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

Some Recent Infrared Shots

Vallejo Nocturno 2020 - Pandemic Hikes

Held to Account

 

From TalkingPoints.com, Josh Marshall writes:

One of the most abiding criticisms of the Obama administration is that no one was held accountable for the actions that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Relatedly, but addressing a different set of equities, others criticized Obama for ‘turning the page’ on the manipulated intelligence scandals that led to the Iraq War. These are complicated questions that are beyond the scope of this discussion. But there are at least potent reasons to avoid the cycle which has plagued so many countries in which losing power means vulnerability to political prosecutions and the necessity of exile.

But we often get this part of the civic accountability calculus wrong. Prosecution and criminal punishment play an important role in combating public wrongdoing. But they are not the most important tool. Indeed it often operates at cross purposes to the far more important goal of public exposure.

We have seen this pattern play out repeatedly in recent years and as recently as the Mueller investigation. The investigation resulted in numerous secondary prosecutions but on the main points ended inconclusively. Investigators found that the Trump campaign sought and welcomed assistance from Russia but uncovered insufficient evidence of a conspiracy to merit prosecution. Indeed because the main investigation was focused on crimes under statute law the public wasn’t and probably will never be allowed to see much of the evidence. This turns the whole matter on its head. Not only are prosecutions not the most important form of accountability, some of the gravest wrongdoing is not captured in the criminal law. As Warren Hastings wrote a quarter millennium ago: “The only redress for a fraud for which the law had made no provisions is the exposure of it.”

Part of the lack of any true and robust congressional inquiry was due to Republicans’ effort to defend the President. But it was also tied to Congress not wanting to cross-wires with a criminal probe. We’ve increasingly missed the mark on this since the Iran-Contra Scandal when Oliver North famously had his conviction overturned because of immunity concerns tied to his congressional testimony. Since then Congress has been extremely wary of overlapping with criminal probes. But again, this gets the calculus all wrong.

The truth is that in the most important respects it doesn’t matter that much whether Roger Stone or Paul Manafort or even Donald Trump spend time in prison. But for public accountability it matters a great deal that we the people know what they did. Seeing public bad actors do time is at best a sugar high of public accountability. It metes out, often against a random array of individuals, what it properly addressed at large by exposure and elections. Exposure lights the road to a better future and gives voters the information they need to ensure accountability at the ballot box.

President Trump has not only consistently abused his powers and conflated his personal interest with the national interest. He has used his vast powers of secrecy to conceal his crimes and betrayals. That should stop the day he leaves office and it can be easily done. It doesn’t rely on the courts or the Congress. The new President will inherit all those powers for his own tenure and all past Presidents. As Trump himself has so failed to understand none of these are his powers. They are the powers of the sitting President.

Tommy Smith Quartet doing Coltrane

Tommy Smith is an extremely capable tenor playing from Scotland-I'm always impressed with his ability to capture feeling in a very precise way. Here he is at the BBC Jazz Nights with his quartet.

 

Ignorant Terrain

 

Paul Krugman writes about the US innability to get COVID19 under control:

But the United States is exceptional, in a very bad way. Our rate of new cases never declined all that much, because falling infection rates in the New York area were offset by flat or rising infections in the South and the West. Now cases are on the rise nationally and surging in such states as Arizona, Texas and Florida.

And no, reported infections aren’t rising just because we’re doing more testing; contra Donald Trump, we can’t solve this problem just by testing less. Other indicators, like the percentage of tests coming back positive and hospitalization rates, show that the Covid-19 surge is real.

It’s true that deaths are still falling for the nation as a whole, although they’re rising in some states. This reflects some combination of the way that deaths lag infections, better precautions for the elderly, who are the most vulnerable, and better treatment as doctors learn more about the disease.

But we’re still losing around 600 Americans per day — that is, we’re experiencing the equivalent of six 9/11s every month. And many people who aren’t killed by Covid-19 are nonetheless debilitated by the illness, sometimes permanently.

Why are we doing so badly? A lot of the answer is that many state governments have rushed to return to business as usual even though only a handful of states meet federal criteria for even the initial phase of reopening. Epidemiologists warned that premature reopening would lead to a new wave of infections — and they were right.

Beyond that, in America, and only in America, basic health precautions have been caught up in a culture war. Most obviously, not wearing a face mask, and hence gratuitously endangering other people, has become a political symbol: Trump has suggested that some people wear masks only to signal disapproval of him, and many Americans have decided that requiring masks in indoor spaces is an assault on their freedom.

As a result, social distancing has become partisan: self-identified Republicans do less of it than self-identified Democrats. We all saw how this plays out in Tulsa, where a large (if smaller than expected) crowd gathered, mostly without masks, in an indoor setting custom-designed to spread the coronavirus.

And the next Trump rally, on Tuesday, will take place in Arizona, where Covid-19 is exploding, but where the Republican governor not only refuses to require mask-wearing but refused until a few days ago to allow local governments to impose their own rules.

The moral of this story is that America’s uniquely poor response to the coronavirus isn’t just the result of bad leadership at the top — although tens of thousands of lives would have been saved if we had a president who would deal with problems instead of trying to wish them away.

We’re also doing badly because, as the example of pellagra shows, there’s a longstanding anti-science, anti-expertise streak in American culture — the same streak that makes us uniquely unwilling to accept the reality of evolution or acknowledge the threat of climate change.

An Interview with Mavis Gallant

Been reading some Mavis Gallant short stories recently and surprised that I had not spent more time earlier in my life with them. They do tend to shine for someone that has experienced the world and I think I may have missed some of her intimate details when it comes to the way she can very perceptively describe her characters' emotions and POV. Anyway here is an interview where she discusses some of her craft at the site Aurora Online:

Aurora: In defining the short story, often textbooks resort to saying what the short story is not: it's not an anecdote, it's not a reported incident, it's also not a novel.

Gallant: It can be a reported incident, but the writer should know more about it than the writer says, and that should be apparent to the reader. There are Chekhov short stories that are merely incidents, but he knows absolutely everything humanly possible about them, and that is what comes through to the reader in a very few words. That is the difference between a reported anecdote in a newspaper and a work of fiction. That is art.

Aurora: Do you feel that people—textbooks, perhaps—are reducing the short story when they see it in terms of another form?

Gallant: It is another form altogether. Writing a short story is different from writing a novel. A short story is extremely difficult, not that a novel isn't, but a novel is difficult in another way. Hardly anyone was ever constantly on tiptoe for the length of a novel. Oh, someone like Virginia Wolf, yes. But in a successful short story, you are standing on your toes the whole time; you don't dare let down for a second because a word too many or too few and the whole thing collapses. It's very tense. Writing a novel is a bit more relaxed. It's longer, and perhaps you can take a few more chances.

Aurora: Edgar Allan Poe theorized about the short story claiming that it dealt with a single effect to which every detail is subordinated.

Gallant: Well, in the long run that's true. I don't think one sets out thinking, “I am going to do this and this.” I think the short story aims in one direction, so you see the end of the road from the beginning. I don't like trick short stories like Maupassant, and I don't like O'Henry, that kind of thing. But anyway it's out of fashion.

Aurora: The traditional view of a plot with five stages—an exposition and rising action, crisis, falling action, resolution—is really no longer valid for many contemporary short stories. In fact, it's been said that your stories move in a helix fashion, and I think you've, said that your stories build like a snail growing out from the centre.

Gallant: Oh no, that was William Maxwell, my editor at the New Yorker for 25 years. After ten years he sent me a letter and said, “You finally stopped going round and round.” But he had never once before told me that I went round and round.

Aurora: So you consciously are not going round and round?

Gallant: I wasn't aware of it. I can't imagine leading into a story with the weather or the colour of the sky. I don't despise those stories, but I wouldn't imagine doing it myself.

Aurora: What is at the centre of your story?

Gallant: Well, the first glimpse of any story is an image in my mind. It's always an image of someone doing something. I don't write anything yet. I have just seen this thing. It's like a nucleus around which different things build. I can't really explain it in a way that would be satisfactory to a student, for example, for every writer works differently, but this is what happens with me.

I have been asked to write for an anthology, Ten Best American Stories of the Year. I was asked to explain a bit about how I came to write the story, and I was at a complete loss. I don't know how I come to write anything. There is a very quick image which goes round and round, as William Maxwell said, and then I can write it. I know that's not helpful because I don't think it's possible to describe the creation of fiction. It's a very odd process, and if you begin to describe it, you begin to sound as though it were a mechanical process with the author as a transmitter and, of course, that's utter nonsense because it's not metaphysical.

Aurora: In The Pegnitz Junction, you stretch the limits of the traditional use of point of view. You tell the story from Christine's point of view, but she actually is receiving the thoughts of the other characters.

Gallant: Fiction. That to me is the writing of fiction. I truly enjoyed writing The Pegnitz Junction, and I didn't care if it was ever published. I absolutely adored writing it. I wrote it in a great hurry and put a lot of things into it that I liked and that amused me. It's one of the few things I can reread.

Aurora: I feel sometimes that she is almost helpless. They are transmitting, and she has to receive these waves, these messages. Sometimes she doesn't know what to do with them.

Gallant: But it's not metaphysical. I absolutely refuse that! I won't have it! No, I'm joking. The things that she sees out of the train window all had a reference to German literature. I was just having a good time with it, and a lot of it is satire. There are names in it from Wilhelm Busch, the German caricaturist. That thing in the castle is obviously just a satire of Kafka's castles. Even the names I gave people, if you look at them closely, are satire. But I just did it for myself.

Aurora:At the same time, I have read that you were exploring the whole phenomena of the rise of Nazism.

Gallant: Was I now? When I was writing the stories that were in the book—not the novella—I was fascinated with Germany, but that has something to do with my generation. I am the war generation, and I was never satisfied with anything that I had read about it. Everything seemed to me to be written in black and white, and I wondered if I could do something with fiction. I thought it had to be done at a kind of lower middle-class level. I think that's where it all arose, the Nazi movement. I got very much into it, then I couldn't do anymore, so I stopped. That was when I wrote all those stories, as well as a couple that were in other anthologies.

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Qualified Immunity?

From Lawfare, what is qualified immunity:

Qualified immunity is a judicially created doctrine that shields government officials from being held personally liable for constitutional violations—like the right to be free from excessive police force—for money damages under federal law so long as the officials did not violate “clearly established” law. Both 42 U.S.C. § 1983—a statute originally passed to assist the government in combating Ku Klux Klan violence in the South after the Civil War—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1971) allow individuals to sue government officials for money damages when they violate their constitutional rights. Section 1983 applies to state officials, while Bivens applies to federal officials. Because damages are often the only available remedy after a constitutional violation has occurred, suits for damages can be a crucial means of vindicating constitutional rights. When government officials are sued, qualified immunity functions as an affirmative defense they can raise, barring damages even if they committed unlawful acts. (Qualified immunity is not, however, a defense to claims for injunctive relief.)

The Supreme Court has generally traced qualified immunity back to the immunities available to government actors when officials were sued for common law torts during the 19th century. The basic idea is that when Congress enacted § 1983 in 1871, it incorporated the then-existing immunities into the statute, which the Supreme Court has also extended to Bivens suits. However, recent scholarship has called into question the Supreme Court’s account of the government immunities available in 1871, whether Congress intended them to be defenses to § 1983 claims, and the coherence of the relationship between the history and the modern doctrine.

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Black Lives Matters Plaza

Friday we decided to go to DC in the morning and see the areas where the confrontation happened over a week ago that seemed to turn the tide among people here in the US. I may regret saying this but the evening where Trump decided to stage a photo op across the street of Lafayette Square seemed like a turning point. A desperate act that ended up souring many to his divisive tactics. Let's hope so. Here are some images on a sunny Friday morning.

All images Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Black Lives Matters Plaza

Give up Something

© Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos/POLFOTO

A 1968 interview with James Baldwin at Esquire:

From a very short-range approach, what should the federal government do, right now, to cool it off?

What do you mean by the federal government? The federal government has come to be, in the eyes of all Negroes anyway, a myth. When you say the federal government, you're referring to Washington, and that means you're referring to a great many people. You're referring to Senator Eastland and many people in Washington who out of apathy, ignorance or fear have no intention of making a move at all. You're talking about the people who have the power, who intend to keep the power. And all they can think of are things like swimming pools, you know, in the summertime, and sort of made up jobs to simply protect peace and the public property. But they show no sign whatsoever of understanding what the root of the problem really is, what the dangers really are. They have made no attempt, whatever, any of them, as far as I know, really to explain to the American people that the black cat in the streets wants to protect his house, his wife and children. And if he is going to be able to do this he has to be given his autonomy, his own schools, a revision of the police force in a very radical way. It means, in short, that if the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don't give it up, it will be taken from them.

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The Trail of Corruption

Walter Shaub on the open corruption of the Trump Regime at NYRB:

The Watergate scandal left many Americans wondering if they could ever trust their government again. In October 1978, hoping to restore public confidence in federal institutions, Congress created new mechanisms for oversight and new agencies to administer them, including the Office of Government Ethics, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority. It further established a cadre of inspectors general at large federal agencies. Public servants like me who have worked in these agencies or inspector general offices think of 1978 as the 1776 of our anticorruption work.

Jimmy Carter, who signed the Inspector General Act into law, saw the new inspectors general as a tool to “root out fraud and abuse.” As his chief domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat later put it, “For him, Watergate was not simply the break-in and the cover-up. It was the abuse of power, the misuse of the IRS and the CIA against domestic enemies.”

If Donald Trump’s goal is to abuse power, he may have special cause to fear the seventy-four inspector general offices. They investigate wrongdoing and audit the performance of federal agencies and government programs to detect problems or identify systemic risks that could harm the public. They are supposed to be nonpartisan and independent; as a line of defense against the various forms of corruption that can infect government agencies, they have traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support. But that tradition is being tested as Trump seeks to gain control over these watchdogs.

On April 3, he announced his intention to fire Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community. Last September Atkinson complied with a legal duty to notify Congress of the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment. A law intended to buy Congress time to defend inspectors general mandated a thirty-day hold on Atkinson’s firing, but Republican senators expressed only mild unease at the threatened dismissal. (It became final on May 3.)

During an April 6 briefing on the coronavirus, Trump attacked Christi Grimm, acting inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), because her report on supply shortages in hospitals during the pandemic embarrassed him. Having left the inspector general post vacant for nearly a year, he rather promptly selected Jason Weida, an assistant US attorney in Boston, to replace her. What little public information there is on Weida’s career suggests that he has not led an office before, which could be a problem since the HHS inspector general leads a 1,600-person office that monitors the response to the pandemic; more than $1 trillion in annual federal expenditures; and, under the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the department, the government’s regulation of food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, medicated animal feed, and other products that together account for twenty cents on every dollar spent by American consumers. Leadership experience may not have been the criterion that led Trump to select Weida.

The day after criticizing Grimm, Trump replaced Glenn Fine as the acting Defense Department inspector general just as his office was wrapping up an investigation of suspected White House manipulation of a $10 billion defense contract for cloud computing services, and one week after he was chosen by a council of inspectors general to chair a panel monitoring the $2 trillion coronavirus bailout fund. Fine’s return to his position of deputy inspector general disqualified him from serving on the panel.

And then on May 15, Trump announced that he would fire State Department inspector general Steve Linick. Eliot Engel, the Democratic chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called it “an outrageous act of a President trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of State [Mike Pompeo], from accountability.” Linick had been nearing the end of an investigation into the legality of the Trump administration’s sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia. He was also investigating claims that Pompeo may have directed his staff to run personal errands for him in violation of regulations of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Trump and Pompeo have admitted that, in a case of the investigated targeting the investigator, Pompeo requested the firing. Trump has also admitted that he’s told his appointees he’d be willing to fire others:

I would’ve suggested, and I did suggest in pretty much all cases, you get rid of the [inspector] generals because it happens to be very political, whether you like it or not, and many of these people were Obama appointments.

To replace Linick, Trump appointed as acting inspector general Stephen Akard, who has worked with Mike Pence and is now the director of the Office of Foreign Missions in the State Department. Akard will keep that position while filling in as inspector general. This dual responsibility is an extraordinary breach of the principle that inspectors general must be independent. It also gives a member of the State Department’s management team access to whistleblower files, exposing employees who report wrongdoing to the risk of retaliation. And the night Trump declared his plan to fire Linick, he announced that he was replacing the Department of Transportation’s acting inspector general, Mitch Behm, who was reportedly investigating DOT Secretary Elaine Chao, who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Like Linick’s replacement, Behm’s replacement will hold two positions.

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The Strange Occurance of the Unemployment Rate

Among the many things that seem to be flying apart, the unemployment rate like the # of people who have died due to Covid19 appears to be incorrect. Incorrect enough that the imbecilic Trump came out Friday and declared a new day was coming. Here the Brookings Institute discusses the complications:

he Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) surprised the markets and most economists Friday with an announcement that the unemployment rate fell from 14.7 percent in April to 13.3 percent in May. President Donald Trump had the temerity to boast that George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, was “looking down from heaven” to admire those numbers. “This is a great day for him,” Trump said in the Rose Garden. “This is a great day for everybody.”

Beyond the president’s remarkable and offensive invocation of Floyd, there is good reason to be skeptical of his administration’s latest report.

BLS asserts that 20,935,000 Americans were unemployed in May, attributing the decline to employers adding 2,509,000 jobs in May as states allowed “a limited resumption of economic activity.” But it’s not that simple. The unexpected decline in the jobless rate is based on a survey of businesses and households conducted over the week of May 16th, and BLS has also reported that 29,965,415 Americans received unemployment insurance benefits in the same week. That’s a gap of 8,980,415 people, enough to raise the May jobless rate 5.7 percentage points to 19.0 percent and much closer to economists’ expectations.

How did the Labor Department come up with such a low figure? Part of it is the Payroll Protection Program: The BLS counted anyone who employers say were still being paid as employed “even if they were not actually at their jobs.” Part of it involves how the BLS treats the many millions of people now on furlough and not being paid. They are considered “unemployed on temporary layoff.” But if BLS expects them to return to their old jobs, based on the survey, they do not count among the unemployed.

Those judgments are left to the BLS’s discretion, and the agency does not issue any data on those decisions. Yet a recent analysis from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago estimated that 42 percent of people furloughed by the COVID-19 crisis will never get their old jobs back, and only 30 percent of those laid off will land new jobs later this year. With 30 million people receiving unemployment benefits, that analysis is more consistent with unemployment at 19.0 percent today than 13.3 percent. BLS itself acknowledges in its May report that counting those on furlough as unemployed would raise its official rate to 16.3 percent.

Finally, part of the 9 million-person discrepancy may involve how BLS decides whether a person who is not working is still part of the labor force. If you are out of work but didn’t look for a job over the previous four weeks, or couldn’t work for family reasons such as caring for children who are no longer in school, BLS says you are out of the labor force. If you’re not in the labor force, you’re not unemployed.

Again, it is BLS’s judgment call—and BLS clearly has decided that millions of people who lost their jobs because of COVID-19 shutdowns do not count as unemployed. In May 2019, BLS reported that 96,207,000 working-age Americans were not in the labor force; today, BLS reported that a year later, that number had jumped by 5,865,000 to 102,072,000. For reference, the BLS found that 95,636,000 working-age Americans were not in the labor force in 2019, down 80,000 from 2018. Those 5,865,000 people could explain nearly two-thirds of the 9 million-person gap between those receiving unemployment benefits and those counted as unemployed.

Sometimes, unexpected events produce wildly inaccurate results from computer models that assume the unexpected won’t happen. Perhaps there is a glitch in the BLS unemployment model that couldn’t accommodate disruptions from the COVID black swan. We also have seen the Trump administration interfere with scientific analysis in other areas, such as when it directed what models the U.S. Geological Survey could use for the mandated National Climate Assessment. It would be unprecedented for the White House to pressure the Labor Department to produce a jobless report that serves Donald Trump’s needs and desires. But unlike the May unemployment report, it would not surprise anyone