Mixed Message

 

Bad Ends

While we cannot know the detail of the negotiation talks that have taken place behind closed doors - what we do know is that Israel halting aid entering Gaza 17 days ago was an attempt to force Hamas into offering new concessions.

That hasn't worked so far and now it appears Israel has returned to violence in order to try to extract a new deal, one that is more favourable for its political leaders, and one that offers fewer wins to Hamas.
Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?

I don't think that I am the only person who believes that Hamas isn't daft enough to believe that Israel would abide by whatever new agreement it extracts from them. And that's the problem with breaking a deal in order to attempt to win a better deal; it gives the other party a pretty good reason to doubt one's honesty and intentions. (But what do I know, considering that Hamas is daft enough to think they can force the dissolution of Israel?)

Although Hamas still seems willing to negotiate while the United States is a party to the talks, so there may still be some possibility that some sort of agreement can be reached; but since the Trump Administration has made no bones about the fact that it's clearly on the side of Israel, I'm curious what it brings to the table in all of this. It's certainly not going to hold the government of Israel to any agreements it makes.

I am still of the opinion that, sooner or later, all of this inevitably ends in the deaths and displacement of the Palestinians. It may not be this conflict, or the next, but it's coming, one way or another. Arab leaders may view Donald Trump's plan to empty Gaza (and I'm sure that the West Bank will come up eventually) of its residents and remake the place into an Israeli-run resort as an insult, but if President Trump could be trusted to live up to his end of the deal (and there's very little chance of that) it would likely be the best outcome that they could hope for. (Although why any sane person would want to get anywhere near a resort that's going to be under constant attack by angry former residents of the area is beyond me.)

The central problem in all of this is the same as it ever was, namely:

Hamas, to put it crudely, has one card to play in the negotiations: the hostages.

The Palestinians, as a people, have nothing to offer Israel in exchange for being allowed to stay, in either Gaza or the West Bank. They can go the "no justice, no peace" route as they have been, but we can see where it's gotten them. And while there is an Israeli Left that's willing to stand up for them, they don't have the political clout to get someone into the office of Prime Minister. Unless something changes, and gives them from real bargaining power, bad deals are likely to to be the only ones the people of Palestine ever get.

One or the Other

In a 1,300 word story, sometimes, two sentences are important.

In the lawsuit, Energy Transfer says Greenpeace participated in a publicity campaign that hurt the project and the firm's bottom line — allegedly raising the cost of construction by at least $300 million.

Greenpeace denies the allegations, saying it played a limited, supporting role in the protests, which were led by Native American groups.
Jury says Greenpeace owes hundreds of millions of dollars for Dakota pipeline protest

Because the question that I have is a simple one... Which is it?

The article talks to a few legal experts, but shies away from the important question: Did Greenpeace actually cross a line such that Energy Transfer had some legal grounds to sue them. While I understand the "David and Goliath" nature of the case lends itself to labeling the action a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, the right to protest is not unlimited, so it is, at least in theory, possible to take a protest to the point of committing a civil tort against the party being protested against. So I think that it's worthwhile in a story like this to actually talk about the case itself, and not simply its presumed implications.

Juries are neither perfect nor above criticism. So there's no reason to presume that if one or more of the three people that NPR quotes in the story felt that the jurors had erred in some way, they could say so. Pace University associate law professor Josh Galperin says he thinks that Energy Transfer's "real concern is the persistence of the protest — the way it is capable of turning public opinion," but even he doesn't say that the jury was mistaken in their decision. Just because Energy Transfer may have had ulterior motives in bringing the suit doesn't make it without genuine legal merit.

This being NPR, I don't believe that they set out to deliberately bury some evidence in their possession that Energy Transfer may have been in the right. Instead, they're catering to their audience, who, being left-leaning, are likely to see Greenpeace as the victims here. So they're approaching the story from that angle. This isn't journalism shading into advocacy, it's journalism that starts from a presumed truth and presents the case for that understanding of the facts of the matter. And I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. It just left me looking for more information than was presented.

Pushback Party

Democrats in Congress are upset over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's decision to not filibuster the recent bill to fund the government, allowing President Trump and Republicans in Congress to avoid a shutdown of the government. There's even been talk of having Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run against Senator Schumer in his next primary election.

But for all of the "deep sense of outrage and betrayal" that Representative Ocasio-Cortez says that Democrats feel, I'm inclined to think that Senator Schumer understood something about a shutdown that  maybe some other Democrats don't at this point: None of the problems that people in Blue America are dealing with would have been solved by a shutdown. It wouldn't have undone any of the initiatives the Trump Administration is driving. As much as I understand people's frustration with the "the Resistance," and the feeling that Democrats don't have a viable plan to oppose President Trump, simply opposing the President hasn't worked for anyone thus far... so why stick with it?

The primary problem that Democrats have right now is that many Americans feel that the party is focused on identity politics and the problems of relatively small groups of marginalized people (some of whom aren't even Americans), rather than attempting to make things better for the nation as a whole. Senator Bernie Sanders has taken some grief for the position that Americans aren't really driven by racial animus, but I think that he's largely right in making the point that when people are regularly eating steak, they don't mind if someone else is thrown a bone now and again. But if they believe their own problems are being ignored, they resent the work that goes into finding solutions for others.

And shutting down the government wouldn't have been a solution to anything, other than Democratic lawmakers' feelings of powerlessness. No new jobs would have been created, no price hikes ameliorated, no justice done. The best-case scenario is that the Democrats picked up a bit of leverage; but it'd doubtful they could have done anything immediate with it, and, failing that, they would have been seen as the cause of whatever misery (and, let's face it, inconvenience) would have come out of the whole thing.

Donald Trump is not, by any means, a particularly popular President, but the support he does have is a result of the perception that he's solving people's problems. He may be going about it like a bull in a china shop, but as long as his supporters don't feel that it's their plates being broken, they're willing to support him, and turn their ire on people who don't. The problem with the four years of the Biden Administration was that President Biden came to see another four years as an entitlement, rather than something that he needed to actively work for, on the terms of the electorate. The problem wasn't that is was a do-nothing administration, but that too many members of the public felt that it did nothing for them. Something tells me that Senator Schumer, at least, saw where things went wrong.

Go Team

The problem that I tend to have with partisan rhetoric is, well, it's partisan nature; in the sense that it's by partisans, for partisans, and it doesn't need to make sense to anyone else.

Take Trump Administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's comments to Meet the Press last week. In defending President Trump's imposition of tariffs, he said that "American products will get cheaper." His stated logic was that American farmers, ranchers and fishermen would be "unleashed" and when they "explode in value," food prices will decrease. That may as well have been in Burmese for all the sense it makes to me. What's the relationship between this "unleashing" and the costs of farm inputs? How is "exploding in value" going to raise the volume of food produced? What's going to drive farmers to produce more food than demand levels warrant? These are the sorts of questions that I, as someone who isn't a Republican partisan, would like answers to. But I understand that I'm not going to get them, because I'm not in the target audience for Secretary Lutnick's comments, which is, well, Republican partisans.

Partisan cheerleading, whether it's comprehensible to non-partisans or not, is par for the course in partisan environments because people think that it delivers results. If, as I suspect, Secretary Lutnick is attempting to head off, or at least blunt, a looming recession by keeping consumer sentiment high (at least among Republicans), he could just as easily chanted "Brick-a-bracka, firecracka! Siss, boom, bah! More tariffs, more tariffs! Rah, rah, rah!" because what matters isn't the words used, but whether or not the home crowd cheers. In that sense, it's irrelevant what the ground reality is, or appears to be, for other people; what's important is that the right people buy into the message of "It will be great; you'll see!"

But the public at large is made up of more than just "the right people." There are skeptics, critics and the simply neutral in the audience, and their behavior plays a role, too. If the actions of committed partisans were enough to drive specific outcomes, one would think that the United States (and a lot of other places, for that matter) simply wouldn't ever have economic downturns. Surely, George W. Bush, for example, could have mobilized enough committed Republicans to avert the Great Recession if they could have prevented it by themselves.

Partisan rhetoric is an invocation of mind over matter in the sense that "those who mind, don't matter." Secretary Lutnick, and the Trump Administration as a whole, appears to believe that only the people who cheer when they speak matter, despite the fact that this strategy (or non-strategy) hasn't worked out well for people in the past. I'm inclined to chalk a good part of this up to the idea that presidential Administrations tend to see themselves as unique and special; and there's no reason why the Trump Administration would avoid that particular mindset. But I wonder how much of it is a willingness, if not a desire, to believe one's own rhetoric. It's tempting to think that Secretary Lutnick himself believes his comments to "Meet the Press" to be simply so much rambling nonsense, but I don't think I'd be surprised to learn that he's actually convinced himself that an adversarial approach to international trade should be taught in Economics 101 courses as a sure-fire means to rapid economic growth, and the fact that it doesn't make intuitive sense to me is simply proof that I'm a hater.