v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Punitative Racist Logic from a Bad Man

From Common Dreams:

Tough Guy Attorney General Jeff Session has announced that federal prosecutors will charge low-level drug offenders and others with the most serious crimes possible, despite overwhelming evidence and a bipartisan agreement that this approach is racially discriminatory and counterproductive.

The Sessions approach will throw thousands of people – especially Americans from communities of color or with low-incomes – into prison needlessly, sabotaging their life chances and increase post-release criminality. It is shameful and stupid. Shameful because there is overwhelming empirical evidence that this approach unfairly targets and damages young people of color. And stupid because there is, equally, overwhelming empirical evidence that it will create a cycle of crime.

At the same time that Sessions is announcing a clampdown on nonviolent, low-level offenders, Session’s Department of Justice is expected to announce resolution of a longstanding major corporate crime case: allegations of a massive Wal-Mart bribery scheme in Mexico and perhaps other countries. If news reports of the settlement are accurate, the settlement will involve a slap-on-the-wrist fine; no individual prosecutions; and a non-prosecution agreement with the Wal-Mart company, in which the company avoids prosecution in exchange for a promise not to break the law in the future – a meaningless commitment since the company is required to follow the law with or without an agreement with the Department of Justice.

So, it appears Tough Guy Attorney General Sessions is only tough on the poor and vulnerable. (That conclusion comports with Sessions’ performance as Alabama attorney general, as we explained in a January report on Sessions’ tenure in that post.) When it comes to the rich, powerful and connected, it seems that Sessions is soft on crime.

This is a moral and policy disgrace.

The moral element should be self-evident. From a policy point of view, corporate crime and wrongdoing inflicts far more harm on society than street crime, as horrific as the toll of street crime is. And the corporate criminal class is likely to be far more responsive to the deterrent effect of harsh penalties – as well as far more likely to break the law if violations are prosecuted lightly or not at all – than street criminals.

Polica Live on KEXP

Alleys of Louisville-Patrick Wensink

from Oxford American

Republican Stupidity

From Washington Monthly:

One challenge with writing on the weekend is that much of the biggest news during the week has already been beaten half to death and all the good takes already written. So it is with the Republicans’ passage of the horrendous AHCA earlier this week. The bill is so stupendously bad, and the Republican celebrations afterward so shortsightedly crass, that the four most obvious takes are the only ones worth writing:

1) Donald Trump wants a “win” so badly that he doesn’t even care what’s in the bill or why, even if it means breaking every single one of his campaign promises;

2) Republicans are so desperate to cut taxes for the rich that they’re willing to literally kill millions of Americans to get them, and to set up the financing for their next round of tax cuts for the rich.

3) The most conservative Republicans are now conducting governance by nihilism: the Freedom Caucus knows its bill has no chance in the Senate without being totally rewritten, but they care more about hewing to some version of objectivist Ayn Rand ideology than of their voters–or worse. I’m not a religious man, but they claim to be. If I truly believed in the Almighty and life after death I would be afraid to meet my Maker after voting for such an immoral catastrophe. It’s such a blatantly disgusting giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of the sick that even the Features Editor at Reason Magazine railed against it in the New York Times. Conservative Ross Douthat called it a “self-parodic exercise in cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich.” Yikes.

But the most relevant take is the fourth: that whether the Senate passes a bill or not, House Republicans have set themselves up for punishment in a massive blue wave that leaves no district uncontested.

The ads will write themselves. The list of pre-existing conditions which will allow insurers to jack up rates on unsuspecting Americans is staggering. The loss of coverage created by the elimination of Medicaid expansions will be devastating. We won’t know the full extent of the damage until the CBO releases its score, but the result will likely be politically disastrous.

Democrats will give no quarter. It won’t matter if the Senate fails to pass a bill, or if the Senate passes a much-watered down bill. The House Republicans who voted for this monstrosity will be held accountable for what they voted for. In an electoral environment in which Democrats are already far overperforming in Republican districts in special elections, we could easily see a massive tidal wave sweep over House Republicans based on this issue alone–and we’re still only 100 days into a deeply unpopular and historically divisive Trump Administration.

7 Theories

From Law Fare Blog-putting the info together on the Russian Hacking:

Theory of the Case #6: Kompromat

This one’s pretty self-explanatory, at least in broad strokes. Well before the release of the Steele dossier, critics speculated that the Kremlin had something on Trump. What else could explain why Trump—so notoriously self-contradictory on everything else—was so uncharacteristically consistent in his defense and flattery of an undemocratic U.S. adversary? What else could explain his persistent refusal to back off that flattery even as it became obvious that Russia had intervened in the electoral process to his apparent benefit? What else could explain his denial of the reality of Russia’s intervention in the face of the unified opinion of the intelligence community?

Notwithstanding Russia’s indignant denials in response to the publication of the Steele dossier, we know that kompromat is a classic weapon in the Russian and Soviet arsenal. We also know that Trump’s attempted business deals in and visits to Russia stretch back years, and Trump has not exactly cultivated a reputation for avoiding scandal. Prior to the election, much of the speculation focused on Trump’s financial interests and what might lie behind his refusal to release his tax returns. But the Steele dossier also contains more salacious details that are at least plausible given Trump’s crude public statements and alleged private conduct (whether it’s being accused of sexual assault or bragging about what sounds like sexual assault).

That said, if Putin is holding something over Trump—or has more subtly, but to Trump’s knowledge, obtained “compromising personal and financial information” that allows Putin to exert some sort of influence—that would raise as many questions as it would offer answers. How explicitly a threat has been made, if one has been made at all? How far Trump has gone to foreclose embarrassment?

Not all kompromat is created equal (and some kompromat is more equal than others). We could be dealing in this scenario simply with inhibitions on Trump’s part associated with the possibility that a kompromat file may exist; call this the “soft kompromat” scenario. The soft kompromat scenario does not even require a real kompromat file, much less an explicit threat to Trump, only that Trump believes that one exists—or may exist. Alternatively, it is possible that Trump was, by one means or another, made aware of the existence of the material at some point in the (presumably distant) past in such a fashion that constitutes some kind of blackmail; call this the “hard kompromat” version.

Again, the kompromat theory could blend with some of the other ones. A soft kompromat scenario could, after all, inform Trump’s refusal to say anything negative about Putin, while Theory #2 might still provide the best explanation for why Russophiles have gravitated towards Trump like moths to a flame.

There are two reasons to take the kompromat theory seriously: The first is that Steele is a reputable intelligence officer and aspects of the dossier have, according to some news stories, been validated. The second is that the intelligence community took the matter seriously enough to brief the matter to both Trump and Obama, while the latter was still President. That’s not something you do if you believe a matter frivolous. But there’s a big gap, of course, between not frivolous and true.

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Know Nothings

 

 

From a review of the book The Knowledge Illusion:

Over the last few decades, the ideal of the rational individual has been attacked from all sides. Postcolonial and feminist thinkers challenged it as a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of white men. Behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with the African savanna in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate for dealing with the urban jungle of the silicon age.

Sloman and Fernbach take this argument further, positing that not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.

As Sloman and Fernbach demonstrate in some of the most interesting and unsettling parts of the book, individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to produce her own clothes, how to start a fire from scratch, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We today think we know far more, but as individuals we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood how a zipper works. Most people confidently replied that they understood it very well — after all, they use zippers all the time. They were then asked to explain how a zipper works, describing in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zipper’s operation. Most had no idea. This is the knowledge illusion. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

This is not necessarily bad, though. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for humans.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless conduct fierce debates about climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate them on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.

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The Odious Ivanka

 

From The New Yorker:

The international project of flattering Ivanka Trump—which some of the world’s most notable women, from Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, to Queen Máxima, of the Netherlands, engaged in at a panel discussion during the W20 conference, in Berlin, this week—does not always run smoothly. There was, first, the achingly obvious oddity of deciding that Trump, whose experience on the public stage largely consists of marketing her clothing and jewelry lines, and her efforts to get her father, Donald Trump, elected, was qualified to sit between Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, and Chrystia Freeland, the Foreign Minister of Canada. That was quickly followed by the dispiriting thought that Trump might actually have as much power over people’s lives as the other women, through the influence that she supposedly wields over her father. Why else would the head of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, have co-authored an op-ed in the Financial Times with her, on the importance of promoting female entrepreneurship? Their insights include this: “mentorship opportunities and access to networks bring learning opportunities and connections to capital and markets.” There are probably many people in the world who would like to mentor Trump and have access to her networks. It might even explain why Merkel invited her to Berlin, a move that the German press praised as “klug,” or clever, in terms of opening a route to President Trump—and why Merkel suggested, from the stage, that the World Bank look at ways to get funding to women entrepreneurs in the developing world, and then, at an event afterward, complimented Ivanka for supporting the idea. But that is also where it all got a little bit confusing, as things tend to with the Trumps.

At some point during her Berlin sojourn, Trump spoke to Mike Allen, the political journalist. Allen ran an item on Axios with the headline “Ivanka Trump’s new fund for female entrepreneurs,” illustrated with a photograph of Trump grazing her fingers on one of the slabs that make up Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. “Ivanka Trump told me yesterday from Berlin that she has begun building a massive fund that will benefit female entrepreneurs around the globe,” Allen wrote. He added that contributors would include companies and governments—Canada, Germany, “and a few Middle Eastern countries” had already made “quiet commitments”—and that “President Trump is a huge supporter of his daughter’s idea, and she has consulted with World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim about how to pull it off in a huge way.” Double huge. It sounded a lot like the Clinton Foundation, or like any number of corporate or N.G.O. initiatives, except that Ivanka Trump’s office is in the White House. This raised a flurry of questions: What about conflicts? Would this be a for-profit operation or a shakedown one? In a few hours, it became clear that it was neither of those—because “Ivanka Trump’s new fund” was a complete misnomer. This would be a World Bank project, as spokesmen for the White House and the bank emphasized. Trump would not be involved in raising money, managing it, or deciding how it would be spent. But the World Bank wanted everyone to know that it was very, very grateful to Ivanka for promoting the fund, or “facility,” as it would be called. It was kind of her idea.

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