Weekend Roundup [30 - 39]Sunday, June 28, 2020
Weekend Roundup
Late-breaking tweet from @realDonaldTrump: "Nobody wants a Low IQ
person in charge of our Country," trying to deflect from the obvious
by adding that "Sleepy Joe is definitely a Low IQ person!" Sure, he's
never struck me as especially bright, but it's rather clever that
the Democrats are nominating someone Trump cannot attack without the
slanders reflecting back on him.
Trump's approval rate at 538 is down to 40.6%, with 56.1% disapprove.
That's the biggest split I can recall.
Onion headline:
Officials warn defunding police could lead to spike in crime from
ex-officers with no outlet for violence. When I mentioned this to
my wife, she already had examples to cite. Article cites "L.A. police
chief Michel Moore" as saying:
The truth is that there are violent people in our society, and we need
a police department so they have somewhere to go during the day to
channel their rage. If these cuts are allowed to continue, we could
be looking at a very real future where someone with a history of
domestic abuse is able to terrorize their spouse with impunity
instead of being occupied testing out new tactical military equipment
or pepper-spraying some random teens. The fact that these dangerous
attackers and killers are being gainfully employed by the LAPD is
the only thing standing between us and complete chaos.
By the way, there is a
new batch of questions
and answers, not all on music. Ask more,
here.
Some scattered links this week:
Zeeshan Aleem:
Hannah Allam:
Vehicle attacks rise as extremists target protesters. Isaac J Bailey:
We don't need to cancel George Washington. But we should be honest about
who he was. I agree with that. Washington, and for that matter Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe are not just important figures
in American history, but can also still be inspiring. In some respects, I
could argue the same for Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, to pick two
highly problematic characters who have received some critical attention
recently. Nor am I much bothered by statues of Christopher Columbus,
although I can't think of any redeeming qualities he had. Again, the
history should be made clear, but I'm not sure the icons matter much.
The Confederates are one exception I'll grant: the sooner we get rid
of these tokens of white supremacy, the better. And I hope some day the
deliberately orchestrated plot to names things after Ronald Reagan gets
unrolled. Nothing good can be linked back to his legacy. And if you
don't want to melt all that "art" down, perhaps store it in a musty
museum somewhere -- as long as it's treated with the solemnity of
Auschwitz. By the way, I'm totally cool with
John Wayne airport could get a new name that doesn't celebrate a
homophobic white supremacist.
Riley Beggin:
Steve Benen:
How the GOP gave up on governing in order to keep winning elections:
Excerpt from Benen's new book, The Impostors: How Republicans Quit
Governing and Seized American Politics. More on this "no governing"
meme below. Charles M Blow:
Can we call Trump a killer? Argues for "his culpability in the
neglectful handling of the coronavirus." That's a distinction I don't
find terribly interesting, but there are other cases where the evidence
is undeniable, like the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani,
which Trump has bragged about. You might object that all US presidents
order killings abroad, but that's no excuse let alone comfort. Obama
got his first taste of blood when he ordered the killing of a Somali
pirate, and that just opened the floodgates, leading to hundreds of
drone killings and the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, as well
as the Air Force's casual slaughter of bystanders. You might object
that the sheer numbers lost to Trump's delayed Covid-19 reaction and
premature re-opening far exceed the drone kill count (perhaps not the
military offensives), and besides here we're talking dead Americans,
but negligence is always messy to prove. On the other hand, where has
Trump not been negligent and careless? The Mexico border and Puerto
Rico are two cases that leap to mind, and I expect you can find bodies
there, too. On the other hand, calling him Killer is too likely to be
taken as flattery. I'll wait for the ICC indictments. Max Blumenthal:
Jim Bovard:
The Korean War atrocities no one wants to talk about. Technically,
the Korea War is America's longest running war -- 70 years this week --
because the US never had the decency to acknowledge that it was pointless
and over. But that's hardly the only thing the US remains in denial over.
More on Korea:
Khang Vu:
Trump is wrecking South Korea's relationship with North Korea. Max Balhorn:
How South Korea's pro-democracy movement fought to ban "murderous tear
gas". Doug Bandow:
We should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Korean War by leaving:
"The US doesn't need to protect the south any more." More pointedly, the
US is keeping South Korea from negotiating its own separate peace -- as
such, the US presence is more threatening than reassuring. Dan DePetris:
Don't tie peace on the Korean Peninsula to denuclearization in the
North. We have managed to live with "hostile" powers possessing
nuclear weapons since 1950, and none have used those bombs against
us (unlike what the US did to Japan in 1945, when the US still had
a monopoly on such terror). The only thing that makes North Korea
different is that we've insisted on not formally ending the war
which de facto ended in 1953. The only way to lessen the threat is
to reduce the degree of hostility, which at present mostly takes
the form of crippling economic sanctions against the North, and
to open up formal lines of communication and trade. Recognizing
that North Korea has nuclear weapons and the rocketry to deliver
them is at this point common sense. Morever, it's clear that the
only reason they bothered to develop such useless weapons is to
force the US to recognize that they're too dangerous not to treat
with the basic respect that normal nations routinely show each
other. For more, see the Reckford article below, which also cites
the failure of sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela to produce
any results imagined as favorable to the US. Jessica Lee:
The Korean War started the trend of endless wars for America. How
do we change course?
The United States is not equipped to solve every global problem. No
nation is. In the case of the Korean War, our failure to close that
chapter of history has allowed mistrust to fester for so long that
détente seems impossible, despite the fact that lowering tensions
would protect U.S. interests in the region better than the status quo.
Owen Miller:
Uncovering the hidden history of the Korean War. Kap Seol:
The US didn't bring freedom to South Korea -- its people did. Seong-ho Sheen:
To have any chance at ending the Korea War, America must become more
flexible. Louie Reckford:
Why Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaigns are a maximum failure. John Cassidy:
Donald Trump's big problem with senior voters. Kyle Cheney/Leah Nylen:
Prosecutor says he was pressured to cut Roger Stone 'a break' because
of his ties to Trump. Sarah Churchwell:
American Fascism: It has happened here.
American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism,
but that doesn't mean they're not fascist, it means they're not European
and it's not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes
of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an
authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic
instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents,
the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the
will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges
of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for
modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are
doing great.
Max Cohen:
Bernie's student army learns to live with Biden. Given time (and
Trump), stories like this were bound to appear. Aaron Ross Coleman:
Protesters win a new investigation into Elijah McClain's death. Nancy Cook/Adam Cancryn:
Trump team weights a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism.
Does he know anything about management other than "you're fired"? Ranjani Chakraborty:
What "defund the police" really means. Fabiola Cineas:
These protests feel different because they're shifting public opinion:
Interiew with Megan Ming Francis.
As she points out in her book, Civil Rights and the Making of the
Modern American State, the NAACP from 1909 to 1923 mobilized
state-building by first shifting public opinion, then creating change
within political and legal structures. And according to polls, opinion
is already shifting: In 2015, just 51 percent of Americans believed
racism is a big problem in the US; now 76 percent of Americans do.
The menacing symbolism of the noose: "Noose incidents are uncoincidentally
on the rise as protesters continue to demand justice for Black lives." Eli Clifton:
The hedge fund man behind pro-Trump media's new war on China.
Huayi Zhang, associated with Robert Mercer. Jason Ditz:
Tiffanie Drayton:
Global protests reveal that white supremacy is a problem everywhere.
John Feffer:
What will it take to defeat Trumpism? "Learning lessons from the end
of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Saddam's Iraq" -- a mixed bag of
examples, all three thoroughly defeated militarily (Iraq least decisively),
then allowed to reconstitute themselves (the Confederacy most along its
original, white supremacist lines). It's much easier for a foreign power
to defeat a malevolent faction (slaveholders, Nazis, Baathists) than it
is to keep those ideas from re-emerging in the defeated populace. Still,
the relative success in de-Nazifying Germany has more to do with ethnic
unity (vs. the black-white divide in the South, and the Sunni-Shiite-Kurd
divide in Iraq), and the annihilated value of Nazism for the resurgence
of German capitalism. (A big part of the reason Germany recovered so well
was the imposition of worker participation in corporate boards, which has
mostly kept German corporations from turning into predatory profit-scrapers
like their American and British counterparts.) Still, I wonder whether
Feffer isn't making too much out of Trumpism. Given the incoherence of
its leader and the ineptness of its followers, it's likely after defeat
to break down into its constituent parts and crawl back into the woodwork,
festering, waiting for its next charismatic revival.
Feffer notes that "in West Germany in 1947, 55% of those living under
the US occupation believed that 'National Socialism was a good idea badly
carried out.'" The occupation of Germany at that time was still pretty
harsh, and poverty was widespread, but after the Bundesrepublic gained
independence in 1949, and the economy boomed with the European Coal and
Steel Community in 1952, Nazi sympathies faded away. The only sure way
to get rid of Trumpism is to fix the problems it arose to fight, or show
that those problems aren't real. Russell Arben Fox:
The coronavirus in Kansas: The first 100 days. Covid-19 cases have
continued to rise, with Sedgwick County topping 1,000 cases. For more,
see John Handy/Andy Tsubass Field:
Kansas communities see dramatic spikes in coronavirus cases. Andrew Freedman/Matthew Cappucci:
Historic Saharan dust event fouls air along Gulf Coast as next blast
enters Caribbean. Susan B Glasser:
Trump retreats to his Hannity bunker: "Beaten by the pandemic and
down in the polls, a President and his propagandist create an alternate
reality." Amy Goldstein/Emily Guskin:
Almost one-third of black Americans know someone who has died of covid-19,
survey shows: Compare to 9% of white Americans. Alex Henderson:
Respected marketing guru explains how Trump could 'monetize' a loss to
Biden in November -- and make millions of dollars from his far-right
MAGA base: Donny Deutsch. Eoin Higgins:
Why a socialized system like Medicare for All beats for-profit healthcare
in one chart of covid-19 infection rates. Gil Hochberg:
An anti-colonialist Zionist? Remembering Albert Memmi: "The great
prophet of anti-colonialism embraces Zionism without ever questioning
its colonial implications." Memmi was born in Tunisia, was Jewish,
wrote The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and many other
books, was "asked to leave" when Tunisia became independent, lived
in France until dying at age 99. Also on Memmi:
Jack Holmes:
There is no plan. There is no second-term agenda. Takeaway
from a Hannity interview, but just because Trump couldn't think of
an agenda doesn't mean there won't be one. Trump has long delegated
odious tasks like thinking and doing to the little people (mostly,
it seems, Pence and Kushner).
The fact is that the Republican Party hasn't been much interested
in governing the country for some time. They want to deregulate
industries whose executives pay the campaign bills, and cut taxes
on the donor class, and knuckle immigrants, but the idea of drawing
up a comprehensive set of policies to make life better for the broader
American public has long been anathema. (The Democrats often govern
incompetently, and with too much regard for the preferences of powerful
interests over those of working people, but they do seek to govern the
country.) Trump is merely the most garish expression of this, turning
the nation's highest governing office into a rolling circus act while
shredding the institutions of democracy, and while the termites of the
state go to work behind the scenes.
This thing about the Republicans not being interested in governing
has been making the rounds lately, and rather misses the point. The
Republicans are obsessed with grabbing and monopolizing power, but
they actually have a very narrow definition of governing. Their aim
is to use power to accumulate more power, so they mostly see the
government as a vast patronage machine that can be used to reward
their supporters and punish their enemies, and that's about it. The
closest thing any Republican had to a vision was Tom DeLay's K Street
Project, where they demanded that lobbyists support their culture war
in order to qualify for graft favors. But fear seems to drive them
even more than greed: by seizing power, they deny it to their mortal
enemies, the Democrats, who if given the opening would surely also
use their power to reward their supporters and punish their enemies.
That view isn't fair because Democrats habitually try to rule for the
benefit of everyone, whereas Republicans are much more discriminating
in who they help and hurt. Where Republicans most obviously fail is
in trying to govern in a crisis. They don't plan, they don't prepare,
their graft becomes visible, and quite often they simply don't care.
Trump is the worst ever in this regard, but you have to go back
generations to find competent Republican administrators. A big part
of this can be traced back to how the Republican campaign machinery
is designed expressly to do nothing but attack Democrats. Trump has
no agenda for a second term because he doesn't even comprehend what
he's been doing in his first term -- except, that is, relentlessly
attacking his numerous enemies. That's all he's got to campaign on.
Sean Illing:
"It's ideologue meets grifter": How Bill Barr made Trumpism possible.
Interview with David Rohde, author of a
New Yorker profile on Barr. Christopher Ingraham:
New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have
intensified the severity of the pandemic. Umair Irfan:
Why it's so damn hot in the Arctic right now. Related:
Alex Isenstadt:
Roge Karma:
4 ideas to replace traditional police officers. Ezra Klein:
Trump's reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality. Draws
a lot on Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney's chief campaign strategist in
2012 and author of It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party
Became Donald Trump, talking a lot about the incompetency and
incoherence of Trump's government. One thing Stevens says: "To me,
the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of communism in the
Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and
what it said it was was just so great."
In praise of polarization: "How identity politics changed the
Democratic Party -- for the better." Without the guiding hand of
identity there wouldn't be polarization, a subject that Klein flogged
to death in his book, Why We're Polarized. Carolyn Kormann:
A disastrous summer in the arctic. Paul Krugman:
Nicole Lafond:
Barr joins Trump effort to will antifa into existence with new 'anti-gov
extremists' task force. Eric Levitz:
The 'V-shaped' recovery has died of coronavirus. Wasn't going to
happen anyway, because the panic and lockdown changed buying habits
in ways that simply re-opening wouldn't (and couldn't) undo. Perhaps
at some point, if the stimulus remains robust and is widely distributed
people will feel a desire to spend some of their savings on big-ticket
items, but that's a while off. More likely, the Republicans will kill
off stimulus (except for the stock market) and we'll get a double-dip
recession instead. (Was tempted to say W-shaped, but still not sure of
the eventual upstroke.) Ryan Lizza/Laura Barron-Lopez/Holly Otterbein:
Why Biden is rejecting Black Lives Matter's boldest proposals:
"Activists want to defund the police. Biden won't even legalize pot."
This stuff doesn't bother me, at least not like his Venezuela tweet
did. He'll drag his feet, but he's at least somewhat open to reason.
And given the gauntlet that any sort of reform has to run, he'll
likely be there at the end, not leading but also not obstructing,
and that's probably where his broadest supporters want him. German Lopez:
Robert Mackey:
Josh Marshall:
Princeton drops Woodrow Wilson from name of public policy school.
Wilson was president of Princeton before moving into politics, so this
particular naming was an obvious choice at the time, and I doubt it's
being given up lightly. Wilson did several notably progressive things
as president. He also started two wars with Mexico, engaged in a lot
of "gunboat diplomacy" in the Caribbean, led the US into WWI, and ran
a very aggressive campaign against war dissenters -- notably jailing
presidential candidate Eugene Debs. He represented the US personally
in the talks leading to the Treaty of Versailles, making a promise
that David Fromkin turned on its head for his essential book on the
post-WWI Middle East: A Peace to End All Peace. Well into the
Cold War era, he was revered by Democrats for his internationalism,
and his opponents' isolationism is still a dirty epithet. Many of
these things should be giving us doubts about his legacy, but the
one that's finally catching up with him is explained by Dylan
Matthews in his 2015 article:
Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist -- even by the standards of his
time, which was written after Princeton students started objecting
to his name heading Princeton's School of Public and International
Affairs. Madeline Marshall:
Why America's police look like soldiers: "Why are the police bringing
military assault rifles to protests?" Dylan Matthews:
How police unions became so powerful -- and how they can be tamed. Media Matters: This could be an ongoing series, but for
now just a taste of how Fox et al. are handling the debacle:
Ian Millhiser:
Nicola Narea:
Ella Nilsen:
Progressive Black candidates swept key races on Tuesday. Results
don't look quite that weeping, although
Middle school principal Jamaal Bowman unseats Eliot Engel in New York
was a big story (and not close, despite Engel endorsements from NY Dem
leaders, not to mention AIPAC). Anna North:
Ricardo Nulla:
The coronavirus surge that Texas could have seen coming. Chad Painter:
1960s coverage of Stonewall shows that mainstream press has always
struggled to cover protests: "New Yorkers reading the local,
mainstream papers wouldn't have known that a new civil rights
movement was unfolding." William J Perry/Tom Z Collins:
Who can we trust with the nuclear button? No one. Cameron Peters:
Trump is holding a rally in one of the country's worst Covid-19 hot
spots: Next stop (Tuesday, June 23): Phoenix, Arizona, where
"cases in the state have increased by 174 percent over the past
three weeks, and the Arizona Health Department reported a record-high
3,600 new cases on Tuesday alone." Craig Pittman:
Can Trump beat the Florida convention curse? I didn't know there
was one -- Nixon won after Miami Beach conventions in 1968 and 1972;
the Democrats also did Miami Beach in 1972, McGovern losing to Nixon;
and Romney lost after being nominated in Tampa in 2012 -- but Trump
is bound to bring out the worst in the state. Andrew Prokop:
John Quiggin:
Modern monetary theory: Neither modern, nor monetary, nor (mainly)
theoretical?: Review of the MMT-based Macroeconomics
textbook by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts. Anita Rao/Pat Dillon/Kim Kelly/Zak Bennett:
Is America a democracy? If so, why does it deny millions the vote?
A series of articles in the Guardian on "the fight to vote":
Robert Reich:
Donald Trump's re-election playbook: 25 ways he'll lie, cheat and
abuse his power: "From now until November, opponents of the most
lawless president in history face a fight for democracy itself."
Things like postponing the election remain to be seen, and would
be hard to pull off. "Coddle dictators" sticks in my craw. Ever
since WWII, US foreign policy has supported dictators who were
deemed good for business, while opposing ones (and, by the way,
democracies) who weren't (e.g., Iran, Guatemala, Chile). The only
way Trump deviates from this is that he needs "good for business"
to be good for him personally. Whether the US cherishes or ignores
human rights depends strictly on which side of the good/bad ledger
a country falls. David Roberts:
Corey Robin:
Forget about it. The author continues to be shocked that others
can still be shocked by the latest Trumpian outrages, given how many
comparable examples even a cursory remembrance of history offers up.
I've been reading and writing about conservatism since the summer of
2000, when I interviewed William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, and
Norman Podhoretz for a Lingua Franca article. I was surprised
to hear how discontented these elder statesmen were now that the Cold
War was over. It was almost as if they longed for the United States --
or at least themselves -- to be back in the grip of murderous anxiety,
ready to embark on a terrible rampage. Since then, what has always
struck me is how turbulent and intemperate, how savage and ferocious,
the dream life of the right truly is -- even among, especially among,
its most staid figures.
When Trump became a contender for the White House, I saw him as an
extension or fulfillment of the conservative movement rather than a
break with it. Almost everything people found outrageous and objectionable
about his candidacy -- the racism, the contempt for institutions, the
ambient violence, the hostility to the rule of law -- I'd been seeing
in the right for years. Little in Trump surprised me, except for the
fact that he won.
Whenever I said this, people got angry with me. They still do.
For months, now years, I puzzled over that anger. . . . Historical
consciousness can be a conservative force, lessening the sting of
urgency, deflating the demands of the now, leaving us adrift in a
sea of relativism. But it need not be . . . Telling a story of how
present trespass derives from past crime or even original sin can
inspire a more strenuous refusal, a more profound assault on the
now. It can fuel a desire to be rid of not just the moment but the
moments that made this moment, to ensure that we never have to face
this moment again. But only if we acknowledge what we're seldom
prepared to admit: that the monster has been with us all along.
Charlie Savage/Eric Schmitt/Michael Schwartz:
Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill US troops,
intelligence says: "The Trump administration has been deliberating
for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment."
This is supposedly a big deal, but sounds like a total crock. While
Afghan government and Taliban have continued to attack each other,
US fatalities in Aghanistan have dwindled to practically nothing --
not just since Trump signed a cease-fire with the Taliban, but you
have to go as far back as 2014 to find a month with 10 US fatalities.
So if Russia is paying a bounty, they're not finding many takers,
and it's not costing them much. It seems much more likely that the
whole story was hatched by "deep state" figures to try to scuttle
the Taliban peace deal, to reverse US troop withdrawals, to gin up
anti-Russian sentiment for a new Cold War, and (what the hell) to
make Trump look bad by drawing out the Trump-Putin buddy meme.
This left me wondering whether the US had actually paid bounties
for dead Russians during the 1980s, when inflicting casualties on
Russians was the explicit goal of US support for Afghan mujahideen.
I tried googling that, but all I got were echoes of the NY Times
piece, like the Guardian's
Outrage mounts over report Russia offered bounties to Afghanistan
militants for killing US soldiers (and not wanting to be left
out or devalued,
Russia offered bounty to kill UK soldiers). Similar articles
were all over the supposedly liberal press (Google it yourself:
these are from the first two pages): ABC, Chicago Tribune, CNBC,
CNN, LA Times, MSNBC, NPR, Reuters, Time, USA Today, Vox, Washington
Post, Axios. Some bought the story but tried to put the focus on
Trump, as in Jacob Kuntson:
Trump denies report he was briefed on alleged Russian bounties on US
troops (my favorite line here was "The report was confirmed by
the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN," meaning that those
organizations picked up and ran the story); also Bob Brigham:
Trump remained silent as Putin paid to kill US soldiers;
Peter Wade:
Back from golfing, Trump denies knowing about Russian bounties to
kill US soldiers. Isaac Sebenius/James K Sebenius:
How many needless Covid-19 deaths were caused by delays in responding?
Most of them. David Smilde:
Joe Biden should not try to out-hawk Trump on Venezuela. Biden's
tweet on Venezuela is one of the few things that genuinely disurb me
about his nomination. It is factually inaccurate -- Trump may "admire
thugs and dictators" but not Nicolas Maduro; he clearly loathes Maduro,
and is using the power and influence of the United States to overturn
Maduro's election victory and replace him with a pliable puppet. I"m
not even sure that Maduro qualifies as a "thug and dictator" -- not
that I doubt that power is seductive and tends to corrupt, but as far
as I can tell, most of Venezuela's problems have been imposed by the
US, and their propaganda is formulaic and suspect as usual. Biden's
vow that he "will stand with the Venezuelan people and for democracy"
shows, to put it charitably, how completely he has been taken in by
the propaganda. If you want a definition of "thug and dictator," what
about someone who would impose a puppet government on another nation?
If Biden had any respect for democracy abroad, he wouldn't be casting
his lot with Trump and the oil moguls on this issue. And if he had
even the slightest self-awareness of how much havoc and misery US
intervention in Latin America has caused, he would grasp the folly
of trying to force American views on others. Nor do you have to go
back to Monroe and Wilson for examples: the recent coups in Bolivia
and Brazil are currently creating human rights disasters that reflect
back on us. Biden needs to break with that legacy, not echo it. Emily Stewart:
The Georgia legislature finally passes a hate crime bill in the wake
of Ahmaud Arbery's death. When signed, that will leave only three
states without hate crime laws (the others are South Carolina, Wyoming,
and Arkansas). Rachel Stohl:
Defense industry cheers as the Trump administration is poised to loosen
restrictions on drone exports. Critics complain that "the Trump
administration appears to be sacrificing long-term security goals for
short-term economic gain" -- i.e., for the arms merchants, not for
those who foot the military budget. Of course, if selling arms leads
to an arms race, the industry would see long-term economic gains as
well, and we would all wind up less secure. Lawrence H Summers/Anna Stansbury:
US workers need more power: Good title, but don't fear, he's not
really offering much. No talk about co-determination, let alone making
companies fully employee-owned, which is the direction we should be
moving in. Matt Taibbi:
On "White Fragility": Review of Robin DiAngelo's book, "a few
thoughts on America's smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism,"
one of which is it "may be the dumbest book ever written." I
rather doubt that, if for no other reason than that I recall
Taibbi's review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. Michael Tomasky:
Biden's journey left. Nick Turse:
Pentagon war game includes scenario for military response to domestic
Gen Z rebellion. "Gen Z" is defined as those born after 1996. Peter Wade:
Trump can't name one thing he'd prioritize if re-elected: Good. Paul Waldman:
Alex Ward:
The head of US broadcasting is leaning toward pro-Trump propaganda.
Biden would fire him. Michael Pack, head of US Agency for Global
Media (USAGM), which runs "Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting,
Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Office of
Cuba Broadcasting," so is already neck-deep in the propaganda business.
Pack, a close ally of former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon, began
his three-year tenure just this month and wasted no time making dramatic
changes to reshape the agency. Last week, within hours of introducing
himself to employees, he purged four top officials from the agency's
media organizations. The two chiefs of Voice of America (VOA), the most
prominent outlet in the agency, had already resigned earlier over Pack's
appointment.
Related:
The real villain of John Bolton's Trump book is John Bolton. More
Bolton book:
How Trump's China obsession could derail nuclear arms control, in one
tweet: "Bolton makes clear President Trump's foreign policy is
absolutely terrible -- but Bolton's is much, much worse." /Nicole Narea:
The US military will stay on the US-Mexico border, even with migration
falling. Matthew Yglesias:
Trump is rescuing Maine lobstermen from himself, and blaming Obama:
"The lobster bailout, explained."
Martha McSally's bailout proposal for the travel industry, explained:
"The Arizona senator wants to give each US adult $4,000 to go on vacation --
but only if you're not too poor." The bottom line is that this is another
Republican tax cut for the rich, albeit limited and dressed up funny.
Trump's reelection polling is looking really bad. Why does he always
have to note: "After all, Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points in mid-July
1988"? Not only is that a bummer, there are lots of reasons why this year
is nothing like that year.
