Social Capital and Inequality

Inequality is different this time, because the rich are usurping a different kind of capital.

For a long time, most thinkers in the West accepted poverty as natural. As Jesus said: “The poor you will always have with you.” But by 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing an entire discourse on the origin of inequality and blaming it largely on the practice of recognizing land as private property.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Thomas Paine, who in many ways was the most radical of the American revolutionaries, observed the contrasting example of the Native American tribes — where he found no parallel to European wealth or poverty — and came away with a more nuanced model of the connection between inequality and landed property, which he published in 1797 as Agrarian Justice. He started in much the same place as Rousseau:

The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, 
and ever would have continued to be 
THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man 
would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest 
in the property of the soil, 
and in all its natural productions, 
vegetable and animal.

But Paine also recognized that the development of modern agriculture — which he saw as necessary to feed people in the numbers and diversity of activities essential to advanced civilization — required investing a lot of up-front effort: clearing forests of trees and rocks, draining marshlands, and then annually plowing and planting. Who would do all that, if in the end the harvest would belong equally to everybody? He saw private ownership of land as a solution to this problem, but believed it had been implemented badly. What a homesteader deserved to own was his or her improvement on the productivity of the land, not the land itself. If the land a family cleared became more valuable than the forest or marshland they started with, then the homesteaders should own that difference in value, but not the land itself. [1]

Society as a whole, he concluded, deserved a rent on the land in its original state, and he proposed using that income — or an inheritance tax on land, which would not be as clean a solution theoretically, but would be easier to assess and collect — to capitalize the poor.

When a young couple begin the world, 
the difference is exceedingly great 
whether they begin with nothing 
or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, 
and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; 
and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way 
of becoming useful and profitable citizens.

Paine argued this not as charity or even social engineering, but as justice: The practice of privatizing land had usurped the collective inheritance of those born without land, so something had to be done to restore the usurped value.

In one of my favorite talks (I published versions of it here and here), I extended Paine’s idea in multiple directions, including to intellectual property. Just as Paine would buy a young couple a cow and some tools, I proposed helping people launch themselves into a 21st century information economy. Like Paine, I see this as justice, because otherwise the whole benefit of technological advancement accrues only to companies like Apple or Google, reaching the rest of us only through such companies. A fortune like Bill Gates’ arises partly through innovation, effort, and good business judgment, but also by usurping a big chunk of the common inheritance.

Avent. And that brings us to Ryan Avent’s new book, The Wealth of Humans: work, power, and status in the twenty-first century. There are at least two ways to read this book. It fits into the robot-apolcalypse, where-are-the-jobs-of-the-future theme that I have recently discussed here (and less recently here and here). Avent’s title has a double meaning: On the one hand it’s about the wealth humans will produce through the continued advance of technology. But that advance will also result in society having a “wealth” of humans — more than are needed to do the jobs available.

Most books in this genre are by technologists or futurists, and consequently assemble evidence to support a single vision or central prediction. Avent is an economic journalist. (He writes for The Economist.) So he has produced a more balanced analysis, cataloging the forces, trends, and possibilities. It’s well worth reading from that point of view.

But I found Avent’s book more interesting in what it says about inequality and social justice in the current era. What’s different about the 21st century is that technology and globalism have converged to make prosperity depend on a type of capital we’re not used to thinking about: social capital. [2] And from a moral point of view, it’s not at all obvious who should own social capital. Maybe we all should.

What is social capital? Before the Industrial Revolution, capital consisted mainly of land (and slaves, where that was allowed). By the late 19th century, though, the big fortunes revolved around industrial capital: the expensive machines that sat in big factories. The difference between a rich country and a poor one was mainly that people in rich countries could afford to invest in such machinery, which then made them richer. On a national level, industrial capital showed up as government-subsidized railroads and canals and port facilities. (The Erie Canal alone created one of the great 19th-century boom towns: Buffalo.) A country that could afford to make such improvements became more productive and more prosperous.

In the 20th century, the countries that rose to wealth — first Japan and then later Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea — did so partly through investment in machinery, but also through education. An educated populace could provide the advanced services that made an industrial economy thrive. And so we started talking about human capital, the investments that people and their governments make in acquiring skills, and intellectual capital, the patents, copyrights, and trade secrets that powered a 20th-century giant like IBM.

That may seem like a pretty complete list of the kinds of capital. But now look at today’s most valuable companies: Apple and Google, either of which might become the world’s first trillion-dollar corporation in a year or two. Each owns a small amount of land, no slaves, and virtually no industrial capital; Apple contracts out nearly all of its manufacturing, and a lot of Google’s products are entirely intangible. Both employ brilliant, well-educated people, but not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of them. They have valuable patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc., but again, intellectual property alone doesn’t account for either company’s market value. There’s something in how all those factors fit together that makes Apple and Google what they are.

That’s social capital. Avent describes it like this:

Social capital is individual knowledge that only has value in particular social contexts. An appreciation for property rights, for example, is valueless unless it is held within a community of like-minded people. Likewise, an understanding of the culture of a productive firm is only useful within that firm, where that culture governs behavior. That dependence on a critical mass of minds to function is what distinguishes social capital from human capital.

Social capital has always existed and been a factor of production, but something about the current era, some combination of globalism and technology, has brought it to the fore. Today, a firm strong in social capital — a shared way of approaching problems and taking action that is uniquely suited to a particular market at this moment in history — can acquire all the other factors of production cheaply, making social capital the primary source of its wealth. [3]

Who should own social capital? Right now it’s clear who does own a company’s social capital: the stockholders. But should they? Avent talks about Bill Gates’ $70 billion net worth — created mostly not by his own efforts but by the social organism called Microsoft — and then generalizes:

People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

Stockholders — the people who put up the money to acquire the other factors of production — currently get the vast majority of the benefit from a company’s social capital, but it’s not clear why they should. We usually imagine other forms of capital as belonging to whomever would have them if the enterprise broke up: The stockholders would sell off the land and industrial and intellectual capital, while the employees would walk away with the human capital of their experience and education. But the company’s social capital would just vanish, the way that a living organism vanishes if it gets rendered into its constituent chemicals. So, rightfully, who owns it?

Another chunk of social capital resides in nations, which are also social organisms. The very real economic value of the rule of law, voluntary compliance with beneficial but unenforceable norms, shared notions of fairness, trust that others will fulfill their commitments, and general public-spiritedness — in other words, all the cultural stuff that makes a worker or firm or idea more valuable in America or Germany than in Burundi or Yemen — who does it belong to? Who should share in its benefits?

Bargaining power. Avent does not try to sell the conservative fairy tale that the market will allocate benefits appropriately. Under the market, what each party gets out of any collective endeavor depends on its relative bargaining power, not on what it may deserve in some more abstract sense.

Avent proposes this thought experiment: What if automation got to the point where only one human worker was required to produce everything? Naively, you might expect this individual to be tremendously important and very well paid, but that’s probably not what would happen. Everyone in the world who wanted a job would want his job, and even if he had considerable skills, probably in the whole world millions of people would share those skills. So his bargaining power would be essentially zero, and even though in some sense he produced everything, he might end up working for nothing.

Globalization and automation, plus political developments like the decline of unions, have lowered the bargaining power of unskilled workers in rich countries, so they get less money, even though in most cases their productivity has increased. As communication gets cheaper and systems get more intelligent, more and more jobs can be automated or outsourced to countries with lower wages, so the bargaining power of the people in those jobs shrinks. That explains this graph, which I keep coming back to because I think it’s the single most important thing to understand about the American economy today: Hourly wages tracked productivity fairly closely until the 1970s, but have fallen farther and farther behind ever since.

Companies could have afforded to pay more — by now, the productivity is there to support a wage nearly 2 1/2 times higher — but workers haven’t had the bargaining power to demand that money, so they haven’t gotten it. [4]

A similar thing happened early in the Industrial Revolution: Virtually none of the benefits that came from industrial capital were shared with the workers, until they gained bargaining power through political action and unionization. The result is the safety net we have today.

Just as workers’ ability to reap significant benefits from the deployment of industrial capital was in doubt for decades, so we should worry that social capital will not, without significant alterations to the current economic system, generate better economic circumstances for most people.

Who’s in? Who’s out? When you do start sharing social capital, whether within a firm or within a country, you run into the question of who belongs. This is a big part of the contracting-out revolution. The janitors and cafeteria workers at Henry Ford’s plants worked for Henry Ford. But a modern technology corporation is likely to contract for those services. By shrinking down to a core competency, it can reward its workers while keeping a tight rein on who “its workers” are. No need to give stock options or healthcare benefits to receptionists and parking lot attendants if they don’t seem essential to maintaining the company’s social capital.

Things shake out similarly at the national level: The more ordinary Americans succeed in getting a share of the social capital of the United States, the greater the temptation to restrict who can get into the US and qualify for benefits — or to throw out people that many of the rest of us think shouldn’t be here.

