Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: January 2017 Page 3 of 4

The Latest Dossier on Trump

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On January 11, 2017

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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.

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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The Continued Collision Between Trump and the Fed

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On January 10, 2017

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As I noted before, the Fed and the Trump admin are on a collision course. More evidence:

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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The Public Option for Obamacare Was Not Impossible

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On January 9, 2017

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***This is a Guest Post by Dan From T.O.***

Back in 2009-2010, Chris Bowers, co-founder of openleft.com, (at the time an “A-List” liberal/progressive blog by all accounts*) and Adam Green of the PCCC led a set of outsider “whip count” exercises in support of improving & passing the Affordable Care Act.

  1. The initial whip count effort in 2009 was focused on garnering 60 votes for cloture in the Senate in support of a public option (the House bill had one). This actually succeeded,** and had all 60 Democratic senators on the record in support of a public option, until 4 Senators backed out.
  1. In early 2010, a whip count was run to gain Senate support to pass health care under reconciliation rules (meaning only 51 votes were needed for passage). This also succeeded, and ultimately the ACA included a “side-car” reconciliation fix once Democrats lost the 60th vote in the Senate via the MA Senate special election.
  1. Concurrently with , another whip count was run to pass a public option via reconciliation. This also succeeded and Bowers & Co had 50 or 51 Senators publicly in favour of passing a public option through reconciliation.

All this is to say: The Public Option was very plausible. Even Joe Lieberman & Ben Nelson were open to it and, really, they weren’t needed as it could have been done under reconciliation. Is it 100 percent certain that it could have passed? Of course, no counterfactual can be perfectly certain. Given how close Bowers et al. got without much support from the Democratic leadership, and in fact the secret opposition of Obama who had traded away the Public Option, it is not ascribing magical powers to the Bully Pulpit to think that if Obama had wanted a Public Option in the bill, he could have got one.

The history here in this set of posts by Bowers is worth a review of the chicanery in play. In both occasions, progressive activists were given seemingly impossible tasks to get a public option passed, did so, and somehow had the goal posts moved. The posts read like a House of Cards plot to manipulate activists; not giving them what they wanted while still appearing sympathetic. For instance, this excerpt from Bowers’ 2009 post-mortem:

Back on May 21st, there were only 28 Senators in support of a triggerless public option. Through your tireless participation in a whip count effort, by October 8th we raised that number to 51 when Jon Tester came out in support. By October 30th, when Evan Bayh said he wouldn’t filibuster, we were up to 56 Democrats for cloture on health care reform with a public option.

From that point, the only four Senators we still needed all lied to us in one form or another.  Both Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln signed a document stating that they supported a public option, only to reverse their positions.  Blanche Lincoln’s website still comically claimed she supported a public option even as she was declaring her opposition to one on the Senate floor.

Still, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson were all part of the group of ten Senators who forged a deal on the public option that included a Medicare buy-in.  Further, immediately after that deal was reached, Harry Reid contacted Joe Lieberman to see if he liked the deal.  Lieberman told Harry Reid that he was liking what he was seeing, and just wanted to wait for the CBO report.  Further, Lieberman had supported an even stronger Medicare buy-in (for Americans aged 50-64) as recently as September 2009.

Six days later, Lieberman and Nelson went on national television to engage in some more mendacity. Lieberman said he would filibuster the deal, despite the facts that he’d told Reid he liked it and had recently advocated for it. Ben Nelson badmouthed the deal even though he helped forge it.

Tell me that does not read like Obama’s team working behind the scenes to flip Lieberman & Co. back to ensure the deal with Pharma was kept.

The demise of the Public Option in the 2010 effort comes off about as bad, with a bad-faith exercise in finger pointing between the House & Senate over who should add the Public Option to the bill, and even a bonus arm-twisting of Bernie Sanders to try to prevent him from doing so by amendment.

