Trump’s Manchurian Trade Policy [feedly]

I can imagine its difficult to come up with a clever paradigm to frame a column or two every week for the NYT. However, I do not quite get "the national security threat" in Chinese company ZTE. Disclaimer: I use a ZTE phone. Cheap AND a solid product.

ZTE is accused of distributing phones with US  "high tech" components to "sanctioned" regimes.  I have no idea what this means, or what the national security threat is. However  I do know, from working in software for half a worklife, that if there are security features in the components, they were certainly  designed by the US to hack info in other countries, and into the communications of  its own citizens.

Everything on the Internet is hackable with sufficient effort That's not likely to ever change. 

I am unconvinced by K's memes today. And, in general, China bashing in the name of national security is most likely a cover for another Trump crime. Everything he says, I assume the opposite is more likely true

Trump's Manchurian Trade Policy
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/opinion/trump-china-trade-policy.html

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Italy’s Political Crisis….How Ugly Might It Get? [feedly]

Italy's Political Crisis….How Ugly Might It Get?
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/italys-political-crisis-ugly-might-get.html

Italian politics are messy even at the best of times. The battle over forming a government took a nasty turn. We'll give a short overview and then make a few observations, in the hopes of eliciting informed reader input.

The far-right Lega Nord, or League party, which won in the wealthy north, was seeking to form a coalition with 5 Star, which led the polls in the South. One of the things they agreed on is opposition to the Eurozone, so that looked likely to feature even more prominently in any joint policies than it had in their respective campaigns.

The coalition had proposed seating Paolo Savona, a very vocal critic of the Eurozone, as finance minister. The president, Sergio Mattarella, nixed the appointment, which he has the power to do. The coalition's proposed prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, abandoned his efforts to form a government.

Mattarella has proposed that Carlo Cottarelli, a former IMF official, form what amounts to a caretaker government, with his key task to get a budget passed, which would have the convenient effect of calming down Mr. Market for a while. Italian bond spreads are at their highest premium to German bunds in four years.

However, Lega Nord and 5 Star supporters are not surprisingly up in arms, so the current conventional wisdom is that there will be snap elections in the fall instead.

Mattarella was seeking to appease the bond gods. From the Financial Times:

Mr Mattarella, who has the power to approve or block cabinet appointments, considered Mr Savona a threat to Italy's position in the eurozone, at a time when Italian debt was already taking a big hit in the markets. 

"The uncertainty over our position in the euro alarmed Italian and foreign investors who invested in shares and companies," Mr Mattarella said. "The rise in the [bond] spread increases the debt and reduces the opportunity to spend on social measures. It burns companies' resources and savings and foreshadows risks for families and Italian citizens."

Unfortunately, that didn't work as planned. Mr. Market at first liked the idea, with both the Euro and Italian bond prices rising, but then went into full reverse when they saw the severity of the political backlash.

Note that despite Savona, the proposed economics minister, having a fabulously acid tongue, he had said he would uphold Eurozone rules. So was the issue that Savona was seen as such a fierce opponent to the Euro that he's renege on his promise or that he could be still be plenty disruptive while not crossing any official lines?

The flip side, as Politco snarked in its daily e-mail:

All the fuss, remember, because the president of the Republic rejected one minister (and this is not the first time that has happened) — who seems to have been so crucial to the whole project that without him, it's better not to govern at all.

Even though the caretaker Cottarelli does not on paper have the votes to secure a majority, it's premature to rule that out. Remember there are other factors that come into play….like looking responsible, particularly when Italian banks are still mighty wobbly, and not wanting to have to campaign again, particularly for any representatives who won with less than comfortable majorities.

The right is the big winner in this upset.

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Alberto Nardelli

✔@AlbertoNardelli

Poll out tonight in Italy: M5S drops below 30%, Lega flying: 27.5%, Forza Italia continues its fall, everyone else flat

2:43 PM - May 28, 2018

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This is not a constitutional crisis. This is a very bitter, high stakes political crisis, but there are not yet any constitutional issues in play, despite 5 Star calling for Mattarella to be impeached.

The underlying issue is austerity and budget constraints. Italy's economic distress comes from having its GDP contract over the last decade. It needs deficit spending. Eurozone budget rules severely constrain running fiscal deficits.

The worst is the Eurocrats should know better by now. Even the chief economist of the IMF, Olivier Blanchard, said his own data showed that for weak economies, fiscal multipliers were greater than one. That is economist-speak for deficit spending results in even greater economic growth, so that the end result is that debt to GDP ratios fall.

Similarly, Yanis Varoufakis proposed a finesse during the 2015 Greek debt negotiations, a European infrastructure bank. The reason for focusing on infrastructure is it provides for even more fiscal bang for the buck, potentially $3 of GDP growth for every dollar spent. However, colleagues who believe that the Eurozone needs to relax its budget rules said the infrastructure bank idea would run afoul of them as currently constituted. Predictably, Germany nixed the idea.

A fall vote as a de facto vote on the Eurozone….or not? The press has been quick to seize on the notion of an election in the autumn as a vote on the Euro. But it isn't so clear cut, and the two leading parties may not play that up as much as one might anticipate despite that being their biggest area of common ground.

Recall that in Greece, which has suffered far more under austerity that Italy has, in 2015, the Greeks wanted relief but did not want to leave the Eurozone. It was only some time after Syriza knuckled under to the Troika, that Greek votes turned against the Eurozone.

Italian polls show majority support for staying in the Euro. Like Greece, they want to remain but to have more room to spend. So making Eurozone exit, as opposed to Eurozone reform, the campaign pitch might backfire, and Lega Nord and 5 Star pols have to know that. So until we have the government fall and see how Lega Nord and 5 Star position themselves, it's too early to say how the campaigns will address the Eurozone choke chain.

Financial time moves faster than political time and may affect outcomes. Italy has been in the throes of a slow-motion banking crisis since mid-2016. The fall in Italian bond prices will put weak institutions under even more pressure. From a Don Quijones post yesterday:

A recent study by the Bank for International Settlements shows Italian government debt represents nearly 20% of Italian banks' assets — one of the highest levels in the world. In total there are ten banks with Italian sovereign-debt holdings that represent over 100% of their tier-1 capital (which is used to measure bank solvency), according to research by Eric Dor, the director of Economic Studies at IESEG School of Management.

The list includes Italy's two largest lenders, Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, whose exposure to Italian government bonds represent the equivalent of 145% of their tier-1 capital. Also listed are Italy's third largest bank, Banco BPM (327%), Monte dei Paschi di Siena (206%), BPER Banca (176%) and Banca Carige (151%).

In other words, despite years of the ECB's multi-trillion euro QE program, which is scheduled to come to an end soon, the so-called "Doom Loop" is still very much alive and kicking in Italy. The doom loop is when weakening government bonds threaten to topple the banks that own the bonds, and in turn, the banks start offloading them, which causes these bonds to fall further, thus pushing the government to the brink.

Quijones pointed out that French and Spanish banks are big holders of Italian debt too. So too much Italian political stress could morph into financial freakout. Contagion, anyone?

I suspect it did not go unnoticed that European officials were just about as unhelpful as they possibly could be when Italy was pressing for a waiver from its budget rules so it could rescue its banks. In other words, we'll see soon enough how committed the upstart parties are to their principles when following through with them could produce a banking crisis.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Perils of Nationalism in Global Finance [feedly]

The Perils of Nationalism in Global Finance
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/29/05/2018/perils-nationalism-global-finance

_{Chiara Oldani describes the financial risks that could hit the G7 economies in the coming futures; most of them arise from nationalism in global financial regulation.}

 

_{Certain financial risks could hit the G7 economies in the coming futures, and most of them arise from reduced coordination in global regulation (i.e., nationalism).}

 

_{The 2017 G7 Leaders' meeting in Taormina (Italy) represented a turning point in global governance, since Leaders clearly confirmed their shift to nationalism with respect to relevant global issues, in particular climate change and financial regulation and coordination. The U.S. President took off his headphones during the Leaders' meeting, to physically stress his refusal to find an agreement on climate change, where America Comes First.}

 

