US Agriculture and the Dependence on Undocumented Workers

Agriculture is one of humanity’s oldest and most important technologies.  For most of our history crop production was characterized by a high concentration of labor.  It has been said that when we first began to organize into collective entities with industrial-scale grain production, the labor was so intense that workers essentially had to be enslaved by those in power to keep them from running away.  Humans, like plants and animals, had to be domesticated to accommodate the demands of agriculture.  Technology would improve over time and lessen the burden, but it would require the twentieth century inventions of fossil-fuel-driven machines to virtually eliminate manual labor.  Crops like corn can be planted and harvested with machines doing almost all the work.  However, there still exist crops that have resisted full automation and continue to require difficult and unpleasant labor.  Consider the humble tomato plant.  It produces numerous fruit over a period of several months, so it must be harvested continuously as the individual tomato reaches the right stage for picking.  This involves a lot of unskilled labor.

If owners of agricultural land had to pay a market price for labor, the cost of the produce might become too high to find buyers.  The traditional response of landowners was to resort to some form of servitude such as slavery, serfdom, or sharecropping.  Wealthy countries such as the OECD nations have high labor costs making labor-intensive agriculture relatively inefficient.  Since forms of servitude are generally highly restricted now, the only option is to seek guest workers willing to work at the lowest rate.  Often, this still does not provide cost-effectiveness and nations must decide if they wish to subsidize some of their agricultural products (or place tariffs on foreign produce) to allow them to compete in the marketplace.  No country wishes to be totally dependent on imported food from low-wage nations.  Consequently, some form of accommodation must be made to keep the price of desirable products tolerable.

Although, some of the founding fathers of the United States liked to think of it as a nation of small farmers, the most efficient early agricultural model involved large tracts of land worked by slaves.  After a huge amount of new fertile land became available after the Louisiana Purchase, the only people who could clear that land and put it into productive service were the large slaveholders.  This further entrenched the plantation model for agriculture in the southern regions.

The plantation system in the South produced cotton for the international market and provided the United States with the funds it could use to develop its other industries.  Not all the wealth became available to the plantation owners.  The North controlled credit and international transportation which siphoned off a considerable fraction of the profit.  The North also imposed high tariffs on imported goods to protect its fledgling industries.  Since the South devoted nearly all of its resources to producing cotton, the majority of its other needs had to be purchased from the North at above international market prices, further enriching the North at its expense.  The South has been instinctively in favor of free-market trade and has been mad at the North ever since.

After the end of slavery, large landowners tried to maintain the plantation model by various schemes to create indentured labor.  The South could resort to cheap black labor purchased from prisons, or they could reinvent the serf model and call it sharecropping.  Technology and mechanization would eventually change even that region.

There remain agricultural pursuits that still require difficult and intense labor.  These generally involve crops that must be picked by hand.  Michael Greenberg produced an interesting and revealing article on the state of agriculture in the Central Valley of California.  It was titled In the Valley of Fear and appeared in the New York Review of Books.  What is clear from Greenberg’s presentation is that the plantation model is still alive and well with undocumented immigrant labor taking the place of slaves.

“The revenue from all the crops harvested here and elsewhere in California is $47 billion a year, more than double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state. Most of this revenue benefits a few hundred families, some with as many as 20,000 or even 40,000 acres of land.”

“Plantations on the west side of the Valley are so huge that managers keep track of workers by flying over the fields in planes. Computers monitor the release of water, which is delivered to the plants with an intricate system of pipes and valves. ‘It’s prisons and plantations, nothing else,’ Paul Chavez, the son of Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union (UFW), told me. ‘You can’t even get an education in these places. According to the state of California’s own survey, in farmworker towns barely 30 percent of school teachers are accredited’.”

In the 1950s one could still find 10-15% of whites working the fields with the remainder being a mixture of minorities.  However, the nature of the work is such that now only the most desperate for employment will perform it.

“Today, at least 80 percent of farmworkers are undocumented Mexicans, the majority of them Mixteco and Trique, indigenous people from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Guerrero—the poorest regions in Mexico—who speak no or very little Spanish, much less English. Most of them have been working the fields for at least a decade, have established families here, and live in terror of la migra, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is called, and instant deportation or imprisonment that would wrench them from their children.”

It has often been claimed that undocumented migrants take jobs away from citizens.  Greenberg provides this perspective on that issue.

“In response to the argument that immigrants steal jobs from Americans by undercutting their wages, the UFW set up a website offering citizens and legal residents agricultural jobs anywhere in the country through state employment services. This was in 2010, during the Great Recession. The website received about four million hits, out of which around 12,000 people filled out employment forms. Of these, a total of twelve citizens or legal residents actually showed up for work. Not one of them lasted longer than a day. According to a Los Angeles Times report, Silverado, a farm labor contractor in Napa, ‘has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum.’ A wine grower in Stockton couldn’t lure unemployed citizens for $20 an hour.”

There are reasons besides money that make agricultural labor uninviting for those who might have other options.  Greenberg visited a tomato field and observed the picking.

“Because of the heat, the workday lasted from 5 to 10 AM, when temperatures rose to 113 degrees. The sun beat down, but everyone was covered from head to foot in several layers of clothes: cracked baseball caps anchored in place by hoodies and homemade scarves, sweatshirts over sweatshirts, two pairs of pants, heavy socks and boots; only eyes and cheeks and fingers were exposed. This was to protect against pesticides. Cancer rates among pickers throughout the Valley are high. The soil is so hardened by chemicals that it comes up in the hand in dry, pale stone-like clumps. In the heat the chemicals rise potently from the earth; within an hour I tasted them burning in my mouth.”

However, there are limits to what such workers will endure.  They do not allow their children to be caught up in the same system.

“Fruit and vegetable picking is a one-generation job—farmworkers I spoke to neither wanted nor would allow their children to follow them into the fields. The heat and physical toll, combined with the feudal power of the growers, make it preferable to work in an air-conditioned hotel or packing house, where you can stand upright and be free of pesticides for the same low wages.”

In order for owners to maintain a dependable supply of pickers there is a need for new illegal immigrants to replace those who are deported or are no longer able to do the job. 

“Since 2005 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving. And this isn’t only because of a crackdown at the border. In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6 million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016 the number was 192,969.2 Ed Taylor, an economist at UC Davis, estimates that the number of potential immigrants from rural Mexico shrinks every year by 150,000. This can be partly explained by improved economic conditions in northern and central Mexico, which have dimmed the allure of minimum-wage labor in the US, and partly by the cost and danger of venturing across the border. If you do make it into the US, payments to a smuggler can keep a minimum-wage laborer in debt for life.”

The supply of pickers has not been keeping up with demand.

“As things stand, there is a labor shortage the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen in at least ninety years. It has prompted growers to rip out labor-intensive fruits like table grapes and plant almond trees, which require relatively few workers. Housing costs, especially in the Coastal Valley, have made it even harder to attract and keep workers. In recent years, millions of dollars’ of unpicked crops have been plowed under or left to rot in the fields.”

The growers would prefer that traditional system of employing migrants—legal or not—could continue.  But in the current environment where the Trump administration is attempting to deport everyone it legally can and make life so miserable for the rest that they will choose to leave on their own, that is highly unlikely.  This system could be replaced by a viable guest worker program, but that is complicated by the existence of the current, largely undocumented, workforce.  Could such a program recognize their need to maintain their jobs, income and families, or would it require that they all be deported to make way for the new system?  There is an existing program designed for “emergency” needs, but growers do not see it as a viable solution.

“Under the current guest-worker law, which is intended to address emergency labor shortages, guest workers are expensive: employers must pay for their travel from and back to their country of origin and provide housing during the term of their contract, which cannot exceed one year. The law is designed to discourage businesses from engineering a labor surplus by importing unlimited numbers of Mexicans and undercutting workers who already live in the US, as growers did under the Bracero Program (whose name comes from the Spanish word for manual laborer) from 1942 to 1964, in response to the agricultural labor shortage during World War II.”

That law seems to recognize the replacement and deportation of all current undocumented workers as an unacceptable solution.  There is a bill before Congress, that has not yet gained the number of supporters needed to pass, that illustrates the current administration’s approach to these issues.

“A bill sponsored by Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia seeks to weaken—and in some instances abolish—employer requirements, such as mandatory housing and transportation, in order to create a vast pool of two million or more regulated guest workers. Passage of the bill, its sponsors believe, will make it economically feasible to do away with hiring undocumented workers from Mexico and to deport virtually every one of them already living in the US.”

This passage describes the conditions of employment envisaged under the Goodlatte bill.

“Under the Goodlatte bill, guest workers could be hired for up to three years and would be paid the minimum wage in the state they are brought to—$7.25 in Texas, $8.25 in Florida, $10 in Arizona, $11 in California, all states that use a substantial number of farmworkers. Crucially, they would not be allowed to bring their spouses or children. And they could only work for the contractor who hired them. If they experienced wage theft or maltreatment on the job, they would have no recourse to seek justice or find work elsewhere. If fired, they would be immediately deported, at their own expense. If they fled, they would be hunted as outlaws. At least 10 percent of their wages would be withheld until the contract expired, to make sure that they left the country.”

Technically, such conditions would qualify as indentured servitude, but it should more properly be recognized for what it is—a modern form of slavery.  It is disturbing to consider that this nation was born accepting slavery as a viable social option, and now, after about 250 years of supposed social progress, there are those who would choose to return to such a system.  We were once a better nation than that.

The undocumented immigrants who have been working our fields were essentially invited here by the growers willing to hire them.  Any solution should allow those who have been good residents, paid taxes, and raised families to stay on.  Any guest-worker program should protect the rights of both existing workers and guests to tolerable conditions and provide recourse to legal means for redressing grievances.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Illegal Immigration: Hysteria over a Nonexistent Problem

Early States, Capitalism, and the Domestication of Humans

How Climate Change Will Shrink the Habitable Planet

Many people can observe for themselves that their climate is changing and growing warmer even if they don’t believe the effect is due to human activity.  However, most are yet to experience a sense of urgency appropriate for what the future holds.  Bill McKibben attempts to convey the seriousness of climate change to those who still haven’t got the message in an article in The New Yorker: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet.  It was titled Life on a Shrinking Planet in the paper version.  He begins with this lede.

“With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable.”

The current world population is estimated at about 7.7 billion.  Those who make such projections anticipate population growth leveling off leaving us with a peak population of around 10 billion sometime this century.  That means a lot more people are coming.  If habitable space is declining, there will be problems.

The most obvious source of a shrinking habitat is the rise in sea levels that are observed.  The potential rise is astounding.  If the Greenland ice cap should melt sea levels would rise by 20 feet.  If all of Antarctica melts as well, that would add another 200 feet.  These eventualities would take a long time to occur, but scientists are eager to make projections of the seal level rise that could occur by the end of this century, and they are significant.  Jeff Goodell addressed these estimates in his book The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World and found estimates of peak possible sea rise in that period between 3 and 15 feet.  The more scientists observe the effects of global warming, the more worried they become about the rate of ice melt.  Even if only 3 feet is encountered, Goodell claims that will be disastrous.

“Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level.  As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.”

McKibben chimes in to point out that people are already on the move because of rising sea water.  We don’t have to wait long for the effects to become quite severe.

“Each year, another twenty-four thousand people abandon Vietnam’s sublimely fertile Mekong Delta as crop fields are polluted with salt.”

“In one week at the end of last year, I read accounts from Louisiana, where government officials were finalizing a plan to relocate thousands of people threatened by the rising Gulf (‘Not everybody is going to live where they are now and continue their way of life, and that is a terrible, and emotional, reality to face,’ one state official said); from Hawaii, where, according to a new study, thirty-eight miles of coastal roads will become impassable in the next few decades; and from Jakarta, a city with a population of ten million, where a rising Java Sea had flooded the streets. In the first days of 2018, a nor’easter flooded downtown Boston; dumpsters and cars floated through the financial district. ‘If anyone wants to question global warming, just see where the flood zones are,’ Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston, told reporters. ‘Some of those zones did not flood thirty years ago’.”

A hotter world is close to creating zones where the combination of high temperature and high humidity will render them uninhabitable.

“About a decade ago, Australian and American researchers, setting out to determine the highest survivable so-called ‘wet-bulb’ temperature, concluded that when temperatures passed thirty-five degrees Celsius (ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit) and the humidity was higher than ninety per cent, even in ‘well-ventilated shaded conditions,’ sweating slows down, and humans can survive only ‘for a few hours, the exact length of time being determined by individual physiology’.”

Even higher temperatures are common on the planet, allowing the deadly threshold to fall to lower levels of humidity.

“As the planet warms, a crescent-shaped area encompassing parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the North China Plain, where about 1.5 billion people (a fifth of humanity) live, is at high risk of such temperatures in the next half century. Across this belt, extreme heat waves that currently happen once every generation could, by the end of the century, become ‘annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.’ By 2070, tropical regions that now get one day of truly oppressive humid heat a year can expect between a hundred and two hundred and fifty days, if the current levels of greenhouse-gas emissions continue.”

Temperatures are rising faster near the poles than at the lower latitudes leading to severe effects in Alaska.  Villages were often built on the coast to take advantage of the sea ice, but now the sea ice disappears and leaves the coast vulnerable to erosion during storms.  Entire villages must be moved further inland.  The rising temperatures also increase the melting of permafrost. Buildings were generally constructed on the assumption that permafrost was permanent.  Now that it is demonstrably not permanent, bad things are happening.

“As the permafrost melts, it releases more carbon into the atmosphere. The thawing layer cracks roads, tilts houses, and uproots trees to create what scientists call ‘drunken forests.’ Ninety scientists who released a joint report in 2017 concluded that economic losses from a warming Arctic could approach ninety trillion dollars in the course of the century, considerably outweighing whatever savings may have resulted from shorter shipping routes as the Northwest Passage unfreezes.”

Rising temperatures will also make it more difficult to feed those extra 2.5 billion people who are expected to arrive.  Among other factors, the fundamental process of photosynthesis is strongly temperature dependent, falling off rapidly at higher temperatures.  This source provides information.

“At medium temperatures, between 50 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit, or 10 and 20 degrees Celsius, the photosynthetic enzymes work at their optimum levels, so photosynthesis rates gauge high.”

“At temperatures above 68 degrees Fahrenheit, or 20 degrees Celsius, the rate of photosynthesis decreases because the enzymes do not work as efficiently at this temperature. This is despite the increase of carbon dioxide diffusion into leaves. At a temperature above 104 degrees Fahrenheit – 40 degrees Celsius – the enzymes that carry out photosynthesis lose their shape and functionality, and the photosynthetic rate declines rapidly.”

McKibben provides this observation.

“The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research concluded in a recent study that, as the number of days that reach eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit or higher increases, corn and soybean yields across the U.S. grain belt could fall by between twenty-two and forty-nine per cent.”

Rising temperatures increase the amount of water and energy in the atmosphere.  This will lead to weather events that are more powerful and more destructive.  While average global rainfall is likely to increase, there is no way of knowing where and when it will fall.  We are now experiencing a combination of drought conditions and extreme flooding.  That is expected to get worse, but the locations of those events need not remain the same.

“As some people flee humidity and rising sea levels, others will be forced to relocate in order to find enough water to survive. In late 2017, a study led by Manoj Joshi, of the University of East Anglia, found that, by 2050, if temperatures rise by two degrees a quarter of the earth will experience serious drought and desertification. The early signs are clear: São Paulo came within days of running out of water last year, as did Cape Town this spring. In the fall, a record drought in Germany lowered the level of the Elbe to below twenty inches and reduced the corn harvest by forty per cent…We’ve already overpumped the aquifers that lie beneath most of the world’s breadbaskets; without the means to irrigate, we may encounter a repeat of the nineteen-thirties, when droughts and deep plowing led to the Dust Bowl—this time with no way of fixing the problem.”

Perhaps the most significant result of global warming will be conflict.  Rising sea levels, scarcity of food and water, storm damage, and desertification will all create climate refugees.  Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move seeking a viable place to live.  Humanity’s record for dealing with refugees does not foster optimism.  Mass murder is the more likely outcome.

Human civilization will likely endure, but it will enter an uglier, more brutal phase.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Climate Change: The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell

The Water is Coming, and Venice, New York, and Miami are Waiting….and Waiting

Global Warming and the Resurrection of Dormant Diseases

Global Warming and the Holocaust’s Warning: It Can Happen Again

Global Warming Comes to Alaska

Ground Zero for Sea-Level Rise: South Florida

Affirmative Action and Diversity: Asian Americans and Fairness in College Admissions

In October of this year, a US District Court began hearings on a suit filed on behalf of Asian Americans who believe that Harvard (and other elite universities) discriminates against them because of their race.  This is a complex issue with the potential to eliminate the vestiges of affirmative action in college admission.  If the suit is successful, it is likely that white and Asian American students would gain higher admission rates at elite schools at the expense of African-American and Hispanic students.  Hua Hsu produced an interesting assessment of the issues involved for The New Yorker.  His article appeared in the paper version as School Colors, and online as The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action.

Asian Americans tend to be left-leaning in their politics, and when surveyed, announce that they are in favor of affirmative action.  And, in fact, older Asian Americans well remember riding on the vehicle of affirmative action to overcome discrimination they experienced in years past.

“For previous generations of Asian-American activists, affirmative action was a key component in the struggle for multiracial justice. In the late eighties, the Department of Education investigated a series of claims alleging that Berkeley, Harvard, and other élite institutions had put a limit on the number of Asian-Americans admitted. The claims had been lodged by young, largely progressive Asian-American activists, for whom affirmative action was the solution to the problems they were identifying, not the cause.”

“In most cases, the students’ suspicions of unfairness were well founded, and Asian-American populations at these schools began to grow. This history captures the almost paradoxical position of many Asian-American supporters of affirmative action.” 

It is therefore both ironic and contentious that younger Asian Americans are teaming with conservative activists, led by Edward Blum, who wish to eliminate affirmative action and any other racial considerations in society.  Blum organized students and others into an organization called Students for Fair Admissions (S.F.F.A.) to bring the suit against Harvard.

“If Blum’s suit is successful, the effect will be felt far beyond Harvard. It will limit the freedom that academic institutions have often had in pursuing their unique educational missions. The lawsuit, and Blum’s efforts to change the cultural conversation surrounding diversity and discrimination, could end affirmative action in higher education as we know it.”

Are Asian Americans being discriminated against?  Hsu produced these data.

“S.F.F.A. alleges that Harvard attempts to curate the racial breakdown of each incoming class. In order to achieve classes that, in recent years, have been roughly half white, twenty per cent Asian-American, fifteen per cent black, and twelve per cent Hispanic…”

This source indicates that Asian Americans make up about 5% of public-school students and 23% of those admitted to Harvard’s 2017 freshman class.  Is that a sign of discrimination?  The argument for a higher admission level must be based on a narrow definition of what defines “merit” in college admissions.  The plaintiffs argue that admission should be based on grades and performance on standardized tests only.  The assumption is that Asian Americans work harder than others, including the white students, and they deserve an even higher acceptance rate.  Under that constraint, admissions of both whites and Asian Americans would likely increase at the expense of other minorities, including poor whites and poor Asian Americans.  However, it is well-known that tests like the SAT and ACT are burdened with cultural biases that favor those with higher family incomes.  Is it in the best interests of a university, and of society in general, to create a student environment that favors the wealthy and culturally endowed? 

Do these angry Asian Americans have a legitimate beef or are they merely over-entitled students?  And are they merely tools in a conservative plot to eliminate affirmative action once and for all?  It is notable that Trump’s Justice Department supports the suit against Harvard, apparently seeing this as an opportunity to eliminate affirmative action for the less-entitled African-American and Hispanic minorities.

To address the issues raised it is necessary to review the history of affirmative action and that of prior court rulings. 

“…the first time the government used the term [affirmative action] in relation to race was in March, 1961, when John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors to ‘take affirmative action’ to help realize the nation’s goal of ‘nondiscrimination’.”

“The premise of affirmative action was that, for African-Americans, the status quo was innately negative. To act affirmatively was to acknowledge the history of denigration and inequity that continued to define black life, and to come up with ways in which the future could be different.”

The intention was good, but a coherent implementation plan never developed.  It would be the courts that stepped in and defined what affirmative action could and could not mean.  Hsu discusses this history, but a more concise treatment can be found in an article by Noah Feldman in the New York Review of Books: Justifying Diversity.

The Fourteenth Amendment would form the basis for most litigation regarding affirmative action.  Adopted in 1868, it was mainly focused on ensuring that the freed slaves would be considered citizens (Citizenship Clause) and that they would have the same rights as any other resident of the nation (Equal Protection Clause).  Any actions to compensate African Americans for centuries of abuse and discrimination became an easy target for court litigation as an infringement on the rights of other groups, particularly whites.  The critical ruling with respect to affirmative action in university admissions came in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).