All of this is “I told you so” of course, but I-told-you-so is important at times so mistakes aren’t repeated. The ACA is most likely going to be gutted or repealed entirely and the lack of a Public Option has certainly not helped it ever get the strong base of public support it needed to survive a term of opposition government. If one reviews the history of polling on the ACA, it is clear that between the “it’s ok” camp and the “it needs to be expanded/made more liberal” camps there is consistently well over 50 percent support for it, but in straight up approval polling, the law was always more unpopular than popular.

The theory from the law’s proponents back in 2009-10 was that once it took effect and started helping people, it would get more popular. This was plausible except that it isn’t really what happened–probably because private insurance companies are awful to deal with. Thus, more people felt the ACA was hurting rather than them as time went on:

The public option would have meant that those people finding they hated the exchanges could have opted out of that mess and bought into some version of government provided plan that could have been simple, not subject to major price changes, and regular cancellations (frequently a problem for ACA plans). It also would have meant more people attributing their shiny new access to health care to Obama and the Democrats which only could have helped in those mid-term blowouts.

Like his unforced errors on the too-small stimulus, HAMP helping banks instead of people and not prosecuting Wall Street fraud, this error is on Obama: He chose to not have a public option in the ACA and if he’d wanted one, it is quite likely he could have had it.

* – See here for Hillary Clinton herself being sent an openleft.com post from 2010 per the Podesta email dumps.

** – Sorry, link rot has really set in on a lot of this. Someone (Bowers himself possibly) is maintaining the archive of openleft.com posts I am linking to but most of the links from those posts no longer work.

Rule of Men, Not Law

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On January 7, 2017

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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 and the Art of the Strongman

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On January 6, 2017

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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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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Cyclical vs. End-Time Thinking

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On January 5, 2017

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Eras come and go.

Civilizations come and go too.

There have been ecological collapses in the past. For example, one took out the Mayans, and it was self-inflicted. The same is true, on a lesser scale, for Mesopotamia.

Human history is cyclical. It’s only “up trend” in a very long view of things.

In the normal course of events, I would expect that Western civilization would fall. It’s, well, inevitable. I don’t even think it’s that far away in historical time. Might be this cycle, might be a couple hundred years, but we’re clearly coming to the end of our rope.

A civilization ends when it can’t handle problems that are totally obvious, because its ideology won’t allow it to deal with them. In our case, the ideology is economics and capitalism, which insists that decisions must be made based on what maximizes profit. Our ideology doesn’t recognize that profit is a social construction, and doesn’t take into account all the upsides or downsides of doing anything. This, combined with our moral belief that money is “good,” and that the more money you have the better you are, is killing our civilization. (These categories, expanded slightly, cover state capitalist societies like the USSR well enough.)

These problems are acknowledged; just as most of the problems which led to the fall of the Roman Empire were acknowledged, but we refuse to fix them. Every once in a while, an FDR will roll around and patch up one part of the problem, but, eventually, we go back to doing the same thing.

Normally this would amount to reactions like, “Oh well, sucks to live in such times.” Nations, societies, and civilizations come and go and it’s very sad, but it’s just how the world works.

The question is, “Is this time different?’

The argument is scale. We’re a global society, and we’re causing an environmental disaster that is magnitudes larger than any humans have caused before.

One argument is that, “Hey, people predict the end of the world all the time and they’ve always been wrong.”

Which is true, and that argument will be usable until humanity does go extinct (which, inevitably, it will, the question is only when) because it is a one-time event. That it has not happened to humans in the past does not mean it cannot happen. We’re currently driving many species to extinction. Each species goes extinct only once; species extinction due to environmental problems is dead common, and often due to environmental problems the to which the animal in question contributed.

My best guess is that this time is not the human extinction event, but I make that a matter of probability, not probability based on, “It’s never happened before,” (because it has, just not to us), but simply because I expect the climate and ecology will stabilize at a new norm and that the norm will likely be livable for humans.

I regard the loss of all coastal cities and lands as inevitable. We are going to lose the Antarctic ice shelf, and it is going to flood coastal lands. Due to the self-reinforcing part of the cycle, especially with relation to methane gas, that’s just going to happen–and probably sooner than we think.

