The FBI issue

FBI director James Comey did something highly unusual and highly unorthodox when he announced, apparently without the consent or agreement of the agents working the Clinton email investigation, that the FBI would not be recommending prosecution for her security breaches. He then did something else quite unorthodox when he released to Congress, but under very tight restrictions, some of the documentation about the investigation. And now he has done yet another unorthodox thing in writing to Congress, 10 days before the election, about reopening the email investigation with the newly-discovered Clinton emails on top Clinton aide Huma Abedin's laptop.

A number of sources report severe internal dissension within the FBI about Comey's actions, including a number of pending high-profile resignations (insiders say he has a stack of resignation letters on his desk by now). And of course by now he has infuriated both the Republicans and the Democrats. Moreover recent revelations make it pretty clear that the investigation itself was highly unorthodox (unnecessary immunity deals, no grand jury empaneled to allow the FBI to issue subpoenas, agreement to destroy the relevant laptops, agreement to limit questioning, etc, etc).  It certainly looks from the outside like the whole thing was fixed from the beginning to assure Hillary wouldn't face charges.  And in fact the agent originally in charge of the investigation, John Giacalone, resigned in disgust midway through the investigation, telling friends the investigation was "going sideways" (Washington slang for being politically manipulated).

Some writers are guessing that Comey jumped at the chance to reopen the investigation in order to try to repair his reputation, and/or perhaps to repair the reputation of the FBI, and get some of the heat off of himself. We will see. My guess is that we won't see the results of this new investigation until after the election, and that no one will have the guts to charge a president-elect with a criminal case. Of course if Trump defies the odds yet again and wins the election, Hillary will indeed be in a world of hurt.

Bill Clinton vs Bill Cosby

Several writers recently have asked an interesting question: Bill Cosby is accused of molesting a number of women, and paying off one or more of them, and is being treated as an outcast because of it. Bill Clinton is accused of molesting a number of women, and paying off one or more of them, and yet is still much loved by a large portion of the nation. What is the difference?  Is it because Bill Cosby is black and Bill Clinton is white? Is it because Bill Clinton is a Washington insider and Bill Cosby isn't? Is it because Hillary defends Bill Clinton but not Bill Cosby?

It is an interesting question.

Campus Rape Outrage

Fact: TENS OF THOUSANDS! Of young women, and a few young men, will be raped on college campuses this academic year.

Fact: The vast majority of those rapes will be committed by a very small number of serial rapist students, a disproportionate number of whom are popular athletes on campus and/or members of a few fraternities. Almost none will even be expelled, let alone prosecuted.

Fact: College administrators and college police, and even local police, will usually do little or nothing about this – and in fact will belittle the victims, threaten them, and try to talk them out of any legal action, all to “protect” the image of and donations to the college.

Want to know more? See the 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground.  College administrators, board members and powerful alumni are trying to suppress it, and deny it is accurate – but it is. 

People who are (rightly) upset about Donald Trump’s boorish and sexist locker room comments ought by rights to be rioting in the streets about college rape and rapists who are never prosecuted, and hanging effigies of college deans and presidents from lamp posts. But they aren’t.

Among the other institutional, bureaucratic, and political abuses  that are driving much of the current voter anger this year, this issue of college rape, and especially the institutional cover ups about it, ought to be prominent. It is every bit as bad as the child abuses in the Catholic Church, and it ought to stoke as much anger.

What’s next?

Unless there are some stunning surprises in the next couple of weeks, this election is pretty much over. We will get Hillary as president, perhaps with a slim majority in Congress for the next 2 years; perhaps not.

I expect it will be a difficult presidency for her. A fair proportion of the country will be against her – all Trump supporters and many of the Sanders supporters. I think there will be a real feeling among some 30-40% or more of the country that she is an illegitimate president, an unindicted felon who should have been disqualified, if not fined and jailed, for her carelessness with classified materials, but who managed to stay on the ballot because of insider tampering with the FBI and the justice system.

And I don’t expect the Trump effect to go away. Trump himself may well remain a political force (I read that his son has been in talks about setting up a Trump TV network), but even if he fades back into celebrity obscurity the voter anger that has fueled his campaign will still be there, and I expect in the next presidential election four years from now someone – perhaps Ted Cruz – will try to resurrect the Trump voting block.

If Clinton gets a temporary majority in both houses of Congress it will be interesting to see if she learned anything from the Obamacare debacle, or if she will try to force through a progressive agenda without any bipartisan support. A temporary majority in the Senate will at least allow her to appoint some liberal judges to the Supreme Court, but that might turn out to be about her most effective action as president, especially if the House remains in Republican hands.

