The Manic Style in Political/Economic/Climate Discourse

As an example of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter cited the 1964 Senate testimony of a witness who had driven all the way from Bagdad, Arizona to denounce the regulation of interstate shipment of firearms as "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government." According to the witness, Dr. William Gorder, the proposed Dodd bill would "create chaos which can only aid our enemies." Dr. Gorder further expounded on the theme of a sacred bond between gun ownership and freedom:

Article II of the Constitution was based on the unalienable or natural right of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without the means of defending his property a citizen's life and liberty will be gone. No man can take this right of the citizen away because it is his duty to defend himself and has been so since time immemorial.

Two other witnesses from Bagdad made similar claims about the imminent threat of a Communist takeover and the connection between gun ownership and freedom. Thurman Gibson explained that "the gun is the standard of freedom in the United States of America." Burr D. Marley -- a maintenance superintendent at the Bagdad Copper Corporation -- was more explicit about what "freedom" and "liberty" meant to him:

I think most Americans today feel they were born into this Nation, into this world, in this United States, free, and we feel that the world owes us nothing as an individual. 

What we get out of this life is what we are able to get for ourselves, through our individual initiative, our hard work, and this is the way we get to the top. And this represents freedom.  

Now, to me, freedom does not come without some effort. It is a price I must pay. Now, I think in all of the gun legislation discussion this morning, we realize that there is a problem when we own guns. Somebody is going to get shot. 

Well, this is part of the price of freedom that we are going to have to pay in order to have freedom. And I, as an individual, am willing to take this chance along with some other things.

Burr Marley's credo of independence, initiative, hard work, sacrifice and success may seem trite and innocuous alongside his "paranoia" about a Communist takeover but actually it provides the key to deciphering the enigma of the resilience and persistence of such "paranoid" politics, which were once regarded as fringe.

"What is so seductive about conspiracy thinking?"

How Shocking Was Shock Therapy?

In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her  book, Shock Doctrine.  It promulgated that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result.  This was "shock therapy" that was more like destructive electroshock than any sort of therapy.  There is a lot of truth to this argument, and it highlighted underlying ideological arguments and outcomes.

The argument largely seems to hold for the original poster boy example in Chile with the Pinochet coup against the socialist Allende regime.  A military coup replaced a democratically government.  Whiole Chlle was experiencing a serious inflation, it was  not in a full-blown economic collapse.  The coup was supported by US leaders Nixon and Kissinger, who saw themselves preventing the emergence of pro-Soviet regime resembling Castro's Cuba.  Thousands were killed, and a sweeping set of laisssez faire policies were imposed with the active participation of "Chicago Boys" associated with Milton Friedman.  In fact, aside from bringing down inflation these rreforms did not initially improve economic performance, even as foreign capital flowed in, especially into the copper industry, although the core of that industry remained nationalized.  After several years the Chicago Boys were sent away and more moderate policies, including a reimposition of controls on foreign capital flows, the economy did grow quite rapidly.  But this left a deeply unequal income distribution in place, which would largely remain the case even after Pinochet was removed from power and parliamentary democracy returned.

This scenario was argued to happen in many other narions, especially those in the former Sovit bloc as the soviet Union disintegrated and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market capitalism imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus.  Although he has since  expressed regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American nations and what went down after 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs.  Klein's discussion especially of what went down in Russia also looks pretty sound by and large, wtthout dragging through the details, although in these cases the political shift was from dictatorships run by Communist parties dominated out of Moscow to at least somewhat more democratic governments, although not in all of the former Soviet republics such as in Central Asia and with many of these later backsliding towards more authoritarian governments later.  In Russia and in many oothers large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered.  Klein has also extended this argument to other nations, including South Africa after the end of apartheid.

Having said all that it must also be recognized that in some parts of the book Klein overstated her argument even to the point of including outright false informaation.  The casse that really sticks out in thie regard is Poland, arguably especially important as it was the place where the term "shock therapy" was first used.  As it turns out, many observers have an inaccurate perception of what happened there, with Klein's account not helping.  It is understandable that many might be misled given that it was the Polish finance minister during the worst of the crisis and shock in 1990-91 when economic output fell sharply and unemployment rose, Leszek Balcerowciz, who coiined the term and said that it was being applied in Poland.  But this turns out to be an exaggeration, with much of what he wanted with the support of Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF at the time not happening due to an election in 1993 that threw out the shockers and mitigated the policies substantially.  The upshot ultimately was that Poland ended up performing better than any other of the former socialist transition economies of the former Soviet bloc, becoming in fact one of the best economic performers in the entire continent of Europe, the only nation there not to go into recession in 2009 and now further ahead than any of the others economically.  While inequality and unemployment are somewhat higher than in 1989, they are not dramatically so while many other economic variables are strongly better.   The unemployment rate in August 2018 was 3.4%, higher than the less than 1% of 1989 but lower than in the US or most other European nations.  The Gini coefficient is now somewhere in the .32 to .34 range, higher than ..25-.28 of 1989, higher than in Sweden or the Czech Republic but about the same as in Germany and much lower than in Russia, the US, or China.

The vast majority of the population is unequivocally better off economically now than in 1989.  Comparing 2013 to 1989 as a ratio, real per capita GDP in Poland was 2.98, higher than any Soviet bloc transistion econoomy aside from Turkmenistan (whose data is unreliable), wih Russia at 1.44, the Czech Republic at 1.68, Hungary at 2.17, and Moldova at 0.82, now Europe's poorest economy falling below Albania at 2.55.  Poland suffered an inflation rate of 6905 in 1989 but this is was brought down fairly rapidly and is now barely above zero.  It had the least level of graft of any of these economises as of 2013, There has been major environmental cleanup, especially in its southwestern corner, formerly part of the "dirty triangle," one of the most polluted locations ever on this planet.  The rato of measured happiness between 2013 and 1989 is 1.44, higher than in any of the other transition nations.

A particularly controvrsial issue is that of the poverty rate in Poland, for which there are competing meassures.  Depending on the measure, the poverty rate in the 1980s was probably in the 5-10% range.  In 2012, 6.7% of the population was below a living wage level, while alternative measuures had it at around 11% or even as high as 16%.  The poverty rate certainly rose sharply as did income inequality in the crisis years of 1990-91, but then fell and rose again before falling aftrwards.  A low point after the transition was 2003, the year before Poland entered the EU and began receiving substantial agricultural subsidies that helped the poor largely rural southeastern region long marked by small unproductive farms (Poand had mostly private fram ownership throughout the communist period), with by one measure thr poverty rate possibly getting as high as 24%..  This is a point where Naomi Klein's analysis basically went completely off the rails.  Her story on Poland basically stops with 2003, which can be understood given her book came out in 2007.  But she claims a poverty rate in 2003 of 59% (pp. 241-242), and declares strongly that the economic quality of life in Poland had completely collapsed.  This is simply false, a wild exaggeraton,

So, how did Poland end up doing so well, actually one of the best performing economies in Europe over the last quarter century?  Crucial is that in fact it did not follow through on important parts of its supposed shock therapy, although most people (including Naomi Klein) do not seem to know this.  Very important was that it did not undo its generous social safety net, especially its generous pension system.  This was a central issue in the 1993 election, with both Blacerowicz and Sachs unhappy about this outcome.  I remember well the 1994 ASSA convention at which Sachs gave a major speech in which he basically whined about this election outcome and essentially accused the Polish people of being a bunch of spoiled brats for wanting to hang onto their suppposedly overly generous pension system.  I note that he has since changed his tune and now recognizes the stabiliing and humane nature of maintaining a decent social safety net in these economies. 

The other area where Poland did not follow through on its shock policies involved privatization, which was supposed to be rapid and complete.  It was not and has never been completed.  Indeed, today Poland has the highest rate of state owneed production in its economy at around 30% of GDP of any OECD economy, another little known fact.  Privatization was resited, especially because of fear of German companies taking over Polish firms, and what privarization that happened tended to be gradual, with a laege part of the private sector consisting of brand new firms owned by Poles, arguably the most dynamic part of the economy.In this areas, Poland actually resembles China substantially, a comparison made by a number of careful observers.  The current populist government of the Law and Justice Party has if anything tighteened restrictions on foreign ownership of banks and land, if not having engaged in any outright renationalizations as we have seen in Russia and Hungary.

Given that much of the shock therapy program did not happen or did not do so shockingly, where was there shock therapy.  This did indeed happen with respect to macro policy, driven by the problem of getting the incipient hyperinflation that had developed by 1989 in largely market socialist Poland under control.  This did involve sharp pain with falling output and rising unemployment and poverty in 1990-91, but Poland was the first of the Soviet bloc tranition economies to turn arond, with most still having declining output in 1994 and quite a few until well after that.  The pain in Poland was sharp, but it was short, and the onger run state has outperformed the others and put Poland far above where it was in 1989.

The politics of all this has been quite complicated and involved some important and curious twists and turns.  From 1989 on there has been a broad "left-right" split with probably the most important constant in this being attitudes towards the Roman Catholic Church in famously devout Poland, with being pro-Church being on the right, with people coming out of the old Commuinst Party veing on the left.  But the positions on economic policy regssrding these groups have changed over time.  in the 1989-93 period, the supporters of the shock therapy were on the right, although including the workers of the Solidarity movement.  However, by now the rightist  Law and Justice Party that is in power and attacks its rivals for being leftover communists and also strongly opposed Russia (in contrad to the populist rightist regime of Orban in Hungary who is friends with Putin), has in it populism become more the defender of both the social safety net and and supporting the state-owned enterprises compared to the supposedly crypto-communist left, now out of power.

Needless to say, there is much discussion about how it is that Poland has been by so many measures so economically successful, yet since 2015 has cmoe to be ruled by a reactionary populist party that has beeen restricting media and judicial independence, although it may be that it is going to hold back on some of this compared to Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.  I think two things are important.  One is that although Poland avoided going into recession in 2009 (largely due to staying out of the euro and also being strongly linked into the supply chains of neighboring Germany), its growth rate has slowed in more recent years while remaining positive, something happening throughout all of Eastern Europe, which has stopped catching up to Western Europe. And the second is that the frame of reference has changed.  Whereas Poland has done well compared to its formerly socialist neighbors, the population now ccompares rhemselves to those in Western Europe, especially nighboring Germany, whom they are clearly well behind.  Maany young Poles have left for the West, with a cliche in the Brexit debates in UK being about the supposed problem of "the Polish plumber" coming in to take away British jobs.  The Poles may be much happier than they were 30 years ago, but the bloom is off the rose as the transition has been long over.  Where they will end up is uncleat.

A final irony is that for all his advocacy in 1989-93 (and later as Director of the Polish central bank) for the hardline version of shock therapy that many think happened in Poland, Balcerowicz himself at one point advocated something pretty much like what came to pass, a gradual privatization and maintaining most of the sociaal safety net while advocating shock monetary policies to bring inflation under control.  This was before the transition started and Communist Party was still in control. Indeed, I met him in this period and heard him advocate pretty mch this approach, which he also advocated in print.  It was 1988 and I was teaching summer school at the University of Wsconsin-Madison when he  showed up in town as part of a general wandering around the US tlaking to people and giving talks.  We had some beers on the famous Union Terrace there by beautiful Lake Mendota.  I confess thinking him a naive dreamer with all his plans for Poland that at the time seemed so unlikely and utopian.  But that was one of those lessons for me: one should never discount a wandering prophet wihout position.  He can end up running the show and making at least some of his dreams become reality.

Barkley Rosser




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Teddy Bears' Picnic

Donald Winnicott develops the concept of transitional objects in a fairly short, remarkably lucid, engaging and, in my view, extremely important paper titled "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena." There is no reason not to read it and thus there is no reason for me to go into a pedantic rehash of Winnicott's argument.

In a nutshell, Winnicott is dealing specifically with the objects -- such as a soft toy or a piece of blanket -- that infants adopt as a substitute for the illusion that the maternal care they receive is something they have created themselves. Although, in health, the original object will be abandoned as the child matures, the potential space occupied by the transitional object is perpetually refilled in the manipulation of toys in imaginative play and eventually in the cultural creativity of adults. A little reflection will reveal that we live surrounded by our transitional objects -- things that we have significant relationships with.

Illusion -- and disillusionment -- plays a central role in Winnicott's analysis. For Winnicott, illusion isn't mere error but is the cornerstone of creative engagement with the external world. The dark side of illusion, though, is that illusions can also serve as defense mechanisms to repress anxieties rather than face the threats that generate those anxieties. Illusions are thus both paradoxical and ambiguous.

"The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet" is the title of a 1992  book by Richard Douthwaite. The "illusion" in the title doesn't allude to Winnicott's analysis of the transitional object but maybe it should.

