We are all Russian assets now

Matt Taibbi writes that Democratic party establishment and its media allies have resorted to Cold War fear mongering rhetoric, epitomized by Hillary Clinton suggesting that Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein are “Russian assets”,

Hillary Clinton is nuts. She’s also not far from the Democratic Party mainstream, which has been pushing the same line for years.
…

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

Democrats now are assuming the role once played by Republicans of the Tom Delay era, who denounced everyone opposed to the War on Terror as “Saddam-lovers.”
[Read more…]

Reality TV is corrupting everything

I am not an instinctive hugger of people, even when I know the other person well. It is not that I object to hugs or shy away from physical contact but to me a hug implies a level of intimacy that may not be mutually shared. So I wait for the other person to initiate it before engaging in it. I am also mindful of what female faculty members have told me of male faculty colleagues who hug too closely, too long, and in too encompassing a way, so that they felt uncomfortable. One female faculty member volunteered to demonstrate to me what she often experienced. She played the role of the male hugger, and I could immediately sense why it would feel awkward to be at the receiving end of such hugs.
[Read more…]

Donald Trump bungles even the simplest photo op

Given the horrendous couple of weeks that Donald Trump has had, his advisors must have been pleased to have the opportunity to schedule a feel-good photo op with the two American women astronauts who did the first all-female space walk. It should have been a slam-dunk, where all Trump had to do was congratulate them on achieving a milestone. And yet he managed to bungle even that when he thought it was the first time that any woman had done a space walk. The astronaut had to gently correct him.


[Read more…]

The other battle in the UK over abortion and LGBT rights

Confusion reigns as usual in the UK over Brexit, After Boris Johnson’s defeat on Saturday and his subsequent childish behavior in sending an unsigned letter requesting an extension from the EU as required by law, his government had hoped to bring up his Brexit deal for another vote today but a few hours after his party said so, speaker John Bercow said that parliamentary rules did not allow for a motion that had been defeated once to be brought up again before parliament without substantial changes and this bill did not meet that standard, thus stymying Johnson’s attempt. Of course, there may be other maneuvers that Johnson can try and the situation keeps changing by the hour.
[Read more…]

How the ratings agencies triggered the financial meltdown

Matt Taibbi has come out with an excellent article that looks at the role of the ratings agencies, those institutions that are supposed to protect the interests of investors by providing accurate ratings for the investments issued by companies, in causing the financial collapse of 2008. Their role has been criticized before (I wrote about it back in 2008 here and here) but Taibbi says that recent revelations show that their culpability is even worse than was thought.
[Read more…]

Surprising backing down by Trump

One of the things that Donald Trump is notable for is the way he acts on wrong-headed impulses and then his reaction to criticisms of them. His tendency is to double down, to lie and make up stuff to support his earlier decisions, since his whole mode of operation is to give his followers the impression that his judgment is infallible and that any fault lies with his critics. Given that he and his family are grifters who see nothing wrong with using their positions for private gain, I was not surprised that he decided that the next G7 meeting that the US is hosting would be held at his own Doral resort in Miami. It would be a huge windfall for the property that has had declining revenues since 2015.
[Read more…]

Boris Johnson acts like a spoiled brat

It looks like the US is not the only nation with a petulant, childish head of state. In the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson, already a fan of Donald Trump’s oligarchic-friendly policies and brash style, seems to also be an admirer of his practice of doubling down on wrong-headed actions and words when criticized for them, and trying dubious methods to circumvent what is required of him by the usual norms and even the law.

The UK parliament had passed a law that required the UK to ask the EU for an extension to the October 31 Brexit deadline if a deal was not passed by October 19. Johnson failed to meet that deadline. But Johnson had vowed never to ask for an extension, saying that he would rather “be dead in a ditch”. Since parliament blocked his deal, he was faced with defying the law and risk being taken to court or backing down. So what does he do? He sends a letter to the EU asking for an extension that was unsigned, accompanied by another letter signed by him saying that he did not want an extension. You can read the letters here and here.
[Read more…]

Why America has ‘low-road capitalism’

While Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and Elizabeth Warren also is promoting progressive policies, we should be clear that neither is a socialist in the classical sense. They are advocating a system similar to certain other developed countries, all of whom are fundamentally capitalist but with policies to smooth out its rough edges. So how did it come to be that the US, when compared to many other developed nations, has much greater inequality, no universal health care, low wages ,high job insecurity, and a rotten social safety net.

Matthew Desmond has a good label for what we have in the US. He calls it ‘low road capitalism’. In an article (pages 30-40) in the 1619 Project that I discussed earlier that looked at the massive impact that slavery had on the history f the US, he says that many of the current ills in the US can be traced straight back to the way that slaves were exploited. Slavery enabled employers to impose harsh working conditions on slaves but even after slaves were freed, there was a determined effort to not give them anything but the barest minimum. That impacted the entire society since the floor for treatment of workers was set so low.
[Read more…]

When speed kills

I understand that the capitalistic system, at least in theory, is based on businesses competing with each other to provide the best product for the lowest price and that as a result the consumer benefits. But what concerns me is when the drive to be better is based on a metric that is not really that important. Unlike safety and quality which are good metrics, one metric of dubious value is speed of service. Because of the drive for speed, we have online retail giants like Amazon, already under fire for the awful conditions under which its workers have to labor and the poor wages it pays, boast about the rapidity with which it delivers the product to your door.
[Read more…]