When Howard Schultz, best known for not being known at all outside of Davos, announced he was going to run for President, a paroxysm of interest staggered the limited number of people who care about such things. While his campaign got off to a, ah, rough start, the pundit class was already analyzing his chances.

Not his chances to win, of course: his “independent bid” was recognized by virtually everyone except Hugh Hewitt and probably Tom Friedman as a load of vanity nonsense. Mostly, people are worried that he might siphon enough votes away from the Democratic candidate to get Trump re-elected.

While this seems possible, it is more likely that this campaign goes nowhere, since I would think most people are too jacked-up and partisan at this point to even pay attention to a third-party gadfly. Beside, to whom does he have appeal? Liberals dying for an inexperienced billionaire who has ruthlessly exploited global supply chains? Or to conservatives for whom “Starbucks” isn’t a byword for effete urbanism?

But I think the Schultz campaign might be good for something, and that is to expose once and for all the myth of the “social liberal, fiscal conservative.” That description, always self-applied, has long been popular in the Acela corridor, and among certain politically-engaged types who like to present themselves in a certain way.

It makes sense: it combines heart with a certain pragmatism. “I care about people, but I also think we can’t go around exploding the deficit and etc.” It appeals to people’s sense of “centrism”. It’s fun to say the parties have been hijacked by extremists, so I’ll take a little from one side and a little from another and present myself as the champion of real people. The forgotten middle. The salt of the dang earth.

The problem is, of course, that it’s all bullshit, not least of all because the Republican Party could never be defined as fiscally conservative. They blow up spending and slash revenue. It’s literally their defining feature, other than cultural warfare (and these are connected, as we’ll get to in a quick second).

It’s bullshit because those two sides are completely contradictory, unless you reduce social liberalism to the merest platitudes. What do you believe in? Social Security? Medicare or Medicaid? How about enforcing the VRA? Having an activist DOJ? A jobs program? Public transportation investment? Fair housing? A robust food stamps program, at least?

These things cost money, which means taxes, especially taxes on the wealthy. It means a progressive tax. And sister, Schultz is not having any of that.

“There are a number of areas here that need to be addressed,” Schultz said, insisting “I’m not trying to dodge any question, but I feel like what we have today is an unfair system.”

But he argued that Warren’s “ultramillionaire” tax — which would create a 2 percent wealth tax on those with a net worth above $50 million and impose an additional 1 percent on net worth above $1 billion — was showboating.

“However, when I see Elizabeth Warren come out with a ridiculous plan of taxing wealthy people a surtax of 2 percent because it makes a good headline or sends out a tweet when she knows for a fact that’s not something that’s ever gonna be passed, this is what’s wrong,” he said. “You can’t just attack these things in a punitive way by punishing people.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/29/schultz-warren-tax-plan-2020-1133228

See, he doesn’t believe funding programs, because he doesn’t really believe in the programs.

He said running as a Democrat would be “disingenuous” because he doesn’t believe in some of the issues that many in the party (and certainly many 2020 contenders) support — free college, universal free health care, and guaranteed jobs. He said on those matters, the party “has shifted so far to the left.”

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/28/18200565/howard-schultz-starbucks-2020-independent-60-minutes

But here is the final series of inanities.

Schultz criticized the 2017 Republican tax cuts for giving a “free ride to business” and said he would have been “more modest” in giving tax relief to those who need it the most. In an interview with CNBC on Monday, he said he didn’t want to get into details on whether he would raise taxes on corporations, which in the 2017 bill got a cut from a 35 percent rate to 21 percent.

“I don’t want to talk in the hypothetical about what I would do if I was president,” he said.

In the Times interview, he expressed concern about the national debt and the affordability of free college and guaranteed government jobs.

“Doesn’t someone have to speak the truth about what we can afford while maintaining a deep level of compassion and empathy for the American people?” he said.

idib

The first quote is, of course, the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard, but the last one is key. “What we can afford” is meaningless when you refuse to take the steps to afford anything. Now, Schultz might just be running to protect his own class, or to lower his taxes, or to send a message to the Dems about how far left the plutocrats are willing to let them move before revolting. Any of those are possible, and the last one is particularly interesting.

But take Schultz out of the equation, and you get to the hollow end of the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” mental scam. It essentially boils down to “I’m all for fairness, but not if we have to pay for any of it. Can’t have that. Simply can’t afford it.”

At the end, it’s basically just clucking your tongue at racism, homophobia, and systemic injustice, without actually taking any of the steps to fix it, and without recognizing that it takes an activist and well-funded government to undo and fix the vast inequalities and legacy of top-down class warfare on which this country was funded.

We know the GOP doesn’t want to do that; cutting taxes on billionaires enhances those conditions, combining their fiscal recklessness with their social psychopathy. But without actually doing any of the funding, the “fiscal conservative” is enacting the same goals. Maybe they think “leadership” or whatever can make things better. It’s pretty to think so, at least.

In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019

We’re confronted on a daily basis with the reality that the most powerful man in the world is also one of its stupidest citizens, certainly its least curious, and a man only happy and intellectually stimulated when idiots on Fox say nice things about him through the TV. We all know this.

We see examples of it all the time. During the shutdown, he pulled one of his classic negotiating moves, which is: walking out of a meeting. I say “classic” because he’s been talking for literally decades about how this is his key power move, how it is an unbeatable negotiating tactic.

The problem, of course, comes when 1) everyone knows that is your only tactic and; 2) when you have no leverage. But the President is so convinced of his deal-making genius, and so sure that people will cower, that he is unable to learn anything new or be shaken one degree from the surety of his self-regard. That makes him a moron!

(Caveat: maybe this once worked in the high-stakes world of New York real estate, making other real estate people and bankers cower. While as an occasional tactic it is not without merit, it is just another example that our plutocratic class is, by and large, a bunch of pudding-brains twits.)

And so we come to one of the central paradoxes of the Trump Era. Because he’s such a consistent, record-shattering idiot, to an overwhelming degree about literally everything that matters, it is easy to forget just how much of a world-class powerlifting dope he is on any specific thing.

The tweet above is the perfect example of his arrogance, his ignorance, and his 4th-grade understanding of climate change being brought to public on the strength of his 2nd-grade wit. He not only thinks he is right about this; he is sure he is devastatingly right. End of story. It’s cold in the Midwest.

And it is! Right now, I’m getting ready to head to the train to go to work, and it is really goshdarn cold. And it is 25 degrees warmer than it’ll be this time tomorrow! These are, as everyone knows, record-shattering temperatures.

But of course, and I shouldn’t even have to say this, there are a few obvious things to point out.

1. Climate isn’t weather. I know this, you know this, everyone knows this.
2. This tiny part of America isn’t the world.
3. This few days of cold isn’t, like, all the time.
4. Intense polar vortexes are an outcome predicted by the climate change model

Really, all anyone has to do is look at a current climate map.

It’s still super warm most everywhere else, and even more to the point, how can someone say “Looks like everything in the weather is goddamn crazy! Clearly the climate is fine!”

Look, I know you’re bored reading this. We all know this. I’m bored writing it, and genuinely depressed about it. We have an idiot as our President. We have an idiot, with one particular specialty of idiocy, at the worst possible time. And here’s why I’m particularly depressed.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014

That was right before the 2014 polar vortex, and I remember very clearly being enraged. This one stuck in my head. The sheer ignorance, the buffonery, the certainty of his position was heightened by the fact that I had to hear about it. Like, I didn’t follow him or anything. But I saw “Trump talks to Fox about Global Warming” on Slate or whatever, or “Check out Trump ROASTING climate extremists to the chuckleheads at Fox and Friends”.

I actually remember walking around and being livid that this charlatan was paid attention to at all, when any of his “points” could be so easily refuted (by the exact same list above, in fact). It was maddening and infuriating. Why was anyone caring at all what he had to say? I took some comfort in the fact that no one actually was.

And now he’s President. The worst public figure of his generation, the embodiment of everything stupid and cheap and tacky and vulgar and flauntingly ignorant in our society. At a time when we are, at best, already tipping over the tipping point, we have a sentient cheeseburger insisting not just that things are fine, but that he’s the only one who really knows. Trust him.

As a side story, I remember that week in 2014 extremely clearly not just for the bitterness of the vortex, but for it being the week my dad passed away. For days, I wasn’t able to dig my car out, and my wife and I took buses and cabs to see family. But the day of the wake I of course wanted my car, and worked like hell to dig and push it out, but I couldn’t.

I was doing that thing where I was steering and pushing, to no avail, as car after car passed me by. Until a pickup truck slowed down, and three men jumped out. They were three Mexican men, spoke only Spanish, and to my mind, probably hadn’t been in the country that long. They weren’t dressed for a normal Chicago winter, much less that particular one.

So here they were, thousands of miles from home (I assume). And without question, they jumped out, and helped me push my car out. No hesitation. And I don’t know if the biggest guy could see that I was going through some shit, but he put his hand on my shoulder, and nodded with the “it’ll be all right” look. I won’t ever forget that kindness through my sorrow, that human connection in the inhuman weather, that sheer unflinching decency.

So yeah, regarding the President’s racist push to keep people out of this country, I say this sincerely: fuck you. You aren’t worth a single immigrant.

So, first a programming note. As the handful of you who read this can probably tell, posting has been sporadic at best. The grind of writing 1500 words every morning isn’t always compatible with my schedule, and I admit to being frustrated that the work doesn’t really seem to have an impact. I truly value everyone who reads- you mean more to me than I can express- but I’ve decided to focus more on larger projects, rather than quick reaction pieces.

So this will still be active, but mostly for book reviews and good read roundups. I’m sure I’ll be writing when moved by something, but want to work on a few other things, without the pressure to blog or the weird scratching guilt that comes when this has lain fallow for a few days.

OK- enough solipsism: onto the reads!

Illinois has always been a hub state, where the Great Lakes get connected to the Mississippi River basin. It’s where the continent shifts. Chicago, especially, was built to connect the two great water systems, and it quickly became the railroad center of the nation. Read the magisterial Nature’s Metropolis for a deep background on how the vast American west relied on (and built) Chicago.

So to say that the region was forged around the dictates of capitalism is a bit of an understatement. It is still the case, even if it has shifted. In The New Republic, Alexander Sammon has a really well-written, comprehensive, and stunning piece about how Elwood, IL, 40 miles southwest of Chicago, is at the center of the global shipping economy, and how it has transformed and erased this town of 2200.

As Sammon explains, Elwood is blessed with “serendipitous proximity to the country’s major infrastructure. Six class-1 railroads and four interstate highways pass through the region, which is situated a day’s drive from a full 60 percent of the country. Chicago is some 40 miles northeast as the crow flies.”

It ain’t the crow that flies though. It is 25,000 tractor trailers every day. It is over three million shipping containers a year. It is goods from around the world, transported on vast ships, loaded onto trains, distributed into trucks in Elwood, and then to their final destination.

Sammon shows how it the center of the global economy, with all that entails. This is a story of the promise of industry and jobs not trickling down even as global companies get bigger and the rich get richer. It’s wildcat truck drivers, unaffiliated contractors who are untrained and paid only for getting goods as quickly as possible, hurtling down residential streets at 50 miles an hour. It is creeping automation. It’s choking pollution. And it is always growing. Always consuming. It never stops.

It didn’t just start, of course. Here in Chicago we’ve had 150 years of industrial impact, but as a new report by the NRDC shows, it’s impact hasn’t exactly been even. (Via Citylab and Sophia Yeo, who explains perfectly what it all means.)

This shows what neighborhoods are most at risk for pollution and its dangerous impacts. You can see pretty clearly that the industrial corridor running southwest along the Sanitation and Shipping Canal (or the South Branch) is deeply dangerous, with a long legacy of industrial negligence and environmental apathy.

While this isn’t a 1:1 with race and class, it is pretty telling. Some areas have political power, and some don’t. We put industry and dumps and power plants in near some people, but not others. We redline some people out of areas with more parks than plants, but not others. There is no one decision made: it is a long and intertwined history. You can’t tell the entire history of Chicago from that map, but you certainly can give it a good shot.

Want some more Chicago history? Of course you do, dammit! Here’s a cool story in the Guardian, by Tanner Howard, about Native American trails that are still in Chicago’s grid system. It’s not all the angle streets, but most of them. Actually, the story is less “cool” than “predictable”.

These native roads are buried and the history effaced. Rogers, up in Rogers Park, was originally called Indian Boundary Road, since it marked where natives had to be beyond after the Blackhawk War. It might be an uncomfortable name, but it is also an honest reckoning one. Howard’s story is unflinching in the way colonizing land and people and history works, how thorough and comprehensive it is- how comprehensive the project of effacement needs to be- even down to the street system.

One thing that stands out in the story is that the native trails were based on nature- on the search for high ground in the marshy wetlands.

Over the course of four distinct periods of glacial melting, stretching as far back as 14,500 years ago, Chicago’s terrain was shaped by the ebbs and flows of melting ice. Through the process of littoral drift, where small bits of sand and organic matter drifted from place to place on the tide, small but distinct ridges were etched into the land. Those natural high grounds, rising no more than 10 or 15 feet above the rest of the terrain, became some of the pathways used by Native peoples as they began to inhabit the area about 11,000 years ago.