One of the distinguishing features of economic growth is that it never means what critics think it means. Critics of growth invariably misunderstand growth. This is inevitable because economic growth always means something other than what it has been defined to mean. Critics of economic growth "mistake an output variable for an instrument," they don't realize that "economic measurements incorporate quality... and not just quantity" etc., etc.

Actually the misconception of economic growth by its critics is more fundamental than that. Critics do not understand that economic growth always means something else. It always refers to something that is undefined and ultimately undefinable. Economic growth is an illusion in the Winnicottian sense. More concretely, it is an illusion that substitutes for an illusion that substitutes for an illusion (and so on ad infinitum). It's teddy bears all the way down!

Admittedly this game can be played both ways. "Degrowth doesn't mean what you think it means," said every advocate of degrowth ever. But who is listening? The "growth cult" -- hat tip to Maurice Stans, Director of the Bureau of the Budget, 1959 -- has the upper hand.

In a fascinating article, Manuel Rivera investigated the extent to which critiques of, and alternatives to growth fail to translate from academic and popular topicality to parliamentary political discourse.

Our first finding is as trivial as it is striking. While the committee of enquiry [on ‘Growth, Well-being, and Quality of Life’], despite its enormous tensions and ultimate inability to produce substantial consensus, had agreed on economic growth never being an end itself, but only a means toward other political ends, the analyzed documents state the opposite: Out of 1095 phrases that establish a growth related purpose or hierarchical purpose-agency ratio, 92% do so by evoking growth as an end in itself.

In other words, pay no attention what we say 92% of the time, "it's only a means to an end and not an end in itself." The historical perspective that Rivera brings to the analysis, especially from Matthias Schmelzer's historical analysis of the growth paradigm, suggests an unspoken and unmentionable 'political unconscious' to that dogma of growth as an end in itself. At the historical moment when the growth paradigm became hegemonic, economic growth was promoted particularly as a bulwark against political pressure for income redistribution:

What was banished was of course not redistribution per se (which continued to operate) but the unresisted debate about redistribution, which would lead to social unrest. The formula was (and is): The more economic growth is possible, the less redistribution is needed.

It is tempting to conclude, as Rivera does, that a way to re-activate a democratic discourse about growth, its discontents and its alternatives, would be to focus on redistribution. I'm not sure it is that simple. The debate about redistribution was displaced half a century ago by the "transitional object" of growth. The world we inhabit now is quite different politically, socially and environmentally. I would nominate reparation, rather than redistribution, as what the world needs now.

No, I don't know exactly what "reparation" means in the context of global climate change. But at least I know what it doesn't mean, which is more than conventional economists can say about their desiccated concept of economic growth.

Can We Minimize Econogenic Outcomes?

I am back from the annual ASSA/AEA meetings in Atlanta.  I learned a new term that on checking I find has been around for about five years. It is "econogenic," coined by George DeMartino, who spoke on this in a session on "Ethics and Economics" held by the Association for Social Economics. It means "harm done by economists," and it is inspired by "iatrogenic," referring to harm done by physicians.  His talk focused on this and claims that the medical profession  is 50 years ahead of the economics profession on dealing with harm they do.  For physicians he praised the patients' rights movement that took off in the 1960s and has gained substantial legal support, with patients now having say on how they are treated by physicians rather than living in a world where the physician was always right.

DeMartino noted policies supported by many economists that can be defended on the grounds that they supposedly lead to gains that outweigh losses with Hicks compensation potentially able to make things right and pay off those who might be hurt.  Lots of economists have supported such policy changes when convinced that such calculations are correct.  The problem is that most of the time, indeed, the vast majority of the time, those compensating payments are not made.  And to make things worse, while those gains may exceed those losses, they often are widely spread across many people, while the costs are intensely concentrated very painfully on a smaller group of people.

His main example is increasing free trade.  Most estimates show gains outweighing losses, but those gains are widely and thinly distributed as lower prices while costs are heavilly borne by much smaller groups of people who end up losing their jobs.  While there have been some half-baked efforts in the US to provide some adjustment assistance, it has always amounted to little.  Other nations have done this far more vigorously, with those Nordics Sweden and Denmark outstanding examples.  Of course it is easier for them as much smaller and more homogeneous economies than that of the US, where growing export industries are often located far away from areas losing jobs due to imports.  These issues are not easily dealt with, but there have been amazingly few efforts to do so in the US.

Another example is "shock therapy" policies in transition and other economies.  Again, after a painful period of adjustment, most of those transition economies have ended up having higher real incomes with more democratic regimes than they had previously.  But despite these improvements in most of these nations there have remained groups of people, usually rural, older, and less well educated, who have remained worse off than they were before, although by how much has varied greatly across these nations.

Anyway, I urge more use of this term and more importantly more efforts by economists to make much more serious efforts to urge that when major policy changes happen that seriously damage identifiable groups of people that genuine efforts be made to make those compensations that can be covered by the gains from the new policies.

Barkley Rosser

On Some Predictions

I am not somebody who makes endo/beginning of year predictions, and I am not about to stsrt now.  But I have just read a guest post by Jeffrey Frankel on Econbrowser where he brags about making six accurate predictions for 2018 while not reporting on some others he made that did not work out so well.  I happened to largely agree with them when I saw him making them, with some questions on two, while myself quitely making some that failed to come true.  I shall comment.

Frankel's six predictions were: 1) market volatility would increase (presumably across many markets), one I expected and that clearly has come true; 2) the stock market would fall, which I had mixed feelings on, thinking that indeed the bull market of 2017 was over but given my expectation of high volartilty unsure how it would end and indeed the markets did hit new all time highs a few months ago, only to plunge more recently to end the year lower. 3) that Trump would switch from criticizing the Fed for not raising interest rates fast enough to for it raising them too fast, with my only caveat there being that I think he was already in 2017 makking noises about wanting the Fed not to raise interest rates too fast; 4) that minerals prices would fall, with my view on this being basically the same as my view on the stock markets, expecting greater volatility without being sure of where they would be at this point and with them indeed not too long ago being well above starting year levels if now lower; 5) tax cuts wouls raise deficits, for sure, and 6) those deficits would raise both the dollar and the current account deficit, darned tooting.

So where did things not go as I expected, or to be more precise, where I hoped, having fears that what happened might well happen?  The most important was his decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, the Iran nuclea deal.  I feared that he might ddo that, but as of a year ago he had continued to verify that Iran was obeying the agreement, and most importantly he has in place a trio of advisers supporting sticking with the agreement, notable SeeState Tillerson, NatSec Adviser McMaster, and SecDef Mattis.  As it was, he  removed those first two not too long before he withdrew from the agreement, replacing them with Iran hawks, Pompeo at State and Bolton as Nat Sec adviser, with Mattis clearly sidelined and now out as of tomorrow, with this decision a facto in his resignation.

What has surprised me more than that Trump made this withdrawal, which I certainly viewed as a serious possibility, has been that his reimposition of economic sanctions has had as big of an impact as it has.  Aside from the rump of Israel, KSA, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, and one or  two other minor powers, no other narion has supported Trump's withdrawal from the agreement, in particular none of the other signatories to the agreement: UK, France, Germany, EU, Russia, and China, with the UNSC also a party to it.  But despite this near-solid political opposition, many private corporations, especially those based in Europe, have repsonded to the threat of not having access to  US markets and have withdrawn from doing business with Iran, with France's Total a poster boy for this.  Also, many nstions not part of the agreement have reduced, if not fully elminated, importing oil from Iran.  I did not expect this level of obedience to Trump's reimposition of economic sanctions, given all that political lack of agreement, but indeed  he has gotten away with it and may yet convince the SWIFT system to cut off Iran.  The impact on the already not too-well-performing Iranian economy has by all reports been pretty substantial.

That said, Iran has responded by making no changes in policies.  Some of this is good, most importantly continuing to adhere to the JCPOA with the strong political, if not economic, support of the other signatories (some, especially Russia and to a lesser degree China, have not cut back economic support or have even increased it some).  OTOH, Iran has continued to engage in missile tests and some other activities that are not supported by other nations and which do not particularly add to peace in the region, although I understand that their obvious response is not to cave at all too demands being made by Trump.  Indeed, again, I am glad they have not responded by themselves withdrawing from the agreement and restarting substantial uranium enrichment activities.

I note as sort of an aside that I do not think despite their rhetoric that what has bothered the Israelis so much has been the threat of Iran getting nuclear weapons, which I think they know has been not likely to happen any time soon if at all.  Rather their more immediate concern has been trying to keep Hezbollah weak, whom they were unable to fully defeat in 2006.  So they see the economic sanctions as helping them by making it harder for Iran to arm Hezbollah, although I gather that Iran has not particularly altered its activity on that front.

Something else that has surpised me somewhat has been how little Trump has suffered politically for this move in the US.  Indeed, if anything it seems to have been a hit, with him getting praised for having "fulfilled a campaign promise," even if this has led to widespread condemnation and ridicule around the world.  But I guess this shows how isolated the US public is from the rest of the world, especially thos in the Fox News/Trump news bubble.  Some of his other bad decisions seem to have been similarly motivated: to satisfy unwise campaign promises.  I kind of suspect a motive for this is all the reporting about his constant lying.  Maybe he lies 15 times per day, but, wow, look at him keep this campagin promises! 

The other area where I feel I have not made good predictions, although in fact I made none and I think I accurately understood that it was unwise to make any given the unpredictability of Trump, has been with regard to his trade wars.  Really, I am not sure  what I expected, but I know that I thought that if he actually would come to an agreement with Canada and Mexico on a new NAFTA, which I did not expect, I did not expect that it would involve him keeping in place the steel and aluminum tariffs against them with them going along with that.  Of course, it may well be that his NAFTA 2.0 may fail to get ratified by the incoming Congress, but I did not expect this.  I suspect that his adherence to those tariffs really is tied to his obsession with helping the coal industry as well as more generally the industrial Midwest, even as the steel tariffs have hurt the Midwest auto industry.  But metallurgical coal output and employment is up, even if electric power demand for coal has continues to decline.  This is probably the political motive behind this particulae outcome.  But, again, I really do not know what he is up to with trade or where he is going, esepcially given that he clearly believes strongly in a lot of rank nonsense such as that bilateral trade balances indicate one nation winning at the expense od the other.

In the meantime, Happy Gegorian New Year to one and all.

Barkley Rosser

Economic Growth and Climate Change: Mistaking an Output Variable for an Instrument

When I first started arguing against the degrowthers, I thought they were a small, uninfluential fringe, important only because they had a sway over a portion of the left—what we might call the Naomi Klein left.  That was then.  Today degrowth is entering the mainstream, as can be seen by the latest David Roberts piece in Vox.  Roberts reviews a discussion between several economists on the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) website.  (INET is a Soros-affiliated outfit whose mission is to push economics in a more progressive direction.)  The key article is by Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm; using historical data, they test for the potential of decoupling economic growth and carbon emissions, finding the scale of decarbonization we need is incompatible with economic growth—hence the need to reject economic growth as a social objective.  A similar perspective is provided by Gregor Semieniuk, Lance Taylor, and Armon Rezai, while a rebuttal comes from Michael Grubb.  All three papers are authored or coauthored by important figures in the academic left or center-left, and their point of dispute reflects the expanding influence of the degrowth perspective.

If I had more time I’d write up a response in the form of a paper.  (Actually I am writing a response, but it will be a book.)  For now a blog post will have to do.  Here’s what I think these estimable economists are missing:

1. Economic growth is not, not, not a policy variable.  There is no magic button available to society that delivers a given rate of economic growth, or degrowth for that matter.  It’s an outcome of a host of factors, some of which are controllable, others not.  Indeed, as we wait for quarterly GDP numbers to be revised several quarters later, we still don’t know what economic growth or contraction we’ve experienced.  It is true that politicians often speak of the need to adopt some policy or other for sake of economic growth, but at best they are proposing to push on one of the many factors that influences it.  There is no growth dial, and even if there were, twisting it a few notches would have almost no impact on carbon emissions, which need to fall by nearly 100% within two generations.

2. It is certainly true that serious action against climate change will require giving decarbonization needs the highest priority.  In that sense, economic growth as an objective will have to recede.  This doesn’t mean growth is “bad” in any general sense, just that it now needs to rank lower among the many things we want for ourselves.  Given any level of decarbonization (and setting aside all the other competing needs, of which there are many), if we can achieve this with more growth, or less degrowth, so much the better.  The one point of agreement I have with the degrowth view is that the argument sometimes put forward that we can’t afford to take stringent measures against carbon because it will derail economic growth has to be rejected.

3. Grubb is right in his critique of Schröder/Storm insofar as there has yet been no determined action to forestall catastrophic climate change.  Extrapolating from the weak, hesitant policies of the past tells us little about what is likely to happen when policy gets serious.  We will be entering unexplored ground.

