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counterpunches · 1 year ago

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There's so much to unpack here and so much incorrectly and inappropriately used terminology, but no amount of effort and information is going to convince some people that Israel is not a white settler colonial state (Jews have lived on the land since ancient times x; 70% of the current Israeli population are brown and black Jews who have been ethnically cleansed from the other African and Middle Eastern Arab nations like Libya, Jordan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, x x; 60% the land that was offered to the Jews by the British aka actual white colonialists in the 1947 UN Partition Plan was desert) x or that they're not attempting genocide (Palestinian population has grown in the past thirty years; Egypt also enforces the blockade and security wall and no one is BDSing them???; Israel is the only one to have ever offered Palestinians their own sovereignty and state despite both Egypt and Jordan having had control of the territories) of an indigenous population (Jews are as indigenous to the region as Palestinians).

Has there been a disgusting right-wing political party in power in the Israeli government? Yes. (Have the majority of Israelis been protesting loudly for months against this government and their policies much the same way many Americans did while Trump was President? Yes x x) Are there abuses of power and Israeli settlers committing domestic terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank? Yes. (Is Israel itself an apartheid state for Arabs and Muslims? No. Arabic is one of the three official languages of Israel, along with Hebrew and English.Do Arabs face discrimination? Certainly they can.America lets not call the kettle black, shall we?)

But fine, whatever. Keep whatever narrative you want. But what I can't refrain from is addressing blatant lies and manipulation made in some of the links and statements made at the outset of the post. So one at a time, here goes:

First, the narrative was Israel would never bomb hospitals While Israel could certainly bomb a hospital if they wanted to, the article linked in the post is from October 18th, and it has since been proven that the rocket was a failed launch by Hamas, hit a parking lot near the hospital and killed 12-100 people as opposed to the 500+ initially reported x, x, x, x, x

Now, the hospitals are Hamas bases Israel has always maintained that mosques, schools, and hospitals have served as Hamas bases x and additional intelligence confirms reports x, x

First, we are not letting fuel in until the hostages are released. Now, we are not accepting the hostages back because that would stop our ground invasion and let Hamas win the article linked above literally explains why Israel didn't accept the hostage deal, because Hamas demanded 5 days to get those 50 hostages and "refused to provide a detailed list of the hostages who would be released" and also idk, maybe people change their minds as new information is released throughout the course of a conflict and hostage negotiations drag on? also idk, its a common tactic to not want to negotiate with terrorists?

If you look up "Hamas rape" on google, the first link leads to Times of Israel saying Israel has found no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and only one eyewitness testimony out of 3.5k people attending the rave Several people already commented about this in the notes, but jfc the link provide literally describes why there's "no forensic evidence of sexual violence" is because they were focused on identifying bodies and physical proof is limited due to bodies either being burned or decomposing and too much time has passed for legal evidence. there are dozens of statements from people collecting bodies that they've seen evidence of rape, also video evidence, as well as both victim and perpetrator testimonies ("believe women" but not if they're Israeli women, I guess). An article from yesterday, November 14, states they're still trying to build rape cases with other evidence.

If you Google "Hamas beheaded babies" the top links say they have no evidence for the claim besides word of mouth from extremist soldiers. Israeli extremists think about the ugliest goriest scene they can make out in their sick heads, tell that to a international journalist and they run away with it like it's gospel. There's nothing to suggest the soldier interviewed is an extremist, Unless by 'extremist', thats just supposed to means "Israeli" so therefore all Israelis are extremists? but yeah, international journalists tend to run with something that is a good headline even when they really, really shouldn't. Like, idk 'Israel bombs hospital, 500+ dead' using nothing but reports from an Iranian-proxy genocidal terrorist organization x x Volunteers with emergency response groups have described babies with marks from a kitchen oven on its body, severed limbs, stabbed in the head, tortured, confirmed photographs of bodies riddled with bullets, bodies burnt. (love that the argument for the radicalized is "ok so babies were murdered but they weren't beheaded, god" as if that somehow justifies either what happened or your reaction to it)

The situation for innocent Palestinians is a horrific and dire crisis. Spreading misinformation or skewing it to be intentionally misleading when the situation is complicated enough is a pretty shitty thing to do.

Follow qualified journalists who are dedicated to speaking truth and admitting where there might be bias in their own perspectives!! (Yes, its hard to find these! But worthwhile to do! Here are some listed below!)

There are plenty of non-Jewish Iranian voices like yashari ali and the wellness therapist, left wing trans Jews like dana levinson and queer Arab Israelis like Muhammad Zoabi, non-Jewish educators like Sharon McMahon out there speaking against Hamas and Iran, against right-wing Israeli politics and settlers, against antisemitism, against Islamophobia.

Be constructive. Donate to organizations helping on the ground like The Alliance for Middle East Peace, Doctors without Borders, or World Central Kitchen.

And for the love of god, do some fucking research.

Subscribe to news media with perspectives outside your own so the world isn't a mirror but a window. Especially when its this important. Too many lives around the world depend on it.

I can't stop thinking about the news out of Palestine. Israel is sieging al Shifa hospital. Videos of people's limbs being severed off are haunting (graphic video tw). The hospital has ran out of fuel and 39 babies in incubators are fending for their lives by themselves, because Israel has stationed snipers around the hospital and is shooting all medical crew that walks into their sight.

First, the narrative was Israel would never bomb hospitals. Now, the hospitals are Hamas bases. Then, we respect journalists. Now, we have a fucking kill list of journalists because they are Hamas collaborators. First, we are not letting fuel in until the hostages are released. Now, we are not accepting the hostages back because that would stop our ground invasion and let Hamas win. And I could go on about every single lie they're making up. If you look up "Hamas rape" on google, the first link leads to Times of Israel saying Israel has found no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and only one eyewitness testimony out of 3.5k people attending the rave. If you Google "Hamas beheaded babies" the top links say they have no evidence for the claim besides word of mouth from extremist soldiers. Israeli extremists think about the ugliest goriest scene they can make out in their sick heads, tell that to a international journalist and they run away with it like it's gospel.

And children are being killed in the name of these lies. Thousands are being displaced in images that remind me of the pictures of Tantura 75 years ago, with their hands up so the tanks don't shoot them. Amputees are leaving the hospitals in wheelchairs hours after their surgeries because they are being shot at. Elders who survived the Nakba on 48 are having to walk towards Southern Gaza on foot (imagine walking from one end of your city to the other on foot), displaced again. People are cheering for the haunting images of white phosphorus bombs being dropped over Gaza. Gazan workers who were arrested in the West Bank are being thrust back into the bombings wearing numbered labels.

This is not normal. We are seeing the early stages of the settler colonial genocide of an indigenous population. Native leaders who have visited Gaza say its refugee camps look eerily like reservations. We can stop this. For the first time we are able to see wide scale accounts from the hands of the people suffering the genocide, and Israel is so scared of it they have cut all communications in Gaza.

This is our litmus test. I think we have never seen more clearly, with Palestine, Armenia, Congo and Sudan how colonialism has made our world a rotten place to live in.

The South African apartheid collapsed due to boycotts. We have to do everything in our power to stop Israel's hegemony. Even talking to a group of friends about Palestine changes the status quo. There's no world where we can live peacefully if Israel accomplishes their goals.

Educate yourself. Read into Palestinian history and the occupation. You can't common sense people out of decades of propaganda. If your arguments crumble when a zionist brings up the "disengagement of Gaza", you have to learn more.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe).

Keep yourself updated and share Palestinian voices. Muna El-Kurd said every tweet is like a treasure to them, because their voices are repressed on social media and even on this very app. Make it your action item to share something about the Palestinian plight everyday. Here are some resources:

Al Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, Mondoweiss

Boycott Divest Sanction Movement

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing protests and direct action against weapons factories across the US

Mohammed El-Kurd (twitter / instagram)

Muhammad Shehada (twitter)

Motaz Azaiza (instagram) - reporting directly from Gaza.

Hind Khudary - reporting directly from Gaza. Her husband and daughter moved South to run from the tanks but she stayed behind to record the genocide. The least we can do is not let her calls fall on deaf ears.

You can participate in boycotts wherever you are in the world, through BDS guidelines. Don't be overwhelmed by gigantic boycott lists. BDS explicitly targets only a few brands which have bigger impact. You can stop consuming from as many brands as you want, though, and by all means feel free to give a 1 star review to McDonalds, Papa John, Pizza Hut, Burger King and Starbucks. Right now, they are focusing on boycotting the following:

Carrefour, HP, Puma, Sabra, Sodastream, Ahava cosmetics, Israeli fruits and vegetables

Push for a cultural boycott - pressure your favorite artist to speak out on Palestine and cancel any upcoming performances on occupied territory (Lorde cancelled her gig in Israel because of this. It works.)

If you can, participate in direct action or donate.

Palestine Action works to shut down Israeli weapons factories in the UK and USA, and have successfully shut down one of their firms in London.Some of the activists are going on trial and are calling for mobilizing on court.

Palestinian Youth Movement is organizing direct actions to stop the shipping of wars to Israel. Follow them.

Read Decolonize Palestine. They have 15 minute reads that concisely explain the occupation (and its colonial roots) and debunk popular myths, including pinkwashing.

Read on Palestine. Here's an amazing masterpost.

Verso Book Club is giving out free books on Palestine (I personally downloaded Ten Myths about Israel by Ilan Pappe. If you still believe in the two states solution, this book by an Israeli professor debunks it).

Call your representatives. The Labour Party in the UK had an emergency meeting after several councilors threatened to resign if they didn't condemn Israeli war crimes. Calling to show your complaints works, even more if you live in a country that funds genocide.

FOR PEOPLE IN THE USA: USCPR has developed this toolkit for calls, here's a document that autosends emails to your representatives and here's a toolkit by Ceasefire in Gaza NOW!

FOR PEOPLE IN EUROPE: Here's a toolkit by Voices in Europe for Peace targeting the European Parliament and one specific for almost all countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Austria, Belgium Romania and Ukraine

FOR PEOPLE IN THE UK: Friends of Al-Aqsa UK and Palestine Solidarity UK have made toolkits for calls and emails

FOR PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA: Here's a toolkit by Stand With Palestine

FOR PEOPLE IN CANADA: Here's a toolkit by Indepent Jewish Voices for Canada

Join a protest. Here's a constantly updating list of protests:

Global calendar

Another global calendar (go to the instragram of the organizers to confirm your protest)

USA calendar

Australia calendar

Feel free to add more.

#israel

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Monopolists are winning the repair wars

In 2018, dozens of states introduced Right to Repair bills. These bills are wildly popular among voters, but wildly unpopular among monopolists ranging from Apple to Microsoft to Google to GM to John Deere to Wahl. Every one of these bills was defeated.

Repair advocates regrouped for 2021. 27 R2R bills have been introduced at the state level. Every single one that came up for a vote was defeated, thanks to aggressive lobbying by an unholy alliance of the country’s largest, most profitable, least taxpaying corporations.

In 2014, a pair of American political scientists published a groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper analyzing 30 years’ worth of US policy-making that compared policy outcomes to public polling results.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#authors-details

They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making — but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.

Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.

Take auto-repair. As auto-manufacturing has grown more concentrated, car makers have squeezed independent mechanics — as close to a folk-hero as the American imagination can produce! — to the margins.

After all, forcing car owners to use official service depots has huge advantages: manufacturers can gouge on service prices, they can force drivers to buy expensive original parts, and they get to unilaterally decide when a car is beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.

Drivers have a good intuitive sense that this is going on. That’s why, when Bay Staters voted on Massachusetts Question 1 (an automotive R2R ballot initiative) in 2012, it passed with an 86% majority!

Mass Question 1 is a really good example of how monopolists can arm-twist politicians into frustrating the will of the people. Immediately after the 2012 initiative, auto-makers set about retooling their cars to escape the new right to repair rule.

The 2012 rule forced automakers to give mechanics access to diagnostic info from cars’ wired internal networks, so Big Car moved all the useful diagnostic data to their cars’ wireless networks. Hence the 2020 Massachusetts R2R ballot initiative, which closed this loophole.

The 2020 fight over the Mass. R2R ballot initiative was fuckin’ wild. The car-makers ran some seriously freaky scare-ads, in which the ability of auto mechanics to read wireless diagnostic data led directly to women being stalked and murdered.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

I’m not making this up. The underlying premise was, “We turned your car into a hyper-aggressive mobile surveillance platform that incidentally gets you places. If we let other people see the data we’re nonconsensually extracting from you, it will put you in terrible danger.”

Thankfully, Bay Staters saw through this bullshit and passed 2020’s Question 1 with a 75% majority.

The thing is, people completely understand that they should be in charge of deciding who fixes their stuff.

They understand that the risk of poor repairs should be addressed through consumer protection laws (which also bind monopolists’ own authorized repair depots), not by having the repair market privately regulated by monopolists who have vast conflicts of interest.

This understanding has only deepened through the pandemic year, as authorized repair depots shuttered and vital equipment languished thanks to anti-repair laws and technological countermeasures.

For example, Medtronic’s workhorse PB840 ventilators couldn’t be refurbed without using a grey-market activation dongle that a single Polish med-tech homebrewed, encasing them in cases harvested from busted clock-radios and guitar pedals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Medtronic — a med-tech monopolist that effected the largest corporate inversion in history to escape US taxes — argues that letting independent med-techs fix its products puts patients at risk, but this argument is every bit as flimsy as the auto-makers’ Mass. scare-ads.

It ignores three important facts:

I. Med-techs have always done this kind of repair. The change isn’t that med-techs are demanding the right to do something new — it’s that Medtronic leveraged its monopoly to foreclose on the industry-standard practice

II. Medtronic’s own security track-record is comically terrible. This is the company that makes pacemakers that can be wirelessly hacked from across a room to kill its user, whose software update system doesn’t even use cryptographic signatures.

If Medtronic is an expert on any aspect of patient safety, that expertise is certainly hard-won, derived from its long history of lethal patient endangerment.

III. If there is a problem with indie technicians struggling to fix Medtronic products, the obvious answer is to provide service manuals, parts and diagnostic codes.

The case for Right to Repair is incredibly strong. Not only does R2R protect consumers from ripoffs, it also provides local jobs — 1–4% of US GDP comes from the independent repair sector, almost entirely in independent small/medium businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

Repair is an important environmental, labor and human rights story. As leaked internal memos demonstrate, Apple’s aggressively landfilling of devices (so customers buy more) is environmentally devastating and creates demand for conflict minerals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#e-waste-apple

The average American family loses $330/year because of the lack of access to independent repair, a $40b annual drag on the economy thanks to monopoly rents collected by monopoly firms.

To say nothing of the impact on jobs: landfilling a kiloton of ewaste creates <1 job; recycling that waste creates 15 jobs, while repairing it creates 200 good, local jobs that can’t be offshored (you don’t send a phone overseas for repair).

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Jobs-Revolution

Then there’s the food security story: John Deere is an agribusiness monopolist that outraged farmers by claiming that they didn’t own the tractors they paid six figures for, merely “licensed” them on terms that forbade them from fixing their own machines.

Deere leads Big Ag’s anti-repair, forcing farmers to use official parts, preventing modifications that would allow third-party attachments, and collecting outrageous service call fees for a technician whose job is to unlock the tractor after the farmer replaces a part.

This policy means that farmers who fix their own tractors still can’t use them even if there’s a hail-storm coming and they need to bring in the crop. Farmers — who’ve been fixing their own gear since the first farmer built a forge next to their farmhouse — are desperate.

Some farmers download anonymously maintained Ukrainian firmware and overwrite the Deere software, creating unknowable risk of remote attack. Others have to maintain “backup tractors” they use for weeks while waiting for Deere to fix their equipment.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000400896/standoff-between-farmers-and-tractor-makers-intensifies-over-repair-issues

Just like Medtronic and GM, Deere claims that allowing independent service creates infosec risk — but just like its anti-repair comrades, Deere’s own infosec is a dumpster-fire, with tractors across America at risk of mass-scale cyber-attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

The common thread joining these firms is monopoly: a lack of competition that allows them to extract billions from the public, and a cozy cohort of business leaders who can mobilize that loot to ensure that politicians and regulators don’t give the public what it demands.

American industry is experiencing a wave of monopolism not seen since the Gilded Age, and it affects every sector. Take hair-clippers — a category that exploded during the lockdown thanks to the newly created need for home haircuts.

The clipper market is monopolized by a single firm, Wahl. As I discovered — the hard way — Wahl has designed its newest clippers so they disintegrate if you try to take them apart to sharpen them.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1380554358824136706

Instead of sharpening these devices, you’re expected to buy a new $40 blade (for a shaver that costs $60 all in!), and throw out the old one — or, less realistically, you can mail them your razor for factory sharpening.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Wahl is part of the war on repair, sending letters to state legislators warning that letting people sharpen their own clipper blades could lead to fatal housefires.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4446374-Wahl-Opposition-Illinois.html

Two years ago, the FTC convened an inquiry on independent repair called “Nixing the Fix.” The Nixing the Fix report was released earlier this month, and it affirms everything that repair advocates have said all along.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

The FTC calls bullshit on manufacturers’ claims about cyber-risk, housefires, and whether getting your car fixed by your family’s beloved mechanic will lead to your murder. It broadly and firmly endorses Right to Repair.

Which brings me back to 2021, were every one of the 27 R2R bills that has been brought before a state legislature for a vote has been defeated, thanks to heavy corporate lobbying by monopolists.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-20/microsoft-and-apple-wage-war-on-gadget-right-to-repair-laws

These bills were voted down after heartbreaking testimony from ed-tech repair specialists who described the devastating impact that a broken laptop has on poor families whose kids are doing remote learning.

They were voted down despite the record, the public support, the climate questions, the food security issue, the human rights issues — voted down to preserve the monopoly profits of a tiny number of firms whose claim to being “American” is tenuous at best.

These tax-dodging, offshoring companies view the American public as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and disclaim any responsibility to the country — while still expecting its lawmakers to defend their interests, at the expense of the voters.

Image: Jcaravanos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E-waste_workers.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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niafrazier · 6 years ago

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Making the Case for Beto O’Rourke

Full disclaimer: Beto is one of my top picks amongst the 2020 democratic field as of now. I’m a supporter but am in no way affiliated with his official campaign.

At a certain point, Beto O’Rourke was hailed by the media as basically the second coming of Obama, RFK, JFK, [insert any popular democratic figure from this past century… oh and Abe Lincoln]. After he unsuccessfully attempted to unseat Ted Cruz in the senate race, many people across the country were calling him to run for the presidency. He even surged in polling being just behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both who virtually have 100% name recognition. His senate race garnered national attention and even caught Oprah’s attention (she practically begged him to run on her show FFS). Many (including me) grew to admire his authentic, organic, and down-to-earth approach to politics, which is especially refreshing to see given the fact that everything seems so contrived nowadays. So, he wrestled with his decision thoughtfully and eventually came around to the idea, officially tossing his hat into the ring on March 14th, 2019. But now? Right out the gate, the narrative has shifted, and to the mainstream media pundits and Twittersphere, he is seen as an empty-suited, entitled, misogynistic, arrogant dude dripping with white male privilege. What changed? How is it that the media, the very one that contributed to the rise of “Betomania,” subsequently went into a frenzy and poo-pooed all over his rollout? The faux outrage, double standards, and cynicism directed at Beto by opinion writers, pundits, etc. have basically motivated me to give my own takes on the most common criticisms I’ve seen thus far. So, here we go:

“ ‘Man, I’m just born to be in it?’ ”

I’m not gonna lie, taking a look at the Vanity Fair cover and seeing that quote was a facepalm moment. As predicted, this quote sparked outrage fairly quickly… given the optics of a privileged straight white man joining a race of several qualified women and POC… Understandably so. However, upon reading through the whole article, I was able to grasp the essence of Beto’s words. Here’s what he says leading up to his declaration, expressing urgency:

“This is the fight of our lives…not the fight-of-my-political-life kind of crap. But, like, this is the fight of our lives as Americans, and as humans, I’d argue.”

And now here’s the full quote: “Man, I’m just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment.”

He’s not so much saying that he was born to be in a position of power, rather, he’s expressing that during such dire times, especially in U.S. democracy, he could not in good conscience be complacent and not take action. Just as he was drawn to serve his district in El Paso as a 6 year city council member and a 3-term congressman, he believes that at this moment, he has a purpose to serve the whole nation by being as actively involved in the national discussion as possible—to stand up to bigotry and divisiveness displayed by the current administration of the White House. Beto basically confirmed what I had thought after further inspection when he clarified his statement later (Google it. I’m having trouble with my hyperlinks right now). Could he have worded it better? Sure. I just reject the notion that this one gaffe is supposed to sum him up as an egotistical maniac… please.

“He adds absolutely no value to the race”

This is arbitrary depending on what your key issues are, but I’m gonna give my take on why I think he’s an excellent addition to the race. So, I’ve been intrigued about the possibility of an O’Rourke presidential run since he’s hinted at it back in November. I really didn’t know much about him until toward the end of Midterm season, but the more I learned, the more impressed I became. (Side note: it was this clip that first caught my full attention.) What really fueled my interest in Beto though, was his stance on immigration. As a first generation Nigerian American, this topic is pretty personal to me. My parents were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to immigrate to America and raise me and my three other siblings. However, I’ve also seen firsthand the difficulty of not only getting through with the ridiculous process but also assimilating into this country. For so long, the Democrats haven’t really made immigration a central issue, until the Trump administration hijacked it and pushed the Overton window all the way to the right. With heightened xenophobia running rampant in this country as a result of this abhorrent presidency, it is pertinent that the Democrats not merely pay lip service to this issue any longer and take serious action. Beto has an advantage here: He’s grown up in and served as a U.S House Rep. in the border district of El Paso, also home to the largest binational community in the Northern hemisphere. He can add a lot to the national discussion and debate on the matter. When Trump came to El Paso, the local community organized a counter rally where Beto gave an impassioned speech about the border wall and immigration. It’s pretty long, but I highly recommend the watch. Furthermore, Beto has outlined a 10 point proposal on how best to approach the immigration issue, along with some facts about the border’s history, which you can read here. Immigration hasn’t really been a winning issue, and I honestly don’t see it being one in 2020. With that being said, I respect the fact that despite this, Beto has shown that this is an issue that he deeply cares about. If I’m being honest, even though comprehensive immigration reform is universally called for amongst Democrats, I doubt that anyone in the field will truly make immigration a main priority in their prospective presidencies. To me, Beto has shown that he will. Even if he doesn’t clinch the nomination, it still means a ton to me that we can have the potential to change the narrative of immigration in this country with serious discussion. With the way Beto is able to convey his message, I am hopeful for what’s to come.

So, let’s talk about Texas. With the way Beto was able to energize the Democratic base in Texas, Democrats have the opportunity to put the Republican bastion state into play. With 38 electoral votes at stake, Texas is extremely crucial for the GOP. To put things in perspective, if Texas turned blue in 2016, President Hillary Clinton would have been a thing.

*Bonus: “He Lost to Ted Cruz lol… already a nonstarter”

Yes. But you know who else lost to Ted in Texas? Donald Trump. Cruz obliterated him in the Texas Republican primaries. I’m not saying Texas is guaranteed to turn blue with Beto on the ballot, but if we learned anything in 2016, it’s not to underestimate the possibility of seemingly blue or red states to flip at any given moment. The GOP has taken note of this. We’ve seen that Beto has a ton of appeal in Texas amongst not only Democrats but Never-Trump-Republicans and independents as well! If Beto is on that ballot, the GOP will most likely exhaust a ton of resources and money into Texas to keep it from going blue. This will only make other states that Trump won with the slimmest of margins vulnerable. Also… I find it disingenuous to make comparisons between Beto and other senators that hail from deeply blue states regarding electability. If Beto lost to Ted in California, then yeah… we could have a conversation about that.

“A woman running mate is his preference? Who does he think he is?”

The backlash on this surprised me, to be honest… Even Whoopi Goldberg blasted his ass for the statement on The View. If I had to go on a whim here, I feel like it was the Vanity Fair article that sort of set the mood for Beto’s campaign thus far… because otherwise, I believe that this really wouldn’t have been a story. In fact, Beto is not the only male candidate to call for a woman VP. Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders have strongly hinted at choosing a woman running mate. Interestingly enough, I didn’t recall there being any backlash. Here are Beto’s full remarks on choosing a woman as his running mate:

"It would be very difficult not to select a woman with so many extraordinary women who are running right now, but first I would have to win and there's-- you know, this is as open as it has ever been."

This is very much the response I expected from Beto. Time and time again, he has openly acknowledged his privilege, even before getting hammered about it on social media. In the Vanity Fair article, he states his stance on lack of representation in Washington:

“The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.”

Furthermore, he is understanding and considerate of the fact that people are craving for diversity. Here’s what he says:

“But I totally understand people who will make a decision [cast a vote in the primaries] based on the fact that almost every single one of our presidents has been a white man, and they want something different for this country. And I think that’s a very legitimate basis upon which to make a decision. Especially in the fact that there are some really great candidates out there right now.”

I know I don’t speak for all POC or women, but as a WOC myself, I took no issue to his statements. In fact, I appreciate his sensitivity to the issue and the fact that he doesn’t shy away from addressing uncomfortable topics in politics, such as race and representation.

Let’s just be glad he didn’t pull a Hickenlooper…. Jesus.

“Light on policy… but he stands on counters amirite?”

To discuss this point, it’s important to understand Beto’s campaign style. Beto is more like a blank canvass. What he does is first listen to people and their concerns, and then from there, he shapes his policies around that. He feels that this is the best way to serve the people. The point of his road trips and tours was not to lecture people on full fleshed policy proposals. There is debate on whether or not this is an effective strategy, and I do understand that people do like to know exactly what they’re signing up for before casting a vote. That’s why some people will more likely gravitate toward candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who have been consistent in their messaging. However, I also think people underestimate the power of simply listening. Take these comments that a potential voter made concerning Beto’s ability to listen during his stop in South Carolina for example:

"I think if he keeps talking to the people and being able to listen, and not talk at the African-American voters. Talk to us. Listen to what we have to say… As long as you listen and then actually put forward ideas that are legitimate ideas to do things, then he will be fine.”

While policy specifics are important, this is still the early stages of Beto’s campaign. Specifics, of course, will have to come at some point, especially when debates come around. Another critique I hear is Beto not having any policy proposals on his website yet. He’s not alone though. Several candidates who have been running longer than he has don’t either. It’s also important to note that while people in the race most likely have been mulling a presidential run for several months or years, this has been something that came around to Beto as recent as November 2018. Stuff like this takes time. I think he has potential, however, in this area. For instance, as I mentioned earlier, he has put out a 10-point proposal on immigration. He also has a brief 5-point plan regarding criminal justice reform and legalization of marijuana. (Fun fact, he even coauthored a book concerning the legalization of weed.) And it’s not like he hasn’t taken stances on issues ever either… I mean, he has a whole congressional record, and his townhalls give you an idea of where he stands on key issues.

Oh... and about the countertops. Ugh. The fact that this really sparked outrage is comical. I’ve seen all sorts of takes on this from asserting his male dominance to throwing his youth in Bernie and Biden’s faces (lmao). At a campaign stop, the owner of the coffee shop that he was at asked him to stand on the countertop because people complained that they weren’t able to see Beto amongst the crowds and camera equipment (despite him being 6’4’’, ha). So then it just became a thing since. And he’s respectful about it in case anyone was wondering, lol. But there’s one thing I think both the Beto detractors and I can agree on: why tf is this getting media coverage? I do agree that there should be more coverage for other candidates concerning the real issues. However, the response shouldn’t be to go after Beto or chastise him for doing harmless acts during his campaign stops… Talk that up with the media. The ironic thing about this is that some of the media pundits complain about giving Beto so much coverage… all while giving Beto more coverage about the coverage he’s receiving… 🙄

So if you made it to the end of this extremely long effortpost, thank you. I actually had tons more to discuss but I’m not trying to make this into a novel. Anyways, I’ll say one last thing:

Before going along with groupthink or engaging in the toxic political echo chamber that is Twitter, I implore you all to take a step back and actually get to know these candidates. Seek after local news outlets when candidates visit to get a feel of the vibes from locals. Go to Beto’s Facebook page and watch a town hall or two. You may come home with a different impression than what is portrayed in mainstream media. I can tell you that when I did this, the difference was night and day. We have such an amazing field of contenders to choose from, and I’d hate for misinformation or bad-faith arguments to warp perceptions.

#beto o'rourke #2020 #democratic primary #2020 election #politics

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warninggraphiccontent · 4 years ago

Text

6 August 2021

The sun is shinin', come on get mappy

Ever found yourself floating aimlessly around the alphabet soup of UK government departments doing data, wondering who's responsible for what? Or lost track of all the interesting initiatives that you might be able to get involved with or learn from?

I'm delighted to be running a new project with the ODI that tries to help with that. We're mapping data responsibility and initiatives across the UK government here, so please do tell us what we've missed and comment on what we've already got. It'll be open for comments until Friday 10 September, so you have all summer to contribute.

There's a launch page explaining everything here, and we're also going to be publishing a blogpost a week focusing on a particular area of the ODI manifesto. This week is infrastructure week. Keep an eye on the ODI blog for future ones.

In other news:

A date for your diary - the 22nd Data Bites will be taking place on Wednesday 8 September at 6pm, thanks to ADR UK and the ESRC. Details will appear here in due course - which is also where you can catch up on the previous 21 events.

I'm also chairing an event for IfG at this year's Labour Party conference - more here.

I'm really sad to see this news about Understanding Patient Data (full disclosure - I'm doing some work for them at the moment). Natalie has done a terrific job, and I really hope their work is able to find a home elsewhere - it's more important than ever, given recent events.

Nick Timmins' new report on how the Department for Education handled the pandemic is well worth a read. Warning: contains mutant algorithms. Diginomica pull out some lessons on those here; my piece from last summer on that is here; and there are more links below.

If you enjoyed this account of what allegedly happened to that Spectator piece on Marcus Rashford (h/t Alice), pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy this story of something similar from my time at the Media Standards Trust.

I did it - my first half marathon since 2019. There's still time to sponsor me and donate to the excellent Tommy's, here.

Warning: Graphic Content will now be taking a break until September. I'll be posting some things on Medium as well as on Twitter in the meantime, so do follow me there. If you need some other data-related newsletters, podcasts or event series to tide you over, there's a list for that. And if you know anyone else who should subscribe, encourage them to start the new school/parliamentary term in September the right way by signing up.

Enjoy the summer, thanks for subscribing, and see you in September

Gavin

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Today's links:

Graphic content

Tokyo shift

Olympic records are being broken at a record pace* (The Economist)

How the Olympics became bigger and more diverse* (The Economist)

What the Tokyo medal table tells us halfway through the Games (BBC Sport)

Russia and Kenya take the podium in the athletics doping contest* (The Economist)

Tokyo Olympics: Will Team GB beat its record-breaking performance in Rio? (Sky News)

20 Chinese gold medal contenders at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (South China Morning Post)

Olympians are probably older — and younger — than you think* (Washington Post)

The Fastest Men In The World Are Still Chasing Usain Bolt (FiveThirtyEight)

Here's how Sydney McLaughlin of the U.S. won the 400-meter hurdles at #Tokyo2020, breaking her own world record (New York Times - more here)

Katie Ledecky's historic week, day by day* (Washington Post)

The Climber: Adam Ondra | The Hurdler: Dalilah Muhammad | The Gymnast: Sunisa Lee | The Swimmer: Simone Manuel (New York Times)

Viral content

Why are Covid cases falling in the UK?* (FT)

Excess deaths in your neighbourhood during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic (ONS)

COVID-19: Sewage surveillance reveals 'widespread increase' of coronavirus in England last month (Sky News)

Covid travel: which countries are on the green, amber and red lists? (The Guardian)

Tim Spector: the data explorer who uncovered vital clues to Covid* (FT)

Which Americans are against the jab?* (The Economist)

Chart: Less than 0.1% of vaccinated Americans tested positive for COVID-19 (Axios)

America is plummeting down the global vaccination league table* (The Economist)

Florida’s hospitals set a bleak pandemic record* (FT)

How Europe, After a Fumbling Start, Overtook the U.S. in Vaccination* (New York Times)

Side effects

Why the pandemic is not making your rent cheaper* (New Statesman)

New York City Homebuyers Are Back, and They’re Looking for Deals* (Bloomberg)

Net worth

How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes* (New Statesman)

Explore different settlements on the balance of power and what they mean for the future of the Internet (Demos)

Ransomware attacks rise despite US call for clampdown on cybercriminals* (FT)

Environment

Planetary ‘vital signs’ show extent of climate stress — and some hope* (FT)

How heat dome has sparked worst wildfires in a decade across parts of Southern Europe (Sky News)

Beyond human endurance: How climate change is making parts of the world too hot and humid to survive* (Washington Post)

Race

The 'ethnic data gap' on voters - and why it matters to parties and pollsters (Sky News)

Hollywood reaps the rewards of becoming more diverse* (The Economist)

The first ever machine generated map of the @UKParliament treaty procedure (UK Parliament)

Favourability towards Boris Johnson falls to lowest level since October (Ipsos MORI)

Productivity: firing on all cylinders (IfG)

Mathematician Hannah Fry: ‘I’m sure there’s lots of tutting — but not to my face* (FT)

Everywhere else

‘It’s Huge, It’s Historic, It’s Unheard-of’: Drug Overdose Deaths Spike* (The Upshot)

Elon Musk’s Outrageous Moonshot Award Catches on Across America* (Bloomberg)

Police shootings continue daily, despite a pandemic, protests and pushes for reform* (Washington Post)

People in the West are least worried about hurtful speech* (The Economist)

An Inca highway still benefits people living nearby* (The Economist)

German election 2021: The New Statesman’s poll tracker* (New Statesman)

Meta data

Information health

Statistics informing quarantine requirements for arrivals to England (Office for Statistics Regulation)

Review of NHS Test and Trace (England) and NHS COVID-19 app statistics (Office for Statistics Regulation)

What we mean by trustworthy use of patient data (Understanding Patient Data)

The future of Understanding Patient Data (Understanding Patient Data)

Lord Bethell’s new phone (Good Law Project)

UK government defends deleting all trace of job vacancies after appointing Matt Hancock's lover to health department board (Business Insider)

Education, education, education

Schools and coronavirus: The government’s handling of education during the pandemic (IfG)

The UK A-Level ‘COVID-19 algorithm fiasco’ and lessons for the enterprise (diginomica)

Four things government must learn from the A-level algorithm fiasco (me from last year for IfG)

More from last summer (W:GC)

Even more from last summer (W:GC)

Ensuring statistical models command public confidence: Learning lessons from the approach to developing models for awarding grades in the UK in 2020 (Office for Statistics Regulation, from March 2021)

AI got 'rithm

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped.* (MIT Technology Review)

I’m sorry Dave I’m afraid I invented that: Australian court finds AI systems can be recognised under patent law (The Guardian)

Bias in Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Magazine)

The ethics of recommendation systems in public-service media (Ada Lovelace Institute)

Britain can set 'gold standard' in ethical artificial intelligence - industry report (BCS)

ICO baby

The Information Commissioner's Office is letting us down* (Telegraph)

Response: ICO’s priorities and impact of our work (ICO)

New guidance on direct marketing and the public sector (ICO)

Thread (Tim Turner)

Information Rights Strategic Plan: Trust and Confidence - annual tracker (ICO)

UK government

Introduction to Data Quality course launched (Government Data Quality Hub)

A new model for modelling (Actuaries in government)

Six reasons why digital transformation is still a problem for government (NAO)

govcookiecutter: A template for data science projects (Data in government)

Radar – more than just wave detection (Defra digital)

Driving technology convergence and reuse in our Future Borders and Immigration System (Home Office Digital, Data and Technology)

The longlist (Civil Service Data Challenge)

Cabinet Office eyes ‘geographical capability map’ for civil servants (Civil Service World)

Next step in plans to govern use of digital identities revealed (DCMS)

Building a single sign-on for government: What we’ve learnt so far (Services in government)

ESRC launches opportunity to inform data infrastructure strategy (UKRI)

Keeping old computers going costs government £2.3bn a year, says report (BBC News - CSW had this last week)

2021 Deane-Stone Lecture: Ambitious, Radical, Inclusive and Sustainable: How a National Statistical Institute evolved through Covid-19 (Sir Ian Diamond for NIESR)

Taking the wiki

Left-leaning Wikipedia is no match for my shelf of dictionaries* (Telegraph)

There are 11,656 athletes at the Olympics. Guy Fraser wanted them all on Wikipedia (The Guardian)

A sense of place

‘X’ Marks the Spot: Officials Map a Route Out of the Pandemic* (New York Times)

What 3 Words is a Mess

Dis and that

Disinformation: It’s History (CIGI)

Why Generation Z falls for online misinformation (MIT Technology Review)

It's a jungle out there

Why Amazon’s £636m GDPR fine really matters* (Wired)

The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream* (Wired)

Open for the best

Natalia Carfi to carry the torch of openness (Open Data Charter)

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall (The Register)

The promise of open-source intelligence* (The Economist)

Private parts

Estonia says a hacker downloaded 286,000 ID photos from government database (The Record)

Here’s how police can get your data — even if you aren’t suspected of a crime (Recode)

Everything else

The social value of data (Bennett Institute)

BIG TECH’S DUTY OF CARE (New Economics Foundation)

Inequality just went stratospheric. Can we bring it down to earth?* (Prospect)

A New Tech ‘Cold War?’ Not for Europe. (AI Now Institute)

THE TIME TAX: Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens?* (The Atlantic)

Can data cooperatives sustain themselves? (LSE Business Review)

medConfidential note on the PRUK green paper and DARE project (medConfidential)

Measuring internet poverty (Brookings)

Data don’t lie, but they can lead scientists to opposite conclusions* (The Economist)

Opportunities

JOB: Head of Digital Data & Digital Democracy (London Borough of Newham, via Martin)

JOB: Executive Director (Digital Freedom Fund)

JOB: Senior Data Analyst (Common Wealth)

JOB: Visuals Project Editor - Visuals (The Guardian)

JOBS: Data for Science & Health team (Wellcome Trust)

JOB: Data Journalist (Tech Monitor, New Statesman Media Group)

JOBS: Data and Digitalisation programme (Ofgem, via Owen Boswarva)

JOB: Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement, Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (DCMS)

JOBS: Economic Advisers - The Digital and Tech Analysis team (DCMS)

JOBS: Modelling Hub Analyst Roles, Data & Analytical Services Directorate (MoJ)

JOB: Director of Analysis (MoD)

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP: Data, Visualisation and Storytelling (The National Archives)

JOB: Product Manager - Data (BBC, via Jukesie)

And finally...

Vennerable

In celebration of John Venn's 187th birthday today, here's a poem in the form of a Venn diagram. (Brian Bilston)

*whispers* that's not actually how they work, but fine, it's funny (@StandingHannah, via David)

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Markets Fret Over Halt to Johnson & Johnson’s Vaccine New worries about J.&.J.’s Covid vaccine Federal health officials have called for an immediate halt in using Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine, after recipients in the U.S. suffered blood clots within two weeks of vaccination. It could mark a hurdle for America’s inoculation efforts. Six women between age 18 to 48 developed a rare disorder involving blood clots. One died and another is hospitalized in critical care. Over all, nearly seven million people in the U.S. have received the J.&J. one-shot vaccine, and nine million more doses have been shipped to states. The move follows several countries’ limiting the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine after similar reports of blood clotting. Both shots are based on the same viral vector technology; vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna haven’t been associated with such risks. J&J’s share price fell nearly 3 percent in premarket trading and U.S. market futures turned negative on the news. It’s unclear how much the J.&J. halt will hurt the Biden administration’s goals, with the White House aiming to have enough vaccines to inoculate all adults in the country by the end of May. F.D.A. officials plan to hold a news conference at 10 a.m. Eastern, and you can listen here. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING More businesses take action against efforts to limit voting rights. Will Smith is pulling a forthcoming film production, backed by Apple, out of Georgia following its passage of voting restrictions. And a group of law firms, including Paul Weiss, Skadden and Cravath, plans to “challenge voter suppression legislation.” President Biden declares semiconductors as infrastructure. At a meeting with tech executives yesterday, Mr. Biden addressed a global chip shortage that has hurt manufacturers, tying the issue to his $2.3 trillion infrastructure spending plans. Britain’s Parliament will investigate David Cameron’s role advising Greensill. The former prime minister will face an independent inquiry into his work lobbying top government officials on behalf of the now-insolvent lender. Mr. Cameron has denied violating lobbying rules. Uber shows a strong rebound from the pandemic. The company reported a record number of bookings last month as Covid-19 vaccination rates rose and pandemic lockdowns lifted. But the company still has a problem: a dearth of drivers. Bitcoin sets a record, again. The cryptocurrency was trading at more than $62,000 this morning, continuing a weeklong run-up. That’s good for Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange whose shares are set to begin trading tomorrow at a potential valuation of more than $100 billion. Behold the biggest SPAC deal ever Grab — a ride-hailing company, bank and food delivery business all rolled into one — is set to make its debut on the Nasdaq, in the largest offering by a Southeast Asian company on a U.S. stock exchange. The deal announced today values Grab at $39.6 billion, the largest SPAC deal to date by some distance. It includes an additional investment of more than $4 billion, from investors including BlackRock, T. Rowe Price and Temasek. It’s trying some new things with how SPACs work. The SPAC’s sponsors, Altimeter Capital Management, are holding onto some of their shares for at least three years, matching the span of the financial projections presented in the rollout of the deal. They’re also giving 10 percent of those shares to the company’s recently announced GrabforGood Fund, to share with its workers. It highlights a flourishing dealmaking scene in Southeast Asia. Bain, the consulting firm, said it expected that the region would have at least 10 unicorns — start-ups valued at $1 billion or more — by 2024. Updated April 13, 2021, 7:14 a.m. ET Meanwhile, the S.E.C. plans to tighten a key rule for SPACs. The agency put out new guidance for warrants, which early investors in blank-check funds can exercise to buy more shares. Those instruments might need to be classified as an accounting liability, which Bloomberg notes poses a headache for both pending SPAC filings and funds that have already struck deals. How did Microsoft escape the antitrust crackdown? Big Tech is under intense scrutiny for its monopoly power, with investigations into Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and a case against Google, underway. But when Microsoft announced yesterday that it would acquire Nuance Communications for $16 billion, analysts appeared confident that regulators would allow it. “We see no major regulatory hurdles to Microsoft getting this deal done,” Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a report. “Microsoft is on the M&A warpath over the next 12 to 18 months and Nuance could be the first step in an increased appetite for deals,” Mr. Ives wrote. The tech giant was the poster child of antitrust action in the 1990s but has received relatively little attention during the most recent round of antitrust probes, even as it bought ZeniMax for $7.5 billion, bid for TikTok and reportedly looked to buy Discord and Pinterest. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief, was the only Big Five tech C.E.O. who did not testify at congressional antitrust hearings last year. After Microsoft completes the all-cash purchase of Nuance, it will still have plenty of money for more deal-making: It ended last year with $132 billion in the bank. “Microsoft right now feels free as a bird,” Mr. Ives told DealBook, in contrast to its Big Tech rivals wary of antitrust attention. So why hasn’t Microsoft attracted more scrutiny? Nuance doesn’t directly compete with Microsoft, which makes it harder to prove that the acquisition would be anti-competitive. The two companies have been partners since 2019, and Nuance’s A.I. and voice recognition technology is mainly focused on the health care industry. Hal Singer, a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Institute of Public Policy, told DealBook that “the proposed acquisition would be considered vertical, as voice assistance would complement Microsoft’s core offering. And the law on vertical mergers is quite weak.” “Microsoft is not perceived as predatory in the same way” as other Big Tech firms, said Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. “It hasn’t been displacing whole industry segments, whereas the other four have.” He added that government agencies “have to pick something to focus on, and Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are the pace-setters of the economy.” But those expecting the deal to sail through could be wrong. Rebecca Slaughter, the acting chair of the F.T.C., has called for a tougher approach to vertical mergers. Last month, the agency sued to block a $7.1 billion deal in the drug industry that would be only the second such case involving a vertical merger in the past 40 years. Positioning Bitcoin for legitimacy Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, goes public tomorrow at what is expected to be an eye-popping valuation. The debut is a major milestone in the mainstreaming of digital money, but barriers to acceptance will remain as long as crypto maintains a reputation for facilitating illicit activity. The exchange and its allies are working to dispel that impression. A former C.I.A. leader called concerns about crypto “significantly overstated” in a new report. Michael Morell said he had begun his “call it as I see it” investigation suspicious of crypto, but concluded that officials are not sufficiently informed about the technology. “Most illicit activity still takes place in the traditional banking system and not via cryptocurrency,” he wrote. Notably, the research was commissioned by the Crypto Council for Innovation, a new trade association with four members: Coinbase, Fidelity, Paradigm and Square. It’s one of several overlapping crypto trade groups lobbying lawmakers in Washington, a subject that DealBook will soon cover in more depth — get in touch with any tips. Wells Fargo invests in five more Black-owned banks Wells Fargo announced equity investments in five Minority Depository Institutions today. It’s part of Wells Fargo’s pledge to invest up to $50 million in Black-owned banks; it invested in six other lenders in February. “The capital came in handy for us to deploy immediately,” said Cynthia Day, the C.E.O. of Citizens Trust, one of the banks receiving an investment. The Atlanta-based bank, which was founded in 1921, issued more than $60 million P.P.P. loans to small businesses during the pandemic. Ms. Day said she expected the bank’s partnership with Wells Fargo to help with technology in particular. “These partnerships allows us to be able to expand and stay independent,” Ms. Day said of the rapid consolidation of regional banks as compliance costs rise and fintech firms compete for customers. The idea came with a change of leadership at Wells Fargo. Charlie Scharf joined the bank as C.E.O in 2019 and Bill Daley as head of public affairs shortly thereafter. “Considering the depth of the issues of this place,” Mr. Daley said, the bank’s leaders discussed “how to get engaged in a different way in lots of communities.” It announced the investment plan in March last year, before the protests over the police killing of George Floyd that spurred a number of similar pledges (sometimes at much larger scales). “That was a little uncomfortable period there,” Mr. Daley said. “And we just said, ‘No we’re on pace to do what we’re going to do — and it’s not about getting that press release out, but getting the relationship done.’” PNC gives up revenue to tame overdraft fees PNC announced a move today to reduce its share of the $17 billion in overdraft fees that Americans pay every year. It’s expected to cut customers’ overdraft fees about 60 percent, and its own annual revenue by $125 million to $150 million. It comes as PNC prepares to close its deal with BBVA, making it the country’s fifth-largest retail bank. Overdraft fees are paid largely by people who can least afford them. Eight percent of American families account for three-quarters of the fees, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Overdraft is an expensive fee they charge only on those people who run out of money that goes straight to short-term profits,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We weren’t doing the best we could do by our clients,” PNC’s chief executive, William Demchak, told DealBook. Over the long term he expects that the move will help it gain market share. “In the short run, if it cost us 100 million bucks or something — so what?” How it works: PNC’s app will feature a “low cash mode.” It sends alerts when an account is low, and when it goes negative the customer has at least 24 hours to fix it, including by reviewing pending payments and deciding which to prioritize. “I think it will change the industry,” Mr. Demchak said. For the largest banks to adopt a similar approach is a matter of technology — and desire. Overdraft fees help drive revenue: $35.61 per account annually for JPMorgan Chase on the high end and $4.90 per account for Citi on the low end, according to Mr. Klein. PNC fell in the middle, with $14.96 per account. THE SPEED READ Deals Despite owning over $100 million in stock, Archegos never publicly disclosed its holdings as S.E.C. rules generally require. (NYT) When Wall Street banks’ earnings start coming out tomorrow, they’re likely to show a big reliance on deal-making for profits, thanks in large part to SPACs. (Bloomberg) Politics and policy The U.S. budget deficit hit $1.7 trillion in the first six months of its current fiscal year, setting a record as the government spent trillions on pandemic aid. (NYT) Tech Nvidia plans to roll out a line of general-purpose C.P.U. chips, its most direct challenge yet to Intel. (FT) A key technical standards organization is trying to get rid of computer engineering terms that evoke racist history, like “master,” “slave,” “whitelist” and “blacklist.” (NYT) Best of the rest Reuters named Alessandra Galloni as its new editor in chief, the first woman to hold the role in the news agency’s 170-year history. (NYT) GameStop is looking for a new C.E.O., as the video game retailer overhauls itself after being at the center of the meme-stock frenzy. (Reuters) The New York Stock Exchange’s first NFTs memorialize the initial trades of six stocks, including Spotify, DoorDash and Coupang. (CNBC) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #Fret #halt #Johnson #Johnsons #Markets #Vaccine

