Weaponized Credulity

Democratic-leaning blogs and tweets this week have been jubilant about the findings of the latest investigation into the Benghazi affair. The facts themselves are simple.  As the Associated Press reported: 

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees."

The "left" (meaning pro-Democratic) response to this has been many versions of "we told you so" coupled with demands for apologies from both Republican politicians and Fox News.  There has been an accompanying gleeful observation that these apologies are not forthcoming and that the report was issued on a Friday afternoon, a traditional ploy for hiding news.  I think the truth is that the invented Benghazi "scandal" has already successfully lodged itself into the thinking of the people who want to believe the worst of either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton (or both.)  These people are ready to believe the worst of Obama and Clinton, no matter how bizarre or farfetched.  There is simply no way to disprove their beliefs with fact.  They are credulous -- meaning willing to believe anything -- about the Democrats they demonize.

This campaign cycle we have heard Republican politicians publicly dismiss fact checking and admitting that the truth doesn't matter.  Way back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness" during the inaugural episode of "The Colbert Report."  He explained in a later interview,

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything."

But I am not so interested in pointing to how credulous others can be.  That's easy.  I am much more interested in recognizing my own credulity.  This week a satire post circulated claiming that Sarah Palin insisted on Sean Hannity's show that undocumented Mexicans be put on commandeered cruise ships and deported back across the Mexican Ocean.  When I first heard this I correctly assumed that it was a joke.  But a close and trusted confidant assured me that it was true, citing an exchange between Hannity and Palin in which Hannity gently corrected her but Palin insisted.  I wrongly believed that my friend had SEEN this exchange instead of merely reading it.

Another very close friend posted a link to the satire on Facebook (as truth) with the comment: "Can't make this up.  Holy crap."  And what did I do? I commented, in agreement, that I had been skeptical until I saw Hannity gently correct, etc. which I had not!  Despite my initial skepticism, I piled on with the false claim that I myself had seen the exchange because I believed somebody I trusted had!

This is weaponized credulity.  Poe's Law states that without a winking smiley or something, it is impossible to create a satire on the internet that cannot be mistaken for the real thing.  I will grant that there may be some difference between (on the one hand) satire that people accept as real and (on the other hand) intentional misstatements that become part of the general discourse.  But what they both point up for me is the incredibly fracturing of the fund of common knowledge.  In fact there appears no longer to be any "common knowledge."

Again, regarding the common knowledge of the Right,  I have been astonished to see repeated internet references to "welfare," meaning huge numbers of people who sit home watching TV and collecting checks from the rest of us.  This form of welfare has not existed since the Clinton Administration.  Instead, working people receive food and housing subsidies, which is a subject for a whole other post.  But how is it possible that EIGHTEEN YEARS after the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, "ended welfare as we know it" people still believe in the Reagan Era myth of the "welfare queen"?  And I say "myth" because even then it was based on political legerdemain characterizing a serial felon and identity thief as a typical ADC recipient.

But what about the common knowledge of the "Left?"  If we are getting our political facts from carefully crafted Facebook posts that are designed to become viral memes, and if we share those posts without checking, how are we different from our political antagonists whom we readily decry as gullible and unconcerned with truth?

I am much more interested to see people call themselves out for "truthiness" than to call out their opponents.  And not because I believe it will open the minds of our opponents, but because I believe we need to open our own first.

Playing in a Rigged Game

I am, in effect, thinking aloud here.  A week ago, after Andrew Cuomo won the New York gubernatorial election, and after Republicans swept Congress I started to think about where we can contest power in a game that isn't totally rigged.  In New York, we have a long history of so-called "third parties" cross-listing the candidates of the two major parties.  This year, Cuomo ran on the lines of the Democratic Party, the Working Families Party and the Women's Equality Party.  Four years ago his big win swept a Democratic majority even into the state Senate.  So he collaborated with a group of Democratic state senators who suddenly decided to caucus with the Republicans, giving them continued control of that house.  This year he eliminated that embarrassment by refusing to support Democratic candidates, while Republican Senate leader Dean Skelos reciprocated by refusing support to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rob Astorino.  This isn't about party, ideology or platform.  It isn't about working "across the aisle."  (I am so fed up with that hackneyed phrase.)  It is about two politicians collaborating to keep each other in power.

Then there was that big electoral sweep which gave the Republicans control of both houses of Congress.  Yes, they took over by winning the support of an impressive 19% of eligible voters!  I have to wonder what they are going to do with their legislative majorities: Vote to overturn health care for underserved people again?  Impeach Obama like they impeached Bill Clinton?  Pass a Constitutional amendment against abortion?

And I am ever mindful of what the Democrats did with their majorities in both houses of Congress back in 2008, which was nothing.  They didn't strengthen the NLRB.  They didn't pass immigration reform.  They didn't even pass health care reform.  They did jack shit.  Because they need an obstructionist GOP, just like Cuomo does, to rationalize their utter refusal to serve the needs of the people who elect them.  That is why all the fundraising emails I receive from the Democrats are filled with scary Koch Brothers stories: because they want my support despite their complete lack of interest in anything I believe is important.

Leaving aside the backwardness of our AFL-CIO it has been horribly difficult to organize the unorganized in this country because the NLRB does nothing.  The massive (and massively illegal) intrusion of Tennessee elected officials into the UAW's campaign at Volkswagen is a good example.  It just means that we are left to find other arenas for organization.

So where is the playing field on which we can actually accomplish something?

The New War of Each Against Each

In Spring 2007 we were preparing our first senior class at Global Enterprise High School for graduation.  We encouraged those students who were totally up with their credits and Regents to complete the last semester of English and Social Studies requirements with supervised internships or individual projects.  We got some interesting work, too.  One boy, now an elementary teacher in New Orleans, interned with the consulate of Antigua and Barbuda.  They loved him (honestly, everybody loves this kid) and he had the opportunity to travel for them to tourist-industry fairs and to meet their government ministers.  Another boy simply began pursuing his career goals as a magician and a booking agent for other magicians.  His presentation of his work was very professional, did not include illusions, and showed a lot of learning.  He is now deeply involved in the work of Magicians Without Borders.

Then there was M.  When he first began trying to map out a project for himself, he was passionate about mountain biking.  We spent a lot of time figuring out a challenge that would involve actual learning and fill his days.  After much metaphoric spinning of wheels, he switched his interest to tuning and racing import cars.  It was easier to imagine study and work with this topic, but not without amounts of capital that he did not have.  Around that time a friend of M's dad announced that he was starting a new business and would be happy to have M intern with him.  Since Global Enterprise was a business-themed school, with a four-year sequence in marketing, business planning, accounting, etc. this was not a bad idea.  The challenge, as with any internship, was to ensure that learning was primary.  The business was ice cream distribution and I imagined how easy it would be for M to simply be an unpaid helper on the truck, loading and unloading that ice cream.  His journals and our weekly meetings were going to have to be very directed.

In the event, the learning only required his attentive observation to what this business really entailed. It was another example of large corporations turning to independent contractors to do the work of their employees... or simply turning their employees into independent contractors.  M's mentor had purchased a route from Haagen Dazs.  He had purchased a used truck from Haagen Dasz.  He now had to insure that truck.  He had to maintain that truck.  He had to purchase health insurance for himself and his family.  He had to do his own accounting, billing and quarterly taxes.  It appeared to me that Haagen Dasz had simply offloaded all the costs of an employee while keeping the profits.  I had heard of this phenomenon, but it was really eye-opening to see it up close.  M's mentor started with the core idea of being his own boss, but as the months went by, he wondered whether he was.

I am reminded of this today because of the parallel successes and disruptions we are seeing in the rise of Airbnb and Uber.  These two companies exist without any significant fixed capital.  They are both still privately owned and so their market valuation is different than publicly-traded companies, but Airbnb is valued at $10 billion and Uber at $18 billion.  They are essentially apps for transferring costs to workers, but they can be imagined in many different ways, depending on the angle at which you look.

