In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger is alarmed at the Democratic presidential aspirants’ anti-corporate rhetoric:

Naturally, the Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination needed a bogeyman, and they have created one even scarier than the Trump monster. It’s them—“corporations!” At their recent presidential debate, one candidate after another claimed corporations were wrecking the country.

Elizabeth Warren, who knows a thing or two about scaring people: “They have no loyalty to America. They have no loyalty to American workers. They have no loyalty to American consumers. They have no loyalty to American communities. They are loyal only to their own bottom line.” And by the way, “I have a plan.” Yikes.

Cory Booker ranted about “corporate tax incentives,” and Amy Klobuchar wants a rollback of “what we did with the corporate tax rate.” Beto O’Rourke somehow related a woman he said was working four jobs with “some of these corporations,” and Tom Steyer, billionaire, said we have to “break the power of these corporations.”

Finally Joe Biden, seeing where this was going, invoked the “corporate greed” of companies that are “not investing in our employees.”

The one of those plaints I want to consider in a little more detail is Joe Biden’s. It isn’t greed that deters large companies from “investing in its employees” but prudence. Why spend money training your present employees to ensure that they have the skills you want when you can call an Accenture, Wipro, or Infosys and get temps, whether here in the United States or offshore, with precisely the skills, experience, and qualities you need? Under the circumstances doing anything else would be irresponsible. It is no accident that month after month employees in the category “business services” continue to increase in numbers in the labor situation reports.

That those affordable outsourced workers design planes that crash or provide poorer service than the workers they replaced is a mere bagatelle.

The solution to that isn’t retraining programs, which are nearly always backwards looking and have spotty track records. The solution is removing the incentives that have been put in place that move companies to outsource, when onshore or off. There are plenty of them.

But that brings me to the real conclusion. I don’t think that Mr. Henninger need worry about some anti-corporate fervor seizing the Democratic Party. Sure, the candidates will rail against “corporate greed” but after the election is over and they’ve satisfied their union and populist supporters, they’ll fail to enforce antitrust laws, rescue big companies when they get themselves into trouble, expand patent and copyright terms, provide breaks for specific companies, and generally be as corporatist as their Republican opponents would have been. They need those big companies. They need their money, both while running for office and when they leave office and are looking for a cozy sinecure that pays the big bucks.

Even Elizabeth Warren, that bugaboo of banks and financial services companies, will be able to tell her friends from her enemies.

That’s the real competitive advantage of large corporations. They can offer incentives to politicians that can’t be matched by small ones.

I find myself in partial agreement with New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo:

But lately my affinity for my home state has soured. Maybe it’s the smoke and the blackouts, but a very un-Californian nihilism has been creeping into my thinking. I’m starting to suspect we’re over. It’s the end of California as we know it. I don’t feel fine.

It isn’t just the fires — although, my God, the fires. Is this what life in America’s most populous, most prosperous state is going to be like from now on? Every year, hundreds of thousands evacuating, millions losing power, hundreds losing property and lives? Last year, the air near where I live in Northern California — within driving distance of some of the largest and most powerful and advanced corporations in the history of the world — was more hazardous than the air in Beijing and New Delhi. There’s a good chance that will happen again this month, and that it will keep happening every year from now on. Is this really the best America can do?

Probably, because it’s only going to get worse. The fires and the blackouts aren’t like the earthquakes, a natural threat we’ve all chosen to ignore. They are more like California’s other problems, like housing affordability and homelessness and traffic — human-made catastrophes we’ve all chosen to ignore, connected to the larger dysfunction at the heart of our state’s rot: a failure to live sustainably.

but I don’t think he quite understands California’s problem. It isn’t just an assumption of infinitude. I would say it’s more a rejection of history and reluctance to manage the implications of your choices. California was and has been settled by people eager to leave their prior lives behind, to assume new identities and new lives in a new state. Go West! As Horace Greeley put it:

I believe that each of us who has his place to make should go where men are wanted, and where employment is not bestowed as alms. Of course, I say to all who are in want of work, Go West!

