China brokers deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia

The Eurasia Group's  Ian Bremmer provides a quick, multi-perspectival take on the recent peace deal between the Middle East's biggest rivals-- Iran and Saudi Arabia. Is it for real? What are the implications for the US, China, the Saudis, and Iran? How might it affect efforts at negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, given China's recent 12 point "peace plan" proposal? If the US is "against" all autocracies, what role do we have left in a MENA (i.e. mid east and northern Aftica) where democracies are all but extinct (with Israel hanging on by a thread as Netanyahu does his best to extinguish it there)? These and other questions are cursorily touched on in this 10 minute update by Bremmer. Might the Chinese, even if their own plan is rejected, change the tone of global discourse on the War in such a way as to make talk of sanctions and prolonged fighting, with attendant risks of escalation less palatable?  Are we seeing a "game-change" in MENA as Bremmer suggest, or just a tempest in a teapot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YpDYF-M2Fo&list=TLPQMTUwMzIwMjMph2hK17YBvw&index=2

The Truth Is Out There — Fox Viewers Don’t Care

 

Republican voters, especially those who get their “news” exclusively from conservative outlets, may be unique in history. While there have always been demagogues who have lied to their constituents — and in many cases used mass media to do so — what sets modern conservatives apart is that they quite clearly want to be lied to.

Never before has so much information been available to so many but used so little.

More:

https://whowhatwhy.org/cartoon/the-truth-is-out-there-fox-viewers-dont-care/

Conclusion:

None of that matters, though, to an audience of tens of millions conditioned to only accept as fact what conveniently fits into their belief that they, and their country, are exceptional.

At least they are right about that part. They are exceptionally prone to being lied to, and they are exceptionally ignorant. 

Bits about the Silicon Valley Bank failure

Among some other things, the failure of SVB is a great example of how modern politics and radical right propaganda works. The radical right spin monster is already lying through it’s teeth. The behaviors and moral rot of brass knuckles capitalists and corrupted politicians are crystal clear and undeniable. And, the corrupt nature of Republican Party brass knuckles capitalism and Democratic Party neoliberalism are also clear. Political power was no on the side of the public interest. It was on the side of unbounded greed and personal ambition driven by cynical moral rot and ideological fantasies.

The truth

The truth is needed for context. Some key points are these:

Runs on banks in the 1930s led to the creation of federal regulations and a regulatory agency, the FDIC.

Banks and Wall Street bitterly hated bank and financial regulations, attacking them as destructive, unnecessary, socialist and whatever other slander or stupid fantasy they thought would resonate with the public and idiot, incompetent and/or corrupt/cynical politicians and presidents.

Deregulation of banks and the financial sector led to the massive bank, financial and housing catastrophe of 2008-2009. Millions of people were seriously damaged, but 100% of criminal elites were untouched.

Democratic and Republican politicians bailed out some customers, but also investors in the face of the 2008 catastrophe. The regulatory system was never designed to bail investors out. It was there to protect depositors, not risk-taking investors.

New regulations to prevent bank failures due to runs on banks by panicked depositors passed in 2010 over vehement Republican opposition.

The banks lobbied relentlessly against the new regulations. Once the Republicans were back in power, they relaxed the regulations in 2018 by exempting mid-sized banks (up to $250 billion in assets) like SVB from the depositor-protecting regulations. Those banks were freed to take a lot more risk. Added risk increased profits, which led to huge payouts to bank executives. 

People like Elizabeth Warren warned that the dropped regulations would lead to bank failures due to runs on banks. Warren was 100% correct in her analysis. Greedy bankers took risks that regulations could have avoided and that led SVB to fail. The fiasco was aided by a the anti-regulation Federal Reserve under the brass knuckles capitalist Jerome Powell. Under Powell, the fed has been fully captured and neutered by banks and Wall Street, making regulations impossible or as weak as possible.

SVB failed because it had held too much asset in the form of low interest rate bonds, not because it was woke. When the fed started raising interest rates, those bonds had to be sold at a loss if there was a run on deposits. There was a run on deposits, $42 billion on one day, which caused SVB to collapse. 

A few hours before bank regulators took over SVB, the executives paid themselves one last big bonus for a job well done for themselves. Those morally rotted executives had no concern whatever about pain and damage their failure caused to depositors. That problem was no longer their problem once the regulators closed the bank down.  

This is a story about the essence and soul of unregulated brass knuckles capitalism and incompetent politicians who are corrupt, ruthlessly cynical and/or idiotically ideologically deluded into a belief that unregulated capitalism is best for everyone.

The radical right spins its poison lies and slanders

It seem fit to point out that the radical right propaganda Leviathan and the shameless jaw-dropping lies and slanders it routinely poisons American society with. Business Insider writes:

• Some Republicans blamed “woke” investment strategies for Silicon Valley Bank's downfall.

• The GOP has increasingly portrayed itself as against “wokeism” in all aspects even when the definition is unclear.

Conservatives are blasting their new boogeyman of wokeism after the second-largest bank collapse in US history, eschewing the more straightforward story of problematic balance sheets in favor of raw politics.

“SVB = too woke to fail,” Senator Josh Hawley tweeted (R-MO) on Monday.

To Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the culprit was “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The bank website says it was building a global workforce celebrating “greater dimensions of diversity.”

“This bank, they're so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff, I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis said on Fox News' “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Rep. Jim Comer, head of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, blasted "Democrat inflation" and called Silicon Valley Bank “one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing,” a reference to environmental, social, and governance policies. 

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, himself a former presidential candidate, announced last week that he’s penning a new book titled “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.”

That bullshit speaks for itself. SVB clearly failed due to the wrong assets on its balance sheet, not wokeism. The radical right blames wokeism and the left for its own failed policy choices. This is standard radical right authoritarian propaganda. 

Other commentary

The Financial Times writes:

It may stick in some throats that the US and UK financial authorities have had to engineer an emergency rescue for an institution, and an industry, that is so fond of railing against government intervention and lobbying against stricter regulatory oversight. 

The SVB fiasco also shines an unforgiving spotlight on the hypocrisy of some of the biggest venture capital players on both sides of the Atlantic, who privately urged their portfolio companies to pull their money from the bank and then later publicly called for government support. SVB collapsed on Friday as a result of a classic bank run after customers withdrew $42bn of deposits.

Well as we all know, hypocrisy does not faze the radical right or its brass knuckles capitalist supporters. Money is the only thing that counts. Democracy, truth and civil liberties can all go to hell as far as the radical right is concerned. 

Slate comments:

As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.

By now, it is relatively clear what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. A pandemic bull run inflated the value of tech startups and the funds of investors, resulting in a tripling of deposits at the regional bank that specializes in the industry’s fledgling companies, from $62 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021. SVB wanted to put that money to work, so it bought up U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds that would take years to mature but serve as a relatively safe place to park its cash—as long as interest rates didn’t rise. They did rise, however, multiple times.

Again the point is clear. Brass knuckles capitalists hate regulation. But when lack of regulation leads to a preventable disaster caused by unregulated greed, hypocrite capitalists scream to be bailed out by the government they hate so much. 

By now, it should be clear to everyone that brass knuckles capitalism is all about deregulated risk-taking and demands for bailouts when unregulated greed causes trouble. Capitalist dogma is clear and simple: Maximize wealth accumulation by privatizing and concentrating profits with the elites, but socializing risk and damage to the masses, the government and/or the environment, i.e., anyone or anything but lying, corrupt, hypocrite capitalist elites.

The NYT comments on the ongoing fallout: “Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks.”

News bit: Radical right legal tactics update

CONTEXT

Textualism is the ruse that the radical right says it often uses to analyze laws passed by congress and legislatures. Originalism is the ruse that American radical right authoritarians sometimes use to interpret the Constitution. Originalism is interpretation of a written constitution or law allegedly based on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be. Experts constantly point out that finding original intent is impossible because both the drafters of the constitution and average people were deeply divided. 

Originalism sells itself as a way of constraining judges. But it’s more often a way of unleashing their partisan impulses and party loyalty. Originalism is related to textualism, which focuses mostly on the words instead of intent. The radical right relies on either alone or in combination to arrive at partisan decisions. 

The major questions doctrine holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The Supreme Court justifies this limitation with the non-delegation doctrine. The nondelegation doctrine seeks to distinguish the constitutional delegations of power to other branches of government that may be necessary for governmental coordination from unconstitutional grants of legislative power that may violate separation of powers principles. The radical right is leveraging the major questions doctrine to get outcomes that the controlling political dogmas demand.

Hypocrisy in legal reasoning

A Washington Monthly article discusses the unprincipled nature of legal reasoning by radical right authoritarian ideologue judges. This point has been raised by a number of legal experts who pay close attention to the state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. WM writes: 

With the rise of the “major questions” doctrine, conservatives' invocation of “textualism” has been exposed as hypocrisy.

Conservatives claim “textualism” is the only defensible approach to analyzing and applying a legal text. The term emphasizes the “plain meaning” of the text of a legal document and rejects the use of legislative history and other contextual resources to clarify vague or confusing language. Perhaps not surprisingly, this approach almost always leads to conservative outcomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality. But with the rise of the “major questions” doctrine, we can now see that “textualism” is synonymous with hypocrisy. The doctrine, which requires that agencies receive explicit direction from Congress to address a particular issue, gives the Court’s conservative supermajority a tool to achieve their preferred outcomes when textualism doesn’t get them there.

Here’s an example. It’s clear from oral arguments in the student loan case that the Supreme Court heard last month that textualism wouldn’t allow the panel’s conservatives to kill the administration’s plan, which provides relief to millions of post-secondary students.

That the loan relief costs a lot of money must mean that Congress had not actually authorized it, contended Chief Justice John Roberts at the arguments. But by passing a 2003 law signed by President George W. Bush, Congress authorized the education secretary to address emergencies. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, known as the HEROES Act, states explicitly that the secretary of education may “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to help loan recipients affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.” As Justice Elena Kagan said at the arguments, “Congress could not have made this much more clear,” adding, “We deal with congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not.” Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that “waive” is “an extremely broad word,” and “in 2003, Congress was very aware of potential emergency actions in the wake of September 11.”

The late Justice Antonin Scalia was perhaps the foremost advocate for “textualism,” arguing that it would provide more “certainty in the law, and hence greater predictability and greater respect for the rule of law.” Scalia allowed that judges could consult dictionaries and use linguistic “canons of statutory construction” to elucidate vagueness but insisted that textualism was the only way to avoid judicial encroachment on legislative terrain.

Contrary to Scalia’s drivel, the unprincipled, often irrational way the American radical right interprets the Constitution and laws provides less certainty in law, less predictability and less respect for the law. The problem arises mostly from a mix of (i) authoritarian radical right ideology, (ii) open contempt for and rejection of inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning (e.g., the anti-woke movement), and (iii) disrespect for secular democracy, civil liberties, and principled rule of law. 

By its actions, the radical right has made it clear and undeniable that it will remake the law according to its corrupt radical authoritarian-theocratic dogmas. Talk of principled originalism and textualism is just a smoke screen to deflect from the morally bankrupt intellectual basis of what the radical right is, corrupt, authoritarian and theocratic. What it wants to do to American society, democracy, civil liberties, governance and inconvenient truth and history is not what most Americans support.