Good morning.
A new year begins for Whitewater under partly cloudy skies and a high of six degrees. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4L:32 PM, for 9h 06m 46s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1836, an act of the Michigan legislature forms the Wisconsin Territory.
Recommended for reading in full —
In September, Lawrence Tabak wrote Why Foxconn’s Wisconsin Promise Of 13,000 Quality Jobs Is An Empty One:
Proponents of the deal, which include President Donald Trump, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, are blinded by the political windfall that would come with Foxconn’s promise of 13,000 jobs at the $10 billion Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) factory and assembly complex planned for southeast Wisconsin (Ryan’s home district). These politicians are so eager to score a political win that much of Wisconsin’s promise of $3 billion in tax incentives to Foxconn would be paid in cash.
But careful study of Foxconn’s past dealings shows that the number and quality of jobs promised for Wisconsin are highly suspect. Back in 2007, when Foxconn announced plans for the facility in Plainfield, they said the plant would employ 1,400 people. The fact that the facility has matured to a workforce of 900 gives some indication of their prowess, or perhaps lack of honesty, when it comes to job prediction. (The same percentage shortfall would take the promised 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin down to 8,357.)
Foxconn’s original proposal to Wisconsin is also telling. Before the jobs number swelled to 13,000, Foxconn initially proposed 2,000 jobs — incidentally, the same number of workers currently employed at Foxconn’s LCD factory complex in Sakai, Japan, the largest and most advanced LCD factory in the world. The LCD plant itself was up and running with 1,000 workers. Boosters of the Wisconsin deal have visions of the working lines at the old Chrysler and GM factories in Kenosha and Janesville, where motivated high school graduates could make a living wage. But the few images and inside descriptions we have of the Sakai plant, by far the best model for what the Wisconsin factory will look like, show engineers and technicians behind computer terminals overseeing the work of giant robotic machines.
In addition to the numbers, the quality of jobs promised Wisconsin is also in question. In their written testimony in support of the Foxconn legislation, the heads of the Wisconsin Department of Administration and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation used the term “family-supporting 13,000 jobs” eight times. Much has been made of Foxconn’s estimate that the average salary will be $54,000, but there is no written guarantee regarding it. Furthermore, pay the top Taiwanese management team tens of millions each and the average is so skewed as to be meaningless. There is a welcome provision in the legislation that Wisconsin’s generous contribution of 17 percent of payroll be limited to jobs paying $30,000 to $100,000, which will certainly incentivize Foxconn to meet that mark. But Foxconn is relentless in cost management and if an unsubsidized job can be filled at a wage producing a lower cost to the company than a subsidized $30,000 job, history shows they’ll do so. And the modest constraints of the legislation give Foxconn enormous flexibility to spread those subsidies beyond native Wisconsinites. For instance, the company is known for traveling efficiency teams that roam the globe imposing the company’s latest assembly improvements. These teams have to have a home base somewhere—why not Wisconsin, where their wages would be subsidized by the state?
(It’s worth noting that the 13,000 jobs estimate is from Walker, not Foxconn. Foxconn hasn’t promised anything like 13,000.)
Julia Ioffe reports What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling:
Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:
In an updated edition of their book, The Red Web, Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan—veteran reporters on the Russian secret services—revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election. It happened, according to Soldatov and Borogan, at a meeting in April between Putin and a small inner circle of his national security advisors, most of them former KGB officers. Putin’s decision was also reportedly an emotional, knee-jerk one, in retaliation to the release of the Panama Papers, which implicated him. Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.
An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.
That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race. They learned their subject matter by reading Americans’ social media posts and by watching House of Cards, effectively weaponizing American culture and openness.
Last week, TVRain ran a written interview with Konstantin Kozlovsky, who is currently in a Russian prison for hacking into various Russian banks. He confessed to hacking the DNC and to creating the viruses Lurk and Wanna Cry, the latter of which is responsible for a ransomware attack that paralyzed computer networks across the world. Kozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)
Earlier this month, the Bell, a scrappy upstart website based outside of Russia, published a detailed exposé by the legendary Russian investigative journalist Svetlana Reiter about the four Russian men—two of them high-ranking FSB cyber warriors—arrested in Moscow last December in connection with the 2016 election hack. Reiter delved into the mystery of why the men were charged with, of all things, passing information to the CIA about the Russian cyber-attack. According to Reiter, they had been set up by a rival faction in Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The rivalry, which Soldatov and Borogan had also reported on, centered on securing both the prestige and budgetary funds that came with penetrating U.S. government cyber-defenses. This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack….
(These Russian journalists take huge risks to report these stories, as Ioffe notes: “many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether. This is apparently the case with the journalists who published the RBC report on the troll factory: After receiving threats, they left journalism. ” They are brave men and women who have risked much for the truth. Trump wishes to reduce our own press to the same perilous condition.)
Taylor Hosking catalogues The Rise of the Alt-Right (“Selections from The Atlantic’s coverage of 2017, when the right-wing movement gained momentum”):
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, white nationalists gathered in Washington, D.C. for an annual conference, where The Atlantic captured the audience offering cheers and enthusiastic Nazi salutes. At the helm was Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right,” a term he popularized. “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” they exclaimed. Spencer would go on to set up a “hub” for the alt-right movement in the Washington area. But fractures within the the movement were emerging at the Deploraball, an event held in January, where figures of the alt-right celebrated Trump’s victory.
Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News who once described the site as “the platform for the alt-right,” served as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Over the course of the year, the resurgence of white nationalism would play out on the national stage….
In The Atlantic’s September cover story, “The First White President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that race propelled Trump to the White House. Chloé Valdary countered that there’s no single explanation for Trump’s election. Vann R. Newkirk II called for the need to define white supremacy, claiming that giving it too narrow of a definition allows it to flourish. And Adam Serwer argued that efforts to highlight non-racial explanations for Trump’s glaringly racial appeal is a long-standing political tradition in “The Nationalist’s Delusion.”
Anne Applebaum writes of The euphemisms I refuse to use in 2018:
In columns or commentary, one sometimes needs to simplify in order to save space. But here’s my New Year’s resolution: In the coming 12 months, I will try to avoid the expressions “far-right” and “populist” whenever possible. They are catch-all adjectives, useful in describing a general phenomenon. But they are also euphemisms, and they disguise what’s at stake.
The terms “right” and “left,” not to mention “far-right” and “far-left,” have long been due for a rethink. They date from the French Revolution of 1789, when the nobility sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries sat on the left. Since most Western “right-wing” parties aren’t seeking to conserve aristocracy anymore, and many of the “left-wing” parties stopped being revolutionary a long time ago, the metaphor has grown stale.
As for “far-right,” it doesn’t really belong on that scale, because the modern European “far-right” isn’t conservative in any sense at all. Nor does it have much in common with parties of the so-called center-right, many of which favor free markets and global trade and are happy to participate in international institutions and treaties. The “far-right,” by contrast, is anti-trade and anti-market, favoring instead a greater role for the national state or, in Hungary for example, for oligarchs close to the ruling party. More important, many favor a greater role for those ruling parties, treating with suspicion journalists, courts, civil servants, universities and even police forces that question their compliance with existing law….
(Applebaum finds no easy solution, and there isn’t one: we lack clear terms as no description seems wholly adequate.)
Here are Highlights of the January 2018 Sky: