Dean Baker: Impeachment Is About a Fair Election in 2020 [feedly]

Impeachment Is About a Fair Election in 2020
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/impeachment-is-about-a-fair-election-in-2020

Some people on the left have been neutral or even opposed to the Democrats' drive to impeach Donald Trump over his effort to coerce Ukraine's government into taking steps to harm a 2020 competitor. Some argue that there are better reasons to impeach the president, or that Democrats' efforts are woefully inadequate. But part of this disdain for impeachment stems from objections to the New Cold War policies that the career State Department staff wanted to pursue. Many also are not fans of Joe Biden and don't mind seeing him slimed by the Trump administration.

These sentiments are understandable but incidental to the impeachment process. The issue here is whether Trump is allowed to use the full resources of the U.S. government to undermine his political opponents.

Biden is the target because he was (and still) is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Ukraine is involved because it happens to be convenient for a right-wing story. Trump can and will make up many other stories as the need arises.

If anyone thinks Trump plans to have a fair race against whoever wins the Democratic nomination, they haven't been paying attention. Trump and the Republican Party do not consider themselves bound at all by rules of electoral fairness or reality.

Remember, this is a guy that went around the country for five years saying that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump insists that he had the largest inaugural crowd ever and that he was elected in a landslide.

He claims that this is the best economy ever and that he is responsible for that fact. (It isn't even close in terms of wage or median family income growth, and in any case, what we see is the continuation of trends that were in place years before he took office.)

Anyhow, we could just have a good laugh if it were only a question of Trump being delusional. But he has staffed the top levels of his administration with people who are totally prepared to ignore reality in his service. The most important figure in this respect is his Attorney General William Barr.

Barr demonstrated his contempt for reality with his four-page "summary" of the Robert Mueller report. This summary completely misrepresented the Mueller report's findings. However, it served a huge political purpose, as it was treated in the media as the actual Mueller report, which Barr kept out of public view for three weeks.

More recently, Barr found a political hack in federal prosecutor John Durham, who was assigned the job of making the Trump-Russia investigation into a "deep state" effort to undermine the Trump presidency. Durham recently signaled his intent to ignore procedures and the law to make this case. He took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the Justice Department inspector general's report on the Trump-Russia investigation, based on his ongoing investigation. (Prosecutors do not comment on ongoing investigations.)

Barr, of course, is not the only top-level official corrupting the agency they control to advance Trump's political agenda. We saw that top officials at the Commerce Department were prepared to punish the National Weather Service for correcting Trump's ridiculous claim about a hurricane's path. Earlier, the administration tried to rig the census so that immigrants would be undercounted.

Given what we know about how he operates, we should expect Trump to use the full power of the government against whoever runs against him. People may not be fond of Biden, but do you think it won't affect a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren candidacy if it is reported that they are under IRS investigation for cheating on their taxes?

How about if the Justice Department is investigating Warren for fraud in connection with her past consulting work, or Sanders for his wife's dealings as president of Burlington College? It doesn't matter at all that there may be absolutely no substance to such allegations; Trump and his lackeys care zero about reality.

Reality is, at most, an inconvenience for them. If it would help Trump's campaign to make up outlandish charges against his opponent, and then have the Justice Department pursue them. Why would anyone think that he wouldn't do it?

The impeachment process is calling Trump to account for a case where he clearly abused his power to advance his political agenda. We are fortunate that career public servants were prepared to risk their jobs and possibly more (some have received death threats) to expose this corruption.

If progressives want to laugh it off and get their way, then we should expect a lot more of this corruption in the 2020 election. If there is anything we should know about Trump at this point, it is that he will do whatever he can get away with.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

How Trump Lost His Trade War [feedly]

How Trump Lost His Trade War
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/opinion/trump-china-trade.html

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Trade wars rarely have victors. They do, however, sometimes have losers. And Donald Trump has definitely turned out to be a loser.

Of course, that's not the way he and his team are portraying the tentative deal they've struck with China, which they're claiming as a triumph. The reality is that the Trump administration achieved almost none of its goals; it has basically declared victory while going into headlong retreat.

And the Chinese know it. As The Times reports, Chinese officials are "jubilant and even incredulous" at the success of their hard-line negotiating strategy.

To understand what just went down, you need to ask what Trump and company were trying to accomplish with their tariffs, and how that compares with what really happened.


First and foremost, Trump wanted to slash the U.S. trade deficit. Economists more or less unanimously consider this the wrong objective, but in Trump's mind countries win when they sell more than they buy, and nobody is going to convince him otherwise.

So it's remarkable to note that the trade deficit has risen, not fallen, on Trump's watch, from $544 billion in 2016 to $691 billion in the 12 months ending in October.



And what Trump wanted in particular was to close the trade deficit in manufactured goods; despite giving lip service to "great Patriot Farmers," it's clear that he actually has contempt for agricultural exports. Last summer, complaining about the U.S. trade relationship with Japan, he sneered: "We send them wheat. Wheat. That's not a good deal."

So now we appear to have a trade deal with China whose main substantive element is … a promise to buy more U.S. farm goods.


Trump's team also wanted to put the brakes on China's drive to establish itself as the world's economic superpower. "China is basically trying to steal the future," declared Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser, a year ago. But the new deal, while it includes some promises to protect intellectual property, leaves the core of China's industrial strategy — what's been called the "vast web of subsidies that has fueled the global rise of many Chinese companies" — untouched.

So why did Trump wimp out on trade?

At a broad level, the answer is that he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. America was never going to succeed in bullying a huge, proud nation whose economy is already, by some measures, larger than ours — especially while simultaneously alienating other advanced economies that might have joined us in pressuring China to change some of its economic policies.

At a more granular level, none of the pieces of Trump trade strategy have worked as promised.

Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that China is paying his tariffs, the facts say otherwise: Chinese export prices haven't gone down, which means that the tariffs are falling on U.S. consumers and companies. And the bite on consumers would have gone up substantially if Trump hadn't called off the round of further tariff increases that had been scheduled for this past Sunday.

At the same time, Chinese retaliation has hit some U.S. exporters, farmers in particular, hard. And while Trump may quietly hold farm exports in contempt, he needs those rural votes — votes that were being put at risk despite a farm bailout that has already cost more than twice as much as Barack Obama's bailout of the auto industry.

Finally, uncertainty over tariff policy was clearly hurting manufacturing and business investment, even as overall economic growth remained solid.

So Trump, as I said, basically declared victory and retreated.

Will Trump's trade defeat hurt him politically? Probably not. Many Americans will surely buy the spin, and the trade war was never popular anyway.

Furthermore, voting mostly reflects the economy's direction, not its level — not whether things are good, but whether they've been getting better recently. It may actually be good political strategy to do stupid things for a while, then stop doing them around a year before the election, which is a fair summary of Trump's trade actions.



There will, however, be longer-term costs to the trade war. For one thing, the business uncertainty created by Trump's capriciousness won't go away; he is, after all, a master of the art of the broken deal.

Beyond that, Trump's trade antics have damaged America's reputation.

On one side, our allies have learned not to trust us. We have, after all, become the kind of country that suddenly slaps tariffs on Canada — Canada! — on obviously spurious claims that we're protecting national security.

On the other side, our rivals have learned not to fear us. Like the North Koreans, who flattered Trump but kept on building nukes, the Chinese have taken Trump's measure. They now know that he talks loudly but carries a small stick, and backs down when confronted in ways that might hurt him politically.

These things matter. Having a leader who is neither trusted by our erstwhile friends nor feared by our foreign rivals reduces our global influence in ways we're just starting to see. Trump's trade war didn't achieve any of its goals, but it did succeed in making America weak again.


Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Boeing to Temporarily Shut Down 737 Max Production [feedly]

Boeing to Temporarily Shut Down 737 Max Production
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/business/boeing-737-max.html

Boeing next month will temporarily stop making the 737 Max, its most popular passenger jet, the company said on Monday.

The decision, after a two-day board meeting, is the culmination of the worst crisis in the company's 103-year history and follows two crashes that killed 346 people. Boeing had repeatedly signaled that the plane would be cleared to return to the sky before the end of the year.

Boeing's decision could ripple through the American economy. The company is America's largest manufacturing exporter and it views the 737 Max as critical to its future.

This new model of its workhorse 737 was begun under pressure in 2011 as the company sought to fend off competition from its European rival, Airbus. But after the two crashes, prosecutors, regulators and two congressional committees are investigating whether Boeing overlooked safety risks and played down the need for pilot training in its effort to design, produce and certify the plane as quickly as possible.


One focus for investigators is a software system known as MCAS, which was created for the Max and was found to have played a role in both crashes. Shortly after the first crash, off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018, Boeing promised a fix to MCAS. Then the second crash happened in March, in Ethiopia.

The plane was grounded days later, and Boeing has still not delivered a software fix for MCAS that has met federal approval. And there is still no timeline for the plane's return to the air.

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Boeing's reputation and stock price have been battered, with shares in the company falling 25 percent since March. The company has already announced more than $8 billion in charges related to the crisis, a figure that is expected to rise significantly.

With the company still unable to win approval from global regulators to let the plane fly again, executives and board members have made, in halting production, one of the most consequential decisions in the manufacturer's history, one that will also affect its hundreds of suppliers around the country.

Shutting down the factory "emphasizes the uncertainty of getting Max back in the air," Jonathan Raviv, an analyst at Citi, wrote in a note on Monday.


Boeing has only rarely stopped production of its airplanes, most recently in 2008. But the company has never faced a situation like the one it now confronts. Boeing has sold roughly 5,000 of the jets, making it the best-selling aircraft in its history, and it has built nearly 400 Max jets that it has not yet delivered.

"It will have enormous ripple effects," said Susan Houseman, director of research for the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "It will have very real effects on many people's lives, and it's never good for this to happen right before the holidays."

Boeing said it intended to redeploy the roughly 12,000 workers building the Max in its factory in Renton, Wash., to other projects, avoiding layoffs or furloughs for the time being.

It will try to manage the disruption to suppliers, though it did not give details. It may continue to accept parts from major suppliers, so that when the company restarts the Max line production can be quickly ramped up. Other suppliers are likely to endure significant financial pain if Boeing's shutdown halts part of their assembly line for a period of months.

"Our objective continues to be ensuring supply chain health and production system stability, including the preparedness for seamless transition in the future," a Boeing spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said in a statement.

Boeing's shares were down more than 4 percent before the announcement. Shares of Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage of the Max, fell nearly 2 percent on Monday.

But because Boeing is not planning significant layoffs and its suppliers are distributed around the country, the overall effect on the broader economy will depend on how long the stoppage lasts.

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"It's a blow to the collective psyche," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. "But the American economy is performing well, job growth is strong, and the stock market is near a record high. If there was a time when the economy could digest something like this, it is now."

Boeing had already slowed production at the factory after the crashes. In April, the company said it would reduce the number of 737 planes it produced each month to 42 from 52.

It was not clear how long the Max factory will be shut down. Boeing continues to encounter hurdles with the Federal Aviation Administration and other global regulators as it works to return the plane to service.

The delays have varied from the technical to the procedural, and have now made it likely that the Max will be grounded for a full year, if not longer. Boeing has still not completed all the steps necessary to satisfy regulators.

As a result, Boeing has repeatedly pushed back the projected date of a return to service for the Max. Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing's chief executive, said in October that he expected the planes to be approved to fly this year. But last week, Stephen Dickson, the administrator of the F.A.A., said the Max would not fly until 2020.

Southwest Airlines and United Airlines had already postponed Max flights until March, while American Airlines has said it won't fly the Max until April.

The production shutdown adds to the pressure facing Mr. Muilenburg. Among his challenges: the company's fraying relationship with the F.A.A., which has become more willing to openly question Boeing in recent weeks.

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In a meeting at F.A.A. headquarters in Washington last week, Mr. Dickson told Mr. Muilenburg that it would be impossible to get the plane flying by the end of the year, despite Boeing's previously rosy predictions.

"Boeing continues to pursue a return-to-service schedule that is not realistic," an F.A.A. official wrote in an email to Congress before the meeting. "More concerning, the administrator wants to directly address the perception that some of Boeing's public statements have been designed to force F.A.A. into taking quicker action."

The board stripped Mr. Muilenburg of his title as chairman in October, saying the move would allow him "to focus full time on running the company as it works to return the 737 MAX safely to service." David Calhoun, who became chairman of the board, has expressed confidence in Mr. Muilenburg.

But in an interview on CNBC last month, Mr. Calhoun did not offer a clear answer when asked whether the company would keep Mr. Muilenburg in his role as chief executive after the Max returned to service.

"Why speculate on that?" Mr. Calhoun said in the interview. "If we successfully get from where he started to where we need to end up, I would view that as a very significant milestone and something that speaks to his leadership and his courage and his ability to execute and get us through this."

Mr. Calhoun added that "the board deliberates, every single meeting, on the subject of our leaders and how well they're doing, and do they have our confidence."

Boeing's board was in Chicago on Monday as the company decided between reducing Max production or temporarily halting it. Though shutting down the line rather than further reducing the rate of production is a drastic step, it could help the company in some ways.

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The process of delivering the Max jets it has already built but not delivered will take at least a year, and reducing the backlog would simplify that process. It would also reduce the time the newly built planes sit idle.

But the task of delivering its growing backlog was made more complicated last month, when the F.A.A. took control of issuing certificates of airworthiness for each airplane. That decision means Boeing won't be able to deliver planes as quickly as it had hoped.

Boeing first suggested it might halt production of the Max in July. Last week, Boeing reached a partial settlement with Southwest Airlines to compensate it for some of the costs it has incurred as a result of the protracted grounding of the Max.

"Boeing still has credit lines and probably the ability to incur new debt," said Scott Hamilton, managing director of the Leeham Company, an aviation consultancy. "Even so, at some point, Boeing — even with its financial resources — has to stop the cash bleeding."

At the very moment Boeing announced it was ceasing production of its most important product, the company took steps to meet Wall Street's expectations. As it announced the shutdown on Monday, it sent a simultaneous news release announcing a regular quarterly dividend for shareholders


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Party That Ruined the Planet [feedly]

The Party That Ruined the Planet
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/opinion/climate-change-republicans.html

text only content:

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn't the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn't see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren't paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America's two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it's hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I've seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.


But the terrifying political news and the terrifying climate news are closely related.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.

But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America's Republicans, who are the world's only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn't just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.


And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we're seeing with regard to Trump.

As I've written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of "fake news," Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the "deep state," they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.



Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, "little concern for legal restraints."

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But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn't even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don't believe that it's just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there's a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you're more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn't just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don't fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it's the only hope we have.


Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman -- via my feedly newsfeed

Who to blame for Johnson winning? [feedly]

time for a "deeper look" indeed...but there's the little problem of "INCOMING!!!!" Duck!

Who to blame for Johnson winning?
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/12/who-to-blame-for-johnson-winning.html

When I wrote thisin July I desperately wanted to be wrong. (Of course I was wrong about a lot of the details but alas not the main point.) But it soon became clear that, compared to 2017, the press had had two more years to paint Corbyn as marxist, unpatriotic and racist, and for enough people that would be a reason not to vote Labour. Among others who supported Brexit, they really did believe that Johnson was the man to get Brexit done.

Many will say that Labour lost badly because they had a left wing manifesto. They always do after each election defeat. I doubt that has much to do with this defeat, although the large amount of giveaways to the wrong people was probably a factor. The problem was Corbyn, not Labour's manifesto. And while many voted against the media image of Corbyn more than anything else, it has to be said that Corbyn's past and his failures over the last three years made the media's job very easy.

We should of course blame the media. The right wing press became part of the Tories propaganda war. The Tories lied like never before, just as some of them did in 2016. The BBC was even more careful not to do anything that might upset the government, and it has a real problem when 'accidents' keep advantaging one side. But the moment the BBC played a key role in electing Boris Johnson was very specific, and it goes back to the day Johnson got his deal with the EU.

What the media should have asked at that moment is why Johnson had accepted a deal that was essentially the first the EU had proposed, but which he and other ERG members had said at the time was unacceptable. Why had he capitulated? Was it all just a ruse so he could become Prime Minister?

Nobody thought a deal was possible, gushed Laura Kuenssberg, repeating one of CCHQ's lines to take. No sense from her of what had actually happened. As I noted here, the BBC's Brussels correspondent got it about right, but the tone of the reporting was set by Kuenssberg. Whether this misrepresentation of Johnson's deal was deliberate or the result of ignorance I don't know, but it was critical.

Of course the Tory and Brexit press also took CCHQ's lines to take. The BBC is the only chance most voters have to get a check on what their newspapers say. It did not provide any such check on this occasion. And it is critical because it allows Johnson to say, as he has, that it was his unique abilities that helped him achieve a deal that everyone said was impossible. No doubt he will say the same when he refuses an extension in July next year because the EU have refused to give him the deal he wants.

Voters who still believe in leaving the EU were left with the impression, thanks to the BBC (and of course the Brexit press), that Johnson was the person who could deal with the EU and get Brexit done. They were not told the truth that he was the person who had helped waste almost a year in squabbling in part so he could get to be Prime Minister. So Leavers are left with an image of competence rather than the reality, which is that Johnson is quite prepared to damage the economy and the workings of democracy just for his own personal gain.

But there is little that Labour or the Liberal Democrats can do about media bias while they are out of power. Undoubtedly a key reason Johnson won was because the Remain/anti-Johnson vote was split. It is depressing and very worrying how many people voted for Johnson, our own Donald Trump, but while the Electoral College gifted Trump his victory despite losing the popular vote, so First Past The Post (FPTP) gave Johnson his victory. A lot of people voted tactically, but not enough.

Both Labour and Liberal Democrats are to blame for not cooperating. While Labour's failure was not a surprise, I had hoped the Liberal Democrats would take the opportunity to seize the moral high ground and not put up candidates in Labour marginals like Canterbury. It didn't, and instead it spent too much of its time attacking Labour in the futile belief that this would win over some Tory voters. I suspect they would have been much more successful if they had been honest that the best way to stop Brexit was through a minority Labour government dependent on LibDem votes.

The ultimate responsibility for the split vote must nevertheless rest with Jeremy Corbyn.

The big surge in the Liberal Democrat vote from below 10% to over 20% at its peak began in the Spring of this year, and it coincided with a collapse in Labour's vote. This quite remarkable change in fortunes cannot be put down to a biased media, but is obviously a Brexit effect.

Throughout 2018 Labour had managed to stay the obvious choice for Remainers, as it had been in the 2017 election. But as soon as May finalised her Withdrawal Agreement it was clear triangulating would no longer work, and Labour would have to take a position. The polls suggested Labour would lose votes by not supporting Remain, but as I notedin December last year too many within Labour were in denial.

Labour entering into talks with May to get Brexit done was I suspect the final straw for many Remainers. They didn't go to the new and short lived Remain party but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. The European election was a disaster, but shifting Labour's policy seemed like trying to get blood out of a stone. I really think if they had moved at the beginning of 2019 to where they ended up things would have been rather different. Instead the Labour leadership single-handedly created the revival of the Liberal Democrats. That, as well as his failure to deal with antisemitism and some of his intolerant supporters, are major factors behind this defeat. 

Easy to say in hindsight? Not really. I said these things in 2016 in the second Labour leadership election that Corbyn won. I said it throughout late 2018 and early 2019 was the Remain vote became disenchanted with Corbyn. But the behaviour of Labour MPs made an alternative to Corbyn impossible in 2016 then, as it had been in 2015, and after the 2017 general election result he was never going to be removed.

Could we have stopped Johnson if Labour had not allowed the Remain vote to split. To be honest I don't know. That is how negative the media's image of Corbyn has been. Some Lexiters will say it is all Remainers' fault, but that is a nonsense position. As a result of this defeat we have reached the end of the line for the Remain cause. It has been three years of experts and people who made themselves experts trying to explain why Brexit was such a bad idea, but nothing we could do was able to counteract the propaganda of the Brexit press and the knowledge as opinion attitude of the broadcast media, and particularly the BBC. The really striking finding after three years when the truth about Brexit became crystal clear to anyone wanting or able to see it is that the number of people wanting Brexit changed only a little, and that is what gave Johnson his majority.

Now that we have elected our own Donald Trump, I'm reminded of a talk Paul Krugman gave after Trump won. At the time I wrote a postabout it, and I ended it like this:

"We can, and should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth world."

