Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 129
March 22, 2018
What you need to know about the Facebook controversy
Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: Getty/David Ramos)
Over the weekend, work by a company called Cambridge Analytica edged into the news, courtesy of a New York Times examination of how the company got hold of private data of 50 million U.S. Facebook users and turned the data into a psycho-political weapon for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
While there may be little here overtly criminal outside of the question of possibly having hacked into Facebook, it immediately presented a fascinating look inside modern politics — complete with Russian links. The Times was working with the Observer of London and The Guardian, which presented a terrific insider’s view from Christopher Wylie, the company’s oddball founder. The detail and the sheer brashness of their work are telling.
Wylie went on television yesterday in a mea culpa apology for work he did for Cambridge Analytica. By the end of the day, a British television company released “hidden” videos it had captured with Cambridge’s leaders offering to sell its trickery to other political operations, including the one the TV station was pretending it was.
A Canadian, Wylie was 24 when he thought up the company as a data analytics company that would polish its brazenness in the Brexit election in Britain before accepting a huge investment from Robert Mercer, the New York political conservative and turned the company’s attention to Stephen K. Bannon, who joined the company, and the Trump campaign. Now legislators on both sides of the Atlantic want to know a lot more about how private Facebook information ended up in their hands, whether the result of a breach or actual participation by Facebook, and how Cambridge Analytica was able to politically weaponize the information to target would-be voters.
As The Guardian quotes Wylie, in 2014, he went to work for Bannon, then the executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart, “to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology — information operations — then turn it on the U.S. electorate.”
It was Wylie who oversaw that effort, and who, by his own description, was among a handful of individuals who pursued threads that linked Brexit and Trump to Russians. Wylie’s story also outlines how Cambridge Analytica had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. It also discusses that Cambridge’s British parent company, SCL, has agreements in place with the State Department to develop personality information.
The effort by the three newspapers relied on documents and inside witnesses to the effort. It is likely to build a new path of investigation for Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Already, Congress members and Massachusetts’ attorney general are calling for hearings with Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg, whose lawyers say Facebook never was hacked.
Again, let’s assert that all of this is very detailed, with different levels of sourcing, in which it is unclear what may have violated our communal sense of security as opposed to what has crossed criminal lines. But that is exactly why these easy, partisan calls either for immediate impeachment or to abandon the Mueller investigation defy the levels of complexity in all of these investigations.
In order to get the footage, a Channel 4 News reporter “posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.” In one clip, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, appears to suggest to the undercover reporter that he could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house” as a means of getting dirt on the opponent.
In another, Nix suggests covertly taping a bribery attempt and posting the video on the Internet.
It was Wylie who “came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the U.S., and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup. We ‘broke’ Facebook, he says, adding that he did it on behalf of Steve Bannon.
Asked whether he hacked Facebook, he said, “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.” Indeed, as things turned out, Facebook invited them in under a paid survey program, technically not a hack, but an unintended collection of data, for sure.
In more formal statements and inquiries, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica personnel have denied hacking into Facebook and questioned whether Cambridge still has Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix has said, “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data,” though that is at odds with other information and Wylie’s description. Between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been gathered. Wylie has a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers saying that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately. In any event, Facebook has known about this since 2015 and said nothing.
Among other things, Cambridge Analytica had on staff a data miner named Aleksandr Kogan, Russian born U.S. citizen. According to Wylie, it was Kogan, a professor at Cambridge University in Britain and St. Petersburg State University in Russia, who had the skills in the Brexit situation to duplicate the information from a paid personality survey that allowed them to find information from “friends,” and turned into a collection that reached millions, giving Cambridge Analytica its own big data set. Wylie’s account says Kogan obtained Facebook permission to draw on private information for research purposes only. Under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.
“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So, they were like, ‘Fine.’ ”
Kogan maintains that everything he did was legal and he had a “close working relationship” with Facebook, which had granted him permission for his apps.
Cambridge Analytica had its data. This was the foundation of everything it did next — how it extracted psychological insights from the “seeders” and then built an algorithm to profile millions more, reported The Guardian. Wylie said, “Everything was built on the back of that data. The models, the algorithm. Everything. Why wouldn’t you use it in your biggest campaign ever?”
Wylie said that Cambridge Analytica pitched its services to other non-election businesses, including Lukoil, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, which had interest in reaching international customers. It is reported that the Mueller investigation is pursuing this connection as an example of trying to reach U.S. voters rather than oil consumers. Like all big Russian companies, Lukoil has connections to newly reelected Russian president Vladimir Putin.
There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica ever did any work for Lukoil. What these documents show, though, is that in 2014 one of Russia’s biggest companies was fully briefed on: Facebook, micro-targeting, data, election disruption, reported The Guardian.
For its part, Facebook has cut off Rogan, Wylie and others from Cambridge Analytica. But clearly, it faces a future of questions about security, the use of private data in political terms and its business model of selling advertising to targeted audiences.
None of this sounds like a specific U.S. crime (there may be civil penalties from outstanding consent degrees involving privacy) by Facebook or Cambridge Analytica or even the Trump campaign, but it is pretty interesting stuff about how rotten the digital persuasion techniques have become and how they have become fundamental to politics.
March 21, 2018
Zuckerberg breaks silence, vows to take measures to protect user data
Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: Getty/Redrigo Buendia)
In true Mark Zuckerberg fashion, the billionaire tech CEO broke his silence amid a multifold setback for Facebook, the company he co-founded in his Harvard dorm. In a long-winded post which detailed the timeline of events leading up to the Cambridge Analytica data breach, Zuckerberg pledged to take steps to prevent a disaster like this from recurring.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
The announcement follows news that Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profile company, violated the privacy of millions of people without their knowing in order to help propel Donald Trump to victory in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, Facebook is being accused of potentially breaking American and British laws for failing to disclose that their data had been used by an outside firm. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is reportedly preparing to launch an investigation into the matter. Investors are suing the social media company in the wake of the news.
Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg has remained silent — until now. In his post, he outlines the timeline of events regarding the relationship Facebook had with Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan. In 2013, according to Zuckerberg, Kogan created a personality quiz app that was installed by nearly 300,000 people around the world. These people reportedly shared their data — and unknowingly, the data of their friends, too.
“Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data,” Zuckerberg writes.
In 2014, Zuckerberg explains, the platform made changes to restrict the data that apps could access. Apps like the one Kogan built couldn’t access friends’ data without unless their friends had also authorized the app.
In 2015, The Guardian reported that Kogan allegedly shared the data he acquired from his app with Cambridge Analytica during the Ted Cruz campaign.
“We immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data,” Zuckerberg explain. “They provided these certifications.”
“Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified,” Zuckerberg continued. “We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We’re also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.”
Kogan has publicly said that he doesn’t believe he broke Facebook’s policy, however.
This breach of trust has, according to Zuckerberg, inspired a new round of limitations to be implemented moving forward. Facebook is reportedly now launching an audit on all apps that had access to large amounts of information before access was reduced in 2014. Any developer unwilling to comply with the audit will be banned and everyone affected by those apps will be notified. Facebook will also be removing access to users’ data from apps that users haven’t used in three months; moreover, the company plans to limit the data accessible by apps to only name, profile photo, and email address. Finally, Facebook is claiming that it will be more transparent in showing users how to revoke apps’ permissions to data.
“While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn’t change what happened in the past,” Zuckerberg concluded. “We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”
It has yet to be determined if this apology will be well-received by Facebook followers, or if this will continue to push people away.
Now we know who Trump really is
(Credit: Getty/Nicholas Kamm)
You need know only two things about the Trump presidency to understand what kind of man he is. We learned fairly early on that the Trump administration is the first in memory to bar release of its daily logs of visitors to the White House. More recently, we learned that Trump demanded from the start that all senior White House staff sign NDA’s, non-disclosure agreements, similar to the contracts signed by the employees of the Trump Organization and his campaign.
These are not actions taken by the president of a democracy. They are the actions of a dictator.
You cannot look to our nation’s past to find similar policies put in place by an American president. Do you think Barack Obama, or George Bush, or Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon had the temerity to conceal the identities of those with whom they met in carrying out the nation’s business? Do you think they thought of themselves as so all-powerful that they could contractually demand the kind of loyalty represented by signing a non-disclosure pact? You have to look overseas, to totalitarian regimes headed by dictatorial strongmen, to find anything comparable.
It took intervention with a lawsuit filed by the good-government group Public Citizen to get the logs of a few offices within the Executive Office of the President, including the Office of Management and Budget, released to the public. The names of all other visitors to the White House — everyone who sees the President, say, or the chief of staff, or “senior adviser” Jared Kushner — are kept secret. The Secret Service, which maintains the White House logs, has been instructed to forward all of the logs not covered by the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to the White House Office of Records Management, which is exempted from FOIA requests. That office has said that once the logs of visitors are received from the Secret Service, they are destroyed.
The non-disclosure agreements signed by White House staff are said to forbid talking about any “confidential” information, defined as “all non-public information I learn of or gain access to in the course of my official duties,” according to the Washington Post. One report on the White House NDA’s said that violation of the contracts could result in a $10 million fine payable to the federal government. Whether or not these contracts are enforceable — and legal experts say they aren’t – is beside the point. They are evidence that Trump cares only about loyalty to himself, not to the Constitution or the nation.
It is perhaps one of the greater ironies of the Trump presidency that his White House has leaked more to the press than any administration in memory. The latest leak to come out was the recent revelation that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met in the White House with the head of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, and the CEO of Citigroup, just before both of those financial giants loaned more than a half billion dollars to Kushner’s private real estate company. The only reason we know that the two Kushner meetings is because someone in the White House talked to the press. If Trump had his way, knowledge of those meetings would have never been released, and if the identity of the person who revealed the meetings became known, he or she would have faced punishment under the flawed NDA’s that were signed.
I am focusing on these two policies because they are overt, tangible evidence of totalitarian actions taken by President Trump. But we have had plenty of other evidence of Trump’s totalitarian instincts. Since the beginning, it’s been evident that Trump is a bully who enjoys intimidating and pushing around anyone he thinks is in his way.
Remember “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” during the primaries? Trump’s bullying monikers for his opponents got a lot less amusing when “Crooked Hillary” morphed into chants of “lock her up” at the Republican National Convention and during his rallies. Back then, we had no way to know that he would turn the “lock her up” rallying cry into a very real threat when he started tweeting demands that his Attorney General use the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute his former opponent for imaginary crimes involving uranium sold to Russia and the Clinton Foundation. This is not the way the presidents of democracies ordinarily act, but it is the way that dictators act all the time. A glance at prosecutions of opponents by the totalitarian regimes in Turkey and Russia tells you all you need to know. The only two leaders Trump speaks highly of consistently are Putin and Erdogan.
We know that Trump is an inveterate liar because the Washington Post has keep an actual running count of his lies (now topping 2,436) since he took office. There is another word for lying on this scale. It is propaganda, and Trump doesn’t just rely on his own lies to mislead the public. He has had his spokesman deliver lies from the podium in the White House press room quite literally since the day he took office, when Sean Spicer tried to make the laughable case that Trump’s inauguration was the best attended in history.
Trump and his people have lied repeatedly that they had no contacts with Russians during the campaign, even as it was revealed that such contacts were regular and frequent. His cabinet secretaries have lied about everything from their travel arrangements to how they expend taxpayer dollars to the qualifications of those they have nominated to positions within their departments. The only difference between the Trump administration and those of totalitarian leaders in other countries is that Trump doesn’t actually have a formal Department of Propaganda, although his press operations throughout the government effectively function as one.
Trump made it a feature of his White House to put members of his own family into positions of responsibility and power, and he loaded up his cabinet and administration with wealthy cronies who had no qualifications whatsoever for the jobs they were appointed to. Dictators of totalitarian regimes do the same thing. The recent interview on “60 Minutes” by his Secretary of Education, Betsy deVos, is as far as you need to go to understand how woefully unprepared and ignorant Trump’s appointees have been. Can you imagine Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, or Rick Perry, Secretary of Energy, doing any better? At least Rex Tillerson, while not exactly a towering figure in the world of foreign policy, had run an organization of equivalent size to the State Department and had negotiated business deals in countries all over the world. But now Trump has pushed Tillerson out, along with a plethora of senior staff at the White House, some of whom he hasn’t bothered replacing.
According to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Trump is said to be “more confident” in his job now that he has consolidated his power and gotten rid of some of the “adults in the room” who were supposed to be keeping him in check. Chief economic adviser Gary Cohn was supposed to be one of the people who would blunt Trump’s worst instincts. At least that’s what we have been told by Republican pooh-bahs who have sought to compartmentalize the President by pointing to “good Trump” (tax cuts for the rich) while ignoring or trying to conceal “bad Trump” (Russiagate, Stormy Daniels, tweeting, ignorance of and hostility to policy).
But there never was a “good Trump.” There is just Trump, and he made it crystal clear who he is when he called Vladimir Putin yesterday, against the advice of his national security team. Presidents of free nations don’t call brutal dictators and congratulate them on their fake “electoral victories,” but fellow dictators do.
Hey, Joe Biden: Your macho fantasies about a Trump beatdown don’t help women
Former vice president Joe Biden (Credit: Getty/Scott Olson)
Let no one say Joe Biden doesn’t know how to work a crowd. Speaking at a University of Miami rally for sexual assault prevention on Tuesday, the former vice president reportedly earned an enthusiastic reaction by slamming President Donald Trump’s misogyny. Addressing Trump’s comments about women captured on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that was released about a month before Trump won the 2016 election, Biden went all-in with a headline-grabbing zinger.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” Biden said. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
Biden also took a shot at Trump’s “locker room talk” defense. “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” he added. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest SOB in the room.”
Biden’s never been wrong when he’s scoffed at the idea of debating Trump. You might as well debate the wind, or an airline gate agent. His pugnacious punchline, on the other hand — that carefully crafted combo of derring-do mixed with scrappy honor that screams Vintage Uncle Joe — could use some work.
I want to state for the record that it’s not easy for me to criticize the guy. In addition to having a sharp mind and a long record of solid civic work and leadership, Joe Biden is also the human embodiment of everything I love about dogs: unabashedly emotional, loyal to the core, stout of heart, willing to throw himself in front of a dangerous animal or a Trump to save someone else from harm. You don’t have to be too deep in the edibles to wonder, am I living up to the potential Joe Biden might see in me?
But if I can’t put on my humorless feminist pants when talking about the prevention of sexual assault, when can I? If we’re going to make the most of this #MeToo momentum and create an opportunity for meaningful progress, we have to break some old toxic-masculinity habits.
Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit, even for powerful allies. Can we declare a moratorium on glorifying violence, on celebrating the patriarchal ideal of man as enforcer and protector, and on equating (even in the inverse) athletic prowess with good character? Because these ingrained cultural habits have historically not been kind to women and girls.
Taking someone behind the gym and beating the hell out of him is an ego-driven enterprise, a poor way of preventing future sexual assaults, and also — oh yeah! — an illegal criminal assault. Working to change the system — as Biden has done, notably with the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, which he later found out had made no dent in campus sexual-assault statistics — can be a hard and long, collaborative process where nobody gets exactly what they want and everyone has to live with the consequences of a failed attempt. If anyone could make that sound like a bad-ass mission — as much as roughing up a creep — it would be Joe Biden, which makes me wish he’d gone for that kind of mic-drop moment instead.
Biden has been on a speaking tour of college campuses in conjunction with the anti-sexual violence organization It’s On Us that he founded with President Barack Obama in 2014. About a year ago, as HuffPo reported, Biden hopped on a call with students to discuss ideas for combatting sexual assault on campuses, starting with the feedback he’d received from high school and college students about how to start:
Almost all of the students got back to him with the same answer: Get men involved.
“Ergo the phrase: ‘It’s on Us,’” Biden said. “It’s on all of us. It’s on the Chrises and the Joes and the Kyles; everybody on campus, everyone in the country who sees this violence occurring has an obligation to intervene. If you do not intervene you are an accessory. If you do not intervene you are sanctioning what happens.”
A colleague told me recently that a stranger emailed to ask her — obviously in good faith, of course — just what kind of outcome #MeToo “warriors” like her wanted. Her reply: “The endgame is actions having consequences.”
If it’s on every Chris and Kyle on campus to stop sexual violence — and I’m sorry to harsh the Fun Uncle Joe vibe here — we need to teach those guys how to take the work of advocating for women seriously. An entry-level lesson could be: “It’s not about you or your righteous rage,” followed by the more obvious but still important: “Violence is never an acceptable solution.”
Biden’s less glamorous mandate — “if you do not intervene, you are an accessory” — is a potential game-changer. If only a quote like that, along with some sense of what those interventions might need to look like, could grab a fraction of the headlines and Twitter love we give a Donald Trump beatdown fantasy.
The Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland really is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare
Krishanti Vignarajah (Credit: Mcarthur Newell)
While headlines this week have put one woman running this year for her state’s governor in the spotlight, women all across the nation are stepping up and throwing their hats into political ring for the critical 2018 elections. But Krish Vignarajah’s campaign out of Maryland is unique. When the democratic contender named former Baltimore Teachers Union president Sharon Blake as her running mate last month, it became the state’s first ever all-women of color ticket. “We have a strong, united vision,” Vignarajah said at the time, “a vision for leadership, a vision for public education, and a vision for elevating women and women of color to have a stronger, louder voice at the table and in the political process here in Maryland.”
