Hot Topics

I try to stay away from hot topics on this blog, because I figure the back-and-forth over whatever Twitter outrage has erupted in the moment will be covered to death elsewhere.  However, today I'm going dip my toe in those waters for a minute.

First of all, many Trump supporters understandably don't care much about Russia's involvement in our election and think, in fact, the crying about it may be sour grapes.

"BernieBros" and Clinton people (did they ever acquire a dismissive name like "BernieBros"?) meanwhile continue to battle it out over Russia, rather than banding together to face the presumed opponent.

I'm going to suggest that the following two propositions can both be correct at the same time!  

1.) Russia definitely interfered in our election with the intent of getting Donald J. Trump elected President; their interference is a sovereign attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power and should be responded to in kind.

2.) Russia's interference did not decisively lead to the defeat of Hillary Clinton, or even play a very substantial role therein.

There's no need to fight over these two propositions - they're both correct.  Continuing to deny that Clinton ran a Dewey-like campaign with a terrible ground game and instead blaming everything on the Russians is just reveling in the Denial stage of grief.  On the other side of the ledger, being so gung-ho about saying "neener neener neener" to Clinton supporters, to the extent that you overlook the fact that a homophobic dictator who has his enemies imprisoned and assassinated ----ed around in our election, is similarly delusional.

If progressives are serious about stepping up to Donald Trump, they will not split hairs over Russia for the next four to eight years.  Now, will progressives/liberals be able to leave their egos at the door in this regard?  I'm not optimistic, honestly.

Whatever they do, Russia, as an issue, is unlikely to trouble Trump supporters for now.  Emphases added mine:

The Russians may have very well gotten involved, several people said. They added that kind of interference should be combated. But many assumed that foreign actors had long tried to play favorites in American elections, and that the United States had done the same in other countries’ elections. Even if the Russians did do it — which some were more willing to concede than others — what difference did it make? People did not need the Russians to make up their minds about Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s election opponent. Blaming her loss on the Russians was, as one Trump supporter here said, “just being sore losers.”

“I don’t think the Russians posed as big a problem to the Clintons as the Clintons posed to themselves,” said Paul Emenes, 49, while he sold ribs, shoulders and chops at a frigid outdoor farmers’ market in Covington. Russian hacking was concerning, sure, Mr. Emenes said. He added that, as long as Mr. Trump was not involved himself, “it doesn’t change the way I view him.”

My two cents: don't blame Clinton's loss on Russia; at the same time, ---- Russia and the horse they rode in on.  America has enemies that are weak, powerless, and preyed upon by America wrongly: innocent victims.  Then America has enemies like Russia. 

In other hullabaloo news, let's address Meryl Streep's speech.

My Facebook feed is a little liberal bubble for the most part, and I see all my friends tripping over themselves to salute Ms. Streep's speech as well as her bravery.

I agree with much of her speech - which was fine, not as revolutionary as it is made out to be, but a fine speech on the whole.  However, it flatly does not take bravery to denounce Donald Trump in front of a bunch of Hollywood types.  All it does is elicit this sort of reaction:

Later Monday morning, Mr. Trump, in a series of tweets, called Ms. Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood,” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.” He also reiterated his argument that he had not mocked the reporter [with disabilities] “but simply showed him ‘groveling.’”

Now, it goes without saying (to me at least) that the President of the United States should not bother getting into Twitter wars with actors.  Surely the President-elect has bigger fish to fry.  And it is frankly rather troubling that Mr. Trump feels the need to respond to every critic on Twitter.  Shouldn't he be reading intelligence briefings?

That said, I have ask those who are actively opposed to Donald Trump: has a speech by an actor or actress ever moved the dial politically, except in a negative way, when it came to a right-wing figure in power?  Has it not always generally empowered figures on the populist right?  Outspoken Hollywood liberals are the populist Republican's best friend.  Dick Nixon understood this well. 

Meryl Streep is a fine actress and she can say what she wants, but as a rallying cry for Trump's opponents, I cannot think of much worse.

Tomorrow I'll return to more substantive issues.

NAFTA from Mexico's Point of View

Since we have a new, allegedly protectionist, President-elect, NAFTA is likely to be in the news quite a bit.  It's well known what effect NAFTA had on the American working class: NAFTA lowered wages, as it was intended to do.

