Category: Trump Era Page 12 of 17

If Trumpcare Fails

On March 24, 2017

Update: And, they have pulled the bill. Now Trump needs to get a win. (Note: This would have been a loss if it had actually passed, though Trump may not realize that.)

It will be for the best for both America and Trump. The original deal was bad, and the deal that Ryan and Trump have negotiated would have been disastrous–literally worse than no bill at all.

This is true for Americans, who would have worse quality care, along with less, more expensive coverage; and it is true for Trump, who promised something better and whose marginal followers will know he betrayed them. Indeed, polls have shown a collapse of Trump’s approval ratings since the first viewing of the draft bill.

If Trump is pushing for a vote when he knows he doesn’t have the vote, perhaps there’s some dim idea of that fact in there. A bad deal, as Trump knew in the 1980s, is worse than no deal at all.

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Trump Is Now Breaking His Core Promises

By Ian Welsh

On March 17, 2017

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On January 26th, I wrote that Trump had yet to break his core promises; that his actions at that point were consistent with the major promises he had made during the election. He had ended TPP, was moving on the immigration bill, was working on the wall, and so on.

He might have lied about a lot of things, but he had yet to lie about what mattered.

However Trump made promises that lay at the core of his ur-promise, which was to make things better for those who the old economy had failed. He is now making those promises into a lie.

Trumpcare is clearly worse than Obamacare. It will not cover things Obamacare covered, will cover fewer people and will cost more.

The budget is a direct strike at the poorest and weakest and at people who voted for Trump in regions whose support he needed, like the Rust Belt. It’s one thing to “cut the state,” it’s another to cut programs that feed hungry adults and children. The extra money to the police state and military will help his people, but not as much as the cuts and the Trumpcare failure will cost them.

He has yet to move on NAFTA, a core promise.

It’s not possible for me to look at what Trump is doing and say, “This will really make a difference to his core supporters.” It won’t.

It’s quite possible than Trumpcare won’t pass, and it’s almost certain that Trump’s budget will take some huge hits before passage as well. But both indicate a failure by Trump to take his promises, and his ur-promises seriously.

Course correction is possible but unlikely. It is rare for Presidents to change from who they are during their first year: Obama never changed from the man who bailed out bankers and the rich, and fucked over small people, for example.

In one sense, this changes little. It will continue the loss of faith in the political system, continue America’s decline and continue on the glide path to the age of war and revolution our world is in. It will happen faster than it would have under Clinton, and more Americans will suffer sooner, but the trend lines remain intact.

In another sense, this is a lost opportunity, not to do the right thing, though some of what Trump promised was the right thing, but to restore some faith. Trump failing, but doing what he promised would be quite a bit different than Trump not even trying to keep his ur-promise, the same as Obama (Change!) or Bush.

So it has been, and it looks like, so it shall be.

So be it.

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The Fed Hikes

By Ian Welsh

On March 16, 2017

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So, the Fed has raised its rate by .25 percent. This is bad policy, and it is bad politics.

Employment Population Ratio

The unemployment rate is at 4.7 percent. As I have discussed before, the primary use for the unemployment rate is to determine wage push pressure, not whether people can get jobs (they can’t, and have given up).

Even by that policy, whose intention and largely successful result has been to keep employees from getting raises much higher than inflation, thus flushing money to the rich, 4.7 percent is not full employment. This raise is early.

That leads us to the politics. Yellen has been quite clear in her opposition to Trump’s avowed economic policies and that she intends to use Federal Reserve policy to neuter them. Given Trump hasn’t done anything yet but make promises he may well break, this seems premature, but the perception on the right will be, and possibly accurately, that Yellen, who barely raised at all in eight years of Obama’s economy, is suddenly raising when a Republican is President.

It’s not a good look, and I don’t see any reason to give Yellen the benefit of the doubt. Americans have only barely begun to get raises that put their income higher than before the financial collapse, with millions still unable to find work, and she raises rates?

The Federal Reserve is both irredeemably corrupt and anti-democratic, as well as an incompetent tool of the rich. At the least it needs to be brought back under Democratic control, a wing of the Treasury department, as it was before 1951.

In the meantime, this is another spike in Trump’s chances of a good Presidency, another spike in the jobless coffins of too many Americans, and another way of making sure that the rich get all the gains while everyone else eats their scraps.

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Trump Couldn’t Buy Coverage Like This

By Ian Welsh

On March 13, 2017

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All the semi-scandals don’t add up to one cover like this.

As for Trump’s program, I am so far largely unimpressed, not as a matter of ideological opposition, but of pragmatics. His health care plan is bad, and will hurt people who voted for him in ways they will notice: increased cost, less health care, and more suffering and death. It’s not the sort of chintzing which can be waved off.

So far he has no solid stimulus proposal (and such as the one he had was, it wasn’t very good). He hasn’t acted on free trade, beyond cancelling the TPP, which wasn’t in effect anyway. His proposed cuts to the non-military budget will have a negative trickle down and will not be good for the economy. Bannon’s okay with that, he has an ideological desire to destroy the post-WWII state, but Trump needs his people to feel good.

The one perhaps clever thing Trump has done is his asked for a 54 billion dollar increase to the military budget. Jobs created this way will tend to go to Trump supporters and communities. If you’re dedicated to slashing the rest of the bureaucracy, this is an excellent offset.

Well, it could be, depending on how many jobs it produces. The dollars/job correlation on defense funding is pretty lousy, and if I were Trump/Bannon I’d be leaning hard on the Pentagon to spend this in ways which will actually produce jobs, whether directly in the military, outsourced, or manufacturing.

Much remains undetermined, but so far Trump’s made only one potentially smart economic move. Let’s wait and see, within a couple months we should have a fuller picture and thus a better idea of his likely fate.

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So Trump and Republicans Are STILL More Popular than Clinton and Dems

By Ian Welsh

On March 8, 2017

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After the last month and a half, after endless brouhaha and constantly “losing the media,” here are the favourability ratings according to the Suffolk poll.

Pence 47/35% +13

Trump 45/47 -2

GOP 37/48 -11

Media 37/50-13

Dem Party 36/ -16

Hillary 35/55 -20

Congress 26/52 -26

As Matt Stoller points out, it is also fascinating that 39 percent of union households approve of Democrats, while 50 percent disapprove.

Takeaways:

Trump isn’t losing his war with the media, and he’s not wrong to attack them.
Trump should be scared of Pence, because the population would rather have him as president, and, by all reports, so would most Congressional Republicans.
People may not like Trump much, but they aren’t wishing they’d had Clinton in charge (though doubtless some of the disapproval is from Democrats angry she lost).
Trump is more popular than the Republican party, he has room to use that to get them to do what he wants.
Pence aside, if Republicans try to impeach Trump, they’ll have problems.

I think it’s fairly remarkable that after all the mini-scandals about Russia, the screaming about immigration, and so on, that Trump’s numbers are still this high. It simply hasn’t penetrated; people are going to give him time to prove himself.

What will matter is Trump’s results. So far he’s not moving in the right direction on that (as with the new healthcare bill), but he still has time to course correct.

What he should take away from this is to take the media less seriously. By all means, de-legitimize them as much as possible, but don’t let them rile him. Work on his most important promises: a better healthcare bill (still possible, though the current one is in trouble) and a better economy.

Little else really matters, it’s just a distraction.

And keep an eye on Pence.

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The GOP Healthcare Plan

By Ian Welsh

On March 7, 2017

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This is a good overview.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it. Other than the changes to state-based regulations, the removal of the individual mandate and the removal of the tax on good healthcare plans (so-called gold-plated plans), as it stands, this plan is slightly worse than Obamacare in pretty much every way.

It is not an improvement, it is not what Trump promised in his speeches, though it’s not far from what was in his policy documents. It is also not a disaster, but it certainly won’t be a win for Trump or make his followers feel better off and it was one of two ways he could, or can, do so. The other would be to improve their economy.

This matters far more to Trump’s future, and his presidency, than all the noise over immigration or Russia. He should have pushed hard for something simple that was an obvious win; something Democrats would find it hard to oppose.

This is not a win for his supporters, or for him.

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The Press Is Trump’s Enemy, Not the Left’s Friend

By Ian Welsh

On February 20, 2017

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The enemy of my my enemy is not my friend. It often isn’t even my ally, but just someone with whom I have something in common.

Roosevelt on the Press from F.D.R. and the Press

FDR wasn’t that left wing, yet the press savaged him relentlessly. Corbyn is relentlessly savaged and lied about by the British press, and his political beliefs are basically 60s liberal with a side of anti-nuke.

The media works for its owners. As of 2000, 80 percent of US media was owned by six companies, and that percentage is higher now. The media serves the interests of the people who own it and anyone else’s only incidentally and insofar as those interests don’t contradict the owners. Furthermore, and at this point, almost all journalists and editors in the US media are Ivy League grinders.

Such people are deeply, personally, offended by the idea that someone like Trump, who just does not know how to act and who is rich despite being everything that parses as incompetent and gross to them, is President. Trump is not part of the club; despite being rich, he never has been. His father was rich, he was rich, but he comes across as nouveau riche, a parvenu, without taste or class. And his followers, in whose company he revels, are culturally beyond the pale to virtually anyone who was conditioned in an Ivy League school, and who jumped through all the hoops to get into an Ivy League school (a process which requires the unfortunate subject to be a grind and a brownnoser from elementary school all the way through high school).

Just as the intelligence community’s opposition to Trump does not make them good guys, the press’s opposition to Trump does not make them good guys. For all the screams about “fake news,” the worst purveyors of false news in the past 20 years were the mainstream media who sold the Iraq war for George Bush; with the most prestigious newspaper in America, the New York Times, making the flagship effort.

As a result, by the time Iraq was invaded, 72 percent of Americans thought that Iraq had been involved in 9/11 and a majority thought they had WMD and were a threat to America.

Now that’s fake news.

