Patrick Onyekwere imbues his photorealistic portraits with layers of emotion. Before sketching with blue, ballpoint pen, the Nigerian artist invites his subjects into a conversation about their lives, contemporary culture, and nature to establish the mood or story he’s hoping to convey. Their responses produce a collaborative endeavor that organically merges their perspectives and histories, which the artist translates to his artworks.
Onyekwere collects a few snapshots of his subject for reference as he meticulously shades and crosshatches every inch of his hyperrealistic pieces. The artist sees his powerful renderings as “speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves” and finds the subjects’ eyes most interesting. “They mirror some of our deepest desires, fears, inhibitions, perceptions, thoughts, most of which we ourselves are consciously unaware of,” he says. “(The eyes have) the power to convey emotions and feelings and also communicate and connect to the viewer, inviting them to live in an untold story, in such a way they don’t see an already existing piece but take part in the creation of it.”
To see Onyekwere’s portraits-in-progress and follow more of his expressive works, follow him on Instagram and YouTube.
Many of us fret over the loss of a beloved sweater or discovering a lone sock, but we can at least find some solace in knowing that the garments abandoned at Wansho Laundry in central Taiwan are being worn to their full potential. The laundromat’s owners, 83-year-old Chang Wan-ji and 84-year-old Hsu Sho-er, have been fashioning the skirts, blouses, and trousers left behind into adorable, eclectic styles. Just last month, their grandson Chang Reef began sharing photographs of the octogenarian couple modeling their fashionable outfits—which often include matching shoes, graphic tees, and a range of accessories like hats, big sunglasses, and small leather pouches—on Instagram, where they’ve since gone viral. For more of Chang and Hsu’s backstory (they got married in 1959!), dive into this New York Times profile. (via Kottke)
Beyond the scratch of the pen on paper, drawing as a practice isn’t thought to be particularly rhythmic or melodic. An inventive machine by musician Lamond Campbell, though, adds a musical component to its looped sketches. The Harmonograph Synthesiser is exactly as its name suggests: Campbell connected a modern, modular synthesizer to an 18th-Century harmonograph, an antiquated apparatus that uses pendulums to render geometric shapes. Two of the swinging mechanisms move linearly with the pen, while the third rotates with the board. Each triggers the synthesizer when movement occurs, which creates the corresponding audio track. An additional microphone picks up the noise of the pen.
Watch the video above to see the intricacies of the modified contraption. Campell is selling a complete, 18-track collection on his site, and you can find more about his multi-media creations on Instagram and YouTube. To see a reverse audio-visual process, check out “Visual Sounds of the Amazon II.” (thnx, Craig!)
Although many of us will never step foot on the red planet, a new compilation captured by Mars rovers walks through the rocky, sandy terrain in stunning detail. Throughout the video of 4K imagery, the rovers explore the wide-open plains and candy-colored stretches of the Martian landscape. As the narrator notes, getting actual footage of Mars currently is impossible, as even the most technologically advanced rovers like Curiosity still are limited to extremely slow data-transmission speeds back to Earth. Watch the full compilation on YouTube, check out this 1.8 billion pixel panorama taken by Curiosity. (via Twister Sifter)
American carnage vs Portland quirk.
by Charles Mudede
Federal officers pepper spray a protester in a cloud of tear gas on Saturday, July 18. MATHIEU LEWIS-ROLLAND
Trump's deployment of the secret police to Portland, Oregon has produced his desired results. For one, it has claimed a good chunk of news space from the top story of the day, the pandemic, which is once again claiming 1,000 American lives a day.
Trump's secret police seemed to be operating on another level power, one that hovers above conventional laws—it's a zone of action that couldn't exist without daily confirmations from Fox News. It really is there. It's right in front of our noses. But access to it is blocked by the "do-nothing" left. The secret police wore combat uniforms, and this gave the appearance of a war between no-nonsense "law and order" and a mob of urban villains that Trump obsesses over, and that almost all of his voters have never seen in real life. Trump's Portland intervention marked his return to the part of the 2017 inauguration speech (written by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller) that concerned "American carnage."
The structure of Trump's law-and-order narrative received a blow (not yet fatal) when Portland's Black Lives Matter protesters (now vastly increased in number) confronted the secret police on July 21 with a Wall of Moms and Dads With Leaf Blowers. Or, put another way: when Portland matched fascistic resolution with quirkiness. Tonight, the quirkiness will continue with a Chef March (slogan: "ACAB: We Spit in Your Food!")
Another day, another bloc forming in Portland: Chef Bloc is now scheduled for Friday. I've been told that “ACAB, WE SPIT IN YOUR FOOD” is going to be one of the chants. 👨🍳 pic.twitter.com/MFdyT5KzgC — Tuck Woodstock (@tuckwoodstock) July 22, 2020
In what remains of this post, I want to examine quirkiness and how it is different from whimsy.
In 2013, I wrote an essay that condemned the design of the then recently completed Beacon Hill Library. My point was simple and incontestable, but I happened to use the wrong word to make my point. I stated the mode of the library's design was "quirky," when it was in fact "whimsical." The protests in Portland have made the difference between quirky and whimsy apparent to me. The library's awful design has as its inspiration the latter and not the former.
Here is the core of my piece, "I Hate the Beacon Hill Library, and You Should Too":
If you can imagine that soul-crinkling mess, you can see exactly what's bad about the Beacon Hill Branch. It's trying ever so hard to be diversity.
Carlson Architects, a firm that got its big break designing Larry's Markets in the late 1980s, has also done solid and serious local work, such as the addition at the School of Social Work at the University of Washington and the Ballard Lofts. But judging from that work, and the work in their book Carlson Architects: Expanding Northwestern Regionalism, it's hard to believe they ever took a serious interest in diversity. That was not their thing. What they did well, what dominated their projects, was the industrial aesthetic. And so what did Carlson Architects fill this lack of experience with multiculturalism with? Please be prepared to weep, as this is really the tragedy of my story: They filled it with quirkiness. The boat in the sky like a weather vane, the upside-down hull-like roof, the scupper that's shaped like a beak, the poetry on the stones—all of this is quirky.
It is actually whimsical, which has no political content or potential at all. Anyone can be whimsical, it costs nothing, it adds nothing, it only wants to appear to be interesting—for example, Donald Rumsfeld balancing a chopstick on his upper lip.
These are things we know that we know — like how a photograph of a young Rumsfeld, a chopstick balanced on his protruding upper lip as he gazes at a giggling geisha — came to decorate packets of U.K. snack-food manufacturer Tyrrell’s Spicy Coated Peanuts. “All our packs feature imagery which aims to be rather entertaining, quirky and just a bit different from the norm of popping a slice of cheese and an onion on the front of a pack,” e-mails Oliver Rudgard, Tyrrell’s marketing director. “We thought this image was in line with our brand’s light-hearted and slightly eccentric view on life.”
Quirky is not right the word. A chopstick on the war-hawk's lips is whimsical. The swirling boat thing on Beacon Hill Library is just as whimsical.
But not Dads With Leaf Blowers. Indeed, the Stranger's most literary critic, Christopher Frizzelle, calls it "high quirk." Merriam-Webster's online dictionary describes quirky as: "Unusual in especially an interesting or appealing way," and it associates the word with the production of art. As for whimsical, it results "from or [is] characterized by whim or caprice especially." One thing these definitions reveal is a distinction that's temporal. Quirkiness does not happen on a whim. It not only becomes in time but has in it the aspect of a method.
But why was this quirkiness so effective during the Portland protests of July 21? Because it exposed the secret police (their gear, their swirling gas clouds, their seriousness, their leader) as nothing more than a performance. The performance of the Wall of Moms has something to it. It has the joy and laughter and fortitude that a revolution needs for the long-term survival of its emancipatory principles. (The last sentence needs some unpacking, which I will do in a post that concerns the conclusion of the TV series Snowpiercer).
As for the Escape From New York-type look the secret police had going, it was as tired as recooked cabbage. Indeed, your connection with reality must be very weak, if there at all, if you believe that Trump's secret police will make anything better or provide the public with actual social goods, in Portland or Chicago.
BREAKING: DOJ will provide $61 million in grants to hire hundreds of officers for Operation Legend.
They're literally using your tax dollars to pay their secret police force—on the same day unemployment relief checks were downgraded to $400/month.https://t.co/8YWu7i8QAP — Jesse Damiani (@JesseDamiani) July 22, 2020
Scientists have been trying to figure out how to make use of one of nature’s tricks for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with rock and rain. As rain washes away tiny particles of rock, newly exposed minerals bind with carbon, transforming carbon dioxide into new chemicals. It’s a simple combination of basic chemistry and erosion.
We can speed the process up by speeding up erosion, crushing tons and tons of rock and spreading it across the earth’s surface, if we had the money to do it and a vast area where inhabitants don’t mind trucks covering everything with a layer of rock dust once a year. Farms are the most likely candidate for such a massive undertaking, because farmers already do some incidental advanced weathering as a byproduct of “liming”, where they apply crushed limestone to fields when their soils become too acidic.
A paper just published in Nature provides the most detailed calculation to date of just how much carbon this technique, known as enhanced weathering, could capture and how much it would cost. Deploying the practice worldwide could remove 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year — about a third of what the United States emits each year — and would run between $60 and $200 per ton of carbon to apply all that rock dust on fields, varying by country. It would be cheaper in places like Indonesia and India that have better conditions for weathering (warm, seasonally wet weather), and low labor and energy costs. The countries with the greatest potential to deploy enhanced weathering are, the researchers note, “coincidentally the highest CO2 fossil fuel emitters (China, USA, and India).”
One of the scientists involved in the study, James Hanson, the climate Cassandra and Columbia University climatologist, said in an email that he became interested in weathering because it can trap carbon for thousands of years. Hansen said other approaches, “such as reforestation, are important, but require management to assure that the carbon sink is maintained.”
The researchers estimate that if the United States spread rock dust on half the country’s farmland it could capture 420 million tons of carbon dioxide, at an annual cost of $225 for every American, or $176 for every ton of carbon. That’s a higher price tag than some other solutions. Building solar farms, for instance, currently cuts emissions at a rate of less than $40 per ton. But because the world is failing to slash emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that we will need to use “negative emissions,” expensive techniques to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.
Farmers stand to benefit, too. In theory, spreading much more rock dust on fields could improve soil health and crop yields. And that could help farmers get out of poverty and increase world food production at the same time they’re soaking up carbon. And, as with any major attempt at geoengineering our atmosphere, there’s likely to unforeseen pitfalls, and unexpected benefits, along the way.
An ancient-book collector is offering a rare glimpse into a Sino-Tibetan book that’s believed to have been printed as early as 1410 in Beijing. A self-described bibliophile known as Incunabula, the collector shared a thread containing dozens of images showing inside spreads full of red ink drawings and Ranjana script, a writing system developed in the 11th century. The Gutenberg Bible, which was printed with movable metal type, dates back to 1454, nearly 45 years after this woodblock-produced text.
Within its accordion-fold pages, the ancient book contains impeccably detailed “Sanskrit dhāranīs and illustrations of protective mantra-diagrams and deities” and a collection of Tibetan Buddhist recitation texts. It has more durable, black covers that are covered in gold-paint drawings featuring “20 icons of the Tathāgatas,” which roughly translates to “one who has gone.” All text is printed twice on each side of the paper to allow for right-to-left and left-to-right readings in both the Indo-Tibetan and Chinese styles, respectively.
“During the early Ming, close relations were established between Tibetan monks and the imperial court in Beijing. Although not directly part of the Buddhist canon, this work relates closely to the manner of woodblock carving employed for the production of the Sino-Tibetan Kangyur,” the collector writes.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, right, gestures as he speaks with his daughter Liz Cheney during the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce annual meeting (Rick Barbero/The Register-Herald via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
AP
The U.S. military has been fighting in Afghanistan for almost nineteen years. House Democrats, working in tandem with key pro-war GOP lawmakers such as Rep. Liz Cheney, are ensuring that continues.
Last night, the House Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment — jointly sponsored by Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado and Congresswoman Cheney of Wyoming — prohibiting the expenditure of monies to reduce the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan below 8,000 without a series of conditions first being met.
The imposed conditions are by no means trivial: for these troop reductions from Afghanistan to be allowed, the Defense Department must be able to certify, among other things, that leaving Afghanistan “will not increase the risk for the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens inside Afghanistan” and “will not compromise or otherwise negatively affect the ongoing United States counter terrorism mission against the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and associated forces.”
The Crow/Cheney amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last night passed by a vote of 45-11. The NDAA was then unanimously approved by the Committee by a vote of 56-0. It authorizes $740.5 billion in military spending — roughly three times more than the world’s second-highest spender, China.
President Trump throughout the year has insisted that the Pentagon present plans for withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan prior to the end of 2020. Last week, reports indicated that “the Trump administration is close to finalizing a decision to withdraw more than 4,000 troops from Afghanistan by the fall.” Trump’s plan “would reduce the number of troops from 8,600 to 4,500 and would be the lowest number since the very earliest days of the war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001.” In February, Trump announced an agreement with the Taliban to end the war completely.
Shortly after those White House withdrawal plans were reported, anonymous intelligence officials leaked a series of claims to the New York Times regarding “bounties” allegedly being paid by Russia to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops. Those leaks emboldened opposition to troop withdrawal from Afghanistan on the ground that it would be capitulating to Russian treachery. It was that New York Times leak that Liz Cheney, along with GOP Congressman Mac Thornberry, cited in a joint statement on Monday to suggest troop withdrawal would be precipitous:
“After today’s briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need. We anticipate further briefings on this issue in the coming days.”
America’s adversaries should never question the will of the United States government or the American people to defend our interests, to protect the security of our nation, to protect our Armed Forces, and to respond when attacked or threatened. pic.twitter.com/czl22H8hrd
The Crow/Cheney amendment impeding Trump’s withdrawal plan asserted that “a rapid military drawdown and a lack of United States commitment to the security and stability of Afghanistan would undermine diplomatic efforts for peace” (only the U.S. could malign a troop withdrawal plan after a 19 year-old war as “rapid”). Their amendment also claims that “the current agreement between the United States and the Taliban does not provide for the appropriate protections for vulnerable populations, does not create conditions for the rejection of violence and prevention of terrorist safe havens, and does not represent a realistic diplomatic solution, based on verifiable facts and conditions on the ground, that provides for long-term stability”
The NDAA that was approved last night by the Committee also imposed restrictions on Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Germany. Trump’s plan called for the removal of roughly 9,500 troops from German soil, reducing the number of U.S. troops in this extremely prosperous and rich European nation from 34,500 to 25,000. But by an overwhelming vote of 49-7, the Armed Service Committee approved an amendment to the NDAA that “bans the administration from lowering troop levels below current levels until 180 days after Pentagon leaders present a plan to Congress and certify it will not harm U.S. or allied interests.”
Just as she did with Afghanistan, Congresswoman Cheney, to oppose this troop removal from Germany, cited — along with her Democratic Committee colleagues — the threat of Russia, now the all-purpose rationale for continuing endless U.S. imperialism and war, just as it was during the first Cold War:
Pulling US troops out of Germany is in Russia’s interest, not America’s.
Meanwhile, the leading Democrat who joined Cheney to oppose troop withdrawal from Germany, Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona, also cited “increasing Russian aggression” to argue that “it is more important than ever that our NATO allies and partners remain confident about the United States’ commitment.” For decades, the perceived threat from Moscow was the leading instrument used to justify endless U.S. imperialism, and even now that Russia is little more than what journalist Vincent Bevins today called “a minor power in Eastern Europe,” it still somehow occupies this same crucial role in the U.S. imagination and militaristic discourse.
Opposition to troop withdrawal in both Afghanistan and Germany was not unanimous. There were elements of the progressive left and the pro-Trump right who supported these withdrawals. Yesterday on Twitter, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, the former co-chair of the Sanders campaign, and GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, traded mutual support and vows to work together to defeat the Crow/Cheney amendment:
But this left-right anti-war coalition is no match for the war machine composed of the establishment wings of both parties and the military and intelligence community that continue to use selective, illegal leaks to sabotage any plans to reduce the U.S. military presence around the world. That the Democrats have spent a full decade desperately recruiting former military and intelligence officials to serve as their Congressional candidates (both Congressman Crow, Liz Cheney’s co-sponsor on the Afghanistan amendment, and the anti-German-troop-withdrawal Congressman Gallego, are both Iraq War veterans) has only made the party even more militaristic.
Combined with the fact that Democrats are increasingly merging with and being led by the Bush-era neocons and other Bush/Cheney operatives in creating such jingoistic and militaristic messaging campaigns as the beloved-by-liberals Lincoln Project, and that Biden is clearly trying to run to Trump’s right on foreign policy with ads accusing him of being too soft on China and linking him to Castro and Chavez, the picture is clear. It should come as absolutely no surprise that House Democrats are finding common cause with Liz Cheney and other GOP warmongers to block any efforts to reduce even moderately the footprint of the U.S. military in the world or its decades-long posture of endless war.
Updated: Friday, July 2, 4:02 p.m. PDT The roll call vote on the Crow/Cheney amendment to prevent Trump’s withdrawal plan from Afghanistan is now available. Of the 11 members voting “no,” eight were Republicans (Mo Brooks, Bradley Burne, Austin Scott, Scott DesJarlais, Ralph Abraham, Trent Kelly, Matt Gaetz, Jim Banks) and three were Democrats (Tulsi Gabbard, Anthony Brown, Ro Khanna). That means that the “yes” votes — to impede troop withdrawal from Afghanistan — came from a signifiant majority of Democratic votes. The roll call vote can be seen on the videos below:
With Jun Aizaki’s latest design, you could be picking up your morning latte poured into a dried gourd rather than a disposable adorned with a green siren. The Brooklyn-based designer, who owns CRÈME, recently launched a project to reduce single-use plastic waste by shaping the flowering fruit into simple drinking vessels. Heading The Gourd Project, Aizaki created both a cup and a flask that can hold hot and cold liquids and are an alternative to traditional products. After three to six uses, the containers can be composted with other food waste.
Aizaki “explored the century-old craft of drying plants to make receptacles, in order to find a way to reduce plastic and contribute to nature through design,” project organizers said. Each biodegradable vessel takes about six weeks to grow from its first planting at a Pennsylvania farm with six harvests each year. Because gourds have tough skin and fibrous insides, they’re shaped easily as they fill out. Each 3D mold is made of plastic right now, although the team hopes to switch to reusable materials once it expands production.
The sustainable project comes amid reports that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is increasing plastic consumption and affecting how, and if, the material is recycled, in addition to companies banning reusable cups and containers to stop the spread of the virus.
Construction is beginning on the world’s largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants.
The project near Manchester, U.K., will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid.
A big expansion of wind and solar energy is vital to tackle the climate emergency, but they are not always available. Storage is therefore key, and the new project will be the largest in the world outside of pumped hydro schemes, which require a mountain reservoir to store water.
The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. Chemical batteries are also needed for the transition to a zero-carbon world and are plummeting in price, but can only store relatively small amounts of electricity for short periods.
Liquid air batteries can be constructed anywhere, said Highview’s chief executive, Javier Cavada: “Air is everywhere in the world. The main competitor is really not other storage technologies but fossil fuels, as people still want to continue building gas and coal-fired plants today, strangely enough,” he said.
The U.K. government has supported the project with a $12.5 million grant. The energy and clean growth minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, said: “This revolutionary new facility will form a key part of our push towards net zero, bringing greater flexibility to Britain’s electricity grid and creating green-collar jobs in Greater Manchester.
“Projects like these will help us realize the full value of our world-class renewables, ensuring homes and businesses can still be powered by green energy, even when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing,” he said.
Alex Buckman, an energy storage expert at the Energy Systems Catapult group, said polluting gas power plants were the main way the U.K. electricity grid was balanced. But a net-zero carbon system would need more than the 30 percent renewable energy of today and therefore more storage.
“There is likely going to be a need for one or more of the medium-to-long duration electricity storage technologies to fill a gap in the market, and liquid air energy storage (LAES) is right up there as an option,” he said. Pumped hydro is limited by the need for a mountain reservoir, while gravity storage — where you raise a weight and then let it drop to power a generator — is less developed, as is large-scale production of hydrogen fuel from green energy.
“The combination of being more developed and more scalable provides LAES with an opportunity to be competitive, if they can prove that they can reduce costs with increased scale,” Buckman said.
The Highview battery will store 250 megawatt-hours of energy, almost double the amount stored by the biggest chemical battery, built by Tesla in South Australia. The new project is sited at the Trafford Energy Park, also home to the Carrington gas-powered energy plant and a closed coal power station.
The project will cost $106.5 million, and Highview received $43.9 million of investment from the Japanese machinery giant Sumitomo in February. The liquid air battery is creating 200 jobs, mainly in construction, and employing former oil and gas engineers, with a few dozen in the continuing operation. The plant’s lifetime is expected to be 30 to 40 years. “It will pass to the next generation,” said Cavada.
Highview is developing other sites in the U.K., continental Europe, and the U.S., including in Vermont, but the Manchester project will be the first. “The first one is definitely the most important and this is why we really value the U.K. government’s bold move to use U.K. technology to solve U.K. problems and afterwards export the tech globally,” said Cavada.
Usually, when posting a representative line, it’s a line of code. Rarely, it’s been a “representative comment”.
Today’s submitter supplied some code, but honestly, the code doesn’t matter- it’s just some method signatures. The comment, however, is representative. Not just representative of this code, but honestly, all code, everywhere.
// i should have commented this stupid code
As our submitter writes:
I wrote this code. I also wrote that comment. That comment is true.
Why do I do this to myself?
I sometimes ask myself the same question.
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Facebook’s latest attempt to infiltrate the financial services sector has seen the rebranding of their Libra cryptocurrency project into the new Facebook brand Novi. Last year this release was widely criticized by both regulators and the technology industry. After the initial announcement and code drop last year, the Libra name has been dragged through the mud by the press due to the project’s complete disdain for compliance, horrific privacy implications, and bizarre code architecture. However, nothing about this project has changed in any meaningful way and its intentions are just as insidious as they were last year. Novi is an attempt to build a large global data mining project on consumer financial data. If the Facebook Novi project is allowed to launch, it has the potential to create conflicts of interest which rival the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This new rebranding attempts to whitewash the train wreck of the Libra launch and reframe itself in a regulatory friendly light. However, Facebook’s sixteen-year history has repeatedly shown that creating the impression of trustworthiness while profiting from deception is central to their business operations. When you peel back the lies of their marketing department’s story of openness and connectedness, the ugly truth of their motivations becomes clear.
This all comes in the same week that the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the Washington Post have all broken widening scandals on the company, including covering up internal whistleblowers, and illegal activity with shareholders and governance concerns.
While the United States struggles with social unrest and Zuckerberg cozies up to the Trump administration for favours, the Novi project is business as usual. The executives are right now trying to weasel through the requirements across the US and Europe to put this new project into place. Regulators are being asked to allow Facebook to quietly construct a massive data mining apparatus on top of the American and European financial systems. This new move would allow Facebook directly into the most personal data of citizens. As has always been the business model of Facebook, user data will at best be sold off to Novi consortia members, monetised for advertisers, and at worst used for the same political purposes as we saw in 2018.
What we see in this project may unfold into a massive scandal exactly how it has in the past, but with even greater damage to the social order if Facebook is left to recklessly hold the funds and financial data of citizens. This article serves as a publication on a matter of public interest from a concerned programmer working in tech, about how the future will unfold and how we can stop it now.
Facebook Privacy Bait-and-Switch
If you believe the Novi “fine print” their stance toward data privacy is to not share data with Facebook, except when they chose to. And not surprisingly all aggregate data they mine from the transaction stream is explicitly exempted from consumer consent:
Aside from limited cases, Novi will not share account information or financial data with Facebook, Inc. or any third party without customer consent.
Aggregated data: Novi may share aggregated data to Facebook, Inc. or third parties relating to the performance of its products and services.
The usual dark pattern for Facebook around “customer consent” is to disable the functionality of the product until the “opt-in” consent to link with Facebook accounts is turned back on. This can happen at any time in the product life cycle, while technically opt-in provides no mode of operation without connection to Facebook. The second pattern in the Facebook playbook is to simply go to market with one set of terms and conditions and then swap them out for another. Leaks of the internal Facebook database schemas have revealed the existence of a cross-product shadow account system and it is unclear if any Chinese wall exists between divisions of the company to protect consumer interests.
We see this playbook explicitly spelled out in the testimony for the 2019 FTC vs. FACEBOOK, Inc. case. The settlement for this case resulted in a $5 billion fine against the company for deceptive disclosures and involuntary privacy settings modifications that undermined users’ privacy preferences in violation of the 2012 FTC order. In a 2019 complaint filed for the case, the FTC writes:
To encourage users to share information, Facebook promises users that they can control the privacy of their information through Facebook’s privacy settings. However, through at least June 2018, Facebook subverted users’ privacy choices to serve its own business interests.
With Novi, the game that will almost certainly be played by Facebook is to enable users to onboard to the system under one set of terms and conditions where a linked Facebook account won’t be required to add funds to their Novi account, and this will continue for a fixed period of time until Facebook swaps out the terms and conditions that do require the linking of Facebook accounts. This will be done under the guise of additional KYC obligations but will effectively lock the majority of the user base out of their accounts and funds until they “opt-in” to additional Facebook permissions to restore access to their funds. This privacy bait and switch is the core Facebook business model, and giving the company access to hold user funds ransom only increases the potency of this model.
Libra’s own website is the clearest example of a deceptive presentation by the company. The central marketing for the organization appropriates the financial struggles of women in developing nations for its own branding. Since the launch, the project has presented this false narrative of “banking the unbanked’’, but as the Financial Times reported there is no actual mechanism for this product to uplift developing economies nor has Facebook invested any actual work toward pursuing this as a project goal. At the last annual shareholder meeting, the motivation behind this project was made crystal clear: it is purely a means to expand their advertising profits by analyzing financial data. This two-faced marketing is central to the fundamental duplicity of Novi: financial inclusivity as a cover for data strip mining.
An Architecture for Surveillance Finance
As I wrote previously, the Novi project’s positioning of itself around a “blockchain” technology is odd and counterproductive. The story around these fringe technologies seems to shift every year but the only real use-case is the creation of censorship-resistant stores of value. These products serve the interests of a certain class of investors looking to speculate on highly volatile instruments beyond the reach of tax authorities. There is no reason that Novi needs a blockchain at all, and this entire pointless architecture could be simply replaced with a database.
Nevertheless, this bizarre technology choice carries with it some very strange and troubling assumptions that have profound regulatory and privacy implications. In the past, I have argued that an architecture that requires the consortium of legally bound validators in a closed network to maintain byzantine consensus of account states is technologically absurd. No regular institution would ever choose this mode of storing data since it is a completely wasteful model that serves no purpose. However, intrinsic to this technical architecture is that all data is necessarily replicated in the clear across the multinational consortium members and must be stored in the clear to validate the consistency of the shared ledger state. In most financial services information security standards the base level of compliance requires encryption at rest and encryption in transit. Yet the Libra blockchain has no encryption at all. The whitepaper released is non-committal on the technical difficulties of this problem and suggests that “new techniques” would be required:
Another outcome of the above design decisions is that the Libra Blockchain will support a privacy approach that will take into account the variety of participants on the network. The Association oversees the evolution of the Libra Blockchain protocol and network and continuously evaluates new techniques to enhance privacy compliance on the blockchain while taking into account applicable regulatory requirements.
Furthermore, the use of this architecture means that the transactions of millions of citizens will be kept in an immutable audit log that lasts forever. Indeed, the architectural documents for Libra blockchain have not clarified how or when the organisation would allow for effective removal or unlinking of user data or how to reconcile this requirement with the underlying technical implementation. The code is open source and a dive into the codebase finds that the current solution simply stores all transaction data in the clear at the consensus level. Moreover, the codebase has yet to address the validator isolation problem I brought up one year ago. It is a simple question to ask how data will be demarcated between separate companies who run validators in this network and who have conflicts of interest with each other’s businesses. There is no answer to this simple question.
Facebook has deliberately tried to evade this in its marketing campaign and presentations to regulators with obscurantist language and false promises instead of actual detail. Thus, in its current form, Facebook has deliberately chosen an architecture where the protocol cannot conform to either GDPR, Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, or the encryption requirements needed to obtain a money transmitter license in most European countries.
Most importantly, the real question for European representatives is a simple one, do German and French citizens want their private financial data domiciled on American servers and mined by American capitalists with no recourse or oversight from their own governments? In this last century alone, history has taught us the hard lessons about the consequences of Zerfall der Privatsphäre. The entire Libra project is a threat to the strategic sovereignty of Europe and its ability to enforce its own data protection laws.
Political Dealings
An active area for journalists to look into is the potential transactionality of Facebook’s dealings with the current administration. The launch of Novi would require a great deal of federal support to even launch within the United States and it is unclear what has changed since last year to attempt this again. Their current dealings on this front are all behind closed doors, but it may be the case that Facebook has been fast-tracked through the regulatory hurdles necessary to obtain the licenses in exchange for recent actions. What is public record, however, is that Facebook’s political donations have been very tactically targeted at politicians who are members of subcommittees regarding financial services regulation and privacy oversight. The preparations for this product launch have been years in the making.
In addition, while most of the Libra consortium members fled the organisation after the initial project implosion, there are a few that have cut deals with the organisation in the last few months. The lynchpin to his rollout has been Shopify as the pilot partnership to become the first company to accept the new Facebook payments. Shopify which has chosen a very bad time to align itself with Facebook in light of recent events. And Shopify management will have to come to terms with the tradeoffs of saving small fees on card transactions compared to the backlash that connecting to this controversial network will bring.
Starving the Vampire
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff wrote about the parasitic mechanism of Facebook’s business:
It revives Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.
After sixteen years of lying to users, Zuckerberg has long ago torched whatever shred of trust ever existed between Facebook and the public. However, in the presence of failing institutional controls and passive shareholders the company will be allowed to continue to recklessly rip apart our democracies all in the name of increasing advertising profits.
Luck has granted us a small window in which to take action. There may not be any time remaining to prevent it’s rollout in the US. However if you can write to your MEP and tell them that Facebook’s Surveillance Apparatus has no place in Europe. Don’t wait for the privacy scandal to hit the front page of the Financial Times and Der Spiegel.
Facebook is an unethical company. It is a business whose core model is the perpetuation of an outrage Skinner box that exploits our relationships with family and friends for profit. It is an organisation that has put itself on the wrong side of history and decided to cash in on the same social dynamics that gave us Trump: the politics of social strife, resentment and surveillance. Novi represents an expansion of the same Facebook goals, and this vampire company must be starved of this new feeding ground for human experience.
The teams at Gramazio Kohler Research and Incon.Ai recently collaborated on an architectural project that merges digital savvy with traditional craftsmanship to create a skillful new building technique. Completed in 2019, “Augmented Bricklaying” relies on digital markers to instruct bricklayers about where to spread mortar, how thick to layer it, and what the position of the next stone should be.
A custom-designed guidance system, the hybrid technique combats the limitations of both traditional and innovative digital approaches: robotic arms have restricted mobility and difficulty with pliable materials like mortar, while physical templates can be cumbersome and less accurate for masons. The new model “combines the advantages of computational design with the dexterity of humans, supporting an entirely new way of fabrication,” the Zurich-based team said in a statement.
To create the 225 square-meter structure, masons assembled 13,596 locally sourced bricks in varying rows. The differentiated mortar heights range from five to 30 millimeters and help to determine each brick’s rotation that spans -20° to +20°. “That way mortar, usually treated as secondary material in the design of fair-faced brick walls, became a defining element in the appearance of the facade,” the team said.
Because of the differed construction, the porous exterior appears as a wave or ripple. The patterned facade provides ventilation and allows sunlight to stream into the building, which produces an array of circles that shifts based on the time of day. It will house KITRVS Winery’s processing and storage facility. The Greek vineyard overlooks the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea at the base of Mount Olympus.
Gramazio Kohler Research is the ETH Zurich’s chair of architecture and digital fabrication, and Incon.Ai is a subsidiary of the organization’s robotic systems labs. Keep up with Gramazio Kohler’s inventive projects on Instagram and Vimeo. (via designboom)
During an internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack.
On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees.
The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”
Facebook Workplace is currently used by major employers such as Walmart, which is notorious for its active efforts to suppress labor organizing. The application is also used by the Singapore government, Discovery Communications, Starbucks, and Campbell Soup Corporation.
The suggestion that Facebook is actively building tools designed to suppress labor organizing quickly caused a stir at the Menlo Park, California-based company. Facebook employees sparked a flurry of posts denouncing the feature, with several commenting in disbelief that the company would overtly pitch “unionize” as a topic to be blacklisted.
The following day, the company presentation was taken down. But on Thursday afternoon, after the presentation had been deleted, Karandeep Anand, a product manager for Facebook Workplace, weighed in on an internal company board. Anand apologized for the “unionize” example, noting that “censoring users is not the purpose of this feature and Workplace’s ambition is to give everyone a voice, while maintaining a respectful work environment.” He added that the “oversight” was likely “lack of context versus bad intent from anyone on the team.”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Facebook said, “While these kinds of content moderation tools are useful for companies, this example was poorly chosen and should never have been used. The feature was only in early development and we’ve pulled any plans to roll it out while we think through next steps.”
The incident is the latest example of a deeply divided office environment at Facebook, at which a growing number of engineers and designers are openly expressing distrust in leadership.
One Facebook employee who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity said he saw the blacklisting feature, with a suggested use case around unionization, as a clear effort to give employers the ability to exert control over employees.
The company has long been criticized for selectively regulating what’s posted on its platforms, allowing paid ads to remain online no matter what. The laissez-faire approach to potential political misinformation contrasts sharply with the powerful tools for employers to monitor and control discussions in the workplace. The employee noted that many Facebook team members are now questioning the moral compass of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Earlier this month, a number of Facebook employees staged a virtual “walkout” to protest the company’s decision not to flag an inflammatory post from President Donald Trump, in which the president appeared to endorse shooting in response to widespread looting and protests.
Many believed that the post was a clear violation of Facebook policies that prevent communications around the incitement of violence. The controversy touched on growing concerns that Facebook has failed to do enough to combat misinformation on its platform, particularly with its decision not to regulate or fact-check paid political advertising.
The critics, however, have not won over Zuckerberg.
The 36-year-old technology tycoon has dug in, casting aside internal critics and bringing on combative Republican operatives to help him chart his way through a series of scandals. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Zuckerberg moved to replace several longtime board members in part of a shakeup to reassert his control of the firm. The company is reportedly planning on launching a group called “American Edge,” a dark-money venture to more forcefully pressure lawmakers and regulators it sees as political opponents.
That Facebook is marketing Workplace as having built-in labor union suppression tools comes at a time when more and more Americans are likely using Facebook to organize.
A recent memo to employers, first reported by The Intercept, warned that the coronavirus pandemic has sparked widespread support for labor unions, and that online networking tools have become a powerful vector for organizing campaigns.
Employers have long attempted to stifle lawful workplace organizing by monitoring social media. One study of the phenomenon found that between June 2009 and April 2011, the National Labor Relations Board received about 100 charges that employees had been fired or disciplined due to online posts, largely on Facebook, around labor organizing.
Update: June 12, 2020, 3:10 a.m. ET This article has been updated with a comment from Facebook.
While many of us slather our toast with butter day-after-day, Manami Sasaki is transforming thick slices of bread into Zen Japanese rock gardens and Pantone swatches that make breakfast into the most jubilant meal of the day. A watercolor artist turned toast connoisseur, the Japanese designer combines the stocks available in her fridge and pantry to assemble delightful bread-based creations.
In a patch of flowers, she adorns a tomato-sauce base with margarine petals and mint leaves that are finished with mustard details. Another dense slice is torn and reassembled with edible gold before being smothered in sour cream and garnished with ketchup to resemble Kintsugi, the Japanese art of pottery repair.
To see the latest in Sasaki’s delightful series of nourishments, follow her on Instagram. You also might like this candy garden. (via Spoon & Tamago)
While many people are spending their days starting batches of sourdough, Karin Pfeiff-Boschek has been busy baking sweet pies with mesmerizing arrangements that appear almost too pretty to eat. She tops each pastry with a delicate floral motif of flaky dough, a precisely arranged gradient of sliced fruit, or a checkered weave braided in rows.
The pastry designer tells Colossal that she was raised in a family of bakers, although pies weren’t her first form of artistic expression. “As a child, I enjoyed seeing, smelling, and eating the breads and pastries that both of my grandmothers made. Baking was traditional in our family in rural Germany, and when I was a young teenager, I began baking cakes and pastries for my brother and sister,” she writes. “I did not become a baker, however, but became interested in fabrics, eventually designing, dyeing, and creating my own works of textile art.”
After learning to make pies from her American mother-in-law, Pfeiff-Boschek merged her new culinary skills with her background in design, saying she “began to wonder whether one could decorate them in a manner similar to the way cakes are turned into works of art.” Employing her own techniques, Pfeiff-Boschek modified her mother-in-law’s original recipe in minor ways and opted for chilling the raw pastry in batches.
I found that by cooling the dough while creating decorations, using a very thin, sharp knife such as a scalpel and working very precisely it was possible to create ornate decorations that held their shape during baking. I make it a priority to also show the baked pie because regardless of how beautiful a pie may look before baking, it never will be served in that state and must look good after it comes out of the oven.
To alter the dough colors, Pfeiff-Boschek adds powders made from freeze-dried berries, spinach, and beetroot. She tends to bake sweet pies with peaches, apples, and other fruits, although occainsly assembles a savory version filled with meat and vegetables. Each creation takes between two and six hours to assemble and adorn. “I love nature, and many of my designs come from time I spend in our garden with our German shepherd dog, Halgrim. I am inspired by trees, leaves, and vines but also by classical geometric patterns and quite mundane articles, such as gully lids,” the designer says.
Many of Pfeiff-Boschek’s edible artworks have culminated in a book, Elegant Pie, and on her blog by the same name. To see both pre- and post-bake photographs, head to Instagram. You also might like Lauren Ko’s vibrant pies and tarts.
This gecko from Madagascar has feet that "contain about a billion microscopic points that bind to individual molecules, allowing the animal to walk upside down on smooth surfaces." Photo credit to Piotr Naskrecki, from a book of macrophotography, "The Smaller Majority," which I hope to review here next week.
The generic name, Uroplatus, is a Latinization of two Greek words: "ourá" (οὐρά) meaning "tail" and "platys" (πλατύς) meaning "flat". Its specific name phantasticus is the Latin word for "imaginary" based upon the gecko's unique appearance..
Danish artist Jacob Brostrup (previously) beautifully blurs the organic and domestic in his enchanting scenes of soaked floorboards and branches that jut from every corner. What could be a reason to phone a contractor in real life, the downed trees and pooling water in the artist’s oil paintings create a fictional universe in which nature and humanity exist simultaneously in the same space. Each artwork is filled with an incredible number of realistic details that pattern armchairs and provide moss its fuzzy texture.
In a statement, Brostrup referred to his vivid works as “a sampling of snapshots, of hidden glimpse(s) of the past, of other cultures, of the movement of everyday life… There are layers upon layers; a fusion of sensory impressions.” His process begins with a pencil sketch on canvas before covering backdrops of cloudy skies and tiled floors with ornate molding and tree blossoms.
You can find an extensive history of Brostrup’s charming paintings on Instagram, along with his available pieces on Artsy.
Left: “On Top,” oil on canvas. Right: “Fallen Tree,” oil on canvas, 160 x 120 centimeters
“The Bridge” (2019), oil on canvas, 35 2/5 × 31 1/2 inches
“Calling Back Home” (2019), oil on canvas, 27 3/5 × 21 7/10 inches
“The Laboratory” (2019), oil on canvas, 51 1/5 × 70 9/10 inches
“The House” (2019), oil on canvas, 47 1/5 × 55 1/10 inches
“Entries and Exits” (2019), oil on canvas, 47 1/5 × 63 inches
If history is anything to go by, it's very possible that the return from Gates's long-view reforms would make Flint, Michigan look like a socialist paradise.
by Charles Mudede
Gates' sweaters all in my TV...
In the past week or so, three noted billionaires have received considerable attention from CNN and MSNBC: Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates. These spectacularly rich businessmen mark the full spectrum of the class of billionaires often described as socially enlightened—Zuckerbeg is at one end (the least enlightened) and Gates is on the other (the most enlightened). Bloomberg is exactly in the middle.
Between April 23 and April 26, Bill Gates hopped between CNN and MSNBC (changing his sweater with each hop) to promote his scientifically based vision for checking the spread of the virus and for starting up the post-COVID-19 economy. He fleshes out the details of this vision in a long blog post called, "The First Modern Pandemic: The Scientific Advances We Need to Stop COVID-19." The post requires 24 minute to read, it presents an overview of the crisis that emphasizes innovation, and it has these three sentences at its center: "One urgent activity is to raise money for developing new tools. I think of this as the billions we need to spend so we can save trillions. Every additional month that it takes to get the vaccine is a month when the economy cannot return to normal."
Gates, in short, is trying to save capitalism from its present configuration.
The capitalism that the billionaire's plan wants to suspend is defined by "continuous short-term refinancing," as the Italian economist Riccardo Bellofiore put it in a 2014 paper (PDF) for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Gates is taking the long view on the crisis, and this position requires, if it is to succeed, restructuring the capitalism that has prevailed since the end of the 1970s. If you do not spend big now, you will be faced with a much larger bill in the future. At that point, the cost of saving capitalism will likely be politically out of reach. In this respect, the position of the American billionaire resembles that of the Depression-era British economist John Maynard Keynes.
"We took a much worse situation and crafted it into the institutions and the economic growth and innovation that we’ve had between World War II and now. I hope that this looks like that."
Keynes, whose moment was between 1933 and 1939, was a conservative, but he also understood that the capitalism of his time would not survive the Depression if it wasn't reformed. The choice was either the socialism embodied by the Soviet Union, the fascism embodied by Nazi Germany, or, as Bellofiore words it, a "high-profits/high investments/massive (ex ante)-fiscal-deficits economy."
After the war, the source of high profits for large US firms was big government spending, debt-financed housing construction, and wage-enlarged consumer demand. The problem was that much of the public's money went to the military, and the waste of middle-class consumption degraded the environment. These defects can be attributed to absence of a politic link (class struggle) between Big Government and capitalism in Keynes's policy prescriptions. It was just about the former keeping the latter alive. This is the same with Bill Gates's mode of reform. It is apolitical.
And so we have at this transitional period of the global crisis three possible economic futures. One that is opened up by revolution, another that is supported by reform, and yet another that is undone by return. The GOP and business leaders are pressing for a return: open the economy and live with the virus. But if the return is implemented, it would be catastrophic (read the section of Gate's post concerning "exponential growth and decline"). Indeed, as Gates point, the economy closed itself. This is a point that the anti-lockdown logic misses.
Gates writes:
When people hear that an infectious disease is spreading widely, they change their behavior. There was never a choice to have the strong economy of 2019 in 2020.... Most people would have chosen not to go to work or restaurants or take trips, to avoid getting infected or infecting older people in their household.
As for reform, it will likely work, but the problem is that it would only delay the return. This happened in the second half of the 20th century. Once reform (known as the New Deal) stabilized capitalism between 1947 and 1979, the economy reverted to an even more virulent short-termism: "wage deflation, capital asset inflation... real growth doped by toxic finance," as Bellofiore put it. If history is anything to go by, it's very possible that the return from Gates's long-view reforms would make Flint, Michigan look like a socialist paradise.
So, there is revolution. The thing to keep in mind is the future resulting from radical change is radically unknowable. The most a socialist can say about the construction of a non-capitalist society from the ruins of capitalism is: it might work. From the position of scientific socialism, however, we know for sure that the replacement of capitalism with communism is bound to fail catastrophically. Why? Because this form of communism, once embodied by Russia, is tied to capitalism in two bad ways: the persistence of the ideology of historical progress, and the continuation of labor as the subject of that history.
What to call a society liberated from labor in its present form? I recommend momunism. What I have in mind is a revolution that amplifies the key conclusion of Sarah Hrdy's anthropological sociobiology. This key (which can be seen as the passe-partout to all realms of a future human society) is the relationship between a mother and child. In Hrdy's masterpiece, Mothers and Others, the elaboration of the species-specific features from this bond is human cooperative behaviors. I will have more to say about momunism in future posts.
"Cooperative breeding and human cognitive evolution" by J. M. Burkart S. B. Hrdy C. P. Van Schaik.
First I've ever read of Sarah Hrdy's work — sorry I've waited this long. Check it out: https://t.co/psPNbFQOKt — Andy Isaacs (@maththoth) April 7, 2020
“Sorry for the long wait,” the TSA agent joked from behind his surgical mask. It was March 28, and I was the only person in the security line at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. I was trying to get home to San Jose, California, to quarantine with my recently widowed father. Sea-Tac was eerily, frighteningly quiet. When I got on an inter-terminal train, there were only two people on board — me and the pilot of my flight.
The coronavirus pandemic has frozen many Americans in place, and the fallout is hitting airlines hard. On Thursday, only around 95,000 passengers passed through TSA checkpoints, compared to 2.6 million on the same day last year: a drop of more than 96 percent.
But even with most of the country staying home, the federal government is forcing planes to stay in the air. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, airlines are only eligible for their portion of the $25 billion aviation bailout that the Trump administration recently negotiated if they maintain “minimum service requirements.”
That’s part of why, even though passenger numbers have plummeted, flights are still taking off all across the country. “The number of flights has only dropped something like 50 or 60 percent,” said Daniel Rutherford, program director for marine and aviation at the International Council on Clean Transportation. Flights that were once mostly full are now carrying a few passengers.
Other countries are flying markedly less. The commercial flight-tracking website Flightradar24 shows swarms of flights over the United States, while Europe has dramatically reduced its numbers of planes in the air.
The conditions of the federal bailout stipulate that if an airline flew a route at least once a day, five times a week before March 1, it must continue to do so during the pandemic — or request an exception.
At least nine airlines, including American, United, and Delta, have asked for exceptions so far, arguing that keeping planes in the air is neither “reasonable nor practical” during the current crisis. But the Department of Transportation has refused to grant most of them. On Thursday, the agency ordered Spirit Airlines to reinstate flights to 25 cities or risk losing government aid.
Rutherford believes that the minimum service requirements are only part of the story behind why U.S. planes are still flying. Airlines have been slow to adapt to the drop in demand, and are still figuring out how to adapt to fewer flights and where to park grounded aircraft. “By some analyses, airlines are still flying way more than they’re required to,” he said. “But I’m on the side that we don’t need a lot of these flights — and any government policy standing in the way of canceling them is a bad move.”
Flying is one of the most carbon-intensive actions an individual can take, and aviation currently accounts for about 3 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Democratic lawmakers had previously called for the airline bailout to include provisions for lowering emissions from the aviation industry; in the end, however, the money came with no climate strings attached.
Future stimulus plans could still encourage more environmentally friendly policies. The government could attach future funding to requirements that domestic flights offset climate-warming emissions — or the EPA could, at long last, announce greenhouse gas emissions standards for aviation.
Those policy changes will be all the more important as aviation rebounds post-pandemic. Rutherford thinks that, once the worst of the outbreak has passed, people will be excited to travel again. “History has shown that leisure travel rebounds pretty quickly,” he said.
A massive millionairetax break was tucked into the final version of the coronavirus stimulus package without the knowledge of a number of Democrats, even though their party colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee had fought to block it during earlier negotiations — highlighting, at best, a breakdown in communication within the party and among the two chambers.
In 2017, when Republicans passed their new tax plan, they put a limit on business losses people can use to reduce the amount they owe in taxes. The provision was necessary to keep its official “score” within the range the party needed to use a 50-vote process in the Senate, bypassing Democratic opposition. Now that the tax plan is law, Republicans used the Covid-19 relief package to obliterate those limits.
Eighty-two percent of the benefits of the new tax break will go to real estate and hedge fund investors, and people making $1 million or more a year, the Washington Post reported, citing an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation that was requested by Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas. The estimated 43,000 people who will benefit from the provision will each see their tax liability fall by an average of $1.7 million this year — costing the government more than $90 billion, according to the estimate. That tax break is more than 1,400 times larger than the $1,200 stimulus check the federal government issued to individuals with incomes up to $99,000.
Democrats on the Finance Committee tried to strike the measure, which appeared in earlier Republican versions of the bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and were deliberated in the week before its final passage, according to spokespeople for two Democratic Senate Finance Committee members. Democrats eliminated some provisions, according to a spokesperson for ranking member Ron Wyden of Oregon, but failed to strike the millionaire tax break.
“This was a Republican provision that had been included in their bill from the beginning,” said Ashley Schapitl, spokesperson for Senate Finance Democrats. “If you recall, McConnell put out the Republican-only bill the day or two before those weekend negotiations began (March 20) and this was in there. We were able to knock a few of these things out of the final bill like the transition tax overpayments and downward attribution.”
The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate. At least one Finance Committee Democrat — Whitehouse — was unaware that the tax breaks were included in the final bill text, which was set less than an hour before the vote, according to his spokesperson Richard Davidson. “Further, he only learned of the skewed distribution of the tax cuts after requesting an analysis.”
The bill then went to the House, where it passed by an unrecorded voice vote on March 27 with many members — including some in leadership — either unaware that the tax break provision even existed, or unwilling to raise it publicly. The lack of public debate over the extent to which the stimulus was crafted to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor further underscores how scandalous it is that there is no official record of the vote. According to The Intercept’s effort to reconstruct a roll call to record how each member voted, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the only Democrat who has so far said she would have voted against the bill.
Asked if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about the provision allowing for the millionaire tax break before voting on the bill, spokesperson Henry Connelly did not provide an answer, but said Republicans snuck in the provision as a tax giveaway to a small number of wealthy people.
“The CARES bill that came out of the Senate negotiations had things that we like and things that we don’t. Democrats secured some absolutely life and death wins for workers and families, but as ever, we have seen how devious the GOP majority in the Senate is about sneaking in tax giveaways to the wealthiest few,” Connelly said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the House committees on financial services and oversight, said Republican Senate staffers added the provision at the last second to the final bill text, and that relevant leadership and committee staff did not have a heads-up.
California Rep. Ro Khanna, a member of the House committees on oversight and budget, said he found out about the provision after seeing reporting from the Washington Post. “Our office just learned about this when it was reported, it was a surprise to see,” said Heather Purcell, spokesperson for Khanna.
“These loopholes alone could cost over $170 billion. That’s more than we gave hospitals the CARES Act. The next relief package should work for the people who need it the most, not for the 1%,” Khanna tweeted Wednesday, following The Intercept’s inquiry.
Two other Democratic members who declined to comment on the record said they were not aware of the provision before voting, and learned of it after reporting and requests for information from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Doggett, who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, along with Whitehouse, sent a request to the White House seeking information on the origin of the provisions, citing reporting that shows that the tax break will potentially benefit the president himself, Jared Kushner, and “real estate investors in President Trump’s inner circle.”
“As both small businesses and workers were running out of options, Republicans insisted on this tax break for those at the very top,” Doggett said in a statement to The Intercept. “Only after the Senate had approved the CARES Act was the cost of this provision revealed—more care to this narrow slice of the top 1% than for hospitals or state and local governments. Now that we have laid bare the cost and just how few it cares for, it must be repealed.”
Whitehouse is also calling for its repeal. “It’s a scandal for Republicans to loot American taxpayers in the midst of an economic and human tragedy,” Whitehouse told the Post. “Congress should repeal this rotten, un-American giveaway and use the revenue to help workers battling through this crisis.”
The stimulus was passed without some critical enforcement mechanisms, and President Donald Trump has already fired the inspector general set to oversee the distribution of the relief package’s funds, setting his sights on a White House lawyer to take over instead. While the stimulus calls for a five-person panel to oversee disbursement of the relief funds, Congress was slow to populate the committee. Until Friday, when party leaders named three committee members, Bharat Ramamurti, a former staffer to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was the lone official on the committee. Earlier in the week, he took his oversight role to Twitter, where he posted a thread listing questions he’s asking about how the money is being moved. “Please follow along if you’re curious about what’s happening to billions of your dollars and who it might be helping (or not),” Ramamurti wrote.
The political possibilities of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right.
That’s not hyperbole. The anger of Americans, once they figure out what’s being done to them right now, is going to be volcanic. The fallout from 9/11 and the great recession of 2007-2010 will be imperceptible in comparison.
Not long from now, almost everyone will have a family member or friend who died of Covid-19, many of them suffocating in isolation wards with insufficient treatment, perhaps deprived of a ventilator that would have saved their lives. Huge swaths of the country are plummeting into desperate penury, even as they witness large corporations unlock the U.S. Treasury and help themselves to everything inside.
John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath” describes a similar moment during the Great Depression, when people starved even as orchards of fruit were burned to make the food that remained more profitable: “Men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. … There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. … In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
We’re about to live this again, in more sophisticated ways. Then it was fruit being incinerated so no one could eat it. Now it’s cheap ventilators that were never built because a company called Covidien worried they would compete with their more expensive models. It’s N95 masks that were not available because President Donald Trump delayed invoking the Defense Production Act in order to protect corporate power. It’s tens of thousands of hospital beds being eliminated in New York and New Jersey because the surplus capacity cost money; some of those hospitals were turned into luxury condos. Now, as it was 85 years ago, human beings are being offered as a blood sacrifice to profit. Now as then, the resulting wrath will be towering.
What we know from history is that someone always shows up to harvest this level of ambient rage — but it can go in two directions. If people can be made “angry at the crime,” as Steinbeck wrote, there can be huge positive political changes. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt and unions organized the anger and used it to create the New Deal and the largest middle class in history. In unluckier countries, like Germany, Italy and Japan, the political left failed. The fury was organized by fascists, and directed at innocents.
It’s tough to be optimistic that today’s liberals can replicate Roosevelt’s success. The corporate-managerial-legal class that operates the Democratic Party fears anger and sees it as illegitimate as the basis for action. Having beaten back the threat of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential candidacies, both fueled by strong populist emotion, they dream of a technocratic politics purified of messy, fickle human feelings.
But the American right specializes in the politics of anger. If the Democrats refuse to harness the legitimate rage of Americans and direct it at those responsible for our predicament, the right will make this anger its own and will win.
To understand the stakes, briefly imagine two possible versions of America one year from today, with two different uses of anger. Let’s start with the anger we need, the kind that clarifies and motivates, and underlies all effective politics.
Blue 2021
The Democratic candidate — likely Joe Biden, but we know anything can happen in U.S. politics — beat Donald Trump going away.
The winning Democrat’s slogan was “Fighting Mad.” And that was the core of his or her campaign — both the unabashedly mad part and the demonstrated willingness to fight based on that anger.
The Democrat began the convention address — either in Milwaukee or from his or her basement with no one within 6 feet — by saying: “I’m running for president because I’m angry. And if you’re angry too, there’s nothing wrong with that. ‘Anger’ comes from an Old Norse word that means ‘sorrow.’ Every single one of us has known sorrow because of the thieves and incompetents who’ve been running this country. If you’re angry, then join me and together we’ll take that trash out to the curb.”
The Democrat told the truth without truckling about who exactly was to blame for what had befallen them. The overall Democratic story could be understood by regular people because it included what every story needs: villains to be angry at, and heroes to root for. And unlike the right’s stories, this story was true.
“We’re all in this together,” the Democrat declared. “And what that means is that the people who’re out for themselves are going to pay the price. When I’m president, we’re going to put all the president’s daily briefs online so everybody can see exactly how Trump screwed us. Politicians who made money off inside information on the coronavirus and profiteers who hoarded medical supplies are going to spend the rest of their lives in jail.”
Mobilized anger at the healthcare industry terrified Congress into passing Medicare for All.
Mobilized anger at the country’s poisoning by Fox News led to a congressional investigation of whether the network had knowingly misled Americans about the dangers of Covid-19. The documentation uncovered became the basis for lawsuits that bankrupted and neutered Fox.
Mobilized anger created a sea change in U.S. culture. The taboo against being honest about the anguish and failure all humans experience was shattered. Suddenly Americans realized they were surrounded by suffering just like their own, and much of it was the fault of political choices, rather than them individually being losers.
The example from the top made an entire young, tragedy-stricken generation see that being a liberal politician can mean being a normal, angry human being instead of a technocrat built in a Stanford lab. Suddenly new potential candidates were showing up from unions and grassroots activists rather than elite law schools.
More than anything else, the liberal embrace of anger in 2021 transformed progressive politics into a movement that was serious about power. If there were no people who were truly dangerous, who were hurting us and rightfully deserved our fury, why bother getting out of bed to get power in the first place? And why wield it to vanquish your foes if we’re all on the same team in the end? Anger finally unlocked a liberal capacity to tell the truth.
Red 2021
Donald Trump was reelected. What stunned the Democrats, CNN, and the New York Times even more than Trump’s victory is that he ran on the slogan “Healing America” — even as voluminous, exquisitely researched media output demonstrated that his catastrophic mismanagement helped the coronavirus kill a million surplus Americans.
Yet it somehow didn’t matter. Trump and the GOP’s mighty Wurlitzer settled on a suite of hazy stories, all of which the party’s base fervently believed even though they were mutually contradictory.
Such as, there had been mass deaths but they were the fault of Hunter Biden’s friends in China. Simultaneously, they argued that barely anyone had died and the numbers had been wildly exaggerated by the media to hurt Trump. The suffocation of the country’s small businesses could be blamed on Nancy Pelosi’s bailout of big business and Wall Street. Big business and Wall Street had valiantly kept us alive despite the Democratic hate for free enterprise. At the bottom of the right’s food chain, there were constant whispers that brown people from New York had streamed out of their warrens to purposefully infect the heartland.
What the stories had in common was that they featured someone to blame, someone who could be the target of valid but misplaced rage. By contrast, the stories told by the Democratic candidate and the corporate press were accurate but had no villains and no heroes, and hence were not stories in the normal sense at all, just a complicated conglomeration of facts that looked good on a blackboard but had no heart.
The Democratic candidate’s quiet campaign refused to get exercised about much of anything. When the candidate was asked whether he or she would investigate Trump’s dilatory response to the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, the Democrat said no, because “I know Donald loves this country and even out of office we’ll need his shoulder at the wheel to beat this thing.” What about prosecuting senators for insider trading? No, the candidate explained, because “when I’m president the country will all pull together.”
With a terrifying resurgence of Covid-19 in the fall, and the Democrats failing to secure universal vote by mail, that November saw the lowest turnout ever in a presidential election. The Democratic base — confused, demoralized, and frightened — didn’t show up. Trump declared his modest win to be “the greatest landslide in history.”
The Republican base became even more rage-filled and vindictive in victory. “The Washington Post is trying to destroy America,” Sean Hannity began to declare each week. “Someone’s got to shut it down.” Two days later, a gunman infiltrated Post headquarters and was stopped just before he could open fire.
Trump was now free of all restraints, and he commenced an enormous bombing campaign against Iran. Protests were outlawed for public safety. Large numbers of Americans continued to die from the coronavirus, although no one was sure exactly how many because the government no longer released statistics on it. Fox began quietly, and then more and more loudly, claiming that opponents of the war were importing “biological bombers” from Iran to spread the disease. The stage was set for the classic collapse into authoritarianism, with the official outside enemies purportedly collaborating with the enemies on the inside.
No one knows today which path the U.S. will take. But it’s going to be one or the other: The right or the left will emerge as the champion of the coming American rage. All we can do now is try to make the anger and its consequences rational, based on an accurate understanding of the world and the unnecessary sorrow we experience. We need to make people angry at the crime.
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The political possibilities of this moment are different than anything we have ever experienced. We possess a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the United States a more humane country. But if we fail to seize it, we will face mortal danger from the right.
