Dear Commons Community,
My colleague, David Bloomfield, has a short, sublime suggestion for Joe Biden in a letter to the New York Times that was printed this morning. See below.
Tony
——————————————————————————————
New York Times
To the Editor:
September 20, 2020
Joe Biden should immediately announce Barack Obama as his choice to add a worthy new justice to the Supreme Court and ensure record Democratic turnout in the presidential and Senate elections.
David C. Bloomfield
Brooklyn
Dear Commons Community,
New York Times opinion columnist, Pierre Bouie, had a piece yesterday entitled, Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World, that begs the question: How much longer are we going to allow this platform to foment hatred and undermine democracy? He makes the point that Facebook has evolved into the platform of choice among hate groups and others seeking to sway opinion and incite violence.
Bouie focuses first on examples of dictators in developing countries who have used Facebook to engage in genocidal behavior. He then comments on how here in the United States, Facebook has been the chief vector for QAnon, a byzantine conspiracy theory in which President Trump struggles against a global cabal of Satan-worshipping, life-force sucking pedophiles and their enablers. QAnon supporters believe Trump will eventually go public in an operation that ends with the arrest, internment and execution of that cabal, which conveniently includes many of his Democratic political opponents.
Bouie’s piece also includes a reference to a memo written by Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, that shows the company’s refusal to take action against governments and political parties that use fake accounts to spread propaganda, mislead citizens and influence elections.
The entire piece is below.
Tony
——————————————————————————–
New York Times
Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World
By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
Sept. 18, 2020
For years, Myanmar’s military used Facebook to incite hatred and genocidal violence against the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority group, leading to mass death and displacement. It took until 2018 for Facebook to admit to and apologize for its failure to act.
Two years later, the platform is, yet again, sowing the seeds for genocidal violence. This time it’s in Ethiopia, where the recent assassination of Hachalu Hundessa, a singer and political activist from the country’s Oromo ethnic group, led to violence in its capital city, Addis Ababa. This bloodshed was, according to Vice News, “supercharged by the almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people’s anger.” This follows a similar incident in 2019, where disinformation shared on Facebook helped catapult violence that claimed 86 lives in Ethiopia’s Oromia region.
Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow.
The news from Ethiopia comes at the same time as a report about a memo, written by Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook. Obtained by BuzzFeed News, the memo shows the company’s refusal to take action against governments and political parties that use fake accounts to spread propaganda, mislead citizens and influence elections.
“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” Zhang wrote. “I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she continued.
The most disturbing revelations from Zhang’s memo relate to the failure of Facebook to take swift action against coordinated activity in countries like Honduras and Azerbaijan, where political leaders used armies of fake accounts to attack opponents and undermine independent media. “We simply didn’t care enough to stop them,” she wrote. In a statement, a spokeswoman for Facebook said that “We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company.”
Zhang’s memo only adds to what we already know about the ease with which bad actors use Facebook to further violence and authoritarian politics. “There are five major ways that authoritarian regimes exploit Facebook and other social media services,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, writes in “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” They can “organize countermovements to emerging civil society or protest movements,” “frame the public debate along their terms,” let citizens “voice complaints without direct appeal or protest” and “coordinate among elites to rally support.” They can also use social media to aid in the “surveillance and harassment of opposition activists and journalists.”
We’ve seen such activity in places around the world. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s allies use Facebook and other social media to harass critics and spread disinformation on behalf of the regime. In India, Vaidhyanathan notes, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party used Facebook to “rile up anti-Muslim passions and channel people to the polls” as well as “destroy the reputations of journalists, civil society activists, critics of anti-Islam policies, and political enemies.” And in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte leveraged Facebook for “virulent character assassination, threats, and harassment” as well as propaganda in service of vigilantism and violent nationalism.
Here in the United States, Facebook has been the chief vector for QAnon, a byzantine conspiracy theory in which President Trump struggles against a global cabal of Satan-worshipping, life-force sucking pedophiles and their enablers. QAnon supporters believe Trump will eventually go public in an operation that ends with the arrest, internment and execution of that cabal, which conveniently includes many of his Democratic political opponents.
Facebook, according to the company’s own investigation, is home to thousands of QAnon groups and pages with millions of members and followers. Its recommendation algorithms push users to engage with QAnon content, spreading the conspiracy to people who may never have encountered it otherwise. Similarly, a report from the German Marshall Fund pegs the recent spate of fire conspiracies — false claims of arson in Oregon by antifa or Black Lives Matter — to the uncontrolled spread of rumors and disinformation on Facebook.
