Month: August 2018

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting article on Vox entitled “Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan to Save Capitalism.”  It is well worth your time.

The gist of the article is that Warren is pushing a piece of proposed legislation that attempts to make large corporations more responsive to the needs of their workers and the community, not just their shareholders.  The bill would require corporations with revenues exceeding $1 billion to apply for and receive new federal charters.  In order to get a charter, the corporations would have to agree to limit share buybacks, CEO compensation, and self-interested political activity, and boards of directors would have to include a minimum number of representatives from labor and the public.

It’s an interesting idea.  My questions about it are as follows:

1. Is it conceptually sound?
2. Is it politically feasible?
3. How well would it work, in practice?

My responses are as follows:

1.  Yes, the bill is conceptually sound.  It is true, as Warren asserts, that:  (a) the creation of a corporate entity is a legal privilege that can be conditioned by the government in the public interest; (b) corporations have been afforded new constitutional rights, including rights under the First Amendment,  without accepting any countervailing responsibilities in the recent past; (c) the proposal looks a lot like a model that works in Germany; and (d) the move towards a shareholder value form of governance over the last fifty years has coincided with an increase in corporate profits, and a loss of power and income for labor.
2. There is nothing about this bill that is “socialist,” but it would be portrayed as such in hysterical terms by the GOP.  Getting it through Congress would require a blue wave election, which in turn would mean complete failure on the part of the Trump administration.
3.  I’m skeptical about how well the bill would actually work in practice.  Measures to control corporations are typically gamed successfully by management, and putting the burden of enforcement on dissident left-wing shareholders isn’t necessarily going to succeed.

On the whole, I prefer direct and transparent measures which redistribute wealth and power to this kind of indirect interference with the market, but I am willing to keep an open mind on the subject.  Make your case, Ms. Warren.  I’m listening.

Iran and Turkey are hardly natural allies.  Iran is Shiite; Turkey is Sunni.  Their predecessors, the Ottoman and Persian Empires, were neighbors who fought countless border wars (the boundaries of the current state of Iraq were a result).  Finally, Iran was determined to keep Assad in power in Syria, while the Turks wanted to see the back of him.  Historically, there isn’t much reason for cooperation there.

Until now.  Today, they share the same large and deadly adversary–America.  In addition to providing each other with diplomatic support, the Turks can and will help the Iranians bust the new sanctions.  The two of them can also collaborate to make the lives of the Kurds and their American friends miserable in Syria.  It’s going to happen, and we need to prepare for it.

The Turks have been difficult friends even under much better circumstances.  Much of the blame for the current circumstances falls on them.  Trump is making things worse, however, with his blundering, swaggering “diplomacy,” and we are going to pay a price for it in the near future.

It sucks to watch your heroes die.

It hurts to see them go.

There is no point in asking why.

There’s no response, you know.

 

The world will go on after us.

It did OK before.

So mourn the dead because you must.

Prepare for many more.

In the very unlikely event that you don’t know why she was called the “Queen of Soul,” just watch the YouTube video of her 2015 Kennedy Center Honors program performance.  It will tell you everything you need to know.

I write today to warn everyone that dark days lie ahead for those of us who are over, say, fifty.  While far too many of the great sixties artists died young, most of them (somehow!) didn’t;  McCartney, Dylan, Jagger, Richards, Townshend, Daltrey, Stevie, and Smokey are still with us.  That isn’t going to last much longer, and the world will be infinitely poorer for it.  Get ready, and enjoy them while you still can.

The resistance needs a snappy slogan to compete with MAGA.  Here are some ideas:

1. Stop the Madness!
2. Make America Good Again!

If anyone has any other ideas, please send them to me by next Wednesday.  The winning slogan will be recognized at that time.

Andrew Sullivan had a lengthy, but interesting, article about Jeremy Corbyn in the NYM last week.  He clearly views the improbable rise of Corbyn as a threat to the well-being of the UK and a cautionary tale for the Democrats.  Is he right?

The similarities between Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are way too obvious to ignore.  That said, I think Sullivan’s concerns are overblown, for the following reasons:

1.  While Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership contest, Sanders lost to Clinton in 2016.
2.  Surveys taken during the campaign showed that a large number of Sanders voters were actually more conservative than Clinton, and were voting for him solely because they weren’t with her.
3.  The UK, for all of its changes, is still far more class-conscious than the US.  The Democrats are more of an identity-driven party, which makes old-style leftism more difficult.
4.  Corbyn clearly detests America.  No American politician is going to get elected with that message.
5.  Corbyn is a genuine 1970s socialist.  Socialism actually had a following in the UK back then, so you can view him as sort of an “everything old is new again” phenomenon.  For a variety of reasons I have discussed previously, socialism never had a large following in this country, and probably never will.

