Political or Cultural Writers you find thorough and thoughtful

[TSherbs]

I thought that we might list the writers (contemporary essayists and columnists) that we find thorough and thoughtful (not simply catering to our political biases). Here is one that I recently have been reading:

David French (his column is called "The Third Rail"). I disagree with him politically (he is conservative), but I appreciate his writing and thinking.

[Bold2013]

Ayn Rand and Huxley’s Brave New World.

[TSherbs]

Ayn Rand and Huxley’s Brave New World.

Thanks, Bold.

By "current," I did mean still writing (alive) today. But all suggestions are fine.

[Chip]

A new book by Fiona Hill is getting good reviews. Her memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. I don't consider her, as a seasoned diplomat, politically biased. But she has been demonized for telling the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-putin-ukraine-fiona-hill.html?referringSource=articleShare

I'm a fan of Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who writes on a wide range of topics. Other NYer faves are Adam Gopnik, Casey Cep, James Wood, and Peter Schjeldahl.

[TSherbs]

A new book by Fiona Hill is getting good reviews. Her memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, traces the journey of a literal coal miner’s daughter from working-class England to the White House. I don't consider her, as a seasoned diplomat, politically biased. But she has been demonized for telling the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-putin-ukraine-fiona-hill.html?referringSource=articleShare

I'm a fan of Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who writes on a wide range of topics. Other NYer faves are Adam Gopnik, Casey Cep, James Wood, and Peter Schjeldahl.

Thanks, Chip

[fqgouvea]

I thought that we might list the writers (current) that we find thorough and thoughtful (not simply catering to our political biases). Here is one that I recently have been reading:

David French (his column is called "The Third Rail"). I disagree with him politically (he is conservative), but I appreciate his writing and thinking.

Alan Jacobs’s blog “Snakes and Ladders” is quite interesting.

[TSherbs]

I thought that we might list the writers (current) that we find thorough and thoughtful (not simply catering to our political biases). Here is one that I recently have been reading:

David French (his column is called "The Third Rail"). I disagree with him politically (he is conservative), but I appreciate his writing and thinking.

Alan Jacobs’s blog “Snakes and Ladders” is quite interesting.

Thanks.

And I'll add this one that I have also recently been browsing: Isaac Saul's "Tangle" https://www.readtangle.com/ He summarizes what the "Right" says on a topic, what the "Left" says, and then gives his own take.

[manoeuver]

Chuck Klosterman's new one was fun. The Nineties.

He's real good at bringing counterintuitive takes that connect events in unexpected ways.

He's also very funny, that helps.

[TSherbs]

Chuck Klosterman's new one was fun. The Nineties.

He's real good at bringing counterintuitive takes that connect events in unexpected ways.

He's also very funny, that helps.

thanks, manoeuver

lotta rain out your way...

[Chuck Naill]

I read her book, How the South Won the Civil War and am now receiving her daily blog posting. I found this latest installment something important since it addresses "white greivance" for rural commun ities and shows what is being infested.
"
April 11, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson
Apr 12

Comment
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Last week, we lost a crucially important voice in the media when media reporter Eric Boehlert died unexpectedly. In his last column for his publication Press Run, titled “Why is the press rooting against Biden?,” Boehlert wrote that there is such a “glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments” that it seems the press is “determined to keep Biden pinned down.”

Boehlert pointed to the extraordinary poll showing that only 28% of Americans know the country has been gaining jobs in the last year—7 million jobs, in fact—while 37% think the country has lost jobs. Under Biden, the U.S. has added more than 400,000 jobs a month for 11 months, the longest period of job growth since at least 1939. And yet, Boehlert pointed out, on the day the latest job report was released, cable news used the word “inflation” as many times as “jobs.” On Sunday, NBC’s “Meet the Press” ignored the economy and instead featured conversations about two problems for the Democrats in the midterms: immigration and Trump.

It is no secret that we are in a battle between democracy and authoritarianism in America and around the world. It seems to me that the Biden administration is seeking to weaken the ties of misguided voters to authoritarianism by proving that a democratic government can answer the needs of ordinary Americans. The administration appears to be taking the position that focusing on the latest outrage from the right wing locks the country into their view of the world: you are either for Trump or against him. Instead, the administration seems to be trying to demonstrate its own worldview, but with the press glued to Trump and the Republicans, the administration is having a hard time getting traction.

The White House has taken on the idea that the Democrats are unpopular in rural areas. On March 31, the Department of the Interior announced a $420 million investment in clean water in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota. Today, the president announced a $440 million commitment to an “America the Beautiful Challenge” to attract up to $1 billion in private and philanthropic donations to conserve land, water, and wildlife across the country.

