E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Democratic socialism’s time has come around:
“Socialism has known increments of success, basic failure and massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane construction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.”
With those words, Michael Harrington began his book “Socialism,” published in 1972. In his day, Harrington was often called “America’s leading socialist.” He was also one of the most decent voices in politics, a view shared not just by his friends but also by most of his critics.
Harrington founded Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which, in the often splintered politics of the left, was a breakaway group from the old Socialist Party. My hunch is that Harrington — whom I counted as a friend until his death in 1989 at the age of 61 — would be amazed, though not entirely surprised, by the extraordinary growth of DSA since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.
It would thrill him that the organization is now heavily populated by the young, although I also suspect he would have spirited tactical arguments with youthful rebels about what works in politics. Harrington was a visionary realist, and the dialectic between those two words defined his life. He preached vision to those worn down by a tired political system, and realism to those trying to change it.
Socialists have had quite a journalistic run since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old DSA member, defeated veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), a genial and rather liberal stalwart of the old Queens Democratic machine, in a primary last month.
Opinion has been divided, roughly between those who see her as the wave of the future and those who warn of grave danger if Democrats move “too far to the left.” I use quotation marks because that phrase has been repeated so much, and because it’s imprecise and misleading. [...]
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—‘Sort of a Double Negative’:
Then he said: “What he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer.”
That’s right, Trump thinks the criminal’s denial of the crime was “powerful” and thinks its an “incredible offer” that the criminal wants to help investigate the crime he committed.
Trump on Tuesday tried to backpedal one minor part of his comments, saying:
“In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.”
No, the negatives are that there is now an open question as to whether this president is compromised by or somehow loyal to the Russians, and that he has conditioned and cowed an entire American political party into not only supporting his behavior but defending it.
This is truly an American crisis moment.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Trump outdoes Orwell in role as Moscow's Agent Orange:
The man pretending to be the American president spent most of his time posing in what purported to be a press conference. He pouted and thrust his chin out in the style made famous by Benito Mussolini. He pensively nodded like Pablo Escobar in Narcos on Netflix.
It was hard to see Putin’s facial expression because his skin has been stretched so tight across his skull. Besides, underneath all that plastic surgery, there’s the face of “an intelligence officer”, as he reminded us all.
This rank-and-file Russian officer did what Moscow’s finest have done for so long. He made sure his best asset was staying on track (a remarkably easy feat; this one is almost too enthusiastic), and he continued to wage war against the real enemy: the Magnitsky Act.
Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in a Russian jail, leading to the most unfortunate regime of sanctions against the regular business types who make up Putin’s cartel. If you think the sanctions are a sideshow, you should know that the Russian lawyer in the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of the election year wanted to trade dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for lifting them.
And somehow the name of the man behind those sanctions, US-born British hedge fund manager Bill Browder, emerged from Putin’s lips on Monday, at the heart of a scandal that is so epic, and so unreported, that it surely deserves its own special counsel investigation.
Suzanne Moore at The Guardian writes—The truth is still out there. Remember that, as we are all gaslighted:
Learning to lie is an important stage of child development. It indicates cognitive and social maturity. The tiny child who has chocolate cake smeared all over its face will say “No, I didn’t eat the cake.” It’s cute and funny when little kids do it. They think they can fool us. They don’t understand that other people have minds of their own.
The next part of development is learning that they do. This is called theory of mind. As small children, we learn that other people have different thoughts or feelings or desires to our own. That’s a pretty complicated thing to learn, when you think about it. We learn to interpret other people’s behaviour this way. At around four years old, something crucial happens, and children start to understand that their own thoughts might not be “true”. We learn to see things from someone’s else point of view.
I keep thinking about this as lying has now become the modus operandi of so many of our leaders. Well … not lying exactly, but obfuscation. Dizzying denials. Robert Winston once said that when discussing child development that children who learn to lie convincingly may well be more successful than those who don’t. This is because he connects it to social intelligence. Good liars need this.
So what is happening now? The general discombobulation that so many are feeling now is to do with the fact that they are such bad liars with limited social intelligence. These are toddlers with cake smeared on theirs faces saying they have never seen the cake. They know we can see them lying and they don’t much care. They misspeak.
Apparently this is just part of living in a post-truth world. [...]
In October last year, a federal judge issued an order to bar the Trump regime from blocking an undocumented “unaccompanied minor” in U.S. custody from obtaining an abortion. A judge looked askance at this. She said that delaying the procedure for the teenager—known publicly as J.D. and already approaching the time in her second trimester when she would no longer be able to obtain an abortion in Texas—would cause her to “suffer irreparable injury in the form of, at a minimum, increased risk to her health, and perhaps the permanent inability to obtain a desired abortion to which she is legally entitled.” If she were to remain in custody, U.S. attorneys argued, the government would be facilitating an abortion if it allowed her to obtain one. Instead, it said, she should be released to a sponsor.
About this Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times writes—A Kavanaugh Signal on Abortion?
