It’s Over Gandalf. We Need to Unite Behind Saruman to Save Middle Earth from Sauron!
It appears to be gaining meme status on the internet.
Category: Good Writing
Samantha Bee is Kicking Some Major Ass
Asking tough questions, like why everyone hates
Ted Cruz with a white hot burning passion
She just unloaded on Ted Cruz, and it was a thing of beauty.
Watch it.
I am now adding Ms. Bee to the most sacred and hermetic order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.
I think that this is the first Canadian on the list.
Why Trump Might Become President
For all of his bombast, Thomas Franks notes that Donald Trump has a serious and real position on trade that is unique amongst his Republican compatriots, specifically he is the only one who talks against the current regime of free trade fetishism that is the Washington Consensus.
Over the past 50 years, there has been a trajectory towards greater trade liberalization, along with a massive expansion in property rights and rents.
Ordinary Americans note that this has made their lives, and the lives of their children, measurably worse.
The Very Serious People (VSPs) among our elites argue that in the long run we will benefit, but it’s been over 2 generations with poor results, and as John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
The VSPs maintain that it is all racism. It’s something more significant than that:
………
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
The most frightening thing about Donald Trump is that he is the best Republican on the issues, not his demagoguery.
Didn’t Expect This to Appear in Fortune Magazine
This essay eviscerates the claims by the finance industry that it needs to cheat its customers to function:
There’s a horrendous lie being told by the brokerage industry and its army of lobbying groups. It goes something like this:
“Middle-class Americans are not worth serving if we can’t charge them egregious fees and sell them products that they do not need.”
They’re not using that exact language, but this is precisely what they’re saying. This message disgusts me personally and I’m in a unique position to comment on it professionally. As I documented in my book Backstage Wall Street, the business model of selling investment products to investors is hopelessly rife with conflicts.
………
In other industries, higher-priced products are typically superior in both quality and efficacy—think luxury watches and cars, or the difference between a roadside motel and the Ritz-Carlton. With financial services products, however, it works in exactly the opposite way. Virtually every single piece of academic research ever produced on the topic says that the less you pay for an investment product, and the simpler it is, the better off you’ll be over the long-term.
Wall Street knows this for a fact. It’s undeniable that high fees and excessive trading costs damage the long-term potential of a retirement account and work against investors. Unfortunately, the brokerage business is predicated on selling the higher cost solutions because that’s where the profit margins are. The incentives paid by fund companies to brokerage firm sales forces across the country are a cancer that must be rooted out. This built-in conflict between advisor and client is partially responsible for the nation’s looming retirement crisis. It also plays a role in the finance industry’s almost universally negative perception among Americans.………
The logic here is astounding. The argument is literally that some people need to be taken advantage of in order for them to be worthwhile clients. I believe Ryan is on the wrong side of this issue and on the wrong side of history. But more than that, his argument—that somehow conflicted advice is better than none at all—is wrong for at least two reasons.
It’s a righteous rant. I suggest that you read the rest.
Tweet of the Day
Q: What is better than Trump winning?
A: These people losing pic.twitter.com/imdNxh0rzA— Coach Finstock (@Q1776) March 9, 2016
Heh.
Headline of the Day
Clowns Kicked out of Trans Pacific Partnership Roadshow.
It’s a real headline, and it does not refer to the people trying to sell that piece of unmitigated crap, it refers to actual clowns:
Four people dressed as clowns have been kicked out of the first stop of the Government’s Trans-Pacific Partnership information roadshow in Auckland.
The quartet were honking horns, blowing balloons and laughing, Newstalk ZB reported.
Master of Ceremonies Sean Plunket asked those also present at the roadshow to vote on whether they should be allowed to stay, before they were escorted out by police.
The 12-country agreement is designed to free up trade and investment between the countries, but has been a beacon for controversy for several years, mainly due to the secrecy of the deal, lack of public consultation and fears New Zealand’s sovereignty could be diminished. Widespread protests occurred when it was signed in Auckland a month ago, and traffic in the city was brought to a halt by protesters who blocked roads and motorway on and off-ramps.
