debate with his obvious fluency on a range of topics . . . Marco Rubio is becoming a force to be reckoned with -- on the debate stage. He is fluent, smart and bold."

    That is not what I saw at all.

    I agree that Rubio continues to come off as likable and he makes no obvious mistakes in these encounters. I actually think that just by dint of process of elimination he has a substantial better shot at the nomination that most people realize. But in his recitations on foreign policy he doesn't come off as knowledgable or seasoned. He comes off as someone who has obligingly internalized, in a kind of rote manner, the wisdom of Bill Kristol to get the money of Sheldon Adelson. There is a strong DC insider appetite for these nostrums. So it's not just the money. But these are dangerous, discredited ideas that were tried and failed miserably under the last Republican President. Indeed, they failed so miserably that even in President Bush's second term the standard-bearers were largely ushered aside in favor of a slightly more realist approach to cleaning up the messes created in the first term.

    If there is one thing the country does not need it is another impressionable foreign policy neophyte who comes under the influence of this war-addicted DC coven.

    Next is Carly Fiorina. I entirely agree that she had a strong, commanding debate. She seemed particularly focused and knowledgable on national security questions as she rattled off a number of things she would do to take a more aggressive posture toward America's adversaries and rivals.

    Unless of course you actually have any idea what you're talking about. In which case, the things she said seemed quite different. At a broad level, it's the same kind of confrontational and dangerous foreign policy that got the country into trouble a decade ago. But as Ezra Klein explains here, Fiorina's list of proposed actions were a mix of things that were irrelevant to the questions at hand, are already happening, or things that operate on a time scale such that they can't have any real affect on the challenges she suggests they're aimed at countering. The dangerous ground of half-knowledge. Or policies as puzzle pieces with no larger picture or understanding.

    I think the appeal the necons have among Republicans now is tied up with the right's obsession with condemning all things Obama. It is, after all, an extremist doctrine, one that takes common assumptions of the cold war security state and through a combination of logical rigor and macho posturing drives them to seductive but untenable extremes. It's worth recalling that the neocons' original nemesis was none other than Henry Kissinger, no minor war criminal himself, so casting Obama as cowardly and unpatriotic was easy. (Lazy and shameless too: after all, the crime they wailed about in Benghazi! wasn't Obama's running an illegal CIA operation there or getting it blown up but not spouting the correct anti-Islamic bigotry afterwards -- i.e., the one that would justify further disastrous intervention.)

    The neocon parlor game of rhetoric is hard to beat in the salons of Washington, even though it has never been shown to work in the real world -- where America isn't omnipotent, where American efforts to "shock and awe" other into submission merely publicize the moral rot that somes with superpower hubris. The neocons always have the excuse that their principles were compromised by weaklings who didn't believe and didn't try hard enough. The real antidote to neoconism is to question the assumptions -- something Obama and Clinton never had the guts to do, because the institutional power of the security state is too entrenched. Some of the leading dimwits of the Tea Party movement were tempted in that direction, but Michelle Bachmann fizzled before she could articulate much, and Rand Paul let himself be convinced that only by prevaricating could he win the nomination -- leaving himself no principle to stand on.

    Marshall's conclusion:

    The attitude of embattlement and grievance that currently animates the Republican party is something we're quite familiar with in the domestic sphere but it's even more present in the outlook abroad. It is a dangerous thing to take a coalition which feels embattled, victimized and disempowered and put them in charge of the most powerful military in the world. A coalition like that, with an untrained hand at the helm, guided by terrible advisors is a recipe for disaster.

  • Philip Weiss: Coulter's point is that Republicans pander on Israel to win donors, not voters: I referred to the Republican presidential debate above as a "dog and pony show" -- a phrase that back in my corporate days we used to refer to any staged presentation (to customers, to investors, or to anyone else you hoped to deal with). I was looking for an alternative turn of phrase, but also I was a bit uncomfortable with "debate" -- that suggests a high-minded collegiate contest being scored by experts, and while many pundits are conceited enough to think of themselves that way, that wasn't necessarily the judgment the candidates were looking for. Some were mostly intent on selling themselves to potential voters, while some were no doubt more concerned with donors. It now occurs to me that the latter may have been the main focus, one that resonates with my "dog and pony show" quip: after all, who bothers to watch a dog or horse race unless they have some money riding on the result?

    Coulter is a thoroughly obnoxious pundit, one who built her entire career by heaping hateful invective on liberals, a torrent so vile it's consumed her, turning her into such a fount of hatred that she's lost the ability to distinguish between former friends and foes. It wouldn't surprise me if her "fucking Jews" tweet reveals anti-semitism because her hate has become so universal, although it sounds as much like her usual stock in trade. Still, the sequence of her tweets shows she's at least trying to think through what she's seeing. She quickly figures out that Republican appeals on Israel aren't meant to curry favor with Jewish voters, because there aren't that many of them, and most vote Democratic anyway. She considers whether it's "to suck up to the Evangelicals" -- they are more numerous, and they're a key target constituency for Republicans: many see Israel as an essential step toward the second coming of Jesus, the "end times" and all that. (I've known people obsessed with that, although you don't read much about them as it's considered impolite to talk about such delusions.) But in the end Coulter decides the candidates are pitching their donors, and she comes up with this tweet, which despite everything is pretty much on target:

    How to get applause from GOP donors: 1) Pledge to start a war 2) Talk about job creators 3) Denounce abortion 4) Cite Reagan 5) Cite Israel.

    Worth noting that (1) is an implicit case of (5), not that war with Iran isn't the only pledge, but if it wasn't Iran it'd be someone else on Israel's "existential threat" list -- ISIS, for one, is looming. Coulter's hot button issue at the moment seems to be nativism, which whenever it has erupted in American history has been rooted in racism (and often linked to anti-semitism, although these days the semites are much more often Muslim). Nativism has also tended to be associated with autarky and isolationism, and Coulter seems to be leaning that way -- if you don't want foreigners coming to America, you shouldn't go around the world starting wars and stirring up distress, like America's liberal interventionists have been doing ever since FDR. One could build a coherent conservative argument around such notions, but I have yet to hear one from Trump or Coulter or even Rand Paul. Part of the problem there is that Fascists in the 1930s discredited those notions for generations. Part is that capital -- the money of the superrich who think they run the GOP -- has become so globalized that any real autarky has become unimaginable. And while it's not clear that global capital really requires America's military sprawl, no Republican has come around to asking that question.

    In a sense, (3) has become the core point: not so much that the money Republicans hate abortion, but abortion has become a litmus test issue, something no Republican can question without being drummed out of the tribe. But then all the points are increasingly like that: litmus tests, articles of faith, self-commitments. They draw applause because Republicans love to applaud themselves. But they're increasingly self-selecting themselves into a power-losing minority.

    By the way, we can thank Netanyahu for moving Israel out of the realm of bipartisan consensus and into the Republican column. That will eventually free the Democrats of a terrible burden. As Weiss puts it:

    One good result of this conversation will be more Jews condemning Sheldon Adelson and Norman Braman and the Republican Jewish Coalition moneybags for trying to have a war with Iran, more Jews declaring that they aren't Zionists.

    As for Coulter's (4) point, see: Jon Schwarz: Seven Things About Ronald Reagan You Won't Hear at the Reagan Library GOP Debate: "And maybe that's appropriate -- since if Reagan stood for anything as president, it was creating a completely fictionalized version of the past."

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Sunday, September 13, 2015

Weekend Roundup

Friday was the 14th anniversary of the 2001 Al-Qaeda "attack" against America, when nineteen Arabs (mostly Saudis) hijacked four airliners and committed suicide by flying those planes into iconic buildings in New York City and Virginia (and a Pennsylvania corn field). The media went berserk, describing all of America as "under attack." The political class decided this was war, and vowed to return the fight back to foreign lands -- which, after all, is the only experience any of them had ever had of war. Within days the intelligentsia, including way too many who had identified with the left, launched a pre-emptive attack on pacifists and anyone else who tried to talk reason -- especially anyone who expressed doubts that America was wholly innocent of wrong-doing.

I experienced those "attacks" from a barely comfortable distance, visting a friend, staying in her apartment above Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. I could stick my head out the window and see the smoking (still-standing) towers, and could watch masses of people trudging home on foot as the subways were stopped. One of my first thoughts was that I knew it wasn't an atomic bomb because the pedestrians' panic had subsisted a mere three miles into Brooklyn. I tried to imagine what it must be like to be under siege in Sarajevo -- the most graphic experience of war from the 1990s -- and concluded that this wasn't at all like that. War wasn't something that ordinary people in New York felt that day. War was just a concept in the fevered minds of the people who talk on TV. For people who were in lower Manhattan that morning, of course, it was immediate: a disaster on a scale no one had experienced or was prepared for. But just a few miles away from "ground zero" more than anything else it was damn inconvenient. Like the Con Ed blackout I lived through in the 1970s. Well, in some ways worse, but on that order.

Of course, if you knew someone who was killed that day, it also had a tragic dimension. I knew one such person, a niece (the wife of my first wife's nephew), and I spent a fair amount of time the next two weeks with the family, so I did feel something other than inconvenienced. But I didn't experience that as war, but as random, sudden, violent, shattering -- like when my uncle was killed by a drunk driver, leaving his wife and three pre-teen children to fend for themselves. My niece had two children, one so young he'd never remember her. The manner of her death was obscenely worse, giving us days of uncertainty and months before they identified some of her DNA in the megatons of rubble. And something like that happened to nearly 3,000 other people, their families and friends, in not much more than an instant. Still, that's only about one in 2700 New Yorkers (or one in 94000 Americans, just barely one-thousandth of 1%). No one else I knew in New York in those weeks had such bad luck.

I wish someone would sift through the new coverage and punditry we saw on TV those first few days and edit a fair sampling of the insanity we saw. I clearly remember Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu smiling and cackling about how this was "very good" for Israel, and John Major lecturing on how much the Uk could teach America about how to handle terrorism. I remember a bit of fuzzy nighttime footage of a rocket explosion near Kabul being aired over the presumptive banner line "America Strikes Back." I remember the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, standing on the Capitol steps and daring Al-Qaeda to take their best shot at her. I spent much of the day thumbing through a book of photographs called Century, looking at images of the real wars that plagued the past century while the phony warriors nattered on TV. It helped to keep it all in perspective, something almost everyone was losing.

For me, it wasn't hard to see that no good would come of such war fever. But how much bad would come was always hard to grasp, or even imagine. One might cite the nominal costs of 14 years of non-stop war, of endless war, of war with no prospect of victory or redemption -- over 6,700 US soldiers dead, many more maimed (physically and/or psychologically), trillions of dollars spent, and many times that much death, destruction, and destabilization that those wars have inflicted abroad -- but I'm ever more worried about the cognitive toll those wars have taken on American society, indeed on the ability of Americans to think clearly and to engage the world constructively.

Another thought I had on 9/11 was even rarer, and I think more profound: it occurred to me that the "attacks" were a "wake up call" -- a reminder to look into your own self to see whether anything you've done might have contributed to this tragedy. Needless to say, no notion was more unwelcome in post-9/11 America. The idea isn't to partition blame. Rather, it is to make certain that we do not spread the blame with future acts. Within a few months the United States had done just that: protected against self-awareness, obsessed by a sense of self-righteous victimhood, Bush marshaled the full force of American military power not against the individuals who plotted 9/11 but against whole nations of people who had nothing to do with the "attacks." He thereby greatly compounded the crime many times over, something he could do because so few Americans questioned the assumptions he made: that America's fortunes depended on the world's fear of America's military power; that the "attacks" had been an affront to that power, which could only be restored by reassertion; and that the United States, due to its unique virtue, was uniquely entitled to project that power over the rest of the world; and that the American people would continue to support a bold leader (like Bush) who would restore America to its rightful greatness.

It is difficult to overstate the amount of hubris, let alone ignorance, that feeds this worldview. Fourteen years later, by any objective measure, the stance has failed. Yet when Obama, recognizing that America's power to impose its will on Iran's leaders and people was limited, resorted to negotiating a framework that would at least ensure that Iran could not develop nuclear weapons -- the same "hot button" issue that Bush had used to provoke his ill-fated war in Iraq -- every single Republican senator and presidential candidate rose in opposition. Their objections have nothing to do with what Iran may or may not do. They object to the deal because it represents a retreat from their belief that American might (American greatness) is the answer to all problems in the world.

Nonetheless, it is not just the Republicans who continue to cling to these core assumptions. You'd be hard pressed to find any example where Obama has rethought why America is involved in the Middle East, or reconsidered what effect that involvement has had. The Iran deal is merely a change of tactics: he continues to assume that Iran is America's (and Israel's) mortal enemy, and that it meant to escape the omnipresent threat of American (and Israeli) attack by developing its own nuclear deterrence. The difference is that Obama chose a more realistic, more effective, and less risky method of preserving nuclear monopoly than, say, Bush did while allegedly pursuing the same goals viz. Iraq.

Of course, realism, effectiveness, and risk-limits are among the things Republicans hate about the deal. They suggest that Obama is not a true believer in America's greatness. Perhaps they even recall the Bush-era neocon mantra, "anyone can go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." Obama isn't their idea of a real man. Simple as that.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Josh Marshall: You'll Want to Read This: Marshall, in his intro and outro, shows he doesn't really known what to make of "TMP Reader JB" -- "no one bats 1000% at this" [presumably he means a batting average of 1.000, which means 100% of at bats turned into base hits] -- but it's helpful that he published it last year and reminded us of it this year.

    Could an attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of "sleeper cells" lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and killed thousands of innocent civilians since 9/11. One would think our actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etcetera would spawn at least a few motivated and effective enemies bent on revenge through domestic attacks. Apparently not.

    So, ironically, if we had done absolutely nothing in response to 9/11 aside from hold funerals and shake our heads in disbelief, we would have been no less safe than we are now after two useless wars, trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, and a decade of taking off our shoes for domestic flights. I'm not saying this was obvious when 9/11 happened. Far from it. I was just as freaked out as anyone else at the time and I think it would have been foolish to ignore the threat. But the fact is if we had we would have been far better off, because as it turns out there were not hundreds of other Mohammed Attas out there in the wings. In fact, there were none, at least not with any meaningful capabilities (which would exclude folks like the shoe bomber and the Tsarnaev brothers). We know this to be the case because if such people did exist we would have been hit 100 times over by now. It is too damn easy to sow terror and chaos with motivation and even a below average IQ. Think Newtown or D.C. sniper.

    A few sad teenagers have committed far, far more domestic terror attacks than all the Islamic militants in the world over the past decade, and that is an outcome I think very few would have predicted, myself included, in the aftermath of 9/11. I'm sure the Rudy Giuliani set would love to take credit for the lack of attacks, but I think any serious expert on stopping domestic terrorism attacks would agree that the only way to bat as close to 1000 as we have is if your enemy is fictional.