The administration appealed, and two days later, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2 to 1 to vacate Judge Chutkan’s order and to give the administration an additional 11 days to find a sponsor who would assume custody of J.D. [...] The problem, left unacknowledged in the court’s order, was that the Department of Health and Human Services, which necessarily vets would-be sponsors carefully, had been looking for one for J.D. for six weeks without success.
Judge Kavanaugh was presumably the author of the unsigned order, given that the other judge in the majority, Karen LeCraft Henderson, wrote separately, and the third member of the panel, Patricia Millett, wrote a stinging dissent. “The government says it does not want to ‘facilitate’ the abortion,” Judge Millett wrote. “But there is nothing for it to facilitate” because everything would be handled by others. She added: “So what the government really claims here is not a right to avoid subsidizing the abortion decision; it claims a right to use immigration custody to nullify J.D.’s constitutional right to reproductive autonomy prior to viability.” It was, Judge Millett continued, “an astonishing power grab, and it flies in the teeth of decades of Supreme Court precedent preserving and protecting the fundamental right of a woman to make an informed choice whether to continue a pregnancy at this early stage.” [...]
Three times in his nine-page opinion, Judge Kavanaugh used the phrase “abortion on demand,” a famous dog whistle for those opposed to abortion, as odd as it is brutal-sounding. What does this phrase actually mean? We don’t say “rhinoplasty on demand” or even, for a medical emergency, “appendectomy on demand.” Here was Judge Millett’s response in her own separate opinion:
“Abortion on demand? Hardly. Here is what this case holds: a pregnant minor who (i) has an unquestioned constitutional right to choose a pre-viability abortion, and (ii) has satisfied every requirement of state law to obtain an abortion, need not wait additional weeks just because she — in the government’s inimitably ironic phrasing — ‘refuses to leave’ its custody. That sure does not sound like ‘on demand’ to me. Unless Judge Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion means the demands of the Constitution and Texas law. With that I would agree.”
Over the past several years, one of the things I’ve written about repeatedly is the failure of the economic recovery from the Great Recession to improve wages. Despite surpassing what all but the most leftwing economists used to call a “full employment” level, American workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) wages have been nearly flat, up just 1.7% from the 2nd quarter of 2009 to the 2nd quarter of 2018. No improvements in that paltry gain are yet to be seen. Between May 2017 and May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the cohort they define as “production and non-supervisory workers”—more than four-fifths of the entire labor force—saw their real wages decline over those 12 months. Average wages in that cohort rose by 2.8 percent, but inflation grew by 2.9 percent. That’s called losing ground.
There are various interlocking theories about why this is. Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the center-left Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and he was chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden. At The New York Times, he writes—Why Real Wages Still Aren’t Rising:
Economists ask this question every month when the government reports labor statistics. We repeatedly get solid job growth and lower unemployment, but not much to show for wages. Part of that has to do with inflation, productivity and remaining slack in the labor market.
But stagnant wages for factory workers and non-managers in the service sector — together they represent 82 percent of the labor force — is mainly the outcome of a long power struggle that workers are losing. Even at a time of low unemployment, their bargaining power is feeble, the weakest I’ve seen in decades. Hostile institutions — the Trump administration, the courts, the corporate sector — are limiting their avenues for demanding higher pay. [...]
G.D.P. has sped up and may clock in at around 4 percent in the second quarter of this year, but not enough of that growth is reaching workers. This is, of course, the defining characteristic of high inequality. Since the early 1980s, G.D.P. growth has failed to consistently increase working-class incomes.
Still, in earlier periods, tight labor markets were able to deal a blow to inequality. The last time unemployment was at 4 percent, in the latter 1990s, the share of national income going to paychecks was 3 percentage points higher than it is today. In other words, even with the economy now near full employment, profits are squeezing paychecks.
While Bernstein does a good job of putting forth the conventional liberal explanation for what’s happening, there’s not even the hint of a prescription. Whether they are in the goods or service sectors, he writes, workers have no political clout. True enough. He offers no suggestions, conventional or otherwise, on how they could acquire some.
David Klion at The Nation writes—Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle: It isn’t just the story of a few corrupt officials, or even a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt Republican Party:
… it seems that the Republican leadership was at the very least aware of this possibility, amused by it, and did nothing whatsoever to alert the public or any relevant authorities. They were happy to enjoy the benefits of Russian interference and said so openly among themselves. Similarly, as the Postreported, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was informed of Russian interference in September 2016 in a meeting with President Obama and other senior officials, he threatened to cast any public announcement of the threat as partisan politics. It’s not a stretch to say McConnell deliberately undermined national security for partisan advantage, a decision that has paid off with the signing of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and the looming establishment of a durable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.
In other words, Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington. After Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans in Washington proclaimed their solemn concern, just as they did when the president expressed his sympathy for the white supremacists in Charlottesville last year. But all of them are fully aware that they are abetting a criminal conspiracy, and probably more than one.
Gary Younge at The Guardian writes—For May, the ‘special relationship’ means craven compliance:
A US president with no moral authority flies in to meet a British prime minister with no authority whatsoever. Each seeking legitimacy in the presence of the other, they hail their special relationship like two bald men might brandish a comb. Isolated in their trajectories, belligerent in their rhetoric, incoherent in their policies, they have alienated their allies in pursuit of a brazen nationalism that bodes ill for them and everybody else.