I do understand why they were thrown out.
The real clowns are the people in suits trying to sell the deal.
On the Death of Nancy Reagan
I don’t have anything to say, but read Charlie Pierce’s thoughts.
It’s actually rather kind.
Quote of the Day
But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That’s really what it comes down to.
Read the rest of the article, but this bit is the synthesis of all that the Republicans fear about Trump.
Snark of the Day
Democrats Always Prove the Commies Right
Read his whole post, but he has a list of things where his communist friend’s predictions proved right:
I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.
By that I mean something very simple: my communist friends who really do say that the two parties are the same make predictions about politics. My Democrat friends do the same. Looking back at the times when the two groups have clashed, the commies have been right literally 100% of the time.
I get accused of being a “Naderite,” though in fact I voted for Gore in the first election I was old enough to vote in. (I’ve come to regret that decision over time.) The Democrats said that left-wing critics of the party would be welcomed into the fold; the commies told me that the Democrats hate the left and always would. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that anti-Iraq war voices would be an important slice of the party in the debates to come. The commies told me Democrats and their representatives in the media would engage in redbaiting eliminationism like we’d never seen before. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that a candidate like Howard Dean, who at the time was running as an explicitly left-wing challenger to the Democrat establishment, would have a great chance at the nomination; my commie friends said that the Democrats and their surrogates in the media would destroy Dean. The commies were right.
He’s right, but kind of depressing.
Still, it’s a good read.
Quote of the Day
Clinton talks of possibly decades-long occupations and orderly regime changes, yet somehow Sanders is the fantasist.
Clinton’s foreign policy positions are kind of like Dick Cheney’s, only without Cheney’s warmth and charisma.
Snark of the Day
Finding a Republican operative with character is like finding a Syrian moderate.
—Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.
Too Funny
It appears that during the last Republican debate, when everyone was calling everyone a c*cksucker, whoever was doing the closed captioning threw up his hands in despair:
Last night’s Republican brawl at recess was best summed up by some anonymous soul working at the closed-captioning desk at CNN who clearly was completely fed up with the idiotic proceedings on stage and decided to let the hearing-impaired citizens of the United States of America know that he was. (In fact, I hope that the hearing-impaired citizens of the United States of America know how lucky they were last night.) This wasn’t a political debate. This was a pissing contest among men who are worried about the size of their dicks.
(Unintelligible yelling)
Would you have trusted any of these clowns with the nuclear codes? (Maybe John Kasich, but only if there were absolutely no other option, Curly Howard being dead and all.) I wouldn’t trust any of them to park my car.
(Unintelligible yelling)
What was your favorite moment? Was it Dr. Ben Carson’s contention that the “fruit salad of their lives” are dangling precipitously on “the abyss of destruction? What did he mean? Who knows? The mind of Dr. Ben Carson is not the mind of an ordinary man. The mind of Dr. Ben Carson is on loan from a curiosity shoppe somewhere on the moons of Saturn.
Perhaps I should start playing the Republican Debate Drinking game, because it does sound entertaining, if not particularly informative.
Very Long, Read Anyway
How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable by the invaluable Matt Taibbi.
If Mark Ames’ 2004 essay, “Spite the Vote,” gave us the big picture on Trump’s appeal in a moment of prognostic brilliance, Taibbi’s article explains the specifics, and the specific dangers.
He also makes a very good argument that Clinton is precisely the sort of candidate who will lose to him in the general.
I gotta look into Alyiah to Israel for my family and me.
President Trump.
I do not like that, Sam I Am.
Honestly, this is the Nicest Thing that Taibbi Says About the Morning Joe Crew In the Whole Article
Honestly, it makes his savaging of Tom Friedman look like a walk in the park.
Go read.
I Did Not Expect This from The Boston Globe
It’s not the editorial board, but they just published an OP/ED calling out our incoherent and contradictory and ineffective policy in Syria:
Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.
For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.
This month, people in Aleppo have finally seen glimmers of hope. The Syrian army and its allies have been pushing militants out of the city. Last week they reclaimed the main power plant. Regular electricity may soon be restored. The militants’ hold on the city could be ending.
Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian and Syrian Army forces. “Turkish-Saudi backed ‘moderate rebels’ showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars,” one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based analyst Marwa Osma asked, “The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS — so you want to weaken the only system that is fighting ISIS?”
This does not fit with Washington’s narrative. As a result, much of the American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been a “liberated zone” for three years but is now being pulled back into misery.
………
Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra, is made up of “rebels” or “moderates,” not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise. Saudi Arabia is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS. Turkey has for years been running a “rat line” for foreign fighters wanting to join terror groups in Syria, but because the United States wants to stay on Turkey’s good side, we hear little about it. Nor are we often reminded that although we want to support the secular and battle-hardened Kurds, Turkey wants to kill them. Everything Russia and Iran do in Syria is described as negative and destabilizing, simply because it is they who are doing it — and because that is the official line in Washington.
………
Politicians may be forgiven for distorting their past actions. Governments may also be excused for promoting whatever narrative they believe best suits them. Journalism, however, is supposed to remain apart from the power elite and its inbred mendacity. In this crisis it has failed miserably.
Americans are said to be ignorant of the world. We are, but so are people in other countries. If people in Bhutan or Bolivia misunderstand Syria, however, that has no real effect. Our ignorance is more dangerous, because we act on it. The United States has the power to decree the death of nations. It can do so with popular support because many Americans — and many journalists — are content with the official story. In Syria, it is: “Fight Assad, Russia, and Iran! Join with our Turkish, Saudi, and Kurdish friends to support peace!” This is appallingly distant from reality. It is also likely to prolong the war and condemn more Syrians to suffering and death.
This is the sort of thing I would expect to see in the Guardian or the BBC, not in a major US paper with a closet full of Pulitzers.
Our incoherent policies, and our “allies” who work for terrorists are generally terra incognita for our mainstream media.
Headline of the Day
Boris Is a Copper Bottomed, Double Dealing Hypocritical Little Sh%$. The Press Will Destroy Him
—Jerry Hayes, who appears to be a bit put off by the fact that Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has come out in favor of a Brexit.
(%$ mine)
Say what you will about the British, but the land of Shakespeare has not lost its facility for venom .
Understanding the Trump Voter
In 2004, Mark Ames wrote about the “Spite Voter”, and it is the best explanation of the Trump appeal.
Here is a sample paragraph:
Spite voting is not just an American problem; it’s a flaw in democracies everywhere. When I lived in Kosovo in the late summer of 2000, I asked my Serb friends there if they thought Milosevic was going to win the upcoming Serbian presidential elections. Most were pessimistic. They told me of friends, young people even, who voted for Milosevic “just out of spite.” The Serbian spite voters believed that if the opposition got their way and Serbia became as tame and civilized as Luxembourg, all those college-educated Otpor protestors and pro-Western intellectuals would simply take the privileges enjoyed by Milosevic’s cronies for themselves. They didn’t want caste-based happiness and its accompanying propaganda, so they voted for Milosevic precisely because he was wrong, because he was a vote against hope. Under Milosevic, nearly every Serb was f%$#ed equally, and that suited some people, particularly some Serbian males, just fine. But if you’re a failure under two completely different regimes, then the inescapable conclusion would be that it’s your own damn fault. Better to keep the villain in, and the young ambitious go-getters out.
(%$# mine)
Read the rest. It’s long, but well worth reading.
Deep Thought
Lad I don’t know where you’ve been but I see you won first prize.
Today’s Must Read
In The Grauniad,* Thomas Frank makes the obvious point about Hillary Clinton.
Specifically, he notes that Hillary is not a corrupt thrall of the malefactors of wealth, she is a malefactor of wealth herself:
Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.
After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.
………
These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.
………
Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.
That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.
Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.
………
In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.
Notwithstanding her prodigious abilities and accomplishment, Hillary Clinton is part of a package with Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not just a member of the (not thankfully defunct) right wing Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of its founders.
It’s not that they are bought and paid for by people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, it’s that they ARE the people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and unlike, for instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they are not willing to separate themselves from those people.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”