[y66]

Quote of the day:

Quote

“Trump did not create the Republican Congress; the Republican Congress created Trump.” -- former Senate majority leader Harry Reid

[Winstonm]

 y66, on 2019-May-09, 16:21, said:

Quote of the day:

From my understanding, the possibility of a demagogue winning a party's nomination can be traced back to Bobby Kennedy's assassination and the following 1968 Democratic convention where Hubert Humphrey, who did not run in a single primary, was chosen by the Democratic party brokers to be their nominee. This action so angered the anti-war Democrats that the police were called onto the convention floor, while outside the convention police and protesters collided in bloody and violent attacks.

After this disaster, the call for open and more democratic methods of choosing a nominee led to increased emphasis on the primary vote as binding on delegates took off with today's methods the end result.

[johnu]

Trump Ghostwriter Charles Leerhsen Says President Was Bad At Business

No surprise to anybody who reads or watches real news. Viewers of the Fox Propaganda Network should ignore this and remain blissfully ignorant.

Quote

But Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling.

Somebody should send a couple of suitcases full of fabric swatches to the White House to take Dennison's mind off a trade war with China and military action in Iran

Quote

Once during a lull I told him a story I thought he’d like to hear about how I had just taken the Trump Shuttle to Washington, and as we flew through a storm the plane had been struck by lightning. I commended the pilot for the way he handled the incident; he had gotten on the loudspeaker to tell the passengers what had happened and to reassure them.

But instead of being pleased to hear that, Trump, using the general number, immediately dialed the shuttle to demand to know why he hadn’t been informed about what had happened. Unfortunately it took about 10 rings before it was answered by a woman who said, “Good morning, Trump Shuttle.” By then he was purple with rage. “This ... is ... Donald ... Trump!” he growled. For the poor woman, it must have been like working at Popeye’s and getting a call from the sailor man himself. “Why did it take so long to answer this phone?” Trump demanded. Then, after bawling her out for a minute or two, he hung up abruptly, forgetting why he had called in the first place.

Dennison has a mind like a steel trap. Unfortunately it was left out in the rain and doesn't work anymore because it is completely rusted.

[y66]

From How California, Oregon and Washington are winning the fight against Trump’s hateful policies by Timothy Egan at NYT:

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LOS ANGELES — A big crowd showed up for the festive unveiling of President Barack Obama Boulevard here last weekend, at the intersection of “hope and resistance,” as one news outlet put it. Sure, it’s just a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of road, a living ex-president’s name added to streets honoring Jefferson and Washington.

But the ceremony also marked the latest, and one of the most joyous, of the not-so-subtle ways in which the West Coast continues to live free and prosper under a president doing everything he can to hurt the 51 million Americans in the three lower-48 states that hug the Pacific shore.

President Trump hates the West Coast. He has called California “out of control” and boasted about “my sick idea” to dump migrants into the progressive cities in this time zone. Worst of all, his administration is actively working to take away health care from more than five million people in California alone.

He appears to have warmer feelings for Kim Jong-un, the thug who starves his own people — “We fell in love,” Trump once said of North Korea’s dictator — than for a majority of citizens under his rule on the West Coast. He has higher praise for a traitor and slaveholder, Robert E. Lee — “a great general” — than for the states working under a hostile administration without seceding from the union.

His energy and environmental policies would hasten the collapse of some of nature’s finest handiwork, from a pristine coastline that he tried to open to oil drilling, to forests that will soon be aflame again because the president will not do anything to stall climate change.

His trade war is a bullet that could wound the nation’s most trade-dependent state, Washington, which produces apples and wine and software and coffee and jetliners and trucks and global health care for the world.

To Trump, everything “Out West” is like occupied territory. Almost daily, he issues legal missives and executive orders intended in some way to make life worse on the West Coast.

But here’s the good news for E Pluribus Unum: He’s losing. Badly. The West Coast is crushing it against Trump. Using the law to fight a bully, the Constitution to challenge an authoritarian, and facts against Fox News-driven fantasy, California, Oregon and Washington have stalled some of the most despicable of Trump’s retrograde policies.

And this is the place to say that, yes, Trump loathes the rest of Blue America as well, and many of those states are on the front lines against Trump.

But this president has a particular strain of hatred within his tiny dark heart for the Pacific states. And they hate him back. After the wipeout in last year’s congressional elections, only a mere 38-mile strip of the Pacific shore in the lower 48 states, in Washington, remains in Republican hands.

In California and Washington, the ranks of the uninsured have fallen to record lows because of Obamacare. Would any other sitting president go out of his way to reverse that lifesaving progress? He recently directed his Justice Department to try to kill the entirety of the Affordable Care Act.

If the law stands, and the 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions keep their legal protections, you can thank California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, for leading an aggressive coalition to defend Obama’s greatest legacy.

Federal judges have repeatedly sided with California against Trump on air pollution, toxic pesticides and oil drilling. In April, the Interior Department was forced to suspend a plan to drill off the Pacific shore. And a federal judge in Oregon has so far backed a far-reaching attempt to hold Trump’s government responsible for averting climate change.

West Coast governors have defied Trump’s ban on transgender Americans serving in the military; they’ve opened their National Guard ranks to the people Trump is trying to shun from service.

Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, has filed 36 lawsuits against the Trump administration and has not lost a case. His first takedown of the tyrant halted, nationwide, the initial Muslim ban.

Last week, Trump went to bat for social media extremists and conspiracy theorists, issuing a warning to the Silicon Valley companies that are trying to banish the hatemongers: “We are monitoring and watching, closely!” Actually, they’re monitoring and watching him — closely. It’s, um, what they do in Big Tech.

Under Trump’s guidance, the United States is running up debt faster than one of his bankrupt casinos. It’s what he does. By contrast, California, after raising taxes on the rich and wages for the poor, after extending family leave and health care, is projecting a $21 billion budget surplus for the coming fiscal year.

Talent and capital can go anywhere. It’s drawn to the West Coast, because creativity doesn’t grow well in nurseries of fear and tired thinking. Washington was named the best state for business in 2017, and the best place for workers in 2018.

We’ll soon look west for a replacement for Trump. By moving their presidential primaries up to March, California and Washington have assured that the one-in-seven Americans who live in those two states will have an early say. It’s only fitting, given how much they’ve contributed to the fight against the Trump blight on the Republic.

Power to the people! Stick it to this dark hearted man!

[johnu]

MyPillow Lays Off 150 Workers After Praising Trump’s Tax Cuts, ‘Booming Economy’

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MyPillow, one of the few remaining advertisers frequently featured on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, is laying off more than 100 employees not even a year after the company’s founder praised President Donald Trump for creating a “booming economy.”

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“After more than 500 days with Donald Trump as our president — with record-low unemployment and a booming economy — it’s clear, Minnesota, that we can rest easy,” wrote Lindell in the op-ed.

[johnu]

Dennison's lack of understanding of tariffs costs Americans billions

Trump Trade War Just Raised Taxes On Consumers By Tens Of Billions of Dollars

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“Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products. These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.,” Trump wrote on Twitter, repeating the false claim he made to reporters Thursday about “all of the tariffs that China has been paying us for the last eight months ― billions and billions of dollars.”

But that assertion, one that Trump has made in various forms dozens of times through the years, has no basis in fact.

“No, no, no. No! Not so. False. Wrong. Nuh-uh,” said Jared Bernstein, once the top economic adviser to former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden. “Tariffs are paid by the importing company who then typically tries to pass the tax off on consumers.

As far as the importing companies passing the tariff costs on to consumers

Trump's Washing Machine Tariffs Cleaned Out Consumers

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President Donald Trump's tariffs on washing machines resulted in consumers paying an extra 12 percent, on average, to buy a new dryer last year, new data show.

Yes, you read that correctly. Tariffs on imported washing machines ended up increasing not only the retail price of washing machines but dryers too—despite the fact that dryers were not subject to the new import taxes imposed by the Trump administration in January 2018. Research from a trio of economists at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve show that retailers made the decision to hike the price of both washing machines and dryers (since they are frequently bought together) after the tariffs took effect.

LOL, the tariffs on washing machines gave cover to dryer companies to raise prices even though they didn't have to pay tariffs on dryers.

[johnu]

Ocasio-Cortez compares GOP to Dwight from 'The Office'

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This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and “fact check” it. Like the “world ending in 12 years” thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.

Obviously this goes a little overboard. I'm pretty sure that sea sponges are very fine people too.

[Winstonm]

We are inexorably moving toward a morally insolvent United States:

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By Sherrilyn Ifill

Since April 2018, more than two dozen executive and judicial nominees have declined to endorse the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This week — one that marks the 65th anniversary of the landmark ruling that struck down legal apartheid in this country — the Senate is poised to confirm three of those judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench.

That is simply unacceptable.

Few of us — no matter our race, color or creed — would recognize our democracy or legal system without the changes touched off by this momentous civil rights case. For nearly 65 years, the legal consensus around Brown was unequivocal. With its transformational opinion eviscerating segregation and codifying the modern contours of equal justice, Brown remained above partisanship, ideology and everything else.


Even the most conservative judges affirmed its centrality to our nation’s democratic character. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. repeatedly affirmed his agreement with Brown. That same year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. explained that Brown “vindicated what the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was supposed to mean, which was to guarantee equal rights to people of all races.” Just last year, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh described Brown as the “single greatest moment in Supreme Court history.”

But in April 2018, Trump judicial nominee Wendy Vitter bucked more than a half-century of unanimity by failing to offer support for the Brown decision. In response to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) request for her position, Vitter said, “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with.” Judicial nominees such as Andrew Oldham, Neomi Rao and Michael Park followed Vitter’s lead.

This response simply doesn’t pass muster. The reluctance to speak about Brown cannot be explained by the rationale frequently offered by nominees who refuse to answer questions about Citizens United, for instance, namely that the case is one that might come back before the court. But no serious legal analyst thinks the issue of segregation will be relitigated ever again. In 2005, Roberts deemed Brown as unlikely to come back before the court as Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established the principle of Supreme Court judicial review.

More recently, and more perplexingly, President Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general also refused to answer the question. This is unprecedented territory for a Justice Department nominee during the Trump administration, and it appears to be new ground for a Justice Department nominee in any administration since the watershed decision. Jeffrey Rosen said he could not be expected to go through “thousands of Supreme Court opinions and say which ones are right and which ones are wrong.” But the deputy attorney general oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, whose mandate is to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws and precedent, including Brown. We do, in fact, have a right to know his position.

So, what’s the real reason these executive and judicial nominees are suddenly demurring on Brown? The ugly truth is that declining to offer approval of Brown signals a willingness to question the project of democracy that Brown created — one in which African Americans and other marginalized groups compelled the federal courts to honor the spirit of equal justice embodied in the words of the 14th Amendment. And this isn’t just deeply troubling; it’s also downright dangerous.

Once positioned near the center of the canon of Supreme Court jurisprudence, it’s hard not to conclude that a move is afoot to move Brown to the margins. If distancing oneself from Brown becomes an accepted marker of conservative legal bona fides, something monumental will have shifted in American legal thinking and values.

But there has been little public outrage about this clearly orchestrated response by Trump nominees. That is a colossal mistake. Perhaps we have blown past so many norms and guardrails over the past two years that we have become numb to the onslaught. But we must awaken from this paralysis. This year, when so much is at stake, we must reclaim Brown. We must demand that all nominees to the federal bench offer their support of this central feature of the rule of law in the United States.

If we are to pass down to our children a system that will protect their rights for decades to come, we must reject nominees who reduce Brown to merely one among “thousands of Supreme Court opinions” rather than as a seminal case that anchors our very conception of modern American democracy.

Support for Brown should be regarded as a low bar to clear for any judicial or Justice Department nominee. That scores of Trump nominees have been confirmed despite a refusal to even approach this simple question is a shameful reminder of how far we have moved away from principles that once enjoyed broad consensus in this “new normal.” Nominees either support Brown, the rule of law and equality under the law, or they do not. And if they do not, they put our very democracy at risk.

[Zelandakh]

Ben Shapiro BBC interview. The interviewer is Andrew Neil, regarded by many as the most right-winged voice on British political programming.

[awm]

 Zelandakh, on 2019-May-14, 03:27, said:

Ben Shapiro BBC interview. The interviewer is Andrew Neil, regarded by many as the most right-winged voice on British political programming.

Now that we live in Switzerland, we are watching quite a bit more BBC. Interviews on BBC are (in general) a lot more adversarial than interviews on US news media. American political figures are used to ignoring questions they don't like, talking over the interviewer, reciting canned talking points, and outright lying when the truth isn't favorable to their position. They are virtually never called on this by US journalists, who typically just move on to the next question. In comparison, BBC interviewers really attack the people they're interviewing and tend to call them on all of these behaviors, which explains some of what's going on in this particular interview. We find the BBC style much more informative and entertaining, although this would never work in the US with the myriad channels and no main "national news network" (an American interviewer who did these things would find it very difficult to get more interviews, since there are so many other options to get on TV).

[y66]

From A de Gaulle of Our Own -- "In search of a statesman with a certain idea of America" by Ross Douthat at NYT:

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[Julian Jackson's] new biography of de Gaulle is relevant — in addition to just being educational, a sweeping-yet-concise introduction to the most brilliant, infuriating and ineffably French of men — because his grand project, his only consistent purpose apart from his own ambition, was a struggle to reintegrate the competing narratives of Frenchness, to get his country to transcend its ideological civil war.

De Gaulle was a man of the French right, associated from his earliest days with conservative institutions — the Catholic Church, the military — and right-wing and monarchist family traditions. But his particular style of nationalism, his extreme devotion to a “certain idea of France,” made him constantly inclined to seek a more inclusive nationalism — one that would lionize the military heroes of the ancien régime and the generals of the revolutionary period equally, let Joan of Arc live beside Marianne, and enable Paris's jostling, rivalrous monuments, Catholic and Bourbon and Republican and Bonapartist, to share the city rather than dividing it.

As with any reinvention of tradition there was an artificiality to Gaullism, a deliberate submerging of many important controversies, a mythmaking about national “grandeur” that dodged as many questions as it answered. Unsurprisingly, it somewhat disappointed its perpetually disappointed leader, who felt that the France he forged was less than he had hoped — less conservative in its culture, less ambitious and effective in its policy, less glorious than the France of his imagination. And like any such project, it was provisional, bequeathing buried tensions that in today’s France are being increasingly exhumed.

But compared with other efforts at statesmanship in long-divided countries, it had enduring effects without requiring disastrous bloodshed. “Gaullism succeeded,” Jackson writes, “in becoming the synthesis of French political traditions, or as de Gaulle put it, reconciling the left to the state and the right to the nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.” That synthesis required rejection as well as inclusion, with enemies to both the right and left — the Communists to one side, the Vichyites and eventually the betrayed Algerian colonials to the other. It required cynicism and compromise, a blitheness about constitutional niceties and a cult of personality. But it established a unity out of deep division that could not have been anticipated in 1940.

Of course that raises the question of whether anything like Gaullism would have been possible without the total French collapse in that dark year, which simultaneously established de Gaulle as the unconquered embodiment of a conquered nation and discredited, through the stain on Vichy, elements of the right that might have more successfully opposed him. If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study.

But even with that caveat, I would still hand Jackson’s biography to any politician who imagines breaking out of our 50-50 politics and governing as a national rather than a tribal figure. What it suggests, above all, is the centrality of narrative and imagination to successful statesmanship, and the extent to which it’s possible for a very unusual sort of politician to effectively reinvent tradition, synthesize from conflict, and persuade many millions of people to go along with it.

And it also suggests the importance of a Gaullist question for our would-be leaders: What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include?

Good question Ross.

[Winstonm]

For anyone who still doesn't believe how close we are to losing our country to a radical minority, I submit these seemingly unrelated items:

A)

Quote

In 1992, the Supreme Court looked poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark case protecting abortion rights. They didn’t, however, and the main reason was respect for precedent—specifically, the legal doctrine known as stare decisis, or “let the decision stand.”

Hyatt was, in large part, about stare decisis. A 1979 Supreme Court case, Nevada v. Hall, held that citizens can sue a state in another state’s court. In 1998, Gilbert Hyatt did just that as part of a tax dispute, with tens of millions of dollars at stake. This week, the court overruled its 1979 decision by a vote of 5-4 and tossed out Hyatt’s claim. The split was on ideological lines, with the court’s five conservatives in the majority and four liberals in the minority.

B)

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Attorney General William Barr assigned a federal prosecutor to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, The New York Times reports. John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was reportedly tapped to look into how the probe—which culminated in the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report—started in the first place. President Trump has called for this investigation, claiming the probe was an “illegal takedown that failed” and proclaiming that “somebody’s going to be looking at the other side.

C)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has never shied away from rubbing shoulders with leaders more typically kept at a distance by the West, and his Oval Office meeting Monday with Hungary's far right-leaning prime minister was only the latest example of his engagement with strongmen.

Like Trump, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has espoused hard-line anti-migration rhetoric. The president described his guest this way: "Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that's OK. That's OK. You've done a good job and you've kept your country safe."

D) How Democracies Die chapter 4, Subverting Democracy:

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To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it's helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at least some of the other side's star players, and rewerite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage, in effect tilting the playing field against their opponents.

The way I view it, American democracy in our two-party system is like a marriage. To make it work, each side must commit to making the marriage superior to individual desires. In our current environment, we are much closer to divorce than to a stable marriage. And as anyone who has undergone the process knows, there are no winners in divorce. A house divided more often than not goes into foreclosure.

[Winstonm]

Ain't this grand? WaPo reports:

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In the weeks before they were ousted last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.

According to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security officials, the administration wanted to target the crush of families that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after the president’s failed “zero tolerance” prosecution push in early 2018. The ultimate purpose, the officials said, was a show of force to send the message that the United States was going to get tough by swiftly moving to detain and deport recent immigrants — including families with children.

The sprawling operation included an effort to fast-track immigration court cases, allowing the government to obtain deportation orders against those who did not show for their hearings — officials said 90 percent of those targeted were found deportable in their absence. The subsequent arrests would have required coordinated raids against parents with children in their homes and neighborhoods.

But Vitiello and Nielsen halted it, concerned about a lack of preparation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the risk of public outrage and worries that it would divert resources from the border.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albence were especially supportive of the plan, officials said, eager to execute dramatic, highly visible mass arrests that they argued would help deter the soaring influx of families.

The arrests were planned for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the other largest U.S. destinations for Central American migrants. Though some of the cities are considered “sanctuary” jurisdictions with police departments that do not cooperate with ICE, the plan did not single out those locations, officials said.

So this must be fake news, too? So this had nothing to do with Vitiello and Nielsen being fired, either, I guess?

Despite the fact that it was strongly supported by Stephen Miller and described as a "half-baked idea" which lends strong credibility to the reporting.

[cherdano]

 awm, on 2019-May-14, 06:47, said:

Now that we live in Switzerland, we are watching quite a bit more BBC. Interviews on BBC are (in general) a lot more adversarial than interviews on US news media. American political figures are used to ignoring questions they don't like, talking over the interviewer, reciting canned talking points, and outright lying when the truth isn't favorable to their position. They are virtually never called on this by US journalists, who typically just move on to the next question. In comparison, BBC interviewers really attack the people they're interviewing and tend to call them on all of these behaviors, which explains some of what's going on in this particular interview. We find the BBC style much more informative and entertaining, although this would never work in the US with the myriad channels and no main "national news network" (an American interviewer who did these things would find it very difficult to get more interviews, since there are so many other options to get on TV).

I don't think "attack" is really the right word for it. In some sense, they are giving the interviewee the opportunity to thoroughly argue for their position from first principles by contrasting their view with the opposite one. Imagine asking Elisabeth Warren "Isn't the threat of breaking up big banks/tech companies/... destroying the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America great?" - she'd relish the chance to explain how she arrived at this position, and what really drives her politics.

The problem of course is that this exposes the fraud that is Ben Shapiro. Since he is apparently good at winning debates with random college students, he thinks of himself as this intellectual philosophical giant, when in fact he cannot rigorously defend any of his views when questioned about them from a mildly surprising angle.

[Chas_P]

 Winstonm, on 2019-May-14, 09:46, said:

:
The way I view it, American democracy in our two-party system is like a marriage. To make it work, each side must commit to making the marriage superior to individual desires. In our current environment, we are much closer to divorce than to a stable marriage. And as anyone who has undergone the process knows, there are no winners in divorce. A house divided more often than not goes into foreclosure.

Well said Winston. I agree.

[Chas_P]

 johnu, on 2019-May-12, 18:28, said:

Ocasio-Cortez compares GOP to Dwight from 'The Office'


I'm pretty sure that sea sponges are very fine people too.

Yes they are! And with cognitive abilities somewhat greater than AOC and Mazie Hirono combined.

[johnu]

 Chas_NoDignity_NoSelfRespect_NoIntegrity, on 2019-May-14, 18:14, said:

Continues to demonstrate a total lack of self control in posting here.

[cherdano]

 Chas_P, on 2019-May-14, 18:14, said:

Yes they are! And with cognitive abilities somewhat greater than AOC and Mazie Hirono combined.

Wow! Yay! What a cool reply - that will school the libs!!! You are such a genius!

[y66]

From There’s a revealing puzzle in the China tariffs by Larry Summers at WaPo:

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On Monday, China announced new tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. exports, and the United States threatened new tariffs on up to $300 billion of Chinese goods. These actions were cited as the principal reason for a decline of more than 600 points in the Dow Jones industrial average, or about 2.4 percent in broader measures of the stock market. With the total value of U.S. stocks around $30 trillion, this decline represents more than $700 billion in lost wealth.

This was not an isolated event. Again and again in the past year, markets have gyrated in response to the state of trade negotiations between the United States and China.

The market sensitivity to threats and counter-threats in the trade war is quite remarkable. Monday’s announcement by the Chinese, for example, would be expected to raise China’s tariffs by about $10 billion. Much of this will show up as higher prices for Chinese importers, and some of it will be avoided by diverting exports of goods such as liquid natural gas to other markets, so the impact on U.S. corporate profits will be far less than $10 billion. Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs are likely to raise corporate profits as higher import costs push some business to domestic producers.

There is the further consideration that reasonable market participants should not have entirely discounted the possibility of tariff increases Monday and that there surely remains some chance a trade deal will be reached. So, in fact, the market should not even have moved in full proportion to the change in corporate profitability associated with new tariffs.

There is a revealing puzzle here. Events whose direct impact on corporate profits is a few billion dollars seem to be driving market fluctuations that change the total value of corporations by hundreds of billions of dollars. To be sure, there would be many ways of refining my calculation of the profit impact to recognize various feedbacks, and certainly the imposition of tariffs increases uncertainty, which in general depresses markets. But with any plausible calculation of the direct impact of tariff changes on profitability or uncertainty about profitability, it is not possible to justify the kinds of changes in market value we observed Monday or on many other days when there was news about the status of the U.S.-China trade negotiations.

Part of the answer to the puzzle, I suspect, lies in markets’ tendency to sometimes overreact to news, especially in areas where they do not have long experience. This idea is supported by the tendency illustrated by the market’s Tuesday rally, which took place without any particularly encouraging U.S.-China developments.

A larger part of the answer probably lies in the idea that the current trade conflict is a possible prelude to a far larger conflict between the two nations with the largest economies and greatest power for as far as can be foreseen. When it appears less likely that a conflict over well-defined and ultimately not-that-difficult commercial issues can be resolved, rational observers conclude that it is also less likely the United States and China can manage issues ranging from 5G wireless technology to North Korea, from the future of Taiwan to global climate change, and from the management of globalization to the security architecture of the Pacific region.

A world where relations between the United States and China are largely conflictual could involve a breakdown of global supply chains, a splinternet (as separate, noninteroperable internets compete around the world), greatly increased defense expenditures and conceivably even military conflict. All of this would be catastrophic for living standards and would also have huge adverse effects on the value of global companies.

It is, I suspect, the greater risk of catastrophic medium-run outcomes, rather than the proximate impact of trade conflicts, that is driving the outsize market reactions to trade negotiation news.

This carries with it an important lesson for both sides: It is risky to turn the pursuit of even vital national objectives into an existential crusade. Rather, even when nations have objectives that are in conflict, it is important to seek compromise, to avoid inflammatory rhetoric and to confine rather than enlarge the areas where demands are being made. Establishing credibility that promises will be kept and surprises will be avoided is as or more important with adversaries as with friends.

As the Trump administration carries on the trade negotiations, and as the presidential campaign heats up, Americans will do well to remember that there is no greater threat to the success of our national enterprise over the next quarter-century than mismanagement of the relationship with China. It is not just possible but essential to be strong and resolute without being imprudent and provocative.

[Winstonm]

Quote

What's in a name? That which we call a rose collusion
By any other name would smell as sweet like collusion;

Fixed Will's Problem

Quote

The Mueller report puts in front of our noses Russia’s “sweeping and systematic,” interference in the 2016 election, its perception that “it would benefit from a Trump presidency,” its work “to secure that outcome,” and the Trump campaign’s expectation “that it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”