Speaking of* [70 - 79]

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Speaking of Which

Too late for an introduction.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Seems like a relatively tame week for evil, but there are always examples.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Necessarily a grab bag, but we're probably stuck with it.

  • Eric Levitz: He's one of the better writers at New York Magazine, but I find a lot to quibble with this week:

    • [07-11] Biden's unpopularity is more mysterious than it looks. Returns to the subject of his previous piece: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far), admitting that "the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I'd previously allowed." I find both arguments unconvincing, but I'm not sure I got them right. One problem is that lots of things are only explicable with statistics, but they don't carry the same weight as experience. And even experience is subject to interpretation. By all objective measures, the 1980s were a great decade for me, but I didn't credit Reagan with any of that, and in fact I blamed him for a lot of problems that hadn't really materialized yet, but which seemed all but inevitable given his policies. If you expect the economy to go to hell when a Democrat or Republican takes over, it isn't hard to find evidence that you're right -- especially given that both have primarily given us more inequality.

    • [07-08] The 'greedflation' debate is deeply confused: Sure, he scores easy points against straw men or hacks -- Robert Reich is an example -- not least by pointing out cases where profits all but automatically rise when external events impact supply. (If you're as old as I am, you may remember the "windfall profits tax" passed in 1973, when OPEC forced oil prices way up, inadvertently making American oil men suddenly much richer.) On the other hand, I don't buy the argument that monopoly couldn't be raising prices now because if it existed, it would have raised prices previously. There are lots of reasons for monopolists not to fully exploit their power the moment they get it, but to do so when others give them cover for rising prices (as well as the incentive kick of raising costs). But also, "greedflation" provides an alternative to the cruel notion that inflation should be fought by taking away people's jobs.

    • [07-12] The case for Cornel West 2024 is extremely weak. But the case would be stronger if Levitz hadn't made a wrong turn in his first sentence: Cornel West recently decided that the best way for him to advance economic and social justice in the United States . . . thereby marginally increasing the odds of a second Trump presidency." I'm not interested in debating the last part, which as Levitz admits is a very marginal concern. The mistake is in thinking that West's campaign is only about "economic and social justice," and only in the US. If that's all that's at dispute, I'd happily concede that Biden is already making progress in that direction, and that West, no matter how much more he wants to achieve, isn't likely to do much better. If that's all he wants, he, like Bernie Sanders, would be better off working with Biden. But West has another major plank in his campaign, one that is diametrically opposed to both Republican and Democratic leaders, and that is foreign policy, and the almost certainty that current policies will lead to more wars that will eventually prove disastrous both for America and for the world. [E.g., see this interview; also another interview by Chris Hedges.] Not many people understand that, but that's all the more reason for West to stand up and argue the case. My biggest worry for 2024 is that some Biden miscalculation will throw us into a war, that will trigger a rebound for Trump, who is already arguing that only he can save us from world war. The rest of the article consists of minor arguments with a pro-West piece by Lily Sánchez, which pale in importance to this issue.

    • [07-13] A new order blocking Manchin's pipeline could hurt the climate: "Restricting Congress's authority to exempt energy projects from judicial review would undermine the green transition."

    • [07-15] Can extremely reflective white paint save the planet? If anyone does come up with a plausible geoengineering scheme for cooling the atmosphere, Democrats (in particular) will happily throw a lot of money at it. This is an example of a small hack that's unlikely to scale significantly, but at least it involves spending more to avoid simply cutting back on energy use -- one solution that no one serious considers plausible.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-14] Biden's new plan to forgive $39 billion in student loans, explained: "More than 800,000 borrowers are now eligible for student loan forgiveness." Something else for Republicans to try to ruin.

  • John Nichols: [07-14] Jesse Jackson's politics of peace: "His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns called for ending military interventions, supported disarmament, and sought deep cuts in Pentagon spending." Not even Bernie Sanders has done that since, which is more evidence of how deeply rutted our thinking is on the military. I've long thought that Jackson would have won the Democratic Party nomination had he run in 1992, but he didn't, to avoid blame for losing a second term to GWH Bush. I also thought that Clinton owed him big time for not making the run, and I expected some kind of payoff for the favor, but never noticed one.

  • Timothy Noah: [07-12] You'll be very surprised who's benefiting most from Bidenomics: Not really. "Red states, not blue ones, are seeing the biggest income gains." Isn't it always like that? Poor states vote Republican, and better off states bail them out.

Climate and Environment:

Ukraine War: Conspicuous by absence is any news on how well Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is going, which suggests it isn't. On the other hand, NATO met, and continues to rack up milestones, which as usual mostly involve arms sales. Wake me when we see some diplomacy, because once again nothing else matters. The Gessen piece is historical, stuff you should know. It doesn't mean that Putin's invasion was in any way justifiable, or that sending arms to help Ukraine fend off that invasion is bad policy, but understanding America's deep culpability for the conflict would go a long way toward negotiating a way out of it. Conversely, not recognizing how this all went wrong prevents us from understanding the chief lessons of this war: that deterrence and sanctions are more likely to provoke war than to prevent it; and that not just the combatants but the world cannot afford for wars like this to go on and on.

Around the world: But mostly Israel, again.

Other stories:

Kai Bird: [07-07] Oppenheimer, nullified and vindicated: Co-author of the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird explains the campaign to get the federal government to admit that they erred in 1954 in revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance, thus excluding the director of the Manhattan Project from any further role in atomic weapons planning. The vindication didn't come until December 18, 2022, and serves as another example of something Biden's administration has done that Obama's was too chickenshit to venture. I will quibble with the assertion that Oppenheimer was "the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism." Sure, he was the bigger celebrity, but the execution of the Rosenbergs was a graver miscarriage of justice. But Oppenheimer is a clearer example of how McCarthyism worked: it meant that anyone with a vaguely leftist past could be crucified as a traitor, and hardly anyone would dare come to their defense -- especially liberals who could themselves be tarred as "fellow travelers."

Jonathan Chait: [07-11] In defense of independent opinion journalism: "The 'hack gap' between right and left has been closing." I'm not convinced. I won't deny that there are hacks on the left, but they differ significantly from hacks on the right. For one thing, they're not all aligned against their partisan enemies. Take Chait, for instance, who only seems truly happy when he's attacking people to his left -- a considerable number, given his support for the Iraq war, his pimping for charter schools, and his "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination." But even when leftists slip into hackdom, they still start with commitments to truth and justice that are utterly alien to the right. Then, by the way, there is the deeper problem of objectivity, which is impossible, making it a claim one should always be suspicious of.

Bob Harris/Jon Schwarz: [07-04] Carl Reiner's life should remind us: If you like laughing, thank FDR and the New Deal: "Their comedy descends directly from the Works Progress Administration." The WPA did a world of good for America, but much of what they did, especially in the arts, would be considered too frivolous, and in many cases too controversial, for "taxpayer" funding these days. Until that attitude changes, we're stuck with a government distinguished mostly by misery: how miserable its workers feel, and how miserable they make the rest of us.

Noasm Hassenfeld: [07-16] Even the scientists who build AI can't tell you how it works: Interview with Sam Bowman.

Oshan Jarow: [07-14] Poverty is a major public health crisis. Let's treat it like one. You'd think that such an argument would make people more inclined to support anti-poverty measures, but Republicans have aligned themselves pretty firmly against public health (or at least doing anything about it).

Jess Lander: [07-13] What led to Anchor Brewing's downfall? Sapporo, some workers say. America's oldest craft brewer is going out of business, supposedly a victim of Covid or maybe bad marketing, but I'm suspicious of two ownership changes: in 2010, owner Fritz Maytag, who had rescued the brewery after prohibition, sold to Griffin Group ("a local beverage consulting company," which smells a lot like private equity even if they're not a big name), and in 2017 Griffin pawned the carcass on to giant Japanese brewer Sapporo. It's easy enough to say that the latter didn't understand American craft brewers, and to illustrate this with various marketing blunders, but the deeper truth is that they simply didn't care, especially after the workforce unionized in 2019. After all, it's not unusual for big companies to buy up small ones only to shutter them, leaving the larger company with one fewer competitor (even if, as in this case, one that barely mattered).

Back when I worked for a high-tech startup, where most employees owned a small sliver of stock, I concluded that the world would be much better if employees owned a controlling share of stock, thus resolving conflict with management. (Unions, valuable as they are as a balance against management power, usually increase conflict, especially when they lack legal rights, as is often the case in the US; on the other hand, in Germany, where "co-determination" gives workers a stake in management, unions align more closely with management.) I'd like to see many policies that help facilitate employee ownership. One of the most obvious ones would be to allow employees to claim defunct businesses, wiping out the company's previous debt obligations, and providing funding for a fresh start. I have no doubt that a company like Anchor could be revived, if handed over to workers who care about the product and the customers, and about their own jobs.

Shira Ovide: [07-14] We must end the tyranny of printers in American life: "Printers cannot be reformed. They must be destroyed, once and for all." I had to include this because my latest printer purchase, a HP OfficeJet Pro 9010, is the biggest purchasing mistake I've ever made. They insisted that I use a wireless connection, and while it is recognized by my Linux computers, I'm not able to send any jobs from them to be printed. (At one point, this worked, but even then scans couldn't be uploaded, at least not using sane.) One main reason for the wireless connection is the need to reorder ink as part of a subscription program that was originally offered for $2.99/month, then immediately raised to $4.99/month. Of course, they haven't sent me any ink, because I haven't been able to print. I've owned several HP printers going back to their LaserJet II in the 1980s, but they've never pulled anything like this before. At last, as Ovide will be happy to hear, I'm learning to live without printing. Now I need to figure out how to stop paying for nothing.

Kelsey Piper: [07-12] Stop looking to Mother Nature for answers to resource questions: "The silly way we think about resource scarcity." Followed, sad to say, by an equally silly answer. While it's true that we haven't discovered every earthly resource we might eventually manage to exploit, that's mostly because people keep assuming that only very short terms matter: a "50 year" phosphorus find may be a big deal for 50 years, but 50 years is a pretty short time frame.

Sigal Samuel: [07-11] Scientists unveil the key site that shows we're in a new climate epoch: Title has it backwards: some scientists decided we are in a new climate epoch, then looked for a geologic site that could be used as a marker between the old Holocene epoch and the new Anthropocene. They found one, but it's not based on climate change. Rather, what it marks is the appearance of fallout from nuclear bombs testing, which increased significantly around 1950. On the other hand, human impact on the geostratigraphic record goes back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, eventually becoming dramatic enough to justify the term Anthropocene (much like the Cambrian is sometimes called the age of trilobites).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-14] Roaming Charges: Clusterfuck in Vilnius. He's in a bad mood, starting with cluster bombs for Ukraine.

Two subjects I didn't want to say anything about are No Labels and RFK Jr. -- among other things, do I file them under Republicans, who they effectively work for, or Democrats? -- but if you want some well-reasoned analysis, turn to No More Mister Nice Blog:

An old piece I ran across, still worth mentioning:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 9, 2023

Speaking of Which

I could write about Israel every week, as every week some new outrage occurs there. I don't, because I tire of making the same points over and over, and because what happens there is mostly out of sight and therefore out of mind. But since the current Netanyahu government took power, built as it is on ultra-religious parties tied to settler aggression and violence, a direction has clearly emerged, which if unchecked will lead to the end of Jewish Democracy -- let's face it, there's never been universal democracy in Israel -- and eventually to genocide against Palestinians. The ruling junta's plot to break the judicial system, which sometimes acts as a brake on the government's violence, has been widely reported, because it's been widely protested by Israeli Jews and their sympathizers in the US. The violence directed against Palestinians has received much less attention, mostly in the form of pieces like: [07-04] Israel targets West Bank militant stronghold in major operation. Of course, it helps to know that all Palestinians are considered "militants," and any place they're in the majority is a "stronghold." For a brief introduction to what happened there, see Jeffrey St Clair: [07-07] The meaning of Jenin.

I'll follow up with some more links, but first I want to be clear on several points:

  1. From its inception in the 1880s, Zionism has always been a colonial settler project, pitched to gain sponsorship by an imperial power. The UK adopted the movement in 1917 to use against the Ottomans. After the British withdrew in 1948, Israel became independent, but still needed allies for arms (first Russia, then France, then the US).

  2. With British protection secured, the Zionist community (Yishuv) was segregated and grew self-sufficient, buying land while marginalizing Palestinian workers -- the powerful Jewish labor union insisted on only employing Jewish labor. The adoption of Hebrew as their national language further isolated Jews from Arabs. When Israel was declared, a separate-and-unequal society and economy already existed, reinforced by law.

  3. Like all settler colonialists, Zionists understdood that success depended on numbers. In the US and Australia, an overwhelming number of settlers (aided by disease and superior arms) relegated the few surviving natives to reservations. But settlers never had a chance in places where they were a tiny minority (like Haiti or Kenya), nor were settlers ultimately able to retain power in places where they held substantial power but were still a minority (like South Africa and Algeria). When the British withdrew, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 35%. Israel attempted to solve this problem by partition (a UN-approved plan they agreed to but didn't honor), war, and the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from land they occupied during the war. The Palestinians remaining in Israel were accorded some rights, but lived under a military justice system separate from Jews, and faced economic restrictions.

  4. Israel never accepted its borders. (There are still Israelis who believe they are entitled to the East Bank of the Jordan, to southern Lebanon, and to Sinai.) It obliterated the UN partition plan, by seizing West Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Western Galilee, among other expansions. It then launched wars in 1956 and 1967 to seize more land. After 1967, Israel developed a complex system of control over the occupied territories, but they kept wanting more, to which aim they permitted settlers to claim an ever-expanding array of select locations.

In 1967, Israel faced three threats -- Arab attack, Palestinian uprising, and world opinion turning against Israel -- beyond the obvious demographic trap, but could have navigated their way around them. The threat of Arab armies (mostly Egypt and Syria) was largely ended by Israel's 1967 blitz, which gave them territories that could be returned for peace -- as finally happened with Egypt in 1979, and almost happened with Syria in 2000 (before Barak got cold feet and/or greedy). Israel could have organized Gaza and the West Bank into an indepdendent Palestinian state, which could have repatriated refugees, thus degrading the PLO and its offshoots. And world opinion -- which would later tip the balance against South Africa -- was most sensitive to injustice, which Israel had started to address by ending military rule within the 1967 borders.

But Israelis weren't satisfied, and given the belief system they had painstakingly constructed, probably couldn't be. They had built a military juggernaut, and doubled down on it, becoming one of the most thoroughly militaristic societies the world has ever known. Meanwhile, the state supported the ultra-orthodox, who moved from apolitical to nationalist and beyond. The stratification of society and economy inflated Jewish pride, while grinding Palestinians into resistance, which could be met with half-hearted accommodation (like Oslo), or simply with violence. Such violence risks international support, but as long as the US blindly follows, Israel can manage the rest.

I'm not insensitive to the plight of Palestinians under Israel's yoke. Nor do I see this oppression as steady state. Under the current political regime, Israelis will continue to take land and livelihood from Palestinians. Moreover, they don't fear violent uprising. They welcome it as an opportunity for even more violent reprisals. No one can doubt that Israel has the firepower to commit genocide. And more than a few Israelis already have the mindset. With more violence, more will join them, until some tipping point, which is becoming increasingly likely -- especially if the US swings back to some Christian Zionist fanatic or fool. Donald Trump is certainly the latter, if not necessarily the former.

But I'm also bothered by what Israel's cult of dominance is doing to them. They have ordered a society which is racist at its core, which is profoundly unequal and unjust, which is maintained both by psychological manipulation and brutality. That's no way to live. (Late in his life, Ariel Sharon admitted as much, not that he did anything about it.) As a result, Israelis are doomed to struggle and suffer, finding themselves increasingly out of step from the rest of the world -- not least from Jews in the diaspora, who are finding it increasingly difficult to even recognize their brethren.

Injustices everywhere increase the odds of revolutionary violence spilling into further war, which is a big reason -- even if sympathy and solidarity doesn't move you -- to worry and warn against them. However you measure such things, Israel is one of the most unjust nations in the world today. It's also one of the most heavily armed, so it's not like world opinion can do much if they snap. But the threat I worry even more about is that the US will see Israel as a model, and seek to replicate its injustices at 50 times the scale. If you don't know who I'm talking about, start with the Republicans section below.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

  • Walker Bragman: [07-06] How Ron DeSantis turned Covid denialism in a major political weapon: "The Florida governor's deadly anti-public health politics may just help him outflank Trump, who looks like a moderate in comparison." I wouldn't call Trump a "moderate" here. He just likes to have it both ways, taking credit for the vaccination program while through his own miraculous recovery testifying that we didn't really need it. If you want to dwell on a pivotal moment in history, consider what would be different if Trump had died in Walter Mead instead of bouncing back. His recovery, more than anything else, revitalized his campaign -- and, of course, allowed him to carry on with his post-election nonsense.

  • Philip Bump: [07-05] You can't be more conservative than Trump when he defines conservatism.

  • Margaret Hartmann: [07-06] Trump sours on Kari Lake because she's too Trumpy. Follow up to reports a few weeks back touting her as Trump's vice-presidential running mate. Not only does she add gender balance to the ticket, she's already proved she can lose Arizona. Highlight is a Trump "truth" on Lake's new book: "I know this book is great, because I wrote the foreword." Hartmann also wrote: [06-29] Melania Trump releases 'Yearning to Breathe Free' NFT. Biggest surprise here is that Melania seems to have gotten into the NFT racket earlier than her husband.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-06] 4 revelations from the latest unsealed records in the Trump classified documents case:

    1. Prosecutors relied on security footage to build their case against Trump
    2. Trump didn't initially argue to prosecutors that he declassified the documents
    3. Trump's lawyers probably never looked beyond the storage room for classified documents
    4. We still don't know all the reasons why prosecutors believed that Trump still had documents in his possession

  • Timothy Noah: [07-06] The truth about the GOP and the deficit: All they do is raise it. You know this, right?

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-06] Ron DeSantis's ghoulish embrace of American Psycho Patrick Bateman: "The increasingly hopeless presidential candidate is now clinging to a weird right-wing meme in hopes of winning over the misogynistic-sociopath vote." Aka, "the base"?

  • Marianna Sotomayor/John Wagner: [07-07] House Freedom Caucus votes to oust conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Further proof that they eat their own. (Mo Brooks is a previous example, in case you forgot.) Admittedly, not as dramatic as the guillotining of Robespierre. More like a playground squabble. Also note: the most unflattering pic of MTG to date.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-07] Pay attention to what you see: Donald Trump is losing his marbles.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [07-03] There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage: "Let us count the ways." Provides many examples of Graham's warmongering over the years, but woefully incomplete, missing even such egregious examples as his insistence in 2008 that the US go to war with Russia over Georgia. But while he's a broken record on war, on many other subjects -- especially Trump -- the one thing he repeatedly shows us is how little thought occurs before he speaks. There's quite a bit on him in Mark Leibovich's Thank You for Your Servitude, where he is depicted as a habitual flunky who's always looking for a leader type to suck up to -- he's floundered since John McCain's death. (As Kathleen Parker put it: McCain's "death five years ago left his wingman without a lead pilot.")

    I still have this vague memory of a quote from him from back when he was still in the House (1995-2003), explaining that Republicans need to lock in as much power as possible while they still have the chance, because longer trends were working against them. That stuck with me as smart, cynical, and evil. But probably not an original thought, as those seem beyond him. Rather, as he's wont to, he just inadvertently spilled the beans about a plot that had already been hatched. Vlahos also cites: Jack Hunter: [2022-03-05] Sadly, Graham's call for Putin's assassination is not his craziest moment.

