“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.”
Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?
A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a mask-less ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curve ball.
Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal.
But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.
Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss.
Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000).
[snip]
There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended.
This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.
He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on.
It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.
Barack Obama could never have gotten away with the sordid personal behavior of Bill Clinton or the manifest ignorance of George W. Bush. (I leave out Donald Trump because he’s in a category all his own.)
So does that mean Barack Obama and black dishwashers are in one category, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and white waiters and waitresses are in another?
Barack Obama is a rich celebrity. He lives in an $11.75 million house in Martha’s Vineyard. He has nothing in common with a dishwasher.
The Obamas are good friends with the Bushes, who are good friends of the Clintons, who used to be good friends of the Trumps.
They all have more in common with each other and with other rich celebrities than any of them does with an hourly worker of any race.
∞∞
Click to enlarge.
So which matters most? The vertical lines that separate Americans of different races or the horizontal lines that separate Americans of different economic classes?
If you look at different jobs, you see that a disproportionate amount of the dirty, low-wage work of American society is done by the descendants of enslaved black people and conquered Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. It is not a coincidence that the descendants of enslaved and conquered people are at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The lines are diagonal lines. Race and social class can’t be separated. You find people of every race on every level of American society—but not equally.
∞∞
Racism and prejudice are almost always factors in racial inequality. Nowadays, they are seldom the only factors.
Community activists battling plans for a hideous Chicago shrine to Barack Obama have been dealt a series of blows in recent months. Perhaps most notable was a rebuff from none other than Amy Coney Barrett, whose decision in favor of Obama bore all the hallmarks of ruling class solidarity.
Update. I was over-hasty in posting this link. On sober second thought, it is unfair to attribute a bad motive to Judge Barrett.
In principle, the elected municipal government and its officials have better standing to determine what is in the public interest than do self-appointed community activists or un-elected judges.
The former have to answer to the public at the polls; the latter do not. Judge Barrett was acting according to the well-established legal philosophy of judicial restraint.
In practice, the Obama project seems like a horrible idea, and nobody who is responsible for it will ever face any kind of accountability.
I came across this interview with Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and campaign strategist, on the Naked Capitalism web log today.
It was done back in January. I happened to turn it on and kept watching until the end. It’s an hour long, another video that’s a little long to watch on a computer screen, but you can listen to it while doing something else, such as making and eating breakfast.
I don’t agree with everything Luntz had to say, he’s more inclined to give some people the benefit of the doubt than I am, but he is someone who gets around and who actually listens to people, and he had interesting things to say.
I’m not sure the whole PBS Frontline series is worth watching, but here are the links if you’re interested.
The Obama foreign policy was a continuation of the Bush foreign policy by other means.
It is a mistake to think of Obama’s election as a change of direction, as I and others hoped and expected at the time.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, ex-General Wesley Clark, former commander of NATO, visited old friends in the Pentagon.
One of them showed Clark a copy of the long-range strategy. After a supposidly easy victory in Iraq, U.S. forces would go on to invade Syria, Libya, Somalia and other countries including Iran.
The American public, thinking this had something to do with fighting terrorism, went along with this for a while, but after a while became sick of seeing their sons and brothers coming home in flag-draped coffins for no apparent reason.
Barack Obama, running in 2008, said, “I’m not opposed to wars. I’m opposed to stupid wars.” He instead waged “intelligent” wars based on flying killer robots, teams of trained assassins and subsidies to local armed factions who supposedly would serve U.S. purposes.
He did not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and instigated new wars in Libya and Syria. Yes, there were pro-democratic protests in those countries that provided an excuse for intervention, but the purpose of U.S. intervention had nothing to do with those purposes.
The war in Syria would long ago have died down if not for U.S. forces there, U.S. bombing and U.S. and Saudi subsidies to rebels, many of whom are Al Qaeda rebranded.
The U.S. meanwhile has special forces carrying on war in more countries in Africa, Asia and Latin American than any member of the public and probably any member of Congress knows.
I don’t know to what degree Obama’s policies represented his sincere conviction and how much he simply acquiesced in what he thought he had to do to protect his political career. I do give him credit for trying to establish normal diplomatic relations with Iran and Cuba.
On the other hand, his administration instigated a new proxy war in Ukraine. It engineered the overthrow of an unpopular and corrupt but legitimate government before the incumbent could be removed by means of an election. This set off a conflict that continues to this day.
