Ian Welsh

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

Month: March 2019 Page 2 of 3

Climate Change and Game Theory

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On March 21, 2019

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**This Article Is By Stirling Newberry**
It is certainly true that if you want to know the economic outcome of a situation, it is best to study Game Theory. But it is also true, that if everyone else is bad at game theory you’re even better off. Which is why the New Yorker has a writer whose job is mis-represent game theory.

 

I suppose that I should talk about Brexit, and I will in due time. But there is a larger game afoot: climate change.

 

Money is crated in the past, but paid for in the future. Loans are paid off by future earnings. Normally money is created about the same in the future as in the past, so the fact that it’s actually created in the future doesn’t matter. Because this is mostly true, economists usually don’t pay much attention to the fact, even though they know it. As a result, they don’t think about the times when the future will be a lot different than the past.

 

But 1st people are going to use the false game theory to make a bundle of cash, and then die. Because after all, dying is a way to keep the money and choose who it goes to. But more on that later.

 

One of the main ways that the future changes from the past is when we change how we get our supply of energy. Think back 300 years, only the most vital industries could use coal, almost all of the rest used either wood, wind, or muscle power. Coal started extremely expensive, but once transportation was run by coal became cheaper. That means that 100 years ago, everybody who could use coal did so.

 

But on the boundaries there was a new kind of energy: oil. Oil had several advantages over coal, mainly because it was liquid and flowed from place to place rather than solid which meant it had to be shoveled. And do not think the people shoveling did not how hard that was. Coal was mainly for industry, and next for naval (which is the 1st place when Churchill appeared on the scene, he was one who decided that oil was the right way to power ships, rather than coal).

 

What this has to do with Game Theory? Very occasionally the past is loaded with people who made money from an economy based on one specific power, but the future needs another source. This is why today we are stuck between the people who made money in oil, but whose future is not oil. The problem is that it is not just oil, it is the entire apparatus for distributing power: cars, for example, are actually oil on wheels. So the people who made money in the past want to keep going because they are going to die before the bill comes due. Meanwhile, people who live in the future, that is to say, young people, realize that oil is bad for them. One can draw supply-demand diagrams if one really needs to. All people with oil are rich, and the vast majority of young people are poor and they do not spend as much of their lives on oil-based things and activities.

 

That means that old people, who run the economy and politics, keep voting for oil ( and to some extent coal.) The problem is that it is not just people, but climate which has a say. Almost everybody reading this will not be alive by 2200, but our children might just make it, and their children almost certainly will. This is a problem with Game Theory if you think about it: the people who have the money are going to die before the bill comes due. If John Maynard Keynes was alive he would propose government as the solution, but the government is now run by same old people. So don’t hold your breath.

 

 This is why action is coming from below: young people know that they are going to pay the actual bill for the oil based economy, while old people are going to get the money. There are various other problems, such as nuclear power being safe, except because of the people who run it. This is actually also part of game theory: nuclear power requires smart people run it, but the probability says that there are more profitable things than running a nuclear plant, so people with talent go into those rather than supplying nuclear power. Which is a problem because nuclear power is dangerous, and stupid people who run it make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi.) Once every 15 years does not do the job, it has to be 0 tolerance, and that means getting brighter people, but the economics does not allow for that. Thank you for playing have a nice day.

 

But the general problem of money from the past dictating the future can be solved: because borrowing occurs regularly, and most of the borrowing is rolled over. That means that the currency markets could, by general government agreement, make borrowing for the oil based economy more expensive and make it cheaper for renewables and nuclear power. Proceeds will be split between the 2 currencies, and while there will be graft ( you cannot help that, but you can limit it.) slowly the world’s energy supply will be made cleaner. Gradually as more people become aware of the cost to themselves, the fee will be enlarged to cover the cost.

 

Thus the result is an N by N matrix with each player determining what is the best use of there time. This means that the government sector, will determine the cost, and the market will determine what should be done.

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Rules of Thumb

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On March 20, 2019

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Just for amusement I’m going to throw out some of my rules of thumb: these are the rules of judgement and research that I use to cut through the BS.

This is one of the oldest posts I wrote which I still have access too. There’s a couple things I’d amend, fourteen years later, but I think the basic still stand – Ian

Don’t trust liars Now someone isn’t a liar because they once got something wrong, or made an honest mistake. But people who regularly bend facts to make their point shouldn’t be trusted. Seems obvious, eh? Well then, why were so many people giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt in the run up to the Iraq war? Not only were they known liars who had lied repeatedly on taxation and economic issues during the 2000 campaign, they were caught out on lie after lie during the actual selling of the Iraq war. If they had a case, they would have made it honestly – they didn’t and it was obvious. People who bought it bought it because they wanted to believe.

Accept the Obvious The number of people who can’t accept the obvious always astounds me. Obviously people are not rational – why have we built an entire branch of economics around this BS? Obviously the Nasdaq was overvalued in 1999. Obviously Dow 36,000 was a pack of bullshit. Obviously options are an expense and if anyone tries to tell you they aren’t, tell them that since they cost nothing you’d love to have a few million of them. Obviously people who are willing to die for their beliefs cannot be usefully classified as cowards.

Read the shortest book on a subject Want to learn about a subject? Find the shortest book on the subject. Do not find the longest. The shortest will have to distill the topic down to a framework which you can appropriate and use to hang new facts and theories off of. You may well discard that theory in time but in order to remember things you have to be able to connect them to something – the framework will let you do that. Also, shorter generally forces the writer to think more sharply. That’s good. After you’ve read a few short books on myth you can read The Golden Bough. Not before.

Being Smart Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong Don’t fall into this trap. If you’re smart, you can work any set of inconvenient facts to support your beliefs. You can be /clever/. Don’t be clever. Don’t trust people who are. If someone has to bend logic into a pretzel to support a thesis they’re almost certainly wrong.

Human Nature Doesn’t Change Never has. Never will. Don’t believe any argument which supposes implicitly that it has.

Real discontinuities are rare Everything doesn’t change all that often. In fact, entire lifetimes go by in which almost nothing changes in entire areas of human experience. Computers did not repeal basic laws of economic gravity, they just reduced certain transaction costs and made certain types of automation easier or possible. The 90’s telecommunications “revolution” didn’t “revolutionize” it the way the telegraph did – it just continued an ongoing trend. Whenever someone tells you “things are different now” ask, “how exactly?” You’ll usually find everything is different in degree – not kind.

TANSTAAFL Nothing’s free. If someone tells you something is, they’re scamming you. If you don’t know who’s paying – it’s probably you.

There is no crisis Well sometimes there is. But usually there isn’t. And every bill that is a “reform”, isn’t. When people use words of like “reform” and “crisis” be very wary – 90% of the time they’re trying to get something changed because they have a “solution” which benefits someone . There is no Social Security “Crisis”, to use the most contemporary example. There is budget “crisis”, but it isn’t getting a lot of play.

Follow the Incentives Always ask what behaviour is rewarded or punished in any system, proposed system or legislation. Because that’s the behaviour you’re going to get.

You can’t make a man understand something if his job depends on him not understanding it.
Enough said.

Easy is not a synonym for simple. Hard is not a synonym for complicated Despite what people would have you believe, there are very few complicated problems in public life. There are, however, many hard problems in public life. Think of it this way – it’s simple to lose weight, just eat less and exercise more. It is, however, hard to lose weight. It is not complicated to balance the budget – just spend about the same as you bring in. It can be hard however, since you have either cut spending or raise taxes and doing either hurts someone.

Efficient and effective are not synonyms and efficient is not always good. That’s right – reduced transaction costs aren’t always a good thing. In fact, almost nothing is good in all circumstances. Anyone who tells you freer trade is “always” better is an ideologue. Same thing with someone who tells you that there can never be any restrictions on speech. Same thing with people who tell you there should never be any restrictions on what you can spend your money on. Well, they’re either an ideologue or they’re trying to sell you something.

You can’t look it up Knowledge you have not internalized cannot be used to think with. You cannot form connections between it and other things you know. You also can’t look something up you don’t know exists. There is no substitute for actually knowing something yourself – the internet only makes it easier to look things up, not to know you need to look it up.

If you can’t explain it, you don’t know it. ‘Nuff said.

If you don’t know it from the basic building blocks, you’re a monkey. A related rule is “do it right, then do it fast”, because if you do it fast first you’ll never do it right. If you only know the later parts of a discipline, but not the reasoning behind them, you won’t know when the rule doesn’t apply. An example is in my Ricardo’s Caveat – where generations after Ricardo forgot that comparative advantage didn’t apply to nations with free capital flows – they skip past the necessary conditions to the conclusions and take it as a universal law rather than a conditional one.

Imagination is the mother of empathy If you can’t put yourself in another person’s shoes and see the world as they see it then you’ll always be a cripple when it comes to prediction, understanding or effective action. Empathy isn’t just for symps – it’s the foundation of strategy and tactics. If you can’t think like your enemy you’re at a severe disadvantage and if you judge before understanding you’re a moral cripple.

Know Yourself Not just because you need to know your own prejudces in order to adjust for them, but because knowing your own beliefs allows you to refine your thinking. Thinking comes from emotion primarily, not from logic, and that’s fine – as long as you know what principles are driving your emotions.

Ideas are tools. Want to examine the relation of classes to the means of production? Marxism works great. NeoClassical economics doesn’t. Want to understand how positive and negative associations build up in a person?  Behaviouralism. Want to understand how people organize models of the world? Don’t use behaviouralism. Want to know how interest groups form? Conflict sociology. And so on – what works for one thing, may not work for another and the “intellectual” who is just a Marxist or just Freudian or just a Feminist – is just a fool.

Concluding Thoughts on IQ and Smarts I don’t want to get into the IQ debate, but let’s admit that some people have more processing power than other people. There are tons of people who are smarter than I am but most of them don’t know how to think – they use their brains to support their predetermined beliefs and they waste huge amounts of cycles on trivia or on cleverness that leads nowhere useful. The metaphor I like to use is this. Say you’ve got a really powerful motorbike (good brains) with a mediocre driver (bad thinker). Opposing them you’ve got a bike with a weak engine with great driver (good thinker). Now if there in a race – what’s going to happen? Well, if the race is on a straightaway the good bike is going to win. If the question is a technical one which can be stated in value neutral language and solved though pure application of logical rules – the smarter person will get there first and do a better job. But if the road is a twisty hilly one the better rider will win hands down (ask any good motorcycle rider) and indeed if the bad rider tries to keep up he’ll probably crash. And when it comes to tricky real world problems that’s what happens. The smart but rigid thinker goes where his ideology tells him to – right through hills if necessary. The smart guy who doesn’t understand the fundamentals doesn’t realize that the rules of his discipline change in certain circumstances. The guy who is paid to come up with certain results or gets fired – comes up with those results and convinces himself they’re right.

Thinking well, beyond a certain point, isn’t about how bright you are – its about judgement. It is a talent which can be refined as a skill. And it mostly isn’t taught in University or college or high school – it’s learned the hard way. An expert is just someone who knows a lot – not necessarily someone who thinks well and a professional is just someone who is paid to do something and may well be paid to do it and come up with expected results. Anyone can learn to think better if they work at it – and if they remember than while there are heuristics and rules of thumb, there are, in the end, no shortcuts.

(Reposted from BOP, 2005.  Only thing I’d note is to emphasize that sometimes it is a crisis, and you have to know when…)

Water Wars And the Great Indian Die-Off

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On March 19, 2019

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Humans can go without food for weeks. Water, a few days:

The core fact of climate change and human mismanagement of resources that a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that the worst of it is going to be about water.

Consider the Indian subcontinent. It is under three main water threats:

  • As glaciers go away, glacier fed streams and rivers dry up.
  • There has been vast depletion of aquifers, and within twenty to thirty years this will reach a crisis that devastates agriculture. There is no water to replace this aquifer water.
  • Climate change will change wind and rainfall patterns. Much of Indian agriculture is based on the monsoon cycle. If it fails even a few times in a row, agriculture will be devastated.

These items often feed into each other: for example, depleting groundwater is one of the culprits in drying up the Ganges, and if the Ganges goes dry, India dies.

Meanwhile, how do you think Pakistan is going to react, when, as things get worse, they realize that their agriculture, or people, are dying because India has decided to take upstream water they need?

India isn’t the only nation that will be hit hard by all this, but it’s going to be one of the worst. I am almost entirely positive we will see a famine in India which kills literally hundreds of millions of people.

Perhaps it won’t include a war between Pakistan and India; nuclear armed states, over water.

We are now in the triage period of an oncoming catastrophe. A lot of people are going to die, more will be immiserated, and the question now is who, and to a lesser extent how many.

This isn’t to say that nothing can be done to decrease the death count slightly, and to reduce the odds of human extinction, but we are past the point of no return on Climate Change. It will happen, the large stores of methane in permafrost (and probably in the arctic) will be released and climate, including rainfall patterns, will change. Large numbers of rivers and streams will dry up, and sea-levels will rise.

This will not happen on an even schedule of +X every 10 years, when it goes bad, it will go ballistic, and events like ice melts and changes to ocean and wind currents will happen quickly. Some of them may happen like switches flipping. It will go from “sucky” to “catastrophic” fast, with little warning.

So, I know that many people are stuck. No money, no health, no youth and too many obligations.

But be aware of this and plan for it if you can.

And if you live in India or any of the nations around the Indian subcontinent, please be particularly careful as there is even less possibility of India avoiding the worst case scenario than there is for most countries.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Circles of Identity, Circles of Violence

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On March 18, 2019

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Globe on FireThe worst humanitarian disaster in the world today is almost certainly Yemen, which is under siege and bombed every day. There is a famine, people are dying every day, and there is no let-up in sight.

For years, there were terror attacks in Iraq virtually every day; bombs going off in markets, and so on. Then someone would, say, attack the London Underground and the West would go into paroxysms of grief.

We care about violence in direct proportion to how much we identify with the victims. We identify with fellow Westerners far more than we do with non-Westerners. Let there be an attack in Western Europe (not Eastern Europe) or an English-speaking nation and we cry and talk about racism and fascism and intolerance and go on and on and on.

And meanwhile Yemenis die. Iraqis die. Afghans die.

One might say “all deaths matter” but we don’t act that way. Some deaths definitely matter more than others, some violence definitely matters more than other violence. When Saudi Arabia, aided by the United States, bombs the hell out of Yemen, well, that doesn’t much matter.

When some right-wing fascist shoots up a mosque, we go into paroxysms for days.

All lives, and all deaths, are not equal, they never have been.

Which is, I guess, like saying, “The sun is hot.” Everyone knows this, we just, too often, pretend otherwise. We pretend we care about people who aren’t like us, who aren’t members of our societies or societies we identify with.

And maybe we do. A little bit. A very, little bit.

Identification is in the running for the first evil; the first sin.

Oh, it’s entirely understandable: humans are tribal. For much of history, the most dangerous animal to a human was another human, and we compete for the same resources. Our near-competitor is other humans (with insects coming a close second, ever since the agricultural revolution).

It is human to identify: We put ourselves first (my body!), our families second, our friends third, our tribe fourth, and everyone else a distance thousandth.

But much of what is human is evil or self-destructive. Much of what is human is especially evil or self-destructive when it scales to billions of people.

In a world where humans are a few million or even a few hundred million people, what we do doesn’t much matter. Oh we can and did cause ecological collapses. We can and did cause genocides. We can and did wipe out entire species (including, basically, all megafauna). We’ve always been cannibalistic locusts on two legs.

But when there are billions of us, when we live in each others pockets, and when what happens in the Amazon, the Congo, or the Arctic bounces back to effect us almost immediately, when what happens when a country like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Yemen becomes a failed state, or when a country like Saudi Arabia becomes a fantastically rich, fundamentalist state exporting its particular ideology all over the world, well, our identities are ramped up into weapons far more deadly– more so than they were when our ancestors wiped out the European aborigines, or most of the Native Americans.

Identity tells us not just who to care about, it tells us who to kill.

And we are very good at killing.

The irony is that identities are very close to arbitrary. You didn’t choose where you were born, or who your parents are, so you didn’t choose your culture or your nationality. As for religion, most people worship the religion of their parents.

We kill each other fighting over characteristics we didn’t create (you didn’t create Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, or, America, or Russia) and which almost none of us chose.

This is bug-fuck insane. If you change your religion, you are still you. If you change your nationality, you are still you. We are killing ourselves or identities which are, well, crazy to identify with. (This will strike most people as radical, but no, your religion or nationality is not fundamental and if you think it is, you are nuts.)

Or we divide ourselves up over frankly absurd biological characteristics: the color of our skin, or our sexual characteristics.

None of this makes any sense.

And the consequences are severe: Because we do not take care of everyone, because we are scared of each other, we treat each other badly.

The simplest and surest rule of human nature is this: People who are abused tend to become abusers. People who are treated well tend to treat other people well. Oh, this isn’t a 100 percent rule–there are always exceptions, those people who were abused and turn into saints, those who are treated well and are still bad…but overall it’s a rule that works.

Evil redounds. It doesn’t always, or even often, redound directly on those who do evil (the world would be a better and simpler place if it did), but it does hit other people.

Evil leads to more evil.

Good leads to more good.

But because someone has a different culture, or religion, or nationality, or skin color, or genitals, we think it’s ok to do them more evil, and less good. We think it’s ok to care more about the evil done to people we identify with, and care less about people we identify less with.

And in a world with billions of people, that doesn’t work. The evil we do thousands of miles away comes back to us.

Further, our identification with humans above all other life is also a problem.

If we cared about what was happening to other species, to other animals, we could have avoided the worst of climate change and environmental collapse. Because, we, humans are not yet taking it in the neck, we don’t much care; we have done, effectively, nothing.

But there is already an apocalypse among animals, with species dying every day, in the fast mass extinction in Earth’s history.

This was a warning sign.

But they’re only animals, we don’t identify with them, so, well, whatever.

In a world with billions of people, we will only have a good world, a world worth living in, and maybe even a world we even can live in, if we either identify with no one or everyone. Either we recognize that humans, and life, are a web supporting each all of us, and that our good lives require all of us, or we will create hell.

Or rather, given that climate change and ecological collapse are now irreversible to some extent, we have already created hell, it just hasn’t been completely delivered by nature yet.

Preferential identity, for us as a species, is an evil. Most religions and nationalities and ideologies, putting some people above everyone else, are evil. Perhaps they have done some good in the past. Perhaps they do some good in present. But overall they lead to evil, and cannot but lead to evil. (As most recently, nationalism did.)

No one wants to believe this, but most people identify with nationalities or religions or cultures or skin color or whatever. They identify with crap that either clearly is not them, or which is meaningless (who cares how much melanin you have?)

Until we fix this, every fix for our problems as a species will be temporary: a band-aid on a gusher.

So it has ever been.

Does it have to ever be?

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 17, 2019

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On March 17, 2019

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**This Post Is By Tony Wikrent**

Strategic Political Economy

How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the ‘One Percent’

[Films for Action, via Naked Capitalism 3-14-19]

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the one percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The one percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

The Birth of Predatory Capitalism: How the Free World Took Four Giant Leaps to Self-Destruction
[Medium, via Mike Norman Economics 2-10-19]

Economics in the real world

“Lawmakers who supported the ban said cashless stores were unintentionally discriminating against people in the community who don’t have debit or credit cards, since they would be unable to make purchases. Cash is also an appealing choice for people who want to keep their purchasing history private from retailers, credit card companies, or perhaps even spouses. It also negates any potential risks, in the event a company is breached and customer information is leaked to hackers. While cash and coins are legal tender, there is no federal law that requires businesses to accept them, according to the Federal Reserve’s website.”

Why not make this a Federal law?

Why the Amazon River Can’t Be Crossed By Bridge

[Conde Nast Traveller, via Naked Capitalism 3-13-19]

“[T]he Amazon is the world’s longest river not crossed by any bridges… For most of its length, the Amazon isn’t anywhere close to too wide to bridge—in the dry season. But during the rainy season, the river rises thirty feet, and crossings that were once three miles wide can balloon to thirty miles in a matter of weeks. The soft sediment that makes up the river bank is constantly eroding, and the river is often full of debris, including floating vegetation islands called matupás, which can measure up to 10 square acres. It’s a civil engineer’s worst nightmare. But the real reason for the lack of bridges is simply this: the Amazon Basin has very few roads for bridges to connect.”

