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Javier E

Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...irish-slaves-myth.html

ireland slavery myth whitelash history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • : the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.But it’s not true.
  • Historians say the idea of Irish slaves is based on a misreading of history and that the distortion is often politically motivated. Far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?”
  • Last year, 82 Irish scholars and writers signed an open letter denouncing the Irish slave myth and asking publications to stop mentioning it
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The Irish slave narrative is based on the misinterpretation of the history of indentured servitude,
  • it was a completely different category from slavery,” said Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Ireland who has spearheaded the debunking effort. “It was a transitory state.”
  • Unlike slaves, servants were considered legally human. Their servitude was based on a contract that limited their service to a finite period of time, usually about seven years, in exchange for passage to the colonies. They did not pass their unfree status on to descendants.
  • any form of coerced labor can be described as slavery, from Ancient Rome to modern-day human trafficking
  • But in colonial America and the Caribbean, the word “slavery” had a specific legal meaning. Europeans, by definition, were not included in it.
  • “An indenture implies two people have entered into a contract with each other but slavery is not a contract,
  • The memes sometimes pop up in apolitical settings, like history trivia websites, but their recent spread has mirrored escalating racial and political tension in the United States
  • Central to the memes is the notion that historians and the media are covering up the truth. He said he has received death threats from Americans for his work.
  • “These memes are the No. 1 derailment people use when they talk about the slave trade,” he said. “Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”
  • “It almost becomes a race to the bottom of who suffered more,” Mr. Reilly said, adding that the memes are “an effort to claim a certain ancestry of suffering in order to claim a certain political position.”
  • The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right, but it became specifically Irish after the 2000 publication of “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland,” a book by the late journalist Sean O’Callaghan
  • In America, the book connected the white slave narrative to an influential ethnic group of over 34 million people, many of whom had been raised on stories of Irish rebellion against Britain and tales of anti-Irish bias in America at the turn of the 20th century. From there, it took off.
  • The memes became popular on white nationalist message boards, neo-Nazi websites and far-right sites like InfoWars. On social media, they are primarily a creature of Facebook, where they have been shared millions of times.
  • It is true that anti-Irish sentiment was present in the United States until well into the 20th century, but that is a separate issue from 17th century indentured servitude, Ms. Harris said. The descendants of indentured servants, Irish or otherwise, did not face a legacy of racism similar to the one faced by people of African descent
  • “This continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history,” Mr. Hogan said. “There are libraries filled with all the bad things that actually did happen. We don’t need memes and these dodgy articles full of lies.”
Javier E

NFL Protests Obscure the Facts on Race and Policing - 0 views

nymag.com/...acts-on-race-and-policing.html

violence black police statistics facts race arrests gun

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Post has indeed found that there’s a strikingly consistent number of fatal police shootings each year: close to 1,000 people of all races. But that figure includes the armed and the unarmed.
  • In the first six months of this year, for example, the Post found a total of 27 fatal shootings of unarmed people, of which black men constituted seven.
  • There are 22 million black men in America. If an African-American man is not armed, the chance that he will be killed by the police in any recent year is 0.00006 percent.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.
  • I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president’s response. But on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality.
  • A Cornell Ph.D. student, Philippe Lemoine, has dug into exactly that: by examining the data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is testimony from black people themselves, not the police; it’s far less tainted than self-serving police records.
  • It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans.
  • are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men.
  • black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.
  • You could also argue that lynching was statistically very rare in the past, but it instilled a real terror that belied this real fact.
  • If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men.
  • I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare.
  • the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)
  • Is “rare” a fair judgment? It’s certainly a subjective one, and I do not know how I would feel if there were a 0.5 percent chance that any time I encountered a cop, I could be subjected to physical violence, as opposed to the 0.2 percent chance that I, as a white man, experience.
  • What makes it worse for black men, of course, is something called history, in which any violence by the state rightly comes with immensely more emotional and political resonance — and geography. Police violence may be rare across the entire country, but it is concentrated in urban pockets, where the atmosphere is therefore more fearful — and there’s a natural tendency to extrapolate from that context.
  • Specific horrifying incidents — like Alton Sterling’s death — operate in our psyches the way 9/11 does. It understandably terrified Eric Reid — but also distorted his assessment of the actual risk that one of his family members could suffer the same fate.
  • It’s true, too, that the huge racial discrepancy in the prison population affects our judgment.
  • On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing.
  • we’re not talking about extralegal lynchings by civilians, in the context of slavery or segregation or state-imposed discrimination. We’re talking about instantaneous decisions by cops, often in contexts where their own lives are at stake as well. Their perspective — and many of these cops are also African-American — matters as well.
  • This is the balance we have to strike. We can and should honor the spirit of the protests. But we cannot allow ourselves to let emotion, however justified, overwhelm reality
  • t the election wasn’t just an anti-May vote. It was also a pro-Corbyn one, especially among the rising generation. Millennials, having never experienced socialism, love it. And Corbyn is on the leftist edge of socialism. He’s for huge increases in taxation and public spending, he promises free college for all, he wants to instate rent controls across Britain’s major cities, and, in his speech last Wednesday, he described gentrification as “social cleansing.”
  • Most of his proposals would add mountains of debt to the British economy, and he doesn’t really care. Austerity is so over.
  • This makes him a bigger leap to the left than Trump is to the right. It’s as if Roy Moore were the GOP nominee — and leading in the polls.
  • another key factor is Corbyn’s effortless Englishness. He is a very specific character — a very English leftist. He’s mild-mannered in speech, even as his ideas are radical. In the last election campaign, he came off as an ordinary man of the people
  • Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology are the foundation of Buddhism Is True. And I find much of it both intellectually convincing, and also recognizable with my own developing practice.
Javier E

