The slow progress of bad decisions or 'Who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000?'

The guy on the left probably isn't evil, but this is not a good look

Despite what movies and cop procedural TV shows would have us think, I don't believe most people who do terrible things are intrinsically evil. Sure, the Stephen Millers of the world exist, but he's an exception. (Even real jerks don't usually make speeches to their high schools arguing kids should be slobs because the school's janitors can clean up after them.)  A good chunk of people in positions of power believe on, some level, they're doing good, or at least, they're not actively evil. 

That's why I was fascinated a by Planet Money episode that profiled a white-collar convicted felon. The cumulative effect of the episode is more like a dark comedy than a business podcast. Then again, this isn't a new feeling since most serious news these days plays like Dr. Strangelove.

LONDON: The people back in the studio on TV after this - they were talking about it. Like, who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says his friends asked him that, too. And he does not have a great answer. He can't say exactly why he did it. I asked, was it exciting? Was the thrill part of it? 

LONDON: No - wasn't exciting at all. 

GOLDSTEIN: Was he trying to get his friend to like him more? Is that what was going on? 

LONDON: No. That didn't ever pass through my mind. 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should've been. 

GOLDSTEIN: Scott says what he did was just dumb. He says that. But he says, you know, as best as he can figure out, as best as he can reconstruct, he did it to help out his friend. And he says he didn't think they were going to get caught.

What struck me about Scott London's story was the ease of making increasingly bad choices. Of course, people make ruinous choices all the time and often for reasons as banal as what London describes in the interview with journalists David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. In this case, London's choices led to criminal behavior, a guilty plea, and jail time. 

***

Some backstory: London was a CPA and partner at the giant firm, KPMG. He led teams that conducted massive audits of Fortune 500 companies. As he said, he made more than $500,000 a year. But he had a friend in the wholesale jewelry business who was struggling. It was during the 2008 recession and his friend asked him for a favor - can you tip some stock info to me? He proposed trades in the five figures, a small amount considering the tidal wave of money moving through stock markets.

LONDON: You know, it's a battle. The simple version of the one side is that I knew it was wrong. It was stupid. And then the other side is, all right, well, he's a good friend. I trust him. You know, if you are trading, and, you know, you're only going to make 10 or $15,000, who's going to know?

The answer to that last question? The feds. (The picture above was taken by FBI agents.) He was arrested in one of those 6 a.m. knocks federal agents pull. London didn't fight the charges, but he also didn't fully understand the ramifications of his actions. 

KESTENBAUM: It got worse. Scott got a lawyer. And one day, they were on their way to court in the lawyer's car. Scott's reading the news on his phone, and he sees this story about his case that has something he says he didn't know. His friend Bryan hadn't been just making small trades for a few thousand dollars. The story says Bryan had been placing much bigger trades, says he made $1.27 million. 

LONDON: And I almost threw up right there in the car. And I actually told my attorney, you got to pull over. He was driving. But I just - you know, I was just fearful that I was just going to lose it right there. So I just couldn't believe it. And once I saw that, I said, holy hell. This is - you know, this is obviously going to be a lot worse.

One would think a top-tier CPA, an expert in fiscal compliance, wouldn't need a reminder that a stock tip can used as easily for million-dollar trades as $10,000 ones. Greed is a funny thing, though. What we assume about others' decisions involving the seven deadly sins is usually wrong. 


***

I'm fascinated in a "can't look away from a car wreck" sort of way by the ostensibly well-off, competent people who've humiliated themselves working for this White House. Sean Spicer, for example, had a decent career as a press flack for Congress, then the RNC before becoming a punchline. Rex Tillerson ran the 10th-largest company in the world and then was fired while taking a call on the toilet. (Side note: Who answers the phone on the toilet?)

It's not hard to see similarities between London and the retinue of folks who've sold their soul for a nominally prestigious position. Take John Bolton, the national security advisor. This is a guy who's made his name pushing U.S military intervention is most every world conflict since Reagan was in office. (A short list of countries he's wanted to bomb: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Iraq two different times.) 

Reminder: last year John Bolton called the Russian election interference "an act of war."

Now as national security adviser he puts out an official statement calling investigation of said act of war "witch hunt."

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 25, 2018

Note how quickly Bolton reversed himself on a fundamental view. I wonder if he even acknowledges the switch to himself. In a way, I thought of Scott London when I read that tweet. Both guys made decisions that seem counter to everything they've done up to that point. 

