Welcome to our new, terrifying reality
Phil Plait on Trump’s censorship of the science agencies:
Welcome to our new, terrifying reality: According to reports, President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered a media blackout of people who work at the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Department of Agriculture.
He adds that he wants to be careful, and that this could be just a transitional move while the new administration gets sorted.
This may be true. BuzzFeed and the Associated Press, however, obtained internal emails from the EPA and USDA that indicate the new administration is gagging people at the two government agencies, forbidding them [to tweet], going on any social media, or issuing press releases about their science. The only news they are allowed to issue must be vetted first. Also, in the case of the EPA, a Trump administration order has frozen grants and any new business. Note that the EPA has been under heavy attack by the GOP for years.
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It appears that Trump wants to keep these groups under the thumb of the White House, and to make sure the only news that gets out aligns with what the new administration approves.
If true, this is no media blackout. It’s censorship.
Again, this seems like an extreme conclusion, but we now live in a time of extreme circumstances. Just days ago we saw Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s first press meeting, where he blatantly lied about the size of Trump’s inauguration audience, then abruptly left without taking questions. Then Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway dismissed criticism of Spicer, saying he was presenting “alternative facts.”
In short, brazen lying is their MO.
The trend here is clear. Trump has been lying and saying provably false things since the early days of his campaign; his entire rise to the top of the GOP presidential candidate heap was based on his birtherism. He has also fervently denied any science that goes against his ideology, picking and choosing what he wishes to believe (or disbelieve). Hence his denial of the reality of human-induced climate change and his courting of the worst of the anti-vaccination promoters like RFK Jr. and Andrew Wakefield—the latter is the father of the modern anti-vax movement, even though he has been struck off the U.K. General Medical Council’s register and his original findings have been retracted and branded as fraudulent.
Ordering the EPA to take down its climate change pages is appalling. As Reuters says,
The page includes links to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change.
The Trump administration’s recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team.
So yeah, that’s very, very worrisome.
So no, we don’t have to just shrug and say “Well he has absolute power so whatever.”
We’ve seen this happen before in recent times; when Stephen Harper became Canada’s prime minister, his anti-science right-wing administration did much the same thing, gagging scientists, including climate scientists, from talking to the media or public. Scientists rebelled and created their own site where they could announce their results, but the gag order wasn’t rescinded until Harper’s party was voted out of power. Besides it being a national embarrassment, the gag order meant that news articles about scientific research could report it incorrectly and the scientists could not issue corrections. It also allowed Harper to prevent the public knowing about research that went against his own anti-climate agenda.
Don’t think it can happen here? It already has, back in the George W. Bush administration, when for just one example a PR flack was put in place at NASAwho meddled with their science communication efforts.
And now, it seems, it’s happening here once again.
This is extremely worrying. In the absence of scientific autonomy and open discussion, the administration is free to make up whatever reality serves it best. Given that Trump signed an executive order making it easier to build the Dakota Access Pipeline—a colossal conflict of interest, since Trump has stock in the company that would build it—we can see very clearly what reality that will be. Massive corruption, suppression of free speech and the freedom of the press, oppression of minorities, the complete reversal of women’s rights, and the literal sickening of America.
In short we’re in deep trouble and must fight back every way we know how.
Remember, they make the reality, and we just have to keep up. But there we are, reality based thinkers, thinking you can’t just change the world to what you want it to be by ordering it to be that way. Silly us, reality based scientists, that insist on doing science the scientific way, rather than the GOP way.
What I really don’t get, as a non-American, is why there is this assumption across many Anglo-Saxon countries that their head of government gets to do whatever they want.
One would think that one cannot legally freeze activities that are connected to already signed contracts. One would think that there’d be rights and rules allowing research agencies some degree of independence – not to frustrate a democratically elected government, but to follow their stated mission until the mission statement is changed. One would think that it would be wise not to vest the authority to launch all the nuclear missiles in a single person. Etc.
When I was in what you would call high school, we learned about American democracy with an emphasis on the idea that it had invented checks and balances. So whence “well he has absolute power so whatever”? Why does it seem that most other countries have actual checks, but places like Canada and the USA have none? Genuinely puzzled here. Did my civics teacher and textbooks completely misunderstand the USA?
Alex – the president was created to be relatively weak. This started changing with Teddy Roosevelt, who claimed a lot of powers he didn’t really have and got away with it. Then later Wilson, then FDR, and it was pretty much done. Some of what they did was for good, some not so good, but the imperial president has really expanded particularly in this century, and Congress lets them get away with it. In fact, Congress enables it by now giving them a discretionary budget, when they didn’t really have funds before.
Americans seem to want one single, big, macho leader who can just call the shots, and since we’ve never had a king, and our president was limited, they just elected people who would ignore those limitations. It has worked.
In reality, Congress is the stronger of the branches, but they have ceded a lot to the President, out of expediency, or maybe just because they didn’t want to deal with it, or maybe because our Congress is often as ignorant of the actual Constitution as our citizens. That’s one of the risks of having a citizen Congress. Lawyers may not even know the constitution that well, depending on what branch of law they specialized in, and if it’s expedient to not say anything, the lawyers in Congress may also just stay silent.
So it’s sort of been the Roman empire thing – Congress gradually weakening, while the President grows stronger. Soon, an emperor? Could happen…most people think it couldn’t, but I suspect they aren’t paying attention.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1423569364328187/?type=3&theater
There’s also the fact that the checks and balances are between state and national governments and among the three branches of government. Right now, one party controls both parts of the legislature and the executive branch, with a pretty good hold of the judiciary about to get stronger and a lot of lower court appointments that will breeze through now that the Senate won’t be blocking the other party’s President’s picks.
So what we have now is not only a government tilted toward executive power – not only one in which state governments are in many cases dominated by political extremists, unlikely to restrain their compatriots in the national government – but also one in which the entities meant to hold one another back from wild and crazy stuff at the national level are rooting one another on like a bunch of drunken frat bros.
I have sad, pathetic daydreams about a powerful, entrenched, unelected bureaucracy that could save us from nihilistic, incompetent demagogues. But alas, it’s not a tradition that’s ever taken root here.
Alex SL,
There are some restrictions. The government can be sued for breach of contract. Laws may require agencies to take, or to refrain from taking, particular actions. Regulations may, too — the executive branch has the power to change the regulations, but there’s a process that usually has to be followed. Some government agencies have a degree of independence — there are some whose heads are appointed by Congress, some who do not “serve at the pleasure of the president” (meaning he can fire them).
And Congress retains supervisory power too, in a sense. It can hold hearings and subpoena witnesses and documents to investigate whether mismanagement or neglect or political influence is going on. And Congress has the power of the purse — it can refuse to fund an agency, or place conditions on it (“don’t talk about abortion!”). Of course, this Congress is no prize, either. Scarily enough, this new Congress has revived a rule that authorizes it to deny funding right down to the level of an individual employee’s salary. (“Here’s your annual budget, EPA. But you can’t give a penny to Joe Climatologist, or Sally the Solar Energy Expert.”)
But there’s really a lot of grey areas, and as iknklast says above, it’s evolved over the years. There are some genuinely tricky questions. For example, we have a bunch of states which have now legalized marijuana to some extent. But there are still federal laws regarding marijuana. Can the President (through the Attorney General) tell the Department of Justice including the FBI “don’t hassle stores that are complying with state law”? Or can the President direct the Customs and Immigration Service “don’t bother with deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who haven’t committed a crime”? On the one hand, prosecutorial discretion is a long-recognized power — prosecutors aren’t expected to go after every little legal violation they see, and the administration is entitled to set priorities for how to use their limited staff and resources. On the other hand, the President is obligated to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — is it a violation of that duty to effectively ignore federal marijuana laws or selectively ignore immigration laws?
And there are customs and norms about which things can be politicized and how. The President can fire his cabinet members for any reason, in theory, but the “Saturday Night Massacre” was one of the last straws in Nixon’s downfall. Of course, we also had a custom and norm that presidential candidates release their tax returns.
I’ve encountered quite a few Americans who have a really disproportionate amount of faith in the U.S. Constitution, as if it were some perfectly drafted document that answers everything and resolves every crisis. These are usually the same Americans who are appalled that other countries “still have a queen!” who has considerable power “on paper.” But these same Americans would be shocked to learn just how much of what they take for granted isn’t actually constitutionally required, at least not explicitly.
You mean the liberal elite media cabal that has been secretly running the joint? Kinda puts the lie to that claim right? I mean, if they were that good and powerful that they could hold off the ‘righteous’ for so long then it should be easier to identify them. If they were weak and ineffectual (as all right-wingers know liberals to be) then why did it take so long to kick their asses?
I’ve always considered the almost religious fervour around the US Constitution to be unsettling and vaguely creepy. It barely rates a pass mark and should have been significantly redrafted long since. I imagine quite a few of the founding fathers would be disturbed that it hasn’t and that it is taken as such an article of unquestioned faith now.
I am aware that laws are empty if a custom has developed to ignore them – for better or for worse. For every law being ignored that would restrict executive overreach there are probably ten local ordinances being ignored that say women need to wear skirts or people will be fined for cussing on a Sunday.
But still, just considering this: “this new Congress has revived a rule that authorizes it to deny funding right down to the level of an individual employee’s salary”. I have seen that in the news, but how can that be legal, or constitutional, whatever? How can society function if every government employee’s contract stating “you have been hired on an ongoing basis, your salary is XYZ, and the law says we need good reason to terminate you” is superseded with the stroke of a pen? Isn’t it clear that we all need to be able to rely on contracts?
I get that there are some people who like that kind of world as long as they can envision themselves being the ones in power. What I don’t get is why so many others are so complacent about acts like these being possible in the first place. Why wasn’t it made clear decades ago that nobody gets to do that?
Alex – one of the downsides of the American system is that it was effective at providing a proportion of the people with a good enough life that they didn’t want to rock the boat. The mantra here is that anyone can succeed, so people who don’t have enough to do more than barely subsist are assumed to be lazy. Then the powers that be kick up a ferocious noise about the threat that these “lazy no goods” are going to take away the comfort through taxation that all goes to above-mentioned “lazy no goods”. Big business promises utopia through shopping and consumption. Then they (those who would loot our government) start promising to stop taxation. Couple all that with schools teaching a highly whitewashed patriotic vision of history, and you get a strangely schizophrenic country that is both complacent and angry at the same time. They’re complacent about the looting and angry about the social safety net. In a bizarre upside-down world like that, Donald Trump was probably inevitable.
On a slight tangent, this got me “thinking”: Whatever put the lead into leaders?
The empire of Rome is believed to have collapsed in part because of endemic lead poisoning from the state of the art plumbing in that world capital.
This longish article from a year ago suggests that tetra ethyl lead additive in gasoline has had a deep effect on levels of population intelligence and violent crime, principally in urban US areas, after about 1940 (and not over yet, although a ban on leaded automotive fuel started 40 years ago). The statistics seem to favor this hypothesis.
Donny is from NYC and born 1946? Everyone now suffers from his bad impulse control and aggressive demeanor, and he does not really project a super-high IQ, now does he?
I guess I may pitch in a modest donation to that site; looks like it may come in handy.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health
#9 – What iknclast said. Also, racism plays into it: the have-nots tend to be black or other ethnic/racial minorities more than whites do, so the white have’s can despise the have-not “takers” in part (or whole!) out of racism without having to own up to racism if/when it is socially unacceptable. That the majority of the have-nots really still are white (just not in as large a proportion as the have’s) is something usually forgotten or ignored. The white have-not’s won’t identify themselves that way, just as down on their luck, or the lower end of a middle class, so politically, they remain allied with the people keeping them struggling for a paycheck.
On the one hand, we have a society with a marvelous dream of being knit by political bonds and open to all races, ethnicities, and religions; on the other, it’s one in which that diversity of creed and color gives us so many divisions to be exploited.