Lobbyists Mobilize for Priority Access to Coronavirus Vaccine

Industry lobbyists, representing everyone from pesticide manufacturers to factory farms and aquarium and zoo operators, are pushing regulators to allow their workers to jump the line for the coronavirus vaccine.

A coronavirus vaccine, one of which could be cleared for use as early as today, is set to be distributed first to those in health care facilities, essential workers, and individuals most vulnerable to the virus. This has set off an influence blitz as various industry groups petition the government for inclusion on the list of professions most crucial to keeping the country running.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through a panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has established a framework for individuals to receive the first available doses of approved Covid-19 vaccines. The framework is nonbinding but expected to shape state agencies and other institutions that will govern distribution of the vaccines.

The first to receive the vaccine, through a process the ACIP has called Phase 1a, will likely be health care personnel and residents of long-term care facilities, who have been hit especially hard by the virus. The second deployment, Phase 1b, will include essential workers. The following group, Phase 1c, includes adults with high-risk medical conditions and senior citizens over the age of 65.

The category of essential work has been the focus of furious lobbying this year as various businesses and professional groups have pressed to be certified as essential in order to stay open. Each state has its own guidelines for who is considered essential, but the CDC provides broad guidance. Many industry groups have asked the CDC to rely on a memo from the Department of Homeland Security on critical infrastructure workers, a document published in August, to determine whether a worker is deemed essential for vaccination — a list that was itself the focus of intense lobbying.

Earlier this year, dozens of industry associations lobbied Homeland Security to be on the critical infrastructure list, including gun manufacturers, coal mines, stock exchanges, and the Fragrance Creators Association, the trade group for the makers of perfumes, colognes, and scented candles. The DHS memo, notably, includes the production of “fragrances” as essential work.

Homeland Security claimed the categories were determined to be “so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”

The vaccine’s rollout has only intensified the campaign to shape the list of what type of workers are counted as critical to the economy. Now truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers, the restaurant industry, grocery stores, school nurses, and other associations have similarly petitioned the CDC, arguing that their members should count as essential workers. Earlier this week, MarketWatch reported that the American Bankers Association asked that bank tellers, given their close contact with the public, should be given priority for receiving the vaccine.

by Lee Fang, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Samuel Corum/The New York Times/Bloomberg/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Q&A with Dr. Larry Corey: With a coronavirus vaccine on the way, clinical trials leader reflects on what’s next (Seattle Times).]

Back to Back Hurricanes in Central America

Even disaster experts are stunned by the devastation in the Honduras this fall.

"I've been to too many disasters all over the world," says Vlatko Uzevski, who arrived in Honduras last week from Macedonia to lead an emergency response team for Project Hope.

"And I have never been to a place that was struck by two hurricanes in two weeks," says Uzevski, a physician who has been doing this type of work for 15 years.

The two Category 4 hurricanes – Eta and Iota — made landfall in Central America on Nov. 3 and Nov. 17 respectively. Even today, the region continues to dig out from mudslides. Aid agencies say nearly 7 million people in a zone stretching from Colombia to Mexico are in need of assistance.

Despite both hurricanes initially coming ashore in Nicaragua, neighboring Honduras appears to have suffered the most damage and the most deaths from landslides and flooding caused by the intense rainfall. The cyclones slowed over Honduras and being the last two named-storms of a record-breaking hurricane season, they dumped precipitation on already saturated hillsides.

This week in a nationally broadcast address, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández assured his people, "No están solos" meaning "You are not alone."

The storms destroyed bridges, roads, schools and health clinics. Families lost their homes, farms and businesses to floodwaters. Landslides packed small downtown plazas with mud.

Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans remain homeless. Many are crowded into shelters. Others are staying with friends and relatives.

President Hernández announced a plan to invest 4 times the nation's annual budget in infrastructure and social programs to help Hondurans recover from the devastating storms. (...)

Aid officials say that the damage from hurricanes Eta and Iota rival the damage caused by Hurricane Mitch one of the deadliest Atlantic storms of all time. Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, left 3 million people homeless and prompted tens of thousands of Hondurans to migrate to the United States.

"The damage in terms of costs, destruction, damage to agriculture is just as high," as from Mitch, says Hugo Rodriguez, deputy assistant secretary of state for Central America, about Eta and Iota. "This is Mitch-scale if not bigger." The U.S. through USAID has pledged millions of dollars to help respond to the crisis.

And it's not just Honduras. The record-breaking hurricane season displaced even more people in Guatemala.

Steve McAndrew, deputy regional director, for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says his agency has relief operations in response to Eta and Iota now in seven countries.

"Hurricane Eta affected almost all of Central America, including Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua," he says. "And then the second hurricane Iota also had a direct hit on the San Andreas Islands, which are part of Colombia. There's heavy damage and the region's been heavily affected."

by Jason Beaubien, NPR | Read more:
Image: Jose Cabezas/Reuters

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin

[ed. Mississippi Queen. See also: here.]

via:

Brett Amory, Waiting #190
via:

Bowhead Whales Recovering Despite Arctic Warming

In some rare good news from the top of the world, bowhead whale populations have rebounded and are nearing pre-commercial whaling numbers in US waters.

Surprisingly, the whales’ recovery has actually accelerated as the Arctic warms, according to an update on the species published this week by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

“This is really one of the great conservation successes of the last century,” said J Craig George, a retired biologist with the North Slope borough department of wildlife management.

