Great Times for USDA?

Someone got a bit mischievous on USDA's tariff website, and listed Wakanda as a country. (It's the home of the Black Panther.) USDA claims it was listed as part of some test data and should have been deleted before going live.

Meanwhile the annual survey of employee satisfaction showed USDA as just above HSD at the bottom of the ratings for departments, with ERS and NIFA plunging into the depths.  (OGC and the Asst Sec for Civil Rights were also in the bottom 10 of the "subcomponents" ranking.

Trump Viewed by a Civil Libertaruan

Conor Friedersdorf considers himself to be a civil libertarian, according to wikipedia.  From this piece on Trump

"It won’t be difficult for future generations to find specific examples of his lust, greed, wrath, envy, pride, adultery, fraud, cruelty, vulgarity, bigotry, and bearing of false witness. Yet even a complete catalog of his sins would be incomplete, because Trump is distinguished not only by his misdeeds, but by the dearth of redeeming qualities to offset them.

Three Reports and the Bureaucrats in Them

My wife liked the The Report so we're watching it again, Dec. 13, the same week the Washington Post is doing their "The Afghanistan Papers" rollout, and shortly after the IG's report on the Crossfire investigation was released.

I've not read the IG report yet, nor the report which The Report describes, and I am reading the Post articles on Afghanistan.

There may be some commonalities, as follows:

• there are two groups of bureaucrats in The Report--the CIA people and contractors involved with the "enhanced investigation measures" (i.e., torture) and the Feinstein staffer, Dan Jones, and his assistants who did the research and prepared the report.
• in Afghanistan there's military bureaucrats and civilian bureaucrats with many roles over many years.
• in the Crossfire investigation there's FBI personnel.

For Crossfire, we're offered two choices--either the FBI agents were incompetent or they were biased against Trump.  I think there's a third choice: they were focused on a big task and developed the blinders almost inherent in doing the job.

 

I think in all of the above cases the bureaucrats thought their job, their objective, was important (people find ways to make that true), and devoted their efforts to doing it.  CIA wanted to stop terrorism; Dan Jones wanted to understand and reveal torture; the military and civilians in Afghanistan wanted to stop terrorism, build a modern nation, or at least not "lose Afghanistan" on their watch; the FBI agents wanted to prevent Russian subversion. That's an idealistic description: very likely on many days and for many people it was just a matter of getting through the day, putting one foot ahead of the other, but knowing when they wrote the story of their life it would have this idealistic sheen to it, ignoring the drudgery and the missteps.

But we shouldn't underestimate the addictive power of doing an important job.  The popular examples of this are from Silicon Valley, the nerds who work round-the-clock to develop software. As we learned in 2000 with the tech crash, very often their dedication was wasted on bad ideas, ideas that had no viable business model.  "Confirmation bias" is real, but it's only a part of what goes on in these cases.

Today''s Newspapers

Two pieces in the newspapers today 

• in the Post, I think, a review of a book (which also mentions a Netfix documentary on the same high school) describing a Navaho high school using the device of following their basketball team to.  The basketball coach was most proud, not of the team record, but the fact that none of the students he counseled had committed suicide.
• elsewhere a discussion of the effective tax rate of big corporations--declined from 21 percent to 11 percent.

"Family Farms"

ERS has its 2019 report on family farms out:

Family farms accounted for 98 percent of farms and 88% of production in 2018.
Large-scale family farms accounted for the largest share of production, at 46%.

Over 50 percent of farms are either retirement farms or run by persons whose primary occupation is not farming.

Note that "family farms" can be corporately owned, so long as one extended family owns the corporation.

Discrimination in SS

Been reading Eleanor Lansing Dulles' autobiography (it was recommended somewhere in a survey of memoirs by women).  She was the younger sister of Allen Dulles (CIA) and John Foster Dulles (Sec. of State).  Born in 1895 she had a varied career, meeting almost everyone, working mostly in economics in varied positions, from WWI relief, research in Europe, college teaching, service in the government with the initiation of Social Security through reconstruction of Austria after WWII and then the State Dept, which is where I'm at now.

Anyhow on page 152 she comments on exclusions from the initial social security setup ministers and teachers.That's a reminder that social security was an innovation for America, and it was focused on wage workers in industry and services.  Its limitations were, as I've argued before, not particularly intended to discriminate against African-American farm workers, but to enhance the chances it could be successfully implemented.

I may blog later about Dulles' and sex--she struggled with discrimination.

The Revival of Supply Management

Two straws in the wind

this tweet links to an article on Russian wheat, including a desire to form an international wheat cartel, like OPEC, to do some supply management.  (We used to have an International Wheat Agreement).

This is positive news for Canadian grain farmers. Anything which adds uncertainty to export sales from other nations is positive for grain growers/exporters here. https://t.co/exHSKjvMst

— Terry Daynard (@TerryDaynard) December 13, 2019

There was also an article on Wisconsin dairy farmers expressing interest in supply management for dairy, as Canada still has.

Is Trump Scared Straight? NO!

I blogged the question here, citing lower twitter activity.

But here's a report on his record 88 tweets.

So much for me and my predictions.

Rational Choice and the FBI

Rational choice is a theory sometimes applied to bureaucrats. My laiyman's understanding is you view a bureaucrat as a rational actor, trying to maximize his or her power, salary, etc.; in other words, treating bureaucrats as humans, economic men.

How does it apply to the FBI in connection with Trump?

Let's imagine the FBI bureaucrats confronted with the allegation that Russians were working with Carter Page to influence the Trump campaign. The chief of counter intellignence in the FBI  might have these thoughts:

• this is a big hot potato.
• it's dangerous to ignore it--think of the people who ignored warning signals before 9/11.
• it's dangerous to explore it--suppose Trump wins
• but the odds are Clinton will win, so that means exploring it is less dangerous.

On the other hand, FBI counter intellignence works with the CIA, but can have strained relationships.  (Read about Robert Hanson and Ames.) So the sharing of info between the FBI and CIA may have had hiccups. 

One of these days I should read the OIG report.

A Look Back at Afghanistan

IIRC, I was dubious of GWB's war in Afghanistan.  Memories of Vietnam and the "Man Who Would Be King", etc. were big in my mind. But the surge of feeling after 9/11, which I shared to some extent, meant it was easy to get caught up  in enthusiasm over the easy triumph over Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  That enthusiasm, plus the support of some writers whose names escape me now, led me to  very reluctant support of the Iraq.venture, though the skeptical articles in the Post also weighted heavily.  I regret I wasn't blogging then, so I'd have a written record against which to compare my memories.

Later my reservations on Afghanistan were raised by various books and articles, but there was never a clear decision point where politicians debated the issues.  And there was never a clear course, a way to reconcile my liberal desires for nation-building and women's rights and my doubts over the effectiveness of our strategies.

Now the Post is publishing the Afghanistan equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, documents from a "lessons learned" exercise by the special IG for the war.  

My bottom line, not having read the whole series yet, is this: most of the criticisms were valid, but it's one-sided, no answer to the question: "what was the alternative?"

I can only add this perspective: looking at Vietnam today and the status of US-Vietnam relations, the war didn't have lasting bad effects at the global level.  When you consider the deaths and injuries, particularly of Vietnamese, and destruction resulting from the 1945-75 conflict you have to deplore it.