Last year, Donald Trump ran for president. Now I'm a different person.

If nothing else, the last year and a half have been a humbling lesson on how some events, although utterly beyond my control, can alter my day-to-day existence. Can force me to adapt. Can change me, irrespective of my will. I paused today, just to notice the change. I tried to measure it. Which in turn prompted me to think back to the version of myself that existed before all of this happened. That guy was hardly any different than me! But I can’t help but feel that, in some way, he was healthier than I am.

It's not unlike remembering life before the onset of a mild but chronic illness. I can’t be entirely sure, but back then, I think I used to be able to concentrate just a little bit more. Back then, my undivided attention was just a bit less divided. My highs were just a bit higher. Back then, I might have been slightly less categorical and rigid in my thinking.

Although I remain hopeful that the worst outcomes of a Trump presidency will ultimately be avoided, I think I used to be more optimistic and less jaded. I think I was just a bit more willing to grant the benefit of the doubt. I was more confident in my ability to steer any political conversation, no matter how heated, toward common ground. I know I didn’t respond like a pavlovian dog at the mere mention of a stranger’s name.

It’s important and necessary to think about politics. We are an engaged citizenry, these things affect our lives, and it is fitting and proper to remain informed about them. But what used to be a sound habit of mind now feels a lot like the symptom of a disease.

I don't just follow, but actually consume this degrading and exhausting drama. It's hard not to crave, on some level, that heady melange of negative emotions—fear, outrage, sadness, disgust, conceit—that off-gasses from today's politics like a toxic cloud. And even when I want to turn it all off—to get away—I can’t. It’s on every screen, and there are screens everywhere. It's on the minds and lips of my friends and loved ones. Negativity and cynicism are addictive, and they are now the main course in my daily news diet. I'm being conditioned to live in—and perpetuate—my own nightmare. This feels like abuse.

I've already been changed and possibly harmed—simply by witnessing this vile shitshow—in ways I can’t quite enumerate or describe. I imagine that this is happening, in some fashion, to many others as well. I think it's changing, however imperceptibly, the way we understand ourselves in the world, the way we interact with each other, the way we approach our daily lives. I worry that it’s corroding our ability to govern ourselves, which rests upon our ability to generate empathy for one another—even those with whom we vehemently disagree. But then, I am also slightly less empathetic than I used to be.

We're six months into this term. I wonder if my country will even be recognizable in three and a half years. I wonder that about myself.

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]]>Toxic Politics FatigueHistoryPoliticsEric BuschFri, 14 Jul 2017 17:52:42 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2017/7/13/you-wont-believe-what-happens-next57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:5967961586e6c03d6393f48b

Good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes. For more than three quarters of a century, the United States has maintained its fences in an adversarial but remarkably stable relationship with the Soviet Union, and now Russia. Despite the deep and enduring antipathy between the two countries over that span, moments of true exigency—the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance—have proven the exception rather than the rule.

Both countries have deployed highly capable intelligence services extensively against each other, constantly testing their own defenses and probing each other for weaknesses. But no publicly-known espionage operation—save the Soviet Union’s atomic spying in the late 1940s—has been as strategically consequential as Russia’s “hacking” of the United States election of 2016. Last year, the Russian state launched a successful multi-dimensional attack against the foundations of the American political system—an attack that we must assume is ongoing for at least as long as Donald Trump remains in office.

But the premise of this post, and the worry that underlies it, stems from a simple question that I don't hear many people asking yet: How does this resolve? How will the United States deal with the fallout of this attack after Donald Trump leaves office? Will we retaliate, or will this assault on our most sacred national institutions go unpunished? Will there be a war?

I confess that I don’t entirely understand why the American press and political class insist on referring the Russian interference in the 2016 American election simply as “hacking.” To say that the Russians “hacked” our election is akin to saying that the Germans illegally discharged their weapons on Polish soil in September of 1939. Although accurate in a narrow sense, calling it "hacking"—or even "meddling"—vastly understates the event's magnitude and consequences, and elides entirely the intentions of those responsible.

Yes, the Russians hacked the DNC. They used Wikileaks to make those files public. They apparently tried to hack the machinery behind the election itself, although there is no proof yet that Russian hacking directly changed the vote counts in any precinct. But hacking (i.e. using computers to gain unauthorized access) was merely one modality of what is proving to have been a shockingly broad and complex assault on the foundations of our political system: one that combined the tools of cyber-warfare with some of the oldest tradecraft techniques in the book. One that exploited the United States' most critical security vulnerability: the win-at-any-cost, utterly corrupt faction that is the modern GOP.

In fact, the single most effective tactic Russia brought to bear against the United States last year dates back to the days of the old Russian Empire at the very least. In his 1839 travelogue, Letters from Russia, the Marquis de Custine noted the widespread use of disinformation to deceive foreign visitors. “The profession of misleading foreigners,” de Custine wrote, “is one known only in Russia, and it helps us to divine and comprehend the state of society in that singular country.”

When they came to power in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks weaponized disinformation, using it to curry favor in the Western press, among other things. The Soviet Union’s success in hiding the mass starvation in Belarus and Ukraine from the West during the early 1930s owed itself in large part to these efforts. Throughout its history, the KGB concocted elaborate disinformation campaigns, including the 1980s-era Operation INFEKTION, which sought to manipulate global opinion into the belief that the United States had invented the AIDS virus to rid the world of non-whites. The fall of the Soviet Union did not stop, or even slow, the use of Russian disinformation against Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and the United States.

It is now the consensus view of the American intelligence community that the Russian government was responsible for much of the disinformation, or “fake news,” that appeared on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign. Aided by algorithms targeting specific voter groups in swing states, the Russian government harnessed both Facebook and Twitter to disseminate “news” stories that were uniformly critical of Hillary Clinton. More than likely, Russian intelligence used American help to determine which voting groups to target, and how best to reach them. Regardless how it was done, Russian electioneering via social media played a key role in elevating the furor over Clinton’s emails to the front pages of major American newspapers for days on end, even as Donald Trump was doing everything he possibly could to tank his own campaign.

The Russian government also used old-fashioned tools of tradecraft to approach—and ultimately turn—Donald Trump, his family and close associates, and possibly the Republican Party itself. It apparently began cultivating Republican lobbyist and future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2004, when he went to work for Putin’s Ukrainian puppet Victor Yanukovych.

At the same time, Russian money began pouring into Trump’s enterprises, helping to prop up the company when no American bank would loan to him. In 2008, Trump’s son Donald Jr. told a real estate conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” President Trump himself seems to have been firmly captured in Putin's orbit by 2013, when he held his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow at the invitation of billionaire real estate developer and Putin associate Aras Agalarov and his son Emin. From that point forward, Trump has unswervingly spoken highly of both Putin and Russia, even when doing so wasn’t necessary, and even at considerable political risk.

We know there were meetings between Russian government emissaries and Trump’s close associates during the campaign, and that those associates have lied repeatedly, sometimes under oath, about them. Those lies continue even as this post is being written, and will persist for as long as Trump and his cronies remain in power. But despite the Trump Administration's obfuscations, we’re now finally starting to learn a little more about what happened in those meetings, and the quid pro quos that tied this whole arrangement together. We know, for instance, about Donald Trump Jr.’s attempted collusion, in which he, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met a Russian lawyer, who offered the campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, possibly in exchange for a pledge to repeal the Magnitsky Act of 2012.

We know about the existence of a still-unexplained settlement last month by Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department of a major Russian money-laundering case involving the son of a powerful Russian official represented by that same Russian lawyer. (This was one of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s cases, before Trump abruptly fired him.) We know that the Trump administration is preparing to return two of Russia’s diplomatic compounds, which had been seized by the Obama Administration in retaliation for Russia’s election interference. We have witnessed the inexplicable American pullback from NATO, and the damaging political line that Trump has taken against the European Union, Putin's other major geopolitical headache. It is not unreasonable to surmise that what the public knows about Trump’s collusion with Russia constitutes just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

In short, the Russian government couldn’t have done what it did to us entirely on its own. It relied on the collusion of a considerable number of American citizens—from the top of the ticket to the political trenches—in order to pull off its attack on our elections last year. Russian intelligence has been working for years on this.

What do the Republicans in Congress have to say about it? Collectively, aside from a few feckless grumblings, they’ve said almost nothing. Entire stories have been written on how adept Republicans have become at dodging questions about the Russia investigation. But individual Republicans have certainly distinguished themselves as active enablers of those ties. There is, for example, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell who, after being briefed on Russian election interference last year, threatened to politicize any effort by the Obama administration to respond. There is House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes of California, who has sidetracked the House investigation into those ties, and even briefed the White House on undisclosed topics related to his own committee’s investigation—twice—without telling the other members of his committee. There was the House Appropriations Committee that, just yesterday, rejected two amendments to revoke Jared Kushner’s security clearance, even though Kushner omitted all his meetings with Russian nationals on his initial SF86 security clearance form, and several that later came to light on his revised form. Each of these omissions potentially constitute separate federal crimes.

By both their silence and active enabling, congressional Republicans have made a pact of convenience with the Russian government to hijack the American political system. Both sides have taken a tremendous gamble, and for the moment at least, both sides are getting a lot out of the deal. The Russian government is neutering its most powerful geopolitical foe far more effectively than its Soviet antecedent could have done. And the Republicans are (theoretically, at least) clearing the field to enact long-held but wildly unpopular policy objectives, which include repealing Obamacare, rolling back social and educational programs, restricting the franchise, slashing labor and environmental regulations, and delivering massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. The cynicism that sustains this vile marriage of convenience rivals that of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at the outset of World War II.

Like the grotesque arrangement by which Poland was carved up by the Soviets and the Nazis, this bargain will also come to an end, one way or another. Putin's government and the Republican Party are not closely ideologically aligned, and their interests will not remain convergent indefinitely. But the high-risk (and in the Republicans' case, potentially traitorous) nature of their current alliance makes it difficult to see how they'll be able to gracefully disentangle themselves from one another.

Assuming Trump leaves the basic fundaments of our political system in place when he goes, how will the next administration deal with the fallout from what Russians did to us? How will it handle the revelations about the Americans who might have helped them? It will fall to the next administration to grapple with the truth that Russia's attack on our political system—one of the few threads that binds us as a nation—was in fact an act of war. There will be pressure to “restore” American sovereignty, possibly militarily. There could be a neo-Red Scare the likes of which we haven't seen since at least the days of Joseph McCarthy. And the longer Trump and his Republican enablers remain in office, the more explosive that eventual reckoning could potentially become.

So much of what has transpired over the last year is without precedent, and the worst of it is likely yet to be uncovered. But the Russian operation against the 2016 American election was clearly intended to harm the United States. The fact that we are still describing what was actually a full-scale attack on our political system as "hacking" and "meddling" is a testament to how devastating that attack truly was.

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]]>Eric BuschTrump/Russia: You Won't Believe What Happens NextHow Does the US Move Past the 2016 Election?false12:43PoliticsPublic PolicyEric BuschMon, 26 Jun 2017 19:15:59 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2017/6/26/tsa-misery57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:5951297478d171adad193c7d

The Transportation Security Administration — one of the many component bureaucracies of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security — is reportedly preparing to force all air travelers to remove all books and paper objects, as well as food items, from their carry-on bags when going through airport security. The next time you travel by air, you can likely look forward to being barked at by a surly blue-shirt to separate your laptop, your snacks, and all your paper belongings, including books, magazines, diaries, etc., into separate bins while also taking off your shoes and belt, and placing the contents of your pockets into your carry-on, unless, of course, those contents are either paper or food. And hurry up about it. You’re holding up the damn line.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly blames this policy change on air travelers themselves, who he claims are overpacking their carry-on bags to avoid checked bag fees. Apparently, all of the stuff we’re lugging onto the plane — in a rational attempt to avoid paying for half of an additional fare just to bring our clothes with us — are making it hard for Sec. Kelly’s agents to see through our overstuffed backpacks with their x-ray machines.

This is a problem with an easy and immediate fix — one that doesn’t involve introducing massive new inefficiencies into an already ridiculous and punitive security process, or allowing government agents to scrutinize the reading materials of private citizens in possible violation of the 4th Amendment. All it would require is convincing the airlines to charge less — or better yet, go back to charging nothing — for checked baggage. Problem solved.

But the obvious solution appears to be a non-starter. So while you contemplate how much worse air travel will become as a result of this proposed new policy, here are a few things to consider:

1. The domestic airline industry is dominated by four players, which are shielded from foreiegn competition on domestic routes by the federal government.
2. Fees for non-overweight checked baggage didn’t exist until May of 2008, and were initially justified by the airlines as a temporary measure to defray the high cost of jet fuel during the recession.
3. Airlines are taxed on revenue generated from ancillary charges like baggage and reservation-change fees at a much lower rate than revenue generated from fares. This is important.
4. Industry-wide profit from baggage change fees grew by 10% last year, even as overall profits declined by 46% from record highs in 2015.
5. The TSA sucks at the job it claims to be doing. According to a 2015 DHS internal investigation, TSA agents failed to prevent undercover agents from smuggling weapons through airport checkpoints in 67 out of 70 attempts including, in one case, a fake bomb strapped to a man’s back. It has never stopped a real terrorist. But despite all its failings, flying is still really safe.
6. When they do resort to the use of force, agents of the state generally do so to coerce passengers in ways that benefit the airlines.

Ancillary fees are now a core element of the business model of domestic airlines. Thanks to the non-competitive structure of the deregulated domestic air travel industry, we have no idea how much airlines can charge for checked bags, how many flights they can overbook, or how many people they can rip off of planes by the scalp before they finally become vulnerable to competition or re-regulation. We’re not there yet. The fact that those revenues are not subject to the excise tax imposed on revenue from fares only makes ancillary fees more attractive to the airlines.

Pro-industry analysts have argued that the revenue from baggage fees pales in comparison to the costs airlines incur through delays caused by the increased number of carry-ons, and by inefficient security procedures. But if it's not profitable to charge people to check their bags, then why do it? Why has almost every major domestic carrier increased their baggage fee revenues each year since 2008? If they're so worried about delays, why wouldn’t they see the TSA’s insane proposed security regulations as a looming financial disaster? Why wouldn’t they be doing everything they could to stop the TSA from enacting them?

The truth is that baggage fees are a major profit driver for airlines, and that by making it more difficult for passengers to carry their luggage onto the plane, the TSA is directly contributing to the airlines' bottom line. According to its own operational assessment, the agency isn't really accomplishing much of anything else.

There may not have been any backroom meetings in which Kelly and his TSA chiefs agreed to shake down paying customers on behalf of domestic air travel industry. (Although in the current political climate, who knows?) It doesn’t matter though, because the effect is the same. The TSA may be terrible at delivering actual security. But it is getting quite good at delivering value for the airlines, by negatively incentivizing passengers to make use of the airlines' most profitable “services.” All of which prompts the question: is that its actual job?

Every second of every day, hundreds of American servicemen and women around the world wait in readiness for a presidential order to launch a nuclear weapon. For most civilians, the idea of global nuclear war seems more remote and fantastical than it has since the beginning of the nuclear age—more like a plot point in a movie than an ever-present possibility. But those who serve on America’s nuclear front lines--its submarines and missile launch facilities—know all too well that nuclear war remains only a phone call and a keyturn away.

Although the day-to-day job tasks of nuclear weapons officers may be technically demanding, their main function is not supposed to require any thought whatsoever. They have been conditioned by years of repetitious training to launch missiles if they receive an authenticated order from the president. In fact, nuclear weapons officers are specifically chosen for duty based on their willingness to deliver death to millions, if so ordered, without question or hesitation. The logic of nuclear conflict makes no accommodations for human psychology or morality. If they receive an authenticated launch order (i.e. an order certain to have come from the President or a surviving head of the nuclear chain of command), it is taken as a given that American nuclear weapons officers will follow it.

It is precisely that certainty, paradoxically, which has permitted us to co-exist with our own terrible devices for three quarters of a century without being destroyed by them. (That, and quite a bit of dumb luck, as Eric Schlosser recounts in his sobering history of American nuclear weapons, Command and Control). The concentration of nuclear authority in the hands of the president, together with the absolute certainty that the president’s launch order will be followed, form two of the major pillars of America's nuclear deterrence doctrine.

The functionality of this arrangement depends upon the careful avoidance of certain questions. But sometimes those questions get asked anyway. In 2011, writer Ron Rosenbaum recounted the story of a former Air Force officer named Harold Hering. Major Hering had proven his dedication and valor, serving five tours in Vietnam and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. But while training as a nuclear launch officer at Vandenburg AFB in 1973, Hering did something unforgivable in the eyes of the Air Force: he questioned the command process by which it deployed nuclear weapons.

Maj. Hering’s concern was simple: what if the president was mentally unfit to order a nuclear launch? Were there any safeguards to prevent World War III from being started by a deranged president, or a foreign breach of the nuclear chain of command? These were not academic questions at the time. A beleaguered President Nixon — no paragon of mental stability even at his best  — was showing visible signs of nervous collapse under the weight of the Watergate scandal. In fact, as the investigation into Watergate approached its endgame, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger quietly ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him personally before passing along any “unusual” military orders coming out of the White House.

But the Air Force was not interested in answering Maj. Hering’s question. They were so keen to avoid it, in fact, that they discharged him for "failure to meet the duty performance required of an officer." According to an Air Force board of inquiry, the legality of a nuclear launch order was not something an executive officer needed to know. “I have to say,” Hering responded in his unsuccessful appeal to the discharge, “I do feel I have a need to know, because I am a human being.” There are still no systemic safeguards in place to prevent an unbalanced president from launching nuclear weapons.

Today marks the 115th day of Donald Trump’s extraordinary presidency. After he won, many hoped that the solemnity of the office would sober him to his grave responsibilities as president. So far though, it is the office itself, not Donald Trump, that has changed, and not for the better. Trump's insatiable neediness, dishonesty and delusion make it impossible for him to act as other presidents have, even though doing so would far better serve his interests. Trump's decision-making seems almost reptilian in its simplicity: that which flatters him or elevates his profile is good, and that which does not is bad. He communicates poorly and recklessly, wasting political capital and undermining his own legitimacy. Far from seeking stability like a normal president might, he radiates chaos and negativity. He is impossible to work with or to trust. He has been diagnosed as a mentally unfit by knowledgeable observers across the political spectrum.

As a candidate, Trump displayed a lack of basic knowledge about America's nuclear command structure. He panned the Iranian nuclear agreement as “disastrous” with no understanding of what it actually did, and pledged to dismantle it on his first day in office. He seemed open to using the threat of nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic. His military adventures thus far have consisted of a botched raid in Yemen, the pointless and costly shelling of a Syrian airbase with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the deployment of the most destructive non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal to collapse a few Taliban tunnels in Afghanistan. Trump cannot explain any of these operations in tactical terms, let alone articulate any coherent security strategy underlying them. These flashy but ineffectual actions suggest that military decision-making in the Trump White House is driven by something other than strategic national interest.

So what happens if Trump orders a nuclear strike against Iran or North Korea? Or Spain? What happens when a president who cannot be trusted to understand and contextualize an unfolding conflict situation orders an intervention of overwhelming force, leading to the possible deaths of millions? Is it legally possible to authenticate a launch order if it comes from a president who is mentally unfit? How many nuclear launch officers in the American military are asking themselves these questions right now? How many of our allies and adversaries are asking them?

The more irrationally the president acts, the more he tests the assumption that he alone controls America’s nuclear arsenal. If he is shown to have been compromised by Russian intelligence, an order to launch nuclear weapons will seem even more suspicious and problematic. Obviously, if he tries to launch a nuclear weapon for no reason, somebody further down the chain of command damn well better stop him. But what happens to the principle of civilian control of the military if a presidential launch order is countermanded by a general? And if he continues to damage his credibility, will President Trump be able to successfully order a nuclear strike — even if circumstances warrant?

The point is that when it comes to nuclear deterrence, uncertainty is dangerous. And the uncertainty surrounding Trump could actually increase the likelihood of nuclear confrontation.

Maj. Hering’s inconvenient question now seems like an opportunity squandered, lingering ominously unanswered in the era of Trump. Today, as then, American nuclear weapons officers rely on the sanity of the commander in chief to shield them from complicity in a potentially world-ending mistake. I have never envied them less. Who would want to twist the launch key on the say-so of Donald Trump?

As a historian, I rely on federal data to help tell stories about our collective past. So I am proud to work with Data Rescue Austin (#DataRescueATX), which is one of many local citizen archivist groups organized in the wake of last year’s election. #DataRescueATX works with national organizations like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) to identify, back up, and help preserve freely accessible federal data resources in the event that they are removed from public view and use. These organizations are particularly concerned with preserving federal data that supports climate and environmental research and advocacy. But the federal government also collects and distributes extensive social and economic data, which is also at serious risk of politicization and suppression. It is important to advocate for, protect, and preserve this data as well.

Accessible, reliable information is the lifeblood of democracy. So it is no historical accident that the United States’ federal government is the largest—and possibly the most effective—compiler, repository and disseminator of social and economic data in the history of the world. Aside from the federal government's crucial role in support of the hard sciences, arts, and humanities, the social and economic data it collects, preserves and distributes is absolutely foundational to what we know about ourselves, and to our ability to plan for the future. That vast trove of data is a vital part of the American civic tradition, helping to sustain and stabilize our legal and political orders.

Although civil authorities in America have been collecting basic census data since the colonial era, the large-scale, systematic use of federally collected social and economic data in policy-making dates back the mid-to-late 19th century. As both American society and the American economy grew larger and more complex during the “Age of Progress”, statistics became an increasingly useful way of understanding patterns of continuity and change, identifying and responding to economic and social problems, and developing a basis for rational planning. By the 1860s, the federal government was collecting data on manufactures, fisheries, agriculture, and social metrics like church membership, taxation rates, poverty and crime.

Among the most important milestones of federal statistical record keeping was the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Labor in 1884. Initially modeled after state labor agencies, the Bureau of Labor was tasked with compiling and disseminating statistics on American employment and productivity. The new bureau produced cutting edge work on both social and economic issues, and developed innovative statistical methods to better quantify and analyze the country’s rapidly changing economic and social landscape.

Today, that agency is known as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is part of the larger Department of Labor. The BLS has a proud history of measuring inflation, employment, pay rates, productivity, and consumer spending. It has served as the model for many of the data-gathering agencies that came after it: strictly non-partisan, highly rigorous, and well respected across the political spectrum. Its data have been used to craft better public policy. Collectively, these agencies accounted for only .18% of the federal budget in 2016, which is also a small fraction of the financial value—both to the private sector and the American public—of the data they produce. (For those interested in a deeper look at the role and importance of federal statistics, check out this joint report by the Hamilton Project-AEI).

For over a century, data gathering on American society and its economy has been a settled function of federal government. For over a century, that data has been used to guide decision-making in private industry, craft and hone public policy, and keep public officials accountable. No major national political figure since the Civil War has explicitly challenged the credibility—and even the utility—of the social and economic data collected by federal agencies.

Until now. During his successful run for the presidency last year, Donald Trump:

• loudly and repeatedly dismissed the accuracy of the jobs numbers collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed a strengthening job market under Obama.
• Suggested that the actual unemployment rate might be as high as 42%. He claimed that crime was rising toward “record levels” which is disproven by the work of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), whose statistics have shown overall crime to be near historic lows.
• Tweeted that 81% of all white homicide victims are killed by African Americans, for which he cited something called the “Crime Statistics Bureau--San Francisco,” which doesn’t exist. The FBI does exist however, and its statistics show that 15% of whites were murdered by blacks in 2014—an error factor of 5.4.
• Claimed that America’s GDP had dipped “below zero” for the first time ever. (He meant GDP growth, and it happens all the time.)

All of these statements are--and have been--easily disproven by federal data. And they comprise only a fraction of the untruths he has uttered—both during the campaign and as president—that run completely counter to what we know because of federal data. Yet rather than concede the proof of his errors, Donald Trump and his officials have doubled down on his demonstrably false claims, while at the same time impugning the press as “fake news,” and the federal agencies whose data contravenes his statements as part of an undemocratic “deep state.”

Rather than rising to the defense of federal data collection, the Republican Party, which controls both houses of Congress, has essentially adopted Trump’s war on federal information as their own. Current Republican bills both the Senate and the House would, for instance, prohibit federal funds from being used "to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing." Another Republican house bill threatens to make large sections of the American Community Survey—an important yearly survey sent to 3.5 million Americans per year since 1940—“voluntary” rather than legally mandated. This data has proven immensely valuable over the years, and its loss can only negatively effect future policy outcomes.

There's a grim logic to all of this. Aside from their historical value, the statistics gathered by executive agencies like the BLS are an important tool for grading our public servants. These numbers cut past the rhetoric and political spin to reveal the real-world consequences of actual public policies. As with all presidents before him, they will be among the truest measures of President Donald Trump--particularly as he compares to his immediate predecessor.

Trump and the Republicans are now in position to warp the federal government’s information regime to their will. As it happens, most of the agencies that gather social and economic data are part of the executive branch. The Trump administration has already moved strongly to subordinate and stifle the agencies under his direct control. Until this year, for example, Mick Mulvaney was a congressman from South Carolina. In 2011, Rep. Mulvaney was at the center of a movement of hardline conservatives to trigger a default on the federal debt, risking a possible global economic catastrophe. In 2013, he nearly single handedly blocked an emergency relief bill for victims of Hurricane Sandy by insisting that every dollar spent be offset by equal cuts somewhere else in the federal budget. He is now Donald Trump's head the Office of Management and Budget.

The head of OMB was already a powerful position. But last Monday, Trump signed an executive order instructing Mulvaney’s OMB to come up with a plan to “reorganize...or eliminate unnecessary federal agencies.” On paper at least, Mulvaney now has the power to wipe out whole executive agencies without oversight, justification, or recourse.

The Mulvaney appointment is of a piece with other personnel moves that undermine the core functions of crucial federal agencies within the executive branch. Trump has placed a man to rejects climate science in charge of the EPA. He has placed a man who believes that Hillary Clinton received millions of fraudulent votes in the last election in charge of the Department of Justice, and a woman who has worked openly to dismantle public schools in charge of its Department of Education.

These actions go beyond ideology. They are purposely destructive, unaccountable, and antidemocratic. And if there were any lingering doubts about the motives behind them, Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, laid them to rest at CPAC last month, when he swaggeringly vowed that the Trump administration would fight “every day” toward the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” By definition, an “administrative state” is a state that counts things. By destroying the federal government’s ability to produce and disseminate credible social and economic data, the Trump administration looks to strike a blow against the heart of our democratic system. In the information vacuum Trump and the Republicans are trying to create, the truth will be whatever they say it is.

All of which makes federal data preservation a fundamental act of resistance. Datarescue Austin is part of a nationwide effort to scrape as much data from federal servers as possible so that it can be safely backed up and preserved on private servers. We know that scientific data—particularly data which demonstrates the reality of climate change—is under threat under the current administration. But we also need to protect the social and economic data that tells us about our history, and helps us plan for our future. That data belongs to us. And right now, it is vulnerable.

But we also need the federal government to continue collecting data in order to maintain its consistency and comprehensiveness. That requires keeping close watch on what Mulvaney does to the federal statistical system, and pressuring congress to stop him if he should attempt to dismantle it under the phony guise of cost-saving. Below is a list of major at-risk agencies that collect social and economic data. Each is part of the Federal Statistical System of the United States--the decentralized network of federal agencies that produce data about the people, economy, natural resources, and infrastructure in the United States.

• Bureau of the Census (USCB) under US Department of Commerce: Conducts Decennial Census. http://census.gov/
• Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under US Department of Labor: Principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. http://www.bls.gov/
• National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) under the US Department of Education: Collects, analyzes, and publishes statistics on education and public school district finance information in the United States. http://nces.ed.gov/
• National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS): NASS conducts hundreds of surveys and issues nearly 500 national reports each year on issues including agricultural production, economics, demographics and the environment. NASS also conducts the United States Census of Agriculture every five years. http://www.nass.usda.gov/
• National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS): Provides statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/index.htm/
• Energy Information Administration (EIA) under US Department of Energy: responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating energy information to promote sound policymaking, efficient markets, and public understanding of energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. http://www.eia.gov/
• Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) under US Department of Commerce: provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics including the gross domestic product of the United States. http://www.bea.gov/
• Economic Research Service (ERS) under US Department of Agriculture: Provides information and research on agriculture and economics. https://www.ers.usda.gov (Site appears to be offline).
• Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) under US Department of Justice: Collects, analyzes and publishes data relating to crime in the United States. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/
• Statistics of Income Division (SOI) under IRS/Department of the Treasury: Collects and processes data so that they become informative and shares information about how the tax system works with other government agencies and the general public. https://www.irs.gov/uac/soi-tax-stats-statistics-of-income
• Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) under US Department of Transportation: Compiles, analyzes, and makes accessible information on the nation's transportation systems; collects information on intermodal transportation and other areas as needed; and improves the quality and effectiveness of DOT's statistical programs through research, development of guidelines, and promotion of improvements in data acquisition and use. https://www.bts.gov
• Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics (ORES), part of Social Security Administration: Provides statistical data on OASDI and SSI program benefits, payments, covered workers, and other indicators; Sponsors special-purpose survey data collections and studies to improve data for research and statistics related to social security issues; develops links between administrative record data and survey data for use in Social Security research and policy analysis. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/about/ORES.html

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]]>The Federal Government’s Social and Economic Data Is In Danger And We Need To Save ItPoliticsHistoryEric BuschThu, 02 Mar 2017 22:57:10 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2017/3/2/the-republican-party-vs-american-democracy-only-one-can-survive57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:58b8878cf7e0abb1700f4fa0

The Republican Party has won for itself all three branches of national government by a combination of chicanery and sedition. They have secured the House thanks to gerrymandered districts and targeted voter suppression--strategies which evoke legitimate comparisons to the days of Jim Crow. They have fallen in line behind a president who never tells the truth, scapegoats the weak and vulnerable, and who probably conspired with the Russian government to beat Hillary Clinton last fall. They have stolen a Supreme Court nomination from a Democratic president, and radicalized their base so as to make bipartisan compromise a political impossibility.

And for all this, they have been rewarded with a once-in-a-century opportunity to remake American government into an undemocratic instrument of private wealth, programmed to transfer even more money from the poor and middle class, as well as the assets still held in common trust (e.g. public lands, natural resources, etc.), to the few at the very top.

But they haven’t won yet. To ensure the realization of these long-held goals, the entire Republican Party is now hard at work covering Trump’s messy tracks and propagating his cult of personality. At the same time, they are trying to ram through a repeal of the ACA before anyone can see it--a necessary first step toward a government exclusively by and for the hyperwealthy. And finally, Trump and the Republicans are trying to intimidate and delegitimize both the intelligence community and the free press--two of the remaining centers of opposition to his authoritarian rule. (Trump even pays homage to one of the "Great Ones" by resurrecting an old Stalinism, "enemy of the people," to castigate the press.) Should the Republicans fail in any of these endeavors, their ambitiously dystopic vision may never come to pass.

So now, we as a nation have finally reached the crossroads we’ve been moving toward since the era of Barry Goldwater. All of the antidemocratic things the Republican Party has done over decades to reach this point have gradually made it anathema to the foundational American ideals of transparent and representative governance. The GOP is now beyond accommodation, appeasement or redemption. And now that a strongman like Trump occupies the Oval Office, the death struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is no longer just over the horizon; it’s here. The foundational institutions of American democracy will either triumph or perish in the fight. The same is also true of the Republican Party.

This fight was not the will of the American people, but the choice of a handful of powerful Republicans, who deliberately made their party incompatible with America's democratic traditions in exchange for power. It's going to be ugly and destructive no matter what.

Should Republicanism/Trumpism prevail, the United States will likely become a one-party state, in which an informed and engaged citizenry plays no role. If, on the other hand, American democracy is to survive in anything more than name, the architects of this historical moment--which include names like Trump, Bannon, Sessions, McConnell and Ryan--will have to be sidelined and discredited, and the party they lead repudiated and possibly even abolished. That's where we're at. These men know very well the stakes of the game they play. Everyone else should know them too.

The Supremes didn’t go for it however, unanimously rejecting Nixon’s claim as “contrary to the basic concept of separation of powers and the checks and balances that flow from the scheme of tripartite government.” The president resigned two weeks later.

But even though Nixon lost his case, events were definitely trending in his direction. Remarkably, Watergate proved barely a speedbump on the road to an ever-more powerful “unitary executive.” For a number of reasons (the deepening dysfunctionality of American electoral politics not the least of them), the legislative and judicial branches have willingly ceded authority to the executive branch ever since.

Some of the blame for this goes to Gerald Ford. Preemptively declaring “our long national nightmare” to be over, Ford pardoned Nixon, foreclosing a rare opportunity to reign in the power of the presidency. A decade later, after Oliver North, one of Ronald Reagan’s military aides, began arranging funding for the Nicaraguan Contras via the illicit sale of arms to Iran, the Reagan White House pushed the concept of executive privilege just as far as Nixon had. Farther, perhaps, because Reagan actually got away with it--assuming symbolic (and thus meaningless) “responsibility” for the actions of his subordinates, of which he nevertheless claimed to be unaware.

But it was 9/11 that really supercharged the consolidation of executive power. The George W. Bush White House used the attack to engineer a fake casus belli for the invasion of Iraq, a geopolitical blunder of world-historic proportions. It created black sites, enacted torture, ramped up spying on American citizens, and shrouded its decision-making in ever-greater secrecy.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was widely viewed as a popular repudiation of everything George W. Bush had stood for. But far from rolling back the enhanced security powers bequeathed to him by his predecessor, Barack Obama added to them, ordering several major military actions without any congressional approval, and prosecuting whistleblowers with unprecedented ferocity. Stymied by Congressional Republicans throughout both his terms, Obama also came to rely on executive orders to govern responsively.

Through it all, the guiding assumption of the national press and political class has remained that any president would, at the very least, abide by certain norms of behavior as to the use of their broad authority.

But in just his first week, Donald Trump has already shown the entire world the how dangerous it has always been to rely on the character of popularly elected chief executives as the only bulwark against authoritarianism.

Because Trump—a profoundly damaged human being if ever there was one—is now the most unfettered, institutionally powerful president in American history. He has more latitude to prosecute wars of choice than any president before him. He has more power and technical capacity to spy on anyone, anywhere.

Overseas, Trump’s White House can operate with less external oversight and more secrecy than any before it. Building on Bush II and Obama’s extensive use of drones, Trump commands more authority to order the assassination of anyone he deems a threat to national security. At home, he has more tools at his disposal with which to manipulate and punish the press, spy on political opponents, and intimidate potential whistleblowers.

Perhaps most worrisomely, Trump has more power than any executive before him to further degrade the power of the other two branches. With the help of Republicans in Congress, he is ramrodding profoundly unfit appointees to head crucial agencies with an absolute minimum of oversight. (Senators charged with confirming potential Education Secretary Betsy DeVos were arbitrarily limited to five minutes each.) And on the White House webpage describing the branches of the federal government, the judiciary branch temporarily disappeared altogether.

And thanks to his predecessors, Trump has plenty of rhetorical and legal ammunition with which to justify all of this. Indeed, the Trump administration is already defending executive overreaches like the refugee ban simply by repeating, ad nauseum, that the Obama administration did exactly the same things. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s serpentiform advisor, justified the refugee ban to one reporter by saying, “President Obama did it, now President Trump is doing it.” That’s a lie, of course. The Obama Administration never came close to barring whole classes of refugees based on their countries of origin. But get used to hearing it, because it will be the party line after every one of Trump’s executive overreaches, no matter how egregious. And unfortunately, if Trump's administration starts prosecuting journalists for doing their jobs, that line will contain more than a hint of truth.

Still, we are where we are. If there is a silver lining to any of this, it’s that the Trump presidency represents an opportunity to correct a historic mistake going back at least some forty years. Our government is comprised of three equal branches. In order to be truly “equal,” they have to serve as a check on one another at all times, not just when the opposite party is in power. The “unitary executive” is a historical lie, and a precondition to autocracy. Beyond just seeing Trump impeached, his opponents should look to restore balance to the federal branches. This requires targeting the House and Senate leaders for at least as much political pushback as we give the president himself. Until men like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell put country over party—or (preferably) are replaced by people who do—there's really no stopping Donald Trump.

Update: I note, with no particular satisfaction, that I posted this a few hours before the Trump administration night-fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who had refused to enforce last week's immigration ban. The Saturday Night Massacre it ain't; Trump is well within legal bounds to do this. But the White House press release accompanying her firing reads like it was written by a pre-pubescent Nixon himself, noting darkly that Yates has "betrayed the Department of Justice," and is "weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration."

It's worth noting that Sally Yates worked at the Justice Department for 27 years, serving administrations from both parties. To accuse her of "betraying" anything is both ludicrous and deeply unsettling. It's also worth remembering that while Trump can fire his legal staff whenever he likes, it is the AG's job to tell him when he's wrong, which is what Yates just did. At least that's what Jeff Sessions thinks the AG does, right?

If the shades of Nixon are this obvious from the cheap seats, I can only imagine how things look inside the Beltway these days. Yeesh.

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]]>Trump is Bad. The Unitary Executive is Worse.HistoryPoliticsEric BuschTue, 13 Dec 2016 21:46:34 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2016/12/9/ourbrittlesystem57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:584b75c659cc6806055ade1e

It's hard to predict the timing of massive systemic failures. But once complex, interconnected systems start to fail, they tend to do so in predictable ways. "Cascading failure" describes a common scenario in which a single failed part triggers a chain of successive failures and eventually collapses an entire system. Examples: an overloaded transformer blows, spiking voltage to other transformers, which also fail, bringing down a power grid and plunging an entire region into darkness. A single truss supporting one floor of a skyscraper gives way, pancaking that floor onto the ones beneath it to cause total progressive collapse. A trader at a too-big-to-fail bank is overexposed to derivatives on unsecured debts, generating enough systemic risk to threaten an entire financial system. A cat bite on the thumb causes sepsis, which triggers sequential organ failure. Higher arctic temparatures due to climate change melt the permafrost, releasing vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere, likely resulting in mass extinction. In each case, interdependence magnifies both the threat and potential severity of systemic failure.

So when the United States elects someone mentally and morally unfit for civic leadership as its top official, it invites a reckoning about the country's systemic vulnerabilities. This used to be a familiar line of thinking for most Americans. Duck-and-cover drills in schools offered a routine reminder to multiple generations of Americans that life as they knew it depended on the competence and sanity of their country's leaders. But decades of relative peace and stability at home have given rise to the profoundly ahistorical notion that our systems of politics, governance and civil order are self-sustaining. That the familiar rhythms of our lives will endure regardless of electoral outcomes. That politics itself is an abstraction--an escape from the mundanities of "real life." In the election cycle that just ended, that civic lassitude gave rise to the widespread acceptance of more specific fallacies, like the one which holds that with "smart people" to offer advice, anyone can successfully lead the country. As if a man with multiple irremediable character disorders could choose an effective cabinet.

On those rare quiet days at the White House, President Trump might just be adequate to his job, despite his manifest personal limitations. But most days won't be like that. And some days will bring horror and confusion. There will be natural disasters, and mass shootings, and terrorist attacks, and acts of geopolitical aggression that demand an American response. Some of the moments Trump will face as president would tax the judgment and emotional reserves of even the most competent, prepared and focused leader. Pressure and uncertainty come with the job. But the character and judgment to master them can only come from the person who holds it. Donald Trump is wholly unequal to the terrifying and decisive moments sure to come. But he will face them all the same.

Our systems of governance and civil order constitute what theorists might call "brittle systems." (Warning: PDF.) They are imbricated and interdependent with other systems--financial, environmental, etc. As of now, they retain the outward appearance of stability, rationality and permanence ("hardness"). But they lack "ductility," i.e. the ability to gracefully adapt to stress, making them vulnerable to fracture and cascading failure. We caught a glimpse of what that failure might look like in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina broke the levees protecting New Orleans from flooding. Federal, state and local governments underestimated the severity of the storm's impact, failed to gather the appropriate resources or communicate with each other, and well over a thousand people died as a result. We caught another glimpse in 2008, when high default rates among subprime home mortgages—the predictable result of ill-considered degregulation in the late 1990s—crippled the global economy and touched off the "Great Recession" from which many are still recovering. Only an extraordinary injection of liquid capital by the US and other governments prevented a second Great Depression. With the earth-shaking revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, we are arguably seeing the cracks in the foundations of our governing systems yet again.

In these scenarios, expert leadership is one of the strongest backstops against cascading failure. But Donald Trump is not an expert leader. In fact, he is himself a systemic stressor. His incipient presidency—already erratic and concussive in the extreme—introduces a new level of instability to an already-fragile network of interlinked systems. The Trump presidency is a fool’s bet that our systems of governance and civic order can withstand an agent of chaos at their head. We all have a lot riding on that bet—far more, in fact, than we can yet foresee.

Trumpism is also a natural consequence of America's deteriorating governing structure and traditions: the corporate capture of state and media power, income inequality, civic disengagement, the devaluation of the basic idea of the commons, and the degradation of civil liberties. As a result, we have now entrusted every organ of elected federal government to an avowed authoritarian and his political party.

It's a good bet that most establishment Republicans are also shocked by Trump's victory. Their takeaway from Mitt Romney's loss in 2012 was that the party needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform to attract Hispanic voters, or they'd never win the presidency again. That was Marco Rubio's whole reason for being. And then the party went and nominated Donald Trump. He was seen by party regulars as a ruffian and a terrible electoral risk. He was supposed to lose, and they were supposed to pretend that he'd never existed.

But he won, with some help from Putin, the FBI, and yes, vote rigging. And now a radical, amoral Republican Party has a completely unexpected opportunity to roll back every progressive policy accomplishment since the Civil War. Their priorities are the priorities of their corporate masters: to wipe out ACA, roll back financial reform, destroy what remains of the union movement, and privatize Medicare, public education, and social security. They will challenge the very idea of federal environmental policy. They will gut workplace safety regulations, void rules governing overtime pay, etc., etc...

And unless the Dems can stop them somehow, they will definitely do serious damage to our country's electoral system. This will be the first time Republicans have controlled both houses and the presidency since Justice Roberts declared the 1965 Voting Rights Act obsolete in 2013's Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case. So they'll be looking for more and better ways to lock in existing franchise restrictions and further suppress minority voting, or even to change how votes are counted. I expect Republicans to take a page out of Vladimir Putin's playbook by imposing heavy new restrictions on how American elections are monitored. Edit: I note here that Kris Kobach, Kansas' own vote cager extraordinaire, has been named to Trump's transition team.

In exchange for the ability to do everything they've ever wanted, Republicans will now pledge their fealty to Donald Trump. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is getting that little errand out of the way today. House Speaker Paul Ryan is claiming that Trump has a "mandate" despite losing the popular vote. Ryan's a liar by both temperament and profession, but that's probably the most blatant public whopper he's told so far. That's how you know an authoritarian is feeling confident.

I don't know yet what congressional Democrats can do to protect the basic functions of American democracy. But at the very least, every Republican judicial appointment--not just to the Supreme Court--must be fiercely opposed. Going forward, I don't want to hear a single congressional Democrat snivel about how "so-and-so Republican is really a straight shooter (Hi Jim!)" or that "this is the best we're going to get from this administration." I don't ever want to hear Dems talk about how they need to "work across the aisle" to "get something done for the American people," or any other such nonsense. No Republican uttered any of those words in the last eight years. Congressional Republicans refused to even grant a hearing to Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland for almost a year. Merrick f'n Garland! No congress in the history of the country had ever done that before. And not only did Republicans pay no political price for violating the constitution they claim to revere, but their gambit worked to perfection. With Trump's victory, congressional Republicans have successfully stolen a Supreme Court pick out from under a Democratic president. There are no rules anymore, which is an objectively terrible state of affairs. But that's how the ballgame is played now, Dems. You don't have to like it. But by God, don't wimp out. And whatever you do, don't let the Republicans put your presidential candidate in jail.

Here's another idea: stop talking about the Republican Party and Trump as if they aren't one and the same. There are no Republicans anymore, only Trumpists. Every Republican is, and should always be referred to, as a Trumpist for at least as long as he's in office. In writing, quotes, speeches, everything. There is no daylight between the party and the monstrosity at its head. So he should define them, not the other way around. Michael Moore's got some other pretty good ideas about how citizens can organize to oppose the Trumpist takeover of our government. But the point here is that we are now officially in opposition to self-proclaimed facism. The normal rules of decorum no longer apply.

Above all, don't despair. Overt demagoguery tends to have a short shelf life in American politics. The First Red Scare whipped up fears of bolshevist revolution in the United States, resulting in race riots and 1918 Sedition Act--a rather conspicuous violation of the First Amendment. But when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the architect of much of the Red Scare, warned the nation of a communist uprising planned for May Day 1920 and it didn't happen, he was laughed off the public stage and the Sedition Act was repealed. When Joseph McCarthy first burst onto the scene in 1949, he turned the federal government inside out, cynically repurposing genuine American fears about communism into a seemingly invincible partisan weapon. (Notably, Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy's odious chief counsel, was also a legal representative and close advisor to Donald Trump until Cohn's death in 1986.) But Joseph McCarthy also ultimately failed. The moment of his public demise, which came during the Army-McCarthy hearings, was recorded for posterity. Written on his political epitaph were Senator Joseph Welch's famous words, "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" It's a powerful reminder of where we've been, and it's worth rewatching this week.

By some measures at least, we've now entered a far darker time than either of the Red Scares. If you care about the environment and climate change, human rights, income inequality, the alleviation of poverty, national security, equal protection, racial equality, gender equity, public lands, government transparency, civil liberties, public health, financial and industrial regulation, the integrity of our elections, public safety, the future of American democracy, or just the basic Golden Rule, the next four years are going to be agonizing to witness, and for many, to endure. The white backlash has now been mainstreamed, and Trump's election will uncork a flood of racial and gender-based aggression and cruelty. But we are still free to assemble, still free to give of our time and our money, still free to speak. We are free to stand up for one another, to protect each other. And now we have to do all of those things like we have never done them before.

There will come another Joseph Welch moment. It won't come without effort, without concerted and dogged resistance. I don't know when, or how much damage Trumpism will do beforehand. And it may not be a moment at all, but rather a gradual and accumulating diminution of Trumpism's ability to inflict further harm on our body politic. Beneath Donald Trump and his party is the dustbin of history--silently awaiting their inevitable fall. And when it happens, Trumpism won't be a thing anymore. It will be an epithet.

“For some months, I have traveled and traversed the border in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, ‘I will fix this.’ And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue.”

October 2016 will mark the 79th anniversary of the so-called Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic. In the fall of 1937, the soldiers and police under the command of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo killed an estimated 10-15,000 Haitians living along the Artibonite River, which flows along a stretch of border between the two countries. The genocide went by many names: "El Corte," ("the cutting" in Spanish), Kout kouto (the "knife blow" in Creole), and the massacre du Percil (the Parsley Massacre) in French. The latter name originated from multiple accounts that Dominican soldiers differentiated between Haitians and Dominicans by holding up sprigs of parsley and forcing their potential victims to pronouce the Spanish word for the herb, perejil. Those who could not roll their Rs in convincingly Spanish fashion were immediately executed.

In the decades before the massacre, Haitians and Dominicans along the border had mixed fluidly. "Before the massacre," one Haitian survivor recalled, "in the frontier, although there were two sides, the people were one, united." In fact, families of both cultural heritages had lived together peacefully on both sides of the border for generations. Historians Richard Turits and Lauren Derby argue that the Parsley Massacre’s victims were in fact integral parts of a peaceful, multiethnic borderland community—one that had shown little sign of ethnic fracture. The society they had made together was Rafael Trujillo’s true target.

That society ended as quickly and violently as the lives taken by Trujillo’s soldiers. By 1939, every Haitian living near the border had either been killed or chased away. The Dominicans who remained were compelled by their government to guard against the Haitians’ return, and thereby socially reprogrammed to regard their former neighbors with hatred and suspicion (a trend that persists today). When confronted by the US about the atrocities, Trujillo justified the mass killings as a defensive move against an imaginary “pacific invasion” by Haitians. But the real objective of El Corte was the centralization and consolidation of state power in the Dominican Republic via the utter destruction a syncretic border culture and the militarization of its frontier. In that regard, it succeeded. Not coincidentally, the violent reconquest of the borderlands also aided Trujillo in his own quest for absolute political power, which he retained until his death in 1961.

The Parsley Massacre is one of many modern historical examples of the violent imposition of state power on national frontiers by despotically-inclined governments seeking to consolidate political power within an ethno-nationalist construct. To varying degrees, the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide all targeted borderlands and frontier regions as sites of ethnic cleansing and genocide, in the service of nation building and consolidation of political authority.

During his run for the presidency, Donald Trump has drawn a number of comparisons to various historical autocrats. His appeals to xenophobic nationalism, pathological self-regard, and crypto-authoritarianism find parallels in the examples of other well-known despots. Recently, Omar Encarnacion of Foreign Affairs explicitly likened Trump to Rafael Trujillo, placing the Republican nominee squarely within the caudillismo tradition of charismatic authoritarianism, common in modern Latin American history.

I have no idea how accurate these comparisons are. I hope we don’t have to find out. But I’m particularly struck by the similarities between the Trump and Trujillo quotes at the beginning of this post. Both of them take it as given that transnational borderland cultures are problems--problems that they alone, using the full legal and military might of the state, can solve. Both characterize non-natives and ethnic minorities as innately lawless and dangerous, and both posit border militarization and even ethnic cleansing as state-strengthening remedies. "Without a border," as Trump is fond of saying, "we just don't have a country."

The long and bloody history behind this kind of rhetoric is worrisome—particularly in border states like Texas, which already have violent and racially-charged borderland histories. (My friend and colleague Miguel Levario has written an excellent and moving history on the militarization of the Texas border.) But the fact that these words come from a candidate with no sense of—or respect for—the limits of presidential power makes them more frightening still.

A full year and a half into this campaign, it’s still basically impossible to make any predictions about what a Trump presidency would mean for domestic and foreign policy, because his policy proposals are so vague. But his proposed “big beautiful wall” and forced deportation of 11 million people aren’t just policy proposals, they’re threats. And though it may be difficult to predict what he'd actually do, it's pretty clear who and what he is threatening: the people, economies and cultures of La Frontera.

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]]>Despots and BorderlandsPublic PolicyEric BuschFri, 19 Aug 2016 14:48:28 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/teachforyourself57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:57b63031b3db2bc3d14cd53bThe other day, my wife forwarded me an ad for a non tenure-track teaching position at a Texas community college. As is now increasingly common, the pay for the position is calculated based on the instructor’s “contact hours” with students. Under the contact-hour system, instructors earn an hourly rate only for the time they spend actually teaching or holding office hours. That hourly rate is comparatively high ($38-$40/per hour) to compensate for whatever additional time instructors spend planning, prepping, grading and offering written feedback. (For a typical course this works out to around $3,000/semester.) The stated reasoning behind this system is that it eliminates the gap in pay between instructors who prep quickly and those who take longer. But the contact-hour system also explicitly incentivizes instructors to minimize the time they spend planning, prepping and evaluating student work, and to take on as many courses as they can each semester. In other words, it moves college teaching quite a bit further into the realm of the gig economy.

In other sectors of the so-called “access economy,” there is a clear and coldly rational calculus to the monetary relationship between corporate market makers and contract employees. Uber, for example, doesn’t particularly care if its drivers make money on any given fare. The company’s business model externalizes most of the costs of the driver’s time, equipment and fuel, and takes the same 20% cut of every fare regardless. As long as its drivers accept as many fares as possible, Uber’s interests are served. In exchange for being squeezed to maximize their version of “contact hours,” Uber drivers get the flexibility to work when they want, and to contract with competing ride-sharing companies simultaneously. Good service often gets tipped. And while drivers collectively shoulder most of the rideshare industry’s inherent risks and uncertainties, at least there’s no ambiguity about who they are working for: themselves.

But unlike vehicles for hire, education is not a simple service or commodity. There’s obviously no tipping and far less flexibility. Yes, adjuncts are paid to give lectures and grade a couple of exams per course. But they are expected to help students learn—to facilitate active, personalized and memorable experiences of discovery. You won't find it spelled out on any adjunct job ad, but that is what their employers actually expect of them. That is what their students expect of them. And that is how a real teacher measures her competence—not by how little time she can spend on a course while still getting passable teaching evals. There’s simply no way to accomplish all of this without engaging deeply with students’ work, which takes up a lot of time outside the classroom. The contact hour model turns that time into a burdensome operating expense-functionally equivalent to waiting for an Uber fare. But when it comes to teaching, only frauds work solely for themselves.

In some ways, the contact hour model of compensation merely clarifies the warped incentive structure that already exists for adjuncts. But pegging an adjunct’s effective hourly rate directly to her “efficiency” explicitly devalues the things a teacher has to do outside the classroom in order to be able to deliver anything of worth inside it. The contact hour model cynically rationalizes the labor inequities now endemic to American colleges and universities, and emphasizes the extent to which the interests of adjuncts and their students have been artificially forced into direct competition. I can’t think of a more expedient way to exacerbate higher education’s ongoing labor crisis, or to undermine it as a value proposition.

It would be nice to think that the community college I mentioned would find it difficult to fill their position under such terms, but they won't. I know that because for all of the similarities between adjuncting and driving for Uber (contingent contracts, no benefits, no professional development) there is at least one big difference: nobody drives for Uber hoping for a shot at tenure.

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]]>Teach for Yourself?HistoryPoliticsEric BuschTue, 26 Jul 2016 22:19:24 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2016/7/25/americafirst57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:579657564402438332e0b89d

At last week’s RNC convention, “Make America First Again”—an isolationist twist on Donald Trump’s basic campaign catchphrase—was one of the gathering’s four nightly themes. Since then, a number of media outlets have noted that Trump’s invocation of “America First” resuscitates an old slogan once used to try to keep the United States out of World War II. At almost the same time, we are also suddenly hearing more about the Trump campaign’s improbably extensive network of professional and financial ties to Russia—whose intelligence services may have just been implicated in the theft and leaking of 20,000 embarrassing emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee. Vladimir Putin, whose strategic interests would certainly be served by a more isolationist American foreign policy, has spoken favorably of candidate Trump on many occasions, and judging by Trump’s rhetoric, the feeling is clearly mutual. More worryingly, Trump has called into question the very existence of NATO, the US-led military alliance that has functioned as a guarantor of global security—and a geopolitical check on Russia—since 1949. So, is Russia helping Trump get elected, and has Putin been promised something in return?

I don’t know, obviously. But it wouldn’t be the first time a foreign power tried to sway the results of an American election by tapping into the political impulse of isolationism. In 1940, as Britain stood alone against a seemingly unstoppable Nazi juggernaut, it became the job of the German charge d’affairs in Washington DC, Hans Thomsen, to keep the United States from getting into the war. So Hansen asked his government for money—lots of it—to fund a “well-camouflaged lightning propaganda campaign” to steer public opinion and both major parties away from intervention. Roosevelt was certain by then that Nazi Germany posed a threat, and he desperately wanted to help Britain. So Thomsen funneled the German money toward the President’s isolationist political enemies in both major parties, who strongly opposed American intervention even in the event of England’s defeat.

German official communiques uncovered in the late 1990s by historian Gerhard Weinberg show that Thomsen requested $3,000 to help one unnamed isolationist Republican Congressman bring around 50 like-minded members of his party to the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, where they would push for an antiwar plank in the party’s platform. The German government also secretly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions today) to buy full-page ads in Philly newspapers during the convention, urging delegates to vote for the antiwar platform. The money for the ads was effectively laundered through an organization called the National Committee to Keep America Out of Foreign Wars, chaired by Rep. Hamilton Fish, who loathed Roosevelt. (There is no evidence that Rep. Fish knew where money came from, and the arrangement would not have been illegal under the existing campaign finance laws anyway.) The Germans appear to have tried something similar at the 1940 Democratic Convention in Chicago, spending around $160,000 “buying the approximately 40 Pennsylvania delegates to vote against Roosevelt” and successfully push for a plank to keep the US out of foreign wars. At Roosevelt’s insistence, that plank was later appended with the phrase “except in case of attack.” According to Weinberg, the German effort was, at the time, the most “extensive foreign intervention” ever into an American election.

It’s probably not possible to measure Hans Thomsen’s effectiveness at keeping the US out of the war, separate from all the other dynamics then in play. (In fact, the American Communist Party was likely undertaking similar efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union—up until the Nazis invaded the USSR.) But from a domestic politics standpoint, the Nazis’ political meddling was quite shrewd. By tapping into the isolationism that had dominated American politics since the end of World War I, Thomsen and the Nazis hindered Roosevelt’s efforts to help Britain.

It’s not like there weren’t some justifiable reasons for Americans to be suspicious of direct involvement in what seemed like other countries’ wars. The economic stagnation of the Great Depression still lingered, and the prospect of fighting a war on another country’s behalf seemed to many like a ridiculous expense of lives and money. Many isolationists regarded Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program as a not-so-furtive step toward American intervention, taken at the behest of ungrateful allies and war profiteers. Staunch antiwar advocates like Senators Gerald Nye and Burton Wheeler also fit within the strong isolationist tradition in American foreign policy, dating back to George Washington’s famous entreaty not to “interweave our destiny with that of any part of Europe.”

Alongside these potentially well-taken concerns, there were also less-laudable reasons for opposing American intervention, including anti-Semitism, nativism, and antipathy to Roosevelt himself. Many noted anti-Semites, including Henry Ford, were members of the America First Committee, the largest and best-known advocacy organization opposing American intervention. The AFC’s spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, infamously blamed American Jews for pushing the country toward war.

This was the roiling admixture of political impulses that Hans Thomsen and the Nazis exploited in their effort to keep America out of the war. It bears striking resemblance to the political energy now fueling the Donald Trump phenomenon. We do not stand on the precipice of a world war, and America faces much different geopolitical challenges today than in 1940. But once again, a calamitous and unpopular war has spawned an isolationist movement, whose standard bearer advocates a shortsighted, transactional foreign policy. Once again, that movement appeals to nativism and bigotry, while at the same time addressing (at least rhetorically) progressive concerns like income inequality, political corruption and unfair business practices. And once again, that movement may be lending itself to political manipulation by a foreign country.

It is worth keeping in mind the kinds of foreign regimes that have sought to profit from American isolationism in the past. It is also worth remembering the global conflagration that flared up the last time America turned its back on the world.

The 7-day mark for the Pulse Nightclub shooting came this past Sunday, when John Dickerson interviewed LaPierre on CBS' Face the Nation. This time around, the NRA frontman rejected the notion that the nightclub shooting had anything to do with targeting the LGBTQ community, or with the easy availability of tactical-grade firepower to a man known by the FBI to have radical Islamic inclinations. This time, according to LaPierre, the real issue was “terrorism.” One might imagine that someone interested in preventing terrorism would be ok with stopping people on a terrorist watchlist from buying assault weapons. But when pressed on that point, LaPierre argued that doing so would somehow be “tipping off the bad guys.” (Oddly, this argument has yet to be made against the no-fly list.) Unsurprisingly, the Senate voted down any meaningful gun control legislation yesterday: one day after LaPierre’s appearance on television, and eight days after the deadliest single-gunman massacre in modern American history. The pattern is clear: the “debate” about gun control has become a circular discourse that produces no change. Thousands more Americans will die because of it.

Strangely, we still don’t seem to have a good fix on exactly what Wayne LaPierre is. The media treats him as a thought leader on the issue of guns, even though everyone already knows exactly what he thinks. Wayne LaPierre is not a thought leader, or a politician, or an activist. He is not a true party to any debate over gun regulation, because he has no authority to make concessions on behalf of his principals—the gun manufacturers. He is merely an agent of a massive industrial apparatus that wants to stay politically invisible. He is a program on a recursive loop. His only job is to keep gun manufacturers and their congressional enablers from ever having to come to the negotiating table. Whenever anything particularly unfortunate happens involving a firearm in this country, Wayne LaPierre trots out onto the public stage and metaphorically lights himself on fire. Gun control advocates immediately challenge his over-the-top rhetoric, and the circle of gun control discourse remains closed, leading nowhere.

As long as LaPierre is treated as if he has anything of value to add to gun control debate, and as long as gun control advocates continue to be suckered into directly engaging with him in the political arena, then he is succeeding in his task. He is a red herring; a heat sink. His continued success means that his corporate paymasters, including Midway USA, Springfield Armory, Beretta, Sturm Ruger, Smith & Wesson and Taurus, need never cease—let alone answer for—their moral crimes. His continued success ensures that the politicians who faithfully serve the gun industry will continue to do so without consequence.

Unlike the vulnerable corporations cowering behind him, Wayne LaPierre cannot be shamed, bankrupted or politically defeated. He must be bypassed.

The “it’s not about race” strategy has worked out well for the modern Republican Party, to put it mildly. And it’s so easy...all you have to do is not mention race, ever! And when an opponent points out the disparate racial impacts of the policies you’re proposing, you hit ‘em with the Race Card! It’s such a familiar, tried-and-true tactic on the right that, even now, it’s almost incredible to see the Republican presidential nominee dispense so completely with pretense of racial opacity. To the extent that there is a deep uneasiness with Trump’s candidacy among Republicans, I suspect that his gleeful shredding of the Atwater playbook has a great deal to do with it. To Trump's most ardent supporters, Atwater's injunction against explicit political racism is just another manifestation of PC culture run amok. To the Republican establishment, many of whom owe their careers to "It's not about race-ism," what Trump is doing probably looks like political suicide, for him and for them.

And maybe it is. But if Trump even makes a good show of it, get ready for a wave of post-Atwater Republicans, who will no longer consider it necessary to disguise the racism at their movement's core.

Cities have always been battlegrounds when it comes to the control of public services. Today, the forces arrayed against local, community control is higher than ever. Economically stressed communities like Flint are facing unprecedented pressure to give up local control, or risk losing basic services altogether. But it isn't just the Flints of the world facing these pressures. Uber's recent battle with the city of Austin over fingerprinting its drivers was actually an attempt strong-arm the city into exempting ride sharing companies from municipal regulation. AT&T just successfully killed municipal broadband expansion in Tennessee. Charter schools chip away at the public education model that serves most American children.

But water is different. If Flint has taught us anything, it's that water service should not be run like a business. For over 100 years, local public utilities have supplied American cities with clean, safe, and affordable water. And while many of these municipal systems do require expensive updates, privatization is not the mechanism for making those necessary investments.

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]]>The Future of Public WaterPoliticsEric BuschFri, 13 May 2016 21:48:30 +0000https://ericbusch.org/blog/2016/5/13/the-post-policy-president57309edd27d4bdb4d51c92e1:57364b80746fb95a93be1417:57364b8d746fb95a93be146eTo talk public policy in the context of Donald Trump's presidential campaign kind of misses the point of Trump-as-politician. This should worry Democrats. Earlier this week, Paul Krugman gamely laid out a few of the almost preposterous inconsistencies in Trump's evolving tax policies--particularly in light of his refusal to release his own returns. Much of what Krugman writes is so true as to be self-evident. And, a la Krugman, Democrats will continue to hammer Trump every day from now until November on his stunning ignorance of foreign and domestic policy, glaring inconsistencies, and seemingly pathological aversion to concrete proposals. They will do this knowing all the while that in the end, it might be no more effective than throwing water on a grease fire.  

Clinton is running her second presidential campaign, but this is Trump's thousandth pissing match. His tactics and strategy amount to the same thing: making himself look good by making her look bad. And he's well practiced at that game. Ultimately, Trump's proposition--that public policy is no longer relevant to our politics--is probably the closest thing he's got to an actual policy proposal. If he's right about that, and the Democrats are playing the wrong game, he may win. The fact that nobody has any idea what he'd do afterward is a feature, not a bug.