Yes, Time Magazine has a list of what it thinks are the 100 best all-time nonfiction books. There is a fair amount here that documents the history of the 20th century as it was unfolding, which would be interesting to read. It is a fairly politically left-leaning (e.g., Howard Zinn), pro-science (E.O. Wilson) list, although they do throw in Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater for good measure. It appeals to that small part of me that wants to retire, abandon my family, and just read from now on.
Tag Archives: U.S. politics
you hate teleprompters!!!
Well, if you want to know why Jon Stewart said that you would have to watch this video.
debating Trump
I don’t make a point of reading the National Review, but sometimes I do so I know what they are saying. Most of this is ridiculous, like a suggestion that Trump will get the minority vote because minorities are on welfare and they are afraid illegal immigrants will get their welfare. That’s just lies, racism, and nonsense. But I did think the article made some points about how and why it is hard to debate someone like Trump.
it is suicidal to descend into the muck to battle Trump. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all tried and failed, despite the fact that they had every moral justification in hitting back in like kind. Elizabeth Warren is trying to be an anti-Trump street-fighter; but her incoherent venom suggests that Harvard Law professors should stick to academic jousting in the faculty lounge. Brawlers know the rules of the street far better than establishmentarians. The Senate is not The Apprentice, and politics is not New York real estate. Ask the trash-talking Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg if she came out on top in dueling with Trump — or whether she virtually destroyed a quarter-century’s reputation in minutes and ended up no better than an elderly version of Rosie O’Donnell in a Supreme Court Justice costume. Hillary is stepping up her crude attacks on Trump. But as in the past, such hits are more likely to make the Trump mode suddenly seem normal, and to make Trump a target of those who claim they are more sober and judicious but in extremis prove no more measured than Trump himself.
Stoop to Trump’s level and you are trying to beat him at his own game, and he will shred you. Refuse to engage him and you might look weak or scared. That leaves trying to challenge his facts and logic and lack of coherence from one speech to the next. Clearly his supporters don’t care about any of these things, but maybe some swing voters are capable of logic. We will find out.
Trump’s Banana Republic
Here’s what Fareed Zakariah had to say about the Republican Convention.
Over the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this week. The Republican convention has been colorful and chaotic, but above all, it has been consumed by a vigilante rage, complete with mock prosecutors, show trials and chanting mobs. The picture presented to the world has been of America as a banana republic.
We have descended so far so fast that it is sometimes difficult to remember that this is not normal. It was only eight years ago that the Republican nominee, John McCain, interrupted one of his supporters who claimed that Barack Obama was an Arab and thus suspicious to explain that his opponent was in fact “a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”
Contrast that with the tenor of this campaign, which has been set from the top by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that Hillary Clinton deserves to be in jail. He even promised that were he elected, his attorney general would reopen the books and “take a very good look” at possibly indicting her, himself having concluded that she is “guilty as hell.” That might have happened in a Latin American country — 30 years ago.
The Art of the Deal
It turns out Donald Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal all by himself. Here’s what the guy who actually wrote it has to say in The New Yorker:
“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”
intelligence?
According to TheWeek.com, the “Turkey coup attempt was a surprise in diplomatic and intelligence circles, says House Homeland Security Committee member“.
Is this a rare lapse by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment? No, if you believe Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Using mostly primary sources and declassified government documents, he makes a surprising but very strong case that the CIA was never very good at spying. This is why major historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 have caught our government completely by surprise, and why we have had trouble competently prosecuting wars from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The government and military just don’t have an accurate picture of what is going on or an understanding of the complex cultures and conflicts they are dealing with, and it leads to disaster. The CIA is pretty good at buying intelligence from allies that are good at spying on their neighbors, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea, etc., which explains our strong ties to many of these countries. So it is not too surprising that if something is going on inside one these countries itself, we would not be the first to know.
the fall of the U.S. republic?
This article on History News Network compares the current state of the United States to the Roman Republic a few decades before it fell.
By the second century B.C., the Romans believed they had achieved the ideal state: a republic with strong checks and balances that provided a voice for the common people while limiting the dangers of direct democracy. By the mid 140s B.C., victories in foreign wars had led to a massive expansion of Roman power. It seemed the Republic — stable, powerful, and immensely wealthy — would last forever.
But things changed. The economy transformed as Roman power expanded across the Mediterranean. As Rome began to import cheap grain from North Africa in quantities previously unimagined in the ancient world, grain prices plunged. Domestic small farmers were squeezed out of the market and off their lands. Rich landowners snapped up land from these struggling farmers, incorporating these plots into giant plantations worked by slaves from newly conquered territories. Many of these land acquisitions were illegal — but the plebeians were powerless to stop them. Forced to compete against slave labor and facing a nascent form of corporatization that favored the wealthy, the plebeians felt that they were cast aside as Rome ascended to greatness.
In response to these changes, the plebeians voted a slew of populist politicians to power. These politicians were called Populares. While some Populares genuinely sought to uplift the plebeian class, others learned to harness the power of the people in a cynical ploy for power.
– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163207#sthash.FccCVUPn.dpuf
Could the U.S. form of government really fall? I am not predicting that but I can envision a scenario where it is plausible. Let’s say a completely incompetent leader gets elected by the people (I’m not naming any names) and orders the military to do something so egregious it refuses to carry out the order. At that point, the Constitution would no longer be functioning, so what then? Congress could act quickly to impeach the President to maintain the appearance of order, while the military could temporarily maintain order until the Vice President or another civilian leader could be installed according to the letter of the Constitution. But if that sort of thing kept happening, the Constitution would be weakened each time until one day the civilian government might cease to exist. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but within the realm of plausibility. Throw in some serious natural or industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical conflicts and it could put even more strain on our system.
NAFTA, Appalachia, and Trump
This article caught my eye just because (a) it is in the BBC and (b) it is about Martinsville, Virginia. It just so happens I was born in Martinsville in 1975 and lived there until 1985. Many of my relatives worked in the furniture and textile factories there between the end of World War II and when most of the factory jobs left in the 80s and 90s. Once upon a time Martinsville was an Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse and a place working class people could get decent paying jobs. Race relations were not perfect by any means but still, white and black and spanish-speaking working people shared in the relative prosperity. Workplace health and safety was also not perfect – my grandfather was minus a foot and an aunt was minus a few fingers at one point, although they were later reattached. Given all that, there was relative prosperity, health, and modern amenities for people whose parents and grandparents were subsistence farmers. The article talks about how NAFTA destroyed most of those jobs and most of that prosperity, and people are still bitter about it.
Now, I find the ideology of free trade attractive as a general principle. I think those industries were on the wane and those jobs were on the way out, and NAFTA just hastened them along. Still, it was a very abrupt and drastic change in Martinsville, and the people who were hurt are real people that I know. It illustrates that abstract measures of average economic prosperity that look good on paper have to be tempered with an understanding of what is going on with a broad cross-section of people across geographies, for example working class white and black and Hispanic people in Appalachia. People need viable options to be retrained and relocated in some cases to remain economically viable, and obviously their children need to be well educated. There has to be a safety net for the people who still fall through the cracks.
Sadly, the people interviewed in this article don’t seem supportive of the very policies that might help them, like universal health care. They were supportive of Obama but felt let down by him when he wasn’t able to deliver substantive change in their lives during his years in office. They don’t support anyone named Clinton because they associate that name with NAFTA. So, despite the fact that the people interviewed in this article are kind hearted, moral, and anything but bigots, which fits my personal experience in Appalachia, they are left with Trump as the only available choice that makes sense to them.
housing vouchers for all?
This article argues that if the U.S. took away the mortgage interest tax deduction, it could provide a housing voucher to everyone below the median household income. That’s hard to believe, but the key is probably that the median is well below the average, because of course the income distribution is skewed toward the top. I like my mortgage interest deduction. It is an important part of my retirement strategy and as I am a bit above the median (but hardly rich) it would be hard for me to support this policy.
Here’s another article on BillMoyers.com that says if you took away the mortgage interest tax deduction, the cap on social security deductions, the lower rate on capital gains, and tax-advantaged retirement accounts, you could double Social Security benefits for everyone. There’s a bit of a trick here – these ideas are presented as revenue neutral, because you can think of all these tax breaks as money the government is spending, rather than money it is not collecting compared to what it could be collecting or what it has collected under some past policy. It would be very easy to paint these as tax increases instead, of course. Still, I could be more easily persuaded to support this policy that the first one, because I would be guaranteed to get a portion of the higher taxes I am paying now back when I am older, and I wouldn’t have to worry so much about savings or home equity now. I would know that people who are both richer and poorer than me would all get the same share I would get, which I might be able to accept on grounds of fairness. I’m not out in the streets campaigning for this policy yet, I have to think about it.
divide and conquer
This article on History News Network goes through a long account of “divide and conquer” strategies of the white elite in the U.S., which led poor and working class white people to support the rich elite rather than unite with poor and working class black people. It goes all the way from slavery and civil war through to the Nixon and Reagan years and on to Trump. But he suggests that it won’t work for Trump because the white working class itself is shrinking and divided.