Author: hamilton1788

The deadline for a deal on a CR is only two weeks away. Will Speaker Mike crash the car to prove to the far right that he can, or will he trade on his credibility with the extremists to keep the lights on?

It’s obviously disheartening to know that a white Christian nationalist is in a position of power in the House, but his ideology matters less in this instance than his personality and his leadership skills.

I think he will draw back from the brink. From what I’ve seen, he understands perfectly that he has to satisfy the moderates as well as his right-wing friends if he wants to accomplish anything and keep his job. That should deter him from following his instincts and creating chaos.

For now, anyway.

Some left-leaning commentators are celebrating the UAW’s apparent victory over GM, Ford, and Stellantis. This could be the beginning of a shift in power away from large corporations and towards working people, and the beginning of the end for the dollar store economy, right?

The pandemic should warn us that there are other possibilities, including the following:

1. The companies protect their profits by jacking up prices, and consumers pay them. Increased inflation is the result.
2. The companies jack up prices, but consumers refuse to pay them, and buy cars built with non-union labor. Profits fall, layoffs ensue, and the companies don’t have the funds to facilitate the change to electric vehicles. Tesla and the Japanese car companies are the big winners here.
3. The companies don’t jack up prices, profits fall, and there is no money left for the conversion to electric vehicles. The pace of the conversion slows as the companies beg for relief from government timetables.

None of these is a victory for working people or the nation as a whole. History tells us that only government action, typically in a massive crisis, causes major redistributions of wealth. A few union victories aren’t going to do the trick.

To borrow a phrase from Xi and Putin, Trump and Bibi used to be as close as lips and teeth. Today, Trump is much more critical of Bibi than he used to be. Why?

Because Bibi has to live in the real world, and it is Biden, not Trump, who commands the aircraft carriers off of the Israeli coast. Bibi has embraced Biden because he has no choice. Trump, being who he is, will never forgive him for that act of disloyalty.

Oh, well. He still has Putin’s unconditional support, and that’s what really matters.

Biden goes to Israel, hugs Bibi, and does his consoler-in-chief thing. He sends aircraft carriers to deter Hezbollah. Thereafter, he spends most of his time warning the Israeli government about the dangers of throwing temper tantrums and killing innocent civilians. Having established an enormous amount of credibility with the Israeli public, his concerns are difficult to ignore. His initial gesture was genuine, but was it also a tactic?

Yes, and it is working. Will he get any credit for it from the public, either in America or throughout the world? I doubt it.

One hears two responses to the exit strategy question from the Israeli government. The first is that power in Gaza will be given to an outside group of technocrats, or the PA, or the UN, or some group to be named later. The second is that Hamas is a group of Nazis, and the story will end the way World War II did, after the unfortunate but justifiable deaths of thousands of civilians. Is this a workable strategy?

Option 1 is an exercise of wishful thinking; no outsider is going to come in and save the Israelis from the costs of an occupation. If you accept the World War II analogy, you are implicitly tolerating the need for a lengthy and expensive occupation. The Israelis would prefer to avoid that.

Barring a switch to the “cut the grass” strategy discussed in my last post, the fact is that Israel will be faced with two options at the end of the war. The first is an occupation of indefinite length; the second is a political initiative that would actually seek a reasonable solution to the Palestinian problem. The second choice is obviously the better one from an American perspective. Is it plausible? It would actually make the war worth fighting, but if push comes to shove, Bibi will undoubtedly pick occupation over the two-state solution.

Zack Beauchamp thinks the current Israeli campaign is unfocused and ultimately impossible. He suggests that the government should give up the massive air bombardment and rely on probing commando raids to capture or kill the Hamas leadership and free the hostages. The alternative of wiping out Hamas altogether begs the question of what happens next; on that point, the government lacks any kind of viable plan. Is he right?

It is true that limiting the scope of the campaign avoids the question of who runs Gaza when the war is over. It is also true that doing so will result in a Hamas recovery within, at most, a few years. It is a slightly more intense version of the usual Netanyahu approach to “cutting the grass.”

I doubt the Israeli public will tolerate the yard guy tactic this time. But how does the story end if the war isn’t limited? I will address that in my next post.

There is a furious debate going on within the right about the virtues of neo-liberalism. Reactionaries insist it has been a total failure; the PBPs, its principal beneficiaries, disagree. Who is correct here?

The principal components of neo-liberalism are as follows:

1. Cut taxes and regulations on business. This will result in additional investment, higher productivity, and increased profits, which will ultimately cause wages to increase. Everyone wins.
2. Embrace globalization and technological change. Free trade creates efficiencies and thus higher profits with lower prices on consumer goods.
3. Resist expansions of the welfare state for the benefit of the losers from globalization and technological change. They only encourage workers to lounge in the hammock of dependency.

It is fair to say that the ultimate, and predictable, outcome of neo-liberalism is the dollar store economy, which had the following symptoms:

1. Global inequality decreased significantly. If you’re a Chinese worker, that’s a great thing. If you’re an American worker, not so much.
2. Inequality in America has skyrocketed as the result of vastly increased share and asset prices. American bosses make far more money relative to workers than they did fifty years ago.
3. The price of consumer goods remained steady or even decreased. This was a substantial blessing for everyone, including the poor, that was incorrectly taken for granted until recently.
4. With the exception of Obamacare and the expiring pandemic programs, the right succeeded in preventing any redistribution of the benefits of globalization and technological change to workers and the poor. The result of this victory is right-wing populism.

The bottom line is that neo-liberalism did, in fact, create efficiencies, and could have worked for everyone if the business community had been willing to share its benefits. It didn’t; large areas of America suffered; and our current political situation is the result.

Let’s be honest here–we don’t really know what kind of testimony Trump’s attorneys are going to provide against him. What we do know is that Trump, as usual, has distanced himself from his co-conspirators, while demanding complete loyalty in return. They had every incentive to flip on him, and they did.

Could Rudy be next? Trump refuses to help him pay his rapidly mounting bills. It would make perfect sense for him to come out of the cold.

On the GOP Speaker named Mike.

I don’t see a lot there to like.

He’s supported aloud

By the burn it down crowd.

They must think it’s their turn to strike.

Joe Biden has consistently made it clear to the Israelis that they need to avoid civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible. They also need a viable exit strategy. The left is nonetheless arguing that he values Israeli lives over those of Palestinian civilians. Is that fair?

No. What Biden is saying is that Hamas is ultimately responsible for Palestinian civilian deaths, because its fighters use civilians as human shields. While the Israelis have an obligation to protect civilians, it would be a mistake for them to reward Hamas for this kind of thuggish behavior. On that point, he is completely correct.

The West Bank is hard. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have legitimate claims to the land. The Israelis base theirs on ancient and very recent history; the Palestinians base theirs on the rest of time. Is it any wonder that the two sides can’t muster the will to make a deal, even though the general outlines of one are obvious to everyone?

Gaza, on the other hand, should be easy, because the Israelis don’t want it. Nobody really wants it. Gaza is a problem because the leadership of the residents doesn’t accept the existence of Israel, not because the Israelis want to occupy and run the place.

The residents of Gaza can have peace with Israel just by accepting the fact that Israel exists. The Israelis would have no reason at that point not to let them get on with their lives. For their part, the Israelis have to understand that something like Hamas is going to return to run Gaza unless they manage to find either a competent Palestinian or international partner to run the place as their agent after the end of the occupation. At this point, the chances of that happening are pretty poor.

Religious reactionaries–the genuinely pro-life people–won’t make deals on the availability of abortion. Human life, in their eyes, is not negotiable. But they are willing to talk about beefing up the welfare state in order to make abortion less necessary. They won’t insist on it, mind you, but they are open to it.

The more secular reactionaries–the ones primarily motivated by racial, cultural, or economic grievances–dislike abortion because it empowers women and disrupts their traditional views about the leadership of society and the family. They are not genuinely pro-life. As a result, they have no interest in expanding the welfare state to improve the lot of involuntarily pregnant women (creating misery is the point, after all), but they see a national abortion ban as an obstacle to overcome in the overriding objective of winning power, so they are willing to compromise on it.

In other words, both sides are willing to make a deal on the issue the other side won’t put on the table. Since the religious reactionaries are a small minority within the GOP (just ask Mike Pence, who has now dropped out of the race), they are losing the argument within the party.

Leaf season in the NC mountains is always poignant, but this year, the colors have been spectacular. The yellows and oranges have been particularly impressive. But, as always, it is a sign of impending death. It is the last blaze of abundant life in the face of mortality. Winter is coming. It is the opposite of Easter.

We are heading back to DeSantistan tomorrow out of necessity, as it will be very cold here next week. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that the Hungarian Candidate is a much-diminished figure, even in his home state, and anyway, the legislature in North Carolina is every bit as reactionary as the one in Florida. It just doesn’t get the same amount of publicity.

Trump said a lot of harsh things about China during the campaign, but the questions remained: would he fixate on the trade deficit instead of human rights and Chinese aggression in the South China Sea; walk away from Biden’s policy of flexible containment with local allies; and offer to hand over Taiwan in exchange for increased agricultural exports? After all, Trump had always seen our relationship with China in economic, not geopolitical, terms, and he viewed our allies in the regions as being parasites.

The answer to these questions was yes. Once again, Trump’s concept of “America First” meant America alone, largely because he simply assumed, against all advice, that anything Biden did to contain China had to be wrong. We would face China with no meaningful assistance from Japan, South Korea, Australia, or India.

A few days ago, I predicted the new Speaker would be someone with a skimpy enough record to pass muster with the entire House GOP. I was right. By all accounts, Johnson is a kind of genteel reactionary, which gives hope to both sides.

Will he govern like McCarthy–making lots of promises to everyone, providing drama for the right, but making deals with Democrats when the chips are down? Or will he be a chaos agent, driving the GOP into shutdowns in an effort to make government by a right-wing strongman more appealing?

Nobody, including me, knows the answer to those questions. That’s why he won the election.