February 16, 2020

Trump’s quest to rewrite history of the Russia probe

President Trump is actively seeking to rewrite the narrative that had been meticulously documented by federal law enforcement and intelligence officials, both for immediate political gain and for history.

Internal reviews and re-investigations feed suspicion inside Justice Dept.

Critics are concerned that agency leaders are trying to please President Trump regarding cases in which he is personally or politically invested.

Iowa caucus chaos was years in the making, involved decisions by national Democratic leaders

A Washington Post review of the decisions leading up to the Feb. 3 debacle found that responsibility for the chaotic events extended beyond the local officials who have borne the brunt of the criticism.
(Reuters)
(Reuters)

Storm Dennis churns up 100-foot waves and slams U.K.

The storm has become one of the most powerful nontropical cyclones on record in the North Atlantic.
(Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
(Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

He thought therapy was confidential. Now, a traumatized migrant may be deported.

The information sharing is part of a Trump administration strategy that is technically legal but which professional therapy associations say is a profound violation of patient confidentiality.

Fears mount over new coronavirus case in Westerdam cruise ship thought to be cleared

Infections also continued to spread in the Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored off Japan. In China, meanwhile, the rate of growth for new cases appears to be slowing.

Americans Are Right To Think the Economy Is Rigged

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on the Tax Codes, Unequal Education, and Homegrown Inequality