Before then, we’re going to see widespread disruption of weather, which, combined with our overuse and poisoning of aquifers, will mean widespread food shortages, starvation, and mass migration of hundreds of millions of people in one go. There is no question in my mind that we will see wars for water, and they will be major wars.

There are a myriad of knock-on events which will occur, most of them bad. It will be particularly amusing (in, yes, a sick and sad but appropriate way) if Europe is plunged into an Ice Age. This seems quite likely, as the warm water current which keeps Europe much hotter than it should be could be cut off.

But there are reasons to believe that we’ll stabilize, and those humans who remain will go on. This isn’t a 100 percent thing. I believe there is a non-trivial chance we will drive ourselves into extinction, but I judge it as less likely.

On the other hand, I’ve rolled a lot of dice in my life, and I can tell you that the one, ten, or 30 percent probability you discounted can bloody well come up.

More to the point, while catastrophe is now inevitable, the scale of that catastrophe is not fixed and we can still do quite a bit to mitigate and prepare.

Clearly, we aren’t going to be doing any mitigating or preparing for the next four to eight years. The current generation of leadership needs to be replaced, either by youngsters or the last of the post-war liberals with integrity (Sanders and Corbyn are the representatives of that cohort; Sanders lost, Corbyn is polling badly, though I haven’t written him off).

This is where we are. Our civilization is heading into one of the periodic crises that civilizations go through AND, not coincidentally, we have an ecological disaster of unprecedented scale barreling down on us.  The first has so far made it impossible to deal with the second, but it is also our best chance, because it promises the possibility of new leadership with new priorities on the other side.

But we must find a replacement for our current economic ideology, as it has served us very badly. We are also going to need to take a hard look at our political ideologies, whether “democratic” or authoritarian, because they have performed no better, being unable to even so much as slow the onrushing night.

Life, in general terms, is going to spend a long time getting worse for a lot of people. There’s a lot of triumphalism about how great our world is, and stats to back it up (stats I don’t trust, but that’s another post), but even if it’s 100 percent true, this “greatness” is time-limited. It has already reversed for many people in the core hegemonic power, where we have had an absolute decline in years lived, as well as huge shocks rolling through the birthplace of our civilization, Europe.

Expect this. Bake this into your plans. Things are going to get worse, and you should be prepared for that, not just physically, if you can, but psychologically. Periods which are shit for decades or even centuries are common in human history, and people keep on keeping on.

Trump isn’t the end of the world, if the end of the world is coming. He isn’t even the start of the end of the world. He and various other events which will occur soon, are at most, the beginning of the end of this period of history.

At the other side of this crisis point, we will either have a society which can deal with these problems well enough to save hundreds of millions to a billion or two lives, or we won’t.

And that’s a set of issues far larger than Trump.

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2016 In Retrospect

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On January 3, 2017

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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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People Are Not of a Piece

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On January 1, 2017

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One of the most difficult things for many to understand is that someone can be wonderful in some parts of their life and truly awful in others. A man can be a rapist, say, and also be genuinely kind to other people. Someone can go into work, make decisions that will impoverish millions, and then make sure they make it to their child’s play, where they agree to help build a facility to help disabled children or a shelter for abused women.

People can be terrible in one part of their life, and good in another.

It’s a relatively minor thing and an unimportant celebrity, but take Mel Gibson, of the infamous anti-semitic rants and terrible temper. Many people came forward to say how wonderful he’d been to them, and many of his friends, like Jodie Foster, didn’t turn on him.

The bad stuff doesn’t cancel the good stuff. The good stuff doesn’t cancel the bad stuff.

This is important in two ways: When someone who is generally good is accused of doing something bad, they may well have, especially if what they’re known for being good about isn’t related.

And if someone who is generally bad does something good, they still deserve credit.

It is also important analytically. If you assume someone is all bad or all good, you rarely actually understand that person, nor can you predict their actions. Terrible people can do good (Genghis Khan), wonderful people can do evil (FDR).

Good in what way? Why? Bad in what way? Why?

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