#^d 2019-03-16 #^h 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:
Allegra Harpootlian: The school shooters of the planet.
Bob Dreyfuss: The rise of the hardliners: "Is a war with Iran on the Horizon?"
Rebecca Gordon: A 1970s feminist looks back at a joyous time.
Greg Grandin: Donald Trump, pornographer-in-chief.
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:
Trump said he wouldn't cut Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. His 2020 budget cuts all 3. "Trump said he wouldn't be like 'every other Republican.' He is."
Trump's 2020 budget proposal seriously uts the nation's safety net.
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:
Learning from 1968's leading anti-immigration alarmist: "Enoch Powell gave his xenophobic 'Rivers of Blood' speech 50 years ago -- but lessons of its reception still apply today."
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:
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:
Bethany Moreton: Kochonomics: The racist roots of public choice theory: Review of Nancy Maclean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Plan for America.
Dani Rodrik: Rescuing economics from neoliberalism.
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 Nougaryčde: 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:
Opportunity costs: can carbon taxing become a positive-sum game?
Too big to ignore: "Monopolies and oligopolies have come to dominate Western economies, and the case for braeking them up is strong."
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: