Ian Welsh

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

Category: Trump Era Page 5 of 13

Trump the Peacemaker?

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On December 20, 2018

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So, Trump recently said the US would be withdrawing from Syria. Now, we have news that Trump has ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for leaving Afghanistan.

During the 2016 election, I refused to endorse either candidate; I considered Clinton a war-mongerer, with a non-zero chance of starting a war with Russia over Syria. Trump, was, of course, beyond the pale in so many ways.

However, as I told an American friend, by 2016 I was done prioritizing American lives and well-being over those of other nationalities. Before then, I had, slightly, because I believed that if the US could be turned around, as the hegemonic power, that would help everyone else.

But by 2016 it was clear that the US was basically hopeless. Everyone’s blood is the same color, everyone suffers the same. Bad things happening domestically in the US do not trump American mass-murder and terrible policy to other nations.

Now I don’t know if Trump will actually withdraw from Syria or Afghanistan; just as I don’t know how real the North Korean negotiations will turn out to be. (I just want a peace treaty out of that mess.)

But Trump has a chance to come out of this looking a lot better than Obama. All he has to do is stop a couple wars, and not start a war.

Something Obama (Libya) was unable to do.

Non-American lives matter.

Oh, and withdrawing will save some American lives, too, though a trivial number compared to how many foreigners’ lives it will save.

Plus it will correct a monumental geopolitical error. Bin Laden’s entire plan was to get US boots on the ground, prove the US military could be be beaten, and bleed the US dry. Americans, in their hubris, walked right into his trap.

Maybe time to step out of it.

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Putin’s Control of Trump and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

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On October 23, 2018

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There is a meme in the resistance that Trump is Putin’s “puppet.”

This meme’s explanatory power is weak.

Take Trump’s announcement that he will pull the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty: This isn’t something Russia, or Putin, wants.

Trump admires Putin, and Putin provided some support for Trump’s election, hoping that would lead to the reduction or removal of sanctions (spoiler: it didn’t), but Trump doesn’t do everything Putin wants, or not do everything Putin doesn’t want.

What Russia wants, simply put, is a sphere of influence and to feel secure within that sphere of influence. This desire isn’t a particularly comfy desire if you’re near Russia (and weak–Europe is not weak). But it is no worse the US’s desire to have a sphere, as any Caribbean, Latin American, South American, many Asian, European, African, Middle Eastern nations have learned.

In fact, it’s a lot less scary unless you’re close by.

Russia doesn’t have 800 bases around the world. It has invaded, sanctioned, and overthrown less countries than the US in the last 30 years, and so on.

That doesn’t mean Putin is a good guy, or Russia is a “good” nation, but it’s certainly less evil, in terms of external body count and, heck, even internal numbers of people locked up, than the United States.

“Lesser Evil” isn’t much of a rallying cry, as the Democrats refuse to learn, but it does mean that when the US treats Russia as the horrible evil enemy, it falls flat.

The US is in what looks like serious decline. Rather than interfering in every one else’s business, it should mind its own business. If there is a formal defensive alliance: Live up to it. Otherwise, butt out. A great deal of evil in the world would be weakened and likely defeated, if the US would simply stop propping it up. This is true of Saudi Arabia and Israeli apartheid (and yeah, it is now formally apartheid whatever pretense otherwise) as well as many other evils.

A “good” country in the world helps other nations, doesn’t injure other nations and doesn’t support evil nations, but does not, as Adams said, go looking for monsters to slay.

Grant to others the right of self-determination. Do not support evil. Do not interfere in internal affairs. Do defend actual allies. That is all.

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Trump’s Continued Collision with the Federal Reserve

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On October 22, 2018

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Back around Trump’s election, I said that there would be a collision between him and the Federal Reserve. At the time, it was run by Yellen.

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.

So, Trump hired Powell, and Powell is doing what Yellen would have done. Trump, on October 11th, said that he wouldn’t fire Powell, but was only disappointed.

It’s unclear whether or not Trump can fire Powell, however he can fire all other members of the Federal Reserve board for non-performance of duties. The case isn’t as clear as back in, say, 2009, but the economy still isn’t good for large parts of America, a case can certainly be made.

More to the point, Trump should.

Yes, Trump is the source of all evil and anything and everything he does should be opposed, I know, but bear with me: The Federal Reserve should not be insulated from pressure from elected officials.