Zuckerberg clearly wants the public to see him and his company as partners in the defense of democracy. Earlier this month, he announced steps to limit election-related misinformation and stop voter suppression and to support efforts to help Americans register and cast a ballot. “I believe our democracy is strong enough to withstand this challenge and deliver a free and fair election — even if it takes time for every vote to be counted,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’ve voted during global pandemics before. We can do this.”
He is right that our democracy can survive a pandemic. It is unclear, however, if it can survive a platform optimized for conspiratorial thinking. Like industrial-age steel companies dumping poisonous waste into waterways, Facebook pumps paranoia and disinformation into the body politic, the toxic byproduct of its relentless drive for profit. We eventually cleaned up the waste. It’s an open question whether we can clean up after Facebook.
Dear Commons Community,
Journalist Bob Woodward pushed back during an interview Thursday on Fox News after host Dana Perino confronted him about his personal political judgments about President Donald Trump.
In Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which is partly based on 19 interviews with the president, the journalist ultimately concludes that Trump is not fit for the Oval Office, a judgment he has repeatedly said is based on overwhelming evidence. This includes his conversations with Trump, other top White House and government officials, and Trump’s deliberate downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic that, as of Thursday, has killed more than 197,000 people in the U.S.
Perino questioned Woodward’s journalistic authority to make that call and asked for his judgment on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
“What I did in the last 4½ years is report on Trump, I think as much as any outsider, get close to him and his operations, so I’m able to make the judgment, as I do, that I believe ― with overwhelming evidence ― he is the wrong man for the job,” Woodward said. “I have not reported in depth on Joe Biden. I am not endorsing anyone.” \
Perino also asked her guest what Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor whom Woodward credits with teaching him journalism, would have thought of him weighing in on Trump’s fitness for office. Woodward had said that Bradlee always told him to be “tough on everyone … we’re not in the political game.”
“Dana, if you’ve been able to read the book, the evidence is overwhelming,” Woodward answered. “It’s one of the saddest moments for this country to have a leader who has failed to tell the truth, who has failed to warn the people.”
“The confusion in the message for somebody trying to figure this out: Should I send my kids to school? Can I go to the grocery store? … The president has that megaphone, and people look to him as the one who is going to say, ‘Here’s the reality.’ And if you distort the reality, you have failed in your job, and you’re the wrong man for that job,” he said.
Watch the entire interview above. Good stuff especially the last six minutes.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died yesterday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.
The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D.C., surrounded by family. She was 87.
“Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd comments on her passing below.
Tony
—————————————————————————————————-
New York Times
Maureen Dowd
Septmeber 19, 2020
WASHINGTON — I used to feel pretty optimistic that the country would get through the Trump years intact.
In 2016, America got mad — and went mad. This administration has unleashed so many fresh hells that a portrait of the last four years looks very Hieronymus Bosch. But the idea of this country is so remarkable; surely it could withstand one cheesy con man who squeaked in.
Now we might have passed a point of no return. No matter who wins in November, can the harsh divisions abate?
The stunning news Friday night of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg guaranteed a political bonfire. President Trump is in a position to reshape the Supreme Court long past his time in office with a third justice, giving conservatives a 6-to-3 majority.
With Democrats still smarting over Republicans’ refusal to consider Barack Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland for the court, this will push them over the edge, and maybe to the polls, especially women. And Trump’s base could race to vote, because the president has talked about nominating Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz, aiming to have a court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Mitch McConnell said Friday that Trump’s nominee — hopefully not Jeanine Pirro — will get a floor vote.
“We cannot have Election Day come and go with a 4-4 court,” Cruz told Sean Hannity. Imagine a Bush v. Gore scenario with a 4-4 court.
As it turned out, the founders created a country painfully vulnerable to whoever happens to be president. They assumed that future presidents would cherish what they had so painfully created, and continue to knit together different kinds of people from different areas with different economic interests.
But now that we have a president who takes those knitting needles and stabs the country mercilessly with them, we can see how fragile this whole thing really is.
All the stuff we took for granted — from presidential ethics to electoral integrity to a nonpolitical attorney general — is blown to smithereens. The president who does not believe in science has been conducting a science experiment for four years: What happens to a country when you have a president who is doing everything in his power to cleave it?
It wasn’t long ago that Obama started on the road to the White House with a stirring speech about ignoring those who would slice our nation into red states and blue states because this is the United States of America.
Now Trump blames the “badly run blue states” and “Democrat cities” for everything. He clearly doesn’t see himself as president of a majority of the country. Whenever he talks about the half of the country that didn’t vote for him, he paints a picture of a Scorsese urban hellscape the minute you cross state lines.
On Wednesday, the president offered the heinous hypothetical that the death toll from the coronavirus would not be as bad “if you take the blue states out.”
As the president of Red America, Trump “regularly divides the country into the parts that support him and the parts that do not, rewarding the former and reproving the latter,” The Times’s Peter Baker wrote.
The line between politics and governing can be blurry, certainly. But with Trump, there is no line.
Jared Kushner bragged to Bob Woodward that Trump can “trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions.” Woodward writes that Kushner told an associate, “The Democrats are getting so crazy they’re basically defending Baltimore.” This gleeful assessment from Kushner, a Baltimore slumlord, is the height of cynicism.
The anxiety about our fractious nature was reflected in the question of Susan Connors at Joe Biden’s CNN Town Hall Thursday night. “Mr. Vice President,” she said, “I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs. And my question is, what is your plan, to build a bridge, with voters from the opposing party, to lead us forward, toward a common future?”
Biden was soothing, reassuring that he could pick up those knitting needles once Trump was “out of the way, and his vitriolic attitude, and his way of just getting after people, revenge.”
But will it be so easy? The cultural ecosystem, and the fever swamps of social media that amplify Trump’s craziness, will remain. Fox News and Facebook will continue to validate the biases and conspiracy theories of a nation that’s increasingly proud of its ignorance, anti-intellectualism and denial of science.
Isn’t the simple fact that the race is this close, when Biden should be crushing Trump, given the president’s lethal negligence and willful subterfuge on the virus and his racial demagogy, proof that our realities are so disparate from one another that unifying will be akin to cleaning a dozen Augean stables?
After Woodward’s book revealed that Trump knew early on how dangerous the virus was but downplayed it, I heard from those two alternate universes.
“I can hardly breathe, it’s so incredible,” my friend Rita said angrily.
“He was just trying to buck people up,” my sister, Peggy, said placidly.
In Duluth, Minn., at a campaign stop on Friday, a man in a MAGA hat jeered at Biden and told him he could never win. Biden approached the man from the alternate reality, elbow bumped him, chuckled and assured him that if he does win, Biden would work for him, too.
If McConnell has his way, that work wouldn’t include replacing R.B.G.
Dear Commons Community,
Two companies, Moderna and Pfizer, revealed details about how participants are being selected and monitored, the conditions under which the trials could be stopped early if there were problems, and the evidence researchers will use to determine whether people who got the vaccines were protected from Covid-19. By doing so, the companies hope to earn the trust of the public and of scientists who have clamored for details of the studies. As reported by The New York Times.
“Moderna’s study will involve 30,000 participants, and Pfizer’s 44,000.
Companies typically share these documents after their studies are complete. The disclosures while the trials are still underway, a rare move, are aimed at addressing growing suspicion among Americans that President Trump’s drive to produce a vaccine before the election on Nov. 3 could result in a product that was unsafe.
The plan released by Moderna on yesterday morning included a likely timetable that could reach into next year for determining whether its vaccine works. It does not jibe with the president’s optimistic predictions of a vaccine widely available to the public in October.
Pfizer’s plan does not appear to estimate when its results could be available. Its chief executive has said repeatedly that the company hopes to have an answer as early as October. Moderna has said only that it could have a result before the end of the year.
Moderna’s 135-page plan, or protocol, indicated that the company’s first analysis of early trial data might not be conducted until late December, though company officials now say they expect the initial analysis in November. In any case, there may not be enough information then to determine whether the vaccine works, and the final analysis might not take place until months later, heading into the spring of next year.
Moderna’s timeline meshes with the cautionary estimates from many researchers, including Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told senators on Wednesday that a vaccine would not be widely available until the middle of next year. Hours later, Trump sharply contradicted him, making unsubstantiated projections that a vaccine could become widely available weeks from now.
On Wednesday, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said in Wilmington, Del., that the process used to evaluate and approve a vaccine would have to be “totally transparent” to win public confidence. He has said that Mr. Trump’s calls for companies and regulators to speed the process have shaken the public’s faith in vaccines and that politics has no place in vaccine development.
Researchers in particular have been urging vaccine makers to share the detailed blueprints of their studies so that outside experts can evaluate them. At least one expert, after reading the plans, has already raised questions about the way the trials were designed.
“I want to acknowledge a good deed done,” said Peter Doshi, who is on the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in Baltimore and an editor with The BMJ, a medical journal. He previously requested the plans from Moderna and Pfizer. “They have opened up, for the first time, the ability for researchers not involved in the trial to form their own independent judgment about the design of this study.”
Until now, none of the nine companies that are testing vaccines in large clinical trials had released this level of detail.”
Without a doubt, we need this level of transparency with testing. As I said in a previous posting, I will not take a vaccine unless Dr. Anthony Fauci says it is okay. He is the only person in the present administration who I believe when it comes to COVID-19.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Here is a sad case that exemplifies the dangers of not wearing a mask and practicing social distancing at a wedding reception. Multiple outbreaks — including some over 200 miles from the wedding venue — have emerged in the last month. As reported by the Bangor Daily News and The Huffington Post.
“At least seven people have died due to a coronavirus outbreak linked to a single indoor wedding reception in Millinocket, Maine.
One of those deaths occurred in a Millinocket hospital while six were at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation Center in Madison, a nursing home where 19 confirmed COVID-19 cases emerged last week.
The nursing home is roughly 100 miles southwest of the Big Moose Inn, Cabins and Campground, where the wedding reception was held on Aug. 7. A spokesperson for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention previously told HuffPost that one of the wedding guests was in the same household as an employee of the nursing home.
The wedding, which saw attendance from more than 60 guests who did not wear masks or socially distance, is now linked to 176 COVID-19 cases in Maine, including an outbreak in York County Jail, which is over 220 miles southwest of Big Moose Inn. One of the wedding guests worked at the jail, according to the Bangor Daily News.
Amanda Roy, whose mother Anna Littlejohn resides at Maplecrest Rehabilitation Center and tested positive for COVID-19, told the Bangor Daily News that she is angry at the wedded couple for the resulting virus spread.
“I’m glad they got the greatest day of their life,” Roy told the paper. “But it made a nightmare and probably the worst days of some other people’s lives.”
During a media briefing this week, Maine CDC Director Dr. Nirav Shah stressed that all Maine locals needed to remain vigilant to quell the spread of COVID-19. The state was facing over 4,400 confirmed cases and had seen 138 deaths as of Tuesday.
“COVID-19 right now is not on the other side of the fence,” Shah said. “It is in our yards.”
Shah also stressed the importance of face masks, pointing out that wearing masks had not been the norm in the York County Jail, likely contributing to the outbreak.
“The one theme that runs through all of [these incidents] is mask wearing,” Shah said. “Face coverings both at a molecular level and now at a population level have been well associated at reducing the likelihood of transmission of COVID-19. Does it eliminate the likelihood? No, there’s no intervention in medical science that eliminates anything. But they greatly reduce the likelihood.”
The lesson here is to please wear a mask and practice social distancing!!!!
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
The coronavirus pandemic continues to take its toll on the economy especially with regard to unemployment. The number of jobs lost keeps mounting, with the latest weekly total of Americans applying for unemployment benefits coming in at 860,000.
Last week’s unemployment applications brings the total amount of jobless claims to roughly 60 million since the pandemic began, wiping out the 20 million jobs added over the last decade by a three-to-one margin.
While some states have seen unemployment applications recede from record highs after the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. employment picture in March, some have suffered stubbornly high job losses months into the recovery. In some states unemployment rates shot as high as 20%.
According to the Department of Labor’s latest report (see graphic above), which breaks out the insured unemployment rate (a ratio of people on unemployment benefits divided by labor force) through August 29, Hawaii is currently suffering the worst employment picture with a nation-leading insured unemployment rate of 20.3%. California jumped up to second on the list with a similar unemployment rate at 17.3%. Nevada held firm in the third spot with its own insured unemployment rate at 15.6%. All three states are suffering from notably higher insured unemployment rates relative to the nation average for the same week at 9.3%.
New York and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico round out the top five worst job markets, with insured unemployment rates at 15% and 14.1%, respectively.
Compared to pre-pandemic levels, those unemployment rates are notably higher than the worst states listed in the week ended February 22. Back then, Alaska topped the nation with a similar unemployment rate at just 2.9%. As high as the unemployment rates are now in the hardest hit states, they have still marginally improved from peaks seen months prior. Nevada, for example, has seen its unemployment rate improve more than 10 percentage points, down to about 16% from 27% during the week ended May 9.
Looking at unemployment statistics published in August by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures unemployment by the more traditional ratio of unemployed workers to the size of the labor force, Massachusetts notched the highest unemployment rate by that metric for the month of July at 16.1% followed by New York at 15.9%.
As a Yahoo Finance review of jobless claims data showed earlier, some states are recovering more quickly than others, but all are still struggling with varying economic restrictions tied to controlling the spread of the coronavirus.
The greater concern is how long it will take for unemployment to pick up again even after a vaccine is found for COVID-19.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
President Donald Trump was skewered yesterday for bragging that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus would be lower if one subtracted the deaths from “blue” states.
“The blue states had tremendous death rates,” Trump said. “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at, we’re really at a very low level.”
Trump’s boast wasn’t even factually accurate; as many critics pointed out on social media, the United States would still have one of the world’s worst tolls from the virus even without deaths from “blue” states.
According to data collected by The New York Times, 3 of the top 6 states in terms of deaths have Republican governors and 5 of the top 10 voted for Trump in 2016.
In any case, Trump is president of all 50 states, each of which is populated with both Democrats and Republicans. And the Trump administration’s delayed response to the virus ― as well as the president’s confession to Bob Woodward that he downplayed the threat early on ― impacted everyone and caused a number of needless deaths.
Tony
Dear Comments Community,
Attorney General William Barr is facing severe criticism for comparing calls for a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus to slavery. “Putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest,” he said during an event at Hillsdale College. “Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.” Barr also launched into a tirade against the hundreds of Justice Department prosecutors working beneath him, equating them to preschoolers and essentially saying the opinions of politically appointed Justice Department leaders are more important than those of career attorneys who have served through multiple presidencies. Barr also recently suggested charging violent protesters with the rarely used accusation of sedition — conspiracy to overthrow the US government.
Barr’s legacy as Attorney General will be that of being the perfect toad for Trump.
Tony
Dear Commons Community,
Last night, I finished reading Brian Stelter’s book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox news and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. It is a blow by blow account of how the relationship between Trump and Fox News has evolved. As a blurb on the inside jacket cover states, it is: “The urgent and untold story of the deadly collusion between Fox News and Donald Trump.” For those who follow Fox News not for its news but for its propagandistic treatment of the “news” especially on its prime time evening programs, Stelter fills in many of the gaps in stories that have been published elsewhere. If you are someone who does not follow Fox News at all and have little or no idea of its present operation, Hoax is an eye-opener. Below is a good review that came across my email from Mother Jones. It includes a link to an interview with Stelter. I think you will find Hoax a quick read and thought-provoking.
Tony
—————————————————————————————
Mother Jones
September 16, 2020
It is impossible to tell the story of President Trump’s rise to power without understanding his relationship with Fox News. Together they form one of modern America’s most defining duos, argues CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, who documents their symbiotic dance in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.
Through countless interviews with sources at various levels of power inside Fox, Stelter reveals how the wildly popular cable channel has subordinated journalistic integrity to President Trump’s political interests, while setting the broader daily agenda for his administration. “Every day’s a new episode,” Stelter told Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery during a livestream hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California. “Certainly Fox programs his presidency that way.”
Stelter argues there is no Trump without Fox. Trump entered the national political arena via a weekly call-in segment on Fox & Friends, during which he pioneered the racist birther lie; he regularly regurgitates talking points from Fox News’ The Five; he is emboldened by—and wed to—positive coverage from anchors like Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Tucker Carlson, whose shows reach millions every night; and Hannity is a close adviser who even stumped for the president at a rally in Missouri.
“We don’t feel we have power to fact-check Trump,” Stelter recounted being told by one Fox journalist. “We feel like we’re being squeezed out by propaganda.”
The title of Stelter’s book was inspired by back-to-back uses of the word “hoax” by Trump and Hannity to describe the emerging coronavirus crisis in the United States. Both Trump and Fox downplayed the threat at the outset, a deadly error for which they face dual culpability (but zero accountability from Fox brass)—a travesty made all the more apparent following the recent release of Bob Woodward’s tapes.
For a look inside the Fox-Trump feedback loop that has distorted truth and threatened American democracy, read Jeffery’s interview with Stelter [link.motherjones.com], or listen to their conversation on this episode [link.motherjones.com] of the Mother Jones Podcast.
—Molly Schwartz
