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      Win the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich

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      The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More

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      in US Politics

      Ex-Trump aide tweets 'executive orders' after Google lists him as president

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      Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence turned potential Republican candidate for governor of California, gleefully seized on an error by Google on Saturday, promising “a plethora of executive orders” after the search giant listed him as “President of the United States since 2021”.The former Trump aide also took a low shot at the actual president, Joe Biden, tweeting: “I will run up the stairs without tripping.”Biden stumbled dramatically on Friday, as he climbed the stairs to Air Force One. On Saturday, before noticing his accidental promotion by Google, Grenell complained about media coverage of Biden’s fall including criticism of Donald Trump Jr’s decision to tweet a gif showing his father knocking Biden over with a golf ball.“Washington DC types are killing humour and laughter,” Grenell claimed.Few Democrats or Washington officials found much to laugh about in Grenell’s time as acting director of national intelligence.In February last year, one unnamed former official told Vanity Fair his appointment “clearly, unambiguously” represented “the politicisation of intelligence” and said the former ambassador to Germany was Trump’s “guardian against fact”.In the event, Grenell filled the role for three months before being replaced by John Ratcliffe, a former congressman many observers thought similarly unqualified and inappropriately partisan.On Saturday, Grenell’s first tweeted “executive orders” as the Google-anointed president, if not the actual one, included the demand that a liquid natural gas terminal “be built ASAP on the west coast of the United States (preferably in California)” and that “multiple desalinisation plants [and] new nuclear power plants be built in California”.“Oh,” he added, “and Eric Swalwell hereby loses his security clearance.”Swalwell, a California Democrat who briefly ran for the presidential nomination in 2020, was a House manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Republicans have sought unsuccessfully to remove him from the House intelligence committee, over reports of links to a suspected Chinese spy.By lunchtime on the east coast on Saturday, Google had fixed its mistake.Grenell seems more likely to run for state than national office. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, is the subject of a recall attempt. In February, Grenell was reported to have discussed a run with Trump.Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Grenell said: “And of course, if a public official is still failing to deliver on their promises, and if you can’t limit their term or recall them in time, there’s always one other option. You can run against them yourself.” More

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      in US Politics

      Liberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real | Thomas Frank

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      One day in March 2015, I sat in a theater in New York City and took careful notes as a series of personages led by Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates described the dazzling sunburst of liberation that was coming our way thanks to entrepreneurs, foundations and Silicon Valley. The presentation I remember most vividly was that of a famous TV actor who rhapsodized about the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and the rest: “No matter which platform you prefer,” she told us, “social media has given us all an extraordinary new world, where anyone, no matter their gender, can share their story across communities, continents and computer screens. A whole new world without ceilings.”Six years later and liberals can’t wait for that extraordinary new world to end. Today we know that social media is what gives you things like Donald Trump’s lying tweets, the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Capitol riot of 6 January. Social media, we now know, is a volcano of misinformation, a non-stop wallow in hatred and lies, generated for fun and profit, and these days liberal politicians are openly pleading with social media’s corporate masters to pleez clamp a ceiling on it, to stop people from sharing their false and dangerous stories.A “reality crisis” is the startling name a New York Times story recently applied to this dismal situation. An “information disorder” is the more medical-sounding label that other authorities choose to give it. Either way, the diagnosis goes, we Americans are drowning in the semiotic swirl. We have come loose from the shared material world, lost ourselves in an endless maze of foreign disinformation and rightwing conspiracy theory.In response, Joe Biden has called upon us as a nation to “defend the truth and defeat the lies”. A renowned CNN journalist advocates a “harm reduction model” to minimize “information pollution” and deliver the “rational views” that the public wants. A New York Times writer has suggested the president appoint a federal “reality czar” who would “help” the Silicon Valley platform monopolies mute the siren song of QAnon and thus usher us into a new age of sincerity.These days Democratic politicians lean on anyone with power over platforms to shut down the propaganda of the right. Former Democratic officials pen op-eds calling on us to get over free speech. Journalists fantasize about how easily and painlessly Silicon Valley might monitor and root out objectionable speech. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, journalist after journalist can be seen rationalizing that, because social media platforms are private companies, the first amendment doesn’t apply to them … and, I suppose, neither should the American tradition of free-ranging, anything-goes political speech.In the absence of such censorship, we are told, the danger is stark. In a story about Steve Bannon’s ongoing Trumpist podcasts, for example, ProPublica informs us that “extremism experts say the rhetoric still feeds into an alternative reality that breeds anger and cynicism, which may ultimately lead to violence”.In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.“Debunking” was how the literary left used to respond to America’s Niagara of nonsense. Criticism, analysis, mockery and protest: these were our weapons. We were rational-minded skeptics, and we had a grand old time deflating creationists, faith healers, puffed-up militarists and corporate liars of every description.Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right: those were their means of lashing out against rap music or suggestive plays or leftwingers who were gainfully employed.What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.There have been countless times over the years where Democrats might have reappraised this dumb strategy and changed course. But again and again they chose not to, blaming their failure on everything but their glorious postindustrial vision. In 2016, for example, liberals chose to blame Russia for their loss rather than look in the mirror. On other occasions they assured one another that they had no problems with white blue-collar workers – until it became undeniable that they did, whereupon liberals chose to blame such people for rejecting them.To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itselfAnd now we cluck over a lamentable “information disorder”. The Republicans didn’t suffer the landslide defeat they deserved last November; the right is still as potent as ever; therefore Trumpist untruth is responsible for the malfunctioning public mind. Under no circumstances was it the result of the Democrats’ own lackluster performance, their refusal to reach out to the alienated millions with some kind of FDR-style vision of social solidarity.Or perhaps this new taste for censorship is an indication of Democratic healthiness. This is a party that has courted professional-managerial elites for decades, and now they have succeeded in winning them over, along with most of the wealthy areas where such people live. Liberals scold and supervise like an offended ruling class because to a certain extent that’s who they are. More and more, they represent the well-credentialed people who monitor us in the workplace, and more and more do they act like it.What all this censorship talk really is, though, is a declaration of defeat – defeat before the Biden administration has really begun. To give up on free speech is to despair of reason itself. (Misinformation, we read in the New York Times, is impervious to critical thinking.) The people simply cannot be persuaded; something more forceful is in order; they must be guided by we, the enlightened; and the first step in such a program is to shut off America’s many burbling fountains of bad takes.Let me confess: every time I read one of these stories calling on us to get over free speech or calling on Mark Zuckerberg to press that big red “mute” button on our political opponents, I feel a wave of incredulity sweep over me. Liberals believe in liberty, I tell myself. This can’t really be happening here in the USA.But, folks, it is happening. And the folly of it all is beyond belief. To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right’s class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for – a betrayal that we will spend years living down – may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true. More

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      in US Politics

      Amazon to stop selling books that frame LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness

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      Amazon will no longer sell books that frame gay, lesbian, transgender and other sexual identities as a mental illness.
      The company made the announcement public in a letter sent to Republican senators who had asked why Amazon had stopped selling When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a book by the conservative academic Ryan Anderson, best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage.
      In the letter, first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon writes: “As a bookseller, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable.
      “That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content. All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we. As to your specific question about When Harry Became Sally, we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
      The letter came in response to criticism from the rightwing senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Mike Braun and Josh Hawley who wrote to the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, criticizing the book’s removal and calling it a signal “to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms”.
      The move will have a significant impact on books that frame LGTBQ+ identities as mental illnesses. Amazon accounts for 53% of all books sold in the US and 80% of all ebooks, according to Codex Group, a book audience research firm.
      The decision comes at a moment when Republicans and the conservative movement are increasingly focused on so-called “cancel culture”. Republicans have recently criticized the decision by Dr Seuss publisher to stop publishing six of his books because they portrayed people of color “in ways that are hurtful and wrong”.
      “Everyone agrees that gender dysphoria is a serious condition that causes great suffering,” Anderson and Roger Kimball, publisher of Encounter Books, which published the book, said in a statement given to the Journal.
      “There is a debate, however, which Amazon is seeking to shut down, about how best to treat patients who experience gender dysphoria,” they added. “Amazon is using its massive power to distort the marketplace of ideas and is deceiving its own customers in the process,” they said.
      A spokesperson for LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD said: “There’s an antiquated and shameful history of equating LGBTQ identity to mental illness, and Amazon’s decision to stop selling books that falsely equate the two is a positive step in ending the misinformation campaign against LGBTQ people, especially trans youth, meant only to cause harm.
      “This book is dangerous and harmful to trans kids, and those who are looking for information about trans identity should not look to resources written by someone who has made their livelihood by publishing screeds against the trans community.” More

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      in US Politics

      'Talk to me': Molly Jong-Fast on podcasting in the new abnormal

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      Molly Jong-Fast has known great success as a writer but over the last year on The New Abnormal, her podcast on politics in the time of Covid, she has become both half of a crackling double act and an interviewer with a habit of making news.The double act formed with Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and the co-founder of the Lincoln Project who is now taking a spell off-air. The producer Jesse Cannon has stepped in but the interviews remain largely the realm of Jong-Fast.Years ago, Molly and her mother, the author Erica Jong, gave a joint interview of their own. Molly, the Guardian wrote, was “loud, arch and snappishly funny [with] the mien of a runaway train, words hurtling forth, helter-skelter.”It remains the case. Before the pandemic, she threw famous dinner parties which brought unlikely people together. Now a contributing editor for the Daily Beast, she throws politicians, scientists, policy wonks and comedians together on a podcast, a form of broadcasting well suited to pandemic life. Down the phone – or up it – from Wall Street to the Upper East Side, appropriately socially distanced, I appropriate one of her own ways to start any interview. A few introductory remarks, then …“Talk to me about that.”And she does.I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing“As you know, as someone who lives in New York, our lockdown came fast, and it came very profoundly, and we were locked down. Actually, it was this time last year. I had just come back from [the Conservative Political Action Conference] in Washington DC. As I was coming home, I got an email that said, ‘If you were at CPAC, you may have been exposed to a super-spreader, and you need to quarantine.’ So I actually called the school nurses at all my kids’ schools and I said, ‘You guys, what I do?’“Since nobody really knew anything about the virus, they said, ‘Look, you can do whatever you want, but we would really appreciate if you would just keep your kids home for two weeks.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely. We don’t know anything.’ As someone who is not a doctor but who is completely obsessed with my own physical health in a totally deranged and neurotic way, I’m proud to say I’ve worried about every pandemic that comes. I was worried about H1N1 before.“And you could see this coming. I have friends in Milan … You saw these stories about Milan, and you knew we were a week behind or we were two weeks behind. I had a friend in London … her mother had a fancy private doctor and the fancy private doctor would send her these letters about who was going to get treatment in the hospital and who was going to be left at home to die.“So I had a sense that that stuff was coming, so I really made sure that everybody locked down way early in my house. Then I had nothing to do.“So I said, ‘Let’s start a podcast.’ I had sort of been the driver behind it because I had wanted to do a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. It’s a thing. But I’m always interested in what other people have to tell me. So … I get a lot from it.“Another thing about me is, besides being dyslexic and a horrible student, I have terrible, terrible ADHD, which has never been medicated. I don’t take medicine for it because I’m 23 years sober, so it just would be too complicated for me. And I’m a person who was, in my heyday, a terrible cocaine addict, so I would not trust myself for a minute with ADHD drugs.”I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we ge people and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh’Jong-Fast chronicled those wild years in two novels and a memoir about being the daughter of a writer who wrote a lot about sex. In the 1970s, her mum invented “the zipless fuck”. But I digress. As Jong-Fast likes to say to interviewees: “Continue.”“But I’m super ADHD, so I get very bored very easily. So we get these people, and if they don’t say interesting stuff, I’m like, ‘Eh.’ I’m like, ‘This is very boring.’ So I think that has made the pod good, because I do these interviews and I get very bored. Then I’m like, ‘Come on. Get going here, people.’”New Abnormal interviews are fascinating and often hilarious. That’s down to a mix of the ethics of podcasting, looser than for talk radio – as Cannon says, “FCC guidelines would never be able to handle what we do” – and the ethics of the Daily Beast, a New York tabloid in website form, pugilistic and intelligent, taking the fight to the man.Another Jong-Fast interview technique, very much in the vein of the podcast’s one beloved regular segment, Fuck That Guy, is to ask key questions in the bluntest way possible. Take two recent examples. To the White House Covid adviser Andy Slavitt: “Can you explain to me what’s happening with AstraZeneca, because that seems to me very much a clusterfuck.” To Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, there to discuss Brexit: “What the fuck is wrong with your country?”What the fuck is that all about?“Well, as someone who was interviewed a lot when I was young and would sit through endless mother being interviewed, grandfather [the novelist Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus] being interviewed, always watching, I always think that the worst questions are the questions where you tell the person what you want them to say.“Look, I get it. I write things all the time where I want people to say stuff, but you can’t really get them to say it anyway … Part of it is I always think you should make it so they’re comfortable enough to really tell you what’s going on and to let you in. Also, I think they know that I don’t have a malicious intent. I just want people to see who they are.”What they are, in many cases after a year of lockdown, is suffering.“I had Mary Trump on the pod again today,” Jong-Fast says, of the former president’s niece. “She’s a psychiatrist, so she and I always talk about mental health because I’m just a sober person, and when you’re sober you’re always in your head thinking about mental health. We were talking about how we really are in the middle of this terrible mental health crisis, and everyone is just in denial about it.”Donald Trump has left the White House. The Biden administration is flooding the zone with vaccines. But we are still in the new abnormal.“I’m always surprised no one sees that. So it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t understand why I have a terrible headache. It can’t be because hundreds of thousands of Americans have died.’ So it is weird.”‘I wish we could get more Republicans’The New Abnormal has featured Democrats – senators, representatives, candidates – and bureaucrats and technocrats too. But in both the very strange election year in which the pod was born and in the brave new world of Biden, few Republicans have followed.“I wish we could get more,” Jong-Fast says. “I think I got one Republican guy who was running for Congress, but it’s not so easy.”That was John Cowan, from Georgia, who ran against Marjorie Taylor Greene and her racially charged conspiracy theories – and lost.“Yes, and he’s going to run again. He’s a neurosurgeon. I was thrilled to get him. But they’re not so interested in coming on, even the sort of moderates.”She does the booking herself, so perhaps Congressman Adam Kinzinger or Senator Mitt Romney might one day pick up the phone to find Jong-Fast full blast.“‘You are a fucking genius. Why are you so brilliant?’ I’m very good at schnorring people into doing things for me. I’m very able to just endlessly schnorr people. I think that’s key to getting the guests.”I don’t know what schnorr means.“It means you sort of just put the arm on people to get them to come on the pod. The guests are the big thing because the people who want to come on are often not people you really want.”A lot of listeners want Wilson to return. Jong-Fast, formerly an unpaid adviser to the Lincoln Project, calls him “a very good friend” but is uncomfortable talking about his absence from the podcast – which was prompted by allegations of sexual harassment against another Lincoln Project co-founder and reporting on fundraising and internal politics.Cannon calls Wilson “one of the most politically astute people in America” and “a genius”. And he may well be back, one day, to reconstitute the double act, the Florida Republican and the Upper East Side liberal lobbing spiralling profanity at the extremity, inanity and insanity of Trumpism and life under Covid-19.But it’s not all about fighting back.“I wish there were a little bit more good-faith want for people to interact with the other side,” Jong-Fast says. “Look, there are people on the other side, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are not good-faith actors, and you can’t even try. But there are people like Mitt Romney who, while I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, he’s a very good-faith actor. So I think there’s a real chance.”If you’re reading, Mitt, if Molly calls … pick up the phone. More

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      in Elections

      Rightwing 'super-spreader': study finds handful of accounts spread bulk of election misinformation

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      A handful of rightwing “super-spreaders” on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.” The report analyzed social media posts featuring words like “election” and “voting” to track key misinformation narratives related to the the 2020 election, including claims of mail carriers throwing away ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being counted, and other false or unproven stories.The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. It found during this time period, popular rightwing Twitter accounts “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on honest voter concerns or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic election fraud”.Ultimately, the “false claims and narratives coalesced into the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later propelled the January 6 insurrection”, the report said.“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to weaponizing viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and erode Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.Next to no factchecking, with Trump as the super-spreader- in-chiefIn monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than more than 22 million tweets sent between 15 August and 12 December. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread misinformation.“Influential accounts on the political right rarely engaged in factchecking behavior, and were responsible for the most widely spread incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 were verified Twitter accounts – which are particularly dangerous when it comes to election misinformation, the study said. The “repeat spreaders” responsible for the most widely spread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot, and Sidney Powell. All 21 of the top accounts for misinformation leaned rightwing, the study showed.“Top-down mis- and disinformation is dangerous because of the speed at which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, it can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or factchecker has time to review its content.”On nearly all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – Donald Trump played a massive role.It pinpointed 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account jumpstarted the spread of a false narrative across Twitter. For example, Trump’s tweets baselessly claiming that the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for election fraud played a large role in amplifying the conspiracy theory to a wider audience. False or baseless tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9m followers at the time – garnered more than 460,000 retweets.Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel was linked to six distinct waves of misinformation that, combined, were the most viewed of any other repeat-spreader’s videos. His Facebook account had the most engagement of all those studied.The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the massive influence Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between 1 January 2020 and 6 January 2021 – Donald Trump pushed disinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report from Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was ultimately suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will ever be allowed back.Specifically, 516 of his posts contained disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained election disinformation, and 683 contained harmful rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Allegations of election fraud earned over 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions on his posts in 2020. Trump had a unique ability to amplify news stories that would have otherwise remained contained in smaller outlets and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.“What Trump did was take misinformation from the rightwing ecosystem and turn it into a mainstream news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that, and inflame people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6.”Effects of false election narratives on voters“Super-spreader” accounts were ultimately very successful in undermining voters’ trust in the democratic system, the report found. Citing a poll by the Pew Research Center, the study said that, of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half had cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that absentee or mail-in ballots had been counted as intended.The report outlined a number of recommendations, including removing “super-spreader” accounts entirely.Outside experts agree that tech companies should more closely scrutinize top accounts and repeat offenders.Researchers said the refusal to take action or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped to fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly stated “three-strike” system for offenses related to the election. Platforms like Facebook reportedly had three-strike rules as well but did not make the system publicly known.Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January. Twitter has maintained that its ban of the former president is permanent. YouTube’s chief executive officer stated this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform once the “risk of violence” from his posts passes. Facebook’s independent oversight board is now considering whether to allow Trump to return.“We have seen that he uses his accounts as a way to weaponize disinformation. It has already led to riots at the US Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again,” Gertz said. “It would be a huge mistake to allow Trump to return.” More

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      in World Politics

      The COVID-19 Crisis Has Catalyzed Vision 2030

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      A look back at history shows that desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures. After all, it was not until Saudi officials watched in horror as oil prices plummeted by 70% that, in 2016, Vision 2030 was born. While other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members presented their own initiatives, true to form, Saudi Arabia’s economic reform agenda is the most ambitious yet. 2020 was set to mark the agenda’s first benchmark achievement. Instead, an oil price war, a disastrous bombing campaign against Yemen and a 5.4% contraction in GDP set a different tone than the kingdom may have intended.

      The Line: Mohammed bin Salman’s Green Blockbuster

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      The disruption ensued by the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on economies and markets worldwide, but none saw the eye-watering lows experienced by the oil industry. This was exacerbated by Saudi Arabia and Russia going head-to-head in a price war that brought about further carnage. Despite production cuts being eventually agreed upon, the global downturn and persistent oversupply of oil reached its crescendo with US oil dropping spectacularly into negative for the first time in history.

      Progress Overview

      As the dust began to settle, a sense of urgency set in among leaders as they were faced with the aftermath of the crisis. Not only did COVID-19 highlight the risk of oil dependency, but it has further exposed oil-exporting economies to fiscal vulnerabilities. With growth contractions across the MENA region, the current price of oil is far below the break-even level required to balance the budgets. With the exception of the UAE, oil represents over 50% of GCC budgets, highlighting the urgency to diversify in order to pay off the fiscal bill. While the impact of COVID-19 on Vision 2030 is unclear, an analysis of existing achievements and overall aims can paint a clearer picture of how Saudi Arabia should reassess its grand plan in light of the pandemic.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Only a year after the announcement, it seemed that Vision 2030 was not enough to satiate the Saudi appetite for grandiose ideas. So, in 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced the construction of a $500-billion smart city of NEOM. Aside from talk of a fake moon and flying cars, the Saudis managed to hit a more palpable note with investors with the city’s $5-billion green hydrogen plant. By 2025, the facility will supposedly produce 650 tons of hydrogen daily and 1.2 million tons of green ammonia for export.

      Despite the challenges hydrogen fuel presents, this project offers Saudi Arabia an unparalleled opportunity to pioneer a market gaining “unprecedented political and business momentum,” according to the International Energy Agency. Beyond this, while there is little publicly available information on the kingdom’s key performance indictor achievements, visible progress has been made in the one thing it does best — state-managed tasks. Notable regulatory reforms in 2018-19 earned Saudi Arabia a spot in the World Bank’s top 10 global business-climate improvers.

      Strong development has also been observed in capital markets and the banking system, whereby the growth of Tadawul, the Saudi stock exchange, has been the standout achievement. Such praiseworthy steps have also been accompanied by progress in the realm of digitization and social reforms. Yet this is not enough.

      While the kingdom is certainly achieving its goal of being an ambitious nation, less can be said for its key pillar — a thriving economy. Job creation, foreign direct investment (FDI), entrepreneurship and private sector growth are all core areas where Saudi Arabia has fallen short. A recent string of PR disasters, like the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 and the 2017 high-profile purge that included the arrest of 11 senior princes, have further tainted the kingdom’s image, harming investor confidence. At mere 0.57% of GDP, current FDI levels are simply not enough to fund the diversification plan.

      Needless to say, the economic challenges spurred by the pandemic will require a tightening of the Saudi purse strings to rein in the growing budget deficit. Such fiscal prudence will inevitably impact the ever-more necessary reform agenda, indicating that a stringent revaluation of the Vision 2030 objectives will be needed to deliver on its promises.

      The To-Do List

      To lay the foundations of their revised plan, the kingdom must first reprioritize spending and maximize income from existing revenue streams while attracting and retaining investor funding. This will require boosting FDI through greater transparency, accountability and generally better self-conduct on the international stage. In the longer term, focusing on strategically sound, high-impact projects while delaying those with little real-time value will be an integral step in the agenda’s revaluation.

      Much to Saudi Arabia’s dismay, this will mean moving away from the likes of NEOM to the less glamourous task of actual economic reform. Yet if NEOM were not enough, within it there is now The Line — a linear, AI-run city free of carbon, cars and any sense of realism. Regardless of its supposed economic benefits, the fact of the matter remains that problems are not solved through procrastination, even if it costs billions.

      Arguably the hardest yet most important step for Saudi Arabia will be to cede state control to make room for a diverse, competitive and independent private sector. The kingdom’s strategy of spreading itself thin across all sectors is not only inefficient, but unattractive. A more market-based approach will stimulate entrepreneurship, competition and, most importantly, draw in foreign investment.

      This ties into the second key step: optimizing the business environment. This means pushing for greater access to capital, greater ease of doing business and greater stringency and transparency in the legal system, encouraging entrepreneurship both at home and from abroad. The third and most important step is human capital development. In a country where 67% of the population is below the age of 34, disregarding the youth would mean neglecting Saudi’s greatest asset.

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      Quality of education and upskilling the youth must be prioritized alongside creating jobs suited to the existing workforce. The importance of human capital cannot be overstated: In order to create a successful economy that best serves the people, investing in its citizens must be the crux of Vision 2030.

      Finally, to reinvent itself as the business hub of the Middle East, the kingdom must rein in its regional military interventions, a massive burden on both its budget and international image. In order to truly convince investors, Saudi must actively channel its efforts away from conflict and toward long-term economic reform.

      On the whole, despite some notable achievements, progress is slow, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a long journey ahead. However, COVID-19 has prompted a much-needed agenda revaluation, revealing some shortcuts and pushing Saudi leaders to move with a greater sense of urgency. The Word Bank itself warns that “higher than expected oil and gas revenues could reduce the pressure for [GCC] governments to reform,” exemplified in Vision 2030 itself being the result of such a price shock. However, with the eye-watering oil price drops of 2020, COVID-19 may have been the rude awakening Saudi leaders needed.

      The challenge now lies in both pioneering change while stimulating an economy in a world experiencing the greatest recession since the Second World War. This, of course, is no easy feat, but the key to success will lie in focusing on projects that truly add value. This will mean ceding control to facilitate private sector growth, optimizing the business environment and committing to its citizens by investing in the youth. Only then can Saudi Arabia unlock its potential and become, as it envisions, the “epicenter of trade and the gateway to the world.”

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      McDonald's spies on union activists – that's how scared they are of workers' rights | Indigo Olivier

      by

      On 24 February, Vice reported that McDonald’s has, for years, spied on activists and employees engaged in labor organizing and the Fight for $15 campaign. Internal McDonald’s corporate documents obtained by Vice confirmed that the company has been concerned with gathering “strategic intelligence” on workers involved in efforts to secure higher wages, better working conditions and a union. This includes using data collection software to monitor employees and their networks through social media and “a team of intelligence analysts in the Chicago and London offices”.
      This comes after years of reporting on similar efforts by Amazon to prevent the unionization of their own employees. Job postings for intelligence analysts to monitor and report on “labor organizing threats”; social media monitoring; interactive “heat mapping” tools to anticipate and pre-empt strikes or union drives; Pinkerton operatives; and, most recently, coordinated efforts with county officials to change the traffic lights outside Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama to prevent organizers from speaking to workers during shift changes – all have been deployed to secure the company’s bottom line.
      As Vice points out, surveillance against labor organizers is nothing new. What’s new is the use of technology to aid in these efforts, which may also be in violation of federal labor law.
      The surveillance and intimidation of workers is a feature, not a bug, and one that has come to define American capitalism at home and abroad. As Vox noted last June, “the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest.” While police in southern cities are largely a vestigial outgrowth of slave patrols, in northern cities like Chicago, elite businessmen pushed for the development of municipal police forces to suppress labor organizing around demands like an eight-hour workday. The concept of policing as “public safety” came later.
      There is no evidence to suggest government involvement in the surveillance of workers at either Amazon or McDonald’s. Yet the failure on the part of past administrations to condemn these egregious labor violations – or condemn the yawning wealth gap between megacorporations and the underpaid workers whose labor they depend on – amount to tacit approval of business-as-usual by any means necessary.
      This Sunday, Biden broke this awful trend by releasing a surprisingly strong statement in support of unions. While he stopped short of calling out Amazon by name, his video address was directed at “workers in Alabama” and represents the strongest pro-union statement of any president in modern US history.
      “You should remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist, it said we should encourage unions,” Biden said. “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union. The law guarantees that choice.”
      Under an economic system that enriches CEOs by underpaying workers for the value of their time and pocketing the profits, there is a direct connection between the dystopian anti-labor tactics used by the likes of McDonald’s and Amazon and the $1.3tn transfer of wealth to the country’s 664 billionaires over the course of the pandemic. Bezos’s path to becoming the world’s first trillionaire is precisely because of his successful efforts at preventing unions from taking hold in his private empire.
      As Marx put it: capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
      Biden now has a choice to make: Amazon or unions. He can’t fight for both.
      On the campaign trail, Biden sent conflicting messages by cultivating the image of a blue-collar union man and simultaneously promising a room full of corporate donors that under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”
      Biden adopted a $15 minimum wage as one of his few concessions to the left, in an effort to win over Bernie Sanders supporters, and later changed his tone by saying he didn’t believe the provision would last in the most recent Covid-19 stimulus package. The statement amounted to a shrugging off of one among a number of campaign promises that look less likely to be fulfilled by the day. Democrats are now dishonestly pointing the blame at a single and little-known Senate parliamentarian, though Kamala Harris could easily overrule the decision and lift nearly a million people out of poverty.
      We can and should give credit to Biden for his recent statement on unions while also recognizing that words alone are not enough. Biden has the power to immediately pass a federal $15 minimum wage, raise corporate taxes, call on the National Labor Relations Board to investigate companies like McDonald’s and Amazon which unlawfully spy on their employees, and take a trip to Bessemer to show support for the facility’s 5,800 workers.
      This is a David-versus-Goliath fight and the stakes are simply too high to stop short of executive action. Until he proves otherwise, we need to remember Biden’s message to corporate America: nothing will fundamentally change.
      Indigo Olivier is a 2020-2021 Leonard C Goodman investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine More