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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:
- Start With Hippie Good Intentions . . .
- Then mix in capitalism on steroids.
- The arrival of Wall Streeters didn't help . . .
- . . . And we paid a high price for keeping it free.
- Everything was designed to be really, really addictive.
- At first it worked -- almost too well.
- No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable . . .
- . . . Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic.
- . . . And even as they invaded our privacy.
- Then came 2016. [Donald Trump and Brexit]
- Employees are starting to revolt.
- To fix it, we'll need a new business model . . .
- . . . And some tough regulation.
- Maybe nothing will change.
- . . . 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.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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