CapitalistImperialistPig

The horde of candidates running for the Democratic Presidential nomination are throwing all sorts of lefty tropes at the wall, hoping to find some that stick.  Here is my classification of the one I find worthwhile and not. Good: (1)Something like Medicare for America, an idea that expands health insurance to all Americans without eliminating private insurance.  This idea, in some version or other, is well tested and used in virtually every other advanced country. (2)Making college education cheap again.  We have done it before, most other advanced countries do it, and our vast pool of educational debt is a major drag on the entrepreneurial spirit of young Americans. (3)Subsidized child care.  Again, a well tested idea that frees more parents to work. (4) Take dark money out of politics.  Make every dollar be accounted for. (5)Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Bad:  It seems like Kamala Harris likes every stupid idea on my list. (1)Reparation...

There are about 30 countries in the world that have net wealth greater than the market valuations of the richest corporations. The net wealth of the UK, the fifth richest nation, is about 15 times the market valuation of Apple or Amazon. The richest nation, the US, has a multiple of about 100. India, number 45 Peru, #44, on the country list, has a net wealth somewhat less than Tencent, Facebook or Berkshire Hathaway (each recently #5 on the corporate list). Wikipedia lists India twice, once at #45 and once at #12 - I think the latter, at 6-7 multiples of the largest corporations, is more likely, In terms technical expertise, no national government is competitive with these corporations, and in terms of data and information - the oil and steel of the modern age - there might be something like parity between the very most powerful states and the great information corporations, except that the corporations surely have it better organized. I was pretty shocked by these facts, but it...

Jim Jordan, attack dog for Trumpistan and possible candidate for Speaker of the House, has run into a bit of flak on his own history.  Jordan is famous for his attacks on the Department of Justice, Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, and any other threat to the Trump-Putin love fest.  He's not especially bright, but he is a real asshole, at least in his Committee hearings. His problem is that he spent 8 years as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, when, as has been revealed, the team was mired in a "cesspool of sexual deviancy and molestation" led by two team doctors.  Jordan has denied knowing anything about it, but several team members have now called him a liar. William Saletan points out that even if what he now claims were true, his own standards in attacking his foes condemn him.  Item 1 of several: 1. You’re responsible for what happens on your watch.  In 2013, Jordan berated then-FBI Director Robert Mueller for  not knowing details  ...

The Democratic defeat in the 2016 election was monumental at virtually every level. Only the Presidential election was close. Why so? There are, of course, a million theories, but the one I like best is based on the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, which was published a couple of months before the election. She set out to look at Louisiana members of the Tea Party, but many aspects resonate more widely. The last half century has not been kind to the middle class, who have gotten virtually none of profits of economic advance, and have been brutal to the working class, which has lost a lot of ground. Now some blame this on the explosive growth of the wealth of the super-rich, but for various reasons, including a powerful propaganda apparatus in the hands of those same super-rich, many see the entitlements of those they consider line cutters, all those allegedly disadvantaged who get a leg up thanks to the gover...

Or, in some cases, trying to read. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. This book is a monster, almost 1200 pages in its paperback edition, but I listened to the 48 hour audible edition. We picked it up for a long drive, but we didn't drive nearly that long. Murakami is clearly a master, probably the best modern novelist that I have read. He is a Japanese writer, writing in Japanese, but his characters would hardly be out of place in London or New York. Murakami knows English well, and has been a prolific translator of American novels into Japanese, and oversaw the translation into English. The genre is a sort of magical realism - a realistic world into which strange events start intruding. Carver, Chandler, Salinger, and Theroux are just a small sample of the authors he has translated, and the influence of the detective yarn is strong in 1Q84. He claims to have been influenced by Shakespeare, Kafka and Stephen King. I mentally compared Murakami with a couple of notably long books ...

Krugman: Well, in my pre-Iowa notes I called the Republican primary right: I know what will happen on the Republican side: someone horrifying will come in first, and someone horrifying will come in second. Let me add that someone horrifying also came in third. Marco Rubio may seem less radical than Cruz or Trump, but his substantive policy positions are for incredibly hawkish foreign policy, wildly regressive tax policy, kicking tens of millions of people off health insurance, and destroying the environment. Other than that, he’s a moderate. I would add that the Democratic first and second placers are on the verge of doddering into senility.

Susanna Martinez, our governor and formerly a local prosecutor, was pretty angry when the police showed up in the early morning to break up a loud and drunken party she was attending at a hotel in the Capital. Martinez came to the front desk after three police officers showed up at the hotel. A slurry-sounding Martinez can be heard on the second recording repeatedly pestering Garcia to tell her who had complained -- or at least say what room they were in. “Oh you can tell the police, but they won’t tell you -- you won’t tell me?” Martinez said. “I’ll get it from the cops.” Martinez then gets on the phone with the police dispatcher, who also refuses to identify the people who complained. The third, and funniest recording, has Martinez speaking to an officer on the phone, incredulous that cops had been sent to the hotel. It's unclear at that point whether she is back in her room. “So we’re sitting in there, I’m the governor of the state of New Mexico, and we’re in there with my ...

OK, I could only stand an hour or so of it, but it looked like Cuba was winning. One of the more disturbing parts was some buffoon promising to "punch Putin in the nose." At least two morons wanted to unilaterally establish a no-fly zone and shoot down any Russian planes that violated it. Rand Paul pointed out that this was likely to start WW III, but Christie, Trump and other buffoons were unimpressed. Obviously, these morons have no idea how the First World War started. I have no insight into the peculiar psychosis that constitutes a Republican primary voter, but it seemed to me that the audience kinda liked Rubio and Cruz -- maybe not Trump so much.

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”..........James Hansen I haven't yet read the agreement, but my first inclination is to agree with Hansen. That's despite the fact that I tend to think Hansen is a bit hysterical. Stoat has links to an assortment views, including his own, communicated in a reasonable facsimile of those parts of the English language that we happen to share.

Carson, the leading Republican candidate for President, was formerly a famous neurosurgeon. I seemingly recall that he was once reported to have removed half of someone's brain. I wonder if it could have been his own. I always thought that a certain minimum amount of general intelligence and world knowledge was required to become a physician, but Carson presents a rather sharp challenge to that idea. In a Republican field notable for its know nothing character, Carson is a real standout displaying a breadth of ignorance of politics and government that would be surprising in a high school dropout. One of his latest bloopers is repeatedly expressed opinion that the pyramids were build to store grain. I guess they just forgot to make them hollow. Kevin Drum reports on another Carsonism. “I recently had a discussion with a well-known physicist. He was talking about the Big Bang Theory and how all this obviously culminated into this wonderful, extraordinarily organized solar s...

I think I've made it pretty clear that I don't like any of the prominent Republican Presidential candidates, and there are some that I actively despise. So I've spent a lot of energy trying to convince myself that Hillary would be a good President, and I'm not doing that well. Aside from the fact that she is too old, too greedy and too Clinton, there is that Clinton knack for unforced errors. Frank Bruni, a pretty reliable liberal and feminist, has a more in sorrow than anger meditation on her latest misadventure , the private emails she relied on as Secretary of State. They know what the caricature of them is and they play right into it. They’re familiar with the rap against them and generously feed it. And they tune out their critics, at least the ones they’re not savaging. Although they’ve long been derided for a surrender of principle when they’re on the hunt for donations, their foundation has raked in money in a manner that opens them up to fresh, predictab...

R: Obama is the most extreme leftist to ever be President of the US. D: You are one ignorant, stupid, racist MoFo* The above sample dialog is probably not the best way to start a mutually enlightening political dialog - unless you consider fist fights to meet that criterion. Haidt, I think, might suggest a reply more like: Why would you say that? * MoFo - believed to be an abbreviation for Mo ss covered Fo ssil.

... in the political wars, at least recently. Haidt plots importance of five "morality modules" against position on the political spectrum from very liberal to very conservative and finds a striking result. Only two of the modules (care, and fairness) are very important to the most liberal, and their importance declines with relative conservatism, while the other three (loyalty, authority, and purity/divinity) increase with increasing conservatism, until all are of essentially equal importance to mainstream conservatives. This fact says Haidt, gives conservatives a built in advantage in that they can appeal to all five of our these root moral modules.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justices sake... Charles M. Blow in the NYT on why this isn't just about what happened forty odd years ago: In an interview with Fox Radio on Thursday, Romney laughed as he said that he didn’t remember the incident, although he acknowledged that “back in high school, you know, I, I did some dumb things. And if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.” He continued, “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far. And, for that, I apologize.” There is so much wrong with Romney’s response that I hardly know where to start. But let’s start here: If the haircutting incident happened as described, it’s not a prank or hijinks or even simple bullying. It’s an assault. Second, honorable men don’t chuckle at cruelty. Third, if it happened, Romney’s explanation that he doesn’t remember it doesn’t ring true. It is a searing account in the telling and would have been eve...

Some of Romney's "hi-jinks," like tormenting the two effeminate kids, seem motivated by his desire to force everyone to fit his image of what a student at his elite school ought to be. Others, like running the blind teacher into glass doors seem more purely mean spirited. Andrew Sullivan is eloquently incensed: ...there remains something raw about the violence of Romney's assault on a gay kid and his humiliation of a blind man that goes beyond pranks against teachers. One of the key tests for me of anyone's character is their response to cruelty. Cruelty I would describe as the punishment of the weak by the strong. At Cranbrook, Romney had everything: the father who was a former the sitting governor of the state, a sharp intellect, a classic handsome face, charming, and to the manor born. And yet when he saw a younger effeminate kid with a non-conformist look, he felt no compunction in assaulting him with a pair of scissors, cutting off clumps of his hair. He ...

A popular senior at an elite prep school becomes publicly incensed at the appearance of an effeminate fellow student and gathers up a posse of fellow students, who assault, tackle and pin the student as he screams for help while the senior hacks off his hair. The senior, who was the son of the current governor of the State, was never punished. His victim was later expelled for smoking a cigarette. By the standards being applied today in New Jersey, the perpetrators committed a hate crime, one in some ways more heinous than that which led to the NJ student's suicide. Although five witnesses and perpetrators clearly recalled the deed forty some years later, the ring leader denies remembering it, but still apologized for "youthful hijinks." That was a long time ago, so should the bully be held responsible for those long ago acts, even if they inflicted a lifetime's worth of damage on the victim? I don't know, but as Andrew Sullivan has said, it fits well with the...

Nick Confessore in The New York Times Being elected President in the US now requires stroking the rich and super rich. With a little help from their friends on the Supreme Court, they have become the College of Cardinals for the American presidential election.

It's fashionable to say, and I've probably said, that Obama faced the most difficult situation of any President since Roosevelt. In one critical way he faced a more difficult situation. The Great Depression started on Hoover's watch, and he had more than two years to try to deal with it by the time FDR took office. His utter failure meant that American expectations were near zero when FDR started. Obama, by contrast, was elected just as the catastrophe showed itself, and the economy was still in the throes of its first collapse when he took office. Most Americans failed to grasp that what was occurring was not a standard issue recession - and to an extent that was true of many top economists as well. That the Great Recession (or Little Depression) never became another Great Depression was due in large part to the early interventions of both the Bush and Obama Administrations. These interventions were huge - but almost certainly not big enough - and extremely controve...

Kevin Drum can turn a phrase : So what happens now that both the national spotlight and Romney's millions are turned on Santorum like the eye of Sauron? Nothing good, I imagine. Alternatively, maybe he really does have a chance, and Republicans have made up their minds to stage a nostalgic revival of 1964. The mind reels.

An awful lot of people, including some of his oldest colleagues, seem to think that the real Mitt Romney is either elusive or non-existent. Frank Rich looks for the soul of the mystery man but doesn't find much: Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he ­responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was." ... He can come across like an android who’s been computer-­generated to be the perfect genial candidate. When forced to interact with actual people, he tries hard, but his small talk famously takes the form of guessing a voter’s age or...