Current Affairs – US

By now many of you will have read or seen the story of a paying passenger who was physically removed by law enforcement from a United Airlines flight. The underlying cause of the issue was that airlines routinely overbook seats on flights, in order to take account of no-shows and people who fail to arrive at the departure zone on time for other reasons. In this case, passengers did not volunteer to give up their seats in order to address the overbooking situation, so the airline arbitrarily decided to bump a passenger who, since he had paid for a seat and was a medical doctor with patients to see, declined to be bumped. At which point United had him removed from the plane by law enforcement in a way that caused him bodily injury.
The United CEO has, inexplicably, refused to issue an unconditional apology and has instead chosen to defend the airline publicly.
There are a bunch of different backdrops to this issue, but here are a few that spring to mind.

1. United Airlines has a worse reputation than many airlines for customer service, in an industry that has a lot of deep-seated dysfunctions when it comes to customer service. There was a good reason why a disgruntled passenger started the website untied.com a few years ago. (This site is now being subjected to a campaign of lawsuits from United Airlines in order to shut it down.)
2. The airline industry routinely overbooks planes and (mostly) gets away with it. The strange thing in all of this is that buying and paying for a ticket does not automatically give a passenger the right to be carried on the flight that they booked. This is definitely at odds with most other industries, where if you book a service, you expect to avail yourself of the service at the specific date and time, and you can sue the provider for breach of contract if that does not occur.
3. Airlines continue to get away with these sorts of behaviors because, at the end of the day, their stock prices and business performance do not suffer. As this article makes clear, consumers are not willing to punish airlines sufficiently for poor attention to customer service to get the attention of airline leaders and stockholders.
Another article makes the same point using stock price diagrams. Bad treatment of customers pays off.

The bottom line is that airline behaviors will only change when consumers refuse to buy airline tickets from airlines who provide bad customer service, or who engage in devious business practices. So it is up to We The Customers.

Back in 1992, I watched from the UK as Ross Perot came from nowhere to capture a significant share of the vote in the Presidential Election campaign.
While I liked a lot of the overall approach of Perot, it was very easy to see, even from 5000 miles away, that he would have made a poor President. Like many entrepreneurial builders of corporations, he saw government as just like a business, only bigger, and relished the chance to impose his own brand of “business discipline” on it, not realizing that the US governmental system is not built to facilitate command and control by a single person. He would have been a miserable, frustrated POTUS.
Now we have an even more extreme example as POTUS, and it is every bit as bad as I feared. Donald Trump makes Ross Perot look like a genius every day.
However, Donald Trump is not some left-field aberration. His appearance on the national political scene is the end result of over 40 years of progressively more strident resentment politicking from the GOP.
Which brings me to a more detailed consideration of what is known as “grift”.
A lot of the promulgation of resentment politics has been via talk radio, and other forums dominated by aggressive, contentious commentators at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Those kinds of channels require money to operate, and there is plenty of money fuelling that communications process. Some of it comes from rich donors, some of it comes from advertising, but some of it comes from old fashioned grift. Call it begging or pleading, or call it the selling of snake oil, asking for money is as old as the hills, as organized religions show us.
The history of grifting by authoritarian groups affiliated with the GOP and other organizations in that area of the political spectrum is a long and sometimes sordid one. Almost every crackpot website that I read by End Times proponents, and SovCits, contains some variant of the crawler at the bottom of the browser window saying “send money”.
In some cases, the money is not going to any useful political activity. There is an entire infrastructure of web sites and movements whose leaders are living off of grift, just like the televangelists, whose tactics they often adopt. They trade in FUD and demand money to “protect the USA from evil”.
Unfortunately, as we have seen in the USA since 9/11, fear sells.
The obsession with persuading supporters to cough up money is interesting on another level however. It shows that authoritarians, unlike many progressives, realized a long time ago that if politics runs on money, they should be collecting as much of their own as possible. In politics, money is always very useful.
A lot of the issues that the progressive end of the political spectrum has with messaging are due to lack of money, which is in turn fuelled by a conviction that politics ought not to be driven by money, so they will refuse to go grubbing for dollars.
This is somewhat self-defeating.
The current alternate universe information dissemination echo chamber in the authoritarian area of the internet has become pervasive due to the application of large sums of money over a very long period of time by rich individuals and PACs. The contrast with progressive communication channels is an instructive one. There is no progressive talk radio infrastructure worth a damn in the USA since Air America ceased operations. At one time, by virtue of having progressives in the IT innovation space, progressive organizations knew how to use the internet better, but those days are gone, and there is a lot of evidence that outside authoritarian entities have learned how to manipulate the online world in order to distort messaging and simulate popularity.
The reason for a lack of progressive channels has a lot to do with both lack of money, but also the lack of a progressive power structure that matches the networks of authoritarians. Authoritarian followers are always more cohesive than progressive followers, since many of them are happy to be told what to do. Progressives are, almost by definition, mostly freethinkers. Think “herding cats”. Many of them also believe that money is grubby and that ideas should speak for themselves.
There is a somewhat complacent worldview in many progressive groups that believes that America is undergoing a demographic transformation which will see the regressives die off. This is a flawed analysis. It assumes the continuation of a level electoral playing field, and as we are seeing, the GOP is not interested in a level playing field. It wants to tilt the playing field in its favor, distorting the electoral process at all levels to enshrine a permanent GOP majority. (The ends justifies the means as far as the GOP is concerned, since they see progressivism as an existential threat, and are often unable to distinguish between dissent and disloyalty).
The 2016 election should have been a wake-up call to progressives in the USA. I fear that the message has still not been properly absorbed.
In order to avoid the permanent distortion of the electoral process, which will lead to decades of authoritarian rule, progressives need to be able to do several things that they have shown themselves to be poor at doing in the past:

1. Organize around a simple set of coherent, short, appealing messages
2. Repeat the messages and not get trapped into using the other side’s terminology (see Lakoff, George)
3. Be prepared to FUND FUND FUND. Call it grifting if you must, but money makes the political process go round.
4. Be prepared to use economic power in other ways such as boycotting corporations who align themselves with their opponents, or do not behave equitably. If there are 60 million progressives in the USA, and 6 million of them stop buying goods from a major corporation, that will have a significant impact.

Folks here is one of my lessons in practical US governance.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have no real interest in requiring any POTUS to get permission before committing US forces to action around the world. Never mind what some elected representatives might talk about or proclaim as part of their regular public strutting, watch what they actually do (HINT: Nothing of consequence).
Part of the reason is that many specific operations are covert, and so cannot be disclosed or debated in advance.
However, the main reason is that if the HoR or the Senate does not intervene, they get to have it both ways. If the military action is seen to be a success, they get to pass motions congratulating US forces, attend parades and homecomings in their states or districts, and generally bathe in reflected glory. If the action is perceived to be a failure, then they get to walk away and blame the POTUS for “misadventure” or some such, while burnishing their credentials as Real Americans (TM) by attending funeral and memorial events.
Cynical, moi? On this subject, yep. Very.

I had an interesting conversation with a prospective client yesterday as part of my day job.
Their IT service vendors are unable to meet some of their requirements for staffing IT delivery projects at present, because the suspension of fast-track visa processing means that they cannot quickly bring any new resources into the USA from elsewhere in the world.
This seems to be happening all over the place, from other conversations i have held this week with work colleagues. Fast Track visa processing is on hold, and renewals of current visas are being denied. I know of one IT consultant at one of my previous clients whose H1B visa expires in August and is not being renewed, so he is going to have to move his family back to India and go back there in August to find work.
Now, I know that some people are sitting there thinking “good, that means more jobs for US workers”, but it’s not as simple as that. There are two factors that work together to make this a significant issue
1. Right now, the bench for some IT skills in the USA is weak to non-existent. A lot (and I mean a LOT) of experienced IT people are currently retiring, they are part of the Baby Boomer generation. Many of them are genuinely old enough and have enough money in the bank to retire, and a lot of them are burned out and ground down by 10+ years of slash-and-burn by IT departments. The retiring people have 20-30 or more years of experience, and they will not be easy to replace. Anecdotally, I have around 220 names on my Skype Contacts list internally. I know of at least 3 people who have retired in the last 9 months off of that list. While retirements might improve my job security, the current SNAFUs on immigration and visa processing will negatively impact corporations in the USA. There aren’t the people out there in a working age bracket ready to step in and provide help.
2. The commodity mindset for IT services is well-established, even for people-based delivery. Corporations have been buying on price for a while. If the Indian “pure plays”, who currently have tens of thousands of people here in the USA on (mostly) H1b visas, run into visa issues, they will go to Plan B. Plan B will consist of them moving most of those people back to India, from which they will still hire them out to US corporations, only this time cheaper. The corporations will bite. Hell, they would hire penguins in Antarctica if it looked like a good deal.
(2) has negative consequences that go beyond the non-re-appearance of IT jobs. The people who leave the USA , who were all employed and paying taxes and spending money, will no longer be doing either, so the GDP and tax revenues of the USA will be impacted, as will service industry businesses.

Washington DC, 7th March 2017 – The replacement bill for the PPACA, announced today by the Republican Party, includes a radical overhaul of the charging structure for US healthcare.
Under the terms of the bill, all charges on all estimates and bills for healthcare in the USA after the bill becomes law will be denominated in IPU – iPhone Units.
“iPhones are now the preferred measure of the wealth of the poor” commented Rep. Jason Chaffetz at a press conference given to announce the publication of the bill. “If the wealthy poor always compare healthcare costs to iPhones, by God, we intend to make it easier than ever for them to work out the cost of healthcare”.
Asked if Apple might object to their brand name being used without permission to name a charging structure like this, Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, was blunt. “Apple has a nice business in the USA, be a shame if something was to happen to it” he said, winking at the questioner. He continued, “they have a lot of cash that they want to bring back to the United States, and I am sure that they will be amenable to a quid pro quo for the use of this name”.

If a Republican politician, when discussing healthcare, utters the phrase “access to healthcare”, activate your bullshit detector.
Immediately.
What you are listening to is most likely going to consist of sophistry and doublespeak. The context in which it is usually used is a statement along the lines of “we will ensure that every American has access to healthcare”.
The phrase, in that context, is bullshit. Everyone of us has access to healthcare. As long as we can pay for it…
The weasel word “affordable” is also cause for one hand to be on the bullshit detector. “Affordable” for a millionaire Congresscritter is not “affordable” for an unemployed factory worker in Upper Podunk.
Pay attention to the weasel words, folks. The GOP had no plan for replacing the ACA, and the weasel words are a positioning game to create confusion and buy time.

A significant percentage of the cockanamie, likely unconstitutional legislation that is proposed almost daily by the censorious nitwit wing of the GOP is what I call Don Quixote legislation.
The people floating the legislation often have not bothered to draft them properly, and may not even have considered all of the implications of the proposed bills (this is probably why at one point the state of Texas proposed marriage protection legislation that, absent any different interpretation by the courts, could have outlawed heterosexual marriage. Personally I think the state should not be in the business of setting rules for marriage other than that the parties to the marriage are capable of informed consent, but that’s because on these any many other matters I am a libertarian).
The proposers of these bills know full well that they are unlikely to (a) ever make it into law, and (b) if they make it into law they will most likely soon be struck down by one or more courts.
They don’t care about these practical items. Their purpose is not really to get the half-baked cockanamie bill or bills passed into law. Their purpose is virtue signalling. They are saying to their base, for example “look, I know you’re terrified about perversion of The Children, and you’re for tough legislation against those three-legged trisexual perverts using the bathroom, so I just tabled the Unbelieavabubble Three-LeggedTrisexual Bathroom Bill”.
Virtue signalling is a no-lose tactic. If, by some bizarre series of events or miracles, the Unbelievabubble Three-Legged Trisexual Bathroom Bill makes it into law, they get to say to their base “look, I came through for you”. If the bill dies in committee (which is where most bad bills go to die), then they get to say to their base “look, I tried”.
If the bill makes it into law and gets struck down, they get to say to the base “see, here we go again – unelected judges legislating from the bench again – Please Send Money”.
If you want an excellent contemporary example of virtue signalling at national level, you can examine how the GOP, after gaining control of the House of Representatives in 2012, proceeded, over a 4 year period, to schedule at least 57 separate votes to repeal the PPACA. The votes were purely symbolic, a total waste of House time, and our taxpayer dollars, but they were a means of signalling to the GOP base that the party was Deadly Serious about repealing what they named “Obamacare”.
There is no downside to this form of political masturbation for the person doing the virtue signalling.

Donald Trump is the Electoral College President.
He was elected by the Electoral College 304-227. This is the 46th largest winning margin ever out of 56 elections where there was a clear result. So calling it a “landslide” is bullshit on both raw numerical and ranking grounds.
Donald Trump gained 46.1% of the popular vote compared to 48.2% for Hillary Clinton. So he did not win a majority of votes cast.
A total of 26% of eligible voters voted for Donald Trump.
If anybody attempts to argue that Trump voters are the “silent majority”, ask them how they can explain this using math. You might want to go get some popcorn and sodas to keep your body busy while you wait for a coherent logical answer.

One thing I noticed a long long time ago when I first came to the USA was that people here (and by extension, the media) love a redemption narrative.
The steps in the story are utterly predictable:

– Individual with a good (in some cases, virtuous) public profile either starts to behave publicly like a total dick, or crazy person, or is discovered to be secretly behaving badly.
– Individual is excoriated, body-slammed by the internet, the media etc. and suffers various negative consequences, up to and including loss of liberty, bankruptcy etc. etc.
– Individual suddenly changes behavior, often accompanied by ostentatious public displays of new-found virtue.
– Media and public acclaim reformed behavior of individual and praise said individual to the heavens
– Everybody pats themselves on the back and lives happily ever after.

This is the sort of arc of crash followed by redemption that some celebrities and public figures in the USA follow all of the time.
Somewhere in there, God and Jesus Christ often figure prominently. If I could have a dollar for every time I have seen a fallen-but-now-trying-to-rise individual claiming to have “found God”, I would be writing this posting from Bora Bora instead of Pennsvylvania.
This feel-good narrative cliche is relentlessly promoted by the media, who love a “bad person made good” story. It is also immensely satisfying on an emotional level for believers in simplistic good vs. bad morality tales.
The problem is that in their eagerness to find examples of this narrative, just about everybody ignores substance and becomes fixated on style.
Which brings us to the speech by President Trump last night.
It seems that, for a change, he not only had somebody write out his speech in advance, but he actually stuck to it, and did not veer off-script and into his favorite habit of speaking off the cuff, blurting out all sorts of peripheral comments, allegations and promises. Of course, this meant that he had to stick to the text on the teleprompter.
Some media commentators have been acclaiming his speech as somehow indicative of his “being Presidential”, “growing into the job”, “pivoting” etc.
Pardon me while I burst out laughing.
One thing that I notice immediately about all of these praising cliches is that they say almost nothing about substance. They are all about style and perception.
Style and perception are, as the words themselves should make clear, not in any way connected to substance.
One of the easy-to-spot endemic weaknesses in US electorates, obvious to anybody who grew up outside the USA, but seemingly and puzzlingly non-obvious to people born in the USA, is a fixation on style as an indicator of substance. I have lost count of the number of times that I heard people complimenting Ronald Reagan for “acting Presidential” or “behaving like a President”. (The cynic in me always wanted to yell “Of course he can act Presidential, he was a ****ing B-movie actor!” but my British DNA forbade me to utter that).
My take-away from these comments is that it is not enough for Americans that their President actually, you know, be the President and do all of the things that Presidents are supposed to do. He or she actually is also required to “look Presidential”.
This probably helps to explain why, given the choice between a competent but unexciting Democrat (Gray Davis) and an action-hero actor (Arnold Schwartzenegger) for the Governorship of California, a majority of electors voted for “The Governator” – more than once. Quite clearly, style won out over substance, at least the first time around. (Schwartzenegger actually turned out to be an OK governor, but one can quite easily make the right choices in life for the wrong reasons).
In Donald Trump, the electoral college elected as President a man whose entire public life has been based on relentless, narcissistic self-promotion. He had no experience in politics whatsoever; however, unlike more weaselly and equally dishonest fake insurgents like Ted Cruz, who had spent decades in Texas politics, Donald Trump could plausibly and truthfully claim to be “not a politician”, which was definitely part of his appeal.
The problem with a “not a politician” candidate being elected to a political post is that the system around you, a political system (with all of the good, bad and ugly that this entails) expects you to operate within it, not outside it. This is especially true of the US President, whose role is deliberately constrained by the Constitution in order to avoid the “Great Dictator” result that crippled European countries. The President has relatively little direct power, most of the power is “soft”power such as patronage. The idea that Donald Trump espoused of “blow the system up” is not one that he could put into practice alone. He needed willing collaborators, who would be difficult to find, since once they get into office, most politicians realize that the system as it currently works is the source of nearly all power. They will be about as enthusiastic about blowing up the system as fish would be about having their river drained.
Donald Trump, since taking office, probably believing way too much of his “blow the system up” rhetoric, has ostentatiously and publicly tried to govern without reference to any of the norms of Presidenting. Those include (but are not limited to) asking for and listening to advice, keeping your mouth shut until you actually know about something, not trying to undermine your own government departments in public, and not pissing off other countries and their leaders.
Then there is the expectation that the President will at least make a good-faith effort to be truthful in public pronouncements.
Donald Trump has been unable or unwilling to do any of these things. As a result the first 45 days of his presidency have been a total train-wreck, which is not only profoundly disturbing to people in the USA (outside of his supporters, who probably regard most of the recent outcomes as a feature, part of the “smash the system” impacts), but also deeply unsettling to the rest of the world.
Which brings us back round to…Trump’s speech last night. Not only did he speak from a teleprompter (which would be something hardly worth commenting about, were it not for his past refusal to use one, and the fact that when Barack Obama used one, the GOP pissed and moaned about it like he had committed some cardinal sin), but he seemingly was able to get to the end without either crashing and burning, or veering off into the weeds.
One would think that this is a pretty low bar for a public official to clear. What could be simpler? Read it in advance, get the delivery right, run though in private, fine-tune, go to the House, deliver it. No questions from those damn media assholes afterwards, just go home, watch the highlights on TV.
However, to read the media, it seems that Donald Trump did not so much cleat the bar with the speech as hit it out of the park. Apparently he is now a reformed man, a True President who not only is The President, but looks the part.
Folks, this is horseshit.
Donald Trump, when you take away the brownie points for, you know, sticking to the script, said nothing that was in any way superior to anything he has previously said in public. The speech was the usual collection of falsehoods, pious-sounding appeals for “unity” and “co-operation”, and deeply duplicitous promises totally at odds with recent actions.
Yet the media thinks he is in some way reformed.
Either the media commentators saying this are hopelessly gullible, or they have been ingesting some mind-altering substance that I do not want to ever ingest.
A focus on style over substance is fatal to any attempt at honest appraisal of actions or success. Looking Presidential is not enough. Ronald Reagan looked presidential, yet he ran up the deficit terribly, was a dangerously hands-off leader, and was regarded by the rest of the world (but not by the oblivious US) as a failed B-Movie actor who lucked into the job, rather than a President who happened to have been an actor.
When Donald Trump really changes, as in, he stops behaving most of the time like an out-of-control halfwit asshole, I will start believing claims that he has changed. Until then, all of this back-patting is total flim-flam which further erodes the very limited remaining credibility of the media.

Just a reminder about the current row over media access to White House press conferences.
First, a question. When did you last see a press conference that was in any way revelatory? As in, some truly interesting information was revealed?
You’re probably scratching your head trying to remember.
Press conferences are not communication sessions. They are mostly performance art. Whoever is at the lectern spends most of their time attempting to send messages without revealing much of anything. The audience (the media) spends most of its time trying to trap or trip up the person at the lectern. It can be entertaining, but it’s seldom valuable news.
Secondly, think back to Watergate. Bernstein and Woodward did not uncover all of the various threads of malfeasance by going to press conferences and attending briefings. They rolled up their sleeves and did a lot of old-fashioned investigation, slowly connecting the dots on a conspiracy involving illegal behavior and deception.
The media does not need press conferences. They are nothing more than an age-old Punch and Judy show, and my cynical take is that many political leaders use them as a distraction. My rule of governance is “always look behind the curtain”. I think the mass media would be a lot more impactful and credible if they blew off press conferences and off the record briefings in favor of investigative journalism. It’s been out of fashion for a long time because it costs money and takes time. However, if you want to really understand what is going on behind the scenes in the US government, which is horrendously complex, there are no short cuts.