In retrospect it is amazing that both political parties managed to field such unsuitable candidates. By all measures the Republicans should have won this election in a walk, especially against a candidate as unpopular as Clinton. Yet they managed to bungle it anyway.

Well, this election has upset lots of things. It will be interesting to see if any effective reforms come out of it in either political party.

Recommended: America's Russia Policy Has Failed

There is a good article in this month's Foreign Affairs: America's Russia Policy Has Failed. It is clear that the Obama administration has been outfoxed and wrong-footed time and time again by President Putin, and is even now being humiliated by Russia in Syria, to the point where Russia is telling us where we can and cannot fly over Syria. But the article argues that the American problem runs deeper than just Obama's naivete - that the Washington foreign policy consensus over the past few decades on how to handle Russia is wrong and needs to be rethought.

This is a good article, worth reading.

Media statistics

I suggested months ago that Trump had an uphill battle because the entire Washington establishment – Republican and Democratic alike – opposed him because he was an outsider who threatened their cozy world. He of course has made their job easier by his intemperate campaign and manifest unsuitability for the job. But even if he had been an outstanding candidate they still would have done their best to bring him down.

The current media statistics show just how biased the mainstream media has become. A recent article in The Hill reported that a review of the tapes of the evening news over the period when this last flap occurred showed that NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news together devoted a total of 23 minutes to coverage of the attacks on Trump for his sexism, but only a total (across all three networks!) of 57 seconds to the revelations about Hillary from the hacked WikiLeaks emails.

Of course sex sells better than substance in the media, but 23 minutes (favoring Hillary) to 57 seconds (favoring Trump)? Hardly an unbiased press!

What is America’s real condition?

There is an old saying that the optimist sees the glass half full, while the pessimist see it as half empty (an engineer sees the wrong size glass). That seems to be the case in this election.

In truth, the biggest difference between supporters of Clinton and supporters of Trump is their estimate of how well America is doing. Hillary supporters think America is doing great and we just need to keep doing what we have been doing for the past eight years.  Trump supporters think America is in trouble and we really need to change some things. So which view is correct?

Well, certainly America remains for the moment the world’s economic powerhouse. While the economies of Europe, China and Russia are in trouble, the American economy, even at its current slow pace of recovery, is the one global bright spot. And the American military remains far and away the most powerful in the world, at least on paper. American productivity, as ranked recently by tech company PGI, ranks third in the world, behind Germany (first) and France (second) – not too shabby, but a decline from recent decades. The World Intellectual Property Organization ranks America first in number of patents granted worldwide (27.9% in 2013), though Japan and China are rapidly catching us.

If you are a liberal (though not necessarily a Hillary fan), this supports your belief that Obama’s eight years in office have been at least satisfactory, if not outstanding.

On the other hand the Obama administration added $6.5 trillion dollars to the national debt over seven years, a 56% increase (the Bush administration added 10%, the Clinton administration added 32%).  That national debt (including foreign debt), according to the IMF, now stands at 104.5% of GDP, which is generally considered to be well into the danger zone for any economy.  In education, against other industrialized nations, our secondary students rank 16th in science and 23^rd in math, not very good considering we spend more money per student than all but four other nations (Austria, Luxemburg, Norway and Switzerland).  The US murder rate overall isn’t too bad (5 per 100,000 vs a world average of 4.7 per 100,000), but for African Americans it is astronomical (19.1 per 100,000, and most of them committed by other African Americans). Chicago has passed 500 murders so far this year. Wage inequality has been rising steadily for the past 35 years, with the top 10% getting most of the increases in recent years. And while our military is the strongest in the world on paper, we are flying 50 year old B52 bombers and 44 year old KC-135 tankers, sailing 38 year old submarines, and our underground nuclear missile silos still use floppy disks in their computers.

Beyond that, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked, and as all the recently leaked emails reveal, the Washington political system (including the media, and apparently even the FBI) has become seriously corrupted.

If you are not a liberal (though not necessarily a Trump fan), this supports your belief that things need to change.

A useful article to read in this regard is Victor David Hanson’s American Civilization Paralysis. Hanson is a classical scholar, and he sees parallels between the decline of past great empires and America today.  Empires, he argues, decline when they can no longer bring themselves to reform and make the changes they need to make to survive – it is simply easier to keep the status quo than to make painful but necessary adjustments.  Have we reached that stage?

In general, I think America needs to make some (often painful) changes to prevent or reverse the decline – cut government spending, increase taxes, make rational if painful decisions about our priorities (infrastructure repair may be more important than some social programs), reform the political system (such as eliminating gerrymandering).  That doesn’t mean I think Trump is the one to lead this (I don’t), but it does mean I don’t think Clinton’s “more of the same” approach is right either.  

