Voice of a Maryland

It's time for state governments to overtly and generously stand-up media organizations.

The death of local newspapers is much bemoaned, but that ecosystem which was once the beating heart of our public square is dead nonetheless.

I've long supported reforms along the lines Dean Baker suggests, letting citizens earmark public funds to media organizations they support. But we are in an emergency occasioned in large part by plutocratic control over media. We need to change the media environment rapidly and directly.

A mode of governance — like, you know, liberal democracy — cannot survive without a media ecosystem in which the case for that mode of governance is full-throatedly and vigorously offered, alongside more critical views. Outlets like Fox Media, X, and Facebook are mouthpieces for authoritarian plutocrats. They use opposing views to only launder the thumb they place on the scale. Outlets like The New York Times, ABC, CBS, CNN are corporate interests themselves. They rely upon the goodwill of regulators for getting mergers through and for other treats and goodies.

Very few prestigious, influential outlets will make a muscular case for social democracy, or even for what used to be "centrist" liberalism, when a vindictive Federal government seeks to suppress and discredit those views. In theory, of course, the Federal government cannot discriminate against corporate media on the basis of viewpoint. Ha. It will be trivial for political appointees to invent pretexts that hide the connection between editorial position and adverse regulatory treatment. Plutocrats control the commercial marketplace of ideas now, either directly or by credible threat.

It would not be a huge burden for state governments to run news organizations on the scale of the major dailies that their cities used to host. States have First Amendment rights against the Federal government. They have every right to speak, to provide news from their own editorial perspective, to communicate what they are doing and their case for why they are doing it.

"State media" might become blatantly propagandist, little Pravdas for whatever the governor is doing. But that sort of media probably would not attract much of an audience or engender much respect. Far better models would be Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which are high quality, largely independent, news organizations, whose editorial perspectives are shaped by US interests. We could have fifty diverse but capable news organizations very quickly under this model.

Of course, Texas would have its news organization as much as Maryland would. Red state outlets might well adopt the editorial perspective of Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, etc. That's fine. They have every right. But our news ecosystem is already saturated with that viewpoint, so the addition of these new voices would do little new harm.

Our news ecosystem is starving for voices that make the affirmative case for high quality government, extensive public goods provision, pooling resources and working together to build a more just and prosperous society. Some of the publicly funded state outlets might take on this role. Even red state governments might betray some sympathy for the good work of government. The marginal benefit to social democrats would be much greater than the marginal benefit to plutocrats, if a stable of state-financed media organizations were to emerge..

But US states, like corporations, also depend on the Federal government. Won't their coverage be warped by the same pressures that turn corporate outlets into tongue-tied pussycats?

To a degree, perhaps. But the Trump Administration already overtly discriminates in favor of red jurisdictions and treats blue states with hostility. From a blue state's perspective, the marginal cost of pissing plutocrats off just a bit more than their baseline intent to destroy and subdue is low. Majorities of voters in their states sincerely want media that describe the world plainly and are unapologetic about supporting democratic values.

Plus, the existence of state media might open new avenues for states to defend against politically motivated discrimination. I don't know whether it's legal for the Federal government to discriminate between states on the basis of electoral outcomes, but it is certainly unconstitutional for it to discriminate on the basis of a state's speech. The thin-skinned narcissists who run the Federal government will predictably, inevitably, constantly lose their shit over stuff blue-state media outlets say. States then could argue that any petty and punitive kneecappings are in retaliation for speech and constitute unlawful viewpoint discrimination. It might or might not succeed. I'm as cynical about the current Supreme Court as anyone. As with corporations, operatives will always invent speech-unrelated pretexts for their sabotage. But at the margin, outspoken state media may help more than hurt blue states that will be targeted no matter what they do.

The traditional, liberal case against overt state media is that it would be overweening. State subsidy would confer so great an advantage over private speech that government might dominate the marketplace of ideas — not on the merit of those ideas, but by virtue of relentlessness and sheer volume. Neutrality among citizens is an important value that liberal states seek to uphold. But neutrality presupposes basic equality between the citizens that constitute the public square. That prerequisite is no longer in place. In a much more equal society, it might make sense for states to largely opt out of direct participation in media. In a tremendously unequal society, however, the speech that is overweening is speech purchased by plutocrats. In a world with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Citizens' United, "neutrality" is a sham. The value we must lean upon is pluralism. The liberal remedy to bad speech is more speech. For that to work, the more speech must be loud enough to be heard above the din. Fifty US states can provide both pluralism and volume.