It also released today a 17-page bipartisan “playbook” to help rural communities identify more than 100 programs designed to fund rural infrastructure. It explains how to apply for funds to expand rural broadband, clean up pollution, improve transportation, fix rural bridges and roads, ensure clean water and sanitation, prepare for disasters including climate change, upgrade the electrical grid, and so on. These are critical needs that local communities, which cannot afford lobbyists, might need help navigating.

The administration is also sending officials into rural communities to make sure that billions of federal dollars and the resources they command reach across the country. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Infrastructure Coordinator Mitch Landrieu will all be on the road.

Also today, the administration took steps to address medical billing practices and medical debt. It will collect information on how more than 2000 providers handle patients, and will weigh that information into grant-making decisions as well as sharing potential violations with law enforcement. The newly rebuilt Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gutted by the former president, will investigate and hold accountable debt collectors that violate patients’ rights. The administration is also eliminating medical debt as a factor for underwriting in federal loan programs.

Last week, Biden extended the moratorium on most federal student loan programs through the end of August—sooner than most Democrats wanted—and expunged the defaults of roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers, permitting them to resume payments in good standing.

Finally, today, Biden nominated Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). The bureau has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015 because gun-rights groups oppose those nominated to the position. The Senate has confirmed only one director in the past 16 years. Dettelbach is Biden’s second nominee; the Senate scuttled the first, a former ATF agent who called for gun regulations.

The administration today announced a Justice Department rule that manufacturers of gun kits, which enable people to build weapons at home, will be considered gun manufacturers and must be licensed, the gun parts must have serial numbers, and buyers must have background checks. So-called ghost guns, assembled at home and unmarked and untraceable, are increasingly widespread. From 2016 to 2020, law enforcement recovered nearly 24,000 ghost guns at crime scenes.

Polls widely show that more than 80% of Americans support background checks for gun buyers. Nonetheless, Gun Owners of America vowed to fight the rule.

Biden’s worldview in which the government works for ordinary people contrasts with what we are learning about the worldview of the former administration under Trump, where a lack of oversight meant that money went to grifters and well-connected people.

There have been plenty of stories about the misuse of funds under the Trump administration, including the story on March 28 by Ken Dilanian and Laura Strickler of NBC that prosecutors are calling the distribution of funds under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), designed to keep businesses afloat during the pandemic, “the largest fraud in U.S. history.” As much as 10% of the relief money—$80 billion—was stolen in 2020, as money went out the door without verification checks (the Biden administration has since imposed verification rules). Swindlers also stole $90 billion to $400 billion from the Covid unemployment relief program, and another $80 billion from a different Covid relief program.

We have also learned that the State Department can’t account for the foreign gifts Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other administration officials received in office because the officials did not submit an accounting, as is required by law.

But those stories pale in comparison to the news broken last night by ​​David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly of the New York Times: six months after Trump left office, an investment fund controlled by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), invested $2 billion with Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite the fact that the fund advisors found Kushner’s new company “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” At the same time, they also invested about $1 billion in another new firm run by Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Kushner has little experience in private equity, and his firm consists primarily of that Saudi money; no American institutions have invested with him. The Saudi investment will net Kushner’s firm about $25 million a year in asset management fees, and the investors required him to hire qualified investment professionals to manage the money.

It certainly looks as if Kushner is being rewarded for his work on behalf of the kingdom, and perhaps in anticipation of influence in the future. Kushner defended MBS after news broke that the crown prince had approved the killing and dismemberment of U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner helped to broker $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, even as Congress was outraged by MBS’s war in Yemen. Most concerning, though, is that Kushner had access to the most sensitive materials in our government. Career officials denied Kushner’s security clearance out of concern about his foreign connections, but Trump overruled them.

We also know that classified material labeled “Top Secret” was in the 15 boxes of documents belonging to the National Archives and Records Administration that Trump took to his home at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating."

[Empty_of_Clouds]

I haven't read a great number of specifically cultural or political books. Looking on my little bookshelf I see:


The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes
The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham
The Washing of the Spears - Donald R. Morris
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75 - Geoffrey Best
Culture and Society in Britain 1850-1890 - JM Golby (Ed.)





The first three of these I can recommend as thoroughly ripping accounts of their respective histories and the culture/politics involved.

The last two of these I read as part of an English Lit & Art degree at the Open University (UK)



Not really sure if the OP means books that are intended as direct examinations of the political and cultural landscapes, or can include fictional works that are allegoric.

[TSherbs]

I haven't read a great number of specifically cultural or political books. Looking on my little bookshelf I see:


The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes
The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham
The Washing of the Spears - Donald R. Morris
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
Mid-Victorian Britain 1851-75 - Geoffrey Best
Culture and Society in Britain 1850-1890 - JM Golby (Ed.)





The first three of these I can recommend as thoroughly ripping accounts of their respective histories and the culture/politics involved.

The last two of these I read as part of an English Lit & Art degree at the Open University (UK)



Not really sure if the OP means books that are intended as direct examinations of the political and cultural landscapes, or can include fictional works that are allegoric.