‘They Never Stopped, Ever’: Here Are Some of Your Student Loan Horror Stories

[Splinter News 3-16-19]

Earlier this week, in the aftermath of the college admissions scandal, I wrote about my own experience with college and student loans. After that post, many of you emailed me and relayed your own heartbreaking and ridiculous stories about student loans, and the shit you’ve put yourself through to pay…

What the Hell Actually Happens to Money You Put in A Flexible Spending Account? 

Read More

There Is No Downside to Impeaching Trump for Democrats

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On March 14, 2019

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Nancy Pelosi recently said:

Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.

I note, first of all, that Nancy Pelosi ruled out impeaching George Bush, so her reluctance to impeach for clear crimes is consistent with her record. I never understood why others thought that Pelosi would be pro-impeachment. The idea that she’s some partisan fighter is contradicted by her record. Pelosi is what she has: She has beliefs, and those beliefs include that the right is respectable and that left are unrealistic losers (as when she dismissed the Green New Deal).

But let’s leave Pelosi aside for a moment. The Democrats have control of the House. They can impeach. They cannot convict in the Senate, but impeachment is certainly possible.

Why would they want to?

Because it would cripple Trump and the Republicans. During the period of the impeachment, Republicans would be able to get virtually nothing done, except by executive fiat.

This is because the impeachment hearings would completely dominate months of news cycles–constantly hammering in every illegal, crooked, corrupt, and cruel thing that Trump has done.

This is largely a no-lose strategy, if you were actually partisan: There isn’t a lot that House Dems can get through anyway while the Republicans control the Presidency, Senate, and Supreme Court. They can’t actually get most of their legislation through without crippling compromises, so this is fine.

They need to take control the news cycle; to make sure bad legislation doesn’t pass for months; keep Trump tied down fighting impeachment and, on top of that, spend months talking about every shitty thing he has done.

Some may argue impeachment might “backfire,” that Americans “want to see legislators working,” but that sort of argument has been made for decades. Contempt for Congress isn’t going to get much worse (it hardly can), and if working means doing the wrong thing, it’s better not to.

In the face of all the positives, like dragging Trump through the mud, crippling his ability to do anything, and controlling the news cycle, impeachment starts looking, politically, like the obvious thing to do.

And if you actually care about justice, well, Trump is at the very least, a walking emoluments violation. He is clearly profiting from being President. Carter had to sell his peanut farm, Trump hasn’t even put anything into blind trusts and many of his businesses are clearly profiting from his Presidency.

Bush should have been impeached. Trump should be impeached. Ironically, Clinton, who was impeached, shouldn’t have been (lying about consensual sex is a ridiculously low bar).

Pelosi made the wrong decision with Bush. She appears in danger of making the wrong decision here. I doubt she’ll change her mind, but I hope I’m wrong.

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The Question Isn’t Manafort’s Short Sentences

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On March 13, 2019

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So, now we have two sentences for Paul Manafort. According to guidance, they should have added up to between 19 and 24 years, they come in to about seven-and-a-half years.

This is bad.

It isn’t bad because he should be locked away for longer in any grand sense: US sentences are too long. It is bad because, he, a rich, white, and white collar criminal with political connections is being sentenced way below guideline when people are locked away for far longer for crimes like petty theft or possessing marijuana.

It is wrong because it is unequal.

Suddenly, when the criminal is rich, white, and politically connected, judges find that they can and will sentence to less–much less–than mandatory minimums.

What a surprise.

That said, Manafort is 69 and will soon be 70. If these sentences, plus one more still to come, are actually served, there’s a good chance he’ll die in prison.

Unsaid, also, is that these sorts of crimes aren’t usually even prosecuted. The prosecution of these crimes was a political decision, for a political crime. (This isn’t to argue they shouldn’t be prosecuted: Laws should be either enforced or gotten rid of.)

The real question, which won’t be answered until Manafort’s final trial is over, is whether or not Trump will pardon him.

