Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Mr. Robot

"Mr. Robot" is a TV series airing on the USA cable channel.  It's second season aired last summer but I only got around to watching it in the last few days.  It is not for everybody so this is not a "go see it now" commercial disguised as a blog post.  But even though its appeal is limited I think it is worth talking about.

Mr. Robot conforms to a now popular model.  It is in effect a novel broken into one hour episodes analogous to chapters in a book.  In the old days TV shows consisted of a number of stand alone episodes.  That's not what's going on here.  Each episode advances the story.  To completely understand what's going on you have to have seen earlier episodes.  The most visible example of this sort of thing is "Game of Thrones", airing on HBO.  Game of Thrones is based on the "Song of Ice and Fire" books by George R. R. Martin.  Each season is a condensed version of one of the volumes in the series.  But in this case there is no book underlying "Mr. Robot".  So what's it about?

At one level it is the ever popular "David versus Goliath" story.  Instead of a single individual we have a small band of plucky nobodies taking on the large and powerful "E" Corporation.  At least from the point of view of the show, our band is the good guys and E Corp is the bad guy.  And oh boy does E Corp fit the role of villain.  They do pretty much every bad thing a corporate villain is supposed to do.  They are powerful and completely unscrupulous.  They literally kill people by poisoning the environment.  They buy and sell politicians.  And in true villain fashion they occasionally straight up assassinate people.

The case for our plucky band being heroic is mush less straightforward.  They seem like good people but they end up doing a lot of bad things.  In one case one of them actually kills someone on purpose.  They do other bad things because, you know, "the ends justify the means".  The moral ambiguity (to put it politely) makes for better drama and we definitely get lots of drama.

And you will probably be less than totally surprised to find out that there is a chief good guy.  His name is Elliot and he is played by Remy Malek.  And, this being a modern drama, Elliot is a hacker par excellence.  Season one revolves around the team's efforts to pull off a giant attack on E Corp.  BTW, the E Corp logo looks a lot like the logo for Enron.  The nickname for E Company in the series is Evil Company.  This nickname would have fit Enron very well.

In the show E Corp houses all the records on who owes money to who.  By wiping out E Corp's databases (and some other stuff that's necessary to make the plan work but is too complicated to go into here) our plucky band seriously injures E Corp.  But they also plunge the world (or at least the US) into chaos.  For reasons I never was quite able to figure out only cash and a Bitcoin-like payment service housed on smart phones continues to work after the attack.  E Corp somehow owns the phones but not the payment handling service.  But the payment service leaves digital tracks behind so anyone who has access to the right computer systems knows how you are spending every penny.

That's where season two starts up.  E Corp is wounded but still very much in business.  Lots of people are chasing after our band and it is obvious that "stage 2" is necessary to complete the job of defeating evil and raising up good.  I am mostly through the season and so far almost no progress has been made with respect to stage 2.  In a "behind the scenes" companion show one of the actors opined that the series might run 5 seasons.  So I will be very surprised if things are resolved by the time I finish watching the remaining episodes.  And if you want to know more about what happens you'll have to get your hands on the episodes and watch them.

But I want to step back form the twists and turns of a specific episode and look at what is happing at a more macro level.  "Mr. Robot" follows a pretty standard model, albeit in its own idiosyncratic way.  And the basic idea is that the "David" group exposes and documents the bad behavior of the "Goliath" group.  Then everybody recoils in shock and horror and the cops round up the perps and we all live happily ever after.

There is a specific example of this in season 2.  The good guys by nefarious means secure an audio recording of the bad guys doing bad things.  They, again by nefarious means, upload this audio file to the Internet then draw attention to it.  The audio is quickly copied far and wide so that the bad guys can't suppress it and everyone reacts in shock and horror right on queue.  Then the cops, or in this case a Senate committee, swoops in and starts reining the bad guys in.  This is pretty much standard stuff.

It happened that way in "Three Days of the Condor", a 1975 movie.  The last scene features Robert Redford in front of a The New York Times sign.  The implication is that he has provided all the information he has uncovered about bad behavior in the CIA to the paper.  They, in turn, will publish it and the bad guys will be punished accordingly.

And the poster child for all this is Watergate.  Dogged reporting, most prominently by Woodward and Bernstein, eventually exposed nefarious doings by the Nixon Administration.  Eventually Nixon was forced to resign and a number of people ended up in jail.  It is important to note that "Three Days of the Condor" came out only a few years after Watergate.

But the question that now haunts me is:  does this model still work?  The Nixon people worked very hard to keep their bad behavior out of the public eye.  They knew what they were doing was wrong and that even if it wasn't it would look wrong and that would be damaging.  But we have moved away from things working that way since.

Part of it has to do with the definition of what constitutes bad behavior.  In 1928 Al Smith was deemed an unsuitable candidate for President because he was a Catholic.  That rule held until Kennedy was elected in 1960.  In 1964 it was widely believed that Nelson Rockefeller was an unsuitable candidate for President because he had been divorced.  That rule held until 1980 when Reagan was elected.  In 1972 Thomas Eagleton was deemed an unsuitable candidate for Vice President because he had undergone certain treatments for a Psychiatric condition.  And then there's the whole Monica Lewinski thing with Bill Clinton.  President Clinton survived the whole impeachment process because the general public did not think that his behavior justified the punishment.

We now have something called Borking.  Judge Bork was a well respected jurist.  He was nominated for the Supreme Court.  His nomination was eventually blocked because too many Senators felt that his positions were too far out of line with mainstream judicial thinking.  It has since been forgotten that two Democrats voted for Bork and six Republicans voted against him.  (He had been nominated by Reagan.)  On numerous occasions afterward Republicans have accused Democrats of "Borking"  one Republican nomination or another.  This has the desired effect of deflecting attention away from the actual substance behind any opposition.  This allows any opposition by any Democrat to any Republican nomination to be characterized as "political" and, therefore, unworthy.  It should work the same way for Democrats.  They should be able to "Bork" Republican opposition to Democratic nominees.  But that never happens.  This tactic is one of many that has resulted in the increased polarization of politics.

That's bad enough.  Democrats in the Bork case presented substantial evidence to back their contention.  But it turns out that unsubstantiated attacks can work.  The classic example is birtherism.  When Obama first threw his hat into the ring there was a legitimate question as to where he was born.  So in 2008 he released his "short form" birth certificate.  Republican government officials in Hawaii immediately confirmed that it was authentic.  Various news organizations were quickly able to confirm that birth announcements had appeared in the two largest newspapers in Honolulu.  This all happened in 2008.  That should have been the end of that.

But then the most unlikely figure took up the cause.  Her name was Orly Taitz.  Look her up.  You wouldn't believe a person with her background and expertise could be seen as a credible source of information on the subject but she was, at least by some.  She was able to put on a good enough performance to justify repeat bookings on conservative radio and TV shows.  She never came up with anything substantial but that didn't diminish her popularity on these shows.  That resulted in Obama going through all the hoops necessary to obtain and release his "long form" birth certificate in 2011.  That only resulted in a change in the cast of accusers.  Donald Trump took up the cause.

Was any new information unearthed?  No!  Trump at one point announced that he had sent investigators to Hawaii but never released any results from the "investigation".  Nor did anyone else turn up anything else.  And let me repeat.  The matter was definitively settled in 2008.  President Obama was born in Hawaii.  Yet the "birther" controversy persisted until a few weeks ago.  Donald Trump made a short announcement that President Obama was born in the US.  Will that finally put this nonsense to bed?  If past is prologue then the answer is a resounding no.  But the President is leaving office soon.  This will remove the actual reason for all this bad behavior.  So I actually expect the issue to finally die the death it should have died all the way back in 2008.

