The Myth of Joe Biden’s Working-Class Support

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

People always talk about Joe Biden’s special connection to the white working class, those vaunted lost voters throughout the industrial Midwest whom Democrats are desperate to get back if they want the White House again.

No one has any proof that this connection gets anyone to vote for Biden, or vote at all.

The idea that he can win white working-class votes is part of every calculation about Biden’s likely 2020 run, in public and among his inner circle. It has become automatic filler in conversations and news stories about how he’d measure up against the rest of the Democratic field and how he might perform against Donald Trump, or which states he’d put in play. It was part of why Barack Obama put him on the ticket in 2008 and how Hillary Clinton deployed him in 2016, and it defined which districts he was asked to campaign in during the 2018 midterms.

[Read: Biden’s anguished search for a path to victory]

So is he the working-class juggernaut, ready to roll over the 2020 field of candidates on the backs of union members and people scraping to get by? Maybe. No politician speaks as viscerally about the working class as Biden does, from his own experiences growing up to the causes he fought for during his decades in government.

Just go back to that August day in 2016 when, after endorsing Hillary Clinton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he took her to the house he grew up in to show her the kitchen where his grandfather used to sit and stress about finances. He was soon bounding around the neighborhood shaking hands, trying to draw people into conversations, while Clinton was left standing on his old front lawn deflecting a question about why so many in the area were supporting Trump.

Or last year, when Abby Finkenauer’s congressional campaign persuaded him to make a trip to Iowa, despite his attempts to avoid stoking presidential speculation by appearing in the state. Finkenauer insisted to his team that he could make the difference in swaying suspicious swing voters to back a Democratic woman in her late 20s (she won, narrowly).

Or maybe the idea that he’s a magnet for white working-class votes is yet another bit of conventional political wisdom that’s about to be blown apart. Beyond two previous presidential runs that barely got off the ground, he’s never run a race on his own outside Delaware, and the last competitive race he had there was his first one, when Richard Nixon was president.

“We strongly believed that he would be a help in the industrial Midwest, and we used him there a lot,” said David Axelrod, the top Obama adviser who helped bring Biden onto the ticket in 2008. Whether he was, in the end, a help in the industrial Midwest, Axelrod said, “that’s so hard to say.”

[Joe Biden: ‘We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation]’

“Watching him campaign, it does strike me that he could campaign in all 88 Ohio counties and break through with people,” said Ohio’s Democratic Party chairman, David Pepper. He added, “I think people are too quick to make a set of assumptions about one candidate and assume that others couldn’t do it.”

While Biden is a tighter demographic fit for the white working-class voters whom the Democrats want to win back, the last Democrat to comfortably win the Iowa caucuses and go on to win Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in a general election was a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan from Chicago by way of Hawaii.

Biden certainly wanted to believe on Tuesday morning that he was reaching people in their guts, looking out from the stage in the basement of a Capitol Hill hotel at the International Association of Fire Fighters union convention, which has essentially pre-endorsed him, handing out free Firefighters for Biden T-shirts to members after the speech. It was a crowd full of Run Joe Run signs and chants from a mostly white crowd. He spoke emotionally about collective bargaining, fair pay, standing up for the people who want to warp the country toward the rich, and the crowd responded.

[Steve Clemons: One last trip with Joe Biden]

“I appreciate the energy when I came up here. Save it a little longer—I may need it in a few weeks,” he said. With an introduction by his wife and a cheerleading introductory video, the event was a dry run for what a campaign announcement might be like. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “Be careful what you wish for.”

He’s enjoying his coquettishness, answering questions with a smile and a wave, or a little comment while taking selfies in the crowd after and saying, “We’ll announce that pretty soon.” The union’s president, Harold Schaitberger, seemed pleased after working the crowd with Biden. “His voice is more than connecting with the neighborhoods,” he said. “He really connects with the individuals.”