  • Peter Wade: [07-09] DeSantis whines to Fox News that 'the media' is sabotaging his campaign. After all, that's his job.

Democrats: Like a shaggy old coat, the only thing protecting us from the life-sapping chill of Republican sociopathy. The latter should be so obvious by now that a Democratic rout in 2024 should be a lock, but still we worry.

Courts and Law:

Climate and Environment: I can add that in Wichita, at least, we've been in a lucky bubble of nice weather, with major storm fronts bypassing us to the north or to the south. We did have three days over 100°F when the heat dome that's so impacted Texas spread north, but no record temps were threatened. We did have an exceptionally warm and early Spring, associated with a drought that really hurt the winter wheat crop (so farmers may dispute my use of "nice"). And while this week has brought a lot of rain -- still not enough to bring the year back to normal, but the farmers raising corn are optimistic -- we've been spared the severe weather that's repeated hit points to the east.

Ukraine War:

  • Blaise Malley: [07-07] Diplomacy Watch: Washington may deny it, but looks like someone wants to talk to Russia. Still too early to declare that sanity is at long last breaking out, as details are few and veiled. The same "Track II" is discussed by Trita Parsi: [07-06] Former US officials reportedly open talks with Moscow. Also mentioned is Richard Haass/Charles Kupchan: [04-13] The West needs a new strategy in Ukraine: "A plan for getting from the battlefield to the negotiating table." Haass is outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kupchan is a senior fellow. Both are wired deep into the foreign policy blob, but aren't speaking in any official capacity. Kupchan wrote on [02-24]: US-West must prepare for a diplomatic endgame in Ukraine. It doesn't take a genius to see that much, but feigned ignorance is still the word in Washington, and will be until it isn't.

  • Jen Kirby: [07-07] The US's controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, explained.

  • Patrick Leahy/Jeff Merkley: [07-07] Here's why supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions would be a terrible mistake.

  • Marc A Thiessen/Stephen E Biegun: [07-08] Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine: I don't think I've ever linked to one of Thiessen's columns before. He's never right about anything, but this one is outrageously dumb that I couldn't help. Just give it a second's worth of thought. NATO's proposition offers two things: one is access to American and European arms; the other is the deterrence provided by its vow to jointly defend any member (at least attacked by a non-member, as Greece and Turkey found out). Maybe NATO membership would have deterred Russia from attacking, but that was never an option: before 2014, Ukraine was effectively aligned with Russia; and as soon as the government flipped in 2014, ethnic Russian enclaves divided Ukraine, with Donbas proclaiming independence and Crimea being annexed by Russia. From that point, Ukraine could buy arms from the West, but NATO membership was out of the question as long as borders were disputed. But it's too late now for joining NATO to deter a Russian attack.

    Until Ukraine settles its borders with Russia, NATO membership would mean two things: a declaration of war [*], committing NATO members to send troops into the fight to reclaim Ukrainian territory; and it would undermine Zelensky's command -- unless you think NATO would give up command of its own troops. And in theory it would commit Ukraine to defend other countries -- not that any of them are currently under threat, but there are always "war games" to participate in (which is pretty much NATO's speed -- it was never designed to fight real wars, just to parade about and feel self-important). Ukraine actually has the best of possible deals now: unlimited arms and support, while retaining its own control and autonomy.

    As for "after the war," NATO membership might be possible, but the prospect only gives Russia more reason to prolong the war. At best, it's a chip that Ukraine can exchange in negotiations, but there may never be negotiations if Zelensky holds it too tight.

    [*] Biden has said as much: see Katie Rogers: [07-09] Biden says Ukraine is not erady for NATO membership.

Israel, and elsewhere around the world: See the introduction above.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [07-09] Mixed progress in the fight against inequality and for democracy.

David Broder: [06-12] Silvio Berlusconi was the iconic political figure of our times: Trump, and maybe Putin, will be disappointed to have been overlooked, but if you've ever had trouble imagining what Trump might have been like if he had been twice as rich and not a fucking idiot, Berlusconi would fill the bill.

Sean T Byrnes: [07-06] The myth of Reagan's Cold War toughness haunts American foreign policy: I was just reminded of this in the Lindsey Graham articles above, where Graham's Reagan would be shooting Russian planes down. This is a review of William Inboden's book, The Peacemarker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. The book tries to pass Reagan off as a great diplomat. The reviewer is critical, and I'm more so, but sure, Reagan deserves some credit for overcoming his jingoism and letting the dissolution of the Soviet empire play out. But it's not like he learned any meaningful lessons from the experience. American hubris only grew after the Cold War, to no small extent out of the demented notion that Reagan's rhetoric and his military buildup had succeeded.

Sam Fraser: [07-06] Biden's disgraceful nomination of Elliott Abrams: It's not much of a reward: a seat on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which can issue reports and make recommendations but has no policy role. The USACPD is variously described as non-partisan or bi-partisan (with four vacancies, is Biden obligated to appoint a Republican?). [PS: As the update to Corn, below, explains, Abrams was recommended by Republican congressional leaders to fill a Republican slot on the Commission. Still seems like Biden could have vetoed their recommendation, especially considering the embarrassment it caused.]

In any case, on paper Abrams looks like a perfect choice. He's had many titles involving "public diplomacy," and no one has more experience lying about human rights abuses by the US and its allies. Fraser mentions some of these, starting with the 1981 massacre in El Salvador that was the first of many things Abrams lied to Congress about. Fraser also reminds us that Abrams was finally convicted of lying to Congress in 1991, but avoided jail thanks to a pardon from GWH Bush. He also mentions Abrams' work for Trump to undo diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Iran. But for some reason he skips over Abrams' tenure under GW Bush, especially his role in dismantling the Oslo Accords and ending any prospect for a "two-state solution" in Israel. More on Abrams:

I'm seriously baffled by the lack of reference to Abrams' role under GW Bush regarding Israel/Palestine. At the time, it was well known that he was in direct contact with Ariel Sharon, providing advice as well as cover for carving up the PA, especially the decision to dismantle settlements in Gaza and wall it up into a Hamas-run prison enclave. Afterwards, Abrams wrote a book about his role. I haven't read it, but I wrote up this Book Roundup entry at the time:

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013, Cambridge University Press): A self-serving memoir in the manner of Dennis Ross and so many other failures, but Abrams didn't fail -- he was pure evil, and was remarkably successful not just at wrecking any prospects for peace in Israel's neighborhood but in making everyone involved, including the US, much meaner and crazier. No idea how much of this he admits to -- such creatures usually prefer to dwell in the dark.

Steve Fraser: [07-06] The return of child labor is the latest sign of American decline.

Eric Levitz: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far): For one thing, I hate the term. New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, even Great Society were better. The only other president to get his own "omics" was Reagan, and hardly anyone ever understood what that was about. (Had they done so, they would have hated it.) Clement Attlee liked to speak of "leveling up" as a path to greater equality that didn't involve hardship. Biden's preferred term seems to be "middle out," which is less easily diagrammable, but at least graphic. The problem, of course, is that Biden's reforms, while more substantial than anything Obama or Clinton attempted, are still piecemeal, and depend a lot on companies to grow before the benefits trickle down to workers and the public. If that's a hard sell, it might help to offer greater rewards with more Democrats elected to Congress. And/or it might help to scare people about how much worse off Republicans would make us.

Annie Lowrey: [2019-10-21] $350,000 a year, and just getting by. We've heard variants of this many times before. They're always based on mistaking elite private services (e.g., education) for essentials and/or high savings rates based on the assumption that public programs like Social Security won't suffice.

Mark Oppenheimer: [07-07] In Tabula Rasa, John McPhee looks back at books not written. Since he turned 80, McPhee seems to have given up on writing about new travels and acquaintances, and settled for writing about writing, in this case "a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn't make it."

Adam Ozimek: [07-05] The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession: The "idea" is that the way to reduce inflation is to lay people off. I don't doubt that it works, but it's the worst of all possible solutions.

Nathan Robinson:

Lily Sánchez: [07-08] Cornel West's presidential campaign deserves the left's solidarity: I wouldn't go that far, but it deserves some respect. West is going to be saying a lot of things that Biden won't say, and that deserve a respectful hearing. One hopes that if his arguments are persuasive, Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee is) will adopt some of them. In any case, we should at least respect his freedom of speech, and see his campaign as an exercise thereof. Especially tiresome and disrespectful is the argument that he could act as a spoiler. If that happens, the only thing that proves is that the Biden/whoever failed to make the pretty obvious argument that a majority of voters would be better off with the Democrat than with the Republican. I know that no matter how much I might prefer West, it's extremely unlikely that I won't vote for the Democrat in 2024. But I'm not going to waste my breath denouncing West when there are Republicans that actually deserve taking down.

An alternative view comes from Ben Burgis: [06-13] Cornel West should challenge Biden in the Democratic primaries. This makes sense because we live in a two-party system, and the right has chosen one of those parties, which gives the rest of us only one realistic option. One result is that most of the left have aligned with the Democrats, as have most of the people the left needs to convince to achieve even the most obvious reforms. And sure, there are a lot of retrograde elements in the Democratic Party, but it's not beyond hope, or reason. One of my mantras is that the solutions are all on the left. Republicans are only interested in power, but Democrats are also interested in results, and that's what's moving them to the left. Well, along with Bernie Sanders, who by running with the Democrats has gotten a lot more open ears and doors than he ever could in a third party.

On the other hand, West may have his own reasons for running on the fringe. I can think of several, but no point speculating here.

Norman Solomon: [07-04] Patriotism and war: Can America break that deadly connection? I'd be happy just for a respite from the fireworks, which on the evening of the 4th were audible 50-100 times per minute for hours on end, well into the night. I always figured if you loved the land and the people you were good, but the never-before-permanent military became some kind of fetish after WWII. By the time I was a teenager, I was being told to "love it or leave it," where "it" was every stupid and senseless thing done in the name of "national defense." In that environment, the usual icons and tchotchkes like flags and anthems lost all their allure. Still, to the cultists who worship such things, our reluctance only proves that we should be chucked out (if not simply wiped out). On the other hand, we can still read the Declaration of Independence, which was what the day was originally about, as an aspiration we still need to work on. Meanwhile:

Too late for me tonight, but do take a look at the blog for No More Mister Nice Blog, especially First they came for the pro-LGBTQ retailers.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Speaking of Which

Started this early enough, but can't say as I brought much enthusiasm to it. Links are down to 63, words to 4752 (as I'm typing this, so a bit more [PS: now 68 links, 6061 words]). Main news was that the Trump Supreme Court finally (well, once again) lived up to our fears. It is, as Biden pointed out, still too early to resort to radical measures like expanding the court, but more and more people are grasping the need for bringing the Court back into the political mainstream. Still, the Court's partisan rulings aren't way out of whack given the still substantial extent of Republican power in Congress and in the States. What we need more than speculation about changing the Court is robust electoral victories. For instance, would the Court invalidate a law (as opposed to an executive order) that explicitly forgave student debt? Would the Court chuck out a voting rights act that applied to all states? Would the Court question a law which directs the EPA to regular carbon dioxide emissions? With this court, maybe, but until you pass the laws, we don't know. And until you get the power to pass such laws, you have no chance of expanding the Court (or impeaching a couple egregious examples).

I wrote quite a bit about Ukraine below. I should probably consolidate my recent points into something succinct (much more so than my still-useful 23 Theses on Ukraine). At the risk of being too schematic, let me point out:

  1. It is important to understand what the US and NATO did to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for that matter to provoke the regional revolts in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, not because they in any way justify Russia's reaction but because understanding is useful to figure out how to resolve the crisis.
  2. And the extent of the current crisis is really huge, especially in Ukraine but also in Russia, and all around the world. And this crisis deepens with every day the war goes on. The long-term consequences are already unfathomable, and will only grow more so.
  3. Russia is capable of fighting this war indefinitely, as long as its leadership believes necessary to secure its minimal goals, to the ever increasing destruction of Ukraine. Oh, and perhaps I should mention Russia's nuclear arsenal, which they are unlikely to use unless they get backed into a severe corner and/or get taken over by someone truly insane. Which, as far as we can tell, Putin is not, but he has gotten a bit wobbly.
  4. We should recognize that Russia is "too big to fail." We all need Russia to be integrated into the world economy, and to participate in projects like limiting climate change. And to do that, we need Russia to have a stable political system (even if it doesn't fit our idea of democratic norms). Sanctions and disinvestment may have been reasonable responses to invasion, but are not things we should seek to maintain indefinitely).
  5. On the other hand, Ukraine cannot afford to fight Russia indefinitely, even if the flow of arms is inexhaustible. The destruction of land and people have limits -- especially the latter, as it is unlikely that Ukraine's allies will send more than trivial numbers of volunteers to help Ukraine fight.
  6. While I have no problem with arming Ukraine to defend itself against Russian invasion, we should recognize that its borders are arbitrary, and are ultimately subject to the will of the people who live there. A fair solution before the invasion would have been to let each disputed territory vote on whether it prefers to be part of Ukraine or Russia. The invasion and subsequent displacements have complicated this, but it should still serve as a basis for fairly resolving the conflict. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate until Russian troops retreat to their pre-2014 borders is not just impractical but wrong-headed.
  7. Expansion is not a legitimate goal of NATO. The only legitimate goal is peace, and the only way to achieve it is to deëscalate the tension and hostility between Russia and the rest of Europe. On the other hand, Putin's actions would seem to justify both the existence and expansion of NATO, so it is largely up to him to show that NATO is no longer needed.
  8. Once Ukraine is secure in universally recognized borders, it should be free to join the EU, NATO, and/or any other international arrangement. On the other hand, it is clear from the last year that Ukraine does not need to join NATO to obtain arms and other support necessary to defend itself. Such arrangements can continue, as long as Ukraine doesn't abuse them (e.g., by escalating the war against Russia).
  9. The US and Europe need to fundamentally revise much of their strategic military thinking, based on its failure to prevent the current war. The practice of implementing sanctions against Russia has only aggravated the level of hostility (as well as preparing Russia to work around them). Sanctions are still better than armed reprisals, but only barely. They are more likely to provoke war than to deter it. Speaking of which, the idea of basing defense on deterrence is fundamentally flawed. It "works" primarily when the other country has no intention of attacking (as was the case between the US and USSR during the Cold War). Otherwise, it tends to incite wars, especially among relative equals, where there might seem to be an advantage to fighting now instead of later.
  10. While the events leading up to Russia's invasion in no way excuse the invasion itself, those responsible for refusing to negotiate the current war are every bit as responsible for its continuation as Russia is for its launch. While it's certainly possible that Putin is in no mood to negotiate, that he has no opportunity is solely the fault of those in Kyiv and elsewhere who refuse to make the offer. I'm not saying that the US should force Ukraine to accept an adverse treaty, but that reasonable offers need to be entertained.
  11. As A.J. Muste put it, the way to peace is peace. This war is what happens when you assign all power on all sides to people who don't have the slightest fucking understanding of that.

By the way, if you have some kind of publication and would be interested in reprinting the above on Ukraine, let me know, and I'll work with you on it. At present, this is a one-pass draft, with a couple extra points wedged in as seemed appropriate.

As usual, this is a quick scan through the usual sources. No doubt I missed much, but that's inevitable.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

The Supreme Court:

Climate and Environment:

Ukraine War:

  • Blaise Malley: [06-30] Diplomacy Watch: How is the West responding to Prigozhin's abandoned revolt? No real change, although one should consider the chances that Russian leadership could change from bad to worse. As for diplomacy, which remains the only viable option, the Vatican sent its envoy to Moscow, where he was received politely.

  • Matthew Blackburn: [06-29] The dangers of Europe's blindness to a long war in Ukraine.

  • Chatham House Report: [06-27] How to end Russia's war on Ukraine: British think tank, founded 1920, aka The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Title is misleading, because the only end to the war they approve of is a smashing defeat of Russia, because, well, if we don't teach them a lesson, they in the future they might do something like they just did. The report attempts to dispell nine "fallacies," all set up as strawmen to be beat down, even though most of them are fallacious, or at least evasive, to begin with. The only thing that keeps this from being a plan for perpetual war is the "it's now or never for Ukraine" sense of urgent hawkishness: "A protracted or frozen conflict benefits Russia and hurts Ukraine, as does a ceasefire or negotiated settlement on Russia's terms." Protracted war hurts everyone, but most especially the people of Ukraine.

  • Keith Gessen: [07-01] Could Putin lose power? Author turns to historian Vladislav Zubok and others for analogies, but doesn't find much, so falls back on: "Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it's there; the next day, poof, it's gone." Nothing here convinces me that this is a germane question. Even if Putin is replaced, the most likely scenarios favor someone already close to power, with the same basic commitments and views as Putin. This may promote someone more cautious and conservative, like Brezhnev replacing Krushchev. It may even be someone willing to make a tactical shift to end a debilitating war, as when Eisenhower replaced Truman -- ending the Korean War while planting seeds for future wars, especially in Vietnam. Less likely would be the rise of a Lenin, who accepted defeat then regrouped to become a still greater threat. Regime change rarely changes regimes in any fundamental way. If that's your best hope, you really don't have much. On the other hand, with Putin you have someone who still has enough national power to make a deal and make it stick. It should be clear now that the US could have negotiated better deals with Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein than they got by insisting on regime change.

  • Masha Gessen: [06-26] Prigozhin showed Russians that they might have a choice: Talk about starry-eyed optimists: Prigozhin is a choice?

  • Matthew Hoh: [06-30] Destroying Eastern Ukraine to save it. To take one example, Bakhmut had an estimated population of 71,094 in January 2022. The most recent estimate, much less precise, is ">500." The population of Mariupol, which fell to Russia relatively quickly, dropped from 425,681 to "<100,000." The total number of refugees from Ukraine has been variously estimated in excess of 8 million, plus millions more internally displaced within Ukraine, not counting an unknown number in Russia (one figure I've seen is 65,400). While the air war gets most of the press, the battle lines are mostly fought with artillery and small missiles, and the devastation is immense (e.g., Bakhmut). The longer the war drags on, the more devastating it will become. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate is based on the belief that Ukraine can regain its pre-2014 territory, but at the current rate, that will not only take years, it will deliver the "victors" nothing but a wasteland. By the way, Hoh includes a link to a [2022-03-15] piece by David Swanson: 30 Nonviolent things Russia could have done and 30 nonviolent things Ukraine could do. Number one was: "Continued mocking the daily predictions of an invasion and created worldwide hilarity, rather than invading and making the predictions simply off by a matter of days." Why is this sort of thing so hard for many people?

  • Caitlin Johnstone: [06-29] Aging Iraq invaders keep accidentally saying 'Iraq' instead of 'Ukraine'.

  • Frederick Kunkle/Kostiantyn Khudov: [07-02] Ukraine says Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plays is currently controlled by Russia, as was the now-destroyed Kakhovka dam. Both are in areas Ukraine is threatening to take back with its counteroffensive. It's not unusual for retreating armies to blow up things they're abandoning. (Both Russia and Germany blew up a Ukraine dam in 1941 and 1943, so the lesson is perhaps more vivid there.) By the way, the blown dam has reduced the power plant's access to cooling water.

  • Branko Marcetic: [06-28] We shouldn't be cheering for state collapse in Russia: Starts by pointing out that Gen. Anthony Zinni in 1998 did a war game study of Iraq that concluded that removing Saddam Hussein would plunge Iraq into "bloody chaos," which is pretty much what happened five years later. Last week's mutiny revived dreams of regime change among hawks who dream of little else, but worse scenarios are possible if Putin should fall from power. Some links to older Marcetic pieces: [03-23] For Putin, Iraq War marked a turning point in US-Russia relations; and [06-13] Is the US military more intent on ending Ukraine war than US diplomats?

  • Prisha: [07-02] CIA director calls Russia-Ukraine war 'once-in-a-generation opportunity' to recruit spies: Isn't this the sort of thing that you wouldn't say if it was true, because it would tip Russia off to the new spies, and that you wouldn't say even if it wasn't true, because it would give Russia cover for charging mere dissidents as being foreign spies? And wasn't Burns supposed to be the smart one among Biden's entourage of neocons?

  • James Risen: [07-01] Prigozhin told the truth about Putin's war in Ukraine: "Yevgeny Prigozhin is a disinformation artist whose failed rebellion was marked by a burst of radical honesty." Risen also wrote: [06-24] Yevgeny Prigozhin's coup targets Putin and his "oligarchic clan".

  • Mikhail Zygar: [06-30] Putin thinks he's still in control. He's not. Author of a book on the internal political dynamics of the Russian government (All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin) and the new (out July 25) War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, I linked to an interview with him last week. One of many premature obituaries, speculating about exposed weaknesses, his power "desacralized." The NY Times has been churning them out:

  • Robert Wright: [06-30] Michael McFaul's dangerous muddle: The "influential Russia hawk, says Putin's handling of the [Wagner] crisis shows that fears of his using a nuclear weapon are exaggerated; Putin chose to negotiate with Prigozhin rather than fight, so we can assume that he wouldn't go nuclear if faced with big losses on the battlefield, including even the loss of Crimea." So, the more evidence that Putin is acting with sane restraint, the more recklessly we can trample over his "red lines"? One thing the hawks fail to understand is that evidence that Putin behaves rationally casts doubt on their picture of him as a tyrant with an insatiable lust for expansion. It actually suggests that he is someone who can be reasoned with, but to do so you'll need to match concessions to his, and not just beat him into submission. Unfortunately, the hawks are not just incapable of seeing possible compromises, they think the very idea of sitting down to negotiate is a sign of weakness. But it's really just a sign of contempt, a way of telling Putin you won't be satisfied until he's destroyed.

    The worst hawks, and McFaul is a good example, are obsessed with destroying Putin and Russia, and see Ukraine primarily as a cudgel to beat Russia with. That poisons their understanding of events. For instance, Wright writes:

    Yet McFaul seems to expect Putin, if cornered, to gracefully surrender -- because, according to McFaul, that's what happened last week. He says Putin "capitulated" to Prigozhin.

    Huh? Prigozhin had these demands: (1) Don't integrate Wagner's forces in Ukraine into the Russian military. (2) Fire Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. (3) Fire Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin got none of these things. Plus, he got exiled! And the (probably few) Wagner troops who choose to follow him into exile won't be allowed to bring heavy armaments.

    The only concession Putin made was to withdraw his threat to prosecute Prigozhin for treason. That isn't much, seeing as how Putin has gone on to strip Wagner assets, and render Prigozhin powerless. On the other hand, he managed to avoid unnecessary bloodshed -- most likely, the "Russian blood" that Prigozhin claimed to have saved by accepting the deal was his own, although there always is a small chance that Russian soldiers would have refused to fire -- as they refused to support the coup against Gorbachev -- and that would have been disastrous. None of these things suggest to me that Putin is weak or foolish. He is, rather, someone who knows that his power and ambition have limits. I wish I could say the same thing for Zelensky, Stoltenberg, and Biden.

Around the world:

Other stories:

Phyllis Bennis: [06-30] A tale of two tragedies at sea.

Lindsey Bever: [06-29] President Biden uses a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. Here's what to know. Not sure this should be news, but good on him. I use a CPAP machine, and sleep much better for it, and never doze off during the day or evening, as I sometimes did before. I know many other people who use them. My father didn't, but suffered severely. He dozed off literally every evening in front of the TV. A cousin asked him how he decides when to go to bed. His answer: when I wake up.

Mark Hill: [06-29] A billionaire baseball owner failed to extort Oakland, so he's scamming Nevada instead: "John Fisher, an heir to the Gap fortune, is being handed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to screw over A's fans by moving his team to Las Vegas." Author notes that the move has "revived the national debate over public funding for private sports clubs," and adds that it's been proven that "the public never gets its money's worth." The debate it should stimulate is about expropriating the errant teams and redistributing ownership to the fans. That is, by the way, the reason the Packers are still in Green Bay, despite the fact that there are about 150 larger markets a greedy owner could shop the team to.

Elizabeth Kolbert: [06-26] How plastics are poisoning us: Draws on Matt Simon: A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. I personally cannot imagine how we could go on without plastics. (Kenneth Deffeyes, who wrote Hubbert's Peak about the impending "peak oil" crisis, believed that even after we ran out of oil for fuel, we'd still need what little was left to make plastics.) But we're hearing more and more about this, and it's not going to let up.

Mike Lofgren: [07-01] There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual -- only apologists for right-wing power: "From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible." Starts with the famous Lionel Trilling quote which dismisses conservative thinking as "irritable mental gestures." I wouldn't go as far as the title, but that's largely because I've never been comfortable calling myself an intellectual. Over the last couple centuries, intellectuals have mostly emerged from the conservative class, and have occupied rarefied positions in establishment-controlled institutions, which they rarely failed to serve. It's hard for me to deny that Friedrich Hayek, John Von Neumann, or T.S. Elliot were real intellectuals, even if they were often wrong.

However, as Trilling claimed, the dominant intellectual tradition in America was liberalism, which allowed for dissent and debate, and expected progressive (but not revolutionary) change. But as the Cold War heated up, and even more so with Reagan's win in 1980, conservative instincts gave way to reactionary ones, as the right sought to build its own politically charged intellectual world, from which liberals and worse would ultimately be purged. On the other hand, the more they insist that truth be politically theirs, the less credibility they have. Conservative public intellectuals like William F. Buckley often came off as empty rhetoric wrapped up in a gauze of snobbery -- a tradition that continues today with the likes of George Will and David Brooks, but has more often given way to even baser impulses. The subject here is Deneen, who wrote Why Liberalism Failed and has a new book: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. You don't need an extended survey to see why such books don't deserve to be taken seriously (despite Deneen's real academic credentials), but Lofgren indulges you. Here's a bit:

Modern conservatives are hag-ridden by demons -- the fallen state of man, the hopeless decadence of secular humanism, the imminent collapse of Western Civilization (a term always capitalized). They are radical rather than pragmatic, undeterred by the mountain of evidence that tax cuts don't increase revenue, an unregulated market is not stable, and banning abortion won't make people more moral. They crave power, are as humorless as a commissar, and entirely lack introspection as to their own fallibility.

That the first line could easily have come from Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950; there must be earlier examples but this one is explicit) just reminds us how timeless the imminent demise of the upper class has been. The only thing that's changed of late is that the whines have become ever more shrill, and the proposed remedies ever more crude. I've tracked conservative thought as expressed in recent books (they're here, but so is everything else, so it might be useful to break them out into their own file), and they've gotten so deranged of late that it's hard to give them any credit at all.

Blaise Malley: [06-20] Do laws preventing Chinese from buying US land even make sense? I'm inclined to say yes, because I think local ownership is better than distant ownership, especially across borders. Sure, it doesn't help that these laws are being pushed by Republican presidential candidates -- Ron DeSantis (FL) and Doug Burgum (ND) recently signed bills to this effect -- combined with jingoistic anti-Chinese bile. I'd go further and say that companies should be employee-owned, and that land should either be owner-occupied or regulated (some form of rent control).

Timothy Noah: [06-30] Bidenomics is working -- here's why the business press won't say so: "To economics journalists, bad news is always just around the corner -- especially when a Democrat is in the White House." He blames the business press, but it's something deeper than that: "Democratic presidents consistently outperform Republicans on managing the economy. This isn't anything new. It's been true for the past century. Folks just don't want to believe it." Part of the reason, I think, is that rank-and-file Democrats are never really satisfied with the greater growth under Democratic presidents, largely because it rarely trickles down to their own bottom lines. And that's partly because the long-term trend has been toward greater inequality, and Democrats have abetted that trend, largely in pursuit of donors. On the other hand, Republican presidents always claim to be presiding over perfect economics, even with more or less major recessions in each of them. Lots of pundits want Democrats to brag more, but I doubt that's going to do the trick. Better to point out the myriad ways Republicans are plotting to screw virtually everyone over.

Alex Shephard: [06-24] He made a mess of CNN. Now he's ruining Turner Classic Movies too. "David Zaslav, whose Chris Light hire butchered CNN, is vandalizing TCM, a beloved cultural institution."

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-30] Roaming Charges: Strange coup. Admitting he has no idea how the war in Ukraine will end, he doesn't have anything definitive to add about Prigozhin's mutiny, but voice a thought that's also occurred to me: "I've always believed that fragging of officers by US troops did more to end the US's rampages in Vietnam than the peace movement back home." At the very least, fragging ended the draft, which meant that the war could no longer be fought the way it had been for ten years. Russia's use of "conscripts and convicts" (as well as private militias like Wagner, and he also mentions "Chechen paramilitaries under the control of Ramzon Kadyrov, who has repeated urged the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine," so another less than happy camper) has got to be a vulnerability. (On the other hand, note that Ukraine is also using conscription, much more aggressively than Russia is, but it seems to be less of a morale problem, most likely because Ukrainians are defending their own land from invasion.)

Nikki Haley tweeted this:

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.

Haley was born in 1972, by which time America had been divided by the civil rights movement and the racist reaction, by the Vietnam War and antiwar dissent, by women's liberation and a reaction that would soon kill the ERA, and by various cultural issues. She must have been pretty isolated to view those times as idyllic. I was born in 1950, before most of those fractures, in a period that could plausibly be remembered as a Golden Age of affluence and shared-interest, but the last word I would pick to describe my childhood is "easy." I mostly remember those years as demanding a lot of hard work. And threatening various terrors if we didn't work hard enough, or if we failed, or sometimes just for the hell of it. And we were fairly well insulated from the plight of the poorest. We never had to worry about where the next meal would come from, or that we might be evicted, or that we couldn't afford to see the doctor, in large part because we had little reason to fear that my father might lose his union job.

True that people today have things to worry about that we didn't. But that doesn't mean that we had it easy. As for Biden's role in ruining our country, I suppose that's easier to argue than it is to make a case that Haley or any other Republican could lead us into a promised land. But most of the things I can fault Biden for are cases where he simply went along with bad ideas other were pushing, and a number of those he seems to have grown out of. He's easy to mock, but he's the first president in my lifetime who's surprised me favorably. (To be fair, Haley surprised me favorably when she took those Confederate flags down, but she's not exactly playing that up in her campaign.)

St Clair's response to the Haley tweet:

Give Nikki credit. Perhaps she's talking about those easier, simpler days -- only a year ago -- when 10-year-old girls weren't forced to give birth to their uncle's child and 12 year-old boys weren't sent to work on the midnight shift sharpening cutting blades at the slaughterhouse.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Speaking of Which

The Washington Post Editorial Board headline today is actually rather sensible (and hopefully sobering): Putin's humiliation means new dangers for Russia -- and the world. Still, given the dangers, maybe "humiliation" isn't the word we should be using. While the odds that Putin would resort nuclear weapons were never very high, it should be understood that they do go up with every humiliation, with every time he gets pushed back into a corner. The only way out of this trap is a negotiated settlement based not on the balance of power but on generally recognized principles, notably self-determination. And to bring that about, we still need a stable Russia. Blowing it up and replacing Putin with even crazier leaders isn't the way.

The Washington Post Editorial Board also wrote another piece that should be sobering but probably isn't: [06-24] Is there enough money to rebuild Ukraine? In it, they fantasize about getting Russia to pay for the rebuilding, which may be "an unarguable moral case" but is also a total non-starter. (Remember when LBJ promised to pay for rebuilding Vietnam?) Meanwhile, the fact that Americans are asking these questions suggests that they don't intend to pay either.

One problem is probably that the Post editors are reading their own war propagandists, like David Ignatius: [06-24] Putin looked into the abyss Saturday -- and blinked. From what I can gather, it looked like Prigozhin was the one who took the easy way out. But then the former Iraq War apologist has been writing pieces like this all along: [06-06] D-Day dawns for Ukraine.

As usual, it's impossible to get to everything. I do hope this is the last time I ever devote a whole section to Hunter Biden. Even with this much, I doubt I really got adequately into the Republican reaction, or their continuing obsession with him. Sure, he could serve as an example of why nepotism and influence-peddling are wrong, but that's not a point Republicans are going to make. Tax cheating and gun buying are things they normally celebrate.

Top story threads:

Trump:

  • Adam Goldman/Traci Angel: [06-21] Former FBI analyst goes to prison for taking classified documents: "Like former President Trump, the former analyst was accused of violating the Espionage Act, taking home hundreds of classified documents and being unhelpful." Kendra Kingsbury was sentenced to 46 months jail for fewer charges than Trump is facing. Republicans like to say that if they can come for Trump, they can come for anyone. Looks like they got the order backwards.

  • Margaret Hartmann:

  • Fred Kaplan: [06-23] When Trump promises to end the Ukraine War, here's what he really means. I initially filed this under Ukraine, but Trump has no plan as such. Rather, all he has is tremendous faith in his genius as a dealmaker, which is supported by absolutely nothing from his previous term as president. Kaplan cites Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China as examples. One problem with those cases is that his closest advisers (e.g., Pompeo and Bolton) didn't want deals, so they sandbagged every prospect, leaving him with nothing. Not mentioned are a couple cases where Trump's people did negotiate deals, which Trump agreed to but really didn't have any direction over. The first is a minor revision of NAFTA, fulfilling a campaign promise. He got a new name, plus a couple of trivial concessions he could tout as a victory. The other was the deal with the Taliban for a ceasefire and withdrawal of US forces. The Taliban was still free to attack Afghan forces. More effectively, they recruited so the moment the US left, Afghanistan fell into their hands. By that point the US was helpless, having put all its faith into an army and government who by then worked for the other side. What would have been much better was to negotiate an orderly transition, with promises of future support in exchange for protections (including a right to exile) of Afghans who had worked for the US-backed regime). But no American, least of all "strongman" Trump, could admit to such a defeat, so they concocted this charade that the Afghans would be able to survive on their own.

  • Ed Kilgore: [06-20] Trump's Fox News interview exposed his real weakness: He "does not come across as a cunning predator avoiding the snares of his fearful liberal prey and plotting his revenge. He's more like a weak, confused old man worried about grubby law-enforcement personnel touching his golf clothes."

  • Eric Lipton: [06-20] Trump real estate deal in Oman underscores ethics concerns.

  • Ben Mathis-Lilley: [06-21] Donald Trump continues to twist what it means to be "conservative" into total incoherence: Good for him, too, because clear and lucid explications of "conservatism" are not just unappealing but repugnant to most people. However slipshod Trump might be on policy, he gets the appeal right: for him and his followers, conservativm is simply a matter of worshipping certain totems -- like God and country -- and hating people they deem unworthy. And while all conservatives agree with that much, no one else delivers hatred as unvarnished as Trump.

  • Greg Sargent: [06-21] Trump's confession on Fox News should prompt Democrats to step up. Contrasts this with Hunter Biden case.

  • Asawin Suebsaeng/Adam Rawnsley: [06-20] Team Trump suspects his former Chief of Staff is a 'rat': They're wondering what Mark Meadows is up to?

  • Li Zhou: [06-20] Trump's Fox News interview was a defense attorney's nightmare.

DeSantis, and other Republican lowlifes:

Hunter Biden: The president's son agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and admitted to the facts of a rather dubious gun charge. The plea deal would give him three years of probation, plus a diversion on the gun charge, so it is expected that he will not go to jail. This should bring to a close one of the sillier outrages of the "lock her up" era, but Republicans have invested so much in it they can't bear the idea of letting go. Besides, what else to they have to run on? Certainly not policy ideas. On the other hand, it's hard to have much sympathy for him, even if you buy that he was railroaded. His influence-peddling schemes may not have been illegal, but probably should have been. (Had they been, that would wipe out a large swathe of Washington's upper crust, and good riddance to them.) And as a person, he seems to offer little to respect much less admire. But that, too, is hardly grounds for prosecution, and if it were, I can think of lots to put in line ahead of him.

Law and the courts: The Alito scandal broke last week, under Li Zhou below. It's beginning to look like Leonard Leo not only grooms conservatives for the Supreme Court, he hooks them up with billionaire patrons to keep them on the straight and narrow. And, let's face it, no one in recent history has been more narrowly partisan than Alito.

Environment:

Ukraine War: High hopes for Ukraine's counteroffensive have precluded any interest in diplomacy, but so far: [06-23] Early stages of Ukrainian counteroffensive 'not meeting expectations,' Western officials tell CNN. On the other hand, the head Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit Russia has employed especially at Bakhmut, has "declared war" on Russia's military command, which may signal a rebellion or even a coup against Putin. I cited this piece last week, by Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, which now looks prophetic. This is very much a developing situation. I'm citing some articles as it develops, but (as with the "counteroffensive") note that nobody knows very much. One thing that does seem clear is that Prigozhin's beef with the Russian command (and Putin?) isn't over whether to continue the war, but how to fight it more effectively. Lieven and Beebe ended their piece with: "however bad things are in Russia, they can always get worse."

PS: As of Sunday afternoon, the key events are: Wagner occupied Rostov (Russia's "southern command" center), and started to march on Moscow; Putin condemned them harshly ("Those behind the mutiny will pay"), then Belarus president Lukashenko negotiated a stand down, which will allow Prigozhin and those who revolted with him to relocate to Belarus.

  • Connor Echols: [06-23] Diplomacy Watch: Brinksmanship on grain deal could frustrate Russia's friends.

  • Isaac Chotiner: [06-15] Ukraine's counter-offensive, and what comes after. Interview with Marina Miron, a "postdoctoral researcher at the war-studies department, in King's College London." Not much detail here, but I'm not sure that details are that important. They key thing to understand is that this year's war is different from last year's war. Last year Russia was on offense, and Ukraine defense. Russia's blitz against Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, foiling Putin's hopes for a quick coup, leading to a strategic retreat. On the other hand, Russia's offensive from Crimea was fairly successful, including the hard-fought battle for Mariupol, securing a land corridor to Crimea (which otherwise is being supplied over the Kerch Bridge). This year, all Russia has to do is to defend against the much hyped Ukrainian offensive, and in doing so they have a fairly wide buffer territory they can afford to lose before Ukrainian forces approach the ethnically Russian enclaves that broke off from Ukraine in 2014. Most Ukrainians have fled this buffer zone, so the remaining inhabitants should be more favorable to Russia, as are the Donbas and Crimean zones. And most importantly, as Ukraine showed last year, it is easier to defend and disrupt than it is to attack. The prolonged battle of Bakhmut, where Russia prevailed, offers little hope that Ukraine will make major gains elsewhere.

    Zelensky has spent the winter promising NATO that if they give him enough weapons, Ukraine will win back all of the pre-2014 territory. That seems unlikely to happen, but few in the west were willing to sound a note of caution, least of all about the capabilities of their pricey weapons. The result is that the war will continue as long as the political orders on both sides remain entrenched, which could be a long time. Miron's main contribution here is to point out that even if Ukraine recovers territory, it will be nearly impossible to rebuild as long as hostilities ensue, and Russians would likely resort to some kind of guerrilla insurgency even if regular troops are withdrawn. Once again, the only solution is negotiation.

  • Chas Danner: [06-24] Wagner's Prigozhin backs off after marching on Moscow.

  • Valerie Hopkins: [06-25] One big winner of Kremlin-Wagner clash? The dictator next door. Don't bet on that. The last thing any dictator needs is an alien army with no one else to fight. (I imagine there are numerous examples, but the Vandals are the first to leap to mind.) Of course, it's also possible that Putin orchestrated the deal, and Lukashenko is just the patsy we always figured. Either way, he has little reason to sleep soundly, much less to gloat.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [06-25] Russia's wild last 24 hours and the Wagner group's march to Moscow, explained.

  • Jen Kirby:

  • Anatol Lieven/George Beebe:

  • David Remnick: [06-24] Putin's weakness unmasked: "How Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion exposed the Russian President." Well, not exactly. He draws on conversations with Mikhail Zygar, who wrote the 2016 book All the Kremlin's Men ("a best-seller in Russia and a well-sourced examination of Putin's rule and the inner dynamics of his ruling circle"), and has a forthcoming book, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, which is fast becoming obsolete. It's worth remembering that the word "dictator" implies much more autonomy at the top than is often the case. (Biden's recent slur on Xi Jinping and the furor it aroused should be another reminder.)

  • Anton Troianovski: [06-25] Prigozhin revolt raises searing question: Did it harm Putin's staying power? Certainly the first question on the mind of American hawks dreaming of regime change, but way too early to answer. It looks to me like it does two things: one is that it immediately reduces Russian troops in Ukraine, at a time when Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is ramping up; the other is that it should shortly bring an end to the acrominiously divided Russian forces command. Any student of war will tell you that divided command is a recipe for disaster, so Russia may emerge in better shape -- though much still depends on whether Russian command is really as bad as Prigozhin alleged. My guess is that in the short term Putin can rally support, but the stakes of losing Ukraine are growing more severe.

  • Joshua Yaffa: [06-24] The Wagner Group is a crisis of Putin's own making.

Sunday morning, Max Blumenthal tweeted: "Everything we said about Russia yesterday was an insane lie or completely wrong, now check us out on the White House ex-propaganda minister's show today." He's referring to "Inside with Jen Psaki," where the guests constitute a war council: Michael McFaul (former Ambassador to Russia), James Stavridis (Admiral), Anne Applebaum, Elissa Slotkin (Representative), and Nancy Pelosi (House Speaker Emerata). So the "we" isn't meant to include Blumenthal, but most likely it applies to him as well -- he has spent the last year attacking Ukraine and military support from US/NATO so exhaustively it's hard to draw a line between his stand against the US-led empire and his willingness to repeat Russian propaganda. But it's easy to imagine these five going gaga over the prospect of a revolution against Putin, even from the right -- something they have little conception of, despite the fact that Putin's harshest critics have always come from that direction -- then their disappointment when Prigozhin called the whole thing off. Whiplash is a risk of cheerleaders for politicians who can spin on a dime. I'm always reminded of the poor Communists who woke up one day finding they had to defend the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

[1] Blumenthal quotes Applebaum as saying: "Yet even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin." Weaker, but still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.

Around the world: Indian president Narenda Modi visited Washington last week, which occasioned much agonizing over India's human rights record, and Biden's willingness to overlook it. That actually strikes me as respect due to leader of another nation -- respect that the US, with its compulsion to divided the world up between friends and foes -- rarely shows. Which doesn't mean that the parties weren't up to no good.

  • Ben Burgis: [06-22] Israelism is a powerful indictment of pro-apartheid indoctrination. Quotes a critic of the film complaining, "There is no mention, for instance, of the UN role in the creation of Israel, Arab aggression at the birth of the state," blah, blah, blah. True that the UN passed one resolution approving of the partition of the British protectorate of Palestine, but there is no reason to treat that as some sort of immaculate conception. While Israelis lobbied for the resolution, and cited it in their Declaration of Independence, they immediately discarded its borders, and moved to claim Jerusalem (an international zone per the resolution), as well as expelling Arabs from Jaffa (a Palestinian enclave surrounded by Israel). Then Israelis murdered the UN mediator. The UN never sanctioned the explusions that Palestinians know as the Nakba. The UN Security Council passed resolutions after the 1967 and 1973 wars that Israel gave lip-service to but never honored (although Egypt and Jordan eventually did, and Syria negotiated a peace deal that Israel ultimately rejected). The "peace offers" that Palestinians supposedly rejected were never made in good faith, but the Oslo Accords, which Arafat did accept, were wrecked by Israel. Still, I doubt the film dwells on all that history, when the case against Israel's denial of basic human and civic rights to Palestinians today is so clear cut, and really so shameless.

  • Melvin Goodman: [06-23] Netanyahu takes aim at US diplomacy again: Over the last several weeks, I've seen reports that Biden is close to an agreement with Iran to restore the JCPOA deal that Obama negotiated and Trump scuttled. I haven't bothered reporting them because they're meaningless until announced, and the likelihood of that happening is slim given that Israel remains opposed -- it beggars belief why, suggesting that Israel would much rather prop up Iran as a mortal enemy (something that has never been true, either under the Shah or the Ayatollahs) than see its stated concerns actually addressed -- and Israel exerts such influence over American politics that it's unlikely that Biden would dare. The thing is, while Israel can afford pricking at Iran, the US actually does have good reason for negotiating friendlier terms. Non-proliferation matters, but more immediately pressing is Iran's ability to block oil traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. There's also the matter of Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, which Israel periodically attacks, and could hit back at American troops there. Biden must also realize that pushing Iran into the embrace of Russia and China isn't helping. He also must realize that after the US military failed so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, a military threat against Iran would be several steps beyond stupid. But to move forward Biden would have to reassert the importance of American interests over Israel's.

  • Jonathan Guyer: [06-23] Why the US is selling India so many weapons: "Prime Minister Modi visits the White House, and arms deals follow." It's almost like the sole determinant of US foreign policy is arms sales. India has most often bought arms from Russia, which is part of the reason India has refused to support US sanctions against Russia. But one can see the thinking as more than an immediate cash grab. But arms sales may be a lever both to divide India from Russia and to align India against China.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [06-25] Guatemala's elections can't undo years of government corruption: Not to mention coups, most directed or at least sanctioned by the US.

  • Achal Prabhala/Vitor Ido: [06-01] Next pandemic, let Cuba vaccinate the world. Uh, you think this pandemic is done yet? We're going to be taking boosters indefinitely. There's still plenty of world demand, especially if affordable. And Cuba's developments should remind us that we don't need billionaire patents to motivate people to develop life-saving pharmaceuticals. Even if the US companies shut down today, we could ride free on the rest of the world's research and development. Also the world could free ride on Cuba's investment. The embargo, which remains stupid and cruel, wouldn't stop others from manufacturing Cuban vaccines, assuming they got developed in the first place.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [06-25] Why the RFK Jr., Rogan, Musk outrage machine doesn't bother Big Pharma. Also see Sarah Jones, below.

Tim Dickinson: [06-15] Is America already in a civil war? Interview with Bradley Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism -- and What Comes Next. I have to admit that my eyes glaze over when I read these pieces about the Christian Right, given that my own faith is so lapsed that they seem to be from a completely different planet. The idea that anyone, much less than 30% of all Americans, believe in predispensationalism just boggles my mind -- even though I now realize that one of my more memorable conversations with my grandfather (1895-1965) was about exactly that. I never took him to be insane, but in that moment he was.

Andrea González-Ramirez: [06-23] One year without Roe: "All the ways abortion bans have affected pregnant people, providers, and clinics, by the numbers and in their own words." Also:

Constance Grady: [06-22] When you can't separate art from artist: Interview with Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, a meditation on how to feel about art produced by people who turned out to have committed other reprehensible acts. (Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, and Bill Cosby are among the first-named, along with Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Roman Polanski.) I'm only bringing this up because my wife read the book, so it came up in conversations I never really answered. But I do have two core reactions: one is that I believe that works of art stand on their own the moment they are released (you might argue that copyrights and residuals argue differently, but I've never cared much for boycotts either); the other is that people are complicated but only turn monstrous when they take or are given power over others. So this isn't a dilemma I often engage in. I won't deny that some works of art embody their creator's damaged psyches in ways that merit little or no respect (e.g., Ayn Rand's novels). But the problem there is the art, not the artist (not that Rand, herself, wasn't quite some piece of work).

Greg Grandin: [06-21] Cormac McCarthy's unforgiving parables of American empire.

Sarah Jones: [06-24] Anti-vaxxers don't want a debate; they want a spectacle. Image here, with a mask reduced to the space of a Hitler moustache grafted onto a picture of Anthony Fauci, and the caption: "Stop! Faucism," is one way of saying, I'm so dumb, no point arguing with me! One of the most disturbing things about the Republicans (and one of the most Republican things about RFK Jr) is how completely, based on nothing but symbolism and bile, anti-vaxxers have taken over the collective consciousness of the GOP.

Naomi Klein: [05-08] AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their makers are. Too broad a subject to simply endorse her take, although the core idea that AI will serve the powers that control it, which means that in a system of rapacious capitalism, that's what it will mostly be used for. The details are messier. The word "theft" gets thrown around a lot, which needs to be squared with a stiff critique of so-called "intellectual property" rights.

Eric Levitz: [06-23] The recession that didn't happen: Well, didn't happen yet -- Jerome Powell is still promising further rate increases, his pause explained by worry over failing more banks (the health and wealth of banks, after all, being the Fed's true raison d'être).

Nicole Narea: [06-22] What happens now that the Titanic submersible search has ended in tragedy. Not that you need more, but:

Joseph O'Neill: [03-21] One man's foray into the heartland of the far right: Review of Jeff Sharlet's The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War.

Alex Park: [06-16] 'Freakonomics' was neoliberal bullshit: "A look back at the bestselling book franchise that taught people to 'think like economists,' by which it meant 'think cynically and amorally.'" The bestseller was written by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, and published in 2005, and sold over four million copies, spawning a sequel and other exploitations. I never read it, but I've read several other think-like-an-economist books (the most disturbing being Steven Landsburg's Armchair Economist, which left me haunted by "the principle of indifference"). I don't know about neoliberal, but I've been reading John Quiggin's Economics in Two Lessons, and I have little doubt that Freakonomics qualifies as what Quiggin calls "Lesson One economics": if it looks "cynical and amoral," that's because the theory doesn't allow for anything else.

Heidi Przybyla/Shia Kapos: [06-23] No Labels declines to reveal just who is funding its third party bid. I don't think I've mentioned this "centrist" group, with its plot to offer the distraction of a presidential candidate not aligned with either major party. I've had plenty of opportunities from Democrats who have been whining about third-party candidates on the left since Nader in 2000. This year their pet peeve is Cornell West -- for some reason they assume that they should pocket the votes of everyone on the left, even if they offer nothing in return. But this year, they're even more worried about No Labels siphoning away center votes they do bend over backwards to woo. After all, Biden in 2024 is the only possible protection against Trump (or some equally vicious MAGA maniac), and everyone should be willing to put up with a lot of waffling and compromise to keep that from happening. The fact that the money behind the operation is secret just adds to the air of conspiracy. As does the flirtation with conservative Democrats like Manchin and Sinema, which makes it look like they are prioritizing capturing Democratic votes. I suspect that, like most third party efforts, it won't ultimately amount to much, and is likely to serve as a protest outlet for more disaffected Republicans than Democrats, so may even help Biden. But in any case, the answer isn't to whine. It's to come up with a better campaign, and win so big the third parties are irrelevant.

Tweets:

Dr. David A. Lustig @drdave1999:

Ron DeSantis continues to drop in the polls, as Americans reject the chance to "make America more like Florida."

DeSantis miscalculated badly in believing that voters were looking for an authoritarian strongman with the social skills of a rabid wolverine.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Speaking of Which

Calling time on this, 10 PM Sunday evening. The most obviously missing story is something on the heat waves in Asia and Texas. Also, note that while the non-Trump Republican section is short, it's pretty ominous, and even worse things are lurking down in the miscellaneous section.

Top story threads:

Trump: He was arrested on Tuesday, pled innocent, and was allowed to leave. Republicans are so sure he's guilty they're already talking about pardoning him. Some "law and order" party they are!

DeSantis, and other Republican scum:

Climate and environment, disastrous and new-normal:

Courts and the law:

Ukraine War: The "counteroffensive" has officially started, but there's little reporting on it -- the best the cheerleaders of the New York Times can muster is: [06-18] Ukraine appears to make a small gain in the south as counteroffensive continues.

  • Blaise Malley: [06-16] Diplomacy Watch: Roiling disagreements over Ukraine path at NATO: There hasn't been much diplomacy to watch for at least six months, as Ukraine has been arming for its counteroffensive, in the expectation that gains on the ground will offer leverage when they finally start negotiating. Meanwhile, pressing for NATO membership just confirms Putin's gravest fears and shores up Russia's resolve.

  • Masha Gessen: [06-15] Putin's war hits close to home: "Russia has faced a series of recent attacks, but, in the absence of public space, military losses are personal tragedies, not collective experiences." More pointedly, attacks in Russian territory are more likely to rally support for Putin than to cause people to doubt his leadership. Includes some quotes from Jade McGlynn, author of the new book Russia's War.

  • James Glanz, et al: [06-16] An inside job: "The evidence suggests Russia blew it up from within." I was inclined to keep an open mind on the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, but this presents a reasonably convincing case that Russia blew up the dam, causing extensive flooding along the lower Dnipro, and denying Ukraine a large hydroelectric power plant. In doing so, Russia sacrificed the power plant, the major water source for Crimea, and its occupied territory along the east bank of the river. The destruction is fairly described as an ecological disaster, and as a war crime -- one more in a war full of them. [PS: Robert Wright, who's followed this war more carefully than most, tweeted: "I'm calling bullshit on this Times piece. It makes no sense for Russia to have blown that dam."]

  • Lev Golinkin: [06-13] The western media is whitewashing the Azov battalion: "Before Russia invaded Ukraine, these fighters were neo-Nazis. They still are." Not clear to me what "whitewashing" Nazis means, but this is an old story, one that got picked up by Putin as part of his rationale for invading, which is no more excuse for invasion than any of his others. It's much more accurate to say they're Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, which have practically everything in common with the Russian ultra-nationalists who fervently support Putin's war, except that they hate each other, going back to WWII, where the Russians fought the Nazis, and a faction of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, etc., saw Germany as their liberator from Russian rule. As long as Russia is fighting in Ukraine, I don't see any problem with them fighting for Ukraine. After the war, of course, they could be a problem, like the German Freikorps. Even in the run up to the war, Ukrainian nationalists made it harder to reach any sort of accommodation with the ethnic Russian minority, and thus helped trigger the invasion. After the war, they're likely to be a malign political force -- as ultra-nationalists are everywhere, but Ukraine is likely to emerge with a very powerful warrior caste.

  • Greg Lane: [06-16] The real reason why Putin put Russian nukes in Belarus: I'm afraid that the "real reason" isn't very clear here. Has Belarus offered itself up as a Russian hostage? Is Putin hinting at nuclear aggression without blowing anything up? Is he setting Belarus up to demonstrate use of a tactical weapon while preserving a slim thread of deniability?

  • Anatol Lieven: [06-14] Ukraine's paradoxical lessons for the future of warfare: Hard for me to comment on the technical military aspects Lieven focuses on, particularly "a kind of belated vindication of the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) of the 1980s." (Fred Kaplan wrote about RMA in Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, published in 2008.) I think it's too early -- Ukraine's gains to date can just as easily be seen as strategic retreats by Russia -- to enthuse about the superiority of American weapons and methods. I have no doubt that Ukrainian soldiers are more motivated than Russian soldiers, but wonder whether that advantage will hold up when/if Ukraine enters ethnic Russian strongholds in Donbas and Crimea. Meanwhile, the territory between the front lines and the strongholds could easily change hands, as it's of little value to Russia (but also few Ukrainians remain there to welcome liberation). Lieven doesn't bother with what I think of as the bigger lessons: the strategy of deterrence has completely failed; the threat of sanctions has had little effect on Russia; and while European unity against Russia has never been stronger, few beyond the US and Europe share that instinct (suggesting that the US and Europe aren't widely trusted as sympathetic powers).

  • Branko Marcetic: [06-13] Is the US military more intent on ending Ukraine war than US diplomats? I think it probably is true that top military brass is more acutely aware of the limits of military power than the jingoistic neocons Biden has chosen to stock his State Department with.

  • Alfred McCoy: [06-15] Is China the only way for peace to come to Ukraine? "It's beginning to look as though Beijing has the means, motivation, and ultimate self-interest to end the war." [Originally on TomDispatch.]

  • David Sacks: [06-16] Will upcoming NATO summit launch forever war in Europe? "Pressure is mounting to make some sort of formal declaration over Ukraine's membership at meetings in Vilnius next month."

Around the world:

Other stories:

Dean Baker:

  • [06-07] Owning up to mistakes and pandemic deaths: As noted, the embargo of Cuba since 1962 has been an all-around failure. That it continues to hamper worldwide distribution of Cuba's affordable Covid-19 vaccines is one more problem, one that contrasts starkly with the massive subsidies the US has lavished on Moderna's pricey patents.

  • [06-15] Biden's restrictions on oil drilling have pushed prices back up to where they were in the Bush administration: Irony alert (what "restrictions"?), but look at the chart: oil prices reached their absolute peak late in the Bush administration, before the economy cratered and took the oil market with it. I've long maintained that the dip had more to do with the financial collapse killing futures speculation than with unemployment reducing demand. Same thing happened with the pandemic in 2020, and since the Fed started increasing interest rates in 2022.

  • [06-16] Will Biden's industrial policy create a lot more Moderna billionaires? It will unless it also addresses the gross inequality in power between companies and workers (unions would help; so would codetermination, which gives workers board representation; my favorite is worker-owned companies, which doesn't just tip the scales but blows them up).

Niccolo Barca/Tommaso Grossi: [06-15] The damage Silvio Berlusconi (1936-2023) leaves behind: "The notorious tycoon and former Italian prime minister is gone, but his toxic legacy remains." Before Trump, there was another billionaire who sought office to flamboyantly flount his ego. With his death (and his neo-fascist successor), I'm surprised not to see more on their analogies, including a stretch out of office before coming back, and various skirmishes with the law.

Ok, found one:

Zack Beauchamp: [06-15] What a new conservative call for "regime change" in America reveals about the culture war: Review of Patrick J Deneen's new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen, a political science professor at Notre Dame, previously wrote Why Liberalism Failed in 2018. I grew up reading fairly radical critiques of liberalism, and only softened my view as liberals lost power and prestige and stopped being the ones chiefly responsible for American imperialism and instead became fair-weather defenders of people with little power that conservatives like to pick on. So I can imagine writing books with titles like these, but not this crap, which boils down to a program of seizing power for self-appointed right people and using that power to marginalize or suppress everyone else, resulting in a well-ordered utopia of well-behaved automatons. One problem with liberals is they cut fascists too much slack.

Frederick Clarkson: [06-17] "Unfriending" America: The Christian right is coming for the enemies of God -- like you and me. Inside the "New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement at the cutting edge of Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelicism, which is now the second largest Christian faction in the world after the Roman Catholic Church and the largest growth sector in American and global Christianity."

Fabiola Cineas: [06-17] The "anti-intellectual attack" on higher ed will take years to undo: Interview with Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), noting more than 50 bills in 23 states aimed at "chilling academic freedom." Could have filed this under DeSantis.

