Trump The Russian Puppet and other highlights from the week

The story of how Russian mobsters and spies helped Trump get elected continues to unfold and yet, with Republicans covering his flanks and the rumored cabal inside the FBI covering his rear, Trump is still marching toward his inevitable inauguration in one week’s time.

Why did Jim Comey's FBI hide the Russia allegations? He met with Democrats and it was a shit show.

From DailyBeast

Much of the in depth coverage is coming from the UK. This analysis from the Independent.

It was MotherJones' David Corn who first broke this Russian memo story last summer. His latest here

And from Rolling Stone

This is scarifying stuff and the Republicans seem unusually blasé about it. As if they were in on it. It smells like the Watergate coverup minus those responsible Republicans (an extinct species) who helped uncover it.

We have a president-elect who attacks the professional journalists while being feted and worshipped in the lurid tabloids. Politico explains how the readers of supermarket crap newspapers are now running America. We have a truth problem. America has decided truth and facts are the enemy and Russian spies are our friends.

This Quartz story argues that Putin is schooling Trump on how to discredit the American press

The Week asks what hath Trump wrought. Phraseology usually reserved for catastrophes, which this feels like.

The good news is Trump is historically unpopular for a president-elect. Politico reports on this

Lawrence O'Donnell runs us through the numbers on that. We are not alone feeling conned, cheated, scared, pretty much like our democracy has been stolen.

And this on the poll numbers and the Trump fiasco parade from The New Republic

But the Times’ David Brooks in his weekly NewsHour analysis says it was a good week for DonaldTrump has had a good week for the country. Does anyone else think David Brooks lives in a bubble? Or maybe he’s been institutionalized. “I hate to praise Trump so much…” said Brooks as he went on to praise Trump. Then he said John Lewis had dealt Trump a low blow by questioning his legitimacy.

Brooks said we need to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Wait and see. Trust but don’t verify, to turn inside out what Reagan said about the Russians.

I guess Brooks wants to withhold judgment until the Russians are given our nuclear codes and various other things. As if these serious charges of Russian collusion with Trump and a coverup at the FBI to protect Trump and Russia––as if that is all nothing to worry about.

The Hill is reporting that there's one Republican senator who condemned Trump’s attack on John Lewis.

The Boston Globe has this column on how dangerous Trump is turning out to be.

Newt Gingrich via DailyBeast continues to give Trump political cover, suggesting Trumpism is a philosophy...

The Republican leaders in Congress are working very hard to reconfigure America’s idea of ethics to enable Trump to limbo into office and seat a corrupt cabinet without objections. This story from VOX

Bloomberg takes the quaint view that ethics actually matter, even if Trump is making corruption and treason seem more normal.

Instead of demanding completed ethics questionnaires from Trump’s cabinet nominees, Jason Chaffetz has decided to mount an investigation of the ethics office which is demanding Trump’s nominees fill out their ethics questionnaires… It’s very confusing. And some mainstream news sources are trying very very hard to persuade us that nothing weird is happening...

The Rich Are Less Ethical Than the Unrich

A study published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that affluent Americans are likelier to break rules, lie, cheat, steal and otherwise behave unethically than less affluent Americans. The reason? Personal gain appears to justify any means that enables that gain. The more a person has gained the more license they feel to get more, by hook or by crook. I read about this in an excellent story written by Susan Perry, who writes for MinnPost here in Minneapolis.

This isn't true of ALL rich people. It's just a tendency, a small tendency really. Rich people are likelier to lie, cheat, steal, take advantage than poor people and average people. But if you asked most people about their judgments about strangers they meet on the street, they'd probably admit they are likelier to assume criminality among poor people than rich people who dress nicely and have expensive haircuts. Which shows how much common sense is worth. There are rich people who steal billions. (Fran Lebowitz once said a person doesn't earn a billion dollars, he steals it.) It's the poor kid taking a pair of shoes or a sixpack of pop who end up in prison. And the rich people who take/appropriate/finagle/chisel/steal billions are likelier to feel justified. The arbitrageur who uses a company's own money to take it over and then loots it, shuts its factories down and fires its workforce and puts their pension fund in his pocket, has no qualms because his personal wealth proves he is a good man. Maybe poor people wind up in prison because they have the honesty to feel guilty.

So wealth tends to confer a sense of license or entitlement. Here's a nifty set of infographics.

That word again. "Entitlement" is one of the dirtiest words among pundits these days. It appears––among the rich anyway–– that "entitlements" are only wrong if they are given to people who need them or have earned them. If you consider that rich people are (according to this research study) likelier to take what isn't due to them, likelier to butt in line, likelier to cut people off, likelier to lie for their own gain, the other side of this coin is worth looking at too, namely that poor people or people of average income are likelier to wait their turn, refuse what isn't due them (or what might not be due them), likelier to yield advantage to others, likelier to concede in a dispute, to compromise, to forgive, likelier to play fair politically and likelier to accept adverse events without complaint, events such as stolen elections, unfairly foreclosed mortgages, stolen trillions on Wall Street, jobs and wages and pensions lost in order to enrich those higher up on the income scale. And yet we tend to judge these people more harshly. We tend to think they aren't as good as someone who's got lots of money.

Dressing well and driving an expensive car and living in a fine house in a fine neighborhood and having wealthy friends sanitizes your behavior, or that is the common belief. And not only among the rich. Those unrich people who yielded when cut off in traffic, who went along with being lied to, who accepted being cheated or stepped on, acquiesced to the wrongdoing. Wealth breeds arrogance, but poverty breeds obedience. It's like they said in the middle ages: "might makes right." What was true then, before democracy made the world fair, is still true. Maybe this fair world we grew up in was only temporary.

Getting Underlings to Commit Your Crimes

Reading the news I often get the feeling I've read the same thing before. There's this from a Stephen Moss profile of historian and Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw in the Guardian:

" ...the phrase most associated with Kershaw: "working towards the Führer", the idea that though Hitler was not dictating every aspect of policy the entire bureaucratic apparatus devoted itself to trying to interpret his wishes. "People second-guessed what he wanted," Kershaw explains. "He didn't need to command everything. People interpret 'getting rid of the Jews' in different ways, and cumulatively that then pushes along the dynamic of the persecution without Hitler having to say 'do this, do that, do the other'."

And this paragraph from Michael Wolff's analysis of the Murdoch scandal in AdWeek from a week ago:

"It’s all about the organization. It’s an organization all about doing what Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine Rupert wants you to do, or doing what you imagine your boss imagines Rupert wants done. There are few companies as large as News Corp. that are so devoted and in thrall to one man. There are few companies which, over so long, have so assiduously hired the kind of people who would be in thrall to one man. Indeed, News Corp. can be quite a disorganized and scattered company, and yet its driving premise, what unites and motivates this oft-times gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight enterprise, is to do as Rupert would have you do."

In the Reagan White House, this same management style gave Reagan "plausible deniability" when his subordinates were selling advanced weapons to Iranian terrorists and using the profits to arm Central American guerillas that Congress had refused to support. Ollie North's "neat idea." They knew what the president wanted and got it done without explicit instructions. When the crime was discovered, the boss avoided blame.

The useful managerial instruction "I don't care how you do it...just get it done" has caused of a lot of misery in the world, but it takes awhile for the consequences to fall on the perpetrator. The harm hits everyone else first. Ethical managers know better. It isn't a new phenomenon. In the twelfth century Henry II had an archbishop named Thomas á Beckett who he wanted dead, and some eager minions who took care of it for him.

Evading Responsibilty Through Mathematics

Today's Must-Read comes from the online chautaqua BigThink. (Visit it. Read it. Subscribe, before you get distracted by something trivial.) Today's BigThink reminds us (and we need reminding) that mathematics doesn't/shouldn't/cannot remove or diminish the necessity of ethical decisions.

Our biggest mistake is delegating our ethics and our humanity to logarithms, to mathematics. Does profit know right from wrong? It doesn't care, and we should. If we don't know any better than this we aren't human. If our elected officials and our bosses don't know any better than this they don't deserve to lead. Rationalization is something we were supposed to outgrow in childhood. It's embarrassing to see it's become part of how our society operates. It may kill us yet.