Trump

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Republican Rot?

This is going to sound parochial to those of you not steeped in America’s current internal conversation.

Poor David Brooks, his column in today’s New York Times is entitled “The G.O.P. Is Rotting”. He is correct. His column is a long lament about his sense of loss. The problem is that the thing[s] he thinks he has lost were largely imaginary. The Republican Party he so longs for was never the party he describes. And the populism he subsequently spits at is not the outright evil he proposes it is.

No: Brook’s problem is that his beloved conservative cause was too easily co-opted by the crassness, corruption, misogyny, and outright narcissism of Trump. All the supposed excellence he lists in his article was no defense against the marauding plebeian horde currently trampling those conservative values into the dust.

Perhaps Brooks ought to ask why it was that the uneducated masses so easily stormed the conservative heights.

Let me help explain:

Brooks anchors his lament firmly on post-Reagan ground. He thus conveniently ignores the venality and overt racism of the Nixon Southern strategy which was designed to shake Southern voters who opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960’s free from their lifelong adherence to the old Democratic party and scoop them safely into the Republican embrace. This is hardly excellence. Nor does Brooks note that Reagan launched his campaign for the presidency in true Nixonian fashion by heading to the same Southern states that Nixon had pandered to. Racism sits squarely at the heart of the modern GOP. It is inescapable. It is rotten populism writ large, but apparently not part of Brook’s preferred trope. So it banished from his memory.

Here’s where he gets going:

“The Republican Party I grew up with admired excellence. It admired intellectual excellence (Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley), moral excellence (John Paul II, Natan Sharansky) and excellent leaders (James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick). Populism abandoned all that — and had to by its very nature. Excellence is hierarchical. Excellence requires work, time, experience and talent. Populism doesn’t believe in hierarchy. Populism doesn’t demand the effort required to understand the best that has been thought and said. Populism celebrates the quick slogan, the impulsive slash, the easy ignorant assertion. Populism is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.”

If he were to compose a defense of patriarchy or of elitist arrogance he could hardly have chosen better words. Damn the ignorant masses he is telling us, what do they know? They are shallow, lazy, stupid, selfish, and have too short an attention span to undertake the great works of office. The Republican Party he suggests was populated by wise elders who knew how to run things in the interests of the nation as whole and not simply in the interest of the plebes.

The trouble, I would gently suggest to Brooks, is that those self-same wise elders screwed things up royally. Well, they certainly screwed things up for the vast majority of folks many of whom are not ignorant, lazy, shallow and so on. Not at all: indeed many of those whom the wise elders have royally screwed are intelligent and motivated enough to call and end to the games played by the elders.

And that end is called populism.

Now I would never defend Trump’s populism, largely because I think he is a lying, conniving, and incompetent fool. He isn’t motivated to solve the problems of the masses. He is motivated by the acquisition of power and the accompanying grandiosity. He is besotted with himself and nothing, or no one, else. And he is a perfect representation of the modern, rotten, GOP. He has no belief beyond money. He has no worldview beyond what fits on a napkin after a good New York City steak dinner eaten in the company of his cadre of misogynist hangers-on. He has a tenuous grasp of the complexity of economic policy. He has no interest in, or empathy with, the people whose emotions he stirred up; and no interest in solving any major problems. His entire approach is one that assumes anything that predates his ascension to the throne needs to be broken by virtue of predating him. There is no philosophy of governance.

And that’s Brook’s issue.

The modern Republican Party has no philosophy of governance either. It is simply the tool of the plutocratic elite. It does the bidding of the few even when that bidding causes it to contradict its heritage. So the GOP attacks deficits when those deficits might have a social purpose and defends them when they are produced by tax cuts for the rich. It has no theory about the efficacy of deficits. All that matters is channeling the benefits of growth into the hands of its benefactors.

Then there’s this:

“Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.

Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.”

There’s a couple of choice pieces in there. Stagflation I will concede. Sclerosis I will not. GDP grew about 3.2% in the Carter years and about 3.5% in the Reagan years. That small increase came at the cost of a massive sea of red ink — never before experienced without crisis as a cause — and the headlong rush into inequality and insecurity that characterizes the long arc of the post-Reagan era through to today. I would argue that the cost was too high. Brooks would too if he could get himself to understand that contemporary populism is rooted in that inequality and insecurity rather than being an expression of lowlife ignorance.

Then there’s the reference to the intellectual framework offered by Say’s Law: “Supply will create its own demand”. Really? So, after several massive tax cuts (Brooks mentions only three, he ignores GW Bush) each designed to shovel money into the maw of the capitalist class and thus, presumably to set in motion that great creation of demand, why is it that we suffer from a chronic and crippling lack of demand? Say’s Law is habitually trotted out by the ideologically committed right as cover for the distribution of wealth upwards. An excellent case can be made that it is thoroughly disproven by history and ought to be consigned to the rubbish heap. Keynes long ago said as much. But the right has not much else to offer. So it keeps repeating that same mistake over and over again.

Except, of course, it is not a mistake. It is the consequence of the rot within the modern GOP. The intellectual virtues that Brooks parades before us have been shown to be errors by history. The Republican project he so lauds is a failure. It needs replacing and modernizing. The current ramshackle legislation called “tax reform” is an example par excellence.

To paraphrase Brook’s hero Ronald Reagan: “There they go again”.

Yes, David, the GOP is rotten. But it was back in the era you imagine as its finest hour. This isn’t news.

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Spite as Policy

There’s not much to say, but let me say it anyway:

Last week Trump simply stopped pretending he wants to make policy based on thought. He revealed, instead, that his primal driving force is to humiliate and stomp on anyone who stops him being in total control. Since Congress failed to deliver a “repeal and replace” just as he had advocated during the election campaign, Trump decided to let his inner spite flow. He decided to smash away at the Obamacare edifice regardless of the consequences in a child-like rage. He hadn’t got what he wanted. So people have to suffer. And suffer greatly.

So spiteful is his rage at being denied his original goal that Trump cares not one whit about the damage to ordinary citizen’s lives he is wreaking. That’s not the point: being concerned is for weak people. Domination and control is for strong people. And, boy, does Trump want us to cower in the shadow of his presence.

Apparently Trump’s calculation is that if he smashes away at the Affordable Care Act, if he undermines it sufficiently, if vents his anger and spews out his hatred of Obama enough, and if enough people feel the pain, then others — notably Congress — will be forced to come to heel. If not, then so be it, let people die, let people suffer, let people go without. In Trump’s contorted and vile mind, all that devastation is justified, it is part of his act.

Trump likes to imaging himself a deal maker. His method is based on a zero-sum approach. A deal is only good for him if someone else manifestly loses. He has no ability to give and take. He has no measure that allows nuanced or complex deal making. No, not at all: a deal is either a win or a loss. And the best way to arrive at a win is to demonstrate your willingness to tear down all and sundry until the opposition caves in. If the opposition doesn’t cave in, then all the destruction is their fault because they could have surrendered.

So when Trump stops the cash subsidies that have propped up the insurance markets he knows well what he is doing. He is driving up insurance premiums for everyone; he is undermining the entire healthcare system; he is adding substantially to the Federal deficit; he is hurting  insurance company profitability; and he is tossing people out of the system altogether. There is nothing good about any of it. He doesn’t care.

He lashes out by fiat.

He is driven by spite.

All because Congress didn’t deliver on his impossible promises.

His body language when he spoke about his actions tells us all we need to know. His actual language simply reinforced it.

He told us that Obamacare “no longer exists”; he has, he said ,”got rid of it”. More to the point he announced that the desperate  attempts going on in Congress to salvage something from his outburst, are only taking place because of his swathe of destruction. This latter assertion is, naturally, a total lie. Bipartisan efforts have been underway for over a month to come up with a fix to Obamacare. That they haven’t progressed far is due to his indifference: they don’t render unto Trump what he wanted. He wants to expunge the entire Obama legacy. He is entirely uninterested in fixing or improving anything. He, because of his insatiable ego, needs to be boss. And especially he needs to boss his predecessor, a black man far more popular, far more sensitive, for more intelligent, and far more aware of the needs of the country.

