Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 182

The Gray Lady Rediscovers 1924

In the age of Trump, the center-left is intermittently rediscovering the complexities of U.S. immigration history. The latest instance can be found in a New York Times opinion piece by Helene Stapinski. Like myself, Ms. Stapinski is part Italian, and has rediscovered the 1924 law shutting off immigration from South, Central, and Eastern Europe. It was, as I’ve written before, a disaster for those from that region, and a dark moment in American history. Premised on the notion that Italians, Greeks, Jews, etc. were inescapably alien and irredeemably degenerate, it led to the country shutting its doors to millions of immigrants, at the hour of their greatest need, whose cousins, subsequent history shows, turned out to be model American citizens..

The more that can be done to examine the real history that lies under rosy platitudes about the “nation of immigrants,” the better. Alas, the story Stapinski tells is so oversimplified as to do as much harm as good. Hers is ultimately the familiar Manichaean tale, contrasting desperate masses of humanity looking for a better life with unfeeling, racist nativist Americans barring their way.

One detail of her narrative in particular should raise flags: Stapinski mentions 19th century Italian peasants fleeing from prima nocte—a practice that, as far as many historians have argued, never actually existed. Perhaps the author can cite some sources; if not, it’s surprising this made it past the editors, and seems to suggest more emotion than analysis is at work here. Furthermore, the villains of her story—a northern Italian eugenicist and his American enablers—are a bit too conveniently packaged. Beyond that, Stapinski is on firmer—if more generic—ground. Her case for sympathy rests on the grind of farm life, the fiscal depredations of quasi-feudal overlords, the shocking infant mortality rate among rural peasants.

In reality, the picture in the 1920s was considerably more complicated than one pitting pitiable peasants against reactionary racists. Then (as now), Middle America was quite well aware that the rest of the world—not only in Italy, but in the whole of the former Russian, Austrian, German, and Ottoman empires—was awash in misery. And yet it still wouldn’t budge on immigration. This attitude, however, had much less to do with racism than a kind of hard-headed realism. Be it for folk-cultural reasons (in general, Jacksonians, like Jeffersonians, have deep-seated cultural inclinations, inherited from certain strains of English Protestantism, to view the world outside the folk group as dangerous and fallen), or from stories told by family members in the military, missionaries, or the news, most Americans well understood the sorry state of the world. They simply didn’t see it as a problem that was rationally addressable through a lax immigration policy.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, many Americans who had previously been open to quite large amounts of immigration feared that an unstoppable, unacceptably huge second wave was heading our way. Thirteen years passed between the (Progressive, “scientific”) racist Dillinham report, which Stapinski flags, and the immigration shutdown in 1924. In that time, American immigration proponents wholly failed to find a sustainable policy solution, or convince the middle of the country it had control over the rate of intake. The reaction swung so far against immigration that the largest period of intake in U.S. history was succeeded by a near-total shutdown that lasted for two generations.

Stapinski’s misty-eyed pose blinds her to other critical parallels to today. Facing a wave of immigration skepticism, this generation of the pro-immigration center-left has also not moderated, but has increasingly dug itself into an increasingly absolutist, moralizing position. And as wars and mass dislocation have proliferated abroad—most notably in Syria and Libya—and those who proclaim loudest their sympathies with the refugees this creates have offered posturing rather than policy.

The elite center, which has so long set the tone on immigration policy as it had on foreign policy, screamingly needs to find a sustainable consensus on both. In each case, that means pressing beyond comforting myths and self-illusions, and ask hard questions. History is a great place to start—but not if we’re mining it for fairy tales.

To Save Public Higher Education, Defang Public Sector Unions

In the New York Times last week, David Leonhardt denounced “the assault on colleges—and the American Dream” by state legislatures across the country that are gradually reducing their investments in public higher education. These cuts, Leonhardt says, undermine social mobility by forcing state colleges to pass over low-income students and enroll less economically diverse freshman classes. While there are reasonable objections to the way colleges spend the money they do have, the trend Leonhardt describes is indeed a cause for concern.

But why do public university budgets keep getting the ax? It’s not (at least not primarily) about the selfishness of wealthy taxpayers. The real answer is more inconvenient for the Democratic coalition: Namely, that exploding public pension costs are putting tremendous pressure on state budgets, and higher education is the softest political target for the belt-tightening needed to make up for it. So argue Daniel DiSalvo and Jeffrey Kucik, political science professors at the City University of New York, in a new Manhattan Institute report that they summarize at U.S. News:

The common assumption is that higher education cuts are just another consequence of states tightening belts in the wake of the Great Recession. But a closer look at the health of state finances tells a different story. State government tax revenues now exceed pre-recession levels and spending in almost every budget category has grown since 2008. Unfortunately, higher education is not following the same pattern. America’s public colleges and universities enjoy the dubious distinction of being the only major budget category in which states are cutting back.

In a new report, we show just how far higher education has dropped down states’ priority lists. Spending on hospitals, policing and public welfare are all up by at least 10 percent. The most notable increases are on public employee pensions, which grew the fastest in terms of total liabilities and expenditures. In short, pensions are crowding out higher education.

So long as public sector unions have a powerful grip on state legislatures, and so long as they can extract inviolable pension commitments (and paper over the magnitude of these promises by assuming unrealistic rates of return) discretionary programs without guaranteed funding carveouts will continue to be squeezed. You won’t hear many progressive activists making this case, but the single best avenue for ensuring that public colleges are fully funded is to roll back collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees so that pension obligations can be put on a sustainable path.

Or at least, you won’t hear many progressive activists making this case anytime soon.

But in the long-run, the contradiction between state-level Democrats’ loyalty to public sector unions and their desire to expand social welfare programs of various kinds will become increasingly hard to conceal. When the fiscal vise tightens enough, we may see new coalitions start to form.

Freeing My Inner Curmudgeon

It’s a well-known fact, supported by data you can slap on snazzy charts and graphs, that as many people (especially males) age, they get ornery, dour, dark, dick-headed, and downright curmudgeonly. Feeling the brunt of mortality’s anticipatory revenge, they often develop a gravelly graveyard laugh just from reading the newspaper. They revel in the misfortunes of deserving others—those they know personally and most certainly those they don’t—and plot fantasy evils to be visited upon their real and imagined enemies whom misfortune has unjustly overlooked.

That is not all. In rough proportion to the burden of bodily aches and pains they experience, they use more toilet paper than they know they should, stubbornly refuse to floss (because what the hell anyway, you know?), and curse pointlessly at the dog when no one else is around. What’s more, and so very much worse, they kind of enjoy all this and could not give a shit if anyone objects.

My loving wife, years ago already, warned me of the dangers of curmudgeonliness. She can well do without it, particularly in me. In her own right (which is always), she is so generally upbeat—or old New England-stock stoic, as circumstances require—that it sometimes makes me want to howl. Yet I fully understand and take to heart her counsel.

After all, I personally knew James Schlesinger, the king of curmudgeons, a man so advanced in the arts of scowling, sibilating, and seething that he achieved full black whisky belt curmudgeon status before turning fifty. When he spoke in his characteristic low growl, with mouth all but closed and teeth touching, perspiration silently boiled off his forehead. So, knowing what advanced cases look like, I prepared a symbol of my wife’s good counsel as a constant reminder of my responsibilities to be as a gentle and charming as my arthritic and dyspeptic personality allows (see above).

I made several large copies of this graphic and tacked them up hither and yon around my work places. The sight of them restrains me temporarily, and at the margins. But they are nearly powerless to resist tidal surges of bilious revulsion against human stupidity, concupiscence, Piltdown Man pig-eyed stares, and puke-orange hair—namely, Donald J. Trump. Yes, it would be pointless to deny it: The great waves of curmudgeonly energy that well up within me have multiplied since November 8, and my gravelly newspaper reading laugh, I am informed, has noticeably deepened. It all begs therapy, but, then again, now that we are all pinned to the mat in the late Professor Rieff’s reigning age of the therapeutic, doesn’t everything?

When my anti-curmudgeon banners do not suffice to contain me these days, and cursing becomes just too much wasted energy (besides which it debases the verbal currency), what is left but literary complaint? So I seethe on paper for comfort, but I seethe exclusively over subpolitical irritations because, for some reason, getting upset about politics makes me feel even worse once the curmudgeonly spasm has spent itself. These small irritations vary greatly in kind, for reasons beyond explanation or control. Some verge on the stark raving silly, while others may contain at least a seed of the sublime—a condition prone to strand my seething “voice” somewhere between that of George Carlin and that of Joseph Epstein (not that Carlin has been saying much lately).

Look, it’s just what I do, and I am about to do it now, moving from pretty silly to even sillier and then back again. Listen in if you like. If you don’t like, I couldn’t give a shit.

Hands Off the Fruit

When I was a kid—this is the standard curmudgeonly prolegomenon, in case you’re wondering—fruit came from store to home naked. We didn’t have to peel off or eat around ubiquitous little pieces of sticky paper, usually oval or round in shape, slapped on every damned apple, pear, peach, banana, plum, mango, and orange we eat.

I don’t so much mind the damned things on bananas because no one eats the peel, and anyway I don’t care for bananas. But on soft, delicate plums? On perfect shiny, almost opalescent, apples and on delectable sweet pears? Even peaches, for God’s sake? What bureaucratically berserk asswipes have wrought such a sinister subversion of everyday life? Screw, to a stiletto-studded stony wall, the bastard who invented this pointless nonsense, and screw the servile automatons who participate in these wanton acts of graffruti. Have these people no aesthetic sense at all when it comes to fruit?

