Yeah, I know, Trump is wrong on everything.
But I agree with Thomas Walkom on NAFTA. The bottom line is that what Trump wants is what the left should want, and if it doesn’t, it isn’t the economic left.
And Trudeau’s pretty face and lovely abs don’t change that.
- raise the minimum North American content in autos from 62.5 to 85 per cent.
- Have 50% of autos which qualify for NAFTA free movement be manufactured in the US.
- Remove Chapter 11, which allows companies to sue NAFTA governments. (This has been horribly abused to stop environmental regulations)
- A 5 year sunset clause.
And Trudeau has said that if Chapter 19 doesn’t stay in, he’ll walk from NAFTA. (Chapter 19 allows us to take it to court to see if domestic laws are applied. We’ve won such rulings and the US has just changed the law, as with softwood lumber.)
Frankly the changes that Trump wants to NAFTA are mostly good. The sunset clause simply means the deal must keep working, and it is far better than clauses which make it hard to leave deals.
Of course these changes aren’t all great, but they would lead to more jobs in all three countries, and I can’t see why that’s a bad thing. The bottom line is that countries not only have a right to say that access to their markets should benefit their citizens, they have a duty to do so.
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Perhaps Trump is doing this for petty reasons, but this is a good thing. Media is absurdly over-concentrated already, and should not be more so.
The only thing that would better would be a law straight up forbidding media companies to grow beyond a certain size, and forcefully breaking the firms back down to that size.
Of course, Trump’s administration doesn’t want that. The FCC is removing restrictions on ownership controls in local markets, for example.
Nonetheless, this is a good news, and we can hope that in time it will be seen to be the start of a new wave of anti-trust cases and law. America, and the world, need few things more.
For years, decades even, America has had a policy of assassination. Americans believe that if you kill the leaders, you kill an organization.
This is delusional. It only works when it almost isn’t necessary. How many times has American killed the #2 man of the Taliban? Did killing Osama stop Al-Qaeda? Assassinating Yamamoto in WWII was not just meaningless, it was a bad idea (he wasn’t a great admiral, but he did oppose war with both America and China.)
Assassination ONLY works when the organization is unhealthy OR when much of it doesn’t agree with the current leader but is following them anyway.
In a healthy organization someone else just steps up and leads, and they’re about as good as whoever was there before. It’s not that leadership doesn’t matter, it’s that healthy organizations create lots of people who are capable of leading. Very few leaders are actually genius leaders, most of what looks like genius is leading a good organization, and knowing how. Sometimes someone is the first person to really figure out how to lead an organization, but if they’re good, they train successors, or people learn from watching them.
The second time it works is if there is a genuine disagreement in organization. Perhaps some are willing to make peace, and some aren’t, and if you kill a few of the key leaders who don’t want to make peace, you can get peace.
The problem with all this, however, is that it’s often hard to tell who is actually a genius leader and what people actually believe. A lower ranking leader, gunning for the first spot, is often not public about disagreeing with #1, and if he is, may be lying to get followers. It’s just hard to tell. As for genius: it’s rare, and people are good at faking it till crunch time. Who was America’s last genius general put in real command? I am not aware of one from the last 20 years (Petraeus certainly wasn’t.)
Hannibals, Caesars and Subotais are truly, genuinely, rare. Genius political leaders are truly rare as well. And genius politicians often are terrible leaders (not the same thing). You may want them in charge.
But the bottom line is simple: a good organization produces a surfeit of good leaders who agree with the organization’s mission. Decapitation works on unhealthy organizations.
America’s managers (America doesn’t have many leaders) lead unhealthy organizations rife with disillusionment, designed to promote time serving managers who don’t take risks, who actively work to harm the rank and file of the organization and who believe in nothing but themselves.
Such managers find it difficult to get anything done. They have to use fear and coercion and lies to get the rank and file to do what they want, because what they want is usually both evil and against the rank and file’s self interest.
They know that managing organizations is difficult from their own experience, and they think that all organizations are like that.
But organizations like the Taliban or Hezbollah (not to conflate, I don’t regard Hezbollah as equivalent in many ways) actually believe in what they are doing. People join because they believe in the mission. Even large drug cartels have a belief in mission and a winnowing of fools and poltroons that often (though not as often as belief organizations) allows them to replace leadership.
When real leadership meets real mission, people fall over themselves to join. They want to belong. They believe. They will work for virtually nothing. They will beg to be part of something bigger than them.
Most Americans have NEVER experienced this. They cannot understand it at a gut level. It is alien to them.
Assassination works only when organizations are unhealthy, and run by managers, not leaders, or during the early stages of a charismatic cult. (A healthy charismatic cult, like the early disciples of Jesus, will quickly create enough leaders to survive a decapitation strike.)
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No, central banks aren’t screwing the economy up with their purchases:
Veolia (Paris:VIE) has issued a 500 million 3-year EUR bond (maturity November 2020) with a negative yield of -0.026 %, which is a first for a BBB issuer.
To be clear, central banks didn’t buy those bonds, investors did. But central bank purchases of government debt are a large part of what is causing this issue.
The ECB (European Central Bank) has been buying SEVEN times the issuance of government bonds. Seven times. Seven times.
They are straight up financing governments (which, done right, could be a good thing, but isn’t in this context).
The problem in the world today is the same as it was 15 years ago, before the financial collapse: There is too much money chasing not enough returns. Because there isn’t enough real growth, that money moves into bubbles and fraud, and destroys companies through leveraged buyouts and so on, but it also means that, if there isn’t enough fraud or predation going on, it sits and stagnates and does nothing worthwhile.
What the developed world actually needs is stuff to invest in, high marginal tax rates (higher on capital gains than on earned income), distributive policies to the bulk of the population to create wide-spread demand, and moderate inflation of about five percent a year to get people to actually invest in new businesses, not in financial speculation.
The problem with this solution set is that if it doesn’t also include effective regulation, it can have to environmentally devastating effects; for instance, because solar is not fully online, the above solution set could lead to oil price spikes.
Those problems, however, are not why this isn’t being done. This isn’t being done because current leadership does not believe in high taxes, wide distribution, or regulation. They are neoliberals, and 40 years of neoliberal disasters cannot convince them to engage anything other than neoliberalism, because neoliberalism has made them and their friends very very rich.
But the game is coming to an end. They want to tax the middle class and poor people, sparing the rich but they are now starting to tax the rich through the back door of negative interest rates. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class, especially the young ones, are losing patience and are willing to go either straight-up socialist or straight-up fascist (the Polish 50K rally).
This is going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.
There will be three choices for countries: Fascism, left-wing populism, or dystopic surveillance/police states.
Choose.
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In things that rich people buy.
Ever since the financial crisis, there has been a lot of screaming about inflation. Screaming that it should show up, with all the money being created by central banks and, privately, and isn’t.
A painting of Christ by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci sold for a record $450 million at auction on Wednesday, smashing previous records for artworks sold at auction or privately.
New York, London, and Vancouver real estate, along with a number of other cities (China’s printing more money than anyone else), is also where it showing up.
And it’s showing up for ordinary people, not as hyper-inflation, but as high inflation of some things. Whatever the figures show, anyone who buys food knows that food prices have been going up faster than normal wages for quite some time.
But mostly it is showing up at the top end, in things that rich people bid up. $450 million is damn near half a billion, the ability to blow that amount of money on a single painting is absolutely crazy, no matter who the painting is by. It could not have happened even 20 years ago, and did not happen even ten years ago.
The rich are floating on an ocean of money, and they have nothing to spend it on that really matters, so it’s going to third homes, real estate, speculation and conspicuous luxury consumption (which is what that painting is).
As an aside, one of the ways to deal with off-shore tax haven money is for the major economies to not allow it back into their countries without high taxation. It’s great that you have a few billion in an offshore haven, but you can’t spend it there. If you want to bring it back or use it as collateral then just make them pay taxes on it. 90 percent is a good rate.
What, they won’t bring it home at that tax level? Then fuck’em. You can’t buy anything that matters in most tax havens, and no one wants to live there. Let it rot, uselessly, there.
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I don’t usually write about subjects I disagree with Matt Yglesias on, but this piece on how Bill Clinton should have resigned over Lewinsky is sickening.
It’s not that Clinton’s actions with Lewinsky weren’t awful, it is the moral and ethical vacuum required to think that’s the issue over which he should have resigned.
Clinton gutted welfare. I guarantee that killed a lot of people and hurt way more. Clinton pushed the three strikes laws hard, which hit black communities brutally, locking people up for years for a third strike for things like stealing a bicycle. Bill Clinton engaged in punitive sanctions against Iraq which hit basic medicine, killing and hurting a lot of people. Bill Clinton pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and signed it; this was one of the causes of the 2008 financial collapse and, thus, killed and hurt a lot people.
What happened to Lewinsky was sad, gross, and wrong. But it came nowhere near the harm Clinton did with other actions.
This inability to think at scale haunts us when dealing with powerful people. What matters most is by far and away what they do as policy. One intern and a cigar is a tragedy, to paraphrase Stalin, but thousands of deaths and people locked up for decades is a statistic.
Oh, there are arguments against this: That killing and impoverishing people is the role of the US president, but that screwing around with interns isn’t, basically.
I…guess?
I actually can see the case. Some things are over the lines. Rape, for example. Or torture. But war causes both, and Bush, Jr. served out his terms, as did Obama. Heck, by some accounts Bush, rather closely supervised some of the torture in Guantanamo and enjoyed doing so.
The bottom line is that we choose our leaders in part because they are functional sociopaths–able to do great evil and sleep at night. We shouldn’t choose them that way, but for a variety of reasons, we do.
But to be concerned about one abuse of position (which was consensual, however) and not about all the vast harm Clinton did to people even more powerless than Lewinsky, to say that’s where you draw the line rather than at, say, welfare reform—I don’t know, it sticks in my craw.
About the only good argument is that people who abuse power in that manner shouldn’t be allowed near power. I agree. But by the time Lewinsky occurred, Clinton had already shown he was willing to hurt the weak and poor at scale.
It’s the statistics that matter. The individual cases only can warn you about the statistics that might follow, and they aren’t always so accurately predictive. (FDR had an affair with his principal secretary. It didn’t make him a bad President and if he’d stepped down it would have been disastrous.)
I wonder if we evolved killer apes are capable of running large civilizations in anything close to an effective and beneficial fashion. The evidence coming in is looking grim.
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(YES THIS IS A MANDOS POST; MANDOS ALERT MANDOS ALERT MANDOS ALERT)
I mostly concur with Yves Smith’s assessment of the on-going, cruel tragicomedy that is Brexit. However, she points out a Twitter thread that has been making the rounds, and it is interesting. It concurs with everything I have read about grassroots Brexitism:
Been conversing (on and offline) with grassroots Brexitists again. Really struck by their intense lack of interest in the details of how to make it happen – verging on hostility to it, as if the search for practical steps to make it work is a trap (1/9)
— Alan Finlayson (@ProfAFinlayson) November 9, 2017
However, Prof. Finlayson analyzes this in terms of Utopianism, which is not entirely wrong:
I think that’s one more piece of evidence for the fact that Brexitism is a species of Utopian ideology, for which the belief in its happening is more important than its actually happening (2/9)
— Alan Finlayson (@ProfAFinlayson) November 9, 2017
And while it’s not entirely wrong, I think it’s incomplete. I’ve written before about the Brexit phenomenon here before (and pretty much everything I said there has been borne out, not to toot my own horn too much), and one of the factors here is the role of the managerial/technocratic class. I interpret the hostility towards the details that Brexiters seem to exhibit (“Don’t talk down Brexit!!!”) partly in terms of something else. What grassroots Brexiters want is to force the managerial class, the people with the technical skills in government administration, to implement something (whatever it is) that the managerial class visibly doesn’t like and doesn’t agree with, and to do it enthusiastically as a duty to the Brexit-voting public. In any discussion, people arguing for the Remain side are therefore seen as proxies or stand-ins for that class, even if they themselves aren’t necessarily responsible for the implementation. Therefore, the Remainers demand for detail is seen as shirking, i.e. a threatened refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Brexit vote, because it is the Remainers’/managerial class’ job to come up with the details for whatever policy course is chosen especially via referendum.
The problem is that the managerial classes/technocrats in question do not believe that they can deliver a good Brexit and do not want to, and even if they go to work every day to produce the policy and administration required to do it, they are only going to do it on a work-to-rule basis. Work-to-rule is an effective labour disruption strategy—and the managerial classes are expected to do labour on someone else’s behalf in this instance, obviously—because it turns out that a lot of jobs really require the worker not only to be there and do the work in the job description, but to give an additional surplus of energy and attention for the enterprise to produce a good outcome.
Now in all probability, in particular due to the conditions under which Brexit has been unleashed, it is impossible to deliver a “good” Brexit even with the most enthusiastic of technocratic staff. But that is not the real demand—rather, the demand is that the technocratic class visibly demonstrate that it shares the identity markers and self-image of certain large sectors of British society, instead of appearing wholly alienated. However, if the technocrats genuinely don’t believe that there can be a good Brexit, that puts everyone in an impossible position: If technocrats impertinently ask the pro-Brexit public what they really expect is to signal that they are shirking their duty to come up with those ideas and that they really aren’t “of the people” (keeping in mind that enthusiastic pro-Remain positions also represent a wide grassroots in British society!). The reality of the situation is that there simply are no good ways to go about doing this, under the schedule of Article 50 and particularly under the political dysfunction of the British Tories and pro-Brexit vested interests.
Vladimir Putin
So, Trump said he believed Putin when Putin said he did not meddle in the US election. He was criticized for it, because the American intelligence community says otherwise. He backed down.
Newsflash: The CIA has the track record of a pathological liar. Putin lies as well.
Maybe the best thing to do is disbelieve both, and make up your own mind based on the evidence (which, by the way, is far weaker than the news articles, which assert but do not prove, would suggest.)
The CIA and the rest of the US intelligence establishment are not due benefit of the doubt.
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