A Welcoming Community
Here is Trump’s new NATO that disrupts the Chinese One-Belt One-Road Initiative.
Here is another case of the wrecking crew making their own disruptive reality while the opposition is wondering “What’s happening?” It seems we’ve been too conservative in our imagination of the pushback that the global fossil fuel industry will exert on those states that have reserves of fossil fuel. I wonder when Nigeria signs on.
A whack on the side of the head that might wake some folks up.
I don’t necessarily agree with the “Gee whiz” and optimism in Bartlett’s article. The technology is still hard to pull off, and BitCoin still depends on “foreign exchange” with other currencies. The exchanges are the current profit centers driving the currency forward.
Moreover radical libertarianism has its own problems unless creativity is benignly focused, which it might be in some projects and not in others.
Networks have nodes; nodes gain power as they gain traffic, as any blog owner recognizes. Monetizing nodes is no different from monetizing blogs. And nodes arrange themselves, all things being equal, in hierarchies of salience to the network.
So what to make of Parallel Polis and its visions of future global politics?
What to make when there are independent essentially free networks offering open source encrypted access for all sorts of apps?
My key question: Who pays that huge electric bill for all those servers? Who buys the servers? Who mines the minerals that go into those servers? Yes, they have to do with resource and energy constraints.
But those natural resource constraints are much less exacting than the constraints facing the world’s militaries. One way or the other environmental limits will end war, probably long before the Parallel Polis new financial society arrives.
What is clear is that capitalist society in its pure form cannot survive its own disruptions, wars, and destruction of the planet.
What is not clear is the new form of post-capitalist civilization. It is a difficult to predict as post-feudal society was able to predict the consequences of its religious collapse and religious wars. Or the effects that would ripple out during the Enlightenment from Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press.
Just finished reading Joyce Chaplin’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. Today I discovered she tangled with Ted Cruz over the fact that it was the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that granted the US sovereignty, no matter how much legitimacy the Battle of Yorktown gave to the individual states. Franklin was a big player in the emergence of the new capitalist civilization. From the advice of Poor Richard and The Way to Wealth of self-advancement, creating the entrepreneurial frame of mind to the research into electricity that in the 1900s allowed the fractional-horsepower electric motor to drive manufacturing and electric waves and pulses to drive communication. Franklin’s research into the Gulf Stream created reliable and shipping in the 19th century that took advantage of knowledge of the weather and ocean currents. His advocacy of abolition of slavery created cheap wage labor after the Civil War, but paid enough to form a consumer base when coupled with fossil-fuel driven transportation and energy generation that subsidized manufacturing costs.
What he didn’t touch was the beginnings of management theory, worked out in the sugar-to-rum slave plantations of Barbados and Jamaica, transferred to cotton plantations, and then to the cotton mills of the British Midlands. (Engels owned one of them. Marx was subsidized from manufacturing income. That’s how they knew whereof they spoke. Not workers at all.) Franklin was an apprentice for his brother, ran away, then had his own apprentices. Then his own slaves, who became “servants” in France. Changing civilizations make complicated situations. Do the folks at Parallel Polis understand the ins and outs of the consequences of their technology?
Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo has a post that extends a theme I have often hit on here — geographic diversity in campaigning. And retaking legislatures is the ground on which to build those skills.
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: It’s not how many they are but where they are many
But we are where we are, in part, because Democrats chasing the “emerging Democratic majority” saw changing demographics as favoring them in presidential and statewide races. They abandoned the countryside, focusing instead on the concentrations of blue voters in the cities. That left the plains and mountain states and rural counties (and their elected seats) to the tender mercies of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Ask the South Vietnamese how holding the cities and leaving the countryside to their opponents worked out.
And where the Democratic Party is right now is the inability to hold the urban base and pursue persuadable rural (especially white rural voters) or hit enough issues of all working people to bring in persuadable white working class voters in cities and suburbs. Demographics (and psychographics for that matter, among the Trump campaign veterans) fail when they become the basis of stereotyping. There are a lot of cross-current voters who are persuadable, despite the mythology of the absolutely polarized electorate. That polarization, like Schrodinger’s cat, only determines its state of being when observed at election time.
Julian Borger, The Guadian: Trump Summons Entire Senate to White House Briefing
Senators are to be briefed by the defence secretary, James Mattis, and Tillerson on Wednesday. Such briefings for the entire senate are not unprecedented but it is very rare for them to take place in the White House, which does not have large secure facilities for such classified sessions as Congress.
Officials said the briefing would take place in the auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which can be adapted for such an event.
Boy-oh do the questions roll out.
Why just the Senate? What does Trump see as their role in his North Korea policy and actions?
The symbolism of being commanded to come to the President’s support is all over McConnell’s and Trump’s maneuver here. But we should have expected that, right?
One carrier group in the area and not completely positioned yet is less than most analysts think required to actually conduct military action. So, this has the air of a relaxed pitch for support, right? Except for the strange venue.
The state department appeared unaware on Monday that Tillerson would be delivering the briefing.
Mattis will also be briefing the Senators.
Other questions:
Can this auditorium be fitted out as situation room for Senators to watch a fait accompli?
We know Trump’s preference for show-and-tell setting the framework of discussions. The Chinese leader enjoyed his Mar a Lago meal while 59 cruise missiles created an object lesson (drama, drama) for him to talk to North Korea.
Why the long section of atta-boys to Xi Jinping in Borger’s article?
In recent days Haley and other US officials have underlined China’s helpfulness in seeking to increase pressure on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
“Working with China for the first time — they have really been our partner in trying to make sure that we hold him at bay, and I think it’s a new day when you’ve got China and the United States working together on a statement to condemn North Korea,” Haley said.
“They put pressure on him. He feels it. That’s why he’s responding this way. And I think it is a different day.”
My guess is that this “briefing” will be huge media bait tomorrow, distracting from whether the government will be shut down shortly.
The first two maps tell the story. The remaining maps show where the two candidates must assemble their winning margin.
Yes, francophones will get more out of this, but the maps communicate a lot of information.
Use the comments for translation or paraphrase of any significant text in the article.
Pat Lang’s Sic Semper Tyrannis has another interesting data point. I think there is more to the story of Bannon and Flynn not wanting a US Middle East war. Like I say, politics becoming Byzantine and byzantine.
Sic Semper Tyrannis: McMaster is pushing for US war in Syria – Cernovich
Harvey and McMaster have been trying to subvert Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph Dunford and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Mattis and Dunford support working with our allies in the fight against ISIS. Harvey and McMaster are advocating for a massive American-only ground force.
Two men were standing in between another U.S.-led war in the Middle East – General Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon.” Cernovich
There are some nuances here, I believe. “US-led war” means “US unilateral war, without the encumbrance of NATO or other allies”. “Another US-led war” means open alliance with Russia and Syria to bring the Syrian civil war to an end; I’m not sure what it means with respect to Iraq and DAESH/ISIS/ISIL; Flynn and Bannon never were quoted much on that or it was more in alignment with conventional wisdom. Whatever is going on, I do not trust Bannon and Flynn to be peaceniks with regard to the Middle East. And Flynn seems to have had it in for either Iran or the de facto Shi’ite Crescent that might occur with a Shi’ite-dominated Iran, Assad continuing in power, and Hizbullah power in Lebanon.
We are getting stories of personal infighting now, but we are getting a clearer picture of the policy banners that each faction is flying.
Needless to say, Mattis and Dunford are closer aligned to where Hillary Clinton’s position would have been, except Dunford might be still working the same strategy Obama set in motion until there is an ISIS endgame in Iraq and Syria. Or at least their positions do not diverge as widely as do McMasters’s and Flynn’s from continuity in national security policy.
Juan Cole has an interesting spin on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law, which at one point was a required reading for a college liberal education in the US.
Juan Cole, Informed Comment: As Trump Breaks it, Top Ten Things we need to do to Fix America
Just to summarize:
This is a discussion that small-d democrats need to have urgently. Most of what Juan Cole discusses can be done locally through individual and small group action with existing supportive institutions, generally non-profits and the remaining healthy functions of government. The latter items, especially the ombudsman function and slowing the rush to war are the more difficult struggles. (You thought opposing Trump would be as easy as bringing down the New Deal was for Repubicans?)
Here’s the peril in not moving quickly something along these lines. There is a Constitutional Convention call moving through state legislatures. If the required number of state legislative calls is approved, the state will send conservative corporate and primarily white delegates to the Convention with the political instructions to undo those parts of the current Constitution that they don’t like. In this event, the entire Bill of Rights is in formal danger; it is long past being in practical danger. When the Bill of Rights ceases to be the norm of government action, even if often breached, the United States fails the 240-year-old experiment in self-government that against entrenched interests has the vision of being extended to everyone. Too much “realism” becomes the cynicism that gives up on the struggle to make that vision a reality in fact.
Juan Cole has given a point to change the discussion in a more helpful direction than it has been since the 2000 election first breached Constitutional norms.
I don’t think any observer of last year’s election thought otherwise no matter what few lefties were dissuaded from voting by Clinton’s campaign of “There is no alternative”. It was Clinton’s failure to change or offer change more than Trump’s attraction that cause their sitting out.