In a field dominated still by older white males, Vignarajah, who came to America as a baby when her family fled Sri Lanka, isn’t trying to play by old boy’s club rules. The former policy director for Michelle Obama appears in her campaign ad tapping on her laptop, meeting with supporters and breastfeeding her baby daughter Alana. “I wanted to be true to my experience and message and why I am running,” she told The Cut this week, “and at the core of that is my daughter.”
Earlier this month, Salon spoke to Vignarajah — while she was en route to join in Baltimore student school walkouts — about the race in her state and the changing face of American politics.
I’m thinking about where we are in public education with our current administration and everything that’s been happening this year. There’s been so much attention specifically on Maryland and on the Baltimore schools and the problems that they’ve been having with heat and with supplies. There’s so much to talk about this generation of kids rising up, who are so affected by the problems in our schools and the problems of violence in our schools.
I’m actually the only candidate in the field who is a product of Maryland public schools from kindergarten through to 12th grade. [Both her parents were Maryland public school teachers.] I will tell you that for us it is very much about how we ensure our children have safe schools, because we’re so far from that right now. And what I think has been so heartening is the fact that you’re seeing our kids — knowing that this is the world they’re growing up in — taking the reins of power, more from a grassroots movement perspective. That’s why I hope that, by becoming governor, I can help them.
To your point about children stepping up in the way that I’ve never seen before, it is so heartening. I remember that Michelle Obama would say, “You know you have power literally in your own hands. Don’t just tweet about what you ate for lunch. Tweet about issues that you care about.”
We see the power of social media in terms of the Parkland survivors. They’re speaking out and they’re being heard. In terms of the broader movement, it is inspiring to see folks who have never been involved in politics getting off the sidelines. And that’s where I do think there is a groundswell of supporters who may never have been politically involved before realize what happens when folks get off the sidelines.
I’m curious about what it is that makes your ticket a model for what we’re going to be seeing going forward in the next couple of elections. It’s an all-female ticket, it’s an all-female-of-color ticket. You have a great investment, I’m sure, in what’s going on with immigration right now because of your own story of coming into this country when you were nine months old. It feels like I’m seeing so much change right now that gives me hope.
When I announced, one of the best pieces written was, “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare is running for governor of Maryland.”
I think we represent in many ways and the antithesis of Trump, but [we’re] not just being part of the oppositional resistance. For me, what I stress is that I don’t want to be viewed as just anti Trump or anti our current governor. I think people want a positive, affirmative agenda. That’s why people mobilize because people know what change we can bring about.
Maryland is a two-to-one Democratic state and yet we have a Republican governor. I think that on a range of issues, people realize what’s at stake. So every time Trump and his cabinet of billionaires attack public education, our natural resources, every time they try to deprive women, minorities, immigrants of their basic rights, or every time they question the legitimacy of intelligence agencies or even the free press, I do think we are reminding ourselves and voters of the consequences of elections. And that’s the stakes that compel me to run.
People like you, where you’re coming from politically, are connecting those dots between education and gun violence and domestic abuse and sexual harassment. They’re all part of the big picture.
I think that is in a sense that is a woman’s perspective. It’s the same way that it’s not like we have a work/life balance where we’re doing one thing and then we’re doing the other. We just end up doing it all at the same time. And I think part of that means that we do appreciate that we can talk about education and gun violence. I’m thinking about comprehensive policy. Part of that is including an issue like free hot and healthy school breakfasts and lunches. You realize that obviously affects [students] ability.
It’s little things like that. Or initiatives to make sure that there are free menstrual products in the schools. A girl can’t necessarily pay attention and focus in her classroom if she doesn’t have adequate protection when she’s on her period. And these are things that when you have a bunch of middle-aged men in power, they don’t even think about it.
I think we need to be destigmatizing a lot of these issues.
One of the things I’ve been really interested about in the way that you have present it yourself politically is that you are very clear, very unafraid to identify as a feminist, to identify as someone who is supporting girls and women, who is making that upfront and center issue.
For me it’s a personal view that I do hold very near and dear that especially the Democratic Party has relied on women and minorities, especially in the last few elections. And so my point is we’ve got to not just rely on our base to win elections, but also give them a choice to truly represent themselves. Senator Mikulski of our state has a saying that if you want to save democracy, elect more Democrats. And my point is that if you want to elect more Democrats, have our representatives look more like our base. It is so heartwarming and inspiring to see the marches and the excitement around women taking their rightful place.
But while it’s great to be rah rah, I also think we need to acknowledge that in many ways we’re further behind today than we were in the 1980s. So in Maryland it’s a great example of how staggeringly sad the statistics are. Out of federal and statewide offices, that’s eight congressman, two senators, lieutenant governor, governor, attorney general and comptroller, none of those positions are filled by women. And I’m running against [all] men.
Yes, we should be optimistic and positive, but you can’t take anything for granted, and that’s why I want us to own the set of issues that I’ve been talking about. By that I mean not just equal pay for equal work, but education and gun violence and the environment. All of these issues are all women’s issues. We are starting to not be shy about the fact that guys have run the ship for a very long time.
Women have so long had to self-deprecate in order to be accepted, in order not to be resented for our progress and our achievements.
I look at my daughters and I’m sure you look at your daughter and you just think, “I want them to not go through what I went through and I don’t want them to go through what my mother went through.” And a better world for our daughters is a better world for everybody.
I just want to make sure that we’re not having the same conversations in ten or twenty years. We need to have a change in power . . . . We have to have more diverse representation, and I mean that across the board. I mean gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, geographical location. And that’s where I think that we have fallen short for too many years.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
The other 12 apostles: giving an Irish revolutionary his due
The Twelve Apostles: Michael Collins, the Squad, and Ireland's Fight for Freedom by Tim Pat Coogan; Michael Collins (Credit: Getty/Hulton Archive/Skyhorse Publishing)
Excerpted with permission from The Twelve Apostles: Michael Collins, the Squad, and Ireland’s Fight for Freedom by Tim Pat Coogan.
