Month: September 2019

There is, of course, a robust debate as to the meaning of the term “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” To me, it connotes an action or series of actions that endangers the proper functioning of the legal or political system.

After the release of the Mueller Report, I concluded that Trump’s actions to obstruct justice did not meet the standard, as there was no underlying crime, and the investigation was ultimately permitted to reach its proper end. I would further argue that the Stormy Daniels hush money case does not meet the standard, simply because Trump was not in office at the time of the events. While we do not know exactly what Trump did with Ukraine, however, it seems increasingly likely that he was tailoring the foreign policy of the United States solely in his own political interests. In my opinion, that does, in fact, meet the legal requirement for impeachment, even though it is highly unlikely to occur.

While you’re contemplating that, spare a moment for the poor residents of Ukraine. They have been forced to choose between the American incumbent and his potential successor. My guess is that the Ukrainian government will just stall for time, and say nothing to offend anyone.

(It’s October, 2020. Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump are on the debate stage with a moderator. They begin.)

M: Our first question is for Senator Warren. What do you propose to do about increasing inequality in America?

W: Yes, increasing inequality is a great problem in America, and President Trump has done nothing but make it worse with his tax cut. He stuffed his cabinet with billionaires and tried to take health insurance and a variety of federal benefits away from poor people. I have lots and lots of great plans to save the country. I’ll fight for the struggling working people of America, 24/7.

M: President Trump.

T: You know what the real problem with inequality is in this country? It’s not about money. It’s with overeducated Harvard people talking down to real Americans and telling them what to do. America is sick of that. That’s why I’ll win in November.

M: The next question is for President Trump. What’s your plan to deal with climate change?

T: Climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese and American socialists who want to take away jobs from real American workers. They even want to take away your car and your hamburgers with their idiotic Green New Deal! I alone can stop this; that’s why you need to vote for me.

M: Senator Warren?

W: That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Climate change is an existential problem for all mankind. We need to try to stop it immediately. I’ll fight for the Green New Deal, and it will happen.

M: What do you mean by “fighting for the Green New Deal?” How would you get it past Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate?

W: I’ll fight and fight. I fight all the time. I never stop fighting. I’ll go to Kentucky and fight. I’ll make videos on YouTube and speeches on network TV. Average people will respond and put pressure on Mitch to support me. Fighting is about persistence. Even President Obama didn’t really understand that.

M: Another question for Senator Warren. President Trump is sometimes accused of being a racist. Do you think he’s a racist?

W: Of course he is. From his legal problems with discrimination in housing, to the birther controversy, to the Mexican rapists, to the good people supporting the radical right in Charlottesville, he has always done everything he could to denigrate people of color. My administration will put an end to it. I have a plan for that.

M: President Trump.

T: Whatever you say, Pocahontas. (He pretends to shoot her with a bow and arrow)

M: Senator Warren, your response?

W: See what I mean? All he knows how to do is to divide America. That has to stop. It’s killing our country.

M: President Trump.

T: I’m the least racist person in the world. You’re the racist! You’re the racist! You hate real white Americans! You want to make them write checks to black people because of slavery! Vote for me to keep that from happening!

M: I guess that’s a response of sorts. President Trump, you are often accused of being a corrupt authoritarian. What do you say to that?

T: I drained the swamp of all of those elitist liberals who wanted to boss real Americans around. We’re not doing what’s politically correct any more. If that’s corruption, we need more of it. I need four more years to finish the job.

W: The record is obvious to everyone. He’s destroying this country bit by bit, and making sure he gets paid for it. There won’t be anything left of liberal democracy in America if he gets re-elected next month. Everyone needs to understand that.

T: Yeah, I’m getting rid of “liberal” democracy, all right. My base loves me for it. They’re what America is all about–not political correctness and cuts in line for lazy minorities and illegal immigrants.

M: Final statements, starting with Senator Warren.

W: Just because we’re not engaged in any large scale wars, and unemployment is less than four percent, doesn’t mean the country, and even the entire planet, will survive four more years of this. We’re in an emergency. Vote for me to resolve it.

T: America, do you really want to listen to this old biddy professor lecture you for the next four years? It will be worse than having your mother-in-law in your ear every day. I alone can save you from that fate. Believe me. Believe me.

When it was over, all of the pundits declared Warren the winner, but Trump won the election, because Warren couldn’t overcome her problems with identity politics and swing voters.

Bernie Sanders is right about one thing; Medicare-for-All isn’t some loony leftist raving he stole from “The Communist Manifesto.” While the Sanders plan is both more expansive and expensive than any other single-payer system with which I am familiar, the concept of single-payer is more mainstream, on a worldwide basis, than our current system. If you were designing a system from scratch, it is the model you would probably adopt. The debate over it among Democrats is consequently purely tactical and practical.

The state of that debate, at this point, is rather disheartening. Proponents of the more modest public option have framed the issue as one of consumer choice, because depriving people of choices doesn’t poll well. Sanders and Warren have responded by arguing that no one actually loves his insurance company. That is both accurate and beside the point.

As I’ve noted before, the real issue with the Sanders plan is risk aversion, both for the Democratic Party and the electorate. The party knows that sweeping health care reform has been a big vote loser in 1994, 2010, and 2018, that single-payer will be resisted ferociously by a coalition of providers, insurance companies, and right-wingers, and that eliminating private insurance polls poorly. The electorate is concerned that the new system would be worse than the existing one, either as a result of human error, excessive cost, provider resistance, or GOP sabotage. That fear is both real and perfectly reasonable.

Sanders and Warren have the burden of somehow showing that the benefits of Medicare-for-All are worth the risks described above. Until we have a discussion which actually revolves around that issue, and not whether people love their existing insurance, no one is going to be persuaded by anything that is said during the debates.

The Piketty book is often compared to “Das Kapital,” but that isn’t really accurate. Piketty doesn’t believe in anything as woolly and mystical as dialectical materialism. He doesn’t say that mankind is headed for a classless nirvana. He simply generates data which indicate that, under normal conditions, the rate of return on the investments typically held by the wealthy has exceeded the percentage increase in GDP in Western industrial nations. As a result, barring significant policy changes or disasters (wars, depressions, etc.), the trend will be for the affluent to possess an ever-increasing percentage of national wealth.

You could call it something like the iron law of oligarchy, but, as noted above, it can be reversed. Why do I bring this up? Because Bernie Sanders represents Marx in this debate, and Elizabeth Warren stands with Piketty. At some point in time during the campaign, you have to think there will be at least a bit of a debate between the two of them on this point.

If it happens, expect Warren to win it in a landslide–partly because she is the more intelligent of the two candidates, but partly because her position is much easier to defend.

Picture yourself as a pro-democracy protester in Hong Kong. The government has withdrawn the extradition bill. Should you keep demonstrating, or declare victory and go home?

It’s a tough decision. On the one hand, you’re tired, you’re afraid you could wind up in some dreadful black jail on the mainland, and you’re concerned about the level of violence that typically accompanies the protests. On the other hand, you know the ultimate stakes are much higher than the extradition bill, that battle isn’t remotely over, and it will be difficult to coax so many people out on the street at a later date without a serious provocation from the government, which undoubtedly has time on its side.

All I can say is, I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice. It’s the land of no good options.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren know that Barack Obama is admired by the vast majority of Democrats, and that attacking him would be electoral suicide, so they don’t. Their surrogates, however, have no such qualms. And so, we have a column in today’s NYT which accuses Obama of being a “neo-liberal” who blew a great opportunity to remake the American economic and political systems. At least it didn’t call him an Uncle Tom; the author is probably leaving that for Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There are three major errors in the column:

1. OBAMA DIDN’T RUN TO BRING US THE “REVOLUTION”: He has been accurately described as a liberal Republican from the 1960’s or the early 1970’s. There was nothing in his campaign which suggested he was trying to reshape our political and economic system any more than Hillary Clinton was.
2. OBAMA HAD TO PRIORITIZE ECONOMIC RECOVERY OVER DEALING WITH INEQUALITY: Bashing bankers and businessmen was not exactly a great way to rebuild confidence in a tottering system during a crisis. If he had focused more on helping the little guy than on keeping the country afloat, the poor would have wound up with a larger slice of a much smaller pie, which would not have improved their lot at all.
3. HE DID EVERYTHING THAT WAS POLITICALLY FEASIBLE: Joe Lieberman was willing to tank Obamacare over the public option. Do you really think he was going to vote for a “revolution?”

I’m happy to say I was wrong about the outcome of yesterday’s election (so shoot me!) Lieberman played his cards better than Bibi, and was the big winner. I suspect Bibi fatigue probably played a part, too. In any event, the most likely coalition at this point would be Lieberman’s party, Blue and White, and Likud without Bibi as PM (oh, darn!)

If my latest prediction is right, the new government will be badly split on the Palestinian issue, and will probably aim to do as little as possible, which, in all likelihood, would suit the majority of Israeli voters just fine. I don’t know if it will be more or less hawkish on Iran. I am certain, however, that its relationship with Trump will be quite different than what we have seen in the last three years.

So how exactly will the election results impact American-Israeli relations? Tune in next Middle East Monday for the answer to that question.

The 45th President Trump

Feared the country would fall in a slump

So he jawboned the Fed.

It’s not easily led.

Would low interest rates give him a bump?

David Brooks maintains that America is sick, and he’s not afraid to identify the culprit. It’s the “meritocracy”: the college-educated professionals who marry each other, live in gated communities, and engage in helicopter parenting in order to perpetuate their ill-gotten entitlements. They have destroyed social mobility in this country. It is they, not the one percent, who are the real problem.

Of course, Brooks has no clue how to deal with this issue, which is really the inevitable product of the evolution from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. He also disregards the increasing influence and wealth of the one percent. For today’s purposes, however, the importance of his opinion, which is widely held among Republicans, is that it is an implicit shot across the bow of Elizabeth Warren, whose core constituency is the 10 percent. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, appeals to a less educated audience, and may even agree with some of his critique.

How would Warren respond to this? If I’m Bernie, I would do my best to find out; there are opportunities for him here.

With a big enough sample size, even unpredictability becomes predictable. The Iranians have seen Trump bluster, and then back down, enough times to conclude that he won’t launch anything more than a symbolic strike against them no matter how much they provoke him. As a result, they are opposing his “maximum pressure” with “maximum resistance” without paying any additional price.

This is the dilemma I warned about years ago: if you want to bluster constantly and remain credible, you have to be willing to deliver on your threats in a big way at least once, even if it blows up the economy and threatens your chances of re-election. Bolton may be gone, but MBS is still there, and Bibi probably will be, too; both of them want America at war with Iran, and will be in Trump’s ear constantly. I still say they are more likely than not to get their war, particularly if they keep telling Trump that his reputation as a tough guy is at risk if he doesn’t roll the dice, because it will be true.

We all know the pattern: Trump creates a crisis; exacerbates it by taking extreme positions; then backs down when he gets resistance and claims a “victory” by putting a hold on the issue of his own making. The question for today is, could BoJo, who negotiates in a similar style, reverse course and sell his party and the country on something like the May deal?

It would be very difficult, for two reasons. First, Boris has done his best, and with considerable success, to persuade a majority of his party that the only acceptable outcome is no-deal. Second, Boris has no national mandate to just be Boris. He’s accountable to his party, and completely dependent on it. In addition to being an even more deft and experienced liar, Trump won a national election on his own, so he can reasonably claim that the electorate chose him to be whatever he chooses to be.

It’s not completely impossible, but don’t hold your breath.

When David Cameron was the PM, the Conservative Party was dominated by its versions of the PBPs and CLs. Budget cutting, austerity, deregulation, and social liberalism were the order of the day.

Today, the situation is completely different; Reactionaries are in charge. The script has flipped; George Osborne’s austerity is over, conservative social policies are all the rage, and the interests of business are getting short shrift in the interests of delivering Brexit.

Can a Tory government grounded solely on a single faction–albeit the largest one– survive? In the long run, probably not. You can expect Boris to attempt to reunify the party once Brexit is a done deal. He will have self-interest and Labour extremism as allies, so it will probably work.

The kingdom’s vulnerability to low-tech warfare has been exposed. MBZ is already starting to back away from the ghastly war in Yemen. Will MBS (and Trump, by extension), see the problem, change course, and start looking seriously for a negotiated solution? Or will they double down?

Trump typically doubles down in his never-ending quest for leverage, but he has shown the ability on occasion to retreat and spin it as a victory. I haven’t seen MBS do that. My guess is that he will double down, and the situation will become even more perilous for everyone.

The GOP’s intense antipathy towards unions has always been a potential point of vulnerability for Donald Trump. He needs union votes to win in the swing states in 2020; anything that emphasizes the battle between capital and labor isn’t going to help him, as Scott Walker would be happy to tell you.

On the Democratic side, expect to see all of the candidates lined up to support the union. Don’t be surprised to see Bernie Sanders on a picket line, and he may well have company.

It’s a no-lose situation for the Democrats, even if it emphatically isn’t for the UAW.

Not what we needed.