When the result (in electoral college votes, which is what matter) is as close as it was in the US election, every factor in play contributed to the result.
Did the Wikileaks release cost Clinton the election? Probably.
Did Comey’s last minute letter to Congress about Clinton’s email cost the election? Probably.
Did Clinton choosing not to campaign in Wisconsin cost the election? Probably.
Did Clinton’s neglect of the Rust belt cost the election? Probably.
Did the Clinton campaign’s refusal to listen to locals cost the election? Probably.
Did the Clinton campaign’s flawed model cost them the election? Probably.
Did Trump’s superiority in earned media cost the election? Probably.
Did Jared Kushner’s innovative ad campaign cost Clinton the election? Probably.
Did voter suppression cost Clinton the election? Probably.
Did calling a quarter of the electorate “deplorables” cost Clinton the election? Probably.
Right. Hopefully you have understood the point.
What is happening right now is hysteria. An attempt is being made to overthrow the election by saying Russia influenced it, through Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0.
So far there is no hard evidence for this, and Wikileaks, at least denies it. That US intelligence believes it to be true is nice, but almost irrelevant to anyone with enough memory to remember what they believed in”high confidence” about Iraq.
I seriously suggest you READ the NIE on Iraq from 2002. It was essentially ALL WRONG.
So, if the intelligence community and Obama want to make this charge, they need to release the hard evidence. Their word is not good enough, especially that Putin was personally involved.
I point out, once more, that even if true, this amounts to “overturn the election because a foreign government helped release TRUE information about one of the candidates.”
If it actually occurred, I would regard it as a neoliberal coup, similar to the ones which occurred in Greece and Italy, meant to insure policy continuity in the face of someone who doesn’t agree with all the tenets of neoliberalism.
I don’t think faithless electors will throw the election (but who knows), however I note something else important: creating this as the primary storyline mitigates, hard, at looking at stuff which Democrats can actually control: like their own abysmal campaign, at virtually ever level from basics like canvassing (“we don’t need literature”, said the Clinton campaign), to their model, to their message “America is already great”, “deplorables”, to clearning the field so a candidate with huge negatives would be annointed the candidate.
If Democrats had gotten even one or two of the things listed above which were in their control right, and which did not depend on their opponents actions at all (and the list is incomplete) Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect today.
Running against Russia in the election was stupid; the act of a Goldwater girl who doesn’t understand that the USSR fell almost 30 years ago. Making them the primary actor in Clinton’s loss and Trump’s win pushes attention away from the things which can be fixed by Democrats unilaterally, and is dangerous to boot, both domestically, by degrading political norms even further, and internationally, by hyping a heavily nuclear armed state as an enemy when America has almost no actual interests in opposition to Russia’s. (Syria and the Ukraine are unimportant to the US’s interests. Period.)
Meanwhile, the Democrats have spent the last eight years being slaughtered at the State and local levels. In February of 2009, I wrote that Obama was planning to ditch the 50 state strategy, and received a torrent of abuse (mostly from Kossacks.) The Whitehouse said that was bullshit; their hero wouldn’t do that!
He did.
Self-goal. Something completely under the party’s control that they chose to do, which hurt them.
In the end, whether or not Russia released some derogatory–but true–information about Clinton and other Democratic candidates, that act was only one of many factors which cost Clinton the election.
Concentrating on it is stupid, demagogic, and dangerous and allows people whose fuck-ups were far more responsible for the loss to largely slide.
Democrats should concentrate on what they can control, and understand that, as the side with less guns, constitutional norms protect them more than they do the other side.
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One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media, and politicians.
It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: Promises were made that turned out to be lies, those promises were not kept.
Soviet Communism was supposed to lead to a cornucopia and a withering away of the state. Instead it lead to a police state and a huge drought of consumer goods, and often enough, even food. Communism failed to meet its core promises.
The world order we live in was born in 1979 or 1980, with Thatcher and Reagan. It made a few core promises:
- If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs.
- Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity.
- Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone.
- Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.
These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.
Understand clearly, by 79 people had lost faith in the post-WWII order. They were willing to try something new.
