Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 166

Trump and Sessions are playing “bad cop-good cop” in the drug war

Jeff Sessions: Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Getty/Photo Montage by Salon)

The omens are not good. In a pair of speeches this week, the president and his attorney general made some very menacing comments about drug policy. While their last-century drug warrior rhetoric has not, for the most part, translated into regressive, repressive drug policy prescriptions — yet — it’s probably not safe to assume that will continue to be the case.

At the same time, the Trump White House appears to be approaching key aspects of the country’s opioid crisis, which contributed mightily to a record 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016, with a mixture of indifference and incompetence.

Trump wants to drastically slash the budget of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP, the drug czar’s office), his White House opioid response is laughably led by pollster and counselor — not drug policy or addiction expert — Kellyanne Conway, and his budget proposals are for spending substantially less, not more money on treatment and prevention.

An Obama-era law that designated a billion dollars to help states fight opioids runs out of money this year, with no sign Trump intends to ask Congress to renew it, and Trump’s 2018 budget request has a $400 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the lead federal agency for treatment.

Instead of proactive responses aimed at ameliorating the crisis, Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are falling back on drug war rhetoric that would have been at home in Nixon’s 1970s or Reagan’s 1980s.

Trump spent barely a minute talking about the opioid crisis in his State of the Union speech last week, and now he says he’s focused on law enforcement, not treatment and prevention.

In a speech this week in Cincinnati, Trump said the opioid epidemic “has never been worse. People form blue-ribbon committees. They do everything they can. And frankly, I have a different take on it. My take is you have to get really, really tough; really, really mean with the drug pushers and drug dealers.”

Attorney General Sessions, for his part, was on the same page this week. In a Tuesday night speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation for an event honoring Ronald Reagan’s birthday, Sessions could have been channeling The Gipper himself, blaming the media, not enough drug war, and “permissive rhetoric” for problems with drug use.

“We don’t think illegal drug use is recreation,” he said. “Lax enforcement, permissive rhetoric, and the media have undermined the essential need to say no to drug use. Don’t start. That’s what President Trump said to us the other day in a meeting. What did Nancy Reagan say? Just say no.”

Sessions reiterated his opposition to state-legal marijuana resorted to the discredited “gateway theory” to try to blame marijuana for the opioid epidemic.

“The DEA said that a huge percentage of heroin addictions starts with prescriptions. That may be an exaggerated number — they had it as high as 80 percent — we think a lot of this is starting with marijuana and other drugs,” Sessions ventured.

“We are not going to pretend that there is not a law against marijuana. There is a federal law against marijuana,” he said. “And we’re not going to pretend that marijuana is good for you, either. I don’t think it is.”

Drug war rhetoric is one thing; actual policy shifts is another. So far, despite the tough talk, about the only concrete action aimed at driving us back to the failed drug war policies of the past is Sessions’ move last May to reverse Obama-era policy of moving away from harsh mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases. Other than that, there’s been a lot of sound and fury, but little in the way of actual policy proposals. Still, the remarks this week from the president and his chief law enforcement officer ought to be setting off alarm bells.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has a better idea. The independent Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic presidential contender on Wednesday announced a petition calling on Congress to “end the failed war on drugs.” “The criminal justice system is not the answer to drug abuse. Addiction is a health problem and we should start treating it that way,” Sanders wrote. “While communities all across the country lack adequate resources for treatment or prevention, we are spending approximately $50 billion a year on the war on drugs. That’s absurd. We need to get our priorities right.”

Shooting a Tesla into orbit: A slap in the face to real science

A Tesla roadster launched from the Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy driver named "Starman" heads towards Mars. (Credit: Gett/SpaceX)

Every power-hungry titan in history has had dreams of immortality. This has never been practically achieved — only metaphorically. From the pharaohs to the numerous libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie to the many, many universities and hospitals named for their donors, it’s a general rule that when you reach a certain amount of wealth and power, the best way to ensure your name lives on in perpetuity is to slap it on a building, monument or foundation.

This tangent about philanthropy is more relevant to Elon Musk’s recent car-launching stunt than it might seem. The Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gateses of the world achieve existential immortality by hoodwinking us with their faux-charity, attaching their names to nonprofit institutions or scholarship funds. This in turn gives them fuel to avoid taxation and hide their money — after all, if they’re “doing good” in other ways, they must be good people and therefore don’t deserve to get taxed.

In the same manner, Musk has achieved a comparable kind of immortality: the record-book feat of sending a luxury car into space, to orbit the sun for eternity. Long after Tesla stock collapses, long after SpaceX is nationalized out of existence, long after the “Zuckerberg” in Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital is displaced by another trillionaire donor’s name, the Tesla will keep on circling the sun.

Yet the true hubris of the car-launching stunt lies in how little respect it shows for real science and science education.  Sending something into orbit is a phenomenally expensive ordeal; even sending equipment to low-Earth orbit — barely above the mesosphere  — hovers between $9,000 per pound and $43,000 per pound, according to one estimate. Sending cargo further out — say, scientific instruments —  is far more expensive; as such, the cost of sending a satellite of comparable weight into the orbit Musk’s Tesla now occupies would be in the eight- to nine-figure range. Many astronomers spend years submitting proposals to get their 10-pound instrument attached to a probe, and often get denied again and again.

“This is basically the criticism a lot of scientists have” of the Tesla launch, said Jill Scudder, a physics professor at Oberlin College who publishes a science outreach blog called Astroquizzical. “Why not send a whole fleet of CubeSats [small cubical satellites] or something?”

Musk could have reached out to the scientific community to put something of scientific or educational value on the Falcon Heavy rocket, but didn’t. NASA confirmed as much in a comment to a GeekWire reporter. Or Musk and company could have sent a few kids’ science experiments along in the passenger seat; they sent an advertisement for a union-busting billionaire’s car company instead. 

There is another, more intriguing question swirling around SpaceX’s launch, one that speaks to a deeper enmity towards science: Was the Tesla sterilized prior to launch? Spreading living organisms around the solar system unintentionally is a huge risk that every space agency on Earth attempts to avoid at all costs. Both Scudder and Jason Davis (writing in the Planetary Society’s blog) have expressed concerns about this. “That worries me about the car,” Scudder told Salon.

She added that she hadn’t seen any confirmation that the car was sterilized prior to launch; I could find no evidence of that either. Indeed, the car seats didn’t look melted, as they likely would if it had been sterilized the normal way satellites are, via heat. (Salon reached out to SpaceX for comment, and did not receive a response prior to publication.) “Planetary protection policies say you should bake your spacecraft to stave off bacteria,” Scudder said, “in case it crashes into something that maybe has the capacity for life, or something that could end up somewhere with the capacity for life.”

Scudder was particularly concerned with contingencies. The launch was successful and Musk’s Tesla satellite is now in an orbit that’s unlikely to crash it into Mars, but there were no guarantees of that in advance. If something had gone wrong with the launch, the car could easily have contaminated a body in the solar system with pesky Earth microbes, a result that would have infuriated actual scientists. In the battle between billionaire hubris and international scientific protocol, the former seems to have won out.

Indeed, we now seem to have entered a strange new era in space travel, where space is no longer a sacred realm where humans trespass only cautiously, and only on the basis that whoever does so acts on behalf of our entire species. Writing in The Atlantic, Marina Koren marvels at how Carl Sagan and a group of scientists labored over the import of what to put on Voyager’s “Golden Record.” In comparison, the Tesla in space feels trite. Space is no longer romantic, and far less a symbol for collective human achievement and human possibility.

Scudder was comparably skeptical about the symbolism of the Tesla launch. It did not “feel like a great symbol of humanity,” she told Salon. “I don’t think of cars as symbolizing humanity … I think it’s a symbol of SpaceX and a symbol of Elon Musk. He made the Tesla happen, he made the company happen, he made the launch happen.” She continued, “It’s very self-contained in that way. This is not really a symbol of accessible space travel.”

I agree. Musk sending a Tesla into space is an exercise in frivolity. Just as Dwight Eisenhower once suggested we view military spending as a theft from the poor, I see random, self-promotional space junk as a theft from humanity. Compared to the important scientific tasks space travel has enabled, from planet-detection to gravity-wave observation to infrared telescopes, the $100,000 luxury car floating in the void is nothing more than a wasteful monument to billionaire stupidity. Or perhaps it’s a harbinger of a new era, in which space is now normalized as a rich man’s playground rather than a scientific commons. In other words, it’s not even a small step for man — it’s just a huge leap for Musk’s already vast ego.

Humanizing the border: Francisco Cantú’s “The Line Becomes a River”

A child standing at the border wall observes the "Not Walls" demonstration by activists in the US in front of the wall that divides Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from Sunland Park, New Mexico, on October 23, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / HERIKA MARTINEZ (Photo credit should read HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images) (Credit: Getty/Herika Martinez)

How and why people come to the United States, what they do and how they are treated once they get here, and who they are allowed to become, is a cornerstone of the American story. Throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s administration, part of that national story has been playing out through ICE raids, deportations and round-ups, and heated political standoffs over the fate of undocumented immigrants brought here as children. And since Trump began campaigning for president on the promise that he would build a wall along parts of the border between the U.S. and Mexico — and make Mexico pay for it — in order to more tightly control crossings between the two countries, the boundary line itself, walled or open, has become a hotly-debated point of interest throughout the country. Trump’s now see-through wall makes the metaphor concrete: The U.S. needs to carefully control who crosses, while still keeping an eye on who is on the other side. And yet, border crossing fatalities rose in 2017, even as the number of migrants making the journey decreased, suggesting that official deterrence in the borderlands could be working only on those not desperate enough to risk the most dangerous routes or methods.

Boundaries are political and logistical constructs, but to each person who crosses, the border and their relationship to it is personal. Writer Francisco Cantú, author of the new narrative nonfiction book, “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border” (Riverhead Books, out now), grows up with one level of intimate knowledge of the border: his mother, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raises him in the national parks of the Southwest, where she worked as a ranger. Seeking a different level of understanding than he could gain through academics and observation, Cantú joins the border patrol, where he tracks, arrests, processes and sometimes saves the lives of the people attempting to cross into the U.S. through unauthorized entry points and without proper paperwork.

Told in lyric prose that brings the uncompromising dangers of the mountains and deserts of the border states to hard, glittering light, “The Line Becomes a River” weaves together research on the history and current state of the border and the forces within Mexico that drive migration with an account of Cantú’s time working as an agent in Arizona and Texas, from training to field patrol and then intelligence work. With his degree in international relations, as his mother points out, joining the border patrol is an unlikely career move for a guy like Cantú, who received the prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to complete this book. “You can tell whoever asks that I’m tired of studying,” he tells her, “I’m tired of reading about the border in books.”

“I want to be on the ground, out in the field, I want to see the realities of the border day in and day out. I know it might be ugly, I know it might be dangerous, but I don’t see any better way to truly understand the place,” he writes.