His attack on Obamacare last week wasn’t an act of policy. It was an act of spite.

In Trump’s case it is no longer possible to tell what else he might do in a fit of rage.

His policy is spite. It’s all he has.

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Health Care Front Lines

Health care is the muddy hellhole pocked wasteland of American politics. Forgive my World War One analogy, but its the best I can come up with. We are stuck in mindless trench warfare. The generals sit somewhere off to one side planning the next big futile initiative and the troops — in this case you and me, the consumers of healthcare — are once again thrown into the maelstrom.

This is stupid.

This is epically antisocial.

And this is the great defining point of American democracy.

If we cannot provide decent, patient oriented healthcare at a sensible price to our fellow citizens, then just who are we? Everyone else can. Why can’t we?

Last night Trump, the antisocial imbecile, gave orders to undermine the Affordable Care Act. He did this out of personal pique and narcissist-driven rage. He had promised his rabid supporters the impossible: cheaper and yet somehow more extensive healthcare. He had failed to deliver it because the Republican party is so splintered over healthcare policy. He failed to understand the basic economics and logic of insurance. And so, with his ego foremost, he has decided to undo the ACA without having in hand any replacement or fix. Healthcare is about to deteriorate for millions of Americans.

Trump imagines, I think, that this is some brilliant negotiating tactic. He imagines, I think, that his attack on the ACA will force Congress suddenly to defy its recent history and act on behalf of the people. He imagines, I think, that his unilateral action to raise insurance premiums — that is the logical result on his actions yesterday — will cause such a stir that the Democrats will have to reach out and work with him to repair the damage he has wrought.

He is an idiot.

He, apparently, has no idea of how Congress works. He has no idea of why he failed before. It wasn’t because the Democrats wouldn’t reach out, it was because the Republicans refused to cooperate.

He is an idiot.

The goal of legislation ought to have been to fix the more obvious glitches in the original ACA. But because it was associated with Obama whose name alone is sufficient to invoke loathing and hatred amongst Trump voters, fixing was never on the table. No. The GOP was committed to “repeal and replace”. The problem was that they never, ever, thought about having to fulfill the promise. They failed at their first attempt. They failed at their second attempt. They failed at their third attempt. And their fourth attempt was lost in the churned up mud of the battlefield before the troops even roused themselves out of the trenches.

The problem is simply this: there is no way to”fix” healthcare by going backwards. The only true fix is found by tossing aside all previous ideas and by combining up with a commitment to universal coverage with a very large government involvement in order to modulate and regulate costs — especially on prescriptions.

Yet the Republicans remain committed to exactly the opposite. They believe in reducing quality and coverage in the name of “individual choice” apparently ignorant that this will undermine the foundations of the insurance system. You can always offer cheap “skinny” coverage to healthy people. Their rates will go down. Which is the goal of one of Trump’s executive orders. But that exact action will shift the onus of costs onto the shoulders of the sick. It will make, inevitably, healthcare unaffordable for people who have long term illnesses. It will reduce coverage.

The entire premiss of insurance is that healthy people pay more than their health needs them to in order to subsidize the costs of care for the sick. Its called citizenry. As in we all help each other. As in you help me and I will help you.

This eludes the Republicans.

To them, in echoes of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, since society doesn’t exist as a collective agent, and, thus, everything is reduced to individual agency, anything collective is beyond their intellectual framework. Insurance, however, is at its heart a collective activity. There is nothing individual about insurance.

This is why the Republicans are doomed to screw insurance up.

And it is why Trump is an idiot.

So much for his business acumen. He doesn’t comprehend insurance. His experience seems limited to bankruptcy law.

In any case:

The orders signed by Trump yesterday will cause insurance premiums to rise. In California they will rise by 12.5% next year alone. That seems to be the benchmark across the entire country. Not only that but policies will cover much less: maternity costs will probably be one of the first to be dropped.

So we plunge back into the mud.

The people suffer deprivation and possibly some will die. Whilst the generals in Washington prepare another stupid foray from the trenches.

Did I mention? Trump is an idiot.

Let’s stop talking about Obamacare: it’s “Trumpcare” now. Stick him with it.

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Puerto Rico

America doesn’t treat its territories very well. The relative responses to the hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico and those that followed the hurricanes that blew through Texas and Florida gives us a sharp and distasteful look into the Trump led American mentality.

Clearly territories are a lesser breed. And the people living there are somehow sub-American.

Nowhere is the more clear than in the awful performance of Trump.

The hurricane did not appear from nowhere. We all knew it was heading straight into Puerto Rico. We also knew it was a monster storm capable of doing enormous damage. Add to this foreknowledge the obvious truth that the island is in dire financial straits and has major infrastructure challenges, and anyone with executive responsibility ought to have been busy planning how to respond.

Apparently not. Trump was too busy golfing and complaining about the protests of sports players. His mind was not on Puerto Rico at all.

Nor was it for several days after the stream blew through.

When, finally, the American response was criticized for its inadequacy Trump went on offense. Instead of motivating a faster or better flow of aid, and instead of mobilizing the military to ship in vital supplies, he lashed out at his critics. In particular he singled out the mayor of San Juan who had been vocal in her criticism.

His words were priceless in their ability to encapsulate his bigotry and narcissism in  stark light. The mayor is a woman: Trump cannot stand criticism from a woman. She is Hispanic: Trump cannot stand criticism from minorities. Trump was thus doubly irate. She questioned his focus, so he lambasted her and her employees as being lazy. He said that Puerto Ricans want everything done for them.

His resort to stereotypical characterization of minority workers as indolent even in times of crisis adds to the growing evidence we have that Trump is a nasty bigot. His inability to think or plan ahead is testimony to his executive incompetence.

I am not going to fall into the trap of suggesting the bigotry of his words are aimed at his voter base in order to prop up his popularity. No. I think we all ought simply admit what is increasingly obvious. Trump meant exactly what he said, and our attribution of bigotry to his attitude is an accurate insight into his character.

Trump is simply a nasty person. And his flirtation with white supremacy and other racist far right emotions are a result not of strategy, but are part of his make-up. That they act also as rallying cries to his more extreme followers is neither there nor there. Trump is simply being Trump. And Trump is a bigot.

Puerto Rico is being left to flounder because it is not part of the mainland and is predominantly Hispanic.

That’s another blot on the American character courtesy of Trump.

And so the decline goes on.

Addendum [Oct. 3rd 2017]

Trump showed his cluelessness and his distaste for Puerto Rico today when, during his visit, he bragged about the new aircraft being ordered for the US military — the F-35. This plane has so far cost the US around $1.5 trillion which is what the lower cost estimates for the Iraq war are. This year’s budget included a further $10.5 billion for the F-35 project. 

But this enormous and ongoing cost is, apparently, not a budget buster. Trump appears to think it is normal.

The cost of the aid to Puerto Rico doesn’t get the same warm feeling. On the contrary, Trump complained that Puerto Rico was going to “throw the budget a little out of whack”. Oh: the cost of aid is expected to be right around the same as the F-35 appropriation this year. One is just fine. The other is a budget problem.

Bias?

Yes, bias, made even more obvious by Trump’s claim that the Katrina disaster was a “real catastrophe” whereas the state of Puerto Rico is evidently not.

Bias?

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Ugly and Uglier

Is uglier even a word? Anyway: this is not about economics.

One reason I have not been very communicative in the past two months is my disgust at the state of the nation. America is simply not the place I came to live in back in the late 1970’s. It is a tired, aging, and deeply unsettled country grappling with an identity crisis and its steady loss of economic energy.