Schaitberger said Biden “absolutely” delivered votes for the ticket in 2008—a campaign in which Jim Messina, an aide on Obama’s 2008 campaign and his 2012 campaign manager, called Biden “a crucial touchstone for these white working-class voters in assuring them Obama was on their side and shared their values.”

Pressed to identify where those votes were, Schaitberger said, “It’s not like physically where they were; it’s like who were they.” He said he wasn’t going to get into saying there were any states Obama won that he would have lost without Biden on the ticket, and he’d never polled his members to see whether they shared his own love for Biden.

“I’ve just watched him and this for so long—maybe it’s my own personal bias. I’ve seen this, felt this, been on the trails with him. And I see how workers and people react,” Schaitberger said.

Bill Russo, a Biden spokesman who was at his side backstage and working the crowd at the firefighters’ event, said he doesn’t see the support as a question.

“Joe Biden has fought and will fight for policies that treat working people with the respect and dignity they deserve, and they in turn support him,” Russo said. “He believes there is no distinction between pursuing progressive policies and speaking to the real concerns of working people. It’s why he is able to campaign for candidates from Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania to Andrew Gillum in Florida—because working people know they can depend on Joe Biden.”

John Anzalone, a pollster who has been advising Biden on a 2020 run, pointed to a Harvard-Harris poll from last month that showed that three-quarters of people who said they’d support Biden don’t have a college education, and that he’s winning 42 percent of non-college-educated voters—as opposed to the closest runner-up, Bernie Sanders, who had 22 percent. Likewise, Anzalone noted that Biden was leading among non-college-educated voters with 30 percent in a Monmouth University poll that came out earlier in the week.

There’s no way to actually measure whether Biden has moved or motivated voters in the past, but Anzalone said he feels that the polls are a strong indication that he did.

“Biden has consistently had comfortable leads with non-college voters in public polls because he has a real connection with them,” he said. “They think he is both authentic, cares about them, and understands their lives and problems.”

One former 2016 Clinton operative remembered Biden’s numbers in Pennsylvania as being “supernaturally high,” and above anyone else’s in other battleground states as well. Of course, Clinton went on to lose Pennsylvania, as well as all the other states in which she had Biden campaign.

“Clearly that didn’t translate. But I don’t think most surrogates translate, so that’s not any evidence that he’s not effective when his name is on the ballot,” the operative said. He warned that could change, as Clinton’s own support among working-class voters changed in 2008, if and when Biden, and his record, are being attacked directly as a candidate himself.

Axelrod agreed.

“There is credence to the theory that were he the nominee that he could close off the industrial Midwest in a way that perhaps some others couldn’t. The challenge is you have to run a very long gauntlet to there,” he said. “The one thing polls can’t do is project what the world’s going to look like a year from now.”

After Controversy, Heartland to Close Four Illinois Shelters for Immigrant Youth

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Melissa Sanchez, Duaa Eldeib, and Jodi S. Cohen

Eight months after its shelters for immigrant children came under public scrutiny over allegations of abuse and lax supervision, Heartland Human Care Services says it will close four shelters in suburban Chicago and add staff, training and other resources at its remaining five facilities.

The decision, announced to employees in a memo Friday, comes as another agency, Maryville Academy, plans to open two additional shelters, including one as early as next month.

Heartland officials told ProPublica Illinois they plan to move children out of its four shelters in Des Plaines between now and the end of May. Altogether, the Des Plaines shelters can house as many as 116 children and teens; the change will cut Heartland’s total capacity under state rules a little more than 20 percent, from 512 to 396.

According to the memo, obtained by ProPublica Illinois, Heartland officials decided to shutter the Des Plaines facilities after an internal review and listening sessions with staff in the chaotic aftermath of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration crackdown. The practice separated more than 2,700 children from parents and sent them to shelters across the U.S., including 99 to Heartland shelters in Illinois.

“We began this process last summer following the challenges we all experienced as we cared for the influx of children who had been severely traumatized by the federal government’s practice of forcibly separating them from their parents at the border,” executive director David Sinski wrote in the memo.

Some of the separated children sent to the Des Plaines shelters said they were mistreated by staff and had witnessed an employee sedate an unruly young boy, allegations first reported last summer by The Washington Post. The allegations, which Heartland has denied, prompted an ongoing federal investigation, outcry from elected officials and regular protests at the shelters and even outside Heartland fundraisers.

In a statement, Heartland officials said the decision to close the Des Plaines shelters and move children to its Chicago facilities was prompted by the organization’s lease in Des Plaines ending and an effort to “align capacity” to the average number of children it has housed in recent years.

While the zero-tolerance crackdown brought new attention to Heartland’s shelter program, the problems the organization now seeks to address predate that policy.

ProPublica Illinois reported extensively on conditions inside Heartland shelters last year and found repeated problems related to lax supervision dating back years. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has found that Heartland failed to provide appropriate supervision in cases involving an employee having an alleged sexual relationship with a detained teen, children having sex in a common room and children running away during a field trip.

More than a dozen children have run away from Heartland facilities in recent years, including three teens who left a North Side shelter together last August.

A DCFS spokesman said the agency has two pending Heartland investigations, both involving Chicago shelters. ProPublica Illinois also has talked to several formerly detained children, in addition to former shelter employees, who said some shelter workers routinely threatened to slow reunification efforts when children refused to take part in daily activities.

Heartland officials have said such threats are not part of its policy.

Heartland Human Care Services, part of a larger nonprofit called Heartland Alliance, has provided shelter services for immigrant children and teens for more than two decades. But it expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the Des Plaines shelters about five years ago. Heartland’s five shelters in Chicago are in the Bronzeville, Rogers Park, Englewood and Beverly neighborhoods.

Nationwide, some 100 shelters house thousands of immigrant children and teens each year.

Heartland has long struggled with employee turnover at its shelters, and it has had particular trouble filling weekend and overnight shifts. The organization occasionally turns to temp agencies to staff its shelters. More than a dozen current and former employees have told ProPublica Illinois they felt overworked in emotionally draining jobs, as they dealt with children and teens who had often endured violence or other trauma in their home countries or on their treks to the U.S.

In the memo to staff, Sinski said closing the Des Plaines shelters would help “streamline our efforts and maximize our efficiency in providing care.” The organization plans to move all its employees from Des Plaines to parallel positions at its Chicago shelters “so we should have plenty of staff for the work we do in Chicago!”

According to the memo, shelter staff told Heartland officials that “our teams on the frontlines” would benefit from increased staffing. In response, Sinski said the organization would add 11 new positions and offer training to better prepare workers to deal with trauma.

Jesse Bless, a Boston-based attorney who has represented more than a half-dozen children in Heartland’s care in their immigration cases, said he was glad Heartland is working to improve its programs. He said the restructuring corroborates “the terrible events of last summer.”

“It is an implicit admission that there were mistakes made and inadequate attention to the care of children,” he said. “They took a look at their procedures and they are saying, ‘We need to do better.’”

As Heartland maps out the closure of some of its shelters, Maryville Academy, a Catholic child welfare agency that operates two shelters for immigrant children in Illinois, plans to expand. Maryville is working to open an all-boys shelter on its existing Des Plaines campus — on the same site where Heartland is shutting down facilities — and hopes to open an all-girls shelter at St. Alphonsus Church in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood this year.

The federal government approached the agency about increasing its capacity and has already approved opening the boys’ shelter, said Sister Catherine Ryan, Maryville’s executive director.

“What we hear from the folks at [the Office of Refugee Resettlement], what we hear from the other agencies, is that the need is so great for these dear children,” she said. “We can’t serve great numbers of them, but we want to serve the children we can.”