I will continue to rage, but not quite as often as I have done since the blog began almost exactly eight years ago. It is time for deeper thought about how we get back to the light and ensure that we never again lapse into a post-truth world.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Opioid epidemic is not over -- Nor is the inequality crisis, despite low uneployment

The opioid crisis: A consequence of U.S. economic decline?

Iris Marechal  

The opioid epidemic continues to devastate families and communities across the United States, causing serious health and socioeconomic crises. The high prescription rate for opioids and the subsequent misuse of this medication by millions of Americans accelerated addiction and has led to a four-fold increase in the rate of overdoses since 1999. Estimates indicate that more than 90 Americans die every day from opioid overdoses. This drug misuse costs the federal government $78.5 billion per year in health care, addiction treatment, and productivity loss, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton at Princeton University attribute the sharp increase in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2015 to "deaths of despair" rather than to the increased ease of obtaining opioids: That is, their research suggests that higher drug suicides are attributable to social and economic factors such as a prolonged economic decline in many parts of the United States. They show that white Americans are more affected by the opioid epidemic, yet less affected by economic downturns than other racial and ethnic groups in the country. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1

Why are whites experiencing a more dramatic rise in drug mortality than nonwhites? Other researchers associate this growth with the drug and public health environment rather than economic conditions. Research scientist Kyong Ae Ko and his colleagues at the University of Texas MD Cancer Medical Center find that the availability and the use of risky drugs are of particular importance in rising drug fatalities. Health scholars Ashta Singhal at the Boston University School of Dental Medicine, Yu-Yu Tien at the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, and Rene Hsia at the Department of Emergency Medicine and Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, find similar results. Both studies observe that whites have been prescribed more opioids than nonwhites, and assert that this fact explains the racial-ethnic disparities in drug overdose.

In a recently released paper, public policy professor Christopher Ruhm at the University of Virginia sheds further light on the debate over whether the opioid crisis is health related or economy related. He assesses the relative contribution of the opioid addiction crisis and socioeconomic crisis from 1999 to 2015 in 3,098 counties with consistent boundaries over the time period across the country. As a first step, the author measures the impact of long-run economic changes on drug and alcohol suicide by labor-market outcomes, household wealth, and international trade shocks. Ruhm finds that counties that are more affected by economic decline show higher drug mortality than those with better performance. Yet he also finds that the size of this effect is not large enough to explain the opioid epidemic.

Overall, he estimates that economic conditions explain roughly one-tenth of the drug death increase. Thus, he says the "deaths of despair" theory fails to adequately explain the fatal drug epidemic.

He also finds evidence that the "drug environment hypothesis"—that the availability and the cost of drugs in legal and illicit markets mostly explain the increase in overdose deaths—is valid. Ruhm observes a shift in the nature of the drug involved in fatal overdoses: The beginning of the analysis period was dominated by a rise in opioid analgesic overdoses, while since 2010 overdoses mainly involved illicit opioids such as heroin. If economic conditions were the key driver of the increase in overdose deaths, then there would be no reason for such a shift.

Moreover, he also finds that overdose death rates vary with sex and age, further validating the drug environment hypothesis. Indeed, the groups at higher risk of abusing prescription opioids (females and older adults) have the largest increase in drug death rates early in the analysis period, while males and young adults (a group with higher risk of illicit drug abuse) experience an explosive growth in drug death rates around 2010. Thus, he argues that a change in the drug environment over these years and the people more at risk of specific drug abuse were differently affected.

President Donald Trump in October declared the opioid crisis a national health emergency. Further research into the economic causes of the crisis identified by economists Case and Deaton and the drug environment causes pinpointed by an array of health experts would go a long way toward developing federal, state, and local policies to combat the opioid crisis effectively.

Iris Maréchal is a Fall intern at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and a French exchange student at the Johns Hopkins University within the Aitchison Fellowship Program.

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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

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War on Terror Rages on because the West Won’t Learn from Two Decades of Failure [feedly]

War on Terror Rages on because the West Won't Learn from Two Decades of Failure
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/13/12/2019/war-terror-rages-because-west-wont-learn-two-decades-failure

Eighteen years ago the head of the UK's military warned against relying on military solutions alone. But governments still aren't listening.

Things are not going as well in Afghanistan as the US government would have you believe. Not from a US point of view, anyway. This week The Washington Post claimed that classified government reports reveal a persistent campaign to put the war in the best light, "making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable". This may come as a surprise to many, but not to those few media outlets that have taken a more distanced view of the war and its supposed progress.

Right from the earliest days there were indications of major problems, but such was the euphoria that the US military had been able to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida within three months of 9/11 that these counted for nothing in the public mind. George W. Bush drove on regardless: barely a month after that victory he used his 2002 State of the Union address to extend the war against al-Qaida into a far wider conflict with an 'axis of evil'. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were the first enemies to be dealt with, but with Libya, Syria and Cuba also in line for action.

Not all the western military were convinced that this was a good way forward. One of the most remarkable indicators was included in a report in openDemocracy in January 2001, months before 9/11 and the 'war on terror' that Bush declared against the evil axis. It reported a speech that the head of the UK's armed forces at the time, Admiral Michael Boyce, gave to an influential audience at the Royal United Services Institute in London:

He warned against the idea that a war on terrorism could be won by intensive military action while failing to recognise the root causes of the problem. More than that, he warned that the use of excessive force could even tend to radicalise Islamic opinion.

Why is it significant to recall this, eighteen years later? Dig a little further and an interesting element emerges which is as relevant now as then. Boyce was a much less political chief of defence staff than his predecessor General (later Lord) Guthrie. He tended to draw his analysis from astute military sources, so it is especially significant that he was prepared to be so blunt just as the US was area-bombing the Taliban. Over the following months, there were all too obvious signs that all was not going well for the Pentagon in Afghanistan.

By 31 December, openDemocracy was reporting that the great majority of the several thousand al-Qaida militias in Afghanistan had simply disappeared from view, with only a few hundred of captured or killed. If that was true for al-Qaida then it was even more so for the tens of thousands of Taliban militias. Time after time they had retreated and dispersed in the face of the combined US/Northern Alliance warlord forces, often taking their weapons with them. For most of the Taliban it was a matter of slipping back into their own towns, villages or city districts, while many al-Qaida fighters went over the border into Pakistan.

Furthermore, by early 2002 and within weeks of Bush defining the axis of evil, the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida was expanding. One example was a US-led coalition operation against insurgent forces around the town of Sirkanel in the mountains south of Kabul. What was intended as an operation involving a thousand US troops backed up by local forces went badly wrong almost from the start: the strength of opposing forces was badly underestimated. As openDemocracy reported in March that year:

As the conflict developed, US capabilities had to be reinforced by five Cobra attack helicopters and two UH-53 transport helicopters flown in from an amphibious support ship, the Bon Homme Richard, in the Arabian Sea.

An unconfirmed report from the BBC suggested that the five helicopters were to replace a similar number damaged during the fighting. The fighting has involved intensive use of bombers, AC-130 gunships and thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) weapons, with 450 bombs dropped by US and French aircraft in the first four days alone.

Within four years, the Taliban were spreading their influence right across Afghanistan. Western troop numbers grew from barely 5,000 at the end of 2002 to 130,000 a decade later. Yet the war continues to this day.

Where that early experience fits in to the present day is that we are now assured that the 'war on terror' is finally dying down. Donald Trump even declares that the West has won. In Western media there is little mention of the return of ISIS and their like in Syria and Iraq, hardly any coverage of Libya, Yemen, Somalia or Afghanistan, and little awareness of what is happening across the Sahel region of the Sahara.

Occasionally there is an event that attracts attention, a mass attack by several hundred paramilitaries in Niger this week being an example. Groups reportedly linked to al-Qaida and ISIS overran a military base killing 71 Nigerien soldiers as fighting across the country escalated in spite of the presence of thousands of French and regional forces supporting the Nigerien government in its counterinsurgency operations.

Behind the scenes, even now, experts may be telling the British, US, French and other Western governments that Admiral Boyce's eighteen-year-old thoughts on the need to recognise the root causes of violence and to avoid inciting further radicalisation are just as relevant now as then. None of them seems able to take this on board, however, and it may be another two decades before we learn of their wilful disregard for a painful reality.

 

 

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is 'Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins' (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows 'Why We're Losing the War on Terror' (Polity, 2007), and 'Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century' (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

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