“The case was brought by an unsuccessful white medical school applicant who claimed that affirmative action violated equality under the Civil Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His challenge was part of the fascinating—and in many ways horrifying—revisionist backlash against the integrationist jurisprudence of the Warren Court. In a series of close decisions, conservative majorities of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts struck down various types of affirmative action as violating the equal protection rights of whites.”

“These decisions undermined the rationale for affirmative action, which was, its advocates generally maintained, to make up for slavery and segregation by ensuring that African-Americans (and sometimes Latinos) would be able to obtain professional opportunities that had historically been denied them.”

The court had four justices who believed the actions taken by the University of California were legally acceptable as a response to past acts of discrimination.  Among those was Thurgood Marshall who provided this comment.

“…the Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro. Now, when a State acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier.”

Four other justices were ready to declare the actions violated equality protections.  The ninth justice, Lewis Powell Jr., offered a compromise between the opposing views.  Selection explicitly on the basis of race would not be allowed, but race could be considered as a factor a university could use in assembling a diverse student population that it considered necessary to meet its educational goals.  Curiously, Powell arrived at this compromise after reading a brief filed in the case by Harvard University.

“Powell famously got the idea of using diversity as the rationale for affirmative action from the amicus brief filed by Harvard University and flagged for him by his law clerk.  The most famous line from the brief, included in Powell’s opinion, read: ‘A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer’.”

Although a decision was reached, the compromise did not satisfy either those who insisted that affirmative action could be based on remediation of past abuses, or those who were against it under any circumstances.  It would only be in 2003 that Sandra Day O’Connor would write an opinion on diversity that the majority of the court would agree with.

“Powell had emphasized that courts should defer to universities’ stated educational mission. O’Connor preserved the appeal to diversity, but subtly shifted the argument away from the educational benefits of diversity and toward its broader social effects among the graduates of elite institutions. Invoking both businesses and the US military, she insisted that ‘in order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity’.”

While these decisions allow race and ethnicity to be factors in university selection, they do not provide much guidance in terms of how this should be done. 

“In reality, elite institutions do seek to evaluate applicants individually. Yet they simultaneously manage to produce demographically balanced classes according to established proportions of race, geography, and wealth, which do not necessarily correspond to the demographics of the larger population. The balance typically differs only a little from year to year and even less when one compares the classes admitted by all schools of similar standing in any given year.”

“Those consistent results would be highly improbable if the admissions officers were merely evaluating individual applicants on a ‘holistic’ basis, without attention to overall numerical goals. The balanced classes are sometimes defended (although not by Harvard) as creating a ‘critical mass’ of minority students. Presumably, the similarity across institutions satisfies the universities’ desire to include students of many backgrounds while simultaneously protecting them from the criticism that they got the balance wrong by appealing to shared institutional norms.”

The fact that elite universities tend to arrive at fairly consistent fractions of minorities in their admission classes year after year suggests that there might be some form of algorithm at work that “balances” out the numbers.  Any hint of such balancing would provide those determined to eliminate affirmative action entirely with justification for supporting the Asia-American suit against Harvard.

Harvard could argue that its conception of the ideal admissions class to meet its perceived educational goals might arrive at fairly consistent distributions of minorities.  Feldman pores over Harvard’s statements about its intentions and provides this description of the types of interactions between students for which it is aiming.

“The interactions ‘ensure that our students truly engage with other people’s experiences and points of view, [and] that they truly develop their powers of empathy.’ This account strives to make diversity not only useful but an inherent good for an educational community, since different identities generate the different ideas that are necessary for a proper education.”

This is a view that is easy to accept, but it does not define how this mixture of individuals is arrived at.  Feldman finds diversity as a goal to be a rather slippery topic.  He would prefer that a redefinition of what is considered “merit” should be the basis for assembling a “diverse” student body.  Merit should consist of something more complex than just grades and test scores; it should include the potential for contribution to the school and to society from those who have experienced unusual or challenging backgrounds.

“But diversity should not be an end in itself. Rather, diversity should be the indirect result of the goal of inclusion based on forms of merit found in every part of the population and not purely reducible to grades and scores. The university need not look precisely like America. But its classes should reflect a conscientious effort to find and admit the students who are best placed to pursue truth and become future leaders, weighing their abilities and potential in the light of the challenges they have faced. That should logically result in a wide range of students. Diversity could then live on—as an outcome, not as an objective.”

One could argue that this view merely replaces a slippery concept of diversity with a slippery concept of merit. 

Feldman does come up with a firm and defensible view of the suit against Harvard.

“Finally, although the plaintiffs in the suit assert that affirmative action for African-Americans and Latinos is the reason that more Asian-Americans are not admitted, it is very unlikely to be the case. Given current balancing goals in admissions, Asian-Americans are being compared with and balanced against white applicants, not African-American or Latino ones. If there exists unconscious, stereotype-based admissions discrimination against Asian-American applicants, as the suit alleges, that problem must be addressed by examining the unspoken bias and ensuring it does not persist. That might conceivably lead to fewer white admissions and more Asian-American ones. It should not reduce the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos admitted.”

The suit against Harvard is designed to satisfy the conservatives who wish to eliminate race from consideration at all.  Their goal is to minimize for white students any competition from African Americans and Hispanics.  If the Asian Americans have a complaint, it is due to a bias shown them with respect to white students.  That is the battle they should be fighting.

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

The Tragedy of the Fourteenth Amendment: The Supreme Court and the Death of Equality

The Catholic Dilemma: How to Deal with Human Sexuality

Pope Francis has generally been viewed as a sympathetic figure by US commentators.  He has been described as relatively liberal Catholic leader who is attempting to relax some of the Church’s traditional views and make life a bit easier for its members.  But recently, his liberal standing has been threatened by a claim by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that he participated in the coverup of instances of sexual abuse.  Viganò went so far as to call for Francis to retire.  This has followed additional releases of data describing decades of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics that was well-known within the Church hierarchy but not publicly admitted.  The question of Pope Francis’s guilt or innocence in these matters is crucial to his future credibility as Church leader.  Alexander Stille provided an assessment of the Pope’s options in moving forward.  It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title The Sins of Celibacy.  He makes clear the dire consequences of many decades of continuing the requirement of priestly celibacy while at the same time sheltering the Church from the harm from sexual abuse by its priests.  It seems the Pope’s options moving forward are more complicated than one might expect, and the need to take some form of action is becoming more urgent.

Stille provides this background on the issues facing Pope Francis.

“On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a declaration of civil war by the church’s conservative wing.”

“As a result of Viganò’s latest accusations and the release eleven days earlier of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that outlines in excruciating detail decades of sexual abuse of children by priests, as well as further revelations of sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., Francis’s papacy is now in a deep, possibly fatal crisis.”

An existential crisis for the leader of the Catholic Church?  How could this have come to pass?

It seems that early decisions by the first Christians with regard to sexuality were not, and, eventually, could not be corrected as times changed.  Initially, there were many views as to what constituted Christianity.  Many sought a more personal interaction between a believer and his God.  Often such attitudes were more consistent with equality before God for both men and women.  These beliefs were opposed by those who believed that Christ’s apostles, all men, formed a hierarchy of authority that would be passed down to their successors.  As in almost all human organizations leaders were identified and the remainder became followers.  What emerged was a military-like organization with specialized uniforms and levels of command.  And the commanders were all male.  Women became second-class members, if not a sub species, and men defined their roles as they wished.  What emerged is a very restrictive view of women’s reproductive rights: they have none. This and the restriction of the priesthood to men has generated long simmering issues with women.

Church leaders also developed some strict sexuality standards for men as well.  It was wished that priests be viewed as exceptional men, above the lower desires that beset other humans.  Eventually, this developed into a requirement that all priests would vow to forego any sexual activity.  This code was always difficult to follow and for centuries sexual relations were ongoing but tolerated within the priesthood. 

“The modern church has boxed itself into a terrible predicament. Until about half a century ago, it was able to maintain an attitude of wise hypocrisy, accepting that priests were often sexually active but pretending that they weren’t. The randy priests and monks (and nuns) in Chaucer and Boccaccio were not simply literary tropes; they reflected a simple reality: priests often found it impossible to live the celibate life. Many priests had a female ‘housekeeper’ who relieved their loneliness and doubled as life companions. Priests frequently had affairs with their female parishioners and fathered illegitimate children. The power and prestige of the church helped to keep this sort of thing a matter of local gossip rather than international scandal.”

The term celibacy can be interpreted as merely remaining unmarried.  Chastity is more specific when it comes to sexual activity: it is only allowed between married individuals (a man and a woman according to the Church).  Pope John Paul II made the policy crystal clear when he stated those who would become priests must be “blessed” with the gift of “celibate chastity.”  That means young men who enter the priesthood are expected to forego all sexual activity forevermore. 

Celibate chastity is clearly an unnatural state for a human male and is certainly going to lead to behaviors that will be problematic for the Church.  The long history of heterosexual excursions by priests indicates that the system did not and could not work.  And given the environment in which priests and prospective priests lived, homosexual activities were inevitable.

Consider this perspective from and article written in 2004 by Michael J. McManus: Only Half of Catholic Priests are Celibate.

"’Obligatory celibacy and the church's official teaching on human sexuality are at the root of the worst crisis the Catholic Church has faced since the time of the Reformation,’ writes Father Richard McBrien, professor of theology at Notre Dame in the Foreword of a new landmark book "Celibacy in Crisis," by A.W. Richard Sipe.”

“In an interview, Father McBrien explained, ‘The Eastern Orthodox do not have celibate clergy, and they have no sexual abuse crisis. When you require celibacy as a life-long commitment from any control group, you are inevitably, automatically and infallibly limiting your pool of potential recruits to one of the thinnest slices of the population.”

"’There are some healthy people who practice celibacy. But that requirement of the priesthood will attract a disproportionately high percentage of men who are sexually dysfunctional, sexually immature, or whose orientation will raise the question - are they attracted to the priesthood because of the ministry, or because it is a profession that forbids one to be married’?"

Sipe was an ex-priest who left the Church, married, and made a career out of providing psychological counseling for sexually troubled priests as well as sexual partners of priests.

“The issue goes far beyond the sexual molestation of minors. Sipe writes in his new book, ‘I estimate that at any one time 50 percent of priests are practicing celibacy’. He makes these shocking estimates: ‘Thirty percent of priests are involved in heterosexual relationships, associations, experimentation or patterns of behavior. Fifteen percent of priests are involved with homosexual relationships...Six percent of priests involve themselves with minors’."

This indicates that about 50% of priests have a sexual relationship with another individual.  So much for celibacy.  Chastity is in even greater trouble.  Stille references a study that indicates that 95% of priests engage in masturbation.

The Church is aware of these issues.  Stille provides these comments.

“When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, bishops from many parts of the world hoped that the church would finally change its doctrine and allow priests to marry. But John XXIII died before the council finished its work, which was then overseen by his successor, Paul VI (one of the popes most strongly rumored to have been gay). Paul apparently felt that the sweeping reforms of Vatican II risked going too far, so he rejected the pleas for priestly marriage and issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraception, overriding a commission he had convened that concluded that family planning and contraception were not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine.”

The result of a path to priestly marriage being cut off led to many heterosexual priests leaving their calling and fewer heterosexuals entering the priesthood.  But the attraction of the priesthood to those with homosexual leanings was undiminished.

Stille gains additional perspective from a Father Thomas Doyle, “a canon lawyer who was tasked by the papal nuncio to the US with investigating abuse by priests while working at the Vatican embassy in Washington in the mid-1980s, when the first lawsuits began to be filed.”

“Conversely, the proportion of gay priests increased, since it was far easier to hide one’s sex life in an all-male community with a strong culture of secrecy and aversion to scandal. Many devout young Catholic men also entered the priesthood in order to try to escape their unconfessable urges, hoping that a vow of celibacy would help them suppress their homosexual leanings. But they often found themselves in seminaries full of sexual activity. Father Doyle estimates that approximately 10 percent of Catholic seminarians were abused (that is, drawn into nonconsensual sexual relationships) by priests, administrators, or other seminarians.”

The increase in homosexually oriented priests does not seem to be associated with an increase in people who might prey on children, but it does lead to increasing dysfunction within the priestly ranks.

“Sipe, during his decades of work treating priests as a psychotherapist, also concluded that the lack of education about sexuality and the nature of celibate life tended to make priests immature, often more comfortable around teenagers than around other adults. All this, along with a homosocial environment and the church’s culture of secrecy, has made seminaries a breeding ground for sexual abuse.”

The Church has an ungodly mess to deal with in terms of sexuality.  How is Pope Francis doing?  One of his more curious moves was to jointly declare that Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II were saints.  John XXIII has an unblemished reputation and might have had the courage to deal with the Church’s problems, but John Paul II is responsible for the policy of protecting the Church’s reputation by trying to deny there was a problem with sexual abuse.

“The greatest responsibility for the problem of sexual abuse in the church clearly lies with Pope John Paul II, who turned a blind eye to it for more than twenty years. From the mid-1980s to 2004, the church spent $2.6 billion settling lawsuits in the US, mostly paying victims to remain silent. Cases in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and Mexico followed the same depressing pattern: victims were ignored or bullied, even as offending priests were quietly transferred to new parishes, where they often abused again. ‘John Paul knew the score: he protected the guilty priests and he protected the bishops who covered for them, he protected the institution from scandal,’ I was told in a telephone interview by Father Thomas Doyle…”

John Paul also eliminated any path to equality for women.

“John Paul II did his best to tie the hands of his successors by declaring the prohibition of female priests to be an ‘infallible’ papal doctrine, and Francis has acknowledged that debate on the issue was ‘closed’.”

John Paul’s legacy is a large number of high-ranking priests who are guilty of participating in his policy toward sexual abusers.  Any attempt to punish all the guilty would lead to the removal of much of the Church hierarchy.  It would require a momentous decision on the part of Francis to pursue such an outcome.  Conservatives are already trying to run him out of office, so there is no hope of relaxing views on celibacy, homosexuality, and female roles.  This leaves Stille with a rather pessimistic view of the future of both Pope Francis and the Catholic Church.

“Both radical change and the failure to change are fraught with danger, making Francis’s path an almost impossible one. He is under great pressure from victims who are demanding that the church conduct an exhaustive investigation into the responsibility of monsignors, bishops, and cardinals who knew of abusing priests but did nothing—something he is likely to resist. Such an accounting might force many of the church’s leaders into retirement and paralyze it for years to come—but his failure to act could paralyze it as well. As for the larger challenges facing the church, Francis’s best option might be to make changes within the narrow limits constraining him, such as expanding the participation of the laity in church deliberations and allowing women to become deacons. But that may be too little, too late.”

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

Early Christians and the Feminine Element

The Fifth Risk: Barbarians Breaching the Governmental Gates

A Michael Lewis book is always an interesting read.  His latest effort, The Fifth Risk, is certainly interesting, but it is much more than that.  It should be a mandatory read for those who view government programs as valuable and necessary contributors to society.  It should also be required reading for all those who believe that government programs are a waste of money and they are populated by freeloaders not competent enough to get hired in the private sector.

One might expect that the nature of the fifth risk would be revealed in a subtitle, but Lewis takes a different path.  He believes the reader might not appreciate the enormity of the fifth risk until he/she receives a bit of an education.  The book cover merely contains a sloppily constructed column of wooden blocks.  One knows the blocks are representing something about our country because glimpses of the stars and stripes are visible on some edges.  The construct is reminiscent of the pile of blocks used in the movie version of Lewis’s The Big Short by one of the characters to illustrate how the failure of one block to provide support could lead to the failure of the entire structure.  It seems to represent some aspect of the United States being at risk of collapse.  One assumes that it is some form of attack on Donald Trump and his administration—and it is—but it is much more than that.  It is also a letter of praise and a thank you to all those unknown and unappreciated federal workers who do the work we may know nothing about, but which is critical in keeping us safe, healthy, and prosperous.  That is why everyone should read this book.

Lewis introduces the reader to several cabinet-level departments in the federal government.  Here the focus will be on the first he encounters—the one in which he is introduced to the fifth risk—the Department of Energy (DOE).  This organization has a very broad mandate beyond what one might think of in terms of energy.  Only a quarter of its roughly $30 billion budget is devoted to fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable sources of energy and their issues.  The remainder is devoted to various aspects of the nuclear weapons complex.  Two thirds of that is associated with maintaining the nuclear arsenal and one third is devoted to cleaning up the mess created by nuclear weapons production plants in the past.

One might wonder why this collection of activities ended up in one department.  Partly it derives from the desire to keep nuclear weapons technologies under civilian control.  And partly it is because all these activities involve big, expensive scientific research.  The DOE owns the system of national laboratories where much of the nation’s long-term research is performed.

“…the best argument for shoving together the Manhattan Project, nuclear-waste disposal and clean-energy research was that underpinning all of it was Big Science—the sort of scientific research that requires multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators.  The DOE ran the seventeen national labs—Brookhaven, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Oak Ridge, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and so on.”

As one former DOE manager put it:

“The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE…it is the Office of Science for all science in America.”

The oversight of nuclear weapons activities extends into areas beyond designing, manufacturing, and assessing continued viability of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

“Two billion [dollars] goes to hunting down weapons grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.  In eight years alone—2010-2018—the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.  The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, its because of these people.”

The DOE routinely sends its experts to major public events to search for evidence of a possible terrorist strike.  For example, radiation levels are monitored in order to detect a bomb laced with radioactive materials, a so-called dirty bomb, before it can be detonated.

The DOE plays a critical role in advancing technologies that are too long-term or too risky, or just too expensive for private industry to deal with.  Examples include nuclear reactor technologies and controlled fusion concepts.  It helped get the electric vehicle and solar power industries get started.

“Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.  Its loans to early-stage solar energy companies launched the industry.  There are now thirty-five viable utility-scale, privately funded solar companies—up from zero a decade ago.”

Given the scale and importance of DOE responsibilities, its former director, Ernest Moniz asked John MacWilliams to assume the role of chief risk officer.  It became his job to evaluate the potential and actual situations that have arisen or could arise and insure that the DOE was focusing its resources appropriately.  Lewis went to visit MacWilliams, who is no longer at the DOE, and asked him what he thought were the five biggest risks the DOE needs to be addressing.  Tellingly, no one from the new administration thought to ask him that question.

The first risk on MacWilliams’s list is an accident with a nuclear weapon.

“’It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,’ he says.”

Lewis asks, naively, whether there have ever been any significant accidents.  MacWilliams is hampered by DOE classification limitations and suggests he search on the term “Broken Arrow.”  That term has been used to describe an accident with a nuclear device that did not lead to a nuclear detonation.  Then MacWilliams describes a recently declassified event that happened in 1961.

“A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina.  One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself.”

Actually, it didn’t fully arm itself.  The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory spend a good deal of their time, and the DOE’s budget, making sure that nuclear devices can only detonate in the manner they were designed for.  That means electrical and environmental checks are in place to validate the device is being used as its designers and Department of Defense users intended.  All other environments must not lead to a nuclear detonation.  No type of impact, no fire conditions, and no access by a terrorist should allow a nuclear explosion.  Radioactive material, however, can be dispersed in any of those scenarios.

“It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup.  Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.”

MacWilliams indicates that North Korea would be second on his risk list.

“…there lately have been signs that the risk of some kind of attack by North Korea is increasing.  The missiles the North Koreans have been firing into the sea are not the absurd acts of a lunatic mind but experiments.  Obviously, the DOE is not the only agency inside the U.S. government trying to make sense of these experiments, but the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do.”

Third on the list would come Iran.  DOE experts were critical in helping devise a treaty that would insure that Iran could not produce a nuclear device from uranium enriched by centrifuges, from plutonium enriched by nuclear reactors, or by buying a weapon or the needed weapon materials from some entity. 

“After the deal was done, U.S. Army officers had approached DOE officials to thank them for saving American lives.  The deal, they felt sure, had greatly lessened the chance of yet another war in the Middle East that the United States would be dragged into.”

At the time of Lewis’s conversation, the risk was not that Iran would secretly figure out a way to acquire a nuclear weapon, it was that the U.S. president would not understand the issues and back away from the deal.  And that is exactly what Trump decided to do.

The forth risk listed by MacWilliams involved the nation’s electrical grid.

“…we don’t actually have a national grid.  Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities.  The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private sector mechanism.”

The grid had proved highly vulnerable to physical attack on subsystems, but cyber attacks have become the most serious threat.

