Kevin Drum

This is just a coincidence, but I happened to run across two similar stories today. The first is about a guy who had to replace his credit card due to fraudulent charges and therefore wanted to make sure that all his auto-payments weren't automatically updated:

He said Bank of America told him his credit-card account couldn’t be removed from the card updater program.... Bank of America said automatically updating card information is a customer convenience, and it works with customers to resolve issues. A spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that it has now removed Evans’s credit-card account from the updater program.

The second story is about a guy in Chicago whose property taxes suddenly skyrocketed because his $200,000 house had been newly assessed at over a million dollars:

Lloyd initially attempted to resolve the issue with the Cook County Tax Assessor's Office, but wasn’t taken seriously. “I told them that I had a substantial increase, and they were like, ‘everybody's taxes increase,’" he recounted.

However, after Lloyd got in touch with FOX 32 Chicago, it contacted the Assessor's Office and discovered the exorbitant tax bill was indeed an error, as Lloyd had claimed. "This property was given an incorrect assessment due to a permit that was unintentionally applied to the property,” a representative from the office stated.

One of these examples is a private company and the other is a public agency. Both unfolded the same way. The initial response was, basically, "bugger off," but when the press got involved it suddenly turned out that impossible things were possible after all.

But why? Why is it so hard to get "customer service" organizations to even take queries seriously in the first place? It's one thing to make a mistake, or for a poorly trained rep to have a hard time solving a problem. But that doesn't excuse the frequency with which people are simply told to take it or leave it without the problem even being looked at.

In the retail biz it's pretty common for customer service to be not just good, but maybe even more forgiving than it should be. It's considered to be a minimum requirement for a giant, faceless chain trying to gain customer trust. So why is it so uncommon everywhere else? Less competition, I suppose, along with higher switching costs. Still, I find it surprising that so few non-retailers even try to attract business with legitimately generous customer service. Everyone claims to have great customer service, of course, but almost no one does. Why?

Marine Le Pen's right-wing populists appear to have won barely more than 20% of the vote in France's election today. This was a dismal showing for a party that was finally expected to win after years of rebranding and makeovers. But voters weren't fooled: a strong turnout unexpectedly powered an alliance of the left to the biggest share of the vote. Going forward, parliament will almost certainly be controlled by some kind of coalition of the left and center.

Meanwhile, Britain's right wing got crushed in Thursday's election; the right-wing candidate for president lost in Iran; and last month the far-right party in Belgium failed to make its predicted gains, with the usual messy coalition of center-left and center-right remaining in control. In India, Narendra Modi's religious nationalists were shocked by the success of a secular leftist coalition; and in Mexico left populists cemented their control.

Can we please get a few stories now about how the left is ascendant around the world while the forces of right-wing nationalism are in disarray because they're still consistently unable to appeal to more than a small fraction of the electorate? Thanks, much appreciated.

Are there things you firmly believe even though you know they aren't true? I'll start: I get way more red lights than I should.

Do not bother arguing about this. Your so-called "facts" mean nothing to me.

News from Britain:

Perhaps you don't know what this is all about. It's been a big deal in Britain for the past couple of years but I first heard of it only about a month ago. I was so gobsmacked that I had to read two or three articles before I convinced myself it wasn't some sort of late April Fool's joke.

It wasn't. Rishi Sunak seriously had a plan to cut down on illegal immigration by shipping migrants off to Rwanda. He had hundreds of millions of pounds budgeted for this, partly to bribe the Rwandan government and partly to pay for airfare and housing in Kigali.

In the end, something like two migrants were flown to Rwanda and the housing there mostly sits empty. Now it always will.

This whole scheme sounded like one of those Donald Trump fever dreams that he'd blather about but never actually follow through on. That's the danger of a future Trump who's more competent. He might really try to put Trump's dumbest ideas into practice.

I was stargazing last night and mostly out of cell phone reach, so I didn't see the big interview with Joe Biden until I got home this morning. Now I have, and it seems like a big meh.

Biden was OK. He had plenty of facts and figures at his command. He denied he was in big trouble and denied Trump was ahead, but that had nothing to do with him being in denial. That's how all politicians act when they're behind in the polls.

But I doubt the interview did much to change any minds. Biden said six times that he just had a "bad night" during the debate, but that's not enough. It was way more than just a bad night, and the almost unanimous claim of the insiders who have commented about Biden over the past few days is that his performance is highly variable and getting worse. So one acceptable-ish interview won't set any minds at ease. He needs to do this over and over to prove the insiders wrong.

I don't get the impression he plans to do that.

The Wall Street Journal writes today about Joe Biden's difficulties among union workers, but it's pretty much the same story as it's been since Reagan Democrats started defecting 40 years ago. Lots of working class voters are more concerned about immigration, trade deals, and culture war issues than they are about support for unions. For example:

Ford employee James Benson Jr., a UAW member, bought a house in Canton, Mich.,—roughly 20 miles west of Detroit—in 2017 because he planned to send his daughter to its highly-rated public schools.

In late 2020, however, the Plymouth-Canton school board, which is nonpartisan, overhauled its policies to protect transgender students from discrimination. Among other changes, the new policy prohibits school staff from disclosing that a student is transgender—including to the parents or legal guardian—unless required by law or authorized by the student.

“So obviously our kid goes to a private school now just to avoid that,” Benson said. He said the decision, which he made because of his Christian faith, is a hit to his family’s finances on top of sharply higher prices. “It’s like, what planet are you from?”

Put aside for a moment the wisdom of schools concealing transgender inclinations from parents. It's easy to argue either side of that. What I wonder is what Benson is afraid of. Is it:

Fear that his own kid will become transgender and he won't be told?

Fear that the school is encouraging students to become transgender, and he doesn't want his kid exposed to that kind of environment (bathrooms etc.)?

No real fear, just objection at an abstract level—and he's willing to pay $10,000 a year to register his protest?

Regardless of my own beliefs, it's not hard to understand that lots of working class folks have a traditional view that boys are boys and girls are girls. But what precisely bothers them the most? Merely being around trans kids? Sharing bathrooms, locker rooms, and so forth? $10,000 is a lot of money over a new school board policy.

Charlie loves his bird bath. And as you can see, he's not afraid of getting his paws wet. He just jumps up and camps out in the water while he watches the birds fly by.

In the Washington Monthly today, Joshua Douglas says:

The lengthy delay in deciding the Trump immunity case and the likely appeals that will follow the complicated ruling mean that Americans will not have the knowledge they need—whether Trump is guilty of election subversion—before they vote in four months.

I can't count the number of times I've read this. But is it really true? In the case of Trump's hush money trial, you could argue that the case was obscure and complicated, so the jury's verdict really had an impact.¹

The election interference case is just the opposite. "Stop the Steal" was a big deal for months. The January 6 insurrection received huge attention at the time it happened and Trump's role was endlessly dissected. A House committee spent months on public hearings. Hundreds of protesters were sent to prison. The press has continued to chew on it ever since.

Surely pretty much everyone in America has an opinion about this already. Is it really likely that a trial and a jury decision would do anything to change that? Technically I agree with Douglas's point, but in real life I doubt it really matters. We already know everything we're going to know.

¹Although even at that, it barely made a ripple in public opinion.

There's no big point to make here, just an observation. The unemployment rate is still low, and will likely remain low for the rest of the year. But it's definitely going up.