Read this carefully. It foretells where the extra $54 billion for defense is going. And the consequences will cause the defense budget to only go up.
Trump’s reckless killing of civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen is many things: barbaric, amoral, and criminal. It is also, ironically, likely to strengthen support for the very groups — ISIS and al Qaeda — that he claims he wants to defeat, given that nothing drives support for those groups like U.S. slaughter of civilians (perhaps the only competitor in helping these groups is another Trump specialty: driving a wedge between Muslims and the West).
But what Trump’s actions are not is a departure from what he said he would do, nor are they inconsistent with the predictions of those who described his foreign policy approach as non-interventionist. To the contrary, the dark savagery guiding U.S. military conduct in that region is precisely what Trump expressly promised his supporters he would usher in.
One of the things blocking unity in opposition to Trump is the fact that too many of his opponents have halo effects and horns effects relative to the Democratic Party and critics of the Democratic Party. We have forgotten that word that was so current about Bush in the 2003-2006 era — “nuance” — in the rush to imitate the hardball tactics of Republicans. I once thought that imitation would strengthen Democrat’s position; I now see that the long-ago stated values of the Democratic Party get undermined by such chicanery. Stop writing off people.
Masha Gessen gets it right again.
Masha Gessen, New York Times Opinion: Don’t Fight Their Lies with Lies of Your Own
The bad news is that Mr. Trump is succeeding. Fraudulent news stories, which used to be largely a right-wing phenomenon, are becoming increasingly popular among those who oppose the president. (I prefer not to add to the appeal of such stories by citing them, but an example is the string of widely shared items that purported to link every death of a more-or-less prominent Russian man to Russian interference in the election.) Each story dangles the promise of a secret that can explain the unimaginable. Each story comes with the ready justification that desperate times call for outrageous claims. But each story deals yet another blow to our fact-based reality, destroying the very fabric of politics that Mr. Trump so clearly disdains.
Proper resistance is occurring against administrative actions and in opposition to legislation. Yesterday’s victory was one of authentic resistance for which Resistance(tm) is trying to claim credit. The grassroots actually got it without the Washington bubble media campaign.
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: Elections have unintended consequences
The problem with Rich’s analysis is the “election to come” part. Elections involve math. At the end of Election Day we count votes. Not empathy, not good intentions, not programs, not policies, and not hurt feelings. Whether Democrats can win back control of Congress and state legislatures is about numbers.
Another problem — and this is hardly Rich’s alone — is that “Trump voters” always seems to imply red states, or to at least to conflate red states with Trump voters. And after reading Rich’s take on Trump voters, the knee-jerk response is to say to hell with them. But there are more than Republican voters in those red states. Those states each get two U.S. senators and a number of representatives; they each have governors and legislatures, many dominated by Republicans just as crazy as Trump. Abandoning them is not a progressive option.
Democratic activists should not hold their breaths waiting for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) to come to Jesus and become more than “old boys” reelection funds. And the jury is out on whether a Democratic National Committee that snapped up Hillary for America veterans who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory will, as promised, restore Howard Dean’s 50 state plan in more than name only, or adopt a time horizon that looks beyond the next election. Their focus on (what they consider) sure bets is why state organizations have withered since Obama pulled the plug on “50 state.” But liberal, grassroots activists cannot ignore red states unless they have started ignoring math the way Trump voters ignore climate science. Nationally and locally the numbers don’t add up for winning back Congress and writing off red states. (Ask Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina what it means leaving state legislatures in Republican hands.) Liberals cannot have both a winning 50 state plan and a policy, as Rich’s piece implies, of giving 60 percent of states the middle finger.
If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. Too many Republican sinecures in red states go uncontested because dispirited Democrats there have neither the training, the funding, nor the infrastructure to contest them. When Dean sent organizers into such places in 2005, some had not heard from the national party in years. By 2006, Democrats were chalking up big wins. Conditions are ripe for them to do so again.
What I think the fixation on taking down Trump with accusations of Russian involvement is hampering.
It would be a shame to squander all that fresh activism and youthful enthusiasm on misdirected anger. But perhaps that’s what Rich meant by suggesting Democrats weaponize it. “Instead of studying how to talk to ‘real people,'” he wrote, “might they start talking like real people?” Absolutely. So long as they do it not from TV studios but on the stump in districts and in races they need to win to regain majorities in state houses and in Congress. As The King suggested, “A little less conversation, a little more action.”
And even at the local level there are establishment Democrats trying to put this new energy back in the box. Another three months of this shortsightedness will kill it, which might be their intent. Gotta protect those lobbying sources of money, you know, the ones that at the state level play both sides of the street.