4. Standard economic models embody this extrapolation approach by applying consumption functions derived from past experience to the various goods and services that have carbon inputs.  A carbon price or some regulatory constraint is introduced, and the model is run to see how desired consumption changes.  (These models typically assume constant levels of employment and capital utilization.)  Given this structure, there is little they can tell us about the consequences of rapid, massive price changes that make the prior structure of demand unaffordable.  A carbon price of hundreds of dollars per metric ton, which is where we will need to get to within a few years of instituting a policy, is essentially a demand-forcing mechanism in the same sense that some past regulations have been technology-forcing.  It imposes a reduction in demand beyond the range of substitution people have historically faced.  It’s brutal, but that’s what it will take to live within a carbon budget compatible with 2ºC of global warming, much less 1.5º.

5. The only conceivable way to sell such a policy, and to sustain living standards in the face of such a shock, is to return most or all of the carbon revenues to the public in a progressive fashion, since ability to cope with the shock is roughly proportional to one’s income.  A per capita rebate does this efficiently, fairly and transparently.

6. The main threat to the level of economic activity is the massive capital writeoff that such a carbon policy shock would entail.  Current speculation centers on the stranded assets of fossil fuel suppliers, and this is substantial, but I estimate it constitutes no more, and probably much less, than half the capital loss faced by investors.  There are entire industries whose existing stock of investment will be rendered uneconomic by a serious carbon price; think of the airlines, for instance, and the businesses like tourism that depend on affordable air travel.  Think of the trucking fleet, the current location of residential and commercial real estate, or industrial agriculture with its large fossil fuel inputs.  Existing models consider changes in operating costs; what none of them take into account is how much of the capital stock will simply have to be scrapped, and what the economic consequences will be.  Here it is precisely labor and capital utilization that is in question.  Based on historical analogies (discussed in the book), I believe it is likely that stringent carbon policy will be accompanied by a large negative economic shock, greater than any recent demand-driven recession, including 2008.  Keynesian policy can help us get through such an episode but can’t avoid it.

7. And this means degrowth, at least for a while.  But it’s not planned or desired degrowth—on the contrary.  It is the result of having the wrong capital stock for the decarbonized economy of the future; we will have to submit to a contraction, but we should anticipate and counteract it to the extent we can.  Above all, we should adopt policies to protect and improve living standards in the lower income countries.  I predict this will be a tough sell when belts are tightening throughout the capitalist world, but if you care about social justice this will be your fight.

Goodbye To Goodlatte And The GOP Going From Lincoln To Trump

Outgoing Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte is my Congressman.  I even know him, having had civil almost friendly relations.  He has been in office for 26 years.  But his career exemplifies the degeneration of the Republican Party from a Lincoln-derived progressive force in US politics to the racist and reactionary disaster that it has become with Donald Trump as president. The quick story on this is that he was once an aide to a predecessor, M. Caldwell Butler, a "Mountain Valley Republican" who voted to impeach Richard Nixon as a member of the House Judiciary Committee back in 1974, the committee that Goodlatte has come to chair.  In contrast to his former boss, Goodlatte, who entered office as a supposed "moderate," if not a full-blown Lincoln-derived Mountain Valley Republican, he has suppressed investigations of Trump and done much worse.

While he has supported a long list of corporate special interests, probably the ultimate sign of how low he and his party have fallen is his final act as Judiciary Committee Chair, reported in today's Washington Post.  He single handedly blocked a bill that was unanimously passed by the Senate to protect Native American women from violent attacks.  His reason fo this was totally aobscure and ridiculous, a trivial concern that the bill favored certain agencies over others in making complaints about such violence.  The bill was originated by outgoing Dem Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of ND, but apparently it will be reintroduced by Lisa Murkowski of AK next year, and hopefully it will pass.   Indeed, I really do not know why Goodlatte is going out on this.  What makes this all the more appalling is that our Congressional district contains the largest Native Indian tribe in Virginia, the Monocans, who have had a long history of being ignored and discriminated against.

For those who do not know the fuller history here, the Shenandoah Valley has long been the base of the Republican Party in Virginia, with few slaves held west of the Blue Ridge.  So this really does date back to Abraham Lincoln and the anti-slavery progressive Republican Party, with their descendants becoming these now nearly extinct "Mountain Valley Republicans" who were known for being reasonably liberal. There are still a handful of these folks in the state legislature, even as the Valley has largely gone hardline conservstive.  The journey of Goodlatte folows this, going from the "moderation" of his former boss, Caldwell, and even his early years in the House, to his shameful final performance, leading silly hearings that had James Comey testifying in secret overt his objection, and then this final insult, this blocking of helping out vicitmized Native American women, almost a caricature of the Trumpist Republican Party.

Abraham Lincoln, whose father was born in Goodlatte's district a few miles north of where I live, would be utterly ashamed of this conduct.

Barkley Rosser

The US Postal Service in a Parallel Universe

Imagine that, instead of the dinosaur of a postal service we have today—the product, among other things, of congressional insistence that no government outfit can compete with private business in lucrative new markets—we had an entrepreneurial, innovative public dynamo.  In this other universe, the USPS was always on the lookout for new opportunities to build on its postal infrastructure, providing better services to the public while broadening its revenue stream.

USPSʹ, this better but hypothetical twin, greeted the arrival of the internet a generation ago with anticipation.  Yes, it was obvious that email would be a threat to its core business of moving mail, but there would also be new possibilities for people to shop and do other business remotely.  If a postal customer goes online to find a new product to clean his bamboo floor and decides to buy it, somehow that product has to find its way to its new owner.  This is a job for the post office!

Driven by the urge to leverage its vast delivery infrastructure, USPSʹ years ago set up a website for remote shopping.  They encouraged producers to list their goods by making it free; the postal service stood to profit from providing the logistics for any transaction, so there was no need to cream any revenue from the site itself, meaning no need to sell advertising.  Of course, they hired top programming talent to make the site as searchable as possible and improve the online shopping experience for simplicity and transparency.  The idea of allowing users to review and rate products was imported from other sites and found to be reasonably effective.

Over time, our hypothetical USPSʹ became something like Amazon, but Amazon wedded to the delivery infrastructure of the traditional postal service.  No Jeff Bezos got to be a gazillionaire out of it, there was no crass commercialism and as a public institution it was amenable to democratic input.  The health information and products site, co-managed with the National Institutes of Health, was a big hit.

