visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?
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Hitting Rewind, Bush Museum Says - You Decide - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The hypothetical exercise, which includes touch screens that let users watch videos of “advisers” before voting on whether they would make the same choices that Mr. Bush did, revisits the most consequential moments of his administration. In the process, the country is being asked to re-evaluate the two-term president who presided over some of the most tumultuous years in the nation’s history.
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The museum’s 14,000 square feet of exhibits present the presidency Mr. Bush intended (tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, faith-based social services) juxtaposed against the presidency he ended up having (terrorism, war and financial crisis)
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It does not ignore controversies like the weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq, but it does not dwell on them either. In the Iraq display it says flatly, “No stockpiles of W.M.D. were found.” But then it adds, “Post-invasion inspections confirmed that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to resume production of W.M.D.”
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A six-minute introductory video narrated by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledges disputes over Iraq and interrogation techniques while defending them as efforts to protect the country. “If you were in a position of authority on Sept. 11,” she says, “every day after was Sept. 12.”
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Mr. Bush wanted the exhibits to avoid editorializing and, for example, insisted that critical letters from troops be included. “We try to let it speak for itself,”
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An intriguing aspect of the museum is who is featured and who is not. There is a statue of Mr. Bush with his father, a section devoted to Laura Bush’s travels, a video by his daughters and even statues of the family dogs and cat. In addition to Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush’s two chiefs of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. and Joshua B. Bolten, also narrate videos. But former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, generally make only cameo appearances in news footage.
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Chance the Rapper: 'Black people don't have to be Democrats' - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Kanye West's recent praise of President Donald Trump has left some of the rapper's fans aghast, but fellow Chicago rapper Chance the Rapper and West's wife Kim Kardashian have come to his defense.Chance the Rapper, who has been critical of Trump in the past, tweeted, "Black people don't have to be democrats."
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Now when he spoke out about Trump... Most people (including myself) have very different feelings & opinions about this. But this is HIS opinion. I believe in people being able to have their own opinions,even if really different from mine. He never said he agrees with his politics
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"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West famously declared during "A Concert For Hurricane Relief" telethon, criticizing the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.
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The coronavirus isn't another Hurricane Katrina. It's worse. - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html
hurricane pandemic emergency federal government
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the United States again faces a circumstance in which the problem may be larger than the institutions that normally deal with it.
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Public health is mainly the responsibility of states and localities. Americans may think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is leading a national response to the coronavirus. It isn’t. The CDC has a weak role in setting and implementing policy, and it is not sufficiently staffed to do the job people think it is doing.
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The working group headed by Vice President Pence — while needed and helpful — only has the power of cajoling. In a public health emergency, there is no national coordinating function.
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some problems have a scope — say, fighting a war or constructing a national highway system — that overwhelms the theory of local control.
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As America moves to the mitigation stage of the outbreak, social distancing measures — such as closing schools, ending mass gatherings and restricting travel — are the next line of defense. But the problem with such measures is that they tend to be imposed too late and/or lifted too early. And the current implementation of social distancing by states and localities can best be called spotty.
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Dangerously and absurdly, political leaders have been using the low number of confirmed cases as the evidence of success when it is actually a measure of our blindness.
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if sickness begins to come in a sudden rush, it will swamp the health-care system, leading to shortages of masks, hospital beds, ventilators and personnel (as it has in northern Italy).
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“The glaring risk today,” as J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told me, “is that the elderly and those with fragile health suffer extreme illness but are unable to access life-sustaining care and die in large numbers.”
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On the Power of Being Awful - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-the-power-of-being-awful.html
trump approval confirmation bias politics gwb katrina
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One basic principle I’ve learned in my years at The Times is that almost nobody ever admits being wrong about anything — and the wronger they were, the less willing they are to concede error.
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when Bloomberg surveyed a group of economists who had predicted that Ben Bernanke’s policies would cause runaway inflation, they literally couldn’t find a single person willing to admit, after years of low inflation, having been mistaken.
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sure enough, it turns out that Trump is ignorant and temperamentally unqualified to be president. But if you think his supporters will accept this reality any time soon, you must not know much about human nature. In a perverse way, Trump’s sheer awfulness offers him some political protection: His supporters aren’t ready, at least so far, to admit that they made that big a mistake
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What will Trump’s Katrina moment look like? Will it be the collapse of health insurance due to administration sabotage? A recession this White House has no idea how to handle? A natural disaster or public health crisis? One way or another, it’s coming.
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Who Watches the Watchdog? The CJR's Russia Problem - Byline Times - 0 views
bylinetimes.com/...tchdog-the-cjrs-russia-problem
russia propaganda journalism review watchdog bias censorship crisis culture sponsor
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In December 2018, Pope commissioned me to report for the CJR on the troubled history of The Nation magazine and its apparent support for the policies of Vladimir Putin.
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My $6,000 commission to write for the prestigious ”watchdog” was flattering and exciting – but would also be a hard call. Watchdogs, appointed or self-proclaimed, can only claim entitlement when they hold themselves to the highest possible standards of reporting and conduct. It was not to be
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For me, the project was vital but also a cause for personal sadness. During the 1980s, I had been an editor of The Nation’s British sister magazine New Statesman and had served as chair of its publishing company. I knew, worked with and wrote for The Nation’s then-editor, the late Victor Navasky. He subsequently chaired the CJR.
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Investigating and calling out a magazine and editor for which I felt empathy, and had historic connections to, hearing from its critics and dissidents, and finding whistleblowers and confidential inside sources was a challenge. But hearing responses from all sides was a duty.
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I worked on it for six months, settling a first draft of my story to the CJR‘s line editor in the summer 2019. From then on my experience of the CJR was devastating and damaging.
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After delivering the story and working through a year-long series of edits and re-edits required by Pope, the story was slow-walked to dismissal. In 2022, after Russian tanks had rolled towards Kyiv, I urged Pope to restore and publish the report, given the new and compelling public interest. He refused.
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he trigger for my CJR investigation was a hoax concerning Democratic Party emails hacked and dumped in 2016 by teams from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency. The GRU officers responsible were identified and their methods described in detail in the 2019 Mueller Report.
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The Russians used the dumped emails decisively – first to leverage an attack on that year’s Democratic National Convention; and then to divert attention from Donald Trump’s gross indiscretions at critical times before his election
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In 2017, with Trump in the White House, Russian and Republican denial operations began, challenging the Russian role and further widening divisions in America. A pinnacle of these operations was the publication in The Nation on 9 August 2017 of an article – still online under a new editor – claiming that the stolen emails were leaked from inside the DNC.
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Immediately after the article appeared, Trump-supporting media and his MAGA base were enthralled. They celebrated that a left-liberal magazine had refuted the alleged Russian operations in supporting Trump, and challenged the accuracy of mainstream press reporting on ‘Russiagate’
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Nation staff and advisors were aghast to find their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets – Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times. Even the President’s son.
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When I was shown the Nation article later that year by one of the experts it cited, I concluded that it was technical nonsense, based on nothing. The White House felt differently and directed the CIA to follow up with the expert, former senior National Security Agency official and whistleblower, William Binney (although nothing happened)
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Running the ‘leak’ article positioned the left-wing magazine strongly into serving streams of manufactured distractions pointing away from Russian support for Trump.
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I traced the source of the leak claim to a group of mainly American young right-wing activists delivering heavy pro-Russian and pro-Syrian messaging, working with a British collaborator. Their leader, William Craddick, had boasted of creating the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy story – a fantasy that Hillary Clinton and her election staff ran a child sex and torture ring in the non-existent basement of a pleasant Washington neighbourhood pizzeria. Their enterprise had clear information channels from Moscow.
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We spoke for 31 minutes at 1.29 ET on 12 April 2019. During the conversation, concerning conflicts of interest, Pope asked only about my own issues – such as that former editor Victor Navasky, who would figure in the piece, had moved from running and owning The Nation to being Chair of the CJR board; and that the independent wealth foundation of The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel – the Kat Foundation – periodically donated to Columbia University.
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In the series, writer Jeff Gerth condemns multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on Russian interference operations by US mainstream newspapers. Echoing words used in 2020 by vanden Heuvel, he cited as more important “RealClearInvestigations, a non-profit online news site that has featured articles critical of the Russia coverage by writers of varying political orientation, including Aaron Maté”.
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On the day we spoke, I now know, Pope was working with vanden Heuvel and The Nation to launch – 18 days later – a major new international joint journalism project ‘Covering Climate Now!‘
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Soon after we spoke, the CJR tweeted that “CJR and @thenation are gathering some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts” for the event. I did not see the tweet. Pope and the CJR staff said nothing of this to me.
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Any editor must know without doubt in such a situation, that every journalist has a duty of candour and a clear duty to recuse themselves from editorial authority if any hint of conflict of interest arises. Pope did not take these steps. From then until August 2020, through his deputy, he sent me a stream of directions that had the effect of removing adverse material about vanden Heuvel and its replacement with lists of her ‘achievements’. Then he killed the story
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Working on my own story for the CJR, I did not look behind or around – or think I needed to. I was working for the self-proclaimed ‘watchdog of journalism’. I forgot the ancient saw: who watches the watchdog?
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This week, Kyle Pope failed to reply to questions from Byline Times about conflicts of interest in linking up with the subjects of the report he had commissioned.
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During the period I was preparing the report about The Nation and its editor, he wrote for The Nation on nine occasions. He has admitted being remunerated by the publication. While I was working for the CJR, he said nothing. He did not recuse himself, and actively intervened to change content for a further 18 months.
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On April 16 2019, I was informed that Katrina vanden Heuvel had written to Pope to ask about my report. “We’re going to say thanks for her thoughts and that we’ll make sure the piece is properly vetted and fact-checked,” I was told
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A month later, I interviewed her for the CJR. Over the course of our 100 minutes discussion, it must have slipped her mind to mention that she and Kyle Pope had just jointly celebrated being given more than $1 million from the Rockefeller Family and other foundations to support their climate project.
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Pope then asked me to identify my confidential sources from inside The Nation, describing this as a matter of “policy”
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Pope asked several times that the article be amended to state that there were general tie-ups between the US left and Putin. I responded that I could find no evidence to suggest that was true, save that the Daily Beast had uncovered RT attempting cultivation of the US left.
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Pope then wanted the 6,000-word and fully edited report cut by 1,000 words, mainly to remove material about the errors in The Nation article. Among sections cut down were passages showing how, from 2014 onwards, vanden Heuvel had hired a series of pro-Russian correspondents after they had praised her husband. Among the new intake was a Russian and Syrian Government supporting broadcaster, Aaron Maté, taken on in 2017 after he had platformed Cohen on his show The Real News.
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On 30 January 2023, the CJR published an immense four-part 23,000-word series on Trump, Russia and the US media. The CJR‘s writers found their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets. Fox News rejoiced that The New York Times had been “skewered by the liberal media watchdog the Columbia Journalism Review” over Russiagate”. WorldNetDaily called it a “win for Trump”.
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Pope agreed. Trump had “hailed our report as proof of the media assault on Trump that they’ve been hyping all along,” he wrote. “Trump cheered that view on Truth Social, his own, struggling social-media platform
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She and her late husband, Professor Stephen Cohen, were at the heart of my reporting on the support The Nation gave to Putin’s Russia. Sixteen months later, as Pope killed my report, he revealed that he had throughout been involved in an ambitious and lucratively funded partnership between the CJR and The Nation, and between himself and vanden Heuvel.
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As with The Nation in 2017, the CJR is seeing a storm of derisive and critical evaluations of the series by senior American journalists. More assessments are said to be in the pipeline. “We’re taking the critiques seriously,” Pope said this week. The Columbia Journalism Review may now have a Russia Problem.
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Donald the Unready - The New York Times - 0 views
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It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the incoming administration would be blatantly corrupt. But would it at least be efficient in its corruption?
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Mr. Trump hasn’t pivoted, matured, whatever term you prefer. He’s still the insecure, short-attention-span egomaniac he always was. Worse, he is surrounding himself with people who share many of his flaws — perhaps because they’re the sort of people with whom he is comfortable.
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the typical Trump nominee, in everything from economics to diplomacy to national security, is ethically challenged, ignorant about the area of policy he or she is supposed to manage and deeply incurious.
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People tend to forget the extent to which the last Republican administration was also characterized by cronyism, the appointment of unqualified but well-connected people to key positions
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In particular, if you want some notion of what Trump governance is likely to look like, consider the botched occupation of Iraq. People who knew anything about nation-building weren’t wanted; party loyalists — and corporate profiteers — took their place. There’s even a little-known connection: Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, founded Blackwater, the mercenary outfit that, among other things, helped destabilize Iraq by firing into a crowd of civilians.
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Now the conditions that prevailed in Iraq — blind ideology, contempt for expertise, effective absence of any enforcement of ethics rules — have come to America, but in a far more acute form.
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will happen when we face a crisis? Remember, Katrina was the event that finally revealed the costs of Bush-era cronyism to all.
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Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.
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Scandals Republicans Like - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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what if the truth is more pedestrian: that the I.R.S. is simply not adequately funded to do its job and that Republicans are the ones who have kept the agency underfunded?
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Republican zeal for reducing the size of government, particularly its tax collecting apparatus, has left the I.R.S. ill-equipped to perform its functions, one of which is to review applications for tax-exempt status from groups claiming to be “social welfare” organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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Under intense pressure to meet I.R.S. production targets, civil servants – including registered Republicans — adopted the practice of flagging phrases like “tea party” to speed identification of applications requiring careful examination.
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Was there, Connolly asked, “a triggering event that flooded the I.R.S. with new applications?” Answering his own question, Connolly said “the triggering event is the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United. The number of applications between 2009 and 2012 for a 501(c)(4) doubled from 1,751 to 3,357.” Citizens United was decided on Jan. 21, 2010.
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R.S. appropriation has gone up during periods of Democratic control and down when Republicans have controlled at least one branch of Congress
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the I.R.S. commissioner, described the effect of these cuts to the Way and Means Committee. “No challenge facing our agency is greater than the significant reduction in funding that has occurred over the last several years,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about the ability of the I.R.S. to continue to fulfill its mission if the agency lacks adequate funding. Our current level of funding is clearly less than what the agency needs.”
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Koskinen observed that cuts in agency funding have reduced audits of corporations and of wealthy citizens: “Audits of high-income individuals – defined as those with $1 million or more in income – fell 3.7 percent as well last year. The I.R.S. examined approximately 61,000 business returns in FY 2013, down 13 percent from FY 2012.”
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Republicans are aware of what happens to tax collections from the rich when the I.R.S. budget is cut and seem happy to live with those consequences.
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imilarly, the House Oversight Committee has been relentless in its efforts to blame the Obama administration for the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Committee Republicans have done so despite their own record of repeatedly voting to cut spending on security for state department personnel.
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it’s no fun serving on an oversight committee when your own party is running the executive branch. The years when Republicans controlled the House and White House, 2001 to 2007, were a public relations disaster for the Oversight Committee. The panel pointedly avoided taking on the Bush administration despite a plethora of scandals: abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison, evidence that the claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was false, Jack Abramoff’s illicit lobbying, and the failure of the administration to respond to Hurricane Katrina.By the end of 2005, the committee had issued the Bush administration a total of 3 subpoenas, all on relatively noncontroversial matters.
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Opinion | The Content of the G.O.P.'s Character - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...gop-character-bad-faith.html
character gop morality corruption culture politics crisis
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Trump’s latest outbursts were very much in character — and I don’t just mean his personal character. When did you last see a member of the Trump administration, or for that matter any prominent Republican, admit error or accept responsibility for problems?
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Don’t say that it has always been that way, that it’s just the way people are. On the contrary, taking responsibility for your actions — what my parents called being a mensch — used to be considered an essential virtue in politicians and adults in general.
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And in this as in so many things, there’s a huge asymmetry between the parties. Of course not all Democrats are honest and upstanding; but as far as I can tell, there’s almost nobody left in the G.O.P. willing to take responsibility for, well, anything.
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I don’t think this is an accident. The sad content of modern Republican character is a symptom of the corruption and hypocrisy that has afflicted half of our body politic — a sickness of the soul that manifests itself in personal behavior as well as policy.
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And it didn’t start with Trump. In fact, way back in 2006 I wrote about the “mensch gap” in the Bush administration — the unwillingness of top officials to accept responsibility for the botched occupation of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and more.
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At the trivial but still telling end of the scale, we have the tale of Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who keeps flying first class at taxpayers’ expense. The money isn’t the important issue here, although his spending violates federal guidelines. The revealing thing, instead, is the supposed reason he needs to fly premium — you see, ordinary coach passengers have been known to say critical things to his face.
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Nor, by the way, are we only talking about politicians. In my neck of the woods, I remain amazed by the unwillingness of right-leaning economists to admit that they were wrong in predicting that the Fed’s efforts to rescue the economy would cause runaway inflation. Being wrong is one thing — it happens to everyone, myself very much included. Refusing to admit and learn from error is something different.
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in this case the personal is, ultimately, political. The modern G.O.P. is, to an extent never before seen in American history, a party built around bad faith, around pretending that its concerns and goals are very different from what they really are.
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Flag-waving claims of patriotism, pious invocations of morality, stern warnings about fiscal probity are all cover stories for an underlying agenda mainly concerned with making plutocrats even richer.
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And the character flaws of the party end up being echoed by the character flaws of its most prominent members. Are they bad people who chose their political affiliation because it fits their proclivities, or potentially good people corrupted by the company they keep? Probably some of both.
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let’s be clear: America in 2018 is not a place where we can disagree without being disagreeable, where there are good people and good ideas on both sides, or whatever other bipartisan homily you want to recite. We are, instead, living in a kakistocracy, a nation ruled by the worst, and we need to face up to that unpleasant reality
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FEMA Will Aid Hurricane-Ravaged Churches - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Tucked among the provisions in the budget bill passed by Congress on Friday are new rules about how FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, works with houses of worship. According to the new law, religious nonprofits can’t be excluded from disaster aid just because of their religious nature, which had been the agency’s policy in certain contexts prior to January.
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Last summer, when Hurricane Harvey ripped across islands in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and Texas, it left roughly $125 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—second in cost only to Hurricane Katrina. Worse, it was followed almost immediately by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which further devastated Florida, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and other areas.
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While these new guidelines changed the situation for houses of worship, they were ultimately impermanent and vulnerable to revision under a new administration. That’s where Congress’s new budget bill comes in: It revised the text of the Stafford Act itself. Under the new law, which was signed by Trump on Friday, houses of worship can’t be excluded from aid provided to other nonprofits, including schools, hospitals, and elder-care facilities, just because they’re led by people “who share a religious faith or practice.” This includes money for the “repair, restoration, and replacement of damaged facilities.”
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Sea Levels Are Already Rising. What's Next? - 0 views
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A new category of the dispossessed now exists—“climate refugees.” Which countries are particularly at risk—and should the rest of the world be held financially accountable for them?
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The countries that are most vulnerable are places like Bangladesh, India or West Africa. Globally, 145 million people live 3 feet or less above high tide. Small island states, like the Marshall Islands, may not only have to move to escape the rising seas, they’re going to lose their entire cultures as their nations are literally going to be under water. The central paradox is that the people who are going to suffer most, like the Marshall Islanders or people in Bangladesh, are those who have done the least to contribute to this problem. These are not the people who are driving around in SUVs and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere!
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The last time the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher. But even if we all turn in our cars and ride skateboards to work, because of the heat that’s already in the ocean, sea levels are going to continue to rise.
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How fast that will happen is hard to say. But a place like Miami is going to go underwater. There is no stopping that. There’s only trying to think about how we reinvent Miami to live with water.
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But you can’t do anything like that in Miami or South Florida. There’s no real technological fix for rising seas there other than elevating structures or retreating.
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In Florida, you also have a geology of porous limestone that makes it difficult to build sea walls around places like Miami and Miami Beach because the water will just come through underneath and flood from below. In the Netherlands they’ve built the dikes to keep the water out. In New Orleans, which was flooded severely during Hurricane Katrina, they have also built big dikes.
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Much of your book focuses on Florida. Why is that state at such risk from sea-level rise? The vast majority of south Florida is less than six feet above high tide. That risk is exacerbated by the fact that it’s on a hurricane track, so you get these storm pulses that come through every year.
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New York mayor urges Trump to help as more US coronavirus hotspots emerge | US news | T... - 0 views
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New York City has recorded 85 deaths from coronavirus in 24 hours, with the number of patients on ventilators doubling, while hotspots emerge in New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit and early-hit states such as California and Washington continue to battle the virus.
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“We are holding on,” said Mitch Katz, the head of the NYC Health and Hospitals system. “It is very rough, it is very challenging, but all of the hospitals are working above their capacity to meet the need.”
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De Blasio described Donald Trump’s aspiration that the US could “get back to work” by Easter Sunday, 12 April, as “false hope” and said the city was prepared to be on a stay-at-home footing for its 8 million residents at least through May.
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He continued: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators and now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
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Taking new measures to enforce social distancing, New York has taken down dozens of basketball hoops across the city and is planning to close wide boulevards in the Bronx and Brooklyn to traffic to allow pedestrians more space to move around while distancing themselves from each other.
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In Chicago, city officials closed its famous lakefront to the public, after too many crowds were gathering on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mayor Lori Lightfoot told Chicagoans in a vociferous public plea: “Dear God: stay home, save lives.”
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In Louisiana, the number of known coronavirus cases in Louisiana rose to 2,305 on Thursday, an increase of 510 cases in a day, and a total of 83 deaths, according to the Louisiana department of health.
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Amid the statistics, personal stories are beginning to emerge. A two-month-old baby died of coronavirus in Nashville; in New York, Dennis Dickson became the first NYPD officer to die from the virus.
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Opinion | Four Ways of Looking at the Radicalism of Joe Biden - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...bs-infrastructure-economy.html
biden strategy crisis policy politics economics 2021
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The real starting point, however, is the institutional collapse of the right. Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics.
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But over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here, but so too was then-Speaker John Boehner’s inability to sell his members on the budget bargain he’d negotiated with President Barack Obama, followed by his refusal to allow so much as a vote in the House on the 2013 immigration bil
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economists are one of many voices at the table, not the dominant voices. This partly reflects Biden himself: he’s less academically minded, and more naturally skeptical of the way economists view the world and human behavior, than either Obama or Clinton. But it goes deeper than tha
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This has transformed policy design: These are now negotiations among Democrats, done with the intention of finding policies popular enough that Republican voters will back them, even if Republican politicians will not
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iden still talks like he believes bipartisanship is possible in Congress, but his administration has put the onus on Republicans to prove it, and to do so on the administration’s terms. That, more than any other single factor, has unleashed Democrats’ legislative ambitions.
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in general, the younger generation has sharply different views on the role of government, the worth of markets and the risks worth taking seriously.
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the new generation of staff members see the world very differently. “There has been a lot more work done to try to understand what the roots of economic inequality are over the course of the last decade, and openness to thinking about power and power dynamics,
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“The next generation of the economics profession is rebelling against its predecessors by being all about inequality in the same way that my generation rebelled against its predecessors by being all about incentives, and this is a good thing,” said Larry Summers,
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Multiple economists, both inside and outside the Biden administration, told me that this is an administration in which economists and financiers are simply far less influential than they were in past administrations.
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And it’s impossible to overstate the damage that Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling of Merrick Garland, followed by his swift action to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, did to the belief among Senate Democrats that McConnell was in any way, in any context, a good-faith actor. They gave up on him completely.
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The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise
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Biden is a politician, in the truest sense of the word. Biden sees his role, in part, as sensing what the country wants, intuiting what people will and won’t accept, and then working within those boundaries.
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the scale of the climate disaster, and the speed at which it must be addressed, simply demands a different role for the government. “If you think across the big systems in our country — the transportation system being one, the power and energy system being another — in order to actually solve climate change, we’re going to have to transform those systems,”
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Biden and his team see this as fundamentally a political problem. They view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous.
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it’s not just a messaging and narrative imperative,” he told me. “It has to be that Americans see and experience that the investments in building out a more resilient power grid actually improve their lives and create job opportunities for them, or their neighbors.”
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Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years
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Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.
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Many who served under Obama, and who now serve under Biden, believe that they were so focused on economic risks that they missed the political risks — and you can’t make good economic policy if you lose political power
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But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.”
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In America, that’s often treated as a dirty business. We like the aesthetics of conviction, we believe leaders should follow their own counsel, we use “politician” as an epithet.
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But Biden’s more traditional understanding of the politician’s job has given him the flexibility to change alongside the country
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Stagnating wages and a warming world and Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic virus proved that there were scarier words in the English language than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it
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He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much.
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What is the Insurrection Act? - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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Viral social media posts have falsely claimed that President Donald Trump invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 law to deploy American soldiers to police US streets. That didn't happen.
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While the law provides ample legal footing for presidents to deploy the military if they so choose, in practice it's been used sparingly. The most notable application of the law was perhaps its invocation to enforce desegregation in the 1950s.
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The Insurrection Act hasn't been invoked since 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man, according to the Congressional Research Service.
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"Historically and practically, such a request is not necessarily a prerequisite to the President using regular federal troops for domestic law enforcement," Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor and CNN contributor, previously told CNN of the law.
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The main provision of the Insurrection Act states that troops can only be deployed to an American state by the President if the governor or state legislature requests it.
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Congress amended the law after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 to give more clarity about its use during natural disasters, but dropped some of those changes a year later after objections by state governors who did not want to cede their authority.
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Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act when he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and then sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to integrate the schools.
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While he's never invoked the law, the President did threaten to use it last year.Following the police killing of George Floyd in May, Trump touted the Insurrection Act as a way to break up anti-fascists, or Antifa, who he said were organizing violent riots that led to looting."If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," Trump said at the time, though he never did.
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Transgender athlete bills put trans girls at center of America?s culture wars, again - ... - 0 views
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Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.
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“What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”
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But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender
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The Montana youth athlete bill passed the state House on a 61-to-38 vote and is moving to the Senate.
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Democratic opponents of these bills and some political experts charge that the legislative efforts amount to a political power play to rally the conservative base around an issue they see as threatening traditional gender roles.
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The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group for socially conservative causes, published a blog post this week that charges transgender athletes with hijacking competitive opportunities and calls Biden’s executive order a threat to “gut legal protections for women and girls.”
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“It’s an easy way for them to show that Democrats have just gone over the edge, that there is no limit to how far they will push these radical ideas.”
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For generations, anti-trans messaging in the United States has largely focused on transgender women rather than transgender men,
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Trantham said one of the first people she notified when she decided to file the bill was the head of the LGBTQ advocacy group South Carolina Equality.“I want to make sure you guys understand this is not me trying to hurt the transgender community,” Trantham said she told him. “This is me trying to protect girls in women’s sports.”
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LGBTQ activists and many pediatricians say that the medical treatments transgender youth receive to align their bodies with their gender identity mitigate the physical disparities in athletics.
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“I’ve seen arguments that this will be the end of women’s sports,” said Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and bioethicist. “If so, it should have ended already.”
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“Values always matter and there’s a divide in our country over values,” Deutsch said in a phone interview Thursday. “I stood up and said this is not a hate bill. It’s about biology. It’s science. You can’t change your sex. You can look like a boy, you can take hormones and sex operations but it doesn’t make you a boy. Your gender can be a boy, but you can never change your sex.”
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while public opinion polls across the board show support for transgender military service and other transgender rights, support softens when it comes to public accommodations and sports, Haider-Markel said.
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School athletics are “an extremely competitive environment,” said Trantham, whose daughter was a high school basketball player. “If it was my daughter and she needed that scholarship to go to college, it would be very important to me that she was playing on an even playing field.”
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Serano argues that the disparity is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and the idea that “there’s a certain amount of societal respect for wanting to be a man.” Even when it comes to cisgender children, she said, “people are a lot more disturbed, concerned by feminine boys than they are by masculine girls.”
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bills about transgender athletes trigger the idea that “this is wrong; this male person is in this space that is supposed to be segregated to protect girls and women,
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Transgender cross-country runner Juniper Eastwood started competing for the women’s track team at the University of Montana after she began presenting as female and taking testosterone suppression medication. She said running improved her mental health. At one point, Eastwood said, she had contemplated suicide so she wouldn’t have to deal with knowing she was transgender.
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Eastwood said she’s hopeful that a new generation of conservatives will learn to understand who transgender people are, just as many conservatives have come to accept the gay community.“It’s just going to take a long time,” she said. “It won’t happen this year.”
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The National Guard's Role, Origins Explained - WSJ - 0 views
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Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times.
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Last year, in June, roughly 3,300 National Guard troops from 10 states deployed to Washington, D.C., during racial-justice protests. The National Guard dates back to before the declaration of U.S. independence, and its troops have deployed to locations as far flung as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Mexican border.
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The National Guard was conceived at first as a citizen force to protect families and towns from hostile attacks, and its mission has since grown to encompass domestic emergencies, overseas combat missions, counternarcotics operations, and other duties.
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Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times.
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Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times
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tate governors can call branches of the National Guard into action during local or statewide emergencies, including natural disasters and civil disturbances. The president can activate the National Guard for participation in federal missions in the U.S. and abroad.
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National Guard units can be ordered into federal service, in which case control of the mobilized units passes from the respective governors to the president
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The National Guard has long participated in disaster-relief operations such as those following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and its troops provided security at airports around the country after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn Will Soon Be The Youngest House Member | Huf... - 0 views
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Madison Cawthorn, a 25-year-old Trump-loving conservative, is projected to win the North Carolina House seat once held by Mark Meadows, now White House chief of staff.
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Cawthorn’s campaign issued a statement calling out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive firebrand from New York City who at 31 is currently the youngest member of Congress. He had previously said that Ocasio-Cortez’s rise inspired him to run.
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Cawthorn, who became paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in 2014, has been a controversial candidate. During the campaign, he was accused of sexual misconduct, an allegation he said was politically motivated. He acknowledging the encounter but said he was acting “just in a flirtatious way.”
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his campaign created an attack website that went after a local reporter for working for “non-white males, like [Sen.] Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Cawthorn said that the line was a “syntax error” and that he merely meant to deride “left-wing identity politics.”
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“It just really personally saddens me that somebody who is so clearly racist is a nominee of a major party, and I think it’s a disrespect of the entire community,” the New Jersey Democrat said. “It’s really unfortunate.”
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He’s still an ardent supporter of Trump and has since been called a rising star in the party. He is anti-abortion and pro-border walls.
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Gripped by disease, unemployment and outrage at the police, America plunges into crisis... - 0 views
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crisis culture politics 2020 unemployment disease police racism
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“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.
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the toll of the coronavirus outbreak made long-standing racial inequities newly stark. Then, images of police violence made those same disparities visceral.
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“There are major turning points and ruptures in history. . . . This is one of these moments, but we’ve not seen how it will fully play out.”
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Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, said the past is filled with events whose outcomes have not been as sweeping as they seemed to portend. He pointed to examples as disparate as the European revolutions of 1848 — famously said to be the “turning point at which modern history failed to turn” — and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which exposed lethal failures but did not cause political transformation.
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“There seems to be a very powerful inertia pushing us back to normal,” Foner said. “I’m skeptical of those who think this coronavirus is going to change everything.”
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“Is this going to be the summer of covid-19? Or is this going to be the summer of urban unrest?” Brinkley said. “And Trump does not want it to be the summer of covid-19.”
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“I was amazed watching people who were out,” said Raoul Cunningham, head of the NAACP branch in Louisville. “To me, it made clear that we’re at a period of time like we’ve never faced before.”
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Brinkley, the Rice University historian, said the moment seemed akin to Richard Nixon’s presidency, when the country was divided politically over the Vietnam War and the president was attacking the press over the Pentagon Papers.
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Trump, he said, seems to see the unrest as a potentially helpful “political issue,” if he can position himself as a law-and-order candidate cracking down on anarchy and possibly distract from the pandemic. A Washington Post national average of polls in May shows Trump trailing Biden by seven points, 42 percent to 49 percent.
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A president’s impeachment, demonstrations over police killings and even global pandemics all have precedents. But their confluence in such a short span of time — under this president, who consistently pushes the boundaries of historic norms associated with his office — has exacerbated the nation’s sense of unease.
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Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said Trump seemed to be exacerbating the crisis.
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Norms that we took for granted have been eroded. And at a time when what is most needed is thoughtful, calm, deliberate leadership, we have the opposite.”
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How the White House Coronavirus Response Went Wrong - The Atlantic - 0 views
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oping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools.
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I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a “whole of nation” response, rather than being manageable with any one element of “hard” or “soft” power or even a “whole of government” approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude.
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“If he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, ‘What do I do first?’ We wouldn’t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.”
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Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong
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with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, it has suffered by far the largest number of fatalities, about one-quarter of the global total, despite having less than one-20th of the world’s population.
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What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude?
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This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.
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Timelines of aviation disasters typically start long before the passengers or even the flight crew knew anything was wrong, with problems in the design of the airplane, the procedures of the maintenance crew, the route, or the conditions into which the captain decided to fly. In the worst cases, those decisions doomed the flight even before it took off. My focus here is similarly on conditions and decisions that may have doomed the country even before the first COVID-19 death had been recorded on U.S. soil.
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What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf
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As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.
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the most important event was the H5N1 “bird flu” outbreak, in 2005. It originated in Asia and was mainly confined there, as the SARS outbreak had been two years earlier. Bush-administration officials viewed H5N1 as an extremely close call. “
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Shortly before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group—yes, that was a thing—released a report reflecting the progress that had been made in applying remote-sensing and AI tools since the early days of Global Argus. The report is freely available online and notes pointedly that recent technological advances “provide opportunities to mitigate large-scale outbreaks by predicting more accurately when and where outbreaks are likely to occur, and how they will progress.”
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“Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”
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The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown.
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other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.
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During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market
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“It was in the briefings by the beginning of January,” a person involved in preparing the president’s briefing book told me. “On that there is no dispute.” This person went on: “But knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.” He didn’t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not.
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To sum up: The weather forecast showed a dangerous storm ahead, and the warning came in plenty of time. At the start of January, the total number of people infected with the virus was probably less than 1,000. All or nearly all of them were in China. Not a single case or fatality had been reported in the United States.
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In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors
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in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s.
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One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.
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“We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.”
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What did the breakdown in U.S.-Chinese cooperation mean in practice? That the U.S. knew less than it would have otherwise, and knew it later; that its actions brought out the worst (rather than the merely bad) in China’s own approach to the disease, which was essentially to cover it up internally and stall in allowing international access to emerging data; that the Trump administration lost what leverage it might have had over Chinese President Xi Jinping and his officials; and that the chance to keep the disease within the confines of a single country was forever lost.
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In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.
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“The state of the relationship meant that every U.S. request was met with distrust on the Chinese side, and every Chinese response was seen on the American side as one more attempt to cover up,”
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Several officials who had experience with China suggested that other presidents might have called Xi Jinping with a quiet but tough message that would amount to: We both know you have a problem. Why don’t we work on it together, which will let you be the hero? Otherwise it will break out and become a problem for China and the whole world.
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“It would have taken diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to allow us to insert our people” into Wuhan and other disease centers, Klain said. “The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”
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The president’s advance notice of the partial European ban almost certainly played an important part in bringing the infection to greater New York City. Because of the two-day “warning” Trump gave in his speech, every seat on every airplane from Europe to the U.S. over the next two days was filled. Airport and customs offices at the arrival airports in the U.S. were unprepared and overwhelmed. News footage showed travelers queued for hours, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. Some of those travelers already were suffering from the disease; they spread it to others. On March 11, New York had slightly more than 220 diagnosed cases. Two weeks later, it had more than 25,000. Genetic testing showed that most of the infection in New York was from the coronavirus variant that had come through Europe to the United States, rather than directly from China (where most of the early cases in Washington State originated).
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Aviation is safe because, even after all the advances in forecasting and technology, its culture still imagines emergencies and rehearses steps for dealing with them.
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Especially in the post-9/11 era of intensified concern about threats of all sorts, American public-health officials have also imagined a full range of crises, and have prepared ways to limit their worst effects. The resulting official “playbooks” are the equivalent of cockpit emergency checklists
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the White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, then claimed that whatever “thin packet of paper” Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” and is freely available online. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.
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What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration’s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” and publicly available here, differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw
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consider the one below, and see how, sentence by sentence, these warnings from 2005 match the headlines of 2020. The topic was the need to divide responsibility among global, national, state, and community jurisdictions in dealing with the next pandemic. The fundamental premise—so widely shared that it barely needed to be spelled out—was that the U.S. federal government would act as the indispensable flywheel, as it had during health emergencies of the past. As noted, it would work with international agencies and with governments in all affected areas to coordinate a global response. Within its own borders it would work with state agencies to detect the potential for the disease’s spread and to contain cases that did arise:
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Referring to the detailed pandemic playbooks from the Bush and Obama administrations, John R. Allen told me: “The moment you get confirmation of a problem, you would move right to the timeline. Decisions by the president, actions by the secretary of defense and the CDC, right down the list. You’d start executing.”Or, in the case of the current administration, you would not. Reading these documents now is like discovering a cockpit checklist in the smoking wreckage.
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a virtue of Sully is the reminder that when everything else fails—the forecasts, the checklists, the triply redundant aircraft systems—the skill, focus, and competence of the person at the controls can make the difference between life and death.
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So too in the public response to a public-health crisis. The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.
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n a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV. “And all around him, you have this carnival,”
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“There would be some ballast in the relationship,” this person said. “Now all you’ve got is the trade friction”—plus the personal business deals that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, has made in China,
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The deadliest airline crash in U.S. history occurred in 1979. An American Airlines DC-10 took off from O’Hare Airport, in Chicago—and just as it was leaving the ground, an incorrectly mounted engine ripped away from one of the wings. When the engine’s pylon was pulled off, it cut the hydraulic lines that led from the cockpit to the control surfaces on the wings and tail. From that point on, the most skillful flight crew in the world could not have saved the flight.
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By the time the pandemic emerged, it may have already been too late. The hydraulic lines may already have been too damaged to transmit the signals. It was Trump himself who cut them.
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The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of people in its middle layers—the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and craftsmen; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants
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Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.
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“There is still resilience and competence in the working-level bureaucracy,” an intelligence-agency official told me. “But the layers above them have been removed.”
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Traditionally, the National Security Council staff has comprised a concentration of highly knowledgeable, talented, and often ambitious younger figures, mainly on their way to diplomatic or academic careers.
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“There is nobody now who can play the role of ‘senior China person,’” a former intelligence official told me. “In a normal administration, you’d have a lot of people who had spent time in Asia, spent time in China, knew the goods and bads.” Also in a normal administration, he and others pointed out, China and the United States would have numerous connective strands
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The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.
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Presidents cope with this discovery in varying ways. The people I spoke with had served in past administrations as early as the first George Bush’s. George H. W. Bush came to office with broad experience in the federal government—as much as any other president. He had been vice president for eight years, a CIA director, twice an ambassador, and a member of Congress. He served only four years in the Oval Office but began with a running start. Before he became president, Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years and had spent decades learning and talking about government policies. A CIA official told me that Clinton would not read his President’s Daily Briefs in the morning, when they arrived, but would pore over them late at night and return them with copious notes. George W. Bush’s evolution from dependence on the well-traveled Dick Cheney, in his first term, to more confident control, in his second, has been well chronicled. As for Obama, Paul Triolo told me: “By the end of his eight years, Obama really understood how to get the bureaucracy to do what he wanted done, and how to get the information he needed to make decisions.” The job is far harder than it seems. Donald Trump has been uninterested in learning the first thing about it.
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In a situation like this, some of those in the “regular” government decide to struggle on. Others quit—literally, or in the giving-up sense
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The ‘process’ is just so chaotic that it’s not a process at all. There’s no one at the desk. There’s no one to read the memos. No one is there.”
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“If this could happen to Fauci, it makes people think that if they push too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll get their heads chopped off. There is no reason in the world something called #FireFauci should even exist. The nation’s leaders should maintain high regard for scientific empiricism, insight, and advice, and must not be professionally or personally risk averse when it comes to understanding and communicating messages about public safety and health.”
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Over nearly two decades, the U.S. government had assembled the people, the plans, the connections, and the know-how to spare this nation the worst effects of the next viral mutation that would, someday, arise. That someday came, and every bit of the planning was for naught. The deaths, the devastation, the unforeseeable path ahead—they did not have to occur.
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The language of an NTSB report is famously dry and clinical—just the facts. In the case of the pandemic, what it would note is the following: “There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people that would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.”
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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views
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doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics
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as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
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In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
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Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
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Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
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Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
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Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
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How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
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“When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
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In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
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A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
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Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
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In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
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I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
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In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
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“I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
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The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
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“Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
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“Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
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“People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
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By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
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many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
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The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
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r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
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Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
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“Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
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The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
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Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
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d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
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That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
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If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
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In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
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Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
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The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
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Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
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Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
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In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
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“Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
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American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
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In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
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An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
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He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
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Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
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Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
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As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’
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As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”