Douglas F. Dowd Is Dead

Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd has died at age 97 in Bologna, Italy.  A scholar of Thorstein Veblen and expounder of a radical view of US economic history that strongly influenced Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg, among others, he was also a serious political activist.  After serving as a bomber pilot in the Pacific in World War II, he managed the 1948 presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace from Berkeley, CA, his home town, he later was a major organizer of anti-Vietnam War sitins and campus teach-ins and was vice presidential candidate with Eldridge Cleaver in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom ticket.  His best known book was probably Blues for America (1997).  He taught at Cornell, Berkeley, San Jose State, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Modena in Italy, where he was lecturing until well into his 90s.  His New York Times obituary is here, which has many more details.

I have old and deep personal connections with Doug.  When I was a kid living in Ithaca, NY in the 1950s, his son, Jeff, was my best friend, and I got to know Doug from that perspective.  I came from a conservative family, but Doug spoke directly and openly about his views to me as if I was an adult. Hid kids, Jeff and Jenny, called their parents by theiri first names, Doug and Zirel, the only family where I saw such behavior.  Doug made me aware of many of his views about the nature of the US and its society. I would move away to Madison, Wisconsin in 1963 to enter high school, but I would remain in contact with Doug off and on until quite recently.  I regret that I did not visit him recently when I was in Florence for an extended period, with him living in Bologna, Italy, not far away, where he was living with his third wife, who owned a feminist book store.  He was always honest and direct and forthright in his views and expressions.

It turns out that his son, Jeff, would become "The Dude," the model for the character in the movie, "The Big Lebowsky."  He is a major behind the scenes figure in Hollywood as producer and director and organizer of film festivals and a variety of other things.  If you google him, you can see him talk about political issues, and he talks about his dad and his economics views.  During the early 1970s, Jeff was part of the Seattle Seven who were arrested for organizing an antiwar demonstration there that turned violent against the wishes of the organizers.  Jeff would be convicted of contempt of court for denying in the course that he was the "leader" of that anarchist group.  I feel sorry for him and his sister on the death of their dad, although he did manage to live until age 97, and was active and lively until very near the end.

RIP, Doug.

Barkley Rosser

Price Gouging

Whenever there’s a natural disaster, a famine or some other such crisis, people zero in on price gouging.  Are grain merchants jacking up prices to take advantage of a food shortage?  What about airlines raising fares to cash in on desperate attempts to flee an impending hurricane, or stores that double or triple the price on bottled water?  And generators that suddenly only the rich can afford?

Most think this type of exploitation is unjust and even wicked, but Econ 101 says the opposite: it’s a rational, socially desirably market response to a change in supply and demand.  Higher prices for goods made scarce and valuable by a disaster encourage both more provision and greater care in use, exactly what you would want in such a situation.  For details, see the writeup in today’s New York Times.

According to the Times, the main flaw in the free market argument is that it allows the poor to be completely priced out.  This is an application of the argument, made by many social theorists, that distinguishes between essential goods, which should be rationed more or less equally among all, and inessentials, which can be left to the market.  There’s a lot to be said in its favor, and I won’t dispute it.

But the Times and most commentators miss a second point, which is about the same issue of social utility as the case for markets.  Societies depend on a general willingness to share, volunteer and reciprocate, especially in desperate times.  When a hurricane or earthquake strikes, or when war or some other spasm of human destructiveness occurs, we depend on friends and strangers to help locate survivors, pick up the rubble, share their homes and meals and generally pitch in.  There have been a number of stories, for instance, about ordinary people from other parts of the country who, hearing about Harvey’s devastation of Houston, made their way their to help out however they could.  Most of us won’t drop everything and head to Texas, but it’s safe to say that Houston won’t recover, or at least not so much or so quickly, unless hundreds of thousands in Texas and elsewhere lend a hand.

The problem with price gouging is that it undermines the spirit of voluntary provision.  Who will make a personal sacrifice to help the community rebuild if those with the most means are using disaster as a golden profit opportunity?  Pecuniary incentives crowd out intrinsic ones.  This is true at the individual level and also socially.  A society in which the market performs rationally but spontaneous cooperation is snuffed out is cold, cruel and ultimately not rational at all.

Disaster relief for sale is not so different from love for sale.

It Is Monday, And WaPo Bashes Social Security Again

What a surprise, the Washington Post is at it again, and it is the usual culprit, Robert J. Samuelson. Of course he has his attack buried under a title that appears to point more broadly, "The deficit is everybody's fault," although not if "everybody" includes people who die before they become eligible for Social Security and Medicare (and those parts of Medicaid that go to old people).  He even has further cover in that the new numbers come from the "left-leaning" Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in a report issued on Sept. 6 written by Paul van der Water, and I grant that the numbers he shows do come from that report, which makes projections out to 2035, the year when the adjustment for baby boomers going onto elderly entitlement programs will have been largely completed.

While in fact the report shows a slightly lower budget deficit as percent of GDP in 2035 than now (3.0% to 3.1%), that does involve a tax increase of 2.7% of GDP, along with cuts in spending on numerous categories of the budget.  These are in place to offset increases on four items: Social Security at the top of the list with an increase of 1.3% of GDP (from 4.9% to 6.2%), followed by Medicare with an increase of 1.2% (from 3.2% to 4.4%), interest on the national debt of 1.1% (from 1.3% to 2.4%), followed by "other health" (mostly Medicaid) of 0.5% (from 2.3% to 2.8%).  With maybe 60% of the latter not being due to more old people, and interest payments also not due to them, that leaves those aging baby boomers responsible for about 2.7%, just equal to the amount of the tax increase assumed to have the budget deficit decline by 0.1% of GDP, and although it is implied otherwise, some of that tax increase presumably would be paid by those elderly.

OK, I agree that old people will increase as a percentage of the population.  The number that appears in the CBPP report shows them rising as a percentage of the population from 15% today to about 20% in 2035, an increase of a third, or 33 and 1/3%.  But the increase in Social Security spending is only a 26% increase, not as much as the increase in the share of old people in the population. The underlying report notes that indeed cuts in Social Security spending already passed will be responsible for this gap, but Samuelson somehow does not note this, and calls for more cuts.  It is the one item he specifically mentions.

However, two of the other three items are projected to increase by more than the rate of increase of the elderly population.  Medicaid is to increase by 37.5% (3/8), an extra 4.5% beyond the population increase and interest on the national debt is to increase by a whopping 84.6%.   Only "other health" to increase by less at 21.7%. In the underlying report slight lip service is given to reining in rising overall medical care costs, but this is largely shoved aside by noting that new techniques will probably cost a lot (far from certain) and that there will be more super old, above 85 years, who really cost a lot.  But, as Dean Baker and others have relentlessly pointed out, we already spend way more than other nations on health care.  At a minimum a serious reining in of future increases ought to be very high on the agenda for the US.  This remains an obvious way to go.

As for the increase in the interest payments, the report does take this projection from a CBO estimate, and so I am not going to say that van der Water is cooking up some unreasonable number.  But this also depends on something else, future Federal Reserve policy.  It is true the Fed has been talking a lot about interest rate increases, but in fact they have delivered much less on that front than they have talked about, and with not that much increase in national debt as a percentage of the GDP projected, it would not take all that much restraint to reduce the increase due to this number.

As it is, as usual, Samuelson says nothing about reducing the interest rate increase number and nothing about reducing the rate of overall health care cost increases.  His only proposal is his usual one, to make further reductions in increased per capita Social Security payments as a percent of GDP beyond those already cooked into the books, although he does not recognize or admit that this is what he is doing.  But then, we have seen this before from him repeatedly, so this is not a surprise.

Barkley Rosser

What is a Reasonable Royalty for Restasis?

Dean Baker is on the case with respect to the abuse of the patent systems by Allergan:

If you thought the pharmaceutical industry couldn't possibly sink any lower in its pursuit of profits Allergan just proved you wrong. The geniuses at Allergan came up with the brilliant idea of turning over one of its patents on the dry-eye drug Restasis to the Mohawk tribe. The tribe will then lease the patent back to the Allergan. The reason for this silly trick is that the Mohawk tribe, based on its sovereign status, is disputing the right of generic competitors to pursue a case before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Dean says sales are $1.3 billion but last year they almost reached $1.5 billion. This story provides some background:

Allergan could face a new patent risk for its key eye drug Restasis, facing off against generics and specialty pharma Mylan Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of the global Mylan N.V. The U.S. Patent Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) granted Mylan's petition to launch an inter partes review of six Restasis patents, which are due to expire on August 27, 2024. A decision on the reviews, which will assess the patentability of Allergan's claims, is expected in late 2017.

So this gimmick extends the patent life for another 7 years. My understanding of this deal is that the Tribe will receive $15 million in license revenues per year, which represents a royalty rate equal to only 1 percent. I checked the 10-K filing of Allergan and it suggests that the segment operating margin is 75 percent as cost of production is only 5.5 percent of sales and operating expenses are 19.5 percent of sales. Given these financials, one could argue that a reasonable royalty rate is closer to 70 percent rather than only 1 percent. Two thoughts here with the first being that the Tribe should sue arguing for a much higher royalty rate. Of course Allergan could protest that the Tribe never paid Allergan for these patent rights. But of course that would expose just how much of a sham this deal really is.

The Othering of "Economic Illiteracy"

Noah Smith has written a column at BloombergView, "Don't Believe What Jeff Sessions Said About Jobs," which scolds Attorney General Jeff Sessions for "terrible economics." That may be a bit like carping about Charles Manson's hairstyle or critiquing David Duke's academic integrity. But there is something far more dangerous going on with Smith's knee-jerk invocation of the lump-of-labor fallacy to rebuke Sessions and, presumably, those who might find Sessions's claims credible.

In effect, Smith is falsely equating Sessions's rationale for the expulsion of 800,000 young people who have grown up in the U.S. to Dean Baker's advocacy of work-sharing. Lest that appear to be hyperbole, here is how Smith described Sessions's terrible economics: "It's a classic application of a well-known fallacy called the Lump of Labor  -- the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world, and those jobs get divvied up among people." And here is how Omar al-Ubaydli framed his counterpoint to Dean Baker's case for shorter workweeks: "Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people."

But Smith's is only a relatively tame implementation of the fixed amount of false equivalency racket. Would you believe "collective bargaining = genocide"? Pierre Cahuc and ‎André Zylberberg traversed the obscene false equivalence distance from work-time reduction to genocide in The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Growing Economy:

The idea that any country's economy, and a fortiori the world economy, contains a fixed number of jobs or hours of work that can be parceled out in different ways is false. When used to justify the policies that reduce the length of the individual work week, it may lead to unintended consequences. ... It can even be dangerous, as when it leads to the notion that getting rid of "superfluous" manpower (the Jews of Nazi Germany in the past, immigrants from many countries in the present) will give work back to indigenous residents.

Of course the above claim is not only false but absurd in the extreme. Work is "parceled out" all the time. A shift manager at Starbucks fills available hours with interchangeable baristas. The number of jobs or number of hours doesn't have to be "fixed" to allow them to be parceled out in different ways. Nevertheless, Cahuc and Zylberberg ride their vile hobby horse from the ominous-sounding "unintended consequences" of reducing the work week to the downright dangerous notion of getting rid of unwanted populations, which somehow begins to sound almost benign compared to those terrifyingly vague unintended consequences. The slippery slope only needed to be greased one short step to encompass the principle of collective bargaining. That step was taken by Thomas Cree in  "The Evils of Collective Bargaining in Trades' Unions" when he described the "economics upside down" that underpinned trade unionism and collective bargaining:

But now, there is a more serious evil than any of the foregoing. It is this, that the power of the union is exercised to enforce regulations which limit production and waste labour. Most workmen believe (and the belief is not confined to workmen) that increase of production per man is an evil. They think they are benefiting their class by doing each as little as possible, so as to make the work go over a greater number; and the desire to relieve the society of out-of-work allowance is a reason for enforcing that view. This is at the root of the demand for an eight hours' day, and for a say in the management in shops, and also a cause of the objections to piecework. In this view exceptional industry is no longer a virtue—it is a fault to be punished not only by disapproval of fellow-workmen but, in some cases, by penalties. In some trades, if a man earns more than a certain wage he is fined, and his employer is fined as well.

As did many of his fellow dogmatists, Cree felt it instructive to obscure the claim of a false belief in a fixed amount of work by embedding it in the "regulations which limited production" and the supposed impulse toward slacking and shirking. The rationale, however is that "most workmen believe... that increase of production per man is evil"... because they assume that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done and thus if one man does more of it than there will be less left for others. This argument was explicated in David Schloss's canonical explanation of "the Theory of the Lump of Labour":

In accordance with this theory it is held that there is a certain fixed amount of work to be done, and that it is best in the interests of the workmen that each shall take care not to do too much work, in order that thus the Lump of Labour may be spread out thin over the whole body of work-people.

Schloss's "Theory of the Lump of Labour" conformed to a template that already was more than a century old, having been expressed in similar terms in 1780 by the Lancashire magistrate, Dorning Rasbotham, in response to factory riots the previous year. Successive iterations of the complaint against the economic illiteracy of workers, handed down from Rasbotham to Schloss, adhered to what Albert O. Hirschman diagnosed as the "rhetoric of reaction." Workers enjoyed "the best of all possible worlds." Any effort on their part to "coerce" employers into paying higher wages or operating shorter hours would inevitably result in -- as Cahuc and Zylberberg put it -- "unintended consequences" that would make them worse off.

But, in what Noah Smith calls "one case where economists get it absolutely right" the consensus of economists -- outside of Econ 101 textbook orthodoxy -- is far less unanimous than he presumes. Among those economists who directly refuted the fallacy claim are Maurice Dobb, A.C. Pigou and Robert Hoxie. Economists who indirectly countered the fallacy claim in their analysis include Sydney J. Chapman, John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, Luigi Pasinetti, John R. Commons, Dorothy W. Douglas, John Maurice Clark and Thorsten Veblen. Amazingly, objections and counter-arguments raised by these economists are never mentioned -- and obviously never addressed -- when the fallacy claim is trotted out. What kind of getting it "absolutely right" is that?

In my view, two of the most effective repudiations of the fallacy claim came from Dobb and Hoxie, both of whom presented alternative explanations for why workers might appear to want to "restrict output." Dobb argued that what workers were after was not maximizing aggregate earnings but maximizing earnings relative to expenditure of time, effort and bodily "wear and tear." Hoxie argued that the tactics and strategies of trade unions were not based on some abstract idea of what was happening in the "economy as a whole" but on everyday experience in a local economy. Dobb referred to the "Work Fund" fallacy, which was another name for the lump of labor:

...trade unionists in the nineteenth century were severely castigated by economists for adhering, it was alleged, to a vicious 'Work Fund' fallacy, which held that there was a limited amount of work to go round and that workers could benefit themselves by restricting the amount of work they did. But the argument as it stands is incorrect. It is not aggregate earnings which are the measure of the benefit obtained by the worker, but his earnings in relation to the work he does — to his output of physical energy or his bodily wear and tear. Just as an employer is interested in his receipts compared with his outgoings, so the worker is presumably interested in what he gets compared with what he gives. A man who works longer hours or is put on piece-rates, and increases the intensity of his work as a result, may earn more money in the course of the week; but he is also suffering more fatigue, and probably requires to spend more on food and recreation and perhaps on doctor’s bills.

Hoxie re-branded the lump of labor as the "fixed group demand theory" and concluded that this theory, in practice, "is simply the application by the unions of the principle of monopoly, admittedly valid":

There is much scorn of unionists by economists and employers because of this lump of labor theory with its corollaries. This scorn is based on the classical supply and demand theory and its variants. Supply is demand. Increased efficiency in production means an increase of social dividend and increased shares, which in turn increase production and saving. Therefore, the workers cut off their own noses when they limit output or limit numbers. The classical position is undoubtedly valid when applied to society as a whole, if there is any such thing, and in the long run. But the trouble is that, so far as the workers are concerned, there is no society as a whole, and no long run, but immediate need and rival social groups.

Both Dobb and Hoxie called attention to the central conceit of the economists' scorn for unionist "theories" -- that somehow those who do not embrace the economic orthodoxy must have a view of economics that is "upside down" relative to the "true" theory. which is to say, same-but-different, with difference indicating deficiency. To put it bluntly, othering. 

What the hell is "othering"? In a nutshell it is the practice of constituting the self as sovereign Subject by constituting the other as subjugated. 

In the seminal text for the analysis of othering, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presented "three random examples of othering." I'm not sure how "random" these examples were or even if they were random at all. Maybe she meant random as a kind of joke. At any rate, the first example had to do with s young Captain, Geoffrey Birch, riding through the countryside from Delhi to Calcutta "to acquaint the people who they are subject too." 

Spivak's second example was General Sir David Ochterlony, a gentleman, who saw in the locals "all the brutality and purfidy [sic] of the rudest times without the courage and all the depravity and treachery of the modern days without the knowledge or refinement." Her third example concerns some deletions in a letter drafted by the Court of Directors of the East India Company but expunged by the Board of Control. These deletions explicitly spelled out the rationale for withholding technology and knowledge from the natives. The final communique enacted the restrictions without disclosing the reasons.

So what does Spivak's narrative of power, disparagement and knowledge have to do with the lump of labor fallacy or, for that matter, with the expulsion of colonial subjects "dreamers"? My point is that Noah Smith's recourse to the bogus lump-of-labor fallacy claim has a much closer affinity to Attorney General Sessions's remarks blaming "illegal aliens" for denying jobs to Americans than do the latter remarks to Dean Baker's advocacy of shorter work weeks. 

Dorning Rasbotham, Sir David Ochterlony and Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions are reactionary birds of a colonialist feather, along with Thomas Cree,  Pierre Cahuc and ‎André Zylberberg. Sessions's economics is indeed terrible... as is the economics that opposes to it a fraudulent fallacy claim.

Sessions, Krugman, DACA and the Lump-of-Labor Fallacy

Now may be a good time to remind people that there can be bad arguments for good causes. There may even be good arguments for bad causes.

Sessions is wrong:

The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.

This is a lie. DACA has not "denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans." But it isn't a lie because it assumes the amount of work to be done is fixed. To make that claim trivializes both the mendacity of the Trump administration and the gullibility of people who believe the lies that demagogues tell them. The alleged "fixed amount of work" has nothing to do with it.

To the extent there is economic illiteracy, the economics profession is the main culprit. Economists have shamelessly touted policies that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor and pooh-poohed egalitarian proposals like work-time reduction. For all too many of them, it's their job. When those policies have exactly the effects they were designed to have, economists become puzzled about where all the inequality is coming from.

In simple terms, when things are not going well for people they tend to scapegoat vulnerable others. This is not "economic illiteracy." It is scapegoating. Ironically, the economic illiteracy claim is itself a form of scapegoating. People stop listening to the experts because the experts have sold their credibility to the highest bidder. Instead of reflecting on why people don't trust them any more, the experts blame it on economic illiteracy.

UPDATE: Here Paul Krugman makes good arguments in defense of DACA and avoids the fixed-amount-of-work straw man distraction. The Very Bad Economics of Killing DACA. Much better.

Why Are We Not Keeping Track Of The Dead From Hurricane Harvey?

It is not surprising that as Hurricane Harvey has finally moved off the Atlantic coast and is over, and the flood waters recede in the various places that it caused damage, it is unsurprising that reporting has moved onto the inside pages of papers and even seems on the verge of disappearing.  But somehow a piece of information that I would think is important, and that I have seen reported more substantially in past disasters, is the number who died as a result of the hurricane.  If one googles "dead from Hurricane Harvey," one gets as the top hits reports from many days ago in which one learns that the number who died is in single digits.

As it is, by digging hard I have found that the number is much higher, but seems unclear, but is only barely being mentioned deep in stories on the event.  After digging hard, I found scattered reports within the last 12 hours.  The number dead are reported to be either 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, or 50.  Those searching through badly flooded buildings, now free from the water, are gradually discovering those who could not escape and drowned.  But somehow these numbers seem to be of little interest.  I remember previous disasters where a few died, and that number would be the big headline, and people would keep track.  But somehow, for reasons I do not understand, the number dead from this event somehow seems to be of little interest to the media, and perhaps even the public. Is this really true, and if so, why?

Somehow I doubt that it is because over 1,200 people have died this season in South Asia from floods as that piece of information has received even less media attention.

Barkley Rosser

Yet Another Republican President Stabs A South Korean President In The Back

[Able to get on here from my home laptop]

Donald Trump has long had a record of doing things one finds not just unbelievable, but seriously outrageous.  However, we may now have seen him do so in a situation involving a really dangerous foreign policy situation, the threat of a war on the Korean peninsula, a war that could involve nuclear weapons and could involve not just thousands, but possibly millions of people dying. The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is the most heavily armed place on the face of this planet, by a long shot, with most of those armaments piled up on the northern side.  It may be of a lower qualitative technological level than what faces it from the southern side, but it is simply enormous in quantity, and quite capable of inflicting massive damage on metropolitan Seoul, only 30 miles south of the DMZ, whose population in the greater metro area approaches 20 million people, a very large number of sitting ducks.

As it is, the DPRK, or North Korea, has been provocatively testing ever more capable missiles and bombs.  A missile that flew over Japan, more or less freaking them out, supposedly has the ability to hit even the east coast of the US.  Kim Jong-un made noises about firing missiles at Guam and Trump made a lot of loud noises.  That Kim backed down led Trump to brag that he knew how to handle Kim.  Meanwhile, new President Moon Jae-in of the ROK, South Korea, supported engaging in peace negotiations, even though Kim Jong-un has so far made no positive responses to that.  Then over the weekend Kim put the cherry on the top by testing a 100 kiloton device that has been advertised as a fusion H-bomb, a qualitative jump to a much more dangerous type of weapon.  Trump's response was to tweet that Moon was pursuing "appeasement" in contrast to his tough way of handling things, which he claims works, despite all this glaring evidence to the contrary.  Kim seems not deterred or suppressed in the least.

But the really outrageous move here is on top of this Trump has declared that he is planning to terminate the free trade agreement with South Korea, not even renogiate it, just cancel it.  Really?  The South Koreans do not support this and like the agreement.  Trump claims that the bilateral trade deficit of the US has increased, which was the immediate outcome of the agreement, but over the last year that has turned around with the deficit declining and has now returned to about what it was when the agreement was signed and continues to move in that direction.  But not to put too fine a point on it, Trump is lying about this as well as stabbing Moon in the back just as he denounces Moon for advocating what Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and pretty much every other leader in the world advocates, and even Trump has said he supports on certain days, ready to talk face to face to Kim under the right conditions. But if Moon says it, well, time to cancel that trade agreement, especially since it was another of those things that Obama did.  So, it must go.  The South Koreans are mystified and simply do not even know how to respond to this outrage.  What can they say?  They need the US alliance, even if the man in the White House is a lunatic, which is what they say he is.

I shall note that this is not the first time a Republican president has stabbed a peace-seeking South Korean president in the back. I have blogged on this previously, but back in March 2001, President Bush killed the peace efforts of then ROK President Kim Dae-Jung.  He came to dinner, thinking that the peace process under way from the previous administration and supported by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, would continue.  He was to have a dinner at the White House. But Cheney and Rumsfeld got to Bush and convinced him that a hard line against the DPRK would bring about regime change, a much better outcome, ha ha!  We can see how that turned out.  Kim Dae-Jung went home humiliated.

Most of the discussion of this now goes on about how the North Koreans cheated on nuclear agreements by enriching uranium.  However, those commentators somehow fail to note that the agreements were only about plutonium, not uranium. But "history" has the North Koreans violating agreements, with everybody forgetting how Bush undercut the agreements (and the US never fulfilled parts of it in terms of supplying DPRK with various items).  Trump's back stab is worse, but this is not the first time.

Oh, Moon has responded to Trump's outrageous tweet.  He has pointed out that Korea suffered a "fratricidal war," which he does not want to see again.  He intends to "pursue denuclearization" on the peninsula "by peaceful means" in agreement "with our allies."  Sounds reasonable to me, but at the moment reason does not seem to be in charge of what is going on here.  Let us hope for Moon's view to prevail, somehow or other.

Barkley Rosser

 

Let Trump Continue To Fail To Appoint People

There has been much moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by many commentators and politicians over the failure of President Donald Trump to appoint people to fill numerous now vacant positions within the executive branch of government, with the State Department often being put forward as one of many agencies with many empty chairs in official positions.  However, the other night I heard Lawrence O'Donnell make an interesting point: those empty chairs are being filled in the meantime by long-in-place civil servants who actually know what they are doing and are not Trump-loving hacks and fools.  In departments where he has made appointments, such as the EPA, his appointees have wreaked havoc and done mostly awful things. 

So, let us hope that he gets bogged down in tweeting and blocking possible candidates for these positions because they are insufficiently kowtowing to him.  That way we might have at least some parts of some government agencies run by non-crazy knowledgeable individuals. We can only hope.

Barkley Rosser

No To Unprovoked Violence By Anybody

And, sorry, but no, simply saying things one does not agree with does not justify in engaging in unprovoked violence.  This is directed at the recent events in Berkeley where it appears that masked and self-identified "anarchists," (not "antifa members" as Hannity called them), engaged in violence that was not in self-defense. I am not all that happy about people shutting others down from simply speaking publicly, but I am completely opposed to doing this by means of unprovoked violence (self defense as happened in Charlottesville is a different matter).  This applies to what happened at Middlebury College as well. 

There is a very fine line here, but progressives must not fall into the pit of saying that unprovoked violence is acceptable because "those people are bad."  Sorry, not acceptable.  Peaceful counterprotesting as we saw in Boston is the way to go.  Period.

Barkley Rosser

Is David Ignatius Falling For Saudi Propaganda?

Washington Post columnist and occasional novelist and diplomat, David Ignatius, is one of the best informed and wisest of commentators on Middle East affairs.  Thus it is with concern that in yesterday's Washington Post in a column titled, "A new chance for Middle East peace?" he seems to have fallen for third rate propaganda largely being pushed by the Saudi government, although also backed by the UAE ambassador (closely allied to Saudi Arabia in their anti-Iran and anti-Qatar escapades), as well as "the White House."  I can appreciate that in recent years hopes for any kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace deal have simply been absent, so maybe he is indulging in some sort of optimistic thinking with the idea that pushing any sort of plan is better than having none.  But I fear that not only is he being a pollyanna here, but joining a herd of suckers for drivel coming out of the Saudi PR machine, which wishes to puff up new Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammed bin Salman (MBS) as a wonderfully progressive and open-minded reformer.  Yuck.

Indeed, what is probably the most dramatic point here is that indeed MBS has apparently been going around saying that "resolution of the Palestinian problem and peace with Israel are 'crucial for the future of the Middle East.'"  This is indeed louder than what has been heard from Saudi leaders previously, although the late King Abdullah did put forward a peace plan that involved the Israelis moving back to the 1967 borders, a plan that went nowhere.  So, peace noises out of the Saudis are not exactly completely unprecedented.

The more detailed part of the column where Ignatius shows his usual ability to ferret out information not previously reported by others is that the specific plan being pushed involves using a UAE-based Gazan Palestinian named Mohammed Dahlan to get Hamas to moderate its demands on Israel in response for a bunch of economic aid, including a power plant to be built across the border from Gaza in Egypt.  No evidence that the current Hamas leaders in Gaza will go along with this is provided and, and it is admitted that Dalhan has long been at odds with Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader who is in charge of the West Bank.

I grant that Ignatius recognizes that MBS has his flaws, "has made brash moves that have caused him trouble, including the war in Yemen."  But this is all supposedly offset by his "youthful and dynamic leadership" as touted to Ignatius by MBS's younger brother, Prince Khalid bin Salman, now Saudi ambassador to the US, with the UAE ambassador also weighing in.  Ignatius recognizes that underlying this push from the Saudi-UAE-Egyptian axis and possibly Israelis is a common enmity shared with the Trump administration toward Iran. Ignatius does not discuss the increasingly failed effort by these to isolate Qatar, which has just reopened diplomatic relations with Iran, or the dangerous apparent moves by the Trump administration to undo the Iran nuclear deal.

Maybe all this would be wonderful, but frankly it looks like a bunch of wishful thinking amounting to poor propaganda given today's reporting. In the first section of today's WaPo is a story about the trip just concluded by Jared Kushner to that neck of the woods, with Ignatius's story clearly representing some PR for it based on what Kushner thinks he is doing, with Kushner and MBS big pals by all reports.  This is their big plan.  But in a story misleadingly titled "Kushner's Mideast talks called 'productive'" it turns out that mostly things look like they are not going anywhere. 

A meeting with Mahmoud Abbas had a bottom line that Abbas is not going to do any serious talking unless the Trump administration accepts the two-state solution, and the story made it clear that Kushner did not do that, and the administration more generally has not done that.  It also  notes that the Netanyahu government is becoming distracted by an increasing corruption scandal, so may be unwilling or unable to do anything at all out of the ordinary.  Maybe there will be mumbling in Gaza, but the idea that we are on the verge of some great breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli relations looks to be a joke, despite Ignatius playing pumpboy for the trouble-making Saudi crown prince's propaganda who seems so able to get lots of people in Washington to spout his nonsensical and dangerous drivel at the drop of a hat (or a sword).

This is disappointing.  David Ignatius should know better.

Barkley Rosser

Michael Boskin’s Revisionist Economic History

The latest from Michael Boskin belongs on the National Review:

So far, Trump has failed to deliver any major legislative policy achievements. Nonetheless, he has helped the economy by rolling back President Barack Obama’s damaging regulatory and administrative diktats in areas such as energy, education, finance, and labor law.

He offers no evidence for this spin – just a lot of babble regarding Trump tweets or whatever. But what caught my attention as well as that of Brad DeLong with this intellectual garbage:

Bill Clinton’s administration began with a lack of discipline, a failed attempt at health-care reform, and a loss for the Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections. But Clinton turned things around, appointing new aides, moving toward the political center, winning reelection in 1996, and working with a Republican-controlled Congress to balance the budget and reform welfare.

Brad does a nice job of debunking this nonsense but let me just add that the Republican controlled Congress was not what balanced the budget. What balanced the budget was the 1993 tax increase they voted against, the economic boom they claimed would not happen, and the peace dividend that the GOP hawks abhorred. Boskin next sings the praises of St. Reagan:

Similarly, Ronald Reagan endured large Republican losses in the 1982 midterm election. At that time, the US was in a deep recession, owing to the Federal Reserve’s tough disinflation policy, which Reagan had supported. But the economy made a strong recovery, helped by Reagan’s tax cuts and increased military spending.

At least Boskin did not try to pin the 1982 recession on Jimmy Carter but how can he endorse Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility while trying to tag Clinton as allegedly having a lack of fiscal discipline. After all, the Reagan fiscal stimulus dramatically increased real interest rates which not only hurt private investment but also led to a massive appreciation of the dollar leading to a sharp fall in net exports. Maybe this fluff does not belong on the pages of the National Review as it may have been too dishonest even for those Republican hacks.

What Would Jesus Do?

First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn't resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn't have a permit...

Trump and What Army?

Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve.  Has he crossed some sort of new line?  Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days.

I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in reserve.  They appreciate the vehicle that has brought the hard right to power, but they are ready to remove it if it no longer serves their purposes.  It’s not clear whether there is evidence sufficient to impeach him today, but there almost certainly will be in the coming months, especially as his finances are exposed.  I am not claiming that impeachment is a certainty, only that less hormonally imbalanced elites want it to be available should they need it.

The problem is that something like a third of the country supports Trump, most of them passionately.  His base will regard an impeachment as a final, decisive battle for American freedom, the fulfillment of all their most paranoid suspicions about the evil forces arrayed against them.  And quite a few of them are armed.

The nightmare scenario is an impeachment process setting off mass violence in the streets—a civil war.  Trump can be forgiven climate denialism, nuclear sabre-rattling and various other sins, but he can’t be allowed to encourage the formation of loyal paramilitary band of supporters, a praetorian guard of street thugs.  Hence the uproar over Charlottesville by plutocrats and Republicans who have swallowed equally contemptible posturings in the past.

I Agree With Robert E Lee

I agree with the senior Robert E Lee as well as his descendant, Robert E. Lee V, and also the great grandsons of Thomas L. ("Stonewall") Jackson, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, that Confederate monuments should be removed from public locations to either museums or other locations, much as was done in the former Soviet Union.

In 1866, the senior Robert E. Lee wrote a letter to my collateral relative, Thomas Lafayette Rosser, last commander of the Laurel Brigade, who refused to surrender at Appomattox, and who is now buried in the Riverview cemetery in Charlottesville, VA.  In that letter Lee said the following:

"As regards the erection of such monuments as is contemplated, my conviction is that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt...would have the effect of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which Southern people labour."  

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.