Frank Kogan

If Trump and Musk and their people continue to defy judicial orders, what will happen and what do we do about it?

I mean, what do we do now? What do we do in the next ten days? These are genuine questions. I'm looking for guidance.

I'm not a political writer and I don't have ideas you can't get elsewhere, but I'm a good writer so maybe throwing thoughts onto the screen here will jostle something among the fifteen or so people who read this. Or maybe you'll feel – I don't know – less isolated? More prepared? More scared? Anyway, I'm drawing on Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Paul Krugman (Substack), so I recommend you read them.

Overnight (that's about 24 hrs ago now) I read a piece in the Washington Post that made me think that the next 10 days or so will be critical to whether Trump gets to set up a framework for a dictatorship. Not that if he falls short now he won't succeed later, but there's danger right now.

The WashPost piece ended up getting folded into a larger one, and if the original is still on the site I can't figure out where (here's the longer) and they both fell off the page in the flood of news. What it said was that District Judge John J. McConnell, who'd originally ordered the administration to stop its freeze on federal grants, had found that the administration had, in fact, not unfrozen those grants as he had ordered. So he was again ordering the administration to unfreeze the funds.*

And this is it, our Lexington-Concord. I'm baffled that the issue isn't getting a larger slice of the news screen. Maybe few others feel my 10 days – there are about 40 judgments telling the administration to halt, don't know if the Trump-Musk crew are ignoring or defying them all, or are pretending to comply on some of them or what.

Anyway, bearing in mind that I don't really know the law, the political situation, how federal payment systems work, or what I'm talking about, this is the risk:

If the administration gets away with ignoring the courts, so ignoring the orders to stop DOGE's access to Treasury and health payment systems – so Musk's access continues – this is what I foresee. Musk and his confederates not only continue to block payments to congressionally authorized projects that they don't like but also block payments owed to contractors – say, block payments to contractors unless the contractors donate to the Republican party – or simply don't send salary payments to VA doctors and nurses in areas that vote Blue, and don't send funds owed to hospitals in such areas, and they close the buildings that judges who've ruled against them work in, or withhold their salaries, or loot the bank accounts of such judges (at least the ones who've ever gotten a tax refund, so their routing numbers and account numbers are now on Musk's server). Or delay or not send tax refunds owed to members of a liberal advocacy group or to people who work at a disfavored business firm. Or simply not pay disability benefits to people who express dissenting political views, or to people whose relatives have.

Anyway, I don't know how federal payments work, don't know how easy or hard this is to do. For that matter, even if there were no DOGE, over time the Trump administration could corrupt all the relevant institutions. But the Trump people seem to want to be forcing the issue early. And what's key to me is that they can do these things if they can get away with defying or ignoring judges' orders. Right now we seem to be relying on judges and on states attorneys general to block this impending dictatorship. I want to know what effective social and political support we can give to those judges and attorneys general, to show them we have their back. I mean, in the next ten days! This post began as a letter to one of my senators, Michael Bennet of Colorado. I don't follow congress and senators well enough to really know, but he's a Democrat, something of an oddball and not always right, but he's courageous. Writing to him and Jason Crow and to Hickenlooper is what I can think of to do, so that's what I'm doing. Seeing what I can manage to fit on a single page.

Wondering somehow if I could reach some moderate or conservative somewhere, to convince them that their own life and freedom are at risk too... They'll probably think that I'm hysterical with what I wrote here. Well, I'm extrapolating from what Trump tried to do to Zelensky in 2019, what Trump got impeached for, telling Zelensky that he wouldn't release the funds that congress had authorized for Ukraine unless Zelensky lied and said that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden for corruption. I'm hypothesizing that what Trump tried to do to Zelensky he'll try to do to you, too. (Some of what I wrote is just copying Krugman, btw.)

Also, for what it's worth, in the long run I think democracy is going to win and Trump and Musk are going to lose,** that they've misjudged badly and weakened their efforts. Well, that's what Ezra Klein thinks and I'm parroting him but in my own vocabulary, obviously. Trump and Musk don't really know how to take control and run a government, so they're waving their dicks around trying to convince themselves that they do. But it's better if we can counter them now, at least semi-successfully, rather than after years of protest and civil disorder and pain and suffering to millions. I mean, there will be pain and suffering; Trump won the election and is going to do a lot of damage. But there can be less, the more successfully we act – even if I don't really have much of an idea what to do.



