Sunday, April 22, 2018


Weekend Roundup

Another week where I ran out of time before I ran out of links. Indeed, one I couldn't get to is Chris Bertram: Is there too much immigration? I also noticed that John Quiggin has been publishing chapters to his forthcoming book Economics in Two Lessons on Crooked Timber.


Some scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered this week, explained: Michael Cohen had some fun in court; A baby went to the Senate floor (Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth's); Democrats got some good news in Senate polling; Mike Pompeo took a secret trip to North Korea. Other Yglesias posts:

    • There's no good alternative to building more homes in expensive cities.

    • Trump tweets: "The crime rate in California is high enough." California is a safer-than-average state. Trump thinks more immigrants, more crime, but opposite is true.

    • 11 House Republicans call for prosecutions of Clinton, Comey, Lynch, and others: The most charitable explanation is that the call is just meant "to try to muddy the waters in the media," but I should note that in some countries (e.g., Brazil and Russia) prosecuting political enemies has moved beyond the drawing board. I'm sure we could come up with a matching list of Bush cronies who Obama neglected to prosecute (although his DOJ did go after John Edwards). Still, prosecuting prosecutors for failing to prosecute cases that no reasonable person would view as winnable (n.b., the Edwards and Menendez cases failed), is pretty extreme.

    • James Comey isn't the hero we deserve. But he's the hero we need. The gist of Yglesias' argument is here:

      But to react to Comey's charges against Trump with a comprehensive assessment of his entire career is to miss the point. James Comey is a critical figure of our time not because of any particular decision, right or wrong, that he made during his tenure in government. He's important because he exemplifies values -- most of all, the pursuit of institutional independence and autonomy -- whose presence among career officials safeguards the United States against the threat of systemic corruption.

      The greatest safeguard we have against the dangers of Trump's highly personalized style of leadership and frequently expressed desire to reshape all institutions to serve his personal goal is that officials and bureaucrats have the power to say no. Comey, whatever else he did, said no to his boss and was fired for his trouble. America needs more government officials who are willing to take that stand. In many ways, Comey is not the hero the United States deserves. But in a critical moment, he may be the hero we need.

      Still, further down in the article Yglesias gives a pretty chilling account about Comey's prosecutorial mindset and institutional loyalties. Comey, for instance, holds up his prosecution of Martha Stewart (for "covering up a crime she didn't commit") as exemplary: "the Comey view is that true justice is treating Martha Stewart just as shabbily as the cops would treat anyone else." Also:

      Comey's handling of the 2016 campaign was essentially in the tradition of FBI directors acting on behalf of their agency's institutional goals. Knowing that the Obama administration was reluctant to fight publicly with the FBI over the matter while congressional Republicans were relatively eager, he slanted his decision-making on both the Russia and email investigations toward the interests of the GOP. As Adam Serwer writes, "the FBI is petrified of criticism from its conservative detractors, and is relatively indifferent to its liberal critics." And over the course of 2016, it showed -- when Mitch McConnell wanted Comey to keep quiet about Trump and Russia, he did. When Trump-friendly elements among the rank and file wanted him to speak up about Anthony Weiner's laptop, he did.

      On Comey, also see: Matt Taibbi: James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover. On the FBI's use of its own power to cover its own ass, see: Alice Speri: The FBI's race problems are getting worse. The prosecution of Terry Albury is proof. By the way, shouldn't the Espionage Act be reserved for disclosing secrets to foreign governments? Albury's "crime" was leaking documents to the press (i.e., the American people).

    • Richard Cohen's privilege, explained: Long-time Washington Post columnist, known for courageously standing up against "too much diversity" and complaints about the "privilege" enjoyed by white males like himself. I find much talk about "privilege" annoying myself, but then I don't sit on his perch ("and because the demographic of put-upon older white men does, in fact, exert disproportionate influence over American social and economic institutions, there continues to be a well-compensated and not very taxing job for him into his late 70s"). Yglesias provides some back story, but doesn't mention that Alex Pareene featured Cohen in his annual "hack lists" at Salon (tried to find a link but got blocked by Salon's "ad blocker" blocker -- probably why I stopped reading them, although I had less reason to when their better writers left).

    • Richard Clarinda and Michelle Bowman, Trump's new Fed appointees, explained: "Two boring, competent, well-qualified, industry-friendly picks."

    • Donald Trump's corruption means he'll never be a "normal" commander in chief: Mostly about Syria, more generally the Middle East, where Trump has numerous business entanglements. "We don't know who's paying Trump -- or whom he listens to."

    • Comey interview: "I thought David Petraeus should have been prosecuted".

  • Zack Beauchamp: Syria exposes the core feature of Trump's foreign policy: contradiction: Many aspects of Trump's foreign policy are mired in contradiction (or at least incoherence), but it seems unfair to single out Syria as a Trump problem. Ever since the civil war there started it has been a multifaceted affair. Since US foreign policy has long been driven by kneejerk reactions, even under the much more rational Obama the US found itself opposing both Assad and his prime opponents in ISIS, leading to a policy which can only be described as nihilism. What Trump added to this fever swamp of contradictions was sympathy for pro-Assad Russia and antipathy for pro-Assad Iran. Meanwhile, America's two main allies in the region (Israel and Turkey) have each doubled down on their own schizophrenic involvements.

  • Amy Chozick: 'They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President': Excerpt from Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, yet another journalist's campaign chronicle, a reminder of how pathetic her obsession turned out to be. Not clear who "they" were in the title, other than the American people, but had she really understood that truth, why did she run in the first place? Why, given the inevitability of defeat, did she keep us from nominating a candidate who actually could have defeated Donald Trump? I doubt that Chozick has any such answers. Instead, we find her apologizing for getting caught up in such distractions as parsing John Podesta's hacked emails instead of seeing the broader context, not least that the email dump was timed to take attention away from the leak of Trump bragging about assaulting women ("grab them by the pussy").

  • Robert Fisk: The search for truth in the rubble of Douma -- and one doctor's doubts over the chemical attack; also Patrick Cockburn: We Should be Sceptical of Those Who Claim to Know the Events in Syria: Of course, Trump jumped at the opportunity to bomb Syria before anyone really verified that reports of a chemical weapons attack were true. That is, after all, how American presidents prove their manhood.

  • Steve Fraser: Teaching America a Lesson: About the national effort to forget that class was ever a concept rooted in reality. From Fraser's new book, Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion (Yale University Press). Also at TomDispatch: Tom Engelhardt: A Tale of American Hubris.

  • Zachary Fryer-Biggs: Rudy Giuliani is Trump's new lawyer. His history with Comey could spell trouble.

  • William Greider: American Hubris, or, How Globalization Brought Us Donald Trump: Unpack this a bit: "It was 'free trade' mania, pushed by both major political parties, that destroyed working-class prosperity and laid the groundwork for his triumph." Unpack that some more, why don't you? What made "free trade" such a problem was decline in union power, especially due to a politically rigged union-free zone in the US South, combined with decreasing domestic investments in infrastructure and education (also politically engineered), plus growing pressure on the rich to seek new sources of wealth abroad. To blame all of that on "free trade" confuses mechanism with cause. Trump benefited not from free trade so much as from that confusion. More importantly, Democratic politicians suffered because it looked like they had sold out their base to rich donors. (As, indeed, they had.) Note that The Nation has another piece this week with the same pitch line: Michael Massing: How Martin Luther Paved the Way for Donald Trump. It's as if they wanted to make the leap from tragedy to farce in a single issue. In an infinite universe, I guess you'll eventually find that everything leads to Donald Trump. That's a lot of inevitability for a guy who only got 46.1% of the vote.

  • Umair Irfan/Eliza Barclay: 7 things we've learned about Earth since the last Earth Day: i.e., in the last year.

  • Jen Kirby: Mike Pompeo reportedly met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: This is less interesting than the bilateral talks between North and South Korea, which actually seem to be getting somewhere, but does indicate that the planned summit between Trump and Kim may actually come to pass. Past efforts to bridge differences between the US and DPRK have generally been sabotaged by mid-level US staff -- one recalls the frantic efforts of Sandy Berger and others to derail Jimmy Carter's mid-1990s agreement. One might expect a neocon like Pompeo to throw a few monkey wrenches into the efforts, and indeed he may still, but it's also clear that Mattis and the DOD have no appetite for launching a war against North Korea, so maybe it's not such a bad idea to negotiate a little. Also see: Robin Wright: With Pompeo to Pyongyang, the U.S. Launches Diplomacy with North Korea.

    Wright also wrote: The Hypocrisy of Trump's "Mission Accomplished" Boast About Syria. Actually, Trump is establishing a track record of acting tough and making flamboyant and reckless threats then pulling his punches. It's sort of the opposite of Theodore Roosevelt's maxim to "speak softly and carry a big stick" -- only sort of, because he has expanded the murderous drone program, encourage Saudi Arabia to escalate their bombing of Yemen, sent more troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, so it's clear that he has no respect for world peace or human life. Moreover, his pugnacious stance is making the world more dangerous in many ways, not least by the contempt he projects on the rest of the world (and on a good many Americans).

  • Noah Kulwin: The Internet Apologizes . . . Picture shows a weeping cat, with a couple of tweets from "The Internet": "We're sorry. We didn't mean to destroy privacy. And democracy. Our bad."

    Why, over the past year, has Silicon Valley begun to regret the foundational elements of its own success? The obvious answer is November 8, 2016. For all that he represented a contravention of its lofty ideals, Donald Trump was elected, in no small part, by the internet itself. Twitter served as his unprecedented direct-mail-style megaphone, Google helped pro-Trump forces target users most susceptible to crass Islamophobia, the digital clubhouses of Reddit and 4chan served as breeding grounds for the alt-right, and Facebook became the weapon of choice for Russian trolls and data-scrapers like Cambridge Analytica. Instead of producing a techno-utopia, the internet suddenly seemed as much a threat to its creator class as it had previously been their herald.

    Fifth years ago I wouldn't have had a moment's hesitation as to the problem here: capitalism. That may seem like a quaint, old-fashioned analysis -- even I would be more inclined these days to speak of market failures and distortions -- but it's basically true and was totally predictable from the onset. For instance, the very first time I heard of WWW it was in the context of a question: how can we make money off of this? Sure, people may have had trouble imagining how pervasive, how all-consuming, it would be. And it may not have been obvious how few companies would wind up monopolizing such a huge slice of traffic. But from the start, every business plan imagined monopoly rents -- Microsoft's picked up their favored term ("vig") from the Mafia -- at the end of the rainbow. As practically everyone realized, the key to the fortune would be what economists called "network effects" -- hence every serious contender started off by offering something for free, figuring on hooking you first, eating you later. Had we been smarter, we might have placed some roadblocks in their way: antitrust, privacy regulations, free software, publicly funded alternatives. But that wasn't the American Way, especially in the post-Cold War glow of capitalist triumphalism. One great irony here is that while right-wingers like to complain about popularly elected government "picking winners and losers" in free markets, the reality is that the not-so-free markets are deciding who wins our supposedly free elections.

    After the intro, the article moves on to "How It Went Wrong, in 15 Steps," through the words of 14 "Architects" -- a mix of techies and businessfolk. The 15 steps:

    1. Start With Hippie Good Intentions . . .
    2. Then mix in capitalism on steroids.
    3. The arrival of Wall Streeters didn't help . . .
    4. . . . And we paid a high price for keeping it free.
    5. Everything was designed to be really, really addictive.
    6. At first it worked -- almost too well.
    7. No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable . . .
    8. . . . Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic.
    9. . . . And even as they invaded our privacy.
    10. Then came 2016. [Donald Trump and Brexit]
    11. Employees are starting to revolt.
    12. To fix it, we'll need a new business model . . .
    13. . . . And some tough regulation.
    14. Maybe nothing will change.
    15. . . . Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge.

    Useful, although one could imagine alternative ways of threading the analysis. Step 12, for instance, says "we'll need a new business model," then offers: "Maybe by trying something radical and new -- like charging users for goods and services." New? That's the way thousands of exclusive newsletters aimed at business already work. What makes them viable is a small audience willing to pay a high premium for information. You could switch to this model overnight by simply banning advertising. The obvious major effect is that it would cause a major collapse in utility and usage. There would be a lot of other problems as well -- more than I can possibly list here. Still, true that you need a new business model. But perhaps we should consider ones that aren't predicated on capitalist greed and a vastly inequal society?

    The article also includes a useful list of "Things That Ruined the Internet":

    • Cookies (1994)
    • The Farmville vulnerability (2007) [a Facebook design flaw that made possible the Cambridge Analytica hack]
    • Algorithmic sorting (2006) ["it keeps users walled off in their own personalized loops"]
    • The "like" button (2009)
    • Pull-to-refresh (2009)
    • Pop-up ads (1996)

    I would have started the list with JavaScript, which lets website designers take over your computer and control your experience. It is the technological layer enabling everything else on the list (except cookies).

    Speaking of alternate business models, Kulwin also did an interview with Katherine Maher about "Wikipedia's nonprofit structure and what incentive-based media models lack": 'There Is No Public Internet, and We Are the Closest Thing to It'.

  • David Leonhardt: A Time for Big Economic Ideas: For the last forty years, the Republican "small government" mantra has sought to convince us that we can't do things that help raise everyone's standard of living, indeed that we can't afford even to do things that government has done since the 1930s. On the other hand, they've pushed the line that markets rigged so the rich get richer is the best we can hope for. And they've been so successful that even Leonhardt, trying to reverse the argument, doesn't come close to really thinking big. One of my favorite books back fifty years ago was Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals. A while back I opened up a book draft file with that as a subtitle. Haven't done much on it yet, but not for lack of big ideas.

  • German Lopez: The Senate's top Democrat just came out for ending federal marijuana prohibition: Chuck Shumer, who has a bill to that effect (as does Cory Booker). Lopez also wrote: John Boehner just came out for marijuana reform. Most Republicans agree. Being a Republican, Boehner did more than accede to public opinion. He figured out a way to get paid for doing so. I'm reminded of gambling, which when I was growing up was regarded as one of the worst sources of moral rot anywhere. However, as it became the fount of several Republican-leaning fortunes, the guardians of our moral virtue learned to embrace it. Indeed, lotteries have become a major source of tax revenues in many states (especially here in Kansas).

  • Andrew Prokop: Andrew McCabe's criminal referral, explained: This may give second thoughts to some of the people who ponied up a half-million bucks to help McCabe sue for his pension and other possible damages from his politically motivated firing. Still, this doesn't seem like much of a criminal case. The charge is that "McCabe lacked candor about his role in leaks about a Clinton investigation." The leak was one designed to correct a report that he wasn't being tough enough on Clinton. Clearly, whatever McCabe was, he wasn't a partisan Democratic mole in the FBI. On the other hand, his new friends probably figure that any lawsuit that forces the government to expose documents is bound to turn up something embarrassing for Trump and Sessions.

    Prokop also wrote: The DNC just sued Russia and the Trump campaign for 2016 election meddling. Hard to see what the value of this suit is, as it is critically dependent on on-going (and far from complete) investigations to establish linkage between the various parties. Moreover, I have two fairly large reservations. One is that I don't generally approve of using US courts to sue over foreign jurisdictions, especially cases highly tainted with prejudice. (The 9/11 lawsuits are an example.) The other is that I see this as a time-and-money sink for the Democrats, at a time when they have more important things to focus on: winning elections in 2018 and 2020. For more on the lawsuit, see: Glenn Greenwald/Trevor Timm: The DNC's lawsuit against WikiLeaks poses a serious threat to press freedom:

    The DNC's suit, as it pertains to WikiLeaks, poses a grave threat to press freedom. The theory of the suit -- that WikiLeaks is liable for damages it caused when it "willfully and intentionally disclosed" the DNC's communications (paragraph 183) -- would mean that any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting, or even theoretically prosecuted for it, or that any media outlet releasing an internal campaign memo is guilty of "economic espionage" (paragraph 170):

    This is effectively the same point Trump tried to make during his 2016 campaign when he argued that libel laws should be passed which would allow aggrieved parties like himself to sue for damages. Indeed, throughout his career Trump has been plagued by leaks and hacks (i.e., journalism). You'd think that the DNC would appreciate that we need more free press, not less. Makes it look like they (still) prefer to work in the dark.

  • Brian Resnick: Trump's next NASA administrator is a Republican congressman with no background in science: Jim Bridenstine, of Oklahoma, once ran the Air and Space Museum in Tulsa. Hope he realizes that unlike many government agencies, when/if he causes NASA to crash and burn it will be televised.

  • Emily Stewart: Nobody knows who was behind half of the divisive ads on Facebook ahead of the 2016 election: Half were linked to "suspicious groups"; one-sixth of those were linked to Russia.

  • Beyond Alt: The Extremely Reactionary, Burn-It-Down-Radical, Newfangled Far Right: A smorgasbord, written by a dozen or more writers with links to even more material. Certainly much more info than I ever wanted to know about the so-called alt-right. One aside mentions a symmetrical "alt-left," but notes that alt-leftists hate being called that. Right. We're leftists.

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