Researchers associated with Cornell University have studied the sources of misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was remarkable in the number of sources that were studied. According to the researchers:
“The study was performed using Cision Media’s Next Generation Communications Cloud platform, which aggregates content from 7 million-plus sources around the world. This database was queried with an English-language search string for misinformation topics in the context of COVID-19, using an iterative cycle of different keywords.
The study evaluated over 38 million pieces of content published by English-language, traditional media worldwide between January 1 and May 26, 2020.
It analyzed engagement with traditional media stories on social channels.
The study identified over 1.1 million news articles (2.9% of the whole COVID-19 conversation) that disseminated, amplified or reported on misinformation related to the pandemic.
The major findings of the study identify US President Trump as the source of almost 38% of all misinformation references.
“It is apparent from the data that mentions of President Trump within the context of COVID-19 misinformation comprise by far the largest single component of the “infodemic.” Trump mentions comprised 37.9% of the overall “infodemic.”
• However, a substantial proportion of other topics was also driven by the president’s comments, so some overlap can be expected. This strengthens the conclusion that the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic.”
• Only 16.4% of the misinformation conversation was “fact-checking” in nature, suggesting that the majority of COVID misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction.
The study identified 11 topics that were identified as misleading or false:
1 Miracle Cures 2 New World Order / Deep State 3 Democratic Party Hoax 4 Wuhan Lab / Bioweapon 5 Bill Gates 6 5G 7 Antisemitic Conspiracies 8 Population Control 9 Dr. Anthony Fauci 10 Plandemic 11 Bat Soup
I have not myself heard the rumors about bat soup but I likely skipped over those articles in self-defense. But the findings are rather extraordinary, testifying to the power of the “bully pulpit“, a phrase first used by US President Theodore Roosevelt. But the dissemination of false or misleading information in a pandemic is intrinsically dangerous. Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Herbert Lin and Harold Trinkunas point out all the problems engendered by false information. If one wishes to find reputable information about COVID-19, I would strongly recommend going to the website on the virus maintained by the Johns Hopkins University.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have had a long-standing dispute over the rights of people who live in the disputed region known as Nagorno-Karabakh. That dispute has broken out into open conflict. Armenia has a Christian majority population and Azerbaijan has a majority Muslim population. The population of Nagorno-Karabakh is majority Armenian, but it falls within the national territory of Azerbaijan. The Council on Foreign Relations gives a good background to the conflict:
“In the 1920’s, the Soviet government established the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region—where 95 percent of the population is ethnically Armenian—within Azerbaijan. Under Bolshevik rule, fighting between the two countries was kept in check, but as the Soviet Union began to collapse, so did its grip on Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh legislature passed a resolution to join Armenia despite the region’s legal location within Azerbaijan’s borders. As the Soviet Union was dissolving in 1991, the autonomous region officially declared independence. War erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region, leaving roughly 30,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands of refugees. By 1993, Armenia controlled Nagorno-Karabakh and occupied 20 percent of the surrounding Azerbaijani territory. In 1994, Russia brokered a cease-fire which has remained in place since.”
There have been many attempts by outsiders to mediate the conflict, most notably by the Helsinki Commission. Unfortunately, these efforts have not yielded fruit, and the recent outbreak in fighting has the potential to draw in outside powers. Russia has a defense treaty with Armenia and Turkey, a member of NATO, strongly supports Azerbaijan. Iran, a Shia Muslim state, seems to be more favorable to Armenia, largely because it fears the Turkic Azeri population even though they are Muslim, albeit Sunni Muslim. Unfortunately, outside powers are more than willing to sell weapons to both states, regardless of policy alignments. Both countries can ill-afford a sustained arms race.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has issued a report entitled “COVID-19 leads to massive labour income losses worldwide” a not surprising finding. The stock market has increased in value during the pandemic, thanks largely to the favorable tax and monetary policies pursued by the Trump Administration.
While the owners of capital have prospered, the ones that only have their labor to sell have suffered. According to the ILO:
“Global labour income is estimated to have declined by 10.7 per cent, or US$ 3.5 trillion, in the first three quarters of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019. This figure excludes income support provided through government measures.
“The biggest drop was in lower-middle income countries, where the labour income losses reached 15.1 per cent, with the Americas the hardest hit region at 12.1 per cent.”
The ILO is also projecting that these losses will continue. The study suggests that there have been greater losses to labor from inactivity (reduced hours) than from unemployment, which represents a serious problem for recovery:
“This rise in inactivity has important policy implications. Experience from earlier crises shows that activating inactive people is even harder than re-employing the unemployed, so higher inactivity rates are likely to make the job recovery more difficult. Moreover, younger and older people have been hit particularly hard by the COVID‑19 crisis: since these two groups normally have a higher risk of becoming inactive, there is a danger that they will face long-term labour market disadvantages”
It may be the case that the rich are congratulating themselves for gaming the system to help them accumulate capital. At some point, however, there will be no one who will be able to buy the products that the rich produce. The continuing impoverishment of the lower income citizens will bring the economy to a stop, as happened in the 1930s.
US President Trump issued an Executive Order on 22 September entitled “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping“. The order has not received any attention in the media–not surprising given the other news that we are processing. The misrepresentations in the order are breathtaking and, in many respects, terrifying. For example:
“Today, however, many people are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual. This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.
“This destructive ideology is grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history and its role in the world. Although presented as new and revolutionary, they resurrect the discredited notions of the nineteenth century’s apologists for slavery who, like President Lincoln’s rival Stephen A. Douglas, maintained that our government “was made on the white basis” “by white men, for the benefit of white men.” Our Founding documents rejected these racialized views of America, which were soundly defeated on the blood-stained battlefields of the Civil War. Yet they are now being repackaged and sold as cutting-edge insights. They are designed to divide us and to prevent us from uniting as one people in pursuit of one common destiny for our great country.”
I do not know how to process this tangle of straw men, flawed historical record, or the complete lack of awareness of the depth of debate about these issues among people who care deeply about the possible meanings of what living in a liberal society could imply.
I would recommend that we should read this document carefully to understand where the current Administration means to take us.
On Monday, the Trump Administration imposed what it called “snapback sanctions” on Iran for what it termed were violations of the 2015 nuclear program agreement signed between Iran and the 5 Permanent Members of the Security Council plus Germany (technically known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA]). The decision was based on the original terms of the Agreement in the event of Iranian non-compliance, but the US pulled out of the agreement in 2018. The US insists that it is named as a participant to the Agreement and therefore it retains the right to insist upon the terms of the agreement even though it is no longer bound by the Agreement.
Most countries, including all the signatories to the JCPOA, reject the US interpretation. The US demand–that all countries refrain from trading with Iran–would be meaningless except for the fact that the US also asserts the right to sanction other states, individuals, or entities that do engage in trade with Iran. So far, there has been little of substance from the US action. CNN reports:
“A total of 27 entities and individuals that the administration say are “connected to Iran’s proliferation networks” were hit with sanctions or export control restrictions on Monday.
“Eric Brewer, deputy director and senior fellow with the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN that ‘so far, this is really all for show.’
“‘It looks like a lot of the new designations are individuals, sub-organizations, etc. of previously sanctioned entities. Also, these sanctions could have been done under existing executive orders without snapback,’ he said.
As Barbara Slavin, the director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told CNN last week, ‘it is still illegal under US law for American companies to sell arms to Iran. There is a European arms embargo, which will continue until 2023.’
“”The rest of the world will wait for US presidential elections and then make its decision about whether or not to sell weapons to Iran,’ Slavin said.
The isolation of the US on the matter is profound (only the Dominican Republic voted in the Security Council in favor of the US resolution to enforce the sanctions). Iran has certainly made changes to its nuclear program that are ostensibly forbidden, but it has assiduously avoided making any changes that would dramatically alter its ability to make a bomb within a period of a year. The New York Times published an editorial which emphasized the shortsightedness of the US position:
“The tragedy of the Trump administration’s approach is that it has alienated European allies who share the common goal of curbing Iran’s most worrisome behavior. The United States once stood shoulder to shoulder with not only France, Germany and Britain, but also with Russia and China — to isolate Iran. Now, it is the United States that is isolated.
“The bigger question is whether the American efforts to invoke snapback will kill the nuclear deal, which the other parties have been trying desperately to keep alive. Iran had been widely seen as keeping its commitments under the deal until the U.S. exit. Afterward, it increased its production of fissile material, as a calibrated response to the American withdrawal.
“Now, the agreement is in tatters. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, the chances of reviving the accord are slim to none. Iran could walk away from the nuclear deal altogether and resume its previous levels of production of fissile material, which it claims will be used as fuel for a peaceful nuclear reactor. This will set Iran back on a collision course with the United States and Israel.”
“Trump’s maximal use of sanctions has become a policy overreach that has alarmed both U.S. allies and adversaries, prompting not just concerted diplomatic resistance, but investments in economic countermeasures aimed at circumventing the U.S. dollar’s supremacy in the global financial order. For instance, last month Beijing encouraged Chinese banks to reduce their reliance on the SWIFT network commonly used to conduct transactions, and which is susceptible to U.S. pressure. China is clearly looking to diminish the United States’ ability to pressure adversaries by denying them access to international financial networks. Mounting resistance to U.S. sanctions will make it more difficult for Washington to rally international support to pressure Iran. That would require fewer U.S. sanctions, not more.”
It may be the case that the US strategy has nothing at all to do with the Iranian nuclear program. The US may be building a case for attacking Iranian facilities although no other states, other than Israel, would be likely to support military action. But the Trump Administration may be paying attention to only US domestic political opinion.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has published a report on how major international banks have potentially laundered $2 trillion worth of transactions by a number of individuals and organizations over the period from 1999 to 2017. The report is based upon about 2,100 leaked Suspicious Activities Reports (SARS) to the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). The list of suspected individuals is a vertiable rogue’s gallery which also includes Paul Manafort, one of President Trump’s campaign managers in 2016 who was flagged as early as 2012. The ICIJ reports:
“Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.
“The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.
“U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.
“In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.”
The report, however, goes on to indicate that these records are merely a drop in the bucket of possibly illegal activity:
“Though a vast amount, the $2 trillion in suspicious transactions identified within this set of documents is just a drop in a far larger flood of dirty money gushing through banks around the world. The FinCEN Files represent less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million suspicious activity reports that financial institutions filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017.
“FinCEN and its parent, the Treasury Department, did not answer a series of questions sent last month by ICIJ and its partners. FinCEN told BuzzFeed News that it does not comment on the ‘existence or non-existence’ of specific suspicious activity reports, sometimes known as SARs. Days before the release of the investigation by ICIJ and its partners, FinCEN announced that it was seeking public comments on ways to improve the U.S.’s anti-money laundering system.
“The cache of suspicious activity reports — along with hundreds of spreadsheets filled with names, dates and figures — flag bank clients in more than 170 countries who were identified as being involved in potentially illicit transactions.”
It is staggering to think of how people have been incarcerated for victimless and petty crimes. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:
“Despite making up close to 5% of the global population, the U.S. has nearly 25% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our incarcerated population has increased by 700% – 2.3 million people in jail and prison today, far outpacing population growth and crime.
“One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino boys—compared to one of every 17 white boys. At the same time, women are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States.
“There are twice as many people sitting in local jails awaiting trial and presumed innocent than in the entire federal prison system. And each year, 650,000 men and women nationwide return from prison to their communities. They face nearly 50,000 federal, state, and local legal restrictions that make it difficult to reintegrate back into society.”
But it appears as if you can move around millions of dollars, it is unlikely that you will ever be prosecuted. The term “double-standard” does not even come close to describing the inequities in the system.
Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards of the RAND Corporation have published a paper entitled “Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018” which tries to quantify how much income the bottom 90% of the US population lost due to departures from the income distributions that existed in the US from 1945 through 1974. It was a counterfactual exercise so its conclusions can only be assessed as speculative. Nonetheless, its conclusions are disturbing:
“This work seeks to quantify the scale of income gap created by rising inequality compared to a counterfactual in which growth was shared more broadly…. We document the cumulative effect of four decades of income growth below the growth of per capita gross national income and estimate that aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile over this time period would have been $2.5 trillion (67 percent) higher in 2018 had income growth since 1975 remained as equitable as it was in the first two post-War decades. From 1975 to 2018, the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.”
The period from 1945 to 1974 was unique in US and global history. The growth the US experienced was extraordinary because of the recovery from the devastation of World War II. But the marginal tax rates on American citizens were quite high, in some cases reaching 90% for the highest income categories. Those high tax rates did not seem to inhibit economic growth and most Americans experiences a rapidly rising standard of living.
That situation changed in the late 1970s and 1980s as taxes were lowered on the higher income groups, and from that period tax rates were continually lowered. The reduction of taxes continued with the tax cuts of 2017 which lowered the taxes on the rich to very low levels. These cuts were justified as a method of stimulating economic activity which would purportedly create new jobs. The ideology behind this action is known as supply-side economics–a souped-up term for “trickle-down” economics.
What has actually happened is that the ideology has created “trickle-up” economics where the money flows from the poor to the rich, and if the calculations of the RAND paper are correct, the upflow was indeed prodigious. And the rich have consolidated their political power to assure that their privileged status is protected.
There was a signing ceremony at the White House yesterday with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. As I indicated in my post on 11 September, the normalizing of relations is always a good thing and all involved should be congratulated for these small steps for peace. The fanfare at the ceremony, however, was disproportionate to the actual change the steps imply. Israel and the UAE have been secretly cooperating for many years. President Trump made the following assertion:
“And they want to see peace. You know, they’ve been fighting for a long time. They’re tired. They’re warring countries, but they’re tired. They’re tired of fighting. And so you’re going to be seeing further announcements.”
“Just whose blood might be involved was glossed over. The other signatories of the ‘accords’, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, had never been at war with Israel. They are Gulf monarchies from the high-end enclaves of the Arab world, who have exchanged intelligence and technology with Israel as wall as a mutual fear of Iran, for several years already. The ‘peace agreements’ involved three Middle Eastern governments putting an official seal on once furtive friendships, in a brash ceremony honed to benefit Trump, part of a broader diplomatic flurry that is part of his reelection campaign.
Most of the fighting in the Middle East has been more closely related to US moves since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In real terms, the normalization of relations among these states is roughly equivalent to a damp squib.
The UAE and Bahrain both insisted that Israel stop the process of annexing the West Bank. We shall wait to see how long this pause lasts. Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently under indictment and Israel is suffering from a significant spike in COVID-19 infections so the political pressures on him are particularly intense at this point in time. The UAE has also asked for the top-of-the-line US fighter jet, the F-35, and Israel is opposed to that step since it would make the UAE a more formidable power in the Persian Gulf. The Bahrain decision is interesting since the regime is closely tied to Saudi Arabia and it implies that the Saudis are also thinking about normalizing relations as well. Such a move is unlikely as long as King Salman is alive, but he is an ailing ruler and his son, the Crown Peace, appears to be more willing to make the move.
The US-Israeli strategy toward the Palestinians is becoming clearer. Essentially, the plan is to isolate completely the Palestinians from other Arab states and wait for the Palestinians to capitulate from exhaustion and lack of money. In the short run, the strategy might work. But Israel has yet to decide what to do with the Palestinians who may ultimately be forced to live in Israel.
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