Web of Lies or Web of Necessity?

 

The pandemic has had many long-term ramifications for us all. While our interconnected world has allowed people with distinctly extreme and often socially disastrous beliefs to unite and pose a greater combined threat, and as the ability to separate fact fiction has been severely compromised, we have nevertheless become dramatically dependent on the Internet. From simple communications between and among us, to ordinary commerce and banking, cries for emergency services and access to information, the Internet seems to have risen even above the telephone as our connected lifeline. Indeed, even instruments that are labeled in a manner that suggests traditional voice-to-voice communications – smart phones – they are devices that are primarily used for Web-based audio-visual research and connectivity.

The children most negatively impacted by the pandemic, medical issues notwithstanding, have been those unable comfortably to access online education or who are less familiar with its scope and operational capacity. As David Lazarus points out in his October 23^rd contribution to the Los Angeles Times, “After months of being stuck at home, many Americans know full well that there are three things they can’t live without. Two of them are power and water… The third, I’m sure, will be obvious to all…  Internet access… Imagine this prolonged ordeal without being able to work or attend school from home, without email, without being able to shop online, without streaming video and music.” For many, the Web has replaced not just the telephone, but both radio and television.

It’s a whole lot more than simple access these days. Bandwidth has become mission critical. Slow and inconsistent downloads and uploads, image and Web-page instability, crashing and lost signals and dead zones. Whether we get our Web access through a hard wire, fiber, satellite or some form of telephonic access (4G and perhaps 5G), the elegance of the signal fails if all we can access in old-world “dial-up” or snailing “broadband” misnomers. Americans think of themselves as technologically advanced, world leaders if you will. But for those of us who have traveled to Europe, Korea, Singapore or Japan, our overall capacity and pricing structure seems very “developing nation” level, although mega-corporations have managed to purchase massive fiber optic bandwidth to protect their interests. Many of these countries find even 100 mbs to be exceptionally slow and retarded, yet that is the gold standard for too many Americans.

Here how Lazarus summarizes our current technology compared to other advanced nations, and we seem to be solid and making progress: “At first glance, that seems to be true. Over the last decade, the percentage of Americans with access to broadband internet climbed to 93.5% from 74.5%, according to a recent report from BroadbandNow, a service comparison site… Meanwhile, the consumer price index for internet service has remained relatively stable over the same period, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics… The average U.S. internet user pays about $60 a month for service.

“But industry observers say we’re measuring things wrong. Rather than comparing current internet prices with how much we paid 10 years ago, we should be comparing our prices to what people in other developed countries pay… By that yardstick, Americans are getting a lousy deal, not just in terms of pricing but also in terms of service quality — that is, speed… A recent comparison of worldwide broadband charges by Britain’s Cable.co.uk, a telecom service provider, found that the U.S. ranked 119th out of 206 countries, with monthly costs far surpassing those of Germany, Britain and Japan.

“Another study, this one by DecisionData.org, found that although U.S. internet speeds had increased over the last decade, we’re not even in the top 10 . (Want fast internet? Move to Romania.).. ‘Americans have the slowest, most expensive internet in the world,’ said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with just a bit of hyperbole.

“Telecom companies have been steadily raising internet prices to offset growing numbers of cord cutters ditching their TV plans. The companies are fond of saying that the main reason for these price hikes is investment in new high-speed lines… But Harold Feld, senior vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, says this is misleading. Most of the necessary fiber-optic cables for current internet use are already in the ground, he said.”

Rates for varying levels of Internet access depend on the number of carriers in your immediate neighborhood. Pricing is all over the map, and if you happen to be in a household earning less that $30,000/year, chances are 44% that you do not have broadband access at all. Has meaningful Web access risen to the level of a ubiquitous public utility? Obviously, yes! But that’s not how the federal government sees it, and since FCC is the likely regulatory body, staffed with the administration’s profits-for-business underlying strategic priority, consumers are simply left by the wayside.

“‘If it wasn’t clear before, it’s now crystal clear that internet access is necessary to survive in our contemporary world, similar to electricity,’ said Catherine Powell, a law professor at Fordham University who focuses on digital rights and civil liberties… Susan Aaronson, director of the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at George Washington University, went so far as to say affordable high-speed internet access ‘is a service that government should provide… It is an essential public good and should be embedded in the law as some nations do… It is essential to equality of opportunity, access to credit, access to other public goods, access to education.’

“This is a separate matter from debates about regulation of internet content, or whether behemoths such as Google and Facebook have too much power… The position of the U.S. government — not to mention phone and cable companies — is that the internet is a free-market service, full stop. It’s not a utility… Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, says the internet industry merits only what he calls ‘light-touch’ regulation, which is to say hardly any regulation at all.” Trying to function in society today without broadband access is increasingly akin to trying to live as an illiterate in any first world nation. Without that social umbilical cord, people are left isolated, abandoned as well as politically and economically excluded.

“‘The internet is the direct descendant of the U.S. telephone network,’ said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a digital rights advocacy group… Until the phone industry was deregulated in the 1980s and ’90s — a move that boosted competition for a while before the industry reunited into a handful of big players — ‘it was the first information utility,’ he told [Lazarus]… The internet now plays that role, Chester said.

“Aaronson at George Washington University says one reason we lag behind other advanced countries is we don’t view broadband as a right — just as we don’t view healthcare or higher education as things all people are entitled to… This, she told me, is incredibly shortsighted… ‘Access to broadband is essential for society as a whole to succeed,’ Aaronson said… The very definition of a utility.” Lazarus. More affluent cities across the United States are implementing free and ubiquitous Internet access for all within city limits. But for many folks, especially in small towns or rural areas of limited bandwidth competition (and no satellite access is not that robust for most) or those in high cost cities, they are the forgotten ones. Those who wish to shove the United States back into the simple times of the 1950s need time machines, not policy power!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and by simply reprioritizing individuals and their well-being over corporate behemoths, admittedly a very different direction from current practices, we just might make this nation work for everybody.

 

 

 

Filling the Void When Trust Disappears

 

Let’s face it. Liberals don’t trust the Trump administration. Trump supporters don’t trust anyone who disagrees with the President, noting that mainstream media are the “enemy of the people.” Most Americans don’t trust the CDC or the FDA as they rush “way too fast” to approve the creation of a new vaccine. Liberals laugh at Breitbart and Fox News, while right-wing pundits scoff at CNN and MSNBC, and many folks think of ABC and CBS News as vanilla without the bean. Russian disinformation, expertly disseminated, finds its way into the ether, as fake news slowly gets the “snowball to avalanche” effect and is taken as gospel simply based on the volume of messaging.

I’ll never forget that phrase from Kellyanne Conway, "alternative facts," created in a January 22, 2017 interview on Meet the Press, defending Donald Trump’s proclivity to play fast and loose with the truth… and by then, truth had long since left the building. Looking back over the Trump administration’s pronouncements during his campaign and term in office, the net results included severe polarization (the growth of irreconcilable factions), the death of a willingness to compromise and, perhaps most of all, the crushing and pervasive lack of trust among us all. Nasty stuff, but when trust goes, there is a void. The most dangerous development, however, is what fills that void… and the consequences to democracy, truth and the very viability of the nation itself.

The growth of conspiracy theories and fake news, the desperate craving of those who harbor views that were never considered acceptable to find support for their “outside the bounds of logic and facts” views, allows highly biased factions to “repeal” easily provably facts (except many no longer believe once credible sources) and replace them with “alternative facts” supported by the wide dissemination of conspiracy theories and totally fabricated “truths.” The trust void is almost always filled with “something else.”

New York Times Op-Ed writer, Farhad Manjoo, explains (October 21^st) some recently-released Harvard-driven research on the subject: “Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School… is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation — the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society… Donovan’s research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation… Donovan’s team published ‘The Media Manipulation Casebook,’ a searchable online database of their research. It makes for grim reading — an accounting of the many failures of journalists, media companies, tech companies, policymakers, law enforcement officials and the national security establishment to anticipate and counteract the liars who seek to dupe us. Armed with these investigations, Donovan hopes we can all do better.

“I hope she’s right. But studying her work also got me wondering whether we’re too late. Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome. Every day I grow more fearful that the number of those Americans will be large enough to imperil our nation’s capacity to function as a cohesive society.

“‘I’m worried about political violence,’ Donovan told me. America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands. Donovan told me she fears that ‘people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.’…

“Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions — a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.

“Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. It’s often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Trump last week — as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Trump is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites… But that undersells QAnon’s danger. To people who have been ‘Q-pilled,’ QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.

“Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the ‘deep state’ and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.

“‘We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down,’ Donovan said of QAnon. It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.”

The threat to America is to incite a level of “patriotic” violence – perceived to require a violent individual effort to crush the subject matter of the conspiracy theory – added to a widely shared  and pervasive belief that COVID-19 is fading, and that mask-wearing and social distancing are both a sign of weakness and the major factors keeping our economy from recovering. Both positions would result in lots of serious injuries, suffering and deaths. The combined impact could well be the end of the United States itself, through extreme and prolonged illness and civil war.

The problem pits our First Amendment against the dangers of conspiracy theories. Is the adding real consequences to the dissemination of harmful conspiracy theories “censorship” or is it more akin to holding someone who caused panic in a movie theater by yelling “fire” when there is no fire? Or is subscribing to conspiracy theories any different from seeking a religious explanation for the meaning of life? “People ‘are seeking answers and they’re finding a very receptive community in QAnon,’ Donovan said.

“This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies they’re targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.

“Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.” That it could end is the ultimate consequence.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot get truth and facts into the headlights of the vast majority of Americans again, is this really a nation worth trying to hold together?

 

Google, Google – a Turkey Sound, Bipartisan Enemy or a Red Herring

 

On October 20^th, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in the Federal District Court (District of Columbia) against Google focusing on its purportedly predatory practices relating to its search and search advertising platforms. “The DOJ argues that Google has entered into exclusionary contracts with phone makers to preload its search engine onto devices using Alphabet’s Android operating system.

