Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 153

Anti-BDS Bill Misses the Mark

For once, the Senate is closing in on enough votes to pass a bipartisan piece of legislation. Alas, while the reasons for putting forward the bill are understandable, the execution and the accompanying optics are absolutely terrible, and the bill is a bad idea.

In an effort to clamp down on BDS—the anti-Israel boycott movement backed by fanatical leftists, ignoramuses, and some anti-Semites—Congress has prepared legislation that would make certain types of boycott participation a federal felony. But the bill raises some civil liberty concerns. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports:

The American Civil Liberties Union called on U.S. senators to oppose a measure targeting boycotts of Israel and its settlements.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, introduced in March by Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, would expand 1970s-era laws that make illegal compliance with boycotts of Israel sponsored by governments — laws inspired at the time by the Arab League boycott of Israel — to include boycotts backed by international organizations. Those adhering to boycotts would be the subject of fines. […]

“We take no position for or against the effort to boycott Israel or any foreign country, for that matter,” wrote Faiz Shakir, ACLU’s national political director. “However, we do assert that the government cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, punish U.S. persons based solely on their expressed political beliefs.”

The proximate rationale for the bill is to get ahead of a resolution passed by the UN Security Council last December. The resolution mandated the creation of a list of companies that do business in the West Bank. That list is set to be published later this year, and there are legitimate fears that the UN could use it to issue more formal guidance that would become he justification for a broader boycott. The idea behind a law like this is to deter other actors (like the cockamamie caucus of crazies at the current UNHRC) from taking next steps.

However, at the moment this is just a possibility, not an actual fact. And the deterrent effect against UN nut-cases is grossly overstated a) because they are in fact nut-cases, b) because they might be perfectly OK with a boycott that isolated the U.S. as well as Israel, and c) because a lot of this is symbolism and theater, and boycotts make good theater regardless of what the U.S. Congress does. In any case, a non-binding resolution or even letters signed by a majority of House and Senate members would have essentially the same deterrent impact by stating that if such a boycott were enacted, the U.S. Congress would immediately pass a law blunting its impact.

It’s true that the bill is probably not as blatantly unconstitutional as some of its opponents are arguing: it modifies a decades-old law that has been upheld in court, and legal scholars are still debating exactly how it would be enforced. But it’s not free-and-clear either. Crucially, the law revises the older legislation’s language criminalizing support for a boycott so that it also criminalizes support for a “request to impose any boycott by any international organization”. It seems possible, for example, that a person funding a student campaign for a university to enforce a UN or EU-backed Israel boycott could be exposed to criminal liability. Now, in fact the courts would quickly throw a case like that out—the First Amendment easily trumps a piece of feel-good legislation that Congress whooped through to gain popularity points. But it is hard to base a case for supporting a legal proposal on the argument that some of its obvious applications to domestic circumstances would be dismissed out of hand.

Beyond that, the expansion of the language of the original law to “request” turns an old and uncontroversial piece of legislation that has done its job for more than a generation into something fuzzier and, quite possibly once the courts get through with it, weaker.

Moreover, the PR consequences are real—and not good. Rightwing political correctness is no better and no less dangerous than leftwing political correctness, and if the law passes, it will surely be used as a recruiting tool by boycotters. BDS is already failing in the United States, and those of us who oppose it should keep beating it back with reason and persuasion. A legally-questionable crackdown will only make it stronger.

It is also a matter of principle and higher interest. Nobody is in greater danger from deranged college PC codes and “speech regulations” than pro-Israel speakers and students on campus. There is nothing to be gained by supporting something that in effect legitimizes the ugliest and nastiest tactics of the campus far Left. And of course it is morally wrong to do anything that lends political cover or credibility to the forces in our society that would like to destroy our universities as places of free enquiry. As a minority, and a minority that historically has often been unpopular, Jews have a structural interest in the protection of minority rights. This also implies some limits on the power of the state to regulate political behavior. Overreaching laws like this, even when well intentioned, are exactly what supporters of minority rights in the United States ought to oppose.

