We have finally admitted that Canada and Mexico do not represent national security threats:

The United States agreed Friday to lift its tariffs on industrial metals from Mexico and Canada, clearing a major obstacle to congressional passage of President Trump’s new North American trade deal.

….Senate Republicans, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the powerful Finance Committee chairman, had said they would not approve the deal while the tariffs were in place. Iowa farmers were among the casualties of Mexican retaliatory tariffs, which cut deeply into U.S. agricultural exports. The Mexican tariffs, and similar Canadian levies, also are being eliminated.

As you can see, this decision had nothing to do with national security, which means it never had anything to do with national security in the first place. I’m sure you are all shocked to hear that.

In any case, this is why it was always ridiculous to think that tariffs would cause American steelmakers to invest heavily in new capacity. It takes years to build a new steel mill, but only minutes to wipe out a tariff. In this case, 20 percent of American steel imports were released from tariffs with the stroke of a pen. (And nearly half of aluminum imports.) Overnight, a new mill that made sense might suddenly not pencil out.

Besides, a temporary increase in capacity utilization from 74 percent to 77 percent was never going to send the green eyeshades set into a money-spending mood in the first place. Only an idiot would base long-term capex spending on politically motivated tariff decisions that could change from one day to the next depending on what Fox & Friends happens to say one morning.

Also worth noting: no tweet! Apparently President Trump isn’t very excited when he removes tariffs, even though that’s what his trade war is allegedly about.

Mother Jones illustration; Nikodash/Getty

Corruption is nothing new. You’ll find it in big government, big religion, big business, big unions, and big military. Anytime you get more than two human beings together, you run the risk of corruption.

But things feel different today, don’t they? There’s a certain level of crude corruption that we thought we were mostly past in America, but it’s turned out we weren’t. Our president baldly refuses to answer any congressional subpoenas at all, something we thought had been settled during Watergate. Our military blandly lies about civilian casualties, something we thought had been settled after Vietnam. Big banks wreck the economy and big businesses pay their CEOs hundreds of times what their workers make, something we thought had been settled by the New Deal. Conservative politicians pursue every avenue they can to suppress the black vote, something we thought had been settled by the Voting Rights Act.

But none of that was settled at all. And we can add to that some brand new types of corruption, like social media companies selling your personal information to the highest bidder and fossil fuel companies pretending that global warming doesn’t exist.

There’s a single wrapper that ties all of this together: a growing dismissal of the media that once exposed My Lai, the Rambler, Bull Connor, and Watergate. The White House doesn’t even bother holding press conferences anymore. Apple Computer routinely refuses to talk to reporters. Science is going through a replication crisis that sometimes smells like outright fraud, helped out by journal editors who’d rather just look away. Local politicians act with impunity because local reporting is all but gone. The national press still keeps a close eye on the president, but hardly any other person or institution gets the same kind of treatment these days. There’s just no money for it. The eyeballs that once paid for it have moved to Facebook and Netflix and Google, none of which have any interest in using it to pay for reporting at all, let alone deep-dive investigative reporting.

Obviously Mother Jones can’t fix this all by ourselves. But recently we decided to start making a bigger difference on this front by creating the Corruption Project, a million-dollar investment in reporting on the kinds of corruption that more and more seem to define us—both the illegal kind and the legal kind.

Monika and Clara have more about the Corruption Project here, and it’s worth a read. It will all come together in the summer of 2020, in time to make an impact on next year’s election.

Oh, and did I mention that it will cost a million dollars—actually $1.2 million if you want an exact number? I did? Well, let me mention another thing: This project will have its own dedicated staff and we need to crowdfund $500,000 to finish putting it in place by July. This is the biggest single project we’ve ever mounted, and we’ll need a lot of contributions to pull it off.

• Click here to make a tax-free donation to the Corruption Project.

I hope you can help out. It’s time to fund a little more sunshine on the folks who pull the strings behind the scenes.

My first night in Virginia during this month’s vacation to the Blue Ridge Parkway was spent in my sister-in-law’s house. The next morning, I was the very first person to see her new dog, Watson. He’s a rescue dog, about five years old, and judging by the hour or so I spent with him, very friendly and full of energy. Watson is a terrier mix, and he found a toy to play with about one minute after being shown in the door.

Poor Hilbert, though. It’s been nearly a month since he’s been the star of cat blogging. We’ll fix that next week.

Breaking news this morning:

The House passed legislation Friday to amend the decades-old Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

That’s great news. It’s about time we—

As Democrats applauded, the bill passed 236-to-173, with eight Republicans breaking ranks and joining all Democrats in backing the measure. It is unlikely to get a vote in the Republican-led Senate, and the White House has signaled that President Trump would veto the measure if it ever reached his desk.

Oh. Right. The Republican-led Senate plans to let nothing interfere with its schedule for confirming judges who think discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is just peachy. It will be 2021 at the earliest before Congress does anything else.

Shortly after World War II ended, John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase “countervailing powers.” Here is Ezra Klein:

You rarely hear the term today, but it’s time to bring it back. It’s key to understanding the debate playing out in the Democratic primary.

….Galbraith believed that in an advanced capitalist economy, the inevitability of bigness needed to be recognized, even embraced. “People want large tasks performed,” he wrote, and “large tasks require large organizations. That’s the way it is.”

Once you accept that premise, the implications are clear. Bigness can only be checked by bigness. A healthy economy was one in which these countervailing powers balance each other. An unhealthy economy is one in which one or more of these powers was left to run roughshod.

We are, today, in an unhealthy economy.

That’s for damn sure. Since 1980—that is, the era in which labor unions were more or less powerless—the incomes of the rich have gone up nearly 200 percent. The incomes of the rest of us have gone up 15 percent.

This is, by a mile, the biggest reason that liberals should fight to restore the power of labor unions. Sure, unions help to raise wages. They bring more dignity to work. They support the middle class. But even if none of that were true, it would be enough that they are the only countervailing power sufficient to rein in the power of big business.

Organized labor is far from perfect. About as far away as big business, I’d say. If there were an alternative, I might support it. But there sure doesn’t seem to be, and this means that unions deserve liberal support no matter what issues you might have with them. Are they crude? Sometimes corrupt? Do they introduce inefficiencies? If they have real power, will they represent workers in ways that sometimes make college-educated lefties uncomfortable? Yes to all of the above. They are, after all, human institutions. You can say the same and worse about big finance, big auto, big retail, big tech, and every other form of big business.

I wonder how many Democrats understand this? Back during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a key piece of pro-labor legislation failed even though Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Everything went downhill from there. The lesson from that failure is obvious: in 2021, even if Democrats win back control of both the Senate and the presidency, and even if they eliminate the filibuster, they still won’t be able to pass serious pro-labor bills unless they stick together. Most likely, it will take only a small handful of defectors to torpedo any kind of serious labor agenda.

But labor is the foundation of liberalism. Republicans understand this with crystal clarity. They will have no trouble mustering unanimous opposition to any labor legislation, no matter how small—which means there’s no point in small measures. We might as well either go big or go home. The only legislation that matters would be legislation that makes it possible to organize the service sector with the same power and efficiency that unions organized manufacturing back in the first half of the 20th century. That means wiping Taft-Hartley off the map. Passing card check. Outlawing right-to-work laws. Appointing an NLRB that will vigorously enforce labor rights.

This is one area where there’s really no point to compromise or centrism. Half measures will accomplish nothing, so you need to commit to the whole agenda or nothing. Maybe then we’ll get back to this:

Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

Hey, maybe it’s worthwhile for Congress to keep looking into those obstruction-of-justice charges against President Trump after all:

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn told investigators that people linked to the Trump administration and Congress reached out to him in an effort to interfere in the Russia probe, according to newly-unredacted court papers filed Thursday….“The defendant informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could’ve affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation,” the court papers say.

I’m shocked, just shocked. And in related news:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators.

So Flynn got a phone call about interfering with the Russia investigation, and a judge has ordered that a transcript be made public by May 31. That should be interesting.

CBS

Tonight is the last episode of The Big Bang Theory. Here’s my story about that.

As you all know, five years ago I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and spent a week in the hospital. Anybody who’s been through something like this probably knows what I’m talking about when I say that it was harder on Marian than on me. A cancer diagnosis is terrifying on its own, but a spouse has the additional anxiety of helplessness. All Marian could do was go home each night and worry.

I hobbled home after a week, and when I turned on the TV it was tuned to TBS, which, as usual, was showing reruns of The Big Bang Theory. It turned out that BBT had been part of what kept Marian sane while I was in the hospital. She had discovered it while channel surfing, and it was just what she needed. Not a sophisticated, bittersweet, single-camera semi-comedy. Just an old-fashioned, brightly lit, multi-cam yuk fest. Did all the jokes land? No. But enough of them did. It was a funny show that didn’t require a whole lot of mental energy to watch, and that was perfect for the moment.

I’ve been watching it with Marian ever since. Thanks, Chuck Lorre.

President Trump announced his big border plan today:

• Build the wall
• Send phony asylum-seekers home pronto
• Scan everything that comes through the border
• Change the legal immigration system to prioritize merit rather than family

In other words: do a bunch of stuff that Republicans and big business like and call it a day. This is obviously not a plan that’s seriously meant to be passed, just something designed to support campaign talking points about how Democrats want to let murderers and gang members into your neighborhood. It’s really not worth spending any time thinking about.

How about if we start to wind down the week with another view of the Blue Ridge Mountains? Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty more where this came from.

This is sunset from the Riprap Overlook, just north of Waynesboro, where the Virginia Skyline Drive ends and the Blue Ridge Parkway starts up. As usual for wide vistas, it’s a composite of two different exposures. The trees made it hard to register the two pictures precisely, and if you look at them closely (especially on the left side) you can see where dark and light versions of the same branches mesh together slightly imperfectly.

How badly is Donald Trump hated in his hometown of New York City? Very badly:

Why did I post this? Oh, no reason, I suppose. It just seemed worth mentioning.