Of course, it never happened this way.  Instead we have a private octopus of an online shopping site called Amazon and a hobbled, money-losing public postal service that’s prohibited from even thinking about entering a new market—but provides crucial, subsidized logistics for its Amazonian overlord.  That’s the world of today.  But tomorrow?  Why not think about acquiring Amazon as a public utility, or even setting up a public competitor to it?  Where’s the road that takes from where we are now to the alternative universe we’d rather be in?

Real Military Pay

Donald Trump lies about everything including military pay:

Trump Brags To Troops About A Fictional Giant Pay Raise He Got Them - The president told military personnel in Iraq that they’ll get a raise of over 10 percent, their first in a decade. But it’s 2.6 percent, and they get a hike every year.

Dave Jamieson even notes that Bill Kristol has called out Trump on this whopper. But to me this is not the story. The real story is that Trump thinks our troops are stupid. As I read this sad account, I thought of a classic paper by Robert Lucas on the role of monetary policy in the New Classical model. Lucas postulated several island economies each with one individual who observes his own wage but not the general price level. Business cycles were generated by unexpected changes in the money supply which drives up everyone’s wages but people have yet to catch on to the fact that the general price index had also increased. I always found this an odd way of explaining persistent changes in output since most people shop at least on a weekly basis. But maybe the soldiers during the Vietnam War did not know their at home spouse and kids were facing higher grocery prices. But with the internet and advance telecommunications, this story is not tenable today even for our soldiers overseas. Dave links to this informative source:

Annual military pay raises are linked to the increase in private sector wages, as measured by the Employment Cost Index (ECI). In the 1990's, the annual military pay raise was capped at one-half percent below private-sector growth unless specifically granted a larger increase by Congress. The FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act directed that pay raises for 2000 through 2006 would automatically be one-half percent above the private-sector wage increases. Pay raises beginning in 2007 are equal to the increase in the ECI. Pay raises may exceed these automatic levels if authorized and funded by Congress.

Trump got the troops nothing – the 2.6% nominal increase for 2019 was automatic and will capture the nominal increase in ECI. For all this talk of nominal increases year by year, one would think our troops would realize that a nominal increase in ECI that barely keeps pace with the rise in the consumer price index does not represent an increase in real compensation. The point of our graph is to look at real compensation changes from 2006 to 2018 using the percentage increases stated in our link as compared to what has happened to the CPI from 2006 (base year = 1) through today. Note for some years real compensation did rise but for other years real compensation fell. I assumed that a soldier received $30,000 in 2006 and with these nominal increases, his nominal pay had risen to $38,779 by 2018. But with 2018 prices being 29.75% higher than they were in 2006, his real pay on net has declined. We do not know what inflation will be for 2019 but we should not be surprised if it turns out to be around 2.5%, which would mean real compensation will not grow appreciably. Our troops get that even if their Commander in Chief does not.

Taxes Up 30%!

A couple of months ago yours truly complained a bit about some fiscal dishonesty coming from Team Trump:

He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in tax revenues.

But if we look at customs duties we do see an increase in a category that represents a very modest part of Federal tax collections. Back in the 3rd quarter of 2017, these collections were a mere $38,428 million but by the 3rd quarter of 2018, they had risen to $51,383 million. A 33.7% nominal increase in a year represents a 31% real increase. Team Trump take a bow! Of course this is not only an inefficient means of collecting taxes but also one likely to hit the average Joe the most. It is also a drop in the bucket and pales to the reduction in real tax revenues from that income tax giveaway to the well to do.

On the Front Lines of Climate Change: Old White Homeowners, Many of them Upper Class

The other night I was sitting at home, locked in a conversation about climate change and race.  How is this a racial issue, I asked?  I realize that the society I live in has pervasive racism, and one should always keep this in mind, but how specifically is climate change worse for nonwhites?

Well, it’s all about first and worst impacts, I was told.  People of color are on the front lines.  They are the one experiencing the most severe consequences, and therefore failure to act against climate change is environmental racism.  The key example is Hurricane Katrina.  That was an early impact of global warming, and what was it if it wasn’t a racist horror show?  Whose houses were flooded?  Who was forced to flee the city?  Who were gunned down by police and blocked by white vigilantes along the way?  Whaddyamean climate change isn’t about racism?

OK, I replied.  I understand the racial geography of New Orleans, and the aftermath of Katrina was every bit the nightmare you say it was.  But what about the recent Camp Fire in California?  That was an early impact of climate change too, and lots of people were killed.  Even more lost everything they had.  But from what I could see in the coverage of it, most of the folks out there were white working people or retirees who were priced out of the Bay Area.  I guess that makes the vanguard of the movement against climate change a bunch of older white dudes.

And then there was Hurricane Sandy.  Think about all those upper middle-class or wealthier white folks who lost all their possessions when the storm washed away their oceanfront properties.  This is more evidence, that climate change is mainly about white people, right?  People whose big picture window living rooms look right into the maw of sea level rise.

No, it’s not about race.  Climate change has worst-and-first effects in a variety of places—fires, storms, coastal inundation.  If you want to look for the truly worst off, you’ll find them on small, low-lying islands or in tropical regions facing horrific heatwaves.  Yes, the front lines are overrepresented by poor people who can’t afford to escape the waves or air condition themselves against the heat, but all disasters sort us on this scale.  Race?  Not really.  This doesn’t mean we can ignore racism, just that we don’t have to invent it where it’s not a factor.  There’s enough of the real stuff to go around.

The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS

Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days.  Today, "Mad Dog" Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as "the last adult in the room" among the Trump national security team, announced his resignation effective at the end of February.  This is not a coincidence, although his letter makes it clear that he had been thinking about this serously for some time.

In his letter the most fundamental issue seems to be his concern for proper relations with US allies, with Trump obviously treating nearly all of them badly.  So a  crucial sentence is the following.

"While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies."

Later after noting that 29 democracies supported the US after the 9-11 attack as showing the importance of allies he writes:

"The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof."

Now I have mixed feelings about various pieces of this.  Many of those upset by this sudden and unexpected decision by Trump are focused on Iran and Russia and Assad in Syria: that Assad will remain in power with both Russia and Iran influential there.  I agree Assad is a murderous dictatorial creep, but Russia (and before it the USSR) has had a naval base there in Tartus since 1971 that they are not remotely going to give up.  The Iranians are less important,so the worry about them is mostly silly huysteria.  And on Assad, those most likely to replace him were radical Sunnis allied with al-Qaeda, the group that attacked the US on 9-11.