Bowhead whales – the only baleen whale that lives in the Arctic year-round – were once on the brink of disappearing forever. The population near Alaska was targeted by commercial whalers beginning in the 1700s for their oil, blubber and baleen. Their large, rotund bodies and slow-moving nature made them easy targets, and they were nearly hunted to extinction by the turn of the 20th century.

Once commercial whaling ceased, the western Arctic population living in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas began to rebound. The whales’ recovery has been in large part thanks to the natural inaccessibility of their ice-covered home, which has shielded them from commercial shipping and fishing activities that threaten their right whale cousins to the south.

George also credits sustainable management and stewardship of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC), who have fought against offshore oil drilling and other activities that could harm the species.

“No one has fought harder than the AEWC to protect bowhead habitat from industrial development in the US Arctic,” George said.

Researchers work with Alaska native communities such as the Inupiat of Utqiaġvik, Alaska, who have hunted the whales at sustainable levels for at least 1,000 years, to monitor and study the species. “The general understanding of cetacean biology, anatomy and physiology and ecology has been greatly enhanced in the partnership with indigenous hunters,” George said. “It was the Inupiat captains that taught us how to properly count whales.”

Bowhead whales can provide broader insights into Arctic marine ecosystem health. The species’ longevity and sensitivity to annual fluctuations help biologists track changes in the Arctic over long periods of time.

Bowhead whales’ accelerated population expansion in recent decades has come as a surprise to biologists, who expected the cold-adapted whale species to suffer from the melting sea ice. Bowheads are highly specialized to their Arctic environment, with a pronounced bump on their heads used to break ice and blubber over a foot and a half (half a meter) thick. So far, however, the whales have proven resilient in the face of dramatic changes and have even benefited in unexpected ways.

The Arctic is becoming more productive as temperatures rise and more light reaches the ocean surface layer where sea ice is thinner or absent. Less ice and more nutrients flowing north from the Bering Sea have led to an increase in bowhead whale foods like krill and copepods in northern latitudes. These changes have been helpful to bowheads around Alaska, resulting in fatter whales and more babies, according to Noaa.

Bowheads have also been able to expand their territory north into waters where the ice was once too thick for them to break. While the western Arctic population was hunted down to just a few thousand individuals by the end of commercial whaling, they had rebounded to about 10,000 individuals by the turn of the 21st century and now number at least 16,800.

by Rachel Fritts, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Flip Nicklin/FLPA

[ed. I started my career in the late 70s studying the Bering Straits and developing regulations to protect bowhead whales. I've eaten them and they are definitely an accquired taste.]

'Toke-lahoma'

WELLSTON, Oklahoma—One day in the early fall of 2018, while scrutinizing the finances of his thriving Colorado garden supply business, Chip Baker noticed a curious development: transportation costs had spiked fivefold. The surge, he quickly determined, was due to huge shipments of cultivation supplies—potting soil, grow lights, dehumidifiers, fertilizer, water filters—to Oklahoma.

Baker, who has been growing weed since he was 13 in Georgia, has cultivated crops in some of the world’s most notorious marijuana hotspots, from the forests of Northern California’s Emerald Triangle to the lake region of Switzerland to the mountains of Colorado. Oklahoma was not exactly on his radar. So one weekend in October, Baker and his wife Jessica decided to take a drive to see where all their products were ending up.

Voters in the staunchly conservative state had just four months earlier authorized a medical marijuana program and sales were just beginning. The Bakers immediately saw the potential for the fledgling market. With no limits on marijuana business licenses, scant restrictions on who can obtain a medical card, and cheap land, energy and building materials, they believed Oklahoma could become a free-market weed utopia and they wanted in.

Within two weeks, they found a house to rent in Broken Bow and by February had secured a lease on an empty Oklahoma City strip mall. Eventually they purchased a 110-acre plot of land down a red dirt road about 40 miles northeast of Oklahoma City that had previously been a breeding ground for fighting cocks and started growing high-grade strains of cannabis with names like Purple Punch, Cookies and Cream and Miracle Alien.

“This is exactly like Humboldt County was in the late 90s,” Baker says, as a trio of workers chop down marijuana plants that survived a recent ice storm. “The effect this is going to have on the cannabis nation is going to be incredible.”

Oklahoma is now the biggest medical marijuana market in the country on a per capita basis. More than 360,000 Oklahomans—nearly 10 percent of the state’s population—have acquired medical marijuana cards over the last two years. By comparison, New Mexico has the country’s second most popular program, with about 5 percent of state residents obtaining medical cards. Last month, sales since 2018 surpassed $1 billion.

To meet that demand, Oklahoma has more than 9,000 licensed marijuana businesses, including nearly 2,000 dispensaries and almost 6,000 grow operations. In comparison, Colorado—the country’s oldest recreational marijuana market, with a population almost 50 percent larger than Oklahoma—has barely half as many licensed dispensaries and less than 20 percent as many grow operations. In Ardmore, a town of 25,000 in the oil patch near the Texas border, there are 36 licensed dispensaries—roughly one for every 700 residents. In neighboring Wilson (pop. 1,695), state officials have issued 32 cultivation licenses, meaning about one out of 50 residents can legally grow weed.

What is happening in Oklahoma is almost unprecedented among the 35 states that have legalized marijuana in some form since California voters backed medical marijuana in 1996. Not only has the growth of its market outstripped other more established state programs but it is happening in a state that has long stood out for its opposition to drug use. Oklahoma imprisons more people on a per-capita basis than just about any other state in the country, many of them non-violent drug offenders sentenced to lengthy terms behind bars. But that state-sanctioned punitive streak has been overwhelmed by two other strands of American culture—a live-and-let-live attitude about drug use and an equally powerful preference for laissez-faire capitalism.

“Turns out rednecks love to smoke weed,” Baker laughs. “That’s the thing about cannabis: It really bridges socio-economic gaps. The only other thing that does it is handguns. All types of people are into firearms. All types of people are into cannabis.”

Indeed, Oklahoma has established arguably the only free-market marijuana industry in the country. Unlike almost every other state, there are no limits on how many business licenses can be issued and cities can’t ban marijuana businesses from operating within their borders. In addition, the cost of entry is far lower than in most states: a license costs just $2,500. In other words, anyone with a credit card and a dream can take a crack at becoming a marijuana millionaire.

“They’ve literally done what no other state has done: free-enterprise system, open market, wild wild west,” says Tom Spanier, who opened Tegridy Market (a dispensary that takes its name from South Park) with his wife in Oklahoma City last year. “It’s survival of the fittest.”

The hands-off model extends to patients, as well. There’s no set of qualifying conditions in order to obtain a medical card. If a patient can persuade a doctor that he needs to smoke weed in order to soothe a stubbed toe, that’s just as legitimate as a dying cancer patient seeking to mitigate pain. The cards are so easy to obtain—$60 and a five-minute consultation—that many consider Oklahoma to have a de facto recreational use program.

But lax as it might seem, Oklahoma’s program has generated a hefty amount of tax revenue while avoiding some of the pitfalls of more intensely regulated programs. Through the first 10 months of this year, the industry generated more than $105 million in state and local taxes. That’s more than the $73 million expected to be produced by the state lottery this fiscal year, though still a pittance in comparison to the overall state budget of nearly $8 billion. In addition, Oklahoma has largely escaped the biggest problems that have plagued many other state markets: Illegal sales are relatively rare and the low cost to entry has made corruption all but unnecessary.

All of which has made Oklahoma an unlikely case study for the rest of the country, which continues its incremental march toward universal legalization. Oklahoma is struggling with the sudden growing pains common to all booms. As pretty much everyone acknowledges, the market simply can’t sustain the number of businesses currently operating. Meanwhile, state regulators are trying to introduce a seed-to-sale tracking system that many say is necessary to avert a public health disaster without cutting off the flow of tax revenue that they have come to rely on in lean budget times.

“This is a perfect test in front of the world,” says Norma Sapp, who has been waging an often lonely campaign for marijuana legalization in Oklahoma for more than three decades. “How will this shake out?”

by Paul Demko, Politico | Read more:
Image:Misty Keasler/Redux

Taylor Swift

‘Evermore,’ Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ Sequel, Is a Journey Deeper Inward (NY Times)

Yes, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” as upbeat and propulsive as this record gets, is a very explicit tribute to Rebekah West Harkness, the eccentric multiple divorceé and Standard Oil heiress/widow who filled her Rhode Island mansion’s pool with champagne and her fish tank with scotch; “stole her neighbor’s dog and dyed it key-lime green,” a splendid detail after Swift’s own master-songwriter heart; and upon her death in 1982, had her ashes placed in a $250,000 urn designed by Salvador Dalí. (This song is also your first opportunity to hear Swift sing the word “bitch.”) Naturally, Harkness has inspired multiple lengthy explainer blog posts in the past 72 hours, because Swift wrote a song about her, because Swift owns her house now. (The refrain “She had a marvelous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”) And wow is it impressive, genuinely impressive, how charming this song is given the fact that it’s a white pop star, in July 2020, singing a song about her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion. (The Ringer)

[ed. A new album out less than five months after her widely acclaimed Folklore. The girl's a music machine. I like Folklore better, especially this song (it's not an easy song to sing with the phrasing but she nails it). See also: the last great american dynasty (the long pond studio sessions) for a stripped-down version; and, for reviews of Evermore Taylor Swift, pop culture workhorse (Vox), and Taylor Swift could use an editor (Atlantic).]

Pandemic Villains: Robinhood

As the world went into lockdown and the global economy into a spiral last spring, one company struck gold. A phone-based trading app called Robinhood began wiping the floor with more celebrated online brokerage rivals like Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and E-Trade. The moment the pandemic began, it seemed, the world started trading stocks on Robinhood.

The numbers were staggering. Robinhood’s average daily trading volume tripled in the first quarter of this year, compared with the last quarter of 2019, and saw a tenfold increase in net deposits as millions were losing their jobs. The New York Times reported that the firm in the first quarter traded nine times as many shares as E-Trade, and an incredible 40 times as many as Schwab. It added 3 million new customer accounts, and by June was doing 4.3 million daily average revenue trades, or DARTS, more than any other online firm and more than Schwab and E-Trade combined.

Backed by a string of venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Google’s VC arm, GV, the firm received four major cash injections. Investors poured $200 million into the firm in April, $320 million more in July, another $200 million in August, and finally in November, another $460 million. Through this brief time, the company’s valuation jumped from $8.2 billion to $11.7 billion, by which time word leaked out that the firm had “asked banks to pitch for roles” for a possible IPO next year.

Analysts saw nothing but conquest ahead. “Competing versus Robinhood will be difficult,” said Larry Tabb, head of market structure research for Bloomberg Intelligence.

Robinhood seemed a new prodigal son of 21st-century capitalism, an awesome hybrid of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The firm combined the pure greed of a Goldman, Sachs or JP Morgan Chase with the cheery, youth-friendly user-engagement strategies of Instagram or TikTok.The firm was founded in 2013 by two perma-smiling Stanford grads named Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev, who wore khakis and Monkees haircuts and never seemed more than a moment away from bro-hugging one another.

These harmless-looking eggheads sounded genuinely excited to bring their product to the world, explaining they had a mission to “democratize finance for all.”

The app is perfectly designed for such “democratization.” It’s free, charging no commissions for trades. It also has an alluring, Joe Camel-like marketing campaign, featuring a host of bells and whistles in the form of free sample share giveaways, “scratch-off” rewards, and video confetti to celebrate transactions. “Even the most skeptical investor can be drawn in,” is how Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal just put it, describing how an assignment to learn more about the Robinhood experience led to something like addiction in less than a week.

Small-time customers who can’t afford a whole share of, say, Amazon stock can buy fractional stocks, and can also engage right away in complex options bets, just like the pros! What Bloomberg called “stock trading on a fun gamelike phone app” brings hordes of rookies into the markets: half of Robinhood’s customers this year were first-time traders, and 80% of its assets under management belong to millennials.

The firm is an icon of success in the pandemic age, finance’s answer to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Without sports to bet on, or bars to crawl, a whole new generation of “investors” are making Robinhood the destination for the ultimate new Covid-19 addiction: binge-trading. What could possibly go wrong with bringing more people into the stock market?

A lot, as it turns out. “Every time someone says they want to ‘democratize access,’” says Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading, “I get very scared.” (...)

In what the press accounts describe euphemistically using terms like a “controversial but legal practice,” Robinhood makes the bulk of its money on “payment for order flow.” It sells its data to high-frequency traders like Citadel and Virtu, market makers who ostensibly are paying for the honor of executing trades for Robinhood investors. These firms, using the technology that’s the subject of the celebrated Michael Lewis book Flash Boys, hunt out tiny price differences and gauge market sentiment and supply and demand before other traders, using sophisticated algorithms to jump ahead of the pack.

A Robinhood investor typing in a trade is just beginning a series of transactions that might result in a string of actors being compensated. Robinhood does not and can not post orders directly to exchanges like the NASDAQ; for a fee, it sends all of its orders to market maker firms like Citadel or Virtu. Those firms in turn have what amounts to a free option on the Robinhood trader’s order. They can execute the trade themselves, or they can offload it to an exchange, which in turn posts the order and compensates the market maker firm in the form of rebates, while earning money itself by charging fees for “data feed” that include information about such retail orders.

The mechanics of all of this are not absolutely necessary for Robinhood customers to understand, but it is worth asking the question of whether all of these actors in between the Robinhood client and his or her trades withdraw more or less value than, say, traditional broker fees. The HFT firms that handle the bulk of Robinhood’s business have always maintained that what they do is socially beneficial, because their trades “add liquidity” and make markets more efficient. Critics say the opposite, that high-speed algorithmic trading is just using advance peeks at market intelligence to turn trading into a low-risk arbitrage-like activity. (...)

The obvious problem is that a lot of these younger customers have no clue what they’re doing. “Retail investors don’t understand stocks, let alone options,” sighs Saluzzi. He compares the service to bringing amateur poker players to Vegas and seating them not at a table with old ladies and tourists, but with the best players in town. “It’s throwing them right in with the sharks,” he says.

by Matt Taibbi, TK |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Stephen Colbert in Lockdown

However you describe Colbert’s role, the show has been more vital than the one before. Maybe that’s because he has more fully realized its mandate. Colbert recalls a talk he had with director Spike Jonze in 2015, when Jonze asked him what he wanted the show to be about. After thinking about it, Colbert remembered a line from e.e. cummings: “What is more important than love, which is ‘the only god who spoke this earth so glad and big’? And I haven’t the slightest fucking idea how to do that, okay?” he says. “How can you make it about love? For the life of me, I did not know how to do it. I just kept on doing it and doing it. What has occurred to me since Trump became president is that what the show is about is loss. And you feel it with such clarity, because you’re losing something you love, which is—however illusory or real, because I’m not going to judge either way—America’s moral authority in the world, that shining city on the hill.”

“Our own national image gets lost,” Colbert continues. “Our own sense of the purpose of America gets lost. And then there’s economic hegemony, then there’s a loss by white Americans thinking that they are the default culture of America. There’s all the loss that the people who’ve been denied their position or their rights in America have always dealt with, that then we have to deal with, which is also another sense of loss and innocence. There’s all this loss going on in America. And on a nightly basis, because there’s no audience, I can talk about loss, but what I’m really talking about is, ‘Look at what we love. It’s on fire.’ ”

by Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Annie Leibovitz

Yes, Facebook Has Become a Menace

It’s about time, even if it’s been a very long 22 years.

It was 1998 when Microsoft finally landed in the cross hairs of the federal government, when the Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general alleged in an antitrust lawsuit that the software giant had abused its market power to crush competition. It was the last time the government took meaningful action against the unfettered rise of a tech behemoth.

The Big Tech companies that have sprouted up since the Microsoft case have been treated by government as if they were the most delicate of flowers, in need of more nurturing than the most finicky of ferns. There have been laughable fines, while one merger after another was allowed to sail on by.

Those charged with regulation have given companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon a very wide berth to grow into some of the most valuable entities in the history of the planet. Their founders are among the richest people ever.

It all came to a halt with the announcement in October that the Justice Department was finally taking aim at Google in an antitrust lawsuit focused on search and advertising. And on Wednesday, in the most potent government action since the Microsoft case, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Guam, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleging that Facebook has employed anticompetitive tactics that allowed it to bully and bury rivals. The filing, after an 18-month investigation, recommends breaking up the company.

“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition,” said the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who led the state group, at a news conference. “By using its vast troves of data and money, Facebook has squashed or hindered what the company perceived to be potential threats.”

The F.T.C., which is charged with protecting consumers from corporate dominance, has ducked its responsibilities many times over the years when it comes to tech companies. It has finally decided in the waning days of the Trump administration to go for broke.

Facebook will bring its enormous power to bear against the agency, which has only some 1,100 employees and a paltry budget of $330 million. In contrast, Facebook’s revenue rose sharply to $21.5 billion in its most recent quarter, giving it ample resources to add to its already ample resources.

“It will be the lawyer employment act of 2020,” one regulator joked to me about the prospect of Facebook sucking up every hired legal gun in Washington to battle the F.T.C. and the states.

But it’s no joke. And Facebook would be wise to mount the strongest possible defense since the stars are finally aligned for serious antitrust action. In this case, the stars include the feds, the states — and also a bipartisan group of legislators.

For those of us who have been paying attention, the need for this legal action has been obvious for a long time. The unchecked growth of some tech companies has been a challenge to new entrants and ultimately a dampener of innovation. And with unfettered power, Big Tech companies have become bullies, armed with fists full of data, acquired through outsize market share, to keep them at the top of the heap.

Which is why it is amusing that Facebook’s first response to the lawsuit has been to act like a victim. It’s a feint that those of us covering Silicon Valley have had to listen to for years, where those with most weaponry cry most plaintively about being under siege.

The poor-little-me act is tiresome enough, but Facebook is doubling down on the whine by claiming that the F.T.C. cannot re-evaluate deals from years past.

“The most important fact in this case, which the commission does not mention in its 53-page complaint, is that it cleared these acquisitions years ago,” Jennifer Newstead, Facebook’s canny general counsel, said in a statement. “The government now wants a do-over, sending a chilling warning to American business that no sale is ever final.”

That’s laughable and disingenuous. The agency never actually approved the deals in question, specifically Facebook’s purchase of the Instagram social photo service in 2012 for $1 billion and the WhatsApp messaging service acquisition in 2014 for $19 billion. Rather, the government simply did not step in to stop the acquisitions.

Think of it more like regrets that are now being resolved, using proof — and an unearthed spate of mine-mine-mine emails from the Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. His missives make it clearer than it was possible back then that Facebook sucked up possible competitors in order to eliminate challenges to its hegemony. And so, in hindsight, it’s time to rewind to unwind.

by Kara Swisher, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock

B.B. King

via:
[ed. Vaccines! omg let's see how long this will take to get politicized. See also: Supply Is Limited and Distribution Uncertain as COVID Vaccine Rolls Out (KHN)]

2020: The Year in Pictures

A Year Like No Other (NY Times)
Image: Lam Yik Fei

On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

Among the other problems with the LA Times’s editor’s statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). The Hill just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo (or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them, and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national marriage.

by Rebecca Solnit, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Universal’s Bob Dylan Catalog Buy Is About Survival

In the 24 hours since Bob Dylan sold his peerless songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group for a nine-figure sum, discussion has, understandably, centered on Dylan himself.

I keep hearing the same two questions: Will this affect the way fans digest his music? (No, but expect to hear his hits in more perfume commercials.) And what might have been Dylan’s motivation for selling his crown jewels now? (Music catalogs are fetching all-time-high prices, he’s nearly 80 years old, and Joe Biden may significantly hike taxes on big U.S. asset sales when he becomes president.)

What hasn’t drawn as much attention is the motivation of the buyer, Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), which my sources indicate paid closer to $400 million than $300 million to get Dylan’s 600 songs. Obviously, Dylan’s catalog is one of the most evergreen collections of music to ever be committed to notation. As Universal boss Sir Lucian Grainge said in an internal email yesterday: “In an instant, we have forever transformed the legacy of this company.” He hinted that UMPG won the deal against stiff industry competition because of its historical pedigree: “That this opportunity came to us was no accident,” he wrote. “When you put songwriters first, when you achieve unparalleled value for the art they create, when your track record is clear and consistent then the best of the best come to you.”

Grainge’s choice of words here is very deliberate. The “clear and consistent track record” comment is an obvious slight against newer companies — like Hipgnosis Songs Fund and Primary Wave — which have recently been nibbling into Universal’s market share. These firms have quickly acquired triple-A publishing catalogs from the likes of Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, Stevie Nicks, and Mark Ronson, using institutional investor money to pay more than traditional music companies like Universal are willing to.

Universal’s Dylan acquisition, then, is a landmark statement from the world’s biggest music rights company: We’re not going to sit back and just let the greatest music in history be auctioned off to Wall Street under our nose.

Which raises the question: Who’s this statement for? To a degree, it’s for the current investors of Universal’s publicly-traded French parent Vivendi. But here’s the thing: Vivendi has confirmed Universal Music Group will be spun out for an IPO in 2022. In doing so, it’s deliberately seeded excitement amongst new would-be investors, who have seen music rights become one of the most reliable growth assets of the pandemic era.

The bear-case counterargument on Universal is that it has allowed cash-rich industry upstarts to reduce its commercial leverage; maybe, critics have said, Universal doesn’t have the fight or the funds to buy triple-A catalogs in the modern era. So — as its two-fingers to the financial naysayers — Universal went out and snatched up 600 Bob Dylan songs.

The Dylan buy is Universal putting a flag in the ground that reads, “We’re still Number One, and we’re staying that way.” The company wants to demonstrate its ability to survive, long-term, as king of the jungle — and, of course, to drive that future IPO price through the roof.

