We've Made Bad Choices For President - But Corrected Them

For those of you fearing the outcome of this presidential election, Robert Reich offers a ray of hope:

I want to try to reassure you about this country. 

I know that you’re worried and upset. You have every reason to be. Donald Trump is a vile human being, and he got away with a tsunami of lies Thursday night. Joe Biden didn’t come across with the vitality he needed to show. 

I have no idea whether Biden will get his mojo back or the Democrats will find someone else to take on Trump. But I have an abiding faith in the common sense and good-heartedness of most Americans. 

Although we’re horribly divided right now, the fact is, again and again, we’ve rejected vicious haters and demagogues — Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace, to name a few. 

We’ve made a few bad mistakes in our choices of president, to be sure, but we’ve corrected them as soon as we could. We elected James Buchanan in 1856, but he was out in four years. We allowed Andrew Johnson to become president following Lincoln’s assassination, but we impeached him. We elected Richard Nixon in 1968 but sent him packing in 1974. We elected Trump in 2016 (although more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton), and we didn’t reelect him in 2020. 

There have been times when I doubted America. I think the worst was 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and then Bobby Kennedy, the riots and fires that consumed our cities, the horrific Democratic convention in Chicago along with protests and violent police response, the election of the dreadful Nixon, and the escalating carnage of Vietnam. 

It seemed to me then that we had utterly lost our moral compass and purpose. 

But the Watergate hearings demonstrated to me that we had not lost it. Democrats and Republicans worked together to discover what Nixon had done. I had much the same feeling about the brilliant work done by the House’s special committee to investigate January 6, 2021. 

Washington, D.C., is not the Gomorrah portrayed in the media, and I think it important not to become so consumed with its failings or its Republican crazies that we overlook the many good things happening there, particularly under Biden — the most aggressive use of antitrust and most pro-union labor board I remember, and Biden’s extraordinary legislative accomplishments. 

When I think about what’s good about America, I also think about the jurors and prosecutors and the judge in Trump’s recent trial in Manhattan, who took extraordinary abuse. Their lives and the lives of their families were threatened. But they didn’t flinch. They did their duty. 

I think about our armed services men and women. I think about our firefighters and police officers. I think about our teachers and social workers, and our nurses who acted with such courage and dedication during the pandemic. I think about all the other people who are putting in countless hours in our cities and towns and states to make our lives better. 

And all the people who are working their hearts out right now to make sure Donald Trump stays out of the White House. (I assure you, I’m doing the same, and I hope you are as well.) 

A few nights ago, I had dinner with an old friend whom I haven’t seen in many years. He’s now a United States senator. He works extraordinarily hard. He cares deeply about the country. He shares many of our values. 

He told me that he seriously doubts Americans will elect Donald Trump. 

I agree with him. We are so much better than Trump. 

The Secretary Of Defense Apologizes To Americans

When a person makes a mistake, the correct action is to apologize for it. But that rarely happens in the political world.

Most of the time, elected and appointed political figures either deny the mistake, try to justify it, or issue a non-apology apology -- like "I'm sorry that people misunderstood what I did" or "I'm sorry that people felt hurt by my action".

Those are not real apologies. They shift the blame for the mistake from the person who did it to others. Trying to shift the blame for mistakes is not apologizing. It's just another pathetic attempt to justify the mistake.

In December, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had a procedure to cure his prostate cancer. In early January, he was experiencing some medical complications from that procedure and went into the hospital. Being a private person (as many people are), the Secretary did not notify the president or the American people of his hospitalization.

Secretary Austin, being a private person (as many of us are), did not notify the president or the press (which had the effect of keeping it a secret from the American people). 

The nation's defense was not in jeopardy since either the Secretary or Assistant Secretary was in charge at all time. But the failure to notify was a serious mistake. The president and the nation have a right to know about the hospitalization of such an important government official.

To his credit, Secretary Austin did not try to deny his mistake, justify it, or shift the blame. He issued a real apology on Thursday' press conference, saying, "I want to be crystal clear. I did not handle this right. I should have told the president about my cancer diagnosis. I should have also told my team and the American people, and I take full responsibility. I apologize to my teammates and to the American people."

It is refreshing to see a government official recognize a mistake and issue a real apology for it. Others serving the American people should take note and do the same when they make mistakes. The American people deserve honesty from their officials.

I commend the Secretary for recognizing his mistake and issuing a real apology!

Elon Musk's Biggest Mistake After Buying Twitter

The following is from Robert Reich:

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he clearly didn’t know that the key assets he was buying lay in Twitter’s 7,500 workers’ heads.

On corporate balance sheets, the assets of a corporation are its factories, equipment, patents, and brand name.

Workers aren’t considered assets. They appear as costs. In fact, payrolls are typically two-thirds of a corporation’s total costs. Which is why companies often cut payrolls to increase profits. 

 

The reason for this is simple. Corporations have traditionally been viewed as production systems. Assets are things that corporations own, which turn inputs — labor, raw materials, and components — into marketable products.

Reduce the costs of these inputs, and — presto — each product generates more profit. Or that’s been the traditional view.

Yet today, increasingly, corporations aren’t just production systems. They’re systems for directing the know-how, know-what, know-where, and know-why of the people who work within them. 

 

A large and growing part of the value of a corporation now lies in the heads of its workers — heads that know how to innovate, know what needs improvement, know where the company’s strengths and vulnerabilities are found, and know why the corporation succeeds (or doesn’t).

These human assets are becoming the key assets of today’s corporations. But they can’t be owned, as are factories, equipment, patents, and brands. They must be motivated. 

  

When Musk fired half of Twitter’s workforce, then threatened to fire any remaining dissenters and demanded that the rest pledge to accept “long hours at high intensity” — leading to the resignations last week of an estimated 1,200 more Twitter employees — he began to destroy what he bought.

Now he’s panicking. Last week he tried to hire back some of the people he fired. On Friday he sent emails to Twitter employees asking that “anyone who actually writes software” report in, and stating that he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack” (its software and related systems).

But even if Musk gets this information, he probably won’t be able to save Twitter.

Most of Twitter’s employees are now gone, which means most of its know-how to prevent outages and failures during high-traffic events is also gone, most of its know-what is necessary to maintain and enhance computing architecture is gone, most of its know-where to guard against cyberattacks is gone, and most of its know-why hate speech (and other awful stuff advertisers want to avoid) is getting through its filters and what to do about it, is also now gone.

 

Without this knowledge and talent, Twitter is a shell — an office building, some patents, and a brand — without the capacity to improve or even sustain its service.

Twitter is unlikely to fail all at once. But bugs and glitches will mount, the quality of what’s offered will deteriorate, hateful tweets will burgeon, and customers and advertisers will flee.

As Richard Forno, assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County told the New York Times, “it’s like putting a car on the road, hitting the accelerator, and then the driver jumps out. How far is it going to go before it crashes?”

Not even Donald Trump seems particularly eager to take up Musk’s offer to have him back on the platform.

Safe to say, Twitter is no longer worth the nearly $44 billion Musk paid for it. It’s now probably worth only a fraction of that sum — a fact that should be of no small concern to the bankers who lent Musk $30 billion to purchase Twitter on condition he pay $1 billion a year in interest.

Two lessons here.

First, corporations that regard employees only as costs to be cut rather than as assets to be nourished can make humongous mistakes. Elon Musk is Exhibit #1.

Second, where corporations view employees as costs, the traditional way for employees to flex their muscle is to strike, thereby temporarily closing factories and stopping the machines.

But where employees are a corporation’s key assets, workers’ greater power comes in threatening to — or actually — walking out the door. Elon Musk is Exhibit #2. 

The Putin-Lovers In The Republican Party Have A Problem

Many Republicans had jumped on the Putin bandwagon (Donald Trump, Madison Cawthorn, Tucker Carlson, etc.). They liked the idea of emulating his authoritarian control -- with themselves in control. Putin's criminal invasion of Ukraine has made them look like the fools they are.

Here is Paul Krugman's take on the situation in The New York Times:

Just a few weeks ago many influential figures on the U.S. right loved, just loved Vladimir Putin. In fact, some of them still can’t quit him. For example, Tucker Carlson, while he has grudgingly backed off from full-on Putin support, is still blaming America for the war and promoting Russian disinformation about U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.

