Don't read Adam Tooze

This is an extended version of my Goodreads review of his new book "Shutdown," along with an essay of his I found at Noema Magazine about how China dodged the early post-USSR Russian implosion.

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Problematic and troubling technocratic narrative

The "problematic and troubling" is NOT about the material in the narrative. It's not about "all shall bow before Xi Jinping." Rather, the narrative itself (including Tooze's take on China and COVID) is what's problematic and troubling. And, like British new leftist Perry Anderson's take on Tooze's "Crashed," I speak from several degrees to his left, albeit here in America, not the UK. But, I'm not close to a Trumpist, contra other low reviewers.

A deeply problematic book.

By page 11, Tooze is describing Dems’ Green New Deal as though it were pristine and unsullied, rather than a watered-down ripoff of the Green Party’s original. If a centrist mag like Atlantic or a left-center (but moving a bit more left) site like TNR (can’t remember which one) could report this, why can’t Tooze have it?

Especially since he doubles down on this story. And does so mulitiple times.

Probably because it would spoil his narrative.

The narrative? With a plasticine definition of “neoliberalism,” the main narrative by page 30 seems to be that neoliberalism can stretch to fit anything, just as much as his definition of it. The ergo that comes from that is that, if neoliberalism got anything wrong before, a better version of it will fix things in the future.

Also by page 30, he downplays the more baleful parts of neoliberalism in the west (inequality gap grows) and globally (increased climate change by carbon and other pollution being exported to places with less regulation and increased exploitation of workers, especially minorities like China’s Uyghurs).

In other words, we’ve got a book written by a technocratic neoliberal celebrating the “pragmatic” work of most central banks and using that pragmatism to underpin his plasticine.

Other problems, some bigger, arise after that.

The first and foremost is Tooze’s assumption that China controlled COVID as well as it claimed it controlled it. Even before he makes this claim / accepts this assertion, he’s undercut it by talking about Chinese restrictions on COVID-related information leaving the country. (As I write up this review, per Worldometers, China claims less than 5K COVID deaths, a number that’s laughable. It reports fewer total cases than Rwanda, also laughable.) We also have good evidence that larger nations of East Asia, like Vietnam, haven’t controlled COVID as well as they have claimed, or as their reflexively anti-American parroters in the West have claimed. Then, there’s the related vaccine issue. China’s is worse than anything developed in the West. And, the most Westernized Asian nation, Japan, was a flop on distributing Western vaccines.

In the last full chapter of the book, Tooze really jumps the shark, with his claims about efficaciousness of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Sinopharm has much less study than Western vaccines. Plenty of news stories note this. They also note that inactivated virus vaccines may have less potency than mRNA or adenovirus jabs. Tooze ignores all of this. He also ignores that China had reported only relatively limited clinical trial data.

Sputnik V? Production problems. It’s why WHO never approved it. And, its clinical trial data was so bad to leave open the question of data manipulation.

Also ignored.

Now, more details on some of this only came out after Tooze's book, but some of this information was out there last year, or at the start of this. And, if he didn't have a chance to know of this, he shouldn't have made the claims he did. (Amazon has a pub date of Sept. 7, 2021, to be precise, so that largely removes even that excuse.)

And, on this, with me already seeing this as a three-star book, it fell to two stars.

There was one final failure in the conclusion. Tooze talks about the “huge East-West gradient” in dealing with COVID. Of course, he bases this on accepting Chinese data, or lack if it, at face value, and ditto for Vietnam and some other nations. At the same time, he ignores the clusterfuck response of one major East Asian nation, Japan. He also ignores that at least one “Western” nation, New Zealand, did generally quite well.

Beyond all of this, some of his tangents, like Middle Eastern rivalries becoming more exacerbates, aren’t really even tangentially connected to COVID.

If this is a “grand narrative,” which he calls it, then it’s a dime-novel version of one.

And, at that point, before getting to the conclusion of my original review, I want to talke about his Noema piece. It ties with his intellectual dishonesty about China expressed repeatedly throughout "Shutdown." I call it intellectual dishonesty because a professor at Columbia who writes for international public and foreign policy magazines knows the truth about China issues (and should know the truth about things like the Green New Deal).

The piece is all about how China, in the late 1980s, avoided Russia's implosion at the end of the USSR and start of the new Russian Federation. And, yes, China may have had good leadership and smart economists, but the amount of difference in their situations, HUGE differences, is all omitted by Tooze.

First, China was a member of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank since 1980, when the membership it had since 1945 was stripped from the Republic of China and given to the People's Republic. Remember that James Earl Carter, arguably our first neoliberal president, was in the White House then and not St. Ronald of Reagan. Russia didn't get membership in either organzation until 1992.

Ditto on most-favored-nation status. Russia didn't get that until 1992, either. And, in all three cases, US strings were attached that weren't for China. Again, Tooze knows all this. And, given that Noema started out of a partnership with the WaPost and Puff Hoes, the turd-polishing of China, and the shin-kicking of Russia, shouldn't be surprising. Bipartisan foreign policy establishmentarian par for the course. I don't recognize all the names on the editorial board, but I see enough. Walter Isaacson, writer of crappy modern history books and bios and Aspen Institute "guru"; Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn; Fareed Zakaria of Beltway media; Pico Iyer; and Puff Hoes founder Arianna Huffington. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times etc.

And with that, I not only recommend against reading this book, but as with select other authors, I recommend against reading Tooze in the future, period. His lack of engagement with COVID facts, especially vis-a-vis Beijing, is troubling.

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#FeelTheBern got burned in an F-35 afterburner at the #GOPDebate by John Kasich

The Swiss Army Knife clusterfuck

The former Ohio gov has a thing about the Swiss knife clusterfuck airplane. He, unlike the rest of the GOP presidential field, knows that's what it is, and isn't afraid to call it that, as he did last night, more politely, at the GOP presidential debate.

Kasich is surely in part just doing what he can to separate himself from the rest of the GOP playing field, along with his Compassionate Conservativism 2.0 playbook

The fact is, though, that Kasich is right: The plane sucks, as anybody who's honest about it and will talk about it knows.

Which led me to Tweet

@PDiddie Did @JohnKasich ask @BernieSanders if it was OK to oppose the F-35? #FeelTheBernGetBurned

— SocraticDiogenes (@SocraticGadfly) February 26, 2016

For your info, Sandernistas, Bernie loves him some F-35s as part of military Keynesianism for Vermont. (Just like he's not a corporate socialist until it comes to dairy price supports in a Big Ag bill.)

Again, the fact is, Kasich is right: The plane sucks, as anybody who's honest about it knows. You know what else? Military Keynesianism also sucks.

But, ever since he graduated from Burlington Mayor to the House of Representatives, Sanders has become more and more a part of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. That's why this piece in The Nation, about a possible Sanders foreign policy, is more aspirational than real, about what some people think Sanders should do, rather than what he would do.

Sanders had his clear chance at the Milwaukee debate to say he'd cut defense spending, for example, and whiffed.

So, let's be honest, and not project our own foreign policy desires onto an inadequate vessel.

Of course, if Bernie likes lusting after potentially crappy planes for military Keynesianism, there's a planned new bomber Boeing just unveiled.

Brian Schweiter — great but flawed #Hillary opponent?

Brian Schweitzer: Can he overcome his guns & greens flaws?
Getty Images photo via Slate

In the face of the potential landslide 2016 Democratic presidential nomination of the yet-unannounced Hillary Clinton, two potential opponents have been mentioned — financial populist Elizabeth Warren, now Massachusetts' junior U.S. Senator, and Brian Schweitzer, mountain West populist former Montana governor.

While I don't agree with Schweitzer on everything, or am even close to agreement in some areas, this Slate interview points out why I hope he runs and why, if I don't need to vote in a contested Green primary, I would consider pulling his lever in a Democratic primary.  

But, please note what I said. Consider, but not guarantee. While he's got a lot of positives, he's got some definite, and large, negatives, which I note later on in this piece.

He's definitely not going to be inside the bipartisan foreign policy box. That's the biggest plus.

First, he knows, and admits the truth of, why Iran dislikes and distrusts us — the anti-Mossadegh coup:

So we’ve had a bad history with Iran because of what we did in 1953, replacing an elected official with a dictator. 

Bingo.

And, he background that with his knowledge of the Middle East, having lived there and being a good Arabic speaker:

The Iranian deal makes sense. We linked up with the Saudis before and after World War II. Look, unlike virtually every member of Congress, I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of the Middle East. The day after I got out of graduate school, after I defended my thesis, I went straight to Libya. I was there for a year; I was in Saudi Arabia for seven. I learned to speak Arabic. I can explain to you, in a way that almost no one else in the country can, the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. I can explain to you who and what the Wahhabis are in Saudi Arabia. I can talk to you about why we, the United States, initially got involved with the Saudi royal family, what we got out of the deal. I can explain to you why we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We knew, because we supplied chemical weapons to him so he could poison the Iranians. The Iranians are Persian, not Arab; they haven’t got along for several thousand years.

Hillary Clinton just isn't going to tell us that. And, as of now, I have no idea of Elizabeth Warren's stance on foreign policy issues.

Schweitzer goes on to criticize our still being in Iraq, bluntly saying the Taliban is in the Stone Age and of no threat to us.

That leads to the next issue.

He's not inside the bipartisan snooping policy box, either:

If Edward Snowden is a criminal, then so are a lot of people that are working within the CIA and the NSA who have been spying illegally on American citizens. They ought to grant Snowden clemency.

No way Hillary Clinton is saying that.

Meanwhile, he admits Obamacare isn't working well, probably won't work well, and says why: payoffs to lobbying groups, including those tied to former Montana Senator Max Baucus. That said, he says that he can make it work, as well as diagnosing those problems:

I will give you not just how this thing should have been written, but what it will get to be, because what we have right now will not work. No. 1: You pass national health insurance laws that say you can’t discriminate against women, charge them higher premiums than men of the same age, you can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, you can’t have annual caps. Then you allow insurance companies to compete wherever they want, in any state. Boom. The second thing is, you say to every citizen in the United States, now you have the option to buy into Medicare.

We just need to act like capitalists, not socialists. We need to negotiate to buy medicine. Now, what’s interesting is that the detractors hear that and say—this is like socialized medicine. No! Are you kidding me? France, the United Kingdom: They negotiate like capitalists to buy their medicine. The United States? We say to the pharmaceutical companies, how much would you like this for? We continue to pay them three times what they sell the same medicines for all over the world. Right after the bill was passed, big pharma was running ads for all the Democrats who voted for this thing. Even in Montana. What’d they get out of it? They now have a lot more money.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Keep the insurance coverage guarantees of Obamacare, do actual negotiations for drug prices, and make "Medicare for all" an option, at least.

As to why we got where we are on Obamacare, he's blunt about Dear Leader himself, too:

He’s not unlike Woodrow Wilson, who was the last really big Democratic corporatist.

Ouch. That said, he does have a somewhat more nuanced overall assessment:

In part what a president is able to do is elevate, through rhetoric, issues that need to be elevated. I’d give him an A in that area. His ability to communicate, to deliver the message about the values that set us aside as Americans, is very good. I just don’t think his administration has been very good at doing things, about organizing things. It’s not just about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. As governor I had four years to work with the Bush administration and four years to work with the Obama administration, and they’re just not good at getting things done.

I think he's far from alone in the "competency" assessment, a think that Obamiacs who admit their man is a neoliberal still fight tooth and claw. The "competency" issue is, as some conservatives note, at the heart of liberal governance. Because neolibs want to surrender more of that to the private sector, "competency" is even more important for the slice of governance it wants kept in the public sector.

Also, the Wilson comparison quote shows he's a definite student of history in general. And, that he wouldn't be part of the bipartisan economic policy establishment, either.

That said, is Brian Schweitzer perfect, or nearly so, as a presidential candidate?

Probably not.

The main disagreement I have with him? He's a squish on environmentalism. When he was governor, he wanted to start a massive coal gasification program with eastern Montana's coal. First, that takes a lot of water — water that eastern Montana doesn't have. Second, it's air polluting. Third, the waste rock detritus is ground polluting. Fourth, it's carbon intensive. I don't know if he's ever apologized for that or not, but it would make me leery.  (And, while he may hoo-haw for Montana hunters, Montana farmers like the Jon Tester he semi-derides wouldn't like those water shortages, either.)

And, this isn't the only area where he's problematic, or worse, on environmental issues. He has advocated breaking federal law, namely the Endangered Species Act. Considering that elected officials are all supposed to swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States, he arguably broke his gubernatorial oath of office.

Even more leery? In his gubernatorial re-election run, especially, he touted his NRA membership and affinity. Now, the NRA of pre-Obama days wasn't quite as nutbar as today's, but it was already nutbar enough that this was after the time that Poppy Bush had resigned his membership. I'd specifically want his take on the need (or lack, he might say, for what I know) of additional gun control laws, and actual stricter enforcement of current ones (not just the NRA lip service mantra) post Newtown.

In short, his greens and guns stances leave me thinking that, overall, he might be an upgraded version of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. I mean, the skeet shooting trick is about exactly like what Manchin did.

Hence, I said consider, but not guarantee, on voting for him in a Democratic primary. And, while he'd be a breath of fresh air, unless he changes his position on guns and green issues, I'd still vote capital-G Green in the general election if Schweitzer somehow got the Democratic nod.

Two bankrupt candidates, lying about bankruptcy

Well, Mitt Romney was right about one thing in tonight’s debate ­— both he and Barack Obama falsely believe (or at least profess to falsely believe) Social Secuirty is going bankrupt. Hence’s Romney’s desire to privatize it, and Obama’s Catfood Commission.

It was at that point, after about half an hour of tuning in, that I decided it was high time to tune out again and turn off the TV.

In “chess match” terms, Obama didn’t wax the floor with Romney, from what I saw, unlike Biden with Ryan. But, he did seem ahead on points, to use boxing analogies, while counterpunching a bit better than Romney and throwing his own jabs, too.

Sometime later this week, I’ll probably do a more in-depth post on one Democrat/Obamiac cherished anti-Green, etc., talking point — the appointment of Supreme Court justices — and myth vs. reality here.

There is NO shortage of #STEM students

It's become a meme, especially in the not-so-hallowed halls of Congress, that the U.S. faces a growing brain drain in domestic Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM students. The "answer," from our business-friendly leaders of BOTH major parties, is to .... give more visas to international people.

Reality? This is business as usual by business as usual (along with academia becoming more and more business as usual):

Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas. 

Note that I mentioned this is bipartisan evidence-distorting. The story cites Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) as one of the people leading the charge on this issue.

Solution? One commenter to the story has it at least somewhat right: Unionization.

Muddled thinking on financial inequality

Recent polls continue to show that Americans have not ambivalent, but instead, ultimately uninformed, unreflective, self-misinformed, even brainwashed attitudes about financial equality.

Polls continue to show that Americans want more equality of economic opportunity, but that the majority doesn’t worry about income inequality per se.

Usually, I’m not harsh in this blog, but there’s only one word for people who want more equality of opportunity but aren’t worried about growing income inequality.

DUMBASSES!

I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it.

Decreased equality of opportunity is part of HOW the rich increase income inequality.

And, if you don’t stop brainwashing yourself with various myths of American exceptionalism, including the myth of how much social mobility there is in the U.S., you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Because it's simply not true, and again, it's not true in part due to deliberate actions of the rich, their lobbyists and their pawns on Capitol Hill and in the White House. (Name me one concrete proposal of Obama or Bill Clinton, not just either Bush or Reagan, to address growing income inequality. The pawns are on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in both parties.)

On economic mobility issues, the American public is so willfully stupid.

And, the older, white tea party types who fear the increasing numbers of black and brown faces should instead look at the white CEOs who are showing ever-fewer qualms about practicing age discrimination. That, too, is part of growing income inequality. And because blacks/browns are more numerous in younger population, it looks like "they" are taking your job; no, it's just because they're young.

SOTU: Comatose or unstable?

From a domestic perspective, and a political spinelessness perspective, Frank Rich offers up "comatose."

From the reactions of foreigners, Tom Friedman weighs in with "unstable."

They're both right, overall.

That said, I disagree with Rich that Obama did not enter into Clinton-like bite-sized programs. As I blogged last week, the way he parceled out light rail money certainly looks that way, and looks like it has a political angle to it, too. (It seems Rich is indulging in a bit of long-past Clinton-bashing through the judo of Obama-boosting.)

Friedman errs in thinking anybody from the GOP wants to be non-obstructionist. He salutes Lindsey Graham and Judd Gregg by name AFTER every Republican senator voted against reinstating pay-go legislation. (Friedman's Washington political world is apparently "flat," too.)

Both Rich and Friedman are worth a read. Just don't get into the fine print too much.

Your fat-cat Congressman ...

Might just be a Democrat, Roll Call notes. Yet another reason why financial "reform" probably won't be.

The ‘brilliance’ of Foreign Policy mag

If, in a survey of its “FP 100,” allegedly today’s version of “the best and brightest”, 20 percent can call “the economy” the top underreported story of the year, why the hell should we trust people like this on situations like Afghanistan?

The worst recession in at least nearly 30 years, if not since the Great Depression, a recession that, perhaps with too much euphemism, got the media moniker “The Great Recession,” is underreported?

The economic crack-up WAS bipartisan

In vetting the claims in President Obama’s State of the Union address, the Washington Post takes him to the fact-checking woodshed on a couple of issues.

One of them was his subtle, or not-so-subtle dig at the GOP, attempting to lay all the blame for the current economic situation at its feet.

Guess B.O. didn’t want to throw the name of his own “economic czar,” Larry Summers, into that mix now, did he?

The Larry Summers who, as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, pushed so hard for financial dereg in general? Or the folks like Sen.-Banking, Chris Dodd, or Sen-MBNA, now Veep-Stanford Investments, Joe Biden, who were okey-dokey with loosening the reins of federal regulatory oversight, right?

I’ve said in the past and will say again, my rule-of-thumb blame-assigning on this issue is 2/3 Republican, 1/3 Democratic.

More on Obama’s non-SOTU State of the Union speech

B grade overall; less than that on content

Sorry to Mike Madden as well as Josh Marshall and others. It’s always been called SOTU for previous first-year presidents.

Weirdly, the Dallas Morning News Sunday weekly TV insert called it SOTU, but its daily prime-time programming list on Tuesday didn’t.

That said, from what I’ve read about it (I was at a Joan Baez concert!), and my overall impressions of Obama already, I’d give it a straight B. Better than that on delivery, a bit lower on content.

I don’t believe his claims that his proposed housing bailout bill will distinguish “underwater” honest buyers from spec buyers, because it has no mechanism to do that! (And, I’m far from the only person to point that out.)

Nor, given his administration’s ambiguous-at-best, temporizing-at-worse stance on Guantanamo- and rendition-related issues, do I believe his “We don’t torture” claim.

Why did that get so much GOP applause, anyway? Does the Congressional GOP have a sense Obama will strongly oppose the Leahy-Conyers “truth and reconciliation” drive? Will he try to eviscerate such a bill in Congress? Will he have AG Holder ignore it if passed? Would he even dare veto such a bill?

Beyond that, Obama’s subtle, or not-so-subtle, attempt at GOP-only blame-casting for the financial excesses of this decade gets taken to the fact-checking woodshed by the Washington Post.

Guess B.O. didn’t want to throw the name of his own “economic czar,” Larry Summers, into that mix now, did he?