Month: September 2017

With the Kurdish referendum in the books and the Catalan vote looming, the question for today is, under what conditions is secession justified?  Here are my standards:

1.  The geometry has to make sense.  It has to be possible to remove the seceding area from the mother country without making the map look ridiculous. Scotland is geographically discrete, so secession there makes sense;  Quebec, which is located in the middle of Canada, does not.

2.  The seceding area has to have a distinct and separate culture and some history of operating as an independent nation.  No elaboration necessary.

3.  The seceding area has to have some sort of legitimate historical grievance against the mother country.  I say “legitimate” because the case for the Confederacy was based on slavery.

Just because you can meet these standards doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen;  the mother country and other affected countries may impose a veto for geopolitical reasons.  If you do, however, you meet what I would call the “moral” test, and your claims should be taken seriously.

How do these standards apply to current real world conditions?  Kurdistan would meet all of the tests.  Quebec would fail #1.  Scotland would have a strong case, although you could argue that centuries of cooperation as part of the UK trump the events of the 13th and 14th centuries.  The case for Catalonia is debatable on all counts.

Like the war itself,  it’s finally over.  Here are my thoughts:

1.  In a previous post, I noted two important differences between Vietnam and Korea:  the open-ended American military commitment and the greater effectiveness of the South Korean government.  Here are a few more important differences: (a) Kim Il Sung didn’t have the kind of nationalist credibility that Ho Chi Minh had; (b) partly as a result of that, there was no South Korean equivalent of the Viet Cong; (c) while the topography in Korea had its challenges, it didn’t provide cover in the same fashion as the jungle did in Vietnam; and (d) due to geography, there was no equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
2.  The situation was worse than John Kerry’s famous question made it out to be. Based on the evidence in the film, the last men to die were unwitting tools of Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign.
3.  The Cambodia campaign and the mining of Haiphong Harbor would have made a lot more sense if they had happened earlier.
4.  Non-nuclear strategic bombing didn’t accomplish much in World War II.  The story was the same in Vietnam.  Lacking much of an industrial capacity, and relying on imported weapons, there were few targets of any value in North Vietnam.  The bombing essentially evolved into an unsuccessful terror tactic.
5.  The film omitted one fact of extreme importance:  there was plenty of evidence that the USSR and the PRC were at daggers drawn by the middle of the 1960’s. That cut the heart out of the argument that a defeat in Vietnam was a victory for monolithic Communism, but our government apparently didn’t understand that, or somehow didn’t care.
6.  I was just a child during the war, but I remember thinking that the public response to returning veterans (particularly draftees who were just following the law) was just wrong.  The statements made by the veterans in the film have assured me that I was right about that.
7.  The level of mobilization of the North Vietnamese state, given its lack of resources, was nothing less than astonishing.  Nothing short of an effort to obliterate the entire population would have been successful.

In 2005, George W. Bush was looking forward to spending his political capital on the partial privatization of Social Security.  His response to Katrina, however, made him look both incompetent and insensitive.  His Social Security initiative, which was already in trouble, subsequently died.

Trump has displayed the same combination of incompetence and insensitivity in his response to Maria.  Will the result be the same?

No.  Trump lost all moderate opinion long ago;  he only cares about his base.  For their part, his base is indifferent to the plight of Democratic-voting Hispanics living on an island far from any red states.  As far as they’re concerned, if Trump is more interested in tweeting about the NFL than providing essential services to Puerto Rico, that’s fine with them.

They may start to care, however, when the residents of Puerto Rico start moving to Florida and turning the state blue.  They haven’t thought that far ahead.

Trump is already trying to sell the tax cut sort-of plan as a proposal that will benefit the middle class, not the wealthy.  This is, of course, a lie, because:

1. The increase in the standard deduction is counterbalanced by the elimination of personal exemptions and the increase in the bottom bracket from 10 to 12 percent.  I suspect the net impact for most people will be a very small cut that doesn’t stimulate any new economic activity, but grows the deficit.
2.  The abolition of the estate tax and the AMT will benefit wealthy people exclusively.
3.  Likewise, the proposed 25 percent rate for small corporations and the reduction of the 39.6 percent rate to 35 percent.
4.  While the “plan” leaves open the possibility that a higher rate might be created for the truly wealthy, don’t hold your breath on that.
5.  We don’t have enough details about loophole closing to know exactly what the impact of the corporate tax changes will be.  The outcome may be an overall tax cut, or just a shifting of burdens from some businesses to others.  If the overall impact is a cut, however (that seems likely), the primary beneficiaries will be wealthy shareholders, not workers, unless you assume that workers carry more clout with management than shareholders, which is rarely true in 2017 America.
6.  Middle class taxpayers who itemize in a few blue states with high state and local taxes will almost certainly be the big losers with this proposal.  Their taxes will go up.