But what can you do? and how can your family help you? Your mother, I infer, is to be counted out as an effective worker. But what of the rest? And you – can you chop? Can you plow? Can you mow? Can you cut up Indian corn? I reckon not. And in the west it is hard to find such work as you have been accustomed to. The conditions of living are very rude there.

On the whole I say, stay where you are; do as well as you can; and devote every spare hour to making yourself familiar with the conditions and dexterity required for the efficient conservation of out-door industry in a new country. Having mastered these, gather up your family and Go West!

It is impossible to “live sustainably” when your economy is premised on continuing explosive economic growth in a fragile ecosystem. San Francisco and Los Angeles’s air qualities are poor because of the geographic conditions in those places and there are simply too many people living lifestyles in excess of what the land can support. They need too much space. Their ability to build up is limited both by risk and preference so they build out. They need too much water. They need too much electricity which they don’t care to produce themselves. They want the land to remain wild but their very presence calls for it to be managed.

This post was inspired by Katrina vanden Heuvel’s most recent WaPo column to which I won’t even bother to link because it’s paywalled. In it she characterizes the Democratic Party establishment as “panicking” because two of the three leading Democratic presidential aspirants, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are not part of the club. She goes on to mention a dinner at which various names, e.g. Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, were mentioned as possible last-minute saviors.

Ms. vanden Heuvel assumes facts not in evidence namely

1. That Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could become the eventual nominee and
2. That either one of them could be elected.

I don’t think the Democratic Party can afford to have Bernie Sanders as its standard bearer but, to paraphrase Harry Truman, given a choice between a real socialist and a fake socialist, will Democrats still pick a real one every time?

Both the Democratic and Republican establishments are panicking but not for the reasons Ms. vanden Heuvel suggests. Each of our political parties has two wings. Among the Republicans it’s their ideological wing (whether libertarian or “conservative”) and their operational or establishment wing. The Democrats have their progressive and operational or establishment wings.

The temperaments and motivations of the ideological and operational wings are completely different. Members of the ideological wings of their respective parties do not have the interest or patience to deal with the boring, repetitive, mindless minutiae of actual governing. The members of the operational wings have clear, compelling motives to do that. They are thoroughly corrupt. They are motivated by personal gain.

The reason that the establishments are panicking is that the ideological wings of the two parties, largely due to the general incompetence of the operational wings, are gaining in influence at the expense of the operational wings and the corrupt operational wings realize that the gravy train is running dry.

In a piece at Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi laments the sorry state of today’s journalism:

During the Trump-Clinton presidential race three years ago, I wrote:

The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption. This setup just doesn’t work.

The al-Baghdadi story is a classic example of what happens when that dynamic is allowed to play out to its logical conclusion. From Fox to the New York Times, all of the major commercial outlets this weekend were more consumed with telling audiences who benefited politically from the al-Baghdadi mission, than getting the facts about that mission out.

This is a disservice to audiences, who deserve to know the basics. Who is al-Baghdadi? How did he come to be the leader of ISIS/ISIL? Why was he in Idlib? The story of this person ought to have been a mix of the enraging and the sobering. Al-Baghdadi was reportedly involved in all sorts of atrocities, from beheadings to crucifixions, but he seems to have become radicalized by America’s invasion of Iraq.

This ought to have been a moment to reflect on what’s happened in the last twenty years, and if our policies across multiple administrations have been the right ones. Would we even be launching operations against such a person if we hadn’t invaded Iraq all those years ago? What’s the endgame? What do the people of the region think?

All of this has been subsumed to the only story left that matters in the United States – who’s winning Twitter at any given moment, Trumpers or anti-Trumpers? News outlets are now so committed to pushing one or the other narrative that they are falling prey to absurdities like the Post’s “austere cleric” headline.

I have been criticized here for falling for “rightwing political correctness”. If I have fallen victim to rightwing agitprop, so has Matt Taibbi. I think a more accurate way of viewing my criticism of the WaPo’s headline which, like Mr. Taibbi, I thought was absurd, is that I am viewing it more as journalists used to as is Mr. Taibbi.

