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Javier E

Spain's far-right Vox party shot from social media into parliament overnight. How? - Wa... - 0 views

  • Whereas successful political movements used to have a single ideology, they can now combine several. Think about how record companies put together new pop bands: They do market research, they pick the kinds of faces that match, and then they market the band by advertising it to the most favorable demographic. New political parties can now operate like that: You can bundle together issues, repackage them and then market them, using exactly the same kind of targeted messaging — based on exactly the same kind of market research — that you know has worked in other places.
  • Opposition to Catalan and Basque separatism; opposition to feminism and same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration, especially by Muslims; anger at corruption; boredom with mainstream politics; a handful of issues, such as hunting and gun ownership, that some people care a lot about and others don’t know exist; plus a streak of libertarianism, a talent for mockery and a whiff of nostalgia
  • All of these are the ingredients that have gone into the creation of Vox.
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  • The important relationships between Vox and the European far right, as well as the American alt-right, are happening elsewhere.
  • there have been multiple contacts between Vox and the other far-right parties of Europe. In 2017, Abascal met Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, as Vox’s Twitter account recorded; on the eve of the election, he tweeted his thanks to Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader, for his support. Abascal and Espinosa both went to Warsaw recently to meet the leaders of the nativist, anti-pluralist Polish ruling party, and Espinosa showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the D.C. area, as well.
  • these are issues that belong to the realm of identity politics, not economics. Espinosa characterized all of them as arguments with “the left
  • the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition.
  • The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another.
  • dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.
  • Alto Data Analytics. Alto, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of public data, such as that found on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other public sources, recently produced some elegant, colored network maps of the Spanish online conversation, with the goal of identifying disinformation campaigns seeking to distort digital conversations
  • three outlying, polarized conversations — “echo chambers,” whose members are mostly talking and listening only to one another: the Catalan secessionist conversation, the far-left conversation and the Vox conversation. 
  • the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users” — bots, or else real people who post constantly and probably professionally — were also found within these three communities, especially the Vox community, which accounted for more than half of them
  • uncovered a network of nearly 3,000 “abnormal, high-activity users” that had pumped out nearly 4½ million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic messages on Twitter in the past year
  • For the past couple of years, it has focused on immigration scare stories, gradually increasing their emotional intensity
  • all of it aligns with messages being put out by Vox.
  • a week before Spain’s polling day, the network was tweeting images of what its members described as a riot in a “Muslim neighborhood in France.” In fact, the clip showed a scene from recent anti-government riots in Algeria.
  • Vox supporters, especially the “abnormal, high-activity users,” are very likely to post and tweet content and material from a very particular groups of sources: a set of conspiratorial websites, mostly set up at least a year ago, sometimes run by a single person, which post large quantities of highly partisan articles and headlines.
  • he Alto team had found exactly the same kinds of websites in Italy and Brazil, in the months before those countries’ elections in 2018
  • the websites began putting out partisan material — in Italy, about immigration; in Brazil, about corruption and feminism — during the year before the vote.
  • they served to feed and amplify partisan themes even before they were really part of mainstream politics.
  • In Spain, there are a half-dozen such sites, some quite professional and some clearly amateu
  • One of the more obscure sites has exactly the same style and layout as a pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian site, almost as though both had been designed by the same person
  • The owner of digitalSevilla — according to El Pais, a 24-year-old with no journalism experience — is producing headlines that compare the Andalusian socialist party leader to “the evil lady in Game of Thrones” and, at times, has had more readership than established newspapers
  • They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign
  • all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.
  • he Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Though the pact received relatively little mainstream media attention, in the lead-up to that gathering, and in its wake, Alto found nearly 50,000 Twitter users tweeting conspiracy theories about the pact
  • Much like the Spanish network that promotes Vox, these users were promoting material from extremist and conspiratorial websites, using identical images, linking and retweeting one another across borders.
  • A similar international network went into high gear after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims “celebrating” the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been arson
  • These same kinds of memes and images then rippled through Vox’s WhatsApp and Telegram fan groups. These included, for example, an English-language meme showing Paris “before Macron,” with Notre Dame burning, and “after Macron” with a mosque in its place, as well as a news video, which, in fact, had been made about another incident, talking about arrests and gas bombs found in a nearby car. It was a perfect example of the alt-right, the far right and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America and beyond.
  • CitizenGo is part of a larger network of European organizations dedicated to what they call “restoring the natural order”: rolling back gay rights, restricting abortion and contraception, promoting an explicitly Christian agenda. They put together mailing lists and keep in touch with their supporters; the organization claims to reach 9 million people.
  • OpenDemocracy has additionally identified a dozen other U.S.-based organizations that now fund or assist conservative activists in Europe
  • she now runs into CitizenGo, and its language, around the world. Among other things, it has popularized the expression “gender ideology” — a term the Christian right invented, and that has come to describe a whole group of issues, from domestic violence laws to gay rights — in Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe.
  • In Spain, CitizenGo has made itself famous by painting buses with provocative slogans — one carried the hashtag #feminazis and an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick — and driving them around Spanish cities.
  • It’s a pattern we know from U.S. politics. Just as it is possible in the United States to support super PACs that then pay for advertising around issues linked to particular candidates, so is it now possible for Americans, Russians or the Princess von Thurn und Taxis to donate to CitizenGo — and, thus, to support Vox.
  • as most Europeans probably don’t realize — outsiders who want to fund the European far right have been able to do so for some time. OpenDemocracy’s most recent report quotes Arsuaga, the head of CitizenGo, advising a reporter that money given to his group could “indirectly” support Vox, since “we actually currently totally align.”
  • “Make Spain Great Again,” he explained, “was a kind of provocation. . . . It was just intended to make the left a little bit more angry.”
  • The number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low — most immigration to Spain is from Latin America — and the number of actual U.S. Muslims is, relatively, even lower. But the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has, of course, a special historic echo in Spain
  • “We are entering into a period of time when politics is becoming something different, politics is warfare by another means — we don’t want to be killed, we have to survive. . . . I think politics now is winner-takes-all. This is not just a phenomenon in Spain.
  • As Aznar, the former prime minister, said, the party is a “consequence,” though it is not only a consequence of Catalan separatism. It’s also a consequence of Trumpism, of the conspiracy websites, of the international alt-right/far-right online campaign, and especially of a social conservative backlash that has been building across the continent for years.
  • The nationalists, the anti-globalists, the people who are skeptical of international laws and international organizations — they, too, now work together, across borders, for common causes. They share the same contacts. They tap money from the same funders. They are learning from one another’s mistakes, copying one another’s language. And, together, they think they will eventually win.
clairemann

Supreme Court: Why Brett Kavanaugh could pick the next president if the election comes ... - 0 views

  • Here’s how grim the future of voting rights looks for both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats: the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court — the justice who is likely to decide all closely divided voting rights disputes in the near future — is Brett Kavanaugh.
  • credibly accused of attempting to sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school, denied the allegation then lashed out at Democrats who believed it disqualified him from serving on the nation’s highest court.
  • has staked out a position on voting rights that is less extreme than the views of many of his colleagues.
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  • he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
  • her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i
  • was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.
  • he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,
  • Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.
  • appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.
  • Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”
  • “The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’
  • Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.
  • Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.
  • that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots
  • Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”
  • “in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”
  • the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.
  • It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).
  • Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.
  • On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.
  • but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.
  • Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.
  • Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.
  • But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.
  • It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.
Javier E

Franco's shadow: reburial battle sees Spain confront its darkest days | World news | Th... - 0 views

  • Vox, which broke through into the mainstream in last December’s Andalucían regional election, is big on slogans, short on details and shares much of its ideological DNA with Franco and his followers.
  • the anti-immigration, anti-feminist party has called for a “reconquest” of Spain, railed against “feminazis”, and called for the expulsion of 52,000 “illegal immigrants”
  • it has raised the prospect of banning far-left political parties and those that push for Catalan independence– a particular bestia negra – and suggested that “good Spaniards” should be allowed to possess weapons and use them in self-defence
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  • She is not alone in her appraisal. In a recent interview, Iñaki Gabilondo, perhaps Spain’s best-known journalist, was asked how he would characterise Vox. “To me, it’s Francoism,” he told eldiario.es. “I was 33 when Franco died. That means I’d lived for 33 years … with Franco in my head, my heart, my world and my soul.”
delgadool

Elizabeth Warren's plan to erase America's student debt, without Congress - Vox - 0 views

  • Rather than going to Congress to pass a new higher education law, Warren says in a plan released Tuesday that she’s found a way for her administration to wipe away up to $50,000 in debt for 95 percent of student loan borrowers in the United States, about 42 million people, by using provisions of the Higher Education Act, which gives the education secretary the “authority to begin to compromise and modify federal student loans.”
  • That bill came with a hefty price tag: $1.25 trillion over 10 years, which Warren plans to pay for with the ultramillionaire tax she introduced in January.
  • Some higher education experts said it was worth exploring the Education Department’s potential powers, while others expressed skepticism the plan could pass legal muster.
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  • “I think often policymakers have often overlooked the substantial tools and abilities the Department of Education has, so I think it’s encouraging to see a broader exploration of what can be done there,” Ben Miller, the vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, told Vox.
  • Still, Warren’s proposal could also serve to shift the debate about what measures are possible to tackle America’s $1.6 trillion student debt crisis — especially if other candidates propose similar plans.
  • The key question here is whether Congress envisioned the Higher Education Act to be used to give the education secretary such broad power in canceling more than $1 trillion worth of student debt.
  • This broad executive action could be challenged in court, but because the existing law grants the secretary “absolute” discretion to modify loans, multiple experts told Vox it could be difficult for outside parties to sue. Loan servicers themselves might be in the best position to file a suit.
  • “The burdens of student debt are not distributed equally across all Americans: our country’s student debt crisis is hitting Black and Latinx communities especially hard,” Warren wrote in her plan. “Half of Black borrowers and a third of Latinx borrowers default on their loans within 20 years.”
  • That could mean a “redirection of that money spent potentially on housing, a car, large-ticket items where they could take out a loan to finance that rather than the student loan,” said Bill Foster, a vice president with Moody’s and an author of the report, in an interview with Vox. Debt holders “might be more inclined to start a family or buy a house. It could lead to household creation, and when people start families, people spend more.”
  • Just as canceling the entirety of America’s student loan debt could be an economic boost, it could also raise the federal deficit. Universal student loan debt cancellation would result in about “0.4% of GDP in annual forfeited revenue as the government foregoes debt service collection on forgiven loans,” according to the Moody’s report.
lindsayweber1

Report: Chicago police use excessive force and often treat people "as animals or subhum... - 0 views

  • The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.
  • The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.
  • For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.
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  • The report is likely the Justice Department’s last major investigation before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has aggressively investigated nearly two dozen police departments and pushed for reform, particularly after high-profile police killings. But Trump and his attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, have voiced skepticism of the investigations, suggesting that the Trump administration will do less to hold local police departments accountable through the Justice Department.
  • We found that officers engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone — including unarmed individuals.
  • Yet just 1.3 percent of complaints over racist language between 2011 and March 2016 were sustained by internal investigators, the Justice Department found.
  • CPD has not provided officers with adequate guidance to understand how and when they may use force, or how to safely and effectively control and resolve encounters to reduce the need to use force
  • But it’s not just tolerance; at times the police department appears to engage in an active cover-up — particularly through “a code of silence” and by hiding evidence.
  • One particularly striking statistic: More than 30,000 complaints are made against the Chicago Police Department every year. But while the department sustains less than 2 percent of those complaints, most are never investigated at all.
  • Still, it’s worth emphasizing that these findings may not be exclusive to Chicago. Whether it’s Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans, or Ferguson, Missouri, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.In that sense, it’s not just Chicago policing that’s flawed, but American policing as a whole.
delgadool

The Warren-Sanders handshake is keeping us from discussing sexism - Vox - 0 views

  • Perhaps it was an intentional snub and Warren didn’t want to shake his hand. It could also have been an awkward oversight akin to not noticing someone trying to give you a high-five or waving to someone only to realize they weren’t waving at you. It’s even less clear what they discussed.
  • In some ways, all the attention heaped on this one moment was unsurprising, coming after several days of escalating tension between the two progressive leaders
  • Making a handshake the biggest moment of January’s debate has drawn attention away from important things that informed it: narrowly, Sanders and Warren working hard to bury the hatchet in the name of advancing the progressivism they share, and broadly, conversations around the sexism inherent to questions of whether a woman can be president.
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  • Warren and Sanders have had a nonaggression pact throughout the campaign, but that truce was broken following a report from Politico’s Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein that the Sanders campaign had given volunteers a script that attacked other candidates, including Warren.
  • The Warren campaign responded to this by saying Sanders told Warren during a private meeting that he didn’t think a woman could win the White House in 2020. Sanders and his surrogates said the Vermont senator said no such thing. Warren and her surrogates said he did.
  • But the peace and goodwill engendered by the debate itself was largely derailed — among the senators’ bases, at least — by the moment CNN captured after, when no handshake occurred.
  • Obviously, this little moment is getting so much attention because the Iowa caucuses are now about two weeks away. Voting in New Hampshire comes directly after that, then contests in Nevada and South Carolina. In other words, time is running out.
  • That hesitancy is reflected in polls on the issue, many of which show that individuals want — or at the very least have no problem with — a woman nominee, but that they don’t believe other voters feel the same.
  • haven’t swayed voters in favor of the Minnesota senator. Instead, Biden, who has lost elections, and who does not have as strong a record of winning in Republican areas, is seen as Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump, according to recent polls. And it is Biden who leads nationally.
  • In 2020, anything could happen: Trump enjoys the advantages of incumbency and the Electoral College system, but experts have said the Democratic base is incredibly energized and is expected to show a strong turnout. Respondents to polls may believe Biden has the best chance against Trump, but experts have told Vox that no research argues a woman would be destined to lose in November because of her gender.
Javier E

How Taiwan built "Medicare for all" and gave everyone health insurance - Vox - 0 views

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    Taiwan's single-payer success story - and its lessons for America The first in a Vox series on how countries around the world achieve universal health care. By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Jan 13, 2020, 5:30am EST
rachelramirez

The way we think about cancer is outdated. Here's how to change that. - Vox - 0 views

  • The way we think about cancer is outdated. Here’s how to change that.
  • The cancer death rate has dropped by 23 percent since 1991, with some even larger gains in types of cancer that used to be extremely lethal.
  • Under the non-Hodgkin lymphoma umbrella alone, there are 60 different subtypes — and each has a different disease progression.
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  • "To imagine that we will find a simple solution to this doesn't do service to the true complexity of the problem," explains Siddhartha Mukherjee
  • Overall, Archer points out, the language around cancer in general desperately lags behind the current scientific understanding of the disease — and that has implications for cancer patients and their families.
  • The psychological effects of cancer are in fact so widespread that the American College of Surgeons recently required all accredited cancer centers to screen for the level of cancer distress in new patients and then offer psychosocial care to match patients' needs.
delgadool

World War 3 memes as therapy: Coping with war and crisis through memes - Vox - 0 views

  • You might think this type of reaction is juvenile or dismissive, but it’s really just human. Memes frequently operate as exemplars of larger trends, as well as stand-ins for cultural anxieties and ways to express and alleviate fears or other emotions through humor.
  • the overall tone of the memes boiled down to a kind of cheerful ambivalence about the prospect of war.
  • The American government eliminated the draft in 1973, but that didn’t matter to the meme makers — which makes sense, because fears about the draft being reinstated have always circulated among teens and young adults. In 2016, a false claim that Trump wanted to bring back the draft circulated around the internet as a part of the larger cultural anxiety over his campaign.
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  • As it often does, Black Twitter was the first community to drive this meme. That also makes sense, given that a recurrent fear of the draft has been especially prevalent in black culture since the Vietnam War, when black men were disproportionately affected by the draft.
  • Do you have zero skills that can prepare you for battle? Are you learning Persian via Google? The memes tell you you’re not alone in being hilariously underprepared for a real global emergency.
  • These are significantly different ways of framing our relationship to Iran and its people, but they’re both equally important examples of how people are thinking about the war. Because as the memes and their narratives travel and spread, they help shape the larger cultural narrative about Iran itself — just as all memes, from toxic to wholesome, help create cultural narratives.
  • The memes seem to follow a recent trend of viral internet humor as a coping mechanism — memes that are more overtly psychological than the usual wholesome meme, and more upfront about the touch of nihilism that drives them.
  • The basic idea here, as Alhabash points out, is that the World War III meme itself isn’t just about war. It’s about the larger cultural mood and the ways in which we receive, express, and amplify that mood. Alhabash expressed doubts about how self-aware this process was. But for a subset of the meme makers and their audience, the war jokes are helping quell anxiety and keep things lighthearted.
  • It’s worth noting, however, that some situations do seem to be utterly too dark to meme — there are virtually no memes about the Australian bushfires, for example — and that ironically might be cause for hope. If the potential global conflict is something we can joke about, then it might mean that our prevailing emotion is still hope that it won’t happen.
dytonka

Trump's long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020 - Vox - 0 views

  • Most recently, Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” —
  • From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped with racist acts after his 2016 election.
  • In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.
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    History of Trump's Racism despite him saying he's not racist
clairemann

AOC and Rashida Tlaib's Public Banking Act, explained - Vox - 0 views

  • A public option, but for banking. That’s what Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are proposing in a new bill unveiled on Friday.
  • would foster the creation of public banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated.
  • at some point it’s just hitting a wall where it doesn’t carry them along and they’re looking for options,” said Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, the third-poorest congressional district in the country. “So I’m putting this on the table as an option.”
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  • The proposal lands in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shed light on many inefficiencies in the American system, including banking. Take the Paycheck Protection Program, for example: It used the regular banking system as an intermediary, which ultimately meant that bigger businesses and those with preexisting relationships with those banks were prioritized over others.
  • guarantee a more equitable recovery by providing an alternative to Wall Street banks for state and local governments, businesses, and ordinary people,
  • The public banking bill also does double duty as a climate bill: It would prohibit public banks from investing in or doing business with the fossil fuel industry.
  • “Public banks empower states and municipalities to establish new channels of public investment to help solve systemic crises.”
  • But, he said, this proposal is particularly comprehensive and supportive.
  • If Democrats keep control of the House come 2021 and manage to flip the Senate and win the White House, they’ll be able to take some big legislative swings, including and perhaps especially on issues related to the economy.
  • which theoretically would be more motivated to do public good and invest in their communities than private institutions, which are out for profit.
  • To be clear, the Public Banking Act isn’t creating a federal public bank.
  • encourage and enable the creation of public banks across the US. It provides legitimacy to those who are pushing for more public banking, and it also includes regulators as key stakeholders who can support and provide guidance for how those banks should operate.
  • though different public banks would likely have different areas of emphasis.
  • They could also facilitate easier access to funds for state and local governments from the federal government or Federal Reserve.
  • “It’s basically a way to finance state and local investment that doesn’t go through Wall Street and doesn’t leave the community and turn into a windfall for shareholders,
  • Public banks need the FDIC to provide assurances that it will recognize them in accordance with the bond rating of the city or state they represent.
  • Tlaib recalled hearing from her constituents when the $1,200 coronavirus stimulus checks went out this spring — people waiting days and weeks for direct deposits, or getting a check in the mail only to lose a substantial portion of it cashing it at the store down the street.
  • The Public Banking Act allows the Federal Reserve to charter and grant membership to public banks and creates a grant program for the Treasury secretary to provide seed money for public banks to be formed, capitalized, and developed.
  • “This is more about community development.”
  • McConnell said the FDIC issuing guidance that it recognizes the city’s — and the state’s — public banks as an AAA rating would send a clear direction to the state financial regulators that the public bank is considered low risk.
  • The bill would also provide a road map for the FDIC, which insures bank deposits of up to $250,000, to insure deposits for public banks, so people feel assured they won’t lose all their money by choosing to open an account with their state bank instead of, say, Wells Fargo.
  • the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has historically been charged with chartering national banks in the US, not the Fed, meaning this is a fairly novel idea.
  • It prohibits the Fed and Treasury from considering the financial health of an entity that controls or owns a bank in grant-making decisions.
  • So here is the thing about private companies, including, yes, banks: The point of them is to make money, and that drives their decisions. It’s not necessarily evil (though sometimes it kind of is), but it’s just how they work.
  • The idea behind public banking isn’t that Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley go away; it’s that they have to compete with a government-owned entity — and one that’s a little fairer and more ethical in how it does business.
  • Public banks, as imagined in the Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez proposal, would provide loans to small businesses and governments with lower interest rates and lower fees.
  • Student loans are facilitated directly with BND, but other loans, called participation loans, go through a local financial institution — often with BND support.
  • According to a study on public banks, BND had some $2 billion in active participation loans in 2014. BND can grant larger loans at a lower risk, which fosters a healthy financial ecosystem populated by a cluster of small North Dakota banks.
  • Democrats have a lot of ideas, and if they take power come January 2021, there’s a lot they can do.
  • The Public Banking Act is meant to complement ideas such as the ABC Act and postal banking. And, of course, it’s linked to the Green New Deal, not only because it would bar public banks from financing things that hurt the environment, but also because the idea is that public banks would play a major role in financing Green New Deal and climate-friendly projects.
  • If former Vice President Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats control both the House and the Senate come 2021, the talk around these ideas becomes a lot more serious.
Javier E

Why Matthew Yglesias Left Vox - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.
  • there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”
  • “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic …
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  • One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”
  • I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”
  • an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views.
  • “Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues,” Sunstein wrote of his experiment. “Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.”
  • Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect.
  • The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.
clairemann

SB 8, Texas's anti-abortion law, is back at the Supreme Court. Here's what's different ... - 0 views

  • On October 14, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit formally blocked a trial court’s decision halting SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions in that state.
  • But there are some important legal distinctions between the current challenge to SB 8, known as United States v. Texas, and the Court’s previous order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson allowing SB 8 to take effect. Specifically, the Justice Department argues in its request for relief that the United States is allowed to sue Texas directly, even if private parties may not.
  • The Texas law was specifically drafted to evade judicial review.
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  • But SB 8, written to sidestep that kind of legal challenge, explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. The idea is that, if no state official can enforce the law, abortion rights plaintiffs have no one to sue.
  • This scheme, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissenting opinion in Whole Woman’s Health, “is not only unusual, but unprecedented.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the law is “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”
  • The new challenge from the DOJ argues that, at least in an unusual case such as this one, the United States should be allowed to sue the state of Texas — and that it should be able to do so specifically because no one else can. As Judge Robert Pitman, who briefly blocked SB 8 before his decision was stayed by the Fifth Circuit, summarized the DOJ’s argument, the United States should be allowed to step in when “(1) a state law violates the constitution, (2) that state action has a widespread effect, and (3) the state law is designed to preclude review by the very people whose rights are violated.”
  • The second and more difficult question is why the federal government should be the plaintiff of last resort. DOJ rests the lion’s share of its argument on In re Debs (1895), a Gilded Age decision giving federal courts extraordinary authority to halt union activities that disrupt interstate commerce (Debs arose out of a massive railroad strike that threw shipping in the Midwest into disarray).
  • Ordinarily, if a state law permitted private parties to sue abortion providers in state court, those providers could wait to be sued, and then argue that the law permitting them to be sued is unconstitutional during that state court proceeding. But SB 8 is designed to frustrate this normal process as well. For one thing, it contains a simply extraordinary provision stating that SB 8 defendants may not assert their “belief that the requirements of this subchapter are unconstitutional or were unconstitutional” as a defense in state court.
  • Although this Court is unlikely to protect abortion rights, there are still potent reasons why even anti-abortion justices should oppose SB 8. For one thing, if Texas can offer bounties to anti-abortion plaintiffs — and evade judicial review in the process — other, bluer states could pass copycat laws. Do the justices really want New York to pass a law permitting “any person” to collect a bounty from gun owners?
  • I don’t have any illusions that this Supreme Court will hold that doctors who perform abortions cannot be punished. But I’d hope that we could all agree that doctors who are falsely accused of violating a state law should not be punished. If due process means anything, it should mean that Dr. Smith should get her day in court before she is forced into bankruptcy.
lenaurick

Why Republicans are debating bringing back torture - Vox - 0 views

  • Several Republicans have suggested that they'd be open to torturing suspected terrorists if elected — especially New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump.
  • "Waterboarding is fine, and much tougher than that is fine," Trump said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire. "When we're with these animals, we can't be soft and weak, like our politicians."
  • Previously, Trump promised to "bring back" types of torture "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding" during Saturday's Republican debate. The rest of the GOP field took a somewhat more nuanced position. Marco Rubio categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists "practice how to evade us."
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  • This debate doesn't have much to do with the merits of torture as an intelligence-gathering mechanism: The evidence that torture doesn't work is overwhelming. Rather, the debate among four leading Republicans over the practice is all about politics, both inside the Republican Party and more broadly.
  • Cruz, for example, has said that waterboarding does not constitute torture, but also that he would not "bring it back in any sort of widespread use" and has co-sponsored legislation limiting its use.
  • Well, under the definition of torture, no, it's not. Under the law, torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, it is not. It is enhanced interrogation, it is vigorous interrogation, but it does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.
  • international law, under both the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, considers waterboarding a form of torture and thus illegal.
  • A January 2005 Gallup poll found that 82 percent of Americans believed "strapping prisoners on boards and forcing their heads underwater until they think they are drowning" was an immoral interrogation tactic.
  • In 2007, 40 percent of Americans favored waterboarding suspected terrorists in a CNN poll, while 58 percent opposed. By 2014, 49 percent told CBS that they believed waterboarding could be at least sometimes justified, while only 36 percent said it never could be.
  • Today, 73 percent of Republicans support torturing suspected terrorists, according to Pew.
  • Any Republican who took a strong stance against waterboarding or other torture techniques could be pegged as weak on terrorism — a damning charge in a Republican primary that's been preoccupied with ISIS.
  • Reminder: Torture is morally abhorrent and also doesn't work
  • Some proponents will claim that while morally regrettable, torture is nonetheless necessary to keep us safe. But the best evidence suggests that it this is a false choice: Waterboarding, and other forms of torture, does not work.
  • In most cases, torture is used by authoritarian states to force false confessions
  • The evidence that torture did not aid the hunt for Osama bin Laden is particularly compelling.
  • In other words, some GOP candidates' pro-torture sentiment isn't just a relic of Bush-era partisan debates — it's also totally out of whack with everything we know about the practice of torture today.
rachelramirez

The head of the Democratic Party is trying to weaken Sen. Warren's consumer protection ... - 0 views

  • The head of the Democratic Party is trying to weaken Sen. Warren's consumer protection agency
  • Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has joined conservative lawmakers' efforts to curtail coming CFPB regulations about predatory payday lending
  • At Salon, Ben Norton noted that 85 percent of payday loans in Florida go to those who have seven or more loans already every year.
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  • Bernie Sanders, while unlikely to win the nomination, has shown that a substantial section of Democrats yearn for their party to take a much more hard-line position on big business and champion the working poor.
lenaurick

Saturday's election results show Donald Trump can still be stopped - Vox - 0 views

  • For the first time in nearly a month, Donald Trump looks mortal again.
  • the GOP frontrunner came away with just two wins that were both quite narrow, in Louisiana and Kentucky. He lost the Maine caucuses — his first defeat in the Northeast — and got blown out in
  • Kansas
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  • And for the first time, it appeared that most of the anti-Trump voters across the country broke towards the same candidate — Ted Cruz.
  • Perhaps the most heartening development for Cruz, though, was in Louisiana, where results indicated that voters swung late toward him and away from Trump and Rubio.
  • But as election day votes were gradually counted, Cruz's share of the vote suddenly surged, while Trump's declined and Rubio's utterly collapsed. The most recent vote total showed Trump still in first with 42 percent, but Cruz not too far behind him at 38 percent, while Rubio was far back at a mere 11 percent.
  • He didn't have one clear nemesis in every state — instead, voters rallied behind Cruz in some states, Rubio in others, and even Kasich in a couple.
  • But tonight, things suddenly looked quite different. Rubio utterly dropped off the map in Louisiana and Maine, getting about 11 percent and 8 percent of the vote, respectively. He did a bit better in Kansas and Kentucky, but could only get 17 percent in each. Meanwhile, John Kasich remained far back in every state (though he did top Rubio to get third place in Maine).
  • Instead, it was Cruz who rose to the occasion, suggesting that we could be entering a new phase of the race — Trump vs. Cruz.
  • But, as Vox's delegate tracker shows, he'll still have less than a third of the delegates he needs for a majority. And Cruz will be less than 100 delegates behind him.
  • If Cruz keeps performing like he did on Saturday — beating Trump badly in some states, and coming very close to him in others — he could well close that gap
  • That's not to say that he will do either of those things. We don't know how a head-to-head matchup between Trump and Cruz would turn out. But that late swing toward Cruz in Louisiana, and his surprising strength in Maine, show that Cruz shouldn't be counted out. He may give Donald Trump a real run for his money just yet.
Javier E

The West Virginia primary shows Trump's election was no aberration - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • the West Virginia GOP primary confirms that this sort of vulgar demagoguery is becoming routine. Trump’s election was no aberration. Rather, he exploited deep problems in American politics that had been building for years — and others, following his example, will exploit those same problems after he’s gone.
  • Before Trump, there was Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the Republican Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus. The Republican Party tried to harness the rage of the nativist right but ultimately couldn’t contain it.
  • Now we have Blankenship, Roy Moore, Joe Arpaio and a proliferation of name-calling misfits and even felons on Republican ballots. They are monsters created by the GOP, or rather the power vacuum the GOP has become.
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  • Political scientists have observed that American politics has deteriorated into an unstable combination of weak parties and strong partisanship — dry brush for the likes of Trump and Blankenship to ignite.
  • The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform restricted party fundraising, and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 essentially destroyed parties by giving everybody else freedom to spend unlimited sums to buy politicians. The moderating influence of parties was replaced by the radicalizing influence of dark money.
  • Related to this, partisanship in Washington escalated, aggravated by partisan redistricting that puts almost all House members in safe seats where the only threat comes from primaries. Primary voters tend to favor extreme candidates — who, once in Congress, turn politics into warfare.
  • the problem is most severe among Republicans, and it’s no small irony that the man who arguably did the most to create the current system is now under attack by it. McConnell, who championed unlimited dark money, cheered Citizens United and dramatically accelerated the partisan revenge cycle on the Senate floor, is now the victim of extremists his own actions created.
  • this much we already know: McConnell unleashed the forces now shredding his party. Blankenship, like Trump, exploited those forces. And nobody controls them.
cartergramiak

Read: transcript of Trump's call with Ukraine's president - Vox - 0 views

  • But for now we have the White House’s version of the call, which may omit certain sections. You can find it below.
  • The White House has just released a partial readout — which it admits isn’t a full transcript — of a now infamous call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
  • Critics say the transcript won’t really prove anything as it isn’t a verbatim account of their call, and a whistleblower’s complaint — reportedly having to do with Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine — would be a more useful document right now. That may come out later this week.
Javier E

Coronavirus economy plans are clear: No return to normal in 2020 - Vox - 0 views

  • Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.
  • In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future.
  • The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.”
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  • The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.
  • The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin
  • o state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.
  • The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined
  • All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.
  • This, too, requires some imagination. Will governors who’ve finally, at great effort, reopened parts of their economies really keep throwing them back into lockdown every time ICUs begin to fill? Will Trump have the stomach to push the country back into quarantine after he’s lifted social distancing guidelines?
  • even if the political hurdles could be cleared, it’s obvious, reading the AEI proposal, that there’ll be no “V-shaped recovery” of the economy. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who helped craft the plan, says he thinks something like 80 percent of the economy will return — that may sound like a lot, but it’s an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.
  • As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do-nothing argument is even less plausible: It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business.
  • That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.
  • My point isn’t to criticize these plans when I have nothing better to offer. Indeed, my point isn’t to criticize them at all. It’s simply to note that these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal
  • They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.
  • As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own. That’s a terrible abdication of leadership, but reading through the various proposals, you can see why it’s happened. Imagine you’re the president of the United States in an election year. Which of these futures, with all its costs and risks and pain, would you want to try and sell to the American people?
kaylynfreeman

How the US could help Uighur Muslims in China with 5 steps - Vox - 0 views

  • That rare consensus in Washington has generated some action, most importantly the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month. The law imposes sanctions on foreign individuals and entities involved in abuses in Xinjiang and requires the president to periodically “send Congress a list identifying foreign individuals and entities responsible for such human rights abuses.
  • The US has invoked that and other laws to sanction several Chinese companies and individuals — most prominently Chen Quanguo, who governs Xinjiang and is a top member of the politburo in China.
  • But many activists and experts say it’s not enough, and that the US can and should do more to pressure China.
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