Month: October 2017

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES? TRUMP DODGES BOTH

Washington is once again awash with talk of presidential falsehoods. One Republican senator decried Donald Trump’s “flagrant disregard for the truth.” Another said the president is “utterly untruthful”. A neutral fact-checking service says close to 70 percent of Trump’s statements it examined were false.

Trump calls his tax plan a “middle class miracle” that will be “fantastic” for workers and make the rich pay more, when it actually does just the opposite. He says former president Obama never phoned families of fallen soldiers, when the record is replete with such calls. Major media organizations have kept a running catalog of the president’s false statements, now deep into four figures (here, here, here and here). Evidence of the president’s estrangement from the truth is so overwhelming, that a substantial majority of Republicans think he is a prolific liar, but still support him.

Yet, the Donald’s problem is not that he lies a lot. It’s that truth is utterly without value or meaning to him. The president is simply agnostic on the subject. Truth and falsity are equally irrelevant in his world. The words that flow from his mouth and Twitter app, are visceral, not factual. They are servants to his limited, binary emotional wiring: they either heap grandiose praise on himself or viciously attack others. It matters not one iota to him whether those words are true or false.

In fact, many of Trump’s falsehoods are not lies. Lying is a conscious act of deception. That means a liar must know the truth in order to deceive an audience with the lie. Think about some of the president’s classic claims: Mexico will pay for it; the New York Times is failing; Obamacare is dead. This is not a guy who methodically determines the truth and then disguises it with a lie. He simply goes with whatever jumps into his head, with whatever sounds good to him, with zero regard for the truth of the matter.

When, in 1972, Richard Nixon said he had no knowledge of the Watergate burglary, he was lying. When, in 1986, Ronald Reagan said he did not trade arms for hostages, he was lying. When, in 1998, Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky, he was lying. These men knew the truth and strategically replaced it with a lie. They were not the only presidents to have done so. But Trump is in a league of his own. Truth does not matter to him. He doesn’t know what it is, and has no desire to learn. This makes him, as noted philosopher Harry Frankfurt observed, a “greater enemy of truth” than a mere liar.

Trump’s former butler, Anthony Senecal, read a published claim by his boss that some of the tiles in the Mar-a-Largo beach club had been personally designed by Walt Disney. Surprised by that revelation, Senecal asked Trump if that was really true. His response: “Who cares?” That pretty much captures this post-truth presidency. The leader of the free world, our commander in chief, the keeper of the nuclear codes, cares not one whit about truth.

Let me introduce you to someone who does care. Her name is Shannon Mulcahy. She is a 43-year-old single mother trying to support herself, two kids, a disabled grandchild, and two dogs in a small town near Indianapolis. Until a few months ago, Shannon worked at the Rexnord factory in Indy helping produce the Cadillac of steel bearings. She’d been there for 18 years. In an interview with the New York Times and the newspaper’s Daily podcast, Shannon said she loved the work as much as she did the good pay and benefits provided by her union contract. Last October, Rexnord announced that it was closing the plant, laying off its 300 employees and moving the work to Mexico. Shannon rushed to her car in the employee lot and started crying. Just like that, her middle class life began to crumble and she had no idea how she was going to support her family. Then came the tweets from candidate Trump, blasting Rexnord by name for “viciously firing all of its workers” and moving to Mexico. “No more,” tweeted the candidate.

Shannon never paid much attention to politics but had voted for Obama. Donald Trump and his tweets captured her attention like no politician ever had. He gave her and her coworkers hope at a time they needed it the most. “All of us were hopeful,” she told the Daily. “A lot of us there at Rexnord was thinking that he could actually step in and stop what was going on there. (If) he’s the president, he can do whatever he wants, right? I mean he’s kind of like a cowboy. He says things that a lot of past presidents wouldn’t say. The way he talked about American jobs and all that, I was thinking this could be the opportunity where . . . you know, a lot of our jobs come back from overseas. That would be awesome.”

So Shannon went political. Trump was her lifeline to a job that put meaning in her life and food on her family’s table. She conducted her own social media campaign on his behalf. She was thrilled when he won and then waited for him to come riding into town on his white horse to save the factory. It was like waiting for Godot. The cowboy never came. The plant closed. In a year filled with disillusion, Trump was just one more hard knock for Shannon. “After he got in there,” she said, “he done forgot about us and we don’t matter anymore.”

Sadly, Shannon, you never mattered to him. Nothing matters to this man except himself. Certainly not truth. His words have no shelf life. They exist only in the impulse of the moment. He makes us all long for the good old days when presidents only lied every once in a while.

IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP – OUR WHOLE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

Our body politic is totally messed up. If a family member was as out of control and dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress, we would have staged an intervention long ago. Could it be that we are so sidetracked by the aberrant, maniacal antics of an unhinged president that we can’t bring ourselves to focus on the much broader problem of a broken system?

It is, after all, difficult to have a serious conversation about realigning the architecture of governance over the constant din of presidential tantrums, tweeted threats of nuclear annihilation and never-ending Russia investigations. Yet, if we step back from the chaos of the moment and examine how we got there, this glaring truth emerges: Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of our problem. It may be hard to remember, but our democracy was pretty out of whack before the Donald landed in the White House. In fact, that’s how he got there.

The heart of our systemic problem is a deep toxicity of tribalism that has coagulated in the veins of our politics, blocking the free flow of creative, constructive, problem-solving solutions. For most of this country’s history, elected representatives from both parties were able to tackle major issues through a rugged-but-productive give-and-take. It wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. All that slowed to a crawl, then to a virtual stop, over the past decade.

A 2014 study examined the productivity of Congress over the years by measuring the number of major issues that body failed to address. It found that the volume of gridlock had doubled since 1950, with 75% of key legislation dying by deadlock. Things have only gotten worse. Despite single-party control of the House, Senate and the presidency, not a single salient issue has been resolved this year. Small wonder that 80% of Americans disapprove of Congress. Even before last year’s election, 70% of Democratic activists said they were afraid of Republicans, while 62% of the GOP said they were afraid of Democrats. That’s a level of hyper partisanship never before recorded or experienced.

Analysts offer a multiplicity of causes for this congressional quagmire. Among them: growing income disparity, free-flow of corporate money in campaigns, racism, and an expanding right flank in the Republican Party, exacerbated by gerrymandered reapportionment and primary battles between the GOP mainstream and the right. On top of those factors, the relative parity between the two parties creates an intense competition. The result is that making the other side look bad is more important than passing productive legislation.

Although this strategic dysfunction set in well over a decade ago, it was not openly acknowledged. That all changed in 2010 when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell came out of the closet and announced that his top legislative goal was to make sure then-president Obama did not get a second term. It’s been downhill ever since. A new breed of hardline conservatives, ranging from the Senate’s Ted Cruz to the House’s Freedom Caucus, got elected by bucking the Republican establishment. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these folks think nothing of closing the government over the debt ceiling or Planned Parenthood without the slightest expectation of success. Such “unbending opposition,” says the Journal, “is not a means. It is an end in itself.”

It was in that kind of atmosphere, that the Democrats, enjoying a rare bicameral majority in 2010, did something that had never been done in modern congressional history. It passed a major bill, the Affordable Care Act, without a single vote from the opposition party. The Republicans seized the moment, coined the term “Obamacare” and have been staging exorcisms ever since. Obama became the source of all evil for those on the right. Trump didn’t write that script. He just picked it up and went with it. Meanwhile, particularly in the last two years of his presidency, Obama gave up on an intransigent Congress and used executive orders to put as much of his program into place as possible. He sealed a deal with Iran on his own, created a legal status for the dreamers, issued numerous rules and regulations on the environment, and negotiated the Paris climate change pact.

“We have a president,” Trump said during his campaign, “that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place.” Last week, Trump signed his 49th executive order, the most of any president (at this point of his term) in more than 50 years. He has managed to reverse the bulk of Obama’s executive actions. At this moment, Obamacare continues to breathe only through the ineptitude of its would-be executioners.

This schizophrenic approach to governance is not what the founders had in mind. Yes, power needs to change hands at the direction of the electorate, but the entirety of our domestic programs and commitments to other countries has never been discarded en masse. Until 2010, every major legislative package (Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, Voting Rights, etc.) was passed with votes from both parties. None of those laws were repealed when control of Congress changed.

Partisanship is an inherent component of our democratic process, but partisanship on steroids, divorced from cooperation and constructive engagement, is a lethal anathema to good governance.

An amazingly prophetic George Washington, in his final address as president, warned that extreme partisanship would lead not just to a revenge-seeking loop between the parties, but ultimately to authoritarianism. Said our first president: “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to see security and repose in the absolute power of an individual (who) . . .turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” As if he had the vision of 2017 in front of him, Washington then suggested that this evil of hyper-partisanship will open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Before it’s too late, we need to return to a political system where the needs of the people outweigh the needs of the politicians.

WITHOUT A MOTIVE, LAS VEGAS SHOOTING STIRS MORE FEAR AND LOATHING

It’s been nearly a fortnight since a Las Vegas music festival became our latest mass murder battlefield, setting yet another casualty record in America’s well-armed war against itself. Yet, the dead and wounded stats weren’t the only thing that made this rampage so horrific. There was this: the assassin didn’t tell us why he did it. The guy killed 58 people, wounded 489 others and then killed himself, all without leaving a single manifesto, Facebook post or YouTube video explaining himself, not even an angry post-it note. What kind of demented lunatic does something like that?

That, of course, is the question we always focus on in the days and weeks after a mass shooting. Why did this happen? What was the motive? We have to know the why in order to process the what, in all of its carnage. We have a ritual for our mass shootings. Just like taking communion or sitting Shiva, there are steps to be taken, a chronology to follow. First comes the breaking news of the shooting, followed by a preliminary body count. Then we tweet our thoughts and prayers, and move on to argue about whether it’s too soon to utter the words “gun control”. Then we are ready to hear why the shooter did it, an essential process step that leads to closure based on the knowledge that this evil was perpetrated by some pathetic nutcase who had a grudge, a vision, voices in his head, terror in his heart, or had been off meds for a month.

It’s been 12 days now since the music stopped and bullets rained down from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. We still have absolutely no idea why the guy did it. Las Vegas police have frustratingly created a new ritual by announcing daily that they have looked at more than 1,000 leads but are still without a motive. For the first few days, police spokespeople said they were confident they would eventually have an answer to that question of why. More recently, the city’s undersheriff, Kevin McMahill, qualified that assurance: “I believe we will have an answer,” he said. “But that answer may also end up being ‘we don’t know why he did it.’”

How could that be? Americans have always known the motive for our mass murders, or at least thought we did. For example:

• Columbine High School in 1999; 13 dead, 20 wounded. The two teenage shooters were supposedly social outcasts whose journals contained detailed plans to blow the school up with bombs.

• Virginia Tech in 2007; 32 dead, 17 wounded. The perpetrator was a student with mental health issues. He left behind an 1,800-word statement and 27 QuickTime videos expressing a hatred for the rich and his views on religion.

• Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; 26 dead. The 20-year-old shooter filled numerous dark web sites with his screed on the evils of humanity and how society was trying to manipulate him into following an immoral value system.

• Orlando’s Pulse Club in 2016; 49 dead, 53 wounded. The killer told hostage negotiators that he had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and the deaths were to avenge the pain inflicted on Syrians and Iraqis.

Even in the old days, when mass murderers achieved their status through serial killings, we always seemed to know how peculiar they were. Ted Bundy decapitated 12 of his victims and kept the heads as mementos. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, claimed he was told by a neighbor’s dog to murder people. Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious serial killer and cannibal, had a childhood obsession of killing animals and preserving their bones with bleach.

The sheer bizarreness of these mass killers is oddly comforting to us. Their total otherness sets them apart from our world, a removal that coaxes us into believing these horrific acts of evil are somehow isolated and outside of our everyday lives. And that’s why the lack of a motive in the Las Vegas massacre is so unsettling. The shooter was a 64-year-old man who acquired his wealth through real estate. He enjoyed enough status at the Mandalay to get free rooms, including the suite he used as his shooting perch. He was an obsessive gambler, but had no known debt issues. He didn’t traffic in social media, had no criminal record and no extreme political or religious beliefs. Those close to him described him as a good, decent man. So, why did he do it?

I’ll tell you why he did it. The answer has been hiding in plain sight since the first bullet flew through the shattered glass of a hotel window. He did it because he could. He did it because he lived in a country that allowed him to assemble 47 guns, multiple loaded high-capacity magazines and automatic firing devices. He did it because he was able to haul his arsenal into a high-rise suite of a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas strip. He did it because nobody stopped him. Nobody stopped him because, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger, he was just another ordinary Second Amendment-loving, gun-toting guy.

And therein lies our terror. America’s worst mass murder was executed by someone who looked and acted like the guy next door. In a country that has 5% of the world’s population, but almost half of its civilian-owned guns – and 31% of its mass shootings – this should put all of us on edge. We can’t write this carnage off as the product of some radicalized lunatic who fell between the cracks of our bureaucracy. When a seemingly normal, law-abiding, senior citizen acquires a desire to kill as many people as possible, the only thing that could stop him is a lack of access to guns. Until that access is seriously restricted, all we can do is keep tweeting our thoughts and prayers.

IT’S TIME TO CONTROL THE RUNAWAY TRAIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Like something out of a bad science fiction movie, social media technology has evolved into a grotesque, out-of-control monster that threatens our way of life. The beast’s ferocity has expanded so quickly and mindlessly that nobody is able to tame it, including the now-billionaire geeks who created it. Think that’s a harsh overstatement? Then look at these facts:

• Facebook admitted that it unknowingly accepted payment in Rubles from Russia for disguised pro-Trump propaganda spread to at least 10 million U.S. users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• Twitter is equipped to place anonymous racist ads, ordered online, targeting 14.5 million users identified by Internet usage as responding to the n-word; 26.3 million to the term “wetback” and 18.6 million to Nazi.

• Google offers an online advertising tool in which ads are sold and placed with targeted users on the basis of such concerns as: “black people ruin neighborhoods”, “evil Jew” and “Jewish control of banks”.

To make matters worse, the offending content, placed on these sites by unidentified customers, have none of the visual properties of an online advertisement. They looked like ordinary posts, all part of a user’s daily newsfeed. In the case of the Russian Facebook buy, news-like items linking Hillary Clinton to Black Likes Matter or American Muslims were placed, for a price, on the pages of users who had clicked “like” on similar racist content.

Now, if these vile, misleading blurbs had been handled the way media outlets used to do business, a salesperson would have executed a formal contract for the buy and the advertisers’ name would appear in the copy. But that’s so 1990s. These social media sites rake in their billions over the transom of their medium. It’s all done online. In fact, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, brushed off reports of clandestine Russian interference on his site as a “pretty crazy idea.” Then he hired 3,000 “content monitors”, and suddenly hundreds of Russian “ads” and fake accounts were found. Same thing happened at Twitter.

Executives from the big three platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google – steadfastly insist that there was never an intention to allow this kind of nefarious, deceptive activity on their sites. Think about that for a minute. Their defense is that the technology is at fault, that a bad algorithm did it. If they are right, then shame on all of us for allowing artificial intelligence to run roughshod over our democracy, for letting the technology control us, rather than the other way around. It’s time to take that control back.

Based on population, Facebook is larger than any country in the world. Except for Asia, it’s bigger than any continent. And it continues to grow at 17% a year. Zuckerberg, as an idealistic young Harvard student in 2004, created it in his dorm room. He said it would bring the world together through a “free flow of information”. He got the information flow part right, but there is nothing free about it. Facebook is now the largest online advertising company in the world, worth almost half a trillion dollars. As British writer John Lanchester put it, “Facebook was built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers.”

And that was precisely the transaction that Russia was looking for. It gave the Kremlin access to Facebook accounts of racist and anti-Muslim Americans, a ripe audience for pro-Trump messages paid for in Rubbles, but without a hint that they came from a foreign power. CNN reported Thursday that Russia’s Facebook campaign buy on Trump’s behalf was orchestrated so surgically that it hit disproportionately on a large number of targets in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that helped push Trump over the top in electoral votes.

So there is now a legislative campaign for transparency in digital political ads. Sadly, even that embarrassingly modest proposal is facing strong resistance. And it doesn’t begin to fix the much broader problem. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not just multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Together, they control the communication infrastructure for most of the free world. Yet, the people who run these companies are not publically held to a single standard of accountability. Barbers and horse trainers are more closely regulated than these gigantic informational monoliths.

This is a long-overdue transformational moment. Technology has enhanced and lengthened our lives in so many ways. But that is no excuse for humanity to abdicate control, to let technology run itself, free from controls that reflect the values that only humans can construct. Yet that is precisely what has happened with these social media companies. No sick, ruthless executive knowingly took Russia’s money to let them tamper with our elections. It just happened because the technology allowed it to. Unrelated to the election, there are tens of millions of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, routinely sending off links to equally fake news sites. Neither company planned for that result; it was just technology doing its thing, unrestricted by human thought.

Folks with a rudimentary knowledge of code writing can create Twitter and Facebook bots, fake accounts, complete with pictures and bio. For all sorts of nefarious purposes, “bot farms” have been created to fire off thousands of phony messages every day. It is estimated, for example, that 43% of President Trump’s 38.6 million Twitter followers are fake accounts. In a recent high point of absurdity, Trump retweeted a follower’s post that blasted “fake news”. Turns out it had been created by a fake account.

This can’t continue. These companies can’t be allowed to simply sit back and bank their billions while their algorithms wreak havoc on the things that really matter to us, like truth and our democratic process. Whether through legislation or regulatory control, these corporate executives have to be sent back to their laboratories. They need to be forced to retool their technological monstrosities so that they comport with our values, not destroy them.