Motel Living and Slowly Dying

By trade and self-identity, I am a novelist. But to keep the groceries coming, I am also an oil pipeline worker. They call me a “pig tracker,” which means I monitor the location of cleaning and diagnostic tools traveling through pipelines, and when I’m not in the field, I’m in a hotel somewhere along the line, sleeping my way toward my next shift.

The particular rhythms of what I do — track the pig in its journey beneath the prairies, hand off the job to my counterpart on the other shift, find a hotel near where I’ll rejoin the line, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat — have made me something of an unintentional expert on hotel living and on the America nobody dreams about seeing on vacation.

I travel by secondary and tertiary roads, skulking around the pipeline on 12-hour shifts, either midnight to noon or noon to midnight. I work alone, mostly. And when the shift is done, I catch my rest in places like Harrisonville, Missouri, and Iola, Kansas. Lapeer, Michigan, and Amherst, New York. Toledo, Ohio, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota. I’ve learned that Super 8s are not always super, and Comfort Inns sometimes afflict the comfortable. I rack up IHG points and Wyndham Rewards and Choice Privileges. I may never have to pay for a personal car rental again, so fulsome are my Enterprise points.

Sometimes I lose track of what day it is, or when, exactly, I’m going home again. But the places where I set my head stand ready to reorient me with a comfortable sameness. There’s the antiseptic smell of a well-cleaned lobby, the paper coffee cups in my room wrapped in plastic, the rattle and hum of the air-conditioning unit. When I arrive in the wee hours, the lonely night auditor is often all too happy to talk. When I leave at 11 p.m. for my next night shift, I often have to talk the clerk through my reasons for arriving and departing in the same 12-hour period. Twenty-four hours a day, there’s coffee of varying age and quality.

I’ve come to value the simple things: a clean room, reliable hot water, and a staff that respects a do-not-disturb sign. And learned the sublime wisdom of a song called “My Favourite Chords” by a Canadian band called the Weakerthans.

I want to fall asleep / to the beat of you breathing / in a room near a truck stop / on a highway somewhere …

The words are a concise demonstration of language’s power to inspire cinema in our heads. They also form a picture of my life. Because the truth is, I’ve been living in motels since I was a child.

¤

My father was an exploratory well digger, and I traveled with him every summer through the American West, far off the interstates, in a nomadic way that was worlds different from my life at home with my mother in Fort Worth, Texas.

In the summer of 1981, when I was 11 years old, I lived with him and my then-stepmother in a bottom-floor room at the Park Plaza Motel in Sidney, Montana. Dad was working near Watford City, North Dakota, about 50 miles east, but he used Montana and its lack of a sales tax as a home base. I’d ride out to the fields with him during the day, peeling around on my motorcycle, then return with him and his crew to Sidney in the evening, reuniting with my stepmother. The three of us would have dinner, watch some TV — it was the summer of Fernando Valenzuela’s miracle stint with the Log Angeles Dodgers — and then start the cycle again. (...)

My life in motels doesn’t bear much resemblance to what I’ve read or seen; it’s too ordinary, too predictable. I’m not Humbert Humbert, dragging his Lolita through the West, a step ahead of Clare Quilty. I’ve never met someone like Juan Chicoy, the impromptu innkeeper from John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus, or the precocious little girl Moonee and her crazy mom from the recent movie about permanent motel existence, The Florida Project. My stays are straight credit-card transactions, reimbursed by my employer, and generally last just a few hours before I move along again. My intimacy with these places runs no deeper than: “Welcome back, Mr. Lancaster.”

There is, of course, a darker, seemingly hopeless side to these homes away from home. In left-behind precincts of cities and towns — indeed, on the main drag that connects my comfortable suburban neighborhood in Billings, Montana, with downtown — you can find bedraggled motels where single-room occupancy often means a family of five sharing a sink, a shower, and maybe a kitchenette. These are the working destitute, or the pensioned-off. These folks are able to scrape together several hundred dollars for rent, but not the first and last months and a water deposit and a credit score required for a less expensive apartment, let alone the three-percent down on an FHA mortgage.

We tend to think of homelessness in terms of cardboard boxes on street grates and cars that double as living spaces, but that’s a small aperture of the overall problem. These past-their-glory motels house people who work hard — and who face crushing odds of ever getting ahead of their circumstances. And as we run the average rents in places like Seattle and San Francisco to the stratosphere, without an attendant increase in affordable housing, we’re falling deeper into crisis.

In Billings, where I live when I’m not in a motel, we have 110,000 people, and 621 of them are homeless kids in the public school system. That’s the total from the most recent full school year. Of those 600-plus, 104 live the peculiar form of it at motels with names like the Lazy K-T. By any measure, it’s a shameful number. Teachers and administrators at the schools write grant proposals for supplemental breakfast programs. My friends who oversee classrooms have mastered the subtle art of pulling a kid aside and, without shaming him, learning whether he has a winter coat. When the answer is no, they find a way to get him one.

Elizabeth Lloyd Fladung, who has photographed American families on the margins for the past two decades, told The Nation in 2015: “The sight of these iconic structures now serving as home to scores of destitute people who don’t seem to have any chance at the American Dream really shows just how little infrastructure there is to help poor people in need, and how much damage decades of wage stagnation has done.”

by Craig Lancaster, LARB | Read more:
Image: uncredited

This Poisonous Cult of Personality

Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House these days, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.

Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. Youthful good looks, an unconventional marriage, and some intellectual showmanship helped turn Emmanuel Macron, virtually overnight, into the savior not just of France, but of Europe, too. Until the approval ratings of this dynamic millionaire collapsed, a glamour-struck media largely waived close scrutiny of his neoliberal faith in tax breaks for rich compatriots, and contempt for “slackers.”

Another example is Aung San Suu Kyi who, as a freedom fighter and prisoner of conscience, precluded any real examination of her politics, which have turned out to be abysmally sectarian, in tune with her electoral base among Myanmar’s Buddhist ethnic majority. Her personal sacrifices remained for too long the basis for assessing her political outlook, though the record of Robert Mugabe, among many other postcolonial leaders, had already proved that suffering for the cause of freedom is no guarantee of wise governance, and that today’s victims are likely to be tomorrow’s persecutors. (...)

The liberal Obama, however, was the greatest beneficiary of an age of rampant depoliticization, when public figures turned into blank receptacles and the urge to project private desires and frustrations onto them overrode the need to make sober political judgements. This craving for emotional communion was not confined to marginalized and voiceless citizens. Many writers and journalists closely identified with the literary intellectual they saw in Obama; they were thrilled to watch, I wrote in 2008, “one of their kind ascend to the West Wing,” and were seemingly unconcerned that “the overall decline in national fortunes” was likely to push their country “to the rancorous right.”

Obama continued to dazzle the literati even as he stepped up deportations of illegal immigrants and drone attacks, ruthlessly pursued whistle-blowers, and inaugurated the extrajudicial executions of American citizens. He exhorted African Americans to assume personal responsibility for their plight while absolving bankers of all responsibility for ruining the lives of millions of people. Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.