We are in an emergency. The survival of meaningful democracy in the United States, the hope for any kind of civilized society, is under severe threat. Private media are largely captured by fascists. A unique strength of the United States is its strong federalism. State governments could unilaterally and quickly restore an ecosystem of vibrant, diverse media with substantial capability and reach.

Let's do this.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2025-03-09 @ 02:00 PM EDT

Meeting Starter

Republican Representative and Senators are standing around with their hands in their pockets while Elon Musk unlawfully and unconstitutionally decimates the United States government, under the imprimatur of Donald Trump.

When Republican members of Congress meet with their constituents, the public expresses a certain, um, lack of delight with the current state of affairs. The growing discontent has spurred these honorable leaders to bold action. They increasingly resolve no longer to conduct open, public meetings where constituents might confront them.

In-person, human-to-human meetings are the heart of democratic governance. Much of why Americans have become so cynical about democracy is there are so few opportunities to participate in forums that put our representatives directly within earshot of us, and us them.

I think it's a mistake that we let our humble servants, our hired hands, set the terms of when and whether they will deign to meet with us. When we want to meet, they ought to show up and speak to us. They have one job.

Here's an idea: Suppose that we create public websites on which constituents and organizations can propose public meetings. It would be the responsibility of the proposer to price out a suitable venue, support staff, any catering, etc. Constituents could then reserve seats, pledging if they can afford it to cover their portion of the cost.

But constituents would be encouraged to pledge more than simply the cost of their own seats. The excess would first subsidize seats of those who can't afford a paid admission, then to create a "goodwill surplus".

The goodwill surplus would be donated. But not to the Congressperson's campaign. We have too much of that kind of legalized bribery already. The surplus would be donated to the government that our representative serves. For a member of the US Congress, the surplus would be donated to the US Treasury. For a meeting requested with a city councilperson, the surplus would be donated to the city budget.

Citizens have no way to compel representatives to take our meetings. If we are unwilling to bribe them with campaign donations, they usually decline. But with "meeting starter" websites, the asks and responses would be public and visible. Declining meetings with substantial goodwill surpluses would amount to directly costing taxpayers money.

Suppose a hundred citizens publicly ask for a meeting, proposing a reasonable venue during a recess of the representative's chamber, offering a goodwill surplus of a few thousand dollars for an hour and a half of their time. The representative can still say no. But she will have shirked the core obligation of her job, and she will have cost taxpayers those several thousand dollars as well.

She will have provided pretty clear evidence what kind of public servant she is. Which voters might take into consideration at the next election.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2025-03-02 @ 03:55 PM EST

A theory of Elons

Over the years, I've struggled with how to understand Elon Musk.

A decade ago, it was easy. I admired him. Tesla had proven electric cars could be more than golf carts, that they could be adequate or even superior replacements to gasoline-powered vehicles. When Musk proposed out-of-left-field ideas like the hyperloop and The Boring Company, transportation experts dismissed and maligned him. I remained curious and cut Musk some slack. Maybe he really was a genius who would prove the naysayers wrong.

The years have not been kind to my admiration. The experts were right about The Boring Company and the hyperloop. The more Musk engaged on Twitter, the harder it was to concede him any kind of genius. Even before he threw himself headlong into replacement theory and Nazi salutes, 2020 Musk seemed more PT Barnum than any kind of Einstein, "hustling" (his word) DOGE when it was just a memecoin, hustling Tesla stock in largely the same way.

And yet. Tesla is falling behind, but in its early years, it was a remarkable achievement. SpaceX is Musk's newer jewel. By increasing the frequency and reducing the cost of satellite launches, then becoming its own customer to build global internet provider Starlink, it has made itself indispensable.

The Musk of social media is obviously an idiot, at least if you take his tweeting at face value rather than as cynical propaganda. Yet it strains credulity to say he just lucked into the accomplishments of both Tesla and SpaceX. There must be some competence or competences he does contribute.

