With fascist white supremacists doing their best to generate a riot in Portland, Steve King doubling down on his support for rape and incest, and Donald Trump being … Trump, it’s easy to forget that there’s another democracy out there struggling to stay afloat. And no, I’m not talking about the frightening knife edge being walked as Hong Kong tries to stay semi-independent from a Chinese government that shows every sign of enacting Tiananmen Square II. I’m talking about that other democracy that is drowning in a slumgullion of nationalism, propaganda, and astounding incompetence. I’m talking about the U.K.
For those who thought it history’s second most incomprehensible day to see professional mop head Boris Johnson stroll out from meeting with the Queen, take heart … or not. Because there’s a very good chance that when the never-less-united kingdom’s parliament wanders back to London after their summer break, Johnson’s conservative government composed entirely of people who have definitively proven that they don’t have a clue what to do next, after years of claiming they were the only people who knew what to do next, is going to be kicked to the left-hand curb (not left because they’re progressive, left because it’s Britain).
Odds are looking pretty high that in the ever shortening time between now and when the U.K. would “crash” out of the European Union at the end of October, someone new is going to get a chance to try their hand at running some kind of emergency, national unity government composed of a hodgepodge of labor, conservatives who haven’t drunk the no-deal Brexit tea, and whatever other parties exist by then. There are only two things that people can really agree on at the moment: the head of that new government can’t be Boris Johnson, and the goal of this stop-gap institution is to come up with anything other than driving the kingdom over the cliff in that lie-decorated bus that Johnson used to convince the nation that this whole Brexit thing would be so bloody cool.
All right then. And as the formal head of the opposition, the first person who gets dibs on forming a new government is Jeremy Corbyn. Except … there are actually three things that everyone agrees on, and the third one is please, no, anyone except Jeremy Corbyn. Only there’s another problem. The everyone who agrees that it can’t be Jeremy Corbyn includes everyone but Jeremy Corbyn, who keeps insisting that by dent of that sticky little thing called tradition and based on long-standing interpretation of that dratted unwritten constitution, no one, but no one, gets to form a government until Jeremy Corbyn has had a shot at forming a government. Which makes the likelihood that anyone will be able to form a government in time to anything before that bus hits All Hallow’s Eve at full speed about a thousand times less likely.
Right now, there are about a half-dozen names circulating of people who might be at the head of a government, including conservative MP Kenneth Clarke (top qualification: he isn’t Johnson) or former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman (who … isn’t Corbyn). These names have inspired the entire U.K. to a gobsmacking level of meh and left the nation to realize that, not only do they have Boris Johnson as their leader, they’re having a very hard time thinking of anyone who they would have as their leader. So far, no one has nominated Mr. Bean, Mary Poppins, or the car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang … but it’s just a matter of time. Because the ridiculousness of Brexit, like the immorality of Donald Trump, honestly has no bottom.
Okay, let’s go read pundits.
Paul Krugman on the failure of Trumponomics.
New York Times
An old economists’ joke says that the stock market predicted nine of the last five recessions. Well, an “inverted yield curve” — when interest rates on short-term bonds are higher than on long-term bonds — predicted six of the last six recessions. And a plunge in long-term yields, which are now less than half what they were last fall, has inverted the yield curve once again, with the short-versus-long spread down to roughly where it was in early 2007, on the eve of a disastrous financial crisis and the worst recession since the 1930s.
Honestly, I think that even the term “Trumponomics” gives it to much credit. It treats Trump’s economic actions as if they’re part of a coherent strategy. Trump doesn’t do strategy. He does personal relationships, real estate deals, and revenge. And even that is overselling it. Mostly it’s just about the revenge.
Neither I nor anyone else is predicting a replay of the 2008 crisis. It’s not even clear whether we’re heading for recession. But the bond market is telling us that the smart money has become very gloomy about the economy’s prospects. Why? The Federal Reserve basically controls short-term rates, but not long-term rates; low long-term yields mean that investors expect a weak economy, which will force the Fed into repeated rate cuts.
So what accounts for this wave of gloom? Much though not all of it is a vote of no confidence in Donald Trump’s economic policies.
Don’t worry. Republicans will be selling bumper stickers two months into the [insert Democratic president here] administration that’s trying to pick up the pieces of their latest crash that say “Miss Donald Trump yet?” And millions of Duck Dynasty fans will be nodding, and talking about how the recession magically happened after Trump left office.
Art Cullen on how immigrants make a convenient scapegoat for companies and racists.
Storm Lake Times
To set things straight: The people who want to deport the undocumented are the same people who wanted to bust the unions because they had too much power. Once busted, meatpackers were able to cut wages in half in the 1980s. The United Food and Commercial Workers is hamstrung by the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Act during the Reagan Administration. Since then, rural meatpacking communities have become weaker. Immigrants get blamed for taking jobs that resident citizens could have. But the jobs in Mississippi for poor people have always been exploitive. It’s a messed-up system: Put value on skills so no one wants to work in unskilled labor, recruit the unskilled to fill the jobs that Biff and Buffy who went off to college don’t want, exploit them, criminalize them, deport them, then complain about low wages brought by the great unwashed. The immigrants and poor black people do not set the wage. The boss does. He made sure the union went down. He made sure everyone thought that the Hygrade union man was getting paid too much. He convinced everyone that the union was stealing your paycheck. And now people complain that immigrants are ruining this country.
They didn’t break the unions, and they don’t set the wage. We want cheap food. Immigrants provide it, so we crucify them. Biff is learning arbitrage and hedging to be used later on livestock contracting.
We need a big change in this country.
That’s a message that should get repeated. Often.
Joan Walsh explains why she publicly cancelled her New York Times subscription.
The Nation
Some of you know this already: I tweet too much. Most of it gets ignored, as it should.
How was I to know that one tweet would start a conversation the world needs to have, about how The New York Times hasn’t yet reckoned with the disaster to democracy Donald Trump represents? But the world is having that conversation badly, because of the misrepresentation of my tweet.
The actual tweet is here. Basically, Walsh was justifiably upset about something that upset a lot of people — the latest kid glove treatment given to Trump in crediting him with being somehow reasonable in delivering a late, dishwatery statement on the El Paso shootings after spending his entire campaign and White House time hammering the hate and xenophobia that inspired those shootings.
When it came time for The New York Times to go to press, someone—a “copy editor” we learned later, a ghostly figure, easily erased—headlined a reasonably skeptical story about the teleprompter recitation ‘Trump urges unity vs. racism.’ And all hell broke loose.
Social media exploded, but I was actually a bit late to it. You can see that my tweet is tied to one of Beto O’Rourke’s, which followed Nate Silver’s. But mine got a lot of attention, in the interviews that Times editor Dean Baquet rolled through over the next few days.
Walsh’s explanation of her intent, and of the Times reaction, is definitely worth reading. In fact, it’s worth being carved into the sidewalk outside Baquet’s window … though it seems unlikely he could, or would, read it. But you should read it right now.
Last week, ICE raided five meat-processing plants in Mississippi, detaining 680 people who were assumed to be undocumented. The initial stories focused on children who were “devastated” with no parent at home. In a statement the day after the raids, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced that approximately 300 of the people who had been detained were released.
Preliminarily, it appears that approximately 30 detained aliens were released yesterday on humanitarian grounds at the individual sites where they were initially encountered, and another 270 detained aliens were released after being processed by HSI at the National Guard base in Pearl and returned to the place where they were originally encountered.
But at least five days after the raids, there were still reports that some children had not been reunited with their parents.
Those people thinking that ICE somehow overlooked charging employers for repeatedly and knowingly breaking the law can relax. That wasn’t an accident. Because when these same plants were raided back in 2008, the concentration was on the management.
The CEO of the Postville plant was criminally charged and sentenced to 27 years in prison for not only hiring hundreds of undocumented workers, but also providing them with phony documents and laundering money through other businesses he controlled. Then in 2017, Donald Trump commuted his sentence. So while the president is locking immigrant families up in cages, he wants the guy responsible for hiring them to go free.
Not just “wants,” Trump freed him. Makes more room for locking up children.
Anne Applebaum on the protests in Hong Kong and Russia.
Washington Post
We live in an era of declining faith in elected leaders, declining faith in the institutions of the West, declining faith in democracy itself. In the United States, the world’s most important democracy, Congress seems permanently deadlocked, in hock to moneyed interests, unable to grapple with the big issues of climate change, technological change, the information revolution. In Britain, one of the world’s oldest democracies, politicians now speak in an offhand way about “proroguing” Parliament — asking the queen to suspend Britain’s House of Commons — as a way of resolving the unresolvable problem of Brexit.
Nor is the problem confined to the Anglo-Saxon world. A couple of years ago, two political scientists, Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, looked at the numbers in a now famous article and found that the number of people who believe that it is “essential” to live in a democracy has slipped in almost every Western country. The trend is especially pronounced among the young. Among Swedes born in the 1930s and 1940s, just to take one random example, more than 80 percent believe democracy is “essential.” Among Swedes born in 1980, however, the figure has fallen to 60 percent. At the same time, several established democracies, from Hungary to India, have begun dismantling fundamental institutions and principles, including independent courts — a democratic deconsolidation that doesn’t even arouse the interest of this U.S. administration.
Honestly, I think it’s too soon to call this an era of declining faith in democracy. Yes, things are bleak at the moment, but that bleakness only gained control more or less yesterday. Give it another cycle or two, and this thing may well sort itself out.
And … that’s pretty much it for the morning because while I’m back from vacation this week, it seems that many members of punditry decided this was a Sunday to sleep in, or to sneak off to one more beach week before school starts. In any case, many of the normal roster are off for this week. So, for that reason, let me give you a peak at a non-pundit piece.
Here are Washington Post reporters Jenna Johnson and Greg Jaffe discussing the critical voters that Democrats need to get to win in 2020.
On a quiet cul-de-sac across the road from Glass Lake and not far from her subdivision’s golf course, Jody LaMacchia was doing something that only a few years earlier would have seemed unthinkable: asking strangers for money.
“I am running to be your state representative in 2020,” she told a small group in this Republican-leaning suburb of Detroit. “I am tired of all the toxicity in our politics.”
Down the hall, a half-dozen campaign volunteers were complaining — in often alarming terms — about the Republicans and Trump.
To Katie Weston, LaMacchia’s best friend, who typically votes for Republicans, the doom and gloom seemed a bit too dramatic, especially when the economy is surging and unemployment is so low.
“It’s stuff like this,” Weston whispered with a shake of her head.
If you’re wondering what other voters Johnson and Jaffe are going to talk about … don’t. Because they’ve set their entire story about “critical voters” on two white, well-off, women who are convinced that Democrats need to nominate someone who “appeals to everyone.” Or they’re not voting.
Because three years in, we are still doing these damn stories.