I wrote here recently about Omarosa. The tone of my comment was dismissive. You probably didn't believe, reading this, that I would return to the subject so soon. And I don't want to. But all the fuss about her -- her book, her tapes, her media tour -- even in the few days since I last wrote about her here, has exposed some important facts about the shaky coalition that now runs the country. Jonah Goldberg, portrayed here, writing for the old-line conservative journal National Review , catalogs the different worlds whence come this President’s appointees. His examples come both from those still at work within this administration and from those who have departed. Some of them are from the world of business or the military, like Wilbur Ross from the former or Jim Mattis from the latter ; others come from the Bannonite “counter-establishment,” (Bannon himself, and Gorka); others from the GOP hierarchy (Priebus, Spicer); others are movement conservatives, like Sessi...
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A complete list of the Rightward Shoves in US political presidential history, according to the cyclical theory I described recently. John Adams elected 1796. One term. 28 years later.... John Quincy Adams, elected (by the House of Representatives) 1824. One term. 32 years later.... James Buchanan elected 1856. One term. Union dissolved on his watch. Then history does a bit of a stutter step. A civil war and its aftermath messes up the cycles a bit. Grover Cleveland is elected for the first time in 1884, 28 years after Buchanan. On schedule if we consider that the shove. He is defeated in 1888 (due to electoral college arithmetic) and triumphantly re-elected for a non-consecutive term in 1892. The subsequent cycles work out properly if we count the second Cleveland victory as the shove. So count both 1884 and 1892 as necessary. 28 years later after the latter.... Warren G. Harding elected 1920. Dies in office. Portrayed above, he was the first of three Re...
1. George Washington (1788-96).Got the experiment with the new constitutional structure going. Jefferson and Hamilton, two cabinet members, famously argued over the extent of federal powers, and the propriety of a national bank. 2. John Adams (1796-1800). Often called the “father of the American navy.” Built up the Navy in the face of the conflict between England and France, and their competing claims to control trade in the North Atlantic. 3. Thomas Jefferson (1800-1808). Founder of the Republican-Democratic Party. Later shortened its name to “Democratic.” Still around – oldest political party in the world. 4. James Madison (1808-16). He allowed the charter of the Bank of the United States, Hamilton’s bank, to expire unrenewed. But he was soon forced to create a new one, the so-called Second Bank, in order to finance a new war w...
Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States. The markets have been gobsmacked by this. They clearly didn't see it coming. Neither, as it happens, did I. In fact I consider it more than a bit scary. But allow me to try to intellectualize a bit as a defense mechanism. A few days before the election, I noticed this: Click. "Superstar Marxist Philosopher Just Endorsed Trump" runs the headline to which you come if you do click that. Somehow this doesn't surprise me. As I believe I've mentioned here before, Zizek is the sort of Marxist who tries to get behind Marx chronologically and conceptually, to get himself back in touch with the original Hegelian inspiration. This is a not uncommon move among the intellectuals of the continent, motivated perhaps by the fact that understanding the distinctive post-Hegel aspects of Marxism, the stuff that Marx himself studied for long days in the library of the British Museum to master as he poured over the...
The headline of this blog entry is probably the only advice that is of any value to the Hillary Clinton campaign right now. So I have given it to them, free of charge. Ain't I a generous guy?
Jill Stein is running for President on the Green Party ticket. I believe that Jordan Weissman, of Slate's money box, did a fine job recently of chronicling some of the difficulties in taking her policy positions seriously. Yes, Weissman is probably in the tank for HR Clinton, and probably figures running down Stein helps save the world from Trump. Still, when he's right he's right. I'll simply paraphrase here one of Weissman's contentions, about Stein's ignorance of monetary policy. Student loans, she said, "should be canceled in the same way that the debt of Wall Street was canceled, essentially writing it off as a digital 'hat trick,' which is done in the form of quantitative easing.” Let's ignore this as a contribution to discussion of student loan. The point here is whether she knows an anus from a hole-in-the-ground in the realm of monetary policy. The conclusion is: she does not. I'm against quantitative easing. I think is a...
Has the headline of this post put you to sleep already? If so, enjoy the zees. If not, you may be interested in this link: from Huffington Post. That represents where discussion stood as of July 1, anyway. As it happens, July 1 was the day Puerto Rico defaulted on its general obligation bonds. The last-minute Congressional action in contemplation of a restructuring of those debts was too last minute to prevent this. Given this coincidence of timing: what does the platform say about Puerto Rico? It gets a paragraph at the bottom of p. 16, after (and longer than) a separate graf on the "people of the territories" generally. The paragraph on Puerto Rico takes while to get around to the debt issue, but it ends with that: "Finally, we believe that Washington must respect Puerto Rico’s local self-government as Congress and the Executive Branch work to provide the necessary tools and aid that Puerto Rico needs to restructure its debt so that it can get on a path...