But what about our partners in NAFTA? There's been some rather spurious, very inaccurate talk over the years about how Mexico has gained from NAFTA at the United States' expense.  That claim is absurd, as this article and this article make clear.

The emphases added below are mine.  Quotes are from the two articles above, interspersed:

Nafta has cut a path of destruction through Mexico. Since the agreement went into force in 1994, the country’s annual per capita growth flat-lined to an average of just 1.2 percent -- one of the lowest in the hemisphere. Its real wage has declined and unemployment is up.

 

As heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other staples poured into Mexico, producer prices dropped and small farmers found themselves unable to make a living. Some two million have been forced to leave their farms since Nafta. At the same time, consumer food prices rose, notably the cost of the omnipresent tortilla.

It's funny.  You'd think a free trade agreement such as NAFTA, very much the product of a free market ideology, would not have to face market distortions such as subsidies to agriculture (essentially welfare for farmers), but, well, there you have it.  America has long had subsidized agriculture problems (for God's sake read "Cadillac Desert"), and in this case, they've led to the suffering of our ostensible partners in the free-trade pact NAFTA.

Not all of Mexico’s problems can be laid at Nafta’s doorstep. But many have a direct causal link. The agreement drastically restructured Mexico’s economy and closed off other development paths by prohibiting protective tariffs, support for strategic sectors and financial controls. 

Funny, isn't it?  America abandoned its tariffs and paid the price; Mexico abandoned its tariffs and paid the price.  If Mexico was really preying on the USA, would things have played out this way?

Meanwhile, for those who take issue with illegal immigration, it's worth noting:

Nafta’s failure in Mexico has a direct impact on the United States. Although it has declined recently, jobless Mexicans migrated to the United States at an unprecedented rate of half a million a year after Nafta.  

It is very important to note, however, as many people are living on another planet when it comes to this basic fact: more Mexicans have left the United States since 2009 than have immigrated here.  You could make the argument for many reasons, if you wish, that there are too many illegal immigrants here (I am not making that argument myself) but you cannot credibly argue that Mexican immigrants continue to pour into the United States in overwhelming numbers.

NAFTA has failed to make the average Mexican more prosperous:

Mexico’s economy has grown an average of just 2.5 percent a year under Nafta, a fraction of what was needed to provide the jobs and prosperity its supporters promised. More than half of Mexicans still live below the poverty line, a proportion that remains unchanged from 1993, before the deal went into effect.

Oddly, Americans think that Mexicans have gained from NAFTA at the expense of Americans; Mexicans think that Americans have gained from NAFTA at the expense of Mexicans!

All of this is not lost on Mexicans, despite their government’s defense of Nafta. A recent poll by Parametría, a respected Mexican pollster, found that more than two-thirds of respondents believed that Nafta had benefited American consumers and businesses, while just 20 percent believed it had been good for them. The poll, consisting of 800 interviews in people’s homes, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Hmm.  Could it be that Americans and Mexicans would be better off in solidarity rather than attempting to fight an asinine pseudo-race/culture war?  What a concept!

Sounds like both sides would agree that NAFTA should go.  Oho!  But will it be easy to get rid of?

After two decades, the two economies are tightly braided together. Goods manufactured by companies operating in both countries — whether speakers, cars or airplanes — cross the border multiple times during production, a shared manufacturing process that, if destroyed, would mean shared job losses.

And hey... maybe the decay in Mexico is not entirely NAFTA's fault:

Investments in research and development, for instance, have failed to materialize in both the public and private sectors. Government spending on infrastructure has dropped to its lowest level in seven decades, experts say, leaving an unreliable network of ports, highways and even internet connections across the country. Burdensome regulation and corruption stifled investment, while the nation’s banks lent far less than their Latin American peers, leaving small companies to scramble for credit.

Hm. Some of that sounds a lot like "El Norte" to me!  

It sure sounds as though if NAFTA were to be retired, few working people in the USA or in Mexico would mourn its passing.  And Donald Trump has been an outspoken opponent of NAFTA.  So NAFTA will go, right?

Not if traditional Republican bankroller the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has anything to say about it!