This is a trend amongst the major music companies, by the way — a public fightback against existential threats to their dominant position — that has really come to the fore during the pandemic. In October, Warner Music Group took the unusual step of raising $250 million in debt with the express intention of spending it on two acquisitions, at a combined cost of $338 million. My sources suggest that one of these deal, which took up the majority of the $338 million, saw Warner quietly acquire the publishing catalog of an all-time giant of music.

by Tim Ingram, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Gianni Schicchi/AP

Arnold Hagström, The Flower 2015
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We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .

To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that Moderna should have been allowed to roll out its vaccine in February or even in May, when interim results from its Phase I trial demonstrated its basic safety. “That would be like saying we put a man on the moon and then asking the very same day, ‘What about going to Mars?’ ” says Nicholas Christakis, who directs Yale’s Human Nature Lab and whose new book, Apollo’s Arrow, sketches the way COVID-19 may shape our near-term future. Moderna’s speed was “astonishing,” Christakis says, though the design of other vaccines was nearly as fast: BioNTech with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca.

Could things have moved faster from design to deployment? Given the grim prospects for winter, it is tempting to wonder. Perhaps, in the future, we will. But given existing vaccine infrastructure, probably not. Already, as Baylor’s Peter Hotez pointed out to me, “Operation Warp Speed” meant running clinical trials simultaneously rather than sequentially, manufacturing the vaccine at the same time, and authorizing the vaccine under “emergency use” in December based only on preliminary data that doesn’t track the long-term durability of protection or even measure the vaccine’s effect on transmission (only how much it protects against disease). And as Georgetown virologist Angela Rasmussen told me, the name itself may have needlessly risked the trust of Americans already concerned about the safety of this, or any, vaccine. Indeed, it would have been difficult in May to find a single credentialed epidemiologist, vaccine researcher, or public-health official recommending a rapid vaccine rollout — though, it’s worth noting, as early as July the MIT Technology Review reported that a group of 70 scientists in the orbit of Harvard and MIT, including “celebrity geneticist” George Church, were taking a totally DIY nasal-spray vaccine, never even intended to be tested, and developed by a personal genomics entrepreneur named Preston Estep (also the author of a self-help-slash-life-extension book called The Mindspan Diet). China began administering a vaccine to its military in June. Russia approved its version in August. And while most American scientists worried about the speed of those rollouts, and the risks they implied, our approach to the pandemic here raises questions, too, about the strange, complicated, often contradictory ways we approach matters of risk and uncertainty during a pandemic — and how, perhaps, we might think about doing things differently next time. That a vaccine was available for the entire brutal duration may be, to future generations trying to draw lessons from our death and suffering, the most tragic, and ironic, feature of this plague.

For all of modern medical history, Christakis writes in Apollo’s Arrow, vaccines and cures for infectious disease have typically arrived, if they arrive, only in the end stage of the disease, once most of the damage had already been done and the death rate had dramatically declined. For measles, for scarlet fever, for tuberculosis, for typhoid, the miracle drugs didn’t bring rampant disease to a sudden end — they shut the door for good on outbreaks that had largely died out already. This phenomenon is called the McKeown hypothesis — that medical interventions tend to play only a small role compared to public-health measures, socioeconomic advances, and the natural dynamics of the disease as it spreads through a population. The new coronavirus vaccines have arrived at what counts as warp speed, but not in time to prevent what CDC director Robert Redfield predicts will be “the most difficult time in the public-health history of this nation,” and do not necessarily represent a reversal of the McKeown hypothesis: The country may still reach herd immunity through natural disease spread, Christakis says, at roughly the same time as the rollout of vaccines is completed. Redfield believes there may be 200,000 more American deaths to come. This would mean what Christakis calls a “once-in-a-century calamity” had unfolded start-to-finish between the time the solution had been found and the time we felt comfortable administering it. A half a million American lives would have been lost in the interim. Around the world, considerably more. (...)

The treatment dilemmas facing physicians and patients in the early stages of a novel pandemic are, of course, not the same as the dilemma of rushing a new vaccine to a still-healthy population — we defer to the judgment of desperate patients, with physicians inclined to try to help them, but not to the desires of vaccine candidates, no matter how desperate. An unsafe vaccine, like the one for polio that killed ten and paralyzed 200 in 1955, could cause medical disaster and public-health backlash — though, as Balloux points out, since none of the new coronavirus vaccines use real viral material, that kind of accident, which affected one in a thousand recipients, would be impossible. (These days, one adverse impact in a million is the rule-of-thumb threshold of acceptability.) An ineffective vaccine could also give false security to those receiving it, thereby helping spread the disease by providing population-scale license to irresponsible behavior (indoor parties, say, or masklessness). But on other matters of population-level guidance, our messaging about risk has been erratic all year, too. In February and March, we were warned against the use of masks, in part on the grounds that a false sense of security would lead to irresponsible behavior — on balance, perhaps the most consequential public-health mistake in the whole horrid pandemic. In April, with schools already shut, we closed playgrounds. In May, beaches — unable or unwilling to live with even the very-close-to-zero risk of socializing outside (often shaming those who gathered there anyway). But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall. The whole time, we also knew that the Moderna vaccine was essentially safe. We were just waiting to know for sure that it worked, too.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

“We do this every year for influenza,” Rasmussen says. “We don’t know which influenza viruses are going to be circulating, so we make our best guess. And then we formulate that into a vaccine using essentially the same technology platform that all the other influenza vaccines are based on.” The whole process takes a few months, and utilizes a “platform” that we already know is basically safe. With enough funding, you could do the same for viral pandemics, and indeed conduct Phase I trials for the entire set of possible future outbreaks before any of them made themselves known to the public. In the case of a pandemic produced by a new strain in these families, you might want to do some limited additional safety testing, but because the most consequential adverse effects take place in the days right after the vaccine is given, that additional diligence could be almost immediate.