“Those contracts have allowed Google to maintain a monopoly while stifling competition and innovation, the suit contends. It also accuses Google of using profits from that monopoly to buy preferential treatment for its search engine on web browsers, including Safari… Estimates of Google’s control of the market for online searches range from 80 percent to 90 percent, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.” TheHill.com, October 20^th. Google has, likewise, been in the antitrust headlights of the European Union as well.

Why the rush to file such a massive lawsuit right before the election? Was it an attempt to find common ground with the Democrats? An effort to unite against a perceived common enemy? Or was the administration trying to pretend that Joe Biden was so in the pockets of “liberal social media” that he could not be trusted to fight the big fight later? Attacking a big corporation seems more like a progressive, hardly a Republican effort. And could the fact that it is the Trump administration filing the lawsuit potentially work in Google’s favor?

“Matt Stoller, the research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said on Wednesday [10/21] that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case against Google is ‘not partisan.’ ... Stoller told Hill.TV’s ‘Rising’ that Attorney General William Barr is trying to get the lawsuit out before the election, and said it’s the ‘most interesting thing happening in the administration so far.’ 

“‘This is not a partisan cheap shot. There probably is a little bit of electoral ramifications here, or at least he might think that,’ Stoller said, referring to Barr. ‘But largely it’s just ‘I want to get this out before Biden people come in and try to squash it.’ … Stoller also called the charges a ‘huge deal,’ adding that they were ‘massive’ both ideologically and politically… ‘You have the Trump administration---a right-wing Republican administration--trying to break up a trillion dollar company,’ Stoller said. ‘That is a huge deal because we haven’t seen that in decades.’” TheHill.com, October 21^st. The lawsuit currently does not seek to break Google into component pieces, a remedy that could easily be added later.

Writing for the October 21^st Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik digs deeper into the differences between the Republican’s and Democrat’s perspective on this litigation, knowing that everybody simply agrees that Google is just too damned big for its britches. “Their [bipartisan] accord has limits, however — Democrats favor breaking up the company, but that’s not an explicit goal of the lawsuit… That said, for the moment the stars seem to be aligned. After the Justice Department filed its case, New York [State] Atty. Gen. Letitia James cited the ‘good working relationship’ she and other Democratic attorneys general have with the [federal] Justice Department on their ‘separate but parallel’ investigations of Google.

“As much as Google’s other critics might wish to applaud the Trump administration’s aggressive stance against Google, there’s reason to be concerned about the prospect that the lawsuit is clouded by Trump himself… Trump has waged a long rhetorical campaign against Google and other online companies, accusing them — implausibly — of ‘censoring’ conservative viewpoints.

“Atty. Gen. William Barr, in a June 21 interview on Fox News , directly tied accusations of censorship to the administration’s concerns about the ‘concentration of these very large companies that have that kind of influence on the sharing of information and viewpoints on our society.’

“Senior members of the Justice Department have been reported to be upset at the apparent haste to file the Google lawsuit before the election, on the theory that the brandishing of a legal stick against Google might win Trump votes… Trump’s public determination to punish companies such as Google can’t help but undermine the legal rationales embedded in the Justice Department complaint, which is said to be the result of more than a year of investigation…

“[Search] engines rely on user queries to build their effectiveness and reliability, so Google’s enormous footprint effectively keeps would-be rivals from building up their own systems. That produces ‘continuous and self-reinforcing monopolies in multiple markets,’ the Justice Department says… Google protects those monopolies by cutting exclusive deals with computer and mobile hardware makers such as Apple, whose operating systems compete with Google’s Android, with hardware makers seeking to license Android for their own products, and with wireless carriers and browser designers.

“For years, the Justice Department says, Google has contracted with Apple to set its search engine as the default for Apple’s Safari browser, iPhones and iPads. Naturally, its search engine is the default for Android mobile phones, and for Google’s own Chrome browser, the most popular web browser for computer and mobile users.

“As everyone in the consumer tech industry knows, inertia is a powerful factor — customers almost never bother to change the default settings that come with their devices. That makes dislodging Google as the search engine of choice a daunting task indeed… Google has used its dominance in search to acquire a dominant position in search page advertising, the lawsuit asserts. The same phenomenon is at work in advertising as it is in search — the larger the footprint, the greater the appeal to customers.

“Google’s search ads ‘have become a ‘must have’ for many advertisers,’ the Justice Department says. ‘But users do not benefit’ to the same extent. In fact, their privacy may be compromised by Google’s ability to exploit their personal information, including their searches, to feed them ads thought to be personally appealing.”

Given the virtually unlimited financial resources available to Google, almost an infinite ability to use legions of lawyers to pummel the DOJ at every turn which requires an in-kind DOJ response, we can expect legal fees to escalate into the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on each side… or maybe even more. Google has easily absorbed mega-billion-dollar fines from the European Union, and it should be able to drag this process through the US judicial system for years. Don’t be surprised if Google’s efforts result simply in a large fine-based settlement, a few token agreements to increase competition, but no material change in their dominant status in search and advertising.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and we live in an era where transnational corporate behemoths’ cross-border political and economic interests trump (yeah, trump) any normal and reasonable global regulatory schemas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump clouds Google lawsuit

MICHAEL HILTZIK

Keep Dem City Slickers from Voting!

 

The 5-4 2013 conservative Supreme Court ruling Shelby County vs Holder, claimed that the passage of time since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (amended but retained over the decades) required that the Court release states that, in 1965 and subsequent amendment years, had practiced racially discriminatory voting restrictions from federal supervision under sections 4(b) and 5 of the statute. Both sections were annulled. Section 4(b) contained the coverage formula that determines which jurisdictions are subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting, and Section 5 had required certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was widely heralded as one of the major changes to the Jim Crow laws that prevented African-Americans from voting.

Almost immediately after the ruling, “several states once covered under preclearance have passed laws that removed provisions such as online voting registration, early voting, ‘Souls to the Polls’ Sunday voting, same-day registration, and pre-registration for teens about to turn 18. The ruling has also resulted in some states implementing voter identification laws and becoming more aggressive in expunging allegedly ineligible voters from registration rolls. States that have changed their voting policies post-Shelby include both jurisdictions that were previously required to undergo federal preclearance, as well as some that were not covered, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the states most likely to enact voting restrictions were states with the highest African-American turnout in the 2008 election.

“Three years after the ruling, 868 polling places had been closed down. Five years after the ruling, nearly a thousand polling places had been closed in the country, with many of the closed polling places in predominantly African-American counties. Research shows that the changing of voter locations and reduction in voting locations can reduce voter turnout.” Wikipedia. Virtually all of the post-Shelby voting restrictions was passed by Republican legislatures and signed into law by Republican governors. And while many early efforts to contain minorities from voting were reversed by the lower courts, many others were sustained, and rejected efforts were quickly replaced by new voting restrictions, slightly reconfigured.

The Republican Party, viewed as the party of wealthy tax-avoiding elites and right wing social conservatives, had come to the realization that on a strict demographic basis, they were a minority party with a strong rural constituency in a country that was well over 85% urban. Fear of losing both the presidency and the Senate is the force behind the eleventh and a half hour rush to nominate a right-wing Supreme Court Justice in complete defiance of the once-GOP-backed tradition of kicking late term presidential judicial appointments past the election. If the GOP does not win the Presidency and hold the majority in the Senate, a supermajority of conservatives can reverse the will of both Congress and the President.

Controlling who can vote is equally important. Just looking at the overwhelming mayoral control of most major American cities by Democrats, the handwriting for the GOP was on the wall. To survive, the GOP felt the need to dilute the urban and non-white vote by whatever means possible. Otherwise, America’s growing shift toward the center and left of center would become their worst nightmare.

Cities are particularly vulnerable. There is much more mobility (moving to new homes, new cities) among those who make their living in cities versus in rural communities, and the resulting constant change in the relevant voter rolls gave rise to new tools to delist and disqualify those who change their place of registration. By blending the conservative countryside into districts that include cities with liberal leanings, gerrymandering effectively dilutes those liberal votes into oblivion. And today, Republican controlled states, even as their populations are shifting to purple and maybe even blue (e.g., North Carolina), are far and away the greatest implementers of gerrymandering.

Sensing that if he can stop new voters from turning out, he can stem the liberal tide against him, Donald Trump has attempted to attack, thwart and undermine a well-established and pervasive vote-by-mail practice, seen by many as a necessity during the pandemic. Then, in conservative states, by making early voters struggle to get their ballots counted at all, the GOP is erecting barriers specifically to keep minorities and city dwellers, particularly those without cars, from being able to cast their ballots at all.

As once virulently red states are turning purple if not blue, the need to stop that transition dead in its tracks has become a GOP obsession. Like in Texas. Houston is the largest city in the state (and the fourth largest in the country), located in Harris County, which is 1777 square miles (making it bigger than Rhode Island). And like most big cities in Texas, Houston skews heavily Democratic. Sylvester Turner, an African-American, is the current Democratic mayor of the city, which last had a Republican mayor in 1981!

Houston has ample public transportation, including the modern Metro rail system noted on the above map. If you live in Houston (or Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, etc.), you do not need to own a car. Why does this matter? Because during a pandemic, even if you typically use public transportation, you are less inclined to do so in a state (and a city) with some of the highest COVID infection and mortality rates in the nation. Traditional white voters beyond the pale of big city limits almost uniformly have cars. Thus, voters with cars are more likely to be in conservative rural areas than liberals and minorities in cities who do not. Hmmmm. That gave the governor an idea.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, anxious to deliver his state to Donald Trump and make sure that both Senators remain Republican, in early October, issued an executive order limiting each of the state’s 254 counties, including Houston’s Democrat-led Harris County, the nation’s third largest by population, to a single ballot drop site. One place. Challenged in federal district court, Abbott was gratified when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed his order to take effect. Any further judicial review would take place after the election. The dozens of polling deposit sites in Houston were closed, and only one drop-off site remained. And if you don’t own a car… Oh….

