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We have not heard from one of the older themes of neo-liberalism in a while – so much so that we are in danger of forgetting it. But we shouldn’t, because surely it will come back, bad penny that it is. This is the theme that, as a New York Times story put it in 1992, the accusation that politicians “tell people what they want to hear”. In 1992, this was a strong theme in the Democratic party. All the young wonks had driven out the bad New Deal relics, and they were ready to tell people what they didn’t want to hear: we couldn’t afford any of that new deal garbage any more! What we needed to do was freeze the minimum wage, help the “poor” by expanding the earned income tax credit, and wean the middle class from their addiction to “special interest” stuff. All that porkbarrel stuff. All that stuff that the government did – which, tragically, denied the private sector of its opportunity to go in and do a better job of, say, piling up debts so that people ended up serfs off the cre

You know who interfered in our elections? The Supreme Court interfered in our elections. Striking down the 1965 Civil Rights provision that supervised the election process in the South allowed, for instance, Trump to win in N.C. That there were 65,000 less black votes in 2016 than in 2012 - instead of about a 120 thousand more - is the direct result of Republican actions. By not expanding the Civil rights act to Wisconsin, which under its Shitty governor has pressed the id c ard voter thing - see here  and here :- the Supreme court was defintely putting its thumb on the scales for the GOP. Expect more of that. Russian trolls on fb did not win for Trump. John Roberts did. And the House of Unrepresentatives and the cockeyed Senate are going to keep that happening. The attack on American democracy is coming from the structures put in place during the 170 years of unchallenged white supremacy. As we head further into the century of bringing down the Holocene, we are goi

The Russophobia passing through the liberal sphere in the U.S. is comic, if not rather sinister. The discovery that Putin is Dr. Evil is a little belated, and heralded with the usual U.S. amnesia. Hmm, what country was it, long ago and far away, that supported Putin's patron, Yeltsin, an incompetent drunkard, as he ran for president of Russia? Ah, yes, that was the Americans under Clinton. They were quite proud of using the media, which was pretty much under oligarchic diktat , to wage the kind of one sided campaign that makes for the election of world historical bandits. Did the Clinton administration think twice about, say, helping a government that was waging a dirty war in Chechnya? No. As a reminder of how Russia went from Yeltsin to Putin, a good amnesia lifter is this article by Tony Wood in the LRB . The mania of the Russophobe contingent has drawn in remarkably unsavory characters, who first made their mark flogging Islamophobia, or promoting ever more American interv

Adam is going on a Scooby Doo trip. Every day, he watches that cartoon, which I have never loved. Or liked. But it occurred to me, as the pattern of the show fell rigidly into place, episode after episode, that the part at the end where Fred and Velma explain everything in the smarmiest way possible must be the model for today's journalists. Vox, for instance, could just rename itself: Fred and Velma explain. Which would explain a lot!