By now the president has found out that he can't single-handedly take on the combined de-industrializing institutions that control the GOP -- the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, agribusiness, etc. These are the labor-intensive sectors of the economy responsible for passing NAFTA, sending jobs and factories out of our country and into cheap labor colonies like Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump identified the American operators of these businesses as the enemy -- frequently holding up Carrier, an A/C manufacturer, as a vivid example. Also Ford Motors, Nabisco, and others. They were moving their plants to Mexico? Well, how about a big fat 35% tariff on everything they make there and try to bring back into the US market? That would totally counter-act the greedy American executives' attempt to generate higher profits simply by slashing labor costs, sending the work to Mexico instead of Michigan.
As a rule, executives should only be rewarded for improving their company's products -- providing a higher quality and quantity for a lower price. Or inventing entirely new products. They must be punished for cutting labor costs, since that is not an invention or product improvement. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you can boost profits by slashing labor costs, it only takes a sociopath. By rewarding their cheap-labor programs, we are breeding the executive class to be dull-witted, lazy, and predatory, rather than ingenious, industrious, and pro-social.
Since taking office and getting immediately cock-blocked by the de-industrial lobbies, as well as every politician in his own dominant party, the president has given up on taking the fight to the anti-American executives who have destroyed the economy that once used to support a large prosperous middle and working class. He no longer harangues flagrant violators of his former campaign slogan to "Hire American," like when Harley Davidson just shut down their plant in Kansas City, in order to move production over to Thailand.
He also doesn't put any pressure on the cheap labor colonies themselves. Quite the contrary -- he just helped save a telecom cartel in China, complaining about US policies that were costing too many Chinese jobs. And he's not only capitulated to Mexico on NAFTA, but on the never-to-be-built wall as well. Really, how hard would it be just for symbolic theatrical value to keep demanding that Mexico will pay for The Wall? He doesn't even bother with the empty symbolism anymore.
He's never attacked Vietnam, despite their soaring trade surplus against the US. He used to mention them on the campaign trail as one we've got to watch out for, how Vietnam is the next China, etc. But he's surrendered on that front too -- even rhetorically, let alone substantively.
The leaders of these cheap labor colonies are the recipients of stolen goods -- our manufacturing sector -- rather than the thieves themselves (the American executives). However, Trump doesn't go after either group involved.
The only party he's interested in picking fights with are Canada, Japan, Germany, and by extension the EU.
Contra the liberal airheads, no one cares if these are "historic allies" since the motive for that alliance is long gone -- WWII and the Cold War. No one cares about preserving zombie alliances as some kind of diplomatic cargo cult. Maintaining that alliance costs the US an absolute fortune, for which we get nothing in return, aside from the imperial operators at the top level of the Pentagon and State Dept.
Nevertheless, these are not cheap labor colonies, and they therefore have little to do with the de-industrialization of our economy. When Carrier, Ford, and Nabisco close down a plant in Indiana, Wisconsin, or Michigan, they are not sending the work to be done in Canada, Germany, or Japan. Wages are too high there, and the whole point is to slash labor costs.
Some of them do benefit from our providing their military needs more or less for free -- South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy -- which frees up a lot of their government's funds to invest in their domestic industries, making them much more competitive internationally. But even if we ended that practice, and their manufactured goods became more expensive, that would not return factories back here.
Our tool-makers did not get wiped out because the German tool-makers were heavily subsidized due to their government not having to pay for national defense (taken care of by Uncle Sam) -- but because our greedy executives and stockholders shut down the American factory and sent production to China, Mexico, or India, and sold the product back into our market with shameless American branding, despite being made in the third world.
The only one of the countries whose national defense we provide that is still something of a cheap labor colony is South Korea, although less and less so recently as their standard of living improves and their workers expect higher wages, similar to Japan's trajectory. And who's the one country that Trump never bitch-slaps about how heavily our provision of military needs only serves to subsidize their industries, which wipes out our own industries back home? Why, South Korea.
It's not because he's trying to make nice with them during negotiations about North Korea, since he keeps his hands off of every cheap labor colony, not just the one we're involved in high-stakes geopolitical negotiations with.
In fact, Trump's sense of defeat has become so ingrained that he doesn't even try to argue for our re-industrialization anymore -- bringing factories and jobs back. Instead it's about how to export more and more agricultural products -- one of the few things we still produce, as candidate-Trump used to mock on the campaign trail. ("Japan is sending us cars by the ship-load, and what do we send them? Beef. And wheat. And corn.")
Agriculture has never created a prosperous middle class anywhere on Earth in its 10,000-year history. It does create an elite class, unlike the hunter-gatherer economies that preceded it. But they don't pass their wealth on down the pyramid, since their underlings are not very value-adding. Slaving away in the fields doesn't add much value, since most people can sow and harvest their own crops -- why pay such a huge premium for someone else to do it for you? Mostly what you're paying for is the fact that some giant landowner has the productive land, and you don't, so doing your own agriculture isn't feasible.
Making your own steel, your own television, your own clothing, however -- not so easy to do, and worth a much higher premium. Especially when mass production gets invented, then the owners of a manufacturing plant can really start churning out these highly profitable items -- if only they can hire enough workers to operate it day-in and day-out. That leads them to pay much higher wages to unskilled or semi-skilled laborers. While the elite class gets richer with industrialization, the working class gets even richer, narrowing the inequality gap for the first and only time in human history.
There's no other way than industrialization, which is why backwards economies are so desperate to industrialize in a single generation -- so much so that they propel violent revolutionary movements to take over the government and economy. As we become more de-industrialized ourselves, I worry that we too will go in that direction when we re-industrialize. You'd hope that the elites would see that, and re-industrialize peacefully and pro-actively in order to avoid ending up like the Romanovs -- but they show all the signs of still being blind to the destruction they have caused by de-industrialization, so why bother getting out in front of a non-existent problem?
Trump got elected to try to peacefully negotiate the re-industrialization of our economy -- not to push even more agricultural products on foreign countries. Today's plantation owners already get subsidized out the ass by our government, they already make a killing in globalist free trade deals -- the cheap labor colonies get the factories, as long as our plantations get to wipe out their farms -- and none of them "Hire American". The former populist now openly brags about getting cheap-labor immigrants to work on the "farms" so that their greedy plantation owners do not have to pay decent wages to American citizens, or to invent or adopt new technology that would replace farm labor regardless of whether it was foreign or American.
The idea of him hounding Canada, who is nowhere near the top of economic threats to us, into buying more food products, when that sector has never been doing better, and is a key group behind our de-industrialization, is utterly ridiculous.
He only looks slightly less clueless or impotent when he tries to lower barriers to American cars in Asia or Europe. That's one industrially manufactured good that we still do make here, but we aren't going to re-industrialize the economy simply by making more cars for export. Maybe by punishing Ford for moving plants to Mexico, and forcing them back to Michigan. But not by trying to open up Japan or Germany to American cars -- which their citizens want absolutely nothing to do with.
Hey, big gas-guzzling American cars, and our more nationally distinctive pickup trucks, are not everyone's cup of tea. Lowering tariffs or raising quotas won't do anything to kick our car production into high gear, since the Big Three car-makers are nowhere near hitting their quotas already. If the re-industrialization of our economy depends on getting Europeans to buy Rams instead of Renaults, we're doomed.
Our peer nations are not the cause of our impoverishment, since we all enjoyed the Golden Age of Capitalism together during the mid-20th century. France was making cars, Germany was making cars, and America was making cars -- competition among this tier of nations did not matter. Germany made tools, and America made tools. Japan made televisions, and America made televisions. France made kitchen appliances, and America made kitchen appliances. Big deal!
(We were also supplying Japan's and Germany's national defense for that period as well, pointing again to the secondary rather than primary nature of that problem, vis-a-vis our de-industrialization.)
The real change that happened -- around 1980 -- was not competition from a foreign peer nation, but an internal betrayal by the executives of our own companies that made trucks, tools, televisions, and toasters. Our shuttered factories did not move to peer nations, where the wages were comparable to our own, but to cheap labor colonies in the third world.
Trump knows all of this, given his speeches from 2016 and before, but he seems to have begun rationalizing his GOP-obstructed plan to re-industrialize. Now he's no longer going to attack the "shithole countries" that all of our factories have been relocated to by the beneficiaries of the massive corporate tax cut -- he's going to stand up to a "worthy fuckin' adversary" like Canada or Germany. A fellow real, first-world country, not one of those fake wannabe up-and-comer countries. He can fold it in with his other rationalizations about going big or going home, dealing with winners rather than losers, and so on.
That bodes very poorly for the remainder of his disjunctive presidency, which was lame-duck from the get-go. He'll be picking fights with people who don't matter, while giving a pass to, or downright genuflecting to the real problems we face -- Saudi Arabia as the source of radical Islamic ideology and collective violence, China et al as the cheap labor colonies that receive our stolen manufacturing sector, and Mexico that keeps waving on hordes of immigrants across their border with us.
Again, the real fight to pick is with the American leaders who have made junior partners with these foreigners, especially the military brass and the executives of the material sectors in the economy. But if you did confront foreigners, it would be the Saudis, the Chinese, and the Mexicans -- not the Germans, the Japanese, or the Canadians (what a joke!).
The president has little time left to steer the Overton Window back in the direction of his historic 2016 campaign. All signs point to it shifting even further in its current wrong-headed direction. That will allow re-aligners on the Democrats' side like Bernie Sanders to easily steal back the trade issue in 2020, depriving the GOP of its tepid support from the Rust Belt, and ending their Reaganite reign for good.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
June 11, 2018
May 4, 2018
Democrat elites will concede on free speech etc. when GOP elites concede on climate change etc.
Although conservatives correctly complain about liberal Democrats abusing their control over the media sector to marginalize information that they don't want to be widely adopted, liberals can just as well complain about conservative Republicans abusing their control over the energy sector to marginalize energy sources that they don't want to be widely adopted. This generalizes to any abuse of power in any sector that one party controls.
See this post for the full analysis of which sectors of society use which party as their political agent to shape society in their own interests. But suffice it to say that the Democrats are the party vehicle of the finance, internet, and media / entertainment sectors (informational), while the Republicans are the party vehicle of the armed forces / law enforcement, energy, and agriculture sectors (material).
The elites of each sector have a quasi-monopoly on some critical resource in the operation of society -- funding, information, consensus shaping, force, energy, and food. As operators of a cartel, they can abuse their power, and the victims can do nothing within that sector but complain or numb out their awareness of the abuse.
One sector could mobilize against another sector, though, pitting its own distinct monopolistic strength against the other's. And given the society-wide scale of the battle, the sectors tend to form coalitions in order to maximize their collective strength and minimize the number of fronts that they do battle on. These coalitions of elites from various sectors are formalized as political parties, who carry out their ultimate battles in the political realm.
So it's not only that conservatives complain about liberal elites restricting conservative opinions from the consensus-shaping process that plays out in the mass media. They also complain about the entertainment sector's consensus portrayal of the abnormal as normal and vice versa, the (shadow) banning of conservatives from social media, the relegation of conservative sites to the distant results pages of search engine queries, and now the potential attempts by the big banks to no longer lend the money that would keep gun-makers' businesses operating.
On the other hand, liberals complain not just about the energy sector elites thwarting efforts to limit fossil fuel use, compared to more carbon-neutral energy sources, with an eye toward mitigating climate change. They also complain about the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and cruel living conditions of livestock in factory-farms, about militarized police forces, over-zealous prosecutors, and a hawkish interventionist foreign policy.
One solution to this stand-off is de-escalation, whereby each side agrees to give relief to the aggrieved party in the sector where they themselves are in control, in order to get relief from the other party in the sector where they themselves are aggrieved.
The mass media could make conservatives 50% of the anchors, panelists, writers, and producers who shape consensus over crucial events -- provided that the military makes non-interventionists 50% of their general staff who shape our nation's posture of collective violence toward other nations. The big banks could provide no-interest loans or forgive existing debt for agribusiness, provided that they eliminated genetic engineering / chemical pesticides / factory-farming of livestock. Twitter agrees to stop banning conservatives, provided that the pharma industry yields to a Medicare-for-all healthcare system.
The other solution to the stand-off is a partisan battle of wills, whereby the overall victor (if not the 100% victor) will be the party that is the dominant, agenda-setting, framework-establishing one for its historical period. E.g., the Democrats during the Jacksonian period or the New Deal / Great Society period, and the Republicans during the Civil War / Reconstruction period or the Reaganite period.
Since we currently live in a highly polarized climate, the elites choose the battle of wills option. So far, during the Reaganite period that we are still in, that has benefited conservatives and Republicans over liberals and Democrats. Even if conservatives haven't gotten 100% of their demands during the Reagan period, their complaints about Hollywood, CNN, Twitter, and Wall Street amount to only 10% defeat. It is the liberals or leftists who have gotten only 10% victory, and 90% defeat, during our current period -- getting mostly nothing on the environment, labor unions, food production and consumption, and use of armed force (domestic or international).
But because Trump is an end-of-his-era president who tries but fails to radically alter his party's longstanding paradigm, we are about to shift into a new period led by today's opposition party, who will deliver the goods where the ossified dominant party had failed. Drawing on Stephen Skowronek's theory of political regime cycles, that means a populist, anti-globalist paradigm led by Bernie-affiliated Democrats.
Assuming the elites are still in the battle of wills mode, that means the overall victor will soon be the liberals and Democrats (maybe they will call themselves progressives), as conservatives and Republicans find themselves largely left out of society's operation.
It's in the interests of conservatives and Republicans to change from the battle of wills solution to the de-escalation solution. In that situation, they make concessions but also enjoy concessions from the other side. And since the shift from Reaganism to Bernie-ism has not yet been completed, the other side might be willing to hear out the idea of truce talks, while they're still temporarily the weak side.
If the conservatives and GOP keep pushing the battle of wills solution, thinking that they will not soon be on the weak side of a multi-decade political order, they will get shut out and shut down as completely as the liberals and Democrats have been during the Reaganite period.
And given that partisan polarization keeps rising, the next shift may be even more acrimonious and humiliating than the Reaganite period has been for its losers. Peter Turchin in Ages of Discord shows that polarization was only this high leading up to the Civil War. That suggests that, whether or not there is outright war, during the upcoming Bernie period the Republicans will fare like the Democrats did during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and not merely like the Whigs did during the Jacksonian period.
With T-minus two years to the most seismic election since 1980, there are few conservatives entertaining the idea of truce talks, other than perhaps Marco Rubio's recent overtures on desanctifying the Reaganite vision of corporate profits uber alles. Trump of course pitched himself in 2016 as half-Republican and half-Democrat, but he's more of a moderate than a conservative to begin with -- and more importantly, nobody on his side is willing to follow that lead, instead dragging him over toward their conservative, partisan GOP side.
We'd like to believe that "there's still plenty of time left to change," and that "history does not always repeat itself," but the way things look now, the odds are that the GOP won't figure it out, and that the hardline conservative base will refuse to pressure their side's elites to make concessions to liberals in the sectors that they control (armed forces / law enforcement, energy, agriculture), even if it were matched by the liberal base pressuring Democrat elites to make concessions to conservatives in the sectors that they control (finance, internet, media / entertainment).
Civil War 2.0, here we come -- the goal now is to keep it as cold and bloodless as possible.
See this post for the full analysis of which sectors of society use which party as their political agent to shape society in their own interests. But suffice it to say that the Democrats are the party vehicle of the finance, internet, and media / entertainment sectors (informational), while the Republicans are the party vehicle of the armed forces / law enforcement, energy, and agriculture sectors (material).
The elites of each sector have a quasi-monopoly on some critical resource in the operation of society -- funding, information, consensus shaping, force, energy, and food. As operators of a cartel, they can abuse their power, and the victims can do nothing within that sector but complain or numb out their awareness of the abuse.
One sector could mobilize against another sector, though, pitting its own distinct monopolistic strength against the other's. And given the society-wide scale of the battle, the sectors tend to form coalitions in order to maximize their collective strength and minimize the number of fronts that they do battle on. These coalitions of elites from various sectors are formalized as political parties, who carry out their ultimate battles in the political realm.
So it's not only that conservatives complain about liberal elites restricting conservative opinions from the consensus-shaping process that plays out in the mass media. They also complain about the entertainment sector's consensus portrayal of the abnormal as normal and vice versa, the (shadow) banning of conservatives from social media, the relegation of conservative sites to the distant results pages of search engine queries, and now the potential attempts by the big banks to no longer lend the money that would keep gun-makers' businesses operating.
On the other hand, liberals complain not just about the energy sector elites thwarting efforts to limit fossil fuel use, compared to more carbon-neutral energy sources, with an eye toward mitigating climate change. They also complain about the use of genetic engineering in agriculture, and cruel living conditions of livestock in factory-farms, about militarized police forces, over-zealous prosecutors, and a hawkish interventionist foreign policy.
One solution to this stand-off is de-escalation, whereby each side agrees to give relief to the aggrieved party in the sector where they themselves are in control, in order to get relief from the other party in the sector where they themselves are aggrieved.
The mass media could make conservatives 50% of the anchors, panelists, writers, and producers who shape consensus over crucial events -- provided that the military makes non-interventionists 50% of their general staff who shape our nation's posture of collective violence toward other nations. The big banks could provide no-interest loans or forgive existing debt for agribusiness, provided that they eliminated genetic engineering / chemical pesticides / factory-farming of livestock. Twitter agrees to stop banning conservatives, provided that the pharma industry yields to a Medicare-for-all healthcare system.
The other solution to the stand-off is a partisan battle of wills, whereby the overall victor (if not the 100% victor) will be the party that is the dominant, agenda-setting, framework-establishing one for its historical period. E.g., the Democrats during the Jacksonian period or the New Deal / Great Society period, and the Republicans during the Civil War / Reconstruction period or the Reaganite period.
Since we currently live in a highly polarized climate, the elites choose the battle of wills option. So far, during the Reaganite period that we are still in, that has benefited conservatives and Republicans over liberals and Democrats. Even if conservatives haven't gotten 100% of their demands during the Reagan period, their complaints about Hollywood, CNN, Twitter, and Wall Street amount to only 10% defeat. It is the liberals or leftists who have gotten only 10% victory, and 90% defeat, during our current period -- getting mostly nothing on the environment, labor unions, food production and consumption, and use of armed force (domestic or international).
But because Trump is an end-of-his-era president who tries but fails to radically alter his party's longstanding paradigm, we are about to shift into a new period led by today's opposition party, who will deliver the goods where the ossified dominant party had failed. Drawing on Stephen Skowronek's theory of political regime cycles, that means a populist, anti-globalist paradigm led by Bernie-affiliated Democrats.
Assuming the elites are still in the battle of wills mode, that means the overall victor will soon be the liberals and Democrats (maybe they will call themselves progressives), as conservatives and Republicans find themselves largely left out of society's operation.
It's in the interests of conservatives and Republicans to change from the battle of wills solution to the de-escalation solution. In that situation, they make concessions but also enjoy concessions from the other side. And since the shift from Reaganism to Bernie-ism has not yet been completed, the other side might be willing to hear out the idea of truce talks, while they're still temporarily the weak side.
If the conservatives and GOP keep pushing the battle of wills solution, thinking that they will not soon be on the weak side of a multi-decade political order, they will get shut out and shut down as completely as the liberals and Democrats have been during the Reaganite period.
And given that partisan polarization keeps rising, the next shift may be even more acrimonious and humiliating than the Reaganite period has been for its losers. Peter Turchin in Ages of Discord shows that polarization was only this high leading up to the Civil War. That suggests that, whether or not there is outright war, during the upcoming Bernie period the Republicans will fare like the Democrats did during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and not merely like the Whigs did during the Jacksonian period.
With T-minus two years to the most seismic election since 1980, there are few conservatives entertaining the idea of truce talks, other than perhaps Marco Rubio's recent overtures on desanctifying the Reaganite vision of corporate profits uber alles. Trump of course pitched himself in 2016 as half-Republican and half-Democrat, but he's more of a moderate than a conservative to begin with -- and more importantly, nobody on his side is willing to follow that lead, instead dragging him over toward their conservative, partisan GOP side.
We'd like to believe that "there's still plenty of time left to change," and that "history does not always repeat itself," but the way things look now, the odds are that the GOP won't figure it out, and that the hardline conservative base will refuse to pressure their side's elites to make concessions to liberals in the sectors that they control (armed forces / law enforcement, energy, agriculture), even if it were matched by the liberal base pressuring Democrat elites to make concessions to conservatives in the sectors that they control (finance, internet, media / entertainment).
Civil War 2.0, here we come -- the goal now is to keep it as cold and bloodless as possible.
Categories:
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Food,
Media,
Politics,
Technology,
Violence
April 2, 2018
Guns don't protect speech, and govt is not the main censor: Antitrust needed to break up media / tech monopolies who control public forums
As the gun nuts become more desperate to defend their policy of allowing private citizens to amass personal arsenals of military-style weapons, they have shifted from making one sort of slippery slope argument to another.
First, they began by appealing to other gun nuts and conservatives, arguing that if you let the government prohibit you from owning an extreme type of gun, they will not be satisfied and will move on to prohibiting ordinary types of guns. Realizing that there aren't that many gun nuts or conservatives in the population, compared to moderates and liberals, they gave up on that line of defense.
Now they have begun trying to appeal to normies by arguing that the political goals of moderates -- not just conservatives -- are served by a hardline stance on gun deregulation.
The NRA's recent propaganda tries to show non-whites and women as the winners from gun deregulation -- letting them practice self-defense in dangerous ghettos or against violent would-be rapist males. If you want to regulate guns, the propaganda says, you're only going to make disarmed minorities and women more vulnerable -- and therefore, gun-grabbing liberals are the real racists and sexists.
No one believes any argument about liberals and Democrats being the real racists and sexists, but that doesn't stop the Right from trotting out these failed appeals over and over again. The even more retarded among them agree that it's a pointless argument -- but only because appealing to normies at all is pointless, and that they should only focus on ginning up hysteria to turn out the gun nut "base" (a tiny minority in a country where 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns).
In the same vein as "Dems are the real racists," gun nuts have begun arguing that extreme deregulation of gun laws serves another treasured goal of moderates -- protecting free speech. As a commenter here recently said, "When you give up your second amendment they will take your first amendment."
I'm not clear on whether they focus on freedom of thought and speech, or extend it to freedom of assembly also -- as though we could not freely assemble in public without the possibility of showing up armed, to deter would-be breaker-uppers of our crowd.
At any rate, "No 1A without the 2A" is the most paranoid branding mistake that gun nuts could make when trying to appeal to normies. The desired regulations are not to repeal the 2nd Amendment anyway, but to de-militarize the weaponry that private citizens own.
The NRA was not a gun nut lobby until the late 1970s -- meaning, the focus on more military style weapons, vigilante fantasies, and paranoid rhetoric about the federal gubmint coming to take your guns.
Americans did enjoy free speech before the late '70s, and if anything the situation has deteriorated during the Reagan era since. That's not because the Reaganites championed censorship per se, but because of their over-arching goal of deregulation and laissez-faire toward corporations.
That directly led to the consolidation of the media into five gigantic monopolies, and later to info-tech firms that would centralize all online media into a few monopolies. From that concentration of wealth and power came the ability to censor speech -- and with the ability, the implementation.
And unlike the agricultural, energy, and military-industrial sectors of the economy who control the Reaganite GOP, the senior management of the media and info-tech sectors are overwhelmingly liberal. So when they flex their organizational muscles, it will be to strangle conservatives.
Impotent right-wingers only wagged their limp fingers at the media and tech monopolies whose towering wealth and power they had encouraged and indeed worshiped. Why would organizations with the ability to censor, not actually use it? For the greater good? -- bullshit, they're imperial corporations controlled by power-hungry billionaires.
And for the longest time, conservatives refused to even identify corporations as the main threat to free speech -- their #1 enemy was always the gubmint, from whose tyranny the corporations would save us. Corporations would never regulate our lives, right?
The growth of the internet was supposed to provide a forum inherently immune from attacks by government tyranny -- it was a virtual rather than physical space, and distributed rather than centralized in organization. And yet, it has given us mega-corporations that are the sole space for most speech these days, which is subject to arbitrary censorship by the managers of these corporations.
The only way to break their hold on free speech is to break up their concentrated wealth and power, through antitrust actions. But the dumb dinosaur Reaganites are still adhering to the faith about laissez-faire regardless of the costs to society and to individuals -- even when the regulations would crush liberal censors like Facebook and Twitter.
It's time for the Right to get with the Trumpian times, and start demanding trust-busting of media and tech monopolies in order to protect free speech -- not promote some laughable vigilante fantasy about protecting your free speech with guns.
Your entire private arsenal will have zero effect on Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube banning conservative people or ideas. You're not going to take your private arsenal to a college campus and do literal battle with the Leftist professors. And you're not going to launch a literal attack by surrounding the CNN headquarters with your militia buddies.
You have to fight power with power -- and security-blanket arsenals give no power to the cosplay warriors who own them. They must instead take over the government to dismantle the over-sized corporations that have such a monopoly on the forums of speech.
Somebody's going to be doing the regulating. Regulate them before they regulate you.
First, they began by appealing to other gun nuts and conservatives, arguing that if you let the government prohibit you from owning an extreme type of gun, they will not be satisfied and will move on to prohibiting ordinary types of guns. Realizing that there aren't that many gun nuts or conservatives in the population, compared to moderates and liberals, they gave up on that line of defense.
Now they have begun trying to appeal to normies by arguing that the political goals of moderates -- not just conservatives -- are served by a hardline stance on gun deregulation.
The NRA's recent propaganda tries to show non-whites and women as the winners from gun deregulation -- letting them practice self-defense in dangerous ghettos or against violent would-be rapist males. If you want to regulate guns, the propaganda says, you're only going to make disarmed minorities and women more vulnerable -- and therefore, gun-grabbing liberals are the real racists and sexists.
No one believes any argument about liberals and Democrats being the real racists and sexists, but that doesn't stop the Right from trotting out these failed appeals over and over again. The even more retarded among them agree that it's a pointless argument -- but only because appealing to normies at all is pointless, and that they should only focus on ginning up hysteria to turn out the gun nut "base" (a tiny minority in a country where 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns).
In the same vein as "Dems are the real racists," gun nuts have begun arguing that extreme deregulation of gun laws serves another treasured goal of moderates -- protecting free speech. As a commenter here recently said, "When you give up your second amendment they will take your first amendment."
I'm not clear on whether they focus on freedom of thought and speech, or extend it to freedom of assembly also -- as though we could not freely assemble in public without the possibility of showing up armed, to deter would-be breaker-uppers of our crowd.
At any rate, "No 1A without the 2A" is the most paranoid branding mistake that gun nuts could make when trying to appeal to normies. The desired regulations are not to repeal the 2nd Amendment anyway, but to de-militarize the weaponry that private citizens own.
The NRA was not a gun nut lobby until the late 1970s -- meaning, the focus on more military style weapons, vigilante fantasies, and paranoid rhetoric about the federal gubmint coming to take your guns.
Americans did enjoy free speech before the late '70s, and if anything the situation has deteriorated during the Reagan era since. That's not because the Reaganites championed censorship per se, but because of their over-arching goal of deregulation and laissez-faire toward corporations.
That directly led to the consolidation of the media into five gigantic monopolies, and later to info-tech firms that would centralize all online media into a few monopolies. From that concentration of wealth and power came the ability to censor speech -- and with the ability, the implementation.
And unlike the agricultural, energy, and military-industrial sectors of the economy who control the Reaganite GOP, the senior management of the media and info-tech sectors are overwhelmingly liberal. So when they flex their organizational muscles, it will be to strangle conservatives.
Impotent right-wingers only wagged their limp fingers at the media and tech monopolies whose towering wealth and power they had encouraged and indeed worshiped. Why would organizations with the ability to censor, not actually use it? For the greater good? -- bullshit, they're imperial corporations controlled by power-hungry billionaires.
And for the longest time, conservatives refused to even identify corporations as the main threat to free speech -- their #1 enemy was always the gubmint, from whose tyranny the corporations would save us. Corporations would never regulate our lives, right?
The growth of the internet was supposed to provide a forum inherently immune from attacks by government tyranny -- it was a virtual rather than physical space, and distributed rather than centralized in organization. And yet, it has given us mega-corporations that are the sole space for most speech these days, which is subject to arbitrary censorship by the managers of these corporations.
The only way to break their hold on free speech is to break up their concentrated wealth and power, through antitrust actions. But the dumb dinosaur Reaganites are still adhering to the faith about laissez-faire regardless of the costs to society and to individuals -- even when the regulations would crush liberal censors like Facebook and Twitter.
It's time for the Right to get with the Trumpian times, and start demanding trust-busting of media and tech monopolies in order to protect free speech -- not promote some laughable vigilante fantasy about protecting your free speech with guns.
Your entire private arsenal will have zero effect on Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube banning conservative people or ideas. You're not going to take your private arsenal to a college campus and do literal battle with the Leftist professors. And you're not going to launch a literal attack by surrounding the CNN headquarters with your militia buddies.
You have to fight power with power -- and security-blanket arsenals give no power to the cosplay warriors who own them. They must instead take over the government to dismantle the over-sized corporations that have such a monopoly on the forums of speech.
Somebody's going to be doing the regulating. Regulate them before they regulate you.
March 25, 2018
Ban everything harmful and polluting: The new nonpartisan Temperance movement to undo the bipartisan libertinism of our neo-Gilded Age
A major shift in the zeitgeist is turning away from the laissez-faire individualism of the past 40 years, and toward regulation in the social interest. It's popping up in various disparate issues -- assault weapons, pitbulls, sugary drinks, drugs, pornography, etc.
So far it is an inchoate shift in attitudes, rather than a consolidated united front movement, but it's going to get there at some point in the near future. The near-term goal should be to highlight the commonalities across the new attitudes, and to band together politically to achieve all of them as part of a single new movement to regulate chaos in order to prevent societal destruction.
That would reverse the reigning orthodoxy, akin to Social Darwinism, of letting anyone do anything and hoping that the optimal outcome (for individuals or for society) will result from unfettered behavior.
In this post we'll be focusing on social-cultural issues, even though there is a similar shift on more economic issues (banks, social media companies, immigration, inequality, etc.). This is like a new Temperance movement, which is running in parallel with a new Progressive economic movement -- just like they paired with each other during the last struggle to overturn a laissez-faire Gilded Age.
As revealed by a new poll from Fox News, the rearguard Conservative Movement (TM) has failed to win the argument on gun regulation.
Put aside particular items like banning assault weapons or requiring background checks, and look at which general goal is more important -- protecting the right of citizens to own guns, or protecting citizens from gun violence? A bit over 50% say protection from gun violence, a bit over 40% say protecting gun rights, and under 10% are undecided.
Those figures do not depend on class or age / generation. Men, whites, and Independents are split evenly, when they should have been decisively in favor of gun rights, to balance the expected anti-gun views of women, non-whites, and Democrats.
Gun nuts have only focused on preserving their hardcore libertarian base -- gun owners, Republicans, white Evangelicals -- and alienated the middle enough to make them 50-50 allies at best. Like all extremist interest groups, the gun nuts will either not accept those numbers as true, or they will dismiss their relevance and refuse to try to win back the middle.
They will shrink even further into their echo chamber, ramp up their already high level of anti-social paranoia regarding gun-grabbers advancing toward them in a great big confiscation apocalypse event -- which would now seem to be confirmed by how ambivalent the average American, not just the typical liberal Democrat, has come to feel about their cause.
As the extremists retreat further from attempts to reach out and make deals, the opportunity arises for those who are not rabidly pro-gun or anti-gun to strike grand compromises. As detailed in an earlier post, I don't see these being compromises on a particular issue, with endless haggling over the precise kind and degree of regulation on firearms. Rather, the side screaming for more gun regulation will more or less get their way -- in exchange for giving up to the other side on some separate issue, where there will be much greater regulation, for example on immigration (regulated downward).
Trading more gun control for more immigration control may seem a bit too random of a pairing, though. So perhaps the trade should be one form of harm-based regulation for another. Liberals are rabidly anti-assault rifle, but also rabidly (as it were) pro-pitbull. Conservatives (distinct from libertarians) are pro-gun and anti-pitbull. In a stylized trade, both sides would agree to remove assault rifles from the population of firearms, and to remove pitbulls from the population of dogs.
If the conservatives felt like pitbulls were not enough to make the trade worth it, make it violent criminals instead. If the goal is to reduce the threat of violence, remove both assault rifles and violent felons -- not by killing them off, just keeping them locked up instead of turning them loose back onto the general public to commit further violence.
Or conservatives could push for a trade related to preventing harm -- preventing pollution, degradation, and other forms of degeneracy. In exchange for banning assault weapons, both sides agree to ban red light district activities like strip clubs or legal marijuana shops.
Liberals have their own puritanical views on food and drink, so maybe there could be another trade within the framework of preventing pollution -- the Right gets a (figurative) war on drugs, while the Left gets a war on sugar. Both sides would be spared the sight of people who viscerally disgust them -- junkies for the Right, fatties for the Left.
These have mostly been material things that could be subject to bans, but there are also informational media that could be subject to regulation in the social interest. During the golden age of the 1950s, government censors prevented all sorts of "bad influences" from showing up in comic books, movies, and music -- today that would have to extend to internet media and video games.
Pin-up posters were fine, but hardcore pornography was illegal. Alcohol was OK, but not marijuana. Violence in movies was fine in moderation, but not gore. Sexual innuendo was allowed in pop music lyrics, but not graphic descriptions. Certain profane words could not be said on TV, radio, etc.
Those were all aspects of mass media that conservatives wouldn't mind seeing a return of.
On the other hand, right-wingers were not allowed to use their own taboo words, and had to make arguments with terms that were not socially offensive per se. Whatever they said privately, in the mass media for public consumption, they said "negro" rather than "nigger," "fairy" rather than "faggot," "tramp / hussy" rather than "slut / whore," and so on and so forth.
Again, in private situations they could say taboo words, or make taboo gestures like the middle finger or jerking off. But in a social and public space like the mass media, these were not allowed.
Would conservatives be willing to bring back "words you can't say" in the media, including those that free speech / libertarian right-wingers might prefer to use themselves, in exchange for bringing back "images you can't show" in the media?
Liberals are more abstract and verbal, and are more sensitive to offensive words, while conservatives are more corporeal and visual, and are more sensitive to offensive sights.
The danger of censorship, on the verbal side, is going beyond regulating isolated words to entire ideas regardless of which specific words are used to express them. On the visual side, the danger is going beyond regulating discrete images to entire scenes or events regardless of which images are used to convey the gist of who did what to whom (e.g., banning all scenes that convey sexual behavior having taken place, rather than just hardcore pornography).
So the compromise in regulating the media would likely be restricted to the discrete items, rather than broad bans on ideas or scenes.
The main laissez-faire objection to these bans is that they won't be effective -- you can't make bad things go away just by passing laws against them.
First, they certainly do reduce the level of bad things, and that's what we're looking for.
But more importantly, the effectiveness of these public campaigns to "ban X" does not only come from the direct results of the ban. It comes also from the change in norms that is signaled by the broadly popular, publicly supported, and lobbied-for ban.
When drugs and porn are banned, people get the idea that substance-based and sexual degeneracy are socially "out," so they start dialing down their inclination toward degeneracy, lest they be perceived as deviants and treated as pariahs by others.
The ban is like a social pressure -- threatening ostracism if others do not adhere to the new norms that are signaled by the ban. Without a highly visible norm that everyone knows is there, how can violations of it be policed (somewhat by law enforcement, but really by your fellow citizens)?
Perhaps a tacit norm is fine for policing an enduring problem, but then when a new problem emerges, there may need to be an overt concerted effort to signal a norm against it. That will be more likely when technology is the driver -- promiscuity is an old enduring problem that everyone understands needs to be policed, whereas hardcore porn videos streamed into an internet-capable device are new, and require a more overt regulation. Ditto for assault rifles or hand grenades, as compared to earlier weapons.
That's how it worked to drive tobacco consumption, and cigarettes especially, out of the public sphere. The government could raise taxes and limit access to cigarettes all they want, and it would make a decent dent alone -- but reinforced by the greater social pressure that the restrictions had signaled, they all but wiped out cigarette smoking within a single generation.
Banning high-carb food and drink, banning porn, banning assault rifles, banning pitbulls -- all would unfold the same way as in the war on cigarettes. Some direct effect, backed up by an even more powerful social pressure.
These problems are not going away, and the dam has already begun to break on the laissez-faire morality of the last 40 years. Hardcore libertarians on any issue -- allow all guns, allow all porn, allow unlimited pot, allow unlimited sugar, etc. -- are losing the argument, and have begun to grate on the average person's nerves, especially when they attempt to give an overarching framework to justify their views. It boils down to embracing chaotic destruction-creation, and Social Darwinism will improve society by separating the strong from the weak.
We see where unregulated chaos and Social Darwinism has gotten us, and we don't like what we see, unless we're Boomers who have been shielded from the consequences of their decisions since they were babies.
"I don't know how to define dystopia -- but I know it when I see it."
Now is the time for striking grand bargains on regulating these social-cultural issues, not doubling down on all-or-nothing partisanship.
So far it is an inchoate shift in attitudes, rather than a consolidated united front movement, but it's going to get there at some point in the near future. The near-term goal should be to highlight the commonalities across the new attitudes, and to band together politically to achieve all of them as part of a single new movement to regulate chaos in order to prevent societal destruction.
That would reverse the reigning orthodoxy, akin to Social Darwinism, of letting anyone do anything and hoping that the optimal outcome (for individuals or for society) will result from unfettered behavior.
In this post we'll be focusing on social-cultural issues, even though there is a similar shift on more economic issues (banks, social media companies, immigration, inequality, etc.). This is like a new Temperance movement, which is running in parallel with a new Progressive economic movement -- just like they paired with each other during the last struggle to overturn a laissez-faire Gilded Age.
* * *
As revealed by a new poll from Fox News, the rearguard Conservative Movement (TM) has failed to win the argument on gun regulation.
Put aside particular items like banning assault weapons or requiring background checks, and look at which general goal is more important -- protecting the right of citizens to own guns, or protecting citizens from gun violence? A bit over 50% say protection from gun violence, a bit over 40% say protecting gun rights, and under 10% are undecided.
Those figures do not depend on class or age / generation. Men, whites, and Independents are split evenly, when they should have been decisively in favor of gun rights, to balance the expected anti-gun views of women, non-whites, and Democrats.
Gun nuts have only focused on preserving their hardcore libertarian base -- gun owners, Republicans, white Evangelicals -- and alienated the middle enough to make them 50-50 allies at best. Like all extremist interest groups, the gun nuts will either not accept those numbers as true, or they will dismiss their relevance and refuse to try to win back the middle.
They will shrink even further into their echo chamber, ramp up their already high level of anti-social paranoia regarding gun-grabbers advancing toward them in a great big confiscation apocalypse event -- which would now seem to be confirmed by how ambivalent the average American, not just the typical liberal Democrat, has come to feel about their cause.
* * *
As the extremists retreat further from attempts to reach out and make deals, the opportunity arises for those who are not rabidly pro-gun or anti-gun to strike grand compromises. As detailed in an earlier post, I don't see these being compromises on a particular issue, with endless haggling over the precise kind and degree of regulation on firearms. Rather, the side screaming for more gun regulation will more or less get their way -- in exchange for giving up to the other side on some separate issue, where there will be much greater regulation, for example on immigration (regulated downward).
Trading more gun control for more immigration control may seem a bit too random of a pairing, though. So perhaps the trade should be one form of harm-based regulation for another. Liberals are rabidly anti-assault rifle, but also rabidly (as it were) pro-pitbull. Conservatives (distinct from libertarians) are pro-gun and anti-pitbull. In a stylized trade, both sides would agree to remove assault rifles from the population of firearms, and to remove pitbulls from the population of dogs.
If the conservatives felt like pitbulls were not enough to make the trade worth it, make it violent criminals instead. If the goal is to reduce the threat of violence, remove both assault rifles and violent felons -- not by killing them off, just keeping them locked up instead of turning them loose back onto the general public to commit further violence.
Or conservatives could push for a trade related to preventing harm -- preventing pollution, degradation, and other forms of degeneracy. In exchange for banning assault weapons, both sides agree to ban red light district activities like strip clubs or legal marijuana shops.
Liberals have their own puritanical views on food and drink, so maybe there could be another trade within the framework of preventing pollution -- the Right gets a (figurative) war on drugs, while the Left gets a war on sugar. Both sides would be spared the sight of people who viscerally disgust them -- junkies for the Right, fatties for the Left.
* * *
These have mostly been material things that could be subject to bans, but there are also informational media that could be subject to regulation in the social interest. During the golden age of the 1950s, government censors prevented all sorts of "bad influences" from showing up in comic books, movies, and music -- today that would have to extend to internet media and video games.
Pin-up posters were fine, but hardcore pornography was illegal. Alcohol was OK, but not marijuana. Violence in movies was fine in moderation, but not gore. Sexual innuendo was allowed in pop music lyrics, but not graphic descriptions. Certain profane words could not be said on TV, radio, etc.
Those were all aspects of mass media that conservatives wouldn't mind seeing a return of.
On the other hand, right-wingers were not allowed to use their own taboo words, and had to make arguments with terms that were not socially offensive per se. Whatever they said privately, in the mass media for public consumption, they said "negro" rather than "nigger," "fairy" rather than "faggot," "tramp / hussy" rather than "slut / whore," and so on and so forth.
Again, in private situations they could say taboo words, or make taboo gestures like the middle finger or jerking off. But in a social and public space like the mass media, these were not allowed.
Would conservatives be willing to bring back "words you can't say" in the media, including those that free speech / libertarian right-wingers might prefer to use themselves, in exchange for bringing back "images you can't show" in the media?
Liberals are more abstract and verbal, and are more sensitive to offensive words, while conservatives are more corporeal and visual, and are more sensitive to offensive sights.
The danger of censorship, on the verbal side, is going beyond regulating isolated words to entire ideas regardless of which specific words are used to express them. On the visual side, the danger is going beyond regulating discrete images to entire scenes or events regardless of which images are used to convey the gist of who did what to whom (e.g., banning all scenes that convey sexual behavior having taken place, rather than just hardcore pornography).
So the compromise in regulating the media would likely be restricted to the discrete items, rather than broad bans on ideas or scenes.
* * *
The main laissez-faire objection to these bans is that they won't be effective -- you can't make bad things go away just by passing laws against them.
First, they certainly do reduce the level of bad things, and that's what we're looking for.
But more importantly, the effectiveness of these public campaigns to "ban X" does not only come from the direct results of the ban. It comes also from the change in norms that is signaled by the broadly popular, publicly supported, and lobbied-for ban.
When drugs and porn are banned, people get the idea that substance-based and sexual degeneracy are socially "out," so they start dialing down their inclination toward degeneracy, lest they be perceived as deviants and treated as pariahs by others.
The ban is like a social pressure -- threatening ostracism if others do not adhere to the new norms that are signaled by the ban. Without a highly visible norm that everyone knows is there, how can violations of it be policed (somewhat by law enforcement, but really by your fellow citizens)?
Perhaps a tacit norm is fine for policing an enduring problem, but then when a new problem emerges, there may need to be an overt concerted effort to signal a norm against it. That will be more likely when technology is the driver -- promiscuity is an old enduring problem that everyone understands needs to be policed, whereas hardcore porn videos streamed into an internet-capable device are new, and require a more overt regulation. Ditto for assault rifles or hand grenades, as compared to earlier weapons.
That's how it worked to drive tobacco consumption, and cigarettes especially, out of the public sphere. The government could raise taxes and limit access to cigarettes all they want, and it would make a decent dent alone -- but reinforced by the greater social pressure that the restrictions had signaled, they all but wiped out cigarette smoking within a single generation.
Banning high-carb food and drink, banning porn, banning assault rifles, banning pitbulls -- all would unfold the same way as in the war on cigarettes. Some direct effect, backed up by an even more powerful social pressure.
* * *
These problems are not going away, and the dam has already begun to break on the laissez-faire morality of the last 40 years. Hardcore libertarians on any issue -- allow all guns, allow all porn, allow unlimited pot, allow unlimited sugar, etc. -- are losing the argument, and have begun to grate on the average person's nerves, especially when they attempt to give an overarching framework to justify their views. It boils down to embracing chaotic destruction-creation, and Social Darwinism will improve society by separating the strong from the weak.
We see where unregulated chaos and Social Darwinism has gotten us, and we don't like what we see, unless we're Boomers who have been shielded from the consequences of their decisions since they were babies.
"I don't know how to define dystopia -- but I know it when I see it."
Now is the time for striking grand bargains on regulating these social-cultural issues, not doubling down on all-or-nothing partisanship.
Categories:
Crime,
Food,
Health,
Language,
Media,
Morality,
Pets,
Politics,
Pop culture,
Psychology,
Technology,
Violence
March 10, 2018
GOP will sabotage Trump-Kim summit and trade war, as with all other unorthodox proposals; Real change only after Bernie revolution
Regardless of their approval or disapproval of the announced summit between Trump and Kim Jung Un, most observers are still lost in their fairyland view of politics being a war of contesting individuals, rather than of institutions. Ditto for their takes on the recent announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum. See, for example, this take about his staff shake-up, and this take about Trump playing by his own rules.
In both cases, Trump the individual has "gone rogue" against most of the White House staff, especially those whose role is to preserve the status quo from the would-be re-aligner. But more important than irking the individuals who occupy these status-quo-preserving roles, Trump is threatening the material interests of the institutions on whose behalf these individuals are acting.
With the GOP in control of the government, that means the material sectors of society that are labor-intensive -- the military, manufacturers (not their workers), energy, and agriculture. The senior member of this GOP coalition is the military, whose distinct leverage in the struggle among elite factions is their control of the use of force -- directing where it goes, in what amount, and toward what ends.
Lacking any institutional support from his own party -- indeed, drawing their ire -- has made Trump largely unable to carry out the major reforms he was elected to do. This is unlike the proposals that are more of the same for the Reaganite party -- such as corporate tax cuts and putting conservative judges in the courts -- for which he suddenly receives overflowing support from his party.
Let's look at the prospects for the two recent unorthodox announcements on tariffs and North Korea, while remembering the track record the GOP institutions have had whenever Trump attempted a major change to the status quo (pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan, forcing NATO to pay 2% GDP, making South Korea pay for THAAD, leaving the social safety net alone, talking up single-payer healthcare, immediately restricting immigration, building a border wall, and so on and so forth).
Trump has been able to refrain from joining new entanglements that we were not already involved in, such as leaving the TPP and the Paris Climate Accords before we actually signed the papers. But not getting into further messes is not the same as pulling out of those that we are already in. And the two recent announcements involve messes we have already been in for decades -- de-industrializing our economy, and occupying the Korean peninsula.
First was the announcement of stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were watered down in less than a week. Now there are exemptions for Mexico and Canada, who are among the largest exporters of steel into our country, and there will be two weeks for the other major exporters to get exemptions, on the basis of being friendly allies who don't pose a major threat to us.
That makes it likely that exemptions will be won for the EU, based on Germany and Italy being NATO allies with major US military bases, even though those two are also among the top exporters of steel. Likewise exemptions for major steel exporters Japan and South Korea, the latter having already asked for theirs after setting up the Trump-Kim summit.
Perhaps there will be tariffs on the metals coming directly from China, but not much comes from them that way -- they "transship" their steel to other countries, who then import it into the US. While every little bit helps, watering down Trump's initial announcement of "no exceptions" will largely preserve the status quo on de-industrialization of our economy.
Trump was able to make the announcement because one of the main globalist saboteurs had recently been fired (Staff Secretary Rob Porter), and because Trump was hopping mad and looking to lash out after Hope Hicks had gotten fired. The trade hawks Ross and Navarro struck while the iron was hot. They did succeed in getting an announcement made of a major trade action, but within a week, the lawyers and other institutional actors clawed back most of the substance, leaving it largely symbolic.
Even symbolic concessions are unacceptable to the GOP, though, as they have all come out vehemently against the watered-down version. They see it as the first trip down a slippery slope, at least rhetorically but also substantively.
The only institutional support Trump has received has been from labor unions and Democrat politicians -- from the rival party, in other words. Producers of the industrial commodities are happy, of course, but they are not squarely within one party's coalition or the other. They get screwed by the manufacturers of the GOP coalition, who insist on cheap materials for the things they make (leading them to seek cheap foreign steel), and they are not an informational sector that naturally fits into the Democrat coalition.
