Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 181

Trump pushes for American authoritarianism ��� with success

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His act is familiar to all by now: Donald Trump diverts public attention with clownish acts, outrageous statements and headline-making Tweets. But his agenda is sinister. He is moving consistently, persistently and successfully to undermine American democracy and enhance his power.

There has never before been such a forceful effort to replace democracy in the land of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln with dictatorship. The reason is simple: Trump is driven by a lust for personal power and for accumulating still greater personal wealth that such power can yield.

Much worse than watergate

Any honest assessment of the current political situation would find that Trump���s assault on democracy is graver than ���Watergate.���

That episode was a combination of illegal dirty tricks, obstruction of justice and lies directed by the nation���s top public officials. Their first goal was to secure the re-election of President Nixon and the second to cover up the crimes committed in the pursuit of the first goal.

The U.S. constitutional system strives to check absolute power by a system that established three co-equal branches of government (the federal courts, the U.S. Congress and the Executive branch). Plus, the first amendment, that enshrines freedom of the press.

Trump is now, ever more brazenly, diminishing the influence and, in time, the independence, of the Congress, the courts and the press.

Sycophancy rules

Trump frequently derides Republican Party leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives, but �����like lap dogs �����they remain loyal to him.

Trump, for example, has frequently humiliated Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, yet Ryan declared as the new tax legislation was signed: ���Something this big, something this generational, something this profound, could not have been done without exquisite presidential leadership.��� That is quite an amazing act of sycophantism.

De-basing the political system

Trump���s assault on the courts and the legal system is persistent and vicious. When judges rule against Trump���s executive orders, be it on immigration or repealing environmental regulations, then he blasts the courts as corrupt and opponents of the Executive.

Trump compounds this assault by regularly attacking the professional lawyers and investigators at the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence agencies. Rarely does a week go by without Trump turning to Twitter, or giving campaign speeches, to attack the whole system of law enforcement.

At the same time, Trump has proposed hosts of new judicial appointments, almost all of which have strong conservative credentials and/or have been large financial contributors to the Republican Party.

As The Guardian��reported: ���The makeup of America���s judges is quietly becoming the site of one of Trump���s most unequivocal successes: Nominating and installing judges who reflect his own worldview at a speed and volume unseen in recent memory.���

Most mainstream media ARE intimidated

Then there are his constant tirades against ���Fake News��� and the media that opposes him, plus his calls for legislation to introduce tough new libel laws. His deliberate and cunning acts of intimidation are having an effect.

The mainstream media, be it The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, which all have commentators who regularly attack Trump (unlike his favorite, Fox News), now all go to considerable lengths to give space to Trump���s supporters and defenders. They have become more cautious, quite often, in their reporting because of the persistent attacks on them from the White House.

Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona stated on the floor of the Senate that Trump reminds us of Joseph Stalin when calling the press ���the enemy of the people.��� Flake, who is not standing for reelection this year, said: ���Of course, the president has it precisely backward. Despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot���s enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy.���

Unbalancing the U.S. political system

The constant efforts by President Trump from his first day in office to diminish the Congress, the courts and the press have a gradual cumulative impact. There has rarely been a U.S. president who so dominates the news, and inevitably this provides less media space for good coverage of the courts and the Congress.

The unbalancing of the political system in favor of an ever-stronger White House has been fortified by the consistent Trump effort to make the rich still richer and American business still more ruthless.

The termination of environmental regulations has been one of the central pillars of this strategy. Another has related to the strengthening of financial institutions, from the hollowing out of consumer protection in this sector, to attacks on financial regulation to tax benefits.

The excessive income and wealth inequality in the United States produces an ever greater number of citizens who feel that their government is not treating them fairly. So far, in what is the most bizarre act of American shortsightedness, they continue to see Trump as their champion.

They do so, in sheep-like manner, despite the fact that so many of his actions have damaged the lower-middle class. There is no American public figure who is as masterful a media manipulator as Trump.

Conclusion

There is one effective way out of the current conundrum since Trump feeds off public attention, like moths fly to any source of light.

The one way to cool his heels would be to stop responding to whatever his latest attention-craving, headline-grabbing outrageous Trump tweet is. We should understand by now their ultimately almost always sinister purpose.

By the same token, rather than all the vapid and self-glorifying talking about the ���resilience��� of U.S. civil society, we Americans ought to prove to ourselves and the world that we can stop the slide into authoritarianism.

This matters all the more given that we have been world champions in telling others around the globe how to run their own affairs, a lot is at stake for the United States��� standing in the world.

To succeed, we will need to focus far more forcefully on the unprecedented attack by the U.S. president on a constitutional system that has been designed �����and historically succeeded in the mission �����to guard against the rise of authoritarianism.

At the end of Trump first year in office, the United States faces graver challenges than in many generations.

DACA isn���t just about social justice ��� legalizing Dreamers makes economic sense too

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Earlier this month, hopes were high that a bipartisan deal could be reached to resolve the fate of the ���Dreamers,��� the millions of undocumented youth who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Those hopes all but vanished on Jan. 11 as President Donald Trump aligned himself with hard-line anti-immigration advocates within the GOP and struck down bipartisan attempts to reach a resolution.

Now that optimism is re-emerging once more after Republican Senate leadership agreed, in exchange for ending the shutdown, to hold a vote on a solution to the young immigrants��� plight within weeks ��� if they haven���t reached a more comprehensive deal on immigration by then. But whether or not the president and Republicans can overcome the anti-immigrant elements in their party and reach a deal remains to be seen.

One of the arguments advanced by those who oppose giving them citizenship is that doing so would hurt native-born workers and be a drain on the U.S. economy. My own research shows the exact opposite is true.

Lives in limbo

All in all, about 3.6 million immigrants living in the U.S. entered the country as children. Without options for legal residency, their lives hang in the balance.

To address this problem, the Obama administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012. DACA gave almost 800,000 of them temporary legal work permits and reprieve from deportation. Although his successor terminated the program in September, this month a federal court halted that process, allowing current recipients the ability to renew their status.

Any cause for celebration, however, was short-lived as the Department of Justice immediately responded by asking the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. The Supreme Court has not yet announced a decision. In the meantime, the future of DACA recipients remains uncertain.

Today, the best hope for a permanent fix for the Dreamers rests on bipartisan efforts to enact the 2017 DREAM Act ��� for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors ��� which would extend pathways to citizenship to undocumented youth who entered the United States as children, graduated from high school and have no criminal record. A version of the act was first introduced in 2001 and will likely be up for discussion in coming weeks.

The debate surrounding the DREAM Act is often framed around two seemingly irreconcilable views.

On one side, immigration activists advocate for legalization based on pleas to our common humanity. These Dreamers, after all, were raised and educated in the United States. They are American in every sense but legally.

On the other, critics contend that legalization will come at a cost to U.S.-born workers, and their well-being should be prioritized.

Impact of Dreamer citizenship on wages

My research with economists Ryan Edwards and Francesc Ortega estimated the economic impact of the 2017 DREAM Act if it were to become law. About 2.1 million of the undocumented youths would likely be eligible to become citizens based on its age and educational requirements.

Our research showed that immigrants given permanent legal work permits under the DREAM Act would not compete with low-skilled U.S.-born workers because only those with at least a high school degree are eligible for legalization. The act also encourages college attendance by making it one of the conditions for attaining legal residency.

We also found that the act would have no significant effect on the wages of U.S.-born workers regardless of education level because Dreamers make up such a small fraction of the labor force. U.S.-born college graduates and high school dropouts would experience no change in wages. Those with some college may experience small declines of at most 0.2 percent a year, while high school graduates would actually experience wage increases of a similar magnitude.

For the legalized immigrants, however, the benefits would be substantial. For example, legalized immigrants with some college education would see wages increase by about 15 percent, driven by expansions in employment opportunities due to legalization and by the educational gains that the DREAM Act encourages.

Broader economic benefits

The DREAM Act also promotes overall economic growth by increasing the productivity of legalized workers and expanding the tax base.

Lacking legal work options, Dreamers tend to be overqualified for the jobs they hold. My ongoing work with sociologist Holly Reed shows that the undocumented youth who make it to college are more motivated and academically prepared compared with their U.S.-born peers. This is at least in part because they had to overcome greater odds to attend college.

