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Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin describes sexual assault by US senator
US newsLongtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin describes sexual assault by US senatorRevelation of incident ‘buried’ by Abedin contained in new memoir Both/And, to be published next week
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Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellyTue 26 Oct 2021 15.53 EDTLast modified on Tue 26 Oct 2021 16.11 EDTHuma Abedin, a longtime close aide to Hillary Clinton, has written in a new book that she was sexually assaulted by a US senator, an incident she “buried” until allegations against the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh triggered her memory years later.Abedin makes the shocking claim in a memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. Abedin does not name the senator or his party or give any other clues as to his identity.Abedin details her alleged assault while describing her work for Clinton when the former first lady and future secretary of state and presidential candidate was a US senator from New York, between 2001 and 2009.The passage comes shortly after a description of how Abedin and the Clintons came to attend Donald Trump’s wedding to his third wife, Melania Knauss, in Palm Beach, Florida, in January 2005.Of that occasion, Abedin, who was born in Michigan but grew up in Saudi Arabia, writes: “I felt I was at an Arab wedding back home.”Then, after describing a Washington dinner attended by “a few senators and their aides” but not Clinton, Abedin writes: “I ended up walking out with one of the senators, and soon we stopped in front of his building and he invited me in for coffee. Once inside, he told me to make myself comfortable on the couch.”She says the senator took off his blazer, rolled up his sleeves and made coffee while they continued to talk.“Then, in an instant, it all changed. He plopped down to my right, put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.“I was so utterly shocked, I pushed him away. All I wanted was for the last 10 seconds to be erased.”Abedin writes that the senator seemed surprised but apologized and said he had “misread” her “all this time”. As she considered how to leave “without this ending badly”, she writes, the senator asked if she wanted to stay.“Then I said something only the twentysomething version of me would have come up with – ‘I am so sorry’ – and walked out, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible.”Abedin writes that she kept away from the senator “for a few days” but then ran into him on Capitol Hill, nodding when he asked if they were still friends. Clinton then joined them, Abedin writes, “as if she knew I needed rescuing even though I’d told her nothing about that night”.Abedin writes that she stayed friendly with the senator and soon “buried the incident”, which she wanted to forget, succeeding in erasing it from her mind “entirely”.Then, in late 2018, Kavanaugh was nominated to the supreme court by Donald Trump. A professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a party years earlier, an allegation Kavanaugh denied.Testifying in the Senate, Ford said the alleged assault “drastically altered” her life, before a therapy session in 2012 led her to do her “best to suppress memories of the assault because recounting the details caused me to relive the experience, and caused panic attacks and anxiety”.Though Kavanaugh became a leading symbol of the #MeToo era, in which allegations of sexual misconduct and assault have brought down prominent men, Republicans did not waver in their support of his appointment and he was duly confirmed to the court.Abedin’s memory of her experience on the unnamed senator’s couch, she writes, was triggered when she read about Christine Blasey Ford “being accused of ‘conveniently’ remembering” her alleged assault.Earlier this month, an excerpt from the book published by Vogue dealt with Abedin’s experiences when her husband, the former congressman and New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, became embroiled in repeated scandal over sexually explicit behavior on social media.Abedin and Weiner are now estranged.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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Facebook revelations: what is in cache of internal documents?
FacebookFacebook revelations: what is in cache of internal documents?Roundup of what we have learned after release of papers and whistleblower’s testimony to MPs Dan Milmo Global technology editorMon 25 Oct 2021 14.42 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 16.04 EDTFacebook has been at the centre of a wave of damaging revelations after a whistleblower released tens of thousands of internal documents and testified about the company’s inner workings to US senators.Frances Haugen left Facebook in May with a cache of memos and research that have exposed the inner workings of the company and the impact its platforms have on users. The first stories based on those documents were published by the Wall Street Journal in September.Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen calls for urgent external regulationRead moreHaugen gave further evidence about Facebook’s failure to act on harmful content in testimony to US senators on 5 October, in which she accused the company of putting “astronomical profits before people”. She also testified to MPs and peers in the UK on Monday, as a fresh wave of stories based on the documents was published by a consortium of news organisations.Facebook’s products – the eponymous platform, the Instagram photo-sharing app, Facebook Messenger and the WhatsApp messaging service – are used by 2.8 billion people a day and the company generated a net income – a US measure of profit – of $29bn (£21bn) last year.Here is what we have learned from the documents, and Haugen, since the revelations first broke last month.Teenage mental healthThe most damaging revelations focused on Instagram’s impact on the mental health and wellbeing of teenage girls. One piece of internal research showed that for teenage girls already having “hard moments”, one in three found Instagram made body issues worse. A further slide shows that one in three people who were finding social media use problematic found Instagram made it worse, with one in four saying it made issues with social comparison worse.Facebook described reports on the research, by the WSJ in September, as a “mischaracterisation” of its internal work. Nonetheless, the Instagram research has galvanised politicians on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to rein in Facebook.Violence in developing countriesHaugen has warned that Facebook is fanning ethnic violence in countries including Ethiopia and is not doing enough to stop it. She said that 87% of the spending on combating misinformation at Facebook is spent on English content when only 9% of users are English speakers. According to the news site Politico on Monday, just 6% of Arabic-language hate content was detected on Instagram before it made its way on to the platform.Haugen told Congress on 5 October that Facebook’s use of engagement-based ranking – where the platform ranks a piece of content, and whether to put it in front of users, on the amount of interactions it gets off people – was endangering lives. “Facebook … knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world. And that’s what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia,” she said.Divisive algorithm changesIn 2018 Facebook changed the way it tailored content for users of its news feed feature, a key part of people’s experience of the platform. The emphasis on boosting “meaningful social interactions” between friends and family meant that the feed leant towards reshared material, which was often misinformed and toxic. “Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” said internal research. Facebook said it had an integrity team that was tackling the problematic content “as efficiently as possible”.Tackling falsehoods about the US presidential electionThe New York Times reported that internal research showed how, at one point after the US presidential election last year, 10% of all US views of political material on Facebook – a very high proportion for the platform – were of posts alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent. One internal review criticised attempts to tackle “Stop the Steal” groups spreading claims that the election was rigged. “Enforcement was piecemeal,” said the research. The revelations have reignited concerns about Facebook’s role in the 6 January riots.Facebook said: “The responsibility for the violence that occurred … lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.” However, the WSJ has also reported that Facebook’s automated systems were taking down posts generating only an estimated 3-5% of total views of hate speech.Disgruntled Facebook staffWithin the files disclosed by Haugen are testimonies from dozens of Facebook employees frustrated by the company’s failure to either acknowledge the harms it generates, or to properly support efforts to mitigate or prevent those harms. “We are FB, not some naive startup. With the unprecedented resources we have, we should do better,” wrote one employee quoted by Politico in the wake of the 6 January attack on the US capitol.“Never forget the day Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, we determined that it violated our policies, and yet we explicitly overrode the policy and didn’t take the video down,” wrote another. “There is a straight line that can be drawn from that day to today, one of the darkest days in the history of democracy … History will not judge us kindly.”Facebook is struggling to recruit young usersA section of a complaint filed by Haugen’s lawyers with the US financial watchdog refers to young users in “more developed economies” using Facebook less. This is a problem for a company that relies on advertising for its income because young users, with unformed spending habits, can be lucrative to marketers. The complaint quotes an internal document stating that Facebook’s daily teenage and young adult (18-24) users have “been in decline since 2012-13” and “only users 25 and above are increasing their use of Facebook”. Further research reveals “engagement is declining for teens in most western, and several non-western, countries”.Haugen said engagement was a key metric for Facebook, because it meant users spent longer on the platform, which in turn appealed to advertisers who targeted users with adverts that accounted for $84bn (£62bn) of the company’s $86bn annual revenue. On Monday, Bloomberg said “time spent” for US teenagers on Facebook was down 16% year-on-year, and that young adults in the US were also spending 5% less time on the platform.Facebook is built for divisive contentOn Monday the NYT reported an internal memo warning that Facebook’s “core product mechanics”, or its basic workings, had let hate speech and misinformation grow on the platform. The memo added that the basic functions of Facebook were “not neutral”. “We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations and optimising for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform,” said the 2019 memo.A Facebook spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we are a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie. The truth is we have invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”Facebook avoids confrontations with US politicians and rightwing news organisationsA document seen by the Financial Times showed a Facebook employee claiming Facebook’s public policy team blocked decisions to take down posts “when they see that they could harm powerful political actors”. The document said: “In multiple cases the final judgment about whether a prominent post violates a certain written policy are made by senior executives, sometimes Mark Zuckerberg.” The memo said moves to take down content by repeat offenders against Facebook’s guidelines, such as rightwing publishers, were often reversed because the publishers might retaliate. The wave of stories on Monday were based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission – the US financial watchdog – and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of news organisations including the NYT, Politico and Bloomberg.TopicsFacebookSocial mediaSocial networkingUS Capitol attackUS politicsDigital mediaanalysisReuse this content More
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Trump’s judges will call the shots for years to come. The judicial system is broken | Shira A Scheindlin
OpinionUS politicsTrump’s judges will call the shots for years to come. The judicial system is brokenShira A ScheindlinIn just one term, Trump was able to appoint 33% of US supreme court justices and 30% of US appellate judges. They’ll serve for life Mon 25 Oct 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 14.44 EDTFor many Americans, Donald Trump will be remembered as the first US president to be twice impeached, to have supported, or even incited, an insurrection against democracy, and for allowing thousands to die due to his abject failure to lead the nation in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. But for many other Americans, his true legacy will be his enduring impact on the third branch – the federal judiciary.Americans don’t have faith in the US supreme court any more. That has justices worried | Russ FeingoldRead moreThe expansion of executive power, and the diminishment of legislative power due to partisan gridlock, is a well-known story. Governing by executive order has become the new normal. But it is the stealthy and steady rise of the power of the judicial branch that has caught many Americans off-guard.Federal judges have life tenure. Once they are appointed they remain in office until they retire or die. The president appoints every federal judge and these appointments have very long-term consequences. A look at Trump’s record of appointments reveals a relentless commitment to cementing his peculiar and idiosyncratic ideology. In short, he and his sidekick, former majority leader Mitch McConnell, did all they could to entrench an actively conservative judiciary.The numbers tell a clear story. There are a total of 816 active federal judges comprising the supreme court, the 13 appellate courts, and 91 district courts. In just one term Trump was able to appoint 28% of those judges due to past and continuing vacancies. Most importantly, he appointed 33% of America’s nine supreme court justices and 30% of the appellate judges. The vast majority of his appointments were white males – not one of his 54 appellate judges is Black. But what really stands out is the age of his appointees. The average age of his appellate judges was 47 (five years younger than those selected by Barack Obama). Six of those were in their 30s, and 20 were under 45. By contrast, of the 55 appellate judges picked by Obama – in eight years, not four – none were in their 30s and only six were younger than 45.Trump’s judicial appointments will shape American jurisprudence for decades to come. The Federal Judicial Center has found that this age disparity means that Trump judges will serve 270 more years than Obama’s judges, and they will decide thousands more cases. Moreover, the average tenure for a supreme court justice has increased from 15 years in the early 1970s to 27 years in more recent years, due in large part to the younger age of the justices at the date of appointment.The Trump legacy of judicial appointments is most apparent in the recent behavior of the supreme court. A new term has been coined – the shadow docket – which refers to the sudden uptick in emergency requests filed by the government. In the 16 years preceding the Trump presidency only eight such requests were filed, and, of those, only four were granted. By contrast, during Trump’s four-year term, 41 such applications were made, of which 24 were granted – a 70% success rate that supported Trump’s policies. These cases are heard without full briefing, without oral argument, and often result in a single-sentence order as opposed to a full reasoned opinion.One such decision overturned, by a 5-4 order, a Wisconsin trial court order allowing an extension for the receipt of absentee ballots. The last-minute supreme court decision issued the day before the election caused chaos and confusion. A second example of how the now safely pro-Trump court supported his policies involved his administration’s rule prohibiting migrants from seeking asylum in the US before seeking it in the countries through which they had travelled. The lower court suspended enforcement of this unprecedented rule, but the supreme court allowed the ban to take effect immediately even as the case proceeded through the lower courts. Another particularly disturbing example involved four death penalty cases where a lower court halted four executions because the use of pentobarbital to kill the prisoners would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. In a 5-4 ruling, issued after 2am, the stay was overturned and at least one of the executions carried out – the first federal prisoner to be executed in 17 years.Most recently, in yet another emergency appeal, the supreme court by a 5-4 margin, refused to block the newly enacted Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, allowing that rule to be enforced for the foreseeable future. This emergency request was brought by abortion providers after the very conservative fifth circuit court of appeals, to which Trump had appointed six judges, stopped the trial court from holding a hearing as to whether the new law could take immediate effect. A month later a trial judge blocked the law from taking effect and the fifth circuit promptly reversed. The Department of Justice is now appealing that decision to the supreme court.In each of these cases, the supreme court deprived the affected parties of a chance to be fully heard and often deprived the appellate courts of the chance to review the ruling of the trial courts. This unprecedented haste, and acquiescence to the importuning of the executive branch, gave the appearance that the supreme court was no longer an independent and co-equal branch of government but rather a partner of the Trump-led executive branch.Many Americans now question the court’s integrity and are jumping on the bandwagon of seeking supreme court reform. Proposals for reform include imposing term limits on supreme court justices to ensure that no one justice or group of justices controls the outcome of cases for decades to come. It is noteworthy that the three justices Trump appointed were 48, 49 and 53 at the time they joined the court, guaranteeing decades of influence by those justices. A variation on this proposal would require mandatory retirement by all federal judges at the age of 70 or 75.Another more controversial proposal is to expand the court. This proposal is, in part, a response to the widespread belief that two of President Obama’s appointments were stolen. The first was the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia. Obama’s nominee to fill that seat was stonewalled by Republicans for 10 months, purportedly due to the proximity to the upcoming presidential election, while the second was the record-breaking speedy confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before a presidential election.Other proposals include reform of the shadow docket by requiring briefing, argument, and a reasoned opinion on all emergency matters; imposing a code of conduct and ethics on supreme court justices similar to that binding lower court judges; requiring a 6-3 super-majority before finding a federal statute unconstitutional; and requiring that Congress consider any presidential nomination within a fixed period of time – perhaps 45 days after nomination.The growing support for some or all of these reforms by many non-partisan organizations, academics, and Democratic politicians, is a response to the discontent created by Trump’s unprecedented manipulation of the appointment process for federal judges, designed to ensure that his politics and policies will control the lives of future generations. Trump’s brazen capture of the supreme court, engineered with the help of the Republican Senate majority, requires a bold response. If reform efforts fail, which is likely given the arcane Senate rules, Trump will have succeeded in entrenching his regressive, if not destructive, political agenda. This may be good for Trump’s legacy but it is surely bad for the country.
