Tag: Paul Krugman

I’ve been reporting on Sundance non-stop for the past week.

As the stated topic(s) on WeeklyWilson are movies/TV AND politics, it’s time to condense for you some world views of the situation with our current administration, as articulated by various international political commentators.

With close friends in Minneapolis (who have an adopted South Korean son who now has to carry his naturalization papers with him at all times, for fear ICE will harm him), I’m upset by what is going on in our country. There should not be federal troops in ANY American city, and most definitely not simply to intimidate and punish

Killing two citizens and then trying to blacken those citizens’ reputations by portraying them (inaccurately) as trouble-making terrorists is inexcusable and a technique that would only be employed by an administration led by someone without any ethical or moral center. Since that is the very definition of the man and the Trump administration, it follows that Trump will try to “spin” the truth to benefit himself, without any regard for reality. After all, that’s how he got elected.

ICE agents are responsible for 2/3 of the murders in the city of Minneapolis this year (2 out of 3). Sending more ill-trained troops simply to terrorize and punish the populace for being a blue state is the very definition of bad government and divisiveness. Greg Sargent in The New Republic put it this way: “This is a campaign of deliberate terror designed in part—yes—to encourage illegal migrants to self-deport. But mainly it’s to send a warning to ordinary Americans that if we resist Trump’s agenda our citizenship will give us no more protection than it did Renee Good.”

Here are the views of world leaders on the heels of the Davos Conference in Switzerland, where Trump repeated his plans to take control of Greenland. Addressing a packed conference hall at the World Economic Forum Trump repeatedly referred to Greenland as “Iceland.” Nations including Britain, France and Norway sent troops to Greenland in support of Denmark. In Denmark’s capital of Nuuk some of the 57,000 residents of the island demonstrated, chanting “Yankee, go home!”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (whose full speech should be required viewing here in the U.S.) received a standing ovation for his speech in which he declared, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” (For a translation of Carney’s remarks, I will append it in a second post tomorrow.)

Trump seemed to reverse his constant messaging about owning Greenland, one way or another, but, as Eli Stokola and Diane Nerozzi wrote in Politico, “So while the immediate crisis may have been averted, Trump’s retreat did little to reverse a deep-seated sentiment among Europeans that they can no longer consider the U.S. a reliable ally.”

Lauren Aratani in “The Guardian:”

Trump’s semi-retreat from his previoust repetition of how he planned to take over Greenland came after his tariff threats alarmed Wall Street and Europe, which said they refused to be blackmailed and that they might have to unleash a trade bazooka that would further damage U.S. economic interests. Bloomberg, in an editorial, said “lasting harm had been done.”

Said Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in the Wall Street Journal, Greenland is “Trump’s white whale, calling his obsession with taking over Greenland “foolish” and a sign that “he needs more therapy.” Jenkins also said that it may be a sign that Trump is “flirting with cognitive decline.”

Paul Krugman said, “To read Trump’s unhinged text to the Norwegian prime minister, full of false claims, self-aggrandizement is to see hard evidence that America’s president is deeply unwell and getting sicker…America and the world are being held hostage to the whims of a petulant, violent, and deranged individual.”

Andrew Sullivan (Substack) wrote: “The imposition of one man’s will on an entire policy with no checks, balances, or even reasons cited to back him up” is insane. “A U.S. takeover of Greenland is an insane idea that no Greenlander wants and that three-quarters of Americans oppose. Trump himself has given no coherent rationale for wanting it.” He’s spoken of the “psychological” benefit he’d derive from “owning” the territory. “Essentially, he’s upended the Western world out of pure solipsism and pursuit of personal glory. That’s really all this is.”

Jack Blanchard (Politico): “Even if Trump’s step back from the brink holds, something much bigger and unstoppable is now underway…For 80 years allies have viewed American military protection and U.S. respect for a rules-based order as articles of faith. Even if Trump’s Greenland adventure ends without a hostile takeover, that illusion has been shattered and there’s no going back.”

Donald J. Trump & Ghislaine Maxwell.

From The Guardian:

“Less than two weeks before Jeffrey Epstein’s death in jail, his lawyers and Manhattan federal prosecutors met and discussed his potential cooperation, several documents within a cache of newly released investigative files state.“On July 29, 2019, FBI and [prosecutors] met with Epstein’s attorneys, who, in very general terms, discussed the possibility of a resolution of the case, and the possibility of the defendant’s cooperation,” an FBI document titled “Epstein Investigation Summary & Timeline” stated.”

To sum up, here’s what Kevin D. Williamson wrote in The Dispatch:

“Donald Trump aspires to be the sort of man Xi Jingping is, the sort of man Vladimir Putin is, the sort of man Li Peng was when he ruthlessly suppressed the Tiananmen Square demonstrations—a vicious act of repression that Trump has spoken of admiringly. The acts of unjustifiable violence and extralegal threats carried out by his agents are, manifestly, to Trump’s taste. He is fundamentally totalitarian. And he seems to desire violence. Why wouldn’t he? He has the guns and the gun thugs. Where there are genuine acts of violence being perpetrated against federal agents, those carrying out the acts are giving the Trump administration what it desires: a pretext for escalation.”

