Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Meanwhile, Behind The Scenes….

Every day, a “Presidential” tweet or administrative outrage occupies the attention of the media and citizens who follow current affairs.

We are mesmerized by the slow train-wreck that Trump and his Keystone Kops are engineering, and for good reason. We rarely have a chance to catch our breath, or to wonder–as my husband often darkly does–what the truly vile people we don’t hear about are doing while our attention is  diverted by the ongoing public clown show.

Recently, my cousin the cardiologist (to whom I sometimes refer) sent me an example.

I have just been made aware that WomensHealth.gov has deleted much of its breast cancer web pages. But why?

It seems there has been a great reduction of breast cancer content on the website of the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), leaving just a single page with rudimentary information on mammograms and breast cancer. Most of the previous, seven-page content is gone.

The removal appears to reflect what my cousin calls “a broader agenda from the current administration.”

For example, under the auspices of the Affordable Care Act, breast cancer screening is offered free of charge for women meeting certain financial criteria, but that information has been deleted from WomensHealth.gov. Now, the information must be accessed on the site via a link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, which, in turn, requires a click through to yet another link.

Also, the “Government in Action” section of WomensHealth.gov previously contained information on federal programs that provide free or low-cost cancer screening, including clinical breast exams and mammograms. Known as the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, the entity offers screening to all “low-income, uninsured, and underinsured women.” That entire section of the site is now removed.​This information cannot be found elsewhere on the OWH website, or anywhere on the HHS site, despite the agency’s contention that it has been integrated into other parts of the HHS website.

Apparently, most of the breast cancer content on WomensHealth.gov has been deleted.

“Because breast cancer is the most common cancer for women in the US, affecting 250,000 annually resulting in 40,000 deaths a year, it is astonishing that important information about risks, prevention and treatment of breast cancer has been eliminated from the Office on Women’s Health site,” said Joyce Bichler, deputy director of Breast Cancer Action in San Francisco, California.

According to a report from the Sunlight Foundation, a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog, the government’s justification for this removal was  “lack of use.” This is transparent bullshit; WomensHealth.gov was visited nearly three quarters of a million times in one recent month. An HHS spokesperson told ThinkProgress that the “pages were removed… because content was not mobile-friendly and very rarely used. Before we update any of the information…we engage in a comprehensive audit and use analysis process that includes reviewing other federal consumer health websites to ensure we are not duplicating efforts or presenting redundant information.”

More bullshit.

The spokesperson directed users to WomensHealth.gov/cancer, which presumably contained the “duplicated” material, but doesn’t even have a dedicated section for breast cancer. The same spokesperson said “sister HHS agencies…have the same information in a much more user-friendly format on their websites.”

This isn’t the first time that important health information has vanished without notice or explanation. The removal of breast cancer information is part of what the Sunlight Foundation calls “wider changes to the OWH website that include the removal of resources related to lesbian and bisexual health, minority women’s health, and other topics.”

“The specificity of these removals adds more evidence to a growing concern: that public information for vulnerable populations is being targeted for removal or simply hidden,” says Sunlight.

Bottom line: Important information intended to assist low-income individuals and people of color access healthcare has been removed from the website–even though the most common cancer in women is breast cancer–and at the same time, the administration is ramping up its assault on Planned Parenthood, an important provider of breast cancer screenings.

Don’t tell me that “war on women” is hyperbole.

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Automation, Anxiety And Anger

The devil, as the saying goes, is always in the details.

It’s easy to point to social change as a reason for the increased anxiety and tribalism of American voters, just as it is easy to insist that we must “resist”/”do something.” It’s a lot harder to specify the nature and consequences of those social changes, or the form that resistance should take.

A lawyer with whom I used to work was fond of saying that there is only one legal question: what should we do? That adage also works pretty well for political action.

One of the drivers of social change is technology–not just the rapid evolution of communication devices and the like, but the truly incredible advances in automation. Robots are assembling cars and refrigerators; three-dimensional printers are beginning to look a lot like Star Trek replicators.

While labor advocates are still fighting the last war–international trade–automation poses a far greater threat to manufacturing jobs. Thomas Edsall recently compared our current dislocations to the Industrial Revolution, and that sounds about right.

We may never stop arguing about which historic currents swept President Trump into the White House.

Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum, is unlikely to have had Trump in mind when he described the fourth industrial revolutionin Davos in January 2016:

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.