Thanks, EOC.

I actually mostly meant contemporary essayists/columnists. I will edit the o.p. to be more specific. My bad. I've also edited the thread title to be more specific.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

No probs. I can delete my post and you yours if you want to tidy things up a bit.

[Chip]

Hughes's The Fatal Shore is in my shelf. Good book, especially as an introduction to Australian history.

When we were in New Zealand and my spouse was doing legal work for iwi on rangatiratanga (sovereign rights to land and resources) I was made aware of the huge gap between English accounts of colonisation and those of the Mäori.

A couple good books on the enormities of the British are:

Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by Ian Cobain,

https://i.imgur.com/hQP7MlU.jpg

and Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins.

https://i.imgur.com/B6WrHe8.jpg

[TSherbs]

If you've never come across Maria Popova before, you should check out her writing. She writes wonderfully, and I always learn so much. The extensive excerpts she quotes make her articles long, but that is the kind of review I like: give us the meat and voice of the writer that you are discussing.

Here is an example that I read this morning on the life and work of Kepler: https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/12/26/katharina-kepler-witchcraft-dream/

[TSherbs]

No probs. I can delete my post and you yours if you want to tidy things up a bit.
I'm not a tidy person!

[Chuck Naill]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-17-2022?r=87nb3&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[Chip]

Just started a book by Fintan O'Toole, an editor with the Irish Times, that's both astute and charming, in an incisive way.

https://i.imgur.com/4rpZxWu.jpg

I'll make it a daily read, with a dram of Powers whiskey (it'll take at least one more bottle).

O'Toole has written several books, on a wide range of topics.

[Chip]

A ways into the book, O'Toole writes that his maternal grandfather worked at the Powers Distillery in Dublin.

https://i.imgur.com/o8UjQzz.jpg

(Despite the name, the label is no longer gold.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_(whiskey)

That closed in 1975 and the operation relocated to the large Irish Brands complex at Midleton, Cork.

[Chuck Naill]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-18-2022?r=87nb3&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[Chip]

Just mentioned Timothy Snyder on the Ukraine thread. He's written a number of good books on history, politics, etc.

https://i.imgur.com/MYrOBlw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/9CdOrWb.jpg

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/243930.Timothy_Snyder

[Chuck Naill]

I’ve read those from Snyder.

[Chuck Naill]

April 26, 2022
Heather Cox Richardson
Apr 27

Comment
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I intended to write tonight about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and I will—but the research for that topic led me elsewhere: into the world of the early years of the Trump administration, when many journalists were trying oh, so hard to pretend that maybe Trump’s gutting of the State Department, for example, was just some part of a new policy approach.

It’s startling when you compare it with today’s coverage of Biden.

What got me on this track was Blinken’s offhand comment today that his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was “the 100th time that I’ve had an opportunity to brief Congress, which is one of the ways I’ve worked to meet the commitment that I made in my confirmation before this committee to restore Congress’s role as a partner both in our foreign policymaking and in revitalizing the State Department.”

That reminded me that shortly after Trump took office journalists wrote about how he was sidelining the State Department. “Is the State Department Being Intentionally Gutted?” wondered Michael Fuchs on February 28, 2017, in Just Security. He noted that Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, had not held a single press briefing since he took office and hadn’t been at summit meetings with Trump and foreign leaders. The tradition of daily press briefings from State Department spokespeople had also stopped dead the day Trump took office. The White House had said it was going to cut the State Department budget to offset an increase of $54 billion in defense spending.

The Trump administration had asked the senior career officers running the department’s administration to resign, and several senior diplomats had been recalled before replacements were even nominated. The floor where the secretary of state and the senior team have offices was essentially empty, and the administration was not filling those positions.

Maybe, Tillerson was “just getting up to speed,” but while he sounded tentative, Fuchs wasn’t willing to believe an innocent explanation. He said there were “strong signs” that “the White House [was] trying to sideline the State Department[.]” Fuchs noted that Trump seemed “enamored of the military” and seemed eager to get rid of the nonpartisan bureaucracy that stabilizes democracies.

CNN’s Nicole Gaouette had similar observations but wondered if the silence of Tillerson’s State Department was just a reflection of his caution in front of the media. She recorded that the deafening silence from the State Department created confusion as Trump’s tweets rocked long-stable ships. “[T]he President and his Cabinet have given mixed messages on issues like the US commitment to NATO,” she noted.

And then, for his first trip abroad, Trump went not to Canada or to Mexico, our two largest trading partners, democracies, close allies, and neighbors, but to Saudi Arabia, an oligarchic kleptocracy. There, he and Tillerson appeared to embrace the culture, something previous presidents had been careful to avoid because of its extreme misogyny and occasional extremism. Tillerson did in fact hold a press conference there, but U.S. media was banned: only foreign media was admitted. Foreign affairs expert Anne Applebaum called the trip “bizarre, unseemly, unethical and un-American.”

