Time To Stop Laughing At Trump's Buffoonishness?

The Economist's Global Forecasting Service is not talking the Trump Freak Show as a joke. This week, in an assessment of global risks, a Trump presidency rants between a European Union breakup and the tide of jihadi terrorism destabilizing the global economy. They cooly lay out their case without partisan rancor or hysteria:

Thus far Mr Trump has given very few details of his policies-- and these tend to be prone to constant revision-- but a few themes have become apparent. First, he has been exceptionally hostile towards free trade, including notably NAFTA, and has repeatedly labelled China as a "currency manipulator." He has also taken an exceptionally right-wing stance on the Middle East and jihadi terrorism, including, among other things, advocating the killing of families of terrorists and launching a land incursion into Syria to wipe out IS (and acquire its oil). In the event of a Trump victory, his hostile attitude to free trade, and alienation of Mexico and China in particular, could escalate rapidly into a trade war-- and at the least scupper the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and 11 other American and Asian states signed in February 2016. His militaristic tendencies towards the Middle East (and ban on all Muslim travel to the U.S.) would be a potent recruitment tool for jihadi groups, increasing their threat both within the region and beyond.

Although we do not expect Mr Trump to defeat his most likely Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton, there are risks to this forecast, especially in the event of a terrorist attack on US soil or a sudden economic downturn. It is worth noting that the innate hostility within the Republican hierarchy towards Mr Trump, combined with the inevitable virulent Democratic opposition, will see many of his more radical policies blocked in Congress-- albeit such internal bickering will also undermine the coherence of domestic and foreign policymaking.

Governmental deadlock and dysfunction-- an outcome plutocrats and oligarchs always crave and usually thrive on. Politico's Roger Simon understands the Trump Freak Show. His 1996 book, Show Time: The American Political Circus and the Race for the White House was a best seller before Life's Losers became the potent political force in Republican Party politics they are today. But Simon isn't laughing anymore-- and this week he warned his readers they shouldn't be either. He brought up Chuck Todd's interview with Trump after he had claimed he was attacked by someone with ISIS ties. Todd wondered what evidence there was for that claim.

“I don’t know,” Trump responded. “All I know is what’s on the Internet.”

And what more does a potential president really have to know? If it’s the truth, the Internet will print it. If it’s a dangerous lie, the Internet will print it.

So take your choice. And have some fun doing it.

Not everybody gets this. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama said the current campaign for president is “vulgar and divisive.”

“There are values that our parents taught us and that we try to teach to our children to try to treat others the way we want to be treated,” Obama said. He also said we should not have to explain to our children “this darker side” of U.S. politics.

But you know what I say to that? I say listen to Sarah Palin, with whom Trump likes to go on the stump because she adds intellectual heft to his campaign. Here is what she said Monday at a rally in Tampa, Florida:

“We don’t have time for all that petty, punk-ass little thuggery stuff that’s been going on with these quote-unquote protesters, who are doing nothing but wasting your time and trying to take away your First Amendment rights. And the media being on the thugs’ side-- what the heck are you guys thinking, media?”

Me, I’m thinking how did this person ever get the Republican nomination for vice president? But that was probably a joke, too.

Humor is part of our lives. Which is why we use words like “circus” to describe this current presidential election, because circuses are fun and harmless and it makes us feel less guilty when we are fascinated by it.

In an interview this month in the Washington Post, Joan Baez said of this election: “It’s entertaining, it’s insane and it’s sick and it’s nasty, and I’m like a lot of people: I can’t resist watching it. And then I turn it off and try to do something decent. Anything. Like have a cup of coffee.”

Which I think is as honest a statement as I have read recently.

On Sunday, in West Chester, Ohio, Trump was downcast that only one protester showed up and there was no big disruption of his speech. “In some ways,” Trump said, “it makes it more exciting.”

The next day, at an airport in Vienna Township, Ohio, Trump said: “Tell your friends, vote for Trump. You’ll look back two years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and say, that was the single greatest vote I ever cast.”