Compared with previous industrial revolutions, Schwab continued,

the fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

Edsall connects the dots between seemingly unrelated phenomena and this fourth industrial revolution. For example, he points out the ways in which technology has facilitated immigration, both legal and illegal. Immigrants fly into the U.S. and overstay their visas, rather than trudging across borders. Innovations in transportation, communication, together with the globalization of politics and culture, have made the international movement of people “cheaper, quicker, and easier.”“

The IT revolution that has occurred in my adult lifetime has improved living standards and consumer convenience; but at substantial social cost. The substitution of machines for human labor is accelerating, and that reality has significant political and social consequences.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, “By regions, the average robot density per 10,000 employees in Europe is 99 units, in the Americas 84 and in Asia 63 units.”

In a March 2018 paper, “We Were The Robots: Automation in Manufacturing and Voting Behavior in Western Europe,” Massimo Anelli, Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig, of Bocconi University in Milan, found that “robot shock increases support for nationalist and radical right parties.”

The authors note that “both technology and trade seem to drive structural changes which are consequential for voting behavior.”

Some scholars even attribute Trump’s victory in the Electoral College to automation.

In their October 2017 paper, “Political Machinery: Did Robots Swing the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election?” the authors demonstrate that

Support for Donald Trump was significantly higher in local labor markets more exposed to the adoption of robots. Other things equal, a counterfactual analysis shows that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would have swung in favor of the Hillary Clinton if robot adoption had been two percent lower over the investigated period, leaving the Democrats with a majority in the Electoral College.

An economist at Brookings has estimated that full adoption of driverless vehicles would put two-and-a-half million drivers out of work. Others estimate that the anticipated addition of 105,000 robots to American factories will result in 210,000 fewer assembler and fabricator jobs in 2024 than otherwise would have been the case.

Edsall quotes a number of economists who explain how IT has increased inequality and reduced labor force participation, and will continue to do so. The dislocations of this fourth industrial revolution are a breeding ground for what social scientists call populism–and what most of us call White Nationalism.

The question “What should we do” is getting pretty urgent.

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Cory Booker’s Big Idea

The thing about gloom and doom–a venue in which I increasingly reside–is that it makes you question some basic assumptions. Privileged people who wake up each day to depressing news about our country’s governance and prospects for social progress have a choice: we can take an “I’ve got mine” approach, ignoring the effects of social disintegration on those less fortunate, or we can try to figure out what went wrong and why, and what it might take to fix it. Obviously, I believe the latter option to be the moral one.

I have concluded that the major, underlying problem we face–in America and the world– is tribalism. Us versus Them. Suspicion of the “Other.” Tribal identities and interests–racial, religious, political–make it infinitely harder to solve other pressing problems.

Rapid social change operates to harden those tribal affiliations.

If my conclusion is correct, we need to determine how a different approach to U.S. social policies might ameliorate tribal antagonisms, rather than exacerbating them.

Look, for example, at America’s (inadequate and patchwork) social safety net. Critics of “welfare” are everywhere. How many times have you heard someone accuse “those people” of abusing the system, how often do you hear someone complain about paying taxes to support “those people” who don’t work? (Yes, I know the data contradicts these assertions, but data rarely convinces those who don’t want to be convinced.)

Now try to think of the last time you heard similar criticisms of Social Security recipients. Crickets, right?

Social Security is a universal program. We all pay taxes into it; we all are entitled to benefit from it. It undercuts those “us versus them” scenarios. Social welfare programs that are universal are less likely to stoke tribal resentments and feed stereotypes; that is one of the appeals of proposals for a Universal Basic Income. But the UBI goes against the ingrained American belief that people should work for what they get.

And that brings me to Cory Booker’s big idea. As Vox reports,

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has a big idea: give 15 local areas federal money so they can guarantee all their residents a job.

The Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, announced by Booker on Friday, would establish a three-year pilot program in which the Department of Labor would select up to 15 local areas (defined in the bill as any political subdivision of a state, like a city or a county, or a group of cities and counties) and offer that area funding so that every adult living there is guaranteed a job paying at least $15 an hour (or the prevailing wage for the job in question, whichever’s higher) and offering paid family/sick leave and health benefits.

Booker’s bill is a pilot project to test the policy outcomes and political practicality of a jobs guarantee. The Vox article has a lengthy discussion of the merits and risks of such a proposal, and notes that, ideally, such a program would both improve the lives of lower-income Americans and support Americans’ belief “that people should work to earn their crust.”

“The job guarantee asserts that, if individuals bear a moral duty to work, then society and employers bear a reciprocal moral duty to provide good, dignified work for all,” Jeff Spross added in the influential center-left journal Democracy.

As Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon,

While universal basic income has become a hip talking point, it would be a lot easier to implement if it was attached to a job guarantee program. The reality is that most Americans value work, for themselves as well as others.

Right now, the United States is experiencing massive conflicts of values and interests and world-views. These conflicts are especially dangerous due to the widening gap between the rich and the rest, the predatory behaviors of the political class, and the disintegration of democratic norms.

We comfortable folks can shrug our shoulders, note that Rome fell too, and go about our individual lives–or we can begin the very arduous process of reimagining and reinvigorating American social and governing institutions.

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Pence: The Definitive Portrait

Let me begin by saying that I am not a particular fan of George Will. I find him patronizing, occasionally dishonest, frequently petty, and given to a prose style evidently intended to remind us lesser beings that he once swallowed a thesaurus.

But I really, really loved his recent screed about Mike Pence, which he titled “Trump is no longer the worst person in government.”

Most readers of this blog have probably seen it by now–for a couple of days, it was the most widely shared column on my Facebook feed, and probably many others. (As one of my friends noted, we in Indiana have had this impression of our former governor for years; it’s nice that non-Hoosiers can share it.)

Will doesn’t waste time getting to his thesis. Here’s the opening paragraph.

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Oleaginous. Toadyism. Obsequiousness. Lickspittle. Ordinarily, I would be annoyed by the pretentiousness of the language, but I am compelled to admire how perfectly it fits. I do hope Mike Pence has a dictionary…

The entire column is a devastating–and accurate–takedown of Mr. Piety, and if you have somehow missed it, I encourage you to click through. What evidently set Will off was Pence’s praise of Joe Arpaio, the despicable sheriff who spent years violating the constitutional rights of people in Arizona, during a speech in Tempe.

Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praised him as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

As those of us who have known him for years can attest, this performance was classic Pence. His “service” as governor was marked both by his constant parading of his Christian bona fides and his equally constant willingness to act in what most people would consider very unChristian ways: trying to block desperate Syrian refugees from settling in Indiana, opposing basic civil rights for LGBTQ Hoosiers, endorsing punitive anti-choice, anti-woman legislation… all while neglecting the pesky, day-to-day details of actually governing the state.

It’s hard to disagree with Will’s brutal last paragraph.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

Florid prose or no–when the man is right, he’s right.

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The Dangers Of Know-Nothingness

I don’t know which is more maddening–the ignorance of the voters who were willing to turn the country over to a man who had no concept of domestic policy or world affairs and a clear disinclination to learn–or the hubris of an aggrieved con artist who fancies himself immensely more able than he is.

Trump is a walking manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The New Yorker has published an article detailing the reactions of experts–aka people who actually know what they are talking about–to Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran accord. The article begins by confirming that Iran is in full compliance with the terms of that agreement, and that the other signatories–including countries we consider close allies–all counseled against Trump’s action.

Critics were scathing about the U.S. withdrawal. James Dobbins, a former U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., who negotiated with Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and now works at the RANDCorporation, said that the decision “isolates the United States, frees Iran, reneges on an American commitment, adds to the risk of a trade war with America’s allies and to a hot war with Iran and diminishes the prospects of a durable and truly verifiable agreement to eliminate the North Korean nuclear and missile threat.”

Wendy Chamberlin, a former career diplomat who is now the president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, warned that by forfeiting American leadership in the one successful multilateral deal in the volatile Middle East, Trump risks making a bad situation worse.

The withdrawal from the agreement comes days before the U.S. moves its Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, another controversial decision that has inflamed anti-American passions. “Trump is pouring gasoline on a Middle East in flames already, with his Iran and Jerusalem decisions,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A., White House, and Pentagon staffer who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me.

Trump’s decision also undermines the transatlantic alliance, crafted after the Second World War, between the United States and Europe. The President defied a determined last-ditch pitch by America’s three most important European allies, made during visits by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson.

Daniel Kurtzer, a former Ambassador to Israel and Egypt now at Princeton University, said Trump has reneged on America’s word and undermined American credibility.

“The United States used to be the leader, the convener, and the engine of international diplomacy. Trump’s actions have turned us into an untrustworthy and erratic diplomatic outlier.”

Re-imposing sanctions on Iran will create the greatest division between Europe and the U.S. since the Iraq War, Mark Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Washington, told me. “Only this time it will be worse, since not a single European state sides with the U.S. on this matter.” Beyond Europe, American credibility worldwide “will go down the tubes,” he said. “Who will ever want to strike a deal with a country that, without cause, pulls out of a deal that everyone else knows has been working well? America will be seen as stupid, arrogant, and bullying. Pity the poor U.S. diplomats who have to explain this illogical decision to their host countries.”

And then–once again–there’s Russia. As several foreign policy experts have pointed out, Trump’s decision benefits Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.  It strengthens Russia’s hand and diminishes that of the United States. On CNN, Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, was blunt. “We’re playing into Putin’s hand.”

Is that collusion? Or just Trump’s trademark incompetence?

The Know-Nothings–Trump and his base–don’t care. They are incapable of distinguishing between bluster and substance.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching an un-self-aware ignoramus lay waste to America’s global influence and good name.

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