#^d 2019-02-03 #^h 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.
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):
Garikal Chengu: Sanctions of mass destruction: America's war on Venezuela.
Dan Cohen/Max Blumenthal: The making of Juan Guaidó: How the US regime change laboratory created Venezuela's coup leader.
Ben Dangl: "The worst option is war": US intervention in Venezuela will only deepen the country's crisis.
Eric Draitser: Trump's coup in Venezuela: The full story.
Pete Dolack: Sorting through the lies about Venezuela.
John McMurtry: US enemies and the lawless 'rule of law'.
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.
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:
The hypocrisy of Trump's jobs claims, in one chart: "Under Obama, the jobs numbers were fake. Now the news is."
Why Chris Christie and Jared Kushner hate each other so much: Sure, marginal distinctions if you hate them both. The feud revisited in Christie's new book, Let Me Finish.
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.