America as a myth was always built around the notion that it was a “land of opportunity”. That opportunity was open to as many interpretations as there were people thinking about it, but that was, I think part of the point. Most often opportunity meant, or at least implied, that citizens of the US has a better chance of personal success, of achieving financial security, and of being able to pass that along to future generations than people elsewhere. This was, post-war, largely myth: other countries were rapidly catching up and were building their own versions of the myth, such that the American exceptionalism people here are so proud of was deeply diminished if not eradicated by the latter end of the last century.

Freedom and opportunity abounded in the industrial west, it wasn’t just concentrated here.

Not only this but because of the politics of America since 1980 American reality and American myth parted company. The ability of the elite to speak of a “rising tide lifting all boats” began to sound very hollow, if not being an outright lie, as it became more and more obvious that certain parts of our citizenry were being tossed overboard to fend for themselves. Eventually, as we all now know, that part being tossed overboard constituted the majority and America became tightly controlled by and governed on behalf of a privileged few.

Discontent festered and was roused by the clarity that the myth had become a lie. The ability of the American capitalist machinery to act as a conveyor belt providing just enough prosperity to its workers to prevent insurrection broke down. And so we arrived at our populist moment where the seams of unity ripped apart and our citizenry turned upon itself in ragged and unhealthy conflict.

That this was eminently predictable is of no comfort to those of us who have railed against the neoliberal turn a few decades back. Division and the breakdown of solidarity was utterly inevitable as the elite dug ever more deeply into the national income.

The populist moment has produced the ugliest leadership in American history, and has allowed the most base instincts top rise to the surface.

America never faced its racist past and dealt with it. All comprise, of course, try to avoid their own ugly memories. Where those memories are more recent it is easy for them to cause conflict if they are replayed and dragged into the current spotlight.

The discontent that spilled over in the last election threw racism up in its wake. It is now clear that large sections of the population resented, or were willing to be led to resent, the historic presence of a black man in the White House. Everything Obama touched has become a litmus test for his unworthy successor. It is as if Trump is driven simply to undo the entire Obama era regardless of efficacy. There is no other agenda.

So it does not matter that healthcare reform may leave tens of millions of people without a health care plan, all that matters is that the hated word “Obama” is banished from the scene. Millions may have to suffer degradation, economic hardship, illness and even death in order for the current leadership to satisfy its urge. Despite the majority of the public supporting Obamacare, and despite the current Republican alternative being reviled and detested with only a mere 15% support throughout the electorate, the GOP marches onward to fulfill its promise. Obama will be effaced from memory. This single mindedness can only be explained by a deeper more visceral emotion than party politics.

That emotion is racism.

It shows too in the entirely different field of sports.

Trump has engaged in an entirely unpresidential slanging match with sports figures over the last weekend. Not only is it demeaning for a president to engage in social media slanging, it speaks volumes about his personal driving force.

The argument started last year when one American football player refused to stand through the playing of the national anthem that is a prelude to all sports events in America. His reason was simple: he was staging a protest against the apparent brutality of various police authorities against black citizens. He was and is entirely within his rights to stage a protest.

Trump, though, sees it somewhat differently. He sees the protest as an affront to the American flag and hence to the country itself. Others have piled on by arguing that the protest is disrespectful of the military who, those people assert, are single handedly responsible for the protection of American freedoms. It was Trump’s comment that players who don’t stand for the national anthem should be fired. Over the weekend Trump spent far more time slanging sports players and what he perceives as their disrespect than he did talking about the storm created crisis in Puerto Rico. Why? Both are instances of his basic enmity for minorities.

Oh: and it isn’t patriotic to stand and salute the flag. It is patriotic to stand for and further the values that America is supposed to represent. So the military does not have a unique responsibility to protect or further those values. We all do.

And, I think, the players who kneel during the national anthem are doing more for those values than Trump is. They are arguing for equal treatment before the law. Without which America is greatly diminished. The biggest threat to that equality comes from the bigotry that seems to motivate Trump and his ilk so strongly.

Then again, as Trump’s comments show, there is a significant minority of voters who object to and/or fear equality.

These are dangerous times. Economic inequality, financial insecurity, and now social unrest have undermined cohesion. Trump keeps opening up the divide.

His administration is ugly and getting uglier.

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