It is my contention that Michael Collins was one of the most extraordinary men ever to have been born in Ireland. Collins’s remarkable qualities – as a man, a citizen, a commander and strategist – shine through the years; and to me, they gleam all the more brightly in this centenary year of the 1916 Rising. Almost thirty years ago, I wrote my biography of Collins – and he remains a major focus of my research today, because now I want to examine in detail one of his most extraordinary, and certainly most controversial, creations.
This was the Squad, or the Twelve Apostles: the names given to a small undercover unit controlled by Collins which operated in Ireland during the final era of British rule from Dublin Castle. It is crucial to note that the Apostles were by no means superbly resourced – indeed, the opposite is the case: the unit was only ever lightly armed: the original .38 pistols held by its members were eventually swapped for rather more powerful but still essentially modest .45 revolvers – and in such improbable fashion, these individuals took on the forces of a state that was equipped lavishly with artillery, machine guns, rifles and tanks. The real firepower of the Twelve Apostles, however, originated elsewhere, from sources that the state could neither control nor eliminate: from widespread public support among the Irish in Ireland and abroad (especially in the United States); from sheer idealism; and from an enormously potent intelligence-gathering operation that was also masterminded and run by Collins himself.
Collins was a difficult man. He let off steam by wild bouts of furniture-smashing and wrestling matches. He was given to practical jokes that were not all that funny. He had a volcanic temper, and he could be bullying. Yet he was the Squad’s alpha and omega; the story begins and ends with this fascinating and controversial character. One man’s freedom fighter is, after all, another man’s terrorist – and nobody in modern Irish history encapsulates this slogan more fully than Collins, who can well be described as both a freedom fighter and a terrorist.
Indeed, Michael Collins was a walking contradiction of a man. He was both an idealist and a realist, with the two conflicting parts fused together by his genius and his incredible energy, his ruthlessness and his compassion. His idealism had taken him into Dublin’s General Post Office during the 1916 Rising, but the first of his reasons for forming the Squad is contained in recollections following this traumatic week in Dublin. He told his friend Kevin O’Brien (as I record in my biography “Michael Collins”) that:
It is so easy to fault the actions of others when their particular actions have resulted in defeat. I want to be quite fair about this – The Easter Rising – and say how much I admired the men in the ranks and the womenfolk thus engaged. But at the same time – as it must appear to others also – the actions of the leaders should not pass without comment.
They have died nobly at the hands of the firing squads. So much I grant. But I do not think The Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of Memoranda couched in poetic phrase, nor of actions worked out in a similar fashion. Looking at it from the inside (I was in the GPO), it had the air of a Greek tragedy about it, the illusion being more or less completed with the aforementioned memoranda. Of Pearse and Connolly I admire the latter the most. Connolly was a realist, Pearse the direct opposite. There was an air of earthy directness about Connolly. It impressed me. I would have followed him through hell, had such action been necessary. But I honestly doubt so much if I would have followed Pearse – not without some thought anyway. I think chiefly of Tom Clarke and Mac Diarmada. Both built on the best foundations. Ireland will not see another Seán Mac Diarmada. These are sharp reflections. On the whole I think the Rising was bungled terribly, costing many a good life. It seemed at first to be well organised, but afterwards became subject to panic decisions and a great lack of very essential organisation and cooperation.
Collins, then, had not only participated in great and stirring events. He had watched too – and he had learned. He had made up his mind that in the new round of fighting, not merely should that round not be bungled – it must be a new form of resistance. There was to be no more “static warfare” such as had been witnessed across Dublin during the Rising, consisting as it did of taking a strong point and holding on gallantly until superior numbers and firepower inevitably crushed the insurgents. This was certainly stirring to behold and support – but it was doomed to fail.
In addition, Collins had witnessed the political detectives going about the room full of captured prisoners in Richmond barracks in Dublin, identifying the rebel leaders for the British Army – and for the firing squads. It was a grim lesson in the importance of intelligence, of the political police or “G-Men”, and of the machinery of repression that held the country – and this was only underlined further for him when an intelligence officer in Dublin Castle, Edward – Ned – Broy, smuggled him into Brunswick Street police station one evening. Collins spent a crucial night here sifting through the police records which demonstrated how the collection of political intelligence was an essential tool in the maintenance of British control. Later, his thinking and planning would justify the ruthless means by which he put an end to that control.
In an interview with me, Vincent (Vinnie) Byrne – one of the Squad’s most celebrated members – told me:
We were all young: 20–21. We never thought we would win or lose. We just wanted to have a go. We would go out in pairs, walk up to the target and do it, then split. You wouldn’t be nervous while you would be waiting to plug him, but you would imagine everyone was looking into your face. On a typical job we would use about eight, including the backup. Nobody got in our way. One of us would knock him over with the first shot, and the other would finish him off with a shot to the head. Collins was a marvel. If he hadn’t done the work he did, we would still be under Britain. Informers and drink would have taken care of us, but our movement was temperate. Collins would meet us from time to time and say, you’re doing great work, lads. There was no formality about him. I remember after the Irish government was set up, I was on guard duty at Government Buildings, and he was Commander in Chief. He saw me and came over to me and put his arm around me and said, How are you going on, Vinny?
And his colleague and friend Frank Thornton summed Collins up thus:
Mick Collins was the ideal soldier to lead men during a revolution such as we were going through and I think all and sundry whether they subsequently fought against him in the civil war or not who had close contact with him, must admit that he was the one bright star that all the fighting men looked to for guidance and advice.