Where this gets bad involves indeed ISIS or ISIL or Daesh to give some of its other names.  They really are a bad bunch, worse even than al Qaeda from whom they split.  Trump says we can leave because they have been defeated, but they have not been defeated.  They have been pushed out of all urban areas of any size they once controlled, but they continue to hold out in a final desert area on the Iraqi border in the desert, and for whatever reason nobody has been able to finally defeat them.  I fear withdrawal of US troops at this point, likely to be followed by a Turkish invasion to push out the Kurdish forces allied to the US that defeated ISIS in their old capital of Raqqa, will allow the obviously still pretty strong ISIS to revive and retake some of their former territories.  I suspect this is also a concern of Mad Dog Mattis.

Anyway, aside from the Turks signing a $3 billion Patriot missile deal after Trump made this announcement, this decision seems to be completely incoherent.  The US is against Iran, but Iran gains, not to mention Hezbollah?  That Trump may be pleasing Putin, well, what do we expect?  And as for the Kurds?  Well, we have screwed them over many times.  No wonder the Mad Dog is walking out.

Barkley Rosser

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology

As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”.  Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and the incentives these things generate—were everything and agency, meaning culture and consciousness, were nothing.  The latter was sometimes claimed to be derivative of the form.

Then we had a cultural turn.  Now it seems it’s all about consciousness and ideology, of which economic structures are a pale reflection.  Neoliberal ideology is said to have seeped its way into the heads of intellectuals, journalists and politicians—perhaps even the public at large—and this explains things like deregulation, privatization and the ubiquity of outsourcing and global value chains.  It’s even possible to have 500-page treatises about the failures of capitalism that make no reference at all to the empirical structure of the economy, only modes of thought, as I point out here.

According to this view, the various failings of our society, from the inability to act on climate change to mass incarceration to the imposition of market logic on higher education, all converge as consequences of neoliberal hegemony.  But what is neoliberalism?  It is usually described as a philosophy, born sometime between the fall of the Hapsburgs (Slobodian) and the postwar convening of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Mirowski et al.), and surely there is truth to these well-documented accounts.  But should we understand the past four decades or so as primarily the product of a sea-change in thought, the end result of these precursor currents?

The position I would like to take digs beneath the opposition between structure and agency, the empirical economy and the conceptions people have of it.  No doubt the rules and incentives that direct economic life are the product of choice, and therefore consciousness, just as consciousness is strongly influenced by the problems our economic circumstances throw at us and the possible solutions it affords.  Shouldn’t there be a coevolutionary process down there somewhere that encompasses both of them?

Identifying such processes is the task of historians, and as we know, understanding the present as history without the benefit of hindsight is an enormous challenge.  In my preferred world, this would be the project of political economists, giant armies of them, adequately encouraged and funded.  We would see a constant flow of books and articles on the matter, hashing out points of debate.  The real world is quite different, alas.

Here is a thought intended to provoke research in this area.  How do we understand the timing of the neoliberal turn?  In the English-speaking world it took hold a few years before or after 1980, a bit later elsewhere.  What transpired to account for this?

A standard narrative is that the Keynesian postwar order cracked up over the crisis of inflation during the mid-1970s.  A conservative alternative that trusted markets more and government less was vindicated by events and established its intellectual dominance.  After a lag of a few years, policy followed along.  One can critique this on matters of detail: economic growth remained stronger during the 70s than it would be thereafter, anti-Keynesians did not have a superior understanding of economic developments, and no intellectual revolution was complete within the space of just a few years.  But the deeper problem, it seems to me, is that this attributes vastly exaggerated agency to coteries of intellectuals.  Do we really think that the elections of Reagan and Thatcher, for instance, were attributable to a shift in grad school syllabi in economics and related fields?

I propose an alternative hypothesis.  From the end of WWII to the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, a large portion of capital was illiquid, its value tied to its existing use.  The rich sought to diversify their portfolios, of course, but there were limits.  Stock market transactions were beclouded by large information costs, and share ownership tended to be more stable and concentrated.  Fortunes were rooted in specific firms and industries.  In such a situation there were significant divisions within the capitalist class that attenuated its overall political clout.  Industries divided according to policy preferences, and political parties, which were essentially interest group coalitions, attracted different segments of this class.  (In the US the Republicans were just as much an interest group coalition as the Democrats, just different interests like small retail business, domestic mining, nonunion manufacturing, etc.)  Public policy in this dispensation, whatever its ostensible justification, reflected sectoral influence.

Since the early 1970s capital ownership has become substantially more fungible in every respect.  Equity funds of various sorts established themselves as institutional players, allowing individual capitalists to diversify via investment in these funds.  Regulatory restrictions on capital movements were dismantled or bypassed.  New information technology dramatically reduced (but not eliminated!) the fog of all financial markets.  And firms themselves became separable bundles of assets as new technology and business methods allowed for more integrated production across ownership lines.  The combined result is a capitalist class with more uniform interests—an interest in a higher profit share of income and greater freedom for capital in every respect.  The crisis in real returns to capital during the 1970s, the true economic instigator, galvanized this reorganization of the political economy.  (In the US the S&P peaked in 1972 and then lost almost half its inflation-adjusted value by the end of the decade.  This is not an artifact of business cycle timing.)

Of course, all understanding of the world is mediated by the way we think about it.  The wealthy didn’t say to themselves, “Gee, my assets are taking a hit, so the government needs to change course.”  They turned to dissident, conservative thinkers who explained the “failures” of the 70s as the result of too little concern for the engine of growth, which (of course) was understood to be private investment.  Market-friendly policy would, it was said, reinvigorate investment and spur economic growth.  Keynesianism was seen as having failed because it took investors for granted, taxing and regulating them and competing with them for finance; politicians needed to show respect.  It’s understandable why capitalists would interpret their problems in this way.

The other side of the coin was political influence over ideas.  Intellectuals who advanced the positions we now call neoliberal were rewarded with research funding, jobs and influence over government policy.  When the World Bank and the IMF were remade in the wake of the 1982 debt crisis, this influence was extended internationally.  Lending conditionality reproduced in developing countries the same incentives that had shifted the intellectual environment in the core capitalist world.

This hypothesis—and it’s important to be clear that’s what it is—also gives us an explanation for why the 2008 crisis, while it did provoke a lot of reconsideration by intellectuals—did not result in meaningful institutional or policy change: the underlying political economic factors were unaltered.  And it implies that further intellectual work, necessary as it is, will not be enough to extricate us from the shackles of neoliberal political constraints.  For that we need to contest the power that undergirds them.

