Political issues – Page 19

For your worry list, with apologies

Raven Rock: The Story of the Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die, by Garrett Graff. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War. National Academy of Sciences Press, 1986.

Our worry lists are long. As a friend recently said in email, “…[W]e probably all have a limited capacity for despair.” This is true. But I respectfully submit that the risk of thermonuclear war ought to be (once again) on our worry lists, and on the international agenda. Many analysts are warning us that the risks of thermonuclear war are growing.

Just yesterday, Politico carried a piece by Sam Nunn and Ernest J. Moniz, The U.S. and Russia Are Sleepwalking Toward Nuclear Disaster.

For more detail from a higher altitude, consider this New Yorker piece from last year: The Growing Dangers of the Nuclear Arms Race.

In December 2018, Russia said that it has successfully tested a new hypersonic weapons-delivery missile that flies 27 times faster than the speed of sound. Such a missile would render current defenses useless. The United States is working on hypersonic missiles, but Russia seems to be in the lead on this.

Two days ago, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. is withdrawing from a 1987 treaty on nuclear forces. Yesterday, Russia’s President Putin said that Russia also is withdrawing from the treaty. Today, the story about the treaty is still on the opening page of the Washington Post’s web site, but Trump’s wall is played much higher on the page. This is a media failure as well as a potentially catastrophic failure of leadership. We are arguing about absurd political distractions such as Trump’s wall while ignoring actual existential threats such as thermonuclear war and climate disaster.

Sheer craziness is on the rise in worldwide leadership. Both Trump and Putin are anti-NATO. New nuclear weapons are coming on line, and other new weapons and delivery systems are not far off. The idea that “tactical” nuclear weapons can be deployed in limited ways is gaining advocates if not credibility. International tensions are high. Many things could go wrong.

Raven Rock is a well done history of the Cold War. It’s a miracle that we have survived this many decades without nuclear weapons being accidentally deployed. There have been many close calls.

For example, in 1979, NORAD’s computers reported that hundreds of missiles — a full-scale nuclear attack — were headed this way from Russia, aimed at a full list of American targets including military targets and cities. Underground American command-and-control facilities closed their blast doors and tried to figure out what to do, with only minutes to respond. Bombers and interceptors were scrambled. Missile silos were ordered to prepare to fire. The Strategic Air Command’s ranking officer on that shift, Colonel Billy Batson, saved civilization by doubting that the attack was real. He ordered telephone contact with the watch officer in Fort Richie, Maryland, which radar said would be one of the first places hit. They counted down the seconds until destruction. But nothing happened. SAC stood down and went to work to figure out what had happened. What had happened was that someone had put a training tape into the actual early warning system. This event helped inspire the 1983 film “WarGames” starring Matthew Broderick. There have been many other close calls.

Whatever the risks of accidental nuclear war, the risk of intentional use of nuclear weapons is increasing. Last year, the United States actually lowered the threshold for use of nuclear weapons. The use of “tactical” nuclear weapons is increasingly tempting, because of the idea that the use of nuclear weapons can be limited, without leading to all-out mutually assured destruction.

In the early decades of the Cold War, there was an effort to help the civilian population survive thermonuclear war. It was a given that millions would die, but the idea was that recovery would be quicker if enough of the population survived to restore industry, etc. Most of the effort, however, went into “continuity of government.” The government has spent untold billions of dollars on keeping enough members of the government alive to support ongoing constitutional government. Who would argue that this is not necessary? Of course it is necessary. But, since the 1980s and 1990s, we ordinary people have been on our own. We can’t even expect a warning anymore, let alone protection. Resources simply don’t exist to support the population after widespread catastrophe.

The American “continuity of government” system was brutally tested during 9/11. Raven Rock has an excellent chapter on 9/11. For hours, the administration and the military hardly knew what was going on. They were watching television like the rest of us. We failed that test. If improvements in “continuity of government” have been made with the billions of dollars that have been spent since then, there is one thing we can still be sure of: We ordinary people will still be on our own.

What should we do? I have no idea. But awareness is surely a start. And pulling a delusional administration back toward reality is the first thing on the list.

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War is not a book that most people will want to read cover to cover. I certainly didn’t. It’s more of a reference. The book is a collection of papers from a conference that was held at Stanford University in 1985. A list of the titles of some of the chapters should underscore just how scared we ought to be, even though our capacity for despair is overloaded:

Possible Fatalities from Superfires Following Nuclear Attacks in or near Urban Areas

A Review of the Physics of Large Urban Fires

Nuclear Famine: The Indirect Effects of Nuclear War

Nuclear Winter: The State of the Science

Possible Toxic Environments Following a Nuclear War

Radioactive Fallout

Acute Radiation Mortality in Nuclear War

Burn and Blast Casualties: Triage in Nuclear War

Psychological Consequences of Disaster

Expected Incidence of Cancer Following Nuclear War

Genetic Consequences of Nuclear War

Sources of Human Instability in the Handling of Nuclear Weapons

Here’s a short quote from the chapter on nuclear famine:

“The consensus that developed was stark: the indirect effects of large-scale nuclear war would probably be far more consequential than the direct effects; and the primary mechanism for human fatalities would likely not be from blast effects, not from thermal radiation burns, and not from ionizing radiation, but, rather, from mass starvation.”

I apologize for this disturbing distraction. Now let’s all go turn on our televisions and catch up on the engaging media drama of what’s new with Trump’s wall.

Update: Yesterday in the New Yorker:

Can Elizabeth Warren and Adam Smith, Defying Trump, Persuade Americans to Get Serious About Nuclear-Arms Control?

It’s inevitable

The March cover story of The Atlantic probably marks a turning point in the long process of bringing Donald Trump to justice. The Atlantic is a centrist publication that often speaks for Washington’s centrist think-tank establishment. This article makes it official: the centrist Washington establishment is done with Trump. They now understand what he has done.

Here’s a link to the article, which is magisterial: Impeach Donald Trump.

February 7 probably is the day when most Americans, who are very busy and distracted, will begin to pay attention. That’s the day Michael Cohen (Trump’s “fixer” and former attorney) starts his testimony to the House Oversight Committee. On February 8, Matthew Whitaker (Trump’s acting attorney general) will testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

My view, based of course only on dot-connecting and following bread crumbs, is that Washington already knows what has to happen — that Trump must leave office. It took time to collect the evidence and to build the legal case. It appears that Robert Mueller is almost done with that. The next step, then, is to inform the American people and to prepare the American people for what is going to happen. That preparation process is now beginning. It seems highly likely that yesterday’s reports that Trump instructed Cohen to lie under oath to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project (that alone would be grounds for impeachment) is a part of the preparation process. What the American people are going to learn from Cohen’s testimony on February 7 is going to be shocking. As Yoni Appelbaum points out in the Atlantic article, once Trump’s crimes start being described in day after day of public testimony in Congress, Trump (and Fox News) will have no chance of controlling the narrative. Instead, the narrative will be about the FBI’s evidence and congressional testimony under oath.

Rethinking the unthinkable

Those of you who recognize the quote in the image above will guess the subject of this post: thermonuclear war. The quote is from the 1983 classic film “War Games” starring Matthew Broderick.

First of all, I’m not the only person with a renewed concern about nuclear weapons. It seems to be in the zeitgeist recently. For example:

• Two days ago, on Christmas day, Russia tested a new bomb-delivery missile that flies at 20 times the speed of sound. Putin gloated. The Russian people were thrilled. Here is a link to the Washington Post story, Russia is poised to add a new hypersonic nuclear warhead to its arsenal.

• The day after Russia’s missile test, Vox published a fairly detailed overview of the current state of the world’s nuclear weapons, including some quotes from experts about the global level of danger as it stands today. The article also includes some scary information on just how deadly the detonation of even one nuclear weapon would be. Here is a link to the article, This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you.

• Earlier this year, the United States released a report with the title Nuclear Posture Review 2018. The report was signed by Jim Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who recently resigned as Secretary of Defense because of his disgust with the Trump administration. The report is a slick piece of public relations. You have to read it carefully to catch the main point. That main point is that, under Trump, the United States has lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Here is a link to the report.

• The Vox story includes an anecdote from a Georgetown University professor who, for many years, has taught a course on nuclear weapons and world politics. As part of the course, he always asks students whether they think nuclear weapons will be used in their lifetime. In years past, no more than one student would raise their hand. But for the past two years, 60 percent have raised their hands. The professor agrees with them.

In this context, please take a moment to ponder the insanity of an American politics that construes the most urgent threat to the nation’s security to be the U.S. border with Mexico, a politics so depraved that it’s willing to shut down the U.S. government to get billions of dollars for a border wall. Yes, the Pentagon is spending lots of money to catch up with Russia on hypersonic missiles. But to the Trump administration, diplomacy is a dirty word, as Trump repeatedly insults our allies and sucks up to corrupt and belligerent strongmen. Trump boasts that his nuclear button is bigger than North Korea’s nuclear button. The world’s nuclear arsenal is now largely under the control of madmen.

I grew up during the Cold War. Most people concluded that elaborate shelters were not affordable or justifiable. The government at the time actually recommended the building of fallout shelters and made plans available. But, as my father used to say, what would you do when the neighbors show up and want in? Shoot them?

But I think that there probably is a sweet spot on the affordability scale. There are inexpensive things that one can do in advance that greatly improve one’s options in a sudden emergency. These include the storage of a certain amount of food and water for all types of emergencies, including weather emergencies or earthquakes. Where might that sweet spot be for thermonuclear war?

As far as I can tell, the standard handbook is still Nuclear War Survival Skills. It was originally published in 1979 by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was revised in 1986. The revised edition is available, in print, from Amazon. A PDF version is downloadable, free, from many places on the Internet. You can find it by Googling for the title.

Chapter 16 of Nuclear War Survival Skills is only two pages long. It’s a summary of “minimum pre-crisis preparations.” Most of those preparations are inexpensive, and all are based on common sense. For example, you may not make the effort to turn your basement into a fallout shelter. But why not have a plan, and why not stash some items such as tools and tarps. Did you know that stacks of books can be used for radiation shielding?

One potentially costly item that must be stashed in advance is a radiation detector. I have an old Civil Defense Geiger counter. It was made in 1963. It still works great. I bought it on eBay. Dosimeters also would be highly desirable, to track the total cumulative exposure to powerful radiation such as gamma rays. A cheap dosimeter card is available on Amazon. I can’t vouch for its quality, but I believe that the science of it is sound. I don’t want to get into the science of why iodine absorption is a problem with nuclear fallout, but having potassium iodide on hand is a good idea. It’s inexpensive and is available on Amazon.

Preparations aside, survivability would greatly depend upon one’s knowledge. Some of the needed knowledge is easy to acquire. Some of that knowledge is probably not available. For example:

• What should you do if you see extremely bright lights in the sky and suddenly the power goes out? Nuclear War Survival Skills contains these instructions: Don’t look at the light. As quickly as possible, get behind the strongest shield possible between yourself and the light. Stay there for at least two minutes. If no shock wave or explosion sounds reach you in two minutes, then you are more than 25 miles from the detonation. Congratulations. You probably will not be harmed by the effects of the blast itself. You can now come out of hiding and deal with the problem of surviving the nuclear fallout. How to survive nuclear fallout in an improvised shelter is a complicated matter, and that’s why you might want to have a printed copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills on your bookshelf. You also will want to know as much as possible about prevailing winds in your area and the location of nuclear power plants or other military targets, especially if they are upwind of you. This information is easy to acquire now. But after the power goes out, suddenly many things become much more difficult.

• Even with the 1986 revisions, the information about military targets and the capabilities of nuclear weapons is hopelessly out of date. There may be places on the Internet where one might find much of this information, with some diligent research. But all I’ve been able to find is low-quality stuff from people such as right-wing preppers, people with high levels of paranoia and low levels of knowledge. In addition to the lack of references, I’d imagine that much information is a matter of military secrecy. Should we continue to assume, as we did in 1986, that any runway long enough to land a B-52 bomber is a target? I have no idea. Are nuclear power plants still a target? I have no idea. Are major cities still a target? I have no idea. Still, those are all things that I would not want to be downwind of. The amount of fallout from a nuclear detonation greatly depends on the size of the warhead and how far above the ground it detonated. A flash of light will tell us little to nothing about those factors. We just don’t — and probably can’t — know enough to fully assess the risks, either before or after we see a flash. Would radio broadcasts provide information after a flash? Though a battery-powered radio is an essential item, my guess is that any stations that are still able to broadcast are likely to be far away, out of range of most receivers and antennas and with no information on local conditions.

Readers in Europe: Your risk calculus will be a little different that risk calculus in the U.S., but the risk to Europeans is as great, or greater, than in the U.S.

I’m not arguing here that we ought to worry ourselves to death. The Vox article, for example, says that the actual risk that a nuclear weapon (or weapons) will be used remains small. We’ve lived with nuclear weapons now for almost 75 years, and, except for once, we’ve had the good sense not to use them. Nevertheless, the world and its leadership does seem to be particularly disordered at the moment. There is still a huge investment in nuclear weaponry, with new generations of weapons coming online. The United States has lowered the threshold for the use of these weapons. There also is a chance that a rogue state or a terrorist cell will get a nuclear device.

Minimal preparation, I think, is in the same category as insurance. We all spend relatively minor sums on insurance to protect ourselves against major losses. As far as I know, every major business has a disaster plan, prepared in advance and kept up to date. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, where earthquakes are a constant threat, we always had a disaster plan, with backup production sites that were equipped and ready, so that we could continue to publish after an earthquake.

Households, I think, would do well to have a disaster plan, with an affordable level of preparations in place. It’s not just about thermonuclear war. It’s also about storms, blackouts, and epidemics, which are far more likely.

Update: From today’s Irish Times, a European take on Russia’s new missile: Bullish Putin unveils ‘invulnerable’ nuclear weapon.

Turning points in right-wing propaganda

Source: Axios. The red components were added by me and are explained below.

This morning, Axios has an optimistic piece with the headline “Trust in the media is starting to make a comeback.” The article reports on several polls and studies, including a study by the Knight Foundation released in September 2018. Axios says nothing about what was happening during the years the trust trajectory changed directions. But it’s very important that we take note of this history, because it reveals a great deal about right-wing propaganda and the degree to which people fall for it.

First, what happened in the 1970s?: A long trend toward declining trust for the media began in the 1970s. Though I have no sources to cite for this, my hunch would be that a major cause of distrust toward the media was the oil crisis of the 1970s. The line starts downward around 1976. At that time, gasoline costs were rising sharply, and a recession had just ended. People were badly stressed by “stagflation” and the cost of gasoline. People began to doubt (rightly so) whether they were being told the truth about inflation and oil. Gerald Ford, who was president from 1974 to 1977, did not inspire much confidence, nor did Jimmy Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981. Then came Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), who lied freely and often and who took great delight in dividing the country and demonizing the opposition. It was Reagan who began teaching angry, ignorant old white people that government was the problem, not the solution. Reagan was followed by the feckless George H.W. Bush (1989-1993).

In 1995, the utterly vile Newt Gingrich became speaker of the U.S House of Representatives. Gingrich left no doubt: Republicans hate government and find government useful only insofar as government controls war and taxation. When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the country was sharply divided, not just politically, but also intellectually (insofar as right-wingers need rational support for what goes on in their heads). Republicans by now had learned an extremely important lesson: Distrust of the government and distrust of the media are a powerful double-barrel weapon. They aimed that weapon at the American people. In 1996, Fox News was created, with the evil Roger Ailes as CEO. As David Frum has written, Republican ideology is an ideology that cannot succeed in a democracy. People just don’t want what Republicans actually want to do, so Republicans have no choice but to lie and cheat. Republicans are perfectly willing to do whatever damage to democracy is necessary to achieve right-wing objectives. They realized many years ago that an anti-government ministry of propaganda is essential to the right-wing project.

Fox News: Turning point 1, late 1990s: This is a major turning point. For the first time, the American people were faced with a powerful organization whose product was pure propaganda. The historian Christopher R. Browning has called Fox News “a privatized ministry of propaganda.” The so-called mainstream media were completely unprepared for Fox News’ ruthlessness and the sheer brazenness of its lies. Fox News has more than enough power to set an agenda and to force the responsible media to repeat and amplify that agenda. The lies are thick, fast, and repeated. Right-wing shouting heads amplify the lies’ emotional power. Most of the lies go unchallenged. While Fox News was finding propaganda to be highly profitable, the mainstream media underwent a disastrous downsizing after the Internet destroyed a critical part of its business model (classified ads). Newsrooms were confused and intimidated, terrified of losing more subscribers than they already were losing. Having worked in newsrooms all my life until I retired in 2008, I watched something terrible play out. Journalists refused to call a lie a lie. Somehow, the received wisdom in newsrooms was that he-said she-said journalism was the key to survival. Official lies were passed on with no challenge other than a quote from the opposition, as though both sides were equally valid. My view was that the only hope for journalism — and for the trustability of journalists — was to call a lie a lie. Very few journalists agreed with me. I lost the argument then. But now I believe I have been vindicated. I have even received an apology or two from journalist colleagues who now admit that they were wrong. But the damage has been done.

We were lied into the Iraq war: Turning point 2, 2004: Point number 2 on the chart above is extremely embarrassing. It shows what can happen when journalism is overwhelmed by propaganda. Notice the modest increase in the early 2000’s, as President George Bush and vice president Richard Cheney lied the country into the Iraq war, pulling the country and the media along with them. The country actually was unified for a while — in support of a war. Then there was a downdraft of trust around 2004 as people — and people in newsrooms including the New York Times — realized that they had been propagandized and deceived by the Republican Party and the neoconservatives who had taken over the party. It was May 2004 when the New York Times published its half-assed, and still shameful, apology for its coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. We must never forget Judith Miller, whose name must remain on the long list of graves to be pissed on because of the damage people like her have done to the American democracy, in their service to power and money. Few things in my life have been more terrifying than watching while not only the United States, but also our allies such as Britain, were seized with war fever. That war fever was a well-designed product of the Bush-Cheney administration and its propaganda machine. This country actually became deranged with war fever. Anyone who dared to resist was exposed to a level of demonization that was professionally and socially dangerous. I was in San Francisco at the time. Even the Left Coast newspaper where I worked, the San Francisco Chronicle, was swept up in the war fever, though our subscriber base provided the cover to resist, had we had the journalistic good sense to avoid the contagion of war fever. But the New York Times had war fever, so most other newsrooms did, too. (The McClatchy Washington bureau was a rare exception.)

You might think, if you were naive and optimistic, that a profitable war on false pretenses, sold by a corrupt Republican government and its ministry of propaganda, is the worst thing that could be enabled by a timid and insecure mainstream media culture overwhelmed by an aggressive and amoral ministry of propaganda. But you would be wrong to think that. During Barack Obama’s presidency (2009 to 2017), Fox News and the Republican Party doubled down on demonization and lies, setting the stage for what I believe is the most dangerous political event in American history: Donald Trump in the White House.

The media finally started calling a lie a lie: Turning point 3, 2016: I always hesitate to say that Donald Trump was elected to the White House, because a reasonable person can have reasonable doubt about how severely the presidential election of 2016 was corrupted not only by brilliantly focused propaganda and meddling both foreign and domestic, but also, possibly, by the hacking of state elections systems. Robert Mueller, surely, will have more to tell us on that subject. In any case, Donald Trump’s gaining the White House was like a Near Death Experience to every responsible journalist who still had a job. Suddenly newsrooms came to their senses. They saw what idiots they had been. They saw how they had been played by the right-wing media and the Republican Party. They suddenly remembered that truth, rather than trying to “balance” lies, was the standard of journalism. Subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post surged. I still wonder about the Times sometimes, but the staff of the Washington Post went to work to redeem themselves. At long last, American newspapers were able to use the word “lie.” Fully understanding in spite of his stupidity that the truth would take him down, Donald Trump, like all despots and despot wannabes, declared the media to be the enemy of the people. Only Trump was to be believed.

So the Republican Party took the White House in 2016. But they overplayed their hand, ensuring disgust and blowback not only for the Republican Party, but also for its propaganda machine. Every rational person who is halfway paying attention now knows that Trump is a criminal and a traitor and that he brought his criminal syndicate with him into the White House. When Trump is taken down, the Republican Party will go down with him. Fox News will be exposed for what it is: a propaganda machine that serves power and wealth by profitably deceiving angry old white people, many of whom don’t have a pot to piss in, partly because they lack what it takes to succeed in the modern world, and partly because they have been betrayed by the machinery of economic inequality, for which even the Democratic Party deserves a share of the blame.

What will happen next?: No one knows. But I have a lot of hope, and a lot of guesses. Some people already have gone to prison for the criminal conspiracies that got Trump into the White House. Many more will go to prison. Trump will go to prison, too, unless he can make some kind of deal for resignation that allows him to avoid prison. The Republican Party and the Republican Senate will turn on Trump when that becomes necessary to try to save the Republican Party as the Trump criminal syndicate goes down in flames. But, if there is enough justice in the world, the Republican Party will have so damaged itself that it will never win — or steal — another election. Fox News will lose credibility with everyone but the 20 percent or so of the American people who will believe anything they are told, as long as their hatreds, their fears, and the ugliness of their religion are fed. The deplorables are a minority, far too few to continue to knock the country around once the Republican Party dies, as it will die, simply because (as David Frum wrote) anything as vile as today’s Republican Party cannot survive in a democracy.

I am hardly the only one who believes that we are at a fork in history. On the right lie the Republican Party, fascism, an end to the rule of law if Trump’s criminal syndicate is allowed to remain in power, the triumph of the international oligarchy that brought Trump to power, and killing blows to the American democracy through right-wing legislatures and right-wing courts. To the left lies a lot of hard work.

This 2016 uptick in media trust is probably the most encouraging sign I’ve seen that 2016 was the trough of the right-wing war on the American democracy, a war in which the death of truth would be to them a good riddance. If the blue line on the chart above breaks the 50 percent barrier and continues to climb, then I think that the American democracy has a future. It will mean that we have begun to agree on some things again, after a long national nightmare during which right-wing tactics intentionally drove us apart and intentionally made agreement impossible. To save the Republican Party, it was necessary for evil men to dismiss those things that threaten all of us to focus politics only on the things that threaten the Republican Party and its oligarchs’ agenda. And if the American democracy has a future, then maybe, just maybe, we might actually be able to do something about the things that we agree on, once a shared reality sets the agenda. Climate change and economic inequality are at the top of the list. We also need some fixes in our democracy, to insure that liars, criminals, and oligarchs never get control again.

The yield curve and the coming Trump recession

A Facebook meme

One of the first rules of managing your money is never to give, or to accept, advice about money. I’m not giving any advice in this post. But I am suggesting that now is a good time to take a good hard look — according to one’s own lights — at the state of the U.S. (and the global) economy.

Yesterday, the yield curve on U.S. treasury bonds (2-year notes vs. 5-year notes) inverted for the first time since 2007. We all know what happened in 2008. An inverted yield curve, of all economic indicators, has proven to be as reliable a predictor of economic downturns as exists.

Here are some articles:

Bloomberg: The U.S. Yield Curve Just Inverted. That’s Huge.

Reuters: Dollar drops as U.S. Treasury yield curve inversion sparks recession fears

Forbes: The Yield Curve Just Inverted — Sort Of — And That Is A Sell Signal For Stocks

Am I blaming Trump? Not necessarily. Just as Trump gets zero credit for the past few years of economic growth, he may not get the blame for the next recession. Economic cycles and their causes don’t usually have a great deal to do with who is in the White House. But how a country responds to an economic downturn, though, is very important. Trump has plenty of room to screw up on that.

Back in the 1990s, as I got old enough to get serious about money and retirement, I did my best to study up on economics, investing, and economic cycles. I watched very carefully as the Dot-Com boom of the late 1990s turned into the enormous bubble burst of 2001. And as the housing and mortgage bubble grew during the Bush-Cheney years, I watched with horror (because I was very close to retirement). That bubble burst in 2008. But I landed on my feet without losing a nickel of my retirement money, because I knew the bust was coming.

During periods of economic growth, risk is less risky. Lots of people make money. But when an economic downturn is looming, it’s time to go defensive. Going defensive means taking a look at your investments. Is your money in the right places? Going defensive means taking a hard look at the economy, trying to figure out where the trouble spots are, and trying to figure out one’s vulnerabilities.

When big players in the stock market (often called “strong hands”) realize that the market is unsustainable and is going down, there is a huge retail effort to transfer stocks to “weak hands.” Weak hands are then forced to sell in a panic and absorb most of the losses. That’s why professional investing advice is often so corrupt. There is a famous (and possibly apocryphal) story about J.P. Morgan, who said that he knew it was time to sell his stocks when his shoeshine boy started talking about buying stocks. It’s true that the stock market is not the economy. But the economy and the stock market do tend to run on parallel tracks.

We all need our own crystal balls, because everyone’s situation is different. I’ll have more posts in the future on economic conditions. But, for the moment, I have only one point to make. That is that the warning lights are flashing that the time has come to go defensive. Thanks to globalization, we’re all in pretty much the same boat these days. Readers in Europe have plenty to think about, too, such as Brexit in the U.K., or the recent outbreak of economic discontent in France, which has forced President Macron to reverse course on fuel taxes.

As for me, I’m going to plant an extra-big garden next spring.

Update: Just after I posted this, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down almost 800 points. The media are focused on a connection to American trade with China. But I suspect that it has much more to do with investors spooked by the yield curve, as large institutions unload stocks and go defensive. The Dow may well regain most of these losses tomorrow morning, as often happens. But this kind of churning in the stock market is typical of what occurs at this point in the economic cycle.

Update 2: This advertisement appeared in my Facebook feed a day after I wrote this post. This kind of deceit is typical at this point in the economic cycle. As “strong hands” work to sell off their holdings for as high a price as possible, retail efforts intensify to sell stocks to “weak hands,” who are not aware of where we are in the economic cycle and are left holding the bag. Notice that this ad is targeted at older people, and that Facebook knows my age.

Update 3: Here is what Fox watchers are being told:

The global rot of billionaires

The list of things that make American deplorables so deplorable is very long — racism, vile religion, anti-intellectualism, appalling ignorance, love of propaganda, and tolerance for violence, to name a few. But one of the worst vices — taught by their sorry politics as well as their sorry religion — is the glorification of the rich.

Sometimes I think that the state of the world today is best understood not by looking at the competing interests and activities of states (the U.S., Russia, China, Germany, etc.), but rather by looking at the competing interests and activities of global oligarchs. Our media, out of long habit, focuses its attention on states and their doings, while the doings of oligarchs fly under the radar.

The media do report on the doings of billionaire oligarchs, but in a piecemeal way. The media ignore, or cannot see, the larger pattern of how billionaire oligarchs now have the world by the throat and have tapped the power of the state to amplify the power of their money. (See links below.)

The key to understanding Trump is to understand that the global oligarchy, with which Trump is criminally entangled, intends to loot the United States the same way they have looted (and continue to loot) Russia, China, Africa, Latin America, and many smaller states such as North Korea and the Czech Republic. The test for the United States is whether the rule of law will be able to slow this process of looting, which has been going on since the Reagan administration. There is nothing new in Trump’s politics. It’s just that Trump is more flagrant. His intent is more transparent. He is rather obviously a tool of global oligarchs, for reasons that the Mueller investigation will surely expose. The Republican Party has gone along with Trump because the Republican Party has been working for years (though with disguised intentions) to loot the American commons, to weaken the American democracy, and to hand the country over to the oligarchy. Billionaires have learned an incredible new trick: How to masquerade as populists, which the ugliness of right-wing politics and the stupidity of the deplorables have made possible.

The question is whether democracies can muster the power to rid themselves of these billionaire parasites and their corruption. The solution is easy to describe, but much harder to actually do. The solution is to use the existing power of states to put billionaires in prison when they break the law, and then to tax them into the dirt.

As for the deplorables, I’m afraid they’ll never get it. They’ll probably continue to glorify the rich who are eating them alive, while blaming dark-skinned people, whose poverty and powerlessness they are destined to increasingly share if billionaires continue to get away with looting and murder.

Here are just a few reports on the doings of global billionaires:

Czech Republic: The New York Times: Scandal Around Billionaire Prime Minister Leaves Czechs in Limbo. What Andrej Babis is doing to the Czech Republic is remarkably similar to what Donald Trump is doing to the U.S.

Venezuela: The New York Times: Jets, Horses and Bribes: How a Venezuelan Official Became a Billionaire as His Country Crumbled. This is about how an oligarch family sucked up the assets of the Venezuelan people, Russian style.

China: The Guardian: Guo Wengui, the maverick Chinese billionaire who threatens to crash Xi’s party. This is about competing billionaire oligarchs in China. China is run by billionaire oligarchs.

North Korea: The Sun: Where does billionaire Kim Jong-un get all his money to spend on luxuries such as superyachts, top quality champagne and his favourite Swiss cheese? North Korea is just one country of many that is controlled by damned-fool oligarchs.

Africa: Quartz: There may now be more billionaires in Africa than in Latin America. Competing billionaires are sucking all the wealth out of Africa, while the people of Africa are increasingly impoverished.

Russia: The Irish Times: Oligarchs and ‘unexplained wealth’: London’s rich Russians. Russia, of course, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It’s a country run by oligarchs, for oligarchs.

Saudi Arabia: The New York Times: Saudi Arabia Arrests 11 Princes, Including Billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal. There is some sort of power struggle going on among the billionaires of Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has shown that, like billionaire oligarchs everywhere, he can get away with murder.

The United States: The American Prospect: The Trump Presidency: Oligarchs, Billionaires, Corporations, and Porn Stars. To quote from the article: “But the hate is not the point of this presidency. It’s a tool for protecting the massive looting of the public commons currently under way, and most importantly, the shady network of Russian oligarchs, U.S. billionaires, Kremlin cronies, hapless lawyers, and privately held corporations that brought Donald J. Trump to power. The U.S. billionaires and privately held corporations are in it for the looting.”

The authoritarian lust for scapegoats

Transgender teenager Ally Steinfield, who was murdered last year in Missouri. Her body was mutilated and set on fire.

We live in a strange society in which a rather sad, vulnerable, harmless teenager like Ally Steinfield is seen as sick and dangerous. Whereas the people who have a mysterious need to scapegoat people like Ally Steinfield are considered normal.

It blows my mind how effectively this society programs most of its young to think so rigidly about gender and sex. After she was murdered, Ally Steinfield’s body was butchered. Her eyes were gouged out. Her genitals were stabbed. The body was set on fire. Then the remains were put into a garbage bag and hidden in a chicken coop. Four people were charged. One of them was 25, one was 24, and two were 18. And this is just one example of violence against transgender people that occurred last year. By high school age, most of our young people will have acquired thoroughly crummy educations in most things. But they will have acquired the equivalent of Ph.D.’s in this society’s notions about gender and sex.

Once again, the difference between liberal and conservative minds makes all the difference. Liberals don’t feel threatened by harmless differences. Liberals don’t feel a need to police other people’s private lives. Whereas authoritarian minds are terrified that the sky will fall if their fetishes for authority, obedience, and conformity can’t be policed, and if their scapegoating of out-groups isn’t sanctioned. This terror is so prevalent that our dominant religion is desperate to be permitted to legally discriminate. The terror is so prevalent that billionaires will put big money into lobbying for the legal authority to discriminate. For more on that, see this piece in yesterday’s New York Times, ‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.

The Republican Party, allied with fundamentalists, has retailed this sky-is-falling sex panic all the way down to the local level.

Last month at the county fair here, the Democrats’ tent was, as usual, close to the Republicans’ tent. A Republican candidate for county commissioner, accompanied by the Republican Party’s county chairwoman, were haranguing me about transgender people and bathrooms. They brought it up, not me. They are inflamed by the issue. The Republican Party has made authoritarian scapegoating into a key political wedge issue, and their preachers have made it into an urgent religious issue. I have had similar encounters many times. Nothing I’ve ever said has gotten through. A person’s sex, they will soon say, is “God given.” I ask if they’ve ever known a transgender person. They haven’t, of course. Even though they’re not aware of ever having met a transgender person, nevertheless they believe the threat is imminent, personal, and severe — the sky is falling.

There is no mistaking one’s God-given gender, authoritarians say. Apparently they have never heard of the list of birth conditions that blur physical gender. Those conditions include ambiguous genitalia and gender indicators that don’t match up (external parts, internal parts, or chromosomes). In such cases, gender is often “assigned” at birth, based on a guess. But we have learned that children — and certainly adolescents — will let us know how they experience themselves from within, regardless of how they came to be that way. Who would argue with that? Authoritarians, of course. Mere argument wouldn’t be a big deal. But authoritarians are compelled to go much farther than that — policing, scapegoating, persecution, and sometimes violence — because for some mysterious reason they feel threatened, and because their politics requires scapegoats.

Even in discussions with other liberals whose lives and identities fit comfortably inside the range regarded as normal, it’s difficult to get them to see just how strange and rigid our training in gender and sex is. It isn’t difficult to compare that training with other human societies or even with our own society’s history. We didn’t have to be this way. And there are better ways to be.

One of the things that I found striking in in Ronald Hutton’s Pagan Britain (which I recently reviewed here), is that our prehistoric ancestors in western Europe seemed to see very little difference between the sexes. To a considerable degree, this attitude can be reconstructed archeologically, from images such as cave paintings, carvings, stoneware, and metalware, and also from burial rites. Writing about relatively recent (728 to 352 B.C.) statues found in the British Isles, Hutton writes, “The one from Scotland is of alder wood, and may be female, although the sex is hardly emphasized, while that from Devon has been called male and is of oak; sexual ambiguity seems the case at Roos Carr.” Writing about much older images, from the Paleolithic, Hutton writes, “Modern Western culture has long drawn a sharp distinction between human and animal, and female and male but, in pictures at least, the Paleolithic did not.”

Historian Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Hutton writes, “… has shown how the blurring of lines between species was accompanied by an equivalent ambiguity in representing gender, and a disinclination to distinguish clearly between the human and divine. When human and animal were combined, special types of beast were chosen, namely horses, dogs, stags, and bulls, and the stag above all: indeed, its antlers were sometimes given to female human-like figures as well as male. At the least, all this plausibly suggests a spirituality which depended on a regular sense of crossing ‘natural’ boundaries and of fluidity of identity.”

Sociologists have found a similar fluidity around sex and gender in Native American (and other) societies. Sex and gender weren’t a big deal. Those who were different actually were valued for their differences, and those who were different often took on special roles that were helpful to the community. Not only that, but those who were different were often consulted for their different perspective on tribal or personal issues. It could work that way today, if only we’d listen.

