Rolling Stone Analyzes Trump's Success

.
Let's face it: Donald Trump has enjoyed a lot of success running for President as a Republican candidate, though Party faithfuls detest him.  In a recent article, Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone Magazine explains why this is working so well.

Of course, the recent history of the party, the disaster of George W. Bush and his Iraq War, and various other factors have helped Trump, but Matt Taibbi details the events of the past year or so, and we begin to see a more complete picture of how Trump manages to keep himself ahead of the other hopefuls.

In addition to factual completeness, the Taibbi article is fun to read, because it uses the rhetoric that I would use if I knew how to use rhetoric.  Though it is unfortunate, my ordinary language is not mean enough to express how much I dislike or detest the various denizens of the Republican stable, but Matt Taibbi fills in beautifully.

I could never vote for Donald Trump, if he means what he says.  No national leader should talk that way.  I could never vote for Donald Trump if he does not mean what he says, because nobody that cynical should be allowed to speak for any nation.  So I could never vote for Donald Trump.  But according to Matt Taibbi, some of the facts Trump has been claiming are at least partly true, or at worst, exaggerations.

He doesn't owe anything to anybody, in particular: Oil Companies, Insurance Companies, Energy Companies, and Automobile manufacturers and Banks.  This is largely true; if he did, we would hear about it.  So Trump says that if he gets into office, he will pin them down and make them do what's best for America.

Well, we just don't know; Trump will do what is best for him.  Will he do what is best for the people?  He could.  But he might not.  This would be a page from Bernie Sanders's book, but the Donald has never been in office; we just don't know whether he can handle it.  Why does Hillary Clinton accept such enormous fees ($675,000) to speak at Goldman Sachs, which has been described by Matt Taibbi (in other articles) as the great Vampire Squid (that sucks the life from small businesses)?  Taking money from Big Business is a way of life for bigtime political types; this is why it is so hard to curb the influence of Lobbyists.

One piece of information that must be common knowledge to everyone except me, is that Insurance companies enjoy an exemption from the anti-trust law, which enables them to avoid competing with each other too much in every state.  In other words, they can agree among themselves to carve up the US into little territories in each of which only a few of them compete.  Apparently neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have ever considered ending this little privilege, notably Obama when creating the ACA.  Apparently the insurance industry enjoys too much power for Congress to reverse this loophole, which was put in place around 1945, if memory serves.

A particularly telling couple of paragraphs from the piece is a more general theorem that we would do well to read, understand, and be depressed to:

The electoral roadshow, that giant ball of corrupt self-importance, gets bigger and more grandiloquent every four years. This time around, there was so much press at the Manchester Radisson, you could have wiped out the entire cable-news industry by detonating a single Ryder truck full of fertilizer.

Like the actual circus, this is a roving business. Cash flows to campaigns from people and donors; campaigns buy ads; ads pay for journalists; journalists assess candidates. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the ever-growing press corps tends in most years to like – or at least deem "most serious" – the candidates who buy the most ads.  Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.

Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage and see manipulative political ads on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities. Trump is right: Because Jeb Bush can't afford to make his own commercials, he would go into the White House in the pocket of a drug manufacturer. It really is that stupid.

[Italics are mine - Arch.]

[Added later:]

A lot of people of a variety of political opinions are deeply frustrated at how politically dysfunctional America is becoming.

I believe dysfunctionality is in our future for a long, long time; there are many clever people in the USA, most of them not very public spirited, who are very good at working what we call "the angles."  Shortly after credit cards were invented, there were fellows out there dreaming up clever new ways of ripping people off legally.  Shortly after Health Insurance was invented, we had an industry that figured out how to fleece the American public.  Shortly after Social Security was invented, we got people in Congress figuring out how to use it for their own pork barrel projects.  Shortly after automobiles were invented, there were guys figuring out how to sell them to people who didn't really want them.  And Advertizing.  And Television.  And the movies.  And fashion.  And the Tabloid Press.

Now a breed of politician has figured out how to get elected, just so that they can enjoy the health care that they're denying everyone else, and a fat pension.  So the GOP (and the Dems, too, in the past) are trying to see just how far they can push government dysfunctionality.  They used to think that they had to pretend to serve the people, until someone, somewhere, asked the question: Why?  What have the people ever done for us?  Furthermore, the stupid electorate will forgive its darlings anything.  Memories are short, and Mitch McConnell will be elected repeatedly by a certain beetle-browed sector of the Kentucky electorate no matter how much he contributes to the general foolishness of Washington.

Notice that though the Republican Party has a majority in the Senate and in Congress, they continue to blame Washington for all the ills of the entire nation.  That's chutzpah.  They can have both houses of Congress and the White House, and still blame Washington for everything.  Note that Obama has actually managed to reduce the national debt.  But they will blame him for not reducing it more, and they will start a number of wars for which they will burn up even more money.

If this were just a phase, and civility and cooperation were to return shortly, we could simply endure it for a while until then.  But there is some belief that dysfunction is here to stay.  The Republican Party has given up its leaderships to a gang of reckless fools who are not afraid to escalate the rhetoric of hate and hostility.  The result is success for the individuals, and failure for the nation.

Arch

The New Bafflement

.
In a recent piece, the former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair (who has the distinction of having supported George W. Bush's misadventures in Iraq) says that he is baffled by the rise of Bernie Sanders in the US, and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

In the politics of recent times, i.e. the 19th and 20th centuries, there have been two factors that would-be national elected leaders had to take into account:

What does the country need the next elected head-of-state to do?
The related question: "Am I willing to do this?" is sort of secondary.  This approach to politics is cynical in its very nature; the question is whether one can come across as less cynical than the other a$$holes.

What should I say I am in favor of, to get the largest possible number of people to support me?
This is the "electability" question that Tony Blair is raising: if either Corbyn (in Britain) or Sanders (in the USA) were to be elected, who will stand with them to push forward their agenda?  As you can see, on the face of it, this question is even more subtly cynical, since it brings up the issue of whether one is lying in order to get support.  Then, the other interesting question is this.
Before the election, every voter must ask herself: does this fellow have a chance of getting any other votes than those of a few space cadets like myself? If the answer is yes, then we consider that the candidate concerned is electable. If the answer is no, then very few will be voting for him, despite how much you may like him, and we would regard him as in-electable.
If everyone was more concerned about electability than about the attitudes, principles and character of the candidate, then it becomes an exercise in guesswork: we're merely trying to guess which candidate is likely to get the most votes, even if he's not the one we want.

This election seems unusual in that we're willing to play for high stakes.  The stakes are: if we go with continuity ("More of same"), then the banks and Big Business will get richer, and we will get poorer, and we'll be working harder for less to show for it.  Many of my friends (but not all, to be fair,) are willing to gamble on a candidate who wants to make a major change in how politics is conducted in the US, and that candidate seems to be Bernie Sanders, though for the life of me I can't see that team behind him enabling him to achieve his goals if he were to get into office.  We don't know any of these people.  (But then, we didn't know the Obama team, nor the Clinton team before they came into office either.)

Meanwhile, there are some people of limited intelligence, it seems to me, that seem to think that what we need most is someone in the White House who will make rude remarks about foreign countries and religions other than Christianity, be willing to escalate wars in all theatres, take a belligerent posture, and help Big Business get richer than ever.  There are yet others who want to take a harsh attitude towards people of foreign origin, be hostile towards Cuba and Mexico, in order to prevent trade (and probably smuggling) across the border into the US.

The more successful the US is in its economy, its politics, the more hospitable its society, the more immigration we're going to see.  The only way to stem the tide of immigration is to become such a hell-hole that no one wants to come here.  Staunching the flow of immigrants is a finger-in-the-dike approach that wastes all our energies.  No doubt we must ensure that those who come into the US will help the society and the economy rather than be a drag on it, but that's not a good platform with which to run for the presidency.  Nor is militarism, hostility to LGBT rights, and hostility towards health care legislation, and hostility towards education.

Arch

Review: The Martian

.
We watched the movie The Martian last night.  My wife and I were thoroughly pleased with the movie, despite the fantastic aspects of it, and the over-the-top exaggeration of some scenes and events.  I think that most successful Hollywood producers and directors tend to believe that modern movie audiences will not take a movie seriously without some surreal scenes or fantastic representations of fairly simple events.  But the most attractive thing about the movie was that it was so plausible.  Like the beginning of Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this movie seems just a few years in our future.

Everybody knows by now that the story is about an astronaut on a Mars exploration team who is left for dead when the remaining members of the team need to make an emergency evacuation due to a Martian "storm".  I personally find it difficult to believe that Martian storms of such extreme energy occur with that frequency.  (A professional--or semi-professional--analysis of the matter is available here.)

The movie has good writing; the writing for the Matt Damon character is especially good; it is very 21^st-century in its idiom, and has just the perfect blend of Matt Damon and Neil De Grasse Tyson.

