Trump.....good article

[t-bob]

‘I’ve known him for ten years and Trump is not a monster’, opined Piers Morgan last night on Question Time. I think he has a point. Modern ‘monsters’ are people like Slobodan Milošević and Dick Cheney and others one can think of who seem to pursue evil as their personal kind of good. The Donald, whatever harm he may yet do, could accidentally do some good. The problem really is that it’s all the same to him. I thought I would be enraged by a diabolically well-crafted inauguration speech disavowing his more racist and absurd campaign sound-bites, attempting some states-manly grace, trying to bridge the great divide in American politics. Instead, it was a typical campaign speech addressed to his supporters, and a fairly mediocre speech at that. As for rhetoric, he was obviously just winging it. At one point he thanked the people who make America safe, the military, the police, the firemen, then – remembering the rural folk who voted for him – ‘most importantly, God,’ like God the fireman.God, the most important member of Team America. Trump is obviously lacking in spirituality or even rudimentary religious education but he knew better than to leave out God.
Indeed, up to now, the most effective enemies of liberalism were right-wing evangelicals and libertarians. They made intolerance, guns and anti-science the defining values of ‘Christianity’ and elected politicians who pledged to fight for faith-based policies and block social legislation like affordable health care. This remains their concept of ‘good’ whether the ebb and flow of politics favors these causes or not. They fight for their beliefs, win or lose. Trump, on the other hand, is just a deal maker. He has no moral code. He is not a monster, not a liberal, not a conservative, not a so-called Christian, but a fervent believer in whatever will makes him a winner on a particular day. Vladimir Putin, terrible as he seems, is probably the same kind of guy; not good, not bad, just doesn’t care. If anything these men do results in making the world a better place, they’ll take the credit, but making the world a better place was never on their agendas.
I admit coming from a family that could be viewed as dynastic, patriarchal and privileged; not wealthy in Trumpian terms, but established and relatively safe from catastrophe. Trying to do the right thing, to be good, to make the world slightly better is a deeply rooted moral instinct, but even if it were not, we were raised to place honor and reputation above money. Most people live by almost subliminal codes of civility and dignity in daily life. There is apparently no part of Trump that is motivated by culture or religion, no system of obligation, no honor, and he is rude and guilt-free. He is a ‘winner’ who doesn’t pay tax, doesn’t pay contractors, uses bankruptcy and lawsuits as tools of his trade, doesn’t care who knows it or what people think. Being rich is justification enough. In some ways, I’m more afraid of the amoral vision the Donald considers a selling point than I am of the determinedly bad guys. To live without judgments, with no right or wrong, just winning and losing, may sound like existential freedom, but it isn’t far from the condition of lesser animals who simply exist in order to exist.

I think Trump will probably do some good for people with blind luck!

[Doug]

Yep he believes his job is to win. The advantage right now is that he is trying to win for the US. Which I think will do well on the international stage, but I'm not sure he knows what winning for the US is on the domestic stage. 

[jdd2]

I wonder how turmpf will deal with this:

Amazon is going to kill more American jobs than China did

Millions of retail jobs are threatened as Amazon’s share of online purchases keeps climbing

Amazon's revenue has been growing at more than 20% a year.

Amazon.com has been crowing about its plans to create 100,000 American jobs in the next year, but as with other recent job-creation announcements, that figure is meaningless without context.

What Amazon (AMZN) won’t tell us is that every job created at Amazon destroys one or two or three others. What Jeff Bezos doesn’t want you to know is that Amazon is going to destroy more American jobs than China ever did.

Amazon has revolutionized the way Americans consume. Those who want to shop for everything from books to diapers increasingly go online instead of to the malls. And for about half of those online purchases, the transaction goes through Amazon.

For the consumer, Amazon has brought lower prices and unimaginable convenience. I can buy almost any consumer product I want just by clicking on my phone or computer — or even easier, by just saying: “Alexa: buy me one” — and it will be shipped to my door within days or even hours for free. I can buy books for my Kindle, or music for my phone instantly. I can watch movies or TV shows on demand.

But for retail workers, Amazon is a grave threat. Just ask the 10,100 workers who are losing their jobs at Macy’s.(XNYS:M) Or the 4,000 at The Limited. Or the thousands of workers at Sears (SHLD) and Kmart, which just announced 150 stores will be closing. Or the 125,000 retail workers who’ve been laid off over the past two years.