Trump's catastrophic failure on testing is no joke: "The president
is continually more focused on good numbers than good policy."
Why it feels like there are a lot more fireworks this year. No,
I hadn't noticed. I don't think I've heard a single firework bang so
far this month, or maybe this year. No doubt I will hear some closer
to the 4th, but probably less than usual. The old Lawrence Stadium
used to shoot off fireworks at least once a week, but they tore it
down, built a new ballpark, and have yet to play a single game there.
Wichita is not traditionally hostile to fireworks -- although the
Fire Dept. had a lot more say in the matter when I was growing up
than in recent years. I went out driving one July 4th and identified
at least 20 places that were shooting off major fireworks (of course,
the big one was downtown, which we could watch from out front lawn).
Then I drove down Main St. toward where I grew up, and it looked like
a war zone with all the debris. My mother especially loved fireworks,
but I'd be just as happy never to see or hear any ever again. Li Zhou:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Weekend Roundup
All in all, not a very good week for Donald Trump. It started off
with Supreme Court rulings that the 1965 Civil Rights Act prohibits
discrimination against LGBTQ people, and that Trump's revocation of
the DACA program was invalid because the Trump administration failed
to explain why. The marches continued, as did the police outrages
provoking more demonstrations, but also a few reform stories, and
even some indictments and/or dismissals that show that, despite the
fury of Trump and the right, protest is getting somewhere. Trump
spent much of the week threatening and/or suing his former national
security director and his niece for writing books showing some of
the many ways he is incompetent and/or vile. And just as we're still
processing his recent purge of federal inspectors for trying to do
their jobs, he goes off and fires a US attorney who had opened
investigations of some of his cronies. He's finding Covid-19
infection rates still on the rise in nearly half of the states,
including virtually all of the "red" ones in the South. He expected
to finish the week on a high after resuming his campaign rallies in
one of those states, only to find the Tulsa arena half-empty (and
considerably less than half-masked). It's hard to see how that turns
into a win.
Even before the rally, most polls show Trump losing badly to Joe
Biden. See Nate Silver:
Our new polling averages show Biden leads Trump by 9 points nationally,
which shows a bunch of 2016 Trump states flipping: Michigan, Florida,
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, but
not quite Iowa (where Biden is -0.6) or Texas (-0.7). Trump's approval
rating is 41.4% (vs. 55.2% disapprove). The generic congressional ballot
is at 48.4% Democrats, 40.4% Republicans. Of course, too early to count
your chickens. The one thing I'm most certain of is that the rest of the
2020 campaign season is going to be the nastiest in American history.
Quite a few sublists below, usually starting with the first piece
I found on a subject, so you'll have to scour around to find ones of
personal interest. In fact, quite a lot of everything.
Some scattered links this week:
Sasha Abramsky:
Zeeshan Aleem:
Katelyn Burns:
Seattle's newly police-free neighborhood, explained. Marc Caputo/Matthew Choi:
Klobuchar shuts down VP speculation, urges Biden to pick woman of
color. Article describes this as "a blow to the chances of
Massachusetts' Sen Elizabeth Warren," but that assumes that someone
who didn't rate high enough to still be a contender has somehow
gained influence by pissing in the punch bowl on the way out.
Leaves me with the feeling that not only does she want to torpedo
the much more progressive Warren, she also can't bear losing to
her fellow midwestern prospects (most often mentioned are Gretchen
Whitmer, Tammy Baldwin, and Tammy Duckworth). Matthew Chapman:
Trump claims his niece signed an NDA, threatens to sue her over tell-all
book: report. The niece is Mary L Trump, PhD, the book Too Much
and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous
Man. Also:
Fabiola Cineas:
The disappearance and death of activist Oluwatoyin Salau, explained.
Sean Collins:
Police killings can be captured in data. The terror police create
cannot.
Jesselyn Cook/Nick Robins-Early:
Inside the dangerous online fever swamps of American police: "Cops
have a far-right media ecosystem of their own, where they post racist
memes, spread disinformation and call for violence against antifa."
Daniel Denvir:
Donald Trump is a menace to American democracy. But he didn't come out
of nowhere. "His rise was only possible because of a Republican and
Democratic political consensus that has ravaged American politics and
society for a generation." Long article, touches on a lot of things.
It's certainly true that politics have become more polarized, especially
on the very ideological and aggressive right, and Trump in many ways is
a logical extension of where the right was already going. Still, I wonder
if it might be more fruitful to look at how businessmen have become more
imperious and arrogant (and, no coincidence, much richer) over the last
30-40 years. Trump may seem like a major break with previous politicians,
but how different is he from the last few generations of CEOs/financiers?
(Insert long list of names here, like Jack Welch, Carl Icahn, Charles Koch,
Sheldon Adelson, etc.) Trump's instincts are certainly authoritarian, but
they strike me as more like despotic monarchs, who grew up in worlds where
everyone deferred to them, and fascist (or mafia) strongmen, who came to
power by snatching it, and kept it by intimidation.
Tom Engelhardt:
The age of disappointment? Or how the American century ends. These
TomDispatch articles get reproduced on various websites, often with
slightly different titles. AlterNet calls this
The American century is ending decisively with a pyromaniac in the
White House.
Mara Gay:
Why was a grim report on police-involved deaths never released?
Elena Goukassian:
Who really was Roy Cohn?: Interview with Ivy Meeropol, who directed
a new documentary on Trump's mentor, including his role in getting her
grandparents executed, in what Alan Dershowitz thinks "was one of the
greatest miscarriages of justice ever in this country."
Constance Grady:
Black authors are on all the bestseller lists right now. But publishing
doesn't pay them enough.
Glenn Greenwald:
Jeff Halper:
Israelizing the American police, Palestinianizing the American people.
Elahe Izadi/Paul Farhi:
The standoff between owners and journalists that's eviscerating Pittsburgh's
biggest newspaper. Newspapers are businesses, owned by rich people, who
are often tempted to impose their political views on their reporters -- here
the signal is the charge of "bias." Free press is a nice concept, but doesn't
exist in America -- least of all, evidently, in Pittsburgh.
Sarah Jones:
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein:
Letting private equity billionaires rob worker retirement funds: "A
new Department of Labor rule allows private equity to get into 401(k)
plans. One expert estimates a $13.7 billion annual wealth transfer from
workers to Wall Street tycoons."
The government can afford anything it wants: Review of Stephanie
Kelton: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of
the People's Economy. I must admit that I've never understood
MMT, although I have noticed that the predictions of "deficit scolds"
have rarely (if ever) come true -- so it wouldn't surprise me if
there is more flexibility for deficit spending than is commonly
assumed (e.g., by those bemoaning how Bernie Sanders could ever pay
for his proposals). Consider:
"The problem we have today," Kelton writes, "is that economic policy
is often prescribed by people who, despite holding advanced degrees
in economics, possess no real understanding of how our monetary system
works." The idea is that a basic understanding of how money works, of
MMT precepts, could empower any citizen to fight for a better world.
But this will only happen once we reconcile what the country is capable
of and what the people are willing to do. "Austerity," Kelton writes,
"is a failure of imagination." So what kind of society do we want to
imagine, if we unshackle ourselves from the language of taxpayer-funded,
deficit-diminishing government? Are we willing to stop shoveling resources
into the military (and its domestic paramilitary offshoot, police
departments) and start diverting them to working-class communities?
If everyone deserves to be safe, housed, and prosperous, let's instruct
the Federal Reserve to start marking up some different accounts.
Seung Min Kim:
Top State Department official resigns in protest of Trump's response to
racial tensions in the country: Mary Elizabeth Taylor, assistant
secretary of state for legislative affairs..
Jen Kirby:
Remember Brexit? It's still not over.
The 7 most disturbing allegations about Trump in John Bolton's forthcoming
book. Bolton didn't get to start any major wars during his brief tenure
as Trump's national security adviser, but at least he got a book out of it,
The Room Where It Happened, and enough publicity that it's likely
to be a bestseller (assuming a
Trump administration lawsuit fails to quash it), setting himself up
for a return to the limelight should Tom Cotton or Marco Rubio or some
similar reptile become president. Subheds (which really aren't more
disturbing than what you already know):
- Trump asked Xi for help with his electoral prospects -- as
if he ever thought about anything else.
- Trump told Xi to go ahead with the internment of Muslims in
China -- as if Xi cares what he thinks.
- Trump learns about nukes . . . Trump didn't know that the UK
has nuclear weapons, but (unlike the US) they've never used them.
- . . . and about geography -- well, Finland used to be part of
Russia, and the US actually did land marines in Venezuela, and later
effectively owned its oil industry.
- Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO with a dramatic made-for-TV
scene
- Trump had some issues with the Constitution -- like wanting
to execute "scumbags" who rat him out; this is a polite way of saying
he doesn't understand why a president shouldn't be able to do things
any self-respecting mob boss would.
- Meddling in Ukraine, yes, but so many other things
More reaction to Bolton:
Nancy LeTourneau:
John Bolton didn't tell the truth when it mattered most: "Instead,
he kept his mouth shut until he could cash in on a book deal." This is
the popular line among people who are eager to grasp at any cudgel to
attack Trump, but we should be clear that Bolton always had his own
private agenda, and it always included concern for his bottom line.
Even before his book deal, Bolton has long made an unseemly amount of
money by consistently hewing to the most hawkish line allowed at any
given moment, even as each of his arguments has proven disastrous.
That he occasionally finds Trump insufficiently belligerent is more
of an indictment of him than of Trump. That he occasionally finds
Trump to be stupid, vain and petty just shows that he can marshal
ordinary perceptions into passages that make himself look smarter
and more principled, if only by comparison. Theodore J Boutrous Jr:
Why Trump's lawsuit against John Bolton will fail. Jonathan Chait:
Trump: I didn't realize Bolton supported Iraq War until after I hired
him: "A small slip-up in the vetting process"? What vetting process?
Did Trump ever make his own concerns known? Bolton not only supported
the Iraq War, he never stopped defending it. It's impossible to imagine
a job interview, even by someone as inattentive and uncurious as Trump,
failing to raise red flags. Matthew Chapman:
Trump is determined to get John Bolton jailed. Matt Ford:
John Bolton: American coward. Andrew Gawthorpe:
There are no heroes in the John Bolton v Donald Trump story. Josh Gerstein/Kyle Cheney:
'The damage is done': Judge denies Trump administration request to block
Bolton book: "but he warned the former national security adviser
could face criminal charges." John Hudson:
Bolton book exposes rare fissures between Trump and Pompeo. Steven Nelson:
Trump: I should have fired John Bolton for botching North Korea nuclear
talks. Yes you should have. No you didn't. Moreover, it was totally
obvious when you appointed him that he would do everything he possibly
could to make sure no agreement was reached. Same could be said of your
boy Mike Pompeo, although he did a slightly better job of pretending he
was with the program. Trump should rifle back through what remains of
his memory and identify all the people who recommended Bolton to him,
and fire them too. By the way, I wouldn't say that Trump's own words
were especially eloquent or insightful, but for once their pith finds
a deserving target:
"When Wacko John Bolton went on Deface the Nation and so stupidly said
that he looked at the 'Libyan Model' for North Korea, all hell broke
out," Trump tweeted Thursday. "Kim Jong Un, who we were getting along
with very well, went 'ballistic,' just like his missiles -- and
rightfully so."
Trump added that Kim "didn't want Bolton anywhere near him."
"Bolton's dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with
North Korea, even now. I asked him, 'what the hell were you thinking'"
He had no answer and just apologized. That was early on, I should
have fired him right then & there!" Trump wrote.
William Rivers Pitt:
It's Trump vs Bolton, and I'm rooting for a meteor. Frank Rich:
The folly of Trump's Bolton lawsuit. Zoë Richards:
WH trade adviser slams Bolton book as 'deep swamp revenge porn':
Peter Navarro. Eugene Robinson:
John Bolton is a weasel in a party of weasels. Jennifer Rubin:
Trump's Bolton problem is nothing compared with Senate Republicans'
woes: "We knew Trump violated his oath. Now we're certain Senate
Republicans did, too." Jon Schwarz:
John Bolton is telling the truth, but let's not forget his horrible,
dangerous career. Tierney Sneed:
DOJ goes all in on trying to block release of Bolton book.
Ellen Knickmeyer:
US drops planned limit for toxin that damages infant brains.
Bonnie Kristian:
Another General wants forever war in Iraq: Meet CENTCOM Commander
Gen. Kenneth F McKenzie Jr.
Jill Lepore:
The history of the "riot" report: "How government commissions became
alibis for inaction."
Nancy LeTourneau:
The ongoing struggle between two American ideals: liberty and equality:
"Inside the biggest fault line between the two parties in American politics
today." The conservative mind-trick here is defining liberty as something
that only a few people can enjoy because it's taken at the expense of
others. But you never can get to "liberty and justice for all" that way,
which makes me wonder if it isn't better to think of liberty as something
equality makes possible. Even conservatives should be satisfied defining
liberty as the ability to choose one's course of action without being
compelled by economic constraints. Why can't everyone enjoy such freedom?
The real "fault line" has nothing to do with liberty, which all pursue,
but with equality, which conservatives deny and despise. Sure, they have
their rationalizations, but even if true -- and I'd argue they are not --
why would a democracy prostrate itself to their vanity?
Why are conservatives so threatened by equality? Subhed says "It's
the toxic and irrational fear that more freedom for LGBTQ Americans
infringes on their own," but isn't that just a way of admitting that
they believe that their freedom comes at the expense of other people?
And not just LGBTQ -- there's also race, class, sex. They believe that
unions are picking their pockets. Each plank is rooted in a sense of
privilege, and a belief that force can safeguard their privileges.
After all, we might all agree to be equal, but there can never be
agreement (hence there can never be peace) that one class is entitled
to rule over all others.
How Republicans convinced themselves that Trump will win in a landslide:
"Delusional thinking often goes unchallenged when you're living inside
a cocoon." Also:
John Hinderaker:
The landslide of 2020? Someone recommended this link as the funniest
thing he had read in quite some time. Doesn't quite qualify as a review of David
Horowitz's Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win because he
admits that he hasn't read the book, but he believes Horowitz ("one of
the most perceptive observers of the current scene") blindly.
The current environment reminds me of 1972, and a conversation I had
then with a friend who was, like me at that time, on the left. The
contest then was between Nixon and McGovern, and my friend said,
"Nixon will win because he is for America, and McGovern is against
America." He and I didn't see it that way, but we knew that was how
the race was coming across to most voters. That is true in spades
this year: McGovern was wrong about a lot of things, but he was a
sincere patriot. Today's Democrats, in contrast, really are
against America.
The cognitive disconnect in the last sentence is so hard to
process that the simplest explanation is that people who utter it
are stark raving insane. Yet we hear this line repeated endlessly
on the far right, especially since Obama won the presidency in
2008. (Sometimes at book length, as in David Limbaugh's The
Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic -- the
most explicit title from a long list I compiled in 2012, which
I summed up as "uninspired and empty.") The thing is, there's
never been a shred of evidence that Obama or any other mainstream
Democrat wanted to harm America. Maybe you can accuse a few fringe
leftists (maybe even myself) with being insufficiently obeisant
to the militarized symbols of American power, but Obama, Biden,
the Clintons, Pelosi, Shumer, et al., have become the last true
believers in American exceptionalism: the steadfast belief that
this country remains a beacon of light, of hope and opportunity
for the rest of the world. Even those of us who have become
thoroughly disenchanted with America's long history of racism,
militarism, colonialism, corruption, and economic plunder, tend
to express our concerns by referring to the historical moments
when Americans seemed to aspire to something better, and we can
frame our solutions in terms which promise to help the majority
of Americans. But while we believe that further left solutions
would be better for Americans than what mainstream Democrats
have done, the fact is that when given the power, Democrats have
made the economy more prosperous, have reduced the harm done to
less fortunate Americans, have blundered into fewer wars, have
treated the environment better, and have responded to disasters
more effectively, than Republicans have done. So how can people
like the author here say such things? I considered the possibility
that their definition of America was just so exclusive -- as Todd
Snider put it, "conservative Christian, right-wing Republican,
straight, white, American males" -- that maybe their paranoia was
grounded in something real. But I know many such people, and I've
never seen them actually hurt by things Democrats have done (even
where they've felt outraged). So, I have to conclude, the depths
of their delusion far exceeds my ability to explain. David Siders:
'We're thinking landslide': Beyond DC, GOP officials see Trump on glide
path to reelection: Quotes Phillip Stephens, a GOP county chairman
in NC: "The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies
support for Trump. We're calling him 'Teflon Trump.' Nothing's going to
stick, because if anything, it's getting more exciting than it was in
2016. We're thinking landslide." Paul Waldman:
Trump supporters already know he will definitely win by a landslide.
Martin Longman:
Two stories that show why Trump's unfit for office.
The are two lightly reported stories in the news that really highlight
the norm-breaking and criminality of the Trump administration. One
involves the nation's inspectors general and the other the administration's
treatment of science. Anyone who might care about these subjects is most
likely already in Biden's camp, but they should get wider circulation
because they ought to inform how people will vote.
The stories Longman cites (though neither are isolated incidents):
Joe Macaron:
The 'Caesar Act' has no teeth and is not about Assad. Evidently
"Caesar" is an anonymous photographer who documented human rights
abuses by the Syrian military police, providing the basis for a
report (known as "The Caesar Report") written by ICC prosecutors,
and hence a law which allows the US (sworn enemies of the ICC) to
levy sanctions on Syria, adding fuel to America's psychotic love/hate
relationship with Syria. While I would have been pleased if the
Assad regime had fallen and disappeared in Syria, at this point
continued war is far worse for all concerned. Instead of figuring
out ways to inflict further pain, the US would be well advised to
make peace with Assad, and use whatever good will that produces to
help the Syrian people recover from the war the US (and its nominal
allies) did so much to protract. Related: Shahed Ghoreishi:
The next US administration must fix our broken Syria policy.
Notice that at this point no one has any hopes the present
administration can fix anything.
Dylan Matthews:
A new paper finds stimulus checks, small business aid, and "reopening"
can't rescue the economy.
Bill McKibben:
How public opinion changes for the better.
Peter Miller:
Policing or occupation? Crowd control practices in the US and Palestine.
Ian Millhiser:
Peter Montague:
Trump wants to create election chaos by killing the Post Office:
On March 30, Trump spilled the beans himself when he said, if it were
easier to vote in the U.S., Republicans would never get elected. The
president made the comments as he dismissed a congressional Democrat-led
push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day voter registration and
early voting to help states run elections safely during the COVID-19
pandemic. "They had things, levels of voting that if you'd ever agreed
to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again,"
Trump said. "We don't want anyone to do mail-in ballots," the president
said in May.
Sara Morrison:
The Trump administration's flawed plan to destroy the Internet as we know
it: "Following the president's lead, Republicans are trying to chip
away at Section 230."
Yascha Mounk:
Is Donald Trump a danger to democracy? Review of new books by Masha
Gessen (Surviving Autocracy) and Eric A Posner (The Demagogue's
Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump),
by the author of The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger
& How to Save It (2018). All concerned are fond of analogies, so
their books run the gamut. I think it's important to make a distinction
between Trump with his authoritarian impulses and the Republican Party's
greedy schemes to subvert democracy. Trump is reprehensible but dangerous
only to the extent that the Party supports and defends him. The real
threat is the Party, but I suspect that the authors would rather indict
individuals than look into the profoundly anti-democratic beliefs of
modern (or, indeed, any) conservatism.
Ellen Nakashima/Shane Harris:
Elite CIA unit that developed hacking tools failed to secure its own
systems, allowing massive leak, an internal report found.
Nicole Narea:
Trump fires the US attorney investigating his allies: "Attorney
General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman on Friday, but
he refused to step down. So the president stepped in."
Jonathan Chait:
Barr trying to purge the last prosecutor who can still investigate
Trump. Josh Marshall:
A remarkable turn of events:
The Trump administration, with its most effective enforcer, Bill Barr,
is looking at an uphill reelection campaign, a range of still unfolding
civic catastrophes, and trying to make the most of its executive power
while it still holds it. Abusing the powers of office look like the
clearest path to retaining those powers past next January. But since
the rampant abuses are now adding to the marked deterioration of support
for Trump's presidency the incentives for bad acting only grow more
perverse, the need to keep doubling down or upping the ante only grows.
As I noted above, Berman's public refusal is itself a sign of Trump's
ebbing power. It all points to a perilous six months of mounting
instability, wrongdoing and criminality in which Trump, his lieutenants
and toadies see the need to keep rolling the dice, fomenting chaos in
the hopes some version of it works in his favor.
Renae Merle:
Trump's pick to run Manhattan US attorney's office defended prominent
Wall Street firms for years: Jay Clayton, previously SEC chairman,
another obvious perch for serving his past (and future?) clients.
Terry Nguyen:
Aunt Jemima and the long-overdue rebrand of racist stereotypes.
Anna North:
Morgan Palumbo/Jessica Draper:
Knockout in Washington: "A monumental lobbying battle over American
foreign policy -- How the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Emiratis took
Washington." I'm tempted to argue that the US hasn't had a coherent
foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Maybe GW Bush thought
he had one with his Global War on Terrorism. Maybe Obama thought his
"Pivot to Asia" would fill the void left by abandoning the hapless
GWOT. But really, US foreign policy just reverted to what it had been
before rabid anti-communism added its ideologial veneer: favors for
interest groups with business abroad. Before WWII, those favors were
for US companies, especially in Latin America. More recently, the
companies became multinationals, and sovereign nations got into the
act, all working through the usual lobbyists. Trump's innovation was
to drop the pretense that foreign policy was ever about anything but
money. So if Saudi Arabia, for instance, wants to bomb a neighboring
country, or kill an American journalist, all they really have to do
is to make sure the checks clear, and America will be their ally.
Steven Pearlstein:
The Fed is addicted to propping up the markets, even without a need.
Why, exactly, the Fed feels it necessary to inject more dollars into
the corporate credit market is hard to fathom. The interest rate at
which investment-grade companies can borrow on the bond market is now
below 4 percent, about as low as anyone can remember. And the pace of
bond issuance so far this year, at over $1.2 trillion, has been double
that of last year's torrid pace. Indeed, there's so much capital
sloshing around that investors are lining up to lend money to companies
such as Boeing and Macy's and the cruise-line operator Carnival, although
these companies' revenue has plummeted with along revenue in much of
the travel and retail sectors. . . .
The best explanation for this confidence is the widespread belief
on Wall Street that the Fed will do "whatever it takes" -- that is,
print money to buy as many bonds as necessary -- to keep credit flowing
to the business sector, no matter the risk. By placing a floor under
bond prices, the Fed makes it possible for over-indebted, sales-starved
companies to borrow even more to cover operating losses, or refinance
existing loans, allowing them to avoid, or at least delay, the day when
they cannot pay their bills.
Cameron Peters:
Trump's executive order on police reform, explained.
Brad Plumer/Nadja Popovich:
Emissions are surging back as countries and states reopen.
Ari Rabin-Havt:
Mitt Romney is not your friend.
Adam K Raymond:
One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor is getting fired.
Rebecca Rivas:
Feds dismiss incitement charge against Michael Avery. As near as
I can tell, Avery (a "Ferguson activist") was charged for making posts
on Facebook criticizing St. Louis police. Greg Magarian commented,
"Winning malicious prosecution suits is nearly impossible, but Avery
should go for it, and [prosecutor Michael] Reilly should have this
abomination hung around his reputational neck for the rest of his
professional life." Another piece from the St. Louis American that
Magarian pointed me to: Chris King:
New video shows Florissant cop swerve to hit fleeing man with SUV.
King's follow up story:
Florissant cop charged with felony assault, armed criminal action.
David Roberts:
A national US power grid would make electricity cheaper and cleaner.
Dylan Scott:
David K Shipler:
The racial stereotypes infecting American police departments.
David Sirota:
Republicans are hypocrites. They happily 'de-funded' the police we
actually need.
Emily Stewart:
One of America's worst acts of racial violence was in Tulsa. Now, it's
the site of Trump's first rally in months. More pieces on Tulsa,
past and present (some before and some after Trump's event):
Zeeshan Aleem:
Trump falsely suggests wearing a mask at his Tulsa rally could be
harmful: "He anticipated a 'wild evening' where 'people do what
they want.'" Russell Berman:
The 'Silent Majority' didn't show up for Trump. Bob Brigham:
"Pitiful turnout": Trump mocked for "hilariously weak" attendance at
Tulsa comeback rally. Matthew Chapman:
Six Trump campaign staffers in Tulsa test positive for COVID-19 ahead
of indoor rally. Eugene Daniels:
Trump campaign blames protesters for disappointing turnout at Tulsa
rally. Robin Givhan:
Trump's rally looked like his vision of America. Limited and pitiless.
It was a long, rambling performance with the president lamenting that
he surely must have saluted some 600 times and by God, it was so hot
that day and the ramp was like an ice-skating rink and he was wearing
leather sole shoes. As far as he was concerned, he really should have
been cheered for making it down that ramp unscathed instead of being
mocked in the media. So perhaps it made him feel better when the Tulsa
crowd -- his crowd -- applauded after he theatrically drank a
glass of water onstage with only one hand and didn't dribble any of it
on his tie.
It was Trump's crowd. Everything is his. Everything is because of
him. "We -- I -- have done a phenomenal job," he said about
the federal government's response to the pandemic. "I saved hundreds
of thousands of lives."
