Last week we suffered from a tragic infographic blackout, but the folks at Compound Interest have dealt with their technical issues, so this morning a little chemistry for those shopping for just the right present—with no opinion on why little bits of rock that 99% of people can’t tell from a hunk of glass have any value at all.
Bernie Sanders takes to the editorial page to discuss Trump’s Carrier cave.
President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly announce a deal with United Technologies, the corporation that owns Carrier, that keeps less than 1,000 of the 2,100 jobs in America that were previously scheduled to be transferred to Mexico. …
In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut.
You know what they say: Speak loudly and carry a nice box of tax breaks. Or wait … was it the other way around? In any case, have some fat corporate tax breaks! Now every person in the state of Indiana gets to shell out to reward a corporation for using its workers as hostages. That’s the smell of Trump victory.
Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren’t thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be reevaluating their stance this morning.
Cut government programs and instead funnel money to through corporations. What could be more efficient? After all, it’s exactly the fiscal policy of people who made the trains run on time. To places no one wanted to go.
Let’s be clear. United Technologies is not going broke. Last year, it made a profit of $7.6 billion and received more than $6 billion in defense contracts. It has also received more than $50 million from the Export-Import Bank and very generous tax breaks. In 2014, United Technologies gave its former chief executive Louis Chenevert a golden parachute worth more than $172 million. Last year, the company’s five highest-paid executives made more than $50 million. The firm also spent $12 billion to inflate its stock price instead of using that money to invest in new plants and workers.
But Bernie, if we only give them more billions eventually some of it will slop over onto workers, and if that doesn’t work—we give them more.
Come on in. Let’s talk to pundits.
Ruth Marcus and the OED word of the year.
“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams in 1770, defending British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Not a problem now, John. We’ve spent the last two+ centuries wrestling those facts, holding them down, and making them eat dirt.
The practice of post-truth — untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion — helped get Donald Trump to the White House. The more untruths he told, the more supporters rewarded him for, as they saw it, telling it like it is.
As Politico’s Susan Glasser wrote in a sobering assessment of election coverage for the Brookings Institution, “Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated.”
The only response to someone who fires off lies like a series of missiles is to stop providing a massive, multi-billion dollar launch pad for every salvo. It’s hard to champion truth if the first paragraph of every story is simply a restatement of lies.
And yes, I know I’m guilty of firing up the big Electro Trump-Cardio Slux so that I can complain about the Trumpism of the day … by repeating it. But dammit, it’s hard. So … hard to resist. Seriously, it’s difficult to refute without first repeating, which means every fight starts on Trump’s court and has to be coaxed back to the side of rationality. Which sucks.
Indeed, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1967, presciently explained the basis for this phenomenon: “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller.”
If election 2016 has told us anything, it’s that the penalties for lying your butt off are infinitely smaller than the penalties for telling the truth. That’s a pretty horrifying outcome. Seriously, let’s just reserve the making-stuff-up for people who create the perfect Christmas gift for everyone.
Stephen Johnson on why it’s the blue states that should be hurling some tea.
When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately represented by the remote authorities in Washington.
But the election of 2016 presents a challenge to that historical lineage. The home states to the Tea Party are actually doing great on the taxation and representation front. It’s the progressive blue states that should be protesting.
2016 isn’t unique. Yes, the inequity between votes and results was particularly noticeable in the presidential outcome this year, but the House has been a symbol of the effectiveness or gerrymandering and inequitable weighting for several cycles.
The right way to think about the political conflict in this country is not red state versus blue state, but red country versus blue city. And yet we are voting in a system explicitly designed to tip the scales toward the countryside.
Not only do country voters have different priorities than city voters, they often have a jealous hatred of the city. Take it from someone who has lived in Missouri for three decades—if the rural counties could vote a rain of frogs on St. Louis and Kansas City, any global threat to amphibians would be ended.
Frank Bruni looks at a lopsided Senate race that was supposed to be a tougher fight.
“I very much believe — no offense to anyone — that Rob Portman ran the best campaign in America,” Matthew Borges, the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio, told me.
“People think this world of campaigns is like these stupid movies and, at some point, some grand decision suddenly tips the scales: a particular ad, a particular event,” he noted. But what Portman did, he said, was toil away, methodically and precisely, with one question above all others in mind: What’s the path to the most votes?
Which is pretty much the least glamorous, least soul stirring means of carrying out an election—but one that can be ruthlessly effective. Especially when the opposition isn’t exactly causing people to fall into a rapture.
Strickland made sense on a superficial level, and the party initially convinced itself that it had hit a home run. A former Ohio governor, he had instant name recognition and deep experience, and was guaranteed to raise gobs of money.
But he was 15 years older than Portman, a fellow political insider and a lackluster campaigner. He couldn’t use the most effective tactic against an incumbent and cast himself as a spirited insurgent or agent of change.
It also helps that Strickland ran a worse-than-lackluster campaign that seemed unable to find any theme beyond name recognition—which was definitely a mixed bag for a one-term governor.
Eugene Robinson on Trump’s Corporate Deal.
“If they’re going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they’re going to sell those air conditioners to the United States — there’s going to be a tax,” Trump said on “Meet the Press” in the summer. “It could be 25 percent, it could be 35 percent, it could be 15 percent, I haven’t determined.”
As it turns out, how about zero percent?
The plant does not make air conditioners, a fact that hasn’t made it through Trump’s skull after a thousand repetitions. But anyway … No! Zero is far too high. Let’s hit them with negative 10 percent. Negative thirty percent! That’ll show them.
In fact, how about giving United Technologies state tax breaks worth about $7 million over the next decade, in exchange for moving only 1,300 jobs to Mexico? That’s basically the deal offered by Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who happens to be governor of Indiana (and thus in a position to offer the tax relief).
Thank you, Indiana tax payers, for footing the bill for Trump’s grandstanding. That includes you, Carrier workers not lucky enough to be in the “Donald Trump bought me a job” club. But wait! There’s more to this deal. Trump promised an even bigger worm to catch this minnow.
… instead of worrying about a potential tariff, United Technologies can anticipate a major reduction in the federal corporate tax rate. That’s something Trump promised on the campaign trail — and also, reportedly, in a recent phone call with United Technologies chief executive Greg Hayes.
You get a corporate tax cut! And you get a corporate tax cut and … well. Not really you. Unless you’re reading this and you also happen to be a corporation, in which case I may rethink my whole opinion on Citizen’s United.
Ross Douthat is one of many to whack the Carrier deal from the right.
Unfortunately this is not an optimal approach to economic policy. It ignores deep Hayekian insights about the problems inherent in picking winners and punishing losers from on high. It expands an economy of favors and phone calls in which insiders will inevitably profit more than innovators. It embodies the crony capitalism that only yesterday Republicans opposed.
And yes, “Hayekian” is the word of the day … though the way Douthat slings it here doesn’t really convey information about Hayek’s economics. Which is kind of non-Hayekian. Anyway …
And it’s disappointment with wages writ large, and male-breadwinner wages especially, that’s crucial to the economic element in Trump’s populist appeal. Even with unemployment falling, years and decades of slack wage growth are a crucial fact on the economic ground, and an issue that both parties — the Republicans in their paeans to heroic entrepreneurs, the Democrats in their promise of new welfare spending — have talked around more than they’ve addressed.
Douthat spends the rest of his article talking about how there’s no policy that can really address this—except tax cuts of course. Tax cuts for everyone! You get … No. Sorry. Did that. But hey, I don’t know, a law that requires corporations to pay higher wages and which sets a mandatory cap on the ratio between executive pay and worker pay, how about that as a way to address worker pay? Rising worker pay. I suppose it’s not very Hayekian. Or Chicago School. Speaking of which, Trump’s tax plan skips right past both into Laffer Land.
… the tax policy to expect from Trump is probably a modest gesture toward Middle America paired with a sweeping, 1-percent-friendly, supply-side tax cut.
Your anytime-it-comes-up reminder: Supply side economics doesn’t work, has never worked, was based on pure unsupported speculation at the outset and has generated nothing but contradictory results since then. That any political party can still mount a case based on supply-side economics without being laughed out of town is possibly the ultimate expression of how propaganda has triumphed over facts and reason.
Fred Hiatt reminds us that there are other leaders out there rewarding specific corporate pals.
... there is a whiff of Putinism in the combination of bribery and menace that may have affected Carrier’s decision — the bribery of tax breaks, the menace of potential lost defense contracts for Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.
If this were to become the U.S. government’s standard method of operation, the results would be Russian, too: dwindling investment, slowing economic growth, fewer jobs.
My “I am not harboring the wandering soul of Joe McCarthy” post of the day: In fact, I don’t think Trump’s policy here looks all that Putiny. It’s more like that other guy. The one with the tiny ‘stache.
Alex Wellerstein wins the “that’s not reassuring” award for the week.
Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if he hasn’t already learned about them.
All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. She cut an ad along the same lines. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — also said they didn’t think he could be trusted with the launch codes.
Now they’re his.
Excuse me. I’m now back from my ten minute screaming and pounding my head on the wall break.
When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them if and whenever he decides to do so. The one sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.
Nope. Sorry. I was wrong. More head-pounding was required. The only positive thing I can think of is that if the briefing on how to light that big fuse was more than 27 seconds long, Trump probably zoned out and started thinking of how to put hotels on aircraft carriers, or taco bowls, or taco-tels where every room comes with golden nacho cheese. If only the guy with the football will pretend not to understand when Trump starts screaming for the “button thingee,” we might live through this. Maybe.
Kathleen Parker is back from maybe-he-won’t-be-so-bad land.
More than a month and a half away from Inauguration Day, Trump’s only discipline seems to be making good on bad faith. His attacks both on the media and on those who, rather rarely, burn an American flag, are fundamentally assaults on the Constitution and the First Amendment.
Do Trump followers really not care about these founding documents and their bearing on all the freedoms we take for granted? Or, could they really not know any better?
Seriously? When did Trump supporters seem concerned about the Constitution. I mean, maybe one-third of the Second Amendment (raise your hand if you’ve seen a poster where the Second Amendment starts with the words “The right”), but that’s only because people keep pretending it’s under threat.
Most disturbing is the absence of objections from the right. Where are the Republicans when the leader of their party speaks so dismissively toward our principles of freedom and the journalists, many of whom they know personally, who practice in good faith the spirit of the law? How long before Trump’s words persuade some off-balanced Second Amendment “patriot” to take out a “crooked” media person, fully expecting to be applauded by the president-elect?
Trump hasn’t actually said “who will rid me of this troublesome reporter” — because he doesn’t read and saves the plays for Pence — but he’s come damn close. The reason the press is kept in pens at Trump events? It makes it easier to find them, jeer at them, and spot them when they try to leave.
... his persistent attacks on the media, threatening to restrict press freedom, are so misplaced, potentially dangerous and, not least, impossible for him to do constitutionally. Either Trump knows this, which makes his crowd-baiting not only offensive but also irresponsible, or he’s unfamiliar with the Constitution, the defense of which is one of the primary functions of the presidency.
There’s a better possibility: Trump is both playing to the crowd and he doesn’t know the Constitution. Or, to be more accurate, he doesn’t give a flying fig about the Constitution.
Dana Milbank and our new second-hand access to our own government.
It is a sign of how secretive the new administration plans to be that when Donald Trump spoke this week with the Pakistani prime minister, Americans learned what was discussed not from their president-elect but from the oppressive Pakistani government’s Ministry of Information.
How did we learn that the American president-elect had talked to the Argentinian president about a building permit? From an Argentinian journalist. About Trump’s discussions with his Indian partners? From Indian papers. The only time Americans get any direct insight into Trump’s activities is when he feels they’re tweet-worthy, and in those cases the relationship between reality and Trump’s 140 mangled characters is definitely suspect.
Dear Americans, here’s your president elect speaking, courtesy of Pakistan Press Release No. 298:
“President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.”
… Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. ”Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.”
There are other people in the house. For this reason, I do not scream or let out gales of hysterical laughter at 3 AM. Which is only making my pre-pounded skull ache worse.
Note: Sometimes you see a headline from Charles Krauthammer and you think “hey, that could be interesting.” But it’s not. It’s Charles Krauthammer.
Leonard Pitts and journalism’s year in the wilderness.
This has probably not in fact been the worst year in the history of American journalism.
But you’ll forgive me if it feels that way just the same.
It was, after all, a year in which the country firmly entered the post-factual era, led by an incoming president who has no time for intelligence reports, yet is a devotee of a conspiracy website that claims symbols on a pizza menu are used by pedophiles to send messages. This same guy spent much of the year castigating journalists as “dummies,” “slime,” “disgusting,” “lame,” “sad,” and “the lowest form of life,” all of it eaten up by mobs that snarled and snapped at the traveling press corps, who stood penned up at his rallies like that goat lowered into the Tyrannosaur paddock in “Jurassic Park.”
If only that goat had known how to do a proper Joe and Mika style talon-licking, it could still be bleating in that paddock today. The lesson for journalists delivered piping hot from the Morning Show? If you bow down, you can move up the ladder from hatred to plain old disdain.
Worldwide, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that over 1,200 journalists have been killed since 1992. According to Reporters Without Borders, 81 were killed last year alone.
The United States has been largely spared those outrages. Yet they provide a chilling context for the anti-media frenzy so gleefully generated by the incoming president.
Have you thought about career opportunities at Breitbart? Not only is there less getting shot, you can skip the ugly parts of the news business—interviewing real people, checking facts, etc.
David Holahan on a practice that has been a staple right here at DK for years.
Bird watching is getting even harder because there are fewer birds every year. Two recent studies documented the decline: one, based on the annual Christmas count, reported that wintering North American birds are down by one third since 1966; the other predicts that unless conservation action is taken more than a third of North American bird species are at risk of extinction.
This has been a good year for the species count generated by looking out my window. Spring storms delivered Cormorants and Great Egrets. Now that there’s finally a bit of coolness in the air, the duck diversity is climbing, with Buffleheads, Blue-winged Teal, and Hooded Mergansers joining the Mallards, Wood Ducks and Pie-billed Grebes that were summer regulars.
But the number of individual birds is way, way … make that WAY down. I want to think that’s just my little lake, and that somewhere, just over the next hill, big flocks of Coots and Shovelers and Snow Geese are passing out of my sight.
We take the environment for granted, assuming it will take care of itself and will always be there for us. We rarely stop and admire the bluebirds, even if we are out looking for birds.
Let me recommend the Backyard Science group here at Daily Kos for regular reminders that you live on a planet occupied by things other than the great Orange-faced Spit Adder, and the Birds and Birdwatching group specifically for all things feathered. Follow both these groups. It will help. Trust me.
Sara Vilkomerson from Entertainment Weekly may seem an odd addition to the morning mix, but …
As Hulu prepares its adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss, the dystopian tale has never felt fresher.
Margaret Atwood’s novel became an instant classic when it was first published in 1985, but in light of the current political climate, its themes feel more contemporary than ever. “We never wanted the show to be this relevant,” says star Elisabeth Moss from the Toronto set of the new Hulu series (out April 2017).
“We never wanted the show to be this relevant.” That’s a terrifying bit of honesty.
Set in the dystopian Republic of Gilead — a totalitarian theocracy in what was once the United States, where women have been stripped of their personal rights — the series finds Moss’ character, Offred, in a class called handmaids, females whose sole role in society is to reproduce.
The only thing Atwood missed was the pageants. Surely there will be pageants so the Dear Leader can select the prime “stock.”
And since we’ve already wandered into Entertainment Weekly …
In a case of life immitating art, Donald Trump slammed Saturday Night Live on Twitter for a sketch about his tweets.
“Just tried watching Saturday Night Live – unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad,” Trump wrote on Twitter just after midnight on Sunday morning.
I’d like to object to the idea that what’s happening now is actually “life.”
Trump’s actual critique of the Twitter sketch came before the SNLepisode ended, and drew a reply from Baldwin himself. “Release your tax returns and I’ll stop.”
That’s not how you negotiate. Where’s the package of tax breaks?
Not only is the Compound Interest infographic back this week, it’s time for their annual Chemistry Advent Calendar! I didn’t put it at the top of the page because the format is not our-pictures-lean-to-landscape friendly. But you’ll want to go to their site and get the full sized version in any case.