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Saturday, January 8, 2022
POLITICO NIGHTLY: The Great Resignation comes for schools
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
RSN: NY Times Editorial Board | Train the Police to Keep the Peace, Not Turn a Profit
23 November 21
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Policing for profit encourages unfair enforcement of the law. It also increases the likelihood that motorists stopped for infractions largely unrelated to public safety will be killed or injured during encounters with officers who are trained to view traffic stops as moments of mortal peril.
The situation cries out for departments to change how officers are trained. Ultimately, these departments need to stand down from practices that bring many more people than necessary into contact with the law under circumstances that too often lead to what one district attorney refers to as “anticipatory killings” by police officers.
The New York Times lays out these and other issues in an alarming investigation of the culture that too often transforms traffic stops for common violations into unnecessary beatings, car chases or shootings.
The Times investigation found that over the past five years, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers who were not brandishing guns or knives or who were not being pursued for dangerous crimes.
Many of these motorists ended up dead in stops that began with standard violations like having broken taillights or running a red light. Over and over again, prosecutors convinced the courts that the killings were legally justified because the officers felt that their lives were endangered.
Only five officers were convicted of crimes in connection with these deaths — but local governments ended up paying at least $125 million to settle about 40 wrongful-death suits and other claims.
The Times investigation found in a number of encounters that officers often seemed to exaggerate the threat to their lives. Worse still, officers commonly manufactured dangerous situations by stationing themselves in front of fleeing cars or reaching inside of vehicles. They then fired their guns in what they later described as self-defense.
African American motorists were overrepresented among those killed. A criminologist told The Times that the act of exaggerating the danger of stops compounded racial bias: “Police think ‘vehicle stops are dangerous’ and ‘Black people are dangerous,’ and the combination is volatile,” he said.
Officers are sometimes killed during traffic stops, but statistically speaking, the odds of that actually happening are low. Traffic stops are far and away the most common point of contact between people and the law. Given that there are tens of millions of such stops each year, studies have found that an officer’s chances of being killed during one are less than 1 in 3.6 million.
Nevertheless, police academies tend to show trainees gory videos and worst-case scenarios, while depicting the traffic stop as the most dangerous encounter an officer can engage in.
As one police official told The Times: “All you’ve heard are horror stories about what could happen. It is very difficult to try to train that out of somebody.” A culture of gross exaggeration creates an atmosphere in which outrageous police conduct leading up to a civilian death is judged acceptable.
For example, The Times investigation found that more than three-quarters of the unarmed motorists who died were killed while attempting to flee. Dashboard and body-camera footage showed officers “shooting at cars driving away, or threatening deadly force in their first words to motorists, or surrounding sleeping drivers with a ring of gun barrels — then shooting them when, startled awake, they tried to take off.”
The federal government worsens this problem by spending more than $600 million a year to subsidize the writing of tickets. At least 20 states have responded to this policy by evaluating police officers based on how many stops they make per hour.
Communities that are dependent on traffic-ticket revenue sometimes maintain larger police departments than are really necessary only for the purpose of raking in money. The Times investigation found more than 730 municipalities that rely on fees and fines for at least 10 percent of their revenue.
The town of Henderson, La., with a population of about 2,000, got nearly 90 percent of its general revenue from fines and fees in 2019. Oliver, Ga., home to about 380 people, gets more than half its budget from fines. A state investigation found that last year the town’s police force had written more than $40,000 worth of tickets outside its legal jurisdiction.
Departments that trawl poor communities in particular for ticket revenue — and whose officers sometimes manufacture infractions — undermine trust in the law. Policing for profit also subjects motorists to unfair scrutiny and potentially dangerous encounters with officers during traffic stops. States and municipalities need to move away from this practice.
A poster of Kyle Rittenhouse held in protests outside his trial. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
The verdict exposed a disturbing point of agreement between violent militias and the GOP.
Immediately after Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal on Friday, the fringe right’s online forums lit up with celebration — and among some, a belief that they too can kill without legal consequence. On Telegram, a secure messaging app popular with extremists, the leader of a neo-Nazi group wrote that the verdict gives “good Americans legal precedent and license to kill violent commies without worrying about doing life in prison if we defend ourselves in a riot.”
There is every reason to take such rhetoric seriously. “It has never taken more than a whisper of approval to fan the flames of militant right action. The Kenosha acquittal is a shout,” writes Kathleen Belew, a historian of white power movements at the University of Chicago. Based on how it’s been cheered in some quarters, the verdict is potentially setting the stage for future violence.
Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project shows that, between January 2020 and June 2021, there were 560 protest events where either demonstrators or counter-demonstrators showed up with guns — about 2 percent of all protests in the United States during the studied time period. The data also shows that these demonstrations are more than five times more likely to involve violent or destructive behavior as compared to unarmed ones.
Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason — the co-author (with Nathan Kalmoe) of the forthcoming Radical American Partisanship — worries that this trend will escalate. At future protests on charged issues like racial justice and voting rights, armed right-wing counterprotesters may continue to descend on America’s cities, in increasingly large numbers. “The January 6 folks coming by, Kyle Rittenhouse-style,” as she put it.
Mason and Kalmoe’s research documents rising support for political violence in the US, prompting worries that eventually, the killing in Kenosha will repeat itself elsewhere. The more it does, the more likely it is to lead to retaliatory violence from the other side. The ultimate risk may be what Mason terms “an endless cycle” of partisan killing, like Italy’s Years of Lead or pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas.
Looking at the reaction to the verdict from mainstream conservatives makes the current predicament even scarier. Far from cooling the passions of the fringes, mainstream Republican politicians and allied media are canonizing Rittenhouse, elevating him into a model for ordinary conservatives to follow.
Rittenhouse’s acquittal is in a certain sense unsurprising: America’s self-defense laws are incredibly permissive, making it difficult to convict someone in a violent situation who claims to fear for their life. Yet it is one thing for conservatives to say the jury reached the legally correct verdict and another thing entirely to describe Rittenhouse as a moral exemplar: a gun-toting American standing guard against the country’s internal enemies.
“By suggesting he is a hero,” Mason tells me, “the implication is that what he did was not a tragedy at all. It wasn’t a conflict gone lethally wrong, it was a good lethal conflict.”
A bloody turn in this deeply polarized moment for American democracy need not be inevitable. But the Rittenhouse case has revealed a scary convergence between the fringe and the mainstream on the wisdom of turning guns against their political enemies. Its resolution validates that belief in ways that challenge the basic nonviolent compact at the heart of democratic political life.
After Rittenhouse’s acquittal, the fringe right gears up for battle
According to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish nonprofit that tracks the fringe right, extremists have spent the past year lionizing Rittenhouse as an example of a white man taking the struggle against the left into his own hands. The “not guilty” verdict was, for them, a kind of vindication.
“As soon as the jury announced its verdict, online extremist spaces erupted in cheers and self-congratulatory rhetoric,” the ADL explained in a Friday blog post. “Supporters heralded the Rittenhouse verdict as a victory for the principle of self-defense and providing legal precedent for violent responses to perceived threats, and some argued that people no longer need to avoid acting during tense situations for fear of legal repercussions, a potentially dangerous development.”
The ADL documented a wealth of examples, including a large number of right-wing extremists interpreting the ruling as a license to engage in intimidation or violence at future Black Lives Matter protests:
- A user on a chat room called “Warriors for America (Oath Keepers)” wrote that it was “open season on lib trash commies!”
- A Twitter user affiliated with the extreme right boogaloo movement — which reportedly seeks to foment civil disorder — wrote “WE CAN PROTECT OUR COMMUNITIES NOW REFERENCING RITTENHOUSE V. Wisconsin.”
- One member of patriots.win, a pro-Trump web forum, wrote that “BLMKKK gotta be shitting. We have permission to defend ourselves now.”
The ADL is not the only organization or expert to notice a surge in right-wing calls to arms on Friday.
Within minutes of the jury’s announcement, “the verdict [was] already being rallied around as justification for racial violence” writes Alex Newhouse, the deputy director of the extremism research center at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “Rittenhouse has been ‘sanctified’ (joining the ranks of mass shooters like the Christchurch, El Paso, Norway shooters).”
Over direct message, Newhouse pointed me to a group of extremist Telegram channels, frequented by people he called “the absolute worst of the worst.” Perusing these forums, I found memes celebrating Rittenhouse’s violence, dancing on the graves of those he killed, and a sense that the ruling was a real victory for their movement.
“Hey parasites, Kyle Rittenhouse killed 2 of your friends and got away with it. Now he’s celebrating life as a free man, and being showered with praise,” one Telegram extremist wrote. “Your impotent rage only makes the victory all the more sweet for us. Literal National Socialists are celebrating your failure. ... Hail Rittenhouse.”
Another far-right group claimed to be “monitoring” a protest in Boston after the verdict, vowing that “our activists will intervene if senseless attacks are carried out by Antifa on white civilians.”
As of Monday, there haven’t yet been national media reports of deadly far-right violence in Boston or other parts of the country since the verdict. This reflects the fact that many of these Telegram posters are just that: posters. They talk tough on the internet but don’t actually plan to act on it in practice.
But all it takes is one to really mean it: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, for example, posted about his plans on the social media site Gab before he killed 11 people in 2018. And for that reason, experts are warning that the Rittenhouse verdict could have far-ranging consequences for the safety of American protesters and American politics more broadly.