Obama’s supporters remain as defensive about their president as Trump’s fans are about theirs, even though Obama, kite-surfing with Richard Branson in the wake of Trump’s victory, and reassuring Wall Street with handsomely remunerated speeches, has affirmed his dedication to the one percent. But we should not be surprised and dismayed that Obama’s audacity of hope dwindled into some humdrum self-cherishing, or that Macron is now derided as “president of the rich.” The actual record of personality cults reveals the mendacity of hope. Real change always comes through the sustained struggles of countless people who often wish to remain unsung.

by Pankaj Mishra, NYRB | Read more:
Image:Jack Gruber/Pool/Reuters
[ed. Kennedy and Reagan would also be good examples.] 

How About a Military Tax?

One of the military’s biggest problems of the past five years is the political shell game Washington has played with ­defense spending and the Pentagon budget.

So, as Congress is now trying to rewrite the federal tax law for the first time in more than a decade, here’s an idea: A dedicated military tax.

Lawmakers could set a military tax to a specific rate. It would be clearly labeled on everyone’s pay stub. And the money would go directly to the Defense Department.

It’s not that bizarre of an idea. Your pay stub today has a line labeled “FICA” that is a dedicated tax earmarked by law to fund the Social Security trust fund that pays retirement checks to elderly citizens. And many states have dedicated taxes earmarked for schools and other specific government operations.

Why can’t Congress write a tax code that is clear and transparent about what the military gets? One that ensures the military gets a reliable funding stream? One that would be naturally adjusted for inflation every year?

That’s not the way it works right now.

Ultimately, about a quarter of all federal tax dollars goes to the Defense Department. But that money must first be collected through a general income tax, then put into some theoretical pool of all federal tax dollars so Congress can argue about it every year.

It becomes an endless cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The Defense Department gets whatever comes out of that annual, unpredictable circus.

At the crux of the disaster known as “sequestration” was lawmakers’ inability to agree on precisely how much money would go to the Defense Department and how much would go to everything else.

Lawmakers should just declare a military tax, and set it as a percentage of income. Rich people would pay more, as they always have. So, for example, instead of having millions of Americans in a 25 percent tax bracket and requiring them to pay a general purpose 25 percent tax, the tax law could instead have those same Americans pay 15 percent in general purpose, non-military taxes and 10 percent in military taxes. By law, that money would go straight to the Defense Department. No debate about it.

by The Editors, Military Times |  Read more:

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Downward Spiral

We are talking about the NFL, which is to say that we are talking about a league that increasingly sees itself as presenting not only the most popular American sport—which football demonstrably is, at least going by television ratings and profits—but the most American American sport.

The sport’s elephantine self-regard plays out in ways big and small—and in ways that transcend the obvious patriotic signifiers that the NFL grafts to every available surface of its exhaustively branded viewing experience. It’s not just the booming fighter jet flyovers or the deployment of American flags visible from space when it’s time for the national anthem, although there is all that. It’s the bombastic anthem rituals—and the sidelong glances cast during that anthem to make sure that everyone around is revering the anthem appropriately. Some of that is the result of Colin Kaepernick’s quiet and quite probably career-ending anthem-based act of protest, but the NFL’s dedication to its specific and strange vision of conformity predated Kaepernick’s political awakening. The NFL is selective and self-serving and alternately priggish and thuggish in how it goes about maintaining its strange brand, but it is always singular. Every mania of our broader moment, from those grandiose delusions to the million points of cheesy graft, is reflected in the NFL itself. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the NFL would come into conflict with President Trump—when it comes to honking overdetermined proxies for Maximum America, there can be only one.

So there are the flyovers and the performative patriotism, but there is also the fact that the NFL was, for years, secretly billing the Pentagon for all those color guards and Hometown Hero promotions. And it’s maybe especially the fact that the commissioner’s office expressed shocked dismay upon the exposure last year of all of this and contritely returned a small percentage of the money the teams had received.

To a culture that’s addicted to spectacle and inured to dishonesty, the NFL delivers bulk loads of both: the pyrotechnically performative God-and-country stuff and the greasy profit-seeking, the stilted recitation of the Declaration of Independence before a football game and then the batshit branded hijinks that follow at the commercial breaks. There isn’t much distance, in broadcast time or pure blank weirdness, between those patriotic fife-and-drum montages and the ads in which a lone Budweiser Clydesdale convinces a small businessman not to commit suicide or a man eating Doritos is comically rocked in the nuts by a snack-minded Corgi or whatever. America, as the poet said, is hard to see. But in watching the NFL, at the baroque phase on what appears to be the back end of its zenith, we can see a reflection of the nation at something like the same point.

The NFL is financially healthy and also pretty luridly out of its mind, increasingly given to grandiose delusion and stubborn denial and spasms of executive sadism. And lately, it’s declining—in ways that are obvious for even casual viewers and evident during an average Sunday’s slate of games and in ways that the league might not fully feel for generations.

It’s America’s game all right, and if the NFL is sick, if it is even perhaps dying, it is for the most American of reasons—because it is increasingly ragged and rotten with corruption, and because it can’t quite come up with any other way that it would rather be.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Impunity

There is a door that opens while watching a bad NFL game on TV, a gateway into something very much like an out-of-body experience. It’s not an especially desirable out-of-body experience, to be sure, but there’s something about being subjected to a NFL game at its worst that grants even the most devout fans the opportunity to see how football looks to people who absolutely hate football. Witness enough off-tackle plunges for one-yard gains, then watch as they are negated by offsetting penalties, and something reveals itself, even to those of us who enjoy the game.

It is not pretty. The grunting, juddering, anti-flow of the broader game, the rote brutality and steak-headed backwardness of the action at the play-by-play level, the sudden blundering intrusion of all those honking commercials—for achingly sincere domestic macro-pilsners, for strapping trucks and their loud and swaggering drive-train warranties, for extremely emotional insurance companies and also weirdly ironic insurance companies—at every stoppage of play. In the most basic sense this is just what the average NFL game is, but more worrying for the lords of the league, it is also a description of what is an objectively not-great television show—one with the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car accident, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and that somehow manages to be three hours long.

For people who don’t like watching the NFL, every excruciating moment of every game looks like this. For those of us who enjoy it, against or despite our better political and aesthetic judgment, that description only fits the worst shitshow jackpot: muddy punt-offs in Cleveland, for example, or the groggy Sunday morning games that the NFL has lately played in front of rustling, uninterested crowds at London’s Wembley Stadium as part of its stalled attempt to open international markets.

In recent years, though, the games resembling out-of-body experiences have become worryingly common. The sudden glut of ultra-shitty games probably isn’t the greatest long-term problem facing the sport, but it’s also the most obvious and inescapable challenge to all the solemn covenant-pageantry of the NFL; it’s hard to civically sanctify the experience of being bored.

Not every game can be a classic, of course, or even competitive. But the palpable decline in game quality, week by week and 12-9 game by 12-9 game, is neither incidental nor accidental but happening seemingly by design—the natural result of teams taking cheap-out shortcuts in constructing their rosters, and a high-volume and highly conservative coaching style that emphasizes an empty efficiency over any of the unpredictabilities that make games worth watching.

Put another way, the specific nature of the league’s declining ratings is a reflection of the limited appeal of spending three hours watching quarterbacks rack up four-yard completions. As The Ringer’s Kevin Clark points out, the absolute number of people watching NFL games hasn’t declined, but those viewers are watching for increasingly brief periods of time. “Fans are tuning in and then tuning out,” Clark writes. “If that doesn’t scare the league, then nothing will.”

Gladiators on the Make

Here’s the thing, though: the NFL not only doesn’t seem scared, it doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s broadly understood that NFL football is not terribly good at the moment. If you credit the lamentations of the anonymous front-office-types who tend to pop up in stories complaining, always complaining, about how unprepared today’s college players are for the pro game or the dearth of NFL-ready quarterbacks available through the NFL draft, the near future does not look great, either. Factor in a steady decline in youth football participation that extends back to the first stories about the link between football and brain injuries (such as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) more than a decade ago and it’s tough to feel great about the long-term outlook.

Rich television deals ensure that profitability is locked in for the foreseeable future, and ratings are only slightly off their old Olympian standard. But the NFL currently feels very much like a league in decline—the league seems in a real way to have lost interest in football, or in trying to stop the league’s broader skid. There are and will always be bad teams, but the NFL in 2017 is remarkable for the number of teams that appear not even to be trying to compete. This includes not just teams embarking on variously forward-thinking tank schemes to gain advantageous position in upcoming drafts, or the roughly equal number of teams that are plainly institutionally incompetent. The ones that stand out most dramatically are those that are plainly not trying to do anything but bump along the bottoms of their divisions and collect their share of the $39.6 billion in television revenues that the league’s thirty-two teams will divide between 2014 and 2022. (...)

It’s not quite sufficient to say that the NFL is an owners’ league. It absolutely is, in the sense that every decision the league makes is made to advance the financial interests and flatter the various vanities of the owners. But, on a more mundane level, the league’s current deemphasizing of the game of football in favor of oafish executive theater—the protean expansion of the league’s metastatic rulebook, the endless rounds of stern but vague disciplinary action that issue from the commissioner’s office—is more than the owners dictating the way that their sport is overseen and organized. It is the owners making the league more explicitly about them: not just what they want, but what they do.

From a fan’s perspective, this is a bad choice for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that the people playing football in today’s NFL are stronger and faster than any people who have ever played the game before and that the owners are interchangeable soft pink guys whiffing on high-fives in their luxury boxes. Those are the bosses, though, and so the league’s appeal to fans is increasingly less about strength than power—less about the physical geniuses tossing or catching forty-yard lasers than the proper management and, where necessary, punishment of those players. The fantasy the league sells is less about the vicarious experience of a superhuman specimen like Odell Beckham Jr. than the vicarious experience of controlling such a specimen—whether on a fantasy team or through taking a hard line in real-world salary negotiations.

It’s possible to see this collective will-to-power as part of a slick and subtle bit of anti-labor propagandizing on the part of a caste whose most deeply held ideal has always been paying players as little as possible. But it’s just as easy to see it as a simple failure of imagination by rich men who have come to believe that they are more important and more interesting than the strange, violent, astonishing game on which this is all leveraged.

by David Roth, The Ringer |  Read more:

Image: Scott Boehm/AP Photo

[ed. See also: Is This the End of the NFL?]

Alex Pishtar, Here and now #5 
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At Least They’re Not Even Pretending Anymore

I’m not much for conspiracy theories, but I’m almost convinced that every Senate Republican is secretly working for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign. They certainly seem to be doing everything possible to reinforce the image of the Republican Party as a gang of plutocrats committed to destroying what’s left of the social safety net and handing out tax cuts to the already-extremely-rich. By passing a massive corporate tax cut in the middle of the night, they’ve basically written Sanders’ presidential campaign speech for him: “The Republican Party says they stand for ordinary Americans, but the only significant piece of legislation they have passed has been a massive tax giveaway to large corporations. They don’t care about you, they care about CEOs, billionaires, and billionaire CEOs.”

What’s refreshing about the tax bill is that Republicans are now barely even pretending that they care about anything beyond making rich people richer. Usually, they make at least some effort to convince the public that their policies come from a Very Serious Concern About Deficits or are Just Basic Economics. No longer: politicians who have spent a lifetime crowing about how government spending is out of control and the deficit is too high have just voted overnight to add a trillion dollars to it. The nice thing about this is that nobody ever again needs to listen to the Republicans when they insist that they oppose social spending because of Principles of Fiscal Responsibility. (Except Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, the only Republicanto actually consistently uphold his anti-deficit principles by voting no on the tax bill. Bob Corker still gets to talk about Fiscal Responsibility without being instantly laughed out of the room. But none of the others.)

And as for Basic Economics, turns out Republicans don’t care about that either. The economic arguments for the tax giveaway are so thin that it barely even seems as if the party is trying to persuade anyone. Larry Kudlow at the National Review wrote about 600 words, declaring without citing any actual economic research that the bill would benefit everyone, “will generate way more growth and investment than mainstream forecasters suggest,” and that everyone who said it wouldn’t was delusional. (Side note: I had always assumed because he is a prominent economics commentator that Kudlow was an actual academic economist, but it turns out he dropped out of his master’s program and doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree in the subject.)

There was only the barest effort to suggest that professional economists thought this was a good idea; a Republican list of “economists” who endorsed the plan included an ex-felon, an office assistant, and person who may not even actually exist. Actual economist Brad DeLong—certainly no socialist—was so appalled at the self-contradictory misrepresentations of the few mainstream economists willing to sign onto the plan that he believed the entire profession’s integrity was threatened. A selection of several dozen of the world’s top economists, surveyed by the University of Chicago, were almost unanimous in their conclusion that Republicans’ claims about how the tax cuts would affect both deficits and economic growth were either unproven or false.

Republicans haven’t even tried to explain the mechanism by which the economic growth they promise would be dispersed to workers. Corporations are, to their credit, not saying they’re going to pass on the benefits to their lowest-paid employees, but are just openly salivating at the windfall profits they’ll enjoy. Every aspect of the Republican tax giveaway (which for some reason even staunch critics annoyingly continue to call “reform”), from its being rammed through with indecipherable handwritten changes in the middle of the night to its screwing over of graduate students, makes it look more like an open act of class warfare by the rich. Republicans have the votes in Congress to do as they please, so there is no longer any need to provide justifications for their actions. Nobody can stop them, so they can be as openly sinister and greedy as they please, punishing low-income people and rewarding the rich. (That “refreshing honesty” is kind of the paradox of Donald Trump himself: though he’s obviously an extremely dishonest person, he doesn’t really try to disguise the fact that he’s a selfish narcissistic plutocrat who cares solely about other plutocrats. It’s helpful to the left to have Republican economic policy represented by loathsome French monarch types like Steve Mnuchin and Louise Linton.)

Unfortunately, since Democrats have almost no political power, there’s nothing they can actually do to stop this. And since they don’t really have effective grassroots organizations, they can’t really mobilize popular protest either. The only good news is that by choosing to spend their time and energy doing nothing more than handing money to the upper middle class and rich, and thereby worsening the government’s financial situation in ways that will provide a ready excuse for cutting social services down the road, Republicans are making it easier and easier for Democrats to mount successful challenges to them in 2018 and 2020. When people see their insurance premiums balloon, and see America’s catastrophic inequality get even worse, the tax bill will make it quite easy to point to a culprit. The nice thing about Republicans controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency, to the extent that “nice” can ever be the right word, is that everything that happens now is on one party’s shoulders.

The only question is whether Democrats will successfully be able to take advantage of this opportunity. Past experience suggests that they’ll stumble: they’re not very good at formulating successful economic messages, because of the uncomfortable fact that they, too, are ultimately a party of the rich. It’s somewhat frustrating that party leaders didn’t do more to mobilize the public around the tax bill, the way they did on ObamaCare. Perhaps they reason that if it passes, the Republicans will seal their own electoral fate. But “allowing others to make things worse so that you can make them better” often doesn’t work out the way you expect it to (see, e.g., the Democrats who encouraged Republicans to nominate Trump). In a class war, you need to be fighting at every moment. (And make no mistake, this is a war by the rich against the poor.)

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The End of the Social Era Can't Come Soon Enough

Many people imagine 19th-century antebellum America as a frontier fantasia: men with handlebar mustaches sitting in dusty saloons, kicking back moonshine whiskey, as a piano player picks out tunes in the background. In reality, though, life was a little more sordid: Americans spent their time after work in fully legal heroin dens; in 1885, opium and cocaine were even given to children to help with teething. “Cocaine Toothache Drops,” which were marketed as presenting an “instantaneous cure” were sold for 15 cents a box. Today, in the midst of our opioid crisis, we hear about this past and wonder unequivocally, what the hell were they thinking?

I often wonder the same thing when I think about social media and its current domination of our society. Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide? Indeed, some of the people who gave us these platforms are already beginning to wonder if this is the case. Last month, I wrote a piece detailing how some early Facebook employees now feel about the monster they have created. As one early Facebook employee told me, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.”

After the piece published, I expected to receive angry e-mails and text messages from current or former Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram employees. Instead, my inbox was flooded with former (and even current!) employees of these social networks, who confided that they felt the same way. Some even mentioned they had abandoned the platforms themselves. The people who reached out ranged in pay grade from engineers to C-suite executives. Some venture capitalists who once funded the companies, or their competitors, have told me that they no longer use them—or do so sparingly. After witnessing Trump’s use of social networks, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures wrote last month that he had deleted Facebook and Twitter from his phone. “This has really had a massive improvement on every day of my life in ways I can’t describe unless you try it yourself,” he wrote. This squares with the countless journalists who have told me they have deleted their accounts, removed the apps from their phone, or simply walked away from the world of social media.

When I noticed one religiously Twitter-loving V.C. had become dormant on the platform, I e-mailed him to ask if he was O.K. His response: “Having a hard time imagining why I would come back [to Twitter]. Feels like an addictive, inflammatory disease that I have kicked, much to my immune system’s pleasure.” As my colleague Maya Kosoff wrote this week, the social-media boom, powered by the growth of mobile computing, is over. “Whether the tech industry can move beyond mining our social anxieties to sell ads, or feeding our anger to increase engagement, may require renegotiating a new relationship between the Bay Area and the rest of the country,” she aptly pointed out. It is a feeling that, ironically, coexists in certain quadrants of the Bay Area and the rest of the country.

I for one, am part of that group now (and have been for months). I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and Snap from my phone. I now log onto Facebook once a month, if that (and it’s more for a drive-by look to make sure no one has messaged me on there, rather than to like a post or comment on a picture). I haven’t logged into Snap in a year or more. I went from sharing a picture on Instagram three times a day, to now doing so three times a year. While I still use Twitter sparingly for professional purposes, I delete the app from my phone on weekends because looking at it either makes me sad, angry, or anxious. (I can’t recall the last time I looked at social media and felt happy afterwards, or even enriched by the experience.) This might not seem like much on the surface, but this is coming from someone who loved Twitter so much that I chose to write a book about it.

Yes, it’s true that we’ve heard this all before—that people are abandoning social media, that the platforms are doomed. The New York Times has written variations on that story so many times over, it could have been a standing column in the business section of the paper. But I do believe that this time is different, the beginning of a massive shift, and I believe it’s the fault of these social networks.

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

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Salvador Dali, Spring Explosive, 1965
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Erik Brun
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Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us?

We talk a lot these days about how the United States has sorted itself into two distinct media bubbles, and all the ways in which those bubbles become self-reinforcing and reality-denying. But there is another way in which the perfect epistemic closure that characterizes this moment continues to play out. On Friday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. This moment will prove to be incredibly important, or not important at all. The importance or nonimportance of Flynn’s plea will depend on whether the law and legal conclusions continue to matter going forward, or whether they matter not at all. This is the question all of us are asking all day every day: Is the rule of law an escape hatch or a relic?

Like most people on the left, I have spent the past year putting great faith in the courts and legal institutions to act as a check on Donald Trump, maintaining this faith even as Trump fired career lawyers like James Comey and Sally Yates and replaced them with ideologues and thugs. And like most people on the left, I placed an enormous amount of confidence in Robert Mueller as the embodiment of the principle that Trump could not escape the oncoming steamroller of justice and legal liability. Even as we remained uncertain whether our political leaders were up to the task of sidelining the Trump train of destruction, we took solace in the fact that the last grown-ups in America were hard at work in the special counsel’s office. And no, they don’t spend their weekends on the golf course.

In recent weeks, and most especially in this past week, I’d begun to suspect that the forces of chaos and nihilism that stand against Mueller’s project might swallow whatever outcomes he produced. The shocking norm-and-truth defiance of the GOP tax bill, the refusal of the GOP leadership to criticize or even comprehend the enormous violence done by Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets, the president’s staggering support for the candidacy of Roy Moore, the silent Republican collusion to the seating of demonstrably unfit judges, and the virulence of the White House’s attacks on the press all contributed to a general sense that absolutely everything was broken and that Democrats had lost whatever momentum they had to halt this chaos.

In our ongoing national nightmare of creeping authoritarianism, we talk a good amount about normalization and the numbing effects of a barrage of shocking daily news. But I have also tried to be vigilant about all the ways in which magical thinking about law and lawyers—this is a nation of laws, not men, we’re told—can also numb us, and lead to a declining sense of agency or ownership.

Democrats don’t like giving up on their institutions easily, and the Mueller investigation has served as both the best and the worst manifestation of that alluring Democratic reasonableness. So long as he is working away, filing documents and convening grand juries, nobody needs to take to the streets. But as the year has progressed, it’s become clear that absolutely nothing will persuade Trump supporters and Republicans in Congress that it’s time to disavow the president—not lying, not spilling state secrets, not abject failure in crisis management, and not openly performed corruption. Given that reality, it often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?

It seems as though truth and law are forever losing ground in the footrace against open looting and overt totalitarianism. The more abjectly deranged Trump’s behavior and the more Republicans in Congress cover for him, the less likely it is that anything Mueller can magic up in his underground hall of justice will matter. Trump’s legal antagonists like to think that the next legal “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be the one that ends all this chaos. But with every passing day, as Trump escapes consequences and attacks the courts and the press, the chances that a “tick, tick, tick, boom” will be played off as #fakenews also increase.

I’ve been thinking that America is operating along two parallel legal tracks. On one track is the chug-chug of law and order, as embodied in the Mueller investigation. On the other is the daily mayhem and denialism and circus-performing of the present White House. I tend to worry that with every passing day, the circus is training us to ignore, discredit, devalue, or disbelieve what’s happening on the other track. By the time the Mueller train gets to its final station, the norms that would ordinarily lead to impeachment proceedingsmight be tiny piles of yellow legal pad–shaped cinders. And then it really would be time to take to the streets.

For the past year I’ve been trying to understand what exactly the Trump era has been training us to become. Passive, certainly. Overwhelmed and anxious and unable to focus, without a doubt. But I also wonder whether we’re being trained to abandon our steadfast belief that the rule of law will save us, or if we’re being taught to cling to the illusory protections of the law as it becomes just another on a long list of anachronisms.

In weeks like this one, when it seems the Mueller investigation is quite literally the only authority and sanity we can look to, it’s hard to tell whether the net losses outweigh the wins, or whether the massive national game of deconstruction and deflection and deception is even the littlest bit disrupted by news that the special counsel is closing in on a legal conclusion. Maybe it’s really too late in the slide toward authoritarianism for any major legal outcome to change the game. We crave nonpartisan and serious authority figures like Mueller because we believe they can guide us through. But having seen this White House shatter norms around the free press, civility, international diplomacy, and truth-telling, it almost defies belief that the line in the sand, the stopping point, is Mueller.

by Dahlia Lithwick, Slate |  Read more:

Image: AP

Google Data Center 2079
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A Historic Tax Heist

With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.

The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act.

Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars.

Because the Senate was rewriting its bill till the last minute, only the dealmakers themselves knew what the chamber voted on. There will, no doubt, be many unpleasant surprises as both houses work to pass final legislation for President Trump to sign.

The votes for the bill by Susan Collins of Maine and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona were particularly disheartening. Ms. Collins, who helped sink an effort to effectively repeal the A.C.A. in September, blithely voted for a tax bill that will leave a gaping hole in that law by repealing its requirement that most people have insurance or pay a penalty. She traded away her vote for an inadequate deduction for property taxes and empty promises from Mr. Trump and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, that they would help shore up the A.C.A., which they have repeatedly tried to sabotage. Mr. McCain, who previously voted against tax cuts in the Bush era because they were heavily tilted in favor of the rich rather than the middle class, seemed unconcerned that this bill was even worse in that regard. Then there is Mr. Flake, who has spoken powerfully against Mr. Trump and who is not seeking re-election. He folded on the basis of vague assurances about protecting the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

Republicans offered one fantasy after another to make the case for their budget-busting tax cuts. For example, the White House has said that cutting the corporate tax to 20 percent from 35 percent will lead to a boom in investment and wages — an argument disputed by most credible economists. Almost all of those extra profits will enrich senior executives and shareholders, experts say. This week, The Times reported that despite the repeated claims of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, his department never produced an analysis that backs up the administration’s assertion that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. It is not hard to see why. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and other experts say that the bill would not come close to paying for itself.

For his part, Mr. Trump has repeatedly asserted with a straight face that the tax bill would hurt him. In fact, it will give him and his family a windfall. That’s because the Senate bill will provide a generous tax break for income that people earn through limited liability corporations, partnerships and other so-called pass-through businesses that do not pay taxes before passing on profits to owners. Under the Senate bill, the president will be able to claim a 23 percent deduction on profits he earns through his more than 500 pass-through businesses.

You can expect the lies to become even more brazen as Republicans seek to defend this terrible bill. But no amount of prevarication can change the fact that Congress and Mr. Trump are giving a giant gift to their donors and sticking the rest of the country with the tab.

by The Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

[ed. I'm so pissed I can barely see straight. A massive giveaway to corporations and the rich by the GOP, right after publication of the Paradise Papers. I wonder how businesses (other than Defense contractors) will find enough consumers to buy their products when no one has any money anymore? See also: What will feature in the final version of the Republican tax plan? and After Taxes, G.O.P. May Seek Cuts to Social Safety Nets.  ]

The Dog

The sign on the gate says “Chien méchant,” and the dog is certainly méchant. Every time she passes by he hurls himself against the gate, howling with desire to get at her and tear her to pieces. He is a big dog, a serious dog, some sort of German shepherd or Rottweiler (she knows little about dog breeds). From his yellow eyes she feels hatred of the purest kind shining upon her.

Afterward, when the house with the chien méchant is behind her, she ruminates on that hatred. She knows it is not personal: whoever approaches the gate, whoever walks or cycles past, will be at the receiving end of it. But how deeply is the hatred felt? Is it like an electric current, switched on when an object is sighted and switched off when the object has receded around the corner? Do spasms of hatred continue to shake the dog when he is alone again, or does the rage suddenly abate, and does he return to a state of tranquillity?

She cycles past the house twice every weekday, once on her way to the hospital where she works, once after her shift is over. Because her transits are so regular, the dog knows when to expect her: even before she comes into view he is at the gate, panting with eagerness. Because the house is on an incline, her progress in the mornings, going uphill, is slow; in the evenings, thankfully, she can race past.

She may know nothing about dog breeds, but she has a good idea of the satisfaction the dog gets from his encounters with her. It is the satisfaction of dominating her, the satisfaction of being feared.

The dog is a male, uncut as far as she can see. Whether he knows she is a female, whether in his eyes a human being must belong to one of two genders, corresponding to the two genders of dogs, and therefore whether he feels two kinds of satisfaction at once—the satisfaction of one beast dominating another beast, the satisfaction of a male dominating a female—she has no idea.

How does the dog know that, despite her mask of indifference, she fears him? The answer: because she gives off the smell of fear, because she cannot hide it. Every time the dog comes hurtling toward her, a chill runs down her back and a pulse of odor leaves her skin, an odor that the dog picks up at once. It sends him into ecstasies of rage, this whiff of fear coming off the being on the other side of the gate.

She fears him, and he knows it. Twice a day he can look forward to it: the passage of this being who is in fear of him, who cannot mask her fear, who gives off the smell of fear as a bitch gives off the smell of sex.

She has read Augustine. Augustine says that the clearest evidence that we are fallen creatures lies in the fact that we cannot control the movements of our own bodies. Specifically, a man is unable to control the motions of his virile member. That member behaves as though possessed of a will of its own; perhaps it even behaves as though possessed by an alien will.

She thinks of Augustine as she reaches the foot of the hill on which the house sits, the house with the dog. Will she be able to control herself this time? Will she have the will power necessary to save herself from giving off the humiliating smell of fear? And each time she hears the growl deep in the dog’s throat that might be equally a growl of rage or of lust, each time she feels the thud of his body against the gate, she receives her answer: Not today.

The chien méchant is enclosed in a garden in which nothing grows but weeds. One day she gets off her bicycle, leans it against the wall of the house, knocks at the door, waits and waits, while a few metres from her the dog backs away and then hurls himself at the fence. It is eight in the morning, not a usual time for people to come knocking at one’s door. Nonetheless, at last the door opens a crack. In the dim light she discerns a face, the face of an old woman with gaunt features and slack gray hair. “Good morning,” she says in her not-bad French. “May I speak to you for a moment?”

by J.M. Coetzee, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Thomas Prior

The Great American Single-Family Home Problem

The house at 1310 Haskell Street does not look worthy of a bitter neighborhood war. The roof is rotting, the paint is chipping, and while the lot is long and spacious, the backyard has little beyond overgrown weeds and a garage sprouting moss.

The owner was known for hoarding junk and feeding cats, and when she died three years ago the neighbors assumed that whoever bought the house would be doing a lot of work. But when the buyer turned out to be a developer, and when that developer floated a proposal to raze the building and replace it with a trio of small homes, the neighborhood erupted in protest.

Most of the complaints were what you might hear about any development. People thought the homes would be too tall and fretted that more residents would mean fewer parking spots.

Other objections were particular to Berkeley — like a zoning board member’s complaint that shadows from the homes might hurt the supply of locally grown food.

Whatever the specifics, what is happening in Berkeley may be coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Around the country, many fast-growing metropolitan areas are facing a brutal shortage of affordable places to live, leading to gentrification, homelessness, even disease. As cities struggle to keep up with demand, they have remade their skylines with condominium and apartment towers — but single-family neighborhoods, where low-density living is treated as sacrosanct, have rarely been part of the equation.

If cities are going to tackle their affordable housing problems, economists say, that is going to have to change. But how do you build up when neighbors want down?

“It’s an enormous problem, and it impacts the very course of America’s future,” said Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard who studies cities.

Even though the Haskell Street project required no alterations to Berkeley’s zoning code, it took the developer two years and as many lawsuits to get approval. He plans to start building next year. The odyssey has become a case study in how California dug itself into a vast housing shortage — a downside, in part, of a thriving economy — and why the State Legislature is taking power from local governments to solve it. (...)

From the windows of a San Francisco skyscraper, the Bay Area looks as if it’s having a housing boom. There are cranes around downtown and rising glass and steel condominiums. In the San Francisco metropolitan area, housing megaprojects — buildings with 50 or more units — account for a quarter of the new housing supply, up from roughly half that level in the previous two decades, according to census data compiled by BuildZoom, a San Francisco company that helps homeowners find contractors.

The problem is that smaller and generally more affordable quarters like duplexes and small apartment buildings, where young families get their start, are being built at a slower rate. Such projects hold vast potential to provide lots of housing — and reduce sprawl — by adding density to the rings of neighborhoods that sit close to job centers but remain dominated by larger lots and single-family homes.

Neighborhoods in which single-family homes make up 90 percent of the housing stock account for a little over half the land mass in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, according to Issi Romem, BuildZoom’s chief economist. There are similar or higher percentages in virtually every American city, making these neighborhoods an obvious place to tackle the affordable-housing problem.

“Single-family neighborhoods are where the opportunity is, but building there is taboo,” Mr. Romem said. As long as single-family-homeowners are loath to add more housing on their blocks, he said, the economic logic will always be undone by local politics. (...)
Kurt’s Tomatoes

The 1300 block of Haskell Street sits in a kind of transition zone between the taller buildings in downtown Berkeley and the low-rise homes scattered through the eastern hills. The neighborhood has a number of single-family homes, and the street is quiet and quasi-suburban, but there are also apartment buildings and backyard cottages that nod to the city’s denser core.

A little under three years ago, a contractor named Christian Szilagy bought the property and presented the city with a proposal to demolish the house and replace it with three skinny and rectangular homes that would extend through the lot. Each would have one parking spot, a garden and about 1,500 square feet of living space.

The neighbors hated it. The public discussion began when Matthew Baran, the project architect, convened a meeting with 20 or so neighbors in the home’s backyard. A mediator joined him and later filed a three-sentence report to the city: “The applicant described the project. Not a single neighbor had anything positive to say about it. No further meetings were scheduled.”

On paper, at least, there was nothing wrong with the proposal. The city’s zoning code designates the area as “R2-A,” or a mixed-density area with apartments as well as houses.

Berkeley’s planning staff recommended approval. But as neighbors wrote letters, called the city and showed up at meetings holding signs that said “Protect Our Community” and “Reject 1310 Haskell Permit!,” the project quickly became politicized.

One focal point was Kurt Caudle’s garden. Mr. Caudle is a brewpub manager who lives in a small house on the back side of Ms. Trew’s property (that lot has two homes, or one fewer than was proposed next door). Just outside his back door sits an oasis from the city: a quiet garden where he has a small Buddha statue and grows tomatoes, squash and greens in raised beds that he built.

In letters and at city meetings, Mr. Caudle complained that the homes would obstruct sunlight and imperil the garden “on which I and my neighbors depend for food.” Sophie Hahn, a member of the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board who now sits on the City Council, was sympathetic.

“When you completely shadow all of the open space,” Ms. Hahn said during a hearing, “you really impact the ability for anybody to possibly grow food in this community.”

On paper, at least, there was nothing wrong with the proposal. The city’s zoning code designates the area as “R2-A,” or a mixed-density area with apartments as well as houses.

Berkeley’s planning staff recommended approval. But as neighbors wrote letters, called the city and showed up at meetings holding signs that said “Protect Our Community” and “Reject 1310 Haskell Permit!,” the project quickly became politicized.

One focal point was Kurt Caudle’s garden. Mr. Caudle is a brewpub manager who lives in a small house on the back side of Ms. Trew’s property (that lot has two homes, or one fewer than was proposed next door). Just outside his back door sits an oasis from the city: a quiet garden where he has a small Buddha statue and grows tomatoes, squash and greens in raised beds that he built.

In letters and at city meetings, Mr. Caudle complained that the homes would obstruct sunlight and imperil the garden “on which I and my neighbors depend for food.” Sophie Hahn, a member of the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board who now sits on the City Council, was sympathetic.

“When you completely shadow all of the open space,” Ms. Hahn said during a hearing, “you really impact the ability for anybody to possibly grow food in this community.”

The proposed homes are not that. They are estimated to sell for around $1 million. But this is an illustration of the economist’s argument that more housing will lower prices. The cost of a rehabilitated single-family home in the area — which is what many of the neighbors preferred to see on the lot — runs to $1.4 million or more.

Even so, economics is not politics. The argument that quiet, low-slung neighborhoods have to change to keep everyone from being priced out is never going to be a political winner. When the Haskell Street proposal came up for a vote, Jesse Arreguin, who was then a city councilman but is now the mayor of Berkeley, gave a “no” vote that sounded like a campaign speech.

“This issue is bigger than Haskell Street,” Mr. Arreguin said. “This project sets a precedent for what I believe is out-of-scale development that will compromise the quality of life and character of our neighborhoods throughout the city of Berkeley.”

The city’s denial won applause from the crowd. It also drew a lawsuit.

by Conor Dougherty, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Baran Studio Architecture
[ed. Hawaii approached the problem a little differently by passing a law that allowed Ohana (family) Dwellings to be built on existing residential lots. There were some good results, but many abuses too. Now the program seems to be morphing into something else.]

How Does It Feel to Die in a Tsunami?

Everyone who experienced the tsunami saw, heard, and smelled something subtly different. Much depended upon where you were, and the obstacles that the water had to overcome to reach you. Some described a waterfall, cascading over seawall and embankment. For others, it was a fast-rising flood between houses, deceptively slight at first, tugging trippingly at the feet and ankles, but quickly sucking and battering at legs and chests and shoulders. In color, it was described as brown, gray, black, white. The one thing it did not resemble in the least was a conventional ocean wave, the wave from the famous woodblock print by Hokusai: blue-green and cresting elegantly in tentacles of foam. The tsunami was a thing of a different order, darker, stranger, massively more powerful and violent, without kindness or cruelty, beauty or ugliness, wholly alien. It was the sea coming onto land, the ocean itself picking up its feet and charging at you with a roar in its throat.

It stank of brine, mud, and seaweed. Most disturbing of all were the sounds it generated as it collided with, and digested, the stuff of the human world: the crunch and squeal of wood and concrete, metal and tile. In places, a mysterious dust billowed above it, like the cloud of pulverized matter that floats above a demolished building. It was as if neighborhoods, villages, whole towns were being placed inside the jaws of a giant compressor and crushed.

From the hillside where they had narrowly escaped to safety, Waichi Nagano and his wife, Hideko, could see the whole scene spread out below them, as the water swept in pulsing surges over the embankment and across the village and the fields. “It was a huge black mountain of water that came on all at once and destroyed the houses,” he said. “It was like a solid thing. And there was this strange sound, difficult to describe. It wasn’t like the sound of the sea. It was more like the roaring of the earth, mixed with a kind of crumpling, groaning noise, which was the houses breaking up.”

There was another, fainter noise. “It was the voices of children,” said Hideko. “They were crying out—‘Help! Help!’” On the hill above, where he had half climbed, half floated to safety, Kazuo Takahashi heard them too. “I heard children,” he said. “But the water was swirling around, there was the crunching sound of the wave and the rubble, and their voices became weaker and weaker.”

How does it feel to die in a tsunami? What are the thoughts and sensations of someone in those final moments? Everyone who contemplated the disaster asked themselves these questions; the mind fluttered about them like an insect around a flame. One day I mentioned it, hesitatingly, to a local man. “Do you really want to know the answer to that question?” he asked. “Because I have a friend who can tell you.”

He arranged the meeting for the following evening. His friend’s name was Teruo Konno and, like Toshinobu Oikawa, he worked in the branch office of the Ishinomaki city hall. Oikawa was the model of the local bureaucrat: quiet, patient, dogged. But Konno was an imaginative and restless character. As a boy, he had dreamed of leaving Tohoku and traveling the world. His parents, seeking to quell this impulse, had discouraged him from going to university, and Konno had spent his life in the place where he grew up, and his career in local government. In March 2011, he had been deputy head of the local development section, responsible, among other things, for “disaster countermeasures.” Few people were more knowledgeable about the menace of earthquakes and their particular threat to the Kitakami area. “Our assumption was that there would be another big quake,” Konno said. “There hadn’t been a tsunami since the 1896 and 1933 quakes, so we expected that too.” There was no doubt that the small village where the town office was located, situated at the mouth of the river, two and a half miles downstream of Kamaya, would be in its path. Konno and his colleagues bent their efforts to ensuring that they would ride it out.

The two-story branch office had been built on a rise fifteen feet above sea level, and its ground floor had been elevated a further ten feet above that. Essential utilities, such as electricity and communications, had been installed on the uppermost floor. On the wall was a digital readout that recorded the intensity of tremors as they occurred. As recently as the previous August, the city government had conducted a drill in which police, fire brigade, and local officials acted out their roles in case of an earthquake and tsunami.

When the moment finally arrived, Konno experienced it with the calm detachment of a disaster professional.

“It came in three stages,” he told me. “When the shaking first began it was strong but slow. I looked at the monitor. It showed an intensity of upper five, and I knew that this was it.” Even as the rocking continued, he was calling to his staff to make a public announcement: a tsunami warning, he knew, would soon be issued. “But the shaking went on,” Konno said. “It got stronger and stronger. The PC screens and piles of documents were all falling off the desks. And then in the third stage, it became worse still.” Konno gripped his desk amid a tumult of competing sounds.

Pieces of office furniture were rattling and colliding as they shunted across the room. Filing cabinets were disgorging their files. Now he looked up again at the wall-mounted readout of seismic intensity: it displayed only an error message. Then, gradually, like the slowing of a beating heart, the shaking and the panic eased, and the employees of the Ishinomaki Kitakami General Branch Office sprang to their appointed tasks.

The emergency generator rumbled into life, the toppled television was lifted off the floor and reconnected, and the tsunami warning was relayed through the municipal loudspeakers. Oikawa and his men were dispatched to those communities where the loudspeakers had failed. Just as had been planned, representatives of the police and the fire brigade relocated to the town branch office. “Everything functioned very well,” Konno said. “No one was hurt, everyone was calm, and there was only slight damage to the building. We had drilled for this. Everyone knew who should do what, and what to do next.”

Soon there were fifty-seven people in the branch office. Thirty-one of them were locals who had evacuated from more vulnerable premises to the safety of the strong, modern building. They included six children from a nearby school, the counterpart of Okawa Elementary School on the north side of the river, as well as eight old people from the local day-care center. Three of them were in wheelchairs; four more were carried in on stretchers. Volunteers sprang forward to help them safely and comfortably up to the sanctuary of the second floor.

At 3:14 pm, the estimated height of the imminent tsunami was revised from 20 feet to 33 feet. But at some point the backup electricity generator failed, and Konno and his colleagues never received this information. It would have made no difference anyway.

The building, mounted on its elevation, faced inland, with its back to the river and its front entrance facing the hills over the small village below. From his window, the only water Konno could see was a sluggish brown stream, little more than a drain, which trickled into the Kitakami. “That was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “The water in the creek had become white. It was churning and frothing, and it was flowing the wrong way. Then it was overflowing, and there was more water coming in from the river behind, and it was surrounding the houses. I saw the post-office building, lifting up and turning over in the water. Some of the houses were being crushed, but some of them were lifting up and floating.” The destruction was accompanied by that mysterious noise. “I never heard anything like it,” Konno said. “It was partly the rushing of the water, but also the sound of timber, twisting and tearing.” In the space of five minutes, the entire community of 80 houses had been physically uprooted and thrust, bobbing, against the barrier of the hills.

by Richard Lloyd Parry, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Koichi Sato
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Big Money Rules

I grew up in the 1950s, an era when many believed that our society would inevitably progress toward ever greater economic equality. Desperate poverty would recede, it was assumed, as new federal programs addressed the needs of those at the very bottom of the ladder and as economic growth created new jobs. The average CEO at the time earned only twenty times as much as the average worker, and during the Eisenhower administration the marginal tax rate for the highest earners was 91 percent. Today, the goal of equality appears to be receding. The top marginal tax rate is only 39 percent, far below what it was during the Eisenhower years, and most Republicans would like to lower it even more. Employers now make 271 times as much as the average worker, and half the children in American schools are officially classified by the federal government as low-income and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Union membership peaked in the mid-1950s and has declined ever since; the largest unions today are in the public sector and only about 7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union.

Despite these alarming developments, however, politicians who support the deregulation of business and champion pro-employer legislation—from state legislators to members of Congress—have a firm electoral foothold in most states. During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump promised to support basic government services like Medicare and pledged to bring back jobs that had been outsourced to other nations. However, once he was president, Trump endorsed health care bills that would have left millions of low- and lower-middle-income Americans without health insurance, and his insistence on reducing corporate tax rates suggests his determination to act in the interest of wealthy elites.

Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American politics today. Why do people of modest means who depend on government-funded health care and Social Security or other supplements to their income continue to vote for candidates who promise to privatize or get rid of those very programs? Why do people who are poor vote for politicians who promise to cut corporate taxes? (...)

At the center of Democracy in Chains is the work of the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan, who died in 2013. Buchanan is associated with the doctrine of economic libertarianism: he is widely credited as one of the founding fathers of the “public choice” model of economics, which argues that bureaucrats and public officials serve their own interests as much as or more than the public interest, and he was the leading figure in the Virginia School of economic thought. He trained many economists who came to share his libertarian views, and his acolytes have protested MacLean’s view that he had “a formative role” in the evolution of an antidemocratic “strand of the radical right.”(...)

In MacLean’s account, Buchanan was responding to the threats that democratic institutions posed to the preservation of wealth in America. Early American democracy had limited this threat by confining the franchise to white male property owners. But as voting rights were extended, the nation’s elites had to reckon with the growing power of formerly disenfranchised voters, who could be expected to support ever more expensive government programs to benefit themselves and ever more extensive ways to redistribute wealth. MacLean asserts that Buchanan supplied his benefactors with arguments to persuade the American public to go along with policies that protect wealth and eschew federal programs reliant on progressive taxation.

If everyone is motivated by self-interest, he argued, government can’t be trusted to do what it promises. Indeed, it cannot be trusted at all. Bureaucrats can be expected to protect their turf, not the public interest. Every politician, Buchanan wrote, “can be viewed as proposing and attempting to enact a combination of expenditure programs and financing schemes that will secure him the support of a majority of the electorate.” For Buchanan, this was reason enough to endorse economic liberty, freedom from taxes, and privatization of public services, such as schools, Social Security, and Medicare. In MacLean’s view, those proposals promised a return to

the kind of political economy that prevailed in America at the opening of the twentieth century, when the mass disenfranchisement of voters and the legal treatment of labor unions as illegitimate enabled large corporations and wealthy individuals to dominate Congress and most state governments alike, and to feel secure that the nation’s courts would not interfere with their reign.

Charles Koch well understood the power of academic experts, and he directed millions of dollars toward developing what are now called “thought leaders” to defend his self-interested political and economic vision. Buchanan was one of those academics. Koch bypassed Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys,” MacLean writes, because “they sought ‘to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.’” Instead, in the early 1970s, he funded the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, designed to advocate for what MacLean summarizes as “the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution—and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.” Koch also funded the libertarian Reason Foundation, which advocated for privatizing all government functions. Another Koch-backed organization, the Liberty Fund, hired Buchanan to run summer conferences for young social scientists.

Buchanan’s challenge was to develop a strategy that would enlist the public’s support for the ideas he shared with Charles Koch. This challenge was especially daunting in the case of Social Security. Overwhelming majorities of Americans supported Social Security because it ensured that they would not be impoverished in their old age. In an influential 1983 paper, Buchanan marveled that there was “no widespread support for basic structural reform” of Social Security “among any membership group” in the American political constituency—“among the old or the young, the black, the brown, or the white, the female or the male, the rich or the poor, the Frost Belt or the Sun Belt.” Pinochet’s Chile—which Buchanan visited for a week in May 1980 to give what MacLean calls “in-person guidance” to the regime’s minister of finance, Sergio de Castro—had privatized its social security system, and libertarians hoped to do the same in the United States. We now know that the privatization of social security in Chile was a disaster for many, but the libertarians were unshakable in their enthusiasm for market solutions and ignored the risks.

Buchanan laid out the strategy needed to divide the political coalition that supported Social Security. The first step was to insist that Social Security was not viable, that it was a “Ponzi scheme.” If “people can be led to think that they personally have no legitimate claim against the system on retirement,” he wrote in a paper for the Cato Institute, it will “make abandonment of the system look more attractive.” Then those currently receiving benefits must be reassured that nothing will change for them. “Their benefits,” as MacLean puts it, “would not be cut.” Taxpayers, in turn, would have to be promised, as Buchanan says, “that the burden of bailing out would not be allowed to fall disproportionately on the particular generation that would pay taxes immediately after the institutional reform takes place.” Cultivating these expectations would not only make taxpayers more ready to abandon the system; it would also build resentment among those who expect never to get payments comparable to those receiving the initial bailout.

After they announce the insolvency of Social Security, Buchanan argued, the system’s critics should “propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes,” which would, MacLean writes, “irritate recipients at all income levels, but particularly those who are just on the wrong side of the cutoff and now would have to pay more and work longer.” Calls for protecting Social Security with progressive taxation formulas would emphasize the redistributive character of the program and isolate progressives. “To the extent that participants come to perceive the system as a complex transfer scheme between current income classes instead of strictly between generations,” Buchanan predicted, “the ‘insurance contract’ image will become tarnished” and its public support will be compromised.

Critics of MacLean claim she overstates her case because Buchanan was merely presenting both sides of the issue. But it is indisputable that Cato and other Koch-funded policy centers favor privatization of government programs like Social Security and public education. The genius of their strategy was in describing their efforts to change government programs as “reforms,” when in fact they were intended from the outset to result in their destruction. This rebranding depended on think tanks amply funded by Charles Koch, his like-minded brother David, and other ideologically friendly sponsors. Charles Koch funded the James Buchanan Center at GMU with a gift of $10 million. The libertarian philosophy funded by Koch and developed by Buchanan has close affinities with the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus of the Republican Party, which oppose federal spending on almost anything other than the military and has placed its members at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

MacLean’s argument that Buchanan knowingly engineered a strategy for the wealthy to preserve their hold on American democracy has prompted intense resistance. She has been repeatedly attacked on libertarian blogs, historical websites, and even in The Washington Post. The attacks are sometimes personal: Steve Horwitz, a libertarian economist who called MacLean’s book “a travesty of historical scholarship,” earned his degrees at GMU, where Buchanan was one of his professors. Most of her prominent critics—Michael Munger, David Bernstein, Steven Hayward, David Boaz—are libertarians; some receive funding from the Koch brothers. They accuse her of unjustly berating a legitimate area of economic inquiry and overstating the evidence against Buchanan in support of her position. Other critics have come from the political center. The political scientists Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, for instance, have argued that MacLean overstates the extent to which Buchanan and his supporters were “implementing a single master plan with fiendish efficiency.” MacLean has replied to her critics that her book demonstrates that Buchanan was part of a much larger movement.

MacLean’s reputation will no doubt survive. She has written a carefully documented book about issues that matter to the future of our democracy and established the close and sympathetic connections between Buchanan and his far-right financial patrons. However fierce they might be, her critics have been unable to refute the central message of her important book: that the ongoing abandonment of progressive taxation and the social benefits it gives most people is undergirded by a libertarian economic movement funded by wealthy corporate benefactors. The dismantling of basic government functions by the Trump administration, such as Betsy DeVos’s efforts to privatize public education, shows the continuing influence of Buchanan’s libertarian ideas.

by Diane Ravitch, NYRB |  Read more:

Image: Jill Freedman/Steven Kasher Gallery