In addition, the story of Collins and the evolution of his reputation has been marked, shaped and at times stunted by the context against which twentieth-century Irish history unfolded. For decades after Collins’s death (in August 1922, at the age of thirty-one), his most formidable adversary held power in Ireland – and Éamon de Valera saw to it that his own reputation was extolled, most thoroughly, and to the detriment of Collins and his legacy. Indeed, a cross erected over Collins’s grave by his brother Johnny at Glasnevin Cemetery was only permitted on a reduced scale and to a design sanctioned by de Valera himself; and Collins’s name was excised from an official government handbook produced on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.
So long as de Valera’s palsied hands gripped the reins of power, moreover, representatives of the Irish Army, of which Collins was the first Commander-in-Chief and within the ranks of which Collins’s memory was held in the highest regard, were not permitted to attend the annual commemoration at the place where he was killed, Béal na Bláth in West Cork. Indeed, it was not until 1990 and the centenary of Collins’s birth (when incidentally, I had the honour of delivering the commemorative oration), that an Irish Taoiseach permitted Irish Army personnel to attend.
This mean-spirited and ungenerous treatment at home did not, however, affect Collins’s reputation as a guerrilla leader abroad. Take the example of one of the most ruthless and successful guerrilla movements of the twentieth century, which led eventually to the creation of the state of Israel in what had been the British Mandate of Palestine. The Jewish leader Yitzhak Shamir both studied the methods of Michael Collins, and used the code name Michael as his own nom de guerre. And in the state of Israel which Shamir helped to form, I was made aware of a guilty foreboding on the part of those Israeli citizens who knew their history, that one day the Arabs too might produce a Michael Collins – and that if they did, there would not be a supermarket left standing in Israel.
During his lifetime too, there was no shortage of observers who knew exactly what Collins was capable of achieving, and what he might do with his energy and talents – and in the years that followed his death, many individuals were more than prepared to learn from Collins and from the methods he deployed. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery – and his British adversaries paid him the supreme compliment of importing Collins’s tactics and adopting them in their own covert military operations. When the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – sometimes known as ‘Churchill’s toy shop’ – was established at the onset of the Second World War, Winston Churchill envisaged the force ‘setting Europe ablaze’ through the use of such distinctly Collins-esque methods as assassination and sabotage.
The SOE was tutored in Collins-patented methods by Major General Sir Colin Gubbins, a prime mover in the British forces of the time, who described his experience of service in the Ireland of the 1920s as ‘being shot at from behind hedges by men in trilbies and mackintoshes and not being allowed to shoot back’. Irish survivors of the Anglo-Irish War, particularly wounded ones, were left in some puzzlement as to where the bullets did come from. But there is no mystery about the fact that in later years, Gubbins would lecture the SOE on the lessons of his Irish service, warning them in particular to leave no documentation behind them and commit as much as possible to memory. Gubbins knew what he was talking about: Collins and the IRA devoted much time and energy to the capture of British documents; and, towards the end of the conflict, the British benefited from the capture of pieces of Collins’s own paper trail.
Gubbins drew many of his recruits from the British public school system – but the individuals who comprised Collins’s elite, or Twelve Apostles, were members of a rather different tribe. They were largely working-class men and women whom he sculpted into a hidden army that drove a spear into the heart of an empire. He commanded them by force of personality, for in addition to the difficult and tempestuous personality I have mentioned above, Collins possessed something – one might call it the X Factor – that explains more than a thousand military manuals ever could how he wielded that empire-wounding spear. In the words of Frank O’Connor, whose biography The Big Fellow (1937) allows the sheer humanity of this public figure to shine through, Collins took:
the simplest men, men to whom no man in the world had ever attached importance to, and made them feel that the smallest task they performed was a matter of life and death. Before him, after him, none could give them the same sense of responsibility, and their devotion to him was no greater than his to them.
As for the members whom he controlled and commanded: these individuals performed dark and brutal deeds, and when the Anglo-Irish War was over some of them performed even darker ones. War, after all, can never be sloughed off: on the contrary, it has a habit of affecting the winners just as much as the losers. Yet this small band captured the imagination of large swathes of the Irish public. The idea that the Lilliputians, after centuries of conquest, could at last strike back successfully against an enormously stronger foe: this sense overlaid the grimmer realities of war and strife with a patina of romance that has still not faded – even if contemporary Irish attitudes towards militarism generally tend to be more critical and analytical than of yore.
Change is effected, and history made, by a combination of will and circumstances. Collins had the will: and in the circumstances of his day he and the Squad altered the course of Irish history. The world has changed much in the century since Collins and his Apostles took on the authority of the British state in Ireland. The echoes of the bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland have largely died away since the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998: and as we have lately seen, the Republic’s decision-takers have deemed it safe to allow the people to take ownership of the commemoration of the centenary of the Easter Rising – unfettered by doubts and fears of what reaction this might elicit from either Conservatives at Westminster or Unionists in Ulster. Michael Collins and his Apostles played a vivid and, in the end, decisive, role in the history of the years that we are now committed to remembering.
Excerpted with permission from The Twelve Apostles: Michael Collins, the Squad, and Ireland’s Fight for Freedom by Tim Pat Coogan. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing. Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound.
Unarmed black man carrying only a cellphone when he was shot by cops
(Credit: Getty/LPETTET)
Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old black man, was fatally shot and killed by Sacramento police in his own backyard Sunday night. Clark was carrying a cellphone, not a firearm, when confronted by two officers, the department said in a statement late Monday.
Stephon Clark was gunned down in the backyard of the south Sacramento home he shared with his grandparents and siblings, his 25-year-old brother Stevante Clark told The Sacramento Bee. The police department said officers were responding to a call that a 6-foot-1 black man wearing a black-hooded sweatshirt and dark pants was taking cover in a residential backyard after shattering car windows with a toolbar.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies circling the area in a helicopter spotted Clark in a nearby backyard, reportedly breaking a window with a toolbar, and directed the two officers on the ground to his location.
