It’s not just a populist backlash – many economists who once swore by free trade have changed their minds, too. How had they got it so wrong? • Read the text version here

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period.…

Our climate is changing and because of it, our oceans and rivers are rising. In the past, we used large, manmade infrastructure to keep the water at bay. But maybe instead of trying to fight off nature, we should start working with it instead.

Michael Goldfarb tells the story of Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, who asked Who is God? and what role should religion play in government.

07-28-2017 (Photo:spy vs spy ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow Searching for the secret Fusion GPS Democratic client. @ThadMcCotter @MaryKissel Word is Mr. Simpson has made clear he will appear for a voluntary committee interview only if he is not specifically asked who hired him to dig dirt on Mr. Trump. Democrats are going to the mat for him over that demand. Those on the Judiciary Committee pointedly did not sign letters in which Mr. Grassley demanded that Fusion reveal who hired it. Here’s a thought: What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources? Moreover, what if those Kremlin-tied sources already knew about this dirt-digging, tipped off by Mr. Akhmetshin? What if they specifically made up claims to dupe Mr. Steele, to trick him into writing this dossier? Fusion GPS, in an email, said that it “did not spread false information about William Browder.” The firm said it is cooperating with Congress and that “the president and his allies are desperately trying to smear Fusion GPS because it investigated Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.” If the Russian intention was to sow chaos in the American political system, few things could have been more effective than that dossier, which ramped up an FBI investigation and sparked congressional probes and a special counsel, deeply wounding the president. This is all to Mr. Putin’s benefit, and the question is whether Russia engineered it. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Democrats and the media really want answers about Russian meddling, this is a far deeper well than the so-far scant case against Mr. Trump. If they refuse to dive into the story, we’ll know that the truth about Russia and the election was never what they were after. https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-paid-for-the-trump-dossier-1501193386?shareToken=stbb6be7bb41be4309b953078bc9ea80a9&reflink=article_email_share

Doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters. Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth? • Read the text version here

How and why did alleged war criminals from WW2 escape punishment for their crimes?

A new study suggests that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won more votes from communities with high military casualties than from similar communities which suffered fewer casualties.

Recall that Trump campaigned as a somewhat antiwar candidate who would break with bipartisan pro-war consensus (a promise he has not lived up to, and which didn’t exactly match his past record). His Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, ran a campaign more or less embracing the war status quo — with the emphasis occasionally, as with the case of Syria, on more.

Boston University political science professor Douglas Krinera and University of Minnesota Law professor Francis Shen studied the relationship between military casualties and pro-Trump votes. Comparing the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, they concluded that regions that had seen high concentrations in casualties over the past 15 years of warfare saw a swing in support towards Trump.

They demonstrated this relationship in a scatterplot:

The researchers controlled for a number of other factors, including race, income, and education; they also controlled for the percentage of the population that lives in rural areas and the military veteran population — both populations tended to support Trump overall, so controlling for these variables means that the number of military casualties was still a statistically significant driver of the vote, even in rural areas that share many of the same characteristics.

Their model also suggests that three swing states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — could very well have been winners for Clinton if their war casualties were lower.

In an interview with The Intercept, Shen speculated that this angle of the election has not been explored as much because academics and the media are not from communities that have been besieged with war deaths.

“Those writing both in universities and in most of the media are not regularly experiencing the cost of war. It’s not, again, on average their communities who are seeing as many deaths and it is more likely on average communities that are poorer, less educated, and are more rural,” he said. “And I think its plausible, it’s certainly plausible I think that the … rhetoric of Trump’s campaign may have resonated with that group.”

Towards the end of their paper, Krinera and Shen suggest there are a number of political implications from their conclusion — one of which is that Trump does not deviate from the pro-war consensus, it may very well cost him in 2020. That is, they write, if the Democrats offer an alternative:

Top photo: A United States flag that covered the casket of a U.S. army sergeant is folded by members of the burial team during the soldier’s burial service at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 5, 2016.

The post Study Finds Relationship Between High Military Casualties and Votes for Trump Over Clinton appeared first on The Intercept.

