It’s the big day. A lot of bad stuff starts, let us hope that some good comes with it. I will say that so far most of the bad stuff Trump has promised to do is what most of the Republican candidates would have done. Bear that in mind. (That doesn’t make it any better, just some perspective.)
Category: Trump Era Page 14 of 17
Well, Trump keeps saying stuff, and people keep freaking out. He said a number of interesting things this weekend, let’s run through them.
The U.K. is smart to leave the bloc because the EU “is basically a means to an end for Germany.”
Yeah. Not so clear. BUT, there’s an element of truth here. Among the major European powers, Germany is the one who has benefited most from the EU, or rather the Euro (which England was not a part of). The Euro is not worth nearly as much as a German mark would be, making German exports far more affordable than they would be otherwise. Meanwhile, Germany has pushed hard for austerity policies, on the crazed moral point that countries which don’t run trade surpluses shouldn’t have good things. At this point, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece would clearly all be better off outside the Euro–at the very least. Germany has acted monstrously over the past eight years, no more so than to Greece, but not only to them. About the only thing I agree with Merkel about was when she opened up Germany to immigrants (something Trump slams).
- Trump said Bayerische Motoren Werke AG would face a 35 percent import duty for foreign-built BMW cars sold in the U.S. BMW should scrap plans to open a new plant in Mexico and build the factory in the U.S. instead, he was quoted as saying. BMW plans to start building 3 Series sedans at San Luis Potosí in 2019.
I have exactly zero problem with this. This is how much of the world economy was run prior to the rise of neoliberalism. If you wanted access to a market, you were expected to locate much of the production in the country, with foreign content rules in place. Often it was expected that, say, 60 percent of work and materials would be produced in the country to which you were selling.
- NATO, he said, “has problems.” “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump was quoted as saying about the trans-Atlantic military alliance. “Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism.”
I have believed, since the fall of the USSR and the release of the Warsaw Pact countries, that NATO should be dissolved. I have not changed my mind because Trump is now saying it. Let us be clear, the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.
Russia’s population is 143 million.
The EU minus Britain has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.
Yeah, Europe can afford to pay for its own defense. It has a larger economy and a larger population than Russia. It isn’t even close. If Europe refuses to defend itself, I don’t see how that’s America’s problem, the only thing Europe really needs from America is a nuclear shield, and that need could easily be fulfilled another way (and France has nukes).
NATO is the main reason that Russia is a problem. The Russians were promised that NATO wouldn’t expand into the Warsaw Pact countries. That promise was broken, and when it became possible that the Ukraine would join NATO, Russia acted, because Russian generals believe that it is impossible to defend Moscow if troops start from the Ukraine.
- On Russia, he suggested he might use economic sanctions imposed for Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Ukraine as leverage in nuclear-arms reduction talks
This isn’t a bad thing. Good relations with the other massively nuclear armed state in the world are good, and America has zero interests of importance in the Ukraine. As for Europe, see above: They can defend themselves, and if they can’t be bothered, so be it.
- President-elect Donald Trump said in a weekend interview that he is nearing completion of a plan to replace President Obama’s signature health-care law with the goal of “insurance for everybody,” while also vowing to force drug companies to negotiate directly with the government on prices in Medicare and Medicaid.
Now, to be frank, I don’t believe it will be good insurance (I’ll be happy to be wrong), and I note that it is not healthcare for all, but insurance for all–insurance many may not be able to use. I also doubt it will be universal. But then Obamacare was insurance that many people can’t afford to use, so that alone doesn’t make it a worse plan than Obamacare was.
Still, the actual promise has potential to be better than Obamacare, because Obamacare was not actually insurance for everyone: Nine percent of Americas still lack insurance (this is down from about 14 percent before Obamacare).
If it’s better than Obamacare I will laugh like a hyena.
My read on Trump’s future is as follows: He either gets two terms, or he gets impeached in his first term. Most GOP Congress members would rather have Pence than Trump. BUT Trump’s followers are very faithful and as long as he remains popular, Congress would not dare to impeach him. They have to live in districts where he is popular, and not only their seats, but much more would be at risk if they were labelled traitors by Trump. Bear in mind that there’s no way Trump goes peacefully, or doesn’t call them out, he would fight to the end.
So Trump has to deliver to his base, or he’s done. Also, Trump wants to be adored. It is his deepest psychological need, as best I can see.
The risks with Trump remain high (especially in regards to his China policy); his tax cuts are deranged, the supreme court is going to be a disaster, but that doesn’t mean that his administration may not be successful enough for the people it needs to deliver for to get him his second term.
More than that, Trump is saying the things that no one else in power would say. I mean, he called out pharma as protected and said that’s over. He’s mostly right about NATO. He said in this interview that Iraq was the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history (that’s overstating it, but it’s the biggest since Vietnam).
It’s going to be an interesting few years. Strap in.
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So, there was a lot of hoopla over Trump’s press conference, most of it concentrating on the release of the oppo research file on him, containing not one proven assertion.
I decided, once again, to read the actual transcript. And found out that there was little coverage of something which should matter more to most Americans: Trump’s promise to lower Pharma prices.
We’ve got to get our drug industry back. Our drug industry has been disastrous. They’re leaving left and right. They supply our drugs, but they don’t make them here, to a large extent. And the other thing we have to do is create new bidding procedures for the drug industry because they’re getting away with murder.
Pharma has a lot of lobbies and a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power and there’s very little bidding on drugs. We’re the largest buyer of drugs in the world and yet we don’t bid properly and we’re going to start bidding and we’re going to save billions of dollars over a period of time.
The business press seem to be taking this seriously.
It is also, AGAIN, something which should have been tackled long ago. Obama deliberately refused to allow price negotiation with pharma and so did Bush. In both cases, they gave into the lobby. Insane.
Nor, as some say, will this mean that pharma prices will have to rise overseas. Pharma is a profitable industry which spends more on marketing and advertising than on drug research, which researches mostly the wrong drugs, and so on. They can just make less money–high profits to Pharma are mis-allocated resources.
Next Trump talked about the F-35 (for those who don’t keep track, it basically can’t fly and is vastly over cost.)
And we’re going to do that with a lot of other industries. I’m very much involved with the generals and admirals on the airplane, the F-35, you’ve been reading about it. And it’s way, way behind schedule and many, many billions of dollars over budget. I don’t like that. And the admirals have been fantastic, the generals have been fantastic. I’ve really gotten to know them well. And we’re going to do some big things on the F-35 program…
AGAIN something which should have already been dealt with.
Trump thinks like a deal-maker and a business man, and what he sees is that the government is vastly over-paying for services and products, and he doesn’t like that. And what he sees is that Americans are overpaying as well, because the government refuses to act on their behalf.
I’m sorry, I’m very sorry. Trump will certainly do bad things, but if he follows through on these two things (especially pharma), he’ll be doing very good things that people like Obama would not do.
This is of a piece with Trump killing the Trans Pacific Partnership, while reports have regularly indicated that getting it passed was Obama’s most important legislative priority, likely for his entire Presidency.
Understand clearly that this is the sort of stuff that Trump was elected to do, along with bringing jobs back, curtailing immigration, and so on.
The next thing to watch will be what replaces the ACA (Obamacare). I am not optimistic, because health care accounts are a terrible idea. But let’s see. (Or, alternatively, call your Congress critters and insist the ACA not be repealed. You might win.)
But right now, as I score it, Trump is more or less on track to do what he said he would do. I think his tax cuts will be disastrous, especially in the long run. I don’t like Obamacare, but I expect him to replace it with something worse. However, in a lot of areas, he’s talking about doing things that should have been done long ago.
When the people too many liberals think are “good” (like Obama), won’t do what everyone knows what must be done, they will eventually be done by people liberals consider “bad,” in ways liberals might not like.
There’s a lesson there.
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Buzzfeed published it. They start with this:
A dossier, compiled by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official, alleges Russia has compromising information on Trump. The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.
“We can’t confirm any of it, and we know some of it is wrong, but we went with it anyway.”
Sigh.
On the face of it, I’m inclined to agree with Glenn Greenwald that it seems possible the Deep State is taking a shot at Trump. Because Trump has plans to reorganize the intelligence agencies, that’s not surprising.
Perhaps unrelated: Trump will be keeping his private security, and not relying entirely on the Secret Service.
Greenwald’s point that when much or all of this is proved false, it will immunize Trump from any true revelations in the future, is also worth pondering.
I’m not sure what to say beyond that, except that reading this Twitter stream from Matt Stoller is important. It starts as follows.
1. The basic political problem Democrats face can be summed up in one sentence. Under their watch, the mortality rate went up.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 11, 2017
Yeah. It’s just possible that Democrats lost not because of a super evil Russian conspiracy, but because they didn’t do the very basic job of government. All the bullshit lists that have come out miss the simple point that, measured in terms of jobs as a percentage of the population, the economy hasn’t recovered.
As for Obamacare, insurance coverage is not health care. If it was, the mortality rate wouldn’t be going up. The transmission is not applying power to the ground.
Democrats lost to an extremely unpopular, very flawed person, because they ran the country badly for a lot of people, and those people are upset.
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As I noted before, the Fed and the Trump admin are on a collision course. More evidence:
Fed minutes show many officials think they may need to accelerate rate hikes if fiscal raises demand over sustainable levels
— Sam Fleming (FT) (@Sam1Fleming) January 4, 2017
The Fed’s argument is that the unemployment rate is low enough that it is at the natural rate of employment which doesn’t cause wage-push inflation. As of December, that was 4.7 percent. (There are tons of problems with this, but we’ll ignore most of them, what matters here is what the Fed thinks.)
I am old enough to remember when an unemployment rate of five percent was considered a scandal, but no matter.
The fact is that the people who elected Trump aren’t feeling good. To make them feel good, Trump is going to have get the official unemployment rate lower than it is now, at least under four percent, and hopefully to three percent or lower and hold it there for some time, at least two or three years.
This stuff takes time to ripple through the economy, and it takes time for a tight labor market to push employers to both raise wages and to hire people who they consider marginal.
If the Federal Reserve raises rates if/when Trump’s policies (“fiscal,” in the above) start to work, they will be making sure he can’t deliver to his constituency.
This is a direct collision course.
Now let me say something simple. The Federal Reserve, for over 30 years, has deliberately crushed wages. This was policy. Policy.
The idea that the Federal Reserve should be able to sandbag the policy (“fiscal”) of elected representatives has always been anti-democratic and bogus. They work fastidiously to make sure the rich get richer, to bail out banks, and ensure their profits. Despite “full employment” supposedly being part of their charter, they have defined full employment to mean “employment pressure which doesn’t lead to general increases in wages faster than inflation.”
That is, they have deliberately set out to create stagnation and decline of general wages, while deliberately also ensuring that the rich get richer.
That’s what the Federal Reserve does in practice, and has done since the early 80s.
And that’s why, as with many of Trump’s other targets, I have no intention of defending the Federal Reserve. Yes, Trump is bad, etc. But the Federal Reserve needs to be broken to the will of government, and thus to democracy.
Since none of the “non-bad” or “not so bad” presidents did it, it will fall to Trump to do it. This will probably be the worst way to do something necessary, but so be it; none of the so-called “reasonable” people will do it, so it will be done by someone unreasonable (if Trump does it, this is not a fait accompli.)
Along with breaking the intelligence community (which could lead the world into an even worse situation, but a task that also falls into “needs to be done” category), Trump may well wind up being the most transformative President since Reagan, or even FDR.
This is what happens when the necessary actions which are not taken by “reasonable” people. They wind up being done by unreasonable people, and those unreasonable people may not be “unreasonable” in the way you like.
Keep an eye on this: If the Fed doesn’t blink and Trump doesn’t break them, he’s probably a one-termer.
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Amidst all the screaming about Trump, there is a feeling that he is being unfair by singling out various companies for attack.
This is true.
It is also special pleading.
What Trump is doing, and what he will almost certainly do when he is in office, is pick out specific groups and individuals, and he will very likely use the weight of the state against them.
Oh dear. Oh dear.
This is rule by men, yes. It has also been going on for years. Anti-war protestors and environmentalists have been singled out for special attention on the positive side of the scale.
Meanwhile, on the negative end of the stick, let us compare two financial crises. In the eighties, there was a financial crisis too, filled with tons of fraud, called the Savings and Loan crisis. It happened under a Republican president.
Executives were charged, and they went to jail.
In 2007-2008, we had a financial crisis, and from 2009 on, Obama’s DOJ applied fines, not criminal charges. Those fines immunized the participants, and since they did not take money from those who had benefited (and were often less than the profits taken by the corporation, even) they did not dis-incentivize criminal acts. Instead, the DOJ said: “There is no real penalty, so make the money when you can, and we’ll immunize you for a token fee.”
There is no question in any reasonable person’s mind that many executives had engaged in fraud, negligence, and criminal conspiracy which could have been indicted under RICO.
But hey, they were let off. Meanwhile, people who applied for mortgage relief were deliberately given the run-around and fucked over, losing their houses (see David Dayen’s “Chain of Title” if you need the blow-by-blow.) Robo-signing by financial institutions, post-financial crisis, was also mass fraud, attesting to facts the signers had no knowledge of.
America is already a nation of men, not laws. One can say, “It has always been thus,” and there is some truth to that, but it is more a lie than true: see the S&L crisis.
People have already been getting away with lawbreaking–depending on who they are–and not small numbers of people. And if you don’t think various firms haven’t been picked out for special, positive favors, you simply haven’t been paying attention.
2000’s Gore vs. Bush ruling was “men over laws.” It was such a bad ruling that the Supreme Court tried to say it couldn’t be used as a precedent. Meanwhile, the protections of law in general were gutted: the Patriot Act, the AUMF, the rise of the vast surveillance state with its clear industrial-scale violations of the Fourth Amendment. Most Americans live in a border zone, where they don’t have freedom from arbitrary search and seizure. As for the First Amendment, the existence of “First Amendment Zones” tells you all you need to know.
Trump’s behaviour is and will be the direct consequence of how many previous Presidents acted, including Obama (who notably killed an American citizen without any trial and claimed the right to do so).
To cry now, and especially to weep for large corporations who are bad actors, is hilariously hypocritical and intensely revealing. “Trump blackmailed them into keeping a few jobs in America, that tyrant!”
Oh, My, God, the funny. Now yes, Trump has also called out people for terrible reasons. Oh well. Yes, that’s a new bad thing (though not worse than killing a US citizen without trial, the right to face his accusers, or see the evidence presented against him), but I just find it hard to get very worked up over.
You already lost your rule of law. There are a few places one can date the loss to, but I put it in Obama’s mass-immunization of financial executives. You could argue for Bush vs. Gore or a number of other places.
But wherever you put it, it already happened.
You have the rule of men. For certain people, the law is interpreted and enforced differently.
This, folks, was at the heart of Trump’s attacks on Clinton for e-mail, which liberals laughed off. But we all know that if some peon had done the exact same thing, they would have been ruined and probably gone to jail.
You already lost rule of laws, and had rule of men.
You have already paid a frightful price for this. The reason your economy is so bad is because bankers were immunized and bailed out, staying in charge of your economy when they are incompetent crooks and ordinary people were not bailed out.
Not coincidentally, minus not bailing out ordinary people, Trump does not win election in 2016. (He also wouldn’t have won if Obamacare was not so flawed, but that’s another post.)
Trump is just the continued price for breaking your own laws and constitution, and your own unwritten norms.
As such he falls under “as you sow, so shall you reap”.
Until large numbers of Americans see it this way, including at least some faction of elites or would-be-elites, there can be no true fix for this situation, whatever happens with Trump.
Trump is the symptom, not the disease, and until you treat the disease, things like Trump (or the financial crisis and the lack of real recovery from that crisis) will continue to happen, and fools will continue to be bewildered by them, as if the very public actions of the people they elected had not led to them.
Machiavelli wrote, and America’s founders agreed, that good men could make bad laws work, and that good laws could not save bad men.
The founders’ equivalent was that eventually Americans would become so degraded that they could only be ruled by despots.
Americans have given many signs of being this degraded, and now it’s up to Americans to prove that they aren’t.
Don’t dare to say this is all on “deplorables” or Republicans, because Democrats have not just been complicit in all of this, they have spurred it on in deliberate ways–as with Obama on surveillance, drone murder, and whistleblowers.
It is on Americans.
Americans are reaping as they have sown. That all Americans are not bad or degraded is not the point. Enough of you are, and your elites are corrupt as a class, so much so that I would easily expect, in nine or ten years, to be fundamentally unethical and unsuited to public life. That includes, by the way, Bill Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Trump is what Americans have earned.
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Trump has now taken a number of firms to task, over Twitter, about moving jobs to Mexico. While there’s some disagreement, it seems that some critics have backed down.
“I know from talking to business people that no major firm wants to be a subject of a Trump tweet,” says Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says companies realize Trump controls the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the IRS, the Treasury and regulatory agencies, and “the amount of control that intersects with what companies are doing is enormous.”
This is, first, an implicit rebuke to all the Presidents who did nothing, and to all the fools who said they could only do nothing.
But, it is also about the art of getting powerful people to bend to your will.
The classic method is to pick out someone, someone powerful, and break them. Humiliate them, destroy them, and do it publicly. Make them grovel.
You make an example of someone. In almost every case, and certainly in Trump’s case, were the powerful to band together, they could easily take you down. You must make sure they don’t do that.
So you make an example of someone, and then you treat others kindly.
“You can have tax cuts and beautiful labor law cuts and a privatizing stimulus, but in exchange I need you to keep jobs in America and bring some back.”
That’s the deal.
The problem is that many CEOs and billionaires will want to take all the goodies, and still move jobs overseas. Normally, in fact, that’s what has happened: Tax cuts were given, and the savings were used to accelerate offshoring and outsourcing and to do massive stock buy-backs to enrich executives.
So Trump is putting companies on notice that this won’t be tolerated, and I believe to really drive the lesson home, he will need to break someone.
Be very clear, this is easy to do. The President is fantastically powerful. Unleash the FBI, NSA, DOJ, and IRS on any major firm, and you will find offenses. Moreover, in almost every case, they will include criminal offenses–if you allow them to be.
Then, you charge executives with crimes rather than immunizing them with fines, and you tie them up in court for years. If they lose, you throw them into a maximum security prisons, and you let bad things happen to them.
Even before this sequence is through, people will get the message.
Presidents have chosen NOT to do this, even in cases of rampant corruption and criminality (Obama being the worst offender by far, with his wholesale immunization of fraud and racketeering in the financial industry).
But you don’t have to play the game that way, and I’m guessing Trump won’t. And that’s why executives are bowing, because they’re scared he will break someone to demonstrate his power, and they don’t want to be the executives he hauls out of the crowd, to whom he has his goons deliver a beat-down.
This is nasty pool, but I wouldn’t weep for whoever becomes the example. They’ll almost certainly have it coming. The injustice won’t be in what happens to them, but in the fact that all the others will be let-off so long as they kow-tow.
We’ll talk more about this principle, with regards to the Federal Reserve and the intelligence community, for now, watch for it.
(Trump gets his second term if he delivers enough for his base. This is existential for his administration.)
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There seems to be a general belief that 2016 was a particularly bad year. Part of that is the twin political events of Brexit and Trump, and part of it seems to be that a number of particularly beloved celebrities died.
But unless you were in a few specific places, like parts of Syria, and certainly if you were in most of the developed world, your odds of having something bad happen to you were about the same as they had been in 2015.
Certainly Brexit and Trump are both, potentially, earthquakes, though their severity remains to be seen, and I regard both as consequences of decisions that were made over a period of decades.
What made them seem so severe, I think, is that they were, to the liberal classes, surprises. In both cases, polls indicated they wouldn’t happen; and it was conventional wisdom among certain groups that both events were absurd. Trump, in particular, was treated as a grotesque joke when he announced his candidacy, and right up to the last moment, almost literally, icons such as 538 and the New York Times insisted he was almost certain not to win.
When he did, an entire world view went away.
Because they thought it had been impossible for Trump to win. He was a joke, according to that world view, and those who held it have seized, in particular, on “Russia did it!” It was a deus-ex-machina, because their world model simply cannot accept that it happened.
And, in both cases (Brexit and Trump), there is a great deal of shaming and othering of those who voted the “wrong” way. They are castigated as stupid and immoral, people who are too dumb to vote in their self interests, to understand how the world works, motivated almost entirely by racism.
Bad people.
So many liberals in America and Britain now believe they live in countries where half the voting population are evil, stupid racists and that those people are now in charge.
Oh, and the big, bad Russians are also responsible.
While some are willing to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, the policies that even they voted for and/or supported (under Blair, Clinton, Obama, and the EU) might have something to do with all of this, the metaphysics of most essentially boils down to the notion that bad people (Russia, racists) combined with stupid people, are destroying our world.
Because they can see little responsibility for themselves (either in past policy or in the specifics of the campaigns (Clinton’s was notably incompetent)), they have eviscerated their sense of their own power, and thus their ability to create change.
Responsibility and power are exactly equal to each other. You have exactly as much power as you have responsibility, any mismatch is a denial of reality, and if society abets you in denying that reality, as it often does, by giving you more credit or less blame than you deserve, it does not change either your responsibility or power.
It is also true that an accurate perception of blame enables correct action. When Clinton and her team completely fumbled their campaign, not removing them from all positions of power indicates a willingness to tolerate failure again and again. Indeed, after Clinton, the presumptive front-runner, was defeated by Obama in 2008, perhaps the realization should have dawned on us/her that she and hers were incompetent and that she should not be the presumptive candidate. She started with a vast advantage and lost it.
Meanwhile, in the eight years Obama has led the Democratic party, vast losses have occurred in State Houses and Congress.
As for policies which have lead to vast numbers of Britons and Americans being willing to vote for Brexit and Trump; well, I have written on those subjects more than enough.
Liberals and centrists, as a group, deny responsibility, and thus deny agency. They refuse to put the locus of responsibility in those areas over which they have control. Instead, they blame forces over which they have no control (Russia) or over which they have less control (the current racism that is ex-nihilo, completely unrelated to the policies they have championed for decades).
It is not the crisis, as such, that predicts the future, it is the response. I was able to accurately predict the shape of America and Europe’s economy because I saw the response to the crisis in ’09. The day the outlines of Obama’s stimulus were announced (he’d already fumbled the bailouts, by bailing out the rich rather than ordinary people), I wrote that American jobs and wages would not recover for 20 years. Eight years later, that’s still looking accurate. (The unemployment rate is not what matters here, the jobs/population ratio is.)
So, seeing the liberal response to 2016’s political crises, it is clear that, at least so far, liberals have not learned the necessary lessons. Thus, trends will continue in the wrong direction. Locating the problems as beyond their control, liberals have self-emasculated.
There is still time for that to change, and perhaps it will. So far, however…well…
Happy 2017.
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