“In 2016 the DOE counted half a million cyber intrusions into various parts of the U.S. grid.”

“To that end the DOE had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face.  ‘They all sort of said “But is this really real?”’ said MacWilliams.  ‘You get them security clearance for a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes go really wide’.”

When asked about the fifth risk, MacWilliams had a simple reply.

“Project management.”

These discussions with MacWilliams and other things he had learned about DOE efforts had convinced Lewis that the department has responsibility for some really important activities.  The implication of the fifth risk is that the department assembled over decades as new issues arose could collapse under incompetent or corrupt leadership.

One thing that must be understood about the federal workforce is that the greater the expertise and responsibility that one acquires, the lower is the pay relative to what can be earned in the private sector with equivalent levels of knowledge and responsibility.  High-level people do not come to the government for the money, they come to be of service.  If they believe their work is no longer appreciated or they can no longer be of service, they can leave.  And they take their experiential base with them.  Much of the technical knowledge required for DOE projects consists of things that are not taught in schools.  For the system to work properly, older workers must hang around long enough to impart what they have learned on the job to new employees.  If your experts suddenly decide to walk away, they take their knowledge with them.

So, if project management is such a risk, how is the Trump administration doing in managing the DOE?  Lewis gave a clue when he began his tale with this tweet from Trump on November 15, 2016.

“Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions.  I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”

Every time a new administration takes office it installs a lot of people in power who might have little prior knowledge about a particular department’s activities.  Someone has to provide them with that knowledge.

“To address that problem, a year before he left office, Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable people across his administration, including fifty or so inside the DOE, to gather the knowledge his successor would need in order to understand the government he or she was taking charge of.  The Bush administration had done the same for Obama, and Obama had been grateful for their efforts.  He told his staff that their goal should be to ensure an even smoother transfer of power than the Bush people had achieved.”

“Thousands of people inside the federal government had spent the better part of a year drawing a vivid picture of it for the benefit of the new administration.”

On the day after the election it was expected that a squad of new administration people would descend on DOE to begin the transition.  At least 30 people were expected who would be presented with all the briefing materials that had been assembled.  No one showed up.  It would be weeks before any semblance of a transition team was encountered.

“The one concrete action the Trump transition team took before inauguration day was the attempt to clear the DOE and other federal agencies of people appointed by Obama.  It was traditional that political appointees stay around long enough to ensure their replacement knew what they needed to know.  But Trump’s people had no interest in learning what they didn’t know.”

“In the run-up to the Trump inauguration, the man inside the DOE in charge of the nuclear weapons program—Frank Klotz was his name—was required to submit his resignation, as were the department’s 137 other political appointees.  Frank Klotz was a retired three-star air force lieutenant general with a PhD in politics from Oxford.  The keeper of the nation’s nuclear secrets had boxed up most of his books and memorabilia like everyone else and was on his way out before anyone had apparently given the first thought to who might replace him.  It was only after Secretary Moniz called U.S. senators to alert them to the disturbing vacancy, and the senators called Trump Tower sounding alarmed, that the Trump people called General Klotz and—on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States—asked him to bring back the stuff he had taken home and move back into his office.  Aside from him, the people with the most intimate knowledge of the problems and possibilities of the DOE walked out the door.”

Trump showed his contempt for the department and its employees by naming Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, who is most famous for claiming he wanted to eliminate the DOE but couldn’t remember the name of the department on national television.

In his confirmation hearings Perry confessed that he didn’t understand all the things the DOE did and now didn’t want to eliminate it.  He claimed he had subsequently learned a lot from briefings presented by the former secretary, Ernest Moniz.  However, a quite different picture of Perry emerges when DOE employees are asked about Perry’s education.

“With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth Perry had spent minutes, not hours.  “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,’ a DOE staffer told me in June 2017.  ‘He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking’.”

“Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre.  He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that DOE program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.”

The people who have power in the DOE derive that power directly from people within the White House.  Perry seems to have nothing to do with it.  About these people Lewis received this quote from a career staffer.

“There’s a lack of professionalism.  They’re not very polite.  Maybe they’ve never worked in an office or government setting.  It’s not hostility so much as a real sense of concern with sharing information with career employees.  Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done.  All policy questions remain unanswered.”

It is not clear whether any of those briefings produced for the transition team that didn’t exist were actually presented to anyone.  Certainly, no one had any interest in MacWilliams’s cataloguing of the risks faced by DOE.

“My team prepared its own books.  They were never given to anybody.  I never had a chance to sit with Trump people and tell them what we are doing, even for a day.  And I’d have done it for weeks.  I think this is a sad thing.  There are things you want to know that would keep you up at night.  And I never talked to anyone about them”

Lewis sees a strategy in the Trump administration’s willful ignorance.

“If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost.  If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems.  There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge.  Knowledge makes life messier.  It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Trump’s War on the Federal Workforce

Trump’s Gang Tries to Hide Its Crimes: Attacking the Freedom of Information Act

The High Price of Police Brutality: Everyone Suffers but the Police

An article appeared in The Economist a few years ago discussing the problems police forces have endured when their officers used excessive force and caused harm.  It was titled Wanted: cops with people skills.  It suggested that police work consisted of mostly mundane tasks more akin to social work than television cops and robbers stuff.  Police activities were rather safe and becoming safer over time, yet police training and public assumptions view police work as extremely dangerous and requiring defensive vigilance to avoid harm.

“The reality of the job, as one officer from a large west-coast agency explains, is far less glamorous. ‘The public want us to come up and deal with a neighbour who is mowing their lawn at 3am. They want us to deal with their disruptive child. They want us to deal with the crazy person who is walking down the street shouting.’ As crime has fallen across America since the 1990s, policing has shifted more towards social work than the drama seen on TV. Police culture, however, has not caught up.”

“Yet fewer police officers are killed now than in the past, and the number who are shot is less than the number who die in traffic accidents. Over time…a justified alertness to danger may have warped into a belief that the swift use of force is the only thing keeping cops safe. At its worst, this manifests itself in a fiercely defensive culture.”

The article also suggests that police forces are using the wrong strategies in recruiting new members.  It provides this example of a recruiting ad.

“To the sound of electric guitars, heavily armed police officers fire assault rifles, drive squad cars fast and pull their guns on fleeing crooks. ‘Are you qualified to join the thin blue line?’ asks a narrator, in the sort of breathless voice you might expect in a trailer for ‘Fast & Furious 7’. The advert’s aim is not to sell movie tickets, however, but to recruit police officers in Gainesville, a city of 127,000 in Florida.”

 “…if you try to recruit cops by telling them they are social workers, fewer may apply. At least part of the glamour of the job is the promise that you get the chance to use violence against bad people in a way that ordinary civilians never can, except in video games.”

If you are trying to attract people who are thrilled by the idea of violent activities, you are probably going to acquire the wrong sorts of recruits.  And those bad recruits are going to cost you a lot of money and grief in the future.  Andrew Cockburn produced an article, Blood Money: Taxpayers pick up the tab for police brutality, for Harper’s Magazine.  In it he discusses the financial issues associated with excessive police violence.  He provides this perspective.

“Policing is a comparatively safe occupation, ranking far behind logging, commercial fishing, roofing, groundskeeping, and other civilian jobs in terms of fatality rates. Nonetheless, police culture appears to be imbued with the notion that officers’ lives hang by a thread at all times, thus justifying a violent response to anything they perceive as a threat, such as the eighty-seven-year-old Georgia woman hit with a taser this August thanks to a knife she was carrying to cut dandelions. Prosecutors and jurors generally accept this dubious presumption of constant peril, so officers can usually avoid punishment by testifying that they feared for their lives.”

“But even when juries or prosecutors balk at criminal charges or guilty verdicts, victims or bereaved relatives are increasingly able to exact some financial satisfaction when overwhelming evidence is available. In part, this is due to technology. Ubiquitous smartphone, dashboard, and body cameras, as well as DNA-based checks on forensic evidence, which can reverse past frame-ups, have caused compensation payments to rise.”

While police and their departments are well-sheltered from criminal responsibility for their actions, no such protection exists in civil trials, particularly when videos exist of police abuse.

“A 2015 Wall Street Journal study found that the ten biggest police departments in the country had over the previous five years spent a collective $1.02 billion to settle cases that included shootings, beatings, and wrongful imprisonments.”

Those ten departments were spending an average of $20 million per year responding to grievances of harmed parties.  Where does that money come from?  Cockburn indicates studies that have determined some of the money comes from police department funds that are appropriated for that purpose, but mostly the money must come from other sources.  Rarely does an offending police officer suffer significant financial penalties, and department funds are rarely impacted.

Where do large cities with expensive penalties turn to cover their costs?  There is a financial instrument referred to as a “police brutality bond.”  Why raise taxes to cover these additional expenses when you can borrow the money and put the burden on some future government leaders.

Consider Chicago’s response to their police problems.

“Chicago, for example, raised $709.3 million in the bond market between 2010 and 2017 to settle claims such as the $5 million awarded to the family of Laquan McDonald, shot sixteen times—all but one while he already lay wounded on the ground—by police who then faked evidence to justify the killing.”

Chicago has a history of police abuse that suggests the city will be dipping into the bond market continually over the years.  This becomes a good investment for finance companies.  Cities are rarely allowed to go bankrupt, so the chance of a significant investment loss is very small, while at the same time, the city’s finances provide credit-rating agencies the justification for letting financial firms charge cities like Chicago a high interest rate.

“A $225 million bond issued by Chicago in 2017 for the stated purpose of “settlements and judgments,” for example, carries a 7.045 percent interest rate. Fees exacted by the various financial institutions involved, beginning with lead underwriter Goldman Sachs, creamed off at least $1.8 million.”

A non-profit agency called the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) has been following the financial and social issues associated with police abuse.  It coined the term “police brutality bonds.”  It estimates that the $709.3 million borrowed between 2010 and 2017 would end up costing the city about $1.7 billion before the bonds were paid off.

While borrowing money allows Chicago to spread out payments over many years, the annual payments are still significant, and that money must come from somewhere.  The only sources available are taxation and the cutting of services.  One can be sure that the police budget is safe.  Those who study Chicago’s finances conclude that the people who suffer the most from police abuse are the ones who also suffer the most from the city’s financial problems.

“As to who is actually supporting Chicago’s finances, including the brutality bonds, it’s shockingly clear that poor people, mostly black, shoulder an undue burden. ­ACRE bluntly termed this a ‘transfer of wealth from communities—especially over-policed communities of color—to Wall Street and wealthy investors’.”

“Chicago, with its huge portfolio of brutality borrowings, presents a striking demonstration of this transfer at work. Not only do poor Chicagoans bear the brunt of police misconduct itself, but as taxpayers they must share in compensating the victims. In fact, they are actually taxed more onerously than their wealthy neighbors across town (who are, of course, less likely to be shot or brutalized by law enforcement). This striking example of racial injustice was laid bare in a detailed 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune, which revealed that the Cook County tax assessor’s office, which oversees Chicago, had for many years been routinely overvaluing homes in poor neighborhoods and undervaluing properties in wealthy ones. As a result, homeowners in lower-income neighborhoods such as North Lawndale and Little Village had been paying double the property tax rate levied on the more affluent residents of areas such as the Gold Coast or Lincoln Park.”

“Further compounding this disparity is Chicago’s heavy reliance on parking tickets and traffic fines as a source of revenue, collecting nearly $264 million in 2016—7 percent of the city’s operating budget. A recent ­ProPublica investigation revealed that poor black neighborhoods furnished most of that sum, not least because of the proliferation of cameras to detect red-light violations in these areas. The take for city coffers is additionally boosted by residents who have trouble finding the money to pay initial fines, which then balloon with late fees and even more fines, forcing many to choose between losing their driver’s license and going bankrupt. Fines for failing to display city vehicle stickers—which now cost $200, thanks to a steep hike introduced by Emanuel in 2013—are a major cause of bankruptcy among black residents of Chicago.”

The poor also pay in more subtle ways.  Bond payments take precedent over things like screening for lead poisoning, school funding, mental health services, and after-school programs.  Again, the portion of the population requiring these services aimed at limiting crime are the ones most likely to suffer from the police abuse that caused the decrease in funding.  This generates a feedback loop that ensures that aggressive policing will continue and more settlements for the abused will be forthcoming.  Police departments can continue to argue for ever greater budgets and point to the danger inherent in their work.

Cockburn is not very kind to the financial industry for participating in this process.

“Given the phenomenon of brutality bonds, it could therefore follow that high police budgets are, in effect, a worthwhile investment as far as bondholders are concerned. They are a bet placed on increased levels of police violence that generate lawsuits and payouts, which ultimately lead to profitable investment products. Renewal of the process is further guaranteed by cutbacks required to service the debt, thus ensuring that underlying societal problems will endure and generate even more investment opportunities.”

ACRE suggests that a better way to break this loop would be to turn away from bond funding to an insurance-based system.  For example, individual police officers could inherit real financial responsibility if they were required to take out the equivalent of a doctor’s malpractice insurance.  Funding the police department’s litigation expenses via insurance could force an immediate financial response to bad behavior in terms of higher premiums, rather than pushing the problem off on future general funding.  Cockburn indicates that a number of smaller cities do rely on insurance to cover their liabilities, and the threat of immediately higher premiums or no coverage at all has had the effect of generating improved performance by the police.

Cockburn’s bottom line is that improvements in police performance are possible if bad behavior has real consequences, and if police departments are willing to change their ways.

“Requiring officers to exhaust all other means to resolve a situation before opening fire reduces killings by 25 percent, according to Campaign Zero, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Rules banning strangleholds bring down killings by 22 percent. The culture of individual police departments, in terms of leadership and training, clearly makes a difference. Between 2013 and 2016, for example, police in Buffalo, New York, killed zero people, while police in Orlando, Florida—a city similar in population, demographics, and crime rates—killed fifteen.” 

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