David Cohen: [06-16] Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the truth behind the Vietnam War, dies at 92. "Some called Ellsberg a hero and others branded him a traitor." Count me in the hero camp. As far as I know, there has never been any "top secret" document more in need of exposure than the deep history of mistruths and bad faith exposed in The Pentagon Papers. More on Ellsberg:

Michael Hiltzik: [06-13] A farewell to James G Watt, environmental vandal and proto-Trumpian: Reagan's infamous Interior Secretary (1981-83) has died, at 85. His most Trumpian attribute was a loose tongue that repeatedly offended everyone but mining company executives, although it's worth noting that eventually he was (per Wikipedia) "indicted on 18 counts of felony perjury and obstruction of justice and accused of making false statements before a federal grand jury investigating influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development," which was settled when he "pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of withholding documents." More:

Sarah Jones: [06-15] What the censors want. Same question raised by Jane Smiley: [05-30] What are the book banners afraid of? It's not just that they want to hermetically seal young people in a cocoon that celebrates the conservative order. "They are afraid of readers -- especially young readers -- learning the truth about humans, about American history, about, perhaps, their own lives." They talked less about banning books in my day, because it was effectively done before any schools could get their hands on contraband. My reaction was to seek out anything else I could find, and, well, look how I turned out.

Jay Caspian Kang: [06-13] What was Nate Silver's data revolution? I've sometimes wondered whether I should read Silver's book (The Signal and the Noise, 2014). I avoided statistics when I was a sociology major (much to my regret), but I've picked up a general understanding since then; even if I still lack technical skill, I have an interest in and feel for data. But scanning through the book sample on Amazon doesn't reveal much I don't already know. Nor is this piece especially enlightening, least of all about Silver's recent defenestration from FiveThirtyEight. On the other hand, it does highlight a new stats/gambling competitor, Split Ticket. Their Initial 2024 Presidential Ratings are almost exactly what you'd expect.

Ed Kilgore: [06-16] Why do so many Americans think Biden is doing a bad job? That's a good question. I'm afraid it boils down to Republicans never missed a beat in trashing Biden, Democrats rarely fighting back, and the media's predilection for bad news and/or controversy, and their lack of interest in context or complexity. It also hurts that Biden's not much good at speaking for himself. Context matters, because most of our current problems have been developing for decades, making change hard, especially given entrenched Republican power centers. Climate change is probably the clearest example, but workers have been losing ground since the 1980s, inequality has been increasing, the military has been growing (to no good effect), diversity has been increasing (along with a more virulent backlash). The net effect is a sense of decline, which Republicans rail against, blame and exacerbate, while Democrats craft weak reforms and try to exude confidence (without much conviction).

The easiest response here is to list the many ways Democrats are not as bad as Republicans, while glossing over the cases where there isn't much difference (foreign policy, especially the Ukraine War; support for the military; policing immigration; bailing out banks). Even there, it's possible to hope that Democrats will improve. But even where Biden has fallen short, the solution isn't to throw him out -- the only hope is to elect more Democrats. Related:

Ezra Klein: [06-18] 'What the hell happened to the California of the '50s and '60s?': Talks with California Gov. Gavin Newsom about permitting problems, especially environmental impact studies that are slowing down and often killing decarbonization projects needed to save the environment. While consideration of environmental impacts is important, it shouldn't be crippling, as is often the case. Republicans have made "permitting reform" a hot-button issue, with a view to pipelines and mines that are being held up, but it's also obstructing "green energy." Reading this, two thoughts came to mind: one is that California wouldn't exist as we know it had the water projects of the early 1900s had to pass environmental impact studies (one can argue whether that would be good or bad, but it's certainly big). The other is that the first principle of the New Deal was "do something." One looks back at the 1930s and marvels at how much they did, how fast and cheap it was. And sure, much of what they did was build dams, but they changed people's lives, mostly for the better. A progressive movement that can't do that is going to have a hard time surviving, much less flourishing.

Naomi Klein: [06-14] Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr's candidacy at our peril: Useful if you're considering giving him a second thought. I read his 2005 book Crimes Against Nature: How George W Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, which seemed solid enough, but in retrospect was an easy target. He dedicated that book to his then-wife ("the real environmentalist in the family"). He filed for divorce in 2012, and four days later she killed herself. He moved to Los Angeles, married an actress, and within months was railing against vaccines. As Klein documents, he went crackers after that, including his hate book (The Real Anthony Fauci, published by right-wing Skyhorse Publishing). One more point I'd like to add is that I really hate the idea of dynastic politics (and more generally the whole nepotism dynamic, and for that matter inherited wealth -- which better describes Trump than entrepreneur, not that new money can't be obnoxious either). Also on Kennedy:

Eric Levitz: [06-14] Larry Summers was wrong about inflation. He argued that "we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment" to contain inflation. Of course, he'd argue that it's still not contained, even if levels have dropped significantly. But the problem isn't just that Summers is often wrong. It's the ways in which he's wrong, and his obliviousness to the human toll that he argues for.

Jaclyn Peiser: [06-17] How Instant Pot went from coveted appliance to bankruptcy: Regardless of "post-pandemic trends," the real culprit is private equity, which robbed the company (Instant Brands) blind while saddling it with excessive debt.

Thomas Piketty: [06-15] The wealth of (some) nations: French economist, author of major works Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Capital and Ideology (2020) as well as more pointedly political collections of essays, interviewed by Felicia Wong and Michael Tomasky.

Kelsey Piper: [06-14] Four different ways of understanding AI -- and its risks: I'm surprised this isn't illustrated with a simple four quadrant chart, where one axis is how important AI will be (really big to fairly minor) and the other is how useful or troubling it will be. The piece does mention four quadrants, but only focuses on the "big and good" corner.

I think the more important questions are whether access to AI will be restricted to enhance corporate profits, and whether the AI itself will be engineered to further corporate interests. Of course, the same thing can be said about software in general, and the line between crude deterministic software and AI is already rather blurry (e.g., in shopping for an electric toothbrush I found models that advertise AI, which almost certainly is far short of I). There are also questions of whether AI is subordinate to human decision making or autonomous, and whether it is able to command mechanical power (self-driving cars are a case in point), and therefore how fast it can act, or how hard it is to halt. The author's "four quadrants" depend a lot on these questions. Related:

Alex Shephard: [06-12] The rise of independent voters is a myth: Well, it feels better to think of yourself as an independent, as opposed to someone who blindly follows party choices you have little or no control over. Also, both parties share one major negative: both spend much of their time chasing donors, offering to do their bidding. And both parties are bound to the military and the residues of imperialism, even though we have nothing but sorrow to show for their last twenty (or, hell, seventy-five) years of belligerence. Democrats have the extra burden of having repeatedly ignored and undercut the interests of most of their voters. Republicans have the extra burden of nearly everything they try backfiring. So it's easy to see why many people prefer to distance themselves from such a dysfunctional system. But the self-proclaimed centrists rarely offer any sort of alternative. Rather, they embrace the worst of both parties, a muddle of clichés.

Alex Skopic: [06-13] How the lottery became a substitute for hope: I knew a guy who signed all his email with a definition of lottery: "a tax on stupidity." My quick take was that it's a tax on hopelessness. It offers people an extremely small chance of becoming rich, which could be seen as a good deal if your actual real life chances were even slimmer. But it also depends on people believing that becoming rich is the answer to their problems.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-16] Roaming Charges: All the girls around him say he had it coming. Starts with a quote from the late Cormac McCarthy: "Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it." Then he mentions Trump, but just to point out he's no whistleblower (his counterexample is Julian Assange, who Trump's DOJ prosecuted, and Biden's is still after). Then: "When I think about the many victims of the Espionage Act, my thoughts immediately go to Ethel Rosenberg," who was convicted and executed not for treason but for "being engaged in a conspiracy to 'commit espionage.'" A crucial figure in that execution was Trump's old mentor, Roy Cohn, who personally lobbied the judge to sign the death warrant.

Trump fancies himself as the victim of a "witch hunt," but while he's earned a desire among many for vengeance, he doesn't grasp the most basic principle of actual witch hunts, which is less to punish the initial target than to smoke out more witches. Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible to point out how much McCarthyism had in common with the Salem witch trials -- two episodes in American paranoid thought that are now widely regretted (if not fully: one can imagine DeSantis setting up tribunals to interrogate witnesses -- "are you now or have you ever been woke?" -- and demand that they name names; and while none of the recent laws criminalizing aid and advice on getting an abortion specifically mention witches, the history there runs pretty deep; by the way, later down there's a Pat Robertson quote about the "feminist agenda" which lists "practice witchcraft" among other evils, like "leave their husbands" and "destroy capitalism").

St Clair shows a meme, where Trump says "In reality, they're not after me . . They're after you. I'm just in the way." But where was Trump when "the feds came for crack users, welfare mothers, immigrant families, striking workers, jaywalkers, whistleblowers, and medical pot users"? He was mostly cheering them on. "There are 2 million people currently incarcerated in US prisons and jails. There are 5 million formerly incarcerated people in the US. 20 million people have been convicted of felonies. 80 million have some kind of criminal record. They've already come for and gotten almost all the rest of us."

Then there's a quote from DeSantis vowing "We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress." St Clair:

Who knew the war on corporations would finally be launched because they sold t-shirts and beer to gay and trans people and not because they gouged prices, poisoned your drinking water, evicted you from your home, killed the Gulf of Mexico, made life-saving drugs too expensive to buy and turned the atmosphere into an air fryer?

Colin Woodard: [06-16] The geography of gun violence: Most likely interesting for the map, which was the subject of Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. But the differences in gun deaths are striking (3.5 and 3.8 at the bottom, 12.2 in the Far West and 15.6 in the Deep South, and a few outliers even higher).

Notable tweet, from Dean Baker (linked to a Washington Post editorial you can chase down yourself):

Trump was completely right. He can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and the Washington Post would say that indicting him for murder endangered democracy.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Speaking of Which

I see that Nathan Robinson's Current Affairs has launched a biweekly News Briefing via Substack. If the free first issue is anything to judge by, it's better than what I've been trying to do (e.g., below) over the last several years. Still, I stopped cold when confronted with the paywall (Substack's minimum $5 per month, or $50 per year). Nonetheless, I got an email within minutes saying, "You're receiving free posts from Current Affairs Biweekly News Briefing." (I did nothing more, but maybe they glommed onto a cookie, as I'm a non-paying subscriber to a couple other Substack newsletters. The way they do this makes it impossible for my wife and me to share Substack accounts, which disinclines me from doing anything with them at all.)

By the way, apologies for the paywalled content linked to below. My wife subscribes to a lot of stuff (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), which I piggyback on, so I don't notice when it's not free. On the other hand, the titles usually work as an outline, and my comments are always visible, never joined to a shakedown or any other kind of scam. If Current Affairs (or anyone else) wants to fold stuff I write here into their own offerings, more power to them. Just don't charge me for it.

I continue to be bothered by my lack of progress on any other writing front, despite the relative ease with which this weekly compendium practically writes itself.

Top story threads:

Trump: I started collecting before the Trump indictments dropped, but that only partially obsoletes Andrew Prokop: [06-08] Trump's next indictment is looming -- and the evidence against him is trickling out. Prokop also wrote: [06-08] Trump says he's been indicted again: The Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, explained; and [06-09] The detailed, damning new Trump indictment, explained.

DeSantis, and other Republicans: I originally wanted to keep all the sociopaths together, but the Trump volume argued for a separate section. Still, the only significant difference seems to be that he got caught -- something that in happier times he derided John McCain for:

  • Jonathan Chait::

    • [06-05] The GOP's authoritarian acceleration: "Internal resistance to its anti-democratic turn has all but vanished." Kind of odd that the first illustration here (four paragraphs long) of the Republican embrace of "violations of democratic norms" is Trump's firing of James Comey: "Now every FBI director is eminently fireable," which sounds to me like an improvement over the untouchable J Edgar Hoover. (The idea that Hoover was above politics is a pretty lame and narrow view of politics.) Of course, the basic point is valid: Republicans have always had an exaggerated sense of their own indispensability, and conservatives have never trusted democracy, so the combination has proven especially eager to cut corners and rig power centers in their favor. Nixon's "dirty tricks" backfired when exposed, but Trump can be more brazen about his authoritarian aims, largely because, to quote David Kochel, "the conservative media ecosystem has built a giant wall of inoculation around everything Trump." Or everything Republican.

    • [06-08] Mike Pence says Trump can commit all the crimes he wishes: "Enforcing the law would be 'divisive.'"

  • Ana Marie Cox: [06-11] The war on drugs is getting meaner and dumber, and Texas and Florida show how bad it can get.

  • Zach Despart: [06-09] GOP donor at center of Ken Paxton scandal charged with 8 felonies as prosecutors seek $172 million: "Texas real estate investor Nate Paul charged with making false statements to financial institutions."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [06-08] Why I support Chris Christie's (doomed) 2024 presidential bid: More than a little tongue in cheek here, and "there's no chance he'll actually be president" isn't much of a reason. The one exception is that Christie's likely to be the only Republican candidate willing to talk about Trump's graft. Of course, Christie's such a sleazeball that could blow back on him.

  • Jack Hunter: [06-07] Neocon Nikki Haley rides again: Every now and then I worry that some Republican will try to outflank Biden on war, and that one issue will sway people. To some extent, Trump did that in 2016, although he was never very credible, in part because he was so inconsistent. On the other hand, Biden came into office determined to bring NATO back into American orbit, and thanks to Putin he succeeded way beyond his wildest dreams. Less noticed, he's also managed to reunite America's allies around the Pacific rim, again by pushing the spectre of threat from China. Still, one Republican I'm not worried about upsetting Biden with a turn toward world peace is Haley.

  • Ed Kilgore: [06-07] Doug Burgum bets that 2024 voters don't care about culture wars: Given the laws the North Dakota governor has signed recently, he's pretty well hedged on culture war issues. Hard to see what else he can run on, other than the once-successful "I'm a billionaire, so you know I'm honestly for you."

  • Ezra Klein: [06-11] Ron DeSantis thinks Trump didn't go far enough: A fairly close reading of the Florida governor's campaign tome, The Courage to Be Free: "It's not a good book, exactly. But it's a revealing one." What it mostly reveal is that DeSantis is a vindictive prick who will use every ounce of power he can seize to punish his supposed enemies, which very likely means you and me.

  • Mike Lofgren: [06-09] The party of pollution, disease and death: When Republicans tell you who they are, believe them. By the way, Lofgren previously wrote: [05-20] The GOP's heart of darkness: Why Ron DeSantis can never beat Donald Trump: "No Republicans can beat Trump, because no one else can command his coalition of damaged, discarded, marginal people." I've never been especially happy with deriding Trump's followers as mere miscreants, but he has something that brings to the fore those traits in lots of people, making them seem respectable and even special. (Lofgren, by the way, is a recovering Republican, author of The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.)

  • Dana Milbank: [06-09] In the House, a spectacular flameout: Speaker Kevin McCarthy, after passing his debt limit deal with considerable help from Democrats, fails to get enough Republicans to pass his purely symbolic gas stoves initiative.

  • Nicole Narea: [06-09] Why are all these random Republicans running for president? Well, it's not, as the subhed argues, because "everybody still thinks they can win in 2024." Most candidates, as ever, see it as a way to raise their political profile (a category that obviously includes Doug Burgum, and extends past Tim Scott to Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be happy just to sell more books). What's more remarkable is the absence of 2016 contenders (Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Kasich, Carson), who have more to lose than to gain by losing again. (Christie is the one back, but he has a fairly unique martyr angle. DeSantis and Pence are in, because they'd look like cowards if they didn't run, and each has an angle to claim Trump's mantle should Trump fail. Same could be said for Haley, although her angle is more oblique. And, well, while it's unlikely any Republican can beat Trump in the primaries, he could still be forced out, or simply collapse, creating an opening. [Who did I leave out? Looks like Asa Hutchinson and Larry Elder. Feel free to slot them yourself.]

  • Katha Pollitt: [06-08] The Right's latest target: no-fault divorce: "Republicans have a new way of sticking their noses in other people's business." Not to mention that their favorite game is finding fault with everyone else for the myriad sins of the world. They can't fix anything, but at least they can assign blame.

  • Alex Thomas: [06-09] The right has a vigilante fetish: "Daniel Penny takes his place in conservatives' growing pantheon of violent 'heroes.'"

  • Ken Ward Jr: [06-01] West Virginia Governor's coal empire sued by the federal government -- again: "seeks millions in unpaid environmental fines."

  • Linda K Wertheimer: [05-30] Inside the Christian legal crusade to revive school prayer.

While the following articles aren't strictly about Republicans, this seems like a good place for them:

Fire and smoke:

And other environmental disasters:

Ukraine War: Most observers are reporting that Ukraine seems to have started their "counteroffensive," albeit with little fanfare. Their only discernible victory so far is in getting journalists to say "counteroffensive" instead of "[Spring] offensive" -- we still need to make clear that Russia is the aggressor in this war. It's been pretty clear all Winter that Zelensky has no intention of negotiating until he first gives his fancy new war weapons -- especially the tanks -- a chance to tip the scales. While I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine manages to claw back much of the territory they lost in 2022, the only solution is still negotiation, and the only reasonable basis for negotiation is the self-determination of the people involved. Until both sides realize that, the destruction continues. And if you think this week's dam destruction was a disaster for everyone, wait until the fighting overwhelms the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant (already endangered, especially denied water from the dam).

  • Connor Echols: [06-09] Diplomacy Watch: S. Africa suggests moving BRICS summit to China: The change of venue would allow Putin to attend without fear of being arrested and handed over to the ICC. The BRICS nations have nearly all floated peace initiatives, as have (noted here) Indonesia and the Vatican. Meanwhile, Anthony Blinken dismisses any ceasefire as a "Potemkin peace."

  • Ben Armbruster: [06-09] How WWII nostalgia fuels media's impractical Ukraine aims: "Yes fighting the Russians is just and Putin is a very bad guy, but analogies to the Nazi era rarely if ever apply." The most obvious difference is that Roosevelt's insistence that Germany surrender unconditionally is impossible: even if Ukraine recovered its 2014 borders, a hostile Russia would remain a persistent threat. The only way to eliminate this threat is to negotiate a deal which leaves Russia satisfied -- if not with Ukrainian territory, then with other (possibly economic) concessions.

  • Chris Baraniuk: [06-08] The Kakhovka Dam collapse is an ecological disaster.

  • Max Boot: [06-09] The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic. Now, that's what I call "pathetic."

  • Shane Harris/Souad Mekhennet: [06-06] US had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline. Further information from the what's now being dubbed the Discord leaks, suggests that Ukraine, rather than the US (as Seymour Hersh reported) was responsible for blowing up the gas line between Russia and Germany. This follows an earlier Discord leaks piece by John Hudson/Isabelle Khurshudyan: [05-13] Zelensky, in private, plots bold attacks inside Russia, leak shows.

  • Matthew Hoh: [06-09] A war long wanted: Diplomatic malpractice in Ukraine: This provides a pretty detailed litany of the many acts seen as provocations by Russia since 1991, including the scuttling of the Minsk agreement and the military buildup in 2021 before Russia invaded in February, 2022. Part of the intent is "understanding the war through Russia's eyes," which should help open our own. Perhaps the article needs a stronger disclaimer that Putin in many cases misunderstood the provocations, and in any case had no right or even reason to invade as he did, but it's not like those are points we don't understand. Rather, they are chits that critics of US policy have to cash in order to be taken seriously on any other point. This ends with brief sections on "who profits?" and "the cost of war," as well as a couple paragraphs on the need for peace through diplomacy. All very sensible.

  • Fred Kaplan: [06-08] Ukraine's counteroffensive has begun. Now what? "Impossible to say."

  • Jen Kirby:

  • Najmedin Meshkati: [06-09] Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant -- receding waters narrow options for cooling.

