Throwing the Baby out with the Bath

I recently read William Cohan's "Why Wall Street Matters". It was a good explanation of all the good things banks do: finance governments, finance corporations; provide credit which is the grease that makes the economy run. It was all good stuff with one major problem.

His argument is that with all the negative press the banks garner everyone seems to forget all these good things that banks do.

Really?

Is there something inherent in banks that in order to do good they have to also be rife with immoral if not criminal behavior?

It's not that I'm expecting banks to be populated by saints. But I am puzzled by this idea that if you punish the bad bankers then the good one's won't be able to function.

Maybe Mr Cohan should spend less time praising bankers for doing what they are supposed to do and come down a bit heavier on those bankers who knowingly abuse their knowledge and position to game the system in a 'heads they win tails we lose' casino.

That might have been Bernie Sanders point.....

A Perfect Storm

I recently got into a somewhat heated exchange with two friends over my equating of Trump with Hitler. For the record I must state that neither of them are Trump supporters. One is a staunch Democrat and Hillary supporter and the other a Libertarian with Republican leanings, but as I mentioned, aggressively anti-Trump.

To be fair my foray into the comparison was predicated on an article I had read (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/michel-houellebecq-und-der-untergang-des-abendlandes-13373949.html). The article was actually an analysis of Michel Houellebecq's novel "Submission" in conjunction with Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West".

What got the exchange started was my quoting Spengler's "Caesarisim"- his theory that democracies are susceptible to populism and as such subject to an inherent tendency to dictatorship. Spengler was writing in 1918 and his hypothesis found its realization in Hitler and Mussolini.

That is when the discussion went ballistic.

How could I possibly compare Trump to Hitler? He would never murder 6 million people.

That was my mistake. Hitler was an extreme version of autocracy. They were right. I am unsure how far Trump will go in his pursuit of power. To equate him with Hitler is somewhat disingenuous on my part. It moves the discussion from the rational to the emotional.

So I will rephrase my statement.

The United States is at a tipping point. We are closer than at any other time in our history to fall prey to a populist with autocratic ambitions that could dismantle our democratic institutions and replace them with a dictatorship in all but name. To resist this temptation takes a person of staunch republican values. Someone who recognizes the limits of power as proscribed under the constitution. And someone with the moral fibre and integrity to understand that the office of the presidency is not a platform for personal aggrandizement but rather an almost sacred seat from which one rules for the benefit of the nation.

Trump has done nothing to demonstrate that even if he were aware of the intellectual, personal and moral discipline required to maintain the presidency that he would submit his own ego and narcissism to the requirements of the office.

So I was wrong to compare Trump to Hitler. Hitler is but one in a long line of despots who rode into power on the coattails of some semblance of a democratic process and then systematically destroyed that very same process to wrest absolute power for themselves.

The founding fathers were fully aware that they were on the cusp of something not really ever seen before. They were following on from the ideas of the Enlightenment where the concept of the rights of mankind were understood and well defined. They were creating a land where personal freedoms would be protected by law and where the power of the people would be measured and moderated in a representative government that itself would be controlled by a series of checks and balances intended to guard against absolutism.

But these checks and balances were predicated on a statement, while fraught with all sorts of baggage given the position of the Native Americans, slaves and women just to name a few, still sang out: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Let me repeat that. "We hold these truths to be self-evident...".

They don't require any further discussion. They were written to explain why they were declaring their independence from absolutism. They were planning to put in its place a system predicated on the rule of law with a rash of freedoms enshrined in the document by which they would rule.

One of the things I kept hearing during the presidential campaign was that in the separation of the judicial, legislative and executive offices we have a carefully crafted system of checks and balances that would keep Trump in check.

I have seen nothing to suggest this is happening.

I also heard after the election that Trump was elected and it was his responsibility to fulfill his mandate granted by that electorate.

What everyone seems to forget is that Hitler too was elected to power. He too had a popular mandate, provided by the same barbell that catapulted Trump to power: the disaffected mob and the industrial complex.

But neither was elected to dismantle the democratic state. Neither was elected to trample over the rule of law in creating their autocracies.

Trump has entered the White House in a whirlwind.

He is following a time honored method to segue from democracy to autocracy.

Muzzle the press.
Rule by decree.
Find a scapegoat.
Dismantle the organs of government:
The Judiciary
The Intelligence Agencies
The Central Bank


Trump has declared the press the enemy. He and his staff are working hard to undermine their role as an organ of opinion and analysis and to replace them with "Alternative Facts".

Trump has essentially declared a state of national emergency, sidestepping the standard procedures of state and ruled by executive order.

Trump has declared immigrants, refugees and Muslims as all members of an undesirable group, the root of all evil, and under the mantra of national security is systematically removing whatever vestige of human rights they might have. For the record he is also going after women.

He is replacing independent "civil servants" with his own people. Trump has removed the Director of National Intelligence and the Chief of Staff from the National Security Council and has replaced them with Steve Bannon who I have not yet decided if he is Josef Goebbels or Martin Bormann. by his own admission he himself draws inspiration from Leni Riefenstahl so I can't be far off.

The next assault will be on the judiciary. It will begin with the nomination for the Supreme Court that the Republican Congress refused to even entertain under the Obama Administration.

I also expect the independence of the Federal Reserve to come under pressure when Janet Yellen's term ends in February 2018.

So perhaps I was a bit overzealous with my comparison of Trump with Hitler.

Let it please be so.

You Reap what you Sow.

Although I have not read the recent 35 page dossier published by BuzzFeed and actually think it was poor judgement to release unverifiable material somehow I can't dismiss the report out of hand.

First and foremost, according to the Politifact scorecard Trump was True 4%; Mostly True 11%; Half True 15%; Mostly False 19%; False 33% and Pants on Fire 18% of the time. This means he blatantly lied 51% of the time and was very judicious with the truth 34% of the time. For him to suddenly find religion and denounce others for lying seems very much in tune with what I would expect from Trump.

Making unverifiable accusations was meat and potatoes to his campaign, so his denouncing this dossier as lies and slander doesn't help in discovering the truth. He denounces everything he doesn't agree with as lies.

I am interested however that the material made it into a classified briefing from the intelligence agencies to the President and President-Elect. I am sure the intelligence community sees a lot of bizarre material, but I would doubt that they include it all in their briefing material.

Somewhere there must be a concern that there are at a minimum parts of this report that merit disclosure, at least at a classified security briefing. Otherwise it would have been dismissed out of hand.

Still, I think BuzzFeed was wrong to publish it. There is more than enough garbage being spewed daily by Fox News, Breitbart and the like that I would have thought BuzzFeed wouldn't want to be put into that category. They actually have lowered themselves to the level of that bastion of journalistic endeavor and one of Trump's favorite sources the National Enquirer. But that is their cross to bear.

Trump has helped introduce and relished in the post-factual age and then complains when it is turned against him.

He should grow up.

Is it Treason?

Over New Year I had an interesting conversation with an M&A lawyer who is deeply concerned about President-elect Trump and that his allegiance apparently lies not with the United States but rather with the Trump empire as personified by himself.

My friend went on to discuss Trump's disregard for the establishment framing him as an anti-political agitator, indeed that he is in denial of politics itself which in essence means he is against the democratic process which is the only alternative to government by coercion and the tyranny of the majority.

This last point is important. Trump's approach is to constantly harp on about the will of the people while trampling not only on the rights of minorities but actually on the rights of the minority. Anyone who raises objections to the "will of the people" is branded as an enemy of the people.

Such an anti-democratic stance I would suggest is diametrically opposed to the Constitution which Mr Trump will be swearing to uphold on January 20 but I am also aware that it would be very difficult to prove until it is too late. What appears to me to be less difficult to prove is Trumps response to charges that Russian cyber attacks on the United States intentionally interfered with the democratic process during the election. Mr Trump has chosen to come down decidedly on the side of Wiki-Leaks and the Russian Intelligence community against the 17 US Intelligence agencies, outside cyber experts, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill and even at least one Trump adviser all expressing either misgivings or outright accusations about Russia's cyber activities in the context of the election.

The definition of Treason in Article III of the Constitution states that "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court". (The bold type is my own).

I would maintain that Trump is flirting with treason: I question that he indeed intends to uphold the Constitution and I feel strongly that he is adhering to enemies of the United States.

The Ghost of Saul Alinsky

Last August I attended a dinner with the CEO's of a number of major US corporations who unsurprisingly were staunchly Republican but in the main had not yet jumped on the Trump bandwagon with one vocal exception.

She was rabidly for Trump and equally ferocious in her denunciation of Obama, roundly criticizing him as a disciple of Saul Alinsky.

To be fair I did not know Mr Alinsky. When I questioned just what it was about him that she objected to she accused him of being a radical organizer. When pushed, she could not substantiate her accusations as she had never read anything written by him and it was obvious she was just parroting what someone else had said.

Given the setting I decided not to indulge in what would certainly be a difficult discussion about someone that neither of us had read and chose instead to purchase one of his books and try and understand what all the fuss was about. The next day I duly went to the bookstore and bought a copy of the "Rules for Radicals", published in 1971.

He is essentially a community organizer with a Marxist/socialist bent believing that our society could be transformed for the better. This of course explains why he is on the receiving end of so much abuse.


For the record the book was a great read. It had a list of 12 rules which Glen Beck thought so powerful he put them on his website.

His rules are not left or right wing. They are simply how to go about achieving your goals. They are opportunistic. They believe the end is more important than the means. They are harshly realistic and yet simple. But most importantly they require that the leaders of a movement understand what they want to achieve and how to mobilize a constituency in reaching their targets.

Glen Beck, annoying as he might be understood what Alinsky was about. He also understood how dangerous these rules for radicals could be in the wrong hands. Bizarrely I would posit that Beck was equally distraught that Obama had used the rules so effectively to get elected twice, and that Trump, or at least his advisers had also read the rules and appeared to understand how to apply them.

Obama, like most left of center politicians/democrats, had focused on the demographic shifts taking place in the USA and was able to mobilize the myriad minorities into a coherent block paving the way to the presidency as well as a democratic election the first time round.

But that is where Obama made his gravest error. The single largest "minority" in the USA are women. But women are not monolithic. And just as the largest group in the USA are ethnically white, approximately 50% of that majority are women.

And when push comes to shove white women vote with white men. The Tea Party saw this.

Alinsky foresaw it in 1971.

He realized that the middle class college radicals were rebelling against their parents, taking up the banner of the minorities in confrontation with the "silent majority". That backlash brought us Nixon, Reagan and eventually Trump.

But I get ahead of myself.

Throw into the mix the decline of the middle class towards working class at the same time that the captains of industry and their lieutenants are busy feathering their nests and you suddenly find the white "majority" circling their wagons against the encroaching minorities and the economic and political elites. Trump understood this. He understood that the silent majority had lost faith in the economic and political elites. They felt threatened that they were being squeezed in the middle and that no one had their (white American) interest at heart.

Of course neither does Trump. But that is irrelevant.

The liberal establishment thought demographics would win the day. The populists knew to exploit the (in part valid) concerns of the white middle/working class knowing full well that they would not be able to make good on half of what they promised. Indeed, an analysis of Trump's campaign by the German Public News agency found that 70% of his rhetoric was untrue, although they failed to recognize that this was irrelevant.

While the liberal elites focused on the inanity of Trump, belittling his support base, Trump happily followed one of the main tenets of Alinsky- the end justifies the means.

If your lies feed into the desires of the electorate you need to win an election, why tell them the truth?

We can't castigate every Trump supporter as an uneducated white racist. Some are. But many are truly filled with existential fear.

Trump believes it is a zero sum game and so has embraced the white majority at the expense of basically every minority.

The challenge is to create a policy that understands there is enough room in the boat for everyone and minorities are not the problem....

Trump

I know it sounds extreme but I find it difficult not to equate voting for Trump with voting for Hitler.
No. I am not suggesting that he is Hitler. He at least had a platform and was relatively coherent in presenting it.
And I am not really that concerned with Trump's economic plans. I think the system has enough checks and balances both within the government and outside of it in the form of bond and equity markets to temper his actions.
I am however seriously concerned with his social agenda.
Trump has unleashed strains in the USA which are definitely proto-fascist. He has not distanced himself from the KKK or the Alt-Right neo-Nazis. Indeed he has chosen the ringleader of this mishmash of white Christian supremacists, Steve Bannon, to be his Chief of Staff thus ushering him directly into the corridors of power.
So I have to ask myself how did the Republican Party become the vehicle of Mr Trump.
I think the answer is two fold.
On the one side stand educated white men making short-term, selfish decisions focused solely on their desire for even more power and influence. Hollow captains of industry willingly selling their souls in a Faustian pact.
Standing right next to them is the disaffected white working class, left to fend for itself, easy prey to populist exhortations that their's is the kingdom and that they will be returned to the land of milk and honey.
Put these two together and you have the perfect storm of national populism, which is just one step away from its sister national socialism.
Just as with Hitler there is the hope that the institutions of constitutional democracy will tame him and his bark will be much worse than his bite.
I could say this is because Trump contradicts himself so consistently that one could pretend that he doesn't mean half of what he says- but that begs the question which half.
He certainly said all the right things to the white supremacists and their potential storm troopers the WWC. He said the right things to the educated Captains of Industry who chose to sell their souls.
Last week he tried to show the same lip service to the other half of America personified by some editors, columnists and reporters at the New York Times. In a meeting, despite a campaign of relentlessly bashing the NY Times he suddenly flipped to trying to flatter them, telling them of his "tremendous respect for the New York Times" and that is was"a great American jewel".
His exhortations to "White America" on the one hand and to the NY Times on the other are mutually exclusive.
The Americans who believe in a constitutional democracy, who believe in a multi-ethnic liberal society didn't vote for Trump.
That leaves the National Populists.

The Snake Sheds Its Skin

So the last of the Republican hopefuls finally threw in the towel to leave the ravaged party grandees to put the pieces together again. Now I didn't mind Mr Cruz admitting defeat: I thought he was potentially even more dangerous than Mr Trump. But that is all relative.

I despise evangelists regardless of affiliation. They are all fundamentalists who have yet to recognise that one of the most powerful, dare I say sacred tenets of the Age of Enlightenment was the separation of Church and State. The Evangelicals thrown together, be they Christian, fundamentalist Jewish or the extreme Muslim groups are all adamant that the earth is 6000 years old and the bible is god's word spoken directly to whomever.

This headlong flight from the Age of Reason back to the Dark Ages of the Age of Superstition is being led by the Republican Party, be it Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. It is an all-out assault on the political freedoms won over the centuries. And now the ringmaster-in-chief Mr Trump has the baton firmly in his hand as he rushes into the past giving the crowd panem et circenses while stripping them of their civil liberties and tries to recapture an America that never really existed.

One only has to think back six weeks ago when the Republican Party heavyweights were circling their wagons to try and stop Trump. Now they are circling their wagons around him, to make him one of their own.

How quickly they are willing to forget every racist, misogynist, fascist and ignorant bit of drivel he spat out back when he was the evil entertainer. Suddenly he is being shaped into a presidential, measured almost house trained caricature around whose banner they look like they will all now flock. This reversion to type- any Republican- even a brain-dead Republican rather than an intelligent, experienced presidential being like Hillary Clinton is not surprising, even if it is revolting.

This is not going to be a pretty election.