Every month, when I post the latest jobs numbers, I also mention the wages of production and nonsupervisory workers. I do this because I think it’s a good rough measure of how well economic growth is helping the working and middle classes, not just the upper middle class of lawyers and programmers. But I don’t normally put this in any larger context, so here’s the wage growth of production and nonsupervisory workers during the past seven years of the recovery, adjusted for inflation:

P&NS workers took a big hit in 2011, made up for it with good wage growth in 2015, and have seen very modest growth since then. Over the past seven years this adds up to cumulative real wage growth of 3.9 percent. That’s about 0.6 percent per year.

This is better than going down, of course, but not much better. We’ve had a long, steady recovery since the Great Recession, but workers in the middle mostly continue to stagnate.

The American economy added 209,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 119,000 jobs. That’s an OK number, about the same as last month and equal to the average of the past three years. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 4.3 percent, all of it due to an increase in the number of employed people. A net of about 150,000 people re-entered the labor force, and the labor participartion rate ticked up slightly.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 3.4 percent. Inflation is currently running at 1.6 percent, so that’s pretty good. If we could only keep this up for a year or two, we might have a real recovery. All in all, this was a modestly positive report with no real downsides.

I don’t ordinarily do this, but I want to clear up what I said yesterday about North Korea and nukes. This time, I’ll say it in the plainest language possible.

Fifteen years ago, it’s possible that diplomacy could have stopped North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. That’s certainly what I thought. It’s also possible that heavy sanctions could have done it. It’s even possible that military action could have done it, though that would have been very risky for reasons that everyone knows about—though here’s a map in case you don’t:

None of this is true anymore. North Korea already has nuclear weapons. They have a productive source of fissile material. They’re very close to developing a reliable ICBM, and probably close to developing a nuclear warhead small enough for their ICBMs. That’s what the DIA thinks, anyway. And North Korea has made it crystal clear that developing a nuclear deterrent capability against the United States is their #1 national priority.

Liberals like to think that maybe more diplomacy will stop North Korea’s nuclear program. It won’t. Conservatives like to think that tougher sanctions, or possibly military force, will stop their nuclear program. They won’t. Donald Trump likes to pretend that China can stop their nuclear program. They either can’t or won’t. Like it or not, this is where we are.

There are only two options left. Either we accept a nuclear-armed North Korea or we launch a nuclear strike to take out their capabilities. Since a nuclear strike is insane for too many reasons to list—including the fact that it might not even work—this means we really have no options at all. We can, if we want, maintain a hostile attitude toward North Korea as a signal to others about the price of developing nukes, but we basically have to accept the reality that North Korea is a nuclear state.

This is what I think could use some plainer language from national security types. Let’s knock off the fantasy op-eds full of vague talk about China and sanctions and diplomacy. Instead, tell people the bald truth. It would give the hawks some pause, and might even reduce the pressure that could lead someone like Donald Trump to do something stupid. This is, unfortunately, something we all have to think about these days.

The Trump-Russia investigation is entering a new phase. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase, according to people familiar with the matter.

….Grand juries are powerful investigative tools that allow prosecutors to subpoena documents, put witnesses under oath and seek indictments, if there is evidence of a crime….“This is yet a further sign that there is a long-term, large-scale series of prosecutions being contemplated and being pursued by the special counsel,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

More specifically, this strongly suggests that Mueller is contemplating criminal charges. You don’t need a grand jury for anything else.

“Hey, what color is this rose?”

“Mmm, it looks like coral to me.”

“Coral! I like that!”

Without help, I suppose I would have just called it a pink rose or something. But thanks to Marian, it’s a coral rose. Would a rose by any other name look as pretty?

There’s a move afoot in the Senate to prevent President Trump from firing Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating his campaign connections with Russia:

On Thursday, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced they would introduce a bill to allow Justice Department special counsels, like Mueller, to challenge their removals in court….The decision is a preemptive attempt to curtail the president, who has publicly criticized Mueller and derided the Russia investigation.

In the past week, the Senate has (a) passed a Russia sanctions bill Trump opposes, (b) snubbed Trump’s demand that they keep trying to pass health care reform, (c) spurned Trump’s position on the debt ceiling, and (d) introduced a bill to protect Mueller from possible Trump reprisals.

Do Republicans in the Senate care at all about what Trump says anymore? It doesn’t much seem like it.

Andrew Harrer/DPA via ZUMA

Natasha Bertrand points us to the 13th paragraph of Eli Lake’s piece at Bloomberg today about Russia sanctions. The latest round of sanctions were, he says, driven largely by leaks. And while he appreciates the end result in this case, he’s not happy about leaks in general. In particular, he’s not happy about the practice of “unmasking,” in which White House officials ask for redacted names to be revealed so they can better understand what intelligence intercepts are about—and then maybe leak some dirt about their political opponents.

Susan Rice was the most recent target of nonsense allegations that she had unmasked the names of Trump aides and then leaked them to the press. But Lake’s sources tell him this:

Not everyone agrees that what Rice did was improper. She was after all receiving much new intelligence about Russia’s role in the election, some of which suggested coordination with Trump associates. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has concluded that Rice did nothing wrong, according to two U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. That might explain why Trump has yet to declassify more information on the prior administration’s unmasking requests.

Yes, that would explain it, all right. Rice did nothing wrong; McMaster (and therefore Trump) know she did nothing wrong; and declassifying further information would simply make that clear. It’s much more fun to let things dangle. That allows the conspiracy-theory crowd to continue believing that Rice is a partisan hack who lied about Benghazi and tried to smear Trump’s campaign team.

Last year I read SPQR, Mary Beard’s readable and not-too-long history of the Roman empire up through AD 200. It was good! You should read it if you have any interest in the Roman empire.

Recently, however, Beard found herself under attack for confirming that black-skinned people were part of the empire and some of them migrated to Britain. Since Rome controlled large swaths of Africa, this seems unsurprising, but a lot of people were unhappy about it and did what unhappy people do these days. They took to Twitter:

It was then that the attacks came, and have gone on for days since. True they haven’t yet got to death threats (as they have with my US colleague Sarah Bond, who had the nerve to talk about classical statues not originally being white) but a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender (batty old broad, obese, etc etc )….And it got worse after Nicholas Nassim Taleb weighed in, not on my side. He proved a rallying cry for the insults.

….So why not just block them, as many kind voices suggested? Well I see the point, but have always felt ambivalent about blocking. It doesn’t stop them tweeting, it only means that you don’t see it, and it feels to me like leaving the bullies in charge of the playground. And it’s rather too much like what women have been advised to do for centuries. Don’t answer back, and just turn away. Besides, although one will probably make no difference to the hardcore, one might change the minds of some of the penumbra, as well as showing everyone that it is possible to stand your ground.

This is the eternal question of Twitter. It’s a cesspool, but is it a cesspool we should ignore or a cesspool we need to face up to? Like Beard, I have never blocked anyone (yet), partly because I find the idiot tweetstorms kind of amusing and partly because I like to know when the mob has been aroused and what it is that aroused them. It’s better to know than to not know.

The bigger problem, I think, is that not everyone is as thick-skinned as Beard or as bemused as me. Plus, the stuff I get is, I imagine, tinker toy nonsense compared to what women, blacks, gays, immigrants, and so forth get. Nobody has threatened my life, or told me I should be raped, or posted my address, or doxxed me to the local SWAT team.

My dedication to free speech is such that I don’t really want to turn off this deluge, no matter how dumb and degrading it is. That’s easy for me to say, though, since it doesn’t have much effect on my life. Still, it does have some, and for others it has even more.

At the moment, the only suggestion I have is that the rest of us should pay less attention to twitterstorms. Generally speaking, they represent only a minuscule fraction of Twitter opinion, and they only exist because tweets require virtually no effort. It takes ten seconds to add your insult to the pile and then you’re done. Until the number of tweets gets to, say, 10,000 or so—roughly 24 hours of collective effort —it should just be treated like playground mud throwing, not worth reporting on or writing about. We may not be able to stop the flamers, but neither is there any reason we have to give them the attention and influence they crave.