We find that they are also more likely than their native-born peers to graduate college with a degree. Yet despite being highly motivated and accomplished, undocumented college graduates are employed in jobs that are not commensurate with their education level, according to sociologist Esther Cho. With legal work options, they will be able to find jobs that match their skills and qualifications, making them more productive.

Legalization also improves the mental health of immigrants by removing the social stigma of being labeled a criminal and the looming threat of arrest and deportation.

From an economic standpoint, healthier and happier workers also make for a more productive workforce.

Overall, we estimate that the increases in productivity under the DREAM Act would raise the United States GDP by US$15.2 billion and significantly increase tax revenue.

Everyone can win

The U.S. continues to grapple with how to incorporate the general population of nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country.

The inability of the Trump administration and lawmakers from both parties to find common ground is emblematic of just how deeply divided Americans are between those who want to send most of them home and others who favor a path toward citizenship for many if not most of them.

While there appears to be no resolution in sight for the general population of 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, common bipartisan ground can be found on the issue of Dreamers. A recent survey found that 86 percent of Americans support granting them amnesty.

The DREAM Act offers an opportunity to enact a permanent resolution for a group widely supported by the public. What is more, our research shows a policy that affirms our common humanity also increases economic growth without hurting U.S.-born workers.

This is a win-win for everyone, whether you care about social justice or worry about U.S. workers.

Amy Hsin, Associate Professor of Sociology, City University of New York

Tide Pod challenge: Blaming stupid millennials is the easy way out

(Credit: AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast))

An interesting and somewhat bizarre trend recently cropped up on the internet. The ���Tide Pod challenge��� simply entails filming yourself biting down on a Tide Pod; a laundry detergent capsule, which some say resembles a sweet.

Like many things on the internet, the origins of the challenge are murky and unclear. Some trace it back to a satirical article by The Onion, others to CollegeHumor videos, and others still to various tweets about the appetising appearance of the capsules.

Various US and UK media outlets have claimed the trend is a ���craze��� that is ���sweeping the internet���. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission warned its 42,000 Twitter followers not to take the challenge. Facebook and YouTube have been busy scrubbing all videos referencing the challenge from their platforms, and Tide Pod manufacturer Procter & Gamble has recruited New England Patriots player Rob ���Gronk��� Gronkowski to tell consumers not to eat the pods.

Eating Tide Pods can be fatal, and the Washington Post reports that teenagers have been exposed to the capsules 37 times so far this year �����only half of which were actually intentional. Yet this data, from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, doesn���t reveal an enormous increase from 2017, when nearly 220 teens were exposed and around 25% of the cases were intentional.

Hysteria and hand-wringing

Due in no small part to the press coverage, trends like these are quickly blown out of proportion. As with the creepy clown sightings of 2016/17, or the Kylie Jenner lip challenge of 2015, the mainstream media seems to add to the hysteria surrounding these fads, which only serves to extend their relatively short shelf life.

Some such coverage mourns the decline of younger generations����� as though millennials and Gen Z-ers have a monopoly on stupidity. But as the brilliant Pessimists Archive podcast has shown, hand-wringing over the state of younger generations is nothing new, and there���s no evidence to suggest that today���s young people are inherently more reckless than previous generations.

What is different about today���s young people, though, is that they have the technology to record their stupidity for posterity, as well as a desire to push boundaries and attract viewers to the content they post online. This is the ���attention economy��� in action, whereby attention is an increasingly scarce resource, which users are desperate to gain as ever greater amounts of content are put online.

At their core, these trends are born and driven by what people do when others might be looking. The attention economy can help to explain the powerful effects of being watched on the way humans understand, conform to, and deviate from what���s ���normal���. And this, in turn, gives us a way to make sense of the Tide Pod challenge and other internet phenomena, such as the vlogger Logan Paul���s fall from grace.

Enter the panopticon

Bentham���s panopticon prison.

Jeremy Bentham

The panopticon is a theory of surveillance and social conditioning proposed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, and based on a prison design by Jeremy Bentham. It suggests that people will police themselves and conform to social expectations, if they believe that they could be being watched at any moment. Ideas about what is ���normal��� and ���appropriate��� take on vast power and significance.

On the face of it, the panopticon seems to apply rather aptly to conversations around digital spaces and our desire to be liked online. In the 21st century, we are constantly being observed by a wide network of ���friends��� via social media apps, by neighbours and strangers in increasingly crowded cities, and by police through CCTV. In a world where everyone is potentially being watched, there���s great pressure to conform to social expectations �����many of which are unrealistic and unattainable, especially when it comes to beauty, wealth or happiness.

But Foucault���s panopticon is based on the idea of a few powerful people watching the many. In the case of social media, the opposite could be true, too �����the many are increasingly watching the few. In the ���synopticon���, society holds up individuals such as the Kardashians as ideal figures of femininity and masculinity.

Instead, the few with power are observed, scrutinised and mimicked. We see this time and time again during celebrity ���crises���; whenever Beiber, Lohan or Britney veer away from the norm, their behaviour is discussed, dissected and criticised by the public. So the synopticon also strengthens the conventions that tell people which behaviours are acceptable �����and which are not.

Watch and be watched

The Tide Pod challenge is not fully explained by either the panopticon or the synopticon. Social media was meant to level the playing field by giving everyone their own personal publishing outlet. But in practice, it means that the general public are now competing with celebrities to be heard and observed. Welcome to the ���omniopticon���.

Here, we are all watching and (to varying degrees) being watched: both through increased social media use, and by platforms��� algorithms and tracking data. Having so many voices across so many different platforms not only leads us towards conformity, but also towards a culture of one-upmanship in the quest for attention. There has been a shift towards increasingly extreme behaviour and problematic publicity stunts.

Logan Paul recently gave us an example. The YouTube star, known for posting prank videos, faced a public backlash after posting a video of himself with a dead body in a known suicide location in Japan. The mounting pressure to outdo oneself and others demands more extreme content, until eventually �����inevitably �����a line is crossed.

Whether by embodying beauty ideals or eliciting laughs, everyone in the omniopticon is scrambling to be at the centre of attention and hold power and influence, however fleetingly, over what people are talking about. It���s becoming apparent that this competition is leading towards a culture of extremes. People are pushing the limits in order to get noticed, and this includes doing bizarre and even deadly things �����like eating laundry detergents.

Harry T Dyer, Lecturer in Education, University of East Anglia

Donald Trump fails at meeting Norwegian ideals

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In the past couple of weeks, thanks to the president���s racist comments about Haiti and African countries he can���t even name ��� remember ���Nambia���? ��� as well as the stamp of approval he awarded future immigrants from Norway, we���ve seen a surprising amount of commentary about that fortunate country. Let me just say: those Norwegians he���s so eager to invite over are my ancestral people and, thanks to years I���ve spent in that country, my friends. ��Donald Trump should understand one thing: if he and his Republican backers really knew the truth about life in Norway, they would be clamoring to build a second ���big, fat, beautiful��� wall, this time right along our Eastern seaboard.

One thing is incontestable: a mass of Norwegian immigrants (however improbable the thought) would pose a genuine threat to Donald Trump���s America.�� They would bring to our shores their progressive values, advanced ideas, and illustrious model of social democratic governance ��� and this country would never be the same!

It���s hard even to begin to imagine what a Norwegian-ization of the United States might mean. ��But just for a moment, try to picture how strange our country would be.�� After all, based on life in Norway, you would have to assume that our beloved land would lose many of its twenty-first-century landmarks.�� Gone would be its precious ghettos and slums, its boarded-up schools, hospitals, and libraries in the heartland, not to speak of its heirloom infrastructure: collapsing bridges, antique trains, clogged roads, and toxic drinking water.

To grasp what���s at stake, consider how such immigrants would have reacted to the Republican tax ���reform��� bill, praised by the president as ���the greatest achievement��� of his first year in office (which, by his own account, is the greatest year in American history). That bill, filled with miscellaneous handouts meant to ensure the votes of individual Republican legislators, guarantees that the super rich and their mega-corporations will get richer still in perpetuity. ��It is, in its own way, a glorious hymn to future heights of economic inequality (in a country already ranked the most unequal in the developed world), as it cleverly passes on to the children of the un-rich classes a national deficit inflated by an extra $1.5 trillion.

It is, of course, the nature of any tax plan to redistribute the wealth of a nation in some fashion, even though Republicans use the word ���redistribution��� only to assail Democrats who occasionally suggest a little something to help the poor.�� But redistribute those Republicans did in a masterful way, surrendering yet more of our national wealth to the tiny team of people (many of whom also happen to be their donors) who already pocket almost all of it. As the Republicans were writing the tax bill, the top 20% of households were already taking home 90% of the American pie. Now, they will get more.

That���s exactly the kind of ���achievement��� that no Norwegian parliament would ever approve. ��All nine parties now in that country���s parliament, from left to right, would have joined in tearing up that Republican tax bill and replacing it with a much simpler one aimed at redistributing the nation���s wealth equitably to every last one of its citizens.

As a start, they would have tossed in the trash can the single most basic project of Trump and the Republicans: making the rich richer. Norwegians have long worked to do just the reverse, based on a well-established conviction that inequality creates elites that corrupt and destroy democracy. ��That���s where politics come in: devising multiple systems to regulate a capitalist economy and safeguard democracy.

For example, two national confederations, of trade unions on the one hand and corporate enterprises on the other, annually negotiate wages and working conditions, while minimizing the difference between high-paying and lower-wage jobs, between CEOs and workers.�� As a result, Norway���s income equality is near the top of any international list. America���s, not so.�� On average in 2014, for instance, American CEOs grabbed 354 times the salary of their workers. For many corporate chiefs that figure hit well over 1,000 times the salary of a median employee, while in Norway for every dollar the worker earned, the average Norwegian CEO took home 58 bucks.

Equitable paychecks may slow down the creation of Norwegian billionaires, but the country���s overall standard of living is among the world���s highest.�� The U.S. ranks much lower on international evaluations, although with its immense and still rapidly growing gap between the plutocrats and the rest of us, it���s hard to calculate a meaningful ���standard.���

While those new Norwegian immigrants were at it, they would quickly move to simplify our tax system. That, of course, is exactly what Trump and the Republicans promised ��� you remember that ���postcard��� you were going to mail to the IRS ��� even as they made everything yet more complicated. ��In Norway, the government not only simplifies the tax system, but figures out, on a progressive scale, what every taxpayer owes and then sends out the bills.

Those dangerous Norwegians are peculiar enough to be grateful. They gladly pay up because taxes fund the country���s universal public welfare system, which guarantees that strikingly high standard of living to a whole society. (That phrase ���whole society,��� by the way, is the meaning of the word ���social��� in the phrase ���social democracy.���) Keep in mind that all Norwegians have the right to universal public health care, universal public education through professional schools or university and beyond, care of the elderly and disabled, paid parental leave for mothers and fathers, subsidized early childhood education (from age 1), affordable housing, state of the art public transport, and a raft of other services that take the worry out of daily life.�� The catch is ��� and I can already hear the thundering footsteps of the Republican herd as it heads in panic for its top secret bunker����� if Norwegians can���t trust the government, they kick it out and elect another.

We Americans, on the other hand, have been taught not to trust any government, but rather to admire our brilliant super-rich people who own this one, and so to let them pocket our tax money and think none the less of them for their dependence on Republican handouts like that tax bill.�� Consider the situation this way: Norwegian governments spoil their citizens, while President Trump and the Republicans despoilus ordinary Americans. ��And that just goes to show how much they trust us to take care of ourselves ��� so much so that they���re now planning to slash Medicaid and Medicare, leaving us ���free��� to set forth into sickness and death on our own. ��And if that isn���t the good old American spirit of free enterprise, what is?

Striking ���Oil��� With Fair Wages for Women

To explain how Norway pays for all those social programs, almost every American commentator, even when theoretically sympathetic to the Norwegians, points to the income from the country���s North Sea oil fields, discovered and developed in the 1970s. On that, however, they are mistaken.

Norway���s welfare state programs are supported not by oil revenues but by taxing the citizenry. (While some of those citizen taxpayers are paid for working, directly or indirectly, in the oil business, as of 2016 they made up only 7% of the Norwegian workforce.) So to understand how Norway can afford to pay for the genuine well-being of its people in such an impressive way, you need to look at those tax rolls, which very nearly doubled in the 1970s when women walked into the workplace (and politics) in a major way ��� and at wages close to matching those of men. In 2016, the Ministry of Finance calculated that the labor of women added to the net national wealth a value equivalent to the country���s ���total petroleum wealth��� created by that North Sea oil and held in the world���s largest sovereign wealth fund, worth in 2017 more than one trillion dollars.

It���s pretty scary to think of hordes of immigrants from such a country landing on our shores, considering the radical reality I���ve just described, the startling idea that you could upgrade an economy in a wholesale way just by requiring fair wages for women. Not to mention that with the taxes those women pay, you could fully fund free universal child care, the lack of which drivesAmerican women from the workplace back home, where Republicans thinkthey belong. In the U.S., none of our good old boy leaders would dream of enacting programs so… well, unpatriarchal. Or how about another idea I���ve heard from many Norwegians: that gender equality is the key to the good life?

But about that North Sea oil money: it, too, represents a kind of thinking utterly alien to this country. Oil is something we Americans believe we understand. Spill it in Alaska, spill it in the Gulf of Mexico.�� Now, drill for itin the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (thanks to the need to secure Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski���s vote for that tax ���reform��� bill), as well as up and down the coasts of the country (except for Florida, the home of Trump���s favorite golf club). We don���t mind what you do with it as long as you keep down the costs of propelling our outsized vehicles over our outdated highways.

Norway, on the other hand, owns 67% of the shares in Statoil, the Norwegian oil company that controls those North Sea wells, even as it leads the world���s changeover to electric vehicles. It���s a country with a remarkable record of developing and adopting new technologies while phasing out the old, so its workforce is always employed. By law, the government spends no more (and usually less) than 4% of its yearly oil profits on current expenses. The other 96% or more, it pours into that trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. ��That, in turn, has been set aside for the future, for the country���s children and their children, although some Norwegians, famous for their worldwide humanitarian and peacemaking activities, now propose to give much of it away to other lands that may need it far more. ��

Here���s a question for future American administrations: Could they apply for some of that Norwegian money to build an East Coast wall against Norwegian immigrants or maybe to help our kids pay off that estimated $1.5 trillion in debt Trump and the Republicans just handed them in the new tax bill?�� Could we take advantage of those radical Norwegians without even letting them into our country?�� I���ll bet Trump could finagle that.��

Selling F-52s to Norway

It���s likely that Norway came to Trump���s mind in that meeting with Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham (among others) as some idyllic source for future white Republicans only because, the day before, he had met with its substantial and very white prime minister, Erna Solberg. (Surprised observers of the meeting tweeted that Solberg speaks better English than the American president ��� as most Norwegians do.) ���Erna,��� as Norwegians ��� for whom everyone is equal and on a first-name basis ��� call her, is the leader of the Conservative party. She heads a coalition government in which the top three positions are held by women. ��That in itself might have caused Trump to keep his hands in his pockets, but apparently he wasn���t told. It���s likely he mistook ���Conservative��� for ���Republican,��� but as a matter of fact, all nine of Norway���s political parties now in parliament are well to the left not just of the Republicans but of the Democrats and, yes, even that independent ���democratic socialist��� from Vermont.

At the moment, only one Norwegian cabinet member, Silvi Listhaug of the right-wing Progress Party, might be considered sufficiently neoliberal, uber-Christian, and mean to fit into Trump���s regime.�� Perhaps that���s because her early training included a 2005 internship in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives.

In Norwegian terms, Erna often tilts dangerously to the right under the pressure of U.S. and British neoliberal economic theorists. It has to be hard for the leader of a small country ��� five million people, half the population of Haiti ��� to resist pressure to conform to the autocratic example of a nation that styles itself the most exceptional on Earth. ��Erna herself is a polite, circumspect politician who, on returning from her visit to the White House, assured reporters in Oslo that President Trump was ���a normal man��� with ���a sense of humor.��� ��Apparently she didn���t mention Trump���s self-proclaimed political acumen, intellectual brilliance, or awesome ���America First��� foreign policy. Norwegians reading their morning papers could, however, fill in the blanks.