_{The Finance Ministers meeting that took place in Bari in May 2017, a few days before the Leaders' summit in Taormina, focused on issues mainly in the domain of international economic coordination, in particular how to reduce the evanescence of taxation for IT companies, how to safeguard stability and enhance growth by means of coordinated public and fiscal policies. The necessity to better coordinate in the global financial regulatory system has not been felt by Finance Ministers and the G7 Leaders either, and positions are still way too far. The weakening of financial regulation and coordination in G7 countries, led by the US and the UK, does not facilitate the mission of globalisation. The June 2018 Canadian G7 summit in Charlevoix is very unlikely to reverse the nationalistic path of finance globalisation, since Leaders and their policies have not changed with respect to 2017, except (maybe) Italy.}

 

_{The evolution of financial technologies (FinTech) and the growth of cryptocurrencies (that are not money nor means of payments) attract increasing quantities of capital, because of the need to get rid of the banking system and its stringent rules that aim at safeguarding stability but inevitably reduce freedom and anonymity. Cash and deposits are rapidly moving out of the regulated banking system, going to wallets filled of Bitcoin (Fig.1) and Ethereum, increasing the need of capital for banks and then further diminishing their structural stability. Nationalism cannot win in a playing field dominated by the technological innovation that is changing deeply the inner structure of the economy, and in particular of the banking systems in the G7. The Chinese government, worried by frauds and capital flights, intervened in February 2018 to block any trading of cryptocurrencies by its inhabitants. However, in the absence of any coordinate intervention on innovative financial infrastructures, the Chinese decision will probably be ineffective.}

 

Fig.1 BITCOIN PRICE USD (2010-2018)

 

 

_{History repeats itself. In the very recent past deregulated financial phenomenon, like Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives, have been considered to be at the root of the financial meltdown, and a few markets' players have been found guilty and paid for their errors (e.g. Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Northern Rock, and Greece). The notional value of global OTC contracts reached its peak in 2013 with $710 trillion, and decreased to $532 trillion in 2017, according to the BIS; 80% of OTC contracts are on interest rates. The introduction of a centralized counterparty system in the OTC derivative markets after 2010 reduced the counterparty risk, but increased the market's concentration since 90% of contracts are cleared in one clearing house in the United States.}

 

_{The goal of stability collides with the America First policies implemented in the US, and in the UK (i.e., hard Brexit). American and the British Leaders push forward financial deregulation of the financial system for different reasons; the decisions to substantially reduce the size of the reforms undertaken with the Dodd Frank Wall Street Consumer Protection Act in the US, and to leave the European Union and get rid of the European financial pass-porting allow for regulatory arbitrage that does not enhance financial stability.}

 

_{The easing monetary policies implemented in most G7 economies (i.e. quantitative easing) will further sustain inflated assets' prices in G7 in 2018. The Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, in 1996 referred to irrational exuberance when describing the behaviour of investors in the US stock market; similarly, after many years of cheap money, present markets' expectations are still very high.}

_{The reduced regulatory coordination can increase the volatility of sovereign bonds yields, especially for heavily indebted countries, like Italy, France, the US and Japan with detrimental effects on public spending and the welfare state. Inflated assets' price and bonds' volatility are main ingredients of financial bubbles.}

 

_{In this complex institutional framework G7/G20 central banks and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) can act to smooth these explosive nationalistic forces, by persuading policy makers that financial regulation should coordinate, and by finding a reasonable framework for debt and wealth to stabilize; they can achieve their duty also by persuading the markets that inflation can rise, interest rates should normalize to positive values, and asset prices should reverse to more sustainable levels.}

 

 

 

 

Chiara Oldani (Lecturer of Economics, University of Viterbo "La Tuscia", Research Associate CAMA, Director of the G7 Research Group in Italy) coldani@unitus.it

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Italian President’s Loyalty to the Euro Creates Chaos

Italian President's Loyalty to the Euro Creates Chaos
President Sergio Mattarella of Italy enraged populists by rejecting a cabinet minister he feared would lead Italy out of the eurozone.CreditVincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Jason Horowitz

May 28, 2018

ROME — He's been called "gray," "invisible" and "gentle to the point of seeming fragile." Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, once compared him to "a monk."

But on Monday, Italy's quiet, white-haired president, Sergio Mattarella, emerged as the most contentious figure in Italian and European politics. His refusal to confirm a euroskeptic economistas a government minister set off the collapse of a populist coalition hours before it was expected to take control of the European Union's fourth largest economy.

Mr. Mattarella's defenders hailed him as the courageous protector of Italy's democracy, institutions and financial health, while fuming populists sought to make the usually revered figure of the Italian head of state the country's public enemy No. 1. They called for his impeachment, saying he had overstepped his constitutional bounds with delusions of grandeur, blocked the will of the people and destroyed Italian democracy.

In response, Mr. Mattarella privately plugged along.

On Monday morning, as markets rose and fell with the whiplashing events in Italy, Mr. Mattarella gave a new mandate to form a government to Carlo Cottarelli, a respected economist, former International Monetary Fund official and Italian government appointee, who told reporters that he would form a caretaker government only with the goal of passing a budget and guiding Italy to new elections.



If Parliament votes in support of his caretaker government, elections would take place in early 2019. If it does not, which seems much more likely, he would quit "immediately" and elections would take place sometime after August.

Mr. Cottarelli's main goal in speaking on Monday seemed to be to assure nervous investors in Italy and abroad that the country was in good hands. He guaranteed, "in the most absolute way, that a government led by me would assure a cautious management of our national accounts," and that Italy's "continuous participation in the eurozone" was essential.

It was Mr. Mattarella's loyalty to the euro that prompted the 11th-hour collapse of the nascent government of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-immigrant League.

He determined that the alliance's proposed economy minister, Paolo Savona, the co-author of a guide to leaving the eurozone, could lead Italy to abandon the euro without sufficient public debate, being that the parties maintained vague and shifting positions on the issue during the campaign leading up to the March 4 elections.

But in deliberately forcing a new election over the euro, which a majority of Italians say they support, the usually careful and measured Mr. Mattarella expressly put an explosive issue with the potential of transforming Europe front and center. And by using his constitutional powers to block the new government in order to protect Italian savings accounts from increasingly wary markets, he also handed the gifted and gleefully hostile populist parties the talking point of a lifetime before the elections.



The coming vote "will be a referendum on Europe, on the euro and on the Italian constitutional model," Francesco Verderami, a political analyst, wrote in Corriere della Sera on Monday. "Because it is equally clear that the presidency of the republic — which has been threatened with impeachment — during the electoral campaign is sure to be one of the targets of the populist and nationalist forces."


Carlo Cottarelli, a former International Monetary Fund official, said in Rome on Monday that he would form a caretaker government to pass a budget and guide Italy to new elections.CreditAlessandro Di Meo/ANSA, via Associated Press

It did not take long for that to come to pass.

Luigi Di Maio, Five Star's political leader, called on party members to demonstrate their opposition to Mr. Mattarella and "the darkest night of Italian democracy" by hanging Italian flags out their windows, marching in the streets and flooding the social networks where the party developed its support.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Di Maio said that Mr. Mattarella had prompted problems in the markets by creating uncertainty. "We don't want to leave the euro," he insisted, calling the party's well-documented ambivalence to the common currency "a lie created by the counselors of Mattarella."

He also said he would work to impeach Mr. Mattarella, and to ensure that "after the election there will not be the same president." His partner in the populist alliance, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, added that "The gravest fact is that the president of the republic chose the European markets ahead of the Italian people."

On Monday, several analysts and politicians accused Mr. Salvini, who rebuffed Mr. Mattarella's appeal to substitute the proposed economy minister with a top League official, of purposely blowing up the government in order to bank increased electoral support in new elections. He wants to be prime minister.

Leading members of the Five Star Movement proclaimed the new technical government dead on arrival and said they would introduce impeachment proceedings against Mr. Mattarella in Parliament.


But their efforts to intimidate Mr. Mattarella last week, saying he should not get in the way of Italian voters, failed. Some supporters argued that the potential blowback and risk in coming elections was worth keeping the populists, who have shown disregard for Italian institutions, away from power.

Mario Calabrese, the editor of the left-leaning daily La Repubblica, wrote in a front-page editorial, "If the president had given in, folding before the ultimatums and threats, and if he went back on his only objection, the state's checks and balances would have broken into pieces."

Mr. Berlusconi, the former prime minister and coalition partner of Mr. Salvini, also gave his support to Mr. Mattarella, saying the Five Star Movement was "irresponsible as always, talking about impeachment."

"Forza Italia waits for the determination of the head of state, but when necessary will be ready for the vote," he added, referring to his party.

That supportive language caused signs of a fracture with Mr. Salvini, who said Mr. Berlusconi's defense of Mr. Mattarella made him sound like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mr. Salvini hinted that he was also open to running with the Five Star Movement in the coming election, saying that the policy agenda the two parties had hammered out was not "scrap paper," and that there was "a good base for working together."

Both he and the Five Star Movement unveiled campaign language in which they accused Italy of being held hostage by Germany, international markets, bankers and the overreaching president who did their bidding.


Matteo Salvini, center, the leader of the far-right League party, has been accused of purposefully blowing up the government in order to draw support in new elections.CreditLuca Bruno/Associated Press

Constitutional scholars debated on Monday whether Mr. Mattarella was within his rights. In Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading paper, Massimo Luciani, a professor of constitutional law at La Sapienza University in Rome, said Mr. Mattarella "exercised his constitutional rights" because he "believed that the choice of a certain minister for a key government position put the interests of our country at risk."



He added, "This is an institutional evaluation."

But Paolo Flores D'Arcais wrote in the political magazine MicroMega that while the president can object to the appointment of a minister if "he finds in the candidate's past behavior something that conflicts with honorability," Mr. Mattarella's problem with the economy minister was his position on the euro.

"It falls beyond the powers of the president of the republic to judge the candidates' political opinions in the single ministries," he wrote.

At first, markets seemed more appreciative of Mr. Mattarella's rejection of the populist government, but they then fell sharply, with stocks and bonds falling as investors digested the increased uncertainty.

"Developments in Italy are likely to keep the financial markets on tenterhooks," analysts at the German lender Commerzbank said in a note to clients Monday morning. Referring to polls that indicate that Italy's populist parties are likely to win any snap election called this year, they continued, "The entry into office of an Italian government that is on a confrontational course with the E.U. and disregards its rules is only postponed."

Italy's benchmark stock index, the FTSE MIB, was down more than 2 percent in afternoon trading in Europe, and the country's bonds took a beating. The yield on the main 10-year Italian government bond, which moves inversely to its price, rose to as much as 2.69 percent, its highest level since August 2014.

The "spread" between Italian government bonds and their German counterparts, in particular, has widened considerably since the start of the year, indicating investors see Italian debt as a riskier investment.



That "spread," a word often uttered with venom by Italian populists, was also the focus of Mr. Mattarella's remarks Sunday night, and Mr. Cottarelli's on Monday morning.

But it is the coming election, and the promised centrality of the euro in it, that makes many in Europe nervous. Mr. Mattarella, a 76-year-old Sicilian, has shown he is not easily shaken.

The son of a government minister, he decided to go into politics after his older brother, Piersanti, then the governor of Sicily, was shot and killed by the Mafia. Mr. Mattarella pulled his bloodied brother out of the car.

The first time he ran for office was in the 1970s, when he ran for a position in his university. He regretted it right away, his friend Vito Riggio once told La Repubblica, recalling that the quiet Sicilian had found himself surrounded by screaming, rabid student protesters.

"The more they screamed, the more he lowered his voice," Mr. Riggio was quoted as saying. "At a certain point, he said to the most enraged one, 'Excuse me, but why are you screaming? We are here to discuss. No?' "

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Neo-Marxism [feedly]

Is there a trend toward 'identity'  as opposed to 'class' politics? is it a step towards a broader coalition, or a more divided one?

Neo-Marxism
http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/

A couple of days ago, Andrew Sullivan delivered a blast against "neo-Marxism":

The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with "acting white" are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.

There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-"white" and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat.

Matthew Yglesias rightly complains about Sullivan's suggestion that Marxism lurks behind the movements for gender and race recognition. Jonathan Chait has been making an even cruder version of this argument for a while, telling us that the "campus left" has borrowed its extremism from Marxism, and would likely drag us all off to the gulags if we ever got a chance. This theory marks a weird and unfortunate alignment that is taking place between a particular strain of center-to-center right opinionating and the "Intellectual Dark Web" crowd. Zack Beauchamp's description of how Jordan Peterson

elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the "postmodernists" win, if people start using others' chosen pronouns, we're one step closer to modern gulags.

could be applied just as aptly to Chait, and likely, with modification, to Sullivan too, (the "hierarchies … imposed by fiat" bit sounds sinister but is notably weaker than gulag rhetoric; Sullivan is clearly angrier about race than he is about gender).

You could, I suppose, treat Sullivan's, Chait's and Peterson's arguments as serious claims to be taken seriously, pointing to the specific situations where campus leftists have indeed behaved like arseholes, and extrapolating this into a general trend of angry, intolerant and indeed totalitarian illiberalism on the march towards possible victory. Frankly, I think that that would be granting unwarranted respect to nonsense. These claims seem to me to instead be rhetorical attacks which illegitimately treat reasonable claims for recognition as if they were steps on a journey towards dictatorship. Contrary to their framing, they are fundamentally illiberal, in the small 'l' sense of liberalism, intended to justify existing power relations against people who would reasonably challenge them.

Where this becomes most clear is in Sullivan's previous post, which is particularly aimed at Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sullivan begins by praising Coates, sort of, before describing him as the exemplar of a "tribal" dynamic, where the "individual is always subordinate to the group," leading to the social exclusion of Bari Weiss's "Intellectual Dark Web," a group of "non-tribal thinkers who have certainly not been silenced, but have definitely been morally anathematized, in the precincts of elite opinion." Sullivan laments that something important has been lost:

But then I remember a different time — and it wasn't so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other's good faith or human worth.

It's only a decade ago, but it feels like aeons now. The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it.

I grew up outside America – which means that many aspects of the American argument about race don't come easily to me. I also don't know anything first hand, obviously, about the personal relationship between Coates and Sullivan, which I suspect colors their interactions too. So take these caveats as a health warning regarding what follows. Still, I think it's quite plain that Coates has a very different memory of his interactions with Sullivan than Sullivan's depiction. A week before Sullivan's piece, Huffington Post published a transcript of a conversation at the Atlantic about the hiring and rapid firing of Kevin Williamson. Coates says:

I got incredibly used to learning from people. And studying people. And feeling like certain people were even actually quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn't really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.

This extends not just from my early days as a journalist, but if I'm being honest here, from my early days at The Atlantic. You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn't speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn't speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us…. I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him.

I don't have the privilege of being able to look into Sullivan's head, but it is hard to imagine that his piece about Coates and tribalism was not an angry and hurt response to Coates' claim that he, Sullivan, was a "fucking racist."

In juxtaposition, Sullivan's and Coates' pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a "different time" when "neither of us denied each other's good faith or human worth," is, in Coates' understanding, a time where he was required to "take seriously" the argument that "black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people" as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The "civility" and "generosity of spirit" that supported "human to human" conversation is juxtaposed to Coates' "teachers" who didn't see him "completely as a human being." What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan's depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed.

Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan's claim that "identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable," and we are all being pulled down by the "riptide of tribalism." The imagined paradise of liberal discussion from which we are being torn was only a paradise for some; others were there on sufferance, or not allowed in at all. Sullivan's hostility to "tribalism" reflects his unwillingness to confront the rather sordid politics of his own position, and his past and continuing history on race and intelligence.

Sullivan, Chait, and, I suspect many other soi-disant centrists and centrist liberals are now converging with Peterson and the whole sorry crew of white men on the Internet shouting out against the oppression of Social Justice Warriors. This allows them to delegitimize – and hence avoid having to seriously confront – hard criticisms of their own positions. If they want, it's perfectly reasonable for them to push back against what they believe to be excesses. Gender activists and race activists are human too, which means that they surely may be wrong, and may certainly behave stupidly, or badly. But claims that "neo-Marxists" and "campus leftists" are looking in general to build gulags, impose hierarchies by fiat and the like are themselves both bad and stupid rhetoric, which undermine rather than reinforce the commitment to open debate that they claim to hold so deeply.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Trump’s Corruption: Thanks to Koch Brothers, GOP Congress Is in on the Take [feedly]

Trump's Corruption: Thanks to Koch Brothers, GOP Congress Is in on the Take
http://prospect.org/article/trumps-corruption-thanks-koch-brothers-gop-congress-on-take

Poor Paul Ryan, caught between a rock and a hard place. His caucus divided between the belligerent and the merely unreasonable, Ryan's very tenure as speaker of the House is threatened. Even though he promised to step down in January, there are maneuverings among his colleagues to oust him before then.