Law enforcement officials said they believed Clark was armed with a gun at the time, though no firearm was found at the scene. Officials said Clark had an “object in his hands” that he extended while advancing towards the officers, and that’s when “officers approached the suspect, handcuffed him and began life saving efforts.” The officers fired multiple rounds at Clark, shooting him several times, officials said.
The 22-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene by fire personnel. He left behind two young sons, Cairo and Aiden, his family told The Bee.
Sequita Thompson, Clark’s grandmother, told the news outlet that she was awake and sitting in the dining room when she heard four gunshots. “The only thing that I heard was pow, pow, pow, pow, and I got to the ground,” she said. Thompson also said neither she nor her husband heard the officers issuing commands before firing.
Thompson said it was normal for her grandson and other family members to enter the house through the backyard, because the front doorbell is broken and she and her husband, who is in a wheelchair, have limited mobility. Thompson said guests often knock on the back window and ask her to use an automatic opener to raise the garage door and let them in.
She said her husband called the police to report the shots.
Law enforcement officials interviewed Thompson for several hours about what she had heard that night but did not tell her about her Clark, she said. Thompson said she only found out her grandson had been shot when she decided to peek out a window and saw his body in the backyard.
“I opened that curtain and he was dead,” Thompson said. “I started screaming.”
On Monday, officials said Clark used the toolbar to break a sliding glass door one house away from where he was shot and that they believe Clark shattered the windows of at least three nearby vehicles.
Police said Clark ran away from the officers toward the back of the property, where officers said he turned and moved toward them while holding an object in his hands.
The two officers involved in the shooting have been with the department for two and four years, officials said. The officers were not injured in the incident and have been put on paid administrative leave.
The department announced that video and audio footage associated with the occurrence will be released to the public within 30 days.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said he supported the investigation and the department’s “intent to expedite the release of all relevant video,” The Sacremento Bee reported.
“I am always sorry when someone loses their young life,” the mayor said. “I am also grateful that the officers were unharmed.”
A GoFundMe page to fund Clark’s funeral expenses was created Monday afternoon. Clark’s brother, Stevante, told The Bee the family is trying to come up with enough money to bury his younger brother next to another brother killed a few years ago, also by gun violence.
“He would not want for us to be sad but to come together,” Clark said. “He was a good person. He always had jokes for everybody.”
Clark is the latest black person to be unfairly targeted by the police. More than 1,000 people have been killed by the police nationwide in 2017 — according to Mapping Police Violence, a research initiative on police killings nationwide — but 25 percent of those killed by the police were black, despite black people only making up 13 percent of the population. The data also shows that black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and that 30 percent of black victims were unarmed in 2015 compared to 21 percent of white victims.
Images and video shared through social media have led to nationwide outrage and protests over questionable behavior and practices by American policing, united by the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter.”
Mick Mulvaney manipulated data to justify “tip-stealing” rule: report
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney (Credit: Getty/Win McNamee)
In a move that threatens to take hundreds of millions of dollars from American workers who rely on tips to make a living, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney sided with Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and overruled the White House regulatory affairs chief by releasing a contentious rule about tip-pooling and knowingly withholding accurate data.
The rule, which has been pushed by the Department of Labor in recent months, would legally allow employers to profit off workers’ tips — collectively pocketing an estimated $640 million more for employers — so long as the workers are at least paid the federal minimum wage. The Economic Policy institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the real total employers could pocket could be as high as $5.8 billion.
Mulvaney’s decision to side with Acosta’s Labor Department and overrule the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) “allowed the department to delete from the proposal internal estimates showing businesses could take hundreds of millions in gratuities from their workers,” three current and former executive branch officials told Bloomberg Law.
OIRA Administrator Neomi Rao fought to ensure the data be publicized. The OIRA’s responsibility “is to ensure agencies assess and inform the public of the potential positive and negative economic effects of significant new regulations.”
Bloomberg Law elaborated:
Acosta and his team elevated the dispute to Mulvaney, who as Office of Management and Budget director oversees OIRA, after Trump-appointed OIRA Administrator Neomi Rao and her staff attempted to block the Labor Department from issuing the tip pool regulation. Rao wanted the department to reinsert estimates quantifying how much workers could lose out on tips to their bosses, who would be allowed to participate in the tip pool.
While the $640 million certainly represents a large sum that American workers stand to lose, it could actually be an underestimate. It was reported by Bloomberg Law on Feb. 1, that “the department’s political leadership ordered new methodologies that progressively lessened the expected impact.”
The OMB has denied that Mulvaney and Rao held different positions on the matter. “There is zero daylight between Director Mulvaney and Administrator Rao on regulatory policy,” Coalter Baker, an OMB spokesman told Bloomberg Law.
“It’s pretty apparent that in this case and potentially others, that the administration and OMB are willing to manipulate the cost-benefit numbers to make them look good for their attempts to roll back regulatory protections,” Amit Narang, a regulatory policy advocate at the progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, told Bloomberg Law. “This is a transparency concern, a legal concern, and I think it’s got to be a concern for the legitimacy and the integrity of the deregulatory agenda writ large.”
The news is a stunning example of the Donald Trump administration’s willingness to omit and obscure public information in order to implement a deregulatory agenda that would further enrich the richest and most powerful. Bloomberg Law interviewed 15 former Cabinet agency and White House officials, and not a single one could give an example of a time in which the OIRA released information while knowingly excluding substantive available data.
Children’s gendered stereotypes of scientists have shifted in the past three decades
(Credit: Getty/xijian)
A new study suggests that changing media depictions have affected common gendered stereotypes — particularly when it comes to the stereotypical image of a scientist, a historically male-dominated field.
Using literature databases, researchers at Northwestern University examined 78 studies they identified over the last 50 years that included “Draw a Scientist” tests in America. The idea was to observe if children thought of a man or a woman when asked to draw a scientist.