She remains unconvinced that a job in law enforcement is necessary to fully comprehend an oppressive system and concerned about what effect his involvement in such an institution might have on her son’s humanity. And in the beginning of the book, the reader might have reservations about his enterprise. His mother’s voice provides a welcome and necessary ongoing critical counterpoint to his willingness to do this work, and as such provides an emotional touchstone for the reader, too. In the hands of a different writer, “The Line Becomes a River” could have become a longform piece of adrenaline journalism from which the writer is lucky to emerge alive, and which offers confident assessments about the efficacy of our immigration and enforcement system from an outsider’s cool perspective. Instead, Cantú has written a poetic and empathetic work whose message — the border is built on an imaginary line, but its impact on the people who cross it, or can’t, is real — feels more urgent this year than ever.

[Cantú will be featured live tomorrow, Feb. 13, on “Salon Talks,” SalonTV‘s live video interview series. Join the live conversation at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT on Facebook and Periscope.]

As Cantú’s mother suspects, the job does exact an emotional and psychological toll. The first two-thirds of the book reflect a psyche constantly under attack by what he witnesses: dead bodies in the desert; survivors found, half-mad of thirst and desperation, wandering the unforgiving terrain, knowing that when they are sent back, they will attempt the treacherous crossing again and again until they succeed or don’t; the inexorable threat of cartel violence; the systematic dehumanization of vulnerable people. The stress of trying to maintain and practice humanity inside such an adversarial role leaves him grinding his teeth at night, when he is haunted by dreams of the landscape and the dangers that lurk in it.

Much of the current rhetoric around law enforcement is broken into two camps: the unquestioning assumption of ingrained heroism on one side and the suspicion of unchecked power in an authoritarian arm of state enforcement on the other. Cantú’s accounting dwells instead in the ambiguities of the job and its mission. In one scene, his fellow agents destroy a couple of backpacks full of supplies abandoned by drug smugglers, a routine they follow when they encounter such caches, the idea being that when the migrants “regroup and return to find their stockpiles ransacked and stripped, they’ll realize . . . that it’s hopeless to continue, and they’ll quit right then and there, they’ll save themselves . . .” And yet his supervisor also says “Hell no” to trying to track down the people who left the backpacks and the drugs behind, wary of the load of paperwork that a smuggling arrest, rather than a simple load of confiscated contraband, would bring. Cantú’s eye for the emotionally significant detail never closes: inside one of the backpacks, a prayer card for St. Jude, patron of lost causes and desperate situations.

The latter third of the memoir recounts his time after he leaves the job and experiences the system from the other side, as he advocates for an undocumented friend — a family man, active in his church, beloved at work, raising three kids — who is apprehended while returning from visiting his gravely ill mother in Mexico. The book up to this point is Cantú’s story — how the work affected him, what he learned and realized, how he grew in his understandings, both emotional and logistical, of the border. The story of José — one individual, a friend instead of a different set of strangers every day — is where the stakes of the book become manifest.

Despite his decades of undocumented status, José is unmistakably a good American — in every emotional, if not official, sense of the word. He works hard, he pays his bills, he contributes to his community. He risks his family’s stability to see his mother before she dies, and he is caught. Can Cantú, with his intimate understanding of the process and bureaucracy, put his hard-earned knowledge to work to save one man’s family and future? Anyone with a heart can see how this story should end, and that José, though he is the dynamic and loving individual we come to know through Cantú’s account, is not exceptional in that regard, but rather closer to the norm than those ordering ICE raids, and those cheering them on, would like to admit.

Why long stretches of “alone time” can be dangerous

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Lots of people are afraid of driving past massive tractor trailers on the highway — perhaps for more reasons than they know. In one study, a truck driver described “traveling down a flat, straight stretch of roadway in the middle of the night in clear weather. Suddenly he ‘saw’ a calf standing in the road ahead. He swerved his vehicle sharply to the left, and it overturned in the roadway.” The driver admitted that in the past he had seen “things that are not there.” The driver wrote off the hallucinations to being very sleepy. But there’s another explanation: he was lonely.

There have been stories about truck drivers at the wheel when they’re tired, or drugged, or delusional from methamphetamines. But there’s a rarely recognized danger of being alone.

We hear similar stories of British and US Air Force pilots experiencing disorientation, anxiety, and a feeling of “detachment from reality” after flying for extended periods without other human contact. The disorientation was more likely to happen when flying at high altitudes, not because of the thinness of the atmosphere, but because pilots could not see the ground. In short, they were suffering from sensory deprivation.

We have learned more in the last decade about sensory deprivation thanks to the use of various forms of solitary confinement against people captured, imprisoned, tortured, and “extraordinarily rendered” as part of the so-called war on terror. U.S. prisons, too, have radically increased the number of prisoners subjected to solitary confinement, often for extended periods of time.

To explore causality—the ways we explain the world and how to do it better—we need to dispense with generic models of the human mind and recognize the way it actually operates. The experiences of people in isolation strip away some of our assumptions. For starters, we call humans rational individuals when really we’re neither. We’re not individuals because when we’re taken out of the company of other people, even for relatively brief periods, we fall apart. We’re not rational because our rationales are shaped by where we see ourselves in the social world, where our ancestors were in the natural order, and what social concepts we adopt to understand everything around us. It’s clear that we don’t think like some idealized computer. Like the trucker who hallucinated the calf, we see things that aren’t there. Like the pilots in the stratosphere, we lose sight of things that really do exist. Our vision is selective and creative, and how we make sense of it all depends on what we learn from the social web of people around us. Isolation distorts our perception of the world, and we need to be more alert to its appearance than we are.

* * *

We understand physical torture more viscerally than the torture of isolation. Certainly, most of us imagine that physical torture must be far worse than being left alone. But the horrors of solitary confinement are as unparalleled as they are unexpected. U.S. Senator John McCain, who spent two years in solitary confinement after being shot down while bombing Hanoi as a Navy pilot in the Vietnam War, described solitary in unequivocal terms: “It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” This assessment is from a man whose escape from his crippled plane broke his right arm in three places, his knee, and his left arm, who then had his shoulder broken from a blow from a rifle butt, and was stabbed in the ankle and groin with a bayonet. His injuries were left unset and largely untreated for five years while he was a prisoner of war, where he suffered years of dysentery that reduced him to one hundred pounds, and was regularly subjected to physical torture to the point of losing consciousness. If solitary confinement is worse than that physical agony, then we must reevaluate how our minds really work.

McCain’s description of how crushing solitary is shows us something about the brain we’re working with. First and foremost, it’s deeply social. Alone, the mind loses its resolve, loses its identity, and doesn’t even know what it knows. We think in particular ways. (It would be impossible for us to think in every possible way.) The fact that social context influences what we know, that we notice social explanations and disregard others, gives us a preview into what we overemphasize and what we overlook.

The underappreciated effects of solitary confinement demonstrate how harmful the mistaken image of ourselves as rational individuals has been—not just to prisoners, but to everyday people from truck drivers to anyone who has been lonely in a crowd, and to the economic models (and Robinson Crusoe stories) we mistakenly think will predict how people will act. First we need a sharper sense of how being alone affects us.

Solitary confinement is used extensively in U.S. prisons, in part because federal courts rarely acknowledge that it is torture. (Courts have said they will intervene only in cases of physical injury, not mental torture.) This classification grossly underestimates the damage solitary confinement does to the human psyche. One prisoner who had a long history of offenses was sentenced to five years in solitary confinement when he was recaptured after escaping from prison. When he was brought into the thirteen-by-eight-foot cell, he thought, “This is going to be a piece of cake.” He would have a radio and television and could read. But within a few months, he was pacing back and forth compulsively, then began having panic attacks and screaming for help. He hallucinated and became enraged by routine sounds, like the shutting of a nearby door. Soon he heard voices speaking directly from the television, which he hid under his bed.

Solitary confinement can induce a predictable and terrifying array of symptoms. Examining a hundred years of research, journalist Brandon Keim found that:

Consistent patterns emerge, centering around . . . extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function.

Beyond prisoners, pilots, and truck drivers, who else might exhibit those symptoms—extreme anger, hallucinations, mood swings, hypersensitivity, panic attacks, depression, and loss of memory and cognitive function? Security guards? Cowboys? Suburban housewives? Kids stuck on social media? Video game junkies? Elderly people living alone? In a society where we take our rationality and individuality for granted, and make few explicit accommodations for our needs as social beings, the effects of solitary are more common than we acknowledge. These symptoms identify the outer bounds of how far humans can be from other people.

The changes brought on by solitary can be rapid. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, a former professor at Harvard Medical School, is one of the foremost experts in solitary confinement. At the outset of his research, he expected to conclude that the prisoners’ claims of mental distress were self-serving exaggerations. But he found that the effects were far more severe than he imagined. Grassian noted that, “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” Victims often describe falling into a “fog” in which they cannot remain alert or concentrate. They are simultaneously deprived of external stimuli and unable to process what little stimuli they may experience, causing them to be hypersensitive to small noises or irritation by slight physical sensations.

In 2009, three Americans were hiking on the border between Iraq and Iran when they were taken into custody by Iranian guards, and ultimately brought to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Unlike Iranian prisoners, they were kept in individual cells, and were not beaten like the inmates whose screams they could hear through the doors. But this diplomatic treatment turned out to be its own torture. Even though they saw their interrogator almost daily, got outside twice a day, saw the guards who brought them meals, and occasionally even whispered to a prisoner in the hall or a nearby cell, Josh Fattal, Sarah Shourd, and Shane Bauer began experiencing the effects of solitary confinement after just a few days.

Josh Fattal became so hypersensitive to the whirring sound of the fan in his cell that he hid in his bathroom, under the sink, to avoid the noise. More symptoms, like depression and loss of cognitive function, followed: “In the cell,” Fattal wrote in the account all three contributed to, “the blankness is my enemy. I don’t have a better word for it, but it’s dulling my mind. It’s a world where I can only reference myself in circular loops, where nothing makes sense.” His mind could no longer assemble logical explanations: hearing a helicopter, he became sure he was about to be rescued, and fixated on the thirtieth day of their captivity, certain that that arbitrary and insignificant date would bring about their release.

People in solitary confinement are often haunted by hyper-violent fantasies in response to tiny perceived slights from other people. Josh imagined he’d find a particular guard one day on the street: “I’ll push him into an alleyway, get him on the ground, and kick him and watch him bleed amidst garbage and rats.” What atrocity had the guard committed? “Bystanders will try to stop my rage,” Josh went on, “then I’ll explain to them that this guy took my books when I was in prison, and they’ll cheer me on as I continue kicking him.”

From his experiences, Shane Bauer described solitary confinement as “the slow erasure of who you thought you were.” Each of them tried all sorts of mental gymnastics—working out endlessly, remembering the details of their life in sequence, singing songs, reading when they could get books, writing when they could find a contraband pen, but they felt themselves breaking apart.

Sarah Shourd’s isolation was longer and more complete, so her individuals are not rational symptoms became proportionally more extreme. Many days, Sarah wrote, she fumed for every waking hour over the thought that Josh and Shane were able to speak to each other while she was still alone. Hypersensitivity and hallucinations consumed her as her concentration deteriorated. Sarah wrote later, “Like an animal, I spend hours crouched by the slot at the bottom of my door listening for sounds. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming down the hall, race to the door, and realize they were imagined . . . These symptoms scare me. I’m certain solitary confinement is having an effect on my brain.” She couldn’t focus to read and became hyperpossessive about her stuff. She had violent fantasies, like Josh: “I will run up to the first man in a suit that I see and I will wrap my hands around his neck and I will squeeze. I will squeeze his neck and look into his eyes as he tries to scream.” She heard screaming down the hall, and only when a group of guards rushed in did she realize it was she who was screaming, and that the wall was smeared with blood from her beating her fists against the wall. “I’m going crazy in here,” she told a guard soon after, “I am not safe!” Mirroring the thinking of U.S. prison guards, this guard didn’t understand what the problem was: “We gave you a TV—doesn’t that help?”

This quick descent into madness, triggered by nothing—triggered, in fact, by the absence of any trigger—tells us something important about ourselves. Once we realize that humans are so social that being alone, even briefly, is unnatural to the point of being dangerous, we see that being a lone individual is fundamentally at odds with being human.

Researchers now know that solitary confinement reprograms the brain. Research suggests solitary produces significant changes, like a smaller hippocampus region and impaired brain development.10 The damage is often permanent. In the most extreme cases, people may experience psychosis and be permanently debilitated. At minimum, individuals who have been subjected to solitary confinement are often unable to socialize, have trouble speaking, suffer from panic, and fail to reintegrate into the social world.

Few of us think of spending time alone as torture; many of us fantasize about taking just such a break. Probably because being solitary seems, to the uninitiated, so unobjectionable, research on the effects of solitary confinement tends to follow a predictable cycle of revelation, abhorrence, and collective amnesia: First, a powerful institution in society, typically government, will experiment with solitary confinement, imagining it will be harmless, even therapeutic, certainly not painful. After accounts of its true ferocity come to light, it is banished. After about fifty years, however, the culture has forgotten the effects of the last round of solitary, and the cycle begins again.

That cycle dates back to 1829 in the United States, when the Philadelphia Prison (or Eastern State Penitentiary) opened. It sought to be more humane and effective than earlier, intentionally punitive prisons. Eastern State aimed to be meditative, reforming, and enlightened. Prisoners would remain in solitary cells—in isolation from bad influences and distractions—where they could begin reflecting on their lives and reforming their ways.

The problem was that prisoners did not reform but went mad. Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, and reported in horror how one man “gazed about him and in the act of doing so fell into a strange state as if he had forgotten something . . . In another cell was a German,  .  .  . a more dejected, broken-hearted, wretch creature, it would be difficult to imagine.” Dickens saw yet another man “stare at his hands and pick the flesh open, upon the fingers.” Eventually researchers concluded that “[i]t was unnatural . . . to leave men in solitary, day after day, year after year; indeed, it was so unnatural that it bred insanity.”

In 1890 a landmark Supreme Court case demonstrated how damaging the justices recognized solitary confinement to be. Colorado had passed a law requiring condemned prisoners be kept in solitary for a month before execution. A man murdered his wife before the law took effect, but was still sentenced to solitary. The court found that the month he was to be isolated before his execution was so severe that it constituted an additional punishment beyond what could be imposed. They let him go. As the court wrote,

This matter of solitary confinement is not . . . a mere unimportant regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner . . . experience [with the penitentiary system of solitary confinement] demonstrated that there were serious objections to it. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

After the 1890 decision, solitary confinement fell out of favor for some time. Research was resurrected in the 1950s and ’60s by the U.S. military, stirred by the fears of “brainwashing”—the concern that U.S. servicemen captured in Korea and other wars could be converted to communism through the use of solitary confinement during their incarceration as prisoners of war. In some of that research, college students and other participants in psychological tests were subjected to solitary confinement. Though projects often anticipated subjecting people to such conditions for over a month, their rapid deterioration often led to

the research being curtailed after just a week. That research on solitary confinement served as a warning, not an instruction manual, until it was blithely ignored by the Bush administration, which, half a century later, sought to use solitary confinement and other forms of torture against people picked up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere who were presumed to be terrorists.

Our conception of human beings as individuals runs counter to the reality of our existence. The model of the “rational individual” is fundamentally flawed at its most basic assumption: Individuals are not rational. Individuals are not even individual. We are social, and we need social contact nearly as frequently as we need water to survive. If there is any human rationality, it is socially produced, not individually exercised. Where did we get this utterly inaccurate fiction that we could survive on our own?

When it comes to men accused of sexual misconduct, Trump gets defensive

Steve Wynn and Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Joe Cavaretta)

As the #MeToo movement has continued taking down powerful people who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, President Donald Trump seems to think it’s not such a great idea.

Unlike many other Republicans who gleefully promoted some of the many allegations against disgraced former movie producer and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, the president was unusually restrained in his reaction. Trump’s only public comment on Weinstein was to say that he was “not at all surprised” by the accusations. He has said nothing at all about allegations that actor Kevin Spacey harassed male colleagues.

That’s not exactly a surprise, considering that at least 15 women have accused him of various non-consensual groping or kissing, in addition to his own boasts about walking into women’s dressing rooms and grasping women by their genitalia.

The president has been much less shy about defending men he likes who have been accused of misconduct. He’s stood up for Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Christian supremacist Roy Moore, and most recently, his former White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, who has been credibly accused of beating his ex-wives.

In a Saturday tweet, Trump indirectly admitted that he sees himself in such instances.

Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 10, 2018

It is true that false allegations can be destructive, but Trump himself is proof that even open admissions of sexual misconduct will not necessarily harm a politician. (He also could have used the court system to dispose of the allegations against him if he were truly interested in “Due Process.”)

It’s also worth considering that, as the Washington Post demonstrated when it took down far-right activist James O’Keefe after he tried to promote a false allegation against Moore, credible accusations are usually what destroys careers, not made-up ones.

Trump’s public and private defenses of political allies accused of sexual misconduct have become so numerous that his own staff members can’t seem to keep them all straight. During a Fox News interview, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said that he thought Trump was referring to Steve Wynn, the former Republican National Committee finance chairman who recently resigned from his company after he was accused of forcing himself sexually upon employees.

“When I saw the tweet — I know Rob Porter wasn’t mentioned — I wondered if the President was talking about his friend Steve Wynn, who has been accused and essentially condemned without any due process,” Mulvaney said.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to show the president was still behind women who were standing up, however.

Sarah Sanders: "Above all, the president supports victims of domestic violence"

Reporter: Why haven't heard the president say that?

Sarah Sanders: "I spoke with the president and those are actually directly his words…it's my job to speak on behalf of the president" pic.twitter.com/rlXYRpT8TM

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) February 12, 2018

Amazon to shed hundreds of corporate employees in “rare” job cuts move: report

FILE - In this June 18, 2014 file photo, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduces the new Amazon Fire Phone in Seattle. The eight individuals who own as much as half of the rest of the planet are all men, and have largely made their fortunes in technology. The founder and CEO of Amazon.com helped revolutionize the retail industry by popularizing online shopping. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) (Credit: AP)

Despite recent years of substantial growth for the company, Amazon is reportedly shedding hundreds of corporate employees — though it has promised to hire aggressively in other areas.

The move will mainly impact several hundred corporate employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, but cuts will also reach hundreds “elsewhere in Amazon’s global operations,” the Seattle Times reported, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Amazon still had 566,000 employees worldwide, as of last December, an astonishing 66 percent increase from last year. Seattle itself is home to 40,000 of those employees. As of Monday, the company still had 12,500 job openings and is currently in the process of finding a city for its second headquarters. Afterwards, Amazon plans to hire 50,000 more workers, the Times reported.

But the move is still being seen as unusual, especially for the second-largest corporate business in the United States.

The Times elaborated:

According to several employees, the rapid growth of the last two years left some units over budget and some teams with too much staff for their work. Amazon had implemented hiring freezes in recent months across several groups, a move that reduced the company’s open job listings in Seattle to their lowest level in years.

[…]

Some employees have already been informed of the elimination of their roles, and layoffs are expected to be completed in the next few weeks, one of the people said.

Recent layoffs at Amazon units outside Seattle suggest the company is consolidating established retail businesses.

In a statement, Amazon defended itself and said it was making “headcount adjustments in other countries,” but still planned for “aggressive hiring” in other areas, the Times noted.

The statement added, “For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

There has also been fear among some Seattle employees, who were informed “that [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos and the Amazon brass wanted to put more pressure on managers to weed out lower performers and enforce spending discipline after the rapid growth of recent years,” the Times reported, citing one managerial source.

“People are in terrible shape,” the source said. “There is so much stress on campus.”

One former employee said he’s seen people “managed out” in the same way, as improvement plans could “trim the size of teams without resorting to layoffs,” the Times reported.

Recently, President Donald Trump has bragged about (the few) American companies that have issued $1,000 bonuses to employees, supposedly as a result of the new GOP tax plan. Yet many of those companies, such as Walmart, have also laid off hundreds if not thousands of employees as well. It is unclear if Amazon’s decisions are connected to the tax plan, but they certainly speak to mixed economic news, as opposed to the president’s sunny economic pronouncements.

 

Vanessa Trump in hospital after receiving letter with mysterious white powder

Vanessa Trump and Donald Trump Jr. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Vanessa Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, was briefly hospitalized on Monday after she opened an envelope that contained a white powder substance.

A representative for the New York City police department said that the powder was found to be non-toxic but that it was going to be analyzed further.

According to the Associated Press, Trump had called 9-1-1 after saying she began coughing and started feeling nauseated. Fire department spokeswoman Sophia Kim said that 3 patients were taken to the hospital. She did not provide specifics due to medical privacy laws.

According to police, the letter was sent to the Manhattan apartment where Trump and Donald Trump Jr. live with their children. She opened it around 10 a.m. local time.

“How disturbed must a person be to do what they did to a mother of five children?” Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, said in a public statement. “This dangerous and reckless act goes beyond political differences.”

Unlike Laura Trump, wife of Eric Trump, Vanessa Trump is one of the least political members of the presidential clan.

The Secret Service confirmed that it was investigating the incident.

“The Secret Service and our law enforcement partners in New York City are investigating a suspicious package addressed to one of our protectees received today in New York, New York. This is an active investigation and we cannot comment any further,” the agency stated on its Twitter account.

In September, Donald Trump Jr. had requested that his security detail be dropped in light of his frequent camping and hunting activities. His protection was restored several days later, however.

This story has been updated to include that Sophia Kim works for the fire department of New York and that the names of the patients who were transported to the hospital were not identified.

Trump’s budget cuts, well, pretty much everything

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump’s new $4.4 trillion budget includes drastic cuts to Medicare and food stamps, even as it doesn’t hesitate to increase spending on the military.

The new budget proposal — which would add $984 billion to the federal deficit next year and add an additional $7 trillion over the subsequent 10 years — would spend $200 billion on his infrastructure plan alone, according to The New York Times. The budget plan would also spend $85.5 billion on discretionary funding for veterans’ health care, increase the Pentagon’s budget by $80 billion and spend $13 billion to tackle opioid abuse.

At the same time, the budget would also cut $237 billion from Medicare, $2.8 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency (or 34 percent of its current budget), $757 million from federal Amtrak spending and reduce cash spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly one third, according to Bloomberg. The SNAP cuts, which are intended to be paired with a program that sends hungry Americans foods “such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish,” are intended to save $214 billion over the next decade.

There are other programs that have been slated to get cut entirely, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Global Climate Change Initiative, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The budget also attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare, something that the Trump administration failed to do in Congress last year.

President Trump's budget proposes to repeal the ACA and replace it with a block grant to states, also capping federal Medicaid spending. It would reduce federal spending on health coverage by $675 billion over a decade. pic.twitter.com/cQabHbxk6H

— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) February 12, 2018

It’s worth noting that, although the budget does establish both Trump’s and the Republican Party’s larger legislative priorities, the current proposal is widely expected not to pass. Budget proposals are, as Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. put it to The Washington Post, “aspirational documents and seldom have a real impact on spending.”

Experts have taken to Twitter to denounce Trump’s budget proposal.

Just a reminder that taking health care away from millions of Americans remains the official position of the Trump administration. https://t.co/sJs0NUCS2u

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) February 12, 2018

And yes I said "care." Insurance and care aren't always the same thing. But when you take insurance away from this many people — without an adequate replacement — they will go without care.

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) February 12, 2018

Of course, for many the primary impact will be financial, not medical: They'll experience financial hardship, sometimes severe, because they cannot pay their medical bills.

— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) February 12, 2018

Trump's proposed FY19 budget is out. Over 10 years:
– $300+ billion cut to Medicaid
– $213 billion cut to SNAP
– $21 billion cut to TANF
– $72 billion cut to disability programs
– eliminates Social Svcs Block Grant (helps pay for child care and foster care) 1/

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) February 12, 2018

Remember: his budget proposal is just a proposal, but it's a clear statement of his priorities. Making deep cuts to programs families rely on has been a priority since Day 1. The budget also assumes passage of (at least part of) Graham-Cassidy #TrumpCare. Not giving up. 2/

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) February 12, 2018

On SNAP: This is absurd. The Admin wants to turn a portion of it into a delivery system, where the government controls what people eat, how much, and when they get it. This, in the name of "improving nutritional value" and reducing alleged "fraud." 3/ pic.twitter.com/xhgXmuJOrJ

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) February 12, 2018

It bears repeating, as we marvel at the cruelty of these proposed cuts, that Repubs just voted to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit to give huge tax cuts to their wealthiest friends and corps. The #GOPTaxScam bill has come due, and we now know (as we always did) who'll pay. 4/4

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) February 12, 2018

Trump’s infrastructure plan rests on some rickety assumptions

(Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Experts greeted the long-awaited details of President Donald Trump’s promise to unleash a US$1.5 trillion wave of new infrastructure spending with skepticism.

There’s widespread concern about whether his plan can deliver because it puts only $200 billion in federal funding on the table, which Democrats say is roughly equal to the money that the White House has been trying to cut from similar programs, such as the Highway Trust Fund. There are also ample questions

from the lawmakers who need to approve that money about where even that sum will come from.

As expected, Trump wants to rely on states, local governments and, most importantly, private investors to foot most of the bill. As researchers studying ways to boost private infrastructure spending, we believe that it will fall short of the target investment because it does not address private investors’ key concerns, and it would not work for many kinds of high-priority projects.

Matching and mismatching Half the proposed new federal funding — $100 billion — would cover the cost of making direct grants to local governments intended to spur more infrastructure spending. Another $50 billion would cover the cost of new block grants for rural projects. Some $20 billion would support what the White House calls new “transformative projects.” The remaining $30 billion would help pay for miscellaneous existing infrastructure programs. Trump’s plan would also streamline and expedite the process now required for legally mandated environmental reviews. It would also make it easier for states to raise money through tolls, user fees and the sale of land and other assets. Overall, the plan rests on the premise that the government can leverage private investment to help pay the nation’s infrastructure bill. That is why his plan favors “public-private partnerships,” or P3s, the most common way governments attract and leverage private investment. Here’s how they work. A public sponsor — either the federal government agency or a state or local government agency — contracts out part or all of the financing, construction, maintenance and operation of a project to a group of private companies following a competitive bidding process.

P3 bottlenecks

The amount of infrastructure money in new U.S. P3s has waned in recent years. It fell to $710 million between 2011 and 2014 from higher levels seen a few years earlier, the most recent period for which data is available. And P3s only facilitated about 1.5 percent of the $4 trillion all levels of government spent on highways between 1989 and 2013, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

However, the number of pension funds and other institutional investors putting money into infrastructure has doubled.

What’s been holding things up?

Investors do not typically say that a lack of federal subsidies, like the $200 billion Trump seeks, is a big bottleneck. Instead, to draw much more private investment, the U.S. needs clear, consistent regulations that will help make projects more likely to withstand any shifts in political power — such as when the majority party changes at any level of government.

Establishing a more successful track record for these partnerships, which have often faltered, will also help.

These proposed changes could help raise money, but they would not help state or local governments reassure their constituents that P3s serve their best interest.

One step the U.S. could take now is to follow the examples set by Australia and Canada, where more infrastructure is being built through these partnerships.

Specialized P3 teams in those countries have developed uniform competitive bidding processes, standardized contracts and project pipelines all based on lessons learned from prior partnerships. They also help identify projects that will help the public the most, rather than those with the greatest potential to generate revenue.

Californian precedents

The spotty track record for some U.S. efforts to establish P3s underscores the importance of that kind of coordination.

California, for example, sought in 1989 to harness four of these partnerships as “demonstration” projects. It only completed two of those four.

First, California’s transportation department created a P3 to build express lanes for its busy SR-91 highway to ease Orange County congestion near Los Angeles.

Because the department agreed to not build free roads running parallel to the tolled ones, a public outcry ensued after the 10-mile-long road opened to traffic in 1995.

Orange County then bought out the private-sector partner stake in this project eight years later, cutting its long-term contract short.

Expanding the South Bay Expressway, the other P3 California announced in 1989 that got done, took until 2007 to complete. Three years later, the project’s private partner declared bankruptcy, largely because of years of litigation that delayed the onset of tolls — which then generated less revenue than expected.

These planning errors, which were due to lack of experience, undercut confidence in the partnership approach for investors and the public alike.

We believe that unless the Trump administration — despite his disdain for bureaucracy — establishes new government offices to oversee federally backed P3s, it is likely to repeat the errors that hampered California’s pioneering projects.

If they build it

With infrastructure, investors are looking for relatively stable returns and less risk, more akin to bonds than stocks. This makes financing these partnerships attractive for pension funds and other institutional investors.

At the same time, it can make investors more eager to back projects that already exist and are generating revenue through user fees, such as toll roads, airports, ports and some rail projects with nearby land that can be sold or leased.

In the U.S., however, the government mainly needs the private sector’s help meeting other less profitable priorities, such as improving water quality, expanding public transit and building levees.

Although those projects may not be attractive to investors, they can stoke economic growth and productivity while fostering a higher quality of life.

India’s mixed results

Interestingly, Trump’s $100 billion Infrastructure Incentives Program resembles India’s approach, which has had mixed results since its 2004 inception. There, the national government foots about 20 percent of the bill when it enters into public-private partnerships, just as the White House proposes to do.

The Indian policy was intended for toll roads and airports for which the government fixed the user fees. The subsidy closed the gap between this regulated revenue stream and investors’ expectations.

However, India has failed to spend most of the money it budgeted for this initiative, suggesting that it will take more than subsidies to entice private investment.

Between India’s track record and signals about insufficient federal guidance and support for public-private partnerships, we doubt that Trump’s plan can catalyze the infrastructure spending he envisions.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article published on Feb. 9, 2018.

Caroline Nowacki, PhD Candidate, Global Projects Center, Stanford University and Kate Gasparro, Graduate Research Fellow of Sustainable Design and Construction, Stanford University

Here are the right-wing media figures using the Nunes memo to attack Rosenstein and Mueller

Devin Nunes (Credit: Getty/Win McNamee)

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted on January 31 to release a memo, written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), which they claim shows partisan abuse of power on the part of the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant. The full four page text of the memo was released on February 2 and, led primarily by Fox News host Sean Hannity, right-wing media figures have used its contents to slam, discredit, and call for the firing of both special counsel Robert Mueller and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Fox host Sean Hannity claimed that Mueller “never should have been appointed based on what we know tonight” and that “he needs to go, yesterday.” He also called the investigation “a witch-hunt from the very beginning” and called for charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn “to be dropped.” Hannity also declared the investigation an attempted “coup” and “an attempt to unseat an elected president” based on the memo.

Right-wing author Ann Coulter tweeted, “Rosenstein should be fired for opposing the release of the memo.”

Conservative radio host and frequent Fox guest Dan Bongino tweeted that Rosenstein “STILL” has a government job despite being one of the “central figures in the most significant political spying scandal in US history.”

Tea Party Patriots tweeted, “It’s time for DAG Rod Rosenstein to do his job or resign!”

Former Trump aide and Fox News national security strategist Sebastian Gorka tweeted, “Rosenstein should be suspended from his position immeidately.”

Frequent Fox News guest Ben Stein said Rosenstein should be “fired without question.”

Tom Fitton, frequent Fox guest and president of Judicial Watch, said Rosenstein “has some explaining to do” and that “it’s fair to ask whether he’d be fired.” Fitton also told Fox host Harris Faulkner that the probe is subject to “being called off now by the Justice Department.”

Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett tweeted that a “source” told him Rosenstein in a meeting with Nunes “threatened to subpoena the texts and emails of Congress,” and called for Rosenstein to “resign or be fired” if true.

Fox News host Todd Pirro asked former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski if “it’s time for Rod Rosenstein to go.” Lewandowski responded that Rosenstein’s involvement with the FISA application “should give people in the Justice Department grave concern … and Rod needs to answer for those questions.”

Conservative radio host, Townhall columnist, and birther Jeff Crouere wrote, the memo showed Mueller is “investigating the wrong administration” and claimed Mueller was “compromised from the very beginning of his probe.” Crouere went on to call for an end to this “witch hunt” after the release of the “bombshell memo.”

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh alleged that the memo means Mueller is investigating the wrong people “on purpose,” and called the FBI’s activities a “Democrat-run operation.”

Conservative radio host Mark Simone tweeted that Rosenstein is on the same “team” as former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Far-right blog The Gateway Pundit claimed Rosenstein “threatened” Nunes and House Intelligence Committee members.