Charles Pierce: The US ending the INF is a huge victory for Vladimir Putin.
Esquire
I'm not sure how giving Vladimir Putin everything he wants is supposed to hurt him, but I am not the Secretary of State. This is an odds-on decision to start another nuclear arms race in Europe, which can only hype up the ambitious Russian ganglord's dreams of a gangster-capitalist new USSR. The INF Treaty was one of the Reagan Administration's shining accomplishments, and one of the first indications that Mikhail Gorbachev was a real reformer.
It was the first arms-control agreement that required a reduction in nuclear weapons rather than simply freezing the number of them in place. It brought Europe out from under a dark shadow. (These were the days in which nuclear war was again thought to be feasible, if not imminent.) It allowed people in Europe to breathe a little easier. For all his faults, Reagan made the INF Treaty a landmark in nuclear diplomacy, and it led directly to President George H.W. Bush's START treaty which cut in half the nuclear arsenals of both countries.
There’s little doubt that for the last few years Russia has been violating the INF. It’s been doing so in a way that poked, poked, poked at American negotiators by breaking the treaty in a way that they could deny — though, not really with any degree of plausibility. But the reason they’ve been doing that is not because they wanted to sneak in a few missiles here and there. This is what they wanted. They wanted America to throw up their hands and walk away from the table.
And now Trump, with the giggling aid of Mike Pompeo, has done just that. This is an enormous gift to Vladimir Putin, perhaps the biggest thing Trump could give him without actually wrapping up Europe with a bow. And, though there are plenty of weapons designers ready to satisfy their itch by crafting a new generation of hemispheric weapons, and a line of arms manufacturers ready to open their wallets to a fresh infall of cash to build those weapons, what there is not is any way, any way at all, that walking away from the INF benefits the United States. Mr. Master Dealmaker who loves to work one on one, just walked away from one of the most critical deals on the planet, and didn’t even really try.
If your partner in a treaty cheats, you use the mechanisms of the treaty to hold the partner to account. You don't simply abandon the treaty—unless, of course, you want to start arming up in Europe all over again and (maybe) don't mind much if Russia does the same thing. Were I an ordinary Czech, say, I might wonder if two oligarchs weren't actually working together to dominate the European landscape.
Trump
Jonathan Chait: Why the news on those blocked phone calls does not absolve Trump Jr.
New York Magazine
One of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the Russia investigation has been a series of phone calls Donald Trump Jr. made to a blocked phone number while he was setting up a meeting during the campaign with Russian agents who were promising to help his father. Many people, including me, speculated that the call might have been to his father to inform him of the meeting. Yesterday, CNN reported the calls were actually “between Trump Jr. and two of his business associates.” …
To be clear, nobody said the phone calls “were made to his father.” They said the calls might have gone to his father. (Democrat Eric Swalwell suggested last year, “That looks like he may very well have been trying to call his father to talk to his father about taking this meeting.”) They didn’t. So, whether or not Trump Jr. did inform his father of the meeting — Steve Bannon speculated he did so in person immediately after — he didn’t do it through those phone calls.
But just because the calls didn’t go up a floor to cheeseburger central, doesn’t mean they were either innocent or unconnected from Russia. They certainly don’t mean that Junior wasn’t excited about the prospect of the upcoming meeting.
The recipient of one of the phone calls was Howard Lorber who is, yes, a “family friend.” But he is also a longtime point of contact in Trump’s ambitions to build a tower in Moscow, which date back to the 1980s. Lorber accompanied Trump on a 1996 visit to Moscow to explore building there. “Howard has major investments in Russia,” Trump boasted to a Russian politician at the time. As Craig Unger notes, Lorber’s dealings in Russia put him in contact with Russian mobsters.
So the first thing that Junior did on getting the news that he was going to talk with someone about “the Russian governments plan to help your father” was call someone who had gone with Trump to Moscow and who had even more connections than Trump. Exactly how is this supposed to be something that proves no collusion again?
Leonard Pitts: Is tired of reading enablers whose remorse came way too late.
Miami Herald
Let’s call it Trump Remorse.
It’s a new literary genre — books by former staff members and aides who now want to dish about the awfulness of Donald Trump or his White House. Last week, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie debuted the latest book in that field, “Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics.”
Christie thus joins Omarosa Manigault Newman, whose “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” came out in August, and Cliff Sims, whose “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days In The Trump White House” also was released last week. Granted, Trump Remorse is just a literary trickle now. But given the extraordinary rate at which the man burns through personnel, it’s reasonable to think the trickle may soon become a flood.
If just one of these people, just one, in their time as a Trump surrogate had spoken up, spoken out, or spoken the truth about what was going on, then maybe they’d be worth ten minutes’ consideration. But people who had a million chances to disown Trump’s idiocy and abuse when it counted, don’t deserve a moment of the nation’s attention when they could deliver insight only for a fat fee from a safe distance.
After all, the only thing these authors really have to offer is the gratification that comes of hearing some true believer finally admit what you already knew. And with Christie, you barely even get that. To judge from media coverage, his book concentrates its fire on the circus Trump surrounds himself with, while the ringmaster himself escapes relatively unscathed.
Because nothing says Great Leader like hiring a crew of idiots — like the authors of these books.
Ralph Northam
Dana Milbank: On the painful inadequacy of Northam’s latest press conference.
Washington Post
Ralph Northam is soon to be the former governor of Virginia. And that is how it should be.
His governorship ended, as a practical matter, on Friday night, when he acknowledged he was in a just-surfaced 1984 photograph from his medical school yearbook of one man in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood.
The Democratic governor attempted to apologize in written and video statements Friday, and then, bizarrely, attempted Saturday to retract his admission and his assumption of responsibility. At an afternoon news conference, he implausibly claimed he wasn’t in the offending photo (which contained what he called “blackfacing”) because “I so vividly don’t remember this” and didn’t know where it came from, even though other students chose the photos for their pages.
Northam made a mistake, you see, because even though he wasn’t in that blackface photo, by a total coincidence he did appear in public in blackface that same year. And it’s an astounding coincidence that something similar ended up on his yearbook page. Which he had never seen. A really staggering coincidence.
Yet he proceeded to acknowledge that he wore dark shoe polish on his face another time that same year while impersonating Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk in a dance contest — which he won! He allowed, in a rare moment of sense, that others “will find this difficult to believe.”
But his flailing serves only to compound his disgrace, because he has been denounced and disowned by his fellow Democrats; his only path forward as governor is as pariah and laughingstock.
I think those words are too kind.
Security / Intelligence
Virginia Heffernam: Trump’s top advisor doesn’t deserve top clearance.
Los Angeles Times
For an applicant, the SF-86 is the mythic “woodshed” in PDF form. It’s a place to face your whole shifty lifetime of corner-cutting, half-truths, pleasure-seeking and brazen misdeeds. Slept with a married colleague, defaulted on a J. Crew card, didn’t quite finish an online college course? There’s no hiding anything on the fearsome SF-86.
And you come clean, or risk imprisonment. It’s odd, then, that Jared Kushner’s almost numberless liaisons with foreign nationals — and his lies about them — didn’t land him in deep hot water. Instead, he was waved through to top-secret clearance.
Over the objections of the people who hand out that clearance at every level.
Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere, made an eye-popping hundred-plus “mistakes” on his SF-86, a lot of them about Russians. These lies and contacts don’t bother his boss, who seems to have had his own — ahem — liaisons with foreign nationals.
It’s well known that Kushner had extreme difficulty getting his SF-86 right, and that he was granted multiple chances to try, try again to tell all. He at first left off that he had used a private email server for state business (as one does), and he failed to include all those meetings with foreign officials. They slipped his mind. One hundred times.
Kushner’s made a record number of “mistakes,” but even in the period where he didn’t officially have top clearance, it seems very likely that he trotted off to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman and shared classified information that got people killed. And as a result … Kushner got top secret clearance anyway. And hey, have you thought about Jamal Khashoggi lately?
This is your regular reminder that Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was dismembered by agents of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman while still alive, and that Jared Kushner told bin Salman that if he just stayed quiet, it would blow over. Don't let Jared be right.
Michael Morell: On Trump’s calling out his own intelligence officers.
Washington Post
Presidents have long disagreed with some of the information and analysis they get from the intelligence community. President George W. Bush would occasionally say to me during a morning briefing, “Michael, I don’t think this is quite right” or “I have a different view here.” There are also plenty of examples of intelligence analysts telling presidents that they cannot accomplish something only to have them do just that. During the mid-1990s war in the Balkans, the intelligence community was highly skeptical that a peace deal was possible, but President Bill Clinton delivered the Dayton Peace Accords nonetheless.
But somehow, everyone else seemed to miss out on the ability of the executive to not just redirect blame, but call the intelligence community wimps while doing it.
So what is different now? For one, the number of the disagreements between Trump and his intelligence agencies is much greater than in the past, and many are displayed for the public to see. And where most differences between presidents and their intelligence communities are over interpretation, causes and implications, they are typically not about facts. It is one thing to question whether Kim Jong Un will ever give up his strategic weapons; it is quite another to say that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat.
Moreover, Trump does not seem to be engaging with the intelligence community on a substantive basis, as other presidents have.
There’s a reason for that. Trump doesn’t engage with anyone on a substantive level. First, he would have to have substance.
Social Media
Anne Applebaum: Has a position that is hard for our current society to face.
Washington Post
A few days ago, ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom, discovered that a tool it was using to track political advertising on Facebook had been quietly disabled — by Facebook. The browser extension had detected political ad campaigns and gathered details on the ads’ target audiences. Facebook also tracks political ad campaigns, but sometimes it fails to detect them. For the past year, the company had accepted corrections from ProPublica — until one day it decided it didn’t want them anymore. It also seems like “they don’t wish for there to be information about the targeting of political advertising,” an editor at ProPublica told me.
Facebook also made news in recent days for another tool: an app, this time its own, designed to give the company access to extensive information about how consumers were using their telephones. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, has defended the project vigorously, on the grounds that those who signed up to use this research app knew what they were doing — and were paid $20 a month. Unamused, Apple decided to intervene — and has now banned the app from its phones.
Once upon a time, in heady simplistic days when hundreds of millions pouring into a startup’s door seemed like a lot, Google made it’s company mission simply “Don’t be evil.” It’s hard to accept that even at Facebook they haven’t come to the conclusion that Facebook is simply evil. It’s even hard to believe that hasn’t become their goal.
Both of these stories have something in common: They illustrate who is making the rules of our new information network — and it isn’t us. It isn’t citizens, or Congress, who decide how our information network regulates itself. We don’t get to decide how information companies collect data, and we don’t get to decide how transparent they should be. The tech companies do that all by themselves.
But what Applebaum is suggesting is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. For everyone who has grown up bathed in the glow of Google, Facebook, Instagram and others, the idea that these things need to be strictly regulated seems almost un-American. Which is, of course, just what Facebook, and Russia, want you to think.
Howard Schultz
Michael Tomasky: Both sider-ism has seldom been more wrong.
Daily Beast
Well, this has not gone the way Howard Schultz was expecting it to, has it? When even fellow billionaire and chronic party-swapper Mike Bloomberg is saying an independent presidential run is a daft idea, you know you’re in the soup.
Schultz has taken a thousand shots by now from people pointing out that an independent run by a socially liberal candidate can only split the non-right-wing vote and reelect Trump. This is obviously true and I certainly agree with it. But there’s another critique of Schultz that I haven’t seen and that needs to be aired. And since I hope somehow that the man himself reads this and takes it semi-seriously, I’m going to write it in a non-vituperative way.
Oh please, vituperate.
Both parties are not to blame for the current dysfunction. All right, the Democratic Party is not blameless. But political polarization has been driven almost wholly by the Republican Party.
I could write a book about this (wait, I have!), but here in a column, let me just give a couple of examples.
The first is Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. You probably know of it; he has this pledge that he makes Republican members of the House and Senate sign agreeing that they’ll never raise a tax. He dreamed it up in the 1980s, and it really took off after George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge in 1990. They’ve almost all signed it, and with very minor exceptions, no Republican in Congress has voted for a tax increase since 1990.
I’m still pushing the Batman solution. Schultz should just look at how popular those superhero movies have been. I know I’m dying to see him ride the lattemobile into a crowd of criminals and proclaim “I’m … Coffee Boy.”
Elizabeth Brueing: On the man without a party.
Washington Post
Resentment springs eternal in American politics, and if the primaries of 2016 and 2020 indicate any kind of pattern, it’s that every unique form of resentment eventually gets its own presidential candidate. Howard Schultz, the billionaire former chief executive of Starbucks, is the manifested resentment of the super-rich, who have been as miffed by the right-wing turn toward gauche Trumpian reaction as by the Democratic shift toward economic populism. If you find Trump tacky and taxes icky, Schultz is your man.
Naturally, Schultz is considering running as a “centrist independent,” opposed to “unrealistic policies and promises” such as single-payer health care and tuition-free college. Schultz detests the idea of higher taxes on the super-rich, and also worries about the nation’s budget deficit, which he would shrink by targeting welfare spending. But, of course, he’s socially liberal — against Trump’s border wall and in favor of LGBTQ rights. He’s an American Dreamer, self-made with his own resolve and good, old-fashioned American opportunity, as he relishes to remind us. “Imagine,” he invites us in a recent op-ed, “if our founding ideals of freedom and equality, and the promise of opportunities such as education and jobs, were more fully realized.”
So … Schultz is the man for the 1 percent who believe that Trump just lacks taste. Has he considered that maybe his ideas aren’t so much “independent” as just very, very unpopular?
Labor
Will Bunch: Explains what the rich people are talking about at Davos.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Fifty-plus years later, and it’s clear that Hanna-Barbera cartoon robots were a lot more adorable than what was coming in real life. In the post-war idealization of an automated future, robots were just cool add-ons that made your everyday life easier — the maid that 1960s middle-class folks couldn’t afford, or maybe a friendly family dog. (“Hello, I’m Rags — woof woof!” went the annoying robot dog in Woody Allen’s 1972 flick, “Sleeper.”) Thanks to all the leisure time created when robots were doing so much of the work, George Jetson only went to work one day a week, for just two hours.
In the actual 21st Century, George Jetson has been fired — replaced at Spacely Space Sprockets by a robot that uses artificial intelligence to design new, better sprockets — and his flying car is up on blocks because he can’t afford the insurance payments. But his former boss Cosmo Spacely is doing better than ever — recently having purchased his fifth flying space yacht.
The whole purpose of capitalism is to defy a kind of monetary thermodynamics by using labor to concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Every time we crank up that horrifying measure of “economic growth” known as productivity, we’ve gone up a notch in greasing that path to selected pockets. And by now, that path is getting very, very slippery.
I was thinking about the robot fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s and the robot realities of the 21st Century this weekend as I read a remarkable report from the World Economic Forum in Davos by the New York Times' Kevin Roose. It described in detail how the world’s billionaires and their powerful friends are talking about an automated near-future in which millions of jobs from truck driver to bookkeeper to newspaper journalist are replaced by machines. It’s a development all but guaranteed to cause massive societal upheaval but the grand poobahs of technology are powerless to stop it...because, you know, shareholders.
Corporations are, of course, also kinds of machines, even if their parts are made from bylaws and their cogs from employees. Even societies are machines, and our society — like our corporations — has refined the process of taking from the many and giving to the few down to the point where they’re milking the very last few percentages of inefficiency away. And no. No matter what you’ve been told, improving efficiency does not create new jobs with better pay. It creates fewer jobs and less pay. That’s the whole damn point.
Go read this column.