That order has now betrayed too many people, and it is falling. It will continue to fall. We are in the twilight of Neoliberalism (longer article on that later.)
But this is why people are going for “fake news”. This is why people are willing to listen to demagogues. This is why people don’t trust the press (why should they, the press lied to them repeatedly, it is the original fake news). This is why they don’t listen when hundreds of economists say Brexit is bad (why should they, most economists missed the housing bubble.)
Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it. Who didn’t buy into it? Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right”.
So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right. Because people are ideologically and identity driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.
Trump does not talk like those people. Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and to a large extent, neither did Sanders.
And so they are turning to people who don’t parse like the regular type of elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right), but that doesn’t matter to a lot of people: they can’t take the pain any more; the assured long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.
Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. That is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal) and experts have done to themselves and the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: if you trust them, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says “but 90% of economists think X is bad”.
FAIL. They also missed the housing bubble. They lied or were “mistaken” about trade deals. Their opinion means nothing.
All this screaming about fake news is something I will take seriously when the New York Times, who helped sell the Iraq war based on “fake news” is listed as fake.
The current order has very little credibility left, and they are losing more and more. Look at all the poll failures: somehow the polls almost always get it wrong against insurgents, not for them.
No, neoliberalism is dying, and its defenders are discredited, and both things deserve to be the case. That does not mean its death-throes will be pleasant (they won’t be) or that what replaces it has to be better, just that it has run its course.
Those who supported it took their rewards in their time: the top tier got filthy stinking rich, the courtiers received good jobs and money, when for their victims, the good jobs and money were going away. They will have to be satisfied with that, because posterity will be absolutely scathing to them, as it is to the generation leading up to World War I.
Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will happen. It is that simple.
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Ok, so the Federal Reserve, coincidentally, now that Trump has been elected, decided that the economy is at full employment and raised rates.
The funny thing is, it’s true. Sort of. The unemployment rate (u-1) is low enough to be considered “full employment“. What that means is that the labor market is tight enough, that for the first time in Obama’s reign, workers actually got raises in 2015.
By the economic policy regime which has run the Federal Reserve, and the US, since Greenspan, that can’t be allowed. The moment employment starts causing “wage push inflation” (wage increases faster than the general rate of inflation) it must be stopped.
Of course, out of Obama’s era, there has been only one good year so far (though 2016 will probably come in as decent), and the only reason the unemployment rate has improved is because millions of Americans gave up on finding a job. As a percentage of the population, there are about as many jobs as there were at the bottom of the last recession.
There was quite a bit of growth, but it didn’t make it into wages, and the only way it will, is if the labor market stays tight for years, because there are years (decades, really) of almost all the gains going to the top few percent.
So, Yellen probably “should” have raised rates 6 months or so ago. She didn’t, probably because she’s Obama’s appointee, in the same way that Bernanke didn’t when he “should” have because he was Bush’s appointee, and wanted a Republican to replace Bush.
Under Barack Obama, the deficit (how much the US pays on its debt) dropped, but the debt increased by $7.917 trillion (not including the 1st year, which he didn’t control.) The deficit dropped because the Federal Reserve kept interests rates extremely low for years and years and bought up a pile of debt as well.
But the debt is higher than it has been, in relative terms, since the WWII debt splurge. And if Yellen raises rates, debt service charges will start to increase (not immediately, much of it is in longer term instruments).
More to the point, higher interest rates are meant to make sure that wages increases stop, the unemployment rate increases, and that (in effect) the economy never actually recovers from the financial crisis.
So Trump has a problem. He needs cheap money if he’s to have a good economy, and Yellen is ending the cheap money era right when he was elected.
It’s not completely a coincidence, but it’s not entirely not a coincidence, and if I were Trump or his team, I’d be livid, and it looks like they are.
Worse, Trump has a big stimulus plan. It’s a bad plan, but it’ll still create some jobs, and Yellen has said :
“I would say at this point that fiscal policy is not obviously needed to provide stimulus to help us get back to full employment,” Yellen said.
