Suppose David Brooks knew how to think
There’s also the revolting cynicism of David Brooks’s saying hey why didn’t “Trump opponents” – i.e. Representatives who think he should not be committing crimes – just concentrate on fixing the potholes instead of doing their constitutional duty to prevent the president from abusing his power to extort political favors from vulnerable allies. Gee, I don’t know, maybe it’s because they really do actually think that a president should not be abusing his power to extort political favors from vulnerable allies. I kind of hope they do, if you want to know the truth.
I kind of think Brooks ought to.
Why did the Times hire him, again? I never can remember.
Why all the fuss about a bit of “light treason.” ?
Think outside the square. From a global, or preferably a whole-solar-system perspective, there can be no such thing as ‘treason.’ And did Trump’s defence team even mention that? No.
;-)
Seriously, potholes? Surely Brooks realizes that Congress doesn’t deal with potholes? Those are local government functions. My city council can take care of the potholes in my town even while Congress deals with the issue of criminals in the White House.
Tut-tutting and finger-wagging for Democrat actions… anything for the Republicans who just acquitted Trump in the senate?
This is one of the reasons I think it is unhealthy how Americans don’t have much of an interest in foreign politics.
Okay so there is a lot to learn from African politics when it comes to corrupt leadership. One of the major things is that corruption is a cost multiplier that is very difficult to get rid of.
So lets look at Jacob Zuma. Zuma was not the worst president South Africa’s had since 1994, he was second to Thabo Mbeki. The only reason why I say this is that average life expectancy rose under Zuma, and we lost about a decade under Mbeki.
At lot of what has enabled the ANC’s failures of governance has to do with the fact that our opposition parties have historically been window dressing. Under Apartheid the National Party ruled the roost since 1949 to 1994, since 1994 the ANC has been the ruling party.
In a political situation where whoever is in power can more or less guarantee that their party will remain in power in perpetuity there isn’t really much reason for that party to govern particularly well. Thus in 1994 the ANC was a pretty good government, but by the end of Mbeki’s reign of error our healthcare system collapsed and our chief of police was shown to be best buddies with the head of our mafia.
Then by the end of Zuma’s reign, every single SOE was shown to have been captured, and being used to launder money that was being nicked from state funds. And the ANC still won reelection, in part because the opposition either fractured or was shown to not be all that much better.
Donald Trump is a combination of the worst elements of Zuma and Mbeki. His science denialism means that America’s environment is being degraded, and you’re seeing dropping life expectancy as a result. If you dump coal waste into your streams, where are you getting your drinking water?
At the same time he is massively corrupt, and you see this with the Ukraine situation. Trump is using American aid as a bribe in order to get foreign countries to investigate his political rivals. While being a politician should never equal being above the law, investigations on the basis of “Well that guy’s my political opponent” are a threat to democracy and thus a threat to one of the primary motivators political leaders have to perform.
What happens when a government rules virtually unopposed? Well look at South Africa. South Africa spends more on education than other African country, yet our outcomes are worse than a lot of the others and we have schools that still operate on the bucket system. That is actually dangerous, every now and then we get articles about children drowning in cesspits because the floors collapsed.
This is why I didn’t particularly object when Trump talked about “shithole countries” – it is a bit difficult to do that when we have children drowning in literal shitholes.
How can this be? Well, our political leaders swiped the money that was supposed to go into maintaining those schools and upgrading them to having plumbed toilets, and used it to buy political favour within the party. According to the New York Times, this is exactly what our current deputy president did when he was in charge of Mpumalanga.
Because there is no real risk to the ruling party that they could end up not ruling anymore, they have little incentive to put a stop to practices like this.
An infrastructure bill in such a situation just means a situation where that infrastructure is put on hold until the bribes are in place. Instead of dealing with small yet vital projects, government focuses on big contracts because that is where the big bribes are.
In South Africa one of our major economic bottlenecks is our power supply. Eskom for four years didn’t maintain its plant and machinery. Its staffing has dramatically increased, but power output hasn’t – because if you don’t maintain a power plant it breaks down, and you have to send out engineers on an emergency basis. These engineers aren’t cheap.
And because this isn’t a new problem for South Africa, we did in fact invest in new power plants. The tenders for those power plants were inflated, the plants were delivered late, overrunning their deadlines and expanding costs, and they keep breaking down because a lot of corners were cut in their construction. They’re actually less reliable than the plants we’ve got which haven’t been maintained and are nearing the end of their lifespans.
To add insult to injury Eskom has on an annual basis gotten government waivers on its environmental standards. As a result Emalahleni has some of the dirtiest air in the world. How could this all happen? We have over 29% unemployment and the ruling party is still the ruling party. If the ruling party has no fear of losing power, it has no incentive beyond personal interest to deliver.
Trump is a thoroughly corrupt individual, more he represents a network of corruption through the Republican Party, much the same way Zuma represented a network of corruption through the ANC. You can see this by how the Senate hasn’t held Trump accountable, anymore than the ANC parliament held Zuma accountable (At least up until it became clear they might actually lose an election due to Zuma).
This network over time will reach through the administration of every department of government, meaning if you pass an infrastructure bill while the president is such a blatant crook that he is using state funds to bribe foreign governments into investigating his opponents, you’re just throwing your money away.
You’re going to end up with a situation where you spend billions when you should be spending millions, and the end result still doesn’t work.