After it was announced that the Medicare Trust Fund would become insolvent around 2026, and the Social Security Trust fund a few years after that, it became impossible for the parties to kick the can down the road any longer.  That was of great value to the Democrats, as the GOP was unable to play its cynical and hypocritical game of attacking them for past Medicare cuts, while quietly supporting privatization and massive cuts of their own, during the 2024 campaign.  Largely as a result, the Democrats won the election, but their majority was too small to get reforms through Congress without some GOP support.

Seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, the Democrats proposed a carbon tax to make up the deficit in the two entitlement programs.  The GOP was split; the CLs, of course, demanded benefit cuts, while the other factions wanted to keep the current benefit levels in place, but without raising any taxes.  When it was all said and done, the two parties compromised in the usual way;  benefit levels were maintained simply through payments from general revenues, without raising taxes.  The deficit increased substantially once again, interest rates went up, and the economy suffered as a result.

Afghanistan is often analogized to Vietnam, and with good reason.  The analogy isn’t perfect;  the American public is more indifferent than hostile to the war, since Afghanistan was the platform for an attack on us, we haven’t suffered major losses there, and it didn’t result in the reinstitution of the draft.  However, the objective in both countries was to create enough space to permit a successful transition from American to local control of the war.  In Vietnam, it failed completely;  in Afghanistan, after 17 years, it has become clear that it will never succeed.

The questions, then, are as follows:

1. What is a realistic objective for the war?
2. Is the war worth the effort?
3. Are there viable alternatives to the longstanding pattern of surging and retreating?

My analysis is as follows:

1. The only real American strategic interest in Afghanistan is in preventing the country from becoming a platform for terrorist attacks in the US and Europe.  Promoting liberal democratic values and limiting the cultivation of opium there are certainly worthy goals, but we are probably doomed to failure in the end, given the local culture and economy.
2.  Afghanistan is not unique when it comes to providing a platform for terrorists.  There is no longer any obvious reason to throw a disproportionate number of resources at it as opposed to, say, Yemen or parts of Africa.
3.  The alternatives to the current surge and retreat approach are:  (a) escalate the war to include parts of Pakistan; (b) treat Afghanistan in the same way as Yemen or Africa (i.e., withdraw virtually all of our combat forces and fight terrorists, with or without the cooperation of the government, with drones and special forces); or (c) use South Korea as the model, rather than Vietnam, and accept openly that we will be there to maintain a stalemate indefinitely.
4.  Since Pakistan has nuclear weapons, (a) is not a viable approach.  There is no obvious reason why (b) can’t work as long as our objective is as limited as I have suggested in #1.  (C) has worked in South Korea, and can work in Afghanistan as long as the American public is willing to accept the costs of propping up the government and maintaining a stalemate. (C) is also the best alternative if you believe that a negotiated settlement with the Taliban is a reasonable possibility.
5. Either (b) or (c) would be more realistic, and have a better chance of success, than the current approach.  I prefer (b) because I don’t believe there is a sufficient justification for treating Afghanistan differently than the other terrorist hot spots, and the record doesn’t show much of a basis for believing that the Taliban and their Pakistani friends are much interested in a deal.

Sunday’s NYT Magazine contained a lengthy article about the Afghan War that was largely written from the perspective of a single soldier who became increasingly disillusioned with our government’s tactics over time.  The author of the article clearly believes that the war has been a failure.  Is that true?

Yes and no.  Yes, we have been unable to destroy the Taliban; that will not be possible as long as they have the support of the Pakistani military and we lack the will to turn the war into a far larger and more dangerous regional conflict.  Even worse, it has become increasingly clear after seventeen years that the Afghan military and government will not be able to do the job by themselves for the foreseeable future.  On the other hand, we have been able to keep enough pressure on the Taliban to prevent any international terrorist events along the lines of 9/11, and to maintain control over a large portion of the country.   That’s a draw, and a draw is not the same as a defeat, even if we haven’t been able to accomplish our more ambitious objectives.