The Triumph of Obama's Long Game - 1 views

nymag.com/...iumph-of-obamas-long-game.html

politics US policy foreign policy israel gender

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”
  • I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.
  • But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all.
  • It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?
  • Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well.
  • You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”
  • Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy.
  • Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity.
  • the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.
  • The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism.
  • Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?
  • it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it!
  • One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?
  • And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans.
  • I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal?
  • Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled.
  • pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.
  • Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.
  • This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.
  • Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule.
  • And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube
  • We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track).
Javier E

We're at cyberwar. And the enemy is us. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The United States and its allies are under attack. The cyberwar we’ve feared for a generation is well underway, and we are losing. This is the forest, and the stuff about Russian election meddling, contacts with the Trump campaign, phony Twitter accounts, fake news on Facebook — those things are trees.
  • we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership, free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us. The attack is ongoing.
  • With each passing week, we learn more. Russia and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore themselves to pieces.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.
  • They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
  • The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms
  • Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.
  • The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
  • What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.
  • Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.
  • His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary
  • Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.
  • We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.
knudsenlu

Republicans Are Throwing Away Their Shot at Tax Reform - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...546317

republicans tax reform politics US

shared by knudsenlu on 20 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • America badly needs corporate tax reform.
  • The United States pretends to tax corporations heavily. But those heavy tax rates are perforated by randomly generous rules such that many tax-efficient firms pay nothing at all, or even receive money back from the U.S. Treasury. The result is heavy unfairness between industries and firms, an unfairness that many economists believe systematically distorts investment decisions. U.S. productivity growth has been sluggish since the Great Recession—and had actually turned negative by the beginning of 2016.
  • Lowering the corporate rate while tightening collection—with a view to raising more revenue, in a more rational way—has been a good-government cause since the late 1980s. John Kerry campaigned on it in 2004, as NBC News reported at the time:
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Now, in 2017, the all-Republican federal government at last has a chance to make progress on this goal. And it is throwing that opportunity away.
millerco

Without Saying 'Trump,' Bush and Obama Deliver Implicit Rebukes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...george-bush-trump.html

Trump bush obama Us history crisis politics

shared by millerco on 20 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Without Saying ‘Trump,’ Bush and Obama Deliver Implicit Rebukes
  • Neither of them mentioned President Trump by name but two of his predecessors emerged from political seclusion on Thursday to deliver what sounded like pointed rebukes of the current occupant of the Oval Office and the forces of division that propelled him to power.
  • In separate and unrelated appearances, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both warned that the United States was being torn apart by ancient hatreds that should have been consigned to history long ago and called for addressing economic anxiety through common purpose.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • While not directly addressing Mr. Trump, neither left much doubt whom and what they had in mind.
  • Mr. Bush, the last Republican to hold the White House, spoke out at a conference he convened in New York to support democracy, noting that America first had to “recover our own identity” in the face of challenges to its most basic ideals.
  • While Mr. Trump seeks to raise barriers to trade and newcomers, lashing out at targets with relish, Mr. Bush defended immigration and free trade, denounced nationalism and bigotry and bemoaned what he called the “casual cruelty” of current public discourse.
  • “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” Mr. Bush said.
  • “We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade, forgetting that conflict, instability and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.
  • We’ve seen the return of isolationist sentiments, forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places.”
millerco