Yes, I well understand that our food chain is truly international these days and that these crappy little flecks of paper are there to protect us, somehow. That’s doubtless why they are pockmarked with tiny print no one can read. I can’t believe that this is the only—and it can’t possibly be the best—way to accomplish this nanny-nanny-boo-boo guardianship function on behalf of us poor dumb schmucks who need protection from pathological kiwis and other foreign terroristic dangers of the fruity sort.

I have come to expect that the next step will be the paper desecration of individual grapes in a bunch or of every bing cherry in a paper sack, or that some pinheaded government functionary will invade my yard to tag my cute little blueberries and raspberries aborning. But of that I’ve no fear, for the Second Amendment is still here. (Oh, yes I would, too.) I feel better already.

Dropkicked

Since we’re on the topic of food, let me note that something has gone horribly wrong with the standard horseradish condiments on offer in the grocery store. Used to be that this stuff—whether Gold’s or some other brand, plain “white” or flavored deep red with beet juice—was, if ingested, the rough equivalent of a small nuclear weapon. You’d fork it out of those six-ounce tall bottles onto a piece of forlorn, pallid gefilte fish—and all store-bought gefilte fish is forlorn and pallid, in case you are not aware—at the one and only time during the year when you were liable to be doing anything like that (namely, during Passover). So you’d stare at the stuff just lying there looking so innocent on your little piece of fish, and you’d confidently gird your loins, mental and otherwise insofar as you had any as a young boy, because you were sure you could man up to the challenge it presented.

And you’d soon be proven wrong.

The stuff would start out nice and tasty, but before you could complete one modest swallow you could sense both the detonation below, about six inches below your gullet, and the liftoff to come. What would lift off would be the top of your head, as toxic fumes gushed from your nose and ears, curling your eyelashes and sideburns; every hair follicle felt like a miniature Atlas missile just ignited for launch. Your eyes shuttered open and closed and open again, to stare into the onrushing abyss. For a second—it seemed like minutes—you could not breathe, your voice would become thin, high, and panicky if you foolishly tried to use it, and you would rapidly flap your arms up and down for no apparent reason whatsoever. You looked and felt like a battered dragon having just been rocketed down from the sky in a black-and-white 1950s Japanese horror adventure flick, or else like Jerry Lewis “acting out” in front of Dean Martin (and if you’re too young to conjure an image of that, count yourself fortunate). And then, of course, you would blink twice and take another bite.

You can’t do this anymore. No eight-year old kid can do this nowadays with the store-bought stuff. Except for some small-batch designer brands that are not easy to find, the kick has been dropped. For reasons unknown to me, the stuff the standard labels now peddle labeled horseradish—by the same companies in the same bottles with the same labels and in the same two “flavors”—is so schvach (weak) that it couldn’t get the sideways attention of a baby canary even if you dunked the bird right in the sauce head down. You can spoon the stuff directly down your throat half a bottle’s worth at a time, skipping the gefilte fish altogether, and…nothing. Nothing happens.

Who has been pussyfooting around with my bitter herbs is what I want to know. And to what possible purpose? Is someone, yet again, trying to protect me from myself? Is this the gastronomical analogue to those killjoy numbnuts who have managed to banish every piece of playground equipment that was any fun?

I have suffered many indignities and frustrations during my life at the hands of those who claimed only the best of intentions: the designated-hitter rule, emission-control devices in cars, the sudden murder of Lik-m-Aid, and—I shudder to recall it—the advent of bicycle helmets. But mess with my horseradish and you have gone too far. Too far—do you hear me?—you cowardly (because anonymous) corporate turds!

Manufactured Sincerity

Early stage disintermediation has radically reduced the frequency with which most people have to engage with bank tellers, gasoline pumpers, and those—like travel agents—associated with a whole host of other common service-related functions. ATMs, automated gas pumps, and related mechanisms have seen to that, for better and mostly for worse, because they contribute to the everyday class segregation of American society.

But every once in a while I do enter an actual brick-and mortar bank, in my case to make a small deposit in a feeble extended family-related business account that lacks a facility for remote deposits. When I do this downtown around 19th and M Streets, NW, in our nation’s capital, I am invariably greeted by a seemingly random employee whose job seems to be to stand within easy earshot of the door (but not too close), smile vacuously, and mutter meaningless, if mercifully succinct, unctuous greetings to entering customers. In other words, the bank, through the employees detailed to “greeting” duty, is in the side business of manufacturing fake sincerity.

It could be that some bank customers are so desperately lonely and isolated that they actually like this sort of thing. Or maybe they work someplace where they occasionally are obligated to do something similar, and so empathize with the vacuous misery of it all. Fine. But while I don’t hate these hapless employees, I do hate fake sincerity, which is a form of industrialized pseudo-emotion. I hate it more than ever since I have entered the maw of the curmudgeonly personality, but truth to tell I have always hated it.

I don’t scream at these people or throw things at them. I don’t grunt, spit, or even harrumph. These days I just stiffen in preparation to ignore them, and head for Paula, the bank teller I actually know for some years, and who knows me. We never fail to engage in small talk, which sometimes even spills over into harmless banter.

So I’m all for friendliness in business transactions as long as it is earned, just as I am all for manners when manners do what they were designed to do: confer dignity on all those who observe them regardless of personal connection or station in life. The small amenities that our forbears composed into the rhythms of human interaction are not small in cumulative effect—they help render us fully human social animals and civilize us from generation to generation. Fake these kinds of things enough over time and you debase them, just as intimacy too rapidly sought and accepted drives out the real and valuable kind.

Don’t be shocked by this modest outpouring of sentiment. We curmudgeons do still care about such things. Most of us, after all, are just long-since-disappointed idealists in mourning for our youthful hopes.

Now, there is no good purpose to be served by trying to explain any of this to an obedient bank employee who almost certainly would rather be doing something else. I know; I’ve tried. It’s like asking directions from a coconut. Not even a card-carrying curmudgeon would keep plugging away at such an effort for long, seeing as how there are so many other, more satisfying targets out there to fume over.

I could go on, and on—all of us of a certain age can. Pre-curmudgeons can readily guess many of the common apolitical fuses that set us oldsters off: robocalling telemarketing scumsters; litterers; jackasses who refuse to use their turn signals; ignorami who say “exact same” and use impact as a verb; less-than-a-dollar price sign-makers who don’t know the difference between a decimal and the dark side of the moon; technoboobs who keep putting mostly pointless new buttons and gadgets on simple tools and calling it progress; clueless conflators of a wondrously beautiful world who can’t tell a bee from a wasp from a hornet; almost anything the USPS does…..the list is long if not endless.

Then again, most of us curmudgeons nurse customized grievances of one kind or another, if only to illustrate our highly individual, if rapidly rusting, personalities. For example, every curmudgeon worth his pepper hates to be held hostage to loud cellphone half-conversations while riding on public conveyances. That alone probably accounts for considerable support for the death penalty, in hopes that, one day, terminal rudeness will become a capital offense.

But my blood-red beef is with women (and men, to the lesser extent it may apply) who daub makeup on themselves as though no one else was anywhere near them on the train, bus, or plane. It’s as though they are signaling that, while they clearly intend to get dolled up and attractive for someone, you are most definitely not that someone. These commuter selfie-artists think nothing of finishing getting dressed—because that’s pretty much what it comes down to—right in front of you since to them you don’t actually exist, notwithstanding your being roughly as physically near to them as they are to you.

Admittedly, others feel differently. About the makeup thing one friend suggested I was being needlessly persnickety—as if needless persnicketiness were really all that easy to distinguish from needful persnicketiness. To re-coin a phrase, that is a judgment firmly in the eye of the persnicketeer.

But I take the point. I know a guy who goes ballistic every time he encounters a double-glass door on some commercial establishment, and one of the doors—invariably the one he tries to push or pull open—is locked in place (which is all of the time). I can hear him now: “Why the fuck would you have two doors if you’re always going to lock one of them—and not indicate which door it is?!” I empathize, but the double-door thing just doesn’t rise to my particular bar of curmudgeonly outrage. Maybe next year.

So I make my “no curmudgeon” signs and place them around, doing the best I can to stop the advancing wave of a new irritation rising in my gorge. But it’s only a holding action; I know that. I am resigned to freeing my inner curmudgeon. After all, as everyone stupidly blurts out at one time or another, there’s no stopping progress.

1967’s Gift to America

The United States had little to do with the course of the Middle Eastern war that was fought fifty years ago this month. A half century later, however, it is clear that one of the major and enduring consequences of that war has had a powerful and beneficial influence on American foreign policy.

During the war and immediately afterward the American government was largely a bystander. Its main contribution consisted in what it did not do. President Lyndon B. Johnson tried but failed to organize a multinational naval flotilla to ensure free passage through the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only outlet to the Red Sea, after Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had ordered them closed. Nor did Johnson repeat President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s demand, after the previous Arab-Israeli war in 1956, that Israel retreat from the territory it had captured. Instead, the United States supported United Nations Resolution 242, which called for the exchange of the land Israel had conquered in return for peace with its Arab neighbors, and which has served as the template for peacemaking ever since.

The outcome of the war had one major consequence that has reverberated throughout the region ever since: the establishment of Israeli military supremacy in the Middle East. It affected the Arabs almost immediately. Most of them—Egyptian President Anwar Sadat being the conspicuous exception—did not relinquish the goal of eliminating Jewish sovereignty in the region, but they did change the tactics they employed. They adopted terrorism through proxies as a way of killing, harassing, and, they hoped, demoralizing Israelis. They championed, as well, the political strategy of delegitimation, seeking to question the basis of Israel’s existence in the eyes of the world. With the 1973 conflict, which Sadat waged for limited aims and which set in motion the diplomatic process that returned all of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt (by April 1982) in return for an Egyptian peace treaty with Israel (in March 1979), the era of Israel’s major wars with its Arab neighbors came to an end.

As important as it was for Arabs and Israelis, Israel’s post-1967 military predominance in the Middle East has had a powerful, if often indirect, unacknowledged, and unappreciated effect on the foreign policy of the United States. It has proven to be a valuable American strategic asset for the past half-century.

Since World War II the United States has had an overriding goal in the region: to prevent any single hostile power from dominating it. This goal echoed the classic, centuries-long aim of Great Britain’s European policy: to preserve a balance among the various great powers on the continent such that none would become strong enough to threaten the British Isles. When necessary the British intervened, by preference with economic assistance rather than with their own troops, to keep a rising power—the Spanish Habsburgs, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany—from achieving continental hegemony.

After World War II the United States had this aim not only in the Middle East but also in Europe and East Asia. The Soviet Union posed the most serious threat in all three, but the Middle East differed from the other regions in two significant ways. First, unlike in Europe and East Asia, to maintain an acceptable balance of power the United States did not need to station American forces on the territory of its allies. Israeli military supremacy helped to make a major American military presence on the ground unnecessary, and thus reduced the cost of American foreign policy. Indeed, Israel was and remains the only democratic ally of the United States that does not seek direct American military protection. In the Middle East, America could, therefore, act as what the British historically preferred to be in Europe: an “offshore balancer.”

Second, unlike in Europe and East Asia, local powers, friendly to the Soviet Union and later to Russia but not formally tied to them, actively sought regional dominance, and so threatened American interests. Nasser’s Egypt was one: Israel put an end to his ambitions in 1967. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a second. In response to his 1991 invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which placed him in a position to intimidate Saudi Arabia and thus gain control over the majority of the region’s oil, the United States did send an army to the region. In the war that followed, President George H. W. Bush made it clear that Israeli participation was neither needed nor welcome, and indeed pressured the Israeli government not to strike Iraq even after Iraq fired missiles into Israel.

Even then, however, Israeli military prowess made a vital contribution to American success. Ten years earlier an Israeli airstrike had destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, setting back Saddam’s nuclear weapons program. After the 1991 conflict it was discovered that Iraq had, in the intervening decade, made considerably more progress toward acquiring such weapons than Western intelligence services had believed. But for the earlier Israeli strike, Saddam might have had nuclear weapons in 1991. In that case the United States would not have gone to war with Iraq; or, if it had, the costs would have been exponentially higher than they turned out to be.

The role of Israel’s post-1967 military supremacy in keeping at bay would-be challengers to the status quo of the Middle East has received less notice than it deserves, in no small part because of its very nature: It has usually operated invisibly, deterring attacks rather than repulsing them. There have been exceptions to this pattern. The explicit threat of Israeli military intervention in September 1970 helped to stop a Syrian assault on an important Arab ally of the United States, the Kingdom of Jordan. For the most part, however, Israeli military prowess worked to America’s advantage by suppressing initiatives that Middle Eastern countries hostile to both Israel and the United States might otherwise have taken.

In this way Israel’s strategic value to the United States has resembled the impact of an effective shot-blocker in basketball, who affects the game by the shots that his very presence causes the opposing team not to take. Just as shots not taken do not appear in the statistical record of a basketball game, so the powerful benefit that the United States has derived from Israeli military supremacy does not appear in the historical record of the modern Middle East: History, after all, is the chronicle of what has happened rather than what has not happened.

Recently, however, Israeli military power did play an explicit role in U.S. Middle Eastern policy because the American government deliberately and foolishly chose not to make use of it. Iran today, like Egypt and Iraq before it, is seeking to dominate the Middle East. Its program to acquire nuclear weapons forms a major part of its efforts to that end. President Barack Obama sought to place restrictions on it through negotiations, and he did reach such an agreement with the Iranian government, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in July 2015.

Ordinarily the outcome of an international negotiation reflects the relative strengths of the parties to it. In the JCPOA, however, the United States, despite being much more powerful than Iran, made major and potentially very damaging concessions: The Islamic Republic retained its facilities for enriching uranium, something all American Presidents, including Barack Obama, had vowed not to permit, and all the limits on its nuclear program expire after 15 years, leaving Iran free to get the bomb thereafter. The reason for this outcome was Obama’s clear unwillingness to make use of America’s military advantage with a credible threat to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Still, a substitute for a credible American threat was available: The Israeli government announced that it was prepared to launch such an attack if the United States would not. Israeli military power, and Israel’s track record in using it, made this threat credible. Far from using it as leverage in his dealings with Iran in order to secure an outcome more favorable to the United States and its regional allies, however, President Obama very publicly opposed any Israeli strike, even hinting that Washington would punish Israel if it dared to launch one.

No doubt the American President had several motives for his Iran policy, including the belief that offering the hand of American friendship to the ruling mullahs would cause them to moderate their foreign policy—a belief not borne out by Iran’s conduct since 2015; and while the ultimate consequences of Obama’s nuclear bargain cannot yet be assessed, one thing can be said of it with certainty. In negotiating it, the Obama Administration squandered what has been, for the United States, the extraordinarily valuable legacy of the Six Day War that is now fifty years old.

The First Impact of the Climate Deal Withdrawal

The real, measurable impacts of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement are going to be few and far between, but the first one we’ve seen thus far has been a drop in the price of oil. This won’t hurt Trump with his voters: market participants think that the U.S. will now pump more oil, leading to long term lower oil prices. Reuters reports:

Crude fell more than 1 percent on Friday, heading for a second straight week of losses, on worries that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from an international climate accord will spur further domestic production and contribute to a persistent global oversupply. […]

“Trump seems to be removing any barriers he can find that would obstruct growth of crude oil or natural gas,” said Stewart Glickman, energy equity analyst at CFRA in New York.

Let’s not give the White House too much credit here, though. The Obama administration, for all of its gesturing towards renewables, was remarkably friendly towards the shale industry. The recent growth we’ve seen in American production is the result of innovation and falling costs in shale drilling, rather than the rolling back of regulations.

But perceptions matter to markets, and Trump’s announcement yesterday has further strengthened analysts’ belief that this Administration will do everything it can to help out America’s oil and gas industry (even though the natural gas boom is responsible for knocking Old King Coal off his throne in the U.S.).

Russia is paying close attention to U.S. oil production these days, and the CEO of the state-owned oil company Rosneft, Igor Sechin, publicly expressed concerns that surging American supplies could overcome petrostate efforts to cut production and push prices back up. We certainly saw evidence of that in trading today.

U.S. and China Ready New Sanctions On North Korea

The UN Security Council will vote today on a new round of sanctions against North Korea, in a proposal crafted by the U.S. and China. Reuters:

The draft resolution…would sanction four entities, including the Koryo Bank and Strategic Rocket Force of the Korean People’s Army, and 14 people, including Cho Il U, who is believed to head North Korea’s overseas spying operations.

If adopted, they would be subject to a global asset freeze and travel ban, making the listings more symbolic given the isolated nature of official North Korean entities and the sophisticated network of front companies used by Pyongyang to evade current sanctions.

It is the first Security Council sanctions resolution on North Korea agreed between the United States and China since President Donald Trump took office in January.

Trump has been trying for weeks to get China to amplify pressure against North Korea, and the sanctions here seem to be the first tangible results of that effort—aside from a few mostly symbolic gestures China has made to show it is putting an economic squeeze on Pyongyang.

Separately on Thursday, the U.S. also unilaterally sanctioned nine entities for their support of North Korea’s weapons programs. Two Russian firms were among the sanctioned companies, which sparked outrage in Moscow and raised concern that Russia might veto the U.N. proposal in retaliation. Today, though, Russia announced it will not veto, while still expressing consternation over the unilateral U.S. sanctions. Assuming voting goes as expected, the whole episode certainly looks like a minor victory for Team Trump: the U.S. got both Beijing and Moscow on board with new UN sanctions, while levying unilateral ones that double as a reminder that the White House is not in thrall to the Kremlin.

That said, the sanctions are hardly a game-changer, nor are they a major departure from previous attempts to curb Pyongyang’s weapons activity. For all Trump’s dramatic promises to end the “strategic patience” of past administrations, the actual content of his North Korea policy has largely been in line with what has been tried before, including UN sanctions. Introducing new China-friendly sanctions certainly could help to pressure Pyongyang—but it will take much more than that to change North Korea’s behavior.

Mattis Moves to Reassure Asia (Again)

James Mattis is off to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this weekend for his second Asia trip as Defense Secretary. This time, he may face an even more skeptical region than he did during his reassurance tour in February.

Financial Times has a preview:

While Mr Mattis will repeat the usual ​US ​mantra about ​American leadership in the Asia-Pacific region, his words ​may ring hollow to some. His speech will come four months after Donald Trump walked away from the TPP and two days after he announced he would quit the Paris climate accord, ​placing the US in a three-member club with Syria and Nicaragua. […]

Mira Rapp-Hooper, an Asia expert at the Center for a New American Security, said Mr Trump was ​also ​taking a very narrow approach to Asia that marked a big difference from Mr Obama, and added that it was worrying how little he had said about ​assertive ​Chinese ​moves​ in the South China Sea.

“One of the most striking things is the transactional approach . . . that has left China feeling like it could not be better positioned and left allies feeling that they are intensively vulnerable,” she said. “[That’s] made the region feel that US leadership is completely up for grabs.”

To be fair, Mattis can point to a series of recent actions that counter the narrative of American disengagement. This past week, the Trump Administration launched its first freedom-of-navigation operation in the South China Sea; this week, two U.S. carriers are conducting drills with Japan in a show of force aimed at Pyongyang; and yesterday, the United States introduced new sanctions against North Korea at the Security Council. All of these moves seem to have been strategically timed ahead of Shangri-La to reassure skittish allies that the U.S. government was not surrendering its traditional leadership role.

But the FT is right that those positive actions have been undermined by other signals, including Trump’s griping about trade deficits and defense costs with South Korea, his initial quiescence on the South China Sea, and his many laudatory statements about China’s great efforts to restrain Pyongyang. Combined with Trump’s withdrawal from Paris and TPP, those moves have left some in Asia to conclude that the United States can no longer be relied upon, as they hasten to cut deals with Beijing or cast a fresh eye on China’s trade agenda.

None of this is irreparably damaging to America’s standing: As Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull noted during his keynote speech, Asia’s disappointment over TPP and Paris does not preclude cooperation with Washington on a host of other vital issues. But it remains to be seen which issues Trump will actually choose to address. Trump’s prioritization of the North Korean crisis is clear enough; so, too, is his notion that the United States should try to peel Beijing away from Pyongyang. Otherwise, though, the region is still waiting for clarity.

Mattis’s challenge at Shangri-La is to articulate a vision that has so far been lacking, and to demonstrate that Trump’s early record of mixed messages can be shaped into a coherent strategy. Let’s hope he can deliver.

Labour’s Jewish Problem

Aside from the thankfully lifeless British National Party, there is little evidence of anti-Semitism on the British Right today. Contrast that state of affairs with the miserable condition of the British Left. Since its hijacking by Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes in the fall of 2015, the Labour Party has been engulfed in a series of anti-Semitism scandals. Ken Livingstone’s sick fixation on claiming Adolf Hitler was a Zionist (the ulterior motive of which is to slander Israel as the reincarnation of Nazi Germany) would be comical were the former London Mayor not such a popular figure within his party. Indeed, so voluminous have Labour’s anti-Semitic eruptions been that they led both the party and parliament’s Home Affairs committee to launch separate inquiries. The latter of these determined that “The failure of the Labour Party consistently and effectively to deal with anti-Semitic incidents in recent years risks lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic.” As for Labour’s internal probe, it was a travesty, capped when Corbyn rewarded its author, the shameless Shami Chakrabarti, a peerage just two months after she produced a whitewash.

In advance of Thursday’s general election, Corbyn’s Labour is doing surprisingly well, shrinking a 15 percent Conservative Party lead to just 5 percent over the course of two weeks. Prime Minister Theresa May had called the snap election in hopes of securing what nearly everyone assumed would be a massive Tory majority, thus giving her a stronger position with respect to the European Union in negotiating Britain’s departure from the bloc. With the election framed as something of a quasi-second referendum on Brexit, the extremism of Corbyn and his supporters has been obscured.

The overripe anti-Semitic rot within Labour Party smells worse than ever thanks to Corbyn, who, in addition to being a sympathizer of the Irish Republican Army and practically every anti-Western political tendency, spent more than thirty years on the backbenches consorting with a wide variety of Jew-haters. There was his well-known reference to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”; his sharing a stage with Dyab Abou Jajah, the Lebanese man who called 9/11 “sweet revenge” and said Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion”; his inviting the Palestinian hate preacher Raed Salah to Parliament; and his donating money to the anti-Israel organization operated by a Holocaust denier. Just recently, too, it emerged that, less than a year before assuming the party leadership, Corbyn attended a ceremony in Tunisia where he laid a wreath on the grave of a PLO terrorist involved in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. It was only natural that once this man became leader of one of the UK’s two major political parties, the anti-Semitic dregs with which he had associated himself for decades would rise to the surface.

Leftwing anti-Semitism is hardly limited to the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats have long had to put up with Baronness Jenny Tonge, whose accusations of Israeli organ harvesting would make Julius Streicher blush, and David Ward, the now ex-MP with a predilection for accusing Jews of behaving like Nazis. Institutionally, British academics play a disproportionate role in the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the National Union of Students is a hot-bed of anti-Semitic incitement, and the Guardian remains the most anti-Israel newspaper in the English-speaking world, home to cartoonist Steve Bell, who once drew Benjamin Netanyahu as a puppet master and has lately taken to defending Livingstone’s “Israel is Hitler” obsession. And no discussion of leftwing anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain would be complete without mention of George Galloway, the Ayatollah of Bradford West.

All this is necessary context for a recent survey that found 40 percent of Britons to be concerned about anti-Semitism on the right, but only 36 percent about anti-Semitism on the Left. When the former is negligible and the latter is rampant, what explains the disparity?

One possibility is that Britons are simply unaware of the facts just enumerated and default to an atavistic conception that automatically correlates anti-Semitism with the political Right. But this is hard to believe, considering the massive press coverage the various Labour anti-Semitism scandals have received in the less than two years that Jeremy Corbyn has been leader, and the absence of similar outrages on the Right.

A second explanation is that many people don’t consider Corbyn and company’s obsessive anti-Israel activism to be anti-Semitism at all, but rather see it as a perhaps eccentric form of anti-imperialism—the premise presumably being that Israel is part of some global imperialist cabal or is a micro-imperialist power with regard to the Palestinians. This applies a nefarious double standard to anti-Jewish prejudice. Put Corbyn’s associations and behavior in a rightwing framework and the contradiction becomes obvious: If Corbyn had spent thirty years sharing platforms with the BNP and Northern Irish Loyalist militants, would anyone at the Guardian or other fashionable precincts of the British Left hesitate to conclude he was a racist, fascist sectarian?

At the very least, Corbyn and those who support him are, if not themselves anti-Semites, extremely tolerant of others who are. You don’t consort with Holocaust deniers and call organizations constitutionally committed to the murder of Jews worldwide your “friends” unless you are extraordinarily indifferent to Jewish concerns.

If much of the British Left is oblivious to the rampant anti-Semitism in its ranks, British Jewry isn’t. According to a poll conducted by the Jewish Chronicle, a whopping 77 percent of the country’s Jews plan to vote Conservative next week, compared to just 13 percent who say they will support Labour. British Jews also see political anti-Semitism in a rather different light than their countrymen. On a scale of one to five, with one representing “low levels of antisemitism among the political party’s members and elected representatives” and 5 representing “high levels,” Jews rank Labour at 3.94 and the Tories at 1.96.

What the aforementioned poll reveals is a remarkable complacency about anti-Semitism in Britain, at least on the Left. One cannot help but draw a comparison to the supporters of Donald Trump. For just as Americans “knew that Trump was vulgar, ignorant, racist and misogynist” and voted for him anyway, so are Corbyn’s backers aware of his “support for terrorism and his tolerance for anti-Semitism,” writes David Hirsh, professor at Goldsmiths College and author of a forthcoming book on leftwing anti-Semitism. “It isn’t that the electorate doesn’t know; it isn’t even that it doesn’t care. Maybe the electorate is thrilled by it; and by his refusal to play the game.” Indeed, Hirsh writes, “the more people demonstrate Corbyn’s record of support for terrorism, of his support for any war against Britain, of his support for anti-Semitic movements, the more a kind of stubborn respect for him kicks in.” The utter indifference to, and in some cases, esteem for, Jeremy Corbyn’s long comradeship with a miserable assortment of terrorists, cranks, and anti-Semites is a disturbing portent. A once-great party has confused democratic socialism with the socialism of fools.

Illinois Is Running Out of Money and Time

The cascading fiscal crisis in America’s fifth-largest state just got more acute. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Illinois is on the verge of becoming the first state with a junk-bond rating following downgrades from two of the world’s largest credit-ratings firms. […]

Illinois is one of many states that, despite a generally strong U.S. economy, are struggling to close budget gaps because of pensions and other entitlements. State and local retirement liabilities have ballooned since the financial crisis, and some governments don’t have enough assets to cover all future obligations.

S&P on Thursday dropped its grade on the state’s general-obligation bonds one level to BBB-minus, the lowest possible investment-grade rating, citing Illinois’s inability to pass a budget.

The situation in Illinois is partly the product of political gridlock that might abate with the right leadership. But it also points to a broader failure of institutional organization that we call the “blue model.” The combination of defined-benefit pension systems for public employees, powerful public sector unions, and the shady accounting schemes needed to prop them up are pushing states and localities across the country down the path to Puerto Rico.

The Journal notes, later on, that “the state is still funding certain core functions.” You know things are bad when this needs to be made explicit.

Juncker: EU Can’t Extort (or Enforce) Democracy

Jean-Claude Juncker is rebuffing renewed calls from Berlin to make EU funding dependent on members’ adherence to democratic governance and the rule of law.  Financial Times: 

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has rejected a German proposal to make EU funding contingent on member states’ adherence to democratic principles and human rights — an increasingly charged issue in countries such as Poland and Hungary.

The proposal was contained in an internal German government paper, seen by the FT, that deals with reforming the EU after Britain leaves the bloc. It says the European Commission should examine whether the receipt of EU funds “could be linked to [a country’s] compliance with the fundamental principles of the rule of law”.

Asked at a conference in Berlin if he supported the idea, Mr Juncker said: “I am of the opinion that one should not do that.” He added that the proposal would be “poison for the continent”.

Juncker may well be right that the proposal would further divide the EU and alienate Warsaw and Budapest. But his position here only highlights the complexity and contradictions of the European project. In theory, a commitment to democracy and the rule of law is the foundation of the European Union. But the President of the European Commission is saying that this commitment is essentially unenforceable.

If funding from Brussels cannot be used to uphold the core of the project, what is left of the union? More pragmatically, how does Brussels expect German taxpayers to up their financial contributions to foreign governments that spit on their basic commitments?