Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Visions of a Future Gift Economy

January 8, 2018 – 8:03 am

Cory Doctorow’s recent novel Walkaway imagines a world where scarcity is unnecessary and generosity is a feasible way of life.

When you take a mountaintop view that lets all the gritty details blur into insignificance, most of our political arguments come down to two visions of how an economy might function. We might have a capitalist market economy, where good things are scarce and people compete to obtain them (and possibly fail to obtain necessities like food or medical care). Or we might have a socialist command economy, where central planners figure out how the work all of us do is going to produce the goods and services all of us need.

Our current economy is a blend of the two — a mostly capitalist economy sitting over a socialist safety net that is maintained by a tax-supported central government — and our endless political debates are about where the capitalist/socialist boundary should be. Do we want higher taxes and a sturdier safety net, or lower taxes and a flimsier safety net?

There is, however, a completely different third vision, which for most of human history has sounded kind of crazy: an anarchist gift economy, in which people compete not to obtain scarce goods, but to give the most impressive gifts.

Christmas dinner. Gift economies already exist in little niches, on very small scales. For example: the pot-luck family Christmas dinners I remember from when I was growing up. If you approached the dinner like the homo economicus of capitalist theory, you’d bring the minimal dish to get yourself in the door, and then pig out on what everybody else brought. The obvious result, as any economist could predict, would be a tragedy of the commons: Everybody would bring less and less as the years went by, until Christmas became a celebration of scarcity rather than abundance.

If such an outcome didn’t kill Christmas entirely, it would probably lead to a socialist revolution: A central planning committee would make sure we all got enough to eat by telling everyone exactly what to bring, specifying quantity and quality very precisely, and checking that no one cheated. So food would be plentiful again, but even so, the joy of the season might get lost.

In fact, though, neither of those things ever happened. Instead, my aunts competed with each other to bring the most appealing dishes, probably secretly hoping that everybody would eat their food first and only eventually get around to sampling what the other aunts brought. The way you won Christmas wasn’t to get the best deal for your household, it was to give the best gift. As a result, the common table was anything but tragic; we all stuffed ourselves and there was plenty left over.

Sweat and scale. Critics will ask how that example scales up, and they’ll have a point. The general human condition was laid out thousands of years ago in Genesis: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Ever since we got kicked out of Eden, good things have required work, and work has been disagreeable. Christmas dinners are one thing, but in general nobody’s going to do the world’s work voluntarily, just so other people can have nice stuff.

Imagine, for example, being a New York gentleman shopping for a shirt around 1850 or so: The raw cotton has come from slaves working under the lash, and has been turned into thread and cloth and finally a shirt in factories where teen-age Irish immigrant girls get respiratory diseases from breathing the lint spewed out by the big machines. None of them would have put themselves through that just to give you a shirt.

And yet, as technology hands more and more of the economy’s grunt work off to machines, gift-economy niches are expanding, especially in any area that involves information or the internet. Wikipedia is a darn good encyclopedia. Linux is a top-notch operating system. They both required huge amounts of human effort to create, but they’re gifts; they exist (and are continuously updated) because people want to make themselves useful, even if they’re not paid for it. [1]

Facebook and other social-media platforms are a fascinating hybrid of economic models: Mark Zuckerberg got fabulously wealthy by putting a capitalist interface around a gift economy. Nobody (other than maybe a few of his personal friends) uses Facebook because they want to interact with Zuckerberg. We use it to see the interesting, clever, and entertaining things other people post for free. Like my aunts at Christmas, we compete with each other to provide more and better free content. The ads that have made Mark a zillionaire are the friction that we tolerate for the chance to give and receive each other’s gifts.

Goods and services. Still, Linux-programming nerds are a special case, and a real economy is more than just clever tweets or cute cat videos. What about services that require time and effort here and now? Will people provide that for free?

Yeah, they will. Look at retired people, especially professionals who did something more interesting than purely physical labor. Often they keep doing similar work on a smaller scale for nothing. Retired public school teachers teach art classes at the community center, or mentor at-risk students one-on-one. Retired business executives give free advice to small start-ups. Retired doctors and nurses help out at free neighborhood clinics, or go off to disaster areas like Haiti after the earthquake or Puerto Rico after the hurricane.

When you ask such people why they stopped working for pay, the answer usually isn’t that they wanted to do nothing; it’s that the jobs available were too exhausting and constraining. The workplace wanted too much out of them, or left too little room for the parts of the job they most enjoyed. Young people describe the same situation from the opposite side: It’s not hard for them to think of ways to use their talents to help people and make stuff, or even for them to get excited about doing so. What’s difficult is figuring out how to get paid for it.

Anyone involved with a volunteer organization knows that people will even step up to do physical labor as long as there’s not too much of it. If you require long hours of drudgery day after day, you’ll have to pay somebody. But if you want a bunch of people to paint the new school or clean out the church basement, you can usually get that done by volunteers. If not for the thought that some big corporation would be making money off of us, I could imagine people volunteering to help at UPS during the holidays, as long as we could do it on our own terms. “Hey, I’m not doing anything Tuesday. You want to go deliver some Christmas presents?”

Material goods. OK, but what about real stuff? Physical things are different from information or services.

But not as different as they used to be. 3D printing is still in its infancy, but it looks like a bridge between the information-wants-to-be-free world of the internet and the sweat-of-thy-face world of physical objects. Most of what you can make now falls under the broad heading of “cheap plastic crap“, but you only have to squint a little bit to see future printers that are more like general fabricators: They’ll use a greater variety of materials, and weave them together on smaller and smaller scales, until we have something approaching the replicators of Star Trek.

In the future, you might acquire a shirt by getting your torso scanned, choosing from a set of designs somebody posted free to the internet, and having your general-purpose home fabricator assemble the shirt molecule-by-molecule, using one or two of your worn-out shirts as raw material. No slaves. No wheezing red-haired girls. Just energy (which you might have gotten free from the wind or sun), computing power (so cheap that it’s barely worth accounting for), and gifts from other people.

It’s a stretch, but you can imagine even food working that way eventually: Get some organic molecules by throwing your grass clippings into the fabricator, and take out a beef stroganoff — or maybe at least some edible substance that is tasty and nutritious. In the meantime, people love to garden or raise chickens or tend bees. A lot of them happily give their surplus away. At the moment, that’s not nearly enough to feed the world. But such small-scale producers might come a lot closer if they didn’t need to have jobs or sell their produce for money. If you needed traditional food merely as a garnish, and got your basic nutrition elsewhere, the gift culture might provide it.

In short, some desirable things — beachfront homes, original copies of Action #1 — might always be scarce and remain part of a market economy. But it’s possible to imagine the market and gift economies switching places: Markets might become niches, as gift economies are now.

Capitalism and the surplus population. Compare the gift economy’s trends to what technology is doing to the capitalist economy. Picture a capitalist economy as a set of concentric circles: The innermost one consists of the relatively small number of people who increasingly own everything. They can afford to get whatever they want, so there has to be a next circle out, consisting of the people who produce goods and services for the rich: food and clothing, obviously, but also yacht designers, heart specialists, estate planners, physical trainers, teachers for their kids, bodyguards, and so on.

It takes a lot of people to provision a single oligarch, but if the central circle is small enough, the next one out will still be just a fraction of the general population. Those second-circle people may not be rich like the central circle, but they will need to be paid enough to buy a number of the things they want. So a third, even larger circle of people becomes necessary to produce goods and services for them.

And so on.

It would be pleasant to imagine that these circles expand forever, each new circle spreading the wealth to the next circle out, until everybody can be paid to do some useful work. But as the inner circle gets smaller and smaller, and as more and more work is done by machines, probably the process ends long before it includes everybody. So you wind up with a final outer circle of surplus population: people the economy has no real use for. It’s not that they have no skills or don’t want to work or have some moral failing that makes them unemployable. It’s just math. The people with money can get everything they want without employing everybody, so a lot of other people wind up as ballast. [2]

If you’re a bleeding-heart type, you might get sentimental about those surplus people. But put yourself in the shoes of an oligarch: The prevailing moral code won’t tolerate just letting the extra people starve, so somebody has to maintain them through either charity or taxes, even though they’re entirely useless. Imagine how you must resent all those parasites, who have no connection to your productive economy, but still want to be supported by it! [3]

Now we’re in the world of Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway.

Walkaway. The novel takes place in the late 21st and early 22nd centuries, by which time several of the trends we can see now have gone much further. Large numbers of people compete for a relatively small number of jobs, and the people who get those jobs are increasingly desperate to keep them. If you weren’t born rich, getting enough training to compete for the good jobs involves taking on debts that you may never get a good enough job to pay off. The economy has contracted around a few major economic centers, leaving large sections of the U.S. and Canada virtually empty.

Increasing numbers of people who get fed up with this situation “go walkaway”: They set out for the empty areas, hoping to find a way to make a life for themselves outside the “default culture”, which the Walkaways come to call Default. Fortuitously, the UN has responded to a variety of refugee crises over the decades by developing technologies that make it easy to establish settlements quickly: cheap wind and solar generators, small fabricators you can use to make bigger fabricators, shelter designs that don’t require skilled construction, and so on. Computing power and internet connectivity are easy to set up, and from there you can get whatever expert advice you need from professionals who find their Default jobs unfulfilling.

Walkaway settlements display that unique combination of order and anarchy you may recognize if you’ve spent any time at Burning Man or an Occupy encampment or working on an open-source project. There are elaborate social processes aiming at consensus, but if you can’t resolve a conflict you walk away from it: Take a copy of the source code and go create your own version of Linux if you want; maybe other programmers and users will come to like your vision better, or maybe not.

The Walkaway lifestyle is a mixture of hardship and abundance. The prevailing aesthetic is minimalistic, but everything you actually need is freely available. If somebody really wants your stuff, let them have it and go fabricate new stuff. If a group of assholes shows up and wants to take over the settlement, walk away and build a new settlement.

Doctorow’s most interesting insights involve the values implied by Default and Walkaway. Default is based on scarcity, and a person’s claim on scarce goods revolves around having special merit. [4] So everyone in Default is constantly striving to be special, to convince themselves that they’re special, and to prove their specialness to others. The hardest thing to adjust to in Walkaway is that you’re not special; you’re like everybody else. But that’s OK, because everybody deserves a chance to live and be happy.

Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that three things drive the plot:

  • An oligarch’s daughter goes walkaway, and he wants to reclaim and deprogram her.
  • Researchers at “Walkaway U” (a loose collection of scientists who mainly need computing power and don’t want their research controlled by oligarchs) solve the problem of simulating brains and uploading a person’s consciousness into software, thereby creating a version of immortality. Not only do the oligarchs want this technology — that would be easy, since nobody is keeping it from them — they want it to be expensive intellectual property that only they can afford to use.
  • Default culture is starting to fall apart, as more and more of the people it relies on stop believing in it. [5]

Default had tried to ignore Walkaway, and then to smear it as a dangerous place full of rejects and criminals. [6] But the plot-drivers cause Default to start seeing Walkaway as a threat.

Reflections on scarcity. One thing I take away from the novel is to be more skeptical of scarcity. Systems tend to justify themselves, so it’s not surprising that a system based on managing scarcity would concoct ways to create unnecessary scarcity. Much of our current culture, I think, revolves around making us want things that only a few people can have. [7] The vast majority that fails to acquire these things are defined as losers, and they/we deserve whatever bitter result they/we get.

Ditto for the idea that work is disagreeable. Maybe we’re making work disagreeable. Because good jobs are scarce, employers can demand a lot and treat workers badly. If, instead, we could fully engage everybody’s talents and energies, maybe the work we each needed to do wouldn’t be that demanding. We might even enjoy it.

So I’m left with a series of provocative questions: What if scarcity isn’t the fundamental principle of economics any more, or won’t be at some point in the near-to-middle future? What if God’s post-Eden curse — “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” — came with a time limit? What if our sentence is up?

[1] This blog is a gift: no subscriptions, no ads, no click-here-to-donate buttons, not even a means to collect and sell your data. It’s really this simple: I want to write it and I hope you enjoy reading it. If you want to do me a favor in return, spread my gift to your friends.

[2] Once this process gets started, a vicious cycle makes it worse: The larger the surplus population, and the more capable people it contains, the more competition there is for the available jobs. This drives down wages, and shrinks all the circles further. For example: The less the second circle gets paid, the fewer goods and services it can command. Consequently, the third circle doesn’t have to be as big. And so on.

[3] In case you’re struggling to put words around the flaw in this way of thinking, I already did: The mistake is the assumption that the oligarchs own the world, and that a baby born into poverty has no claim on either the natural productivity of the planet or the human heritage that created technological society. The oligarchs assume they are the sole rightful heirs both of the Creator and of all previous generations of inventors.

[4] Characters in the novel dispose of the “meritocracy” view of capitalist society very quickly: The view is based on circular logic, because “merit” is defined by whatever the system rewards. So Donald Trump is on top because he has merit, but the only observable evidence of his merit is the fact that he’s on top.

[5] The collapse of Soviet Communism is probably a model here. The Soviet system maintained the appearance of vast power right up to the last minute. When people respect you mainly for your power, the first signs of weakness quickly snowball.

[6] Recall the mainstream reaction to Occupy Wall Street.

[7] The archetypal example of this is the the Prize in Highlander: “In the end there can be only one.” Reality TV tells us this story over and over: The Bachelor will pick only one woman. Only one performer will become the next American Idol. And so on.

Posted in Articles, The Sifted Bookshelf | Tagged , | Comments (21)

The Monday Morning Teaser

January 8, 2018 – 6:58 am

So I appear to have gotten away with taking Christmas and New Year’s off. For two weeks, the breakneck speed of news during the Trump Era slowed down. For example, Trump did not fire Robert Mueller, in spite of all the rumors predicting that he would as soon as Congress started its holiday break.

Then after New Year’s, it all started up again. Tuesday, in a weirdly hermaphroditic hybrid of implicit sexual imagery, Trump taunted Kim Jong Un by tweeting about the size and functionality of his nuclear button. Wednesday, the first excerpts of Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury hit the internet. The full book came out Friday, and since then the whole administration has been consumed by the need to reassure Trump’s base that in fact they don’t all secretly believe that Trump is a moron and they aren’t all constantly working to corral him as if he were a hyperactive child. (Trump himself announced that he is in fact a “stable genius”, which is something that I can’t imagine an actually stable genius ever saying. The very statement is evidence against itself.)

New evidence that Trump obstructed justice came out, the founders of Fusion GPS shot down the Republican conspiracy theories about the Steele dossier (while daring Senator Grassley to release their sworn testimony to the Judiciary Committee; he didn’t, and instead sent a letter to the Justice Department recommending that they investigate Steele for possible crimes), and congressional Republicans doubled down on the strategy of undermining all the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, Congress is on the clock to avoid a bunch of self-inflicted disasters, like a government shutdown or the deportation of the Dreamers.

So there’s all that to cover, but I’m going to leave it (and a few other things) for the weekly summary. The featured post steps back to take a longer view. Over the break, I read Cory Doctorow’s recent novel Walkway, which envisions a future economy based on giving rather than competing for scarce resources. That sounds crazy, but little niches of the current economy are already based on gifts, and technological trends make their expansion sound somewhat less crazy. As we settle in for the capitalism/socialism death match, it’s worth remembering that those aren’t the only two possibilities.

So “Visions of a Future Gift Economy” should post around 8 EST. I’m less sure about the scheduling of the weekly summary, but I think it will be out before 11.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

Profit and Loss

December 18, 2017 – 11:56 am

The next new posts will appear on January 8.

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question.

– David Brooks, “The GOP is Rotting” 12-7-2017

This week’s featured post is “Should We Care What Happens to the GOP’s Soul?”

Through no doing of my own, it turns out that the next two Mondays are Christmas and New Years. I’ve interpreted that as a sign from the Calendar Gods that I should take a two-week break (something I haven’t done in years). I reserve the right, though, to put out a special edition if something happens that I can’t stop myself from commenting on.

This week everybody was talking about Roy Moore’s defeat

When Trump appointed Jeff Sessions attorney general, I don’t think anybody at the RNC was worried about hanging on to his Alabama Senate seat, and I doubt anybody at the DNC imagined waging anything more than a nuisance campaign. And yet, here we are: Doug Jones is going to be the next senator from Alabama, the first Democrat since Richard Shelby won in 1992 and then switched parties.

Pundits and operatives of all persuasions are trying to discern the lessons of the Jones/Moore race. To a certain extent that’s foolish, because so much of this race isn’t repeatable. I mean, wasn’t Jones clever to run against a molester of 14-year-olds who is nostalgic about slavery? Democrats should try that nationwide!

Still, there is at least one thing worth noting: Always field a candidate, because you never know what might happen. Sessions ran unopposed in 2014. (A write-in candidate spent $4500 and got less than 3% of the vote.) If no Democrat had gotten onto the ballot this time, Moore would have won no matter what voters found out about him.

A second lesson is just an extension of the first: Run hard, even if victory seems unlikely. That big turnout in the black community didn’t just happen. A combination of star power (Cory Booker, NBA great Charles Barkley, and a robocall from President Obama) and hard work by many, many volunteers made the difference.

One mistake I’m seeing in the Democratic discussion is the tendency to interpret Jones’ victory in light of the interminable Bernie/Hillary debate. It shows the importance of turning out the Democratic base, say Bernie folks, while Hillaryites note the importance of fielding a moderate candidate who didn’t rile up Republican partisanship.

In my mind, there is still a debate to be had about the 2018 campaign, but it’s not primarily a progressive/pragmatic debate. It’s a national/local debate. Should Democrats nationalize the 2018 campaign around progressive proposals like single-payer healthcare and a $15 minimum wage? Or should each candidate target his own state and district with a message that’s in the local mainstream?

In a special election, going local is the obvious choice, which is what Jones did. (I know some progressives believe their message would sell in a red state like Alabama, but I’m still waiting to see an example.) But whether 2018 should be a bunch of local elections or a national one like 1994’s Contract With America is still debatable.

This, however, is just foolish: Because Jones hasn’t endorsed single-payer healthcare or a $15 minimum wage or free college, he’s “a terrible candidate”.

Come election day, Alabamians will have the sacred honor of participating in the democratic process by voting for either a child rapist or a weak-kneed white blob in a suit to go work on Capitol Hill for some unknown corporate donor. Personally, I can’t say that I will be taking part.

Thank God 671K Alabama voters didn’t agree.

Every election asks voters a question. It may not be the question you wanted to be asked, but it’s the only question you’re going to get in that cycle. Answer it.

Naturally, Jones’ victory has produced conspiracy theories about out-of-state ringers being bused in. (It was the same story last year in New Hampshire, where both Clinton and Maggie Hassan won narrow victories.) John Rogers, co-creator of the thieves-working-for-the-greater-good TV show Leverage, addressed the theory, because “very few things piss me off like sloppy heist plotting”.

He points out all the logistics that would be required to engineer a 20,000-vote upset, when no one could be sure a week ahead of time that the election would even be that close. Somebody, he observes, would have to recruit tens of thousands of ringers, rent hundreds of buses (with drivers) to transport them, provide them with registered identities to claim  and ID to verify those identities (all of which the conspiracy had in reserve just in case the GOP nominated somebody beatable like Moore), and then drive them to polling places in a state with a hostile Secretary of State — all with nobody noticing.

Nobody leaks. Nobody tells a friend. Not a single slip-up. That is some fucking OPSEC.

Similar points were made in response to the 2016 New Hampshire conspiracy theory:

“Who drove the buses?” asked William Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state, who does not believe the voter fraud theories. “Who owns the buses? Where did the buses leave from? Who paid to rent the buses? You give us some specifics and we’ll investigate it.”

That rational critique didn’t dissuade anybody from trotting the theory out again in Alabama, and I’m sure it will keep resurfacing every time a Democrat wins a close election.

BTW: The theory specifically says that black people were bused in to cast illegal votes; that explains the unusually high black turnout. Apparently it doesn’t make sense to Republicans that blacks might vote in large numbers against a candidate who expresses nostalgia for the days of slavery.

and tax reform

Thursday, it briefly looked like the package might be in trouble. But Friday, both Marco Rubio and Bob Corker announced they would vote for it, so it looks likely to pass this week. Corker’s support is particularly dismaying. He didn’t vote for the tax reform package the first time around in the Senate because (by every serious analysis) it would increase the national debt by more than $1 trillion dollars. Nothing has changed to fix that, but Corker appears to have decided that it just doesn’t matter; his lifetime as a deficit hawk was a lie.

Of course, it is only a matter of time before Republicans declare the debt to be an existential crisis again, and demand cuts in safety-net programs to deal with it. Paul Ryan is already talking about it.

Assuming this tax bill passes, I hope Democrats treat it the way Republicans have treated ObamaCare: It has to be repealed, no matter how long it takes.

The combination of tax reform and Doug Jones gives 2018 a particularly clear storyline. Republicans are unlikely to pass any other major legislation, so they will go into the midterm elections exactly one achievement: a tax bill that borrows a bunch of money to benefit the rich.

