Category: Politics and Government

Irony, Thy Name Is Trump

Yesterday, Trump bemoaned how terribly he is treated as President. From a man who has never encountered a superlative he didn’t incorporate into everyday speech … not surprising. But I keep thinking about how Trump is treated in comparison to Obama. Fundamentally different stories, and one narrative has yet to be proven true or false. But even if Trump’s campaign literally had nothing to do with Russian influence in the election – simply had overly-trusting people trying to do the “right thing” and ended up speaking with the wrong people (I had eight calls from the dude, the last one ten minutes long because I was telling them to STOP CALLING ME). Even if we ignore abuses of power relating to the investigation into the nothing that really happened (you get charged with a crime you didn’t commit, try intimidating witnesses because the charges scare you or the bad publicity scares you … the intimidation itself IS a crime). The basic premise behind how Republicans treated Obama is that policies he advocates are so terrible that we’d rather literally accomplish nothing in the next four years. And any cycle you spend hosting a beer summit after making a completely fair assessment of public bias and police actions (seriously, would some old white professor have the cops called if he got locked out of his fancy brownstone?) or discussing birth certificates (hey, Trump, that would be yours) is a cycle not spent advancing odious positions. Agree or disagree with the positions, it’s a decent strategy that the Republicans cultivated there. Positions switch, and beyond play acting … are you really surprised to see the opposition using the same strategy?

Difference is that Obama had a halfway decent approach to dissent — Trump makes a dramatic reality show with a cliffhanger each week (and a bit like “how did you not expect to be red herring’d out of effectiveness” … voters, how did you not expect the reality show star to create, well, THIS!?).

Russia Returns

Russia has a decent play at undermining the American government without actually colluding with Trump’s campaign. Do something that benefits any part and there is suspicion. Do something that benefits someone who has been suspected of shady dealings with your country (money laundering, loans to someone American banks consider too risky) and the suspicion is even deeper. Someone who has used obstruction and intimidation routinely in business using the same tactics in their political misadventure … not exactly shocking.

Trump’s administration seems hopelessly unable to do anything but help the Russians undermine our government. Firing Comey looks bad no matter what happened during the election. Sharing code-word classified information with the same country suspected of interfering with the election … outright silly.

An “independent” investigation or one run by the House / Senate / FBI led by whomever Trump puts in charge – there’s no good outcome.

The investigation finds nothing illegal – half the country things the investigation was tainted, but we continue down this path. Allies withhold intel because they cannot trust Trump not to use the latest intercepts to brag about how great his intel briefings are. Reasonable policies are overturned along with the unreasonable because the Executive branch leadership doesn’t understand the “benefit” part of cost/benefit analysis. Taxes are lowered and deficits explode.

The investigation finds something – half the country thinks it’s fake evidence to go along with their fake news. But something has to be done. It isn’t like there’s a do-over election clause in the Constitution (even if there were, half of the country objects to the do-over election). Trump is impeached and Pence takes over – Democrats object – we’d have almost been better off with the ignorant guy who didn’t heap religious fundamentalism on top of his deregulation, tax cuts, and environmental destruction. Trump voters who are not traditional Republicans object — they didn’t vote for Pence’s policies either. Trump is impeached and Pence goes down too — Ryan takes over. See previous.

 

GoFCCYourself(.com)

You know what you find when you drain a swamp? A whole bunch of rotting detritus. I’m not going to pretend astonishment that a former Associate General Counsel from Verizon thinks net neutrality is a terrible idea. I remember getting an e-mail message from my employer, another network provider, detailing how this terrible proposal was going to drive us all out of business. Or something similarly over-dramatic.

Facilitating public comment on Executive branch proceedings, such as GoFCCYourself.com, is an interesting idea. Take a circuitous government web site that ostensibly allows individuals to post comments on issues and circumvent the terrible user interface by getting your own URL and I assume including the appropriate POST headers to get individuals in exactly the right place to submit their comments.

I’ve used this short-cut to submit my opinion to the FCC, but I also forwarded the same message to my rep in the House and my two state Senators:

I have submitted this to the FCC for Docket 17-108 but wanted to include you as well. If the FCC does roll back net neutrality, as their chairman indicates is his desire, I beseech you to ready legislative controls to prevent ISPs from using speed controls to essentially censor Internet content.

I am writing to express my support for “net neutrality” — while you want to claim it reduces carrier investment or innovation, customer acquisition and retention drives carrier investment and innovation. Lowered cost of operations, creating a service that allows a higher price point, or offering a new service unavailable through a competitor drive innovation. Allowing a carrier to create a new revenue stream by charging content providers for faster access is not innovation – QoS has been around for decades. And it isn’t like the content is being delivered to the Internet for free. Content providers already pay for bandwidth — and a company like Netflix probably paid a LOT of money for bandwidth at their locations. If Verizon didn’t win a bid for network services to those locations, that’s Verizon’s problem. Don’t create a legal framework for every ISP to profit from *not* providing network services for popular sites; the network provider needs to submit a more competitive bid.

What rolling back net neutrality *does* is stifle customers and content providers. If I, as a customer, am paying 50$ a month for my Internet service but find the content that I *want* is de-prioritized and slowed … well, in a perfect capitalist system, I would switch to the provider who ‘innovates’ and goes back to their 2017 configurations. But broadband access – apart from some major metro areas – is not a capitalist system. Where I live, outside of the Cleveland suburbs, I have my choice of the local cable company or sat – sat based Internet introduces a lot of latency and is quite expensive for both the customer and the operator (and has data limits, which themselves preclude a lot of network-intensive traffic that ISPs wish to de-prioritize). That’s not a real choice — pay 50$ to this company who is going to de-prioritize anyone who doesn’t pay their network bandwidth ransom or pay 100$ to some other company that is unable to provide sufficiently low latency to allow me to work from home. So add a hour of commute time, fuel, vehicle wear, and reduced family time to that 100$ bill.

Rolling back net neutrality stifles small businesses — it’s already difficult to compete with large corporations who have comparatively unlimited budgets for advertising and lawyers. Today, a small business is able to present their product online with equal footing. In 1994, I worked at a small University. One of my initiatives was to train departmental representatives on basic HTML coding so the college would have an outstanding presence on the Internet. First hour of the first day of the training session included a method for checking load times off campus without actually having to leave the campus network. On campus, we were 10 meg between buildings and the server room and anything loaded quite quickly. At home, a prospective student was dialing in on a 28.8 modem. If your content is a web page for MIT, a prospective engineering student may be willing to click your site, go eat dinner, and come back. Load time isn’t as much of a problem for an organisation with a big name and reputation. Unknown little University in Western PA? Click … wait … wait, eh, never mind. The advent of DSL was amazing to me because it provided sufficient bandwidth and delivered content with parity that allowed an unknown Uni to offer a robust web site with videos of the exciting research opportunities available to students and the individual attention from professors that small class sizes allow. No longer did we need to restrict graphics and AV on our site because we weren’t a ‘big name’ University. That there ever was a debate about removing this parity astonished me.

Aside from my personal opinion, what is the impact of non-neutral networks on free speech? Without robust legal controls, ISPs engage in a form of quasi-censorship. How do you intend to prevent abuse of the system? Is a large corporation going to be able to direct “marketing” dollars to speeding up their page to the harm of their competitors? Can the Coca-Cola Company pay millions of dollars to have their content delivered faster than PepsiCo’s? Is the ISP then the winner in a bidding war between the two companies? What about political content? Does my ISP now control the speed at which political content is delivered? What happens when Democrats raise more money in the Cleveland metro area and conservative views are relegated to the ‘slow’ lane? What happens when the FCC gets de-prioritized because ISPs want even less regulation??

I would still worry about the legal controls to prevent quasi-censorship, but I would object less if the FCC were to implement the net neutrality requirements like some of the telco regulations for CLEC’s where there were no ILEC’s had been — where there is no or limited competition, net neutrality is a requirement. Where there are a dozen different ISP options, they can try selling the QoS’d packages. Polls and voting aside, the ISP will find out exactly how many customers or content providers support non-neutral networks.

Hack The Vote

There is a component to the ongoing story of Russian involvement in the 2016 election that seems to have gone missing from public discourse. The RNC was hacked too. Information from DNC hacks were released – embarrassing information that questioned the legitimacy of Clinton’s primary victory and that substantiated the worst view people have of her (and politicians in general). What was released from the RNC hack? Zilch.

One possibility is that the RNC hack yielded nothing embarrassing or subversive to release. But do you really think the RNC wasn’t trying to undermine Trump the same way the DNC undermined Sanders? Do you really think the entirety of the RNC is completely upfront about every facet of political discourse?

Immediately after the election, Russians were said to have a kompromat dossier on Trump. Whatever was gathered from the RNC hack is good insurance should Russia’s choice of American leaders backfire on them in some way. Personally damaging information on Trump and RNC information that compromises the integrity of the party.

Repeal and Replace

There’s a television show where a group of people go around to auctions and buy ‘stuff’ to resell. They’ll “bid up” the price to screw other people out of money (I expect this is a strategy to prevent competition for upcoming items?) but sometimes get stuck with a high price on something they didn’t actually want because the competition backs out of bidding prior to expectations. I’m worried the AHCA is the guy who overpaid for junk … it started out as a marketing ploy than actual legislation. Pass a repeal and go to their constituents with “*I* got this passed for you (vote for me again), but the bloody rest of the HR stopped your will from being enacted. We don’t have enough Reps, donate NOW and get more R’s in here. Oh, the cursed President said not to worry because he’ll veto the bill — donate NOW and vote for the R. Oh, wait, this didn’t pass the Senate – send money NOW so we can get a super-majority in 2018.

Except it passes the Senate and the incumbents have to live with the results of their legislation. And, yeah, this country has a policy where hospitals need to provide emergency care to anyone regardless of means (they can also bill the person a few hundred thousand dollars, slowly drain away that person’s assets, and file a lien against the estate). Which is great for a relatively health person who suffers a sudden calamity — car crash, fall down a mountain, etc. May not even be terrible for someone who experiences a heart attack. Town halls with Tea Partiers going on about abstract death panels are going to seem like nothing. Wait until the people slowly dying with access only to emergency interventions that extend their suffering start popping up in the town halls — no coverage for the cancer relapse, but you’ll stabilize me and send me home to suffer a few more weeks. People who realize that, sure, an insurance plan *is* available to someone who had a stroke a few years back but how does this state high risk pool with a 250k annual premium help ME? Seniors who lose their subsidies and can no longer afford heath care. People stuck in terrible work situations because losing coverage means the condition will become pre-existing.

Wait until women see premiums quadruple after having a child. My local rep couldn’t tell me if the insurance company would be disallowed from raising my premiums if I self-funded sterilization, provided a doctors note attesting to menopause, swapped over to female partners, or otherwise precluded future pregnancies … and he then he got all annoyed with my expectation that he would have read and, ya know, *understood* the full text of a bill for which he was voting. 

And Republicans will free insurance companies from ACA’s requirement to spend 80-85% of premiums on health services … so all of these sad stories will be coupled with record profits and stock buy-backs within the insurance sector.

Middle East Peace And Avoiding The Civil War

Donald Trump thinks the Civil War could have been avoided — well, yeah it could have been. If slave owners had voluntarily ceeded their economic advantage (i.e. capitulated to the abolitionists position)  or if the nation had continue granting individual states the “right” to allow their citizens to enslave other humans … voila, no war. But there’s no middle ground between “I can subjugate and exploit other people based on some aesthetic aspect” and “humans are humans”. His ignorant musings worry me – if for no other reason than a great deal of study has been done into the proximal and distal causes of the Civil War (i.e. the exact opposite of “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?”).

It is simply terrifying when the same individual is willing to “do anything” to broker a peace deal in the Middle East. I guess he’ll be learning that (just like health care, free trade, and South East Asian affairs) Middle Eastern discord is harder than he thought.

Unanticipated consequences

I was at a rally opposing privatization of social security investments – a reporter asked me to comment on my particular objection. Was I worried about affording retirement? Was I concerned about parents? Or someone else? No – my objection is that the raison d’être of social security was the massive crash in the stock market in the 30’s. Lots of people had their money in the stock market (sure, over-leveraged so more than their money) and then had nothing. The social safety net was to provide bare sustenance for people whose private retirement savings didn’t pan out. Why in the hell would you want to invest that money in the stock market?!

I think the net neutrality opponents are having the same lack of foresight. How is controlling network bandwidth allocation any different than censorship? How does it not prevent alternative ideas from being propagated? How does it not stifle innovation and harm small companies?

America-First Offshore Energy Strategy

I don’t like the idea of offshore oil drilling. Didn’t much care for it before the BP fiasco down in the Gulf, and certainly didn’t become a fan of it afterward. I understand the allure of cheap domestically produced fuels, but if one really wanted to put America first … there would be a focus on energy production that is sustainable in the long term.

Companies bidding to drill on federal lands pay two dollars per acre. Probably a huge bargain, but not zero. Then there’s a royalty of 12.5% from their production (maybe 18% for offshore, it’s a little confusing because two different agencies control the on-shore and off-shore lease agreements). Again, probably a huge bargain … but the current royalty seems to have generated two billion dollars in revenue from offshore oil drilling alone. And, yeah, the government is already doing something with that money. But they are not doing anything with the money from drilling contracts that have not yet been made.

I propose our Legislature dedicates 90% off the proceeds from the new drilling contracts to (1) renewable energy research, (2) public utility renewable energy adoption, and (3) outfitting federal buildings with wind turbines, solar panels, or other renewable energy generation facilities as appropriate for the area. Buy American made solar panels and wind turbines. Hire American workers to install the things. Spur advancements so American made solar panels are incredibly more efficient than anyone else’s.

Yeah, we’ll probably destroy the ANWR in the process. But that’s going to happen either way. This would at least provide a viable long term solution and the short-term MORE OIL solution we’re getting anyway.

Why Some Jobs Matter

A week or two ago, Paul Krugman published an article titled “Why Don’t All Jobs Matter?” in which he explored the different narratives behind the decline of mining and manufacturing jobs and the decline of retail jobs. He tried very hard to avoid focusing on the sexist and classist snobbery behind the difference. To some degree, losing low paying jobs that frequently lack benefits is not as bad as losing decently paying jobs that include health benefits and pensions (although court ruling that allow companies to raid pension plans for operating cash basically rendered pension plans an empty promise).

All jobs don’t matter in public discourse because people lack respect for the retail, cell center, hospitality, etc staffs with which they directly interact. Mining and manufacturing jobs were afforded this mythos because the majority of people never interact with these employees. A sentiment echoed today in a newsletter from Sherrod Brown’s office:

“I heard from those miners and their families in Steubenville. I talked with them, and heard their stories – stories of years of backbreaking, dangerous work, but work that had dignity. They put in their time to earn better lives for their families, and they deserve the full health care and pensions they were promised.”

“Work that had dignity”!? And calling out that they “put in their time to earn better lives for their families”!? I hope he didn’t intend to imply that all of these other sectors lack dignity and working in them are not actually attempts to earn better lives for a family too. I wish they would at least pretend to care about all of the non-white non-male people who are losing their jobs too (hey, politicians … white dudes are probably losing non-mining and non-manufacturing jobs too … if that helps you care).

Fifty years ago, a high school graduate knew he could show up at the GE Locomotive plant in Erie, PA and have a job for life. And the downfall of American manufacturing has eliminated that path. But women in the same city knew they could show up at the GTE office on the other side of town, get hired on in operator services, and have a job for life too. They, too, no longer have such certainty (nor can they be positive that either GE or Verizon are even hiring).

Not a lot of people grow up dreaming of being a sales clerk or fast food counter worker – but I doubt people dream of being an entry level manufacturing line worker either. People enter into the field and work their way up — and, yeah, “working you way up” in the steel plant involved a lot of physical work whereas becoming a low level manager at a store or a call center team lead involved a lot of time and mental effort.

It’s not a job – it’s a period in time associated with the job. When coal powered industrial revolutions, white men had power and everyone else knew their place. Sadly, failure to bring back the “good” manufacturing and mining jobs may not doom Trump to perceived failure so long as his policies punish non-white non-male people.