Will Trump and the GOP persuade the country as a whole that this is pro-worker legislation?  If so, welcome to Trump University, Part Deux.

 

In a post in yesterday’s Vox, Matthew Yglesias made the case for strong DNC involvement in the Alabama Senate race.  He conceded that Moore was likely to win regardless, but argued that the Democrats could catch lightning in a bottle, that Jones is a good candidate, and that Moore is so egregious that he simply can’t go unopposed.  It was a reasonable, principled position.

A cynic, on the other hand, would say that Democrats have no chance in Alabama, that making the Republican caucus even more ungovernable is a win in and of itself, and that Moore’s weird theocratic views will be the gift that keeps on giving in  the 2018 and 2020 campaigns.

Personally, I lean more towards the cynical side.  I would not put much money into this race unless the polls suggest that victory is a reasonable possibility.

On the GOP victor named Moore.

He’s right-wing to his very core.

So Bannon has won.

When it’s all said and done

Can the Democrats show him the door?

As I noted previously, the Schroder labor reforms made Germany more prosperous, but they divided and demoralized the SPD, to the benefit of the CDU.  Hollande, on the other hand, initiated half-hearted reforms that accomplished little, but also divided and demoralized his party, which, however, still exists.

Macron is in a different position than either Schroder or Hollande.  The whole reason for being of his presidency is his willingness to push through reforms over the opposition of extreme left-wing unions.  He doesn’t have any symbols or history or class-consciousness to fall back on if he fails.  His presidency will simply wither and die.

And so, he has no choice but to move forward even if the polls are unfavorable and a Socialist, in his position, would have to back down. The former basketball coach at my alma mater referred to this as “the luxury of no alternative;” life is simpler if there is no viable Plan B.

It sounds kind of Napoleonic, doesn’t it?

In 2009, with the economy crashing around his ears, Barack Obama proposed a stimulus package that included both spending increases and tax cuts.  Virtually every respectable economist who has reviewed the history of the stimulus has concluded that the spending increases in particular had a relatively high multiplier, and that the economy would have been far worse without the legislation.  The GOP, however, derided the stimulus and claimed that it was a complete failure. The theory, of course, was that there was no multiplier, and that spending today only increased the deficit and resulted in less spending later, so a stimulus by definition only served to displace more productive spending by the private sector.

Today, with the unemployment rate below 5 percent and interest rates rising, the GOP is proposing tax cuts to increase existing levels of growth.  There is virtually unanimous Republican support for the idea of “dynamic scoring,” and some diehards will even say that the tax cuts will create so much growth, they will pay for themselves, even in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

I’m guessing you can see the inconsistency here.  You might even think there was another agenda at work.

NASCAR, hunting, and fishing are red sports.  The NBA and Formula One are blue sports.  Most other sports are in the middle, including the NFL.

Given its violence and military analogy and the facelessness of the players, you would expect the NFL to lean a bit to the red side, and it does.  However, it has plenty of blue fans, including me, and times are changing.  Many of the players are African-American, and the recent revelations regarding safety are a long-term threat to the viability of the league.  The NFL, in short, doesn’t need any more sources of controversy right now.

Trump probably thought that commenting on national anthem protests would play well with his base, which, of course, is the only thing he knows how to do. The impact of his comments, however, was to unite the players against him, and the owners, who are natural allies of his, were in no position to resist under the current circumstances.

The bottom line is that the NFL isn’t NASCAR, and when Jerry Jones, Bob Kraft, and Tom Brady disagree with you, you know you just screwed up.

The Burns/Novick series on Vietnam is an amazingly vivid and powerful piece of filmmaking.  I know it is because I can’t stop watching even though it is giving me nightmares.

One of the running themes of the program is that three American presidents continued to escalate the war and tell the public we were “winning” in spite of strong privately-held doubts because the fear of the consequences of “losing” was just too great.  The unspoken conclusion is that if only one of them had possessed the moral courage to stand in front of the escalation train and do what needed to be done, the story would have ended more happily.

That is exactly what Barack Obama did when he refused to enforce the red line, and why takes pride in his inaction, in spite of a foreign policy consensus to the contrary.  He could see that a short bombing campaign, by itself, would not bring down the Assad regime, but would lead to demands for further action, which could not logically have been stopped short of an occupation that he was determined to avoid.