That’s Fed speak for “spend the money if you want, but every dollar you spend, we’ll neutralize”. Which, by the way, has been orthodox Fed policy since Greenspan and arguably Volcker. Almost 40 years.
So, Trump (and Bannon) if they want a good economy, and their stimulus to work, have a problem: Yellen and the Federal Reserve Board. Yellen has stated she won’t step down till her term ends, in 2024.
They can do two things. The first is to wait, not for Yellen, but for the terms of other Federal Reserve members, to expire. Two slots of the 6 (7 with Yellen) are currently empty, he can fill those. That gives him two. One (Powell) is a Republican and may be amenable; and Fischer’s term expires June 2018. So by late 2018 Trump might have a Fed willing to cooperate with him, and not sandbag him.
BUT that’s quite a while, and assumes that Powell is amenable. It gives Trump only two years to make the economy work how he needs it, and means his first two years will be sandbagged by the Fed. Trump’s followers are not going to care that’s the reason, they expect results.
The other option is hardball. Governors can be removed for cause. Trump can say they have performed badly (it’s not a hard case, and people who voted Trump and many others will agree) and remove them. This can then go to the Supreme Court, which, if Trump is smart, will then be firmly in Republican hands.
I will be frank: I would absolutely do this. I would have done it as Obama to Bernanke (if Obama had actually wanted a good economy, or to have banks go under) and I would do it as Trump. The Federal Reserve, for 4 decades, has sandbagged wages and made sure the rich got richer. It is not even in question, and the financial crisis was only the largest proof, not nearly the only one.
I think this is coming. The Federal Reserve bows (and Yellen has been very clear she won’t) or the resisting Governors get booted.
There will be screams from Democrats and “liberals” and I will ignore most of them. As with ending the Trans Pacific Partnership, this is the right thing, and it’s something that should have been done decades ago. Appointed technocrats sandbagging Congress’s fiscal policy and deliberately crushing wages was always evil.
Get out your popcorn, folks.
Oh, and these sort of stakes are why there is such a huge effort, abetted by the CIA (and opposed by the FBI) to make sure that Trump doesn’t take office.
Like it or hate it, he’s going to have to destroy much of how DC has done business for 40 years, and many people in power really, really don’t want this.
Don’t defend the Federal Reserve if you claim to care about workers, the middle class, or anyone under the top 10% or so. They have acted unutterably evil for decades, and if it takes another evil person to destroy their power, I’m fine with it. Frankly, the Federal Reserve should be placed under direct control of Congress with 4 year terms at most, and every central bank in the world should lose its “independence”. They have misused that independence to do little more than make the rich richer for decades and they are profoundly anti-democratic.
It’s a pity so much that has to be done will likely be done by someone like Trump, and that he’ll do much of it the wrong way to support terrible policy like tax cuts, but that’s what happens when the left allows the right to be the populist party, and chooses to be the party of bailouts and technocrats.
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Oxford’s student union has suggested using “ze” as a gender neutral pronoun.
(Edit: apparently they haven’t even done that!)
It is an offense to use the wrong pronoun deliberately, but not required to use “ze” for everyone. This follows the University of Tennessee suggesting tutors ask students which pronoun they prefer.
I remember in the 70s when Ms. came into use. It felt really awkward, but in a couple years I didn’t even notice. Issue of basic politeness, if they wanted to not announce their marriage status, it was polite to accommodate them and did me no harm. Gender neutral pronouns exist in various languages, and frankly, if ze comes into wide use, I might prefer it to the awkward “he or she” in places where “they” likewise feels awkward.
However, this is a minor issue, especially in America, where the right to an abortion has been receding for years and is now at real risk of being lost. I’m for trans-rights, etc… but the right to an abortion effects far more people and is far more basic.
(Theresa May, the UK’s Prime Minister, also supports a reduction in the allowed time for abortions to 20 weeks from 24, though how much she cares about this issue is unclear and it’s not nearly the same thing as an overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. Meanwhile, in Canada, we have no abortion law, and the world has not ended.)
