Tag Archives: Russia

3/1-3 News Roundup & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

How the State of the Union Became One of the Weirdest Nights in American Politics

More than a century ago, Woodrow Wilson gave the first in-person presidential address to Congress since Thomas Jefferson ended the practice in 1801. The new tradition stuck and eventually became the template for the president’s annual “message to Congress.” It was Franklin Roosevelt who coined the phrase, “the State of the Union” in one of those speeches, and by the late 1940s, it had become our national shorthand for the speech. The 20th century transformed what had been, for most of American history, a staid, written report into a giant annual spectacle of presidential majesty and congressional hooting and hollering.

In recent years, thanks to the increasingly commingled worlds of politics and popular entertainment, the annual State of the Union address has evolved into an even grander and creakier spectacle: a nationally broadcast circus of government whose uncanny resemblance to an awards show or grand fund-raising gala has only grown as its cast of characters expanded. Today, the State of the Union functions as a kind of political Super Bowl, Oscars, Met Gala and Rotary Club dinner all in one. As self-serious as amateur theater and as monumental as a coronation, it is one of the weirdest evenings in American life. Only habituation makes it seem normal, and even habit has its limits.

National politicians have always had a kind of fame, but the rise of social media thrust politics into a realm of popular celebrity and turned the campy solemnity of the State of the Union into mere farce. Even the lowliest members of the House of Representatives used to sit at some statesmanlike remove from us, democratic avatars of actual constituencies, yes, but also a kind of abstraction. Now, via social media, we are privy to their passing thoughts, their workout routines and workplace rivalries, their classical American infatuations with crackpot theories. There was once something edifying and even a little mystical about virtually the entire American national government gathering in one place for a grand and unabashedly imperial spectacle. No longer. It has all the mystery and half the charm of a slapped-together awards show, a too-familiar crowd of celebrities who spend the evening alternating between looking overly enthusiastic and terribly bored.

For most of the past century, presidents have given the address in January or February. President Biden’s has been postponed until March. This delay has been attributed to the Covid pandemic, to the ratings competition of the Winter Olympics, and to the hope that last-minute politicking might rescue a few pieces of Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda from obdurate Republican opposition and the dogged lack of cooperation from Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. This hope is almost certainly doomed. Mr. Biden will march down the gauntlet of glad-handing members of Congress with his approval ratings at one of their lowest points, a tenacious pandemic, national worry over rising prices and a generally poisonous national mood, not to mention a terrifying Russian invasion of Ukraine that the administration and its European allies could predict but not forestall, and whose course could become more volatile and unpredictable.

A rival nuclear power starting a shooting war in Europe just a few days earlier presents the kind of circumstance in which a State of the Union address could hypothetically be vital. But it is still likely destined to merely be bland news cycle chum. The chatterboxes on the cable channels and the pundits in the political press will debate the “expectations” for the speech, and we will all earnestly pretend to wonder whether our president — older now than Ronald Reagan was when he left office — will be able to summon some heretofore unobserved rhetorical genius to conciliate our sick and tired nation.

I hope that he will subvert expectations deliberately. Mr. Biden’s intrinsic political genius is his ability to act as a mourner and as a bearer of bad news. His greatest act of political bravery was to tell America, after 20 years of lies, that the war in Afghanistan was over and lost, and then to mostly keep quiet and stick to his guns. The stakes are much lower for a gaudy speech like the State of the Union, but he should really do the same. Go up the hill, deliver a dull litany of bullet points, get to bed early and consign this silly ritual to C-SPAN, where it belongs.

In 1796, writing to his great friend, Filippo Mazzei, an Italian physician, farmer, pamphleteer and gunrunner for the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson complained of the great changes in America since its independence. “In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro’ the war, an Anglican, monarchical and aristocratical party has sprung up,” he wrote, lamenting the adoption of British “forms” of pomp and circumstance, especially by the executive and judicial branches. Mazzei’s enthusiasm overcame his discretion, and he promptly dispatched copies of Jefferson’s observations to friends around Europe. They were published in French and Italian, and then made their way back across the Atlantic to the United States, where they reputedly caused a personal rift with George Washington, whose regal presidency — complete with annual addresses to joint sessions of Congress, which Jefferson considered far too similar to a British monarch’s “speech from the throne” — was understood to be a target of Jefferson’s contempt.

Jefferson’s dream of a nation of independent yeoman farmers was a fantasy even in his own time (not to mention a bit hypocritical — can anyone imagine the squire of Monticello driving a horse and plow through 40 rocky acres of Appalachian Virginia?), but his hostility toward the monarchical trappings of an imperial presidency was not wrong. His dream would be undone as America became a continental empire, then a hemispheric power, then an overseas empire and a great industrial and military titan. The centrality and power of the presidency could only increase as America evolved into a modern, bureaucratic state. It was inevitable, with the advent of modern mass broadcast communications, that the president would become a figure of enormous cultural significance as well. By the 1930s, presidents were everywhere on the radio; by the 1960s and the gilded, media-centric presidency of John F. Kennedy, they were culturally ubiquitous, singular synecdoches for America itself.

We are too close to these people now. Pomp can stand a little silliness; it may even require it. But it can’t survive absurdity. The advent of social media ruined celebrity by imitating proximity, and the transformation of politicians into ruined celebrities further destroyed politics. To see an actor whom you only know from movies and glossy magazines glide down a red carpet once or twice a year in a wild dress and borrowed jewels is to be astonished; to live with her everyday eructations of bad musical opinions and worse food photographs is to be annoyed. Likewise in politics. Our ostensible leaders are social media addicts like the rest of us, only more so. Their court rituals and pagan traditions have lost all of their high masonic mystery. We find ourselves watching a regional industry dinner, the sorry spectacle of insiders wallowing in self-congratulation over rubber chicken amid too much applause.

The form is exhausted. Mr. Biden has largely avoided the more ostentatious imperial vibes of his office, in part because he is the least telegenic president since George H.W. Bush. He has none of Ronald Reagan’s actorly charm; he cannot mimic Bill Clinton’s gregarious air of a debauched but beloved country preacher; he lacks Mr. Bush’s jingoistic cheerleading, Mr. Obama’s grandiosity, Mr. Trump’s nasty but effective comic timing. If he were wise, he would embrace his relative plain-spokenness and dislike of spectacle and diminish this absurd tradition.

The founders themselves imagined a new constitutional convention every few generations; perhaps every hundred years is also a good time to come up with new binding national political rites. We could do away with the speech entirely, and simply give out more civic medals for ordinary workers — the supposedly essential Americans whose daily, unseen labor makes the country run even as they are steadily alienated from mass politics and the highflying economy. Otherwise, the speech will continue to be more tendentious, reality-show entertainment. Will Sam Alito mouth off again? Will Nancy Pelosi do another ironic clap? Who will leap to applaud which lines, and who will sit on their hands? Enough is enough. Make the State of the Union boring again. We have been sufficiently entertained.

I would add that choosing to deliver the SOTU when Texas has a major primary….that’s also odd.

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2/28 News Roundup & OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Larry Summers Shares the Blame for Inflation

“Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” Larry Summers wrote in The Times in 2006. Mr. Summers comes from a family of left-leaning economists who saw Milton Friedman as a “devil figure.” But as he moved into the upper echelons of the family profession, Mr. Summers came to have “great admiration” for the conservative thinker and his work.

The transformation reflects how elite economists in both parties reached a rough accord on the importance of free markets, free trade, and restrained regulation. Each side believed they could harness these forces for liberal or conservative ends. And there was little disagreement about the means.

Virtually every American feels the consequences of this today, whenever we visit a grocery store with empty shelves, or do a double-take at the price of an appliance. For decades, economists like Mr. Summers advanced policies like globalization, deregulation, and markets that valued efficiency over competition. They promised that these trends would deliver lower prices. And they did, for a time. But they also left the system vulnerable. During the pandemic, when demand burst beyond what the system could handle, prices for shipping soared, ports clogged, trucks and railroads lacked manpower, and underinvested companies scrambled for logistics workarounds and warehouse space. Increased shipping and distribution costs have undeniably raised prices.

Mr. Summers has been focused on a different story, warning that government spending could increase inflation. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 40 years, he has been lauded for making the right call. “Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?” Politico asked last November.

The problem with this reading is that the economy hasn’t really overheated. Real gross domestic product and employment are still lower than prepandemic projections, according to government statistics. Yes, consumer spending patterns have shifted from services to goods, but that began two years ago; the fact that our supply chains still cannot adjust reflects a bigger problem with how they were designed.

Mr. Summers’s claims don’t express an economic truth. They seem designed to deflect blame. A leading economic adviser in the Clinton and Obama presidencies, Mr. Summers is prominent among the fraternity of mainstream economists who are deeply implicated in building the system at the heart of our current predicament, and setting up our economy for failure. If engineers constructed a bridge this prone to collapse, they’d be fired. But with our accountability-free elites, being an economist means never having to say you’re sorry.

Mr. Summers built an early reputation as an economic wunderkind, earning tenure at Harvard at age 28. Stagflation in the late 1970s had sent New Deal-style Keynesianism into retreat, and thrust into prominence Friedman’s vision of a marketized economics that catered to the whims of large corporations. As Friedman asserted, also in The Times, the sole social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Cut regulations, cut taxes, and allow companies to structure markets, people like Friedman maintained, and watch the economy take off.

During Mr. Summers’s formative years, this logic became the dominant current of economic thought. Mr. Summers spent a year under conservative economist Martin Feldstein in the Reagan administration; his generation “re-emphasized the importance of markets and the failures of government,” according to Mr. Summers’s mother, also an economist.

As under secretary for international affairs in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department, Mr. Summers was at the forefront of encouraging developing nations to open their markets, a kind of enforcer of globalization. Later, as Treasury secretary, he helped facilitate China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and argued that the United States should give China “permanent normal trade relations” (or P.N.T.R.) status. Mr. Summers told the Senate Banking Committee in 2000, “It is difficult to discern any disadvantage to the United States” from the policy.

During the Carter era moves were made toward deregulation in transportation services like trucking and rail. In the Clinton years, a little-remembered law called the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998 helped carry that over to ocean ships. Mr. Clinton also continued a trend toward economic concentration that began in the Reagan administration. If Mr. Summers opposed the deregulation and consolidation that occurred during his tenures with Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama, I have found no evidence that he said anything about it. In fact in 2001, he stated that “the goal is efficiency, not competition.”

U.S. financial services, which under P.N.T.R. pried open the Chinese market, grew enormously powerful in this period, too. Mr. Summers fought the regulation of derivatives and pushed Congress to eliminate the separation of investment and commercial banks. Where finance accounted for 15 percent of corporate profits in the U.S. economy before the 1970s, it grew to 43 percent by 2002, after this economic restructuring. Later, when runaway financial innovations (including the derivatives Mr. Summers did not want to regulate) collapsed the world economy, Mr. Summers, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, pushed for banks to be protected with bailouts, maintaining the status quo.

Mr. Summers was not especially novel in his preferences. He fit within an economist consensus that has largely governed the country since the late 1970s. The free trade consensus enabled corporate executives to chase cheap labor and centralize production. The just-in-time consensus pushed companies to only order what’s needed to pass on to customers, with inventories seen as unnecessary costs. The bigger-is-better consensus encouraged mergers and market dominance. The deregulatory consensus breaks worker power and greases the whole system. The Wall Street consensus lets investors dictate adherence to everything else, demanding ever-higher profits and returns that flow not into reinvestment but to them, in the forms of stock buybacks and dividends.

The gamble of such a system paid off, for a while. In 2005, Mr. Summers’s longtime collaborator Jason Furman best explained the philosophy when he pronounced retail behemoth Walmart a “progressive success story,” in part because of its ability to deliver low prices. “There is little dispute that Wal-Mart’s price reductions have benefited the 120 million American workers employed outside of the retail sector,” Mr. Furman wrote. That seemed to override everything else: low wages, competitors driven out of business, manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, communities hollowed out across America.

The trade-off was clear: sacrifice resiliency, wage security, and community for the promise of a five-dollar pack of tube socks. And the Summers-Furman side initially delivered: Prices for consumer goods, at least, did fall. Assuring these low prices became an important goal; while some liberals wanted to bring back manufacturing jobs to the United States or maintain reserves of vital goods, the threat of higher costs was enough to keep the system in place.

But the adherents of hyper-efficiency do not seem to have emphasized what might happen if there was a breakdown anywhere in the system. Economists spat out their models and assured us that very little could stop the global production engine. But their models did not adequately contemplate the physical world. And that’s why the system Mr. Summers and Mr. Furman helped build was so primed for collapse, and why the low prices, intended to be the compensation for increased inequality and left-behind regions, vanished in a matter of months.

The policies many of these economists championed during the decades leading up to the pandemic are the policies responsible for the supply chain’s fragility. When disruptions hit the center of global production in China, they spread across the entire world. Specialized facilities producing most of a particular good or component can easily produce shocks with even a small loss of output.

Shipping deregulation passed during the Clinton administration helped lead to ever-larger container vessels that can only dock at certain U.S. ports, further narrowing bottlenecks. The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are responsible for about 40 percent of all seaborne imports in the United States; by early January, 105 ships were awaiting entry offshore, and import volume had fallen, despite the increased demand, for four straight months. Trucking deregulation has similarly contributed to bottlenecks, as long hours, poor working conditions and inadequate wages have made it next to impossible for port truckers to stay in the industry.

The financier-above-all approach Mr. Summers helped entrench made things worse. Preferences for lean inventories meant there were no reserves when things spun out of control as the pandemic hit. Precision scheduled railroading, a Wall Street tactic of cutting back on service and spare capacity to maximize profits, made it difficult for rail lines to handle rising demand.

Economists often seem to assume corporate self-interest will sort this out, that the prospect of more sales will create urgency to move supply. But concentration along key nodes of the supply chain (three ocean carrier alliances control most shipping, two railroads control eastern routes and two others control western ones) have brought skyrocketing profits to the companies at the center of the chaos. The shipping industry earned twice as much in the first three quarters 2021 as it did in the entire period between 2010 and 2020.

Similarly, big businesses are announcing in earnings calls that they are using this opportunity to lock in higher prices, well above rising input costs. Estimated profits for S&P 500 firms rose nearly 50 percent in 2021. Bigger businesses also circumvented supply chain issues by demanding that suppliers fulfill their orders first, raising costs for smaller rivals. The supply chain mess, in other words, has also been a consolidation event, harming workers and communities.

The bottom line is that a system without redundancy and flexibility, which assumes that the corporate executives who control it are doing everything in their power to prevent it from breaking, is simply unsustainable.

The shocks will only continue until we reverse course on this prevailing consensus. Democrats put their faith in an economics profession that is far too distant from on-the-ground realities to grasp the consequences of globalization, monopolization, financialization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics. They failed to recognize how things could crumble because of the vulnerability they engineered.

No country can be perfectly self-sufficient; imports and shipping will still exist. But we can ensure some stability through bringing back manufacturing of critical goods to our shores, while maintaining productive capacity and strategic reserves. Public utility regulation can ensure smoother flow of goods, and competition policy can eliminate price gouging. And infrastructure investments like we’re currently embarking on can force open bottlenecks.

Economists will howl that losing efficiency will raise costs. Those words ring hollow in the face of the highest inflation in 40 years. Broken systems raise costs far faster than resilient ones.

Mr. Summers seems to acknowledge, at least partially, the extent to which his economic school of thought was responsible for the fragility of the supply chain. In a 2020 interview with The American Interest, he acknowledged the need to develop industrial capacity in the U.S. “In general, economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency,” Mr. Summers said. “Going forward we will need more emphasis on ‘just in case’ even at some cost in terms of ‘just in time.’ ”

But it’s not enough for him to simply acknowledge the downsides of efficiency. There is a live debate over how to solve the problem going on right now, as the Biden administration takes the first steps toward prioritizing resilience by attempting to re-regulate shipping companies, encourage competition to weaken corporate pricing power, and support domestic manufacturing. Mr. Summers shouldn’t be an obstacle to this effort or even an interested bystander, watching it unfold; he should be an active enthusiast for cleaning up the mess he made.

More comments, news, perspectives after the jump. This also serves as an open thread.

2/23-24 News Roundup & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/02/22/bernie-sanders-denounces-russia-indefensible-invasion-ukraine

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called for the U.S. and its allies to impose heavy sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other oligarchs in the country as he condemned Moscow’s escalating military aggression toward Ukraine.

“Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine is an indefensible violation of international law, regardless of whatever false pretext he offers,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “There has always been a diplomatic solution to this situation. Tragically, Putin appears intent on rejecting it.”

In addition to backing sanctions, Sanders said preparations must be made to accommodate refugees displaced by the conflict and called for investments in a global clean energy transition to fight the climate crisis and disempower “authoritarian petrostates” worldwide.

Sanders’ remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden—in concert with officials in the United Kingdom and the European Union—moved to impose new economic sanctions on Russia following the Kremlin’s deployment of troops into two breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine, which Putin on Monday formally recognized as independent.

To prevent Putin’s effort to expand his country’s presence in the Donbas region from descending into a broader military conflict, peace advocates in the U.S. and abroad continue to urge the Biden administration to double-down on diplomatic efforts, as Common Dreams reported earlier Tuesday.

“The United States,” said Sanders, “must now work with our allies and the international community to impose serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs, including denying them access to the billions of dollars that they have stashed in European and American banks.”

“The U.S. and our partners must also prepare for a worse scenario by helping Ukraine’s neighbors care for refugees fleeing this conflict,” Sanders continued, alluding to the possibility that Russian lawmakers’ approval of the use of military force outside the country could lead to a full-fledged war.

In the wake of recent developments in Ukraine, oil prices surged to nearly $100 per barrel on Tuesday, the highest in more than seven years, and European gas futures spiked by as much as 13.8%.

While the U.S. fossil fuel industry is expected to benefit from Germany halting approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline due to Russia’s recent actions, people in Europe—already struggling with skyrocketing energy bills—are bracing for even higher costs in the case that Moscow restricts gas exports.

“In the longer term,” said Sanders, “we must invest in a global green energy transition away from fossil fuels, not only to combat climate change, but to deny authoritarian petrostates the revenues they require to survive.”

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1/7-9 Weekend News Roundup & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

U.S. Details Costs of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The Biden administration and its allies are assembling a punishing set of financial, technology and military sanctions against Russia that they say would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine, hoping to make clear to President Vladimir V. Putin the high cost he would pay if he sends troops across the border.

In interviews, officials described details of those plans for the first time, just ahead of a series of diplomatic negotiations to defuse the crisis with Moscow, one of the most perilous moments in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The talks begin on Monday in Geneva and then move across Europe.

The plans the United States has discussed with allies in recent days include cutting off Russia’s largest financial institutions from global transactions, imposing an embargo on American-made or American-designed technology needed for defense-related and consumer industries, and arming insurgents in Ukraine who would conduct what would amount to a guerrilla war against a Russian military occupation, if it comes to that.

Such moves are rarely telegraphed in advance. But with the negotiations looming — and the fate of Europe’s post-Cold War borders and NATO’s military presence on the continent at stake — President Biden’s advisers say they are trying to signal to Mr. Putin exactly what he would face, at home and abroad, in hopes of influencing his decisions in coming weeks.

snip

While the Commerce and Treasury Departments work on sanctions that would maximize America’s advantages over Russia, the Pentagon is developing plans that have echoes of the proxy wars of the 1960s and ’70s.

Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.

A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s rhetoric toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

A measured approach. President Biden has said he is seeking a stable relationship with Russia. So far, his administration is focusing on maintaining a dialogue with Moscow, while seeking to develop deterrence measures in concert with European countries.

To underscore the potential pain for Russia, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, spoke with his Russian counterpart two weeks ago and delivered a stark message: Yes, he said, you could invade Ukraine and probably roll over the Ukrainian military, which stands little chance of repelling a far larger, better armed Russian force.

But the swift victory would be followed, General Milley told Gen. Valery Gerasimov, by a bloody insurgency, similar to the one that led to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan more than three decades ago, according to officials familiar with the discussion.

General Milley did not detail to General Gerasimov the planning underway in Washington to support an insurgency, a so-called “porcupine strategy” to make invading Ukraine hard for the Russians to swallow. That includes the advance positioning of arms for Ukrainian insurgents, probably including Stinger antiaircraft missiles, that could be used against Russian forces.

More than a month ago, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, created a new interagency planning cell to examine a range of contingencies if Mr. Putin goes ahead with an invasion. The cell, which reports directly to Mr. Sullivan, includes representatives from the National Security Council, the intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Energy and Homeland Security.

The cell is attempting to tailor responses to the many types of attacks that could unfold in the next few weeks, from cyberattacks aimed at crippling Ukraine’s electric grid and pipelines to the seizure of small or large amounts of territory.

Intelligence officials said recently that they thought the least likely possibility was a full-scale invasion in which the Russians try to take the capital, Kyiv. Many of the assessments, however, have explored more incremental moves by Mr. Putin, which could include seizing a bit more land in the Donbas region, where war has ground into a stalemate, or a land bridge to Crimea.

Several officials familiar with the planning say the administration is looking at European nations that could provide more aid to support Ukrainian forces before any conflict, as well as in the initial stages of a Russian invasion.

Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, a Defense Department spokesman, noted in December that the United States had already committed over $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, including $450 million in 2021 alone. Over the past three months, it has delivered 180 Javelin missiles, two patrol boats, ammunition for grenade launchers, machine guns, secure radios, medical equipment and other items that U.S. officials describe as defensive in nature.

But the planning cell is considering more lethal weaponry, such as antiaircraft weapons.

After visiting Ukraine last month, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Marine officer, said that in his view, “We need to make any incursion by Russia more painful — Day 1 painful, not six months from now painful.”

“We have a short window to take decisive action to deter Putin from a serious invasion,” Mr. Moulton said in an interview. “I worry our current deterrent tactics are responding to an invasion rather than preventing it.”

One option likely to be discussed at NATO this coming week is a plan to increase, possibly by several thousand, the number of troops stationed in the Baltics and in Southeast Europe.

Jake Sullivan is a Hil hawk.

More news, tweets, perspectives in the comments below. This serves as an open thread.