You Can’t Just Give Something Away and Instantly Get It Back if You Change Your Mind

Much of the advantages our nation has that the Trump administration is undermining will not come fully back even if the next administration reverses policies. To understand why, consider the history of how we achieved some of the good things and advantages we’ve had which are being lost.

After World War II much of the world was not up to excelling at many of the things that make a country great. Academic institutions, scientific and technological development, national economies, and industry were in most cases hardly at their best. Europe was recovering, Germany was defeated and just starting to change course toward being a cooperative country again. Japan was defeated, China was nothing like the world power it would later become, Russia/U.S.S.R. had not been as advanced a country as some to start with and it had a lot of recovering to do as well, and it was going through political changes.

That left the U.S. in relatively good shape and poised to leap in economic capacity, scientific and technological development, industry, and world leadership. From that foundation the U.S. gained all sorts of special status in the world. It was U.S. companies, with and without government involvement and support, that made scientific discoveries and technological advances. It was U.S. universities that the “best and brightest” young minds around the world wanted to come to to get their degrees. And with their degrees, then either stay and work in the U.S. or at least have a network of contacts here they would later collaborate with. It was the U.S. dollar that became the standard currency to rely on, the global “reserve” currency. It was the massive U.S. military that was looked to as the anchor of maintaining international order. It was the U.S. generally that was looked to for world leadership. And this is only a partial list.

Much of those advantages we have managed to maintain. Partly by continuing to be the biggest or most advanced in many of these things, but not with as much difference as was true shortly after the war. Europe recovered, Germany turned into an industrial powerhouse, so did Japan. China’s role in the world has greatly expanded, Russia has advanced in some ways and also evolved its desire to affect the world and evolved its methods of doing so. We are still the leader but not as much heads and shoulders above others. So, some of those advantages we’ve maintained we’ve done so partly just out of legacy.

Take where the bright young minds of the world go for education. If there was no legacy of our leading that, if it was starting from scratch, we would still be one leader, but many other countries would get more of their share of that. We’ve maintained the degree of advantage we’ve had in some of these areas by being good at husbanding them and encouraging them. The field of education and therefore of science is one. The degree of economic leadership for instance among developing countries is another. The degree of military leadership, and therefore getting more of our say of how that goes, for good or ill, is another.

When we interrupt our leadership on those areas, even temporarily, we can recover by reversing course but it won’t come back as much because we will have given up the legacy hold we had. We will just get our proportionate part of each of these, but now in a world where we are ahead of others but not nearly so much as we were after the war.

When students look more to other countries for their education and to develop their collaborations because we’ve scared off even some of the best aspects of immigration, when developing countries look more to China or others for big economic partners because we have overly focused on ourselves and not on our footing around the world, when military decisions are being made by a collaboration of European countries rather than the Pentagon because we stepped back from NATO and from global influence, then even if we reverse course and open those doors again we do so with a reduced advantage, reduced reason for the world to turn to us.

Our position after World War II gave us many birds in the hand, many of which we’ve continued to hold onto. When you open the hand, the bird flies. You don’t get that back just because you close the hand again. Current policies are letting many birds fly.

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The post Why America’s Post-War Advantages Won’t Return Once Lost appeared first on DCReport.org.

That’s a front-page headline from today’s New York Times. Trump is already using armed drones and rockets to kill people in boats on the open sea. He came up with a lame allegation that the people in the boats are terrorists smuggling drugs to “attack” the United States. He claimed that his powers as Commander in Chief under the Constitution make the killings legal. But everybody knows he did it just because he can.

My question is, why is he even bothering to ask for legislation that will allow him to commit murder when he’s already doing it?

The Times describes the draft for the suggested legislation as a “broadly worded proposal, which would legally authorize the president to kill people he deems narco-terrorists and attack countries he says helped them.”

Critics of the three attacks on alleged drug boats, which have killed a total of 17, say the military operations violate the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which requires that if “Armed Forces of the United States are introduced in hostilities,” the use of military force “shall be” reported to the Congress within 48 hours “together with a full account of the circumstances under which such hostilities were initiated, the estimated scope and duration of such hostilities, and the constitutional and legislative authority under which the introduction of hostilities took place.”

There has been no such report to the Congress. In its place, Trump has beaten his chest on Truth Social and in comments to the press, threatening Venezuela and its president that more attacks will happen if they keep sending drug boats to “attack this country.” He has also moved a naval armada into the waters off Venezuela and dispatched a squadron of F-35 fighters to Puerto Rico that are said to be in preparation for more military action against “drug terrorists.”

Trump’s model is clearly President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who during his eight-year reign in office, oversaw the non-judicial killing of somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000 alleged drug suspects, according to various human rights groups that tried to keep track of the vicious carnage unleashed by Duterte. He urged the police at all levels of Philippine society to shoot drug users and dealers on sight and assured them that if they were charged with criminal offenses for the killings, he would pardon them. Early on in what he called his “anti-drug campaign,” Duterte openly compared himself to Hitler.

The language in the Times story is aching in its careful neutrality in describing Trump’s obvious attempt to unilaterally murder people on the high seas without identifying them or providing even a smidgen of evidence that what they were doing in their boats had anything to do with drugs. The Times reported that at a Senate confirmation hearing for a Defense Department nominee this week, Democrats asked questions about what the legal justification was for the “strikes” on the boats in the open sea. “The Pentagon nominee said he was unable to answer them.”

Trump believes he doesn’t owe anyone any answers for his use of military force against alleged drug smugglers. What he is asking the Congress for is a fig leaf to cover what he’s already doing.

Now I’m going to do something I haven’t done before in any of my many columns about the outrageous authoritarian moves of Donald Trump. In the past, every time Trump has done something, like mass-firings of federal employees at the Department of Education and USAID, my instinct has been, he’ll never get away with that. The courts will step in and stop him. My wife Tracy’s response has always been, you have too much faith in the system. Not only will he get away with it, he’ll do something worse.

As I have learned – as we’ve all seen – Tracy is the one who has been right. What he’s done at the CDC, at the EPA, in the firings of the boards that run independent agencies such as the Labor Relations Board, and countless other outrages is beyond anything I foresaw.

Today, Tracy said that Trump won’t stop with killing people he claims without evidence are “terrorists” in boats off the coast of Venezuela. He has already put armed soldiers on the streets of multiple cities in this country, and he has announced plans to deploy more. He is asking for legislation that will allow him to unilaterally declare foreign nationals as “terrorists” without evidence and order that they be killed by the U.S. military. What is to stop him from seeking to do the same thing within the borders of this country, using the same justification? He has already declared that undocumented immigrants are part of a “foreign invasion force.” He has used a law passed in 1798, the Alien Enemies Act, to order the deportation of foreign nationals to third countries where they have been imprisoned under terrible conditions and tortured without legal representation or due process of law. Why wouldn’t he invoke that law, or ask his puppet Congress to pass him a new one, that will give him non-judicial powers to imprison or even kill people accused of various offenses he has made up out of whole cloth, because he has labeled them as “terrorists” or they are engaged in a “war against the people of America?” He has already declared that journalists are “enemies of the people,” and think about all the people he has accused of treason, such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff and former President Obama. His list of made-up criminals gets longer by the day.

We already know what he will do. From recent evidence, he will use any justification he can come up with, no matter how spurious or ridiculous, and he will do anything he wants to do, declaring, as he already has, that as President, “I can do anything I want to do.”

I am finished giving our system of laws and checks and balances the benefit of the doubt. Our Democratic system is not working. Right now, Donald Trump is killing civilian non-combatants outside of the borders of this country without providing the Congress or anyone else any justification for what he is doing beyond his powers as President.