“Texans are supposed to be able to vote several ways. Early in-person voting started last week [early October]. Those who are out of state are eligible to vote absentee. Certain in-state voters can have ballots mailed to them, including those who are disabled and 65 or older. Those ballots may be mailed back to election officials or dropped with poll workers at designated sites…

“But ongoing legal maneuvers by Republican state officials have resulted in frustration at the polls amid record early turnout. Abbott and others say they’re trying to guard against possible voter fraud, but voting rights groups and Democrats complain of voter suppression — long a problem for minorities in Texas — and they worry the actions could tilt the outcome of the presidential election.

“Texas was one of nine mostly Southern states barred for decades from changing voting laws without federal approval under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down provisions of the act in 2013, Texas Republicans have attempted to redistrict and to impose stricter voter identification legislation, prompting lawsuits alleging voter suppression.

“Abbott has also refused to mandate masks at the polls during the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially further tamping down the vote. And Republican leaders have fought straight ticket voting, which would have reduced the time voters spend casting in-person ballots, and have unsuccessfully tried to block curbside voting and online voter registration. Republicans have also fought one another over voting restrictions: When Abbott ordered early voting to start a week earlier than scheduled because of the pandemic, other state GOP leaders unsuccessfully sued to stop him…

“Some at the polls last week said they worried about vote fraud and agreed with the governor that ballot drop sites should be restricted… ‘It’s good because you can get oversight. It’s all about control,’ said retired Texas Ranger Dewayne Goll, 58, after casting an early vote for Trump at a polling place in a German dance hall turned community center in a Houston suburb.” Los Angeles Times, October 19^th. Despite constant statements to the contrary, no one has produced any serious tangible evidence of inherent fraud in vote-by-mail anywhere in a US national election.

Given the obvious manipulation and vote-rigging, it seems pretty clear that even Texas Republicans fear Donald Trump can’t win their traditionally red state. So, if Trump does in fact prevail, it would seem pretty obvious, given the rapid erosion Trump’s poll numbers, that such a victory would only be by reason of a dramatic distortion of the will of a majority of the American voting public. It’s not clever or cute. It is downright unpatriotic and un-American!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and if you ever wondered how democracies morph into autocracies, look around you at all the efforts to marginalize all but white traditional voters.

The Fallacy of Constitutional Interpretation: “Originalism”

 

You might ask where in the Constitution our framers authorized the formation of the Air Force or how Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (copyright and patent protection clause) would extend the notion of a “writing” to indecipherable digitized electronic impulses that cannot be viewed or understood without an extrinsic “reader.” For jurists who embrace the notion of “originalism,” what was once considered a fringe view of the Constitution in the 1980s, perhaps those were not permissible interpretations. Fortunately, those issues were never brought before a modern Supreme Court where any justice embraced that legal approach to Constitutional interpretation.

“Originalism is a theory of the interpretation of legal texts, including the text of the Constitution. Originalists believe that the constitutional text ought to be given the original public meaning that it would have had at the time that it became law. The original meaning of constitutional texts can be discerned from dictionaries, grammar books, and from other legal documents from which the text might be borrowed. It can also be inferred from the background legal events and public debate that gave rise to a constitutional provision. The original meaning of a constitutional text is an objective legal construct like the reasonable man standard in tort law, which judges a person’s actions based on whether an ordinary person would consider them reasonable, given the situation. It exists independently of the subjective ‘intentions’ of those who wrote the text or of the ‘original expected applications’ that the Framers of a constitutional text thought that it would have. 

“Originalism is usually contrasted as a theory of constitutional interpretation with Living Constitutionalism. Living constitutionalists believe that the meaning of the constitutional text changes over time, as social attitudes change, even without the adoption of a formal constitutional amendment pursuant to Article V of the Constitution.” Steven G. Calabresi writing for the Interactive Constitution for the Constitutional Center.

The champion of strict constructionism, originalism, was the late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia who said (in 2016): "The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted." His former law clerk, now a sitting federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit and Trump 11^th hour nominee for the RBG vacancy, Amy Coney Barrett, admittedly shares Scalia’s view on Constitutional interpretation:

"In English that means that I interpret the Constitution as a law," said Barrett on the second day of her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, "and that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn't change over time and it's not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it."

The notion of immutability of the U.S. Constitution actually flies in the face of common sense. How can you apply a constitutional interpretation from an era of muskets and flintlocks, where 94% of the nation was engaged in agriculture, where ships needed oars or wind power, and where electricity was relegated to Ben Franklin’s experimentation with kites and lightening? As Los Angeles Attorney (UCLA Law, and UCSB undergraduate in philosophy), Branden Frankel, writes in his letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (October 16^th): “What did ‘liberty’ and ‘property’ mean to the slave owners who framed that amendment? Their definition of those terms has been shown by history to be not just wrong, but also evil.

“On top of being morally repugnant, originalism is self-contradictory. The framers could have written into the Constitution an explicit requirement that terms were to be construed according to their common meaning at the time of ratification. But they didn’t, meaning that originalism is affirmatively placing a modern meaning on the Constitution it most certainly did not have at ratification… In fact, the framers were steeped in the common-law tradition, in which judges continuously refined and changed the law over time.”

And then there is the tiny detail: the entire American legal system is and was based on the British notion of “common law,” one where judge-made laws fill obvious voids. Our basic approach to breaching contracts or assessing responsibility for negligent harm was built primarily on common law. Not statutes! While some arenas are not amenable to this approach (taxation, treaties, compulsory military service, budgetary allocations, etc.), our common law system – taught in every law school in the United States (and the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.) – was intended to address the obvious, an evolving society and act as a sort of spackle to fill the cracks between the statutes passed by the state legislatures and Congress.

Our Founding Father’s made an affirmative choice to adopt this legal approach (as opposed to the more purely statutory “civil law” practiced in France, Spain and Italy). U.S. courts even routinely cited British common law in our early years. Congress and our appellate courts can always reverse a judge-made law (statutes and the Constitution take precedence) if they think a court overstepped its natural bounds. Scalia and Barrett were raised within that legal system!

One more reality, one that infuriated me when conservative justices, dissenting against past civil rights decisions, suggested that the only proper path to implement a fair result was for a new constitutional amendment to pass. Such justices were acutely aware of the virtual impossibility of such adding new constitutional amendments. Given the level of polarization that defines contemporary politics, the U.S. Constitution is the least amendable constitution of any genuine democracy on earth. Just shy of generating the necessary votes from the required number of state legislatures within its self-set time limits, the Equal Rights Amendment is now dead. A ground zero do-over.

The last constitutional amendment, the 27^th – which required an intervening election before Congress could implement any raises it voted for itself – took 203 years to pass. 1992 to be precise. “It was submitted by the 1st Congress to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789, along with eleven other proposed amendments. While ten of these twelve proposals were ratified in 1791 to become the Bill of Rights, what would become the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the proposed Congressional Apportionment Amendment did not get ratified by enough states for them to also come into force with the first ten amendments.”

The notion of originalism is a relatively recent theory of constitutional law embraced by severe right-wing jurists opposed to change, regardless of the obvious social necessity. None of the gender inequality cases would have passed muster under this archaic view of the Constitution.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I am furious that otherwise able jurists are able to infuse their limited views of equality by relying on absurd theoretical constitutional interpretations that even our Founding Fathers never followed.

 

Privacy? LOL, LOL!

 

“These [data privacy] issues are of urgent societal importance… The data market, which lies at the core of the internet economy, will not function efficiently absent policy interventions. Yet, our rules, regulations, and understanding of the market haven’t evolved much over the last 20 years. Our work provides a conceptual framework to help policymakers think through these issues, which are extremely complex and will require a range of interventions.”

Dirk Bergemann, Yale Professor of Economics

You’d think with the tsunami of global privacy legislation flowing everywhere – from the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) to US state statutes like California’s Consumer Privacy Act – that we are protected from all manner of online privacy intrusions from hackers (we know that’s not happening) and from large, mainstream corporations. Ask anyone Millennial aged and younger, and they will tell you that the notion of privacy left the building years ago.

Data by itself is a strange beast, and too much of it becomes unmanageable. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) that can, without continuous human command and control, spot and analyze patterns within groups and even within individual behavior. Like when you send an email or text to a friend or make a social media post, and suddenly ads pop up on your screen, as do emails and texts suggesting purchases that relate to what you thought were private postings and communications.

Here’s a big reveal. The big commercial enterprises don’t even need your personal data anymore. Those AI programs are happy to find the overall groupings that you might fall into based on little things, like Amazon or eBay purchases. And those groupings are so detailed, and people within those groups behave so predictably, that there may be no further need to analyze what you do individually. Gotchya!

Remember, there is a lucrative trade in data. In addition to the revenues generated in consumer transactions, these behemoths also generate massive metadata from just about everything you do. That metadata has economic value in and of itself. It is commoditized, bought and sold. But good metadata can get very pricey, so these companies seem to have found shortcuts where buying data from constant individual monitoring is no longer a justifiable expense.

These trends are so fascinating that they are the subject of many academic studies. Writing for the October 15^th YaleNews, Mike Cummings explores a recent approach from some high-profile Yale economists: “Shopping online. Searching the internet. Posting to social media. These ordinary activities allow Amazon, Google, Facebook and other digital behemoths to amass unprecedented amounts of people’s data while offering them little, if any, compensation in return.

“In a new paper, ‘The Economics of Social Data,’ Yale economists offer insight into why big tech companies can gobble up so much personal information at such a small price. It turns out that any one person’s data aren’t worth that much to Google et al. because the companies already know so much about our behavior from the data of people who resemble us, the researchers assert.  