  • Samantha Schmidt/Isobel Koshiw/Natalia Abbakumova: [06-06] Damage to Russian-held hydroelectric plant floods south Ukraine battlefield. One possible factor is that Water level behind Russian-controlled Kakhkovka Dam was at historic high before it was destroyed. Of course, Russia and Ukraine are blaming each other for the destruction. While high water would have stressed the dam, making an accidental breach (somewhat) more likely, it more obviously made the flooding worse. Much depends here on whether Russia expected to lose the dam during Ukraine's counteroffensive, which last fall advanced to the Dnipro River. Blowing up the dam would presumably slow Ukrainian advance in the region, as well as adding to the rebuilding cost of the flooded areas. On the other hand, blowing the dam sacrifices the canal that diverts Dnipro water to Crimea -- a view that only makes sense if Russia expected to lose the dam and canal anyway. For Ukraine's spin, see Veronika Melkozerova: [06-06] Defiant Ukraine says dam carnage won't stop counteroffensive.

  • Robert Wright: [06-09] Timothy Snyder's pernicious influence: I've long admired Tony Judt, so I was inclined to give his protégé some slack. But I'm left wondering whether the influence went the other way, with Judt's late celebration of East European revolts against Soviet domination boosted by Snyder's vicious anti-Russian prejudices. In any case, Snyder has become one of the most uncritical anti-Russia hawks anywhere. I'm reminded of an old saw: that America's China experts usually fell in love with China, but the Russia experts inevitably hated Russia. Anne Applebaum has rivaled Snyder among public intellectuals turned warmongers.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [06-08] Nord Stream revelations should chasten Ukraine dam 'hot takes': Rule of thumb: Ukraine always blames Russia, and Russia always blames Ukraine. Ukraine blamed Russia for the Nord Stream sabotage, but that never made sense, for lack of motivation. Ukraine had the motive, but how could they do it? The US and maybe Poland or Norway had lesser motives, which allowed Seymour Hersh to construct a plausible (albeit uncertain) scenario for a US operation (with help from Norway). We've since seen a plausible scenario for Ukraine (with help from Poland). Still not proven, but makes sense. As for the Kakhovka Dam disaster, I can imagine motives for both Ukraine and Russia, and while it would be easier for Russia to pull off, it certainly could have been Ukraine. Yet neither motive is convincing, as each depends on assumptions about how the counteroffensive will go under different scenarios. And, let's face it, neither side knows, no matter how confident they seem. Then there's the third possibility, that it was some kind of accident. I'd score that as Russia's fault, because they had no business being there. But also because war always leads to unpredicted disasters, and Russia -- even admitting much provocation -- launched this war.

World:

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [06-07] Owning up to mistakes and pandemic deaths: "It would be a huge step forward for both public health and US foreign policy if we could begin down the road of freely sharing health care technology rather than trying to bottle it up so that a small number of people can get very rich." Also see Ryan Cooper, below.

Zack Beauchamp: [06-11] How the right's defeats gave us the anti-LGBTQ moment: "The American right is returning to its homophobic roots." I figured the culture war over LGB was pretty much settled, but T opened it up again, largely, I think, because the right will embrace any non-economic grudge they can get any leverage on. (Gas stoves is an almost comical example.) Economic issues are trickier, because helping the rich get richer isn't all that popular, even among caste-conscious Republicans. Beauchamp's thesis is less convincing, but the right has few rivals when it comes to nursing grudges and stoking paranoia about vast left conspiracies. Otherwise, they might have to face responsibility for their repeated failures.

Irin Carmon: [06-06] When pregnancy is the crime: "An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths."

Zachary Carter: [06-06] What if we're thinking about inflation all wrong? "Isabella Weber's heterodox ideas about government price controls are transforming policy in the United States and across Europe." With visions of magical markets dancing in their heads, economists hate price controls (even if coupled with wage controls, which softens the blow because economists also hate people), it's easy to see how they fell for the Volcker maneuver as the only proper remedy for inflation. But it's a very blunt, indiscriminate instrument, kind of like engineering a flood to put out a house fire. It may eventually work, but the collateral damage is immense, and may not even solve the real problem.

This recent round of inflation always struck me as caused by two things: the first is temporary supply chain kinks, which made it possible for companies to price gouge, some of which stuck given that most companies preferred profit to volume; which was possible due to increasing monopolization of damn near everything. Monopoly rents had trailed limits to competition because customers resist price increases, making companies reluctant to squeeze their every advantage, but the dam broke, companies could take whatever the market would bear. For proof, consider that most companies have been raking in record profits while others pay their premiums.

Weber has some interesting ideas for price controls -- often ones that avoid the bureaucratic overhead of the old OPA, although with modern computers you'd think that overhead could be slashed.

Ryan Cooper:

James K Galbraith: [06-09] Next time, dammit, just default: "Democrats feared a monster called 'default' -- but it's just another Washington scare story." Makes sense to me. In fact, makes me wonder why I didn't see something like this before the deal -- although parts of it are somewhat familiar. It's actually an old story where the Left (or its compromised proxies in parties like the Democratic) are called on to sacrifice their own goals in order to save capitalism, on the premise that not doing so would hurt worse.

Sarah Jones: [06-11] "It's not just the fringe who are committing these violent acts": Interview with Julie Burkhart, who runs the only clinic that provides surgical abortions in Wyoming. She formerly worked for the late George Tiller here in Wichita.

Peter Kafka: [06-07] Firing Chris Licht won't fix CNN. Licht drew flak for his efforts to move CNN toward the "center," especially the synthetic news event he billed as a "Trump town hall, but Kafka attributes his firing to the exposure in Tim Alberta: [06-02] Inside the meltdown at CNN. Alberta says "Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network's reputation for serious journalism." I'm not sure that "serious journalism" is even possible on TV given diminished attention spans, but if one wanted to try, the obvious way to go about it would be to look beneath the headlines and start to notice the interests that corrupt and distort understanding.

Robert Kuttner: [06-09] Remembering William Spriggs: "A life devoted to pursuing economic justice." Died this week, at 68.

Dylan Matthews: [06-10] Labor unions aren't "booming." They're dying. "Unions won't come back without fundamental changes to bargaining."

Ian Millhiser:

Nathan Robinson:

  • [06-08] How the John Birch Society won the long game: Review of Matthew Dallek: Birchers: H ow the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Argues that "The American right doesn't need the John Birch Society these days, but that is because it's adopted the Birchers' extremism wholesale."

  • [06-05] We now know the full extent of Obama's disastrous apathy toward the climate crisis: Columbia University, with funding from the Obama Foundation, has compiled 470 interviews to form an "oral history of the Obama presidency." We also have what Robinson terms memoirs by sycophants and his own gargantuan self-exonerative autobiography, where even rose-tinted reflection fails to show Obama as concerned much less prophetic on the climate crisis (though maybe not contemptuous and imbicilic, which would be par for the Trump administration). I've always been dismayed at the lack of credit Obama got for expanding oil production (mostly through fracking, you may recall), but the media always assumed that Republicans were the oil party. Yet there is a bit here where Obama is speaking to a bunch of Texas oilmen and bragging: "You know how we became number one in the world in oil production? That was me." The oil men cheered. Then they voted for Trump.

  • [05-31] Introducing Murray Bookchin, the extraordinary originator of 'social ecology': Interview with Janet Biehl, who wrote a 2015 biography (Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin) and edited The Murray Bookchin Reader (1999; looks like both of these are out of print). Bookchin's 1971 book Post-Scarcity Anarchism had a great deal of influence on my own thought. Of late, I've been thinking about how anarchist cooperation models could help us with international relations, given the impossibility of establishing a world order (no matter how much Washington, Beijing, etc., might try).

Greg Sargent: [06-08] How Pat Robertson created today's Christian nationalist GOP: The Christian Broadcasting Network founder died at 93. Interview with Rick Perlstein.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-09] Infamy at sea, cover-up in DC: Israel's attack on the USS Liberty: In 1964, two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin reported being fired on, which LBJ quickly blew up into the casus belli that justified America's escalation of war against Vietnam. Three years later, another American ship was attacked at sea, this time killing 34 US sailors and injuring 174. LBJ was still president, but the only thing he escalated this time was the amount of foreign aid sent to the attackers. This is an old piece, from a 2004 book, but perhaps the story is new to you?

Maureen Tkacik: [06-02] Days of plunder: A review of two recent books on the most malign force in modern capitalism: Gretchen Morgenson/Joshua Rosner: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs -- and Wrecks -- America, and Brendan Ballou: Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. Opens with more than you want to know about PetSmart, but that's just one example.

Robert Wright: [06-07] AI is at a dangerous juncture: It's hard to know just where to hook into this argument, mostly because it's unclear what AI is going to do -- the most obvious thing is to increase speed and productivity of data-intensive operations -- or more pertinently what it could do that we don't want it to do. One thing that makes that alarming is that for many years speed has been viewed as the holy grail of war (from blitzkrieg to the decision to respond to a nuclear first strike). Still, the question we should ask isn't how AI can give us (or them) an advantage in waging war, but whether our model of defense through deterrence hasn't been thorough discredited (e.g., in Ukraine).

One comment here: "AI will not be regulated properly because companies will always put profits over everything else." For all the talk about the need to regulate AI, I've never seen a concrete proposal for doing so. My best guess is that the first movers want it regulated to keep future competitors out -- that's actually a common regulation strategem. What would make more sense to me is not to regulate what AI can do but to regulate the business you can do with it, starting with how it can be monetized. A good start would be to deny any patents on it, which would disincentivize developers, especially from doing unsavory things with it. One could go a step further and require that the source code be free (in the GNU sense). For starters, that would make it publicly inspectable (and again it would disincentivize bad actors). And certainly, the products of AI shouldn't be copyrightable. (Thus far, as I understand it, they are not.) Of course, if we start talking along these lines, the current companies' push to regulate is going to evaporate. As long as politics are driven by greedy parties, this isn't likely to happen, but if the threat is real, how can we afford not to?

Abby Zimet: [06-04] A rank immunity: Henry Kissinger is still a war criminal: I thought we had flogged this not-year-dead 100-year-old carcass enough over the last couple weeks, but couldn't resist tipping you to the Wonder Wart-Hog detail used as an illustration. If you can stand more, try Jonathan Guyer: [06-08] I crashed Henry Kissinger's 100th-birthday party: "The elite love him but for some reason won't say why."

Notable tweet from @sorrelquest:

it's insane how like half of all political "arguments" boil down to one side that's universally beneficial and that everyone agrees with and one side that we need to pretend is contentious because eight people with a lot of money feel strongly about it

From Zachary D Carter:

The vagueness around whether we "need" unemployment at 4.5 percent or 5.5 percent shows how imprecise enthusiasts of this model can be, but the really extraordinary line for me is: "That's why we have central banks, is to make tough choices."

The point Furman is making is that central banks exist to do unpopular things. Democracy left to its own devices will produce too much inflation. "Too much" here being defined as about 4 percent, the "though choices" solution being millions of layoffs.

Plenty of economists agree with Furman that this is the proper role of a central bank. But that has not always been the case. It's pretty easy to create unemployment without a central bank. The U.S. had decades of deflation and persistent financial crises from 1870 to 1913.

And one of the chief arguments for establishing a central bank was to create more economic flexibility so that these crashes didn't become depressions and that deflation didn't destroy American democracy.

The idea that the Fed was supposed to handle one aspect of a full employment program was pretty common until the Volcker era. Congress passed two laws to that end, one in 1946 and another in 1978.

Managing expertise and public opinion isn't obvious or easy. But the belief that the people want too many jobs for their own good, and need to be disciplined into unemployment is not inherent to central banking. It's a very particular worldview, and one that I think is wrong.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 4, 2023

Speaking of Which

Abbreviated this week, as I basically lost Friday and Saturday to a cooking project. Anyhow, enough for a placeholder. The non-story of the week is the debt deal. (Glad that's over.) The story that really looms large is the insurance industry debacle. Also note the problems in Kosovo, which should remind us that temporary hacks don't last where long-term stable solutions are needed.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republican sociopaths:

  • Kate Aronoff: [05-30] Ron DeSantis threatens to "Make America Florida": "The GOP hopeful's climate denial papers over a horrifying reality in his home state." I've been to Florida a couple times, and it's a nice enough place to visit (in March, anyway). But is this really a workable sales pitch? Even if you ignore the considerable damage he's already inflicted on Florida, which is really more to the point. A while back, Aronoff wrote: [2022-10-12] Florida and the insurance industry weren't build to withstand a flooded world.

  • Devlin Barrett/Josh Dawsey/Carol D Leonnig: [05-31] Prosecutors have recording of Trump discussing sensitive Iran document: "could undercut key defense claims that Trump declassified or didn't know about the documents."

  • Ben Brasch/Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff: [06-01] Candidate charged with shooting at Democrats' homes after election loss. Solomon Pena (R-NM), lost state House seat nearly 2-to-1, blamed fraud, hired two more guys to help him with shootings.

  • Fabiola Cineas: [06-02] Florida has launched an "unparalleled" assault on higher education: "Ron DeSantis is threatening academic freedom everywhere." Illustration here is a sign that gets to the point: "Support real education, not DeSantis indoctrination."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [05-30] It turns out 'Trump Bucks' aren't actually legal tender.

  • Ed Kilgore: [06-01] 2024 presidential candidates side with far right on debt deal: No responsibilities, no consequences.

  • Eric Levitz: [05-29] The contradiction at the heart of DeSantis 2024: On the one hand, he wants to be seen as more electable than Trump; on the other, he also wants to be seen as doing everything Trump would do and then some, suggesting he intends to be more extreme. But that's only a contradiction if you assume that everything balances off the center -- a view that only centrists have these days, I suppose because they insist on being wrong about everything. DeSantis embraces both sides of this equation not because he's a centrist but because he's a cynic. In the Republican primaries, he'll run not as the saner Trump but as the more effective model: the guy who delivers things that Trump can only promise. If he's nominated, he'll pivot back to the middle, not because he's changed one iota but because the gullible media wants any excuse to cozy up to a Republican. If he's elected, he'll pull the same kind of stunts he's been doing all along in Florida, which will come as a complete surprise to all the centrists who rushed to support him. It's not a bad plan, and if he wasn't such a jerkwad (or at least could fake it) it might work, but there are lots of possible pitfalls. The first is that Trump's base don't want a subtler, more efficient strongman. They want one who acts up, who gets in their supposed enemies' faces and heads.

  • Yvonne Wingett Sanchez: [06-01] After harassment, Arizona county official won't run for reelection: The unfortunately named Maricopa County Supervisor, Bill Gates.

  • Li Zhou: [06-01] Mike Pence is a man without a constituency: That's not really fair. Pence has a constituency, just a very small one. It's wonks who liked Trump's policies but were ultimately taken aback by his personality. Billmon referred to the GW Bush years as the Cheney Administration, because the personnel and all the policies seemed to emanate from the VP. (Curiously, Cheney lost most of his influence in Bush's second term, especially after he lost Scooter Libby to indictment.) Same thing with the Trump years, except that Trump claimed all the glory. But even though Pence was central to policy direction, most people realize that any Republican flunky would have done the same, and most could have presented the same pious supplication.

Biden, Democrats, and the end of the debt crisis: For the record, I'm not unhappy with Biden's debt ceiling deal. He gave McCarthy a little victory and a bit of respect, which he probably didn't need to do, but it didn't cost much. And what Biden gained was to kill the issue until 2025, or longer if Democrats recover and win Congress. Anything else would be litigated endlessly, and while he'd probably win, that would have made the Supreme Court look a bit less fanatical than they are. It might have been different had he been able to rally the media to his viewpoint, but he's not that kind of guy. I wish Democrats could do better, but there's not much evidence of them even trying.

Ukraine War:

  • Blaise Malley: [06-02] Diplomacy Watch: A peace summit without Russia.

  • Andrew Bacevich: [06-01] The compulsion to intervene: "Why Washington underwrites violence in Ukraine.

  • Dave DeCamp: [06-01] SpaceX lands Pentagon contract for Starlink terminals for Ukraine: Add Elon Musk to the list of war profiteers.

  • John Feffer: [05-31] How Russia's war in Ukraine threatens the planet.

  • Anatol Lieven/George Beebe: [05-31] Prigozhin erupts: Has a Russian succession struggle begun? No reason to get excited here. "And if the choice of a successor to Putin really becomes that between President Prigozhin and President Patrushev, would either of these be an improvement on Putin himself?"

  • Suzanne Loftus: Kazakhstan's view of Ukraine is complicated because it, too, is complicated.

  • Neil MacFarquhar/Milana Mazaeva: [06-03] In Russian schools, it's recite your ABC's and 'Love your army': "The curriculum for young Russians is increasingly emphasizing patriotism and the heroism of Moscow's army, while demonizing the West as 'gangsters.' One school features a 'sniper'-themed math class." This just poisons the future.

  • Nicole Narea: The potential fallout from drone attacks in Moscow.

  • Timothy Noah: [05-08] Putin can't afford to lose in Ukraine -- but he can't afford to win, either: When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, it represented 10.5 percent of the global economy; by April 2022, Russia's share had shrunk to 3.5 percent, and GDP has shrunk by a quarter since 2013. Capitalism doesn't seem like much of a blessing.

  • Jordan Michael Smith: [06-02] How Russia got the Ukraine War wrong: Review of two recent books on the war: Owen Matthews: Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War Against Ukraine, and Serhii Plokhy: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. I've read Plokhy's 2021 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, which was pre-invasion but well into the 2014 division. No doubt he knows the history, but I have wonder how much inside scoop Matthews -- a British journalist based in Moscow in the late 1990s, and later in Istanbul -- actually has.

    Matthews offers three reasons behind Putin's decision to go to war. The first, that "Western influence was growing too powerful in a country vital to Russian influence," needs a lot more elaboration. It seems likely that Biden's administration took much more concern with Ukraine than Trump's had done, and that promise of support emboldened Zelensky to ditch the Minsk II accord and further threaten Russian separatists in Donbas. Why Putin should see Ukraine as a vital interest is deeply embedded in the history Plokhy explains, seeing it as a threat, and believing Russia could solve that threat with aggression, is a more complex problem.

    Matthew's second reason seems justified: Putin's belief that Russia could withstand sanctions has largely been vindicated, but like most conflict issues, it has a second side. It is just as possible that the US overestimated the sanctions threat. The third reason -- that the US was weakened by its clumsy retreat from Afghanistan -- makes the least sense. If anything, the US was more eager to confront Russia once it was no longer stuck in Afghanistan. If Putin thought otherwise, he was being foolish -- although it is just the sort of thing American hawks would say.

    I suspect much more research is needed to fill in the details, which is where the devil dwells. One pull quote deserves reiteration here: "A wounded Russia might be even more prone to extremism, paranoia, and aggression than it was before the war."

The rest of the world:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [05-30] Uganda's extreme anti-LGBTQ legislation, explained. Three other African states have similar laws (Kenya, Zambia, Ghana). But there is an argument that the driving force behind such laws is "American evangelicals through their local actors."

  • Marc Martorell Junyent: [06-01] Is the new Taliban reign less extreme than it was in 2001? Hassan Abbas has a new book on this, The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left, arguing that the question is open, but continued exclusion isn't helping.

  • Anatol Lieven: [06-02] Ethnic conflict in Kosovo: Cutting the Gordian Knot: This is yet another diplomatic failure, exacerbated by foreign powers picking sides in a local ethnic dispute. One might even argue that NATO's intervention in Kosovo was every bit as egregious as Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Other stories:

Christopher Flavelle/Jack Healy: [06-01] Arizona limits construction around Phoenix as its water supply dwindles.

Matthew Duss: [06-01] The bad thing Henry Kissinger did that you don't even know about: "the practice of turning vast global contacts into wealth has been horrible for American democracy." After leaving government, Kissinger set up shop and encouraged rich people to give him money. What he did for all that money was often unclear (and still is). But he turned GW Bush's invite to oversee a commission on 9/11 because he feared that taking the post would expose his business to public scrutiny. He wasn't the first person to do that sort of thing, and many more have followed in his footsteps.

Victoria Guida: [05-29] Historic gains: Low-income workers scored in the Covid economy. Something else for Republicans to try to destroy.

Umair Irfan:

  • [05-30] A big El Niño is looming. Here's what it means for our weather. "How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world."

  • [06-02] Climate change is already making parts of America uninsurable: "We're steadily marching toward an uninsurable future." This is probably the biggest story of the week, and maybe the year. Two key problems with private insurance: the risk models haven't kept pace with increasing risks; and once you fix the risk models, the upshot is that few people can afford insurance. And if you can't insure property, how can you finance it? If we had understood this 20-30 years ago, maybe we could have done a realistic cost-benefit analysis on carbon reduction, but having ignored the real risks all this time, it's too late to catch up. I'm convinced that the solution will be for the federal government to provide insurance, either by backstopping the private companies or by offering some degree of insurance directly. If the latter seems hard to imagine, consider such current programs as flood insurance, crop insurance, FEMA disaster funding, and and too-big-to-fail banks. This will be a big political issue in the not-so-distant future, and needs to be thought about sooner rather than later.

Sarah Jones:

  • [05-30] The revolt of the other mothers: "Moms for Liberty learned motherhood is a potent force. So too have their opponents."

  • [05-30] A generation moves on: On a Washington Post feature about "Christina and Aaron Beall, parents who have abandoned the Christian homeschool movement." They themselves were home schooled, brought up to "discipline" their children as they had been "disciplined" (which is to say, beaten). As with all case studies, no way to tell how representative their stories are. Jones has a similar (though she suspects less extreme) background, which helps. By the way, I've kept Jones' [04-08] piece open, as it's one of the best I've seen all year: Children are not property. I find the notion that they are property, which is consistent with recent right-wing programming, horrifying. Even worse, I suppose, is the notion that your children should be their property too.

  • [05-29] The fantasies of Josh Hawley: "The senator's new book, Manhood, is an exercise in cowardice." I've cited several rejoinders to this book in recent weeks, less because we need to tear it down than because its its author is often taken as a serious Republican thinker-activist yet the book is such an easy target. By the way, on Facebook Greg Magarian noted: "Masculinity? That's a complicated idea, but I've never encountered any idea of manhood that looks like Josh Hawley."

Glenn Kessler: [05-16] And the president most to blame for the national debt problem is . . . Author cites one fairly arbitrary study to pin the blame on Lyndon Johnson, on the theory that "entitlements" like Medicare and Medicaid are the culprit, and ranks Nixon second for similar reasons, despite later admitting that "social programs, in fact, can provide more benefits than costs in the long run." Curiously, no mention here of the impact of war and defense spending on the balance sheet -- not even Johnson's (and Nixon's) largely unfunded Vietnam War, which was the source of most budget imbalances at the time.

Whizzy Kim: [05-26] What was Succession actually trying to tell us? The HBO series has been a rare unflattering portrait of the very rich, and the many ways their wealth warps their perceptions and actions. For its first three seasons, it managed to be watchable despite a total absence of sympathetic characters, but it finally got good in the fourth season, when Logan Roy's death raised the stakes. Kim also wrote [05-29] Succession ends exactly how it needed to. I'd say they did what they could after painting themselves into a corner. To say Tom Wambsgans came out the winner overlooks how totally hollow his new position will be. But I don't like Lukas Matsson's odds any better. He came out as a phony and bully way out of his league. Except that everyone involved comes out with unimaginable piles of money, conjured from rarefied bullshit. This is no way to run a world.

Ian Millhiser: [06-01] The Supreme Court deals another blow to labor unions.

Andrew Perez: [06-03] Right-wing dark money funded Kansas's failed anti-abortion campaign.

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-02] Roaming Charges: The shame of the game. Not happy with the debt deal: "The Democrats asked for nothing and got less. The Far Right demanded all they could think of, got it and now wants more."

Peter Turchin: [06-02] America is headed toward collapse: From the author's new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Section here is a very sketchy outline of two previous crises -- the Civil War and the Great Depression -- with similarities to the current period highlighted. Turchin has several previous books. His War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, is summarized as follows:

Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society's capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 28, 2023

Speaking of Which

I started collecting this on Thursday, and was pretty much done on Saturday before the "debt ceiling deal" broke. Most of the links there are to now-forgettable, soon-forgotten thinking, which I sympathized at the time, but the thing I like best about the deal is that it kills the issue until well after the 2024 election, whereas the unorthodox fixes would be litigated that long, even if they're ultimately found valid. In the meantime, the Republican House is going to cut more spending and encumber it with more stupid rules than Biden agreed to this round. The only response to that is to kick their asses in 2024, and any cause they give you should be used back against them.

Top story threads:

Ron DeSantis: The Florida governor announced he's running for president, which got enough ughs and moans to temporarily bump Trump off the top spot here.

Trump and other Republicans:

The debt ceiling: Latest reports are that Biden and McCarthy came to some sort of deal, which still needs to be passed before the latest June 5 disaster date projection (see: Li Zhou/Dylan Matthews: [05-28] Biden and McCarthy's budget deal to lift the debt ceiling, explained). Nihilist Republicans will still try to trash the deal (e.g., see: Furious Freedom Caucus vows to scuttle debt deal), so it will need Democratic votes to pass Congress. Left Democrats will also be unhappy that Biden went back on his initial position and caved in negotiations with terrorists. But most Democrats are solidly pro-business, and will line up behind any deal to save capitalism -- even one that hurts many of their voters. Most of the links below are pre-deal (check dates).

Ukraine War: There is a report that first steps in counteroffensive have begun. Ukraine has been advertising its "spring offensive" all winter, while pleading for more and more weapons, and waiting their arrival.

  • Connor Echols: [05-26] Diplomacy watch: Denmark offers to hold Ukraine peace talks in July: That sounds kinda squishy, but expectations are high that Ukraine will launch a "spring offensive" soon, and they're unlikely to consider any form of talks until they first give war a chance -- after all, that is the point and the promise of all those tanks and planes they've been lobbying so hard for. Echols also wrote: [05-22] The West must prepare for Putin to use nukes in Ukraine. Interview with Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, whose prediction that Russia will use nukes seems intended on pushing them along. But how exactly does one prepare for such an attack? It's not like fallout shelters are a practical project at this time. The only real defense is negotiating a winding down of the war. Anything else is just fucking insane. Robert Wright: also writes about Ryan: [05-26] Why the chances of nuclear war grew this week.

  • Julian E Barnes: [05-26] Russian public appears to be souring on war casualties, analysis shows: I'd be inclined to file this under propaganda, not least because no one's reporting solid casualty figures. But sure, you can't totally hide these costs, so it makes sense that ordinary Russians would start to question the mission -- as happened with the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Just how that public perception can turn into policy is hard to imagine. Gorbachev gave his generals enough rope to hang themselves, then pulled the plug. Putin, on the other hand, is much more invested this time.

  • Isaac Chotiner: [05-24] Why Masha Gessen resigned from the PEN America board: An interview.

  • Eli Clifton: [05-24] Dedollarization is here, like it or not: The effective shift may have more to do with the US-China conflict, but Ukraine sanctions are convincing more and more nations not to trust the US. Few people talk about this, but the debt ceiling nonsense is further undermining world trust in the dollar. Clifton also wrote: [05-26] Jamie Raskin and Rachel Maddow, brought to you by Peter Thiel and Lockheed Martin.

  • David Cortright/Alexander Finiarel: [05-25] Russians' support for the war may be softer than you think. I've always suspected there was little public support for war, which is why Putin moved so decisively to quash dissent. Still, there is no evidence that Putin's grasp on power is precarious.

  • Daniel L Davis: [05-21] F-16s won't fundamentally alter the course of Ukraine War.

  • Gregory Foster: [05-26] How war is destroying Ukraine's environment.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [05-21] How Ukraine is trying to woo the Global South -- and why it's so hard: Ukraine has massive support from the US and Europe, but the rest of the world is a much tougher sell.

  • Fred Kaplan: [05-16] How the Russia-Ukraine war has changed Europe: Mostly on Germany, where Kaplan spent a month recently. Russia burned a lot of bridges when they invaded Ukraine, and this has pushed Europe back into a closer alliance with America. The link title suggested a broader topic: "The ripple effects from the Ukraine War are becoming clear now." That could have been a more interesting story. Kaplan also wrote: [05-20] The alarming reality of a coming nuclear arms race.

  • Michael Klare: [05-18] The G-3 and the post-Ukraine world: The Ukraine War dominated the latest G-7 confab, with all seven powers -- effectively the US and its six dwarfs -- firmly in the pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia camp. But it's impossible for such a group to mediate regional conflicts when they're busy fighting them. Back in the day, the US and USSR could quickly agree to impose a ceasefire on their clients (as they did in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars), yet no one today can do that -- even Klare's hypothetical G-2 of the US and China, or G-3 adding India (the world's most populous country; as Klare notes, the three of them would represent 40% of all people on the planet). Getting those three nations to work together for world peace will be much harder than lining up the G-7 to ratify Washington's wishes, but might actually work. This complements a piece by Juan Cole: [05-16] China and the Axis of the Sanctioned, occasioned by China taking the lead in reconciling Saudi Arabia and Iran.

  • Eric Levitz: [05-24] Will the Ukraine War become a 'frozen conflict'? By "frozen conflict" he seems to mean something like Korea, where fighting has halted but neither side admits defeat or can reconcile with the other. Apparently, this is an idea being circulated in Washington (see Nahal Toosi: [05-18] Ukraine could join ranks of 'frozen' conflicts, US official say). But that's no solution. The main thing that's allowed the Korean War "freeze" to persist is how isolated North Korea is from the rest of the world. Russia is a much larger country, with a much more complex set of trading partners and relationships, including a large portion of the world not currently on board with America's sanctions regime.

  • Anatol Lieven: [05-25] Ukraine attacks in Russia should be an alarm bell for Washington: Supposedly the US disapproves of such attacks, but that doesn't seem to be limiting the supply of weapons that could be used to attack beyond the Russian border. This is doubly dangerous as long as the US seems to be leaning against peace talks.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [05-23] What does the fall of Bakhmut in Ukraine really mean? Interview with Anatol Lieven and George Beebe.

Around the world:

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [05-22] Should Jamie Dimon get a government salary? Points out that Dimon got $34.5 million last year as CEO of JP Morgan, and stands to get much more in coming years, despite much evidence of mismanagement. On the other hand, the head of FDIC makes $181 thousand, and the head of the Fed makes $190 thousand. I'm not really sure how the suggestion that bank heads should be put on civil service salaries would work, but it seems unlikely it would undermine the competency of management, and it might make the banks a bit less predatory. Then there's inequality: "We have let the right rig the market to generate the extremes of inequality we see. While government tax and transfer policy to reduce inequality is desirable, it is best not to structure the market to create so much inequality in the first place."

Zachary D Carter: [03-16] On Silicon Valley Bank, and finance as a public good: This is old as news goes, but worth the effort. One current thought is to wonder how many similar banks would have failed had the feds defaulted on the debt. I also like this line: "Nobody ever just came out and said it, but the basic attitude from the bill's Democratic supporters seemed to be that it was unfair to harp on Democrats doing something corrupt and stupid when Republicans were corrupt and stupid as a matter of principle."

Coral Davenport: [05-28] You've never heard of him, but he's remaking the pollution fight: "Richard Revesz is changing the way the government calculates the cost and benefits of regulation, with far-reaching implications for climate change."

David Dayen: [05-25] A liberalism that builds power: "The goals of domestic supply chains, good jobs, carbon reduction, and public input are inseparable." Related:

David French: [05-28] The right is all wrong about masculinity: Occasioned by Josh Hawley's silly new book, but no need to dwell there when the inanity is everywhere: "But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults."

Luke Goldstein: [05-24] How Washington bargained away rural America: How farm bills get made, usually a bipartisan grand bargain ensuring food (SNAP) for the poor and profits for agribusiness.

DD Guttenplan/John Nichols: [05-26] Biden must remake his candidacy: I doubt I'll bother with many of the articles I'm sure we'll be seeing as various Democrats debate strategy going into 2024. But the point these left-Democrats make about Biden's lousy polling numbers is valid. It means that he can't run a campaign based on his personal charisma while ignoring the needs of his party, as Clinton did in 1996, and as Obama did in 2012. To win, he needs a Democratic Party sweep, giving him sufficient margins in Congress to actually get things done. You'd think Republicans are making such a campaign easy, but the media landscape remain treacherous, and Democrats have little practice settling on a winning message.

Benji Jones: [05-23] Why the new Colorado River agreement is a big deal -- even if you don't live out West.

Peter Kafka: [05-23] Do Americans really want "unbiased" news? "CNN and the Messenger both say they're chasing the middle." Well, bias is inevitable, and just because its 'centrist" variation is often incoherent doesn't except it from the rule. You can, of course, muddy up the situation by providing countervailing points of view, but as a practical matter that rarely works. In theory, you could clarify the situation by taking an unflinchingly critical view of everything, but in today's political arena, that would get you tagged as "left-biased" because the right is almost always not just wrong but lying their asses off.

Ian Millhiser:

Timothy Noah: [05-26] Why workers will be treated better in the future. Researchers have noticed that in many cases higher wages pay for themselves, but it usually takes pressure to get companies to move in that direction. So much of what Noah predicts is based on the notion that political power will shift toward workers. It's clear enough what needs to happen, but harder to see how it happens. But the great suppression of wages can clearly be dated to the rise of Reagan Republicans in the 1980s.

McKenna Oxenden: [05-27] An 11-year-old boy called 911. Police then shot him.

Aja Romano: [05-24] Puritanism took over online fandom -- and then came for the rest of the internet: "Puriteens, anti-fans, and the culture war's most bonkers battleground." After reading Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland, I should have been prepared for this piece, but my basic reaction is to imagine that no one, even the author, could have anticipated how much more blurred the line between fantasy and reality could become in a mere six years. Less clear is how ominous all this fantasy is.

The temptation to inhabit imaginary worlds probably goes back to the oral folklore preserved as myths, and certainly encompasses the whole history of literature (usually explicitly labeled fiction). In recent years, three inventions have intensified this: television has immersed us in fiction, making it both easier to consume and more much vivid; gaming has added an interactive dimension; and the internet (social media) has made it trivially easy for people to react and expound upon the stories. As long as people recognize the line between fact and fiction, and as long as they maintain respect and decorum in their posts, it's hard to see much harm. But there have always been gray areas, especially where fantasy is presented as fact, even more so when it's driven by malign politics. Still, the problem here is less the art than the politics. As long as you can keep them straight, I don't see much problem. (For instance, we watch a lot of shows where cops are extraordinarily insightful and smart, have integrity and character, are profoundly committed to justice, and rarely if ever make gross mistakes -- traits uncommon among real cops.)

One thing that made this article difficult is the terminology. In particular, I had to go to Fanlore to find a definition of shipping: it is contracted from relationship, and used for promoting or derogating hypothetical relationships between fictional characters. This all seems to be tied to an increase in anti-sex attitudes -- no doubt this is amplified by the internet, but really? -- including an obsession with pedophilia and trafficking. Supposedly this has been made worse by the FOSTA-SESTA act, which originally sounded unobjectionable but its loudest advocates can turn it into cruel repression.

Jim Rutenberg/Michael S Schmidt/Jeremy W Peters: [05-27] Missteps and miscalculations: Inside Fox's legal and business debacle: "Fox's handling of the defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which settled for $787.5 million, left many unanswered questions."

Lily Sánchez/Nathan J Robinson: [05-18] Robert F Kennedy Jr is a lying crank posing as a progressive alternative to Biden. Also:

Richard Sandomir: [05-27] Stanley Engerman, revisionist scholar of slavery, dies at 87: Engerman co-wrote, with Robert W Fogel, the 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery, which significantly changed our understanding of how slavery function within American capitalism. Fogel & Engerman were among the first prominent historians to base their work on extensive data analysis, as opposed to the standard practice of collecting stories from primary and secondary sources.

Jeffrey St Clair: [05-26] The Clintons and the rich women: No "roaming charges" this week, sad to say, so St Clair dusted off an oldie from his book, An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (a compilation of short essays published in 2022). This one explores the lobbying effort (and the money behind it) that secured Marc Rich a pardon in 2000. One surprise name that pops up here is Jack Quinn.

Maureen Tkacik: [05-23] Quackonomics: "Medical Properties Trust spent billions buying community hospitals in bewildering deals that made private equity rich and working-class towns reel."

Nick Turse: [05-23] Blood on his hands: "Survivors of Kissinger's secret war in Cambodia reveal unreported mass killings." More occasioned by his 100th birthday:

  • Ben Burgis: [05-27] Henry Kissinger is a disgusting war criminal. And the rot goes deeper than him.

  • Greg Grandin: [05-15] Henry Kissinger, war criminal -- still at large at 100: "We now know a great about the crimes he committed while in office, . . . But we know little about his four decades with Kissinger Associates." Grandin has a 2015 book on Kissinger: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. In that book, I found this quote, based on Seymour Hersh's 1983 Kissinger book, The Price of Power:

    Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the B-52s. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh's hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage with epic consequences.

  • Jonathan Guyer: [05-27] Henry Kissinger is 100, but his legacy is still shaping how US foreign policy works. I've never tried to figure out how much US foreign policy in the pivotal 1969-75 period was Kissinger as opposed to Nixon. My guess was that Kissinger added intellectual filigree to Nixon's baser impulses, but Kissinger was callous enough to suit Nixon's needs. As for his later freelance efforts, I knew few specifics, so I'm most likely to chalk them up as ordinary graft. With all the criminality -- in some ways, Kissinger's most damaging legacy isn't what he did but that he made such things seem normal, expected even, for those who followed -- it's easy to overlook one of Nixon's most important moves, which was to end the Bretton-Woods system, during which the US was responsible for maintaining a stable capitalist world market. After, it was each nation for itself, which ultimately turned into the US (and the few "allies" it intimidated) against the world.

  • Fred Kaplan: [05-27] Henry Kissinger's bloody legacy: "The dark side of Kissinger's tradecraft left a deep stain on vast quarters of the globe -- and on America's own reputation."

  • Jerelle Kraus: [05-27] Henry Kissinger: A war criminal who has not once faced the bar of justice.

  • Bhaskar Sunkara/Jonah Walters: [05-27] Henry Kissinger turns 100 this week. He should be ashamed to be seen in public: The picture, from 2011, shows him with a rather giddy-looking Hillary Clinton.

You can also watch a piece from the Mehdi Hasan Show on Kissinger. You might also take a look at this chart of life expectancy in Cambodia, which falls off a cliff during the years Kissinger was in power (1969-77). Some commenters want to make a distinction between bombing deaths (150-500K) and the genocide unleashed by the Khmer Rouge (1.5-3M), but the the former destabilized the studiously neutral Sihanouk regime, allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize power.

Kayla M Williams: [05-28] Who should we honor on Memorial Day? The article argues that many veterans are unfairly not counted among the war dead heroes because they were felled by longer, slower maladies that only started in war, such as exposure to toxic chemicals (Agent Orange in Vietnam, burn pits in Iraq) or PTSD (the suicide rate among veterans if if anything even higher than the battlefield death rate). I have no quarrel with that argument, but my initial gut reaction to the title is that we shouldn't limit honor to war dead or even to veterans.