Tracy is right. He will expand on his horrors. We could be next.

Erika Donalds has long been a leading face of school choice in Florida, even as her husband Byron has risen through the GOP to become a major political player. Now a new story dug up by Will Bredderman at Florida Bulldog shows how Donalds is a model of how folks in the charter school world can make a bundle.And she's the CEO of Optima Ed, a private ed biz that offers school management and works with a variety of partners, including Step Up For Students, the outfit that manages the money fueling school vouchers--and that outfit is chaired by John Kirtley, who reportedly runs DeVos-funded PACS (included American Federation for Children) and who allegedly provided support for the FCSBM. Optima Ed also operates a chain of Hillsdale-powered charter schools.

Donald Trump would like nothing better than to pretend that this country was not founded on the backs of slaves. The latest evidence of this came early this week when it was reported that the administration has ordered the removal of references to slavery from multiple national parks in an effort to “scrub them of corrosive ideology,” according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s executive order, signed on March 27, directs the Department of the Interior “to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

To that end, the Department of the Interior has ordered that the famous photograph, taken in 1863 of the back of an enslaved man known as Peter Gordon, showing the scars of whippings he had been administered by his slave owner, be taken down in any park where it is displayed.

As if he didn’t exist as person, as if his scars are not there in the photo, as if the fact of his enslavement did not happen.

The Interior Department has ordered the removal or alteration of 30 signs at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia that refer to racial discrimination and violence by white people against slaves. Harpers Ferry was where the abolitionist John Brown led a raid encouraging slaves to revolt and seek freedom.

The Trump administration wants to excise the names of the nine slaves owned by President George Washington when he lived in “The President’s House,” his residence in Philadelphia, the ruins of which lie within Independence National Park where the founders signed the Declaration of Independence. Trump wants the evidence that Washington owned the nine slaves while he lived there erased, as if they did not exist.

It would seem a little difficult to run a park dedicated to ending slavery without mentioning slavery itself, wouldn’t you say? Trump’s executive order gives away the game by using the word “corrosive” to describe the thing they want to do away with. They don’t want the word “slavery” mentioned because it’s nasty; it reminds us of a chapter in our history – the founding chapter, as it happens – that included the enslavement of human beings within certain of the states of the Union that considered the institution of slavery essential for their existence.

This is like turning backflips in order to avoid looking at one’s own body: if you throw your head back and look for the ground so you can spot your landing, you’re not looking at yourself.

We’ve been turning backflips for our entire history, but especially in the 160 years since the end of the Civil War. We were never taught that slaves built the Capitol and the White House. In southern states, students were never taught that slaves built their state capitols and most of the courthouses standing in the central squares of county seats. Just go on your class trip to Washington and take the tour of the Capitol and look at all the marble and the statues in the rotundas and ignore the fact that slaves carried that limestone and marble, and slaves laid the stones and the slabs, and some of the statues of the great men – they are all men, every single statue – were slave owners.

The truth of the intent behind Trump’s executive order is its utterly disgusting racism. It seeks to absolve the governing establishment that founded the country and has run it ever since of the enduring legacy of slavery. Trump dictates that the history of the country be taught to make it seem that we have an “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” He says that he wants to restore America’s “rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

George Washington commanded the Revolutionary Army and defeated the British to establish the independence of the 13 colonies from foreign rule and was our first president. He was a great man.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and along with James Madison had a hand in forcing the Constitution to include the Bill of Rights and was our third president. He was a great man.

Both men are regarded as “founders” of this country, and both men were slave owners.

Thomas Jefferson owned 600 slaves during his lifetime. On any given day, more than 200 slaves worked at his home and plantation, Monticello. Jefferson fathered six children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. The only slaves freed in his will when he died all had the last name “Hemings.”

Because I am a 6^th great grandson of Jefferson, the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are my cousins. We – and by “we” I mean myself and my children and my sisters and my brother before he died – are descended from a slave owner, and we are blood relatives of the descendants of a slave, Sally Hemings. We are also related to Sally Hemings because she was the daughter of John Wayles, the owner of a nearby plantation, who was also the father of Martha Wayles, who married Thomas Jefferson and gave birth to Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson, his two white daughters.

I realize that is a lot to take in, but those relationships – between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, between Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson’s father, and between Jefferson and his children with Sally Hemings – are complicated but they are real, and they are part of our history.

Beyond the story of Jefferson and Hemings is the story of all the other slaves in this country and all their descendants. The figures are difficult to distill from census records, but some experts believe that as many as 90 percent of Black Americans are descended from enslaved people. A Pew Research Study done in 2022 found that 57 percent of Black adults say that they are descended from slaves. Because the Black population in this country is 42 million, one hell of a lot of Black Americans are descendants of enslaved people.

Don’t they have the same right to be proud of their family history that every other American does? That is the question that Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear the answer to. He believes their history is “corrosive,” that it lessens the rest of American history because it includes facts he doesn’t want taught in schools or displayed at parks or displayed in museums.

The problem Donald Trump and his white supremacists have is blood. Our blood is mixed. The descendants of slaves and the descendants of slave owners are related. We come from the same families. The history of our families is the history of this country. You cannot erase DNA from museums and public parks. Our DNA is everywhere. It is on the bricks and sawn boards of Monticello. It is on the stone walls and marble floors of the Capitol building and the White House and the state Capitols in the South. It is in the dirt that was farmed for corn and wheat and cotton on plantations in the South. Slave DNA is even in the north on Long Island, for example, where Sylvester Manor plantation on Shelter Island used slaves to grow food that was shipped to the island of Barbados to feed slaves who worked on sugar plantations.

Slavery and its descendants are everywhere in this country. All you have to do is look around. History is in our bodies and in our land. It cannot be denied because it is alive in all of us.

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Suddenly, the watchword about Donald Trump and the nation, about the world’s wars, about how we treat each other seems to be “defiant.”

We’re choosing to reject more civil communications, entreaties for treaties, and — in different ways — ruing culture wars raging only because we choose to keep them hot. And we’re losing our words of condemnation for all of it because of numbness from a constant fire hose of self-centered defiance.

If you’re part of Team Trump, “defiance” seems to mean moving now to crush dissent. If you’re a critic, “defiance” is raising a fist in the face of someone trying to dictate how to think.

The truth seems to be that we’re hanging onto impatient explanation that if one side keeps being jerky, the other side will simply relent over time because of pace and persistence. We’re seeing those sentiments playing out in Israel’s choices to ignore virtually global advice to end the war in Gaza, defiantly sending ground troops into Gaza City for what must turn into another bloody offensive. We’re seeing it in a recalcitrant Russia that would rather thumb its nose defiantly in the face of Western powers than halt its attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.

And we’re seeing it in our continued high-decibel defiance about trying to keep our own political talk from descending further into the very political violence that we insist, loudly, that we want to avoid. Not only is this seemingly stubborn attitude ill-chosen, but this belligerent trend seems a deliberate choice for the Trump administration and for frustrated critics.

Targeting Dissent

Even if you see yourself as outside the partisan fray, it is impossible not to see continued defiance of law in the unauthorized deployments of military units to U.S. city streets and the many excesses of a deportation campaign turned obsessively cruel, defiance of national and international laws in the arbitrariness of the tariffs and in the decisions to cut health and food support for tax cuts for the wealthy.

If sinking one alleged Venezuelan drug boat on international waters is legally hazy, this administration doubles down with a second. Defiance demands it.

Away from law, Trump seems to believe that he defiantly can rewrite history to erase slavery or turn the Jan. 6, 2021 revolt into a patriotic event or can wave a wand to eliminate America’s insistence on finding groups or identities to hate by saying they simply do not exist.

