Basically The New York Times has given over its editorial page to an unending string of Trump attacks. Yesterday it was a David Brooks dissection of Trumpist misogyny, "The Sexual Politics of 2016," paired with a broadside by Roger Cohen, "Trump's New World Disorder," accusing Trump of calling for a nuclear arms race in East Asia.
The goal is to drive up Trump's negatives so high only the most fervent of supporters will back him. Trump will be left only with uneducated, working-class white men. He might win the GOP nomination, but he will not be electable in the general.
This appears to be the establishment strategy du jour. MoveOn is polling its members to see if they want to engage in an extended anti-Trump mobilization.
But good reporting has also been done on the Trump phenomenon. Nicholas Confessore's "How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump," which appeared Monday, is a must-read. The answer to the question of lost voters is lost jobs. Trump was able to get traction by attacking trade and immigration.
Corporate-managed trade policy, which has de-industrialized large swaths of the United States, is emerging as the premiere issue of the 2016 presidential race. The New York Times, always a stalwart on free trade, has attempted to obfuscate the issue with a series of think pieces -- Neil Irwin's "The Trade Deficit Isn’t a Scorecard, and Cutting It Won’t Make America Great Again" and Eduardo Porter's "Nafta May Have Saved Many Autoworkers’ Jobs" -- which acknowledge that jobs might have been lost because of U.S. trade policy but overall the country is stronger.
That might sound good in a corner office in Manhattan, but it makes no sense to most voters. People want jobs, affordable housing and health care, quality public education, efficient transit and well-maintained roads and decent food. Oh, and some green space. That's about it. They don't care about the dollar's hegemony and the rest of the Great Game bullshit.
Dipping into the coverage of what is being labeled China's "currency plunge," one finds reporting that is all over the map. For the alarmist perspective -- China's robust growth is actually an Oz-like mirage; an incipient trade war is brewing with cascading currencies devaluations -- read Neil Gough's "Devaluation Hints at China’s Rising Distress Over Economy" which appears today on the front page, upper right corner, of the NYT national edition.
While Gough includes some helpful numbers to illustrate ebbing construction in China, the idea that the country might be headed for recession seems absurd to me; in fact, Gough undercuts it himself in his choice of a closing for the article:
As the government pumps money into the market and the broader economy, it will help, along with moves like the devaluation. It is just not clear how solid the economy will actually be.
“It’s all about the quality of growth,” said Victor Shih, a China scholar at the University of California, San Diego. “If they want to, they can always achieve the right rate of growth.”
The Chinese government, he added, just needs to find a group of people and “tell them to go dig a ditch.”
The Chinese government has proven repeatedly to be adept at managing its high-growth economy, something that you will not see acknowledged in the Western mainstream press. In the United States, the idea that markets can be effectively manipulated by government bureaucrats is akin to championing child molestation.
A good story to go for one-stop shopping is Neil Irwin's "Why Did China Devalue Its Currency? Two Big Reasons." Those two reasons are 1) because the Chinese renminbi is pegged to the dollar, and the dollar this year has appreciated against other currencies, the renminbi is overvalued:
The renminbi on Monday was at about the same exchange rate versus the dollar that it was in mid-December. But in that time, the dollar index was up 8.7 percent, meaning the dollar — and by extension the renminbi — was up that much against other advanced nations’ currencies, like the euro, the yen and the British pound.
And 2) China is making a play for the renminbi to be included in the basket of global reserve currencies:
China is looking to assert more of a leadership role in the global economy, and an important piece of that is establishing the renminbi as a reserve currency. The dollar and the euro have a reach and a usefulness far beyond the borders of the countries that use them, and China would like the renminbi to have a similar sway in global trade and finance, especially in Asia.
But you can’t really be a global reserve currency when you maintain all the restrictions that China insists on in the interest of keeping control of its domestic economy. The dollar wouldn’t play its central role in global finance if the American government made it illegal to exchange it for other currencies in many circumstances or used legal prohibitions and aggressive interventions to keep its value from fluctuating in response to market forces.
In other words, China has wanted some of the diplomatic benefits it would gain if the renminbi became a more important currency abroad, without paying the price at home.
Just last week, the International Monetary Fund said that the renminbi was not quite ready for inclusion in the basket of currencies the I.M.F. uses for “special drawing rights,” a reserve asset that currently is a mix of dollars, euros, yen and pounds. Christine Lagarde, the organization’s managing director, said China needed to make its currency more “freely usable.” And the policy change on Tuesday, by moving closer to a world in which markets determine its price, is a step in that direction.
What is being touted by some as proof of rot in the Chinese economy could actually be the moment when U.S. dollar hegemony begins its end.
Debaltseve has fallen to the Novorossiya Armed Forces (NAF). What is interesting about David Herszenhorn's story, "Ukraine Forces Withdraw From Debaltseve, a Strategic Town," is he doesn't let on to where the Ukrainian Army is planning to retreat.
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian national security and defense council, confirmed the retreat at a briefing in Kiev, the capital, on Wednesday afternoon, and said that the pullout was nearly completed.
“Today, the armed forces of Ukraine are conducting the organized, planned retreat of units of forces of the antiterrorist operation from the city of Debaltseve,” Mr. Lysenko said. “At the moment, almost 80 percent of the Ukrainian units have retreated from this sector, and this operation is to be completed soon.”
Herszenhorn doesn't mention in his story that Debaltseve is encircled by the NAF. There is nowhere for the Ukrainian Army to flee. But in a story yesterday by Andrew Kramer, "Despite Ukraine Truce, a Battle That Continues," it is clear Poroshenko's troops are surrounded and in deep trouble:
As many as 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are holed up in the city, a rail hub connecting the capitals of the two rebel regions, Donetsk and Luhansk. Rebels have reportedly sent text messages to phones in the town, telling the soldiers that they have been abandoned and should surrender.
The Ukrainian government maintains that the town was not surrounded before the cease-fire took effect, and that European monitors of the truce should insist that the separatist forces halt their offensive and open a corridor to evacuate the wounded.
The main rebel group, the Donetsk People’s Republic, has said it will not observe the agreement in Debaltseve, saying that it was encircled before the cease-fire began and that it is therefore now an internal region in its enclave, not a section of the front.
The only resupply road into Debaltseve is mined, in range of rebel artillery and at times held by pro-Russian infantry. On Friday, eight Ukrainian soldiers reportedly escaped on foot through the fields, and on Sunday, a dozen or so made it out in a truck [one of the soldiers on the truck said it was dumb luck that they made it out alive].
On Tuesday, however, Ukrainian rocket-launching trucks and tanks were barreling down the resupply road toward the fighting, though the cease-fire required both sides to withdraw heavy weaponry starting at midnight Monday.
All my sources confirm that Debaltsevo is mostly in Novorussian hands and that the junta forces are in full retreat to the south of the pocket. All the top Novorussian brass was on hand today, including Kononov, Motorola, Givi, Mozgovoi and Zakharchenko as were many tens of Ukrainian prisoners. It appears that the junta forces were unable to provide the kind of resistance they showed in Peski, and that make sense because in Peski they were not surrounded and they had the fire support of Ukrainian forces just north and west of them. This time the cauldron is too deep and the "lid" too strong.
You can see that the cauldron "lid" has now closed on Debaltsevo from the north and that the junta forces are either surrendering of fleeing south where there is quite literally nothing for them to do then to wait until they run out of food and ammo. Bottom line: it's over for the Ukie forces in the Debaltsevo cauldron.
Amazingly, the freaks in Kiev as still insisting that there is no cauldron but only a "bridgehead". The good news is that apparently nobody buys that nonsense any more and the mothers and wifes of the men caught in the cauldron are trying everything they can to force the Ukie high command to accept the Novorussian offer of an evacuation corridor. The try to protest in front of the General Staff building in Kiev, then the blocked traffic. In a particularly poignant moment one of these women put a megaphone next to a cellphone to amplify the voice of her son/husband calling from the cauldron and announcing that they had for about 3 hours of supplies left.
All this is truly catastrophic news for the junta in Kiev. First, their policy of denying the issue made it impossible for their forces to get out while it was still possible. According to Russian military experts, about half of all the (comparatively) combat capable units of the Ukrainian military have been surrounded in this cauldron and that means that 50% of the Ukrainian army is now gone. Second, while Poroshenko and the junta freaks tried as hard as they could to completely deny the very existence of the cauldron, thanks to the Internet and the Russian TV channels most folks in junta-controlled Ukraine know that they are being lied to. That, in turns, means that the regime is loosing the very little credibility it might have had with the general public. Last and not least, now there will be a lot of very ugly recriminations from all sides of the political spectrum about who is guilty for that latest disaster. I would not be surprised one bit if the Ukrainian death-squads (aka Azov battalion & Co.) decided to storm Kiev for two reasons: a) to take out their rage on the regime and b) because it is safer to storm Kiev than Donetsk. Poroshenko better watch his back now. By the way, rumor (unconfirmed!) has it that he already evacuated his family to Germany.
Novorussian intel is reporting that the junta is trying to assemble three battalion tactical groups and numerous MLRS north of the cauldron to try to rescue the surrounded forces, but this will be too little too late. The Novorussians are used to Ukie artillery and they don't fear their armor or, even less so, infantry. Besides, I bet you that now that they are inside Debaltsevo, the Novorussians will deeply dig in. When is the last time that the junta forces succeeded in an urban assault operation? Exactly.
Bottom line: yet another brilliant victory for the Novorussian forces and yet another humiliating defeat for the junta in Kiev.
Judging from the reaction to Debaltseve by various participants at Minsk last week, The Saker is on the money: This is another titanic blunder by the junta which bodes ill not just for Kiev but for the West and Russia as well.
First, Herszenhorn reports Putin's reaction as follows:
[Poroshenko's] comments [asserting bizarrely that Ukrainian troops had accomplished their mission in Debaltseve], however, came after the separatists boasted of controlling the town, and after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia suggested on Tuesday in Hungary that Ukraine should accept its defeat at Debaltseve by separatist forces he described as “underdogs.”
“Life is life; it just goes on,” Mr. Putin said. “No need to dwell on it.”
Germany's reaction is troubling: more sanctions, more blame for Russia. According to Herszenhorn:
Ms. Merkel’s office condemned the separatist offensive, calling it a clear violation of a cease-fire.
At a regular government news conference, Steffen Seibert, Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman, said Europe was prepared to support a new round of sanctions against Russia if the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.
“There has been a massive violation of the cease-fire which took effect on Sunday,” Mr. Seibert said, according to Reuters. He said it was too early to say whether the Minsk peace deal had collapsed.
“The hopes linked to the Minsk agreement have been seriously damaged,” he said. “We must push for the implementation of the package of measures.”
“We see the U.N. resolution as an impulse in this direction, and in the coming days, we will work with the possibilities that we have,” he said.
To blame the NAF solely for a violation of the Minsk 2.0 ceasefire is not credible. Even the extremely biased Gray Lady reports that the Ukrainian Army violated the ceasefire. All indications are that the West is going to continue to back the junta. Hopefully, The Saker is right and Kiev will collapse from within either due to a new Maidan uprising or another Right Sector putsch. Because of the lifeline the West keeps extending to Poroshenko, change will have to come from within, and that appears to me to be a longshot.
Germany's insane behavior -- doing the same thing (sanctions) and expecting a different result (surrender of the NAF) -- does not bode well for the outcome of loan negotiations between Greece and the troika. Germany's institutional obtuseness has to be factored in.
On the other hand, one might argue that what determines German behavior is what Washington wants. Germany did not want a civil war in Ukraine, but Merkel has gone along with the disastrous U.S.-backed ATO in the Donbass. Washington supports some flexibility for Greece (see today's NYT unsigned editorial, "Give Greece Room to Maneuver"); Obama has voiced support, albeit meekly, for the Syriza-led government being allowed to implement some of its pro-growth policies. The idea here, as expressed in an "Upshot" today by Neil Irwin, "A Possible Day of Reckoning, Again, for Greece and Europe," is that eventually Germany will capitulate in favor of European unity:
If Greece ends up dropping out of the euro currency zone entirely, with unpredictable ripple effects across the Continent and the world financial system, the events of the last few days will look like a turning point that led to that moment. As of Tuesday, to be clear, markets were predicting nothing of the sort. European stock markets were down only slightly, and the value of the euro was actually up a bit. In effect, markets have seen this show before: the sturm und drang of threats and counterthreats that end in a last-minute deal.
The hedge fund manager Mark Dow offered on Twitter a way to think about the tense negotiations: “EZ bears underestimate the short-term resolve of EZ policy makers. EZ bulls overestimate the long-term viability of the exchange rate system.”
Here’s what Mr. Dow is saying. We have seen again and again that this generation of European leaders, who built their careers on the altar of European unity, will eventually do what it takes to prevent the common currency from ripping apart. If this recent history is a guide, then the drama of the last few days is merely the theatrics required to get these finance ministers to arrive at a deal.
On the other hand, Mr. Dow also points out, Europe really does have a big and plausibly unsolvable macroeconomic problem.
One more way to look at it is if Germany goes against her interests in Ukraine by supporting the Washington war drive then she earns the right to lead in negotiations with Greece. This means that the Moscovici document that Varoufakis was willing to sign but that was withdrawn at that last moment by Jeroen Dijsselbloem at Germany's behest will not be recycled. There are reports in the media that this is what is in the works.
Right now, given Germany's reaction to the fall of Debaltseve, it looks like continued impasse between the troika and Greece.
Hippies vs. Punks has been on hiatus. Since February Ukraine has absorbed most of my attention. I realize now that these Hippies vs. Punks posts, though of modest depth and limited insight, require a level of attention, effort and research that I have been unable to deliver of late.
The standard operating procedure for a Hippies vs. Punks post is to take a band, an album, a song, sometimes even a genre and immerse myself in selected recording(s) for a week or two, and then sit down and deliver. And what I want to deliver is some sort of understanding of what happened when the Hippies gave way to the Punks.
Why is this important? Because it is the period of time, when the Hippie dream gave way to the Punk nightmare, that marks the beginning of the age of neoliberalism in the West.
A story that appeared this week in the New York Times reminds us what many (Noam Chomsky, for instance) have been saying for decades -- that inequality, the re-ascension of capital, begins in the 1970s after a brief spurt of egalitarianism in the 1960s. Neil Irwin writes in "Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?" that great gains in the fight on poverty were made between 1959 to 1973 -- what one could call the heyday of rock'n'roll -- but have completely stalled or fallen backwards in the last 30 years:
From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent.
But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty.
The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning group’s policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since.
“It used to be that as G.D.P. per capita grew, poverty declined in lock step,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at E.P.I. and an author of the study. “There was a very tight relationship between overall growth and fewer and fewer Americans living in poverty. Starting in the ′70s, that link broke.”
The idea behind Hippies vs. Punks has always been that if we could understand what was going on when the kids gave up on the Hippie dream -- go back to the land, reject technocratic corporate society, live in communion with nature, practice tolerance, etc. -- in favor of the nihilism and know-nothingness of the Punks we could understand where we went wrong the last time around. So that now, as the wheel turns and signs appear pointing towards the coming demise of neoliberalism, we will be prepared to avoid the mistakes the Hippies made.
Not all Punks were "No Future" nihilists like the Sex Pistols or Rock 'n' Roll High School know nothings. The foremost example of a politically engaged, socially conscious first-wave Punk band is The Clash.
It is hard to appreciate today how big The Clash were in the early 1980s. In fact, my freshman year at the university they were the band at the top. And what made them different is that they were, at least as the gestural level, clearly opposed to the cultural establishment that they were reigning over.
When The Clash signed to CBS Records and released their eponymous debut in April 1977, it marked the critical moment when the corporate mainstream recognized the new avant-garde.
As has been noted in numerous past Hippies vs. Punks posts, 1977 is the year that the Hippie finally gives up the ghost and disappears, becoming nothing more than a heavy metal headbanger. The Hippie, shorn not of his locks but of his Aquarian aspirations, had been trending in that direction for many years, certainly since 1971. By 1977 the shift is irrevocable.
Five-years later The Clash release their double platinum Combat Rock (1982); it is the year I graduate from high school and enter the university. My first few months on campus songs from Combat Rock were heard everywhere -- from the student union Bear's Lair, to transistor radios, and out of the mouths of collegiate gridiron heroes. I owned a cassette tape of the album, which I played repeatedly.
The Clash performed "Straight to Hell," a song about the gross injustice of living in a world ruled by war and greed, on Saturday Night Live, October 2, 1982. Watch the YouTube of the performance. It is wonderful. The band is flawless. From the animated guitar playing of Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to the precision of a mohawked Joe Strummer on lead vocals.
I remember that evening. It had been a beautiful, sunny day in the Bay Area. I had been out with a girl, and I got home late and turned on the TV to Saturday Night Live. Everyone watched Saturday Night Live in those days. It was obligatory. I remember thinking that Joe Strummer's conclusion to "Straight to Hell" -- when he holds two fingers (simulating a gun) up to his temple and rasps sharply into the microphone -- was a bit over the top. But watching it today, I have no such qualms.
Nineteen-eighty-two is the zenith for The Clash. Reaganism and Thatcherism rule the West. It is the end -- for the Hippies, for the Punks, for any dream of progressive transformation of society.
But on that one beautiful Indian summer dark night in October I was feeling good: a young man, a boy, living alone for the first time, in a clean apartment, on top of the world as it hurtled through space on its trip around the Sun.