The leakiest administration ever continues to leak. Today, the Washington Post published transcripts of those calls with Mexico’s president and Australia’s prime minister that got a lot of attention a few months ago. Here’s just the Trump side of the end of his conversation with Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister of Australia, about the American agreement to vet and accept 1,250 economic refugees:

Look, I spoke to Putin, Merkel, Abe of Japan, to France today, and this was my most unpleasant call because I will be honest with you. I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad.

….I do not know how you got them to sign a deal like this, but that is how they lost the election. They said I had no way to 270 and I got 306. That is why they lost the election, because of stupid deals like this.

….This shows me to be a dope. I am not like this but, if I have to do it, I will do it but I do not like this at all. I will be honest with you. Not even a little bit. I think it is ridiculous and Obama should have never signed it. The only reason I will take them is because I have to honor a deal signed by my predecessor and it was a rotten deal. I say that it was a stupid deal like all the other deals that this country signed.

….We are like a dumping ground for the rest of the world. I have been here for a period of time, I just want this to stop. I look so foolish doing this. It [sic] know it is good for you but it is bad for me. It is horrible for me. This is what I am trying to stop. I do not want to have more San Bernardino’s or World Trade Centers. I could name 30 others, but I do not have enough time.

….I do not know what he got out of it. We never get anything out of it – START Treaty, the Iran deal. I do not know where they find these people to make these stupid deals. I am going to get killed on this thing.

Throughout the entire conversation, Turnbull sounds like a kindergarten teacher trying to calm a screaming five-year-old. He keeps patiently explaining what the deal is actually about, and Trump just refuses to listen, instead erupting time and again about how this makes him look like a chump. I can only imagine what Turnbull said to whoever was nearby when he finally hung up.

On the Mexican side of things, it turns out that Trump never uttered the phrase “bad hombres.” He called them “tough hombres.” The FAKE NEWS got it wrong as usual.

21 Club

In today’s edition of “Stupid Things Donald Trump Says,” the topic is Afghanistan. The problem is that the president wants to win, but his generals are a bunch of losers. NBC News has the leak:

During the July 19 meeting, Trump repeatedly suggested that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford replace Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, because he is not winning the war….Trump complained about NATO allies, inquired about the United States getting a piece of Afghan’s mineral wealth and repeatedly said the top U.S. general there should be fired.

The president’s advisers went into the mid-July meeting hoping he would sign off on an Afghanistan strategy after months of delays, officials said….Trump, however, appeared to have been significantly influenced by a meeting he’d recently had with a group of veterans of the Afghanistan war, and he was unhappy with the options presented to him.

Yes, you read that right. Trump chatted with a few soldiers who were unhappy about this and that—after all, it’s the God-given right of every buck private in the Army to know exactly how the brass are botching things up—and therefore decided to reject his generals’ plan. And before you all start yammering about how Trump said last year that he already had a plan ready to go, that was for Iraq. He never said he had a plan for Afghanistan. OK?

And now, for some more comic relief, here’s an inside look at how Trump comes up with these bright ideas:

To underscore his view that the veterans who fought in the war may be better positioned to advise him on an Afghanistan strategy, Trump compared the policy review process to the renovation of a famed New York restaurant in the 1980s, officials said. Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan’s elite ‘21’ Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. After a year, Trump said, the consultant’s only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.

Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant’s waiters instead might have yielded a better result.

The ‘21’ Club, which has been one of Trump’s favorite New York spots, closed for two months in 1987 while it underwent a full renovation and reopened to great fanfare.

Consensus reality is that the run-down 21 Club closed for two months after it changed ownership,¹ and then reopened after a big renovation. Trump reality is that his favorite haunt was closed forever and they didn’t even fix whatever petty gripe he probably had at the time. Because of this, he rejected the new Afghanistan plan. That’s quite the butterfly effect, isn’t it?

I should make clear that I have no problem with presidents rejecting the advice of their military advisors. I just prefer it when they have actual, non-kindergarten reasons for doing so.

¹Three months, actually, but who’s counting?