“We’ve already seen a lot of armed activity around protests over the last couple years,” J.M. Berger, an associate fellow at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague, tells me. “This verdict likely ensures that those armed people will feel more comfortable taking a much more confrontational stance.”
This is how the country could start drifting in the direction of Mason’s nightmare scenario. The more Rittenhouse’s acquittal inspires armed right-wingers to take it on themselves to “police” liberal protests, the more likely it is that there is another deadly incident. This is especially the case when far-right extremists who’ve been marinating in fantasies of violence get involved, as the country saw in the murder of Heather Heyer during the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, far-right rally.
In their studies of previous episodes of political violence, Mason and Kalmoe document a self-perpetuating effect: “Violent episodes tend to increase support for violence,” as Mason puts it. People see their side being killed and see violence against their enemies as a justified response.
Rittenhouse’s acquittal might not be the end of the story. It could be the beginning of a bigger and scarier one.
The dangerous convergence of the violent fringe and the GOP mainstream
Violent white nationalists on the internet’s fringes weren’t the only ones to immediately celebrate Rittenhouse’s acquittal. Within minutes of the not-guilty verdict, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) had already offered him an internship.
“Kyle, if you want an internship reach out to me,” he wrote on Instagram, adding that his supporters should “be armed, be dangerous, and be moral” — like Rittenhouse, presumably.
Cawthorn has competition. Two other House Republicans, Reps. Paul Gosar (AZ) and Matt Gaetz (FL), have also suggested they want Rittenhouse in their office. Gosar, fresh off of an official censure for posting a video in which he is depicted killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), tweeted that “I will arm wrestle Matt Gaetz to get dibs for Kyle as an intern.”
The celebrations in conservative media were, if anything, even more effusive.
“Not only did Kyle Rittenhouse have the right to do this, I encourage you to do it,” said Steven Crowder, a popular right-wing YouTube host. “Some people needed a catalyst, let today be the day,” he continued — adding that conservatives will make sure “there will not be another town burned down” if they take up arms against “this evil of the left.”
“Kyle Rittenhouse wound up on the streets in Kenosha with a gun in the first place for one reason. He was there because, in the summer of 2020, the leadership of the Democratic Party endorsed mob violence for political ends,” Fox’s Tucker Carlson said on Friday evening, while touting an exclusive interview to air on Monday night.
“If Kyle Rittenhouse can save his own life, you can too,” he said.
In theory, it would have been possible for conservatives to say the verdict was the right one without lionizing Rittenhouse. A handful of anti-Trump conservatives — like David French, who is also a staunch Second Amendment supporter — did just that.
But that’s not the tack that much of the mainstream right has chosen. They sound less like French than they sound like the extremists on Telegram — turning Rittenhouse into a hero, a model to be emulated, rather than a cautionary tale.
“The rhetoric is stated slightly differently, but the end result is the same: This is a young man who did the right thing,” Art Jipson, a professor at the University of Dayton who studies white racial extremism, told the Washington Post. “The arguments start from different origin points, but they create an almost iconic, or at least a powerful, symbol.”
In some cases, there are ties among the Republicans celebrating Rittenhouse and parts of the violent fringe. Gosar met with an Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers militia and, according to one participant, said that America was already in the midst of a civil war. Gaetz attended a rally where the Proud Boys, a “Western chauvinist” street brawling group, was providing security — and then praised them on his podcast. In this, they were following former President Donald Trump’s praise of the fringe, referring to the “very fine people” at the Charlottesville rally and telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate.
The fringe and the mainstream right differ on many key points — among others, the bigotry of the extremists is far more naked and eliminationist — but they agree on a conspiratorial worldview in which liberals are not mere political rivals but existential threats to the American way of life.
“One of the biggest problems this country faces is perceived polarization, driven by misinformation on the right [claiming] leftist extremists want to destroy our way of life and, thus, it is reasonable to do everything in our power to stop them,” writes Yphtach Lelkes, a scholar of political rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania.
In this narrative, every illiberal move Republicans and conservatives make is a form of self-defense. Seizing partisan control of vote counting is justified as a means of stopping Democratic fraud. Banning school libraries from carrying books by Black and LGBTQ authors is a means of stopping liberal indoctrination. Laws that protect drivers who run over protesters from lawsuits are a way of protecting communities from rioters.
Rittenhouse is a powerful symbol for the right because he acted out a long-held fantasy — a man with his gun, standing up to the liberal hordes. That he was found not guilty is validation that fantasy could be made reality, a godsend to genuine extremists.
But his acquittal’s celebration across a much broader spectrum of the right is perhaps even more troubling. It threatens the mainstream consensus that political violence has no place in a democratic society — and the related notion that Americans need to share a country with people who disagree with them.
A 'win' for abortion rights advocates in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization would mean holding the line on abortion rights and access. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court will hear arguments over Mississippi's 15-week ban, which has the potential to undo Roe v. Wade and devastate abortion access.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is likely the big abortion case on the Court’s docket this year. This remains true even after the Court decided to let Texas SB 8, which bans abortion after cardiac activity is detected around six weeks, take effect a few months ago. Should the Court allow Mississippi’s 15-week ban to take effect, such a ruling has the potential to devastate abortion access and undo Roe v. Wade.
Here are five key things you should know about the case.
The law in question
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is arguably the most significant abortion case in decades. As Rewire News Group Executive Editor Jessica Mason Pieklo put it, “The fate of abortion rights and access for millions of people in this country could end up being decided by nine unelected justices.” And while oral arguments will be livestreamed, the justices will decide behind closed doors, and they can take up to a year to rule.
At issue in the case is a gestational ban, which outlaws abortion at a specific point in pregnancy—in this case, 15 weeks’ gestation.
Why 15 weeks, you might be asking? Well, even the lawmakers who passed the laws don’t know. It’s an arbitrary marker—it has nothing to do with responsible practice of medicine and everything to do with exploiting and politicizing perceived moral discomfort around later abortion.
Impact on other states
If the Supreme Court puts its stamp of approval on Mississippi’s 15-week ban, it means many more patients in Mississippi will be forced to travel out of state for care. So will patients in neighboring states like Georgia and Alabama. Pregnant people are already forced to cross state lines to access care, thanks to existing restrictions—which will likely tighten if the Court undermines the abortion precedent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, forcing pregnant people to travel even farther.
Susan Rinkunas reported for Rewire News Group this year about the case’s potential impact on other states: Louisiana’s 15-week abortion ban is tied to the outcome of Jackson Women’s Health, which means if the Court upholds the Mississippi ban, the Louisiana law could go into effect. Meanwhile, clinics in Florida, a state considered an abortion safe haven right now, are bracing for an influx of patients.
No compromise on abortion rights
With the Supreme Court also hearing challenges to Texas SB 8’s enforcement mechanism, some coverage has compared the two abortion bans, framing a six-week ban as more “extreme” than a 15-week one. But it’s not that simple—and it’s important to make clear that the 15-week ban at stake in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is in no way a compromise on abortion rights. It is not a middle ground or a more reasonable alternative to a six-week ban like Texas SB 8.
If the Court allows a 15-week abortion ban to stand, the floodgates would open. That’s because it all comes down to the constitutional principles at stake—the precedent that abortion restrictions cannot be an undue burden on the right to choose abortion, and the precedent that prevents states from banning abortion before fetal viability.
What’s on the line
The case is about a 15-week abortion ban in Mississipi, but what’s really at stake is the fate of Roe v. Wade, and thus the future of abortion access in the country. Under the joint precedent set by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states cannot ban pre-viability abortions and they cannot enact any abortion restrictions that present an undue burden on access.
Both these critical stopgaps are on the chopping block with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. A decision by the Court undercutting Roe and Casey by allowing the Mississippi ban to take effect would open the door to more draconian bans like Texas SB 8 to stay in effect as well.
What happens if advocates win
What are the odds we’ll have a win for abortion rights at the Supreme Court next year? That’s a trick question, if we’re being honest.
There’s a conservative supermajority on the bench, and a number of the justices are openly hostile to abortion access. The very fact that the Court agreed to hear this case—and followed it up by allowing SB 8 to take effect—signals an openness to weakening the abortion precedent.
In short: There’s really no way for abortion advocates to “win” at the Supreme Court with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
But what happens if the Court sides with the Jackson Women’s Health Organization and finds the 15-week ban unconstitutional? Just as a loss would have ripple effects that extend beyond Mississippi, so would a win.
A “win” for abortion rights advocates would mean holding the line on abortion rights and access. As the right prepares for its next attack on access, advocates would have a sort of stopgap, knowing that no matter what conservatives come up with next, a 15-week ban likely won’t survive legal challenges.
A ruling against the 15-week ban could also mean good things for the vast abortion care desert that stretches west from Florida to New Mexico and north to Virginia. It would overturn laws like SB 8, and, despite not being nearly enough to ensure access for all, that would protect countless providers and patients nationwide.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference on May 10, 2021, in New York City. (photo: Mary Altaffer/Getty Images)
The New York state Assembly Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report indicates the former governor very much deserved to be impeached
The report covers a lot of ground. It lent credence to the attorney general’s report about Cuomo’s sexual misconduct, concluding that there is “overwhelming evidence that the former Governor engaged in sexual harassment.” It found Cuomo was “not fully transparent” about the number of nursing home residents who died from Covid-19. It also found that Cuomo was forcing his staff to work on his own lucrative, and increasingly comical, book about how well he handled the Covid crisis. Ironically, staffers working on the book complained it was cutting into time that could be used … handling the Covid crisis.
“[A] senior state official complained in a text message to a colleague that work on the Book was compromising the official’s ability to work on COVID-related matters,” the report reads.
In the summer of 2020, Cuomo landed a lucrative deal to write about how he shepherded New York through the Covid crisis. The governor was soon beset by scandals, including reports that his office fudged the numbers about Covid-related nursing home deaths just as he was beginning to write his book, titled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The impeachment report released Monday concludes that the former governor “utilized the time of multiple state employees, as well as his own, to further his personal gain during a global pandemic a time during which the former Governor touted the ‘around-the-clock’ state response to the crisis.”
Senior state officials worked “extensively” on the book, according to the report. This work included meeting with publishers and agents, transcribing and drafting portions of the book, coordinating how the book would be promoted, and more. This was all done during “normal work hours” as part of the “regular course of work in the Executive Chamber.” Working on the book was “not voluntary,” according to one senior official, who was a different senior official than the one who complained the book was sucking up time they could have been spending actually addressing the Covid crisis.
Cuomo even lied about how much money he was raking in from the book, according to the report, by trying to “downplay the extent of his earnings.” Cuomo claimed that his income from the book would primarily come from sales, but his contract guaranteed him $5.2 million in advances, with additional sales-related payments coming on top of that sum.
Bueller? (photo: InTheseTimes/Paramount Pictures)
Elites are sounding the alarm over threats of inflation in order to block Biden’s social spending plan. We shouldn’t fall for it.
Since 2010, median housing rents have gone up by 36 percent. The cost of family health insurance has risen 47 percent. From the academic year 2009 – 2010 to 2018 – 2019, average costs of college went up 39 percent. And the median hourly wage rose by just 11 percent, so rent, healthcare and college — among other things — are all less affordable now than they were ten years ago.
To varying degrees, each of these problems is addressed in the Democrats’ budget reconciliation bill, dubbed the Build Back Better (BBB) plan. That legislation includes added support for housing, increased premium subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and expanded Pell Grants for college students. There is compensation for the inadequate growth of wages, including tax credits for families with children, subsidized childcare, pre‑K for three- and four-year olds, and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for workers without children. Of course, each of these items is scaled down from what was originally proposed by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. More should be done.
Now comes Manchin, leading the charge by calling the budget bill “inflationary.” It’s like criticizing a fire company for using water instead of gasoline. The bad faith here is stunning. There wasn’t a peep about inflation in the case of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, supported by Manchin and signed by Biden on Monday, much less about former President Trump’s tax cuts or defense spending increases.
The spur for this new campaign is a handful of cherry-picked, transitory changes in particular prices. On the most basic level, there is a widespread misunderstanding of what “inflation” really is. Inflation is a continuous increase in prices, more or less across the board. As my reactionary graduate macro economics professor taught me, a spike in the price of, say, oil is not “inflation” unless it ends up feeding into a sustained increase in other prices.
As Ryan Grim notes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that’s what we are looking at right now. The change in prices is overwhelmingly due to energy. Now, if that spike persisted, it would not be surprising to see it propagate through the wider economy. But there is no reason to expect that. As Dean Baker points out, an isolated bottleneck in the supply of anything is likely to clear in short order, one of the limited blessings of on-demand capitalism. For example, just this year, television prices rose in the summer and subsequently fell by almost three percent.
There has been reporting that oil prices are being propped up by Saudi leader and part-time butcher Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in concert with the Russians. There are two reasons to doubt this. One is that there are other countries not beholden to Saudi Arabia who can offset any manufactured shortfall by ramping up their own production. Members of the OPEC cartel have been known to cheat on mutual agreements to limit supply. Two is that price spikes encourage the adoption of alternative energy sources. It is true that this adoption takes time, but once it is established, it is non-reversible. A temporary price increase can generate a permanent loss of customers.
This narrowness of the price increases is well illustrated in the latest figures for the Consumer Price Index. Including the latest, allegedly alarming, one-month change of 0.9 percent in the total CPI yields a year-over-year (‘YOY’) change (from October of 2020 to last month) of 6.2 percent. It should be noted that this 6.2 figure does not itself provide support to any claim that the increase is either spreading through the economy or is being sustained. On the first count, what is called the “core” CPI, excluding the volatile numbers for food and energy, shows a YOY increase of a more modest 4.6. And the 0.9 percent jump in October constitutes just one month of data, so it is too soon to say it is sustained.
The politics of all this, meanwhile, is a different matter. We are being driven deep into the silly season. The up-to-date price of gasoline, which people buy on a regular basis, is displayed on huge signs all over the country (and on Twitter by pundits like Blitzer). The price of milk is listed in the advertisements we get with the local newspaper. As Kevin Drum demonstrates, the news media thrives on publicizing outliers in prices, not boring averages.
On the other hand, the prices of healthcare or college don’t receive so much public attention. We could be forgiven for suspecting that underlying this disparity is the presumption that the working class doesn’t need healthcare or higher education. Moreover, anyone who follows the news knows that no Republican ever gives a Democrat credit if the price of gas goes down, which it often does. The GOP only cares when prices go up during Democratic presidencies.
Purely for the sake of argument, let’s concede that the recent increase in energy prices is a problem. Even so, contracting or eliminating the BBB bill to reduce the price level, as some “centrists” have advocated, is as absurd as invading Iraq to avenge 9/11. (Do you see a pattern here?) A serious response to an undesirable increase in energy prices would do something about…energy. A broad-brush response, such as a move by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, would contract a much wider swath of the economy than the energy sector. And, under that scenario, we might not even see a pale imitation of Biden’s agenda come to fruition.
In the latter regard, inferring an inflation risk from BBB fails the most elementary economics, since, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the current version of BBB is mostly offset with tax increases. It would only be the net of spending over revenues that would potentially be inflationary, if and only if the economy did not still have a shortfall of five million jobs. In reality, the BBB legislation is likely to lessen the inflation risk, not increase it.
You don’t have to be a socialist to discount the inflation danger. In late September, a group of eminent, Nobel Laureate economists announced support for BBB, writing: “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”
The Federal Reserve itself is saying the recent increase is annoying but transitory, reducing the likelihood (thankfully) that it will take any action to choke off the current growth in employment.
Another group that is paid — handsomely — to anticipate inflationary trends consists of those who trade in the bond market. Since most bonds’ returns are in nominal dollars, a change in the price level changes the value of any such bond. The ‘coupon’ of a bond is a fixed dollar amount. The market will reprice bonds so that they hit the market interest rate. It’s amusing to note that, before and after the latest panic about the October price change, the interest rates on Treasury bonds with durations of seven years or longer all went down, not up.
All things considered, this new inflation scare is one of dumbest turns in what passes for economic thinking since voodoo economics.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. (image: POLITICO/AP/iStock)
The Taliban is banned from Facebook, but its Ministry of Interior was quietly allowed to post.
After the Taliban assumed power in August, Facebook initially tightened its controls on the group, which it had already blacklisted. But internal company materials reviewed by The Intercept show that Facebook has carved out several exceptions to its Taliban ban, permitting specific government ministries to share content via the company’s platforms and contributing to a growing tangle of internal policies on how the Taliban posts.
Facebook has for years officially barred the Taliban and myriad affiliates from using its platforms under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, an internal blacklist published by The Intercept in September. The DIO blocks thousands of groups and people from Facebook platforms and dictates what billions of people can say about them there. But unlike other banned groups on the DIO list, like Al Qaeda or the Third Reich, the Taliban is now a sovereign government engaged in the very real business of administering an entire country with millions of inhabitants.
An internal policy memorandum obtained by The Intercept shows that, at the end of September, the company created a DIO exception “to allow content shared by the Ministry of Interior.” The memo cited only “important information about new traffic regulations,” noting “we assess the public value of this content to outweigh the potential harm,” although it did not limit its exception to traffic updates only. A second DIO exception added at the same time provides a far narrower carveout: Two specific posts from the Ministry of Health would be permitted on the grounds that they contained information relevant to Covid-19. Despite the exceptions, however, Interior’s Facebook page was deleted at the end of October, as first reported by Pajhwok Afghan News agency, while the Health Ministry’s page hasn’t posted since October 2.
While no other government offices are currently allowed to share information, other exceptions to the DIO policy reviewed by The Intercept were even narrower in scope: For just 12 days in August, government figures on Facebook were permitted to recognize the Taliban “as official gov of Afghanistan” without risking deletion or suspension, according to another internal memo, and a similarly brief stretch from late August to September 3 granted users the freedom to post the Taliban’s public statements without having to “neutrally discuss, report on, or condemn” these statements.
While exempting the Ministry of Interior would permit Afghans to receive information about a variety of important administrative functions like public security, driver’s licenses, and immigration matters, no such exceptions have been issued for other offices with responsibilities vital to the basic functioning of any country, like the ministries of agriculture, commerce, finance, and justice. Afghanistan is currently “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe,” according to a recent U.N. report, and the new Taliban administration is still struggling to establish itself.
Facebook spokesperson Sally Aldous told The Intercept that the Taliban remains banned from the company’s services through the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, adding, “We continue to review content and Pages against our policies and last month removed several Pages including those from the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Public Works. However, we’ve allowed some content about the provision of essential public services in Afghanistan, including, for example, two posts in August on the Afghan Health Page.”
It’s unclear how Facebook has arrived at this piecemeal approach to its Taliban policy, or how exactly it determined which government ministries to permit. Aldous declined to explain how the company drafted these policy exceptions or why they they weren’t publicly disclosed, but told The Intercept that “Facebook does not make decisions about the recognized government in any particular country but instead respects the authority of the international community in making these determinations,” adding, “We have a dedicated team, including regional experts, working to monitor the situation in Afghanistan. We also have a wide and growing network of local and international partners that we work with to alert us to emerging issues and provide essential context.”
Experts who spoke to The Intercept say these exceptions, even if well-intentioned, demand a public disclosure not only of their existence, but also of how the determinations were reached. Others criticized the policy exceptions as arbitrary in nature, underscoring the unchecked power the American company holds over the functioning of another country’s government, particularly in a society like Afghanistan where a lack of internet infrastructure creates a greater reliance on Facebook products. In 2019, a New York Times report noted that Facebook messaging product “WhatsApp has become second only to Facebook as a way for Afghans to communicate with one another, and with the outside world.” While poorer countries are a lucrative and growing target for Facebook’s advertising operations, years of reporting show these markets are often an afterthought in terms of content policy and moderation.
Masuda Sultan, co-founder of Women for Afghan Women, told The Intercept that while the potential for Taliban propagandizing is a concern, Facebook platforms in Afghanistan may present “the only communication that many people have in order to relay messages with the entities in power, or for these entities to hear them.” In August, Sultan made use of the now-shuttered Taliban WhatsApp hotline when her NGO’s Kabul office was attacked amid the chaos of the American pullout. “It was incredibly important for us to have access to them because the police had abandoned their posts and we had no one else to call,” she added. “Especially during an emergency, it is not helpful to have communications shut down between ordinary people and those in power.”
While Facebook is a publicly traded company and at times consults and collaborates with both governmental experts and regional NGOs, the company remains under the complete and total control of one man, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, and its policy decisions are ultimately his. It’s unclear to what extent the future of Afghanistan is a priority for Zuckerberg, even while his company’s undisclosed content policies continue to affect it.
The company has stumbled through issues of national sovereignty in the past — throttling the military junta in Myanmar’s access to Facebook and banning the sitting president of the United States early this year — but the magnitude of banning an entire government and then creating niche exceptions to that ban is a new test of the company’s de facto control over the flow of information to billions of people around the world. “Facebook has had to make these calls before,” explained Jane Esberg, a senior social media analyst at International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, but “the scale of it is new in the sense that it is both extremely political in the United States, and it is with an organization that is a designated terror organization.”
While the Taliban is not listed as a terrorist entity by the State Department, it is subject to economic sanctions through the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster, a list of entities on which Facebook’s own internal blacklist relies heavily. Facebook has repeatedly pointed to the SDGT list as the legal rationale behind its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, claiming it has no choice but to limit such speech, though legal scholars deny the company is under any legal obligation to censor the Taliban or any other SDGT entity, let alone censor those who want to mention them.
However, Facebook appears to be operating based on its own extremely broad and conservative interpretation of the law, one that critics say isn’t grounded in the actual statutes at play but rather the company’s corporate prerogatives. In a recent Twitter thread on this topic, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior attorney and civil liberties director David Greene wrote, “I can confirm that for years we’ve been asking Facebook to provide the specific legal authority that compels them to remove these groups (as opposed to just deciding they don’t want them). I’ve always said there is none. And we’ve never had a specific law cited to us.”
By notable contrast, Twitter continues to permit the Taliban to use their platform without legal penalty of any kind. “It’s completely unclear what the political logic is and who’s driving the political logic internally,” said Esberg, who emphasized the importance of “some degree of transparency so that we understand what the logic is, what counts as information that the Afghan public needs to see” versus whatever speech is deemed too “dangerous” for the platform. In a recent article for Just Security, Faiza Patel and Mary Pat Dwyer of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice rebutted the notion that the company’s hands are tied by anti-terror statutes and sanctions compliance, writing: “Facebook needs to set aside the distracting fiction that U.S. law requires its current approach.”
The ad hoc exception to certain elements of the Taliban government makes Facebook’s claims that it’s legally bound by the federal government to censor certain foreign groups even more untenable: If U.S. law mandates barring the Taliban regime from using its platforms, as the company and its executives repeatedly assert, then presumably these exceptions would be violate Facebook’s expansive interpretation of its legal obligations. Facebook spokesperson Sally Aldous did not respond to a question on this point.
Ashley Jackson, a former aid worker with the U.N. and Oxfam and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups, also criticized the company’s approach. “Why not exempt the Ministry of Education, or whatever else that deals with essential services?” she asked. “The post-2001 republic collapsed. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have absolute power over the government. It makes little sense to pick and choose.”
The ban is all the more baffling because members of the Taliban can thwart it, Jackson added. “I know that the Taliban have used Facebook to spread propaganda and wage the war because I’ve seen it and written about it,” she said. “I’ve even used Facebook to connect with Taliban commanders. All [Facebook] are doing is covering themselves and obstructing information.”
Still, Facebook is no doubt under political pressure at home to deny the Taliban any benefit whatsoever, even if it means keeping Afghans in the dark.
“Facebook’s stance reflects a much more contentious debate on ‘legitimizing’ the Taliban, which has been marked by total and utter policy incoherence on the part of Western States,” Jackson explained. “It makes sense that Facebook’s own policy is incoherent, but erring on the side of conservatism — they’re trying to avoid public criticism. No private company should have this power, of course, but what they are doing is a cynical PR exercise — not actual safeguarding.”
Facebook’s Taliban problem began as the militant group took control of Kabul in August, pitting the social network’s opaque and U.S.-centric content moderation policies against the undeniable reality on the ground. As the last American planes were escaping the city and Taliban officials were setting up shop in government buildings, Facebook terminated a WhatsApp “emergency hotline” created by the group “for civilians to report violence, looting or other problems,” the Financial Times reported. The move immediately drew a mixed reaction, satisfying foreign policy hard-liners while disturbing others who said it would only deprive an already beleaguered Afghan public of receiving information from their new government, however loathed in the West.
But even though Afghanistan now occupies a diminished space in the American public consciousness and media, Facebook’s role there remains no less fraught. “There’s a real tension between wanting to keep certain information on the platform, including propaganda and misinformation,” said Esberg, “and allowing these actors to actually govern, and not completely scuttling their attempts at governing a country that is already facing a pretty severe crisis in and of itself.”
Butterflies land on branches at Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, California, on Wednesday. Early estimates show that the number of Western monarch butterflies wintering along California's central coast is bouncing back after the population reached an all-time low last year. (photo: Nic Coury/AP)
This year’s official count started Saturday but an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites.
The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.
An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California’s central coast.
This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, Director of Endangered Species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
“This is certainly not a recovery but we’re really optimistic and just really glad that there are monarchs here and that gives us a bit of time to work toward recovery of the Western monarch migration,” Jepsen said.
Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster to keep warm. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.
Monarchs from across the West migrate annually to about 100 wintering sites dotting central California’s Pacific coast. One of the best-known wintering places is the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, a city-owned site in the coastal city of Pacific Grove, where last year no monarch butterflies showed up.
The city 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of San Francisco has worked for years to help the declining population of monarch. Known as “Butterfly Town, USA,” the city celebrates the orange and black butterfly with a parade every October. Messing with a monarch is a crime that carries a $1,000 fine.
“I don’t recall having such a bad year before and I thought they were done. They were gone. They’re not going to ever come back and sure enough, this year, boom, they landed,” said Moe Ammar, president of Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce.
This year a preliminary count showed more than 13,000 monarchs have arrived at the site in Monterey County, clustering together on pine, cypress and eucalyptus trees and sparking hope among the grove’s volunteers and visitors that the struggling insects can bounce back.
Scientists don’t know why the population increased this year but Jepsen said it is likely a combination of factors, including better conditions on their breeding grounds.
“Climatic factors could have influenced the population. We could have gotten an influx of monarchs from the eastern U.S., which occasionally can happen, but it’s not known for sure why the population is what it is this year,” she said.
Eastern monarch butterflies travel from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of miles to spend the winter in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the monarch population in the eastern U.S. has fallen about 80% since the mid-1990s, but the drop-off in the Western U.S. has been even steeper.
The Western monarch butterfly population has declined by more than 99% from the millions that overwintered in California in the 1980s because of the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.
Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile (4,828-kilometer) migration synched to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.
“California has been in a drought for several years now, and they need nectar sources in order to be able to fill their bellies and be active and survive,” said Stephanie Turcotte Edenholm, a Pacific Grove Natural History Museum docent who offers guided tours of the sanctuary. “If we don’t have nectar sources and we don’t have the water that’s providing that, then that is an issue.”
Monarch butterflies lack state and federal legal protection to keep their habitat from being destroyed or degraded. Last year, they were denied federal protection but the insects are now among the candidates for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.
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