At a joint press conference with Erna, Trump proudly announced that, last November, the U.S. had delivered the first F-52 and F-35 fighter jets to Norway, part of a $10 billion order of American military equipment.�� Norwegians are, in fact, stubbornly averse to war and think of their reluctant acquisition of way too many over-priced, overdue, bug-plagued F-35s as a surcharge on NATO membership. But F-52s?

That thoroughly fictional plane, as it turns out, exists only in the video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. (Do you suppose Trump spends his executive time playing commander-in-chief?) Norwegians are having a good laugh, while their commentators are saying ���thanks, but no thanks��� to Trump���s immigration invitation. If they really mean it, then perhaps we can relax and forget about that wall along the Eastern seaboard.

On the other hand, judging by their press, an awful lot of Norwegians are even more appalled and angered than we are by Trump���s racist slurs about ���shithole countries.����� What���s more, just days after returning to Norway, Erna Solberg rolled out her new government, a coalition of three parties, all led by women, and a gender-equal cabinet to run ministries focused not only on defense or finance, but also on climate and the environment, eldercare and public health, research and higher education family and equality.�� Erna announced that the platform of this new government would be “greener” and committed to sustaining the welfare state.�� And this, in Norway, is a center-right government.

You see what I mean about Norwegian ideas being totally at odds with Trump���s America. Still, Trump might play that to his advantage. If he and his Republican supporters in Congress decide to build that East Coast wall after all, they might be able to get the Norwegians to pay for it ��� not to keep themout, but to keep us in.

Conservatives just don’t understand that racism runs deep in American education

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Betsy DeVos and company are at it again. The DeVos-led Department of Education is currently cooking up ways to get rid of the��2014 Obama-era guidelines��for K-12 public school discipline, which was aimed at ameliorating discrepancies based on race, class and disability when it comes to how students are punished in school.

In November, conservative think tanks Center of the American Experiment and the Fordham Institute��helped coordinate a meeting at the Department of Education��wherein teachers critical of the 2014 guidelines testified about their experiences with violent students in their schools. Such testimony is being collected by conservatives to argue that the guidelines represent not only a sort of governmental ���PC police��� but that they are also actively making U.S. schools more unsafe by muzzling how teachers are able to discipline their students.

���For a time, education reform used to be a bipartisan or nonpartisan enterprise for improving student achievement,�����write��Robert Pondiscio and Max Eden of the Fordham and Manhattan Institutes, respectively, in an op-ed for the New York Daily News. ���But much of the movement has morphed into an arm of the social-justice industrial complex, dedicated to causes du jour from the travel ban to transgender bathrooms.���

In addition to disparaging the humanity of immigrant families and transgender people as if their lives are no more than a liberal fad, Pondiscio and Eden go on to reference the��school-to-prison pipeline��in scare quotes, arguing that education reform activists��� concern about racism in schools is a ���refus[al] to admit the possibility that differences in poverty and family structure play a role.��� This type of argument is a shorthand for the ���culture of poverty��� argument expounded in the infamous��Moynihan Report during the 1960s,��which controversially explained black poverty and family instability as in large part a cultural defect of the black family structure, found in the figure of the overbearing black mother in particular.

Conservatives��� latching onto such an explanation allows them to gloss over black oppression as the logical historical outcome of being enslaved, denied intergenerational wealth-building opportunities through that enslavement (and on the contrary, growing the wealth of white families through forced and unpaid labor), disenfranchised from jobs and housing, and exposed to manifold other forms of��violent anti-black terrorism��that have punctuated black life in America since black people were brought to this nation���s shores against their wills.

Pitting education reformers against teachers, Pondiscio and Eden claim in a false dichotomy that ���[s]ocial justice reformers ��� limi[t] teachers��� subjective disciplinary judgment … blind[ing] themselves to reality as a school spirals dangerously out of control.���

In contrast, Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA and a former teacher for a decade, tells AlterNet that the 2014 guidelines are crucial for addressing the implicit bias that exists in schools, even among well-meaning teachers, just as such bias exists throughout society.

���Stereotypes are in the air we breathe,��� says Losen. ���Not because we want [them] to [be], but because in every depiction [in media], we have not escaped the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and after that, the criminalization of black youth and the negative characterization of black males.

���What we find from research is that these negative stereotypes permeate our thinking in ways we���re just not aware of. And that���s not to blame teachers or slander them��� it���s to acknowledge that the playing field is not level.���

Derek Black, professor of law at the University of South Carolina, voices a similar position, saying, ���School suspension rates have skyrocketed over the past four decades and the lion���s share of the increase has been on the backs of poor and minority children.

���In most districts across the nation,��� explains Black, ���African American students are suspended and expelled at anywhere from two to six times the rate of white students. And it is not because they misbehave so much more. Studies consistently show that even when engaging in the exact same type of misbehavior, minorities are more likely to punished, and punished more severely, than white students.���

These types of inequalities are what the Obama-era guidelines sought to remedy as a response to the reality of systemic racism, classism, and ableism, systems of oppression that conservative ideologues attempt to downplay or outright attack in their arguments against the guidelines.

Addressing the conservative claim that investigating the disproportionate punishment of students with disabilities and students of color will turn schools into dens of violence, Curtis L. Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network,��wrote��recently, ���[T]he [Obama-era] guidance ��� does not inform school districts that they must refrain from suspending students who behave in a dangerous manner toward students, staff, or themselves.��� According to Decker, ���It does not dictate to states or schools how they should structure their programming. Schools may choose to implement the recommendations found in the guidance or not.���

���What it does do,��� argues Decker, ���is support schools in their efforts to create and maintain safe and orderly educational environments that allow all our nation���s students to learn and thrive.���

Losen has come to a similar conclusion, saying that in Los Angeles, ���teachers were not complaining [about] the change in policy; they were complaining that they weren���t getting enough training in restorative justice. They wanted more of the change, not less of the change.���

Such teachers, according to Losen, are more interested in shifting existing school resources, especially those related to professional development and classroom management.

Many conservative researchers��� refusal to recognize the reality of the unequal playing field for students of color, says Losen, ���informs their take on any kind of research,��� with the result being that they often rely on cherry-picked evidence to support their claims. The Obama-era guidelines are in fact supported by major research studies, such as��a 2016 Yale study��that found that black male children are more likely, as early as preschool, to be closely observed by teachers in the expectation they will misbehave.

Such constant and disproportionate monitoring from the beginning of one���s life, Losen says, ���can erode trust in the institution if you���re a black male and you start to pick up on the fact that you���re being watched all the time and being profiled all the time.

���Eventually as you become a young adult you���ll become more aware [of the discrimination], and that will breed resentment and mistrust.���

The notion that schools are ���spiraling out of control��� due to dangerous students too often functions as part of the assumption of black male criminality, a pattern that has been documented in the field of education. Ann Arnett Ferguson, in her��2001 book Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, refers to this process as ���adultification,��� whereby ���black children���s ��� transgressions are made to take on a sinister, intentional, fully conscious tone that is stripped of any element of childish na��vet��.

���The discourse of childhood as an unfolding developmental stage in the life cycle is displaced in this mode of framing school trouble,��� Ferguson writes. In other words, young black students, especially boys, are seen as being on the same level as adult criminals. Ferguson gives as an example a white teacher who ��� shortly after the��1992 LA riots in response to the acquittal of the four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King����� called black students ���looters��� after they failed to return books she loaned them and described the situation as ���just like the looting in Los Angeles.���

History has shown time and time again, from��Emmett Till��to��Tamir Rice, that this adultification of black boys can have fatal consequences. Yet black children ��� including girls, who, according to a��2017 study��by Georgetown Law���s Center on Poverty, are perceived by adults as ���less innocent and more adult-like��� than white girls starting at age 5 ��� deserve to learn, feel safe and thrive in educational environments where they won���t be punished at higher rates than their white peers due to racist assumptions about their lack of innocence and predilections for criminality.

At the core of conservative attacks on the 2014 guidelines is an attack on the reality of the implicit bias that continues to permeate classrooms across the country, and it must be vociferously challenged at every turn.

In the end, says Losen, ���If you know there���s a better way to do something, and you know what you���re doing is fundamentally unsound, it behooves the district to change those policies.

���Anything else is immoral.���

What a medieval love saga says about modern-day sexual harassment

(Credit: Ydefinitel via Shutterstock)

Suddenly, popular media is saturated with stories of powerful men outed by women for behavior in the workplace. These alleged harassers seem to assume that power in the workplace grants them sexual access to anyone.

In medieval Europe, most people assumed the same thing, although they didn���t call it ���harassment.���

As a historian of gender in the European Middle Ages, I am all too familiar with well-documented cases of sexual harassment, abuse and rape. Such behavior was not considered unlawful or wrong in the medieval period unless one powerful man harassed a woman who belonged to another powerful man.

One famous 12th-century saga involved a young philosopher, Abelard, and his teenage student H��loise. The story has many similarities with news of modern-day aggressors, with one major exception: None of today���s harassers has suffered medieval punishment.

The case of Abelard and H��loise

In 1115, Abelard was the star of the budding university scene in medieval Paris. Famous for his quick mind and infallible memory, Abelard supposedly never lost an argument. One day he encountered H��loise, who also studied classics and philosophy (rare for a medieval girl). Abelard later wrote of that first glance, ���In looks she did not rank lowest while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme.���

Knowing himself to be handsome and brilliant, Abelard stalked the girl and persuaded her uncle, Fulbert, a church official and H��loise���s guardian, to hire him as her personal tutor. Fulbert was delighted to employ the famous Abelard. Fulbert gave Abelard room and board, so that he might tutor H��loise day and night.

Abelard taught H��loise more than philosophy. ���My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages,��� he admitted. ���To avert suspicion I sometimes struck her.��� Eventually, as he wrote, their ���desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love devised something new, we welcomed it.���

The affair became the subject of student ballads sung in the streets of Paris.

The wages of sin

Abelard was alarmed at the gossip and sent H��loise off to her old convent school outside of town. Their affair remained torrid, though, and he visited when he could. They once had sex in a corner of the refectory where nuns took their meals.

Their troubles became worse when H��loise became pregnant. Abelard sent her away �����this time to his sister in Brittany, where H��loise gave birth to their son Astrolabe, whom she left behind when returning to Paris.

When Uncle Fulbert learned of Astrolabe���s birth he ���went almost out of his mind,��� as Abelard put it, even though Abelard reminded him that ���since the beginning of the human race women had brought the noblest men to ruin.��� Eventually, to appease Fulbert, Abelard agreed to marry H��loise, but only if Fulbert would keep it secret. H��loise objected but submitted.

As things were, the stalking and beating of H��loise posed no danger to Abelard���s reputation nor did fathering an illegitimate son. News of a marriage, though, would ruin him ��� for only celibate churchmen could find permanent employment as teachers.

Fulbert, however, spread word of the marriage. H��loise and her uncle argued fiercely until Abelard once more hid H��loise in a convent. Against her wishes, he made her wear nun���s clothing.

Uncle Fulbert believed that Abelard had abandoned H��loise. One terrible night, Abelard awoke to find himself under attack by a gang of ruffians who took shocking vengeance for Fulbert. As Abelard put it starkly, ���They cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.���

A eunuch, like a married man, was barred from high church offices and teaching positions. Ab��lard became a monk and H��loise an unwilling nun.

Whose calamity?

We know this sad story from Abelard���s ���History of My Troubles��� (���Historia Calamitatum���) written about 15 years after his marriage to H��loise. By then, she had become an abbess in charge of a small community of nuns at The Paraclete ��� a monastery founded by Abelard and named after one of his famous philosophical arguments. The two began to exchange letters in the 1130s. H��loise had never been happy in the convent. She wrote to her husband:

���The pleasures of lovers which we have shared have been too sweet ��� wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep.���

Abelard suggested that she give all her love to Christ instead. He sent her handy tips for running a monastery. He refused to visit, though.

���My agony is less for the mutilation of my body than for the damage to my reputation.���

His career was paramount; her grief, less so. ���His��� reputation, ���his��� calamity. What about ���hers���?

Bad love

Something about the history of Abelard and H��loise endured the centuries until 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals embraced the tale of these star-crossed lovers. Several poets and artists depicted H��loise unhappily entering the convent or dreaming of lost love. Parisians erected an ornate monument to the couple in the cemetery of P��re-Lachaise, where today���s lovers still leave fresh roses.

However, despite the discovery of more letters exchanged between Abelard and H��loise, today���s medievalist scholars tend to accept Abelard���s version of the relationship ��� that H��loise was complicit.

Abelard said H��loise loved him. But did the teenage girl actually consent to sex with the teacher who beat her? Did she agree to have the child? Did she prefer ���love to wedlock and freedom to chains,��� as Abelard claimed?

We know from her letters to him that she resisted the convent.

���Of all the wretched women, I am the most wretched,��� H��loise complained, long after the affair.

Romancing harassment

No one has labeled Abelard a rapist, the seducer of a minor or a sexual harasser. His philosophical works remain crucial to the history of Christian theology and philosophy. H��loise is celebrated mostly for being a female intellectual in a period when there were few.

Such historical ���romances��� still play out in gender relations today, particularly in the university. A recent survey of graduate students and professors, for example, revealed the extent to which male professors prey on young minds and bodies under their guidance.

And, like H��loise, many such victims still find it hard to voice resistance, although they no longer cower in the cloister. Instead of writing letters to their harassers or singing ballads in the streets, they reveal their secrets in digital media ��� too often anonymously.

���Plus ��a change,��� or ���the more it changes, the more it���s the same thing,��� as Abelard might say. One thing we have learned since the Middle Ages is that sexual harassment is a destructive crime, no matter how romantic the backstory.

Lisa Bitel, Professor of History & Religion, University of Southern California ��� Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Bill Clinton and UFOs: Did he ever find out if the truth was out there?

Bill Clinton (Credit: AP/Doug Mills/Getty/ursatii/Salon)

In 1999, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would have required across-the-board cuts to most federal agencies and depart��ments, including the Department of Education, which President Clinton learned about as he was about to meet with a delegation of edu��cators. The budget cuts also meant that teachers would probably not be getting any raises, something that irked Clinton to the point where, in an impromptu and unscripted remark, he said, channeling Ronald Reagan���s famous statement, ���If we were being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn���t be playing these kinds of games.��� Funny how when Ronald Reagan said the same thing to the United Nations, folks commented that Reagan sure knew how to illustrate a point. When Clinton made his statement, Rush Limbaugh thundered into his microphone, ���What���s he going to do, arrange one?���

Just three years earlier, while on a trip to Ireland where he was visiting a very troubled Belfast, Clinton read a letter he received from a child named Ryan, who had asked him about what he knew regarding stories of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Clinton hadn���t come to talk about UFOs. He was trying to make a point regarding how children can be victimized by political violence. In front of his Belfast audience, Clinton said to Ryan, ���No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.��� But then he added, to the delight of his audience, ���and Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn���t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.���

Clinton did want to know, Webster Hubbell, Clinton���s associate attor��ney general, wrote in his own memoir. As AAG, Hubbell claimed that President Clinton asked him to find out all that he could about two things: who killed JFK and what the government knew about UFOs. He reported to the president after being stonewalled by the relevant agencies that there was a secret government that closely holds secrets to which the president doesn���t even have access.

