Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Trump, And Perhaps Russia

Billions of people around the world are provided with a free service by Facebook.  The service allows users to stay in touch with friends and relatives and it enables some users to enjoy the Facebook megaphone.  They can voice their opinions about almost any topic and share their views with friends.  Facebook has not, however, become worth billions by providing a free service.  It makes billions by selling the information that users provide by using the free service.  Cambridge Analytica is in the business of farming the data that users provide about themselves and their friends simply by using the free service.  They profile the users, and their friends, and sell the profiles to advertisers and others who use the profiles for a variety of purposes.  Jared Kushner was in charge of Trump's digital marketing campaign.  He employed Cambridge Analytica to provide profiles of Facebook users that were used to target voters with messages based upon the profiles provided by Cambridge Analytica which is owned by the Mercer family. 50 million Facebook users were profiled by this service.  The Mercer family also funded Steve Bannon's Breitbart News organization.  It would not be surprising if the voter profiles provided to the Trump campaign by Cambridge Analytica found their way to the trolls who were employed by Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Facebook and other social media make their money by selling information to advertisers and others who use the information to target customers.  Billions of users will continue to use Facebook and other social media.  Most users probably don't know that they have consented to allow Facebook to profile them by farming the information that they provide by the actions that they take by using the free services.  What they don't know is that they are also providing information that is used to profile their friends.  Most of this is harmless but the information and services provided by Facebook and other social media has been harmful in our electoral system.  Other potential misuses of the user profiles are discussed in this article.  The conflict between Facebook's business model and the potential for the misuse of the data made available to fuel disinformation services is very real. One its top executives resigned because Facebook executives who manage profits seem willing to ignore the potential misuses of the data provided by users.

Paul Krugman Answers Good Questions About Trump Trade Policy

Paul Krugman was awarded his Nobel Prize in economics for his work on international trade.  He explains why Trump's tariffs cannot bring back lost manufacturing jobs in steel and aluminum without creating job loss in industries that are heavy users of those metals.  His major concern about Trump's presidency is that we will lose our position of leadership in the world.  His article ends on that note.  Trump's trade policies were designed to win elections in the rust belt.  That worked in 2016.  It may not work in 2018 and in 2020.  The Republican loss in the Pennsylvania district that Trump won by 20% in 2016 suggests that many Americans have lost faith in his ideas.

David Brooks argues that Trump is morally bankrupt and he concludes his critique of Trump's takeover of the Republican Party with a conclusion similar to Krugman's critique of Trump's trade policies.  Our international and national leadership is being sacrificed for short term political gain.  David Brooks and Paul Krugman come from very different political worlds.  Brooks has been a Republican intellectual for most of his life, and Krugman wrote a book about why he is a liberal. They both agree that Trump's presidency has been a disaster and that he is the greatest threat to our well being.  Trump's management of his White House staff has also been a failure.  He appointed unqualified candidates to key positions, and the replacements that he is considering must pass his loyalty above all other considerations.  It will not be easy for him to find qualified candidates for top positions after the way that he fired Secretary of State via a tweet. Trump has also decided to fire his National Security Advisor and his EPA chief is campaigning to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.

Meet Peter Navarro Who Promoted Trump's Trade Policy

Peter Navarro has been a critic of US trade policies,  with a particularly strong focus on China and Germany which have large trade surpluses with the US.  He teamed up with Wilbur Ross, who Trump selected for the top job in the Commerce Department,  to order tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Ross had been a very successful investor.  He had invested in Trump's Jersey City casinos that were failing.   He convinced bankers and other investors to go along with Trump's plan to deal with the failing casino's.  The team of Navarro and Ross convinced Trump to announce his tariff plan against strong opposition from Gary Cohn who announced his resignation as Trump's Chief Economic Advisor.

There has been a lot of criticism in the press about Navarro who is not a top tier economist.  The Wikipedia article I linked above on Navarro provides an excellent overview of Navarro as well as comments by economists and others about the use of tariffs and their relationship to national security issues which Trump used to justify his tariffs.

What Are Corporations Doing With The Funds From Their Tax Cuts?

Corporations are using the windfall from the cuts in their tax bill just like survey's said that they would.  They are buying back their shares, which increases the value of the unsold shares;  they are paying higher dividends to shareholders and they are looking to acquire other companies.  Since corporate executives are also large shareholders that is good for them.  It is also good for the richest 10% which owns 84% of corporate stocks.  That's good news for many of us, but that is not how the tax cuts were sold to the public.  They were told that corporations would use the funds to purchase capital equipment, build new plants and to increase wages.  Each of those outcomes would lead to higher economic growth, more jobs and higher wages.  Corporate executives are not interested in stimulating GDP growth.  They get measured and rewarded every quarter on movements in their stock price.  Making investments in projects that may increase the stock price a couple of years from today is not high on their priority list.  That, of course what they told economists in the surveys.  Apparently, Trump and his administration decided that it made more political sense to convince its base that they succeeded in passing a middle class tax cut.  Good politics but bad economics.

