Weekend Roundup [90 - 99]Sunday, April 7, 2019
Weekend Roundup
One of my principles here is not to bother with politician horserace
links, especially presidential candidates. One thing I've long held is
that a president is only as good as his (or someday her) party, so the
big question to ask any presidential candidate is: what are you going to
do to get your party elected and make it an effective force? Still, every
now and then I have opinions on specific people. When Greg Magarian griped
about
Tim Ryan and
Michael Bennet getting a burst of press attention, as have recent
stories about
Beto O'Rourke and
Pete Buttigieg raising great gobs of money, I commented:
Worth noting that O'Rourke and Buttigieg are principled neoliberals, and
are raising money as such. They can do that because their youth and
inexperience hasn't saddled them with the sort of baggage the Clinton
establishment bears. That's bad news for Biden, who would be the obvious
next-in-line for Clinton's donors if they didn't suspect that the brand
is ruined. They may also be thinking that running someone young and
outside might help crack Sanders' lead among young voters -- something
Biden has no prayer of doing.
The one candidate I've been hearing the most (and most negative) about
is Joe Biden. He hasn't announced yet, but evidently the decision has been
made, the timing around Easter. Biden has led recent polls, but that can
be attributed to his much greater name resolution. I've always figured the
decision would turn on whether he's willing to risk his legacy on a very
likely loss, but I suppose the decision will turn mostly on whether he can
line up sufficient funding. (I had some doubts that Bernie Sanders would
run, but when I saw his early funding reports, I immediately realized I
was being silly.) Clearly, he didn't run in 2016 because Hillary Clinton
had locked up most of his possible funding. That's less obvious this year,
but a lot of competitive candidates have jumped in ahead of him.
Biden isn't awful, but he has a lot of baggage, including a lot of
things that wound up hurting Clinton in 2016 (like that Iraq War vote).
Some of those things could hurt him in the primaries, especially his
rather dodgy record on race and crime, and with women. Other things,
like his plagiarism scandal, will hurt him more in the general election.
But the big problem there is that he was a Washington insider and party
leader for so long that he makes it easy for Republicans to spin this
election into a referendum on forty years of Democratic Party failures.
Obama was largely able to avoid that in 2008, but Clinton couldn't in
2016.
Also, there is the nagging suspicion that he isn't really a very good
day-to-day candidate. Last time he ran for president he was an also-ran,
unable to get more than 1-2% of the vote anywhere. He got the VP nod from
Obama after Clinton decided she'd rather be Secretary of State, and one
suspects that the Clintons pushed for Biden as VP because they didn't
regard him as a serious rival in 2016 (when a sitting VP would normally
have the inside track to the nomination). And he's exceptionally prone to
gaffes. He managed to avoid any really bad ones running with Obama, but
running on his own he'll get a lot more scrutiny and pressure. Nobody
thinks he's stupid or evil -- unlike Trump, whose base seems to regard
those attributes as virtues -- but nobody is much of a fan either (well,
except for the fictional
Leslie Knope, which kind of proves the point).
For more, if you care, see Michelle Goldberg:
The wrong time for Joe Biden:
Beyond gender, on issue after issue, if Biden runs for president he will
have to run away from his own record. He -- and by extension, we -- will
have to relive the debate over the Iraq war, which he voted to authorize.
He'll have to explain his vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which,
by lifting regulations on banking, helped create the conditions for the
2008 financial meltdown. (Biden has called that vote one of the biggest
regrets of his career.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton was slammed for her
previous support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act, which contributed to mass incarceration. Biden helped write the law,
which he called, in 2015, the "1994 Biden crime bill." . . . No one should
judge the whole span of Biden's career by the standards of 2019, but if
he's going to run for president, it's fair to ask whether he's the right
leader for this moment. He is a product of his time, but that time is up.
Other political news last week included the death of Ernest Hollings,
the long-time South Carolina senator, at 97. I was, well, shocked to see
him referred to in an obituary as a populist -- a thought that had never
crossed my mind. I would grant that he was not as bad as the Republicans
who served in the Senate alongside him (Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham),
or his Republican successor (Jim DeMent). Still, those are pretty low
standards.
By the way, a couple of non-political links below: subjects I used to
follow closely in more carefree times. See if you can pick them out.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Jonathan Blitzer:
How climate change is fueling the US border crisis: "In the western
highlands of Guatemala, the questio is no longer whether someone will
leave but when." Two further installments:
The epidemic of debt plaguing Central American migrants, and
The dream homes of Guatemalan migrants. Philip Bump:
Nearly everything Trump just said about Puerto Rico is wrong. Jane Coaston:
FBI director: White nationalist violence is a "persistent, pervasive
threat". Related: Weiyi Cai/Simone Landon:
Attacks by white extremists are growing. So are their connections. Sean Collins:
Barack Obama warns against a "circular firing squad" over ideological
purity in politics: Sounds like Obama is attacking the left, once
again counseling compromises that ultimately prove ineffective, but
his centrist-neoliberal allies are every bit as ideological, and if
anything have more experience in using their spite against the left
to make sure even their lame compromises rarely change anything. I'm
reminded how John Lewis refused to purge Communists from the UMW,
because he appreciated that they were the union's most passionate and
effective organizers. The centrists need to realize that they need
the left in order to attain anything significant once they've worked
their compromises. And as the article shows, left-leaning polticians
aren't actually doing things to undermine party unity -- other than
making solid policy proposals and arguing them on their merits. Obama,
on the other hand, is showing himself to be irrelevant. Some may feel
nostalgic for his basic competence and his devotion to the threadbare
pieties of Americanism, but as a politician you have to judge him on
his inability to deliver the change he campaigned for and his failure
to build a party that could protect, sustain, and extend even his most
modest dreams. Tara Golshan:
Congress passes historic resolution to end US support for Saudi-led war
in Yemen. David M Halbfinger:
If you've followed Israeli elections, you may have noticed that since
the late 1970s, the only time Israeli politics have shifted left was when
the Bush I administration made clear its displeasure with Yitzhak Shamir's
obstruction of the Madrid Peace Talks. Israeli voters noticed, and voted
the more flexible Yitzhak Rabin in, leading to the Oslo Accords, which
Clinton allowed Netanyahu and Ehud Barak to turn into a charade. But as
Clinton, Bush, Obama, and even more explicitly Trump kowtowed to Israel,
Israelis had no reason not to indulge their chauvinist prejudices, with
each election pushing the government ever further to the right. Sean Illing:
How digital technology is destroying our freedom: Interview with
Douglas Rushkoff, exploring the theme of his recent Team Human
and earlier books like Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation
(2009), Program or Be Programmed (2011), Present Shock: When
Everything Happes Now (2013), and Throwing Rocks at the Google
Bus (2016) -- he's sort of a latter-day Neil Postman. (The one book
I've read by him is Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism,
where he sees Judaism as an evolutionary step toward atheism. I could
make a similar claim for Calvinism, based more on personal history.) Sarah Kliff:
Trump does have a health care plan. It would cause millions to lose
coverage. Mike Konczal:
Should the Green New Deal repeat the failures of Cap-and-Trade? Paul Krugman:
Donald Trump is trying to kill you: "Trust the pork producers; fear
the wind turbines." I will add this quibble: if you ever find yourself
standing under a wind turbine, you'll find that they are very ominous
and unpleasant, emitting loud noises as the huge blades screech and
whine above your head.
Republican health care lying syndrome: "Even Trump supporters don't
believe the party's promises."
The incredible shrinking Trump boom: "At least corporate accountants
are having some fun." I suspect this title could be used for a much broader
investigation than this note on the effects of the Trump tax cut.
GOP cruelty is a pre-existing condition: "Republicans just won't stop
trying to take away health care."
Republicans really hate health care: "They've gone beyond cynicism
to pathology." Related: Jamelle Bouie:
An opening for Democrat: "On health care, this isn't what Trump's
voters bargained for." Bouie writes:
But while Trump's decision to govern for conservatives has netted him
high approval ratings with Republicans who remain loyal to him, it has
also undermined the coalition that put him in the White House,
threatening his prospects for re-election.
We saw some of this with the midterms. The drive to repeal Obamacare
was a major reason Republicans lost their majority in the House of
Representatives. The attempt made Trump's approval rating plunge to
the mid-30s, lower than that of other presidents at that point in their
first term. Large majorities opposed the bill to repeal and replace the
health care law, and 60 percent said it was a "good thing" it failed to
pass. Forty-two percent of voters named health care as their top issue
in the midterms, and 77 percent of them backed Democrats.
In 2016, Trump ran without the burden of a record. He could be
everything to everyone -- he could say what people wanted to hear. And
he used that to reach out to working-class whites as a moderate on the
economy and a hard-line conservative on race and immigration.
Now, as president, Trump is a standard-issue Republican with an almost
total commitment to conservative economic policy. Those policies are
unpopular. And they have created an opening for Democrats to win back
some of the voters they've lost.
Dara Lind:
German Lopez:
Jonathan Mahler/Jim Rutenberg:
How Rupert Murdoch's empire of influence remade the world: Part 1: Imperial
reach, followed by
Part 2: Internal divisions, and
Part 3: The new Fox weapon. Louis Menand:
What baseball teaches us about measuring talent: Review of Christopher
Phillips' new book Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About
Baseball. Noted because this is a subject I've spent a lot of time on,
albeit not very recently. Kelsey Piper:
Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry: I can imagine
many angles to this, but the best reported one was opposition to Heritage
Foundation president Kay Coles James, underscoring the notion that
conservatives have no credibility when it comes to ethics -- although
Google's inclusion of a "drone company CEO" was even more blatant. - Douglas Preston:
The day the dinosaurs died: "A young paleontologist may have discovered
the most significant event in the history of life on Earth."
Andrew Prokop:
Some Mueller team members aren't happy with Barr's description of their
findings. Aaron Rupar:
Trump plans to nominate a second loyalist to the Fed: Herman Cain:
You got to give Trump some credit for learning here. When the Fed chair
opened up, his staff gave him two options. While he picked the lesser
inflation hawk, he still wound up with a guy who repeatedly raised the
Fed funds rate, constricting the economy (and especially speculators
and scam artists like himself who benefit most from cheap money). No
doubt this got him thinking: Why not pick some loyal political hacks
instead of letting the bankers limit his choices? Stephen Moore was
his test case, and while Cain isn't as much of a hack as Moore, he's
even less "qualified" (in normative terms). Amanda Sakuma:
Trump attacks Rep. Ilhan Omar hours after a supporter was charged with
threatening to kill her: Subhed: "He wants to drive a wedge between
Jewish voters and the Democratic Party." TPM emphasized the latter in
its coverage of Trump's speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition:
Zeke Miller:
Trump tries to lure Jewish voters: Dems would 'leave Israel out there'.
Related: Matt Shuham:
American Jewish orgs to Trump: Netanyahu is ot 'our' Prime Minister.
On the other hand, Netanyahu is Sheldon Adelson's Prime Minister --
Adelson owns the newspaper in Israel most closely associated with
Netanyahu, and Adelson is the Republican Party's most visible Jewish
bankroller, so that's probably close enough for Trump. Emily Stewart:
What's going on with Mar-a-Lago and Chinese spies, explained.
Related: Fred Kaplan:
Mar-a-Lago is a foreign spy's dream come true. Matt Taibbi:
The Pentagon wins again: "In an effort to prevent non-defense cuts,
House Democrats grant the DOD exactly the raise it wanted." Alex Ward:
Philip Weiss:
Sean Wilentz:
The "reputational interests" of William Barr. Related:
Benjamin Wittes:
Bill Barr has promised transparency. He deserves the chance to deliver.
TomDispatch:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Started late, figuring I'd "just go through the motions," and
I'm giving up with maybe half of my usual sources unexamined.
Anyhow, this should suffice as a sample on what's gone on this
past week.
One piece I intended to link to was an article in the Wichita
Eagle a few days ago about sex abuse in the local Catholic diocese,
going back to the 1960s or earlier. My closest neighborhood friend
attended Catholic schools and often talked about how sex-obsessed
the priests were -- not that he was himself abused, but something
I found completely baffling at the time. That was something I often
wondered about When the scandals in Boston and elsewhere were finally
exposed, but until this article appeared I had never seen mention of
Wichita. Can't find the article on the Wichita Eagle website --
although I did find an earlier one,
KBI investigating clergy sex abuse cases in Kansas, asks victims to
come forward, mostly on Kansas City, KS.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Trump EPA appointees want more air pollution -- that's a very bad idea:
"Fine particulates are, if anything, massively under-regulated. . . . The
question of exactly how much we are under-regulating particulates seems
somewhat open to me, but the sign of the error is very clear."
The emerging 737 MAX scandal, explained: "It's more than bad
software."
Amy Klobuchar's $1 trillion infrastructure plan, explained: "Fulfilling
a pledge Trump infamously left on the cutting room floor." Seems like a nice,
round ballpark figure, but I suspect the need is much more. Also note that
you could triple it and it would still cost less than the Iraq War
debacle.
Elizabeth Warren's plan to make farming great again, explained: "A
crackdown on agribusiness conglomerates, and more."
The panic over yield curve inversion, explained: "A key financial
indicator says a recession is coming soon (maybe)."
It's time for Congress to do its job and investigate Trump:
It's worth remembering how Mueller's investigation came into existence.
Back in 2017, Trump's relationship with Russia was the only question
that Republicans, who controlled Congress, wanted to investigate.
Even on Inauguration Day, there were plenty of obvious lines of inquiry
into Trump to pursue. There were the credible allegations of sexual assault
(allegations that have only multiplied since then), the campaign contributions
that helped Trump University investigations go away, the fake charity Trump
ran for years, the dubious financing of his real estate ventures, and, of
course, the mystery of his tax returns.
Since he's taken office, the list of questions worthy of investigation
has only grown. There's his family members' weird security clearances,
reporting that a group of Mar-a-Lago club members appear to be running
the Veterans Administration, and the prosecution of Trump's personal
attorney Michael Cohen, which seems to have implicated Trump personally
in a crime.
The problem with all of this has been that Republicans didn't and don't
care. It was not until Nancy Pelosi took over as speaker of the House this
January that there was anything Democrats could do to take on these
questions without Republican help.
Democrats got behind Mueller's investigation because it was the only
game in town, not because it seemed incredibly promising. It was Trump's
abrupt decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, followed by months of
incredibly guilty-sounding tweets and other statements from the White
House, that led many of us to believe Mueller was likely to uncover
something big.
Michael Ames:
How Bowe Bergdahl may end up being the key to peace with the Taliban:
Author of the book American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy
in Afghanistan, which my wife recently read and touts as one of the
best books written on the whole misbegotten Afghanistan fiasco. Ross Barkan:
Will Rachel Maddow face a reckoning over her Trump-Russia coverage?
I've done my best to avoid her for more than the two years she's been
obsessed with Trump/Russiagate, but I've seen enough to suspect that
she's earned her winning spot in
The Post's Mueller Madness bracket -- she beat Ann Navarro, John
Oliver, John Brennan, and Stephen Colbert along the way. I've watched
Colbert regularly over the period, although he's sometimes stretched my
patience with his jokes on Mueller, Putin, and "treason" (a word that
should never be uttered). Of the other 30 bracket picks, I recognize
about two-thirds of the names, but only follow a couple regularly --
Jimmy Kimmel, Paul Krugman -- with another half-dozen I've read on
occasion. Most of those have a much broader critique of Trump, so I
doubt they'll have problems moving on. Jamelle Bouie:
Oliver North showed Republicans the way out: "Belligerence, shamelessness
and partisanship can take you far." Alexia Fernandez Campbell:
Jane Coaston:
The Mueller investigation is over. QAnon, the conspiracy theory that grew
around it, is not. Steve Coll:
The media and the Mueller Report's March surprise. Coral Davenport:
Trump's order to open Arctic waters to oil drilling was unlawful, federal
judge finds. David A Farenthold/Jonathan O'Connell:
Mary Fitzgerald/Claire Provost:
Trump-linked US Christian 'fundamentalists' pour millions of 'dark money'
into Europe, boosting the far right. Masha Gessen:
After the Mueller Report, the dream of a sudden, magic resolution to
the Trump tragedy is dead.
Of course, Donald Trump has not single-handedly destroyed the American
public sphere. It had been in decline for a while, with the horse-race
culture of its political campaigns, the anti-intellectual posture of
many of its politicians, and its media's obsession with entertainment.
But Trump has forced the deterioration to new lows. This is true of
Trumpism in general: its elements -- corruption, xenophobia, isolationism,
disdain for the media, denigration of the government, and lack of
transparency -- are not new phenomena but are, rather, long-standing
trends. But Trump represents a quantum shift, a leap into the abyss.
And much of the descent has gone underdiscussed by public figures and
undercovered by the media, which has been focussed on the investigation
by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to the exclusion of much else.
The Mueller investigation, as a media story and a conversation topic,
has been irresistible largely because it promised a way to avoid thinking
of Trump as an American development. The Russian-collusion story dangled
the carrot of discovering that Trump was entirely foreign to U.S. politics,
a puppet of a hostile power. It also held the appeal of a secret answer to
our catastrophe, one that would make the unimaginable suddenly explicable.
The truth about Trump has been in plain view all along. The President has
waged an attack on political institutions, the law, and culture, and has
succeeded to an astonishing extent. We are no longer surprised, for example,
that more than a month passes between White House press briefings, or that
the President and his spokespeople lie openly and routinely. The assumption
that the Administration should at least act as though it were accountable
to the public has vanished, and we barely took notice.
Tara Golshan:
Joshua Gotbaum:
The federal government gave up on retirement security: "As companies
shortchange employees with pensions, Treasury and Labor look the other
way." David A Graham:
The Steele Dossier set the stage for a Mueller letdown. Sean Illing:
Did the media botch the Russia story? A conversation with Matt Taibbi.
Also see links to Taibbi's latest pieces, below. Jen Kirby:
Sarah Kliff:
Donald Trump is very committed to taking away your health insurance:
But in office, Trump has attempted to implement an agenda that does the
opposite. He's backed legislation, regulations, and lawsuits that would
make it harder for sick people to get health insurance, allow insurance
companies to discriminate against patients with preexisting conditions,
and kick millions of Americans off the Medicaid program.
This week, his Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that a
judge should find Obamacare unconstitutional -- a decision that would
turn the insurance markets back into the Wild West and eliminate Medicaid
coverage for millions of Americans. By at least one estimate, a full
repeal could cost 20 million Americans their health care coverage.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Louisiana's disappearing coast: "The state loses a football field's
worth of land every hour and a half. Now engineers are in a race to
prevent it from sinking into oblivion." Dara Lind:
Dylan Matthews:
The government failed to stop the last recession. It can prevent the next
one. A smorgasbord of ideas, none of which strike me as especially good
(or even appropriate), but perhaps worth thinking about. My impression is
that recessions are mainly caused by asset bubbles and excessive leverage,
and none of these really address those problems. Some do fit under the
rubric of "automatic stabilizers," which don't prevent recessions but do
limit the damage. Ella Nilsen:
Michael Paarlberg:
Enough collusion talk. It's time to focus on Trump's corruption:
"If there is a silver lining to the confusion and disappointment of
Russiagate, it is that we can now pay attention to the real fleecing."
This piece could have been written two years ago, and would still have
come too late. I always hated the "collusion talk" -- basically, four
reasons: it lazily recirculated cold war prejudices, ignoring the fact
that Russia's motives have fundamentally changed (from left to right,
from inept socialism to the oligarchy of mafia capitalism); it assumed
that a temporary alignment of interests (both Putin and Trump wanted
to bend their governments to better support the rich, and both were
deeply cynical and contemptuous of democracy) amounted to an alliance;
and they saw Trump (even as president) as naive and submissive to the
stronger and more cunning Putin; and finally, it was embraced most
fervently by Hillary Clinton's fans, because it seemed to offer an
explanation for her loss that she couldn't be held responsible for --
by a devious, hostile foreign power dedicated to hurting Americans by
denying us the blessings of her wise and generous rule, which brings
full circle to the lazy thinking of the first point. As Masha Gessen
notes above, Russiagate seemed to have the appeal of a magic bullet,
but it ignored the simpler explanation, which was that Trump was no
more than a "useful idiot" for Putin, the Kochs, the Mercers, and a
cast of others (including Israelis and Saudis and Chinese and less
notorious "foreigners") -- made useful precisely because he was and
is so utterly, shamelessly corrupt. So sure, let's talk about his
corruption now, as many of us have been doing since he selected his
cabinet and started cashing in chits at his hotels. But we should
also acknowledge that a big part of why Clinton lost was that she
was tainted by the same corruption as Trump: in fact, he could even
brag about the favors his campaign dollars bought from her. Still,
I suspect that corruption misses the real crux of the problem with
Trump. There is a deeper problem with Trump, and indeed with nearly
all Republicans these days, and that is worldview: their understanding
of how the world works, and of how people should live and act in the
world. Martin Pengelly:
Trump is the 'world's worst cheat at golf,' new book says. The
book is Rick Reilly's Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.
Andrew Prokop:
Mueller's many loose ends: "What comes next now that the probe is
finished." David Roberts:
The Green New Deal aims to get buildings off fossil fuels. These 6 places
have already started. Aaron Rupar:
Amanda Sakuma:
Georgia passes 6-week 'fetal heartbeat' bill that bans most abortions.
Dylan Scott:
Sabrina Siddiqui:
From victory to vengeance: Trump scents blood in 2020 fight:
t felt like a victory lap. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on
Thursday night, surrounded by a sea of red Make America Great Again
hats, a defiant Donald Trump held the podium before a raucous crowd.
"After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax
is finally dead," the president declared in a 90-minute speech.
Basking after the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller's
investigation, which clouded the first two years of his presidency,
Trump falsely claimed "total exoneration."
He vowed retaliation against some of his sharpest critics and
suggested consequences for the media were in order. He spoke of doing
away with Barack Obama's healthcare law. And he threatened to shut
down the US-Mexico border as early as next week.
It was a stark reminder of how Trump views his executive authority
and a glimpse of his looming fight for re-election.
Emily Stewart:
Matt Taibbi:
On Russiagate and our refusal to face why Trump won:
Trump would already be president-elect before he was taken seriously as
an electoral phenomenon. Right up until the networks called Florida for
him on election night, few major American media figures outside of Michael
Moore -- who incidentally was also right about WMDs and ridiculed for it --
believed a Trump win possible.
The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for
Trump's poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the
story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant
Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to
reach for any other data point that might better explain what just
happened.
Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an
incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened
in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the
immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor
any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people
hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump."
Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on
their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to
Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump's troubles. This is what Fox looks
like to liberal audiences.
Worse, the "walls are closing in" theme -- two years old now -- was
just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what
they wanted to happen with what was happening.
As the Mueller probe ends, new Russiagate myths begin. Peter Wade:
Poll: Only 29 percent of Americans say Mueller Report clears Trump.
Alex Ward:
Russia is a threat to American democracy, with or without collusion:
Two subheds: "Russia is still a threat to American elections" and "There
was still a lot of Trump campaign contact with Russia." Both statements
are certainly true, but also taken out of context and blown out of
proportion. The biggest threat to American democracy is the outsized
influence of special interest money, especially its ability to focus
and control media. Putin's Russian state is essentially a protection
racket for international oligarchs. It's no surprise that they would
want to steer other countries' elections and politicians to advance
their interests -- indeed, pretty much everyone with the means tries
to do the same thing (not least, Americans who have interests/allies
all around the world). On the other hand, Russia's budget is trivial
compared to (to pick one of many domestic example) the Koch network,
and due to history they have to lurk in the shadows (in stark contrast
to Israel and Saudi Arabia). Li Zhou:
The Joe Biden and Anita Hill controversy: "He just keeps apologizing --
without saying anything new." New York Times Editorial Board:
The secret death toll of America's drones: "President Trump is making
it harder to know how many civilians the government kills by remote
control."
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller handed a report in to Attorney
General Bill Barr on Friday, and Barr released a letter to Congress
"summarizing" the report, spun primarily to let Trump off the hook.
Publication of the full report would be a fairly major news story,
but all we have to go on now is just Barr's spin. For example, see:
Tierney Sneed:
Barr: Evidence Mueller found not 'sufficient' to charge Trump with
obstruction. That's always seemed to me to be the probable outcome.
Anyone who thought Robert Mueller would treat Trump like Ken Starr and
his crew did the Clintons clearly knew nothing about the man. Moreover,
letting Barr break the news is resulting in much different headlines
than, say, when James Comey announced that he didn't find sufficient
evidence to charge Hillary Clinton with any crimes in her email case.
At the time, Comey buried the conclusion and spent 90% of his press
conference berating Clinton for her recklessness and numerous other
faults. You're not hearing any of that from Barr, although when the
final report comes out -- and presumably if not released someone will
manage to leak it -- the odds that someone else less in Trump's pocket
could have reported it more critically of Trump are dead certain. As
I write this, reactions are pouring in. For instance: William Saletan:
Look at all the weasel words Bill Barr used to protect Trump.
No time to unpack this now, and probably no point either. I started
to write something under Matt Taibbi below, wasn't able to wrap it up
neatly, and left it dangling. I'll return to the subject at some point,
hopefully with better perspective. But I would like to make two points
here. One is that anyone who tried to pin the word "treason" on Trump
has committed a grave mistake. The word assumes that we are locked in
a state of war that is fixed and immutable, something that we are not
free to make political decisions over. It is, in short, a word that we
should never charge anyone with, even a scoundrel like Trump. Moreover,
it is a word that through its assumptions indicts its user much worse
than its target. Those Democrats who used it should be ashamed and
apologetic. (Needless to say, the same goes for Republicans who hurled
the same charge at Obama and the Clintons.)
The second point is that we need to recognize that what we allow
politicians (like Trump, or for that matter the Clintons) to get away
with legally is a much bigger scandal than whether they ever get caught
violating the law. Indeed, if you take the Mueller Report as exonerating
Trump, you're inadvertently arguing that anything a person can get away
with is fair and acceptable.
Little bit of insight I picked up from Greg Magarian on Facebook:
It's so fucking easy to be conservative. That's maybe the gratest
under-the-radar reason to hate conservatives: because all they have
to do is stand around and let the world keep sucking.
Best news I've seen this week:
A century with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: Probably his least interesting bunch of
pieces since Trump was elected -- maybe he's letting his election as
"Chief Neoliberal Shill" (beating out Scott Linciome in the finals, and
a host of other obvious candidates along the way) go to his head, or
maybe he's just letting his mind wander as presidential campaign news
starts to heat up (although it looks to me like 16-18 months too early
for that).
Fred Barbash/Deanna Paul:
The real reason the Trump administration is constantly losing in
court. Zack Beauchamp:
Walden Bello:
Why free trade is bad for you (or most of you at any rate): "Free
trade is simply a euphemism for the corporate capture of international
trade." Ajay Singh Chaudhary:
The Amazon drama: "The Amazon HQ2 story is a microcosm of twenty-first
century capitalism and a parable about the changing nature of politics for
the left." Jane Coaston:
Gaby Del Valle:
Boeing and other companies put safety at a premium. Vikram Dodd:
Anti-Muslim hate crimes soar in UK after Christchurch shootings.
Coincidentally: Ayal Feinberg/Regina Branton/Valerie Martinez-Ebers:
Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate
crimes. Juliet Eilperin:
Federal judge demands Trump administration reveal how its drilling plans
will fuel climate change. Nicholas Fandos:
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump use private accounts for official business,
their lawyer says. John Feffer:
After Trump: "Centrist liberalism is dead, and Trump is a disaster.
But progressives can use what he's done to remake America and its place
in the world." I doubt the first premise here, but that may just be
semantics: neoliberal foreign policy -- support for globalized capital
protected by a world-wide military umbrella cemented through alliances
with dependent countries and occasional fits of fury with any countries
that aren't adequately deferential -- is so embedded in the psyches of
centrist Democrats that it's automatic even if they are dead. Still,
Trump's "America first" doctrine fractures those alliances, revealing
the underlying weakness of American hegemony, and it's going to be hard
to restore anything like the Pax Americana that thrived after WWII and
through the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What's missing from Bernie Sanders' 'Progressive International':
"To challenge fascists and weak-tea liberals, Sanders has called for
a Progressive International . . . but it's not very international." Masha Gessen:
Jacinda Ardern has rewritten the script for how a nation grieves after a
terrorist attack. Lloyd Green:
Kushner, Inc review: Jared, Ivanka Trump and the rise of the American
kakistocracy: Review of Vicky Ward's book, Kushner Inc.: Greed.
Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and
Ivanka Trump. New word for me, reportedly coined in the 17th century:
kakistocracy: "a system of government which is run by the worst,
least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens." Karen J Greenberg:
Trump wants to take away your citizenship: "The current administration
is bent on making it easier to denaturalize American citizens." [Title from
The Nation.] Also at TomDispatch: William Astore:
The Death of Peace: "America's senior generals find no exits from
endless war." Conn Hallinan:
Nuclear powers need to disarm before it's too late: "The world's major
nuclear powers are treaty-bound to move towards disarmament. The India-Pakistan
clash underscores the need to get moving." Rosalind S Heiderman/David A Fahrenthold:
Trump's legal troubles are far from over even as Mueller probe ends.
Sean Illing:
How the politics of racial resentment is killing white people:
Interview with Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How
the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland,
who says:.
I look at the rejection of the Affordable Care Act in the South. I look
at policies that make it far easier for people to get guns and carry
guns everywhere. I look at tax cuts that benefit wealthy Americans
but cut roads, bridges, and schools in poor and working-class areas.
Every one of those policies has been sold as a policy that will make
America great again. But they have devastating consequences for
working-class populations, particularly working-class white populations,
in many instances. . . .
I found that if you lived in a state that rejected the Medicaid
expansion and blocked the full passage of the Affordable Care Act, you
lived about a 21- to 28-day shorter life span on the aggregate. So it
was costing people about three to four weeks of life in those states.
When I looked at states that made it incredibly easy for people to
buy and carry guns pretty much anywhere they wanted, I found that this
correlated with hundreds of deaths that wouldn't have happened otherwise,
particularly in white populations, because gun suicide rose dramatically.
And I found that if you lived in a state that cut away infrastructure and
schools and funding, that correlated with higher high school dropout
rates.
All these variables are associated with shorter life expectancies, so
this is what I mean when I say these policies are killing people.
Umair Irfan:
The Midwest floods are going to get much, much worse: "An 'unprecedented'
flood season lies ahead this spring, according to NOAA." Fred Kaplan:
Trump's North Korea strategy is an incoherent mess: I think Kaplan
is way off-base here (although I wouldn't dispute "incoherent" either
viz. Trump or his free-wheeling administration). Starting talks should
have started a process to unwind sanctions, even with only the loosest
general agreement of reducing tensions. The fact that Kim has called a
halt to testing of rockets and nuclear warheads is significant, as is
Trump's decision to suspend "war games" in the region. Both sides have
gotten the other's attention, and made some tangible progress, so why
not start to unwind the sanctions that had so severely isolated North
Korea as to convince them of the necessity of building a nuclear threat?
The only reason the US hasn't budged on this issue is that hard-liners
like Bolton have convinced Trump to keep up maximum pressure, that all
he has to do is to hang tough until Kim surrenders everything. Yet what
happened was that Treasury tried to add even more sanctions, only to
have Trump publicly withdraw them. Kaplan thinks "Kim is gaining the
upper hand," but aside from making Trump and his administration look
even more schizophrenic I can't think of any advantage Kim accrues.
Sure, he can go back to sabre rattling, but the only reason for that
in the first place was to get Washington's attention, to start the
process of talking. But until he gets some sanctions relief, all he's
got to show for his scheming is some pictures socializing with one of
the world's most reprehensible oligarchs. The only good news on this
front since the Hanoi summit ended is that South Korea is starting to
act on its own, in its own search for peaceful resolution, rather than
letting Trump and Bolton mess things up. See: Josh Rogin:
The United States and South Korea now openly disagree on North Korea.
Gun crazy: "Trump's record-setting military budget is bloated, illegal,
and doomed."
Base instinct: "Trump thinks US military deployments are a protection
racket, and nothing will convince him otherwise." Sarah Kliff:
Nikki Haley is wrong: Finland takes care of new moms way better than the
US. /Dylan Scott:
We read Democrats' 9 plans for expanding health care. Here's how they
work. Since I have it up (it was foolishly recommended by a FB friend),
here's a link to Ezekiel J Emanuel:
Bernie Sanders thinks he can vanquish health insurers. He's wrong.
I read Emanuel's book, Healthcare, Guaranteed: A Simple Solution for
America, when it came out in 2008, along with another dozen books
on the subject. What he recommended then was marginally better than what
we had then, and his new plan is marginally better than what we have now,
but he's always been a shill for the insurance companies (see his "full
disclosure" buried deep in this piece), and his only core belief is that
billionaires shouldn't be inconvenienced by politicians, who in any case
will never be able to buck the rigged system. (His brother is Rahm Emmanuel,
so he should know something about how that system works.) On the other hand,
why would you even consider health care policy from someone who wrote
Why I Hope to Die at 75?
A spinal surgery, a $101,000 bill, and a new law to prevent more surprises:
"How New York state fought surprise medical bills -- and won." Jen Kirby:
The brewing fight over making the Mueller report public, explained. German Lopez:
It took one mass shooting for New Zealand to ban assault weapons. Dylan Matthews:
Nicholas Mulder:
Who's afraid of the International Criminal Court/ Mike Pompeo, for
one. Ralph Nader:
Greedy Boeing's avoidable design and software time bombs. Andrew Prokop:
Brian Resnick:
What Mozambique's unfolding flooding catastrophe looks like. Aaron Rupar:
Stephen Moore, the Trump loyalists nominated to the Fed, explained.
Oddly enough, when Trump picked Larry Kudlow as his chief economic adviser
I had him confused with Moore. Maybe I'll be able to keep them straight
from here on, although their stupidities are pretty interchangeable.
Presumably Moore will back Trump and fight for low interest rates. On
the other hand, as Catherine Rampell reminds us in a tweet:
Funnily enough, when we DID have deflation -- during the depths of the
financial crisis -- he argued for tighter monetary policy, suggesting
that the Fed was about to stoke hyperinflation. Of course, a Democrat
was in the White House then.
Trump's untruths about Veterans Choice illustrate the sheer audaciousness
of his lies: "Trump takes credit for a program he didn't create in
order to demean the late war hero who in fact created it." I'm not opposed
to giving McCain credit where credit is due, but can we please stop this
reflexive reference to him as a "war hero"? It's true that he fought in
a war, and one may certainly sympathize with his suffering during that
war, but nothing he did was heroic, and indeed the only thing Americans
should feel about that war is ashamed. In fact, I have more respect for
Trump's (no doubt selfish) efforts to avoid that war than I do for the
"gung ho" enthusiasm of McCain, Kerry, and many others. [PS: I wrote the
above before I read this piece on POW fetishism: H Bruce Franklin:
Trump vs McCain: an American horror story. If pressed, I would have
guessed that the reason Trump's base so hates McCain has nothing to do
with Vietnam; what they can't forgive him for is losing to Obama. I feel
that same way about Hillary Clinton losing to Trump.]
Kellyanne Conway's stunningly irresponsible advice: read New Zealand
mosque shooter's manifesto. Dylan Scott:
Matt Taibbi:
16 years later, how the press that sold the Iraq War got away with
it:
In the popular imagination, the case for war was driven by a bunch of
Republicans and one over-caffeinated New York Times reporter
named Judith Miller. . . . It's been forgotten this was actually a
business-wide consensus, which included the enthusiastic participation
of a blue-state intelligentsia. The New Yorker of [David] Remnick,
who himself wrote a piece called "Making the Case," was a source of many
of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces, including a pair written by
current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD
hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart. Other prominent Democrat
voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof
(who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar) were on board, as a
Full Metal Jacket character put it, "for the big win."
The Washington Post and New York Times were key
editorial-page drivers of the conflict; MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and
Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism; CNN flooded the airwaves with
generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC
and PBS stacked the deck even worse: In a two-week period before the
invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who
questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
This is an excerpt from a new book, Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media
Makes Us Despise One Another, which seems to be available as some
kind of
subscription deal [actually, here's a
better link]. Following that link led me to another title:
"It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD." I'd like to
quote something here, but I'm having trouble making sense of Taibbi's
point -- other than the broader one that the media (both right and
"left") is corrupt, stupid, and vain, and as such rarely credible,
but you know that by now, don't you?.
PS: Pulled this from Taibbi's twitter feed:
As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared
to Russiagate. The sheer scale of errors and exaggerations this time
around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it's led to most journalists
accepting a radical change of mission. We've become sides-choosers,
obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution
whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.
The problem I have here is that the WMD lie was simple, coherent,
and obviously directed by the White House, US security services, and
their allies, "Russiagate" is a vacuous mix of charges and innuendo,
poorly sourced, and reeking of sour grapes from the excuse-hunting
sore losers around Hillary Clinton. If you take that as a strict
definition, journalists like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are right to
be critical, but how much of the media has chosen to be that narrowly
partisan? Rachel Maddow is certainly one, and I'm sure there are many
more -- including a bunch I habitually avoid. On the other hand, some
journalists have helped sort fact from fiction, and those facts note
that: a fair number of Trump campaign staff had considerable contacts
with Russians and instinctively lied about them afterwards; also it
is clear that Russian cyber operators actively campaigned for Trump,
often reinforcing Trump's own campaign messages, although it is not
clear to what extent (if any) the two campaigns coordinated (in this,
Russia was acting much like the many "independent" PACs that favored
Trump for supposedly didn't coordinate with the Trump campaign); and
after the election, Trump and his circle lied about the contacts and
eventually organized a massive PR campaign to counter and discredit
the Mueller investigation, which led to uncovering further embarrassing
facts and behavior. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has turned out
to be the most thoroughly corrupt ruling clique in American history,
with dozens of inadequately reported scandals -- perhaps because it's
been convenient for both sides (originally Trump/Clinton, with varying
degrees of party allegiance) to focus on the banner charges: "collusion
with Russia" (often hysterically inflated to "treason") and "obstruction
of justice." [ . . . ]
How to blow $700 billion.
The Pentagon's bottomless money pit.
Trump wants more war money than last year and Democrats don't seem to
mind.
Turns out that trillion-dollar bailout was, in fact, real. Alex Ward:
Jennifer Williams:
The massive anti-Brexit protest march in the UK, in 19 photos. Richard Wolfe:
No collusion, plenty of corruption: Trump is not in the clear.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Stories that caught folks' interest this week included an airplane
that aims to crash, mass slaughter of Muslims in New Zealand, and the
revelation that some rich people got caught trying to cheat their way
into getting their kids enrolled by elite colleges (as opposed to the
proper way, which is to give the colleges extra money). On the latter,
I'd like to quote Elias Vlanton (on Facebook):
Missing the Forest for the Trees: A few rich people bribed their kids
into elite colleges. So what? The real scandal is an educational system
that favors rich students over poorer ones (regardless of color) from
the first day of pre-K through crossing the graduation stage, diploma
in hand. If every bribing parent is jailed, the real injustice of social
inequality will remain. Ending it is the real task.
The post was accompanied by a photo of some of Elias's students, who
look markedly different from the students caught up in this scandal.
This seems to be one of the few crimes in America with a means test
limiting it to the pretty rich. Actually, I feel a little sorry for
the parents and children caught up in this fraud -- not so much for
being victimized (although they were) as for the horrible pressures
they put upon themselves to succeed in a world that is so rigorously
rigged by the extreme inequality they nominally benefit from. I got
a taste of their world when I transferred to Washington University
back in 1973. That was the first time I met student who had spent
years prepping for SATs that would assure entrance to one of the
nation's top pre-med schools. It was also where I knew students who
tried (and sometimes managed) to hire others to write papers and to
take graduate school tests -- so I suppose you could say that was
my first encounter with the criminal rich. I always thought it was
kind of pathetic, but it really just reflects the desperation of
a pseudo-meritocracy. And true as that was then, I'm sure it's much
more desperate and vicious today.
One more thing I want to mention here: I saw a meme on Facebook
forwarded by one of my right-wing relatives. It read:
YESTERDAY IN THE PHILIPPINES A CHURCH WAS BOMBED BY MUSLIM TERRORISTS
KILLING 30 CHRISTIANS. NO MEDIA COVERAGE.
I suppose the intent was to complain about news coverage of the mass
shooting in New Zealand, where a "white nationalist" slaughtered 50
Muslims, implying that the "fake news" media is playing favorites again,
acting like Muslim lives are more valuable than Christian lives. I thought
I should at least check that claim out. Google offered no evidence of
such an attack, at least yesterday. However, I did find that two bombs
had been set off on January 27, 2019, at a Catholic Cathedral in Jolo,
Sulu, in the Philippines, killing 20 people. There's a pretty detailed
Wikipedia page on the attack, so that could be the event the meme
author is referring to. I've also found an article in the
New York Times, although the emphasis there is more on the growth
of ISIS within the long-running Islamic separatist revolt -- which
started immediately after he US occupied the Philippines in 1898,
and has flared up repeatedly ever since, most recently in response
to Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte (one of Trump's favorite
strongmen). (Also another article in
CNN.) The context stripped from the meme doesn't excuse the
atrocity, but it does help explain American media's limited interest.
I have several links on the New Zealand shooting below, and they too
reflect our rather parochial interest in the subject. Although pretty
much everyone deplores the loss of life in all terrorist atrocities,
the New Zealand one hit closer to home (for reasons that will be
obvious below -- see, e.g., Patrick Strickland).
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
"Jexodus," the fake departure of American Jews from the Democratic Party,
explained: Starts with two Trump tweets, not that he coined the term
but it was the sort of thing that stuck to his brain. To quote:
- "Jewish people are leaving the Democratic Party. We saw a lot of anti
Israel policies start under the Obama Administration, and it got worse
& worse. There is anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. They don't
care about Israel or the Jewish people." Elizabeth Pipko, Jexodus.
- The 'Jexodus' movement encourages Jewish people to leave the Democrat
Party. Total disrespect! Republicans are waiting with open arms. Remember
Jerusalem (U.S. Embassy) and the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal! @OANN
@foxandfriends
If anyone's antisemitic here, it's Trump, with his assumption that
American Jews will flock to whichever party that gives Israel the most
uncritically blind support. Trump assumes the old charge that Jews feel
more allegiance to Israel than to America, and his second tweet makes
plain how he sets US policy based on his own political calculation.
The Manafort case is a reminder that we invest too little in catching
white-collar criminals: "It shouldn't take a special counsel to
catch a tax cheat." WJ Astore:
Big walls, fruitless wars, and fortress America: Review of Greg
Grandin: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall
in the Mind of America. Frida Berrigan:
A mother swept away by climate change: About "Generation Hot":
"some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global
warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its
mounting impacts." Also this week at TomDispatch:
Max Blumenthal:
US regime change blueprint proposed Venezuelan electricity blackouts as
'watershed event' for 'galvanizing public unrest'. Related:
Ben Norton:
Venezuela coup leader's oil plans revealed: Guaidó hopes to privatize
state-controlled industry. Robert L Borosage:
Democrats must expose Trump's betrayal of working people. Jamelle Bouie:
The trouble with Biden. Philip Bump:
Reminder: The president regularly spends the weekend hobnobbing privately
with rich clients. Jane Coaston:
The New Zealand shooter's manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric
spreads: "The same language featured in the alleged gunman's manifesto
is seen in white nationalist writings and outlets around the world." Gaby Del Valle:
A Yelp-style app for conservatives wants to protect right-wingers from
"socialist goon squads": "63red Safe claims to identify which businesses
are 'safe' for conservatives." The notion of "socialist goon squads" strikes
me as pure projection, but I don't doubt that the fantasy is being embedded
in reactionary minds as an excuse for forming their own goon squads, maybe
even igniting civil war. It's not like it hasn't happened before. Indeed,
in 1993 and 2009 Republicans went to unprecedented extremes to fight back
from loss of presidential power, and unlike then it's pretty clear that
Trump is not going to bow out gracefully. Still, this app belongs to a long
line of hucksters who exploit and prey on conservative fears. Tara Golshan:
Sean Illing:
Why are millennials burned out? Capitalism. Interview with Malcolm
Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of
Millennials. There's a very striking chart here, showing that from
1948 up to about 1973 productivity and hourly compensation increased
(almost doubled) at the same rate, but after 1973 (and especially after
1980) they started to diverge: hourly compensation actually declined
up to the late 1990s, then rose slowly, winding up about 20% higher,
while productivity more than doubled again.
An autopsy of the American dream: Interview with Steven Brill,
author of Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year
Fall -- and Those Fighting to Reverse It (also, back in 2015,
America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the
Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System). Starts with five
examples of American decline: the fifth is the one I always find the
most damning (although it's arguably a consequence of the more prosaic
first four): "Among the 35 richest countries in the world, the US now
have the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy."
Conor Friedersdorf: Parts of an ongoing series remembering
1968:
Naomi Fry:
The college-admissions scandal and the banality of scamming:
This week's exposure of the college-admissions scam is significant exactly
because, in its trite ordinariness, it makes granular and concrete what is
usually abstract and difficult to pin down. The parents who responded "I
love it" to Singer's criminal propositions reminded me, viscerally, of
Donald Trump, Jr.,'s breezy e-mail reply when, in 2016, he was told of a
Russian source's ability to share dirt on Hillary Clinton: "If it's what
you say I love it." When the e-mail was revealed, in 2017, I felt a similar
satisfaction. In both cases, casual corruption, usually obscured by several
layers of secrecy and legal trickery, was finally laid bare. The people
involved were so self-satisfied and secure in their power that they greeted
unethical, perhaps felonious proposals with complete nonchalance.
Masha Gessen:
How I would cover the college-admissions scandal as a foreign
correspondent. Monica Hesse:
Where is William H Macy in the college admissions scandal? Miriam Jordan:
Trump Administration plans to close key immigration operations
abroad. Jen Kirby:
UK Parliament rejects second referendum in latest Brexit vote. Brian Klaas:
A short history of President Trump's anti-Muslim bigotry. Mike Konczal:
The failures of neoliberalism are bigger than politics: A response
to "an excellent
discussion with economist Brad Delong" (cited last week). Delong
argued that neoliberals need to ally with the left because there are no
viable options on the right. Konczal points out that left neoliberals
have deeper problems: much of what they expected their pro-market plans
to accomplish has failed, or worse. For another comment on this, see
Three-Toed Sloth. Konczal works for the Roosevelt Institute. Some
recent articles and reports there:
Paul Krugman:
Don't blame robots for low wages.
The power of petty personal rage: After some examples:
The point is that demented anger is a significant factor in modern
American political life -- and overwhelmingly on one side. All that
talk about liberal "snowflakes" is projection; if you really want to
see people driven wild by tiny perceived slights and insults, you'll
generally find them on the right. Nor is it just about racism and
misogyny. Although these are big components of the phenomenon, I
don't see the obvious connection to hamburger paranoia.
Just to be clear: To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, I'm not saying
that most conservatives are filled with rage over petty things. What
I'm saying instead is that most of those filled with such rage are
conservatives, and they supply much of the movement's energy. Not to
put too fine a point on it, pathological pettiness almost surely put
Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 election.
Indeed, pathologically petty is a pretty fair description of Donald
Trump.
America the cowardly bully: "What the world has learned from Trump's
trade war." Easy to make fun of Trump's "trade war" negotiations, and
easier still to make light of the "improved" agreements he's made, not
least because their impact on actual trade effects is so negligible --
the bottom line is that the US under Trump is running even higher trade
deficits than even before. Still, I recoil at "the deal would do little
to address real complaints about Chinese policy, which mainly involve
China's systematic expropriation of intellectual property." That's only
an issue because rent-seeking IP owners have inordinate influence over
US trade negotiations. It's not something that benefits average people
anywhere in the world, least of all in the US. Indeed, in most cases
that's not something we should be forcing Americans to pay for, let
alone Chinese. Michael LaForgia/Matthew Rosenberg/Gabriel JX Dance:
Facebook's data deals are under criminal investigation. Matthew Lee:
US bars entry to International Criminal Court investigators. PR Lockhart:
American schools can't figure out ow to teach kids about slavery:
The game-playing examples sound awful, and I can't think of any way to
redeem them. But there's been a tremendous amount of research since I
was in school -- I was ten when the Civil War centenary came along,
close enough you could still see and touch its artifacts and legacies,
although political interests made sure there was plenty of smoke to
obscure the reasons and repercussions. I can't remember what I learned
at the time -- I had a wonderful US history teacher in 8th grade, and
learned tons of stuff from him, but nothing on the Civil War era stands
out -- but by the early 1970s the picture had changed considerably. By
then, two major books on racism had appeared: David Brion Davis: The
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), and Winthrop Jordan:
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negrok, 1550-1812
(1968). Those books made it clear how racism was invented to justify and
perpetuate slavery. Along with those books, I read everything by Eugene
D Genovese, who showed how the economic institution of slavery grew
into self-contained worldviews of slaveholders and slaves, and much
else, including C. Vann Woodward, Eric Foner, James McPherson, David
Montgomery -- scholars influenced by the civil rights (and labor, at
least for Montgomery) movements. I'm less familiar with later books,
but I gather they follow along similar lines. It should be simple to
put together a survey of what we know about what we know about race
and slavery in American history, but we're still plagued by people
wanting to impose their political agendas on the past. Perhaps such
impositions are inevitable, but they came easier (because they made
more sense) fifty years ago, when America's major wars -- Revolution,
Civil War, WWII -- could be justified as steps toward a freer, more
equal and just world. That narrative has always been burdened with
nasty details, but lately conservatives have added more obstacles to
understanding. The fruit of such constant thrashing is often ignorance
and indifference, which is what these examples add up to. Dylan Matthews:
Andrew Yang, the 2020 long-shot candidate running on a universal basic
income, explained. I'm not going to do many links on presidential
candidates, partially because I want to downplay the presidency relative
to other political campaigns (e.g., Congress), and partly because these
days professional politicians are so practiced in the art of boilerplate
they almost never say anything interesting. On the other hand, Yang is
someone cut from different cloth, with real ideas (not that I've taken
the trouble to see whether I agree with many of them), and that makes
him worth pointing out. At the bottom of the article, there's a list
of "who's officially running so far," eleven names, 8-10 you probably
already know, one I wasn't even aware of:
Marianne Williamson is Oprah's spiritual adviser. She's also running
for president. I only mention her because I'm always fascinated by
things I didn't know. I see no reason to take her seriously, but she's
no less qualified and probably more fun than Ben Carson. She may even
be competitive with her most similar match among Democratic hopefuls:
Kamala Harris. Oh, speaking of similarities, I have very little worth
saying about new candidate Beto O'Rourke, but his track record (a few
years in the House, losing high-profile Senate race) matches pretty
closely one previous presidential candidate: Abraham Lincoln. Bill McKibben:
A future without fossil fuels? Review of two short reports: 2020
Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming, and A New
World: The Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. Dana Milbank:
This is what happens when corporations run the government: Specifically,
Boeing. Also note: Tara Copp:
Trump's defense secretary faces ethics complaint over Boeing promotion.
This influence peddling suggests why we've wound up with titles like
America last: After 42 other countries put safety first, US finally joins
ban on flights of Boeing 737 Max aircraft, itself a link to the more
modestly titled
Boeing planes are grounded in US after days of pressure. That pressure
happened because US pilots had been complaining for months. See
Kalhan Rosenblatt/Jay Blackmann:
US pilots complained about Boeing 737 Max 8 months before Ethiopia crash.
Suresh Naidu/Dani Rodrik/Gabriel Zucman:
Economics after neoliberalism: A forum, with additional responses
(Corey Robin pointed me to this piece). Starts with a straightforward
statement of the problem:
We live in an age of astonishing inequality. Income and wealth disparities
in the United States have risen to heights not seen since the Gilded Age
and are among the highest in the developed world. Median wages for U.S.
workers have stagnated for nearly fifty years. Fewer and fewer younger
Americans can expect to do better than their parents. Racial disparities
in wealth and well-being remain stubbornly persistent. In 2017, life
expectancy in the United States declined for the third year in a row,
and the allocation of healthcare looks both inefficient and unfair.
Advances in automation and digitization threaten even greater labor
market disruptions in the years ahead. Climate change-fueled disasters
increasingly disrupt everyday life.
It's certainly possible for reasonable people to disagree on how best
to deal with these problems, but the basic political divide in America
today isn't about competitive solutions. It's about our ability to see
problems like these. One camp simply denies their existence, or denies
that they matter as problems, or denies that anything can be done about
them without making matters worse. The effective difference between the
last three is nihil. The article makes a lot of worthy points. For a
taste, here are some pull quotes:
- Economics is in a state of creative ferment -- a sense of public
responsibility is bringing people into the fray.
- Neoliberalism -- or market fetishism -- is not the consistent
application of modern economics, but its primitive, simplistic perversion.
- Economics' recent empirical bent makes it more difficult to idolize
markets because it makes it more difficult to ignore inconvenient facts.
- Economics does not necessarily have definite answers, but it does
supply the tools needed to lay out the tradeoffs, thus contributing to
a more informed democratic debate.
- Taking contemporary economics seriously is consistent with recommending
fairly dramatic structural changes in American economic life.
- These proposals all show a willingness to subordinate textbook
economic efficiency to other values such as democratic rule and
egalitarian relationships among citizens.
- Many economists dismiss the role of power, but these tackle power
asymmetries frontally and suggest ways of rebalancing power for
economic ends.
One good idea here might be retiring "neoliberalism" in favor of
"market fetishism" -- which really gets to the point, shorn of the
increasingly muddle political overtones. (The original neos tried to
hijack a well-established political tradition, although their ideas
ultimately had more appeal to the right.) Some more pieces I noticed
at Boston Review:
Sharmine Narwani:
US officials offered my friend cash to take down Tehran's power grid:
and now they seem to have succeeded in Venezuela. Anna North:
What the college admissions scandal reveals about the psychology of wealth
in America. Natalie Nougaryède:
A chaotic Brexit is part of Trump's grand plan for Europe. Isn't
"grand plan" a bit beyond Trump's grasp? Roger Trilling was closer to
the mark when he described conservatives as only capable of "irritating
mental gestures," although they're more frequent and more impactful in
the Trump era than ever before. Still, something is missing here. It may
make sense that Trump wants Europe to be divided and weakened so it would
be easier prey for American control, but why should anyone in Europe
support that? Two possible reasons I can think of. One is that there's
some sort of "fraternal order of neo-fascists" where politicians with
similar reactionary instincts overcome their natural nationalist dislikes
to cheer each other on. The other is that international business concerns
back right-wingers everywhere because deregulation and chaos suits their
business model. John Quiggin:
Brian Resnick:
Trump wants to cut billions from the NIH. This is what we'll miss out on
if he does. "Is spending money at the NIH a good deal? The research
is incredibly clear: Yes." James Risen:
Paul Manafort didn't get off easy -- unless you compare him to whistleblower
Reality Winner: written before Manafort's second sentencing, but still
"Winer performed a public service," and "was sentenced to 63 months, which
is the longest ever handed down to someone accused of leaking to the press."
Related: Henry N Pontell/Robert H Tillman:
Manafort's sentencing shows again that white-collar criminals get off
lightly: I'm not sure I'd place much weight on a single case with
so many political overtones, but the general point is probably right,
not that the perspective shouldn't be flipped: that non-white-collar
criminals get treated more harshly. There are several pretty obvious
reasons for this, but one that is rarely mentioned is that as the US
has become an increasingly unequal society, the law has increasingly
been used to impose a system of class control: to lock up more poor
people, to regulate more through probation, and to intimidate still
more with the threat of horrific consequences should they stray out
of line. It's surely no coincidence that harsh sentencing and mass
incarceration grew at the same time as we were cutting taxes on the
rich, dismantling civil rights protections, and reducing regulation
in ways that made white-collar scofflaws (like Manafort) more likely
to think they could get away with bending the laws even further. Sigal Samuel:
The case for spraying (just enough) chemicals into the sky to fight climate
change: I'm willing to keep an open mind on geoengineering proposals
to counteract global warming, but this particular plan -- "injecting aerosols
into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space" -- strikes me
as a lot like spraying perfume to cover up the stench of rotting bodies in
the basement. I'd also be skeptical of claims like "no bad side effects."
Dylan Scott:
Somini Sengupta/Alexandra Villegas:
Tiny Costa Rica has a Green New Deal, too. It matters for the whole
planet. Adam Serwer:
White Nationalism's deep American roots: Singles out Madison Grant,
whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race was acclaimed as
"bible" by Austrain fan-boy Adolf Hitler. Grant was also the subject of
Jonathan Peter Spiro's book, Defending the Master Race: Conservation,
Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009). I've long been
aware of how American race law provided models for other countries,
especially for South Africa's Apartheid laws, so the news that Nazi
Germany borrowed from American precedents was obvious. I recently read
James Q Whitman's Hitler's American Model: The United States and the
Making of Nazi Race Law (2017), which I would fault on two counts:
one is that he spends way too much time tiptoeing around the feelings
of his American readers; the other is that he misses the one obvious
difference, which is that Nazi race law was aimed at purging (ultimately
annihilating) "inferior races," while American racism originally meant
to maintain a stable, powerless, low-cost labor force. American racism
found its ideal state where it started, in slavery. However, there is
another less-discussed American root for annihilationist racism: the
relentless war against native Americans. Indeed, it is little wonder
that white racists around the world have always turned to the US for
inspiration: we have so much history to choose from -- something to fit
every raging prejudice. Amy Davidson Sorkin:
What Pelosi means when she said, of impeaching Trump, 'He's just not
worth it" -- to work, impeachment requires substantial Republican
support, and until that arrives, Democrats are better off campaigning
against both Trump and Republicans, rather than trying to split them.
Related: Adam Gopnik:
The pros and cons of impeaching Trump. Emily Stewart:
Patrick Strickland:
White nationalism is an international threat: "The Christchurch
attacks point to a disturbing web reaching from the United States,
to the United Kingdom, to Greece, and beyond." Yanis Varoufakis:
A European spring is possible: "The DiEM25 proposes immediate
financial changes to end austerity and fund a green -- and hopefully
post-capitalist -- future." For some background on Varoufakis, see
two pieces by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian:
Saving the sacred cow: "Yanis Varoufakis' vision for a more
democratic Europe." And:
Yanis Varoufakis's internationalist odyssey. Alex Ward:
Li Zhou:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Weekend Roundup
No introduction, other than to note that I hadn't planned on including
anything on the Ilhan Omar controversy, mostly because I still haven't
bothered to track down what she said and/or apologized for. I'm pretty
careful to make sure that nothing I say that's critical of Israel can be
misconstrued as anti-semitic, but that canard is used so often (and so
indiscriminately) by Israel's hasbarists that it feels like a waste of
time to even credit the complaints.
One more note is that I expected to find more on the record-setting
2018 trade deficit, but all I came up with was the Paul Krugman post
below, where the main point is that Trump is stupid, specifically on
trade and tariffs but actually on pretty much everything. Krugman's
explanation that trade deficits reflect a savings shortfall doesn't
really tell me much. As best I can understand it, deficits are a means
by which wealth transfers from consumers to the rich -- primarily the
foreign rich, but much of that money comes back to domestic rich for
investments and sales of inflated assets. I remember some years ago
William Greider proposed a blanket, across-the-board tax on imports
aimed at restoring a trade balance -- evidently such a thing is OK
under WTO rules, and it would get around the balloon problem Krugman
refers to -- but I've never heard about it since. Strikes me as a
good idea (although I'm not sure how it would interact with exchange
rates).
Also thought a bit about writing an op-ed on Trump and Korea.
Specifically, I wanted to pose a rhetorical question to Trump, to
ask him why he lets people like John Bolton undermine his chances
for forging a signature world peace deal, and securing a legacy
as something other than, well, you know, a demagogue and a crook.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Erin Banco/Betsy Woodruff:
Team Trump keeps pushing deal to send nuclear tech to Saudis. Related:
Lachlan Markay:
The nuclear energy industry goes MAGA to win over Trump. Fred Barbash:
Wilbur Ross broke law, violated Constitution in census decision, judge
rules. Zack Beauchamp:
A Clinton-era centrist Democrat explains why it's time to give democratic
socialists a chance. Interview with economist Brad De Long, who worked
in the Clinton (or should I say Rubin?) Treasury Department, and identifies
as a neoliberal.[1] However, De Long has realized something more: not so
much that neoliberalism doesn't work as that there is no political center
for maintaining it in a way that works for the common good.
The core reason, De Long argues, is political. The policies he supports
depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They're premised
on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would
be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade
system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.
"Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney's health care policy,
with John McCain's climate policy, with Bill Clinton's tax policy, and
George H.W. Bush's foreign policy," De Long notes. "And did George H.W. Bush,
did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack
Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did
not."
The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to
shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly
ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition
should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly
neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve
ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable
basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future.
The premises here are the weakest: I doubt that since Reagan's win in
1980 there has ever been even so much as a "responsible center-right" faction
in the Republican Party -- Republicans have only welcomed "bi-partisan"
deals on their own terms, which is that they must (like NAFTA, "welfare
reform," or "no child left behind") hurt the Democratic base and discredit
the Democratic Party leadership in their eyes. More importantly, Democrats
only needed this "responsible center-right" alliance because they didn't
have sufficient votes to pass policy legislation on their own. And that
was basically because they kept undermining their historic base (unions
and the working class) while chasing donors in high-tech and finance. The
result was that the growth they pursued above all else was soaked up by
the rich, leaving their base with nothing to show for their votes. Left
democrats generally accept neoliberal economic ideas, but part ways in
one crucial respect: they understand that what it takes power to ensure
that the economy works for every one, and that sacrificing power (as the
neoliberal democrats repeatedly did) makes nostrums like growth totally
meaningless. The important thing about this piece is that De Long gets
that, and that realization has moved him from opponent to enthusiastic
supporter:
Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists
in the past are concerned. They're social democrats, they're very strong
believers in democracy. They're very strong believers in fair distribution
of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to
work and what is not. But they're people who we're very, very lucky to
have on our side.
That's especially opposed to the people on the other side, who are very,
very strange indeed. You listen to [Never Trump conservatives] like Tom
Nichols or Bruce Bartlett or Bill Kristol or David Frum talk about all the
people they had been with in meetings, biting their tongues over the past
25 years, and your reaction can only be, "Why didn't you run away screaming
into the night long ago?"
[1]: De Long pointed me to this
Neoliberal Shill Bracket, evidently an annual ritual among the breed,
where DeLong was highly seeded but failed to advance to the Elite 8 round.
It's a little hard to follow given that nominees are only identified by
their twitter handles, but the round of 8 gives us: Tyler Cowen, Will
Wilkinson, Scott Linicome, Alex Nowrasteh, Alan Cole, Megan McArdle,
Noah Smith, and Matthew Yglesias. (DeLong lost to Austan Goolsbee, who
in turn was eliminated by Noah Smith -- last year's winner.) The person
who runs this circus defines the core values of neoliberalism
here. They
tout their belief in "classical liberal freedoms," "equal rights,"
and "intelligent regulation and redistribution" -- making them more
conventionally liberal than we usually associate with the term --
but those are all secondary to "we believe in free markets, and the
power of markets to alleviate poverty and generate unparalleled
economic growth." Nice theory. Too bad things don't work that way. Jonathan Chait:
The most unrealistic promise Democrats are making is to restore
bipartisanship. Chris Cillizza:
Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to delegitimize the 2020 election.
I suppose this story is meant to shock, but he already did a bang up job of
delegitimizing the 2016 election, so of course he's sowing the seeds for
denying his future embarrassingly shoddy showing. On the other hand, Hillary
Clinton only hurt herself by trying to prod Trump into agreeing that if he
lost he'd bow out responsibly. He never took the bait, and in the end she
was the one who had to prematurely concede. Steve Coll:
The jail health-care crisis: "The opioid epidemic and other public-health
emergencies are being aggravated by failings in the criminal-justice
system." Colin Drury:
Netanyahu says Israel 'belongs to Jewish people alone' in attacks on
nation's Arab population/a>. Related:
Ruth Eglash:
Wonder Woman takes on Netanyahu with anti-racism post on Instagram:
Not my idea of a big deal, but I like the contrast. Also:
Richard Silverstein:
Pompeo: If Bibi wants a Fascist government, fine by us. Ben Ehrenreich:
The shameful campaign to silence Ilhan Omar. Related:
Wajahat Alli/Rabia Chaudry:
Want to combat hate? Stop the hazing of Ilhan Omar and start listening;
Hanna Alshaikh:
The Ilhan Omar controversy shows how little we care about Palestinian
lives;
Phyllis Bennis:
The Democratic Party attacks on Ilhan Omar are a travesty;
David Dayen:
Ilhan Omar's victory for political sanity;
Tara Golshan:
Three 2020 Democrats express concern that attacks against Ilhan Omar
will stifle debate on Israel: "Warren, Sanders, and Harris all come
out in support of Omar;
Sarah Jones:
The Democratic Party needs Ilhan Omar;
Richard Silverstein:
Israel lobby and pro-Israel House Democrats tried to excommunicate Ilhlam
Omar, they failed. Masha Gessen:
Why measles is a quintessential political issue of our time. Tara Golshan:
The anti-Bernie Sanders campaign being pushed by former Clinton staffers,
explained: "Former Hillary Clinton aides really want Bernie Sanders
to get the Clinton treatment." Presumably that means to be abused as
unfairly as Clinton was, although for Clinton's truest believers the
fact that he challenged her at all, and in the process exposed some (by
no means all) of her faults is something that can never be forgiven.
Of course, the same people were every bit as bitter on losing to Obama
in 2008, even as Obama bent over so far as to turn his administration
into a Clinton rerun -- so much so that Sanders' principled criticism
of Obama was used as a cudgel, helping Clinton to pick up many Obama
votes, especially in the early primaries in states Sanders wasn't well
known in. The quotes here are a mix of stupid and cruel; e.g.: the
Clinton aide accusing Sanders of "saying things that don't resonate
with a lot of people who don't share his privilege as a cis white man
in politics."
Bernie Sanders's real base is diverse -- and very young. Adam Gopnik:
The pros and cons of impeaching Trump. Garrett M Graff:
How Giuliani might take down Trump: "The parallels between the Mafia
and the Trump Organization are striking, and Giuliani perfected the
template for prosecuting organized crime." Glenn Greenwald:
NYT's exposé on the lies about burning aid trucks in Venezuela shows how
US government and media spread pro-war propaganda. Sean Illing:
Ed Kilgore:
Trump owns the swamp now, and it's awash in lobbyists:
Most of these people are not as famous (or infamous) as, say, the former
oil industry shill and coal lobbyist who have serially run the Environmental
Protection Agency under Trump. But 350 ex-lobbyists represent a lot of
special interests. And their greatest concentration, the Post notes, is
in the Executive Office of the President, where 47 ex-lobbyists toil to
set policy for the entire federal government.
Paul Krugman:
Tariff Man has become Deficit Man:
Republicans in Congress spent the entire Obama administration inveighing
against budget deficits, warning incessantly that we were going to have
a Greek-style fiscal crisis any day now. Donald Trump, on the other hand,
focused his ire mainly on trade deficits, insisting that "our jobs and
wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of
us."
But over two years of unified G.O.P. control of government, a funny
thing happened: Both deficits surged. The budget deficit has hit a level
unprecedented except during wars and in the immediate aftermath of major
economic crises; the trade deficit in goods has set a record.
Jonathan Lambert:
Greener childhood associated with happier adulthood. Paul Woodward's
title for this is more explicit: "We need contact with nature for the sake
of our sanity." German Lopez:
Marijuana legalization is winning the 2020 Democratic primaries. Dylan Matthews:
Democrats have united around a plan to dramatically cut child poverty:
"The American Family Act, one of Democrats' biggest policy initiatives of
2019, explained." Jane Mayer:
The making of the Fox News White House: "Fox News has always been
partisan. But has it become propaganda?" Indeed, it has. This article
has gotten a lot of attention for its revelation of how Fox knew about
and killed he story on the Stormy Daniels payoff before the election --
a clear decision to manage the news for Trump's benefit. But the piece
is much, much bigger than that one headline-grabber. Ella Nilsen:
Osita Nwanevu:
Democrats push to make Washington, DC, the fifty-first state. Toluse Olorunnipa/Josh Dawsey:
Trump's massive reelection campaign has 2016 themes -- and a 2020
infrastructure. Andrew Prokop:
House Democrats launch massive obstruction of justice and corruption probe
aimed at Trump: "They've requested documents from 81 people or entities.
Here's who they are." Adi Robertson:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says 'we should be excited about automation':
"Robots aren't the problem, she says -- economics are." Hard to exaggerate
how smart this is, at least compared to the usual blather politicians of
both parties spout about Jobs:
New York congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes
that people should welcome robots taking their jobs -- but not the economic
system that can make it financially devastating. During a talk at SXSW, an
audience member asked Ocasio-Cortez about the threat of automated labor.
"We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,"
she said in response. "We should be excited by that. But the reason we're
not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have
a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem."
Also note this pull quote: "Not all creativity needs to be bonded by
wage." David Rothkopf:
The Mar-a-Lago connection to the Cindy Yang affair raises huge security
risks. Related:
Chas Danner: Everything to know about the spa founder selling access to
Trump. Emma Sarappo:
Trump will reportedly ask Congress for another $8.6 billion to guild the
wall. Eric Schmitt/Charlie Savage:
US airstrikes kill hundreds in Somalia as shadowy conflict ramps
up. Gabe Schneider:
Why Sacramento is still protesting Stephon Clark's death, one year
later. Dylan Scott:
A single-payer advocate answers the big question: How do we pay for
it? Interview with Matt Breunig. Emily Stewart:
Jeffrey Toobin:
Adam Schiff hires a former prosecutor to lead the Trump investigation.
Siva Vaidhyanathan:
Facebook's new move isn't about privacy. It's about domination. Related:
Sam Biddle:
Mark Zuckerberg is trying to play you -- again. David Wallace-Wells:
Could one man single-handedly ruin the planet? After mentioning Xi
Jinping and Donald Trump, he gets to an even more ominous test case:
Brazil's new president, Jair Bolsonaro. Alex Ward:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Three fairly major stories dominated the news this past week: Trump
walking away from his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un without
even making a serious proposal or showing any interest in long-range
peace; Michael Cohen's congressional testimony, where he made a case
that his own crimes were directed by Trump; and Trump's "free-form"
speech at CPAC's annual convention. We'll take these in order, then
conclude with the leftovers, including some stories that are actually
bigger and more ominous than the headline grabbers: a dangerous border
skirmish between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, US escalation
against Venezuela, the impending indictment of Israeli PM Netanyahu,
the usual gamut of Washington scandals, and some hopeful legislation
that Democrats are introducing (and campaigning on).
Some links on Korea and the summit failure:
Jason Ditz:
Fred Kaplan:
Love can't buy a nuclear deal: "Trump and Kim failed to reach a
breakthrough in Hanoi. For now, that may be for the best." It bothers
me a lot when otherwise astute observers say things like this. War is
so horrific no one should ever argue that walking back from the peace
table is a good thing. What this really shows is that Kaplan, like so
many American "experts," doesn't see costs and risks to perpetuating
the status quo, especially the cruel sanctions regime. In the lead up
to the summit, I didn't bother citing the many pessimistic forecasts,
like Kaplan's own
Trump's bargaining position with Kim Jong-un is unbelievably weak.
Kaplan is half right about that, in that there is virtually nothing
the US can do to force North Korea to capitulate. On the other hand,
the US has one great asymmetric advantage, in that we know that Kim's
"nuclear threat" is mere bluff, while US sanctions cause real pain
with little or no cost or risk. I could expand on this much more, but
right now don't have the time or stomach. But I will leave you with
two points: one is that Trump is exceptionally capable of negotiating
a realistic deal with Kim because he identifies with strong dictators
and has no inclination to judge them morally (also because he doesn't
have any compelling graft not to deal, as he has with Iran, Yemen, and
Venezuela); the other is that this summit demonstrates a common thread
in Trump's foreign policy, which is his utter contempt and callousness
in all his dealings with the world. Jen Kirby:
North Korea contradicts Trump on the reason a summit deal fell
through. Jeffrey Lewis:
Jon Schwarz:
Breakdown in Hanoi Summit shows the real danger on the Korean Peninsula:
Donald Trump's America. Alex Ward:
Trump is missing his opportunity to press Kim Jong Un on human rights:
On the other hand, Kim missed the opportunity to press Trump on same. Robin Wright:
After all the swagger, Trump's talks with North Korea collapse.
Some links on Cohen and this week in the "witchhunt":
Natasha Bertrand:
Michael Cohen's road map for Democrats. Isaac Chotiner:
A legal editor on what we learned from Michael Cohen's Congressional
testimony: Interview with Quinta Jurecic, managing editor of
Lawfare. Maureen Dowd:
The sycophant and the sociopath. David Frum:
Uncontradicted: "Republicans on the House Oversight Committee impugned
the integrity of Trump's former lawyer -- but failed to defend the president
from his key charges." Jen Kirby:
Michael Cohen: I probably threatened people for Trump hundreds of
times. Andrew Prokop:
What Michael Cohen's testimony means for the Russia investigation. Emily Stewart:
And some links on Trump and this year's CPAC (Conservative Political
Action Conference) orgy:
Still more scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Bernie Sanders is poised to open up a painful intraparty debate about
Israel. Michael A Cohen:
Mitch McConnell, Republican nihilist. Wish I could also share
Fintan O'Toole:
The King and I, a review of Chris Christie's Let Me Finish
and Cliff Sims' Team of Vipers (locked behind paywall). Rachel M Cohen:
Labor unions are skeptical of the Green New Deal, and they want activists
to hear them out. Sam Cowie:
Jair Bolsonaro praised the genocide of indigenous people. Now he's
emboldening attackers of Brazil's Amazonian communities. David Dayen:
It might be time for a "War Dogs" sequel: Report on a Defense
contractor TransDigm Group, which a recent report revealed "'earned
excess profit' on nearly every parts contract it made with the Defense
Department." David A Graham:
Trump aides keep writing memos to protect themselves: "Their urge
to document the president's requests and interactions is justified by
his behavior." Greg Grandin:
How the Right is using Venezuela to reorder politics: "The
social-democratic wing of the Democratic Party must find a way to put
forth a compelling counter-vision." Maggie Haberman: et al.:
Trump ordered officials to give Jared Kushner a security clearance:
Not much of a story, but much cited this week. Kushner eventually got
his clearance, and nobody seems to know exactly why it took so long --
in his position, it should have been automatic (not that he ever should
have gotten the job). So the interest now seems to be catching Trump in
another bald-faced lie (video link included). Murtaza Hussain:
Trump and Brexit proved this book prophetic -- what calamity will befall
us next?: Interview with Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the
Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2014). For
a flavor, here are the pull quotes:
"The year 2011 proved to be the moment of phase change, when digital
anger passed over into political action."
"Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing
their distance from the public than with reforming the system or
restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging
to the top of the pyramid."
"When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it's like you've
had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things."
"If we select the elites, we can un-select them. When it comes to
politics, we can support politicians who fit into the digital age and
are willing to compress the pyramid and dwell closer to the public."
Jen Kirby:
Trump delays more tariffs on China in hopes of a trade deal
breakthrough. Sarah Kliff:
Medicare-for-all: Rep. Pramila Jayapal's new bill, explained.
Related: Ryan Grim::
The special interests behind Rep. Pramila Jayapal's Medicare for All
bill are not the usual suspects. Paul Krugman:
Socialism and the self-made woman: "What Ivanka Trump doesn't know
about social mobility."
O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn't get much
better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business
strategy involves trading on her father's name. But let's go beyond the
personal here. We know a lot about upward mobility in different countries,
and the facts are not what Republicans want to hear. . . .
Look, Ms. Trump is surely right in asserting that most of us want
a country in which there is the potential for upward mobility. But the
things we need to do to ensure that we are that kind of country -- the
policies that are associated with high levels of upward mobility around
the world -- are exactly the things Republicans denounce as socialism.
Elie Mystal:
Running the Democratic primary through 'Trump Country' is the road to
defeat: "Yes, we're looking at you, Bernie Sanders." Basically says
don't waste your breath on the deplorables, or anyone else who lives
in parts where they're statistically significant -- in effect, arguing
that demography is destiny, and going even further than Clinton in
admitting that Democrats have nothing to offer people who aren't part
of their focus groups. Dismisses Sanders as "just the most prominent
white man in the race right now." Adds that: "Both Trump and Sanders
campaigns could be read as promising to put a white man 'back on top,'
where he always thinks he belongs." As if any differences between the
two pale in comparison to checking a couple of boxes on census forms.
Nomi Prins:
Survival of the richest: "All are equal, except those who aren't." Corey Robin:
Why has it taken us so long to see Trump's weakness? Robin blames
the "Historovox" (a word I hope never to hear of again):
Perhaps the answer lies in a new genre of journalism that forgoes the
pedestrian task of reporting the news in favor of explaining it through
the lens of academic research. Ensconced at Vox, FiveThirtyEight,
dedicated pages of the Washington Post and the New York
Times, and across Twitter, the explainers place great stock
in the authority of scholarship -- and in journalists who know how
to wield the authority of scholars. This genre first arose under the
roseate glow of Obama, reflecting the White House's warm embrace of
science and smarts. Now, in the age of Trump, it's less a happy
affirmation of wonks and geeks than an anxious cry of the Resistance.
Being smart, honoring research, favoring truth: These are the emblems
of the world Trump wants to destroy and that the explainers wish to
preserve. . . .
Short-term interests and partisan concerns still drive reporting
and commentary. But where the day's news once would have been narrated
as a series of events, the Historovox brings together those events in
a pseudo-academic frame that treats them as symptoms of deeper patterns
and long-term developments. Unconstrained by the protocols of academe
or journalism, but drawing on the authority of the first for the sake
of the second, the Historovox skims histories of the New Deal or rifles
through abstracts of meta-analysis found in JSTOR to push whatever the
latest line happens to be.
It's not hard to think of suspect examples -- indeed, most of the
efforts to sketch Trump into the long histories of fascism or populism
miss more than they discover, much like the efforts to psychoanalyze
Trump as a sociopath -- but everyone brings some framework to their
observations, and it's usually better to have one that's tested and
coherent, rather than just falling for whatever PR slant most tickles
your fancy. I, for one, have found Vox exceptionally useful since Trump
became president. They do a relatively good job of summarizing news and
putting it into a context that is historical and scientific, and their
political slant isn't unpalatable (not that I don't find bones to pick).
On the other hand, I've found The Nation (which should be closer
to my politics) to be nearly useless (except for Tom Engelhardt's
remarkable TomDispatch, and whatever Mike Konczal contributes). Jon Schwarz:
CNN hires Trump official who used same anti-press rhetoric as man who
sent bombs to CNN. Richard Silverstein: Both of these articles were occasioned
by Netanyahu's decision to bring the ultra-right Kahanist political movement
into his governing coalition:
John Sipher:
Putin's one weapon: The 'intelligence state': "Russia's leader has
restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era --
keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries." As noted,
the role of the secret police dates back to the Tsars. It's always been
justified by the presumed weakness of the nation and state, something
it tends to perpetuate. Emily Stewart:
Sen. Brian Schatz will introduce a new bill to tax stock trades and curb
high-frequency trading. Matt Taibbi:
This battle of billionaires was inevitable: "A surprise decision over
a Pentagon contract seems like the latest volley in a war between President
Trump and Jeff Bezos." Billionaires will always be jealous of one another,
but the main interest here is an open-ended contract to turn management of
the DOD's cloud computing over to a private contractor, under rules that
curiously exclude all competitors other than Amazon. Alexia Underwood:
Peter Wade:
Police who shot Stephon Clark will not be charged, District Attorney
announces. Mark Weisbrot:
Trump's other 'national emergency': Sanctions that kill Venezuelans:
"The humanitarian crisis will get rapidly worse if the most recent sanctions
continue." Li Zhou:
The Senate just confirmed a former coal lobbyist to lead the EPA:
"Three things to know about Andrew Wheeler."
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Weekend Roundup
When I started this exercise, I reassured myself that I would just go
through the motions, collecting a few notes that I may wish to refer back
to after the 2020 election. While I've written very little on it, I've
thought a lot more about my four-era synopsis of American history, and
I'm more convinced than ever that the fourth -- the one that started in
1980 with Ronald Reagan -- ends definitively with Donald Trump in 2020.
I doubt I'll ever manage to write that book, but it's coming together
pretty clearly in my mind. I'll resist the temptation to explain how
and why. But I will offer a couple of comments on how this affects the
Democratic presidential field. For starters, it is very important that
the Democrats nominate someone who is not closely tied to Reagan-era
Democratic politics, which means the Clintons, Obama, and Joe Biden.
Those politicians based their success on their ability to work with
Reagan-era constraint and tropes, and those have become liabilities.
It's time for a break, which could mean an older candidate with clear
history of resisting Clinton-Obama compromises (like Bernie Sanders)
or a younger candidate who's simply less compromised. Second point is
that Republicans have become so monolithically tied to Trump, while
Trump has become so polarizing, that no amount of "moderation" is
likely to gain votes in the "middle" of the electorate. On the other
hand, these days "moderation" is likely to be seen as lack of principles
and/or character. In this primary season I don't see any reason not
to go with whichever Democrat who comes up with the best platform.
Still, there is one trait I might prefer over a better platform,
which is dedication to advancing the whole party, and not just one
candidate or faction.
I don't intend to spend much time or space on candidates, but
I did note Bernie Sanders' joining the race below, a piece on his
foreign policy stance (which has more to do with the shortcomings
of other Democrats), as well as a couple of policy initiatives
from Elizabeth Warren -- who's been working hard to establish her
edge there. I've been running into a lot of incoherent spite and
resentment against Sanders, both before and since his announcement,
often from otherwise principled leftists, especially directed
against hypothetical "purists" who disdain other "progressives"
as not good enough. I'm far enough to the left that no one's ever
good enough, but you make do with what you can get. I sympathize
with
Steve M.'s tweet:
Everyone, pro and anti Bernie: Just grow the fuck up. He's in the
race. Vote for him, don't vote for him, let the process play out,
then fight like hell to enact whoever wins the nomination. STOP
DOING 2016 BATTLE REENACTMENTS.
Of course, if Hillary throws her hat in, all bets are off.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Jamelle Bouie:
Sanders has an advantage, and it's not about economics: "He has put
forward a foreign policy vision that pits democratic peoples everywhere
against illiberalism at home and abroad." I wish he was better still --
Laura blew up about some comments he made the other day on Venezuela,
but he's not as kneejerk reflexive as most Democrats, or as gullible
when someone pitches a war as humanitarian -- but he's closer to having
a framework for thinking about America's imperial posture than almost
anyone with a chance to do something about it. By far the biggest risk
Democrats are running is the chance they may (as Hillary was) be tarred
as the war party. Ted Galen Carpenter:
How NATO pushed the US Into the Libya fiasco: I think this was pretty
obvious at the time, although once the US intervened, as it did, the war
quickly became something all sides could blame on America -- particularly
as the US had a long history that had only grown more intense under Bush
and Obama of absent-minded intervention in Islamic nations. Obama later
said that he regretted not the intervention per se but not planning better
for the aftermath -- an indication of lack of desire or interest, not that
Bush's occupation of Iraq turned out any better. (Of course, the fiasco in
Iraq was also excused as poorly planned, but no one doubted the interest
and excitement of the Bremer period as Americans tried to refashion Iraq
in the image of, well, Texas.) One point that could be better explained
is that Europe (especially France and Italy) had long-standing commercial
ties to Libya, which America's anti-Qaddafi tantrums (at once high-handed,
capricious, arbitrary, and indifferent to consequences) had repeatedly
undermined. After NATO fell in line behind the US in Afghanistan and (for
the most part) Iraq, Europeans felt America owed them something, and that
turned out to be Libya. That all these cases proved disappointing should
prove that NATO itself was never the right vehicle for dealing with world
or regional problems. Ben Freeman:
US foreign policy is for sale: "Washington think tanks receive millions
of dollars from authoritarian governments to shape foreign policy in their
favor." Not just authoritarian governments, although you could argue that
the most obvious exception, Israel, qualifies. For that matter it seems
likely that many other nations (democracies as well as dictatorships) are
every bit as active in buying American foreign policy favors -- so much so
that singling out the "authoritarians" is just a rhetorical ploy. Original
link to
TomDispatch. By the way, in the latter, Tom Engelhardt quotes from
Stephen Walt's new book, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's
Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy:
[T]he contemporary foreign policy community has been characterized less
by competence and accountability and more by a set of pathologies that
have undermined its ability to set realistic goals and pursue them
effectively. To put it in the bluntest terms, instead of being a
disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public
and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable,
today's foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged
insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and
insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of
the policies they promote.
Although "good intentions" often fail, Walt is being overly generous
in accepting them at face value. Up to WWII, US foreign policy was almost
exclusively dictated by private interests -- mostly traders and financiers,
with an auxiliary of missionaries. WWII convinced American leaders that
they had a calling to lead and manage the world, so they came up with a
great myth of "good intentions," although those were soon shattered as
they embraced slogans like "better dead than red." Greg Grandin:
How the failure of our foreign wars fueled nativist fanaticism: "For
nearly two centuries, US politicians have channeled extremism outward.
But the frontier is gone, the empire is faltering, and the chickens are
coming home to roost." Adapted from Grandin's new book, The End of the
Myth: From the Frontier to the Border in the Mind of America.
Had the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq not gone so wrong, perhaps
George W. Bush might have been able to contain the growing racism within
his party's rank and file[1] by channeling it into his Middle East crusade,
the way Ronald Reagan broke up the most militant nativist vigilantes in
the 1980s by focusing their attention on Central America. For nearly two
centuries, from Andrew Jackson forward, the country's political leaders
enjoyed the benefit of being able to throw its restless and angry citizens --
of the kind who had begun mustering on the border in the year before 9/11 --
outward, into campaigns against Mexicans, Native Americans, Filipinos, and
Nicaraguans, among other enemies.
But the occupations did go wrong. Bush and his neoconservative advisers
had launched what has now become the most costly war in the nation's history,
on the heels of pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation's
history. They were following the precedent set by Reagan, who in the 1980s
slashed taxes even as he increased the military budget until deficits went
sky-high. Yet the news coming in from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere began
to suggest that Bush had created an epic disaster. Politicians and policy
intellectuals began to debate what is and isn't torture and to insist that,
whatever "enhanced interrogation" was, the United States had a right to do
it. Photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing US personnel cheerfully
taunting and torturing Iraqis circulated widely, followed by reports of
other forms of cruelty inflicted on prisoners by US troops. Many people
were coming to realize that the war was not just illegal in its conception
but deceptive in its justification, immoral in its execution, and corrupt
in its administration.
Every president from Reagan onward has raised the ethical stakes,
insisting that what they called "internationalism" -- be it murderous wars
in impoverished Third World countries or corporate trade treaties -- was
a moral necessity. But the disillusionment generated by Bush's war on
terrorism, the velocity with which events revealed the whole operation
to be a sham, was extraordinary -- as was the dissonance. The war,
especially that portion of it allegedly intended to bring democracy to
Iraq, was said to mark a new era of national purpose. And yet a coordinated
campaign of deceit, carried out with the complicity of reporters working
for the country's most respected news sources, had to be waged to ensure
public support. The toppling of Saddam Hussein was predicted to be a
"cakewalk," and US soldiers, according to Vice President Dick Cheney,
would "be greeted as liberators." But Cheney still insisted that he needed
to put in place a global network of secret torture sites in order to win
the War on Terror.
As thousands died and billions went missing, the vanities behind not
just the war but the entire post-Cold War expansionist project came to
a crashing end. . . .
War revanchism usually takes place after conflicts end -- the Ku Klux
Klan after World War I, for example, or the radicalization of white
supremacism after Vietnam.[2] Now, though, it took shape while the war
was still going on.[3] And border paramilitarism began to pull in not
only soldiers who had returned from the war but the veterans of older
conflicts.
Notes: [1] Of course, "channeling" racism wasn't something Bush II
worried about, after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I had built their winning
presidential campaigns by cultivating it. It was by then part of the
Republican brand. [2] What about the Red Scares
following both World Wars? Even wars that were definitely won seem to
have left a hunger for more, starting with the search for scapegoats.
[3] Or should we say, the war abroad dragged on even after most Americans
lost interest in or commitment to it? Alex Isenstadt:
Trump rolls out massive corporate-style campaign structure for 2020.
Sarah Kliff:
Elizabeth Warren's universal child care plan, extended: More evidence
that Warren is running away from the pack in producing serious thinking
about and proposals for policy. For another, see: German Lopez:
Elizabeth Warren's ambitious plan to fight the opioid epidemic,
explained. Natasha Korecki:
'Sustain and ongoing' disinformation assault targets Dem presidential
candidates: "A coordinated barrage of social media attacks suggests
the involvement of foreign state actors." I bet not just those scary
foreign state names but PACs and slush funds all over the world, any
outfit with a cross to bear or an interest to push. Anna North:
The Trump administration is finalizing plans to strip funding from Planned
Parenthood. John Pilger:
The war on Venezuela is built on lies. Also related:
Timothy M Gill:
Why is the Venezuelan government rejecting US food supplies?
We can surely debate the cruelty of Maduro's domestic policies and his
inability and unwillingness to seriously combat the economic crisis,
perhaps in an effort to benefit his cronies. Yet, Maduro is not incorrect
about the U.S.'s disingenuous behavior.
At the same time that the U.S. is portraying itself as a literary
protagonist with its supplies situated on the Colombia-Venezuela border,
its policies are intensifying hardships for Venezuelan citizens. If it
truly wanted to help Venezuelans, it could work through international
and multilateral institutions to send aid to Venezuela, push for dialogue,
and take some options off the table, namely military intervention.
Above all, the U.S. is currently damaging the Venezuelan economy with
its sanctions, and its supplies on the border will do very little to solve
the crisis writ large. If sanctions haven't felled governments in Iran or
Syria, to name just two examples, it doesn't seem likely that they will
fall the Maduro government any time soon. They'll only perpetuate suffering
and ultimately generate acrimony towards the country.
The US has put this kind of pressure on nations before, imposing huge
popular hardships as punishment for the government's failure to surrender
to American interests. Crippling sanctions failed to break North Korea
and Cuba. Iraq held out until the US invaded, then resisted until American
troops withdrew. Syria descended into a brutal civil war. The US is on a
path of goading Maduro into becoming the sort of brutal dictator that
Assad became. One might cite Nicaragua as the exception, where the
Sandinista regime relinquished power to US cronies, for what little
good it did them. Aaron Rupar:
Stephanie Savell:
US counterterrorism missions across the planet: "Now in 80 countries,
it couldn't be more global." See the
map. Tim Shorrock:
Why are Democrats trying to torpedo the Korea peace talks? That's a
good question. You'd think that Democrats would realize by now that the
conflicts created and exacerbated by America's global military posture
undermine both our own security and any prospects for achieving any of
their domestic political goals.
"Democrats should support diplomacy, and remember the most important
president in this process is Moon Jae-in, not Donald Trump," Martin
said. "Moon's persistent leadership toward reconciliation and diplomacy
with North Korea represents the fervent desire of the Korean and
Korean-American people for peace. Members of Congress from both parties
should understand that and support it, skepticism about Trump and Kim
notwithstanding."
Amanda Sperber:
Inside the secretive US air campaign in Somalia: "Since Trump took
office, figuring out whom the US is killing and why has become nearly
impossible." Emily Stewart:
Matt Taibbi:
Thomas Friedman is right: Pie doesn't grow on trees. Taibbi is the
reigning champ of parsing Friedman's blabber, but instead of translating
his pie metaphors into English, Taibbi is so overwhelmed by the moment
he just transcribes them into page-straddling German nouns. The Friedman
piece in question:
Is America becoming a four-party state? I would start by sketching
this out as a 2x2 chart, labeling the vertical columns Republicans and
Democrats. The top row for leaders of both parties who think that all
you need is growth (which mostly means pandering to big business); the
bottom row for the resentful masses who feel they haven't been getting
their fair share of all that growth. I imagine this less as four squares
than as a capital-A. The top row is narrowed, the partisan differences
marginal, while the bottom row diverges as to who to blame. Friedman
pines for the good old days when all elites of both parties had to do
was compete with each other to better serve the rich, when no one on
either side stooped to pandering to the masses.
Bernie enters the 2020 race with defiant anti-Trump rhetoric.
Does Washington know the difference between dissent and disinformation?
Margaret Talbot:
Revisiting the American Nazi supporters of "A Night at the Garden":
A seven-minute documentary film nominated for an Oscar, based on a 1939
pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and its relevance today. Jeffrey Toobin:
Roger Stone's and Jerome Corsi's time in the barrel: "Why the mismatched
operatives matter to Trump -- and to the Mueller investigation." Alex Ward:
Sean Wilentz:
Presumed Guilty: A book review of Ken Starr: Contempt: A Memoir
of the Clinton Investigation, a reminder of the days when so-called
Independent Investigators really knew how to run a witch hunt. Perhaps
the new piece of information here is the extreme contempt that Starr
and his minions, including Brett Kavanaugh, held for Hillary Clinton. Li Zhou:
The House will vote Tuesday on blocking Trump's national emergency.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Another weekly batch of links and comments. At some point I started
shunting pieces on Trump's "state of emergency" declaration to the end,
but a few are scattered in the main list. Also wound up adding more
"related" links under first-found stories. More time might let me sort
out a better pecking order. But at this point I'm mostly going through
the motions, to establish a record for possible later review. Book
idea is still germinating. Last couple weeks have been especially
trying for me, and this coming one looks likely to be worse.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
The real national emergency is Trump's incompetence.
Today's national emergency declaration from Donald Trump is an obvious
fraud, detectable if nothing else by the reality that various White House
and congressional officials have been teasing it as a possibility for
months. In a real emergency, you act fast.
In a fake emergency, you act when you've decided the political timing
is right as part of a larger ass-covering move because you need to back
down from an ill-advised congressional fight that, itself, followed from
an ill-advised campaign promise. . . .
First the shutdown and now the "emergency" both stem from the basic fact
that Trump will neither admit his whole wall spiel was BS nor decide to
act like someone who genuinely wants a wall and make a deal to get it.
Instead, a lot of people's time and money is now going to be wasted on
litigation while money is taken away from duly authorized programs and
sent instead to a construction project nobody really wants. This is not
the worst thing anyone has ever done in American politics -- it's not
even close to being the worst thing Trump has ever done -- but it's
arguably the most absurd.
And it raises, once again, the fundamental question about Trump. When
you have a president who can't handle relatively banal problems like a
disagreement over a $5 billion appropriation for a pet project, what's
going to happen to us when a real crisis hits?
California high-speed rail and the American infrastructure tragedy,
explained.
New York is better off without Amazon's HQ2: "Without significant
reform of land use, an influx of tech jobs would've hurt the city ore
than helped it."
The real stakes in the 2020 primary aren't about legislation:
"Foreign policy, personnel, priorities, regulation, and economic
management matter most."
The case for hiring more police officers.
The controversy over Ilhan Omar and AIPAC money, explained.
Related: Richard Silverstein:
Israel lobby seeks to muzzle Ilhan Omar, sabotage democratic resurgence.
Zach Beauchamp:
The fight between Ilhan Omar and Elliott Abrams, Trump's Venezuela envoy,
explained: "It revealed the real divides in American foreign policy."
One should add: it was notable because those divides are scarcely ever
talked about in Washington. After reviewing Abrams' criminal history,
and sorting the "divide" into three baskets:
These are obviously stylized differences, with individual advocates in
these debates taking more nuanced views. But which of these three visions
you're closest too, broadly, shapes the way you think about and approach
various questions in American foreign policy. If you think the United
States is typically a force for good in the world, you tend to be more
comfortable with American intervention in foreign conflicts. If you
think America is a meddling imperialist power, not so much.
The debate between Abrams and Omar is, really, a debate about these
visions. But it's also a debate about a very real policy question
currently facing the US: Should the US militarily intervene -- or
intervene at all, in any way, even diplomatically -- in Venezuela?
This isn't quite right. The fact is that the US government has
historically (over more than 100 years), including (but not limited
to) landing troops in the country, and it has always done so in favor
of local elites aligned with American business interests. Indeed, it
is pretty clear that the US has repeatedly attempted to overthrow
the democratically elected Chavez and Maduro governments, always
in support of the same elites. Clearly, US backing for Guaidó is
just one more step in the neverending effort to seize Venezuela's
government and turn it against the Venezuelan people.
One can imagine a left government in America having a very different
foreign policy, one that would break with centuries of past exploits
and stop opposing the aspirations of people around the world to take
democratic power and implement policies that would provide for fair
and equitable distribution of each nation's wealth, regardless of its
impact on American business interests. However, there's little chance
of that happening, even if some relatively left-leaning Democrat were
to win the presidency in 2020. Short of that, the most practicable
foreign policy option is to resist US intervention, even in cases
where one is tempted to argue that intervention would be some kind
of humanitarian venture -- of course, the fact that "humanitarian
intervention" has been cited repeatedly and has accumulated a totally
dismal track record makes it that much easier to dismiss the canard
out of hand. (Not that it isn't a big part of the Trump case for
intervening in Venezuela.) Jedediah Britton-Purdy:
The Green New Deal is what realistic environmental policy looks like.
Alexia Fernández Campbell:
A record number of US workers went on strike in 2018: "Working-class
Americans haven't been this fed up with their employers since the 1980s."
Not sure how they're qualifying "record": chart looks like since 1986,
but there were higher totals literally every year from 1947-83. Still,
last year towers over every year 2001-17. Gaby Del Valle:
Amazon scrapped its New York City plans. Some residents are elated -- others
are disappointed. E.g., "Real estate developers who had bet that Amazon's
presence in Long Island City would drive up rents were stunned." Still,
nearly every other city in America is groveling at Amazon's feet, because
it's easy to see the benefits of a new development (even if government
winds up kicking back all of its taxes to the company), and hard to see
the broader effects (as Yglesias does in the article above). Still, there
is another story yet to be told: why does Amazon think they're going to
need all those extra "headquarters" workers? What's the business model
there? You know there must be one, and it must involve capturing a lot
of what's currently other companies' business.
Related: Jeremiah Moss:
A dispatch from the anti-Amazon victory party; Derek Thompson:
Amazon got exactly what it deserved -- and so did New York.
From Thompson:
The larger truth is that corporate subsidies, including the $3 billion
package offered to Amazon, are often pernicious and usually pointless.
Studies show that these sorts of measures "have no discernible impact
on firm expansion, measured by job creation." Yet every year, local
governments spend more than $90 billion to move headquarters and
factories between states, a wasteful zero-sum exercise whose cost is
more than the federal government spends on affordable housing, education,
or infrastructure. In the most garish example of corporate-welfare
absurdity, Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing company, solicited up
to $4 billion in subsidies from Wisconsin in exchange for a factory
and tens of thousands of workers. Now it's an open question whether
that facility will ever get built.
But even the less garish examples are galling. New York City doesn't
have an employment problem; it has a housing-affordability problem.
Michelle Goldberg:
Donald Trump is President and anything is possible: This sounds
a lot like my book outline:
In the resulting atmosphere of crisis and upheaval, a new coalition
can bring a new reconstructive president to power. When that happens,
Skowronek wrote, governing priorities are "durably recast," and a
"corresponding set of legitimating ideas becomes the new common sense."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a reconstructive president. So was Ronald
Reagan. The assumptions of New Deal liberalism governed American politics
from 1932 to 1980. The assumptions of the conservative movement have
dominated thereafter, though perhaps not for much longer.
Viewed through this schema, Donald Trump's presidency looks more like
the end of a cycle than the end of the Republic. Throughout the 2016
presidential campaign and the early months of the Trump administration,
the constitutional law professors Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson
exchanged letters arguing about the durability of our system; the
letters will be published this spring as a book, "Democracy and
Dysfunction." Balkin is the more sanguine of the two, in part because
he sees Trump fitting into Skowronek's model.
Trump's presidency, wrote Balkin, could be what Skowronek called
"disjunctive," meaning one "in which a president allied with an aging
political regime promises to restore its dominance and former greatness,
is unable to keep all of the elements of his coalition together, and as
a result presides over the regime's dissolution."
The latter line reminds me of James Buchanan, who remains as Trump's
only serious rival for "worst president ever." Sean Illing:
Umair Irfan:
Jen Kirby:
Andy Kroll:
How Trump's swamp works now. Jill Lepore:
Eugene V Debs and the endurance of Socialism. Dara Lind:
4 winners and 4 losers from the funding bill and emergency declaration:
Winners: federal employees; 2020 Democrats; immigration detention;
Congressional oversight. Losers: the "power of the purse"; Mitch McConnell;
"Build the wall"; federal contractors. PR Lockhart:
Colin Kaepernick's collusion grievance against the NFL, explained.
Related: Jemele Hill:
Kaepernick Won. The NFL Lost. German Lopez:
Alec MacGillis and ProPublica:
The original underclass: "Poor white Americans' current crisis shouldn't
have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has." Dylan Matthews:
Bill and Melinda Gates and the problem of the "good billionaire":
Of course, nothing here on how Gates got all that money. Andrew G McCabe:
Every day is a new low in Trump's White House: From the Trump-fired
former deputy director of the FBI, who now has a book, The Threat:
How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump: "The
president steps over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he encounters
them. Everyone in America saw it when he fired my boss. But I saw it
firsthand time and again." Kelsey Piper:
Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first.
David Roberts:
A California coalition is tackling one of the hardest, unsexiest parts of
climate policy: "Decarbonizing buildings: it's tedious, but oh so
necessary." Dylan Scott:
Utah Republicans have officially blocked their state's voter-approved
Medicaid expansion. Richard Silverstein:
Israel elections: the vultures are circling Netanyahu: Election is
on April 9. Open question is whether Netanyahu will be indicted before
then, and if so, how toxic that will make him. Jordan Smith:
What Brett Kavanaugh's dishonest anti-abortion dissent reveals about his
Supreme Court agenda. Emily Stewart:
David Thompson:
Alex Ward:
The US held a global summit to isolate Iran. America isolated itself
instead. Related: Kathy Gilsinan:
The Trump Administration can't get a united front against Iran;
Fred Kaplan:
The Trump Administration looks more isolated and incompetent than ever at
this week's anti-Iran conference;
Trita Parsi:
Warsaw summit was a failure for Trump -- but a win for Netanyahu;
Richard Silverstein:
Netanyahu calls on Arab states to join war against Iran.
Some more links on the "emergency" declaration:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Nothing much on Korea this week, other than
Trump announces second Kim summit will be in Hanoi, Vietnam, a few
weeks out (Feb. 27-28). The
Wichita Peace Center was pleased
to host a couple of events last week when Professor
Nan Kim from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, author of
Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the
Divide (2016), an activist in
Women Cross DMZ
(here on
Twitter). I expect
we'll be seeing a lot of speculation and spin on Korea over the next
few weeks, especially from neocons so enamored with perpetual war --
but also from Democrats hoping to score cheap points against Trump.
I've written a fair amount about Korea over the years. I won't try
to recapitulate here, but here's a bit from a letter I wrote last
year, with links to various key writings:
I wrote up some further comments on the Korea situation in the intro
to my
August 26, 2018 Weekend Roundup blog post.
I was born in October, 1950, the same week as the Chinese entry, a
date which marked the maximal US advance in the peninsula. I wrote
several pages about this in a memoir. I've written a fair amount about
Korea over the years -- mostly when US presidents threatened to blow
it up. For instance:
Many lesser references, including virtually every month since March 2017.
I've also been known to make a pretty decent kimchi, and a couple dozen other
Korean dishes.
On nuclear weapons, I wrote a fairly substantial
post on Aug. 6, 2005,
another on Aug. 21,
2015.
I've read Rhodes' four books on nuclear weapons, plus quite a bit more.
I believe that Kurlansky's
2nd point is generally correct
["Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use
them"], but nuclear weapons are something of an exception: most politicians,
even ones as ill-disposed toward peace as Kennedy and Krushchev, seem to
have drawn a line there, so I tend not to worry as much as most of us
about proliferation.
One thing I hadn't thought much about until Saturday was the economic
problem of unifying Korea. I was aware of the German "model" -- and thought
at the time that people were following a lot of bad ideas (e.g., totally
shuttering the East German auto industry because their cars weren't good
enough to sell in the West). But I didn't follow it much later -- I do
know more about the economic failures in Russia, especially in the 1990s,
when as David Satter put it, "[Russia's reformers] assumed that the initial
accumulation of capital in a market economy is almost always criminal, and,
as they were resolutely procapitalist, they found it difficult to be
strongly anticrime. . . . The combination of social darwinism, economic
determinism, and a tolerant attitude toward crime prepared the young
reformers to carry out a frontal attack on the structures of the Soviet
system without public support or a framework of law." (Quote in my
17/04 notebook, referring back to
07/09.)
Anyhow, I now think the utter impossibility of unifying the two Korean
economies is an important point -- one of several that Americans don't
seem to have a clue about.
I'll add one comment here. One thing I was struck by in Trump's State
of the Union address was this:
On Friday, it was announced that we added another 304,000 jobs last month
alone -- almost double what was expected. An economic miracle is taking
place in the United States -- and the only thing that can stop it are
foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations.
If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war
and investigation. It just doesn't work that way!
My bold. Of course, the point everyone noticed was his plea that for
the good of the country (i.e., Trump) Democrats must give up their efforts
to investigate (e.g., Trump, for possible crimes or other embarrassments).
Of course, he had no hope of getting his way there, even if his intent was
truly threatening -- e.g., that if the Democrats investigated him, he might
start a "wag the dog" war as a diversion, hoping the people would blame
the Democrats. Still, I think the quote does show that when his personal
financial interests aren't slanted otherwise, Trump is inclined to favor
peace. The saber-rattling over Iran is clearly a case where the corrupt
money (from Israel and the Saudis) is able to make Trump more belligerent.
Venezuela is another case where Trump's corrupt influences may lead to
war. But Korea is one case where the major influencers -- even if you
discount Russia and China -- are pushing Trump toward war, so it offers
a rare opportunity to claim success at achieving peace. Granted, the
neocons and the defense industry don't like it, but they may be just
as happy to pivot to higher budget, lower risk "threats" like Russia
and China. That's one of several reason to be cautiously optimistic
that Trump might be able to deliver a peaceful outcome. On the other
hand, I think that Democrats need to be very cautious, lest Trump be
able to make them out to be dangerous, war-thirsty provocateurs. I
still believe that a major reason Trump beat Clinton in 2016 was that
she came off as the more belligerent (e.g., her claims to superiority
in "the commander-in-chief test").
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Andrew Belonsky:
Dear Howard Schultz, you don't understand the American Dream: "The
phrase was coined by a banker-turned-Pulitzer prize-winning historian
[James Truslow Adams] who believed in the redistribution of wealth and
thought culture was more important than money." For another 'Dear Howard"
piece, see: Michael Tomasky:
Howard Schultz is wrong about 'both sides.' It's Republicans who ruined
the country. Sarah Churchwell:
America's original identity politics: Long piece by the author of the
book, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and
"the American Dream" (2018). I quickly grow bored of talk of identity
politics, but can draw the point that when Mark Lilla argued for a return
to "pre-identity liberalism," he would have had trouble finding such a
time in the past. Emily Cooke:
The brutal economy of cleaning other people's messes, for $9 an hour:
Review of Stephanie Land's book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's
Will to Survive. Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote about house
cleaning in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001).
I remember reading a book along these same lines a bit earlier -- don't
recall the title or author, too early to show up in my reading lists. I
don't recall it as being quite this grim, but I wouldn't be surprised to
find working conditions have deteriorated. I also read Sarah Smarsh's
recent memoir, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke
in the Richest Country on Earth, which is about how hard it is to
break out of the traps Stephanie Land fell into. Nicholas Fandos:
Asked to stop investigations, House digs in. Franklin Foer:
Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating America: "When the USSR
collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist
values -- and lost." Sentence would make more sense if you dropped the
adjective "democratic," as indeed most American policy-makers had no
qualms about doing. It would actually be more accurate to say that
Russian-style kleptocracy is simply the adoption of American-style
capitalism without the countervailing powers that keep its excesses
in check. As such, Russia has become a model for the US right as they
seek to enshrine the profit motive as the only force that matters in
American policy. [By the way, I was thinking of the Satter quote in
the introduction above here, but when I wrote this not planning on
looking it up.] That we don't think of kleptocracy as American owes
much to tradition:
America's fear of kleptocracy goes back to its founding. . . . The perils
of corruption were an obsession of the Founders. In the summer of 1787,
James Madison mentioned corruption in his notebook 54 times. To read the
transcripts of the various constitutional conventions is to see just how
much that generation worried about the moral quality of public behavior --
and how much it wanted to create a system that defined corruption more
expansively than the French or British systems had, and that fostered a
political culture with higher ethical ambitions.
In her important history, Corruption in America, Zephyr Teachout,
a legal scholar and liberal activist, argues that during the country's first
200 years, courts maintained the Founders' vigilance against corruption. For
a good chunk of American history, a number of states criminalized lobbying
in many forms, out of a sense that a loosening of standards would trigger
a race to the bottom. That near-phobia now looks quaint, and also prescient.
The political culture, the legal culture, the banking culture -- so much of
the culture of the self-congratulatory meritocratic elite -- have long since
abandoned such prudish ways.
Samuel G Freedman:
In revering Trump, the religious right has laid bare its hypocrisy:
Not that it matters: hypocrisy is as American as violence and apple pie.
Sure, I (for one) was turned off evangelical christianity by hypocrisy,
but anyone who might follow my lead must have noticed the problem long
before Trump. The fact is that hypocrisy is a bedrock faith: the whole
point is that it doesn't matter what you do, only that you say the right
things in public. And that's a litmus test that even someone as flawed
and compromised as Trump can pass. This actually is the polar opposite
of Calvinism, which maintained that one's fate was determined by works
and God's grace, irrespective of public piety. Born-again christianity
is a religion fashioned to appeal to lazy sinners, folk constantly in
need of forgiveness. Of course, Trump is their hero. Masha Gessen:
How Trump's State of the Union guests embodied his politics of fear and
dread. Umair Irfan:
Arnold Isaacs:
A cruel war on immigrants. Quinta Jurecic:
A confederacy of grift: "The subjects of Robert Mueller's investigation
are cashing in." Allegra Kirkland/Josh Kovensky:
Why Trump's inauguration was so sleazy, even for Washington. Sarah Kliff:
What to expect when you're expecting to eliminate private
insurance. Paul Krugman:
Robert Malley:
Lachlan Markay/Asawin Suebsaeng/Maxwell Tani:
Private eyes detail inner workings of National Enquirer 'blackmail'
machine: a story bigger than Jeff Bezos' penis. More: Allyson
Chiu/Kayla Epstein:
Ronan Farrow says he also faced 'blackmail efforts from AMI' for reporting
on the National Enquirer, Trump. Also: Molly Olmstead:
The National Enquirer started doing shady things long before this Jeff
Bezos scandal. George Monbiot:
Why disaster capitalists are praying for a no-deal Brexit. Anna North:
The Supreme Court has blocked a Louisiana abortion law -- for now. Richard Parker:
Why the wall will never rise: For one thing, buying up border land
is very expensive and time-consuming. Mike Pesca:
The Green New Deal will never work: I haven't (and probably can't)
read this closely enough to decide whether I agree, let alone whether
Pesca actually believes what he's written. I do share his skepticism
about aiming for 100% of pretty much anything. I'm not sure that 100%
renewable energy is even desirable much less practical, but I am sure
that the direction the Green New Deal proposes is the right one, and
I'm not seriously worried about whether the last few steps will be
worth the trouble. Similarly, it may be impossible to achieve complete
equality, but we can do much better than now, and right now we'd be
much better off moving in that direction.
Pesca makes an offhand remark: "Similarly, there is a jealousy of
the detail-free triumphs of the right as expressed by
Shadi Hamid. It looks like Hamid's another guy who makes
his living as a confusing contrarian; e.g.:
Dylan Roberts:
There's now an official Green New Deal. Here's what's in it.
The Green New Deal, explained [updated]. By the way, this seems to be
a Trump tweet:
I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with
their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called "Carbon
Footprint" to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas
& the Military - even if no other country would do the same.
Brilliant!
Most likely he thinks he's being sarcastic, but if you filter out
the nonsense it reads as an endorsement. When I tried to cut/paste,
Twitter displayed a long thread of replies, most of which were truly
dumb, many offensive and demeaning. I take it that's a cross section
of the Twitterverse -- something I'm normally spared because I only
follow a couple dozen generally sane feeds.
For a better example of sarcasm, consider Michael Musto's response
to a Trump tweet with a picture of him, Melania, and Baron, and the
caption: "Name a better family, i'll wait": Musto's reply: "I'll start:
Manson." Aaron Rupar:
Trump has no clue how to strike a deal with Dems. His State of the Union
speech proved it. Dylan Scott:
Matt Taibbi:
Chris Christie's Agonizing New Memoir: "The inside story of the man who
welcomed Donald Trump into the political mainstream and got nothing in
return."
But Christie -- who releases his book amid "news" he "won't rule out" a
presidential run in 2024 -- can't give up the dream of being taken seriously.
So Let Me Finish ends up being a furious allegory about the perils
of not being as smart as you think you are.
Christie was once an insider favorite to succeed Barack Obama as president.
He was the Beltway's idea of a "crossover" political star, i.e. mean enough
to parallel park over a homeless person, but maybe able to name three good
movies. . . .
He was probably headed to the White House -- until his staff was caught
intentionally causing traffic jams on the George Washington bridge. . . .
"Bridgegate" instantly changed Christie's rep, from an asshole with a
future to just an asshole.
The first half of Let Me Finish shows Christie boasting about
what a mean, uncompromising, double-dealing negotiator he is. He spends
the second part, about Trump, complaining about being the victim of such
a person.
Kaitlyn Tiffany:
That freezer is watching you: "The Microsoft-backed Cooler Screens is
testing targeted ads in pharmacy frozen food aisles." There are lots of
things wrong with America these days, but advertising is truly the bane
of our existence.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Weekend Roundup
We watched Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 last night. Here's
a review by
Owen Gleiberman, which hits most of the key points. Seems to me he
should have cut it into two separate movies: one on Trump (with more
coverage of what he did after taking office), the other on the Flint
water crisis (rather than just using his home town as his pet way of
contextualizing world events). The Flint story winds up turning Obama
into the goat (if not the villain, still Rick Snyder), which would
have been more effective without Trump all over the map.
The Trump parts are more interesting. Moore treats Trump's presidential
run as a publicity stunt -- as he's done before, but this time he went
through with it only because NBC fired him for racist comments, only to
find his fan's adoration in his early rallies. His decimation of his
Republican opponents, then of Hillary Clinton, is a piece of story that
Moore could open some eyes on, in large part because Moore doesn't flinch
when Trump's absurdity and cruelty come simultaneously into focus. Indeed,
his whole sequence of Trump and Ivanka is extremely creepy. However, after
the election, instead of delving into the profound corruption and malign
neglect that has been so evident, he settles for a long lament on the end
of democracy and the rise of fascism. He can be creepy there, too, as with
the Trump voiceover of stock Hitler/Third Reich newsreel footage, with
side glances at Putin and Duterte and commentary by Timothy Snyder. I
don't see that as necessarily unfair -- in fact, when I first noticed
the Nazi rallies I expected a segue to Fred Trump in the 1930s at Madison
Square Garden -- but it's far from the most important or enlightening
thing a filmmaker like Moore could come up with.
One story I don't delve into below is the flap over Virginia Governor
Ralph Northam, something involving racist photos in his college yearbook,
which has elicited howls of indignation and calls for his resignation from
many Democrats and leftists -- Elizabeth Warren and Barbara Ehrenreich are
two names that popped up in my twitter feed (full disclosure: I follow
Ehrenreich but not Warren or any other office-holders). I suppose if I
knew more details I might think differently, but my first reaction is that
I find these calls deeply troubling, both on practical grounds and because
they display an arrogant self-righteousness I find unbecoming. Sooner or
later, Democrats need to learn to forgive themselves -- especially those
who show some capacity to learn from their mistakes. I understand that
Northam is no great shakes as a Democrat, but I'd rather see him become
a better one (if that's possible).
On the other hand, I don't want to turn this into a diatribe against
"purism" -- if real leftists (like Ehrenreich) insist on holding folks
to higher standards, God bless them.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Bernie Sanders's new plan to supercharge the estate tax, explained:
I'm more partial to this idea than I am to
Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, because it's hard to value
assets until they're liquidated, and property taxes tend to force people
to liquidate assets at inopportune times. On the other hand, death seems
to be the perfect time to force liquidation. I also like the idea of
progressive brackets -- indeed, I'd like to see that applied to other
income taxes, such as capital gains and corporate earnings. When the
Democrats get around to reversing the Trump tax cut, they might keep --
or even slightly lower -- the reduced rate for small/less-profitable
companies while increasing the rate as profits increase. With capital
gains and other forms of unearned income -- which could include gifts
and estates -- I'd tax progressively based on lifetime earnings, so
people get a break early on to build up savings while limiting the
accumulation of the very rich. But within the current estate tax
framework, the only problem I see with Sanders' proposal is that the
top marginal rates should be higher. We also need to take a good look
at foundations, which for over a century now have been created mostly
to evade estate taxes. Some do some good, but many don't, and none
should be allowed to perpetuate themselves indefinitely.
That time Donald Trump proposed a 14.5 percent wealth tax.
Lindsey Graham floats a dangerously irresponsible escalation of the slat
wars.
New RNC poll spun as good news for Trump is actually full of terrible news
for Trump
Justice Democrats, the group aiming to create many Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes,
explained. Zach Beauchamp:
Stacey Abrams's new essay on identity politics reveals why she's a
rising star: Linking to this only because I may have to write
something about the tangle of "identity politics" in America today.
I figure identity is at best a heuristic, an easy (perhaps too easy)
way of telling who's for or against your interests. Also, Abrams is
right that much of what we recognize as "identity politics" is due
to stereotyping and discrimination. However:
As a result, Abrams argues, minority groups face two choices: either
ignore their own oppression or engage in some form of so-called
identity politics. Asking minorities to eschew identity politics
is tantamount to asking them to ignore their own oppression. . . .
In Abrams's view, critics like Fukuyama are functionally telling
people like her to sit down and shut up.
Abrams also finds the alleged alternative, a class-focused
politics, unpersuasive. She points to the Democratic party's
nationwide victories in 2018 as evidence that candidates can run
on identity issues and win (although Abrams herself did not).
Alexia Fernández Campbell:
Job growth in January was phenomenal. Wage growth was pathetic. James Carroll:
Can Elizabeth Warren and Adam Smith, defying Trump, persuade Americans to
get serious about nuclear-arms control? This Smith is in the House
(D-VA), co-sponsor with Warren of a bill that thinks about the unthinkable,
and remoes the most obvious of those "options on the table," declaring:
"It is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first."
Christina Cauterucci:
It's both difficult and incredibly important to make the case for
third-trimester abortions. Jane Coaston:
The remarkably selective outrage on the right about Roger Stone's arrest.
For a different perspective on the arrest, see Rachel Marshall:
Roger Stone shows how much better it is to get arrested when you're rich.
Juan Cole:
Top 10 ways that the United States is the most corrupt country in the
world. David Enrich/Jesse Drucker/Ben Protess:
Trump sought a loan during the 2016 campaign. Deutsche Bank said no.
Masha Gessen:
The Trump-Russia investigation and the mafia state. Greg Grandin:
William Hartung/Mandy Smithberger:
The Pentagon's revolving door spins faster: E.g., Boeing's Patrick
Shanahan, Trump's new acting secretary of defense. Michael Hudson:
Trump's brilliant strategy to dismember US dollar hegemony: Actually,
this ranges much further, and "brilliant" is ironic, as only his neocon
bumbling and short-sighted "America first" accelerate the collapse. The
administration's plot to take over Venezuela looms large. CounterPunch
has several more pieces related to Venezuela worth citing here (the fact
that the publisher touts its "fearless muckraking" allows a critical
clarity the mainstream lacks in such matters; I'll also include
Grayzone here):
Fred Kaplan:
Lack of intelligence: "Trump's latest attacks on his own intelligence
agencies are galling, even by his standards." Actually, I'd say this is
a case where both parties are guilty of the same thing: selecting "facts"
to fit their own political interests. Trump may do this less artfully,
not least because he rarely bothers to even collect "facts," but the
security heads have always pursued their own objectives.
Military intervention in Venezuela would be a catastrophe.
Paul Krugman:
Attack of the fanatical centrists: E.g., Howard Schultz, Michael
Bloomberg, people whose wealth and ego makes them think they're the
center of the world, when in fact they are extreme fringe.
The Venezuela calumny: "If screaming about a failing petrostate is
all you have, you've lost the argument." Still, not so much about
Venezuela, other than to point out the ridiculousness of thinking
you can reject more egalitarian American reformists by identifying
them with Chavez and Maduro.
Elizabeth Warren does Teddy Roosevelt: "Taxing the superrich is
an idea whose time has come -- again."
John Nichols:
Democrats need to make getting rid of the electoral college a top priority:
No, they don't. Sure, it's unfair, but so are lots of things -- like the
humongous deviation from "one person, one vote" that is the US Senate --
but it would take a constitutional amendment, and given that Republicans
are 4-0 in cases where the electoral college differed from the popular vote
(the two recent cases you remember, and two in the 19th century when voter
suppression allowed Democrats to run up big "popular" margins in the South),
and given that Republicans don't care much for democracy in the first place,
they're not going to cooperate. In fact, what it would probably take is a
constitutional convention, which would be more likely to make the situation
worse than better. The priority for Democrats should be winning elections
by such huge margins that structural iniquities don't matter. A good start
there would be to make sure that everyone can vote, and that everyone has
a party worth voting for. Nichols, by the way, writes about five articles
like this every week, and while his heart is usually in the right place,
most of them are as half-assed as this one.
Daniel Politi:
Ann Coulter on believing Trump's wall promises: "OK, I'm a very stupid
girl".
Andrew Prokop:
Jerome Corsi's claims about Roger Stone, WikiLeaks, and the Access Hollywood
tape, explained. For more on Corsi, see the
deeper dive into his history that Jane Coaston and Prokop wrote last
year.
Brian Resnick:
An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think: Interview
with psychologist David Dunning.
Jill Richardson:
Another billionaire presidential candidate who doesn't get it: Howard
Schultz, although this much is true about all of them:
We need a government that understands the lives and struggles of ordinary
Americans and can craft policies to help them. Billionaires generally won't,
regardless of their intentions, because it's human nature to be generally
clueless about those with less privilege than you.
David Roberts:
These governors are showing what happens when you campaign on climate
action and win: "There's a flurry of green political news at the
state level."
Corey Robin:
The plight of the political convert: On Derek Black and Max Boot,
who recently moved from right to left, and their antecedents.
Daid Rohde:
Geoffrey Skelley:
Almost half of voters are dead set against voting for Trump.
Jamil Smith:
Mitch McConnell, enemy of the vote.
Emily Stewart:
Matt Taibbi:
The great Middle East head-fake: Sixty-eight Senators, including 22
Democrats, voted for a resolution opposing Trump's spastic gestures to
withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. But before you get too riled
up about the "bipartisan vote," note: "Every Senate Democrat who's even
rumored to be running for president voted nay."
The constitutional idea that Congress does the declaring of wars, while
presidents only command them, is designed to give voters extra input on
this most crucial of decisions, i.e. when we're going to risk American
lives (to say nothing of foreign ones).
But Congress has been abdicating that responsibility for a while now.
Two successive presidents made a joke of it, expanding limited authorization
to go after 9/11 terrorists into nearly two decades of open-ended Middle
East missions. We were bombing seven countries when Trump took office, and
probably 99 percent of voters couldn't have named them.
When Trump tried to withdraw troops from two countries, what happened?
Congress, snoring on this issue since at least 2001, threw a fit that the
president was acting unilaterally.
Howard Schultz: America's new banality supervillain: Review of the
ex-Starbucks honcho's book as he angles to become America's second
billionaire president, realizing (unlike Michael Bloomberg) that he
can't really pass as a Democrat and that Trump has him blocked on
the right.
Once you get past the somewhat interesting "avenging my loser Dad"
portions, the rest of the book is just collections of clichés lifted
variously from the campaign-lit and CEO-bio genres. Schultz's mind
is a giant T-shirt.
He goes to Gettysburg and learns "Experience . . . is the clay of
wisdom." Entrepreneurship is like "raising a child." (Forbes
alone has done that headline at least twice.)
"Magic," he writes, "is not reserved for selling pie and coffee.
It can extend to any endeavor -- like trying to create jobs."
368 pages of this!
Alex Ward:
The US is withdrawing from a nuclear arms treaty with Russia. An arms race
might be next. Well, isn't that the point? As far back as the 1950s,
Americans have believed they have an inherent advantage in arms races: deep
pockets. One might even argue that Reagan's "Space Wars" missile defense
initiative was the perfect arms race gambit: one so ridiculously expensive
the Russians couldn't even compete in. That seems to be the idea behind
the trillion dollar nuclear arms buildup proposed under Obama, and for
that matter in Trump's "Space Force." Still, behind these schemes is the
core neocon idea: that the US must maintain a posture of total military
dominance over any conceivable rival. That such a state is unachievable
is hidden behind a veil of sleazy, seductive rhetoric. More important is
that it is not desirable, either for us or the rest of the world. Whatever
flaws may exist in the now-discarded INF treaty should be resolved with
greater arms limitations, not an accelerated arms race.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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