What was most wonderful about this movie (the click-bait phrase would be "genius", or "unbelievable" or even "epic") is how it makes science so attractive.  To the youngest generation, "science" has come to mean cell-phones and GPS.  That's all well and good; it's small technology.  But it would be lovely to have a revival of spaceflight and space exploration, despite the problems of environment and energy usage.  The will to use our resources for conservation and human upliftment is nowhere to be found.  We may as well put people to work building rockets.  Heaven knows there's a need for employment.  The Final Frontier could still invigorate young people, and steer them away from unproductive areas of study such as marketing and business, towards engineering and aircraft design.

Arch

The Trajectory of Bernie Sanders's Campaign

.
It has increasingly become clear to all of us that Bernie Sanders is trying to accomplish a lot more than simply get elected President.

Barack Obama had indicated that he was interested in a run about four years before he ran.  By the time he was ready to begin his campaign, there were basically two things that had to be done: the several wars we were engaged in had to be brought to a close; the economy had to be salvaged, and Health Care legislation had to be got underway.

With Bernie Sanders, it is clear that he wants to bring the influence of big business into government back to pre-1980 levels, which is a huge undertaking.  The reining back of People's United --or whatever the heck it is called-- is part of this; Republicans had put in place an enormous amount of systemic mechanisms to encourage continued increase in conservative influence on all levels of government.  Gerrymandering was only a small part of this; stacking the Supreme Court, fooling with the Senate rules, and a number of trivial-seeming arrangements that have a large cumulative impact are all part of the clever onslaught on the free and impartial operation of government.  A look at the train-wreck-in slow-motion that is the UK makes clear how these things are done.

In order to get anywhere, Bernie Sanders needs to have a huge majority in Congress, and a large majority in the Senate.  Furthermore, these people must have the courage to support an agenda that the Business Lobby will totally hate.  Over the next six months, any liberals among us who have the energy and the courage to get into the fight will have to mobilize their friends to find people who are willing to run for Congress, who are not cynical, and who are not afraid to be unpopular, and be vilified by Fox News, for surely that will happen.  The several industrialists who control the conservative media will unleash a lot of money to discredit everyone who supports Bernie Sanders, and the others who run for office with the intention of supporting him.

First, it has to be made clear that supporting Bernie Sanders is something that will meet with approval by a large sector of the population, even though right now it has been given the appearance of tilting at windmills.  (God help us if conservatives get hold of that image.)  Secondly, we actually have to find people willing to run for office, and sign petitions to get them on the ballot.  There is an arch to this sort of effort, and one wonders whether the Bernie Sanders campaign has timed it correctly.  If they had started much earlier, the campaign could have fizzled out by now.  If they started any later, there would not have been time to complete it.  We have to assume that it was timed correctly, and jump in to help.

Unfortunately, the Democrat pragmatists, under the leadership of the Clintons, play a dangerous game with Big Business.  We have made some headway, especially with Health Care, where Obama has made clear to a lot of people who never had Health Insurance before, that Medicare works.  But that's just the start; a spotlight must be shone on the excesses of Health Insurance companies, and the games they play.  The Clintons appear to be unwilling to alienate Big Business.  To my eyes, alienating Big Business is unavoidable.

So the takeaway is this: we must not let the campaign implode; Bernie is not the only one who must get elected.  There is work to do.

Arch

American Politics Explained to the Brits

.
In this hilarious piece on the US elections, written for the BBC*, US political commentator P. J. O'Rourke makes all the observations we would make, if only we were that clever.  Here are some of the main points.

"The US presidential field" he says, "has begun to narrow at last. Although, to judge by who's left, this is not because of quality control."  I was laughing so hard, I laughed through the rest of the piece.

After briefly making fun of Trump**, he goes on to ponder the mindset of a large proportion of the American Electorate.  "America," he says, "is a pretty good place," a sentiment I must strain to agree with.  It certainly is good for the most affluent, but the number of unhappy people is very high.  Some are unhappy because they feel they deserve a bigger piece of the pie, but they're of the opinion that their share is being taken by the Government, and given to the undeserving poor.  The others are unhappy because they know exactly where the pie is going, namely to the most affluent, the owners of big businesses.  This is, to my mind, the most insightful portion of the article.

Then, the author goes on to mock Bernie Sanders, saying that the ideas he's putting forward had been abandoned long before the present generation of Sanders supporters had been born, back in the Seventies.  However, to those who are concerned that if the US population continues to play the game by the rules of US Business, we're not going to be left with much of anything, it's worth trying one last time to reclaim some of that lost territory.  Every year that goes by with politicians in power under the control of Big Business, it becomes that much harder to make life tolerable for those with minute incomes.