Rah Rah Economics

Greg Mankiw read Trumponics by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore so we don’t have to:

When economists write, they can decide among three possible voices to convey their message. The choice is crucial, because it affects how readers receive their work. The first voice might be called the textbook authority. Here, economists act as ambassadors for their profession. They faithfully present the wide range of views professional economists hold, acknowledging the pros and cons of each ... The second voice is that of the nuanced advocate. In this case, economists advance a point of view while recognizing the diversity of thought among reasonable people ... The third voice is that of the rah-rah partisan. Rah-rah partisans do not build their analysis on the foundation of professional consensus or serious studies from peer-reviewed journals. They deny that people who disagree with them may have some logical points and that there may be weaknesses in their own arguments. In their view, the world is simple, and the opposition is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Rah-rah partisans do not aim to persuade the undecided. They aim to rally the faithful.

Guess which voice Laffer and Moore used throughout their book. While I appreciate Mankiw’s three categories – one has to wonder how we should place some of the over the top arguments for the 2017 tax cut by Republican economists not in this White House. Mankiw to his credit writes:

The authors offer no credible evidence that the tax changes passed will lead to such high growth. Most studies yield far more modest projections. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trump tax cuts will increase growth rates by 0.2 percentage points per year over the first five years. A study by Robert Barro (a conservative economist at Harvard) and Furman (a liberal economist at Harvard) published in 2018 estimates that the tax bill will increase annual growth by 0.13 percentage points over a decade. And that is if the changes are made permanent. Barro and Furman estimate that as the legislation is written, with many of the provisions set to expire in 2025, it will increase annual growth by a mere 0.04 percentage points over ten years.

Liberal economists had a bit of a debate in 2016 over some rah rah economics on our side. Rather than revisit that mess, can I slightly object to this from Mankiw?

The tribalism of Moore and Laffer’s approach stems primarily from their devotion to a single issue: the level of taxation. Obama pursued higher taxes, especially on higher-income households. His goal was to fund a federal government that was larger and more active than many Republicans would prefer and to use the tax system to “spread the wealth around,” as he famously told Joe Wurzelbacher, known as Joe the Plumber, a man he encountered at a campaign stop in Ohio in 2008. By contrast, Moore and Laffer want lower taxes, especially on businesses, which in their view would promote faster economic growth.

Smaller governments do not necessarily mean faster growth. Conversely, some progressives argue that the economic plan put forth by Senator Sanders could have led to a fairer society and somewhat faster growth by getting closer to full employment and the use of more public investment. But Mankiw and I agree that anyone who promises growth rates of 4% per year or more on a permanent basis are doing rah rah. While I’m at it – permit me to nitpick two other parts of this otherwise interesting review of what has to be a really stupid book:

The bottom line is that for a politician seeking election, opposing free trade is a lot easier than supporting it. Many voters are more likely to view foreign nations as threats to U.S. prosperity than as potential partners for mutually advantageous trade. Economists have a long way to go to persuade the body politic of some basic lessons from Econ 101.

Free trade may be a move to efficiency but we must acknowledge free trade may lead to equity issues. I have asked this before but does the Harvard economics department teach the Stopler-Samuelson theorem? Finally, a strong objection to this:

To be fair to Trump and other anti-globalization zealots, amid all their mis-information and bluster is a kernel of truth. The United States produces a lot of intellectual property, including movies, software, and pharmaceuticals. The failure of countries, especially China, to enforce the copyrights and patents that protect intellectual property constitutes a loss to the United States similar to outright theft.

Pharmaceutical companies make a ton of profits off of their patents as it allows them to enforce extreme and costly monopoly privileges. If the Chinese government wants a more competitive drug market, perhaps we should emulate their policies not object to them.

100 Percent Of US Senate Against MBS

Wow. Sometime ago I here called for Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bib Salman bin Abdulaziz al Sa'ud, (MbS) to be rmoved from his position.  How he is punished beyond that for his crimes, I do noit care, especially as I think being prevented from becoming the King of Saudi Arabia will be for him the worst punishment.

So the for once the US Senate agrrees with me, 100%, really.  Hey, I have to cheer such an event that has never happened brfore and probably will not again. Yay!  The US Senate has 100% voted to declare that MbS is guilty for ordering the murder of Kamal Khashoggi.  They are right.  He is guilty guilty guuilty. 

He needs to be removed, and the sooner the broader Saudi royal family figures this out and moves to replace him, the better, really, for the world as a whole, given the ongoing important role that nation plays in the world economy worldwide.  It is clear thart he came to power thanks to Jared Kushner and the Trump admin, who supported his coup removal of his predecessor, Muhammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Sa'ud, who was deeply respected by US mil-intel apparati. MbS had become Defense Sec and was able to send his guys to MbN's palace and imprison him until he gave up and let MbS replace him as Crown Prince.  None of this woudl have happened without Trump and Jared Kushner approving of it, which they did.

So now the  US Senate has figured out that I was right that this was a totsl disaster, that MbS is completely unacceptable as a leader of Saudi Arabis.  This is not a matter of the US declaring against a democraticallhy elected leader.  This is ultimately an absolute monarchy now facing its deeply difficult succession problem.  Folllowing corrupt influence from tehe US, their leaders have made a bad decision, choosing MbS.

I appreciate that it may not be that easy for the royal famoly to get rid of this power hungry murderer, but I applaud this unanimous vote from the US Senate.  He needs to go.

BTW, some time ago there were rumors that a "Co-Prince"  might be approved, although with MbS retaining the succession right.  That Co-Prince is the current Governor of Mecca, a very serious position in that nation, Khalid bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz al Sa'ud, 78 years old.  I actually know KbF and can attest that he is a deeply intelligent and reasonable  person who would make an excellent replacement for the worthless and ddisgusting and degraded MbS.  While KbF is super competent, the legally in place person MbS violently removed, Muhamed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Sa'ud.

In any case, recent Saudi policy has been an outrage, with its war in Yemen the extreme manifesation of how  bad MbS is.  The Senate has also voted against the US supporting this awful war, although not unanimously, and  with the old House of Paul Ryan not supporting any of this.

In any case, I applaud this unanimous vote for MbS to go.  Really, the Saudi royal family needs to get its you know what together and overcome the current king's support fot his discredited son and put something more reasonable in as Crown Prince.  There are several candidates available who would hopefully stop the horrendous war in Yemen.

Barkley Rosser