Month: December 2018

Pauli, we hardly knew ye. But we knew enough.

by digby

Poor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols — a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy “summits” that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama’s opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.” 

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan’s performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn’t control his crazies on the one hand and couldn’t deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn’t even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan’s retirement. Commenting on the media’s surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs. 

And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don’t think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let’s recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn’t negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan’s just rolled along with all of Trump’s lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It’s important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That’s one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn’t.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father’s incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn’t get Obamacare repealed, although Trump’s minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn’t get Trump’s wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That’s quite a record.

But don’t worry. This will work out just fine for them. It’s just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to “grow up” and “take their medicine” by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It’s a beautiful scam and it’s been working for decades. If you didn’t know better you’d almost think they planned it this way.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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Steven and Louise vacation in Cabo. During a government shutdown over the border wall.

by digby

And then Steven did this:

A government transcript:


Hi! Beloved Treasury Secretary and Wonder Woman executive producer Steven Mnuchin here. You probably weren’t expecting to hear from me over the holidays, especially since I’m on vacation in Mexico, but I just wanted to pop in and let the American people know that there’s no danger that every last bank in the country will suddenly run out of money on Monday. In fact, I was so concerned that you might be afraid that the economic system would abruptly grind to a halt within 24 hours, I spent part of my vacation calling bank CEOs on their vacations so I could bring you with this confident, forward-looking statement that says, apropos of nothing, that I have no reason to believe that your life savings will be as worthless as paper in the face of what’s coming on Monday, which is nothing. Nothing is coming on Monday, except for a big meeting which I am convening on Christmas Eve so that we can all talk about how everything is totally fine and good and cool and we definitely won’t be stabbing each other in the streets over scraps of bread by Christmas morning. Why, what have you heard?

Bloomberg:

The tumult in Washington over the weekend did little to placate U.S. equities that careened to the worst week in nearly a decade after the Federal Reserve signaled two more rate hikes in 2019. The S&P 500 is down 19 percent from its record and on track for the steepest quarterly drop since the financial crisis. Combined with the ongoing trade war, higher borrowing costs and signs of a slowdown in global growth, the political turmoil has raised the specter of a recession.

“The reality is, in Washington you have this massive amount of unpredictability,” Chad Morganlander, portfolio manager at Washington Crossing Advisors, said on Bloomberg TV. That combines with concerns over global growth and removal of stimulus “gives investors this level of chill where they’re going to compress multiples regardless of what the backdrop in 2020 will be,” he said.

Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic examines the possible reason for Mnuchin’s bizarre move:

Imagine having a runny nose, itchy eyes, congestion, and a sore throat, and your doctor telling you that you shouldn’t worry about cancer—she consulted her colleagues and they’re certain it is not cancer, and if it were, they could fight it.

This is roughly what happened on Sunday evening, when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put out a press release on calls he held with executives from the country’s largest banks. Mnuchin’s statement assured the public that they had not been having liquidity problems or “clearance or margin” issues—the sorts of things you would worry about if the country were on the brink of a financial crisis.

The markets have been suffering from something like a nasty cold of late, with a major correction in stock prices due to rising interest rates, trade tensions, the government shutdown, and slowing global growth. But the surprise holiday readout, which came with a heads-up that Mnuchin would be holding a call with some of the country’s top financial regulators as well, unnerved and puzzled investors, bank executives, politicians, and economists. What was the Treasury secretary thinking? Who thought we were tipping into a financial panic? None of the possible explanations are very reassuring, though it seems that Mnuchin was trying to be.

Option one: The Treasury secretary was speaking to an audience of one. Mnuchin is under enormous pressure from President Trump, who is upset about the market sell-off and mad at the current Federal Reserve chairman, Jay Powell. The press release was perhaps an attempt to show Trump that Mnuchin was doing something, anything, to talk the markets back into stability.

