Author: Tom Sullivan

Looking before leaping
by Tom Sullivan

Many refugees. Fewer solutions. Even fewer explanations.

Grim news from Austria:

A truck full of refugees discovered abandoned on an Austrian motorway on Thursday contained more than 70 bodies, the interior ministry said on Friday, announcing an updated death toll.

Austrian police had originally put the toll at up to 50 and are due to announce the exact number within hours. The vehicle had come to Austria from Hungary.

Dozens more perished in a sinking off the coast of Libya:

A boat reportedly packed with people from Africa and South Asia bound for Italy has sunk off the Libyan coast, raising fears that dozens have died.

A security official in Zuwarah, a town in the North African nation’s west from where the overcrowded boat had set off, said on Thursday there were about 400 people on board.

While an official death toll has not been announced, sources told Al Jazeera that dozens of people died in the incident, with many reported to have been trapped in the cargo hold when the boat capsized.

In Vienna, just east of the truck filled with bodies, European leaders at a scheduled summit struggled with a response:

“Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence and persecution,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. “And given the large number of unresolved conflicts in our neighborhood, the stream of refugees seeking protection in Europe will not abate in the foreseeable future.”

The gruesome discovery of the truck brings the total of refugee deaths to more than 2,390 this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, compared to 2,081 on the same date in 2014. Many die aboard boats or rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean Sea, or while jumping onto trains as they try to reach the United Kingdom from France’s port city of Calais, where about 3,000 people live in squalid camps near the Eurotunnel entrance.

The BBC has this explainer on the source of the migrants and refugees. The Guardian attempts to dispel some of the misinformation: “Far from being propelled by economic migrants, this crisis is mostly about refugees.” Nearly two-thirds are fleeing “countries torn apart by war, dictatorial oppression, and religious extremism.”

What you won’t find is much analysis about what precipitated the conflicts in Libya and Syria, and one of the largest refugee crises since the end of the Vietnam War, from which we apparently learned little about looking before leaping. Hullabaloo readers can probably fill in those blanks without much prompting. Then again, one London tabloid has an explanation to warm chickenhawks’ hearts: We didn’t intervene enough.

So it goes.

“Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country”
by Tom Sullivan

The usually jocular Charlie Pierce appeared shaken last night on Chris Hayes’ show when he spoke about the on-air shootings yesterday in Virginia. He came packing the truth. “Something’s come dreadfully loose in the country right now,” Pierce said, glancing at the floor. “A lot of stuff that was in the kind of foul tributaries of American life has made it into the mainstream.”

Pierce wrote earlier about the shooting at Esquire:

A news crew, doing a completely ordinary happy-face morning feature at a mall get blown away on camera. If this had happened in Somalia, we’d have a lot of earnest talk about the dangers of a failed society. If it had happened in Syria, Lindsey Graham might liquefy entirely and disappear in a rush down a storm drain. But it happened here, in the exceptional home of American exceptionalism, so, once again, we will be told that Alison Parker and Adam Ward are merely more of the price we pay for the exceptional exceptionalism of a free society.

The killings of a reporter and cameraman as they covered a “happy-face” news story brought gun violence perilously close for both Hayes and Pierce. Pierce was blunt about it:

“It is worrisome to be out on the campaign trail now. It is not terrifying. It’s nothing like following a rifle platoon into the Hindu Kush or something, but there’s something unsettling and something that’s come loose in the body politic. And, frankly, I’m worried about it.”

We are a country now where more money equals more speech for the elite, and more guns equals more freedom for the rest, and murderers post their snuff films on social media. (Next time it will be streamed live.*) What’s to worry about?

Somewhere in the flood of post-September 11 articles about how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us, one writer asked, Would America keep its head? Uh, no. Except the country’s post-September 11 temporary insanity seems, like untreated depression, to have settled in and taken a “set.” The governor on the engine has broken. No, that’s not right. It has been sabotaged. Now it is racing out of control. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

Futurist Sara Robinson periodically reassesses the country’s drift towards the abyss. With daily mass shootings, with Donald Trump threatening to round up and deport millions, and with his “passionate” followers beating the homeless, calling for “white power,” and demanding that Latino citizens “Get out of my country,” it might be time to re-check the cultural doomsday clock and see how many minutes it is to midnight.

* when Howard Cosell went live to cover the assassination of “El Presidente,” it was in Woody Allen’s fictional banana republic.

Biden time, or what?
by Tom Sullivan

Speculation in the press about a Biden run for president caught fire after Vice President Joe Biden met with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Saturday. But Politico reports that Biden will not attend this week’s Democratic National Committee meeting in Minneapolis. That should dampen the speculation unless Biden turns up by surprise. All the major Democratic contenders are expected.

If Biden decides to run, writes Michael Tomasky, the Warren meeting was brilliant press. But things could get ugly fast. The Obama-Clinton primary fight of 2008 was ugly enough. In the end, Tomasky believes, “Obama had the larger and more morally urgent historical claim to make in the minds of most Democrats and liberals. The woman would have to wait, as women so often do.” Making women wait again while yet another white guy takes the White House could be a gut punch to women who believe it’s now Clinton’s turn. Whatever their policy differences with Clinton, too many of the male persuasion on the left don’t seem to appreciate that. Remember the PUMAs?

The Washington Post offers several more reasons why a Biden run would be risky for his legacy. Also, as pretty much everyone observes, it is pretty late in the game for Biden to get in, unless he is positioning himself, as Tomasky suggests, to be the contingency candidate should Clinton succumb to some new “scandal,” as she never has before.

There is a wide-open city council race where I live, in a town where Democrats dominate. The question I ask myself about every candidate is: What does this lefty bring to city council that we don’t already have? As the panel last night on All In with Chris Hayes noted, that’s really the question to answer about a Joe Biden race for president. There’s really nowhere for Biden to go in this field. Where’s his opening?

But the speculation about a Biden-Warren ticket seems outlandish. Warren has already declined a draft movement herself and seems convinced that she will have more clout over a longer term right where she stays in the Senate. Being President of the Senate would take Warren out of the main action. And as NPR reminds us, Biden’s past support for the credit card and banking industries might not make Biden her first choice to champion her issues. Bernie Sanders is already doing a good job of moving the needle on those, even if mostly with the progressive base so far.

Beyond the fringe
by Tom Sullivan

Lazier pundits like to view Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as fringe candidates. But that’s Village-speak for “not establishment.” What fans find attractive about both is their iconoclastic styles, which couldn’t be more different. Writing for Bloomberg News, Will Leitch attended Donald Trump’s event in Mobile, Alabama last weekend and found that the common thread among those standing in line in the heat was this:

They were sick of all the bulls–t. They were sick of being talked to like they’re idiots. They might not be up on the policy papers or every specific detail of the Iran deal. But they can smell bulls–t.

Trump, the flashy billionaire, the reality show host, the consummate bullshitter, uses bullshit to cut through bullshit. They like that. Leitch explains:

They hate Hillary Clinton, they hate Obama, they hate Jeb Bush, and they hate them all for the same reason: They think they’re lying to them. Many, I found, especially hated Bush for his Spanish-language campaign ads. This came up several times. Bush is “as bad as any of them,” said Tony Hamilton, a truck driver from nearby Pensacola, Florida. “I voted for his brother and his dad, but not him, never. He’s just like the rest of them.”

They hate them so much that even if incoherent — his speech was all tangent and no theme — Trump’s unabashed bullshit comes across as authenticity, and that’s good enough. Even when Trump asks an audience of lower-income, southern T-party voters, “anybody here have a Mercedes-Benz? They’re wonderful, right? Great, great cars,” the crowd goes with it.

Meanwhile, for all his unhipness, Bernie Sanders has attracted a large percentage of the youth vote, Nathan Heller writes at the New Yorker. Sanders feels “open and friendly,” but in a more coherent way:

… From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fundraising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.

With 37 percent favorable among under-30 voters in
one poll, Sanders hardly sounds fringe. Hillary Clinton polls 40 percent among the same age group, writes Heller.

Both Sanders and Trump supporters seem tired of business as usual. But while Sanders seems like a seasoned veteran with ideas whose time has come, Trump comes off as a pitchman selling himself as “new and improved.”

But Mr. President, you must be-leeve
by Tom Sullivan

While we’re believing that Donald Trump is going to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without a plan to pay for it, and while we’re believing he’ll build a 2,000 mile-long southern border fence and get Mexico to pay for it (because Donald knows how to negotiate), why not engage in a military buildup without a plan to pay for it? (And without raising taxes. That’s a given.)

According to Politico, “a growing roster of Republican hopefuls” believe the U.S. needs dozens of new warships if it expects to keep throwing around its global weight. Not that the news outlet could find any to quote for the article. Honestly, this almost reads as if it should be labeled “sponsored content” from the Navy League of the United States for the group’s lobbying campaign, “America’s Strength: Investing in the Navy-Marine Corps Team”:

It’s a love affair steeped in the ideology that more warships bristling with aircraft and missiles translates into more security — and that control of the high seas will not only guarantee international trade but also check the worst ambitions of other powers like Russia and China. And it’s also fueled by a powerful shipbuilding lobby in Washington that is also calling anew for billions more in federal spending to beef up the sea service.

Christie was the first to raise the issue earlier this election season, saying the Navy “should be an armada without equal,” and pledging, if elected president, to reach the goal of 350 ships. Walker also noted earlier this year that “we’re at, what, 275, 280 vessels right now? We’re headed down toward 250. That’s less than half of where we were under Reagan.”

And on Monday, Kasich weighed in, saying that “reinvigorating the Navy’s ability to project power globally is critical to defending and advancing American interests, including ensuring the free flow of global commerce.” Rubio has been more nuanced, calling for increasing the number of aircraft carrier strike groups from 10 to 12 (the newest carrier, about to enter the fleet, is estimated to cost $13 billion).

Richard Danzig, former Navy secretary in the Clinton administration, believes this is “more sloganeering than strategic thought.” Candidates are substituting a nice, round number for sound planning. But then, it’s what they do, and it’s what the Navy League of the United States very much wants.

This rebuild-the-fleet tough talk is familiar to anyone paying attention when The Great Communicator ran for president in 1980. Reagan promised a military buildup, that trickle down economics would, and that his tax cuts would help America grow its way out of the budget hole they created. Really. Instead, the national debt nearly tripled. Can you hear Donald Trump promising the same?

Sometime during the Reagan presidency when economic reality was sinking in, at least for the country, Doonesbury ran a strip (I wish I could find) simply showing the White House exterior and Reagan talking to the fairy Tinkerbell. Reagan had worries. Tinkerbell had promised he could cut taxes, build a 600-ship navy, and balance the budget all at the same time.

“Oh, Mr. President, but you must believe,” said Tinkerbell. Our current crop of Republican carnival barkers want Americans with swelling hearts and short memories to believe again, with Donald Trump in the role of P.T. Barnum.

Update: A clever reader supplied a link to the Doonesbury strip mentioned above. Thanks!

A suspiciously “European” solution
by Tom Sullivan

American presidential candidates debate deporting millions of immigrant families to Mexico as Europe faces the worst refugee crisis since WWII. On the Macedonian border with Greece, CNN reported last night:

Refugees who are soaking wet and hungry in makeshift camps, with only a few nongovernmental organizations present to help, told the CNN team of sheer misery.

A Syrian man said he never imagined Europe would be like this.

“Look at her,” he said, motioning to his 3-year-old daughter in his arms. “In Syria she was a princess, now she is like a rag. They are treating us like animals.”

He said that if someone could get him back to Syria, he would go. “Better to die from bombs in my homeland than die out here,” he said.

The Independent reports this morning:

For a second day, they came. And, for a second day, they faced a wall of riot shields, razor wire and batons. But on Saturday something was different. As the Macedonian police waved a handful of exhausted refugees through from Greece, something snapped and hundreds rushed the lines, causing chaos and police retaliation in the form of volleys of stun grenades and beatings. Many were injured.

And yet they still came and, eventually, with the tide of humanity too much to hold, the Macedonians opened the border with Greece. The police, who only hours before had swiped and batted at the crowds, simply stepped aside as thousands – men, women and children, many from Syria – streamed through, crying tears of joy as they began their next step to sanctuary and escape from the horrors of war in their own countries.

The Guardian, also this morning:

Hundreds of migrants have crossed unhindered from Greece into Macedonia after overwhelmed security forces appeared to abandon a bid to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe following days of chaos and confrontation.

Riot police remained, but did little to slow the passage of a steady flow of migrants on Sunday, many of them refugees from the Syrian war and other conflicts in the Middle East, a Reuters reporter at the scene said.

Macedonia had declared a state of emergency on Thursday and sealed its southern frontier to migrants arriving at a rate of 2,000 per day en route to Serbia then Hungary and the EU’s borderless Schengen zone. This led to desperate scenes at the border, as adults and children slept under open skies with little access to food or water.

Elsewhere on the Mediterranean, Italian and other naval vessels rescued another 2,000 refugees yesterday, responding to distress calls from more than 20 vessels in danger of sinking.

Donald Trump and others on the right are too busy insisting we have walls to build across our southern border to take notice. But maybe someone should point out that this is a suspiciously “European” solution coming out of the mouths of American politicians:

Throughout Europe, leaders are succumbing to the keep-them-out syndrome. Hungary is building a fence (along its border with Serbia). Spain has done the same (in Ceuta and Melilla). Bulgaria followed suit (on the border with Turkey). More fencing is springing up in Calais.

In Macedonia, which is not in the EU, they are deploying armoured vehicles against migrants. Will this work? Unlikely. When you flee atrocities and war, the desperation to reach a haven will always be stronger than security fences and dogs.

The causes of migration in Europe and the Middle East are more instability than economics, argues Patrick Kingsley in the Guardian. Human smugglers often portrayed as the source of the problem are simply reacting to the opportunities presented by demand for their services, as any conservative economist could tell you. But as I recall, one of the last mass migrations in my lifetime occurred after the U.S. military debacle in Vietnam. Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the current crisis presents itself in close proximity to American adventures in Iraq and Syria. Strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett has suggested that one of America’s greatest exports is security. Isn’t instability more like it?

Cons not ready for the Big Con
by Tom Sullivan

Real activists work in community organizing, political campaigns, voter registration, call-your-congresscritter, and Get-Out-the Vote efforts, etc. Then there is conservative James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Anti-government militiamen play with weapons in the woods, pretending they’re Rambo. O’Keefe’s hidden-camera crews play at being undercover agents, hoping to coax real activists into doing or saying something that, with the right editing and promotion, will appear nefarious on Fox News.

Project Veritas now seems to have set its sights on the Hillary Clinton campaign, Time reports:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices around the country have been put on alert after at least two women approached Iowa staff under the guise of being supporters in an apparent effort to catch the campaign engaging in improper or illegal activity, a Clinton campaign official said.

The motivations of the women is not known, but their alleged techniques match those of Project Veritas, the conservative group run by James O’Keefe, which specializes in undercover stings meant to embarrass liberal groups and politicians. The group declined to comment on the Clinton campaign’s allegations. “Project Veritas does not comment on investigations, real or imagined,” said Daniel Pollack, the director of communications for the group.

But it’s pretty easy to imagine them being behind an effort to secretly film campaign staffers seeming to accept illegal donations or advocating voter registration infractions after repeated prodding. It worked against ACORN, and copycats recently used the same technique to cause Planned Parenthood grief.

A few of us were at a private party last year when an associate of O’Keefe’s sneaked in “and made a bee line to [Lisa] Graves” from the Center for Media and Democracy. Graves said the team had been stalking her at the Netroots Nation conference all day. They were promptly ejected.

Give me that old time Constitution
by Tom Sullivan

It was good for Samuel Adams. It’s good enough for me.

Donald Trump’s championing the elimination of birthright citizenshhip is a xenophobe’s dream. Trump is getting enough mileage out of hyping the “anchor baby” threat that many among the Republican presidential field are drafting off him, hoping to hang on long enough to pass him in the final laps. Talking Points Memo’s David Leopold debunks some of the nonsense, summing up Trump’s immigration reform plan in four words: They have to go.

When it comes down to it, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has very little to do with immigration; it is fundamentally focused on the preservation of civil rights. Trump’s extremist proposal to end birthright citizenship — whether by elimination or reinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause — comes at the grave cost of abridging civil rights, even hearkening back to the days of Dred Scott, when people were viewed as commodities to be bought and sold.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you listen to conservative talk radio in Iowa. Media Matters reports:

Iowa radio host and influential conservative kingmaker Jan Mickelson unveiled an immigration plan that would make undocumented immigrants who don’t leave the country after an allotted time “property of the state,” asking, “What’s wrong with slavery?” when a caller criticized his plan.

Calling the Iowa state fair “the carnival of the damned,” Charlie Pierce wonders why any American politician would ever engage, not with Mickelson, but with the audience that tunes in for this sort of vulgarity.

Michael Keegan from People for the American Way condemns Republicans for entertaining the notion that we abandon the 14th Amendment:

The Republican presidential contenders’ rush to badmouth a basic constitutional right — in an apparent attempt to appeal to their supposedly Constitution-loving far-right base — speaks volumes about what they really mean when they talk about constitutionalism. They use their pocket Constitutions for the parts that come in handy. The rest of it? Not so much.

Besides, the Founders didn’t pass the 14th Amendment, so technically it’s not really the Constitution, is it? Give us that old time Constitution, back when we didn’t need the specter of voter fraud to justify keeping lesser-thans from the polls.

“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, Rick Perlstein wrote. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, that flexibility is baked into the right’s anti-gay wedding cake.

They not only tolerate the relativism of which they accuse the left, they embrace it. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast explains that far from being shunned by the GOP’s evangelical base, the religious right is embracing Trump in spite of his whatever faith, his string of marriages, and advocating “getting even” in his speech at Liberty University. After all, an eye for an eye is in the Bible, right?

Watch how often believers in nominally Christian America reference the Bible. Except when the Savior’s New Testament teachings about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, rendering unto Caesar and turning the other cheek make them feel that Christ is too soft on personal responsibility or too left on social issues. Then they turn to the 39 pre-Christian books of the Bible filled with good, Old Testament-fashioned smiting and stoning and vengeance and wrath of God stuff – hoping to get a second opinion.

Old Testament Patriots approach America’s founding the same way. The Constitution is holy writ, yes, but when keeping to its laws and principles makes them feel soft on terror and people less American than they are, right-wingers turn to pre-ratification letters and speeches by the founders – particularly the ones whose ideas lost early arguments as the Constitution took shape – hoping to get a second opinion.

Modern Times, old economy
by Tom Sullivan

I am a glorified temp. White collar Manpower. A contractor. I have worked for national and international corporations for years. I never trusted them. Not the people, necessarily, but the machine. To the machine, I am not a person. I am the hired help. A “human resource.” Consumable. Disposable. If work gets slack and I have to move on, it’s not as if anyone is breaking any promises to me I knew they wouldn’t keep. I never let them make them. Like Chaplin’s tramp, just a cog in the machine.

Ah, but “Modern Times” was 80 years ago. And now? The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy observes that this weekend’s New York Times article about Darwinian workplace conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon under Jeff Bezos has drawn more comments to the Times’ website than any other it has published. Cassidy writes:

Perhaps Times readers, who tend to be well educated and reasonably well off, like reading about bad things happening to people like themselves. But I think it goes deeper than that. As the “New Economy” celebrates its twentieth anniversary—on August 9, 1995, Netscape’s initial public offering took place—it is becoming harder to ignore some of its negative aspects. Behind all the technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management power.

Behind the websites of the New Economy are a lot of old-economy infrastructure: people, trucks and warehouses. In them, Amazon is not competing against Apple or other tech firms, but against Walmart and other low-wage, no security employers. Unions organized to oppose oppressive pay and workplace conditions a century or more ago. Will they come back now?

Amazon, for its part, has long resisted efforts to unionize its workforce, both in the U.S. and abroad. This battle is still ongoing. After the Times article came out, an official at a big British labor union, the G.M.B., which is seeking to recruit some of the roughly seven thousand people who work at Amazon’s U.K. distribution centers, accused the company of treating its staff like “robots” and imposing work conditions that often lead to physical and mental illness. A petition authored by the G.M.B. cites a survey of Amazon staff, which found that seventy-one per cent of them reported walking more than ten miles a day at work, seventy per cent felt they were given disciplinary points unfairly, and eighty-nine per cent felt exploited.

I don’t recall the word “exploited” being bandied about much in the dot-com era. Today, though, it crops up quite a lot. In a stinging response to the Times article, Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, reminded his readers that American private-sector unions “were originally formed as a response to exploitation by 19th century mill owners.” He added that, by “keeping a cowed workforce under the lash with non-stop pressure, bullying and psychological warfare, Bezos is the 21st century equivalent.”

Amazon is getting some unwelcome spotlighting here, but it is hardly unique. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The Poors: Leaded and unleaded
by Tom Sullivan

Once again, our vigilant T-party politicians are on the alert for the theoretical possibility of crimes by the Poors. Courtesy of Charlie Pierce comes the next wave of imaginary dirty tricks perpetrated by the Poors on honest, decent Americans. Landlords, in this case:

Holt is Maryland’s secretary of housing, community and development, and he is wise to the ways of America’s crafty poor people. Holt is seeking to “relax” Maryland’s lead-poisoning law in order to take the jackboot of regulation off the necks of the state’s landlords. And nothing gets by Kenneth Holt.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.

Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.

Thank heavens these public servants are always on high alert for the possibility of widespread voter fraud (or was it the widespread possibility?) and other dangers for which they never seem to produce evidence. Bigfoot might steal their Wheat Thins. The Poors might counterfeit the governor’s power bill.
Prisoners might hide tiny revolvers in their beards. “Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there” was good enough to argue last year before the Supreme Court.

Pierce continues:

Republican audiences are perfectly willing to buy the notion that clever moms are having their children suck on lead weights to stick it to their landlords and get something for nothing. Within the Republican Party, there is a relentless search for solutions to problems that do not exist, and an equally relentless search for suckers in the general public.

Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.