The attack on Syria reverses what little we thought we knew about Trump’s foreign policy.
In his campaign and the early days of his administration, Trump did not lay out a detailed vision of foreign policy. But he did have a slogan:
From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first —America first.
No longer would we spend “trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” We weren’t going to commit our blood and treasure for sentimental reasons, or to uphold abstract global principles, or perhaps not even to defend our allies. Our military would be used to promote our interests, and nobody else’s.
The administration’s early moves followed that course: His proposed budget sharply cuts foreign aid. By some accounts, he presented German’s Angela Merkel with a printed bill for Germany’s share of NATO’s defense expenses.
He particularly applied this view to Syria. Such troops and air strikes as we committed to Syria were to fight ISIS, and not to play any role in helping rebels oust the Assad regime. Not only did he want to reverse President Obama’s commitment to taking in Syrian refugees, he didn’t want anyone at all to come here from there, not even as tourists. Just 11 days ago, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were saying that we no longer were going to “focus on getting Assad out“.
Then Tuesday came Assad’s gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun, killing dozens of civilians and producing horrifying video. Trump’s initial reaction was to blame Obama for not taking military action against Assad after a previous chemical attack in 2013 — inaction that Trump demanded at the time. Then he made a semi-coherent statement expressing personal horror at the videos, blaming Assad, and praising himself in advance for his “flexibility”, i.e. not being bound by anything he had said in the past.
Thursday, he shot 59 Tomahawk missiles at the airbase the gas attack came from. The attack was mostly symbolic, since the base reportedly was back in operation quickly, and further airstrikes were made against the same rebel-held area, though apparently no chemical attacks.
What should we do? Before I get too far along in criticizing Trump, let me state for the record that I don’t know what to do about Syria either. Neither do you and neither does anybody else.
Revolutions and civil wars can have happy endings when there is a popular will or national identity that the current ruler is thwarting. In such a case, if you just get that ruler out of the way, things can take their natural course. Being conquered did wonders for Japan and Germany (at least in the west) because the people in those countries had a strong notion of what it meant to be Japanese or German. Given a benevolent conqueror, democratic institutions could be established and a popular government elected.
But while democracy can empower a popular consensus, it can’t create one from nothing. That’s what we’ve seen in Iraq. An occupying power can hold elections, but if the winning and losing sides still want to kill each other, the elected government can’t represent them both. When there is no popular will for democracy to bring to power, no consensus notion of what the country is or how it should be run, then there is no obvious happy ending to aim for. Any outside power that intervenes is looking at a menu of dismal outcomes, all of which will leave its people asking: “We killed and died for this?”
That’s Syria. There isn’t a popular resistance, there are a dozen or so of them, none of which gets along with the others.
Talking past each other. If I can’t give a just-do-this answer, I can at least try to disentangle some of the public discussion. A lot of the commentary on Syria consists of people talking past each other, and the main reason seems to be that “caring about Syria” can mean you care about a lot of different things. Here’s an incomplete list of what your concerns might be:
the Syrian people
the political stability of the region
the rivalries of great powers as they express themselves in the region
international law, particular as it concerns chemical weapons
For example, many have pointed out that the Syrian people probably don’t much care whether Assad kills them with gas or with explosives. But to others, the limited use of chemical weapons since World War I is one of the great successes of international diplomacy, and it would be a shame for that to fall apart, even if preserving it doesn’t help any Syrians.
Conversely, accepting more Syrian refugees doesn’t address any of the concerns of the international-law folks.
The limited menu. Whoever was president this week would have had the same three immediate military options:
Don’t respond. Let the civil war continue with its endless death. And let the world’s malefactors infer that (for practical purposes) chemical weapons are OK now.
Launch an attack to bring Assad down. Either we’d take over Syria with our own troops, or we’d cripple Assad’s military so badly from the air that some group of rebels could win. The risks are endless quagmire for our troops, a larger war with Russia and/or Iran, the possibility that the winning anti-Assad faction will be even worse, or that even after Assad is gone, the war between the other factions will continue and be just as bad.
Launch a symbolic attack that won’t affect the outcome of the war. Such an attack won’t help the Syrian people, but Russia and Iran will probably accept it, and it will preserve (to some extent) the international stigma on chemical weapons.
Trump made the third choice, which probably is pretty close to what Hillary Clinton would have done.
The question is whether there is any follow-up — Clinton probably would have had something in mind — and so far it appears that the answer is no. On the Sunday talk shows, Nikki Haley said regime change in Syria is “something that we think is going to happen”, but National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster strongly implied the ball was in Russia’s court, not ours.
We are not saying that we are the ones who are going to affect that change [in the Assad regime]. What we are saying is, other countries have to ask themselves some hard questions. Russia should ask themselves, what are we doing here?
So we’re waiting to see what Russia does, and so far they’re not backing away from Assad.
A few more points worth making:
Obama is getting a bad rap. Numerous commentators are giving Trump credit for “doing something”, compared to Obama who “did nothing” after Assad’s chemical attacks in 2013.
That’s only true if “something” has to be a military attack. What Obama did was get Russia to oversee the removal of large stockpiles of chemical weapons from Syria, which resulted in no chemical attacks for the rest of his administration. Given the either bad or negligible consequences of the military choices (which Trump is facing now), finding something off the menu was a pretty good move.
Don’t forget the climate change angle. The “Climate Wars” episode of Years of Living Dangerously features Thomas Friedman in Syria, exploring the role an exceptional drought played in starting the civil war.
What if Trump’s reaction really was spontaneous? One explanation of Trump’s missile attack is that he was so affected by images of the victims of the chemical attack that he felt a spontaneous desire to strike back, even if it contradicted all his previous positions.
Here’s the analogous story that popped into my mind: In 1952, bank robber Willie Sutton was caught because amateur detective Arnold Schuster spotted him on a New York subway. Schuster was then murdered, which was a mysterious development, since Sutton had never been that kind of criminal.
One explanation that eventually came out was that mob boss Albert Anastasia, who had no connection to Sutton and who was getting increasingly unstable as his power grew, saw Schuster tell his story on TV and spontaneously told his men “I can’t stand squealers! Hit that guy!”
An unstable guy with too much power has a violent-but-fleeting reaction to something he sees on TV, and people wind up dead. I think I’d rather believe a conspiracy theory.
I’m running an hour behind this week, because I’m in the Central Time Zone. (Amarillo, to be exact, on my way to Arizona.)
Two featured posts this week. The first is the week’s obvious news story: the attack on the Syrian air base. Usually I leave major news stories to major news outlets and only provide links, but here I think the coverage is doing a bad job of disentangling the diverse ways people are reacting. Also, I think Obama is getting a bad rap for “doing nothing” about Assad in 2013, when people really mean “not blowing anything up”. That should be out sometime before 9 EDT. (I’m giving times in Eastern because that’s what I usually do. I’m traveling, but most of you aren’t.)
The second relates a news story to a new book: Jeff Sessions’ announcement that the Justice Department is going to stop overseeing local law enforcement — ignoring a law to do so, by the way — dovetails nicely with Chris Hayes’ new book A Colony in a Nation.
Hayes argues that the right way to think about cases like Michael Brown and Freddie Gray isn’t that the American justice system was biased against them, but that their neighborhoods exist under a different justice system than the one whiter and more affluent people live under. They live in what he calls “the Colony”, not “the Nation”. In the Colony, police are an occupying force, controlling the public in accordance with rules and standards imposed from outside the community.
Obama’s Justice Department tried to bring the rights of America’s internal colonial subjects closer to those of full-fledged citizens. That is the effort that Sessions has pledged to stop. I’m guessing about when that will appear, maybe 10-11 EDT.
In the weekly summary, I’ll talk about the White House palace intrigue that has Steve Bannon retreating from Jared Kushner; the Senate changing its rules to approve Supreme Court Justice Neal Gorsuch, and why the filibuster is nothing to mourn for; Trump’s infrastructure vaporware; and a few other things before closing with a rocked-out parrot.
Trump’s former national security adviser shopped for an immunity deal and apparently hasn’t gotten one. The Wall Street Journalarticle that broke this story is behind their paywall, but some independent confirmation is at NBC.
Two possibilities: The first is that Flynn’s testimony could illuminate the entire network of Trump/Russia connections and bring down Trump himself. That notion was clearly in Josh Marshall’s mind:
You only get immunity if you deliver someone else higher up the ladder. And there’s only one person higher up the ladder.
The other is that Flynn is maneuvering. He faces a long list of legal problems, so maybe he wants to wriggle out without giving much in return. Alex Whiting at Just Security analyzes:
If he had something good, Flynn and his lawyer would approach the prosecutors quietly, go through the proffer process in confidence, and reach a deal. Why? Because prosecutors have an interest in keeping their investigation secret, and Flynn’s lawyer knows that. The last thing Flynn’s lawyer would do if he thought he had the goods would be to go public, because that would potentially compromise the criminal inquiry and would certainly irritate the prosecutors, the very people Flynn’s lawyer would be trying to win over.
I suspect that Flynn’s lawyer is really targeting Congress. He is hoping that one of the Congressional committees will take the bait and grant him immunity in exchange for his testimony.
Either way, two conclusions seem obvious: Flynn believes that by the time this is all over, somebody will want to prosecute him for something, and he’s not trusting Trump to pardon him. (That’s probably a good idea given the way Sean Spicer has been pretending Flynn was never a major player.)
As we contemplate the motives that inspired [the] misdeeds [of Nixon’s lieutenants], we acquire a new awareness of the significance of Cardinal Wolsey’s poignant lament: “Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal I serv’d my King, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”
(The content of the Wolsey quote is historical, but the phrasing comes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.)
and Devin Nunes
The information that Devin Nunes brought to the White House on March 22 — that the Trump transition team had been inadvertently caught up in surveillance targeted at others, so Trump’s Obama-wiretapped-me tweet might have had some tangential basis — appears to have come from the White House to begin with. The New York Timesidentifies Nunes’ sources as Ezra Cohen-Watnick from the National Security Council and Michael Ellis from the White House Counsel’s office. The Washington Post adds a third source, NSC lawyer John Eisenberg.
None of them are the “whistleblowers” Nunes has been claiming, unless, as Josh Marshall adds, “we now consider people disseminating information from the White House on the President’s behalf ‘whistleblowers’.”
The obvious question: Why do White House staffers need to sneak information to the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, so that he can brief the President about it and talk about it (obliquely) to the press? Adam Schiff, the committee’s leading Democrat, asks:
This looks nothing like a whistleblower case. And again, I think the White House needs to answer: Is this instead a case where they wished to effectively launder information through our committee to avoid the true source of the information?
Put more bluntly: Members of the Trump White House selectively leaked classified intelligence that doesn’t actually support their boss’s claim to a credulous congressman who uncritically parroted the information in a press conference just hours later.
Currently, the House investigation is completely shut down, without even behind-closed-doors committee meetings. By participating in what appears to be a White House info-laundering maneuver, Nunes has lost credibility as a leader of the investigation.
If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?
Meanwhile, compared to its House equivalent, the Senate Intelligence Committee looks like a happy family. Republican Chair Richard Burr of North Carolina and ranking Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia have been presenting a united front and pledging to “get to the bottom of this”.
For weeks, Josh Marshall has been talking about the “gravity” of the Trump/Russia scandal — not in the sense of it being gravely serious (which it also is), but in the sense that people who get close to it keep getting pulled in. Why is Nunes sacrificing his reputation like this? Why did Jeff Sessions feel the need to lie to the Senate about his contacts with the Russians?
Astronomers can’t see black holes directly. They map them by their event horizon and their effect on nearby stars and stellar matter. We can’t see yet what’s at the center of the Trump/Russia black hole. But we can tell a lot about its magnitude by the scope of the event horizon and the degree of its gravitational pull, which is immense.
and the Gorsuch nomination
DecisionDeskHQ counts 41 Democrats against. That puts the ball in McConnell’s court: accept defeat or eliminate the filibuster?
I’m discounting all of that. Two things sunk the AHCA: Republicans have no consensus view of the government’s proper role in healthcare, and the ideas that appeal to near-majority chunks of their caucus are deeply unpopular with the country. Neither can be fixed by reworking the details of a bill.
An analogy: When I’m good and truly stuck as a writer, invariably the problem turns out to be that my focus is too narrow to see the whole problem. I’m trying to find just the right word when the paragraph doesn’t make sense, or I’m trying to clarify the presentation of an argument that — if it were perfectly clear — would have an obvious hole in it. When I’m stuck like that, my worst enemy is the thought that I’m almost there. I get unstuck by admitting that I’m nowhere near where I want to be, which allows me to back up and look at what’s wrong with the bigger picture.
Republicans are still telling themselves that they’re almost there on healthcare. As long as they keep doing that, they’ll stay stuck. And the working-with-Democrats idea never includes any suggestions about what Democrats might want. That marks it as a fantasy.
They might run into the same problem on tax reform. The Koch brothers are advertising against Trump’s border-adjustment tax. In the same way that the Republican position on healthcare has been defined by opposition to ObamaCare rather than any positive vision, their position on taxes has always been “less”. They have no consensus on what should be taxed and how much.
They may not even prevent a government shutdown. Currently, the government is funded through April 28, and the clock is already ticking on the next basket of money. The WaPo identifies funding the Great Wall of Mexico as a possible issue, and New York points to defunding Planned Parenthood and/or ObamaCare.
and rolling back regulations that fight climate change
Doom. Obama’s orders were already half-measures, and now we’re not even doing that much.
Shrug. Coal is dead for reasons that Trump can’t change, and the renewable energy boom will continue.
The most sophisticated reaction I’ve seen is Brad Plumer’s at Vox:
the first step in thinking about the road ahead for climate policy under Trump is understanding why federal action was so significant — and then figuring out what’s still possible if Trump rolls it back.
So Trump hasn’t stopped progress against climate change cold, but it’s still a real blow.
How can we know whether God exists? I take a hint from The New Yorker‘s David Owens:
Somewhat tantalizingly, it wouldn’t take much of a sea-level rise or storm surge to inundate the entire place, since [Mar-a-Lago’s] sweeping lawns, like most of the rest of southern Florida, lie just a few feet above high tide.
but deep beneath the headlines, the tectonic plates of culture keep shifting
The FX series Billions now has a gender-non-binary character. “Hello sir, my name is Taylor. My pronouns are they, theirs, and them.” Taylor isn’t a boy pretending to be a girl, or a girl who wants to be a boy, or someone who feels out of place in their body. Taylor’s social persona is not gender-specific. Within the universe of the show, the question “Is Taylor male or female?” has no answer.
After a few episodes, I’m surprised how easy it is to let that question go. The trip from bewilderment to “Why did I think that was a big deal?” is surprising short.
One of the weirder projects out there: FOIA the Dead. When an obituary appears in the NYT, FOIA the Dead sends an automated Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI for whatever files it has on that person, then posts what it gets, if anything. Privacy rules prevent the FBI from releasing the files of living people without some good reason, but looser rules apply to the dead. So, for example, we can now know what the FBI had (not much) on journalist Morley Safer or Kennedy-assassination conspiracy-theorist Mark Lane.
White Democrats and white Republicans disagree more than ever on the sources of racial inequality.
Trump is now more unpopular than Obama ever was. The head-shaking thing is that his problems are entirely self-inflicted. The economy is fine. No new wars, major terrorist attacks, or natural disasters. We haven’t even begun to speculate about whether something might be “Trump’s Katrina“.
If not for Russia and the Trump family’s profiteering on the presidency, HHS Secretary Tom Price would be a front-page scandal. ProPublicareports:
On the same day the stockbroker for then-Georgia Congressman Tom Price bought him up to $90,000 of stock in six pharmaceutical companies last year, Price arranged to call a top U.S. health official, seeking to scuttle a controversial rule that could have hurt the firms’ profits and driven down their share prices, records obtained by ProPublica show.
Thursday, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced a shift in U.S. policy towards Syria: We’re no longer going to “focus on getting Assad out”. In other words: We move closer to Russia’s position and away from our NATO allies.
North Carolina is repealing and replacing its controversial bathroom bill. But the replacement retains a lot of bad stuff. Like the original, it makes a mockery of conservative rhetoric about local control by banning any city from protecting LGBT rights.
A similar mockery: Iowa just nullified any local attempt to raise the minimum wage. Five Iowa counties had voted to establish a wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25, and in one it had already taken effect.
and let’s close with another adaptation of a classic
Last week I posted “Donnie in the Room“, my retelling of the TrumpCare saga in the style of “Casey at the Bat”. This week, Sandi and Richard Riccardi do “The Boy from Mar-a-Lago“.
The problem isn’t in Mexico or on our southern border. It’s here, and it’s us.
All my life I’ve been hearing about the drug problem, but mostly what I’ve heard are attempts to dodge responsibility. Those attempts have taken two main forms:
It’s not my problem. The middle-aged, middle-and-upper-class whites who run the country project the problem onto inner-city blacks or white-trash teens, who can be written off. In other words: I don’t need to do anything, they just need to shape up.
The solution is to punish somebody else. The problem isn’t the American demand for drugs, it’s the supply chain. If we just extend the death penalty to pushers, or seal the border, or launch para-military operations against drug cartels, or spray enough herbicide on the poppy fields of Afghanistan or the coca fields of Columbia, that’ll fix it.
In recent years, though, that first dodge has been breaking down. The opioid problem has started to climb up the national agenda not just because the overall number of deaths has increased, but because drug abuse has increasingly begun to affect whites, rural and suburban communities, and people who are both over 30 and above the poverty line. In cynical political terms: people who matter.
Let’s review a little: Drug overdoses killed 52,000 Americans in 2015. That’s more than car accidents (35K) or gun deaths (36K). The National Institute of Health estimated that in 2013, 1.9 million Americans were dependent on pain relievers, with another million or so dependent on heroin, sedatives, and tranquilizers.
But what makes this a politically serious problem is that it’s hitting white people: The 2015 national life expectancy decline might turn out to be a statistical anomaly, but white life expectancy has barely budged since 2010.
That doesn’t just change the importance of the problem, it changes the rhetoric. If drugs aren’t just a problem for “those people”, then we can’t solve it by telling them to shape up. The rhetoric has to soften, and lean more towards empathy than tough love. During the campaign, Trump said this about the opioid problem:
We’re going to take all of these kids — and people, not just kids — that are totally addicted and they can’t break it. We’re going to work with them, we’re going to spend the money, we’re gonna get that habit broken.
But so far that’s been a shaky promise. The for-now abandoned TrumpCare plan would have eliminated the ObamaCare mandate that insurance policies cover addiction treatment, not to mention the millions of people it would have left without insurance entirely. He claimed to increase funding for addiction prevention and treatment by $500 million, but apparently that was just him taking credit for the 21st Century Cures Act passed under Obama.
But Wednesday was opioid abuse day at the White House, so Trump appointed a commission that will issue a report in October. That’s some real action for you.
While he waits for that report Trump continues to use the second dodge: He’s spinning drugs as a border-protection issue that the Wall will solve. Wednesday, after listening to several people’s stories of addiction that began with prescription drugs, he said:
So it’s been really — it spiked over the last eight to ten years. Would that have anything to do with the weakening of the borders? Because a lot of it comes from the southern border.
Like so many Trump statements, this presents a thicket of misperceptions that you have to hack your way through. First, the border hasn’t “weakened” in recent years. We’ve had more fences and border agents than ever, and fewer people crossing illegally.
And then we get to the reality of the drug problem: About a third of the 52,000 opioid overdose deaths in 2015 were from prescription drugs, and many of the illegal-drug ODs are simply the end of a story that began with legal drugs. Even if we could shut off all the heroin and fentanyl coming from overseas — it’s mostly from Mexico right now, but that doesn’t mean drug importers would give up if we capped that particular pipe — the problem wouldn’t be solved.
And then there’s the assumption that the Wall would stop Mexican drugs cold. Even granting the shaky assumption that Mexico lags behind in crucial ladder technology, bags of pills or powder are not that hard to throw. Fill a football with them, and any high school quarterback could complete the pass.
In short, the only real way to attack this problem is on the demand side, not the supply side. We have to prevent people getting addicted to prescription opioids, and help current addicts (to both legal and illegal drugs) quit. The Great Wall of Mexico won’t do that.
What would? Three things:
Finding ways to manage chronic pain without addictive drugs.
Reducing the overall level of despair among people that the 21st-century economy is leaving behind — over-50 folks in rural areas as well as non-white inner-city youth.
Funding effective rehab programs for everybody who wants to quit.
None of those is a just-do-it thing. We know how to build walls, but chronic pain and despair and effective rehab are much harder questions. The difference is: They’re the right questions, rather than just new ways to dodge the problem.
Freedom can be a bad thing,
if it’s the freedom of the strong to push the weak around.
In American politics, few words have a more positive ring than freedom. We bill ourselves as “the land of the free“. We send troops to bring freedom to other countries. (Our invasion of Afghanistan, for example, was Operation Enduring Freedom.) In the Cold War, our side was the Free World. When France opposed our invasion of Iraq, congressional cafeterias renamed french fries as freedom fries.
Our economic system also claims freedom as one of its top virtues. Milton Friedman’s defense of unfettered capitalism was Free to Choose. The low-tax, small-government, regulation-cutting group in the House calls itself the Freedom Caucus.
The word is so popular that it’s hard to challenge. (Try to imagine someone running as the anti-freedom candidate.) But it needs to be challenged, because often what gets justified by the prestige of freedom are policies that favor the strong over the weak. In particular, certain kinds of freedom have to be restricted in order to establish another good thing, rights.
I first started talking about this more than year ago in a historical context: During Reconstruction, the rights of the newly freed slaves only existed as long as the Army was nearby to restrain their former masters from re-enslaving them. When the Army was withdrawn from the South in 1877, black rights began to vanish until by the turn of the century Jim Crow was fully established. In the rhetoric of that era’s Southern whites, this was a freedom issue: The oppressive federal troops had to leave so that the Southern states could be free to govern themselves as they saw fit.
I drew this conclusion:
Your freedom just needs the government to get out of your way, but your rights require government involvement.
Should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways. They will watch your every action online and create highly personalized and sensitive profiles for the highest bidder. All without your consent. This breaks with the decades long legal tradition that your communications provider is never allowed to monetize your personal information without asking for your permission first.
There has been absolutely no public clamor for this. Nobody has been writing their senators to say, “I wish Comcast could spy on everything I do on the internet, so that they could sell whatever they figure out to people I know nothing about.”
would have required ISPs and phone companies to take “reasonable” steps to protect customers’ information—such as Social Security numbers, financial and health information, and Web browsing data—from theft and data breaches.
Again, how many Americans want ISPs to be careless with their personal data? Or to shrug and say, “shit happens” if it gets stolen by hackers? And again, this was a partisan thing: The rule came from the old Obama-dominated FCC and it was blocked by the new Trump-dominated FCC.
Why? Two things are going on here: First and most obvious, special-interest politics: The big ISPs spend way more on lobbying and campaign contributions than you do, so their desire for profit wins out over your desire for privacy.
But what makes this a partisan issue? Democrats can be bought too, so why isn’t corporate money swaying them as well? The answer is that philosophically proposals like this fit a Republican freedom agenda, but not Democratic rights agenda. Freedom is about getting government out of the way. In essence it restores what Founding-era philosophers used to call “the State of Nature“. The State of Nature includes all kinds of wonderful freedoms, but one of less wonderful ones is that the strong are free to push the weak around.
Rights, on the other hand, are airy-fairy things until there is some institutional mechanism to enforce them, and the State of Nature knows nothing of such institutions. In the State of Nature, for example, you may claim a God-given right to criticize the local strongman. But if he is also free to burn your house down, your right doesn’t amount to much. In practice, the weak have no rights until some institution like government restricts the freedom of the strong.
That’s the issue here: Without meddlesome FCC regulations, your right to privacy on the internet is an airy-fairy thing that the ISPs are free to ignore.
In short, freedom is not always your friend. The more freedom big corporations have, the more you will be under their thumb.
Jared Kushner is a paradigm for success in the Second Gilded Age: He was born rich and married the boss’s daughter.
Underneath conservative rhetoric about opportunity and entrepreneurship are policies that promote an entrenched aristocracy. Proposals to cut the top tax rates and eliminate taxes entirely on dividends, capital gains and large estates mean that once your money starts making money, it should never be taxed again. As John Adams put it, “The snowball will grow as it rolls,” rolling, in this case, down the generations. If your family controls a major corporation, lax anti-trust enforcement will help keep it on top. Gutting public education, maintaining a low minimum wage, keeping college expensive, and saddling those plebians who make it through with unmanageable debt — that all works to grease the pole of success against low-born upstarts. And to keep any of it from changing, eliminate restrictions on money in politics.
We’ve been working towards this vision since Reagan, creating what Paul Krugman has dubbed “the New Gilded Age” and Thomas Piketty calls “patrimonial capitalism”
in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
If you want a symbol of this new aristocratic reality, you need look no further than Jared Kushner, who was born rich, married the boss’s daughter, and is now (at age 36) one of the most powerful people in the country.
Kushner’s title is Senior Adviser to the President, and his yuuuuge portfolio just keeps growing. For example, he is the administration’s point man on bringing peace to the Middle East. That project might totally absorb someone of lesser dynastic credentials, but he also has been Trump’s channel to China, a nation some distance from the Middle East. The Washington Post describes him as “almost a shadow Secretary of State” and “the primary point of contact for presidents, ministers and ambassadors from more than two dozen countries, helping lay the groundwork for agreements.”
OAI will create task forces to focus on initiatives such as modernizing Government services and information technology, improving services to veterans, creating transformational infrastructure projects, implementing regulatory and process reforms, creating manufacturing jobs, addressing the drug and opioid epidemic, and developing “workforce of the future” programs.
Remember when the emerging Tea Party was getting so upset about Obama appointing “czars” to coordinate various policy areas? Kushner is an UberCzar — virtually an unelected crown prince — but Tea Partiers seem not to have noticed. Maybe the problem wasn’t the job itself, but that Obama’s czars were just too proletarian.
Elizabeth Spiers, who Kushner hired to be editor of New York Observer before she resigned and he reduced that once-great newspaper to a web site, is skeptical of Kushner and the value of his business experience in reinventing government. Government, she suggests, suffers from a pennywise/poundfoolish approach to costs, which leaves some offices still using floppy disks. According to Spiers, Kushner took a similar approach at the Observer, preferring to whittle down costs rather than invest for the future. And then there’s this:
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.
But I wonder if it’s Spiers who isn’t being realistic, and is clinging to a pre-Reagan notion of merit. Yes, Kushner may have little in the way of personal accomplishments or evidence of expertise relevant to governing a republic. But if merit is a matter of blood and breeding, and if it is enhanced by an alliance of great houses, then he has merit in spades.
What, you may ask, is the moral of this story? Maybe it’s that parents need to orient their offspring to the true nature of success in this era. Put aside those obsolete lessons about talent, hard work, and becoming excellent in your field. Focus instead on what really matters. True, it may already be too late for your children to be born rich. (That’s your fault, not theirs.) But as long as there are marriageable scions of wealth and power out there, America can still be their land of opportunity.
This week is an experiment in more-but-shorter posts. I’ve been meaning to run such an experiment for a while, and this week it happened more-or-less naturally: I didn’t have a 2,000-word idea, and several notes from the weekly summary were getting too long.
So anyway, three posts in addition to the summary: “Trump Went to Jared” about the ascendancy of the President’s born-rich son-in-law as a paradigm for how to succeed in the Second Gilded Age; “Freedom (Comcast’s) vs. Rights (Yours)”, which follows up on the freedom vs. rights idea I first noticed when talking about Reconstruction, that the rights of the weak depend on institutions that restrain the freedom of the strong; and “Can We Get Real About Opioids?”, pointing out how we dodge the real issues about drugs, and how Trump’s approach to the opioid problem is still doing it.
They should come out in that order, between 8 and 11 EDT, with the weekly summary (Russia, ongoing congressional dysfunction, climate change, nonbinary gender, and a bunch of other stuff, closing with another reworked classic “The Boy From Mar-a-Lago”) around noon.
I hadn’t planned to do a featured post, but once the rhythm of a poem gets into my head, the only way to get it out is to write it down. So Saturday morning I posted a special edition: “Donnie in the Room“. It’s a poetic retelling of the TrumpCare debacle modeled on “Casey at the Bat”.
This week everybody was talking about the failure of TrumpCare
After scheduling a vote Thursday (to coincide with the seventh anniversary of Congress passing ObamaCare), Speaker Ryan delayed until Friday, and then cancelled it altogether, recognizing that he didn’t have the votes. TrumpCare is dead. ObamaCare will continue — at least until HHS Secretary Price can strangle it with administrative changes. ObamaCare is not in fact “crashing” or “a disaster” as Trump keeps claiming, but it is vulnerable to sabotage from the top.
Still, the demise of TrumpCare is good news, especially if you’re on Medicaid or get a subsidy to buy insurance on an ObamaCare exchange. Your risk of dying in the next few years just went down. (It’s still too soon to draw that conclusion directly from ObamaCare data, but the RomneyCare prototype has been around longer, and is saving lives.)
If Republicans are looking for something to blame, though, I would suggest an attitude rather than a person. For years, they’ve been pushing the idea that compromise is just weakness and corruption, and their voters have picked it up. By now, it should be no surprise that they’re not only unable to compromise with Democrats, but with each other.
What’s striking in the larger context is how quickly Trump is disproving all the arguments his supporters made in the fall.
Almost everybody recognized back then that he wasn’t a detail guy and couldn’t measure up to Hillary on a wonk scale. But that wasn’t supposed to matter, because he’d run the government like a business. (You don’t expect the president of GM to design cars, or the chairman of Exxon-Mobil to be much use on a drilling rig.) Trump didn’t have to know anything in particular, because he’d surround himself with the “best people”, people who had mastered all the stuff he couldn’t be bothered with.
That fell apart as soon as he started naming his cabinet and other top advisors. The headline there is foreign agent Mike Flynn as national security advisor, but up and down the ladder (with only an occasional exception) Trump’s people are unqualified, inexperienced, and often quite ignorant of the segment of the government they’re supposed to be running. (Fox News seriously made the case that Betsy DeVos’ ignorance is a virtue. Apparently, you can reform a system better if you have no idea how it works.)
The other thing Trump supposedly had going was that he was the great deal-maker. He came from outside the usual partisan battle lines, so he could break through the gridlock and get things done. But now, in his first test, he embraced a bunch of stale Republican ideology, made no attempt whatsoever to get Democrats on board, and then couldn’t even hold the Republicans together. It was a great example of The Art of No Deal.
His supporters also liked the idea that he “tells it like it is”. Well, his reaction to his defeat on healthcare was to lie: “I never said repeal it and replace it within 64 days. I have a long time.” Actually, what he said over and over was that he’d repeal and replace immediately. No one listening to his campaign speeches could have imagined that he intended to take “a long time”.
Here’s what we all should have learned from Trump’s business career: He sells people a bill of goods, doesn’t deliver, and then claims he never promised what he promised. (Ask someone from Trump U or from Atlantic City.) That pattern is holding true.
I can’t claim I predicted this exact outcome, but I will take credit for being consistently skeptical of the Republican caucus’ ability to find unity. Back on January 9 I wrote:
the replacement plan doesn’t even exist yet, and it’s not at all clear that Republicans can agree on one, even among themselves. They’ve had seven years to concoct a plan; it’s a mystery why the 8th or 9th year would be the charm.
One last-ditch concession to conservatives was to eliminate the “essential services” requirement that ObamaCare imposed on health insurance policies, many of which specifically affect women. Matt Yglesias annotates a photo originally tweeted by Vice President Pence: “The group proposing to cut breast cancer screening, maternity care, and contraceptive coverage.”
Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann explains how that change would give insurance companies a work-around so that they could avoid covering people with pre-existing conditions, or anybody likely to get sick:
Without any minimum benefit requirements to get in the way, carriers will be free to offer bare-bones plans that don’t cover the needs of your typical 50 or 64-year-old. Carriers wouldn’t reject anybody outright—they would just make sure not to sell health plans that might accidentally appeal to an unprofitable customer. I’d expect to see carriers start offering a whole lot of “insurance” that covers one night in the hospital and some antibiotics with maybe a gym discount thrown in to lure Millennials.
Those are extremely perverse incentives that would warp the insurance market in some very ugly ways. Not only would sick people not be able to find the health plan they need, but relatively healthy and well-off customers looking for more comprehensive care like you’d typically get from an employer might have nothing to choose from but junk coverage designed to scare off the ill, or very expensive plans designed to compensate for the cost of caring for them. If you’re a successful self-employed contractor with a nice roofing business, neither of those options probably sounds too appealing.
The idea that you can lower premiums by eliminating men’s pregnancy coverage or women’s prostate cancer coverage shows an appalling ignorance of how insurance works. Premiums have to be high enough to cover the risks of the entire pool, so if you haven’t changed the number of pregnancies or prostate cancers, you haven’t changed the amount of money the insurance company needs to collect.
So now the administration moves on to tax reform, which it imagines will be simpler. I like this suggestion for the Democratic slogan: “No tax return, no tax reform.” We should at least know how much Trump personally profits from his tax plan before Congress votes on it.
and the ever-growing Trump-Russia scandal
A week seems like a very long time in the Trump administration. Just last Monday, James Comey from the FBI and Mike Rogers from the NSA testified to the House Intelligence Committee. We learned that the FBI had been investigating illegal Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possible collusion of the Trump campaign since July. Also, neither agency had any evidence that could support Trump’s claim that Obama had wiretapped him. The top Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, summarized the circumstantial evidence that leads him to conclude that a broad investigation is necessary. The next day, Schiff claimed that there was “more than circumstantial evidence“, but said he could not spell it out in public.
Many Democrats, plus Republicans like John McCain, said that Nunes’ actions cast doubt on the impartiality of the committee’s investigation, and called for a special committee or independent commission to investigate the Trump/Russia issue.
Another development: It has been known for a long time that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort lobbied for the pro-Putin former government of Ukraine. This week we found out that Manafort had a $10 million contract with a Russian billionaire closely tied to Putin, and had offered a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government”.
Press Secretary Sean Spicer has been trying to distance Trump from Manafort, claiming that the man who was campaign chair for several months leading up to the Republican Convention “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time”. He has also described Trump’s disgraced National Security Advisor Mike Flynn as a “volunteer” on the campaign. I’m not sure who this is supposed to fool.
and the Gorsuch hearings
In a normal administration, the pending Supreme Court nomination would be dominating national politics, but I found it hard to watch much of the Senate Judicial Committee’s questioning of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. It seems beside the main point, which ought to be: Why are we having this discussion at all? We’re having it because Senate Republicans stole this seat from President Obama and delivered it to President I-lost-the-popular-vote.
The conversation I want to hear is how we’re going to repair the damage this whole process has done to our democratic norms and to the credibility of our judiciary. Skipping that conversation to discuss Gorsuch’s judicial philosophy or character or previous decisions just doesn’t interest me.
I assume that Gorsuch (or someone indistinguishable from him) will eventually be approved somehow, either because Democrats allow it or because Republicans change the rules to break a filibuster. And at that point, whatever his personal virtues and vices might be, his presence will taint the Supreme Court and its decisions for decades.
but I don’t know how serious a development the protests in Russia are
Thousands of people joined rallies nationwide, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev over corruption allegations.
At least 500 other protesters were detained in the capital and across the country.
Most of the marches were organised without official permission.
TV pictures showed demonstrators chanting “Down with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin!”, “Russia without Putin!” and “Putin is a thief!”.
Does it go somewhere from here, or get suppressed?
and you might also be interested in
Thursday, the GSA’s Kevin Terry ruled in favor of his boss: The Trump Organization is not in violation of its lease of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., which it has turned into the Trump International Hotel. The lease says:
No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom
According to the GSA, the Trump organization wrote an amendment saying that all revenues from the hotel will stay with the hotel — and not flow to the president’s trust company.
Trump still remains the owner of the hotel. The hotel profits will accrue to Trump’s benefit as the owner of the hotel and thus “benefits” will accrue to Trump in violation of the provisions of the lease.
The GSA ruling is nonsense.
It’s like claiming that Microsoft didn’t benefit Bill Gates until it started paying dividends to stockholders in 2003. He benefited because the corporation he owned became more valuable, even if it wasn’t paying out profits to him yet.
I tried to give the GSA the benefit of the doubt by reading its 8-page ruling, but all it does is flesh out the details of Democracy 21’s description, listing the names of the various Trump-family trusts that own the hotel and giving the history of the back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the GSA.
It also makes the case that the lease as a whole is working out well for the government, turning a wasting asset into a rent-producing property. Even if that is true, it’s not relevant to the issue at hand. Even if it was a good idea for the government to let a private developer do something with the Old Post Office, that doesn’t excuse violating the conditions on the lease, or explain why it’s a good idea for the President’s net worth to be tied to a government contract he himself ultimately oversees.
In short, this looks like corruption to me. It is disturbing to see the GSA get enmeshed in the Trump family’s self-dealing.
The Toronto school system and Girl Guides of Canada have both started avoiding trips to the United States. Because of Trump’s proposed travel ban and various other problems Canadians with the “wrong” racial or religious profile have experienced at the border, the Guides say “While the United States is a frequent destination for Guiding trips, the ability of all our members to equally enter this country is currently uncertain.” And Toronto’s Board of Education echoes: “We strongly believe that our students should not be placed into these situations of potentially being turned away at the border.”
Last week I talked about the too-much-news phenomenon that causes all of us to miss stuff. One thing I missed last week was the Confederate flag protest outside the NCAA basketball tournament in Greenville, South Carolina: People who take pride in that symbol of racism and slavery flew the stars-and-bars from a parking garage that was visible to everyone who entered the arena.
I wrote about the flag in detail in 2015 after the Charleston church shooting drew attention to violent white supremacists who see the Confederate flag as their symbol. But I’ll restate that article’s thesis briefly: Sometimes symbols develop an objective meaning, independent of your desire to express something else with them.
Theoretically, a German-American like me might fly a swastika to express pride in German culture. You know: Goethe and Kant, or the scientific tradition of Leibniz and Heisenberg, or maybe the millions of brave German soldiers who weren’t Nazis, but fought heroically under that flag to defend their homes and families. (I’ve never checked, but I’m sure there must have been Muders among them.) But whatever I might intend my swastika to mean, everyone who saw it would read it differently, as expressing pride in anti-Semitism and genocide. And because I’m rightfully ashamed of that part of my German heritage, I don’t even consider flying a swastika.
So if you’re a Southerner who is justifiably proud of the South’s outstanding literary tradition, or the role Southerners played in founding the American republic, or country music, or cornbread and molasses, or the beauty of the Southern countryside — that’s wonderful; I would never want to take that away from you. But the Confederate flag says racism and slavery, and your wish that it say something else is futile. Whatever you intend when you display it, what it represents is shameful.
On the other hand, if you do take pride in the South’s tradition of racism and slavery, carry on. You have freedom of speech, so why not say something despicable?
The White House denies reports that Trump gave Chancellor Angela Merkel a bill for the $374 billion he claims Germany “owes” for not meeting NATO guidelines on defense spending. The Times of London had attributed the story to anonymous sources in the German government.
But this is where the administration pays a price for its constant lying about not just serious matters, but trivialities like the inauguration crowd: Do the White House denials carry any weight? When even The Wall Street Journal is so fed up with Trump’s lack of “respect for the truth” that it compares him to a drunk clinging to an empty gin bottle, and warns he might become “a fake president”, couldn’t anybody claim anything about the Trump administration now?
A chunk of this week’s Sift is already up: “Donnie in the Room“, a poetic retelling of the TrumpCare debacle modeled on “Casey at the Bat“. It seemed more likely to find readers if it came out quickly, so I posted it Saturday morning, and then added an afterword about “Casey” Sunday afternoon. (Also, whenever I get such a crazy idea in my head, I am possessed by the notion that everyone must have thought of this, so I have to be sure to get mine out first.)
By the way, if you find yourself in an inter-generational conversation, an interesting topic is to compare notes on the poems you remember from school. “Casey”, for example, was ubiquitous in my day, but seems to be taught only rarely now. Young people do seem familiar with Poe’s “The Raven“, and I forgot to ask about “The Man Who Wasn’t There“. (Mysteriously, I can’t find anyone of any age who remembers Oliver Wendell Holmes’ clever “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay“. That’s Holmes senior, the judge’s father, who in the 19th century was one of the best-known poets in America.)
Anyway, go read “Donnie” if you haven’t already; I’m pleased with it. This was another week of too-much-news, so even with a featured post out already, it will take me until 11 or so to post the weekly summary.
The outlook wasn’t brilliant for Republicans that day.
They’d promised for six years that they’d repeal the ACA.
But when the caucus gathered, and they looked from man to man
They knew that not a one of them had ever had a plan.
“I’d counted on a veto,” said a rep from Tennessee.
“The blame Obama always took would fall on Hillary.
Then Pennsylvania went for Trump, and Michigan the same.
And now we run the government, we can’t just play a game.”
A colleague from Wyoming was equally concerned.
Shaking his head sadly, he stated what he’d learned.
“My hopes from the beginning always had one little flaw.
I’d pictured making speeches, never thought I’d write a law.”
Neither had the others, though they often said they would.
They knew what programs shouldn’t do, but not the things they should.
Then said a man from Texas, “We’ll never have success.
We got so used to saying No, we’ll never get to Yes.”
“I know,” said Ryan hopefully, “that’s sometimes how it feels.
But Donnie wrote the book about the art of making deals.
I know agreement’s hard to find, and deadlines closely loom.
But we can still succeed if we get Donnie in the room.”
Oh Donnie! Clever Donnie! How everyone agreed.
The plan that he campaigned on was just the one they’d need.
It ended it all the mandates! It set the markets free!
And still it covered everyone, from sea to shining sea!
“It offers better treatment,” noted one committee chair.
“And cheaper,” said another, “I know cause I was there.
You should have heard the cheering. I thought the roof would fall.
And Mexico will pay for it! No, wait, that was the wall.”
But just how would he do it? That wasn’t in their notes.
It wasn’t in the speeches that he made while seeking votes.
It wasn’t on his website, and they recognized with gloom.
They’d never reproduce it without Donnie in the room.
So Ryan checked the White House, but Donnie was away.
He wasn’t in Trump Tower, and he hadn’t been all day.
Ivanka took his message, “Call me when you can.
We can’t repeal ObamaCare without your TrumpCare plan.”
When the President returned his call, he sounded tired and mean,
As he contemplated bogey from the bunker on fifteen.
“Write whatever bill you want. I really couldn’t tell.
Content doesn’t matter, Paul. It’s all in how you sell.”
“But what about the plan you had, the one in the campaign?”
“I only planned to have a plan, that’s no cause to complain.
Grasp this opportunity, and you’ll know what to do.
I sold all the voters, now you get to come through!”
So Ryan then picked up his pen, and wrote a plan so good
It didn’t do a single thing that Donnie said it would.
And as the caucus read it, they all wanted to vote No,
Both from the left, and from the right, and from the CBO.
The Speaker counted noses, and he always came up short.
And for the ones who criticized, he had no good retort.
But Ryan still was smiling as he sorted hateful mail.
For Donnie, clever Donnie, would soon complete the sale.
Trump was back in Washington with all his awesome charm.
He flattered and he compromised and twisted by the arm.
“Those whip counts are fake news,” he said, “we’ve got the votes and more.
Everyone will back me when we take it to the floor.”
Oh, somewhere in a favored land, the people get their way,
And illness leads to treatment, even if you cannot pay.
And somewhere leaders pass the law that makes their promise real.
But there’s mourning in the caucus, Donnie could not close the deal.
Afterward: Why Casey? In my generation of Americans (I’m 60) it was hard to get through school without at some point running into the poem “Casey at the Bat” written in 1888 by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Casey, then, is iconic American figure. Carried away by his own myth and the adulation of his fans, he sets up a dramatic situation in which he can’t deliver the appropriate conclusion. (Rather than hit the game-winning home run that the poem seems to be leading up to, he strikes out.) The parallel to Trump the Great Negotiator seemed obvious to me, which is why I used the cadence and a few phrases from “Casey at the Bat” in this poem.
The attack on Syria reverses what little we thought we knew about Trump’s foreign policy.
I 
The Weekly Sift 
