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U.S. Navy Cancels Lecture by Author Who Planned to Complain About Book Bans

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2025 //
6

Under the misguided policies of Trump and Hegseth, censorship and book banning have been widespread, especially by the Defense Department. Hegseth is eager to please Trump and has stripped recognition from anyone of distinction who is female and/or non-white. Even a photograph of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb, was taken down–because of its name. The Navajo Code Talkers were put into storage. The first women to achieve military feats and honors were mothballed. The U.S. Naval Academy removed almost 400 books from its library because of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) themes.

Ryan Holiday was invited to lecture at the Naval Academy a few weeks ago, as he had in the past. Shortly before he was to speak, he was asked not to mention the books that had been removed from the Academy’s library. When he refused, his speech was canceled.

Question: if the men and women of the U.S. Navy are brave enough to risk their lives, aren’t they brave enough to read a book about race and gender?

Holiday wrote in The New York Times:

For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.

Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151(“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing”).

When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)

Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:

In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”

It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”

At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.

Just a few short years after completing his studies, in September 1965, Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hoa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.

He would spend the next seven years in various states of solitary confinement and enduring brutal torture. His captors, sensing perhaps his knowledge as a pilot of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident,” a manufactured confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that led to greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sought desperately to break him. Stockdale drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mind-set of his oppressors.

“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”

In his writings and speeches after his return from the prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments,” which he used to describe his experience as a captive. He and his fellow P.O.W.s were asked to answer simple questions or perform seemingly innocuous tasks, like appear in videos, and if they declined, there would be consequences.

No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at.

As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many timesalready. More important was the topic of my address: the virtue of wisdom.

As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.

The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted.

“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from The New York Herald Tribune at a news conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing.” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the previous years, because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. He concluded, “Let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.”

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The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library, and as heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the removed books is about Black soldiers in World War II, another is about how women killed in the Holocaust are portrayed, another is a reimagining of Kafka called “The Last White Man.” No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.

The decision by the academy’s leaders to not protest the original order — which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and common sense — has put them in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action.

In many moments, many understandable moments, Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a P.O.W. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, prevented the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life and perhaps even returned him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Stupid, Trump

Thomas Friedman: “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future”

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2025 //
6

Thomas Friedman is not an alarmist. He has been writing about foreign policy for The New York Times for many years. He has written about crisis after crisis. But now we are an unprecedented point in our history. An unhinged ignorant man is President. Probably he is being manipulated by others. And at times, he acts on whims and grievances.

On any day, he comes up with some dangerous idea. He is ruining most people’s life savings. Eliminating or disabling federal agencies. Attacking academic freedom; extorting major law firms and universities. Trampling on the rule of law and the Constitutuon. There is no rationale or ending to his madness.

Friedman admits he is fearful for the future of our country. So am I. Trump is demolishing all established relationships, antagonizing allies, aligning us with Putin’s goals, and breaking whatever he can. Why? Either he is crazy or stupid or acting on Putin’s behalf. I believe it’s all of the above.

Friedman writes:

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.

“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.

He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day —and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”

But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned. Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.

First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.

“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries?” asked The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.

The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.

The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons.

Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead.

You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners.

And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.

In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”

Does that mean China will leave us in the dust? No. Beijing is making a huge mistake if it thinks the rest of the world is going to let China indefinitely suppress its domestic demand for goods and services so the government can go on subsidizing export industries and try to make everything for everyone, leaving other countries hollowed out and dependent. Beijing needs to rebalance its economy, and Trump is right to pressure it to do so.

But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.

The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.

Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.

So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos.

If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Stupid, Trump, Tyranny

ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2025 //
1

Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.

Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica wrote this report:

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

Categories Data, Disruption, Environment, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Research, Stupid, Trump

Trump Posts an Angry, Bitter Easter Message on “Truth Social”

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2025 //
56

Donald Trump showed his vicious, vengeful character in his Easter message, where his hatred was on full display. He posted it on his social media platform TRUTH SOCIAL. Does he know what Easter is about?

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!