I know that orthodoxy says it should, but the fact is that, since 1979, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates whenever it looked like wages were going to rise faster than inflation. The Federal Reserve, in other words, has crushed wages.

This is bad. It is at the heart of why we have the rise of the right, and so many other problems. Vast inequality, in democracies, always leads to political instability, and in democracies the purpose of the economy should be to create a good life for everyone, anyway.

Trump ain’t a good guy, but wages aren’t increasing for ordinary people. That means that whatever the nominal unemployment rate is, the US isn’t actually at full employment. If it was, there would be rising wages. It is that simple. To raise interest rates before there are even significant wage increases is malpractice, even by the usual standards of monetary policy–and the usual standards are already malpractice.

Just because one despises Trump, one should not allow the major part of economic management be run by people who despise ordinary people receiving wage increases, or, indeed, by “independent bodies.” Democracy means elected officials having control over real policy.

So, I hope Trump fires a bunch of Federal reserve members, I hope it goes to the Supreme Court, and I hope that those firings are upheld.

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Why Did The New Yorker Want Steve Bannon to Headline Their Festival?

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On September 4, 2018

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Steve Bannon

So, Bannon was due to headline a New Yorker festival. People became upset and now he isn’t.

Why was he invited in the first place?

I’m not one of those who’ll argue that Bannon isn’t smart. He is–very much so. But there are plenty of very smart, and indeed smarter, people on the left. Chomsky has never headlined for the New Yorker, and he’s a straight-up genius.

Bannon was invited because what the alt-right/fascists want is something centrists can live with. Fascists are big believers in corporations. Under the Nazis, executive wages soared. They crushed unions and depressed wages. They managed unemployment by choosing entire classes of people to make non-people, and the rest of the population mostly got a job.

All of this is stuff that centrists can live with. Elevated executive compensation, pro-corporate policies, keeping unions, and the left down.

Remember, always, that Jews weren’t killed first. Socialists and anarchists were.

So the bottom line is that centrists are okay with fascists because fascists are pro-corporate and executive wealth.

(Oh, Bannon says the right things about the working class, but then Trump gives a huge tax cut to rich people and corporations.)

On the other hand, the left-wing is hostile to large corporations and high executive compensation. At the least, the left would highly regulate corporations and break many of them up, while slapping on 90 percent marginal tax rates and punitive estate taxes.

At the most, some left-wingers would nationalize corporations wholesale and redistribute wealth, or they might force employee ownership of corporations or some version of that.

All actual left-wingers would end the obscene system of over-payment in corporate America.

Left-wingers are an existential threat to centrists because centrists are, substantially, supporters of the status quo. The state of the US and the world is (or was before Trump) essentially good to them. The parts of the status quo that right-wingers want to overthrow don’t hurt centrists. The parts of the status quo that left-wingers want to overthrow do.

So Bannon is okay with them. They don’t really believe he means his class war rhetoric (Hitler didn’t). They are sure that they’ll still be okay under him.

They might not be right. But that’s their bet.

It’s a bet that has been made over and over again since WWII. US elites have always been willing to support right-wingers over left-wingers. You see it in almost every Latin American country. You saw it in Greece, in Iran, and so on, and you’ve seen it domestically–repeatedly.

The center prefers the center. But they’ll always choose the right over the left on anything that even slightly smells of economics, because they want to retain their wealth and the right will allow that and the left won’t.

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How Unpopular Is Trump?

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On July 23, 2018

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Not very, unfortunately.


The bottom line is simple enough: The job economy is doing better than it has since the financial crisis. Oh, it’s still not a good job economy–the unemployment rate is low, but the labor force participation rate hasn’t recovered, and wages aren’t increasing like they would be if it was actually a tight labor market.

But still, it’s a relatively good economy.

As for the rest, the fact is that most Americans don’t think that the Russia story is important: It’s not a major concern to them, but Democrats are insisting on running with it. If they run with it in the mid terms they will shoot themselves in the foot unless they have hard, obvious evidence.

These numbers are also why Trump isn’t going to be impeached by Republican members of the House: They would lose their next primary.

Trump’s a nasty piece of work in a lot of ways: Drone murders are up by three times from Obama (who increased them about ten times from Bush), he’s saber rattling at Iran, and his immigration policies are cruel, rather than just strict.

But most people don’t care that much about such things. And it shows in the numbers.

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The Roots of Trump’s Policy of Separating Children from Parents

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On June 19, 2018

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So, you’ve all heard about this by now.

It is, obviously, a terrible crime. And yeah, evil.

It is an extension of Obama’s policy of holding families (without splitting them up, but still in terrible conditions). If you want to understand the link, read this Twitter thread.


It is also not worse than what the US did to Libya or Iraq, or is helping do, right now, to Yemen, because all of those war crimes include plenty of family separation (by killing the parents) in addition to other crimes.

However, I am gratified to see that for many Americans, there is a crime too evil, if it is shoved in their face at a close enough distance.

For those who wish to oppose this, the blockades of ICE facilities (not letting anyone in or out) are most likely to work, in my opinion. Also most likely to get you beaten and arrested, of course.

I think there’s a decent chance of reversal on this, because it’s getting through the Republican media bubble and actually bothering many of Trump’s core supporters. Even Evangelical churches and pastors are coming out against it.

But the problem with the US isn’t that bad policies have never been defeated, it’s that the trend towards worse and worse has never ended.

And the problem with the #Resistance is that its theory of how Trump happened amounts to freestanding racism because these people are just bad people. It wasn’t caused by anything, oh no, because to explain by, say, pointing out its economic roots would be to excuse it. And they just want a bunch of neoliberals back in.

If Democrats win, and start actually heading in a good direction, rather than slowing some things down and accelerating others (like Obama, who made immigration handling worse, ramped up drone murders, and was the most harsh President on whistleblowers in US history, and far worse on civil liberties overall than Bush) then any Republican defeat doesn’t really matter, except in terms of moving from the fast escalator to hell to the slow one.

But this requires acknowledging that Obama was a bad President who oversaw shitty policies and did tons of evil. And so was Bill Clinton. And Hillary was the prime motivating force convincing Obama to destroy Libya, among other crimes.

The inability to see the road that got the US to where it is, means that it will be hard to turn the US around, and start moving towards a better, by which I mean morally “gooder” US.

More on this later. In the meantime, if you want to stop this, this is a body on the gears moment. But don’t do it unless you understand the risk to yourself and your loved ones.

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.

 

Why Republicans Are Unlikely To Impeach Trump

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On June 6, 2018

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This is why the bar for impeachment is so high.

In Alabama, GOP voters delivered a rebuke to incumbent Rep. Martha Roby, who is headed for a runoff against former congressman Bobby Bright — whom Roby defeated in 2010 when Bright held office as a Democrat.

Roby angered constituents by un-endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump after the 2016 release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he bragged about groping women. In TV ads, Bright accused Roby of “[turning] her back on President Trump when he needed her the most.”

The Access Hollywood tape was the “grab them by the pussy” tape.

The base supports Trump. You have to get past the base in primaries to be a candidate in the general. This is why the fact that Democratic primary voters are basically ok with Democrats makes change from the left hard: they did mostly vote for Hillary, Bernie’s won independents.

The right did take over the Republican party, and they did it by winning primaries. Every recent attempt by the left to do the same in the Democratic party has failed.

Trump has very consistently acted to frame Mueller’s investigation as partisan, so that whether to impeach him becomes a political decision. In any Congress where Republicans have enough votes to stop impeachment, it will be very hard for Republicans to vote to impeach Trump: doing so will mean a serious primary challenge they may well lose.

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Trump Pulls Out of the Iran Deal

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On May 8, 2018

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Yeah, so, it was a good deal and one of the very few real accomplishments of Obama’s foreign policy, possible only after Clinton was no longer Secretary of State.

The fear here is that this is part of a march to war against Iran, something many in the Republican party want, and something pushed hard by Israel and Saudi Arabia.

This was the danger of Republican win: Clinton was deranged about Syria, Trump is deranged about Iran. Both are allies of Russia, and Russia will not want to allow Iran to be destroyed by an American coalition. While the risk of a confrontation between the US and Russia is not as severe over Iran as it was over Syria, it is still very real.

Plus, of course, the Iranians don’t have nuclear weapons and just making enriched uranium didn’t mean they wanted nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, the Europeans are pushing back hard against this, and are willing to just cut their own deal. That may help somewhat.

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.

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