The drive to “go after” those with dissenting political views in the name of supporting “free speech” is not only illogical, but anti-democratic. The Trump administration wants to defy the Constitution, our two centuries of balance of powers, even the cultural wars of pluralism.

Amazingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi was forced to back down from a statement that “hate speech” is not “free speech,” using a social media post to say she meant threats of violence — this week in the tumult that has followed the slaying of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. In fact, there is no Constitutional distinction between hate speech and free speech, but the law does make threats distinct as a form of action rather than opinion.

Nevertheless, Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Vice President JD Vance and various White House staff were threatening to investigate and punish anyone with published remarks glorifying, celebrating or condoning the death — a campaign of defiance, not law wrongly conflates language about political violence with anything that rebuts right-wing partisanship. Bondi went further, killing a DOJ study that had concluded that violence was far more likely to come from right-wing extremists than those from the left.

Beyond what they say, it is not clear what Bondi and Justice intend to do or what will constitute legally supportable action to quash opinion, or how they will identify dissent.

‘Hate in Your Heart’

In no case is one government agency, especially one dominated by one individual, elected as the hall monitor for distasteful or noxious speech. Donald Trump is making clear he sees no need for legal distinctions. For Trump, “hate speech” is anything he doesn’t like personally.

Amid calls to lower political temperatures, Trump defiantly showed he would verbally attack reporters asking him questions that he finds embarrassing or not sufficiently highlighting his achievements.  He told one reporter whose question he disliked that the journalist had “hate in his heart” for Trump. He told an Australian journalist that his question would put the U.S. relationship with his nation at risk.

A $15-billion Trump lawsuit against The New York Times charging defamation and libel for reporting, editorials, even books by Times reporters about himself was absurdly broad and never actually challenged any factual newspaper report — just a lack of adoring coverage, not the job of my former employer. Among other things, he challenged the Times’ endorsement of his opponent, Kamala Harris.

Team Trump’s pressure on ABC and its broadcasters to pull late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for making basically the same point as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — that the suspect from the Charlie Kirk killing was from a family steeped in MAGA thinking until a year ago — is “defiance” raised to an extreme. The only surprise is the ease with which the undercutting won approval.

To avoid its own public defiance, Great Britain went out of its way to plan a Trump presidential visit to Windsor Castle that would simply avoid a route for protesters. Weirdly, it was comforting to see that protesters had gone ahead and projected Trump and Jeffrey Epstein against the castle walls.

Photo by Luis Quintero via Pexels

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The post Defiance Moves Center Stage appeared first on DCReport.org.

Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, both for its contribution to the standard pollutants like particulates and sulfur, but also because it emits more carbon per unit of energy produces than natural gas or petroleum. Thus, it’s good environmental news that, in the last couple of decades, US coal has declined to just 9% of total US primary energy consumption. The US Energy Information Administration reports: “In terms of coal’s total primary energy content, annual U.S. coal consumption peaked in 2005 at about 22.80 quads and production peaked in 1998 at about 24.05 quads.”

(For the curious, “primary” energy consumption refers to the original source of the energy. “Electricity” is not included, because electricity needs to be generated from something else like a natural gas power plant or a solar panel–electricity is not a primary source of energy by itself.)

(For those still more curious, NGPL refers to “Natural Gas Plant Liquids,” which are hydrocarbons like propane, which are separated from natural gas at processing plants.)

(For the additionally curious, the “renewable” energy category here includes hydropower, wind, solar, and biofuels like ethanol and wood. Of the 9% of total US energy consumption that traces to renewable energy in 2023, about three-fifths is biomass, like ethanol and wood. Not quite one-third of the 9% of US energy consumption from renewable energy in 2023 traces to wind and solar.)

But there was a time a half-century ago, when promoting coal use was a primary energy policy for the US government. Karen Clay, Akshaya Jha, Joshua Lewis, and Edson Severnini provide the background as part of their overall history in “Carbon Rollercoaster: A Historical Analysis of Decarbonization in the United States,” in the Summer 20205 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor). 

If you flash back to a half-century ago, you may know that in 1973, the members of OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, embargoed oil exports to the United States and any other countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War.  As Clay, Jha, Lewis and Severnini write: “The real price of imported oil rose dramatically, from $10.67 per barrel in 1972 (in 2007 US dollars) to $36.05 in 1974 (Seiferlein 2007, p. 171). Turbulence in the Middle East kept prices high. Unrest in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War caused further disruption, driving oil prices to $62.71 per barrel in 1980.”

In response, one policy goal of the time was to shift US energy use away from oil. The authors report:

Various regulations passed during and after the crisis reinforced the continued use of coal in electricity and other sectors. The first major piece of legislation was the Energy Supply and Environmental Coordination Act of 1974, which required that, if feasible, electric power plants burning oil and natural gas would have to convert to coal (Meltz 1975). This law was then largely superseded by the Fuel Use Act of 1978. Edward Lublin, Acting Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Coal Regulations in the Department of Energy, wrote: “The Fuel Use Act prohibits new facilities and allows DOE to prohibit existing facilities, from using petroleum or natural gas as a primary energy source unless DOE determines to grant to such facility an exemption from the Fuel Use Act’s prohibitions (Lublin 1981, p. 355).” This pro-coal legislation was often justified in terms of energy independence, given the abundant US reserves of coal. The legislation covered both electric utilities and major industrial fuel-burning installations …

The Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant meltdown happened in March 1979. Thus, an additional policy goal at this time was to shift away from nuclear. The authors write:

After Three Mile Island, no new nuclear power plant construction was authorized until 2012. Because nuclear plants displaced coal-fired electricity generation—one gigawatt-hour of nuclear generation resulted in a roughly 0.8 gigawatt-hour decrease in coal-fired generation historically (Adler, Jha, and Severnini 2020)—the nuclear upheaval kept coal consumption higher than it would otherwise have been.

One additional step was that the anti-pollution efforts of the original Clean Air Act had the useful effect of reducing “conventional” pollutants like ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and others. However, reducing carbon emissions was not yet on the policy agenda. Reducing these other pollutants had a tradeoff that coal was burned with lower efficiency–which meant that more carbon was emitted.

[E]fforts to cut local air pollution often increased carbon emissions. The 1970 Clean Air Act and subsequent amendments in 1977 coincided with less efficiency in converting coal to electricity sold and higher carbon emissions … The aggregate implications of this shift from 1970 to 1990 are meaningful: annual total carbon emissions in 1990 from coal-fired generation was 1,607 million tons, but would have been 1,415 million tons if the same amount of coal-fired electricity had been generated at 1970 levels of carbon emissions per gigawatt-hour. Similarly, the aggregate kilowatt hours of electricity sold per ton of coal burned decreased from 2,529 in 1970 to 2,065 in 1990. Thus, regulation increased coal consumption and carbon emissions.

Putting all of these together, “By 2005, coal consumption was five times what it had been in 1960.”

One of my complaints about the world, which I’m confident will never really be addressed, is that those who advocated for policies that turned out to have undesireable tradeoffs pretty much never acknowledge that reality. The US economy doesn’t really start getting off coal until the fracking revolution greatly expanded the supply of natural gas (as shown by the light blue area in the figure above). But what if it had been possible to move to natural gas sooner? Or France reacted to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 by building nuclear power plants, which means that France’s carbon emissions have been quite low since then. Perhaps the worst thing about the US stepping away from nuclear is that several decades went by without intensive research on how to make the technology safer. What if solar and wind technology could have been accelerated as well? The carbon from the additional coal that was burned from, say, 1975 to 2005 is still in the atmosphere now, and will remain there for a very long time.

The post 50 Years Ago: When the US Encouraged Coal Use first appeared on Conversable Economist.