Categories Character, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Ignorance, Insane, Stupid, Trump

Thomas L. Friedman: After Trump’s Tariff Fiasco, Will Any Other Nation Trust America?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2025 //
8

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs opinion writer for The New York Times. In this post, he excoriates Trump for his arrogance and stupidity in handling the tariffs issue, and especially for his arrogance and stupidity in dealing with China. First, he insisted that he would “hang tough” on his plan to impose draconian tariffs. When the stock and bond markets crashed, he decided to put a 90-day pause on tariffs, exempting China.

He has alienated our allies and outraged China. His arrogance has isolated us in the world as a faithless bully. It seems that Trump’s “art of the deal” consists of bullying, threatening, insulting, and humiliating the other party. It doesn’t work in the international stage. Trump dissipated long-standing alliances and has made us look foolish in the eyes of the world. In less than three months, he has squandered good will, scorned close relationships, and thrown away our reputation as “leader of the free world.” The emperor has no clothes. He stands naked before the world as a stupid and reckless man.

It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He went bankrupt six times. No American bank would extend loans to him because of his abysmal record. Yet his MAGA cult believes in his business acumen because he played a successful businessman on TV. He is a performer who knows nothing about foreign trade, economics, or history.

How will we survive four years of Trump’s demented whims?

Friedman wrote:

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Ignorance, International, Stupid, Trump

Should We Trust Trump?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
7

Trump is a performer who plays the part of a businessman. In New York City, he was known for his high-flying lifestyle, his frequent appearances at nightclubs, and his escapades with beautiful women. A businessman? He declared bankruptcy six times. His credit rating was so poor that no American bank would lend him money.

MAD magazine published this Trump cartoon in 1992:

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Economy, Ethics, Failure, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

Trump Declares All State Environmental Laws to be Null and Void

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2025 //
37

Trump signed an executive order declaring all state laws that address climate change to be null and void. He claims that efforts to protect the environment are a hindrance to energy production. So ignoring climate change is important to national security because we need oil and gas more than we need clean air and water.

Remember when Trump said he was eliminating the Departnent of Education because states should manage their own schools and the federal government should get out of the way? Why can’t states make decisions about clean air, clean water, and auto efficiency?

Categories Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Science, Stupid, Trump

Washington Post: Social Security Facing Chaos After DOGE Cuts

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
6

What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?

The Washington Post reported on chaos at the Social Security Administratuin:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.

The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.

“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.

“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.

The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.

The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.

A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.

The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.

“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”

The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.

Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.

The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.

Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.

In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.

The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.

But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.

At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.”

“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.

Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..

What readers are saying

The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Science, Stupid, Trump

Rex Huppke: Trump Golfs While His Tariffs Destroy the Global Economy

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
9

Rex Huppke writes opinion columns for USA Today. In his latest column, he muses about Trump’s on balance as most Americans watch their retirement savings melt away.

He has a way of finding the humor in gut-wrenching events. Recently he has been writing about Trump’s demolition of the global economy. Don’t worry if your life savings is shrinking. Trump isn’t worried. Trump promises a future of plenty, someday. Trust him at your own risk.

It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He filed for bankruptcy six times. American banks would not lend him money because he was not credit-worthy. His “Trump University” was required by the courts to pay former students $25 million for defrauding them. People forget that he played a businessman on TV. If they knew that, they might be reluctant to support his decision to impose tariffs on every nation (except Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus.) He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He thinks we should not have any deficits. I heard a law professor explain how crazy that idea is. He said, “I shop at my local grocery store and have spent thousands of dollars there. They don’t buy anything from me. I have a large trade deficit with that store.” Nuts.

Huppke writes:

While Americans reeled from watching the economy tank and their retirement accounts get slap-chopped, President Donald Trump – lover of tariffs, destroyer of economies, liar above all – spent the weekend golfing in Florida and hobnobbing with wealthy pals.

He was gracious enough to take a break from the links Saturday to tell Americans, via social media, to “HANG TOUGH.”

Thanks, buddy. As we await whatever fresh hell Monday’s stock market brings and brace for the global response to the ludicrous tariffs you slapped on pretty much everyone, including some random penguins, we’ll do our best to hang tough, comforted by the fact that you and your assorted weirdo billionaires had a lovely weekend.

Look, the let-them-eat-cake vibe of Trump golfing while our economy burns – he even posted a video of himself playing on one of his own stupid golf courses – is enough to put satirists out of work.Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

And I’d almost be able to swallow the maddening absurdity of it all if Trump and his Republican barnacles would just straight up admit their galactic-level hypocrisy.

What if a Democratic president had done this?

None of what Trump is doing with tariffs is a surprise. He told us over and over that he was going to do this. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.

So, of course, he has ignorantly unleashed tariffs that are upending the world trade order and making everyone hate us. Anyone surprised by this insanity hasn’t been paying attention.

But imagine an America where a Democratic president got fixated on tariffs while clearly not understanding how tariffs work. An America where that Democratic president needlessly triggered a trade war, watched the stock market plummet for two days, then trotted off for a golf weekend during which he profited off people partying at his resort.

Would Fox News preach patience if a Democrat tanked the economy?

And let’s say this Democratic president has a weirdo rich pal he named Treasury secretary, and that guy – who’s worth a cool half-billion at least – went on TV and shrugged off the idea that Americans thinking about retiring are worried about the tariffs fallout.

In this scenario, Republicans would have already impeached the Democratic president – twice. Pitchfork sales among right-leaning Americans would have skyrocketed, and the Treasury secretary would have had to flee the country. Fox News would have wall-to-wall coverage painting this hypothetical president as a literal demon and demanding he step down because he’s insane or a communist or both.

That would bring a third impeachment from Republicans, and Fox News itself, along with the entire right-wing media ecosystem, would explode with enough ferocity to open a portal to another dimension.

Imagine if Biden did even a fraction of the damage Trump has done.

That hypothetical is 1,000% accurate. You know it. I know it. Republicans know it, and Fox News sure as hell knows it.

If Joe Biden, as president, intentionally murdered the stock market, it would have ended his presidency. Period. Biden, instead, made our economy the envy of the world and Republicans still wanted to end his presidency. So don’t tell me any of what Trump is doing would be even momentarily tolerated if Trump were a Democrat. 

This point is not debatable.

I’m sick of people shrugging off GOP hypocrisy – they need to own it

So all I ask, as my 401(k) shrivels like a raisin and rich jerks keep telling me to suck it up, is that Trump and his Republican bootlickers and all the little goobers on Fox News and Newsmax and the Illustrious King Trump Mighty Genius Appreciation Network (I might’ve made that last one up) muster the decency to admit they’re giant freakin’ hypocrites.

I’m talking about apex hypocrites. These are unrivaled practitioners of the dark art of hypocrisy. 

And they need to own it.

Better to be poor and honest than poor and a liar, right?

C’mon, tough guys. Show a modicum of courage and tell us what we already know. 

What do you have to lose? Your guy is in charge. He’s taking a wrecking ball to America, and there’s little people like me can do other than come up with clever opposition slogans for protest signs.

As the markets crash and the imaginary factories Trump keeps babbling about never come and regular Americans start Googling recipes that can stretch a pack of bologna out for a full week, Republicans need to say it loud and say it proud: “We are total hypocrites and we’re only OK with this mess because a Republican created it!”

You may end up as broke as the rest of us, but at least you’ll be able to tell your pauper children that, in the end, you were honest.

Do it, you cowards.

Categories Cruelty, Economy, Extremism, International, Stupid, Trump

Gary Legum: Elon Musk Is Screwing Up Social Security

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2025 //
11

Social Security is called the third rail of American politics. The third rail is the one you never touch because it will electrocute you. millions of retirees will want your scalp. Many have no other income.

But Elon Musk is fearless. He thinks he knows how to “fix” Social Security. Not only is he sure that billions are wasted on dead people but now he thinks the computer code must be rewritten.

Gary Legum of Wonkette explains how Musk is touching the third rail:

Having already fucked up the Social Security Administration six ways from Sunday with staff cuts and new ID requirements and field office closures, the incels of the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly plotting one more big step in their rampage: They are planning to rewrite the SSA’s entire computer codebase in a more modern programming language. And they plan to have this project completed in “a few months.”

Oh guess what, it’s Saturday morning (Gary wrote this post Friday afternoon) and the Social Security website is already down.

It has been a long time since we had a database/computer technology-adjacent job, but we know enough to understand that migrating a huge system with a reported 60 million lines of code is not something that happens that quickly. This is a years-long sort of job, one that will take the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It’s a delicate undertaking, and the vampires of DOGE have proven themselves anything but delicate.

Of course, they have also proven that they genuinely don’t give a shit if you wind up sleeping under a railroad trestle after their hacky changes leave you listed as “dead” in Social Security’s databases, so there is one more reason to not trust them if you needed one.

So, we hope you current Social Security recipients enjoyed getting your benefit checks or your benefit direct deposits on time! Hell, we hope you enjoyed getting them, period. Because there is an excellent chance all that is about to be deader than Elon Musk’s soul.

Wired reports on the new plan in a frightening new story with the words “System Collapse” prominently displayed in the title. It all reads as stupid as it sounds. The basic gist is that SSA systems still run on COBOL, a common, business-oriented programming language that has been around since the 1950s. COBOL has lasted this long for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that it still works really well. Programmers at the SSA still actively work with it despite the existence of newer, more modern programming languages for a few reasons, one of which is that it is very robust. So robust, in fact, that quite a few federal government systems still run on it.

The federal government tends to lag way behind in modernizing the technology that bureaucrats use to keep the country running. But as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And DOGE has already proven that it is unfamiliar with COBOL conventions, as Wired already explained in an earlier story about why, contra Musk’s band of Nazi virgins, there were not actually millions of Social Security checks going out to 150-year-olds.

This is one system you do not want to screw up until you are absolutely, positively sure any replacement system is up and chugging along. The computers at Social Security are paying benefits to 65 million Americans every month. For many of them, this is their only source of income. Fuck it up, and people, especially the elderly, can’t pay rent or buy food. Their existence is already precarious enough.

Yet that is likely to be the result when the weasels of DOGE (we very much appreciate the Wired locution referring to it as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” as it is anything but that) get through here.

How enormous an undertaking is it to move the SSA off of COBOL? Let Wired tell you:

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

Lot of problems with that, starting with the fact that even generative AI code still has to be checked for errors. And if it’s wrong, someone still has to manually fix it. What do you think the chances are that DOGE will thoroughly test any changes made by either humans or a technology capable of about the same level of thought as a blender? We’re not talking about Jarvis from the Iron Man movies, we’re talking about Large Language Models of code trained on other code written by humans that likely contains plenty of its own errors. The possibilities for disaster are infinite.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

This is just basic quality assurance testing. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the sorts of dweebs hired by Elon Musk — and by Donald Trump for that matter, he’s still allegedly the president — is that they simply shrug when something breaks before moving along to the last thing. Careless people smashing things up and then leaving the mess in their wakes for others to clean up, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once memorably said of another generation of arrogant, over-moneyed chucklefucks.

Wags online are suggesting that breaking Social Security is the entire point. Conservatives have long wanted to end the program. But too many people rely on it, so cuts are impossible to get through Congress. It’s the infamous third rail of American politics.

If, on the other hand, Social Security broke because a bunch of nerds broke it, and then nobody could get hold of anyone at the agency to help sort out why their measly $2,000 check hasn’t come through this month because DOGE shut down all phone help lines and closed many field offices that people could otherwise have gone to, well, that’s just an act of God that can’t be helped. Shrug and move on to the next thing, the Silicon Valley ethos.

We doubt it is one reason more than another. Sure, ending Social Security through the back door would fulfill a long-term goal of the Right. It could also be that the DOGE guys really are so high on themselves that they look at government programmers and think, What a bunch of dinosaurs! Get out of the way, old people, and let us show you how this shit gets done.

Well, we weren’t going to be able to retire for awhile anyway. Now maybe we’ll just work until we drop dead under that railroad trestle where we’ll spend our dotage.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Stupid, Technology
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