The researchers relied on collected findings from more than 20,000 American children in kindergarten through 12th grade. The first study included an analysis of data collected from 1966 to 1977; the remaining studies included data from 1985 to 2016. According to the analysis, researchers concluded that more children drew women scientists with more frequency in later decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, less than one percent of the drawings showed a female scientists. That percentage had increased to 28 in the 1980s.
“These findings shed light on how children learn to associate science with men and how they respond to changes in their cultural environment such as increases in women’s representation in science,” says the study’s lead author, David I. Miller, Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Northwestern University.
More evidence to suggest that gender stereotypes are influenced by external factors is that gender stereotypes didn’t appear until ages 7 and 8. In the studies analyzed, children drew equally both male and female scientists more often in kindergarten. The tendency to draw male scientists increased “rapidly” with age during elementary and middle school. This finding may be the result of an increase in exposure to more male scientist role models than female ones — both in school and the media.
Women continue to hold fewer positions than men in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. According to a UNESCO report, only 28.8 percent of the world’s researchers are female. While there has been global progress towards gender parity in said fields, recent statistics highlight the continued existence of the gender gap in STEM professions.
Likewise, there has been a recent push to tell women’s stories in science more often; one recent example was “Hidden Figures,” a film about the African American women mathematicians who worked at NASA in the early days of the US space program.
“Given these results, girls today may develop interests in science more freely than before because children’s stereotypes of scientists have become less masculine over time,” explains Alice H. Eagly, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, who co-authored the study. “But because stereotypes remain, teachers and parents should present children with multiple examples of female as well as male scientists across many contexts such as in science courses, on television shows, and in informal conversations.”
A 2% financial wealth tax would provide a $12,000 annual stipend to every American household
Charles Koch; David Koch (Credit: CBS/AP/Photo montage by Salon)
It’s not hard to envision the benefits in work opportunities, stress reduction, child care, entrepreneurial activity, and artistic pursuits for American households given an extra $1,000 per month. It’s also very easy to justify a financial wealth tax, given that the dramatic stock market surge in recent years is largely due to an unprecedented degree of technological and financial productivity that derives from the work efforts and taxes of all Americans. A 2% annual tax on financial wealth is a small price to pay for the great fortunes bestowed on the most fortunate Americans.
The reasons? Careful analysis reveals a number of excellent arguments for the implementation of a universal basic income (UBI).
1. Our jobs are disappearing.
A 2013 Oxford study determined that nearly half of American jobs are at risk of being replaced by computers, AI and robots. Society simply can’t keep up with technology. As for the skeptics who cite the Industrial Revolution and its job-enhancing aftermath (which actually took 60 years to develop), the McKinsey Global Institute says that society is being transformed at a pace “ten times faster and at 300 times the scale” of the radical changes of 200 years ago.
2. Half of America is stressed out or sick.
Half of all Americans are in or near poverty, unable to meet emergency expenses, living from paycheck to paycheck, and getting physically and emotionally ill because of it. Numerous UBI experiments have led to increased well-being for their participants. A guaranteed income reduces the debilitating effects of inequality. As one recipient put it, “It takes me out of depression…I feel more sociable.”
3. Children need our help.
This could be the best reason for monthly household stipends. Parents, especially mothers, are unable to work outside the home because of the need to care for their children. Because we currently lack a UBI, more and more childrenare facing hunger and health problems and educational disadvantages.
4. We need more entrepreneurs.
A sudden influx of $12,000 per year for 126 million households would greatly stimulate the economy, potentially allowing millions of Americans to take risksthat could lead to new forms of innovation and productivity.
Perhaps most significantly, a guaranteed income could relieve some of the pressure on our newest generation of young adults, who are deep in debt, underemployed, increasingly unable to live on their own, and ill-positioned to take the entrepreneurial chances that are needed to spur innovative business growth. No other group of Americans could make more productive use of an immediate boost in income.
5. We need the arts and sciences.
A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 70% of workers don’t feel “engaged” (enthusiastic and committed) in their jobs. The work chosen by UBI recipients could unleash artistic talents and creative impulses that have been suppressed by personal financial concerns, leading, very possibly, to a repeat of the 1930s, when the Works Progress Administration hired thousands of artists and actors and musicians to help sustain the cultural needs of the nation.
Arguments Against
The usual uninformed and condescending opposing argument is that UBI recipients will waste the money, spending it on alcohol and drugs and other “temptation” goods. Not true. Studies from the World Bank and the Brooks World Poverty Institute found that money going to poor families is used primarily for essential needs, and that the recipients experience greater physical and mental well-being as a result of their increased incomes.
Other arguments against the workability of the UBI are countered by the many successful experiments conducted in the present and recent past: Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Kenya, India, Great Britain, Uganda, Namibia, and in the U.S. in Alaska and California.
How to Pay for It
Largely because of the stock market, U.S. financial wealth has surged to $77 trillion, with the richest 10% owning over three-quarters of it. Just a 2 percent tax on total financial wealth would generate enough revenue to provide a $12,000 annual stipend to every American household (including those of the richest families).
It’s easy to justify a wealth tax. Over half of all basic research is paid for by our tax dollars. All the technology in our phones and computers started with government research and funding. Pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t exist without decades of support from the National Institutes of Health. Yet the tech and pharmaceutical companies claim patents on the products paid for and developed by the American people.
The collection of a wealth tax would not be simple, since only about half of U.S. financial wealth is held directly in equities and liquid assets (Table 5-2). But it’s doable. As Thomas Piketty notes, “A progressive tax on net wealth is better than a progressive tax on consumption because first, net wealth is better defined for very wealthy individuals.”
And certainly a financial industry that knows how to package worthless loans into A-rated mortgage-backed securities should be able to figure out how to tax the investment companies that manage the rest of our ever-increasing national wealth.
