Tag Archives: election 2016

the fall of the U.S. republic?

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This article on History News Network compares the current state of the United States to the Roman Republic a few decades before it fell.

By the second century B.C., the Romans believed they had achieved the ideal state: a republic with strong checks and balances that provided a voice for the common people while limiting the dangers of direct democracy. By the mid 140s B.C., victories in foreign wars had led to a massive expansion of Roman power. It seemed the Republic — stable, powerful, and immensely wealthy — would last forever.

But things changed. The economy transformed as Roman power expanded across the Mediterranean. As Rome began to import cheap grain from North Africa in quantities previously unimagined in the ancient world, grain prices plunged. Domestic small farmers were squeezed out of the market and off their lands. Rich landowners snapped up land from these struggling farmers, incorporating these plots into giant plantations worked by slaves from newly conquered territories. Many of these land acquisitions were illegal — but the plebeians were powerless to stop them. Forced to compete against slave labor and facing a nascent form of corporatization that favored the wealthy, the plebeians felt that they were cast aside as Rome ascended to greatness.

In response to these changes, the plebeians voted a slew of populist politicians to power. These politicians were called Populares. While some Populares genuinely sought to uplift the plebeian class, others learned to harness the power of the people in a cynical ploy for power.

– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163207#sthash.FccCVUPn.dpuf

Could the U.S. form of government really fall? I am not predicting that but I can envision a scenario where it is plausible. Let’s say a completely incompetent leader gets elected by the people (I’m not naming any names) and orders the military to do something so egregious it refuses to carry out the order. At that point, the Constitution would no longer be functioning, so what then? Congress could act quickly to impeach the President to maintain the appearance of order, while the military could temporarily maintain order until the Vice President or another civilian leader could be installed according to the letter of the Constitution. But if that sort of thing kept happening, the Constitution would be weakened each time until one day the civilian government might cease to exist. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but within the realm of plausibility. Throw in some serious natural or industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical conflicts and it could put even more strain on our system.

NAFTA, Appalachia, and Trump

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This article caught my eye just because (a) it is in the BBC and (b) it is about Martinsville, Virginia. It just so happens I was born in Martinsville in 1975 and lived there until 1985. Many of my relatives worked in the furniture and textile factories there between the end of World War II and when most of the factory jobs left in the 80s and 90s. Once upon a time Martinsville was an Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse and a place working class people could get decent paying jobs. Race relations were not perfect by any means but still, white and black and spanish-speaking working people shared in the relative prosperity. Workplace health and safety was also not perfect – my grandfather was minus a foot and an aunt was minus a few fingers at one point, although they were later reattached. Given all that, there was relative prosperity, health, and modern amenities for people whose parents and grandparents were subsistence farmers. The article talks about how NAFTA destroyed most of those jobs and most of that prosperity, and people are still bitter about it.

Now, I find the ideology of free trade attractive as a general principle. I think those industries were on the wane and those jobs were on the way out, and NAFTA just hastened them along. Still, it was a very abrupt and drastic change in Martinsville, and the people who were hurt are real people that I know. It illustrates that abstract measures of average economic prosperity that look good on paper have to be tempered with an understanding of what is going on with a broad cross-section of people across geographies, for example working class white and black and Hispanic people in Appalachia. People need viable options to be retrained and relocated in some cases to remain economically viable, and obviously their children need to be well educated. There has to be a safety net for the people who still fall through the cracks.

Sadly, the people interviewed in this article don’t seem supportive of the very policies that might help them, like universal health care. They were supportive of Obama but felt let down by him when he wasn’t able to deliver substantive change in their lives during his years in office. They don’t support anyone named Clinton because they associate that name with NAFTA. So, despite the fact that the people interviewed in this article are kind hearted, moral, and anything but bigots, which fits my personal experience in Appalachia, they are left with Trump as the only available choice that makes sense to them.

divide and conquer

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This article on History News Network goes through a long account of “divide and conquer” strategies of the white elite in the U.S., which led poor and working class white people to support the rich elite rather than unite with poor and working class black people. It goes all the way from slavery and civil war through to the Nixon and Reagan years and on to Trump. But he suggests that it won’t work for Trump because the white working class itself is shrinking and divided.