What all this has in common is the inability of truth to drive out nonsense in public discourse.  Truth can be made invisible and falsehoods can be made visible if enough people want to disbelieve the true thing or believe the false thing and if enough effort is put behind it.  In our fictional universe does Evil Corp have the resources and the ability to make truth invisible and falsehood visible?  They sure do.  And, unfortunately, I am very concerned that the real world analogs of Evil Corp are be able to do the same.

We are seeing the success the Oil industry is having at creating and maintaining over a long period of time the fiction that there is a controversy over global warming and the extent to which human activities are responsible for it.  There is a long, well organized, and successful effort by biblical literalists to convince people that Intelligent Design is a reasonable and scientifically valid alternative to Evolution.  It is neither.  The "birther" nonsense has proved completely impervious to any and all applications of fact for almost a decade.

Finally, in the interest of fairness let me list some areas where lefties are either the prime movers or active co-conspirators in this kind of behavior.  Many on the left believe that GMO crops are wildly dangerous.  There is no evidence to back this up, only suspicions.  There has been an active and well funded search lasting many years for such evidence.  But no one has come up with anything yet.  However, that failure hasn't stopped the anti-GMO people from acting like vast amounts of evidence of harm has been collected and confirmed.

Then there is the anti-vaccination movement.  Vaccines have literally saved millions of lives.  The current vaccines in general use are incredibly safe.  Yet a single small and poorly done study that has since been entirely repudiated was enough to set off a craze that continues to this day.  The result is millions of parents, mostly liberals, failing to vaccinate their children.  People have died as a result.  But the anti-vaccination movement, while diminished, continues to motor on.

The final item on my list is nuclear power.  I should probably do an entire post on this subject.  But here's the Cliff's Notes version.  Nuclear power is dangerous.  But so are all the alternatives.  So the appropriate question is:  how safe is nuclear power compared to the alternatives?  And the answer turns out to be remarkably safe.  Coal kills lots of people by giving them black lung disease.  Coal mining trashes large parts of coal country.  Coal creates incredible amounts of incredibly dangerous byproducts.  By comparison, nuclear kills and grievously harms far fewer people.  It trashes far less land.  And it creates far smaller amounts of dangerous byproducts.  But by comparing nuclear to a theoretically perfect alternative that doesn't actually exist liberals make it sound incredibly bad.

I am not going to connect the obvious dots at this point.  I think you can all do that without me.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

An Open Letter to Trump Voters

I understand why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump.  Those are not the people this letter is addressed to.  It is addressed to a specific group of people who voted for Trump.  With this group I frankly and freely admit I do not understand why they voted for him.  I'll lay out the reasons why I'm confused below.  But before I do that I want to be clear about exactly what group I am talking about.

Hillary Clinton lost a number of "rust belt" states.  The margins were extremely thin.  As of late yesterday (Thursday, November 10), the combined Trump lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan was just over a hundred thousand votes.  If Clinton had carried those three states she would now be the President elect.  Instead she is behind in all three and two of them have been called for Trump.  Mr.Trump did very well in these states with white men without college degrees, the classic "blue collar" demographic.

It is clear, at lest if you can trust reporting on the subject, that these people switched their votes because they felt abandoned by Clinton and that they decided Trump was their guy.  That's the part I don't understand.  The rest of this post is about the sources of my confusion.

If you have read my posts you know I often start with a historical perspective.  I'm going to run true to form once more.  From the '30s through the '70s blue collar workers in what is now nicknamed the "rust belt" were solidly in the Democratic camp.  In the '60s and '70s you could point to a large number of Democratic politicians who styled themselves as champions of the blue collar cause.

A typical example was Hubert Humphrey, who ran for President and was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1968.  In spite of the loss Humphrey continued to champion the cause of "labor".  He included blue collar workers in his "labor" category but also extended it to include the lower echelons of the white collar workforce.  And the thinking was that what was good for blue collar workers would also benefit white collar workers so the primary focus was on blue collar workers.

This played out as strong support for the labor union movement and for worker's rights.  Democrats championed a forty hour work week, paid sick leave, a minimum wage, and many other initiatives designed to improve the lot of the ordinary working man.  Labor returned the favor by voting for Democrats and labor unions provided a lot of the money and manpower necessary to run an effective campaign.  But something big happened in 1980.

A large number of these people voted for Ronald Reagan, the Republican.  He basically said "you are being taken for a ride and I will take better care of you".  They bought that argument.  But the first thing Reagan did was destroy the Air Traffic Controller's Union.  This was not an isolated incident.  His administration was uniformly on the side of management and firmly opposed to labor, organized or otherwise.  In short, he did the opposite of taking care of blue collar workers.  But substantial numbers stuck with him and have stuck with the Republican party since.

At one level the situation couldn't be simpler.  You either empower labor or you empower management.  If you empower labor they will see improved wages, benefits, working conditions, etc.  If you empower management you will see depressed wages (or wages growing more slowly than they otherwise would), downward pressure on benefits, poorer working conditions, etc.  Republicans have consistently sided with management and the results are now obvious.  The standard of living and the general plight of working men is much diminished compared to what it was in the '60s and '70s.  And this is just what you would expect.

And if we examine the period that followed the '80 election we see Democrat after Democrat who had been a traditional champion of labor lose elections to Republicans.  The Democratic party abandoned their aggressively pro labor stance because being pro labor did not win elections.  Instead we got Bill Clinton and "triangulation".

Clinton was a southerner and southerners have historically not been pro labor.  But what triangulation was all about was to try to find a common ground between traditional Democratic positions and traditional Republican positions and see if something that would do some good could get enacted into law.  So we saw welfare reform and criminal justice reform and NAFTA and "Don't ask - Don't tell".  All of these programs were a mix of Democratic and Republican ideas.  People now have a lot of bad things to say about all of these.  But what they are mostly unhappy about are the Republican components.  Clinton argued at the time that "he got the best deal he could under the circumstances" and there is plenty of evidence to support this position.

So why did he get such poor deals?  Because Republicans kept winning elections.  Clinton faced both a Republican House and a Republican Senate for much of the time he was in office.  And one reason Republicans won elections then and now is that they were able to pick up significant support from blue collar workers.  But Republicans never advanced a single piece of pro labor legislation or implemented a single pro labor policy during this entire time.  Instead they systematically championed the side of management.  And it is not surprising that as a result the economic prospects of the middle class, and particularly the blue collar component of the middle class, has stagnated.

Bill Clinton saw record numbers of jobs created and substantial increases in the take home pay of blue collar workers.  In spite of this, Al Gore, his vice president and a fellow southerner, and someone who would be much more pro labor than Bush, lost in 2000.  If blue collar workers had been solidly behind him then he would have won easily.

I won't re-litigate the Bush administration, except to note that he maintained the Republican tradition of being pro management and anti labor.  And this stance was not enough to cost him the election in '04.  Republicans became unpopular shortly thereafter but for other reasons.  And Obama was able to bring enough blue collar voters back into the fold to win in '08 and 12.  But Democrats did badly in '10 and '14 and an important reason for their losses can be traced to lackluster at best support from blue collar workers.

And, if anything, Republicans have amped up their attack on labor during the Obama years.  They have successfully blocked efforts to increase the minimum wage at the federal level.  They have blocked efforts to reign in health care costs.  Not a single Republican voted for the "stimulus" in spite of the fact that a lot of money went into the pockets of blue collar workers in Republican districts.  In fact, they engaged in a systematic deception.  They held dozens of public events where they took credit for bringing Federal money into their districts.  In fact, they had done the exact opposite.  The money was from the "stimulus" bill that they had voted against but they were successful in hiding that fact.

Meanwhile they attacked spending initiatives that benefit blue collar workers and protected tax loop holes that advantaged large corporations and wealthy individuals.  The most egregious example of this was the bailout of the auto industry.  It garnered no Republican support.  And, while it certainly helped a lot of senior executives, investors, etc., it also meant a lot of blue collar jobs in the rust belt were preserved.  They also attacked efforts to strengthen the hand of labor when it was dealing with management.  And there was certainly no outcry from the Republican side of the aisle to lock up fat cat bankers after the crash.

Now let me move from the general to the specific.  And the "specific" in this case is Flint Michigan, a classic rust belt city that has been hit hard.  A Republican governor single handedly caused the lead poisoning crisis in Flint Michigan.  Yet for the most part he was successful in deflecting blame to nearly everywhere else.  Neither the governor nor the Republican controlled state legislature has stepped up to make good the damage the governor caused.  Instead, they have consistently obstructed efforts to make permanent fixes.  Flint is still being hung out to dry.  And there are things the Federal Government could do.  But the Republicans have consistently obstructed and, in many cases, completely blocked efforts there too.

And the "fix" in Flint would create lots of "shovel ready" jobs for blue collar workers.  No high tech solution is necessary.  The work can not be outsourced.  So something that should be done, something that is a good thing, something that would improve the lot of blue collar workers and is strongly supported by Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular, is being blocked by Republicans.

And the Flint situation is the specific example that illustrates the general problem.  It is common knowledge that our infrastructure is in bad shape.  The Flint problem is an infrastructure problem.  President Obama has made proposal after proposal to invest in repairing and modernizing our infrastructure.  These proposals have broad and enthusiastic support from Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular.  They are very popular with the public in general and blue collar workers in particular.  And moving ahead aggressively would create large numbers of good blue collar jobs.  And all of them have been blocked over and over by Republicans.

This is the disconnect I see and which I just can't understand.

Hillary got involved with the Flint crisis and devoted significant effort to trying to improve things.  Trump did one "drive by" appearance and that was that.  More broadly, Hillary started her campaign with an extensive listening tour.  And she listened.  And based on what she heard she developed specific plans to help.  Trump made vague promises and left it at that.  And then there's Trumps business record with blue collar workers.  He repeatedly stiffed them as he did with small businesses.  And he was happy to buy his suits and other "Trump" merchandise from around the world.  He certainly made no effort to understand what was going on in the lives of these people so his plans were little more than slogans.

And what were the slogans?  He promised to reopen the factories and coal mines.  Basically he promised to roll the clock back many decades to the good old days.  But what if he actually tries to make good on these promises?  The big rust belt job killer has not been trade policy.  It has been a combination of a tilt toward management, allowing them to cut salaries and benefits, and automation.

Fifty years ago it took a lot of man hours to make a car.  So making a million cars produced a lot of jobs.  Now manufacturing is heavily automated and it takes far fewer man hours to make a car.  And so making the same million cars produces far fewer jobs.  And those jobs have much poorer wages and benefits associated with them than they did in the good old days.  Domestic industrial production has actually grown substantially in the last decade and looks to continue growing.  But automation means it will not employ people in the numbers it used to.

The same is true of coal.  The big killer of coal jobs has been fracking.  Fracked natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than coal.  Is Trump going to reduce the production of fracked natural gas?  Well, actually no.  Instead he plans to increase production.  So his promises to coal miners are every bit as empty as the ones he has made to blue collar workers in the rust belt.  Yet these promises have been enough to convince blue collar workers that Trump is their man.

Finally, there is a wide spread belief that blue collar workers are forgotten and invisible when it comes to Democrats in general and Clinton in particular.  Based on their behavior blue collar workers want empty promises repeated frequently in stump speeches.  Democrats, on the other hand, have made proposal after proposal that shows that they have thought hard about the plight of these people and are willing to roll their sleeves up and dig in.  But that has not resulted in many of these people coming home to the Democratic party and abandoning Republicans.  This has deprived Democrats of the clout necessary to get their proposals enacted into law.  That's extremely frustrating.  But is it really the fault of Democrats?

What have Republicans offered up in the Obama era?  Gridlock.  They decided that they would oppose everything Obama approved of, even if they originally proposed it.  The classic example is Obamacare.  It started out as a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation.  It then morphed into Romney-care under the sponsorship of the 2012 Republican candidate for President while he was the governor of Massachusetts.  Whatever flaws it has, many of them can be traced to its Republican roots.  Obamacare differs little from Romney-care.  It was a good idea when Romney, a Republican, implemented it.  It was a bad idea when Obama, a Democrat, implemented it.  But it is the same program.

I bring Obamacare up solely to explain how Republicans operate.  It looks like something similar is about to play out.  Trump has proposed a massive infrastructure program.  Obama has routinely proposed this sort of thing each year.  Republicans have made sure it goes nowhere.  Both Clinton and Trump have made it part of their agenda.  Trump's plan may go through.  Why?  Because it is a Republican initiative.  And then again it may not.  There is significant resistance from factions within the Republican party.  They may end up being successful in blocking it and we have no idea at this time how serious Trump is about the whole thing in the first place.

Obama was fairly successful in his first two years in office when Democrats controlled both chambers of the legislature.  But the Republicans' "just say no" strategy was successful enough that he was only able to get a few things done.  Then voters rewarded Republican obstructionism by tossing many Democrats out of office in the 2010 election.  The Republicans then shut down the government, put the full faith and credit of the government into question, and generally behaved irresponsibly.  Were they punished for this irresponsibility at the polls?  No!

The results of this election allow us to make some calls.  Divisiveness won.   Irresponsibility won.  Ignorance won.  Bad behavior won.  Macho won.  Secrecy won.  White privilege won.  Republicans who publicly opposed Trump and were up for re-election lost.  So the Republican party now owns the campaign that Trump ran.  And Trump owns the Republican party.  It is generally believed that a lot of Republicans would have lost without the boost they got from the Trump's win.

There are many people who believe that Trump is going to pivot and behave quite differently now that he will soon be President. There are many people that believe that what Trump said on the campaign trail was standard political rhetoric and he will govern responsibly and effectively.  We'll see.  If he can actually deliver increased employment and increased income to blue collar workers I and many others of his fiercest opponents will be impressed.  Certainly that's what the blue collar workers who voted for him expect to see happen.

And he has made many promises to many others on foreign policy, law and order, immigration, etc.  It will help that, if we go by the experience of the George W. Bush administration, he will get the active co-operation of Republicans in congress.  Campaigns, especially campaigns in which so many promises have been made, generate mandates and expectations.  I and many people like me believe that the agenda Trump laid out in his campaign is a bad one.  We also frankly do not believe he can actually deliver on most of it.

He will be able to wipe out most of Obama's achievements.  Executive orders can be reversed.  Republicans have railed against numerous Obama initiatives for years.  In January they will have all the power and control they need to do what they have so frequently and vociferously promised to do.  It looks like the Democrats are in no position to stop them.  At best they can slow them down.  I think doing this is a bad idea but my side lost.  And I think that many of the blue collar workers who voted for Trump will find that they are hurt badly by the absence of the very programs Republicans have been so successful at demonizing.  We'll see.

And then there is the agenda that is uniquely Trump's, the agenda that goes beyond just "roll this or that Obama initiative back".  We'll all get to see how that works out too.  Given the behavior of Republicans during the Obama administration and the dramatic differences between the agendas of the two candidates the Democrats are under no obligation to provide any assistance at all.  Trump and his Republican colleagues are on their own when it comes to delivering results.  The blue collar workers who voted for Trump think they will end up better off or at least no worse off than they are now.  I think they will quickly find themselves far worse off.  Maybe I'm wrong and they're right.  Either way, we'll see.