*Here's a piece, oddly seems to be on a site in India, which contains a bit of interesting information, a piece of law I didn't know, which was in the original WashPost article but that didn't make it into the later amalgam. It's the final sentence, "The judge further added that White House officials were required to comply with the directive, regardless of their expectations about the case’s outcome." So saying that you think you're going to prevail at a higher judicial level doesn't get you out of following the restraining order now, and facing contempt charges if you don't follow it, even if your argument about funding does eventually win.

**But then, I thought Harris was going to win, too.

CROSSPOST: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/393243.HTML

CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/what-do-we-do-if-trump-and-musk-continue

Emailed this to Dave and Mark the day after the election:

As for yesterday's election, it went even worse than I'd feared (though so far it looks as if the Dems held onto the governor's office in Colorado, though just barely). My only thought, which is not necessarily correct as far as winning elections goes, but:

Of the commercials I saw (mainly while trying to watch YouTube; watching, say, Spanish-language TV could've been a different story), the commercials for Mark Udall, the Democrat, and loser, in the Colorado senate race, mainly attacked his opponent on social issues (Gardner's long opposition to abortion, his confusion around birth control, etc.), while the Republican commercials, for Cory Gardner, consistently attacked Udall on his economic policy. Of course what the Repub ads said was wrong, but that's not my point. We Democrats need to be running against the Repubs on economic issues. But — this is my opinion and my wish, and I'm sure that lots of people would consider it unrealistic — this means that at some point the Dems have to decide that a significant portion of the electorate isn't too busy or stupid to understand some basic, comprehensible, but counterintuitive principles of macroeconomics, if we're willing to take minutes at a time to teach them. Otherwise, the Dems have no good response when the Repubs simulate being responsible and thoughtful by attacking us for running up debt and deficit and accuse us of burdening the future with our current profligacy etc. etc. Of course, most Dems don't know macro either (and I hardly do, but I've got some sense from Krugman of the basic principles), and whom I mean by "Dems" and “Democrats" and "we" and "us" in this paragraph isn't altogether consistent...

This means that a significant number of Democratic leaders themselves need to understand a few core macroeconomic principles and be willing to communicate them to voters, and a significant number of us rank-and-file Democrats need to understand those principles and communicate them to other Democrats and to the independents and Republicans who are willing to listen.

I'm not claiming to understand macroeconomics enough to truly evaluate the core principles, but I think I know a few of them:

(1) If, in order to save money and pay down debt, everyone is cutting back expenditures at once, none of them will succeed in cutting their own debt. This is because your spending is my income and my spending is your income; so when a lot of people are cutting back, your and my and everyone's respective incomes will fall as far or farther than our cutbacks, we'll turn out to be worse off, and the economy will go into a depression.

(2) In these conditions, cutting taxes on private industry and the very rich will have little or no stimulating effect. This is because private industry and the rich are not going to invest in factories, goods, and services when demand is falling. Instead, they'll sock their savings away.

(3) But a government can counteract the debt spiral and the savings glut by stepping up and spending money. This will get the economy back on its feet.

(4) In the conditions I described in 1 and 2 (so, in these conditions, not in all conditions), this extra government spending isn't going to cause interest rates to rise or cause excess inflation. Now, not having studied macro, I don't claim to understand all the reasons here. But, for example (I'm quoting Paul Krugman), since the private sector has excess savings that can't be invested, government borrowing "gives some of these excess savings a place to go — and in the process expands overall demand, and hence GDP. It does NOT crowd out private spending, at least not until the excess supply of savings has been sopped up." (See here and here.)

(5) Overall (so, now not just talking about current conditions), if the economy is growing faster than interest on government debt, we're not burdening future generations by government borrowing or by deficits. (Which doesn't mean we should always run deficits. But that's a different matter.) I'm sure I'm being too simplistic in the way I've written this point. But I hope it gives a gist and that it's correct.

As I've said, I'm not claiming the expertise to evaluate the ideas I've written here (which are basically my attempts to copy what I've read). But the thing is, it isn't that Republicans and pseudo-responsible centrists have counter-arguments to these points. They don't know that the points exist.* Neither do most lawmakers, and neither does most of the populace. And neither do most of the people likely to read my livejournal, I'm guessing. (Not that many people read my livejournal.)

Anyway, while we may have the constitutional right to be ignorant, it's time we weren't. And billions of people will suffer and millions will die if we don't decide to learn something, and communicate what we know.

*There are exceptions, of course. Ben Bernanke is a Republican, for instance.

Say I want to understand human financial behavior. The behavior is actually complex, but if I make the following simplifying assumptions I can at least have a place to start, and can make some calculations, predictions, etc.

(1) In the financial decisions (e.g., job choice, hiring, shopping, selling, investing) all people are trying to maximize their monetary profit or "financial" value and to cut their losses.

(2) Given the available information, people go about this pretty well (e.g., this apple at this store costs $2.00 a pound, the identical apple at that store costs $3.00 a pound, both stores are equally easy to get to and I'm going to both stores anyway for other reasons, so I buy the apple at the first store not the second).

(3) When things don't turn out so well, people modify their understanding of the information and (subject to the caveat in the footnote) they seek new, better information.*

We can say that, given assumption number 1, in doing numbers 2 and 3 people are being rational and that when people don't do 2 and 3 they're being irrational. But this all rests on the simplifying assumption number 1, that in all their financial decisions they're trying to maximize income or financial value etc. But to want to maximize money and financial value in the first place is neither rational nor irrational. And we know, or ought to know, that number 1 in itself is not altogether true, that maximizing profit is not the only motive in play: we posited it as a simplifying assumption so we could get a grip on economic behavior. Motives — such as loss aversion and brand loyalty — that run counter to profit maximizing are no more irrational (or rational) than maximizing profit is, and are no more or less emotional either.**

This is on my mind for two related reasons.

First, a couple of Paul Krugman posts about the parts of macroeconomics that have no "microfoundations" but nonetheless seem to describe macro results better than the alternatives: actually, I'm as ignorant of microeconomics as macro, but I do think that micro has simplifying assumptions that include something like my numbers 1 through 3 above, and that's exactly (or maybe not exactly) why the macro that's micro-based can't explain sticky wages and so on. (I don't pretend to understand the posts to any depth, by the way. But note the word "hyperrational" in the first post and "rational expectations" in the second, which I'm guessing mean that it's taken for granted by some people that assumption number 1 is in itself rational.)

Second, I recently got Daniel Kahneman's highly worthwhile Thinking, Fast And Slow from the library for the second time (I didn't finish it 11 months ago when it first became due), and I think if asked he would, or at least ought to, subscribe to my paragraph above beginning "We can say that..." But actually his language slips a lot, and "rational" and "emotions" sometimes float by in his text without explaining themselves. (I do believe he talks explicitly about at least one of them in the part I haven't read yet; but that doesn't mean he knows what he's doing when the words creep in earlier.)

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( Footnotes )

Damned if I know.

Been online at a few U.S. and Brit papers to see if they think it merits a link on the visible Webpage. Yes: NYTimes, LATimes, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Denver Post, Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, The Times. No: Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald.

I'd say that's pretty good except most of the U.S. links are just passing along the Associated Press story of Cyprus and the EU trying to figure out a way to renegotiate so the terms won't clomp down quite so hard on every depositor. And many of the Brit sheets are merely stuck on the idea that some British nationals might lose money in the next day or two. But the NYTimes, the Telegraph, the Financial Times, and the Independent got the issue that immediately jumps to mind if you're on the lookout for international financial calamities. As Paul Krugman put it in his blog:

The big problem, however, is that it's not just large foreign deposits that are taking a haircut; the haircut on small domestic deposits is a bit smaller, but still substantial. It's as if the Europeans are holding up a neon sign, written in Greek and Italian, saying "time to stage a run on your banks!"

Tomorrow and the days immediately following should be very interesting.

The Financial Times leads with, "Europe botches another rescue," and editorializes, "Like other European island states before them, the people of Cyprus are discovering who pays to keep a metastised banking sector alive."

I have no idea what this leads to, of course. Presumably European leaders (whoever they are) assure everyone, "This is just Cyprus, with its specially weird banking situation."

In endorsing the work of this guy (though Krugman probably has a stronger technical basis in economics for his endorsement):

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3885

I just posted these Krugman links on the "Persuade An Atheist" thread, where they're tangential. Krugman is quoting and floating ideas about technological advances making workers superfluous in some areas and thereby increasing income inequality. I decided this needed more attention — that is, Krugman says it needs attention ("it's important stuff"!), and presumably he's right.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots

Additional factors or explanations cited:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology-or-monopoly-power

More detailed explanation, potential scenarios:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-the-analytics-wonkish

What's happening right now is that we are seeing a significant shift of income away from labor at the same time that we're seeing new technologies that look, on a cursory overview, as if they're capital-biased.

Supporting evidence:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-physical-capital

Of the top fifty songs on last Thursday's Billboard K-pop chart, seven of them have been charting for ten weeks or longer. Here they are, in ascending number of weeks:

Busker Busker "It's Hard To Face You" 10 weeks
Verbal Jint "Good Morning" 10 weeks
Juniel "Illa Illa" 10 weeks
Wonder Girls "Like This" 11 weeks
Big Bang "Monster" 11 weeks
Kim Tae Woo "High High" 12 weeks
Shinyoo "Hands Of The Clock" 51 weeks

51 weeks doesn't mean that "Hands Of The Clock" began its run 51 weeks ago. It just means that the Billboard K-pop chart is only 51 weeks old, and that's when they started counting. The track could be years old, for all I know. Maybe decades old. The singer looks a couple of decades younger than I am, but I'm more youthful at heart. Here's a live version that was uploaded to YouTube in December 2009:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNBkv_4akM

It's currently at 32, the highest it's been in the Billboard K-pop era.*

We've talked about it before. Me: "In the olden days, this would have been my stereotype of what Asian pop sounds like." Also, "Presumably, it's old people who listen to this. I'm an old person, and I like it." (Probably like it somewhere between 4 and 6 points, but let's not quibble.) arbitrary_greay: "Holy cow that sounds like some generic Chinese karaoke staple. I can hear the color change scrolling through the karaoke captions on a flickering blue screen." davidfrazer: "You might enjoy Bret's visit to the noraebang from Flight of the Conchords."

( T-ara holding nearly steady )

( My opinion of Ferguson-Krugman dustup substantially final, despite my investigation being desultory )

Paul Krugman can't make up his mind ("EMU Gets Ostrichized"):

Or maybe head in the sand isn't the right metaphor — maybe it's deer in the headlights, with policy makers paralyzed as it all goes wrong. Anyway, I'm with Tim Duy: I'm losing confidence in European leaders, which is hard because I had hardly any confidence to start with.

And if you click Krugman's Tim Duy link, you get Duy saying:

The devastating train that is the debt crisis keeps rolling right along, currently crashing through Spain's economy.

— which of course is an allusion to the venerable Slow-Motion Train Wreck.

But fortunately I'm not running into Kicking The Can Down The Road this time, not where I'm looking; that was always a problematic metaphor anyway. Not that it's never apt, but the tendency is for it to be appropriated by Fake Adults who look and feel mature when they're ignorantly demanding that we need to ward off inflation NOW, and solve debt problems by immediately cutting spending, etc.

( Whatever it takes )

On one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977

I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.

So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.

If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.

Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.

My understanding of economics is so primitive that I don't even have a good idea of what I need to know but don't. But beyond the basic "supply and demand" stuff, I'd say the crucial concepts one needs to understand right now are (a) cumulative advantage and (b) IS-LM curves. The first I grasp so well — or think I do, anyway — that I wrote about it for the Las Vegas Weekly. But the latter is something I'm not yet close to understanding. I gather it's a critically important technical elaboration on one of Keynes' most crucial ideas and that it's a model that reconciles two apparently contrary stories of what determines interest rates ("reconciles" may be the wrong word: the IS curve gives you one set of possible interest rates, the LM curve gives you another, and where the two intersect is where you'll get your interest rate). Also, it's a model, not a law, but it's one that helps us understand the situation we're in — except that I'm not yet one of the "we" who understand it.

Paul Krugman wrote a blog post last October attempting to explain IS-LM to people like me ("IS-LMentary"), but the explanation still contained too many ellipses — too many points I needed explained further, or at least that I hadn't yet been able to see into. My greatest difficulty was with his explanation of the LM ("liquidity-money") curve. I've bolded the two sentences that were just too condensed for me. If there's anyone who would like to walk me through them real slow, pointing out all the notable sights and features, please do so. Or maybe you could direct me towards someone who can explain this more thoroughly than Krugman did in that post. (I assume it's in some textbooks; but also, if Krugman can't explain it easily, it's probably not easily explainable — not to me, anyway.) Krugman:

( In that case, the interest rate must be such as to match the demand to the quantity of money )

( I'm not understanding the word MUST )

( The world keeps going rectangular )