LITERARY HUB

February 15, 2020


It Was Never About Economic Anxiety: On the Book That Foresaw the Rise of Trump

Samuel Freedman Rereads 1975's Blue-Collar Aristocrats





LITERARY HUB

Fifty-one weeks before the 2020 presidential election, as I was briefly visiting the quintessential swing state of Wisconsin, I made a grim pilgrimage to one of the early landmarks on the road to Donald Trump. It was a low-slung, mustard-colored rectangle of a place, which its roadside sign identified as the Club Tavern. Typical for a bar in this state, the Club touted Friday-night fish fry and a shuttle bus to Badgers football games. I peaked inside early on a Friday afternoon to find a dozen men and women desultorily drinking as a bank of television monitors beamed NFL highlights.
The only reason the Club Tavern merited my attention is that I first knew it by a more evocative alias, the Oasis. The sociologist E.E. LeMasters had chosen that pseudonym when he made the Club Tavern, in the Madison suburb of Middleton, WI, the basis for a book based on five years of fieldwork there, Blue-Collar Aristocrats. Similarly, LeMasters had obliged the norms of his discipline in changing the names of his informants, most of them construction workers, among whom he had drank, shot pool, talked, and listened.
For a work of formal academic research, Blue-Collar Aristocrats enjoyed an unexpected burst of crossover appeal. Reviewing the book soon after its 1975 publication, The New York Times praised it for being “not a dry sociogram” and complimented LeMasters for his sensitivity, compassion, and wisdom. In that initial blast of publicity and praise, Blue-Collar Aristocrats looked as if it might join that relative handful of sociology texts—The Lonely CrowdTally’s CornerThe Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life—that enduringly penetrate the larger culture.
Trump is not a Republican exception but rather the culmination of a Republican trend, going back to Barry Goldwater.
Fate has not been nearly so kind. When I went searching online for a copy of Blue-Collar Aristocrats a few months ago, the only remotely affordable “new” copy was an unsold paperback from 1976 that had to be shipped from England. If the title remains officially in print, then that status seems like a mere legal formality. Yet if there is a forgotten book deserving of resurrection at this moment in American political history, then Blue-Collar Aristocrats just might be it. In an uncanny, even scarily prescient way, LeMasters foretold the construction of Trump’s impregnable base among white working-class men.
In saying so, it is important to acknowledge that the whole trope of Trump having uniquely and decisively attracted such voters is routinely overstated. While white men without college degrees in blue-collar jobs did give Trump some very important votes in swing states of the Rust Belt, they overall supported him in similar proportion to that establishment blue-blood Mitt Romney in 2012.
In fact, part of the great value of re-reading Blue-Collar Aristocrats now is being reminded that Trump is not a Republican exception but rather the culmination of a Republican trend, going back to Barry Goldwater and only defied by “compassionate conservative” anomalies like George W. Bush, of playing on their resentment of women and racial minorities in order to win white male votes. LeMasters brings us much closer to the origin of that trend.
Because he conducted his research between 1967 and 1972, he implicitly answers one of the persistent questions about Trump’s white proletariat: How much of their aggrievement with the Democratic Party and liberalism itself can be ascribed to materialist causes, meaning primarily the demise of industry and the explosion of income inequality? By such measures, the men in LeMasters’s book inhabited a markedly healthier economy. During the years of his fieldwork, the top 1 percent of the population took a 3 to 4 percent share of the nation’s cumulative income—about one-third of what it is now. Union membership, though already declining from its high point of 33 percent of the work force, stood in the high 20s—compared to barely 10 percent now.
So reading Blue-Collar Aristocrats in 2019 is like solving an equation by removing one of its variables: materialism. What remains are the cultural factors felt and acted upon by LeMasters’s men then and the Trump base now. And the echoes of those voices from the Club Tavern a half-century ago are nothing short of eerie. Though LeMasters’s academic specialty was the sociology of marriage, a subject he does treat at length in the book, his acute ears tuned in to the troubling mixture of nostalgia and nihilism that animates the Trump movement today.
LeMasters writes, “All of America’s leaders are white-collar: economic, political, religious, even labor . . . Who, then, can win and retain the respect and loyalty of the blue-collar elite?”
“The puzzle about the cynicism of these men,” LeMasters writes, “at least to this observer, arises from the fact that they have actually done quite well in American society: they are at the top of the blue-collar world and most of them, when questioned, admit that they are well-paid for their work. Very few of them report harassment or mistreatment on the job. Most of these men survived World War II without serious injury and a majority actually ‘believed’ in the war . . .
“Why, then, should these men be so cynical? One can understand fatalism and cynicism at the lower-class level, the Americans at the bottom of the socio-economic system. But the men in this study occupy a very nice spot in the system, and one might expect them to be less gloomy in their outlook on life.”
Gloomy is not even quite the right word for the mood that LeMasters captures. His men bristle with rage and contempt—for women, for blacks, for gays, for anti-war protestors, for white-collar workers, and even for the very union leaders whose efforts have won comfortable pay and working conditions for the rank-and-file. Except for the bar’s bowling and billiards teams, the men of the Oasis resist joining anything; churchgoing and community service are for their wives. They cast votes less for a candidate they admire than for either the one they hate less or the one, Richard Nixon at this time and Donald Trump now, who gives fullest vent to their own class resentment.
Class in Blue-Collar Aristocrats is, for that matter, a concept only tenuously attached to income. To be working-class in this book is not to be materially struggling; it is to have a steady paycheck, a package of fringe benefits, a boat and snowmobile for leisure fun. And when the wives perceive themselves as being middle-class, LeMasters intuits that they are referring less to a certain dollar figure for household income than to holding aspirational ideas about, for example, having their children go to college and a professional rather than into a manual trade.
The #MAGA of Blue-Collar Aristocrats is the half-remembered, half-invented past the men had during childhood on farms or in small towns. “They would like for the world to be like it was when they were growing up,” LeMasters writes. “[T[heir memories are of peace and quiet and satisfaction with things as they were. World War II was a violent interlude for most of these men, and after the war they wanted merely to resume life as it had been before. Nothing about the contemporary world (except the higher wages) seems as good as what they knew in their youth.”
As such a passage shows, LeMasters strives to be an empathetic vessel for his problematic informants. The author notes in the book that he is the son of a coal-miner. During the course of his research, he joins the Oasis’s billiards team. The bar’s regulars affectionately call him “Doc” and chide him with a generous spirit they deny to all their other targets.
None of LeMasters’s affinity, though, blurs his vision of what the self-righteous estrangement of such men from the American project will mean. “In a democratic society there are very real problems when one segment of the society does not respect or trust another segment,” LeMasters writes. “All of America’s leaders are white-collar: economic, political, religious, even labor . . . Who, then, can win and retain the respect and loyalty of the blue-collar elite?”


As for my own visit, brief as it was, it still went on long enough to stir up some personal memories. I went to the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1970s, just as Blue-Collar Aristocrats was being published. While I never hung out at the Club Tavern— which, in any event, has been through at least two more owners since then—I recall having gone to plenty of similar bars for fish-dry dinners or shots of bourbon. Those places felt alien to me, but not hostile. In my long hair and scruffy beard, to say nothing of my left-wing politics, I had zero expectation of fitting in. Yet neither did I feel like I was entering enemy territory. Re-reading E.E. LeMasters’s masterpiece has disabused me of my collegiate naïveté.

February 14, 2020

Trump Is Waiting and He Is Ready



Alternative facts’ are becoming a reality, which works to the president’s advantage.
President Trump at a rally in Manchester, N.H., on Monday.

THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES

Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists

Left and right agree on one point. The president’s re-election campaign is way ahead online.




THOMAS EDSALL, NY TIMES

February 13, 2020

George Soros: Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be in Control of Facebook


The social media company is going to get Trump re-elected — because it’s good for business.


