Trump’s key method is to, one by one, eliminate as many independent institutions as possible that are free enough to resist or criticize him.
In the private sector, Trump has cowed otherwise independent companies by threatening them with arbitrary penalties. Rather than collectively resist Trump’s extortive tactics, companies from law firms to tech giants have sold out the long-term stability of a democratically governed free market to protect their earnings in the short term.
This collective action problem extends to universities, which are independent from government control but rely on governments for research funds, tax-exempt status and the admission of international students and scholars.
In each case, the president isolates key targets and threatens them, and seemingly them only, if they don’t bend to his will. And for each target, the calculation is simple: Resisting entails concentrated costs to their organization and diffuse public benefits to American democracy, whereas capitulating transfers diffuse costs to American democracy and concentrated benefits to their organization.
–Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at GMU who’s quoted for this article.
Sounds like short term thinking, for one thing. As several amidst us here have noted, transferred concentrated benfits to an organization are outweighed when Tramp simply comes back and demands more. Capitulation does not make the bully go away and stay away.
“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill,” Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale, told The Times. “But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”
OK, so I am of two minds on this one. On the one hand, I am all for getting funky, not-for-human-consumption chemicals out of our food chain. (And agreeing with RFK jr is just making me throw up a little.) But this is anincredibly short timeline to make what is a really major change in food manufacturing. A lot of you know my wife is baker specializing in high-end, fancy-schmancy wedding cakes. She has been anticipating something like this and experimenting with natural food colors and dyes. Here is her take: They are expensive. 10-20x the price of current stuff. They are not nearly as intense. To get anything beyond pastels takes an incredible amount of the product. Her “red” (much closer to pinkish purple) icing tasted noticeably of beets. Of the things that these assholes are doing, this is not the most horrible, but it will affect folks lives in a big way. Both in prices and product appearance, this is moving very fast and may wind up being a huge mistake.
If you have ever bought Starbursts or M&Ms in the EU, you will quickly realize that the colors are all slightly different due to what dyes the EU will accept. I doubt it would be too disruptive (in the long term) to mandate the same dyes used in the EU. They’ve done the science.
I’m sure what the GOP has in mind is some companies being allow to continue using their dyes while other are prohibited depending on company loyally or influence. I can’t image that RFK’s “work” is anything other than just part of an extended grift to enrich their friends.
An extreme indeed desire that Tramp may well harbor, but I appreciate Belle’s points that the logistics mean it kinda can’t happen, and that if Tramp really did try it, there would be a lot of advance indications that it’s coming (so there really was no imminent threat of it happening on 4/20, as some feared).
I’ll fully support canonization and start going back to mass if zombiepope claws his way from his casket and drags donnie to the afterlife at the funeral. I’ve got a lot of stuff backed up in the old confessional bank but with that as a sign, I’ll shift my skepticism enough to start considering it Pascal’s Sure Thing.
Great big proud former coders came up to me with tears in their eyes, “sir,” they say “sir, we were slaving all day on our DEI megawoke computer coding jobs but thanks to you we no longer are chained to our desks, drinking sometimes supplied lukewarm coffee and forced to participate in ‘team building’ activities. Now we can scrounge dumpsters for banana peels for dinner like good people!”
