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British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program - The New York Times - 0 views

  • British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program
  • Stirring a divisive internal debate over defense, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, suggested on Sunday that he might support the continued existence of the country’s Trident submarine fleet if it were sent on patrol without carrying nuclear
  • warheads.
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  • Mr. Corbyn, who was elected as the party’s leader last year, is trying to shift Labour leftward on a range of economic issues, such as opposition to inequality and government spending cuts,
  • As a lifelong opponent of nuclear weapons, Mr. Corbyn has opposed Labour’s support for the Trident submarine system
  • Prime Minister David Cameron would be unlikely to order the use of Trident missiles, and when asked about the point of keeping submarines on patrol, Mr. Corbyn replied, “They don’t have to have warheads on them.”
  • a channel of communication to Islamic State militants should be created, and cited the secret contacts between the British government
  • Trident is a highly sensitive issue for Labour.
  • For Mr. Corbyn’s internal opponents, the issue is totemic because, while out of power in the 1980s, Labour shifted away from a unilateralist position on nuclear disarmament as part of a change championed first by Neil Kinnock and later by Tony Blair.
  • Some military figures have also argued that, in an era of strained budgets, Britain could be better off spending its scarce resources on conventional capabilities.
  • “keeping the capability to launch nuclear weapons, and therefore the ability to cause catastrophic and unimaginable destruction, is not a suitable solution, and Trident should be scrapped altogether.”
  • protection of employment in the defense sector as a priority, suggesting that his position was designed at least partly to allay concerns among union leaders
  • and the Irish Republican Army during the decadeslong conflict in Northern Ireland
  • Mr. Corbyn also said there should be a “discussion” with Argentina about the future of the Falkland Islands, and on domestic issues, suggested a repeal of laws outlawing labor action by trade unions in sympathy with other workers
jayhandwerk

Senate Approves $36.5 Billion Aid Package as Hurricane Costs Mount - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the costs of this year’s hurricanes continue to rise, the Senate gave final approval on Tuesday to a $36.5 billion disaster relief package that includes a bailout of the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program.
  • In addition to providing hurricane and wildfire funding, it would help Puerto Rico’s government avoid running out of cash in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
  • The measure approved on Tuesday is intended in part to prop up the National Flood Insurance Program, which is facing an influx of claims from this year’s hurricanes
Javier E

The Making of the Fox News White House | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.”
  • The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”
  • Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.”
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  • Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”
  • Kristol contends that Shine’s White House appointment is a scandal. “It’s been wildly under-covered,” he said. “It’s astounding that Shine—the guy who covered up Ailes’s horrible behavior—is the deputy chief of staff!”
  • Jennifer Rubin, another conservative Never Trumper, used to appear on the network, but wouldn’t do so now. “Fox was begun as a good-faith effort to counter bias, but it’s morphed into something that is not even news,” she says. “It’s simply a mouthpiece for the President, repeating what the President says, no matter how false or contradictory.
  • Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 P.M. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”
  • Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.
  • Kushner now has an almost filial status with Murdoch, who turns eighty-eight this month, and numerous sources told me that they communicate frequently. “Like, every day,” one said.
  • Ailes told Murdoch, “Trump gets great ratings, but if you’re not careful he’s going to end up totally controlling Fox News.”
  • In private, Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator. But, for all their differences, the two men had key traits in common. They both inherited and expanded family enterprises—an Australian newspaper; an outer-borough New York City real-estate firm—but felt looked down upon by people who were richer and closer to the centers of power.
  • both men have tapped into anti-élitist resentment to connect with the public and to increase their fortunes. Trump and Murdoch also share a transactional approach to politics, devoid of almost any ideology besides self-interest.
  • In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton
  • Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.
  • he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”
  • “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”
  • In 1996, Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to create a conservative TV news outlet. Ailes, who died in 2017, was a master of attack politics and wedge issues, having been a media consultant on several of America’s dirtiest and most divisive campaigns, including those of Richard Nixon. Ailes invented programming, Levin argues, “that confirmed all your worst instincts—Fox News’ fundamental business model is driving fear.
  • As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’ ”
  • Until then, the network had largely mocked birtherism as a conspiracy theory. O’Reilly called its promoters “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who at the time also hosted a Fox show, called them “idiots.” But Trump gave birtherism national exposure, and, in a sign of things to come, Hannity fanned the flames. Hannity began saying that, although he thought that Obama had been born in the United States, the circumstances surrounding his birth certificate were “odd.”
  • In certain instances, however, Fox executives enforced journalistic limits.
  • Such niceties no longer apply. In November, Hannity joined Trump onstage at a climactic rally for the midterm elections. Afterward, Fox issued a limp statement saying that it didn’t “condone any talent participating in campaign events” and that the “unfortunate distraction” had “been addressed.”
  • For all of Ailes’s faults, Van Susteren argues, he exerted a modicum of restraint. She believes that he would have insisted on at least some distance from President Trump, if only to preserve the appearance of journalistic respectability embodied in the motto Ailes devised for Fox: “Fair and Balanced.
  • Fox News was hardly fair and balanced under his leadership. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” reports that Ailes was so obsessed with bringing down Obama in 2012 that he declared to colleagues, “I want to elect the next President.”
  • Don’t kid yourself about his support for immigration,” she said of Murdoch. “Rupert is first about the bottom line. They’re all going out to play to their crowd, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC.” (After leaving Fox, Van Susteren was for a short time a host on MSNBC.) Fox’s mile-by-mile coverage of the so-called “migrant caravan” was an enormous hit: ratings in October, 2018, exceeded those of October, 2016—the height of the Presidential campaign.
  • Ailes and Trump were friendly. “They spoke all the time,” a former Fox executive says. They had lunch shortly before Trump announced his candidacy, and Ailes gave Trump political tips during the primaries. Ken LaCorte contends that Ailes took note of “Trump’s crazy behavior”; but Trump’s growing political strength was also obvious. According to the former Fox executive, Trump made Ailes “nervous”: “He thought Trump was a wild card. Someone Ailes could not bully or intimidate.”
  • in 2016 that the network’s executives “made a business decision” to give on-air stars “slack” to choose their candidates. Hannity was an early Trump supporter; O’Reilly was neutral; Megyn Kelly remained skeptical
  • Kelly kept pressing Trump: “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect President?” But he’d already won over Republican viewers. (Fox received a flood of e-mails, almost all of them anti-Kelly.) The showdown helped shape Trump’s image as shamelessly unsinkable.
  • Fox, however, may have given Trump a little help. A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.
  • Ailes, meanwhile, joined Trump’s debate team, further erasing the line between Fox and conservative politicians. Ailes also began developing a plan to go into business with Trump. The Sunday before the election, Ailes called Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, and said that he’d been talking with Trump about launching Trump TV, a nationalist competitor to Fox. Ailes was so excited that he was willing to forfeit his severance payment from Fox, which was attached to a non-compete agreement. He asked Bannon to join the venture and to start planning it as soon as Trump lost the election.
  • Any hopes that Fox would clean house after Ailes’s departure vanished on August 12, 2016, when Fox named two Ailes loyalists as co-presidents: Jack Abernethy, an executive who managed Fox’s local stations, and Bill Shine. The opinion side of Fox News, which Shine had run, had won out, as had his friend Sean Hannity.
  • For years, Ailes had been the focus of liberal complaints, and so when Fox pushed him out many people thought that the channel would change. They were right. The problem, Fox’s critics say, is that it’s become a platform for Trump’s authoritarianism. “I know Roger Ailes was reviled,” Charlie Black, the lobbyist, said. “But he did produce debates of both sides. Now Fox is just Trump, Trump, Trump.” Murdoch may find this development untroubling: in 1995, he told this magazine, “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian societies can work.
  • News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
  • Murdoch “was gone a lot,” adding, “He’s old. He likes the idea that he’s running it, but the lunatics took over the asylum.”
  • Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
  • ” The celebrity opinion-show hosts who drive the ratings became unbridled and unopposed. Hannity, as the network’s highest-rated and highest-paid star, was especially empowered—and, with him, so was Trump.
  • Richie told me, “Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own ‘catch and kill’ on the story to protect him.” He said that he’d worked closely with Falzone on the article, and that “she did her homework—she had it.” He says he warned her that Fox would never run it, but “when they killed it she was devastated.” Richie believes that the story “would have swayed the election.
  • Shine became “an expert in collecting and enforcing soft power,” adding, “He was responsible for on-air contributors to programs, so ultimately you were auditioning for Bill Shine. He was the one who would give you the lucrative contract. He controlled the narrative that way.
  • some people at Fox called him Bill the Butler, because he was so subservient to Ailes. A former Fox co-host says, “He’s perfect for the White House job. He’s a yes-man.” Another Fox alumnus said, “His only talent was following orders, sucking up to power, and covering up for people.”
  • Ailes and a small group kept a close eye on internal talent. “We had a file on pretty much everyone,” the former Fox executive said, adding that Ailes talked about “putting hits” in the media on anyone who “got out of line.”
  • If a woman complained about being sexually harassed, he said, Shine or other supervisors intimidated her into silence, reduced her air time, or discontinued her contract. The former executive recalls, “Shine would talk to the woman with a velvet glove, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’—and, if that didn’t work, he’d warn her it would ruin her career.”
  • Judd Burstein, an attorney whose client was interviewed by prosecutors, told me, “I don’t think someone can be a serial sexual abuser in a large organization without enablers like Shine.”
  • Two months after Shine left Fox, Hannity became a matchmaker, arranging a dinner with the President at the White House, attended by himself, Shine, and Scaramucci, at that time Trump’s communications director. Hannity proposed Shine as a top communications official, or even as a deputy chief of staff. A year later, Shine was both.
  • Murdoch appears to have been wise in securing a rapprochement. Telecommunications is a highly regulated industry, and under Trump the government has consistently furthered Murdoch’s business interests, to the detriment of his rivals. Hundt, the former F.C.C. chairman, told me that “there have been three moves that have taken place in the regulatory and antitrust world” involving telecommunications “that are extremely unusual, and the only way to explain them is that they’re pro-Fox, pro-Fox, and pro-Fox.”
  • Last June, after only six months of deliberation, the Trump Administration approved Fox’s bid to sell most of its entertainment assets to Disney, for seventy-one billion dollars. The Murdoch family will receive more than two billion dollars in the deal, and will become a major stockholder in the combined company
  • In July, the F.C.C. blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative rival to Fox, from combining with the Tribune Media Company. The F.C.C. argued that the deal would violate limits on the number of TV stations one entity can own, upending Sinclair’s hope of becoming the next Fox.
