The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on Chicago’s budget shortfall:

Most city money goes on personnel: salaries, benefits, pension costs. Most of the increased revenue ideas we know about risk unintended consequences, are going to take a lot of time to implement, and may require approval at the state level.

Johnson could also use someone to remind him that his job as the city’s chief executive is to get the best available deals for the city, and its taxpayers, and it’s not to pay contractors, vendors and the like as much as possible, just because he thinks the world should be so.

I wonder where they got that idea? What if Mayor Johnson, rather than seeing it as his job “to get the best available deals for the city”, sees his job as allocating money, picking winners and losers? And ensuring his own re-election, of course.

I found this piece at AlJazeera, an interview by Oliver Jarvis of Arundhati Roy, thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

What has happened in India and it’s so dangerous, so blatant, is that the country, the nation, the government and its institutions have all been conflated with the ruling party – a political party. And that ruling party has been conflated with Modi, the individual. In fact, there is hardly any ruling party now, there’s just a ruler. So it’s as if Modi is hosting the G20. All of us are locked in. We can’t go out. The poor have been purged from the city. The slums have been screened off. The roads are barricaded, the traffic is shut down. It’s as quiet as death. It is as if he’s so ashamed of all of us, of what the city is really like. It’s been purged and locked down for this event.

I think we need to be very, very careful about India. If it isn’t already, India is verging on becoming a fascist state.

In his latest Washington Post column, George Will, never a Trump supporter, cautions against trying to block Trump’s candidacy for the presidency in 2024 using the 14th Amendment:

Leave aside (as a court will be unable to do) the fraught questions about what causal connections there were between Trump’s rhetoric before and on Jan. 6, 2021, and the actions then of his acolytes: They, after all, had agency. And never mind how to calibrate “aid or comfort.” Just concentrate on “insurrection.”

The Confederacy — the attempted secessions of 11 states; rebel cannon firing on federal installations; armies on the march against U.S. forces — was unambiguously an insurrection. A riotous rabble — whatever its motivations and delusional aspirations — on a January afternoon? Rather less so. They were criminal and disgusting, but closer to vandals than to the Army of Northern Virginia.

and

People advocating a 14th Amendment solution to the problem of Trump are spreading the acids of cynicism and suspicion that are corroding trust in institutions. And some states’ election officials — watch Colorado — are apt to seize this occasion for grandstanding, trying to keep Trump’s name off their ballots. This will thicken his armor of martyrdom.

The problem that I see with the push to disqualify Trump from running based on novel and strained interpretations of the 14th Amendment is that I don’t believe they as much a principled arguments as opportunistic ones. The rationale appears to be that Trump is such a threat to democracy that any action is justified in preventing it. That the views of those who rioted on January 6 are the mirror image of that does not seem to occur to them.

It’s all very post-modern. Like burning the village in order to save it.

I’m afraid the Fareed Zakarias is engaging in wishful thinking in his latest Washington Post column. He pleads with Democrats to change their position on immigration:

The Democrats are confronting a crisis that could cripple their chances at the polls at the national, state and local level. I’m talking about immigration. It’s happening not only because Republicans are taking advantage of the problem but also because Democrats are unwilling to accept that their policy ideas on the issue are wrong and grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand.

The number of people coming across our southern border, most claiming asylum, has been around 2 million per year every year since Joe Biden took office. Add to that the number of “gotaways”—those known to have entered but not apprehended—at around 500,000 per year and some unknown number of completely undetected border crossings.

Here in Chicago dealing with the influx of migrants has resulted in a 4% budget shortfall. In a city with very nearly if not the lowest credit rating of any major city and a declining population that is a serious issue.

In short the enormous influx of migrants is threatening a collapse.

I see no prospect whatever that President Biden will admit that he was wrong. Candidate Biden ran on letting “asylum seekers” into the country apparently not realizing that along wiht the legitimate asylum seekers we would get an even larger number of illegitimate claims for asylum. Admitting fault is not something that politicians do well.

The question now is whether the federal government will address the problem at all or will merely stand frozen like a deer in the headlights. Addressing the problem and securing the border has always been within the president’s authority: he could order the military to do it. The asylum requests overloading the system could be addressed by imposing a stricter standard than the present hihgly subjective “credible threat” standard. That, too, is within the president’s authority.

One more point. There is broad agreement among Americans that immigration is good for the country. My concern is at is always has been that the large amount of illegal and illegitimate immigration will threaten support for legal immigration and legitimate claims for asylum.

Here’s Mr. Zakaria’s proposal:

There is only one solution to this crisis, as Nolan Rappaport, a longtime congressional expert on the issue, has suggested: The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

Do you believe that President Biden will do that? That’s the material equivalent of exactly what I said above—closing the U. S. even to legitimate asylum-seekers. The next step would be an outright ban on immigration and I’m concerned that is coming.

The United Auto Workers union has taken the unprecedented action of going out on strike against all three of what used to be referred to as the “Big Three Automakers”. Phoebe Wall Howard, Eric D. Lawrence, and Lily Altavena report at The Detroit Free Press:

The UAW declared a strike against Detroit Three automakers Thursday as contract talks failed to secure new labor agreements before the current deals expired at 11:59 p.m.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the first wave of plants the union would strike if a new labor agreement was not reached before midnight: Ford Michigan Assembly Plant (Final Assembly and Paint only) in Wayne, Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio and General Motors Wentzville Assembly in Missouri.

The graph at the top of the page illustrates how poor the timing is for this particular action. Auto loan delinquencies are at a ten year high and trending in the wrong direction. The manufacturers bear at least some of the costs of those delinquencies. Also consider this:

The Big Three aren’t the Big Three any more. That’s the distant past. At this point Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and Mercedes all have non-union manufacturing facilities in the U. S.

I have some sympathy with the argument the union is making: I think that auto company CEOs are overcompensated relative to performance and the workers deserve a bigger share of the pie. But that’s a determination for the companies’ stockholders to make and that they haven’t made it is an illustration of the perverse state of corporate governance.

Which of the following is most likely?

1. The union will achieve its objectives and that will be a small first step in rectifying the increasing income inequality in the U. S.
2. The union will succeed in driving more manufacturing to “right to work” states (mostly in the South).
3. Both
4. Neither

I think B is the most likely.

If there’ is a better example of what I think of as the “cafeteria approach” to policy, it would be difficult to find a better example than Matt Sheehan’s article at Foreign Policy on the lessons the U. S. federal government should take from China’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence. The “cafeteria approach” is the idea that it is possible to select certain features from other countries’ approaches to solving problems without adopting all of them and despite our, well, being a different country. It’s encountered most frequently in laments of why the United States can’t have Scandinavian social policies. Combine that cafeteria approach with naïveté and you’ve pretty much got this article.

It ignores things like Chinese society being much more cohesive than ours, it not having independent courts, the control the state imposes on Internet connectivity, and a host of others. Note that I’m not saying that China’s strategy for dealing with AI won’t work in China. The jury is out but perhaps it will. The question is whether the Chinese approach would work in the United States. Frankly, I doubt it.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

The clearest difference between the nascent congressional approach and China’s regulations lies in their scope. Schumer is leading a push for comprehensive AI legislation that would address the technology’s impact on national security, jobs, misinformation, bias, democratic values, and more. That approach is praiseworthy for its ambition, but cramming solutions to all of these problems into a single piece of legislation is almost impossible. The contours of these problems are just coming into focus, and the interventions needed to address each issue may prove wildly different.

By contrast, the Chinese government has taken a targeted and iterative approach to AI governance. Instead of immediately going for one all-encompassing law that covers all of AI, China has picked out specific applications that it was concerned about and developed a series of regulations to tackle those concerns. That has allowed it to steadily build up new policy tools and regulatory know-how with each new regulation. And when China’s initial regulations proved insufficient for a fast-moving technology like AI, it quickly iterated on them.

I suspect that Sen. Schumer is taking the approach he is because he believes, likely correctly, that he will get at most one bite from the apple. The iterative approach being suggested would be blocked at every step by the courts. You’d spend a fortune on defending the government’s position and at the be left with very little.

At Al-Monitor Amberin Zaman reports that the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) prime minister has reached out to President Biden, asking him to intercede on behalf of the region with the Baghdad government:

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Masrour Barzani has appealed to President Joe Biden to intervene in a deepening crisis with the central government in Baghdad, airing fears that the Kurdistan Region might even collapse as an entity if the crisis is left unchecked, Al-Monitor has learned.

In a letter dated Sept. 3 that was addressed to Biden and delivered to the White House only this past Sunday, Barzani wrote, “I write to you now at another critical juncture in our history, one that I fear we may have difficulty overcoming. …[W]e are bleeding economically and hemorrhaging politically. For the first time in my tenure as prime minister, I hold grave concerns that this dishonorable campaign against us may cause the collapse of … the very model of a Federal Iraq that the United States sponsored in 2003 and purported to stand by since.”

“We believe that your administration retains significant leverage with Baghdad,” Barzani said of Washington’s ability to diffuse the crisis.

The cri de coeur comes amid escalating tensions between Erbil and Baghdad over budgetary allocations, oil sales and territories that both sides claim for their own. Barzani reiterated his calls for further US engagement to help resolve the disputes in a meeting on Monday in Erbil with US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski.

The underlying problem is the same one that has been there since Saddam. The area around Kirkuk produces quite a bit of oil and the Kurds think they deserve more of the proceeds. It’s not all about the oil, however. Arabs vs. Kurds. Shi’ites vs. Sunnis. Political differences.

Iraq became our responsibility when we invaded 20 years ago. Try as we might extricating ourselves fully remains difficult. The landlocked KRG territory is not really a viable country on its own, especially not if opposed by the much more populous Shi’ite south.

David Ignatius, the Stentor of the prevailing Washington wisdom, states his preference in his Washington Post column—he doesn’t want President Biden to seek re-election. The crux of his argument appears to be that:

1. President Biden is too old and a supermajority of Americans (not just Republicans) think he is too old
2. He has no workable alternative for a running mate and Vice President Harris is even less popular than he is

concluding:

I hope Biden has this conversation with himself about whether to run, and that he levels with the country about it. It would focus the 2024 campaign. Who is the best person to stop Trump? That was the question when Biden decided to run in 2019, and it’s still the essential test of a Democratic nominee today.

Democratic Party camp follower and noted Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal on the other hand says that Democrats have no choice but for President Biden to run again in his piece in The Guardian:

The election of 2024 will be the second referendum on Trump, but the first held on the attempted coup of January 6t. Just as the 2004 election, which President George W Bush won, was in effect a referendum on the terrorist attack on September 11, the only election since 1988 in which the Republican won the popular vote, January 6 is the overwhelming political factor that establishes Trump’s assertion to his party’s nomination by means of incumbency. His forthcoming trials are not peripheral, but central to his claim.

When the illusion of a counter-factual alternative fades, and the choice is between the incumbent and the false incumbent, then Democrats may consider something other than the age of Biden and whether they wish to contribute to a new political age of Trump.

The point of disagreement between the two appears to be that Mr. Ignatius seems to believe that Joe Biden’s running for re-election will effect what Mr. Blumenthal wants to forestall by his running. One potential fly in Mr. Blumenthal’s ointment is that present evidence does not suggest that Americans, generally, share his view either of the Biden presidency or January 6.

My view is that I find it incredible that four years later the only candidate the Democratic Party seems able to produce is over 80 years old. I mean that literally. I don’t find it believable.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal intone:

After Democrats impeached President Trump over his phone call with Ukraine’s President in 2019, we wrote that “the House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely.” Well, here we are, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that Republicans will open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

Unless concrete evidence of some quid for the quo can be found, I do not believe that President Biden should be impeached and certainly not removed if impeached. However, I do think that members of the president’s family if not the president himself have been engaging in influence peddling, that influence peddling is a corrupt practice, and that such corruption is as undemocratic as disorderly conduct and occupying official offices and meeting places.

I think that the available evidence leaves little doubt of that and that the best you can say about the web of shell companies that have been created and receiving emails under multiple pseudonyms is that they look bad, guilty.

If the evidence for President Biden’s knowledge of the influence-peddling is sufficient, I think there is a case for censuring him whether he is guilty of breaking the law or not.