Unless Trump is insane, the answer is yes. If Manafort isn’t pardoned, everyone else will cut deals with Mueller.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Are Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Harbingers of the Turning of the Tide

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On March 11, 2019

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Ilhan Omar

The two most media-savvy new House members from the last election were undoubtedly Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). AOC has single-handedly made the Green New Deal a topic of discussion, and Omar has broken the Washington consensus that one can’t say bad things about Israel without being destroyed by the Israeli lobby as an anti-semite.

Along the way, they’ve also shifted–or started shifting–the Overton window on topics like Reagan being a racist (AOC) and on Obama being a mass murderer (Omar).

They’re a bit less radical than they seem: Omar, for example, is for the two-state solution in Palestine, but compared to what was allowed to be said previously, what was allowed to be supported previously, they are radical.

Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential field has as its norm support for Medicare for All, breaking up the big tech monopolies, and so on.

What it’s possible to talk about and espouse has changed.

On the other side of the ledger, the simple fact is that most of the new Democratic house members who were elected in 2018 are “moderates” and they have also received, overall, better committee assignments than the left-wingers.

Nancy Pelosi, who’s in charge of House Democrats, openly mocked the idea of the Green New Deal.

The Democratic Party establishment is still run by moderates; and those moderates still respect the right and despise the left.

Nor have Omar and AOCs’ voting records been as radical as their rhetoric.

So, are they, and the Presidential candidates, the harbingers of the turning of the tide?

Yes. But not that it will definitely be as left-wing as we might like. There is a demographic turn that is certain. Pelosi and other baby boomers are old. This is the end for them. They have another four to eight years at most, and then most of them will be replaced. The Millenials (who are no longer young) are coming of political age. Unlike GenX, which was not numerous enough to replace the Boomers wholesale, they will be the new majority in politics.

How radical they will be remains to be seen. The trends are optimistic, but Millenials have an authoritarian streak as well as a radical one. Certainly we can expect them to take climate change, for example, more seriously: They will have to live with the results, while the Boomers always knew they’d be dead before it really mattered.

We will know by the end of 2024 approximately how this is going to play out. That’s when the demographic edge will simply require that Millenials take over.

That’s not long from now. To put into perspective, it’s only three house elections away.

If the future is to be better, we will, in the old and tired blogosphere saw, need better democrats than the ones we are electing now. AOC and Omar are outliers, even among their own generation, within Congress.

I’m actually somewhat optimistic. I think that as the Overton window turns, and given just how much pain both the young and the old are in America (with soaring suicide rates, drug addiction, and declining life spans among key constituencies) that there’s a good chance of positive change.

There remains a strong chance of negative change as well. In 2010, I stated that the next President after Obama would be a right-wing populist or authoritarian. It was obvious, because Obama was fucking up and had decided to favor the rich and screw the middle class and poor.

When people are in pain they will choose the disruptive alternative. In 2016, that disruptive alternative was Trump (if Sanders had been the Presidential candidate for the Democrats, I agree with the polling that says he would have won, as he was also disruptive and, unlike Trump, not clearly a cruel lunatic).

So we have cycles: The Democrats get their chance. The Republicans get their chance.

When one of them actually succeeds and makes enough Americans clearly better off in ways that Americans can feel, they’ll lock down politics for the next 30 years or so, in the same way that FDR did and that Reagan and Thatcher did.

If they fail, they will simply pass the ball to the other party.

So far Democrats have been satisfied–more than satisfied–with just passing the ball back and forth. They liked Republicans, basically agreed with neoliberalism and wealth concentration (why not, Democratic leaders personally benefited), and didn’t want to upset the status quo.

AOC, and in particular Omar, are not okay with the status quo. Neither are most of the serious Democratic candidates for President.

If these candidates actually go on to govern in ways change the status quo in a way that is win for a clear voting majority of Americans (and non-voters can become voters), then they will succeed at turning the tide. If they don’t, they won’t.

What individuals do often does matter. It goes against the grain of our society with its “wisdom of crowds” consensus to admit this. A few individuals, chosen by large numbers of people, will likely decide if the US has a turn for another Golden (or more likely, Silver) Age, or not.

Choose wisely.

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