Where's this Bezos AMI thing going? (Reup) By Josh Marshall

Where’s This Bezos/AMI Thing Going?

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h The Daily Beast published an article last night that, through some circuitous and partly opaque sourcing, seemed to confirm a key point: At least in the narrowest sense, The National Enquirer got the Bezos text message from Michael Sanchez, the Trump-supporting brother of Bezos’s girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.

The principal sourcing comes from the AMI side.

But critically, Bezos’s investigators don’t really appear to contest that point.

Indeed, Bezos investigator Gavin de Becker tells the Beast that their “investigation into who initially provided the texts to the National Enquirer, and why it was done—that investigation is now complete.

We have turned our conclusions over to our attorneys for referral to law enforcement.” de Becker goes on to say this: “Our investigation into what the National Enquirer and [publisher] AMI did after they received the initial texts—that investigation is ongoing.” It’s possible I’m misreading the sourcing of the Beast article.

But I doubt it.

So where does this leave us?

Is this just a fairly mundane case of filial backstabbing plutocrat dirty laundry.

If it’s just that, it’s really no more interesting than any other supermarket tabloid affair story.

Last night I noted that, other than conjectures, we’re really going only on Bezos’s Thursday post in thinking there might be a Saudi or Trump connection to this drama.

So where does this leave us?

I discussed and corresponded over the weekend with some people who know Bezos.

I remain convinced about what I said over the weekend.

Even for the richest man in the world, one who owns one of the biggest companies, one of the country’s biggest newspapers and more, this is a big, big move, one fraught with all sorts of peril reputational and otherwise, far beyond the embarrassing photos.

I don’t think he’d push this Saudi angle over some vague suggestions.

In email correspondence a few of you have told me that what really matters is the extortion, not precisely how the Enquirer got the texts.

I don’t agree with this.

If we look at the totality of what we’ve learned about the Enquirer in the last three years, I think we see that they’re part of one story.

The Enquirer appears to operate as an attack and extortion operation, weaponizing secrets against its enemies and leveraging those secrets to enforce silence.

Critically, who counts as an enemy is usually who counts as enemies to its friends, people like Trump, almost certainly other powerful figures as yet unrevealed and even states like Saudi Arabia.

Your garden variety movie star paparazzi photos and celebrity break-ups appear to be a sidelight to this or a complementary operation functioning in parallel.

What all that adds up to is that the extortion and the original motivation for running the stories are likely one and same.

Indeed, the fact that the Enquirer may have gotten the texts from Sanchez, in the narrowest sense, doesn’t really resolve the question.

Because where did he get them?

Did she forward him a few text messages?

Did she leave her phone on a kitchen counter without password protection?

Did he get photos in the same way?

I doubt it’s that simple.

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Let’s Get Real About Virginia by Josh Marshall

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 26min
I confess to being more than a little confused by this piece by Politico cofounder John Harris. Harris started out as a political reporter in Richmond. So it’s about the recent chaos and plunge toward the abyss in Virginia state government and the state Democratic party. As he summarizes it on Twitter, “The good old days in Virginia were bad. These days are worse…”

In other words, Virginia’s current political leaders don’t match up to the virtue and valor of those from the old days.

If you read the actual article, it’s a bit more subtle than this. But not terribly. Or not nearly enough. Harris favorably compares the more buttoned up and genteel Virginia Jim Crow era with that of the Deep South. That has a truth in it as far as it goes. The Jim Crow era was more marked by overt terrorist and state terrorist violence in states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama than in Virginia. The Deep South states also had substantially larger African-American populations. That made both the perceptions and reality of white power inherently more brittle. Thus the machinery of domination was, predictably, more paranoid, brutal and violent. In some ways these differences had roots in the different commodity plantation cultures from the slavery era. But these are hardly distinctions to write home about, to put it mildly.

Here’s one passage …

People outside the state might understandably conclude: Wow, as recently as 35 years ago in the home of the Confederacy the prejudice was so endemic that flagrant racism of the sort depicted in the yearbook was no big deal.

But that assumption isn’t quite right. I grew up in Upstate New York, and I didn’t begin reporting on state politics until the late 1980s. I’m pretty sure, however, that even in 1984 it would have shocked the sensibilities of many in Virginia’s political and business elite to be confronted with a photograph of the state’s governor in an openly racist pose—even if the photo was taken in 1949, 35 years earlier.

Make no mistake: Virginia does indeed have a not-so-distant past steeped in systemic racial discrimination. But as writers like Frank B. Atkinson (who wrote the political history, “The Dynamic Dominion”) make clear, for the most part in the 20th century did not devolve into open racial warfare of the sort that took place in Mississippi, Alabama and other parts of the Deep South, and which later migrated to major cities of the North. The face of discrimination in Virginia—where leaders in the 1950s and beyond engaged in “massive resistance” to avoid integrating the schools after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision—was more typically understated and shrouded in respectability. It came dressed in the well-starched suits of court house lawyers and pols for the Byrd Machine, which dominated state politics for decades, not the gaudy robes of Klansman

I’m not really so sure about this. I’m certainly not apologizing for Northam and Herring. But I think the point is, quite simply, that racism was always at the heart of white Virginia politics and that this scandal is simply a matter of the state Democratic party being whipsawed by the changing attitudes toward race, tolerance and African-American political power over the last thirty-plus years. All Northam and Herring have done is participate in behavior that may have seemed jocular in their time among their peers but now seems clearly racist in ours. (It’s worth noting that Herring’s transgression seems significantly different from Northam’s but the difference isn’t terribly important for this point I’m making.) To the extent we are comparing them to Virginia political leaders of the past, I’m really not sure that can be much of a knock on them since Virginia is literally the birthplace of the North American plantation slavery system, was the literal and spiritual capital of the Confederacy and even today gives symbolic pride of place in its capital to a statues of Confederate leaders, statues which are themselves monuments to white supremacy.

Again, I want to be fair to Harris. He makes some nods to these obvious points. But overall I think he misses or ignores them.

One of the most interesting and revealing points I’ve heard over the past week about this tangle of scandals in Virginia is this: Ralph Northam is the first Virginia governor in a generation who grew up in Virginia. This turns out to be highly significant. Warner, Kaine, McAulliffe, even Bob McDonnell – none of these guys had any connection to an earlier Virginia. For that you have to go all the way back to Jim Gilmore, who was elected in 1997.

Another way to look at it is that Virginia’s Democratic ascendancy, which basically traces to Mark Warner’s governorship, has all been with governors and senators who grew up in the North. That makes sense since the state’s change has been driven in many ways by migration into Northern Virginia. But it also meant that something like what we’ve seen over the last week or more was much less likely to happen. Northam is the first of these men who not only grew up in Virginia but has a family history going back generations. Indeed, his ancestors were slaveholders.

Northam has to answer for himself. But none of his political ancestors are in a position to judge him. To put it mildly.

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Ghosts and Shadows of the South by Josh Marshall

Ghosts and Shadows of the South
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 5h
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There are so many threads of this ugly and increasingly bizarre (three scandals at once) set of scandals in the upper ranks of the Virginia state government. But one is the proximity of these two events to the end of Jim Crow in the South. Before delving into this, let me stipulate that by saying there were lots of racist attitudes in the 1980s I’m not saying there aren’t a lot today. I am trying to make a different point. These events happened in the early 1980s. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was 15 years or so earlier. Brown v Board was almost thirty years earlier. But actual desegregation, even de jure, let alone de facto desegregation was accepted by the courts as a years long process. Basically the de jure end of Jim Crow had only happened maybe 15 years or so earlier. To place ourselves in time, it’s like looking back at the 2004 presidential election day. In other words, just a short time ago.

I’ll give you another example. Back in the 1990s I was reading a political science book about the post-Jim Crow South. One of the questions in that book was how supporters of segregation had remade themselves in an era in which at least de jure segregation and Jim Crow was officially outlawed and at least supposedly socially stigmatized. The big picture as we know was that those people, mostly former Democrats had repackaged themselves as conservative Republicans. But one of the questions in that study was whether they were simply racists or whether they supported something called “racial conservatism.” This was defined as a general belief that the races should remain generally separate, as far as the law would allow, and that traditional racial mores and mores between the races should be preserved. I remember this pretty clearly a quarter century later, even though I’ve never read a lot of academic political science, because “racial conservatism” definitely sounded a lot like racism.

To be fair to the author, whose name I don’t remember, he definitely seemed to think so too. Or at least the subtext of the book did not seem to be defending the concept. The point is that the concept had to be taken seriously in an academic context, even though it was the thinnest repackaging of well … racism. Or to be more clear, it was a fairly thin repackaging of the proposition that ‘Yes, black people are allowed to vote now and laws discriminating against black people won’t stand up in court. But we’ll do everything we can within the law to maintain the current racial hierarchies and that it’s right and sensible that we should do that.’

Let’s jump forward twenty years from the early 80s to 2002 when Trent Lott notoriously praised Strom Thurmond, then still alive and on the verge of retirement, for his explicitly pro-segregationist break away run for President in 1948. That ended Lott’s run as Senate Majority Leader. But at least at first, it didn’t occur to anyone that that was a problem.

At some level it should not remotely surprise us that ten or fifteen after the formal dismantlement of the southern system of apartheid that unreconstructed racist beliefs were still totally pervasive. They’re still widespread of course, in some ways remolded and re-fashioned, in other ways more bold and explicit than they were a decade ago. But the mainstream political dialog in the US has always taken a kind of done and done attitude toward the end of formal apartheid in the United States was or should be basically the end of the story, when that was never going to be the case. African-Americans have much less sense of surprise than white Americans for obvious reasons.

There was never any American equivalent of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or reshuffling of the balance of property and political power in the South, beyond the vote, and that obviously in an imperfect form. This is obviously a vast topic I have no good answers to. Race, age and a lot of other things place obvious limits on my own perspective. My point here is that to the extent that anyone is surprised that young men or teens in the early 80s were dressing up in blackface or taking a jocular attitude to KKK, that’s a product of at least white America’s collective amnesia and denial about how the Jim Crow system in the South ended and the incompleteness of the process that brought it to an end.

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Let's be honest about Medicare for All by Josh Marshall

One of the most important lessons, I would suggest one of the most ingrained lessons of the passage and subsequent defense of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is that Democrats gained nothing for their efforts to accommodate Republican insistence on market-oriented solutions to expanding health care coverage. The ACA was, famously, based on the plan then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) passed in Massachusetts in the early aughts. The concept originated as a Heritage Foundation proposal meant to provide a ‘market-oriented’ alternative to Democratic universal coverage plans. Even worse than Republicans’ maximum resistance, many of the shortcomings of Obamacare were based on the plan’s concessions to the private insurance model of coverage.

For all these reasons, the experience has triggered a critical shift among Democrats. Single payer plans have always had substantial support among Democrats. For decades it was actually official party policy. But there was a middle group who supported single payer in principle but found either the politics intractable or the process of transition too complicated and disruptive given how entrenched the private system is and how interwoven it is with employment. Probably the majority of elected Democrats have been in this middle group for the last couple decades.

Democratic support in principle for single payer was easy to understand. Some variant of a national health care plan ensuring universal coverage exists in every country in Europe and Canada and it’s basically impossible to find anyone in those countries who wants to switch to our system. The Obamacare experience (and by this I mean largely the politics of it) has led many in that skittish middle group to decide or at least be open to the idea that half measures and incrementalism are a fools’ errand and that we need to bite the bullet, with all the complicated politics and complexities of transition and just implement a system that clearly works better in really every other wealthy industrialized democracy.

But there’s a problem.

Much of the debate is being carried on on the basis of polling and claims about public opinion that are highly misleading and in some cases intentionally so.

The point is simple. When you poll “Medicare for All” or “a national universal coverage plan” you get anywhere from clear to overwhelming majorities of public support – numbers ranging sometimes into the 60s or even 70s percentages. But when you add a range of the most obvious counters or negatives of such a plan, support drops dramatically.

For instance, if you ask about support for Medicare for All if respondents heard it would “eliminate health insurance premiums and reduce out-of-pocket health care costs for most Americans” you get 67% support and 30% opposition. But if you say it would “eliminate private health insurance companies” support drops to 37%. If you say that it would “require most Americans to pay more in taxes” that also pulls support down to 37%. (These numbers are all from this poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation from last month.)

Now there are good and clear rejoinders to both these criticisms, especially the second. Yes, it would lead to higher taxes. But certainly for the average American those new taxes would be less than the amount of money they currently pay in health insurance premiums. But this gets to a bigger point about politics. You never get to manage a political fight by defining the question entirely on your own terms or un-rebutted. Your opponents get to do the same. Some of those counter arguments will just be baseless or false and they need to be countered as such. With Medicare for All you will almost certainly hear Republicans talking about rationing, death panels, socialism and the like. Medicare for All would probably still include private health insurance providers offering supplementary plans as they currently do with Medicare for seniors. Some version of that exists in most countries with a national health care system. But it would almost certainly eliminate, either in practice or in law, health care plans as we currently know them, plans that provide a single source of reimbursement or coverage for all medical care.

That’s real. Most people hate their health insurers or find constant reasons for complaint with them. But as you can see from those numbers, eliminating private insurers and eliminating the plan most people currently have drives those support numbers down dramatically. Single payer advocates can say a Medicare style plan would be better than what you currently have. And they have the ubiquitous example of Medicare, which basically everyone can’t wait to get on, as a great proof point that that is the case. But people fear change, especially if they’re largely satisfied with what they currently have or fear they’d lose advantages in a new system.

The tax argument is vulnerable to similar counter-arguments. The argument that the country can’t afford Medicare for All because it would add tens of trillions in spending is a silly and fairly dishonest argument. It’s not new money. We’re already spending all that money. We’re just spending it as premiums through private insurers. Medicare for All would simply take the same money being paid as premiums and reroute it as taxes into Medicare. In fact, we’d likely save money, at least on a per capita basis since you remove the profit margin and get lots of efficiencies that Medicare currently enjoys. So in any fiscal sense, it’s a wash. In practice though it is a lot of new taxes. And that is a big cudgel opponents can and will use against any plan. As those numbers show, that too dramatically drives down support.

There’s another issue. Economists rightly count employer spending on health care premiums as de facto income to the employee. In practice though the taxes will likely fall on the individual, not the employer. It’s not so clear that every employer will immediately pass on savings on premiums to employees as salary. In fact, it’s almost certain many, probably most, will not – at least not at first. So for many people it could end up being a dramatic new expense in the form of taxes which they at least weren’t directly paying in premiums before. Over time that likely all shakes out. Maybe. But politics doesn’t play out over time. It plays out in the moment.

My point here isn’t to throw cold water on the whole effort or demoralize people who see Medicare for All moving to the center of the national debate. But it is a mistake to pretend it’s wildly popular or will be wildly popular in an actual political or legislative debate. Because that’s deeply misleading. It also leads to other confusions. Are Democratic leaders resisting the push for Medicare for All because they’re neo-liberal shills or corrupt weaklings? Or is it because they realize it’s much more political challenging than supporters claim. It may be a bit of each. But people are substantially understating the latter possibility.

There is also an argument that Democrats need to stop pushing for half-measures and actually frame the debate around an ideal or pragmatically ideal outcome. I agree with that. I have made this argument myself, specifically with regards to health care policy. That’s the big lesson for me from the Obamacare saga. Democrats sustained immense electoral damage for championing a system that allowed insurance companies to continue to operate and even get big federal subsidies. And they still worked to undermine the system and sabotage it both in policy and political terms. I myself am of the generation which was surprised at just how quickly the public moved on marriage equality. People with long political experience are subject to failures of political imagination. None of this means that these challenges can’t be overcome. Perhaps it will all happen as it did with marriage equality. But I doubt it. And tax policy may provide a handy illustration.

Tax policy provides an interesting counter-argument. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have rapidly changed the public debate about tax policy by proposing a 70% top marginal rate on income over $10 million and a wealth tax. Especially in the former case this is an almost textbook example of moving the ‘overton window’, shifting what is counted as possible within the public debate. To many pundits’ and politicos’ surprise, both proposals are actually pretty popular. It’s a good example of a proposal that simply wasn’t being made in the public square, in part because of false assumptions. Those proposals will probably still be hard to legislate. But legislating is always hard. And critically, there’s really no strong counters that have traction, as there are with major changes to the health care system. Do you support a 70% top marginal rates on income over $10 million? Well, what if you learned that some super rich people couldn’t buy a third boat? It doesn’t really work does it?

Now, there are counters. Republicans will say, it starts with high rates on the super rich but soon it’s a high rate for you in the middle class. That plays, sometimes effectively, on general mistrust of government in general. They’ll also argue that taking a big majority of income on dollars at any level is simply wrong. These arguments will have some impact. But not a lot. The idea of being worth more than $10 million is far, far outside the experience of the vast majority of Americans. The idea that you might make more than that much money in a single year is almost beyond comprehension. For a few decades Democrats have been arguing about minor quibbles in the high 30s or very low 40s percentage for the top tax rate. At a minimum it’s a good thing to put high rates on the table for extremely high income.

I’ll add the same disclaimer yet again. This isn’t an argument against Medicare for All or single payer. I’m a supporter. But no one ever helps themselves by underestimating the challenge of a fight on the way in. It’s a big challenge. There will be a lot of resistance, even from a lot of people who are supportive of the concept in broad terms. Grappling with that means coming up with counters to those obvious challenges, which makes the chances of success greater and the risk of electoral debacles lower.

[editor’s note: The original version of this post stated that all European countries have some version of single payer. That was sloppy and incorrect. They each have some version of a national health care system which ensures universal coverage. The plans range from centralized health care systems run by the government (the UK) to single payer to plans (Canada) to various public/private hybrid systems.]

Facebook Remade the Internet in Its Hideous Image by Alex Shepherd for the New Republic

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Facebook Remade the Internet in Its Hideous Image
The social network turned 15 today. The next 15 years look to be even worse.
By ALEX SHEPHARD
February 5, 2019
Fifteen years ago today, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook—then known as TheFacebook—out of his Harvard dorm room. It now has more than two and a half billion users across its applications, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and a market capitalization of around $500 billion. By just about any measure, it is one of the most successful and consequential companies ever. But judged against its founder’s own grandiose vision, the company indisputably has failed.

Zuckerberg has long made the case that his company isn’t just about amassing users and monopolizing advertising revenue. Facebook aims to make the world a better, more peaceful place by connecting people who, before the network’s existence, were separated by geographic and identitarian boundaries. “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” Zuckerberg wrote in a manifesto published on the eve of the company’s going public in February of 2012. “It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook is effectively the front page of the internet: One out of every five minutes on the mobile internet is spent on the site. So it has succeeded in connecting much of the world—but often for the worse. Far from freeing people from tyranny and oppression, Facebook has been shown to fuel unrest, violence, and even genocide. The same place you go to wish an uncle happy birthday is, for hostile state and non-state actors, a vital hub for propaganda, misinformation, and recruitment. Whether Facebook survives another 15 years or not, this will be the legacy it has bequeathed to the internet as a whole.

Facebook’s rise was meteoric, even compared to the other “Big Four” companies—Apple, Amazon, Google—to which it is frequently compared. After launching as a Harvard-only social network in February of 2004, it spread rapidly across college campuses before being made available, in September of 2006, to everyone in the United States. By the fall of 2012, it had one billion users; five years later, it crossed the two billion mark.

Initially, Zuckerberg was resistant to advertising on the site, believing that it was intrusive and distracted from the user experience. But after Sheryl Sandberg joined the company from Google in 2008—with the directive to make the company profitable—Facebook embraced extensive user tracking and became one of the most powerful advertising companies in the planet. Its revenue has skyrocketed in the last few years, topping $55 billion in 2018.

At the same time, the company has become so large and complex that it’s possible no one, including Zuckerberg and Sandberg, really understands it. Facebook is a social network, an advertising company, and a data collection hub that relentlessly surveils and profiles its users. It is being utilized by companies wishing to find new customers, as well as governments looking to foil terrorist attacks (and, increasingly, to meddle in the elections and domestic affairs of adversaries). Its advertising business has played a pivotal role in the decimation of the American news media.

A site that was once a place for centralizing social obligations—a mix of an address book and a scrap book, a place to easily share milestones and memories with family and friends—has grown into a world unto itself that plays a pivotal, and often damaging, role in democracies and dictatorships alike. It has been seized on by hatemongers across the world, who use it to spread misinformation and messages of ethnic division with frightening speed, facilitating murders in India and genocide in Myanmar.

Facebook did not invent propaganda or misinformation; mass media has been used to spread hate and violence for as long as mass media has existed. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that many of the malicious acts that are blamed on Facebook would have happened without it, but the social network has nevertheless been a kind of inadvertent pathfinder, a company so convinced of its public utility that it was, until it was too late, blind to its numerous adverse effects. But Facebook has made it easier to unleash these negative forces and to harness the internet for horrific acts, and it will take more than an apology tour to undo the damage.

Facebook will change dramatically over the next 15 years. The rise of deepfakes is already making the problem of fake news—the real kind, not the Trumpian insult—seem quaint. How will augmented reality be used for evil? We can only imagine. But it requires little imagination to see that Facebook is ill-equipped to handle these future threats, given its utter failure to address myriad crises ranging from its handling of user data to its spread of misinformation that may have compromised elections in the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere.

That makes this a pivotal moment not just in Facebook’s history, but America’s—if not the world’s. No company has emerged to challenge Facebook’s supremacy, as it continues to corral users and make record profits. It will require collective action, then, to force the company to change, so that the next 15 years of the internet don’t look like the Facebook-dominated internet of today, or worse. Governments, most importantly the U.S. and EU, have the power to diminish the company’s extreme influence on society, with the laws that tie its hands or even break it up. Facebook’s users have a different sort of power: They can relegate the network to obscurity simply by logging off.

Neither action, alas, would solve the underlying problem. If, by 2034, Facebook has become the next MySpace, we can only wonder what horrors “the next Facebook” has in store for us.

Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic.
@alex_shephard