Avent would like to see us take the broadest possible view of who’s in:

The question we ask ourselves, knowingly or not, is: With whom do we wish to share society? The easy answer, the habitual answer, is: with those who are like us.

But this answer is bound to lead to trouble, because it is arbitrary, and because it is lazy, and because it is imprecise, in ways that invite social division. There is always some trait or characteristic available which can be used to define someone seemingly like us as not like us.

There is a better answer available: that to be “like us” is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia.

Can it happen? Much of the Avent’s book is depressing, but by the time the Epilogue rolls around he seems almost irrationally optimistic. For 200 pages, he has painted as realistic a picture as he could of the challenges we face, whether economic, technological, social, or political. But as to whether things will ultimately work out, he appears to come around to the idea that they have to, so they will. So he ends with this:

We are entering into a great historical unknown. In all probability, humanity will emerge on the other side, some decades hence, in a world in which people are vastly richer and happier than they are now. With some probability, small but positive, we will not make it at all, or we will arrive on the other side poorer and more miserable. That assessment is not optimism or pessimism. It is just the way things are.

Face to face with the unknown, it is hard to know what to feel or what to do. It is tempting to be afraid. But, faced with this great, powerful, transformative force, we shouldn’t be frightened. We should be generous. We should be as generous as we can be.

[1] The arbitrariness of this becomes clear when you consider mineral rights. If my grandfather homesteaded a plot of land, which in my generation turned out to be in the middle of a oil field, what would that wealth have to do with me that I would deserve to own it?

[2] If the term social capital rings a bell for you, you’re probably remembering Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which appeared as a magazine article in 1995 and was expanded to a book in 2000. But Putnam used the term more metaphorically, expressing a sociological idea in economic terms, rather than as a literal factor of production.

[3] Henry Ford’s company probably also had a lot of social capital, but it was hard to notice behind all those buildings and machines.

[4] Individual employers will tell you that they’d go bankrupt if they had to raise wages 2 1/2 times, and in some sense that’s true: They compete with companies that also pay low wages, and would lose that competition if they paid high wages. But that is simply evidence that workers’ bargaining power is low across entire industries, rather than just in this company or that one.

June 12, 2017 – 8:38 am Categories: Articles, Expand Your Vocabulary | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

In my continuing effort not to get swallowed completely by the Trump/Russia scandal (which seems overdue for a name, like Watergate or Teapot Dome), I’m continuing to read what’s-going-on-with-the-economy books. This week I want to tell you about The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent of The Economist. This can be read as a where-are-the-jobs-of-the-future book, which I’ve reviewed several of in the last few years. But I was more interested in Avent’s explanation of the recent increase in inequality: Technological and geo-political change has made social capital the decisive factor of production. And since few of us really understand social capital and our culture has no shared understanding of who should own it, the wealthy have been free to usurp all its benefits.

I’ll put that insight into the context of Rousseau’s and Thomas Paine’s writings on inequality, as well as one of my own favorite talks “Who Owns the World?” That’s the very reduced version of my review of the book, which will appear by 9 a.m. EDT as “Social Capital and Inequality”.

Of course the weekly summary will return to Trump/Russia, and in particular James Comey’s testimony last Thursday. There’s also the British election to discuss (reminding you that last week I passed on Nate Silver’s observation that anything could still happen). I didn’t really have to cover all the fascinating discussions that spin out of the Wonder Woman movie, but I couldn’t resist. A bunch of other things make it into the short notes, and I call special attention to Mitch McConnell’s attempt to sneak ObamaCare repeal past the public without hearings, before closing with a video reviewing the entire history of the world in less than 20 minutes.

June 12, 2017 – 7:19 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Cue the Laughter

We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore.

– Donald Trump, statement withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord
6-1-2017

This week’s featured post is “The Paris Agreement is like my church’s pledge drive.”

This week everybody was talking about the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement

The featured post includes my explanation of why withdrawing from Paris makes no sense. In a nutshell: If Trump thinks Obama promised to cut emissions further than he should have, he could just unilaterally lower our commitment to a level he thinks is fair. But that would mean taking a serious look at the topic and proposing a policy, which Trump seems incapable of doing.

Instead he’s spreading disinformation and sowing confusion by demanding to “renegotiate” without giving anybody a clue what he wants — most likely because he doesn’t have a clue what he wants. The Paris Agreement isn’t unfair to the U.S. for any particular reason; it’s just that all international agreements are unfair to the U.S. by definition.

When world leaders make moves that further no policy goals, they invite explanations that are either psychological or political. Krugman attributes Trump’s decision to “spite“, and Josh Marshall blames “rage and fear“, while Slate‘s Katy Waldman says:

The word for what we saw in the Rose Garden is projection. Trump feels like a tremendous man who is also, somehow, nursing an eternal wound. His country, therefore, is a tremendous nation that is hampered and thwarted by cheaters at every turn.

The political explanation is similar: Trump got elected by appealing to his base voters’ sense of grievance. He’s applying that model to the Paris Agreement not because it fits, but because it will appeal to the low-information part of his base.

Meanwhile a giant ice sheet is about to break off of Antarctica.

On May 26, Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg answered a constituent’s question about climate change [go to about the 47 minute mark in this video]:

I believe there’s climate change. I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I think there are cycles. Do I think that man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No. Why do I believe that? Well, as a Christian I believe there is a creator, a God, who is much greater than us. And I’m confident that if there’s a real problem, He’ll take care of it.

In a Washington Post column, historian Lisa Vox elaborated:

only 28 percent of evangelicals believe human activity is causing climate change. Confidence that God will intervene to prevent people from destroying the world is one of the strongest barriers to gaining conservative evangelical support for environmental pacts like the Paris agreement.

Oh, holy crap. I wonder how many these only-God-can-change-the-climate folks understand that man has already changed the atmosphere. Since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by over 40%, from 280 parts per million to 400. (It had been relatively stable for thousands of years before that. In the distant past it has been higher or lower, but has never increased with this speed.) Unlike global average temperature estimates, atmospheric CO2 numbers don’t come out of some complicated computer model with a lot of debatable assumptions; it’s a simple measurement. It also doesn’t bounce around like temperature; there’s an annual cycle (because northern forests and grasslands soak up CO2 as they grow; the Southern hemisphere has less land and less foliage), but it goes up every year.

Global warming is a complex effect of that simple cause: Greenhouse gases like CO2 block heat from escaping into space; more CO2, more heat. Predicting exactly how fast global temperatures will rise in the future may be difficult and contentious (though not as contentious as some would have you believe). But that they will go up and why is pretty simple science.

I took a look at the Issues page on Walberg’s web site. This seems to be the only issue where he invokes God’s umbrella of protection. He doesn’t consider arguments like “It doesn’t matter if we raise taxes on the rich, because God will just make them richer” or “We don’t need to pay so much attention to terrorism, because God will protect us” or “We don’t have to worry about running up big deficits, because God will keep our economy from collapsing.”

In short, God is a rhetorical device that Walberg deploys selectively, when he wants to believe something unreasonable or convince other people to believe it.

While I’m talking about the misuse of religion in politics: Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin wants to tackle Louisville’s violence problem with “prayer patrols“. Seriously. He wants churches to send groups of 3-10 people to wander around Louisville’s bad neighborhoods and not offer any material help to anybody beyond praying for them. Because that’s the difference between the safe parts of Kentucky and the dangerous parts: not money or race or education, but closeness to God.

and you might also be interested in

Remember “Drain the swamp!”? One of the things Trump brags about to supporters is his new rules to limit lobbyists joining his administration or members of his administration lobbying after they leave office. This week we found out that he’s actually not enforcing those rules.

The Trump administration initially balked when the Office of Government Ethics demanded the White House hand over the waivers it had granted. But after a standoff the administration relented late Wednesday and released about 14 waivers covering White House staffers. They make clear that Trump’s ethics rules are remarkably flexible and that his top staffers don’t need to worry too much about staying on the right side of them. On paper, Trump’s rules are similar to those imposed by President Barack Obama, but it appears that Trump is far more willing to hand out exemptions. At this point in the Obama administration, just three White House staffers had been granted ethics waivers. So far, Trump has granted 14, including several that apply to multiple people.

Steve Bannon got a “retroactive waiver“, a concept that doesn’t even make sense.

“There is no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” [Office of Government Ethics Director Walter] Shaub said in an interview. “If you need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule.”

Nate Silver’s reading of polling in the UK is that almost anything could happen. The election is Thursday.

As has happened in the other two special elections to replace congressmen Trump appointed to his administration, support is shifting away from the Democratic challenger as election day approaches. John Ossoff’s lead is down to 49.1%-47.6%, well within the margin of error. The election is two weeks from tomorrow.

The outlines of Trump’s promised infrastructure plan are coming into view, and it sounds very underwhelming.

The federal government would make only a fractional down payment on rebuilding the nation’s aging infrastructure. Mr. Trump would rely on a combination of private industry, state and city tax money, and borrowed cash to finance the rest. It would be a stark departure from ambitious infrastructure programs of the past, in which the government played a major role and devoted substantial resources to paying the cost of large-scale projects.

A key part of the plan is privatizing essential services, like the air traffic control system. Privatization always promises big gains and small costs, but it rarely delivers.

The brownshirts are coming.

Is it really true that female movie characters get fewer lines? Yes.

but the Kathy Griffin incident means the opposite of what people are saying

Kathy Griffin is a mid-level, mostly apolitical comic that I usually enjoy. However, she stepped way over the line this week by posting an image (which I’m not linking to) of herself holding the bloody severed head of Donald Trump. It was clearly meant to be funny — it wasn’t — rather than a suggestion that somebody should kill the president. (I interpreted the joke as how absurd Kathy Griffin would be in the role of tyrant-slayer.) However, you don’t know how everybody will read an image, so there are some places you just shouldn’t go.

On the Right, this incident is being used as evidence that the Left is unhinged, that it’s the violent hateful side of the political spectrum, and so on. However, if you look at the bigger picture, it proves exactly the opposite: Griffin’s image was immediately rejected by just about everybody on the Left. She apologized, she got fired from her annual role as a New Years’ Eve host on CNN anyway, lost a few other gigs, and I’m not aware of anybody trying to make a martyr out of her. She made a bad choice; it’s going to cost her. Life works that way.

But it doesn’t always work that way on the Right. Take a comparable example, like Ted Nugent saying in 2007 that Obama should “suck on my machine gun” and Hillary Clinton should “ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch”. As far as I can tell, he paid no price for this. He never apologized or lost support. At the time, Sean Hannity defended him. More recently, Trump has let him visit the Oval Office.

The typical right-wing response to suggestions of violence (or even actual violence) from their own side is to circle the wagons around the offender. Like what Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman did the previous week when Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter: “If you’re for draining the swamp, you’re on our team.”

When an incident like this happens among liberals, we reject it, precisely because we are not the violent hateful side of the spectrum. But when has some right-wing expression of hate been too over-the-top to be defended?

While we’re talking about comedians going over the line, I guess I have to comment on Bill Maher saying “nigger” on his HBO show Friday during his interview of Senator Ben Sasse. Slate describes it like this:

The controversy arose during Maher’s weekly Real Time show, where Sasse was a guest to discuss his new book, The Vanishing American Adult. At one point of the conversation, Maher pointed out how adults are putting a lot of effort into dressing up for Halloween these days and asked the senator whether that was a phenomenon in Nebraska as well. “It’s frowned up,” Sasse said. “We don’t do that quite as much.” Maher seemed encouraged by the answer and said that he should “get to Nebraska more.” Sasse then replied that the comedian was welcome to go: “We’d love to have you work in the fields with us.” Maher seemed surprised by Sasse’s invitation and then jokingly replied, “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger.” Sasse grinned and chuckled.

One of this blog’s most popular posts is “Slurs: Who can Say Them, When, and Why“. So how does that analysis apply to Maher’s usage?

On the plus side, he was not using the word in its worst possible sense, as an insult a particular black person, or even as a “joking” insult to a black person or blacks in general. Nor was he invoking an anti-black stereotype in order to win an argument. Directing the slur at himself in a self-deprecating joke — one where he’s not black-facing or otherwise making fun of blacks — is a usage I had not anticipated. (In the same way that Griffin’s joke was more about herself than about Trump, Maher’s was not really about blacks; what’s supposed to be humorous is picturing the scrawny Maher as a field hand.)

Still, this isn’t a private yuk-yuk among sophisticated friends. Maher knew he was on national TV, and would be seen by countless people of all races. So his remark shows either a lack of understanding of or a disrespect for the enormous freight that nigger and the stereotype it invokes still carry. Either way, it’s not OK.

One of the primary symptoms of privilege is that you think it’s up to you to judge whether the people you offend have a right to feel offended. But I think the slurs that have built up baggage for various oppressed communities now belong to them. So it’s up to blacks to decide what the appropriate use of nigger will be going forward. The rest of us should stay away from it, even if we think we’re using it in a non-racist way.

and let’s close with the best news of the week

Animaniacs is coming back. Maybe soon there will be more modern translations of Shakespeare.

June 5, 2017 – 11:00 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

The Paris Agreement is like my church’s pledge drive

How can a non-binding agreement be as important as Trump’s critics say it is? On a much smaller scale, I’ve just been dealing with something very similar.

If you’ve ever read the Paris Agreement on climate change — it’s dull but relatively short as international agreements go, so it’s not that hard — President Trump’s announcement that the United States is withdrawing from it was a bizarre performance. As you can see from David Victor’s annotation of the speech, virtually every line of it was either false, fantastic, or based on an incorrect assumption. (Near the beginning of the speech David Roberts tweeted: “If Trump says something true, I will notify you all.” There proved to be no need.) Parts of it were even internally contradictory, like the line where he called the agreement “non-binding” and “draconian” in the same sentence.

Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.

But though it was wrong in almost every detail, the picture Trump painted was very vivid: The Paris Agreement is an international conspiracy to hoodwink the United States and wreck our economy.

The fact that the Paris deal hamstrings the United States, while empowering some of the world’s top-polluting countries, should dispel any doubt as to the real reason why foreign lobbyists wish to keep our magnificent country tied up and bound down by this agreement: It’s to give their country an economic edge over the United States.

He did not mention President Obama directly, but the implication was clear: Obama agreed to this either because he was a fool or because he was in on the anti-America plot. Unlike his predecessor, Trump is pro-America — he represents “the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” — so he’s calling a halt to this nonsense.

Fact-checkers and other expert critics have been easy to find, but there’s a problem with their account, especially as it relates to low-information voters who are inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt: Not only is the experts’ interpretation of the Paris Agreement much less arresting than Trump’s paranoid fantasy, it doesn’t seem to hang together either. If the agreement doesn’t bind us into some kind of suicide pact, and doesn’t bind other countries either, how can renouncing it have the kind of apocalyptic consequences critics claim? If the nations that signed the agreement are still free to do whatever they want, how does Paris save any polar bears or avert hurricanes or keep the ocean from swallowing Miami?

So if we’re going to help the public resist Trump’s disinformation campaign, what we really need is not more detailed analysis from experts in international law or economics or climatology. We need a simple example from everyday life that helps people understand what the Paris Agreement is and does. In particular, the example needs to demonstrate how a non-binding agreement can be important.

Luckily, I happen to have such an example handy.

The Paris Agreement is a pledge drive. I admit, this model is in my mind for serendipitous reasons: This spring I was on the committee that organized my church’s annual pledge drive. But it turns out to be a pretty accurate parallel.

Every year, our drive works like this: We announce a target, a total amount that members will need to contribute during the next year if the church is going to do all the stuff our member-elected leadership thinks we should do. We send out a brochure explaining what that stuff is, and how the total compares to what we collected the previous year.

Then we ask everybody to send in cards with pledges: “I will contribute X dollars next year.” The pledges are in no sense binding. If you run into financial problems in the course of the year, you can always call the church office and say, “I’m going to have to lower my pledge.” Or you can just not send in the money. It’s not like we can take you to court or turn your pledge card over to the bill collectors.

The Paris Agreement is like that. It announces a goal: The nations participating in the agreement want to keep the overall increase in average global temperature since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution down to 2 degrees centigrade (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Since the main cause of this increase is the rise in greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) in the atmosphere, the agreement asks nations to make a pledge to limit their carbon emissions.

Each country determines the size of its own pledge. The pledge can be changed at any time. And there’s no enforcement mechanism that kicks in if you don’t fulfill your pledge.

Just like at my church.

What good is a nonbinding agreement? If no nation is actually committed to anything in a legally enforceable way, you might well wonder what the point of the agreement is. After all, nothing stops a country from announcing an ambitious goal with a lot of fanfare, and then doing nothing. So if you’re looking for absolute certainty that the world is finally going to take serious action to fight climate change, the Paris Agreement doesn’t provide it.

So what does it do? The point of the agreement, as I see it, is more subtle: Like our pledge drive, it’s a trust-building exercise among its members.

In any collective enterprise with voluntary inputs, there’s always a free-rider problem. If, say, I contribute a lot to the church and the guy sitting next to me on Sunday morning gives practically nothing, we both get to sing the same hymns and hear the same sermon. And since no household contributes more than a percent or two of the whole budget, the direct impact of each individual’s contribution to his or her own church experience is close to zero. (If nobody contributes, we’ll have to fire the minister and turn off the heat, which I would notice. But if everybody else contributes an appropriate amount and I don’t, probably not much changes.)

Climate change is like that, especially for countries smaller than China or the United States. Denmark, for example, is a world leader in wind power. In 2015 it generated 40% of its electricity from wind, and plans to be over 50% by 2020. But it’s such a small country that, considered in isolation, its achievement makes practically no difference to the global climate. Even the U.S. isn’t big enough to turn things around by itself, which is sometimes used as an excuse for doing nothing. As Marco Rubio put it during a Republican presidential debate: “America is not a planet.”

But the nations of the Paris Agreement — everybody except Nicaragua, Syria, and now us — are really close to being a planet. If they can work together, the gains will be meaningful. Building the trust that allows them to work towards a common goal is where the pledge-drive idea comes in.

The point of a pledge drive is to make sure that if you volunteer to make some sacrifices, you can know that you won’t be alone. Before I send in a single dollar towards next year’s church budget, I get to know what all the pledges total up to. (We missed our goal this year, but we’re close enough that almost all our plans still look feasible.) And before I pledge next year, I get to find out whether this year’s pledged money actually came in. (Again, it’s usually a little bit short, due to people losing jobs and having other unexpected financial problems. But it’s never been so short that fulfilling my commitment made me feel like a sucker.)

That’s what Paris is about. It got each nation to commit to either lower its carbon emissions or (in the case of developing nations) to significantly slow the rate of increase. (China, which still has hundreds of millions of people to bring into the modern age, pledges to stop increasing emissions by 2030. They seem likely to do better than that.) Nations also agree to share information about what they’re doing and how well it’s working. There is, in addition, a literal pledge drive in which rich nations raise money to help poor nations take action. (This is the Green Climate Fund that Trump is revoking Obama’s pledge to.)

So before any nation takes Paris-based action to lower its emissions, it gets to see what the other nations are pledging to do. And along the way, every nation gets to see how faithfully the other nations are carrying out their commitments. It’s a way for sovereign nations to move forward on their own climate-change plans while feeling confident that enough other nations are moving forward that they’re not wasting their effort.

To me, that sounds pretty familiar.

What’s not in the agreement. The Paris Agreement does not specify an carbon-emission goal for any particular nation, or mandate techniques for meeting those goals. What a nation commits to do and how it fulfills that commitment is its own business. The agreement also has no enforcement mechanism, no equivalent of the World Court or the WTO that could pronounce judgment against nations that don’t meet their goals.

So Trump’s claims that the Paris Agreement “blocks the development of clean coal” or mandates that “we can’t build [coal-fired power] plants” or puts our energy reserves “under lock and key” are pure fiction. If anybody had a genuinely clean way to get energy out of coal, it would lower our emissions and help us meet our Paris goals. So clean coal is only “blocked” to the extent that it doesn’t work. And energy reserves are under lock and key only to the extent that we voluntarily forego their use.

Likewise, his statements that “foreign leaders … have more say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens” and that “our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty” are nonsense. Our elected government made a pledge that it can adjust at any time. If it chooses to fulfill that pledge, how it does so is totally its own decision.

Why withdrawing makes no sense. I mean that literally. It’s not just that I disagree with Trump’s decision as a matter of policy, it’s that it makes no sense.

Think about it in terms of the pledge drive. Suppose I believed about my church what Trump seems to believe about Paris: that my pledge is so much higher than other people’s that the rest of the congregation is essentially taking advantage of my generosity. Everybody else should either pony up more money or get used to the idea of a more austere church.

OK then: Does it make sense for me to withdraw from the pledge drive? Not a bit. It’s not the pledge drive itself that I think is unfair to me, it’s the size of my voluntary contribution relative to the total. But I could fix that unilaterally. If I felt like a sucker, it might make sense for me to lower my pledge for next year, or even to call up the church office right now and angrily announce that I’m done contributing for this year, even though I haven’t fulfilled my pledge yet. If they need more money they should get it from somebody else.

Trump could have done that. If he has any particular terms in mind — which I suspect he doesn’t; I doubt he’s thought about it that deeply — the “renegotiation” he called for could just be an announcement. If he believes Obama’s pledge is unfair to us or beyond our abilities, he could lower it to an amount he considers fair and achievable. No other nations, no international authority, would need to sign off.

There is a discussion going on about how fair or achievable Obama’s goals were, or how much sacrifice the country should be willing to make to fulfill them. David Victor’s annotations are sympathetic to the view that Obama’s goals would require considerable economic sacrifice, while Paul Krugman believes that “We have almost all the technology we need, and can be quite confident of developing the rest.” (I haven’t studied the question enough to have a opinion worth sharing.)

But Trump is not engaging in that argument. He could simply tell the world what goals he considers fair and why. But he doesn’t. Instead, he’s withdrawing from the process of setting any goals at all.

Given that I could lower my pledge any time I find appropriate, the only reason I would withdraw from the entire pledge drive is if I acknowledge no responsibility to support the church financially. It would be tantamount to deciding to withdraw from the community.

That’s what Trump is doing here: He’s not defending our sovereignty or protecting our jobs or doing any of the other positive things his speech claims. He’s denying that we have any responsibility to work with the rest of the world in addressing one of the major problems of our era. He is, in essence, withdrawing from the community of nations.

June 5, 2017 – 9:07 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The big story this week was Trump announcing that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. It was amazing (in a bad way) to listen to his speech, because the gist of it was so divorced from actual reality: In one sentence, he described the agreement as both “nonbinding” (true) and “draconian” (false).

However, the explanation of why this was such a bad move suffered from a similar problem, especially in the eyes of low-information voters: If the agreement is nonbinding, why is it such a big deal? How can a bunch of nations stating their good intentions be so important that disavowing it has apocalyptic consequences? That disconnect, plus an inclination to distrust “liberal experts” anyway, made the criticism of Trump’s action ring false among people who are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

What is needed, I decided, is not a deep legal analysis of the agreement, or a review of the evidence for climate change, or a description of the horrors that a few more degrees of global average heat could unleash. What we really need is a simple example from everyday life that illuminates what the Paris Agreement is and does.

I happen to have one handy. I just got done serving on the committee that organizes my church’s annual pledge drive. Like Paris, the pledge drive is voluntary, nonbinding, and vitally important to the survival of the church. The parallels actually run pretty deep. If you want to get technical, they’re both devices for building trust among a large number of individual decision-makers in the presence of a free-rider problem.

So that’s this week’s featured post: “The Paris Agreement is like my church’s pledge drive.” It should be out before 9 EDT. The weekly summary links to a bunch of other commentary on Paris, reviews the week’s progress on the Russia investigation, covers polls on both the Georgia special election and UK parliamentary election, and discusses the Kathy Griffin and Bill Maher blunders, plus a few other things, before closing with the best news I’ve heard in some while: Animaniacs is coming back. That should be out by 11 or so.

June 5, 2017 – 7:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Drips of Intolerance

The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution remains “a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace.” And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs’ right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.

— Chief Judge Roger Gregory, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, 5-25-2017

This week’s featured post is “On Memorial Day we ought to remember the dead, not celebrate the Empire.”

This week everybody was talking about Jared Kushner

Last Monday, it had just come out that the FBI was interested in one of Trump’s senior advisers, and a lot of people who didn’t know anything for sure were speculating that it would be Jared. Whoever it turned out to be, the significance of the report was that the Russia problem didn’t just concern people who used to work for Trump, like Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, but also someone who was still playing a major role in the Trump administration.

Well, it is Jared, and the story is stranger than any speculation I had run into:

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Monitoring by American intelligence services, that is. This does not seem to be illegal (although omitting the meeting with the Russian ambassador from his security-clearance application is illegal), but it raises all sorts of questions: He was already talking to the Russian ambassador face-to-face; who in the Kremlin did he want to talk to and about what? Why seek to hide those messages from the Americans?

Words like espionage are being thrown around by people who don’t use that term lightly. Some speculate that the inexperienced Kushner simply didn’t understand what he was suggesting. But he went to the meeting with Flynn, who would have understood it. The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza sums up:

We still don’t have a crime in this case, but there is an awful lot of coverup.

The NYT puts a different slant on this story:

the idea was to have Mr. Flynn speak directly with a senior military official in Moscow to discuss Syria and other security issues.

Though why that conversation required dodging American intelligence isn’t clear. Another cryptic part of the NYT article says this:

And less than two weeks later, the idea was dropped when Mr. Trump announced that Rex W. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil who had worked closely with Russian officials on energy deals, was his choice to become secretary of state.

My working model of Kushner resembles in part my working model of Trump, and maybe reflects my own class prejudice: I imagine that being born at the top of a real estate empire convinced Jared that he’s a lot smarter than he actually is, and shielded him from the criticism he needed if he was going to form an accurate view of his place in the world.

That model is supported by someone who actually knows Kushner: Elizabeth Spiers, who edited New York Observer for him.

I don’t even know how to quantify Kushner’s expertise, anyway. Yes, he ran the company — which he inherited, not uncommon in New York’s dynastic, insular real estate world. But he was sure he had the goods. When I worked for him, I didn’t think he had a realistic view of his own capabilities since, like his father-in-law, he seemed to view his wealth and its concomitant accoutrements as rewards for his personal success in business, and not something he would have had in any case. To me, he appeared to view his position and net worth as the products of an essentially meritocratic process.

It’s not hard to imagine such a person getting in over his head, and being manipulated by well-trained operatives like Ambassador Kislyak and General Flynn.

If you’d ever wondered why Putin would prefer Trump to Clinton, Trump’s meeting with our European allies in Brussels made it clear. In Brussels, Trump continued to work on Putin’s agenda, insulting our European allies

According to a report in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, many EU officials were appalled by how little the Americans appeared to know about trade policy. The guests from Washington seemed not to be aware that EU member states only negotiate trade treaties as a bloc. According to the paper, Trump’s chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, claimed during meetings, for example, that different customs tariffs are in place between the U.S. and Germany than between the U.S. and Belgium.

and undermining NATO. Trump’s advisers had led everyone to believe that his speech would finally unequivocally endorse the center of the treaty defining the alliance: Article 5, the one the obligates all the NATO countries to come to one another’s defense. He didn’t. Instead he continued to peddle a fiction from his campaign: that most NATO countries “owe money” either to the United States or to the alliance. They don’t.

Josh Marshall:

Whether Vladimir Putin has something on Donald Trump or somehow has him in his pay hardly matters. If he doesn’t, he apparently doesn’t need to do since Trump insists on doing more or less exactly what Putin would want of him entirely on his own.

Matt Yglesias:

To undermine NATO in this way has, of course, been a core goal of Russian (and, earlier, Soviet) foreign policy as long as NATO has existed. And through all the ups and downs of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, Russia has never scored a success on that front as striking as Donald Trump’s elevation to the presidency and his continued refusal to affirm that the United States will defend its allies. Why exactly Trump won’t do that remains a mystery, but the conduct itself is striking — in some ways all the more so because it involves Trump overruling the professional opinion of his own aides in favor of a different, more Russia-friendly line.

Here we see a photo of three NATO leaders and what appears to be a cardboard cut-out of Trump.

and the budget

Matt Yglesias:

Budgets are important as statements of values. One clear headline value of the Trump budget is an overwhelming preference for cutting taxes on high-income families over providing food, medical care, housing assistance, and other support to low-income families.

Stranger than that, though, is that the whole thing seems to be based on an obvious double-counting error of something that maybe shouldn’t even have been counted once. Trump’s unspecified tax cuts are supposed to pay for themselves by generating revenue from economic growth — a dubious proposition already. But that increased growth is used again to increase revenue beyond what the current system would produce. The mistake is sizeable: $2 trillion over ten years.

and health care

The CBO analysis of the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill that the House passed came in. The previous version of the bill would increase the number of uninsured people by 24 million in ten years. The version the House passed (without waiting for the CBO analysis) gets that number down to 23 million.

Senate Republicans claim they’re going to do something different, but they have the same underlying problem that the House did: Republicans have made more promises than they can deliver on. 23 million extra uninsured people is the price of delivering on all the Republicans other promises: cutting taxes, reducing the deficit, giving insurance companies more freedom, and so on.

I don’t doubt that the Senate can lower that number, but to do so it will have to turn its back on promises the House fulfilled. I still don’t see a compromise that gets enough votes to pass in both chambers.

and two court decisions

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s appeal to lift a lower court’s injunction against its Muslim Ban. It wasn’t close: 10-3.

The entire issue is whether you take the President at his word: Trump’s executive order (which Chief Judge Roger Gregory abbreviated EO-2, to distinguish it from the first version, EO-1, which Trump withdrew after the 9th Circuit ruled against it) is what judges call “facially neutral”. Its text says nothing about Muslims or religion; it’s all about national security.

However, if you read EO-2 in the context of EO-1 and in the context of Trump’s campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on“, it’s easy to make the case that EO-2 is all about religious discrimination. That’s how Gregory’s majority opinion views it.

Based on this evidence, we find that Plaintiffs have more than plausibly alleged that EO-2’s stated national security interest was provided in bad faith, as a pretext for its religious purpose. …

EO-2 cannot be divorced from the cohesive narrative linking it to the animus that inspired it. In light of this, we find that the reasonable observer would likely conclude that EO-2’s primary purpose is to exclude persons from the United States on the basis of their religious beliefs.

From here, it goes to the Supreme Court.

Right now, the administration claims this isn’t a Muslim ban at all, and that the resemblance to what he promised on the campaign trail is just coincidental. But does anyone doubt Trump’s tune will change the instant the Supreme Court says it’s constitutional? Within a week, he’ll hold a rally somewhere and say, “I promised you a Muslim ban, and I delivered.”

Critics of the decision argue that the judges are playing politics. But I think they should be forced to answer the question the judges had to address: Do you believe the executive order was made in good faith, and not as an attempt to limit Muslim immigration simply because they are Muslims?

Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote on the liberal side of a racial gerrymandering case: The Supreme Court rejected two congressional districts in North Carolina. His concurring opinion is very brief, so it’s not entirely clear what he’s thinking.

There are other gerrymandering cases to be decided before the Court goes on its summer break, so I’ll save more detailed comments until they come in.

and you might also be interested in

Remember how Trump was going to sort-of comply with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by tracking how much of his business’ profits came from foreign governments and voluntarily donating that much to the Treasury? Well, never mind. Rather than produce a transparent, auditable plan for calculating foreign-government profit, the Trump Organization sent Congress a glitzy eight-page brochure describing a process full of holes.

The short version: If they get checks that say “Government of Russia” or “Sovereign Wealth Fund of Kuwait”, they’ll keep track of the amounts and assume that the net profit rate on that property applies to that payment. (This blows off the distinction between average profit and marginal profit, and allows them to do bookkeeping tricks with depreciation.) But the TO considers it “impractical” to track foreign-government payments more subtle than that.

So, for example, if the Russian Embassy decides to throw its Christmas Party at the Trump International Hotel in Washington (pictured below), the profit on that revenue would count as foreign-government income, unless the hotel can find enough depreciation to declare a paper loss that year. But if one of Putin’s billionaire buddies throws a Christmas Party and happens to invite the ambassador and everybody from the Russian Embassy, that wouldn’t count.

Reading the brochure, you have to keep reminding yourself that we’re talking about violating Article I, Section 9 of the effing Constitution. That clause says that foreign-government money can’t be accepted in the first place “without the consent of Congress”, which Trump has not even sought. Obeying the Constitution is often inconvenient, but convenience has never been the standard.

I continue to refuse to go after Melania (for anything other that profiteering off the presidency). This week’s Melania story was about her wearing a very expensive jacket. But I defended Hillary Clinton wearing a somewhat less expensive (but still very pricey) jacket during the campaign, and I extend that defense to Melania: We pay way too much attention to the clothes and hair and shoes of women in public life. If they err on the side of frugality, they’re frumpy. If they err on the side of expense, they’re Marie Antoinette. Men face no comparable choice.

I’ve been following the problems Kansas has had after the Brownback tax cuts. Sunday, the WaPo looked at Oklahoma, where a combination of tax cuts and a decline in oil revenues has the state cutting back on — what else? — education: four-day weeks, 49th in teacher pay, big class sizes, etc.

The year’s best feminist protest was at the Texas State Capitol:

The special election for the House seat in Montana had what is starting to feel like a familiar result: The Republicans held onto the seat by less that they ordinarily would have. Assaulting a reporter on election eve appeared to make no difference. Some Republicans actually liked it.

Despite last week’s rumor, Joe Lieberman won’t be the new FBI director.

Cultural appropriation is when somebody from a dominant culture tries to acquire fame and fortune (or just look cool) by using stuff created by a dominated culture. (I’ve written about it before.) Sometimes it’s done with respect and a share-the-wealth attitude. (Paul Simon didn’t just steal the South African sound, he toured with and helped popularize authentic South African bands.) Sometimes it’s annoying and disrespectful, but relatively harmless (like Anglos who have no idea what Cinqo de Mayo commemorates “celebrating” by drinking too much tequila). And sometimes it results in a significant injustice, like Elvis becoming a musical icon while the black pioneers he imitated couldn’t get radio time.

Crystal Contreras uses a local controversy about a Anglo-owned burrito shop to make a very good point: Cultural appropriation is mostly an effect of injustice. It happens because a dominance relationship already exists. Beating it back may be emotionally satisfying, but doesn’t do much to solve the underlying problem.

It’s just that cultural appropriation is not what caused these inequalities in the first place, and it’s just one arm of a much larger system that makes it so POCs are not seen as experts on our own cultures.

Instead, I’m more interested in confronting the entire apparatus in place that make it so the dude who fell in love with Mexico on spring break is able to open a tamale bar in the ultra-gentrified Hipsterfuck Chill District, while the woman from Mexico has to risk arrest to sell tamales out of a cooler in front of the grocery store.

Her piece doesn’t claim to be the final word on the subject, but it’s a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.

and let’s close with an old song updated

Paul Simon and Stephen Colbert redo “Feelin’ Groovy” for 2017.

May 29, 2017 – 10:59 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (12)

On Memorial Day we ought to remember the dead, not celebrate the Empire.

I grew up in the era of the draft. Young men by the hundreds of thousands were remanded into the military under penalty of law. They were not sent to defend their homes and families against an invader, but to Vietnam to fight a war whose significance was hard to explain. (In retrospect, we lost and American life went on more-or-less as before. So what was that all about?)

Tens of thousands died there. Others came back alive, but left arms or legs behind. Some came back whole, but said little about their experiences afterwards. Some avoided the draft, either legally through student deferments (or whatever other loopholes were available when their names came up), or illegally, by going to Canada or Sweden, or (like Muhammad Ali) to prison.

I imagine that some must have had the kinds of positive experiences I liked to read about in formulaic World War II novels: They came of age. They discovered inside themselves a strength and courage that they had not previously been aware of. They bonded with other young men they probably would not have met any other way, and found friends for life.

This is all speculative for me, because I was never drafted. The draft wound down just in time to miss my age cohort: We had to register, and they held a lottery that told us what order we would have been drafted in, but no draft was held. So whether I would have died, lost a limb, locked the whole experience away in a dark corner of my mind, escaped to Toronto, gone or jail, or found myself — who can say? I was there for the beginning of the all-volunteer army, and I didn’t volunteer.

While I am personally grateful to have had the chance to make that choice, I am ambivalent about the policy that allowed me to do so. I sympathize with the Jeffersonian vision expressed in the opening of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …”. Jefferson and Madison pictured a militia-based military, where ordinary people defended their towns and farms, rather than a standing army that could be sent on imperial missions, or maybe could develop its own interests, separate from the rest of the country. When soldiering becomes a profession, they realized, military and civilian cultures can start to go in different directions. And that’s dangerous “to the security of a free State”.

That divergence has been happening, slowly but steadily, for almost half a century now. It hurts America in two different ways. On the one hand, we get chicken hawks: neo-conservative intellectuals or tough-talking radio hosts, who know that neither they nor their sons or daughters will ever be called on to back up their geopolitical theories or their jingoistic rhetoric. If anyone ends up getting shot it, it will be the rural kid whose college fund vanished after Dad lost his factory job, or the ghetto kid who sees no other way out than to sign away a few years of his life and take a chance on losing all of it.

On the other hand, families who maintain a military tradition without financial necessity may come to see themselves not as representatives of America, but as a breed apart from it — a better, braver breed that has been forced to deal with violent reality in a way that the rest of us avoid, and who therefore deserve to rule. If a fascist takeover ever succeeds in this country, it will be due not just to some Trump-like clown at the top, but also to warriors up and down the line who no longer respect civilian America.

These thoughts come to me on Memorial Day, because I have no one in particular to remember: Not only have I never been shot at, but no one close to me has died in war. Our soldiers continue to serve in war zones in Afghanistan and in parts of Iraq and Syria, but no one I know is in danger. I care about those wars only to the extent that I choose to care. If I ignore them, they will not slap me in the face by claiming someone important to me.

Memorial Day didn’t used to be like this. It began after the Civil War, a conflict that killed about 2% of the population, and is still responsible for nearly half of the total of Americans who have ever died in battle. It began, in other words, at a time when nearly everyone had someone to remember.

I picture the early Memorial Days as bittersweet holidays, full of personal anecdotes about the dead, respect, regret, and a touch of gratitude for the chance to be living in peace. You might take your children to the cemetery to tell them stories about a father or uncle they remembered either dimly or not at all, while silently you hoped that you would never have to visit their graves on a some future Memorial Day. If you prayed, it was not for the greater glory of the United States, but for peace.

For many, perhaps most of us, particularly those in the educated or managerial classes, that personal connection has been lost. We have no graves to visit, and we never seriously worry about our children going to war, because that’s not their job. They’re destined for colleges and offices and the exciting digital future. Bullets and bombs are for the lower classes to deal with.

What replaces the personal is pageantry. Rather than a reminder of the cost of war, this holiday has become either a content-free weekend marking the start of summer, or a celebration of the military. Friday night, I saw on television an example that was simultaneously trivial and ridiculous: The Boston Red Sox played the Seattle Mariners, and both teams marked the Memorial Day weekend by wearing caps of Army green with camouflage visors. (The caps are being marketed; yesterday on a sidewalk, I passed a young man wearing one.)

The changes in Memorial Day are part of a larger growth of nationalistic ritual and worship of things military. I have always been uncomfortable singing the national anthem at baseball games (a practice that began during World War I, in the 1918 World Series; perhaps this misappropriation was the true origin of the curse that prevented both teams — Red Sox and Cubs — from winning a world championship for the rest of the 20th century), because I don’t see what is patriotic about playing or watching baseball. By now, of course, that practice extends to virtually all sports events, to the point that football quarterback Colin Kaepernick could create a national controversy simply by kneeling down.

After 9-11, many teams started putting a second patriotic song (“God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful”) somewhere else in the program, like during the 7th inning stretch. Last summer, the college-summer-league team in my town began including a moment where all veterans in the house were asked to stand and be applauded by the rest of us; not just on a particular day, but every game.

This Thursday, I was at the graduation ceremony of a nearby community college. It also began with the national anthem, included “God Bless America” later in the program, and had a moment when all graduating veterans stood to be applauded. Again, nationalism and militarism seemed pasted onto this event. Why not, for example, the state song or the college song? We were told that graduates came from many different nations: Why were they required to participate in an American patriotic ritual? (Why, for that matter, are baseball players, many of whom come from Latin American countries that have no cause to remember us or our soldiers kindly?) Trump’s planners even looked into the possibility of military vehicles adding spectacle to his inaugural parade, as they did to the old Soviet Mayday celebrations.

As actual soldiers become more and more distant, we are offered the Soldier and the Veteran as symbols. They are to be honored and worshiped, not empathized with, or even taken care of. (They are, in essence, getting the Jesus treatment: Worship Him as Lord, but pay no attention to the actual person. Ignore that liberal Sermon on the Mount, or much of anything else He said.) We are offered the Nation and the Military as objects of veneration, and encouraged to take an imperial pride in their world-bestriding power.

I find myself missing the bittersweet holiday Memorial Day started out to be. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to have a day where we appreciate the huge difference in scale between the Nation’s ambitions and the costs that will filter down into our own lives? Or, perhaps, to recognize the ways that we have been insulated from those costs, which have not vanished, but are borne by someone else instead?

Memorial Day itself is becoming something to mourn for. Once a bittersweet recognition of the toll assessed by military power, it now too often becomes a celebration of that power.

May 29, 2017 – 7:48 am Categories: Articles | Comments (42)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

After the Civil War, Memorial Day arose as a holiday for remembering the human cost of war: You went to a cemetery to visit the graves of friends and relatives who had been killed. It had a personal scale. If you thought of nations at all, it was to pray that somehow they might work out their differences without any more battles.

But in the post-Vietnam era of the professional military, more and more Americans — particularly in the upper and upper-middle classes — have no personal connection to the wars we fight, much less to those who have died in them. And so the holiday is tending to drift. If it has any content at all (beyond marking the beginning of summer), it’s turning into a celebration of the American military and the greatness of the United States.

I feel a need to protest this, so today’s featured post will be “On Memorial Day, we ought to remember the dead, not celebrate the Empire.” It should be out early, certainly before 9 EDT.

The weekly summary will review whatever-the-heck is going on with Jared Kushner, an appeals court (by a wide margin) refusing to let Trump’s Muslim Ban take effect, the CBO score on the Republican healthcare bill, Clarence Thomas amazingly taking a stand against racial gerrymandering in North Carolina, the FY2018 budget proposal, and a few other things, before closing with a Paul Simon/Stephen Colbert duet that doesn’t feel very groovy.

May 29, 2017 – 6:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Greatest Danger

Our greatest danger is not from the grossly wicked around us, but from the unreflecting multitude who are borne along as a stream by foreign impulse, and bear us along with them.

– William Ellery Channing, “Self Culture” (1838)

This week’s featured posts are “What is impeachment for?” where I try to keep myself honest by going back to first principles rather than just tailoring a case against Trump, and “Step Around the Benghazi Trap“, which urges Democrats not to make the same kind of cognitive errors Republicans have made.

A shorter version of a Sift post from March just got published in UU World as “Reframing the healthcare conversation“. They added a truly kick-ass illustration. Man, do I wish I could draw.

This week everybody was talking about Special Counsel Robert Mueller

We now have a special counsel to investigate Trump and Russia. I didn’t see that coming. Of course, I haven’t predicted much of what has happened these last two weeks.

Interesting and very positive article about Mueller in Politico. It describes him as “America’s straightest arrow”.

“His gift is that he’s decisive without being impulsive,” Comey told me several years back, recalling his years working alongside Mueller. “He’ll sit, listen, ask questions and make a decision. I didn’t realize at the time how rare that is in Washington.”

The question everyone has been asking after Mueller’s appointment is: How independent can he be? The answer is in a column Neal Katyal wrote in The Washington Post. Katyal was involved in writing the rules for special counsels back in 1999.

The short version is that Trump could still fire Mueller or impede his investigation in various ways, but every interference with the special counsel’s investigation would have to be reported to leaders of both parties in Congress, who could make that information public.

The regulations provide that Mueller can “be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the Attorney General” (again, Rosenstein here, because Sessions is recused) and only for “good cause.” The president, therefore, would have to direct Rosenstein to fire Mueller — or, somewhat more extravagantly, Trump could order the special-counsel regulations repealed and then fire Mueller himself. Either of those actions was unthinkable to us back in 1999, for we understood that President Richard Nixon’s attempt in this regard ultimately led to his downfall. At the same time, after Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey this month, many things once thought beyond the realm of possibility look less so now.

Ultimately, every democracy lives or dies by the same principle: The public has to have expectations of integrity, and has to punish leaders who are visibly dishonest. If the people become so cynical that they believe all politicians are dishonest, so we might as well tolerate this particular slimeball doing these particular slimy things, then democracy slides away.

For those of you who think a special counsel should be completely immune to outside interference, I have two words: Spanish Inquisition.

There’s no totally satisfactory answer to the question of a government investigating itself. If an investigative body has total independence, it effectively becomes a fourth branch of government that isn’t checked or balanced by the other three.

I keep reading that Trump is about to appoint U.S. attorneys to replace the ones he fired over two months ago, and there are rumors about who is or isn’t in the running for certain districts. But I haven’t found any actual appointments. (Try googling “new u.s. attorney appointed”.) To me, this suggests that the point was to get rid of the old USAs, not to make room for people Trump wanted to appoint.

The persistent rumor is that axing all the U.S. attorneys was just cover for getting rid of one troublesome one: Preet Bharara in New York, who was zeroing in on the insider trading of HHS Secretary Tom Price.

A new administration typically replaces the U.S. attorneys appointed by the previous administration, but usually they stay on until their replacements are confirmed. The exception was President Clinton, who also asked for a mass resignation when he took office in 1993 — and was also rumored to be doing it to shut down one investigation, that of powerful Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski. But didn’t work out that way: Clinton appointee Eric Holder indicted Rostenkowski in 1994. He went to jail.

Sleep well, Secretary Price.

Trump’s approval rating (as aggregated by Nate Silver) shows gradual erosion rather than sudden collapse.

and the Russia leak

I have a theory that would make a great movie: Some coven of feminist witches has cursed Trump to live out all the negative scenarios he conjured up for Hillary.

Seth Meyers played this clip from Trump’s campaign:

If Hillary Clinton were elected, she would be under protracted criminal investigation likely followed by the trial of a sitting president. The investigation will last for years, nothing will get done, government will grind to a halt and our country will continue to suffer.

and commented: “It’s amazing ― the only thing he got wrong was the president’s name.”

So now Trump leaks highly classified information directly to the Russian ambassador — royally pissing off the Israelis, who gathered the information and don’t want the Iranians to guess how they got it — and we have to remember what he said about Clinton and classified information:

This is not just extreme carelessness with classified material, which is still totally disqualifying. This is calculated, deliberate, premeditated misconduct.

and Trump’s tour of the world capitals of monotheism

His speech in Riyadh also fits my witches-curse theory. During the campaign, he called out Hillary’s “weakness”:

We cannot let this evil continue. Nor can we let the hateful ideology of radical Islam … be allowed to reside or spread within our country. Just can’t do it. We will not defeat it with closed eyes or silent voices. Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country.

But now he’s the one who can’t say that name: “radical Islamic terrorism”. Instead his speech talks about “Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires”. The difference between Islamic and Islamist is like the difference between real and realistic: If terrorism is Islamic, then it is a true representation of the faith of Muhammad, but if it is only Islamist, then it has been constructed to resemble Islam, but may not actually be Islam.

During the campaign, he said “Islam hates us.” But now he says:

This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations. This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it.

Honestly, that part sounds a lot like Obama.

Two things are different from Obama: (1) He’s taking the Sunni side in the Sunni/Shia struggle to dominate the Muslim world. His speech to the Sunni Saudis included an all-out rhetorical attack on Shiite Iran. Obama was trying to stay out of that.

(2) He signed a huge arms deal with the Saudis that Obama had balked on.

Back in September, the Obama administration approved a more than $115 billion arms deal with the Saudis. But as the death toll and reports of human rights violations in the Saudi-led war on Yemen began to rise dramatically, the Obama administration nixed the sale of the precision-guided munitions it had originally agreed to put in the deal to try to coerce the Saudis into curbing those atrocities.

Now those munitions are back in the Trump arms package — which speaks volumes about this administration.

In fact, the entire deal paints a vivid picture of the Trump administration — an administration that is willing to bend over backwards to make deals with important friends, that doesn’t let human rights concerns get in the way of doing business, and where personal relationships with those closest to the president can prove highly lucrative.

This fits with the rhetoric he’s using. If we and the Saudis are united in “a battle between Good and Evil”, then our side is Good by definition. So we don’t have to prove our goodness by, say, avoiding war crimes. That weakling Obama thought America’s goodness was open to judgment, and so wasn’t always willing to stick by our friends when they did horrible things. Trump will.

I oppose allowing Trump to re-enter the country until Congress “can figure out what the hell is going on” with him.

and you might also be interested in …

A James Fallows tweetstorm explains why CNN is wrong to feature knee-jerk Trump loyalists like Jeffrey Lord:

Genuine, serious, ongoing, borderline-Fox-like harm to journalism/public life for CNN to keep featuring Lord & the Trumpkins. Why? Since they are guaranteed *never* to criticize anything Trump says or does, and *always* to say HRC/Obama/Dems were worse, and in fact are cast in that role, sit-com style, they embody the idea that politics is ONLY about tribal loyalty.

You pick your team; you stay with it thick or thin, as you would in a real war or a Game of Thrones war or a Mafia war. You wage this combat as if there is no such thing as “reasonable criticism” of your side, or “in fairness, we must credit” for the other. While of course democratic politics *depends* on people recognizing, and changing minds, based on actual ideas, arguments, interests.

CNN should have more actual *conservatives* on air, with actual progressives, but fewer tribal loyalists, who embody idea that all political differences are tribal and THEREFORE INSOLUBLE.

In a fabulous stunt, someone projected messages above the entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Trump is currently facing a lawsuit filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that alleges he is violating the clause by accepting payments from foreign states through his hotel.

Sometimes words like fascist get thrown around too lightly. And then you run into Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who seems to have been appointed as Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security (which does not require Senate confirmation).

During a December 2015 segment of his show, The People’s Sheriff, on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze radio network, Clarke suggested that any person who posts pro-terrorist sentiments on social media be arrested, deprived of the constitutional protection against unlawful imprisonment (known as habeas corpus), and sent to Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. He estimated the number of people who could be imprisoned under his proposal could reach 1 million.

Clarke is popular on the Right primarily because, being black, he gives cover to white racists to quote the stuff he says about Black Lives Matter. (You know: “I’m just repeating what that black guy said.”)

Clarke’s understanding of domestic terrorism runs far beyond radical jihadists. He has predicted that Black Lives Matter will “join forces with ISIS,” and on multiple occasions described the group as a terror organization. The protesters do not “care about black lives. They care about their own radical ideology of terrorism: anarchy.” Clarke insists Black Lives Matter “needs to be crushed.”

BLM is illegitimate, in his view, because the police are doing just fine. Especially his police.

Clarke’s ironfisted beliefs about criminal justice can be explained in part by his own career. He oversees a prison that is notoriously brutal. Four people have died of mistreatment and torture in his custody. One newborn baby died while its mother was shackled during childbirth; another prisoner died of dehydration, after the water in his cell was shut off for seven days. In 2013, one of his deputies ran a traffic light and T-boned the car of a civilian driver, who was badly injured. Clarke’s department charged the driver, who was actually sober, with drunk driving in order to cover up its own culpability.

Roger Ailes died. As the Nixon political operative who created Fox News, Ailes is a central figure in the transformation of the American news landscape into what it is today. He’s an interesting example if you want to debate the Great Man theory of history. Maybe the world would be vastly different (and better) if he had never lived. Or maybe the changes he wrought were inevitable; conservative talk radio already existed before Fox News, and somehow that mindset would have arrived on TV anyway.

I’ll give Joy Reid the last word on this:

Ailes built an empire by creating a fantasy world for white, conservative men, where women are agreeable sex objects and [people of color] are predators.

Speaking of sexual harassers, Bill O’Reilly might be back on TV sooner than anybody thought. Several conservative media groups see themselves as the next Fox News, and hiring O’Reilly might be just what it takes to launch them into the big time.

Of course, the protest groups behind the advertising boycott that prompted Fox News to oust Mr. O’Reilly would certainly have something to say about any move to bring him back to television. As the National Organization for Women president, Terry O’Neill, said to me, “Any network that hires him, what they’re doing is sending a message to women: ‘We don’t care about sexual harassment.’”

But there’s a flip side: They’d also be saying to men “We don’t care about sexual harassment.” And the men who would respond positively to that might be just the audience they’re looking for.

The Onion trolls Republican hypocrisy on Trump:

“Frankly, we need an independent counsel to look into why I continue to do absolutely nothing in the face of mounting evidence against this reckless, unethical, and potentially compromised White House,” said McCain, passionately arguing that his disturbing pattern of inaction in regards to the Trump administration raises “deeply troubling questions” about his own motivations. “Without a thorough inquiry empowered to go wherever the facts may lead, I’m afraid we’ll never get to the bottom of why my opposition to this madness amounts to little more than the mildest of criticisms on Meet The Press. The fact that I essentially rubber-stamp this president’s agenda despite a reputation for integrity and independence simply doesn’t add up, and the time has come to find out once and for all what’s really going on with me.”

For reasons that escape me, Joe Lieberman is rumored to be the front-runner for FBI director.

and let’s close with something mysterious

That glowing orb Trump was touching with the Saudi king and the Egyptian president — was it the Globe of Peace? a palantir? a device for communicating with the Kree Supreme Intelligence?

I love the expression on King Salman’s face. Caption contest: What is he about to say?

The scene turns out to look even stranger in the uncropped photo.

May 22, 2017 – 12:24 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Step Around the Benghazi Trap

As the Trump scandals deepen, Democrats should learn from Republican mistakes: If you let your expectations get too far ahead of what’s known, confirmation bias can lead you into an a universe of alternative facts.

A few days before last November’s election, I saw a guy wearing an anti-Hillary t-shirt with the slogan “Benghazi: I will never forget!”. And it made me wonder: Of the things he will never forget about Benghazi, how many are imaginary? Will he always remember, for example, the stand-down order that was never given? Or that Clinton’s response to four American deaths was to ask “What difference does it make?”

Benghazi was a real event, but eventually it got surrounded by a cloud of virtual events conjured up by conspiracy theorists. The virtual events — did you hear that Obama knew the attack was coming and intentionally did nothing? — stick in the mind so much better than the real ones. I suspect they’re the ones that guy (and the millions like him) will always remember.

Republicans went certifiably insane about Benghazi. When seven separate investigations failed to verify their wildest accusations against Obama and Clinton, they did the obvious thing: spent millions of tax dollars on an eighth one that also found nothing, in the vain hope that someday the same evidence would start saying something different.

Last week, a commenter on this blog asked how Democrats will know if we’ve gone down a similar rabbit-hole about Trump and Russia. I replied that it was way too early to make such a comparison, because we haven’t even completed one investigation of Trump/Russia, much less started our eighth. But the longer I thought about it, the more I wondered if there wasn’t something worth thinking about here: It may have taken four years and eight investigations for their Benghazi insanity to play out, but when exactly did Republicans start making the fatal mistake that eventually drove them insane?

Early days, I think. Right about where we are now.

And here’s what I think the fatal mistake was: convincing themselves that they already knew what had happened and how everything was going to play out. Within days or weeks, they knew that this was the big one, the scandal that was finally going to bring Obama down. Obama and Clinton had done something horrible here, even if nobody was sure exactly what it was. The point of investigating was to find the horrible thing they did, not to determine whether it existed. Any investigators who failed to find something bad enough to end both of their careers — and maybe send them to jail as a bonus — just hadn’t looked hard enough.

The point of me bringing this up isn’t to pooh-pooh the seriousness of what we’re finding out about Trump, or to suggest that an investigation shouldn’t be pursued with all possible vigor. I think Trump and a number of his people are acting like they’re guilty as hell. And the seriousness of the possibilities is undeniable: One of the determining factors in the 2016 election might have been a conspiracy between the winning candidate and a hostile foreign power. An unsavory Trump-Russia connection might go back decades, to Trump getting bailed out of his terrible investment decisions by money that Russian oligarchs needed to launder. Or maybe Trump campaign officials like Manafort and Flynn were Russian agents paid to manipulate the useful idiot who was their candidate.

Those possibilities can’t just be left out there for people to wonder about. If there’s even a tiny chance that one of them is true, a major investigation is necessary.

It’s possible that all this will come out quickly, in months or even weeks. Maybe Flynn or somebody will flip on Trump and produce a smoking gun that will either force him to resign or convince reluctant Republicans in Congress that they need to impeach him. Maybe Pence is in it up to his eyeballs and he’ll be forced out too.

It’s possible. But at this point, I don’t actually know any of those things. Trump does a lot of stuff I don’t understand, so he could be acting guilty for some ridiculous reason that isn’t illegal at all. Remember how adamant he was about his inaugural crowd being bigger than Obama’s, or how he didn’t really lose the popular vote? Maybe the Big Thing he’s hiding is some similarly ego-diminishing fact that anybody else would just own up to. Maybe the stuff that looks like a giant conspiracy is actually made up of dozens of unrelated instances of stupidity and incompetence. Maybe the corruption being covered up is ordinary money-grubbing by lower-level Trumpists, and doesn’t have anything to do with high-level treason.

That’s all possible too.

We need to find out. So we need to keep paying attention. All the avenues of investigation should be pursued as vigorously as possible, and everybody needs to remain vigilant against attempts to change the subject or derail the inquiries. We need to stay on guard against the worst: If the tension keeps ratcheting up inside the White House, eventually somebody is bound to suggest a Reichstag Fire — a real or fake attack on America that is supposed to make us circle the wagons around our Leader.

Or our enemies could decide that now, while the country is divided and so many of us are inclined to disbelieve anything our president says, is exactly the right time to launch a real attack.

As Americans, we need to keep the pressure on our elected representatives to take all this seriously. We need to stay ready to protest in the streets if it all goes wrong, just as Tunisians and Egyptians did to chase their corrupt leaders into retirement.

But while we’re making sure we’ll be geared up for whatever happens, we also need to make sure we’re staying in touch with reality, and that we’re maintaining the separation between what we know, what we suspect, and what we’re getting ready for just in case. We can’t let ourselves live in a speculative future where everything we’ve always suspected about Trump turns out to be true, and everyone who supported him finally has to admit that we were right.

If you get too attached to that future, you’ll most likely miss the turn when reality decides to go some other way. As the facts unfold, you’ll only see the ones that point in the direction you want to go. That’s a well-documented cognitive failing called confirmation bias. It’s not a conservative or liberal thing, it’s a human thing. Unless you’re some particularly well-designed artificial intelligence, you’re susceptible to it.

It’s already starting to happen in certain circles. Things that might eventually turn out to be true are being reported as if they are inevitably going to happen, or maybe have already happened. (Did you hear that Trump has already been indicted?)

It’s very satisfying to respond to Trump’s alternate reality (where his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s, his electoral college margin was historically large, only fraud prevented him from winning the popular vote, and no politician — not even one who got assassinated, like Kennedy or Lincoln — has ever been treated so unfairly) with an anti-Trump alternate reality.

But as boring as it can be sometimes, we need to hang onto real reality. It sometimes takes a while to manifest itself, but in the long run real reality has a power that we want on our side.

It’s tempting to believe that we already know what’s going to happen: We know what James Comey is going to testify to, we know that Michael Flynn and/or Paul Manafort are going to flip on Trump and what they’re going to say; we know where the money trail is going to lead; and so on. We’re just waiting for that inevitable future to arrive, when Trump is ridden out of town on a rail.

But I don’t know any of that stuff, not yet. So I’m going to have to listen to the witnesses as they testify. I’m going to have to read the investigators’ reports as they come out.

Trump’s defenders are telling us that because we don’t already know that he did something wrong, we shouldn’t be investigating. The answer to that isn’t that we’re investigating because we do already know. The reason to investigate is because we don’t know. Trump’s defenders — other than possibly Trump himself and a small circle around him — don’t know either.

We should move forward, but with full knowledge of the uncertainties and ambiguities. That’s harder than moving forward with full certainty of where you’re going. But in the long run, it will keep you sane.

May 22, 2017 – 10:30 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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