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alexsmitposts · 6 years ago

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Stuck on Earth? – Tired of Putin Hate? – Use Alternative Search Engines In a perfect universe, intelligent life from Earth would be seen waiting on the next shuttle to the Alpha Centauri colony. But we do not live in a perfect universe. We live as walk-ons in a tragic comedy where millions of human beings either starve, die of disease, or get shot to pieces in Energy wars. We live on a spinning rock in space where President Donald Trump’s limo is compared to President Vladimir Putin’s in Google News. Scanning Google News this morning I saw three top suggestions when I searched “Putin” in the query box. Fox News ran with California congressman and 2020 Democratic candidate Eric Swalwell comparing Vladimir Putin to Osama bin Laden. Over at Business Insider, Donald Trump’s Beast was compared to Vladimir Putin’s Aurus Senat armored limousine. And the third suggestion was for a YouTube rant by donut gobbling champion Cenk Uygur at Young Turks proclaiming, “Told Ya! Trump Changes Venezuela Policy After Putin Call!” On the other side of the coin, a search for “hunger” here on Earth turns up video recommendations for Florence + The Machine on Vevo, the Hunger – Official Trailer, and Fergie – Hungry ft. Rick Ross (Official Music Video). I’m not sure why the world’s biggest search entity chooses to show music videos when somebody looks for the hunger situation. Maybe whoever really runs Google wants us to be happy about starvation. Perhaps we should remain unworried, soothed, more pliable and complacent? But wait! I managed to find a story at Counterpunch entitled Fighting Childhood Hunger in Baltimore, by William Hughes. The story reveals that “60 percent of children in Baltimore struggle with food insecurity.” It tells of the trillions the United States government has wasted on unwinnable wars. The author shines a light on neighbor helping neighbor, and he does not pound his chest and chant “Told Ya!” at an audience of YouTube zombies. The reality of our situation cannot be more sad, more unsettling, or more sickening. At the same moment, the American public is eating up concocted Google propaganda, millions walk the poverty-stricken streets of the richest nation that ever existed. Google serves up business news outlets turned tabloids, but National Geographic’s story, “The New Face of Hunger” is obscured underneath orchestrated news. In the wings, a new Russian Internet law is transformed by western media into Big Brother Russian style. But Google and the western oligarchs morphing hunger into obscurity is not censorship of the worst kind. Millions of Americans are being slapped with a form of austerity, to make matters much worse, at the same time the war machine gears up for another regime change. And nobody’s watching, nobody knows, and nobody cares. Read the story at National Geographic, if you’ve read this far, and prepare to get mad as hell. By the way, I found the “Hunger” story using a search engine called “DuckDuckGo,” which is a kind of anti-Google project that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. Yes, there are unbiased and honest businesses and organizations out there still. The level of propaganda we see today is unprecedented. But its effects are even more astonishing. The liberal world order (Illuminati or whoever) are winning champions of the mind control world societies are subjected to worldwide. Even in Russia, there are liberal media concerns pumping lies out with machine-like consistency. Let me give you a personal example. A couple of weeks back I was sitting at an Easter gathering of family and friends when I was questioned about geopolitics. At length, a friend, who is a renowned mathematician, began to vehemently disagree with me because I pointed to Google and the other technology monopolies as key instruments of control. After a time my friend brought up world hunger, saying how things in the world are far better now than in the recent past. He is a good man, a smart man, and someone so glued to the machine he will never break free. The world is not better off now, and there are no valid statistics that indicate it is. The only region of Earth where undernourishment statistics are better is in Asia, where the new industrial revolution has created a bigger middle class. Please refer to Figure 2, and NEVER look at World Bank figures ever again. If you are ready to rocket off of Earth, I am sorry, you cannot as of yet. So, since you are anchored here for the foreseeable future, let me distract you from your duty to observe Putin’s cars, dachas, and supervillain duties. 9 million people still die of hunger on Earth each year, and one-third of those are little kids (The Borgen Project). In addition, 40% of all children have some form of anemia, and an additional half-a-million children will go blind because of vitamin deficiencies. I’ll not even delve into how many (almost 200 million) malnourished kids suffer bone, nervous system, or other deficiencies worldwide because of our WAR and PROPAGANDA policies. Finally, the world produces enough food to feed everyone. Food availability per capita has increased from approximately 2220 kcal per person per day in the 1960s to 2790 kcals per person per day as of 2006. However, instead of figuring out a way to distribute Earth’s bounty to all people, our leadership chooses that we all focus on YouTube music videos, who has the biggest car, and how only ultra-liberal views are truthful, helpful, and relevant. Oh, but alternative search engines when you put “Putin” in reveal how he and the American president are discussing a nuclear arms deal. How can this be?

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ content)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated

Do those feel like censorship to you? They do to me. They share a common thread, too: monopoly. In each case, the number of retailers, producers, distributors, etc is small enough that if they collude to block something, it effectively vanishes.

Or the Inquisitions - which were not government censorship. The Inquisitions undertaken by Church officials, who were not part of any government - instead, they represented an unaccountable, transnational authority that governments were largely powerless against.

Does that sound familiar? Our media, speech forums, and distribution systems are all run by cartels and monopolists whom governments can't even tax - forget regulating them.

The most consequential regulation of these industries is negative regulation - a failure to block anticompetitive mergers and market-cornering vertical monopolies.

When governments fail to block the monopolization of speech forums, they're enabling censorship, just not in a way that violates the First Amendment, so we have no recourse and no transparency and no right of action when it happens.

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

If we only call something "censorship" when it involves state action, then there's basically no such thing as internet censorship - not because speech is never suppressed, but because under that theory the First Amendment simply does not apply to the internet.

Social media is a duopoly. If neither will admit you, you can't use it. So you start your own site! Cloud computing is also clustered into a handful of companies (with AWS, a major military-intelligence contractor, running >50% of that business).

If they block you, you'll need to host your own server. The majority of data centers are also concentrated into a few hands, too. Oh, so are the domain registrars. And the payment processors. Also the anti-DDoS companies and CDNs. Search is run by one company.

How many companies need to collude to make it impossible for you to have a detectable internet presence? It's less than 50. And really, since losing any part of this stack can be a definitive blocker, it can be as few as two companies (mobile apps), or even one (search).

You won't be completely unlocatable - the Inquisitons didn't seek to snuff out every copy of banned works (indeed, they preserved many of them in their private libraries!) and the PMRC, Comics Authority and MPAA ratings board don't totally eliminate their targeted media.

But your speech will be marginalized and buried in ways that would be totally illegal if this were the result of state action. Only this speech is sidelined due to government *inaction*.

Ironically, the only corner of the networked world where the First Amendment gets a look in is city-run broadband services - the same services that conservatives who have newfound concerns about online censorship deplore as "government intervention in the market."

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

40 years of antitrust malpractice created a situation in which censorship is up, speech is perilous, and the First Amendment doesn't apply in either case.

The answer is *not* to impose speech duties on private platforms.

"Fairness doctrines" are why the BBC spent years airing anti-vaxxers and climate deniers every time they had a story about why you should get vaccinated and vote for decarbonization.

Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated far worse editorial judgment than Auntie.

The problem with the tech giants isn't just their bad judgment, it's how consequential their mistakes are. Trying to improve the judgment of the tech companies is a fool's errand, a project without precedent. No one's ever convinced a monopolist to turn benevolent dictator.

If we can't stop the tech giants from making mistakes, at least we can reduce the consequences of their errors by making them smaller. Block mergers. Unwind mergers undertaken on false premises (like FB/IG/WA and Google/YT/Ad/Doubleclick).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/dont-believe-proven-liars-absolute-minimum-standard-prudence-merger-scrutiny

Force interoperability upon them as the EU's Digital Services Act and the US ACCESS Act contemplate, then take away their right to block other forms of interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

And for god's sake, stop talking about CDA 230 as an answer to any of this. "You must moderate all your users" is a death sentence to anyone who *doesn't* have an army of moderators - anyone who might challenge FB and Twitter.

For Big Tech, a legal moderation duty is just an excuse to remove any speech that anyone anywhere might complain about: "Sorry we removed your anti-pipeline protest announcement, but we were worried we'd be sued if we didn't."

When the government censors, it's "unconstitutional censorship," but there are other forms of censorship that have always been with us and that we should all be concerned about.

When it comes to communications tech, competition policy is speech policy.

#pluralistic

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libertariantaoist · 8 years ago

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We’re all supposed to be outraged by alleged Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, despite the fact that no actual evidence of such interference has been made public. First it was “17 intelligence agencies” supposedly confirmed that Moscow was behind the DNC/Podesta email releases, and then it was down to just three – with the National Security Agency modifying its judgment to “moderate confidence.” But the media continued to make this claim, as did the Democrats (or do I repeat myself?), and the conspiracy theorizing plowed ahead. Yet the real meddling by foreigners in American politics has been ignored because it doesn’t identify the right targets.

To begin with, there’s the anti-Trump “dossier” that contained salacious details about Donald Trump, a document obtained by Sen. John McCain, delivered to the FBI, and eventually winding up as the subject of a White House “briefing.” This was compiled by one Christopher Steele, a “former” MI6 agent, and commissioned by the opposition research firm known as “Fusion GPS,” with the bill being paid by mysterious “donors.” Steele showed the dossier to a “British security official” before sending it off to McCain, and you can bet that the British intelligence organization knew everything about this dossier, and thoroughly approved, or else it wouldn’t have been put together and shopped around Washington in the first place.

This dossier was the seed from which the “Russia-gate” investigation sprouted – oh, but that kind of foreign meddling is fine with our media and our political class, because it didn’t originate with an “adversary,” i.e. Russia. And speaking of “collusion,” the interplay between the Clinton campaign and the Ukrainian government to discredit Trump advisor Paul Manafort is also fine and dandy, because – again – the Ukrainians are the Good Guys, as opposed to those dastardly Russkies.

Yet this is just the beginning of the story of how foreign governments have acted to intervene in our politics and undermine the Trump administration.

I was interested to read a piece by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept about the latest incarnation of the developing liberal-neoconservative merger, detailing the founding of a new group that calls itself the “Alliance to Secure Democracy.” This hybrid creature is a two-headed monster, with Clinton foreign policy honcho Laura Rosenberger, who served as a key figure in the Obama administration, and Jamie Fly, the neocons’ neocon, formerly with the now defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (the reincarnation of the infamous Project for a New American Century), at the helm.