Dramatically changing the pact could instead threaten 14 million American jobs that rely on trade with Canada and Mexico and send tremors throughout the North American business community, which has invested billions of dollars in developing ways to manufacture everything from cars and airplanes to pharmaceutical products using labor from multiple countries.

...

“You want to get rid of NAFTA?” U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tom Donohue asked in an interview with Fox News earlier this year. “NAFTA is 14 million jobs in the United States.”

The big question that many of us have been asking about Trump is: how much is he his own man, and how much is he just another Republican?  Because it would be a shocker for a run-of-the-mill Republican President to defy the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And if he does stare down the Chamber, he'll still have to work things out with Mexico and Canada, and take on big agribusiness!

Canada and Mexico are the second- and third-largest markets for U.S. farm goods, behind China. The three North American countries are also closely integrated in many manufacturing sectors, such as autos and steel, making any talk of U.S. tariff hikes to bring jobs back to the United States a double-edged sword because it could make the entire region less competitive.

We'll see whether Donald Trump takes down NAFTA after all.  There's an awful lot of money at stake, and when there's an awful lot of money at stake, there's an awful lot of reason to back down, as Donald Trump already has regarding what my colleague Kaye Allyn is calling his "Freedom Fence".

Trump defended that proposal Friday morning in a tweet, saying the move to use congressional appropriations was because of speed.

 

"The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!" Trump tweeted Friday.

Almost certainly, a country which sends a net negative number of immigrants to the United States and has been on the losing end of the free-trade deal that led to the much-decried illegal immigration in the first place will want to pony up for a big pointless wall/fence.

Everyone have a great weekend!

Repealing Obamacare

Man.  There is a lot to talk about today.

Can't neglect the latest news on the GOP's efforts to repeal Obamacare.  The linked-to article is short and well worth reading, but I'll just point out a few things that bear comment.  Emphases added mine throughout.

First of all, it looks like Obamacare as a whole won't be repealed, simply defunded, which will have much the same effect as repeal:

The repeal legislation will be in the form of a reconciliation bill, authorized by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Such bills can be adopted under special fast-track procedures. But Senate rules generally bar the use of those procedures for measures that have no effect on spending or revenue. So the legislation, as now conceived, would probably leave the most popular provisions of the health law intact, such as the prohibition on insurers’ denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Instead, the legislation would:

■ Eliminate the tax penalties imposed on people who go without insurance and on larger employers who do not offer coverage to employees.

Well, that's likely to be popular with many people.  No one likes to be fined for something they didn't want to buy.  People hate taxes, fees, period.

■ Eliminate tens of billions of dollars provided each year to states that have expanded eligibility for Medicaid.

This is likely to be far less popular.  People who can't obtain coverage other than through Medicaid are understandably pretty protective of their Medicaid.  Eliminating tens of millions of dollars per years of Medicaid funding will, quite simply, pull the rug out from under these people.

■ Repeal subsidies for private health insurance coverage obtained through the public marketplaces known as exchanges.

Again, because Obama and his Democratic colleagues felt the need to jump through hoops to placate the insurance industry (largely successful) and the Republican party (totally unsuccessful), they couldn't simply have expanded Medicaid to all and ended up with a nice single-payer program.  Instead, we got this hybrid beast known as Obamacare which subsidizes individuals to purchase health insurance through the private sector.

As such, those subsidies are 100% crucial to these people's continued healthcare coverage.  20 million people who didn't have health care have gained health care as a result of Obamacare.  With Medicaid coverage evaporating and subsidies being withdrawn, what now happens to those people?  No health insurance for them?

It could also repeal some of the taxes and fees that help pay for the expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act. But some Republicans have indicated that they may want to use some of that revenue for their as-yet-undetermined plan to replace the health care law.

Oh.  That sounds slimy.  They're repealing Obamacare, but not repealing the taxes and fees that make Obamacare possible?  Is this like being told a concert you bought a ticket to is being canceled, but your ticket price isn't being refunded?

Anyways, sounds like repeal won't happen overnight.  It'll take a while.  How long exactly?

Republicans say they will delay the effective date of their repeal bill to avoid disrupting coverage and to provide time for them to develop alternatives to Mr. Obama’s law. They disagree over how long the delay should last, with two to four years being mentioned as possibilities.

Saaaaaaay... that sounds a lot like right after midterm elections, or right after Donald Trump's potential re-election.  I'm sure it's just coincidence that taking away 20 million people's healthcare won't occur before either of those benchmarks, but rather, shortly afterwards.

The federal government could continue providing financial assistance to insurance companies to protect them against financial losses and to prevent consumers’ premiums from soaring more than they have in the last few years.

That sounds prudent.  Healthcare inflation, which still outpaces core inflation, has been coming down in recent years, thank God.  Some of that may be due to Obamacare, but it isn't clear that Obamacare is responsible.  The bottom line is that medical costs are rising for most American families.  But this was true before Obamacare as well.  If the Trump administration can tackle this problem somehow, it will rightly achieve much acclaim.  However, here's what the Trump plan is looking like so far:

Even as they move full speed toward gutting the existing health law, Republicans are scrambling to find a replacement. At the moment, they have no consensus.

...

Many experts have said that repealing the health law without a clear plan to replace it could create havoc in insurance markets. Doctors, hospitals and insurance companies do not know what to expect.

This exchange in the Senate was somewhat telling, of the whole repeal scenario:

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, noted that it had taken six years to get into “the ditch we find ourselves in now.”

“When your truck or car is in a ditch, the first thing you need to do is get out of the ditch,” Mr. Cornyn said. “And sometimes that takes a lot of hard work.”

To that, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, parried that when a car goes into a ditch, “the first thing I don’t do is dismantle the car.”

“That doesn’t help me get anywhere in terms of transportation,” she said.

I mean... yep.

So people are finally going to get rid of the despised Obamacare.  But then what?  The American people will not be better off.  There's no plan.  What's the plan?  What is the thought process of the GOP here?  Is there a thought process?  Who does this really placate other than dyed-in-the-wool mainline fiscal conservatives, who are very much not at the core of Donald Trump's alleged new ideology?

Meanwhile, I really, really wanted to talk about this fantastic article about the Mexican POV on NAFTA today, but my blog has already run a bit long. So I'll have to shelve for tomorrow.  In a nutshell: NAFTA isn't good for working people anywhere.  It's not just bad for American workers, it's bad for Mexican workers too!  Imagine that.  If you have the time, definitely read the article; otherwise, come back tomorrow.  Adios for now!

 

Ethics, Ford Jobs, and Republican Ideology

So, look at that!  The GOP has backed down on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics.  Voters were outraged, the President-elect and Republican Congressional leaders clicked their tongues, and now the move has been rescinded.  That was quick!  And, from a political point of view, wise.

The other big headline is that Donald Trump is once again claiming credit for saving manufacturing jobs in the United States.  To what extent has he done so?  Is this like the Carrier deal, where his claims were overblown but he still deserves some credit?  Or is this more like the Sprint deal, where in fact, his claims did not correspond to reality?

There's a lot to unpack, but consider the following:

The decision by Ford to drop plans for a new plant in Mexico — what would have been a $1.6 billion investment — came at the same time the company announced it would add 700 jobs to build electric and hybrid vehicles at a plant in Flat Rock, Mich.

The new Mexican factory was to build Ford Focus sedans currently manufactured at another Michigan plant near Detroit. Now the company will build those cars at an existing plant in Mexico.

Ford officials said that the revised plans were tied to market conditions that have depressed small-car sales, and that they did not consult with the incoming Trump administration before making the decision.

(emphases added mine throughout)

 

That said, it appears that Trump's criticism had something to do with the decision to keep the 700 electric/hybrid vehicle jobs in Michigan:

Ford has been a target of Mr. Trump’s criticism since last spring, when he singled the company out during his campaign for planning to create jobs in Mexico instead of pushing employment in the United States. After the election, Ford dropped plans to move production of a Lincoln S.U.V. to Mexico from Kentucky. That move followed discussions between Mr. Trump and William C. Ford Jr., the company’s chairman.

One industry analyst, Ron Harbour of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, said Ford was under intense pressure to alter its Mexican plans — or risk a constant drumbeat of criticism from Mr. Trump.

“It was an embarrassment for them, and they said, ‘Let’s turn this thing around,’” Mr. Harbour said.

Hmm.  Shall we check in with epic new-one ripper Dean Baker on the subject? 

Anyhow, one aspect of these Ford jobs that has not gotten sufficient attention is that the only reason they exist is because of President Obama's policy on combating global warming. As the NYT article points out, the plant in Michigan where production is being increased produces hybrid and electric cars. These cars were given subsidies as part of President Obama's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This was part of Obama's strategy to combat global warming.

As folks may recall, Donald Trump has said that global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese. It turns out that President Obama's response to this hoax is responsible for creating the jobs that Trump claims to have saved. 

So it appears to me that President-elect Trump deserves some credit for saving jobs which President Obama deserves some credit for creating, and that market conditions were in fact more important than either man.

In other news, Donald Trump is nominating Robert Lighthizer as the US trade representative.  Lighthizer is a protectionist, and assuming he sticks to his guns, will take a dim view of NAFTA, the TPP, etc., and may actually urge tariffs as policy.

It's fascinating to me to see the two wings shape up in the Trump administration: one classically Republican and free-trade, and the other protectionist, which is something we haven't seen out of either party in a long time.

Who will triumph between these two wings?  One of them, on the issue of trade, has to lose.  The cynic in me thinks that the protectionists will lose - there's just too much money at stake to revoke NAFTA, etc.  I think this will play out a lot like the Republican version of the Clinton administration, with the Robert Lighthizers of the world losing out to the Gary Cohns of the world, much as Robert Reich lost out to Robert Rubin.

But I'd by lying to you if I told you things were certain to play out that way.  The protectionists may end up ascendant, which would be extremely interesting to see play out.

Because who knows - maybe the Republican party really is changing.  I'll believe it when I see it, but there are certainly rumblings.  This interesting New Yorker article is worth your time if you're curious regarding the development of the GOP.  One selection:

[Pro-Trump essayist] Decius cited, as one unlikely precursor, the 2004 Presidential campaign of Dick Gephardt, the Democratic congressman, who ran as a fierce opponent of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. (During one debate, Gephardt argued, “We have jobs leaving South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri—my home state—that originally went to Mexico; they’re now going from Mexico to China, because they can get the cheapest labor in the world in China.”) In his “Flight 93” essay, Decius called Trump “the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey,” and he didn’t mean it as an insult. 

Is Trump truly, substantively different from your average Republican?  Again, I'll believe it when I see it.   

But, you know... what if I see it?

Ethics

So! Republicans in Congress made their first order of business axing an anti-corruption office that might have cracked down on Congressional malfeasance.

No one on the right or left is ever surprised by political corruption.  We all expect no less.

This is an especially brazen move, however.  Wouldn't it have been more savvy to allow the Office of Congressional Ethics to function while subverting it from the inside?  A toothless ethics commission can provide great cover for shady activities.  Instead, the GOP is dispensing with even the appearance of cleanliness.

Donald Trump, to his credit, put his own party on (moderate) blast for the move.

To what extent does anyone really care?  That's an open question and remains to be seen.  Congress seems to flatly not care about even the appearance of propriety.  President-elect Trump appears, at first glance, to care.  On the other hand, he can fire off some disapproving tweets, and then say, "Well, I tried to stop them!" without actually doing anything substantive.  Maybe he'll do something substantive, but he scores political points whether he does or not.  

The same calculation seems to be true of the Republican congressional leadership, specifically Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Major Leader Kevin McCarthy, who both publicly disapproved of the move to axe the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Drain the swamp, everyone!  See you tomorrow.

Foreign Aid

A reader of the blog mentioned foreign aid yesterday, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about the subject today.

Donald Trump has said very little about foreign aid - whether he would axe it, expand it or leave it alone.  Overwhelming majorities of Republicans favor cutting back on foreign aid. Cutting back or eliminating foreign aid may be said to be a libertarian, rather than a Republican, position, but libertarian thought is one "leg" of Ronald Reagan's "three-legged stool" of modern conservatism:

The decision to halt foreign aid to countries that do not represent our best interests is unquestionably a conservative view. By definition, one might expect conservatives to apply a cost-benefit analysis to such situations. Certainly, America borrowing billions from China to arm radical Islamists in the Middle East is of little benefit at too high a cost.

Few Americans have a realistic view of how much money is spent on foreign aid.  As of 2014, only one in twenty Americans could correctly identify that foreign aid constitutes less than 1% of the federal budget.  A family of four with a median income of just short of $76,000, paying around 5.34% of their income in federal income tax (see this chart for specifics, also from 2014), or about $4,050 and change per year, ends up spending about forty bucks and fifty cents of that $4,050 on foreign aid per year.

That's not a gargantuan sum, but consider the principle at stake: shouldn't that $40 be spent on our own homeless?  On our own needy?  What makes foreign aid worthwhile in the first place?

Foreign aid is not of a uniform character and therefore it worth looking at it piece by piece.  This Washington Post article breaks down our foreign aid contributions quite nicely.

The largest portion of our foreign aid budget goes to Israel, and that is almost entirely military aid.  If you're an interventionist, that probably makes sense, given that Israel is surrounded by enemies on almost all sides and is a functioning democracy.  If you're a libertarian, there's a lot to dislike in this aid.

First of all, American military foreign aid must be spent on U.S. defense contracts.  Therefore foreign military aid could be said to, in essence, be a handout to weapons manufacturers, certainly anathema to libertarians as well as many liberals.  On the other hand, if you favor a flourishing defense sector, this handout has its perks.  (Israel, specifically, gets a small carve out from this rule; it can spend up to 26% of military foreign aid from the United States on its own defense industry.  Critics of Israel will no doubt object, and fans of Israel can well contend that given the unique historic hostility towards Israel, this is not an unreasonable carve-out.)

Following Israel largesse-wise is Egypt, which receives not quite, but nearly half, of what Israel receives military aid-wise, and then a bit of non-military aid to boot.  In large part this aid is a reward for Egypt's historic peace with Israel, although it helps keep the Suez Canal secure as well, in theory.  Again, if you're a fan of Israel's security, this is probably money well spent.  If you think Israel can take care of itself, this is money not well spent, especially since the current Egyptian government appears both authoritarian and inept.

(There are good, if cynical, reasons to support a dictatorship, one of the main being, "they'll keep the lid on a dangerous situation."  Therefore, when a security situation actually deteriorates under a dictatorship, you have to ask whether active democracy promotion, even when it leads to the election of, say, an Islamist, isn't the better way to go.)

Once you get past Israel and Egypt, the vast bulk of American foreign aid is non-military and dedicated mostly to health initiatives, including the fight against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I think almost everyone would agree that helping fight HIV/AIDS anywhere is a nice move, but again, why not spend that money on people suffering from HIV/AIDS and other debilitating health conditions here at home?

That's a very good argument in the abstract, but there is something else to consider.

The average plate of food in the United States of America travels 1,500 miles to reach the dinner table.  That requires a lot of oil.  Your tennis shoes and laptop also require a good deal of oil to manufacture.  Over half of a barrel of oil is required to manufacture all sorts of goods.

Even if we were to eliminate the combustion engine entirely and live in a world of futuristic, oil-less cars (which I hope we do, someday!) we'll still need a good deal of oil.

And where does most oil come from?  The world beyond our borders.

Perhaps domestic oil production will skyrocket and obviate our dependence on foreign sources of oil.  Or perhaps domestic oil producers will sell oil produced in North America on the global market, which all of us would do if we were the CEO of an oil company, as our job would be to focus on the bottom line of the company we were running, and damn all other details.  Hence, "drill baby drill" coupled with a hands-off approach to regulating business - such as telling an energy company where to sell its fuel - is likely to leave Americans in the boat of needing Saudi Arabia et al to go about our daily business.

As long as our relatively comfortable first world lifestyles continue to depend on the prevalence of cheap oil, we will need oil imported from abroad, and as long as we need oil imported from abroad, a good case can be made that a little money spent playing the beneficent neighbor is money well spent.

Let me make one other pocketbook appeal concerning foreign aid to Africa in particular: Africa is booming.  As an American in his late 30s, it seems odd to type that sentence; all I've ever known is war-torn, starving, suffering, disease-ridden Africa.  But that description, while still containing much truth, is gradually being replaced with that of a more stable, more prosperous Africa that constitutes a major market - a market that can fall under Chinese influence, or under American influence.  (Modern Africa really deserves its own blog post, and it'll get one, one of these days).

I've blithered on long enough, so let me close on a personal note.  My wife and I are lucky enough to be solidly in the upper middle class.  Our approximate tax contribution to foreign aid is $240 per year.

We could definitely use that money on four or five "big" trips to the grocery store, or perhaps a few nice date nights for ourselves, or if we were feeling big-hearted, on numerous meals for the needy.

But seen as a sort of "tip" to the world beyond for ensuring the continuous flow of cheap oil that keeps our upper middle class lifestyle going, $240 per year is, perhaps, money well spent.

New Parties and Misc.

Happy New Year everyone!

Today is a day of rest for most of us (some of you have to work and are not required to be paid overtime) and all I've done today is watch the new Star Wars movie (I liked it a lot) and watched football (why are the Giants playing their starters?  Well, they won...).  As such my "insightful commentary" is drastically curtailed.

That said, I made the time today to read this very good Jacobin article on building a new, labor-oriented party in the USA.  It's worth your time to read in its entirety, but I'll try to sum up a few of the key points:

• The USA erects massive barriers to new political parties, in contrast to other Western, first world countries.  On a state-by-state level, the scales are decisively tipped by law in favor of the Republican and Democratic parties, which do not face onerous restrictions. 
• Because of these restrictions, so much time is spent by third parties simply fighting lawsuits and attempting to gain ballot access that it ends up making sense for third parties such as the Greens and Libertarians to simply run dilettante-ish, "we're making a statement"-style campaigns which are less concerned with winning elections than with pointing out how screwed up the electoral system is.
• Leftists running within the Democratic party are perhaps not the answer for modern progressives.  Best that I quote the article directly here (just read the bold parts if you're lazy!):

“Working within the Democratic Party” has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians. The liberal office-seeker becomes the indispensable actor to whom all others, including progressives, must respond.

...

Orbiting around these ambitious office-seekers are the progressive “grassroots” organizations exemplified by MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, or Progressive Democrats of America. (In an earlier, direct-mail era, it was Common Cause, People for the American Way, or even the Americans for Democratic Action.)

Run by salaried staffers, these groups monitor the political scene in search of worthy progressive candidates or legislative causes, alerting their supporters with bulletins urging them to “stand with” whichever progressive politico needs support at the moment. (Support, in this usage, usually means sending money, or signing an email petition.) Such groups generally maintain no formal standards for judging a candidate’s worthiness. Even if they did, in drawing up such standards they would be accountable to no one, and would have no power to change those candidates’ policy objectives.

Although it’s too early to tell, Bernie Sanders’s recently created Our Revolution organization seems in danger of falling into the same trap: becoming a mere middleman, or broker, standing between a diffuse, unorganized progressive constituency and a series of ambitious progressive office-seekers seeking their backing.

In this “party-less” model of politics, it’s the Democratic politician who goes about trying to recruit a base, rather than the other way around. The politician’s platform and message are devised by her and her alone. They can be changed on a whim. And there is no mechanism by which the politician can be held accountable to the (fairly nebulous) progressive constituency she has recruited to her cause.

• The author (Seth Ackerman) goes on to discuss a hypothetical party which could be incorporated as a 501(c)4 social welfare organization and enjoy considerable fundraising success under Citizens United using a variation on the Bernie Sanders small donations model.

It's worth your time to read if you have 15-30 minutes to kill are interested in the subject.

If that's too much commitment for you, here's two paragraphs of Dean Baker shitting on PE (Private Equity).  Next time someone tells you the world of Private Equity is staffed by superwizards, bear in mind they may be describing not actual geniuses, but inventive con men.  Hmmm!

To close out our first day of 2017, here's a little run down on the Obama-era regulations the GOP is hoping to abolish under Donald Trump.  Obviously, I'll be doing my best to cover this topic in detail as events unfold.  For now I'll leave you with the words of House speaker Paul Ryan:

“I hear probably more about the strangulation of regulations on business and their growth and their development than probably anything else,” the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, said at a recent forum. “I think if we can provide regulatory relief right away, that can breathe a sigh of relief into the economy.”

Here's the ranking of ease of doing business in the United States conducted by the World Bank.