O'Rourke's next observation is both amusing and thought-provoking.  "For the rest of America what's not amusing is Bernie labelling himself a socialist. The word has a particular and peculiar meaning in the US. If you say 'I'm a socialist,' what Americans hear is, 'I'm going to take your flat-screen TV and give it to a family of pill addicts in the backwoods of Vermont.' "  This is absolutely true.  Socialists, to Americans, are people who take things away.  In the rest of the world, Socialists are people who arrange for people to have things.  You gotta pay higher taxes, but usually not much higher for the vast majority of taxpayers than they pay when non-socialists are around.  Non-socialists give breaks to a very small sector of the population.  You get to guess exactly to whom.

The author makes an interesting point.  In a year in which, he says, everybody wants major change: the Democrats for big changes in the election laws, in government control of banks, etc; the Republicans for huge reductions in taxes, and repeal of Obamacare, and an assault on gay marriage, etc, Hillary Clinton offers more of the same.  Again, this is obvious once the point has been made.

The remaining candidates of both sides get their share of attention from O'Rourke, who has incisive things to say about each of them, in a lighthearted tone that has been sadly missing in the political conversation for close to a year.

Another piece about why Americans are angry, on the state of the electorate in the US caught my eye; this one is far more serious in tone, and earnestly tries to understand the American mindset of the moment, especially the anger and frustration.  In the end, though the statistics are revealing, we don't really understand a lot of what that article reports.  It is hard for left-leaning folks to understand the frustration of the Right; it seems to us that the Right has damn well got what it wants.  Of course, it is in the nature of Capitalism that Capital is never satisfied with its enormous share of the wealth.

*British Broadcasting Corporation, in case you didn't know.
**Donald Trump, in case you were wondering.

Those Crazy Republican Candidates!

.
I just watched a few seconds of the most recent Republican Debate.  Actually, I watched that highly toxic exchange between Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio repeating that sound clip he had developed, saying that Obama wanted to make the US just as functional as the other countries across the globe, instead of the great mistake it has historically been.  Marco Rubio wants the USA to go back to being exceptionally dysfunctional, as in the grand old days of, well, G. W. Bush.

I am beginning to suspect that these debates are just the candidates having fun.  The population they're courting just likes to be entertained, and Chris Christie is up for providing it.  And so is Trump, in his own way.  Rubio doesn't have much of a sense of humor, and unfortunately cannot think on his feet, so a lot of the humor sort of flies past him.  Ben Carson is sort of a solemn, serious man, and his humor is rather heavy-handed and pompous.

Actually, it is rather a strain trying to look at the positives among the Republican candidates.  They're just too cynical, and removed from reality, and their supporters are just too silly to be tolerable.  Many progressive writers have written that the Tea-Party sector of the GOP has become impervious to facts and to the truth; they have their own version of "the Facts," a sort of virtual reality that they have created for themselves, and they claim that anyone who tries to set them straight is a liar and a communist.

In the past, of course, everyone has disagreed about their opinions about what is the best way to proceed, but not about the facts.  Facts can be checked.  But the conservative component of the population has now got permanently stuck in a sort of reverse conspiracy-theory.  They have begun to distrust even the fact-checkers.

(Actually, we should not be surprised: fact checkers invariably come down on the side of the progressives, because it just so happens that in the last decade or two, it has been the progressives who have been keeping an eye on the facts, while the conservatives were either oblivious to the facts, or were actively engaged in obfuscating them.)

So the Conservative leadership knows that facts are their enemy, and the Conservative rank and file believe that facts are impossible to verify.  So everything has to be fought on ideology, completely divorced from the facts.  This is sad, and dangerous.  So the conservatives can be happy about one thing: by refusing to recognize the facts, they have taken away the most important weapon of the opposition.

The take-away of all this is that the US Constitution is rendered hopeless when the population is totally unimpressed by facts.  It is as if the entire country has been taken over by some fantastic religion.  (In fact, conservatives are not really driven by actual religion; they just use Christian Dogma as a convenience.  Most of them are not true believers at all.  Remember you heard it here first.)

My wife just informed me that the Australian Government had shut down all research into Global Warming, because the government officially accepted that Global Warming is real.  Why waste time investigating an accepted theory?  So thousands are out of work, because the Australian Government feels that it is irresponsible to expend public money on an already accepted conclusion.  (I mean, we'd be upset too, if we had to spend money on, for instance, research about whether the US is the Greatest Nation On Earth, which we know already.  The GOP would not want to bankroll such a silly investigation.)