“By collecting data from every email, purchase, post, or search on their platforms, the tech giants have amassed valuable information about entire groups of people who share similar characteristics, the researchers explained. The social nature of this data allows the companies to make statistical inferences that predict a wide range of behaviors, such as where people travel, how they live, and the kinds of products they prefer, according to the study. 

“When a shopper is... on Amazon, the company already knows a lot about their preferences based on data from people who share similar characteristics… ‘When a shopper is looking for a book on Amazon, the company already knows a lot about their preferences based on data from people who share similar characteristics,’ said Dirk Bergemann, the Douglass and Marion Campbell Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study. ‘The additional information that the shopper provides companies is not that valuable, therefore they don’t need to compensate for the additional data. This creates an imbalance that favors the companies over individual consumers.’

“Bergemann and his co-authors — MIT economist Alessandro Bonatti and Tan Gan, a graduate student in Yale’s economics department — show that the data’s social nature generates ‘social externalities’ that give the big digital companies an advantage in obtaining data and potentially threaten people’s privacy. ‘Externalities’ are side effects of economic activity that can produce positive or negative outcomes. For example, bees kept for honey might pollinate nearby crops, which is a positive externality. Increased air pollution is a negative externality caused by people driving to work. 

“Whenever someone posts on Facebook it can produce a social externality, Bergemann said. A post about, say, the purchase of new fashionable product conveys information that Facebook can use to predict the likelihood that people in the same or similar social networks will buy that product. While consumers might derive some value from this externality through the company’s targeted advertising, Facebook reaps a far greater benefit from it in increased sales of digital advertising. Moreover, few regulations are in place to prevent firms from trading on this social data in ways that harm consumers, he said.  

“Regulators have tried to level the playing field between consumers and big tech companies by attempting to secure consumers’ control over their information. This, they hope, will lead to people being compensated for the data they choose to share. But his approach is insufficient to protect privacy, the researchers argue, because, due to the externalities of social data, people relinquish control of their information to big-tech firms for little to no compensation…

“In addition to giving people control of their data, policymakers should seek to make stored data easily transferrable and removable so that consumers can regain control of their data, said Bergemann. They also should attempt to increase competition among tech firms for people’s information, he noted. 

“[The big digital firms] profit from gathering massive amounts of data while consumers gain very little from handing over their information… ‘The big digital firms have near monopolies on the personal data,’ he said. ‘They profit from gathering massive amounts of data while consumers gain very little from handing over their information. People would experience greater benefits if the companies were in direct competition for the personal data.’” The notion of “individuality” seems to fall by the wayside. Once you are in a group, your behavior is assumed to be lemming-like predictable. The digital universe if flying at warp speed followed by an old-world piston powered propeller-driven legislative airplane that lags years behind.

“A ballot initiative in California (Proposition 24) gives consumers opt-in and opt-out right for their online activities. “I f this proposal is meant to give people more privacy and more rights over how their data are used, why is it opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Consumer Federation of California? And if it’s meant to stop online businesses from making money by exploiting personal data, why aren’t internet companies lining up to try to kill it?

“A quick read of the measure itself proves impossible. Proposition 24 clocks in at 52 pages of dense technical language concerning the intricacies of online data collection, as intelligible to a layperson as the user manual of an aircraft carrier… In broad strokes, the 2019 consumer privacy law gave Californians the right to know what data companies collect on them, the right to get the data deleted and the right to tell companies not to package and sell the data to other companies…

“[But there’s the reason why Internet companies might like this proposed law:] Some groups that initially backed the California Consumer Privacy Act wanted the new measure to come back stronger than the original attempt: If you’re going to put a new law in front of voters, at a time when there’s a public awareness of the need for privacy, why not make it opt-in, rather than opt-out, and include a private right of action to let the people of California do their own enforcement?

“The ACLU of Northern California, which has spearheaded a number of privacy initiatives, came out strongly against Proposition 24. ‘We believe that there should be an opt-in framework for collection and use of people’s personal information,’ said Jacob Snow, an attorney with the group, ‘and we believe there should be strong enforceable rights backed up by a private right of action, and we have fought for them in the past.’… Adam Schwartz, staff attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that he sees Proposition 24 as ‘a mixed bag of partial steps backward and partial steps forward, and a lot of missed opportunities.’” Los Angeles Times, October 16^th.

Not quite enough, but perhaps enough to slow the train for more comprehensive and genuine privacy rights to a crawl. And believe me, this is only the beginning. Those Web-driven mega corporations make a lot of campaign contributions and pay a lot of lobbyists. Better than a sharp stick in the eye?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and the more you know about this “invasive species of digital intrusion,” the more you can vote for political representatives who reflect your privacy concerns.

Why Hotter Really Matters

 

“Tracking hurricanes from the Cape Verde [Africa] formation zone gives me and other Caribbean people plenty of time to broadcast preparedness warnings.”