And then Europeans came and drained the swamp and imposed a grid system and killed and erased the natives and built this city I fucking love. It’s complicated. But it shows again that we need to understand our history, reckon with it, and take joy that those irritating 6-corner intersections are remnants of glaciers, bits of high ground over the wet prairies, trod on for thousands of years, and remember that we live in geology.

We live in geology and we live in ecology, but we don’t really remember that very often. In fact, as a species, we go out of our way to thwart it. Hence, so long, fish!

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048. That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

We could reverse this, but it would mean international cooperation, a change in the way we organize our lives and comfort, and the ability to look past the short term and our own lives. So yeah: so long, fish!

There’s a chance that is too hard on the species, but we live in liminal times and we’re run by the worst people. Our ruling class is made up of a bunch of wet-brained idiots who are extremely comfortable with corruption. This Washington Post article about how T-Mobile execs suddenly started staying in Trump’s Washington DC hotel when they needed a merger approved is a perfect tale for our times.

You have a huge company getting huger and knowing that to do so they need the personal approval of our idiot President, and they know that giving him money is how to make it happen. There’s no moral or metaphor here. It’s naked corruption.

That’s what Trump has done: by being so insecure, so vain, so empty, and such a ridiculous moron, he’s brought the worst of the ruling class into the open. Corruption and disdain for decency has always been the way they do business. It’s the the daylight now.

Corruption is the key to the entire Trump Presidency and to our moment (except for one other thing, which we’ll get to below). Our monied elite believe that the government should exist only to ease their path to power, help them get richer, and crush the working class. They’ve worked to make that happen. Over the last 40 years, the GOP has built itself around that idea: that government is the enemy and so we’ll destroy it except to help the rich. Large parts of the Democratic Party agree (though that is changing).

So corruption, here, is a feature of the system, not a bug. It’s made so that the rich can get richer and their water-carriers get sinecures. Why not loot? Why not hand over bags of money to the President? Why not use the highest office in the land to make a few more dollars? If the government exists only to serve the rich, what difference does it make?

That’s why Trump is the perfect GOP president. He’s so nakedly corrupt, and believes so fully and openly that the government should exist just to cater to him, that it is a family business, that he has made it open and acceptable to act in the same way. There are no more illusions. It’s an open shop, so long as you flatter the storekeeper.

But while corruption is key to Trump and the GOP, it isn’t the only key. Racism and hatred are the driving force. By now, you’ve seen this horrible teenager.

You’ve probably seen the video. White, MAGA-hat wearing teens, marching to deny women’s rights, got into a shouting match with some Black Israelities (not Black Lives Matter), and then a Native activist started drumming and chatting to break things up. They surrounded him, mocked him, shouted “build the wall”, and otherwise intimidated him.

Especially this kid.

He walked up, inches away, and started staring, and smiling a smile of cruel mockery, of power, of intimidation. He was hoping to scare the activist, to rattle him, to show him who is boss. He was hoping to get laughs. He was hoping to get the approval of his hooting peers.

In some ways, this is edgelord bullshit. It’s defying “norms” or whatever, and showing that you are pretty cool because you don’t give a fuck about being PC. It’s showing that you can do whatever you want. That’s the heart of trolling, of course.

It’s more though. Build the wall, harassing a Native, denying women’s reproductive rights: it’s power and racism. It’s not just that they are looking to be edgy. They’ve found it. As a friend of mine said, “being an racist bully is an edgy identity.”

That’s why racism works and lingers and is growing. For certain people, it is fun. It’s laughable. It’s brave. And while you can say “they aren’t really racist; they just think it is cool”, I think that’s naive. It all comes from a lack of empathy, and manifests itself the same. It’s privilege to know that your actions won’t hurt you, and so you can do and say whatever you want, because those people, those women, those migrants, that old man clamoring for peace- they aren’t people. They don’t matter. We do what we want.

That, of course, is the heart of Trumpism. It’s why those red hats are the official uniform of smug racists. And they aren’t going away.

I was recently reading Against the Grain, by James C. Scott, in which he went deep into the history of state formation, starting with the rise of rooted agriculture, and concluded that neither were the natural way of things, much less the most desired or inevitable. The book was far from political, but even someone as liberal as I am couldn’t help but think ill thoughts about state formation. Is government really needed?

Well, yes.

Illegal roads, cut down Joshua trees, and damaged federal property, along with the need to clean up garbage, prompted Joshua Tree National Park Superintendent David Smith to announce Tuesday that the park would close indefinitely on Thursday to address those impacts incurred during the ongoing partial government shutdown.

…

“There are about a dozen instances of extensive vehicle traffic off roads and in some cases into wilderness,” Smith replied when asked about the damage in the park. “We have two new roads that were created inside the park. We had destruction of government property with the cutting of chains and locks for people to access campgrounds. We’ve never seen this level of out-of-bounds camping. Every day use area was occupied every evening.

“Joshua trees were actually cut down in order to make new roads.”

National Parks Traveler

The government shutdown has done terrible things to our national parks, the one shining symbol of our commitment to and belief in the common good, in a shared heritage. Starved of the resources to keep people in line, the parks have become strewn with trash and filth, littered around nature like the casual discarding of an idea.

In a way, of course, these acts are entirely nonpolitical: it is a bunch of entitled yahoos seeing something beautiful and being overwhelmed with the near-religious need to tear ass across it. And while I believe in my heart that they are the same people who think coal-rolling is a declaration of individuality and pure lib-ownership, I don’t know for sure.

But in a way, it is of course political. It gets to the heart of this country’s conflict: that between people who think the land and everything and everyone on, in, and under it should be converted to capital and made profane, and those who think that the idea of the common good is more important.

That’s tied directly to our idea of self-governance. Are we all in this together, fighting for something, with a responsibility to each other? Are we here to do the hard work? Or do we abdicate that to a ruling class?

It’s complicated, of course: the right wing/libertarian could say that having a government at all is an abdication, but that way leads to things like the national park being destroyed and our shared resources being plundered. The myth of individuality, like we saw at Malheur and with the Bundy clan, is really just a money grab by the powerful who think the government should only exist to protect and further their interests.

It’s been that way throughout our history; it wasn’t until FDR in the 30s that the government was neutral on labor fights. Before then, they threw the weight of the state at strikers, grinding up protestors in the teeth of truncheons and tear gas. And now we’re getting back to those terrible days.

That’s what the Republican Party is right now. It is a vehicle to advance the interests of the rich and powerful by destroying the state’s ability to protect the common good. (It is also a vehicle for white nationalism, but those are intertwined). The GOP hates government, and hates shared resources, and hates land that isn’t being exploited. The shutdown isn’t an accident; it is a culmination.

It’s also a reminder of why we need government, and more of a reminder that the work has to be shared. It is a reminder that we are the government, and our duties toward each other have to make us fight and compromise and struggle together toward something better. Something bigger. Something that keeps the Joshua Trees standing, against the hot winds and the slow erosion of an idea.

*(Want to note that hunter/gatherer societies weren’t ungoverned; like tribal areas in Yemen today, they had rules and regulations and an idea of shared responsibility based on reciprocal altruism. It was also based on the role of luck in life, an obvious attribution that has been Horatio Alger-ized out of America.)

RIP, Associated Press.

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) January 9, 2019

On the one hand, the idea for the wall is racist nonsense, ineffective idiocy, and would require a massive land grab that is both massively authoritarian and ecologically ruinous. On the other hand, some people don’t want that.

From one point of view, the administration’s pricetag of $5 billion is both laughably high and entirely too cheap. It won’t pay for the wall and the admin is unable to offer specifics on what the money will be used for. It’s almost as if the President just made it up out of thin air and now refuses to budge, and the money has become an item of totemic faith for the worst people in the country. From another point of view, they aren’t giving it to him for some reason.

There are many perspectives in this world. There is a perspective that a man who a few weeks ago said he’d gladly shut down the government over a vanity project he can’t even comprehend should shoulder the lion’s share of blame. There is another perspective that says no one understands how it is really dogs who are walking people.

Some people say Al Qaeda is now fully in control of Ciudad Juarez, recruiting MS-13 members to sell cocaine-laced fentanyl to West Virginia, and another side that thinks that sounds a little funny. Who is to say!

From which horizon does the sun rise? Can we ever know the truth? Or is the world an ineffable poem written on the wind?

I personally feel like the party who loathes the role of government and wishes it to be destroyed so that the rich and powerful could have full sway over the land and all the people and which is in thrall to a meglomaniac might bear more responsibility for shutting down said government. I might feel that the inability of our press to recognize the idea that one party is dedicated to operating in bad faith so as to ruin the idea of democratic self-governance helps that party do so.

But it takes two to tango, I suppose.