Citizen Cartwright

Reasons for optimism about U.S. democracy

Columnist David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: "America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to build the structures and customs of democracy — and only weeks to decimate them, as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and bloodier crises and recovered. 

 

"In 'Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,' the historian and scientist Jared Diamond provides case studies — Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after the ’70s — of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and '40s, and the 1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s. 

 

"Some of these countries (such as Japan) endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and 'disappearances'; still others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All of them eventually healed and came back.

"Even now, as I travel around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like [Whigs emphasized traditional morality and progressive improvements, Brooks says] working-class abundance agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.

"Over time, changes in values lead to changes in relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation."

 

Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, says in Foreign Affairs: "For democracy to survive, it must be protected. In the past few decades, in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Poland, opposition groups pushed back successfully against leaders with authoritarian tendencies early in the process of democratic backsliding, when they still had institutional levers to pull. 

"The Democratic Party in the United States can make the erosion of democracy visible to the public and costly to the perpetrators. It can obstruct legislation in Congress, compete in electoral districts where Republicans typically run uncontested, and coordinate to maintain a presence, even if only in protest, in as many institutional spaces as possible. Recent attempts to lead town halls in districts where Republicans refuse to hold them are great examples of this strategy.

"Well-organized social movements and civil society groups can shelter democratic institutions, mobilize voters, and increase the costs of antidemocratic behavior."

 

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto, write in Foreign Affairs: "Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. 

"Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. 

"Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey."

In a webinar, Levitsky and Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, say the important thing is for individuals to act, to choose the cause that’s most meaningful them. They cite as a resource the website Choose Democracy. 

Why it matters that foreign investors are selling U.S. government bonds

Investors traditionally have bought U.S. Treasuries on the assumption that, no matter what, the U.S. government will be there and will stand by its debts, says The New York Times.

But turmoil in the bond markets last week showed the extent to which President Trump’s trade war has damaged American credibility as a responsible steward of peace and prosperity, the Times says.

“The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing,” says Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University and co-author of the forthcoming book “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.”

The Trump administration promotes tariffs as bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, saying short-term turbulence will be followed by long-term gains. 

“But as most economists describe it, global trade is being sabotaged without a coherent strategy,” the Times says. “And the chaotic way in which tariffs have been administered — frequently announced and then suspended — has undercut confidence in the American system.

“For years, economists have worried about an abrupt drop in the willingness of foreigners to buy and hold United States government debt, yielding a sharp and destabilizing increase in American interest rates. By many indications, that moment may be unfolding,” the Times says.

“For Americans, that reassessment threatens to revoke a unique form of privilege,” says the Times. “Because the United States has long served as the global economy’s safe harbor, the government has reliably found takers for its debt at lower rates of interest. That has pulled down the cost of mortgages, credit card balances and auto loans. And that has allowed American consumers to spend with relative abandon.”

“At the same time, foreigners buying dollar-denominated assets pushed up the value of the American currency, making products imported to the United States cheaper in dollar terms,” the Times says.

“Critics have long argued that this model is both unsustainable and destructive,” says the Times. “The flow of foreign money into dollar assets has permitted Americans to gorge on imports — a boon to consumers, retailers and financiers — while sacrificing domestic manufacturing jobs. Chinese companies have gained dominance in key industries, making Americans dependent on a faraway adversary for vital goods like basic medicines.”

When large numbers of investors sell bonds at one time, that forces the government to offer higher interest rates to entice others to buy its debt. And that tends to increased interest rates throughout the economy — for mortgages, car loans and credit card balances.

Last week, the yield on the closely watched 10-year Treasury bond increased to about 4.5 percent from just below 4 percent — the most pronounced spike in nearly a quarter century, according to the Times. 

At the same time, the value of the U.S. dollar has been dropping, even though tariffs normally would be expected to push it up.

Other factors are at work in the sell-off, the Times notes. Hedge funds and others have sold holdings as they exit a complex trade that seeks to profit from the gap between existing prices for bonds and bets on their future values. Speculators have been unloading bonds in response to losses from plunging stock markets, to amass cash to stave off insolvency.

And some people fear that China’s central bank, which has $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, including $761 billion in U.S. Treasury debt, could be selling as a form of retaliation for American tariffs.

For years, foreign holders of U.S. bonds have wanted to diversify into other storehouses for savings. But the dollar and U.S. government bonds have maintained their status as the ultimate repository, the Times says.

“If the Europeans decide to issue a ‘sanity bond,’ the world might jump at it,” Blyth says.

The Chinese government long has wanted to elevate the place of its currency, the renminbi. But foreign investors don’t see China as a having sufficient transparency or rule of law, limiting its utility as an alternative to the United States, says the Times.

So, for now, the Times says: “The old sanctuary no longer seems so safe. Yet no other place looks immediately capable of standing in.”

Trump’s reversal on global tariffs

Hours after the president’s tariffs took effect on nearly 60 countries Wednesday, he said he'd pause them for 90 days, The New York Times reports.

But Trump didn't extend the pause to China, instead raising tariffs again on all Chinese imports, to 125 percent. He made that decision after China raised its tariffs on American goods to 84 percent on Wednesday afternoon.

As a result, nearly every U.S. trading partner now faces a 10 percent blanket tariff, on top of 25 percent tariffs that Trump has imposed on cars, steel and aluminum.

The stock market reversed days of losses, and Wednesday was the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, the Times says.

Trump said he pulled back on the tariffs because people were “yippy” and “afraid” amid the stock market declines.

He said he had been monitoring the bond market and that people were “getting a little queasy” as bond prices had fallen and interest rates had increased.

Global investors ordinarily move to the perceived safety of U.S. debt in times of market tumult, The Washington Post notes. But people around the world were selling U.S. Treasury bonds.

Mohammed El Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz and former boss of the biggest bond manager Pimco, says there had been an "erosion" of bonds being seen as a safe haven, BBC News reports.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the 90-day freeze on Trump's "reciprocal tariffs" was the plan all along to bring countries to the negotiating table, Reuters reports.

“Economists are puzzled to see Trump trying to overhaul the existing economic order and doing it so soon after inheriting the strongest economy in the world,” says The Associated Press.

“There is a deep irony in Trump claiming unfair treatment of the American economy at a time when it was growing robustly while every other major economy had stalled or was losing growth momentum,” says Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University.

The Trump administration accuses other countries of erecting unfair trade barriers to keep out U.S. exports and using underhanded tactics to promote their own, AP says.

And it’s true that some countries charge higher taxes on imports than the United States. Some countries manipulate their currencies lower to ensure that their goods are price-competitive in international markets. And some governments subsidize their industries to give them an edge.

But the United States nevertheless is the second-largest exporter in the world, after China, AP says. 

Wall Street billionaires, other savvy economic operators sidelined on Trump tariffs

“A Wall Street that had been excited for Trump, and the unleashing of animal spirits in markets, is now deflated,” says The Wall Street Journal this morning, as “top executives sense their opinions don’t carry much weight with the president.”

“Many supported Trump last year even while knowing that the steep tariffs he had long promised could be destructive to both the tech industry and the economy as a whole, but they felt that Trump could be swayed by advisers such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to adopt a softer approach,” says The Washington Post.

Over the weekend, Trump officials said that more than 50 countries had asked for negotiations on the tariffs, says WSJ columnist Greg Ip. But leading up to the tariff announcement, talks had been going on for weeks without Trump making a deal to avoid tariffs.

“We are always open for negotiations, but when we, like our Canadian and Mexican friends, ask our American friends, what’s the endgame, the White House can’t tell you what they want,” Ip quotes one European official as saying.

Trump's Trade Representative Jamieson Greer came under fire from Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday in a Senate Finance Committee hearing, reports The Associated Press.

Sen. Ron Wyden, Ore., the committee’s top Democrat, asked Greer: “What is the plan? In the last week, the White House has been all over the map when it comes to these tariffs. There is no clear message about how they were determined, what they’re supposed to accomplish, how long they will be in place, whether they’re a negotiating tool or a move to try and cut the United States off from global trade and usher in a new era of 1870s-style protectionism.’’

Here is historian Heather Cox Richardson's comprehensive rundown on what’s going on.

DOGE plans ‘hackathon’ at IRS this week

The goal is to create over 30 days a single “mega API” — a bridge that enables software systems to talk to each another — for accessing IRS data, Wired reports. 

The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage some parts of the project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, says Wired.

Two top DOGE staffers at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, Wired says. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with links to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management. Corcos also is a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Wired says.

Corcos has talked about plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, Wired says. 

APIs — application programming interfaces — enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with knowledge of the plan tells Wired, meaning anybody with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.

A plan like this likely would touch all IRS data, including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, as well as tax return and employment data, says Wired. The IRS now runs on dozens of disparate systems housed in on-premises data centers and in the cloud that are purposely compartmentalized. Accessing these systems requires special permissions, and workers typically only are granted access on a need-to-know basis.

A “mega API” potentially could allow somebody with access to export all IRS data to systems of their choice, including private entities, says Wired.

“Schematizing this data and understanding it would take years,” an IRS source tells Wired. “Just even thinking through the data would take a long time, because these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.” 

Good news on energy, climate, communications

As usual, I hope you'll have time to scroll through Fix the News' 20 good-news items that are free to read. Among the items that apparently are behind the paywall:

— A California startup has developed new carbon-fiber transmission cables that can be retrofitted on old steel power lines, tripling their electricity-carrying capacity. This enables utilities to upgrade grid connections without lengthy permitting processes for new routes. The Tennessee Valley Authority already is testing the technology on its aging infrastructure, Fix the News says, citing a Bloomberg article that, sigh, requires a subscription.

— Northwestern University engineering scientists have developed a way to store carbon dioxide permanently, turning it into materials that can be used to manufacture concrete, cement, plaster and paint. This offers more benefits than carbon sequestration methods such as capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground. The process to generate the carbon-negative materials also releases hydrogen gas — a clean fuel with a variety of applications, including in transportation. 

— Researchers have broken a distance record in quantum communication by sending a secret encryption key from China to South Africa, using a cheap, lightweight ‘microsatellite,’ according to a Nature magazine article that’s republished without a paywall in Scientific American.

The accomplishment — a kind of encryption known as quantum key distribution — is a step toward being able to send ultra-secure messages between any two locations, however distant. QKD currently is used by banks and governments to transmit keys over fiber optics.

Trump’s tariffs

The president announced on Wednesday new tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners that threaten to dismantle much of the architecture of the global economy and trigger broader trade wars, says The Associated Press.

Trump says he’s putting elevated tariff rates on dozens of countries that run meaningful trade surpluses with the United States, while imposing a 10 percent baseline tax on imports from all countries in response to what he says is an economic emergency. 

He says the tariffs are designed to increase domestic manufacturing, describing the global trade system the United States helped build after World War II as having “plundered” the United States.

Trump’s action “amounts to a historic tax hike that could push the global order to a breaking point. It kickstarts what could be a painful transition for many Americans as middle-class essentials such as housing, autos and clothing are expected to become more costly, while disrupting the alliances built to ensure peace and economic stability,” says AP.

Here is Trump’s list of more than 180 countries and territories facing “reciprocal tariffs,” from CNBC.

Here are FAQs from AP.

Here is reaction of world leaders, from BBC News.

Here is historian Heather Cox Richardson’s comprehensive and well-documented rundown of reactions from a variety of sectors.

Risks as DOGE plans to rewrite Social Security’s code

The Department of Government Efficiency is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans depend — at risk, Wired reports.

 

“One of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” says a Social Security technologist.

