John Fetterman. credit. Steven M. Falk – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Dear Commons Community,

“He’s actually the only American that’s ever beat [former President Trump] in an election,” Fetterman said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” when the host asked him about if Biden is the “best one for” Democrats “to put forward,” in a clip highlighted by Mediaite.

Fetterman later added that he thinks Biden is “the only Democrat that could win.”

“I do believe Joe Biden has that ability to win,” Fetterman said to Maher. “And we have a great — we have a great bench, but I think it’s a very distinct kind of situation right now.”

Maher then remarked that he was “surprised at that,” but that he would “move on.”

“I’m not on the same page there, but okay,” Maher said. “I mean, it’s probably gonna be Joe Biden and I’ll vote for him.”

The Pennsylvania Democrat has staunchly defended Biden ahead of this year’s presidential election, once pushing back against those in his own party who have heightened their criticism of the president ahead of November, stating that they might as well put on a “MAGA hat.”

“I don’t understand why,” Fetterman said on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. “I don’t know what’s in it for you to do that whether you’re just chasing clout or you want to make it in the news or anything like that. But if you’re not willing to just support the president now and say these kinds of things, you might as well just get your MAGA hat, because you now are helping Trump with this.”

Earlier in the MSNBC interview, Fetterman said Biden “is going to win here in Pennsylvania, and I’ve always believed that whoever wins Pennsylvania is going to be the next president as well, too.”

I hope Fetterman is correct in his assessment!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. economy added far more jobs than expected in May, countering fears of a slowdown in the labor market and likely reducing the Federal Reserve’s impetus to lower interest rates.

Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 272,000 for the month, up from 165,000 in April and well ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 190,000, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday.

At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4%, the first time it has breached that level since January 2022. Economists had been expecting the rate to stay unchanged at 3.9% from April.

The increase came even though the labor force participation rate decreased to 62.5%, down 0.2 percentage point. The survey of households used to compute the unemployment rate showed that the level of people who reported holding jobs fell by 408,000.  As reported by CNBC.

“On the surface, [the report] was hot, but you’ve also got a bigger drop in household employment,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “For what it’s worth, that tends to be a more accurate signal when you’re at an inflection point in the economy. You can find weakness in the underlying numbers.”

A more encompassing unemployment figure that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons held steady at 7.4%.

The household survey also showed that full-time workers declined by 625,000, while those holding part-time positions increased by 286,000.

Job gains were concentrated in health care, government, and leisure and hospitality, consistent with recent trends. The three sectors respectively added 68,000, 43,000 and 42,000 positions. The three sectors accounted for more than half the gains.

Overall good news for the economy!

Tony

Anthony Fauci departs congressional hearing on 3 June.  Photo: Francis Chung/Poltico via AP

Dear Commons Community,

A 15-month, often partisan congressional inquiry into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic reached a climax this week when Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), sat for 3.5 hours of questioning before a House of Representatives panel. Although the packed 3 June hearing included fiery—and sometimes outlandish—rhetoric from the panel’s lawmakers, it shed no new light on the pandemic’s origin and instead probed allegations of wrongdoing by Fauci and other federal officials.

Much of the hearing focused on events early in the pandemic that made Fauci, tapped by former President Donald Trump to help lead the federal response, a polarizing figure. Fans of the 83-year-old scientist labeled him as the voice of scientific reason. But critics blamed him, as well as officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for what they considered overly restrictive COVID-19 policies that led to the closing of schools and workplaces.

Republicans on the panel pressed that attack. “You oversaw one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the U.S. has ever seen,” said Representative Brad Wenstrup (R–OH), chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “You took the position that you presented ‘the science’; your words came across … as final and as infallible in matters pertaining to the pandemic.”

Other Republicans accused Fauci of a wide range of misdeeds linked to the debate over the origin of the pandemic. They charged him with protecting a nonprofit group suspected of mishandling a grant that funded virus research in China, colluding with researchers who published a high-profile paper arguing the pandemic virus was not engineered by scientists, and turning a blind eye to a staffer who used a private email account to hide his communications from the public.

Democrats rushed to defend the record of the longtime adviser to presidents, who retired in 2022. “Under the guise of investigating the pandemic’s origins, House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to objectively examine how COVID-19 came to be, and instead weaponized concerns about a lab-related origin to fuel sentiment against our nation’s scientists and public health officials for partisan gain,” said Representative Raul Ruiz (CA), the panel’s ranking Democrat.

For his part, Fauci—a veteran of numerous appearances before Congress—held his ground, assailing accusations made against him as “seriously distorted,” “absolutely false,” and “simply preposterous.” He noted that COVID-19 policy decisions made early in the pandemic were not entirely his. In a January interview with staff from the House panel he had said the early government guidance that people stay 2 meters apart “sort of just appeared.” Fauci said he meant that there had been no scientific study of distancing. He also said the policy—which was later dropped—had originated with CDC. Fauci noted that, at the time, scientific understanding of how to combat SARS-CoV-2 was a “moving target.”

Fauci also denied that he tried to protect or help conservation biologist Peter Daszak and his nonprofit group, the EcoHealth Alliance. In April 2020, Trump moved to kill a NIAID grant to the group after claims that the work it funded in Wuhan, China, led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Fauci said he questioned the legality of that decision, which was later deemed improper. But he said he agrees with last month’s move by federal health officials to suspend—and seek a longer ban on—federal funding for Eco-Health because of its alleged violations of National Institutes of Health rules.

Fauci pushed back on suggestions he had any role in writing the now-famous Nature Medicine correspondence, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that argued against the virus being created in a lab. Although he thinks the evidence supports a natural origin, Fauci testified that “I have always said … I keep an open mind” about the possibility of a lab leak. He also noted he and his family have received—and still do—death threats from those who believe Fauci created the pandemic virus or covered up its origins.

In his written testimony, Fauci distanced himself from an adviser, David Morens, who used personal email to communicate with Daszak and others about EcoHealth’s troubles in a bid to evade public records laws. Fauci said Morens helped him write papers and had no role in policy. Morens’s attempts to avoid public records laws were “an aberrancy and an outlier,” he said, and his efforts to help Daszak, an old friend, were “inappropriate.” Fauci denied conducting official business through personal email, as Morens had claimed in one email to Daszak.

Rep. Wenstrup concluded that he hoped the United States will be prepared for the next pandemic. “What should have been a 9/11 moment for this country … turned into a political nightmare. We need to do better,” he said. He told Fauci he was open to “more off the record conversations about things we can do in the future,” such as developing treatments.

As far as I am concerned, millions of Americans survived COVID because of Fauci’s guidance.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Julia Lee’s Biting the Hand:  Growing Up Asian in Black and White America.  Lee is an associate professor of English at Loyola Marymount  University where she specializes in African American and Caribbean history.  Biting the Hand… is her memoir of growing up in Los Angeles where her immigrant parents owned a convenience store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.  She is candid about the pressures she felt both as a child and as an adult to succeed.  She keenly records events in her life that forced her to examine critically her experiences trying to make it in a “culture of white supremacy.”  I found her insights as a Korean focusing on her own and Black America’s plight in this country illuminating.

At 240 pages, it is a quick read.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times  

Tony

——————————————-

The New York Times

Review of Books

Becoming Asian American, From ‘Neither/Nor’ to ‘Both/And’

Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand,” is about forging an identity in a nation of boundaries.

By Jean Chen Ho

April 18, 2023

BITING THE HAND: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, by Julia Lee

Cultural identity, Stuart Hall wrote, is “a matter of becoming.” Although derived from our many histories, both personal and collective, identity is not some inherent essence, rooted in the past. It is instead, according to Hall, in “constant transformation.” Julia Lee’s memoir, “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America,” examines this process, and in particular the forging of her identity as a Korean American woman in a country that still operates under a racial hierarchy.

The book is divided into three parts, beginning with “Rage,” an intimate account of the author’s tumultuous family life and its tortured silences around racial anxiety and inherited trauma. Lee’s parents, survivors of the Korean War, owned a liquor store in Inglewood, Calif., and then a fast-food chicken joint in nearby Hawthorne. The latter business was heavily damaged in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, when Lee was 15. At the time, Lee was an angry teenager who clashed with her “psycho Korean mom” and chafed against the conservative culture of her private all-girls school.

“Shame” presents her time as an undergraduate at Princeton, where she was indoctrinated into an exclusive, elitist culture “built upon whiteness and in service of whiteness.” After graduation, Lee had a short, miserable stint in management consulting, before entering a doctoral program in English at Harvard. But she floundered there, too, feeling isolated and depressed. “I’d assumed that a community of people devoted to literature would be kinder and more humane” than the corporate world she’d escaped, Lee observes. “But as I soon found out, academia is no different from other systems of power.”

Things looked up only when a friend in the African American studies department introduced her to Jamaica Kincaid, who became a mentor. She offered Lee this crucial advice: Dare to critique those in authority who expect your subservience for access to privilege. “You must bite the hand that feeds you,” Kincaid said, and Lee took this to heart.

In the final section, “Grace,” Lee moves through a personal and professional reckoning in order to find her footing as a professor of African American and Caribbean literature, first at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later at Loyola Marymount University. “I had perfected a teaching persona that was based on my experiences in elite white spaces,” she writes. “But now I was exhausted.” Lee admits to “relearning” how to teach, and how to write, in ways that centered her students (and readers) of color. She became a mother, another reorientation of her identity.

Lee spent decades seeking approval from white teachers and wealthy classmates, contorting herself into a hardworking “model minority” figure at devastating cost to her self-esteem and mental health. It’s a melancholic story of second-generation assimilation that treads familiar narrative ground, perhaps, but Lee’s memoir ultimately enacts a powerful apostasy. Turning from a younger self that was restrictively “Neither/Nor” — Black/white, Korean/American, “model minority”/racial sellout — Lee rejects a compulsory allegiance to whiteness, and compels her readers to do the same. She eventually learns to see beyond herself, to distinguish an emergent Asian American identity that is an accretive “Both/And.”

Throughout the memoir, Lee cites works by Black and Latinx critical race theorists, diasporic literary scholars, Indigenous activists and writers of color, as well as the urgent inquiries raised by the undergraduates she now teaches. I love that a memoir about Asian American identity formation does not rely only on the authority of Asian American thinkers and critics. Lee reminds readers that the term “Asian American,” coined by the student activists Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka at Berkeley in the 1960s, was inspired and informed by the Black Power and Black Pride movements, and in solidarity with the Third World Liberation Front.

Near the end of the book, Lee introduces readers to the idea of “survivance,” a neologism developed by the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor that suggests the blending of “survival,” “endurance,” “resistance” and, for Lee, “vibrance.” It is a beautiful incantation for the ongoing project of Asian American identity, a matter of infinite becoming, ever in transformation.

Dear Commons Community,

Steve Bannon, longtime ally to Donald Trump and former White House aide, was ordered to report to prison by July 1 to begin serving a four-month sentence for his 2022 contempt of Congress conviction.

Judge Carl Nichols granted prosecutors’ motion to revoke Bannon’s bail after a three-judge appeals panel declined to overturn his conviction last month.

Bannon was convicted after defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Outside the D.C. courthouse following Nichols’ ruling, Bannon remained defiant.

“There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up,” he told reporters. “We’re gonna win this. We’re gonna win at the Supreme Court and we’re gonna win on Nov. 5.”

Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro is currently serving a four-month sentence after being convicted of the same crime as Bannon. In March, the Supreme Court rejected Navarro’s bid to remain free.

Despite losing his appeals, Bannon added that he’s “got great lawyers.”

Justice served!

Tony

Student demonstration protesting the closure of the U. of the Arts, in Philadelphia.  Monica Herndon, The Philadelphia Inquirer, AP.

Dear Commons Community,

Over the past week, faculty, staff, and students at the 150-year-old University of the Arts have been scrambling to make sense of the Philadelphia institution’s imminent closure.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

At the heart of the university’s troubles appears to be the same issues that have plagued numerous other small, private institutions: too few students and rising expenses. The bottom line, one campus-finance expert told The Chronicle, is that the university ran out of cash to pay its short-term expenses.

But University of the Arts leaders have done little to clarify why they took such an extreme measure with just seven days’ notice, announcing a closing date of June 7. A meeting planned for Monday afternoon to answer questions was canceled just minutes before it was scheduled to begin. Efforts to get more information from the board or campus leadership have been met with silence, several faculty members said, and the president, Kerry Walk, resigned on Tuesday without explanation.

Another fine institution of higher education bites the dust!

Tony

Ever Forward

Dear Commons Community,

Eighty years ago, on June 6th, 1944, Allied forces launched one of the largest military offensives in the history of the world.  It was the beginning of the end of World War II.  In 2019, my wife, Elaine and I visited Normandy, one week before the 75th Anniversary of the invasion.  You can find a video and photo remembrance of our visit here. The bronze statue above, Ever Forward, stands at the entrance of Omaha Beach and depicts an American GI pulling a fallen comrade to safety. Needless to say, it was a day Elaine and I will never forget. On the one hand, it was perhaps America’s greatest contribution to humanity by setting in motion the defeat of Nazi Germany.  On the other hand, the loss of life on both sides of the battle was tragic. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Patsy Moskal, Chuck Dziuban and I will be interviewed on Alfred Essa’s podcast today at 10:00 am (EDT). We will be discussing our recently published book, Data Analytics and Adaptive Learning:  Research Perspectives (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2024). We will focus on issues of equity, assessments and research among other topics. The podcast software is Riverside.fm and you will need a Chrome or Edge browser to access it.  The URL for this podcast is:

https://riverside.fm/studio/dmp-podcast?t=200162a526db4cfebb8a

Hope to see you later!

Tony

Molly Butler/Media Matters.

Dear Commons Community,

Depending on your perspective, the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts in a Manhattan courtroom was either a refreshing affirmation of the rule of law or a miscarriage of justice in a politically motivated prosecution. A jury returned a verdict finding that Trump had caused the falsification of checks, invoices, and ledgers to conceal the payment of $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election, with intent to conceal the violation of campaign finance and tax laws.

We are all entitled to our own views of the case, of course, but opinion should also be based on facts. Certain myths promulgated by the Far Right, Fox News and other media are creeping into the conversation and distorting the truth about Trump’s conviction. And it’s worth examining some of these myths in order to dispel them.  This analysis is courtesy of Time.

Myth: No one knows what Trump was charged with.

Response: Trump was charged in a 15-page indictment, handed up by a grand jury, with 34 counts of violating New York Penal Law 175-10 in the first degree, which is a felony. A violation in the first degree occurs when a person falsifies business records with an intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit, aid, or conceal another crime. In addition to the indictment, the Manhattan District Attorney filed a 13-page statement of facts detailing the allegations.

Myth: Prosecutors stretched the law to convert a misdemeanor into a felony.

Response: Under New York law, a simple falsification of business records without any intent to commit or conceal another crime is a violation of the statute in the second degree, punishable as a misdemeanor.

An intent to conceal another crime is an aggravating factor that brings enhanced penalties, such as a felony. This law containing degrees of severity was enacted by the New York legislature, and it is a common way of structuring laws with escalating penalties for more egregious violations. (For example, penalties for federal drug offenses range from misdemeanors for simple possession to lengthy terms of imprisonment for aggravating factors based on quantity or intent to distribute.) The grand jury found probable cause of 34 violations in the first degree, and the trial jury found proof of these crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.

Myth: The prosecution didn’t tell Trump what he was charged with until closing argument, a violation of due process.

Response: While the indictment specified each of the checks, invoices, and ledger entries alleged to have been falsified, it did not specify which crime Trump allegedly concealed. A defendant is entitled to fair notice of the crime with which he is charged so that he can effectively defend himself at trial, but New York law does not require this level of specificity in the charging document. New York case law requires that the indictment allege only a general intent to conceal a crime, not an intent to conceal a specific crime.

Nonetheless, prosecutors provided this specificity in a prosecution filing in November 2023, five months before his trial began. In that filing, prosecutors disclosed that the crimes they alleged Trump intended to conceal were violating state and federal campaign finance laws and violating state tax laws. The court rejected an additional basis offered by the prosecution, falsifying business records outside the Trump organization.

Myth: It was improper for a state prosecutor to charge a federal offense.

Response: The parties litigated this issue months before the trial and the court found that statutes outside of the laws of New York were proper bases to be considered “other crimes.” For example, case law has held that an offense under the New York statute prohibiting possession of a concealed weapon by a person who has been “previously convicted of any crime” may be proved by showing that the person was convicted of a crime in another state.

New York courts have also upheld the use of federal offenses as the predicate crimes in other cases involving the falsification of business records in the first degree, the very crime charged in Trump’s case.

Myth: Trump would not have been charged for a mere bookkeeping error if his name were anything other than Donald J. Trump.

Response: The Manhattan DA’s office has filed charges for falsification of business records 9,794 times since 2015. When announcing the charges, Bragg emphasized the importance of the integrity of business records in Manhattan, the “home to the country’s most significant business market.” He explained: “We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.” At the time of Trump’ s indictment, Bragg, had already filed 120 cases alleging violations of 175-10, all of them in the first degree based on the concealment or commission of another crime.

Myth: There is nothing illegal about paying hush money, and famous people do it all the time.

Response: Paying hush money itself is not a crime, but it is a crime to falsify business records. And it is a more serious crime to falsify business records with, as in this case, intent to conceal other crimes. These include violations of campaign finance laws, by accepting donations over the legal limit, and violations of tax laws, by inaccurately characterizing the payments as income.

Myth: The charges were filed after lengthy delay to interfere with Trump’s campaign for president.

Response: While prosecutors have discretion as to whether and when charges should be filed, there is no evidence that this case was brought to interfere with an election. In fact, the trial court found that the reason for the delay in bringing charges was partly Trump’s own doing.

In 2018, the case was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which convicted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the same conduct, and referred to Trump in the charging document as “Individual-1.” For reasons unknown, federal prosecutors during the Trump Administration did not bring charges against Trump. Once federal prosecutors closed their investigation, Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr., started this investigation, but was delayed by Trump’s prolonged challenges to grand jury subpoenas for his financial records, taking his objections all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Vance retired and Bragg was elected, Bragg insisted on reviewing the evidence before deciding whether to continue with the case. Ultimately, he decided to go forward. All of these factors contributed to the delay.

Myth: Justice Juan Merchan was biased because of his $35 financial contribution to Joe Biden and because of his daughter’s work as a democratic political consultant.

Response: Justice Merchan sought an opinion from the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, regarding both of these issues, and received an opinion that he need not recuse himself from the case. The finding of Trump’s guilt was made by a jury that Trump’s lawyers helped select.

Myth: Juan Merchan is a judge on the New York County Supreme Court.

Response: Merchan’s correct title is “justice,” even though he presides in one of New York’s trial courts, which are called the Supreme Court of each county. The state’s highest court is called, oddly enough, the New York Court of Appeals.

Myth: Justice Juan Merchan violated Trump’s rights to defend himself by refusing to permit him to call an expert witness.

Response: In Trump’s defense, he wanted to call Brad Smith, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, as an expert witness on federal election law. Expert witnesses are permitted to testify in trials to assist the jury in understanding facts about matters beyond ordinary understanding. Matters of law, in contrast, are for the judge to provide.

Justice Merchan did not prohibit Smith from testifying, but when he ruled that he could testify only about facts, and not law, Trump’s team decided not to call him as a witness. Contrary to this myth, Justice Merchan would have erred if he had permitted Trump to call an expert witness to testify about the law.

Myth: Justice Merchan violated Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech and to testify in his own defense by imposing a gag order in the case.

Response: The gag order entered by Justice Merchan and upheld by the five-judge appeals division did not prevent Trump from testifying in his own defense, a right Merchan expressly explained to Trump in open court during the trial. Trump had every right to do so, and chose to instead exercise his right to remain silent at trial.

The gag order restricted the defense from making statements outside of court that targeted witnesses, jurors, staff and family members of the court and prosecution team, though not Justice Merchan or Bragg himself. The court of appeals found that the order properly protected witnesses and the fair administration of justice.

Myth: The U.S. Supreme Court may intervene and overturn Trump’s conviction before the his sentencing on July 11, which is four days before the GOP convention.

Response: Trump may appeal his conviction after he is sentenced on July 11. The case could not go before the U.S. Supreme Court until he exhausts all of his appeals in the New York state court system, which likely will take more than a year. Then, Trump could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, but only for alleged errors applied to federal statutes or the U.S. Constitution, such as the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments.

Tony

The introduction of the internet has had consequences for a remote Brazilian tribe.  Photograph – The Telegraph.

Dear Commons Community,

The indigenous Marubo people, who for hundreds of years have existed in small huts along the Itui River in the Amazon, were connected to the Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network in September.

The community embraced the technology, marvelling at the life-saving ability to call for immediate help when grappling with venomous snake bites as well as being able to remain in contact with faraway relatives.  However, there have been some less desirable consequences.  As reported by The Telegraph and The New York Times.

Elders warn tribe members have become “lazy”, reclining in hammocks all day glued to their phones to gossip on WhatsApp or chat to strangers on Instagram.

And there have been reports of young men engaging in aggressive sexual behaviour after being exposed to pornography, Alfredo Marubo, leader of a Marubo association of villages, told The New York Times.

Young men brought up in a culture where kissing in public is seen as scandalous have been sharing explicit videos with one another in group chats, he said, adding: “We’re worried young people are going to want to try it.”

Alfredo also warned that members of the tribe have stopped speaking to their own families since they have gained access to the internet.

Tribe elder Tsainama Marubo, 73, said while everyone “was happy” when the internet arrived, “now things have got worse”.

“Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” she said, adding: “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”

Kâipa Marubo, a father of three, said he was concerned about his children playing first-person shooter video games, fearing they might want to mimic the attacks.

Another leader, Enoque Marubo, 40, said the tribe has started limiting the hours members could access the internet because its introduction had “changed the routine so much that it was detrimental”.

Members can browse the internet for two hours in the morning and five hours in the afternoon and all day on Sundays.

”In the village, if you don’t hunt, fish and plant, you don’t eat,” Enoque said.

Enoque worked with Brazilian activist Flora Dutra to bring the internet to the tribe.

They contacted American philanthropist Allyson Reneau, who reportedly donated 20 Starlink units to the Marubo tribe.

Musk’s Starlink owns around 60 per cent of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and has helped bring connectivity to some of the trickiest places in the world.

Its technology was first made available in Brazil in 2022, but only reached the more remote areas of the Amazon last year.

The region was the last frontier of the clash of civilizations that began in 1492, when Europeans first started arriving en masse in the Americas, conquering indigenous peoples with force and overwhelming them with technology such as metal swords.

Thanks to its dense vegetation and sheer size, the world’s largest rainforest remained cut off from that process until the rubber boom of the late 19th century.

But in recent decades, various commodities, above all oil, timber and land for ranching, have seen more and more isolated tribes enter into contact, some willingly, others reluctantly, with the outside world for the first time.

That has brought them the benefits of modernity, such as the internet and Western medicine.

But some have suffered from new diseases to which they have no immunity to, as well as alcoholism, racism, sexual exploitation, enslavement and massacres.

The result is that across the Amazon traditional cultures are now being consumed by Western materialism.

The process is visible in jungle towns across the basin, where indigenous people now routinely binge on Hollywood action films, Mexican telenovelas and Premier League football.

Such concerns were voiced by TamaSay Marubo, 42, the tribe’s first woman leader, who said she was worried the tribe’s traditions would be lost to young people who “just want to spend the whole afternoon on their phones”.

But one positive change for the Marubo people means the tribe can now call for immediate medical help, rather than rely on the rigmarole of sending radio signals between villages to reach the authorities.

Enoque said this has “already saved lives” and that “the internet will bring us much more benefit than harm. The leaders have been clear. We can’t live without the internet”.

Tony