Egypt film on poverty ruffles feathers triggering patriotic backlash
Agence France-Presse
October 23, 2021

Egyptian film director Omar El Zohairy poses with his award poses with his award for the best Arab narrative film at the El Gouna Film Festival on Egypt's Red Sea coast 

Khaled DESOUKI AFP

Veteran actor Sherif Moneer, who walked out of a screening at Egypt's El Gouna Film Festival this month, has led a patriotic backlash against the film for "presenting Egypt negatively".

But others have praised director Omar El Zohairy for shedding light on a genuine social problem in a way that is both artistic and constructive.

On late Friday at the closing ceremony of the fifth edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, "Feathers" won the award for best Arab narrative film.''

"For me any artistic work will always generate differing views," a beaming Zohairy told AFP on the red carpet, addressing the issue after claiming the prize.

"The film is more important than any award," the director said. "The film is strong because of its feeling, artistic authenticity... and human values."

"Feathers" tells the story of Om Mario (Mario's mother), a poor woman from the rural south who struggles to make ends meet after her husband is transformed into a chicken.

The absurdist narrative is performed by an amateur cast, mostly from the country's Coptic Christian minority.

It was the first Egyptian feature film to win a major award at the star-studded Cannes Film Festival this year.

The film's opponents, who also include pro-government lawmakers, accuse Zohairy of creating an exaggerated image of squalor that bears no relation to contemporary Egypt.

"The slums that we had and those that are disappearing now are better than the scenes represented in the film," Moneer, the actor, said in a television interview this week.

"The state has made great strides in eliminating slums and moving people to excellent alternative furnished housing... We are in a new republic now."

Loyalist MP Mahmud Badr took to Twitter to condemn the "making of a movie depicting your country as if there was no development."

Samir Sabry, a lawyer with a penchant for suing critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, filed a lawsuit against the film's producers for "insulting Egypt and Egyptians".

'Shedding light'

But the rush of well-to-do Egyptians falling over each other to defend government policy and national pride over a movie about poverty was widely lampooned on social media.

Economic rights researcher Osama Diab said the film's depiction of poverty was by no means exaggerated, based on the government's own figures.

Around one in three of Egypt's 100 million people live below the poverty line.

Ammar ABD RABBO El Gouna Film Festival/AFP

"It has been steadily on the rise in Egypt since the '90s, according to official figures," Diab told AFP.

In the past two years, Covid-19 had further deepened social inequality because of "the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the poor", he said.

"The highest concentration of poverty is among women living in the countryside of Upper Egypt, which is ironically the setting of the film."

Diab said poverty reduction had never been a priority for government economic policy, which had been set in agreement with the International Monetary Fund.


Egypt adopted a raft of harsh austerity measures in 2016 to secure a $12 billion loan from the IMF, including a devaluation of the Egyptian pound.

Last month, the IMF hailed the country as one of the few emerging markets that had weathered the pandemic and experienced positive growth.

"The IMF 2016 programme only speaks of mitigation of the shocks caused by economic reforms whereas they don't speak of poverty alleviation. It was never a goal in itself," Diab said.

Film critic Tarek El-Shenawy, who saw the first screening of "Feathers" at the Cannes Film Festival, described the backlash against the film as "vulgar and silly".

"There's no artistic production that can actually tarnish Egypt's reputation," Shenawy told AFP.

He praised the movie as artistically "great", with an "engaging story" and in no way insulting to Egypt.


"If you're actually shedding light on a social problem then you're really wanting to move your country forward not insulting it," he said.

© 2021 AFP

Why does a democratic republic founded in opposition to monarchy tolerate billionaires?
John Stoehr
October 23, 2021

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (AFP/File / Jim WATSON)

In Thursday's post, I imagined a world in which conservatives placed equality at the center of their sensibilities. It was fun, though hardly realistic. As one reader said, conservatives never do that. If they did, they'd be liberals. But the goal of the exercise was less practical than imaginative. At the root of the many problems we face are thorny questions difficult to answer. But there's also a failure of imagination.

I don't mean to say we need "attitude adjustments." I mean to say we tend to accept conditions as if they were natural rather than what they are, which is constructed. So today, I want to stretch our imaginations by asking a deceptively simple question. Why does our democratic republic, founded in opposition to monarchy, tolerate billionaires?

I say "deceptively," because the question might prompt a quick reply: why not? Most Americans believe billionaires don't intend harm, earn their wealth and, on the whole, benefit society. Some Americans even think billionaires deserve our respect. After all, they sell things consumers like, innovate useful technologies, and some, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, give away their fortunes to worthy causes. But what if I suggested this is rationalizing a democratic abomination?

Let's cut through the haze to state two things plainly about how one person becomes a billionaire. One, it's with the government's blessing. Two, it's with the government's willingness to look the other way. The free market is not free. The very obscenely rich would not be nearly as very obscenely rich if it were. Billionaires, therefore, are not self-made. They are politically, legally and socially made. Yet the vast majority of Americans tends to believe billionaires are just the way things are.

I am not suggesting some kind of malicious conspiracy. I am merely pointing out an obvious fact. Jeff Bezos is worth a reported $200 billion. (He is personally financing all those rockets to space.) It is not humanly possible for one man to work so hard so much so fast to earn $200 billion. (It's been a little over two decades since he founded Amazon.) There has to be a system established in tandem with the government, or in tacit approval by the government, to make such a pile of cash.

Ten percent of the country owns 89 percent of stocks on Wall Street, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. "The top 1 percent gained over $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the pandemic," CNBC reported this week. (The bottom 90 percent holds about 11 percent of stocks.) All that idle money is, moreover, taxed at lower rates than income you earn with your labor.

If it's taxed at all. Lots of very obscenely rich people hide their wealth. (Gerard Ryle, head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said of the global network of secretive and legal tax havens: "The people who could end the secrecy … are themselves benefitting from it. So there is no incentive for them to end it.") Meanwhile, the US government's ability to find wealth to tax has been hamstrung by decades of starving the IRS of resources. The result, according to the LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, has been a "tax gap" that reached a stunning "$630 billion in 2019 — more than 2.5 percent of gross domestic product and about 17.5 percent of the more than $3.6 trillion owed."


Let's say that again, with feeling. The very obscenely rich owe more than $3.6 trillion. That dollar amount should sound familiar. It's roughly the same one being haggled over by the Democrats and the White House. If passed, the legislation would be, along with another spending bill, the biggest investment in the American people since the 1960s. Spending so much is controversial, but it might not be if the very obscenely rich had not, as they have for years, created the impression that there's not enough money to spend on public goods and works. There has always been enough money, but this idea keeps living, in part due to the inability of normal people to imagine an alternative.

I haven't explained yet why billionaires are a democratic abomination. I'll close with that. I think it will help to imagine a political alternative.

What does it mean when a government of, by and for the people treats the very obscenely rich in ways it does not, and never would, treat the people? It means the government, founded in opposition to monarchy, has found ways of replacing the old order of greater mortals (kings and queens) with a new order of greater mortals. Instead of having "magic blood," as Lindsay Beyerstein put it, this new order has magic money, meaning they have so much of it, they can create whole industries to rationalize their existence, thus forcing the rest of us to fight with each other over whether to pay for things like community college.


That's not just wrong.

It's a democratic abomination.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

How the richest 1% tricks you into thinking climate change is your fault
Matthew Rozsa, Salon
October 23, 2021

Wealthy friends sip champagne on a yacht (Shutterstock)

Africa has 54 countries, more than one-quarter of the 195 nations on the planet today. The continent is also home to roughly 1.3 billion souls, more than one-sixth of the human population. And despite comprising a large chunk of the community of Homo sapiens, however, Africa is responsible for less than four percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Life being unfair, that isn't going to spare Africans from suffering as a result of man-made global warming. A recent study revealed that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and the Mount Kenya massif in Kenya are going to lose their glaciers — the only ones on the entire continent. Losing these iconic natural landmarks isn't the worst thing that will happen to Africa because of climate change — there will be extreme weather events, rising sea levels, economic devastation and more — but there is a melancholy symbolism to their impending disappearance.

Climate change isn't a problem caused by all people equally; it is caused mostly by the rich, and since we live in a capitalist world, the suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. Climate scientists, sociologists and economists are largely in agreement on this point. And it presages the way that things will need to change in order to stave off the extinction of humanity.

"The problem is structural and systemic," Dr. David Fasenfest, an American sociologist and associate professor at Wayne State University, told Salon by email. "Capitalist society is geared towards waste and destruction in order to promote consumption while producing at the lowest cost. That requires power and that means without strict restrictions most of the time we use 'dirty' forms of energy like coal that pollutes and promotes climate change."

In this sense, there is no individual or group of individuals who can be accurately described as the single "culprit" behind climate change. Everyone is acting according to their self-interest within the system of incentives established by our neoliberal economic system. Cumulatively, these led to social developments that exacerbate climate change. For example, if a business uses a more expensive form of energy rather than a green one, their production costs will rise and consumers will probably respond to the likely price increase by rewarding their customers.

"We are all both culpable and not," Fasenfest observed. People who can afford and use air conditioning during hot weather, or continue to eat beef even though it exacerbates climate change, all contribute to a system that is destroying the planet. As Fasenfest observed, most people have no practical alternatives to participating in this system on a day-to-day basis; they can make lifestyle alterations which make teensy dents in the greater problem, but that is about it. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society that prospers under capitalism (relatively speaking), the chances are that you fall into the category of major climate perpetrator in one way or another.

One cannot discuss this problem without also mentioning industrialization. An advanced energy technology expert, Dr. Martin Hoffert of New York University, broke down the history by email for Salon.

"The agriculture-based civilization of the eighteenth-century using water and animal power to augment human muscle emitted few greenhouse gases," Hoffert explained. Once humanity became reliant on technologies that burn fossil fuel, they kicked off "an unprecedented transfer of carbon from the lithosphere (rocks) to the atmosphere was taking place with no precedents geologically."

"It took two hundred million years for the hydrocarbon energy reserves (coal, oil, and gas) to form, whereas at the current mining and oil pumping rates fueling civilization and supporting global GDP growth, we will have depleted them in a few hundred years," Hoffert added. "We're using fossil fuels a million times faster than nature made them."

In a sense, then, global warming is the story of how industrialized nations put humanity on a collision course with disaster in a capitalist system. It is a global problem, albeit one that wealthier nations have exacerbated the most. To quote Howard Beale from "Network": "We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first."

This is reflected in the nation-by-nation statistics that serve as the backdrop for the melting of the African glaciers.

"Most of the world's total greenhouse emissions have come from the world's rich countries—basically the members of the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]," Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science at Harvard University, wrote to Salon. "Climate change is driven by greenhouse gases, which are produced by economic activity, so the countries with the most economic activity are most responsible for climate change." For most of modern history this included the United States, Japan and industrialized European countries like France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Now that China is experiencing an economic boom, it has become the world's top annual emitter. Moreover, Oreskes noted that national annual emission statistics are somewhat misleading "since the climate doesn't care when the emissions were emitted."

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If you look at per capita carbon footprints by country — that is, ascertaining how much carbon is emitted by the average individual in a given nation — the list is consistently topped by the affluent states.

"We are talking about people in nations that are either very rich, very inefficient, or both," Oreskes explained. In 2011, for instance, the top nations in terms of per capita emissions were Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium and the Czech Republic. In lectures to students, Oreskes explains that the average American has the same carbon footprint as 1.3 Koreans, 7 Brazilians, 9 Pakistanis, 35 Nigerians and 52 Ugandans. Even so, those national statistics are also misleading in the sense that they can dupe someone into believing the problem is about border rather than money.

"This reflects consumption, which reflects wealth," Oreskes told Salon. "A rich person in India might have a carbon footprint similar to an average American. So basically, the answer is rich people."

If you're reading this and are among the global affluent, you should pause before starting to feel too guilty. As mentioned earlier, few outside the tiniest sliver of the billionaire class has the power to single-handedly make massive changes to the socioeconomic order. Even if you live a middle class lifestyle in an industrialized nation, that does not mean you chose the economic infrastructure you inhabit. There is a reason why our economy has not adapted to mitigate climate change, even though the world's nations acknowledged they had to do so by signing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. It isn't everyone's fault: It's the lobbyists from industries that, in one way or another, depend on climate change to make their profits.

Dr. Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who specializes in environmental sociology, described how the fossil fuel industry — including oil, coal and natural gas corporations — have undermined the planet's future.

"They sign pledges and advertise their commitment to reducing carbon emissions, but continually oppose (via PR campaigns, lobbying, and campaign contributions) efforts to achieve reductions — such as their current attempts to undermine [President Joe] Biden's climate agenda," Dunlap wrote to Salon. He identified a number of major actors in this campaign, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Manufacturers Association to industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the National Coal Association.

"All of these actors rely heavily on PR firms to design and deliver their messages to the public," Dunlap explained. "Opposition to climate change mitigation policies from these economically motivated actors was strengthened considerably in the 1990s when key segments of the U.S. conservative movement—conservative philanthropists such as the Koch Brothers and their foundations, the conservative think tanks they support, and conservative media and commentators—committed to a 'free-market' ideology began promoting denial and skepticism among the public, policy-makers and mainstream media out of fear of the regulatory implications of reducing carbon emissions."

In addition to casting doubt on the indisputable science proving the planet is warming, conservative groups also try to convince people that individual behaviors are more important than the consequences of their industries. Since Earth Day 1970, Dunlap pointed out, industries have tried to manipulate the public dialogue so that individual consumers believe their choices can save or destroy the planet, such as stopping littering and helping clean up green spaces. This obscures the systemic issues that are actually causing this problem, guaranteeing that they'll only get worse.

So what is the solution? Simply put: Acknowledge that capitalism is the problem, and tailor one's political solutions accordingly.

"The only way forward is political — challenging the very forces and structures that permit this degradation," Fasenfest told Salon. He noted how people continue to bitcoin mine even though it uses more energy than many small cities, or how corporate interest groups and economic fears overrode self-preservation after humanity began to make strides for the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.

"Today we debate social spending and the senator from a coal producing state [Joe Manchin of West Virginia] insists that alternative energy supports be dropped from those plans," Fasenfest wrote. "Consider that the gap between the 1% and 99% is smaller than the gap between the 0.1% and the 1%, and consider that those people are both insulated and indifferent to a whole range of problems, and you get the reason there has to be a mass intervention that aggressively forces changes."

In addition, people need to become more aware of the exact nature of the political forces that threaten humanity's future. While the elites are responsible for manipulating the masses, that doesn't mean there aren't millions and millions of ordinary people who are complicit through their political choices.

"A big issue is the GOP's tribal nonacceptance of inconvenient scientific truths, as Al Gore first observed," Hoffert wrote to Salon. "The Trump-led Republican Party is in full opposition to science: Whether it's anti-covid vaccinations, universal health care, unequal application of laws by police, Democrat-leaning Black vote suppression, or denying fossil fueled climate change -- in many cases opposing their own economic interests. This looks increasingly unlike loyal opposition and more like visceral hatred of "coastal elites." prioritizing "Owning the Libs,' over other policy alternatives."

He added, "Perhaps because they perceive themselves as dismissed by better educated 'progressive elites' as bunch of ignorant hillbillies. Humiliation is an unappreciated factor in politics. They may not easily give up their gasoline powered pickups with gun racks and Confederate Battle Flags to environmentally friendly cars and trucks."

IT ALREADY HAS

Trump's Big Lie is the new Lost Cause — and it may poison the country for decades
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 23, 2021

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters he would bring back jobs to the depressed steel town (AFP)

Perhaps the biggest of many imponderables about Donald Trump has always been the question of what playbook was he following? His 2016 campaign didn't have a plan beyond questioning the manhood of his male primary rivals and ceaseless yapping about Hillary Clinton's "emails." His 2020 campaign never found a focus until October, when he seized upon his victory over his own case of COVID-19 as evidence of his manhood. Remember his return from Walter Reed Medical Center to the White House? Trump was ripping off his mask on the Truman balcony! That'll show 'em!

In between campaigns, Trump's presidency seemed aimless, stumbling vaguely forward from one indictment to another until the time came to issue pardons, which we soon learned was his "favorite" presidential power — not being commander in chief, not ordering up Air Force One to fly him off on his many golf weekends, not even being able to pick up his bedside phone in the middle of the night and order a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. The pardon power was it.

Losing the election in November and having to move out of the White House has given him something to focus on, however. He never cared about governing and didn't have much of an ideology to guide him, but he's finally found something he can believe in and a playbook he can follow: his very own Lost Cause. Trump has embraced with gusto the South's strategy after losing the Civil War: Tell your own people that you didn't really lose, and double down on the nobility and honor of what they still believe in. In the case of the Civil War, it was slavery and the inherent superiority of whiteness and inferiority of blackness. The new Lost Cause is of course Trump himself, to whom his followers attach the same kind of gauzy metaphors that came into use after the Civil War: flags (Trump campaign flags, the Confederate flag and the "Don't Tread on Me" banner are in heavy rotation) songs ("I'm Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood and — perhaps not so ironically now — "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones are played at all his rallies) and symbols (Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of antebellum shrine to the garish excess Trump represents).

And of course, most important of all are the lies. The lies told to support the South's Lost Cause were as outrageous as they were numerous: Slaves were well treated by their kind and understanding masters and were far better off than they would have been had they remained with their savage tribes in Africa. The war wasn't fought over slavery, it was fought for the cause of "states' rights." Gender roles were preserved in revanchist amber: Men were the protectors of Southern white women's "honor" and "purity," and women returned the favor by forming the Daughters of the Confederacy and charging themselves with erecting the monuments to Confederate war heroes and the Confederate dead which became ubiquitous throughout the South.

It's hardly necessary to delve into Trump's lies about the election: They have been well documented and confirmed by more than 60 losses in his lawsuits contesting the election's outcome in battleground states. Trump has now launched himself into an adjunct of the Big Lie — the lie that the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn't violent and wasn't an assault, but merely a "tourist visit" by Trump supporters, while outside agitators and antifa infiltrators committed all the violent acts to tarnish the Trump cause. Trump has turned Ashli Babbitt, killed at the head of a mob as she broke through a door into an area of the Capitol where members of Congress were sheltering, into a martyr. And his minions on Capitol Hill have done everything in their power to stymie and tarnish the work of the House committee investigating the assault, including voting en masse against a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Capitol assault and now opposing the move by the House to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a subpoena to provide documents and testify before the House committee.

POSTMODERN CONFEDERATE TRAITOR

Bannon is in the process of transforming himself into a latter-day Robert E. Lee, talking about commanding a 20,000-strong army of "shock troops" he plans to use to intimidate "enemy" voters during the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The centerpiece of Trump's personal Lost Cause is nursing his grudge, and the collective grudge of his followers, against the "elites" they blame for bringing down the dream. Which involves, of course, whipping up the festering sore of resentment and hate that is the Trump "base." The South used the KKK and later the so-called Citizens Councils. Trump has the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. I am certain we're going to learn from the House committee that Trump himself was involved in their deployment on Jan. 6 in the violent assault on the Capitol.

Perhaps the most important way the South promoted its Lost Cause after the Civil War was through electoral and legislative means. The rebellion of Southern states against the Reconstruction laws and the 14th and 15th amendments is instructive. Major figures of the Confederacy took prominent roles in the Democratic Party. The Confederate raider and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other Confederate veterans attended the Democratic convention of 1868 in New York where one of Forrest's friends, Frank Blair Jr., was nominated as the party's candidate for vice president on a ticket with a former governor of New York. Their campaign slogan was "Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule." Speeches against emancipation of the slaves given by Blair were said to contribute to Ulysses S. Grant's comfortable electoral victory.

Later, Southern states would virtually nullify the 14th and 15th amendments by passing the Jim Crow laws, stripping Black citizens of the right to vote and consigning them to subservient roles in the Southern economy and society little better than those they had held as slaves. The South separated itself from the rest of the country by its continuing adherence to the doctrines and practices of white supremacy in its legal and social systems.

Something very similar is going on right now in Republican-controlled states, including all of those that comprised the Confederacy, with state laws being passed to suppress the votes of minorities and gerrymander legislative districts to limit representation by minorities and the Democratic Party in general. It's a kind of legalized second secession by Republican states and the Republican Party, which has remade itself as the Trump Party, parroting Trump's racism and lies about the election and following his lead in Jan. 6 denial.

The words constitutional crisis and slow-motion Civil War have entered the lexicon. Former Republican writers like David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charlie Sykes, David Brock and Max Boot are all over the op-ed pages, warning that Trump and his allies are preparing to "ensure victory by any means necessary."

"The stage is thus being set for chaos," Robert Kaplan wrote recently in a widely shared op-ed in the Washington Post. "Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn't have."

Donald Trump had to be handed a loss in 2020 in order to begin championing his new Lost Cause. There won't be another one. If he runs and wins in 2024, we will not recognize the smoking ruins left by a second Trump victory. It won't take them long to begin erecting statues to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and renaming public squares after the "Great Replacement." The only question is, what will the Daughters of the New Confederacy call themselves? The Mistresses of Mar-a-Lago?

Trouble piles up for US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Brett Bachman, Salon
October 23, 2021

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy (Photo: Screen capture)

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy faced over a dozen conflicts of interest during his tenure due to his refusal to divest family stakes in companies tied to the policies of his own agency.

According to documents newly obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) via a Freedom of Information Act, Dejoy reportedly recused himself from agency decisions that might have affected the performance of his former freight transportation company XPO Logistics. However, the postmaster general opted out of divesting from the firm altogether, opening him up to a blatant conflict of interest.

Back in August, CNN reported that, despite his role in heading the USPS, DeJoy's stake in XPO fell between $30 million and $75 million – an apparent conflict that came as a complete "shock" to many outside experts.

"If you have a $30 million interest in a company, of course it's going to impact you," Stuart Gilman, a former assistant director at the Office of Government Ethics, said. "I would assumethat there is a problem here. It certainly doesn't pass the smell test."

XPO routinely carries out contracts with both the USPS and other government agencies, like the Defense Department. During the first two months of his tenure last year, XPO signed onto at least two new contracts with the USPS.

"There was a period of time where the head of the Postal Service was making decisions when there could have been a conflict, and he could have been thinking about his own financial interest, rather than the interest of the Postal Service and the country," said Noah Bookbinder, the president of CREW. "That's significant."

Last year, by October, DeJoy had announced that he would formally divest from XPO in order to preclude any conflicts of interest from arising. At the time, CREW suggested that the nature of the divestment might be a "sham," largely because DeJoy transferred his assets to his adult children, who could then return those assets to their father after he leaves government.

Also under scrutiny are a series of trades made by DeJoy last June, just a month after he joined the administration. The postmaster general specifically bought $50,000 and $100,000 in stock options for Amazon.

"It's another conflict. He's got the option to buy. That means he's gambling that Amazon's value is going to go up," Marcus Owens, a former top IRS official, told CNN. "Why is he investing in a competitor to the enterprise that he's supposed to be managing? This is a classic case for investigation by an inspector general."

The USPS's Office of Inspector has reportedly reviewed DeJoy finances and concluded he has complied with the necessary ethical requirements. Still, CREW noted, the review did not take into account a full picture of the postmaster general's finances.

Over the two years, DeJoy has also come under fire for his gross mismangement of the agency, which last year entailed a series of "cost-cutting" measures, such as the removal of mail sorting machines, that would drastically slow transit times. The move earned the Trump-appointee accusations of attempting to sabotage the election in Trump's favor by undermining the mail-in-ballot process. Many Democrats have called for his resignation.

This month, DeJoy again announced a set of policies that would "result in serious delays and the degradation of service for millions," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The agency is expected to apply steep price hikes on commercial and domestic retail packages, as well as slow first-class mail transit by 30%.

Labor takes Biden fight to homes of congressional leaders
Joe Maniscalco, DC Report @ Raw Story
October 23, 2021


Housing rights advocates and climate crisis activists are desperately urging lawmakers to hold the line against noisy efforts to gut key provisions in President Joe Biden's Build Back Better human infrastructure bill.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, just got more money than it knows what to do with.

Earlier in the week, the Pentagon gleefully sprinkled an extra $10 billion on top of its annual $725.8 billion military budget without a peep from Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona or Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, all Democrats who seem more concerned with reining in federal spending than supporting Biden's signature policy initiative.

"I really don't understand why these people are in public office if all they care about is the donations they get from industries and not the people that they work for. I honestly think it's pretty psychopathic to hear what the science is saying [about climate catastrophe] and then go ahead and ignore it." Anna Jolliffe, tech worker

"Housing is not something that can just be cut from the budget to save on costs," Abigail Ng, policy and communications coordinator for New York City's Tenants & Neighbors group, told me on Wednesday. Extra money for war rather than people, "shows where their priorities are — where our representatives put our tax money — that shows what they value.

"Clearly, because we have to fight for it, it shows they don't value housng as much."

Tenants & Neighbors is a grassroot organization dedicated to affordable housing. About 10 New York City-based advocacy groups agitating for transformative action on climate justice and housing rights rallied along with Ng's group outside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's posh Prospect Park West apartment in the borough of Brooklyn on Oct. 20.

"This is people's futures we're talking about, people's livelihoods — and it's not worth negotiating [away]," Ng added.

Anna Jolliffe, 27, a tech industry worker, decried the rubber-stamping of vast military expenditures while overwhelming social needs circle the drain because a few Democrats aren't backing their party's leader.

"Obviously, there's no future without a healthy climate," Jolliffe said. "I think it's ridiculous. I think it's a complete failure. I really don't understand why these people are in public office if all they care about is the donations they get from industries and not the people that they work for. I honestly think it's pretty psychopathic to hear what the science is saying [about climate catastrophe] and then go ahead and ignore it. It's infuriating."

Pentagon Top Polluter

The U.S. military machine is, a nd has been for a long while, the largest polluter on the planet. It consumes more oil and emits more carbon dioxide [C02] than any other single entity.

At the same time, the lack of affordable housing, poverty, low wages and unemployment have thrust more than half a million people into homelessness across the United States. According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, that trend has only grown over the last four years. This is expected to worsen since the federal pandemic pause on evictions has ended, though some states like New York have their own eviction limits.

Still, advocates for housing rights and other measures contained inside the Build Back Better reconciliation are being told that items meant to uplift working-class people must be subjected to the chopping block in the name of "fiscal sanity."

However, no such caution is expressed when it comes to spending $66 billion in preparation for some speculative future war with China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Brooklyn Protests

Demonstrators outside Schumer's residence reserved a good dose of their anger for the longtime Democratic Party powerbroker himself and fellow New York congressional delegation member Hakeem Jeffries for not doing enough to confront the climate crisis being too cozy with the fossil fuel industry.

"It is incredible to see how they think they can play with our lives and the dignified living that we deserve — and they do it right in front of us by lying to us, and not taking the stands that they had promised to be taking," Estefania Galvis, workers development Director at NICE – New Immigrant Community Empowerment — told me.

NICE is a non-profit organization advocating for vulnerable immigrants — many of them from the perilous building and construction industry — especially deadly jobs to Latino workers.

Latino workers make up roughly 10-percent of New York State's workforce but represented 20.5-percent of worker fatalities in 2019.

Across the United States, Latino worker fatalities in all industries have increased nearly 18% over the last six years.

"People's lives are on the line, right now, especially undocumented people," Galvis continued. "We saw it with the storm that happened [in New York City] a couple of weeks ago; we have seen it on the border; we have seen it in the [detention center] camps — immigrants that are undocumented don't have any human rights in this country — and neither do working-class people."
MSM Favors Infighting Over Substance

Jolliffe also aimed the mainstream corporate media outlets for focusing on all of the in-fighting and politics surrounding the Build Back Better plan instead of "what's actually in the bill."

"I just think there are failures happening all around," she said. "The climate component is most important to me personally. I'm a person who comes from a place privilege, but there's also lots of other things in there that will help people living paycheck-to-paycheck."

One of the things the Build Back Better plan seeks to do is extend existing child tax credits for another three years. The child tax credit, expanded last March, provides pandemic-stricken American families with limited financial relief — up to $300 per child.

However, Joe Manchin is attempting to undermine the entire relief effort by insisting families be subjected to a work requirement and a $60,000 income cap to qualify for monthly aid.

Congress approved the $725.8 billion military budget earlier this week without any muss or fuss. The Defense Department will get $29 billion, 4% more than was allocated last year.

"Give us citizenship, and give us the tools to be able to have dignified lives. That's what we need right now," Galvis added. "Stop funding wars, and stop funding the rich, and stop funding [big] tech. Stop giving away our money to the billionaires — tax the rich and give us a dignified living. We want what we need, and we want it right now. This is the time to do it."

Editorial: Bannon’s subpoena defiance is illegal, yet the ‘law and order’ party defends it

Steve Bannon speaks with reporters in New York on Aug. 20, 2020. A lawyer for President Donald Trump's former chief strategist says Bannon won’t comply with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol because Trump is asserting executive privilege.
(AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, File)Associated Press

By the Editorial Board

For anyone who still needs it, most Republican House members last week provided more evidence that the GOP — once the “law-and-order” party — is now the party that coddles criminals. By overwhelmingly voting against holding Donald Trump crony Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for his refusal to testify in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, this shameful roster (including all six of Missouri’s GOP House members) is once again running interference for a lawless ex-president who tried to overthrow a valid election.

This certainly isn’t the first time congressional Republicans have sided with criminality lately. Not once but twice, most of them voted against holding Trump accountable for clearly impeachable acts (extorting a foreign ally for political support, and inciting the Capitol riot). They defended or silently tolerated Trump’s outrageous string of self-serving, swampy pardons for criminally charged or convicted supporters like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Bannon himself. They’re currently defending wealthy tax cheats by blocking Democratic efforts to strengthen Internal Revenue Service collection powers.

The crime that Bannon committed to merit Thursday’s House vote to hold him in contempt is, like so much of the lawbreaking the GOP tries to ignore these days, pretty clear-cut: When Congress issues a subpoena, the subject of that subpoena is legally required to provide the information being sought — in this case, testimony about Bannon’s conversations with Trump before the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s excuse for refusing is that Trump is claiming executive privilege, which legal scholars say is nonsense because Trump is no longer president.

The strategy for protecting Bannon included a pathetic diversionary tactic by Republican Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, who prattled on, flush with fake outrage, about “serious security vulnerabilities that have not been addressed by this House in 11 months after Jan. 6.” As if security lapses excuse what Trump and his violent minions did that day. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of just nine Republicans who voted to hold Bannon accountable for thumbing his nose at a legally issued congressional subpoena, saw right through Davis’ act, saying: “Don’t let my side use the security structure as the straw man.”

Republicans also argued Bannon should be out of the reach of the investigation because he is just a private citizen. Bannon’s own argument that he’s shielded by Trump’s (nonexistent) executive privilege would seem to suggest otherwise.

This really isn’t that complicated: A congressional probe to establish exactly who did what in advance of a mob attack on the seat of America’s government is not only justified but required. Congress has the legal authority to subpoena relevant witnesses for that probe. Those who defy such subpoenas are breaking the law.

And the party that tries to shield those lawbreakers should stop pretending it cherishes law and order.

Editorial: Bannon’s subpoena defiance is illegal, yet the ‘law and order’ party defends it | Editorial | stltoday.com

FOOD IS A HUMAN RIGHT
Is there a constitutional right to food? Mainers to decide

By PATRICK WHITTLE

1 of 6

Phil Retberg feeds his hogs at the Quill's End Farm, Friday, Sept. 17, 2021, in Penobscot, Maine. A ballot question in will give Maine voters a chance to decide on a first-in-the-nation "right to food amendment."

AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty


PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Depending on whom you ask, Maine’s proposed “right to food” constitutional amendment would simply put people in charge of how and what they eat — or would endanger animals and food supplies, and turn urban neighborhoods into cattle pastures.

For supporters, the language is short and to the point, ensuring the right to grow vegetables and raise livestock in an era when corporatization threatens local ownership of the food supply, a constitutional experiment that has never been tried in any state.

For opponents and skeptics, it’s deceptively vague, representing a threat to food safety and animal welfare, and could embolden residents to raise cows in their backyards in cities like Portland and Bangor.

In the Nov. 2 election, voters will be asked if they favor an amendment to the Maine Constitution “to declare that all individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being.”

The proposal is essentially “the 2nd Amendment of food,” said Republican Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, who proposed the amendment, likening it to the U.S. constitutional amendment that assures the right to bear arms.

He says it’s a common-sense amendment that would make sure the government can’t stop people from doing things like saving and exchanging seeds, as long as they don’t violate public or property rights.

“There’s a lot of disturbing trends in the food category, with the power and control that corporations are taking over our food,” said Faulkingham, who is also a commercial lobster fisherman. “We want to protect people’s ability to grow gardens, grow and raise their own food.”

Faulkingham and others said the amendment is a response to growing corporate ownership of the food supply. They see the amendment as a way to wrest control of food from big landowners and giant retailers.

But Julie Ann Smith, executive director of the Maine Farm Bureau, the largest farmers advocacy organization in the state, argued the language of the amendment is so broad that it could make the food supply less safe.

That’s a problem in a state where potatoes, blueberries, maple syrup and dairy products are all key pieces of the economy, she said. The amendment could empower residents to buy and consume food that isn’t subject to inspections, proper refrigeration and other safety checks, Smith worried.

“We think it’s very dangerous to have the words ‘to consume the food of your own choosing.’ That is so broad and dangerous,” Smith said. “It has the potential to cause serious problems in food safety, animal welfare.”

Smith said the farm bureau is also concerned that the amendment could override local ordinances that prevent residents from raising livestock anywhere they choose.

Supporters of the proposal, including Faulkingham, said that local rules would still be enforced, and that the amendment would not mean you could do things like raise chickens anywhere you want or fish commercially without a license.

The amendment proposal is an outgrowth of the right-to-food movement, sometimes called the food sovereignty movement, which has expanded in recent years in Maine and states around the U.S. and Canada.

The movement comprises a patchwork of small farmers, raw milk enthusiasts, libertarians, back-to-the-land advocates, anti-corporatists and others who want to ensure local control of food systems.

Maine enacted a food sovereignty law, the nation’s first of its kind, in 2017. The law allows local governments to OK small food producers selling directly to customers on site. The law was especially popular with sellers of raw milk, which can be legally sold in Maine but is more restricted in many other states.

The nationwide food sovereignty movement has yielded similar laws in states including Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota, and pushes for the same elsewhere.

The amendment is likely to find support among Maine’s self-sufficient, practical Yankee set, said Mark Brewer, a political scientist with the University of Maine.

However, Brewer agreed with criticism that the amendment is so vague that it’s unclear what it would actually do.

“I’d be more interested in how it could play out in the courts,” Brewer said. “If you want to raise cattle within the city limits when city laws say you can’t, but the Constitution says you can. Then what happens?”

For Heather Retberg, a farmer in the small town of Penobscot, the concerns about cows turning up in cities are a silly distraction from the real goal of the proposal.

Retberg, who has a 100-acre farm with cows, pigs, chicken and goats, said the proposal is “an antidote to corporate control of our food supply” and a chance for rural communities to become self-sufficient when it comes to what food they grow and eat.

It’s also a chance to tackle the problem of the state’s “food deserts,” where residents don’t have enough access to healthy food, Retberg said.

“This shifts the power to the individuals in a rights framework, instead of the corporations,” Retberg said. “It gives us more voice in how we want our food systems to be, and how we want our communities to look.”

Wuhan Coronavirus Research Coverup Allegations Prompt NIH to Give EcoHealth an Ultimatum

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has given U.S. research group EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) until Monday to release all of its NIH-funded coronavirus research data, after it failed to reveal that an engineered coronavirus was found to be more infectious in mice than other forms. Republicans have subsequently accused the group of lying to NIH.

© Niphon Khiawprommas/Getty A stock photo shows a laboratory worker looking down a microscope. EcoHealth Alliance's past coronavirus research has sparked controversy throughout the pandemic.

Both organizations have been thrust into the spotlight by the fact the agency funded EHA research into coronaviruses in Wuhan—the Chinese city where the first COVID-19 cases were reported—over the past several years.

The work, funded by a multi-year grant awarded in 2014 and done in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), involved engineering coronaviruses to see how they affected mice. Critics say this was risky and could potentially have led to human infections or even the COVID pandemic.

The NIH has repeatedly denied that this was possible. On Wednesday, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement that the NIH-funded virus research "could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic."

His statement came the same day the health agency demanded that the EHA hand over any unpublished data related to the studies after it failed to immediately report back to the NIH when a coronavirus experiment produced the significant finding that the mice became sicker.

On Wednesday, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak outlined the NIH's demands to EHA in a letter to Republican Representative James Comer.

In the experiment, the mice infected with the coronaviruses had been bioengineered to have a protein on their cells, called ACE2, to which the viruses could attach. Humans also have this protein, with the idea being that the experiments could more accurately illustrate the risk that these viruses pose to us despite only mice being involved.

According to Tabak's letter, the experiments showed that "laboratory mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus."

Tabak described this as an "unexpected result" that the researchers had not deliberately set out to produce, but that they nonetheless should have reported it in case new biosafety measures were needed.

At the same time, Tabak said that bat coronaviruses studied under the EHA grant "could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic" since they were too genetically different.

As far as the NIH is concerned, this is a breach of the terms of the grant that the agency had awarded to EHA. EHA was required to tell the NIH if any of the experiments revealed what is known as a one log viral growth increase (a factor of ten).

He wrote: "EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as was required by the terms of the grant," Tabak wrote. "EcoHealth is being notified that they have five days from today [October 20] to submit to NIH any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted under this award."

EHA disputed the NIH's allegation that it breached the terms of the grant. In a statement to Newsweek, EHA said there had been a "misconception" about the grant's terms and said that they did publish the research findings "as soon as we were made aware" in April 2018.

"NIH reviewed those data and did not indicate that secondary review of our research was required, in fact year 5 funding was allowed to progress without delay," EHA said.

Republicans in the House Oversight Committee said this EHA blunder was proof that NIH "were lied to" about controversial gain of function research.


🚨🚨🚨

July 28th NIH says “no NIAID funding was approved for Gain of Function research at the WIV.”

Obviously, they were lied to.

NIH confirmed today EcoHealth and the WIV conducted GOF research on bat coronaviruses.

@PeterDaszak with EcoHealth hid it from the USG. pic.twitter.com/Ou3ZLKto0L— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) October 20, 2021

The development comes after scientists called for Peter Daszak, the president of EHA to quit, accusing him of concealing conflicts of interest, withholding critical information, and misleading public opinion during the COVID pandemic.

Newsweek has previously reported on how an activist sleuth group named DRASTIC, standing for "Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19," uncovered details of WIV research in China, as well as on Daszak's collaboration with WIV director and bat virologist Shi Zhengli, and the scrutiny surrounding the EcoHealth Alliance.

Daszak has co-authored nearly a dozen papers with Shi Zhengli, and funnelled at least $600,000 of U.S. government funding to her research.

A Freedom of Information Act request from earlier this year showed that Daszak orchestrated a letter to squelch talk of a COVID lab leak. He drafted it, reached out to fellow scientists to sign it, and worked behind the scenes to make it seem that the letter represented the views of a broad range of experts.

"This statement will not have the EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person," he wrote in his pitch to the co-signatories. Scientists whose work had overlapped with the WIV agreed not to sign it so they could "put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration."

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Scientists React As NIH Head Francis Collins Calls Wuhan Lab Leak Theories 'Misinformation'

January 6 insurrection and Facebook: Internal docs paint a damning picture

Just days after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th, Facebook's Chief Operational Officer Sheryl Sandberg downplayed her company's role in what had happened  

.

© CNN Illustration/Getty Images

By Donie O'Sullivan, Tara Subramaniam and Clare Duffy, 

CNN Bsiness OCT 23,2021

"We know this was organized online. We know that," she said in an interview with Reuters. "We... took down QAnon, Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, anything that was talking about possible violence last week. Our enforcement's never perfect so I'm sure there were still things on Facebook. I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate and don't have our standards and don't have our transparency."

But internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN suggest otherwise. The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement, which played a pivotal role in the insurrection, had turned violent.

Asked by CNN about Sandberg's quote and whether she stood by it, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the greater context around Sandberg's quote. She had been noting that Jan. 6 organization happened largely online, including but not limited to on Facebook's platforms, the spokesperson said.

The documents were provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen as evidence to support disclosures she made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen's legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 US news organizations, including CNN.

One of Haugen's central allegations about the company focuses on the attack on the Capitol. In a SEC disclosure she alleges, "Facebook misled investors and the public about its role perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection."

Facebook denies the premise of Haugen's conclusions and says Haugen has cherry-picked documents to present an unfair portrayal of the company.

"The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them. We took steps to limit content that sought to delegitimize the election, including labeling candidates' posts with the latest vote count after Mr. Trump prematurely declared victory, pausing new political advertising and removing the original #StopTheSteal Group in November," Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told CNN Friday.

"After the violence at the Capitol erupted and as we saw continued attempts to organize events to dispute the outcome of the presidential election, we removed content with the phrase 'stop the steal' under our Coordinating Harm policy and suspended Trump from our platform."

Facebook also on Friday night published a blog post by its vice president of Integrity, Guy Rosen, about its efforts around the 2020 election.

"Our enforcement was piecemeal"

Among the tens of thousands of pages of documents Haugen provided is an internal analysis of how the Stop the Steal and Patriot Party movements spread on Facebook, first reported by BuzzFeed News earlier this year.

"Hindsight is 20:20," the author or authors of the analysis, who are not identifiable from what was provided, write. "[A]t the time it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was protected free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy. But hindsight being 20:20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimatizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection."

The analysis found that the policies and procedures Facebook had in place were simply not up to the task of slowing, much less halting, the "meteoric" growth of Stop the Steal. For instance, those behind the analysis noted that Facebook treated each piece of content and person or group within Stop the Steal individually, rather than as part of a whole, with dire results.

"Almost all of the fastest growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal during their peak growth," the analysis says. "Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to take down individual Groups and Pages once they exceeded a violation threshold. We were not able to act on simple objects like posts and comments because they individually tended not to violate, even if they were surrounded by hate, violence, and misinformation."

This approach did eventually change, according to the analysis -- after it was too late.

"After the Capitol insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country, we realized that the individual delegitimizing Groups, Pages, and slogans did constitute a cohesive movement," the analysis says.

Video: Messages show what employees were saying about Facebook's role in the insurrection (CNN)

This was not the only way in which Facebook had failed to anticipate something like Stop the Steal, or in which its response was lacking.

Facebook has for some time now had a policy banning "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its platforms. This ban allows it to take action against, for instance, the Russian troll army that worked to interfere with the 2016 US election through accounts and pages set up to look as if they were American But, the analysis notes with emphasis, the company had "little policy around coordinated authentic harm" -- that is, little to stop people organizing under their real names and not hiding their intention to get the country to reject the results of the election.

Stop the Steal and Patriot Party groups "were not directly mobilizing offline harm, nor were they directly promoting militarization," the analysis says. "Instead, they were amplifying and normalizing misinformation and violent hate in a way that delegitimized a free and fair democratic election. The harm existed at the network level: an individual's speech is protected, but as a movement, it normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy."

The analysis does note, however, that once Facebook saw the results of Stop the Steal on January 6th and took action, it was able to deploy measures that stymied the growth of both Stop the Steal and Patriot Party groups.

Facebook's Stone told CNN, "Facebook has taken extraordinary steps to address harmful content and we'll continue to do our part. We also closely worked with law enforcement, both before January 6th and in the days and weeks since, with the goal of ensuring that information linking the people responsible for January 6th to their crimes is available."


Pulling levers

Haugen began gathering evidence about the company before she eventually left the tech giant last May. To reduce the chance of getting caught taking screenshots of internal Facebook systems, she used her phone to take photographs of her computer screen.

As the insurrection was underway in Washington and Facebook was trying to get a handle on the situation, Haugen was snapping pictures, documenting the company's response.

One of the documents she captured, titled "Capitol Protest BTG [Break the Glass] Response," was a chart of measures Facebook could take in response to the January 6th attack. The chart appears to have been prepared beforehand; at the time Haugen photographed it, a little less than two hours after the Capitol was first breached, the company had instituted some of those measures while others were still under consideration. Among the potential actions listed in the chart were demoting "content deemed likely to violate our community standards in the areas of hate speech, graphic violence, and violence and incitement."

The page labeled these as "US2020 Levers, previously rolled back."

Those "levers," as Facebook refers to them, are measures -- guardrails -- that the company put in place before last year's Presidential election in an attempt to slow the spread of hate and misinformation on the platform. Facebook has not been clear in its public statements about what measures it did roll back after the election and why it did so at a time of tumult when the sitting president was calling the results of the vote into question.

But according to the "Capitol Protest BTG response" document, the guardrails Facebook reimplemented on January 6th included reducing the visibility of posts likely to be reported and freezing "commenting on posts in Groups that start to have a high rate of hate speech and violence & incitement comments," among others.

In the SEC disclosure, Haugen alleges that these levers were reinstated "only after the insurrection flared up."

Asked about the decisions to dial the levers back and then push them out again, Stone said, "In phasing in and then adjusting additional measures before, during and after the election, we took into account specific on-platforms signals and information from our ongoing, regular engagement with law enforcement. When those signals changed, so did the measures."


A through line

When Facebook executives posted messages publicly and internally condemning the riot, some employees pushed back, even suggesting Facebook might have had some culpability.

"There were dozens of Stop the Steal groups active up until yesterday, and I doubt they minced words about their intentions," one employee wrote in response to a post from Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's chief technology officer.3

Another wrote, "All due respect, but haven't we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence? We've been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn't be surprised it's now out of control."

Other Facebook employees went further, claiming decisions by company leadership over the years had helped create the conditions that paved the way for an attack on the US Capitol.

Responding to Schroepfer's post, one staffer wrote that, "leadership overrides research based policy decisions to better serve people like the groups inciting violence today. Rank and file workers have done their part to identify changes to improve our platforms but have been actively held back."

Another staffer, referencing years of controversial and questionable decision-making by Facebook leadership around political speech concluded, "history will not judge us kindly."

A new whistleblower reportedly claimed Facebook exempted right-wing outlet Breitbart from certain rules because it didn't want to 'start a fight with Steve Bannon'

Katie Canales
Fri, October 22, 2021

Then-President Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. Getty

Facebook "whitelisted" Breitbart to avoid angering Republicans, a new whistleblower told The Washington Post.

When an employee questioned the move, an exec reportedly said "do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?"

Facebook has long been ensnared in a political war over how it moderates users and content.

Another whistleblower has come forward with claims against Facebook, according to The Washington Post.

The anonymous former employee told the outlet that Facebook's Public Policy team - helmed by the company's now-vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan - defended "whitelisting" the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, run at the time by former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon.

"Whitelisting" refers to exempting certain elite, high-profile figures online from rules that apply to ordinary users. When Facebook defended "whitelisting" Brietbart, an employee questioned the move, the whistleblower told The Post.

Kaplan answered, "Do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?" according to the whistleblower, as The Post reported.

The whistleblower is also behind an anonymous affidavit to the Securities Exchange Commission, though their name is redacted, the Post reported. The move is similar to the actions of Frances Haugen, who earlier this year shared documents with the Wall Street Journal and testified before a Congressional committee.

The affidavit alleges Facebook officials regularly deprioritized stamping out misinformation, hate speech, and other content to stay in favor of former President Donald Trump and his supporters, the Post reported. Another reason cited was concern that Facebook's user growth could take a hit.

A Facebook spokesperson denied the firm ever exempted any publisher from its rules and criticized the Washington Post's reporting.

"This is beneath the Washington Post, which during the last five years would only report stories after deep reporting with corroborating sources," they said. "There has never been a whitelist that exempts publishers, including Breitbart, from Facebook's rules against misinformation."

A system known internally as XCheck, acknowledged by the company last month, allows hundreds of thousands of politicians, celebrities, and other individuals who are "newsworthy," "influential," or "PR risky" to be exempt from certain rules, the Journal reported in September. Facebook has said it's trying to eliminate the system.

Many conservatives have condemned Facebook and other platforms for censoring them and favoring liberal views, even as right-wing content flourishes online. The company is aware of scrutiny from both sides of the aisle, but especially from the right.

The company tweaked its algorithm in 2017 but found that the change could slam right-wing publishers, a feat that could have angered Republicans in power during Trump's presidency. To offset the dip, Facebook crushed traffic to progressive news sites like Mother Jones, the publication reported in October 2020.