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The claim that social media is a neutral platform for the amplification of free speech does not hold up to scrutiny. 

Does it matter that Mark Zuckerberg dines with far-right politicians and activists, or that he genuinely seems to believe their websites are trustworthy fact-checkers? Does it matter that Jack Dorsey personally overrules Twitter bans on white supremacists but allows Donald Trump to ignore the acceptable use rules that the rest of us must obey?

Yes and no. Yes, it matters because the political preferences and blind spots of social media C.E.O.s influence their businesses. And no, because leaders’ opinions matter less than how right-favoring ideas, incentives and ways of organizing are baked into social media’s business models in ways those executives don’t even seem fully aware of.

We know that Facebook’s Washington D.C. lobby-shop and electoral integrity work is dominated by Republican party operatives and members, and we know Twitter prefers to give Nazi sympathizers a blue check mark rather than the boot. Google funds climate change deniers and YouTube is a right-wing radicalization engine. There is no shortage of evidence that America’s West Coast tech unicorns qualify as liberal only on a narrow range of identity issues. They’ll stand up for LGBTQ rights, but they’ll come down hard on any union activism among their own employees.

Less obvious is the fact that social media itself is structurally right-wing. Not because its CEOs are tech-bro libertarians or even because of their suspiciously agile pivot to Trump, but because social media affords advantages to the ideas, feelings and organizing principles of the hard-right. Oh, and also because of the money.

Structure

First, some heavy lifting. Social media as we currently organize it is trivially easy to weaponize in ways that favour autocracy and damage democracy. Political scientist Henry Farrell* and information security expert Bruce Schneier recently explained why democracies are so easily harmed by disinformation attacks while autocracies are actually strengthened by them. It’s because democracies and autocracies rely on people having two different kinds of shared knowledge; and social media disinformation disrupts one and favours the other.

In an autocracy, you know who’s in charge and what they want, but you’re not sure who the different political movers in society are, how much power they have and who you could form a coalition with. Certainly, political conflict occurs in societies that are dominated by the power vertical, but mostly off-stage or in ways only insiders can interpret. That’s why we still use the term ‘Kremlinology’ to describe the study of subtle public signs of largely secret power struggles. In an autocracy, shared knowledge about other people’s political views is low. This makes it risky and difficult to organize an opposition. In 2010, democracy activists in Tunisia had very little idea how many other people felt the same and were prepared to rise up against the regime until Mohamed Bouazizi, that fateful vegetable seller, set himself on fire and triggered the entire Arab Spring. Social media did help those protests to go viral — though its role has been exaggerated — but autocratic rulers learned quickly how to turn social media against citizens.

The main tactic autocrats use is "flooding," sending huge numbers of often contradictory political messages via automated social media accounts to drown out discourse and make it impossible to figure out who’s friend, who’s foe, or who’s even a human. The Chinese government strategically uses social media flooding both as a censorship tool — "who knows what’s really true?" —  and to distract and divide people, weakening them as a political force. Autocracies are strengthened by divisions that prevent people coming together as a political force. The tactics autocrats use at home can quickly become part of their strategy abroad. Russia is known to have used flooding to undermine shared belief in the validity of electoral politics in Ukraine and also in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. Social media makes flooding cheap and successful because increasing the quantity of noise degrades the quality of discourse. It might even make it impossible to sustain. When a tactic becomes a strategy, things can change, sometimes very quickly.

An aside: I recently heard a well-connected U.K. conservative saying something I’ve heard from at least a dozen people in powerful positions: "Social media doesn’t do anything new. It just lets people express themselves, for good and for ill." Wrong. Different technologies — embedded in different business models — have different affordances. They encourage certain kinds of behavior, ways to make money and means to concentrate power. Those who benefit from these affordances seem to be almost unaware of the advantages thus bestowed, as though they’re used to playing the game of life on "easy." The same person later regretfully confided that yes, it was dreadful their own party was going to fight an election campaign that would pit parliament against "the people," but no, there was nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all.

Farrell and Schneier’s article explains that democracy is so vulnerable because flooding destroys precisely the kind of information democracy depends on. In a stable democracy we disagree about who should be in charge, but we share — and depend on — common knowledge about who the political actors are, how much support they have and how we can form coalitions. That shared knowledge allows us to have a functioning political opposition. We also share the knowledge that our electoral systems are basically fair, that outcomes approximate what enough people really feel, and that if we lose this year’s election we still have a good chance of winning the next one. If that knowledge goes away, then the institutions that depend on it can, too.

All very interesting, you might say, but this shows that social media helps autocrats, and autocracy can be of the left, too, at least in its self-justifying propaganda. What is peculiar to how social media helps right-wing autocracy?

Social media is structurally disposed to weaken our real-life horizontal ties with one other, to poison our ability even to imagine a social contract, to disrupt our drive to discover shared interests and shape them into collective political action. Social media is great for democracy only if you think democracy is a an exercise in ticking all the boxes for crowning a strongman. I say social media is inherently right-wing because it is structurally predisposed to making social democracy impossible.

Social democracy depends on the ability to form rolling coalitions of different groups around broadly shared goals. If I’m the middle-class parent of a disabled child, I can make common cause with an unemployed miner hundreds of miles away. We both want the state to be a social safety net for when life throws us a curveball. We don’t want all the same things, but we agree on enough to vote for or even belong to the same political party. And it’s not purely transactional. In our kinder moments, we feel solidarity, even though we are in different places and belong to different social classes. But what happens if I start seeing that ex-miner as an enemy, and vice versa? If our tribal identities have become so narrow and hardened that we no longer feel we’re on the same side? Hell, that we no longer even live the same world? If the broad-based coalitions that built social democracy can no longer recognize each other as allies, then it’s devil take the hindmost in a world of an unchecked and punitive state. Goodbye fraternity, hello Koch brothers.

Social media is the ideal medium and amplifier for the actively divisive and zero-sum politics of the hard, populist right. It disadvantages any politics based on compromise, on solidarity, on a forgivingly broad concept of who ‘the people’ are. Social media’s methods structurally favour Duterte, Trump, Orban et al the way tennis disinterestedly favours athletes with long arms.

Methods

Facebook and Google act as advertising consolidators, collecting vast amounts of personal data on users and renting that data and access to their users to advertisers. So the more you use their services, the more data they can gather and ads they can sell. This is called adtech, and it is social media’s chosen business model.  The official version regarding the unique selling point (USP) of adtech is that social media firms can target ads to us more closely because they know so much about us. The private, and more accurate, USP to advertisers is that they have finely segmented the markets we inhabit in order to identify the tiniest possible groups for advertisers to target. The key to adtech is market segmentation— i.e., breaking people down into ever smaller groups to sell things to. We sell things to people by convincing them of the importance and uniqueness of their group. What sells is making people feel they are different, special and even superior. They deserve things most others don’t. In society at large we call this "fomenting division." Social media, the pill we swallow to ingest adtech, is based on creating and exploiting social division. So too, it turns out, is the right-wing project whose goal and working methods are to create in-groups and out-groups for an ever-smaller number of people who count as ‘people’. Social media’s business model is to make us feel more divided than ever, and monetize the finest of distinctions we can be made to feel.

Feelings

And what keeps us clicking? Strong emotions like fear, anger and even hate. By now, most of us know that YouTube and others drive "engagement" by presenting the most emotive content, with most of us barely three clicks away from politically extremist content.

Social media divides us ever more finely, all the better to market our profiles to its real customers, the advertisers, and then it makes us internalize distinction and divisions by force-feeding us hateful clickbait.

Xenophobia and conspiratorial distrust create clicks. These are the signature emotions of the far right. It's anger with no purpose except to be monetized. Clickability almost always leads to the dark side. The political radicalization that helps make social media so wildly profitable is almost exclusively to the right. As well as fomenting division and making political solidarity harder to evoke, the dark emotional palette social media spatters everywhere has a deeper effect on what we think politics is actually for.

Firehosing is a technique used by disinformation merchants to pump out a stream of often contradictory lies. No one has the time, energy or resources to dispute each lie, and airing out lies to debunk them can make even more people believe them. This method is used by anti-vaxxers, far-right media sites and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Firehosing floods what used to be a conversation with wacky grimdark lies that cumulatively insist that nothing really works, everyone is on the make and no organization or authority can be trusted. It implies that nothing we do to collectively improve the state of the world can work, because someone, somewhere is gaming the system and that someone is probably brown or female or educated.

Firehosing helps explain why people who think the government should slash taxes and drop environmental regulations also think it should kidnap immigrants’ children and micro-manage women’s uteruses. The world of the firehose is one in which reality is not true and almost everyone is bad. In this world, the only useful way to use state power is to punish, to coerce, and to hurt. It reinforces a world where states can do no positive good because it will be taken advantage of — someone, somewhere is getting stuff for free that you have to pay for. If the only effective state power is violence, the only role of politics is to decide who to target. This isn’t an intentional effect of the medium, but it is a real world consequence of the quality and sheer volume of the messages it transmits. Social media is rightwing because its amplified nihilism makes far-right misanthropy sound like a fundamental truth and ushers its dream into being; a world where the state exists only to punish outsiders and throttle the poor, not to rebalance wild excesses of inequality.

Organizing

But if social media companies are making money from advertisers, and advertisers – most of them aggregators – are making money from the companies whose ads they place, who is making money from the emotive content that keeps people clicking? Who is paying to feed the beast? All those videos, images and stories that trigger and sustain the outrage cycle aren’t going to just make themselves.

New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel asked whether the Democrats can compete with Trump’s Twitter feed and concluded that “one of the few ways to power right now is to never, ever stop making content."

A Photoshopped image of a dog getting the Medal of Honor. Sharpiegate. A Fourth of July military parade. They’re all attention spectacles.

To "win" social media you must spew out content optimized for virality. Individuals can only do so much. Volunteer organizations don’t have the time and are too busy firefighting (and, let’s be honest, infighting). The organizations manning the firehose are top-heavy political outfits with strong message control – typically the preserve of the hierarchical right — and astro-turf fronts pretending to be grassroots organizations. Yes, there is an ecosystem of ad aggregators and content amplifiers. But the optimal organizational form to create firehose content at scale isn’t the pyramid of large and unwieldy membership organizations so beloved of the left, but a thorn — rigid, narrow and sharpened to a point — all the better to sink deep into the flesh of the body politic.

Social media lets small, well-funded organizations convert grey and dark money into attention. It makes big money’s ideas look like they’re backed by the masses. People on the left almost never have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting around waiting for a vast, anonymizing influence engine to convert money into power. People on the right do. Fake organizations are more effective than real ones. Sock puppets, amplification accounts and automatic reply-guys work 24/7, never disagree with the leader, get disillusioned or split into factions. Social media makes fake organizations look real, and real ones look like dinosaurs. Only on the right is there a sufficient concentration of capital with the means and motivation to exploit this.

Ideas

None of this can be unknown to those running the big social media companies. Their job is to understand what works on their websites in ways we outsiders can only guess at. Science writer James Gleick recently observed that “people on the left and people on the right BOTH understand that Facebook’s policy of allowing lies benefits the right.” Monetizing lies drives profit. How can anyone possibly defend that?

In the US, free speech absolutism is a feature of the right. Liberals argue for laws banning hate speech and incitement, while conservatives and the far right insist freedom of expression is enshrined without condition in the U.S. constitution, even if that means people are hurt or sometimes die. This year, as the clamour has grown against Facebook’s damage to democracies around the world, the company has doubled down on its insistence that advertising is protected speech. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has said: “We believe that ads are a big part of [freedom of expression]."

Social media executives’ insistence that their companies are just neutral bystanders but that the most important value of all is free speech shows how closely aligned their interests now are to the right. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t invite Tucker Carlson home to try and understand the alien mindset of America’s hard right, but because they share a common financial interest in protecting the peculiar political ecosystem of which Facebook is the apex predator.

Social media companies share ideas with the right not because they are awkward fellow travellers but because they share fundamental interests. But just as my conservative acquaintance couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that social media’s affordances privilege the ideas and organizations from which they personally and politically benefit, so social media executives seem to believe their pursuit of self-interest is simply the acting out of self-evident philosophical imperatives like the absolute value of freedom of speech.

But guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether Mark Zuckerberg holds his nose when he dines with the far right, if Jack Dorsey torments himself about open Nazis he keeps inviting back in, or if Susan Woijicki truly believes YouTube is a force for good. It is wholly irrelevant whether these individuals believe they are speaking in good faith or how deep any self-deception may go. Their interests are fully those of their companies, and their companies exist to make money. Their companies are once-in-a-century concentrations of capital whose only imperative is survival and growth. Capital doesn’t care if the boss still thinks he’s one of the good guys, if, in his heart of hearts, he’s truly not a racist but just happens to run a company that monetizes racism. Capital doesn’t care if he can’t sleep at night. Capital calls to capital everywhere.

Social media empires are big business and history shows us that big business doesn’t have a problem with the far right. They want many of the same things; to act unfettered, to weaken horizontal social ties, to re-shape the world in their own twisted image. Social media driven by adtech will only, always serve capital, however many beanbags they have in the office.

* Henry Farrell is the writer's brother.


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Social media’s right wing bias is baked into its business model

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => We can't seem to quit social media, even though we know it's not good for us. Is there a way to take back control of the user experience? 

The good news is that we now know, thanks to investigative journalism, that bad faith actors are using social media to manipulate our emotions and, by extension, our political domain. The bad news is that despite rising awareness, nothing has changed. Facebook is still manipulating its algorithms so that we all live in our own information bubbles. Twitter is still full of fake accounts, often called bots, that dupe even sophisticated users —  like prominent journalists or well-known politicians — into sharing information that simply is not true. 

As Robert Mueller said while testifying to Congress last month, social media manipulators working for Russian intelligence continue to interfere in U.S. politics “right now.”

An addiction to social media goes well beyond craving the dopamine hit supplied by seeing one’s Tweet shared widely, or one’s Facebook post liked many times. These days, journalists need Twitter to follow the news and promote their own work, while Facebook has become an all-but essential tool for staying abreast of cultural events and keeping in touch with friends and family. But while we’re “liking” photos of our friends’ new babies and sharing important investigative journalism via Twitter, we are also inadvertently exposing ourselves to people whose job it is to manipulate our thoughts and emotions. And they are experts.

Now scholars and journalists are warning that YouTube has become a terribly dangerous radicalizing tool. Zeynep Tufekci, an expert in the sociology of technology, warned about YouTube last year in a column for The New York Times. Almost by accident, she writes, she discovered that the video platform was algorithmically programmed to direct users toward opinions more radical than the ones they seemed to hold. If a user searched for a Bernie Sanders video, for example, YouTube might recommend an Atifa video. On the other hand, search for a video by a mainstream conservative commentator and next thing you know the algorithm is suggesting videos by white nationalists. YouTube, concluded Tufekci, "[might be] one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century."

One year later, The New York Times published an investigative story that shows how bad faith actors manipulated YouTube videos in order to radicalize Brazilian society by upending long-held social norms. Teachers quoted in the article say, for example, that their students disrupted classes to quote conspiracy theories they had seen on YouTube videos. Meanwhile Bolsanoro staffers were uploading videos that propagated conspiracy theories about teachers manipulating their students to support communism. The result: voters chose Jair Bolsanor, the far right newly elected president of Brazil. Danah Boyd, the founder of Data & Society, told The New York Times that the YouTube-influenced results of Brazil’s elections are “a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.”

Similarly, Britain saw its democracy undermined in 2016 when bad actors who funded and led the Brexit campaign used Facebook to manipulate British public opinion. The result: a slight majority of Britons voted in favor of leaving the European Union.  

Read more about Brexit: How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour

But given that few Britons had expressed any interest in the EU prior to the referendum, how did this result come about? We now know, as The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr reported in a bombshell investigative piece, that British public opinion had been manipulated by misinformation published on Facebook accounts set up by a now-notorious (but then unknown) company called Cambridge Analytica. The same company later acknowledged the role it had played in manipulating public opinion in the United States prior to the 2016 presidential election. 

Craig Silverman, the Canadian BuzzFeed journalist who coined the term “fake news” in 2015, warned the CBC that Canadians are not immune from the disease of social media manipulation, either. Facebook, he told the CBC, is publishing anti-Trudeau propaganda as well as attacks on members of Trudeau’s government who are people of color. Silverman added that “...people acting outside of Canada publishing, in some cases, completely false or unsupported stories that are having an effect on what Canadians think about the current government and politics in Canada in general.”

How are we to remain connected and informed and still deal with the crisis of disinformation? 

Taylor Owen, a prominent digital media scholar who holds the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University, suggests that some self-awareness would help. We must stop and think carefully before responding to news and opinion that makes us feel an emotion, whether it be satisfaction or anger. “When people are supplied with a wide variety of information that confirms their biases,” he says, they are less willing to accept opinions that contradict them. 

But journalists also have an important role to play, he says in this interview. According to Owen's newly published research, people who consume a great deal of news are not better informed. The reason: they tend to consume and retain information that confirms their biases. The media, suggests Owen, would be doing a public service by reporting deeply on issues for which there is bipartisan agreement. In Canada, interestingly, one of those issues is the environment. 
    [post_title] => How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?
    [post_excerpt] => An addiction to social media that goes well beyond needing the dopamine hit supplied by seeing one’s Tweet shared widely, or one’s Facebook post liked many times. These days, journalists need social media to follow the news and promote their own work, while Facebook has become an all-but essential tool for staying abreast of cultural events and keeping in touch with friends and family.
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How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_content] => More people are currently fleeing war and extreme poverty than at any time in history, but those who try to help often face criminal charges

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 839 people have already died in 2019 trying to cross the Mediterranean. In 2018, the number of dead or missing was 2,277. At its height in 2016, 5,096 people died at sea. These are desperate people fleeing war and extreme poverty. But no state will take responsibility for them. 

Yet even as international accountability for human rights violations becomes a hollow joke, there are people who have taken it up themselves to dedicate their lives to rescuing and helping refugees, no matter what the personal cost. These are idealistic people who also have a firm grasp on reality: they know they cannot save the world, but they believe that capitulating to helplessness is not an option.

Salam Aldeen is the founder of Team Humanity, a Danish nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos. A Dane of Iraqi-Moldovan descent, Salam flew to Lesbos in 2015 to begin sea rescue operations two days after seeing the now-iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Alan and his family had been trying to reach Europe in an inflatable raft.

In January 2016, Greek authorities arrested Salam and four other humanitarian volunteers after they responded to a distress call from a group of refugees on a sinking rubber raft. The arresting officers accused them of crossing into Turkish waters with the intent to traffic refugees into Greece. Salam spent 48 hours in jail, and then two more years on trial, with prosecutors seeking a life sentence. The five men were acquitted of all charges in May 2018 and Salam immediately went back to work, this time building a women and children’s center adjacent to Moria, a notorious refugee camp on Lesbos that is known for violence and horrifying conditions. Moria was built for 3,000 people but shelters more than three times that many, mainly Syrian refugees and Afghan asylum seekers. 

The Team Humanity center is a reprieve for the 1,500 women and children who use it daily. “All women and children are welcome,” Salam said, noting that 11 is the cutoff age for boys. There’s a playground, and space for people to gather to dance, listen to music and watch movies. The center is funded entirely through private donations from all over the world. The money goes toward providing camp residents with necessities like food, diapers, winter clothes, and underwear. Salam gets wistful when he talks about building a school. “I don’t have funds for chairs and tables.”

On August 11th, the night of the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha, a group of men attacked the women’s center. “It was Eid, Ramadan had finished and everyone was happy. People went out. But then some troublemakers started making problems,” Salam says. 

https://vimeo.com/355385248

Salam described a scuffle between camp residents, which included a drunk man, volunteer security people restraining him, and a woman who screamed and pretended to faint. “It was all over quickly, Salam says. “She fainted for attention, it was a joke, and the drunk guy apologized.” But then, he says, a rumor started in the camp that someone had hit the woman. Salam estimated that between 100 to 200 men from Moria showed up, angry. There were only 26 volunteers working at the time, with additional women and children inside. When some men began to climb over the fence, Salam chased after them with sparklers and they ran off. 

https://vimeo.com/355385512

The local Greek police took an hour to arrive. “They don’t want to help. They don’t want us to be there. They want us to suffer so we go home,” Salam says. 

On August 14th, the Greek police returned, this time to rearrest Salam. “The police said the fireworks that I used to protect us were illegal,” Salam says. “They held me for over two hours, and at the same time brought someone in to report me for hitting him. I don’t know what they promised him for that, but it’s so corrupt.” 

He doesn’t expect the harassment will stop. Salam says he received a letter from the United Nations last week, also sent to the Greek government, which condemned the legal actions taken against Salam and the criminalization of humanitarian aid. Still, his biggest hope is for celebrity intervention — a “We are the World” moment to capture international attention.

Salam Aldeen is not the only humanitarian volunteer facing legal charges for aiding refugees. Pia Kemp, the German captain of a ship that was impounded for rescuing migrants at sea, recently announced she was turning down a medal from the city of Paris. Addressing the mayor of Paris, Kemp wrote in a Facebook post, “Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my solidarian action in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews 'work to rescue migrants from difficult conditions on a daily basis'...while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts." Kemp reportedly faces 20 years in prison in Italy on charges of aiding in human trafficking.

There is no humanitarian exception to the European Union Directive that criminalizes aiding illegal migration. The burden of hosting refugees and asylum-seekers falls heavily on Mediterranean countries due to the Dublin Regulation, an EU law which states that people seeking asylum are the responsibility of the first European country they land in. At the same time, whistleblowers in the Greek government have accused the state of misappropriating EU funds meant for refugees, and awarding inflated contracts to local businesses. As Salam put it, “Finance crisis, bullshit, I see new cars. They didn’t have them in 2015, now they do.”

In Denmark, Salam’s home country, the government’s laws and rhetoric are increasingly anti-immigrant. In 2016, Denmark passed the controversial “jewelry law,” which allows the government to confiscate valuables from refugees to pay for their care. The law has not been enforced, but the symbolism remains. “I’m ashamed that Denmark doesn’t take refugees. That’s why I’m here helping people. I’m trying to show that it’s not every Danish person that feels this way,” says Salam. 

In 2018, Arizonan geography teacher Scott Warren was charged by Border Patrol with three felonies for aiding a pair of Central American migrants. His trial resulted in a hung jury. Federal prosecutors have refused to drop the charges since the mistrial, and plan to retry Warren on two felony harboring charges in November.

Warren’s case, like his European counterparts, failed in court because prosecutors could not prove intent to commit a crime. Still, Warren’s arrest is part of an escalating attack on humanitarian volunteers, who for years have put out jugs of water for dehydrated migrants traversing the desert along the United States’ southern border.

Migration flows will increase as the planet warms and regions become uninhabitable. The post-World War II liberal order, built upon freedom of movement and freedom from persecution has failed. The Refugee Convention was not written to account for massive influxes of people fleeing widespread violence and climate change. Permanent impermanence has been normalized - the most obvious example being Palestinian refugees, who were placed under their own UN agency in order to sidestep UNHCR. 

Ironically, during World War II, Syria played host to thousands of European refugees. Now that the tables have turned, Europeans are treating the refugee crisis like a game of hot potato, selling out basic principles in order to keep Muslims out. What began with a 2016 deal to return refugees to Turkey was followed by an even worse deal with Libya. 

In America, our government has behaved no better. Just this week, the Trump administration announced a new policy that would allow for indefinite detention of migrant families and children. Meanwhile, Haitians who have lived for decades on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now face deportation since the Trump regime denied them renewal. 

The crackdowns are real, and until new institutions are constructed to provide accountability, legal or otherwise, we’ll return to the same solutions humanity has used throughout history. 

There’s a Jewish teaching, naaseh v'nishma, which means “we will do and we will hear.” If somebody shows up to your doorstep, feed them, give them a bed, and ask questions in the morning.

Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 

Salam and his family arrived in Denmark in 1992 after fleeing civil war in Moldova, but he insists that his past is irrelevant to what he’s doing now. “Everyone can do what I do. No money in the world can give you the feeling you get when you’re saving a human from drowning. I can’t explain it to you because it’s something insane. Giving a baby back to their mother after pulling them from the water, that is something I’ll never forget. People if they want to do something — know one thing — don’t think that you will get something back, but you’ll get peace with yourself. That feeling when you help somebody, this is your reward. You’ll understand, I did something good. Because one day, maybe it’s you who is going to run.”
    [post_title] => 'Saving lives is not a crime': When ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity
    [post_excerpt] => Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 
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‘Saving lives is not a crime’: When ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable.

America’s inequality crisis has emerged as the central issue of the 2020 presidential campaign. The realization that “it’s the economic inequality, stupid,” was a long time coming, given that the global economic crisis of 2008 is now more than a decade behind us. During the intervening years the global grassroots Occupy movement demonstrated for months to raise awareness, staging sit ins on Wall Street in New York and in major cities across Europe. In remarks delivered in 2013, Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” And three years ago an anti-establishment voter revolt gave the United States its first plutocrat president in the form of Donald J. Trump. Americans have at last come to understand the effect of economic inequality on their lives. But the question of how to address inequality is fraught with controversy.

At the Democratic party debates in June, nearly all of the candidates for the presidential nomination railed against the U.S. economy for benefitting only the very rich. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have made inequality their signature issue, have both proposed detailed plans that would completely remake the American economy. Even frontrunner Joe Biden, for years affiliated with centrist politics, noticed that progressivism was rising in popularity; he too is now talking about inequality—with his donors.

All this is a far cry from the “America is already great” message that hampered the Clinton campaign in 2016, but is undoubtedly closer to the way Americans actually feel. Six years ago, the English edition of Thomas Piketty’s seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, becoming a surprise bestseller and a cultural phenomenon. At the time, economists regarded as controversial Piketty’s warning that if the concentration of wealth and power remains unchecked we risk repeating the adverse conditions of the nineteenth century. In a 2016 paper, however, French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman showed that American inequality is at levels unseen since the Roaring 1920s, with the top 0.1 percent controlling 22 percent of the wealth. This year, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker told the New York Times that the U.S. is “developing into a plutocracy.” Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the American economy is “rigged.” In the media, you can often see our current era referred to as the Second Gilded Age, after the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, when inequality ran rampant and robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan plundered and pillaged their way into unimaginable wealth.

But Americans, who encounter extreme concentrations of wealth and power wherever they turn these days, don’t need economists to tell them what they already know: that capitalism, or at least their country’s form of it, is broken — perhaps irreparably. While the U.S. is among the world’s wealthiest countries, it is also, according to the UN, “the world champion of extreme inequality.” Forty million Americans live in poverty; in some areas of the country, life expectancy is equivalent to that of developing states. Meanwhile, “deaths of despair” — caused by drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide — have spiked. According to the UN, Americans lead “shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy.”

The American Dream — the idea that if you worked hard, you could succeed regardless of where you were born or what your parents earned — is still the national ethos, despite the fact that the U.S. currently has the lowest rate of economic mobility of any industrialized democracy. In contrast to earlier generations, very few young Americans will do better than their parents: they are buried in debt, struggling with rising rents and healthcare costs, and see more deaths from suicide and drug overdose than any other age group. The life trajectory of most contemporary Americans is inextricably linked to their parents’ education and income, and to their geographic location. A recent study by researchers at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, for instance, found a 30-year gap in life expectancy between two neighborhoods in Chicago, one rich and one poor.

Republicans, meanwhile, passed an enormous $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and are now considering another one, while trying to cut Social Security and kick millions off Medicaid. White-collar crime prosecutions are at a record low, the president is openly corrupt, and corporate lobbyists literally run the government. Is it any wonder that polls have repeatedly shown that over two thirds of Americans believe the economic and political systems are rigged in favor of big business and the rich? This is why millions of voters paid attention when Donald Trump said during his presidential campaign that “the American dream is dead.”

While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. And while the top one percent’s share of the nation’s earnings has doubled during that period, the top 0.1 percent fared even better: their incomes quadrupled, even as incomes for the bottom 90 percent, once adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant.

But it is the distribution of wealth that truly highlights the vast disparities hidden by four decades of policies that have created the illusion of economic prosperity. In the U.S. today, wealth is concentrated to such an extent that three men alone — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — are richer than the bottom half of the entire population. Recent data released by the Federal Reserve reveals in startling detail how the distribution of wealth in the U.S. became so unequal. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who analyzed the data, calculated that between 1989 and 2018, the net worth of the top one percent increased by $21 trillion, while the bottom 50 percent became poorer to the tune of $900 billion during the same period. In 2018, Bruenig finds, the top one percent owned “nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Bonn shows how the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated U.S. inequalities, particularly for black households, as the crisis contributed to the widening of a racial wealth gap that had already persisted for decades due to systemic discrimination. According to the authors, the median black household has only 12 percent of the wealth of a median white household and earns about half the income, leaving black households 80 percent poorer than white households. The economic crisis of 2008 erased the few gains they had made, while over the past 70 years “virtually no progress” has been made in reducing wealth inequality between blacks and whites in the United States.

The U.S. is the most extreme example, but most of the world has seen increased inequality over the past 40 years. In the U.K., deaths of despair have spiked following a decade of deliberately cruel austerity policies. In France, 2018’s gilets jaunes protests highlighted the country’s inequality crisis, partly fueled by Emmanuel Macron’s policy of cutting taxes to the top one percent while leaving those clinging to the lowest rungs of the income ladder worse off.

The causes of rising inequality vary from country to country, but in the U.S. and Europe the economic literature points to a few culprits. These include automation, the decline of organized labor, financial deregulation, regressive tax systems that allow the rich to cut their own taxes, and globalization. In the U.S. in particular, a growing body of research points to monopoly power and diminishing competition across the American economy as a major contributor. Among economists, a new movement highlights the negative impact done by decades of policies based on dubious market fundamentalist reasoning.

At the heart of all this is the ongoing failure of capitalist democracies to counter growing concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn fuel voter discontent and elevate populist authoritarians to power worldwide. In recent years many have raised the questions of why liberal democracy failed to address the rise of economic insecurity, or why the popular backlash to rising inequality has been marked by a turn toward far-right nativism —  as opposed to, say, a demand for higher taxes on the rich. Some, like Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and author Thomas Frank, argue that the answer lies in the left and center-left parties’ abdication of their historical responsibility toward low-income workers. Whereas the right has always been up front about its allegiance to business elites, the complicity of center-of-left parties in the policies that increased inequality has made them ill-equipped to address the problems that they helped create. A 2018 study by Piketty seems to confirm this view.

With democracies unable to ensure prosperity for all but the rich and well-connected, support for democracy is decreasing. In a recent speech, Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, declared that rising inequality threatens democratic capitalism. But it’s not the “capitalism” part that’s under threat. Despite their populist protestations, far-right authoritarians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are not opposed to rabid capitalism or even globalization—they just don’t believe democracy must be a part of it, or that it should stop them from giving handouts to their friends. Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman explains that the real threat to liberal democracy “isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy.” If left unchecked, the future of Western democracies could look a lot like Brazil, where pervasive inequality and lack of elite accountability gradually eroded support for democracy until the authoritarian Bolsonaro could rise to power — with the help of the country’s business elites.

Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable. One remedy, particularly in the U.S., is tougher enforcement of antitrust laws, which is necessary to constrain the power of corporate monopolies. Another, as historian-turned-folk hero Rutger Bregman told members of the global elite gathered in Davos earlier this year, is astoundingly simple: “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” Our current system, as documented by Zucman, is built upon massive tax evasion amounting trillions of dollars, by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. Any solution to our inequality crisis necessarily involves wealthy people paying their fair share.

Any attempt at meaningful reform, however, would inevitably have to contend with the fact that all of our political and regulatory institutions have been completely captured by big business and the rich. Which brings us back to the 2020 elections.

The 2020 presidential election is not just a referendum on Trump’s authoritarian populism. It is also a test case for the ability of democratic capitalism to correct itself. The Democratic party’s candidate is thus a critical matter, whether that person is a progressive like Sanders or Warren, whose promises include a more equitable construction of the American economy, student debt forgiveness, reining in corporate power and a wealth tax; or a lifelong neoliberal centrist like Biden, who recently promised his donors that despite his newfound interest in income inequality, under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”

The choice goes beyond the likelihood of defeating Trump, straight to the heart of the debate over what American capitalism, and democratic capitalism in general, mean in the twenty-first century. Does democracy mean an oligarchy rooted in injustice, which is what we have had for the last few decades; or should it be a system that benefits the whole of society, rather than only a select few?
    [post_title] => In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism
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In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism

by Asher Schechter

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    [post_content] => The current political climate seems disastrous for the Palestinians. But as recent history shows, the bleakest circumstances can yield great opportunities.

Alongside the dog whistle politics, much of Donald Trump’s public image is a throwback to 1980s New York City culture, with its gaudy society parties, unapologetic misogyny, and predatory real estate practices. His presidency jerks between rhetorical excess and emptiness. From negotiations with North Korea abroad to immigration policy at home, Trump’s actions have cycled between Twitter onslaughts devoid of meaningful content and the implementation of acutely retrograde executive orders. His administration’s recent effort to address conflict in the Middle East by convening the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Manama, Bahrain, is a further case in point.

At the core of the Trump administration’s economic plans for the Palestinians is a glossy brochure released shortly before the summit itself. Notwithstanding the slick graphics and  the presentation, which makes it look like something a business consulting firm would publish, it is an astonishing study of hollowness and deception. The $50 billion dollar pitch book promotes all sorts of investments, including a desalination plant in Gaza and a transport corridor with the West Bank, but does not even mention the word “occupation” to describe Israel’s control over the occupied Palestinian territories. Particularly galling to Israeli and Palestinian civil society activists was the discovery that the photographs used to illustrate that glossy brochure were from promotional material for the very grassroots peace building initiatives — such as The Bereaved Parents Circle Forum and Olive Oil Without Borders — that the Trump administration had abruptly defunded in recent months.

Live-tweeting from the lobby of Manama’s Four Seasons hotel, where the workshop was held, journalist Jack Moore wrote that he was “was left speechless by the Davos-esque Conflab” he had witnessed during the two-day event. In a widely-circulated Twitter thread, he described a gathering of shady private sector grandees, all male panels, and patronizing U.S. flippancy toward absent Palestinian officials. In his opening speech, Jared Kushner described his vision for an economically vibrant West Bank and Gaza without broaching the political context in which such development might take place. Other participants had spent so little time on the ground in Palestine, that they mispronounced names of well-known places. Meanwhile, the head of FIFA touted the virtues of football as a means of “contribut[ing] to change” in the region. When the numbers were crunched, it was clear that the U.S. government was looking for a way to offload the major costs of economic investment to the Gulf states and private investors, shouldering even less of the paltry amount they now provide in the form of economic assistance in the occupied territories.

This opportunistic spirit of Manama fit with a broader pattern of pushing the Palestinians into a corner. During several interviews in the run up to the Bahrain Summit, Kushner reinforced the approach of excluding the PLO while dismissing fears of American imbalance. Asked if he understood why the Palestinians did not trust him, Kushner responded curtly, “I’m not here to be trusted.” As the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, this “neocolonial arrogance” of the U.S. administration is a throwback to the British Mandate and the notion that Palestinians are not quite ready to govern themselves.

Israeli leaders have also promoted this paternalistic view. The former Education Minister and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, for example, called for the Palestinians to govern themselves “in all aspects barring two elements: overall security responsibility and not being able to allow the return of descents of Palestinian refugees.” When asked whether his vision would provide self-determination for Palestinians, Bennett demurred. “It’s unrealistic…the Stability Plan is only partial self-determination, but in the real world you have to make compromises.”

Since Trump’s election the alignment between the U.S. and Israeli governments has yielded a series of transformative developments that in practice put an end to the two-state solution.

The most widely publicized of these developments was the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. With this move, the U.S. indicated that it no longer regarded as legitimate the Palestinians’ claim to East Jerusalem as the putative capital of their future state. The U.S. also closed its consulate in East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian residents of the occupied territories; and it ordered the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. to close, ending the official Palestinian diplomatic presence in the U.S. capital.

The U.S. withdrew its funding to UNWRA, the United Nations agency that provides essential services, like education and medical care, to over five million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department denied visas to prominent Palestinian figures who had been visiting the U.S. for years — including PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, who received her PhD from the University of Virginia. In addition to adopting a policy of complete indifference to Israel’s ever-expanding settlement expansion in the West Bank, the U.S. removed the word ‘occupied’ from government documents. When Netanyahu campaigned in the recent national election partly on a promise to annex the West Bank, which Israel has occupied for 52 years, the Trump administration did not even respond, even as it has chosen a permissive attitude towards the growing Israeli call for annexation of the West Bank. In all these ways, the conflict has returned to a pre-Oslo paradigm. The Palestinians are, as it were, stuck back in the 1980s.

Rather than simply lament the circus in Bahrain, the Palestinian leadership must look for a meaningful way to respond to this diplomatic farce. Some Palestinians have argued that since the Oslo Agreement has been fatally violated, the Palestinian Authority should formally be dismantled. Those who oppose this move say it would cause harm to the Palestinian population, and perhaps even lead to the outbreak of violence. Another historical parallel to consider is the PLO’s position following the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Abandoned by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, sidelined in autonomy talks over their future without participation, surrounded by an expanding ring of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians were forced to confront both political efforts at state prevention followed swiftly by the 1982 military intervention in Lebanon and Israeli attempts to defeat the PLO in its Beirut stronghold.

This moment of acute crisis was also an opportunity for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to rethink the future of the national struggle. After the PLO was forced to retreat from Beirut in 1982, Palestinian political activists in Gaza and the West Bank forced a shift of power away from the exiled leaders, now based in Tunis, and a new reckoning with their demands, culminating in the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987. The mass grassroots protest against the then 20-year old occupation led to tangible results: the U.S. finally recognized the PLO; and by the early 1990s the Israelis began to engage with the Palestinian political movement. With that same occupation now extending over five decades, what new opportunities might be seized beyond the fulsome rejection of the Trump administration’s effort to impose what one Palestinian playwright has called a “slumlord’s peace”?

In the summer of 1986, the Palestinian political activist and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh toyed with an idea that might shake up the paradigms of political discussion. Writing in the newspaper Al-Mawqef, he posed a thought experiment about which situation was preferable: “autonomy or annexation with full equal rights [for Palestinians] in Israel?” In his view, freedom through the ballot box would give Palestinians joint control over their own lives and the lives of their Jewish neighbors. He soon appeared on a leading Israeli political talk show alongside one leader of the settler movement, who was startled by Nusseibeh’s argument. Either Palestinians would get a state of their own, or Israel would have a battle for equal rights on its hands. Suddenly, the left-wing Labor Party began invoking fears of a “demographic threat” as a means to accelerate negotiations, while the Israeli representative to the UN noted that “If Palestinians begin to think like this, then we’ve really got something to worry about."

These fears remain highly relevant today. What happens when the political conflict is framed as a conversation about equal rights, access, and citizenship? The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acutely concerned about the rhetoric shifting in this direction, a fear underscored by the backlash against the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a means of pressuring Israel in economic, cultural and diplomatic realms. Recent efforts to criminalize BDS, and to label it anti-Semitic, underscore how far this battle of delegitimization can go.

In the face of these developments, advocates for an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must continue to push for a values-centered approach where the language of rights and equality for Arabs and Jews remains at the center of political discourse. Trump himself was quick to dispose of the two-state paradigm in his first meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, telling reporters he was not wedded to the idea of territorial partition. But rather than promote an equitable alterative, his administration has tipped the scales firmly in one direction. To reverse this sense of defeat, a reorientation of the parameters of debate is in order. Rather than haggle over the crumbs of economic peace, there needs to be a clear demand for meaningful sovereignty and citizenship—along with the means of leveraging that equitable future—in whatever political constellation might eventually emerge.

A return to the 1980s can evoke retrograde politics, but it is also an opportunity to interrogate the political imaginaries that took hold at the end of the Cold War, and to imagine alternative paths not taken. Could contemporary developments offer a chance to rethink the Palestinian future, moving away from territorial division and statist demands? Are there lessons to be learnt from Nusseibeh’s earlier calls for annexation alongside Netanyahu’s promise of implementing a more restrictive version? Might this crisis provide a viable way for Palestinians to firmly back out of the narrow Israeli and American corner? The current political landscape might appear calamitous, but Trump and Netanyahu will not last forever. Even as the foolhardy mandarins like Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman demand Palestinian surrender, the threat of being vanquished can also be redirected in bracing new directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 
    [post_title] => Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s
    [post_excerpt] => Pushed into a corner by U.S. and Israeli policy and the indifference of Arab leaders, Palestinian leadership is in a moment of acute crisis. But the calamitous political landscape also presents an opportunity for creative new paradigms.
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Back to the future: How Palestine can pull itself out of the 1980s

by Seth Anziska

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    [post_content] => An unlikely partnership between politically opposed billionaires raises questions about the role money plays in ...  everything.

Perhaps the most surprising news this week is the unlikely partnership between two billionaires who represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. George Soros, the billionaire known for his liberalism, is partnering with the far-right Charles Koch to fund a Washington think tank that will promote a non-interventionist foreign policy. 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, describes his reaction to the announcement in  an op-ed for the Boston Globe:

"The depth of this heresy can only be appreciated by recognizing the meretricious power that nourishes Washington’s think-tank ecosystem… In foreign policy, all major Washington think tanks promote interventionist dogma: the United States faces threats everywhere, it must therefore be present everywhere, and “present” includes maintaining more than 800 foreign military bases and spending trillions of dollars on endless confrontations with foreign countries.” 

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as it will be known, will be led by a number of critics of American foreign policy, including Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi said:

“It shows how important ending endless war is if they’re willing to put aside their differences and get together on this project. We are going to challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century.”

One of the loudest critics of billionaires bearing liberal gifts is Anand Giridharadas. In his book Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world,  the former McKinsey consultant turned social critic attempts to answer the question: “What is the relationship between the extraordinary elite generosity of our time, which is real, and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time?” Giridharadas’s conclusion: that elite generosity is a partner of elite hoarding.

The billionaires’ partnership raises the issue of the role of money in, well, just about everything, explains Kelsey Piper in an article for Vox. 

Institutional pushback against “endless war” feels like a relief and a welcome change in Washington, D.C., but one should temper one’s reaction with a healthy skepticism of billionaires who want to shape the world. 
    [post_title] => The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts
    [post_excerpt] => George Soros and Charles Koch would seem to be the most unlikely of partners, but the two billionaires have found synergy in their newly launched think tank.
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The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => We've changed our name and expanded our mission, but our ethos remains the same

In 2017 a group of journalists and academics with expertise in authoritarianism launched a Medium blog called The Anti-Nihilist Institute. Over the ensuing months they wrote sharp analysis about the historical and social context of anti-democratic forces, and published thought provoking interviews with experts in the field. With a rapidly growing readership of thoughtful people seeking new thinking about critical issues, the founders decided to migrate the Medium blog to its own, dedicated website.

We are delighted to announce that the launch of our new website comes with a new name — The Conversationalist.

The name reflects our expanded mission, which is to bring together thoughtful writers who are experts in a variety of fields to provide new insights into critical issues. Over the past half year we have published thought provoking articles on diverse topics that range from the role of art in times of political despair to a new way of thinking about how to treat opioid addicts. The thread that links these many ideas together is one of creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. We invite you, our readers, to contribute to this conversation: share our articles on social media, comment on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and send us your ideas for new topics to write about here.

We look forward to playing a role in supporting an ongoing conversation about how to make our society  more inclusive, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and thoughtful.
    [post_title] => The Conversationalist: A new name and an expanded mission
    [post_excerpt] => The thread that links these many ideas together is the intention to inspire creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. 
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The Conversationalist: A new name and an expanded mission

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_content] => With leading publications having phased out their public editors, external watchdogs have stepped in, holding the media to account in an age of declining public trust.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has decided to fill the vacuum left by the near disappearance of public editors from major newspapers by appointing a few of its own: Gabriel Snyder will take on The New York Times; Ana Marie Cox will monitor The Washington Post; Maria Bustillos will keep an eye on MSNBC; and Emily Tamkin will oversee CNN. Whether or not the news organizations will engage with these outsiders much (if at all) remains to be seen, but the Columbia Journalism Review is counting on having enough organizational clout so their efforts are not in vain.

Emily Tamkin has already been on CJR's podcast to take CNN to task for filling the airwaves with “underqualified pundits.” An article in the Washingtonian provides more information on CJR’s project, reporting that staffers for various media platforms have already been in touch with editor Kyle Pope to suggest issues for the attention of the public editors.

Something those public editors should consider: Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab on the “new avoidance” phenomenon, which is unfortunately becoming more common globally, and especially in the United States. The report is dismaying, but also illuminating. Some of the comments from readers explaining why they sometimes or always avoid the news demonstrate real demand and hunger for more positive coverage of things that are working—problems that are being solved—which is part of our goal here at The Conversationalist.

In other news:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a new law that permits undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Read more.

An argument for targeting the world’s 2.4 billion gamers with messaging about environmental issues and sustainability. Learn more.

How is participatory budgeting enlivening democracy in New York? Read the op-ed.
    [post_title] => The important work of keeping the media honest
    [post_excerpt] => Journalists passionate about keeping the media relevant have taken on the job of shadow ombudsman

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The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Expressing dissent in China is difficult and dangerous, but a brave few persist in telling their story. 

This week the world remembers the events that took place on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square — although remembering is easier to do in some countries than in others. China’s digital great wall blocks access to information about the massacre, often with the help of American technology companies. Demonstrators who were in Tiananmen and lived through the crackdown that followed don’t even tell their children about it, lest they ask questions of the wrong people. Even more disturbing, young Chinese students raised in a post-Tiananmen world question the value of knowing what really happened that day, as Louisa Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia, writes in the New York Times. 

But while the Communist party has succeeded in crushing dissent, it has not figured out a way to make people forget. Today some survivors of those horrific events that took place in Beijing 30 years ago still make tiny, subversive gestures to show they have not forgotten, thus proving that people can uphold the historical record even under the most repressive governments.

In a moving reported op-ed for the New York Times, China expert Ian Johnson describes this quiet dissent expressed by brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as “unofficial history.” They “have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of the country’s many killings, famines, uprisings and government crackdowns,” he writes. This history is smuggled in and out of China, accessed through VPN software to avoid censorship, or conveyed in symbolic code. This unofficial history is a testament to the resilience of people and of storytellers.

In addition to the vibrant unofficial history kept alive by a community of people, Johnson writes for the New York Review of Books that the official history of Tiananmen Square continues to expand, most recently with a book about how the Communist Party rewrote history the week following the crackdown, including backdating political endorsements of the decision to use military force on the protestors. The “truth stubbornly endures,” Johnson writes.

In other news:

Can the social cost of carbon — a figure that estimates the economic burden of climate change per metric ton of carbon dioxide — help incentive climate change solutions? Read more.

What is “economic patriotism”? Read about Elizabeth Warren’s plan to reinvigorate American industry.

At this New York bakery, it’s not your past (whatever it may hold) that matters, but your future. What does employment based on the  Buddhist principle of “non-judgment” look like?
    [post_title] => This is how China's political dissidents keep historical memory alive
    [post_excerpt] => In China, brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of events their government works hard to repress with digital censorship and police harassment.
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This is how China’s political dissidents keep historical memory alive

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => The decline in international news coverage over the past two years has worrying implications

My friend used to chain smoke cigarettes as he reported from the front lines of Libya’s civil war and from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the tumultuous 2011 Arab Spring. Today, he lives in Washington, D.C., where he has an exciting job covering U.S. news as well as a dog, and a new baby. My friend belongs to a wave of American journalists who were once foreign correspondents but have over the past couple of years shifted back to the United States. Now he reports from a different front line — the Trump White House. This shift of reporters from foreign beats to the domestic one reflects a worrying decline in rigorous international news coverage.

In 2018, six out of 10 of the top stories published by the Washington Post were Trump-related. This could be because readers are looking for Trump news; or it could be that most of the stories their favorite media outlets publish are about the president.

Foreign news coverage has, to be sure, been on the decline for quite some time. According to a 2014 Pew report 20 media companies eliminated their foreign bureaus over the past two decades. Furthermore, 64% of 250 newspapers surveyed said that over the past three years they decreased the space allotted to international news.

Declining interest

Rick Edmonds, a media analyst at the Poynter Institute, says that coverage of foreign news, especially among the big three American networks, has been declining “for a long time.” Those who seek international news coverage now rely on the New York Times and the BBC, or specialist publications and sites. Trump's attempts to monopolize the news cycle, Edmonds observes, has accelerated and exacerbated the decline in international news coverage.

Freelancers are feeling the pinch. Rebecca Collard, who freelances for various Canadian media outlets, confirms that since Trump was elected, she has found it increasingly difficult to find a home for stories that are not about the U.S. president or about the so-called Islamic State. A couple of years ago, Collard said, “there was constant demand” for reporting across print, radio, and television. She was filing four stories per day from northern Iraq, plus television and radio reports. Today she finds it difficult to pitch stories that lack an American angle. The appetite for foreign news had dried up, she said.

Elisa Lees Munoz heads the International Women’s Media Fund (IWMF), which disburses grants to female journalists for investigative and underreported international stories. She confirms that the organization’s grantees are having a hard time pitching and placing foreign stories that had nothing to do with Trump or the elections. Media outlets will publish foreign news pieces “grudgingly” if a media non-profit like the IWMF pays the reporter’s expenses, she said, but they will rarely commission international stories with money from their own budget.

Shaheen Pasha, a professor of international news at Amherst College, sees the freelancers she teaches struggle to pitch their foreign stories to American editors. “These reporters make no money, risk their lives to do stories about people being brutalized around the world and an editor will say, what is the interest, where is Trump?” Pasha said.

The lack of appetite for foreign news has, according to Pasha, created a generation of college students who are poorly informed about international affairs, because the media outlets they read have shifted away from foreign coverage.

Pasha believes that the absence of rigorous reporting on important issues like the global refugee crisis and climate change narrows the breadth of voices we hear in journalism and contributes to “othering,” or a decrease in identification with and compassion for people who speak different languages and observe different religions.

The cost of not knowing

Another consequence of the vacuum in international news coverage is that it distorts the lens through which we view the world, depicting it in simplistic, binary terms and as a place full of violence and chaos. Elisa Lees Munoz of the IWMF gave the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as an example of distorted coverage.  The few media reports one reads about the DRC, she pointed out, were about “war and rape and rape survivors.” So the average American news consumer has no idea that “there are really interesting stories about entrepreneurship and environmental issues” in the DRC. Editors don’t commission those stories, so reporters don’t pitch them.

There are serious consequences to being uninformed about international events. Not understanding how ordinary Iranians experience sanctions for example, makes it harder for Americans to empathize with their situation or to understand the implications of the U.S. government’s foreign policy not only for Iranians – but for Americans, too. So they continue to vote for hawkish lawmakers who make often misleading, saber-rattling statements about Iran, instead of advocating diplomatic solutions. A lack of rigorous reporting about the effects of climate change has also had catastrophic consequences, with poorly informed voters choosing representatives who ignore environmental issues — or, worse, support policies that further contribute to the depleting of natural resources and the dangerous warming of the planet.

The cost of being uninformed about the world is too high to ignore. There are remedies, but they require a commitment to journalism as a crucial pillar of democracy, rather than as a type of money-making entertainment. Journalism schools, said Pasha, must create courses like the one on media literacy and international reporting that she teaches at Amherst, which is available as an elective to students not majoring in journalism.

Lee Keath, a Middle East editor at the Associated Press, said that because the media was so Trump-obsessed, Americans had the impression that the war in Syria was over. The fighting is in fact still raging, but the media’s spotlight has turned away. Afghanistan, too, has slipped off the news cycle despite ongoing flareups in fighting. Keath said that while plenty of editors are looking for a Trump angle to nearly every story, he also knows many journalists who are determined to cover stories rigorously, without reference to the person currently occupying the White House.

How to change

“For me, the question to editors is, why are you passing up on these stories,” said Lees Munoz. She wants to know what evidence or criteria are being used to publish more stories that are only about Trump and the election – if the editorial decisions are based on real data or just on perceptions. One systemic problem is that the vast majority of senior media jobs are still held by straight, white, men who make editorial decisions based on their own interests and worldview.

But there is no single institution or factor that bears all the responsibility for this state of affairs.  Media outlets are obsessed with making a profit and editors are obsessed with the page views upon which their jobs depend. Publishers struggle to keep their newspapers afloat as the revenue from advertising continues to decline. Readers, meanwhile, increasingly fail to engage with anything longer than a 280-character tweet or a 30-second video.

Miriam Elder, World News editor at BuzzFeed, cautions against blaming readers. The news cycle has accelerated to an unprecedented pace, she said, with so much happening all at once that readers are overwhelmed. It’s up to journalists, she says, to do their jobs by reporting and explaining the news clearly, engaging their target audience so that they want to read about what’s going on in the world. “And that,” she said, “Means making it more relatable to their lives.”

Perhaps we all need to remind the editors who commission stories that making the news relatable is a crucial part of their jobs. While Trump and the U.S. elections must and should be covered rigorously, so should stories about what it means for a woman to be pregnant in El Salvador, or why infanticide is a problem in Senegal, or how Indians who oppose the authoritarianism of Narendra Modi are fighting for their democracy, or the real experiences and struggles of queer refugees in Europe and Canada. These are the stories that connect us on an emotional level. When they are told well and reported sensitively, we feel connected to the rest of the world — instead of isolated in a fear-filled fortress of our own making.
    [post_title] => The corrosive effect of the 'Trump Bump'
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The corrosive effect of the ‘Trump Bump’

by Hadeel Al-Shalchi

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    [post_content] => In the age of increasing government surveillance and declining privacy, can citizens take back their right to live an unwatched life?

This weekend I had the dubious honor of coming face-to-face with one of the robots being rolled out by the supermarket chain Stop & Shop. The purpose of the tower of cameras and lasers is purportedly to keep an eye on spills and litter in the aisles, as the Boston Globe credulously reported, but presumably it could also watch customers and employees. The encounter got me thinking about the many forms of surveillance takes in this day and age, and how individuals and governments can push back.

One of the most extreme examples of a surveillance state is the province of Kashgar in northwest China. New York Times reporters created this audio-visual essay in an attempt to convey the extent of perpetual, all-consuming surveillance and its restrictive effect on residents. There are cameras, everywhere; and checkpoints, everywhere. Residents are required to install software on devices so the state can monitor their calls and other movements; and they are subject to random, unannounced visits by police and other monitors at any hour of the day or night. As the Times points out, the effect is as much about “intimidation as monitoring.”

Should you worry about facial recognition technology? Technologist Shelly Palmer says we should not be, arguing that “we live in a post-privacy world of our own creation, and there’s no going back.” Essentially, he says, things are already bad, so there’s no reason to try to fix it.

But people aren’t buying what Palmer and others are selling. As the New York Times recently reported, shareholders have taken an activist role in pressuring Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government agencies, and to conduct an independent investigation into potential violations of civil, human and privacy rights. In many ways, the perpetual surveillance Palmer describes as normal and everyday has raised awareness of how the technology can be abused. Since facial recognition is not-yet-ubiquitous, now is the time for individuals, governments and organizations to take a stand against it.

In another example of this anti-surveillance trend, CNET reports that cities across the United States are passing or considering legislation that would require public approval for new surveillance technologies that police departments are considering purchasing. Voters are asserting their right to decide whether surveillance systems are reasonable and acceptable.

In other news:

Infant mortality rates have dropped in states that expanded Medicaid access, according to a new study from the Georgetown University Center of Health Policy. Read more.

Fully one-half of retirement-age Americans can’t afford to stop working, but there are bills and other proposals on deck that could alleviate the crisis. Learn more.

The daughter of the man who coined the term “regenerative agriculture” wants to rethink the way we treat poop (specifically animal poop) in agriculture. Our food systems and health may depend on it. Read more.
    [post_title] => Reclaiming their privacy
    [post_excerpt] => While some shrug off perpetual surveillance as the new normal, others are taking action to prevent government abuse
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Reclaiming their privacy

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
—William Faulkner

Did you ever wonder why the American education system only gets serious about foreign languages in high school, while the rest of the world seems to start sometime before kindergarten? It’s not by accident, of course. In America, the attitude toward bilingualism has historically been uneasy at best. The tremendous cultural pressure on immigrants to assimilate and to speak English, presents a problem for ethnic and national groups committed to maintaining their own languages and cultural identity beyond the first and second generations.

When a growing Yiddish after school program asked the Milwaukee public school system for use of one of its buildings, it was a local rabbi who went on the record to protest the Yiddish program. “There is altogether too much hyphenism in our present Americanism…” said Rabbi Samuel Hirschberg. He added that foreign language education was wrong because “A foreign language as a household language tends to perpetuate foreignism…” Hirschberg insisted that foreign languages were so corrosive to the American national spirit that no foreign language should be taught before high school.

That was in 1916. Rabbi Hirschberg’s curious campaign to discourage Jewish literacy points to two important facts that tend to be in tension. First, bi- and even tri-lingualism has always been tied to American Jewish identity, both as an immigrant group and a diasporic people. Second, the discourse around bilingualism in America is in large part a function of attitudes toward immigrants. Between 1881 and 1924 some 2.5 million Jews immigrated from Eastern and Central Europe. By the time Rabbi Hirschberg went on the record, the popular conversation around immigrants, especially Jews, had reached unprecedented heights of ugly xenophobia. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Congress passed legislation that would essentially cut off all immigration from Europe, including Jewish immigration.

The persistence of bilingual culture

The case of Rabbi Hirschberg shows that the question of bilingualism was a complicated one, and that the conversations happening in the mainstream were also happening within the Jewish community.

But bilingual (Yiddish-English) Jewish communal life did persist in the United States, and well past its expected life span. In 1933, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Hillel Rogoff, the managing editor of the most widely-read Yiddish newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, was asked about the future of the Yiddish press in America. Despite widely-held views that Yiddish was a dying language, Rogoff was optimistic. “There is no reason,” he said, “why the Yiddish press in America should not go on for many, many years…”

Today, at 122 years of continuous publishing, the Yiddish language Forverts newspaper has already outlived the traditional Yiddish blessing, “may you live until 120.” The history of Forverts reflects a mixture of enormous communal investment, dumb luck and, in the end, the overwhelming power of monolingualism. In that sense, for newer diasporic groups hoping to maintain an identity tied to a heritage language, the Forverts provides an important case study.

In the United States, maintaining an immigrant language and cultural tradition requires an act of tremendous will and coordinated community action. What’s so unique about the persistence of Forverts — which is still published to this day, albeit in a very diminished format — is not just that it defied the two-generation life span for immigrant media, but that it did so in spite of itself. The Forverts was itself a force for Americanization.

Established in 1897 at the peak of mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, Forverts’s most famous sections were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. A Bintl Brif (A Bundle of Letters) was one of the first American newspaper advice columns. It provided guidance on many of the dilemmas of Americanization, including, most poignantly, the cultural gap that inevitably arose between Yiddish speaking parents and bilingual American children, many of whom were ashamed of their foreign parents.

The Yiddish of Forverts was also highly ‘Americanized,’ employing many transliterated English words. Perhaps most importantly, given American political attitudes, while The Forverts was a proudly socialist publication, it was vigorously anti-Communist. The Yiddish paper of record managed to thread the needle of politically acceptable cultural autonomy.

The Forverts was always more than a newspaper. It was part of a wide-ranging, interconnected network of Yiddish flavored, socialist and labor oriented institutions that included WEVD radio, Amalgamated Bank, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, a mutual aid society called the Workmen’s Circle, and a summer camp and after school education system that still exist today. 

At its height, the Forverts parent entity, the Forward Association, was a political machine, an organization with a constitution that spelled out expectations for members to vote along party lines, or risk disciplinary action that included expulsion.

Taken together, the Forverts was a symbol of an urban, all-encompassing model of Jewish life in America. It was explicitly built by and for its members and readers, and that sense of ownership continued to reverberate through later generations, even if in a diminished, distanced way.  

Xenophobia redux

Coordinated anti-immigrant hysteria brought an end to the great era of Jewish mass migration, with the passing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Unfortunately, we are now seeing a resurgence of the ugly xenophobia that was such a salient feature of American life during the 1920s and 1930s. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, almost one third of Americans feel uncomfortable merely hearing a language other than English in public. The irony is, for all the outrage about immigrants and their supposed resistance to assimilation, the process of Americanization is absolutely relentless and no group is immune to the inevitability of language loss.  

First generation immigrants to the United States generally learn English slowly. They depend on media in their native language, which they continue to speak at home. Second generation Americans are bilingual and may or may not be attached to the immigrant language and its institutions. Third generation Americans are, almost without exception, monolingual.

Many of the institutions created by the first generation of Yiddish-speaking immigrants still exist. While the WEVD radio station was sold to Disney, Amalgamated Bank and the Amalgamated Houses still stand. The Workmen’s Circle has created a new identity for itself in the twenty-first century, one that is different from its origins as a mutual aid society, but still centered on an understanding of American Jews as immigrants and descendants of immigrants. 

But those institutions, for all their longevity, did not create a legacy of contemporary Yiddish speakers. While the Workmen’s Circle offers superb and innovative Yiddish language classes for adults, it faces nearly insurmountable challenges in monolingual America. Providing systematic Yiddish language education for children was an exceedingly difficult proposition, given both the financial cost and the pull of assimilation. The Holocaust decimated Yiddish culture in Europe, reducing its native-speaking population by 85%. Today, outside of the Hasidic communities, Yiddish is spoken by only a small number of Jewish Americans. Many of them are people like me and my friends, residents of what we affectionately call Yiddishland.

The will to preserve a culture

So what are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers? According to my Yiddishland friends who are now parents, supplementary and all-day schools (which also exist for Russian, Chinese and Hungarian) have proven highly effective — if extremely expensive — for language transmission, especially where a first generation parent speaks the language at home. But it remains to be seen whether those schools alone can inspire the second generation to transmit to the third, the true challenge in monolingual America.

On this question of the third generation I turned to a young friend of mine, Shifra Whiteman. As a child in the 1990s, Whiteman was part of a small Yiddish-language playgroup called Pripetshik.  The group was created by a dedicated group of second-generation parents invested in Yiddish continuity. Pripetshik met in the Workmen’s Circle building in New York and lasted for years, morphing into a Yiddish chorus and producing lifelong friendships. As adults Whiteman, and the other members of the playgroup, have gone on to become activists and leaders in the Yiddish world.

The playgroup wasn’t just about teaching a language. It included cooking sessions, movies and history lessons. Pripetshik was about transmitting a very specific diasporic Jewish identity. Its location in the Workmen’s Circle building, a few floors down from the Forverts, was an important part of the lesson, showing the kids that they existed within an ongoing cultural project.  

In addition to her Yiddish playgroup, Whiteman also received a conventional Jewish day school education as well as many summers at Zionist summer camp. She recently started teaching Yiddish classes in cooperation with her city’s YIVO and Workmen’s Circle branches. Her students are almost entirely young people hungry for connection to an alternative kind of Jewish identity, one that is not rooted in nationalism or political ideology. At 30, she is ready to start thinking about children of her own, and plans to speak Yiddish with them, just as her parents spoke to her. As she put it to me, among the many Jewish worlds she inhabited as a young person, “the Yiddish stuck.”  

There are no easy answers to the question of how to preserve immigrant cultures and languages in the face of America’s fierce devotion to monolingualism. However, it’s clear that the success of multi-generational cultural transmission will depend on the durability of institutions, and whether the language and culture express values that the following generations find useful, and essential, to their sense of self. The Forverts was a newspaper for immigrants who wanted to become American. Today, many of its readers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, people who want to expand the definition of American and once again redefine Jewish life in the diaspora.
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Make bilingualism great

by Rokhl Kafrissen

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