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The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: They Tried to Get a No on Veto

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What We’re Following Today

It’s Tuesday, March 26.

‣ In a vote of 248–181, the House failed to reach the two-thirds majority required to override President Donald Trump’s veto of legislation that blocked his declaration of a national emergency.

‣ The Supreme Court heard challenges to two cases of partisan gerrymandering, one in Maryland and one in North Carolina.

‣ The Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, devices that allow guns to fire bullets more quickly, went into effect today. Owners must either turn their bump stocks in to law enforcement or destroy them.

‣ Republicans in the Senate voted to block the Green New Deal from proceeding to a vote. All but three Democrats voted “present” in protest, arguing that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell only called the vote to divide the Democratic Party.

Senator Edward Markey speaks at a rally for the Green New Deal outside the Capitol. (Matthew Daly / AP)

Here’s what else we’re watching:

Losing the Narrative: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference, which ended today, underscored the strong and enthusiastic alliance between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The speakers, both Democrat and Republican, maintained that the United States’ support for Israel is, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it, “bipartisan and bicameral.” But that skates over the discomfort many American Jews feel about Trump and Netanyahu, reports Emma Green. “The American political conversation about Israel is shifting, in part because of backlash against America’s and Israel’s right-wing leaders.”

What Barr Left Out: There’s one part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that Attorney General William Barr didn’t mention in his summary for Congress, Natasha Bertrand reports: his probe into counterintelligence operations.

Read Local: Americans don’t know it, but local news is dying. Seven in 10 Americans think their local news outlets are faring “very or somewhat well financially,” while only 14 percent of respondents said they pay for local news. The result, writes Alexis Madrigal, is that local news is disappearing, and civic journalism is eroding. “As the local journalistic institutions have fallen, they have not been replaced by something better, but rather nothing at all.”

#MeToo in Competitive College Speech: Peter Pober built up a reputation as a legendary competitive-speaking coach at George Mason University. But when several former students came forward to say that Pober had sexually harassed them, he was placed on administrative leave. Why did it take 15 years for the truth to win out?

—Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle

Snapshot

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speaks at the AIPAC policy conference. (Jose Luis Magana / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

Democrats Need to Learn From Their Al Franken Mistake (Emily Yoffe)
“As a society, we are in danger of losing a sense of proportion, and a belief in forgiveness. We lack established, fair procedures for evaluating claims of sexual violation outside the criminal-justice system. We need to slow down, be less certain, and think about how to weigh accusations in each case.” → Read on.

No One Who Matters Has Read the Mueller Report Yet (Quinta Jurecic)
“The problem is that Mueller’s report itself is not yet public. So while the matter at hand is definitively no longer one for the courts, members of Congress and the public at large—who will need to decide what is and is not acceptable in public life—don’t yet know the things they need to know in order to make an informed decision.” → Read on.

Liberal Societies Have Dangerously Low Birth Rates (Trent MacNamara)
“As demographic anxiety goes global and populist, a roiling debate is forming around basic questions: Why do some people want children, while others do not? Why do some societies seem to be shrinking? Can a progressive, reproductive-freedom-embracing society survive over time? Or is it doomed to a slow, comfortable death?”  → Read on.

Gerrymandering, or Geography? (Sam Wang)
“For a long time, the Supreme Court has limited racial gerrymanders, but it has been on the fence about the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders, in part because there’s no universally agreed-upon way to measure them. As mathematical diagnostic tools improve, however, the Court might find it difficult to pretend that it has no choice but to do nothing.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ Mike Pence Talked Dan Coats Out of Quitting the Trump Administration (Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube, NBC News)
‣ Obama Cautions Freshman House Democrats About the Price Tag of Liberal Policies (Rachael Bade, The Washington Post) (? Paywall)
‣ The Christianization of U.S. Foreign Policy (Kathryn Joyce, The New Republic)
‣ Abolishing the Electoral College Would Be a Mistake (Jonah Goldberg, The Record)

We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Comments, questions, typos, grievances and groans related to our puns? Let us know anytime here.

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Corporate Bullshit

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Business bullshit is about the meaningless language conjured up in schools, in banks, in consultancy firms, in politics, and in the media. This language drives thousands of business schools. It is this language that is handed down to MBAs. It releases MBAs happy to spread the managerial buzz-word language of business bullshit. When pro-business management academics, management writers, CEOs, and other upper level managers invent bullshit language, they fabricate something that gets in the way of businesses.

The historical origins of business bullshit and its pathological language came with Kroning and AT&T’s management guru, who was hired to change the AT&T corporation. According to Colvin’s Fortune Magazine obituary of Peter Drucker, Drucker once said a management guru is someone named so by people who can’t spell charlatan. In the case of AT&T’s business bullshit, it was the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and his ideas that introduced an entire new set of bullshit language to management.

It might certainly be true that Kroning may have been killed off while Kronese has lived on. Management charlatans like Gurdjieff, even when changing just one company (AT&T), may have had an global impact. It contributed to managerial bullshit language. Bullshit language is part of an ideology that is used to legitimise and stabilize capitalism. Ideologies are not concerned with the truth. Instead, they are designed to eliminate contradictions and stabilize domination. Hence, the managerial bullshitter has a lack of connection or concern for the truth.

Needless to say, it is true that bullshitters are not concerned that their grand pronouncements might be illogical, unintelligible and downright baffling. All they care about is whether people will listen to them. Their jargon can become a linguistic barbed wire fence, which stops unfortunate amateurs from trespassing on territory already claimed by experts. Not surprisingly, one finds that many managerial practices are not adopted because they work, but because they are fashionable. And the bullshit merchant can find a lucrative trade in any large organization.

These are what anthropologist David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs. These are jobs in which people experience their work as utterly meaningless, contributing nothing to the world and they think should not exist. Those in managerial bullshit jobs use image enhancement had had one economic impact: the CEO’s pay went up. Even the otherwise extremely business friendly Fortune Magazine had to admit recently that the pay gap between average workers and CEOs stands at a whopping 271%.

As macro-level neoliberalism and micro-level Managerialism took hold, universities became marketing/ PR institutions with their presidents not yet called CEOs. Undeterred, they create what is calls a PR university. What is happening is the conversion of universities based on research and teaching into PR driven marketing institutions driven. The managerial PR university focuses on Fleck’s Impact Factor Fetishism. While MBAs learning and making use of business jargon, those on the receiving end of the Managerialism-speak merchants are coerced into what ultimately results in silence is the best policy. Meanwhile, workers under Managerialism are forced to adhere to an old feudal policy: when the great lord passes by, the wise peasant bows deeply and farts silently. Today, it is: when the great CEO passes by, the wise worker bows deeply and farts silently. All too often those at the receiving end of all this, i.e. workers are not just forgotten but deliberately eliminated from the public.

Aligned to this is the fact that despite the widespread stories about the decline of bureaucracy sclerosis, we have actually experienced an explosion of bureaucracy. We have seen an explosion of management mutating into Managerialism. When seeking to stabilize Managerialism, as is often done by business schools, their next task is to infuse new MBAs with the latest managerial buzzwords and weasel worlds. Set apart from corporate reality, it is not at all surprising to uncover that many management ideas are cooked up far away from the day-to-day realities of a workplace. Many management ideas are not designed to have much to do with the day-to-day realities of management. Far from workplace reality, business bullshit buzz words have a rather different task.

A notable example that seeks to achieve the task set out by ideology, is bosses continue to demand loyalty from their subordinates while those at the top get the lion’s share of rewards. Not surprisingly, bosses rake it in big time. Meanwhile Managerialism creates a huge number of bullshit jobs, such as PR agents and corporate lawyers. The central task of bullshit managers is to create a vast and apparently unbroken complex of rules and regulations, which increasingly infiltrate all of our lives. Meanwhile, rafts of business schools professors are ready to be the PR agents of corporations. Perhaps American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Upton Sinclair, hits the nail on the head when noting “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Creating business bullshit and its language has never been the job of workers. It remains utterly the job of upper-level managers. Office workers are managerially controlled, supervised, monitored, watched, assessed and measured by KPIs, the infamous key performance indicators. It is not workers, but managers who are responsible for complex of rules and regulations. These govern us – those who need to work. And indeed, corporations, companies, business and even business schools love deregulation as it takes the state out of the equation. Taking out the regulative capacity of the state means opening up an unregulated space. This allows managers to re-regulate such spaces. As a consequence, we find incidents of macho-management. Just as the old saying goes: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

More and more workers spend time answering emails, sitting in meetings and updating your LinkedIn profile they are also required to spend time trying to optimize the way workers process this bullshit. This acts as a double-edged sword for the workers in the form of bullshit time: 1) wasted time satisfying the upper echelons of Managerialism and 2) real working time, e.g. doing your job. Beyond that many workers complain about the stratospheric increase of sitting in often useless meetings. The sheer endless number of internet-transmitted jokes about meetings tells one as much.

Worse, some workers are annually forced into applying for their own jobs. In those cases, human resources (HR) management’s internal labor market is driven to extremes by upper-mangers. Being hooked on Managerialism often means being hooked on the systemic and structural casualization of the workforce often camouflaged as being part of strategic management and being flexible. Beyond that, it legitimizes upper management as they organize the entire recruitment and selection process from analyzing jobs, positioning job descriptions and advertising the position to creating short-lists and holding actual job interviews. More often than not, many of these activities are done to feed the management machine.

Many at the top of the managerial pyramid who believe in management fundamentalism see those at the bottom of Henry Fayol’s chain of command(1916) in the following way, you’re just a sheet of paper. This sheet of paper might appear to be business bullshit. However, management likes to condense workers’ contributions and working lives to a sheet of paper called balanced scorecard.Whether employees are denigrated to human resource assigned an individual profit indicting numbers on an (often not really) balancedscorecard or Excel file for the purpose of performance management, they are forced to toe the line. This is a line invented and handed out by upper management. More often than not, this occurs in a my way or the highway’ approach.

Being forced into the lockstep mode of management  means you can be cynical about management bullshit all you want in private, but in public you need to pretend you are signing up. These are authoritarian workplaces without democracy reflective of mixture of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. Managerialism mixes Orwellian-style some animals are more equal than others with Big Brother style workplace surveillance. Management critiques have labeled this Impression Management.

On a slightly more philosophical note, what this means might be reflective of French philosopher Baudrillard’s Simulacra. Many workers no longer really partake in management bullshit. Instead, they merely simulate signing up. Working in today’s companies becomes mere simulation. And this remains so irrespective of working with the corporate psychopath or not. Of course, it is not only ordinary office workers who are drowning in shit. It is the key theme of universities and business schools. As Don Watson once said “Managerialism came to universities as the German army came to Poland.”

One set of academic staff experienced these effects as plans for a new building for an international center for democracy and conflict resolution being cancelled in favor of a new building for the business school. The more we are made to believe that ‘we live in a democracy’, the more it seems it is taken away from us. Terms resembling workplace democracy and industrial democracy have been extinct. Google.Books suggests industrial democracy has become severely eroded since the 1970s. It has effectively been eliminated from the public domain and even more so from academia.

Industrial democracy is no longer taught at universities. In the managerialised university, teaching and research have been substituted by the classical insignia of Managerialism. Now it is university league tables, beauty contests, rankings and the aforementioned impact factor fetishism – the crown king of scholarly achievement. What counts in universities as in the business school itself is the routinely undergone brand-building and brand-refreshing exercises each time there is a change of Deans or a new cohort of management consultants being hired. This is an activity spiced up with the eternally performed treadmill of business restructuring.

In any university apparatus inflated by Managerialism, the number of administrators has increased rapidly while the number of academics has stays relatively flat. When the managerialist university is Selling Students Short it does so with more managers and fewer academics. Meanwhile, the real work is no longer doing research and teaching and other things a university is supposed to do. Rather, the real work has become dealing with bullshit to make universities appear more business-like.

Eccentrics and math genius, Alan Turing for example, may well be the people who told the truth but in today’s university their reputation is on the line and their jobs too. Today, university management will performance management you out of here if you do not measure up. The case of London’s Imperial College and Stefan Grimm has shown this. Business bullshit in the form of Managerialism has many more serious consequences, reaching far beyond mere lip service. Much of this has been so exquisitely described in Schrijvers’ The Way of the Rat. Interestingly, business bullshit terms such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and business ethics are part management bullshit. Business bullshit has to do with power, capitalism, Managerialism and the ideology that legitimizes management.

Andre Spicer’s Bullshit Business is published by Routledge Press.

Saudi Coalition Bombs Save the Children Hospital in Yemen

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A Saudi coalition airstrike hit a hospital run by Save the Children in the northern province of Saada. The attack killed seven people, including four children:

Coalition airstrikes on homes, markets, hospitals, and schools in Yemen are quite common and have been throughout the war. The Saudis and their allies have consistently hit civilian targets about one-third of the time during their bombing campaign, and according to the Yemen Data Project that means that there have been well over 6,000 airstrikes like this one on civilian targets. Saada is one of the most frequently attacked parts of the country ever since the coalition illegally declared the entire area a military target in 2015. Bombing medical facilities is especially outrageous because the aid groups that support them make a point of notifying the coalition of the location of their hospitals and clinics. When the Saudi coalition blows up a hospital, clinic, or cholera treatment center in Yemen, they know very well what it is they are attacking and they bomb it anyway. It is completely unacceptable and a war crime to attack medical facilities, and it is particularly monstrous to bomb sick young children as they try to get treatment for their ailments. The coalition has been using both hunger and disease as weapons in their war on Yemen, and damaging and destroying medical facilities is part of that.

Yemen’s health care system is already groaning under the severe strain of widespread malnutrition and a new cholera outbreak, and half of the country’s medical facilities have been destroyed or damaged over the last four years. Sick and starving Yemenis that seek treatment at these facilities are always at risk of being the ones killed by Saudi coalition bombs that the U.S., U.K., and other governments sold to them. The U.S. should never have been involved in this war, and it certainly shouldn’t be aiding governments that routinely slaughter civilians in their houses and in hospitals. When you hear administration officials and members of Congress defending U.S. involvement in this war, remember that this is what they are defending.

No Justice For Jussie

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Wow. Just, wow:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his city’s police force Tuesday afternoon, denouncing prosecutors for dropping charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett and slamming the episode as a “whitewash of justice.”

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Emanuel said they were not only furious with the outcome of Tuesday’s surprise hearing but also blindsided by the decision itself, with the officials only learning Smollett wouldn’t face charges for allegedly faking a hate crime at the same time the public found out.

“Where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have – because of a person’s position – one set of rules applies to them and another set of rules apply to everyone else,” Emanuel said. “Our officers did hard work day in and day out, countless hours working to unwind what actually happened that night. The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud…It’s not just the officers’ work, but the work of the grand jury that made a decision based on only a sliver of the evidence [presented]. Because of the judge’s decision, none of that evidence will ever be made public.”

He added: “[This case] sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power you’ll be treated one way and if you’re not you’ll be treated another way.”

The judge in the case sealed the records, so as Mayor Emanuel says, we will never know why this happened. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted the state’s attorney in charge of the case:

First Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Magats said the decision to drop the charges should not be interpreted that Smollett did not do what police and prosecutors have alleged — pay his assailants to fake the attack and then falsely report the incident to police.

Nor did dropping the charges mean that Smollett was a victim of a crime, Magats said emphatically.

“Absolutely not. We stand behind the CPD investigation done in this case, we stand behind the approval of charges in this case,” Magats told the Sun-Times. “They did a fantastic job. The fact there was an alternative disposition in this case is not and should not be viewed as some kind of admission there was something wrong with the case, or something wrong with the investigation that the Chicago Police did.”

Magats, who became the final decision maker on the case after Foxx recused herself in mid-February, said prosecutors made the decision to drop the charges against Smollett under the same criteria they would any other defendant.

“It’s a nonviolent crime. He has no felony criminal background. If you start looking at the disposition in the case, in every case you need to look at the facts and circumstances of the case, and the defendant’s background.”

Magats noted that while there was no court-ordered community service, Smollett had been active in the community even after he was charged. Sealing records as part of deferred prosecution is common, Magats said.

The Sun-Times goes on to quote defense attorneys saying this is extremely unusual for a case of this magnitude. And, again, because the judge granted the state’s request to seal the case, we will never know all the things that the police knew.

Jussie Smollett got away with lying and creating racist hysteria. He flat-out did. All the work of those police officers was for nothing, because somebody in the State’s Attorney office loves Jussie Smollett more than they love justice.

Good news for future hate-crime hoaxers!

 

 

AIPAC Is Losing Control of the Narrative on Israel

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It was the final day of AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington, D.C., and the star of the gathering had finally appeared: Benjamin Netanyahu. An estimated 18,000 attendees sat in rows in a large downtown convention center, watching the Israeli prime minister address them through a patchy satellite feed on gigantic blue screens; although Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump in Washington this week, he cut short his trip after rockets fired from Gaza struck a home outside Tel Aviv.

It was difficult to hear what Netanyahu was saying at times, but the audience didn’t care: The staunch Israel supporters who filled the room gave him standing ovations. The only other speaker who won nearly as much applause on Tuesday morning was David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. He brought greetings from Trump, “Israel’s greatest ally ever to reside in the White House,” as Friedman put it. The whole event underscored the enthusiastic Trump-Netanyahu alliance, even by the standard of the traditionally strong U.S.-Israel relationship. In his meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday, Netanyahu compared him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, and Harry Truman, the U.S. president who recognized Israel.

Anxiety was a consistent theme throughout the conference: American and Israeli leaders condemned rising anti-Semitism and consistently took shots at Representative Ilhan Omar, the freshman Democrat from Minnesota who caused an uproar over her use of anti-Semitic tropes and criticisms of Israel. Many speakers wrung their hands over the way Israel is allegedly becoming a so-called wedge issue in American politics, lamenting partisan divisions over support for the Jewish state.

And yet, the two men who have been among the greatest drivers of U.S. political division over Israel, Trump and Netanyahu, were celebrated. Inside the grand ballroom at AIPAC’s annual conference, longtime attendees and political leaders forcefully maintained that support for Israel is as strong and unifying as it has ever been. Outside the hermetic world of AIPAC, however, the American political conversation about Israel is shifting, in part because of backlash against America’s and Israel’s right-wing leaders.

In the lead-up to AIPAC’s policy conference, Republican leaders, including Trump, have been pushing the narrative that Israel and anti-Semitism might be defining issues in upcoming elections, and that American Jews might come to feel like their votes—and donor dollars—no longer belong in the Democratic Party. The president quoted a Fox News segment in a tweet, claiming that Jews are leaving the Democratic Party in a so-called Jexodus. At the conference, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed concern over “the growing tide of anti-Israel sentiment,” describing it as a movement that is “increasingly shaping the left’s agenda.”

[Read: The fight over Ilhan Omar is a fight over the identity of the Democratic Party]

Survey data and historical trends suggest that both of these arguments are tenuous. Jews overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party: 71 percent voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center, and 79 percent voted for Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. And Democrats overwhelmingly believe Israel is an important ally of the United States: In a 2016 University of Maryland survey, 70 percent of Democrats said this is the case.

Still, Democratic leaders found themselves, yet again, on the defensive. Across the three days of the conference, party representatives sought to assure attendees that Democrats are staunchly pro-Israel, repeatedly taking thinly veiled shots at Omar’s suggestions that American support for Israel conflicts with loyalty to the United States or is motivated by money. AIPAC’s leaders were emphatic that their organization is “relentlessly bipartisan,” which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi later echoed: “Support for Israel in America is bipartisan and bicameral,” she said, “relentlessly.”

But even as American political leaders forcefully maintained that U.S. support for Israel hasn’t changed, they avoided addressing the incredible discomfort that many American Jews, almost all Democrats, and a wide range of self-described Israel supporters feel about Trump and Netanyahu. Many people who would count themselves among these groups believe that Trump has enabled the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States, including the kind of virulent anti-Semitism that led to the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last fall. In 2018, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) found that 71 percent of American Jews rate Trump’s performance as unfavorable. (Disapproval of Trump is even higher among Democrats as a whole.) And according to AJC’s survey, 57 percent of American Jews disapprove of how the president is handling U.S.-Israel relations. American attitudes toward Netanyahu are less commonly measured in polling data, but anecdotal evidence from events in recent years suggests that American attitudes toward the Israeli prime minister are cold.

[Peter Beinart: AIPAC’s struggle to avoid the fate of the NRA]

AIPAC has tried to navigate these tensions among Jews, Democrats, and pro-Israel supporters at several points in recent years, usually awkwardly. In 2016, AIPAC’s president, Lillian Pinkus, apologized for a speech made by Trump, who was then a presidential candidate, because he openly criticized President Barack Obama. That same year, an Orthodox rabbi in D.C. stood up during Trump’s speech, shouting that he is “wicked” and “inspires racists and bigots.”

More recently, AIPAC endorsed a statement by the American Jewish Committee condemning Otzma Yehudit, the far-right Israeli political party of Kahanists, who believe that Arabs are the enemies of Jews and shouldn’t have political rights within the state of Israel. Although neither statement said it outright, these were oblique criticisms of Netanyahu, who reached out to Otzma in the hope of cobbling together a winning governing coalition in the upcoming Israeli elections.

“The American Jewish establishment … has conducted itself for decades under the assumption that the right approach to strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship is by unquestioning support for whatever is going on over in Israel,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, an organization that often frames itself as the progressive alternative to AIPAC. “Where we are, in 2019, is a world in which the overwhelming majority of the people they’re supposed to represent—which is American Jews and others who care about Israel—are deeply upset about what’s going on here and what’s going on there.”

[Read: There’s more to being Jewish than fighting anti-Semitism]

Despite its bipartisan aspirations, AIPAC is unable to set a consensus D.C. policy conversation on Israel. One of its main legislative priorities, a bill condemning the boycotts, divestments, and sanctions movement in opposition to Israel, generated partisan backlash earlier this year: “Nothing—nothing—will motivate Americans to exercise their rights more than efforts to suppress them,” said Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland. “Trying to suppress free speech, even unpopular speech … will only add momentum.” And when Omar criticized AIPAC directly, claiming that the organization’s influence in Washington is “all about the Benjamins,” or financial influence, Democrats in the House were unable to rally behind a straightforward condemnation of anti-Semitism.

But at AIPAC’s policy conference, as attendees posed for pictures with a person in a plush, large-headed Golda Meir costume and applauded wildly at mentions of America’s embassy in Jerusalem, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran deal, and his recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, they did not acknowledge that the American conversation about Israel might be fracturing under Trump and Netanyahu. As the pro-Israel activists listened to American and Israeli leaders tell them that support for Israel is as strong as ever, they gamely nodded along.

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