#^d 2018-03-20 #^h Weekend Roundup
Started this on Sunday, but too many distractions kept me from wrapping it up in a timely fashion. As I've noted already, my sister, Kathy Hull, died last week. We've had visitors and all sorts of chores to do, and I've been plagued by my own health problems. One thing that I did notice was that the sense of horror I felt on hearing the news was one I had experienced several times before: when, for instance, my first wife died, and most recently when Donald Trump was elected president. A big part of that sensation is the dread of facing a future not of unknown and unimaginable consequences but of quite certain pain and loss. The news since election day has merely born out that expected dread. Numerous examples follow, and I'm sure I'm missing at least as much more. One thing I suppose I should take comfort from is that when we finally have a memorial for Kathy (on March 31), we will have fond memories and a lot of art to celebrate. When Trump's term ends we're unlikely to recall a single shred of redeeming value.
Of course, the two events are not comparable in any regard except personal emotional impact on me. The key point is that the shock of the 2016 election, the immediate apprehension of what the American people just did to themselves, hit me pretty much as hard, with much the same body chemistry. Of course, the grief tracks have been/will be different. We will adjust to the impoverished world without her, but the blow has been struck, both final and finite. On the other hand, Trump and his Congress and Courts have barely started to take their toll, which will only grow over time and won't stop when his term ends. On the other hand, there are things that can be done to alter or even reverse the course Trump has set us on. And there is at least one thing I can take comfort in: I've spent literally all of my adult life in opposition to whoever has held political power, as indeed I would still be had Hillary Clinton won, but since the 1970s I've never been in such large or dynamic company. It's also nice to feel no need to defend Clinton when she says something tone-deaf (like her note that she won the urban areas that had fared best under her party's neoliberal advancement) or any of the other petty scandals she's prone to.
By the way, this week is the fifteenth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq. I took another look at what I wrote on March 18, and much of what I wrote then holds up; especially:
As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and throughout the world. In lauching his war, Bush is marching blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him.
I probably tried too hard to rationalize the Bush case, and I spent a lot of time fantasizing that Iraqis might wise up and figure out how to play the PR game in ways that might limit the destruction. That didn't happen first because the seemingly easy military victory unleashed an extraordinary degree of American hubris, and partly because it took very little resistance to change the American stance from would-be benefactor to occupier and schemer. My other mistake was in failing to see how much the US failure in Afghanistan, which was already obvious even if less observed, prefigured the very same failure in Iraq. Not that I was unaware of Afghanistan. Indeed, I've always known that the prime mistake Bush made after 9/11 was driving into Afghanistan.
Even though this isn't appearing until Tuesday, I've tried to limit the stories/links to last Sunday. Some later ones may have crept in -- especially on the Cambridge Analytica story.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: The four most important policy stories of the week, explained: Rex Tillerson finally got fired; Democrats won a very red House seat: Conor Lamb in PA-18, a district Trump won by 20 points; Good news at last for banks; The FDA proposed reducing cigarettes nicotine content. Other Yglesias posts:
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's fiery statement about Sessions's decision to fire him.
James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.
Caught lying about trade with Canada, Trump tweets some new lies about trade with Canada.
Conor Lamb shows that a pro-choice Democrat can win in Trump country.
How Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin became the Trump Cabinet's most endangered member.
Republicans are reaping the whirlwind: Quick take on Conor Lamb's PA-18 win.
Despite the internal tension and the 2-point popular vote loss, Trump emerged victorious in 2016; the way was clear for a potential juggernaut moving forward. If the GOP could adopt Trump's ideological synthesis while backing away from his most disreputable personal qualities, they'd be positioned to do extremely well.
But instead, they've done the opposite. Trump behaves as flagrantly inappropriately as ever, but now the entire party is complicit in it. In exchange, they've gotten Trump to largely drop his eclectic policy approach in favor of a less popular hard-right agenda. And now they're prepared to lose everywhere.
He's remembering Trump's "ideological synthesis" as something more coherent than it ever was -- that Trump lost it so quickly just goes to show how little grasp he had on it in the first place. Yglesias goes on to say "America needs the GOP to pull out of the tailspin." Actually, America needs the GOP to crash and burn so badly that most current right-wing tenants are forgotten for a generation or more. You'd think the person who wrote the following would recognize that:
On a policy level, the Trump-era GOP is pushing unpopular policies on all fronts, from the looming deportation of DREAMers to health care executive actions that are driving up premiums to a rollback net neutrality to the dismantling of consumer financial protection rules. These are enormously harmful to the short-term interests of millions of people and to the long-term interests of nearly the entire country.
At the same time, Trump continues to act like a maniac -- just this week, he fired the secretary of state over Twitter, deployed inappropriate political rhetoric at an official speech to active-duty Marines, and denied Russian culpability for assassinations carried out on British soil -- and it's only Wednesday.
At the same time, he's enmeshed in an unprecedented level of personal corruption; his business enterprises are set up as perfect vehicles for interest groups seeking favors from the government to line his pockets with cash. And the growing Stormy Daniels scandal suggests a whole new dimension of possible corruption and lawbreaking over and above the basic financial conflicts of interest and the shenanigans with the Russians.
Betsy DeVos tweeted a bizarre self-own about Michigan's public schools.
It's time to start taking the Stormy Daniels scandal seriously.
Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong.
Tara Isabella Burton: Mike Pompeo, Trump's pick for secretary of state, talks about politics as a battle of good and evil. I don't doubt that Pompeo holds such views, but his predecessor in the House (Todd Tiahrt) was so much worse Pompeo at first seemed like a breath of fresh air. That went stale with Benghazi!, which is undoubtedly what put him on Trump's radar, and he's gone over the top playing up his stance as a neocon hawk. The Senate should find his nomination alarming, but so far more people have expressed more worry about Gina Haspel, his (well, Trump's) pick to replace him as CIA director -- see, e.g., Matt Taibbi: Trump's CIA Pick Took Part in Silencing Torture Suspect. By the way, Taibbi also wrote It's Too Late to Worry About 'Normalizing' Trump. Decades of Policy Did That for Him: "The current president is just too stupid to be embarrassed about things his predecessors all did, too."
Ted Golshan/Jen Kirby: Florida pedestrian bridge collapses, leaving at least 6 dead: what we know.
Doug Henwood: Here's Why Labor Should Resist Trump's Tariff: Some interesting numbers here:
While steel employment is off 54 percent since 1990, the production of steel (by the Federal Reserve's measure) is up 18 percent. Between 1990 and 2015 (the latest year available), productivity per hour of labor in the steel sector was up 151 percent. Labor's share of value-added in the industry -- the portion of the difference between revenues and costs of raw materials that's paid out to workers -- fell from 23 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2015. . . .
We have some recent experience with steel tariffs, the ones imposed by George W. Bush in March 2002. Bush lifted them in December 2003, under threat of retaliation by the EU, with another politically well-selected set of targets (Florida oranges, and Harleys again), and complaints by domestic steel users. During the 21 months they were in effect, steel employment fell by 9 percent, but production rose by 20 percent.
Bottom line seems to be that tariffs will help producer profits but not jobs.
Sean Illing: Team of sycophants: a presidential historian on Trump's White House: Interview with Robert Dallek. Starts by contrasting Franklin Roosevelt, who encouraged frank arguments among his staff, but doesn't point out the more critical difference: that FDR allowed airing all the views because he wanted to centralize decision making for himself, whereas Trump doesn't just delegate, he encourages his minions to make policy without him (at least on matters he doesn't understand or care about, which is to say that aren't directly tied up in his brand identity). Dallek goes on to slander Warren Harding ("you have to go all the way back to Warren G. Harding in 1921 to find a president as unqualified to hold office as Trump is"). The most obvious likeness isn't their lack of qualifications but the extraordinary level of corruption under both presidencies, but a big difference was that Harding was at worst indifferent, Trump is the foremost practitioner. Note that Paul Krugman came up with a similar theme in Springtime for Sycophants.
Lauren Katz: Ryan Zinke spent his first year in office selling off rights to our public lands.
John Lanchester: You Are the Product: Review, dated 17 August 2017, of three books about social media -- Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys, and Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things -- although he's mostly concerned with Facebook. Useful background when you consider, for instance, Sean Illing: Cambridge Analytica, the shady data firm that might be a key Trump-Russia link, explained; Eric Killelea: Cambridge Analytica: What We Know About the Facebook Data Scandal; Matthew Rosenberg: Cambridge Analytica, Trump-Tied Political Firm, Offered to Entrap Politicians; Nico Hines: Cambridge Analytica Offered to Blackmail Politicians With Prostitutes; Sam Biddle: Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections.
Ganesh Sitaraman: The three crises of liberal democracy: Read this because I just finished the author's very fine book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Here he recommends another book, Yascha Mounk's The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, but I'm less than convinced. Mounk evidently argues that there are three essential groundings to liberal democracy: shared mass media controlled by responsible gatekeepers; relative economic equality; and national homogeneity (shared culture and identity). Mounk is right that all three are stressed recently, however I'd say that the three points have vastly different weights, and I'm not even sure that the first (de-centralized media) and third (greater diversity) are real problems. Inequality is not only vastly more important, it perverts the others.
Jeff Spross: How vulture capitalists ate Toys 'R' Us: Seems like behind every business failure there's a private equity company with a long history of sucking cash out and piling on debt. In this case, well, KKR and Bain Capital.
Emily Stewart: "We've been in a trade war for 30 years": a former Trump trade adviser explains the case for tariffs: Interview with Dan DiMicco, former chair and CEO of steel manufacturer Nucor.
Alex Ward, et al: Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director targeted by Trump, was just fired: This story is most often presented as "now he might not get his pension" -- he had already resigned, pushing the effective date out to qualify for a pension, so his firing showed an uncommon degree of vindictiveness. But it raises other questions, like Emily Stewart: Jeff Sessions may have violated his recusal pledge when he fired Andrew McCabe.
Robert Wright: How the New York Times Is Making War With Iran More Likely. Of course, one could also write a piece on how making Mike Pompeo Secretary of State makes war with Iran more likely -- indeed, war all over the place.
Jason Zengerle: Eating Away at Government From the Inside: Review of David Cay Johnston's new book, It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America. And it's even worse now than it was when Johnston handed his manuscript in -- for instance, the book doesn't cover Trump's corporate tax cut. Still, one especially apt insight: "The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. The endgame is not just a smaller government, which Republicans always say they want, but a weak government." This matters because weaker government makes corporations stronger and less accountable to the public -- indeed, to any moral constraint other than their bottom line.