G.O.P. Senator Jeff Flake, a Trump Critic, Won't Run for Re-election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jeff-flake-arizona.html

Jeff Flake Trump politics US history

shared by millerco on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • G.O.P. Senator Jeff Flake, a Trump Critic, Won’t Run for Re-election
  • Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he will not seek re-election in 2018, saying he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.
  • Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary, 17-minute speech on the Senate floor, in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • He deplored “the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said has become so prevalent in American politics.
  • The remarkable moment came just hours after Mr. Trump had renewed his attacks on another critic in the Republican Party, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, saying he “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” Mr. Corker, appearing more weary than angry, said the president “is debasing our country.”
  • Mr. Flake’s dramatic decision and the back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Mr. Corker appeared to mark a moment of decision for the Republican Party. A week ago, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, decrying the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he sees overtaking American politics. Former President George W. Bush, in yet another speech, lamented, “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”
  • But Mr. Flake, choosing the Senate floor for his fierce denunciation, appeared to issue a direct challenge to his party.
  • Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. He had already touched on these themes in a book he published in August that was highly critical of the president.
  • “We must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”
  • “It is often said that children are watching,” he continued. “Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?”
martinelligi

Misleading Facts Evade Social Media Moderation, Fuel Covid Misinformation : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ts-fuel-vaccine-misinformation

social media vaccine pandemic

shared by martinelligi on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The odds of dying after getting a Covid-19 vaccine are virtually non-existent. According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning.
  • A new NPR analysis finds that articles connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly-engaged-with content online this year, going viral in a way that could hinder people's ability to judge the true risk in getting a shot.
  • Experts say these storylines are much harder for companies to moderate, though they can have the same net effect of creating a distorted and false view of the world.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Whether they have a vaccine or not, roughly 8,000 people die in the U.S. every day. And as more people get vaccinated, more vaccinated people will continue to die from unrelated causes, which the pharmaceutical company Pfizer alluded to in a statement earlier this year.
  • This is not because many more people died during these periods; rather it's the result of multiple news outlets writing articles about the same small number of deaths and reaching a larger audience.
  • For someone to correctly calculate the real risk involved in getting a shot, she says, they need to consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have died because they were not vaccinated against Covid-19, not just a random headline. "We rarely get the contextual information we need," Bostrom says. "And it's really hard to judge the importance of something without that information."
delgadool

QAnon Proves Its Resilience - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-washington.html

politics trump

shared by delgadool on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Tumbleweeds blew through the House chambers today, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved a major vote to Wednesday night, so that lawmakers could skip town a day early.
  • QAnon’s fundamental beliefs that Democrats and coastal elites are involved in an international pedophilia ring, and that Trump is a God-sent savior who will rid the world of them — wasn’t actually true.
  • “In the lead-up, all these influencers realized all these false prophecies are going to look bad and might hurt their profit,” Mia Bloom, the co-author of the forthcoming book “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon,” said in an interview.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”
  • “And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”
anonymous

