Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

26 September 2017

Black Protests, Hidden Reasons


[Click here to skip to the current essay. For brief comment on the chance that President Trump might actually become a leader, click here. For a comparison of Cohn’s with Tillerson’s response to Trump coddling bigotry, click here. For a recent essay on how and why our Civil War continues today, click here. For the usual catalogue of popular recent posts, click on the appropriate link below:]

Catalogue of Popular Recent Posts


Black Protests, Hidden Reasons

    “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Prison warden and dark authority figure in classic movie “Hud.”
Today our media are all agog about NFL football players “taking a knee” while our national anthem plays before their games. They’re protesting something, but what?

I asked my fiancée that question, and she replied. “They’re protesting the national anthem,” she said.

My jaw dropped. This is a woman whom I adore. She’s smart, well educated, well read and well informed, and she’s unusually precise with her words.

She’s a lifelong Democrat and progressive, without a racist bone in her body. She (not I) has a subscription to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and she reads all regularly. She dismisses almost everything our current president says as a meaningless emotional outburst or a calculated lie. Yet that, verbatim, is how she replied.

If such an aware woman lacks the context and “backstory” for these protests, I thought, what white person doesn’t? Maybe the only people “in the know” are bloggers like me, who do our own research, and who will go to our graves with unslaked outrage at how our first black president—our best, in my mind, since JFK and maybe FDR—was treated.

Discussion made clear that my fiancée recognized some of the dots, but she hadn’t connected them. She knew that Trump had called any player protesting during our national anthem a “son of a bitch” who should be fired. She knew that a player named Colin Kaepernick had started the trend of “taking a knee” and now appears to have been blacklisted by the team owners. She had heard that another black NFL player had recently been offended, manhandled and slammed to the ground by Las Vegas police in a case of mistaken identity.

She had heard about many of the police-caused deaths of innocent and/or unarmed black people over the past few years, all over our nation. She knew the names of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown. Yet she didn’t connect the dots.

The knee-taking players were protesting during the national anthem, and that was enough to evoke her conclusion. Yet what they were protesting had little or nothing to do with our patriotic song. The interval reserved for that song just turned out to be the best opportunity for the players to stage a quiet, respectful and peaceful protest before getting on with their jobs.

There are, of course, things the players could have been protesting that have nothing to do with race. Science is now discovering an epidemic of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, among professional football players. This cumulative brain damage arises from the frequent “hard hits” to the head or helmet that are part of the way we play football today. Results can range from dementia to homicidal and suicidal impulses.

Our president made light of this serious medical discovery. He implied that earlier generations of players had been tougher and better because they unknowingly had sacrificed their brains and post-retirement lifestyles for fans’ pleasure. Protesting that attitude would hardly have been unjustified.

But what were the players protesting? Their strong sympathizers knew. Probably almost every black person in the nation knew. But the people they most wanted and needed to reach, including my fianceé, didn’t know. Most of them still don’t.

Part of the blame belongs with our media, including the New York Times. By focusing so much on what Trump says and the ubiquitous political horse race, they allow demagogues to lead them around by the nose. Nowhere in the mainstream media have I read any decent reprise of the reasons for the protests—not even one as sketchy and abbreviated as in this blogpost.

And what about the deeper “backstory”? With my fiancée, I ran through as much of the litany of police-killed, unarmed black suspects as I could from memory. She asked me whether similar things happen to whites. All my mathematical intuition, coupled with my own experience of how differently police treat us whites, screamed “no!” But I didn’t have the statistics at my fingertips.

It’s odd that our nation is reacting to the NFL players’ protests at the same time as much of it is re-living the Vietnam War. Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s superb retrospective takes people my age right back to the formative political events of our lives.

Still much about that awful war remains in doubt. Much is still disputed. But there is now general agreement that the premises on which we went to war and escalated it for decades were false. There were no “falling dominoes” in Southeast Asia, even after we lost ignominiously. Ho Chih Minh and Le Duan were more interested in national liberation than in propagating Communism worldwide. The “Commies” had no interest whatsoever in following us into our bedrooms.

Our nation’s experts—the professors and diplomats who had studied Vietnam as more than an emergent political issue—knew this all along. Before our nation had committed itself irrevocably to wrongdoing, they had held so-called “teach-ins” exposing the relevant facts and history. That’s why so many students protested against the war and its escalation.

Sure, the students didn’t want to go to war. Most sensible people don’t. But they especially didn’t want to go to war, and maybe die in, a fight for no rational purpose.

Once the demagogues got hold of the issue, the rationale for going to war or not got lost. The domestic battle became a name-calling struggle between unpatriotic, free-loading draft dodgers and evil imperialists exploiting and killing brown people for profit.

The lies and resulting hatred on both sides killed any chance for seeing the truth, just as much as the war eventually killed some 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3.5 million Southeast Asians. Now Vietnam, wholly “Communist” in name, makes our underwear, docks our cruise ships, and takes any Americans willing to go on ghastly tours of the results of our deadly folly.

With the memory of that awful time so recently rekindled, we Americans have a sacred obligation not to let the same kind of thing happen again. The NFL protestors and their backers and sympathizers must explain their reasons respectfully, and the rest of us must listen respectfully.

There are reasons for the protests. They include unprecedented police brutality, over-militarization of normal city police, casual disrespect for minorities on our streets, racial profiling by police and citizens, the vast over-incarceration of minor criminals (mostly minorities) in our society, our long history of racism and economic oppression of minorities, and the sad fact of subjecting a whole class of athletes to a terrible disease (CTE)—for our entertainment!—when we could mitigate or perhaps even prevent the disease with some simple changes in rules and equipment.

These are all real issues. We can face them like intelligent citizens of a democracy. Or we can divide into tribes and call each other names, thereby thrilling the heart of every enemy of ours, from Islamic terrorists and foreign strongmen to Russian spooks and North Koreans.

If we want to face these issues like men and women, the first step begins with knowing the facts. And whether fair or unfair, the burden of teaching them falls on the protestors, their backers and their sympathizers. Let the “teach-ins” begin!

Some day, I believe, Colin Kaepernick will be a hero, lionized like Rosa Parks. But before that happens, the many people out of the know—the innocent, the ignorant and the curious—must be taught what these protests are all about. The lessons will not be as dramatic as the dogs, bull whips and clubs of Bull Connor’s police on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. But I trust the results of the education will be similar.

A Good Start

It’s not often that I get caught behind the curve. But I did this time.

Unbeknownst to me, a teammate and friend of Colin Kaepernick named Eric Reid, who had protested with him, had published an explanatory op-ed in the New York Times the day before my blogpost above appeared. But I didn’t read his op-ed until yesterday.

Reid’s work is a fine piece of writing and humanity. It explains how and why the players intended their “take a knee” protest to be gentle and respectful.

In my view, the protest was both solemn and beautiful. But I’m not a Trumpet nor even a big sports fan. So more is needed: the backstory. People like me find Reid’s op-ed convincing because we already know the backstory. The people who don’t know the backstory are the ones who need convincing.

Even as a fervent supporter of the protests, I still want to know more facts. During the past five years, for example, how many white suspects who later turned out to be unarmed and/or innocent ended up dead after encounters with police? I want to know the name, age, gender and story of every such victim, black or white. Of course I want also to calculate the ratio, but the full stories may tell us much more.

For example, I know that Eric Garner was suspected of selling cigarettes without a license, and Sandra Bland was stopped for failing to signal a lane change. Isn’t what turned out to be capital punishment a bit severe for these offenses? But I want to know the whole list.

This information may not be easy to compile. Until two years ago ago, there were no official statistics in America on citizens (white or black) killed in encounters with police. A British newspaper, The Guardian, undertook to compile that information, which you can find here. (The Guardian lists all people killed by police, so you have to do some work to find those who were innocent and/or unarmed and were killed while in police custody, rather than (for example) in a chase or an unprovoked attack on police.)

Maybe I’m naive. I can be a cockeyed optimist. But I hope that, with such statistics, names and faces carefully compiled and presented in summary form, it would be a whole lot easier to convince all but confirmed racists that the NFL protestors have a lot to protest.

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23 September 2017

Why the “Trump Bump” is Over


[Click here to skip to the current essay. For brief comment on the chance that President Trump might actually become a leader, click here. For a comparison of Cohn’s with Tillerson’s response to Trump coddling bigotry, click here. For a recent essay on how and why our Civil War continues today, click here. For the usual catalogue of popular recent posts, click on the appropriate link below:]

Catalogue of Popular Recent Posts


Why the “Trump Bump” is Over

Here, in rough order of importance, are ten good reasons why the stock-market rise since President Trump’s election is dead or dying:

1. The Fed’s unloading
2. Markets hate uncertainty 1: war
3. Markets hate uncertainty 2: health insurance
4. The Trump euphoria is over, or it should be
5. Markets hate uncertainty 3: politics
6. The US is getting ostracized
7. Globalism giveth, and globalism taketh away
8. Everywhere you look, you see rot
9. Winter is coming
10. Lies help nothing
Conclusion

1. The Fed’s unloading. Earlier this week Janet Yellen made clearer than ever that the Fed is going to stop buying government securities, or at least stop re-buying them after they come due, to the tune of a maximum of $10 billion a month this year and $50 billion a month next year.

At that rate, if continued, it would take over six years to liquidate the Fed’s $4 trillion portfolio. So not much will change overnight. But the Fed’s dumping assets should cause at least short-term interest rates to begin to rise right away. As time goes on, the rise in return on relatively riskless assets will take some money out of stocks and into bonds, reducing the demand for and prices of stocks.

The “see-saw” between stocks and bonds is as old as organized markets in securities. We’ve been stuck at an artificial high in stocks, made possible by the Fed bailouts, for going on ten years. But that fact does not repeal the age-old verities. Now the bond side of the see-saw is going up, and the stock side will likely go down.

2. Markets hate uncertainty 1: war. Trump is threatening no less than two wars, with North Korea and Iran. I’m on record on this blog saying that the first war might be the best of dismal alternatives. But the second would be totally gratuitous.

Trump wants to “renegotiate” the nuclear deal with Iran. But he has no leverage. All our domestic experts (in both parties) think he ought to stick with the deal we’ve got. Worst yet, the other parties to the deal (China, Britain, France, Germany and Russia) are itching to do business with Iran. They are unlikely to support or observe additional sanctions on Iran.

So the only real “leverage” Trump would have with Iran is war or the threat of war. He can’t just stiff Iran as he allegedly has his employees, business partners and students, far less unilaterally, without our allies. So if Trump is serious about ditching the deal we have, we’ll be closer to war with Duyba’s “Axis of Evil” than we’ve ever been. Unfortunately, markets don’t like war, although war might make defense stocks rise.

3. Markets hate uncertainty 2: health insurance. If the Graham-Cassidy health-insurance atrocity passes, and if Trump is so imprudent as to sign it, health-insurance markets will descend into chaos. That’s what virtually all our health-insurance trade associations and some leading insurance firms say.

Faltering insurance markets could bring down finance, which might bring down our economy again. Remember how the near-failure of insurer AIG helped cause the Crash of 2008? or how the failure of European insurer Dexia caused aftershocks and required a bailout in Europe?

Health-care accounts for about one-sixth of our economy, and private health insurers support a substantial part of it. So it’s possible that passage of Graham-Cassidy alone could cause our markets to retrench, especially those related to health care and health insurance.

Late-breaking news: Friday Senator John McCain (R., AZ) denounced the hasty and careless manner in which the Graham-Cassidy bill arose. He pled for deliberate and careful bipartisan action on health insurance. His respected voice, as well as announcements by other Republicans, made actual passage of Graham-Cassidy unlikely. But the failure of that hastily-thrown-together bill still leaves private health-insurance markets in limbo, at least until next year. It remains to be seen whether whatever emerges from bipartisan compromise will stabilize or further roil health-insurance markets.

4. The Trump euphoria is over, or it should be.. Trump has been in the White House for nine months now. That’s enough time for a woman to conceive and bear a child.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration so far has been barren. In all that time nothing real and significant has happened, except avoiding national default (for three months), avoiding a government shut down (ditto) and starting the flow of relief money for Hurricane Harvey victims. And it took rare cooperation with Dems to make even that happen.

Other things that have happened, such as weakening banking and environmental regulation and punting DACA to Congress, are generally negative. Weakened regulation may increase the profits of some businesses, but it will hurt others, not to mention the people the regulations protect. Keeping 800,000 young people under the risk of deportation, when they are just in school or starting their careers, is not good for them, their educational institutions, or the general economy.

It could have been different. Trump could actually have improved the lives, jobs and pay of the people who voted for him by making massive infrastructure investment his first priority. But he didn’t.

Instead, he jumped on the GOP bandwagon for the last seven years. He doubled down on having no perceptible plan to improve our nation or people’s lives but making our first black president look bad. He tried to repeal Obamacare without the ghost of a credible replacement.

Now we Americans are staring down the barrel of Graham-Cassidy, which could be even worse than its two failed predecessors. Its self-evident purposes are to kill government-assisted health insurance, give the money released to the rich, and to shift health-care subsidies massively from the populous North and West, to the less populated and productive South and Midwest, where Graham-Cassidy’s supporters cluster. If this atrocity passes, it would deprive millions of access to medical care and expose many middle-class people to bankruptcy, suffering or death. In so doing, it will deepen regional rivalries and hatreds, strengthen arguments for secession, and stir the caldron of political uncertainty.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, Trump has cast his next two legislative priorities in stone by giving Congress six months to resurrect DACA and decreeing a full-court press for tax “reform”—another giveaway to the rich and corporations.

Next year is an election year. Its elections will be among the most bitterly contested in our national history. The chances of serious cooperation between right and left will all but disappear. So infrastructure will have to wait now for almost two years, if Trump has any political capital left. By then the Trump Bump will long since have become the Trump Slump.

5. Markets hate uncertainty 3: politics. US history has few analogues to today’s political uncertainty. The best that come to mind are the leadup to our Civil War, and the Vietnam War era. That’s why Ken Burns’ TV series on the Vietnam War and the domestic division it caused is so timely.

Within the next two years we could suffer any or all of the following: (1) the first-ever removal of a US president after impeachment; (2) the breakup of the Republican Party; (3) the formation of a new party; (4) the whiplash of a progressive Congress, or one of its Houses, replacing the most radical and extreme right-wing Congress since Reconstruction; or (5) the start of a serious move toward breaking up the United States. In the meantime, the parts of politics that most directly affect our economy—infrastructure, insurance, banking, and the status of 11 million undocumented workers (including their children)—will remain in limbo.

And that’s not all. There are two additional aspects of political-economic uncertainty: whether the GOP’s attempt to steal the nation’s substance for its rich and powerful backers or the Red States will succeed and what economic dislocations that will cause. Sooner or later, the homeless that the rich will have to step over on the way to their offices will become a nuisance. Sooner or later, the vast majority of the people, and the “minorities” who are supposed to take over this country in about one generation will see reality and begin to revolt, politically or otherwise. Can all this be good for markets?

6. The US is getting ostracized. As a budding center of right-wing ideology, authoritarian government, racism and xenophobia, the United States is in a far better position that prewar Germany. We just freely elected our would-be tyrant; we haven’t yet made him Führer; with luck, we won’t ever.

We haven’t started a world war lately, although we started two smaller unnecessary ones and are threatening two more. Unlike World War I for Germany, the big war we lost (in Vietnam) didn’t maim any major powers, except maybe us ourselves. And its memory outside our borders is fading.

Europe and Japan are still grateful for the money and military aid we have given them since humanity’s most terrible war. Much of the world thanks us for starting the UN and leading humanity to a new, global economic order. So we Yanks have a large reservoir of international goodwill that Germany never had after World War I.

Yet the signs of failing patience and growing ostracism are everywhere. Our pols are unique globally (except for Syria) in refusing to acknowledge global warming. Our inconsistent and erratic statements about North Korea, Asia generally, and NATO have caused our longtime allies to seek solace elsewhere. Even those most threatened by China, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, are now seeking to accommodate China.

As we turn our back on the rest of the globe and globalism, rising nations seek to replace us and play our role. They included China, Germany, India and Brazil. Even Russia, in its awkward, spook-led way, is seeking greater accommodation with Europe and China and greater cooperation with its Middle-Eastern and South-Asian neighbors.

The brain drain from others to us hasn’t stopped yet. But what will happen if we reduce legal immigration to well below 50,000 per year, as Trump wants? Won’t the rest of the brain drain flow to other nations? Might it even reverse?

Once we were the indispensable nation, in finance, in military hardware, in defense, and in technology. Now our president has declared us to be dispensable and, through his actions, curmudgeonly. Can outflows of trust, credulity, brains and money be far behind?

The world will not have infinite patience with our self-absorption, our apotheosis of celebrity, or our neglect of the norms of truthfulness, politeness, consistency, diplomacy and reason that have transformed our species from beasts to Homo (allegedly) sapiens. It will not countenance, let alone applaud, our abandonment of the science that underlay our leadership in commerce, trade and war during the last century.

7. Globalism giveth, and globalism taketh away. From NATO and ANZUS, through our alliances with Japan and South Korea, to the UN, Bretton Woods, GATT and WTO, we Americans have helped build today’s world order. Perhaps more than any other nation, we have committed ourselves to it. Others have run with us at full speed, so we cannot now retreat without being left behind.

We can impose whatever self-defeating restrictions on immigration we foolishly choose. But we will not and probably cannot restriction emigration. So we are and will remain vulnerable to brain drain, both of people who came here seeking better lives and our own natives who can’t find suitable jobs.

As the primary proponent of open markets and unrestricted capital flows for decades, what will we do when capital starts to flow massively offshore? As the demand for dollars falls, will we restrict outflows like China? Unlikely. And our First Amendment leaves us open to others’ propaganda and fake news, as the last election just showed.

We have made ourselves vulnerable to the globalism that we created and pushed for over three generations. Now we have to live with it. The longer we violate the rules we ourselves have pushed on others, the more we will fall in their estimation, the less they will see us as sensible and reliable, and the less advantageous our trade and security relations with them will be.

In the the next few years both outward brain drains and significant outward capital flows are possible. The coming boom in crypto-currencies, which we did not invent but to which we especially are open, will facilitate capital outflows and make them hard to monitor. Crypto-currencies will also facilitate crime, money laundering, significant arms trafficking (including to terrorists), graft and corruption. Wouldn’t it be nice for corrupt businesses to be able to bribe our pols while being sure that no one could follow the money? They wouldn’t even have to disguise their bribes as campaign contributions.

Unless we can reverse the trend of the last nine months—unless we can return to reason, politesse, diplomacy, vibrant but controlled immigration, and respect for minorities and science—our moral and economic decline will continue. Software and mobile devices are not the last words in human progress and advancement. Things like private space travel, nanotechnology, computerized biology and gene editing, quantum computing and communication, and advanced genetics-based medicine are next. Whether we can continue to lead in these fields as we did in electricity, electronics, computers, software and related medicine remains to be seen.

The clock is ticking, and time for us is running out.

8. Everywhere you look, you see rot. We have a president and members of Congress whose casual lying has reached new depths never before seen in the United States. We have businesses whose goal is “monetizing” everything in sight, rather than doing any job well, let alone doing good. Many of these businesses are so dysfunctional they can’t keep their own operations running right or smoothly; when customers complain, they fob them off on low-wage Indian or Filipino phone reps reading from a script.

Wells Fargo Bank, once the paragon of honesty and back-office efficiency, stands accused of defrauding customers by signing them up for accounts and “products” (including insurance) that they never asked for. A self-important youngster, somehow allowed to run a pharmaceutical firm, oppresses people with rare diseases by raising the price of their essential medications by multiples, for no apparent reason other than price gouging. Our business community utters not a peep; and the young man is sentenced to jail, like Al Capone, for a technical offense far from what stinks to high heaven.

One car maker is fined gravely for designing software to cheat on emissions tests. Then another is accused—a German firm (Volkswagen) at the heart of Germany’s rise to economic power and redemption from the ashes of World War II. It’s beginning to look as if that firm, in combination with others, committed a deliberate fraud on the whole continent of Europe, leaving its roads, towns and cities full of unhealthy diesel fumes and its citizens believing that diesel is more efficient and an answer to Energiewende.

Then, of course, we have the summit of sleaze. The fossil-fuel industries, throughout the West, have gone on a massive propaganda campaign, seeking to convince drivers and voters that their products are not responsible for rising temperatures and more violent storms, and that they will last forever (or functionally so). Using the most powerful tools of lying and persuasion that humanity has yet developed, they seek to blind us to the inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels, which is rushing towards us with the speed of a freight train, and its effect on the energy we use, its prices, and declining fossil-fuel feedstocks for our fertiliziers, chemicals and medicines.

This is far from all, but it’s enough to get the flavor of our American and even global moral and economic rot. Just as before the Crash of 2008, no one is minding the store of reality, let alone morality. Everyone’s out for himself, with the richest and most powerful far ahead, and devil take the hindmost. The phenomenon is more diffuse than in the Crash of 2008, where it was confined to liars’ loans and their derivatives. But doesn’t that just make it more dangerous and its consequences harder to predict?

9. Winter is coming. Our own negligence is heating our planet, but we still haven’t abolished winter. It’s now almost October, the onset of real fall in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s getting cold, even in parts of California.

October is the time when exuberance (irrational or otherwise) turns to real conservatism, not the crazy kind that the GOP tends to profess today. Even squirrels feel it; they stop prancing around lawns and begin seriously to hoard and hide their nuts for winter. People put their tents, plastic swimming pools, lawn chairs and summer clothes away and get back to work.

Fall is also a time of great change. Often it happens when the false exuberance fades with summer, to be replaced by an overwhelming sense that things are not right. The Crash of 1929 came in October. So did the Russian Revolution. By October 2008, even the pols whose constant mantra was “Things are OK; don’t worry!" began to understand that, without swift government action, the global economy would collapse.

So it’s a good time for all but the angriest Trumpets to see, with regret but all of a sudden, that maybe they made the wrong choice. Maybe a solid future can’t be based on lies. Which brings me to the last of my ten points.

10. Lies help nothing. Almost a year before the Crash of 2008, I sold out and saved my retirement. My reasons for doing so I called my “Diogenes Test.”

Remember Diogenes? He was the guy who supposedly roamed around ancient Athens, looking for an honest man. He never found one.

In 2007, neither could I. But today things are worse.

There are two big differences between then and now. Then the lies were less explicit. True, they came from the highest levels of our government and our businesses. But they were mostly what I call “PR speak.” They were words, sentences and whole paragraphs of meaningless verbiage, intended to be soothing but signifying nothing. They were the equivalent of a fired executive, accused of incompetence or wrongdoing in the prime of his life, claiming he quit to spend more time with his family.

But they weren’t outright lies. They weren’t the president of the United States claiming that his inauguration crowd was much bigger than his predecessor’s, when all the photos showed exactly the opposite. They weren’t the president-to-be claiming that his predecessor, born in Hawaii, was not an American citizen. They weren’t the same man claiming, in effect, that running over a bunch of people with a vehicle, and killing one, was roughly equivalent to some unruly shouting and shoving in Charlottesville.

One of the most politically damaging current lies is the notion that the “Black Lives Matter” movement somehow derogates from the value or privilege of whites. Trump and his supporters endlessly promote this notion, expressly and by implication, hinting that BLM advocates (perhaps including white me!) are terrorists.

When and if we ever have a national epidemic of police-shooting deaths of unarmed white youth, in all parts of our nation, there might be some sense in that notion. But so far as I know, there has not been a single such incident in the last several years, despite the fact that we whites are still a majority. So that notion is just another lie, intended to discount and neglect a plea for fairness, justice and equality for a people abused, oppressed and offended in our land for four centuries and counting.

Of course every life matters. But in America today the lives of African-Americans are the only ones under systematic assault with military tactics and weapons that have no place in routine use on our city streets. This must stop.

It’s bad enough that our chief executive is a veritable fount of lies, and that few seem to care. But he’s not the only one. Members of Congress routinely lie, especially Republicans about the intent and effects of their hasty, ill-considered and often still-undrafted attempts to “repeal” Obamacare, without the hearings, debate or the careful consideration—or even the draft language—that usually accompanies major legislation. Putin lies; and his lies, so cleverly inserted into our national debate and social media, probably helped elect Trump.

Yet even this still fails to capture the essence of our moment in history. The worst is that so many people believe the lies.

At this point it’s worth reviewing the impact of Trump’s three main lies, at least before he became president. According to a careful survey, over half of Republicans believed his “birther” lie three months after Trump himself had recanted it. Over half also believed that climate change is not real or not due to human action and that “millions” of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election.

When so many people can believe things that just are not so—even after their chief proponent recants them—we have left the realm of reality and entered a regime of dark fairy tales, told on social media and believed as gospel. We have entered an era when Putin’s trolls and spooks can plant outlandish lies that no precocious child should believe and sway a presidential election. We have entered an era where truth and basic common sense, let alone science, are transient and perishable.

In such a era began the Russian and French Revolutions. In such an era began our own Salem witch trials. In such an era, with nuclear weapons, our species could easily extinguish itself—a fate it narrowly avoided in 1962.

So those of us who retain our skepticism and our common sense can only prepare for winter and hope it won’t be nuclear. We can hope that someone, somehow, somewhere comes up with an editor for Facebook, to keep it from becoming the most powerful and evil nest of lies in human history. We can hope that somehow, somewhen, our nation returns to respect for expertise and news edited for accuracy, and thence back to competence and sanity. For we are rushing, not just drifting, in the other direction.

Conclusion. No nation has a covenant with God to rise always and never decline. Advancement and leadership come to those who help themselves.

Breaking all the rules and believing whatever you like may sound good to a teenager. They may even sound good to a worker crushed by decades of declining opportunity and wages.

But breaking all the rules never works. Just ask the French and the Russians about their bloody and disastrous Revolutions. The only things that work are being an adult and doing the hard, often unrewarding work of cooperating, empathizing, analyzing, and respecting conclusions drawn from evidence, including science. Doing otherwise brings only decline, debility, disease and death, sometimes more swiftly than anyone could imagine.

Nothing done by the Trump Administration during the past nine months has the potential to restore our global economic or political leadership. A lot of it has a clear chance to weaken our political cohesion, reduce our cooperation with other peoples, nations and cultures, and destroy the engine of immigration, education, and innovation in science and engineering that made our nation a global leader.

Sooner or later, unless we change direction radically, all this will have an effect on our markets and our prosperity. That effect could be as profound as the Crash of 2008. It could also be even more profound, if only because it involves more people and more sectors and aspects of our economy and has many more moving parts.

No one can tell precisely when the next crash will come, or how hard it will hit. But ’twill come, unless we wise up soon.

Endnote. As always, I try to live what I write. I have thoroughly retrenched my own portfolio, putting more in cash than ever since I sold out in late 2007, in anticipation of the Crash of 2008. I have also put some money in American mutual funds that invest in Europe and Asia.

I’m prepared to do more along these lines as time goes on and signals of an imminent collapse arise. Like everyone else, I can’t now tell when or how quickly markets will fall, what will be the primary cause, or when and how interest rates will rise as the Fed liquidates its massive bailout portfolio.

But I do believe in cause and effect. Sooner or later, what our totally inexperienced, incompetent and clueless president has done (and not done!) will have a dramatic effect on us Americans, with ripples all around the world. The current picture is neither as dramatic nor as specific as the liars’ loans, increasing default rates, toxic derivatives, and rampant executive lying in 2007. But the very diffuseness and pervasiveness of today’s rot should give everyone pause, for it may augur even more extensive and prolonged consequences.

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16 September 2017

Plain Talk about Immigration


[For brief comment on the possibility of President Trump actually becoming a leader, click here. For a comparison of Cohn’s with Tillerson’s response to Trump coddling bigotry, click here. For a recent essay on how and why our Civil War continues today, click here. For the usual catalogue of popular recent posts, click on the appropriate link below:]

Catalogue of Popular Recent Posts


Pundits keep saying that immigration is “complicated.” I wince every time I hear that.

Why? Because immigration is not complicated; the politics of immigration is. If we really wanted to solve all the problems of immigration, we could start by identifying and categorizing them in just five paragraphs. Here they are:

We have porous borders, at least to our south. That’s bad for at least four reasons. First, porous borders allow people to break the law to come here. Their coming here illegally in large numbers reduces general respect for the rule of law. Second, we don’t have any idea who they are, and because they quickly disperse in our society, we have no way to find out. They could be terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, gang members, or other undesirables. Third, if we don’t stop them from coming, their coming here encourages others to break the law by coming here illegally, too, thus beginning a vicious cycle. Finally, their coming here illegally enrages our citizens and many of the legal immigrants who have paid their fees, waited in line for months or years, patiently filled out reams of documents and questionnaires, and suffered innumerable vetting procedures. So the “seal-the-borders” people have a point.

We now have an estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants. The vast majority has come for jobs, and they are an integral and important part of our economy. If we deport them all, we will bash a huge hole in the nether regions of our economy. Everything from the grapes they pick, the wines from those grapes, the meat and chicken from the animals they slaughter, and the restaurant meals and hotel beds they prepare would become scarcer and more expensive. So would construction and civil engineering, which employs them in droves. All this we know without even mentioning the cruelty and waste of breaking up families and deporting people from the only country they have known for years, to one they may have known long ago but don’t know any longer. So people who advocate regularizing the undocumented already here have a point.

For the so-called “Dreamers,” deportation makes even less sense. They have lived here most of their lives. Our tax money has sent them to school, taught them English and our culture, made them part of us and (depending on age) prepared them to do useful work and enter their professional years. Do we really want to send them to another country just when they are ready to start doing useful work and give us a return on all that investment? It would be hard to imagine a better way to shoot ourselves in the foot, economically speaking. So the people who want to keep and regularize the Dreamers have a point. Not only do they have a point; they constitute a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.

Our porous borders and our large undocumented immigrant population are interrelated. (Duh?!). We have that large population because we have had porous borders for a long, long time. But there is an equally important reverse effect. The larger our undocumented population becomes, the stronger is the pressure to make our porous borders leak. Relatives and friends of those already here want to come. And the more people come illegally, the more those abroad who want to come think they can, and so the more try. Thus does so-called “amnesty” encourage further illegal immigration and therefore require stronger border enforcement lest the undocumented population explode. So the “amnesty encourages-more-illegal-immigration” people have a point, too.

The final point concerns legal immigration. It’s the lifeblood of our economy. One or more of the founders of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Tesla—just for examples—was an immigrant, raised by an immigrant (Jeff Bezos) or the grandson of immigrants (Steve Jobs). If we reduce or cut off legal immigration, we cut our own economic throats. So the people who say “invite them in legally, especially the ambitious and skilled,” have a point.

The logical outline of a solution to our immigration problem is thus pretty clear. We have to find some way to close our porous borders and vet and screen everyone who comes here. We have to regularize the undocumented, vetting and screening them along the way. We have to pay special attention to the Dreamers, who are morally innocent and are our future, and whose skills we have already paid for. We have to make sure that whatever we do doesn’t encourage yet more illegal immigration. And we have to allow legal immigration to maintain our long record of drawing the best talent from everywhere on Earth.

Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? Virtually everyone with a college education—and most successful high-school students—could come up with the outlines of a solution after half an hour’s thought. So why have Congress and our Executive failed even to begin a solution after an entire generation of so-called effort?

The answer is not that immigration is complicated. The answer is that most of our pols have an incentive not to find a solution. What’s worse is that the pols themselves have created these perverse incentives by working consistently to increase their own political power, rather than solving the people’s problems.

How have they done so? Well, each political group has spent nearly a generation demagoguing part or parts of the problem without regard to the other parts. Republicans have focused on the porous-border problem, the presence of so many undocumented immigrants, and the effect of any “amnesty” in attracting even more. Dems have focused on the plight of the undocumented, their constant fear of deportation, their living in the shadows, and the maiming of our economy (not to mention our humanity) that deporting them all would cause.

Each side not only speaks about its “own” part of the problem; it ignores or belittles the other sides and insults the people who care about them. Why? Because by so doing each side can attract and hold voters and win elections.

The more a skewed focus attracts a rabid “base,” the stronger the demagogue’s hold on voters and the greater the political power he or she will have. Thus do pols’ political interests absolutely subvert any rational, let alone intelligent, attempts to solve the problem of immigration.

But it gets worse. After a generation of this nonsense, the multisided problem has produced a vast binary polarization, basically revolving around two extreme and simplistic non-solutions. One proposes closing the borders absolutely, for example, with a wall, and kicking most or all of the undocumented out. The other involves doing little or nothing to strengthen the borders, while granting citizenship or something resembling a green card not only to all the undocumented, but to their relatives, too.

These two camps have retreated into their corners. They have formed echo chambers in which each reinforces itself with increasingly extreme views. They don’t listen to each other. And the pols who are supposed to “lead” them are just fine with this because each group constitutes a reliable political “base” that can be led around by the nose as much as may be necessary to win elections reliably.

But it gets still worse. Our large and powerful business community has a vested interest in not solving the problem. Undocumented immigrants provide a source of cheap labor. Not only is it cheap; it’s also docile. With deportation only a phone call to ICE away, undocumented laborers don’t make trouble, demand higher wages or better working conditions, or organize unions. With cheap and docile labor our employers can build their businesses and provide the public with cheaper products and services than otherwise might be possible.

This way, everybody’s happy, almost. The employers have their cheap and docile labor. The public gets cheaper prices. The ICE agents don’t have to work too hard because no one really wants them to completely cut off the flow of cheap, docile labor. The only malcontents are the eleven million economic serfs in a supposedly free society and the honest citizens who sense that something is really rotten in Denmark.

This is a large part of what Donald J. Trump called the “swamp” in Washington.

He’s said a lot of things, many of them contradictory. But sometimes his instincts can be telling. The swamp in which pols’ corruption and selfish quest for power meets the corrupting influence of business is the place where democracy chokes on filthy, stagnant water. And immigration is right there in its deepest part, where the ‘gators, snakes and other slimy things roam.

Not every member of Trump’s base can probe the stinky swamp with a biologist’s precision. But all of them can smell the stink and see the filthy water. Most are smart enough to spot the self-interest and hypocrisy that has made the multi-sided but conceptually simple problem of immigration infinitely hard to solve. All want some man on horseback to ride in, pull some unseen plug and drain the swamp. For better or for worse, the man on horseback they’ve chosen is Trump.

Pundits seem to think that most of his base are fixated on The Wall. They have good reason to think so: Trump has repeatedly promised a wall and has made it a rallying cry.

But what if his base has more savvy and common sense than that? What if they understand that no wall ever built is so high, so deep or so strong that no one can climb over it, dig under it, or break it with some diamond drills or a few sticks of dynamite? What if someone tells them that you could stop all illegal immigration cold without any wall at all, just by raiding employers and fining those caught with undocumented workers five times the annual savings in wages for each and every undocumented worker caught on the job?

What if The Wall is only a symbol? What if the Trumpets are really clamoring for draining the swamp, taking the problem seriously, and actually trying to solve it at least as well as a rational family might?

What if their support for Donald Trump is not so much a sign of right-wing fervor or a tilt toward white supremacy, but a wish for someone with an ounce of common sense to wade into Congress and crack heads together until something gets done?

If so, hold on to your hat. The Donald had no experience in politics prior to becoming president, but he appears to be learning. He appears to sense that Congress has tied itself up so tightly in procedural knots that it can’t see a clear majority even if one stands up and shouts. He appears to see that, if we can put the non-extreme Dems together with Republicans who are not members of the Tea Party or the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” we can actually find a majority with enough common sense to do the people’s business.

Then the deal with Dems to fend off a national debt default, keep the government running, and fund the first tranche of Harvey relief may be just the beginning. There may be future deals with a majority of the whole Congress, not just the GOP or some fringe group within it. Our country actually may limp back to majority rule.

Wouldn’t that be strange? But even stranger things have happened. A narcissistic real-estate mogul and reality-TV star with absolutely no political experience got elected president. He did so in part because a great mass of voters sensed that Congress simply wasn’t doing its job. And rightly or wrongly, those same voters felt that Hillary wanted to “work with” Congress doing business as usual, rather than crack heads together.

Endnote: Last week I had a heated discussion over breakfast with two members of my extended family. One is a foreign woman who had married the other abroad. Both had gone through the long, difficult and expensive process of getting her a green card. Needless to say, neither was particularly sympathetic to immigrants who came here illegally.

Yet after an hour and a half of discussion, we all agreed on the outlines of a solution to our immigration problems. It involved the following elements: (1) greater control of our borders through technical means and increased manpower, not a wall; (2) saving the Dreamers and non-criminal undocumented immigrants by offering some sort of regularization after they have: (a) paid fees at least as high as those of legal immigrants; (b) paid all unpaid back taxes, (c) undergone thorough vetting and screening; and (d) gone to the back of the line for green cards and/or citizenship; and (3) increased requirements for future undocumented immigrants and/or employer monitoring to weaken the magnet for future illegal immigration.

Our search for solutions never bogged down in someone insisting that his or her favored part of the solution ought to come first. The solution was self-evidently comprehensive, but it could be implemented in stages.

If we relatively untrained amateurs could develop the outlines of a rational solution in less than two hours, why hasn’t Congress in a generation? The answer has to be that most members of Congress have had strong incentives not to find a solution. They wanted—and they still want—the issue as grist for election campaigns, not a solution. They care about their own jobs more than citizens’ jobs, immigrants’ jobs, and doing the people’s work.

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07 September 2017

Avoiding War in North Korea



[For brief comment on the possibility of President Trump actually becoming a leader, click here. For a comparison of Cohn’s with Tillerson’s response to Trump coddling bigotry, click here. For a recent essay on how and why our Civil War continues today, click here. For the usual catalogue of popular recent posts, click on the appropriate link below:]

Catalogue of Popular Recent Posts

[For the consequences of the years of top-level ignorance and incompetence we face, click here. For President Trump’s six-month report card, click here. For comment on our weak Yankee defense against information warfare, click here. For other popular recent posts, click on the links below:]
By now, two things are crystal clear. First, Kim Jong-un is not going to give up his nuclear arsenal or its future expansion out of the goodness of his heart. He will give it up only if or when it is substantially destroyed by military action. Short of that, he might give it up under massive economic/political pressure that amounts to an existential non-military threat. Only China, which accounts for over 90% of North Korea’s trade, has the power to make such a threat, let alone credibly.

Second, the only leverage that the United States has over North Korea is military. Kim has utterly blown off our alleged “economic” leverage, to the point of repeatedly refusing even to talk with us. President Trump’s recent reductio ad absurdum—an empty threat to halt all trade between the world’s first and second economies in order to cut off Kim and his tiny nation—has not gotten Kim’s attention. Likely Kim senses its absurdity: a threat to cut off your own head to scratch your ear more easily.

Our military leverage is a different matter. We have the military power to end Kim’s regime—even to wipe North Korea off the face of the Earth. But annihilating North Korea in a surprise nuclear attack would be inconsistent with our national values and most of our national history.

We could probably terminate Kim and his regime in a limited and precisely targeted nuclear surprise attack. I argued in a recent post that such an attack is not fundamentally inconsistent with our values or our history. In fact, it seems consistent with our above-average national risk aversion, which has underlain our trigger-happy involvement in several unnecessary wars and coups since we got involved too late in the worst war in human history. Trump’s unpredictable presidency adds a random hazard that, in my view, makes such military action more, not less, probable.

But there are risks. The primary risks are to South Korea, our wholly innocent ally. The South suffered massively in the Korean War and does not want to repeat the experience, even in miniature. Hence its apparent policy of self-evidently useless “engagement.” In the best case, that engagement will likely lead to nuclearization not only of the entire Korean Peninsula, but of all of East Asia and perhaps beyond. Not coincidentally, it could lead to subjecting the United States and much of Asia to the threat of nuclear blackmail by one of the most dangerous and least predictable tyrants in human history. Compared to Kim, Stalin was a paragon of reason, self-restraint, and trustworthiness.

There are also other risks to us—to our troops and military “assets” in the region, and to our standing, since World War II, as a mostly peaceful guarantor of stability. Another war on the Korean Peninsula would certainly “roll the dice” of military conflict, whose outcome is always hazardous and uncertain. But it would also “roll the dice” of diplomacy and power politics.

The United States has not been entirely innocent in the past three centuries of Western colonial torture of Asia. Our gunboats “opened up” Japan toward the turn of the twentieth century, and our growing military and economic power supplemented those of the Brits and other European powers in carving up China into colonial domains like a big piece of smoked ham.

But we never kept colonies of our own. We gave the Philippines its freedom less than five decades after winning it from Spain. Our big, permanent military bases in Asia appeared only after we had helped save the day in the most terrible war in human history. Whether through racism, self-regard, innate conservatism, or an advanced sensibility derived from our own long-ago status as a restive colony of England, we Americans never had much appetite for colonization.

So the reason why the United States has great power and influence in Asia is not just our military strength, our formidable Seventh Fleet, or our world-destroying nuclear arsenal. They all help to project power, of course. But what really matters is our pre-war and post-war record. Except for two terrible proxy wars with China (in Korea and Vietnam), we have kept the peace and preserved the balance of power without big wars or massive human suffering. Our “hegemony,” if you want to call it that, has largely brought Asia the thing that China covets most: stability.

That in itself is an extraordinary achievement. The rise of Imperial Japan and its terrible role in World War II showed what modern, Western weapons could do in crowded Asia. If that awful lesson were not enough for Asian leaders, the two regionally devastating proxy wars ought to have been instructive. Our war in Vietnam was the only one in our history that the United States unambiguously and ignominiously lost. On the way to that loss we devastated large parts of Southeast Asia—not just Vietnam, but Laos and Cambodia, too—with poisonous chemicals, land mines, and incessant, terrible bombing, leaving still-unexploded ordnance to maim innocent farmers and children to this day. Those tragedies will redound to our everlasting shame.

The other proxy war, in Korea, absolutely devastated an entire peninsula. But out of the ashes, which our own hubris, paranoia and weapons helped make, arose something extraordinary. There was a side-by-side test of freedom versus tyranny, capitalism versus an extreme form of Stalinism. The former won decisively, creating an extraordinary small nation with global economic and technical impact and global exemplary power.

Even the war we lost, in Vietnam, has produced a peaceful, productive buffer state between China and the West. Although we lost the war, our economic system (or something like it, as in present-day China) has produced a peaceful economic miracle.

It is those things—peace, stability and economic development—that all of Asia wants, not our hegemony or domination. Nor does it want China’s domination.

Whether we or China brings the goods shouldn’t much matter. At the present moment, we Americans have a slightly better track record. It looks as if China started both proxy wars (or encouraged its proxies to start them), while we only responded to southward-moving invasions of divided states. Today, China is adding to the distrust and unease in its region by making baseless claims to the entire South China Sea and taking unilateral action to secure those claims militarily.

In contrast, Americans have no ownership designs in Asia, whether on land or sea. We just want the seas to be open, in accordance with international agreements. We just want free trade, as does China.

There has been much talk lately about the so-called “Thucydides Trap”—the supposed inevitability of war between a declining hegemonic power like the United States and a rising regional power like China. But we twenty-first-century humans are not ancient Greeks in tiny city-states. Far less are we baboons, dogs or apes, whose communication skills are so limited that they must fight to establish social dominance. We have choices, which we can make rationally, collectively and across racial and tribal lines.

We did so in standing down the Cold War with Russia (in its Soviet guise) that, in October 1962, came within minutes of extinguishing our species. For 72 postwar years, our deals and understandings have avoided wars between major powers fighting each other on their own territories. Our deals created an international trading environment that, in a mere three generations, brought billions out of poverty and changed China from sliced colonial ham to the world’s second economic and industrial power, so far without major extra-regional wars.

Deals do work, and they are far better than war, even a limited war on the Korean Peninsula. Therefore the stunning thing—the absolutely astounding thing—is that the US and China are not now engaged in serious bilateral talks to make a deal that could avoid the war now brewing there.

In my essay describing the significant and rapidly rising risk of an American pre-emptive but limited nuclear strike on North Korea, I implied (and secretly assumed) that such talks were going on. But they’re not.

In one of the best pieces of historical/analytical journalism I have ever read anywhere, an unknown (to me) New York Times journalist named Jane Perlez explains why. In essence, China and America are afraid of each other. They are wary of each other in general. They fear each other’s influence and power in Asia and each other’s plans to increase it. They even fear disclosing military or diplomatic secrets inadvertently in talks with each other. So out of irrational distrust and paranoia, of the kind that nearly extinguished our species in 1962, they appear hell bent on making an ancient Greek’s 2,400 year-old analysis become twenty-first century prophecy.

What nonsense! China, apparently, fears that if Kim falters or falls, the South Koreans and Americans will rush in and bring hostile powers right up to China’s very border. South Koreans apparently feel that Kim, if given the chance or if America’s protection falters, will rush in and occupy the South, extinguishing one of Asia’s most admirable economic tigers and extending the world’s most pathological tyranny.

Isn’t it far more likely that any renewed conventional war on the Peninsula would be just as bloody and horrible, and end in just as frustrating a stalemate, as the first? Wouldn’t any nuclear war most likely begin with a surprise pre-emptive attack by the US, which would have many unintended consequences, kill lots of wholly innocent people, irradiate lots of valuable land, and have the sole benefits of terminating Kim and discouraging nuclear proliferation by petty tyrants for a long time to come?

Isn’t it likely that, with these alternatives in mind, we Americans and the Chinese could work out a deal to keep existing boundaries in place, to destroy and change as little as possible, while getting rid of Kim, his sycophants and his nukes? Is such an outcome really beyond the capability of the world’s two greatest powers, if they cooperate fully?

Jane Perlez’ story reveals that we tried talking with China some years ago and just gave up. How could our leaders and diplomats be so negligent and lazy? How could China’s?

So Donald J. Trump, here’s your chance to showcase your “Art of the Deal.” Working with Democrats to put off a debt-ceiling and government-shutdown crisis for three months was easy. But if you can make a deal with China to avoid the necessity for an American pre-emptive nuclear strike on Kim and his nukes, if you can avoid war on the Korean Peninsula and get rid of Kim and his nuclear program, the world and your countrymen will forgive you everything. They’ll forgive your narcissism, your gigantic ego, your inconsistency, your constantly insulting everyone who is not you, your coddling of white supremacists, your casual racism, misogyny and homophobia, your inability to keep a coherent thought in your mind for more than two minutes, and your corrupting virtually everything you touch. They will sing your praises as long as our species survives.

All you have to do is talk with China, seriously and earnestly, without preconditions and with due recognition of each side’s (and our species’) real interests. All you have to do is stick with the talks, through thick and thin, until they bear fruit and refute Thucydides. Don’t you think you ought at least to try that, or to ask Rex Tillerson to do so, and give him full authority and unlimited resources?

There isn’t any better alternative. There’s the growing likelihood of an American limited pre-emptive nuclear strike to destroy Kim and his nukes. There’s the awful prospect of a replay of the Korean War with conventional weapons of much greater destructive power than in the original. There’s the even uglier prospect of one of the meanest tyrants in human history blackmailing the world, including both China and the US, for the foreseeable future. Isn’t the fourth option—real cooperation between the US and China to remove the tyrant and his nuclear threat—by far the most attractive?

China and America share one attractive trait. Neither has ever had a taste for global conquest. America might have made short work of it during the brief period when only it had nuclear weapons, but the thought never occurred. China might have succeeded when ruled by the expansionist Mongols, had the Black Plague not intervened. But that was most of a millennium ago, in a state ruled by foreigners, not the Han who have ruled China ever since.

The simple fact is that Han China and multiracial America share the goals of stability, prosperity and progress and can’t see much profit in conquest or war. Each would be a reluctant hegemon—the best kind. With two such great powers in the Age of Reason, Athens and Sparta need not be a model for all of human history.

Close cooperation between the two great powers, beginning in North Korea, could not just stave off another unnecessary war. It could begin a Golden Age for mankind. How about making that kind of a deal, Mr. President?

Did President Trump Just Become a Leader?

“I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” — Will Rogers

Sometimes giant oaks from little acorns grow.

The biggest unknown in all of American government today is whether the Senate’s continuing resolution yesterday is such an acorn. By that resolution, the Senate decided to raise the debt ceiling and keep the government open for another three months. It also approved the first tranche of Hurricane Harvey relief money.

The resolution is only temporary. The Senate will have to pass another in December, or it will have to come up with 60 votes—a filibuster-proof majority—to pass real legislation to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government.

But real legislation for these purposes is unlikely. Why? Because not only is Congress as a whole deeply divided. Republicans in the House are deeply divided.

Republicans’ so-called “Hastert Rule” requires a majority of the Republican majority to agree, even to bring a bill to the floor. But the crazy right-wing House groups, namely, the so-called “Tea Party” and “Freedom Caucus,” preclude a Republican majority from forming, at least on any measure that a majority of the Senate (let alone a filibuster-proof majority) can stomach. The abject failure of the nasty attempt to deprive 23 million Americans of health insurance proved that.

The crux of the matter is Will Rogers’ little quip quoted above. The Republican Party is no longer the organized phalanx of disciplined legislators that it once was. Instead, the Democrats are.

Republicans may hold a majority in both Houses, but in the Senate at least, Democrats can reliably deliver 48 votes for any piece of legislation that doesn’t sell out the nation to the venal or the rich. If they can peel off three Republicans, they can eke out a bare majority. That’s what they did recently in saving health insurance as we now know it, i.e., so-called “Obamacare.”

But stopping a legislative atrocity and actually passing legislation are two different things. The only way rational legislation can pass through the House is for Speaker Ryan to abandon the Hastert Rule and let a real majority of the whole House act—even if that majority includes the entire Democratic caucus.

Majority rule! What a concept! We haven’t seen it in this country since filibusters became routine and the Hastert Rule went into effect. But the ghosts of the ancient Greeks and Romans who invented popular democracy beckon us to restore it.

We’re not quite there yet. In order to get there, two things have to happen. First, Ryan has to follow the Senate and let the continuing resolution pass the House, with the support of Democrats.

Ryan doesn’t like the resolution because he thinks it favors the Democrats. Why? Because it requires yet another continuing resolution to pass in December, just before the calendar changes to 2018, the year of the midterm elections.

This gives the crazy Republican factions another chance to show their love for extortion, which has been their legislative modus operandi since at least 2013. They say, in effect, “do things our way, or we’ll shoot the government by shutting it down, and we’ll shoot our economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, thereby causing or threatening a default on our national debt.” Ryan, who has been complicit in this extortion for years, suddenly doesn’t like it because it makes his party looks bad.

The second thing that has to happen for majority rule to return to America is for the continuing resolution to be more than a singlet. Either the whole House must get fed up with extremist minority rule, or the President must do so and slide into leadership mode.

The latter may already have happened. President Trump may have gotten fed up with the Tea Party’s and Freedom Caucus’ extortion and the consequent failure of Congress to pass any major legislation at all during the eight months of his presidency so far.

Who knows? Maybe Kim Jong-un’s nuke brandishing reminded Trump what extortion looks like. And Trump, a classic bully himself, may have decided he doesn’t like being the butt of it.

If these speculations are valid, you’d better hold onto your hat. Donald J. Trump’s failure to be a “good” Republican ideologue—which today means an extreme right-wing extortionist—has so far been his weakness. But it can also be his strength. If he can lead the Democrats and the few moderate and non-crazy Republicans to work together, he can pass just about any legislation he wants, as long as it’s passingly progressive, and as long as his own party doesn’t mount a filibuster against him.

Why knows? An infrastructure bill may be next, providing good jobs that can’t be outsourced for all those Trump voters hurt by globalization. So might tax reform that does something for working folk and actually encourages investment. Even a tax bill that lowers capital-gains taxes and raises individual rates might be possible.

The Republican party once began as a progressive party, opposed to slavery and Confederate secession. It may have reached its height during the populist surge of Teddy Roosevelt, who championed progressive legislation, including our antitrust laws. Maybe President Trump can make the party relevant again by returning it to its roots.

If all this a progressive fantasy? Maybe. But two things suggest maybe not. Trump the bully does have a sentimental soft spot. He showed it for the gassed Syrian children whose dismal fate made him strike out at Assad. And his concern for undocumented immigrant children appeared to be genuine, even as he sunsetted DACA by executive order.

The second thing is Trump’s genuine rage at the so-called leaders of his own party—Darth McConnell and blue-eyed Ryan. So far they have produced nothing but abject failure for Trump and his party. The reason is simple and clear: their willingness to coddle the extremists in their own party while excluding and marginalizing Democrats.

President Trump doesn’t like to lose. As a bully himself, he doesn’t like to be extorted. So it’s entirely possible that, in order to “win,” he will start to lead and will do so in a progressive direction. After all, he was once a Democrat and can be one again. It’s a “Big Tent” party.

Consistency is not Trump’s thing. “Winning” is. The Dems have shown him how to win, and the feeling may become addictive. Let’s all hope so.

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02 September 2017

“Soft” Corruption Grips America


[For a comparison of Cohn’s with Tillerson’s response to Trump coddling bigotry, click here. For a recent essay on how and why our Civil War continues today, click here. For the usual catalogue of popular recent posts, click on the appropriate link below:]

Catalogue of Popular Recent Posts

[For the consequences of the years of top-level ignorance and incompetence we face, click here. For President Trump’s six-month report card, click here. For comment on our weak Yankee defense against information warfare, click here. For other popular recent posts, click on the links below:]
[For more recent confirmation of the following essay, click here.]

Sometimes the darkest clouds do have a silver lining. So it was with Harvey—a system of dark hurricane clouds that sat for days over Southeast Texas and dumped a biblical plague of rain.

The deluge that ruined so many homes and so many lives had a silver consequence. Many burly white working men set off in their four-wheel-drive trucks, hauling their boats, to save complete strangers from the flood.

No one paid them, and no one ever will. No one will even repay their expenses. No one told them what to do. In one reported case, three brothers bought a truck on Craigslist for the rescue effort.

Volunteers came to the disaster in droves. Without a thought of personal gain, they donated their time and effort, suffered pain, injury and sleep deprivation, and incurred real, unreimbursed expense—all to help their fellow human beings survive and recover from the flood.

If TV coverage can be trusted, many of the saved were people of color. Black lives do matter, it turns out, at least when what threatens them is rising filthy water, and not the police.

Fire ants survived the vast flood by sticking together, and so did people. The organizers of official help worked well, and so did the vast phalanx of volunteers. No one asked about victims’ race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation.

After a few worrisome head fakes, no one even asked about their status as documented immigrants. All were equal and deemed worthy in the face of the biblical storm.

It was enough to put tears in your eyes and make you think that, yes, we Americans might somehow muddle through. And yet, and yet . . . When you bend down and look under the hood of America, the rose-colored glasses start to slip off your nose.

No one can blame Harvey in particular on burning fossil fuels. As a scientist said on the PBS Newshour [set timer at 1:27], that would be like attributing a particular home run to a baseball player taking banned steroids.

But just as science tells us that forbidden steroids make artificially superior performance more common and more likely, science tells us that unrestrained burning of fossil fuels is making storms like Harvey more common and more probable, as the same scientist recognized.

And what about Houston and its environs? The steady replacement of water-absorbent farmland and wilderness with cheap housing, cement and roads had made any flood, including Harvey, significantly more damaging. [Set timer at 4:50] So the developers who made quick bucks and the many people who got a cheap roof over their heads contributed to the Harvey flood’s biblical scale. And our corrupter-in-chief, our president, has exacerbated the problem by rolling back requirements that builders and planners consider climate change in future planning [set timer at 5:33].

The American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition) defines “corrupt” in part as “1. Marked by immorality and perversion; depraved. 2. Marked by venality or dishonesty: a corrupt mayor.”. While perversion and depravity can come from mental illness or just bad character, the vast majority of “immorality,” “venality” and “dishonesty” in our land comes from pursuing the almighty dollar.

Insofar as concerns politics and business, I would define corruption even more simply. It’s pursuing short-term benefit for yourself instead of doing what you know (or ought to know) is right.

Once you define corruption that way, you can see it everywhere in America. Call it “soft” corruption if you will, but it’s ubiquitous.

It permeates government at the highest level. Our president says he wants to avoid the appearance of corruption. But instead of putting his vast business empire into a blind trust, as all the ethics gurus say he should, he gives control to his children. If you trust that ethical “firewall,” I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

The president’s daughter starts to hawk her trinkets out of the White House, at least until public outrage gets too much to bear. Meanwhile, the president’s hotels worldwide fill with patrons who think they can curry favor with the world’s most powerful leader simply by staying there. Are they wrong?

Congress, of course, is rife with corruption. Few members take outright bribes anymore. With more subtle and less detectable corruption rampant, suitcases full of cash have become passé. A pol now can take millions in campaign contributions, openly and through our capable banking system, from very rich people who have no clue what makes a functioning society, let alone a just or thriving one. All they want is lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses so they can get richer more quickly and more easily. Pols accommodate them in order to get the money they need to propagandize us, the people, and so to get re-elected without actually considering our interests.

It got so bad recently that pols were ready to cut off 23 million people from practical access to medical care before angry mobs at town-hall meetings woke them up. And even then the health-insurance victory hung (and hangs!) by single vote in our Senate. Now pols and lobbyists are trying to emasculate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that keeps powerful financial institutions from oppressing and swindling innocent consumers. So far, the leaky dike of popular support for the regulator appears to be holding.

Anyway, government is less than half the story. Corruption goes far beyond Washington D.C. and our state capitals. As Calvin Coolidge is reputed to have said (but didn’t actually say) “The business of America is business.” In a way, that’s true. The overwhelming majority of economic activity by which American people make money and a living is in business.

How is business in America softly corrupt today? Let me count the ways.

Banking, of course, has been the poster child for corruption. The “liars’ loans” that bankers made, packaged into “mortgage-backed securities” and sold to anyone dumb enough to buy them, caused the Crash of 2008, from which our whole nation is still emerging. Systemic rules help reduce the risk of their doing the same things again, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau keeps them from oppressing individual consumers, but both protections are under relentless assault by lobbyists and boss-financed pols.

Does anyone doubt the banks’ short-term motive of making their managers rich quick? Does anyone fail to see that lending shareholders’ money to people who self-evidently can’t pay it back, and selling the resulting toxic mortgages to unsuspecting buyers worldwide, is not “doing what’s right”? And even if you also blame the avaricious borrowers, as so many right-wing pundits do and did, doesn’t that just mean that they, too, were corrupt? Do two wrongs make a right?

Today, course, we also have the scandal at Wells Fargo. Once a paragon of the big commercial banks, reputed to have the most efficient and honest “back office,” Wells now stands accused of creating millions of false and fraudulent accounts, opened in the names of clueless “customers” without their consent by sales people goaded to increase their output by any and all means possible.

Did the salespeople who opened the fraudulent accounts do right? Of course not. But what about the managers who cheered and goaded them on?

Yet even that’s not all. Corruption today goes far beyond banking. It reaches into every business, especially big, public companies. Why? Because our business schools teach it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying (and don’t believe) that business-school professors are crooked. It all happened much more “innocently” than that, mostly inadvertently. But it happened nevertheless, and it’s continuing to happen every day. Let me explain.

Unlike law schools and liberal arts colleges, business schools have one thing in common with teachers of science and engineering. They focus on numbers. They try to turn their graduates into “quants.”

Fair enough. Numbers are important in any field, especially in accounting and economics. But precisely what numbers do B-schools teach? What do they quantify?

They teach the numbers that are most important to people who own or run a business: profit and its parent, revenue. (Profit equals revenue less costs and expenses.) For owners, they teach “shareholder value,” the stock price.

And how do they teach them? Well, everything in our system of public companies runs on a quarterly basis. Salaries run on an even shorter term, weekly or monthly. Bonuses, stock options and other forms of indirect compensation are annual at their best.

So everything important to public companies and their owners and managers focuses on the receipt of quantifiable monetary value in the short term. Pressure to “monetize” every aspect of business is omnipresent.

Not much focuses on doing what’s right, for three reasons. First, doing what’s right is hard to quantify or “monetize.” You can’t find it or easily put it in a spreadsheet. Second, the effect of doing what’s right—or wrong—may be hard to see. Often it’s not short term, so it falls below the radar of quarterly reports, near-term stock price fluctuations, and “shareholder value.”

Third, what’s right or wrong has a long lever arm. Archimedes reputedly said, “Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the Earth.” Just so, the long “lever” of right or wrong conduct may take a long time to produce results, but the results can be spectacular or horrific.

For the spectacular, consider Amazon.com. It’s well known that CEO Jeff Bezos doesn’t worry much about the quarterly “bottom line.” His focus—indeed, his obsession—is customer service: making life easier, simpler, cheaper, more efficient and happier for Amazon’s many customers.

Amazon’s profit margins are razor thin, sometimes nonexistent. Often they are down in supermarket territory. Yet Amazon continues to crush both online and “brick and mortar” retailing competitors. Its stock’s price/earnings ratio is among the highest of all the “high-tech” leaders, because its profits are lower. Think its customers and the markets may know something that the quarterly-focused green-eyeshade folk don’t?

Apple, of course, has done much the same thing with products that Amazon has done with services. Both Steve Jobs and his successor Tim Cook have focused relentlessly on excellence in the appearance and performance of Apple’s products.

As a result, Apple is one the world’s top two companies in value, even if its stock’s P/E ratio is pedestrian and appropriate for a mature business. And Tim Cook’s response to an investor’s snarky question is legendary: when doing the right thing, such as making his products accessible by blind people, Cook doesn’t worry about the “bloody ROI” (return on investment).

For horrific, we’ve already mentioned two examples. The Crash of 2008, caused by bankers focusing on short-term returns, nearly destroyed our American and the global economy. We are just now in the process of exiting the economic rubble.

Similarly, the focus on short-term results has taken a paragon of banking, Wells Fargo, and dragged its business and name through the mud. Only time will tell whether Wells’ famous stagecoach logo, which has served it since the mid-nineteenth century, will emerge from the ashes or become a sad metaphor for corporate hubris, excess and corruption.

But the Crash and Wells Fargo, and excellent companies like Amazon and Apple, are only extreme cases. What about the vast majority of American public companies, which plod along from day to day, earning neither accolades nor jeers, but churning out the products and services that make modern life enjoyable and even possible?

Here is where the stinky rubber of soft corruption really meets the road. It’s eroding the efficient operation and customer-or-product focus of public companies, and therefore their long-term value. It’s doing so just as rapidly as in the extreme cases. Yet often the rot doesn’t become apparent until, like pustules just under the skin of an infected patient, it bursts suddenly into public view.

A case in point is AT&T, the telephone-internet company. I choose it not because it’s especially bad. Indeed, it may be representative of a whole range of long-term trends in big business. I choose it only because my recent experience in suffering its dysfunction—and assisting my fiancée in “firing” it—gave me special insight into how its apparent moral rot and bottom-line focus can produce complete dysfunction.

Let’s begin with some background and the symptoms. For more than a half century, my fiancée and her late husband had a business relationship with a company called “AT&T.” It began in the old days, when a huge firm using that name had a nationwide monopoly with complete control over the national telephone network. The relationship continued through the voluntary 1984 breakup of that nationwide monopoly, then with one of the resulting so-called “Baby Bells” under another name, and finally into the modern era when the West Coast Baby Bells re-acquired the AT&T name and went into the Internet business.

The sole remaining vestige of the grand old AT&T monopoly is the so-called “copper wire,” the unique “last-mile” of copper wire that, even in the old days, connected every house on the block to “The Telephone Company.” Today, that “last mile” remains a useful asset, but cable companies have made an end run around it by laying their own more flexible and higher-bandwidth coaxial cable.

Undaunted by this competition, the modern AT&T seeks to compete as an Internet service provider with a technology called “digital subscriber line,” or “DSL.” This technology has bandwidth limitations that eventually may cause its demise. But at present it allows AT&T and other telephone companies to provide Internet bandwidths in the low double-digit megabit-per-second range, over the same copper wires as the (much lower frequency) telephone audio. (AT&T and its DSL competitors also can provide simultaneous Internet and telephone service by rolling the audio into Internet telephone or VOIP service, using so-called “Voice Over Internet Protocol.”)

DSL technology is economically viable at today’s bandwidths, but it’s technologically tricky. It’s especially tricky when its provider tries to meld fiber-optic technology—a modern, cheap way of transmitting high-bandwidth Internet service over long distances—with the old-fashioned copper wires for the proverbial “last mile.”

With modern technology and well-trained techs, this melding can be done. But with AT&T, what my fiancée and I experienced was complete dysfunction. It began when AT&T brought fiber-optic lines into our neighborhood, offering what purported to be broader-bandwidth service. We bought the offer, and a friendly tech hooked us up, using the old copper wires to our home for the so-called “last mile.”

Within a week, the service failed. Being retired and temporarily out of personal projects, I decided to do an experiment. I would help my fiancée out. I would pretend that I was an average customer, with no Ph.D. in physics and without decades of experience with computers, code, and the Internet. To get help, I would make a call to the dreaded telephone queue—a business abomination that I had parodied on this blog fourteen years earlier.

The software connected me with a woman with in the Philippines with a medium-strong accent. I quickly discovered that she had only a basic knowledge of English, little knowledge of American culture or business, and only the knowledge of AT&T’s services and technology that she could get from reading her scripts.

Yet I had committed myself to experience the full horror and dysfunction of a big-company telephone queue, so I soldiered on. It took me about an hour to get a commitment from the clueless rep, reading from a script, to send a tech to our home the next day. In the process, and at her request, I did such useless things as go outside to verify that our phone line had not somehow collapsed, when there had been no recent wind or storm and the problem had occurred just after the last tech had set up the new service.

My “experiment” continued continued for the next few days, as a succession of four or five technicians visited our home and the fiber/copper wire connection point (apparently about 1,000 feet away) to try to fix the problem. I made an effort to get to know each tech. That wasn’t hard for me, as I had worked closely with like technicians for years in my first career as a scientist.

Each of the techs was pleasant, friendly and smart. All but one had considerable experience in his job; another had seventeen years’ experience.

But AT&T’s dysfunctional management, policies and procedures reduced each tech to a state of abject helplessness. I watched—and was able to befriend each more—as each waited by his mobile device for unknown and anonymous employees in the central office to do such things as (1) verify our account status, (2) check various technical parameters that should have been checkable remotely, and (3) throw various software “switches” that again should have been able to be thrown remotely from the field, at least by the more senior techs. Often a tech, while on a service call and with the clock ticking, would have to wait at least as long as I, the consumer, to get an answer, or even a response, from what seemed to me a telephone or Internet queue indistinguishable from the abomination I had endured to start the whole process.

It quickly became apparent that no one—not the tech standing in our house, not the techs managing the other sides of the mobile communications, and not the many people talking on the phone with my techs—had anything like the big picture or the ability to see it or handle it. The whole team was pathetically balkanized; it resembled the ten blind men of the Indian parable groping the elephant separately and trying to figure out, without knowledgeable help, what kind of creature it was.

When it came to billing, the situation got worse. Promotional discounts and waivers of installation fees promised by salespeople vanished and had to be “renegotiated.” Sometimes they vanished again, despite telephone assurances, on subsequent billings. Our account status had to be continually verified by visiting techs, often erroneously. After the service (including my fiancee’s VOIP “landline” telephone) stayed down for about five weeks while we were away, the company’s reps refused to waive charges for the down time, during which we had had no Internet or telephone service at all.

The last straw came when the company failed to recognize or credit several verified payments to the account, made using automated checks sent and recorded by a major bank. With my encouragement and technical support, my fiancée switched to Comcast (which already had provided her TV) for both TV and Internet access, and to Vonage for VOIP telephone landline service. Within three days, the new services were up and running well, with no technical and only one billing glitch.

What does all this have to do with corruption? Well, let’s go back to my short definition of “soft” corruption: pursuit of short-term benefit instead of doing what’s right. Just about every awful thing we had experienced likely arose from exactly that.

The purpose of siting telephone queues in places like the Philippines and India is ostensibly to cut costs and increase the “bottom line.” The result for me was to waste an hour of my time (and the Filipina rep’s!), doing what should have taken five minutes. Any of the techs who actually visited my home, knowing that there had been no storms or unusual weather and that the service had failed shortly after a change, would have said, as one passably intelligent human being to another, “Gee, it looks like we did something wrong. We’ll check it out.” So chalk up one hour of my time and one hour of the Filipina rep’s, not to mention the proportion of her pay and the cost to set up the foreign call center, for absolutely no discernible result.

The crux of the matter is that some B-school grad decided that it would save money to put phone reps in a foreign but English speaking country, and to hire new people with no experience in the business or with American culture, let alone the relevant technology. Of course you can’t let people like that have a lot of discretion in representing your company! So they must have no more authority and no more discretion than to read from a list of scripts and ask a list of prescribed questions.

In short, the reps must be cogs in a human machine, with no responsibility, authority or ability to help customers as one human being to another. When the matter involves billing (real money!), the reps’ authority and discretion must be even more circumscribed.

The result, as I wrote in my parody fourteen years ago, is no customer relationship, no human relationship, and a series of awkward, painful and utterly useless and time-wasting human interactions. The customer feels neglected and abused. The rep feels useless and restrained, worse than the operators of those long rows of identical sewing machines in endless identical rows in nineteenth-century sweatshops.

Does any of this ever make it into the B-school grad’s spreadsheet? I’ll bet a fair sum it doesn’t. Likely this decision was made simply by multiplying the number of projected reps in the call center by the differences in salary between the Philippines and wherever the call center was before it was sent offshore.

Thus does “soft” corruption work when it’s not only based on short-term benefit, but the “benefit” doesn’t include all the cost factors, especially those that are hard to quantify. As Albert Einstein reputedly said about scientists, most drill where the drilling is easiest, not where the oil is. If that’s true of physicists working at Einstein’s level, how much more fully does it apply to the average B-school grad?

Well, AT&T cut costs all right. They cut costs so well that, insofar as I and my fiancee were concerned, doing business with them became a nightmare—a parody of corporate dysfunction that continued relentlessly for about six months, until we fired them.

Firing them was a relief, but the dysfunction continued even afterward. My fiancée took AT&T’s DSL modem (along with its power cable and telephone line) to a local AT&T office to effect the firing. But they told her they couldn’t accept it there. She had to take the useless equipment to a courier service and mail it in!

No wonder Amazon and Apple are taking their industries by storm! They focus on the customer experience and the product, respectively. They feel a moral obligation (or at least a business necessity) to deliver, not just receive, something of value. And they think of every possible way to increase that value and decrease the costs, to the customer, not just to themselves. They understand that, once they do, they will receive value and praise in return. They do what’s right and what works, consistently and well, and their businesses grow relentlessly.

Unfortunately, they are the exceptions, not the rule, at least among big public companies. The schemes that B-school grads working in these companies dream up to cut costs and increase revenue are seldom focused on doing what’s right, let alone on understanding their customers and employees as human beings who ought to be treated as such.

Sometimes, they do simple acts of financial manipulation, such as stock buybacks or dividends. Sometimes, they do thinly concealed acts of corporate looting, such as taking a big company private by loading it with unsustainable debt, then downsizing it by selling assets and letting employees go, and finally selling the remnants at a profit. This can make them a lot of money, but is it “right” in any human or even longer-term business sense? Isn’t it all reminiscent of a corporate scrap dealer with a lawyer for a junkyard dog?

Meanwhile, fossil-fuel companies continue finding, extracting, refining and selling fossil fuels with abandon. They know that their customers who burn them are heating our planet, exhausting an irreplaceable resource (of feedstock for plastics, paints and medicines), and threatening the global economy with a vast system of stranded assets. Yet they make only token effort to transition to the new energy economy, which every informed person knows must come within the lifetimes of babies born this year.

So if you define “soft” corruption as seeking short-term benefit instead of doing right, it’s now endemic in our society. It begins with our president, whose corruption is without precedent. It continues with our Congress. And it infects our entire business community, including the bosses who subvert our pols and (most especially) our big public companies, many of which employ business cost-cutters, financial manipulators and corporate looters taught the ways of soft corruption in B-school.

From the perspective of this 72-year-old, the change for the worse in our culture is as dramatic and as clear as the recent total solar eclipse. In my youth, almost every career professional had a purpose in life that was’t just making money. Scientists wanted to create a unified field theory, discover the causes of cancer, or make the next Salk or Sabin vaccine for a dread disease like polio. Writers wanted to write the great American novel. Business people wanted to serve their customers and the community well by creating innovative products and services, such as televisions and computers, and selling them honestly at a fair price. Actors and comics wanted to entertain millions on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Money would eventually flow from all these things, of course, but it was far from their primary purpose. Today, money and transient fame seem the only coins of the realm.

When I was a kid, a series of books by George Gamow explaining recents advances in physics and math to non-scientific readers were best sellers. Today, best sellers focus on the antics and pathology of bent celebrities, corporate raiders, and Donald Trump, and on the questionable means by which people of no particular character or accomplishment got rich or famous. I hardly recognize the nation I was born into, let alone from what our media cover obsessively.

How can we stop the spreading stain of corruption from tarnishing our entire economy? How can we raise our level of moral acuity and get those hard-to-quantify but vital moral factors into our spreadsheets?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how. Religion is on the ropes, at least as Jesus and the other prophets might see it. Jesus would hardly recognize what self-interested pols and so-called “entrepreneurs” say today in his name. When a filthy rich “mega-pastor” preaching the “gospel of prosperity” refuses (until pressured) to open his mega-church to house poor people crushed by Harvey, can national perdition be far behind?

The only realistic cure I can see, as religious moral influence wanes, is to get back to basics. We can focus on what a business does, not the money it makes, and try to do that better and quicker. We can put more engineers and scientists—whose primary focus is on goals other than money—in charge of our businesses and national policies. (That’s why I’m a fan of Rex Tillerson.) And each of us can try to keep a non-monetary goal, or two, foremost in our minds as we go about our daily business.

As Harvey has taught us, our warriors, police and first responders do that every day. They don’t think about their paycheck when they’re trying to protect us against terrorism, violence or the depredations of angry Nature. And the best ones consider moral issues like equality and our civil rights. That’s why many police leaders roundly condemned Trump’s casual equation of white supremacists with those protesting their evil philosophy. As for volunteers, they don’t consider money at all; they spend it doing right.

Can business people start considering moral values as do our warriors, police, first responders and volunteers, who put the most on the line? Of course they can. Internet service providers, for example, can focus on providing less downtime, broader bandwidth, and fewer technical and billing hassles. Journalists can focus on informing the public, as simply, directly, and accurately as possible. They can suppress the urge to increase their audience (and pay) by sensationalizing the immoral and trivial. (If they had done so last year, would Trump be president?) Car makers can focus on the inevitable transition to electricity and renewable energy, and on helping us preserve the Earth’s priceless and limited supply of fossil fuels for purposes other than burning, for as long as possible.

If we don’t do this—if we Americans can’t stop trying to “monetize” all of human life, and to figure costs with childlike simplicity—soft corruption will overwhelm us. We will join the long list of non-“exceptional” nations that have fallen into the dustbin of history by mistaking short-term venal self-interest for historical imperatives or earmarks of national superiority.

Footnote: A word about the seminal 1984 AT&T breakup may be useful, both for students of our American “antitrust” (competition) law and for our Millennials, who have never seen that law effectively enforced.

The breakup was one of the two greatest changes in our industrial landscape wrought by antitrust law in the late twentieth century. The other was the voluntary “unbundling” of computer software from hardware by IBM in 1969.

No court order forced or shaped either of these two great industrial upheavals. Each was a voluntary action, made under a so-called “consent decree,” by private American companies. Yet each was made in response to, and under the pressure of, a credible and meritorious lawsuit by the federal government for violations of our federal antitrust laws.

Together these two voluntary acts created the industrial and technological environment for much of our twenty-first-century prosperity. The 1984 breakup of the old AT&T monopoly supplemented the FCC’s 1968 “Carterfone” decision, which opened the previously monopolized national telephone network to interconnection with independent producers’ equipment. Together, the two events created today’s huge and diverse market for residential and business telephone equipment and software. They also incentivized creation of a significant part of the Internet’s physical backbone and much of the cellphone industry’s physical and software infrastructure.

The 1969 “unbundling” of software by IBM may have been even more important. It created the entire computer software industry, which previously had been monopolized by IBM. It thus opened up the industrial spaces inhabited today by such firms as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, which now owns the tallest building in San Francisco. It also provided the business and legal paradigm for today’s thousands of small producers of independent “apps” for smart phones and tablets.

Anyone who fears that rigorous enforcement of antitrust (competition) laws might impede technical and industrial progress would do well to study these two seminal case histories. Not only did the government’s expensive and prolonged lawsuits fail to impede progress. In the end, they created whole new industries, which undergird our prosperity today.

Just Scratching the Surface (Sunday, September 3, 2017)

Sometimes posts on this blog seem prescient. Whether it’s the hive mind at work, great minds thinking alike, or sheer coincidence, I don’t know. Probably it’s a little of all three.

But in this case, at least three articles in the Sunday New York Times address different aspects of “soft” corruption. All appeared on line about twenty-four hours after I posted the foregoing essay early Saturday morning.

The shortest and easiest to digest is an opinion essay by one David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, on our recent explosion of cultural sleaze. He argues convincingly that our American culture has become radically sleazier and morally corrupt since the late eighties.

He says it all started in 1989, when an extramarital affair of a theretofore unknown tycoon named Donald Trump, with a model named Marla Maples, burst into our headlines. Now the very same rich libertine has become our president, bypassing the inconvenient necessity of accumulating actual experience in political office on his way.

Friend’s essay is itself emblematic of our cultural putrefaction. It’s full of name-dropping and words like “skeeviness,” which seem to make light of our collective turn to the Dark Side.

Not all the names Friend drops are those of mere celebrities. Some are names of media titans largely responsible for our cultural putrefaction, and some are names of pols like Newt Gingrich and the Clintons. Newt famously served his first wife with divorce papers in the hospital where she was being treated for what turned out to be terminal cancer. And how did the Clintons accumulate a reported family fortune of $250 million from careers spent mostly in politics? (For analysis of how both Clintons contributed to our cultural putrefaction while balancing budgets and making friends with minorities, click here.)

The second article at first might seem irrelevant. It’s about bicycle-sharing in China’s congested big cities. Apparently that’s a big business for small startups in China.

The sharing is mostly dockless. What a great idea! Think how much more efficient bicycle sharing could be, with GPS locators for all the bikes, if users would only drop them off voluntarily at designated sharing points. But they don’t. They leave them all over the place, blocking traffic and polluting gardens and private dwellings, so much so that many are lost to crime and some are destroyed—even burned (with fuel!)—by resentful people fed up with having to move them out of their way.

The result, already, is a collective conversation in China about personal morality, or what Chinese call “suzhi.” That term has many meanings but perhaps is best summarized by the English words “good character.”

How is this Chinese story relevant to us? In three ways. First, it proves a universal truth: in any society, corruption and moral decline begin with the individual. A good and true wall can’t have many bricks that are bent. Second, the Chinese story shows, at an individual level, how wasteful and immoral conduct can destroy social cohesion. Finally, it proves that the problem of moral laxity is global; it may be an unfortunate side-effect of prosperity, even in a still-developing nation like China.

The last of the three articles is the one that provokes the most thought. It concerns the trend among both big and small high-tech companies to promote their classroom technologies, including child-friendly social media, directly to teachers. They do so in much the same ways for which pharmaceutical companies have been criticized for promoting their drugs to doctors. They also encourage teachers to engage in personal “branding,” one of the chief enterprises of Donald J. Trump.

The article is not about teen-agers, who we already know are knee-deep in social media. It’s about grammar-school teachers. Third-graders are reportedly happy that their teachers are using and promoting for-profit classroom technology and becoming self-branded “ambassadors” for profit-making concerns.

“Soft” corruption? Probably. The conflicts of interest are obvious and legion, as identified by lawyers in the article. But are there countervailing benefits? Could the law be too slow to adapt?

Whatever the implications of Betsy DeVos’ high dive into school privatization with insufficient evidence that it holds water, this is not exactly school privatization. It’s an uneasy and possibly corrupt partnership between private companies and teachers, even those still supervised and paid by government, who are trying to do their best for their students and themselves.

Other partnerships between government and industry have produced our greatest advances in industry and technology. Just naming a few of them recites the basis of twentieth-century American industrial and commercial supremacy: high-altitude flight, commercial air travel, space exploration, the Internet, and much of modern medicine, including life-saving vaccines for smallpox and polio. All these things and more were initiated, developed and/or first funded by government and later handed over to, or taken over by, private industry.

The extremes just don’t work. All government is Communism, which failed miserably after decades-long, fair trials in Russia and China. All private industry has never been the American way: government has always stepped in where needed, for example, where private investment cannot or does not finance critical infrastructure or basic or high-risk research. Our nation worked like a fine switch watch during the five decades after World War II, when the fruits of government-funded research passed to private industry for development and expansion for the general welfare.

Could a partnership between government and private industry jump-start the roll-out of modern Internet technologies into education? Could that partnership, unlike the post-war one, begin with private enterprise and move to government development and control, in order to avoid corruption and waste of our most precious resources—the minds, enthusiasm and talent of our youth?

One of the most astounding things in the NYT article was this quotation from a student, speaking about the unusual, nontraditional seating arrangements in the classroom:
“If I’m just feeling like relaxing, I usually sit on the rockers or the ball chairs or the beanbag chairs. But if I want to be really, really focused, then I usually feel like going on something a little harder so that I don’t lose concentration.”
This was not a high-schooler speaking, but a third-grader! Maybe this particular student is a budding genius. But if not, don’t you want for your kid whatever made this third-grade student so articulate, precocious and self-aware?

Everyone over fifty has had the humbling experience of having to ask a younger person how best to use new technology. (That’s true even for me, with my two doctors’ degrees and sixty years of experience with electronics, computers and the Internet.) If a private-public partnership can push our kids into learning and accommodating new technology at warp speed, what’s wrong with that?

But we must also watch the Dark Side. Modern communication technology, the Internet and social media have become tools of propagandists. They might yet become tools of indoctrination and mind control on a scale that even Orwell never imagined.

So we have to be careful, very careful. At the end of World War II, with us Yanks in sole possession of nukes, we imagined a world of perpetual peace and limitless nuclear power. We never imagined North Korea or Fukushima. We must guard against similar unintended consequences of information technologies.

Everything depends our moral education, our character, and China’s “suzhi.” If they’re strong and good, we can build a sustainable heaven on Earth, working together. If they’re bad, we can turn our little planet into a Hell that neither Dante nor Hieronymus Bosch could ever have imagined. We can extinguish ourselves with nuclear fire or runaway global warming.

They key is us, and how we educate our kids with strong moral values, not just job-ready skills. But first, we must curb our rising tide of corruption, both soft and hard, lest our natural human tendency to help our individual selves produce catastrophic unintended consequences. At this particular time, we’re not doing that so well.

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