#^d 2019-06-16 #^h Weekend Roundup
Quite a bit below. After a very depressing/blasé week, I got an early start on Friday, and started feeling better -- not for the nation or the world, but pleased to be occupied with some straightforward, tangible work. One thing I can enjoy some optimism about is the Democratic presidential campaign. I expected it to be swallowed whole with the sort of vacant, pious clichés that Obama and the Clintons have been campaigning on for decades now, but what we're actually seeing is a lot of serious concern for policy. The clear leader in that regard is Elizabeth Warren, and of course Bernie Sanders has a complete matching set with if anything a little more courage and conviction, but I've run across distinct and refreshing ideas from another half-dozen candidates. I haven't noticed Biden rising to that challenge yet. He remains the main beneficiary of as fairly widespread faction that would be quite satisfied with their lives if only the Republican threat would subside in favor of the quiet competency Obama brought to government. Personally, I wouldn't mind that either, but I recognize that has a lot to do with my age. Young people inhabit a very different world, one with less opportunity and much graver risks, so platitudes from America's liberal past don't do them much good, or offer much hope. They face real and growing problems, and not just from Republicans (although those are perhaps the hoariest). Talking about policy actually offers them some prospect that faith alone can never fill. And sooner or later, even Biden's going to have to talk about policy, because that's where the campaign is heading.
This could hardly offer a starker contrast to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, where there was virtually no difference regarding policy -- just minor tweaks to each candidate's plan to steer more of the nation's wealth to the already rich, along with a slight range of hues on how hawkish one can be on the forever wars and how racist one can be when dealing with immigrants and the underclass. The real price of entry wasn't ideas or commitment. It was just the necessity to line up one or more billionaire sponsors -- turf that credibly favored Trump as his billionaire/candidate were one. The fact that Cruz and Kasich folded when they still had primaries they could plausibly have won is all the proof you need that the financiers pulled the strings, and as soon as they understood that Trump would win the nomination, they understood that he was as good for their purposes as anyone else, so they got on board.
Democrats may have a harder time finding unity in 2020, because their candidates are actually divided on issues that matter. On the other hand, they are learning to discuss those issues rationally, especially the candidates who are pushing the Overton Window left. Even if they wind up nominating some kind of centrist, that person is going to be more open to solutions from the left, and that's a good thing because that's where the real solutions are. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't any kind of leftist when he was elected in 1932, and his famous 100 days were all over the map, but he was open to trying things, and quickly found out that left solutions worked better than conservative ones. We're not quite as mired in crisis as America was in 1932, but it's pretty clear that catastrophe is coming if Trump and the Republicans stay in power. The option for 2020 is whether to face our problems calmly and rationally with deliberate policy choices or to continue to thrash reflexively and chaotically. There's no need to imagine how bad the latter may be, because Trump's illustrating it perfectly day by day.
Some scattered links this week:
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad: Bellingcat and how open source journalism reinvented investigative journalism.
Eileen Appelbaum: Private equity pillage: grocery stores and workers at risk. I first noticed this as a twitter thread, but the article goes into a lot more detail (while including all the cartoons). The article focuses on food retailers, but if you want a quick rule-of-thumb, whenever you read about a familiar company filing for bankruptcy, you can be pretty sure there's a private equity fund behind it that has already sucked the firm dry of assets and piled up unsupportable debt. Private equity firms -- you may recall that's how Mitt Romney got so rich, not that having a rich and famous father didn't give him a leg up -- are a plague, especially on American workers. Some policy wonks should come up with a program to put them out of business. One idea here would be to allow bankrupted companies to be reorganized as employee-owned, writing down their PE debt, with public loans to recapitalize the company.
Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign to purge pollsters after leak of dismal results.
Ross Barkan: Don't bother replacing Sarah Sanders -- there is no point. I figured I should offer something to mark the passing of Trump's second press secretary, but found very little that captures the true banality she brought to such a thankless and hopeless job. Failing that, this will have to do. Although I did also find: Luke O'Neil: Tweets, lies and the Mueller report: Sarah Sanders' lowest moments. On the other hand, Trump seems to think she has a future: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Governor of Arkansas? It's possible.
John Cassidy: The Stephanopoulos interview is another fine mess for Trump.
Jonathan Chait: Trump: witness to my crime can't testify, but trust me he's lying: That would be former White House counsel Don McGahn, who Robert Mueller interviewed at length.
Sarah Churchwell: 'The Lehman Trilogy' and Wall Street's debt to slavery: How to get rich in the 1840s, and how to get richer after that stopped working.
Iyad el-Baghdadi: The princes who want to destroy any hope for Arab democracy: Trump's best buds in "Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are backing military leaders who kill demonstrators.".
Tom Engelhardt: If Donald Trump is the symptom . . . then what's the disease? Reflects on how Trump was elected based on a widespread fear of decline, economic as well as military, only to accelerate that decline, taking much of the planet with him. Some other recent TomDispatch posts:
William Astore: The dark side of air power: "Ten tenets of air power that I didn't learn in the Air Force."
David Bromwich: What it means to be "great" on a planet going down: Author of a new book (out June 25), American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us, which notes that "the political conditions of the present crisis were put in place over fifty years ago, with the expansion of the Vietnam War and the lies and coverups that brought down Nixon" -- and doesn't skip the contributions of later Democrats.
James Carroll: The 12 days of bombing that never end (for me).
Rebecca Gordon: Of crimes and pardons: "Clemency for the lowly, free passes for the mighty." Previously wrote the major book on this subject: American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (2016).
Laura Gottesdiener: Two Iraqi peace activists confront a Trumpian world.
Dennis Etler: Getting Chian wrong, yet again: Reviews a Council of Foreign Relations report entitled "Trump's Foreign Policies are Better Than They Seem," so yeah, they have lots of examples. Also see: Michael Klare: Bolton wants to fight Iran, but the Pentagon has its eye on China. Pentagon strategists have long liked to promote conflicts with Russia and China, as they help fund their dreams of high-tech weapons systems that never get tested, because wars with nuclear powers like China and Russia are still unthinkable. Interesting that Klare's next book also looks at highly speculative Pentagon funding: All Hell Breaking Loose: Why the Pentagon Sees Climate Change as a Threat to American National Security. Without such threats, and the misunderstandings and myths they are based on, one might realize that such arms spending is unnecessary and, even worse, dangerous.
Tara Golshan: Congress's high-stakes budget fight to avert an economic crisis, explained.
Jeff Goodell: The world's most insane energy project moves ahead: the Carmichael coal mine, in Australia, controlled by Adani Group (of India).
Lloyd Green: The Best People review: how Trump flooded the swamp: On Alexander Nazaryan's new book, The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (out June 18), about "the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making." Green also reviewed Michael Wolff's recent dirt-dishing Siege: Trump Under Fire: Siege review: Michael Wolff's Trump tale is Fire and Fury II -- fire harder. Related: Robert Reich: Welcome to Trump's corrupt state -- the Star Wars cantina of world politics.
Nick Hanauer: Better schools won't fix America: "Like many rich Americans, I used to think educational investment could heal the country's ills -- but I was wrong. Fighting inequality must come first."
Mehdi Hasan: Saudi Arabia may execute teenager for his protests -- including when he was 10.
David Hearst: Why I'm optimistic about the 'deal of the century': Not because he thinks Jared Kushner's "peace plan" is viable let alone workable, but it marks the definitive end of the "two state" albatross that Israel has so easily slagged off. Rather: "The deal presents the biggest opportunity to those who have the most to lose from it." I don't get this optimism yet, although to the limited extent I understand the idea -- despite the advance publicity, it hasn't been fully presented yet -- but I can imagine some tuning that might be tolerable going forward. Hearst also wrote [February 2019]: Lords of the land: Why Israel's victory won't last. Meanwhile, some other relevant links:
Marco Carnelos: Cliches, lies and double standards: Jared Kishner's twisted views on Palestine.
Jonathan Cook: What's in Trump's 'deal of the century'? The answers are in plain sight. Cook also wrote: Trump enjoys bipartisan support for his plan to eradicate the Palestinian cause.
Rashid Khalidi: The neocolonial arrogance of the Kushner plan.
Umair Irfan: The UK has now committed to the most aggressive climate target in the world.
Thomas Kaplan/Jim Tankersley: Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans. Together, they would remake the economy. Related: Paul Krugman: Liberal wonks, or at least Elizabeth Warren, have a plan for that; also Sheelah Kolhatkar: Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?; also: Ed Kilgore: Elizabeth Warren's one-two punch for conquering Washington; also: Alex Isenstadt: Trump campaign zeroes in on a new threat: Elizabeth Warren. Best laugh line from the latter piece: "Warren's populist economic agenda, [Tucker] Carlson said, 'sounds like Donald Trump at his best.'"
Ed Kilgore: Trump can't stop lying about his unpopularity:
Donald J. Trump did not invent the art of political spinning. But he has perhaps raised it to an infernally high standard of sheer mendacity in his determination to attack any information suggesting he is anything other than the most wildly successful and popular politician since Pericles. That means, among other troubling things, that he is engaged in a perpetual war against the scientific measurement of public opinion.
Catherine Kim:
Federal watchdog agency says Kellyanne Conway should be fired after violating the Hatch Act.
After Jon Stewart's speech, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to extend the 9/11 fund: I've always thought of this as blood money, its affordability vouchsafed only because it was presented as a down payment to the much more expensive forever "wars against terror." On the other hand, most of what the fund covers are things that should be every American's right -- ironically, things that would have been much more affordable had we not flew off the handle to wage those hopeless, self-perpetuating wars.
Jen Kirby:
Is it actually illegal to accept "campaign dirt" from foreigners? If it's "something of value" doing so would violate campaign finance laws. On the other hand, I doubt the law could prevent foreigners from simply publishing and promoting "dirt" -- which is presumably what a campaign would do with such information. In fact, most campaigns would probably prefer that it come from an independent source.
The race to be the next British prime minister, briefly explained: Seven candidates survived the first round of voting, the most famous (and possibly the farthest apart politically) Boris Johnson (leader with 114 votes) and Rory Stewart (last at 19 -- he's written a couple of books on Afghanistan and Iraq which show some understanding of and sympathy for the people there). Later rounds will reduce the field to two, to be decided by registered Conservative Party members -- no one in power there is eager to risk a new election. No mention of this here, but since the Tories are a minority in Parliament, it seems to me that their current coalition partners could scuttle the pick. [PS: See Michael Savage/Toby Helm: Boris Johnson's no-deal Brexit plan 'will trigger early election'.]
Sharon LaFraniere/Charlie Savage/Katie Benner: People are trying to figure out William Barr. He's busy stockpiling power.
Eric Levitz: The Fed just released a damning indictment of capitalism: Title after the jump: "The one percent have gotten $21 trillion richer since 1989. The bottom 50% have gotten poorer."
Dara Lind/Libby Nelson: The fight over the 2020 census citizenship question, explained.
Josh Marshall:
Trump tells Polish president: US media is corrupt: Actual quote: "Much of the media unfortunately in this country is corrupt. I have to tell you that, Mr. President." Trump could have turned this into a much smarter quote by dropping "unfortunately" and adding: "that's why we don't have to censor them." Of course, he wouldn't say that, because he wants to censor them anyway. He feels so entitled he cannot recognize that the media has been helped him out enormously. And he's such a thin-skinned whiner he complains about them endlessly. Anything to avoid a moment of reflection that might acknowledge that he's ever done anything regrettable, let alone embarrassing.
The American right gets tired of democracy. I'd say the American right has never liked democracy, and can point as far back as the early 1800s when proposals to extend the vote to white male non-property holders were met by worries that such people might use the vote to further their own personal interests (to the detriment of their richer "betters"). But the right is certainly getting more brazenly contemptuous of voting rights and other aspects of democracy. This connects to a cluster of other links, which purport to grapple with the question of what principles conservatism has left after the right has pledged itself to politicians like Trump:
Sohrab Ahmari: Against David French-ism.
Isaac Chotiner: Ross Douthat on the crisis of the conservative coalition: Interview with Douthat.
Ed Kilgore: Josh Hawley could be the face of the post-Trump right.
Adam Serwer: The illiberal right throws a tantrum: sample quote:
I don't want to overstate the significance of this dispute between French and Ahmari. They are yelling at each other in a walled garden; conservative pundits in ideological magazines have little influence over a base whose opinions are guided by the commercial incentives of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and the partisan imperatives of the Republican Party. If they possessed such influence, Trump would not be president.
The question of whether the Republican Party would abandon liberal democracy for sectarian ethno-nationalism was decided in the 2016 primary, and all French and Ahmari are doing is arguing about it after the fact. The commercial and social incentives for conservative writers to succumb to Trumpism are vast. Some, like French, have had the integrity to stick to their stated principles. Others, like Ahmari, have already fallen. Today's skirmishes among conservatives resemble the irregulars in 1865 shooting at one another because they had not yet heard of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. And the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.
Dylan Matthews:
The surprising truth about extreme poverty: "It's most common with childless adults." Basically because we're much stingier with programs like SNAP where children are out of the picture.
Rashida Tlaib wants to give low-income adults $3,000 a year each, no questions asked.
Ella Nilsen: House Democrats want to make accepting dirt on campaign opponents from foreign governments a crime: "Democrats are rolling out a new package of election security bills after Trump said he's open to taking dirt on his 2020 opponents." That, or even the lesser requirement to report foreign offers to the FBI, strikes me as a bad idea: it practically begs foreign agents to set up and expose test cases.
Anna North: Alabama's law forcing sex offenders to get chemically castrated, explained.
Kelsey Piper: Will climate change kill everyone -- or just lots and lots of people? Oddly enough, I can think of adverse scenarios that are worse than the ones discussed here -- war over diminishing habitat and resources is the most obvious one -- but I can't imagine that no one would survive even that, and I'm dead certain that the survivors will prove adaptable enough to recover from any climate-induced dystopia. As for civilization ending, the bigger threat is politically-directed stupidity (which seems to have already claimed most of the Republican Party). As this explainer points out, much of the dispute here really turns on the question of how much threat we have to feel to act politically. Those who feel unheeded are eager to turn out the hyperbole, but my impression is that so far that has only had the perverse of undermining their credibility.
Andrew Prokop: Trump's legally problematic claim that he'd accept "oppo research" from foreign governments, explained.
Michael Sainato: Bosses pocket Trump tax windfall as workers see job promises vanish.
Jason Samenow:
David E Sanger/Nicole Perlroth: US escalates online attacks on Russia's power grid. Part of the rationale here is to deter Russia from interfering in US elections, but this reads more like a provocation along the lines of Nixon's famous "madman theory" of threatening nuclear war. The assumption seems to be that Russia will react rationally to such insanity, but if they believe that, why not just sit down and negotiate some kind of deal that would lessen the threat of cyberwarfare and present a unified front against hacking by private parties and other countries. Probably the same reason the US works to preserve its unique "first strike" capability: to cower the rest of the world into submission at the first demonstration of "shock and awe."
Richard Silverstein: Is Pompeo angling to interfere in British politics? "In leaked comments from a recent meeting with Jewish leaders, the US secretary of state cites the need to 'push back' against a potential Corbyn victory." Found a couple of useful links there:
Amnon Cohen: Corbyn and anti-semitism claims: The real reason behind the attack on Labour leader [April 2018].
Jonathan Cook: How Israel helped to revive Europe's ugly ethnic nationalisms: "Israel preserved a tribal idea of citizenship that followers of Trump and Europe's far-right now seek to emulate." [July 2018]
Joseph Massad: Pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism are inseparable, and always have been: "Pro-Zionism is the only respectable form of anti-Semitism today, one that is welcomed by the Israeli government and pro-Zionist white nationalists everywhere." Also: Israel and the West: 'Shared values' of racism and settler-colonialism.
Andrew Sullivan: Donald Trump and the art of the lie. He draws some examples from Michael Wolff's Siege, others from the George Stephanopoulos interview, but he could write the same article with fresh examples any week of the year.
For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It's like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you. . . .
A tyrant's path to power is not a straight line, it's dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can't see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system.
Sullivan also writes about Boris Johnson in the next section down the page: "My Old Chum Boris." Sullivan knew Johnson from their school days at Oxford together:
Boris was so posh it was funny. . . . He belonged, for example, to the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive upper-class fraternity that specialized in hosting expensive restaurant dinners for themselves, in white tie and tails no less, with members eating and drinking till they were stuffed and thoroughly shit-faced and then proceeded to puke on the floors and vandalize the joint, smashing tables and chairs and china, breaking windows and the like. Daddy would always pick up the price for repairs. . . . Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness -- with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not -- and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston. . . . But there is some sweet cosmic justice in Boris having to take responsibility for the Brexit he backed. It may be a catastrophe, but it will be his, and, for him at least, it sure will be fun.
Jon Swaine: Company part-owned by Jared Kushner got $90m from unknown offshore investors since 2017. Also, Vicky Ward: Jared Kushner may have an ethics problem -- to the tune of $90m.
Matt Taibbi:
Peter Wade: Ivanka Trump cashed $4 million from her father's DC hotel in 2018: "She and her husband, Jared Kushner, reported earning between $28.8 million and $135.1 million in 2018.
Alex Ward:
How the Trump administration is using 9/11 to build a case for war with Iran: "The case is legally dubious and factually challenged."
What Hong Kong's massive protests are really about: "The fight over an extradition law and democracy in China, explained." Update: Zeeshan Aleem: Huge Hong Kong protests continue after the government postpones controversial bill. Later update: Daniel Victor/Keith Bradsher: Protesters return to Hong Kong's streets, rejecting leader's apology.
Joanna Weiss: How Trump turned liberal comedians conservative: Nice idea for a piece, but doesn't deliver on its premise, nor approximate its title. Weiss laments the eclipse of "wry satire," complaining that today "it's all outrage and punching up -- and it's not always clear where the joke is." I don't doubt that there has been a coarsening of humor since Trump became president. Is any other reaction possible? I worry that many of the jokes offer lazy simplifications (e.g., ragging on Trump for his spelling and vocabulary lapses, like "covfefe"). I've also noted that no one seems to be able to tell funny jokes about Democrats (exception Hillary, but mostly in contrast to Trump). For instance, I can't recall Seth Myers ever cracking a funny joke about Bernie Sanders. Also, I've found myself with a pre-emptive groan every time Colbert does his "Doin' It Donkey Style" routine. On the other hand, the real thing I've found myself looking for from these comedians is solidarity. I rarely need their help in understanding the news, but it's gratifying to know that someone else shares my outrage.
Jennifer Williams: UK signs order for WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to be extradicted to the US.
Paul Woodward: Why Trump remains open to receiving foreign aid during election campaigns: Mostly links to other articles, but his summary is worth underlining:
As much as the media might be inclined to cast Trump's views on this issue as an aberration, they are, on the contrary, completely in line with what has become the GOP's overarching strategy for retaining power as its capacity to win votes declines: through gerrymandering, stacking courts, gutting campaign finance regulations, and now welcoming help from foreign governments.
The Republicans' power-hunger corresponds directly with their dwindling democratic opportunities.
A party that has realized it can't succeed by conforming with the operating rules for a functioning democracy has concluded its self-ascribed "right to govern" depends upon the systematic subversion of the principles upon which this country was founded.
Robin Wright: A tanker war in the Middle East -- again? Two oil tankers were struck in the Straits of Hormuz between Iran and Oman. The Trump administration and Trump's "allies" in Saudi Arabia and the UAE were quick to blame Iran (with no proof but lots of innuendo), and Iran immediately denied responsibility. One line in passing here sticks with me: "Within hours, oil prices rose four per cent." A reminder here of the "tanker war" in the late 1980s, although no mention of the Iranian civilian airliner the US shot down then. More on Iran:
Peter Baker: As Trump accuses Iran, he has one problem: his own credibility.
Dave DeCamp: Japanese ship owner contradicts US officials on tanker attack.
Heather Hurlburt: Trump's Iran accusations put US credibility on the line.
Fred Kaplan: Trump's lack of credibility is hampering America's ability to respond to the crisis in the Gulf: Title after the jump: "Trump's weak case against Iran."
Trita Parsi: Trump blames Iran for the tanker attacks. But let's be skeptical of his administration's pro-war bluster.
Meanwhile, no skepticism at the New York Times, where Bret Stephens is already clamoring for war: If Iran won't change its behavior, we should sink its navy.
Matthew Yglesias:
New Federal Reserve data shows how the rich have gotten richer: "It's been a great 30 years for people who own businesses."
The top 1 percent of the US wealth distribution has increased its net worth by 650 percent since 1989, while the bottom 50 percent saw its wealth grow by a much more modest 170 percent during the same period. . . . The story that the rich have gotten richer and inequality has grown is not new. But the Fed data does let us peek under the hood to help understand why inequality has grown so much.
Trump's big problem is that he's unpopular: "Democrats should worry less about him and more about everything else on the ballot."
A new survey shows how economic policy divides the GOP and unites Democrats: "Lower-income Republicans are decidedly more moderate on economics." The charts say still not as progressive/liberal as Democrats, but still, if Democrats want to peel off some Republican votes, more promising to do so on economic policy (where Democrats are generally most credible) than by trying to appease "cultural conservative" prejudices (where Democrats are less credible).