And don’t worry about the consequences. Because it’s all just a circus. A laugh. A yuk. A hoot. A giggle.

Voting is your right. At least for now.

But two years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you may have to tell your children and your grandchildren just what you thought was so damn funny.

Head-to-head match ups for months have all shown that Bernie is the best bet-- by far to defeat the right-wing menace, whether it comes from Trump or from Cruz. The electability argument is not about Democratic voters who will get behind whoever wins the Democratic primary contest. The electability argument is about independent voters-- who want to see Bernie in the White House but say they won't vote for Hillary. Nominating Hillary for the presidency is very dangerous if you think a Trump or a Cruz presidency would be bad for America and Americans. Please help make sure that doesn't happen, by chipping in what you can here:

Willful Ignorance-- A Problem For Representative Democracy?

On Wednesday, Ken pointed out that more Louisiana Republicans blame Obama for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina than blame George W. Bush, 29-28%-- with another 44% "unsure." Perhaps most Louisiana Republicans didn't recall that they had never heard of Barack Obama in 2005 when Katrina struck. At the time he had been a U.S. senator for a few months. "Oh my God," I thought when I heard about this; "are these people voting? No wonder David Vitter was reelected!" But, it's hardly just Louisiana Republicans-- even if Louisiana does have the worst education results of any of the 50 states. "Seven in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. One in five thought that Obama was Muslim. In another famous poll, Americans were three times more likely to be able to name two of the seven dwarfs than two Supreme Court justices." And they can all vote... and buy automatic weapons. As Ken points out, "the insanification and imbecilization of the American public, a state actively pursued by right-wing strategists for decades, has reached the point where a scarifyingly large sector of the electorate has no conception of what a 'fact' is-- they truly believe that 'reality' is whatever the hell bizarre notions lodge in their heads... As I've pointed out here a number of times, the genius of so-called 'reality TV' is that it plays on the fatigue, or perhaps outright animosity, that a large segment of the public has developed toward, er, real reality, and their eager flight into what I like to call 'reality substitute,' based on the premise that reality is now defined as whatever it makes me feel best to believe. Obama was born in Kenya and has engaged in a lifelong conspiracy joined by who knows how many people to conceal it? I believe it, and it makes my blood boil."

Ken didn't specifically get into what this kind of willful ignorance says about the efficacy of democracy, but the implication that it isn't something that we can avoid thinking about was all over his post. The NY Times is urging Congress to get back to Washington to debate the Syrian crisis before Obama bombs the place. Presumably, among those debaters would be Steve Scalise, Lord Boustany, John Fleming, Rodney Alexander and Bill Cassidy, the 5 House Republicans from Louisiana. Is there any reason to assume they are less ignorant than the people who elected them? Not that I've seen. Boustany, for example, may be best known for an endless series of medical malpractice suits but he is also the congressman who bought a lordship title for himself and his wife online (for $18,500). And Congress hasn't exactly been a deliberative body in the last few years, has it?



The ruling class just watched that in Britain and did not like what they saw-- not one bit. David Cameron called Parliament together to vote on his plans to join Obama in an attack on Syria and... suddenly he had his legs cut out from under him-- by his own backbenchers. Always the spokesvehicle for the ruling elites of the world, The Economist was apoplectic. They called the vote "shocking and shaming."

Many deserve blame for the catastrophe. Some attaches to David Cameron. A parliamentary vote on a decision to go to war that is likely to entail the commitment of significant forces for a sustained period might be considered a necessity. In this instance, in which Britain would have played a very minor supporting role in a punitive action of limited duration that was most unlikely to put anyone from Britain’s armed forces in harm’s way, it was not. Far from the first time, Mr Cameron complacently misread the mood of his rebellion-prone party, a party which contains a sizable minority that seems content to heap humiliation on his head regardless of the electoral consequences and regardless of the standing of Britain’s prime minister in the world.

Nor did Mr Cameron adequately prepare the ground for yesterday’s debate. He could and should have done more to show why any parallels between what he was proposing and Tony Blair’s use of the “dodgy dossier” to take Britain to war in Iraq were wholly and contemptibly specious. In his desire not to overcook the evidence of the Assad regime’s systematic and large-scale use of internationally-banned nerve agents, he admitted that there was not “100% proof." He could, however, have shown that the case against Mr Assad was beyond all reasonable doubt-- the standard required for a conviction in a court of law. It was also a mistake to allow the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, to wind the debate up rather than his foreign secretary, William Hague. Arguments fall apart in Mr Clegg’s hands like sodden cardboard, whereas Mr Hague is probably Westminster’s best debater. It is also not clear why he threw the towel in so completely and immediately after the votes had been counted. There was still time and opportunity to change minds before a second vote which was scheduled for early next week.

But if Mr Cameron got some things wrong, at least he was trying to do the right thing: support Britain’s most important ally in an effort to show an evil dictator that he cannot continue to use the vilest weapons against his own people with utter impunity. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, by contrast, did not seem to know what he was doing other than show he was not Tony Blair, which most people had already realised. Mr Miliband’s claim to require more evidence and to allow the UN weapons inspectors to complete their report, may have sounded reasonable to many people, but in reality was nothing more than a weaselly attempt to avoid taking sides either for or against military action. Given his supreme distaste for military intervention in Syria, nobody would be happier than Barack Obama if holes could easily be picked in the evidence. Mr Miliband’s depiction of Mr Cameron (and implicitly, Mr Obama) rushing to war without adhering to proper process was embarrassingly wide of the mark. Sadly, not one of his MPs had the guts to get up and say so (indeed some found his position distastefully hawkish).

Mr Miliband at least has the excuse of being leader of the opposition. He would have been right to question the government closely on the purpose and possible consequences of military action. He would also have been entitled to have withheld support if the government’s intended course of action appeared reckless or illegal, but he made the case for neither. Those who deserve the greatest opprobrium are the 30 Tory MPs who voted against their prime minister and a still larger group (including, it is said, more than one cabinet minister) who signalled only reluctant support for Mr Cameron. Increasingly, there is a tendency within the Conservative Party that takes such a narrow, Poujadist (or should that be Farageist?) view of national interest that it behaves as if Britain should cease to have any serious engagement with the outside world. It was no coincidence that some of the rebels are also among the party’s most Europhobic headbangers. They seem to care as little for the Atlantic partnership and NATO as they do for the European Union. They claim to be representing popular opinion, which is indeed weary of foreign wars and sceptical about the reasons for Britain’s involvement in them. But not even populist Tories should want foreign policy to be determined by opinion polls.

The only people who should celebrate yesterday’s vote are Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin. Britain’s failure to stand by its allies and stand up to tyranny has diminished it in the eyes of the world.

The Economist, of course, would rather see Britain ignore representative democracy and turn towards authoritarian tyranny than not rush off willy nilly into a war with unknowable consequences. I bet they flipped out when Obama announced he'd be going to Congress on Saturday afternoon. Still, a bunch of Louisiana Republicans are no less trustworthy to make the decision than the political and social elites from the claustrophobic little world that is the transnational Economist.

Oh... and willful ignorance isn't just a problem among Republicans in the Old Confederacy. Try asking relatively well-educated and enlightened New Jersey voters about their looming gubernatorial election. They don't seem to be prepared to allow any facts to get in the way of their decision-making.

Who Exactly Is Sounding The Right's Clarion Call Of Battle Against Teachers And Public Service Unions?

The video above gave the Tory scum (in England) a little taste of what could happen if they keep squeezing and squeezing-- in the name of the Conservative Consensus war against working people (under the "sensible" guise of "austerity")-- and get common peoples' backs up against the wall. And the video below, just a reworking of some old Pulp song, a band no one in America ever heard about anyway, about a bunch of British politicians no one in America has ever heard of. So who cares? Well, Monsieur Jones, something's happening and it's happening worldwide. Lately Americans have started hearing of places called Iceland and Greece that politicians now routinely use to try to frighten voters. It's the tip of the iceberg. There's an international counterrevolution going on-- and our side hasn't started fight back yet, not in America, anyway.

The Economist is kind of a weekly, British version of the Wall Street Journal, but with slightly higher standards. You might be interested in knowing, though, that almost half of its weekly circulation of 1.6 million is sold in the U.S. and Canada. Like the Wall Street Journal it is an unabashed proponent of so-called "free" trade and a dedicated organ of wealth and privilege, a mouthpiece for the interests of the ruling class and the Establishment in all things. The Economist isn't as blinkered, as venal or as apt to fall into neo-fascism on a regular basis as the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It's owned by the Financial Times and the U.K. banksters, the Rothschilds while the Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Wikipedia has an interesting description of The Economist's voice:

The editorial staff enforces a uniform voice throughout its pages, as if most articles were written by a single author, displaying dry, understated wit, and precise use of language.

The paper's treatment of economics presumes a working familiarity with fundamental concepts of classical economics. For instance, it does not explain terms like invisible hand, macroeconomics, or demand curve, and may take just six or seven words to explain the theory of comparative advantage. However, articles involving economics do not presume any formal training on the part of the reader and aim to be accessible to the educated layman. The newsmagazine usually does not translate short French quotes or phrases, and sentences in Ancient Greek or Latin are not uncommon. It does, however, describe the business or nature of even well-known entities, writing, for example, "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank."

...The Economist does not print bylines identifying the authors of articles, other than surveys and special "by invitation" contributions. The editors say this is necessary because "collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists" and reflects “a collaborative effort.” In most articles authors refer to themselves as "your correspondent" or "this reviewer." The writers of the titled opinion columns tend to refer to themselves by the title (hence, a sentence in the "Lexington" column might read "Lexington was informed...").

Critics say editorial anonymity gives the publication an "omniscient tone and pedantry" and hides the youth and inexperience of those writing articles. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” quipped American author Michael Lewis in 1991. “If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.” John Ralston Saul describes The Economist as a "magazine which hides the names of the journalists who write its articles in order to create the illusion that they dispense disinterested truth rather than opinion. This sales technique, reminiscent of pre-Reformation Catholicism, is not surprising in a publication named after the social science most given to wild guesses and imaginary facts presented in the guise of inevitability and exactitude. That it is the Bible of the corporate executive indicates to what extent received wisdom is the daily bread of a managerial civilization."

...In 1991, James Fallows argued in the Washington Post that The Economist suffers from British class snobbery, pretentiousness, and simplistic argumentation, and "unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our [US] shores." He also accused it of an editorial line often contradicted by the news stories. Andrew Sullivan complained in the New Republic that it uses “marketing genius” to make up for deficiencies in analysis and original reporting, resulting in “a kind of Reader's Digest” for America’s corporate elite. (However, criticism in the same 1999 article regarding as-yet-unfulfilled pronouncements by The Economist that the American stock market was overvalued was proven wrong a few months later when the Dot-com bubble burst.) He also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College. The Observer wrote that "its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation."

The photo above is from The Economist. As usual, they're slightly ahead of the curve in comparison to the Journal which isn't likely to run such a picture until there's actual bloodshed in lower Manhattan. Last week's Economist featured a typically red-baiting story on public-sector workers subtitled "Public-sector unions have had a good few decades. Has their luck run out?" Right off the bat, they make it crystal clear just why the international Conservative Consensus has launched a jihad against public service unions:

The past 30 years have been dismal ones for the labour movement. In the American private sector trade-union density (ie, the proportion of workers who belong to unions) has fallen from a third in 1979 to just 7% today. In Britain it has dropped from 44% to 15%. Nor is this just an Anglo-Saxon oddity: less than a fifth of workers in the OECD belong to unions.

There is one big exception to this story of decline, however: the public sector. In the Canadian public sector union density has increased from 12% in 1960 to more than 70% today. In America it has increased over the same period from 11% to 36% (see chart). There are now more American workers in unions in the public sector (7.6m) than in the private sector (7.1m), although the private sector employs five times as many people. Union density is now higher in the public sector than it was in the private sector in its glory days, in the 1950s.

...This private-public shift has transformed the trade union movement. In the 1950s unions were solidly working class, dominated by men who had left school at 16 and leant left on economics but right on social issues. Today they are much more middle-class: more than a quarter of American unionists have college degrees, and even more have liberal views on social and environmental issues.

The shift has also created tension between the public and private sectors. The private sector is dominated by competition and turbulence. Performance-related pay is the norm, and redundancy [arbitrary layoffs] commonplace. The public sector, by contrast, is a haven of security and stability. Many people have jobs for life and performance measures are rare. The result is a paradox: the typical public worker is better off than the people he is supposed to serve, and the gap has widened significantly over the past decade. In America, pay and benefits have grown twice as fast in the public sector as they have in the private sector.

Now that the sovereign-debt crisis is forcing governments to put their houses in order, the growing discrepancy between conditions in the public and private sectors has eroded much of the sympathy public-sector workers might once have enjoyed. This briefing will look at what the future holds for them. But first it will try to answer two questions: how did public-sector unions become so powerful? And what impact has their power had on the way the public sector works?

...Public-sector unions now face the biggest challenge in their history. Governments almost everywhere-- particularly in the rich world-- are being forced to cut back public spending. Many governments (for example in Ireland, Greece and Spain) are cutting public-sector pay. Others (for example in Japan and America) are freezing it. Greece is increasing the retirement age from 58 to 63 and making it possible to fire public servants. Britain is cutting government departments by as much as a quarter, and is reviewing pensions.

In the United States several rising Republican governors are keen to turn the short-term struggle over pay and benefits into a bigger battle about trade-union power. New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Minnesota’s [ex-Gov.] Tim Pawlenty have both eagerly taken on the new “privileged class” of public-sector workers. Do the public exist to serve public-sector workers with their high pay and inflated benefits, they ask, or do public-sector workers exist to serve the public?

Even people on the [so-called] left are beginning to echo these complaints. Andrew Cuomo, the incoming Democratic governor of New York, is rattling his sabre against public-sector unions despite the fact that they make up an important part of his base. Davis Guggenheim, an impeccably liberal film director whose credits include Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, subjected the teachers’ unions to a merciless critique in Waiting for Superman, flagellating them for perpetuating a broken system and presenting Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as “something of a foaming satanic beast,” as the Variety reviewer put it.

The unions have responded by proclaiming war on cost-cutting governments. They have already organised strikes and protests. Millions of French workers marched against Nicolas Sarkozy’s modest plans to raise the retirement age by two years. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Ireland and Greece against austerity measures. London Underground workers have repeatedly paralysed transport in the city. But this is a mere prelude. Unions across Europe have promised strikes in 2011 on a scale not seen since the 1980s.

The pressure to rationalise the public sector is likely to continue in coming years. The debt level in OECD countries is expected to rise to 120% of GDP by 2014, thanks to a combination of ageing populations and inherited obligations, some of them driven by the public sector’s insatiable appetite for pensions. Joshua Rauh, of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, reckons that seven American states will have exhausted their pension assets by 2020.

In the same issue, another story, the one accompanying a reprise of the magazine's cover graphic, just above, The struggle with public-sector unions should be about productivity and parity, not just spending cuts. There's not a whisper nor a hint that it was The Economist's target audience, in sustained paroxysm of fits of carefully cultivated, well-nurtured and little-resisted greed, that caused the economic collapse by throwing all caution and sense of trust and accountability to the winds because... well, they all think they are entitled to be millionaires billionaires. They have a much easier target in mind.

Look around the world and the forces are massing. On one side are Californian prison guards, British policemen, French railworkers, Greek civil servants, and teachers just about everywhere. On the other stand the cash-strapped governments of the rich world. Even the mere mention of cuts has brought public-sector workers onto the streets across Europe. When those plans are put into action, expect much worse.

“Industrial relations” are back at the heart of politics-- not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as “tax eaters.” People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else’s expense. In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.

While union membership has collapsed in the private sector over the past 30 years (from 44% of the workforce to 15% in Britain and from 33% to 15% in America), it has remained buoyant in the public sector. In Britain over half the workers are unionised. In America the figure is now 36% (compared with just 11% in 1960). In much of continental Europe most civil servants belong to unions, albeit ones that straddle the private sector as well. And in public services union power is magnified not just by strikers’ ability to shut down monopolies that everyone needs without seeing their employer go bust, but also by their political clout over those employers.

Many Western centre-left parties are union-backed. Britain’s Labour Party gets 80% of its funding from public-sector unions (which also, in effect, chose its new leader). Spain’s sluggish state reform may be partly explained by its prime minister’s union membership. In America teachers alone accounted for a tenth of the delegates to the Democratic convention in 2008. And the unions are more savvy: this time, the defenders of vested interests are not brawny miners spouting Trotsky, but nice middle-class women, often hiding behind useful-sounding groups like the National Education Association (American teachers) or the British Medical Association.

Politicians have repeatedly given in, usually sneakily-- by swelling pensions, adding yet more holidays or dropping reforms, rather than by increasing pay. This time they have to fight because they are so short of money. But it is crucial that the war with the public-sector unions is won in the right way. For amid all the pain ahead sits a huge opportunity-- to redesign government. That means focusing on productivity and improving services, not just cutting costs. (Indeed, in some cases it may entail paying good people more; one reason why Singapore has arguably the best civil service in the world is that it pays some of them more than $2m a year.)

The immediate battle will be over benefits, not pay. Here the issue is parity. Holidays are often absurdly generous, but the real issue is pensions. Too many state workers can retire in their mid-50s on close to full pay. America’s states have as much as $5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. Historic liabilities have to be honoured (and properly accounted for, rather than hidden off the government’s balance-sheet). But there is no excuse for continuing them. Sixty-five should be a minimum age for retirement for people who spend their lives in classrooms and offices; and new civil servants should be switched to defined-contribution pensions.

Another battleground will be the unions’ legal privileges. It is not that long since politicians of all persuasions were uncomfortable with the idea of government workers joining unions. (Franklin Roosevelt opposed this on the grounds that public servants had “special relations” and “special obligations” to the government and the rest of the public.) It would be perverse to ban public-sector unions outright at a time when governments are trying to make public services more like private ones. But their right to strike should be more tightly limited; and the rules governing political donations and even unionisation itself should be changed to “opt-in” ones, in which a member decides whether to give or join.

Fixing the public sector must not be allowed to degenerate into demonising it. Its health is vital to the health of society as a whole, not least because of its impact on economic growth. Bad teachers mean a lousy talent-pool for employers. Allowing a subway driver to retire at 50 on an artificially inflated pension means less to spend on infrastructure: just look at America’s highways and railways. Even if many public services are monopolies, private capital is mobile: it goes to places where government works. With ageing populations needing ever more state help, the left should have as much interest as the right in an efficient state sector (perhaps more so, as it thinks government is the way to right society’s ills).

Private-sector productivity has soared in the West over the past quarter-century, even in old industries such as steel and carmaking. Companies have achieved this because they have the freedom to manage-- to experiment, to expand successful innovations, to close down bad ones, to promote talented people. Across the public sector, unions have fought all this, most cruelly in education. It can be harder to restructure government than business, but even small productivity gains can bring big savings.

The coming battle should be about delivering better services, not about cutting resources. Focusing on productivity should help politicians redefine the debate. The imminent retirement of the baby-boomers is a chance to hire a new generation of workers with different contracts. Politicians face a choice: push ahead, reform and create jobs in the long term; or give in again, and cut more services and raise more taxes.