[This post has been edited and updated.]

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Cheap Crude Is Hell for Oil’s Old Guard

We live in a new oil reality. Production is surging around the world, and supplies are coming from a number of new places (read: from outside of the oil cartel OPEC). Crucially, the price of a barrel of oil today is less than half of what it was three years ago, and $50 seems to be the new market equilibrium for crude. North America, and in particular the United States, has emerged as the biggest winner in this global transition, but this new reality has produced a large number of losers, too. Petrostates—countries whose regimes have grown fat on oil revenues—have adapted poorly to changing market conditions, and as Bloomberg reports the future looks dim for this category of producers:

Energy-rich Gulf Arab nations have scrambled to adjust to the slump in oil prices since 2014. Three years on, their economies are mired in weak growth and largely just as dependent on crude as they ever were.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes to bolster non-oil revenue and reduce ballooning budget deficits. Much of the savings, however, have been due to spending cuts and the pace of reforms has slowed across the region, said Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. Overall progress in economic diversification has been limited, she said.

The collapse of crude prices hurt everyone in the business of supplying oil, but it was especially painful for petrostates, whose national budgets require a strong oil price to stay in the black. In an attempt to prod prices in the upward direction, OPEC and its ilk cobbled together a weak consensus in order to collectively reduce supplies, but that strategy has been wholly ineffective thus far. Prices remain stubbornly low, while petrostates are ceding valuable market share to upstate producers like America’s frackers. Meanwhile, OPEC members are openly bucking their commitments to cutting production. The cartel’s ability to influence the global market has never looked weaker.

If you’re a major oil producing country like Saudi Arabia, your options for balancing the national budget are few and far between. Without a way to induce a price rebound, petrostates are instead forced to cut national spending, though many are wary to do so as it runs the risk of fomenting social unrest.

Diversifying away from the oil business is the best long-term strategy for these struggling regimes, but that shift will take years if not decades—if it happens at all. In the meantime, OPEC’s members will be forced to accept tepid economic growth for the foreseeable future. If you live by the price of oil, you have to know that you’re going to die by it, too.

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An Open Letter to Chuck Grassley

It seems that President Trump is none too fond of Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein these days. Neither am I, though not for the same reasons. Trump is unable to distinguish his own personal interests from those of his office and the nation he was elected and is pledged under oath to serve, so he judges everything by what it means to him, not to the American people. That won’t change. My anger at Sessions and Rosenstein has to do with something entirely different: their eagerness to violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Unlike Trump and Sessions, I still care about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

You can read all about it in the Washington Post. That’s right: It’s now OK again for police to pull over drivers or stop citizens for reasons they do not have to divulge, and to seize cash and other values from them before they are charged with any crime, and to keep the loot even if they are never charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. The cops get to keep the money, although in the past and now again they are supposed to turn over some chunk of it to the Feds. But since professional-level accounting methods have never been applied to this lucre, the Feds are as likely to have been fleeced as everyone else victimized by this outrage. We don’t even know how much money we’re talking about: One estimate holds that between 2001 and 2015 we’re talking $2.5 billion taken from nearly 62,000 citizens, with no warrants or any criminal charges involved.

The Fourth Amendment protects American citizens from this sort of shakedown—or is supposed to. We all have the right “to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It seems that there are some Americans who have no knowledge of the Fourth Amendment; even opponents who find such policies outrageous rarely raise the Fourth Amendment as part of their argument. I find this puzzling and sort of creepy. Obviously, it takes a lawyer of a certain kind to conclude that police-state tactics like these are somehow compatible with the Bill of Rights, but whenever a hefty fee is involved, some lawyers will always be found to make any argument, no matter how scurrilous.

This new decision is a reversal of one made late in the Obama period by Attorney General Eric Holder, and it pertains to a 1984 law, passed during the Reagan Administration. This time around, the rules are supposedly more restrictive than they were before the Obama Administration banned the practice in 2015, because Rosenstein, at least, admits that widespread abuses existed in the past. Rosenstein now assures us that these abuses will not return en masse, although he left himself an out by noting that mistakes will happen from time to time. Read the Post article; it gives some of the background and is otherwise illuminating.

One thing the WP article doesn’t go into is why on earth it took the Obama Administration six and a half years to get around to reversing this outrageous, unconstitutional practice. One might have thought this would be a no-brainer from the get-go. Ah, but Eric Holder turns out to be a more interesting character than some may have thought—and that’s no to speak of possible resistance to reform that might have come from elsewhere in the Administration—the FBI within Holder’s Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and perhaps elsewhere. As far as I know, the story of the interagency discussion of this in the Obama Administration has never yet been told. I, for one, would like to hear it.

What do I mean when I say that Eric Holder is more interesting than a lot of people may realize? Well, to American alt-right observers and other closet racists, Holder’s appointment to be Attorney General by a black President was just an obvious example of insider Democratic Party affirmative action on steroids—and same for Loretta Lynch, Jeh Johnson, and others. (Never mind that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were Secretaries of State in a Republican Administration.) It’s actually a lot more complicated than that.

When it comes to crime fighting, Holder’s career shows him to be a hard-ass, and a hard-ass willing to navigate some excruciating tradeoffs concerning cops and black people. As law professor and former public defender James Forman, Jr., tells us in his recent book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia during the 1900s, Holder equated tough anti-crime measures with civil rights, asking: “Did Martin Luther King successfully fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could lose the struggle for civil rights to misguided and malicious members of our own race?” Richard Thompson Ford points out in a forthcoming TAI review essay that at the time Holder advocated the use of pre-textual traffic stops and searches to uncover concealed weapons—a version of “driving white black” policing. Holder acknowledged that black drivers would be stopped disproportionately, but pointed out, as Forman tells us, that “94 percent of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants.” Essentially, Holder argued that when the stakes are very high, burdening racial minorities—young men in particular—with a disproportionate share of the cost of law enforcement is an acceptable price to pay.

That doesn’t by itself explain why it took so long for the Obama Administration to get around to this business, but it does show, perhaps surprisingly to some, that the politics of policing—as well as, say, the politics of prosecuting white-collar crime, another Holder portfolio over the years—is a lot more complex from inside the government than it appears to be from the outside.

That said, it should be no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention that Sessions would be eager to overturn the Obama Administration’s ruling. A bit more than two years ago, back in April 2015, hearings were held concerning the proposed Obama Administration reversal of the Reagan-era practice. Here is how I described what happened at the time:

. . . during a hearing before Senate Judiciary Committee, a national law enforcement organization testified in favor of keeping the law as it is, and some Senators, notably Jeff Sessions (R-AL), supported this view. But when Fraternal Order of Police National President Chuck Canterbury claimed that the proposal to restrict the law would deny local and state police departments “hundreds of millions of dollars to fight crime and terrorism”, that was way too much for Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). Grassley dismissed the statement outright, noting that the law had created “perverse incentives” for police “to cut corners and seize cash and property without clear evidence of a crime.” Grassley added that the police position “demonstrates the absurdity of a system of justice in which some in law enforcement appear to value funding their own operations over protecting civil rights.” Even Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who approves of the law on principle, admitted, “We have all seen the troubling reports. Roadside stops that resemble shakedowns. Seizure of bank accounts.”

These seizures in the past, often directed disproportionally against minorities, very often did not resemble shakedowns—they were shakedowns. And now, supposed constraints or not, they are going to return.

Pat Leahy is a lost cause in so many ways, but you, Senator Grassley, bless your Midwestern soul, are not. So here is my question for you: Are you going to take this lying down? Do you feel any less strongly about this now than you did in April 2015? Please make some noise. Please stand up for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As a Republican no one will plausibly be able to dismiss your concerns as partisan shrapnel. Senator, we’re depending on you.

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Political Intolerance Is Rising

A new Pew poll shows that Democrats—especially educated white liberal Democrats—would have significantly more difficulty maintaining a friendship with a person they disagreed with politically than either Republicans or less privileged Democratic constituencies.

The poll tracks with changes in politics and dating preferences that have been observed during the Trump presidency, which showed that liberals are more discriminating than conservatives when it comes to their dating partners’ politics.

The data point to one of the core ironies of liberal politics today: Elite progressivism—the kind of politics rooted in coastal cities and college towns—sees tolerance and openness as its defining principle. America, according to this worldview, is today locked in a mortal struggle between inclusiveness and open-mindedness on the one hand and intolerance and bigotry on the other. And yet, the most persistent evangelists of this Manichean worldview are themselves, in their own way, the most tribal constituency in America.

Many people voted for Trump because they perceived that an elite liberal establishment held them, personally, in contempt—that it saw them as people of questionable character because of their way of life and political views. All we can say from the latest Pew poll is that, well, they weren’t all wrong.

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Palestinians Protesting Metal Detectors

Palestinians rioted across parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank today following Israel’s decision to install metal detectors at entrances to the Temple Mount, home to both al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock—often described as the third-holiest site in Islam. As Haaretz reports:

Three Palestinians have been killed and dozens if not hundreds were hurt in clashes with Israeli police across the West Bank and East Jerusalem as tensions that began in the Temple Mount spread. Police presence in Jerusalem was virtually unprecedented on Friday as prayers and protests on the Temple Mount turned violent.

The security cabinet decided early on Friday that controversial metal detectors installed outside the holy site in the wake of a shooting attack that left two policemen dead last week will remain in place. According to Palestinians, tens of thousands of worshippers came to pray outside the Temple Mount gates, refusing to pass through the metal detectors.

[….] Senior Waqf officials [responsible for the administration of the Temple Mount] said that the intention was to hold Friday prayers as usual without confrontation and that if any escalation and violence took place, Israel would be responsible because of the restrictions imposed on the worshippers.

Mufti Muhammad Hussein told Haaretz: “We will continue to struggle against the metal detectors until the Israeli government takes them out of there. I call on the Muslim world to join the struggle to preserve [the Temple Mount] as an exclusive place for Islam.”

Palestinian political strategy in opposing Israel often relies on provoking a “disproportionate” security response to garner international sympathy. Palestinians armed with rocks facing down Israeli tanks is supposed to cast the Palestinians as David against an Israeli Goliath. If that’s the goal of the Palestinian leadership in fomenting these riots, it seems likely to backfire—badly.

The timeline here is as important as the substance (or lack thereof) of the grievance. Last week, Palestinian terrorists smuggled guns into their own holy site. They then used those guns to murder two Israeli police officers guarding one of the entrances to al-Aqsa. Though murder is murder regardless of the identity of the victims, it’s worth noting that the murdered officers were Arab-Israeli Druze. The attackers then retreated to the al-Aqsa plaza to engage in an open gun battle with Israeli security forces on the Temple Mount. In response, the Israelis temporarily closed the Temple Mount and re-opened it with metal detectors at each of the compound’s entrances. It’s that provocation, the installation of metal detectors, not the heinous use of a holy site as a launchpad for murder and terrorism, that has the Palestinians enraged.

It would be difficult to imagine a less sympathetic grievance to attract Western support to the Palestinian cause. In fact, the Palestinian response will appear contemptible to anyone who bothers to read even the basic facts of the matter. Israelis can’t go into shopping malls and bus stations, let alone visit the Western Wall, without passing through a metal detector. But Israeli-style security measures are a fact of life in the West as well, with metal detectors now a ubiquitous presence at sports events and, yes, outside religious sites like Notre Dame in Paris.

There is also of course a deep historical irony. With the possible exception of al-Qaeda, Palestinian terrorism—which pioneered the use of plane hijackings, airport attacks, and suicide bombings—has perhaps done more to force the introduction of metal detectors into our daily lives than just about any other cause.

The Israelis might try to look for a way out of this confrontation. Violence within the al-Aqsa complex is rare. The Israelis might well decide that the metal detectors have caused more trouble than this is worth, despite the fact that the Palestinian response is being driven by unsubstantiated paranoia about Jewish conspiracies to overturn the Temple Mount status quo. But if this kind of issue is going to be the chief grievance of the Palestinians, they shouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the world shrugs.

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What’s Good for Oil Services Is Good for U.S. Shale

When oil prices collapsed, American oil production declined as well. Shale production, the chief driver of resurgent U.S. oil output over the past decade, is relatively expensive, and the crude price collapse made many fracking operations unprofitable. But the young American shale industry didn’t collapse under the weight of bargain crude the way many analysts expected, in no small part thanks to the haircut many oil services firms accepted to keep the crude flowing. Companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger accepted much narrower profit margins in the U.S. market, and that helped shale producers keep costs low enough to enable them to continue to frack profitably.

In the meantime, those same producers were also innovating new ways to cut costs on the operations side, and in so doing brought their breakeven costs down $20 in just a few years. Now, oil services companies are starting to see their faith in shale rewarded. The FT reports:

Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services group by market capitalisation, has pointed to “robust” activity in North America and strengthening markets in some other parts of the world as its revenues and earnings rose in the second quarter. […]

In revenue terms, North America was by far the company’s strongest market, as shale oil production companies ramped up activity to take advantage of a healthier crude price. Revenues in North America were 27 per cent higher than in the second quarter of 2016 at $2.2bn, while revenues in the rest of the world were down 4 per cent at $5.14bn.

Schlumberger isn’t the only oil services company that’s thriving in 2017, though—smaller services firms are rebounding as well. America’s robust oil services industry was one of the necessary starting components to get the shale boom off the ground, so the fact that these companies are on the rise once again is a very good sign for U.S. energy security going forward.

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Stage Gone Long

Ella Fitzgerald’s talent was never particularly containable, and anyone unwise to its charms would do well to spend some time with a few discs from the person I’m going to say is jazz’s greatest-ever singer.

Born a hundred years ago on April 25, 1917, Fitzgerald’s vocal genius is such that she deserves a year’s worth of celebration. I’ve spent a goodly amount of the spring and early summer revisiting her work, trying to hear it with new ears, even if it’s never far from my listening ken. Her first big break came in January 1935 when she won a contest to perform with the Tiny Bradshaw band in Harlem for a week’s residency, which led to a permanent gig with drummer Chick Webb’s unit. From there it was on to a Decca solo career in the early 1940s and what might be the most influential piece of jazz singing since Louis Armstrong’s earliest sides, a scat treatment of “Flying Home.” No singer had ever gone this far beyond the strictures of a given song to craft an entirely new work born of a teaming of mind and mouth. She was also working for promoter Norman Ganz, appearing regularly at his barnstorming Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, with the live version of Ella gaining more in prowess by the gig.

Ganz became her manager and then basically launched Verve Records, built entirely around his star singer, at which point Fitzgerald, who had believed her lot in life was to sing bop, had one of the crucial breakthroughs in all of jazz, turning to the great American songbooks of writers like Cole Porter and Duke Ellington, fashioning recorded monuments to their genius that brought hers into clearer view.

I’ve been listening to Fitzgerald since college, never less than beguiled by her ability to blend power and beauty. There is more emotion, say, with Billie Holiday, at times, but not the same level of technique; Fitzgerald was a master of phrasing, more so than Armstrong, or Bob Dylan, or just about any great singer whose meatiest part of their métier is how they emphasize certain words and syllables.

Not that she stinted on the emotionalism—no singer better conveyed, with her scat vocals, what it meant to feel something the heart wished for the brain to express in bell-clear words, but just couldn’t, for the overabundance of feeling. But thankfully that voice would come swooping in, and any and all issues of communication, that direct line from singer to listener, would be resolved with the surety of Fitzgerald’s voice.

Over the years, I’ve come to hear various Fitzgerald albums differently than I had before. I think our finest artists are those whose works bend to the contours of your own life and experiences, providing fresh revelations when you need them most, or when you’re better equipped to process them. There was a time I thought of her Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album as slight holiday fare, which is easy enough to do at the outset. Many jazz singers, of course, went on autopilot and cut a holiday album or five. But as aspects of my life changed and Christmas became a harder holiday—on account of that catchall we all call “life stuff”—I began to experience a warmth in her treatments of “Jingle Bells” and “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” that made for tracks in snowy conditions that crisscrossed the grounds of my holiday blues, pointing towards future holidays that could be better—that, by Jove, really might be better.

I love the songbook albums, and you can put them up there, artistically, with any jazz ever cut, but nothing from Ella pleases me more than live Ella recordings. It is impossible to falter in making a selection with the LPs documenting her in-concert self. Twelve Nights in Hollywood cherry-picks from a week and a half of club dates from Tinsel Town in 1961 and is as smooth as a becalmed sea in a tide-free world. Ella Fitzgerald Live at Mister Kelly’s is earthier, a Chicago Club date from 1958 that has rhythm and blues overtones. But for me, there is no surpassing the album I have chosen to make my album of the year in this year of Ella Fitzgerald, that being Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife.

Fitzgerald was ideal for both the grittier jazz clubs and the European concert stage, not something we can say about many singers. She always channeled the blues and bop—bop owing so much to the blues, only sped up to metronome-busting degrees—but with a fringe of operatic stylings. Not so much in technique, but in manner, poise, dignity. Chops, too.

Recorded the day before Valentine’s Day 1960, Fitzgerald is at a vocal apogee in a career that had no lows. Still, there could be a little extra extra, if you will, to her performances, and that extra-ness is coming out in spades here. Part of the considerable appeal of the gig comes from its looseness and even its errors. During her rendition of the album’s title song about that infamous German murderer who lends himself so well to American vocal jazz, Fitzgerald forgets the lyrics, requiring some quick extemporization on her part.

That gussied up an already great concert, and on the record provides the perfect mood to segue into the closer, “How High the Moon.” Fitzgerald must have spent some time with the Les Paul and Mary Ford version, with Paul’s guitar paradoxically providing more of the vocal than Ford’s vocal did, as if it were the voice of the song and Ford’s contribution part of the rhythmic backing. There was always a deeply inherent vocal line in the piece that went beyond mere words, and here, in Berlin, Fitzgerald pulls it out, dispensing with any words you would be able to find in Webster’s for the finest scat singing in jazz history post-Hot Fives and Hot Sevens Louis Armstrong.

Before we were able, as humans, to form words, we still communicated with sounds, and if you had any doubt over how articulate our predecessors could be in certain moments, with sounds alone Fitzgerald dispels them. She’s also at once a horn, a guitar, a one-person string section, plus untapped human joy, that most natural part of what makes a person fully on display without the often-censorious system of checks-and-balances we all encounter when we ask ourselves, “Is it okay to say this, or should I say that instead?”

Scat singing requires impeccable breath control, as there can be less in the way of natural pauses than we find in sentences, even in sentences meant to be sung. There can also be a tendency to rush the scat singing, not allowing for those natural caesuras that mark the end of one rhythmic phrase and allow it to bend into the next.

But these issues are non-starters with Fitzgerald, who sounds like she’s taken the whole of her amazing performance and distilled those contents into this set closer to end all set closers. But when you leave a stage with a number this powerful, can you ever really be said to have left it? Doesn’t its planking stretch far past the wings, into memories and minds and anecdotes and, if we are lucky, recordings such as this, in a career such as Fitzgerald’s? The stage as wood-slatted path that never leaves off, always going like that scat solo you never want to end.

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President Trump Sweats in Public

President Donald Trump’s latest ruminations, revealed in an article in the Washington Post, about pardoning himself, relatives, and close aides, are signs that the more he sees of the talented team that Robert Mueller is assembling, the more worried he gets.

This should not be taken as evidence of obvious guilt, even though that possibility cannot be ruled out. Many readers of Via Meadia, however honest they have been in their business affairs, would pop a sweat if they heard that a large team of the country’s top prosecutors and investigators were about to put their entire past lives under a microscope. The fear that teams of investigators with an unlimited budget will rake through forty years of business and tax records is not an unreasonable one for an honest person whose financial life is simple. It is much worse for a billionaire with multiple interests, active in a business that, in some cities, is almost impossible to conduct without skirting the law.

Yet President Trump’s evident case of nerves doesn’t help him. A more buttoned down president might have kept a stiff upper lip. Richard Nixon might have tossed back a few martinis and raged against the world on the presidential yacht, safely out of earshot of any lurking journalists. That is not Trump’s way; he shares his sorrows with the world, and the world is drawing some conclusions, perhaps prematurely—and perhaps not.

One interesting thing seems to be that Trump is less worried about the probe of his Russia dealings than about a general investigation with no set limits. This seems to suggest that he believes that he has much less to fear from a probe that only investigates his and his campaign’s 2016 Russia relations than some in the media believe.

We shall see in due course, but that tallies with our instincts at VM: that the 2016 Russia connection is certainly embarrassing to the President, but probably not fatal. Any fatal damage to the Trump presidency would, if it comes, come most likely from earlier dealings that were commercial rather than political, and from charges of tax evasion or other matters that came up in the course of the examination.

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OPEC Member Defies the Cartel’s Cuts

Ecuador is a member of the oil cartel OPEC, and as such it’s expected to cut production through March of next year as part of a wider petrostate effort to reduce the glut of crude in today’s market and inflate prices. But the Ecuadorian energy minister defied those expectations in an interview this week, explaining that his country could no longer meet those target reductions due to “needs that the country has.”

Substantively, Ecuador’s lack of participation won’t make or break this collective production cut. The country is one of OPEC’s least productive members, pumping less than 600,000 barrels per day. But it’s noteworthy to see an OPEC member’s energy minister openly admitting to ignoring reduction targets. As the WSJ reports, compliance rates for these cuts are down across the board:

OPEC has struggled with high production levels in recent weeks that have hurt its attempts to pull supply out of the market. Libya and Nigeria—OPEC members that were exempted from the output-cut agreement because of civil unrest—have pumped up their production in recent months.

Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest producer and the world’s top crude-oil exporter, said this month that, for the first time, it failed to comply with its agreed-upon production allotment in June.

Iraq, which has struggled to respect the deal from the beginning, cut only 29% of its reductions in June, a drop from 39% in May. As a result, overall compliance with the OPEC agreement declined to 78% in June, compared with 95% a month earlier, according to the International Energy Agency.

In that context, Ecuador’s repudiation is less of a one-off, and could be interpreted as a bellwether for the health of the cartel. Last year, oil historian Daniel Yergin called out OPEC as being vestigial in today’s market. “The era of OPEC as a decisive force in the world economy is over,” he told the FT. “It is clearly a very divided organisation.” That sentiment rings even truer today, thirteen months and a coordinated production cut later. Petrostates are struggling to adapt to the new oil reality of lower prices and growing unconventional, non-OPEC output, and the strategy to reduce production and inflate prices hasn’t produced the intended results.

With its membership fractured and incapable of meaningfully affecting the market, the question now becomes: what use is OPEC? In 2017, not much.

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The O.J. Trial Was a Preview of America Under Trump

For a few short hours this afternoon, another 1990s celebrity generated so much national interest that he pushed Donald Trump out of the spotlight. O.J. Simpson, after a live-streamed hearing, was paroled from his prison in Nevada. On Oct. 1, “the Juice” will be loose after serving nine years for a 2007 armed robbery.

But was this brief episode really a reprieve from Trump coverage? In many ways, O.J.’s “Trial of the Century” was really just a portrait in miniature of what would befall our country in 2016. The renewed attention to the former football star is in many ways a reminder of the social forces and personalities that landed a reality TV star in the White House today.

Before the Juice fades away once again, consider five ways that the media sensation of his murder trial helped to foreshadow this extraordinary presidency.

1. Identity politics. Race loomed large in the O.J. Simpson trial, which came on the heels of the deadly Rodney King riots. The prosecution team, like Hillary Clinton’s campaign, presented the evidence in a workmanlike manner and made a reasonable (if not particularly inspired) argument for why the jurors should take its side in what seemed to most professionals like a slam-dunk case. But the result came down to ethnocultural identification among the decision-makers more than lawyerly arguments and fact-checks. O.J.’s jurors, like Trump’s voters, simply did not feel understood or recognized by the other team. The prosecution’s efforts at tokenism weren’t enough to convince the largely black jury to take the side of a law enforcement regime they viewed with suspicion, just as Hillary Clinton’s tortured working class appeals didn’t persuade white Rust Belt voters that she had their interests at heart.

2. Class. The prosecution groaned at the O.J. team’s successful appeals to black solidarity to win over the jury. After all, they said, what did O.J. have in common with poor blacks in Los Angeles living in the projects? Here was a wealthy sports celebrity who had mostly seceded from the African community after winning fame and fortune. In the same way, liberals could not stomach Donald Trump’s inroads among working class whites. He was born into wealthy New York City family, and even had a history of stiffing the very people he was now appealing to (i.e., through Trump University). As it turned out, both of these analyses missed the point. Americans of all races dream of being wealthy, and O.J.’s—and Trump’s—fantastic successes probably strengthened rather than weakened their tribal appeal. In any case, for O.J. jurors as for Trump voters, the judgment was just as much about endorsing their man as about sticking it to the other side.

3. Media. The most remarked-upon similarity between these two phenomena is the reality-TV quality of the coverage surrounding them. Both Trump and O.J. achieved wall-to-wall, flood-the-zone coverage unlike anything seen before or since. Both did this at a time of flux in the way Americans consumed information—O.J. at the dawn of the age of cable television, and Trump at the dawn of the age of social media. And both employed similar media strategies, with great success. For O.J.’s legal team, as the communications professional Bradley Tusk wrote in a post-election piece comparing it to the O.J. trial, “message and narrative trumped facts and evidence. Style trumped substance. He turned the whole thing into a spectacle, and the media played right along. Punditry, commentary and celebrity overran the process.” The media wanted O.J. to be convicted, just as it wanted Trump to lose, but the 24/7 coverage vortex probably helped both men more than it hurt.

4. Alan Dershowitz. Perhaps the most prominent figure from the O.J. trial to resurface in the early days of the Trump presidency is the Harvard legal lion Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz’s tactical legal maneuvers helped the defense get the upper hand over the prosecution. More than twenty years later, he is appearing regularly on television and op-ed pages with a compelling and sophisticated legal case that President Trump has not, in fact, committed any crimes—or at least, that there is a premature rush to judgment against him. Dershowitz’s record of success should remind Trump’s dogged critics that taking him down will require more than knowing—just knowing—that he’s dirty. It will take a measured and competent case—one that takes the opposing case seriously and has a plan to surmount it. Anything short of that—an viscerally compelling but legally inadequate impeachment case, for example, to satisfy the Democratic base—could lead to defeat and ruin.

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