Opinion | Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His Power - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cuomo-covid.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Cuomo Thought There Was No Limit to His PowerBesieged on multiple fronts, the governor is no longer holding forth; he’s just trying to hold on.
  • ret Stephens: I can’t believe I’m saying this, Gail, but Cuomo may make former Gov. Eliot Spitzer look good by comparison. At least Client 9’s behavior was, well, transactional, as compared to Cuomo’s creepy come-ons. And the cover-up of the nursing home Covid death count strikes me as possibly criminal and definitely worthy of impeachment. Especially since he was also trying to peddle a book about his Covid leadership skills while he was busy fudging the numbers.What’s your view?Gail: Have to admit it makes me sad. But the double whammy seems impossible to overcome. If it had just been the sex part we could have had some interesting conversations about what’s acceptable in an era that combines feminism with a fairly expansive view of what people — at least unmarried people — can and can’t do.Bret: “If It Had Just Been The Sex Part” could have been the title of a memoir by anyone from Caligula to Johnny Rotten. Sorry, go on.
  • ret: My gut reaction to your scenario is that it sounds very “Ooh la la,” like it could be a movie starring Cate Blanchett as Gov. Fatale, whereas Cuomo’s behavior is strictly “Ugh Yuck,” like it could be a movie starring Mickey Rourke. I just don’t think it works in quite the same way.Gail: If young workers in a state capitol started complaining that their female governor was touching them inappropriately, I sorta doubt the voters would see it as a glamorous movie.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Bret: One of the many reasons I despise Donald Trump is that he took perfectly legitimate policy issues, distorted and lied about them to suit his personal needs, and rendered them politically radioactive. Ballot integrity and public confidence in elections is a legitimate issue. In New York’s upstate 22nd district, we had a congressional race that took over three months to resolve because of a lack of uniform ballot-counting standards and a tidal wave of absentee ballots. In Pennsylvania, a state court ruled that the deadline for late-arriving mail-in ballots would be extended, resulting in the addition of about 10,000 ballots to the overall vote tallies and giving fodder to pe
  • Gail: Ballot harvesting is that system where a person receives an absentee ballot, fills it out, and then relies on somebody else to get it returned. That can be a good deed — or a system party workers use to control the voting. We just need to make sure it’s only used for good purposes. There was a big scandal in North Carolina a while back involving (cough, cough) Republicans.
  • Bret: Or Shere Khan from “The Jungle Book.” As for the bill itself, the most I can say on its behalf is that I’m happy Joe Manchin is in the Senate as a Democrat. We should not pay people more money to be on unemployment than to have a job, especially as the economy opens up again. We should not be sending benefit checks to people with upper middle-class incomes. We s
  • Gail: Well, we can still complain a little, right? Otherwise we’d have to change the name of The Conversation to Quiet Contemplation of a Perfect World.Bret: Agreed. Let’s keep finding things to complain about. You know, the masks are about to come off, which means the gloves are, too.
Javier E

Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618711

myth Lost Cause confederacy history memory

shared by Javier E on 10 May 21 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
  • For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
  • “I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”
  • I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.
  • Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.
  • Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”
  • Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.
  • That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
  • It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
  • The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.
  • “I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.
  • The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
  • “Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.
  • But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
  • Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?
  • I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
  • Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
  • I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.
  • I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.
  • The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”
  • But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.
  • Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.
  • I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.
  • The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
  • Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.
  • Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.
  • Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”
  • “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
  • But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
  • So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.
  • Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?
Javier E

China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618778

china gdp rivalry US competition trade market repression history crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 May 21 - No Cached
  • “We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
  • aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”
  • As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”
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  • many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
  • The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.
  • The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.
  • China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then
  • Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.
  • in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.
  • Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.
  • Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.
  • But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.
  • Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive
  • The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.
  • The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.
  • this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.
  • Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.
  • A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”
  • Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.
  • He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.
  • Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.
  • The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.
  • China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.
  • as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.
  • two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.
  • As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises
  • What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
  • China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places
  • China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital
  • More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.
  • U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.
Javier E

How Index Funds May Hurt the Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618497

economics index funds efficiency concentration competition innovation risk economy

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Thanks to their ultralow fees and stellar long-term performance, these investment vehicles have soaked up more and more money since being developed by Vanguard’s Jack Bogle in the 1970s
  • as of 2016, investors worldwide were pulling more than $300 billion a year out of actively managed funds and pushing more than $500 billion a year into index funds. Some $11 trillion is now invested in index funds, up from $2 trillion a decade ago. And as of 2019, more money is invested in passive funds than in active funds in the United States.
  • Indexing has also gone small, very small. Although many financial institutions offer index funds to their clients, the Big Three control 80 or 90 percent of the market. The Harvard Law professor John Coates has argued that in the near future, just 12 management professionals—meaning a dozen people, not a dozen management committees or firms, mind you—will likely have “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.”
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  • Indexing has gone big, very big. For nine in 10 companies on the S&P 500, their largest single shareholder is one of the Big Three. For many, the big indexers control 20 percent or more of their shares. Index funds now control 20 to 30 percent of the American equities market, if not more.
  • The problem is that the public markets have been cornered by a group of investment managers small enough to fit at a lunch counter, dedicated to quiescence and inertia.
  • Passively managed investment options do not just outperform actively managed ones in terms of both better returns and lower fees. They eat their lunch.
  • Let’s imagine that a decade ago you invested $100 in an index fund charging a 0.04 percent fee and $100 in a traditional mutual fund charging a 1.5 percent fee. Let’s also imagine that the index fund tracked the S&P 500, and that the mutual fund ended up returning what the S&P 500 returned. Your passively invested $100 would have turned into $356.66 in 10 years. Your traditionally invested $100 would have turned into $313.37.
  • Actively managed investment options could make up for their higher fees with higher returns. And some do, some of the time. Yet scores of industry and academic studies stretching over decades show that trying to beat the market tends to result in lower returns than just buying the market. Only a quarter of actively managed mutual funds exceeded the returns of their passively managed cousins in the decade leading up to 2019,
  • What might be good for retail investors might not be good for the financial markets, public companies, or the American economy writ large, and the passive revolution’s scope has raised all sorts of hand-wringing and red-flagging. Analysts at Bernstein have called passive investing “worse than Marxism.” The investor Michael Burry, of The Big Short fame, has called it a “bubble,” and a co-head of Goldman Sachs’s investment-management division has warned about froth too. Shortly before his death in 2019, Bogle himself warned that index funds’ dominance might not “serve the national interest.”
  • One primary concern comes from the analysts at Bernstein: “A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active, market-led capital management.”
  • Active managers direct investment dollars to companies on the basis of those companies’ research-and-development prospects, human capital, regulatory outlook, and so on. They take new information and price it into a company’s stock when buying and selling shares.
  • Passive investors, by contrast, ignore annual reports and market rumors. They do nothing with trading-floor gossip. They make no attempt to research what to invest in and what to skip. Whether holding international or domestic assets, holding stocks or bonds, or using a mutual-fund structure or an ETF structure, they just mirror the market. Big U.S.-stock index funds buy big U.S. stocks just because they’re big U.S. stocks.
  • At least in a Soviet-type centrally planned economy, apparatchiks would be making some attempt to allocate resources efficiently.
  • Passive management is merely a giant phenomenon, not an all-encompassing one. Hundreds of actively managed mutual funds are still out there, as are legions of day traders, hedge funds, and private offices buying and selling and buying and selling. Stock prices still move around, sometimes dramatically, on the basis of new data and new ideas.
  • Still, passive investing may well be degrading the informational content of the markets, messing up price signals and making business decisions harder as a result.
  • When one of these commodities ends up on an index, the firms that use that commodity in their business see a 6 percent increase in costs and a 40 percent decrease in operating profits, relative to firms without exposure to the commodity, the academics found
  • Their theory is that ETF trading shifts prices in subtle ways, making it harder for businesses to know when to buy their gold and copper. Corporate executives “are being influenced by what happens in the futures market, and what happens in the futures market is being influenced by ETF trading,”
  • More broadly, the Bernstein analysts, among others, worry that index-linked investing is increasing correlation, whereby the prices of stocks, bonds, and other assets move up or down or sideways together.
  • the price fluctuations of a newly indexed stock “magically and quickly” change. A firm’s shares begin to move “more closely with its 499 new neighbors and less closely with the rest of the market. It is as if it has joined a new school of fish.”
  • A far bigger concern is that the rise of the indexers might be making American firms less competitive, through “common ownership,” in which the mega-asset managers control large stakes in multiple competitors in the same industry. The passive firms control big chunks of the airlines American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United, for instance
  • The rise of common ownership might be perverting corporate behavior in weird ways, academics argue. Think about the incentives like this: Let’s imagine that you are a major shareholder in a public widget company. We’d expect you to desire—insist, even—that the company fight for market share and profits. But now imagine that you are a major shareholder in all the important widget companies. You would no longer really care which one succeeded, particularly not if one company doing better meant another company doing worse. You’d just care about the widget sector’s corporate profits, which would go up if the widget companies quit competing with one another and started raising prices to pad their bottom line.
  • one major paper showed that common ownership of airline stocks had the effect of raising ticket prices by 3 to 7 percent.
  • A separate study showed that consumers are paying higher prices for prescription medicines because generic-drug makers have less incentive to compete with the companies making name-brand drugs.
  • Yet another study showed that common ownership is leading retail banks to charge higher prices.
  • Across firms, executive compensation seems to be more closely linked to a company’s performance when its shareholders are not invested in the company’s rivals, the study found. In other words, firms stop paying managers for performance when owned by the same people who own their rivals.
  • The market clout of the indexers raises other questions too. The actual owners of the stocks—not the index-fund managers but the people putting money into index funds—have little say over the companies they own. Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, not Mom and Dad, vote in shareholder elections
  • In fact, the Big Three cast roughly 25 percent of the votes in S&P 500 companies.
  • In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the chief executive officer of State Street said he thought it was “almost inevitable, when you see this kind of concentration, that it probably will make sense to do something about it.”
  • But figuring out what the appropriate restrictions are depends on determining just what the problem with the indexers is—are they distorting price signals, raising the cost of consumer goods, posing financial systemic risk, or do they just have the market cornered? Then, what to do about it? Common ownership is not a problem the government is used to handling.
  • , thanks to the passive revolution, a broad variety and huge number of firms might have less incentive to compete. The effect on the real economy might look a lot like that of rising corporate concentration. And the two phenomena might be catalyzing one another, as index investing increases the number of mergers and makes them more lucrative.
  • In recent decades, the whole economy has gone on autopilot. Index-fund investment is hyperconcentrated. So is online retail. So are pharmaceuticals. So is broadband. Name an industry, and it is likely dominated by a handful of giant players. That has led to all sorts of deleterious downstream effects: suppressing workers’ wages, raising consumer prices, stifling innovation, stoking inequality, and suffocating business creation
  • The problem is not just the indexers. It is the public markets they reflect, where more chaos, more speculation, more risk, more innovation, and more competition are desperately needed.
zoegainer

