Matt Taibbi wrote a really interesting article last week, Wells Fargo’s Master Spin Job. It’s about this program that Wells Fargo has started, HomeLIFT. In it, qualified homeowners will be given $15,000 for a down payment on a house. So in the Detroit area, Wells Fargo is putting $5.25 million dollars toward this program. Why such an exact figure? It turns out that this is the amount that the bank is required to give to the area. The money it is paying is punishment for wrongdoing, but politicians and reporters all over the nation are presenting it like it is a great act of kindness.

This is all about the robo-signing scandal of the last several years. “People all over the country found themselves booted out of their homes thanks to bogus affidavits signed by ‘vice presidents’ and ‘regional managers,’ who were often scraggly kids just out of college blindly signing hundreds of documents a day, if not more.” Wells Fargo was one of many banks caught doing this and was part of a $25 billion settlement. There are various parts to the settlement, and Wells Fargo figured out this great way to spin their punishment to make it look like they are the good guys.

Taibbi documented how in most cities, the press has just gone along with Well Fargo’s framing of the issue. KMOX wrote, “Local Companies Join Forces For Home Ownership.” That was about the HomeLIFT program in St Louis that was putting in $4.75 million, “Again, this was exactly the amount specified in the court settlement.” The same thing in Fresno, “The $7.5 million Fresno program was, again, exactly the amount mandated by the Westland settlement.” And when Taibbi confronted Wells Fargo, they said it was just an extension of its CityLIFT program. But then it turns out that CityLIFT was just another court mandated program because of Wells Fargo’s discriminatory loan practices.

But I was wondering about what this would all mean if Wells Fargo were doing this voluntarily. It wouldn’t make me feel good about it. It’s kind of like the guy who beats up his wife and then brings her flowers the next day. Sure, the flowers are nice, but they hardly make up for the beating. And it is only too clear that the flowers are a kind of bribe, “Forgive me because the most recent thing I did is nice.” It’s certain that the guy is going to beat up his wife again. And he knows that the flowers work just fine — and if they fail, perhaps some jewelry.

This program is not going to make up for all the people who were wrongly thrown out of their homes. It is just a marketing campaign. But that’s the really sick part of this whole thing: this part of the settlement was explicitly meant to be marketing, “The terms mandated that the bank spend $67 million on a series of measures to repair its reputation in communities hit the hardest by foreclosures and robo-signing.” Our “justice” system is making sure that people continue to trust the banks that it wouldn’t allow to fail back in 2008. It’s disgusting.

Recently, Donald Trump was on 60 Minutes. I watched parts of it and I agreed with a number of things he said. This was before his “tax reform” plan came out and he showed himself to be a really typical, boring Republican. But one of the things he talked about in the segment was NAFTA. He said, “It’s a disaster…” And Mark Thoma, decided to look into the question, Is Donald Trump Right to Call NAFTA a “Disaster”? As I’ve pointed out in the past, Thoma is no firebrand. He’s a careful, if liberal, economist. And so his conclusion is that it is complicated.

Fair enough. But the main claim that was made for NAFTA was that it was going to a boon for jobs. But what did we see? We saw the loss of “somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 to 700,000 jobs.” But to be fair, in a nation the size of ours, that isn’t a huge hit — between a quart and a half of a percent. But the point is that it was supposed to be a job creator. On the one thing that the deal sold as, NAFTA was indeed a disaster. It didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

The evidence for its impact on Mexico is not even great. Brad DeLong — who might be biased, since he worked on the deal — finds that it netted a million and a half jobs. Others claim less. And as Thoma pointed out, “But whatever the actual number, just like for the US, it’s also relatively small.” There was no economic boom in the region. And the reason for that is that China became a big deal so all those jobs that would have gone to Mexico went to China instead. That’s obviously bad for Mexico, but also bad for the US, because if the jobs had gone to Mexico, those workers would have bought a lot of stuff from America that the Chinese are not.

But I think that Thoma is being too kind. I don’t think that the point of NAFTA was ever to create jobs. It was designed to make it easier for rich people to screw over working people here in the United States. Well, that’s probably putting too negative a gloss on it. It was a way for the rich to enrich themselves even more. In other words, it was yet another government program designed to help out the people who least needed helping. The fact that those people saw greater profits by going to China hardly changes the dynamic.

And now we have the TPP. It’s a treaty that isn’t even about breaking down trade barriers. Most of the signatories already have low tariffs. The big thing in the agreement is intellectual property law, and these will put unheard of tariffs — hundreds and thousands of percent — on covered items. Is this going grow the economy? Is this going to create new jobs? One thing that NAFTA clearly did do was increase inequality. TPP will surely do the same thing. It will make the poor poorer. It will make the rich richer. But in the end, no in power will care, because they know they can always hire another lackey like Obama to push through the next trade deal.

NAFTA might not have been a disaster in a general sense. But it wasn’t a good thing. And we have responded to that by passing trade deal after trade deal. We don’t live in a democracy, my friends.

Now the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a done deal for all intents and purposes, it bears looking at again. The argument for it is that it is going to be great for the economy. That’s what President Obama keeps saying anyway. Of course, it’s bunk. Dean Baker made a good comparison recently, Donald Trump Says His Tax Cut Will Lead to 6% GDP Growth and President Obama Says TPP Will Boost Growth. That’s right: he’s saying that Trump’s widely mocked claim that his policies will lead to 6% growth are as ridiculous as Obama’s claims about the TPP.

It turns out that even people who are in favor of TPP don’t make much in terms of claims for it. The Peterson Institute claims that it will increase economic growth by 0.03% per year. This is literally at the level of noise. And in fact, that’s what others say. The United States Department of Agriculture said that the effect would be “too small to measure.” So we are getting a treaty that will weaken local laws, harm workers all over the world, and increase the prices of patented and copyrighted goods. But on the plus side… Well, there is no plus side.

For a while, a lot of people like me thought that maybe the crazy Republicans would step up and make this an issue. After all, isn’t this treaty exactly what they are always claiming liberals are trying to do: create a one world government that will tell the good God fearing people of Texas or Arkansas or Mississippi what to do? But they aren’t concerned about this treaty because they know that the down side will only affect the poor people and the up side will help the rich people. Thus it is everything that Republicans want in a law or treaty: something to screw the poor and help the rich.

But you might wonder: if the TPP is going to produce basically no economic growth, why do the rich care? Well, it is the same reason that drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been such a big deal for such a long time. There is not enough oil there to make any difference to us on a national level, much less a world level. But it did mean billions of dollars for people who were already hugely wealthy. So it is a big deal to do. And it is the same thing here. This treaty is huge for the pharmaceutical industry. It is huge for Hollywood. But are we going to get better drugs or movies? Don’t be silly. This is about them being able to collect more rents on things they’ve already made.

So it is sad that Obama has pushed this through. In the end, I suspect people will remember him for Obamacare. But they will mention TPP in the same way that people mention NAFTA and Bill Clinton. “Oh yeah, well that was a mistake.” Not that Obama will ever suffer because of it. After he’s out of office, I’m sure that Pfizer and Roche will be eager to give him a million bucks to drop by and give a speech on something like volunteerism.

Plutocrats: 1
America: 0

Daniel Drezner wrote an interesting article at The Washington Post last Friday, The Politics of Leadership and Anger. He noted that President Obama has moved from “weary resignation and shifted into frustrated outrage.” It’s understandable. So far this year, we have had more mass shootings — “incidents where 4 or more people are killed or injured by gunfire” — than we have had days (294 mass shootings in 297 days). The death toll has to get very high before the national news even notices one. And Obama is angry about it — not least because he’s tried to do things in the past and the Republican Congress has stopped him.

At the same time, Republicans claim to be very unhappy about the fake sting videos involving Planned Parenthood. Are they any more angry than Obama is about these mass shootings? They don’t seem to be. Actually, if you ask me, I think it is mostly fake — demagoguery for their base. But even if we take their anger at face value, it is no worse than the president’s. Yet as Drezner noted, Obama is not using the situation to block all the business of the government until Congress does what he wants: (1) threaten to veto all appropriation bills; (2) refuse to raise the debt ceiling; (3) demand the resignations of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Now Drezner has no answers as to why this is. In fact, he seems to be under the delusion that John Boehner is in the same class of politicians as Obama: “a traditional politician who recognizes the limits of what can be accomplished without political support.” And that’s just nonsense. Was Boehner not one of Newt Gingrich’s hatchet men? Wasn’t he in favor of the government shutdowns in 1995 and 1995-96? Why, yes he was! And didn’t he vote to impeach President Clinton? Yes! In fact, only two of four charges passed against Clinton, but Boehner voted for all four.

I think it is critically important to remember this: even the “reasonable” Republicans are crazy. Remember in 2013, Boehner didn’t want to pick a fight with Obama over the continuing resolution. His stated reason was that the Republicans didn’t have as much leverage. He wanted to pick the fight over the debt ceiling — a far more dangerous act of brinkmanship. And so this isn’t — as Drezner claims — about the Tea Party. If anything separates the establishment from the Tea Party it is practical experience. They are all just as crazy; it is just that the establishment types wield the crazy more effectively.

So the problem is not that some in the Republican Party have poisoned it. It is that the Republican Party is itself rancid. And it has been since at least 1981 when Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The conservative movement — and America in a general sense — has managed to forget the first four words at the beginning of that sentence, and decided that the government is always bad. So why not shut it down? From the standpoint of the conservative, as long as the government continues to do the things they want (like send Social Security checks), then it’s fine.

At this point, I don’t think there is any way forward with the Republican Party. It will not reform from the inside — at least as long as it has any amount of political power. It must be destroyed. This is not a Cold War situation where we can move forward together while disagreeing. That was the way it was 40 or 50 years ago. We are now in a World War II situation. The Republicans are determined to destroy a century of American progress. They must be stopped. They must be destroyed.