Korean Impeachment Drama

The situation in Korea has gotten quite interesting. Truly k-drama levels of drama, only less motivated by romantic affairs. A convoluted mess of a plot with surprise twists upon surprise twists upon surprise twists. There's probably a lesson here about hubris and maybe not doubling down when faced with overwhelming opposition - but that's going to wait until the current cliffhangers are resolved.

Recall that earlier this month, the president declared martial law - which was immediately cancelled by the National Assembly. He was then impeached and the prime minister took his place. This is the instigating incident for the craziness to follow.

An interesting aspect of Korean government - the prime minister is appointed by the president and then confirmed by the National Assembly. Since the elections for the presidency and National Assembly are independent and can happen years apart, there can be some very divided governments, as in this case where the opposition controls 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. Also, the prime minister does not need to be a member of the National Assembly, as it is the current situation.

Now the impeachment of the president took two attempts - it requires 2/3 of the National Assembly to vote for it. The opposition Democratic Party only had 192 of the required 200 votes and the first time around, the president's party just left the chambers and didn't vote at all. But the outrage at the declaration of martial law was still so intense that they caved and agreed to have their president impeached.

And now, the Democratic Party is demanding a special commission to investigate the president for treason (and his wife for corruption) but the prime minister/acting president is not signing those laws into force. In response, the opposition is now threatening the prime minister/acting president with impeachment and they say that the 2/3 threshold for impeachment only applies to the president, other members of government are impeached on simple majorities. The opposition says it's only a simple majority since he is only acting as president and not the actual elected president. 

Now IANAL - let alone someone with any actual knowledge of Korea's constitutional intricacies, but my understanding is that this decision - along with the actual verdict of the impeachment - would be decided by the Korean Constitutional Court. So now we get the mid-season introduction of a bunch of new characters.

The Korean Constitutional Court only has 6 of 9 justices at the moment, and four of those were appointed by the impeached president - so it may seem like this bodes poorly for the opposition. HOWEVER, these justices are also confirmed by the National Assembly - so they needed bipartisan support. And the president only directly appoints 3 of them. And due to term lengths, 2 of those direct appointments are from the previous president who was a Democrat and had a Democratic National Assembly to confirm. What of the other 3 justices? Those were recommended by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whom the impeached president appointed. But the Chief Justice is also a position requiring confirmation by the National Assembly, and is his second choice since the first was too conservative to be confirmed. So it's not so clear how those votes will go. 

The bill to impeach the prime minister/acting president is scheduled for Thursday, the day after Christmas. It will almost certainly fall between 1/2 and 2/3 of the National Assembly supporting it. And then it is a true constitutional crisis as the legitimacy of the acting president will be in shreds. It's really wild - the conservatives are doing all of this to protect their impeached president - a man whose approval ratings are just off the charts bad. Even before that guy declared martial law, he was at 19% support, and his crazy ass gambit certainly did not turn things around for him. A net negative 74 approval rating - try to wrap your head around that. There's a glaringly obvious solution - and that's to just throw the wildly unpopular asshole under the bus - but the conservatives of South Korea are just refusing to do so.

So thanks to South Korea for providing more end-of-year drama to fill in the dead space between Christmas and New Years.

Genocide Genocide Everywhere and not a Drop to Drink

In reverse chronological order:

Israel has accused Human Rights Watch (HRW) of blood libel. What prompted this?

Yesterday, HRW accused Israel of acts of genocide by depriving Gazans of access to water, including things like destroying vital water infrastructure.

July 29, US State Department says they are "seeking additional information" after an IDF soldier posted a video to social media of "blowing up the Tel Sultan water reservoir in honour of Shabbat".

July 27 - the IDF blows up Rafah's water reservoir.

Now for this timeline to be more accurate, please imagine around three or four entries per week in that five month span stating "US sends more bombs and weapons to Israel".

It's okay though Israel might still be investigating itself who needs water when you can be drinking 2,000 pound bombs? And I guess water is Hamas.  There were gunmen hiding with SCUBA tanks in the reservoir, the IDF could hear them as they casually filmed themselves wiring in explosives.

Songs of a Lost World

This post is in case any of you didn't know I'm Gen X.

It's been sixteen years since the last album from The Cure. I heard A Fragile Thing back in October as part of the whole teaser thing and got pretty hyped about the prospect of new album. A Fragile Thing most definitely sounds like The Cure. Well, I'm only just now getting around to listening to it, and feeling regret about what I've been doing instead for the past six weeks.

I mean it's not some transcendent work of genius or whatever - but what it is, is unmistakable and definitely The Cure. And if you like The Cure, you will like this album. And if you love The Cure, you will love this album. And if you have no idea what the Cure is and you like this album, you have a deep ass rabbit hole that will bury you deep inside of Robert Smith. Just like heaven.

I'm mentioning this now because remarkably, after over a decade and a half, The Cure managed to completely nail the news cycle about one month ahead of time.

It Has Been Four Hiroshimas

It's been over a month since I suggested that I had an idea about what was causing the disconnect between perceptions of the economy and the actual economy. I really thought I had it - I had an explanation, which might not account for all of it, I thought might have accounted for a significant chunk. And then on firther reflection, I determined that I was probably wrong. And now I've been struggling to fill in my understanding of what happened and what is happening. So I'm still trying to parse the November disatser - but in the meantime, here are some thoughts about the scale of destruction in Gaza. 

It's fucking nuts. Like, we don't really comprehend how fucking nuts it is. I keep trying to find ways to contextualize it so we can understand how absolutely fucking ludicrous the campaign of genocide has been, but it's just beyond comprehension.

One example I tried earlier was to note that US military aid to Israel over the span of a year was on the order of $18 billion. There's another half dozen billion dollars spent on shit like keeping a carrier group deployed to the region and such.  By comparison, the GDP of the West Bank and the Gaza strip combined hit a peak of 19 billion in 2022. Now Gaza was under siege in 2022, and while economic activity in the West Bank was forcibly depressed by Israel, Gaza definitely had it worse.  Meaning that the value of US military aid to perpetrate this war is multiple times higher than the peak total economic activity of the region being bombed. Even if every man, woman, and child in Gaza decided to dedicate their entire productive output to "destroying Israel" or whatever racist bullshit the genocidal maniacs believe - this would still be far less than what the US has provided to destroy them. Multiple times less.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Between 1965 and 1975, the US dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - roughly 100 times more than the amount of bombs dropped on Gaza in roughly one year. Here's an interesting article from ESRI's StoryMaps Team about the Vietnam bombing campaign. They are GIS people so they've plotted out the areas hit by bombs - and since it's ESRI, you can scroll the map around as you please. You can even drag it all the way over to the Middle East and compare the size of the bombing area with the size of Gaza.  It looks something like this:

What's my point here? It's the intensity of the bombing. We're talking about less than 1% of the area being hit by about 1% of the bombs dropped in the Vietnam War - but only in one tenth the amount of time. IOW - Israel is conducting a bombing campaign thats an order of magnitude more intense than the air power used during the Vietnam War.

The StoryMaps article ends with the following:

But there's no doubt that the aerial bombardment of Vietnam will forever remain one of the most staggering sustained attacks in human history.

That was written in 2017. It's already wrong. Incomprehensibly, it has been knocked down to a lower tier of destruction - because what Israel is doing to Gaza is just on a completely different scale.

The people at Airwars have done a study about Israel's bombing campaign for the month of October 2023. They have a bunch of ways of trying to contextualize just how much harm Israel is inflicting on Gaza. That one month was about as deadly for children in Gaza than the deadliest year in the Syrian civil war. And let's not forget that Syria is much larger than Gaza - with almost ten times the population.

85,000 tons of bombs. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a yield of 21 kilotons. It has been four Hiroshimas.

EDIT - added a link I missed earleir

What is Population Growth Actually?

A break from trying to organize my thoughts about The Economy into something (barely) readable.  Dave Weigel tweeted the following:

https://x.com/daveweigel/status/1855248851281555665

Harris is going to get even more votes than Obama! How can anyone say there was an enthusiasm problem?

The US population in 2008, when Obama got 69.5 million votes was 302 million. In 2024, it's 335 million - nearly ten percent higher. 

Some in his replies checked the registered voter numbers. 40 million more registered voters. If there was actually Obama-level enthusiasm, Harris would have taken 47% of registered voters, but she actually got 37% of them. But one of the "reality-based" journos covering it is sure that the enthusiasm was similar. I'm in freaking Canada and I could tell that people were definitely not enthused about Harris. There was a lot of "this is worse than holding my nose and pulling for a candidate I don't like - I am actually compromising some core moral principles in an effort to stop Orange Man Bad."

In Weigel's defense, there were moments when this was true. The DNC was big and there was enthusiasm then. Kamala is brat summer was a thing. The reason we're all feeling blindsided by Trump's victory is that back in August - it really looked like a done deal. Harris was riding high on a tidal wave of support and love. And then the "perfect" campaign fucking burned that down in the very short time they had to do it. Spectacularly amazing really - that they could that campaign so effectively and so fast.

It's the Stupid Economy - Part 2 - Still Failing to Identify the Problem

So, the Biden economy was excellent. People are better off now than they were before COVID hit. There were a lot of real problems caused by the pandemic and other factors, but the US managed its way through those issues better than almost every other country in the world. But Americans are certain "The Economy" sucks.

I think there are multiple reasons for this. Let's start off with what I think are the the smallest factors.

I noted that it was the lowest income earners that got the most benefit - but that assessment is based on how you do the groupings. That lowest grouping includes minimum wage earners - the number of whom did not significantly budge over Biden's term. Those people just straight up saw their purchasing power decline by almost a third. A pretty sizable chunk of this lowest income quintile are in fact worse off, and blaming it on inflation is completely accurate. Their struggle is real.

Also too retirees - and it's weird that we haven't heard about this group since they have historically been one of the media's go to  interviews. Not just retirees, but anyone on fixed incomes, those reliant on pensions or disability payments and the like. Some of these incomes have tried to pace inflation - social security payments get annual cost-of-living adjustments that are close to CPI rates, but often the cost of goods and services required by older people rise in prices faster than the normal basket of goods. And then there are people who planned out their retirements and have a decent nest egg providing them the income they thought they would need - usually factoring in inflation. Except not the inflation we had post-pandemic. They got hit too.

BUT - this doesn't account for it all.  The minimum wage earners? BLS says there's about a million of these people. Retirees? Harris actually did quite well (based on exit polling) with 65+ getting a tie against Trump versus Biden losing them by 5 points in 2020.

So these people definitely exist and they are definitely suffering. There are people who are demonstrably worse off - but it doesn't look to me like this significantly impacted the vote.

4% unemployment is considered full employment. There will always be some percentage of people unemployed - for example, when they change jobs. And also, some people who just have a really hard time finding a job. These people are also getting shafted by inflation offset by wage increases since they are living off savings and employment insurance. But again - not there aren't that many of them. The transitory inflation makes it suckier to be jobless - but joblessness is sucky even with normal levels of inflation and there's less joblessness now than in previous elections. Chronic job seekers are already primed to say The Economy Sucks even without the 2022 price surges, and this group is historically small.

How about the vanishing Middle Class - did they get shellacked with the transitory inflation? Inflation adjusted median income, both household and personal income, roughly flat since the pandemic.  Not great, but pretty decent considering what Biden was dealing with. That said, no one was asked "how is the economy doing, considering the challenges Biden had to face with the global pandemic". So, on balance, the median income buys about as much today - even with current egg prices - than it did before the pandemic hit. The implication is that the number of people doing better is roughly the same as the number of people doing worse. So this might have rightly contributed to the number of people saying "The Economy Sucks" versus those that are wrong about it.

And indeed, polling bears this out. Back in May, 41% said that their personal finances had improved, but only 23% said the economy was good.

There are probably many other small factors - but these are the ones I have thought through. So - not a comprehensive list, but a list of things which are true and might have lead to people being down on The Economy - but are poor explanations as to why people voted for Trump on the Economy.

Do I have a good idea as to why people think the Economy sucks? Probably not. I have an idea that I think is a good explanation, but it's entirely possible that I'm totally wrong. We'll tackle that next time on "watch d-kw rant about random shit so he doesn't go back to screaming about genocide again".

It's The Stupid Economy - Part 1 - Failing to Identify the Problem

The number one reason cited in exit polls for Harris losing was "The Economy" or some variation of that. The price of eggs and stuff. And this is confusing because by almost any quantifiable measure, Biden has done an exceptionally great job at managing the economy. So here, I am going to put my thoughts about it together. There's a lot of thoughts, so it's probably going to span a couple posts

First - yes, Bidenomics has been great. He took over in the middle of a global pandemic which ravaged the entire world order - and shepherded the US economy back to normal faster than any other country in the world, despite the US being hit so hard by COVID. And the benefits have not been concentrated at the top as they usually are. It is the lowest income segments that saw the highest percentage income growth under Biden. The US is at full employment with inflation still in the target 2% - 3% range. That's the theoretical ideal pocket! Stock markets indices are at record highs and the poverty rate is at record lows.

One thing that's obfuscating is that since Biden took over during the COVID crisis - it's easy to demonstrate massive improvement by comparing the start of his term to the end of it. But even if you mute this impact by only looking at the latter half of his presidency, his performance is still incredible in terms of economic growth, job creation, and slowing the growth of inequality. 

The US has outperformed the rest of the world on these terms under Biden's watch. He managed the crisis better than anyone else. So it's like he went to the Olympics for Economic Performance and won gold while setting a bunch of new world records - and the reception he's gotten back home is having garbage thrown at him and getting called a big loser. So let's try to unpack why.

The one thing people point at is inflation. Prices are so much higher now than they were before Biden took office! And this is true - the economic shock that was a global pandemic had major impacts on inflation around the world. Also, there was a big to do about "supply chains". The global logistics and distribution network has been highly optimized, it's been pared down to deliver exactly what is needed and almost nothing more - so as to get the prices down as far as possible. But then the pandemic changed how everyone was doing things. They weren't going into the office anymore, but instead huddling alone in self-isolation. Irrational hoarding behaviour proliferated with people stockpiling toilet paper like it was going to be the new currency in the apocalypse. If your delivery system is designed to supply the factories which pump out fast food entrees for shipping to chain restaurants and suddenly half that demand changes to supermarket food, it will take time and money to adjust.

Russia invading Ukraine didn't help - Russia is a major energy supplier to the world, so this disruption was bound to impact energy prices.

IOW, inflation was caused by outside factors - the shock that was the pandemic and a major energy supplier being hit with a wide slate of economic sanctions. And this was pretty obvious at the time - and also obviously, something which the system would adjust to. The nature of demand had suddenly changed - over a very short time, people needed less office appropriate clothing and more pants with elasticized waists. This calls for a retooling of production and supply, which is expensive - but also something that can be completed. Those costs get paid and then we're back to normal. It's my understanding that this was the argument behind Team Transitory - people saying that the high levels of inflation were temporary and would go away. And that's exactly what it was - a temporary bump in inflation before coming back down to normal levels.

And again - the US outperformed most of the world on this measure too. Yes, there was a lot of inflation, but Biden got it under control, while maintaining low levels of unemployment, faster than anyone else. And more importantly than that - he managed it with wage growth outpacing inflation on the aggregate. Now this did take time - inflation was on top for a while - but that's been reversed now and overall, people have more purchasing power now than they did before the pandemic.

So what gives? Why do Americans still feel like "The Economy" sucks?

I have ideas. They're confused and jumbled right now. And maybe they are dumb and totally wrong - but they are stuck in my head and I need to get them out. But this post is already too long, and I still need to organize them some more, so mark this as "...to be continued" - hopefully not after another decade long hiatus.