  • The Justice Department, meanwhile, went to court in an effort to stop A. T. & T.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns CNN
  • “There may be innocent explanations.” But, he adds, “Trump famously said you’re going to get sick and tired of winning, and that may not be true for the rest of America, but it sure is true of Murdoch.” He says of Murdoch, “He’s an incredibly cunning political player. He leaves no fingerprints. He’s been in the game of influencing government behavior to his benefit longer than most of us have been alive.”
  • Ann Coulter, who has been feuding with Trump over his immigration policy, said that the President told her that “Murdoch calls me every day.” She recalled that, “back when Trump was still speaking to me,” she complained to him that Fox was no longer inviting her to appear. She said that Trump told her, “Do you want me to call Murdoch and tell him to put you on?” Coulter accepted Trump’s offer. He may have called Hannity, not Murdoch, she says, but in any case she was invited back on Fox “within twelve hours.”
  • “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” The network has provided a non-stop counternarrative in which the only collusion is between Hillary Clinton and Russia; Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state”; Trump and his associates aren’t corrupt, but America’s law-enforcement officials and courts are; illegal immigration isn’t at a fifteen-year low, it’s “an invasion”; and news organizations that offer different perspectives are “enemies of the American people.”
  • Benkler’s assessment is based on an analysis of millions of American news stories that he and two co-authors, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, undertook for their 2018 book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” Benkler told me that he and his co-authors had expected to find “symmetric polarization” in the left-leaning and the right-leaning media outlets. Instead, they discovered that the two poles of America’s media ecosystem function very differently. “It’s not the right versus the left,” Benkler says. “It’s the right versus the rest.”
  • Most American news outlets try to adhere to facts. When something proves erroneous, they run corrections, or, as Benkler and his co-authors write, “they check each other.” Far-left Web sites post as many bogus stories as far-right ones do, but mainstream and liberal news organizations tend to ignore suspiciously extreme material.
  • Conservative media outlets, however, focus more intently on confirming their audience’s biases, and are much more susceptible to disinformation, propaganda, and outright falsehoods (as judged by neutral fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact). Case studies conducted by the authors show that lies and distortions on the right spread easily from extremist Web sites to mass-media outlets such as Fox, and only occasionally get corrected
  • Sometimes such pushback has a salutary effect. Recently, Chris Wallace told Sarah Sanders that her claim that “nearly four thousand known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally” every year was wildly inaccurate. Showing Fox’s clout, the White House has dropped the talking point.
  • Unlike Glenn Beck, Hannity has been allowed to spew baseless conspiracy theories with impunity. For more than a year, Hannity and other hosts spread the lie that the hacking of Democratic Party e-mails during the 2016 campaign was an inside job. Hannity claimed that the hacking had been committed not by Russian cyber-warfare agents, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded, but by a Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered by unknown assailants on a D.C. street. Benkler and his co-authors studied Fox’s coverage, and found that not only did the channel give the Seth Rich lie a national platform; it also used the conspiracy story as a distraction, deploying it as a competing narrative when developments in Mueller’s investigation showed Trump in a bad light. In 2017, after Rich’s parents demanded an apology and advertisers began shunning the network, Fox finally ran a retraction, and Hannity dropped the story.
  • By then, Fox hosts had begun pushing a different conspiracy: the “Uranium One” story, which Hannity called “the biggest scandal ever involving Russia.” On an October, 2017, broadcast, Hannity claimed that Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, had given “to Vladimir Putin and Russia twenty per cent of America’s uranium, which is the foundational material to make nuclear weapons.” Ostensibly, the deal was in exchange for giant payments to the Clinton Foundation. Hannity also claimed that “the corrupt, lying mainstream media” was withholding this “bombshell” from Americans, because it was “complicit” in a “huge coverup.”
  • other reporting had poked holes in it, revealing that multiple government agencies had approved the deal, and that the quantity of uranium was insignificant. Yet Fox kept flogging it as the real national-security scandal involving Russia.
  • Alisyn Camerota was a co-host on “Fox & Friends” for years before joining CNN, in 2014
  •  ‘Fox & Friends’ was a fun show, but it was not a news show,” she says. “It regularly broke the rules of journalism. It was basically Roger’s id on TV. He’d wake up in the morning with some bee in his bonnet, spout it off to Bill Shine, and Shine would tell us to put it on TV.” She says that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the standards.”
  • Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism.
  • Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.
  • a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
  • Judging from the timing of Trump’s tweets, Gertz believes that the President records “Fox & Friends” and views it from the beginning, often with a slight delay. As Trump watches, he frequently posts about points that he agrees with. Since August, 2018, Media Matters has tallied more than two hundred instances of Trump disseminating Fox News items to his fifty-eight million Twitter followers. “Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox,” Levin says, giving invaluable promotional help to the channel.
  • Fox hosts sometimes reverse their opinions in order to toe the Trump line: Hannity, who in the Obama era called negotiations with North Korea “disturbing,” now calls such efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” But Gertz has come to believe that Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fo
  • White House aides confirm that Trump has repeatedly walked away from compromises at the last moment because Fox hosts and guests opposed the deals.
  • According to a Senate staffer, one high-profile Republican senator claims that his preferred way of getting the President’s ear is by going on Fox. He calls a friendly host and offers to appear on the air; usually, before he’s taken his makeup off in the greenroom Trump is calling him
  • Fox hosts played a key part in driving Trump’s recent shutdown of the government and his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border. Hannity and Dobbs urged Trump nightly on their shows to make these moves; according to press reports, they also advised Trump personally to do so.
  • For the next thirty-five days, Hannity and the other Fox hosts kept cheering Trump on, even as polls showed that the American public was increasingly opposed to the shutdown. Oliver Darcy, of CNN, says that Democrats, rather than negotiating with Trump, “might as well call Sean Hannity and get him on the phone,” adding, “It seems we sort of elected Sean Hannity when we elected Trump.”
  • “The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.
  • Trump and Fox are employing the same risky model: inflaming the base and intensifying its support, rather than building a broader coalition. Narrowcasting may generate billions of dollars for a cable channel, but as a governing strategy it inevitably alienates the majority. The problem for Trump, as one former Fox host puts it, is that “he can’t afford to lose Fox, because it’s all he’s got.”
  • Similarly, Fox has a financial incentive to make Trump look good. Cable ratings at both Fox and MSNBC dip when the news is bad for their audience’s side. Van Susteren likens the phenomenon to audiences turning away when their sports team is losing
  • A source close to Trump says that the President has been complaining that Shine hasn’t been aggressive enough. Late last year, Trump told the source, “Shine promised me my press coverage would get better, but it’s gotten worse.” The source says, “Trump thought he was getting Roger Ailes but instead he got Roger Ailes’s gofer.”
  • Shine has practically ended White House press briefings. Trump prefers to be his own spokesman. “He always thought he did it the best,” a former senior White House official says. “But the problem is that you lose deniability. It’s become a trapeze act with no net, 24/7. The shutdown messaging was a crisis. There was no exit strategy.”
  • “It was always clear that this wasn’t just another news organization,” Rosenberg told me. “But when Ailes departed, and Trump was elected, the network changed. They became more combative, and started treating me like an enemy, not an opponent.” With Shine joining Trump at the White House, he said, “it’s as if the on-air talent at Fox now have two masters—the White House and the audience.” In his view, the network has grown so allied with the White House in the demonization of Trump’s critics that “Fox is no longer conservative—it’s anti-democratic.”
  • For two years, the network has been priming its viewers to respond with extraordinary anger should the country’s law-enforcement authorities close in on the President. According to Media Matters, in the first year after Mueller was appointed Hannity alone aired four hundred and eighty-six segments attacking the federal criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; thirty-eight per cent of those segments claimed that law-enforcement officials had broken the law.
  • Hannity has spoken of “a coup,” and a guest on Laura Ingraham’s program, the lawyer Joseph diGenova, declared, “It’s going to be total war. And, as I say to my friends, I do two things—I vote and I buy guns.”
  • “In a hypothetical world without Fox News, if President Trump were to be hit hard by the Mueller report, it would be the end of him. But, with Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other President in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation.”
malonema1

LinkedIn's Solution to Job Vacancies Around the Globe - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • n the 1980s, a typical laid-off auto-worker would participate in a months-long job-training program. It would take lots of convincing—reentering the classroom after years on the factory floor can be both daunting and uninspiring—but she’d eventually give in, perhaps taking classes at her local community college where she’d learn, say, the clerical skills necessary to land an administrative job in real estate or insurance. Toward the end of the program, she’d get to brush up on her resume-writing and in-person interviewing skills, too. But when it was time to
  • Federal job-training programs of the future may have more success than did their counterparts of the past, though, thanks in part to new initiatives such as LinkedIn’s Economic Graph, which is available to a select group of researchers and contains data on job-seekers, employers, educators, and skills. In its December monthly Workforce Report, LinkedIn was able to determine which areas of the country have “skills gaps”—scenarios in which employers don’t have enough candidates with relevant skills or, conversely, are contending with a candidate pool that’s oversaturated with qualified applicants. The report also shows which industries are hiring, where they are hiring, and who gets those jobs, among countless other datasets.
oliviaodon

How the U.S. and China Differ on North Korea - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Last week, President Trump named North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism, tagging the communist country with the label almost a decade after the Bush administration removed it.
  • For Washington, the road to a diplomatic solution with North Korea goes through Beijing. But despite public statements to the contrary, the United States and China are quite divided on some key questions, including why North Korea pursues nuclear weapons in the first place, and on the reasons why previous agreements to halt its illicit activities failed. Unless they can bridge these gaps, any lasting resolution of the North Korean crisis is unlikely.
  • The Trump administration has said that its goal is to isolate North Korea, in the hope that pressure through sanctions will compel it to renounce its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and seek dialogue with the United States.
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  • North Korea has a long history of provocation in the face of what it regards as threats from the United States and South Korea. It has warned of a “merciless strike” in retaliation against their joint military exercises, and said it would accelerate its nuclear-weapons program in response to the deployment in South Korea of the Terminal High Altitude Thermal Defense System, a U.S. anti-missile defense network.
  • The U.S. position can be better understood through the lens of a pair of earlier failed agreements with North Korea—failures caused, in Washington’s view, by Pyongyang
  • The view from Washington is quite different. Government officials and experts alike believe North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has aggressive and offensive objectives
  • Chinese experts believe North Korea’s leaders pursue nuclear weapons because they feel genuinely threatened by the United States and South Korea.
  • Unless China adopts America’s approach, at least in part (or vice versa), the crisis is unlikely to diminish. “Even though at the surface level they appear cooperative, deep down their approaches of dealing with North Korea are fundamentally different,” Zhao said. Ultimately, Zhao said, the nature of the disagreements between Washington and Beijing ensures that the crisis of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs will remain unresolved for some time to come.
oliviaodon

Letting It Be an Arms Race - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • As Americans question whether President Donald Trump has the judgment necessary to command the most capable nuclear arsenal on earth, the Pentagon is moving to order new, more usable nuclear options.
  • aggressive shift that will add to the spiraling cost of the nuclear arsenal, raise the risk of a nuclear exchange, and plunge the country into a new arms race
  • The compromise reflected principles of responsible nuclear policy in place since the late Cold War
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  • Trump’s administration has suggested that it sees nuclear weapons as useful against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” on U.S. infrastructure, perhaps including cyber or terrorist attacks.
  • It proposes two new nuclear-capable systems.
  • Neither weapon is needed to deter potential adversaries, and would instead raise the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon—whether because an adversary thinks it is being attacked or whether a U.S. president thinks he has to order an attack. As it stands, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the institutions that would handle the warhead changes, will struggle to find the funding or the manpower to meet existing modernization requirements. New programs would only compound this uncertainty and endanger core nuclear-modernization priorities. Moreover, developing new warheads creates an unpalatable choice: They will either be deployed without a test or with a test. Both options are bad. Lastly, the draft NPR asserts that its program proposals are affordable, but avoids making fiscal trade-offs between different military priorities. Yet Congress will have to ask whether new nuclear weapons programs are really worth the money, given that there is still no plan to pay the $1.2-trillion bill for nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.
  • Even as the Trump administration is proposing expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities, it is subverting traditional mechanisms for controlling them.
  • Today, an astonishing 58 percent of Americans lack confidence in the president’s judgment with the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to believe that Congress or the American public will quietly acquiesce to a major expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities and missions. Yet, without concerted pressure, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review will abandon U.S. leadership to reduce nuclear risks and instead follow our adversaries into a world where nuclear competition is commonplace.
Javier E

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
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  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
Javier E

Austerity Has Ravaged U.K. Communities. It Has Also Spurred Reinvention. - The New York... - 0 views

  • Given statutory imperatives to maintain programs like care for older people and children, local councils have made sharper cuts where they have discretion. Spending has dropped by more than 60 percent on youth centers, by more than half on housing programs and by more than 40 percent on highways, transportation and cultural programs.
  • Some councils are running perilously close to exhausting their reserves, and a few have veered toward bankruptcy. Evidence of change is palpable and pervasive: Older people wait for volunteer-driven buses that have replaced discontinued public routes; patients sit for hours in hospitals before they can see an overwhelmed doctor; school administrators struggle to furnish basic items like winter coats and tampons to students.
  • Most of Britain now finds itself at an uncomfortable crossroads: Either taxes go up, or local services will almost certainly continue to decline.
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  • Here is an irony of austerity’s consequences. Championed as a spur to rugged individualism, it has prompted communities like Preston to intensify government’s role in economic life
  • Yet, in other communities contending with shortfalls, austerity has reinforced support for capitalism. Local leaders have adopted the mien of real estate magnates, using borrowed money.
  • Over the past two years, councils in England have raised purchases of land and buildings from 2.8 billion pounds annually (about $3.5 billion) to £4 billion (about $5 billion), according to government data. At the same time, total borrowing by English councils has risen to £10 billion, around $10.3 billion, from £4.4 billion.
Javier E

Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show - The New York Times - 0 views

  • New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.
  • The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
  • It would not be until late February that Italy would begin locking down towns and cities, and March 11 when Mr. Trump said he would block travelers from most European countries. But New Yorkers had already been traveling home with the virus.
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  • While conspiracy theories might falsely claim the virus was concocted in a lab, the virus’s genome makes clear that it arose in bats.
  • Sophisticated computer programs can then figure out how all of those mutations arose as viruses descended from a common ancestor. If they get enough data, they can make rough estimates about how long ago those ancestors lived. That’s because mutations arise at a roughly regular pace, like a molecular clock.
  • Tracking viral mutations demands sequencing all the genetic material in a virus — its genome. Once researchers have gathered the genomes from a number of virus samples, they can compare their mutations.
  • already, the genomes of the virus are revealing previously hidden outlines of its history over the past few months.
  • The most closely related coronavirus is in a Chinese horseshoe bat, the researchers found. But the new virus has gained some unique mutations since splitting off from that bat virus decades ago.
  • Dr. Boni said that ancestral virus probably gave rise to a number of strains that infected horseshoe bats, and perhaps sometimes other animals.
  • It’s entirely possible, Dr. Boni said, in the past 10 or 20 years, a hybrid virus arose in some horseshoe bat that was well-suited to infect humans, too. Later, that virus somehow managed to cross the species barrier.
  • In January, a team of Chinese and Australian researchers published the first genome of the new virus. Since then, researchers around the world have sequenced over 3,000 more. Some are genetically identical to each other, while others carry distinctive mutations.
  • Dr. Boni and his colleagues found that the genome of the new virus contains a number of mutations in common with strains of coronaviruses that infect bats.
  • The deepest branches of the tree all belong to lineages from China. The Nextstrain team has also used the mutation rate to determine that the virus probably first moved into humans from an animal host in late 2019.
  • In January, as the scope of the catastrophe in China became clear, a few countries started an aggressive testing program. They were able to track the arrival of the virus on their territory and track its spread through their populations.
  • But the United States fumbled in making its first diagnostic kits and initially limited testing only to people who had come from China and displayed symptoms of Covid-19.“It was a disaster that we didn’t do testing,”
  • As new cases arose in other parts of the country, other researchers set up their own pipelines. The first positive test result in New York came on March 1, and after a couple of weeks, patients surged into the city’s hospitals.
  • Dr. Heguy and her colleagues found some New York viruses that shared unique mutations not found elsewhere. “That’s when you know you’ve had a silent transmission for a while,”
  • And researchers at Mount Sinai started sequencing the genomes of patients coming through their hospital. They found that the earliest cases identified in New York were not linked to later ones.“Two weeks later, we start seeing viruses related to each other,”
  • Dr. Gonzalez-Reiche and her colleagues found that these viruses were practically identical to viruses found around Europe.
  • hey write that the viruses reveal “a period of untracked global transmission between late January to mid-February.”
  • Dr. van Bakel and his colleagues found one New York virus that was identical to one of the Washington viruses found by Dr. Bedford and his colleagues. In a separate study, researchers at Yale found another Washington-related virus. Combined, the two studies hint that the coronavirus has been moving from coast to coast for several weeks.
  • While the coronavirus mutations are useful for telling lineages apart, they don’t have any apparent effect on how the virus works.
  • Some viruses evolve so quickly that they require vaccines that can produce several different antibodies. That’s not the case for Covid-19. Like other coronaviruses, it has a relatively slow mutation rate compared to some viruses, like influenza.
Javier E

How the Coronavirus Will Change Young People's Lives - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Generation C includes more than just babies. Kids, college students, and those in their first post-graduation jobs are also uniquely vulnerable to short-term catastrophe. Recent history tells us that the people in this group could see their careers derailed, finances shattered, and social lives upended.
  • With many local businesses closed or viewed as potential vectors of disease, pandemic conditions have already funneled more money to Amazon and its large-scale competitors, including Walmart and Costco.
  • “Epidemics are really bad for economies,”
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  • “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.”
  • People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net. Fewer of them will be able to turn to their parents or other family members for significant help
  • To gauge what’s in store for job-seekers, it might be most useful to look to a different, more recent kind of disaster: the 2008 financial collapse. More than a decade later, its effects are widely understood to have been catastrophic to the financial futures of those who were in their teens and 20s when it hit.
  • Not only did jobs dry up, but federal relief dollars mostly went to large employers such as banks and insurance companies instead of to workers themselves.
  • investors picked off dirt-cheap foreclosures to flip them for wealthier buyers or turn them into rentals, which has helped rising housing prices far outpace American wage growth.
  • Millennials, many of whom spent years twisting in the wind when, under better circumstances, they would have been setting down the professional and social foundations for stable lives, now have less money in savings than previous generations did at the same age. Relatively few of them have bought homes, married, or had children.
  • Just as the nation’s housing stock moved into the hands of fewer people during the Great Recession, small and medium-size businesses might suffer a similar fate after the pandemic, which could be a nightmare for the country’s labor force.
  • Schoolwork, it turns out, is hard to focus on during a slow-rolling global disaster.
  • American restaurants, which employ millions, have been devastated by quarantine restrictions, but national chains such as Papa John’s and Little Caesars are running television ads touting the virus-murdering temperatures of their commercial ovens,
  • The private-equity behemoth Bain Capital is making plans to gobble up desirable companies weakened by the pandemic. The effect could be a quick consolidation of capital, and the fewer companies that control the economy, the worse the economy generally is for workers and consumers.
  • Less competition means lower wages, higher prices, and conglomerates with enough political influence to stave off regulation that might force them to improve wages, worker safety, or job security.
  • as with virtually all problems, grad school is not the answer to whatever the coronavirus might do to your future.
  • there will be “definitely an increase” in people seeking education post-quarantine, taking advantage of loan availability to acquire expertise that might better position them to build a stable life.
  • those decisions have since worsened their economic strain, while not significantly improving professional outcomes.
  • Private universities may suddenly be too expensive, and frequent plane rides to faraway colleges might seem much riskier. Mass delays will affect things like school budgets and admissions for years, but in ways that are difficult to predict.
  • there is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.
  • What will become of Generation C?
  • Many types of classes don’t work particularly well via videochat, such as chemistry and ecology, which in normal times often ask students to participate in lab work or go out into the natural world.
  • “People with a resource base and finances and so forth, they’re going to get through this a whole lot easier than the families who don’t even have a computer for their children to attend school,”
  • Disasters, he told me, tend to illuminate and magnify existing disadvantages that are more easily ignored by those outside the affected communities during the course of everyday life.
  • Disasters also make clear when disadvantages—polluted neighborhoods, scarce local supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, risky jobs—have accumulated over a lifetime, leaving some people far more vulnerable to catastrophe than others
  • Children in those communities already have a harder time accessing quality education and getting into college. Their future prospects look dimmer, now that they’re faced with technical and social obstacles and the trauma of watching family members and friends suffer and die during a pandemic.
  • in moments of great despair, people’s understanding of what’s possible shifts.
  • For that to translate to real change, though, it’s crucial that the reactions to the new world we live in be codified into policy. Clues to post-pandemic policy shifts lie in the kinds of political agitation that were already happening before the virus. “Things that already had some support are more likely to take seed,
  • This is where young people might finally be poised to take some control. The 2008 financial crisis appears to have pushed many Millennials leftward
  • When housing prices soared, wages stagnated, and access to basic health care became more scarce, many young people looked around at the richest nation in the world and wondered who was enjoying all the riches. Policies such as Medicare for All, debt cancellation, environmental protections, wealth taxes, criminal-justice reform, jobs programs, and other broad expansions of the social safety net have become rallying cries for young people who experience American life as a rigged game
  • the pandemic’s quick, brutal explication of the ways employment-based health care and loose labor laws have long hurt working people might make for a formative disaster all its own.
  • “There’s a possibility, particularly with who you’re calling Generation C, that their experience of the pandemic against a backdrop of profoundly fragmented politics could lead to some very necessary revolutionary change,”
  • The seeds of that change might have already been planted in the 2018 midterm elections, when young voters turned up in particularly high numbers and helped elect a group of younger, more progressive candidates both locally and nationally.
  • Younger people “aren’t saddled with Cold War imagery and rhetoric. It doesn’t have the same power over our imaginations,”
  • a subset of young voters believes that some American conservatives have cried wolf, deriding everything from public libraries to free doctor visits as creeping socialism until the word lost much of its power to scare.
  • the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the coronavirus pandemic—if handled poorly by those in power—might be enough to create a future America with free health care, a reformed justice system, and better labor protections for working people.
  • But winds of change rarely kick up debris of just one type. The Great Recession opened the minds of wide swaths of young Americans to left-leaning social programs, but its effects are also at least partially responsible for the Tea Party and the Trump presidency. The chaos of a pandemic opens the door for a stronger social safety net, but also for expanded authoritarianism.
  • Beyond politics and policy, the structures that young people have built on their own to endure the pandemic might change life after it, too. Young Americans have responded to the disaster with a wave of volunteerism, including Arora’s internship-information clearinghouse and mutual-aid groups across the country that deliver groceries to those in need.
  • As strong as people’s reactions are in the middle of a crisis, though, people tend to leave behind the traumatic lessons of a disaster as quickly as they can. “Amnesia sets in until the next crisis,” Schoch-Spana said. “Maybe this is different; maybe it’s big enough and disruptive enough that it changes what we imagine it takes to be safe in the world, so I don’t know
millerco

A Potent Fuel Flows to North Korea. It May Be Too Late to Halt It. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A Potent Fuel Flows to North Korea
  • When North Korea launched long-range missiles this summer, and again on Friday, demonstrating its ability to strike Guam and perhaps the United States mainland, it powered the weapons with a rare, potent rocket fuel that American intelligence agencies believe initially came from China and Russia.
  • The United States government is scrambling to determine whether those two countries are still providing the ingredients for the highly volatile fuel and, if so, whether North Korea’s supply can be interrupted, either through sanctions or sabotage.
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  • there is a growing belief that the United States should focus on the fuel, either to halt it, if possible, or to take advantage of its volatile properties to slow the North’s program
  • Intelligence officials believe that the North’s program has advanced to the point where it is no longer as reliant on outside suppliers, and that it may itself be making the deadly fuel
  • Despite a long record of intelligence warnings that the North was acquiring both forceful missile engines and the fuel to power them, there is no evidence that Washington has ever moved with urgency to cut off Pyongyang’s access to the rare propellant
  • “based on North Korea’s demonstrated science and technological capabilities — coupled with the priority Pyongyang places on missile programs — North Korea probably is capable of producing UDMH domestically.” UDMH is short for unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine
  • Some experts are skeptical that the North has succeeded in domestic production, given the great difficulty of making and using the highly poisonous fuel, which in far more technically advanced nations has led to giant explosions of missiles and factories.
  • the Trump administration has been far more focused on ordinary fuels — the oil and gas used to heat homes and power vehicles. The United States has pushed to cut off those supplies to the North, but it settled last week for modest cutbacks under a United Nations resolution.
  • “If North Korea does not have UDMH, it cannot threaten the United States, it’s as simple as that,” said Senator Edward J.
Javier E

Trump: White Nationalist or in his Second Childhood - A Response - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • the shift of the Republican base to the right that now makes the move to the center terribly risky.
  • Another way to say it is that Republicans moving to the center now means becoming something close to right wing social democrats. It would mean, for example, saying that okay we are going to fix Obamacare by reworking the exchanges and actually doing something about prescription drug prices. And we will revive U.S. manufacturing by building on Obama’s advanced manufacturing institutes. We will fight opioid addiction with a dramatic increase in drug treatment spending. Moreover funding these programs means that we actually have to raise some taxes so we are going to introduce a VAT. In short, they pretty much have to go all the way to being Eisenhower Republicans.
  • Now, of course, that is what we want to happen because if the competition is to see which party is better at devising government programs that will help solve social and economic programs, it would make it possible for the Dems to move left. But I think that conservative parties only make this kind of Christian Democratic turn when the threat from the electoral left is already very strong—and we haven’t reached that point
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  • So this gets us to Trump. The nature of the Republican coalition keeps him from moving to the center.
  • essentially, I think, because Ryan and McConnell said that they were against anything that involved a significant budgetary commitment. So all they can do is some smoke and mirrors type of privatizing effort. So basically Trump has nothing to offer the base of white, high school educated voters. He cannot protect their health care or their retirement and he cannot get them jobs.
  • So what is left? Racism and hostility to immigrants.
  • I think the link to personality is through bullying. Here, I think Josh Marshall is right about the dominance politics—he operates by demeaning others with name calling and threats.
  • The resort to racist rhetoric is just another type of bullying that comes completely naturally to him and it is basically impersonal.
  • So this is his elective affinity with the Klan and the Neo-Nazis. If he condemns them unequivocally, he is embracing the political correctness that says that you are not allowed to demean entire groups based on prejudicial stereotypes. But then he wouldn’t be able to say that Mexicans are rapists and Muslims are terrorists.
  • In short, even with Bannon gone, he does not really have a choice but to double down on racism—it is all he has got.
g-dragon

China: We will be on Mars by the end of 2020 - CNN - 0 views

  • China is aiming to own the race for space in the next decade
  • China's ambitious and fast-growing space program is targeting a landing on the dark side of the moon by 2018, and reaching Mars before the end of the decade
  • He said other plans include sending probes to Jupiter and its moons
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  • Our overall goal is that, by around 2030, China will be among the major space powers of the world
  • China was late to the space race
  • But in the decades since, China has pumped billions of dollars and other resources into research and training
  • China has staged a spacewalk, landed a rover on the moon and launched a space lab that it hopes paves the way for a 20-ton space station
  • It has also sent five crews into space in the same span of time, making it only the third country in the world -- after Russia and the United States -- with such success.
  • China is still studying the possibility of sending a man to the moon, but focusing on robotic lunar missions for now, including making the first soft landing on the far side of the moon around 2018
  • He also emphasized China's increasing cooperation with other international space agencies -- with NASA being the exception
  • the U.S. Congress has prohibited NASA from working with China because of national security concerns
  • NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies," wrote Robert Walker and Peter Navarro
  • While the American government's space program has suffered from under-investment, both China and Russia continue to move briskly forward with military-focused initiatives," they added. "Each continues to develop weapons explicitly designed... to 'deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt, or destroy' America's eyes and ears in space
  • Chinese officials on Tuesday reiterated the country's "peaceful motives" behind its space exploration and utilization, but many have pointed to Walker and Navarro's article as a sign that potential U.S.-China collaboration in space would be unlikely
honordearlove

Want to Make a Deal, Mr. Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Was President Trump’s bipartisan hurricane relief/debt ceiling/government funding deal last week simply a “bipartisan moment,” as the House speaker, Paul Ryan, put it? Probably, given this president’s pattern of poor impulse control and of reverting to base politics. But it’s tempting nevertheless to imagine what Mr. Trump might achieve if he could see beyond momentary, tactical wins.
  • leeful at media coverage of his shockingly bipartisan move, Mr. Trump called Mr. Schumer last week to talk about keeping up the good work. So how could these unlikely allies actually make headway?
  • this is a ripe moment for Congress and Mr. Trump to get behind an overhaul of an outmoded program that does nothing to discourage people from building, and rebuilding, in areas prone to catastrophic flooding.
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  • The DACA program will now expire in six months, plunging these immigrants into limbo, and so far, Congress has done nothing but talk about helping them. Democrats see some hope in Mr. Trump’s seeming lack of commitment to his own draconian edict — last week, “Nancy” persuaded him to tweet reassurance to those affected. It’s a slim reed, but they hope he will pressure Republicans to act on the Dream Act, a 16-year-old proposal to resolve these immigrants’ legal status permanently.
  • Mr. Trump and his new Democratic friends could work on more. They could raise spending caps set to kick in next month by matching increases in military spending that Republicans want with increases in domestic spending that Democrats favor. They could back a proposal to automatically increase the debt ceiling, ending perennial partisan battles over what used to be a routine vote essentially recognizing the debts Congress has already incurred
krystalxu

Education Programs That Pay People As They Learn - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Just before President Trump took office, Ammar Campa-Najjar wrote him a memo urging him to support apprenticeship
  • “You should just put your name on it, like everything else, and take credit for it.”
  • Congress, however, has taken action on the model, recently increasing federal funding for apprenticeships from $90 million to $95 million per year.
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  • 87 percent of participants finish their programs having already secured a job.
  • a simple fix to the country’s $1.3 trillion student-debt crisis
Javier E

The Geography of Trumpism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
  • What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
  • “It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
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  • I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.
  • Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.
  • the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
  • have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.
  • I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.
  • Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.
  • in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
  • Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.
  • Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.
  • there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.
  • Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.
  • among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.
  • The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.
  • Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.
  • As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.
  • Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.
  • Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.
  • This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.
  • The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.
  • Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history
  • Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."
  • It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.
  • Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.
  • The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.
  • If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.
  • You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.
  • There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.
  • However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.
  • It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future
  • So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.
  • this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
  • There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker
  • The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.
  • These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.
  • I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture
  • I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that
  • racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.
  • One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.
  • The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.
  • Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.
  • We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.
lmunch

The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief - 0 views

  • As a result, Pennsylvania tenants in dire need of assistance, some of whom had been living day to day in fear of losing their homes, missed out on roughly $96 million of $150 million in federal coronavirus relief.
  • unemployment spiked to 16.1 percent in April.
  • In May, the state legislature approved a spending package that included $150 million for rent relief from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, as well as $25 million to help homeowners who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments
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  • They put a $750 monthly cap on the assistance each family could receive. In parts of Pennsylvania, that’s less than the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment. Assistance through the mortgage program was capped at $1,000 a month.
  • In addition, landlords who accepted the assistance payments had to agree to treat $750 as full payment of rent, regardless of the actual amount owed. Many balked. And tenants couldn’t receive the aid unless their landlords agreed to take part.
  • Some weren’t eligible because they weren’t yet behind on rent, or had landlords who wouldn’t participate. Others couldn’t produce the right paperwork. Many applications arrived incomplete, requiring hours of follow-up by local agencies.
  • To qualify, tenants couldn’t earn more than the median income in their county. They also needed to have filed for unemployment since March 1, 2020, or have lost at least 30% of their income. Both presented difficulties. To prove a loss of income, applicants needed paperwork to show their current income, as well as their income from before the pandemic — pay stubs from January or February, for instance.
  • A reform bill introduced by Democrats had been referred to the committee. But, despite pleas from officials and advocates for both landlords and tenants, Senate Republicans did not act on it.
  • A bill that would have made more sweeping changes to the program — replacing the $750 cap with a more flexible standard and allowing applicants who couldn’t document their loss of income to sign a certification form, instead — passed the state House unanimously later in October. But Republican leaders in the Senate did not bring it up for a vote, saying Wolf’s changes were enough
  • And this time, if Pennsylvania cannot spend the new funding quickly enough, the state could lose some of it to other states. Federal law says that, starting Sep. 30, the U.S. Treasury can redistribute unused money to state and local governments that have already spent at least 65% of their allocation.
  • While federal law allows state and local governments to spend up to 10% of their allocation on the cost of running their programs, Pennsylvania limits those expenses to 5%. That number was a compromise after Senate Republicans initially proposed a 2% cap that local officials said would be untenable.
  • Bryce Maretzki was in charge of a $150 million effort to keep Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable tenants in their homes.
saberal

China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together - The New York Times - 0 views

  • China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on or around the moon, setting the stage for a new space race.
  • The joint announcement by China and Russia on Tuesday has the potential to scramble the geopolitics of space exploration, once again setting up competing programs and goals for the scientific and, potentially, commercial exploitation of the moon. This time, though, the main players will be the United States and China, with Russia as a supporting player.
  • In recent years, China has made huge advances in space exploration, putting its own astronauts in orbit and sending probes to the moon and to Mars.
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  • It has effectively drafted Russia as a partner in missions that it has already planned, outpacing a Russian program that has stalled in recent years.
  • The two countries did not detail their joint projects nor set a timeline. According to a statement by the China National Space Administration, they agreed to “use their accumulated experience in space science research and development and use of space equipment and space technology to jointly formulate a route map for the construction of an international lunar scientific research station.”
  • The Soviet Union initially led the first space race in the mid-20th century before falling behind the United States, which put the first man on the moon in 1969, a feat the Soviets never managed.
  • China, by contrast, was never invited to the International Space Station, as American law prohibits NASA from cooperating with Beijing.
  • China pledged to keep the joint project with Russia “open to all interested countries and international partners,”
  • With Russia by its side, China could now draw in other countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, establishing parallel programs for lunar development, said Namrata Goswami, an independent analyst and co-author of a new book on space exploration, “Scramble for the Skies.”
mimiterranova

Biden Expands Obamacare, Eliminates Trump-Era Abortion Policy : President Biden Takes O... - 0 views

  • President Biden signed two executive actions Thursday that are designed to expand access to reproductive health care and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
  • "There's nothing new that we're doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was before [Donald] Trump became president. Because by fiat, he changed — made [it] more inaccessible, more expensive and more difficult for people to qualify for either of those two plans," Biden said in a brief Oval Office signing ceremony.
  • "This is going back to what the situation was prior to Trump's executive order."
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  • instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act through HealthCare.gov,
  • "As we continue to battle COVID-19, it is even more critical that Americans have meaningful access to affordable care," a White House fact sheet reads.
  • His second executive action aims "to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care" by rescinding the Mexico City policy, also known as the global gag rule. This policy, reinstated and expanded by the Trump administration, bars international nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding. Biden on Thursday called the gag rule an "attack on women's health access."
  • Last November, the Trump administration and several Republican-led states argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the program should be voided, which would have eliminated popular elements of the law such as protections for those with preexisting conditions.
  • The Supreme Court will hear a case that could decide the legality of work requirements for Medicaid recipients.
  • Biden is reversing course and directing federal agencies to reconsider those work requirement rules. He is also asking agencies to review policies that undermined protections for people with preexisting conditions, including complications related to COVID-19.
  • The administration faced pressure to open HealthCare.gov for anyone to enroll in the Affordable Care Act in response to the pandemic, but it never did.
  • For decades, Democratic and Republican presidents have alternately rescinded or reinstated the global gag rule, with Democrats, such as Biden, opposing the policy. Republicans have argued that the rule would reduce the number of abortions.
  • However, a study released last year suggested the policy failed to reduce the rate of abortions and ultimately had the opposite effect. The study said the rate of abortions increased by about 40% in the countries studied — most likely because the funding ban caused a reduction in access to contraception and a consequent rise in unwanted pregnancies.
  • Under the actions announced on Thursday, the president is telling federal agencies to review a Trump-era rule that limited the use of Title X federal funds meant for family planning and reproductive health services for low-income patients. Under this program, organizations that provided abortions or abortion counseling could not have access to those federal funds. The White House said, "Across the country and around the world, people — particularly women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes — have been denied access to reproductive health care."
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    I did highlights but they didn't show up
Javier E

Opinion | Joe Biden Is a Transformational President - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We’re seeing a policy realignment without a partisan realignment.
  • In a polarized era, the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans, according to a Morning Consult survey. The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle. As I began to write this on Thursday morning, the Fox News home page had only two stories on the Covid relief bill and dozens on things like the royal family and cancel culture.
  • This is not socialism. This is not the federal government taking control of the commanding heights of the economy. This is not a bunch of programs to restrain corporate power. Americans’ trust in government is still low. This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
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  • But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
  • The law stretches far beyond Covid-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
  • I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon.
  • As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
  • There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen-Z, or many other people across America.
  • The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
  • The Covid-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20 percent; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.
  • This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.
  • There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations.
  • There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.
  • As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.
  • the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans,
  • Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Sanders or a President Warren.
  • This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting
  • Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them
  • Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems.
  • These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.
  • It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not wrack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers
  • We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the G.O.P. abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics
  • The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.
  • This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.
  • With the wind at their backs, Democrats are concluding that Biden’s decision to eschew bipartisanship to pass a relief package is better than Barack Obama’s attempts to attract it
  • Republicans have learned that in this new era it’s foolish to fight Democrats on redistribution policy, but they can win elections by fighting culture wars.
  • But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time
  • It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this.
  • At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.
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