Caribbean resident and stormwatch volunteer, Jane Higgins  

Among climate change’s greatest symptoms is the length and severity of tropical storms. Intense winds are born of cold and warm fronts colliding, and as temperatures increase during the various storm seasons around the world, so do the wind forces behind the storms. Likewise, as the water beneath those storms gets warmer, especially ocean surface temperature north of 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the more water rises and is sucked up by the storm. This increases the volume of water now captured by the storm, leaving more to be dropped on human-inhabited land masses later, and the extra weight slows the forward progress of the tropic storm, letting it sit longer atop land mass to dump vastly more rainwater before lumbering on.

The wind velocity itself might not change from the extra water – just the vector of the storm itself – so you have the worst of two worlds: exceptionally high winds with vastly more concentrated rainwater, both hovering in place for longer times before moving on. The concomitant damage results in more intense storms (even as the number of tropical rampaging storms remains about the same) with much greater potential for torrential flooding.

This season’s Hurricane Laura, for example, generated surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were solidly between 86 degrees and 88 degrees. The odd after-effect of the passing storm was to churn up deeper water, bringing surface temperatures down to 82 degrees in Laura’s wake. We saw the same pattern in most recent severe Gulf hurricanes, where the Gulf surface temperature has been riding higher during the hurricane seasons from the last few years. Simply put, the severity of such storms seems to be increasing each year.

What is particularly interesting to those of us in the United States is the impact of serious excessive rising temperatures in West Africa (around Cape Verde) and how that impacts hurricane season in the US. “It turns out that about 83% of major hurricanes – categories 3, 4 and 5 – that hit North America share the same birthplace as [Hurricane] Irma. Those emerging from Cape Verde are among the most powerful and longest-lived tropical storms. This has led stormwatchers to look closely at the atmosphere above Africa for clues about what might be going on. What is it about the storms emerging from here that makes them so devastating? And is it possible to predict the most powerful hurricanes to give people in their path more time to prepare? …

“Typically, the Atlantic sees around six hurricanes a year. But 2020 is no average year – at the time of writing, 25 named tropical storms and nine hurricanes have already formed. After the 2019 hurricane season concluded with Storm Sebastian in November, the World Meteorological Organization’s list of 21 alphabetical names (Q, U, X, Y and Z are excluded) – which are used on a six-year rotation – became exhausted by mid-September. Instead the last four storms have been allocated Greek nomenclature – Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.

“Among the nine hurricanes of 2020, four – including the two most powerful storms Laura and Teddy – can be traced back to Africa, where the seeds for their destructive power were first laid. Like all Cape Verde hurricanes, they began as disturbances high in the atmosphere above western Africa, known as African Easterly Waves. These are huge kinks in the stream of air that flows across Africa from east to west.

“This stream of air, known as the African Easterly Jet, is driven by the large temperature difference between the enormous expanse of the Sahara Desert and the semi-arid Sahel region to its south.

“The Sahara Desert – one of the driest regions on the planet – covers more than 3.3 million square miles (8.5 million sq km) and spans 11 countries in northern Africa. It produces a steady blast of hot, dry air into the atmosphere. ‘Obviously it’s always hot there, but in the summer it gets really hot,’ says Philip Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, who issues seasonal forecasts on the Atlantic hurricane season. The summer heat increases the differences between the hot, dry Sahara and the cooler, wetter Sahel. The more pronounced the temperature gradient, the stronger the jet stream.

“As the hot Saharan air rises several kilometres above the surface, it turns southward to meet the cooler air above the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea. The rotation of the Earth turns this air current westward to create a powerful jet of air across the continent and out into the Atlantic Ocean. ‘It’s a very strong blow out of the east at 15-20,000ft (4.5-6km),’ Klotzbach explains.” BBC.com, October 15^th. Higher heat thus means more intense winds and more water absorbed into the hurricane vortex. The perfect storm has become the routinely perfect storm.

Some scientists believe that giant pumps could be used to bring colder water from deep beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico to the surface to reduce that absorption of warmer water to help reduce the impact of Gulf-related hurricanes. Perhaps, but not only is this exceptionally costly and complex, it is like trying to put a band aid on a massive gaping wound. We just keep sidestepping the dire necessity of dealing with climate change as a whole, noting that hurricanes are one huge, but relatively small, part of the overall damage caused by our failure to contain greenhouse gasses.

Or we can continue to watch once productive agricultural land dry up and turn fallow, disease carrying insects migrate to regions where there is no immunity against those diseases, watch precious forest land burn into oblivion, observe rising seas and massive coastal erosion and uncontrolled flooding decimate man and animal alike. Add the wars resisting unwanted drought-driven migrants, conflicts over increasing resource scarcity and the tens of trillions of dollars of lost values and opportunities. We have been making the wrong economic/business friendly choice.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and the most basic economic principles tell you that ignoring the containment of climate change is probably the most destructive policy possible when it comes to measuring near-term and long-term job growth and sustaining business values and profitability.