#^d 2019-02-10 #^h 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:
- 2 posts May 17-18, 2004.
- 3 posts Oct. 10-12, 2006.
- Sept. 28, 2007, on Halberstam's The Coldest Winter.
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:
America's trains are a drag. The Green New Deal wants to fix that.
2018 was one of the hottest years ever: "It was also one of the most expensive for disaster damages in the United States, according to NOAA."
How Antarctica's melting ice could change weather around the world.
w/Brian Resnick: 3 key lessons from the disasters that hammered the US in 2018.
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:
Attack of the fanatical centrists: "Of obsessions, vanity and delusions of superiority" (e.g., Howard Schultz).
The empty quarters of US politics: "Two missing species: libertarian voters and populist racist politicians." He means racist politicians that are actually critics of the rich and corrupt (i.e., populists).
Robert Malley:
w/Robert Fadel: What we heard in Caracas: "Trump opened the door for change in Venezuela. Now he risks closing it."
w/Aaron David Miller: Trump is reinventing the US approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict [Sep 20, 2018].
w/Peter Salisbury: Yemen's fleeting opportunity for peace [Jul 20, 2018].
Ukraine is ground zero for the crisis between Russia and the West [Jul 16, 2018].
What happens in the Gulf doesn't stay in the Gulf [Jun 7, 2018].
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.:
Ocasio-Cortez understands politics better than her critics: "A 70 percent marginal tax rate might not be realistic -- but that doesn't matter.".
Resist the lure of theological politics: "Instead of applying religious certainty to public debates, Americans need to take a different lesson from their faith traditions." Or maybe consider the ones that doubt the possibility (not to mention the hubris) of certainty?
Trump made socialism great again: "The president has disrupted democratic complacency, and that's a good thing."
Bari Weiss and the left-wing infatuation with taking offense: "Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time." Posted Feb 17, 2018, so not a reaction to the Virginia scandals, but closer than most of what I've seen.
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.