By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Readers, because it took me fifteen minutes of router-wrangling to get going this morning, I didn’t get to all the political news, if news is the word I want, that I wanted to cover. I’ll have some UPDATEs shortly. –lambert
UPDATE The UPDATE’s are done; now for “Obama’s Secret Struggle…”
Trade
“Even as President Donald Trump is on the cusp of potentially taking major action against imports of steel and aluminum on the basis of protecting national security, lawmakers continued to urge caution against any move that might spark a trade war” [Politico]. “”My advice continues to be don’t rush this,’ House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady said after a hearing with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on Thursday. ‘Take your time and get it right.'”
CETA: “Canada ratification upsets Macron’s promises on CETA” [Euractiv]. “A ruling is due this summer. And Belgium, whose calls for additional guarantees had led to a confrontation with Brussels, has promised to take its concerns to the Court of Justice of the European Union in the coming weeks. Most recently, it is France’s new President Emmanuel Macron who has put the issue back on the negotiating table, promising in the last days of his presidential campaign to set up an expert committee to examine the CETA agreement before ratification.”
“OPINION 2/15: ADDING SOME SPICE TO THE TRADE & ENVIRONMENT DEBATE” [European Law Blog]. “In its Opinion 2/15, the Court, unlike AG Sharpston, found that the entire sustainable development chapter (Chapter 13) in the EUSFTA fell within the scope of the common commercial policy…. For the Court, therefore, non-compliance with provisions in this chapter could constitute a material breach of the agreement.” Super-geeky post, so any European trade law experts please chime in!
Politics
Policy
“For congressional Republicans in the new norm of the Trump presidency, nothing is easy, and everything is hard. Raising the debt ceiling in order to keep the government from defaulting on its debt is normally easy; now it is hard. Passing an omnibus budget bill to simply keep the government operating (forget the idea of passing the full battery of 12 appropriations bills) is going to be hard. Coming up with a health care bill in the Senate that could be passed by a simple majority through the budget-reconciliation process usually would be easy with a 52-48 vote edge and a vice president in place to break a tie. But this time, it will be hard. Spending money to fix our nation’s increasingly dilapidated infrastructure—that’s hard too. And then there are things that would be hard under any set of circumstances, such as tax reform. That’s even harder” [Charles Cook, Cook Political Report]. And not because of powerless Democrats, but contradictions within the Republican Party itself. “The Republican majorities in the House (55 percent to 45 percent) and Senate are relatively thin, and the House and Senate GOP conferences are anything but monolithic. Each has members that span the political spectrum, from those who are somewhat conservative and may need the votes of independents and maybe even a few Democrats to win reelection, all the way to members who are to the right of Genghis Khan and can easily win with no independent or Democratic votes—just as Democrats range from somewhat liberal all the way to the left of Karl Marx.” That’s silly. If Sanders were to the left of Marx, he’d have called for the collective ownership of the means of production (not to say that crowdsourcing capital allocation on Twitter, Boaty McBoatface-style, would be worse at capital allocation than the Silicon Valley
croniesVenture Capitalists who shovelled $60+ billion into the black hole of Travis Kalanick’s deeply unprofitable id).
Ossoff Aftermath
“Meet the Man Behind the Ossoff Campaign — He’s Just Getting Started” [Roll Call]. Please kill me now. “But holed up in the campaign’s boiler room in the Westin Hotel, [Keenan] Pontoni, Ossoff’s 30-year-old campaign manager, still saw a path to victory, through outstanding mail-in votes.” The Westin, eh? Pretty nice. I wonder if all Ossoff’s consultants stayed there. I think this is the worst election night coverage I’ve ever read; it presents the obvoius (early voting, mail-in ballots) as dramatic events. More: “Pontoni has a complicated relationship with his craft.” This is what we’ve come to; hagiography for a losing Democratic strategist. That is where we are.
Health Care
“Mitch McConnell: Replacing failed Obamacare” [USA Today]. “Next week, we expect the Congressional Budget Office to release a score. After that, we will proceed with a robust debate and an open amendment process here on the Senate floor.” Interestingly, McConnell lays out a set of requirements that “We agree on” (nice use of anaphora in the piece) without saying how the AHCA will meet the requirements. Granted, the Republican plan we have now (ACA/ObamaCare) doesn’t meet those requirements either, but for every single requirement, the way forward is #MedicareForAll. Too bad all that funding for “the resistance” went to a push to #SaveTheACA, and not to a program that would actually meet McConnell’s requirements. But, Democrats.
UPDATE “There are not currently the 50 votes necessary to advance the legislation that Mitch McConnell unveiled Thursday. There will need to be concessions and compromises, and there are several ways the push could still fall apart in the coming days” [WaPo]. “But pretty much every Republican, including the current holdouts, wants to pass something. And no GOP senator wants to bear the brunt of the blame from the base for inaction. That factor must not be discounted.” What I find interesting is that Susan Collins didn’t shake down the administration for a destroyer at Bath Iron Works, which is the obvious concession to her. I’m reluctant to make a call either way, things are poised on such a knife edge. I don’t think it makes sense to underestimate how feral Republicans can be, with regard to their agenda, to screwing the Democrats, and to screwing their social inferiors. Finally, another obvious concession is to have the pain kick in slowly, like after 2018. “We can always fix it later.” If their opponents were anybody but the Clintonite Democrats, I’d say the Republicans are hosed, but the Democrats can make anybody look good.
“The New Senate Republican Bill Will Transform American Health Care” [Avik Roy, Forbes]. Tax credit wonkery.
Warren on the AHCA:
I’ve read the Republican “health care” bill. This is blood money. They’re paying for tax cuts with American lives. pic.twitter.com/298DLguNiM
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 22, 2017
So where are you on #MedicareForAll, Liz? And where were you in 2016, when it mattered?
New Cold War
“Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault” [WaPo]. For my “hermeneutic of suspicion” on stories in this ongoing narrative, see yesterday’s Water Cooler. So far as I can tell, the sourcing is Obama and three “senior” aides, which immediately raises the question: If all this was happening in August, why was the story kept under wraps? (For example, this sentence: “With Obama still determined to avoid any appearance of politics, the statement would not carry his signature.” Dear Lord. I think immediately of Obama standing up Perez to defeat Ellison and screw Sanders when he was no longer President. Obama has no problem with appearing political at all.) I’ll have more on this in a bit.
* * * UPDATE More on “Obama’s Secret Struggle.” As the “hermeneutic of suspicion” above would suggest, I’m just going to look at this as a narrative. For all I know, the story is “true,” though that would be a welcome change of form from the torturers in the CIA, the perjurers at the NSA, and the entrapment artists at the FBI who form the bulk of the sources for this story. (And then there is Obama: “The Source of Barack Obama’s Power to Trick Us Comes from Our Willingness to Be Tricked.”)
So, considering the story only as a narrative, then, and performing a media critique:
First, consider the lead:
Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
I believe I called this on May 18:
So, if [theatre critic Frank] Rich’s view of the world is correct, and Russian hysteria/gaslighting/what you will (not using “-Gate”!) is like a well-made play, then we can expect to see an instance of the “lost or stolen documents” plot device. In fact, we’re seeing it already with Comey’s notes*, but perhaps there are more documents to be discovered — or “discovered,” as the case may be. See Whitaker Chambers v. Alger Hiss, from our previous McCarthyite period….
The “envelope” is, very precisely, the document in a well-made play that drives a plot turn; a “reveal,” in contemporary terms.
Second, consider the “drip drip drip” aspect. Today’s story can be viewed as the exposition following the reveal which “connects the dots” for previous events in the play, some mysterious. As we linked to the Tablet on March 23:
[T]he steady sound of drip-drip-drip is the telltale sign of a political campaign, where items are leaked bit by bit to paralyze the target. Journalists, on the other hand, have to get their story out there as quickly, and as fully, as possible because they’re always worried the competition is going to beat them to it.
In other words, some may be under the illusion that WaPo is practicing investigative journalism here, but they’re not. They’re practicing access journalism, and the reveals are coming at the pace, in the order, and with the content and the framing that the sources want.
Third, consider those sources:
This account of the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s interference is based on interviews with more than three dozen[1] current and former U.S. officials in senior positions in government, including at the White House, the State, Defense and Homeland Security departments, and U.S. intelligence services. Most agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
In other words, we have what we’ve had from the beginning: Anonymous torturers, perjurers, and entrapment artists telling a story based on evidence that we can’t see. And these torturers, perjurers, and entrapment artists are playing for enormous stakes, and have interests in the outcome — as do the access journalists purveying the story. (Jeff Bezos, for example, has an enormous contract with the “intelligence community” for Amazon Web Services.) Why do we accept their, and WaPo’s, argument from authority?
Fourth, consider the timing. The “envelope” arrived in August. And here’s how Democrat house organ Talking Points Memo summarizes impact today: “WaPo: CIA Intel Showed Putin Directly Ordered Operation To Get Trump Elected.” Interesting, if true, eh? And it would have been even more interesting before Election Day, surely? So what kind of sense does it make that information that could delegitimize a Presidential election was never made public until after the election? If making sure voters were making an informed choice was the priority, that is. Are we saying that the greatest orator of our time couldn’t frame the issue properly? (I’m not saying that the administration had “connected the dots” completely, but given the risks, doesn’t it make sense to have the reveal when it would have made a difference, rather than later? Remember all the furor about handing Trump the nuclear codes, which Obama (presumably) did, knowing what he knew?)
Fifth, consider a key omission:
At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent…. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.
Note that WaPo carefully avoids explicitly saying who stole the DNC emails, although the way the paragraph begins (“outlines of the Russian assault”) implies the Russians did. In other words, the reporters erase the possibility of insider threats, for which there is at least prima facie evidence. (I said “prima facie,” not “proven.”) It’s almost as if the reporters are pushing a particular narrative, isn’t it? And airbrushing inconvenient possibilities away?
Now, just because WaPo’s story exhibits formal characteristics of a carefully crafted work of fiction — in this case, serialized in the press — doesn’t mean it is fiction. I’m doing a media critique, here, nothing more. However, if we’re going to depose a President who took the oath of office after getting a majority of the votes in the electoral college — and that has been the goal of the torturers, perjurers, and entrapment artists who are the sources for this story since the “faithless electors” effort after November 8, 2016 — we need to demand evidence, not claims about evidence. And I think anybody who remembers the Iraq WMD debacle should give consideration to making the same demand.
NOTE [1] Michael Glennon writes in Harpers of “A de facto directorate of several hundred managers sitting atop dozens of military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, from the Department of Homeland Security to the National Reconnaissance Office, has come to dominate national security policy, displacing the authority not only of Congress but of the courts and the presidency as well.” This seems to overlap conceptually with The Blob, and three dozen interviewees is an appreciable fraction of that class.
NOTE If anybody wants to prevent the election from being hacked, the policy solution is hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public. I can’t think why this isn’t on the agenda.
* * * “Now that President Trump has tweeted that he didn’t tape James Comey, the anti-Trump zealots are accusing him of witness intimidation” [Alan Dershowitz, The Hill]. “This is most the absurd of the many absurd charges leveled against Trump by those out to get him without regard to the law. Trump’s bluff was calculated to get Comey to tell the truth. How can that be witness intimidation? If it were, Abraham Lincoln would have gone to prison rather than the White House. As a young lawyer, he, too, bluffed a witness into telling the truth.” I hate to agree with Dershowitz on anything, but it seems that 2017 is going to be as rich with irony as 2016 was!
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Where are all the missing leftist voters?” [The Week]. “The most recent bit of such evidence is an important study based on a survey of voters in the 2016 election. It shows that while a good number of people who voted for Trump may well be reachable by progressives on economic issues, many of them are also likely to be put off by the left’s uniform hostility to any kind of cultural conservatism, whether on social/religious issues or immigration. Apparently, the overwhelming majority of voters on the left combine economic progressivism with strong support for open borders and no-questions-asked abortion-on-demand — a mixture of positions that is likely to remain a deal-breaker for many middle-of-the-road Americans who don’t already vote for liberals.”
UPDATE This excellent tweet storm answers the question above:
Thread. https://t.co/TMvVBITIyi
— Michael Graham (@BLUpfront) June 23, 2017
“Clearly, the energy and fire are on the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren left. Moreover, the crudity of party chair Tom Perez’s attacks on Trump and the GOP, being echoed now by Democratic members of Congress, suggest that the new stridency to rally the angry left is gaining converts” [Patrick Buchanan, RealClearPolitics]. I think Buchanan, as conservatives will do, conflates liberals and the left. Warren went all in for Clintonite Trump-baiting. Sanders did not. Liberals are “We’re not Trump.” The Left is #MedicareForAll. And so on.
UPDATE “Johnny Depp: ‘When was the last time an actor assassinated a President?'” [CNN].
UPDATE “Nebraska Democratic official ousted for allegedly wishing Steve Scalise dead” [Des Moines Register].
UPDATE “Prominent Democratic Fundraisers Realign to Lobby for Trump’s Agenda” [The Intercept]. “After President Donald Trump’s upset election victory, Democratic insiders who worked on Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid weren’t necessarily relegated to the sidelines. Many, in fact, are cashing in as lobbyists — by working to advance Trump’s agenda. Lobbying records show that some Democratic fundraisers, who raised record amounts of campaign cash for Clinton, are now retained by top telecom interests to help repeal the strong net neutrality protections established during the Obama administration. Others are working on behalf of for-profit prisons on detention issues, while others still are paid to help corporate interests pushing alongside Trump to weaken financial regulations. At least one prominent Clinton backer is working for a health insurance company on a provision that was included in the House Republican bill to gut the Affordable Care Act. While Republican lobbyists are more in demand, liberal lobbyists are doing brisk business that has them reaching out to fellow Democrats to endorse — or at least tamp down vocal opposition to — Trump agenda items.” Ka-ching.
Stats Watch
Purchasing Managers’ Index Composite Flash, June 2017: “The economy is solid, at least the service sector, but on the whole is losing momentum, based on Markit’s flash data for June” [Econoday]. “The service strength in this report keeps it from being downbeat, though the weakness in manufacturing, which has been struggling this quarter, is not welcome.” And: “According to Markit the data is consistent with GDP growth rates of around 2.0% and monthly payroll increases of around 170,000” [Economic Calendar]. “The data suggests solid growth in the economy with potential acceleration in growth over the second half while the increase in services-sector inflation is potentially important and should boost Fed confidence in higher inflation levels.” But: We’ll have to see if real data bears out this survey data!
New Home Sales, May 2017: “Housing is back on track following Wednesday’s strength in existing home sales and today’s very solid gain for new home sales” [Econoday]. “The real surprise in the report is enormous strength in selling prices. The median surged 11.5 percent in the month to $345,800. The year-on-year increase is 16.8 percent which, however, is nearly double the 8.9 percent gain in actual sales. This price traction is related not only to demand but also to supply of new homes which is very tight.” And: “US new home sales increased 2.9% in May to an annualised rate of 610,000 from a revised 593,000 in April which was adjusted sharply from the original estimate of 569,000. This was slightly above consensus estimates of a 600,000 rate and also represented an 8.9% annual increase” [Economic Calendar]. “Sales increased in the South and West, although there were declines in the North-east and Mid-West.” And: “This was above expectations of 590,000 sales SAAR, and the previous months were revised up. A solid report” [Calcuated Risk]. But: “This month the backward revisions were significantly up (partially improving last months terrible data), but still the rolling averages significantly declined. Because of weather and other factors, the rolling averages are the way to view this series – and the rolling averages were within the levels seen in 2017” [Econintersect]. “The sales prices were significantly up – so much so that the number looks suspicious. This data series is suffering from methodology issues which manifest as significant backward revision – and this month the revisions were up.”
Housing: “The current median price for a home in San Francisco is now $1.5 million. This is for your standard crap shack flavored box” [Dr. Housing Bubble]. “This is how a mania looks like in the form of home prices. People seem to think just because we don’t have NINJA loans or no-doc products that somehow no bubble can ever occur again. Have you been to Las Vegas? People routinely put actual cash on the table and lose it. This isn’t a shock. Just because you use cash or have a sizable down payment doesn’t mean a correction can’t happen.” I wonder what will happen to the Bay Area housing market if the Uber bezzle pops (or whatever bezzles do).
NAFTA: “United States trade with its North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partners Canada and Mexico increased 0.8% annually to $91.1 billion in April, the most recent month for which data is available, according to the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS)” [Logistlics Management].
Debt: “Farmers Take Out Millions In Loans To Raise Chickens For Big-Box Retailers” [NPR]. “As pork and poultry production grows in the U.S., this is an increasingly common arrangement. Farmers sign multi-million dollar deals to do business with big corporations [like CostCo]. The company provides animals and feed. The farmer builds the barns and cares for the animals. It requires a major investment from the farmers who enter into the agreement.” Just because it’s done on a multi-million dollar scale doesn’t mean it isn’t sharecropping. (Hey, maybe if they start dealing with Amazon, they’ll get a break at the company store Whole Foods!
Shipping: “The shipping industry is no longer a newcomer in capital markets. Yet, despite almost 50 publicly traded international shipping companies on the two major exchanges in New York, only eight of them have current market capitalisations over $1bn” [Lloyd’s List]. “No real barriers exist to companies merging their shipping activities. Commercial and technical functions are scalable, debt is typically rolled over, and there exist no regulatory barriers, except perhaps in the container sector. The impetus to merge should be there given that the bar of getting financing, particularly equity financing, has gotten much higher. Only company executives resist to acknowledge the obvious.” Moar concentration!
Supply Chain: “Asset-light e-marketplaces and other nontraditional shopping channels, combined with shifting demographics, are upending industrial distributors’ inventory-heavy model more rapidly than previously thought” [Supply Chain]. “According to the UPS Industrial Buying Dynamics Study: Buyers Raise the Bar for Suppliers, the biggest shift comes from millennials (defined for this study as those currently ages 21-34) who grew up in a digital era and are bringing their tech-savvy and nontraditional purchasing habits – for example, bypassing the middle man and working directly with the manufacturer – with them into the workplace.”
Supply Chain: “Electronics supply chains in the U.S. are about to get a big boost. Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group is preparing to decide on seven states where it plans to spend some $10 billion to expand its contract manufacturing operations” [Wall Street Journal].
UPDATE The Bezzle: “When the Bitcoin Bubble Bursts” [Bloomberg]. “If bonds are the old world’s safe haven, Bitcoin is the millennial generation’s apocalypse insurance. Crypto-currencies are marketed as a direct expression of opposition to central-bank and government policy, far more so than gold.”
The Bezzle: “3.6 Billion Mobile Ad Clicks Are Fraudulent” [247 Wall Street]. “According to a recent report from Tune, a provider of mobile analytics and performance software, the firm combed through 24.3 billion clicks on more than 700 mobile ad networks and found that eight of the ad networks were totally fraudulent and another 35 were at least 50% fraudulent. The average fraud rate across all ad networks is about 15.2%, or 3.6 billion of the 24.3 billion clicks analyzed.”
The Bezzle: “The resignation of Uber Technologies Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick may help bring back customers disillusioned by his leadership of the company. But the factor that might prompt a return of riders is if the ride-hailing service lowers its costs, according to a survey from Morning Consult, a media and technology company that provides research and data on trends in business and policy” [247 Wall Street]. Idea: Enhance Uber’s lease-to-own program so that when drivers sleep in their cars, they pay an overnight rate. I know that’s on the revenue side, not the cost side, but why leave money on the table?
The Bezzle: “The coup that brought Travis Kalanick down at Uber has left open an intriguing and problematic throne” [DealBreaker]. “[W}e’ve thought this over and it would be almost irresponsible for Uber not to offer the CEO job to [JP Morgan’s] Matt Zames… [A]ny concern that Zames might not be able to handle the perpetual crisis mode that plagues Uber, we’d like to remind you that when The London Whale scandal blew up it was Zames who King Jamie dispatched to fix it. If Zames dealt with the one of the most embarrassing and public risk management clusterf*cks in financial history, it stands to reason that he can manage Uber through implementation of The Holder Report and prevent any more “Miami Letters” from being passed around on company email. Zames is also a financier who understands how public companies behave. As we’ve said ad nauseum, what hurt Uber the most was Kalanick’s seemingly willful lack of care towards Uber’s high-wire financing or the importance of an eventual IPO.” It would be irresponsible not to speculate…
Political Risk: “The Arab states embargo on trade with Qatar is triggering a business boom for logistics companies in Turkey. Transport demand through the Turkish capital of Ankara is already soaring” [Wall Street Journal]. “The blossoming trade is a vivid illustration of how business and profits are moving ahead …. even as diplomatic relations in the region remain fractured.”
Political Risk: “The Dow’s tumultuous 120-year history, in one chart” [MarketWatch]. “At its simplest, the chart proves once again that over the long term, the stock market always rises because ‘intelligence, creativity, and innovation always trump fear,’ according to [Chris Kacher, managing director of MoKa Investors]…. As his 120-year chart clearly demonstrates, the market always recovers. But sometimes, it just takes a little longer.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 53 Neutral (previous close: 50, Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 50 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed. Last updated Jun 23 at 12:09pm.
Health Care
“Iowa insurance market collapse could ground young entrepreneurs’ dreams, early retirees’ plans” [Des Moines Register]. The answer not being the broken ACA, but #MedicareForAll.
Class Warfare
Trump: “So, somebody said, ‘Why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy?’ … I said, ‘because that’s the kind of thinking we want'” [DealBreaker]. Obama did exactly the same thing, but on the down-low, as Democrats do.
“The Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurs Flourish in America” [Noah Smith, Bloomberg]. “Crony capitalists seek to generate profits without producing anything of value.” Exhibit A: Uber. (The article is a primer on rent-seeking.)
“Report: The World’s 10 Worst Countries for Workers [Sourcing Journal] (original report). “And according to the 2017 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)) Global Rights Index, quite a few of those countries are key to sourcing…. In assessing workers’ rights violations around the world, like trade union rights in particular, the index found the 10 worst countries in the world for workers are: Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, the Philippines, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Korea, Guatemala, Turkey and Bangladesh. And while Myanmar didn’t make the top 10 on the naughty list, its ranking went from bad to worst.”
“[J]ust a couple days ago Bob Murray and his company Murray Energy were threatening John Oliver with a SLAPP suit if Oliver’s satirical report about the coal industry was used to ‘defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy'” [TechDirt]. Now Murray has filed suit. ” [Oliver’s report] falls into a variety of clearly protected categories, including opinion, satire and rhetorical hyperbole. The idea that there were materially false and defamatory statements that were put forth knowing they were false (or with reckless disregard for the truth) is laughable. There is no way that this lawsuit succeeds — but, as we’ve been pointing out — that’s not really the point of most of these kinds of lawsuits. SLAPP lawsuits are designed to create a chill on free speech, by making that speech costly.” I know I linked to Monty Python’s Piranha Brothers sketch the other day, but I cannot forbear from doing so again:
VERCOTTI: [They told me I had to see] Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.
2nd INTERVIEWER: What did he do?
VERCOTTI: He used… sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire. He was vicious.
Ludicrously, coal boss Bob Murray stands in for the terrified Vercotti, and comedian John Oliver for the vicious gangster “Doug.” Grow a pair, Bob, my advice.
“A Dive Into the World of Academic Publishing” [Copybuzz]. This is very good:
today “just four large commercial firms each publish more than 2,000 journals: Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis”, and according to the paper “this ‘oligopoly’ of big commercial firms has most influence in the social sciences, where they publish 70% of articles globally”. The authors note that “their profitability has become so reliable that they are regarded as sound investments” (p. 10).
And this:
[T}he list of publications became the standard way of demonstrating disciplinary expertise
In other words, if you want academic credentials, these four oligopolies are one set of gatekeepers (especially in “the social sciences”).
“THE DEVELOPMENT EFFECTS OF THE EXTRACTIVE COLONIAL ECONOMY,” M. DELL & B. OLKEN (2017) [A Fine Theorem]. This is fascinating, methodologically and historically, and relevant today if you frame the flyover states as colonies of the (“BlueSecessionist”) metropolis. From the conclusion:
I continue to await Suresh Naidu’s book on labor coercion – it is astounding the extent to which labor markets were distorted historically (see, e.g., Eric Foner on Reconstruction), and in some cases still today, by legal and extralegal restrictions on how workers could move on up.
“Were”? Here is the full PDF of Dell and Olken’s paper.
News of the Wired
“Practical waterholing through DNS typosquatting” [0 Day]. Fun stuff, if this is your sort of fun.
“A new law allowing the German police to hack into mobile phones for even minor crimes, is expected to be passed by the German parliament this week [update: the law has now been passed]. Currently, the use of a “Staatstrojaner” – government trojan – is only permitted in order to prevent future terrorist attacks. Under the new law, the authorities will be allowed to implant surveillance malware to help secure convictions for over 70 types of crime. These include serious ones such as genocide, treason and murder, but also less serious crimes such as money counterfeiting, vehicle theft, computer fraud, rigged sports betting and tax evasion. Two kinds of trojans will be available. The first allows the authorities to eavesdrop on calls made with the mobile phone, whether using standard telephony or VoIP, while the second gives access to all information held on the device” [Private Internet Access].
“The latest version of ‘Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract,’ a four-page, single-spaced document that we sign and date, will last for exactly 12 months, after which we have the option to revise and renew it, as we’ve done twice before. The contract spells out everything from sex to chores to finances to our expectations for the future. And I love it” [New York Times]. Marriage as a service-level agreement for young professionals. And indeed, why not?
And here’s today’s plant (KR):
Ragwort. KR writes:
These are all from back yard or beside the house. I keep trying to get up close despite the limitations of the camera, because I’m so fascinated by the power of these ostensibly fragile beings.
Yep!
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Sorry this was a minute late to appear; I got interested in the WaPo story on “Obama’s Secret Struggle,” and forgot to press the Submit button.
Please check back soon for additional material on that, and a few more UPDATEs
“My Struggle”, by Barack Obama. If only there was a cosy little prison cell, somewhere, for him to put his soul into words?
The Germans surely have an old schloss somewhere. Rendition him for some pathos.
That chicken farmer debt issue has me angry. I see the next round of debt peonage, leading to foreclosure and trouble all around the farm. Is that a disguised real estate play to get farmers hooked, like happened to truckers and others? Get them loaned up to the rafters, squeeze every last cent out, and then terminate, with extreme prejudice. Yet another reason to eliminate chicken from my diet.
This has been a topic of discussion at my house for a while. My wife and I are borderline deplorables who can raise our own organic meat birds 25 or 50 at a time in our back yard. She wants to do it, but I say we can buy a huge organic chicken for $10 at Costco, feeds us both twice, so why bother with the hard work and nastiness involved with chicken slaughter.
After reading this article, she just might win the argument. I don’t want to support this type of agribusiness, organic or not.
Let alone what that $10 chicken went through.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3861404/Her-head-torn-Disturbing-video-chickens-held-horrific-conditions-Costco-cage-free-barn.html
Damn! That is beyond disturbing. I won’t even show it to my wife. We already have our own cage free eggs, but it’s nothing like that video, I can assure you! She puts “relaxing herbs” in their bedding, so they sleep better at night. And yes, I tease her about it.
Looks like I will be raising my own meat birds soon. And they won’t be those Cornish crosses that are genetically engineered to weigh 8 pounds at 8 weeks old, either. Many of them can’t even walk the last couple of weeks. That is what you often get in the supermarkets these days.
This business model has been the norm in chicken farming for decades:
What makes today’s article relevant IMHO is that Purdue and Tyson are getting cut out of the action by the big boxes. I wouldn’t be shocked if Tyson and Purdue are lobbying the congress critters to pass some sort of bill to protect their chicken farmer debt racket, or starting a financial subsidiary that loans money to chicken farmers at usurious rates, sort of like a GMAC/Ally for poultry.
These all seems to be victims of the same playbook, maybe with some variations:
1. Fast food restaurant franchises
2. Truck drivers
3. Uber drivers
4. Chicken farmers
5. Online order parcel deliverymen
Who’s next?
You left out Amway.
Never let a good idea go to waste, I guess. So, it’s not surprising.
We can offer some resistance by anticipating the next target.
Sadly and probably, you and I…
Be careful with the next business opportunity offer.
I think I’ll pass that “Golden Opportunity” by.
The banks came after the farms for the first time in 1970-1980, regarding the massive foreclosures farmers faced. The farms were sold off cheap to Big Ag.
The farmers told the city folk that soon the banks would come for their city homes. It only took 27 years for the crooked financial industry to do so.
And the bubble is forming again in both farms and houses.
When are the plebs gonna scream “I’m mad as hell & I ain’t gonna take it no more!”
Maybe the chicken to eliminate would be the corporate debt-slave chicken. Maybe the goor-may boo-teek chicken for $5.00 a pound does not lead to that kind of indentured servitude and then eviction for the goor-may boo-teek artisan farmers who produce it.
RE: “Police use of trojans to hack into mobile phones will become routine under new German law”
No way that this will be isolated and re-purposed. Nuh uh, no way, no siree!
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/keenan-pontoni-jon-ossoff-democrats?utm_content=bufferfbe92&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
he is from Teach for America. Are we done here?
dcblogger,
Pontoni is from Ann Arbor, Republic of. Andy LaBarre was a staffer for John Dingel of Michigan before becoming a county commissioner. They are examples of the up and coming liberal class of political professionals. Nothing says outsider quite like an A2 liberal in Georgia. I suspect they don’t know what the term carpetbagger means in that district. If this is the best example of Democratic organizing then they are in for a rough ride in 2018.
It would be interesting to know just which organizations got how much of the millions of dollars that Ossoff blew through to see if it went to the usual establishment suspects.
Tell it. When I was a University of Michigan student, the insularity of Ann Arbor never ceased to amaze me. After I graduated and went back for visits, it really bopped me over the head.
A provisional opinion: at this time the Democrats™ want to lose, and want to appear as hapless as possible.
Cui bono?
They would certainly rather lose, for a thousand years, than turn leftward.
Of course they’ll turn left, just as soon as we lefties start shoveling more money at them than their corporetulent donors.
The shoveling money by the donor class is just the set up and signaling for the sweet payoff in board seats, speaking fees and various other power and money related perks at later stages in their life. The left can’t offer that.
hmmmm… Keenan Pontoni’s linkedin page* (assuming it’s the same Pontoni who managed Ossoff’s campaign) say’s he managed Mich. state Rep Gretchen Driskell’s campaign for US Congress. He hired on in Feb ’15, in March ’15 she led her GOP opponent 42-37%, but by Sept ’15 she was behind 32 – 49%, and went on to lose 40 – 55%. source: Wikipedia – ” Driskell was endorsed by former Republican governor William Milliken,[7] who also endorsed Hillary Clinton”
So a Michigan Dem candidate doing relatively well hires on a very young, newb Dem campaign manager and loses. Not surprising. Did the DCCC recommend Pontoni to her. Did the DCCC recommend Pontoni to Ossoff? And if Ossoff’s race was so important to the Dem estab, so must-win, why use the same 30-year-old who lost Congressional race in Michigan, a more Dem leaning state than GA?
* https://www.linkedin.com/in/keenan-pontoni-a8019140
I agree that the Democrats™ want to lose, but most members of the Democratic party (no trademark) want to win. That’s why it’s crucial for people to vote in primary elections (and if time and energy are available, people need to actively support insurrectionist candidates before the primary election occurs).
One of my favorite parts of Shattered was reading Team Hillary’s explanation for why Russia supposedly hacked our election: they did it because Putin was mad about mean things Hillary said about him. That’s just so hilariously petty and self-centered that it has to be projection.
I also enjoyed the part about the effort to turn this Russian hacking thing into a Story That Could Not Be Ignored. The initial planning was done by people who were surrounded by Shake Shack containers! At the Brooklyn HQ!
My God !! ….. it just comes off like a really bad Saturday Night Live skit …. seriously ! … and the public thinks it’s the real deal …
Amazing
‘Shake sHack’ …. Ha ha !
There has been an awful lot of projection. It seems to be one of the more favorite Republican traits that the Dems have copied.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Just in case people think that these kinds of panics haven’t happened in the U S of A before:
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/20/texas-couple-exonerated-25-years-after-being-convicted-of-lurid-crimes-that-never-happened/
And in these cases, they at least made the children give testimony that was taken to court. I recall a writer telling me that DuPage County, Illinois, was just chockablock with Satanists.
Americans are a fearful people. See: FDR’s famous inaugural speech.
A better analogy would be the Red Scare 100 yrs ago, mass hysteria turned on and off like the flick of a switch. If that latent power existed *before* WW2 and the cold war I suppose it still exists. Doesn’t need to be because Americans are relatively gullible.
I’d welcome a schematic of this, historic or general purpose.
Speaking of Warren & Democrats on healthcare, where is Bernie’s bill? It’s not hard to write companion legislation to HR-676 (Expanded, Improved Medicare for All) for the Senate — unless, that it, you’re a U.S. Senator.
good question. which is why I keep agitating for HR 676.
Agreed. I’m betting he can’t find a co-sponsor (which shows you how vicious it is up there on the Hill).
Sherrod? Elizabeth? Kamala? (her own state is doing it).
I’m telling you, the only way we get single-payer is with a multi-national like UnitedHealth as that payer. Doubt that’s what we want.
As I’ve mentioned before, UnitedHealth, under the name Optum, is already playing a profitable role in the UK’s NHS.
If that’s the case, he should have a staff member leak word it to the press. Once people hear about it, they’ll call their Senators. I’m sure Our Revolution could send an email or two.
Bernie looks more agitated with the Dems of late, perhaps he needs to escalate things a bit to put some heat on them? I don’t think he does this sort of thing nearly enough. He should help rile up lefties against their Dem Party members in Congress.
I’m enjoying the knives coming out for Pelosi….I’d love to see a big fundraiser like her get de-throned. That would be a nice scalp to have.
Have you looked at her recently ?? She reminds me of the goodie hawn characters in the movie ‘Death Becomes Her’ …. she’s about ready to start losing body parts … ! … I mean, That Grimace … ewe !
Scalps ?? … no thank you!
It is very frustrating. I just got an email message from one of the Sanders organizations. Note the final sentence; maybe something really will happen soon?
“And I will be discussing the Medicare-for-all, single-payer legislation that I will soon be introducing in the United States Senate.”
WHEN?
Well, if he’s in your part of Ohio this weekend, ask him. For those in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, do the same: ask him.
“I’ve read the Republican “health care” bill. This is blood money. They’re paying for tax cuts with American lives.”
Ergo, the apt moniker, blood money. It rhymes in principal!
========
“Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault”
Gawd, we’ll hafta wait for the update on this story.
The news is getting even more boring than usual.
Good news is that, altho sleeping well last night, free of bad dreams, I awoke with a jumble of words bouncing around my skull and was able to capture many of them with quill and paper, and am in the process of decoding the hidden meanings within.
It’s happy song, but then quickly turns foreboding, as the star of the tune, the American Neolib Brainwashed Consumer, succumbing to the temptations of rabid, out of control, consumption, not so slowly eats the planet Earth.
It could be a Republican or Democrat song, either way, as both sides voraciously gobble each other across the aisle and straight into the others fat belly.
It can only end with a belch and a pfft.
Actually, a train whistle. The title is, not so coincidentally, Locomotive Breath, by Jethro Tull.
I’ll also post the guitar tabs, chords and sample guitar riffs from a new website I discovered. Cool place. Can stop and start the music with a mouse click and the marker moves from note to note in real time with the audio!
Should be ready to publish for NC viewing consumption tomorrow AM.
Looking forward to that, craazyboy. Knowing what a big Buckethead fan you are, did I tell you about one time when I saw Buckethead live in NorCal and I noticed that his bass player was none other than Viggo Mortensen?
Ya, I remember. I didn’t know he played with Victor- I’ll have to check youtube and see if they got a concert. Lots of em with his Bucket of Bernie Brains band. Great name.
I seem to recall reading he was from OC – I wish I could have seen him there. Don’t know how I missed him all these years? But we had Van Halen, and about 500 hot metal garage bands. A few jazz guys too – Larry Carlton being one.
For Lambert:
Ignore the title and even point of the article. Some fun pushback from Stein to… Neera Tandem. Being good at Twitter, however, is not enough to get my vote.
For The Record, Jill Stein Would Have Made A Great President
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/for-the-record-jill-stein-would-have-made-a-great-president-4d958a7a7d03
Kim Kaufman: I believe that it was Altandmain who posted the link yesterday. The whole thing is a hoot. Jill Stein does well. What lurks in the background, though, is if the Green Party is a one-person operation. Where are the other candidates? Couldn’t they have shown up in any of these by-elections?
KK thanks for the link.
DJG, if you get on the Greens mailing list you see were they are running for office around Amerika. Offices from dog catcher to congress were do have a chance unlike demodogs.
Running for office? You mean like putting their name on the ballot and then sitting around being congratulated by all their Green party friends? Or do you mean actually campaigning, knocking on doors, doing mailers, attending neighborhood meet-and-greets, trying to attract not only independent voters but disgruntled Dems and Repubs? Because if you’re talking about the latter, I’ve never seen it.
Believe what you like
Institutional Factors in US Violence
The pervasive violence in American society is driven by many factors, including easy access to firearms and Hollywood’s glorification of killing, but there are also institutional factors, as Lawrence Davidson explains.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/22/institutional-factors-in-us-violence/
I’m reading an interesting book passed on to me by my daughter, “Angels and Ages, A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life,” by Adam Gopnik. (Darwin and Lincoln were both born on Feb. 12, 1809.)
Re: Violence in American Society:
“In his first important public speech, the Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum, in Springfield in 1838, Lincoln declared a radical insistence on ‘reason’ to be the only acceptable form of public discourse, the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life.
Lincoln was arguing for something, but above all, he was arguing against something, and that was the code of honor that insisted that a higher law lay outside mere procedural obedience. It is hard now to grasp the cultural authority that the code of passionate honor — with its elaborate rituals of feuds and duels — held in the period, and the primacy that it seemed to give to the South. Not merely a political edge but the poetic priority seemed to lie with the feudal and honorable South against the commercial and mouthy North. (It was a cultural advantage that persisted right up through, and perhaps beyond, the Atlanta premiere of ‘Gone with the Wind.’
It was the toleration, even the admiration, that this extralegal code inspired, with its violent consequences for public life, that the young Lincoln set out, ambitiously, to end.” (page 39)
On so many levels…hhhmmmm….
The press has never been so openly partisan in my memory. They have always leaned machine, corporate Democratic in that span, but it’s become astonishingly flagrant with the arrival of Trump on the scene. And they hate anything approaching the actual left just as much, probably more. This is a “center” not of any flavor of actual political moderation but of “winners” and dogs under the “winners'” tables desperately wanting to grasp at any possible entitlements and extend the looting further while the getting’s good.
The rhetoric is often ideological, if vile, pitching markets and fear, but I don’t really feel any allegiance to it; any sincerity. The people at the top are mostly just self-servers, they would have under different circumstances, I expect, adopted nearly any policy set that helped their individual careers and situations. Kissing up and punching down is simply the path of least resistance to where they want to get and stay.
“Kissing up and punching down” – sweet!
WAPO: Changing the Past; Russia and Obama, the Tragic Hero
Pleaseeee…… How serendipitous that his garabage would appear right as I begin to see more people realizing the incongruity between the Trump/Russia Hack investigation and the administration that was actually in charge when this ‘definitely, probably, maybe’ didn’t happen.
“Practical waterholing through DNS typosquatting”
Lambert: just curious. Have you run dnstwist on NC.com?
No. Should we?
Frankly, I don’t think it would be a profitable enterprise to typosquat on the NC domain. But, there may be other factors involved (“hey, what do I know?”).
It appears to be a simple script on github. If you have a linux box somewhere with python, it would appear to be a 10 minute diversion. Mine is under some sheets at the moment as my wife decided a moth grey was preferable to mint green for my office walls.
Requirements:
GeoIP==1.3.2
dnspython==1.14.0
requests==2.11.1
ssdeep==3.1.1
whois==0.7
http://seclist.us/dnstwist-generate-and-resolve-domain-variations-to-detect-typo-squatting-phishing-and-corporate-espionage.html
Note: ANYONE could run dnstwist for any website (DNS resolvable name) they choose, not just the domain owner. The script (python program) is a simple loop that iterates over the name, substituting characters from the alphabet and attempting to see if the newly formed name can be resolved. Obviously, such a thing can be enhanced in myriad ways. From a cursory examination of the script, extending it should be trivial, left as an exercise for the student.
Stop the presses? Barclays execs charged with fraud:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shock-in-square-mile-after-barclays-executives-john-varley-roger-jenkins-tom-kalaris-and-richard-boath-are-charged-with-fraud-xqt3xlkkr
reminder that Al From is the father of the gov’t shutodown
https://medium.com/@matthewstoller/its-al-froms-democratic-party-we-just-live-here-5d0de7f89c3e
Wolf Richter on the Amazon venture into the gig economy.
Those not using bicycles are expected to BYOV (bring your own van) and the vehicle cost comes out of the $18-$25 per hour. A friend in Phoenix has been receiving packages this way and perhaps this delivery venture is Bezos’ backup plan to the loony quadcopter scheme.
Ama-uber?
Forgot the link
http://wolfstreet.com/2017/06/21/amazon-package-delivery-replaces-ups-usps/
It seems like a shrewd move on the part of Amazon considering Uber may soon go belly up. I mean all those drivers are still going to need to make their car payments, no?
Uber drivers make $0.56 per mile on average, average vehicle maintenance costs are $0.57. Counting everything, I think Amazon
indentured serfsDelivery Providers will do about as well.No worries for Kalanick and Bezos however, hyper-free money and hyper post-legal non-enforcement means billionaire monopolists and Ponzi operators pocket 9 or 10 figure payments. How many Aspen chalets and New Zealand farms does one man really need?
“..Keenan] Pontoni, Ossoff’s 30-year-old campaign manager, ”
lol, this explains why Ossoff’s TV ads look like parodies (see Ossoff campaigns youtube channel)….. the manager genuinely doesn’t realize that Ossoff’s TV ads were all political tropes and worn cliches.
15 seconds after the start of an Ossoff ad I fully expected Hans and Franz to barge in and declare their need to “Pump you up” Joe Ossoff
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrQDszRUeEpSa-qm51Qr_gg
The Saudi-Qatar Spat – An Offer To Be Refused
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/06/saudi-qatar-spat-an-offer-to-be-refused-.html
Is it just me, or is the Saudi-Qatar tiff starting to look more and more like the Austria-Hungary v. Serbia dispute of July 1914?
Hopefully cooler heads will prevail because to paraphrase Bismark, Qatar isn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
There is no international situation that the intervention of the United Stated can’t make a hundred times worse.
OTOH, what the hell were the Saudis thinking? That they were going to invade Qatar, with the biggest US base in the ME being there?
I wonder if the Lords of the Universe are ever going to realize that our BFF the CIA, the Saudis and the Israelis are causes of a whole lot of our troubles……
From the point of view of the Lords, that is a feature, not a big.
One:
There is a new crown prince, and its a son of the king. To our ears in the U.S., this might seem normal, but father to son dynasties are quite rare and rarely last. The strength of the English monarchy over the years is largely due to its powerlessness. Moving forces, who might be loyal or have officers from other elements of the family, might be a good idea while the crown prince tries to get recognition from world leaders. The Saudi Royals are susceptible to a Libya style operation. All we need to do is pick a new set of rulers. We don’t want an oil supply disruption, but if the next king was deemed to be unstable, every country on the planet would be going through the list of royals to see who would be a good king to back.
The other reason is Saudi Arabia is a glorified plantation. They aren’t rich because they are smart. They are rich because they have the oil. The Beverly Hillbillies has a good deal of truth*. Democracy in theory time limits bizarre leaders without violence, but who is to say the powerful king or his son is rationale? At this point, we are discussing individuals with no means of control over them. As bizarre as the msm is, it still serves as a check on our own bizarre President. Congress, the courts, the bureaucracies and so on.
*The Saudi clan, which is what they are, like any other group of people has its own share of nasty, irrational people. Money and diplomatic status has put them in a position where these people never learn to act or can be ignored. When we discuss the House of Saud, we aren’t discussing a Sunni sect who follow Mohammed with so many Angels on the heads of pin argumet. We are discussing the Beverly Hillbillies with diplomatic status and mean streaks.
too lazy to find all the links, but this weekend Bernie will be holding health care rallies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and for all I know elsewhere. With any luck he can put the fear of God into certain senators.
I put this into Links proper, CNN IIRC.
I got an email from MoveOn — I keep track of them, with malice — that Sanders apparently composed urging people to attend those rallies. Does anyone know how deep the cooperation runs between OurRevolution and MoveOn?
Bernie may frustrate at times, but often, it seems he’s the only one even trying. God bless that guy.
++ he does care, even if he does frustrate.
Finished an UPDATE on “Obama’s Secret Struggle.” Took longer than I thought.
Re Class Warfare: “Obama on the down-low” — lol!
I’m finally starting to appreciate the debating skills you honed back in the day. Those were some prescient calls you made. I would maintain, however, that those same skills inhibit your ability to become cynical enough.
Hmm fascinating that they say they intercepted ORDERS FROM PUTIN to meddle… and didn’t reveal that at the time though he was caught red-handed with a smoking gun? Suspicious yes to reveal it only afterwards.
Btw here is real footage of Putin in the Kremlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUPRcFjZPM
Washingtonsblog has an entry on this topic:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/06/russia-hacking-allegations-driven-proven-liars.html#more-68171
Nice work. You called it!
Here’s a CNN interview on this topic with Adam Entous, the WaPo reporter who broke this “story”. In the context of knowing the enemy, I watch some of CNN’s (and MSNBC’s and Fox’s, for that matter) reporting on US politics via YouTube, and, at least to my eye, the talking heads (Alisyn Camerota in this case) at CNN have been looking a bit shaken lately.
Oh, and remember this?
Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say
By Juliet Eilperin and Adam Entous
Hmmm.
+1. Is that their political version of TINA? I’ve been bewildered at the way people at Sic Semper Tyrranis, who can overcome what you’d think would be the gravitational pulls of their military and national security backgrounds to do very good criticisms of current US foreign policy, will just tank when it comes to domestic politics and imagine themselves to be confronting a “left” that’s just a collection of Hilbot liberal interventionists. It’s as though they never heard of the opposition to the Iraq war, or to the wars in Central America, etc. I don’t think it’s a matter of ignorance, perhaps it’s a way of maintaining an antifraternization barrier.
The juxtaposition of this with another quote in today’s Cooler gives me the chance to ask Lambert something that’s been on my mind for a while:
This is talking about politicians rather than voters, but implicit in its discussion of constituent demands is the idea that those demands are so varied as to be paralyzing. It airbrushes away of any mode of response other than a grudging move to the status quo center, but that account of things rings as hollow as it does when it’s trotted out on the left: if all that distinguished the constituents of these GOP pols was the magnitude of the tax cuts and bomb deployments for which they long (/s), we wouldn’t be seeing this kind of paralysis, or disorder, or whatever it is we’re apparently seeing.
Lambert, you’ve formulated the illuminating idea that there are really three (rather than two) ends of the political spectrum in America — conservatives, liberals, and the left — where the left is the common enemy of the conservative/liberal factions, etc. But don’t you also see signs of a split on the right, in symmetry with the one on the left?
That is, if “left” is a good term for the distinction vis-a-vis liberals that you want to make on the left (and I think it’s a fine term) then don’t you see signs of an active “right” that can be distinguished from conservatives in many of the same ways? Starting with the distinction that folks on “the right” care about policy as opposed to the conservative stock-in-trade of idpol and grift, and moving on from there?
Obviously, folks on “the right” and “the left” will sometimes have very different ideas about what kind of policies America needs, but that’s not always true. For example, “left” and “right” might find quite a lot of common ground on questions of war, empire, and bailouts; and I suspect that’s just a beginning. At any rate, it would seem useful to acknowledge the difference between the part of that end of the spectrum that’s sincerely policy-oriented and the part that isn’t, just like we wish conservatives would make the distinction between liberals and the left.
Is it just me, or does this characterization of a four- rather than three-way split seem accurate/valuable to you, too?
> Starting with the distinction that folks on “the right” care about policy as opposed to the conservative stock-in-trade of idpol and grift
I’m not sure that makes a difference if ideologically they have more in common than not.
Thanks, I’ll think about that.
I guess I don’t consider myself an ideological leftist: I’m pro-single payer because e.g. you can’t shop for emergency care, pro-regulation because e.g. an unregulated market naturally ends in monopolies, etc. etc. (lots of other reasons for positions like this, but to me those are the most obviously solid ones). If you push me to the wall I’ll say “I just want a system that is close to fair, and in which rights are real.”
When I talk to people e.g. at work who self-identify with the right, in the same way that I self-identify with the left, I get a similar vibe on a lot of counts: they have a different map for getting to “fair” and a different prioritization of rights, but they’re not on a different planet. And a lot of them appear to have exactly the same problems with conservatives that I have with liberals.
Of course it’s also possible that I’m projecting my desire to find common ground and a broad enough consensus to actually drive changes. But it would be a pity to anathematize if the distinction, and the potential for common ground, is actually there.
Yes. I figure their foreign policy experience is great and deep, but that they live in some rarefied atmosphere/retirement village, never saw a Bernie rally, and don’t cruise the internet for the thinking left. You’d think with the fights going on (Perez-Ellison, the CA Chair) they’d notice the Elite Dems are trying to squash a rebellion in the ranks.
Uber sanctioned for refusing to comply with Moraga, CA, sexual battery investigation, judge calls company’s record “horrific” [SJ Mercury News]
Sure, there are no profits, but the “culture” is a problem, too.
Re the latest version of ‘Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract’. These guys are amateurs. For a real relationship agreement, that should see Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icrQX6Yjac
The problem for the Republicans if they pass AHCA is that they will own healthcare.
It doesn’t matter if A doesn’t kick in till 2018 and B till 2022 voters aren’t engaged enough and the GOP margins for victory too narrow for that kind excuse making to matter. Once they pass AHCA they own every insurance premium increase and every problem with medicaid/medicare that pops up until the AHCA is replaced.
Well deserved…
Course, it’s bipartisan. They both deservedly own it.
New thought for me… maybe it took something as bad as o care to get the masses behind Medicare for all.
Re. Obama’s Secret Struggle — I really, really hope the 0-man decides to appropriate that title for the next installment of his multivolume autohagiography, in which case I will definitely get a copy … of the German-translated version. “Mein Geheimer Kampf”, really rolls impressively off the ol’ Zunge, wouldn’t you say?
Obama seemed desperate to rehabilitate the GOP…so…it would be a natural evolution.
Concerning sending a destroyer to Collins, my thought is the Republican Senators (not just the GOP) at large have grown envious of Maryland/Virginia (especially) defense boon of recent years. They all want the money for their own districts, but I think they are too disorganized to achieve these goals.
I don’t think a destroyer will win many votes.
The danger with AHCA is much ObamaCare is by declaring ownership of a decrepit system the premiums (even if they are increasing at rates slower than the Shrub Administration) and other issues will be blamed on the party that declares they passed trans-formative healthcare legislation. Collins isn’t a complete a dope when it comes to politics. She likely understands this.
Ahh.. that Washington Post blockbuster. Am I not supposed to notice that the only elements that arguably had some impact (because they made true information available that the DNC would have preferred to hide), came well before the breathlessly flogged launching of an “operation” by Putin? Or that most of the “operation” consisted of nefariously flogging anti-Clinton stuff on RT and Sputnik? Without much regard for accuracy, but that hardly differentiates them from many of our domestic news purveyors.
btw, what do we think Radio Free Europe, and its hilarious “fact-check the Russkies” site, Polygraph, are? Might they be intended to influence the political behaviour of RUssian, Ukrainian, et al consumers? Is this meddling?
One thing that IS interesting here, is that this story mentions something that floated up in a story or two in the fall, in that they were expecting “worse” material to be released than the DNC email trove. (I think those were September, early October stories, mentioning the Clinton campaign trying to inoculate itself against another shoe dropping.) Now they’ve added the proviso that the Russians might have EITHER had it OR been willing to forge it. But its pretty clear that everybody seemed to think that there WERE worse looking things about either Clinton or the DNC that would count as a bombshell if revealed. Hmmm…
The Post story, like most of the stream of vacuousness I’ve seen, relies on extreme imprecision about what Russian “interference” is. We’re supposed to think of it all as John leCarre stuff, but much of it is just the very prosaic use of the standard propaganda methods widely used by pretty much everybody.
> We’re supposed to think of it all as John leCarre stuff,
I found the breathless focus on the bureaucratic detail vaguely pornographic. Of course, it is DC….
I believe it is what Poo-bah referred to as: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
Any site that didn’t buy into the Daily Kos, Alternet, Truthout, NYT, Wapo directive to coronate Clinton was “guilty” of spreading Russian propaganda to help Trump win (even though he lost the popular vote). You were either for her or against her. God help everyone who was against her, especially if she had won.
Maybe it’s time to look at who in the deep state fed those Clinton sites with anti-Trump propaganda to try to influence the outcome. Looks like they succeeded based on the results of the popular vote in her favor.
Fact is, Obama didn’t do anything about Russian interference because it was assumed by everyone that Clinton would win and thus publicizing Russian interference would have tainted her victory.
Another fact, it still hasn’t been proven that anybody other than a disgruntled DNC insider leaked those damning memos to Wikileaks.
Another fact is, despite Russians preferring Trump over Clinton, nobody has said the voting machines or numbers were tampered with that benefited Trump.
Another fact is, it’s been pretty well-established that Clinton ignored late campaigning in those key states that cost her the electoral vote.
What has yet to be established is how far people like Wasserman-Schultz and Lynch went, including obstruction, to make sure Clinton won.
Also yet to be seen is Clinton apologizing for all the crazy b.s. she’s putting everyone through because she won’t admit that she caused her own defeat because of a flawed campaign strategy, laziness, arrogance and stupidity.
And an investigation into her foundation being used as a quid-pro-quo money making machine.
And finally, yet to be seen is an apology by the news organizations for propagating this anti-Russia and guilt-by association hysteria that has made McCarthyism look pale by comparison.
As a Canadian, I’m very unhappy with the CETA right now.
Canada has repeatedly been a victim of ISDS actions. I fear now it will not just be the US, but also the EU that sues.
We could also see lower wages and the destruction of other key employee protections.
On Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract (which I nearly skipped):
If young, professional couples want to attribute their inter-personal relationship success to their contract, so be it. It doesn’t appear to have prevented them from learning the same lessons other couples learn from working through things on-the-fly.
Still, I chuckled, as I remembered, The Flight of the Conchords, A Kiss Is Not a Contract
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iSlPoQm2XY
“We’ll always have contracts!”
Re: academic publishing
There are some departments (even in the humanities) that make hiring and tenure decisions based on an internal ranking of the publishing houses (e.g., Oxford, Yale) and journals agreed to by department members.
Yeah, it’s that sick.
“NOTE If anybody wants to prevent the election from being hacked, the policy solution is hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public. I can’t think why this isn’t on the agenda.”
I agree. It works in other countries quite efficiently and seemlessly. Why not here. Publically done, hand counte ballots at the precinct level. Our reliance on technology to do this is stupid considering that technology can be hacked so easily by a myriad of actors, internal, national and international.