Instead, our society continues to insist on stark gender boundaries, though much (such as who can wear pants, or earrings) has been renegotiated. But where renegotiation is not complete, those who are different are somehow threatening and, through some strange psychological mechanism that is somehow trained into us, arouse fear. Then there is identity, which, we are learning, is a double-edged sword that can both liberate and obstruct. The authority of authoritarians is worth a whole lot less than it used to be, as people come out of the shadows to demand fairness and to defend their right to self-respect — and to not be scapegoats. Authoritarians aren’t used to that, and they don’t like it. It used to be that gay men and lesbians were the scapegoats. But unless Trump’s new Supreme Court can overturn gay marriage and Lawrence v. Texas (authoritarians will surely try), gay men and lesbians are not nearly as vulnerable as they once were, thanks to the law. Transgender people remain vulnerable. This move by the Trump administration is an attempt to make transgender people even more vulnerable and thus to increase their value as scapegoats. Republicans don’t want another good set of scapegoats to slip away by giving them — gasp! — basic civil rights.

When authoritarians choose a scapegoat, it has to be someone vulnerable. That vulnerability needs to be not just vulnerability under the law, but also vulnerability like Ally Steinfield’s vulnerability, the vulnerability generated by social training that set her up for violence by marking her as disgusting, threatening, deserving of punishment, and weak. Just one thing alone — the fact that authoritarians rely on their lust for scapegoats to keep the sky from falling — reveals how wrong, and how wicked, they are.

Privilege and humiliation

The American people are getting some excellent — and I suspect lasting — new insights into the ugliness of unearned privilege. But unearned privilege is only half of the problem that requires fixing. The flip side of that coin is undeserved humiliation. The two things together — the increasing humiliation of the many and the also-increasing privilege of the few — are tearing the country apart.

Paul Krugman’s column today shines a light on privilege: “The Angry White Male Caucus: Trumpism is all about the fear of losing traditional privilege.” Krugman writes: “And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”

In thinking about this issue, I need to return once again to the “moral foundations” theory of Jonathan Haidt and how the world looks very different to liberals than it does to conservatives. The high value that conservatives place on authority, hierarchy and in-group values blinds conservatives to the humiliation of others while inflaming conservative rage when their privilege, their authority, and their place in the hierarchy are challenged. Whereas, to liberals, with their emphasis on fairness and caring, undeserved humiliation begs for succor, and unearned privilege cries out to be taken down a notch.

Twenty million people, I believe, watched Brett Kavanaugh’s horrifying performance on television last week. Conservatives saw a dangerous assault on their highest values of in-group power, authority, and hierarchy by a threatening rabble of inferior out-group people such as Democrats. Liberals saw how privilege responds with rage and disbelief at the notion that fairness, caring, and justice matter enough to stand in the way of entitled elite power.

It has been sickening to watch the mainstream media, because of the notion of “balance,” trapped into reporting on this spectacle as though what conservatives see is somehow just as legitimate as what liberals see. The real story is the increasing depravity of a conservative minority driven to the last ditch, struggling to use entrenched power to preserve the status quo. The Supreme Court is their last hope to preserve their world a little longer, as the political backlash against right-wing overreach — and an increasing awareness of the ugliness of right-wing intentions — builds.

If you do a little reading on the psychology of humiliation, you’ll soon come across the word revenge. When people are humiliated, they long for revenge.

But there are two kinds of humiliation. There is undeserved humiliation, such as being made to sit at the back of the bus. And there is deserved humiliation (which unfortunately is much more rare), such as the Trumpian thrashing of Brett Kavanaugh’s humiliation as he discovered that there are limits to his entitlements and that questions relating to justice (as with Trump) are questions that (at least in a nation of laws) must be answered. Kavanaugh has earned humiliation, not the revenge he wants. Justice does not contribute to the happiness of the unjust.

Once upon a time in America, humiliation was for the most part a minority experience. Humiliation was reserved for those with dark skin, and for those on the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder, and for those who would not or could not play their assigned “normal” roles. But, as far as I can tell, humiliation in the workplace is now the rule, almost regardless of the type of work or the level of income. Friends with Ph.D.’s in high-paying jobs sometimes tell me shocking stories of humiliation, powerlessness, and abuse by employers. This workplace humiliation, of course, started with those with more modest educations in more modest jobs. But the culture of humiliation has steadily worked its way upward and outward. Merely being white and playing by the rules is no longer enough to guarantee meaningful work and a life of dignity.

But the humiliation of the newly humiliated — many of them white people who supported Trump — contains an element of justice. If you tolerate (or, worse, participated in) the humiliation of those whom you consider beneath you, then don’t be surprised if the rising tide of humiliation spreads and eventually sucks you in, too. As the truly elite know, there’s not a thing in the world that’s special about white church people, though a great many white church people are having a hard time figuring that out. If the arc of justice does not bend toward justice, then it will bend toward injustice. Or the arc may stall, blocked by those who feel threatened by anything other than the status quo, or by those who believe that any improvement in the lives of out-groups necessarily comes at the expense of in-groups.

Therein is a lesson that conservative minds just can’t seem to learn. The conservative mind always wants to assume that anything threatening comes from beneath them in the hierarchy, or from an out-group. The idea that the very in-group authority they glorify is the source of the threat is unthinkable. The right-wing propaganda machine — always demonizing them and always glorifying us — works constantly to reinforce these ideas. This pattern of delusion in the conservative mind is the key to the power of the Republican Party.

I confess that watching Brett Kavanaugh squirm last week was a beautiful thing, insofar as I could bear to watch it. It felt as good as revenge, but it actually was fairness and justice at work. Still, bringing down the Trumps and Kavanaughs of the world is only a small part of the job, and probably even the easy part. That’s because the wholesale humiliation of the American people will continue — until we have a politics that can do something about it. Look at how long black people have been waiting. If white people insist on clinging to a world view that is exactly ass-backwards, then they may have to wait even longer.

Loyalty vs. justice

Matthew Trudeau Photography via Wikipedia

Regular readers here know that I find Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” a very useful tool for understanding the minds of conservatives vs. the minds of liberals. However, I part company with Haidt when Haidt asserts that the moral foundations of conservatives and the moral foundations of liberals are equally valid but just different. My claim is that the moral values of conservatives are inferior. For my previous posts on this subject, search this blog for “Haidt.” But, just as a quick reminder, Haidt’s theory identifies liberals’ primary moral values as justice, fairness, and caring. The primary moral values of conservatives are authority, loyalty and purity. In this post, I want to raise a new complaint against conservative moral values: Conservative moral values are pervertable. But liberal moral values are sound, even under stress.

Yesterday was Aug. 21, 2018, the day Paul Manafort was convicted and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty. Those who previously were too blind to see the criminality and treason of Donald Trump (and of those who surround Trump) ought to have a clearer picture now of what Trump is. Trump’s “Tweets” today reveal a great deal about the conservative notion of loyalty. Trump praises Manafort and calls him “brave” for refusing to “break.” In Trump’s mind, loyalty (to Trump, naturally) is a higher and braver virtue than justice under the law. In Trump’s mind, to betray the conservative value of loyalty for the liberal value of justice means that a person has broken. The depravity of such a view is flabbergasting, but most conservatives won’t even think to question it.

Here is the New York Times headline:

My claim is this: The primary liberal values cannot be perverted. Justice will not harm those who have done no harm. Fairness will not harm those who are fair. Caring will not harm those who care, nor those whom they care about. But the primary conservative values all have a lurking dark side. Where does loyalty to the wicked lead? When authority is wrong, where does loyalty to authority lead? What if an idea is pure, but also wrong?

Conservative values can be valuable if they can yield to higher values. But in our Trumpian age, conservatives can hardly even see the higher values of fairness, justice, and caring. Authority, loyalty, and purity are what matter in their world.

A simple case study: How propaganda works

There are very few exceptions: Right-wingers and the Republican Party cannot win elections or have their way without lying and cheating. Without a sophisticated propaganda system (and, increasingly under Trumpism, the demonization of the responsible media), the right wing would be exposed as what it truly is: A radical minority with a highly unpopular agenda, and no principles, that gets its way only insofar as it can get away with lying and cheating.

This is an interesting case study, because Ken recently had an article in High Country News (a newspaper for the western U.S.) that explains what is really going on. The article is here:

‘No trespassing’ laws create personal playgrounds for the wealthy

The video above shows how right-wingers and Republicans use lies to enact laws that benefit the rich while pretending the opposite. This video — unlike more sophisticated right-wing propaganda with more subtle or hard-to-detect lies — actually is an example of bad propaganda because it’s relatively easy to detect the deception and the attempt to use fear to manipulate people.

In the video, we have a typical American family of three going about their morning routine in a typical American home. Clueless hippies and hikers are encamped on their front lawn, even though there’s a white picket fence. Sheila is out in the yard cooking hot dogs on someone else’s Coleman stove. A man is fishing in their swimming pool. We are given to understand that this is what will happen to typical Idaho families unless the Idaho legislature approves what may now be the most radical trespassing laws in the country.

But the easy-to-see truth is that a typical suburban Idaho family (are there even suburbs in Idaho?) is at no risk. Existing laws already have got them covered. The real story (as Ken shows in the article) is that this is a billionaire’s law.

There are more subtle messages in the video that are very disturbing. One is that nice people don’t camp and fish. Those who do camp and fish (that is, if they’re liberals) are careless and clueless and utterly disrespectful. Nice people, of course, stay in their atomized suburban homes and see the world only on their televisions, or maybe through a window if they ever open their shutters and curtains. The young daughter of the family raises her hand and starts to wave to the fisherman. But her dad pushes her hand down and says, “No; no, no.” The message is that nice people don’t even associate with people like that. That is probably the ugliest and most subtle message contained in this 47 seconds of propaganda: Civility can be dangerous if extended to the wrong people. Civic involvement is one of the last things Republicans want (unless its done through an organization controlled and financed by right-wing money, such as the Tea Party). Nice people stay home, watch television, believe what they’re told, and don’t get involved. Liberals are not only clueless, they’re also a threat to nice normal people. Why doesn’t the dad of the family just go out and ask the campers to leave, or call the police? Because the ad wants people to believe that, unless a new law is passed, the dad has no right to do that — a rather blatant falsehood.

Contrast this with how progressive political elements try to get their message out. This propaganda video is a nice contrast with something I posted two days ago, Environmental justice: The people fight back. The method used in that case was to leverage the media power of famous people to tell the stories of poor people who otherwise are ignored. The most important part of the news conference that I wrote about was not the speechifying by Al Gore and the Rev. William J. Barber (though they gave great speeches). The most important part, rather, was the parade of ordinary people who told true and verifiable stories of devastating illnesses and early deaths caused by living in proximity to coal ash.

For progressives, the challenge is how to draw attention to the truth. That’s what Ken was doing with his op-ed in a Western newspaper, on a subject on which he has done a great deal of research and written a book. For right-wingers, the challenge is designing effective lies, connecting those lies to an emotion such as prejudice or fear, and pumping those lies into the propaganda system.

I propose a game. The Nov. 6 election is coming up. Soon, television screens all over the country will be full of right-wing political ads. Analyze the ads as propaganda. Look for the lies. Were the lies obvious, or was some research required to expose them? Keep your list of fallacies handy. How many fallacies can you identify? What does the propaganda assume that people don’t know, so that it can take advantage of ignorance? What emotions does the propaganda try to stimulate? Whom does it demonize? What is the propaganda’s overt intention? Are there also disguised intentions? Is divisiveness intended? If so, who is being played against whom, based on what element of distrust or fear? Who paid for the ad? Whose interests does it serve? Google them and see if you can follow the money (that may be hard!). Feel free to apply the same checks to ads for liberals, and do your best to apply the same methods to scoring liberal vs. right-wing political ads.