Experimental art project will pay you to do nothing for rest of life…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

An experimental Swedish art project will pay you to do nothing for the rest of your life

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Imagine: For the rest of your life, you are assigned no tasks at work. You can watch movies, read books, work on creative projects or just sleep. In fact, the only thing that you have to do is clock in and out every day. Since the position is permanent, you’ll never need to worry about getting another job again.

Starting in 2026, this will be one lucky (or extremely bored) worker’s everyday reality, thanks to a government-funded conceptual art project in Gothenburg, Sweden. The employee in question will report to Korsvägen, a train station under construction in the city, and will receive a salary of about $2,320 a month in U.S. dollars, plus annual wage increases, vacation time off and a pension for retirement. While the artists behind the project won’t be taking applications until 2025, when the station will be closer to opening, a draft of the help-wanted ad is already available online, as Atlas Obscura reported on Monday.

The job’s requirements couldn’t be more simple: An employee shows up to the train station each morning and punches the time clock. That, in turn, illuminates an extra bank of fluorescent lights over the platform, letting travelers and commuters know that the otherwise functionless employee is on the job. At the end of the day, the worker returns to clock out, and the lights go off. In between, they can do whatever they want, aside from work at another paying job. They’re not even obligated to stay at the station all day long. They can quit or retire and be replaced by another worker anytime they want; otherwise, their employment is guaranteed for life. No specific qualifications are needed, and the artists overseeing the project assured Atlas Obscura that anyone in the world could apply.

“The position holds no duties or responsibilities, other than that it should be carried out at Korsvägen,” the job description states. “Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work.”

Titled “Eternal Employment,” the project is both a social experiment and a serious political statement. In early 2017, Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Transport Administration announced an international competition for artists interested in contributing to the new station’s design. The winner would get 7 million Swedish krona, the equivalent of around $750,000. Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, a pair of Swedish artists whose previous work was inspired by offshore banking, entered and suggested eschewing the typical murals and sculptures that adorn most transit hubs.

Instead, they wrote, they would use the prize money to pay one worker’s salary and give them absolutely nothing to do all day.

“In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous,” their proposal said. “We will all be ’employed at Korsvägen,’ as it were.”

The pair also cited French economist Thomas Piketty’s theory that accumulated wealth has typically grown at a rate that outpaces increases in workers’ wages. The result, Piketty argues, is an ever-widening gap between the extremely rich and everyone else. Using that same calculation, Goldin and Senneby predicted that by creating a foundation to prevent the prize money from being taxed, then investing it in the market, they would be able to keep paying that employee’s salary for “eternity” – which they defined as 120 years.

A 2017 financial analysis conducted by Sweden’s Erik Penser Bank, which the artists submitted as part of their application, concurred. The artists had proposed paying the worker 21,600 Swedish krona a month, the equivalent of roughly $2,312, or $27,744 a year. Factoring in annual salary increases of 3.2 percent, consistent with what Sweden’s public sector employees receive, the bankers concluded that there was a 75 percent chance that the prize money would earn enough interest from being invested in an equity fund to last for 120 years or more.

“In this sense the artwork can function as a measure of our growing inequality,” Goldin and Senneby wrote.

Deeming the idea to be humorous, innovative and “an artistic expression of great quality,” the jury that had been convened to judge the competition decided to award them the prize. There was an “uproar” in Sweden in October when officials announced that Goldin and Senneby’s proposal had won, Brian Kuan Wood, a board member for the Eternal Employment foundation, wrote in the art journal e-flux, with outrage coming from politicians on all sides.

“Old Social Democrats accused them of using financial realism to mock the transcendental accomplishments of the welfare state,” he recalled. “Neoliberal ‘progressives’ accused them of wasting taxpayers’ money to stage a nostalgic return to that same welfare state.” Lars Hjälmered, a member of parliament from Gothenburg who belongs to Sweden’s center-right Moderate Party, decried the conceptual artwork as “stupidity” in the news magazine Dagens Samhälle.

In their own writing, Goldin and Senneby fully acknowledge that paying someone to show up at a train station twice a day and punch a time clock is unproductive and thoroughly worthless. That’s the idea. Many people believe that art is supposed to be useless, they point out. They also suggest that the pointless job could lead to the creation of a new idiom expressing apathy, indolence and boredom: You’re working “as though you were at Korsvägen.”

More from Morning Mix:

Bismarck, a town’s beloved crocodile with a ‘gentle soul,’ was found dead. Residents say he was shot.

Hipsters all look the same, man inadvertently confirms

Who is Alex Trebek? How a mustache and correct pronunciation created a TV legend.

The Atlantic Daily: When Parents Turn to Crime to Get Kids Into Elite Schools

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

What We’re Following

A U.S.-wide FBI probe alleges that well-to-do parents bribed their kids’ way into elite colleges. Fifty people—including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin—were charged in a scam that involved gargantuan sums of money thrown at trying to fake applicants as recruited athletes (sometimes for sports they didn’t even play) and to see through cheating on standardized tests (sometimes involving surrogate test-takers). It’s reportedly the largest admissions-cheating case prosecuted by the Department of Justice. But it’s no surprise the extent to which elite students have all sorts of other advantages in the college-admissions process, that are more legally sound. These include oft-cited “legacy admissions,” but also more veiled aspects of the process, such as college sports (at elite colleges, athletes skew heavily white, and affluent). Currently no students have been charged in the probe. Kids, perhaps, are the ones who suffer most from the intense frenzy over getting into elite colleges.

Parliament, for the second time this year, rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan, two weeks before Britain’s scheduled exit. If no plan falls into place before March 29, the country will be forced to deal with food and medicine shortages, trouble with international travel, and a sagging economy. That apocalyptic scenario could make postponing that deadline likelier than ever, but such a move would require the unanimous consent of the EU’s 27 other members (the group seems to be willing to grant an extension in cases such as a second referendum or finalizing an already agreed-upon deal). May is in a bind, but that doesn’t mean she’ll abandon the Brexiteers in her political party.

President Donald Trump’s critics might be getting their hopes up too high for Robert Mueller’s final document. There’s no assurance that, when the special counsel’s Russia investigation really wraps, some Kenneth Starr-esque narrative report will be released to the public, detailing the the president’s malfeasance: “If my thesis about Mueller is right, then that’s just not happening,” said a former senior counsel on the Whitewater investigation. But the public won’t lack information on how to judge the Russia ties of Trump and his orbit: Mueller’s carefully crafted indictments are chock full of information on precisely that.

—Saahil Desai

Evening Reads

(Katie Martin / The Atlantic)

Whenever Amanda Mull felt the early pangs of a cold coming on, her dog Midge already seemed to be two steps ahead. Can dogs really sense their humans’ malaise?

“Researchers have also found that a person’s mood, which can be an indicator of a larger illness, triggers a dog’s sense of smell. Human emotions manifest physically in chemosignals that are emitted by the body, and dogs are adept at deciphering those changes.

Beyond smell, dogs also pull information from a person’s voice in order to sense changes. In 2014, researchers discovered that dogs have an area of the brain, similar to one found in humans, that allows them to decipher emotional cues in the tone of a speaker’s voice, beyond what they’d be able to pick up from familiar words alone. That’s why Midge wags her little tail when I excitedly ask her if she’s my boo boo, even though she doesn’t know what that is. (To be fair, neither do I.) A person’s voice can also carry indicators of depression, lethargy, or other bad feelings.”

→ Read the rest

*

You Told Us

The world produces about 10 tons of plastic every second, and much of what people assume to be recyclable isn’t. China has limited what materials it will accept from the U.S. What’s tossed is often too contaminated to sort (recyclables mixed with greasy pizza boxes and clothes hangers) or too flimsy to recycle (those plastic clamshells that most supermarket berries come in).

Last week, we asked whether you’d changed your consumption behaviors, or implemented any plastic-saving habits:

Penny McFarline, of Richmond, Va. wrote: “One of the ways I reduce plastic is to keep, clean, and reuse glass jars. I pack fruit and cut-up veggies in them for snacks at work. I freeze leftovers in them. I use them for storing bulk spices. They make decent vases and containers for homemade pickles, jams, sauces, etc. I am determined not to purchase any more plastic containers for food storage.”

Patricia Hale, of Tucson, Ariz. wrote: “I only use stainless-steel straws. I give sets of them to my friends for gifts. I also never use plastic bags. I carry my own bags in my car and in my purse. My governor prevented Arizona cities from banning plastic bags, so I send him pictures of plastic bags stuck to cactus.”

→ Here’s more of what readers had to say about cutting down on plastics

Urban Developments

Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Claire Tran shares today’s top stories:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus art school. Our week-long series will explore the movement’s history and how its designs continue to impact today’s world.

The majority of New Yorkers without bank accounts are people of color. That’s why New York is looking to ban cashless businesses for civil rights violations.

Pedestrians fatalities are rising sharply as Americans are spending more time behind the wheel. And self-driving technology isn’t likely to be the fix we need.

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.

Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here.

Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email newsletters editor Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up. We have other other free email newsletters on a variety of other topics, and at different frequencies. Find the full list here.

New move not about privacy. It's about domination…

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Facebook’s new move isn’t about privacy. It’s about domination | Siva Vaidhyanathan

If you have visited China in recent years you might have discovered how difficult it is to make your way through without WeChat, an all-purpose mobile phone application. People in China use WeChat for everything from sending messages to family to reading news and opinion to ordering food to paying at vending machines to paying for a taxi. WeChat lets you deposit money in your bank, search for a library book, make a medical appointment, conduct business conference calls, and interact with the government. In China, WeChat is the operating system of your life, as it is for almost 1.1 billion people.

For Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, WeChat is both his greatest challenge and the model for the future of his company. Zuckerberg has long wanted Facebook to be the operating system of our lives – at least for those who live outside of China. WeChat is what Facebook has yet to become. WeChat, should it move beyond China and its diaspora, is also the greatest threat to Facebook’s global domination.

This, better than any empty and distracting pledge of “pivoting to privacy”, explains Zuckerberg’s announcement on Wednesday. He pledged to federate the messaging services of his three non-Facebook platforms, Instagram (1 billion users), WhatsApp (1.5 billion users), and Messenger (1.3 billion users). He would extend the strong encryption that distinguishes WhatsApp from many other messaging services (although not, significantly, from growing and encrypted potential competitors like Telegram and Signal) to the other two platforms and allow content to move easily among them.

Facebook hopes to draw those who use competing services like Telegram, Signal, Skype, Google’s Hangouts (formerly known as GChat), Apple’s IMessage, or classic SMS to Facebook’s various and soon-to-be-united messaging services. Crushing all those apps, along with email and old-fashioned phone calls, would be a major step toward becoming the operating system of our lives.

Basically, this announcement means the WhatsApp won’t change as many feared – abandoning encryption and becoming more like Messenger. Instead, Messenger will become more like WhatsApp. This would be the first step toward unifying these services to work and look a lot more like – and thus prepared to compete against – WeChat.

Despite all the hype, Zuckerberg said nothing about changing Facebook itself. Facebook, with 2.3 billion users and growing, will still watch everything you do, will dictate what you read and see in your Newsfeed, and will feature advertisements targeted at you based on the massive surveillance system Facebook has built over the past decade. It will still distribute pictures of puppies and babies along with hate speech, conspiracy theories, and calls to genocide. It will still chip away at democracy and starve journalism.

This recent announcement, with all its unjustified hype about a “pivot” or a “move” serves more of Zuckerberg’s interests. It distracts journalists and critics from several revelations that show how brazenly Facebook exploits and abuses its users.