by David Wallace-Wells, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/AP2009

The Problem With Hashtag Activism

In the thirteen years since Twitter’s inception, users from every political stripe have launched countless campaigns, many of which have subsequently been covered or even adopted by traditional media and become household names. In #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, authors Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles propose that Twitter has become an important tool for activists to “advocate, mobilize and communicate.” They say the platform itself has become a powerful counterpublic for marginalized groups, who use Twitter’s hashtag function to facilitate political coalitions and networks. More specifically, the book investigates one particular corner of Twitter activism, defined by a distinct political culture that is liberal, social-justice oriented, consciousness focused, identitarian, intersectionalist, minoritarian, and moralist.

Even reducing the scope of their study to this particular online culture, it would be impossible for the authors to cover their subject in thorough detail. To their credit, the book is focused and provides an honest and dutiful record of the major campaigns of social justice hashtag activism, outlining a history, a trajectory, and a digital landscape. Curiously, though, the authors’ accounts of these campaigns only serve to thoroughly — almost relentlessly — contradict the book’s techno-optimist thesis, page after page, from the very beginning. (...)

In the larger world, it is difficult to spot a victory or any lasting legacy of power among even hugely popular campaigns like #OccupyWallStreet, #ArabSpring, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo. Occupy Wall Street fizzled, the Arab Spring flopped, George Zimmerman walks free, and police murders of black people have not decreased. While it’s true that a few of the high-profile voices of #MeToo managed to punish and even lock up a few of their higher-profile predators (and publicly censure a few more harmless perverts), no meaningful legislation has been passed to protect or empower ordinary women in the workplace. The campaigns featured in #HashtagActivism have given us little more than the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, the cancellation of a TV cooking show, and the forestalling of a few tawdry book deals.

Who Runs Twitter Town?

In the introduction to #HashtagActivism, the authors are quick to reference academic and “techno-sociologist” Zeynep Tufekci, who observes that Twitter activism “looks very different from traditional, institutional-based politics — a kind of democratic participation that is inclined toward a horizontal, identity-based movement-building that arrives out of grievances and claims.” Like the authors, I would agree with Tufekci’s characterization.

It comes as no surprise, however, that they don’t engage further with Tufekci’s work, or even mention the title of her 2017 book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. As one of the first academics writing on technology and movement-building, Tufekci has been openly and consistently skeptical of social media’s “transformative” potential since at least 2014. Unlike Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, she engages with the history of progressive online activism as a series of failures that she subjects to critical analysis and comparative-historical investigation.

Tufekci does not regard social media as a poison tree capable of bearing only poison fruit, per se, but she is not naive about the digital means of production. In talks and in print, she has illustrated that governments and capital have far more power than the masses over social media, which they often use to spy, censor, and misinform with impunity. (...)

The free and easy voluntarism of posting and content creation obscures an essential fact: the internet is deceptively vulnerable to corporate manipulation — in many ways, far more so than print, radio, or television. Consider TV: the owners create content, the audience consumes it and judges its value, and the government regulates programming, sometimes ever so slightly, even if only under massive public pressure. With the internet, the audience is invited to create their own content (generally for free), and the owners are largely rentiers or digital landlords that remain totally unaccountable for anything that happens on their preserve. Meanwhile, in the United States, the government and its attendant regulatory bodies are either in bed with big tech or can’t even remember their email passwords.

It is difficult to determine whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is uninterested in or merely incapable of regulating the internet, and while advocates of free speech or even basic democracy should regard any attempt to do so with a healthy skepticism, it is significant that you can’t sue a tech company for abuse, harassment, stalking, libel, slander, or defamation that occurs on their platform. What little regulation is adopted is largely designed by the tech companies themselves, and it’s easily sidestepped when convenient. In the United States, the internet operates unlike any other form of media in that it is not subject to the rules that are, at least theoretically, imposed by representatives of the people. With all this in mind, it is difficult to imagine online activity as a revolutionary home base. The omnipotent rulers of these companies yield no transparency, accountability, or democratic control to users, the majority of whom do not display the dedicated platform loyalty of the activists in #HashtagActivism.

Twitter Is on Its Way Out

Even if the public gained some sort of democratic control over Twitter, we would be extremely late to the party. Internet users tend to cycle through social media platforms as they emerge, particularly as new platforms target youth markets with the promise of a parent-free online experience. At this point, Twitter is distinctly millennial, with younger users initially defecting to Instagram, then Snapchat, and now TikTok. Social media platforms also produce their own self-selecting demographics, which are never a particularly representative cross-section of anything. Since online activism is entirely voluntarist, and therefore siloed (“networks” work for the Right as well), mediums for communication will always be a moving target. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok — as our options expand, the crowds disperse.

Twitter users are not only more insular and itinerant than the authors seem to imagine, there are actually very few of them, relatively speaking. A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that only about 22 percent of American adults use Twitter, and they tend to be younger and more progressive than the average American. Moreover, about 80 percent of tweets are produced by 20 percent of accounts, meaning the majority of activity on Twitter comes from a very small (and ever shrinking) number of highly active users. In February 2019, Twitter publicly announced their active user numbers for the first time; previously, the company only publicized their user “growth,” a percentage that was said to be padded with bots and dead accounts. After their grand reveal indicated a much smaller and still shrinking user base, they decided to no longer inform the public about their platform’s numbers.

Even without an accurate inventory of users, the material account of hashtag activism’s record to date exposes it as a midwife to impotent movements that grow and die far too quickly on undemocratic platforms that are corporate-controlled and fleetingly faddish. But what if we could fix all of that? What if we had a social media platform of our very own, one that corrected the aforementioned flaws? Could there be a platform of the people, a publicly controlled fixture that would attract a critical mass of users, with an architecture that patiently fosters the specialization of talents and skills that would herd all the cats of social justice, laying the groundwork for a deft, unified, and democratic organization? Assuming for a moment that such a thing is possible, would it even be desirable?

Can Social Media Be Social?

Once again in clear opposition to the conclusions of #HashtagActivism, Tufekci argues that the rapidity of the growth and spread of online-borne movements may be a potentially intractable obstacle, rather than an advantage, as the speed of horizontalism only seems to foster a specific kind of social formation: the undifferentiated mass. She observes the “tactical freeze” these sprawling movements are inevitably saddled with, as they expand into erratic, unwieldy, unstable blobs, incapable of specialization or coordination. Eventually, they become movements that are unable to move, so they stall out, then dissolve. Tufekci contrasts this life cycle with the slow, heavily coordinated, and decidedly very unspontaneous activism of the civil rights movement, concluding that the March on Washington succeeded as a result of these traditional organizing strategies, while Occupy Wall Street (along with so many other gods that failed) always crumble for lack of them.

Herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of movement-building in #HashtagActivism. It’s true that political sentiments irradiated by the internet do experience remarkably rapid growth — but so does a tumor. The impressive speed and size of online movements are too often mistaken for viability and maturity, when, in fact, the accelerated development of online activism belies a deadly progeria: it burns hotly, brightly, and briefly, often with nothing to show in the end but a glut of forgettable, disposable content and the emotional exhaustion of participants (and perhaps a monograph or two).

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: David McNew/Getty Images

Student Loan Horror Stories

Whether it’s CNBC telling us what issues mattered to the young in the presidential election, or Yahoo! Finance telling us the big winners in the 2020 election were “young people and student voters,” or Forbes telling us “young people with student loan debt have a harder time reaching financial milestones,” the student loan controversy is almost universally presented as a “youth” issue.

This is the first of many deceptions baked into coverage of one of the more misunderstood and misreported issues of our time. Student loans matter to older people, too. In fact, that’s the problem. They matter far too much, to too many older people.

“People that are 45 years and older, that's where the student loan problem is a real issue,” says “Chris,” who took out his first loan in 1981. “Because those are the people that normally would have the highest balances.”

Now 59, Chris asks to tell his story under a pseudonym, to protect the service industry career he’s built in part with the hope of someday escaping his student debt.

“In the realm I'm in now, I don't really advertise the fact that I owe $236,000,” he sighs.

It’s often argued that forgiving student debt would unfairly punish other groups, particularly those who “did the right thing” and paid off their loans. In truth, political changes have already punished plenty of student loan holders. Chris is a prime example.

He grew up in the Midwest, and began studying philosophy and political science at Southwest Missouri State (now called Missouri State) in 1980. He began paying for his undergrad studies upfront, a decision that would have fateful consequences. He entered school just as Americans were electing Ronald Reagan, who wanted to dramatically re-order federal spending priorities. Among his first acts: raising the interest rates for some federally-guaranteed student loans from 7% to 9%.

“What’s really ironic,” Chris says, “is that if I hadn't paid cash the first year and a half that I was in college, my loans would have gotten locked in at a much lower rate.”

Paying the Reagan rate instead of the pre-Reagan rate was Chris’s first political misfortune. The second kicked in years later, in the mid-eighties, by which time he’d transferred to the University of Missouri-Columbia, graduated with a B.A., entered and completed a grad program there, and moved on to Joe Biden’s Alma Mater at Syracuse law. He left graduate school owing $14,000, and left law school with a total balance of $79,000.

He thought he’d be graduating with a law degree, and expected to be able to make his payments. Part of his calculation involved the fact that student loan interest was once tax-deductible, much like mortgage interest. But the Tax Reform Act of 1986 began a see-sawing journey for the student loan deduction, essentially eliminating it as a personal deduction for a time.

“I looked at education as a capital expenditure,” Chris says. “Part of my strategy was, is that the interest would always be tax-deductible. So that would at least give me a little bit of a [cushion] in making my payments, because, I would have that tax deduction.”

After they changed the law, “It was like, ‘Wow, this is going to be difficult, this is going to be interesting.’” (...)

In 2002, Chris got a middle-level job with one of the world’s larger service-industry companies. His first position paid him $28,000 a year, but he didn’t see much of that money. In 2004, his wages began to be garnished. A single federal lender can garnish up to 15% of “disposable” pay, i.e. what’s left over after mandatory withholdings. If there is more than one lender, they may garnish a maximum of 25% of wages.

Chris’s pay was garnished at 15% from 2004-2011, and at 25% from 2011 on. He paid, but didn’t gain ground, thanks to another painful quirk of the system, involving the order of obligation.

“They apply your penalties first, then your interest, then your principal,” he says. “So really they're guaranteeing that you're never going to pay down your loans.”

Into his second decade of garnishment, Chris was paying pure penalties, fees, and interest, not touching a dollar of principal. Although the government had since re-introduced some student loan interest deductions, these were capped at $2500 per year. “At the height of my garnishment, I was paying $900 every two weeks,” he says.

by Matt Taibbi, TK News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited