Mitch's Blog

Cory Doctorow: Xi’s 2012-2015 anti-corruption campaign routed out real and serious corruption — but only when done by Xi’s opponents. Xi’s allies were allowed to continue grifting. Look for Trump to follow that lead in prosecuting corrupt businesses, including antitrust. He’ll find real abuse but turn a blind eye to his allies' crimes.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don’t pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It’s a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the “intelligence community” – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won’t target them because they’re crooked: he’ll target them because they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy’s enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he’ll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That’s exactly what he’ll do.

Hamilton Nolan:

The worst part of the week after the presidential election has been the bombardment of “What the Democrats Must Do Now” messages from people who certainly do not know the answer to that question. “Regular Folks, my Students at Yale Tell Me, Are Tired of the Elites,” by David Brooks. “Some Friendly and Helpful Suggestions to My Friends on the Left,” by Bret Stephens. “Guhhh… Woke! Buhhh” by Pamela Paul. … The zombie opinion-creation industry does not even require a reflection period to trot out an entire set of prescriptions. They just changed the date on the label on the old prescriptions.

You can divide the post-election reactions of people in power into two groups: Genuine Attempts to Grapple With Reality, and then the larger group of Soothing Rationalizations of What Just Happened Which Will Allow People in Power to Continue on in Their Nice Lives. The danger is that the first group gets seduced by the second group and as a result we get the next four years of the same people doing the same things to the same effect. (You may notice that straightforward ideas like “fire everyone in Democratic Party leadership positions automatically after a national election loss” do not appear to be on the table.) This sort of conversation, in which many participants are concerned with covering their own asses, and all theses are unverifiable, is always in peril of puttering out into a grand conclusion of “Change nothing,” despite that being the one plan that has already been proven to be bad.

The “veneer of ‘nonpartisanship’ in mainstream media … causes them to focus on horse race analytics rather than on interrogating the morality of policy questions has seeped into the mind of the general public and now causes a great deal of election analysis to be amateur message analysis rather than substantive discussions of what humans need from politicians. If you find yourself thinking, “How should we change our messaging to win the next campaign?” I suggest you hit yourself hard on the head with a hammer a few times.

…

(Not to grind old axes, but this is the “Defund the Police” problem: a good policy addressing a substantive issue that the public found themselves completely unable to discuss substantively because all anyone would talk about was the slogan itself…. )

…

What the Democrats should do substantively going forward is: Fix people’s problems. Attack the crisis of economic inequality. Tax the rich and send the money to the poor and working class and create universal public health care and child care and free education and strengthen the labor movement and restrict the power of capital and watch the nation’s deepest problems shrink, because the nation’s deepest problems stem from the fact that America allows capitalism to arrange everything for the benefit of capital, which results in an array of awful consequences for humanity.

Addressing economic unfairness will be hard because it requires Democrats to go against the interests of their wealthy donors. Much easier to hope to win over Trump voters by being more racist and “tough on the border” and join in the persecution of trans people, Nolan says. Instead, Democrats must do it all: Fight persecution of all types.

Coal miners who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain–members of the white working class circa 1921– resisted racism and focused on going to war with evil rich people. I believe we can too.

Debra Whitman at the Wall Street Journal: Stress about growing older becomes self-fulfilling. The stress itself causes physiological health problems.

Also:

… our expectations about growing older become self-fulfilling because they affect how we behave. For example, while a positive attitude about aging doesn’t take the place of exercise and eating well, a belief that we can live long and healthy lives often encourages people to invest in their future selves by taking more walks and eating more greens.

On the flip side, when we view health problems as inevitable, we’re more likely to see healthy behaviors as futile. [And:] When older people believe that unhappiness comes with age, they are less likely to seek treatment for depression.

Bret Stephens cites Amsterdam pogroms and hate crimes in Chicago, Brooklyn, Paris and inside Israel and says:

Notice what these attackers aren’t saying. They aren’t expressing themselves in the faddish language of anti-Zionism. They aren’t denouncing Israeli policy or speaking up for Palestinian rights. They aren’t trying to make careful distinctions between Jews and Israelis. They are, like generations of pogromists before them, simply out to get the Jews — a reminder, if one was needed, of the truth often attributed to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Trump is a scab, the Dems need unions, and the Dems are not faithful friends to unions. Harris campaign advisor – her brother-in-law Tony West – is Uber’s chief legal officer and the architect of Prop 22, California’s scab law that formalized “gig work” labor violations. The fact that when the eminently guillotineable union-buster Howard Schultz tries to win a presidential nomination he does so in the Democratic party speaks volumes. If your political party has room for Michael Bloomberg, it doesn’t have room for workers. Seriously, fuck that guy.

— General Strike 2028: Unions fight fascism

A friend is lining up all his vaccinations for the next four years to prepare for anti-vaxxers taking charge of the US healthcare system.

Another friend is stocking up on electronics purchases now, anticipating price increases because of tariffs.

Another friend is diversifying his investment portfolio and moving investments overseas.

And, of course, some people are stocking up on survival gear or leaving the US.

How about you?

We’re not doing anything different, at least not now. If the US is going fascist, I can think of nowhere I’d rather be than California. Certainly not outside the US — no place in the world will be free of US foreign policy.