Donald & Melania Trump , Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell,

To that end, Minnesota (and, particularly, Minneapolis residents) keep on keeping on in the admirable way you have behaved in the face of ruthless and unprincipled behavior perpetrated on the pretext of making us “safer” from our neighbors and friends who came into this country years ago (and have been model citizens ever since, in most cases.) The world and the majority of Americans salute you and stand with you. ICE in Minneapolis is NOT the way we aspire to behave in the United States of America I’ve lived in for eight decades. It is un-American behavior on the part of the corrupt administration of a convicted felon and probable pedophile.

Don’t take the bait organized by the Steven Millers of the world. You’re better than that. I, for one, am proud of your Minnesota Nice behavior in looking out for your neighbors.

Republicans and Their Dubious Relationship with Facts

By Connie Wilson

On December 17, 2020

In Editorial, Essays on Politics: Best Political Essays & Ideology, Local, Of Local (Quad Cities') Interest, Politics

Joe Biden in Independence, Iowa, on the Fourth of July, 2019.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times, but he was reprinted in the Austin “American Statesman” today talking about why Republicans seem to have such a tenuous grip on facts. He has a point. I think some of the explanation behind Krugman’s thesis can be laid at the feet of the fractured nature of today’s news—where even the Facebook-like meeting grounds have splintered into those that are far right, those that are far left, and Facebook, itself. So, here is Paul Krugman’s “When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts?”

I reprint it here because not all of you can re-read it on the pages of the Austin “American Statesman” (p. A11) and, in my own experience, there is always a pay wall up on the NY Times.

“Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss.

What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like.

I’m sure it’s not right to insist that Republicans ‘believe’ that, say, wearing face masks is useless or that there was widespread voter fraud. Framing the issue as one of belief suggests that some kind of evidence might change party loyalists’ minds.

In reality, what Republicans say they believe flows from what they want to do, whether it’s ignore a deadly disease or stay in power despite the voters’ verdict.

In other words, the point isn’t that the GOP believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become very hostile to the idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.

Democratic National Convention, 2008, Denver: CNN Headquarters.

Notice, by the way, that I’m not including qualifiers, like saying “some” Republicans. We’re talking about most of the party here. The Texas lawsuit calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election was both absurd and deeply un-American, but 60% of Republicans in the House signed a brief supporting it, and only a handful of elected Republicans denounced the suit.

At this point, you aren’t considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts.

But when and how did the GOP get that way? If you think it started with Donald Trump and will end when he leaves the scene (if he ever does), you’re naive.

Republicans have been heading in this direction for decades. I’m not sure whether we can pinpoint the moment when the party began its descent into malignant madness, but the trajectory that led to this madness probably became irreversible under Ronald Reagan.

Republicans have, of course, turned Ronald Reagan into an icon, portraying him as the Savior of a desperate, declining nation. Mostly, however that is just propaganda. You’d never know from the legend that economic growth under Reagan was only slightly more robust than it had been under Jimmy Carter, and slower than it would be under Bill Clinton.

And rapidly rising income inequality meant that a disproportionate share of the benefits from economic growth went to a small elite, with only a bit trickling down to most of the population. Poverty, measured properly, was higher in 1989 than it had been a decade earlier.

Other measures suggest that we were already veering off course.

For example, in 1980, life expectancy in America was similar to other wealthy nations; but the Reagan years represent the beginning of the Great Mortality Divergence of the United States from the rest of the advanced world. Today, Americans, on average, can expect to live almost 4 fewer years than their counterparts in comparable countries.

The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for the facts began to take over the GOP.

There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction to America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe.

Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent.

Many Americans are, I think, unaware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine—belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many Americans remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science.

Reagan’s ability to act on his hostility was limited by Democratic control of the House and the fact that the Senate still contained a number of genuinely moderate Republicans. Still, Reagan and his officials spent years denying the effect of acid rain, while insisting that evolution was “just a theory” and promoting the teaching of Creationism in schools.

This rejection of science partly reflected deference to special interests that didn’t want science-based regulation. Even more important, however, was the influence of the religious right, which

Good Old Boy Fred Thompson, running as a Republican, in 2008.

first became a major political force under Reagan, has become ever more central to the Republican coalition and is now a major denier of the party’s rejection of facts—and democracy.

For rejecting facts come naturally to people who insist that they’re acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that don’t go their way.

Sure enough, a few days ago, televangelist Pat Robertson—who first became politically influential under Reagan—pronounced the Texas lawsuit “a miracle,” an intervention by God that would keep Trump in office.

The point is that the GOP rejection of facts that has been so conspicuous this year wasn’t an aberration. What we’re seeing is the culmination of a degradation that began a long time and and is almost surely irreversible.

Tag: Paul Krugman

Politics Resurfaces: Views from Around the Globe

Republicans and Their Dubious Relationship with Facts