My readers will not be surprised by the union of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, which has been documented in this space continuously not only during the recent presidential campaign but also predicted as far back as 1999 (!). So no breaking news there.

While left-leaning commentators like Greenwald are understandably upset that the Democratic party, and its ostensibly “liberal” wing, are canoodling with the neocons, and people like Paul Begala are ranting about how we should “bomb the KGB,” us libertarians – and also students of history – realize that this coming together merely replicates the history of the last cold war. Just Google “cold war liberalism,” Glenn.

While reading Glenn’s piece, I noted a link to the Alliance to Secure Democracy’s web site, and later went back to click on it – and right there on the front page, in the upper left corner, are the initials “GMF.” These also appear under the Alliance’s logo. What the heck is this?, I wondered. I clicked – and wound up on the site of the German Marshall Fund of the US: indeed, the Marshall Fund site hosts the Alliance site. The headline reads: “’Alliance for Securing Democracy’ Launches at GMF.”

Don’t be misled by the “of the US” appellation: the German Marshall Fund is an instrument of the German government, which has subsidized it to the tune of several million dollars since its founding. It has offices in eight countries, including the US. And it’s not just the Germans who are involved. Aside from the German Foreign Office, the donors include:

Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($500,000-999,000)

Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($250,000-499,999)

Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($250, 499,999)

Compagnia di San Paolo, a quasi-governmental association of Italian banking interests ($1,000,000-1,999,999)

The government of Montenegro ($100,000-249,999)

Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

The Brussels Capital Region (the municipality of Brussels) ($100,000-249,999)

Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

Romania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($100,000-249,999)

United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office ($100,000-249,999)

Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs ($50,000-99,999)

Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office ($25,000-49,999)

France’s Ministry of Defense ($10,000-24,9999)

And last, but hardly least, the US government contributes between $1 million and $2 million via the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Oh, and there’s one donor listed as “Anonymous,” whose contribution is “$2 million and beyond.” In addition, among the listed donors there are a number of foreign foundations and trade associations with links, including financial links, to their respective governments.

The agenda of the Alliance is clear to anyone with eyes to see: when you go to their web site, the first thing you see under “Our Mission” is:

“Finding out what happened in the United States in 2016 and the impact it had is important. But that is not enough.”

Of course it isn’t: the goal is to get Trump out of the White House, and, in the process, conduct a witch-hunt on American soil that will root out “Russian influence,” i.e. anyone who opposes the new cold war,

A puff piece by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post fails to mention the foreign funding issue, but does give us a clear indication of what the group’s real goals are: “mapping” alleged Russian infiltration of the US. Trump, of course, is at the center of that “map.” Rogin cites former top CIA official Mike Morell – who endorsed Mrs. Clinton and called Trump Putin’s “useful fool” – as saying:

“In a perfect world, we would have a national commission that would be looking into exactly what happened, exactly what did the Russians do and what can we do as a nation to defend ourselves going forward and deter Putin from ever doing this again. We all know this is not going to happen, so things like the GMF effort are hugely important to fill the gap.”

The Trump administration is hardly going to be setting up a “national commission” to overthrow itself, so foreign governments will “fill the gap.” In short, “The Resistance,” as the anti-Trump fanatics like to call themselves, is getting help from abroad, as well as from our own Deep State.

What’s so astonishing is how brazen the whole thing is: the German Marshall Fund isn’t hiding its relationship with the “Alliance,” which will be headquartered in the Fund’s Washington digs. It says right there on the Alliance web site who is footing the bill. The scale of this kind of foreign meddling in American politics makes the Russians – who run two little-trafficked web sites, RT and Sputnik – look like a joke, which in large part they are.

The very name of the Alliance to Secure Democracy speaks volumes– on whose behalf is our democracy being “secured”? We aren’t told – but a look at the long list of foreign funders tells the whole story. Our parasitic “allies,” who operate generous welfare states while we pay for their defense and risk war on their behalf, have every interest in “securing” a foreign policy that puts them first and America last. Their agenda isn’t hard to discern: one can go on the Alliance web site and listen to Ms. Rosenberger accuse the President of the United States of “dereliction of duty,” while comparing him unfavorably to Angela Merkel.

Although much of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda – NATO is “obsolete,” foreign wars are a drain we can’t afford, etc. – has fallen by the wayside, the mere expression of such sentiments is enough to enrage the internationalists. That such a man is occupying the White House is an affront to them: they cannot let it stand. Their campaign to cleanse the American political landscape of such sentiments is the most comprehensive – and well-funded – effort by foreign entities on American soil to date.

The “Alliance” is a regime change operation funded by foreign governments and corporate interests: its American servitors, such as Ms. Rosenberger and Mr. Fly, are seemingly exempt from having to register as foreign agents. Their immunity to the laws that govern the rest of us is a mystery, especially when one remembers that the current President of the United States pledged to neutralize the efforts of foreign lobbyists and start putting America first.

These fifth columnists have to be held to account: they’re foreign agents, pure and simple, and should be treated as such. Why are they exempt from the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

Yet registering them, and labeling them for what they are, isn’t enough. It’s long past time to get them out of our politics, and out of our country. This kind of brazen foreign meddling should be illegal. Foreign contributions to political campaigns are currently against the law: extending this principle to the post-election scene is the logical next step, and one that needs to be taken immediately.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com

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wewithus · 8 years ago

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The Five Minutes for Freedom series is a collection of small, step-by-step walkthroughs designed to help you take concrete political action in support of the principles of We With Us. The articles in the series are designed to be read and their steps followed in order, as later posts frequently build on earlier ones. A chronological index of all posts in the series can be found here. While this information is targeted primarily at US readers, we welcome readers from all countries and encourage you to adapt these strategies as necessary for your jurisdiction.

5M4F 14: Support Actual Facts. [Support freedom of information for government agencies; oppose Steve Bannon.] Dependencies: 5M4F10, (light dependency on) 5M4F9.

This week’s 5M4F has an online component and our now-usual phone calls component. We’re going to be following and sharing online information from the scientists and civil servants who are standing up against the Trump administration’s gag orders on government agencies, and we’re going to be letting our representatives and the White House know that those government agencies don’t work for Trump: they work for us, the American people. I’m also adding on as a tag a mini-task to oppose Steve Bannon, which may become a theme around here, because Bannon is using the understandable and necessary outrage about everything else the administration is doing to quietly amass power. So let’s make some noise about it, shall we?

If you want to do this all in one go: as always, it’s not possible to make all the calls in one go, because we want to keep individual calls focused on a single issue. But you can do all your scripting in one go with all the online tasks, and then you can make your four calls about scientific freedom at the EPA et cetera in one block on Monday and your calls about Bannon in one block on Tuesday, or whatever.

If you want to do this five minutes at a time: easier! All scripts on one topic will probably take you 5 minutes to assemble, so 5 minutes for scientific freedom, and another 5 minutes to oppose Bannon. One call will probably take you five minutes to make, so that’s four five-minute chunks per issue on two issues, a total of eight 5-minute calls. Following all of the governmental agency resistance social media accounts at once will probably take you 5 minutes. Sharing that information on social media is another 5-minute task. Signing the petitions together will take about 5 minutes. It can seem like a lot of tasks, but they’re all individually pretty small!

If you have extra time, you can get some extra cosmic human-helping brownie points for making some extra calls opposing Betsy DeVos and Neil Gorsuch. I’m not making full posts on either of them simply because I feel like the reasons for opposing them have been covered pretty extensively elsewhere and I try to keep each week’s number discrete 5M4F tasks to ≤4. But please do call if you can.

As I mentioned a few days ago, since the White House comment line has been shut down, you can make your White House calls by either trying a direct line to a White House staffer or a randomly-selected Trump business holding. I continue to recommend that if you can’t get through to discuss political issues (and maybe even if you can), you write an open letter to the Trump White House, cc your senators and representative, and also send a copy to the Government Accountability Office. If this sounds like a nuisance tactic, you’re right! That is exactly what it is! Disabling the White House comment line and running the presidency like an autocracy deserves every inconvenience we can possibly throw their way!!

Section links:

Make calls about scientific freedom at governmental organizations.

Petition for scientific freedom at governmental organizations.

Spread the word about fighting for scientific freedom at governmental organizations.

Complain about Steve Bannon.

A note on how to protest amid breaking news.

How to write your scripts.

What to do if you can’t make calls.

Call your representatives to support scientific freedom at governmental organizations: You probably know the drill by now: ring the local field offices of your senators and your congressperson, as well as the “White House comment line” of your choice, telling them that scientific freedom at governmental organizations like the EPA matters to you.

Here’s my usual rundown of why you should call: while it is typical for governmental organizations like the EPA to temporarily halt public-facing updates (Twitter, press releases, et cetera) during a transition between administrations, it is very far from typical to subject governmental data to political review. The spokesman for Trump’s transition team at the EPA has said that the policy there at least (and very possibly at other organizations as well) will be to subject governmental data to political review. When speaking to NPR, he declined to characterize this policy as temporary. He then told the AP that the hold on public releases was temporary and that there was “no mandate” for subjecting data to political review. If that sequence of events makes you nervous: me too! I have intense social anxiety, especially with crowds, and I’m still seriously considering flying to Washington for the March for Science.

American governmental organizations gather, aggregate, and share critical data and research for multiple sectors of society and industry. This data includes climate and weather data, public health information, data about the economy and U.S. financial health, jobs and labor market data, education access and achievement information, and many many others. Users include not only research universities and public institutions, but also private corporate and non-profit users like Google and Bloomberg and AccuWeather and PossibilityU and Redfin and Ecodesk (source). Government data isn’t just essential to our understanding and handling of issues critical to human survival, like climate change; it also builds and supports private industry. It creates jobs. This is a bipartisan issue if we’ve ever covered one: our country, both our people and our economy, depends on the ability of government scientists to produce accurate, unbiased, nonpoliticized data, without fear of reprisal, retribution, or political censorship.

Call your representatives and let them know.

Petition the White House: There’s a petition on We the People, the White House’s official petitions website, to ask the White House to give government agencies the freedom to share information with Congress and the American public. Ostensibly your signature is being captured even though the count doesn’t update, but I believe this administration as far as I can throw them; so here is a backup of that petition on Change.org. You should sign both the White House petition and the Change.org petition, so we can verify signature counts.

Social Media: If you use Twitter, you can follow and share relevant #Resistance Twitter accounts, e.g.:

AltUSEPA

altNOAA

AltUSDA

Alt_CDC

Alt_NIH

AltHHS

AltForestServ

...and more! I’m not really a Twitter user (I mean, there is a We With Us Twitter but I hate Twitter and am also bad at using it), so I encourage actual Twitter-using people to let me know about other Twitter places where science jedis are currently gathering. The March for Science is also on Facebook, which is another social media platform I dislike and don’t use!! But if you use it you can follow and share it over there. Presumably if you’re here you know how to use Tumblr; you can track relevant Tumblr tags like #march for science and #science resists and so on, and share that information with your friends—whether or not you, yourself, are up to marching. If you did 5M4F9, revisit your network. Where can you share this? Who can you talk to? What friends and family do you have who are willing to listen to you? Talk to them about why freedom of information in governmental agencies is important. Encourage them to protest, and call, and petition, and resist.

And now for what I suspect is going to be a weekly feature for the foreseeable future, which I think I’m going to call: What is Steve Bannon Breaking This Week? Answer:

The NSC: Steve Bannon, Trump’s favorite white-supremacist gnome, has been granted a permanent seat on the National Security Council, while the director of national intelligence and chairman of the joint chiefs will only be expected occasionally. That’s really bad. The NSC bears the main responsibility for advising the president in matters of peace and war; positions on the NSC are typically reserved for generals and national security and military officials of outstanding expertise. Bannon does not have expertise. What he does have is deep-seated racist, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant views, and a bald and oft-stated desire for another major (read: world) war. He’s also extremely sympathetic to Russia, because he views them as America’s white Christian allies in the war on Islam.

Call your representatives (senators, congressperson, and the “White House comment line” of your choice) and let them know that a fascist, warmongering, white supremacist has no place in the White House and no place on the National Security Council.

A note on protesting amid breaking news: While nothing here is quite as time sensitive as the confirmation hearings (which: if you have time to make a couple extra calls protesting Betsy DeVos and Neil Gorsuch, please please please please do), I do still recommend searching a reputable news source, like The Guardian, shortly before you make your calls, for any breaking-news updates that may require you to tweak your scripts. It’s often also useful to check your representatives’ website to see what press releases they have on a given subject, so you know whether (for example) they have already gone on-record as opposing Steve Bannon. If they have? Ask them to do it again.

How to Write Your Scripts (excerpted from 5M4F-5):

The basic phone script for calling your representatives goes something like so:

Hi, {can I ask who I’m speaking to? <, if they don’t say when they pick up>} [Jot their name down.] Hi, <their name>. My name is <your name> and I’m one of <your representative’s name>’s constituents in <where you live>. I wanted to let <your representative’s name> know that I strongly <support | oppose> <the thing you’re calling about>, because <succinct explanation of reason why you’re calling>. Is <your representative’s name> planning to <do the thing you want>?

Then you have to plan for a few different responses:

They’re with you: Thank you. Could you please let <appropriate pronoun> know that <expression of gratitude> and <indication that you will continue to watch your representative’s behavior and hold them accountable>?

They’re neutral: This subject is very important to me because <longer, more in-depth and emotive reason why you’re calling>. I would very much appreciate it if you could let <your representative’s name> know that I feel very strongly about this and would really encourage <appropriate pronoun> to <do the thing you want>. Is there any way I could follow up with you or <appropriate pronoun> later?

They oppose you: This subject is very important to me because <longer, more in-depth and emotive reason why you’re calling>. Can I ask why <your representative’s name> is <not doing the thing you want>? [Let them give you a reason, and write it down.] Okay, thank you. I understand <appropriate pronoun> concerns, but as one of <your representative’s name>’s voting constituents, I would really appreciate it if <appropriate pronoun> revisited <appropriate pronoun> decision because <alternate succinct explanation of reason why you’re calling>. Is there any way I could follow up with you or <appropriate pronoun> later?

<expression of gratitude>! <polite send-off>!

I want to point out that you probably don’t actually really need to plan for all of these responses. You can probably make a pretty good guess where your representative stands based on their party affiliation. However, especially if your representatives are moderates and often vote across the aisle, it’s not a bad idea to spend a little time planning for all three cases, because then your behind is covered, and you can recycle this language over and over on later calls, to different representatives. And yes: we will be calling other representatives.

This is the sample script that I wrote back in November, on a different issue and to Barbara Boxer, who has been replaced by Kamala Harris, but it gives you an idea how the Mad-Libs-filling process works:

Hi, {can I ask who I’m speaking to? <, if they don’t say when they pick up>} [Jot their name down.] Hi, <their name>. My name is <Ginny Washington>, and I’m one of <Senator Boxer>’s constituents in <West Hollywood>. I wanted to let <Senator Boxer> know that I strongly <support> <her resolution to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College>, because <I think every American’s vote should count equally>. {I just wanted to thank her for all her hard work on behalf of the principles of equal representation and equal protection under the law.}

<Thank you so much for your time>! <Have a nice day>!

If you can’t make calls: I recommended before that if you can’t make calls, you copy down snail mail addresses so you can send snail mail letters, and that you grab an email address or online contact link no matter what. Calls are the most effective, if you can make them, but please, do send snail mail letters if you can’t, or an email if you also can’t swing a stamp or get to a post office. You can use the script above as a template for your letter, but you’re probably going to want to default to assuming that your representative opposes you, and you’ll have to of course make it sound like a letter and not a phone convo.

If you care about correct forms of address: weirdly, because these things are super arcane, technically the correct way to address your senator or representative is still “The Honorable <whoever>”, as in, “The Honorable Barbara Boxer.” That goes on the envelope. You can then write “Dear Mr./Mrs./Ms. <whoever>” as your salutation.

As always, the link at the top of the post goes to a poll on Google which makes a great checklist, and where you can check in and let your fellow humans know you’re standing up for them!

#we with us #resist #five minutes for freedom #5m4f #science resists #oppose steve bannon #oppose betsy devos #oppose neil gorsuch

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI

On February 18, executives from the technology firm Cerence rang the Nasdaq opening bell, then stepped into a meeting with their investors and representatives from some of the largest automakers in the world. Over several hours, they pitched a strategy designed to help double the company’s revenue in five years: Record every movement, every glance, every smile, frown, and wrinkled brow of drivers across the world—then sell the resulting data for a profit.

Over the last century, the car has been enshrined as a quintessential piece of Americana—a symbol of freedom and self-expression. It is a space where people share their first kisses, cry after work, and soothe restless babies to sleep, comforted by a sense of autonomy and control. But as the Cerence presentation laid bare, the car’s second century will be very different.

The Burlington, Mass. company is far from a household name, but its technology—including microphones, virtual assistants, and gaze-monitoring cameras—is already installed in more than 325 million vehicles, from which it uploads more than 100 million data transactions to the cloud every month, according to its investor documents. Very soon, Cerence announced, it plans to deepen that data mining operation with in-cabin cameras linked to emotion-detecting AI—algorithms that monitor minute changes in facial expression in order to determine a person’s emotional state at any given time.

“This is data that I think is the untapped potential that Cerence has for the future,” Prateek Kathpal, the company’s chief technology officer, told investors. “What we’re looking at is sharing this data back with the [automakers] and helping them monetize it.”

Over the next two years, companies like Cerence, Affectiva, Xperi, and Eyeris plan to roll out emotion- and object-detecting systems for cars in partnership with many of the world’s largest automakers, according to company documents and interviews with executives. Their plans are bolstered by a European Union law mandating that all new cars be equipped with at least rudimentary driver-monitoring by mid-2022, and a similar bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate.

To the public and to legislators, automakers market the systems as safety features. If a car can detect that a driver is angry or looking at their phone immediately before a crash, these companies reason, the onboard AI may be able to offer a warning the next time it senses similar behavior. Or, if it can determine how a child is positioned in the back seat, the car might deploy airbags more effectively in the event of a collision.

But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.

Automakers and advertisers have come to a “vast realization” that as cars become more autonomous and embedded with screens, “many passengers in your vehicle are kind of a captive audience in an entertainment context,” Gabi Zijderveld, Affectiva’s chief marketing officer, told Motherboard.

Affectiva spun off from the MIT Media Lab in 2009 and has been a pioneer in the often-controversial field of emotion-detecting AI. The company has its roots in marketing and consumer analytics and has been tapped by some of the country’s largest brands to measure focus group reactions to advertisements and entertainment. But over the last four years, it has devoted a significant amount of its attention to developing in-cabin monitoring and has worked with automakers including Kia, BMW, and Porsche. It has also pitched its technology to rideshare companies, suggesting in one product brochure that riders might be willing to be recorded and have their emotions analyzed in vehicles in exchange for free or discounted trips. “That data is tremendously valuable, from a monetization perspective, to the advertisers,” Zijderveld said.

Competitors Xperi and Eyeris are also looking at ways to capitalize, or help automakers capitalize, on the data their products gather.

Jeff Jury, the general manager of Xperi’s automotive group, told Motherboard that the company’s in-cabin monitoring system is a safety feature first, but added that Xperi is exploring ways to combine the system with the sophisticated entertainment recommendation engine it recently acquired through a merger with TiVo.

Eyeris CEO Modar Alaoui likewise told Motherboard that while his company’s technology is primarily designed to improve safety, “we do foresee at some point that [automakers] will try to leverage the data for several use cases, whether it be for advertising or [determining] insurance” premiums.

Inform and consent

Cerence, Affectiva, Xperi, and Eyeris officials all told Motherboard that their companies simply create products with many possible functions. It’s up to the car manufacturers, they said, to decide how the systems will be used, what data will be collected, how that data will be processed internally, to whom it can be sold, and whether to share any of that information with the customer.

With the exception of Volvo, all the automakers contacted for this story—including GM, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, and Kia—either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to answer questions about how they will inform drivers about the data collected from their vehicles. Volvo does not currently have plans to integrate systems that monitor passengers or use emotion recognition, a company official told Motherboard.

European Union regulators have prepared for the likelihood that automakers will want to use in-cabin monitoring systems as data vacuums.

In January, the European Data Protection Board issued guidelines governing the use of data from connected cars. They mandate that, among other restrictions, no personally identifying information can leave the car without explicit driver or passenger consent, and that a car cannot collect any more data than is needed to operate its safety system or to perform another task for which the owner has given specific consent. As a result, it is shaping up to be very difficult for automakers to deploy the kinds of in-cabin monitoring systems in the EU that they are developing for American and Asian markets, Anne-Gabrielle Haie, a Belgium-based data protection attorney with DLA Piper, told Motherboard.

The U.S. is another matter. Several laws, ranging from the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA), provide limited mechanisms to prevent companies from egregiously and repeatedly misusing the kind of data an in-cabin monitoring system will collect. For example, under the FCRA, a car manufacturer would have to notify its customers before providing certain kinds of information to the driver’s insurance agency.

But the laws currently in place are insufficient to protect consumers from the technology that will soon be rolling off production lines, Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, told Motherboard. “That’s part of the reason why the majority of [FTC] commissioners have recommended the enactment of federal privacy legislation that would set up the rules of the road in this area,” she said.

In-cabin monitoring systems will also be highly attractive to police, who, as Forbes has documented in detail, have been demanding data from connected cars for years. In the U.S., there is nothing to stop police from going after that data, whereas the EU rules place special considerations on the circumstances under which law enforcement can access data that may evidence criminal activity, such as speeding.

The Georgia Supreme Court recently ruled that police must have a warrant before accessing car data, but the case law in this specific space is in its infancy, Chelsey Colbert, the policy counsel for mobility and location data at the Future of Privacy Forum, told Motherboard. “If car manufacturers are worried about law enforcement access, they should consider privacy and security by design, she said. “For example, they could use technologies that don’t collect or store identifiable data.”

On the edge of privacy

Twenty of the largest automakers have promised to self-govern their privacy practices for connected cars and, in 2014, signed on to an unenforceable, industry-created set of principles. There is ample evidence those guidelines won’t stop them from cashing in on driver data, though. GM, for example, is one of the signatories. But in 2018, the Detroit Free Press revealed that the company had collected data on the radio listening habits of more than 90,000 drivers in an attempt to find correlations between what people listened to in their cars and what products they purchased.

Affectiva, Xperi, and Eyeris say that their systems are all designed so that the most sensitive data, such as actual video recordings of passengers, can be processed in the car—known as edge processing—rather than uploaded to a cloud controlled by an automaker or rideshare company.

But since the automakers are setting their own rules, they could, of course, decide they want that data after all. Cerence’s boasts about the amount of data it uploads to the cloud from vehicles each month suggest its partners—which, in addition to automakers, includes Microsoft, LG, and a number of other tech companies—have little interest in ensuring edge processing for privacy purposes.

“If they install sensors in the car, it’s going to go out of the car and be viewed by the car manufacturer,” Ben Volkow, the CEO of Otonomo, a car data brokerage based in Israel, told Motherboard. “[Automakers] need to get approval, and after you get approval you need to give the driver the opportunity to, at any point, say, ‘please erase my data.’ That’s supposed to be supported, but I’ll tell you in reality it’s definitely not supported.”

Car Companies Want to Monitor Your Every Move With Emotion-Detecting AI syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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scienceblogtumbler · 5 years ago

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A Zen Buddhist monk’s approach to democratizing AI

Colin Garvey, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), took an unusual path to his studies in the social science of technology. After graduating from college, he taught English in Japan for four years, during which time he also became a Zen Buddhist monk. In 2014, he returned to the U.S., where he entered a PhD program in science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That same year, Stephen Hawking co-authored an editorial in The Guardian warning that artificial intelligence could have catastrophic consequences if we don’t learn how to avoid the risks it poses. In his graduate work, Garvey set out to understand what those risks are and ways to think about them productively.

As an HAI Fellow, Garvey is working on turning his PhD thesis into a book titled Terminated? How Societies Can Avert the Coming AI Catastrophe. He is also preparing a policy report on AI-risk governance for a Washington, D.C.-based think tank and guest editing “AI and Its Discontents,” a special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews featuring diverse contributions from sociologists to computer scientists, due out this December.

Here he discusses the need to change how we think and talk about AI and the importance of democratizing AI in a meaningful way.

How does the public’s tendency to see AI in either utopian or dystopian terms affect our ability to understand AI?

The risk of accepting the utopian or dystopian narrative is that it reinforces a very common attitude toward the evolution of AI and technology more generally, which some scholars describe as technological determinism. Either the market forces are inescapable, or, as some AI advocates might even say, it’s human destiny to develop a machine smarter than humans and that is the next step in evolution.

I think this narrative about inevitability is actually deployed politically to impair the public’s ability to think clearly about this technology. If it seems inevitable, what else is there to say except “I’d better adapt”? When deliberation about AI is framed as how to live with the impact, that’s very different from deliberating and applying public control over choosing what kind of impact people want. Narratives of inevitability ultimately help advance the agenda of beneficiaries of AI, while sidelining those at risk, leaving them very few options.

Another problem is that this all-good or all-bad way of framing the subject reduces AI to one thing, and that is not a good way to think about complex problems. I try to break that up by mapping risks in specific domains – political, military, economic, psychosocial, existential, etc. – to show that there are places where decision making can go differently. For example, within a domain, we can identify who is benefiting and who is at risk. This allows us to get away from this very powerful image of a Terminator robot killing everyone, which is deployed quite often in these types of conversations.

AI is not the first technology to inspire dystopian concerns. Can AI researchers learn from the ways society has dealt with the risks of other technologies, such as nuclear power and genetic engineering?

In the mid 20th century, social scientists who critiqued technology were very pessimistic about the possibility of humanity controlling these technologies, especially nuclear. There was great concern about the possibility of unleashing something beyond our control. But in the late 1980s, a second generation of critics in science and technology looked at the situation and said, here we are and we haven’t blown up the world with nuclear weapons, we haven’t released a synthetic plague that caused cancer in a majority of the population. It could have been much worse, and why not? My advisor, Ned Woodhouse, looked into these examples and asked, when things went right, why? How was catastrophe averted? And he identified five strategies that form the Intelligent Trial and Error approach that I have written about in relation to AI.

One of the Intelligent Trial and Error strategies is public deliberation. Specifically, to avert disaster, deliberation should be deployed early in development; a broad diversity of concerns should be debated; participants should be well-informed; and the deliberations should be deep and recurring. How well do you think AI is doing on that score?

I would say the strategy of deliberation could be utilized more thoroughly in making decisions about risk in AI. AI has sparked a lot of conversations since about 2015. But AI had origins in the 1950s. One thing I’ve found is that the boom and bust cycle of AI hype leading to disillusionment and a crash, which has happened roughly twice in the history of AI, has been paralleled by quite widespread deliberation around AI. For example, in the ’50s and ’60s there were conversations around cybernetics and automation. And in the ’80s there was a lot of deliberation about AI as well. For example, in the 1984 meeting of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery], there were social scientific panels on the social impacts of AI in the main conference. So there has been a lot of deliberation about AI risk, but it’s forgotten each time AI collapses and goes away in what’s popularly known as an “AI winter.” Whereas with nuclear technology, the concern has been more ongoing, and that influenced the trajectory of the nuclear industry.

One way of looking at how little deliberation is going on is to look at examples of privacy violations where our data is used by an AI company to train a model without our consent. We could say that’s an ethical problem, but that doesn’t tell you how to solve it. I would reframe it as a problem that arose because decisions were made without representatives of the public in the room to defend the citizens’ right of privacy. This puts a clear sociological frame around the problem and suggests a potential strategy to address the problem in an institutional decision-making setting.

Google and Microsoft and other large companies have said that they want to democratize AI, but they seem to focus on making software open source and sharing data and code. What do you think it should mean for AI to be democratized?

In contrast to economic democratization, which means providing access to a product or technology, I’m talking about political democratization, which means something more like popular control. This isn’t mob rule; prudence is a key part of the framework. The fundamental claim is that the political system of democratic decision making is a way to achieve more intelligent outcomes overall compared to alternatives. The wisdom of crowds is a higher order effect that can arise when groups of people interact.

I think AI presents us with this challenge for institutional and social decision making, in that as you get more intelligent machines, you’ll need more intelligent democracies to govern. My book, based on my dissertation, offers some strategies for improving the intelligence of decision making.

What’s an example of how democratizing AI might make a difference today?

One area I’m watching closely and working on is the AI arms race with China. It’s painted as a picture of authoritarian China on the one hand and democracy on the other. And the current administration is funding what they call “AI with American values.” I would say that’s great, but where is democracy among those values? Because if they only refer to the values of the market, those are Chinese values now. There’s nothing distinct about market values in a world of global capitalism. So if democracy is America’s distinguishing feature, I would like to see the big tech companies build on that strength rather than, as I see happening now, convincing policy makers and government officials to spend more on military AI. If we’ve learned anything from the last cold war arms race, it’s that there really aren’t winners. I think a long-term multi-decade cold war with China over AI would be a race to the bottom. A lot of AI scientists would probably agree, but the same narrative framed in terms of inevitability and technological determinism is often used here in the security space to say, “We have no choice, we have to defeat China.” It will be interesting to see what AI R&D gets justified by that narrative.

Is there a connection between your Buddhism and your interest in AI?

When people hear that I’m a Zen Buddhist monk, they often say, you must want to tell programmers to meditate. But my concern has more to do with reducing suffering in the world. I see a huge risk for a profound kind of spiritual suffering that we are already getting some evidence of. Deaths of despair are an epidemic in the United States; and there’s a steep rise of suicide and depression among teenagers, even in the middle class. So there are some surprising places where material abundance isn’t translating into happiness or meaning. People are often able to withstand serious suffering if they know it’s meaningful. But I know a lot of young people see a pretty bleak future for humanity and aren’t sure where the meaning is in it all. And so I would love to see AI play a more positive role in solving these serious social problems. But I also see a potential for increased risk and suffering, in a physical way, maybe with killer robots and driverless cars, but potentially also psychological and personal suffering. Anything I can do to reduce that gives my scholarship an orientation and meaning.

In a world where much AI R&D is privatized and driven by capitalist profit motives at corporations around the globe, is it possible for thought leaders at a place like Stanford to make a difference in the trajectory of AI research overall?

Stanford certainly has the institutional capital and cultural cachet to influence the AI industry; the question is how it will use that power. The major problems of the 21st century are problems of distribution, not production. There’s already enough to go around; the problem is that a small fraction of humanity monopolizes the resources. In this context, making AI more “human-centered” requires focusing on the problems facing the majority of humanity, rather than Silicon Valley.

To pioneer a human-centered AI R&D agenda, thought leaders at Stanford’s HAI and elsewhere will have to resist the powerful incentives of global capitalism and promote things like funding AI research that addresses poor people’s problems; encouraging public participation in decision making about what AI is needed and where; advancing AI for the public good, even when it cuts into private profits; educating the public honestly about AI risks; and devising policy that slows the pace of innovation to allow social institutions to better cope with technological change.

Stanford has a chance to lead the world with innovative approaches to solving big problems with AI, but what problems will it choose?

— KATHARINE MILLER

source https://scienceblog.com/516656/a-zen-buddhist-monks-approach-to-democratizing-ai/

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socialjusticeartshare · 5 years ago

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The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old

Baby Constantin spent five months of his first year in a foster home. His family got a painful look at America’s experiment with family separation as an immigration policy.

By Caitlin Dickerson Photographs by Todd Heisler

This article is originally from June 16, 2019 - a sad reminder :(

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The text messages were coming in all day and night with only two data points: Gender and age. With each one that arrived, the on-call caseworker at Bethany Christian Services in Michigan had 15 minutes to find a foster home for another child who was en route from the border. On a brisk winter day in February 2018, Alma Acevedo got a message that caught her breath: “4 months. Boy.”

Since the summer of 2017, the 24-year-old social worker had been seeing a mysterious wave of children arriving from the border, most of them from Central America. Those who were old enough to talk said they had been separated from their parents. “The kids were just inconsolable, they’d be like, ‘Where’s my mommy? Where’s my daddy?’” Ms. Acevedo said. “And it was just constant crying after that.”

None of them had been this young, and few had come this far. When he arrived at her office after midnight, transported by two contract workers, the infant was striking, with long, curled eyelashes framing his deep brown eyes. His legs and arms were chubby, seeming to indicate that he had been cared for by someone. So why was he in Michigan?

Ms. Acevedo went to her computer and pulled up the only document that might help answer that question, a birth certificate from Romania naming the baby, Constantin Mutu, and his parents, Vasile and Florentina. She searched a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency database that showed the baby’s father was in federal custody in Pearsall, Tex.

Constantin was ultimately the youngest of thousands of children taken from their parents under a policy that was meant to deter families hoping to immigrate to the United States. It began nearly a year before the administration would acknowledge it publicly in May 2018, and the total number of those affected is still unknown. The government still has not told the Mutus why their son was taken from them, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment for this story.

In Constantin’s case, it would be months before his parents saw him again. Before then, his father would be sent for psychiatric evaluation in a Texas immigration detention center because he couldn’t stop crying; his mother would be hospitalized with hypertension from stress. Constantin would become attached to a middle-class American family, having spent the majority of his life in their tri-level house on a tree-lined street in rural Michigan, and then be sent home.

Now more than a year and a half old, the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken.

***

Though the vast majority of families streaming across the border from Mexico in recent months have come from Central America, running from poverty, drought and violence, the Mutus came from much further away — Romania, where a small but steady number of asylum seekers fleeing ethnic persecution have for years made their way to the United States.

As children growing up in their small hillside village, Vasile and Florentina Mutu helped their parents beg for money for food. They are members of the Roma minority group, which originated in India. In Romania, the Roma were enslaved for more than 500 years. Violent attacks against them persist throughout Europe. Exclusion from schools, jobs and social services is commonplace, and human rights groups have documented the practice of forced sterilizations.

A decade or so ago, as the Mutus recall, the first Roma family from their village announced that they were leaving for the United States. Word made its way back that the family had found great success — their children learned to speak perfect English, and they had become rich, though it wasn’t clear how. Over the years, more than a dozen other families followed, including Florentina’s older brother, who left a few years ago with his wife and three children. He had posted pictures on Facebook of palm trees, luxury car dealerships and American cash.

By the time their fifth child was born, the Mutus had settled into a system where they raised money elsewhere in Europe, begging and doing menial work, then came back for a few weeks at a time to Romania, where the money stretched further. They had occasional run-ins with police. Once, Mr. Mutu said, he was arrested for stealing cable from a construction site.

Vasile and Florentina Mutu with their children in Olteni, Romania, the village where they grew up.

Extended family lives nearby and often gathers for meals.

The family makes finely honed brooms and axes out of wood, a trade passed down through generations of their ancestors.

Though most of their children had been born at home, Constantin had to be delivered by C-section. Vasile sold two pigs and a cow to pay a doctor to do the procedure. In a haze of pain while she was in labor, Florentina signed documents that she couldn’t read. When she returned to the hospital for an appointment to check on her recovery, a hospital employee told her that the doctor had also performed a tubal ligation. She and her husband had planned to have more children, as is traditional in their culture. They were devastated.

Soon after, in between middle-of-the-night feedings of Constantin and while the rest of their children slept, Vasile and Florentina formed a plan: They would try to seek asylum in the United States with their two youngest children and send for the others when they were settled.

Within weeks, the Mutus had sold their home to pay a man who would arrange to get them into America through Mexico. Florentina packed a suitcase with diapers, a change of clothes for each of them, holy oil and dried basil — a Romanian good luck charm. On the plane, Constantin started to run a fever.

Mexico City was a whirl of chaos and noise. They couldn’t understand the voices or signs in Spanish. Beggars banged on the window to their taxi to ask for money; though they had done the same themselves in Europe, it somehow seemed scarier. They met a smuggler who led them to a crowded bus headed for the border.

The Mutus found seats out of sight from one another, and for the next several hours, took turns caring for Nicolas, their 4-year-old, and Constantin, who was getting warmer. As they approached the border, they got off at a stop and split up to look for medicine. Mr. Mutu had settled into the last leg of the journey on the bus when Constantin started crying on his lap. Mr. Mutu stood up, shimmying toward the back of the bus to get a bottle.He spotted the seats where his wife and son had been sitting, which were now empty.

Mr. Mutu looked around frantically and pulled out his phone to call his wife, but both of them had drained their minutes by making calls back to Romania to check in with their other children. Unsure of what else to do, he paid a cabdriver to take him and Constantin to the foot bridge into the United States, thinking that he could call his wife when they reached the other side. It was dark outside when he reached an immigration officer stationed outside the American border. He told the officer that he wanted political asylum and was taken in to be interviewed with the help of an interpreter on the phone. Mr. Mutu explained that he had lost his wife and son, and that they were fleeing persecution in Romania.

Florentina praying at a monastery near the family’s home. She sobbed when she was finally able to see Constantin on a video call arranged through a social worker.

A handful of officers entered the room. They took Constantin, placed him on a chair, and shackled Mr. Mutu’s hands and feet.

“The police wiped the floor with me,” he said through a translator, explaining that he was dragged out of the room while Constantin stayed behind with some of the officers. “I started crying because I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I couldn’t speak English. I told them, ‘I don’t understand. Why?’”

Florentina Mutu was still at the bus stop with Nicolas, crying on a bench since she had discovered that the bus had pulled away without her, when she got a call from her mother. Border officials had reached her in Romania and explained that she would also be arrested if she crossed the border. The relatives quickly scraped together money to get them home.

***

Constantin was placed with a foster family in Michigan while Ms. Acevedo worked to connect with his parents. She got a phone number for his mother in Romania and made a video call during what was the middle of the night there. A disheveled woman answered, sitting in darkness, looking like she had just been woken up. She spoke frantically, but Ms. Acevedo couldn’t understand, so she pulled up Google Translate on her computer and typed a message about Constantin in English, which she then played in Romanian.

Florentina Mutu started to sob. She repeated her full maiden name, which was listed on Constantin’s birth certificate, over and over. “She said it like 20 times,” Ms. Acevedo said “She said, ‘Florentina Ramona Patu,’ and I said ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I just wanted her to know that he was somewhere. He wasn’t lost or disappeared or something. I wanted her to know that he was with people.”

Ms. Acevedo started making weekly video calls between Constantin and his mother, propping the baby up on the couch. Ms. Mutu would mostly cry as she spoke desperately to him in Romanian.

Vasile Mutu, still in detention, sank deeper into depression. He couldn’t sleep and refused most of the food that he was offered. Occasionally he was handed documents in English or Spanish, which he couldn’t read. He cried so much that his cell mates started beating him to make him be quiet. He thought about committing suicide. “No one was telling me anything. They kept telling me to wait and wait.”

Two months into his detention, an immigration officer came to Mr. Mutu with an offer. As he understood it, if he gave up his claim for asylum, he would be deported back to Romania with Constantin. He agreed, and on June 3, 2018, he was released from his cell and loaded into a van.

He looked everywhere for Constantin and asked the officers where his son was, but was not given a clear answer. At the airport, he refused to board without the baby. The immigration officers, he said, told him that Constantin would be handed to him once he had taken his seat. But the plane lifted off and the baby never came.

When Mr. Mutu arrived home, it felt more like walking into a funeral than a celebration.

***

While the months dragged on waiting for his day in immigration court, Constantin settled into a routine with his foster family, in their comfortable brick house on a hilly road in rural Michigan. The family, which had started fostering immigrant children a year earlier after a life-changing experience doing missionary work in Ethiopia, asked not to be identified in this story because it would violate the terms of their contract with the federal government. Their three daughters immediately became enamored with Constantin and would argue over who could pull him out of his crib when he woke up from a nap.

The baby’s foster mother meticulously documented his developments for Ms. Mutu, keeping in mind how hard it would be to miss moments like when he first scooted across the living room floor or developed the belly laugh that shook his whole body. “He would do new sounds or something, and they only do it for a short amount of time, and so you want his mom to be able to hear that,” she said. “And she always wondered if he had teeth yet, and so when he would smile, you could see. So I just wanted her to see that.”

She poured herself into caring for Constantin while she struggled to fathom how he had come into their home. “I can’t imagine being the person who grabs a hold of a child and takes them. I don’t know where you have to go in yourself to be able to do that job,” she said. “If we were in that situation, I would want someone to take care of my child. I would want them in a home, in a bed. I would want someone asking them, ‘What snack do you want before you go to bed at night? Do you want a pink toothbrush or a green toothbrush?’” she said. “Or rocking them in the middle of the night, helping them go back to bed when they have bad dreams.”

Constantin was still in diapers when he appeared in federal immigration court in Detroit, four months to the day after he had arrived in Michigan, on June 14, 2018. During the five-minute proceeding, he babbled on his foster mother’s lap as she sat on the defendant’s bench. His pro bono legal representative requested that he be returned to Romania as soon as possible at government expense.

A lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security argued against the request, stating that as an “arriving alien,” Constantin was not eligible for such help. The judge quickly ruled against her, questioning the idea “that the respondent should be responsible for making his own way back to Romania as an 8-month-old.” The judge granted the request made on behalf of Constantin, giving the government three months to either appeal or send him home.

By the time Constantin’s travel plans were booked for July — a few weeks after President Trump, facing a wave of public outrage, had rescinded the family separation policy — he was 9 months old and had spent the majority of his life in the custody of the United States government.

Florentina and Vasile Mutu didn’t sleep the night before the reunion. They were standing at baggage claim at the airport in Bucharest when they finally spotted Constantin, hours behind schedule, bobbing toward them in his foster mother’s arms. She handed the baby to his mother, but he screamed and reached back in the other direction, his face crumpling into a knot of terror.

The Mutus had to stop several times on their way home to console Constantin, who bucked and wailed to the point of hyperventilation. For weeks afterward, his mother struggled to get him to eat or sleep and exchanged text messages with his foster mother, who offered advice on how he liked to be cuddled and fed. In the suitcase she had packed, she included $200 in cash — the daily allowance that Bethany Christian Services’s foster children receive — along with clothes, pacifiers, toys and books that Constantin liked, and his favorite blue-and-green striped blanket.

Florentina Mutu struggled with conflicting feelings of gratefulness and guilt. “He’s been spoiled,” she said. “He lived comfortably there, in a decent house. Not like we live here.”

The Mutus, who are pursuing a claim for damages against the United States, are back in the village where they grew up, crammed temporarily into a small house they share with another family — one bathroom with no shower shared among 11 people. They bathe with cups of water warmed on the stove and keep their clothes in an attic, climbing a rickety ladder every few days in order to change them.

Constantin has acclimated slowly. He’s sensitive to loud noises, and crowds make him cry, which is a problem, says his mother, because both are part of Roma culture. “He is not the same as he would be if we had raised him,” she said.

At 18 months old, he still can’t walk without holding onto someone’s hand. He babbles and squeals, but as far as words go, she said, “He says absolutely nothing.”

After Constantin’s return to Romania, his foster parents took two months off from fostering to adjust to him being gone. Ms. Acevedo quit her job after all of the separated children on her caseload were reunited with their parents. “I just couldn’t get over it,” she said. “So if I couldn’t get over it, imagine the kids.”

The Mutu family has returned to traveling through Europe to earn enough money to buy a new home. In the last few months, they have lived in a trailer and picked produce in Sicily, and gone to Ukraine and Poland to rummage for secondhand clothing that they can resell — Constantin and his siblings always in tow.

Both of the parents still dream out loud about returning to the United States. “I’d have to get to Canada,” Mr. Mutu said recently. ”From Canada, I could take a taxi to America, and pay seven or eight or ten thousand dollars to prepare the documents that I would need.”

Ms. Mutu’s brother, who has since returned from Florida, said he thinks they are deluded. He hated the United States, he said; it was full of struggling immigrants and other poor people. By then, he had admitted to them that he had ended up in a cramped, three-bedroom apartment shared with several other families, struggling to make the rent. The only food he could afford to eat, he said, was worse than what they had in Romania. “The laws are very strict there,” he said. “You can’t even beg there.”

