"How a Trump-era policy that separated thousands of migrant families came to pass" PBS NewsHour 8/13/2022
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SUMMARY: The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy separated over 5,000 children from their parents, with no tracking process or records that would allow them to be reunited. Atlantic staff writer Caitlin Dickerson joins Geoff Bennett to discuss her investigation into the policy.
IMHO: Answer is YES!
"Should Native Americans control national parks? Examining an argument for reparations" PBS NewsHour 5/17/2021
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SUMMARY: Trekking to and through a national park is one of the joys of an American summer. As COVID restrictions lift, millions are expected to explore the great outdoors. Now, a provocative article examines the deeper history of how these parks came to be — and their complicated legacy. Stephanie Sy reports.
SUMMARY: The promise of social media is instant human connection. But for many teens, greater use of social media mans a far greater sense of isolation, according to an increasing body of evidence. William Brangham speaks with Jean Twenge, author of "iGen" and a new article in The Atlantic, about the ways smartphones are affecting an entire generation's mental health.
SUMMARY: Whether you're killing time in line at Starbucks or scrolling through an endless meme stream on Twitter, your smartphone is trying to seduce you. Former Google employee Tristan Harris felt something needed to be done to combat tech designers' relentless efforts to influence our behavior. Special correspondent Cat Wise talks to Harris as part of a collaboration with The Atlantic.
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): One billion of us own a smartphone, and we know how addicting it can be.
One former Google employee says this is no accident. Indeed, it is by design. And he became troubled by the relentless efforts of app developers to keep us glued to the gadgets.
So, Tristan Harris founded an organization called Time Well Spent. He is asking the tech industry to bring what he calls ethical design to its products.
NewsHour special correspondent Cat Wise has more, part of our ongoing collaboration with The Atlantic.
TRISTAN HARRIS, Founder, Time Well Spent: I noticed when I was at Stanford, there was a class called the persuasive technology design class, and it was a whole lab at Stanford that teaches students how to apply persuasive psychology principles into technology to persuade people to use products in a certain way.
So, it's not about giving you all this freedom. It's about sucking you in to take your time.
CAT WISE, special correspondent: So, the goal is to keep us on our devices longer. Why?
TRISTAN HARRIS: For any company whose business model is advertising, or engagement-based advertising, meaning they care about the amount of time someone spends on the product, they make more money the more time people spend.
So, the game becomes, how can I throw different persuasive techniques to get people to stay, to spend as long as possible, and to come back tomorrow?
CAT WISE: And it's clearly working.
Today, wherever we go, we're inevitably surrounded by fellow citizens staring into their phones, as we usually are too.
What do you think about when you're out in public and see people on their cell phones?
TRISTAN HARRIS: You know, have you ever been in a moment where you're sitting there, and you just start using your phone to do something productive? Maybe you're in the back of a car, a taxi, or you're on public transportation. Your phone is always giving you a way to spend time that can be more productive, more entertaining, or more stimulating than reality.
I often say that this puts a new choice on life's menu that's sweeter than reality. And so we're turning to it more and more often. We check our phones about 150 times a day.
CAT WISE: And what are the costs of that sort of constant interaction with technology, both on an individual level and as a society?
TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, I think each of us have to tune in for our own experience.
What does it feel like when we check our phones 150 times a day? Or what does it feel like if we have been scrolling, and had our face down, and not breathing very much when we're scrolling for, say, 20 minutes? And how do we feel on the inside?
Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. They don't particularly admire him as a man, they don't trust him as an administrator, they don't agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he'll sign their legislation and they certainly don't want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media.
Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you're willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.
But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it's this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they've struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.
In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration. Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address. The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policy making.
The administration has swung sharply antitrade. Trump's economic instincts are corporatist, not free market. If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump's foreign policy involves actively running away from global engagement. Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident.
Second, even if Trump's ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.
It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world's problems are incoming.
Third, it's becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.
The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the refugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico.
Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there.
Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty. The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who's been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.
None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”
The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.
Trump exceeded expectations with his cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax.
Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on.
With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.
SUMMARY: Can an ex-President have fun? Atlantic writer Barbara Bradley Hagerty examined the lives of modern Presidents to see how they fared in the real world after leaving office in middle age. As part of a collaboration with The Atlantic, Hagerty tells Judy Woodruff that Jimmy Carter was the trailblazer, Bill Clinton the moneymaker, George W. Bush the laid-back painter. So what's next for Barack Obama?
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, The Atlantic: Well, generally, Presidents — and let's refer throughout history — unless Presidents were wealthy, they generally had to work.
So, George Washington became the largest whiskey distiller. And, you know, William Howard Taft became the Supreme Court chief justice. So, they had to work.
But, more recently, what I was interested in seeing is that Presidents are living so long now. And when a President leaves in midlife, at the peak of his game, what does he do then? What does he do for an encore?
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): So, over time, the idea of what to do and the amount of time has changed. Take us back to modern Presidents. I mean, you looked at Jimmy Carter.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Jimmy Carter, he had a rough landing after his Presidency, which is not atypical.
So, Jimmy Carter loses to — in a landslide — to Ronald Reagan, and he comes home to Plains, Georgia, and there he finds that his business, his peanut business, is a million dollars in debt, that his house is in need of repair, and, literally, the forest has come right up to his back step, their back step.
And it was kind of this metaphor for Jimmy Carter's life. How does he navigate through the thicket? How does he have meaning in his life, after he was a one-term, relatively unpopular President? And so that was his challenge.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And he was in his mid-50s.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: He was. He was 56.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, how did he go about figuring out what he would do?
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: When you look at Carter, what you saw was a man who was — his personality, he was very smart, very ambitious, and he had a kind of biblical ethos.
In fact, Walter Mondale told me that Jimmy Carter said, “You know, when this is all over, I want to be a missionary.”
So there's that. And then there was his Presidency. And what you saw in the Presidency, it was a rough Presidency, but he had this one defining area, right, Camp David, peace between Israel and Egypt.
SUMMARY: Has our political system gone crazy? Jonathan Rauch thinks so. In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Rauch explores what he calls “chaos syndrome” in Washington: government stagnation, he argues, is resulting from politicians' inability to compromise, combined with constant calls for transparency. Judy Woodruff speaks with Rauch about the history of American politics and where they stand today.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Almost everyone agrees American politics has become more chaotic in recent years, that it's changed, and not always for the better.
Scholar Jonathan Rauch has a theory about why, and he shares it in a recent article for “The Atlantic” magazine.
JONATHAN RAUCH, The Atlantic: The article is about what I call “chaos syndrome.”
And that is the steady decline in the ability of the political systems to organize itself whether in campaigns, or in government. People think that politics just somehow magically organizes itself. It doesn't work that way. You need to assemble these huge coalitions of 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and tens of thousands of interest groups, and tens of millions of voters, and assemble all those in government to get stuff done.
That requires a lot of middlemen and a lot of people in between doing a lot of bargaining and negotiation. You cut those people out, you get chaos.
What we have done over the last 40 or 50 years is systematically attacked and weakened the parties, the political machines, the professionals, and insiders, and hacks, and all the tools that they use to get politicians to play well together. And with those gone, you get chaos.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What was it that worked, about what you see as the kind of ideal or close-to-ideal political system in this country?
JONATHAN RAUCH: Starting in, really, the very beginning of the republic, we began building parties with political machines and hierarchies and things like seniority systems on Capitol Hill.
So, there were people to call when you had to get stuff done. And if Judy needed Jonathan to vote on a bill in Congress to keep the government open or raise the debt limit or do something for the team, Judy could call me up and say, you know, if you do that, you're going to get money for your campaign, you're going to have an easy reelection campaign, you're going to get that extra runway for the airport in your district, we're going to be able to make this deal behind closed doors.
You could do all that stuff. Virtually all of that stuff now is difficult or impossible. And all you can do is beg me, and I say, why should I do any of that? It's just going to get me in trouble in my district.
Here we are.
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JUDY WOODRUFF: President Obama’s crowning legislative achievement came early in his first term, in 2010. Soon after, Democrats lost their majority in the House. Then, in 2011, the President attempted to negotiate the so-called grand bargain budget bill with Republican House Speaker John Boehner. This time, the results were different.
JONATHAN RAUCH: We were really this close to a very good budget deal in which both parties, and conservatives, and liberals, were all going to give something, and we would have substantially reduced long-term deficits, reduced entitlement spending, raised taxes some, the kind of package that ultimately pretty much everyone agrees we’re going to have to do in order to solve our long-term fiscal problems.
The speaker of the House, John Boehner, wanted to do it, but he could not get his own caucus organized enough to back him up on it. And that’s when I realized that the groups of obstructionists were now able to basically hold the system to ransom.
SUMMARY: What is President Obama’s real foreign policy legacy? Through a series of interviews with the commander in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic set out to determine an answer -- one divorced from the partisan rhetoric that tends to dominate such discussions. As part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff joins Goldberg to find out what he learned.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now, a broad, yet intimate look at how President Obama views America’s role in the world. It comes from “The Atlantic's” Jeffrey Goldberg, who sat down for hours of interviews with the President for his cover story, “The Obama Doctrine,” out today.
Judy Woodruff begins our conversation with how the president’s foreign policy is seen.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG, The Atlantic: One of the interesting caricatures of President Obama is that he doesn’t believe that the U.S. is indispensable. You hear that from his critics all the time, that he’s a retrenchment President, he’s a withdrawal President, a declinist.
I think that’s wrong. I think he understands that America is indispensable to the smooth functioning of global affairs. I think he might be the first President who sometimes resents that role, who looks at our allies and thinks that these guys need to pay for something once in a while, these guys need to do more than they’re doing.
He is also a person who is more hesitant than the average president to use force, specifically in the Middle East. Now, there’s a contradiction here at the core of his presidency, which is that the President who his critics believe is almost a pacifist in some kind of way, a declinist, is also the greatest terrorist hunter in the history of the presidency.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Do any of the critics get it right? Because, on the right, Republicans are saying this is a President who is weak, he’s feckless, he doesn’t believe in America’s strength, and on the left, you have got some liberals saying he’s been too inclined to use force, to use drones, and he doesn’t care enough about humanitarian crises.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.
What he does that annoys people on the right is that he has set a very high threshold for what constitutes a direct national security threat to the United States. But the people on the left understand him to be a ruthless hunter of terrorists, right? They have that — they have that right.
But I think the right gets it wrong. They have this caricature of this kind of feckless President who doesn’t defend the United States. For instance, they talk about ISIS as if we’re not currently fighting ISIS. But the U.S. is deeply engaged in that fight, and that, of course, comes from President Obama.
SUMMARY: Journalist James Fallows says it's time to examine why the best funded, best trained and most professional military in the world hasn't achieved lasting victory in the post-9/11 era. He joins chief foreign correspondent Margaret Warner to discuss his provocative critique in The Atlantic magazine, and how the public should be more connected to American armed conflict.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to a critique of America’s war-fighting apparatus that’s making waves in defense circles and beyond.
Journalist and author James Fallows raises hard questions about this country’s defense establishment in a cover story “The Atlantic” magazine titled “Why Do the Best Soldiers in the World Keep Losing?: The Tragic Decline of the American Military.”
Fallows’ thesis? That it’s time to examine why the best-funded, trained and most professional military in the world hasn’t achieved lasting victories over insurgent forces in the post-9/11 era.
We will have more on the reaction to his piece.
But, first, we hear from Fallows himself. He spoke a few days ago with our Margaret Warner.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Jim Fallows, thank you for having us.
JAMES FALLOWS, The Atlantic : Thank you, Margaret.
MARGARET WARNER: Now, you contend in this article that, after 13 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we overthrew Saddam Hussein and the Taliban and drove most of the al-Qaida remnants at least underground, that we essentially lost those wars?
JAMES FALLOWS: I’m saying that if you looked at this era from a strictly military strategic point of view, you would say there is one clear victory the United States had, which was killing Osama bin Laden.
But by having this last 12 or 13 years of open-ended war in Iraq and the surrounding countries, I argue that, from almost any perspective, that is of use of money, loss of life, taking of life, strategic changes in America’s image and reputation around the world, erosion of American values, this has been an era of defeat, rather than victory.
SUMMARY: A critique of the U.S. military establishment written by journalist James Fallows has made waves in defense circles and beyond. Who is responsible for how America applies its military might? Judy Woodruff gets reaction from former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey and John Ullyot, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Ambassador Jeffrey, to you first.
Is Jim Fallows right when he says, essentially, this has been an era of military defeat in this country, rather than victory, since 9/11?
JAMES JEFFREY, Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq: It has been an era of lack of success in carrying out our strategic objectives in Iraq and in certainly Afghanistan, and, going back, Vietnam as well.
When we get engaged in these long-term conflicts, we have not done well as a nation. The military, as Jim Fallows pointed out, do win the battles. That’s what they are hired for, but they and all of us together under the leadership of the President have not come up with strategies that have led to the achievement of our objectives.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, John Ullyot, that and the biggest point that the country has lost more than it’s gained.
JOHN ULLYOT, Former U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Officer: Well, the ambassador is absolutely right that if you look battle by battle, that we never suffered a single tactical defeat on the battlefield.
So, while Jim Fallows himself is right that they have not been successful, it has not been because of military shortcomings. What it has been is, it’s been the policy-makers have committed our military to wars and conflicts both in Iraq and Afghanistan that are essentially not solvable on a military level.