Barr Is Said to Be Weighing Whether to Leave Before Trump's Term Ends - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...arr-considering-resigning.html

trump Politics US

shared by zoegainer on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • It was not clear whether the attorney general’s deliberations were influenced by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr. Bar
  • r’s acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he still had confidence in his attorney general.
  • By leaving early, Mr. Barr could avoid a confrontation with the president over his refusal to advance Mr. Trump’s efforts to rewrite the election results.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Mr. Barr, 70, is the strongest proponent of presidential power to hold the office of attorney general since Watergate.
  • He managed to heal fissures between the White House and the Justice Department that broke open when the president learned that his campaign was under investigation related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
  • But weeks after taking office, Mr. Barr released a summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that a judge later called distorted and misleading
  • And after the election, Mr. Barr opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, authorizing federal prosecutors to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before results were certified.
  • In October, he secretly appointed Mr. Durham a special counsel assigned to seek out any wrongdoing in the course of the Russia investigation.
  • Pairing the Durham announcement with that revelation was widely seen as an effort to placate Mr. Trump, who was said to be enraged that Mr. Barr had publicly contradicted him.
  • Throughout the presidential campaign, Mr. Barr was among the loudest voices warning that mail-in ballots would result in mass election fraud. He routinely claimed in speeches and interviews that the potential for widespread voter fraud was high and posed a grave danger. Mr. Barr’s claims were sometimes false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.
  • “I don’t have empirical evidence other than the fact that we’ve always had voting fraud. And there always will be people who attempt to do that,” Mr. Barr said in September. He called his conclusions “common sense.”
  • Mr. Barr soon asked John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to open an investigation into the Russia inquiry itself to seek out any wrongdoing under the Obama administration
  • Mr. Barr broke his silence a few days later, telling The Associated Press that he had not seen evidence of election fraud on a scale that would have changed the fact that Mr. Biden won.
  • “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said.
saberal