Speaker(s): Bill Emmott | Liberal democracies of the West are in decline. A former editor of the Economist explains how they must change in order to recover and thrive. When faced with global instability and economic uncertainty, it is tempting for states to react by closing borders, hoarding wealth and solidifying power. We have seen it at various times in Japan, France and Italy and now it is infecting all of Europe and America, as the vote for Brexit in the UK has vividly shown. This insularity, together with increased inequality of income and wealth threatens the future role of the West as a font of stability, prosperity and security. Part of the problem is that the principles of liberal democracy upon which the success of the West has been built have been suborned, with special interest groups such as bankers accruing too much power and too great a share of the economic cake. So how is this threat to be countered? States such as Sweden in the 1990s, California at different times or Britain under Thatcher all halted stagnation by clearing away the powers of interest groups and restoring their societies' ability to evolve. To survive, the West needs to be porous, open and flexible. From reinventing welfare systems to redefining the working age, from reimagining education to embracing automation, Emmott will lay out the changes the West must make to revive itself in the moment and avoid a deathly rigid future. Bill Emmott (@bill_emmott) was the editor-in-chief of the Economist from 1993 to 2006, and is now a writer and consultant on international affairs. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, La Stampa and Nikkei Business. His latest book is The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World's Most Successful Political Idea. Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) is an LSE Fellow in Comparative Politics and author of The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy.

After a crisis, private contractors move in and suck up funding for work done badly, if at all – then those billions get cut from government budgets. Like Grenfell Tower, Hurricane Katrina revealed a disdain for the poor • Read the text version here

Doug interviews two guests. First, Kate Gordon, a Senior Adviser at the Paulsen Institute, talks about China, Climate, and the Paris climate accord. Then, Nancy Maclean, author of the recent book Democracy in Chains, talks about the Right's stealth war and democracy, paying special attention to the role of James Buchanan.

Dan’s guest today is Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College. They discuss Ecuador’s 2017 elections, in which the left won a narrow victory despite the crisis hitting the Pink Tide of left governments throughout the region. Former President Rafael Correa accomplished much for the country’s poor majority. Unfortunately, he did so thanks to a commodity boom that has since gone bust, a strategy that has put the government in conflict with indigenous and environmental movements.

On Jacobin Radio, Gabriel Winant, whose recent article in Dissent on “The New Working Class” looks at the Democrats' cluelessness about today's workers. And Joe Allen, a former UPS worker and author of The Package King, A Rank and File History as well as "Going Brown," a recent Jacobin article on UPS in San Francisco, on UPS and the restructuring of the working class, plus Amazon's recent purchase of Whole Foods and what it means for logistics and organizing.

Democracy Now! 2017-07-18 Tuesday

• Headlines for July 18, 2017
• The Ultimate Hypocrisy? Trump Plan to Renegotiate NAFTA Resembles TPP Deal He Withdrew From
• Amnesty Accuses U.S. Coalition of War Crimes in Mosul: Scale of Death Much Higher Than Acknowledged
• Still Not Free: New Documentary "Life on Parole" Follows Former Prisoners Navigating Early Release

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In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the battlefield, Hannibal ultimately failed in his…

It used to be just a word – now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus? By Archie Bland • Read the text version here

Democracy Now! 2017-07-13 Thursday

• Headlines for July 13, 2017
• A Further Blow to Democracy in Brazil? Glenn Greenwald on Conviction of Lula Ahead of 2018 Election
• Glenn Greenwald: Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails Aren't a "Smoking Gun" or Evidence of Criminal Collusion
• Whistleblowers Shouldn't Be Prosecuted Like Spies: Greenwald on Alleged NSA Leaker Reality Winner

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Jonah Goldberg is the founding editor of the National Review Online, a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise think tank, and a widely distributed conservative columnist. He first gained the spotlight, and began writing for National Review, in 1998, when his mother Lucianne Goldberg helped promote the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

To give you an idea of how he built his career as a “provocative” conservative thinker, he opened a 2001 column thus (Jewish World Review, 10/15/01):

Suddenly, serious people are rethinking an old idea that’s time has come again: colonialism. For years, colonialism has been discredited. It was considered racist on the left to point out that many people lived better and more productive lives under, say, British rule than they have without it.

The core theme of his punditry has always been complaining about “liberals”: His two books, from 2008 and 2012, are titled Liberal Fascism and The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Why has he appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s most widely distributed news hours (primarily Morning Edition) 25 times since April 2016—making him one of the network’s most regularly consulted commentators?

A number of NPR’s listeners have written in to complain about Goldberg’s prevalence on the airwaves. NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen acknowledged in a response column (NPR.org, 4/11/17) that “no liberal commentator has had such a recurring platform, and Goldberg is not always identified by his political views, leaving listeners to guess.” She also defended their frequent use of Goldberg: “I appreciate Goldberg’s commentary and rarely find it following predictable talking points.”

Based on FAIR’s review of all of Goldberg’s NPR appearances since 2015, it is easy to see his value as a pundit to NPR’s editors and producers. He is always an easy interview; he never contradicts NPR hosts and usually confines his commentary to mundane observations on the political horserace between Democrats and Republicans. He is willing to critique Republican strategy and lawmakers. Most significantly, he refused to endorse (or vote for) Donald Trump, sharing what we may assume is most NPR staffers’ distaste for Trump’s style and rhetoric. (NPR’s other most frequent conservative commentator, David Brooks, is also a well-known “Never Trumper.”)

Offering the anti-Trump Goldberg a platform is NPR’s way of providing a “counterbalance” to its widely perceived liberal worldview, while also drawing a distinction between good right-wingers (establishment conservatives) and bad right-wingers (Trump). But promoting Goldberg is a misguided move: The liberal/conservative balancing act has always been a misleading quest for a false “center,” and Goldberg’s brand of conservatism is not an antidote to Trumpism, but rather its close relative and natural precursor.

‘A Conservative Voice’ and the False Center

When Jensen praises Goldberg for “rarely…following predictable talking points,” it is clear that the apparent unconventionality of Goldberg’s commentary is what appeals to NPR. She writes further about political commentary (NPR.org, 10/6/16): “My sense is that the vast majority of listeners are hoping to hear a commentary perspective that makes them consider an issue from a different angle.”

But Goldberg’s unconventionality is superficial. It consists primarily of irreverence towards politicians and the occasional stale pop culture reference (Morning Edition, 5/22/17):

You know, Mitch McConnell, who’s got a gift for understatement, said we could all use a little less drama. That’s code for, dear God, please cut it out. I have these visions of Reince Priebus doing a sort of Jerry Maguire with Trump—you know, help-me-help-you kind of thing.

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s views on policy are conventionally right-wing. His take on Rep. Steve Scalise’s shooting (National Review, 6/16/17), which included his trademark “I can see both sides” posture, concluded that the shooting teaches us…that we need to reduce the size and scope of government. (A glance at Goldberg’s past writings—e.g., Townhall, 3/7/13—on the necessity of cutting “entitlement” programs like Social Security provides a clue as to how he envisions shrinking the government.)

His writings in the past month include an essay on how PC-culture “snowflakes” pose a threat to free speech (Commentary, 6/19/17). He entered the AHCA debate (Townhall, 5/31/17) with the edgy idea that people don’t really need health insurance, parroting a Ted Cruz and Rick Perry talking point from 2015 that’s long been debunked (Factcheck.org, 7/10/15). Elsewhere (Baltimore Sun, 5/5/17), he asks the question: Is empathy a distraction in the healthcare debate?

Goldberg’s views on Israel/Palestine, and US Mideast policy more broadly, can be gleaned from a 2007 column (Townhall, 6/20/07) that complains that “the assumption behind the push for democracy in Gaza and in Iraq is that Arabs can be trusted to handle political freedom.”

It’s tough to see what precious spice Goldberg adds to the mix on NPR; his contributions range from the absurdly equivocal (Morning Edition, 7/20/16):

Oh, Roger Ailes is a colossal figure. And he—the list of people who owe their careers to Roger Ailes is very, very long, including many politicians. And this is a thunder clap, and we don’t know where it’s going to go, but it’s complicated.

…to the hopelessly slanted (Morning Edition, 4/10/17):

There are some people, including some of my colleagues at National Review, that basically see Syria as just a hot mess. It’s basically like the Spanish Civil War, where you had two bad guys fighting each other.

Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, sees the democratically elected left-wing Spanish government and the Hitler-backed fascist coup as “two bad guys.”

His views would only be unconventional if racism, celebration of US militarism and a constant drone of warnings about budget deficits—where the solution is always to cut programs that support poor and marginalized US Americans—were unconventional among right-wing pundits. They’re not; this is the same conservative cocktail that has been served to the Republican base for years, scapegoating immigrant populations, people of color and the poor to provide cover for policies that do little but further concentrate wealth and power upward. It is in the shadow of such policies—the brand of conservatism endorsed by Goldberg—that the white nationalist and proto-fascist tendencies encouraged by Trump have established their foothold, as a population encouraged to blame scapegoats for economic and social problems looks for ever more extreme solutions.

It is strange to think that promoting such a conservative voice—which he will continue to use in service of the same deceptive and exploitative project—would provide clarity or even a clarifying “balance.” From their vantage point amid the Washington, DC, political class, Morning Edition decision-makers may feel that hosting an acknowledged “conservative ideologue” (Morning Edition, 3/24/17) provides the needed balance for a news organization often maligned as “liberal” (ABC News, 2/15/11).

Meanwhile, the inherent conservatism of that same DC milieu would make it extremely uncomfortable for Morning Edition to regularly host a left-wing ideologue of any kind—so they don’t. Conservative ideologues, more often than not, are “balanced” by the voices of Democratic Party loyalists and centrist liberals. In 2016, Goldberg was often paired with former NPR reporter Cokie Roberts as a commentator—someone who claims that she has an ideology that “does not exist” (NPR.org, 10/5/16), but who for decades has consistently been warning the Democratic Party that it needs to move to the right (Extra!, 7–8/98).

The foreign policy realm offers instructive examples of how this balancing act often plays out at NPR. When President Trump ordered an airstrike on a Syrian airbase in March, Morning Edition hosted a series of guests to air their reactions. Among these were Goldberg (4/10/17) along with other conservative supporters and opponents of the strike (Will Hurd, 4/10/17, Chris Buskirk, 4/7/17, Cory Gardner, 4/10/17), plus two ostensibly liberal voices—Democratic senators Tim Kaine (4/7/17) and Adam Schiff (4/7/17)—both of whom approved of the strike, but wished the president had asked congressional permission first.

Any distinctly left-wing guest could have questioned the motives of the United States government and its military’s interventions in the Middle East; at the very least, such a guest could have provided a basic principled anti-war argument against the punitive strike. Somehow, such common sense perspectives were not among the “different angles” that Morning Edition wished its listeners to consider.

Seeing through Goldberg’s surface-level willingness to part with GOP orthodoxy, we perceive Morning Edition reaching to a sometimes extreme right-wing voice in order to balance out a left-wing voice that doesn’t, in fact, exist.

Knowing Better

The 2016 election results belied the predictive punditry of NPR and most other mainstream outlets, where Clinton’s win had seemed a near certainty. This misstep forced a moment of reflection; David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, wrote:

Cenk Uygur, the leftist host of the Young Turks and a supporter of Bernie Sanders, predicted in July that Trump would beat Clinton, based on a populist appeal tapping into voter anger against the establishment. He looks pretty good in retrospect. But he has for years been considered outside the acceptable norm of media voices….

The conservative political columnist Salena Zito…has been writing for months about the depths of Trump’s support. One such column in August was titled: “Stumped by Trump’s Success? Take a Drive Outside US Cities.”

This can be a period of great reconsideration by the press of how it operates, even as the stories arise all around us.… It is a time for humility and taking stock. It is a time for listening to voters who unexpectedly turned to Trump and those who envision a very different form of America.

Christopher Turpin, NPR’s vice president of news programming, told Jensen (11/15/16):

NPR was “a little slow to spot the two mass movements in this campaign,” the ones behind Trump and Sanders. He added, “As an organization, if the election has taught us one thing it is to really think about how broad the political spectrum is in this country.”

It was clear to some at NPR that ping-pong reporting that bounced between establishment liberal and conservative voices was failing NPR’s listeners, in much the same way that the political establishment was failing the whole country. The powerlessness, suffering and struggle of multitudes of US Americans had been ignored, in favor of the competition constructed between powerful political factions.

The mass movements “behind Trump and Sanders” that NPR was “slow to spot” were both partly built around economic populism. Jonah Goldberg is an establishment conservative voice whose problem with Trump, in part, was the latter’s occasional rhetorical flirtation with traditionally left-wing economic and social policies (Morning Edition, 3/2/16):

A lot of people on the right believe that he will be actually a huge victory for liberalism if he wins the presidency, because he’s in favor of all sorts of ideological heresies on the right—you know, on sort of single-payer healthcare, on trade protectionism…. And you hear him last night talking—singing praises about Planned Parenthood.

Now that Trump, in power in making policy, has ditched his lip-service to, for example, single-payer healthcare, Goldberg has softened towards him, and calls for us to “give him a fresh start” (Morning Edition, 11/09/16).

Sticking with Goldberg is evidence that NPR is resistant to really acting on the lessons of 2016. It shows every sign that it will continue to be “slow” to leave behind the traditional gatekeepers of the left and right, and cling to a particularly conservative notion of the “center.” When Jensen addressed Goldberg’s presence in her ombud column in April, she spoke to Sarah Gilbert, Morning Edition’s executive producer:

Gilbert said the show is “careful to make sure we have a varied mix of perspectives on our air, of course,” and that it will include a more complete identification of Goldberg’s views in the future.

Goldberg has been a commentator on the show four times since then, and only once (4/28/17) did the hosts identify him as a right-winger. And that “varied mix of perspectives” has failed to include any commentator who advocates for progressive populism the way that Goldberg speaks up for establishment conservatism.

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You can contact NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen via NPR’s contact form or via Twitter: @EJensenNYC. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

 

 

The current dispute between Australian cricketers and Cricket Australia has nothing to do with sport - and everything to do with industrial relations

Naomi Klein takes on President Donald Trump’s brand, and offers some thoughts as to how to tarnish it, in her new book “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.”

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell • Read the text version here

Author Rick Wartzman says that jobs offering security, decent wages and good benefits are becoming harder to find, in part because of automation, globalization, and the weakening of unions. His book is 'The End of Loyalty.' Also, Sharon Horgan, co-creator and co-star of the Amazon comedy series 'Catastrophe' talks with 'Fresh Air' producer Ann Marie Baldonado about finding her comedy partner Rob Delaney on Twitter, her confessional approach to writing, and working with the late Carrie Fisher.

Democracy Now! 2017-07-11 Tuesday

• Headlines for July 11, 2017
• Battle For the Net: Mass Day of Action Aims to Stop Trump's FCC from Destroying Free & Open Internet
• Former FCC Commissioner on How Greater Media Consolidation is a Threat to Democracy and Free Speech
• As the Pope Calls for Dialogue, a Debate on How to Resolve Venezuela's Political & Economic Crisis

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Regular readers of the NYT and other leading outlets might well get that impression. The one-sided nature of the discussion of these deals (invariably dubbed "free" trade agreements, because no one can be opposed to freedom) is hard for careful readers to miss.

We got yet another example with a column warning that Donald Trump may kill the bourbon boom with his trade policy. The piece uses the example of bourbon to tell us all the ways in which Trump's decision to pull back from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade deals can harm people in the United States and be bad for the world generally.

Starting at the basics, it tells us:

"Take Vietnam, a TPP member that increased American spirits imports by 173.9 percent between 2015 and 2016, to $45.9 million, making it the category’s fastest-growing importer. Under the trade deal, the country is expected to drastically increase its American whiskey consumption.

"Without American membership in the TPP, a 12-nation pact that created zero tariffs for American products, Vietnam’s 45 percent duty on bourbon and other distilled spirits will no longer be phased out, putting those expectations on ice."

There are several points worth noting here. First, apparently, our whiskey exports to Vietnam appear to be doing just fine even with the 45 percent tariff. Perhaps U.S. whiskey is considered a luxury in Vietnam and the people who buy it are not that concerned about the price. I have no idea whether that is the case, but is possible that the reduction or elimination of the tariff may not affect sales very much.

The second point is that the implicit assumption in this story is that the people in Vietnam have no interest in getting cheaper whiskey. The piece assumes that they will continue to impose a 45 percent tax on the whiskey they buy from the United States for the indefinite future. This is, of course, possible, but it's also possible that Vietnamese with access to textbooks on public finance, or who like U.S. whiskey, will push their government to reduce the 45 percent tax with or without a trade deal.

Finally, we should be asking how people in the United States feel about paying more for their whiskey. After all, there is a limited amount of whiskey that U.S. distilleries can produce, at least in the short-term. If Vietnam and other countries will buy more, then there is less left for us whiskey drinkers back in the United States.

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From the Cottage Country Festival, Nigel Grinstead and Jeff McEnery reflect on their small town experinences.

Yes, that is what he said. You can read about it in the NYT. The annualized rate of wage growth in the last three months compared with the prior three months was just 2.0 percent. So, if there is a problem with getting qualified workers it seems to be primarily in the human resources department.

In 1996, the Ministry of Defence decided to sell off its housing stock. The financier Guy Hands bought it up in a deal that would make his investors billions – and have catastrophic consequences for both the military and the taxpayer • Read the text version here