Noah Smith wrote a piece over the weekend trying to make sense of it all. This bit struck me as mistaken, but productively so:

Elon did [all] this in spite of the entire apparatus of American proceduralism and anti-development policy being against what he was trying to do. It’s famously difficult to build factories in America, thanks to land acquisition costs, procedural barriers like NEPA, regulation, high labor costs, and so on. And yet as of 2023, Tesla produced more cars in America than it did in China

The mistake I think is the suggestion that Musk was disadvantaged by all the inertia and procedure and regulation. On the contrary, I think the key, or at least a key, to Musk's successes lies in his unusual competence at overcoming these barriers. In particular, Musk is endowed with an extraordinarily high risk tolerance, a willingness to brazen things out and dare anyone to stop him. He never asks for forgiveness, but he doesn't ask for permission either. "You can just do things." You can just break the law.

Musk has always been rich, but there were lots of comparably rich kids who wanted to play entrepreneur. Most rich kids color inside the lines. They have nice lives to lose if they get put in jail.

It's not uncommon for tech entrepreneurs to capitalize on pushing against the fetters of the law, to place themselves in a zone one might describe as gray or "aggressive". Jeff Bezos resisted collecting sales tax for years. Travis Kalanick of Uber is probably Musk's closest peer. Uber violated municipal taxi regulations with abandon, then relied on customers to exert political pressure to absolve them of any serious consequence and legalize their business model after the fact. That it betrayed plain promises to, say, NYC taxi drivers and drove them to suicide was only the price of progress.

In the libertarian paradise Musk is desperate to create, I think he would have been outcompeted by people wiser and more substantatively capable than the toddler now dismantling the US government. But in the actual world with all its regulations and procedures, wise, capable, already wealthy, people are simply not willing to go as far in daring authorities to fine their firms out of existence, and perhaps put them in jail. Lots of tech entrepreneurs play in gray areas. Musk goes all the way to black. The FAA says, very specifically, do not launch. He launches anyway.

Elon Musk is not actually interesting enough to merit these thousand of my words. He is a low-grade villain who has found his way to where the crystals are kept and is now tossing them at the wall to work out anger issues and to test his sophomoric theories about the world. Elon Musk needs to be stopped, that's all.

What is interesting is the social environment that rendered Being Elon adaptive. What made so sad and stunted a person the richest man in the world? I think two facts shaped the niche in which Elon has thrived.

The first is the one to which Noah alludes. In the modern world, which is interconnected and wealthy, most things innovators might attempt will have serious externalities, which means they must be subject to regulation. In practice, our regulatory environment is so poorly arranged innovators often find it burdensome, sometimes impossible, to comply, even when "on the ground" the externalities could be adequately addressed or compensated.

The second fact that shaped the environment in which Elon became great is elite impunity. Our legal system in fact very rarely dishes out serious consequences to people who can hire great lawyers and are coded as wealthy, white, and entrepreneur. Ex ante, it's really dangerous to break the law. You could go to jail and trade your plush rich-boy jet-set life for an in-cell commode. Ex post, if you break the law brazenly, publicly, and In The Name Of Innovation, you are really unlikely to go to jail. Half the country will rise in your defense with greater passion than an Uber-rider at a city council meeting. The people whose job it is to enforce the law are the ones who bear consequences if they act, no matter how many planes get turned around to avoid the debris, no matter how many people die to provide training data for "full-self driving".

These two characteristics — a regulatory environment in which complying with the law is burdensome plus elite impunity that immunizes people who refuse to comply if they can code themselves "heroic striver" — create an ecological niche that selects pretty strongly for people like Musk, whose main talents are not technical insight or managerial genius, but drive and showmanship and shamelessness.

Another figure who emerges from the same selection pressures is Donald Trump.

For those of us who do not think it awesome that people like Trump and Musk are at the apex of our society, we'll have to address each of these two charateristics that selects them.

First, regulation. Regulation is necessary in an interconnected world. But the compliance burden of regulation is always shared between the regulated and the state. If the regulated party fills out forms, some civil servant must read and evaluate them. Both bear a cost. We should ask the state to bear a much larger share of the regulatory burden, so that actually complying is not a competitive disadvantage. Note that this implies devoting more, rather than fewer, resources to regulatory agencies, both for personnel and to cover direct compliance expenses. When you open your coffee shop, let the government cover the cost of great accommodations for disabled people.

Second, we need to enforce the law, for reals, on people who are rich, people who are famous, people who are popular. Donald Trump's misbehavior would not have been so adaptive if, say, the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution were actually enforced. Elon Musk's Tesla may well surpass Waymo in the race to true autonomy. But, as Matt Yglesias points out, that would only be because Waymo is punctilious about working within the law and operating safely while Tesla is not. The law should have crushed Tesla for its ends-justifies-the-means approach to public safety, rather than repeatedly slap the firm on the wrist while it buys its data with our lives.

Make both regulation and compliance into functions of government. Enforce the law vigorously on the rich and powerful. That's all we need to do.

Then our great industrialists might also be admirable people. Our presidents too.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2025-02-25 @ 11:30 AM EST

A few simple points

The Republican Party has become in substance the American Nazi Party. Most Republican voters, most Republican electeds, did not intend to belong to the American Nazi Party, just as most Twitter users did not intend to be producing content for a Nazi website. They just found themselves there. The alternatives still displease them, it's hard to know what to do. It's forgivable. However, the longer you continue to self-ID as a Republican, the less forgivable it is. You don't have to become a Democrat. Just don't be a Republican. If you are an elected, you have a harder burden. If you don't want to be a Nazi, you do have to cease to caucus with Republicans. If you are a House member and a vote for Speaker is held, you must at the very least withhold your vote from Republican candidates.
If you voted for Donald Trump, you needn't feel guilty and you needn't apologize. It was not remotely clear at the time of the election that the new administration would violate black letter law and procedure to access and expose private and classified data; would decimate the already understaffed civil service; would illegally shutdown vital agencies and literally kill people; would impound lawfully authorized payments; would destroy the foundations of American science and technology; would destroy America's alliances and threaten its neighbors; would ship migrants to camps in Central America with no public transparency as to conditions; all in a continuing attempt at autogolpe that rather parallels Hitler's program in 1933. Yes, lots of people did loudly warn you. But our politics have become so polarized, so tabloidized, that a person of good will could have taken all that noise as self-serving hyperbole. Professional Democrats might have shouted Trump is Hitler, but neither the Biden Administration (hi Merrick Garland!) nor Democratic electeds in the run-up to the election really acted like they believed that. While Biden was still hanging on, when asked how he'd feel if he lost to Trump, he infamously said "I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about." Those aren't the words of a person who truly believed his loss would mean elevation of an American Hitler. (To be fair, Elon Musk's role was far less clear at that time.)
If you voted for Donald Trump and you are a person of good will, you do in my view need to recognize that you erred. In good faith you participated in what turned out to be a bad enterprise. At the very least you have an obligation to withdraw your support.
If you promoted Donald Trump, if you arrogated to yourself any role influencing others to support his election — among friends, on social media, in public writing — you are a locus of accountability. You do, in my view, have a positive obligation to communicate your error at least as powerfully as you once communicated your support, and to work to minimize the damage the movement you helped elect will do. Welcome to the resistance. It's better to be cringe than to crime against humanity.
Republicans are in substance the American Nazi Party. That oughtn't prevent one from recognizing that the Democratic Party is pretty terrible. In my view, the Democratic Party has made itself a jobs program for insiders. It consistently puts reelection and seniority-based promotion of incumbents before effectiveness at promoting the values of its supporters, or even governing effectively. No matter how much it fails it demands ever more cash to enrich a charmed circle of consultants. Culturally the party is a nest of risk-averse careerists, from which their timidity, their infamous "fecklessness", results. And yet. Democrats have the virtue of being the not-Nazis currently available. You save the country with the champions you have, not the champions you might wish to have.
The first order of business is to impeach and remove Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson. That's the only remedy we have within our Constitutional system. If possible, we should avoid joining the Nazis in stepping outside our imperfect but perfectly workable system. Obviously, at the moment, impeachment and removal is a pipe dream. But it can become an inevitability quickly, once Republican Congresspeople understand the absolute toxicity of this administration to the American public.
We are the American public. It is our business to behave in ways that communicate to our sheltered, gerontic representatives the toxicity of this administration in ways they can neither ignore nor write off as the mischief of an unrepresentative activist class.
Obviously phone and write your Congresspeople. Obviously, but really! Frequently! Communicate your shame over the actions of the administration and your loathing of anyone who enables its reckless, awful, behavior.
Our vulnerability to Nazi takeover derives in part from having substituted media for direct, human-to-human interactions with other another. The current emergency is a great opportunity to reverse that. Get in touch. Phone people you haven't spoken to in years. Rekindle those connections. Do that for its own sake. But also communicate, respectfully and without arrogance, the necessity that people of goodwill now participate in politics in ways they might understandably have absented themselves in the past. Encourage your friends also to phone and write their Congresspeople. Get together with people you haven't gotten together with so much to discuss the issues of the day, to make phone calls or write letters together. Host parties.
Demand meetings with your representatives, whether person-to-person, in small groups, or "Town Hall"-style public events. Communicate plainly and energetically that the current administration and the political apparatus that supports it are evil. If our representatives are to represent us, they must work to end the administration and to see that apparatus disgraced.
Consider frugality, as a matter of personal risk management, and as a vote against any justification an evil administration might make on the basis of a supposed go-go economy. Now is a great time to build a giant cushion of savings if you can.
Consider relocating outside the US, hopefully temporarily, as a matter of personal risk management, and as a means of withdrawing your contribution both as producer and consumer from an economy superintended by malign forces. Especially if you have children, if you have means to do so, creating an "outside option" is just wise.
Consider diversifying from US assets, especially absurdly overvalued US equities. I hesitate to say this because I've a conflict of interest. I try (but recently have failed rather spectacularly) to make my living largely through financial speculation. I am often short US equities. I am now. So this advice is self-serving. Nevertheless, I think divesting from US equities is ethically called-for. (I thought it ethically called-for even before this administration, but "now more than ever".) Obviously use your own judgment, ethical and prudential. But while our political system has largely denuded the vote of its expressive power, the American state remains relentlessly attentive to the level of the S&P 500.
Demand Congressional reform. A return to the status quo ante of state paralysis will sow the seeds of yet another disorderly, destructive paroxysm to try to right the ship. The total abdication by Congress of its role and function in our Constitutional system is the deep root of our catastrophe. The three branches of government may be coequal in legitimacy, but Congress is supreme in its power and authority. It's Article I, motherfuckers. We should not be surprised we experience morbid symptoms when the very heart of our system of government has stopped beating. We need electoral reform, so that the House is elected by proportional representation, so that citizens can replace the two legacy parties — one evil, the other torpid — with organizations each of us can find homes in, which will vigorously represent our interests and values. Senators should be elected by approval voting, so that they have incentive to represent their state's entire public, rather than rely upon copartisans, their "base". We also require reform of the arcane procedure that rigs the process of legislating within the two chambers of Congress. This needs to be simplified, made legible and subject to critique from the broad outside public, reformed to diminish status quo bias and disproportionate power based on seniority. The legislative branch must be massively restaffed, so it sustains expertise internally and does not depend upon lobbyists and donor-funded think tanks to write legislation. Term limits should be universal. Institutional know-how should subsist within parties, rather than in the persons of "experienced legislators" who create tradeoffs for voters between legislative effectiveness and their own values.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2025-02-22 @ 07:45 PM EST

Might Elon Musk be personally liable?

I am not a lawyer. Thus the title of this post is a question.

But, as a layperson, it seem to me there's a pretty good case that Elon Musk might be personally liable for the damage he is causing.

There are contexts in law and life where we purposefully limit people's liability, because we believe it would discourage valuable activity if we held them liable for harms that might arise from their conduct. Corporations — and their progeny, LLCs, LLPs — limit the liability of businesspeople, and importantly make possible low-information passive investing. If shareholders of a corporation were held "jointly and severally liable", as is the default for a business enterprise with multiple owners, it would be way too risky for ordinary people to ever hold a single share of, say, British Petroleum. Corporations also often indemnify board members and officers from any liability that might arise from performance of their duties.

The same concerns arise in government. The US Constitution explicitly immunizes Congress for its work. Courts have deemed it necessary that certain officers of the state, most controversially police officers, be understood to have "qualified immunity", so they can do their jobs effectively and without undue fear. The Supreme Court has recently (apocalyptically) determined that the President has at least a presumptive if not absolute immunity in His official acts.

However, by default, we are all potentially liable for our actions. Businesspeople have to perform certain legal formalities in order to achieve the protection of the corporate form. Even after they have done so, if they engage in serious misconduct or use the liability limitation as an instrument of fraud, courts may pierce the corporate veil and impose personal liability.

Government officials are no doubt protected by a variety of forms of immunity and indemnification from torts that might arise as a result of their work. But, obviously, for those protections to arise, a person must actually be acting as government officials. Some threshold must be achieved that marks their status as protected public official rather than ordinary private citizen.

Even among bona fide government officials, if they use their access to the accoutrements of the state in a manner not authorized by law and clearly beyond the scope of their official role, then surely they are liable. If an off-duty FBI agent on a personal vendetta shoots up your truck with her Glock, the fact that the Glock was issued to her by the government does not shield her. A stalker who works for NSA is no less a stalker for having abused the tools at his disposal to spy on you.

Elon Musk is creating a lot of concrete harm for a lot of people. Every sack of USAID food stuck now in a warehouse somewhere would have been feeding someone, but for his intercession. People's children are going hungry and perhaps dying. People on experimental courses of treatment have lost medical supervision. These are serious harms.

Closer to home, Musk is likely substantially responsible for uprooting workers at USAID and placing them unlawfully on indefinite administrative leave. Repeating a move he perfected at Twitter, it was apparently Musk who introduced disruptive changes into the terms of employment of tens of thousands of Federal civil servants. These too are serious harms.

Dangerous intrusions into the privacy of American citizens and businesses, apparently at Musk's direction, have already occasioned lawsuits and injunctions. If our private information has been pilfered by Musk, was he properly acting as an agent of the state?

With respect to civil servant employment, commentators have warned that the terms of the "buyout" offered apparently at Musk's behest might be unenforceable by the courts because they had not been lawfully authorized and so no cognizable contract with the American state exists. If that is correct, if Musk caused the issuance of documents that appear to be contracts with the state but in fact are not, wouldn't that constitute a form of fraud for which he could be personally liable? Let Musk, personally, pay until September whoever takes up those offers.

Musk allegedly does have some sort of formal state affiliation now. He is a "special government employee". Special government employees are usually outside experts who serve temporarily in advisory roles. They face fewer ethics and conflict of interest rules than an ordinary Federal employee. The theory, I guess, is that it shouldn't be burdensome when government officials need to tap outside expertise, and an advisor cannot directly abuse power. Whatever actions result from an advisor's work will be ultimately undertaken by an accountable permanent employee.

Does this status occasion any form of immunity? If so, what are its parameters and limitations?

We do not know when Musk actually obtained this status. Did he improperly direct elements of the state prior to being granted formal status, in ways that may have caused serious harms?

Once this status existed, if such a person arrogates to himself a role of directing state action rather than advising, if he then directs state action that is in contravention of law or lawful procedure, how is that different than our FBI officer shooting up someone's truck in a personal vendetta? Sure, instrumentalities of the state would have been used by a sometimes immunized official. But the person would have been doing things that are unauthorized and unlawful and entirely out of scope from the formal position they have been granted. Would general statements of the President's support for the officer, or even specific support after the fact, immunize our FBI officer? It seems unlikely that the President directed Musk's actions, in their particulars and in advance.

The President of course can pardon Elon Musk with respect to Federal crimes. But the President cannot pardon civil suits, even those that arise under Federal law. The President cannot pardon civil suits or criminal prosecutions at the state level. By bullying civil servants into fake contracts, Musk has arguably perpetrated fraud against people who live in lots of American states.

Musk is best understood not as an instrumentality of the new administration, but as an agent who — in his personal capacity, in pursuit of his own commercial and ideological interests — has usurped control of instrumentalities of the state. He may have lacked sufficient status, authorization, scope, and adherence to lawful procedure to render him entitled to any form of immunity for the vast, foreseeable, preventable harms that his actions have caused.

I am not a lawyer. But Musk should be personally liable for the wreckage he so carelessly has wrought.

draft by Steve Randy Waldman
2025-02-08 @ 04:25 PM EST