If you’re worried that technological progress will lead to mass unemployment — and especially if you think this process is already underway — you should be very interested in what the Federal Reserve does.
This week's featured post is "Jobs, Income, and the Future": Technologists worry that robots are going to make most humans unemployable, and economists scoff at that worry. Who's right?
I was in Florida last week, where I spoke to the Unitarian Universalists of Lakewood Ranch. This group is only a year-or-so old, so I raised the question "Why Be a Congregation?"
This week everybody was talking about Russia again
It's hard to restate the situation more succinctly than Paul Begala:
So:
1 Russia hacked Dems
2 Leaks were timed to aid Trump
3 Trump aides had contact w/Russians
4 They lied about contactsNope. Nothing here
So far, we have a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting a quid-pro-quo relationship between the Trump campaign and the Putin government, but nothing that rises to the level of proof. For some reason, though, Trump's people all start obfuscating, misdirecting, and lying whenever the subject comes up, and his allies in Congress really, really don't want to investigate it.
That's the mystery. Disgraced National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had to resign when it came out that he lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador (and got Vice President Pence to lie for him). And this week we found out that Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied during his confirmation hearings about meeting the Russian ambassador. These are serious matters: Lying to the FBI (Flynn) and to Congress (Sessions) are both crimes. (I'm waiting for Republicans to start chanting "Lock them up!", but so far there are no charges, and Sessions continues to be our top law-enforcement officer.) So why take those risks unless there's something serious worth hiding?
I have to agree with Josh Marshall:
[B]ig, big scandals work like this. People who don't even appear to be that close to the action keep getting pulled under for what seem like needless deceptions. The answer is usually that the stuff at the center of the scandal is so big that it requires concealment, even about things distant from the main action, things that it would seem much better and less damaging simply to admit.
He also makes an interesting point about cover-ups:
We've all heard the old saw: It's never the crime, it's the cover-up. This is almost never true. Covering scandals for any length of time is enough to tell you that. People are generally able to make judgments about how much trouble they're in. We think the 'cover up' is worse than the crime because it's actually very seldom that the full scope of the actual crime is ever known. The cover up works better than you think. The other reason the cover up is a logical response is that it usually works. You only find out about it when it doesn't. So it's a good bet.
Another Trump campaign person changed his story about how the Republican platform plank on Ukraine was softened in Russia's favor. At the time he claimed Trump and then-campaign-manager Paul Manafort weren't involved, but now he says they were.
Marshall makes his best attempt at an "innocent explanation" of what we know about Trump and Russia: Basically, Trump went through a period in the 90s where the only investment capital he could raise came from Russian oligarchs, and given his what's-good-for-Trump-is-good-period narcissism, he came to share an oligarch's worldview: Putin good, sanctions against Russia bad, and so on. Putin recognized the value Trump could have for him, and did his best to put Trump in the White House.
The administration's response to the Sessions revelation, instantly picked up by Fox News and individual Trump fans commenting via social media, was that Democrats have also met with the high Russian officials, as if that were the problem. Chuck Schumer pointed out the lameness of this retort by volunteering to testify under oath about his 2003 encounter with Putin, and daring Trump and his people to do the same about their meetings.
The second response is to throw out a bright shiny object to distract everyone: Trump's so-far baseless claim that President Obama wiretapped him in Trump Tower. Not only has he not explained why we should believe this, he hasn't even said why he believes it.
Notice the response he never gets close to: If there really were no story here, he could score a lot of points with a defiant, bring-it-on attitude towards an investigation.
The Washington Post gets a legal opinion about Sessions' false testimony to Congress:
Under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 1001 and 1621, perjury before Congress is punishable by up to five years imprisonment. To prove that offense, a prosecutor would have to establish that Sessions’s answer was false, that he knew it was false when made and that the subject matter of the answer was “material” to the congressional inquiry in which he was testifying. Those elements all appear to be present.
From Vox:
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and Trump's speech to Congress
It's kind of amazing how low the bar is for this guy. He reads a speech off a teleprompter that doesn't sound totally crazy -- but does misrepresent a number of material facts -- and pundits are thrilled. It's as if I got arrested for indecent exposure, but because I keep my pants zipped in court, the jury decides I must be a changed man.
NPR's reporters do a good job of annotating the text:
President Trump very slowly and emphatically used the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to describe the threat facing the nation. It is a term he used constantly during his presidential campaign. By repeating it Tuesday, he may be rebuking his own national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who reportedly told his National Security Council staff last week that the term may not help efforts to enlist the support of Muslim allies in the fight against ISIS because ISIS terrorism is actually “un-Islamic.” Former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama shared McMaster’s view.
"Radical Islamic terrorism" plays well among Trump's base, and in this administration domestic politics will always come before national security.
The reason the phrase is bad framing should be obvious if you translate it to Christianity, or some other religion you feel more sympathy for. If you're a Christian, "radical Christianity" sounds like it ought to be a good thing. (For that matter, if you're a humanist, "radical humanism" sounds pretty good.)
ISIS and other jihadist groups argue that they practice the "real" Islam, and that all the more liberal or pro-Western Muslims are compromisers who bend the true word of Allah to the worldly powers. If we call their ideology "radical Islam", we're validating their claim, and helping them recruit young Muslims.
Another important annotation:
although Trump has cited the danger of attacks by people traveling from the countries affected by his travel restrictions, all the lethal attacks by radicalized Muslims in the U.S. since 2001 have been carried out by U.S. citizens or people who were in the country lawfully.
From the speech:
I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE –- Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.
One of the common techniques of bigotry is to treat misdeeds by the targeted group as somehow special, and so stereotype the group by those behaviors. So, for example, terrorism by Muslims is different than terrorism by Christians, sexual abuse of students by gay teachers is different than abuse by straight teachers, and so on. Here, Trump is continuing to build on the theme of his convention speech last summer, that undocumented immigrants present some special crime threat.
The reality is that any large-enough group of people will include criminals. If we separated out all the Americans named Donald, I'm sure we'd find that some are rapists, some are killers, and some (I assume) are good people. That separation would promote the (probably unfair) impression that people named Donald are somehow unsavory.
This is yet another fascist resonance in the Trump administration. Andrea Pitzer tells Amy Goodman:
Back in Nazi Germany there was ... a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.
But having said that, I need to balance with this quote from "Godwin's President" by Chris Ladd:
Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was someone else’s sin, someone else’s dragon unleashed. Trump is what Hitler represents, the embodiment of our nightmares, a living vision of a nation at her lowest, darkest, and most suicidally dangerous. Darkness that we once confined in our collective national basement we’ve now loosed on the world.
America's shadow is not necessarily as dark as Depression-era Germany's shadow.
but I decided to think about things other than Trump
The featured post looks at the long-term issue of the future of work and income. Ordinary macroeconomic policy should be enough to maintain more-or-less full employment for now, but eventually we're going to need some kind of basic income program. Making that work will be a social problem, not just an economic problem.
Ross Douthat makes a conservative case for (admittedly limited) reparations to descendants of slaves. He offers this concession as part of a deal to end affirmative action.
Occasionally you'll see lists purporting to be large numbers of scientists who don't believe in climate change. The sheer number of names is supposed to prove that climate change is still a hotly contested scientific issue.
In The Guardian, John Abraham (who actually does research on how to monitor the climate) takes a closer look at one such a list of 300 names. He finds what you always find: The people listed are "scientists" only in the weakest and most general sense. They have degrees or jobs that are somehow related to science or technology, but no particular expertise in climate research.
Within the community of actual climate-science experts, it is a settled fact that the Earth is getting warmer and that burning fossil fuels is an important cause.
Sam Brownback's Kansas tax experiment might be on its last legs. In February, the Republican-controlled legislature voted for a large tax increase, which Brownback vetoed. The House managed a 2/3rds majority to override the veto, but the override fell two votes short in the Senate. So, for now, no tax increase.
However, that veto does not solve the underlying problem: Absent a tax increase, Kansas faces a major budget shortfall. And that situation got worse Thursday when the Kansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the current spending plan falls short of the legislature's responsibility under Article 6 of the state constitution to "make suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state."
In the UK, the Churches Conservation Trust owns a lot of abandoned churches, many of them centuries old. Rather than just let them sit there, the CCT has begun promoting "champing" -- camping out in old abandoned churches. They provide beds and electric candles, though their ad says nothing about the possible ghost problem.
I spent my week off in Florida, where I happened to attend a lecture by Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton. I learned something simple about 9-11, which I was amazed I hadn't heard in the previous 15 years: an answer to the question "Why were so many of the 9-11 hijackers Saudis?"
Haykel's answer: because Bin Laden picked them that way. He did that for two reasons: (1) At the time it was easier for Saudis to get visas than people from other Muslim countries. (2) He wanted to drive a wedge into the U.S./Saudi alliance.
Also while in Florida, I got to see a sandhill-crane chick for the first time. The adult sandhills are absolutely fearless in the face of humans, and see no reason not to claim a new suburban development as their territory. While out for walks near the friends' house where I was staying, I would occasionally turn my head and find myself a few feet from a sandhill giving me an eye-to-eye stare, and showing not the slightest hint of alarm.
But they're a bit more reclusive during hatchling season, so it was only on my last day before heading home that I caught a glimpse of this youngster, a straw-colored fluffball not all that different from chicken hatchlings, albeit with a longer neck.
and you might also be interested in
As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence conducted public business over a private email account, and got hacked. Chris Hayes commented:
This is going to be a very bitter pill for all those voters for whom server management was their top issue.
I could fill the Sift every week with hypocrisy stories like this, where issues that were considered vital to the survival of the Republic before Trump took office now seem not to matter. In a few weeks, Trump will most likely produce a budget that the CBO will analyze as having a big deficit, and we'll see whether Tea Partiers are alarmed by that or not. I predict not. All that 2010 rhetoric about going the way of Greece will be left unplugged.
To me, such examples just underline what does matter, which I spelled out two weeks ago: identity politics. The Trump base voter is nostalgic for an America where white Christians are dominant, where genders and gender roles are clearly defined, and where languages other than English are heard only inside certain big-city ghettos. All other issues are tactical; positions on them can turn on a dime.
For example, this is why terrorism by Muslims is a huge deal, but terrorism by white racists is not. Terrorism is a tactical issue; the core issues are about identity: race, language, religion, and gender roles.
One point of building the Keystone XL Pipeline was that it was going to use American steel. "Going to put a lot of workers, a lot of steelworkers, back to work," Trump said. But that was then, this is now.
One of the more ominous things that happened these last two weeks was when Customs and Border Protection agents boarded a domestic flight from San Francisco to New York and demanded to see everyone's ID. The Atlantic's Garrett Epps can find no legal justification for this, and pledges to refuse to present his documents if he winds up in this situation.
The EPA is undoing Obama's standards for vehicle emissions and gas mileage. Because climate change is a myth, so why do anything to try to mitigate it?
The EU Parliament voted to drop the United States from its visa waiver program. Immediately, this does nothing, because the actual decision would be made by the European Commission. But it is a step in the direction of requiring Americans to get a visa before visiting Europe.
I read this as a shot across the bow: Inside the US, we discuss our immigration and trade policies in a one-sided way, as if we can treat other countries however we want and they'll just accept it. But if we disrespect or disadvantage foreign visitors, immigrants, and products, American visitors, immigrants, and products will be disrespected and disadvantaged in return.
Tuesday, Attorney General Sessions announced a policy change: The Justice Department will no longer be "dictating to local police how to do their jobs, or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court".
In other words, there will be no future investigations like the ones Obama's DoJ did into Ferguson or Baltimore or Chicago police. So the next time there is a police killing like Michael Brown or Freddie Gray or Laquan McDonald, the fix will be in from the beginning. Local police can run a cover-up instead of an investigation, and not worry about anyone looking over their shoulders.
Conservatives often ask why it's necessary to have a Black Lives Matter movement, or why it's not sufficient to affirm that "all lives matter". It's because to people like Jeff Sessions, the lives of young black men like Brown or Gray or McDonald don't matter. If police want to kill them, it's no big deal.
A local pastor gives his account of taking his 11-year-old daughter to Trump's rally in Melbourne, Florida on February 18. He seems not to have been a Trump supporter, but wanted his daughter to take advantage of the rare opportunity to see the President of the United States in person.
I'm trying to separate how I actually feel about this man and his campaignisms. I know why people voted for him; I know why people voted against his opponent. But, at the end of the day, what I felt from his leadership in this experience was actually horrifying. There was palpable fear in the room. There was thick anger and vengeance. He was counting on it. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it would not have taken very much for him to have called this group of people into some kind of riotous reaction.
Now, not everyone in the room was a part of the angry mob mentality – I looked around the room and saw many people who could quite easily be folks from my neighborhood, folks from my church, folks who were planning to go grab a bite to eat at Cracker Barrel afterwards. Folks who truly wanted to see America "great." The people who support the Republican Party want to see some needed changes in the government – the people that were there for that reason, are by and large good folks. But those are not the people the President was inciting – they are not the people he was leading. He was rallying the angry, vigilant ones.
and let's close with something sadly amusing
Patrick Stewart and Stephen Colbert star in "Waiting for Godot's Obamacare Replacement".
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