If we are going to separate into one set of media outlets aligned with the Democratic Party and another aligned with the Republican Party, neither particularly reliable, as it is openly in the United Kingdom, I think we should have libel and defamation laws like those in the UK. Here in the U. S. we have a very high standard. Actual malice must be proven to prevail in a libel suit while it is practically impossible for a public figure to prevail in a defamation suit against a media outlet. In the UK, the burden of proof in a defamation suit is on the defendant. That would be a drastic change.

I would prefer a more judicious media but, alas, that is probably not to be had.

In a piece at Bloomberg Tyler Cowen expresses distress over the wildfires and blackouts in California:

The fires in Northern California — and the resulting power blackouts, affecting millions and running for days on end — show just how many nodes of failure Americans are willing tolerate or even encourage.

The practical and moral failings in this matter are so numerous it is hard to know where to start.

How about this: Systemic blackouts are commonly associated with nations such as Haiti or Pakistan, not the United States. Yet here is California, America’s biggest and probably most innovative economy, treating a blackout as some kind of unavoidable natural event. Why is this development not seen as an unacceptable outrage?

The No. 1 responsibility of a power company is to supply its users with power. So when the first-order response to a pending major problem is to cut the power for days, that is clear-cut evidence that the systems are badly designed.

High on the list of America’s failings would be its wanton disregard of climate change. True, it is difficult to pinpoint particular events as caused by climate change. It is entirely plausible, however, that climate change has made the fires more likely or more intense, due to the greater heat, dryness and wind.

Yet the U.S.’s carbon emissions are increasing. Even when there are successes in the fight against climate change, such as fracking natural gas to replace coal emissions, the benefits to the climate are an afterthought for most people.

In other words: Parts of our natural environment are deteriorating around us, and we are responding passively and defensively rather than with a dynamic, can-do attitude.

Add American liability law to the list of culprits. Because of legal liability from past fire-related events, the share price of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the public utility in California, has fallen from almost $50 to about $5 over the span of a year. It is thus no surprise that the utility is afraid of further fires and will limit them simply by pulling the plug on everyone’s power connections.

I’ll cut him off there. First, he misspeaks. A publicly-owned company’s #1 responsibility is to preserve the investment of its stockholders. Unless it does that it will be unable to provide the goods and services that are its #2 responsibility. California state law renders PG&E responsible for fires started by its equipment. That’s why its stock has collapsed.

I see the problem a little differently than Tyler does. California has a problem distinctly Californian but not unique to California. It has objectives that are in direct conflict with one another. Among these are its need to grow, a desire to preserve California’s natural beauty, California’s fragile ecosystem, and its tax base.

As you can see from the pie chart at the top of this page, California is highly dependent on the real estate and construction industries which account for about a quarter of the entire economy. Indeed, between government and its handmaiden economic sectors, i.e. those whose revenues derive mostly from tax dollars, and real estate and construction, that accounts for more than half of economic activity in the state. Add the financial sector and you’re around 2/3s of the whole economy.

Just about 40 million people call California home. That’s four times as many as lived there in 1950 and ten times as many as lived there in 1920. By comparison Illinois is about 50% larger than in 1950 and 100% larger than in 1920. New York State, too, has about 50% more people than in 1950 and 100% more than in 1920. Obviously, California’s population is growing very rapidly.

But, unlike Illinois or New York, California natural environment doesn’t lend itself to a large population. Unlike those states it has historically been quite sparsely populated. Equally obviously, there’s a conflict between preserving California’s natural beauty with the economic necessity of a huge and growing population. People control where and how housing may be constructed by means of restrictive zoning laws.

California can be wild as it has always been or it can be managed. But California is also home to the U. S.’s environmental conservation movement and that conservation movement has limited the state’s ability to manage its land.

People need electricity but unmanaged land lends itself to wildfires. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Yesterday President Donald Trump spoke in Chicago before a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. WGN reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — For the first time since taking office President Trump visited Chicago on Monday morning.

Trump spoke at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference at McCormick Place, addressing a wide range of topics, including efforts to reduce crime and paying respect to Chicago police officers wounded in the line of duty.

ABC7 Political Reporter Craig Wall spoke exclusively with the president, and asked him why Chicago had been such a frequent target.

“Well, all you have to do is take a look at your numbers, where you have 500 and 600 murders over the year,” Trump said. “You have all the problems that you’ve had. It can be straightened out with proper management.”

The president blamed the murders and shootings on Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.

Whatever Police Superintendent Johnson’s problems Chicago’s homicide rate cannot be laid at his door and Mayor Lightfoot has only been mayor for a few months. The homicide rate has actually declined a bit since she took office. Its peak was under her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.

And any tolerance of illegal immigration is only tangentially related to Chicago’s high homicide rate. Most of Chicago’s homicides are young black men killing one another or people caught in the crossfire, take place in a half dozen of the city’s neighborhoods, and are gang-related.

The reasons for the gangs are complex. It doesn’t help that they have been hand in glove with corrupt city, county, and state governments. One of the reasons for the rise of black gangs is a collapse of the family structure among urban blacks. The young men need social support and protection from somewhere so they turn to gangs.

Judging from the FBI’s statistics the high homicide rate among young urban black men cannot be explained purely by appealing to race. The rural black homicide rate is just about the same as the rural white homicide rate.

Illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, is, indeed, tangentially related to the lack of economic opportunities for young black men since entry level jobs which they might have taken are now being done by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them illegal.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead comments on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi:

The Washington Post may have hastily changed its embarrassing headline for its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—“austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State”—but that won’t be the end of the West’s difficulties in understanding and responding to the multifaceted crisis in the Middle East.

Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.

Arabs of the Middle East should not be offered any solace on his passing. For nearly a millennium they were ruled by non-Arabs, first by Turks and then by European colonizers. They will not achieve what they presumably consider their rightful place in the world by nurturing vipers like Abu Bakr in their collective bosom but by dint of effort, industry, and practicing the virtues that Islam teaches rather than the hate spread by takfiri like Abu Bakr.

Is it my imagination or has the entire world lost its mind? Some people are attacking Trump unjustly; others are defending him unjustly. They do so with equal vehemence. I don’t see how they presently have enough information to do either.

The Washington Post’s announcement of the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can only be described as unhinged. My religion prohibits me from rejoicing in anyone’s death but he was clearly an unspeakably evil man. He won’t be the last. He won’t even be the last head of DAESH.

I’m seeing a lot of scrambling around by European companies, trying to prepare for a Brexit they aren’t even sure will materialize and whose contours they don’t know.

People are using dangerous drugs to turn their 7 year old boys into girls and, presumably, vice versa. At 7 being curious about your sexuality is normal. Wearing Mommy’s high heels is not a sign of gender dysphoria. One of the most manly young men of my acquaintance ran around in a pink tutu at that age.

Chicago’s teachers have been on strike for eight days. The longest teacher’s strike in Chicago history was, I believe, 19 school days back in 1987. At this point no one appears to be really sure what will resolve the strike. They appear to be striking to prove something to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Rather than summarize Lizzy Francis’s article about what it means to be middle class at Fatherly, which I found rather uninsightful, I’ll give you my thoughts on the subject. The difference among the social classes is the amount of risk you bear, some due to your circumstances and family connections, some due to the behaviors in which you engage and the choices you make.

My favorite definition of our social classes is that being upper class means that, no matter how badly you screw up, you will not be allowed to fail. You should be able to think of people who may be characterized that way easily, e.g. Teddy Kennedy or George W. Bush. If I had engaged in the behaviors they did and made the choices they made, I’d’ve been ruined or, at least, my life would have been greatly impeded. They, on the other hand, became a U. S. senator and president of the United States, respectively.

I am decidedly middle class. My grandfather and grandfather’s grandfather back as far as anyone can reckon were middle class. If someone of the lower classes were to engage in the behaviors which Teddy Kennedy and George W. Bush did, his or her life would have been permanently blighted. They’d’ve been imprisoned. That’s what it means to be lower class.

One of the markers of social class is how you perceive risk. Pursuing anthropology as a career, as Ms. Francis has, is an incredibly risky proposition. Being able to prosper in it depends on a large number of very iffy factors. That she did not perceive it as such either tells us she’s a dope or middle class.