I think one purpose of the Russiagate investigations, nowlargelydiscredited, was to cancel the possibility that Donald Trump might make peace with Russia.
Donald Trump from time to time talks about winding down wars, but then backs down. He has stepped up drone warfare and war by economic sanctions, and increased the danger of nuclear war with Russia by canceling important arms control treaties.
There is no reason to think Joe Biden will be any better. Normalization of the forever wars is the continuing Obama legacy.
Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor during the Bill Clinton administration, is an honest man whom I respect.
When he left public service, he went back to his old job as a college professor and author. He didn’t become a millionaire by joining corporate boards of directors or collecting consultants’ fees.
I also respect Reich, who is 4 feet 11 inches tall, for making his way in a world in which most people unconsciously take tall people more seriously than they take short people. This is a form of prejudice I seldom think about.
He wrote an interesting article in The Guardian about how working people no longer feel represented by either the Democratic or Republican parties.
In 2015, he interviewed working people for a new book he was working on. He’d talked to many whom he’d met 20 years before when he was in government, and many of their grown children.
Almost all of them were disillusioned with the “rigged system,” which they thought Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush represented. The only presidential candidates they were interested in were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Reich thinks they had a point.
Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of the 24 years before Trump’s election, and in that time scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time.
But Democrats did nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that had rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top and undermined the working class.
As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.
“The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”
In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
Clinton pushed for NAFTA and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections.
Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash; Obama allowed the Street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash. Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.
Although Clinton and Obama faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses, they could have rallied the working class and built a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy. Yet they chose not to. Why?
Before I respond to Reich’s question, I want to take him to task for saying unions are the backbone of the “white working class.” All workers, regardless of race, ethnicity or, for that matter, gender, need the protection of labor unions.
Black and Hispanic Americans are a larger percentage of union members than they are of the U.S. population as a whole. When you use the expression “white working class,” you ignore the existence of a huge number of American wage-earners.
I don’t think Reich had bad intent, but one of the Democratic Party’s big problems is the successful Republican effort to drive a wedge between native-born white Anglo working people and black, Hispanic and immigrant working people. It’s a mistake to use language that plays into that.
Kevin Drum, writing for Mother Jones, defended President Obama against charges of being too supportive of the Saudi Arabian royal family.
Obama, like all US presidents, was heavily constrained by our foreign policy establishment, but in the end he did provide Saudi Arabia with less support than any previous president—and the Saudis made no secret of their intense dislike of Obama over this.
I think [Glenn] Greenwald underrates just how hard this is in real life, and how much credit Obama deserves for taking even baby steps against the virtually unanimous opposition of the entire US government.
Notice what Drum is saying here. The elected President of the United States is one thing. The unelected actual government of the United States is another. The first can influence, but not control, the second.
I think this is all too true, like Senator Schumer’s warning to Donald Trump to not mess with the intelligence agencies. What does this say about American democracy?
Thomas Frank was recently interviewed by one John Siman, whom I’m not familiar with. This part of the interview stands out for me.
TCF: …… I had met Barack Obama. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, and I’d been a student there. And he was super smart. Anyhow, I met him and was really impressed by him. All the liberals in Hyde Park — that’s the neighborhood we lived in — loved him, and I was one of them, and I loved him too.
Barack Obama
And I was so happy when he got elected. Anyhow, I knew one thing he would do for sure, and that is he would end the reign of cronyism and incompetence that marked the Bush administration and before them the Reagan administration. These were administrations that actively promoted incompetent people. And I knew Obama wouldn’t do that, and I knew Obama would bring in the smartest people, and he’d get the best economists.
Remember, when he got elected we were in the pit of the crisis — we were at this terrible moment — and here comes exactly the right man to solve the problem. He did exactly what I just described: He brought in [pause] Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, considered the greatest economist of his generation — and, you know, go down the list: He had Nobel Prize winners, he had people who’d won genius grants, he had The Best and the Brightest.
And they didn’t really deal with the problem. They let the Wall Street perpetrators off the hook — in a catastrophic way, I would argue. They come up with a health care system that was half-baked.
Anyhow, the question becomes — after watching the great disappointments of the Obama years — the question becomes: Why did government-by-expert fail?
Even outspoken progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the authors of Daring Democracy hold back from doing two things.
They don’t talk about the U.S. state of permanent war, and they don’t criticize the record of Barack Obama.
Thomas Frank, who recently did three more interviews for the Real News Network, doesn’t talk about war and peace either, but he is at least willing to take an honest look at the Obama record and the record of Bill Clinton before him.
I have the three interviews on YouTube, with links that should take you to transcripts.
The Democratic Party historically was opposed to big banks, going back to Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Jackson. That was almost a defining characteristic.
It was golden-tongued Bill Clinton who made the Democrats a second party of Wall Street, and persuaded the Democratic rank and file to accept it. His argument was that Democrats couldn’t win unless they matched Republicans dollar-for-dollar in campaign spending, which they could not do if they were anti-Wall Street.
I voted for Clinton reluctantly. In those days I thought that Democrats, however flawed, were better for working people than Republicans.
I disliked Clinton, not because of the sex scandals or his policies, but because of his treatment of employees of the White House travel office, which arranged accommodations for White House staff and the White House press corps accompanying the President on his travels. He and Hillary Clinton wanted to close the travel office and turn its functions over to cronies of theirs, which they had a legal right to do.
When this became an issue in Congress, Clinton ordered a FBI investigation of the travel office employees to see if any of them were guilty of criminal wrongdoing. He was willing to destroy the careers and ruin the lives of people who did not intend him any harm, but were merely in the way of something he wanted to do.
I did not fully realize until later the harm that Clinton’s signature policies did—the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, the end of welfare for mothers with dependent children, the crime bill leading to mass incarceration and the deregulation of the banking industry. As Thomas Frank noted in the video, all four of these things were long-time Republican goals.
Clinton even toyed with a bipartisan agreement with Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security.
There are two ways of looking at the $400,000 speaking fee that ex-President Barack Obama will receive from the Wall Street brokerage firm of Cantor Fitzgerald for speaking at a health care investment conference.
The other is that Obama is merely doing what all but one of the ex-Presidents from Gerald Ford onward have done, which is to use speaking fees cash in on his celebrity status.
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s speaking fees were a special case because Hillary Clinton was a future Presidential candidate. Hillary’s $675,000 in Goldman Sachs speaking fees could be interpreted as payments not only for services rendered, but for services anticipated. That suspicion was reinforced by Clinton’s refusal to release the texts of her talks.
I imagine that Barack Obama will have sense enough to watch his words enough to be able to release the text of his Cantor Fitzgerald talk without embarrassment.
Obama is not doing anything unusual. All but one of the Presidents from Gerald Ford through George W. Bush cashed in with big speaking fees after they left office.
This is the new normal. In this neoliberal age, an ex-President such as Harry Truman or Jimmy Carter who refused to monetize the office of the Presidency would seem quaint and strange.
Update 1/19/2017. It seems that in fact the Congressional Republicans do have an alternative of sorts to Obamacare. A link has been added to this article.
The top video from Vox is about Kathy Oller, who lives in southeastern Kentucky and has a job signing people up for the Affordable Care Act. It tells why many people in her area think the cost of the ACA is too high, and why they voted for Donald Trump.
The bottom video is about an interview of President Barack Obama by Vox reporters on the topic of health care. Kathy Oller came along. Her question to President Obama and his answer begin at the 37th minute and take about eight minutes.
President Obama is right in saying Republican leaders are irresponsible in proposing to repeal the ACA without having a replacement plan in place, and in challenging them to come up with a better plan.
It’s apparent that the Republican leadership doesn’t have such a plan..
Five days ago Julian Assange stated on Twitter that he would agree to be extradited to the United States if President Obama freed Chelsea Manning. Today President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, effective May 17.
Manning is the former U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning who provided information to Wikileaks about military coverups. He has served nearly seven years of a 35-year sentence, the longest term any American has served for leaking information to the public.
Among the information that he revealed were reports that civilian casualties in Iraq were higher than reported. He also gave Wikileaks the video footage used below..
I don’t have any way of knowing whether President Obama’s decision to commute Manning’s sentence was done out of humanitarian feeling, or whether it was result of negotiations with Assange.
If it was Obama’s unconditional decision, he deserves credit for doing the right thing.
If it is part of an agreement to trade Assange for Manning, then all I can say is that Assange is a brave and honorable man, and Obama is not.
We’ll see what happens in May. If Assange does surrender, we’ll see what President Trump does.
