#^d 2017-06-18 #^h Weekend Roundup
I thought I'd start with some comments on the Trump-Russia mess. As far as I can tell (and this isn't very high on the list of things I worry about these days), there are four separate things that need to be investigated and understood:
What (if anything) Russia did to affect the course and outcome of the 2016 elections, and (harder to say) did this have any actual impact on the results. You might want to delve deeper and understand why they did what they did, although there's little chance they will be forthcoming on the subject, so you're likely to wind up with little but biased speculation. [I suspect the answer here is that they did a lot of shit that ultimately had very little impact.]
Did the meetings that various people more/less tied to the Trump campaign had with various Russians (both officials and non-officials with ties to the Russian leadership) discuss Russian election ops. In particular, did Trump's people provide any assistance or direction to the Russians. [Seems unlikely, but hard to tell given that the people involved have repeatedly lied, and been caught lying, about meetings, so what they ultimately admit to isn't credible -- unless some sort of paper trail emerges, such as Sislyak's communiques to Moscow.]
Did Trump's people, in their meetings with various Russians, make or imply any changes in US policy toward Russia that might reward or simply incline the Russians to try to help Trump's campaign and/or hinder Clinton's campaign? [This seems likely, as the campaign's public statements imply a less punitive tilt toward Russia, but it could be meant for future good will rather than as any sort of quid pro quo for campaign help. The Russians, of course, could have found this reason enough to help Trump vs. Clinton. Again, we don't know what transpired in the meetings, and the fact that Trump's people have lied about them doesn't look good.]
Did Trump and/or his people seek to obstruct the investigation, especially by the Department of Justice, into the above? [It's pretty clear now that they did, and that Trump was personally involved. It's not clear whether this meets the usual requirements for prosecution -- for instance, it's not clear that there has been any fabrication of evidence or perjury, but there clearly have been improper attempts to apply political pressure to (in the quaint British phrasing) pervert the course of justice.]
The problem is that even though these questions seem simple and straightforward, they exist in a context that is politically highly charged. Again, there are several dimensions to this:
Clinton and her supporters were initially desperate to find any reason other than their candidate and campaign to explain her surprise loss to one of the most unappealing (and objectively least popular) major party candidates in history, so they were quick to jump on the Russian hacking story (as well as Comey's handling of the email server fiasco). Early on, they were the main driving force behind the story. [This made it distasteful for people like me who thought she was a bad candidate, but also helped turn it into a blatantly partisan issue, where Trump supporters quickly became blindered to any attacks on their candidate.]
A second group of influential insiders had reason to play up a Russia scandal: the neocon faction of the security meta-state, who have all along wanted to play up Russia as a potential enemy because their security state only makes sense if they can point to threats. If Trump came into office thinking he could roll back sanctions and reverse US policy on Russia, they would have to hustle to stop him, and blowing up his people's Russia contacts into a full-fledged scandal helped do the trick. [This is pretty much fait accompli at this point, although Trump himself isn't very good at sticking to his script. But while some Republicans chafe, the Democrats have been completely won over to a hard-line policy on Russia, even though rank-and-file Democrats are overwhelmingly anti-war. One result here is that by posturing as hawks Democrat politicians are losing their credibility with their party's base -- recapitulating one of Clinton's major problems in 2016.]
As the scandal has blown up, Democrats increasingly see it as a way of focusing opposition to Trump and disrupting the Republican agenda. Meanwhile, Republicans feel the need to defend Trump (even to the point of crippling investigation into the scandal) in order to get their agenda back on track. Thus narrow legal matters have become broad political ones, turning not on facts but on opinions. [This makes them impossible to adjudicate via normal procedures, and guarantees that whatever investigators find will be dismissed to large numbers of people who put their allegiances ahead of the facts. Ultimately, then, the issues will have to be weighed by the voters, who by the time they get a chance will have plenty of other distractions. Meanwhile the Democrats are missing countless scandals and even worse policy moves, while Republicans are getting away with -- well, "murder" may not be the choicest word here, but if Republicans pass their Obamacare repeal many more people will die unnecessarily than even America's itchy trigger-fingers can account for.]
Here are some links on subjects related to Trump/Russia:
Esme Cribb: Pence Hires Outside Counsel to Guide Him Through Russia Investigations: Best case scenario: he becomes president. Worst: Spiro Agnew.
Karoun Demirjian/Anne Gearan: Senate overwhelmingly votes to curtail Trump's power to ease Russia sanctions: Vote was 97-2, with Rand Paul and Mike Lee dissenting, so no Democrats (or Bernie Sanders). Sanders, along with Paul, did vote against a bill that combined Iran and Russia sanctions (see Senate Votes 98-2 to Impose New Sanctions on Iran, Russia), as not a single Democrat voted to protect Obama's nuclear deal with Iran (that's what happens when you get so worked up over Russia).
Noah Feldman: One Trump Tweet Can Shake Up the Justice Department: So now Rod Rosenstein needs to recuse himself, just because Trump tweeted about him? That would make Rachel Brand the one person who can legally dismiss Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and that could be the hope.
Garrett M Graff: Robert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team
Sari Horwitz et al: Special counsel is investigating Jared Kushner's business dealings
Allegra Kirkland: Close Manafort Ally Is Latest Trump Campaign Figure Caught in Russia Mess: Rick Gates.
Lachlan Markay/Asawin Suebsaeng/Spencer Ackerman: Even Trump's Aides Blame Him for Obstruction Probe: 'President Did This to Himself': Trump keeps doing things that guilty people do -- at least, guilty people who aren't much good at hiding the fact. He may not have obstructed justice when he told Comey he "hoped" the Flynn thing would go away, but firing Comey showed the world that he wasn't just hoping. And firing Mueller, which he's threatened to do, would make him look even guiltier. (Just look at how long Nixon lasted after he fired Archibald Cox.)
William Saletan: Jeff Sessions Isn't Trying to Protect Trump. He's Protecting Himself
Richard Wolffe: Jeff Sessions: a poor, misunderstood man exempt from normal rules
Matthew Yglesias: Trump's media allies are making the case for firing Robert Mueller; Yglesias also wrote: Donald Trump is really sad he's not running against Hillary Clinton anymore, where he quotes this June 15 Trump tweet: "Why is it that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?" I've never heard of any such dealings, although I know Bill Clinton was chummy with Boris Yeltsin back in the 1990s when the latter was drunk-driving Russia into a ditch, a national disaster which made Putin look good. Still, the real point is that whenever Trump or many other Republicans look bad, their first instinct is to blame some Democrat (cf. the Steve King link below).
And somewhere, I should mention Yglesias' The week explained: a shooter, sanctions, Sessions, and more: Subtitled "A brief guide to what you need to know," he actually misses a lot of things I touch on further down below (although I hadn't noticed the Uber story).
Someone named James T Hodgkinson took a rifle to a baseball field in Arlington, VA where several Republican members of Congress (and a few hangers-on) were practicing for a charity baseball game, and started shooting. He wounded five, most seriously Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) before he in turn was shot and killed by police. Hodgkinson had a long history of writing crank letters-to-the-editor, as well as a history of run-ins with the law, including complaints of domestic abuse and shooting guns into trees, but he was also virulently anti-Trump, so right-wing talking heads had a field day playing the victim. Still, it's doubtful that this brief experience of terror will move any of the Republicans against the wars we export abroad, let alone question their vow of allegiance to the NRA. Some relevant links:
Angelina Chapin: The Virginia gunman is a reminder: domestic abusers are a danger to society
Esme Cribb: Steve King Partly Blames Obama for Divisive Politics That Led to Shooting
David Frum: Reinforcing the Boundaries of Political Decency: He declares that "across the political spectrum, there is only revulsion" to acts like the shooting members of Congress, he notes that we're much less repulsed when our politicians and commentators threaten violence:
In the wake of this crime, as after the Gabby Giffords attack in 2011, we'll soon be talking about whether and when political rhetoric goes too far. It's an important conversation to have, and the fact that the president of the United States is himself the country's noisiest inciter of political violence does not give license to anyone else to do the same. Precisely because the president has put himself so outside the boundary of political decency, it is vitally important to define and defend that border. President Trump's delight in violence against his opponents is something to isolate and condemn, not something to condone or emulate.
What Frum doesn't note is that while assassination is still frowned on here inside America, it is official government policy to hunt down and kill select people who offend us abroad, as well as anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity of one of our targets.
Charlie May: Trump's favorite right-wing websites aren't listening to his calls for unity following GOP shooting: As Alex Jones put it: "The first shots of the second American Civil War have already been fired." Nor was it just the alt-right that wanted to jump on the shooting to score cheap shots against the left: see Brendan Gauthier: New York Times tries, fails to blame Virginia shooting on Bernie Sanders.
Heather Digby Parton: Don't miss the point on Alexandria and San Francisco: There is a solution for mass shootings: The San Francisco shooting didn't get anywhere near the press of the one in Alexandria, despite greater (albeit less famous) carnage: "an angry employee went into a UPS facility and opened fire, killing three co-workers and himself."
Mother Jones gathers data on mass shootings and has pretty strict criteria for inclusion: The shooting must happen in a public place and result in three or more deaths. This leaves out many incidents in which people are only injured, such as the shooting of 10 people in Philadelphia last month, or those that take place on on private property, such as the recent killing of eight people in Mississippi during a domestic violence shooting spree. (The Gun Violence Archive collects incidents that involve the shooting of two or more victims. It is voluminous.)
According to the Mother Jones criteria, yesterday's Virginia shooting doesn't even count since it didn't meet the death threshold. The San Francisco UPS shooting does, bring the total of such mass shootings to six so far this year. . . .
Meanwhile, 93 people on average are shot and killed every day in America, many of them in incidents involving multiple victims. More than 100,000 people are struck by bullets every year. President Donald Trump was right to speak about "carnage" in America in his inaugural address. He just didn't acknowledge that the carnage is from gun violence.
OK, another boring gun control piece ensues. And no doubt fewer guns (better regulated, less automatic) would reduce those numbers. Still, there are other reasons why America is so trigger-happy, and change there would also help. For starters, we've been at war almost continuously for seventy-five years, with all that entails, from training people to kill to cheering them when they do, and making it easier by dehumanizing supposed enemies. We've internalized war to the point that we habitually treat projects or causes as wars, which often as not leads to their militarization (as in the "war on drugs"). We've increasingly turned politics into a bitter, no holds, drag out brawl; i.e., a war. And we've allowed corporations to be run like armies, which is one reason so many mass shootings are job-related (or loss-of-job-related). Another is that we've increasingly shredded the safety net, especially when it comes to getting help for mental health problems. (Veterans still get more help in that regard, but not enough.) It might help to require companies to provide counseling to laid-off workers (or if that's too much of an imposition, let the public pick up the tab). Free (or much cheaper) education would also help. Decriminalizing drugs would definitely help. And then there's this notion, from a tweet by Sen. Rand Paul:
Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!
That notion proved impractical as early as the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. The Second Amendment actually spoke of well-regulated militias, which the various states maintained up to the Civil War. Once that was over, the role for such militias (and as such the Amendment) vanished, until it was refashioned by opportunistic politicians and activist judges to give any crackpot a chance to kill his neighbors. As Alexandria shows, that right doesn't help anyone. But then the left half of the political spectrum already knew that, partly because they've much more often been the targets of crackpots, and partly because they've generally retained the ability to reason about evidence.
Charles Pierce: When White People Realize American Politics Are Violent: "It's not news to anyone else." He notes America's long history of political violence, including lynchings and a couple of wholesale racist massacres, but also mentioning an attack on miners in Colorado. Pierce then turned around and wrote: This Is Not an Ideal Time to Have White Supremacists Infiltrating Law Enforcement. Come on, is there ever a time when it was harmless much less ideal? I recalled a prime example from fifty-some years ago, a guy named Bull Connor. (By the way, when I went to check the name, I also found this story: Deputy shoots dog after many loses everything in trailer fire. The man was then charged with disorderly conduct, but acquitted. One of many understatements: "The Madison County Sheriff's Department has seen greater problems than the shooting of a dog.")
Some scattered links this week in Trump's many other (and arguably much more important) scandals:
Dean Baker: Going Private: The Trump Administration's Big Infrastructure Plan:
But Trump's big ace in the hole is that he will rely on the private sector to provide funding for infrastructure beyond the amount he put in the budget. This is the idea that we will privatize assets like highways and water systems so that the private sector can profit from them.
This sounds like a great idea for someone who has spent a lifetime running rip off schemes. We actually have considerable experience with privatizing public assets and most of it is not good. . . .
If we think the government is run by buffoons who can't do anything right, it is hard to see how the buffoons are supposed to rein in the fast-moving contractors in the private sector. Putting private firms in a position to take advantage of the lack of effective oversight is likely to make things worse, not better.
This is a lesson we have seen repeatedly in the United States and throughout the world. Donald Trump is incredibly ignorant of history and almost everything else, but Congress isn't.
We should expect better of Congress. The story of mass privatization of assets is a story of rip offs and corruption.
Kate Brannen et al: White House Officials Push for Widening War in Syria Over Pentagon Objections: Specifically, they want to go after Iranian forces allied with Assad. Or maybe they just want to start a shooting war with Iran. Meanwhile, see: Elliot Hannon: Iran Launches Missile Strikes Targeting ISIS in Syria, Dramatically Escalating Role in Syrian Conflict. Also: Russian Military: Airstrike Last Month Might Have Killed ISIS Leader. On the other hand, fighting against the anti-ISIS Syrian government: US Warplane Shoots Down Syria Jet Over Eastern Syria. And US-backed Saudi Airstrikes on Saada Market Kill Dozens of Civilians.
Margaret Brennan/Kylie Atwood: Trump sells Qatar $12 billion of U.S. weapons days after accusing it of funding terrorism: Does North Korea realize all they have to do to get on Trump's good side is buy a bunch of F-15s?
David Dayen: Betsy DeVos Moves to Help For-Profit Schools Defraud Students
Chauncey DeVega: Groveling before the mad king: Donald Trump's Cabinet of sycophants: Probably the most demeaning day for a US Cabinet since Bill Clinton got impeached and rounded up his for a forced display of unity. For more: Isaac Stone Fish: Emperor Trump's sycophantic cabinet meeting stinks of Beijing-like obeisance.
Tom Engelhardt: The Making of a Pariah Nation: When I started working on an autobiography a while back, I noted that my birthdate nearly coincided with "the maximal state of American power in the world": the US had nearly routed the Communists in North Korea and were closing in on the northern border with China. Within a week, the Chinese counterattacked, and US forces started their retreat, finally signing an armistice (but pointedly no peace treaty) in 1953, ending (or suspending) the war as a stalemate. After WWII the US emerged as a very rich country, with something like 50% of the world's wealth, while Europe and East Asia were totally devastated. George Kennan argued at the time that the point of American foreign policy should be to preserve that discrepancy and dominance. Alas, that didn't happen, nor could it. While the US economy enjoyed remarkable growth up to 1970, the world economy grew even faster -- especially in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim, where the US found business allies, treated favorably to steer them away from the Communist bloc. After 1970, the US economy stalled and sputtered, while the US flat-out lost its misbegotten war in Vietnam. And alongside this economic decline, there has been a loss of morals and decency, which we've seen play out both through a series of Republican presidents (Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, now Trump), although you can see its effects nearly as well in the Democrats (Carter, Clinton, Obama). So in a sense, my entire life experience has been touched by national decline and degeneracy. As best I recall, Engelhardt is only a few years older than I am, so this must be his lifelong experience too. Sure, this decline has been long denied: Reagan's "morning in America" made it clear that our future would be based on fraud, which for sure was America's only booming industry during his tenure; even last year Hillary Clinton's "America's always been great" collapsed with her delusional campaign. Even today, Engelhardt hedges his view of "Trump, in real time, tweet by tweet, speech by speech, sword dance by sword dance, intervention by intervention, act by act, in the process of dismantling the system of global power" by which the US "made itself a truly global hegemon." The problem, of course, is that even as Americans feel pinched and belittled, even as we've grown ever more self-centered and contemptuous of the rest of the world, the US is still a very dangerous, very ominous force in that world. Moreover, although Trump starts with a sense of America's diminish stature and role, he has no clue as to how to engineer a more graceful landing. Rather, he's actively picking totally useless (indeed embarrassing) fights with Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, while subcontracting US policy in the Middle East to Israel and Saudi Arabia (or Qatar if the price is right), and pouring more resources into the quicksand of Afghanistan. He's undermined NATO, and sought to weaken the EU, and his rejection of the Paris Accords has offended everyone. While Trump will henceforth be associated with failed slogans, ranging from "Drain the Swamp" to "Lock Her Up," "Make America Great Again" will prove even more vexing. At least no one really knows what "Great" means. Had he been more modest and said "Make America Good Again," it would be clear how badly he's failing.
Meanwhile, the foreign policy gurus are desperately struggling to scale back the damage Trump is doing. It's a difficult task, as Max Boot admits in Donald Trump Is Proving Too Stupid to Be President; also Richard Evans: The Madness of King Donald, which takes a longer, more historical view of incompetent rulers; and Daniel Shapiro: Trump Is Letting America Get Pushed Around by Saudi Arabia -- but they let him play with swords and touch their orb.
Thomas Erdbrink: Raising Tensions, Iranians Again Link Saudis to Terror Attacks in Tehran
Lee Fang: Trump Officials Overseeing Health Care Overhaul Previously Lobbied for Health Insurance Firms: Title is a little obscure, but the gist of the article is how Trump and Secretary Tom Price are stocking HHS with a long list of industry lobbyists (Eric Hargan, Paula Stannard, Randolph Wayne Pate, Lance Leggitt, Keagan Lenihan are the ones mentioned and documented).
Lee Fang: Trump Officials Overseeing Amazon-Whole Foods Merger May Face Conflicts of Interest: May?
President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, has worked since 2005 as a lawyer and lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a firm that is registered to lobby on behalf of Amazon. . . .
Delrahim, however, isn't the only official with ties to the merger. Abbott Lipsky, appointed in March as the new acting Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, which oversees antitrust, previously worked as a partner in the antitrust division of the law firm Latham & Watkins. Lipsky's former law firm has been tapped by Whole Foods' financial adviser, Evercore, to help manage the merger with Amazon, according to Law360.
And finally, Goldman Sachs has stepped up to provide bridge financing for the merger. The investment bank maintains a broad range of connections to multiple officials within the Trump administration, most salient of whom is Gary Cohn, the former chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs. As the chief economics adviser to the president, Cohn will likely weigh in on the contentious merger.
Karen J Greenberg: Donald Trump Is Waging a War on Children: "America's never-ending 'war on terror' wreaks havoc on the physical, mental, and emotional health of kids around the world."
Jeff Hauser/Brian Dew: The Trump Administration's Underrated Threat to the IRS: First, funding cuts targeted against enforcement. Then there is this:
And in particular, that temporary head could make a big headache go away from one very influential person, hedge fund billionaire and Breitbart investor Robert Mercer. In a too-little noticed McClatchy piece last month, it was reported that "The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world's most profitable hedge fund, whose boss's wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House." The IRS demand is hardly controversial, as Mercer's Renaissance Technologies attempts to use an obviously problematic loophole to pretend that's its rapid-fire trading constitutes long term investing that is taxed at a far lower rate.
Jessica Huseman/Annie Waldman: Trump Administration quietly rolls back Civil Rights efforts across federal government: Not sure how quiet this has been, but it's not just Jeff Sessions, although he bears much responsibility.
Fred Kaplan: Trump, Still Unfit for President, Is Letting His Defense Secretary Decide Strategy in Afghanistan. This includes US to Send 4,000 More Ground Troops to Afghanistan, nearly a 50% increase over the 8,500 already there. Later reports suggest that Trump will wind up sinking even more troops: General Urges Up to 20,000 More US Troops in Afghanistan. Also: William J Astore on Trump and the Afghan War; and Ahmed Rashid: Afghanistan: It's Too Late.
David D Kirkpatrick: Trump's Business Ties in the Gulf Raise Questions About His Allegiances
Sarah Kliff: I've covered Obamacare since day one. I've never seen lying and obstruction like this. On the other hand, Ezra Klein thinks: Republicans are about to make Medicare-for-all much more likely: not, of course, by advocating it -- they're much too dedicated to increasing corporate graft opportunities for that -- but by exposing all of the other alternatives to Obamacare as impossible.
Stephen Ohlemacher: GOP Tax Plan in Trouble as Republicans Increasingly Reject Import Tax: Article mentions "strong opposition from retailers, automakers and the oil industry." As I recall, it's also opposed by the Kochs and their AFP front group. On the other hand, the corporate cuts are predicated on raising revenues elsewhere, and the import tax was the bill's main offset.
Miriam Pensack: Trump to Reverse Obama Openings to Cuba Under the False Flag of Human Rights. More on Cuba: Marjorie Cohn: Trump Takes Aim at Obama's Détente With Cuba; Peter Kornbluh: Normalization With Cuba Has Been a Smashing Success -- but Trump Wants to Destroy It. For some reason this Cuba story is making me exceptionally sad. For nearly sixty years the US has had head stuck up ass on this, and Obama finally pried it loose. During that time America's standing in the world has been tarnished by many things, but with Cuba it mostly showed the extremes to which our politicians would go to further a grudge (and not admit any culpability -- let's face it, US treatment of Cuba from 1898-1958 was why there was a revolution). And now it seems like the only real reason Trump has is his desire to erase everything that Obama ever did. (Well, except for the Afghanistan Surge, which he now seems bound to recapitulate.) And he's getting away with this because we've created this Imperial Presidency where the guy in charge -- even though he lost the popular vote, even though his current approval rate is around 38% -- enjoys this incredible, arbitrary power to fuck up the world. Also note: Richard Lardner: Not all GOP Lawmakers Pleased Trump Rolled Back Some Obama Cuba Policies.
Nick Penzenstadler et al: Most Trump real estate now sold to secretive buyers
Corey Robin: Trump can stack the judiciary for years. That's why Republicans stick with him; or as Dahlia Lithwick puts it: Trump Is Trying to Stack the Federal Courts With Wackadoos.
Mustafa Santiago Ali: Trump's planned EPA cuts will hit America's most vulnerable
And finally some other items that caught my eye:
Andrew J Bacevich: The 'Global Order' Myth: Unusually confused summary of Trump and the foreign policy mandarins -- dissidents because they cling to their treasured myths and clichés, which Trump himself shows no evidence of believing in or caring for (unlike Obama and Clinton, who bought into every absurd concept). On the other hand, Trump's actual foreign policy is more crazed but not fundamentally different -- probably because he subcontracts it to the usual suspects.
Dan Berger: Welfare and Imprisonment: How "Get Tough" Politics Have Excluded People From Society: Review of Julilly Kohler-Hausmann's new book, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America.
Tom Cahill: A New Harvard Study Just Shattered the Biggest Myth About Bernie Supporters: "a new poll finds that [Sanders'] popularity is greater among minorities and women than among whites and men." Still, lowest group listed was 52%.
Nithin Coca: Meet Gov, the Open Source, Digital Community Transforming Democracy in Taiwan
Max Ehrenfreund: Kansas's conservative experiment may have gone worse than people thought.
Phil Giraldi: Resist this: How Hillary lost, in her own words: Giraldi was fool enough to vote for Trump, because, as he puts it, "he wasn't the war candidate" -- so no surprise his enthusiasm for a book edited with commentary by Joe Lauria called How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, based on Clinton speeches and leaked emails from John Podesta and the DNC brain trust, The two central themes were "Hillary as an elitist and Hillary as a hawk" -- obviously (at least to a non-conservative) not the full gamut of Clinton's views, but certainly a facet she had a hard time shaking, perhaps because she spent more time raising money than appealing for votes, and because so much of her campaign pitch was built around what she called "the Commander-in-Chief test."
Sarah Leonard: Why Are So Many Young Voters Falling for Old Socialists? Corbyn? Sanders? You have to ask? First, they're the only politicians to have survived the last 35 years of neocon/neolib bullshit with integrity intact. Second, they've established a track record of being consistently right in understanding how that neocon/neolib bullshit would blow up. Third, they actually have practical programs that would help most people enjoy better lives, while making it harder for the rich and powerful to abuse their money and power.
Mike Ludwig: In an Aging Nation, Single-Payer Is the Alternative to Dying Under Austerity.
Alec Luhn: Russia's Massive Protests Reveal a Government Playing by Outdated Rules; and Nadezda Azhgikhina: Russia Is Experiencing the Largest Anti-Government Protests in Half a Decade.
Timothy Noah: Manufacturing Won't Save Us: Review of Luis Uchitelle's new book, Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters. Unfortunately, tagline ("But it's maddeningly difficult to make an evidence-based case for rescuing it") suggests that Noah disagrees. In point of fact, manufacturing has mostly been rescued in America, mostly by driving labor costs down, by breaking and avoiding unions. But rescue like that is turning large swathes of America into a third world nation. The problem has less to do with what business make and do than with a business model that focuses exclusively on draining profits from workers and customers while doing nothing for communities and the country.
Feargus O'Sullivan: The Grenfell Tower Fir eand London's Public-Housing Crisis: It was a 24-floor apartment tower in west London, home to 600 people, now destroyed by fire, with 58 people missing and presumed dead (including and superseding the previously announced 30 dead). The building was public housing, but managed by a for-profit company, with some/many apartments sold to residents and flipped for profit.
In a trend now typical across London, the borough contracted KCTMO to refurbish the tower, in part to increase the number of apartments available for private rent or sale. That work left the tower with just one staircase and exit -- an exit that the management company has failed to keep clear. Protests about the safety of the people living in the tower fell on deaf ears. . . .Redeveloping projects like these is especially attractive to cash-strapped boroughs because it helps them manage severe austerity cuts imposed by the central government. By attracting buyers to these properties, the boroughs can generate direct profits and attract wealthier residents who pay higher taxes and use fewer public services. Redeveloping or remodeling public projects also means that boroughs and developers can squeeze out extra revenue by adding homes for the private market, or "affordable" homes that, while cheaper than market rates, still generate some profit.
In order to maximize these profits, there is pressure to remove as many poorer public-housing tenants as possible, to make more room for market-rate apartments. . . .
If Grenfell Tower hadn't been rearranged to create more apartments and re-clad to make it look newer, there's a good chance it would still be standing intact. . . .
The reports of neglect, threats, and indifference by the Conservative-held local council toward low-income tenants seem especially bitter given the incredible wealth of the area as a whole. On a national level, the media has already noted that May's new chief of staff sat on a report that exposed serious concerns about the fire safety of residential towers. It would still be inaccurate to present Grenfell Tower's neglect as a Conservative issue alone. Most inner-London boroughs are in fact held by the Labour Party, and report similar experiences of low-income displacement, public housing neglect, and officially sponsored gentrification. These have been powder-keg issues in London for years, with activists warning that some crisis would come sooner or later. It's now arrived, in the worst possible way imaginable.
For more on the political fallout (Prime Minister Theresa May seems to have handled this especially badly), see: Jonathan Freedland: Grenfell Tower will forever stand as a rebuke to the right; Lynsey Hanley: Look at Grenfell Tower and see the terrible price of Britain's inequality; Polly Toynbee: Theresa May was too scared to meet the Grenfell survivors. She's finished (she reminds us that "George W Bush was similarly exposed by his clueless reaction to Hurricane Katrina"). Also: Seraphima Kennedy: When I worked for KCTMO I had nightmares about burning tower blocks.
Rebecca Solnit: Victories against Trump are mounting. Here's how we deal the final blow: Reasons to be cheerful, or at least harbor a faint glint of hope. Still, I'm not seeing the glass half full, let alone drinkable.
Matt Taibbi: Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism: On Jeremy Corbyn and the British election.
Douglas Williams: Flint officials may face jail for water crisis. That's bittersweet news
Matthew Yglesias: The Fed just took action to slow job creation despite low inflation: The Fed bumped up their basic rate by a quarter-point, despite the fact that inflation is below its 2% target, and low unemployment is mostly the result of people giving up looking.