John Cassidy's Blog, page 43

Five Things Jeremy Corbyn Has Right

I’m not a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the British Labour Party. A product of the sectarian Labour politics of the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, he has often appeared to be stuck in a time warp, refusing to budge. Hitherto, he has shown little aptitude for, or even any inclination toward, the messy business of governing. Some of his foreign-policy views are naïve, and, as the Guardian’s left-leaning economics editor, Larry Elliott, pointed out a couple of weeks ago, many of the numbers in his economic program don’t add up. Moreover, Corbyn too readily dismisses the achievements of New Labour, which ended eighteen years of Conservative rule, oversaw big investments in Britain’s public services, introduced a national minimum wage and free daycare, guaranteed maternity leave and four weeks of paid holiday, introduced civil partnerships, quadrupled the international-aid budget, and reintroduced free entry to museums and art galleries.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Corbyn Supremacy
Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory and the Demise of New Labour
Misrule Britannia: The U.K.’s Screwed-Up Election

Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory and the Demise of New Labour

On Saturday, the British Labour Party announced that Jeremy Corbyn, the sixty-six-year-old Member of Parliament who represents the London constituency of Islington North, has been elected as its new leader. In the past, Corbyn has expressed his support for unilateral nuclear disarmament, pulling Britain out of NATO, getting rid of the monarchy, raising taxes on the rich, and nationalizing some of Britain’s biggest industries. In the Middle East, he opposed bombing ISIS and favors talks with Hamas and Hezbollah. With the arguable exceptions of Keir Hardie, the Party’s first leader, and Michael Foot, its leader in the early nineteen-eighties, he is probably the most left-wing leader that Labour has had.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Corbyn Supremacy
My Nephew Has Some Questions
I’m Not Going to Dismaland

Donald Trump’s Nose Is Growing Longer and Longer

Behind the brash, self-aggrandizing, and occasionally obnoxious exterior that Donald Trump presents to the world lurks a not entirely inconsequential level of intelligence and self-awareness. “I play to people’s fantasies,” he has said in explaining his business success, which is based, to a large extent, on the often blatantly false idea that anything with his name on it is bigger, better, more exclusive, and more glamorous than rival products. “I call it truthful hyperbole.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Bluster on Iran
2016: Where Do Things Stand?
Cover Story: Kanye’s 2020 Vision

Jeb Bush and the Return of Voodoo Economics

With the economic recovery continuing, the budget deficit falling, and 2016 approaching, it has been clear for some time where the Republican Party is heading on economic policy: back to the old-time religion of tax cuts. About the only question left to be answered was whether the Party would endorse measures narrowly targeted toward middle-income families, which is what Marco Rubio and some others are recommending, or whether it would revert to the old Reaganite model of broad cuts in tax rates, which reduce tax payments for virtually everyone, but especially the rich—and to heck with the deficit.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Comes After Heirloom Seeds?
Do Businesspeople Make Good University Presidents?
Personal Mottos That Haven’t Quite Worked Out for Me

Jeb Bush Breezes Through “The Late Show” With Stephen Colbert

After all the build-up for Jeb Bush’s appearance on Stephen Colbert’s first show as the host of “The Late Show,” on CBS, I tuned in half expecting the excitement of Dan Rather’s 1998 interview of George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton’s 1992 appearance on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” But no. Colbert’s taped interview had all the tension of two distant cousins meeting at a wedding, and all the specificity of a typical Jeb stump speech, which is to say not very much. It wasn’t even particularly funny.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Chuck Schumer’s Humiliation
When White Poets Pretend to Be Asian
Politically Correct “Lord of the Flies”

2016: Where Do Things Stand?

The days when Labor Day marked the beginning of the electoral season have long gone. Thanks to information technology, money, and the Supreme Court, we live in the era of the permanent campaign. But the end of summer still feels like a significant marker, and it provides a good moment to take stock of a set of events that surely would have prompted the good Doctor, had he been alive to chronicle them, to send out for another bottle of Wild Turkey.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Chuck Schumer’s Humiliation
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
Comment from the September 14, 2015, Issue

Janet Yellen and the Fed Should Hold Fire

As you head to the beach or the movies during Labor Day weekend, spare a thought for Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues. For months now, they’ve been umming and ahhing about whether to start raising short-term interest rates, which they have kept at close to zero per cent since December, 2008. Last week, Stanley Fischer, Yellen’s deputy, indicated that the Fed wanted to see August’s job figures before making a decision about whether to go ahead with a rate hike later this month.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Hedge-Fund Manager’s Challenge to the Fed
The Stock Market’s Dive Is Global and Rational
Presidential Candidates’ Shocking Behavior

The Iran Deal Is a Victory for Reason and Economic Sanctions

The U.S. Congress, having apparently been granted the right under the Constitution to exercise power without responsibility, has often used it to block worthwhile international agreements. After the First World War, an isolationist Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and its creation of the League of Nations, which was the precursor to the United Nations. More recently, Congress rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (in 1999) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (in 2012). Other international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, never even made it to the Senate, because they stood no realistic chance of being ratified.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Schumer’s Iran Decision Played with Senate Democrats
An Exile from Iran on the Beaches of Australia
Obama on War and Peace

China’s Economic Slowdown: How Bad Is It?

Tuesday was another nervy day on Wall Street: the Dow closed down almost four hundred and seventy points, or about three per cent. The immediate issue, once again, was China, which by some measures is now the world’s second-largest economy. In Beijing, the government released a set of figures indicating that output from the country’s enormous manufacturing sector is declining. Another new statistic showed that the Chinese services sector, which has been growing pretty strongly, is now exhibiting some weakness, too.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can the Chinese Government Get Its People to Like G.M.O.s?
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, August 26th
A Tale of Two Stocks: Apple and Coke in China

ISIS and the Curse of the Iraq War

I’ve been reading up recently on the ancient history of Iraq and Syria, a region that is often referred to, not for nothing, as the cradle of civilization. Here is where rapid population growth, urbanization, the specialization of labor, manufacturing, written language, money, mathematics, and astronomy all originated.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is Nefertiti in Tut’s Tomb?
Ur-Mothers
Erdogan’s ISIS Opportunism