However, in 1993, the year Clinton was inaugurated, and as pressure was mounting on the CIA to confirm that it had followed UFO stories, Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey ���ordered another review of all Agency files on UFOs. Using CIA records compiled from that review, the study he ordered traced CIA interest and involvement in the UFO con��troversy from the late 1940s to 1990.��� The report reveals that despite official statements to the contrary regarding the government���s interest in what hap��pened at Roswell, the air force did, in fact, open up an investigative unit, known first as Project SAUCER and then Project SIGN, to ���collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise that UFOs might be real and of national security concern.���

The CIA report reveals that the agency followed the air force investigations into UFOs, especially the invasion of Washington, D.C. airspace in 1952, and the reports of pilots and radar operators who said they were seeing images they could not identify and did not seem to represent conventional aircraft. The report continues to explain the nature of CIA involvement in UFO cases over the decades and, without making the point explicitly, implies that despite any official denials, and, moreover, very rel��evant to the background of George H. W. Bush, the agency was very active in UFO research, had compiled voluminous files on UFOs, and had much to share with any American president, should the DCI have reason to do so. The report must have been a real eye-opener to President Clinton, not so much because of what truths behind cases it revealed or did not reveal, but simply that the files that the president had dispatched Webster Hubbell to locate, files��that Hubbell said had been kept from him, now, albeit sanitized, were available to him.

According to Jon Austin in the UK���s Express, as far back as Bill Clin��ton���s first term in office in 1993, Hillary Clinton was talking up UFOs with Laurence Rockefeller, who funded initiatives to research UFOs almost as a way to counter what the Condon Report had argued as well as making its own case for the study of the possibility of extraterrestrial visitations.

���From early 1993 the businessman began a lengthy approach to Bill Clin��ton for disclosure, including files held by the CIA, in what became the Rockefeller Initiative.��� Further, Austin writes, ���During the Clinton family seven-day vacation in August 1995 at the Rockefeller Teton Ranch outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the 85-year-old billionaire privately briefed the President and First Lady on UFOs and his hopes.

���No one else knows exactly what was said, but at the time Mr. Clin��ton, who had a personal interest in UFOs and was frustrated at the lack of information he could glean on it, was carrying out a review of how the Government handled confidential material.��� For a scientific review of the Laurence Rockefeller conference on UFOs at Pocantico Hills, the basis for the Rockefeller conclusions about the need to research the UFO phenom��enon further, see Peter A. Sturrock���s analysis “The UFO Enigma,” in which Rockefeller himself explains the purpose of his initiative.

The Clinton perspective on UFOs, however, took a dramatic turn in March 1997, the time of the Phoenix Lights, the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, and the Heaven���s Gate mass suicide, when President Clinton himself would become involved in the most media covered UFO appearance since the 1952 invasion over Washington, D.C.

The Phoenix Lights

On March 13, 1997, the stage was set for thousands of witnesses across the southwest scanning the sky for the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet ��� for comet watchers, a once-in-a-lifetime event. But it wasn���t just a comet that residents of Phoenix saw on that warm March night. The story actu��ally began before 8:30 p.m. when witnesses in Henderson, Nevada, at the Arizona border reported a strange sight, six orange lights in a triangu��lar pattern slowly moving toward the southeast and making no sound except for what the observer said was the wind. About fifteen minutes later another witness, this time behind the wheel of his car, saw a formation of lights heading his way as he drove north. He headed home, retrieved binoc��ulars, and kept watching the lights as they headed south and west towards Phoenix.

Within minutes [of these] sighting, folks just north of Phoenix began seeing the lights off in the distance to the north-northwest, heading their way. It passed right over private streets, possibly as low as 100-150 feet, and traveling slowly toward the south. Then it seemed to stop dead in the air. It hovered. Then it picked up motion and continued through the narrow valleys toward the outskirts of the city suburbs where more people, some on the roads, some standing on their balconies, spotted the object, which many people described as unearthly.

One of the witnesses was Arizona governor Fife Symington, who said in 2007 and on “UFO Hunters” that despite what he said at his faux news con��ference when he had his chief of staff dress up in an alien garb and show up as the explanation for the lights, Symington himself saw the 8:30 lights from his own backyard and said they were not a conventional craft because the object he saw flew too slowly for an airplane, did not have the thwap��ping sound of rotor blades like a helicopter, and was completely noiseless. A plane would have stalled at the speed it was moving, a helicopter would have shown distinct navigation lights and made a noise, especially at the low altitude at which it was flying, and the lights made the craft larger than a football field. Also, Symington said that as commander in chief of the Arizona National Guard and Air National Guard, he called Luke Air Force Base and was told no military craft were in the sky at 8:30 over Phoenix. Thus the lights were not confirmed as military by the Air National Guard.

About two hours after the first sighting of the lights, a second set of lights flew over the same area, causing even more confusion and frenzy than the first set. Were the 10:30 lights over Phoenix a different object, the same object returning, or flares from air force or National Guard planes scram��bled to establish a conventional explanation for the 8:30 lights? At first, when the 10:30 lights appeared, residents called Sky Harbor air traffic control again and were told that no planes were picked up on radar. Residents also called Luke Air Force Base again and were told none of their planes were in the air. However, after the initial responses from Luke AFB, the air force said that the lights were ground illumination flares from a flight of A-10 Wart��hogs over the Goldwater test range. Months later, the Maryland Air National Guard announced that there were planes in the air on the night of March 13, 1997, from the 104th fighter squadron flying out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona as the unit that dropped LUU-2B/B ground illumination flares in an exercise over the Goldwater test range. CIA UFO consultant Dr. Bruce Maccabee conducted a triangulation analysis of the events and said that it was indeed likely that the second formation of lights were flares that could be seen even though they were many miles south of the Phoenix area at 10:30. However, photo analyst Jim Dilettoso of Arizona���s Village Labs said that after he had performed a spectral analysis of the lights, he determined that the colors of the lights were inconsistent with flares.

Witness and award-winning filmmaker Dr. Lynne Kitei has said that the 10:30 lights were not flares and that subsequent flare-dropping demon��strations by the air force to prove that flares were what people in Phoenix saw on the night of March 13, 1997, showed, again through an analysis of the aerial performance, the colors and the residue actually proved that what witnesses saw were not flares. The controversy over the nature of the lights still remains today.

Making the world safe for loan sharks

(Credit: AP/Elaine Thompson)

The trade group for the payday loan industry, which profits from��interest rates as high as 950% a year��imposed on the poorest among us, is planning to hold its��annual conference��this year at Trump���s golf resort near Miami.

The industry will have a lot to celebrate at the��four-day conference��in April of the��Community Financial Services Association of America,��which��spent $460,000 on federal lobbying in 2017.��The��Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,��our nation���s independent agency that is supposed to be a watchdog for consumers, recently announced that the bureau will��reconsider��a rule that could have��cut industry revenue by two-thirds.

The bureau also��ended an investigation into an installment lender��whose PAC gave at least $4,500 in campaign donations to��Mick Mulvaney,��the former South Carolina congressman who is now the acting head of the bureau. The bureau also��dropped a lawsuit in Kansas against four payday lending companies��that charged interest rates of 440% to 950%.

���Mulvaney is inviting financial predators to help him dismantle consumer safeguards,��� said Bart Naylor of��Public Citizen.

Much of the��payday loan rule��was supposed to take effect in August 2019. It required payday lenders to determine��whether the borrower could actually repay the loan with interest within 30 days��while still paying��basic living expenses��like rent and car expenses. The loans are��often due within two weeks��and have annual interest rates of about 390%.

Our nation has��more payday loan stores than McDonald���s restaurants ��� nearly 18,000. They make about $46 billion in loans each year and��collect more than $7 billion in fees.��Researchers estimate that about 12 million people, many who can���t get other credit, borrow from payday lenders each year.

Big banks such as Wells Fargo��finance eight major payday lenders.��The banks can borrow money at 0.5% from the Fed and then lend it to the payday lenders.

The rule also��limited the number of times a borrower could rollover a loan.��Payday loans are frequently structured with balloon payments. Borrowers unable to repay the full amount can rollover the loan, racking up hundreds of dollars in fees while still owing the original amount of the loan.

���One payday loan often leads to another payday loan��and so on into a debt trap,��� said Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah who advised the bureau on the payday loan rule. ������The average borrower is taking out eight of these loans per year.���

Trump appointed Mulvaney to be acting head of the bureau, replacing��Richard Cordray��who resigned in November. Cordray appointed��Leandra English��as acting director. She has��sued Trump and Mulvaney��to try to block Mulvaney from running the agency. The lawsuit is pending.

Mulvaney has��asked for no money to fund the agency��in the second half of 2018 and has told bureau staffers to��show ���humility and prudence��� and to not ���push the envelope.���

How corporations are destroying video games

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 3: A person dressed as the Nintendo character Mario waves at a pop-up Nintendo venue in Madison Square Park, March 3, 2017 in New York City. The Nintendo Switch console goes on sale today and retails for 300 dollars. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) (Credit: Getty/Drew Angerer/Shutterstock/Salon)

Since��going mainstream in the 1980s, video games have evolved from a nerdy lark to a big industry. When I say big, I mean really big: Forbes reports that in 2016, the gaming industry in the U.S. had sales totaling $30.4 billion. (Contrast that with��the film industry, which had only $11.4 billion in box office receipts in the same year.) And while some games are still produced by small indie studios, the gaming world is much like Hollywood, with a few big players spending tens of millions to produce games that will reap that much or more.

But with big corporations controlling huge swaths of the gaming industry, the precepts of video gaming have inevitably changed ��� and the field���s artistry has been subsumed by the need for profit. Contemporary game designers are motivated to spend more of their time adding features that play into players��� psychology, manipulating them into opening their wallets.

To follow the capitalistic arc of the video game industry, a brief history lesson is in order. Because of course, the gaming industry, even when it was much smaller, was always a for-profit industry. It���s just that how it’s��made money has changed.

The 1980s were the golden age for arcade games. Both kids and adults wanted to experience the euphoric novelty of the arcade: whirring sounds, flashing lights, screaming for joy when reaching a new high score, the clanking of the air hockey table and the sound of change hitting metal.

I recently spent some time in an arcade pumping some quarters into some classic games. I realized that games back then were��much harder��than they are now.��Some might��complain that video games are too easy now, but looking at the current video game landscape, it makes sense that there was a general shift in difficulty. Arcade games were meant to get as many quarters from you as possible.

Consider the game ���Dragon���s Lair,��� recently repopularized by its appearance in the second season of Netflix���s 1980s nostalgic thriller ���Stranger Things.��� The hand-animated cinematic arcade game was composed of a series of button presses that correlated to a character’s action. The player travels through a castle to save a princess, facing traps and monsters as obstacles on the way. The player must react to these traps as they move; failure means losing a life. ���Dragon���s Lair��� was notoriously difficult, meaning it cost a lot of quarters to keep playing after losing again and again.

In their original incarnation, video games were something you played while you were out ��� meaning that you didn���t buy a disk at the store and bring it home; rather, you paid for games quarter-by-quarter at the arcade. As a result,��the foundation of video games was predatory, the goal being to get more money out of the player ��� �� la ���Dragon���s Lair.��� This was somewhat understandable. If I could walk into an arcade and beat a game on my first try, then that wouldn���t be a viable business model. There had to be a balance of player expectation with business viability.

But then, the arcade age died and the video game industry made a major shift to home consoles and PCs. And video games began to embrace their unfortunate foundation in predation.

* * *

Remember ���Candy Crush Saga���? The explosively popular mobile game came out in 2012. It was a matching puzzle game themed around pieces of candy. Every level would present the player with a goal, whether it was matching specific pieces or achieving a certain number of points. The notoriously addictive game progressed through a level system. It had a social element, and could show players what level their friends had reached, which allowed players to ogle or brag about each other���s progress. This type of progression felt satisfying to players, and the levels would get more difficult and complex as you progressed.

This is basic gameplay design: increase the difficulty to make a more rewarding experience for the player. ��But with games like ���Candy Crush,��� players tended to get stuck at the same levels. This is intentional: Players can try and try again to the point of frustration, or pay money to make it easier. In ���Candy Crush,��� as in many other smartphone games, these digital power-ups might give you the ability to make an extra move or another in-game advantage. At last, after spending a dollar on said power-up, you beat the level and feel a sense of accomplishment.

This isn���t accidental; ���Candy Crush Saga��� knows exactly what it���s doing . These kinds of limitations overcome by power-ups are called ���progress gates,��� and it���s a basic��free to play (or F2P) tactic��used to coerce players to purchase in-game items with real money. These kinds of purchases are widely known as ���microtransactions.��� Basically, certain levels will become extremely hard to complete without the help of them.

���Anyone who has played the game ���Candy Crush Saga��� for more than a few minutes has probably, at least on a subconscious level, grappled with the bankrupt soul of modern video-game capitalism,��� wrote Andrew Leonard in Salon in 2014. ���In the so-called free-to-play world, it’s hard to think of another game developer that has more successfully mastered the marketing coup that merges addictive game play with powerful incentives to regularly fork over cold, hard cash.���

Many games won���t let you buy these power-ups until you���ve converted them to their own in-game currency. In ���Pok��mon Go,��� it���s ���coins���; in other games it is often ���gems��� or ���gold.��� This is another coercive way to monetize microtransactions: By using a separate currency, it distracts players from how much they���re buying. Likewise, the true price is generally obscured by bulk discounts: A��game may sell 100 gems for $99.99 or five��gems for $10.99.

While the gaming community has accepted these schemes as inevitable, the general public is often less savvy when it comes to understanding how they are preyed upon by video games. And ���Candy Crush��� is just the tip of the iceberg; its tactics are benign compared to more recent industrial psychological tactics used by other game-makers.

* * *

Back in 2004, Pandemic Studios was contracted to design a video game, called ���Star Wars Battlefront,��� set in the universe of George Lucas��� ���Star Wars��� saga. The game set players in the shoes of a stormtrooper or a rebel soldier involved in an ongoing battle. At the time, the game was well received critically and commercially.

The sequel, ���Star Wars Battlefront 2,��� was a major improvement on the first, and the series became a staple in video game history. Unfortunately, Pandemic shut down and the “Battlefront” franchise was left rudderless, until Electronic Arts (EA) bought the license.

EA DICE (a subsidiary studio of EA) rebooted the whole franchise with ���Star Wars Battlefront��� in 2015. The game was generally well-received, but critical consensus didn���t match the original; Pandemic���s ���Star Wars Battlefront��� was popular because it managed to be one of few ���Star Wars��� games that captured the cinematic nature of the films. But just as Hollywood tends to reboot, remake and revive, EA was here to bilk consumers. Hence, while technically impressive, EA���s ���Battlefront��� had bland, lackluster gameplay, and was criticized for omitting any single-player mode.

Interestingly, the 2015 ���Star Wars Battlefront��� did feature one sinister innovation over the original, though. It offered users the chance to purchase what is called, in modern video gaming lingo, a ���season pass.���

To understand the meaning of ���season pass��� outside of its sports context, first, know that the internet changed how all media, including game media, was consumed. Indeed, video game publishers saw the rise of the internet as a business opportunity that would allow them to cut corners.

Before the internet, console games were shipped on disks or cartridges, and heavily tested for bugs before being mastered. If there was a bug in the game, there was nothing developers could do; the disk or cartridge couldn���t be readily updated. But with the internet, consoles and developers started to take advantage of selling games as a service, rather than a singular product. Likewise, they could sell a bug-ridden game and issue a patch later.

The next iteration of this capitalistic mode of thinking was the realization that games could be released unfinished, or as bare-bones versions that could be fleshed out with downloadable add-ons that the publisher would charge for. These were deemed ���downloadable content��� (or DLC) packs, and are often regularly scheduled, planned releases, like clockwork. Letting users buy all scheduled DLC packs upfront is termed buying a season pass.

Electronic Arts became notorious for its predatory business model with downloadable content. The company is particularly fond of selling games with what is called ���day-one DLC��� �����add-ons that are purchasable on the same day as the��game���s release. The moral issue with day-one DLC is that by its very nature, such a product could been included with the game without being charged for, but was purposely created separately so as to upsell customers. Indeed, there is a reason that EA was voted ���Worst Company in America��� by��Consumerist��two years in a row.

Though these insider business practices might seem confusing to non-gamers, gamers like myself notice and take stock of the small-scale politics of video gaming. There is no gaming industry equivalent of Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate who follows and exposes attempts to rip off video gamers, though those of us who pay attention to such things do our best to fight back against what we see as an oft-manipulative industry. So it was with some surprise that EA ended up in national news recently for its increasingly predatory attempts to rip off consumers ��� attempts that some government regulators believe broke the law.

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���Star Wars Battlefront 2,��� the follow-up to EA���s mixed success with ���Star Wars Battlefront,��� was set to release in November 2017. Before that release, EA launched a beta phase where they let players play the unfinished game in October 2017. During this beta, players realized that ���star cards��� were a main pillar of the game. Specifically, star cards were in-game power-ups that enhanced your characters��� abilities, and which were crucial to winning the game. One of the easiest ways to obtain star cards was to buy ���loot boxes,��� or mystery boxes of random in-game items that��could be purchased with real money or in-game currency (which can be exchanged with real money). In the case of ���Battlefront 2,��� these loot boxes had ���randomized��� odds for receiving certain items; as such, every loot box is a grab bag, and could be worthless or valuable. It���s kind of like a lottery ticket in that sense.

Soon after release, ���Battlefront 2��� became a media fixation, and not just from video game magazines.��CNN��and��HuffPost��picked up the story of the loot boxes, likening them to manipulative forms of gambling. Eventually, the Belgium Gaming Commission opened up an investigation��into the game, claiming that EA���s ���loot boxes��� constituted gambling and therefore broke the law.

And with that, all eyes were on the video game industry.

U.S. politicians took note, too. State Reps. Chris Lee and Sean Quinlan of Hawaii��announced ���action to address predatory practices at Electronic Arts and other companies.��� Quinlan referenced ���Joe Camel,��� the Camel cigarettes mascot widely considered to be a subtle gimmick to get kids interested in smoking, hinting that EA���s gameplay tactics might be turning children on to gambling. Finally, Washington state Sen. Kevin Ranker, D-Orcas Island,��introduced a bill��that aimed to find out if video games��� loot boxes were ���a form of gambling that targets children,��� as one headline glared.

Why did this particular game at this moment get so much negative attention, and become so peculiarly politicized? After all, games in general, and EA in particular, have been making games with microtransactions and loot boxes for years and years. In this instance, the public attention may also be because of the draw of ���Star Wars,��� one of the most valuable entertainment franchises in the world. But the whole loot box debacle also seems to epitomize the path of the gaming industry since its inception: increasingly manipulating players into opening their wallets, and a trend that finally reached a boiling point that crossed ethical and legal boundaries.

This should be an awakening moment for the increasingly exploitative gaming industry, but time will tell if that bears out. In any case, gamers desperately need a consumer advocate, a Ralph Nader of the gaming world, to fight back against corporate greed run amok.

Because video games are such an interactive medium, they can do things that other arts can���t, namely,��foster empathy��by putting players directly in someone else���s shoes. And generally, this is a good thing. But if developers and publishers take advantage of their players, it may be the end of the industry. EA is merely one heinous example of a greedy corporation out to nickel and dime their players at every corner, yet their practices are shared by other big-name video game companies. If the industry doesn���t find a balance between monetization and player enjoyment, they stand to irreparably destroy the art.

Trump NLRB appointee finds a way around conflict of interest rules

(Credit: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

A Trump administration appointee to the National Labor Relations Board benefited the interests and clients of his former law firm when he cast the deciding vote to undo rules protecting workers��� rights in two cases last month.

The decisions, which were both resolved 3-to-2, are instances of what some former NLRB members describe as a side-door means of evading government ethics requirements �����a way to do indirectly what conflict of interest rules prevent the appointee from doing directly.

William Emanuel, who joined the NLRB in September, has recused himself from involvement in more than four dozen cases involving the firm he left to join the labor board. That firm, Littler Mendelson, is known for representing corporations in labor disputes. Littler was not representing any parties in the disputes that Emanuel helped resolve in December.

The law firm had argued, in public filings, for the elimination of precedents in three cases pending before the NLRB. All three involved a widely discussed issue in the labor world and a legal position that Littler was known to espouse. Emanuel recused himself from all three cases.

But he took unusual steps that benefited Littler���s clients indirectly.

To understand how Emanuel accomplished that, a brief primer on the NLRB is necessary: The board often functions like a court, with its five members �����currently three Republicans and two Democrats �����adjudicating labor disputes between companies and their workers. Legal bodies like the NLRB typically resolve only those issues argued by the parties involved in the dispute.

What���s unusual is that, in the two instances last month, Emanuel and his two fellow Republican members raised precedents that had not been at issue in the case they were voting on. No party had asked the NLRB to overrule the precedents, and the board never asked the parties or the public to address the question.

The moves raised hackles among Democratic NLRB members. One of the latter, Lauren McFerran, accused the Republican majority of overruling precedent ���entirely on its own initiative,��� a move she called ���suspect.���

Some former NLRB members criticized Emanuel. ���It looks bad,��� said Wilma Liebman, a Democratic board member in the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. ���It looks like a rush to judgment, and the absence of a deliberative process, and a purely results-driven process ��� and possibly a conflict.���

Former Obama NLRB member Sharon Block agreed. ���Deciding a case in a way the parties didn���t ask you to decide it seems to me inevitably to raise the question: Why are you doing this?��� said Block, who now heads the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. ���Emanuel having clients that actually had made that request ��� at the very least that creates a huge appearance problem.���

Marshall Babson, a former Democratic board member who now represents companies in labor matters, defended Emanuel. Even when a legal issue arises in a case where an NLRB member has a conflict, he said, ���you���re not precluded from deciding a similar issue in another case that you���re not recused from.��� Otherwise, Babson observed, there would be an unworkable number of recusals: Too many prospective board members ��� typically prominent labor lawyers for unions or corporations ��� would be recused from too many cases involving hot-button labor law issues.

Emanuel referred questions to an agency spokesperson, who declined to comment. A Littler spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The cases in which Emanuel���s vote helped his old law firm eradicated labor-friendly precedents governing workplace rules and company responsibility for labor law violations of its franchise holders and contractors. The consequences are expected to be ��� and in some cases already are ��� far-reaching.

The December rulings were part of a rush of decisions in the week before the end of Republican Chairman Philip Miscimarra���s tenure on the labor board, and the precedents Littler objected to had long been in Miscimarra���s crosshairs, too. But until Emanuel joined the NLRB, Miscimarra didn���t have enough votes to overturn them.

Like most executive branch officials, Emanuel signed an ethics pledge upon taking office. The pledge includes conflict of interest rules, which preclude participating in cases where a former client or employer is a party or represents one. Indeed, Emanuel has recused himself from cases in which his old law firm represents a company in a labor dispute with an employee or union, he explained in response to questions from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

That���s why, on the face of it, Emanuel���s participation in the December cases doesn���t implicate conflict of interest rules; Littler wasn���t involved in them. But a close look at them shows how Emanuel���s votes helped his old firm���s clients. In one case involving the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, Emanuel voted to make it harder for workers to show that ostensibly neutral workplace rules interfere in practice with their right to organize. That decision overturned a 13-year-old precedent, one that none of the parties had attempted to end.

But Littler attorneys, on behalf of clients such as Uber ��� in cases in which Emanuel is not participating ��� had asked the board to do precisely that: Reverse the precise workplace-rule precedent at issue. Littler clients in several other pending cases in which Emanuel cannot participate also stand to benefit from the NLRB���s Boeing decision.

Littler has made its positions known elsewhere, too, including in federal appeals courts, which can review board decisions. In one such case Littler attorneys asked an appeals court to reject the Obama NLRB���s so-called joint-employer rule, which made it easier for workers to hold a parent company liable for the unfair labor practices of its franchisees and other companies with which it has a relationship. Emanuel and his fellow Republican board members overruled the Obama joint-employer rule in a second case they decided in December, though no party had asked them to do so.

Critics say Emanuel and the Republican majority have also taken other shortcuts in overturning NLRB precedents ��� five in December alone, including the cases above ��� such as reaching a decision before all the normal procedural steps have been taken.

Ultimately, the ethics of Emanuel���s participation are ambiguous, former members say, in part because similarly close calls simply didn���t arise during their tenures. ���Those fine points of recusal policy didn���t come up, because nobody got that close,��� said Block. ���I don���t remember there being any hard questions, because we just drew a bright line.���