    This is a little confused, but the basic point is surely correct: that the long-term incidence of terror attacks is extremely marginal and doesn't justify such major expense as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, while those wars generated a lot of resistance locally, they don't appear to have generated any blowback inside the homeland. This suggests that Bin Laden's focus on the "far enemy" hasn't found any further adherents. (This may be changing in that ISIS has started to encourage sympathetic "lone wolf" attacks against hostile countries like the US and France, but that appears to be secondary to their recruitment campaigns, and it's not clear that they are organizing such attacks.)

    I would stress three points: (1) that the current and future incidence of terror attacks would go way down if the US wasn't intervening and otherwise supporting violence in the Middle East; (2) that continued US support for violence, including support for repressive measures by corrupt and reactionary regimes in the region, will build up a reservoir of ill will that will be increasingly difficult to defuse over time; and (3) the longer we engage in wars in the Middle East, the more Islamophobic our domestic population becomes, and that prejudice is likely to generate more jihadi recruitment and/or "lone wolf" incidents. So while I agree with "JD" that the actual incidence of domestic terror events doesn't justify the outsized response, I would also argue that the "war on terror" generates a lot more terror than would otherwise happen.

    This doesn't mean I'm against TSA security efforts (I can think of a half-dozen things about airlines that bother me worse), or that I object to the government keeping track of who's buying fertilizer or AK-47s (not that anyone's doing the latter). I do think some of the law enforcement efforts go too far. Like so much wartime hysteria in the nation's history, they are less intended to protect the public than to drive a wedge between the war agenda and people who might question it. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s to the PATRIOT Act in the wake of 9/11, war fever has repeatedly tarnished the democracy and freedom allegedly being fought for, often in ways that once peace returned would be looked back on with embarrassment. (The one exception, by the way, was the War of 1812, scrupulously managed by the one president who understood the constitution above all others, James Madison.)

  • Mark Z Barabak: Republican voters turn their rage against party establishment: Front page article in Wichita Eagle this morning, but I can't find it on their website:

    After years of raging against President Obama, unhappy conservatives have a new target for their anger and disgust: the Republicans in Congress.

    The GOP seized control of the House in 2010 and four years later took the Senate. Yet even with those majorities, Republican lawmakers have failed to achieve such conservative priorities as rolling back Obamacare, their derisive name for the national health care law, or cracking down harder on illegal immigration.

    The controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline is no closer to being built -- indeed, it may soon be dead -- tough anti-abortion legislation has languished in the Senate, and a fiercely disputed nuclear deal with Iran seems virtually certain to take effect, despite near-unanimous opposition from Republicans in Congress.

    In short, as many see it, the promise of the 2010 tea party movement and its 2014 echo have been dashed on the marble steps of the Capitol.

    "People feel betrayed," said Greg Mueller, a longtime conservative activist and campaign strategist. "They feel like they keep working and fighting to elect Republicans to get us back to a limited-government approach to life, and all they get is more spending, more taxes and people who are afraid to fight liberal Democrats."

    What a bunch of conceited, whiny, self-important, ignorant assholes! In 2008, after nearly eight years of the most inept and corrupt Republican Administration in history, 69,498,516 Americans voted for change, for Barack Obama as president, 9.55 million more than voted for his Republican opponent, and they elected a heavily Democratic Congress with a supposedly "fillibuster-proof" Senate, and what did we get for all that effort? Not much. Then a few thousand bitter enders hold a few rallies, wave flags and spout Revolutionary War slogans, and the media goes crazy for them, and the Kochs write them checks, and all of a sudden they feel entitled to run the country their Party had just spent eight years driving to ruin. (Remember the bit about how Obama was running ruinous deficits? During the middle of a recession the Republicans created and were doing everything they could to extend?) And even after all that Tea Party enthusiasm, Obama was easily reelected in 2012 -- no longer promising change, just sanity relative to the parched earth obstructionism of the Republicans.

    I'm pretty sure no one on the right feels more disappointment in their elected partisan leaders than I do. Obama spent most of his presidency unwilling to even speak up for the promises he made in his 2008 campaign, much less to act to stand up for the people who voted for him (a big part of why so many didn't vote in 2010 -- turnout dropped from 129 to 82 million -- and 2014, handing Congress to the big money-backed Republican minority). But though I complain, I'm too used to losing to whine. My first political efforts, after all, opposed the Vietnam War. The rule of thumb is that politicians may appeal to the voters during a campaign, but once the ballots are counted they have to operate in a world dominated by moneyed (and other hidden) interests, a world of obstacles for anyone marginally on the left. Conservatives should rationally see such unelected power as their final bulwark against change, and indeed that's what happened to Obama. On the other hand, the whiners aren't rational. They expect their favored politicians to serve their every whim, no matter how dumb and debilitating: why not shut down the government in order to prevent women from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider? Who needs Social Security checks anyway? And if it wasn't Planned Parenthood, it would be something else -- shutting down the government has become an annual ritual with them, anything "to get us back to a limited-government approach to life." (Anything, that is, but defunding the military, the government's most bloated and inefficient and, nonetheless, counterproductive bureaucracy.)

  • Paul Krugman: Charlatans, Cranks, and Apparatchiks:

    The Jeb! tax plan confirms, if anyone had doubts, that the takeover of the Republican Party by charlatans and cranks is complete. This is what the supposedly thoughtful, wonkish candidate of the establishment can come up with? And notice that the ludicrous claim that most of the revenue effects of huge tax cuts would be offset by higher growth comes from economists who, like Jeb!, are very much establishment figures -- but who evidently find that the partisan requirement that they support voodoo outweighs any fear of damage to their professional reputations.

    While the intellectual implosion of the GOP is obvious, however, it's less obvious what is driving it. Or to be more specific, stories that explain why one set of crank ideas flourish don't seem to work well for other sets of crank ideas.

    Krugman examines two cases of crank economic ideas -- opposition to expansionary economic policy and claims that cutting taxes on the rich will grow the economy -- and finds their rationales are different, but doesn't go much beyond that. I think the former case is more cynical: Republicans only oppose expansionary monetary policy when Democrats are in office and might get credit for growing the economy; otherwise, well, Cheney said "deficits don't matter" and Nixon said "we're all Keynesians now." Sure, there's some residual Gold-buggery in the Ron Paul camp, but that's marginal.

    As for reducing taxes on the rich, that's a policy constant that has been served by every conceivable rationale -- Lafferism is only one such ploy for the exceptionally gullible. And while rank and file Republicans may not get excited about creating a more inequal society, they'll usually buy the notion that tax cuts should be matched by spending cuts, especially subsidies to "those people." But if Krugman is having trouble finding "a general theory of crankification," that's because he's looking at economics, not politics. Once Republicans decided that any argument that sounded remotely plausible could be used to support their favored policies, validity ceased to be one of their concerns. Then they found that by cultivating the ignorance and illogic of their followers they could greatly expand their crackpot arguments and, well, the rest is show biz.

  • Middle East links: Seems like more war all the time. Perhaps unfair to blame all that on the region's number one arms supplier. Kind of like blaming junkies on pushers.

    • Yousef Munayyer: Gaza is already unlivable:

      The United Nations said on Sept. 1 that the Gaza Strip could become unlivable by 2020 without critical access to reconstruction and humanitarian supplies.

      For Gaza's beleaguered residents, none of this is surprising. Gaza is already uninhabitable and has been on a fast track to a complete collapse. The U.N. issued similar warnings three years ago, even before last summer's 50-day war, which left more than 2,200 Palestinians dead and countless others injured -- most of them civilians.

      "Three Israeli military operations in the past six years, in addition to eight years of economic blockade, have ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza," the latest U.N. report said. "The most recent military operation compounded already dire socioeconomic conditions and accelerated de-development in the occupied Palestinian territory, a process by which development is not merely hindered but reversed."

      Actually, what's needed isn't humanitarian aid but a political agreement that splits Gaza free from the isolation and deprivation imposed by Israel (and, for that matter, Egypt's dictatorship).

    • Sara Yael Hirschhorn: Israeli Terrorists, Born in the USA: Did you ever wonder why so many of the illegal settlers in the West Bank, especially the ones most notorious for acts of violence, originally came from the United States? This piece doesn't delve very deeply into why, aside from mentioning the model of Meir Kahane, but I can think of several factors that might predispose Americans to seek out a situation where they can lord it over others with impunity. Israel is one such place. For a current example of such impunity, see Palestinians in Duma are angry that no one has been charged for murders, after 38 days.

      By the way, but I don't see much fundamental difference between these young Americans to go to Israel to join the settler movement, or for that matter to serve in the IDF, and those who go to Syria to fight for ISIS. Both derive from mistaken senses of identity. Both get to mistreat people and feel superior for doing so. Sure, the US government tolerates one case while pushing the other -- even when the other doesn't happen (see Adam Goldman: An American family saved their son from joining the Islamic State. Now he might go to prison.)

    • Nima Shirazi: Slaughtering the Truth and the False Choice of a War With Iran: Anne-Marie Slaughter supports the Iran Deal, for bad reasons, because she's a bad thinker:

      Five years after supporting the invasion of Iraq, Slaughter was annoyed by the "gotcha politics" of being held accountable for her bad judgment, grousing in The Huffington Post that "debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion."

      In 2011, after leaving the State Department, Slaughter lent her full-throated support to the NATO bombing campaign in Libya, extolling herself as a champion of humanitarianism and democracy and then hailing the operation as an unmitigated success. It's been anything but.

      A year later, she was calling for US allies to arm rebel forces against the Assad government in Syria, writing in The New York Times, "Foreign military intervention in Syria offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilizing civil war."

      In 2013, Slaughter openly lamented her support for the invasion of Iraq a decade earlier. "Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found," she wrote in The New Republic. "Had I not believed that, I would never have countenanced any kind of intervention on purely humanitarian terms."

    • Nicola Abé: The Vanishing: Why Are Young Egyptian Activists Disappearing? Back around 1970 I read a book by Egyptian Marxist Anouar Abdel-Malek (1924-2012) called Egypt: Military Society which argued that the military in Egypt was the sometimes hidden/often not backbone power in the nation. I was reminded of this in 2011 when Mubarak was moved out of power in response to mass demonstrations, and shortly later when the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi was deposed by a military coup. Arguably, Morsi overshot his mandate and abused his power, but the same is true of the new dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

      More than four years after the Egyptian revolution, the government headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is cracking down on unwelcome journalists, former revolutionaries and, most of all, Islamists. In the name of fighting terror, laws are enacted that limit freedom of the press and freedom of expression. In some cases, government forces are breaking the country's laws, in what sometimes feels like a retaliation campaign against those who drove out former dictator Hosni Mubarak and believed in democracy.

      Young people are being detained -- on the street, at work and at home. They are interrogated without arrest warrants or access to an attorney, and their family members are kept in the dark about their whereabouts. There were occasional cases like these already under Mubarak, but since Interior Minister Magdy Abdul Ghaffar came into office in March, the police are disappearing scores of people, especially members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the new regime collectively treats as terrorists. Human rights activists believe there are up to around 800 such cases in Egypt today.

    • Eric Schmitt/Ben Hubbard: US Revamping Rebel Force Fighting ISIS in Syria: The American decision to fight both Assad and ISIS (and possibly other anti-Assad and/or anti-ISIS forces) with hired local proxies continues to be plagued by . . . well, everything. It is one measure of the blind faith Americans put in armed force that they are stuck in this schizophrenic nightmare.

      The Pentagon effort to salvage its flailing training program in Turkey and Jordan comes as the world is fixated on the plight of thousands of refugees seeking safety in Europe from strife in the Middle East, including many fleeing violence of the Syrian civil war and oppression in areas under the control of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Officials in Washington and European capitals acknowledge that halting this mass migration requires a comprehensive international effort to bring peace and stability to areas that those refugees are now fleeing.

      The 54 Syrian fighters supplied by the Syrian opposition group Division 30 were the first group of rebels deployed under a $500 million train-and-equip program authorized by Congress last year. It is an overt program run by United States Special Forces, with help from other allied military trainers, and is separate from a parallel covert program run by the CIA.

      After a year of trying, however, the Pentagon is still struggling to find recruits to fight the Islamic State without also battling the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, their original adversary.

    • A Downward Spiral: The Saudi war in Yemen, where the Saudi attack on the local Houthi tribe has been joined by Qatar, UAE, Egypt, and (soon) Sudan, in one of the most naked examples of belligerent aggression the world has seen recently:

      The action certainly has the whiff of revenge. Onlookers have already been questioning what the coalition's campaign, now in its sixth month, hopes to achieve. It is unclear how much support Iran has given to the Houthis, which is one of the main justifications for the coalition's action. Quashing the Shia Houthis is nigh on impossible. Gulf officials and media talk bombastically of preparations to take back Sana'a from them and reinstall Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi as president (the Houthis drove him out of the country in March). But Yemen has long been treacherous territory for foreign invaders, and Gulf armies are relatively inexperienced.

      Since committing ground troops in August, the coalition has taken control of Aden, the southern port city, and is advancing on Taiz. But it is struggling in Maarib, the gateway to Sana'a, where the extra troops, backed by armoured vehicles and missile launchers, are said to be massing. The fighting will only get harder since the Houthis' remaining strongholds are in mountainous redoubts.

      The high toll exacted on civilians may be losing the coalition the support of allied fighters on the ground, a mixture of tribesmen, units of the fractured army and Islamist types including al-Qaeda fighters. "Everyone has now lost someone," says Mr Boucenine. He says civilians make up an increasing proportion of the dead, now approaching 5,000.

    • Amanda Marcotte: Conservatives' Freakout Over Iran Has Absolutely Nothing to Do With Iran: Picture is from the Trump-Cruz rally against the Iran Deal. I saw a bit of Trump talking there and it was the first time he really scared me.

      Obama's plan looks like a done deal, but now the clowns are spilling out, honking their noses and trying to get attention by screaming about how we're all going to die now. As Nick Corasanti of the New York Times reports, a veritable who's-who of unserious but self-important demagogues, led by known foreign policy experts Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, have descended on DC to impart their collective wisdom about diplomacy, which appears to amount to implying that the president's testicles aren't big enough.

      Ted Cruz in particular seems to think that this is his moment to prove to the doubters that he is a big tough guy who gets things done because he's tough and that's what tough guys do. He, along with other House conservatives, is leading a plan to derail the deal by harping on legal technicalities, with Rep. Peter Roskam fully admitting it's a "process argument."

      Now we have Rep. Louie Gohmert threatening to resign over all this. Clearly, Congress will be bereft of this leading luminary who graces this country with conspiracy theories about Jade Helm, how ISIS is being snuck in by Mexican drug dealers, and how God will destroy the country for legalizing same-sex marriage.

      In other words, two of the worst Republican traits of the past 20 years -- pointless obstructionism for the sole purpose of sticking it to the Democrats and mindless demagoguery about the nefarious Middle Eastern threat to convince voters of your manhood -- are joining together to create a massive, misshapen beast that represents everything that's gone wrong with politics in the 21st century.

    • "Jimmy Carter's cancer is God's punishment for his behavior toward Jews," says leading Israeli newspaper: Stuff like this make you think God's some kind of jerk, or maybe I just mean people who presume to speak for Him? Carter's negotiation of the 1979 peace treaty between Sadat and Begin was a great gift of peace for Israel, one that has lasted to this day, even though Begin reneged on the promise of "autonomy" for Palestinians, and three years later squandered the blessing of peace by invading Lebanon.

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Sunday, September 6, 2015

Weekend Roundup

This week's scattered links:

  • Billmon: Once the best political blogger in the country, he gave that up only to return as an excessively prolific tweeter, often spewing out cryptic numbered series of 140-charactertudes that could be collected and polished up into respectable blog posts. Consider this transcribed (and slightly edited) example:

    If GOP was hoping party's enraged wingnuts would calm down, tug forelocks and vote for approved establishment candidates, today's dual Senate defeats on Iran deal, Planned Parenthood will be about as helpful as a couple of snorts of pure crystal meth. Endless frustration of GOP's BS promises of sweeping victories -- "We'll END Obamacare! We'll STOP the baby killers!" -- that can't be kept is a big part of what's whipped the lumpen GOP into such a frenzy of hate and rage. But instead of becoming more skeptical of BS promises of "final victory," lumpen GOP is becoming even more passionate about demanding it. And so a fraud like Trump or a laid back fanatic like Carson can still be seen as the saviors who will make good on the BS promises.

    This reminds me that the most persistent character trait of Republicans ever since Reagan has been their sense of being entitled to lord it over America -- a sense so deeply felt that they are gobsmacked by every shred of evidence to the contrary. And I'm talking less about the elites, who actually do exercise considerable power whenever they can buy or rent it, than the rank and file, the chumps who loyally vote Republican, who think they alone are the country and that everyone who disagrees with them is alien scum. Only exaggerated egos can sustain their sense of entitlement despite perceptions of victimhood. They get that way through flattery, by constantly being reminded by politicians and pundits that they are the true Americans, the source of the nation's greatness and, if only they can regain power, redemption.

    Billmon's also been bothering to post poll results, like:

    Trump favorables:
    All adults: 37/59
    Whites: 48/49
    Hispanics: 15/82
    Blacks: 15/81
    ABC/Post poll
    Ain't Ronny Reagan's America any more, Donald

    "70% of 18-29-year-olds see Trump unfavorably, +12 points since July." His base is white equivalent of Last of the Mohicans

    More evidence that America is slipping away from the self-anointed chosen people.

  • Ed Kilgore: The Ultimate Jerking Knee of Anti-Obamaism: Obama used his executive powers to order the federal government to change the designated name of a large heap of rock in the middle of Alaska from Mt. McKinley to Denali. I was surprised because I thought the deal had been done in 1980 when Denali National Park and Reserve was established, but evidently some dolt at the US Board on Geographic Names didn't get (or honor) the memo. Indeed, the official name in Alaska has long been Denali, as Julia O'Malley explains here. Still, Republicans -- especially those trotting around the country campaigning for president -- blew a gasket. Kilgore sees this as one more example of knee-jerk anti-Obamaism:

    Yet here we have Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee -- so far -- attacking the move and promising (Trump) or demanding (Huck) that it be stopped. There is zero plausible rationale other than hostility to Obama and all his infernal works. If it spreads, that will be incontestable.

    When I first heard about this, I found Ohio politicians like Bob Portman complaining, making me think they should find a mountain in Ohio to name after McKinley (and, while they're at it, a slightly smaller one for Harding)? But I can think of at least two other reasons for their agita. One is that having totally sandbagged Obama's legislative agenda, they've long been primed to cry foul any and every time he uses the routine executive powers of an office that he was popularly elected to twice -- even on something this innocuous. But the other is that Republicans have become obsessed with naming things after themselves, so this seems like backsliding. Their campaign kicked into high gear when they formed a full-time lobby to get things named after Ronald Reagan, figuring that if they could plaster his name everywhere he might achieve exalted Washington-Lincoln status. We've seen fruits of this campaign locally with the VA Hospital named for Robert Dole and the airport named for Eisenhower. (Koch Arena, of course, wasn't a political decision; its naming was bought the old-fashioned way.)

  • Ed Kilgore: Defending the God-Given Liberty of County Clerks to Ignore Duties They Don't Like: Evidently there's a county clerk in Kentucky who's gotten attention by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples -- something recently established as "the law of the land." She regards her refusal to be a matter of religious conscience, but doesn't feel strongly enough to resign her position, which would be the principled thing to do. Rather, she feels entitled to keep her job and use it to discriminate against people she doesn't like, to prevent them from one of their legal rights. She has no legal basis to stand on, although there are a few politicians -- including a "Tea Party dude" named Matt Bevin who's running for governor in Kentucky -- who would like to invent a legal right for at least some people to impose their bigotry on others according to some definition of religious conscience. They key word in that last line is "some" because there are way too many weird tenets in way too many religions to generalize any such "right" -- it doesn't take much imagination to see that the result would be chaos. On the other hand, respect for religious conscience isn't a bad principle. But the way to honor it isn't to turn it into a way to obstruct and frustrate justice. It's to allow the conscientious objector to step back and be replaced by someone amenable to the situation. For the clerk, that means resign and find some new job that doesn't present her with such moral qualms. For a pharmacist, say, who objects to filling prescriptions for birth control, that may even mean finding a new profession. (No business can afford to keep extra staff on hand to compensate for the "religious convictions" of staff that refuse to do their job.) Still, none of these recent examples compel people to do things against their principles like the military draft did, and which military enlistment contracts still do. I strongly believe that any soldier should be able to resign at any moment when faced with an understanding that one's task may be illegal, unethical, and/or immoral. However, even given how much I hate war, I wouldn't go so far as to insist that conscientious objectors be retained in military posts so they can undermine the operation. Rather, I'd hope that enough people would object to bring the whole operation into question.

    Admittedly, resigning a position, possibly even changing a career path, involves an economic cost. If politicians wish to support more people exercising conscientious objection, they could help cushion those costs -- e.g., by providing unemployment compensation for anyone who resigns on principle. But that's not what Bevin, et al., want. All they want is to undermine civil rights by allowing self-righteous cranks to muck up the system. That's why this clerk is their poster child.

  • Norman Pollack: The Trump Phenomenon: This Is Getting Serious: News coverage of US presidential campaigns has been abysmal for a long time, and seems to get worse as a function of how long the campaigns last and how much money is spent on them. One problem this year is having to slog through so much rubbish about Donald Trump's "populism" -- the word they're looking for is "popularity," itself a highly circumscribed property when the only people you're sampling are those who show up for Republican campaign events. I figured the writer most likely to debunk this nonsense is the one who introduced me to the history of the People's Party -- checking back, the book I recall was The Populist Mind (1967), which he edited; he also wrote The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought (1962); The Just Polity: Populism, Law, and Human Welfare (1987), and The Humane Economy: Populism, Capitalism, and Democracy (1990). And he makes a clear distinction between populism and the gruff Trump is peddling. The latter is what he calls "neo-fascism," something he doesn't see Trump pushing so much as pandering:

    Yet Trump is less important than the American people, who, thirsting for strong leadership, pathetic in their wallowing in contrived fear, brought on by decades of gut redbaiting and subliminally-wrought and manipulative anticommunism, place him on a political-ideological pedestal tokening authoritarian submissiveness. America, not Trump himself, is the primary explanation for his standing.

    The political culture is one of uncritical acceptance of war, business, militarism (in truth neo-fascism corrected for eroding Constitutional principles still in place), a long-term historical process in the shaping of a hierarchical capitalist structure, value system, and class relationships. Old Glory is self-immolating, its fabric torn asunder by unreasoning fear (an inflexible societal framework, in essence, counterrevolutionary in scope and substance, because opposed to social change in recognition that property, class, privilege might be questioned if critical judgment were encouraged and allowed to operate freely), and by frustration over obstacles to US unilateral global hegemony. This is not something new, fear being a weapon in the elites' arsenal, permanent, yet trotted out, intensified, when they sense a mass awakening and/or restiveness usually associated with war and its aftermath.

    This neo-fascist impulse is summed up in the mass craving for a strong leader -- the word that expresses it perfectly is Führerprinzip (this is one of those cases where a German word is clearer than anything I could say in English). They can only hope Trump is the Führer of their dreams -- clearly most other Republican candidates aren't, being mere puppets of their billionaire sponsors (most obviously, I'd say, Walker and Rubio). It's safe to say that Trump will ultimately disappoint, if not as Hitler did then at some lower level of catastrophe and/or corruption. Given Trump's track record I'd bet on the latter. Few figures in our time have more consistently pursued fame as a means to fortune. Give him "the most powerful office in the world" and you can be sure he won't rule as the humble servant of the people who voted for him. He will only have his own self-interest to guide him.

    I've never seen anyone mention this, but the obvious model for Trump as a politician is Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul who became prime minister of Italy three times between 1994 and 2011. Forbes pegs Berlusconi's net worth at $7.7 billion, almost double the $4 billion Trump is supposedly worth, although Berlusconi was certainly worth less before he became prime minister. As it happens, there is a new book out: Being Berlusconi: The Rise and Fall From Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga, where we find that along with his great fortune and political triumphs, he also "became bogged down by his hubris, egotism, sexual obsessions, as well as his flagrant disregard for the law."

    His followers say America wants and needs a Great Leader, but the more I look at Trump, the more he looks like a cheap knock off of Silvio Berlusconi.

    Still, otherwise intelligent reporters keep buying at least part of the Trump = populism meme (like Pollack, they're usually people who don't have a very high opinion of most white Americans. E.g., Matt Taibbi: The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia. Taibbi follows up a quick rundown of how oligarchy works followed by a dubious example of Trump breaking rank:

    They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything.

    They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter.

    All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. [ . . . ]

    Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.

    All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.

    And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused on ACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers (has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that's now backing up on them.

    What fakes people out, I think, is that the more ideologically rigorous Republican moneymen (starting with the Kochs) are so wary of Trump, not so much because they think he's not on their side as because he's not (yet) in their pocket. That'll change soon enough when they realize his shtick is just shtick.

    For another piece that takes Trump populism seriously, see David Atkins: Why Donald Trump Will Defeat the Koch Brothers for the Soul of the GOP:

    In order to understand how Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican field despite openly promoting tax hikes on wealthy hedge fund managers, hinting support for universal healthcare and other wildly iconoclastic positions hostile to decades of Republican dogma, it's important to note the that the Republican Party was teetering on the edge of a dramatic change no matter whether Trump had entered the race or not. [ . . . ]

    As for Wall Street? Most Republican voters can't stand them. The majority of the Republican base sees the financial sector as crony capitalist, corrupt liberal New Yorkers who got a bailout. Most GOP voters won't shed a tear if Trump raises taxes on the hedge fund crowd.

    Donald Trump reassures these voters that the "wrong kind of people" won't be getting any freebies on his watch. That's all they really care about -- so if Trump supports universal healthcare it's simply not that big a deal.

    And this ultimately is what the real GOP realignment is going to look like: less racially diverse corporatism, and more socialism for white people. It stands to reason. Blue-collar white GOP voters aren't about to forget decades of fear-based propaganda, and their economic position remains precarious enough that they still need the welfare state help.

    The first point to remember is that no politician can, and many don't even want to, deliver on all campaign promises. Second, it's especially far fetched to think that Trump will, not least because there's scant evidence he really believes in any of this -- especially the "socialism for white people" planks Atkins touts. If/when he gets elected, he'll have to work with a Republican party that has been leaning the other way hard for years -- especially on taxes and benefits, but also on things like trade and capital flows. He could try to push some things through with Democratic support, but that runs the risk of losing not the base so much as the media machine that has kept the GOP so united of late. If I had to guess, I'd expect him to demagogue anti-immigrant positions -- that, after all, is his trademark issue -- but he'll accommodate all the usual interest groups, notably the banks, oil, and the military, and I doubt he'll do anything to undermine the predatory nature of the health care industry (though he'll preserve some form of rebranded, "fixed" Obamacare). But he won't do anything to slow down much less reverse the increasing inequality that is undoing the white middle class. He may get a short term blip because a lot of voters are gullible, but he can't build a realignment on delivering nothing but hot air.

    Trump's slogan is to Make America Great Again, but he can't deliver on that because nothing he knows how to do will work. He is popular now because his jingoism resonates with a certain type of mainstream Republican, but you shouldn't confuse popularity with populism. The latter is a set of principled beliefs. The former is fleeting, most of all for frauds and crooks, and every experience we've had suggests that's all he is.

    PS: It will be interesting to see whether Trump support manages to break off some of the odder chinks in the conservative worldview. The most likely candidates are schemes like the flat tax and the various privatization schemes for Social Security/Medicare -- programs that are very popular among the GOP base but under attack from the libertarian-oriented (i.e., Koch-financed) think tanks. Right now the groups that seem to be most upset by Trump are Koch fronts: having entered this election cycle planning on spending $900 million to finally take control of the whole nation, they've suddenly found themselves on the defensive, in a fight over the mindset of the Republican Party. And they're liable to find that a lot of their pet issues are deeply unpopular even among the party faithful: for instance, their rabid anti-wind push couldn't even pass the neanderthal Kansas legislature, and the exemption that businessmen get from state income tax was only saved by Brownback's unwillingness to compromise on the point.

    There's probably a formal model for this somewhere, but just thinking off the top of my head, let me try to sketch one out. In any political party, there are some stances that are widely held by the masses, and multiple others that are held by the elites. The elites control the media, the think tanks, and in normal times the discussion -- a mix of their own concerns plus a little red meat to keep the masses riled up. Until Trump came along, the race was between a bunch of whores sucking up to the party's top money men, the cream of the elites. Any of those guys would have been acceptable to the masses, but none of them really satisfied their craving for a strong charismatic leader, a Führer. Trump changed all that, mostly by appealing directly to the masses (bypassing the elites) by seizing on a mass hot-button issue, immigration. (The elites are generally pro-immigration, correctly seeing it as good for business and bad for labor, although they often bite their tongue so as not to stir up the shit storm Trump raised.)

    My sense of the Republican masses is: people who basically feel economically secure (unless they own small business); are cynical about government but less so about business; regard wealth and self-sufficiency as signs of virtue, and poverty as a personal failing; regard hierarchies as normal, and tend to defer to strong male figures; strongly identify with like groups, especially the nation. You can probably tune this further. The GOP has been very effective at cultivating single-issue voters, like gun nuts (I added "self-sufficiency" thinking of them), anti-abortion zealots (male-dominated hierarchies has a lot to do with this), and the military (ditto). I could add something about people who aspire to be rich and vote their dreams, but such people mostly fall into hierarchies, and that's sort of a self-serving cliché -- besides, most of the mass base know they'll never get rich (many are already on Social Security), they're just satisfied with their lot. Obviously, most are white and native-born over at least a couple generations -- but there are exceptions, including such over-compensating strivers as Rubio, Cruz, Jindal, Santorum (and I suppose I should add Carson). I didn't include religion in part because I'm not convinced that Republicans have any edge there (let alone monopoly), although they may be more clannish, dogmatic, and bigoted about their religion.

    I also didn't include prejudice or stupidity in this list, mostly because I think they are effects of the way Republican elites manipulate their mass base rather than defining factors of membership. The unavoidable fact is that the mass base is incredibly misinformed about just about everything -- something easy to blame on the right-wing media and their knack for spinning facts and spicing them up with "dog whistle" nuance, something the mass base doesn't just buy into but gobbles up with disturbing relish. Still, this ignorance is a weak spot for the mass base, one that's likely to fracture whenever contrary facts break through -- which happens regularly as Republican programs inevitably blow up.

  • Iran Deal links:

    • Celestine Bohlen: Europe Doesn't Share US Concerns on Iran Deal:

      Given the sound, fury and millions of dollars swirling around the debate in Washington over the Iranian nuclear deal, the silence in Europe is striking. It's particularly noticeable in Britain, France and Germany, which were among the seven countries that signed the deal on July 14.

      Here in France, which took the toughest stance during the last years of negotiation, the matter is settled, according to Camille Grand, director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris and an expert on nuclear nonproliferation.

      "In Europe, you don't have a constituency against the deal," he said. "In France, I can't think of a single politician or member of the expert community who has spoken against it, including some of us who were critical during the negotiations."

      Mr. Grand said the final agreement was better than he had expected. "I was surprised by the depth and the quality of the deal," he said. "The hawks are satisfied, and the doves don't have an argument."

    • Grace Cason/Jim Lobe: Committee for the Liberation of Iraq Members on Iran Deal: As you've probably noticed by now, most of the people who brought you the Iraq War are opposed to Obama's Iran Deal. This article provides an exhaustive rundown:

      Virtually all of the political appointees who held foreign-policy posts under George W. Bush -- from Elliott Abrams to Dov Zakheim, not to mention such leading lights as Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Edelman, and "Scooter" Libby -- have all assailed the agreement as a sell-out and/or appeasement with varying degrees of vehemence, if not vituperation.

      The piece especially covers the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), which was set up in November 2002 to sell the war -- "a classic letterhead organization (LHO), a collection of individuals with widely varying degrees of knowledge about Iraq gathered together by the Bush White House, PNAC, and Chalabi." Of that group, Chalabi seems to be the only one to favor the deal. Many others are quoted, the most flamboyant being Bernard Lewis, who said that "for Iran's leadership, mutually assured destruction is 'not a deterrent, it's an inducement.'" They did find four CLI members who supported the deal, and several others, ranging from James P. Hoffa to Donald Rumsfeld, who have yet to weigh in.

    • Fred Kaplan: How the Iran Deal Will Pass -- and Why It Should: This runs through a lot of opposition arguments and knocks them down. Then ponders the politics, which is subject to a different form of reasoning:

      The biggest source of uncertainty, among some vote counters, is that the whole exercise is a bit theatrical. Because Obama has said he would veto a rejection, all the Republicans and a few Democrats feel that they have leave to succumb to political pressures. They can vote "no," and satisfy their party whips or constituents, without shouldering any responsibility for their actions.

      The irony and danger of this is that, the safer Obama's margins seem, the more Democrats might defect, believing that the deal will pass without their support. But if enough Democrats act on that calculation, the outcome could shift -- maybe enough to override a veto, even though none of the swing voters has that intention.

      This can happen in a political system, such as ours today, that encourages legislators to take their jobs less than seriously.

    • Paul R Pillar: The Iran Issue and the Exploitation of Ignorance: Most of this is on public polling, which confirms here, as it has on many other occasions, that most Americans are ignorant and/or stupid. He then moves on to cases where opponents have sought to exploit this ignorance by spinning minor details into supposed problems -- the "24 day" issue is an example -- but he also points out that supporters can use the issue as an opportunity for educating the public (e.g., Congressman Jerrold Nadler Statement on the P5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

    • Stephen M Walt: The Myth of a Better Deal:

      The most obvious example of magical thinking in contemporary policy discourse, of course, is the myth of a "better deal" with Iran. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, opponents of the JCPOA keep insisting additional sanctions, more threats to use force, another round of Stuxnet, or if necessary, dropping a few bombs, would have convinced Iran to run up the white flag and give the United States everything it ever demanded for the past 15 years. The latest example of such dubious reasoning is the New York Times's David Brooks, who thinks an agreement where Iran makes most of the concessions is a Vietnam-style defeat for the United States and imagines that tougher US negotiators (or maybe war) would have produced a clear and decisive victory.

      Never mind that while the United States ramped up sanctions, Iran went from zero centrifuges to 19,000. Never mind that there was no international support for harsher sanctions and that unilateral US sanctions wouldn't increase the pressure in any meaningful way. Never mind that attacking Iran with military force would not end its nuclear program and only increase Iran's interest in having an actual weapon. Never mind that the deal blocks every path to a bomb for at least a decade. And never mind that the myth of a "better deal" ignores Diplomacy 101: To get any sort of lasting agreement, it has to provide something for all of the parties.

      The next paragraph has another good line but I wanted to stop on the "Diplomacy 101" point. Deals shouldn't turn into contests of power, in part because they're never really zero-sum games. When both sides are equal in power, their deals can be expected to find mutual benefits that exceed either party's losses. But when power is inequal, when one side has to make concessions to the other, it becomes essential that the more powerful side limit those concessions to what will be viewed as just. Failure to do so breeds resentment, both against the unjust treaty and the powerlessness it demonstrates. The classic example, of course, was Versailles, where the reparations Germany was forced to pay fueled a revolt that led to an even deadlier war. I'd worry more that the deal was stacked too much against Iran than that the US negotiators could have held out for something more punitive. The US did not enter these negotiations with a much of a reputation for justice, at least in Iranian eyes, and reneging on the deal (as the Republicans propose) will only sully America's reputation further.

      Needless to say, no nation has a worse reputation for turning negotiations into contests of power than Israel (the main reason the power-crazed neocons so love and envy it).

    • Gareth Porter: Barak's tales of Israel's near war with Iran conceal with real story: A tale of frantic sabre-rattling, designed more for show than as a real military action (kind of like Nixon's "Madman" feint).

      The latest episode in the seemingly endless story of Israel's threat of war followed the broadcast in Israel of interviews by Barak for a new biography. The New York Times' Jodi Rudoren reported that, in those interviews, Barak "revealed new details to his biographers about how close Israel came to striking Iran." Barak "said that he and Mr Netanyahu were ready to attack Iran each year," but claimed that something always went wrong. Barak referred to three distinct episodes from 2010 through 2012 in which the he and Netanyahu were supposedly manoeuvering to bring about an air attack on Iran's nuclear programme.

      The bulk of the article show how Obama used Israel's threats to gain UN agreement on harsher sanctions against Iran.

    • Trita Parsi/Reza Marashi: Obama's Real Achievement With the Iran Deal:

      In his speech at American University on August 5, Obama made clear that the Iran nuclear deal is a product of him leading America away from the damaging over-militarization of America's foreign and national security policies following the September 11th attacks. "When I ran for President eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq, I said that America didn't just have to end that war -- we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place," Obama said. "It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy."

      But a single foreign-policy achievement, however historic and momentous, a mindset does not change. Particularly if the debate surrounding the deal remains deeply rooted in the old, militaristic mindset. Herein lies the Obama administration's own shortcomings in the debate. While the president made clear his aim to shift America's security mindset, most of the arguments employed to convince lawmakers to support to deal are rooted in the mindset that led America into Iraq, not in the mindset that enabled the diplomatic victory with Iran.

      The Iraq war mindset is one where strength above all else produces security. An attitude that, in the words of Obama, "equates security with a perpetual war footing." This mindset, in turn, produces a fear of not projecting strength; of looking weak. As the president pointed out in his speech, "Those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak -- even appeasers of a malevolent adversary."

      This desire to look strong, borne out of this mindset, continues to define the debate over the Iran deal. It has led some supporters of the deal to highlight the military justifications behind their support, even though this defeats the larger purpose of the deal itself: To shift the paradigm from militarism to diplomacy.

      But Obama's line about wanting to change the way we think about war had turned into a joke long ago by the man himself. Whatever doubts he may have had before, they evaporated pretty quickly once his minions started calling him "commander in chief," as he started racking up his own personal body count -- as I recall, the first person he directly, personally ordered assassinated was a Somali pirate, and the list has grown much longer since then. Obama didn't change the way we think about war; war changed the way we think about Obama (not, of course, that the Republicans can be accused of thinking here).

      Even Obama's great diplomatic breakthrough has all the marks of a military campaign, deftly executed to line up a broad front of allies whose combined leverage was so great that Iran saw no alternative but to surrender its Ayatollahs' dreams of nuclear apocalypse. Admittedly, Obama did (at least for the moment) effect a change within American military strategy, preferring a clean surrender signed by Iran's leaders, who remain in place to enforce it, to the usual American military clusterfuck -- you know, invade a country, kill people indiscriminately, destroy the infrastructure to commit mass mayhem, buy off the most corruptible elements and turn them into the face of occupation, then spend eternity putting down guerrilla insurrections. Nonetheless, Obama reserved the latter option in case the deal doesn't work out. You'd think his opponents would at least take heart in that. But then you'd also think that anyone who grasped the alleged problem would recognize that an agreement with positive incentives for compliance will be much more effective than disagreement with random punishments and unpredictable reprisals, which is all that Netanyahu, Lieberman (take your pick), and their ilk have to offer.

      As the debate over the Iran deal concludes and the next policy crisis comes to the fore, both Obama's friends and foes would be wise to take his advice: "Resist the conventional wisdom and the drumbeat of war. Worry less about being labeled weak; worry more about getting it right."

      Indeed, if the Iran nuclear deal solely prevents an Iranian bomb but fails to shift the security paradigm in America towards peace building through diplomacy rather than the militarism of perpetual warfare, then truly a historic opportunity will have been lost.

      Changing the way we think about war will take some leadership who's already changed the way they think, but when it happens we'll look back on this debate and wonder how both sides could have been so drunk on force.

    • Noam Chomsky: On the Iran Deal: I might say he's a little long-winded, but he makes so many solid points the piece comes off as a breath of fresh air. For instance:

      Turning to the next obvious question, what in fact is the Iranian threat? Why, for example, are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that country? Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military. Years ago, US intelligence informed Congress that Iran has very low military expenditures by the standards of the region and that its strategic doctrines are defensive -- designed, that is, to deter aggression. The US intelligence community has also reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual nuclear weapons program and that "Iran's nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."

      The authoritative SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the US, as usual, way in the lead in military expenditures. China comes in second with about one-third of US expenditures. Far below are Russia and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western European state. Iran is scarcely mentioned. Full details are provided in an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which finds "a conclusive case that the Arab Gulf states have . . . an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both military spending and access to modern arms."

      Iran's military spending, for instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia's and far below even the spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Altogether, the Gulf Cooperation Council states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance that goes back decades.

      Next up is the "existential threat" that Iran is said to present to nuclear-armed Israel. And of course Chomsky brings up the 1953 coup, American arms sales to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, etc. I suspect he goes a little too far in belittling Iran's efforts to recruit allies around the Middle East -- their interventionism pales in comparison to what the US and even Saudi Arabia has done, but that doesn't make it constructive. Also, their human rights record, including religious intolerance (particularly against the Baha'i) leaves a lot to be desired -- although, again, maybe not in comparison to our great ally, Saudi Arabia.

  • Also noted:

    • Jason Diltz: Four US Troops Among Six Injured in Sinai IED Blasts: I can't say I was aware of any US troops anywhere in Egypt, but here you go, in harm's way. Evidently they are part of an observer group demanded by Israel to monitor Egyptian forces in Sinai, but Egyptian forces there are mostly fighting other Egyptians, some allegedly affiliated with ISIS. Rather than admitting that their presence has become a complicating factor, doing neither Egypt nor Israel any good, the sensible thing would be to move those troops out, lest they become an excuse for sending more in. But it seems like that's just what the military wants to do: to send more firepower in and escalate the conflict.

    • Jason Diltz: 45 UAE Troops, 10 Saudis, and 5 Bahrainis Killed in Yemen War: Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen has mostly involved killing Yemenis from the air, but as you can see here the Saudis and their Gulf allies actually have "boots on the ground," as 60 deaths in a two-day span clearly shows. Not clear whether the US is actively or merely passively supporting the Saudi effort, but as the Saudis' main arms supplier this is effectively yet another American proxy war effort.

    • DR Tucker: Everything in Moderation: Part II: Starts with a quote from a Rachel Maddow monologue back in 2010, but relevant to much of the above:

      At the top of the show today, we talked about the myth of bipartisanship, the futility of Democrats, including the president, wasting time trying to persuade Republicans to go along with them on policies that are good for the country. [ . . . ]

      None of this is a secret, which is the most important thing to understand about it. Republicans right now do not care about policy. By which I mean, they will not vote for things that even they admit are good policies . . .

      And they are unembarrassed about this fact. They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what's-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive.

      It wastes a lot of time. It won't work. And ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.

      • The bulk of the piece has to do with climate change, but it could just as well be the Iran Deal or pretty much anything else. Republicans can't imagine a better outcome to the "manufactured crisis" than the one Obama handed them, but they've negotiated a deal which lets them sputter on about the deal, secure that nothing they do will undermine the deal, and confident that no one will remember their pig-headedness come next election.

      This feeling Republicans have that nothing can stick to them was hugely reinforced when they took control of Congress in 2010, only four years after Iraq and Katrina wiped them out in 2006, only two years after they caused the largest recession since the 1930s. This sense that no matter what they do they'll never have to pay for it is about the only thing that explains their intransigence on global warming and health care.

      By the way, Tucker is also saying very laudatory things about Barack Obama's Arctic Blast speech. I haven't read or seen the speech, so will take his word (with the usual grain of salt). However, I have been saying all along that even if Obama can't legislate solutions he should be using his pulpit to speak about problems, so this seems to be a step in the right direction. I just wish his convictions on war/peace and economic equality were more laudable.

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