Shira A Scheindlin is a former United States district judge for the southern district of New York. She is the co-chair of the board of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a board member of the American Constitution Society
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Lethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stalling | David Bond
OpinionPollutionLethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stallingDavid BondThere is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.31 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.32 EDTThis week the EPA announced a new roadmap to research, restrict, and remediate PFAS – a group of industrial “forever chemicals” that have been linked to cancer and are found in our food, water, and even our blood. President Biden is requesting $10bn in the infrastructure bill to address PFAS. But this new attention still falls short of what’s required to confront an unprecedented crisis that affects the health of the entire United States and countless people across the world.EPA unveils new strategy to address US contamination of ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreToday, toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere we’ve thought to look for them. As engineered, these synthetic chemicals glide through air and water with ease, evade all natural processes of decay, and inflict debilitating injuries even at exceedingly low levels of exposure. The petrochemical industry has its fingerprints all over the ubiquity of PFAS, yet that very ubiquity is now being used as an excuse against doing anything about it. PFAS are becoming too toxic to fail.The EPA’s hyped national PFAS testing strategy bemoans how “impossible” it is for the EPA “to expeditiously understand, let alone address, the risks these substances may pose to human health and the environment.” Overwhelmed by rampant PFAS contamination, the EPA is asking the petrochemical industry to study these chemicals one by one in the hopes of eventually building enough data to regulate them. Yes, one by one. The timeline proposed will take another century (or two) to make its way through the entire family of PFAS, which now number in the thousands.The manifold ways that PFAS makes a mockery of our regulation of toxins cannot be the end of our ability to prosecute petrochemical malfeasance. Rather, this should be the start to fixing everything that went wrong.The companies behind PFAS knew about its toxicity for decades, but that knowledge was hidden in corporate archives and subject to shamefully lax government oversight.When 3M and DuPont learned about alarming patterns of birth defects and cancers in their own workers at PFAS plants in the 1970s and 1980s, both companies smothered the evidence. In the 1970s, the navy and air force looked the other way when they found PFAS migrating off their bases and into nearby communities. By the 1990s, 3M and DuPont both realized that their PFAS operations were polluting municipal drinking water at levels they considered harmful. As revealed by investigative reporting and dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, corporate executives helped destroy the evidence while giving false assurances to residents and regulators alike.Over the past century, the petrochemical industry had countless opportunities to recognize the dangers of PFAS and install safeguards. Instead, they launched even more PFAS into the world. In defiance of their own internal scientific appraisals of the deadly effects of PFAS, 3M and DuPont integrated these chemicals into a widening array of industrial ingredients, firefighting equipment, and consumer goods. Incredibly, both companies also disposed PFAS waste into watersheds providing drinking water to more than 20 million Americans and irrigation to farms in 13 states.Over the past 50 years, 3M and DuPont manufactured more than enough PFAS to contaminate the drinking water of every single American. PFAS was sold to plastics plants, carpet and shoe factories, and oil and gas drilling sites across the US, where it was routinely discarded by the ton into the environment. Some industries even endorsed the distribution of PFAS-laden waste to farmers as a soil supplement.Now worried about impending liability, the petrochemical industry and the military are busy torching stockpiles of PFOA and PFOS (the two PFAS compounds closest to being regulated) despite growing concern that burning merely redistributes these inflammable toxins, especially into the poor communities of color where waste incinerators cynically base their operations. As the US and Europe move towards regulating some PFAS chemicals, the petrochemical industry is moving PFAS operations to more permissive regimes in Brazil, China, India, and Russia.Each time the question of containing PFAS came into view, 3M, DuPont, and now Chemours launched a perfluorinated blitzkrieg. They flooded the zone. And looking back, a rather demented product defense strategy becomes apparent: total contamination. Rather than controlling PFAS toxicity, the petrochemical industry universalized it.By the time sickened industrialworkers and farmers demanded action, lawyers pried open the corporate archive, and the EPA started issuing voluntary guidelines for a handful of PFAS compounds, it was almost too late to clean up the mess. The poison was out of the bag. An EPA review released this week identified more than 120,000 sites in the US alone that are probably contaminated with PFAS.There is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group. This alarming reality trips up the comparative methods typically used to study toxicity and public health. It is also becoming a rather shameless legal argument in courtrooms across the country.When PFAS was discovered in my hometown of Bennington, Vermont, the plastics factory that emitted these chemicals for decades landed on a novel defense: that PFAS are so pervasive that it’s impossible to determine who is responsible. Residential trash with trace amounts of PFAS and the world at large, the company argued, were the real perpetrators of our PFAS troubles, not the plastics factory that accepted delivery of PFAS by the truckload for more than 30 years.And now American Chemistry Council lobbyists and defense attorneys for the petrochemical industry are hard at work nominating PFAS contamination to the welcoming committee of a brave new world of total contamination. It’s a planetary future they cast as inevitable, surprisingly democratic, and without any liable author. According to their victim-blaming PR campaign, anyone who has worn a Gore-Tex rain jacket or thrown away a McDonalds wrapper is just as guilty as the companies that illegally hid the toxicity of PFAS while spewing millions of pounds of this poison into our lives.PFAS are everywhere, but this disconcerting fact should not distract us from the petrochemical operations holding the smoking gun – smoking, in no small part, because they are still emitting PFAS. The omnipresence of PFAS does not lessen the threat they pose to our health, but it does mean we need bolder ways of prosecuting these environmental crimes against humanity.Yet instead of toughening regulation of the petrochemical industry, the EPA and many state agencies are throwing their hands up at the sheer ubiquity of the problem.Regulatory agencies are proposing natural “background levels” for a synthetic chemical conjured up a mere 75 years ago – in effect giving tacit approval for the history of gross negligence that got us here. That’s not all. The agencies shift blame for this predicament to residents by listing household items containing trace amounts of PFAS alongside factories that emitted it by the ton annually, as if those are equivalent sources; agencies refrain from sampling groundwater near industries suspected of using PFAS; agencies stack science committees with industry lobbyists while putting up roadblocks for independent scientists to participate; agencies applaud a pyrrhic victory of finally deciding to regulate PFOA and PFOS some 20 years after they learned about their toxicity while the petrochemical industry happily churns out a witches’ brew of new unregulated PFAS chemicals; and agencies endorse incineration as a PFAS disposal method while acknowledging that there is no evidence that combustion destroys these flameproof chemicals. And, of course, they make grand commitments to keep studying the problem in the hopes of taking action in, oh, a decade or so.Revealed: more than 120,000 US sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreThe point is clear: by way of regulatory indifference, delay, and now despair, responsibility for the toxicity of forever chemicals is shifting from the corporations who profited from them to the communities who must now live with them.All is not lost. While PFAS inspires paralysis in state agencies, people living on the frontlines of this crisis – in rural towns next to military bases, working-class neighborhoods adjacent to plastics factories, communities of color near incinerators burning PFAS – insist we do everything we can, now. They demand an immediate stop to all releases of PFAS. They demand we compel the industry and the military to start cleaning up sources of PFAS contamination. They demand we ban PFAS as a family of chemicals, not only in the US but across the world. They demand we pass the PFAS Accountability Act, legislation that insists manufacturers retain liability for all the damage PFAS inflicts after they leave the factory. And they demand we hold polluters fully accountable for the decades of damage they’ve done.These communities insist polluters pay for water filtration systems for every affected home and business, medical monitoring for the lifetime of worry that people in polluted communities now carry, and independent scientific monitoring for the generations that PFAS will haunt affected areas.The EPA and state agencies must follow their lead. We cannot retreat into a broken system of indifference and carefully planned inaction. Nor can the ubiquity of PFAS become an excuse for those that profitably manufactured this mess. Any further delay would be an epic dereliction of duty.
David Bond is the associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College. He leads the “Understanding PFOA” project and is writing a book on PFAS contamination
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In Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024
BooksIn Trump’s Shadow: David Drucker surveys the Republican runners and riders for 2024 Mike Pence and Marco Rubio are among presidential alternatives examined by a writer with knowledge and accessLloyd GreenSun 24 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTDonald Trump is a defeated one-term president who cost the Republican party both houses of Congress. Yet three-quarters of Republicans want him to again run in 2024, polling that has other aspirants keeping their heads well down.‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyRead moreJoe Biden is politically vulnerable, his job approval underwater, his coalition fraying. He could meet the same fate as Trump – sans residual enthusiasm.The next Republican nominee could easily be the next president. Against this backdrop, David Drucker’s Baedeker to the current crop of wannabes is a perfectly timed and well-informed contribution.As senior political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, a conservative paper, he knows of whom and what he writes. Better yet, he has access. In Trump’s Shadow is chock-full of tidbits and trivia, the stuff on which political junkies and journalists thrive.Drucker names an array of Republican presidential hopefuls, among them long-shots such as the Texas governor, Greg Abbott; the Nebraska senator Ben Sasse; and Trump’s last national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.Drucker delivers deeper dives on former vice-president Mike Pence; the Florida senator Marco Rubio and governor, Ron DeSantis; Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton; and the governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan. In doing so, he covers the Republican ideological spectrum.Drucker also reports on an interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and retreat. Not surprisingly, Trump has kind words for Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state; contempt for Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader; and disdain for Liz Cheney, the congresswoman from Wyoming and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney who turned against Trump over the Capitol riot.“She’s a psycho,” says the very stable genius.Trump has, however, had time to grow appreciative of “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, the Texas senator whose father and wife Trump attacked viciously during the primaries in 2016.Amid such Trumpian cacophony, Drucker reminds us of just who within the GOP is laying groundwork for runs for the White House, and how realistic their hopes might be. It is a tricky and contorting dance. But though Trump can dominate coverage, he cannot completely extinguish ambitions. Drucker pulls back the curtain on other figures’ schemes, dreams – and hard political infrastructure.Take Pence. Once a congressman from Indiana, then its governor, he began preparing for the top step on the ladder the moment he was elected Trump’s VP. Pence established a separate political operation within the White House and a fundraising Pac of his own, the Great America Committee. He used it to pay expenses while stumping for Republicans around and across the country.Trump was fine with that. It meant Pence would not look to his boss to pay his travel bills. The veep had a stash of his own.Since leaving office, Pence has also launched Advancing American Freedom, a political non-profit which touts “conservative values and policy proposals”. More importantly, it is stocked with Trump loyalists. Kellyanne Conway, the mother of “alternative facts”. Larry Kudlow, chief White House economic adviser. Newt Gingrich, once speaker of the House, a colleague on the right. All are there.Drucker also sheds light on Pence’s defiance of Trump and service to the republic, in the aftermath of a defeat by Biden which Trump sought to overturn with lies about electoral fraud. As a traditional conservative, Drucker writes, Pence was skeptical of the power of the vice-president to unilaterally steal an election. Before he certified results, he sought a legal opinion, which debunked Trump’s false claim that he could.When Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, on 6 January, some chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. Others erected a makeshift gallows. Pence was forced to hide, but he refused to leave.Ten months on, Team Pence seems not to know what to think or say. It was “a dark day in the history of the US Capitol”, Drucker records Pence telling one crowd. But Pence later told Fox News “the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January”.The political momentum is clear. Pence’s own brother, a congressman from Indiana, voted against certifying the election. This week, Greg Pence was the only no-show in the House on the vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying the 6 January committee. Two-thirds of Republicans deny that the Capitol riot was an attack on the government. The right has a new Lost Cause.Drucker also does justice to Rubio, capturing the senator’s tendency to “chase the latest shiny object”, be it immigration reform in 2013 or police reform after the murder of George Floyd. He’s “the butterfly”, according to one Republican strategist.“Marco goes to every brightly colored flower and sticks his nose right in the middle of it, [then] takes a little bit of honey and stands in front of it to see if anyone’s looking at the flower.”Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseRead moreIn 2016, Rubio won three Republican nominating contests but was battered by Trump in his home state, losing the Florida primary by nearly 20 points. Before 2024, he will face a stern Senate challenge from Val Demings, an African American ex-cop and impeachment floor manager.Demings has out-raised Rubio recently but Rubio has $3m more in the bank. This, remember, is a politician who once purportedly told a friend: “I can call up a lobbyist at four in the morning, and he’ll meet me anywhere with a bag of $40,000 in cash.”He also has a history of credit card problems. Imagine what a President Rubio might do with the national debt.If nothing else, Drucker reminds us that though Trump rules Red America, like rust, ambition never sleeps. The starter’s flag on the race for the Republican nomination has yet to fall. In Trump’s Shadow is fine preparatory reading.
In Trump’s Shadow is published in the US by Twelve
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Facebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’
The ObserverFacebookFacebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’ Frances Haugen says chief executive has not shown any desire to shield users from the consequences of harmful content Dan MilmoSat 23 Oct 2021 21.02 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 04.23 EDTThe Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content.Her intervention came as pressure mounted on the near-$1tn (£730bn) business following a fresh wave of revelations based on documents leaked by Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The New York Times reported that workers had repeatedly warned that Facebook was being flooded with false claims about the 2020 presidential election result being fraudulent and believed the company should have done more to tackle it.Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted to be a whistleblower. But lives were in danger’Read moreHaugen, who appears before MPs and peers in Westminster on Monday, said Zuckerberg, who controls the business via a majority of its voting shares, has not shown any willingness to protect the public.“Right now, Mark is unaccountable. He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”She added that giving all shareholders an equal say in the running of the company would result in changes at the top. “I believe in shareholder rights and the shareholders, or shareholders minus Mark, have been asking for years for one share one vote. And the reason for that is, I am pretty sure the shareholders would choose other leadership if they had an option.”Haugen, who quit as a Facebook product manager in May, said she had leaked tens of thousand of documents to the Wall Street Journal and to Congress because she had realised that the company would not change otherwise.She said: “There are great companies that have done major cultural changes. Apple did a major cultural change; Microsoft did a major cultural change. Facebook can change too. They just have to get the will.”This weekend, a consortium of US news organisations released a fresh wave of stories based on the Haugen documents. The New York Times reported that internal research showed how, at one point after the US presidential election last year, 10% of all US views of political material on Facebook – a very high proportion for Facebook – were of posts falsely alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent. One internal review criticised attempts to tackle Stop the Steal groups spreading claims on the platform that the election was rigged. “Enforcement was piecemeal,” said the research.The revelations have reignited concerns about Facebook’s role in the 6 January riots, in which a mob seeking to overturn the election result stormed the Capitol in Washington. The New York Times added that some of the reporting for the story was based on documents not released by Haugen.A Facebook spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our commercial interests lie. The truth is we’ve invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said the company had put in place multiple measures to protect the public during and after the election and that “responsibility for the [6 January] insurrection lies with those who broke the law during the attack and those who incited them”.It was also reported on Friday that a new Facebook whistleblower had come forward and, like Haugen, had filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, alleging that the company declined to enforce safety rules for fear of angering Donald Trump or impacting Facebook’s growth.Haugen will testify in person on Monday to the joint committee scrutinising the draft online safety bill, which would impose a duty of care on social media companies to protect users from harmful content, and allow the communications regulator, Ofcom, to fine those who breach this. The maximum fine is 10% of global turnover, so in the case of Facebook, this could run into billions of pounds. Facebook, whose services also include Instagram and WhatsApp, has 2.8 billion daily users and generated an income last year of $86bn.As well as issuing detailed rebuttals of Haugen’s revelations, Facebook is reportedly planning a major change that would attempt to put some distance between the company and its main platform. Zuckerberg could announce a rebranding of Facebook’s corporate identity on Thursday, according to a report that said the company is keen to emphasise its future as a player in the “metaverse”, a digital world in which people interact and lead their social and professional lives virtually.Haugen said Facebook must be compelled by all regulators to be more transparent with the information at its disposal internally, as detailed in her document leaks. She said one key reform would be to set up a formal structure whereby regulators could demand reports from Facebook on any problem that they identify.“Let’s imagine there was a brand of car that was having five times as many car accidents as other cars. We wouldn’t accept that car company saying, ‘this is really hard, we are trying our best, we are sorry, we are trying to do better in the future’. We would never accept that as an answer and we are hearing that from Facebook all the time. There needs to be an avenue where we can escalate a concern and they actually have to give us a response.”TopicsFacebookThe ObserverSocial networkingMark ZuckerbergUS elections 2020US CongressUS politicsReuse this content More