Nate Silver weighs in

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Nate Silver has launched his general election forecast page. He gives Hillary about an 80-20 chance of winning. He has a long discussion post about it here. I found this last paragraph interesting, where he relates a 20% chance of winning to a baseball game:

A 20 percent or 25 percent chance of Trump winning is an awfully long way from 2 percent, or 0.02 percent. It’s a real chance: about the same chancethat the visiting team has when it trails by a run in the top of the eighth inning in a Major League Baseball game. If you’ve been following politics or sports over the past couple of years, I hope it’s been imprinted onto your brain that those purported long shots — sometimes much longer shots than Trump — sometimes come through.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about risk. Let’s say your favorite team is in game 7 of the World Series, down by a run in the top of the eighth. The game is insanely late on the east coast as they always are, and you have to do something important early the next morning, like interview for a job or operate heavy machinery. Do you turn the TV off? No, of course not, you stay tuned.

June 2016 in Review

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3 most frightening stories

  • Coral reefs are in pretty sad shape, perhaps the first natural ecosystem type to be devastated beyond repair by climate change.
  • Echoes of the Cold War are rearing their ugly heads in Western Europe.
  • Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.

3 most hopeful stories

  • China has a new(ish) sustainability plan called “ecological civilization” that weaves together urban and regional planning, environmental quality, sustainable agriculture, habitat and biodiversity concepts. This is good because a rapidly developing country the size of China has the ability to sink the rest of civilization if they let their ecological footprint explode, regardless of what the rest of us do. Maybe they can set a good example for the rest of the developing world to follow.
  • Genetic technology is appearing to provide some hope of real breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
  • There is still some hope for a technology-driven pick-up in productivity growth.

3 most interesting stories

Trumponomics

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Moody Analytics has tried to take what Trump says and predict what would happen to the economy if he could actually do what he says.

Broadly, Mr. Trump’s economic proposals will result in a more isolated U.S. economy.
Cross-border trade and immigration will be significantly diminished, and with less trade and immigration, foreign direct investment will also be reduced. While globalization has created winners and losers in the U.S. economy in recent decades, it contributes substantially to the ongoing growth of the U.S. economy. Pulling back from globalization, as Mr. Trump is proposing, will thus diminish the nation’s growth prospects.

Mr. Trump’s economic proposals will also result in larger federal government deficits and a heavier debt load. His personal and corporate tax cuts are massive and his proposals to expand spending on veterans and the military are significant. Given his stated opposition to changing entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, this mix of much lower tax revenues and few cuts in spending can only be financed by substantially more government borrowing.

Driven largely by these factors, the economy will be significantly weaker if Mr. Trump’s economic proposals are adopted. Under the scenario in which all his stated policies become law in the manner proposed, the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office (see Chart). By the end of his presidency, there are close to 3.5 million fewer jobs and the unemployment rate rises to as high as 7%, compared with below 5% today. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, the average American household’s after-inflation income will stagnate, and stock prices and real house values will decline.

Trump and organized crime

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Here’s a long article on BillMoyers.com, with links to a lot of other articles, about Donald Trump’s alleged mob links.

While there are some financial subjects on which the media has dared to grill the billionaire — ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month got Trump to deliver a blunt “no” when he asked about the Republican nominee-apparent’s repeated refusal to release his recent tax returns, something every other recent presidential candidate has done — there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.

One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.” As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition calledTrump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention…

Beyond ABC News’ Ross, TV has been even less eager to press inquires about Trump’s history of relations with organized crime. Nor have questions of Trump’s mob ties been much explored in other major news outlets. A notable exception: Johnston, who, in Politico last month, raised yet more questions. One was why Trump relied on ready-mix reinforced concrete construction (mob-controlled) to build his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower and subsequent New York buildings, although steel girders were the usual choice. Another was why, when seeking a license to build casinos in Atlantic City, Trump received special treatment from New Jersey gaming investigators, “Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators,” Johnston wrote, “Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on.” Wayne Barrett calls Trump Tower “a monument to the mob.” He writes of the “sweetheart deals” that delivered the concrete, and the special tax abatements that have continued to roll in for Trump. There, so far as the public is concerned, the matter has rested. Why do the major media, ordinarily eager to fight for their own angles on big stories, lag? Why do the dogs not bark and the chambers not echo?