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses remained level during the administration of George W. Bush and actually fell during the administration of Barack Obama, even though economic output rose.
This means that economic growth doesn’t depend on making global warming worse. It means that, to the contrary, it is feasible to do something about global climate change.
It won’t mean that the Greenland ice cap will stop melting or the American Southwest will stop suffering from drought or coastal cities such as Miami or Houston will be safe. It took a long time to create the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and it will be a long time before they go away.
The benefit of reducing greenhouse gasses will go to future generations, not to us. But is good news, just the same.
Part of this is due to technological progress, which has made renewal energy competitive (or more nearly competitive) with fossil fuels. But credit also is due to the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy under President Bush and especially President Obama.
Sadly, this may all change for the worse under President Donald Trump, who denies the reality of human-made climate change and is filling his administration with climate change deniers.
President Obama seems hell-bent on spending his 20 remaining days in office in pushing the United States into a cyber-war with Russia.
In terms of domestic partisan politics, this may be smart. Foreign policy toward Russia is a wedge issue between Republican war hawks in Congress and President-elect Donald Trump.
In terms of the national interest, this is irresponsible as well as improper.
Much of the U.S. press it takes for granted that Russian intelligence services obtained confidential DNC e-mails and transferred the information to Wikileaks. This may or may not be true.
The determination as to what happened and what to do about it should be made by the incoming administration, which will have the responsibility for dealing with the consequences.
I do not have confidence in President-elect Trump’s judgment, but he does have sense enough to see that there is no fundamental conflict of interest between Russia and the USA (except maybe over access to the oil and gas resources of the Arctic, which is not currently an issue).
President Obama said during the campaign that he’s worried about somebody like Donald Trump with access to the nuclear codes and all the other powers of the Presidency. A writer named Pratap Chatterjee listed nine things Obama could do to reduce Trump’s power to do harm.
Name innocent drone victims.
Make public any reviews of military errors.
Make public the administration’s criteria for its “targeted killings.”
Disclose mass surveillance programs.
Make public all surveillance agreements with private companies.
Make public all secret laws created in recent years.
Punish anyone who has abused the drone or surveillance programs.
Punish those responsible for FBI domain management abuses.
Pardon Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and the other whistleblowers.
That wouldn’t eliminate a President Trump’s power to start wars without authorization from Congress, but it would be a start on reducing Presidential powers to their Constitutional limits.
We Americans take it for granted that we are a democracy. Some of us think we have a right and responsibility to spread out democracy to other countries.
Yet a couple of social scientists have determined that the United States is governed as if it were an oligarchy.
Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern looked at 1,779 issues on which Americans were polled from 1981 through 2002, and then how Congress acted on these issues.
They found that Congress followed the wishes of the top 10 percent of income earners most of the time, and the bottom 90 percent hardly ever.
That is the classic profile of government by oligarchy—government by a small group, usually of rich people.
The survey found that Americans who band together in interest groups, such as the American Association of Retired People or National Rifle Association, have more influence than numerous, but separate, individuals, but business groups have more influence than other groups.
How can this be? A rich person’s vote does not count any more than anybody else’s vote.
But rich people, especially corporate executives, have means of influencing policy that the rest of us lack. They are:
▪ Campaign contributions to influence elections.
▪ Second-career jobs for politicians and government employees
▪ Propaganda to influence opinion, both among the public and the elite.
For most of my life, I thought my country was fundamentally sound and moving in the right direction.
I knew there were serious problems and injustices in American life, but I thought that these were aberrations, contrary to our democratic ideals, which under our democratic system would be reformed over time.
I rejected the Communist belief that the crimes of capitalism are systemic, while the failures of Communism are failures to correctly understand or follow Marxist doctrine.
But my own beliefs were the mirror image of this. I believed that the crimes of Communist countries were the inevitable result of a bad system, while the crimes of Western countries were aberrations that could be corrected.
The first step in my radicalization was the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001. I was shocked at how fundamental liberties, such as habeas corpus and trial by jury, could be simply wiped off the blackboard, and the majority of Americans would see nothing wrong with this.
I always thought of torture as the ultimate crime against humanity, because it destroys the mind and soul while leaving the body alive. Torture became institutionalized, and even popular—possibly because of the illusion that it would be limited to people with brown skins and non-European names.
But I still thought of this as an aberration, part of a scheme by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others to restore executive power that had been lost after the Watergate hearings. I voted for Barack Obama with great enthusiasm in 2008, not because I believed he would be a strong reformer, but because I thought he would restore the country to normal.
I soon learned that there was a new normal, one that was different from what I thought it was.
When I look at the lists of women heads of state and women heads of government since World War Two, I see more warrior queens—Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi—than I do motherly social reformers.
The problem with women leaders in a male-dominated society is that, in order to be respected by men, they often repress the so-called feminine weaknesses of compassion and empathy and emphasize the so-called masculine virtues of combativeness and unsentimental moral pragmatism.
I don’t know whether Hillary Clinton became a war hawk in order to earn the respect of powerful men, or whether she had the respect of powerful men because she already was a war hawk, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be a respected part of the political establishment if she were an advocate for peace. The problem is that a war hawk is not what is needed now.
When Barack Obama was nominated for President in 2008, he offered Hillary Clinton, as the price of her support, a Cabinet post and the promise to back her candidacy in 2016.
Bernie Sanders asked much less in return for his support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy—merely a non-binding Democratic platform that supported his progressive agenda. He didn’t even get all of that. The Democrats have come around to a $15 an hour minimum wage, but refuse to take a stand on fracking or the odious Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.
The difference between 2008 and 2016 is that Obama and Clinton were both candidates of the status quo (which I didn’t realize then) whereas the Sanders candidacy was a real threat to the moneyed interests that who support Clinton.
It is not that Sanders supported anything radical. Although he called himself a socialist, he ran as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. He supported restoration of New Deal programs that worked well in the past and a few programs, such as Medicare for all, that have worked well in foreign countries, while having little to say about foreign policy.
But to enact these modest reforms would require a real political revolution because they are unacceptable to the kind of bankers and billionaires who made Bill and Hillary Clinton rich.
President Obama was elected in 2008 based on promises to, among other things, do something about global warming. My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey called my attention to an article highlighting his refusal to act. Here’s an excerpt:
Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do. He came into office with control of both houses of Congress and a clear mandate to act on the climate crisis, with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms.
But in pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, highlighted by the figurative explosion of frackingand the literal explosions of oil trains and deep sea drilling rigs, Obama has turned the US into the No. 1 producer of fossil fuels in the world.
The value of federal government subsidies for fossil-fuel exploration and production increased by 45 percent under his watch, even as he turned what were once climate “treaty” talks into a subterfuge for global inaction. This, from the guy who ran against “Drill, Baby Drill!”
True, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has enacted regulations classifying greenhouse gasses as pollutants, which are intended to close down aging coal-fired electric power plants. He has obtained subsidies to promote renewable energy. And he has set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to be accomplished by future administrations.
But this has been offset by his promotion of the domestic oil and gas industry and his opposition to enforceable international climate treaties.
The problem is that there is no immediate political payoff from trying to slow down global warming. The climate change that is manifesting itself right now—record-breaking temperatures, floods and droughts—is the result of decisions made or not made 30 or 40 years ago.
What is done—or not done—today about climate change will not change the present situation. It will only help people 30 or 40 years from now. There is little political incentive to do that.
Neither democratic government nor free-enterprise economic systems, assuming that this is what we have, would respond to the immediate concerns and wishes of the public, but not to warnings about future problems. Not that socialist dictatorships have a better record!
The only answer, as I see it, is for climate change activists to do what Naomi Klein describes in her book, ThisChanges Everything, which is to join up with those who are fighting fossil fuel companies on other grounds—protection of property rights, Indian treaties, public health and the environment, and the authority of local government.
Republicans in Congress refused to vote President Obama’s Supreme Court nominations on the grounds that he is a lame duck. But it’s highly likely they’ll join with him to enact the odious Trans Pacific Partnership agreement right after the November elections, when he and they really will be lame ducks.
When Congress voted to allow a “fast track” decision—an up or down vote with little time to discuss the agreement—it was Republican votes that provided the margin of victory.
“Fast track” means there’s no way to stop a lame-duck vote on TPP, even if anti-TPP candidates sweep Congress in the November elections.
All it would take is that President Obama, House Speaker Mitch McConnell and other TPP supporters are brazen enough.
Bernie Sanders opposed the TPP. Donald Trump opposes it. Hillary Clinton promoted it when she was Secretary of State, but she says she now has reservations about it. Her supporters on the Democratic platform committee voted down a plank that would criticize the TPP so as not to embarrass President Obama.