For years we have been instructed to use “two-factor authentication” to secure the login process for services and platforms. Facebook itself encourages us to have it send a message to our mobile phones to confirm that we are who we say we are before logging in. But Facebook does not protect your number from prying eyes or advertisers. Using a phone number anyone can look up a Facebook profile, and there is no way for users to opt out. This puts people at risk for the sake of Facebook’s ability to track them. Given that identity on WhatsApp is mobile-number specific, it’s likely that our numbers will be the source of more vulnerability in the future.

And last week we learned that at least 11 popular health applications were sharing extremely sensitive personal data with Facebook through mobile phones. At least one service, Flo Period and Ovulation Tracker, decided to cease that practice once it came to light. This was the latest in a series of revelations about how Facebook tracks people – even those who are not Facebook users – through mobile devices and applications. Nothing in Zuckerberg’s latest announcement changes this.

Beyond abuses, Facebook has another plan to make itself essential to the daily lives of people around the world. It plans to create a new crypto currency for its users. WhatsApp users could soon use the currency to order food deliveries or purchase train tickets. Imagine if the 1.5 billion WhatsApp users start sending money to relatives in other countries using a currency Facebook controls and payments Facebook authorizes. That could push away many unsavory services that charge high fees. It could also consolidate even more unaccountable global power in Facebook.

The ultimate unification of these platforms under the mothership, Facebook, could effectively block any governmental attempts to sever Instagram and WhatsApp from the company. It might take years for the European Union or the United States government to muster the legal foundation and political will to break up Facebook. By that time Zuckerberg could plead that this new, unified service has shared its back-end data and core functions for too long. There would be nothing distinct to sever. Plus, Zuckerberg could argue that encrypted private messages protect users better than the only other major rival in the world, WeChat.

In the coming battle against WeChat, Facebook can use its pledge to protect private messages from snooping states to his advantage. TenCent, the company that offers WeChat, is very close to the government of the People’s Republic of China and WeChat users assume their communication is subject to state surveillance. Facebook might collaborate with brutal authoritarians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, but it’s still not yet as dangerous as WeChat. That’s something, I guess. And it might be enough to ensure domination for many years to come.

For too long, we have taken Mark Zuckerberg at his word. Too many times he has betrayed us. Let’s not fall for it again. This move is not about protecting you. It’s about defeating other companies and consolidating global power.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

The Problem With Trump’s Foreign Policy Is It’s Too Much Like Cheney’s

On March 13, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Fresh off his likeness’s appearance on the big screen, former vice president Dick Cheney is back in his element dispensing foreign policy advice to Republican administrations.

Politico’s Eliana Johnson reports that Cheney politely but firmly pressed Vice President Mike Pence about President Donald Trump’s deviations from his handiwork during the George W. Bush years. The encounter took place at an American Enterprise Institute confab in Georgia in front of Republicans with deep pockets.

Some of Cheney’s complaints could easily command bipartisan assent: too much policymaking via Twitter, for example, and inartful rhetoric that hasn’t exactly smoothed the path to diplomacy. But that was not the crux of the Bush veep’s argument against Trump and Pence.

“It seems, at times, as though your administration’s approach has more in common with [Barack] Obama’s foreign policy than traditional Republican foreign policy,” Cheney reportedly told Pence. It was an assertion, the kind neoconservatives often make, of total continuity between presidents dating back to at least Ronald Reagan—if not all the way to Dwight Eisenhower—and the architects of the Iraq war. It’s as if history, or at least Republican Party traditions, began circa 2002.

Trump, of course, won the Republican presidential nomination after calling the Iraq invasion a mistake and suggesting that future wars for regime change in the Middle East would be destabilizing. In the process, he defeated Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and other largely unreconstructed defenders of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy.

Pence, no reflexive dove in his own right, made note of this in response to Cheney. “When the American people elected this president, they elected a president who expressed concern about American deployments around the world,” the vice president said, according to the Washington Post. “And they knew this was going to be a president that came and asked the fundamental questions about—you know, where are we deployed and do we really need to be asking men and women in uniform to be deployed in that part of the world?”

And while Pence reportedly argued that Trump was governing squarely within the Republican mainstream, he concluded per the Post, “[I]t should come as no surprise to anyone: This president is skeptical of foreign deployments, and only wants American forces where they need to be.”

“Isn’t it fitting that Cheney is the one mad that Trump is ending his reckless and endless wars?” Donald Trump Jr. asked on Twitter. “I never knew peace would be so unpopular!”

Where Trump and Obama do have something in common is that they both understood on some level that forever war weakens rather than strengthens the United States, spending treasure and political capital. They also both wanted a smaller U.S. military footprint in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Trump and Obama also have a third thing in common: they both broke with the Bush-Cheney foreign policy more in rhetoric than in practice (at least so far, in Trump’s case), allowing themselves to be talked out of retrenchment and into more bombings. Their interventions were narrower in scope than Iraq and committed fewer boots to the ground, but also proceeded without the constitutionally mandated congressional authorization.

So while it is rich to read that one of the men most responsible for mainstreaming dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction and ties between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks chastised Trump for “frequently” not listening to the intelligence community, it is Cheney’s main contention that deserves the most skepticism.

Trump’s foreign policy—a hard line against Iran, continually delayed yet supposedly precipitous withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, interventions in Yemen and Somalia, dragging Elliot Abrams out of retirement to saber-rattle against the admittedly awful Maduro regime in Venezuela, all conducted under the watchful eye of John Bolton—is too much like Cheney’s.

Some of this is due to a new Republican administration being overly dependent on the previous one’s retreads for staffing important national security positions. “Trump has rejected the interventionism and democracy-promotion espoused by George W. Bush, who talked during his second term of ‘ending tyranny in our time’” is how Politico summarizes the dispute.

Trump has not rejected the neoconservative foreign policy in the same systematic way that Bush embraced it, however. Nor did he come into office with the same elaborate plan for ending wars that Cheney had for starting them. Like Obama before him, Trump likely realizes he will be blamed for any bad thing that happens that is perceived to be the result of inaction, while the political consequences of ill-advised intervention will either be nonexistent or spread around the Beltway establishment.

Why, then, go after Trump over something like NATO burden-sharing when he has thus far simply been a less enthusiastic and ideologically consistent hawk? One could easily imagine Cheney or other AEI regulars defending in another context the idea of the Europeans spending more money for their own defense and less on their generous welfare states.

The reason is that the debates Trump has started by just talking the way he has constitute a loosening of the Cheneyites’ once ironclad grip on Republican foreign policy. “Guests seemed divided about new ways versus old ways being best,” a meeting attendee told Politico in an email. “I think most felt that while new ways are fine, some old ways—like thoughtful strategy and communicating/seeking advice from experienced players—is a time-tested and valuable piece as well.”

Conspicuously missing was any reference to regime change, the Bush-era “freedom agenda,” or large-scale, indefinite foreign military occupations as the best way of preventing terrorist attacks against Americans. Even among conservative hawks, including some in Cheney’s orbit, there has been a dampening of enthusiasm for democracy promotion. This group was split, for example, over the Arab spring.

Instead of following Cheney’s advice, as first-term W. did, Trump should learn that his failure to follow through on his “America First” campaign promises has won him little credit from the most important GOP hawks. This is similar to how his reticence on immigration has cost him the support of the Ann Coulters without gaining him any new defenders.

Disastrous results aside, Cheney was always a more articulate and consistent defender of Bush’s foreign policy than the 43rd president himself. Perhaps he just made the best case for Trump’s, too.

W. James Antle III is editor of The American Conservative.