Of course, we now know that Trump was centering foreign affairs in the White House—Ivanka Trump went along on that trip to Saudi Arabia to promote “female entrepreneurs”—and among his own cronies like the “Three Amigos” who tried to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into launching a fake investigation into Hunter Biden. The plan was, at least in part, to stop looking at foreign affairs as national security—just days ago, Trump told an audience that during his term he had threatened European leaders that the U.S. would not honor the mutual aid pact and defend Europe against incursions by Russia—and instead to pocket huge sums of money. We know now it was Trump friend Tom Barrack who was behind the meeting with the Saudis as he angled for a huge deal to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

People who seemed nonplussed by the extraordinary actions of the Trump administration were not deliberately giving him a pass, I don’t think. They just couldn’t believe they were seeing the dismantling of centuries of diplomacy to enrich one family and its inner circle.

So when Blinken now talks about values and national security again, it seems sometimes we are cynically harsh.

Today, he spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reminding it that he, the secretary of state, had spoken to the committee 100 times. He thanked it for its support and talked of the recent visit he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had made to Kyiv, where they had gone to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to the government and the people of Ukraine. He described the countryside and cities coming back to life after the carnage Russia visited on them, and he hailed the extraordinary determination of the Ukrainians.

There is a lesson in that determination for the U.S., he suggested. “Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine has underscored the power and purpose of American diplomacy. Our diplomacy is rallying allies and partners around the world to join us in supporting Ukraine with security, economic, humanitarian assistance; imposing massive costs on the Kremlin; strengthening our collective security and defense; addressing the war’s mounting global consequences, including the refugee and food crises….”

Blinken was understating things. The administration’s bolstering of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other allies and partners, along with its strong effort to keep various nations on board with economic sanctions, has been key to supporting Ukraine. Today, news broke of just how extensive U.S. sharing of intelligence has been with Ukraine, enabling Ukraine not only to protect its own weapons from attack, but also to shoot down a Russian plane transporting troops. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has helped prevent Russia from getting control of the airspace over Ukraine.

And now the administration has expanded that cooperation to include intelligence sharing to enable Ukraine to take back territory Russia has captured, including in Crimea or the Donbas. This reflects Austin’s statement today that Ukraine can not only survive against Russia, but can “win.” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby elaborated: “winning is very clearly defined by a Ukraine whose sovereignty is fully respected, whose territorial integrity is not violated by Russia or any other country for that matter.” Kirby also explained Austin’s comment that the U.S. wants “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Kirby said: “We don’t want a Russia that’s capable of exerting…malign influence in Europe or anywhere around the world.”

In addition to responding to the urgency of the attack on Ukraine, the State Department “continues to carry out the missions traditionally associated with diplomacy, like responsibly managing great power competition with China, facilitating a halt to fighting in Yemen and Ethiopia, pushing back against the rising tide of authoritarianism and the threat that it poses to human rights,” he said. The State Department will continue to modernize, as well, to address emergence of infectious diseases, the climate crisis, and the digital revolution.

Blinken noted that the State Department is filling out its ranks as quickly as it can with diplomats that “reflect America’s remarkable diversity, which is one of our greatest strengths, including in our diplomacy,” providing the paid internships that will enable poorer young people to accept them, and finally having State’s “first ever chief diversity and inclusion officer.” The effort is paying off: State is on track for its largest hiring intake in ten years.

“My first 15 months in this job have only strengthened my own conviction that these and other reforms are not just worthwhile;” Blinken said, “they’re essential to our national security and to delivering for the people we represent.”

—

Notes:

https://www.justsecurity.org/38230/state-department-intentionally-gutted/

https://www.voanews.com/a/several-senior-us-state-department-diplomats-leave-posts/3694107.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/21/politics/state-department-tillerson-press-silence/index.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/05/21/trumps-bizarre-and-un-american-visit-to-saudi-arabia/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-barrack-emirates-qatar/2021/07/21/f903a388-ea36-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-intel-helped-ukraine-protect-air-defenses-shoot-russian-plane-carry-rcna26015?s=09

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/22/trump-says-he-threatened-not-defend-nato-russia/

https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3011263/secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-holds-a-news-conference-following-ukrai/

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/26/austin-ukraine-victory-russia-war-00027737

https://www.state.gov/opening-remarks-by-secretary-antony-j-blinken-before-the-senate-foreign-relations-committee-2/

[TSherbs]

Fuck Trump, forever.

[dneal]

Douglas Murray.

[Empty_of_Clouds]

Fuck Trump, forever.

Is that a book title? Who is the author? :)

[TSherbs]

Ha!