NY TIMES, GEORGE SOROS

At a dinner last week in Davos, Switzerland, I was asked if I thought Facebook was behaving more responsibly today than it did during the 2016 presidential election.

“Not at all,” I answered. “Facebook helped Trump to get elected and I am afraid that it will do the same in 2020.” I explained that there is a longstanding law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that protects social media platforms from legal liability for defamation and similar claims. Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them.

I went on to say that there appears to be “an informal mutual assistance operation or agreement developing between Trump and Facebook” in which Facebook will help President Trump to get re-elected and Mr. Trump will, in turn, defend Facebook against attacks from regulators and the media.
George Soros
George Soros
“This is just plain wrong,” a Facebook spokesman told Business Insider.

I disagree. I believe that Mr. Trump and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, realize that their interests are aligned — the president’s in winning elections, Mr. Zuckerberg’s in making money.

Let’s look at the evidence: In 2016, Facebook provided the Trump campaign with embedded staff who helped to optimize its advertising program. (Hillary Clinton’s campaign was also approached, but it declined to embed a Facebook team in her campaign’s operations.) Brad Parscale, the digital director of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and now his campaign manager for 2020, said that Facebook helped Mr. Trump and gave him the edge. This seems to have marked the beginning of a special relationship.
Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, did not offer any data to back up his claims that micro-targeted Facebook ads were decisive in Trump’s victory.
Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital director, did not offer any data to back up his claims that micro-targeted Facebook ads were decisive in Trump’s victory. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
More recently, direct contact between the two men has raised serious questions. Mr. Zuckerberg met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 2019. We don’t know what was said. But from an interview on the sidelines at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 22, we do know what Mr. Trump said about the meeting: Mr. Zuckerberg “told me that I’m No. 1 in the world in Facebook.” Mr. Trump apparently had no problem with Facebook’s decision not to fact-check political ads. “I’d rather have him just do whatever he is going to do,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Zuckerberg. “He’s done a hell of a job, when you think of it.”
In a 35-minute speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook as a champion of free speech and democracy.
The president’s 2016 campaign mounted a robust data-centric communications effort and has continued to build on that program over the past few years, using Facebook as a key part of their strategy.

Facebook’s decision not to require fact-checking for political candidates’ advertising in 2020 has flung open the door for false, manipulated, extreme and incendiary statements. Such content is rewarded with prime placement and promotion if it meets Facebook-designed algorithmic standards for popularity and engagement.

What’s more, Facebook’s design tends to obscure the sources of inflammatory and false content, and fails to adequately punish those who spread false information. Nor does the company effectively warn those who are exposed to lies.
I expressed my fear that with Facebook’s help, Mr. Trump will win the 2020 election. The recent hiring of a right-wing figure to help manage its news tab has reinforced those fears. 

[Campbell Brown, a former NBC News anchor who has been at Facebook since 2017, has been tapped to lead the program. Before joining Facebook, Brown served as editor-in-chief of The 74, an education policy news website that was funded by the family foundation of Betsy DeVos, who subsequently joined Trump’s cabinet, as Judd Legum has reported. And under Brown’s tenure, Facebook News has credentialed the noxious hate site Breitbart.com as one of the sites the tab will promote. Brown’s defense of that decision -- that Breitbart.com “meets our integrity standards for misinformation” -- suggests that those standards will be absurdly low for right-wing media.Media Matters]

In my comments in Davos, I also pointed out that Facebook has been used to cause worse damage in other countries than the United States. In Myanmar, for example, military personnel used Facebook to help incite the public against the Rohingya, who were targeted in a military assault of incredible cruelty including murder, rape and the burning of entire villages: Around 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. The International Court of Justice in The Hague is currently deliberating whether these atrocities qualify as genocide.

But within the last year, Facebook has introduced new features on its mobile app that actually intensify the fire of incendiary political attacks — making them easier and quicker to propagate. The system is cost-free to the poster and revenue-generating for Facebook. Good for Facebook, bad for democracy.
Matt Walters, an avid Bernie Sanders supporter, inside his home in Almont, Mich. Walters shares memes against Elizabeth Warren to several Facebook groups with the potential for thousands of people to see these images. (Ali Lapetina/For The Washington Post)
The responsible approach is self-evident. Facebook is a publisher not just a neutral moderator or “platform.” It should be held accountable for the content that appears on its site.

Speaking at a cocktail party in Davos on Jan. 22, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, repeated the worn Silicon Valley cliché that Facebook is trying to make the world a better place. But Facebook should be judged by what it does, not what it says.

I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. They follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.

George Soros (@georgesoros) is the founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations.