Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

The Very Online Origins of our Discontents

First, social media made us feel bad about ourselves. Now disinformation is destroying our politics and our public health. It’s time to fix it.


“I like the things you post on Facebook,” my Grandpa told me on a phone call a few weeks ago. 

“I just hate the stuff people comment—it makes me lose hope in people.”

My Grandpa’s not the type to doom-scroll Twitter. But he does check in on my social accounts from time to time. Back in 2017, when I was running for Governor, he came across a Facebook post—with 1700 shares—claiming I was a part of a global Muslim conspiracy to take over America. The kicker? That post was shared by the dude who played Hercules on TV back in the 90s, Kevin Sorbo. Until then, Grandpa and I had both been fans.

The kind of hateful disinformation—as vile as it is violent—bubbled over in real life on January 6th at our nation’s Capitol, but it has been seething online for years. The nature of social media makes us believe that the hatred it fuels is far more common than it really is—even as it grows and amplifies it. Given the impact it's had on our politics and our public health through the course of this pandemic, it’s time to do something about it.

A Selection Bias Amplification Machine.

“Selection bias” is one of the most important sources of error in epidemiology. It’s what happens when the people you include in a study aren’t representative of the population you are studying because of the way participants became a part of your study. Your study sample becomes enriched for some critical feature as a function of how it was generated. For example, if you wanted to study the relationship between car ownership and daily exercise in the United States, and you only included people who live in New York City, you might get a biased perspective. People in New York benefit from access to incredible public transit in the form of a subway system, while things like the cost of parking, terrible traffic, and the general hassle of owning a car in the city make car ownership prohibitive. That particular relationship between New York City and car ownership biases whatever inference you wanted to make in your study and leaves you with erroneous conclusions.

Social media is a public opinion selection bias amplification machine. The only people who usually comment are the folks who have something specific to say—good or bad, but usually bad. And because social media algorithms usually enrich content with the most reactions, and the most extreme comments usually get the most reactions, social media feeds you vitriol. You might think this is a design flaw. Nope: algorithmic sorting is a design feature. After all, social media companies want you to respond—so they send you the things that people like you were most likely to have responded to, good, bad, or ugly. That might be a cute cat video. Or it might be a rant from a far-right social media troll who makes you want to puke. Nausea, too, is a reaction. 

Why do they do this? Because you’re not the customer they want to keep happy. You’re the product. The customer is the advertiser to which Facebook et al. are trying to sell your eyeball time (for a great book on the evolution of this business model, check out Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). And eliciting a reaction is a sure-fire way to keep your eyeballs on the feed—so their real customers can sell you something.

The emergent phenomenon is that we’re left feeling like the world is a scary, hateful, angry place full of people who say mean things to each other. Don’t get me wrong, the world has many of those people—but the ones who don’t hate each other, aren’t angry, and don’t want you to go to hell? They’re probably not commenting. And if they are, you’re probably not seeing it. Their mundane, even-keeled responses don’t get shuttled to the top of your newsfeed.

From Discomfort to Disinformation.

Social media’s business model tends, by its very nature, to veer from truth. Remember, social media companies make money keeping you glued to your feed. And disinformation is a great way to generate reactions. In fact, a team at MIT set out to measure just how much faster disinformation spreads online. Six times faster, they found

From a given social media corporation’s perspective, if reactions are what drive attention on social media, then why tether content to the truth at all? Social media companies have had almost no real incentive to monitor their sites for disinformation. So they simply haven’t. Through the 2020 election cycle, Facebook’s policy was to allow campaigns to publish ads without any truth verification whatsoever. Mark Zuckerberg said, “people should be able to judge for themselves the character of politicians.” 

To demonstrate the absurdity of this, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign ran intentionally false facebook ads during the 2020 Presidential primary claiming that Mark Zuckerberg was intentionally backing the re-election of Donald Trump. This after the Trump campaign ran false ads about then-candidate Joe Biden. 

Zuckerberg’s claims demonstrate that he may be the victim of his own selection bias amplification machine. He’s someone who’s feed is probably populated with center-left content and who, by dint of his socioeconomic position probably consumes far more media outside social media that acts as a check on what he might see on his own platform. To him, the lies politicians tell on social media are self-evidently false—a comment on their poor character. But for the folks most likely to get their news on the platform, who may not have the same tools to discern fact from fiction, who’ve been fed the same lies for years—the folks most likely to vote for Trump—his lies become their truth. Facebook’s own algorithm made it so. A Pew Research study found that people who are more likely to get their news on social media are more likely to push disinformation as well. It’s a self-accelerating feedback loop.

Beyond the algorithm, there’s something else about social media that makes it such a cesspool of disinformation: social platforms create a natural space for concentrating all of our misinformation. In their book LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, Peter Singer and Emerson Booking quote Colonel Robert Bateman: “Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together.” 

Think of the anti-vaxx movement. Thirty years ago an anti-vaccine parent would discover vaccine misinformation individually and maybe share it with their social circle. Today, they can share that misinformation with hundreds of thousands of like-minded, misinformed parents in an echo-chamber—confirming their beliefs through their own selection bias. The anti-vaccine movement, by the way, has been linked to outbreaks of measles, which the United States once eradicated, all across the country. 

Disinformation is Deadly.

Americans have suffered the COVID-19 pandemic worse than any other high-income country in the world. Though we account for 4% of the global population, we are 20% of global cases. Why? Because we’ve failed to do even the most basic things to address this pandemic. Intentionally obstructive disinformation campaigns have undermined public trust in basic public health. 

Social media disinformation campaigns turned wearing a face mask—the simplest way to protect yourself, your family and your community—into some kind of referendum on our belief in liberty. Simple lockdowns to prevent mass spread were meme-ified into a bold-faced assault on business. Science itself became a public opinion contest—people believing that they could and should force the FDA to approve the use of Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 by sheer force of Twitter trend, rather than sound scientific testing—which it subsequently failed

Social media companies have been complicit in the spread of this disinformation on their platforms. The global non-profit organization Avaaz audited medical misinformation on Facebook. They found that by August of 2020, misinformation had accumulated 3.8 billion (with a B!) views on Facebook—and only 16% of that clear misinformation was labeled with a warning. Fact checkers had failed 84% of the time. The misinformation was allowed to stay up. 

As we watched armed insurrectionists storm the Capitol on January 6th, many wondered how it could have come to this. To be honest, given my experiences with rightwing online abuse from folks like bootleg Hercules, I’m impressed that we’ve staved this off so long.

Though Donald Trump—a narcissistic former reality TV star—was uniquely suited to exploit social media’s unique capacity to compound and multiply demagoguery, he was aided and abetted by social media platforms the entire way. It’s hard to imagine the idea of a Donald Trump presidency before the internet era. 

Facebook, in particular, has emerged as an echo-chamber of the right (and wrong). Throughout the 2020 campaign, for example, the top ten most engaged posts on Facebook were routinely filled by far right personalities like Dan Bongino, Franklin Graham, and Candace Owens. Why? Because rightwing propaganda gets clicks. And clicks sell ads.

Long before that, he learned how to use his @realdonaldtrump Twitter handle to foment conspiracy theories to force Americans to take sides—the truth vs. Trump. Don’t forget his birther conspiracy that President Obama was allegedly born outside the US. All of it exploited the worst characteristics of social media’s business model to foment conflict and build notoriety. 

And though, at the bitter end, he was deplatformed by the very platforms that created him, it was, by then, too late. The obvious question being, why did it take so long? Well, it's like the plot of one of those heist movies where one partner in the heist turns on the other just as the cops close in on them both. He was deplatformed the day after the Georgia Senate run-off elections were called for Senators Warnock and Ossoff—with Democrats threatening action on Big Tech. The platforms didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do—but because they knew it was either him or them. Big Tech was playing for a plea bargain. Make no mistake, though, both were in on it the entire time. The damage Donald Trump has done to our politics is immeasurable—but he didn’t do it alone. At each step, he played social media against American democracy. We all lost. 

Disarming Disinformation.

If we’re serious about protecting our democracy—and our public health—we need to regulate social media and curb the power Big Tech corporations have been able to acquire over our economy and our public discourse (we need to break them up, too, because they are some of the worst monopolists in the world right now—but that’s a different conversation for a different day).

Relying on social media companies to police themselves—as much as they want us to—clearly doesn’t work. The growing call for some kind of editorial responsibility-taking over the past decade has been met with the anemic responses we’ve seen through the current moment. In fact, after de-platforming Trump, Facebook is now considering whether or not to give him back his account—effectively handing him back the keys to the semi-truck he just crashed into American Democracy.

And sure, all of us should always be thinking about how to improve our internet hygiene so we don’t inadvertently share misinformation (yes, I’ve accidentally done it too). But these kinds of end user campaigns—I’m imagining Nancy Reagan telling us to “just say no” to sharing viral fake news posts—don’t work on a mass scale, either. 

We need legislative action that forces social media companies to either rethink their business model or bars them from exploiting tactics that spread disinformation online in pursuing that business model. 

Promisingly, social media regulation is a bipartisan issue. It's something both parties agree we should do...but for entirely opposite reasons. So less promisingly, there’s little agreement on what should actually be done.

The GOP thinks that social media should be regulated because it censors free speech on the internet. Indeed, Senator Josh Hawley, who’s actions directly contributed to the Capitol insurrection riots, has a forthcoming book about this called “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” which Simon & Schuster dropped after the riots. It’s since been picked up by Regnery Publishing— joining other titles such as “Civil War 2.0” by Dinesh D’Souza, a Trumpist zealot of ill repute.

Hawley and friends argue that social media moderation, including the harmful disinformation that tends to flourish on the right—or deplatforming a repeat offender like Trump—violates the freedom of speech. Now I’m no first amendment expert, but freedom of speech is one of these concepts that’s afforded a way broader public interpretation than is actually warranted by the law. You can’t scream “fire!” in a crowded theatre—the rush of people to the exits could be deadly. That endangerment through speech isn’t protected. Just like, say, spreading disinformation in the middle of the worst pandemic in over a century. 

There’s another point, too. The first amendment protects your freedom of speech from infraction by the state. But social media corporations aren’t the state. These are private companies that don’t owe you a thing. The New York Times doesn’t have a public responsibility to publish whatever you or I send them. Simon & Schuster doesn’t have to publish your book if you’re an neo-fascist insurrectionist (although Josh Hawley thinks they do). And neither Facebook nor Twitter have any obligation to share what we type into the little box. 

Now you may argue that no private company should have that much power to shape and censor the public discourse. And with that I’d agree with you. Regardless whether deplatforming Donald Trump, for example, was the right thing to do (and yes, it was the right thing to do), the fact that Twitter had the power to take the favorite megaphone from a sitting President in the first place is rather astounding. But solving that problem is another issue entirely—one of power and monopoly, not one of freedom of speech. 

This contention is basically where we find the conversation about one of the principle approaches to regulating social media: repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the legal statute protecting social media platforms from liability for the material shared on their sites. This became a near obsession for Trump in his last days in office—which is ironic because it seems he doesn’t know how 230 works. Proponents of repealing 230 argue that the legal liability to which social media giants would be exposed would compel far stricter moderation—which of course wouldn’t benefit an arch-disinformer like Trump. But opponents of repealing 230 call it one of the most important tools to protecting free speech on the Internet. Yet as we discussed, private companies are under no obligation to publish anything—and even free speech is necessarily limited when it comes to protecting the public’s health.

Some proposals stop short of completely repealing 230, but seek to limit what it protects. Some propose “carving out” particular categories of online content. For example, in 2018, Trump signed into law a pair of bills known as FOSTA-SESTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act [FOSTA] and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act [SESTA]) that carved out a Section 230 exception for civil and criminal charges of sex trafficking or facilitating prostitution—now making social media companies liable for this kind of content. Future legislation could expand these kinds of carve outs to other types of content. One bipartisan proposal that’s gotten a fair bit of attention from Senators Brian Schatz and John Thune is the PACT Act, which would repeal 230 protections for content deemed illegal by a court, force platforms to specify their process for identifying and eliminating prohibited content, empower federal and state enforcement agencies, force them to be very clear about their terms of service and enforce them, and be transparent about their moderation. 

Section 230-based regulations strike at the heart of the disincentive that these companies have to moderate disinformation by making them liable for it. Another approach might be to regulate the tactics internet companies can use on their platforms. Bot amplification and algorithmic sorting are two obvious places to start. Though regulating tactics like these wouldn’t force social media corporations to take disinformation off their sites, they could go a long way in reducing how fast and far they spread. They’d make our social media environment a little bit more like our real environment rather than amplifying only the most provocative material that polarizes our worldviews. They also side-step the dubious, bad-faith free speech arguments. After all, even if an expansive interpretation of the first amendment might justify you saying what you want on a private platform, it doesn’t entitle you to a microphone in the form of millions of fake accounts that echo it for you. We regulate sale of certain products in the name of the public welfare all the time. In that view, corporations shouldn’t be able to create spaces that look like the information-equivalent of a hall of mirrors, taking your ideas and throwing them back at you in warped ways to get a reaction—all to sell you something. 

Will it happen? My guess is that social media reform is, in fact, on the horizon. When coupled with antitrust policies to curb the monopoly power of major tech industry players, I think it will open the door to a flurry of new platforms in the coming few years. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve joined two new social media platforms—Telepath and Clubhouse—each trying to offer a user experience that solves for the worst things about larger competitors like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But the advent of Parler and Gab catering directly to the online right specifically trying to escape moderation along with the massive swing of users to encrypted texting platforms like Telegram suggests that we’re likely going to see polarization by platform. Rather than disinformation making the rounds on a few large platforms everyone uses, we’re probably going to see people who want to consume and share that kind of thing escaping to platforms that resist any effort to moderate it. 

That may, in fact, be a good thing. There’s good evidence to suggest that disinformation and algorithmic sorting suck users into the abyss—so decanting the most aggressive disinformers into their own networks may insulate those who are susceptible from the poison.

Alright, now that that’s through—mind giving this a share? I know, I know. But seriously, will you?

Kamala Harris places bust of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in her office

Matthew Miller 
© Provided by Washington Examiner

Vice President Kamala Harris placed a bust of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in her ceremonial office.

The bust of Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, is on loan from the vice president's undergraduate alma mater, Howard University, according to a statement from Harris's office.

"Vice President Harris has pointed to Justice Thurgood Marshall as an inspiration for her professional career as a lawyer," Harris's office said.

The bust was created by Dr. Randolph Craig, a black artist who worked in the University of Maryland Art Department, according to Above the Law.

Marshall was a Supreme Court justice from 1967 to 1991. Before that, he was solicitor general of the United States and a federal appeals court judge. He died in 1993.

Harris swore in on two Bibles during her inauguration ceremony, one of which belonged to Marshall.
Harris, a U.S. senator and attorney general in California before becoming vice president, explained Marshall's influence on her in remarks given to the National Bar Association.

"I wanted to help people. I wanted to do that. And that was one of the reasons — including Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley — that I wanted to be a lawyer," she said in July. "I wanted to help people and, in particular, to help remove the barriers that stood in their way — to help people everywhere to defend themselves; to define themselves, as opposed to being defined by others; and to determine their own future. And I know this is something we all share, and it’s what — it’s what still drives us all today."
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
'Samsung fined $47 million for price fixing in Netherlands

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Electronics maker Samsung has been fined 40 million euros ($46.9 million) for price fixing in the Netherlands, Dutch competition watchdog ACM said on Wednesday.

The logo of Samsung Electronics is seen at its office building in Seoul

The market regulator said Samsung had pushed up the prices of its televisions in the Netherlands for years, by constantly urging retailers to raise their prices if they were selling them below Samsung's preferred market rate.

This practice undermined competition between seven of the largest online electronics stores in the Netherlands, the ACM said, as Samsung made it clear to all retailers involved that their competitors would also follow its pricing policy.

Samsung also reached out to retailers if their competitors complained about TVs being sold too cheap, documents obtained by the regulator showed.

"Samsung's advice was not individual and not without consequences," the watchdog said. "Its behaviour distorted competition and raised prices for consumers."

Samsung said it would appeal the fine, as it maintained it had never forced retailers to use its price advice and that stores had always been free to determine their own strategy.

But the regulator said that Samsung should have known that its efforts to influence prices went far beyond normal guidance and was in fact a way to structurally determine the market prices of its televisions.

($1 = 0.8537 euros)

(Reporting by Bart Meijer; editing by Jason Neely)
U.S. SEC charges ex-Goldman compliance analyst with insider trading

By Jonathan Stempel 
The seal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seen at their headquarters in Washington, D.C.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. regulator on Wednesday charged a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc senior compliance analyst with insider trading, saying he made illegal trades involving banking clients while working in Warsaw, Poland.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Jose Luis Casero Sanchez, 35, of Spain, learned material nonpublic information about his employer's clients through his work in a "control room" that tracked pending mergers, acquisitions and financings.

Casero's duties included updating the bank's confidential "Grey List," which tracked clients involved in such transactions, according to an SEC complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The regulator said Casero used brokerage accounts opened in his parents' names to trade ahead of significant transactions at least 45 times from September 2020 until his May 2021 resignation, reaping nearly $472,000 of profit.

Wednesday's lawsuit does not identify Goldman by name, but identified Goldman clients in whose stocks Casero allegedly traded.

At least nine of Casero's trades related to mergers involving special purpose acquisition companies, the SEC said.

"We condemn this egregious behavior, which violates our standards of conduct and business principles," Goldman said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with the SEC."

Casero did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for him could not immediately be identified.

The SEC is also seeking an asset freeze against Casero and his parents, both of whom are "relief defendants." It said all three are Spanish citizens believed to have lived in Granada.

According to LinkedIn, Casero worked for UBS Group AG from Feb. 2018 to April 2019, before joining Goldman. He has not since worked at UBS, a person close to the matter said, though LinkedIn said he is "currently" employed there.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Jody Godoy in New York and Chris Prentice in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
US to resume enforcement of unlawful bird deaths by industry

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The Biden administration said Wednesday it will draft rules to govern the killing of wild birds by industry and resume enforcement actions against companies responsible for deaths that could have been prevented, a longstanding practice that ended under President Donald Trump


The move came as North American bird numbers have plummeted drastically in recent decades. That decline was punctuated by news Wednesday that the famed ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 other species have gone extinct.

Conservation groups, which have urged President Joe Biden to take stronger action to protect wildlife, said the planned rules were urgently needed to hold companies accountable for bird deaths.

But the administration's announcement got immediate pushback from the oil industry, which has been subject to some of the most high-profile prosecutions under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Most notable was a $100 million settlement by energy company BP, after government investigators concluded the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill killed about 100,000 birds.

The Independent Petroleum Association of America said resuming prosecutions would harm businesses that killed birds “through no fault of their own.”

“This is not a case of punishing bad actors, but rather a situation where companies are set up for failure," said Mallori Miller, the oil industry group's vice president for public relations.

Federal officials pledged to be judicious in enforcing violations of the century-old bird law.

Enforcement will be reserved for cases where companies could have foreseen bird deaths but did not take steps to avoid them, said Jerome Ford, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assistant director for migratory birds.

In crafting the new rule, Ford said officials would look at a wide range of causes of death — from collisions with glass buildings, power lines and vehicles, to chemical poisonings and birds killed in oil pits. Hundreds of millions of birds die annually from such causes, according to government officials and researchers.

“We've lost almost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years,” Ford said. “We want to create a common sense approach that works to both conserve birds and provide regulatory certainty to industry."

The migratory bird policy was among dozens of Trump-era environmental actions Biden ordered reconsidered on his first day in office. Former federal officials, environmental groups and Democrats in Congress said many of the Trump rules were aimed at benefiting private industry at the expense of conservation.

More than 1,000 North American bird species are covered by the treaty — from fast-flying peregrine falcon to tiny songbirds and more than 20 owl species. Non-native species and some game birds, like wild turkeys, are not on the list.

Former federal officials and some scientists had said billions more birds could have died in coming decades under Trump’s rule.

Researchers have said that cats in the U.S. kill the most birds — more than 2 billion a year.

Besides the BP case, hundreds of enforcement cases — targeting utilities, oil companies and wind energy developers — resulted in criminal fines and civil penalties totaling $5.8 million between 2010 and 2018.

Enforcement will resume after Wednesday’s action goes into effect in 60 days, officials said.

Relatively few enforcement cases end with prosecutions because most companies are willing to take measures to address hazards that their operations may pose to birds, according to wildlife officials.

Courts have been split on whether companies can be prosecuted for unintentional bird deaths.

___

Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

Matthew Brown, The Associated Press
Greens should investigate Annamie Paul's racism claims, says leadership contender

OTTAWA — The Green activist who came second to Annamie Paul in the last leadership race says he is being urged by many to stand again.

 
© Provided by The Canadian Press

Dimitri Lascaris, a Montreal-based lawyer and activist, is "vacillating" about whether to throw his hat into the ring in the race for party leader.

The Greens saw their support plummet in the election, returning just two MPs after months of infighting and sniping at Paul.

Lascaris says it is important for the party "not to dwell on the past year."

He wants independent consultants to investigate Paul’s claims that she experienced racial bias while leader, and says the Greens have "challenges when it comes to diversity."

Paul is the first Black, Jewish woman to lead a federal party in Canada and has said she suffered discrimination.

Many Greens have posted messages of support for Paul, who announced her decision to resign as leader on Monday.

Courtenay Howard, who came third after Paul and Lascaris in the last leadership race, tweeted that it meant a lot to have a "strong, intelligent, articulate woman on the stage." The Yukon doctor has ruled herself out of the race to succeed Paul.

Several leading Greens, including Mike Morrice, the new MP for Kitchener Centre, have also ruled themselves out of the race to succeed her.

A spokeswoman for Elizabeth May has said the former Green leader would consider stepping in as a temporary caretaker if she is asked to by the troubled party.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29 2021.

The Canadian Press
6 million student-loan borrowers are 'far better off' after yet another major company announced it will shut down its services, Elizabeth Warren says

asheffey@businessinsider.com (Ayelet Sheffey) 
© Provided by Business Insider Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. 

Navient, one of the largest student-loan companies, unveiled plans to end its federal loan services.

Elizabeth Warren said its exit will make the federal student-loan industry "far better off."

She cited decades of abuses by the company, including pushing borrowers into deeper debt.

The student-loan industry on Tuesday received yet another major shake-up when Navient became the third company to announce its plans to end its federal student-loan program amid a regulatory crackdown over the last year.


Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had one message for the company: good riddance.

"Navient has spent decades misleading, cheating, and abusing student borrowers," Warren told Insider in a statement. "The Federal student loan program will be far better off without them."

Navient, which collects the federal student debt of six million borrowers, said in a press release that it is working with the Education Department to approve the transition of those borrowers to another student-loan company, Maximus.

The announcement follows the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) and Granite State Management and Resources announcing in June they will be ending their servicing contracts this year. With Navient following their lead, close to 16 million borrowers will be paying their student debt to new companies once the payment pause lifts in February.

Navient CEO Jack Remondi said in a statement that "Navient is pleased to work with the Department of Education and Maximus to provide a smooth transition to borrowers and Navient employees as we continue our focus on areas outside of government student loan servicing."

Warren, who has held both PHEAA and Navient in her sight for decades, has been clear that their plans to shut down is a good thing for borrowers. She said in June that the 8.5 million borrowers serviced by PHEAA could "breathe a sigh of relief" since they would no longer have to deal with the company, and Warren told Insider in a July interview that "the days are over" when student-loan companies could do "a terrible job."

"The world has changed for student-loan-debt servicers," Warren said. "They can't sign a contract, do a lousy job, cost borrowers tons of money, and still get their contracts renewed."

Warren has been fighting to hold Navient accountable since even before she was elected to the Senate. Insider reported in April on the comprehensive history Warren has with Navient, starting in 2006 when she was interviewed on "60 Minutes" and cited Sallie Mae, as Navient was formerly known, for its abuses of the student-loan system.

Since then, she has repeatedly called out the company for unlawful practices with borrowers, like in November 2018, when Warren released an audit providing evidence of Navient's record of causing students to go into deeper student debt by "steering student borrowers into forbearance when that was often the worst financial option for them."

And most notably, during an April hearing where she invited the CEOs of all the student-loan companies to testify, she told Navient's CEO, John Remondi, that he should be fired for the abuses that happened under his leadership.

Richard Cordray, head of the Federal Student Aid (FSA) office, said during remarks at a conference earlier this month that student-loan companies are choosing to shut down rather than face more accountability. To be sure, he did not comment on specific companies but noted that "not everybody was thrilled" with his plans to strengthen oversight of the industry.

Warren told Insider that even though the three companies are ending their student-loan services, she will "continue to fight for greater accountability and better service for borrowers during and after the upcoming transitions."

"Ultimately, the student loan system is broken," Warren said. "The only way to guarantee that borrowers do not face the same predatory behavior from Navient's replacement is to cancel student debt, so that no borrower's future is held hostage by corporations profiting off their financial distress."

Here's How to Avoid the Mayhem of Mercury Retrograde

Brittany Beringer-Tobing 

If you follow along with cosmic events, then chances are you've heard about the infamous Mercury retrograde. It's the seasonal itch when miscommunication, explosive drama, and technological mishaps ensue. This scandalous transit may cause you to feel frustrated as you struggle to find the right words to say, and it can seem like no matter how hard you try, drama seems to find its way to your doorstep. While nobody can escape the treacherous grip of Mercury retrograde, if you want to keep a balanced state of mind, you'll want to avoid these common Mercury retrograde mistakes.



Here's How to Avoid the Mayhem of Mercury Retrograde

Don't text your exes

Because there's such a focus on the past during Mercury retrograde, you may have felt nostalgic about ex-partners or former friends. It's not uncommon that your exes - romantic or platonic - make a comeback during this transit, or you might feel the urge to be the one to hit them up. That's because Mercury retrograde symbolizes a karmic chain. It's a time when you have to decide whether you want to repeat the past or move on. Letting your former friends or lovers reenter your life - while super tempting - is risky territory.

Avoid acting impulsively

Does it feel like you're walking on eggshells? Maybe you feel extra sensitive toward others which in turn causes you to react in ways unlike yourself. Tensions are high during this transit since it throws our communication off, leading us to act impulsively. If you think before responding rather than reacting on impulse, it might save you from having a blowout argument with someone.

Don't dwell on the past

Since Mercury retrograde has its finger on the replay button, you may find yourself wistfully thinking about old relationships and regrets of the past. While it's helpful (and sometimes healing) to reflect, it can become a problem when you're fixating on your regrets of the past. Avoid ruminating on what could have been or reliving moments you've made peace with. Instead, remind yourself of all the reasons you've moved on and how much better off you are.

Avoid traveling


This transit doesn't just throw off communication and our mindsets, but it causes mischief in the world of technology and travel. Mercury retrograde has a bad reputation for causing delayed flights and traffic jams, and it's probably not the ideal time to plan a much-needed getaway, especially if you want to relax and enjoy yourself. So if you want to avoid losing your luggage or other traveling mishaps, you may want to book your plans for a time when Mercury is no longer retrograde.

Don't make commitments

Mercury retrograde is a murky time, especially in terms of what we want, so you may want to really think something through before you commit to it. This transit is infamous for causing extreme confusion since Mercury rules the area of the mind and intellect. You may want to delay contracts and avoid commitments - big or small - until Mercury goes direct. That means you probably want to avoid making things official in a relationship, getting a haircut, or signing a lease until you're in the right headspace to make those decisions. You don't want to get stuck in a situation you can't escape from later.
'This is not 1973': Economist rules out 'stagflation' and persistent price pressures

Elliot Smith 15 hrs ago


Global stock markets were roiled on Tuesday by a spike in bond yields which saw the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield touch a high of 1.567%.

Along with concern over the U.S. debt ceiling debate in Washington, investors are also concerned about rising consumer prices.

© Provided by CNBC Gas prices are seen after U.S. consumer prices surged in April, with a measure of underlying inflation blowing past the Federal Reserve's 2% target, in Beverly Hills, California, June 2, 2021.

Inflation expectations are still being driven by a "temporary spate of supply issues" and there is no sign of continued upward pressure on prices, according to veteran economist Carl Weinberg.

Global stock markets were roiled on Tuesday by a spike in bond yields which saw the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield touch a high of 1.567%.

Along with concern over the U.S. debt ceiling debate in Washington, investors are also concerned about rising consumer prices. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that inflation could persist for longer than expected as reopening pressures and supply chain problems converge.

Speaking to CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Wednesday, Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, said the global semiconductor shortage, bottlenecks at ports and Covid-19 impediments were a "temporary spate of supply issues" rather than systemic inflationary pressures.

"Inflation is a process and not a one-time change in the level of prices, which I think is what we're seeing right now," Weinberg said.

"We're seeing an adjustment to new temporary realities on the supply side but we're not seeing the stagflation process that we saw in the 1970s recurring again."

Stagflation refers to a situation first identified in the 1970s in which inflation is high, economic growth slows and unemployment remains consistently high. The problem for economic policymakers in such an instance is that measures to curb inflation, such as wage and price controls or contractionary monetary policy, may further increase unemployment.

Weinberg said he did not yet see a basis for such a scenario, adding: "This is not 1973."

While acknowledging that a "large segment" of the market believes that inflation will be persistently higher, which in turn is driving up bond yields, Weinberg argued that there are many other factors keeping the U.S. economy imbalanced, "not least of which is Covid."

"With so many Americans resisting vaccination, that will continue to be a problem, and a brake on the economy, for a very, very long time. The chip problem has no short-term solution to it, the supply bottlenecks at the port don't have a short-term solution," he said.

He argued that this was not the Fed's fault and that "supply and demand will rebalance," meaning prices will stop rising "after a certain point."

"We're just going through a really rough patch right now as we reopen the economy at a pace never before seen, after a closure that we've never seen before, and we're getting some unexpected bumps along the way," Weinberg said.

"I'm not sure though that you can add that up into a story that says that beyond the immediate reopening, that we're going to see continued upward pressure on prices."
Explainer-Global energy shortage or a coincidence of regional crises?

(Reuters) - Gasoline stations running dry in Britain. Power costs surging in the European Union ahead of winter. Forced restrictions on energy use in China. And rising prices for oil, natural gas and coal.

© Reuters/MATTHEW CHILDS FILE PHOTO:
 A sign informs customers that fuel has run out at a petrol station in Hemel Hempstead

You would be forgiven if these events made you believe the world had suddenly been stricken by a global energy shortage. But you would also be mostly wrong.

While the supply squeezes slamming consumers and businesses in each of these areas is acute, the disruptions have less in common than you may think.

What unites them is a broad-based rebound in energy demand from lows hit during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic that has raised prices for oil, gas and coal; ongoing supply restrictions by oil cartel OPEC; and global transport bottlenecks that have complicated fuel distribution.

But the list of what separates them is longer, reflecting that the disruptions may have more to do with local policy choices and regional dynamics than a general shortage in global energy supply.

Oil prices broke $80 a barrel this week for the first time in three years, with natural gas and coal also scaling multi-year peaks. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied countries will meet next week to decide whether to unleash their spare production capacity to help tame prices.

Here is a brief summary of what is disrupting energy markets in Britain, Europe and China:

CHINA CRUNCH

China’s government has begun rationing electricity to energy-hungry businesses because of a crunch in coal supply. Because Beijing sets power prices, coal plants struggling with higher coal costs have been unable to operate economically and are shutting down.

Goldman Sachs estimated that as much as 44% of China's industrial activity has been hit by the power shortages, which could hit its GDP.

The China Electricity Council, which represents power suppliers, said on Monday that coal-fired power companies were now "expanding their procurement channels at any cost" in order to guarantee winter heat and electricity supplies.

But coal traders have said finding fresh import sources may be easier said than done, with Russia focusing on serving Europe’s power needs, rains interrupting output from Indonesia, and trucking constraints hindering imports from Mongolia.

EUROPE’S POWER BILLS


The price of keeping the lights on in Spain has tripled, reflecting a broader spike up in power bills across the European Union in recent weeks. The surge in electricity costs has raised fears of a difficult winter ahead as households demand heat and push consumption to a seasonal peak.

The reason for the rising costs in Europe is a confluence of local factors, ranging from low natural gas stockpiles and overseas shipments, lackluster output from the region’s windmills and solar farms, and maintenance work that has put nuclear generators and other plants offline.

The timing is tough as demand is only expected to rise in the coming weeks and months, but the return of power plants from maintenance and the startup of the recently completed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany could eventually ease markets.

In the meantime, Spain, Italy, Greece, Britain and other others are planning national measures, ranging from subsidies to price caps, aiming to shield citizens from rising costs as economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

UK PETROL STATIONS RUN DRY


Panic-buying by motorists has left fuel pumps dry across major cities in Britain in one of the worst energy disruptions facing the country in decades. Fights have broken out at filling stations as the government urged calm.

But the problem wracking Britain is not a lack of gasoline, it is a lack of truckers to distribute the fuel from refineries to retailers – one of the odd side-effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union, and a hangover from postponed trucker certification and training during the pandemic.

The fix? Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been issuing temporary visas to thousands of foreign truck drivers to get fuel to market, has put the army on standby to help out, and hopes to restore order at the pumps before the holidays.

(Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Marguerita Choy)