Donald Trump Does A Terrible Job Playing Our "Fearless Leader"

Donald Trump realizes that autocrats must convince their supporters that they are strong and brave enough to protect them from danger.  Part of the game is to increase the level of fear in their base.  The other part is to demonstrate strength and "manliness" in the face of danger.  Our fearless leader chose to use his powerful Twitter account to demonstrate his manliness.  He claimed that he would have personally attacked the gunman who used his assault weapon to murder 17 people at the Parkland school in Florida if he had been in the building at the time.  Its lucky for him that he was not present during the shootout because he has a poor record of responding bravely in the face of danger.  During the Vietnam war he sought and obtained a deferment due to bone spurs in his heel.  He has also been captured on film reacting to danger in a very unmanly fashion.  The Trumpster is much better at demonstrating power by issuing tweets from his bedroom in the White House while watching cable news.  He is more comfortable insulting enemies and barking commands over the Internet than he is in the presence of danger or retaliation. He is also comfortable speaking powerfully in front of true believers like those at his campaign rallies and far right conservatives at the recent CPAC meeting.  That's pretty easy.  He only has to tell them what they want to hear.  For example, he told the CPAC audience that we should give teachers guns to protect students from deranged individuals armed with assault weapons.  That, of course, echoes one of the party lines from the NRA which keeps conservatives informed about how to protect their Constitutional right to own assault weapons. All statements from the NRA are automatically accepted as biblical truths by CPAC.  Gun manufacturers also love the idea that more guns are needed to protect us from gun owners who want to murder innocent children with assault weapons.  If we did that, we may even be able to protect our students without having our fearless leader available in schools during an attack.

Some Questions For Trump To Answer If He Dares To Have Another Press Conference

Unlike former presidents, who regularly held press conferences, Trump has had only one press conference during the first year of his new job.  His press secretary has been given the job of not answering questions from the press.  Ruth Marcus reported a list of questions that Trump might be asked if he held a press conference.  They are good questions; they make it easy to understand why Trump prefers using his Twitter account to communicate with his base instead of dealing with "fake news" reporters who might ask some of the questions recommended by Marcus.

Marco Rubio And NRA Representative Jeered At Florida Meeting

The Governor of Florida and The President Of The United States, who winters in Florida, did not attend a meeting about the mass shooting in Florida.  They were smart cowards.  Marco Rubio, and a spokes person for the NRA, had to take the punishment and jeers from the parents and students in the audience.  Rubio was asked if he would continue to take money from the NRA.  His answer was as slippery as each of the positions that he took from the audience.  He claimed that the $3,000,000 in contributions he has received from the NRA had nothing to do with his position on guns.  After the jeers from the audience ended, he claimed that his position reflected the views of the public which he represents.  That was a bit more truthful because the NRA has a propaganda arm that defends the economic interest of gun producers.  A substantial portion of the Republican base has been convinced that government controls on access to guns violates their Constitutional rights.  Rubio and other Republican politicians depends upon their votes in elections.  They are a minority but their votes can be counted on by politicians like Rubio.  That explains why a politician as smart as Rubio pretends  that access to assault weapons is protected by a Constitution that was written when the US military consisted of private citizens who served in state militias with their own muskets.  He knows that the second amendment to the Constitution has provided a smokescreen that was invented by the NRA. He is constrained, however, to defend that nonsense in order to protect his seat in the Senate.

Rubio, and the NRA propagandist, took another position that makes Republicans comfortable.  They argued that guns are not the problem.  People who misuse guns are the problem.  That position is consistent with Trump's current views on the subject.  Instead of preventing dangerous people from having access to assault weapons we should try to cure their mental illnesses.  That is utter nonsense. We do not have more mentally ill citizens in the US than other nations.  We lead the rest of the world in deaths from guns because we possess almost half of the world's supply of guns available to households.  Politicians in Australia decided to reduce the number of deaths from guns by addressing the real problem.  They took actions to reduce the number of guns held by households.  That produced a huge decline in deaths from firearms.

Marco Rubio, and the NRA representative, may have lost a bit of sleep after hearing from the parents who lost one of their children and from students who lost classmates from the shootout.  They can also expect more pressure from the public to take some actions that might reduce senseless murders.  Their usual approach is to tinker around the edges of the problem.  They will not deal with the crux of the problem.  They will not ban the sale of assault weapons.  That is because our democracy is being held hostage by around 35% of the electorate.  Their votes can be counted upon in any election.  The only real competition in elections is for the 65% who are open to debate on most policy issues.  We don't have majority rule in the US for that reason.  That is also why the Russians have used cyberwarfare in the US and in Europe to exacerbate divisions over cultural and social issues like gun control, race and religion.  The goal is to undermine democracies without the use conventional warfare.

The social media contribute the divisions that are being exacerbated in the US.  It didn't take long for a video posted on YouTube by an obscure individual in Idaho to go viral with a conspiracy theory about the murders in Parkland.  Mike m posted a video of David Hogg is who a student at Parkland.  The video is about another incident that happened in August.  Mike m declared that David Hogg is an actor who has been hired the MSM (short for networks other than Fox News) which promote left wing ideologies.  The video was picked up other conspiracy sites.  It appeared on Facebook and Twitter as well as on YouTube which is owned by Google.  There were over 200,000 hits to the "trending" video  before it was blocked by YouTube.  Mike m was encouraged by his success.  He posted another video that YouTube blocked.  His account will be deleted by YouTube if another of his posts is blocked.  Of course, he can also create another account on YouTube to move from obscurity in Idaho where he resides.