Is the war worth it, and are there other plausible alternatives?  More on that tomorrow.

 

Erdogan cast his spell on the Turks.

You could call him a bit of a jerk.

While it seems that he hates

Really high interest rates

His alternatives don’t really work.

 

Last week’s issue of The Economist featured a column which gave Trump a medal for being “better than Obama” on Afghanistan even though the author couldn’t point to any meaningful change in tactics.  Part of the justification for the medal was the apparent (to the author, at least) improvement on the battlefield.  A week later, however, the Taliban took over Ghazni.

Whoops!  Does Trump have to give the medal back?  Will we see a mea culpa in next week’s issue?  Not likely.

More on Afghanistan in the following days.

Faced with an economic disaster largely of his own making, Erdogan has responded as all good strongmen would:  by doubling down on his mistakes and blaming foreigners.  When that doesn’t work, will he go the full Maduro?  That remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

From an American perspective, the thing to remember here is that Trump is just as ignorant as Erdogan, has the same authoritarian impulses, and has even less respect for the truth.  When, at some point in the future, American markets spiral out of control, how do you expect him to react?  Exactly the same way, of course, and the results won’t be pretty.

It is undisputed that the GOP weaponizes the deficit when they lose elections and ignores it when they win.  Neither they nor the country has paid the price for their irresponsibility to date;  interest rates remain low, and the economy is roaring.  It then follows, according to the left, that the Democrats should stop trying to be adults about the deficit, and should simply let it rip.  In particular, Obama’s flirtation with a grand bargain was a mistake which should not be repeated when the Democrats regain power.

Are they right?  No.  There is no guarantee that interest rates will remain low forever.  In addition, the financial problems with our entitlement programs haven’t gone away, and will have to be dealt with in the foreseeable future.  If not, the default alternative is a huge battle over how to fix the holes in the system with a deadline looming.  That serves neither party’s best interests.

According to Steve Bannon, 2016 was the inevitable result of 2008.  Angry at an establishment that had initially tolerated the predatory practices of Wall Street financiers, and then had bailed them out, the peasants with pitchforks rose up and elected Donald Trump.  Trump’s limits on immigration and tariffs (loathed by the financiers) will lead to a new golden age for American manufacturing–just you wait!   Wages for workers will soar, and America will be great again!

I hear you snickering.  Stop it!

Of course, this narrative ignores inconvenient facts and distorts others, including the following:

1.  In 2012, after four hard years of the Great Recession, the peasants rose and nominated . . . Mitt Romney.
2.  Bernie Sanders lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
3.  Trump only won a plurality of GOP votes–not a majority.
4.  Clinton won the popular vote by a substantial margin.
5.  Trump spent far more time denouncing Mexican rapists than Wall Street vampire squid during the campaign.
6.  Once elected, Trump stuffed his cabinet with Wall Street billionaires and signed a tax cut which gave virtually all of its benefits to the wealthy.  He continues to bash immigrants on a daily basis.  Wall Street–not so much.
7.  The tariff and immigration program has done nothing for American prosperity to date, and won’t bring jobs back in the future.

Leaving aside the holes in the narrative, there are two interesting aspects to it.  First, Bannon clearly doesn’t subscribe to the bogus GOP counternarrative that it was the Democrats and the federal government, not the vampire squid, who caused the Great Recession.  Second, his rhetoric about Wall Street in the New York Magazine interview could come straight from the mouth of Bernie Sanders.

In the end, right-wing and left-wing American populism may be brothers, not distant relatives.

How to win back Reactionary voters, and whether it is even worth the effort, has been a major topic of discussion among Democrats over the last two years.  Here are my observations:

1.  Don’t expect too much:  You’re only going to nibble around the edges, no matter what you do.  Still, that’s millions of votes that are in play on a national basis.

2.  Faux vs. real populism:  Trump stuffed his cabinet with billionaires and cut taxes primarily for the wealthy, not for working people.  Don’t forget to point that out, repeatedly.

3.  Trump hates labor:  A fair number of Reactionaries are union members.  Make a point of talking about the GOP’s ongoing efforts to destroy unions.

4.  Repeal and don’t replace:  Trump and the GOP tried to take your health insurance away.  Is that really what you voted for in 2016?

5.  Stay neutral in the culture wars:  Emphasize your local roots and your sympathy for rural culture.  Don’t let your opponent tar you as a wealthy, out-of-touch limousine liberal.