Remember how this was supposed to simplify taxes to the point where you could just send the IRS a postcard rather than fill out a complicated return? Well, never mind. That didn’t happen.

One loophole inserted at the last minute will apparently save a lot of money for Trump, Jared Kushner, and a number of Republican senators.

and attacks on the Mueller investigation

It continues to be an open question whether Trump will allow himself to be investigated, and whether congressional Republicans will back him if he decides to place himself above the law.

California Congresswoman Jackie Speier told local PBS station KQED:

I believe the President wants all of this shut down. The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on Dec. 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller.

White House lawyer Ty Cobb denied the rumor (though I’ve often suspected that Trump doesn’t tell everything). It’s hard to tell if this is a somebody-slipped-me-inside-information rumor, or a that’s-what-I’d-do-if-I-were-wannabee-tyrant rumor.

In recent weeks, right-wing media has ramped up a campaign to undermine public trust in the Mueller investigation, pointing to anti-Trump private opinions of some investigators as evidence of professional bias. Republicans in Congress have fanned these flames, most notably in their questioning of Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the person who actually could fire Mueller, but sees no cause to. Ben Wittes at the Lawfare Blog comments:

Most importantly, there is no serious suggestion that any step taken by Mueller’s shop is unjustified. The Mueller investigation will ultimately be measured by its work product, not by the text messages or campaign contributions of its staffers from before the investigation even existed.

The professionalism of the Mueller probe is a stark contrast with the House investigation of Hillary Clinton, which leaked like a sieve, often inducing news organizations to publish damaging stories about Clinton that had to be walked back once more complete information became available. Going back a bit further, the Starr investigation of President Bill Clinton was transparently partisan, writing up its findings in the most salacious way possible, and delaying its exoneration of Clinton’s Whitewater dealings until after a midterm election.

Trump himself has been running down the FBI, the Justice Department, and virtually the entire federal law enforcement system. His claims put him at odds with his own appointees, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

A bunch of the Republican criticisms of the FBI go back to the Clinton email investigation. It’s part of their dogma that Hillary did something horribly wrong, so the fact that the FBI didn’t find it brings the whole organization into suspicion, rather than causing Republicans to doubt their conspiracy theory.

Anybody who kept a close eye on the publicly available information could have predicted that Clinton wouldn’t be charged with anything, as I did in June, 2016.

Saturday, Trump lawyers charged that Mueller had illegally gotten thousands of the emails of the Trump transition team. The claim looks baseless. In particular, the point of raising the charge publicly seems to be to get political mileage out of a claim that won’t fly in court. The WaPo quotes a GWU law professor:

if Trump’s team had a valid legal claim, there is a standard avenue to pursue — they would file a sealed motion to the judge supervising the grand jury and ask the judge to rule the emails were improperly seized and provide a remedy, like requiring Mueller’s team to return the emails or excluding their use in the investigation.

“You go to the judge and complain,” he said. “You don’t issue a press release or go to Congress. It appears from the outside that this is part of a pattern of trying to undermine Mueller’s investigation.”

All along during the Russia investigation, the most compelling reason to think Trump and his people did something wrong has been their own behavior. They have consistently lied about their contacts with Russians, and now, as Mueller’s investigation begins to close in on them, they try to destroy public trust in it.

and net neutrality

The FCC made it official: Net neutrality is dead. Fred Benenson paints a clear picture of what that will mean by 2020:

Negotiating internet access will feel a lot like negotiating your television cable or cellphone bill. You’ll be forced to untangle various packages relating to different sites and services you might use, pay for ISP-branded content you probably don’t care about, and get that sinking feeling at the beginning of every month that, one way or another, you’re overpaying.

Instead of simply worrying about how much internet you use or how fast you need it to be, you’re going to have to worry about what kind of internet you use. Premium sites like Netflix and YouTube will likely cost more, you’ll be nickel-and-dimed for the use of free apps like iMessage and FaceTime, and unfettered access to the full internet will be more expensive.

Start-ups, facing even higher barriers of entry, will be forced to spend money partnering with telecom companies. Fewer of them will survive. And the start-ups that do survive will spend an unnecessarily high amount of their income paying to survive. This is great news for established companies like Facebook and Google that will always be able to afford internet tolls. They will cement their already dominant position against newer but better sites and services.

and you also might be interested in …

The Washington Post tells a very disturbing story of Trump’s refusal to listen to the intelligence services’ evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, or the possibility that future elections will be undermined.

The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.

It sounds like parody, but it isn’t: The Trump administration is telling the CDC what words to avoid in its budget requests: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and science-based.

Whatever conservatives fantasize that liberals are doing, it seems, they will do in reality when they get power. This, for example, really is an example of political correctness trumping freedom of speech and thought.

An important article by Amy Sullivan in the NYT about “Fox Evangelicals” — people for whom “Evangelical” is a tribal identity rather than a theology.

She quotes a study by Lifeway Research, comparing the number of people who call themselves Evangelicals to the number who hold four theological beliefs commonly thought to define Evangelicalism: the authority of the Bible, importance of evangelism, Jesus’ death as payment for sin, and Jesus as the only path to salvation. Only about half of self-identified Evangelicals strongly agreed with all four.

One significant difference between Fox and Biblical Evangelicalism is the attitude toward fear. Fox Evangelicals are driven by fear of outsiders, and see a corresponding need for weapons. The Bible, by contrast, calls for welcoming the stranger and says to “Be not afraid.”

That disconnect underscores the challenge many pastors face in trying to shepherd congregants who are increasingly alienated from traditional Gospel teachings. “A pastor has about 30 to 40 minutes each week to teach about Scripture,” said Jonathan Martin, an Oklahoma pastor and popular evangelical writer. “They’ve been exposed to Fox News potentially three to four hours a day.”

Martin points to a key difference between second-generation leaders like Franklin Graham and Jerry Fallwell Jr. and their famous fathers.

There was a lot I didn’t agree with him on, but I’m confident that it was important to [Jerry Falwell] Senior that he grounded his beliefs in Scripture. Now the Bible’s increasingly irrelevant. It’s just “us versus them.”

My comment: To the extent that Evangelicalism has become an identity masquerading as a religion, it will dovetail with fascism, which is an identity masquerading as an ideology. In both cases, beliefs are merely instrumental; the important thing is that my people stay on top.

I passed through Richmond this week, and saw the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. When you see them close up, the argument that this is about “history” is hard to swallow. They’re there to celebrate the defenders of slavery. I mean, where’s the General Grant statue? He reclaimed Richmond for the United States. Isn’t that history?

and let’s close with something almost familiar

Stephen Colbert inserts himself into Silence of the Lambs.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (13)

Should We Care What Happens to the GOP’s Soul?

December 18, 2017 – 9:20 am

A healthy democracy needs a reality-based conservative party. We haven’t had one for a very long time.

For more than a year, thoughtful Republicans have been posting warnings about the state of their party’s soul. A few days before the recent Alabama Senate election, David Brooks was particularly eloquent:

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto.

The question came up during the 2016 Republican primaries, when Trump began pulling away from the crowded field, in spite of — or maybe because of — his blatant racism, sexism, xenophobia, and disregard for truth. It came up again at the Convention, when Ted Cruz briefly took a principled stand before eventually slinking back into line. Evan McMullin’s and Gary Johnson’s third-party campaigns attempted to appeal to a more upright form of conservatism, and managed to shave off a few votes here and there, but had little effect on the election’s outcome.

And then, in the campaign’s final month, the Access Hollywood video came out; it showed the inheritor of the mantle of Lincoln bragging about sexual assault and infidelity. More than a dozen women soon came forward to give the specifics of the assaults Trump had only alluded to. Briefly, party stalwarts like Paul Ryan tried to distance themselves from Trump, without actually denouncing him. Behind the scenes, religious-right heartthrob Mike Pence offered himself as a last-minute alternative. But Trump held firm: Both he himself and the women who accused him had been lying. (“Locker room talk“, he called it — an innocent variety of fib similar to fishermen’s stories.) In spite of his own words, no pussies had actually been grabbed.

Across the country, Republicans — especially the white Evangelical Christians who had denounced Bill Clinton with such vigor two decades before — stood firm behind their man. Despite losing the popular vote by  larger margin than any victor in U.S. history, Donald Trump was President of the United States.

But even that was just the beginning, as Brooks acknowledged.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. … That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

And so congressional Republicans completed the theft of a Supreme Court seat by approving Neil Gorsuch. They went along with Trump’s appointment of cabinet secretaries who were either unqualified — like Rick Perry (who didn’t even know what the Energy Department does), Ben Carson (whose main qualification to run HUD seemed to be his race), and Betsy DeVos — or conflicted, like Putin-approved Rex Tillerson, whose company (Exxon) stood to profit massively from his intention to relax sanctions on Russia. They showed no interest in Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest and lack of transparency, slow-rolled both the House and Senate investigations into the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, and have increasingly cooperated with Trump’s craven effort to discredit the Mueller investigation. Brooks comments:

Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

But ultimately, what shall it profit them?

Roy Moore. Fundamentally, there are two kinds of moral codes. One insists that you do the right thing, but the other has a lesser demand: Before you do the wrong thing, you have to agonize about it. Again and again, Republicans have demonstrated the second kind of morality.

I had expected the pattern to play out once again with regard to Roy Moore. Faced with a financially corrupt pedophile who has no respect for the rule of law and pines for the days of slavery, both national and Alabama Republicans would agonize greatly, but ultimately they would come through for their party. Alabamans would elect him and the Senate would seat him.

I was wrong, sort of. Apparently, some Republicans finally reached their limit with Roy Moore. Not many, but just enough that a big turnout in the black community could push Doug Jones over the top: According to the exit polls, Moore got 91% of the Republican vote and 80% of white born-again Christians. Statewide, he lost by a mere 21K votes out of a little more than 1.3 million. 649K Alabamans voted for him.

Turning point? So it’s possible that future historians will look back on the Moore debacle as a turning point, when Republicans began to reclaim their party’s soul, as inside-the-tent critics like Charlie Sykes and Jeff Flake have been pleading for them to do.

Or maybe not. Maybe there’s no soul to go back to, or if there is, it’s been lost much longer than the GOP’s internal critics realize. As Ezra Klein observed, the problem didn’t start with Trump and Moore:

It is tempting to split today’s Republican Party into factions, to see Trump as a bizarre aberration, to see his voters as alienated and marginal, to see Roy Moore as an inexplicably Alabaman phenomenon, and to frame establishment Republicans as fundamentally normal politicians suffering through an abnormal moment. This is wrong.

Trump could flourish in the Republican Party precisely because “normal” Republicans like McConnell and Ryan spent years dismissing the facts they didn’t like, undermining the institutions and information sources that contradicted them, indulging the conspiracies and falsehoods they found convenient.

No reputable economic analysis predicts that the cuts in the current tax reform proposal will pay for themselves through growth, but virtually all Republicans voting for the bill say otherwise. They also say that global warming isn’t happening, or that fossil fuels can’t be blamed for it, or that nothing can be done about it anyway. They blame poverty on the poor’s lack of motivation, promote the myth of voter fraud, and insist that guns have nothing to do with mass killings. And racism? What racism? We don’t see any racism.

No major faction in today’s GOP is taking a firm stand on the side of reality, or proposing realistic conservative solutions to problems that actually exist. The intra-party debate is entirely about which fantasies and falsehoods they will run on. In such an environment, best and most brazen liar — Trump, in this case — always wins.

Should we care? For a liberal Democrat like myself, it can be tempting to take a pass-the-popcorn attitude when a kook like Moore wages a primary battle against a swamp creature like Luther Strange, or Mitch McConnell faces a Bannonite revolt.

Maybe, from our point of view, crazier is better. Doug Jones probably wouldn’t have beaten Strange, no matter how corrupt the deal that put him in the Senate. Claire McCaskill might have lost to someone saner than Todd Legitimate-Rape Akin. Harry Reid might have gone down, had the Nevada GOP not gone off the deep end with Sharron Second-Amendment-Remedies Angle. And who knows? An establishment figure like John Kasich or Marco Rubio might have beaten Clinton cleanly, without the distortions of the Electoral College or James Comey or Russia.

In any particular election, Democrats probably do better against off-the-wall crazy candidates than against mainstream Republicans. And yet, after each such race, the national conversation seems a little crazier. Even in defeat, I’ve come to believe, such candidates pollute our political discourse. After Roy Moore’s loss, will it be easier or harder for Republicans to nominate the next Roy Moore, and maybe even to elect him? I suspect the answer is easier. Crazy ideas seem less crazy the second and third and fourth times you’re asked to take them seriously.

That’s why lately, in spite of the prospects in this election or that one, I’ve been rooting for Republicans to get their act together. The Republic needs a reality-based conservative party, and we haven’t had one for a very long time.

Disraeli or Hitler? For historical perspective, it’s worth looking at the recent book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy by Daniel Ziblatt. In it, Ziblatt examines the very different paths that various European countries took towards democracy between 1848 and the 1950s. Some nations evolved gradually but steadily, with an ever-larger electorate and the ever-increasing power of elected officials over aristocrats and generals. But other countries spent that century ping-ponging from revolution to counter-revolution and back again.

What was the difference? All the countries went through economic ups and downs. All of them experienced the internal tensions of capitalists out-pacing landed elites, and labor organizing itself against capital. All of them endured foreign-policy disasters, deaths of important leaders, and corruption scandals. Why was the path to democracy so much rockier in Portugal or France than in Sweden or the Netherlands? And why, for that matter, has the Arab Spring turned out so much better in Tunisia than in Egypt?

The book retells the political history of Europe during that key century to argue for a counter-intuitive thesis: The difference between the easy-path countries and the zig-zag countries was whether or not the old-regime aristocrats and rising capitalists organized themselves into a politically viable conservative party. Where they did, that party might win or lose as circumstances changed. But where they didn’t, eventually the privileged classes would try to protect their interests through extra-constitutional means.

After a wide-ranging defense of his thesis, Ziblatt then zeroes in on two cases to examine in detail: Britain and Germany.

The aristocratic dilemma and its obvious-in-retrospect solution. By definition, an aristocracy is a small class that wields a lot of power. By its nature, it will fear “mob rule” and try to block or delay democratic evolution. But what happens when it can’t avoid yielding power to democratic institutions like a Parliament chosen by a broad-based electorate? Is its goose cooked, or will it find some acceptable (to itself) way to change with the times?

In every country that transitioned to democracy, some kind of conservative political party developed to represent upper-class interests. And that worked fine as long as the electorate was only a little bit larger than the aristocracy itself. The various upper-class and professional-class people who owed loyalty to a local lord would vote that lord (or his chosen representative) into Parliament. But the continuing pressure for democracy resulted in ever-larger expansions of the electorate, each of which required the conservative party to form a larger coalition if it hoped to stay viable.

First they welcomed in the capitalists, but there aren’t very many of them either. Then respectable shop-keepers, small farmers who owned their land, and so on. But eventually working-class people got the vote and became the majority, which led to a dilemma: How do you convince factory workers to vote to preserve upper-class privileges?

The obvious-in-retrospect answer, which you can see very clearly in the development of the British Tories, and which still echoes in America’s religious right today, is to ally with the established church in a coalition to preserve “traditional values”. The conservative party, then, will rally around symbols of patriotism and faith, make a God-and-Country pitch, and hope to appeal to enough workers to keep itself competitive. [1]

Particularly as workers move into the middle class, the conservative party can make a persuasive argument to defend the status quo: If you want to preserve what you have, help everybody else (including the rich) preserve what they have.

How conservative parties fail. In the zig-zag countries, though, the conservative parties failed to make this transition. Rather than put forward a broad traditional-values-and-the-status-quo appeal, they stayed more insular, and relied instead on the unfair advantages their legacy position gave them (like the ability to rig elections or block reform through an anti-democratic upper house). Landed aristocrats didn’t play well with industrialists, and churches developed their own parties. [2] Rather than accept democracy gracefully, the German Conservative Party (DKP) was known to be “more monarchist than the Kaiser”.

What’s fascinating in Ziblatt’s narrative is that he makes heroes out of a class we often think of as villains: the professional politicians and party organizers. Those larger coalitions came about precisely in the countries where a conservative party establishment developed organizational power that allowed it to keep the grass-roots forces (like anti-Irish or anti-Jewish racism) in check, and to resist being dominated by single-issue pressure groups and individual donors. But in Germany, a weak party establishment at the DKP (and its Weimar successor, the DNVP, German National People’s Party) was unable to keep candidates focused on “serious” issues like economics and foreign policy when anti-Semitism could raise more energy, particularly in the rural areas.

The decision that ultimately proved suicidal for the DNVP, though, was to let its own hold on reality slip and instead embrace a comforting popular mythology: Dolchstosslegende,  the theory that Germany only lost World War I because its valiant army was stabbed in the back by traitors on the home front, who were often portrayed as Jewish.

Once the competition shifted to who could tell the most compelling and energizing myth, Germany’s aristocrats and conservative intellectuals were lost. They had hoped to harness popular grass-roots mythology and prejudices against Weimar’s Social Democrats and Communists. But Hitler and his Nazis were much better equipped for that job. What DNVP politicians indulged in as a vice, Hitler saw as a virtue. Freed to tell whatever story he and his public wanted to hear, he was far more convincing.

Sunrise, sunset. Ziblatt is focused on why democracy might fail to take hold in a country, not how it might decay, so he says nothing about contemporary America. But I find the parallels to Trump and Trumpism unavoidable: The conservative role that Ziblatt sees as necessary for a healthy democracy needs a sane and sensible conservative party to fill it. We don’t have one.

In any democracy, some people are going to believe that change is happening too fast, and that old ways that have worked well enough for a long time should not be cast aside lightly. Some sizeable slice of the electorate is going to feel that the reality of what they are being asked to give up is more valuable than the gains they are being promised. Some voters will be skeptical of government programs, or will want to use the power of government to keep what they have rather than right ancient wrongs that seem intractable anyway. Others will grow tired of the governing coalition, whatever it is, and want a change of faces, but not a revolution.

Those people need a place to go, a party that represents them without raising their deepest fears and exploiting their darkest passions. The Republican Party, the party of people like Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford, used to be such a place.  It no longer is.

Two generations of leaders — from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, through the two Presidents Bush, and up to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan — thought they could harness the electorate’s darker, more virulent impulses without being tainted by them. During elections, they could dog-whistle to racists, delegitimize journalism and science, and wink at myths from the Trilateral Commission to global-warming-is-a-hoax to Birtherism — and then govern like rational men.

They never saw Trump coming. The vices they indulged in during campaign season are the virtues he practices every day. He leads the rabble they merely exploited, and glories in the adulation of those they were ashamed to be seen with.

Germany only made it to a stable democracy after it crashed and burned; and for decades democracy only took hold in the part occupied by the armies of foreign democracies. Spain, Portugal, France, and Greece had to endure periods of autocracy, sometimes multiple periods. I don’t know any examples of corrupted conservative parties that reformed themselves without disaster.

I may not be optimistic, but still I have to hope that our Republicans can be the first. If they’re going to reform, though, they need to understand where they are: A simple return to the pre-Trump status quo will just lead to another Trump. They need to go back much further. A less virulent strain of mythology won’t do the trick. For the sake of America, the party needs to return to solid standards of truth and fact. It needs to confront real issues rather than manufactured ones, and propose plausible conservative solutions.

[1] Somehow, I had let What’s the Matter With Kansas? convince me that this kind of coalition was unusual.

[2] One disadvantage Germany had was its more-nearly-even Catholic/Protestant split. British Tories could ally with “the Church”; German conservatives had to choose one church or the other.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 18, 2017 – 7:54 am

For the last few weeks, I’d been treating Roy Moore’s victory as a done deal. Alabama’s mainstream Republicans, I was sure, would bemoan their fate and agonize about their choice, but in the end they’d do what Republicans always do and vote Republican, no matter how reprehensible Moore was. And mostly they did, but there were just enough defectors that a big turnout of black voters could push Doug Jones over the top.

I’m using that upset as a current-events hook for an article I’ve been working on for a while: a discussion of Daniel Ziblatt’s book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. Ziblatt is a historian and his book is about the evolution of democracy in Europe from 1848-1950, but it’s hard not to make the connection to the Trump era in America. Ziblatt claims that countries that developed a healthy conservative party (like Britain) had a smooth evolution towards democracy, while countries without such a party zig-zagged from revolution to counter-revolution (like Germany).

Ziblatt’s focus is the rise of democracy, but it’s an obvious extension to wonder about its decline: We have a very unhealthy conservative party, one that has come unmoored from its traditional stances. The party leadership can’t stand up to outside forces (i.e., big donors and pressure groups like the NRA), while its base has drifted towards being a personality cult.

It’s tempting for Democrats to react with glee when the GOP nominates beatable candidates like Roy Moore, but it’s also an ominous development: Democracy needs a healthy conservative party, and America has a sick one. I’ll examine that idea in more detail in “Should We Care What Happens to the GOP’s Soul?” That should be out around 9 EST.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover: not just the nitty-gritty of the Jones/Moore results, but also tax reform, the attacks against the Mueller investigation, the end of net neutrality, seven words Trump won’t let the CDC use, and more. It will be out later than usual, maybe not until after noon.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (2)

Sad Faces

December 11, 2017 – 10:56 am

As young girls, we feel like maybe now is a good time to just throw something out there. See if it sticks. A PSA to all grown men on the face of the Earth: We do not want to have sex with you. … If you remember where you were on 9/11, you’re too old for us. Did just thinking about that make you feel old? That’s because you’re old. You’re all a thousand to us. Your faces make us sad.

– Jessica M. Goldstein “Hi, It’s Us, All the 14-year-old Girls in America”
[Goldstein isn’t actually 14, but I suspect she channels 14-year-olds pretty well]

There is no featured post this week.

If you’ve ever wondered what I talk about at churches, here’s a video of a talk I gave on “Foundational Faith and Visionary Faith” at First Parish in Bedford, MA in November. If you want to skip the hymns and other churchy stuff, start around the 16 minute mark for the readings, and then go to 25:55 for the sermon. (A week before, I did roughly the same talk at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, IL. They posted the text.)

This week everybody was talking about men resigning from Congress

Democrats Al Franken and John Conyers resigned from Congress after accusations of sexual misconduct. Republican Trent Franks resigned for a somewhat stranger reason, which I’ll discuss below. Donald Trump remains in office in spite of evidence far more compelling than anything we’ve seen against Franken. Blake Farenthold stays in Congress pending an investigation of why taxpayers spent $84K to settle a sexual harassment claim against him, and Roy Moore seems likely to win a seat in the Senate tomorrow, even though evidence is piling up against his denials of sexual misconduct.

Franks’ (not Franken’s) case appears to be The Handmaid’s Tale playing out in real life. Franks and his wife have failed to conceive, and so (according to AP), Franks offered a female staffer $5 million to be a surrogate mother. That seems a bit excessive, because Surrogacy America says:

Typically a surrogate mother’s fee will range from $35,000 to $40,000 plus expenses, depending on experience.

Why the difference? Politico suggests an answer:

The sources said Franks approached two female staffers about acting as a potential surrogate for him and his wife, who has struggled with fertility issues for years. But the aides were concerned that Franks was asking to have sexual relations with them. It was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks opposes abortion rights as well as procedures that discard embryos.

Allow me to read between the lines: The typical in vitro process involves fertilizing multiple ova in a laboratory, letting the embryos develop a little, and then discarding all but the most viable ones. BioEdge reports:

It appears that of every 100 eggs fertilised in an IVF laboratory, only 5 will become live births. In other words, 95% of all IVF embryos are discarded, perish in the Petri dish or die in the womb.

That 95% slaughter of what the pro-life movement calls “unborn babies” must be a horror to someone like Franks, who founded the Arizona Family Research Institute. Hence the temptation to go the way of Abraham and Jacob, who fathered children on female servants.

Dahlia Lithwick writes a thoughtful essay on an issue I’m still struggling with: We’re at a moment in public discourse where no standards of purity will protect liberals from charges of hypocrisy, because conservatives make those charges in bad faith to create false equivalence.

For example, now that Franken and Conyers have resigned, will Republicans acknowledge that Democrats are serious about this issue, and decide that they need to get serious too to protect their public image? Will they start demanding explanations from Moore and Trump, or taking action against them?

Don’t be silly. Of course not. New examples of liberal “hypocrisy” will be found, and will become new subjects for the whataboutism that derails any criticism of conservatives’ vanishing moral standards.

Who knows why the GOP has lost its last ethical moorings? But this is a perfectly transactional moment in governance, and what we get in exchange for being good and moral right now is nothing. I’m not saying we should hit pause on #MeToo, or direct any less fury at sexual predators in their every manifestation. But we should understand that while we know that our good faith and reasonableness are virtues, we currently live in a world where it’s also a handicap.

In an ideal Senate, Al Franken would probably have to leave. But sacrificing Franken won’t give us an ideal Senate, especially once Republicans seat Roy Moore — as they undoubtedly will, despite occasional rumblings to the contrary.

Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder has delayed the election to replace Conyers until August, which effectively keeps a Democratic district unrepresented for nearly a year. What if, in the meantime, some anti-woman measure passes the House by one vote?

What if that’s not the end of the story? What if dozens of Congressmen are accused in the next few months, with the precedent that Democrats resign immediately and Republicans hang on as long as they can (except for truly bizarre cases like Franks)? What then happens in Congress? It’s hard to find the right balance between idealism and pragmatism.

Moore’s sexual issues are only one of many reasons why he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Senate. In September, the LA Times reported on a Moore rally:

In response to a question from one of the only African Americans in the audience — who asked when Moore thought America was last “great” — Moore acknowledged the nation’s history of racial divisions, but said: “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another…. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”

It’s hard to express just how horrible this is. Some of those “strong families” of the slavery era consisted of women and the children they conceived after being raped by their masters. Other families were broken up when its members were sold to new masters hundreds of miles apart.

BuzzFeed’s Grace Wyler, covering Trump’s pro-Moore rally just outside Alabama:”This sort of sums up the general feeling on sexual harassment allegations at the Pensacola Bay Center tonight.”

In case you can’t make it out, the red t-shirts have a picture of Trump on the back. The front is a parody of the Nike Michael Jordan logo, with the silhouette of Trump reaching for a pussy cat and the Nike “Just do it” slogan replaced by “Just grab it”.

and the wedding cake case

I’ve already explained why the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is an easy call under the law: The same-sex couple should win and the baker should lose, because the baker refused to consider making them the exact same cake he would make for an opposite-sex couple. That makes it a pure discrimination case; all the free-speech and free-exercise-of-religion arguments are irrelevant. This is how all the lower courts have ruled.

But that simple clarity doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court will see it that way, because the Hobby Lobby case was also an easy call under the law: The owners had a legal responsibility to offer health insurance, and what the employees chose to do with their insurance was none of the owners’ business. So the owners’ religious beliefs about birth control were irrelevant.

Hobby Lobby’s owners won anyway. The problem is that the Court’s conservative bloc is not controlled by the law. Contrary to the Constitution, it sees no problem in granting special rights to people who hold popular Christian beliefs. That’s what Hobby Lobby was really about, and what this case is about too.

If the baker’s religious convictions caused him to refuse service to blacks or Jews, we wouldn’t be having this conversation — not because nobody’s religion would go that way, but because those views would be unpopular, even among most Christians. If he were a religious pacifist whose convictions required him to refuse service to members of the military, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Similarly, if Hobby Lobby had been a Hindu business trying to stop its employees from eating meat rather than using birth control, that case would have come out differently.

But the Supreme Court may choose to treat religious bias against gays as if it were a completely different animal from religious bias against blacks, just as it regards abortion and birth control as fundamentally more serious moral issues than pacifism or vegetarianism. That’s because the conservative justices believe that Catholics and popular types of conservative Protestants should have special rights; the law should give their issues a level of respect that the issues of Quakers or Hindus (or religious white supremacists) don’t deserve.

Like so many other controversial cases, this one is likely to come down to Justice Kennedy’s opinion. As long-time readers know, I don’t have a lot of respect for Kennedy as a judge. Even though he has often decided cases the way I want, he writes mushy opinions that (while they may be full of quotable rhetoric) consistently fail to define clear principles that lower courts can apply to new cases. (Justice Roberts sometimes does the same thing, as in his Voting Rights decision a few years ago. But I suspect him of conscious obfuscation rather than mushy thinking.)

That’s what I expect here, with the majority opinion being written by Kennedy if the gay couple wins or by Roberts or Alito if the baker wins. (Gorsuch and Thomas will file principled but off-the-wall opinions in the baker’s favor. Ginsburg will analyze the case clearly and correctly.) Whatever the decision, it will not illuminate the intersection of anti-discrimination laws, religious freedom, and freedom of speech. This murky outcome will inspire more people to file lawsuits, and, finding no clear guidance in Masterpiece Cakeshop, lower-court judges will decide those future cases in divergent ways. So the underlying issues will keep coming back to the Supreme Court for resolution.

In my view, it’s inaccurate to attribute the baker’s refusal to his “Christian beliefs”.

Traditional forms of bigotry and the practices that maintain them are often attributed to a traditional religion, even if they are purely cultural practices tangential to the religion. One example is the practice of “honor killings”, in which families kill daughters who “dishonor” the family by having sexual relations with men the families won’t accept as husbands. These killings are often attributed to Islam, both by Muslims who kill their daughters and by outsiders who cite this practice as evidence of Islam’s moral backwardness.

In fact, honor killings are not mandated by Islam, and they happen predominantly in regions of the world where such killings were part of the culture before Islam. So the cause-and-effect works backwards from the way most people think: It’s not that families kill their daughters because of Islam; rather, Muslims who believe in honor killings for cultural reasons interpret Islam in a way that justifies them.

Something similar is happening with Christianity and same-sex marriage. There are a small number of Bible verses that can be interpreted to condemn same-sex marriage. But no one who sat down to read the Bible with an open mind would come to the conclusion that this is the defining moral crisis of our era, or that homosexuality even compares as a moral issue with poverty or violence. (The same could be said about abortion, which existed in Biblical times, but barely seemed worth mentioning.)

In America today, prejudice against gays and lesbians is primarily cultural, not religious. Anti-gay Christians look to the Bible to justify their bigotry, but that’s not where they learned it.

and Jerusalem

I thought I was going to have to write my own article (it was going to be part of the Misunderstandings series) about why Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is such a big deal. It has been easy to find articles about all the outrage the decision is provoking, but hard to find a start-from-scratch explanation of why anyone considers it outrageous. Pro-Palestinian talking heads on TV have exacerbated the problem: For the most part they have jumped straight into venting their outrage, and have skipped the educational prologue that most Americans need. So I could easily picture a low-information voter (and maybe even a not-so-low-information voter) asking: “Don’t we usually put our embassy in the city that the host nation tells us is their capital?”

Saturday, the New York Times did the article I had been looking for: “The Jerusalem Issue, Explained“. The explanation has two main pieces, one having to do with Jerusalem itself, and the other with the United States’ complicated and conflicted role regarding the whole Palestine/Israel issue. As for Jerusalem:

The city’s status has been disputed, at least officially, since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Before that, the United Nations had designated Jerusalem as a special international zone. During the war, Israel seized the city’s western half. It seized the eastern half during the next Arab-Israeli war, in 1967.

In most two-state-solution models, West Jerusalem winds up being the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine. But prior to any peace agreement, most countries — including our NATO allies — regard the status of the entire city as an unsettled issue. (A satirical article makes this point by claiming that the Palestinian Authority is about to recognize Texas as part of Mexico and will move its Mexican consulate to Houston. President Abbas expresses his hope that this decision “will help ease the tension between the two countries over security and immigration.”) Meanwhile, Israel regards Jerusalem as its historic capital since days of King David, and refuses to give up a single block of it.

What makes such a move particularly controversial for the United States is that we have two very different roles in the conflict: We’re Israel’s closest ally, and we’re also the global superpower who is trying to broker peace in the region. Previous administrations have tried to juggle those two contradictory roles, but increasingly it looks like Trump has decided to stop juggling: We are Israel’s ally and not a broker of peace. That means that no one is a broker of peace.

U.S. credibility with the Arab and Muslim worlds is also undermined by the fact that Trump has assigned the Israel/Palestine issue to Jared Kushner, who is both a diplomatic novice and an American Jew whose family foundation (at a time when he was a director) has financially supported the Israeli settlement movement. Trump’s Special Representative for International Negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, is also Jewish. So Palestinians might see little difference between negotiating with Americans and negotiating with Israelis.

The pro-Israel slant of the Trump administration and both parties in Congress makes it easy to go into an Elders-of-Zion rant about the disproportionate influence of Jews, but the American politics of the issue is way more complicated than that. Evangelical Christians (who are strongly anti-Muslim and see Israel as a factor in many end-times prophecies) are probably the larger pro-Israel influence. And perversely, the alt-Right — which is also highly anti-Semitic — sometimes figures in this alliance as well, seeing Israel as the kind of ethno-state they would like to establish for white Christians here, as well as a convenient destination for the Jews they would like to expel.

Trump’s announcement comes only days after leaks about a meeting last month between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a Trump ally who seems to be consolidating power in Saudi Arabia. Reportedly, Prince Salman made what Abbas considered an odious peace proposal:

The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia deny officially that any such plan is in the works. But it remains to be seen whether Palestinians will be offered anything they could regard as justice, or whether the U.S. and Saudi Arabia will join Israel in insisting that they recognize the reality that they are powerless and have to accept whatever Israel is willing to offer them.

You might wonder why Salman would do this. The explanation (again, not confirmed by the Saudis) is that the Palestinians have become expendable. Saudi Arabia is more concerned with possibility of a Muslim civil war between the Sunnis (led by Saudi Arabia) and the Shia (led by Iran). Abandoning the Palestinians might be a small price to pay if it leads to U.S. and Israeli cooperation in that larger struggle.

The embassy is not moving immediately. According to CNN: “It will take years for the US to build the new embassy.”

This is yet another example of Trump following Putin’s lead. Russia recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April. But if the Sunni/Shia conflict does move to the center stage, it might recreate a Cold War situation, with Russia backing Iran.

and tax reform

It should be obvious that writing a tax reform bill isn’t like writing a freshman term paper: You can’t make a bunch of edits just before it’s due and expect things to go well. The Senate, though, didn’t see it that way, and so they made a tiny $289 billion mistake in the way they brought the corporate alternate minimum tax (AMT) back into the bill at the last minute. The move was supposed to raise $40 billion; it actually raises $329 billion. Oops.

The conference committee between the House and Senate (which starts meeting Saturday) will fix that, of course. But there is one consequence: If something goes wrong in the Senate, and it can’t pass the bill that comes out of the conference committee, one alternative would have been for the House to pass the Senate bill as written. (Democrats did something similar to pass ObamaCare after they lost their 60-vote majority in the Senate.) Now that can’t happen, because the Senate bill is so screwed up.

There are a number of other issues for the committee to work out, and things could still go wrong (or right, depending on your point of view). One thing that seems clear: Paul Ryan and House Republicans in general feel no commitment to the deal Susan Collins made with Mitch McConnell to stabilize the health insurance markets. When she gets stiffed, will she still support the bill?

House Republicans from high-state-tax states like California and New York may yet revolt against eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes. It’s going to be hard for them to run on a “tax-cut” bill that actually raises taxes on many of their constituents. And everything that gets taken out of the bill requires something else to be added in, so that the deficit totals work out. Every add-on creates a new issue for somebody.

and natural disasters

Not a movie special effect: I-405 in Los Angeles. I’ve been to the Getty Center, so I may have driven this road.

The number of deaths in Puerto Rico that have been attributed to Hurricane Maria and its aftermath is 62. But somehow, the number of excess deaths since Maria hit — deaths beyond what totals from recent years would tell you to expect — is 1052. I have to believe that if something similar were happening to white people on the mainland, it would get a lot more attention and action.

but here’s something more people should pay attention to

Congress responded to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 by passing Dodd-Frank. One of the things that law did was establish within the Treasury Department the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which is supposed to keep an eye on excessive risks to the U.S. financial system — things like the explosive growth of derivative investments that turned a slump in the U.S. real-estate market into a global catastrophe. (As the Wikipedia article on the 2007-2008 crisis points out, complex financial instruments “enabled a theoretically infinite amount to be wagered on the finite value of housing loans outstanding”. As a result, when people began to default on their mortgages, the losses at the big financial institutions far exceeded the total value of the defaulted loans.)

Working for the FSOC is the Office of Financial Research, which collects and analyzes data from the banks and other big financial players, looking for early warning signs of a flaw in the system that could lead to a crash. Washington Monthly called it “the most important agency you’ve never heard of” and explained its creation like this:

The idea for the OFR took root in early 2009 during the fallout from the financial crisis. Regulators struggled to make decisions during the height of the meltdown in part because they lacked real-time information about which banks were connected through financial relationships, and how. The crisis also exposed how little federal regulators knew about the world of “shadow banking,” such as the vast market for credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other complex securities that played a role in the meltdown. Regulators had no idea how much money was at risk in these activities, let alone who was involved or what the results would be if there were massive defaults.

OFR employs a little more than 200 people and has a budget around $100 million, so each year it costs about 30 cents for each American. So if OFR saved us from a financial crisis once every thousand years or so, it would be well worth the cost. But in fact, you don’t even pay your 30 cents, because OFR is funded by fees on banks.

The downside is that banks hate paying fees and hate having the government looking over their shoulders. And their point-of-view is the one that matters, so naturally the Trump administration is proposing big cuts at OFR. Matt Yglesias points out that this is part of a pattern:

Trump’s pick to run regulatory policy at the Fed wants to let banks take on more risky debt. He’s tapped a bank executive responsible for all kinds of shady foreclosure practices to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

From a short-term point of view, you can almost always make or save money by taking on more risk: Drop the insurance you carry on your health or house or car, and you’ll have more change in your pocket, at least for a little while. Put all your savings in the stock market rather than holding any government-insured investments like bank CDs, and most years you’ll do well. Better yet, borrow back all the equity in your house and put that money into the market too. Most years you’ll make money.

Most years. If you’d done that in 2008, though, it wouldn’t have worked out so well. Ygelsias explains the analogy to the larger economy.

The nature of a banking crisis is you probably won’t have one in any given year, regardless of how shoddy your regulatory framework is. As long as asset prices are trending upward, it just doesn’t matter. In fact, as long as asset prices are trending upward, a poorly regulated banking sector will be more profitable than a well-regulated one.

It’s all good. Unless things blow up. But if your bad policymaking takes us from a one-in-500 chance of a blow-up in any given year to a one-in-20 chance, you’re still in a world where things will probably be fine across even an entire eight-year span in office. Probably.

That’s been Trump’s way of doing business his whole life: Take big risks, and hope that somebody else is holding the bag when it all goes bust.

and you also might be interested in …

Following the electorate’s 62%-38% endorsement of same-sex marriage in a non-binding referendum in November, Australia’s Parliament made it official on Thursday:

The new law expands on earlier legislation that provided equality to same-sex couples in areas like government benefits, employment and taxes, and it changes the definition of marriage from “the union of a man and a woman” to “the union of two people.” It automatically recognizes same-sex marriages from other countries.

Police getting away with murder is not just a black issue any more. After a police officer was acquitted of second-degree murder and reckless manslaughter in Mesa, Arizona on Thursday, the judge released the officer’s body-cam video. It’s horrific, so I’ll link to it rather than embed it. A white man, Daniel Shaver, is clearly scared witless and doing his best to obey the shouted commands of the officer as he lies on the floor of the hall outside his motel room. But he fails and the officer kills him.

It gets worse when you know the backstory. Shaver was a traveling pest control worker who was drinking in his room with two people he had met in the elevator. They asked him about a pellet gun he had. While showing it to them, he pointed it out the window; somebody in the motel’s hot tub noticed and called the police. Shaver was drunk, but not at all belligerent, when six police officers showed up. The police were in complete control of the situation right up to the moment one of them killed him.

Pointing the pellet gun out the window was dumb, but everything else Shaver did is easy to empathize with. He’s away from home and bored, so he gets drunk in his room. He’s confused when the police show up, but he tries his best to comply with their commands. He has no weapons other than the pellet gun, which is still in the room when he’s on the floor in the hall. He winds up dead.

The officer made the usual claim: He was afraid that Shaver was going for a gun. (The more likely explanation is that Shaver’s shorts were starting to fall down as he obeyed the command to crawl towards the officer, so he reached back to tug on the waistband.) Various experts testified that the officer was acting in accordance with his training, and maybe he was. And I don’t know what instructions the judge gave the jurors, so it’s hard to say what I would have done in their shoes. (It’s a lot to ask of jurors that they reverse the result of a bad system. I’m reminded of the mock trial in Salem, where you get to vote on whether to indict a woman for witchcraft. If you put yourself in the mindset of the times, if you respect the opinions of the established church’s witchcraft experts, and respect the law as the judge explains it to you, there’s really no honest way to let her go.)

But if this really is what we train police officers to do, something is very, very wrong. And if you imagine that this is somebody else’s problem, that it can’t possibly touch you, you need to think again.

NBA star Steph Curry is serious about supporting the NFL players anthem protests, and about supporting veterans. There’s no contradiction there.

From the beginning, it was obvious that the Ireland/Northern Ireland border was going to be a problem when Brexit got implemented. Northern Ireland as a whole voted against Brexit, and wants to keep its easy-going border with Ireland. PM May thought she had a deal to do that, but an anti-Irish-unification party is part of her coalition, and wouldn’t support it.

Remember a year ago, when President-elect Trump negotiated something that was supposed to save all those manufacturing jobs in Indiana? Trump and the TV cameras are elsewhere now, and things aren’t going so well.

Trump caused a lot of speculation when he ended his statement on Jerusalem Wednesday by slurring several words. To me and a bunch of other people, it looked and sounded like a denture starting to slip, which the White House denied. But a brain specialist has a different opinion:

In turning my attention to the president, I see worrisome symptoms that fall into three main categories: problems with language and executive function; problems with social cognition and behavior; and problems with memory, attention, and concentration. None of these are symptoms of being a bad or mean person. Nor do they require spelunking into the depths of his psyche to understand. Instead, they raise concern for a neurocognitive disease process in the same sense that wheezing raises the alarm for asthma.

Trump’s Pensacola rally Friday included a bunch of bold, blatant lies. Not spin, not stuff that you can justify if you parse every word just so. Lies about simple, checkable things. For example: “Black homeownership just hit the highest level it has ever been in the history of our country.” Nope. It was 42% in the third quarter, down from 42.7% in the first quarter, and well below the peak of 49.7% in 2004.

Also: “Factories are pouring back into our country.” Not at all. AP says:

Spending on the construction of factories has dropped 14 percent over the past 12 months. There has been a steady decline in spending on factory construction since the middle of 2015

Trump claimed wages are going up “for the first time in 20 years”.

The latest jobs report shows average hourly earnings up 2.5 percent over the past 12 months, roughly the same pace of growth as the year before, when Barack Obama was president. Wages were rising faster in December 2016, up by 2.9 percent.

and let’s close with something frivolous

It’s been a long week. We could all stand to watch some birds dancing.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

The Monday Morning Teaser

December 11, 2017 – 8:06 am

Another week with a lot to talk about: Franken, Conyers, and Franks all resigned from Congress amid accusations of sexual misconduct, while Roy Moore continues to cruise towards a narrow victory with Trump’s support. The Supreme Court began hearing the wedding-cake case, while Australia legalized same-sex marriage. Trump announced he’s moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Tax reform went to a House/Senate conference committee, where there are still ways the deal might fall apart. The LA area has some horrific wildfires. Another police officer got acquitted for a totally unnecessary killing, with two new wrinkles: This time we have body-cam footage, and the victim is a white guy.

In addition to all that, there are issues people ought to be paying attention to that aren’t getting much coverage. I’m going to focus on this one: Trump wants to slash the budget of the office in the Treasury Department that is supposed to pay attention to systemic risk in the banking system. What could possibly go wrong?

Just writing a few paragraphs on each of those things has made the weekly summary much longer than usual, so there won’t be a featured post this week. I’m going to try to get the summary out between 10 and 11 EST.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Persistence

December 4, 2017 – 11:01 am

What it all boils down to is that racism – white racial grievance, immigration restriction, generalized bashing of basically any political or cultural assertion by African-Americans – is the only consistent and persistent line connecting the campaign to the presidency. This is not quite the same as saying that that’s the only real bottom line for his supporters – though there’s a lot of truth to that. But for Trump, that’s clearly the only thing that isn’t opportunistic and situational. Those all fall away. The only thing that doesn’t is the ethno-nationalism and racism. It’s the real him.

– Josh Marshall

This week’s featured post is “The Brazen Cynicism of the Tax-Reform Vote“.

This week everybody was talking about tax reform

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and Michael Flynn

Last week we knew that Flynn’s lawyers had stopped cooperating with the President’s lawyers, so many speculated that Flynn was about to make a deal with Robert Mueller’s investigation. This week it happened: Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, and is cooperating with Mueller. This isn’t a trivial crime, in that it could lead to as much as five years in jail. But it’s also far less than Mueller could have gone for, and Flynn’s son has not been charged with anything.

It is easy to start speculating about what Flynn might know and be willing to share. The particular crime in his guilty plea seems chosen to reveal as little as possible. Trump supporters have jumped on this to imply Mueller has nothing, but those familiar with how plea deals work are pointing in another direction. Vox asked 9 legal experts for their reactions, and got stuff like this:

The fact that Flynn was charged with, and is pleading guilty to, such a minor crime suggests a bombshell of a deal with prosecutors. Flynn was facing serious criminal liability for a variety of alleged missteps, including his failure to register as an agent of a foreign power. If this is the entirety of the plea deal, the best explanation for why Mueller would agree to it is that Flynn has something very valuable to offer in exchange: damaging testimony on someone else.

In general, prosecutors use small fish to catch big fish. Flynn was Trump’s National Security Adviser, so there aren’t a lot of bigger fish Mueller could be using him against.

That could explain why Trump has been so wiggy lately, even by his own standards.

He’s denying the Access Hollywood tape is real. He’s back to saying Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Then publicly he retweeted those anti-Muslim hate group videos from the UK. Yesterday we heard he’s telling advisors a government shutdown would be good for him. He’s gotten more aggressive attacking other politicians accused of sexual misconduct while more aggressively backing Roy Moore, notwithstanding the copious list of accusations against him. All of it together amounts to acting out.

In a tweet Saturday, he stated that he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI before he fired him.

Legal experts said this could be used as evidence that the president was trying to obstruct justice when he allegedly asked James Comey to take it easy on Flynn and then, when he didn’t, fired him as FBI director.

The ongoing mystery of Flynn’s lies to the FBI is how he could be that stupid. As a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn had to know that conversations with the Russian ambassador were monitored, and that he would be caught in his lie if anybody bothered to check. So why do it?

Josh Marshall, who is working from publicly available information and knows nothing more than the rest of us do, has put some thought into this and has as good a working theory as I’ve seen. The short version is that Flynn wanted to get a new Russia policy installed before revelations of Russia’s campaign meddling made that impossible. So it was important to be doing groundwork during the transition period, when he had no authority to do it, and to hide that groundwork as long as possible from both the still-in-power Obama administration and the people within the intelligence services who would fight against the new policy. The new Russia relationship

had to become a fait accompli before the full story emerged. Indeed, if the Trump Team could get in place before most of the information was revealed it might never become known at all since they would take over the key agencies doing the investigating.

ABC initially reported that Flynn reached out to the Russians on Trump’s behalf before the election, but has withdrawn the report and suspended the reporter.

still more sexual harassment reports

It’s hard to keep up: Garrison Keillor, Matt Lauer, Russell Simmons and two new members of Congress: Blake Farenthold, and Ruben Kihuen.

These last few weeks, I’ve been struggling with how to express my own complicity in the culture’s objectification of women without presenting myself as either better or worse than I’ve actually been.

In “7 Reasons So Many Guys Don’t Understand Sexual Consent” David Wong does a great job writing the kind of article I haven’t been able to produce. In particular, he captures the shame so many of us felt about failing to achieve the truly fucked-up vision of manliness we were taught to admire: the James Bond kind of man, who can force himself on women and make them like it.

I never, in any of my public school years, had a lesson saying you needed to wait for verbal consent before touching a woman. I saw the quarterback of the football team slap girls on the butt, I saw guys reach around and grab girls’ boobs as a prank, I saw mistletoe hung over doorways and was told if you and a girl stood under it, she had to kiss you. One time when we were playing volleyball at the beach, Dr. Dre ran up and unhooked a girl’s bikini top.

Again, I never did any of those things. Not because I thought they were wrong, but because I was too nervous.

And I fucking hated myself for it.

Have I mentioned that yet? How much shame I felt at the time for not being a “real man”?

By my 20s, I think I had developed a reasonably healthy respect for women as human beings, but in high school and earlier I remember “pranks” and “jokes” (like the ones Wong mentions) as fairly common. There was a “game” going on between the two sexes: Boys were supposed to try to get away with stuff and girls were supposed to try to stop them. Our collective mythology said it was all in good fun, even if a few spoilsports didn’t get it.

At the time, I think we’d have laughed at anyone who suggested that we were training to be rapists (which I don’t recall that anyone did suggest). But in retrospect, of course we were.

[R]idding guys of toxic attitudes toward women is a monumental task. I’ve spent two solid decades trying to deprogram myself, to get on board with something that, in retrospect, should be patently obvious to any decent person. Changing actions is the easy part; changing urges takes years and years. It’s the difference between going on a diet and training your body to not get hungry at all.

In the meantime, to act like it’s crazy that a particular guy doesn’t see the clear line between consent and assault is misguided. The culture has intentionally blurred those lines and trained that man to feel shame for erring on either side.

meanwhile, Roy Moore is probably going to the Senate

The RCP polling average was in Doug Jones’ favor for about ten days, but Moore caught up on November 27 and appears to be surging ahead. This is not because there has been any good news for Moore. Alabamans have just gotten used to the idea that they’re going to elect a child molester, because he’s the Christian candidate.

It also looks like the Senate will let him take his seat. Sunday, Mitch McConnell said “We’re going to let the people of Alabama decide, a week from Tuesday, who they want to send to the Senate.”

Last Monday, The Washington Post revealed an attempted sting by Project Veritas, the James O’Keefe group responsible for a number of deceptively edited videos to smear liberal groups, including ACORN (his original, successful operation, which forced the organization to close, even if O’Keefe himself did end up paying a $100K settlement).

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15.

But rather than jumping on the chance to besmirch Moore, the Post became increasingly suspicious of the woman’s story, and eventually tracked her back to Project Veritas.

We can only guess what would have happened if the Post had been less careful and the sting had worked, but I assume it would have been used to undermine the credibility not just of the Post, but of all of Moore’s accusers.

Here’s Jay Rosen’s account of O’Keefe sending a fake student to tape his classes and meet with him afterward in 2011. The New Yorker covered O’Keefe’s failed attempt to sting George Soros last year.

and you also might be interested in …

While commenting on the strange announcement of Kellyanne Conway as the White House’s point person on opioids, The Atlantic summarizes the opioid effort as a whole:

The Trump administration has no opioid policy, beyond just continuing to arrest people who violate the (lax) existing drug laws. Throughout, Trump has treated the opioid tragedy as a messaging challenge, not a real-world disaster that calls for a real-world response: pretend to care while doing nothing, because the administration lacks the competence and capacity to do something. The idea that it would seek to appoint as head of the Office of National Drug Control the single member of the House of Representatives who did most to worsen the opioid crisis had a beautiful fitness to it.

So maybe after all Kellyanne Conway would be the right person for the “opioid czar” job. Trump’s concern for opioids is a cruelly deceptive fiction. And who propagates cruelly deceptive fictions more persistently and brazenly than Conway?

BTW, that “single member of the House of Representatives who did the most to worsen the opioid crisis” is Tom Marino. After 60 Minutes exposed his function as a tool of Big Pharma, he withdrew from consideration as drug czar.  He continues to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th district.

Filmmaker Sierra Pettengil:

I was struck by the way the word “history” was blankly lobbed as a defense of the [Confederate] monuments. Take Trump’s reaction, for one: “They’re trying to take away our history.” My instinct was, “Okay, then: Let’s look at the history.”

In particular, her short film Graven Image looks at the Stone Mountain monument in Georgia, where a gigantic carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson is known as “the South’s Mount Rushmore”. The film recalls Stone Mountain as the site of the KKK’s rebirth in 1915, and chronicles how progress on the monument paralleled Georgia’s resistance to civil rights.

In my film, a voiceover from a 1972 Stone Mountain promotional film says, “Remember how it used to be? It’s still that way for you to enjoy at Stone Mountain Park.” I want this film to make us remember how it actually used to be.

and let’s close with something magical

“The magician is the most honest of professionals,” said Karl Germain. “He promises to deceive you, and then he does.” Here, a guy I’ve known since he was a baby (and his partner in crime, who I didn’t meet until last spring) fulfills that promise. And in the finest magical tradition, they do it with mirrors.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (0)

The Brazen Cynicism of the Tax-Reform Vote

December 4, 2017 – 8:53 am


Without even the appearance of doing something good for the country, the Senate plunged ahead.

I admit it: Senate Republicans surprised me this week.

I know, it shouldn’t be shocking that Republicans would give a big windfall to corporations and the very rich. It’s what they do. Just last summer, they came within one vote of taking healthcare away from 20-some million Americans so that the wealthy could pay less tax.

Usually, though, they do a better job of giving themselves cover. The fringe of the party includes people like Susan Collins and John McCain, who try to retain at least the appearance of a conscience. It also includes clever apologists, whose arguments often obscure what’s really going on and make it possible to claim some noble purpose.

But by early Saturday morning, when the Senate passed its tax reform proposal on a nearly party-line vote, those justifications were all gone. This bill was about paying off the big donors and enriching the Trump family, and everybody knew it. Some senators continued mouthing words like growth and middle-class families, but they weren’t arguing any more, they were just lying. They weren’t fooling anybody, and they didn’t seem to care.

In the end, 51 Republicans voted for the bill, with only Bob Corker opposed. All 48 Democrats voted against it. (Remember that, the next time someone claims there’s no difference between the parties.) One by one, the last holdouts had tossed away their fig leaves and jumped into the mire.

  • John McCain, who gave such a moving speech about returning to regular order before he cast the deciding vote against ObamaCare repeal in July, was unperturbed by a very similar process this time, in which the 479-page bill was not available for inspection until a few hours before the vote.
  • Susan Collins, who in the summer seemed to worry deeply about people losing their health insurance, stopped worrying and accepted the Senate leadership’s promises about future legislation that I will be very surprised to see pass the House (unless it’s paired with a whole bunch of really bad things).
  • Jeff Flake, who (like just about all Republicans) seemed to believe during the Obama years that the deficit was a looming catastrophe, and who supposedly had achieved his independence by choosing not to run for re-election, decided that an extra trillion or two of debt really wasn’t worth getting excited about.

So this is where we are: A similar-but-not-identical bill passed the House in mid-November, so a conference committee will have to work out a compromise bill that both houses can pass. In other words, there is still room for something to go wrong, but some bill of this form is increasingly likely to become law by the end of the year.

The numbers. All along, independent analyses from the Tax Policy Center, the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, and even Congress’ own CBO had been telling a very consistent story: The bill would lead to major increases in the deficit with little-to-no long-term benefits for anybody but the wealthy.

This conclusion was supported by anecdotal evidence. The centerpiece of the bill — lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% — was supposed to generate massive new investments in production, creating so many jobs that workers would have bargaining power again, raising wages for everybody. But whenever actual corporate CEOs were consulted, they said they would pass the money on to shareholders through dividends or stock buy-backs rather than build new factories or pay workers more. Bloomberg reported:

That money is also unlikely to spur hiring because companies are already well-capitalized and can bring on as many employees as they need, said John Shin, a foreign-exchange strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“Companies are sitting on large amounts of cash. They’re not really financially constrained,” Shin, who conducted a survey of more than 300 companies asking their plans for a tax overhaul, said in an interview. “They’re still working for their shareholders, primarily.”

Right up until Thursday, though, Republicans were hoping more favorable numbers would appear. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation hadn’t weighed in yet, and they were known to use the dynamic-scoring model conservatives favor, the one that figures in the effects of tax-cut-induced growth. The Treasury Department supposedly had over 100 people churning out analyses; presumably Secretary Mnuchin had seen their preliminary results when he claimed that the proposal wouldn’t just be deficit neutral, it would “pay down debt” by generating more new revenue than the tax cuts gave up.

The JCT analysis came out Thursday, just hours before the Senate was scheduled to vote. Its most favorable dynamic scoring said that increased economic growth would restore about 1/3 of the revenue lost, so that the deficit would only increase by $1 trillion rather than the nominal $1.5 trillion. A third is better than nothing, but even if you allowed for growth, the deficit was going up.

Would this guy lie to you?

But what about Mnuchin and the Treasury? It turned out that they had no analysis, or at least none they were willing to make public.

Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.

So Mnuchin’s many public statements about tax reform had been airy nonsense, grounded in nothing. Meanwhile, here’s what the JCT projected for American families:

(Here’s the same information as a series of charts.) In other words: More than 1/3 of U.S. households will never get anything out of this bill, not even in the first few years. That situation gets progressively worse until nearly all the individual cuts expire in 2027, at which point about 1 in 4 are paying higher taxes, while only 16% still see a tax cut of more than $100.

Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn dealt with this convergence of expert analysis by saying, “I think it’s pretty clear they’re wrong.” Just because.

Full speed ahead. The original plan had been for the Senate to vote on Thursday. But the surprising (to some) revelation that the JCT analysis agreed in principle with all the other analyses, that nothing to the contrary would being coming out of the Treasury, and so the claims they were making had literally no basis — it threw a wrench into the process.

Many options were possible at that point. The bill could have gone back to committee to be scaled down into a defensible form. Maybe 20% was a bridge too far, and corporations would have to be satisfied with a 25% tax rate. That would create some room to fulfill the original stated purpose of the bill: cutting middle-class taxes for real this time.

Maybe the deficit didn’t have to go up, either. Back in 2012, President Obama had proposed a 28% rate that he claimed would produce more revenue than the 35% rate, without any analytic sleight-of-hand. Both parties have acknowledged for years that our high-rates-with-many-loopholes corporate tax system is inefficient. With a little genuine give-and-take, leaders on both sides might assemble a bipartisan coalition of  60 votes or more, avoiding the reconciliation process entirely.

Or, Mitch McConnell could scrawl a few last-minute changes in the margins to assuage the doubts the last few Republican hold-outs, and the Senate could shamelessly go forward with a bill to borrow an extra trillion dollars or more so that the GOP could give a big Christmas present to the very rich. But if they were going to do it, they’d better do it fast, before the public was able to organize against this already very unpopular bill.

By now, you know which choice they made.

The people they betrayed. One way the Senate got its bill to fit onto the procrustean bed of the $1.5 trillion-over-ten-years price tag authorized by the FY2018 budget resolution was to make of a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t gimmick Paul Krugman refers to as Schroedinger’s tax hike. The budget numbers work because only the corporate tax cuts are permanent; the individual cuts mostly phase out, resulting in this graph from the JCT.

(These numbers refer to an earlier version of the bill, but I believe a similar graph could be drawn for the current version.)

Republicans are arguing that those tax breaks [for individuals] won’t actually be temporary, that future Congresses will extend them. But they also need to assume that those tax breaks really will expire in order to meet their budget numbers. So the temporary tax breaks need, for political purposes, to be both alive and dead.

So either individual taxes will turn sharply upwards in 2025, or the tax-reform bill costs a whole lot more than $1.5 trillion. It’s one or the other. Ezra Klein points out the “pure fraud” in the deficit arguments Republicans have been making for years.

The GOP spent the Obama years in a frenzy over debt and deficits. Now they are passing a tax bill that will add trillions to the national debt, complete with budget gimmicks that, if they play out the way Republicans are publicly hoping they will play out, will lead to an even higher price tag.

When a Democrat is in the White House, the national debt is an existential crisis that threatens to bring down the Republic. But that threat magically vanishes when a Republican takes office.

So if you believed what Republicans told you about the deficit then, they’ve betrayed you now. But they’ve also betrayed you if you believed the populist side of Trump’s 2016 message. Because here’s where we are, prior to this bill becoming law: The national debt is around $20 trillion, and is already projected to increase to $30 trillion over the next ten years. Rather than do anything about that, Congress is in the act of tossing another trillion or two on top it. (BTW: In the speech where he announced his candidacy, Trump said: “$24 trillion— we’re very close— that’s the point of no return. $24 trillion. We will be there soon. That’s when we become Greece. That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable. And we’re gonna be there very soon.”)

So what about that big infrastructure project Trump talked about? (“So we have to rebuild our infrastructure, our bridges, our roadways, our airports. You come into La Guardia Airport, it’s like we’re in a third world country.”) Where’s the money for that going to come from? How’s he going to keep his promise not to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, once the trillion-a-year deficits start happening? (“Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it.”)

He won’t keep that promise. He’s already breaking it.

If this passes, there will be no money left for populism, and no money left to save the programs the middle class depends on. They’ll have given it all to the rich.

They’re doing it as you read this, and they’re being totally brazen about it.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 4, 2017 – 8:23 am

Some weeks the important things are obvious: the tax reform bill and Mike Flynn.

Thursday afternoon, when the Joint Committee on Taxation report removed the last possibility of arguing with a straight face that the tax cut wouldn’t blow up the deficit, or that middle-class families would be major beneficiaries, I didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that the bill was dead. But I thought some kind of retreat would happen, because the gist of the whole thing had become pretty clear: “We’re going to borrow a bunch of money and hand it out to the very rich.” I didn’t see how they could go forward with that.

They did. I admit it; I was stunned. I’m still kind of amazed. So that’s the subject of this week’s featured post, “The Brazen Cynicism of the Tax-Reform Vote”. It should be out around 9 EST.

The weekly summary covers Flynn up to a point, but I’m trying to let events unfold without obsessing over speculation. I also mention the week’s other depressing development (after tax reform): Without any new development in his favor, Roy Moore’s popularity seems to be rebounding. There’s a new short film putting the Stone Mountain Confederate monument into perspective, and a few other things have been happening. I’ll close with a card-trick video I can’t explain.

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