Category: Uncategorized

South Korea was a desperately poor nation when it was invaded by the North Koreans, and then the Chinese, in the 1950s.  American troops were sent, and succeeded in creating a stalemate.  They are still there today.  In the meantime, South Korea has evolved from a politically repressive basket case into a genuinely democratic state with a first world economy.

American troops also succeeded initially in creating a stalemate in Vietnam. After the troops were withdrawn, however, it became clear that the South Vietnamese government and military lacked the willingness and the ability to hold off the enemy on their own.  The result was a defeat and a blow to American prestige, although, in the long run, it probably didn’t matter much;  today, Vietnam is more of an ally to us than to its erstwhile patrons.

Why were the outcomes so different?  Two factors jump out at you.  First, the American military commitment to South Korea was open-ended, while the commitment to South Vietnam was not.  Second, and more important, the South Korean government was a success story;  the South Vietnamese government was a failure.  The ultimate success of the mission thus depended largely on factors that were mostly out of our control.

Which of these models more closely resembles Afghanistan?  You decide.

Other than getting to sleep in his own bed at Trump Tower, this week figures to be a nightmare for Trump.  Instead of throwing red meat to an adoring crowd, his speech to the General Assembly will require him to read a highly structured speech from a teleprompter to an audience that undoubtedly views him as an ignorant, arrogant boor.  Then he will have to meet with countless world leaders about whom he knows little and cares less.

Don’t be surprised if he never does this again, regardless of the protocol.

Sometimes people get what they deserve in this world.  Sometimes, particularly as a result of natural disasters, they don’t.  Anyone attempting to create a logically coherent religion/philosophy must be able to account for both situations.

On a somewhat similar note, the GOP battle cry of rugged individualism and limited government can work reasonably well under normal conditions, but it fails utterly in the face of economic or natural disasters.  At that point, everyone looks to the state for solutions.  And so, you have the spectacle of Governor Scott, a man who scoffs at climate change, views public employees as underworked moochers, and opposes virtually every effort to increase burdens on business, running around furiously imposing new and costly rules on nursing homes and using state power to provide gas for residents and evacuees.  And, to be fair, he’s done a pretty good job of it.

Any successful system of government must be sufficiently flexible to operate under both normal and emergency conditions.  Our system has met the test, so far.

On the Florida Governor Scott.

He’s right-wing, until he is not.

He’s dashed ’round the state

Saying things he should hate.

Will the voters connect all the dots?

Nobody foresaw a world war in 1914.  While historians argue about this, in my opinion, the war escalated from a minor localized conflict into a pan-European disaster as the result of the following miscalculations:

1.  The Austro-Hungarian government somehow thought that the prestige gained by crushing Serbia was going to solve the problems of a dysfunctional political system.  The government also thought, with some reason, that the Russians wouldn’t intervene.  They had backed down before, most notably in 1908.
2. The Russian government believed that the danger of backing down exceeded the danger of intervening and losing.  Guess how that turned out.

The current analogy is, of course, North Korea.  I don’t have the impression that Trump really wants to fight the North Koreans;  if he did, the war would already be over.  War could nonetheless come, however, over a miscalculation of motives, including the following:

1. The administration could view a harmless North Korean provocation (say, a missile intended to miss Guam by 20 miles) as an actual declaration of war.
2. Kim could start taking Trump’s tweets seriously and assume that a preemptive strike is imminent, when it really isn’t.
3. And, of course, there is the matter of Trump feeling humiliated, and needing to “win” for his ego and for domestic political reasons, but that is the subject for another day.

The approval of ACA may seem preordained in 2017, but it certainly didn’t look like it at the time.  Even with 60 Democrats in the Senate, every day was a crisis: if it wasn’t Joe Lieberman demanding the elimination of the public option, it was Ben Nelson and the “Cornhusker Kickback.”  Legislation based on GOP ideas about health care ultimately passed by the skin of its teeth.

Notwithstanding that, Bernie Sanders is proposing to sell us a Lexus without telling us how much it will cost, which makes no sense in a world in which the GOP has come within a few votes of eliminating the more limited health care legislation we already have.  Single-payer has absolutely no chance of being approved in the foreseeable future, because:

1. Can you see the Democrats getting 60 votes in the Senate again?  Me, neither.
2. The drug and insurance companies would mobilize all possible support against it.  Hillary Clinton will be happy to tell you what that means.
3.  More to the point, the legislation would threaten the livelihoods of tens of millions of health care providers.  If it doesn’t, it won’t do anything to control costs, and it will be useless.  Bernie only talks about taking on drug and insurance companies;  he doesn’t have the guts to extend the battle to the vastly more popular doctors and nurses.
4. And, of course, he would be replacing the benefits already enjoyed by over a hundred million Americans with a promise.  Will they go for it?  I doubt it.

Sanders surely knows that single-payer isn’t going to become law in his lifetime. One assumes that his rationale for the bill has something to do with playing the long game;  a proposal that seems unrealistic at any given time can be viewed as common sense a decade later.  But what about the current problems?  For them, he has no solution.

To me, this looks like the left-wing version of the PBPs using Reactionaries to get votes for tax cuts, while providing nothing but lip service in return.  The backlash that we are experiencing today was inevitable.  The same thing will happen if the Democrats win elections on the promise of single-payer and then can’t deliver.

We had to evacuate.  Posting will resume when we return and power is restored.

As I’ve noted many times, Donald Trump was elected over the objections of the GOP establishment, and owed nothing to them.  As a result, he was in a position to govern as a man above party, and to sell himself to the highest bidder.  He chose not to do that, but the GOP Congress has been unable to accomplish anything meaningful to date, so why not dismiss them as a pack of pathetic losers and make deals with Democrats?  He even gets good press and better poll ratings that way.

The problem is that Trump has identified himself so clearly with the policy priorities of the GOP that to change course now, particularly on tax cuts, would look ridiculous.  In addition, his only real political skill is throwing red meat to his base.  How is he going to make deals with Schumer and Pelosi while concurrently sucking up to white supremacists?  I don’t see how the blue base would permit it.

The more likely outcome is that Trump will position himself as a Don Quixote figure, bravely (if with mixed success) battling the swamp creatures–Republican and Democrat alike–in Congress.  That will play well with the base, but it doesn’t bode well for the GOP in 2018.

Thomas Jefferson notoriously owned a Bible that he had edited to exclude the parts that made no sense to him.  Steve Bannon must own a Bible like that, too; the difference is that he took out the parts about love, compassion, and charity, and retained only the Old Testament passages about kicking butt.

And so, we’re all waiting for Irma.

We just hope it won’t hit terra firma.

We’re hunkering down.

Lots of folks leaving town.

‘Cause the forecasters’ plots aren’t too firm-a.

My wife and I spent the Labor Day weekend in Chicago.  It was my first visit;  I was impressed by how attractive the city is.  I was also impressed by its dynamism and resilience;  the industries that originally drove the local economy are essentially gone, and yet the city thrives, and the skyline continues to evolve to this day.

You know that there were plenty of losers as the city evolved, but you never hear anything about them.  That leads to today’s question:  why did Trump’s embrace of the losers of technological change and globalization succeed, when previous losers went unheard?  Here are my hypotheses:

1.  Feelings of entitlement have grown as time has gone on.  If your job disappeared in the 1920’s, for example, you didn’t look to the government to bring it back;  you just moved on.  Decades of prosperity and increased government involvement in the economy have changed that;  in addition, years of developing roots in a community make it that much harder to leave.

2.  The welfare state hasn’t kept pace.  Capitalism creates wealth, on an aggregate basis, but it doesn’t come with any guarantee that the wealth will be shared fairly.  The alliance between the PBPs and the Reactionaries, whereby the latter provide votes for benefit and tax cuts in exchange for protection from the supposed predations of “those people,” has resulted in massively increased inequality since the early 1980’s.  The Trump victory can be viewed as an effort by the Reactionaries to drive a harder bargain with the PBPs.  They are likely to be disappointed, and the outcome is going to be explosive.

The North Korean regime, which has no interests other than its own survival, clearly views its ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons as being some sort of a guarantee that it won’t go the way of the Libyan government.  I’ve noted before that this analysis is faulty, and that nuclear weapons didn’t exactly win the Cold War for the Soviet Union.  There is another historical piece to this puzzle, however.

There is little doubt that George W. Bush genuinely (if incorrectly) believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.  It would have been impossible for him to sell the Iraq War to the American public without that belief.  And so, the US went to war with Iraq even though its government fully believed that it would be confronting an enemy with weapons of mass destruction.  In effect, the illusion of those weapons caused the war and the downfall of Saddam Hussein.  He would probably still be alive today if he had come clean and made it clear the weapons did not exist.

In light of this, does it really make sense for Kim Jong-Un to put such faith in his nuclear program?  I think not.

 

I don’t doubt for a minute that there are enough votes in both the House and the Senate to pass a reasonable stand-alone legislative solution to DACA.  That would require Ryan and McConnell to rely primarily on Democratic votes, just as they always do when it is time to keep the government open and raise the debt ceiling.

Immigration divides the GOP like no other issue.  If the Reactionaries were to go off and create their own party, it would probably be in response to immigration legislation.  And so, if you’re waiting for the Republican leadership to do the right thing and permit a vote on DACA legislation, you could be waiting a long, long time.

Harvey wasn’t Katrina, because geography didn’t make southeast Texas the deathtrap that New Orleans was.  Nevertheless, Harvey will have a significant impact on our politics, as follows:

1.  There are potential benefits to strong leadership.  Not botching the response to Harvey, which would include defaulting on the debt or shutting down the government at a time of crisis, would be a nice start for Trump and the GOP.  You wouldn’t think that would be a lot to ask, but it’s 2017, after all. . .

2.  Rugged individualism, as a political credo, doesn’t get you very far after a hurricane.  Republicans can expand the government to fight wars without looking like hypocrites because swagger is such a big part of their identity, but they struggle to deal with recessions and environmental disasters.  And so, you have the spectacle of Ted Cruz begging for money from the federal behemoth he so purports to despise.

3.  What’s the price of climate change?  If you just had your house ruined by Harvey, how do you feel about the notion that your loss is the price that has to be paid for others to continue to enjoy the benefits of a fossil fuel economy?  Is the GOP going to come right out and tell people a measure of annual hurricane damage is OK if it means a few GOP voters in West Virginia get their coal mining jobs back?  Not bloody likely. That’s why it’s just easier to deny climate change altogether;  the alternative of admitting a problem and doing nothing to solve it is politically unpalatable.

While Trump is polling dismally, he takes some comfort in the ongoing rise in the DJIA.  At least he has the confidence of the investor class–the country’s “winners”–right?

Even if you assume (I don’t) that he won’t drag down the economy with some appalling foreign policy decision or a vast increase in the size of the deficit, the fact is that the market is going to face a significant correction at some point in his term.  What happens then?  Will he stand before the country as a strong, confident leader and provide the necessary reassurances?  Or will he panic like a man on golf cart and start insisting that the Fed and Congress do something, anything, to solve a problem for which he, of course, is not to blame?

You can probably guess which option I’m taking.

 

I will be on vacation for a few days.  Posting will resume next Tuesday.