Online sales are growing much faster than sales at stores found in malls and shopping centers.DMAMBMCMDMEZHZQZRZSZTZU

Amazon and other online sellers have decimated some sectors of the retail industry in the past few years. For instance, employment at department stores has plunged by 250,000 (or 14%) since 2012. Employment at clothing and electronics stores is down sharply from the earlier peaks as more sales move online.

“Consumers’ affinity for digital shopping felt like it hit a tipping point in Holiday 2014 and has rapidly accelerated this year,” Ken Perkins, the president of Retail Metrics, wrote in a research note in December. And when he says “digital shopping,” he really means Amazon, which has increased its share of online purchases from about 10% five years ago to nearly 40% in the 2016 holiday season.

It’s only going to go higher, as Amazon aggressively targets other sectors such as groceries and even restaurants with delivery services for restaurant-prepared meals.

(For more background, read “Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities”)

At the end of 2016, the retail sector employed 16.5 million workers, and the restaurant industry employed another 11.4 million. Together, that’s nearly one out of every five workers in America, the same share of employment accounted for by the manufacturing sector in 1982.

Many of those jobs are threatened by Amazon’s incredible growth. But some are relatively safe: Most of the 11.4 million restaurant jobs are safe from online competition, for instance, because people still love going out to eat, and someone has to cook and wash the dishes. The 1.3 million working at car dealerships probably won’t be affected anytime soon, and neither will the 925,000 at gas stations, or the 1.1 million working at building materials stores. You won’t buy a new car, or a gallon of gas, or 50 sheets of drywall online.

However, about 12 million jobs in retail are facing increasing competition from Amazon, particularly the 6.2 million people who work in the kind of stores that are typically found at malls or shopping centers — furniture, appliance and electronics, clothing, sporting goods, bookstores, and general merchandise stores — what the statisticians call GAFO (General Merchandise, Apparel and Accessories, Furniture and Other Sales).

GAFO is the heart of what we think of as retail, and that’s where Amazon has revolutionized the market. After years of barely holding their own, sales at GAFO stores have stalled, falling $1.8 billion (or 0.6%) in the past year while the rest of retail was growing 4%.

Meanwhile, online sales jumped by $13.7 billion through the third quarter of 2016, with Amazon accounting for most of that. It is expected to overtake Macy’s as the country’s top retailer of apparel this year.

At current growth rates, Amazon would have annual revenue of $500 billion in five years. As traditional retailers close stores and dismiss workers, shopping at the mall will make less and less sense.

There’s not much retailers like Macy’s, The Gap (GPS) , Best Buy (BBY), and Barnes & Noble (BKS) can do about it. Their business will be much, much smaller. And now that Amazon is getting serious about groceries, even Wal-Mart (WMT) is threatened.

Although retailers have been laying off workers, they probably aren’t laying off enough, considering how quickly their sales are eroding. While sales fell 0.6% in 2016, employment at the GAFO stores increased by 1.6%, or about 95,000. You don’t make money by hiring more people to sell less.

So what’s the big deal? Won’t the people who once worked at Macy’s just work at Amazon instead? Well, no. Amazon needs about half as many workers to sell $100 worth of merchandise as Macy’s does. Macy’s has floor walkers, and saleswomen at the makeup counter to give personal attention, and cashiers, if you can find one.

By contrast, Amazon has “pickers” in warehouses who grab hundreds of items off the shelves every hour. Amazon just announced it would hire a lot more pickers this year as it opens more distribution centers. But even those jobs are threatened by Amazon.

That’s because Amazon is at the forefront of automating retail. More and more of the work in the warehouses will be done by robots, and Amazon contemplates deploying flying drones (robots) to deliver the packages to your door. Amazon’s concept for selling groceries includes almost no workers, because customers will check themselves out and robots will restock the shelves.

What’s most troubling to brick-and-mortar retailers and their workers is that Amazon’s sales growth is accelerating (19% in 2014, 20% in 2015 and 28% in 2016), and shows no sign of plateauing. Amazon isn’t just taking sales from brick-and-mortar stores; it’s also taking market share from traditional retailers’ online stores.

Amazon is also moving aggressively into warehousing and package delivery services, which combined employ 2 million workers, including 600,000 at the post office. How many of those jobs will Amazon’s drones take?

Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It’s quite likely. Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have estimated China’s manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 2 million jobs.

If Amazon can capture 40% of the GAFO market within five years (as seems likely), about 1.5 million jobs at brick-and-mortar stores could be lost. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses and delivery services, and the total would be well over 2 million.

And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town and hamlet in America.

Don’t worry, though. Economic theory says the displaced workers will find other jobs as the economy grows more productive. And Amazon will pay you a couple of bucks if you’ll use your own car to deliver packages to your neighbors.

And that last bit?!?!

[brucemacneill]

Not sure I understand it but Amazon has started opening brick and mortar stores.

[Deleted]

Corrupt media. Journalism as advocacy. Fake news. Progressive tears are delicious, however. Too bad they can't be used to power the country. We could end the reliance on fossil fuels overnight.

[theevan]

David Brooks expresses my take on Trump and my concern:
______

The very thing that made him right electorally for this moment will probably make him an incompetent president. He is the ultimate anti-institutional man, but the president sits at the nerve center of a routinized, regularized four-million-person institution. If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
__________

Something like Governor William J. Lepetomane of Blazing Saddles...

[theevan]

[Doug]

Jan 21, 2017 10:28:51 GMT -5 theevan said:

David Brooks expresses my take on Trump and my concern:
______

The very thing that made him right electorally for this moment will probably make him an incompetent president. He is the ultimate anti-institutional man, but the president sits at the nerve center of a routinized, regularized four-million-person institution. If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
__________

Something like Governor William J. Lepetomane of Blazing Saddles...

And this is a bad thing. 

[Deleted]

Jan 21, 2017 10:28:51 GMT -5 theevan said:

David Brooks expresses my take on Trump and my concern:
______
If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.
__________

I know most won't believe it, but the above describes the Reagan White House in some respects. The "whole system" didn't go haywire, but Reagan was not as strong a leader as folks were lead to believe. He hated conflict, and would leave things to his underlings to argue about. His poor decision making and scattershot approach to complex problems lead to 241 dead service members, mostly Marines, in Beirut. That's why we also got the mess that was Iran Contra.

Like I said, most won't believe that.

[theevan]

Jan 21, 2017 10:37:43 GMT -5 @pauls said:

Jan 21, 2017 10:28:51 GMT -5 theevan said:

David Brooks expresses my take on Trump and my concern:
______
If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.
__________

I know most won't believe it, but the above describes the Reagan White House in some respects. The "whole system" didn't go haywire, but Reagan was not as strong a leader as folks were lead to believe. He hated conflict, and would leave things to his underlings to argue about. His poor decision making and scattershot approach to complex problems lead to 241 dead service members, mostly Marines, in Beirut. That's why we also got the mess that was Iran Contra.

Like I said, most won't believe that.

Paul, what do you think of his response to the Beirut barracks attack. Which was, if I understand correctly, to withdraw from there? Seems like that "success" was the genesis of a lot that followed, including the mainstreaming of Hezbollah.

[RickW]

Excellent article. And the kind of person he is is exactly what led to civil rights movements, labor unions, environmentalism, all the things the left cherishes. Because nothing but victory matters, and it doesn't matter who gets crushed. That he has managed to mesh that with the beliefs of the right and get elected, is as likely to be temporary as it is to last. Amorality is going to be the lead story from the Whitehouse for the next four years. And I don't think that's what either party is about.

[Deleted]

Evan, the genesis of Hezbollah was the Iranian Revolution. Reagan didn't help by sending 1500 sacrificial lambs into a chaotic situation that we grossly misunderstood.

Consider that Eisenhower sent 15,000 soldiers and marines into Lebanon for six months in 1958 for what was still largely an internal conflict between the Maronites (Christians, just like the Mafia are...) and the Druze.

Reagan sent 1,500 into what was a much more complex crucible. By 1982, the PLO were in Lebanon. Syrians were in Lebanon. Iranians were in Lebanon. Israel had already invaded Lebanon once in 1976 to stop PLO attacks. Here we go traipsing in with 1500, partly because we thought the Soviets had designs in Lebanon, which they didn't. That's reductionist thinking gone nuts, coupled with a distinct lack of understanding of local issues, but sadly par for the course up to 2017.

Who owns Hezbollah?

The Arab league, for dumping the PLO on Lebanon after Jordan kicked them out in 1970. Don't blame Jordan. The PLO tried to overthrow the Jordanian government.

The Iranians, who wanted to "go back to their roots." When the Safavids converted to Shi'ism in the 16th century, they brought clerics from Lebanon to Qom to get it all started.

The PLO, for kicking the crap out of Lebanese Shia in the south of Lebanon since 1970.

The Israelis for stealing Palestinian property in the first 1/2 of the 20th century, then using convenient twists of logic (well they left their land in 1948 when the war was on, so they must have been in cahoots with our enemies. QED - we own your property now.) At best, turning a blind eye or at worst, shooting illumination over Sabra and Shatilla while the Maronites (Christians, just like the Mafia are...) massacred Palestinian refugees didn't hurt Hezbollah recruiting either, even though the PLO are mostly Suni.

The Syrians, for continuously meddling in what they at that time still considered part of their country.

The Maronite and Druze Lebanese - never nice to each other but surely never nice to the Shia minority in Lebanon.

Reagan was at the back end of all of this, and dumb enough to actually think some western solution would work there. He never would've had to react to a Barracks bombing had we either stayed out completely, or sent two divisions in to squat on the entire pressure cooker.

[Deleted]

Three times to go back and make corrections. Damn, but I need new glasses. ::sighs::

[theevan]

It was worth it. Thanks.

[RickW]

And you can also throw in the continuing drought that has made much country that supported people barren wasteland. So along with all the sectarian violence and refugees from said violence, you're getting refugees from drought. Everyone trying to survive, and not trusting anyone who is "different", not caring who they are, they are not moving onto my remaining patch of dry land that is barely supporting me and mine.

[Deleted]

I should also include the Egyptians and their allies for brokering the Cairo Agreement in 1969 between the Lebanese Government (Charles Helou, the Maronite president) and the PLO which established PLO refugee camps in Lebanon but also gave the PLO "permission" to attack Israel from southern Lebanon. I think the Lebanese saw how much trouble the PLO were causing in Jordan, and this was an attempt to buy the PLO off.

It didn't work, and the PLO became a huge thorn in the side of the Maronites. Proving you can live in the Middle East and still get it wrong, part of the deal Israel had in '82 when they invaded Lebanon was that the IDF would clear the PLO out of southern Lebanon and the Maronite Phalange would clear Arafat himself and his followers out of Beirut proper.

No sooner did the IDF come into Lebanon than Gemayel gave the spread handed, "Heeeeey I can't fight for an invading Army. I gotta live here!" Boy, did Begin feel silly.

Like I said, nothing but sorrow in the Middle East.

[aquaduct]

Jan 21, 2017 10:28:51 GMT -5 theevan said:

David Brooks expresses my take on Trump and my concern:
______

The very thing that made him right electorally for this moment will probably make him an incompetent president. He is the ultimate anti-institutional man, but the president sits at the nerve center of a routinized, regularized four-million-person institution. If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
__________

Something like Governor William J. Lepetomane of Blazing Saddles...

Maybe it's because I'm the only one here with experience working with and in the actual bureaucracy in Washington, but I see things much differently. DC exists in an empty intellectual bubble born of a complete absence of practical experience with anything they oversee. They debate "policy" in the absence of any understanding of how the world actually works.

Trump is a change agent. He's not beholden to any effemeral ideology right or left. He's challenging definitions of "the way things have always been" and to great success. His cabinet is built from outsiders who have dealt with the nonsense that rolls downhill from the Hill. The standard defenses of the status quo are completely upended.

For instance to Paul's concern, who exactly determined that it's critical that there is civilian control of the military? How's that worked out since Marshall? Now that Mattis is in charge, might it be a benefit that there's someone in the top spot that understands what it means to either go in to win or stay the hell home?

I'm really quite hopeful. Being in the game as much as I've been, I see where it's going. And while the ninnies whine, he's completely outflanked them. Things will actually get done rather than simply being debated into the ground.

Rock on Mr. President. Rock on.

[jdd2]

One thing I read about Mattis that I liked, was that that he would persistently ask (and presumably think) about third and fourth order effects of a given military action or operation.

Quite different than the "mad dog" image.

[jdd2]

And I especially sympathize with this part of the OP:

In some ways, I’m more afraid of the amoral vision the Donald considers a selling point than I am of the determinedly bad guys. To live without judgments, with no right or wrong, just winning and losing, may sound like existential freedom, but it isn’t far from the condition of lesser animals who simply exist in order to exist.

[patrick]

Jan 22, 2017 1:23:25 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

Maybe it's because I'm the only one here with experience working with and in the actual bureaucracy in Washington, but I see things much differently. DC exists in an empty intellectual bubble born of a complete absence of practical experience with anything they oversee. They debate "policy" in the absence of any understanding of how the world actually works.

I beg to differ on every one of these points, especially the first.