After Second Impeachment, Giuliani Vows to Support Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-giuliani.html

politics US crisis trump

shared by saberal on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When Rudolph W. Giuliani was treating his efforts to carry out President Trump’s wishes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as a payment opportunity — he proposed a daily retainer of $20,000 for his legal services from the burgeoning Trump campaign legal fund — the president dismissed it and responded by demanding to personally approve each expense.
  • Even as he complains about Mr. Giuliani’s latest efforts as fruitless, the president remains unusually deferential to him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Mr. Trump has told advisers.
  • But only up to a point. While Mr. Trump and his advisers balked at the $20,000 request weeks ago, it is unclear whether the president will sign off on Mr. Giuliani being paid anything other than expenses.
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  • Few people have had such durability with the president, and few have been so willing to say and do things for him that others will not.
  • “I don’t mind being shut down for my craziness,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Giuliani, according to Alexander Panetta, a reporter for CBC News who listened to the podcast before it was removed. “I’m not going to be shut down for yours.”
  • In return, Mr. Giuliani, who failed at his own bid for the presidency in 2008, got to hang out with the president in the Oval Office and used his new connections to pursue lucrative contracts.
  • Mr. Giuliani stepped into the president’s legal affairs in April 2018. His eagerness to attack Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, impressed Mr. Trump, who was constantly making changes to his legal team. Most Trump advisers came to see Mr. Giuliani’s efforts with Mr. Mueller as a success.
  • Mr. Giuliani’s own legal problems have mounted alongside those of the president. As Mr. Giuliani pursued separate business opportunities in Ukraine, intelligence agencies warned that he could have been used by Russian intelligence officers seeking to spread disinformation about the election — reports that Mr. Trump shrugged off. Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine continues to be a matter of interest in a continuing investigation by federal prosecutors in New York.
  • In a 37-minute video published Wednesday evening, Mr. Giuliani tried to rewrite the history of the Capitol riot. Although Mr. Trump incited his supporters to march to the building and “show strength,” Mr. Giuliani suggested in the video that antifa activists had been involved, a repeatedly debunked theory that has proliferated in pro-Trump circles online.“The rally ended up to some extent being used as a fulcrum in order to create something else totally different that the president had nothing to do with,” Mr. Giuliani said.
  • “He’s not alone,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump Organization consultant, said of the president. “He’s abandoned. Rudy’s just the last in a whole group of people.”
katherineharron

The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
  • Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.
  • The most telling lie: It didn't rain on his inaugurationclose dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-group bx-group-default bx-group-1245864-3DW
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
  • The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
  • The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control
  • This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.
  • more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
  • The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate
  • Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm
  • Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
  • The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts
  • When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.
  • A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
  • The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda
  • The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion
  • It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.
  • So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
  • The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before
  • according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.
  • The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels
  • he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
  • The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation
  • ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.
  • The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions
  • When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,
  • Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them
  • The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice
  • Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
  • That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
  • The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer
  • At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.
  • his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."
  • The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks
  • Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."
  • My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year
  • Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.
  • The most depressing lie: Trump won the election
  • Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
kaylynfreeman

President Biden's 17 Executive Orders in Detail - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-executive-orders.html

Politics US trump history crisis policy pandemic gop economics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 21 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — In 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations signed hours after his inauguration, President Biden moved swiftly on Wednesday to dismantle Trump administration policies his aides said have caused the “greatest damage” to the nation.
  • Mr. Biden has signed an executive order appointing Jeffrey D. Zients as the official Covid-19 response coordinator who will report to the president, in an effort to “aggressively” gear up the nation’s response to the pandemic. The order also restores the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group Mr. Trump had disbanded.
  • With an executive order, Mr. Biden has bolstered the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects from deportation immigrants brought to the United States as children, often called Dreamers. Mr. Trump sought for years to end the program, known as DACA. The order also calls on Congress to enact legislation providing permanent status and a path to citizenship for those immigrants.
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  • Chief among executive orders that begin to tackle the issue of climate change, Mr. Biden has signed a letter to re-enter the United States in the Paris climate accords, which it will officially rejoin 30 days from now. In 2019, Mr. Trump formally notified the United Nations that the United States would withdraw from the coalition of nearly 200 countries working to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.
  • Mr. Biden will end the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, which released a report on Monday that historians said distorted the role of slavery in the United States, among other history. Mr. Biden also revoked Mr. Trump’s executive order limiting the ability of federal agencies, contractors and other institutions to hold diversity and inclusion training.
  • Mr. Biden is moving to extend a federal moratorium on evictions and has asked agencies, including the Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development Departments, to prolong a moratorium on foreclosures on federally guaranteed mortgages that was enacted in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The extensions all run through at least the end of March.
  • Following in the footsteps of some of his predecessors, Mr. Biden has established ethics rules for those who serve in his administration that aim “to restore and maintain trust in the government.” He has ordered all of his appointees in the executive branch to sign an ethics pledge.
Javier E

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price | Climate change | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crimes-oil-and-gas-environment

oil gas fraud climate denialism corporate history politics

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public
  • for the first time in decades, the lawsuits chart a path toward public accountability that climate activists say has the potential to rival big tobacco’s downfall after it concealed the real dangers of smoking.
  • “Things have to get worse for the oil companies,” he added. “Even if they’ve got a pretty good chance of winning the litigation in places, the discovery of pretty clearcut wrong doing – that they knew their product was bad and they were lying to the public – really weakens the industry’s ability to resist legislation and settlements.”
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  • or decades, the country’s leading oil and gas companies have understood the science of climate change and the dangers posed by fossil fuels. Year after year, top executives heard it from their own scientists whose warnings were explicit and often dire.
  • In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.
  • o investigate the lengths of the oil and gas industry’s deceptions – and the disastrous consequences for communities across the country – the Guardian is launching a year-long series tracking the unprecedented efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account.
  • the legal reasoning behind foreign court judgments are unlikely to carry much weight in the US and domestic law is largely untested. In 2018, a federal court knocked back New York City’s initial attempt to force big oil to cover the costs of the climate crisis by saying that its global nature requires a political, not legal, remedy.
  • Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a “balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate denialism in any developed country.
  • Other climate lawsuits, including one filed in Minnesota, allege the oil firms’ campaigns of deception and denial about the climate crisis amount to fraud. Minnesota is suing Exxon, Koch Industries and an industry trade group for breaches of state law for deceptive trade practices, false advertising and consumer fraud over what the lawsuit characterises as distortions and lies about climate science.
  • Farber said cases rooted in claims that the petroleum industry lied have the most promising chance of success.“To the extent the plaintiffs can point to misconduct, like telling everybody there’s no such thing as climate change when your scientists have told you the opposite, that might give the courts a greater feeling of comfort that they’re not trying to take over the US energy system,” he said.
  • Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.
  • Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.
  • “The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.
  • The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.
  • newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.
  • Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.
  • In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.
  • Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
  • The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.
  • “Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”
Javier E

Extremist rhetoric from rightwing media and officials is 'intensifying', experts say | US politics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ing-media-fox-news-republicans

right-wing media officials rhetoric extremist crisis culture GOP

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • Away from Fox News, Pearson Sharp, a host on the hard-right One America News Network (OANN), has been attempting to carve out his own niche of extremism. In late June, Sharp raised the unhinged and untrue theory that “tens of thousands” of people meddled in the election to prevent Trump winning, and went even further than Carlson in his comments.
  • “In the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution,” Sharp said.
  • Robert Herring, the CEO of OANN, said: “He was only telling what [sic] could happen if you try to over throw America ... He gave the laws that would apply.”
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  • Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, whose newly released book Hoax explores how Fox News covered Trump, told an interviewer in June that the US had entered an environment “where the Fox base” prefers “propagandistic opinion shows [rather] than any semblance of news”.
  • “People want to be lied to, and it’s above my head to know what to do about that,” Stelter told the Washington Post. “What do we do about that, when millions of people want to be lied to every day?”
  • The hysteria is not limited to television. Last week Vice leaked video of a speech by Scott Perry, a Republican congressman and devotee of the false stolen election theory, in which Perry told the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference that they should “go fight them”, referring to Democrats.
  • Vice reported that Perry claimed many Democrats did not share the same American values as conservatives.
  • “We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter,” Perry said, before drawing a dark parallel.
  • “We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Not every not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and 40s was in the Nazi party. They weren’t. But what happened across Germany? That’s what’s important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That’s what we have to focus on.”
  • The comments by Perry, an influential member of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, add further context to what experts fear is the current state of the American right – dangerous, intensifying, and with no end in sight.
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