It makes some kind of squint-and-see-it sense. Mnuchin used Twitter earlier in the weekend to reassure the markets that Trump was not going to fire Powell, who has continued to tap up interest rates as the economy continues to grow at a decent pace. Mnuchin wrote that Trump told him that he “totally” disagrees with Fed policy, calling it “an absolute terrible thing to do at this time.” But he said Trump had informed him, “I never suggested firing Chairman Jay Powell, nor do I believe I have the right to do so.” The readout might be a further effort to keep Trump calm by showing him everything is fine and his Treasury is taking action.

The problem with this explanation is that it means Mnuchin risked roiling financial markets to placate his boss (which of course would only further anger his boss).

Option two: The Treasury secretary believes that the market correction is due in part to animal spirits—animal spirits he could quiet by reminding everyone that the financial system is in fine shape. Perhaps he anticipated further declines in stock prices due to the government shutdown, and wanted to calm the markets.

And it is true that the selloff remains nothing more than a selloff, at least in most economists’ and corporate executives’ eyes—a correction, not a crisis; a cold, not a cancer. Even if the bear market were a precursor to an economy-wide slow-down, that would not necessarily result in bank runs and liquidity panics and cratering financial firms.

But, again, nobody was worried about a banking panic before Mnuchin brought it up. “Can someone who understands markets please explain what Secretary Mnuchin did and why?” Brian Schatz, a Hawaii senator who sits on the banking committee, wrote on Twitter. “Because it seems like a bad look at minimum, and maybe more concerning than that but I honestly don’t know.”

Option three: Mnuchin has some troubling insider knowledge, and wanted to broadcast to the markets that he is aware and in charge. Maybe some financial firms are teetering? Maybe rising interest rates and falling asset prices are straining some important market participants, and it just has not yet become evident in public reports?

Whatever Mnuchin was trying to do, he did not succeed in it, instead stoking market fears and sowing confusion. Perhaps the clearest takeaway is that Mnuchin and Trump’s Treasury lack the expertise to communicate clearly and forcefully with the markets—no surprise, given how few experienced financial operatives Trump has hired and how many experienced nonpolitical civil servants have fled Treasury during this administration.

If they’re communicating this poorly in the absence of a crisis, just imagine how disastrously they might perform in the presence of one.

I suspect it was a bright idea by the president himself. He probably thought that it would distract from his earlier comments about firing the Fed Chairman and reassure the markets. Because he’s a dotard and Mnuchin is his good little soldier doing whatever course it’sim to do.

Of course it’s just as easy to believe this was Mnuchin’s idea of how to appease Trump by showing him that big important rich guys have plenty of money. Or something.

It didn’t help, as you can see by the market, which is now officially in bear territory. It also didn’t help Trump’s mood:

The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch – he can’t putt!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

Oh, and by the way, recall this from 2016:

Trump: Low rates creating false market

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump told CNBC on Monday the Federal Reserve is doing what President Barack Obama wants by keeping interest rates low.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen and central bank policymakers are very political, and Yellen should be “ashamed” of what she’s doing to the country, Trump said, adding the Fed is not even close to being independent.

By keeping interest rates low, the Fed has created a “false stock market,” Trump argued in a wide-ranging interview in which he also talked about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s health problems.

Trump said rates are being kept lower to bolster Obama’s legacy.

Trump reportedly considered keeping that Fed Chair on but decided against it:

The president appeared hung up on Yellen’s height. He told aides on the National Economic Council on several occasions that the 5-foot-3-inch economist was not tall enough to lead the central bank, quizzing them on whether they agreed, current and former officials said.

Well of course. What could be more important?

Meanwhile the president is stuck in the White House with nothing to do on Christmas Eve:

The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch – he can’t putt!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

AMERICA IS RESPECTED AGAIN!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

There’s more but you don’t want to know. The market’s about to close. No Christmas bump. At this moment it’s down almot 500 points. Again.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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“Deck the halls with advertising”
by Tom Sullivan

A young DJ named George Carlin almost got fired for playing Stan Freberg’s 1958 “Green Chri$tma$” on a station in Shreveport, Louisiana. Carlin had a knack for getting fired for being edgy. He played the extended song/skit over and over, insisting to station managers it was “the most moral record ever made.” Freberg himself observed, “My records are not released… they escape.”

The Atlantic‘s Sarah Archer describes the satirical piece as:

… a holiday choral jazz parody inspired by the narrative of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Updated from 1840s England to 1950s America, the 1958 track is set in an advertising agency where the company chairman is named Mr. Scrooge, and a client named Bob Cratchit wants to devise a purely humanitarian holiday message for his small spice company.

Can’t have that, naturally. Scrooge the adman will have no Christmas epiphany.

A Capitol Records executive told Freberg he would never work in advertising again. “A station manager at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, Archer adds, described “Green Christmas”—apparently without irony—as “sacrilegious.” But Freberg got fan mail from clergy members who thanked him.

By now, the anti-consumerism message is as traditional as eggnog:

This kind of anti-commercial critique was all over the place during the economic boom time of the 1950s and ’60s—when “Green Christmas” came out. In Dr. Seuss’s 1957 How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Whos of Whoville proved that the Grinch couldn’t steal their Christmas spirit, because it’s not a commodity that can be given or taken away. And in A Charlie Brown Christmas, which premiered in 1965, Charlie and Linus turned their backs on Lucy’s gaudy forest of pink aluminum Christmas trees, and celebrated the message of “peace and goodwill towards men” with a forlorn, nearly bare pine tree that sagged under the weight of a single ornament. This idea—that we need only one another, standing firm inside the eye of a powerful retail hurricane—is presented anew in some form each December, revealing something about a given era’s particular relationship with consumerism.

Freberg’s carol was more in-you-face than soft-focused and never got the play it deserved. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve heard this bit, and it’s classic Freberg:

Profit never needs reason

Fa la la la la la, la la la

Get the money, it’s the season

Fa la la la la, la la la la

There are a lot of talented comics and satirists on the circuit today. More than enough to get under the notoriously thin skin of an emotionally stunted narcissist who ran for president after decades of complaining the world was laughing at “us.” But some, like Carlin and Freberg, are still missed. During some other period of political crisis (I can’t remember which one), someone asked, “Where’s Tom Lehrer when you really need him?” After this last week of turmoil, a little humor is a tonic.

Despite Capitol Records’ threats, “Green Chri$tma$” wasn’t Freberg’s advertising swan song after all. I still fondly remember from childhood this Freberg pitch for prunes:

Makes you want to hold up a lit cigarette lighter while shouting his name.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Oh my God. He didn’t read the letter.

by digby

We know he does read letters. He reportedly proudly shows off what he calls his “love letters” from Kim Jong Un. But he didn’t read James Mattis’s resignation letter even though it was handed to him directly. He heard about it on TV:

Less than two hours after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis went to the White House on Thursday to hand a resignation letter to President Trump, the president stood in the Oval Office and dictated a glowing tweet announcing that Mr. Mattis was retiring “with distinction” at the end of February.

But Mr. Trump had not read the letter. As became apparent to the president only after days of news coverage, a senior administration official said, Mr. Mattis had issued a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump over his neglect of allies and tolerance of authoritarians. The president grew increasingly angry as he watched a parade of defense analysts go on television to extol Mr. Mattis’s bravery, another aide said, until he decided on Sunday that he had had enough.

In a tweet later that morning, the president announced that he was removing Mr. Mattis from his post by Jan. 1, two months before the defense secretary had planned to depart. Mr. Trump said that Patrick M. Shanahan, Mr. Mattis’s deputy and a former Boeing executive, would serve as the acting defense secretary, praising him as “very talented” and adding that “he will be great!”

Actually Trump had offered a very, very tepid compliment to Mattis. He wrote:

It was all about money. Which is par for the course because it’s really all there is to Trump’s foreign policy. (He has no national security policy other than “not Obama.”) He had nothing to say about Mattis’s leadership at the Pentagon and on the world stage because he either didn’t know about it (after all he says he didn’t know his own middle east envoy in charge of ISIS who quit after Mattis) or he just thinks the only thing that matters in this world is getting NATO “to pay their fair share,” building up the military for God knows what reason and repudiating every treaty, alliance, agreement and promise the US has every made because he’s too stupid to understand any of it so he just thinks if he reverses what everyone else has done he’ll be a hero. (And for about 40% of equally stupid Americans, he will be.)

I think the worst thing about this shutdown is that it means he’s compulsively watching even more TV news than usual.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

by digby

I don’t know what to make of this one but it certainly does look serious. It’s from the two awesome investigative reporters at Buzzfeed Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier:

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News. 

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens. 

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers. 

Russia’s financial crimes agency, whose second-in-command is a former KGB officer and schoolmate of President Vladimir Putin, also asked the Americans for documents on executives from two prominent Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, as well as Kremlin opponents living abroad in London and Kiev. 

In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West. 

The Treasury Department refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents in response. Nor would officials answer any other specific questions about the matter.
In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Treasury does not discuss or comment on confidential communications with foreign governments, including to confirm whether or not they have occurred. We have notified our Office of the Inspector General of these allegations.” 

But documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal that Russia’s attempts to extract information about Western targets triggered alarms inside the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, a powerful unit of the Treasury Department with exclusive access to the most comprehensive and sophisticated financial database in the world. 

Officials at FinCEN said they reported the use of the back channel to Treasury’s counterterrorism unit and security office, and requested an investigation. They said it was a breach of protocol and that it exposed the Treasury to potential hackers because the Russian messages contained attachments — a common way for intruders to worm inside an organization’s servers. 

“If the attachment had a virus it could infiltrate the server,” a senior FinCEN official told BuzzFeed News. This source said insiders have been concerned that their internal records could have been corrupted. 

The FinCEN officials reported the incidents in July and August 2016, and claim that there was no substantive investigation of the matter. These sources said that other senior officials continued to use the back channel even after they were told to stop by the Treasury’s office for security. 

They suspected that the Russian agency making the requests, called Rosfinmonitoring, set up by Putin in 2001 to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, was closely tied to Russia’s espionage apparatus. 

“They are passing information that may have interest to the Russians for other reasons,” a FinCEN official wrote to colleagues in March 2017. “One has to wonder what the heck is going on here.” This official filed for whistleblower protection and quit last year.

There’s more at the link. It’s quite a story and it’s hard to know exactly what the motives are. But check this out.

The first chapter in this extraordinary chain of communications began in late 2015, when a unit of the Treasury Department called the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes entered into an agreement, named the ISIL Project, that called for Russia and the US to share information on financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS. 

According to a senior FinCEN intelligence analyst, Russia’s subsequent actions suggest that was just a cover. “What we were seeing with Russia was the fruition of a long-term strategy to try and compromise Treasury by cultivating civil servants. That’s why we sounded the alarm and reported it.” 

It was not the only time that concerns about serious counterintelligence threats were raised at the elite financial intelligence unit during the past two years. 

Six sources told BuzzFeed News that at least two FinCEN analysts were reported to Treasury’s inspector general over suspicions that they might have been working against the interests of the US.

Ok. Maybe they were just being paranoid. I’m prepared to believe that. But all this activity with Russia is still extremely suspicious particularly since Donald Trump seems to have benefited and has no compunction about tilting US policy in Russia’s favor in a dozen different ways. That might be ok too under different circumstances but the  man is under tremendous pressure over all these probes and he’s doing it anyway which suggests that there’s more going on than some foreign policy vision (which, by the way, would be the first time he had any kind of vision beyond schoolyard nonsense and stupid stuff he picked up on Larry King back in the 1980s.)

This just gets curiouser and curiouser.

If you find what we write about and draw to your attention every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

QOTD: The Prez

by digby

“We’re doing better than we ever did before,” Trump said before his casino company filed for bankruptcy. https://t.co/2pd0rxP3Gv pic.twitter.com/JSUq56y1oi

— CNBC (@CNBC) December 22, 2018

He’s been saying we have the greatest economy in world history and he’s been taking credit for every bit of it. Now this:

“In recent days, Mr. Trump has asked aides whether he can fire Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chairman he appointed, telling advisers that Mr. Powell will ‘turn me into Hoover,’ a reference to the Great Depression-era president.”

It appears he’s building up to a new blame game for the next big failure. He’s been getting away with it his whole life so why not now?

I keep wondering if his cult will ever wake up to the fact that he is the whiniest grown man any of them have ever met. He literally scream “it’s not faaaaiiiirr!” dozens of times a week. When he isn’t bragging he’s blaming or throwing a tantrum. According to that NYT article linked above, in private he pouts and curses at the staff that they’re all “fucking idiots.”

I know I’m repeating myself. This isn’t something you all know. But every once in a while I just have to document it here because it’s so astonishing.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

Alt-governance
by Tom Sullivan

Still from V for Vendetta (2005).

The American right long embraced communism as the bogeyman driving its politics. Totalitarianism had to be met with radical individualism, free markets, drowning government in the bathtub. The state was the enemy, at least whenever its taxing powers sought to level society and limit the avarice of Randian ubermenschen. Then came the 1960s.

The pendulum swing that countered fascism with individualism began breaking down the old order rather than preserving it. In the fullness of time came the backlash enabled by technology conceived to oppose it

Fred Turner is a professor of Communications at Stanford who studies how media and technology mold culture. His Harpers essay, “Machine Politics – The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism,” suggests what we now see as rising authoritarianism spreads on the digital wings of a mass media once thought to inoculate society from it.

It was not simply the collapse of the Weimar era in Germany that allowed Hitler’s rise. Mass media was also thought responsible. At the time, Turner recounts, newsreels, live radio broadcasts, and newspapers saturated German society, turning a highly educated society into a mass cult of personality. As the FDR administration prepared for war, it needed to unite the country, and needed mass media to do it. But leaders feared doing so might “transform Americans into just the kind of authoritarians they were trying to defeat.”

A Committee for National Morale sought ways instead to cultivate a democratic personality, writing in 1942 that “every personality can be a citadel of resistance to tyranny. In the co-ordination of the intelligences and wills of one hundred million ‘whole’ men and women lies the formula for an invincible American morale.” That concept, Turner argues, is the zeitgeist of the computer-enabled, social media platform. To democratize society, “take power away from politicians and put it in the hands of engineers.”

I cannot do justice to Turner’s essay in the time and space available here. One stunning “I never knew that” in his piece is the acronym behind the legendary WELL internet community: Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL). Early internet designers sought to facilitate interconnectedness the way the famous counterculture catalog had. “If the mass-media era had brought us Hitler and Stalin, they believed, the internet would bring us back our individuality. Finally, we could do away with hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism. Finally, we could just be ourselves, together.”

Turner writes:

For Zuckerberg, as for much of the left today, the key to a more egalitarian society lies in the freeing of individual voices, the expression of different lived experiences, and the forming of social groups around shared identities. But Facebook has tried to enable this kind of society by creating privately owned, for-profit digital technologies. As Zuckerberg put it, echoing the goals of the Whole Earth Catalog fifty years before, “Our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience.” Engineers like Zuckerberg or, for that matter, Wiener, have little interest in party politics: if you want to change the world, you don’t lobby or vote; you build new technologies.

This view has proved enormously profitable across Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it has helped turn the expression of individual experience into raw material that can be mined, processed, and sold. The big social-media companies, which often began with a dream of making WELL-like virtual communities at scale, have now become radically commercialized and devoted to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listened to each other, trying to get a feel for what kinds of people they were and how they might work together. Now user data is optimized and retailed automatically, to advertisers and other media firms, in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at light speed, rendering them profitable. In 2017, Facebook reported annual revenue of more than $40 billion.

Just as in any of hundreds of science-fiction flicks, that promise has gone wrong. The technology of radical individualism allowed alt-right figures such as Richard Spencer to “just be themselves” too, and in savvy, social-media-friendly ways. Spewing hate is their civil right. The movement styles itself as a 21st century version of the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Half a century ago, the left fought the military-industrial complex and state surveillance. The alt-right faces off against government itself in “a fantastical Minotaur” it calls the “deep state.” The sitting president attacks the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Pundits on the left are fond of reminding us of how Trump storms and fulminates, the White House itself unable to contain his petulance and rage. Those same pundits then marvel that around 40 percent of the American people still think he is doing a good job. What they fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as psychological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women, and people of color. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporters’ grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of the nation.

Where radical individualism once was supposed to save us from “the hierarchies of organizations,” today, Turner writes, they are all that stand between us and cult of personality.

“The new authoritarianism represented by Spencer and Trump is not only a product of who owns today’s media,” Turner suggests. “It’s also a product of the political vision that helped drive the creation of social media in the first place—a vision that distrusts public ownership and the political process while celebrating engineering as an alternative form of governance.”

Clearly, social media is a terrific organizing tool. But then there is that always-pernicious tendency of the profit motive to swamp all other social concerns. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in promoting a form of profit-driven radical individualism. Now profit-driven social media has turned the individual into a product and unleashed the darker angels rather than the better. I am seeing more friends dump Facebook accounts. But only to seek others. There may be a deep flaw in that logic. Politics is best not left to engineers and requires more face-to-face engagement.

If you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

What will it take to change their minds?

by digby

Holiday Fundraise Soother: A Pitou Donkey Foal

I read this analysis from Gallup in which they take a look at the bizarre and unprecedented fact that Trump’s approval rating started out low and never budges, no matter what happens. This is new. Generally, presidential job approval is at least somewhat related to events and performance but in his case, his base seems impervious to reality.

Gallup attributes this to polarization between the two parties and I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. The mostly white, evangelical Trump base believe he can do no wrong. And there are a lot of these folks. It appears to be around 40% of the country who identify that way. And I firmly believe they are motivated almost entirely by their loathing for the eggheads, the racial minorities, the non-Christians, the city folk, the uppity women, the immigrants. They do not think they should have to share this country with anyone who isn’t like them.  In fact, they are livid about it.

But I think we also have to acknowledge that right wing propaganda on television, radio, and social media has fed these impulses and created such an insular information environment that many of these people simply don’t have any idea that Trump is failing on an epic scale. They think the only problem is the “fake news media” that is sabotaging him. They are living in an alternate universe in which only good news about their idol is real and the bad news is all made up. As far as they know, everything’s going great!

This is one of the most confounding problems we face and it’s a very difficult problem to solve. Obviously, it would be helpful if social media would act in a responsible way to at least keep out foreign propaganda. But that won’t solve it. The right wing has been at this for a long time (who do you think foreigners take their cues from?)  and they have a First Amendment right to lie to their followers.

The one thing that gives me hope is the fact that this story is not new in America, only the means of delivery is. Basically, we fought a civil war over exactly this stuff. As I have posted so often on this blog, here’s Honest Abe in 1860 spelling it out. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

That also describes the state of Trump and his party in 2018. The issue is slightly modified for modern times, but their approach to dealing with it is exactly the same. They demand total capitulation and will settle for nothing less. Compromise is meaningless to them because it suggests that they are not 100% right about everything. Basically, the members of this faction, which is always there in one form or another, don’t really believe in democracy and never have. 

This is why it’s so important that they be repudiated at the ballot box in numbers that are indisputable. There can be no protest votes, no hedging, no “pox on both their houses” in 2020. These people have taken it to the limit and if the country endorses this lawless rogue president and his party again there will be no stopping them.

The Democrats have a large number of potential candidates testing the waters. I’m for spending the next year seeing what they’ve got and finding the best person who embodies the values of the majority of Americans —  that is the 60% who do not support this miscreant and the conservative movement that created him. It’s a tall order. The majority is a big coalition with many different interests and agendas. It’s a big country and it’s not going to be easy to reconcile it. But at this point we have no choice but to put our heads down and get that done. There will be no agenda for any of us if Trump gets a second term and these Republican radicals are validated.

So, I hope to spend the next year looking closely at all the candidates. I don’t have a favorite and I will certainly vote for whomever the voters choose to run against Trump. That’s a no-brainer. But I do hope they pick the strongest candidate and one with a vision for the future and a commitment to fundamental values of fairness, equality and liberty.  Democrats always do better when they offer Americans an optimistic vision of progress and their most successful presidents have always embodied that in one way or the other.

The contrast of that inspirational agenda with this man who openly pledges to reverse progress, to take the country back to an earlier era, build walls and weapons of war and retreat from any positive engagement with the rest of the planet is stark.

If the Democrats succeed in giving America that choice we will see what kind of country we really are in 2020.

We’ll be watching all this like hawks here at Hullabaloo and covering it closely. This next year is going to be extremely challenging and I hope you all don’t decide to tune it out because it’s just too much. (I understand the impulse, believe me.) But if you do just want a place to check in with the zeitgeist once in a while, get a little activist info from my great contributor Tom Sullivan every morning and some big picture stuff from me throughout the day, I hope you’ll continue to stop by.

And if you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

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Saturday Night at the Movies

I hate my sister: Mirai no Mirai (***)

By Dennis Hartley

If you seek a family-friendly film for the holidays that doesn’t involve Grinches or umbrella-powered English nannies, the Japanese anime Mirai no Mirai (“Mirai of the Future”) may be the ticket. The latest effort from writer-director Mamoru Hosoda is a fantasy-drama that plays like a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and Labyrinth.

The story centers on 4-year-old Kun and his busy parents (Dad is an architect and Mom is an executive). Not unlike many 4-year-old boys he’s a wrecking ball, but he seems like a happy kid, doing happy kid things like cavorting with his dog, playing with his toy trains, and generally enjoying all those perks that come with being the Center of the Universe.

Sadly, poor Kun has little clue that the dynamic of this pretty sweet deal is about to shift.

The thing is, Mom and Dad haven’t just been busy at the office. One day, Mom comes home with a little surprise for Kun. It’s a baby sister. Initially, Kun appears excited about the family’s new addition, much in the same manner a 4-year-old gets excited about a shiny new toy before the novelty wears off. His excitement soon changes to consternation when it becomes obvious that the novelty of “Mirai” isn’t wearing off for Mom and Dad. 

He just can’t stop obstructing justice. It’s a tic.

by digby

It looks like Trumps Roy Cohn isn’t getting the job done to his satisfaction:

President Donald Trump has at least twice in the past few weeks vented to his acting attorney general, angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President’s actions in crimes his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Trump was frustrated, the sources said, that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad. None of the sources suggested that the President directed Whitaker to stop the investigation, but rather lashed out at what he felt was an unfair situation.

The first known instance took place when Trump made his displeasure clear to acting attorney general Matt Whitaker after Cohen pleaded guilty November 29 to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. Whitaker had only been on the job a few weeks following Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions.

Over a week later, Trump again voiced his anger at Whitaker after prosecutors in Manhattan officially implicated the President in a hush-money scheme to buy the silence of women around the 2016 campaign — something Trump fiercely maintains isn’t an illegal campaign contribution. Pointing to articles he said supported his position, Trump pressed Whitaker on why more wasn’t being done to control prosecutors in New York who brought the charges in the first place, suggesting they were going rogue.

The previously unreported discussions between Trump and Whitaker described by multiple sources familiar with the matter underscore the extent to which the President firmly believes the attorney general of the United States should serve as his personal protector.

The episodes also offer a glimpse into the unsettling dynamic of a sitting president talking to his attorney general about investigations he’s potentially implicated in.

Whitaker and William “Bill” Barr, Trump’s nominee to replace Sessions, are facing increased scrutiny this week for their criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling. Whitaker refused to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. And a memo from Barr came to light in which he wrote that Trump’s decision to fire former FBI director James Comey did not amount to obstruction.

Trump has already shown a willingness to use the Justice Department to settle political scores. As CNN previously reported, the President questioned Whitaker about the progression of the investigation against Hillary Clinton when Whitaker was Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff.

This is amazing. After all the trouble he’s gotten himself into he’s still doing this. He hasn’t even figured out a way to use a cut-out. I guess he still doesn’t think he needs to.

The president isn’t supposed to weigh in any criminal investigtions, especially political ones, and those that involve him personally. As I have written before, it’s not uncommon for prosecutors to abuse their power. No one would argue with that. But this is the president of the United States blatantly violating the law under the assumption that it does not apply to him.

There is no greater abuse of power. Anyone defending this at this point is an accomplice. And that includes those members of the DOJ who are helping Whitaker act as his lieutenant.

And if you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405