But since the informational sectors that make up the Democrat coalition are not directly threatened by higher material costs -- as most of them don't make anything -- they would be more welcoming of the industrial metal producers, if they could help pack an extra electoral wallop. With the Rust Belt looking iffy for the Democrats, the informational sectors will be required to recruit the industrial commodities producers to win back Ohio, Pennsylvania, and perhaps Indiana (the #1 steel state).
Reflecting the de-fanged nature of the tariffs scarcely one week after their announcement, the stock market has continued to shoot upwards. They sense there is no coming trade war. Even within steel stocks, although they rose several percentage points on the initial announcement, they tumbled by several points on Friday when it became clear that we would be granting one exemption after another to the major exporters.
They'll probably be somewhat up for the year, with at least some tariffs going into effect, but it is not the re-birth of the steel industry as it initially appeared -- and that is all thanks to sabotage from the GOP. Only by throwing in with the Democrat coalition that is insensitive to the cost of metals, will steel be re-born during the Bernie revolution.
The military link to the gutting of the steel industry cannot be overstated. The major steel exporters have so much money sloshing around to invest in their steel and manufacturing industries because Uncle Sam provides so much of those nations' military needs, operating at a giant loss to our nation (aside from the military itself, for whom perpetual global occupation is an endless massive gravy train).
This again points to the Democrats being the future saviors of industry, as the senior sector of the GOP coalition will never permit the withdrawal of forces from major steel producers Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. That is the only way to suck money out of their industries (as they must pay for their own militaries), and re-allocate American money into industry (as we transfer it out of the military budget after exiting those countries). Democrats are not beholden to the military-industrial complex, so they're the only ones who can make withdrawal happen.
Now as for the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, we see the same disconnect between the president's individual announcement and the actual implementation by institutional forces in the aftermath. Media figures obsess too much over the theatrical part of government, and Lord knows Trump is the master at that stuff.
But the Pentagon is not just going to sit idly by while Trump agrees to meet Kim without pre-conditions. Indeed, not even 24 hours later, Press Secretary Sanders repeatedly said that the summit would only take place once there were concrete and verifiable steps taken by NK toward de-nuclearization. No country would take those steps before talks even began, so this is the Pentagon's veto of the whole summit.
As with the watered-down tariffs, maybe there will be some minor symbolic action (not a face-to-face meeting with Trump and Kim), but the military-industrial complex will not permit talks or negotiations to proceed without pre-conditions about denuclearizing. Their goal is to wipe out the North Korean government just like they did with Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, despite promising not to destroy them if they just gave up their weapons of mass destruction. If Kim agrees to unilateral surrender, of course the Pentagon is not going to pass up that opportunity. But that is not happening, so the Pentagon remains dug-in.
To the extent that any progress is made toward peace on the peninsula, it will be led by the dove faction in South Korea, who now have control over the presidency. That has allowed rapprochement to take place between the North and the South, but there must be a similar dove faction in control of the American government for the whole process to succeed. That means a Democrat government during the upcoming Bernie revolution, perhaps guided by Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State or Defense. It may also require a dove faction in control of Japan, which they do not have right now.
By "dove" faction, all this means is one whose material interests do not benefit massively from US occupation of the Korean peninsula. The American producers of industrial commodities fit the bill -- their interests have become decimated by our military occupying SK, which has freed up SK's government to spend money on their steel industry and manufacturing without having to spend money on their own national defense. Without these subsidies, South Korean steel would be much more costly and less competitive against American steel.
It doesn't matter if steel executives and manufacturing workers don't drive to work singing, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." They will support withdrawal of our military from Asia purely in pursuit of their own material interests. Leaving our military over there provides a gigantic subsidy to foreign steel.
So, regardless of how Trump the individual feels -- or how Bernie Sanders, the individual, feels -- it is these institutional forces that will continue to shape our policies at home and abroad. We will not expect a major change regarding North Korea until a Bernie-style revolution takes over, probably during the next electoral cycle, bringing with it a mandate to make good on the promises of populism and de-globalization that sent Trump into office -- only this time, with the institutional support, or at least the absence of obstruction, for the governing coalition to deliver the goods.
In both cases, Trump the individual has "gone rogue" against most of the White House staff, especially those whose role is to preserve the status quo from the would-be re-aligner. But more important than irking the individuals who occupy these status-quo-preserving roles, Trump is threatening the material interests of the institutions on whose behalf these individuals are acting.
With the GOP in control of the government, that means the material sectors of society that are labor-intensive -- the military, manufacturers (not their workers), energy, and agriculture. The senior member of this GOP coalition is the military, whose distinct leverage in the struggle among elite factions is their control of the use of force -- directing where it goes, in what amount, and toward what ends.
Lacking any institutional support from his own party -- indeed, drawing their ire -- has made Trump largely unable to carry out the major reforms he was elected to do. This is unlike the proposals that are more of the same for the Reaganite party -- such as corporate tax cuts and putting conservative judges in the courts -- for which he suddenly receives overflowing support from his party.
Let's look at the prospects for the two recent unorthodox announcements on tariffs and North Korea, while remembering the track record the GOP institutions have had whenever Trump attempted a major change to the status quo (pulling out of Syria and Afghanistan, forcing NATO to pay 2% GDP, making South Korea pay for THAAD, leaving the social safety net alone, talking up single-payer healthcare, immediately restricting immigration, building a border wall, and so on and so forth).
Trump has been able to refrain from joining new entanglements that we were not already involved in, such as leaving the TPP and the Paris Climate Accords before we actually signed the papers. But not getting into further messes is not the same as pulling out of those that we are already in. And the two recent announcements involve messes we have already been in for decades -- de-industrializing our economy, and occupying the Korean peninsula.
First was the announcement of stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were watered down in less than a week. Now there are exemptions for Mexico and Canada, who are among the largest exporters of steel into our country, and there will be two weeks for the other major exporters to get exemptions, on the basis of being friendly allies who don't pose a major threat to us.
That makes it likely that exemptions will be won for the EU, based on Germany and Italy being NATO allies with major US military bases, even though those two are also among the top exporters of steel. Likewise exemptions for major steel exporters Japan and South Korea, the latter having already asked for theirs after setting up the Trump-Kim summit.
Perhaps there will be tariffs on the metals coming directly from China, but not much comes from them that way -- they "transship" their steel to other countries, who then import it into the US. While every little bit helps, watering down Trump's initial announcement of "no exceptions" will largely preserve the status quo on de-industrialization of our economy.
Trump was able to make the announcement because one of the main globalist saboteurs had recently been fired (Staff Secretary Rob Porter), and because Trump was hopping mad and looking to lash out after Hope Hicks had gotten fired. The trade hawks Ross and Navarro struck while the iron was hot. They did succeed in getting an announcement made of a major trade action, but within a week, the lawyers and other institutional actors clawed back most of the substance, leaving it largely symbolic.
Even symbolic concessions are unacceptable to the GOP, though, as they have all come out vehemently against the watered-down version. They see it as the first trip down a slippery slope, at least rhetorically but also substantively.
The only institutional support Trump has received has been from labor unions and Democrat politicians -- from the rival party, in other words. Producers of the industrial commodities are happy, of course, but they are not squarely within one party's coalition or the other. They get screwed by the manufacturers of the GOP coalition, who insist on cheap materials for the things they make (leading them to seek cheap foreign steel), and they are not an informational sector that naturally fits into the Democrat coalition.
But since the informational sectors that make up the Democrat coalition are not directly threatened by higher material costs -- as most of them don't make anything -- they would be more welcoming of the industrial metal producers, if they could help pack an extra electoral wallop. With the Rust Belt looking iffy for the Democrats, the informational sectors will be required to recruit the industrial commodities producers to win back Ohio, Pennsylvania, and perhaps Indiana (the #1 steel state).
Reflecting the de-fanged nature of the tariffs scarcely one week after their announcement, the stock market has continued to shoot upwards. They sense there is no coming trade war. Even within steel stocks, although they rose several percentage points on the initial announcement, they tumbled by several points on Friday when it became clear that we would be granting one exemption after another to the major exporters.
They'll probably be somewhat up for the year, with at least some tariffs going into effect, but it is not the re-birth of the steel industry as it initially appeared -- and that is all thanks to sabotage from the GOP. Only by throwing in with the Democrat coalition that is insensitive to the cost of metals, will steel be re-born during the Bernie revolution.
The military link to the gutting of the steel industry cannot be overstated. The major steel exporters have so much money sloshing around to invest in their steel and manufacturing industries because Uncle Sam provides so much of those nations' military needs, operating at a giant loss to our nation (aside from the military itself, for whom perpetual global occupation is an endless massive gravy train).
This again points to the Democrats being the future saviors of industry, as the senior sector of the GOP coalition will never permit the withdrawal of forces from major steel producers Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. That is the only way to suck money out of their industries (as they must pay for their own militaries), and re-allocate American money into industry (as we transfer it out of the military budget after exiting those countries). Democrats are not beholden to the military-industrial complex, so they're the only ones who can make withdrawal happen.
Now as for the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, we see the same disconnect between the president's individual announcement and the actual implementation by institutional forces in the aftermath. Media figures obsess too much over the theatrical part of government, and Lord knows Trump is the master at that stuff.
But the Pentagon is not just going to sit idly by while Trump agrees to meet Kim without pre-conditions. Indeed, not even 24 hours later, Press Secretary Sanders repeatedly said that the summit would only take place once there were concrete and verifiable steps taken by NK toward de-nuclearization. No country would take those steps before talks even began, so this is the Pentagon's veto of the whole summit.
As with the watered-down tariffs, maybe there will be some minor symbolic action (not a face-to-face meeting with Trump and Kim), but the military-industrial complex will not permit talks or negotiations to proceed without pre-conditions about denuclearizing. Their goal is to wipe out the North Korean government just like they did with Saddam Hussein or Qaddafi, despite promising not to destroy them if they just gave up their weapons of mass destruction. If Kim agrees to unilateral surrender, of course the Pentagon is not going to pass up that opportunity. But that is not happening, so the Pentagon remains dug-in.
To the extent that any progress is made toward peace on the peninsula, it will be led by the dove faction in South Korea, who now have control over the presidency. That has allowed rapprochement to take place between the North and the South, but there must be a similar dove faction in control of the American government for the whole process to succeed. That means a Democrat government during the upcoming Bernie revolution, perhaps guided by Tulsi Gabbard as Secretary of State or Defense. It may also require a dove faction in control of Japan, which they do not have right now.
By "dove" faction, all this means is one whose material interests do not benefit massively from US occupation of the Korean peninsula. The American producers of industrial commodities fit the bill -- their interests have become decimated by our military occupying SK, which has freed up SK's government to spend money on their steel industry and manufacturing without having to spend money on their own national defense. Without these subsidies, South Korean steel would be much more costly and less competitive against American steel.
It doesn't matter if steel executives and manufacturing workers don't drive to work singing, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." They will support withdrawal of our military from Asia purely in pursuit of their own material interests. Leaving our military over there provides a gigantic subsidy to foreign steel.
So, regardless of how Trump the individual feels -- or how Bernie Sanders, the individual, feels -- it is these institutional forces that will continue to shape our policies at home and abroad. We will not expect a major change regarding North Korea until a Bernie-style revolution takes over, probably during the next electoral cycle, bringing with it a mandate to make good on the promises of populism and de-globalization that sent Trump into office -- only this time, with the institutional support, or at least the absence of obstruction, for the governing coalition to deliver the goods.
Categories:
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Geography,
Politics,
Technology,
Violence
March 6, 2018
Make them pay for their own militaries, and repudiate debt, if they escalate trade war (NATO, Japan, South Korea)
If the entire GOP-Koch apparatus is going to come out of the woodwork to subvert Trump's would-be trade war, then his only power is rhetorical. But that can still do a lot of good toward shifting us out of the Reaganite regime and into the Bernie regime.
Since he's already covered how much our working and middle classes are impoverished by free trade, which only benefits the very top of the class pyramid, the next major issue he should thrust into the national discussion is how our military is complicit in the de-industrialization program.
Wealthy countries like Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and South Korea do so much manufacturing and heavy industry, making themselves net exporters rather than importers. Their governments have so much money to invest in their own domestic industries because they do not have to spend the tons of money it takes to operate a national military.
Why not? Because the empire-seekers among the Pentagon brass are only too happy to provide the military power for these nations, operating at a gigantic monetary loss for America, in exchange for getting to brag about how many squares they occupy on the global chess board.
Ordinary Americans do not benefit from the Pentagon occupying more rather than fewer chess board squares -- otherwise we would've seen those benefits a long time ago. It's not like the Pentagon just started providing the military for Germany and Japan yesterday. That goes all the way back to the aftermath of WWII.
Partly this was to prevent the Axis powers from re-militarizing, and partly it was to push back against the Soviets via NATO. Both reasons have evaporated in the meantime, so we ought to pull out entirely.
The Pentagon does not use its occupation of these chess board squares in order to send valuable stuff back to America, like the old system of using force to raid the resources of other countries. They don't even charge rent to the host nations!
The Pentagon provides us with absolutely nothing in return for our funding their global occupation to the tune of trillions of dollars, which will eventually bankrupt the nation as all endless wars have done.
Thus, our fruitless globalist military occupation worsens not only our fiscal deficit -- spending so much on the Pentagon's overseas operations and getting no return on our investment -- but also our trade deficit, allowing those nations for whom we provide the military to re-allocate what should be their military budget into domestic industries, and then importing from them all the things that we forgo manufacturing ourselves. After wasting so much on military occupations, we have nothing left to invest in our industries.
This presents us with two powerful trump cards in dealing with these nations during a trade war.
First, when they retaliate against our initial tariffs, we will pull out our military, and they will have to shift tons of money from subsidizing their industries into providing their own military for a change. That will instantly shrink our trade deficit with them -- they will be manufacturing and exporting less, and we will be manufacturing and exporting more, after we re-allocate that part of our military budget into industrial investment.
And second, we can repudiate the massive debt that we owe them. It is no surprise that these nations are also among the largest holders of our national debt (along with China). They convert their trade surplus with us into buy orders for US treasury bonds, which are a form of a loan that we agree to pay back with interest in the future.
Because our national debt has grown to such unsustainable levels, at first due to military imperialism but now also due to bailing out the financial system for the past 10 years, we will not be able to pay back all of it to every nation that we owe money to.
The natural targets for not paying back the debt we owe are those countries who have benefited so much and for so long from our provision of their military needs. The only reason they could invest so much in manufacturing, sell those goods to us at such high surpluses, and then convert that into US treasuries -- owning so much of our debt -- is that we gave them a free military.
Repudiating the debt we owe them is simply collecting on the unpaid debt that they have been running up with us for decades, by enjoying the benefits of the US military providing their national defense, while not having to pay what it costs. It is a settling of debts owed between two parties, rather than unilateral default.
We will do that also for the massive debt we owe to OPEC nations, as the Gulf jihadist monarchies have enjoyed the use of our endless military spending, without having to pay for it.
The only large holder of our debt who we cannot economically destroy by withdrawing our military, as we do not provide their military, is China. That will be more of a straight-up economic war, although we are still left with plenty of reasons to consider repudiating (at least a big chunk of) the debt we owe them to be settling a debt that they actually owe us -- such as their ripping off of our intellectual property, counterfeiting, adulterating substances they send us (like infant formula), and so on and so forth.
Trump came back to these themes over and over during the campaign, but nothing has happened on them since he took office. As with tariffs, the reason is that he would be directly attacking the material interests of the elites in those sectors of society that control the GOP -- manufacturing owners, energy companies, mega-farm landowners, and the globalist branches of the military.
The GOP is not going to let one guy weaken the party's own elite sectors, just to benefit the working and middle classes in America. Why would they? Just because he won an election? What a quaint idea!
As with tariffs, Trump may be able to pull off some small change here or there -- maybe getting the NATO countries to pony up the 2% of their GDP that they promised to compensate Uncle Sam for providing most of the military budget. That is still not happening for the main beneficiaries like Germany.
Maybe instead of polite dialog to beg Germany to pay 2% of GDP toward NATO, Trump simply holds a press conference or roundtable discussion where he "announces his intention" to pull our military out of Germany, saving us an absolute fortune while not affecting our own national security one bit. Then pointing out how we will re-allocate that military spending toward industrial spending, while Germany must do the opposite -- then let's see what happens to those trade deficits!
Whether or not that goes through (unlikely with the GOP in full control of the government), it at least shifts the Overton window in the anti-imperial, pro-industrial direction. That will tee up the full shift in policy for the upcoming Bernie regime, whose party is not beholden to manufacturing owners seeking to cut the cost of materials and labor, oil companies looking to do business in the Middle East, or the Pentagon looking to preserve its pointless global footprint just cuz.
The Democrats are beholden to the finance sector, tech companies, and media, but these do not have such vested material interests in running massive endless trade deficits through free trade. They won't get harmed by high tariffs on materials since they don't manufacture anything, and they have no need to provide the military for wealthy nations.
At worst, Facebook, Hollywood, and Goldman Sachs do not get unrestrained access to China's market -- but most of that is already bound to happen anyway. And those sectors will still make boatloads of money purely from the American market.
In the larger project to de-globalize American society, we cannot lose sight of the crucial role that our military brass play in entangling us within the great big over-extended global system.
Since he's already covered how much our working and middle classes are impoverished by free trade, which only benefits the very top of the class pyramid, the next major issue he should thrust into the national discussion is how our military is complicit in the de-industrialization program.
Wealthy countries like Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and South Korea do so much manufacturing and heavy industry, making themselves net exporters rather than importers. Their governments have so much money to invest in their own domestic industries because they do not have to spend the tons of money it takes to operate a national military.
Why not? Because the empire-seekers among the Pentagon brass are only too happy to provide the military power for these nations, operating at a gigantic monetary loss for America, in exchange for getting to brag about how many squares they occupy on the global chess board.
Ordinary Americans do not benefit from the Pentagon occupying more rather than fewer chess board squares -- otherwise we would've seen those benefits a long time ago. It's not like the Pentagon just started providing the military for Germany and Japan yesterday. That goes all the way back to the aftermath of WWII.
Partly this was to prevent the Axis powers from re-militarizing, and partly it was to push back against the Soviets via NATO. Both reasons have evaporated in the meantime, so we ought to pull out entirely.
The Pentagon does not use its occupation of these chess board squares in order to send valuable stuff back to America, like the old system of using force to raid the resources of other countries. They don't even charge rent to the host nations!
The Pentagon provides us with absolutely nothing in return for our funding their global occupation to the tune of trillions of dollars, which will eventually bankrupt the nation as all endless wars have done.
Thus, our fruitless globalist military occupation worsens not only our fiscal deficit -- spending so much on the Pentagon's overseas operations and getting no return on our investment -- but also our trade deficit, allowing those nations for whom we provide the military to re-allocate what should be their military budget into domestic industries, and then importing from them all the things that we forgo manufacturing ourselves. After wasting so much on military occupations, we have nothing left to invest in our industries.
This presents us with two powerful trump cards in dealing with these nations during a trade war.
First, when they retaliate against our initial tariffs, we will pull out our military, and they will have to shift tons of money from subsidizing their industries into providing their own military for a change. That will instantly shrink our trade deficit with them -- they will be manufacturing and exporting less, and we will be manufacturing and exporting more, after we re-allocate that part of our military budget into industrial investment.
And second, we can repudiate the massive debt that we owe them. It is no surprise that these nations are also among the largest holders of our national debt (along with China). They convert their trade surplus with us into buy orders for US treasury bonds, which are a form of a loan that we agree to pay back with interest in the future.
Because our national debt has grown to such unsustainable levels, at first due to military imperialism but now also due to bailing out the financial system for the past 10 years, we will not be able to pay back all of it to every nation that we owe money to.
The natural targets for not paying back the debt we owe are those countries who have benefited so much and for so long from our provision of their military needs. The only reason they could invest so much in manufacturing, sell those goods to us at such high surpluses, and then convert that into US treasuries -- owning so much of our debt -- is that we gave them a free military.
Repudiating the debt we owe them is simply collecting on the unpaid debt that they have been running up with us for decades, by enjoying the benefits of the US military providing their national defense, while not having to pay what it costs. It is a settling of debts owed between two parties, rather than unilateral default.
We will do that also for the massive debt we owe to OPEC nations, as the Gulf jihadist monarchies have enjoyed the use of our endless military spending, without having to pay for it.
The only large holder of our debt who we cannot economically destroy by withdrawing our military, as we do not provide their military, is China. That will be more of a straight-up economic war, although we are still left with plenty of reasons to consider repudiating (at least a big chunk of) the debt we owe them to be settling a debt that they actually owe us -- such as their ripping off of our intellectual property, counterfeiting, adulterating substances they send us (like infant formula), and so on and so forth.
Trump came back to these themes over and over during the campaign, but nothing has happened on them since he took office. As with tariffs, the reason is that he would be directly attacking the material interests of the elites in those sectors of society that control the GOP -- manufacturing owners, energy companies, mega-farm landowners, and the globalist branches of the military.
The GOP is not going to let one guy weaken the party's own elite sectors, just to benefit the working and middle classes in America. Why would they? Just because he won an election? What a quaint idea!
As with tariffs, Trump may be able to pull off some small change here or there -- maybe getting the NATO countries to pony up the 2% of their GDP that they promised to compensate Uncle Sam for providing most of the military budget. That is still not happening for the main beneficiaries like Germany.
Maybe instead of polite dialog to beg Germany to pay 2% of GDP toward NATO, Trump simply holds a press conference or roundtable discussion where he "announces his intention" to pull our military out of Germany, saving us an absolute fortune while not affecting our own national security one bit. Then pointing out how we will re-allocate that military spending toward industrial spending, while Germany must do the opposite -- then let's see what happens to those trade deficits!
Whether or not that goes through (unlikely with the GOP in full control of the government), it at least shifts the Overton window in the anti-imperial, pro-industrial direction. That will tee up the full shift in policy for the upcoming Bernie regime, whose party is not beholden to manufacturing owners seeking to cut the cost of materials and labor, oil companies looking to do business in the Middle East, or the Pentagon looking to preserve its pointless global footprint just cuz.
The Democrats are beholden to the finance sector, tech companies, and media, but these do not have such vested material interests in running massive endless trade deficits through free trade. They won't get harmed by high tariffs on materials since they don't manufacture anything, and they have no need to provide the military for wealthy nations.
At worst, Facebook, Hollywood, and Goldman Sachs do not get unrestrained access to China's market -- but most of that is already bound to happen anyway. And those sectors will still make boatloads of money purely from the American market.
In the larger project to de-globalize American society, we cannot lose sight of the crucial role that our military brass play in entangling us within the great big over-extended global system.
Categories:
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Geography,
Politics,
Technology,
Violence
January 18, 2018
Apple, Foxconn sites are hiring foreigners, not Americans
Populists, if they do not want to get co-opted by corporate globalists, must always ask whether these announcements of "companies moving back" mean the new jobs will go to American citizens or instead to foreign workers, whether they're illegals or are brought in on guest worker visas like the H-1B program.
The first big announcement was Foxconn building a manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. In a three-part expose on their hiring practices (here, here, and here), Lawrence Tabak shows that Foxconn hires almost only foreigners at their existing plants in Indiana and Texas. The technical and professional staff are legally brought in on H-1B visas from China, and the unskilled staff are drawn from illegal immigrants. There are only a token number of Americans at these workplaces.
The situation at the Wisconsin plant will be exactly the same. If it were not, they would make a big deal out of reassuring us that they will be hiring few or no foreigners.
Now comes the announcement of Apple building a new campus in America. It is part of an ongoing PR campaign of desperation to get the American working and middle classes to be grateful for the GOP tax cuts going to corporations and the wealthy, which are supposed to trickle down to us, even though they never have after any of the other times they've run this experiment.
They say 20,000 jobs will be added over the next 5 years, but do not say how many will be at this particular campus rather than any of the other zillions of work sites they run. It will certainly not employ more than their headquarters at Apple Park, which has "only" 12,000 working there. I figure it will be in the thousands at the new campus, which will be something like a call center for customer technical support.
Still, will these new jobs go to Americans? Of course not -- Apple is in the top 20 companies for visa sponsors of cheap foreign labor. They got 2,000 visa and green card workers in 2017, no different from 2016, and both years higher than 2015 or 2014. They have shown no willingness to bend the knee to the "Buy American, Hire American" spirit of the Trump campaign.
They will simply ask for a few thousand more visas in order to staff their new campus, and as a giant of Silicon Valley, they will easily get them. That was probably part of the negotiations -- we will build a new campus here in America, and you guys in the State Department will give us enough guest worker visas to staff it. As long as the unsuspecting Trump supporters don't inquire about who is getting those new jobs, it will be win-win-win for Apple and Foggy Bottom and Trump's image!
Again, if Apple were planning to hire Americans rather than foreigners, they would damn well say so -- it would only strengthen their PR campaign about becoming more pro-American, and assuage doubts from populists and Trump voters. The fact that they do not say that, means they have no good news to share in that regard.
We know that Trump himself has already gone all-in for Silicon Valley's pleas for more H-1B visas.
He kept flip-flopping on the issue during the campaign, with his gut instinct always coming back to "give them guest worker visas".
During the transition, he was won over by "a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley" who begged for more H-1B visas. [1]
And most disturbing of all, he recently said that, "We need workers in this country; we need people to come in and work because I have a lot of companies moving in." [2]
He's talking about guest workers immigrating here on visas, in the broader context of giving amnesty to the DACA people and perhaps all illegals currently here. Whether it's one group of foreigners or another -- it's they who are going to be hired at the "companies moving in" because they're cheap labor replacements for American workers.
With the Congressional GOP having sidelined his populist agenda, Trump will spend the rest of his term frantically scrambling to "put points on the board" and "get a win" no matter how much it benefits the corporate globalist elites and foreign workers.
So from now on, whenever we hear about "companies moving back," we must check to see if they specifically say that the jobs will go to American citizens, rather than some vague statement like "jobs will be created in America". If not, they are going to hire cheap foreigners instead.
And the Democrats, if they want to win more seats in Congress or take back the White House, must hammer this point home to those who voted for Trump. "You were promised a return of good jobs to America, but they hired cheap foreigners instead. We won't allow those companies to exploit the visa system, and will make sure that struggling Americans will get those jobs."
Of course that would require standing up to a major institution that controls their party, Silicon Valley, but they are not that dependent on cheap labor like the labor-intensive sectors of the economy are. They can stand to lose a tiny bit of profit from higher labor costs, if it means taking back the government and staving off an angry mob that wants to demolish the tech giants.
[1] From Fire and Fury:
[2] From a recent WSJ interview:
The first big announcement was Foxconn building a manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. In a three-part expose on their hiring practices (here, here, and here), Lawrence Tabak shows that Foxconn hires almost only foreigners at their existing plants in Indiana and Texas. The technical and professional staff are legally brought in on H-1B visas from China, and the unskilled staff are drawn from illegal immigrants. There are only a token number of Americans at these workplaces.
The situation at the Wisconsin plant will be exactly the same. If it were not, they would make a big deal out of reassuring us that they will be hiring few or no foreigners.
Now comes the announcement of Apple building a new campus in America. It is part of an ongoing PR campaign of desperation to get the American working and middle classes to be grateful for the GOP tax cuts going to corporations and the wealthy, which are supposed to trickle down to us, even though they never have after any of the other times they've run this experiment.
They say 20,000 jobs will be added over the next 5 years, but do not say how many will be at this particular campus rather than any of the other zillions of work sites they run. It will certainly not employ more than their headquarters at Apple Park, which has "only" 12,000 working there. I figure it will be in the thousands at the new campus, which will be something like a call center for customer technical support.
Still, will these new jobs go to Americans? Of course not -- Apple is in the top 20 companies for visa sponsors of cheap foreign labor. They got 2,000 visa and green card workers in 2017, no different from 2016, and both years higher than 2015 or 2014. They have shown no willingness to bend the knee to the "Buy American, Hire American" spirit of the Trump campaign.
They will simply ask for a few thousand more visas in order to staff their new campus, and as a giant of Silicon Valley, they will easily get them. That was probably part of the negotiations -- we will build a new campus here in America, and you guys in the State Department will give us enough guest worker visas to staff it. As long as the unsuspecting Trump supporters don't inquire about who is getting those new jobs, it will be win-win-win for Apple and Foggy Bottom and Trump's image!
Again, if Apple were planning to hire Americans rather than foreigners, they would damn well say so -- it would only strengthen their PR campaign about becoming more pro-American, and assuage doubts from populists and Trump voters. The fact that they do not say that, means they have no good news to share in that regard.
We know that Trump himself has already gone all-in for Silicon Valley's pleas for more H-1B visas.
He kept flip-flopping on the issue during the campaign, with his gut instinct always coming back to "give them guest worker visas".
During the transition, he was won over by "a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley" who begged for more H-1B visas. [1]
And most disturbing of all, he recently said that, "We need workers in this country; we need people to come in and work because I have a lot of companies moving in." [2]
He's talking about guest workers immigrating here on visas, in the broader context of giving amnesty to the DACA people and perhaps all illegals currently here. Whether it's one group of foreigners or another -- it's they who are going to be hired at the "companies moving in" because they're cheap labor replacements for American workers.
With the Congressional GOP having sidelined his populist agenda, Trump will spend the rest of his term frantically scrambling to "put points on the board" and "get a win" no matter how much it benefits the corporate globalist elites and foreign workers.
So from now on, whenever we hear about "companies moving back," we must check to see if they specifically say that the jobs will go to American citizens, rather than some vague statement like "jobs will be created in America". If not, they are going to hire cheap foreigners instead.
And the Democrats, if they want to win more seats in Congress or take back the White House, must hammer this point home to those who voted for Trump. "You were promised a return of good jobs to America, but they hired cheap foreigners instead. We won't allow those companies to exploit the visa system, and will make sure that struggling Americans will get those jobs."
Of course that would require standing up to a major institution that controls their party, Silicon Valley, but they are not that dependent on cheap labor like the labor-intensive sectors of the economy are. They can stand to lose a tiny bit of profit from higher labor costs, if it means taking back the government and staving off an angry mob that wants to demolish the tech giants.
[1] From Fire and Fury:
The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
[2] From a recent WSJ interview:
Mr. Trump: ...You have a lot of people of those 800 [thousand, i.e. the DACA people], they work hard, they have jobs. We need workers in this country; we need people to come in and work because I have a lot of companies moving in.
And I’m getting a lot of questions like we want to move to Wisconsin, we wanted—like Wisconsin, I have Foxconn coming to Wisconsin; that’s my deal. You know the head of Foxconn, you know he’s a friend of mine. He’s still only moving there because of me. And the governor has been fantastic.
The governor of Wisconsin has been fantastic in their presentations and everything else. But I’m the one who got them to look at it. Now we need people because they’re going to have thousands of people working it’s going to be a—you know—that’s—that’s the company that makes the Apple iPhone.
WSJ: Yeah.
Mr. Trump: Is that—they’re going to build them here, they’re going to build other things here too.
We need people so we have to be a little bit flexible. I don’t want to be so—I’ve had another pledge that I’m going to move companies back into this country. I don’t want to make it so tough that they can’t come back in.
Would you say that’s a correct statement, Gary, we have to have people.
Gary Cohn: Yeah.
Categories:
Economics,
Geography,
Politics,
Technology
January 13, 2018
Trump's pro cheap labor stance signals willingness for amnesty and guest worker immigration
Most of the attention over the past few days has gone to Trump's description of Haiti and Africa as "shithole countries," echoing earlier statements that Haitians "all have AIDS" and that Nigerians would never "go back to their huts" after seeing America.
I'm unsure if he included El Salvador (MS-13) and other Central American countries with the shithole countries, but he did kick off his campaign by describing all the garbage that was pouring into this country from Mexico -- rapists, drug dealers, gang members, etc.
And after a radical Islamic terrorist attack here, as a candidate he famously called for an end of Muslim immigration into this country, and tried to get through a Muslim travel ban via executive order.
These examples suggest that his main opposition to immigration is based on the corporeal threats posed by foreigners -- violence, disease, and drugs. Not unusual for a conservative.
What about the economic impact of hordes of foreigners flowing in? Immigrants come here in order to undercut American wages (still well above the wages in their homeland), and then drive up the cost of housing by adding tens of millions of people to the demand for housing almost overnight.
Trump almost never mentions this, even though it's the main focus for the very few fellow Republicans who are immigration hardliners, like Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller. Improving the lot of working and middle-class Americans was the justification for the RAISE Act (which only has two supporters in the Senate, Cotton and Perdue).
It's doubly odd since Trump's major campaign theme alongside America-first nationalism was populism, rather than helping the corporate elites do even better when they're already so well off.
In a recent long interview with the WSJ, Trump repeatedly defends giving amnesty to the DACA people -- and perhaps the entire illegal population -- on the basis of needing more workers, especially for companies that may move into America:
Part of Trump's salesmanship is speaking mostly in "floating signifiers" where the audience can fill them in however they want, rather than spelling things out in lawyerly detail, which might turn off a customer if the details are not what they were looking for. While this allows him to build a broad coalition, it also lets him use verbal sleight-of-hand when there's bad news for one audience and good news for another.
Like the recurring phrase "we need people" -- it means nothing on its own, and the listener has to fill in who the people are, what they're doing, and why we need them rather than someone else to do whatever it is they're doing.
In a weak moment, he let the full description slip out at the beginning -- "we need people to come in and work". So he's talking about guest worker immigrants coming into our country on work visas.
Why do we need these immigrants to fill these jobs? The opposition is to native US workers -- they won't be hired at these companies who are bringing in guest workers, or hiring from the DACA population (who already have work permits) or from the to-be-amnestied overall illegal population.
He gives the example of the Foxconn plant that they're planning to build in Wisconsin. Why would he say, in the context of giving amnesty to DACA people and/or the overall illegals, "we need people because [Foxconn is] going to have thousands of people working"? He is saying that most of the jobs created at the Foxconn plant will be going to foreigners, whether they're DACA or guest workers.
I couldn't believe that when I read it, but a search of who these Foxconn workers will be turned up an excellent three-part expose by Belt Mag (covering Rust Belt topics), here here and here.
Did anyone know that Foxconn already has plants in the US? Their own site lists a plant in Indiana, another in Virginia, and the Belt articles describe one in Houston (along with the one in Indiana). So it's not as though this would be the first Foxconn plant in America -- and we can therefore base our expectations for the Wisconsin plant on their track record in their other American plants.
Most people debating the plant are assuming that the jobs will be going to Americans, and are only debating whether they'll be from Wisconsin or nearby Illinois, whether the pollution risk is worth building the plant, how soon the tax breaks will be paid back, etc.
But it turns out that Foxconn's existing plants in Indiana and Texas hire damn few Americans. Most of the professional, technical, and managerial jobs are held by H-1B visa holders from China, and a majority of the less skilled assembly work is done by (generally illegal) foreigners. For language barrier reasons, presumably these foreigners are also Chinese rather than Mexican or Indian.
From the first article (my emphasis):
We can tell how much the Foxconn plants here rely on foreign labor by the fact that they get constantly raided by ICE.
From the third article, on the state seizing Wisconsinites' private land to build housing for the guest workers:
So, this Foxconn deal is completely the opposite of how Trump and the GOP have been portraying it -- everyone from the corporate shareholders to the white collar professionals to the blue collar workers will be Chinese, not American. Their profits, salaries, and wages will not go out into America but will remain in the Chinese company town, or sent back home to China. And American taxpayers will be subsidizing this thing out the ass for decades.
It's the opposite of populism, fleecing taxpayers to give corporate welfare; and it's the opposite of America-first, giving all the benefits to foreigners.
This is Trump's model that he chose for the guest worker program, and the raison d'etre for amnestying the DACA people or even the entire illegal population (if only the Democrats would agree to the specifics).
In that recent clusterfuck of an immigration negotiation with Dems and Republicans, Trump said over and over how he'd like to move right on to "comprehensive" immigration reform, i.e. amnesty for all illegals. That was not an off-the-cuff remark, as he repeats it a few times in the WSJ interview.
We knew back during the campaign that Trump was squishy on the cheap labor use of immigration, as he kept flip-flopping about whether he supported curbing the H-1B visa program or letting Silicon Valley magnates bring in as many cheap foreign guest workers as they wanted. His unguided instinct was to always side with the Zuckerbergs, and tell sob stories about the poor foreigners who study at Harvard and then can't get jobs at Facebook.
Then his campaign staffers, probably just Stephen Miller, would have to issue a press statement saying, "No, the H-1B program is exploitative and anti-American, so we're going to terminate it." Then someone would ask him about it, and he'd give his instinctive answer that it was awesome, followed by another reversal statement from Miller via the press, over and over again.
Was that just during the campaign, and then he changed his tune after he won the election? No: in the Fire and Fury account of the Trump transition and early presidency, there's an anecdote about the head honchos of Silicon Valley visiting Trump Tower to push for more H-1B visas, Trump agreeing with them, Rupert Murdoch trying to correct Trump for this anti-populist anti-nationalist position, and Trump blowing off that suggestion.
Now, most of the response to this vignette was about the exact words that Murdoch used to call Trump, not the fact that Trump was contradicting his campaign themes of populism and nationalism, and blowing off helpful corrective advice on the matter, even when it came from a high-ranking trusted acquaintance. That is what should disturb Trump supporters, and it is confirmed by his spontaneous answers during the campaign, and now by his WSJ interview on why "we have to have people to come in and work".
How do we square this with his stalwart stance against immigration from shithole countries, or terrorist-prone nations, or ones who are not sending their best? He doesn't seem to think that all foreign countries pose a dangerous level of the corporeal threats of violence, disease, and drugs.
Specifically, East Asia gets the "all clear" when it comes to welcoming hordes of immigrants, as long as they're brought in legally and for work purposes, without having to go on welfare. That would dovetail with the support for "merit-based" immigration, rather than a hardline moratorium.
Of course, "merit" simply means that working and middle-class Americans will have their jobs stolen, incomes undercut, and housing prices bid up by a less criminal group of cheap labor scabs. If some of their neighborhoods, and perhaps entire towns, go from all-American vistas to dystopian Chinese ant colonies -- well, that's just what happens when Americans are no longer willing to bust their ass in order to earn their keep.
If we, too, would work for $5 an hour under slave-like conditions with no benefits and suicide nets ringing our factory, then maybe we wouldn't "have to have people to come in and work".
Any nationalist who thinks that any aspect of American culture will survive colonization by the Chinese is gullible, retarded, or ignorant of their track record. Other than not killing each other at the rates that blacks do, most East Asian groups do not assimilate into Western or American culture, particularly the males, who remain disaffected and bitter at not getting dates from the cute white girls all around them.
The Japanese have done better at becoming Western, both in Japan and outside, but that's not who the corporate slave-drivers are going to be bringing into this country as guest workers. No cheap labor to be found in that rich country.
By viewing immigration largely through the lens of "how to import cheap labor to benefit corporate profits," Trump is right at home with the GOP orthodoxy, unlike his stances on most other issues. But as we've seen so far, the only action the government has gotten is on the tiny areas of overlap between the insurgent and the Establishment -- cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, bloating the military budget, and getting conservative judges into the courts.
Unfortunately that means there's a high probability that a mass amnesty is headed our way sometime during his term, whether for just the DACA people or all illegals. We might get some alleviation by seeing Haitians deported, MS-13 prosecuted more fervently, and some Muslim nations kept out. But the vast majority of immigrants who are mere job thieves and culture wreckers will pass through those filters, and will likely continue to flood the country through legal immigration, not to mention receive amnesty if they're already here illegally.
Since the overwhelming force bringing in immigrants is cheap labor, we're going to have to rely more on a Democrat populist to keep foreigners out, starting with mandatory E-Verify. Their grassroots are more focused on class threats, rather than the corporeal threats that disturb conservatives, and their elite sectors are not labor-intensive and therefore not so reliant on cheap labor, compared to the labor-intensive sectors that control the GOP.
That seems like the direction that nationalists must begin to frame the immigration restriction argument in -- preventing the working and middle class in America from getting their incomes undercut and their housing prices bid up by cheap foreign labor. That will keep out most of the immigrants, it will appeal to Democrats and Independents (especially the Bernie-supporting populists who are the wave of the future), and it will help Moderates accept it without being tied to conservative appeals about corporeal threats.
I'm unsure if he included El Salvador (MS-13) and other Central American countries with the shithole countries, but he did kick off his campaign by describing all the garbage that was pouring into this country from Mexico -- rapists, drug dealers, gang members, etc.
And after a radical Islamic terrorist attack here, as a candidate he famously called for an end of Muslim immigration into this country, and tried to get through a Muslim travel ban via executive order.
These examples suggest that his main opposition to immigration is based on the corporeal threats posed by foreigners -- violence, disease, and drugs. Not unusual for a conservative.
What about the economic impact of hordes of foreigners flowing in? Immigrants come here in order to undercut American wages (still well above the wages in their homeland), and then drive up the cost of housing by adding tens of millions of people to the demand for housing almost overnight.
Trump almost never mentions this, even though it's the main focus for the very few fellow Republicans who are immigration hardliners, like Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller. Improving the lot of working and middle-class Americans was the justification for the RAISE Act (which only has two supporters in the Senate, Cotton and Perdue).
It's doubly odd since Trump's major campaign theme alongside America-first nationalism was populism, rather than helping the corporate elites do even better when they're already so well off.
In a recent long interview with the WSJ, Trump repeatedly defends giving amnesty to the DACA people -- and perhaps the entire illegal population -- on the basis of needing more workers, especially for companies that may move into America:
Mr. Trump: ...You have a lot of people of those 800 [thousand, i.e. the DACA people], they work hard, they have jobs. We need workers in this country; we need people to come in and work because I have a lot of companies moving in.
And I’m getting a lot of questions like we want to move to Wisconsin, we wanted—like Wisconsin, I have Foxconn coming to Wisconsin; that’s my deal. You know the head of Foxconn, you know he’s a friend of mine. He’s still only moving there because of me. And the governor has been fantastic.
The governor of Wisconsin has been fantastic in their presentations and everything else. But I’m the one who got them to look at it. Now we need people because they’re going to have thousands of people working it’s going to be a—you know—that’s—that’s the company that makes the Apple iPhone.
WSJ: Yeah.
Mr. Trump: Is that—they’re going to build them here, they’re going to build other things here too.
We need people so we have to be a little bit flexible. I don’t want to be so—I’ve had another pledge that I’m going to move companies back into this country. I don’t want to make it so tough that they can’t come back in.
Would you say that’s a correct statement, Gary, we have to have people.
Gary Cohn: Yeah.
...
Mr. Trump: That’s comprehensive [immigration reform, AKA amnesty for all illegals]—well, if we could do that, that’s fine. I don’t know that that’s going to be possible.
Part of Trump's salesmanship is speaking mostly in "floating signifiers" where the audience can fill them in however they want, rather than spelling things out in lawyerly detail, which might turn off a customer if the details are not what they were looking for. While this allows him to build a broad coalition, it also lets him use verbal sleight-of-hand when there's bad news for one audience and good news for another.
Like the recurring phrase "we need people" -- it means nothing on its own, and the listener has to fill in who the people are, what they're doing, and why we need them rather than someone else to do whatever it is they're doing.
In a weak moment, he let the full description slip out at the beginning -- "we need people to come in and work". So he's talking about guest worker immigrants coming into our country on work visas.
Why do we need these immigrants to fill these jobs? The opposition is to native US workers -- they won't be hired at these companies who are bringing in guest workers, or hiring from the DACA population (who already have work permits) or from the to-be-amnestied overall illegal population.
He gives the example of the Foxconn plant that they're planning to build in Wisconsin. Why would he say, in the context of giving amnesty to DACA people and/or the overall illegals, "we need people because [Foxconn is] going to have thousands of people working"? He is saying that most of the jobs created at the Foxconn plant will be going to foreigners, whether they're DACA or guest workers.
I couldn't believe that when I read it, but a search of who these Foxconn workers will be turned up an excellent three-part expose by Belt Mag (covering Rust Belt topics), here here and here.
Did anyone know that Foxconn already has plants in the US? Their own site lists a plant in Indiana, another in Virginia, and the Belt articles describe one in Houston (along with the one in Indiana). So it's not as though this would be the first Foxconn plant in America -- and we can therefore base our expectations for the Wisconsin plant on their track record in their other American plants.
Most people debating the plant are assuming that the jobs will be going to Americans, and are only debating whether they'll be from Wisconsin or nearby Illinois, whether the pollution risk is worth building the plant, how soon the tax breaks will be paid back, etc.
But it turns out that Foxconn's existing plants in Indiana and Texas hire damn few Americans. Most of the professional, technical, and managerial jobs are held by H-1B visa holders from China, and a majority of the less skilled assembly work is done by (generally illegal) foreigners. For language barrier reasons, presumably these foreigners are also Chinese rather than Mexican or Indian.
From the first article (my emphasis):
Of the Foxconn factory in Plainfield, Indiana, some 16 miles west of Indianapolis, these former employees describe a corporate and management culture that treats Indiana workers as disposable; that favors Taiwanese nationals for management and advancement; and that heavily relies on undocumented workers who are carefully distanced from the parent company via the heavy use of temp agencies.
Indiana native Carl Williams spent a year and a half between 2008 and 2010 at Foxconn’s Plainfield facility as a quality technician and later a data analyst. He reveals that a majority of the 900 workers who were employed at the computer assembly factory during his tenure there were undocumented. “On days when word got out that Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] was coming,” he says, “most of the workforce would be missing.” Williams also describes a “wink and nod” attitude by management toward the use of undocumented workers as the facility declined to be certified as an e-verified workplace (an internet based system of checking worker identification). According to Williams, management acted on the pretense that they simply weren’t aware of, and certainly not responsible for, the documentation status of the bulk of the workforce. Williams added that management appeared to be more interested in rock-bottom wages, dodging the cost of expensive benefits, and maintaining their ability to lay off and rehire for seasonal demand.
Andre Morris, who was a Foxconn employee in Indiana from 2005 to 2013, confirms the large number of undocumented workers at the Plainfield facility and also recalls the sea of empty chairs when there were rumors of an impending ICE raid.
We can tell how much the Foxconn plants here rely on foreign labor by the fact that they get constantly raided by ICE.
From the third article, on the state seizing Wisconsinites' private land to build housing for the guest workers:
But Knapp also believes that, even if they could, Foxconn doesn’t intend to hire locals. With an expression of the proud possessor of inside information she lowers her voice and says that her two sons work construction and that their company is currently bidding on an excavation project. “They’re putting in a housing complex, an entire village, for the Chinese.” Meanwhile, she says, a neighbor down the road just a short distance outside of the Foxconn industrial quadrant has been approached to sell land for a condo project. If Foxconn’s past behavior is any indication, the additional housing is presumably for mid-career engineers from Asia who demand less than the average starting salary available to a fresh University of Wisconsin engineering graduate.
So, this Foxconn deal is completely the opposite of how Trump and the GOP have been portraying it -- everyone from the corporate shareholders to the white collar professionals to the blue collar workers will be Chinese, not American. Their profits, salaries, and wages will not go out into America but will remain in the Chinese company town, or sent back home to China. And American taxpayers will be subsidizing this thing out the ass for decades.
It's the opposite of populism, fleecing taxpayers to give corporate welfare; and it's the opposite of America-first, giving all the benefits to foreigners.
This is Trump's model that he chose for the guest worker program, and the raison d'etre for amnestying the DACA people or even the entire illegal population (if only the Democrats would agree to the specifics).
In that recent clusterfuck of an immigration negotiation with Dems and Republicans, Trump said over and over how he'd like to move right on to "comprehensive" immigration reform, i.e. amnesty for all illegals. That was not an off-the-cuff remark, as he repeats it a few times in the WSJ interview.
We knew back during the campaign that Trump was squishy on the cheap labor use of immigration, as he kept flip-flopping about whether he supported curbing the H-1B visa program or letting Silicon Valley magnates bring in as many cheap foreign guest workers as they wanted. His unguided instinct was to always side with the Zuckerbergs, and tell sob stories about the poor foreigners who study at Harvard and then can't get jobs at Facebook.
Then his campaign staffers, probably just Stephen Miller, would have to issue a press statement saying, "No, the H-1B program is exploitative and anti-American, so we're going to terminate it." Then someone would ask him about it, and he'd give his instinctive answer that it was awesome, followed by another reversal statement from Miller via the press, over and over again.
Was that just during the campaign, and then he changed his tune after he won the election? No: in the Fire and Fury account of the Trump transition and early presidency, there's an anecdote about the head honchos of Silicon Valley visiting Trump Tower to push for more H-1B visas, Trump agreeing with them, Rupert Murdoch trying to correct Trump for this anti-populist anti-nationalist position, and Trump blowing off that suggestion.
The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
Now, most of the response to this vignette was about the exact words that Murdoch used to call Trump, not the fact that Trump was contradicting his campaign themes of populism and nationalism, and blowing off helpful corrective advice on the matter, even when it came from a high-ranking trusted acquaintance. That is what should disturb Trump supporters, and it is confirmed by his spontaneous answers during the campaign, and now by his WSJ interview on why "we have to have people to come in and work".
How do we square this with his stalwart stance against immigration from shithole countries, or terrorist-prone nations, or ones who are not sending their best? He doesn't seem to think that all foreign countries pose a dangerous level of the corporeal threats of violence, disease, and drugs.
Specifically, East Asia gets the "all clear" when it comes to welcoming hordes of immigrants, as long as they're brought in legally and for work purposes, without having to go on welfare. That would dovetail with the support for "merit-based" immigration, rather than a hardline moratorium.
Of course, "merit" simply means that working and middle-class Americans will have their jobs stolen, incomes undercut, and housing prices bid up by a less criminal group of cheap labor scabs. If some of their neighborhoods, and perhaps entire towns, go from all-American vistas to dystopian Chinese ant colonies -- well, that's just what happens when Americans are no longer willing to bust their ass in order to earn their keep.
If we, too, would work for $5 an hour under slave-like conditions with no benefits and suicide nets ringing our factory, then maybe we wouldn't "have to have people to come in and work".
Any nationalist who thinks that any aspect of American culture will survive colonization by the Chinese is gullible, retarded, or ignorant of their track record. Other than not killing each other at the rates that blacks do, most East Asian groups do not assimilate into Western or American culture, particularly the males, who remain disaffected and bitter at not getting dates from the cute white girls all around them.
The Japanese have done better at becoming Western, both in Japan and outside, but that's not who the corporate slave-drivers are going to be bringing into this country as guest workers. No cheap labor to be found in that rich country.
By viewing immigration largely through the lens of "how to import cheap labor to benefit corporate profits," Trump is right at home with the GOP orthodoxy, unlike his stances on most other issues. But as we've seen so far, the only action the government has gotten is on the tiny areas of overlap between the insurgent and the Establishment -- cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, bloating the military budget, and getting conservative judges into the courts.
Unfortunately that means there's a high probability that a mass amnesty is headed our way sometime during his term, whether for just the DACA people or all illegals. We might get some alleviation by seeing Haitians deported, MS-13 prosecuted more fervently, and some Muslim nations kept out. But the vast majority of immigrants who are mere job thieves and culture wreckers will pass through those filters, and will likely continue to flood the country through legal immigration, not to mention receive amnesty if they're already here illegally.
Since the overwhelming force bringing in immigrants is cheap labor, we're going to have to rely more on a Democrat populist to keep foreigners out, starting with mandatory E-Verify. Their grassroots are more focused on class threats, rather than the corporeal threats that disturb conservatives, and their elite sectors are not labor-intensive and therefore not so reliant on cheap labor, compared to the labor-intensive sectors that control the GOP.
That seems like the direction that nationalists must begin to frame the immigration restriction argument in -- preventing the working and middle class in America from getting their incomes undercut and their housing prices bid up by cheap foreign labor. That will keep out most of the immigrants, it will appeal to Democrats and Independents (especially the Bernie-supporting populists who are the wave of the future), and it will help Moderates accept it without being tied to conservative appeals about corporeal threats.
Categories:
Crime,
Dems vs. GOP,
Economics,
Geography,
Human Biodiversity,
Politics,
Technology,
Violence
January 9, 2018
Oprah outcome: Bernie wins primary with over-crowded elitist field
Populists' initial reaction to Oprah's candidate announcement speech may be dread -- even more so if many others like her join the race. Then it will be the Democrats who will be holding a clown car show in 2020.
But that will benefit the Bernie wing of the party, if they manage to run only one candidate, whether Bernie himself or a suitable successor.
Oprah is just going to be another tired and hated identity politics warrior, more focused on her personal story and generic motivational speeches than on re-industrialization of the economy, shrinking our military footprint around the world, single-payer healthcare, and so on and so forth.
And she will definitely have at least one other rival for that sales pitch -- Michelle Obama. Neither of these "strong black women" will step aside for the other, and since they will both be selling the same appeal to voters, they will get similar slices of the electoral pie.
The more candidates there are who are selling one form or another of Democrat politics as usual, the smaller each of those slices will be. They won't take away much from Bernie's share of the pie, since he is such a qualitatively different choice.
Let's say Bernie only gets 45% of the delegates, based on winning over voters who want populism and major change -- but that the remaining 55% are divided evenly among 11 candidates in an over-crowded Establishment field. That leaves each one of the non-Bernie candidates with a puny 5%. Some may do a little better at 10% or 15%, some worse at around 1%. But nothing close to 45%.
In that case, it would start a nationwide riot to give the nomination to anyone other than Bernie. Not even all of the superdelegates could raise a candidate from 15% to 50% -- let alone the lesser candidates who got 5% or 1%. Robbing Bernie of the nomination would require a real bald-faced rigging like re-writing the rules, also bound to set off a riot.
The ideal plan to get a populist or progressive into the nomination, then, is to only run one candidate in that mold. Don't let individual ambition and hyper-competitiveness get in the way of the team movement. Bernie has better name and brand recognition than anyone else, including Elizabeth Warren. He's also more motivating to listen to, compared to Warren's schoolmarm demeanor.
Zogby polling for potential candidates shows Bernie with a solid 10-15 point advantage over Warren, as of late 2017. So the first move is to persuade Warren not to run, and better yet to endorse Bernie early on to solidify his status as the only populist candidate.
Then the goal is to encourage as many candidates to run who would blindly go along with the Wall Street and Pentagon agendas. Ideally they offer different flavors of Democrat politics as usual, to split up the non-Bernie vote.
Offer the strong black woman story, perhaps in two flavors itself with Oprah and Michelle. Offer the gay Hispanic story. Offer the futuristic tech overlord story. Offer the token ethnic on Wall Street story.
None of their substantive policies would differ from one other -- they would simply be rubber-stamping whatever Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the CIA slid onto their desk. But they would split up the non-Bernie voters, with black women choosing Michelle or Oprah, white male nerds choosing Zuckerberg, tax-avoiding yuppies choosing Andrew Cuomo, etc.
The more hyper-competitive the non-Bernie candidates are, the better. They will spend so much time tearing into each other, and not wanting to be the one to fall on their own sword in order to block Bernie. We want maximum chaos and internecine warfare on the Establishment side -- just like there was among Republicans in 2016, clearing an easy path for Trump, who was from a different universe compared to the rest of them.
The more petty, the more egotistical, the more vapid and devoid of anything to say on real policies -- the more disgusted the non-airhead voters will be, and the easier the choice will be to go with Bernie. "Airhead" voters here meaning those going with identity politics.
The sense of desperation to "stop Trump" and to take back the White House will give these freaks the delusion of grandeur, as though they were heroic for wanting to return to the Clinton-Obama ways of the past. And that phony sense of heroism will keep them in the race for as long as possible, splitting up the non-Bernie vote all the way.
Here is an off-the-cuff list of ideal candidates to crowd the non-Bernie field with:
Hillary Clinton
Michelle Obama
Oprah Winfrey
Kamala Harris
Cory Booker
Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Cuomo
Al Gore
Julian Castro
Etc.
In contrast to the backbiting shitshow going on among these Establishment candidates, I'd like to see Bernie pick Tulsi Gabbard early on as the de facto running mate -- a regular opening act to his rallies, a regular surrogate in the media, and a regular activist to mobilize larger networks to GOTV. Supposing Bernie gets the nomination, she's already a familiar presence, ideologically in step with him but making up for his weakness in foreign policy.
She's charismatic, and not that it matters to non-airhead voters, but she can deflect charges of the Bernie campaign being the white guy ticket. Being much younger makes her a credible and reassuring back-up President in case anything happened to Bernie in office.
In general, the image on the populist side would be harmony and productive teamwork, juxtaposed with the cynical individualistic ambition on the Establishment side.
If there's not much excitement going on in the GOP primary -- a big if, assuming Trump is running again after being sidelined by "his own" party for the first term, and assuming further that no bitter Republicans challenge him -- then only Bernie could draw a large number of populist Trump supporters into the Democrat primary. He won't need to point out what horrific prospects they would face if Kamala Harris or Cory Booker were President.
That would also ease fears about him being less electable -- he's the only one who can bring back the Trump voters who generally sympathize with the Democrat side in presidential races. We want populism, not identity politics.
So please, let's encourage as many Oprah Winfreys, Mark Cubans, and Mark Zuckerbergs to run as possible. And lean on Warren to not run herself, if she were considering it, rather than split up the populist / progressive team.
But that will benefit the Bernie wing of the party, if they manage to run only one candidate, whether Bernie himself or a suitable successor.
Oprah is just going to be another tired and hated identity politics warrior, more focused on her personal story and generic motivational speeches than on re-industrialization of the economy, shrinking our military footprint around the world, single-payer healthcare, and so on and so forth.
And she will definitely have at least one other rival for that sales pitch -- Michelle Obama. Neither of these "strong black women" will step aside for the other, and since they will both be selling the same appeal to voters, they will get similar slices of the electoral pie.
The more candidates there are who are selling one form or another of Democrat politics as usual, the smaller each of those slices will be. They won't take away much from Bernie's share of the pie, since he is such a qualitatively different choice.
Let's say Bernie only gets 45% of the delegates, based on winning over voters who want populism and major change -- but that the remaining 55% are divided evenly among 11 candidates in an over-crowded Establishment field. That leaves each one of the non-Bernie candidates with a puny 5%. Some may do a little better at 10% or 15%, some worse at around 1%. But nothing close to 45%.
In that case, it would start a nationwide riot to give the nomination to anyone other than Bernie. Not even all of the superdelegates could raise a candidate from 15% to 50% -- let alone the lesser candidates who got 5% or 1%. Robbing Bernie of the nomination would require a real bald-faced rigging like re-writing the rules, also bound to set off a riot.
The ideal plan to get a populist or progressive into the nomination, then, is to only run one candidate in that mold. Don't let individual ambition and hyper-competitiveness get in the way of the team movement. Bernie has better name and brand recognition than anyone else, including Elizabeth Warren. He's also more motivating to listen to, compared to Warren's schoolmarm demeanor.
Zogby polling for potential candidates shows Bernie with a solid 10-15 point advantage over Warren, as of late 2017. So the first move is to persuade Warren not to run, and better yet to endorse Bernie early on to solidify his status as the only populist candidate.
Then the goal is to encourage as many candidates to run who would blindly go along with the Wall Street and Pentagon agendas. Ideally they offer different flavors of Democrat politics as usual, to split up the non-Bernie vote.
Offer the strong black woman story, perhaps in two flavors itself with Oprah and Michelle. Offer the gay Hispanic story. Offer the futuristic tech overlord story. Offer the token ethnic on Wall Street story.
None of their substantive policies would differ from one other -- they would simply be rubber-stamping whatever Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the CIA slid onto their desk. But they would split up the non-Bernie voters, with black women choosing Michelle or Oprah, white male nerds choosing Zuckerberg, tax-avoiding yuppies choosing Andrew Cuomo, etc.
The more hyper-competitive the non-Bernie candidates are, the better. They will spend so much time tearing into each other, and not wanting to be the one to fall on their own sword in order to block Bernie. We want maximum chaos and internecine warfare on the Establishment side -- just like there was among Republicans in 2016, clearing an easy path for Trump, who was from a different universe compared to the rest of them.
The more petty, the more egotistical, the more vapid and devoid of anything to say on real policies -- the more disgusted the non-airhead voters will be, and the easier the choice will be to go with Bernie. "Airhead" voters here meaning those going with identity politics.
The sense of desperation to "stop Trump" and to take back the White House will give these freaks the delusion of grandeur, as though they were heroic for wanting to return to the Clinton-Obama ways of the past. And that phony sense of heroism will keep them in the race for as long as possible, splitting up the non-Bernie vote all the way.
Here is an off-the-cuff list of ideal candidates to crowd the non-Bernie field with:
Hillary Clinton
Michelle Obama
Oprah Winfrey
Kamala Harris
Cory Booker
Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Cuomo
Al Gore
Julian Castro
Etc.
In contrast to the backbiting shitshow going on among these Establishment candidates, I'd like to see Bernie pick Tulsi Gabbard early on as the de facto running mate -- a regular opening act to his rallies, a regular surrogate in the media, and a regular activist to mobilize larger networks to GOTV. Supposing Bernie gets the nomination, she's already a familiar presence, ideologically in step with him but making up for his weakness in foreign policy.
She's charismatic, and not that it matters to non-airhead voters, but she can deflect charges of the Bernie campaign being the white guy ticket. Being much younger makes her a credible and reassuring back-up President in case anything happened to Bernie in office.
In general, the image on the populist side would be harmony and productive teamwork, juxtaposed with the cynical individualistic ambition on the Establishment side.
If there's not much excitement going on in the GOP primary -- a big if, assuming Trump is running again after being sidelined by "his own" party for the first term, and assuming further that no bitter Republicans challenge him -- then only Bernie could draw a large number of populist Trump supporters into the Democrat primary. He won't need to point out what horrific prospects they would face if Kamala Harris or Cory Booker were President.
That would also ease fears about him being less electable -- he's the only one who can bring back the Trump voters who generally sympathize with the Democrat side in presidential races. We want populism, not identity politics.
So please, let's encourage as many Oprah Winfreys, Mark Cubans, and Mark Zuckerbergs to run as possible. And lean on Warren to not run herself, if she were considering it, rather than split up the populist / progressive team.
Categories:
Dudes and dudettes,
Economics,
Gays,
Health,
Human Biodiversity,
Media,
Politics,
Technology
January 8, 2018
Electoral map reflects patronage, not demographics
With more talks about giving amnesty to large numbers of illegal immigrants, the Right is dragging out an old but wrong argument about how amnesty will turn states Democrat, relying as ever on California as the canary in the coalmine.
It is a non-starter, since California is one of the states where Democrats win the presidential vote even among white voters only. During the Bush-Obama years, these states included the entire West Coast, the Lutheran Triangle of MN, WI, and IA, and the Northeast beginning with NY.
So whatever turned the West Coast into a Democrat bastion has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. An earlier post covered this in detail: amnesty would be suicide for the Dems, not the GOP. Dems have labor unions in their electoral base who would get wiped out by cheap foreign labor, their safe blue states do not benefit from being even more blue-voting, and the purple Rust Belt states they won before Trump have almost no immigrants in them.
But let's move onto the topic of how the electoral map changes over time, not just what the cross-section looks like at a snapshot in time. Do demographic changes result in electoral changes?
Within the regions that would defect from the GOP electoral base of the Nixon-Reagan era, it was the Pacific NW states that left first in 1988, with California trailing in '92. Likewise the Lutheran Triangle states defected first in '88, followed by Illinois in '92. In the states with at least some portion lying in Appalachia, it was West Virginia to defect first in '88, followed in '92 by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, etc.
The trend in demographic changes was the opposite -- at 60% white circa 1990, California should have fallen before Oregon and Washington, which were still 90% white. Similarly for the Lutheran Triangle states compared to Illinois, or West Virginia compared to Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. The whitest states flipped blue first within their region.
Texas should have flipped blue decades ago, if demographics mattered. It is scarcely whiter than California in each of the Censuses from 1990 through 2010, and the percentage has declined steadily as well. And yet Texas remains one of the bastions of the GOP at all levels of government.
Turning to blacks instead of Hispanics as the non-white group, they make up the largest share of the population in the Deep South -- another bastion of the GOP at all levels.
And it's not as though all of the various shifts in the electoral maps since our nation's founding are tracking changes in racial or ethnic composition. A good theory explains as much of the data as possible, and the ethnic-oriented theory limits itself at best to the post-Civil Rights era for blacks as the non-white group, and the post-1986 amnesty for Hispanics.
A superior theory views parties as coalitions of elite factions representing the most powerful sectors of society -- banks, tech, media, military, energy, agriculture, etc. These coalitions use the party system to advance their material interests -- whichever party is controlled by the military, will push for higher troop deployments and weapons procurement, and whichever party is controlled by the banks will work harder to deregulate financial activity.
This is similar to Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of party competition, although without having read his books, I'm not sure whether he stresses non-businesses like the military (or the church, in an older time).
Currently the Democrats are controlled by finance, tech, and the media (informational, labor-insensitive), while the Republicans are controlled by the military, agriculture, and energy sectors (material, labor-intensive). It used to be different, though, with the Democrats being the militarist party for much of the 20th century, as their electoral base was the Deep South ("the Solid South") with its heavy concentration of military-related jobs.
As that example suggests, the electoral map will reflect which economic sectors are the major patrons of the local workforce. None of those sectors is uniformly distributed around the country -- there's lots of farmland in the Great Plains, but not in Rhode Island. There's a concentration of tech firms around Silicon Valley but not in Montana, banks along the Bos-Wash Corridor but not in the South, and oil fields in Texas but not in Massachusetts.
Getting back to California, what flipped it blue from 1992 to today, compared to its solid red or swing state status during the previous decades, was the evaporation of the military sector as the Cold War drew to a close. There used to be all sorts of major military installations in California, but many were shuttered by the Base Realignment and Closure program, whose targets were announced in 1988. Any work that was lateral to these bases, or downstream of them, would have dried up as well.
In place of Cold War or WWII-era military activity, the new activity in California circa 1990 and after would fall within the informational tech sector, as well as the finance sector (venture capital) that gave them their start-up funding. It's not as though these sectors provide all employment in the state, but if you're living and voting in California, you are more likely to currently have a job, or be searching for a job, in those sectors rather than at a military base or a farm.
Sure enough, these differences appear even within California -- the Bay Area is the bluest, with its concentration of tech, finance, and higher ed employment, while the red parts of the state are the agricultural plantations further inland, along with the lone major military installation of the San Diego Naval Base.
Since the shift in the electoral map around 1990, there hasn't been much of a change in which parts of the country rely heavily on agriculture or energy extraction (a little more in Ohio recently with fracking). The main change was the downsizing of military-related employment once the Cold War was over, which subtracts a lot of voters from the reliable Republican column.
But those same areas along the West Coast also saw the growth of tech firms, which were related to the former military spending -- most major R&D is paid for by the government, with the Defense Department paying the most. Without DoD-funded research laying the solid foundation, there would be no Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or Google. These informational firms that supplanted the military bases took the West Coast states from a mere loss for the GOP to a solid gain for the Democrats. They might have turned into purple swing states if they had only lost the military work without any informational sectors to fill the void.
If Texas ever turns blue, it will be for the same reason. It will be hard to flip since it is home to all three major GOP sectors -- military bases, oil fields, and ranches and farmland. But over time, maybe some of those will fade out, and more tech firms pop up around Austin, more finance jobs pop up around Dallas, and more media outlets base themselves there for cheaper office rents. As more residents seek work in those sectors, rather than the material sectors, they will vote more Democrat in order to make a living off of its patronage network rooted in the informational sectors.
The same goes for Georgia, another state the Dems are hoping to flip. But not until there are different major employers. The South and Texas are the regions least affected by the military closures after the Cold War -- the fighting spirit of the Celtic people who settled these regions is not going to let them get rid of all their military installations. So they're reliably Republican as long as that party remains the one controlled by the military.
How strongly is the Southern vote tied to the military? In 1952 and '56, the whole country voted Republican except for the South. This was Eisenhower, not a Civil Rights crusader like Johnson in '64. Why didn't they like Ike? Since the country was enjoying post-WWII prosperity, the main campaign issue was the Korean War -- begun as usual by a Democrat (Truman), who used to be the militarist party, with their Solid South electoral base.
Eisenhower campaigned on exiting the Korean War, which he delivered on, and ended up slashing the military budget in half afterwards since they were no longer in a major war. That's not good for the military patronage flowing to the South, so they were the only region to reject him (both times).
How did Trump win back the Rust Belt for Republicans? He promised to revive a patronage network with them as the beneficiaries -- bringing their manufacturing sector back to life. He didn't have much of a record to point to, but it's not like the Democrats did either (although they do have a superior record on voting against free trade deals). Unlike the West Coast, the Rust Belt did not see a surge in tech or finance companies during the post-Cold War transition away from military employment. So they were left in purple / swing state status.
And they decided to gamble on Trump, the would-be patron of manufacturing. To the extent they notice factories returning, hiring more people, for full-time, benefit-bringing jobs, with good pay, they'll keep on betting on the GOP.
If they don't notice their factories coming roaring back to life, and if Pennsylvania doesn't notice steel rising from the grave, they will dump the GOP as failed patrons and go back to being mild blue states. They don't have much energy production or military bases (outside of Wright-Patterson AFB in swing-state Ohio), although they do have a decent level of agriculture. On the other hand, there's not a lot of tech start-ups, though there are some financial and insurance companies, and large state schools.
It will all come down to who gets the manufacturing sector voters. They ought to be protected by the material sector party, the GOP, but the greedy manufacturing employers have decided to renege on being patrons to the locals and sent their jobs out of the country to be done by cheap labor. They will vote with whichever party wants to slam enough tariffs on their employers to force them to become patrons of their state's economy again.
That would naturally be the Democrats, but we'll see if they can get their act together, while pointing out the failure of the GOP to deliver on Trump's protectionist crusade themes of the campaign.
Pennsylvania would also be helped back into the GOP column by re-opening the massive naval base and shipyard that used to be in Philadelphia -- the nation's first one, and a shame to have been put on the death list early in the post-Cold War era.
I probably shouldn't share that secret, since I've soured on the GOP and would like PA to go back to blue-under-Bernie. But it just shows how little the GOP wants to win the presidency -- destroying patronage networks for large-population states that were not deep red to begin with, and where residents have responded to the betrayal by their former patrons by voting for the other party instead.
So that's what changes a state from being for one party or the other -- changes in which sectors are patrons in the local economy, as well as changes in which party a sector finds itself in a coalition with. Both are subject to change over time.
The least insightful way to analyze politics is focusing on race and ethnicity. It's only good if the goal is anthropology, or the sociology of race and inter-racial dynamics. But not how power is wielded and toward what ends in the political realm, which is rooted entirely in economics.
As for opposing amnesty, that leaves two main arguments: 1) wanting to preserve American culture, and 2) wanting to prevent a lower standard-of-living among Americans as they compete economically with immigrants (lower wages, higher rents).
The standard losing argument is "to prevent one or more states from turning into Democrat bastions". Already you've lost the Democrats, who would be open to the working-class protection argument, as well as most Independents, who want to keep the option open of voting for either party. Plus it ignores what the Democrats stand for -- not long ago, they were the militarist party, then it changed to the non-militarist party. Obsessing over partisan victory per se marks you as an airheaded cheerleader with no vision or direction.
I say focus mostly on the economic argument -- if you can win over enough Independents and Democrats, you will get the same outcome as if you had argued on the much tougher argument about cultural preservation. As long as we keep down immigration and send back the ones already here, we will have preserved our American culture -- regardless of how we argued for it. Just get it done however it needs to get done, and enjoy the cultural benefits afterward.
It is a non-starter, since California is one of the states where Democrats win the presidential vote even among white voters only. During the Bush-Obama years, these states included the entire West Coast, the Lutheran Triangle of MN, WI, and IA, and the Northeast beginning with NY.
So whatever turned the West Coast into a Democrat bastion has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. An earlier post covered this in detail: amnesty would be suicide for the Dems, not the GOP. Dems have labor unions in their electoral base who would get wiped out by cheap foreign labor, their safe blue states do not benefit from being even more blue-voting, and the purple Rust Belt states they won before Trump have almost no immigrants in them.
But let's move onto the topic of how the electoral map changes over time, not just what the cross-section looks like at a snapshot in time. Do demographic changes result in electoral changes?
Within the regions that would defect from the GOP electoral base of the Nixon-Reagan era, it was the Pacific NW states that left first in 1988, with California trailing in '92. Likewise the Lutheran Triangle states defected first in '88, followed by Illinois in '92. In the states with at least some portion lying in Appalachia, it was West Virginia to defect first in '88, followed in '92 by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, etc.
The trend in demographic changes was the opposite -- at 60% white circa 1990, California should have fallen before Oregon and Washington, which were still 90% white. Similarly for the Lutheran Triangle states compared to Illinois, or West Virginia compared to Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. The whitest states flipped blue first within their region.
Texas should have flipped blue decades ago, if demographics mattered. It is scarcely whiter than California in each of the Censuses from 1990 through 2010, and the percentage has declined steadily as well. And yet Texas remains one of the bastions of the GOP at all levels of government.
Turning to blacks instead of Hispanics as the non-white group, they make up the largest share of the population in the Deep South -- another bastion of the GOP at all levels.
And it's not as though all of the various shifts in the electoral maps since our nation's founding are tracking changes in racial or ethnic composition. A good theory explains as much of the data as possible, and the ethnic-oriented theory limits itself at best to the post-Civil Rights era for blacks as the non-white group, and the post-1986 amnesty for Hispanics.
A superior theory views parties as coalitions of elite factions representing the most powerful sectors of society -- banks, tech, media, military, energy, agriculture, etc. These coalitions use the party system to advance their material interests -- whichever party is controlled by the military, will push for higher troop deployments and weapons procurement, and whichever party is controlled by the banks will work harder to deregulate financial activity.
This is similar to Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of party competition, although without having read his books, I'm not sure whether he stresses non-businesses like the military (or the church, in an older time).
Currently the Democrats are controlled by finance, tech, and the media (informational, labor-insensitive), while the Republicans are controlled by the military, agriculture, and energy sectors (material, labor-intensive). It used to be different, though, with the Democrats being the militarist party for much of the 20th century, as their electoral base was the Deep South ("the Solid South") with its heavy concentration of military-related jobs.
As that example suggests, the electoral map will reflect which economic sectors are the major patrons of the local workforce. None of those sectors is uniformly distributed around the country -- there's lots of farmland in the Great Plains, but not in Rhode Island. There's a concentration of tech firms around Silicon Valley but not in Montana, banks along the Bos-Wash Corridor but not in the South, and oil fields in Texas but not in Massachusetts.
Getting back to California, what flipped it blue from 1992 to today, compared to its solid red or swing state status during the previous decades, was the evaporation of the military sector as the Cold War drew to a close. There used to be all sorts of major military installations in California, but many were shuttered by the Base Realignment and Closure program, whose targets were announced in 1988. Any work that was lateral to these bases, or downstream of them, would have dried up as well.
In place of Cold War or WWII-era military activity, the new activity in California circa 1990 and after would fall within the informational tech sector, as well as the finance sector (venture capital) that gave them their start-up funding. It's not as though these sectors provide all employment in the state, but if you're living and voting in California, you are more likely to currently have a job, or be searching for a job, in those sectors rather than at a military base or a farm.
Sure enough, these differences appear even within California -- the Bay Area is the bluest, with its concentration of tech, finance, and higher ed employment, while the red parts of the state are the agricultural plantations further inland, along with the lone major military installation of the San Diego Naval Base.
Since the shift in the electoral map around 1990, there hasn't been much of a change in which parts of the country rely heavily on agriculture or energy extraction (a little more in Ohio recently with fracking). The main change was the downsizing of military-related employment once the Cold War was over, which subtracts a lot of voters from the reliable Republican column.
But those same areas along the West Coast also saw the growth of tech firms, which were related to the former military spending -- most major R&D is paid for by the government, with the Defense Department paying the most. Without DoD-funded research laying the solid foundation, there would be no Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or Google. These informational firms that supplanted the military bases took the West Coast states from a mere loss for the GOP to a solid gain for the Democrats. They might have turned into purple swing states if they had only lost the military work without any informational sectors to fill the void.
If Texas ever turns blue, it will be for the same reason. It will be hard to flip since it is home to all three major GOP sectors -- military bases, oil fields, and ranches and farmland. But over time, maybe some of those will fade out, and more tech firms pop up around Austin, more finance jobs pop up around Dallas, and more media outlets base themselves there for cheaper office rents. As more residents seek work in those sectors, rather than the material sectors, they will vote more Democrat in order to make a living off of its patronage network rooted in the informational sectors.
The same goes for Georgia, another state the Dems are hoping to flip. But not until there are different major employers. The South and Texas are the regions least affected by the military closures after the Cold War -- the fighting spirit of the Celtic people who settled these regions is not going to let them get rid of all their military installations. So they're reliably Republican as long as that party remains the one controlled by the military.
How strongly is the Southern vote tied to the military? In 1952 and '56, the whole country voted Republican except for the South. This was Eisenhower, not a Civil Rights crusader like Johnson in '64. Why didn't they like Ike? Since the country was enjoying post-WWII prosperity, the main campaign issue was the Korean War -- begun as usual by a Democrat (Truman), who used to be the militarist party, with their Solid South electoral base.
Eisenhower campaigned on exiting the Korean War, which he delivered on, and ended up slashing the military budget in half afterwards since they were no longer in a major war. That's not good for the military patronage flowing to the South, so they were the only region to reject him (both times).
How did Trump win back the Rust Belt for Republicans? He promised to revive a patronage network with them as the beneficiaries -- bringing their manufacturing sector back to life. He didn't have much of a record to point to, but it's not like the Democrats did either (although they do have a superior record on voting against free trade deals). Unlike the West Coast, the Rust Belt did not see a surge in tech or finance companies during the post-Cold War transition away from military employment. So they were left in purple / swing state status.
And they decided to gamble on Trump, the would-be patron of manufacturing. To the extent they notice factories returning, hiring more people, for full-time, benefit-bringing jobs, with good pay, they'll keep on betting on the GOP.
If they don't notice their factories coming roaring back to life, and if Pennsylvania doesn't notice steel rising from the grave, they will dump the GOP as failed patrons and go back to being mild blue states. They don't have much energy production or military bases (outside of Wright-Patterson AFB in swing-state Ohio), although they do have a decent level of agriculture. On the other hand, there's not a lot of tech start-ups, though there are some financial and insurance companies, and large state schools.
It will all come down to who gets the manufacturing sector voters. They ought to be protected by the material sector party, the GOP, but the greedy manufacturing employers have decided to renege on being patrons to the locals and sent their jobs out of the country to be done by cheap labor. They will vote with whichever party wants to slam enough tariffs on their employers to force them to become patrons of their state's economy again.
That would naturally be the Democrats, but we'll see if they can get their act together, while pointing out the failure of the GOP to deliver on Trump's protectionist crusade themes of the campaign.
Pennsylvania would also be helped back into the GOP column by re-opening the massive naval base and shipyard that used to be in Philadelphia -- the nation's first one, and a shame to have been put on the death list early in the post-Cold War era.
I probably shouldn't share that secret, since I've soured on the GOP and would like PA to go back to blue-under-Bernie. But it just shows how little the GOP wants to win the presidency -- destroying patronage networks for large-population states that were not deep red to begin with, and where residents have responded to the betrayal by their former patrons by voting for the other party instead.
So that's what changes a state from being for one party or the other -- changes in which sectors are patrons in the local economy, as well as changes in which party a sector finds itself in a coalition with. Both are subject to change over time.
The least insightful way to analyze politics is focusing on race and ethnicity. It's only good if the goal is anthropology, or the sociology of race and inter-racial dynamics. But not how power is wielded and toward what ends in the political realm, which is rooted entirely in economics.
As for opposing amnesty, that leaves two main arguments: 1) wanting to preserve American culture, and 2) wanting to prevent a lower standard-of-living among Americans as they compete economically with immigrants (lower wages, higher rents).
The standard losing argument is "to prevent one or more states from turning into Democrat bastions". Already you've lost the Democrats, who would be open to the working-class protection argument, as well as most Independents, who want to keep the option open of voting for either party. Plus it ignores what the Democrats stand for -- not long ago, they were the militarist party, then it changed to the non-militarist party. Obsessing over partisan victory per se marks you as an airheaded cheerleader with no vision or direction.
I say focus mostly on the economic argument -- if you can win over enough Independents and Democrats, you will get the same outcome as if you had argued on the much tougher argument about cultural preservation. As long as we keep down immigration and send back the ones already here, we will have preserved our American culture -- regardless of how we argued for it. Just get it done however it needs to get done, and enjoy the cultural benefits afterward.
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