Obama was half right.  Refusing to bomb wasn’t a mistake.  Drawing the line, however, was.

The great paradox of German politics is that Angela Merkel largely owes her position to Gerhard Schroder, whose labor reforms brought prosperity to the country and divided the SPD.  Being the junior partner in a coalition doesn’t exactly help your electoral prospects, either:  just ask the Liberal Democrats.

Merkel’s problem is that she has to wear two hats:  one as the German Chancellor, and the other as the leader of Europe.  They frequently take her in different directions, most notably on austerity.  How will she balance her responsibilities in what almost certainly will be her last term?  Will she work with Macron to try to bring some coherence to the EU, or just pursue Germany’s interests and muddle through?  Only time will tell.

I admit it:  Ta-Nehisi Coates drives me nuts.

Having spent the Obama Administration complaining that Obama was too white, calling for white people to pay reparations, and arguing that white people are fixated on breaking the bodies of black men (not something I’ve ever once thought about, and neither have you), he has belatedly discovered the virtues of the Obama years, and is appropriately indignant about Trump and his supporters in a new article in The Atlantic.  As usual, however, he goes way too far, and insists that the outcome of the election was solely dictated by racial views, and had nothing to do with the economic frustrations of white working people.

I don’t accept that West Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Trump because its citizens are bigots–not because they wanted their coal mining jobs back.  I don’t accept that businessmen voted for Trump because they are bigots, and not because they wanted deregulation and a big tax cut.  I don’t accept that evangelical Christians all voted for Trump because they are bigots, and not because they think their morals and their way of life is under threat.  I don’t accept that the vast majority of the white working class cares more about racial issues than their own economic well-being just because small farmers in the South were willing to fight for the Confederacy 150 years ago.

And what if he’s right?  How, exactly, is the Democratic Party supposed to regain power if it has no chance to regain the votes of millions of bigoted white workers? Going to West Virginia and telling unemployed miners that they should pay reparations is not exactly a winning electoral strategy.

I agree with Coates that Bernie Sanders’ class-based approach to American politics is simple-minded, and that identity issues, by and large, are much more important.  I do not agree, however, that race is the only part of identity that truly matters to the average voter.  Coates is almost as simple-minded and wrong as Sanders on that point.

 

Trump has a natural affinity for athletes and soldiers, because he can divide them into “winners” and “losers.”  That makes his new battle with LeBron James and Steph Curry very awkward for him.

What’s he going to do, call them “losers?”  They have five rings between them, and they are much more popular than he is.

Sometimes even the Wizard of Id should know that keeping his trap shut is the best option.

I’ve previously noted that the GOP’s stance on climate change is dramatically different from that of conservative parties in other energy-producing countries, such as Canada and Australia.  I attributed the difference to the greater popularity of right-wing religion and higher amounts of anti-state DNA in American culture.  I’m thinking now, however, that there is another culprit;  the environment is collateral damage in the culture wars.

What do I mean by that?  Well, the Reactionary faction of the GOP has no inherent interest in protecting the pocketbooks of fossil fuel producers. However, the Reactionaries view the American government as being nothing less than evil, given that it allegedly promotes the interests of “those people” over salt-of-the-earth white Christians, so any attempt to increase its power to do anything must be opposed to its utmost.  Since any effort to combat climate change inevitably involves both the use of scientists (a highly suspect non-Christian group) and the augmentation of state power, it must be resisted regardless of its policy implications.

I say “conservatives” because there is nothing genuinely conservative about pretending that an existential threat doesn’t exist.  As I see it, there are three separate strands of “conservative” thought:

1.  Climate change is a hoax.  It doesn’t exist.  Unfortunately, there is a mountain of objective, undisputed data which shows that the planet is warming. Taking this position requires you to ignore the evidence.

2.  Climate change is real, but is a purely natural phenomenon.  If you truly believe this, the logical response is to funnel money into capital improvements that address the symptoms of climate change, if not its causes.  That would require increased federal spending and a larger state.  As a result, #1 is more popular among “conservatives.”

3.  Climate change is real, and at least partly man-made, but doing anything about it won’t be cost-effective.  This approach essentially shifts the costs of climate change from fossil fuel producers to the victims of natural disasters; it doesn’t make them go away.  No politician is going to admit to believing that the fossil fuel industries are more important than the lives of the victims of Harvey, Irma, and Maria, but there you have it.

The best we can hope for in the foreseeable future is a shift to #2 and a realization, without openly admitting it, that it is more cost-effective to prepare for disasters than to pay for clean-up.