[Chuck Naill]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-28-2022?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMzc5MzcyNywicG9zdF9pZCI 6NTMwODE5MTcsIl8iOiJFakI5aiIsImlhdCI6MTY1MTI0Mjg0M CwiZXhwIjoxNjUxMjQ2NDQwLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjA1MzMiLCJ zdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.H8HyBB7Ld2rL2htUFs8fU P_S4Xl7z3KrACd4EpuPXr8&s=r

[TSherbs]

Here is a very interesting and apropos article (Vox) on Hannah Arendt. Give it a look. The woman was prescient!

https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23048597/vox-conversations-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-the-philosophers

[Chip]

Kim Stanley Robinson has written near-future SF novels that are worth a look as social and political documents.

https://i.imgur.com/IK5vVQq.jpg

Plus, he's published quite a few books, so you won't run out quickly.

[Chuck Naill]

“ …at the same time, the rise of a market-based economy in the former Soviet republics made it clear that capitalism and democracy were not interchangeable. An oligarchy rose from the ashes of the USSR, and U.S. leaders embraced the leaders of that new system as allies. That allyship has gone so far that this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference held a conference in Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, who was a keynote speaker at the event, has openly rejected democracy. At the conference, he called for the right in the U.S. to join forces with those like him; yesterday, he declared martial law in his country.

At home, where our focus on free markets has stacked our political system in favor of the Republicans, the vast majority of Americans want reasonable gun laws, reproductive rights, action on climate change, equality before the law, infrastructure funding, and so on, and their representatives are unable to get those things.”

Heather Cox Richardson

[Chip]

Just finished this. Another futurist s/f novel, very well thought-out and detailed.

https://i.imgur.com/VTeQiZ7.jpg

Robinson's special gift is to inhabit his sociopolitical landscapes with engaging characters.

[Chip]

Piketty has some concrete proposals that are sure to infuriate entrenched economists and their capitalist sponsors.

The French economist Thomas Piketty is arguably the world’s greatest chronicler of economic inequality. For decades now, he has collected huge data sets documenting the share of income and wealth that has flowed to the top 1 percent. And the culmination of much of that work, his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” quickly became one of the most widely read and cited economic texts in recent history.

Piketty’s new book, “A Brief History of Equality,” is perhaps his most optimistic work. In it, he chronicles the immense social progress that the U.S. and Europe have achieved over the past few centuries in the form of rising educational attainment, life expectancy and incomes. Of course, those societies still contain huge inequalities of wealth. But in Piketty’s view, this outcome isn’t an inevitability; it’s the product of policy choices that we collectively make — and could choose to make differently. And to that end, Piketty proposes a truly radical policy agenda — a universal minimum inheritance of around $150,000 per person, worker control over the boards of corporations and “confiscatory” levels of wealth and income taxation — that he calls “participatory socialism.”

So this conversation isn’t just about the current state of inequality; it’s about the kind of policies — and politics — it would take to solve that inequality. We discuss why wealth is a far more accurate indicator of social power than income, the quality of the historical data that Piketty’s work relies on, why Piketty believes the welfare state — not capitalism itself — is the most important driver of human progress, why representative democracy hasn’t led to more economic redistribution, whether equality is really the best metric to measure human progress in the first place, how Piketty would pay for his universal inheritance proposal, whether the levels of taxation he is proposing would stifle innovation and wreck the economy, why he believes it would be better for societies — and economic productivity — for workers to have a much larger say in how companies are governed, how Piketty thinks about the prospect of inflation and more.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-thomas-piketty.html?referringSource=articleShare

[Chip]

This book of oral histories and analysis had a profound influence on me.

https://i.imgur.com/5xOQQii.jpg

I will never be a woman and I find in them both mystery and delight.

After I finished the book, I did further research and wrote a novella with a main character who grows up in a village in Siberia, hunting for subsistence, and eventually serves as a sniper in the WWII Soviet Army.

https://i.imgur.com/Rvg3RGr.jpg

[TSherbs]

I thought that this, today, was pretty good:

from The Third Rail, a newsletter examining the disputes that divide America.
By David French



On the last day of the Supreme Court’s most recent term, the Court released two cases that highlight a challenge to American democracy—a challenge that is the direct result of one of the Founders’ more consequential miscalculations. They granted Congress more power than any other branch of government, and they mistakenly thought Congress would possess a sense of institutional responsibility and authority. Instead it is largely a partisan body, drained of any sense of independent civic duty, and American democracy suffers as a result.

The two cases seem unrelated at first glance. One is West Virginia v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s Obama-era clean-power rule. The Court relied on the so-called major-questions doctrine, a relatively new term for the legal idea that if Congress intends to delegate significant power to regulatory agencies to fashion new rules and regulations, it has to do so explicitly.

The second case is Biden v. Texas. The Court upheld the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy, which required a small number of non-Mexican nationals who were detained at the border to wait in Mexico during their removal proceedings.

What do these cases have in common? They both arose from serious and problematic congressional inaction. In the EPA case, the executive branch was responding to legitimate concerns about climate change, but the executive branch is not supposed to be a lawmaking body. In the “remain in Mexico” case, Congress failed to fund sufficient immigration detention facilities, rendering it impossible for the president to comply with Congress’s mandate that immigrants who are not “clearly and beyond a reasonable doubt” entitled to entry “shall be detained.” This left the president with the choice of releasing migrants into the country or requiring them to return to the “foreign territory contiguous to the United States” from which they arrived.

Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution states, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” With the growth of the administrative state, Congress has effectively delegated some of its legislative powers to administrative agencies, which promulgate regulations that have the force of law. For example, many of the rules that govern American immigration, environmental policy, workplace safety, and the securities industry are regulations promulgated by the executive branch, not statutes passed by Congress.

Chief Justice John Roberts sees a problem there. In his majority opinion in the EPA case, he wrote that any judicial inquiry into administrative authority must answer “whether Congress in fact meant to confer the power the agency has asserted.” If Congress did not mean to confer such power on the agency, then the agency does not have the legal authority to act—no matter how pressing the matter or how urgent the crisis. In other words, if Congress fails to act, its failure does not empower the executive branch to fill the legal gap.

As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence in the Biden v. Texas decision, “The larger policy story behind this case is the multi-decade inability of the political branches to provide DHS with sufficient facilities to detain noncitizens who seek to enter the United States pending their immigration proceedings. But this Court has authority to address only the legal issues before us. We do not have authority to end the legislative stalemate or to resolve the underlying policy problems.”

What does any of this have to do with the Founders? How do these cases reflect a challenge to American democracy? The problem is simply this: Congress was intended to be the most potent branch of government. It is now the most dysfunctional. And it’s dysfunctional in part because the Founders did not properly predict the power of partisanship over institutional responsibility.

Even worse, Congress’s dysfunction radiates to other branches of government. Both the presidency and the judiciary assume more power than they should, escalating the stakes of presidential elections and the intensity of judicial confirmations.

Describing the branches of government as “co-equal,” as many people do, is simply wrong. Read the Constitution and you’ll quickly see that Congress has more theoretical power than any other branch. It can fire the president. It can fire any member of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. It can define the jurisdiction of federal courts and the numbers of judges and justices. Its powers are enumerated in the first article of the Constitution for a reason. It’s not equal. It’s preeminent.

Only Congress can declare war. Only Congress can authorize public spending. And for all the talk of the Founders’ suspicion of democracy, they gave these significant powers to the most democratic branch of government.

In reality, however, this independent congressional power depends a great deal on its willingness to uphold its institutional responsibility, to see itself as a separate branch of government that is jealous of its own power and prerogatives. The constitutional theory isn’t that, say, Democrats will check Republicans but that Congress will check the presidency.

Substitute an overriding partisan purpose for institutional responsibility, and the system starts to falter. We see this most plainly in the impeachment context. Congress has quite clearly tended to view impeachment primarily through a partisan lens. When Mitt Romney voted to convict Donald Trump during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019, he was the first senator in American history to cross partisan lines to vote to convict a president.

Congress is now less an independent branch of government and much more a collection of partisan foot soldiers supporting or opposing the sitting president’s agenda. Combine this partisan purpose with a closely divided country and you have a formula for deadlock, and worse.

Politics abhors a power vacuum, and Congress’s absence has been filled by the presidency. As Congress shrinks, the presidency grows. On a bipartisan basis, presidents now choose to act whenever Congress “fails.”

So now it is presidents who, in effect, declare war. Time and again, they initiate military hostilities without congressional approval. Their administrative agencies write laws of great consequence. They draft executive orders that are even designed to redirect funds appropriated by Congress to new presidential priorities. And the quirks of the Electoral College mean we now face a system where most Americans (who live in safe red or blue states) don’t cast truly meaningful votes for the one person who holds all this power. This reality breeds instability, and that instability is amplified each time a president is elected in spite of losing the popular vote.

And this brings us back to the Supreme Court. An emerging Court majority is now highly skeptical of presidential power. Through a series of technical rulings grounded in both the Administrative Procedure Act and in the Constitution itself, the Court is imposing intense scrutiny on executive actions—such as the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal DACA and add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, the Biden administration’s OSHA vaccine mandate, and the Obama-era clean-power rule.

On a pragmatic basis, a dangerous game is afoot. The Supreme Court is telling Congress, “If you want something done, you’ll have to do it yourself.” But what if Congress simply doesn’t do anything? What if it continues to place partisan imperatives over its institutional responsibilities? The Supreme Court can deny the president additional power, but it cannot force Congress to do its work.

Indeed, if Congress continues to abdicate its fundamental constitutional obligations, it will cause even more degradation in the American body politic. Troubling gaps in law and policy will be left entirely unaddressed, and a less and less powerful president will be unable to alter the national course.

Despite all this, however, the Court is constitutionally correct. It is not the role of the judicial branch to enlarge the power of the presidency merely because Congress has lapsed into partisan impotence. Ratifying the continued expansion of the administrative state would only enable Congress’s worst instincts and further damage American democracy.

[Chip]

The Court is off the rails.

What precisely do the learned justices believe Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency to do? To protect the environment, perhaps?

Or to be a service bureau for issuing permits to industry, to rape, despoil, pillage, poison, and pollute?

[dneal]

On a pragmatic basis, a dangerous game is afoot. The Supreme Court is telling Congress, “If you want something done, you’ll have to do it yourself.” But what if Congress simply doesn’t do anything? What if it continues to place partisan imperatives over its institutional responsibilities? The Supreme Court can deny the president additional power, but it cannot force Congress to do its work.

Then that's the (inadvertent) will of the people. They're free to elect new representatives that will do the work.

[TSherbs]

This book of oral histories and analysis had a profound influence on me.

https://i.imgur.com/5xOQQii.jpg

I will never be a woman and I find in them both mystery and delight.

After I finished the book, I did further research and wrote a novella with a main character who grows up in a village in Siberia, hunting for subsistence, and eventually serves as a sniper in the WWII Soviet Army.

https://i.imgur.com/Rvg3RGr.jpg

very cool!

[Chuck Naill]

Mike Pence is against the "woke"movement. Perhaps he is against any historical facts.

From Heather Cox Richardson today.

..."As soon as the amendment was ratified, though, white southerners who were dead set against their Black neighbors participating in their government began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds. Their objection to Black voting, they claimed, was that poor, uneducated Black men just out of enslavement were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services, like roads and schools, that could be paid for only with taxes levied on people with the means to pay, which in the post–Civil War South usually meant white men.

Complaining that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—white southerners began to keep Black voters from the polls. In 1878, Democrats captured both the House and the Senate, and former Confederates took control of key congressional committees. From there, in the summer of 1879, they threatened to shut down the federal government altogether unless the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to end the federal protection of Black Americans in the South. "
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-6-2022?r=87nb3&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

[Chip]

Paul Fussell has written several books full of insight, wit, and humor. The Great War and Modern Memory is a classic.

But if you don't know his work, the best introduction is Class:

https://i.imgur.com/R0jUJNp.jpg

[Chuck Naill]

Republicans raising hell about student loan forgiviness, yet....
"With these headlines from the Republican Party, and coming on the heels of a spectacular few months for the Democrats, the Biden administration came out today swinging against MAGA Republicans.

First, after a day of Republican congress members railing against yesterday’s educational loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others, the White House tweeted a thread of those members alongside the amount of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money those individuals were forgiven.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said: “For our government just to say ok your debt is completely forgiven.. it’s completely unfair.” Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL) said: “Biden’s reckless, unilateral student loan giveaway is unfair to the 87 percent of Americans without student loan debt and those who played by the rules.” Buchanan had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said: “We do not need farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and teachers in Oklahoma paying the debts of Ivy League lawyers and doctors across the U.S.” Mullin had more than $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Kevin Hern (R-OK) said: “To recap, in the last two weeks, the ‘Party of the People’ has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees.” Hern had more than $1 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) said: “Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.” Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said: Everyone knows that in a $60 Billion+ European land war, it's always the last $3 Billion that kicks in the door….” Gaetz had $482,321 in PPP loans forgiven.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-25-2022?utm_source=email

[Chip]

My spouse, who taught law for many years and has briefed Supreme Court cases, thinks highly of Neal Katyal.

Bill Barr Made the Decision to Clear Trump, and That Should Still Frighten Us

By Neal K. Katyal
Aug. 30, 2022

Mr. Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration and is a co-author of “Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump.”

The memo released last week by the Justice Department closing the book on the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election is a frightening document. Critics have rightly focused on its substance, slipshod legal analysis and omission of damning facts.

But the process by which that memo, sent in March 2019, came to be is just as worrisome. Delivered to the attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, the memo was written by two political appointees in the Justice Department.

Mr. Barr used the memo to go around the special counsel regulations and to clear President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice. If left to fester, this decision will have pernicious consequences for investigations of future high-level wrongdoing.

It raises particular concerns because, as a young Justice Department staff member, I drafted the special counsel regulations in 1999 to prevent the exact problem of having partisan political appointees undermine an investigation. The regulations were put in place to ensure that the counsel would make any determination to charge or not and to force the attorney general to overrule those determinations specifically and before Congress.

The 2019 memo tendentiously argued that Mr. Trump committed no crimes — leaving the final decision on the matter to Republican-aligned appointees instead of to the independent special counsel.

The challenge in devising the regulations was to develop a framework for the prosecution of high-level executive branch officials — which is harder than it sounds, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions. So we are left with one of the oldest philosophical problems: Who will guard the guardians?

The solution we landed on was to have a special counsel take over the investigative and prosecutorial functions. That counsel was vested with day-to-day independence in an investigation, but the attorney general would still be able to overrule the special counsel — but, crucially, if the attorney general overruled, to report to Congress, to ensure accountability.

The regulations were written with an untrustworthy president in mind, more so than the problem that Mr. Barr presented, which is an untrustworthy attorney general. Unlike presidents, attorneys general were confirmed by the Senate, with a 60-vote threshold (though it is now a simple majority) — so we assumed they would be reasonably nonpartisan. And we also knew there was no way around the attorney general being the ultimate decider, because the Constitution requires the executive branch to control prosecutions.

We created the role of special counsel to fill a void — to concentrate in one person responsibility and ultimate blame so that investigations would not be covered up from the get-go and to give that person independence from political pressure.

It is outrageous that Mr. Barr acted so brazenly in the face of this framework. The point of requiring a special counsel was to provide for an independent determination of any potential criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Trump. But the political appointees in his Justice Department took what was the most important part of that inquiry — the decision of whether he committed crimes — and grabbed it for themselves. This was a fundamental betrayal of the special counsel guidelines not for some principle but because it protected their boss, Mr. Trump. It is the precise problem that the regulations were designed to avoid and why the regulations give the counsel “the full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States attorney.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/trump-barr-justice-department.html

[TSherbs]

I have been enjoying this columnist (Ruth Marcus) for WaPo. Her column today on the problems and importance of the Presidential powers case in front of the Supreme Court (the loan forgiveness case) is particularly good.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/09/trump-biden-student-loans-emergency-powers/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_ruth_marcus&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl-ruthmarcus&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3888212%2F6393455d9d88976ba34e9343%2F60a90512 ae7e8a50b50fdb7e%2F6%2F19%2F6393455d9d88976ba34e93 43&wp_cu=7c274c833b82beb56003cb0b3d1dabb0%7CC2EBBE389 B042025E0530100007F02A8

[Chuck Naill]

I have been enjoying this columnist (Ruth Marcus) for WaPo. Her column today on the problems and importance of the Presidential powers case in front of the Supreme Court (the loan forgiveness case) is particularly good.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/09/trump-biden-student-loans-emergency-powers/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_ruth_marcus&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl-ruthmarcus&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3888212%2F6393455d9d88976ba34e9343%2F60a90512 ae7e8a50b50fdb7e%2F6%2F19%2F6393455d9d88976ba34e93 43&wp_cu=7c274c833b82beb56003cb0b3d1dabb0%7CC2EBBE389 B042025E0530100007F02A8

Several thoughts, while I was able to pay cash for my children's college, I realize many cannot afford college.

It bothers me that colleges can pay a football coach millions of dollars and cannot provide education that is affordable and convenient. Also, debt is the devil workplace.

America needs skilled and educated people. A foreign student should not have an advantage at a tax payer supported university.

And, not just those that score high on standardized tests should be able to go to college free. People learn differently.

[kazoolaw]

Republicans raising hell about student loan forgiviness, yet....
Do you recall that PPP was an act of Congress, with loan forgiveness built in?
Student loan "forgiveness" (which actually shifts repayment to taxpayers) is the Executive Branch usurping the legislative function.
We've had this same discussion regarding any number of Biden era actions.[/SIZE][/FONT]

[Chuck Naill]

I’m okay with paying for Americans to get an education. I assume I’ll benefit.

[kazoolaw]

I’m okay with paying for Americans to get an education. I assume I’ll benefit.

But will you assume all of the tuition debt?

[Chuck Naill]

I’m okay with paying for Americans to get an education. I assume I’ll benefit.

But will you assume all of the tuition debt?
I’ll assume a tax payer proportionate debt

[TSherbs]

This is a religious writer I admire, but she also discusses cultural Christian religious bias (regions of the world, and some denominational issues): Cynthia Bourgeault, a retired Episcopal priest. I am currently rereading her book "The Wisdom Jesus." I reject some of the reaches of her faith, but her approach to Jesus as a wisdom teacher in a long Jewish and Middle Eastern tradition (Buddhist and Sufi also) is refreshing and inspiring. Her interpretations of the NT are very persuasive (for me). She is a full Christian believer in the divinity of Jesus and the truth of miracles (I am not). But her book is not an argument over the divinity, it is about what his message was.

[Robalone]

Let’s have a great big communal sigh and shed a tear for John Pilger's passing
Truly one of the all time greats , a tireless advocate for truth and justice.
His writing and work will live on as a beacon in the dark times before humanity wakes up.

[TSherbs]

Let’s have a great big communal sigh and shed a tear for John Pilger's passing
Truly one of the all time greats , a tireless advocate for truth and justice.
His writing and work will live on as a beacon in the dark times before humanity wakes up.

Indeed, a bold and colorful journalistic and documentarian career.