Donald Trump’s diplomatic needs are significant. He left America having escalated a trade war with China and stopped off at Nato in Brussels where he insulted everybody, openly questioning the purpose of the bloc of which the US is ostensibly the cornerstone.
America needs a friend. The soft power on which the nation once thrived – the broad cultural appeal of its actors, musicians and authors that drew in even those who abhorred its foreign policy – is steadily being extinguishedby Trump’s heinous political leadership. He may not know how to make friends, keep them or treat them, but he needs them all the same.
Fortunately—for him, if not for us in Britain—he has found here the only kind of friend he could tolerate: one who is craven, compliant and desperate. This obsequious understanding is not new. It is the product of a post-colonial fantasy that Britain’s global role would be to provide a diplomatic bridge across the Atlantic, as the sole reliable conduit between Europe and America.
Before nominating 53-year-old Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, President Trump expressed a hope that his pick would serve for 40 to 45 years. That was wishful thinking: The longest-serving justice in history, William O. Douglas, lasted over 36 years but was so obviously incompetent toward the end that his colleagues conspired to decide no closely contested cases until he stepped down.
Still, Kavanaugh is likely to serve a long time by our standards, and a very long time by the standards prevailing when the Constitution was framed. For most of American history justices left the court at an average age of below 70. Today it’s about 80. They used to serve about 15 years, but now average more than 28 years. (For scale, consider that 28 years ago, about 38% of the U.S. population had not yet been born.) As much as justices appear to enjoy these extended careers, their unlimited terms are dysfunctional for the judicial system, the court itself, the presidency, and Congress. We need term limits for the court.
Right now, justices race against senility, physical decrepitude and death itself in order to hand the power to appoint their successor to a specific party. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was appointed by a Republican, and to few people’s genuine surprise, retired with a Republican in the White House. That’s how it usually works. In a 2010 article, we calculated that the odds of a justice retiring rise 168% during the first two years of the term of a president of the same party. Justices also tend to avoid retirement when the sitting president is not of the same party — a delay that triples their odds of dying in office.
Nick Turse at TomDispatch and In These Times writes—Runaway Empire: Last Year, U.S. Commandos Were Deployed to 75% of World’s Countries:
Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded – and had that been the extent of the casualties, you undoubtedly would never have heard about it.
As it happened, however, American commandos were also operating from that outpost and four of them were wounded, three badly enough to be evacuated for further medical care. Another special operator, Staff Sergeant Alexander Conrad, a member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (also known as the Green Berets), was killed.
If the story sounds vaguely familiar – combat by U.S. commandos in African wars that America is technically not fighting – it should. Last December, Green Berets operating alongside local forces in Niger killed 11 Islamic State militants in a firefight. Two months earlier, in October, an ambush by an Islamic State terror group in that same country, where few Americans (including members of Congress) even knew U.S. special operators were stationed, left four U.S. soldiers dead – Green Berets among them. [...]
None of this should be surprising, since in Africa and across the rest of the planet America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are regularly engaged in a wide-ranging set of missions including special reconnaissance and small-scale offensive actions, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and security force assistance (that is, organizing, training, equipping, and advising foreign troops). And every day, almost everywhere, U.S. commandos are involved in various kinds of training.
Unless they end in disaster, most missions remain in the shadows, unknown to all but a few Americans. And yet last year alone, U.S. commandos deployed to 149 countries—about 75% of the nations on the planet. At the halfway mark of this year, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM), America’s most elite troops have already carried out missions in 133 countries. That’s nearly as many deployments as occurred during the last year of the Obama administration and more than double those of the final days of George W. Bush’s White House.
Conor Lynch at The New Republic writes—Trump Is Not Putin’s Puppet:
While Trump’s latest trip abroad provided some important insights into his worldview and ideology, which has long stumped observers, for many it simply confirmed once and for all that he is Putin’s puppet. [...]
(Last week, in a New York magazine cover story, Jonathan Chait floated a theory that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.) But there’s a more plausible explanation. Trump sees himself in—and aspires to be—the Russian president, not just as a nationalistic authoritarian but a distinguished culture warrior. [...]
This theory that Trump is in the pocket of Putin is still very much a conspiracy theory—just like the claim that the DNC and Clinton campaign emails were the result of an internal leak, not a Russian hack—and like most conspiracy theories it is probably false. The idea that Trump is somehow a traitor who worked for Putin is obviously appealing to those who see Trump and Putin as a dual threat to democracy, and the fact that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump—which the Trump campaign welcomed—makes it all the more believable.
But even after Trump’s scandalous week in Europe, there is still a better explanation for his apparent hostility towards Europe and affection for Putin: Trump and Putin have similar worldviews and political temperaments, and thus see eye to eye on many things. Both are political reactionaries and ultra-nationalists and, though Putin is far more authoritarian, Trump has made it clear that he would rather be a dictator than the leader of a democracy with constitutional restraints on his authority. [...]