Arch

My kids need calculators

.
My students, I mean.

I signed in to gripe about kids needing all sorts of nuclear-powered equipment to do the things we used to do with pencil and paper.  But I got to thinking; I think the most obvious thing there is to be seen is (a) how incredibly diverse the variety of people there are in the world now: people who need calculators to add 6% to $100, and people who can do far more than I ever could, without a calculator.  (b) And it's also amazing how startled any freshman is at the things the other freshmen do.

There is a lot of diversity, and a lot of insularity.

The Internet actually fosters this insularity, because it encourages young people to connect up with like-minded, similar-thinking others on the internet, without making the effort to befriend the kid next door.  One of these days, they'll invent an app so that freshmen on our campus can connect up with other freshmen on campus, without making friends in their dorm, or their cafeteria, or their classes.  Or take online courses from their dorm room.  I can see it coming.

So, one thing a college can do, which a high-school cannot, is to enable a young person to relate to other young people a little different (or considerably different, if there are foreign students, for instance) than him or her.  A high school, after all, only contains his neighbors.

One argument for socially funding education at all levels is that a child or youth deserves far more investment than his family can either afford, or care to spend.  Is it to the benefit of the community to create a person who is comfortable with a wide range of others?  Yes.  Education at every level should be paid for with taxes.

Have a nice day.

Arch.

The Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primaries, and what is a Washington Insider?

.
Haha.  Ted Cruz has evidently come out slightly ahead of Trump and Rubio, and is basking in his slight victory.  (It is hard to imagine how the more sophisticated and socially aware within the GOP can bear the boorishness and hypocrisy of Ted Cruz; but he comes off looking good compared to --well, others of their candidates.)  You just know that the better-educated within the GOP do not believe in Creationism, or in banning abortion.  But it suits their purposes to encourage Presidential hopefuls to spout this extreme propaganda.

Hillary Clinton seem to be slightly ahead in Iowa, and there are rumors that she and Bernie Sanders were in a dead heat in a number of New Hampshire caucuses, and the ties had to be broken with coin tosses.  And she won every single toss, I'm hearing.  I sincerely hope that the Secretary of State did not flood the state with fake coins, though I think she would make a good president.

The problem with Hillary Clinton is that she is viewed by (and heavily painted by) the GOP propaganda machine as a Washington Insider.

What does that mean?  (See the article in Wikipedia about what a Washington Insider is, and "Inside the Beltway," and "Beltway Bandits".  You can Google it.)

Hillary Clinton was in the White House as Bill Clinton's wife for eight years, and as Secretary of State for another eight years.  She has lots of friends and acquaintances in Washington, D.C., but I doubt whether that gives her access to the halls of Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the White House (if it happens not to be occupied by a Democrat), or the Treasury.

Once Obama leaves, he would not be much of an insider either; though one can imagine that his emails could get in to certain influential people.  The political actors in Washington are not the insiders.  The insiders are those in the Washington Think Tanks, and the Lobbyists.  To the extent that anyone has friends among this crowd, they are Washington Insiders.

That would make Hillary Clinton a Washington Insider.  This is the single factor that worries me.  To the extent that Hillary Clinton believes that American Business is the Strength of America, we are in trouble.

I do think that Obama pays lip-service to this idea, and he may even believe it to a certain extent.  But I think Obama is fundamentally a Washington atheist, and doesn't truly subscribe to any of the sacred superstitions about How Things Are Done that political addicts spout.

One doesn't really know what Hillary Clinton believes, any more than one knows what Bill Clinton believes.  They both have a certain level of openness that they let the world see; but there is a deeper level that is kept hidden.  That's fine by me; I'm probably the same way.  Obama is probably the same way, but it seems that there is greater overlap between Obama's professed principles and his real principles.

My wife seems to think that Bernie Sanders's big problem is that he wants to butt heads with Business.  "Every State has some big businesses," says my wife, "and it's difficult to go up against them, because they spread a certain degree of wealth around the cities and states in which they're located."

Hah.  Tell that to Seattle.  There was news recently that Microsoft and Starbucks had negotiated such huge tax concessions with the State Government that they paid practically nothing in taxes.  It was the same with Boeing, apparently.  I wonder how it is with Exxon-Mobil?  No.  The big businesses no longer believe in trickle-down.  They do not believe in dividends, either, which is one reason Wall Street has such a bad time.  Prices of stocks go up and down, but the dividends stay low.

Arch