For the most part, however, America’s Putin lovers are having a moment of truth. It’s not so much that Putin stands revealed as a tyrant willing to kill large numbers of innocent people — they knew or should have known that already. The problem is that the strongman they admired — whom Donald Trump praised as “savvy” and a “genius” just before he invaded Ukraine — is turning out to be remarkably weak. And that’s not an accident. Russia is facing disaster precisely because it is ruled by a man who accepts no criticism and brooks no dissent.

On the military side, a war Russia clearly envisioned as a blitzkrieg that would overrun Ukraine in days has yet to capture any of the country’s top 10 cities — although long-range bombardment is turning those cities into rubble. On the economic side, Putin’s attempt to insulate himself from potential Western sanctions has been a debacle, with everything indicating that Russia will have a depression-level slump. To see why this matters, you need to understand the sources of the right’s infatuation with a brutal dictator, an infatuation that began even before Trump’s rise.

Some of this dictator-love reflected the belief that Putin was a champion of antiwokeness — someone who wouldn’t accuse you of being a racist, who denounced cancel culture and “gay propaganda.”

Some of it reflected a creepy fascination with Putin’s alleged masculinity — Sarah Palin declared that he wrestled bears while President Barack Obama wore “mom jeans” — and the apparent toughness of Putin’s people. Just last year Senator Ted Cruz contrasted footage of a shaven-headed Russian soldier with a U.S. Army recruiting ad to mock our “woke, emasculated” military.

Finally, many on the right simply like the idea of authoritarian rule. Just a few days ago Trump, who has dialed back his praise for Putin, chose instead to express admiration for North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Kim’s generals and aides, he noted, “cowered” when the dictator spoke, adding that “I want my people to act like that.”

But we’re now relearning an old lesson: Sometimes, what looks like strength is actually a source of weakness.

Whatever eventually happens in the war, it’s clear that Russia’s military was far less formidable than it appeared on paper. Russian forces appear to be undertrained and badly led; there also seem to be problems with Russian equipment, such as communications devices.

These weaknesses might have been apparent to Putin before the war if investigative journalists or independent watchdogs within his government had been in a position to assess the country’s true military readiness. But such things aren’t possible in Putin’s Russia.

The invaders were also clearly shocked by Ukraine’s resistance — both by its resolve and by its competence. Realistic intelligence assessments might have warned Russia that this might happen; but would you want to have been the official standing up and saying, “Mr. President, I’m afraid we may be underestimating the Ukrainians”?

On the economic side, I have to admit that both the West’s willingness to impose sanctions and the effectiveness of those sanctions have surprised just about everyone, myself included.

Still, economic officials and independent experts in Russia should have warned Putin in advance that “Fortress Russia” was a deeply flawed idea. It shouldn’t have required deep analysis to realize that Putin’s $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves would become largely unusable if the world’s democracies cut off Russia’s access to the world banking system. It also shouldn’t have required deep analysis to realize that Russia’s economy is deeply dependent on imports of capital goods and other essential industrial inputs.

But again, would you have wanted to be the diplomat telling Putin that the West isn’t as decadent as he thinks, the banker telling him that his vaunted “war chest” will be useless in a crisis, the economist telling him that Russia needs imports?

The point is that the case for an open society — a society that allows dissent and criticism — goes beyond truth and morality. Open societies are also, by and large, more effective than closed-off autocracies. That is, while you might imagine that there are big advantages to rule by a strongman who can simply tell people what to do, these advantages are more than offset by the absence of free discussion and independent thought. Nobody can tell the strongman that he’s wrong or urge him to think twice before making a disastrous decision.

Which brings me back to America’s erstwhile Putin admirers. I’d like to think that they’ll take Russia’s Ukraine debacle as an object lesson and rethink their own hostility to democracy. OK, I don’t really expect that to happen. But we can always hope.

The Lessons We Should Learn From The War In Afghanistan

 It has been said that if we don't learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it. The catastrophe in Afghanistan shows that we did not learn from our mistakes in Vietnam.

The Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has released a report on Afghanistan. You can read the full report at this website.

In the report, the Inspector General lists seven lessons our government needs to learn from our time in Afghanistan. Those lessons are listed in the graphic above.

Will our government take these lessons to heart and learn from them? Probably not! We didn't learn from our time in Vietnam, and it is unlikely that we'll learn fro our time in Afghanistan.

Our politicians are not worried about repeating mistakes from the past. They only care about protecting their own political careers, and as soon as it's popular to engage in another unwindable war, they'll discard these lessons -- and we'll repeat the past again.

GOP Killing The Jan 6th Investigation Bill Was A BLUNDER

 

The House-passed bill to create a bipartisan committee to investigate the January 6th Capitol riot was a gift to the Republican Party. The committee would have had 5 Democratic and 5 Republican members. That would have given Republicans control over the subpoenas issued by the committee (since 6 members would have to agree to issue a subpoena), and it would have given them an equal say in the report issued by the committee. It was the best of all possible outcomes for the GOP.

That makes it weird that most House Republicans voted against the bill, and Senate Republicans filibustered it when it arrived. And when Majority Leader Schumer tried to invoke cloture to stop that filibuster, enough Republicans voted against that to keep the filibuster alive. In effect, that killed the bill.

Does this mean there will be no investigation in Congress? Not at all! It just means there won't be a bipartisan investigation. Speaker Pelosi will make sure the investigation proceeds. She could assign the investigation to a standing House committee (like Intelligence or Judiciary), or she could create a new committee in the House to do the investigation. Either way, Democrats will control the committee by having the most members, and will be able to issue any subpoena they want (without being blocked by the Republicans). And they will be able to run that committee investigation for as long as they want -- maybe right up until the 2022 election.

If any Republican thought they had killed an investigation that would hurt them in the 2022 election, they were very wrong. All they did was give up any control they might have had in any investigation.

Minority Leader McConnell is smart enough to know this. You might wonder why he did such a stupid thing. It was to save his job. Donald Trump, and his base supporters, are not smart enough to know they were giving up control over the investigation -- so they opposed the committee's creation. And if McConnell had not actively opposed the committee's creation it could easily have cost him his leadership position. Trump and his minions would have demanded that.

Any way you look at it, the Senate Republicans committed a MASSIVE BLUNDER in killing the creation of the January 6th bipartisan investigation committee!

The 13.3% Unemployment Rate Was A Miscalculation

Most economists were surprised at the 13.3% unemployment rate for May when it was announced. They had expected it to be higher. They were right. The Labor Department says it miscalculated the rate -- a miscalculation that caused it to be 3 points lower than it should have been. And it wasn't just May. That same miscalculation occurred in March and April also.

Here is how the mistake was reported in The Washington Post:

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem.

“BLS and the Census Bureau are investigating why this misclassification error continues to occur and are taking additional steps to address the issue,” said a note at the bottom of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

Some took this as a sign that President Trump or one of his staffers may have tinkered with the data to make it look better, especially since most forecasters predicted the unemployment rate would be close to 20 percent in May, up from 14.7 percent in April. But economists and former BLS leaders from across the political spectrum strongly dismissed that idea.

“You can 100% discount the possibility that Trump got to the BLS. Not 98% discount, not 99.9% discount, but 100% discount,” tweeted Jason Furman, the former top economist for former president Barack Obama. “BLS has 2,400 career staff of enormous integrity and one political appointee with no scope to change this number.”

Economists say the BLS was trying to be as transparent as possible about how hard it is to collect real-time data during a pandemic. The BLS admitted that some people who should have been classified as “temporarily unemployed” during the shutdown were instead misclassified as employed but “absent” from work for “other reasons.”

The “other reason” category is normally used for people on vacation, serving jury duty or taking leave to care for a child or relative. These are typically situations where the worker decides to take leave. But in this unusual pandemic circumstance, the “other reason” category was applied to some people staying at home and waiting to be called back.

This problem started in March when there was a big jump in people claiming they were temporarily “absent” from work for “other reasons.” The BLS noticed this and flagged it right away. In March, the BLS said the unemployment rate likely should have been 5.4 percent, instead of the official 4.4 percent rate. In April, the BLS said the real unemployment rate was likely about 19.7 percent, not 14.7 percent.