I'm not sure Bolton (or Spicer or Tillerson) could articulate the rationale for the series of choices they led them to hypocrisy and humiliation. But they -- educated and ambitious men, all -- did what they did. 

It's a bleak comedy, sure, but since we have the live their consequences, there's not much for the rest of us to laugh at.

Except for Paul Manafort -- I will be laughing all week at that crook getting methodically destroyed in a federal courthouse.

***

Update on John Bolton's continuing humiliation:

Lol John Bolton just tore out his own mustache https://t.co/FOxH13GhI3

— David Klion 🔥 (@DavidKlion) July 30, 2018

'Look for the helpers'

Name a hospital after this woman already 

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” 

- Fred Rogers

While an awful American betrays his country and as other Americans supinely support this ongoing assault on our values, read about the best person you've never heard of (hat tip to Forrest Dillard for passing on the link to this):

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room 

...Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

...Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was able to speak for only a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her. 

“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.” 

Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a curse Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

(Emphasis mine)

Some things worth pondering:

Burks was doing this in the 1980s when most doctors, let alone the general public, had little knowledge about HIV/AIDS outside of rumors of the "gay plague." We know now that she didn't have a significant risk of being infected herself. At the time, she didn't know that. She went through the red door anyway. 

She did this for years, in anonymity. See more below:

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling Burks, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’...I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.” 

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes out of her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would.

She soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

I remember the political climate regarding AIDS in the 1990s. I'm reasonably sure that if word had gotten out too widely in Hot Springs that Burks was illegally redistributing prescription drugs to HIV-positive gay men, she would've ended up doing hard time. 

To recap, Burks did the following:

• Risked her life
• Risked her savings
• Risked her freedom
• Gave selflessly of her love and time for years in what seemed like a hopeless cause

She did this for a sexual minority facing rampant discrimination from everyone from politicians to health care providers to their own families. She did this for men dying slowly and horribly.

I like to remember that so many of our neighbors are much better than we deserve.

What should we do about the Supreme Court itself?

A wide lens changes perspective

Framing

I'm returning to Amanda Ripley's fantastic article "Complicating the Narrative" about applying professional mediation techniques to writing about conflict in our society. Her first recommendation was to listen to a person, then amplify the contradictions in an answer as a way to tease out nuance. Then, as a person explains more, there's a greater opportunity for common ground.

The second recommendation -- adopt a wider lens -- is useful when you've hit a roadblock in a conflict. The purpose is to "start a bigger conversation," as Ripley writes:

Decades of research have shown that when journalists widen the lens [...] the public reacts differently. Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called “thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother or homeless man).

Again and again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.

Which brings us to the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Mimicking how Mitch McConnell and company treated Obama nominee Merrick Garland, several senators announced their opposition before Trump announced the the pick, citing a corrupt process. It's fait accompli that nearly all Democratic senators will vote against the nomination. 

In short, conflict over Kavanaugh's nomination isn't going to lead us anywhere productive. It's now an exercise in raw power politics. 

We can and should debate the specifics of the nomination. We'll likely have more interesting information in a couple of weeks. For now, let's consider what the Supreme Court could be. 

***
Context

From The Week

First, some factors that got us here:

• Increasing gridlock in Congress made it more difficult to address policy problems through legislation. Major points along this route include instituting the Hastert Rule, banning earmarks, the increasingly regular use of the filibuster (especially during the Obama years), the gutting of campaign finance laws thanks to Citizens United, and the rise of partisan news outlets. 

• This caused presidents of both parties to use executive orders and executive branch rule-making process to enact more policy. 

• This means courts are playing an ever-more important role in deciding how far the president and regulatory agencies can go in enacting policy. This has massive implications for both conservatives and liberals.

• The Supreme Court is one of the few places in the American system where issues can be decided with a sense of finality. This increases the stakes even more.

• The Supreme Court is, by design, not a very democratic (note the small-d) institution. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of lifetime appointments was to insulate its members from the pressures of elections and politicians. 

• Medical advances like vaccines, antibiotics, and various cancer treatments (among hundreds of others) have made the average lifespan of a highly educated American to be much longer than Founders could've imagined. (Life was a little more capricious in the late 1700s.)

• As Republicans have lost the popular vote more often**, they've depended on anti-democratic (again, note the small-d) measures to maintain power. This includes maximizing the number of conservatives in the judiciary, while curtailing the number of judges nominated by Obama. In addition, conservatives built a massive legal infrastructure since the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982 to ensure the farm system always has enough depth.

** George W. Bush's 2004 campaign is the only time the GOP won the popular presidential vote in 30 years. Separately, Democrats in the Senate have consistently gotten more overall votes, but because of the structure of the Senate, control has shifted back and forth between the parties. Republicans and Democrats in the House have alternated winning the overall vote total the past few elections.

***

Widening the Lens

We are at an unhealthy point for our democracy (for this and a lot of other reasons).  The pressures on the high court increases the likelihood it could lose the trust of the public. Too much is riding on 1) the power held by a small number of lifetime appointees, 2) the physical and mental health of nine people, and 3) the arbitrariness by which presidents get to make appointments. It's possible Trump could make two or three more appointments and the 46th president may not have the chance to make any. Finally, the political norms that governed appointments for most of the 20th century are no longer operable. 

Here's an idea: a Constitutional amendment making the following modifications to the judicial branch:

• All federal judges -- district, appeals, and Supreme Court -- serve 15-year appointments. This would end the morbid watch for septuagenarian or octogenarian judges to retire or die. This would also encourage appointing judges in the prime of their careers rather than handing a Supreme Court seat to the youngest plausible jurist. This could also lessen the stakes of potential battles if a justice became senile, but refused to step down.

• Judicial appointments should be on a cycle so that equal numbers of seats are up per year. Each president would get to appoint two Supreme Court justices per four-year presidential term. Voters get a realistic expectation of how much to weigh judicial nominations when deciding on a presidential candidate.

• Each presidential judicial nominee is guaranteed an up-or-down vote in the Senate within six months of her or his nomination or the nominee is automatically appointed to the seat. No filibusters. 

***

Top of the U.S. Supreme Court

This is less about advocating for a specific set of solutions and more about people thinking what our Supreme Court should be. That's a discussion that could ultimately defuse some of the tensions around both the appointment process as well as the high court's decisions themselves. It's always going to matter, but it shouldn't feel like political Armageddon every time a justice retires or dies.

What say you? Leave a comment here or on Twitter or Facebook. 

'When people show you who they are, believe them.'

The reason it is taking a long time to reunite these kids with their parents is that it was never the plan. https://t.co/Ld4KnPgfxo

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 6, 2018

Maya Angelou famously said, "When people show you who are they are, believe them." We need to keep that in mind because the news of child separation at the border is a few weeks old. There's a tendency to forget the mendacity and cruelty.

A timeline:

* The Trump administration, spearheaded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House aide Stephen Miller (a former Sessions aide), implemented a policy of forced separation for all immigrants showing up at the southern border, including those seeking asylum, an internationally protected right.

* After being picked up by border patrol, children were forcibly separated from their parents because their parents were accused of, at worst, a misdemeanor crime. (Note: seeking asylum is not a crime. It is protected by treaty, ratified into the U.S. law by the Senate.) Children and parents were incarcerated in separate locations. In no other context does this happen in America. 

* A federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within a given time period. Note how the judge lays waste the Trump administration's actions:

The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees' release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process.

The facts set forth before the Court portray reactive governance -- responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government's own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.

* After mass outcry, President Trump signed an executive order to reunite the families and jail the entire family together. By ordering to detain the families indefinitely, the government is violating a different court order. 

* For the overwhelming amount of cases, reuniting families hasn't happened. The federal government hasn't tracked which children and parents are connected. From the NYT:

...In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.

As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.

“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification process.

Yet, I've run across a couple of folks (in conversations or on Twitter/Facebook) claiming that the executive order solved the family separation issue. Two things to remember:

1. It did not. See above.
2. Assume for the sake of an argument that it did. Administration officials showed what they are willing to do. Namely, take children away from their parents. 

I don't care what sort of policy end one wants to achieve. If part of the solution involves forcibly taking children away from their parents and not tracking where they go, then the people doing this are committing an evil act. The policy goal is irrelevant. 

Think of this a different way: If I robbed a bank, but gave the money back, the FBI would not forgive and forget. 

One other thing: there's a temptation to put the blame entirely on Trump. That's not quite right. It lets too many people abdicate responsibility. To implement a policy like this takes cooperation from people up and down the federal government hierarchy. Remember the actions Sessions, Miller, and the officers who did things like not even bathe toddlers: 

14. Months. Old. https://t.co/Z3srt7KVco pic.twitter.com/uUgcxgbR0L

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 6, 2018

The people separating children from families have shown us who they are. We should never forget.

***
Update (7/6/18, 4:35 p.m.)

Priorities https://t.co/POUiQFa9Vm

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 6, 2018

***

Yesterday I wrote about how we have multiple views on pretty much every issue. That's true here, too. Even though, I've written quite a bit about immigration and my positions are clear, I can think of some criticisms and conflicting views. 

The nature of these posts is they tend to be strident in one direction. It's worth noting that I believe proper enforcement is necessary. Having a humane and useful immigration system and also improving public safety shouldn't be competing interests. 

In the spirit of bringing out nuance, I'll address some common criticisms of views like mine in the near future. 

Asking the right questions is often about noticing a person's conflicting answers

My brief experience as a professional journalist in 2004-2005 frustrated me in a couple of ways. One is that I rarely felt like I was getting to the real story. I'd go to a board of education meeting or the county supervisors meeting, both full of folks disagreeing about everything short of which day of the week it was. I'd listen to it, interview the people, hear about this view or that one, but never feel like I got to the root of the issue. 

And nothing really changed.

I didn't have a clear picture of why I struggled so much until I read a recent article by Amanda Ripley explaining that I wasn't the only one with this problem. There's an epidemic of not asking the right questions and it's killing the ability of people in our country to talk to each other.

As politicians have become more polarized, [journalists] have increasingly allowed ourselves to be used by demagogues on both sides of the aisle, amplifying their insults instead of exposing their motivations. Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation

Conflict is a fact of life and is a healthy part of a pluralistic society. However, I don't think anyone would argue that our voting public is in a good place. In Ripley's article, she interviews researchers who classify what is going in our country as "intractable conflict."

In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.

(Emphasis mine)

It gets worse.

Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. 

The result of all of this is a situation where everyone is worse off. Something like the equivalent of burning down the house to prevent your ex from getting it. The experience is so scarring, too, that people often overcorrect and refuse to engage in any sort of conflict with anyone. Then, of course, nothing gets solved and problems fester.

So what to do? Ripley interviewed academics psychologists and professional mediators and came away with both a different goal for journalists and some ways to get there. 

The key is solving intractable conflicts is to introduce complexity. It muddles the internal narrative that each of carry about the person opposing us. It also is just a more accurate way of thinking about an issue. Ripley references Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's famous TED talk "A Single Story:" 

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete.

***

Ripley goes on to describe several different techniques for making our stale narratives more complex. It's too much to put into a single post, so I'll focus on one today -- amplifying contradictions. 

Ripley frames this while watching a group interview Oprah conducted with several people, some of whom support Trump and others who oppose him. Two professional mediators joined Ripley to review Oprah's performance. She first interviews a Trump supporter named Tom:

“Every day I love him more and more. Every single day. I still don’t like his attacks, his Twitter attacks, if you will, on other politicians. I don’t think that’s appropriate. But, at the same time, his actions speak louder than words. And I love what he’s doing to this country. Love it.”   

Hearing this, Winfrey turned, without comment, to the woman next to Tom to solicit her (polar opposite) opinion. 

Both mediators jumped all over Winfrey for failing to respond to Tom. It was a perfect opportunity, said Cobb. “I would have said, ‘Gosh Tom, I didn’t know from out of the gate that we were going to have this kind of complexity in the room, and I compliment you because it’s so easy to say Yes or No, but you’ve actually said two things at the same time.”

(Emphasis mine)

Amplifying contradictions is about catching those time we hear a person in conversation say two things at the same time, then asking to explain the contradictions. Not as a "gotcha" moment but rather a way to draw out nuance. 

Listen for the next time someone is talking about their opinion about...well, anything. The thing is, we have multiple views about pretty much any subject. Heck, I've got conflicting views about frying bacon. (I like it prepared medium rare except when in a breakfast burrito. Then I want crispy so it contrasts with the eggs and cheese. See? Nuance!) 

It's weird, but as much as we humans like to talk, we often don't explain enough. Instead, we fall in to the trap of telling a single story. We stereotype ourselves.

Little will change until it costs you lots of money

It will likely take something close to this to substantially move the public's perception of Trump.

Perhaps you, like me, are incensed that our Supreme Court disregards open, expressed religious animus to uphold terrible public policy. 

And maybe you are still furious that we are entertaining bad-faith arguments about who gets to eat at a nice restaurant instead of condemning what seems eerily close to kidnapper's demand: give up your due process rights and the feds will return your children. 

You might have read Michelle Goldberg's op-ed in the NYT today and said to yourself, "Yes. All of this."

Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

Then you read the umpteenth profile of Trump voters and note that Trump's overall approval ratings are creeping up and Republicans approve of him at the same levels they did of George W. Bush, post September 11.

You, like me, might not be stunned so much as a little more cynical. What's it gonna take, huh? How is democracy supposed to work when public opinion doesn't shift much when terrible things are happening?

***

The answer is that we likely won't see a significant change in public opinion until a recession hits. 

One of the more boring truisms of American politics is that politicians in office will, by and large, remain popular when the economy is doing well. If the economy starts to slow, the ruling party is in trouble.

- In 2012, the economy was on its way up, but growth was slow. Barack Obama won small, decisive re-election and the GOP continued to control Congress.
- In 2010, the economy was still in recovery so the Republicans took back both houses of Congress.
- In 2008, the economy was in crisis, and voters elected Barack Obama by a large margin.
- In 2006, the economy was slowing down, though not yet in crisis. Democrats took both houses of Congress. 
- In 2004, the economy was doing well. George W. Bush was comfortably re-elected and Republicans stayed in control of Congress.

It's not that other political issues don't matter. They do, somewhat. For example, major factors in 2006 -- the last Democratic congressional wave -- included the fallout from the Bush administration's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and growing public exhaustion with the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also a mid-term election taking place during an incumbent's sixth year in office -- historically, when voters tire of the president's party. 

A slowing economy in 2006 made all of the above factors much more relevant and drove a massive Democratic victory. 

A bad economy is often the final push that drives dissatisfied voters to the polls, especially in years where the president isn't on the ballot. 

***

If you are a campaign manager and want to put an incumbent out of a job, two methods are the most effective. One is to change the votes of the 5% or so of people who always show up to vote, but regularly split their ballot between the parties. The other is to bring out people who are generally on your side, but typically remember to vote only in presidential years (if that -- see the Democrats in 2016).

Both are difficult to do. When the economy goes south, though, it becomes much easier. A pissed off voter is one who remembers to show up and vote for the out-of-power party.

This happens because voters pay attention to the stock market and jobs. They notice if interest rates are up because it's costing them money when they want to buy a car or take out a mortgage. Voters see if their retirement savings are stagnating or losing value. If their employer, or a relative's, is laying folks off, then they will take their anger out at the polls.

***

The thing about much of our current news is that it's mostly just angered the same people who were already going to vote for a particular party. (Come November, I may vote so hard that I punch a hole through the screen. I can imagine that some of my Fox News-watching compatriots feel the same anger, though directed at a different place.) 

Knowing that, this story in the NYT caught my attention and made me glad that once upon time, I earned an economics degree. (You are forgiven if you skipped over the article after seeing the term "yield curve" in the headline.)

Every recession of the past 60 years has been preceded by an inverted yield curve, according to research from the San Francisco Fed. Curve inversions have “correctly signaled all nine recessions since 1955 and had only one false positive, in the mid-1960s, when an inversion was followed by an economic slowdown but not an official recession,” the bank’s researchers wrote in March.

What's a yield curve? In short, it's the difference between short-term and long-term bond interest rates. Normally, the rate on the long-terms bonds are higher than the short-term. Among other things, this is how banks can make money -- they take in money at long-term rates and loan it out at short-term rates. Pocketing the difference between the two is one way banks make money. 

If the rates invert, banks aren't profiting from loans and will put the brakes on many types of loans. This matters because debt fuels the American economy.

Currently, the long and short-term rates are close to equalling each other, but haven't yet inverted. It may not lead to an immediate recession, but there's reason for pessimism about the long-term economy -- say, a couple months to two years from now.

From the NYT:

The yield curve, once it inverts, has a track record of signaling that a recession is coming.

percentage points

4

2

0

-2

0.34 pct. pts.

’85

’90

’95

’00

’05

’10

’15

⟵Recession

This downward trend is what a flattening yield curve looks like.
↙     

Another way of thinking about this is the economy is cyclical. It's been growing for about eight years. That's a long time in the life of a growth cycle. Eventually, there will be a correction. 

If it happens by this fall, Trump will see a chunk of his popularity erode and a bunch of GOP congressmen will lose their jobs. Trump's administration will then spend the next two years answering subpoenas from a Democratic congressional committees. If a Supreme Court seat is vacated, Democratic senators could channel Mitch McConnell and leave it open. 

So, you know, nothing big riding on this. 

Liam Neeson isn't walking through that door

The central myth of the Taken movies is that you would probably be able to do something if armed men took your kids. 

I know, I know -- it's probably different with you. Maybe you studied taekwondo. Perhaps you own a gun or even many guns. I even know a couple of folks who own AR-15s. Maybe you're just a big ol' boy and no one can take you.

Plus, the adrenaline would carry you, right? Everybody's heard that story about the car that trapped the kids and the 5-foot, 100 pound mom lifted the car so the kids could escape. Parenting elicits such powerful emotions that we would be able to do the same, right?

Thing is, armed law enforcement officers exercise their will on the public every day. They even do this to people who possess weapons. It's central to how our justice system operates. Most of the time, this is a right and necessary use of state power. 

Except when it's not. 

***

I bring this up because I've run across comments along the lines of "Well, they wouldn't take my kids," or "I would defend my family."

This line of thinking is pernicious for couple of reasons. First, it's subtly dehumanizing of the actual people who did have their children ripped away from them. They don't love their kids any less than I love mine or you love yours. Their adrenaline was coursing through their veins the instant they realized that their child disappeared behind that door.

Second, it understates our government's power. It makes it seem like some how, some way, the parent could've chosen to keep their children. 

(I can hear the retort already -- "They shouldn't have brought them in the first place." You try raising your child in a town where drug cartels are the de facto government and tell me you wouldn't do everything possible to get the hell out of there.)

For most of us, if a person wearing a uniform and badge and holding a gun tells you to do something, you do it. 

***

In a civilized society, law enforcement officers make an implicit promise that they wield this awesome power responsibly. 

On our southern border, this promise has been grotesquely broken.  

Consular offices are often involved in cases of unaccompanied migrant youth, especially when children want to return to their countries voluntarily. But this situation was “atypical,” according to José Vicente Chinchilla, the consul general of El Salvador, because they did not even know children separated from their families were coming to New York, let alone how many.

The Washington Post reported (I can't link because of paywall) about an immigration judge blowing up at a prosecutor because parents of separated children hadn't been given any way of tracking where their children are. 

We have entrusted the power to separate children from their parents to people who are too evil, craven, or stupid to understand the gravity of their jobs as public servants.  

In a more perfect world, Liam Neeson would take care of this problem and hold the relevant parties accountable. 

In our highly flawed world, it falls on us. In the short term, outrage works. 

In the longer term, elect people who take seriously the basic responsibilities of government. 

***

Update:

It is shockingly difficult for immigration attorneys to locate children separated from their parents at the border. Today I spoke to lawyers who represent more than 400 parents. They've located two children.

— Kevin Sieff (@ksieff) June 22, 2018

An anecdote about asylum seekers

When I lived in Denver a few years ago, I taught a student who came to this country because if she and her family had stayed in their home country, they faced a credible threat from the Zetas. Her older brother had already been murdered by gang members. The way the cartels operate, the entire family was now a target for harassment, extortion, and kidnapping.

In an alternate reality, my former student could've ended up coerced into a life that is the nightmare for any parents of a teenage daughter.

Faced with an impossible choice, they uprooted their lives and sought asylum at the U.S. border.

When people face a strong likelihood of persecution if they return to their homes, especially in certain places where their governments don't have the ability to protect them, American law permits them legal entry as refugees.

***

I try to imagine suddenly needing to leave Nashville with my family, giving up my home for no money, and moving to a place where we didn’t speak the language. I imagine giving up my way of earning a living because that likely won’t travel to the new place, either. I imagine doing this while grieving the loss of my son. The scale of it all is unfathomable.

Yet that is what my student’s family -- and tens of thousands like them -- did.

These families are who we, through our Border Patrol authorized by the government we elected, are arresting and separating at the border. 

These families, likely already traumatized, are being ripped apart by public servants acting in our name. 

***

Immigration, including and especially taking in refugees, makes our country better off. (Read the studies, if you'd like.) Contra Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Bible, and Jesus in particular, is quite clear about what should be done for impoverished, desperate strangers fleeing persecution.

We empathize best through stories though, and this one has a happy ending. My former student is now in college, training to be a teacher. Her other brother is in high school. Her parents rebuilt their lives, working incredible hours at tough jobs. Their children are thriving because of their sacrifice.

***

The potential we each have within us is a delicate thing. Single, cruel acts can reverberate across families and generations. Rebuilding one’s promise after such cruelty takes enormous effort. For every story that ends like my former student’s, dozens more have a tragic conclusion.

When our country opens its doors to those in need, we all benefit.

The opposite is also true.