When I was young, the focus of Memorial Day was Fluty Cemetery down in Arkansas: either we went there, or my mother arranged for flowers to be placed there by relatives. Some served, but none of the people I knew of under the headstones were killed in war. But they worked the hardscrabble Ozark soil, and built homes and families, eventually leading to me (and, well, many others). As far as I know, they were all honorable people, and deserved remembrance. Of course, those who did die in war deserve remembrance as well, but less for their lives (however valiant) than for their waste, which we should be reminded of lest we blunder into even more wasteful wars.

Li Zhou: [05-23] Montana's TikTok ban -- and the legal challenge of it -- explained. My preferred solution is to ban all companies from collecting personal data, much less passing it on to others. If that impacts their business models, maybe that's a good thing.

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Monday, May 22, 2023

Speaking of Which

Let this be done. I'd rather go watch the basketball game -- well, practically anything -- than keep digging up more articles I have to comment on. Especially ones that suggest that Biden's is not going to do the right thing and tell the Republicans where to stuff their extortion demands.

Top story threads:

Trump: He didn't do much new this week, but he's still the cutting edge of Republican dystopia, so might as well hang onto the top slot here.

  • Ed Burmila: [05-21] How Trump left Washington even swampier: "The battle for power and influence in the nation's capital is more shameless, desperate, and embarrassing than ever."

  • Michael Tomasky: [05-18] Donald Trump against America: "He loves an America of his twisted imagination. He hates -- and fears -- the America that actually exists. And if he gets back to the White House . . . look out." I would have skipped over the diatribe on Trump's call for "peace without delay" in Ukraine, and I wouldn't have interpreted "reevaluating NATO's purpose" as "giving Putin a free hand in what the Russian dictator calls the 'near abroad.'" Trump had similar sentiments when he became president in 2017, but failed to do anything constructive about them, and would likely find the State/Defense/CIA blob equally inpenetrable in 2025. His real threat is elsewhere, as Tomasky goes on to demonstrate: in 2016 he sold a vision that he could "make America great again," and declared America "great" as soon as he got elected -- not that many people noticed much change. But like a bad movie sequel, this time he's out for redemption and revenge. There are people who will relish just that, but a majority? Even outside of the America he's written off, the one he's sworn to destroy, that's going to be a tall order.

  • Michael Tomasky: [05-19] Did Donald Trump seriously sell pardons? The question is being raised in a complaint against Rudy Giuliani, along with much more. For that, see Prem Thakker: [05-16] Rudy Giuliani is a raging alcoholic and sexual predator, says new lawsuit.

Republicans:

Economy and Debt:

  • Jen Kirby: [05-19] What a debt default could mean for America's superpower status: Interview with Marcus Noland, mostly about the demand for US Treasuries and dollars abroad. One side effect could be that it becomes harder to enforce US sanctions against target nations. Given that sanctions rarely work, that doesn't strike me as much of a problem, but there are people with a lot of money at stake, and long-term this gives other nations incentive to cut the US out of their banking systems.

  • Paul Krugman:

    • [05-19] Death, Napoleon and debt: Just the fundamentals. Anyone who claims that governments should pay off their debts like individual have to is profoundly stupid, or (more likely) trying to snow you. Individuals age and die, so their creditors need to get repaid before they lose out. But governments go on and on, usually with growing economy and taxes, so all they have to do is service the debt, which is easy (especially if it is denominated in currency you control).

    • [05-18] Will the US economy pull off a 'soft landing'? His definition is unemployment under 4% and inflation under 3%. Over the last few months inflation has come down a lot while unemployment has increased little, so this convergence seems plausible. However, if the Fed holds to its 2% inflation target, and insists on achieving it through high interest rates and induced recession, this would get bumpier.

    • [05-16] How Biden blew it on the debt ceiling. This was written a few days ago, when Biden and McCarthy were meeting, and signals appeared that some sort of deal was imminent. As of the moment [05-21] that prospect appears to have been quashed by the Republicans, who are greedy and/or malicious.

  • Jason Linkins: [05-20] The Beltway media is spreading debt limit misinformation: "The political press bears a share of the blame for the fact we are once again on the precipice of default."

  • Branko Marcetic: [05-19] The debt ceiling crisis is laying bare the lies both parties tell their voters.

  • Jeff Stein: [05-14] 7 doomsday scenarios if the US crashes through the debt ceiling: stocks crash; a sudden recession; federal workers in limbo; Social Security and Medicare miss payments; US borrowing costs soar; economic problems spread worldwide; the dollar drops, along with US prestige. As one commenter puts it: "These outcomes read like a GOP Wish List. If they can make things bad enough people would welcome a strongman dictator, particularly a fascist like 45 who will blame it all on minorities, immigrants, gays, Democrats, nasty Women, etc., etc." Still, this is one problem that Trump actually could solve in a day, inasmuch as all it would take is for Republicans in Congress to pass a bill that raises the debt limit (as they did repeatedly for Trump). Stein's piece was recycled from an earlier one. He's been covering this issue with little insight into either the politics or economics. A recent piece is [05-20] GOP rejects White House compromise to limit spending as talks stall, partly because debt-conscious Republicans want even higher defense spending.

  • Dean Baker: [05-21] Quick note on the debt burden and the burden of patent and copyright monopolies.

Immigration:

Ukraine War: Russia claims to have taken Bakhmut after a nine-month siege. Ukraine denies this, but are pushing forces to encircle city. Meanwhile, Ukraine hasn't quite gotten around to its much-ballyhooed spring offensive, but has started to test Russian lines on southern front.

World:

Other stories:

Nina Burleigh: [05-16] Who is Leonard Leo's mysterious dark money king? "America needs to know who Barre Seid is, what kind of country he wants, and just how massive an impact his $1.6 billion gift can have on our political discourse."

Steve Early/Suzanne Gordon: [05-20] Corporate politicians are privatizing the VA, the crown jewel of socialized medicine: Phillip Longman wrote a book back in 2007 touting Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours. The basic reason was that not just insurance but actual care was fully socialized (directly run by the government). There were still a couple obvious problems: one is that while veterans were numerous and evenly distributed following WWII, the number of people eligible for VA care has steadily declined; the other is that care is concentrated in large centers, so for many veterans isn't easily accessible. Horror stories about access has led to various efforts for the VA to pay for profit-seeking care, which in turn jacks up costs while reducing quality. And needless to say, the privatization lobbies are all over this, and up to no good.

Connor Echols: [05-16] The War on Terror led to over 4.5 million deaths: That works out to a bit more than 1,000 revenge deaths for every American killed on 9/11. If you factor in American soldiers lost in those wars, the kill ratio drops to a bit more than 400-to-1. Occupying powers from the Romans to the Nazis made a point of threatening kill ratios of 10- or even 100-to-1 to deter rebellion -- a range that Israel has pretty consistently maintained. Of course, you can reduce the ratio further by including contractor deaths (8,000), suicides by veterans (30,000), and deaths of various allies (both local and foreign), but that hardly offers any comfort. (Some of these numbers come from Brown University's Costs of War page.)

Lee Harris: [05-17] Rahm Emmanuel's gas pipeline: "The Biden administration is promoting a new liquefied natural gas complex on the Pacific Coast, with expanded subsidies from the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act." "West Coast" means Alaska. We counted ourselves lucky that Biden didn't give Emmanuel a post, but the only real difference is that now he's explicitly working for the oil and gas industry. Article quotes Lukas Ross: "Rahm Emmanuel did more than any single individual to sabotage Barack Obama's climate agenda at a time when there were congressional majorities."

Patrick Iber: [05-15] When Milton Friedman met Pinochet: "Chicago economists had free rein in Chile. The country is still recovering." Review of Sebastian Edwards: The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism.

Umair Irfan: [05-17] It's not just climate disasters. "Normal" weather is getting weirder, too.

Whizy Kim: [05-19] The billionaire's guide to self-help: "It's a phenomenon of our age that entrepreneurs are celebrities at all."

Eric Levitz: [05-19] The return of the emerging Democratic majority? The 2002 book of that name, by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, fell flat, but new research suggests that young voters (Gen Z/Millennials) have continued to break for Democrats, and are becoming more dependable voters.

Ian Millhiser:

Mark Paul: [05-16] Economists hate rent control. Here's why they're wrong. In my own experience, I've always felt landlords enjoyed a huge power advantage every time a lease was up, as well as all the rest of the time. So I've long felt that some sort of countervaling power was needed. Rent control would help, but as this article admits, that's only goes so far.

Joshua Raff: [05-20] John Durham's vacuous report: A fitting end to Bill Barr's ugly legacy: Barr appointed Durham as an independent counsel to dig into the origins of the 2016 FBI investigation of allegations that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians. After four years, Durham submitted a report, which Attorney General Merrick Garland released "unexpurgated, unredacted and without comment or commentary." As someone who never put any stock into that thing called Russiagate, and who is whatever the polar opposite of shocked is at the suggestion that the FBI might have been swayed by politics, I have no interest in the fine points here (if, indeed, there are any). But I'll add a couple more links (without elevating it to a section):

Becca Rothfeld: [05-18] How to be a man? Josh Hawley has the (incoherent) answers. Well, he has a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, which the reviewer notes is "the latest in a long line of guides," citing others by Jack Donovan, Jordan Peterson, Robert Bly, and Harvey Mansfeld. Insights? "Men do not 'blame someone or something else,' such as 'society,' or 'the system,' but men do, apparently, blame 'Epicurean liberalism' for almost everything that ails them." And: "A man is a rugged individualist who figures things out for himself, but he also relies on how-to guides to teach him how to exist."

Dylan Scott: [05-19] Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing Medicaid every month: "Medicaid's 'Great Unwinding' is even worse than experts expected."

Avi Selk/Herb Scribner: [05-16] Musk says George Soros 'hates humanity,' compares him to Jewish supervillain. I know nothing about Magneto, but the admission that the villain "drew inspiration from Zionist leaders Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Meir Kahane" is troubling on multiple levels. But what is clear is that Musk views his political antipathy to Soros as clearly tied to Soros's identity as a Jew. Why Musk thinks that Soros "hates humanity" and "wants to erode the very fabric of civilization" isn't specified.

Also on Musk:

Jeffrey St Clair: [05-19] Roaming Charges: Living With the Unacceptable: Starts with a classic Dwight MacDonald quote: "The Ford Foundation is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some." Sure, it's part of a fund appeal, but it doesn't hit you over the head.

Li Zhou: [05-17] How Democrats pulled off a big upset in Florida: Jacksonville ("the most populous Republican-led city in the country") elected Donna Deegan mayor.

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Sunday, May 14, 2023

Speaking of Which

Enough for now. Started early but with little enthusiasm, more links and fewer comments, as the Trump articles piled up. While it was gratifying to see Trump lose in court, he came out of the week looking more indomitable than ever.

One article to single out below is the long one by Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky. Sure, it's old news, but it's the root of so much that is happening today (not least in Ukraine). Chomsky has been collecting this book for decades now, but Robinson helps a lot, advancing it beyond the usual dry contempt.

Top story threads:

Trump: On Tuesday, a jury found Trump guilty of sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, and fined Trump $5 million. On Wednesday evening, CNN allowed Trump to flip the story, by hosting a "town hall" limited to his rabid followers, where among numerous other blatant lies, he doubled down, defaming Carroll again. Seems like a dubious legal strategy, but masterful politically.

Republicans:

The economy and its politics (including the debt ceiling): I'm seeing a lot of articles recently about how Biden is going to blink and give into McCarthy's extortion demands.

Courts:

Immigration:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [05-14] Title 42 is over. Immigration policy is still broken..

  • Ed Kilgore: [05-14] Immigration is still fueling Trump's political future: No doubt. It's also an issue that Democrats are having a very hard time coming up with a coherent policy on. Republicans are divided between moguls who want cheap labor and bigots who want zero immigration (except, perhaps, when Trump needs his next trophy wife, or someone like Rupert Murdoch wants to buy a television station). They, at least, can compromise on a program that lets the rich enter discreetly, that lets workers in through back channels to keep them powerless, and that displays maximum cruelty to everyone else. Democrats have it much harder: they are torn between loud advocates of even more immigration, even louder pleas for accepting refugees from every godforsaken corner of the world (many fleeing US-backed regimes, and many more from US-condemned ones), while most rank-and-file Democrats don't care much one way or another, but are willing to go along with the pro-immigrant forces because the anti-immigrants are so often racist and xenophobic. I suspect most Democrats would be happy with a reasoned compromise*, but Republicans like having a broken system they can campaign against without ever having to fix, so there's no one to compromise with. And in a world governed by sound bites, the demagogue always come off as strong and clear while the sophisticate looks muddled and middling.

  • Nicole Narea: [05-11] The seismic consequences of ending Title 42.

  • Tori Otten: [05-11] House Republicans pass immigration bill that would completely destroy asylum process.

*For a compromise, how about this? Clean up the undocumented backlog by allowing citizenship or subsidized return. Impose quotas to cut back on new immigration rates, at least for a few years. Figure out a way to distribute refugees elsewhere, subsidizing alternate destinations. (Everybody deserves to live somewhere safe and healthy, but that doesn't have to be the US.) And stop producing so many refugees (war, economic, climate) -- this may require more foreign aid (and not the military kind). And do real enforcement against illegal immigrants, including thorough checks on employment. But also get due process working.

Environment:

Artificial intelligence and other computations: Vox has a whole section on The rise of artificial intelligence, explained, and a few other articles have popped up. I've barely poked around in all this material, partly because I have my own ideas about what AI can and/or should do -- I had a fairly serious interest in the subject back in the 1980s, but haven't kept up with it -- and partly because I'm dubious about how it might affect me. (Although, as someone with serious writers block, this title caught my eye: If you're not using ChatGPT for your writing, you're probably making a mistake.

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols: [05-12] Diplomacy Watch: China's top diplomat earns mixed reception in Europe.

  • Anatol Lieven/Jake Werner: [05-12] Yes, the US can work with China for peace in Ukraine.

  • Eve Ottenberg: [05-12] Beltway mediocrities bumble toward Armageddon.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [05-11] Trump tells CNN town hall: 'I want everyone to stop dying' in Ukraine. He actually has some points here, including the point about how calling Putin a war criminal only makes it harder to get to a deal. His brags that Putin wouldn't have invaded if Trump was president, and that if he were president, he'd end the war within 24 hours, seem pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself: would Putin have been more likely to invade knowing that he had a indifferent US president who wouldn't fight back, or because he feared he was being pushed into a corner by Biden's much more militant backing of an increasingly hardline Zelinsky? I find the latter much more plausible, but the conventional wisdom would argue that strengthening support for Ukraine should have deterred a Putin attack. Sure didn't work out that way.

  • Robert Wright: [05-12] The ultimate Blob blind spot: A recent Foreign Affairs has a batch of five pieces by foreign policy experts in the global south, casting into relief how Americans fail to see how others sees them. That leads to a lecture on the lack of "cognitive empathy" as a key defect among Blob thinkers. That's true enough, but I think there's a simpler and easier solution, which is to check your hubris and to admit that most things beyond your borders are beyond your control.

World:

Other stories:

Andrew Cockburn: [05-07] Getting the defense budget right: A (real) grand total, over $1.4 trillion: Significantly more than the already obscenely high $842 billion Department of Defense appropriation.

Ben Ehrenreich: [05-10] How climate change has shaped life on earth for millenia: Review of Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story, which attempts to reframe all of human (and for that matter geologic) history in terms of climate change -- that being something we've lately noticed matters.

David A Farenthold/Tiff Fehr: [05-14] How to raise $89 million in small donations, and make it disappear: "A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits." Not to mention a flaw in the enforcement of consumer fraud laws.

Ed Kilgore: [05-08] Democrats shouldn't freak out over one really bad poll.

Erin Kissane: Blue skies over Mastodon: General piece on Twitter-alternatives, which in turn lead to Mike Masnick: Six Months In: Thoughts on the Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options. Just FYI. Neither piece has convinced me to sign up for either, although it's fairly clear that my Twitter following is in decline (followers 591, but views on latest Music Week notice down to 227).

Eric Levitz: [05-11] Do the 'Woke' betray the left's true principles? A review of Susan Neiman's book, Left Is Not Woke. I'm all for emphasizing the primacy of the left-right axis, but I don't see much practical value in opposing that to woke. On the other hand, Levitz's take on "toxic forms of identity politics" are well taken. I recall from my own political evolution how I started out with a deep antipathy to rationalism, but changed my mind when I discovered that reason could lead to the right answers I had intuited, but put them on a much firmer basis.

David Owen: [04-24] The great electrician shortage: "Going green will depend on blue-collar workers. Can we train enough of them before time runs out?" Plumbers, too. I've spent months trying to get a plumber to fix a floor drain, which no one seems to want to touch. I'm tempted to rent a jackhammer and deal with it myself, but then again, I'm also a bit scared to.

Andrew Prokop: [05-12] The potential indictment of Hunter Biden, explained. If you care, some parameters. Worst case is that he's a fuck up who got sloppy on his taxes. Trump would say that makes him smart. The gun form is supposedly the clearest violation, but how often is that seriously investigated?

Nathan J Robinson:

Aja Romano: [05-12] Why the Vallow-Daybell murders are among the bleakest in true crime memory: I normally skip right over mundane crime stories, but the author is right, that this one is profoundly unsettling, not just for what a couple of very crazy people did but for the broader cultural roots of where their thoughts came from. By the way, Rexburg, Idaho, rings a bell: it was once described as the most Republican town in America.

Dylan Scott: [05-10] 3 things you should know about the end of the Covid public health emergency: "A hidden experiment in universal health care is about to end."

Jeffrey St Clair: [05-12] Roaming Charges: Neely Don't Surf: Starts off with the murder of Jordan Neely in a NYC subway car by Daniel Penny, who "loved surfing." He then links to a Clash song: "Charlie Don't Surf".

A society that systematically victimizes people tends to reflexively blame its victims for their own misfortune: poverty, hunger, chronic illness, homelessness, mental distress and, as we're witnessing once again with the case of Jordan Neely, even their own deaths.

Traditionally, this role has fallen to the New York Times and when it came to the murder on the F train they sprang into action. . . .

Penny is described as easy going, a people person, an unstressed former Marine who loved surfing. Yes, he too was jobless, but unlike Neely, he had aspirations. He wanted to become a bartender in Manhattan and a good citizen in the city he loved.

When the Times turns to Neely, we are treated to sketches in urban pathology -- the portrait a troubled black youth, who has been in decline since high school. His life is reduced to his rap sheet, his arrests, his confinements to the psych ward. . . . Neely is depicted as ranting, homeless, troubled, erratic, violent, mentally ill and ready to die. It's almost as if we're meant to believe that Neely's murder was a case of "suicide by vigilante." He was, the story implies, almost asking for someone to kill him.

After protests, NYC prosecutors finally announced that they will charge Penny "with Manslaughter in the Second Degree, which is classified as a Class C Non-Violent Felony, where first-time offenders often receive a non-incarceratory sentence, usually of probation."

Matt Taibbi, et al: [05-10] Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The top 50 organizations to know: Taibbi wrote the introduction, which ginned up the title, while others wrote the profiles that follow. The organizations include a broad mix of non-profits with a few companies and government sections thrown in. They give you a good idea of who's monitoring the internet to identify misinformation. They may do a lot of complaining, but few have any actual ability to censor, which makes this one of the more tenuous X-industrial complex coinages.

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