The media has been relentless in mocking any real left wing candidates as well. Kucinich, who ran for president multiple times, was treated as a joke. Oddly, he had been a successful mayor–he was both a successful legislator and a successful executive, but somehow he wasn’t credible.

For anyone who wants a better, more egalitarian world, with greater welfare for all and true respect for democracy, the best case scenario of the Trump/media fight is for them to destroy each other, and the media to be even further discredited, so that it can be broken back up into thousands of pieces. Even in that state, the majority of media outlets will be the enemy of all decent, kind individuals. However, that way they will be less powerful, and there will be room for a larger minority to advocate for something other than oligarchy and empire and all the evils that flow from both.

Remember, it is a rare person or institution that doesn’t serve the interests of whoever controls it, and if you cut a person’s paycheck, you are paying for control over that person. That is literally what the check is for, and if the person doesn’t act in the interests of their owner, they get fired.

The media is not your friend. They are the bought and paid for workers for oligarchy. That is their job. On the side, where the oligarchs don’t care much, they may do some good, but if “good” and “pushing the interests of their owners” conflict, they will always side with pushing the interests of their owners.

Trump cut the TPP. Trump wants to renegotiate NAFTA. Trump wants huge tariffs on various countries. He wants to kick out undocumented immigrants, who work for bad wages in shitty jobs for people who don’t want to pay enough for people who aren’t scared of ICE to do the job.

There are oligarchs who support Trump’s plan, to be sure (see Fox, various others), but there are plenty who don’t.

That doesn’t make Trump’s plans good, nor by itself does it make them bad. It just means that giants are fighting above our heads. To them, we are ants, and ifm while they fight each other, they happen to step on some ants, that isn’t important to them.

Trump: Not your friend. Media: Not your friend. Intelligence agencies: Not your friends. This is true even if part of their current interests happens to coincide with yours.

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Fools Russians Where Angels Fear to Tread

By Mandos

On February 18, 2017

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD5phTXGN_0

(NB: post by Mandos.)

Recent events suggest that, whatever they may have originally thought, the Trump administration is in the process of being pulled back into the overall historical attractor of US policy regarding Russia. The Russian establishment had made no secret of its preference for Trump and its belief that Trump was a person with which they could deal on a more even footing, a politician in a mold they understood, etc.

I’m not here to argue whether or not Trump (or Flynn) is some kind of Russian plant, an issue that seems to be occupying many others. I gather that conclusive evidence on this matter has yet to be produced and that it so far lies in the realm of (negative) wishful thinking. However, Russian policy-makers are already voicing disappointment that Russia-favorable entities in the Trump administration are increasingly weakened. The US state, particularly its intelligence community, are deeply set up for conflict with Russia, for better or for worse, and it turns out that the White House is only part of a large infrastructure, and any fantasies of an election resulting in a vast purge and house-cleaning were just that: fantasies. The intelligence community still believes to its core in the necessity of containing Russia.

However, one thing that is different now is the position of Western social liberals. Unfortunately, Russia had decided to back in spirit, if not always materially, movements that are identified with various strains of nationalist conservatism that are hostile to the goals and beliefs of social liberals. This is not only in the USA, but especially so in Europe, with the on-going rise of the Le Pens, the Wilders, and other groups in the world. Once upon a time, social liberal groups were principally parochial movements which were relatively indifferent on foreign policy questions regarding Russia, and to a very large extent also overlapped with anti-war movements — and so were once at odds with the intelligence community.

However, the apparent desire of Russia to return to a world of ordinary nation-state politics, and therefore its willing appearance (at minimum) of siding with conservative nationalist movements, have led to many social liberals now viewing Russia as mortal threat to their projects, and therefore, having a plausible motive to try to subvert political movements like that of Trumpism to their aims. In this situation, social liberals (or “identity politics” movements, or whatever you want to call them) will quite rationally stake out a position that the devil you know (American intelligence forces) are better than the devil you don’t (Vladimir Putin). This is not helped by the appearance of things like Russia loosening its laws on domestic violence.

While social liberals have not lately been winning elections on their platforms (most notably, in the USA due to the Electoral College structure), it would be a mistake to assume that these groups have no power whatsoever. In fact, they have broad and deep bases of popular support (merely electorally inefficient), and those bases are being pushed into the arms of forces hostile to Russian interests. The combination of Cold War-style intelligence community conservatism with popular social liberalism is one that is likely to lead to an even more hostile neo-Cold War posture on the part of the Western establishment in the medium-term, unless in the short term Trumpism can generate the political competence required to coerce the establishment in the other direction.

For its part, Russia has been attempting to play, in the “further abroad”, a soft power role given that its other options are not effective. It is attempting to play the part of a rival global hegemon without actually being a hegemon. It does not currently have the cultural or technological reach to do so. While it operates a technologically advanced, developed economy, it is still highly dependent on natural resource development and export. That means that the risks accruing from a strategy of using cultural divisions in the currently hegemonic Western social order are high: should social liberals gain the upper hand due to the inability of nationalist populism to operate the levers of state effectively, they will be confirmed in a resolve for further containment and suppression of a Russia that took sides against them.