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Stop thinking of Trump, as Trump alone. He was never entirely that, and he’s definitely not that any more.
Trump is now Team Trump. The two most influential people in his court appear to be his son-in-law, Kushner, a fellow real-estate developer and the guy who made the key strategic decisions which lead to Trump’s victor; and Bannon. Bannon is an economic nationalist with white nationalist leanings, who identifies with the working class and wants to bring manufacturing back to America. He’s quite willing to have a trade war to do it.
Priebus, the chief of staff, is also influential, but seems to be a bit of a drone. Trump’s children are influential, and it appears that Ivanka, his daughter, is the most influential of the three. She’s probably the most liberal person in the administration (even if she, strictly speaking, isn’t in the administration.)
Trump has loaded up successful oligarchs and on Generals.
Steve Bannon
So, for example, his shift on China policy is in alignment with what a lot of generals think (China is the real threat) and with what Bannon thinks (manufacturing jobs, economic nationalism.)
His economic and labor policy will seek to both undermine labor rights and to spike the economy, which is essentially what authoritarians tend to do.
But the important point is that Trump, because he has only a few fixed ideas, even more than most Presidents, will be defined by the agendas of his closest advisers. To understand Trump’s moves, you need to understand his court.
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Trump received a phone call from the Taiwanese president. That was a violation of the One China policy, where in order to have diplomatic relations with China, one cannot have formal relations with China.
It is quite clear that Trump did this deliberately, it was not a gaffe, but planned.
China stated this was unacceptable, but was willing to pretend it was a gaffe.
Trump doubled down, accusing China of currency manipulation hurting the US (not true right now, but massive in the past); of not helping enough with North Korea, and of unacceptable behaviour in the South China Sea, where it has been building islands in order to seize control of the sea. He said he sees no reason to abide by One China if the US isn’t getting something in return.
China’s official response is that there will be negotiations over anything without One China first.
And here we are.
Some basics. One power maximum; the potential power, of a modern state, is equal to its industrial power. Many nations may not have as much power as their industry allows, but it is the limiter.
China is now the world’s largest manufacturer. It is the world’s potentially most powerful nation. However, China’s policy has been (quite sensibly) to gain the base first, then arm, for classic guns or butter reasons.
China did manipulate its currency to gain all that manufacturing, but American and Western elites were entirely complicit. China offered large profits to individuals and corporations, and they took that money. It is that simple.
China’s rise did not just hurt America, it hurt Japan, probably America’s most loyal ally (with the possible exception of Britain or Canada.)
The manufacturing jobs which are done in China would have been, in an alternate universe, done by the people who elected Trump in the Rust belt.
Trump and his advisors do not believe that China and America’s interests are aligned, they see China as the rising power, who is rising at America’s expense.
This is not insane, it is, actually, accurate. It is possible to imagine a world in which that rise led to shared prosperity, but no one is offering those policies or ever has.
Now, I want you to turn your attention to Russia. Yes, Russia.
See, the problem with NATO expansion and overthrowing the Ukrainian government and the color revolutions and sanctions against Russia and all that stuff, is that it was forcing Russia into China’s camp.
Russia does not want to be China’s ally. Russians (at least in the past, not so sure any more) would far rather have allied with Europe and the US, but Europe and the US would simply not allow it. Running on crazed fumes from the Cold War, they feared Russia, who is no longer a threat to take first sport, rather than China, which was.
Note that Trump has also expressed great skepticism about NATO. He puts it in money terms “why should we pay for Europe’s defense”, but the end is the same, a NATO pointed at Russia doesn’t make sense to Trump or his advisors.
And Trump’s plans for the US involve a change in trade, anyway. People are scared of a trade war, and they should be. What Trump is saying, right now, on the meta-level most people are too stupid to get, is that China is going to have to make a deal which helps American manufacturing, and everything is on the table to get that. Everything.
Because Trump owes his election to the Rust Belt. He must deliver for them, in 4 years, or he will not be elected. His people, at least, will understand this. The election was too close. Trump must deliver.
And if China won’t cut a deal, fine, slap tariffs on them. America is still America; American consumers can still consume, and if it turns into a trade war, manufacturing jobs may well come back to the US.
This is high stakes poker. It could cause a serious war. It could make the world economy go into a serious tailspin.
It is also a realignment moment. The US is pivoting from treating Russia as a big enemy, to treating China as the big threat. This is, whether you like it or not, rational: China is the actual threat to American hegemony.
I assume Trump thinks there is a deal to made, perhaps he even thinks there is a way to make it win/win. We will see.
But do not think this is pure insanity, or that it is not well thought out. This is based on a world model which accords with actual conditions in the world better than the one Obama was operating under.
If the status quo continues, America will be superseded by China; and if China and Russia are allies, American options are extremely limited. China is the rising power, Russia is a great power, but not a threat to be a super power again in the immediate future.
I will remind readers, once again, to stop assuming that Trump and his team are idiots just because they are doing things in new ways. I do not know if this pivot will work, and it could blow up spectacularly, but it is not prima facie stupid.
In fact, politicians who actually put America’s real interests first would have never allowed China into the WTO, and certainly would have gone out of their way to make sure that China’s rise was a win/win, rather than a win/lose OR (if they were ruthless and slightly less smart) would have done everything they could to halt it. (I would not have favored that, to be clear).
Certainly America should have pivoted East years ago. This is a move which is made much more dangerous and problematic than it should have been by the fact that it wasn’t done when it should have been; by absolutely deranged policy towards Russia, which schizophrenically both treated Russia as if it were powerless, and as if it was a huge threat.*
The world is getting a lot more dangerous, fast. But it was going to anyway. This may not be the best China policy possible, but it at least acknowledges reality.
(*I understand the don’t let Russia turn back into a huge threat, but that could have been managed with far less difficulty in ways that wouldn’t have estranged Russia.)
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Alrighty, I had hoped to avoid this topic, because it’s stupid, but here we are, the left can talk about nothing else.
The argument is that Russia interfered in the US election, and that gave the election to Trump, therefore electors pledged to Trump should switch their vote to Clinton.
I’m tempted to just say “this is insanity”, but let’s step by step it out.
The CIA apparently believes that the Russians (GRU) hacked both the DNC and the RNC and Podesta and didn’t release the RNC emails, therefor were trying to push the election to Clinton.
Emptywheel has the best summary of this. She notes that:
First, hackers presumed to be GRU did hack and release emails from Colin Powell and an Republican-related server. The Powell emails (including some that weren’t picked up in the press), in particular, were detrimental to both candidates. The Republican ones were, like a great deal of the Democratic ones, utterly meaningless from a news standpoint.
So, weak on its point. Also, while there are reasons to believe Russia was involved in the various hacks, there is no smoking gun that makes it certain, especially not that it was Russian STATE actors.
But let’s assume it was true: the Russians hacked and made sure that the info wound up public.
So far, I am unaware of a single email which has bee found to be false. Not one. All information released appears to have been true. It was information germane to the election, there was just more truth available about Clinton than Trump.
(There have also been allegations of hacking voting machines. Maybe, but there is no proof. I’ll wait for that, and that it was from outside.)
So, there are some reasons to believe Russia may have tried to influence the election by releasing true information about Clinton that was damaging, but they also appear to have released info against the Republicans too, so—what?
More to the point, none of this is ironclad. Contrary to the wailing I see from many, the idea that intelligence agency assessments are always correct is laughable, as anyone who was alive for Iraq knows. Intelligence agencies not only get things wrong, they have axes to grind and slant intelligence to suit their ends, and the ends of their masters (still Obama.)
If I were a Trump voter, and a bunch of electors, on data that is this uncertain, and which even if it is true amounts to “telling the truth about Hillary and Democrats” were to give the election to Clinton I would be furious.
I would consider it a violation of democratic norms: an overturning of a valid election result because elites didn’t like the result.
And while I’m not saying they should, or I would (nor that I wouldn’t), many will feel that if the ballot box is not respected, then violence is the only solution.
If faithless electors give the election to Clinton, there will be a LOT of violence as a result, and there might even be a civil war.
If you’re pushing for this, understand what you are pushing for. One reason we have democratic elections and referendums (hello people who want to overturn Brexit), so that we don’t settle such things by violent means.
Trump won the election, unless you have ironclad proof of real election tampering that was large enough to throw the election (aka. voting fraud, in auditable form), you should probably live with it, unless you really think he’s Hitler and going to set up concentration camps, in which case I can see no argument against you using force.
This is where Nazi/Fascist/Hitler/Camps rhetoric leaves you. Nothing is off the table.
Either decide you mean it, or calm down and take shit off the table that is going to get a lot of people dead if you pull it off.
(Oh yes, and as a number of wags have noted, the idea of the CIA in specific, or America in general, whining about foreign influence leading to a right wing government is hilarious on its face.)
Update: The article has the worst case scenario for Russian hacks (minus machines) that can be even slightly suggested by the evidence IN ORDER to show that overturning an election result still isn’t justified. It wouldn’t be EVEN if the Russian state was directly behind all info releases. Only hardcore proof of hacking of the machines could justify it.
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Once upon a time I wrote for very political reasons. Bush had invaded Iraq, I was upset, and I saw that if America and the world in general did not change their path we were going to wind up in an era of war and revolution and combined with climate and other environmental issues like aquifer depletion and ecosystem collapse, we were going to have a huge die-off of humans and massive suffering.
At first I went all wonky, I assumed “people can’t want such a catastrophe”, so I explained why it was likely to happen and I explained how to stop it in terms of plans. I used to do VERY detailed policy posts.
That didn’t work. Didn’t get any significant traction at all.
I examined the situation, and realized that people couldn’t reason morally and ethically. A few incidents convinced me that people didn’t understand really basic things like “killing civilians is worse than killing military” and “killing more people is worse than killing less people”.
So I spent a couple years trying to explain basic morals and ethics to people.
That didn’t work. They either already understood, or they were incapable of learning, no matter how simply I put the propositions. Oh, they might agree with no context (although often not even then), but the moment their tribe was involved, they became evil again.
So, I looked at that feedback, and realized that most people can’t reason; can’t separate morals from interests; can’t separate ethics from identity, and so on. Worse many couldn’t even separate their own interests in terms of health, money and staying alive from tribal identity.
To put it simply, they were living in completely delusional fantasy worlds, so separate from any even vaguely objective reality that they might as well be living in a TV show (and, in effect, many are.)
Yes, they were incapable of basic ethical and moral reasoning. Yes, many were incapable of thinking a few years into the future, or evaluating opportunity cost (look it up.) Yes, if they identified with a politician or a group, they were largely incapable of applying ethical rules or even self interest to the actions of that politician.
I then moved onto issues of ideology and identity (though I’ve written less about the second), trying to dig into why people are how they are, how and when that changes and so on.
Short answer: they have to die. The generations who are that afflicted cannot be taught, they simply have to age out of power and shuffle off the mortal coil. They, at a very fundamental level, never intend to do the right thing if it conflicts with anything else of importance to them. And if that means a billion or two billion people die, and there is a great-die-off of non-human life, they’re fundamentally ok with that.
They can’t even understand “kill less people”. It is genuinely beyond them in practice. The majority will certainly never vote for a genuinely good candidate, and those candidates have been offered to Democrats in primaries regularly.
They don’t want to do the right thing. (Yes, not everyone in those generations is so afflicted, there are large minorities who aren’t. They are minorities.)
So, I do not write, any more, to convince people to do the right thing. I know that doing so is beyond most people, certainly most Americans over the age of 30. And that is not about Trump, or Clinton, a people who wanted to do the right thing would not have had an election between two such monstrous individuals.
I write, today, to tell truths I believe many people ignore, especially on the center-left (the right wing does not read me). That Clinton’s hatred of Russia was extremely dangerous. That Trump is not incompetent by any useful definition of the word. That racism grows stronger when times are bad. That under the EU some people in England have been plunged into hopelessnes and that while it may not be the EU’s fault, they are the status quo and will be blamed (and it isn’t not their fault.)
Shit people don’t want to hear.
As such, I suppose, I shouldn’t complain when people scream because I’ve hit a pain point. After all, by telling them truths that are not generally accepted in their group, I’m aiming for pain points.
Yet, I still am flabbergasted by the inability of people to understand simple points like “good and competent” are not the same thing. Or “don’t underestimate your enemy”.
So, I write here to explore subjects which interest me, and, quite often, to tell truths that are not widely accepted. I see little point in writing articles which simply parrot views you can already read in the NYTimes or hear on CNN.
As such, I am likely to say things which challenge your world view. Things which, yes, may hurt.
But the reason the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the reason we are riding that handbasket all the way down, is that warnings that we were in the handbasket were ignored for decades. Trump isn’t the cause, he is the symptom. And frankly, though most can’t understand it, so was Clinton and Obama (who, if you want to blame someone, is the man most proximately responsible for Trump’s victory, but most people can’t admit that, either.)
People wanted to live in fantasyland, and so we are going deeper and deeper into hell.
And so I will speak the truth, as I understand it (I may be wrong, if you think I mostly am, you should not read me.) That is, more than any other reason, why I write.
We are here because people wanted to believe lies and act on the lies, because they could not stand to live in the real world, fantasyland being much more congenial to their self-image based on their group-based identity, and to what they perceived (often but not always incorrectly) as their self-interest.
The problem does not lie at not being able to fix the problem: leaving aside “it’s too late now” we have no significant problems we couldn’t start fixing or substantially mitigating tomorrow if we wanted to. We could easily have avoided the worst of climate change, ecological collapse and the rise of racism/stagnant economies if we had acted decisively 20 years ago.
It lies at people not wanting to do the right thing, and not living in a world with more than a remote resemblance to the real world.
People who cannot understand simple things like “kill less people”; or “don’t underestimate your enemies”, have problems that are far deeper than whether Trump or Clinton rules them, but many who read this won’t even understand that.
The truth won’t set you free by itself, but lies will keep you in the hell more surely than chains made of iron ever could.
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Competent and good are not synonyms.
Smart and good are not synonyms.
Evil and competent are not synonyms.
Virtues are not all moral virtues.
Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless.
Competence is morally neutral. It is how you use your competence that matters.
Next: Human Nature.
It is possible for people to be both good and bad. A politician may do something good, then do something bad. It is even possible for a person who is overall evil (George Bush, Obama, Putin) to do the right thing, for the right reason. People can murder one day, and rescue babies the next and rescue those babies out of the milk of human kindness.
If you do not understand any of the above, if you are not capable of disentangling your emotions or your tribal identities enough to reason like this, then you are incapable of rational thought when it matters.
Finally, if you do not like my writing, if it bothers you that I say that Trump is competent, or that Genghis Khan, though evil was a great man, you do not have to read it. If someone is threatening you if you don’t read my stuff, please call the police.
Many people do not seem to know how to unsubscribe from the email list. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of the email.
While, on occasion, I write to comfort people, I do not write to pander to people’s prejudices or tribal identity.
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You’ve probably all heard that Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered two of the most common high denomination bills (500 and 1,000 rupee) out of circulation and that they would no longer be legal tender after only a few days.
India’s economy is, well, not modern. Most people do not have or use credit cards. Only 53% have a bank account, and cash has been preferred for transactions. 43% who have a bank hadn’t used their bank account in the last year.
India also has a vast corruption problem and huge black and grey markets. The corruption makes it very difficult to fix problems: whether it be removing pollution from the Ganges, building enough toilets so people stop shitting in the streets, or anything else.
The black money (money never taxed or declared) market is supposed to be about 23% to 26% of the Indian economy. I don’t know if that’s low estimate (I doubt it’s high).
Black money and corruption go hand-in-hand, for obvious reasons: you can’t declare the bribes you receive or gave, at least not with some way of laundering them first.
So cleaning up black money should help clean up corruption.
But. Many Indians live in the black money economy. It’s just that simple. Someone gives them money, they spend it, no one is declaring.
De-monetization isn’t just about a couple of bills, it’s about pushing people towards electronic money, which can be easily tracked. There have even been suggestions of beggars using electronic money.
I regard this push to de-monetization as fundamentally insane in an economy like India’s. And it screams rentism. Yeah, black money can’t be taxed, but it also isn’t “bank-fee’d” away. When everything is electronic, thru banks (this isn’t bitcoin) then transaction fees and so on eat away at it. Every hand it goes thru can make a little stick, and only very strict law can make it not happen.
It’s free money from the point of intermediaries, they have to do very little to get it once the system is set up.
It’s leeching. Nearly pure rentism.
I do not support universal e-cash for this reason. It is to easy to do rentism, and rentism (transaction taxes and fees) kill monetary velocity and kill economies. The move to transaction taxes (GST) is one of the things that took the oomph out of Western economies, and it was designed to do so, to reduce inflation by reducing spending.
Despite our era’s absolutely crazed fixation with inflation, there is NO evidence that inflation from about 10% a year on down does ANY harm to the economy in and of itself and there is plenty of evidence that moderate levels of inflation have a myriad of good effects on the economy.
Yes, people who earned their money in the past hate inflation. Too bad, past contributions should be discounted, and proper government policy can easily ensure that people are still taken care of and have enough. Crippling the economy so that people who earned their money years and years ago retain power long past their period of productive contribution is economic malpractice.
Give people who can’t/shouldn’t/don’t work a decent income thru a pension/welfare or even basic income system and get rid of all transaction taxes except for those where you deliberately want to slow down a particular type of economic activity, rather than all activity. If it’s carbon you don’t want to see too much of, tax it. If it’s oil inflation that’s the problem, figure out how to tax that, and so on.
Demonetization without very strict anti-rentism is a bad idea. India is a shitty country to try to demonetize due to its lack of technological infrastructure, plus, ironically, because of it is weak rule of law, vast corruption and huge inequality in both money and power.
India, in general, is far more of a clusterfuck than most understand, including many middle class Indians. Calories per capita are lower than they were 30 years ago, most people are worse off than they were before neoliberal dogma took over.
Meanwhile, much Indian agriculture runs off of aquifers, and they are being depleted, leading to farmer suicides. Climate change is making the monsoons erratic, and it is causing problems with runoff from the Himalayas, which is to say, where northern India gets most of its water. Earlier this year one of the source rivers for the Ganges was dry for weeks.
India is going to go pear-shaped. The question is when, but when it does, I expect hundreds of millions to die. The issue will be water, pure and simple, but India’s inability to deal with even basic problems like open defecation and pollution of the Ganges, means it can’t deal with longer term issues.
Reforms, which have, yes, created a robust middle class, have not improved the situation of most Indians. Yes, many stats say they have, but when I find out that calories/capita is down, I start thinking that GDP/capita is not measuring real welfare. It’s not like Indians were overfed 30 years ago.
I simply DO NOT believe many of the Panglossian statistics that people are using to say the world is the greatest ever. In many cases I can’t prove it (and no, unless you have a 100k you want to give me, I’m not going to prove it), but I know, for example, that proverty stats in America are absolute bullshit: the poverty level has not kept up with increases in cost of living, especially in food, rent and medicine. Not even close, and that’s using formal inflation statistics, which systematically understate price rises in various categories.
So, when the US stats are shit, and knowing what I know about how places like India and most sub-Saharan African countries run, and how incentives to show progress work for the people who measure this shit, I just do not believe a lot of the stats.
I think the world is in worse condition than many make out. I know India is. I’m now receiving information that China is (more on that at a later date, maybe).
So, shit is going to hit the fan, we are in worse shape than we think we are, we are strangling all growth rather that counterproductive growth, and we are lying ourselves about the real shape of our countries and our world, and when we’re not lying about it, we’re ignoring it.
This is going to get ugly. Hundreds of millions in India. And the same in many other places.
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