The TPP—and the related Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement and Trade in Services Agreement—are corporate wish lists written into international law.
These limit the power of governments to legislate and regulate to protect workers, consumers and the environment, grant drug and media companies new intellectual property rights, and create panels of arbitrators that can impose penalties on governments for depriving international corporations of “expected profits.”
So it’s fitting, in a way, that these anti-democratic trade agreements are likely to be enacted into law by a President and members of Congress who may not have run for re-election or been voted out of office.
The danger of a U.S. nuclear war with Russia is real and growing.
The risk is not that an American or Russian President would deliberately start a nuclear war. The risk is that U.S. policy is creating a situation in which a nuclear war could be touched off by accident.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, installed a missile defense system in Rumania and is in the process of installing a system in Poland.
What is the harm of a defensive system? It is that the ruler of a country with a missile defense system might be tempted to launch a missile attack, in the hope that the enemy’s retaliatory missiles might be stopped.
A defense system that is not strong enough to stop an enemy’s first strike attack might be strong enough to defend against retaliation from an attack, since much of the enemy’s weapons will have been destroyed. So, strange as it may seem, setting up a missile defense system can seem like an aggressive act.
Thomas Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Noam Chomsky and others I respect intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in order to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.
I think this is an honorable position, provided that it is a one-time-only position.
The problem is that voting for bad candidates can be habit-foriming.
In defending bad policies in order to prevent worse, you risk losing sight of what good policy might be.
Lambert Strether, who posts on the naked capitalism web log, recently made a list of the things that you have to justify in order to defend Clinton.
1. Corruption. To protect Clinton, liberals have adopted the majority doctrine in Ctizens United: Only a quid pro quo is proof of corruption.
2. Transparency. To protect Clinton, liberals maintain that high government officials can, at will, privatize their communications to shield them from FOIA.
3. Militarism. To protect Clinton, liberals minimize her AUMF vote, ignore Libya, ignore Honduras, ignore Ukraine, and treat unwavering support for Israel as an unqualified good.
4. Health. To protect Clinton, liberals reject Medicare for All.
5. Working Class. To protect Clinton, liberals deny that there is or can be a working class electorate. The electorate is only to be viewed through the prism of identity politics.
Two category errors follow: The “white working class” is deemed to be racist, by definition, and the non-white working class is erased. Consequently, it’s impossible to think through the universal effects of the FIRE [financial] sector on the working class, nor its differential effects on particular working class identities. This is not an accident.
That’s quite a platform. And if you’re thinking the Democrat Party isn’t the Democratic Party you knew and loved, that’s not an accident either. This has been a wonderfully clarifying primary, for which I congratulate all the players.
President Obama has a habit of undercutting Republicans by stealing their issues. He is doing that to Donald Trump on trade.
Trump has threatened a trade war with China, but the Obama administration has already launched a trade war.
Trump proposes to hit China with protective tariffs of up to 45 percent on goods shipped to the United States. But the Obama administration has authorized U.S. Steel Corp. to ask the International Trade Commission for permission for total ban on Chinese steel exports to the United States.
U.S. Steel executives ask for the ban in retaliation for theft of their trade and manufacturing secrets by Chinese hackers.
Earlier this year the Obama administration has imposed a tariff of 522 percent on cold-rolled flat steel from China and 72 percent of this type of steel from Japan. Cold-rolled flat steel is used in auto manufacturing, shipping containers and construction.
The justification for the tariff is that Chinese companies are dumping steel on the world market below their cost of production. They produced more steel than they can profitably sell, and so are trying to cut their losses by selling their product for whatever they can get.
Based on a quick reading of on-line news articles, I think there is a basis for the charges against the Chinese. European countries also charge China with dumping.
Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern looked at 1,779 issues on which Americans were polled from 1981 through 2002, and then how Congress acted on these issues.
I rejected the Communist belief that the crimes of capitalism are systemic, while the failures of Communism are failures to correctly understand or follow Marxist doctrine.
Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do. He came into office with control of both houses of Congress and a clear mandate to act on the climate crisis, with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms. 
When Congress voted to allow a “fast track” decision—an up or down vote with little time to discuss the agreement—it was Republican votes that provided the margin of victory.
During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, installed a missile defense system in Rumania and is in the process of installing a system in Poland.
Thomas Frank, 
Phil Ebersole's Blog 