Ryan's political career is largely the creation of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have built the political infrastructure on which most Republicans in Congress now depend when seeking election. However, with the tax bill now passed and the deregulatory regime well under way in the executive branch, Ryan may have served out his usefulness to the Kochs.

Ever concerned about his reputation, Ryan—unlike Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—likes to occasionally serve up the pretense of judging a cause on its merits. So when the far-right Republican Freedom Caucus tanked a vote on the Farm Bill over the demand for a more draconian immigration policy, Ryan found that despite all the things he's done to please President Donald J. Trump, it wasn't enough for those far-right guardians of the patriarchy.

There's just so little appreciation for Ryan's unfailing support of Representative Devin Nunes's attempts to undermine the special counsel investigation of Russia's intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and any contact the Trump campaign may have had with figures connected to Russia's meddling. Ryan even backed up Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, in Nunes's recent demand to know more about an FBI informant who was dispatched to talk with several campaign members in the bureau's attempt to understand possible contacts between campaign figures and Russian agents. Yesterday, this demand led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to agree to disclosesuch information to Nunes and other House Republicans, despite Nunes's proven biasagainst the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The kind of information demanded by Nunes is customarily withheld from members of Congress outside of a specially appointed body known as the "gang of eight," according to Adam Schiff the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. But Nunes has threatened to impeach Rosenstein if he didn't get what he wanted.

Not to be outdone, the Freedom Caucus drew up a draft of articles of impeachment against Rosenstein. However far Ryan goes down Trump's authoritarian road, it's never quite enough for that crowd. And so, Ryan may be dumped in favor of Trump pal Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader from California.

For Trump, the presidency is not only about power and "toughness" and respect (for him, of course). It's also part of his brand, sold to foreign diplomats and domestic suck-ups alike at the Trump International Hotel, to would-be investors in properties belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Chinese consumers of his daughter's fashion brands, the eponymous Ivanka Trump lines. And don't forget members of and visitors to his golf clubs. There's hush money and hacked emails and oligarch pals and all manner of stuff emitting noxious odors. The preceding list likely barely scratches the surface. But without the Koch brothers, who virtually own the majority in the House, Trump could not remain in power. Despite their confession of the libertarian faith, the Kochs have thrown in with a tainted authoritarian because it's working for them.

It's won them a tax bill that starves government and issues a windfall to the wealthy. It's won them the administration's policy of removing two regulations for every new one that's implemented. (The brothers' conglomerate, Koch Industries, is a famous polluter.) It's won them a promise to open up more, even sacred, public lands for mineral and fossil fuel extraction.

We'll probably never know the scope of the sprawl of the Koch network of interlocking nonprofit organizations, thanks to the unleashing of dark money in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision—you know, the "money is speech" case that allows nonprofit groups to conceal the names of their donors. That dark money is pretty much paying for the perpetuation of Donald Trump's corruption of the presidency and the U.S. Constitution. Because if the Kochs wanted Trump gone, they could put a bug in a few congressional ears about articles of impeachment. Yet they don't. They may even feed their youthful ward, Paul Ryan, to the Trumpian beast that Congress has become.

During the presidential campaign, the Koch brothers made a big show of turning up their noses at the coarse, pussy-grabbing quisling from Queens, with David Koch even sitting out the 2016 Republican National Convention. (In 2012, he served as a Romney delegate.) But on election night 2016, Koch turned up at the victory party in Trump Tower.

In the end, it seems, there is no real division between the authoritarian and the neo-libertarians. Stronger than those differences is their mutual commitment to one unifying principle: greed.

It is unlikely that the United States can find its way back from the corruption epitomized by the Trump administration without addressing the corrosive effect of the dark money unleashed by the Supreme Court.

In the midterm congressional elections, Democrats would be wise to shine a light on the corruption represented by Trump and his congressional supporters. Should they win, it's time to revive legislation that would turn off the dark-money spigot.

The very life of the Constitution may depend on it.

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