Revelation

So what has this election revealed about America and the American political system today? I would suggest at least the following:

1.      That George Washington was right in his farewell speech about the dangers of political parties:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

2.      That the ruling elites of both political parties, living for the most part in exclusive and expensive East Coast enclaves isolated from the rest of America, have gotten pretty far out of touch with the life of average American voters, and the concerns of those votes.

3.      That both parties have lost control of their nominating process, at least for the presidential candidates. Trump, an outsider, completely destroyed the Republican field, and Hillary’s insider connections with the DNC and the press ensured that no candidate could possibly displace her this time like Obama did last time, despite how unpopular she is with the majority of the voters of both parties.

4.      That the mainstream press outlets are now pretty much completely subservient to one party or the other, and hardly a dependable independent voice anymore, if they ever were.

5.      That the Justice Department and the FBI are apparently now susceptible to political influence. The DOJ was always suspect in this regard, since the Attorney General is a political appointee, but the FBI used to be better than this.

6.      That neither party has a viable plan for any of the major issues facing the nation: ISIS and terrorism, the Middle East wars, the new aggressiveness of Russia and China, stimulating the economy, the growing national debt, healthcare costs, the lagging US educational system, repairing our crumbling infrastructure, etc, etc.

This is not encouraging. We have ended up with two completely unsuitable presidential candidates (and in fact their major primary opponents were equally unsuitable), and no debate worth speaking of on the really important national issues. Nor do I see any prospect that this situation will improve, whichever candidate wins.

Recommended: On the Lewdness of Trump & the Culture of The Lie

Rebecca Teti posted a good article: On the Lewdness of Trump & the Culture of The Lie. As she points out, the very media that is decrying Trump's boorish locker room talk has at the same time itself been feeding that same lewdness for decades.  She too sees the hypocrisy. 

The current Trump flap

Trump’s comments in a private conversation 11 years ago certainly are sexist and insensitive, even boorish, and I don’t excuse or condone them, but the level of hypocrisy and partisanship being displayed by the press and politicians about this is astounding. I would bet that a very large proportion of the males in this country have made sexist, homophobic or racists comments in private conversations sometime in the past dozen years, and I would bet that a fair number of the male politicians and media stars who are pretending to be so outraged about this would be embarrassed to have some of their own past behavior made public.

Meanwhile the press is remarkably silent about the concurrent revelations that Clinton has been telling the banking world in private to ignore her public promises – she really doesn’t mean them and has no intention of implementing them. It seems to me this is actually more alarming than the confirmation that Trump is a sexist asshole – we already knew that.  But of course the press is predominantly liberal, and has hardly been even-handed in reporting this election.

It will be interesting to see how Trump deals with this in tonight’s debate.  My guess is that Hillary will bait him and he will take the bait and continue to self-destruct.  But in fact Hillary hardly has the moral high ground here, unless one forgets how viciously and publically she trashed and attacked the women that her husband seduced.

Nothing about this makes me want either one as president, or even think that either one is suitable for the office.

Scott Adams

I like point 14 from Scott Adam's post today, in response to questions about the infamous Trump tapes just released:

Trump wasn't running for Pope.  He never claimed moral authority. His proposition has been that he's an asshole (essentially), but we need an asshole to fight ISIS, ignore lobbyists, and beat up Congress. Does it change anything to have confirmation that he is exactly what you thought he was?

Adams still gives Trump a 98% chance of winning (not that he wants him to), and thinks there will be a lot more entertaining news before we reach voting day. There has been widespread speculation that the Russians, perhaps via Wikileaks, will release a great deal of hacked stuff very damaging to Hillary just before election day. But I would guess that at this point not much of anything will change people's minds about either candidate.

A dangerous moment

This week’s revelations about the two presidential candidates  – the leaked tape of Trump’s comments about women and the leaked contents of Hillary’s speeches to Wall Street groups -  doesn’t really change anyone’s opinion about either of them.  Trump is an arrogant, sexist entrepreneur and Hillary is an arrogant, deceitful politician – that is hardly new news.  We have two badly flawed candidates, or as a British friend put it to me recently, ”the evil of two lessers”.  Whichever one we elect will be despised by half the electorate, and only grudgingly supported by most of the remaining voters.  This hardly makes for a mandate of any sort.

Of far more concern, really, is the increased aggressiveness of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as a number of other despots around the world.  Not since the presidency of Jimmy Carter have the world’s bullies felt they had such a free hand. President Obama may have though he was being measured and thoughtful, but his opponents see him as weak and indecisive – probably from the moment Assad stepped over Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons in Syria and Obama failed to follow through on this theat. Now in the final lame-duck months of his term they are testing him mercilessly, and he is looking pretty ineffective.

Matthew Continetti has a thoughtful article in today’s Washington Free Beacon; The Guns of October. He argues that this is a dangerous time.  It is worth reading this in the light of the upcoming election.  Hillary will probably be elected; she is a cold war warrior by nature anyway, and in addition will be out to prove a woman can be as tough as a man.  Besides, she really hates Putin, not least because he is obviously meddling in the US election against her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a dangerous faceoff with Russia early in her term.

All of which is to say that this ugly election is probably only the beginning of a difficult decade or more for America. Hillary may live to rue the day she was elected.

What is really worrying about Clinton's email scandal

Hillary Clinton's decision to use a private insecure personal server to store classified emails has been as issue all through this campaign.  And it worries me.  If I or any other ordinary citizen had done what she has done, we would be in Federal prison right now.  On the other hand Hillary's paranoia and general carelessness with the truth is no different than that of many other politicians, including her current opponent. And we have seen repeatedly in recent years that Washington insiders (agency heads, member of Congress, influential lobbyists, etc.) get special treatment.   So in that sense she simply represents "business as usual" in today's Washington world.

What worries me far more is the increasing evidence that the FBI deliberately slanted the investigation so as to ensure she was not indicted. I won't detail all the revelations that have been coming out over the past few weeks, but it is clear that sweet deals were cut with her staff to (a) give them immunity, (b) limit the questions that could be asked of them, and (c) destroy their laptops after the investigation so that no one could review them later. The staff, of course, were remarkably forgetful and unhelpful about crucial details, even with immunity.

Even so, the case Director James Comey laid out in his public statement exonerating Clinton didn't add up. Even after all the special deals, he still couldn't make a convincing case that Clinton shouldn't be prosecuted, while the government was at the same time sending several lower-level people to jail for far less serious infractions of the security codes.

I hear from friends with contacts in the intelligence services that  those services were very disturbed indeed about some of the emails she exposed, and that agents and sources may have lost their lives as a result. If that is true, it is a travesty that Hillary paid absolutely no price for her carelessness and thoughtlessness.

But Clinton's infractions, and her ability to evade the consequences, don't worry me nearly as much as the demonstration that the FBI - supposedly above politics and corruption - clearly isn't. During the Nixon debacle they managed not to get entangled in the coverup, much to their credit.  Indeed, in the end it turned out it was a member of the FBI itself that provided the clues that helped exposed the whole sorry affair. (FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was apparently "Deep Throat").  It looks like the Washington corruption has over the ensuring years even invaded the FBI.  Now that is really something to worry about.

What should have been (but wasn't) debated in this election

All elections are won essentially on emotional grounds and issues rather than rational ones. Politicians promise things they know perfectly well they can't deliver but that sound good, and voters tend to vote "tribally" (Republican or Democratic, regardless of how good or bad the candidate is).  This election is no different.  But in this election the emotional issues (immigration, income inequality, the unlikability and sleazyness of both candidates) have been so dominate that there has been almost no discussion of the real issues facing the country.  If we had a rational election, what might be the real policy issues that would have been debated?  Here is my current suggested list:

Priority 1: As I have argued before, everything else depends on the economy. A strong economy can afford to spend money on things both conservatives want (defense) and liberals want (social programs). An anemic economy can support neither.So the first priority should go to finding ways to keep the maximum number of people employed at the highest possible wages, producing the greatest possible tax base. That implies at least:

1. Improving the quality of US education (now well below the mean level of first world nations)  to better prepare the young for the workforce, and to effectively retrain workers put out of work by shifting trade patters and technological advances.

2. Repairing and improving the national infrastructure that supports the economy.

3. Reducing the national debt - currently over 100% of GDP when external debt is included - so that much of the 6% of the federal budget ($223 BILLION a year) that is devoted to debt service can be redirected to other priorities. Also, a reduced federal debt would leave more latent capacity for federal deficit spending next time we face a fiscal crisis.

4. Supporting directly and encouraging indirectly (with tax policy) increased research and development to keep the nation at the forefront of new technologies that might power the economy in coming generations.

5. A rational reassessment of the regulatory environment in the US.  Regulations are essential, but as is inevitable with a huge federal bureaucracy, regulations have gotten far out of hand, with multiple federal agencies having overlapping jurisdictions and sometimes even imposing conflicting regulations. A 2014 report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimated that complying with federal regulation, including preparing and filing all the associated paperwork, costs US businesses about $1.8 TRILLION per year, or about  $15,000 for every household in the nation. And that is undoubtedly a significant underestimate, because it doesn't include the lost opportunity costs - that money and effort  could instead have produced a great deal of additional production or research.

6. A rational reassessment of federal corporate tax policy. On the one hand we have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world.  On the other hand it has so many special interest loopholes that many huge companies pay almost no tax at all.  Clearly it needs a complete overhaul and simplification.

Priority 2: Fixing the broken national political system. Political power inevitably invites abuse and corruption - that has been true all through history and is still true today; it is simply human nature.  The founders of our nation recognized that, and tried to establish a system to at least control and limit the abuses.  First, they divided power among three branches of government, two of them directly elected, so that each branch could be a check on the other two. Second, they gave Congress, a large body of regularly elected people, the sole power to make laws and appropriate funds and declare war - the president can only sign or veto what Congress proposes. Third, they severely limited the power of the federal government, leaving most power in the hands of the individual states, so that the states could act as a check on the power of the federal government.

We have allowed almost all of these safeguards to be overturned by ambitious politicians, and as a consequence are paying the price for our negligence and foolishness. We have allowed the growth of a huge new fourth unelected branch of government, the federal bureaucracy (over 430 federal departments, agencies and sub agencies at last count) that can impose regulations and exact fines and shape policy, yet are not directly accountable to voters or in many cases even to Congress. We have allowed the executive office (the presidency) to arrogate to itself critical powers that only Congress should have (such as waging war or effectively changing laws by failing to enforce laws they don't like). We have allowed the federal government to arrogate increasing powers from the states, removing the restraint that states should have on federal overreach. And in Congress we have allowed gerrymandering to make most of the seats comfortable lifetime sinecures rather than regularly elected positions responsive to voters concerns. Less that 10% of seats in the House of Representative are competitive - the rest are "safe" for one party or the other because of blatant gerrymandering..

It is not at all clear how to overhaul this situation, especially since the political elite have every incentive to keep the status quo. However we badly need to (a) reduce the ability of wealthy individuals, corporations and special interest groups to essentially buy legislation and federal agency rulings in their favor. and (b) make the whole system - legislators and agency bureaucracy alike - more accountable to voters for their actions or inaction.

There are many other things that need to be done, but I would argue that these are the two top priorities at the moment. Too bad both have been largely ignored in this election.

After the election

It seems increasingly likely that Hillary Clinton will win this election, perhaps carrying into the beginning of her term at least a slim Senate majority, though almost certainly still facing a Republican-dominated House. She could still lose it if there is some new last-minute very damaging revelation, but it would have to be very, very damaging indeed to have any effect, because the majority of the electorate seems to have already made up their minds. Trump meanwhile is self-destructing, unable to keep his cool and stay on message or resist responding over the top to provocations, and Hillary has learned to provoke him, as she did in the first debate.

Of course this general upset in the voting populace is just beginning. Hillary's election won't put an end to it by any means. The Trump Republicans will be furious, and will obstruct her at every turn, and the Bernie Sanders Democrats will be disappointed by her inaction on the issues they care about. Expect a disastrous 2019 mid-term election for the Democrats, who already face difficult demographics in that election (Democrats will defend 25 Senate seats to the the Republican's 8).

Hillary's major populist domestic policy proposals, thing like free college education for everyone and expanded Medicare and Medicaid eligibility, will go nowhere not only because the Republican House will obstruct them, but because there is no way to pay for them.  Like Obamacare, they are fiscally unsustainable. Meanwhile she will face severe difficulties with Obamacare, which is collapsing and is still, to this day, unpopular with a majority of the electorate. And she may well face another mini-recession, just because they tend to come at 8-10 year intervals  and we are overdue.

Internationally she will face a series of intractable issues - Brexit fallout, the general disarray in the EU, China's continuing aggressiveness in the South China sea, Russia's spoiler role in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, North Korea's continuing nuclear and missile advances, the endless Middle Eastern wars, and perhaps a new Israeli-Palestinian clash, which also comes in cycles and is overdue. These are all no-win situations for any president, however competent they are, so people will no doubt be disappointed however she responds.

That suggests that the next president, whoever she/he is, will likely be a one-term president, meaning that this whole election upset will repeat again after four years. If, as is likely, the Democrats take the White House, they will not feel the need to rethink their strategies and positions.  The Republicans, on the other hand will have to look at this disastrous election and rethink a lot of things.  It will be interesting to watch the internal Republican civil war and see how, in the end, they reshape the party.