Whitewater

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Politico says Trump plans to dredge up the Whitewater scandal that dogged the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. The Whitewater scandal is just tiresome – you can read about it here. Basically it was a failed deal to develop some vacation homes in the hills of Arkansas. The actual scandal had something to do with the Clintons maybe twisting some arms to get loans to the developers. It was investigated throughout the 90s, a few people actually went to jail for short periods of time related to the loans or obstruction of justice, but there really was nothing even close to a case made against either Clinton.

Compare this to the plots to murder Fidel Castro, the U.S.-backed military coups against elected governments in Central and South America and all over Asia, the secret and illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Iraq, and this little “scandal” looks really silly. I hope the 90s are not starting up again, but you can see the beginnings of that with the “email scandal” and the “Bengazi scandal”. It has been refreshing that there has really been no whiff of scandal in relation to Obama, unless you count “Obama is a Muslim” or the birth certificate thing, but those are beyond silly, just childish. The drone strikes and special forces activity around the world are questionable of course, but then political “scandals” don’t usually involve these matters of actual life and death, do they?

terrorism and U.S. elections

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This Washington Post article was written after the Paris attacks of fall 2015. It says that after a terrorist attack these things happen:

  • concerns about terrorism increase suspicion and even intolerance directed at migrants, refugees and Muslims.

  • On average, leaders who are Republican, male, and have relevant national security experience tend to be viewed as more competent.

  • terrorist threat advantages Republicans more than Democrats, in part because Republicans are traditionally perceived as better able to handle issues related to national defense.

  • Leaders who are both female and Democratic may…experience the most negative political consequences of terrorist attacks.

  • Hillary Clinton is likely to be bolstered by the foreign policy experience she gained as secretary of state and by her tendency to take stands that are more hawkish than those of Bernie Sanders.

  • Trump is a bit of a wild card, however. His bold style may be appealing in a context of threat. However, he may be hurt by his lack of any significant foreign policy experience

In other words, nobody knows. The general election is going to be interesting, and if god forbid there were to be major terrorist or geopolitical events it will be even more interesting.

Trumpism, fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, etc.

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This article, from Salon write Robert Sharp, makes some interesting points about the Trump phenomenon. Even if he falls flat in the general election, what the experts say is inevitable (and I want to agree, but we have all been wrong about everything so far…), his success raises some disturbing questions about the mindset of the population and where the country could be headed in future decades. To summarize, the article says that by offering a return to past glory, but offering no specifics, Trump allows each person to hear what they want to hear, visualize their own personal utopia, and imagine that everyone around them agrees.

While Totalitarian regimes present themselves as harbingers of a better future, they do so by appealing to the perception of a glorious past that has since been lost due to the mismanagement of the existing politicians. Thus Hitler referenced a Wagnerian vision of Germany as the source of two of the world’s great Reichs in order to present his Third Reich as a continuation of German greatness. Similarly, Mussolini invoked the orderliness and domination of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy in order to restore an ancient pride that would lead to a new prominence on the world stage. Such leaders follow a common pattern, in which they blame any failures of their society on the incursion of Others, who lack the purity of the true members of the nation-state.

While the details differ, the call to action carries a consistent refrain: the totalitarian leader promises to make the country great again, to return it to past glories that have long since been lost.

In many ways, calling Trump supporters an analog to the rise of Nazi Germany is too easy, and far too dismissive. However, there is this one obvious similarity. Hitler and the Nazi party appealed to a people who believed that their Golden Age was past them, and that the world was moving on without them. The appeal of the nationalism that was offered was that it would allow a return to greatness, a necessary repeal of all of the policies, both externally imposed and internally permitted, that had led to their fall. Trump offers a very similar message, and he couches it in a way that allows his followers to fill in the blank. Whatever version of the good life they believe existed in their parents’ or grandparents’ day, that is the world that Trump plans to recreate. It is a compelling narrative, because it is their own narrative, and each individual gets to tell his or her own story while simultaneously believing that everyone else around them is thinking the same thing.