Airbnb is an app for matching people looking for a room with people who have a room.  Homeowners facing foreclosure have been able to keep their homes by renting rooms.  People in apartments in tourist destinations have been able to turn them into a supplementary source of income.  Travelers have been able to find less-expensive lodging with real people in real neighborhoods.  Like any good matching app, Airbnb can be a win-win for people who otherwise would never have been able to find each other.  For the hotel industry, Airbnb is a competitor that has found a way to operate without an inventory of rooms, without staff to maintain and clean those rooms, without security staff, without insurance and without licensing.  When an Airbnb lodger robs or trashes a home, all the cost is born by the "host."  The success of Airbnb eliminates the jobs associated with the lodging industry by putting all the work of cleaning and security on the "host."  I live in New York City.  I can certainly see the appeal of generating side income by having strangers in my house.  But I cannot see how the collapse of the hotel industry here would be good for the city.  And, honestly, rereading that previous sentence, I can see the appeal of side income, but I cannot see the appeal of strangers in my house.  It only emphasizes the fact that Airbnb would allow my employer to pay me less than a living wage because I can make up the difference by lodging strangers.

Uber represents the same phenomenon for public transportation.  It is an app matching people with cars with people needing rides.  Initially an improved mechanism for getting a car service (a non-yellow livery cab) to your location, it has expanded to any kind of car or driver.  A livery driver can use Uber to find fares without time-wasting (and gas-guzzling) cruising.  But anybody who owns a car can also supplement their income with Uber if they spend a few hours ferrying people around.  Again, for both the medallion taxi and livery industries, Uber is a competitor that has found a way to operate without investing in cars, insurance or maintenance, without licensing, and without employees.  But riders don't know who they are getting in with.  Drivers are on their own and discover that their conventional auto insurance will not cover them for anything that happens to them, their cars, or their Uber passengers while they are "working."  I think the possibility of supplementing own's income with Uber is just another way of elongating the work day and allowing my primary employer to underpay me.

The power of markets is in their ability to make things available.  I can go to a store and buy beans even though I don't know anybody who farms them.  I can buy a book online that nobody near me would have thought about stocking on their shelves.  Nowadays I can even generate startup capital for an art project on the internet.  But a free market in labor has always been another beast entirely.  It denies our humanity, reducing us to that single element that generates money.  It devalues our children and our elderly.  It drives our working people into poverty.  Even capitalists with vision recognize that paying market rates (meaning the lowest wages possible) means reducing the market for their products.  And most employers really don't want workers leaving at 9:45 am because they hear about another 10¢ an hour up the street.  Or suddenly demanding a new, higher rate in the middle of a harvest because otherwise the crop will spoil.  In fact, our capitalist class is very interested in normalizing employee relations where it benefits them.

The rise of Airbnb and Uber is a new phase in the war of each against each.  That is just a phrase for the radical individualism that denies any "we".  It denies our mutual responsibility to each other.  It would have fire fighters arrive at our homes with credit card scanners, unwilling to turn on the hydrants until our payment clears.  It would have us pay tolls every time we drive onto a highway, with a lower toll for a crowded lane and a higher toll for a freely-moving lane.  It would, as our newly-reelected governor said last week, break "one of the only remaining public monopolies:" in other words, do away with public schools.  Some people associate this crazy ideology with Ayn Rand, others with so-called "Austrian economics."  For some advocates it is mainly a belief system.  For others it represents a chance to cash in on the privatization of a public service.

But Airbnb and Uber represent something different than we have seen before.  Corrections Corporation of America profits from incarceration, but they actually have to build, maintain and guard their private prisons.  Cofiroute, SA profits from its variable congestion pricing on the private toll roads of Southern California, but they actually have to build and maintain those roads and install the electronic transponders for toll collection.  Airbnb and Uber don't have to build, own or maintain anything.  And they depend for their existence on us cannibalizing the parts of our private lives: our homes and our cars.  We have heard anecdotes from other countries of people selling organs to buy iPhones, and of families selling one child to raise enough money to care for their others.  The internet market model could systematize and regularize these practices.  Somewhere, right now, somebody with more entrepreneurial imagination than I possess is concocting a scheme for the next company that will offer me the opportunity to surrender some part of me for money.  And they will make enough money with this that they can also privatize our political process.  Oh, wait.  That has already happened.

Extremely Perverse Incentives

In the 1942 film "Casablanca", Captain Renault closes up Rick's Cafe.  "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" he exclaims as the croupier hands him his winnings.  Today, after years of excessive testing and numerical targets that actually widen the "achievement gap" they are supposed to close, we have no more right to be shocked by the perverse incentives of so-called "data-driven decision-making" in schools than Renault had to hypocritically hyperventilate at finding gambling in Rick's.

Beverly Hall was already a star when she was made superintendent of Atlanta schools in 1999.  She had been head of NY high schools under Chancellor Ray Cortines, and then Newark Superintendent after the State of New Jersey took over those schools.  She was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009 before the whole thing came crashing down in a massive cheating scandal.  People were "shocked, shocked" to discover that teachers and principals faced with enormous pressures to produce score increases might find alternate means of producing those results.  Superintendent Hall was fired and indicted.

Reform superstar Michelle Rhee has a similar scandal in her past.  She still pretends to be "shocked, shocked" by the revelation that her intense insistence on test score improvement might have led to cheating by teachers and principals.  But investigators with subpoena powers discovered a memo to her from an outside consultant she hired to look into cheating.  That consultant was clear that this wasn't about kids copying: "191 teachers representing 70 schools."  And the report points to principals, too: "Could the erasures in some cases have been done by someone other than the students and the teachers?"  But Michelle Rhee is a golden child with the corporate reformers.  She had already been removed -- by a new mayor, which enhanced her "non-political" credentials -- and there has, to date, been no indictment.  I will not dwell on the most obvious difference between Michelle Rhee and Beverly Hall.

These perverse incentives act at all levels.  When I was a high school principal in the Bronx, two of my colleagues in Brooklyn informed me that they had mandated a 90% passing rate for all classes.  I said I thought that was a reasonable target.  They each gave me a look, and then one stressed that this was no target, it was a mandate.  I asked what would happen if there were more than 10% with excessive absences, or inadequate work.  I wondered how the cooperative kids would react when they discovered that their classmates who were blowing off classwork and homework received passing grades.  I asked what would be the eventual effect on Regents' scores.  They told me not to worry.  They were going to improve their data by increasing the proportion of kids receiving enough credits to be promoted to the next grade.  That is data-driven decision-making, too.

We see it in fields other than education.  The entire Enron scandal came from accountants who were driven to make the balance sheets look more attractive to investors.  The "friendly-fire" shooting of NFL linebacker Pat Tilman by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan was finally due to officers who had to check off a certain number of villages entered by their men, regardless of whether that meant towing a broken Humvee through a rocky path after discussing their itinerary in front of Taliban sympathizers!

But there are still times when I am "shocked, shocked."  Today's BBC world news revealed that the Chinese government is trying to get its citizens to stop burying their dead and to cremate them instead.  This means setting quotas for cremations that local Party functionaries have to meet.  So (I suppose I should insert an "of course" but this case beggars my imagination) some local officials have contracted with grave robbers!  The thieves dig up corpses from cemeteries in other districts and these corpses can be cremated in order to meet the quotas.  I would call these extremely perverse incentives.

Except.  Except that, as grisly as this case is, I don't think that abusing the dead is worse than abusing our children.  I spoke to a friend today who has a young son getting ready to start kindergarten.  They live two blocks from a well-regarded public school.  He could have the autonomy to get to school and have friends in the neighborhood.  But she is a public school teacher herself.  She sees herself driven to test prep instead of teaching.  She sees herself driving kids instead of allowing them to develop intellectually.  And she is starting to think that in the current climate of data-driven decision-making, both public and charter schools are becoming torture chambers for kids.  Desecrating graves to meet cremation quotas may be extremely perverse.  But so is the constant testing and preparation for testing that we do to our children, who are -- after all -- still alive.