 

In 2017, Social Security announced a plan to get funding to replace its core systems, Wired says. The agency predicted that the replacement would take about five years. That effort ended up being put off. 

 

Like many legacy government IT systems, Social Security's systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper, Wired says.

 

As recently as 2016, Social Security's infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s inspector general found. 

 

Social Security's core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s, according to the 2017 Social Security modernization plan.

 

Social Security's core “logic” also is written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, says a former senior Social Security technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer. Even minor changes could lead to cascading failures across programs.

 

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” says the technologist. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

 

It’s unclear when the code migration would start, Wired says.

 

I’m seeing suggestions online to download your Social Security records. You can create an online Social Security account here.  

Why ‘Trump voters love him more than before’

This is the online headline of a New York Times opinion article involving four of its conservative columnists — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French and Bret Stephens.

 

They were asked why more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a recent NBC News poll (90 percent of Republicans like his performance; 4 percent of Democrats do).

 

Here are some excerpts:

 

David Brooks says: “Sixty percent believe ‘the system is broken.’ Sixty-nine percent believe the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.’… They get this from media consumption. ... If those are your priors, then you’re going to be happy with a president who wields a wrecking ball.”

 

“Trump policies are not 100 percent wrong; they are just overreactions. Destroying an agency rather than fixing what is wrong and saving what is right.”

 

“As a matter of principle, Democrats should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. As a matter of political tactics, I think they’re better off emphasizing Trumpian incompetence. Determining the constitutionality of some act requires a law degree, but incompetence is something we all recognize — and there is a lot of it.”

 

Bret Stephens: “The sort of inside-the-Beltway moves that feel like political earthquakes to a certain kind of Washington insider leave Trump voters somewhere between indifferent and pleased.”

 

Ross Douthat: “This sense of things may change as Trump pushes the envelope of presidential power or as the right embraces its own forms of censoriousness. Indeed, already you can see some factions that aligned with Trump because they were anti-woke start to break away or critique MAGA excesses.”

 

David French: “There’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the ‘deep state’ or RINOs.”

 

“Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms.”

 

“If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, ‘woke’ programs funded by USAID. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.”

 

“I sincerely doubt that most Republicans think or believe that Trump has done anything illegal so far. Right-wing media is full of legal talking heads telling their loyal audiences that the various district judges are lawless. The right is even attacking Amy Coney Barrett, calling her a grifter or a RINO for exercising her independent judgment.”

“That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.”

 

“If the economy tanks, MAGA will stay with Trump, but we know from the 2020 election that enough voters will step off the Trump train to swing the balance of power back to the Democrats.”

Being on this list can make a condo harder to sell

Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae has a list of condo associations it thinks don’t have adequate property insurance or need to make critical building repairs, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

 

Being on the list can make it harder for buyers to get a mortgage.

 

Fannie Mae greatly expanded the list after the Surfside condo collapse in Florida in 2021 killed 98 people, according to lenders and real estate agents. On top of that, it’s becoming more expensive for condo associations to afford adequate insurance coverage, the WSJ says.

 

The number of properties that fail to meet Fannie Mae’s standards has increased to 5,175 this month from a few hundred before Surfside, according to Stephen Marcus, a condo lawyer at the Boston law firm Allcock & Marcus. Like other industry legal and finance executives, Marcus has access to the list of properties that don’t meet the criteria.

 

Fannie Mae and its sister organization Freddie Mac don’t make loans, but they buy about half of the country’s home loans from lenders and package them to sell to investors, then guarantee payments on them. Loans that meet Fannie or Freddie’s underwriting standards, known as conforming loans, can be less expensive and require lower down payments than other mortgages. 

 

Florida has more than 1,400 developments on the list, in part because of a strict condo safety law enacted following the Surfside disaster. 

 

The next four states at the top of the list — California, Colorado, Hawaii and Texas — are prone to natural disasters and restrictive insurance policies, the WSJ says.