The Devil went down to Beaverton. Or to put more clearly, President Obama went over to Nike to snipe at those of us who don’t agree with him about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I was especially interested in this quote that seemed to appear everywhere that his speech was covered, “There have been a bunch of critics about trade deals generally and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And what’s interesting is typically they’re my friends coming from my party. And they’re my fellow travelers on minimum wage and on job training and on clean energy and on every progressive issue, they’re right there with me. And then on this, they’re like whupping on me.” Let me take a moment to say something personal to Obama.

Mr President, based upon my experience of watching you from a distance these last eleven years, you seem to be an okay guy. But I don’t just follow along with everything you are in favor of. In terms of the TPP, I think you are just another neoliberal idiot who is so blinded by the ways that it is going to help out all of your rich friends, that you can’t see clearly that this is not a progressive deal. I’m not going to be for this trade deal just because we both agree that the minimum wage ought to be increased.

Sherrod Brown is one of those pesky non-authoritarians who doesn’t just get in line because he happens to be in the same political party as the president. He has actual facts that counter Obama’s argument that consists entirely of, “Trust me! I wouldn’t do anything to hurt the American worker!” Brown noted that we’ve been conned before. And we don’t have to go all the way back to NAFTA:

But that’s not all, “Mr Obama insisted that ‘this is the most progressive trade deal in history’ and he scorned critics who say it would undermine American laws and regulations on food safety, worker rights, and even financial regulations…” Well, Dean Baker had a problem with that claim, President Obama Is Badly Confused About the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He noted:

So Obama is not just asking us to trust him (because he thinks a modest increase in the minimum wage is in order), he’s asking us to trust every president who comes after us. Let me just end with another personal note to Obama.

Mr President, I am a liberal. As a result, I’m not an authoritarian. I know that conservatives are mostly a bunch of authoritarians who fall in line whenever the command is given. But I don’t accept arguments based upon someone telling me that they know best. That’s especially true when they’ve shown that they do not know best. So make your case and if I think it’s a good idea, I’ll go along with it. A good start would be to make the text of the TPP publicly available. But I don’t see that happening. Because I don’t think it’s a good deal. And the more scrutiny it gets the less I’m going to like it. And the more you try to ram it through, the less I like you.

See also: The Bad Side of Obama’s SOTU Address.

Tribalism is so important to humans that we almost never think in terms of it. I, of course, am obsessed with the idea. During my lifetime, I’ve seen tribalism get so diced up to the point where opportunity is just not a thing anymore. There was a time — barring a Great Depression — when anyone could have a job if they wanted it. Now, that’s just not true. The rich take care of their own. The middle class is just struggling to survive. And the poor are in the same state that they’ve always been, with the exception that the voices denouncing them are louder and more respected than ever.

The way that I usually frame the issue is as “the right kind of people” versus of “the wrong kind of people.” I wrote about this recently with regard to national security, Petraeus and Sterling: Different Kinds of Leakers. David Petraeus, of course, is the right kind of leaker who released top secret information for the purpose of bedding a younger woman and his own self-aggrandizement. As a result, he gets no jail time. Jeffrey Sterling, on the other hand, is the wrong kind of leaker. He leaked information about wrongdoing in the Bush administration. He’s looking at decades in prison.

Over at The Daily Dot, SE Smith brought my attention to a similar tribal divide, If Homeless People Can’t Sleep Outside, Apple Customers Shouldn’t Either. I’ve never actually given much thought to this because I don’t know any people silly enough to think they have to be the first to get a new phone — or anything else. But I am aware that this sort of thing goes on. I believe people do the same thing for concert tickets and new video games. Smith noted that there is nothing fundamentally different between these people and the people who simply have nowhere else to go.

But from a cultural standpoint, there is a difference. The local business establishments wants those idiots who have $650 in their pockets to blow on a phone. They are nicely dressed. They are shaved and they don’t stink. Of course, if we cared about the homeless people, we could provide them with rooms and clothes and showers — and the mental healthcare that so many of them need. But we decided long ago that don’t care. They are not our tribe. They might as well be a different species — but not one of the cute species that we care about.

It reminds me of the way banks work: if you need a loan, you can’t have one; if you don’t need a loan, they’ve come to your door pleading with you to take one. Of course, banks are private businesses. We don’t expect them to work for the public good. But the Apple Store is too. And all the businesses that don’t want homeless people sleeping out in front of them are too. But they get the government to do their dirty work. They get cities to pass ordinances that make it illegal to sleep on the street — as long as you aren’t one of the right kind of people who are just resting until you can buy an overpriced phone.

If you are the wrong kind of person, there is no job for you. There is no room for you to sleep in. There are no showers or clothes or regular meals. There are just laws criminalizing your very existence. And if you are the right kind of person, well, set up a tent in front of the Apple Store, have a pizza delivered, maybe get a manicure while you wait. If you’re the right kind of person, it’s all good.

One of the great conservative canards is that the government can’t do anything right. Not only is this wrong, but the government is very often better at offering its complicated services than the private sector is at offering its simple services. But the one area where the government does the worst job is when the operations are secret. The things we’ve learned years later about covert operations are often scandalous in their stupidity. Of course, these are exactly the things that conservatives most approve of with regard to the government. And not surprisingly, they are also the parts of the government that are most controlled by conservatives.

Thus, I was intrigued to read Cora Currier, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Fishman, US Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda.” It is based upon the Edward Snowden files — the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently, the US government has labeled veteran Islamabad bureau chief for Al Jazeera Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan as a member of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. And it is all based upon metadata. Given that Zaidan has traveled to and from terrorist locations, they’ve determined that he must be a courier. Like I said: stupid. Of course, it is also just heartless. What does it matter to them if an innocent man is targeted? Especially an actual journalist!

Note that it is based upon this kind of metadata that the CIA and the military call in drone attacks. So this kind of bulk collection of data doesn’t just put the very practice of journalism in jeopardy, it potentially puts journalists’ lives in danger. I have to wonder what our government would say after calling a strike on Zaidan in downtown Islamabad while having lunch with a group of journalists. “They were all men of military age, so they must have been combatants”? It wouldn’t be anymore absurd than much else that the government has claimed in the “war on terror.”

Of course, none of this is new. The article also goes through various times in the past when the US government has targeted Al Jazeera and its employees. This included, “Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the US government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged.” It’s been clear for a long time that the US government just doesn’t like the network because it has a “scary” sounding name and it reports from the other side of our bombing campaigns and so makes us look bad.

That hasn’t stopped the US from being hypocritical, however. “The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood.” And so on. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the US government doesn’t do more harm than good. In the name of making the world “safe for democracy” it is destroying democracy.

This doesn’t just apply to “those people” over there. This revelation comes right after the domestic news, NSA’s Bulk Collection Of Americans’ Phone Data Is Illegal, Appeals Court Rules. But the story of Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan shows what a farce are the government claims that metadata don’t mean anything. The only way that we get control of this is if we drag this stuff out into the light. And the government will do everything it can to avoid doing that. I’m not hopeful.

Last week, I posted a quote from Matt Bruenig, Don’t Blame Unions for Police Brutality. I didn’t realize that calling for an end of police unions was becoming a thing. Last weekend, Ross Douthat wrote, Our Police Union Problem. I will admit, I’ve never been that keen on police unions, simply because I haven’t been that keen on the police. But I nevertheless support police unions because I support workers and their rights to organize. Of course, Douthat is a complete nitwit when it comes to the issue.

He started his article with the usual litany for why public sector unions are bad. For example, “[T]he government’s money is not its own, so negotiations between politicians and their employees (who are also often their political supporters) amount to a division of spoils rather than a sharing of profits.” His unstated assumption here is that taxation is theft. That’s a position that one can take, but almost no one actually buys it. He also noted that unions drive up the costs of services. But who is to say what the value of the services is? We could use slave labor for our policing. That would certainly drive the price of services down. But would that be just? Why is the compensation derived at through collective bargaining too high, while a divide-and-conquer approach is correct?

Just to show that there are no limits to his nonsense, he finished off, “Finally, union lobbying power can bias public-policy decisions toward the interests of state employees.” But private sector companies lobby the government over public policy decisions with the intent of advantaging themselves. How is this different? Douthat doesn’t say because it is just a given that workers are bad and businesses are good.

Finally, Douthat got to his main point: police unions. He made some kind of weird comparison between police and teacher unions. And then he concluded that police unions are always standing in the way of making positive changes in public policy. For example, police unions have been against the use of body cameras. I take his point, but this is not the problem of police unions. They are not the all powerful entities of conservative imagination. And the main way that they have power is through their alignment with conservative politics where laws are passed to disempower public sector unions with special carve-outs for the police.

The big problem here is that people don’t understand the purpose of unions. They exist to protect their members. They are not NGOs or other groups looking out for the public good. Cesar Chavez was given a lot of heat at one time about the UFW being against immigration. People seemed to think that it was his job to be looking out for the interests all Latinos or something. That wasn’t true. His job was to get the best working conditions for his union’s members. The same is true for teachers. And for the police.

Unions are a counterbalance to the power of those who employ them. No one ever questions but that Walmart should be making money. No one complains that it isn’t out in the world trying to get its customers to eat right and exercise. But unions are expected to do this. Or rather, people like Ross Douthat pretend that this is what unions should do. It’s a way of vilifying unions by pretending that they have a charter to make the world a better place.

I accept that police unions — any unions — can be a problem in making positive changes. But that doesn’t make them bad. And regardless, the problems we see with policing throughout the United States are not due to police unions. If the governments who oversee them want to make changes, they can make the changes. Policing did not become militarized because of police unions. Abusive officers do not flourish in departments because of police unions. The lack of widespread use of body cameras is not because of police unions. The government has great resources to make changes, and people like Ross Douthat want to avoid the real question by blaming police unions. It’s a step up from blaming police brutality on single motherhood. But not much of a step.