Virginia Heffernan:
Trump's Tulsa rally is shaping up to be a coronavirus petri dish inside
a wrecking ball. Astead W Herndon:
Black Tulsans, with a defiant Juneteenth celebration, send a message to
Trump. Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman/Reid J Epstein:
How the Trump campaign's plans for a triumphant rally went awry:
"Instead of offering President Trump a glide path back into the campaign
season, Saturday's rally in Tulsa has become yet another flash point
for a candidate who has repeatedly displayed insensitivity about race." Paul Krugman:
Tulsa and the many sins of racism: "The ugly story didn't end with
the abolition of slavery." Eric Lach:
Donald Trump's empty campaign rally in Tulsa. Taylor Lorenz/Kellen Browning/Sheera Frenkel:
TikTok teens and K-Pop stans say they sank Trump rally: "Did a successful
prank inflate attendance expectations for President Trump's rally in Tulsa,
Okla.?" Osita Nwanevu:
This is how Trump plans to beat Biden: "In his latest campaign kick-off
rally, the president maps his desperate plan to overcome the national crisis
he enabled and win re-election." Caitlin Oprysko:
Trump accuses critics of attempting to 'Covid Shame' upcoming rally.
Mary Papenfuss:
Dr Anthony Fauci warned White House that Tulsa rally would be dangerous.
Amber Phillips:
5 takeaways from Trump's Tulsa rally:
- Trump elevates violent rhetoric against protesters
- 'Kung Flu,' a testing slowdown and other flippant comments
about the coronavirus
- No attempt to salve racial tensions
- Explaining 'the ramp and the water'
- Weaving old with the new for a 2020 campaign pitch
Randy R Potts/Victor Luckerson:
A Trump visit lays bare two Tulsas, a mile and a universe apart. Bret Schulte:
How Tulsa's Republican mayor found himself at the center of America's
debate on race. Walter Shapiro:
Trump is terrorizing America: "His reelection campaign is going to be
all about one thing: fear. The Tulsa rally was just the beginning." Brent Staples:
The burning of Black Wall Street, revisited: "Nearly a century after the
Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues." Marc A Thiessen:
Trump must reach out to black voters. His Tulsa rally is the place to
start. I don't normally read him, even given that his columns
inevitably appear in my home town paper. In fact, he strikes me as
the single most reprehensible political pundit in America. So I can't
tell you whether this is more tone-deaf than usual. But I can assure
you that Trump didn't deliver the hoped-for breakthrough message in
Tulsa.
Matt Stieb:
Facebook removes Trump ads with Nazi symbol used to identify political
prisoners. This story is so weird on many levels that I skipped over
it many times before noting it.
Matt Taibbi:
Why policing is broken: "Years of research on brutality cases shows
that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers
of police violence."
Astra Taylor:
A new group of leftist primary challengers campaign through protests
and the coronavirus.
Zephyr Teachout/Shaoul Sussman:
Amazon's private government: "A new patent cements the company's
aims to use its power over sellers to consolidate control." Hard to
tell right now how big a deal this is, but several questions leap to
mind: Should this technology even be patentable? If so, isn't it
dangerous to assign it to an unregulated private company? If the
service is really valuable, wouldn't it be much better to build
it as a public utility? Many parts of Amazon (e.g., Marketplace),
already raise this question.
The patent, for a form of blockchain ledgering technology, will
allow Amazon to oversee the collection of an unprecedented amount
of data about the business operations of its sellers, including
their entire supply chain. In essence, the patent fulfills Amazon's
plans to create a private regulatory regime, where it uses proprietary
information to create a "certification" bureaucracy: a private,
for-profit alternative to the Food and Drug Administration, the
Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission.
Unlike governmental agencies, however, it will have no public
oversight, and can use its certifying power to squeeze sellers
and consolidate control.
Brands and companies that use Amazon's technology would have
to list the manufacturers, couriers, and distributors they use.
Those entities will have to corroborate that they indeed sell to
the brand. Amazon will know where and when every single sweater,
earplug, and frying pan sold on its platform was made, and by
whom. The patent states: To certify an item, a verifiable record
for the item indicating, for example, what materials were used
to make the item, where the item was made, who made the item,
when the item was made, and so forth, is needed.
Jason Tidd:
Kris Kobach's guns stolen from truck at Wichita hotel. Kobach is
running for US Senate. He says he always carries a gun for protection,
and he left a few more in his car, planning on campaigning at some
shooting event. "There were 255 guns reported stolen from vehicles in
Wichita in 2019." Kobach may be the dumbest person running for Congress
in Kansas this year, but don't sell his main rival, Roger Marshall,
short. See Abigail Abrams:
GOP Congressman says the poor 'just don't want health care.'
Alright, he was quoted out of context. The full quote was: "Just like
Jesus said, 'The poor will always be with us.' There is a group of
people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care
of themselves." Marshall, by the way, is a M.D., whose recent publicity
stunt was to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for himself and his family.
Latest piece on his is:
Roger Marshall was convicted of reckless driving in 2008. Here's how
it was erased. Turns out it helps to have the son of a business
partner in the prosecutor's office.
Craig Timberg:
As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from
the right-wing boogaloo movement.
Alex Ward:
Adam Weinstein:
Florida man leads his state to the morgue: "Ron DeSantis is the
latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic
dystopia. Now he's letting its residents die to save the plutocrats."
Also:
Philip Weiss:
Trump is pushing annexation as political tool to cast Dems as anti-Israel,
says J Street expert: Interview with Neri Zilber. /James North:
It sure looks like Trump and Adelson have cut a deal on annexation.
Sheldon Adelson, the Israel-loving, Iran-war-craving casino baron,
talks to Donald Trump all the time, and for good reason, he and wife
Miriam are the biggest Republican donors, poised to give as much as
$200 million this year. Now that the White House appears to be lying
down for the Israeli government as it moves to annex portions of the
West Bank despite a growing chorus of international condemnation,
the focus should be on Adelson. He has always been a strong supporter
of Israeli expansion, a man who says, "There's no such thing as a
Palestinian."
So far, the Adelsons have gotten everything they've wanted from
our transactional president: tearing up the Iran deal, moving the
embassy to Jerusalem, defunding Palestinians, recognizing the Golan
annexation, treating settlement expansion as legitimate, even a
presidential medal of freedom for Miriam, etc. Right up to yesterday --
a Trump attack on the ICC in the name of Israel. As Trump once said
when a Republican rival was getting Adelson's money, Adelson wanted
a "perfect little puppet."
Sean Wilentz:
The disgrace of Donald Trump: "Was the battle of Lafayette Square
the beginning of the end of his presidency?" Why call it a battle?
Doesn't that imply two sides were fighting? (As opposed to one side
using excessive force to drive people who were legally and peaceably
assembled away.) As a historian, Wilentz can think of past events
like Herbert Hoover's routing of the "Bonus Marchers" during the
Great Depression, which was one of many things that led to Hoover's
1932 defeat.
Stephanie Wykstra:
The fight for transparency in police misconduct, explained: "New
York's repeal of section 50-a -- which allowed police to shield misconduct
records -- is a big win for activists, but there is more work to be
done."
Matthew Yglesias:
The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing:
Critique of Alex Vitale's book. I've cited several Vitale pieces and
interviews recently. I agree, although (as with ICE) I also think that
some organizations are so rotten it might make sense to restart from
scratch. The best thing I see coming out of the "defund" argument is
a rethinking about what police should (and should not) be doing. But
we're still stuck the the trials of the modern world. We need laws,
and we need order, and we need a system to enforce that as fairly and
as charitably as possible. In short, we need reform, but we still need
to come out the other end with something, even if it too is imperfect.
More pieces:
Donald Trump is defunding the police: "He's proposed cuts in budget
after budget, and is holding up needed fiscal aid." Meanwhile, it's the
Democrats who are pushing federal aid to cities and states hit hard by
revenue shortfalls
But the larger and more significant budgetary context is that the HEROES
Act passed by House Democrats and stalled by Senate Republicans appropriates
$900 billion to state and local governments.
With that kind of fiscal support, cities that don't want to defund
their police departments wouldn't have to. And cities that do want to
experiment with shifting funding out of law enforcement and into mental
health, drug treatment, and youth services will have the opportunity
to do that.
Republicans, meanwhile, have characterized this idea as a "blue state
bailout" and say Congress should instead consider changes to bankruptcy
law that might allow states to shed their pension obligations in bankruptcy.
Li Zhou:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Weekend Roundup
No intro this week.
Tweet of the week, from paulo. (@itskingapollo):
If the police did their jobs, everyone would trust them. Ain't no song
called "Fuck the Fire Department."
Also, from Rhys Blakely (@rhysblakely):
A 70-year-old man in Seattle survived the coronavirus, got applauded by
staff when he left the hospital after 62 days -- and then got a $1.1
million, 181-page hospital bill.
Some scattered links this week:
Sasha Abramsky:
Georgia primary sends us a warning -- November could be a voting rights
disaster. On the other hand, interest in voting seems to be record
high. See Dareh Gregorian:
Voter turnout soared in Georgia despite massive primary day problems.
Zeeshan Aleem:
Bocar Abdoulaye Ba/Roman Rivera:
Police think they can get away with anything. That's because they usually
do. Zack Beauchamp:
Trump: "The concept of chokehold sounds so innocent, so perfect". Alleen Brown:
Iowa quietly passes its third ag-gag bill after constitutional
challenges. Katelyn Burns:
John Cassidy:
Economic reality bites Wall Street and Trump. Jonathan Chait:
Michael Flynn writes op-ed confirming he's definitely insane. Fabiola Cinaes:
Trump postpones his MAGA rally planned for Juneteenth. Trump's
first rally in months was scheduled in Tulsa on the anniversary of
the 1921 massacre, where "a white mob destroyed the affluent Greenwood
District of the city, known as Black Wall Street, burning down 35
blocks, including 1,200 homes, and killing 300 black people in the
process." This was long referred to as a "race riot," but like all
similar events of the period, it was white people "rioting," much
like the pogroms Czarist Russian authorities organized against Jews.
Tulsa stands out in memory because of the sheer size of the massacre,
but also because it was the first instance of using airplanes to
firebomb an American neighborhood. Speaking of Trump in Tulsa:
Trump's new recovery plan resists sweeping police reforms.
The police shooting of Maurice Gordon, a black man killed during a traffic
stop, explained.
The sexual assault allegations against an officer involved in Breonna
Taylor's killing say a lot about police abuse of power. Also note:
"the Louisville Metro Council banned no-knock warrants with new
legislation called Breonna's Law." Obviously, a few months too late
for Taylor. Aaron Ross Coleman:
Aaron C Davis/Carol D Leonnig/Josh Dawsey:
Officials familiar with Lafayette Square confrontation challenge Trump
administration claim of what drove aggressive expulsion of protesters.
Igor Derysh:
Melania Trump delayed move to White House as "leverage" to renegotiate
a better prenup: report. Dish from Mary Jordan's upcoming book,
The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. Also:
CNN rejects Trump campaign's demand for apology over polls showing him
losing to Biden by 14 points. But CNN's actual response was pretty
clueless: "[authoritarian demands] have typically come from countries
like Venezuela." But authoritarians (regardless of whether Venezuela
qualifies as an example) typically understand the limits of their
authority, which they'd undermine by demanding something they're in
no position to enforce. Trump's demand is pure PR: rejecting the poll
results so emphatically his supporters will hear and believe him, but
expecting nothing further to come of it. Normally, the next step is
to threaten a frivolous lawsuit, but CNN's pockets are deep enough to
get that dismissed, and their own PR department would spin such a
thing into an attack on free press. Dan Diamond:
White House goes quiet on coronavirus as outbreak spikes again across
the US: "It's been more than a month since the White House halted
its daily coronavirus task force briefings." Masha Gessen:
Constance Grady:
How 70 years of cop shows taught us to valorize the police:
I've watched a lot of them, starting (as this article does) with
Dragnet (and from that era I'd add Andy Griffith and
Gunsmoke, which rounds out the picture considerably), and
while I appreciate the positive image most shows attempt to project,
I'm pretty doubtful that I've learned much if anything about the
real world of police work. Nor have they made me any less fearful
of interactions with the police, or the "justice system" more
generally. Maggie Haberman:
Trump's halting walk down ramp raises new health questions. Also
see Philip Rucker:
Trump tries to explain his slow and unsteady walk down a ramp at West
Point: "Elements of Trump's explanation strained credulity." Fred Hiatt:
Why the Republicans' 2020 strategy is to keep as many people as possible
from voting. I'm not very worried that a fair election will give
Trump a second term. And I think that efforts to suppress the vote tend
to backfire, at least up to a point. Still, the Republicans have been
working hard to trim and shape the electorate to their tastes, and it's
not unreasonable to worry that they may ultimately be successful -- for
one thing, look at how they've managed to gerrymander districts.
What does it say about a political party when its chief strategy is
to prevent as many people as possible from voting -- and its leader
admits as much?
That is where Republicans find themselves heading into the 2020
election.
For the latest, breathtaking example of this pathology, look at
Iowa. On June 2, Iowa held a highly successful primary, with record
turnout -- and Republicans in the state legislature immediately
initiated action to ensure the success is not repeated in the fall.
James Hohmann:
Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary
of 'Ax Handle Saturday': After schedule Trump's Juneteenth rally in
Tulsa, of course this comes next:
On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. --
organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city's police
officers -- chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were
trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that
followed -- in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club
African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church -- is remembered
as "Ax Handle Saturday."
Sean Illing:
Umair Irfan:
2 new studies show shutdowns were astonishingly effective. Bruce Jackson:
Buffalo cops -- and all the other cops. Fred Kaplan:
The generals are turning on Trump: "Mark Milley's apology for the
church photo-op is a major escalation."
West Pointless: "Trump made cadets return to campus during a pandemic
to listen to his dull platitudes." First line in article is "It could
have been worse." Hard to imagine the next paragraph ever being written
about any other president:
President Trump's Saturday morning commencement speech at West Point
was merely dull rather than abhorrent, incendiary, or flagrantly
self-aggrandizing, except for a couple of passages and -- significantly --
the fact of the speech itself, which was designed entirely as a video
clip for an upcoming reelection campaign commercial.
Sure, they'll cut out the bit where he waddles down the ramp. And
to think how annoying I found it that every time GW Bush spoke you
first had to watch him walk up to the podium. (OK, it was kind of
sick-funny the time he made Ariel Sharon do the same.) But at least
then we had a president who could walk -- not to mention read a
teleprompter without his eyes glazing over. Who imagine those would
some day be skills we could fondly reminisce over? (Even when
performed by a major war criminal?)
Trump's support for Confederate base names has nothing to do with
respecting the military. Roge Karma:
Why this moment demands radical politics: Interview with Eddie Glaude
Jr., author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American
Soul and Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons
for Our Own. Catherine Kim:
The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't
breathe," explained. Jen Kirby:
The "kettling" of protesters, explained. Aline Kominsky-Crumb/R Crumb:
Bad diet & bad hair destroy human civilization. Robert Kuttner:
About those improved unemployment numbers:
As the Economic Policy Institute's Elise Gould explains in
this indispensable short piece, if you add to the officially unemployed
statistic those workers who were staying home for health or family reasons
but reported themselves as employed, and workers who reported that they
had left the labor force but would seek work if it were available, the
adjusted unemployment rate for May is 19.7 percent.
The clincher is the number of workers still drawing unemployment
compensation, which was just under 30 million the week of May 16,
according to the same BLS report.
Dahlia Lithwick:
Trump's use of the military does not create the "appearance" of abuse.
It is abuse. Martin Longman:
David J Lynch:
Ripple effects of downturn show pandemic's early economic toll was
just the beginning. Branko Marcetic:
"Defenders of democracy" aren't bothered by its end in Bolivia. Ruth Marcus:
If you don't believe systemic racism is real, explain these statistics.
Dylan Matthews:
Pandemic unemployment insurance is expiring soon. This economist has
a fix for it. "Ioana Marinescu would allow people who've lost jobs
to keep collecting $600 a week even after getting a new job." Jane Mayer:
Ivanka Trump and Charles Koch fuel a cancel-culture clash at Wichita
State. Meridith McGraw:
Trump loses 2 pivotal allies in his anti-kneeling crusade: NASCAR and
the NFL. Ian Millhiser:
Nicole Narea:
Timothy Noah:
The black wage gap matters: "The grim state of racial economic inequality
should sicken our consciences." Anna North:
White Americans are finally talking about racism. Will it translate
into action? JC Pan:
The preachers of the austerity gospel are back: "Though we're in the
midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, calls for budget-tightening
have reliably restarted." Brian Resnick:
"Totally predictable": State reopenings have backfired. James Risen:
Donald Trump is an autocrat. It's up to all of us to stop him.
Yeah, sure: not a position I'm going to argue with, or get bent out
of shape over.
Dictatorships are built on denial. Dictators take over gradually;
each incremental step that erodes civil liberties and the rule of
law can be justified and explained away. Sometimes a would-be dictator
is laughed off as a political buffoon who shouldn't be taken seriously.
While it is happening, no one can quite believe that they are on the
road to serfdom.
I might have skipped mention of this piece but wanted to save this
paragraph-plus (more explicitly blood-thirsty than Tom Cotton's famous
op-ed) for posterity:
On Monday, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Trump acolyte,
offered a typical Republican response to the protests when he called
for all the lethal tools of the global war on terror to be brought
home and turned on American protesters. "Now that we clearly see
Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the
Middle East?" Gaetz tweeted Monday. Twitter restricted access to the
Gaetz tweet, labeling it a glorification of violence.
By advocating for an end to the rule of law, Republicans like
Gaetz will find themselves surviving at the whim of Trump. That's
when the jokes about drones and Gitmo won't seem so funny to them.
David Roberts:
The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's
values: America has values? The New York Times should decide what
they are? I agree that Cotton's proposal to flood American cities with
the same troops that tried so fitfully to quell protests in Baghdad
is something one should oppose, but by recent evidence it's hard to
say what he's proposing is un-American. For a couple more general
pieces that take off from the Cotton op-ed:
Travis Sawchik:
Do baseball's labor fights drive away fans? Well, Well, I used to
read box scores every day, but haven't followed MLB at all since the
1994 lockout. That's just one data point, but it's a pretty hard one.
The article refers to "the 1994-95 strike," but all I remember is the
owners' lockout, and that's where I put all the blame. Walter M Shaub Jr:
Ransacking the Republic. Isaac Stanley-Becker:
Fox News removes manipulated images from coverage of Seattle protests.
Jennifer Steinhauer:
Trump's actions rattle the military world: 'I can't support the man':
"The president's threat to use troops against largely peaceful protesters,
as well as other attempts to politicize the military, have unsettled a
number of current and former members and their families." Mark Joseph Stern:
Republicans attack Republican official for expanding voting access. Taylor Telford:
Democrat accuses OSHA of being 'invisible' while infections rise among
essential workers. One would think that OSHA would be the key agency
consulted on all questions having to do with re-opening businesses.
As of Thursday, infections tied to meat plants had surpassed 18,500 and
worker deaths were approaching 70, according to the Midwest Center for
Investigative Reporting, which is tracking industry outbreaks through
local news reports. Grocery workers have been similarly hit hard, with
more than 5,500 testing positive for the coronavirus and more than 100
dying of covid-19, the disease the virus causes, The Washington Post
has reported. Front-line health-care workers have gotten sick in even
greater numbers, with more than 60,000 infected and more than 300 dying
of covid-19, according to new CDC data.
Alex S Vitale:
"Policing is fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our
exploitation": An interview by Mike Uetricht with Vitale, who wrote
The End of Policing back in 2017. Alex Ward:
Erik Wemple:
Forgive Tucker Carlson for his panicky desperation. His world is
collapsing. I don't watch his show, but clips I've seen recently
are extremely unhinged. Also see:
Matthew Yglesias:
Study: Police killings traumatize high school students and hurt academic
performance.
Study suggests Democrats should be running more ads about Biden, fewer
about Trump. What I'd rather see is more ads that work for the whole
party, not just Biden vs. Trump. The Democratic majority in the House,
for instance, has passed a lot of bills that Republicans killed in the
Senate, so those are good opportunities to compare parties. You can
also point out differences between states with Democrats in power vs.
Republican-run states, especially on metrics like how many people don't
have health insurance. I don't see that running a lot of ads on how
Biden's going to lead us to the promised land will have much traction,
although you do want to suggest that you're not embarrassed by him as
nominee (although I rather am).
Joe Biden has a really big lead in the polls. Compares his recent
polls to Clinton's in 2016. The thing that always struck me about 2016
was that no matter how low Trump sunk, Clinton never could hit, let
along top, 50%. ("Even on October 18, Clinton was only at 46 percent
in the polls with Trump doing terribly at 39 and plenty of undecided
and third-party voters.") The CNN poll not only gives Biden a 14 point
margin, his actual figure is 55%. Li Zhou:
"The protesters had to deescalate the police": Demonstrators are the
ones defusing violence at protests.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Monday, June 8, 2020
Weekend Roundup
While this week was unfolding, I've been reading a book by Sarah
Kendzior: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and
the Erosion of America. She is a journalist based in St. Louis,
with a Ph.D. in anthropology and a specialty in post-Soviet Central
Asia and its descent into mafia capitalism and oligarchy. She sees
Trump as part of a vast criminal enterprise, anchored in Russia,
which she insists on describing as "hostile to America." I think
she has that analysis ass-backwards. Capitalism's driving force
everywhere is greed, which constantly pushes the limits of custom
and law. The only thing that separates capitalists from criminals
is a democratic state that regulates business and enforces limits
on destructive greed. The former Soviet Union failed to do that,
but the United States has a checkered history as well, with the
major entrepreneurs of the 19th century known as Robber Barons,
and a sustained conservative assault on the regulatory state at
least since 1980. Trump may be closer to the Russian oligarchs
than most American capitalists because of his constant need to
raise capital abroad, but he is hardly Putin's stooge. Rather,
they share a common desire to suppress democratic regulation of
capital everywhere, as well as an itch for suppressing dissent.
Arguing that the latter is anti-American (treason even) ignores
the fact that that's a big part of the program of the reigning
political party in the US.
Kendzior's arguments in this regard annoy me so much I could go
on, explaining why the supposed US-Russia rivalry is based on false
assumptions, and why Democrats are hurting themselves by obsessing
on the Trump/Russia connection. I was, after all, tempted at several
points to give up on the book. But I stuck with it: it's short, and
anyone who despises Trump that much is bound to have some points.
Also, I lived in St. Louis a few years myself, so was curious what
she had to say about her battleground state. My interest paid off
with her discussion of the 2014 protests against police brutality
in Ferguson, a majority-black suburb just north of St. Louis with
a predominantly white police force that was largely self-funded by
arrests and fines. This is history, but it's also today in microcosm
(pp. 164-166):
Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of
proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what
media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis,
we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning,
because [Michael] Brown's death is part of a continuum of criminal
impunity by the police toward St. Louis black residents. There is no
real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis,
there is no justice, only sequels.
Outside of St. Louis, Ferguson is shorthand for violence and
dysfunction. When I go to foreign countries that do not know what
St. Louis is, I sometimes joke, darkly, that I'm from a "suburb of
Ferguson." People respond like they are meting a witness of a war
zone, because that is what they saw on TV and on the internet. What
they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights
protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because
in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice,
and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains. The
criminal impunity many Americans are only discovering now -- through
the Trump administration -- had always structured the system for black
residents of St. Louis County, who had learned to expect a rigged and
brutal system but refused to accept it.
In the beginning, there was hope that police would restrain
themselves because of the volume of witnesses. But there was no
incentive for them to do so: no punishment locally, and no
repercussions nationally. Militarized police aggression happened
nearly every night, transforming an already traumatic situation into a
showcase of abuse. The police routinely used tear gas and rubber
bullets. They arrested local officials, clergy, and journalists for
things like stepping off the sidewalk. They did not care who witnessed
their behavior, even though they knew the world was
watching. Livestream videographers filmed the chaos minute by minute
for an audience of millions. #Ferguson, the hashtag, was born, and the
Twitter followings of those covering the chaos rose into the tens of
thousands. But the documentation did not stop the brutality. Instead,
clips were used by opponents of the protesters to try to create an
impression of constant "riots" that in reality did not occur. The
vandalism and arson shown on cable news in an endless loop were
limited to a few nights and took place on only a few streets.
National media had pounced on St. Louis, parachuting in when a
camera-ready crisis was rumored to be impending, leaving when the
protests were peaceful and tame. Some TV crews did not bother to hide
their glee at the prospect of what I heard one deem a real-life Hunger
Games, among other flippant and cruel comments. The original protests,
which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis
system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town
activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not
necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led
to disorienting and insulting coverage. Tabloid hype began to
overshadow the tragedy. Spectators arrived from so many points of
origins that the St. Louis Arch felt like a magnet pulling in fringe
groups from around the country: Anonymous and the Oath Keepers and the
Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist
Party and celebrities who claimed they were out of deep concern and
not to get on television. Almost none of the celebrities ever
returned.
In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw
grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their
eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would
well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community,
others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as
any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it
was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it
was a peace born of ignorance. It was a loss that was hard to convey
to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson
protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are
two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on
TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I
would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my
representative, and I would explain: "But they gassed my
representative too."
By the way, here are the latest section heads (as of 7:37 PM CDT
Sunday) in The New York Times'
Live Updates on George Floyd Protests:
- Majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledges to dismantle the
Police Department
- Trump sends National Guard troops home
- New York's mayor pledges to cut police funding and spend more on
social services
- Democratic lawmakers push for accountability, but shy away from
calls to defund the police
- Barr says he sees no systemic racism in law enforcement
- Romney joins protesters in Washington.
- Protesters march through Manhattan, calling for an end to police
violence.
- Thousands turn out in Spokane, Wa., to protest "a virus that's
been going on for 400 years."
- Biden will meet with the family of George Floyd in Houston.
- The view from above: aerial images of protests across the
country.
[link]
- A Confederate status is pulled down during a protest in Virginia
- Global protests against racism gain momentum.
- An officer shot an anti-bias expert who was trying to end a clash
at a protest in San Jose, Calif.
A couple items there look like major breaks with the past. While
the "progressive" mayors of Minneapolis and New York seems to have
spent much of the last week being intimidated by the police forces
that supposedly work for them, the balance of political forces in
both cities may have shifted to viewing the police as the problem,
not the solution. I started off being pretty skeptical of the
protests, and indeed haven't been tempted to join them. But it
does appear that they're making remarkable progress. And while I
abhor any violence associated with the protests, one should never
allow such noise to distract from the core issue of the protests.
Indeed, given that so much of the violence the media likes to
dwell on is directly caused by the police and the government's
other paramilitary forces, it's hard not to see that the only
way this ever gets resolved is by restoring trust and justice --
which is to say, by radically reforming how policing is done in
America.
I expected such sprawl at the start of the week that I decided not
to bother organizing sublists. Still, some fell out during the process,
but I haven't gone back and organized as many as might make sense.
In particular, there are several scattered pieces on the "jobs
report": the one by Robert J Shapiro is the most important, but I
got to it after several others.
This wound up running a day late. Only a couple links below came
out on Monday, and I tried to only pick ones that added to stories
I already had (e.g., I added Yglesias' piece on economic reporting,
but didn't pick up the one on Biden's polling).
Here's a piece of artwork from
Ram Lama Hull occasioned
by the recent demonstrations. I pulled this particular one (out of
many) from his
Facebook page.
Some are also on
Imgur.
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that has come up a lot
recently, as it makes it very difficult to hold police officers
liable for their acts, even the use of excessive or deadly force.
For example:
Parting tweet (from Angela Belcamino):
Who else but Trump could bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 Great
Depression, and the 1968 race riots all in one year?
Some scattered links this week:
Anne Applebaum:
History will judge the complicit: "Why have Republican leaders
abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous
president?" Why does she think "Republican leaders" have principles
any different from their president? Applebaum is especially concerned
about Lindsay Graham. I can't find the reference, but have a clear
memory of Graham, when he was in the House in the 1990s, explaining
that Republicans have to secure as many long-term posts of power as
possible, before demographic changes make it impossible for R's to
win fair elections. So he was always a practical, anti-democratic
schemer. Back in 2016, Trump may have offended his sense of what's
possible, but by winning he sealed his case, and won Graham over.
Applebaum asks, "what would it take for Republican leaders to admit
to themselves that Trump's loyalty cult is destroying the country
they claim to love?" The answer is catastrophic defeat at the polls,
so bad it sweeps all of them out of office. Losing the Senate seats
of Graham and McConnell in 2020 would be a good start. David Atkins/Dante Atkins:
Trump thought brutalizing protesters would save him. He was wrong.
"His gamble on creating a militarized culture war has done the opposite
of what he hoped for."
Even before the brutal killing of George Floyd by officers of the
Minneapolis Police Department, Trump knew that he would need to
maximize his culture war appeal to non-college whites to make up
ground lost to the faltering economy. There can be little doubt
that Trump saw opportunity in the protests that followed to dust
off the Nixon playbook, vowing to restore "law and order" in a
country furious that the law seemed to protect only some, while
enforcing a brutal order on others. If Trump's actions threatened
to turn the culture war into an active shooting war, that would
just be collateral damage on the road to his political recovery.
The Trump orbit considers the iconography of jingoistic militarism
and the violent suppression of protest to be a political winner. . . .
Trump, like Nixon before him, uses "law and order" as a way of "talking
about race without talking about race." In this narrative, a president
who supports American "traditional culture" and stands strong against
people who agitate for racial justice will win over a "silent majority"
of people who just don't want to be disturbed and want to have some
peace and quiet from their politics. . . .
In one sense, [Trump]'s right: people are exhausted with chaos, and
they do want a respect for law and order. The problem for Trump? The
chaos is in large part of his own making, and insofar as it isn't,
he's in the way of solving the problems created by institutional
racism and overlapping hierarchies of oppression. The massive wave
of police brutality has woken even many previously disengaged white
people up to the need for true equality under the law, and an order
in which everyone, including police and the president, are held to
account. And many of the same people Trump is trying to persuade now
believe that kicking him out of the White House is a necessary
prerequisite for making that vision a reality.
Dean Baker:
The jobs report was good, but the economy is still bad. But see
Shapiro, below. Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Katie Rogers/Zolan Kanno-Youngs/Katie
Benner:
How Trump's idea for a photo op led to havoc in a park. Kevin Baron:
Trump finally gets the war he wanted. Katelyn Burns:
John Cassidy:
Trump represents a bigger threat than ever to US democracy. Sean Collins:
Tray Connor/Lisa Khoury:
Every Buffalo cop in elite unit quits to back officers who shoved
elderly man to ground. Two officers were suspended for attacking
a 75-year-old protester, cracking his head against the ground and
leaving him bleeding. Fifty-seven quit to protest the suspensions. Mark Danner:
Moving backward: Hypocrisy and human rights. Derek Davison/Alex Thurston:
Expect more military "liberal interventionism" under a Joe Biden
presidency: My first instinct was to play this down, but the sheer
number of likely foreign policy mandarins mentioned, as well as Biden's
alleged desire to hire anti-Trump Republicans, makes me nervous. One
reason I doubt we'll see more interventionism is that I think the
current generation of military leaders, many burned from Afghanistan
and Iraq (and Syria and Libya), are likely to resist -- especially
pleas on "humanitarian" grounds. Also, as I recall, Biden pushed for
a more minimal policy in Afghanistan under Obama. On the other hand,
his career in Congress always supported the hawks. People do tend
to get more cautious with age, so there's that. But I do agree there
is reason to fret over his personnel decisions. Elizabeth Dwoskin/Nitasha Tiku:
Facebook employees said they were 'caught in an abusive relationship'
with Trump as internal debates raged. Ariel Dorfman:
Trump isn't a dictator. But he has a dictator's sense of impunity.
Rob Eshman:
What the old Jewish radical taught me about George Floyd: Our friend,
Marsha Steinberg. Franklin Foer:
The foundations of the Trump regime are starting to crumble.
Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his
authoritarian instincts -- and now he's meeting the common fate of
autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is
witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a
nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad
societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia,
and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milosevic, Yanukovych,
and Ben Ali.
Matt Ford:
The police were a mistake: "Law enforcement agencies have become the
standing armies that the Founders feared." Masha Gessen:
Donald Trump's fascist performance.
Donald Trump thinks power looks like masked men in combat uniforms lined
up in front of the marble columns of the Lincoln Memorial. He thinks it
looks like Black Hawk helicopters hovering so low over protesters that
they chop off the tops of trees. He thinks it looks like troops using
tear gas to clear a plaza for a photo op. He thinks it looks like him
hoisting a Bible in his raised right hand.
Trump thinks power sounds like this: "Our country always wins. That
is why I am taking immediate Presidential action to stop the violence
and restore security and safety in America . . . dominate the streets . . .
establish an overwhelming law-enforcement presence. . . . If a city or
state refuses . . . I will deploy the United States military and quickly
solve the problem for them. . . . We are putting everybody on warning. . . .
One law and order and that is what it is. One law -- we have one beautiful
law." To Trump, power sounds like the word "dominate," repeated over and
over on a leaked call with governors.
Chip Gibbons:
Donald Trump's "Antifa" hysteria is absurd. But it's also very dangerous.
I have a lot of trouble with "antifa": I'm not sure they exist, but if
they do, I'm pretty sure they aren't part of the left -- which I'd define
as the movement to universalize equal rights, secure peace, and enhance
community through cooperation. Fascists hate the left for just these
reasons, but more often than not they also hate other people, often for
very arbitrary reasons (like race, religion, or favorite football teams).
So it stands to reason that there are people who don't have any particular
commitment to the left but still hate fascists -- because, well, hate
begets more hate. After all, we live in a society that still puts a lot
of stock in violence.
Susan B Glasser:
#Bunkerboy's photo-op war. Constance Grady:
A reading list to understand police brutality in America. Garrett M Graff:
The story behind Bill Barr's unmarked federal agents. Also see:
Washington DC now controlled by gunmen under William Barr's command, and
William Barr's unaccountable nameless army suppresses dissent and
threatens democracy, which starts off with Chris Murphy tweeting
"We cannot tolerate an American secret police." Alisha Haridasani Gupta:
Why aren't we all talking about Breonna Taylor? Could be that this
particular case is complicated by the "war on drugs," which allowed
police to "serve a no-knock warrant" in the middle of the night, and
guns: she was killed after her boyfriend shot at a suspected intruder,
which turned out to be armed police who returned fire massively and
blindly (or at least that's how I understand it went down). As both
the reason for the break in and the firefight were deliberate choices
made by police, it's hard not to think that this could have been
handled differently, in a way where no one got shot, and it's hard
to dismiss the idea that racism didn't factor into those choices,
even if the police never saw the person they were killing. But doesn't
this also raise a key question about guns? A big part of the common
rationale for owning a gun is the idea that you can use it to defend
your home from invasion -- but clearly that doesn't work in cases
where the police are the invaders. Maybe that rationale isn't as
smart as its advocates think? Sean Illing:
Will he go? "A law professor fears a meltdown this November."
Interview with Lawrence Douglas, who has a book on this: Will He
Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. This strikes
me as something not worth worrying about now, although that anyone
can raise such questions reminds us that Trump has no regard for the
Constitution and the rule of law. I can't imagine that anyone in a
position of power would support Trump in spite of a clear electoral
defeat.
Why the policing problem isn't about "a few bad apples": "A former
prosecutor on the fundamental problem with law enforcement: 'The system
was designed this way.'" Interview with Paul Butler, Georgetown law
professor, former federal prosecutor, author of Chokehold: Policing
Black Men. Quinta Jurecic/Benjamin Wittes:
The law-enforcement abuses that don't bother Trump: "The president
believes that those who oppose him should be punished, but that those
who support him should be free to do as they please." Fred Kaplan:
Roge Karma:
Chris Hayes on how police treat black Americans like colonial subjects:
Interview with Hayes, who wrote a very clear book on the subject,
A Colony in a Nation.
We're seeing tactics of policing that are usually used on people that
are outside of view: pressure, harassment, and ultimately domination.
I think the word domination is so remarkable. The president has been
explicit on this: The goal is domination. And what does domination look
like? It looks like a knee on the neck. In fact, a boot to the neck is
like the oldest trope we have to represent domination and represent
tyranny. What is the flag of the colonies? It's a snake that reads,
"Don't tread on me." Do not step on me. Do not place your foot on me.
That is domination. And if you do, I will react.
Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman:
How Trump's demands for a full house in Charlotte derailed a
convention. Amit Katwala:
Sweden's coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed. Philip Kennicott:
The dystopian Lincoln Memorial photo raises a grim question: Will they
protect us, or will they shoot us? Catherine Kim:
Jen Kirby:
The disturbing history of how tear gas became the weapon of choice against
protesters: "The chemical weapon was originally marketed to police as
a way to turn protesters 'into a screaming mob.'" Interview with Anna
Feigenbaum, author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I
to the Streets of Today. Ezra Klein:
America at the breaking point: "The social upheaval of the 1960s
meets the political polarization and institutional dysfunction of the
present." I don't have time to write about this piece, but probably
should refer to it at some point when I finally try to sum up what's
going on. I've always hated the notion that the 1960s divided and
broke America. Rather, events exposed hypocrisies and weaknesses,
but rather than heal them, political reaction took over and turned
us into fantasists. That the same fractures have returned -- sure,
plus some new ones -- should remind us that failure to heal can only
be ignored for so long. Elizabeth Kolbert:
How Iceland beat the coronavirus. Paul Krugman:
Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon: "He -- and his party -- is much,
much worse." The subhed is critical, because is less the leader of his
party than the vessel into which fifty years of megalomania and cynicism
has been poured, the creature grown out of such vile soil. The first
comparison I recall between Trump and Nixon concerned their respective
convention acceptance speeches in 1968 and 2016: Nixon's was much more
concise, and much more cunning, a carefully constructed pitch to the
American people that exploited their feelings while betraying little of
Nixon's real ambitions, whereas Trump's was, despite being scripted, an
incoherent mess. Their presidencies have followed from those initial
premises, but they started out from different places, and to my mind
that makes Nixon more culpable for the ensuing disaster. In fact, when
Trump apes Nixon's law-and-order rants, he's not just repeating past
mistakes but testifying to Nixon's continued legacy. So I really don't
have much patience when liberals like Krugman point out that Nixon
put his signature to some pieces of progressive legislation (like the
Clean Air Act) that Trump has sought to trash. Nixon was smart enough
to bend with the wind, but he was also devious enough to put Donald
Rumsfeld in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and subvert
LBJ's "Great Society" programs from the inside.
Trump takes us to the brink: "Will weaponized racism destroy
America?" Heather Long/Andrew Van Dam:
The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968: "14
charts show how deep the economic gap is and how little it has changed
in decades. The covid-19 recession is also hitting black families and
business owners far harder than whites." German Lopez:
How violent protests against police brutality in the '60s and '90s
changed public opinion: "The backlash to unrest in the '60s gave
the country Richard Nixon, one study found. But we don't know if that
will apply today." One thing not noted here is that we tend to conflate
two different things when we remember "violence in the '60s": "race
riots" which flared up in various cities from 1965-68, most often in
response to local police acts; and the police riot against anti-war
demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Neither
of these should be framed as "protests against police brutality" --
sure, they were occasioned by and exemplified by police brutality,
but they weren't organized as protests. I've long felt that the
former were pent-up explosions of anger, a release of pressures
that had built up over decades of racism and impoverishment, as
I noted that it was very rare for any city to "riot" more than
once. Repeated experiences were prevented not by police dominance
but by community leaders organizing bases of political power.
(Also helpful were cases where white political leaders responded
by getting out into the streets and making their concerns visible,
as John Lindsay did in New York. RFK, campaigning in Indianapolis
when Martin Luther King was killed, was also effective as keeping
anger from turning into riot.) It is true that Nixon cultivated
a backlash against blacks and anti-war protesters, but one thing
that helped him was that he was out of office when the "violence"
happened, unlike Trump. Of course, Nixon was responsible for much
of the violence after he became president in 1969 -- in America,
and much, much more around the world.
How to reform American police, according to experts.
- Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse
- Police should be trained to address their racial biases
- Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force
- Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way
- On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change
- We need higher standards -- and better pay -- for police
- Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence
- We need better data to evaluate police and crime
Kate Maltby:
Viktor Orbán's masterplan to make Hungary greater again. Peter Manseau:
The Christian martyrdom movement ascends to the White House: "A
former professor of Kayleigh McEnany, Trump's new press secretary,
explores her enduring obsession with religious persecution and death." Branko Marcetic:
American authoritarianism runs deeper than Trump. Josh Marshall:
Dylan Matthews:
How today's protests compare to 1968, explained by a historian.
Interview with Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water:
The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Ian Millhiser:
Terry Nguyen:
There isn't a simple story about looting. Tim Noah:
Donald Trump is celebrating the wrong economic accomplishment: "The
president wants credit for a largely illusory blip of improvement in the
job market. He should be going all-in on the $600 sweeteners." Anna North/Catherine Kim:
These videos show the police aren't neutral. They're counterprotesters.
Osita Nwanevu:
Tom Cotton and the elite media's dalliance with illiberalism. The
New York Times published an op-ed by the Arkansas Republican called
Send in the troops, demanding that the US military "restore order" --
a task that same military has repeatedly failed to do in Afghanistan
and Iraq (indeed, a sober analysis would recognize that the US military
only made those situations worse, and not for lack of arms or brutality).
The Times justified printing Cotton with its commitment to airing "all"
voices (meaning conservative ones)
Alice Miranda Ollstein/Dan Goldberg:
Mass arrests jeopardizing the health of protesters, police. Richard A Oppel Jr/Lazaro Gamio:
Minneapolis police use force against black people at 7 times the rate
of whites. Alex Pareene:
The police take the side of white vigilantes: "Over the past week,
cops have shown that they share a coherent ideology." Daniel Politi:
Linda Qiu:
Trump's false claim that 'nobody has ever done' more for the black
community than he has: "The records of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon
B Johnson, among others, beg to differ." Assuming pre-Lincoln presidents
are ineligible, I thought it might be easier to list the ones who had
done less (or who had done more harm). Andrew Johnson was more blatantly
racist than practically anyone. And Woodrow Wilson did major harm in
segregating the federal government. But beyond that just makes my head
hurt. David Remnick:
An American uprising: "Who, really, is the agitator here?" Brian Resnick:
Rubber bullets may be "nonlethal," but they can still maim and kill:
"The dangers of 'nonlethal' police weapons -- like rubber bullets,
flash-bangs, and tear gas -- explained." As I recall, Israeli soldiers,
who use a lot of rubber bullets on Palestinians, like to aim for eyes.
The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world,
documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries
resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the
injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted
in blindness.
David Roberts:
The coronavirus crisis has revealed what Americans need most: Universal
basic services. Interview with Andrew Percy, co-author with Anna
Coote of The Case for Universal Basic Services. Katie Rogers:
Ivanka Trump blames 'cancel culture' after college pulls her commencement
speech: She was scheduled to address graduates of Wichita State
University "Tech." (What is this "Tech"? Looks like the former Wichita
Area Technical College [WATC], which is to say it it's not even the
real third-tier state college in Kansas. I attended WSU for a year
back when my only credential was a GED, and parlayed that into a
scholarship at a much fancier college. WATC was originally an adult
extension of the Wichita East High vocational program.) I'd like to
know more about how this got contracted (and what the kill fee is).
If Ivanka wanted to look for a prestige spot to speak, she settled
pretty low. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone there thinking
she's just what WSU Tech needed to burnish its image -- unless, of
course, one of the Kochs (who have a lot of pull at WSU) whispered
in their ears. How it got canceled is no mystery. It was such a
patently stupid idea, all it took was for one of the faculty to
circulate a petition, which damn near everyone signed. "Cancel
culture" is another new one for me (although evidently not for
Vox). Controversial figures often get scheduled for events
then canceled, but it's almost never due to a vogue for canceling.
Usually, some hidden power (like the Kochs) stomps on the autonomy
of some student group. Or sometimes, as in this case, a popular
uprising spoils some shady insider deal. For more, see Daniel
Caudill:
WSU Tech reverses course; Ivanka Trump will not be a commencement
speaker. Main additional piece of news here is that WSU Tech
President Sheree Utash "serves on the American Workforce Policy
Advisory board," giving her a connection to Ivanka, probably via
Mike Pompeo (Trump's Secretary of State, formerly US Representative
for Wichita area). Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker/Matt Zapotosky/Josh Dawsey:
With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump's strength --
but others see weakness. Also by Dawsey, with David Nakamura/Fenit
Nirappil:
'Vicious dogs' versus 'a scared man': Trump's feud with Bowser
escalates amid police brutality protests. Noam Scheiber/Farah Stockman/J David Goodman:
How police unions became such powerful opponents to reform efforts.
Michael Shank:
How police became paramilitaries.
That beat cops so often look like troops is not just a problem of
"optics." There is, in fact, a "positive and statistically significant
relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved
shootings," according to recent research. In other words, the more
militarized we allow law enforcement agents to become, the more likely
officers are to use lethal violence against citizens: civilian deaths
have been found to increase by about 130 percent when police forces
acquire significantly more military equipment. . . .
Law enforcement has, in fact, been training for a moment like this --
specifically by learning techniques and tactics from Israeli military
services. As Amnesty International has documented, law enforcement
officials from as far afield as Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts,
North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the D.C. Capitol have
traveled to Israel for such training. These programs, according to
research backed by Jewish Voice for Peace, focus on exchanging methods
of "mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest
and dissent."
Robert J Shapiro:
No, the unemployment rate didn't really drop in May: "Donald Trump
bragged about a bogus jobs number and defiled George Floyd's name in
the process." This strongly suggests that the BLS cooked the books to
give Trump a number (13.3% unemployment) he could brag about. This did
this by not counting 9 million people who weren't working but could be
construed as still having jobs (e.g., unpaid furloughed workers). The
true number is closer to 19.0%. Rebecca Solnit:
As the George Floyd protests continue, let's be clear where the violence
is coming from: "Using damage to property as cover, US police have
meted out shocking, indiscriminate brutality in the wake of the
uprising." Jeffrey St Clair:
Roaming charges: Mad bull, lost its way: I don't particularly like
him, and rarely read him, but some weeks deserve one of his laundry
lists, and he notices somethings that few other people do. For instance,
he dug up a headline from 2003: "Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to
freedom," adding: "Perhaps Rumsfeld will write an amicus brief on
behalf of the more than 10,000 protesters arrested for rioting,
looting and just pissing off cops." Yeganeh Torbati:
New Trump appointee to foreign aid agency has denounced liberal democracy
and 'our homo-empire': Meet "Merritt Corrigan, USAID's new deputy
White House liaison." Emily VanDerWerff:
America's contradictions are breaking wide open: "On Donald Trump,
standing outside a church, pretending to be strong." Vox's TV critic,
but isn't it all TV these days? Alex Ward:
Adam Weinstein:
This is fascism: "Trump is sending an unambiguous message to a country
in turmoil -- and his armed supporters, from cops to vigilantes, hear it
loud and clear." Philip Weiss:
Jordan Weissmann:
Here's what happens if Republicans let those $600 unemployment benefits
expire. Robin Wright:
Is American becoming a banana republic? Matthew Yglesias:
Gary Younge:
What Black America means to Europe. The size of the protests has
surprised me everywhere, but especially in Europe. Still, as a placard
in a photo here says, "The UK is not innocent."
George Floyd's killing comes at a moment when America's standing has
never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia,
ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump
epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects
of American power. . . . Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of
American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as
confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period.
It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed
with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office.
It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running
amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George
Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.
Li Zhou:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Weekend Roundup
Lot of articles below on the police killing of George Floyd in
Minneapolis, the demonstrations that have ensued, and reports of
violence (especially in Minneapolis). I have no idea how extensive
the violence is, let alone who's responsible for what, but I'm
skeptical of reports that the nation is being torn apart, let alone
that urban America is being reduced to rubble. I remember the riots
of the late 1960s, Kerner Commission Report, and the backlash Nixon
so profited from. I doubt this is anything like that, but should
also note that the degree of anger over this particular killing --
as you well know there have been dozens that have risen to cause
célčbre status, and hundreds that remain obscure. There was, for
instance, a completely peaceful demonstration here in Wichita that
drew some 2,000 people -- much more than I would have imagined.
(No link, as The Wichita Eagle won't let me get past the headline,
even with a subscription -- making it pointess to pass the link
along.) What does make the current situation worse than in the 1960s
is malignant lout in the White House, his toxic party, and their
deluded followers. We used to jeer LBJ with "how many kids did you
kill today?" but there's no point taunting Trump like that: not
only doesn't he care, he's likely to take it as a challenge.
Speaking of the dead, the coronavirus death count in the United
States topped
100,000 this week. It topped 10,000 on April 17, and 50,000 18 days
later, on April 25. It took 32 days from there to double. The lockdown
in Kansas has pretty much ended, although that makes me even more wary
of going out. I do, however, have a doctor appointment on Monday, and
have been assured they got their protocols together. May make a grocery
run as well, as we're low on pretty much everything.
When I got up this morning, I played Down in the Basement
(a "treasure trove of vintage 78s 1926-1937") and Maria Muldaur's
Garden of Joy. From the former, I was especially struck by the
continuing relevance of
Bessie Brown's "Song from a Cotton Field." The latter ends with
a 2009 remake of the Depression-era "The Panic Is On," with a new
line for Obama. Couldn't find a YouTube link, but here's
Spotify, if that helps. Here's the 1931 original, by
Hezekiah & Dorothy Jenkins; I'm more familiar with a later
version which drops the complaint about Prohibition and adds an
optimistic like about FDR -- on a compilation somewhere, can't find
the link now. I did find more recent ones: by
Loudon Wainwright III (2010);
Daddy Stovepipe (2013); and by
Matt Rivers (2013).
Some scattered links this week:
Jamelle Bouie:
Did you really think Trump would mourn with us:
The president's indifference to collective mourning is of a piece with
a political movement that denies our collective ties as well as the
obligations we have to each other. If Trump represents a radical political
solipsism, in which his is the only interest that exists, then it makes
all the sense in the world that neither he nor his allies would see or
even understand the need for public and collective mourning -- an activity
that heightens our vulnerability, centers our interconnectedness and
stands as a challenge to the politics of selfishness and domination.
Trump is following in Herbert Hoover's footsteps: "And we know
how that worked out." Well, yes and no. Hoover was smart and disciplined
and he was not without caring, but for some reason didn't believe he had
any options -- maybe because his super-rich Treasury Secretary Andrew
Mellon vetoed them. (Mellon served 12 years, so the old joke was that
three presidents served under him.) Trump has none of Hoover's virtues,
and even more remarkably neither do his principle advisers. Also
namechecking Hoover:
Philip Bump:
Trump just said what Republicans have been trying not to say for years:
"The president revealed his real concern about mail-in voting: He's worried
Republicans will lose more." Jane Coaston:
Trump's social media executive order, explained: "It won't hold up
in court. That's not the point." Also:
Sasha Abramsky:
Trump's Twitter tirade is the tantrum of a troll. Peter Baker/Daisuke Wakabayashi:
Trump's order on social media could harm one person in particular: Donald
Trump: "Without certain liability protections, companies like Twitter
would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the
boundaries -- like the president's." John Cassidy:
Trump's phony war with Twitter escalates: "If Twitter were to fact-check
all of President Trump's posts, he could significantly hamper his ability
to propagandize effectively." Not to mention, send him into an endless
recursive loop of rage. Shirin Ghaffary:
Twitter has finally started fact-checking Trump. Sara Morrison:
Section 230, the internet free speech law Trump wants to change,
explained. Alex Shephard:
Mark Zuckerberg comes to Trump's defense. Zeynep Tufecki:
Trump is doing all of this for Zuckerberg: "The new executive order
targeting social-media companies isn't really about Twitter."
Trump is unlikely to repeal Section 230 or take any real action to curb
the power of the major social-media companies. Instead, he wants to keep
things just the way they are and make sure that the red-carpet treatment
he has received so far, especially at Facebook, continues without
impediment. He definitely does not want substantial changes going into
the 2020 election. The secondary aim is to rile up his base against yet
another alleged enemy: this time Silicon Valley, because there needs to
be an endless list of targets in the midst of multiple failures. . . .
Playing the refs by browbeating them has long been a key move in the
right-wing playbook against traditional media. The method is simple: It
involves badgering them with accusations of unfairness and bias so that
they bend over backwards to accommodate a "both sides" narrative even
when the sides were behaving very differently, or when one side was not
grounded in fact. Climate-change deniers funded by fossil-fuel companies
effectively used this strategy for decades, relying on journalists'
training and instinct to equate objectivity with representing both
sides of a story. This way of operating persisted even when one of the
sides was mostly bankrolled by the fossil-fuel industry while the other
was a near-unanimous consensus of independent experts and academics.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
Well done, Twitter. You've finally figured out how to deal with Trump's
tweets. Matt Ford:
Trump's one constant is a fetish for bloodshed: "Violence is the
last refuge of the incompetent, and the president has bunkered down."
Aside from the notes on bullies and cowards, I note this Trump tweet:
"It makes me feel so good to hit 'sleazebags' back -- much better than
seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!)." Assuming that seeing a
shrink is supposed to make you feel better only makes sense when you
realize that he has no capacity for self-reflection, in which case
his denial is not just vanity (something he has tons of) but also an
implicit recognition of his emptiness. Makes me wonder how terrifying
it is to know you know nothing of yourself. Cindy Forster:
Bolivia's post-coup president has unleashed a campaign of terror. Susan B Glasser:
Trump plays macho man as America burns.
The most mendacious president in US history: "On Trump, his Twitter
lies, and why it's getting worse."
From the start of his Administration, his tweets have been an open-source
intelligence boon, a window directly into the President's needy id, and a
real-time guide to his obsessions and intentions. Misinformation,
disinformation, and outright lies were always central to his politics.
In recent months, however, his tweeting appears to have taken an even
darker, more manic, and more mendacious turn, as Trump struggles to manage
the convergence of a massive public-health crisis and a simultaneous
economic collapse while running for reëlection. He is tweeting more
frequently, and more frantically, as events have closed in on him.
Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the
coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner,
angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy
theories about the "deep state" and media enemies such as Scarborough
while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.
Glasser refers to a piece by former Trump ghost-writer Tony
Schwartz:
The psychopath in chief, which she sums up:
[Schwartz] argues that the Presidency has transformed Trump from an
attention-seeking narcissist, who spent decades lying about his golf
trophies, his sex life, and his real-estate properties, into an
ends-justify-the-means ruler who has increasingly and ominously
escalated his lies and extreme behavior. Many of Trump's lies, Schwartz
argues, come from his grandiose misconception of his own knowledge and
powers, including his bragging that he knows more "than anyone" about
ISIS, drones, social media, campaign finance, technology, polls, courts,
lawsuits, politicians, trade, renewable energy, infrastructure,
construction, nuclear weapons, banks, tax laws, the economy, and, during
the pandemic, medicine. "His obsession with domination and power have
prompted Trump to tell lies more promiscuously than ever since he became
President, and to engage in ever more unfounded and aggressive responses
aimed at anyone he perceives stands in his way," Schwartz wrote.
Glasser also reviews a forthcoming book by the Washington Post's Fact
Checker staff, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth. Katie Glueck:
Kris Kobach is back, and a Kansas Senate seat may be up for grabs:
From where I sit, it looks to me like Roger Marshall has sewn up the
Senate nomination, although his stunt aping Trump and forcing his whole
family to take hydroxychloroquine makes me question his sanity. Kobach,
having failed to get a Trump admin job (other than the "voter fraud"
commission that he ran into the ground), and having failed to win his
governor race, strikes me as damaged goods (like Roy Moore in Alabama,
who after losing the special election dropped to fourth in the Senate
primary this year). Admittedly, Kobach is bad enough to worry about,
but so is Marshall and the rest of the field. I'm not impressed by
Barbara Bollier, but we'll take whatever we can get. Erica L Green:
Over veterans' protests, Trump vetoes measure to block student loan
rules. Chris Hedges:
The coming collapse: "It is impossible for any doomed population to
grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is
on the eve of implosion." Sheila Kaplan/Matthew Goldstein/Alexandra Stevenson:
Trump's vaccine chief has vast ties to drug industry, posing possible
conflicts: Moncef Slaoui: a venture capitalist, former executive
at GlaxoSmithKline, a board member of Moderna. Catherine Kim:
The fatal arrest of George Floyd, a black man kneed in the neck by
police, explained. As one section here notes, "the history of
police brutality against the black community is long and repetitive."
This event, following recent killings of
Ahmaud Arbery and
Breonna Taylor, led quickly to protests and more. Also see:
Karen Attiah:
How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another
country. Later I saw a Tony Karon tweet that suggests the answer to
this question is that they'd dub the demonstration "the American spring."
Radley Balko:
White people can compartmentalize police brutality. Black people don't
have the luxury. Katelyn Burns:
Trump responded to the protests by lashing out at antifa, the media,
and Democrats. Is there anything Trump doesn't blame on "his
favorite political punching bags"? Trump has gone on to
tweet: "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA
as a Terrorist Organization." I don't see how he can do that, not
just because the law only applies to foreign organizations, but also
it's not clear that "antifa" is an organization at all. More ominously,
Attorney General William Barr "announced that the federal law enforcement
will activate the 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to apprehend
and charge what he described as 'violent radical agitators.'" Using the
FBI to investigate and harass political "enemies" was common back when
J Edgar Hoover ran the agency, so I can't say his move is unprecedented,
but it is extremely repugnant to the Constitution and democracy. On the
other hand, if you do want to tackle "domestic terrorism," be aware that
virtually all of the threats are on the right.
Police targeted journalists covering the George Floyd protests.
The racist history of Trump's "When the looting starts, the shooting
starts" tweet. Paul Butler: Law professor, former federal prosecutor,
author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men:
Jonathan Chait:
Trump's plan to end Obama's peaceful police reform succeeded. Zak Cheney-Rice:
The lies we tell about riots: "How America mystifies the wages of
racism." Jelani Cobb:
The death of George Floyd, in context. Sean Collins:
Matthew Dessem:
Police erupt in violence nationwide. Shane Harris:
Officials blame outsiders for violence in Minnesota but contradict one
another on who is responsible. Derek Hawkins:
Officer charged in George Floyd's death used fatal force before and had
history of complaints. Rebecca Heilweil:
Feds flew an unarmed Predator drone over Minneapolis protests to provide
"situational awareness". Jason Johnson:
What we're missing when we condemn "violence" at protests.
Which brings us to perhaps the most important thing to understand about
how to watch protests: the context of what kind of protest garners police
response. Over the past three months, the 24-hour cable networks have
extensively covered mostly white armed men and women threatening police
and politicians at state capitols across the nation over coronavirus
lockdown policies.
How often have you seen police in riot gear? In fact, police seldom
use force or even present in force (protest shields, black helmets, etc.)
when conservative or right-wing groups protest. When is the last time you
saw a group of anti-abortion activists get tear-gassed? Yet left-leaning
groups, and especially groups of minorities, their protests are often met
with shows of force. Right-wing groups spit in the faces of police in
regular gear in Michigan, while SWAT teams show up like Storm Troopers
to chanting teens in Minneapolis.
John Judis:
Violent protests could be a gift to Trump: This is an obvious fear
many of us have, especially those of us who remember how Nixon exploited
the urban "riots" of the late 1960s. It also seems to be much on the
minds of pro-Trump media today, who have come out in force to spread
their take on whatever is happening. Personally, I don't see much to
gain from demonstrating at this point: the key message is getting out
more effectively via social media, and the Minneapolis city government
(if not the police) seems to be responding constructively. On the other
hand, if you must have a villain for the "riots," how about Trump? For
a better take also at TPM, see Josh Marshall:
The gang leader as president. Kim Kelly:
No more cop unions: I'll file this here because many of the examples
of how police unions have saved their members from responsibility for
acts of violence against the public come from Minneapolis. Of course,
I don't believe that police should not be allowed to join a union. But
there is much evidence of such unions behaving badly, from supporting
Republicans (which proved to be a fatal mistake in Wisconsin) to bending
policy for their own temperament. Catherine Kim:
Daniel Kreps:
Killer Mike delivers emotional speech to Atlanta protestors at Mayor's
press conference. Robert Christgau tweeted a link to this. When I
returned, the top item on my feed was by an Ali Velshi: "I'm hit in the
leg by a rubber bullet but am fine. State Police supported by National
Guard fired unprovoked into an entirely peaceful rally." Nancy LeTourneau:
In Minneapolis, a police union gone rogue. Dahlia Lithwick:
Whether the president understands the racist history of "looting and
shooting" is beside the point. German Lopez:
Former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin charged with murder in the death
of George Floyd. Media Matters:
Fox News hosts racist former detective Mark Fuhrman to analyze protests
following George Floyd's killing. Also:
Lou Dobbs blames "black churches," "black teachers and leaders" for
Minneapolis protests. Blake Montgomery:
After George Floyd's death, Klobuchar faces scrutiny over record on
police brutality. On the other hand, see Igor Derysh:
Amy Klobuchar denies that she failed to prosecute former officer who
kneeled on George Floyd's neck. Mark P Nevitt:
Trump cannot legally use "looting" to justify "shooting". Michele L Norris:
How Amy Cooper and George Floyd represent two versions of racism that
black Americans face every day. Tess Owen:
Far-right extremists are hoping to turn the George Floyd protests into
a new civil war. Matt Purple:
Maybe we should stop giving the Minneapolis police military equipment.
Dylan Scott:
Ryu Spaeth:
America's social contract is broken: "The protests across the country
are about more than police violence." Alice Speri/Alleen Brown/Mara Hvistendahl:
The George Floyd killing in Minneapolis exposes the failures of police
reform. Emily Stewart:
George Floyd's killing has opened the wounds of centuries of American
racism. Alex S Vitale:
The answer to police violence is not 'reform.' It's defunding. Here's
why. "Bias training, body cameras, community dialogues -- Minneapolis
has tried them all." Maybe the 30% of the city budget that the police
suck up isn't the best way to use that money? Benjamin Wallace-Wells:
The intolerable tensions between American cities and their police forces.
Alex Ward:
"Directly at us": Louisville law enforcement shoots reporters with pepper
bullets. Matt Zapotosky/Isaac Stanley-Becker:
Gripped by disease, unemployment and outrage at the police, America
plunges into crisis. Li Zhou:
"We're a country with an open wound": Joe Biden condemns the police killing
of George Floyd. David Badash:
'Absolute vacuum in leadership': Internet sheds 'coward' Trump for hiding
as 75 cities protest. Assembled from tweets, the least original being
"We don't have a president" and "Hitler hid in a bunker too." My favorite:
Kind of like those FDR Fireside Chats.
You know, without the inspiration, empathy, concern, sacrifice, honesty,
integrity, and 3-syllable words.
Common Dreams:
Michigan sheriff and police didn't use harsh tactics to control Flint
Township's protest -- they laid down their batons and joined it. Jen Kirby:
Trump's purge of inspectors general, explained: "In an unprecedented
move, Trump has fired or sidelined at least five watchdogs in recent
weeks." Ezra Klein:
The vital missing piece of the Democrats' stimulus bill: "If the
rule House Democrats followed doesn't allow enough spending, what use
is their rule?" What's missing is automatic stabilizers, so in the
future something like a rise in unemployment will automatically be
met with funding for unemployment insurance. The rule that prevents
this is one the Democratic leadership foolishly adopted when they
took over the House in 2019, meant to show that they're responsible
about deficits. However, if we've learned one thing about economics
over the last century, it's that deficit spending is the only way
to reduce the tragedy of economic catastrophe. David Klion:
David Frum's hold over the center: "The Never Trumpers styled themselves
as critics of the GOP. Instead, they built up power over liberals." Review
of Frum's latest essay collection, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American
Democracy. For another review, see:
Joe Klein:
David Frum rethinks conservatism. Actually, one thing that I've found
is that Frum remains very entrenched in certain parts of conservatism. For
example:
He proposes a political trade: a severe tightening of immigration
rules in return for the passage of much-needed social and climate
legislation -- a comprehensive national health care system, a carbon
tax (that would include products imported from polluters like China
and India). "If Democrats want to perpetuate their health care reforms,
they must do a better job of solidifying a sense of national belonging.
If Republicans want to safeguard the border, they must offer a better
deal to those living on that border's American side."
I might take such a deal, especially if I could stipulate that the
immigration limits were combined with a program to legitimate all or
most currently undocumented immigrants. But I doubt Republicans would
offer any such deal, because they're more committed to blocking health
care reform and limits on global warming than they really care about
immigration limits. Mike Konczal:
Unemployment insurance is a vital part of economic freedom. Paul Krugman:
Jon Letman:
Trump boosts nuclear weapons spending, fueling a new arms race. Eric Levitz:
GOP vows to kill only thing keeping economy (and Trump) afloat:
Enhanced unemployment benefits: the spectre of workers laid off due to
the pandemic not feeling the pinch of starvation enough to settle for
even lower-wage jobs. Douglas London:
How John Brennan and Mike Pompeo left the US blind to Saudi problems.
Mujib Mashal:
How the Taliban outlasted a superpower: tenacity and courage. Ian Millhiser:
Timothy Noah:
The Trump administratio has abandoned worker safety at the worst
moment. Alex Pareene:
The crumbling cult of Jamie Dimon: "Dimon is a serial Noticer That
Things Could Be Better, but he has always remained quite vague on why
those things could be better or what might be required to improve them."
That much, plus being extremely rich, seems to pass for profundity these
days. I once wrote that "Barack Obama is so conservative he cannot even
imagine a world where Jamie Dimon isn't CEO of a major Wall Street bank."
Obama, you may recall, demanded a major shake up at GM as part of the
price for a bailout, but never pushed to change a head on Wall Street. Heather Digby Parton:
Trump opposes masks because culture war nihilism is his last lie of
defense. Jeremy W Peters:
They predicted 'The Crisis of 2020' . . . in 1991. So how does this end?
Recalls two scholars, William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose 1991 book
Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, tried
to work out a cyclical view of American history, based on 80-year cycles
broken up into 20-year phases. They later published a somewhat shorter
similar sequel, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What the
Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous With Destiny
(paperback, 1997), which is still in print. The fourth phase of these
cycles is "crisis," which they projected to come to a head in 2020,
right about now. This is not far removed from the "four eras" schema
I've been writing about -- their turning points line up with 1780,
1860, 1940, and 2020, whereas mine are 1800, 1860, 1932, 1980, and
(most likely) 2020. Michael Pollan:
The sickness in our food supply: Explains, among much else, why
some farmers are dumping milk, eggs, and chickens, even with grocery
store shelves bare. That's just the way the industry is organized,
for maximum profit, until it breaks. James Poniewozik:
CNN arrest is what actual censorship looks like. David Roberts:
Joe Biden has a chance to make history on climate change: "All he has
to do is embrace the consensus that's waiting for him." Aaron Rupar:
Trump dismisses his own government's guidance about masks as "politically
correct": "Trump's latest unhinged news conference illustrates why
he's no longer doing daily coronavirus briefings."
"Human capital stock": White House adviser Kevin Hassett uses dehumanizing
term for US workers. I'm not a big fan of taking an unfortunate turn
of phrase and blowing it up into a story, but this is pretty egregious,
as well as revealing. He could have said "our workers are ready to get
back to work," and all we'd be questioning is whether that's really true.
He could have said "workforce," and while the abstraction is creepier and
dehumanizing, we'd probably let is pass. It's true that some economists
and businessfolk like to talk about "human capital," but that's usually
to posit a human alternative to other forms of capital, and even there it
suggests that people's skills and "know how" can be owned as an asset --
something that most of us reject. However, "stock" is where this gets
really insulting: a word usually used for animals (e.g. livestock). One
could say "our bovine capital stock is ready to be eaten," but who the
fuck actually talks like that? That's a question I doubt anyone has
asked before, but now we have an answer: Trump economic adviser.
Packing 20,000 people into an arena for the RNC is a bad idea. Trump
wants it to happen anyway. Robert J Shapiro:
The economic recovery will be a whimper, not a bang: "Many economists,
including some liberals, are predicting a strong comeback by November.
They are using the wrong models." Felicia Sonmez:
Graham urges senior judges to step aside before November election so
Republicans can fill vacancies. Always scheming. Joseph E Stiglitz:
Argentina and the future of finance capitalism. Alex Thompson:
Famed Democratic pollster: Warren as VP would lead to Biden victory:
That's what Stan Greenberg says. Andrew Van Dam:
The unluckiest generation in US history: "Millennials have faced the
worst economic odds, and many will never recover." As I recall, it was
baseball mogul Branch Rickey who said, "luck is the residue of design."
What me meant was built strong, deep teams, and luck will break your way.
The converse also applies: the more fundamental weaknesses you have, the
more likely luck will turn against you. The long-term trends of the last
20-40 years have been: the rich have gotten much richer; safety nets have
eroded, so most people are at greater risk should something bad happen;
and bad events have become more frequent due to war, climate change, and
lack of infrastructure investment. Those are trends that are hard to
notice as they're happening, only becoming evident when things break bad.
At first that may look like luck, but deeper down lies design. Peter Wade:
In a disturbing rant, Trump says protesters 'would have been greeted
with the most vicious dogs'. What is it with Trump and dogs? Alex Ward:
Matthew Yglesias:
Household income surged in April despite the collapsing labor market.
For once, you should thank the Democrats for that. When the stock market
collapsed, Trump and the Republicans were desperate to inject cash into
the collapsing economy -- especially those $1200 checks with Trump's name
on them. Democrats went along, but only after insisting on funding the
unemployment insurance system, including broader eligibility and a $600
per week supplement, which meant that some laid-off workers actually came
out ahead. That was absolutely the right thing to do, and Republicans went
along with it only because it was bound to their own poorly thought out
plan. It's clear now that the "stimulus" didn't save the economy -- most
of the money went into savings or debt reduction -- but it did help a lot
of people. Thank the Democrats for that. And expect the Republicans to
revert to form as the economy opens up slowly, and actually does need a
shot of stimulus spending.
CNN reporter Omar Jimenez arrested live on air in Minneapolis.
Twitter flags Trump for "glorifying violence" in "looting starts, shooting
starts" tweet.
Let Hong Kong move to America: "Visas could do more than sanctions
to help Hong Kong and punish China." Contrast this with Jen Kirby:
Trump says he will revoke Hong Kong's special trade status. I don't
see how Trump's threat does anything but force Hong Kong ever deeper
under China's thumb. On the other hand, I'm not wild about Yglesias's
plan either. Reminds me of the special visa class that has allowed
right-wing Cubans to flood the country, warping any chance of ever
normalizing relations with Cuba, while sticking us with right-wing
political operatives like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
The US should prioritize reopening schools, not salons and restaurants.
Joe Biden has a plan for that: "Not a joke, folks: He's running
on a transformative policy agenda." Most of these points have substance
while falling short of what Sanders (or for that matter Warren) proposed.
The weakest area remains health care, where he wants a "public option"
in what's probably a vain hope of reducing public costs by making the
marketplace more competitive.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Weekend Roundup
Robert Christgau wrote an impassioned piece last week on why it matters
for people to vote for Biden and the Democrats against Trump and the
Republicans in November. You can find it
here and
here -- scroll down to the last question and answer. I agree
substantively, but have a few quibbles.
First, I gagged on the phrase "criminally stupid." Stupid, maybe,
but that isn't (and shouldn't be) a crime. Gauging the importance of
any election requires both a lot of information and a good sense of
political dynamics over time. How difficult it is should be clear
from our different estimates and prognoses of what a Trump victory
would mean. (Which, just to be clear, don't diminish our agreement
that this election is "crucial" and that if it goes the wrong way
a lot of very bad things will happen.)
For instance: "Abortion will end, feminism atrophy, gay rights
shrivel." If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, states will
be free to outlaw abortion (and for that matter birth control),
but only a few states will. Same with LGBTQ rights. The effect
will be to undermine rights that currently all Americans share,
but unless this can be followed up with new federal legislation
the effect will be to make red and blue states diverge further.
Granted, if Republicans win by landslides (augmented or enabled
by gerrymandering and voter suppression, which is the only way
that seems possible) they might be able to rewrite federal law
to force their views on blue states. They might even amend the
constitution to get rid of parts they don't like (although most
likely they'll be happy enough to have their packed courts read
the constitution their way).
None of this woud cause feminism to "atrophy": if anything, it
will make it sharper and more necessary. Indeed, while we prefer
not to speak of it, one thing that invariably happens is that when
power tilts one direction, resistance grows. A lot of bad things
have happened since 2016, but resistance has grown, both in numbers
and in clarity and resolve. The lines about what Hillary would have
done differently aren't very convincing -- especially the one about
billionaires, because while she was chummy with different ones than
Trump was, she was always very deferential to them (as were Democrats
like Obama and Biden). At least with Trump as president, we don't
have to go through this election defending her. I'm not a person who
believes that things have to get worse before they can get better,
but I do recognize that people often learn things only the hard way.
I voted for Hillary even though I thought she was fucking awful,
because I understood how much worse Trump was, but also because I
thought we'd be better off starting from her as a baseline than we'd
be with Trump.
Obviously, I think that with Biden vs. Trump, as well. I voted
for Bernie Sanders, and Biden was one of my least favorite candidates,
so I'm not happy he's the nominee, but I'm also not very unhappy with
the way the race has shaped up. Aside from the necessity of beating
Trump and the Republican ticket -- which in terms of policy (if not
personality) if anything worse than Trump -- the second most important
thing for me is to advance the ideas of the left. While Sanders and
others have made remarkable progress, it was clear that they have not
swayed the powers in the party, and that the latter would stop at
nothing (including self-defeat) to keep control of the Democratic
Party. With Biden we have a seat at the table to argue for policies
on their merits, and we shouldn't have to spend much of our energy
fighting off internecine attacks from the right. Nothing is certain,
but as I keep insisting, the answers to our major problems are on
the left. Biden needs answers as much as we do.
The Democratic Primary in
Hawaii went for Joe Biden (63.23%), over Bernie Sanders (36.77%).
You can draw either conclusion from this. On the one hand, Biden has
drawn consistent majorities everywhere since shortly after Super
Tuesday, and there's no real chance he's going to weaken. On the
other hand, there's still a sizable bloc of Democrats who think we
can do better, and that too -- despite the campaign blackout and
Bernie's own endorsement of Biden -- shows no sign of weakening.
Some scattered links this week:
Jon Lee Anderson:
The coronavirus hits Brazil hard, but Jair Bolsonaro is unrepentant.
Kate Aronoff:
America's deadly obsession with intellectual property. Andrew Bacevich:
Still, the Global War on Terrorism goes on. Zack Beauchamp:
The American right's favorite strongman: "Viktor Orbán dismantled
Hungary's democracy. Conservatives love him." What they really love
about him is how his party (Fidesz) has managed to lock themselves into
power even if elections turn against them.
In the United States, the Republican Party has shown a disturbing
willingness to engage in Fidesz-like tactics to undermine the fairness
of the political process. The two parties evolved independently, for
their own domestic reasons, but seem to have converged on a similar
willingness to undermine the fairness of elections behind the scenes.
Extreme gerrymandering, voter ID laws, purging nonvoters from the
voting rolls, seizing power from duly elected Democratic governors,
packing courts with partisan judges, creating a media propaganda
network that its partisans consume to the exclusion of other sources --
all Republican approaches that, with some nouns changed, could easily
describe Fidesz's techniques for hollowing out from democracy from
within.
In this respect, Hungary really is a model for America. It's not
a blueprint anyone is consciously aping, but proof that a ruthless
party with less-than-majority support in the public can take durable
control of political institutions while still successfully maintaining
a democratic veneer.
Trump says he's taking hydroxycloroquine. Related:
- Ginia Bellafante:
First they fled the city. Now they're building $75,000 in-ground pools:
"When the going gets tough, the rich buy oases."
Barbara Boland:
IG fired days after inquiring about Pompeo's 'donor dinners'. Megan Cassella:
Reopening reality check: Georgia's jobs aren't flooding back: "A
month after easing lockdown restrictions, the state is still seeing a
steady stream of unemployment claims, economic data shows." - John Cassidy:
The coronavirus is exposing Wall Street's reckless gamble on bad
debt.
- Casey Cep:
Telling the stories of the dead is essential work. I've been
reading obituaries regularly, at least since my parents died (2000).
Very rarely do I notice anyone I knew or recognized, although I did
run across a couple of Intermediate School teachers I loathed. But
one thing that's always bothered me is that they're not written up
as stories. They're basically run as advertisements: you buy space,
and get to write whatever drivel you want, and for a bit extra you
can add a picture. Made me think that if I ever ran a newspaper,
I'd at least research and write up this one story on everyone. The
point of this article is that in the pandemic, every obituary has
become a story. Same thing happened after 9/11, when the New York
Times took a moment to write about every victim, no matter how
insignificant. Actually, they never were insignificant. They just
looked that way from Mount Olympus.
Amee Chew:
Stop the $2 billion arms sale to the Philippines.
Duterte's human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes through,
it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights defenders and on
dissent -- while fomenting an ongoing bloodbath. Duterte is infamous for
launching a "War on Drugs" that, since 2016, has claimed the lives of as
many as 27,000 souls, mostly low-income people summarily executed by
police and vigilantes.
In Duterte's first three years of office, nearly 300 journalists, human
rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, and
human rights defenders were assassinated. The Philippines has been ranked
the deadliest country for environmentalists in the world, after Brazil.
Many of these slayings are linked to military personnel.
Now, Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization
and repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.
Andrew Desiderio:
Fired watchdog was investigating arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Chauncey DeVega:
Trump's HHS secretary accidentally tells the truth: Racism is driving
pandemic policy. Jason Ditz:
Mark Fitzpatrick:
Will the US try to interdict Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela?
Laurie Garrett:
Trump has sabotaged America's coronavirus response: I mentioned this
article in
Book Roundup,
but one to note one more thing: the date (January 31, 2020). That's
pretty early (before the first US cases were reported), although much
of what's here has since become common knowledge:
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the
government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the
Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response
chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.
In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S.
government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed
confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for
pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it
is -- not just for the public but for the government itself, which
largely finds itself in the dark.
Colin Gordon:
The coronavirus wouldn't be decimating meatpacking plants if company
bosses hadn't busted the unions. Although western Kansas hasn't
gotten much publicity, Ford and Finney counties have the highest per
capita infection rates in Kansas. Murtaza Hussain:
Umair Irfan/Jen Kirby:
The other plague: Locusts are devouring crops in East Africa and the
Middle East. Eileen Jones:
There's nothing good about Phyllis Schlafly: Deconstructing
Mrs. America. Fred Kaplan:
Jen Kirby:
Inspectors general, explained by a former inspector general: Interview
with Clark Ervin, following Trump's firing of State Department IG Steve
Linick. Michael T Klare:
The US and China are dangerously close to a military confrontation in the
South China Sea. Ezra Klein:
Why "essential" workers are treated as disposable: Interview with
SIEU president Mary Kay Henry.
Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives?
My answer is that liberals still think reality matters, and as such
respond to real problems, whereas conservatives live in a fantasy world
where political will creates its own reality. Klein, liberal that he
is, surveys the research, and even quotes Jon Haidt: "Conservatives
react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the
threat of germs and contamination." On the other hand, people of all
political stripes tend to react as herds, and right now conservative
leaders have their own reasons for making light of the pandemic, and
that's emboldening conservative followers. It's tempting to say that
the scales would be tipped if Obama were president and spouting his
usual lines about confidence. Still, the flip wouldn't be symmetrical:
Democrats are more likely to trust the science, because they believe
that government should serve the public, especially in times of crisis.
Republicans, on the other hand, seek power to favor private interests,
and even go so far as to deny that public interests exist (except for
national security, which they conflate with the needs of private arms
merchants), and would like to cripple government's ability to help,
lest people look to government for help in the future. (Although note
that Republican governors are the first in line for federal relief
when disaster strikes their states.) German Lopez:
Biden's opposition to marijuana legalization is at odds with most
Americans' views. Robert Mackey:
Windsor Mann:
Trump's lethal aversion to reading: "Trump is a know-it-all who
knows almost nothing and refuses to read anything except his own name." Greg Miller/Josh Dawsey/Aaron C Davis:
One final viral infusion: Trump's move to block travel from Europe
triggered chaos and a surge of passengers from the outbreak's center.
Ian Millhiser:
Ella Nilsen:
Democrats suddenly have a much better chance of retaking the Senate in
2020. Anna North:
Osita Nwanevu:
We're not polarized enough: Review of Ezra Klein's book, Why
We're Polarized.
Nevertheless, the health and stability of the American political system
depends on the defeat of the Republican Party. Absent a radical shift in
the right's priorities, the only way to depolarize our institutions is
to win and win big against those who want to keep them undemocratic,
protecting the right from the moderating influence more competitive
elections could have. Those victories will depend on reformers
successfully marshaling the forces driving group identity, rather than
assuming the balance of power in America has been set primarily by
immutable psychologies. The way forward lies in convincing Americans
not to retreat from national politics but to think even more broadly
and abstractly about where this country ought to go. Why We're
Polarized does some of the job, but leaves a daunting truth unsaid:
To fight polarization, we'll have to get much more polarized. The only
way out is through.
Workers deserve to be owners, too. I think extending significant
ownership shares to workers is one of the most important things that
can be done in America. Ari Rabin-Havt:
Inside the latest plan to "bankrupt" and privatize Social Security:
Bankrupting, sure, but I don't see anything here about privatizing,
which -- beyond the push toward optional 401(k) plans -- has always
been a pipe dream. One can imagine ending Social Security and plunging
millions of elderly and disabled Americans back into poverty, but one
cannot imagine a privatized system where most (let alone all) Americans
would be better off. Aaron Rupar:
Matthew Sitman:
Why the pandemic is driving conservative intellectuals mad: Not as
broad as I'd like, focusing as he does on one R.R. Reno, although he
does bring Peggy Noonan into it. Danny Sjursen:
US regional imperialism: big sticks, and even bigger guns. Sarah Stillman:
Will the coronavirus make us rethink mass incarceration?
Matthew Walther:
A predictable catastrophe in Michigan: Multiple dams failed alog
the Tittabawassee River, causing massive flooding.
These are the sorts of problems no one wants to address until it's
too late, not just in Michigan but across the United States, where
the phrase "crumbling infrastructure" has been with us so long that
it too is probably on the verge of collapse. We are an old broken-down
country, physically and spiritually, incapable of meaningful action
until we find ourselves in the middle of a totally predictable crisis.
So many of the issues that have arisen during the current pandemic --
the dangers of nursing homes, racial inequality, social atomization --
were ones that should have been familiar to us and dealt with long
before we found ourselves faced with a novel virus. Instead we waited
as we always do until the dams burst, metaphorically and otherwise.
Also see:
Alex Ward:
Philip Weiss:
Peace process was never intended to give Palestinians a state -- true
confessions from Council on Foreign Relations. Cites an article
by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. Matthew Yglesias:
A huge boost in infrastructure spending is very popular -- if rich people
pay for it. Argues that it's going to be very hard to get a big boost
in infrastructure (or other pubic service) spending if most people perceive
it's being paid for out of their own pockets. (Paying for it by taxing the
rich is OK, and indeed the most popular tax proposal on a long list is the
wealth tax.) Personally, I think this would be a very good time to raise
the gas tax. Sure, a flat sales or excise tax isn't progressive, but prices
at present are so depressed consumers come out ahead anyway. And to the
extent that the tax increase reduces demand (and global warming), that's
not such a bad thing either. Neil J Young:
Flooding the swamp: "Why Trump's many scandals never seem to stick."
Alternate title: "There's always a bigger scandal. Li Zhou/Ella Nilsen:
Congress should consider these 7 ideas for the next stimulus package.
Bold ideas, no chance of surviving a Republican veto, and indeed it's
not clear even to me where the money comes from.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, May 17, 2020
Weekend Roundup
No introduction. No time, and none needed.
I should note that you can ask questions (or comment) on this or pretty
much anything else by using
this here form.
Some scattered links this week:
Eileen Appelbaum/Andrew Park/Rosemary Batt:
How private equity firms will profit from Covid-19. Starts with
the recent bankruptcy of PE-owned J. Crew, which is less about how
PE firms will profit and more about how they already have profited --
by looting companies while driving them into the ground. Mentions
some proposed laws unlikely to draw Republican Support: one is the
Stop Wall Street Looting Act; another is the Pandemic Anti-Monopoly
Act. [PS:
JC Penney also filed for bankruptcy. Although it is publicly
traded, its management had run up debt much like bankrupt private
equity-owned retailers.] Kate Aronoff:
America is not as resilient as it thinks it is. Well, we survived
Nixon. We survived Reagan. A friend opined that "if we can survive one
George Bush, we can survive another." I know too many who didn't, but
by and large, sure. Chances are most of us will survive Trump too, but
it's getting tougher, and the wear and tear is showing. The fact is that
bad policy often takes decades to wear down and break catastrophically.
Aronoff isn't making this explicit of a political argument here, but
it's easier to visualize infrastructure flaws as the result of partisan
acts aimed at undermining public service. Rather, she starts with the
forecast for this year's Atlantic hurricane season (see
A new model is predicting "one of the most active Atlantic hurricane
seasons on record"), which is likely to strain disaster relief.
She has other examples, like the "silver tsunami" of aging population,
and so forth. Still, all these examples look political to me. Dean Baker:
Building an economy that works again. Lenny Bernstein/Josh Dawsey/Yasmeen Abutaleb:
Growing friction between White House, CDC hobbles pandemic
response. Jamelle Bouie:
Elizabeth Warren knows what Joe Biden needs in a Vice President.
I'm not interested enough in the VP stakes to care much one way or
the other, but I can see several advantages to Warren way beyond
making a token gesture to "the left." Some other VP pieces:
Alexander Burns:
Seeking: Big Democratic ideas that make everything better. In
some kind of ideal situation, the political response to the pandemic
and its consequent economic depression would transcend party lines,
as both sides recognized the need for similar, well-established fixes
to common problems, and worked together to move quickly and surely.
To some extent, that happened back in March, when lockdown was the
only available approach to slow the spread, and Republicans in power
were so desperate for economic relief they allowed Democrats to make
the bills fairer and broader than they would have liked. Since then,
the issues have become more polarized, and the November elections
will largely turn on which party offers the most sensible promise
of managing and moving beyond the crisis. This is one of a cluster
of articles as Republicans and Democrats sharpen their political
stances, so I'll collect a few here:
Katelyn Burns/Ian Millhiser:
Sen. Richard Burr and the coronavirus insider trading scandal,
explained. Also note:
Jane Coaston:
The private militias providing "security" for anti-lockdown protests,
explained. David Cole:
Why we need postal democracy: He means voting by mail. Juan Cole:
If only we had that $6.4 trillion we wasted on Iraq and Afghanistan
to lift the economy and fight coronavirus. Gabriel Debenedetti:
Biden is planning an FDR-size presidency: "He thinks he'll survive
Tara Reade's accusation. But he knows he can't be an average-Joe Democrat
anymore." Erik Edstrom:
The betrayal of the American soldier: Author is a former Army
Ranger, has a new book on his experiences, especially in Afghanistan:
Un-American: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War. James K Galbraith:
We need a radically different model to tackle the Covid-19 crisis. Atul Gawande:
Amid the coronavirus crisis, a regimen for reëntry: "Health-care
workers have been on the job throughout the pandemic. What can they
teach us about the safest way to lift a lockdown?" Josh Gerstein:
Appeals court greenlights emoluments suit against Trump. Jacob S Hacker:
The progressive pursuit of a bolder Biden. Pull-quote here is
a point I've made before: "Neither FDR nor LBJ looked like progressive
champions when they ran for or ascended to the presidency." They moved
left because that's where they had to in order to be effective, to
solve real pressing problems. However, now that you mention LBJ, one
should also point out that in foreign policy he even more reflexively
into the conventional anti-communist paradigm, leading him deep into
the quagmire of war in Vietnam, ultimately destroying his legacy and
giving Republicans an opening they eventually parlayed into Donald
Trump. Biden's recent "tough talk" on China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran
promises to suck him into a similar trap. As McGeorge Bundy put it,
the difference between JFK and LBJ was that the former wanted to be
smart, while the latter wanted to appear tough. I fear much the same
can be said for Obama and Biden. Hacker, by the way, has a new book
coming out with Paul Pierson: Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right
Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality.
If the pandemic has had any salutary effects beyond making Trump's
defeat more likely, it is that it has highlighted the bonds that
unite all Americans. These bonds will be tested by Trump and his
allies in the weeks ahead. Already, they have tried to activate
anti-urban sentiment and racism to repeat the polarizing path to
victory of 2016. Yet Biden -- second-in-command under the nation's
first black president and the candidate with the greatest symbolic
affiliation with the white working class -- is better poised than
almost anyone to turn these strategies back on the president. To do
so, he'll need his two greatest assets: an ability to connect and
empathize with Americans from every walk of life, and an understanding
that government isn't a swamp but a source of solidarity and prosperity.
Yet he'll also need something that comes much less naturally: a vision
not just of how to win an election, but of how to remake a broken system.
Derek Hawkins:
Eric Trump claims coronavirus is Democratic hoax, will 'magically'
vanish after 2020 election: Is there some sort of contest inside
the Trump family to see who is the dumbest? Or the most self-centered?
Isn't that what you'd call someone who who thinks are so powerful
and ubiquitous and callous to fake 300,000 deaths worldwide just to
make one moron look bad? And, for that matter, if they really are
so powerful and malevolent, what makes you think Donald Trump is the
leader you want to take them on? (Piss them off, maybe.) On the other
hand, Eric has spent his entire life so completely under his father's
thumb he may not realize that there is a world beyond. Paul Heideman:
Stop trying to shame socialists into voting for Joe Biden. It's not
going to work. Amen. They're just exposing themselves as assholes,
and revealing an anti-left prejudice so profound one doubts they will
ever show the reciprocal support they demand. There are, of course,
good reasons why socialists should vote for Biden, but there's still
plenty of time to make that case before November, and we're likely
to be more receptive once the sting of defeat has dulled. Especially
if Biden actually offers something more substantial than simply being
the not-Trump candidate. Sarah Jones:
Jen Kirby:
Hannah Knowles/Candace Buckner:
Alaska lawmaker says Hitler was not white supremacist after comparing
coronavirus measures to Nazi rule. Well, just goes to show how
confused conservatives can get when they understand they're supposed
to denounce Nazis are bad, but find for the most part they're just
misunderstood conservatives. Eric Levitz:
The GOP is the problem. Is 'human identity politics' the solution?
Martin Longman:
Nesrine Malik:
It's no accident Britain and America are the world's biggest coronavirus
losers: "Even before the pandemic hit, both nations had been stripped
of the people and systems required to respond effectively." Andrea Mazzarino:
Why we need redundancy in more than the military. Writes about
the effects of Covid-19 on military families. Author is editor, with
Catherine Lutz, of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of
the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meridith McGraw/Nahal Toosi:
Trump ousts State Department watchdog: After State Department
Inspector General Steve Linick opened up an investigation into Secretary
Mike Pompeo. For more, see: Hannah Knowles:
Top Democrats launch investigation into late-night firing of State
Department inspector general. Bill McKibben:
Thanks to climate divestment, Big Oil finally runs out of gas. Ian Millhiser:
Philip Mirowski:
Why the neoliberals won't let this crisis go to waste: Interview
with the author of a 2013 book: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to
Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. I read
his book when it came out, and found it pretty frustrating. My takeaway
was that nothing much changed because the neoliberals were so quick
and effective at preventing any alternative viewpoints. They recognized
that change requires imagination, and if you can squelch that, you can
survive conditions that were objectively disillusioning. This title is
clearer about who's trying to take advantage of the crisis. However,
it may not be so easy this time. Still, when you look at how completely
Mike Bloomberg upended the Democratic primaries, and how Andrew Cuomo
is conspiring to privatize post-pandemic social life under the control
of tech billionaires, it's not just the Koch types one needs to worry
about. Ella Nilsen:
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are building new, policy-focused task
forces. Anna North:
The police shooting of Breonna Taylor, a black woman who was killed in
her apartment, explained. Rachel Esplin Odell/Stephen Wertheim:
Can the Democrats avoid Trump's China trap?: "The president wants a
new cold war to deflect attention from his failures." Gunar Olsen:
The "Good War" in Afghanistan was never good. Joseph O'Neill:
Brand new Dems? A speculative piece on partisan positioning,
presented mostly as brand management. One example is the recent
ad flurry where both Trump and Biden tried to out-hawk one another
on China.
Biden, to the extent that he is visible at all, is terrible at
campaign messaging. He doesn't connect well with his supporters, many
of whom minimize their exposure to him for fear of demoralization.
Nor does he connect well with persuadable independents. With more
than 60,000 American pandemic deaths to date and nearly 30 million
jobs lost or furloughed, Biden could frame the election around the
critical concerns of ordinary Americans. Nope. In April he devoted
two of his biggest ads to defending himself against Trump's accusations
that he is dangerously soft on China and its role in the pandemic.
Republican strategists, terrified of substantive electioneering, have
decided that Trump's best bet is precisely to lure Biden into an
esoteric, anachronistic, and xenophobic fight about who will stand up
to China. Biden has taken the bait. Even by the standards of easily
rattled Democratic politicians, his is a remarkably rapid surrender
of rhetorical ground.
Trump was able to spook Biden in part because of the second kind of
messaging -- party branding. . . . Biden was afraid to look weak on
China because Americans have a built-in view of the GOP as the party
that does a better job of handling national security. This perception --
a six-point advantage in recent polls -- makes a significant difference
when elections are decided by one or two points. It's not only Trump
who will invoke the Yellow Peril. In a messaging memo that recently
came to light, Republican Senate candidates are forcefully advised to
"attack China" in relation to the coronavirus crisis. These candidates,
too, are exploiting a partisan brand advantage on "national security" --
a concept with powerful connotations of strength, patriotism, and fear
of the other.
Cameron Peters:
Ousted whistleblower warns US is heading toward "darkest winter in
modern history". Derek Robertson:
What liberals don't get about Trump supporters and pop culture:
"The seemingly bizarre pop culture takes emanating from MAGA world are
just reflections of its core philosophy." Aaron Rupar:
Robert Scheer:
Big banks got the sweetest deal from the Covid-19 bailouts: Well,
don't they always? Interview with Nomi Prins, who was the first to
report that banks raked in much more from the Fed than they did from
their $700 billion TARP bailout. Brittany Scott:
To fight Covid-19, we need to build worker power and worker safety:
I can see an argument that workers shouldn't always be allowed to strike
over economic demands -- one might come up with a fair arbitration system
to resolve such disputes, although my preferred solution is co-determination,
where workers have seats on boards and management committees. But one case
where workers should absolutely have the right to refuse to work is when
doing so presents a safety problem. Indeed, I think we should guarantee
workers union representation for just such cases, regardless of whether
a worker is part of a regular union. Indeed, while one approach to job
safety would be to strengthen OSHA rules and enforcement, it would be
more flexible and ultimately more effective to let workers enforce their
own safety concerns, through a process which ultimately includes a
guaranteed right to strike. Dylan Scott:
Germany and South Korea excelled at Covid-19 containment. It still came
back. Michael D Shear/Maggie Haberman:
White House races to contain virus in its ranks: 'It is scary to go to
work'. David Siders:
Trump is getting trounced among a crucial constituency: The haters:
"In 2016, Donald Trump cleaned up among voters who disliked him and
Hillary Clinton. This year, Biden is winning big among the comparable
group." That's one constituency that's always going to break against
the incumbent. Danny Sjursen:
What on Earth is the US doing by bombing Somalia? For more:
Nick Turse:
US airstrikes hit all-time high as coronavirus spreads in Somalia. Paul Starr:
How the right went far-right: Review of Andrew Marantz:
Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking
of American Conservatism. Emily Stewart:
The American unemployment system is broken by design. Matt Taibbi:
Zephyr Teachout/Pat Garofalo:
Cuomo is letting billionaires plan New York's future. It doesn't have
to be this way. Refers to Naomi Klein's
Screen New Deal piece, on how capitalism profits from disaster. Alex Ward:
Libby Watson:
Jared Kushner is a national disaster. Matthew Yglesias:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Weekend Roundup
We seem to be at a crossroads, where the pandemic is undiminished
but the pressures to re-open the economy have grown to the point where
stupidity is taking over. I have to admit I was surprised to see the
economy shut down as quickly and firmly as happened in the first weeks
of March. I was also surprised that Congress moved so dramatically to
compensate victims of the collapse. However, over the last couple of
weeks Republicans have started to revert to form. It's never been
clearer how they see the stock market as a proxy for America: with
the stock market recovered from its initial shock, they don't have
any qualms about letting the rest of the economy rot. Sure, they
talk about opening up, but what they really want to do is to shirk
responsibility: to blame unemployment on chickenshit workers and
customers, and bully them into bucking up.
Meme of the week: "The end of stay-at-home orders doesn't mean the
pandemic is over. It means they currently have room for you in the
ICU."
Some scattered links this week:
David Bacon:
Following Mexico's worker strikes, US steps in to keep border factories
open. Peter Baker/Michael Crowley:
Two White house coronavirus cases raise question of if anyone is really
safe. Devlin Barrett:
Trump vows complete end of Obamacare law despite pandemic. Zack Beauchamp:
The coronavirus killed American exceptionalism. Katelyn Burns:
Adam Cancryn:
Fauci and Birx's public withdrawal worries health experts: "As Trump
clamps down on coronavirus communications, voices of experts give way to
those of politicians." John Cassidy:
Sean Collins:
SV Date:
Win or loose, Trump's top campaign aides are raking in the cash.
For Parscale, who just a few years ago was designing websites in San
Antonio for Trump's properties, among other clients, the sudden wealth
has afforded him a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale,
Florida, a pair of million-dollar condos, a brand new $400,000 boat,
and another half-million dollars in luxury cars, including a Range
Rover and a Ferrari.
"This thing has been a large criminal enterprise. It's like that
scene in the 'Goodfellas' after the heist," said Republican consultant
Stuart Stevens, a veteran of the George W. Bush and Mitt Romney
presidential campaigns. "Dishing out furs to mob bosses' girlfriends
and wives."
On the other hand, you have to admit that Parscale et al. are really
getting in tune with what Trump is all about. Aaron C Davis:
In the early days of the pandemic, the US government turned down an offer
to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America. Related:
Jason Dearen/Mike Stobbe:
Trump administration buries detailed CDC advice on reopening. Chauncey DeVega:
Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times -- compared to
what's coming next." Interview with Hedges, who insists: "We're
heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers."
Concludes with a long pitch on "what does it mean to vote for Joe Biden?" --
projecting into the future every mistake and misstep Biden has made over
the last 40-50 years (and sure, there have been a lot of them). On the
other hand, to pick just one example, do you really think that Biden
wants to further militarize the police and double again the population
of American prisons? And do you really think that Democrats today would
let him do that? Or sign another trade deal like NAFTA, further decimating
America's manufacturing industry? I think it speaks poorly as to Biden's
character that he has gone along with (and in rare instances led) such
things in the past, and I think Democrats made a mistake nominating a
politician with such a miserable record, but I don't think it fates him
or them to repeatedly worsen such mistakes in the future. Hedges insists,
"America's current political system is a corporate political duopoly."
He then admits trivial differences, although the Republican side of the
list ("nativists and racists and climate deniers and creationists") doesn't
strike me as all that trivial. True, Democrats have long been beholden to
the donor class, and they've often put their donors' interests above the
people's, but they also depend on the people for votes, and occasionally
offer them some consolation and hope -- while Republicans under Trump have
little to offer their "base" beyond vindictive rage. Hedges' critique of
the "corporate Democrats" has been valid for a long time, but is eroding
now as the reality of increasing inequality and risks posed by war, by
pollution, by climate change, and by pandemic becomes undeniable. Biden's
nomination may be a last hurrah for the Democratic Party old guard, but if
elected the problems he will face are ones that only have viable solutions
by moving the country to the left. He may well lack the imagination and
leadership skills to succeed, but it's hard to see how he could fail worse
than the current president and his party. I might respect Hedges' pessimism
more if he offered some insight that wasn't simply rooted in repetition of
past failures. It may well be true, for instance, that globalization and
overpopulation has made pandemics (and similar health risks like resistant
bacteria) inevitable and increasingly frequent. It probably is true that
climate change is irreversible and will lead to catastrophic events. It
may be the case that elites will prove so skilled at manipulating mass
psychology that democracy will never get the chance to make rational
poitical decisions. It is likely that technology will develop in strange
ways with vast unintended consequences. It may be that people are so
ill-adapted to civilization that they will tear it down rather than
figure out how to humanize it. Serious pessimists can do something with
such thoughts. Hedges, on the other hand, offers this prescription for
a better future: "Mass mobilization and civil disobedience is what is
needed to defeat the oligarchs and take those first steps necessary to
win back an American democracy." Sure, that's what left-activists like
Hedges have believed and lived by at least since the noble struggle for
civil rights, but that never was a tactic virtuous in its own right --
as the anti-abortion movement proved, and today's anti-lockdown protests
are reiterating. At some point every movement has to move off the streets
and into the voting booths. And even if it's still hard to find candidates
clearly committed to "defeating oligarchs" and "restoring democracy," it's
not really that hard to identify differences. You can start by preferring
candidates who empathize with more people and are more skeptical of elite
favors. You can look for candidates who are smarter and more realistic.
And if all else fails, you can vote for Democrats on the grounds that
(unlike Republicans) they at least on occasion line up with reasonable,
fair-minded people. Jason Ditz:
Alan Durning:
The plague brought the Renaissance. What could Covid-19 bring?
"Three hypotheses on post-pandemic life." Pull quote: "My three
hypotheses (and my hope) is that the long-term effect of the coronavirus
pandemic will be to strengthen the importance (at least in North America)
of competence, science, and solidarity." Evidently by showing what
happens when you lack or ignore all three. Peter Elkind/Doris Burke/Meg Cramer:
Meet the shadowy accountants who do Trump's taxes and help him seem
richer than he is. John Feffer:
Debunking Trump's China nonsense. Eric Foner:
On the road to emancipation: "The making of the Radical Republicans."
Reviews LeeAnna Keith: When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History
of the Civil War. Here's a fact I didn't know, but which makes today's
polarization seem relatively civil: "Joanne B. Freeman's The Field of
Blood relates how nearly every session of Congress from the mid-1830s
to the outbreak of civil war in 1861 witnessed members exchanging punches
or drawing knives and pistols." I did know about the caning of Charles
Sumner on the Senate floor, but thought it more isolated. [Andrew Delbanco
reviewed Freeman's book
here, starting with details of the assault on Sumner.] Other notes:
"Kellie Carter Jackson's recent study of black abolitionists, Force
and Freedom, focuses on their increasingly vocal calls for slave
rebellion." And: "In The War Before the War, his study of the
response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Andrew Delbanco suggests
that armed conflict over slavery began years before the attack on Fort
Sumter" -- not so surprising given to anyone familiar with the career
and legacy of John Brown. Jacob Heilbrunn:
Does the Never Trump movement matter?: Reviews a new book by
Robert P Saldin and Steven M Teles: Never Trump: The Revolt of
the Conservative Elites. While GOP elites may have started out
uneasy about Trump, their qualms were tactical rather than moral,
and they vanished the moment Trump scored his upset victory. It is
significant that there are virtually no politicians in the "Never
Trump" camp. The only identifiable names are pundits, most of whom
write for mainstream outlets which prize the occasional centrist
heterodoxy a George Will or a David Brooks trades in. Such writers
are only amusing when they lay into Trump (Jennifer Rubin and Max
Boot show particular relish there) but become instantly ridiculous
the moment they try to defend their conservative bona fides. One
imagines they saw their apostasy as a calculated bet given certainty
that Trump would prove a colossal failure, and now they're stuck and
lost. When the time does come to blot Trump from GOP memory -- as it
has for GW Bush -- the party faithful won't remember the "Never
Trumpers" for their prescience. They're a spent force both in and
beyond their party. Murtaza Hussain:
With a distracted public, the Pentagon tries to get away with killing
innocent civilians. Sure, but since when did the US need a pandemic
to provide cover for indiscriminate slaughter abroad? Umair Irfan:
It's not your imagination. Allergy season gets worse every year.
Ann Jones:
Getting Trumped by Covid-19. First-person narrative, experiencing
lockdown first in Norway then in America (Massachusetts). One of those
nations dealt with it competently and effectively. One didn't. She
tested positive after flying to Boston. Fred Kaplan:
Sanjana Karanth:
Ida B Wells awarded posthumous Pulitzer Prize for lynching investigations.
A little late, given that she died in 1931, and her reporting on lynchings
date from 1892. Jen Kirby:
The Justice Department has dropped Michael Flynn's case. Related:
Zack Beauchamp:
Bill Barr's revealing defense of the Flynn decision. Josh Gerstein:
Barr reignites charge he is conducting Mueller cleanup for Trump. Lloyd Green:
Welcome to William Barr's America, where the truth makes way for the
president. Sean Illing:
11 legal experts agree: There's no good reason for DOJ to drop the
Michael Flynn case. David Kurtz:
Why the Flynn dismissal is way worse than a pardon. Mary B McCord:
Bill Barr twisted my words in dropping the Flynn case. Here's the truth.
Heather Digby Parton:
Michael Flynn walks free -- and Donald Trump's massive betrayal of America
continues. Poor choice of words: "betrayal of America" implies that
"America" has some interests distinct from the American people, and her
thrust becomes clear with the second sentence landing on Vladimir Putin.
As I see it, Flynn is guilty of three things: (1) politicizing his rank
as a lieutenant general while still in service, setting himself up as an
influential Republican operative once he got fired; (2) using his insider
political status to seek out lucrative "consulting" fees from foreign
governments (especially, but not exclusively, Turkey), even while seeking
a Trump post that would obviously present conflicts of interest; and (3)
lying to the FBI about what he had done. Now, the latter doesn't strike
me as much of a crime -- indeed, it seems designed to criminalize behavior
that is merely embarrassing -- but that he lied is an admission that what
he lied about was embarrassing, even if not technically illegal (in which
case he could have pleaded the fifth amendment, but that would probably
have failed his FBI vetting, and therefore his chance of capitalizing on
his appointment). In dropping the charges, Barr is doing something else,
even if it's not quite clear exactly what. He seems to be signaling to
other Trump people that it's OK to do Flynn-like things, including lie
to the FBI, as long as they remain in Trump's good graces. He also seems
to be telling the American people that it's OK if politics (or in Flynn's
case, the pursuit of money and influence) skirts a few laws -- that the
Justice Department will use its discretion to decide who to prosecute
and who it can exempt, and that those decisions are more clearly than
ever ones of political expediency. I don't know whether that "betrays
America," but it most definitely screws the American people. Jeffrey Toobin:
The Michael Flynn dismissal is another shot in Trump's war on the Mueller
investigation. Philip Weiss:
Mike Flynn ran interference for Israel -- but that angle goes unmentioned
by press. Michael Klare:
The beginning of the end for oil? [Also at
TomDispatch.] Naomi Klein:
Screen New Deal: "Under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in
the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia." Also on Cuomo:
Paul Krugman:
An epidemic of hardship and hunger: "Why won't Republicans help
Americans losing their jobs?"
Trump and his infallible advisers: "Beware men who never admit
having been wrong." As many have noted, Trump seems constitutionally
incapable of admitting error, even when confronted with his own claims
that coronavirus cases "within a couple of days is going to be down
close to zero" and the economy is "holding up nicely."
At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego
is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error.
And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character.
But where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details
of Trump's coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn't
getting bad advice from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame
was their successful sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him
what he wanted to hear were, by and large, pillars of the conservative
establishment with long pre-Trump careers.
But when Krugman expands upon an example, he picks Kevin Hassett,
who strikes me as pretty fringe, although he does have a long pre-Trump
career, most notoriously his 1999 book Dow 36,000. Hassett was
given the job of figuring out a way to model Covid-19 cases to make
them disappear or at least diminish. For more on this, see Matthew
Yglesias:
The Trump administration's "cubic model" of coronavirus deaths,
explained. Krugman closes:
Yes, Trump's insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to
people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge
error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists
and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure
for the whole modern G.O.P.
Trump's narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even
flamboyant. But he isn't an outlier; he's more a culmination of the
American right's long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And
that degradation, more than Trump's character, is what is leading to
vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.
Crashing economy, rising stocks: What's going on? "What's bad for
America is sometimes good for the market." The simplest explanation is
that Trump et al. actually care about the stock market, unlike workers,
people, or even the economy -- not just because they're all about the
1% that owns 70% of the stocks, but because return on investment is
the only thing that really matters to them. Of course, given their
notorious incompetence, they still might blow it, but it turns out
that it's remarkably easy to bolster the stock market: just shell out
lots of money to companies, especially to banks, and the Fed is designed
just to do that.
Peacocks and vultures are circling the deficit. Robert Kuttner:
The zombie invasion of Team Biden: "As I
wrote last week, the Biden campaign has been doing its best to conceal
Larry Summers's involvement in the campaign. But now Bloomberg News
has outed him." Let me add one more point: the problem with Summers
isn't just that he's often wrong (although he is, and spectacularly so),
but that he's such a dominant intellectual bully that he sucks all of
the oxygen out of the room, letting no one else get a word in. Of course,
blame for that should be shared by Clinton and Obama, who gave Summers
positions that gave him that kind of leverage. From what I gather, Obama
had fairly major issues both with Summers and Geithner, but was rarely
(if ever) able to overrule them. It's hard to see how Biden could stand
up to him. Eric Levitz:
The GOP isn't cynical enough to save us from a depression: "For
Republicans, some things are more important than winning an election --
and denying aid to vulnerable workers is one of them." Laura McGann:
The agonizing story of Tara Reade. "Here's what I found, and where
I'm stuck."
Stephanie Mencimer:
What's killing the white working class? "The GOP continues to supply
more of the policies that are destroying its base." Review of Anne Case
and Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
They were among the first to note a downturn in life expectancy among
working class whites, and they build on that discovery here. I'm less
sure about the political dimension. Republicans get a reliable majority
of white working class votes, even though by any objective measure
Republican policies have made working class lives poorer and riskier.
However, I wonder whether the subset of the working class that votes
for Trump and other Republicans doesn't differ from the class as a
whole: by having (for the moment) more stable jobs, by enjoying more
robust families, by being able to call on the support of churches.
In contrast, the people who are dying prematurely are most likely
the ones who have slipped through the fractures. Republicans have
done a remarkable job of convincing a majority of the white working
class that the failures of their neighbors are due to their personal
weaknesses (abetted by sinister liberal elites), and that their best
defense is to join the Republican defense of their culture. That's
a krock, of course, but until tragedy strikes, most people like to
think they are immune. Ian Millhiser:
James Muldoon:
Why we need cooperatives for the digital economy: I'd go a step
further and assert that any commercial software platform can be
supplanted by a publicly-funded cooperative which would be cheaper
to develop and run, more reliable, more functional for many more
people, and free of both obvious and hidden traps and taxes. Jan-Werner Müller:
One damn thing after another: Review of recent books by Sheri
Berman (Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime
to the Present Day) and Adam Przeworski (Crises of Democracy).
Anna North:
Trump administration releases new campus sexual assault rules in the
midst of the pandemic. Caitlin Oprysko:
Trump drafts everyday Americans to adopt his battlefield rhetoric.
In his State of the Union speech, Trump warned about the peril of
"stupid wars," not that his insight kept him from pursuing them at
roughly the same rate as his predecessors (granting, of course, that
the Bushes were a bit more intense and reckless). Trump's innovation
has been to come up with an even stupider war: one fought against an
"invisible enemy"; one to be fought not thousands of miles away but
locally; one fought not by trained, expensively equipped volunteer
soldiers but by every working person, with few (if any) defenses;
one fought for no reason other than to make the president look good,
and to help his business supporters make money. Trump's "leadership"
in this reminds me of how eager many generals have often been to
sacrifice foot soldiers to secure pyrrhic victories.
Encouraging the public to transition out of isolation and into the world,
the president is increasingly deploying battlefield rhetoric in asking
everyday Americans to confront a raging coronavirus pandemic that has
already infected 1.3 million people in the U.S. and killed more than
80,000 -- and this week clawed its way into the inner circle of his
White House.
"The people of our country should think of themselves as warriors,"
he said during a recent visit to a face mask plant in Arizona. "Our
country has to open."
A day later, reporters at the White House asked the president whether
the new moniker was his way of telling the American people to swallow
the fact that reopening the economy will result in more Covid-19 cases --
and therefore more deaths.
"So I called these people warriors," he responded, gesturing to nurses
gathered behind him. "And I'm actually calling now . . . the nation
warriors. We have to be warriors. We can't keep our country closed down
for years. And we have to do something."
As Leana S Wen explains in
Six flaws in the arguments for reopening, "it's worth the sacrifice
if some people die so that the country has a functioning economy" is "a
false choice; there are ways to safely reopen, and consumer confidence
depends on the reassurance of public health protections." More warrior
talk:
Evan Osnos:
The folly of Trump's blame-Beijing coronavirus strategy. Alex Pareene:
Trump's coronavirus task farce.
The task force is the perfect model of governance for our time, because
it is made up of people who assign tasks to other people, wait for them
to finish, and then assume that somehow, they got it done themselves.
It depends on our modern cult of executive worship, which takes the
fact that certain people have the power to make people below them carry
out their orders and turns it into an innate ability to Get Things Done.
The Democrats' cult of pragmatism: A piece I had missed from March 9,
2020, back when the Democrats still had a presidential primary race, and
the inevitable didn't even look very likely. Indeed, more here on Andrew
Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel than on the mediocrity who finally snagged the
nomination. Charles P Pierce: More than a dozen titles in
his blog caught my eye, but I wanted to link to this one because
it's a piece of the sort of everyday graft the Trump administration
is rife with but rarely gets called out on:
This is just business as usury for this administration*: "Mick
Mulvaney's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pulled out all the
stops to protect the profits of payday lenders." Some other
representative titles:
Francine Prose:
Will Americans ever forgive Trump for his heartless lack of compassion?
I rather suspect the answer is mixed. If Trump was able to display the
combination of diligence and compassion that we witnessed from, say,
Rudy Giuliani in the first couple weeks after 9/11 (before he started
reading his polling and decided he deserved a third mayoral term),
his polling would be much higher (although soft, given the likelihood
of a return to form). On the other hand, I imagine that a sizable
chunk of his followers actually likes the idea that he's a cold,
conniving bastard, and while they don't necessarily approve of him
only thinking of himself, they do like the idea that he continues
to piss off those they perceive as their sworn enemies -- and that
matters much more to them than even whether he's relatable. Brian Resnick:
4 reasons state plans to open up may backfire -- and soon. By the
way, efforts to reopen in South Korea and Germany have already backfired.
See: Nicole Winfield/Vanessa Gera/Amy Forliti:
Reopenings bring new cases in S. Korea, virus fears in Italy. David Roberts:
Democrats should make voting reform a nonnegotiable baseline for the
next stimulus bill: "Universal vote-by-mail is the only way to
ensure free and fair elections in November." Cites Colorado research
showing that mail-in voting "raised turnout more than 10 points among
the most vulnerable demographics, including low-income voters, and
benefited Republicans and Democrats equally." Republicans are unlikely
to believe that the issue is non-partisan -- states with heavy mail-in
voting tend to vote Democrat -- and have staked much of their political
future on various schemes to suppress the vote. The one thing mail-in
voting indisputably does is increase turnout, making elections more
representative of popular will. Anyone who believes in democracy will
take that as a plus, but unfortunately many Republican leaders do not,
and are willing to risk questions about the legitimacy of their wins
when they are based on ever-smaller plebiscites. Corey Robin:
Aaron Rupar:
Elsewhere, Rupar tweeted one of the week's dumber Trump quotes,
about Pence publicist Katie Miller (also wife of evil Trump gnome
Stephen Miller):
TRUMP: "Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then
all of a sudden she tested positive . . . this is why the whole concept
of tests aren't necessarily great . . . today, I guess, for some reason,
she tested positive."
I noticed this when Rosanne Cash replied:
Once I took a pregnancy test and it was negative for a long time, and
then ALL OF A SUDDEN it was positive and I said what is this whole
concept and then, for some reason, I had a baby.
Alexander Sammon:
The absolute absurdity of blanket corporate immunity: "With his new
proposal, McConnell rides to the rescue of America's least imperiled."
Well, there needs to be some form of enforcement of safety practices to
prevent the spread of Covid-19. Torts have always been a last resort to
limit abuses of power by businesses (or anyone else), but they're slow,
expensive, and effectively arbitrary. I don't see how the long-term
threat of lawsuits can be trusted to ensure public safety, but unless
you come up with some more efficient means of enforcement, blanket
immunity is only likely to encourage businesses to abuse their powers
and skirt their responsibilities. Moreover, it's not clear where this
is coming from. At this point, most businesses are much more concerned
with reassuring workers and customers that they're safe to open. On
the other hand, McConnell may have a long-term goal to make it all
but impossible for customers and workers to sue companies, and sees
this as a moment to wedge immunity in. "Never let a crisis go to
waste," and all that. Dylan Scott:
Thousands will go uninsured in the Covid-19 outbreak because Republicans
rejected Medicaid expansion. Emily Stewart:
The essential worker trap: "It's hard to get unemployment benefits if
you've been deemed 'essential.'" Indeed, it seems like a lot of the push
to "re-open" the economy is coming from states looking to cut unemployment
costs/benefits.
Matt Taibbi:
The bailout miscalculation that could crash the economy.
Ishaan Tharoor:
A Bay of Pigs-style fiasco in Venezuela.
Philip Weiss:
Bush was worse than Trump. Reaction to Peter Baker:
George W Bush calls for end to pandemic partisanship, where (not
for the first time) Bush proved to be saner, smarter, and more of a
statesman than Trump. Of course, any attempt to rehabilitate Bush --
even if the point is to illuminate how awful Trump is -- isn't worth
the confusion. The fact is that Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump form
a series, where each is worse because their predecessors each left
the polity in much worse shape than they found it. Weiss singles out
the Iraq War as proof that Bush was the worst, but my own view is that
Iraq was just a stupid, arrogant afterthought to Bush's real disaster,
which was the decision to invade Afghanistan -- a decision Bush still
rarely gets credit for, because the media campaign was so automatic
that the major people Bush defeated (McCain in the primary, Gore in
the main) would have done exactly the same thing. (Presumably not my
candidate, Ralph Nader. But even Bernie Sanders voted for the War on
Terror; Barbara Lee was the only one with the foresight and fortitude
to vote against the mad rush to war.) Every time I see one of these
attempts at Bush nostalgia, I'm reminded of
the SNL skit where Will Ferrell plays GW Bush and delivers the
truest line ever: "So I just wanted to address my fellow Americans
tonight and remind you guys that I was really bad." Also see:
One should never forget how much severe damage GW Bush did relative
to when he started out -- worst of all was his "War on Terror," which
his successors have extended another dozen years with no sense of a
change of mind, a militarization of the American psyche that has meant
that a generation of Americans have known nothing but vicious insanity,
but his two terms were riddled with atrocious policy, starting with
his tax cuts, ending with the recession caused by years of indulging
Wall Street. Still, you Bush usually had the decency to hide his plans
behind a shroud of lies and doublespeak. Trump has mostly extended
Bush's standard Republican policy directions -- his cruel turn against
immigration is Trump's one major innovation -- what has changed is how
shameless Trump is about his contempt for law, for decency, for the
great majority of people he seeks to trample on.
Matthew Yglesias:
The unemployment rate soared to 14.7 percent in April. The chart
is especially striking, with the unprecedentedly huge instant jump,
from the lowest rate since 1980 to nearly 30% more than the previous
post-1980 high. Even so, the monthly report understates the current
rate, which "is actually 20 percent." (A couple weeks ago I did some
math based on raw figures and came up with 19.2% unemployment. Using
my formula from then, unemployment should be up to about 25.1%
now -- minus whatever small number of people who filed unemployment
claims but have since returned or found new work.)
Flattening the curve isn't good enough.
Li Zhou:
"Leave no vacancy behind": Mitch McConnell remains laser-focused on
judges amid coronavirus. He understands that Republican control
of the Senate and Presidency are tenuous, but once confirmed judges
serve for life. And while partisan judges cannot legislate, they can
powerfully restrict the ability of the people to make meaningful
changes to law and government. More evidence that the Republicans
are more focused on conserving their power than on letting future
governments serve the will of the people.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Monday, May 4, 2020
Weekend Roundup
This title offers a pretty apt introduction to the week:
Adam Cancryn:
As death toll passes 60,000, Trump's team searches for an exit strategy.
A good second course would be Adam Serwer:
Trump is inciting a coronavirus culture war to save himself.
Trump doesn't seem to understand much, but his big hedgehog idea
is that every day is a campaign day, and issues matter only in that
they can be spun as campaign fodder. This mostly means casting them
as culture war, using his takes to excite his base, or to offend
his enemies (which in turn excites his base). He doesn't have any
other interest in solving problems, and never feels the least bit
of responsibility when his administration fails. Indeed, he's found
that he can usually get away with not mentioning it (or declaring
it "fake news" when someone else brings it up). After all, political
discourse on the right has been untethered from reality ever since
Reagan discovered "morning in America."
As for his minions, they, too, have one hedgehog idea, which is
to consolidate as much political power as possible, and use that
power to do favors for their donors, seeing that as the way to
consolidate even more power. Hence, even with the pandemic dominating
the headlines, they keep plugging away at spreading their corrupt
favors around.
Some primary returns:
Ohio (April 28, postponed from March 17): Joe Biden 72.43%,
Bernie Sanders 16.61%;
Kansas (May 2): Joe Biden 76.85%, Bernie Sanders 23.15%. Kansas,
by the way, used a ranked choice system, which eventually reduced
Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren, and "uncommitted" to 0 votes.
Wikipedia has more: Warren got 7.8% in the first round. Biden
gained 6,119 votes when she was eliminated, vs. 5,822 for Sanders.
Some scattered links this week:
Zeeshan Aleem:
Bernard Avishai:
How Benjamin Netanyahu has managed the pandemic for political gain.
More on Israel:
Peter Baker:
Trump moves to replace watchdog who identified critical medical
shortages. Joe Biden/Elizabeth Warren:
There's no oversight of coronavirus relief -- because that's what
Trump wants. Pretty solid as politician-penned op-eds go. Nice
photos too. Makes them look as well as sound like a ticket. Barbara Boland:
Was that military flyover really worth the cost to taxpayers?
"Looking at what we spend on unwanted, overpriced tanks and planes
against the shortfalls in protective gear." Katelyn Burns:
Trump wants to use coronavirus aid as leverage to force blue states to
change immigration policies. The way I read this, he wants to use
the existence of "sanctuary cities" as an excuse to deny federal aid to
"blue states." I'm not aware of any states actually having immigration
policies. Tyler Cullis/Trita Parsi:
In tortured logic, Trump begs for a do-over on the Iran nuclear
deal. Mike Davis:
Reopening the economy will send us to hell. Jason Ditz:
Michelle Goldberg:
The new Great Depression is coming. Will there be a new New Deal?
Not without a major political shift, and it's quite possible that as
the crisis shifts into a "new normalcy" Republicans won't get blamed
and discredited like they were under Hoover -- after all, coronavirus
is still viewed as an external factor, even though the real damage to
the US economy and society had gradually built up under decades of
Republican-driven misrule. (Democrats don't have "clean hands" there,
but their faults were mostly the result of conceding to Republican
percepts while trying to compete for business favors). New York Times
has several more related op-eds:
Meredith Haggerty:
The novel frugality. My parents grew up on farms during the Great
Depression, so much of this is pretty familiar to me. After my mother
died, the first thing I did was throw out a drawer full of wire ties
and recycled plastic bags. Aleksandr Hemon:
Trump's nationalism advances on a predictable trajectory to violence.
His supporters will kill when they're told to. Sean Illing:
Mitch McConnell's shameless pursuit of power, explained: Interview
with Jane Mayer, author of a recent New Yorker profile,
How Mitch McConnell became Trump's enabler-in-chief.
The coronavirus revealed what was already broken in America: Lots
of people could have made this point, but one Illing interviewed here
is George Packer, who many of us have had trouble stomaching since he
emerged as a leading liberal apologist for Bush's 2003 invasion of
Iraq. To be fair, he walked his advocacy back, rather quickly in his
2005 book, The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, but he wrote
a hagiography of fellow hawk Richard Holbrooke as recently as 2019.
His book cited here is The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America (2013), and he wrote a recent piece in The Atlantic where
he declared
We are living in a failed state. I'll limit myself to one minor
point here. Illing quotes Packer as writing, "If 9/11 and 2008 wore
out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off
the idea that anti-politics is our salvation." Trust maybe, but the
"old political establishment" clung tenaciously to power after 9/11
and 2008, with no practical challenge from the so-called opposition
party. In fact, when Democrats gained power in 2009, they made a big
show of continuity -- both of the post-9/11 Forever Wars and of the
desperate 2008 scramble to bail out the banks -- retaining Bush's
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, giving Fed chairman Ben Bernanke
a second term, and promoting NY Fed chairman Timothy Geithner to
Secretary of the Treasury. I never really thought of Trump in 2016
as "anti-politics," but one can't imagine any candidate more certain
than Hillary Clinton to extend the continuity of politics as usual
from Bush-Obama, so maybe we shouldn't be shocked that some voters
fell for "what have you got to lose"? Near four years later, we're
just beginning to add up the toll -- but the Democrats countered
with a candidate who is even more wedded to the old politics. Sarah Jaffe:
The post-pandemic future of work. Peter Kafka:
A single Trump tweet sums up his media strategy: Confusion. Roge Karma:
Many world leaders have seen double-digit polling surges amid coronavirus.
Trump isn't one of them. Jill Lepore:
Kent State and the war that never ended. Reviews some books:
Derf Backderf: Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (described as
a "gut-wrenching graphic nonfiction novel");
Nancy K Bristow: Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power,
Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College;
David Paul Kuhn: The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and
the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution; as well as
mentioning earlier books: I.F. Stone: The Killings at Kent State:
How Murder Went Unpunished (1970), and Philip Caputo: 13
Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (2005). Sam Long:
Why we can't help France fight its failed colonial wars in Africa:
"US lawmakers are pushing our military to stay in a region that really
has no strategic interest for America." I don't see what "strategic
interest" has to do with it, although that argument has been used with
some success in the past, as when J William Fulbright objected to LBJ's
attempt to send US troops into 1960s Congo. Since then US encroachments
in Africa have generally been kept quiet, even though the existence of
AFRICOM shouts otherwise. On the other hand, France has intervened
repeatedly in its former African colonies. (Although, when France and
Italy wanted to intervene in Libya, they prevailed on their "NATO ally"
to do the heavy bombing.)
It helps to keep this history in context. One of the key lessons of
WWII was that European powers could no longer afford to govern their
colonies in Africa and Asia -- in part because the profits of empire
had been privatized, but also because people everywhere were revolting
against imperial rule -- but they still wanted to exploit them. The
solution was to arrange for independence led by friendly or corrupt
local elites. The US got into the game big time, especially anywhere
independence threatened capital interests, all the while assuring US
companies a cut of the profits (although after globalization is has
become impossible to tell which companies belong to which countries).
Of course, Washington would rather work through proxies and cronies,
but with hundreds of bases scattered all around the world, thousands
of "advisers" and arms merchants, the US alone is capable of striking
anywhere almost instantly. On the other hand, when people do choose
to fight back, American troops have often proved to be ineffective.
Maybe, as Jonathan Schell put it, the world really is unconquerable.
Joe Lowndes:
The morbid ideology behind the drive to reopen America. Robert Mackey:
Through creative accounting, Trump tries to cast America's death toll as
an achievement. Ben Mathis-Lilley:
The coronavirus is showing members of the professional class that the
government doesn't work for them either. Dylan Matthews:
Mitch McConnell's rediscovery of the deficit is a recipe for a
depression. Mark Mazzetti/Julian E Barnes/Edward Wong/Adam Goldman:
Trump officials are said to press spies to link virus and Wuhan labs.
Nicole Narea:
Trump is keeping meatpacking plants open -- but employees are scared to
show up for work. Ella Nilsen:
The White House has blocked Anthony Fauci from testifying in front of
a House committee. Anna North:
A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden ignited a firestorm of
controversy: "A woman says Biden assaulted her in 1993 and has
filed a criminal complaint."
Related:
Maybe had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, I might be tempted
to argue that personal character matters in this election, but he's
a rare exception among politicians. Most are the sort you don't want
to get too close to, and Biden is at best par for the course, perhaps
a bit dingier, maybe creepier too. But at this point I really don't
care, except negatively inasmuch as I think these personal stories
are distractions from the substantive political issues we should be
focusing on in this election. Of course, Biden has a pretty severely
tarnished record there, too, but compared to Trump he's an easy pick.
Maybe on character, too, but at this point I'm not even interested
in finding out. I'm reminded that when Louisiana Republicans picked
Ku Klux Klan Führer David Duke as their gubernatorial candidate, his
opponent, who had recently spent time in jail for corruption, ran
a successful campaign on the slogan: "Vote for the crook. It's
important." I doubt Biden will have to stoop that low, but running
against Trump, he surely can. Jonathan O'Connell/Steve Rich/Peter Whoriskey:
Public companies received $1 billion in stimulus funds meant for small
businesses. Evan Osnos:
How Greenwich Republicans learned to love Trump. Turns out that
Trump's supporters aren't just dumb white blue collar workers. They
also include a big slice of well off, secluded suburban elites. Alex Pareene:
Democrats aren't stuck with Joe Biden: "No one has to tie themselves
in knots to defend him if they don't want to." Nice sentiment, but hard
for me to see any alternative. The primary season got wrecked before the
pandemic finished it off, but Biden did get his votes, even if he did
next to nothing to deserve them, and lost badly when voters had a chance
to consider alternatives. But now what? Have the party insiders impose
some alternative that voters never had the chance to consider? Pareene
mentions the possibility of an Andrew Cuomo-Stacy Abrams ticket, as if
that would be more viable. Like Pareene, I'm not going to tie myself in
knots trying to defend Biden. I may not defend him at all. But I'll vote
for him against Trump, and I'll try not to make myself look too desperate
in doing so. Lois Parshley:
Where coronavirus is hitting rural America hard. Steven Pearlstein:
Socialism for investors, capitalism for everyone else. Still writing
from the prejudice that "socialism" is a bad thing (much like people thought
they were scoring points when complaining about "corporate welfare"). The
word, after all, is rooted in "social," which is something hedge funds will
never be associated with. I'm reminded here of "the Greenspan put" -- the
guarantee that whenever markets showed signs of weakness, the Fed would
intervene to prop they up again. Back in the 1990s, investors could still
claim a "risk premium," even though Greenspan had virtually eliminated
the risk of investing. Since 2008, the Fed has had to get creative to prop
up an ever more precariously overvalued stock market, and the measures
Pearlstein is talking about here are simply the latest and most extreme
measures. As for "everyone else," what they get isn't really capitalism,
just the trail of wreckage capitalists have always left in their wake. Daniel Politi:
A city in Oklahoma ends face mask requirement after store employees
threatened. City is
Stillwater, in north-central Oklahoma, pop. 50,391, home of Oklahoma
State University, population below poverty line 27.3%. I've passed
through the town dozens of times, often in recent times hoping (and
failing) to find a more cosmopolitan restaurant than smaller towns
nearby. Can't think of much nice to say about the place. David Roberts:
Mitch McConnell is gaslighting Democrats (again). Kim Stanley Robinson:
The coronavirus is rewriting our imaginations. Sometimes, I guess,
it takes a novelist used to constructing imaginary worlds to see the
one we're in:
In many ways, we've been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings,
we've been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene,
the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change -- whatever you want
to call it, we've been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our
children's hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as
if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways
that soon will be beyond our descendants' ability to repair. And yet
we've been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990 -- as though the
neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We've been
paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.
Now, all of a sudden, we're acting fast as a civilization. We're
trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve -- to avoid mass
death. Doing this, we know that we're living in a moment of historic
importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be
remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. . . .
Margaret Thatcher said that "there is no such thing as society," and
Ronald Reagan said that "government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem." These stupid slogans marked the turn away
from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the
bullshit of the past forty years. . . .
Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were
trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in
balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it's
used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within
a system of destructive falsehoods.
Aaron Rupar:
Bernie Sanders/Pramila Jayapal:
The pandemic has made the US healthcare crisis far more dire. We must
fix the system. Dylan Scott:
Jamil Smith:
The right's gun routine falls flat during the pandemic: "Michigan's
governor has a killer virus to be scared of, not a bunch of clowns
terrorizing lawmakers with firearms. That's why she held firm on her
stay-at-home orders." Jeff Stein/Carol D Leonnig/Josh Dawsey/Gerri Shih:
US officials crafting retaliatory actions against China over coronavirus
as President Trump fumes. Emily Stewart/Christina Animashaun:
30 million Americans have lost their jobs in 6 weeks. This week's
new filings down to 3.3 million, still almost five times the pre-March
weekly record. Matt Taibbi:
The inevitable coronavirus censorship crisis is here. Kanishk Tharoor:
The exclusivity economy: "How concierge dining, health, and travel
services insulate the wealthy and hide soaring inequality." Draws on
Nelson D Schwartz's book, The Velvet Rope Economy: How Inequality
Became Big Business -- a long list of options the rich have to
keep themselves separate (and more pampered) from everyone else. Nick Turse:
Kenneth P Vogel/Jim Rutenberg/Lisa Lerer:
The quiet hand of conservative groups in anti-lockdown protests.
One prominent Tea Party funder, Charles Koch and his groups, is
reportedly not involved in the demonstrations. David Wallace-Wells:
What the coronavirus models can't see. Alex Ward:
Jordan Weissmann:
Republicans are absolutely deluded if they think only blue states need
a bailout: The state hit worst is Louisiana, followed by New Jersey,
New York, Missouri, Florida, Kansas, and Kentucky. We've managed to end
some of the Brownback tax cuts in Kansas, but the tax base here is still
heavily dependent on some of the highest sales taxes in the nation.
Chart shows 21 states, and most are red. Not on the list: any of the
West Coast and only Rhode Island and Maine in New England. Reid Wilson:
Governors in all 50 states get better marks than Trump in COVID response.
Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou:
Hillary Clinton has officially endorsed Joe Biden for president.
Poison pill?
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Weekend Roundup
It's rather staggering how much stuff one can come up with to read
in a week. Also how little of what follows directly concerns the 2020
elections, which should be pivotal -- especially, now that it so clear
to all concerned that the stakes are critical -- yet seems way above
the heads of the party leaders. There are three items below that touch
on Biden: one on his PAC's worrisome China-baiting ad (Bessner); one
on his ambitious stimulus proposal (Grunwald); one on his VP choices
(Hasan). I suppose you might count a fourth (Kilpatrick) on Sanders'
campaign and supporters, but I don't mention Biden there, and I'm
pretty much done with looking at campaign post-mortems. I also saw,
but didn't link to, various articles arguing that Biden needs to veer
left to unify the party and/or to develop a more effective campaign
(I suppose the Warren-for-VP push might count there). Actually, I
don't much care who Biden picks (aside from my getting irritated by
how pushy the Stacey Abrams campaign has become), or whether Biden
starts giving lip service to left arguments. In some ways, the less
of that he does, the less he'll wind up walking back from when/if he
wins. And, quite frankly, Warren and Sanders will be more effective
in Congress, outside of the Biden administration -- not that I don't
wish them luck steering some patronage to people who actually do have
the public interest at heart.
On the other hand, there are tons of Trump pieces below: many of the
Trump is a moron/Trump is insane variety, which is probably the easiest
call to make. Some align with the Trump is an autocrat/fascist meme,
some going so far at to insist that he is bent on the destruction of
democracy. I don't stress pieces in that vein. There's no reason to
think Trump wouldn't be amenable to a right-wing putsch, I see him
mostly as a front man and a diversion. It's other Republicans -- the
serious ones -- who are the real threat, as should be clear from the
more obscure articles below, the ones about corruption, about their
relentless assault in the environment, about their efforts to skew
the electorate in their favor to perpetuate their graft and their
imposition of anti-democratic ideology. Personally, I wouldn't mind
dispensing with the Trump show, but he does do a remarkable job of
illustrating the derangement of his apparatchiki.
Some scattered links this week:
Yasmeen Abutaleb/Josh Dawsey/Ellen Nakashima/Greg Miller:
The US was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged:
"From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures
cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic
were lost." Kate Aronoff:
The world order is broken. The coronavirus proves it. "Rich countries
have pushed economic policies that set poor countries up to fail." Zack Beauchamp:
A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity's show helped spread the
coronavirus. Daniel Bessner:
The last thing we need is a "new cold war" with China. Looks like
both Trump and Biden are taunting each other for being too close and
friendly to China -- Trump's refers to "Beijing Biden," while
Biden's ad charges "Trump Didn't Hold China Accountable" for
Covid-19. (Trump preferred to hold the WHO responsible for China's
late disclosures, if indeed that's what they were.) Both are playing
a dangerous game, not because China isn't beyond reproach, but it's
more than ever important to move from conflict to cooperation on
the world's many problems. And also it should be admitted that the
US has little if any claim to moral high ground. I also worry that
Biden's efforts to come off as tougher against China and Russia
might give Trump another chance to pass himself off as the anti-war
candidate -- as he did with Commander-in-Chief fetishist Hillary
Clinton. Related:
Philip Bump/Ashley Parker:
13 hours of Trump: The president fills briefings with attacks and boasts,
but little empathy. By "little" I think they mean "zero." Katelyn Burns:
The Trump administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to push
for more deregulation. Jane Coaston:
FreedomWorks is supporting the anti-shutdown protests -- and applying
for government funding. Jessica Corbett:
Calling US Postal Service 'a joke,' Trump demands four-fold price hike
for customers amid Covid-19 pandemic. Caleb Crain:
What a white-supremacist coup looks like: Wilmington, North Carolina,
1898. Eleanor Cummins:
Celebrity quarantine posts are inflaming tensions between the haves
and the have-nots. Related: Chuck Collins:
Let's stop pretending billionaires are in the same boat as us during
this pandemic. Igor Derysh:
Senate Republicans snuck $90 billion tax cut for millionaires into
coronavirus relief legislation. Anthony Faiola/Ana Vanessa Herrero:
A pandemic of corruption: $40 masks, questionable contracts, rice-stealing
bureaucrats mar coronavirus response. Lee Fang:
John A Farrell:
Breaking the grip of white grievance: "The 2020 campaign is shaping
up into a referendum on Trumpism." Susan B Glasser:
Fifty thousand Americans dead from the coronavirus, and a president
who refuses to mourn them. Well, now that you mention it:
Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department official who has been named
White House coördinator for the pandemic response, often mentions
the human toll of the disease and thanks the medical caregivers
risking their lives. On Wednesday, Vice-President Mike Pence began
his brief remarks with a nod to the "loss of more than forty-seven
thousand of our countrymen." It was just the sort of thing you would
expect Pence to say, and yet notable for how different it sounded
compared with the President. Trump began that very same briefing by
saying, "Our aggressive strategy to battle the virus is working." It
is, he said, "very exciting, even today, watching and seeing what's
happening." What was happening, though, was another day on which more
than two thousand Americans died of the coronavirus, a fact that
Trump did not mention.
Personally, I don't mind having a president who doesn't get choked
up over human tragedy. I don't think we should look to the president
for emotional affirmation or even sympathy. I don't think we need to
be flying flags at half-mast. And I find it hard to imagine anyone
becoming president who doesn't start out with an oversized ego. But
I do think that the only reason for tolerating a president who is a
total jerk is if he (or someday she) at least has a staggering ability
to make sense of the big picture. But Trump is not only self-centered
to an embarrassing degree, he's a total fucking moron. He's insufferable
at the best of times, and this doesn't even rise to the level of bad.
Michelle Goldberg:
Coronavirus and the price of Trump's delusions. The op-eds pretty
much write themselves:
Rebecca Gordon:
Strange attractors: On being addicted to Trump and his press conferences.
Compares Trump's daily Covid-19 briefings to the Vietnam War "Five O'Clock
Follies" -- evidently written before Trump declared that he "could see the
light at the end of the tunnel" (a line Robert McNamara famously used to
express his optimism about Vietnam, which speaks volumes about how clueless
Trump is).
I think what provides me (and so many others) with that nightly hit of
dopamine is the sheer brazenness of the president's lies on show for all
to see. Not for him the mealy-mouthed half-truth, the small evasion. No,
his are, like the rest of his persona, grandiose in a way that should be
beyond belief, but remains stubbornly real. . . .
So it's no surprise that he also uses media ratings as the metric by
which he judges the performance of everyone working to slow down the
spread of the coronavirus. For him, governing is nothing but a performance.
Michael Grunwald:
Biden wants a new stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion.
Much of that is Green New Deal. Also note: Jon Queally:
As poll show nearly 90% Democratic support, Biden told hostility to
Medicare for All 'no longer tenable position for you'. Mehdi Hasan:
Dear Joe Biden, here's why you should pick Elizabeth Warren as your
running mate: Not as persuasive a case as could be made. For one,
thing, I wouldn't start with the actuarial tables. And while I'd like
to see Biden extend a "bridge to the left of the party," his need
there is less to secure voters than to establish a better grasp on
policy ideas. Warren helps him most specifically there: even when
Biden appears befuddled, she can talk about issues with authority,
insight, and compassion. Warren's great weakness as a presidential
candidate was her inability to expand her base beyond college-educated
professionals, but that (plus enthusiasm among young voters) should
help shore up a conspicuous weakness of Biden's. (On the other hand,
Biden already does as well as any Democrat can with white working
class voters, as well as with non-whites.) Another point that should
favor Warren is that she likes to present herself as a fighter, and
could mount a refreshingly aggressive attack on Trump and his corrupt
administration -- among other things, that would offer quite a contrast
to Trump's obsequious "vice-poodle" Pence. Of course, one doubts that
Biden's handlers will risk someone they perceive as a loose cannon.
Even if they did, they'd pressure Warren to become a mere surrogate,
which would squander her unique advantages. When Kerry picked John
Edwards as his 2004 running mate, I hoped that Edwards would add a
dash of Southern populist fervor to the patrician Kerry. Instead, he
instantly transformed into Kerry's lawyer/mouthpiece, adding nothing,
and helped lose. Very easy to see lawyer/prosecutors like Harris and
Klobuchar doing just that. As for the much-touted Stacey Abrams, well,
I hate to sound like Trump, but I like politicians who win. (When I
did a google search for "biden vp picks" all three "top stories"
pictured Abrams, as well as one of three "videos": the other two
were worse: "Podesta on how Biden should pick his V.P." and "Jill
Biden: I'd love for Michelle Obama to be VP pick.") As for names
being bandied about, see Ella Nilsen:
What we know about Joe Biden's possible vice presidential picks.
Jon Henley/Eleanor Ainge Roy:
Are female leaders more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?
Maia Niguel Hoskin:
The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests. Zoë Hu:
A new age of destructive austerity after the coronavirus: "The economic
vultures of yesteryear are already scheming about how to head off the
prospect of a better world when the pandemic ends." With Trump as
president, Republicans have been exceptionally eager to prop up the
economy with massive deficit spending, even if they have to cut deals
to route some of that money to ordinary people, but that's not going
to last. You may recall what an emergency it was to prop up the banking
system in 2008, yet once the bankers got theirs (and the presidency
changed from R to D), nobody else mattered enough: we got nothing more
than harrangues about excessive deficits and the need for austerity.
So the pain of recession spread and persisted and festered, and while
profits rebounded spectacularly, all regular people got was underpaid
jobs, diminished benefits, and increased risk. As noted elsewhere,
McConnell has already started to sandbag "stimulus" bills that he
deems overly generous to the wrong people, and with CBO making a
$3.7 trillion deficit projected, the deficit scolds and austerity
prophets will have a field day. Only question is why should we believe
them now/again? John Hudson/Josh Dawsey/Souad Mekhennet:
Trump expands battle with World Health Organization far beyond aid
suspension. Sean Illing:
Why the government makes it hard for Americans to get unemployment
benefits: "The system is dysfunctional. It was designed that way."
Interview with Pamela Heard, author of Administrative Burdens:
Policymaking by Other Means.
There is no anti-lockdown protest movement: "There are protests,
but this isn't a movement, and it's not the Tea Party 2.0." Interview
with Theda Skocpol, who has a couple books on Tea Party politics:
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
(2012, with Vanessa Williamson), and Upending American Politics:
Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from
the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (2020, ed. with
Caroline Tervo).
Millennials are getting screwed by the economy. Again. Interview
with Annie Lowrey, author of Give People Money: How a Universal
Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the
World. Rebecca Jennings:
Nobody's buying clothes right now. So stores are filing for bankruptcy.
Connor Kilpatrick:
Why are they so mad at Bernie supporters? "We're stuck with them,
but they're stuck with us, too." Related:
Catherine Kim:
It took a pandemic for cities to finally address homelessness:
"Some cities are housing homeless people in hotels. But a long-term
solution is sorely needed." Ezra Klein:
Why we can't build: "America's inability to act is killing people."
Credits Francis Fukuyama with the hideous term "vetocracy": a system
designed to inhibit and frustrate change, where many special interests
find themselves able to veto development while few (if any) are able
to overcome other vetos. Klein details three vetocracies: the federal,
the state and local, and the capitalist. Paul Krugman:
Dan Lamothe:
Pentagon plans to dispatch Blue Angels and Thunderbirds in coronavirus
tribute: Well, they mean "tribute to health-care workers and first
responders" rather than to the virus itself, but that doesn't begin
to resolve the cognitive disconnect. This really just shows that in
the gravest national security crisis to hit America in many decades,
the lavishly funded, much vaunted US military has absolutely nothing
to offer or even reassure us. Jim Lardner:
Mapping corruption: Donald Trump's executive branch. Ernesto Londońo/Leticia Casado/Manuela Andreoni:
'A perfect storm' in Brazil as troubles multiply for Bolsonaro:
Possibly the world's foremost coronavirus denier -- Brazil is up to
53,000 confirmed cases and 3,670 deaths -- on top of many other
offenses, including resignation of "a star cabinet member," several
criminal investigations, and talk of impeachment -- couldn't happen
to a nastier piece of work. Also note:
Boeing terminates $4.2 billion deal to buy stake in Embraer unit.
Not the sort of monopoly-girding investment a company makes when its
own business is in free fall. Dylan Matthews:
Trump's new bailout program for farmers and ranchers, explained. Laura McGann:
America doesn't want another Tea Party: "Don't let Fox News fool
you. 81 percent of Americans do not share the views of anti-quarantine
protesters." Ian Millhiser:
Justice Alito's jurisprudence of white racial innocence: "Alito gets
very upset if you suggest that racism exists." Luke Mogelson:
America's abandonment of Syria: "Many Syrians thought the U.S.
cared about them. Now they know better." Stupid mistake. I can't even
imagine where they could have gotten that idea. From America's utterly
reflexive support of Israel? From America's long-standing but limited
military alliances with Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia? From
the long siege of Iraq, followed by invasion, occupation, and cynical
orchestration of civil war to divide the opposition. From America's
even longer-running devastation of Afghanistan? From 40+ years of
sanctions and worse in Iran? From overthrowing Ghaddafi in Libya
and leaving the country in chaos? From arming the Saudis for their
assault on Yemen? From all those drones flying hither and yon, taking
potshots as supposed jihadis? Is there anything in US policy toward
the Middle East that even remotely suggests we care about anyone who
lives there? Hell, the US government can barely be bothered to care
about Americans in America. Nicole Narea:
Trump's executive order to stop issuing green cards temporarily,
explained. Ella Nilsen:
Getting unemployment has been a nightmare for millions of people across
the country. Kee B Park/Christine Ahn:
South Korea is a model for combatting Covid-19, it should now take the
lead in diplomacy with North Korea. Not sure that the two points
follow, but Trump (and his hawks) has bungled his opportunity to work
out a deal with Kim Jong Un. And frankly, why should the US be able
to veto whatever deal the Koreans work out? David Roberts:
Coronavirus stimulus money will be wasted on fossil fuels: "Oil and
gas companies were already facing structural problems before Covid-19
and are in long-term decline." David Rogers:
Trump administration ducks and dodges to justify wall spending. Aaron Rupar:
Dylan Scott:
How the Covid-19 pandemic will leave its mark on US health care.
Five subheds:
- Some hospitals will probably close. A lot of primary care doctors
could also be in trouble.
- Telemedicine will finally go mainstream.
- We'll invest more in public health preparedness and surveillance.
- We could rethink how drugmakers and the federal government handle
urgent needs.
- There will be a push to expand health coverage.
Geoffrey Skelley:
Americans are largely unimpressed with Trump's handling of the coronavirus
pandemic. His approval ratings did get a break early in the crisis, but
he's been sinking for a few weeks, now negative 9% on the generic approval
question, below water on handling the pandemic, with very/somewhat worried
about the economy adding up to 86.5%. Of course, lots of people still have
a blind spot where it comes to him, hence the very cushy "largely
unimpressed" in the title. Michael Specter:
Trump's firing of a top infectious-disease expert endangers us all.
Emily Stewart:
Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown's plan to protect consumers from
financial ruin. Taylor Telford/Kimberly Kindy:
As they rushed to maintain US meat supply, big processors saw plants
become covid-19 hot spots, worker illnesses spike. Map doesn't
include any spots in western Kansas, but I noticed a concentration
of cases in Ford County (Dodge City), which has 38% more cases than
Sedgwick (Wichita), despite having only 6.5% of the population.
Finney County (Garden City) has a population similar to Ford, with
about 30% as many cases, which still is a much higher infection
rate than Sedgwick. Ford and Finney counties are probably the two
largest beef feedlot and packing counties in the state. Nick Turse:
US airstrikes hit all-time high as coronavirus spreads in Somalia. Anya van Wagtendonk:
71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment
benefits.
Trump dismisses his daily coronavirus press briefings as "not worth the
time & effort". I don't think I've ever been moved to quote a
Trump tweet before, but this one is revealing:
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the
Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses
to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, &
the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time &
effort!
I get that "Lamestream" is meant as an insult, a catchy play on
"mainstream" that has become reflexively automatic among those so
disposed, but if you think a bit, it's pretty lame as insults go,
especially given that the highest aspiration of mainstream media is
to be so fairly balanced the stories speak for themselves. Singling
out lameness is Trump's way of asserting that should entertain rather
than merely report. So does his point about "record ratings." Given
that Trump is incapable of reporting information or even conveying
reassuring emotion, the only reason for anyone to watch him is that
the briefings are somehow inadvertently entertaining. Maybe that's
where the "hostile questions" come in? I mean, Trump knows better than
most that hostility is entertaining -- isn't that why his campaign
events are so full of hostile rants? Why shouldn't the media put its
inherent lameness aside for an occasion with no other merit and feed
off Trump's hostility? Why not prod him along a bit, and give the
Trump haters as well as the Trump adorers a cheering interest? As
for "Fake News," nowadays that's nothing but Trumpspeak for reports
that are insufficiently flattering. That "Fake News" has grown by
leaps and bounds over the last 3-4 years is the inevitable result
of its only subject appearing as an embarrassing moron in his every
public appearance. Robert Wright:
Let's kill the aiding-and-abetting meme once and for all! His
examples are attacks on political figures for aiding, abetting,
giving comfort, or just showing a modicum of respect for foreign
leaders or nations, especially those that Americans have long
been trained to suspect or despise (like Russia and China, Iran
and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, but anti-Arab prejudice is strong
enough that Saudi Arabia could also work, but never Israel). The
recent rivalry between Biden and Trump to see who is most negative
on China is an example. One example Wright cites is George Packer:
We are living in a failed state, where Packer likens Trump to
French general and Vichy collaboration leader Philippe Pétain: "Like
Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country
to a prolonged disaster." I agree that Trump has done (and continues
to do, scarcely losing a step to the pandemic) a lot of things that
spell disaster for most Americans, but none of them even remotely
resemble what Pétain did to France and (much more to the point) for
Nazi Germany. Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou:
How the coronavirus is surfacing America's deep-seated anti-Asian
biases. I'm skeptical here, not that Trump isn't riling up the
indiscriminate haters in his fan base, but that the relatively few
who attack and the more who slur Asian-Americans know anything of
the history of anti-Asian racism in America. Granted, it's not so
ancient that I can't remember it in my lifetime (and Trump's older
than I am), but by then the old prejudices had been transformed by
wars which counted at least some Asians as allies.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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