“That’s not true,” Vasile Mutu shot back at the idea later. He had grown up looking at Americans — on television and now on social media — and saw their privilege not only in the way they dressed, but also how they moved and spoke, and in their expressions. The only poor people in America he saw were the ones who were detained with him at the border, hoping to get in.

Caitlin Dickerson is a Peabody Award-winning reporter based in New York who covers immigration. She has broken stories on asylum, detention and deportation policy, as well as the treatment of immigrant children in government custody. @itscaitlinhd

A version of this article appears in print on June 17, 2019, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: 4 Months Old, and Whisked Away. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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#baby #border #child separated #family separation

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meadeqkburnscn73insurance-blog · 6 years ago

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How do you solve a problem like 8chan?

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How do you solve a problem like 8chan?

Rene Aguilar and Jackie Flores pray at a makeshift memorial for the victims of Saturday’s mass shooting at a shopping complex in El Paso, Texas. | Andres Leighton/AP File Photo

President Donald Trump’s vow Monday to scour “the dark recesses of the internet” came as this weekend’s deadly gun violence provoked ire over fringe online platforms like 8chan, an anonymous message board that has hosted a racist manifesto linked to Saturday’s deadly shooting in El Paso, Texas.

But any effort to curb dangerous extremism online will run into a host of obstacles: The Constitution and U.S. laws protect hateful speech, and obscure sites like 8chan are relatively immune to the kinds of political pressure that Washington is increasingly bringing to bear against mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google. And the same big tech sites have made only slow progress in removing content supporting terrorist groups like ISIS, despite years of pressure from the Obama administration.

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Trump promised to press forward anyway, saying in a televised address, “We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts.” He said he was directing the Justice Department to coordinate with government agencies and social media companies “to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”

These are the some of the reasons the effort won’t be easy:

1) U.S. law offers a safe harbor

The First Amendment protects even racist, misogynistic and other hateful speech. And online sites enjoy broad legal immunity through another statute — Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — that has become a major focus of the bipartisan congressional backlash against online sites like Facebook.

Under the law, websites enjoy almost blanket immunity from liability for content their users post. Lawmakers of both parties have questioned whether Section 230 offers too much cover to tech companies that fail to police their platforms — and the 8chan link to the El Paso shooting offers an opening to further attempts to weaken, change or do away with the law.

But industry groups argue that removing the 230 clause would only worsen the proliferation of dangerous material, because the provision is what allows tech platforms, acting in good faith, to take down harmful content without opening themselves up to legal troubles.

“Section 230 empowers platforms to stop the spread of vile content from the dark corners of the Internet,” said Carl Szabo, general counsel at NetChoice, an e-commerce trade group representing Facebook, Google and Twitter. “Without Section 230, extreme speech would become more prevalent online — not less.”

Even some groups highly critical of the online industry’s efforts to crack down on extremist content are warning against dialing back the legal safeguards, which they say protects a vast swath of content aimed at countering hate speech.

“I don’t think we should be in a rush to change the law because these horrible things are happening,” said Heidi Beirich, who tracks online extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

2) Fringe sites often escape scrutiny

Lawmakers and activists have all kinds of leverage against companies like Facebook and Google, which employ vast lobbying armies in Washington, sometimes vie for big government contracts and can be swayed by pressure from their shareholders and employees.

But that kind of leverage has little leeway with sites like 8chan.

8chan, whose owner resides in the Philippines, represents the self-proclaimed “Darkest Reaches of the Internet” seen as a haven for unbridled free speech and a breeding ground for domestic terrorism. It’s even more of a free-for-all site than its better-known counterpart 4chan, which developed a reputation for racist content.

Numerous reports have linked 8chan to misogynistic material, child pornography and the infamous QAnon conspiracy, which claims Trump is waging a secret war against pedophiles and so-called “deep state” actors.

That fringe quality, though, means it’s harder to get such sites to remove content than it was to get big social media companies to remove videos and posts by Islamic State supporters.

“The difference is that with ISIS you’re mostly dealing with the mainstream sites of the world: YouTube, Google, and Facebook,” said Seamus Hughes, a former top staffer at the National Counterterrorism Center who now serves as deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “But with white nationalism, white supremacy, you’re dealing with fringe websites that aren’t part of the larger ecosystem of content moderation.”

In 2017, under pressure from Washington and after years of proclaiming the difficulties of determining what counts as terrorist content and removing it across their platforms, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube formed a group called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism to share best practices and work together to combat violent and extremist posts. Pinterest and Dropbox later joined what Hughes calls a “coalition of the willing.”

Only more recently have lawmakers like Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, turned their attention to sites like 8chan.

“To be honest with you, most of us had never heard of that channel until a few months ago, and then you find out people have been using it for quite a while,” Thompson told POLITICO in May.

3) Even the big sites still provide gateways to radicalism

Experts on white supremacy say that while 8chan might grab headlines, some people — especially young white men — first get a taste of the ideology on popular sites like Twitter and YouTube, despite all the years of pressure for the services to stop fostering hate.

Beirich said tech industry leaders turned a blind eye to white nationalist speech on their sites until the deadly clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 that prompted a public reckoning about online hatred.

“Until 2017, for 10 years, we had no idea how many young white men were radicalized into hardcore white nationalism” online, she said. “This is why we’ve been arguing hate groups should come off of these mainstream platforms for years.”

Since then, the companies have taken steps to crack down. Facebook earlier this year expanded its definition of hate speech to include white nationalist and white separatist content. But the move sparked objections from some right-wing commentators, who tied the policy to longstanding allegations that online platforms censor conservative speech. And advocacy groups warned that the policy shift could inadvertently sweep up groups looking to combat online extremism.

“When speech is censored by private parties based on the content of that speech, there’s nothing stopping Facebook — or YouTube or Twitter — from using that same power to censor organizations fighting to protect abortion rights or individuals fighting against climate change tomorrow,” American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Vera Eidelman told POLITICO earlier this year.

Fringe platforms, meanwhile, have pointed to the ongoing presence of hate speech and extremist content on top platforms to shield against criticisms. “My question is, why is the focus on 8chan? The El Paso shooter also had accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from my understanding,” read a statement posted on the Twitter account of Gab, a social network known as a hotbed for white nationalist content.

The gunman who killed more than 50 people in March at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed that massacre on Facebook, he pointed out, “and no one called for Facebook to be shut down.”

4) Racially divisive speech can fail to trigger the necessary alarms

8chan has served repeatedly as the digital home base where suspects in mass shootings have promoted violent or racist views before carrying out their plans. In March, an account believed to belong to the Christchurch, New Zealand, gunman aired white nationalist sentiment in a manifesto posted to the platform. And in April, an individual who identified himself as the suspect in a deadly shooting near San Diego, Calif., aired racist views on the forum prior to that attack.

But Shahed Amanullah, a former senior adviser on technology to secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, said that both government and industry are less likely to view domestic expressions of racial extremism as problematic than they are with statements supporting international terrorism.

“Back when I was in the State Department, obviously people were very concerned about this behavior coming from Muslim groups, like al Qaeda, but there’s a disconnect: When it’s people who are familiar or closer to home, it doesn’t register as an existential threat, because people are just too familiar with it. There’s terrorism and there’s this thing we don’t think of as terrorism,” said Amanullah.

“But there’s no such thing as ‘domestic terrorism’ anymore because borders don’t mean anything,” he said. And the online platforms, he says, need to take homegrown white supremacist rhetoric seriously: “If you’re truly serious about keeping language off your platform that leads to violence, you need to be true to your word whether it’s Islamic extremists or white nationalists.”

Washington’s failure to treat white supremacy as a serious threat can mean that online platforms don’t feel pressure to act, said Hughes, the former counterterrorism official. “Technology companies respond to the threat of regulation, and if that happens with white nationalism, you might see more action,” he said.

5) The real decision-makers — internet infrastructure companies — don’t want the responsibility

The real power brokers at the moment are the internet infrastructure companies that have the power to erase whole sites from the web, at least for a time.

On Monday, the CEO of Cloudflare — a company that helps protect websites from cyberattacks that can render them unreachable — said that he’d made the decision to pull his company’s protective services from 8chan in light of the El Paso attack. “The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” wrote Matthew Prince, the CEO.

Some lawmakers have pointed to those sorts of moves as useful progress. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) told POLITICO that while fringe sites like 8chan “have yet to demonstrate any willingness to limit content depicting violence, torture, racism and child pornography,” public scrutiny, and the resulting response by services such as Cloudflare, has succeeded in limiting their ability to operate.

“Our efforts should be focused on containing, counter-messaging, and delegitimizing these bastions of hate,” said Rogers, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.

But Prince, the Cloudflare CEO, says he dislikes wielding that power. “We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often,” he wrote. “Cloudflare is not a government. While we’ve been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it.”

Eidelman, the ACLU staff attorney, told POLITICO that “as odious and truly reprehensible as the statements in the manifesto are, I think we have to be careful about a world in which a handful of actors can drive speakers off the web at their sole discretion.”

8chan was offline for parts of Monday, but is likely to return to the web when it lines up other service providers.

#Foreign #Politics #problem #solve

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fullspectrum-cbd-oil · 6 years ago

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Trump May Ease Restrictions on Chinese Tech Giant Huawei, and Republicans Aren’t on Board: 5 Things to Know

President Donald Trump ruffled some feathers within his own political party after announcing that he will consider loosening regulations against Chinese technology giant Huawei.

On Saturday, President Trump announced that he is considering allowing Huawei — which is one of the biggest telecommunications companies on the planet — to consider sales in the United States as part of his trade negotiations with China.

I had a great meeting with President Xi of China yesterday, far better than expected. I agreed not to increase the already existing Tariffs that we charge China while we continue to negotiate. China has agreed that, during the negotiation, they will begin purchasing large…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2019

….again with China as our relationship with them continues to be a very good one. The quality of the transaction is far more important to me than speed. I am in no hurry, but things look very good! There will be no reduction in the Tariffs currently being charged to China.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2019

While many were happy to see progress on trade negotiations, many fear this could be a disaster for the United States.

Here are five things to know about Trump’s negotiations with Huawei.

Why does everyone seem to hate Huawei?

Huawei is a controversial company, to say the least. The tech giant leads in many corners of the global tech industry, including number one in telecommunications and number two in cell phone production.

While Huawei actually produces more phones than Apple, there is a reason why the company may sound unfamiliar to many Americans: They’ve been blacklisted from the United States.

Huawei’s ban wasn’t an attempt to protect American made products. This ban went into place due to national security concerns.

Although Huawei maintains that it is an independent company, many believe the tech giant and the Chinese government have significant overlap. As the New York Times attempted to explain, the lines between the Chinese Communist Party and Huawei are incredibly blurred. The company claims that it is owned by its employees, but reports claim the Chinese government has a firm grasp on the company — as it does with most industries.

Because of this tie to the Chinese government, American security experts fear that the company will sell data collected on Huawei products and use them against American security interests.

These fears aren’t unfounded. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, White House officials found that Huawei products collected information from consumers without consent.

“This report supports our assessment that since 2009, Huawei has maintained covert access to some of the systems it has installed for international customers. Huawei does not disclose this covert access to customers nor local governments. This covert access enables Huawei to record information and modify databases on those local systems.”

These findings prompted the Trump administration to slowly restrict Huawei’s products until they were essentially banned from sale in the United States. Similar bans have been taken up by European countries, as well.

What are Republicans saying about Trump’s deal?

Trump plans to allow the sale of widely available Huawei products in the United States, but most Republicans aren’t having it.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been Huawei’s loudest critic.

If President Trump has agreed to reverse recent sanctions against #Huawei he has made a catastrophic mistake.

It will destroy the credibility of his administrations warnings about the threat posed by the company,no one will ever again take them seriously. https://t.co/jEhHcblsVG

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2019

We must remain clear eyed about the national security threat #Huawei poses to the U.S. and our allies. ⬇ pic.twitter.com/1CW9TaXTZA

— Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) July 1, 2019

Following Trump’s announcement on Huawei, Rubio made it clear that he would do everything in his power to stop Huawei from getting its foot back into the U.S. market place. He took to Twitter and vowed to draft legislation to block Huawei if Trump’s trade deals grant them access to the U.S.

Rubio claimed such legislation would pass with a “veto-proof majority.”

If President Trump has in fact bargained away the recent restrictions on #Huawei, then we will have to get those restrictions put back in place through legislation.

And it will pass with a large veto proof majority.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2019

From the looks of things, he might be right. Many Republican senators have made it clear that they do not support Huawei’s reentrance into U.S. markets.

President Trump needs to stand strong against Huawei and stay consistent in making sure they have ZERO access to the US market.

It’s clear that Huawei has the capacity and the desire to steal our private information and use it against us. (2/3)

— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) June 30, 2019

We need less Huawei, not more Huawei. They want their equipment and networks to be the future of spying. It’s time to stop them in their tracks. https://t.co/92E6VfFoEI

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) June 30, 2019

What are Democrats saying about Trump’s deal?

Republicans are not alone in their concerns over Huawei.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made it clear he would work to oppose the Chinese tech giant. Schumer — like Trump — understands that Huawei is a bargaining chip to be used in trade deals with China, but he thinks this is the wrong time to use it.

President @realDonaldTrump: This is unacceptable. Why are you backing down again on China?

Huawei is one of few potent levers we have to make China play fair on trade.

This will dramatically undercut our ability to change China’s unfair trade practices. https://t.co/B99BbZ6LDG

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 29, 2019

With support from leading Republicans and Democrats, it looks like Rubio is right about securing a veto-proof majority against deals with Huawei.

Who supports Trump’s decision?

From the looks of things, no one is on board politically with Trump’s decision on Huawei. However, some in the tech industry see open dealings with Huawei as a good thing.

When Trump originally pulled the plug on Huawei phones, some U.S. tech companies that provide software for the company lost out on a lot of business. Google, for instance, stopped providing Andriod operating systems to Huawei when they became blacklisted in the U.S.

“The (US) companies were not exactly happy that they couldn’t sell,” Trump noted during the G20 Summitt on Saturday.

Although it isn’t yet clear if these companies would reopen sales to Huawei, they could stand to make a significant profit if Huawei sales took off in the U.S.

What is going to happen next?

It isn’t clear.

The Trump administration has yet to release the full details of their plan for Huawei and, from the sound of things, the plan is contingent on Chinese officials coming to an agreement with Trump.

Many, including Rubio, still have questions about what products will be included in Trump’s negotiations.

Q:Are you taking #Huawei off entity list? @POTUS:“No,not at all. No,no…,but we are going to be supplying equipment from our companies…”

Does this mean continuation of current policy? Huawei on Entity List but allow U.S. export of very specific non-critical components?

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2019

However, it is pretty clear that Rubio and his colleagues in the Senate plan to throw up as many roadblocks as possible to prevent Huawei from cruising back into the U.S. market.

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