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A Long-Despised and Risky Economic Doctrine Is Now a Hot Idea BloombergIt's like a design competition. Hardly anyone thinks central banks can fix a stalling world economy with their current tools. So some of the biggest names in ...
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Paranoia Written All Over S&P 500 in Struggle Back to a Record BloombergThe relentless drive into defensive stocks is a logical way to cope for investors beset all year by signs a recession is at hand. It's also a tough way to set a *fresh* ...
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Trump’s Next Trade Feud Has Parcels From China in Its Sights BloombergSnow, rain or heat can't keep the mail from reaching its appointed address in the U.S. But what about a trade war?
opinion
In the age of instant analysis, almost any unfortunate event — a civil war, a mass shooting, a paralyzing strike or a power outage — conjures a corps of expert commenters eager to explain why it should never have happened.
The premise of these critiques is always the same: If only a few key participants had been smarter, or less greedy, or more far-sighted, we might have avoided whatever unpleasantness we are all busy deploring.
But there is more humble theory of history, one that traces great cataclysms to tidal forces mightier than the men and women tasked to contain them. According to this school of thought, some man-made events are as inevitable as the earthquake that result when one tectonic plate breaks free of another.
The UAW's ongoing strike against General Motors, which entered its fourth day Thursday, is certainly one of these.
Say what you will about the corruption at the top of the union or the oblivious greed of GM's incumbent corporate leaders: This is a strike that needed to happen, a ritualized reckoning that may or may not have come in time to avert a wider and more unpredictable confrontation between workers and employers.
Those who focus narrowly on the auto industry regard the strike as an unpleasant interruption in a period of sustained cooperation between U.S. automakers and the UAW — an unexpected and unnecessary escalation of hostilities between antagonists who haven't faced off in a national strike since before the 2008 recession.
More: Former UAW Lordstown worker does double picket duty in strike against GM
More: GM strike exposes flaws in U.S. labor laws
But this is only the latest (and potentially the most destructive) storm in a sustained season of labor unrest that began with last year's successful teacher's strike in West Virginia and inspired subsequent strikes in the hotel, grocery store and fast food industries.
The UAW's members, it seems, are not the only workers whose wages have not kept up with inflation, and theirs is not the only industry in which employment and benefits have failed to match the pace of corporate earnings.
According to the Gallup organization, popular support for unions is hovering above 60%, a 50-year high. That's more than half-again the 40% approval rating Donald Trump enjoys on a good day, and helps explain why, when workers strike in 2019, a majority of their neighbors are rooting for them.
[ Following the GM strike? Download our app for the latest news.]
The immediate objectives of GM's striking workers are specific: Persuade their employer to keep jobs in the United States, to revive the domestic factories it plans to shutter — er, that is, un-allocate — in Michigan, Ohio and Maryland, and to diminish its reliance on temporary employees who earn lower wages and enjoy fewer job benefits than their permanent counterparts.
The company says it needs flexibility to navigate the technological and economic headwinds that nearly destroyed it a decade ago. Workers counter that their sacrifices were critical to GM's recovery, and that they are determined to secure a larger share of the $35 billion profit GM has logged in the last three years.
But the laborers my Free Press newsroom colleagues talk to on the picket lines regularly expressed their desire to strike a blow in a broader struggle against income inequality, regressive taxes and anti-labor government policies.
Dominique Birdsong, who builds Chevrolet Silverados at the Flint Assembly Plant, told Free Press auto writer Phoebe Wall Howard she and her colleagues are striking on behalf of neglected workers across America.
"I'm not scared, I'm hopeful. Because we're determined," Birdsong said. "We will rally together for the middle class."
If the interests at stake transcend those of UAW members, the GM strike is taking place in the context of a federal investigation that has implicated the union's top leaders in promoting a culture of corruption. That probably made it harder for UAW leaders to sell any offer GM made before the strike as the best available.
But it's simplistic to blame the strike on the UAW leadership's diminished credibility at a time when workers have lost confidence in so many others. Chief among them: GM CEO Mary Barra, whose $22-million annual compensation is 281 times that of the median GM worker, and Donald Trump. who promised to penalize companies that move jobs abroad but has delivered only a reckless trade war that has destabilized the entire industry.
Trump surely understands that this strike is a product of employee resentment that reverberates far beyond GM's factories. His own election may be seen, in hindsight, as an earlier (and equally inevitable) consequence of that resentment.
Whether the strike precipitates a quick settlement that defuses labor's anger or a prolonged war of attrition that inflames it depends not just on GM's next moves, but also on whether corporate leaders outside the auto industry recognize that their own gated communities are also under siege.
The UAW's members aren't the only workers looking for signs their employers can read the writing on the wall.
Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday. And while Zuck didn’t bother to mention the meeting on any of his social media channels, the president proudly posted a photo of the two men shaking hands on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook).
Zuckerberg, arguably the most powerful person in the world as the leader of a company with data on over 2.3 billion people, was in Washington, D.C. on Thursday to meet with a number of legislators. One legislator, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, even told Zuckerberg to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, an idea that the billionaire Facebook founder was not willing to entertain.
Zuckerberg’s sit-down with President Trump reportedly included Dan Scavino, the White House Director of Social Media, but was not open to journalists and news photographers. A Facebook spokesperson told CBS News that the meeting with Trump was “good” and “constructive,” though the tech giant did not respond to questions from Gizmodo.
President Trump has repeatedly denounced the heads of social media companies like Twitter and Facebook over the past few years, claiming without evidence that they harbor an anti-conservative bias and restrict the speech of Trump supporters. Trump has even asked why supposedly liberal institutions aren’t censored on platforms like Facebook, a question that would seem to contradict his alleged support for free speech.
Zuckerberg also met with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia this week to discuss the future of social media. Warner organized a dinner in Washington on Wednesday night where they talked about Libra, Facebook’s digital currency that’s already controversial all around the world. Zuck told Warner that Facebook and the Libra Association, a Switzerland-based group of companies, would not launch the cryptocurrency until they got buy-in from U.S. financial regulators, according to the Washington Post.
Trump supporters who use Facebook left thousands of comments on the White House photo to express their disgust with Zuckerberg, and demonstrated just how vital and insightful these social media platforms can be for a functioning democracy like the United States.
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“Ask him when his crews are going to quite (sic) suppressing conservatives views!” one Facebook user wrote.
“How is he allowed at the white House he sensors (sic) conservatives and tampers with elections,” another user said.
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“Pls suspensed (sic) all account communist,” wrote another Facebook user.
But perhaps one Facebook user who commented on the Trump-Zuck photo said it best...
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*(6)marriage problems*
*(7)promotion in work place*
*(8)luck of jobs*
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*(10)court Case*
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*(13)when you want something from someone*
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Took the words right out of my mouth.
I can’t wait for the 2020 presidential election. It’s going to be both normal and good. It’s tough to predict the future, but at least we can all count of those two things. The next election will be normal and it will be good.
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Say for the moment you are the founder and CEO of a vast social network that has recently come under scrutiny from governments around the world. Your company is incredibly successful, but lately members of various congresses and parliaments have begun wondering aloud whether it is actually too successful. Political parties who once cheered you as a job creator are now musing aloud about chopping you up for parts.
You are paranoid — because you believe only the paranoid survive — and so you have built a large policy, communications, and lobbying apparatus to manage these threats into advantages. (It is a happy accident of working in technology that government regulations tends to benefit you by making it harder for challengers to make it out of the crib.) But lately it is not enough: you are the face of the company, and people expect you to show up and make the case for your company in person.
You do this, once, in your home country, and run so many circles around the people’s chosen representatives that when you get back to headquarters for the weekly all-hands the employees erupted in applause. But then everyone in all the other countries starts asking you to come to their country, and answer their questions, and you decide you would rather not. A big reason these countries are inviting you there is so they can score political points by yelling at you in front of television cameras, which would be neither pleasant nor productive.
But also, to the extent they have questions about your business, they are questions any of your executives can answer. You all speak from the same talking points, after all. Other CEOs might relish shooting from the hip, but not you. So why fly for many hours on your private plane just to answer questions that any number of other people could handle for you?
Usually, for Mark Zuckerberg, the answer is that he doesn’t. But on Thursday he did.
Zuckerberg’s decision to head to Washington to this week signals, to my mind, just how serious the stakes have gotten for Facebook lately. This month, the attorneys general in eight states and the District of Columbia announced an antitrust investigation into the company. The Federal Trade Commission is conducting an antitrust investigation of its own, as are the Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee. Meanwhile, the Senate Banking Committee is scrutinizing Facebook’s plans to launch Libra, the company’s forthcoming cryptocurrency.
There is also the fact that the president has regularly attacked Facebook, although he attacks lots of things, and it’s never really clear how serious it is or what the practical consequences of those attacks might be.
So that’s the backdrop for his visit today. Here’s Tony Romm on what happened next in the Washington Post:
Zuckerberg — who spent Thursday meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill — declined to answer questions as he navigated past a throng of reporters.
Behind the scenes, Zuckerberg heard an earful from lawmakers about the need for his company to better protect the data it collects and guard against political interference in the 2020 election, members of Congress later revealed. Democrats and Republicans also raised competition concerns with Facebook and its sprawling empire, which also includes WhatsApp and Instagram, at a moment when state and federal regulators are amid antitrust probes.
Zuckerberg also met privately with President Trump, Facebook confirmed. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Most of Zuckerberg’s conversations on Thursday were private, and we won’t know whether they had any practical impact — on him or on elected officials — for some time. But we all owe Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, for this readout of his conversation with the CEO:
The criticisms about privacy and competition even led one of Facebook toughest foes, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), to request during his private meeting with Zuckerberg that Facebook sell WhatsApp and Instagram, an audacious proposal that the company executive did not support.
“I think he was a little taken off guard,” Hawley said. “I think that he felt it was not a great idea.”
This is, to my mind, a shame, as selling off WhatsApp and Instagram really is a very good idea. The Interface extends its thanks to the senator for giving it a shot.
In any case, less interesting than the conversations Zuckerberg may have had in Washington today is the fact that he went in the first place. And given the way things have been going for Facebook lately, it might not be too much longer before he goes back.
Trending up: Amazon intends to become carbon-neutral by 2040, a move the company announced after intense pressure from employees.
Trending up: Facebook said its users have raised over $2 billion to date for philanthropic causes on the platform.
Trending up: Google added an incognito mode for Maps, a long-overdue privacy feature.
Trending down: YouTube announced it remove verification badges from thousands of accounts for reasons it could barely articulate.
⭐ Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pledged the company will be carbon-neutral by 2040 as part of a massive new plan to fight climate change. The announcement comes the day before thousands of Amazon employees are set to walk off the job to protest the company’s contributions to pollution and support of fossil-fuel companies and climate deniers. Here’s Justine Calma at The Verge:
The pledge’s target is 10 years earlier than the most ambitious version of the Paris agreement’s climate goals, which currently aims for the world to become carbon-neutral by 2050. Bezos pledged that Amazon would measure and report emissions on a regular basis, implement decarbonization strategies, and offset any remaining emissions. Other companies are also invited to sign on to the commitment.
Bezos’ goal is for 80 percent of Amazon’s energy use to be renewable by 2024. By 2030, Bezos hopes to run Amazon on renewables alone. Bezos says he wants Amazon to be a role model for other companies, which is why he says Amazon will be the first company to sign on to the new pledge.
Amazon’s plan also came with an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans from Michigan-based startup Rivian. The vans will hit the road by 2024, but Amazon might begin testing them as soon as 2020. (Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge)
Facebook also announced a climate-related initiative: it’s banning single-use plastic water bottles at all of its offices worldwide. (Roland Li / San Francisco Chronicle)
The U.K.’s most polarizing journalist, Carole Cadwalladr, is toeing the line between journalism and activism. Her reporting on Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal changed how people talk about data privacy, but some say she’s pushing a policy agenda and has taken her activism too far. (Ben Jodah / The Atlantic)
The California Consumer Privacy Act — our very own GDPR-lite — will apparently go into effect as scheduled on January 1st. The law overcame significant attacks from tech giants and lawmakers in the most recent legislative session seeking to water it down. (Hayley Tsukayama / Electronic Frontier Foundation)
A history of the Democratic Party’s “breakup” with big tech, from the summer of 2016 until now. Today, it’s common for Democrats to call for big tech companies to be broken up — but until recently, the party was a reliable ally for Silicon Valley’s. (Gabriel Debenedetti / Intelligencer)
Trolls have developed new ways to make misinformation go viral ahead of the 2020 election. Reporters are responding with advanced troll-dodging (and troll-hunting) tactics. (Sara Fischer / Axios)
Americans don’t trust tech execs or politicians: over 80 percent say members of Congress act unethically some or most of the time, and 77 percent say the same about tech leaders, according to a new survey by Pew. More than half also say journalists don’t admit mistakes. (Pew Research Center)
The problem with deciding what’s “true” isn’t about trolls or fake news — it’s about technology, argues sociologist William Davies. Having uninterrupted access to information makes people skeptical about who and what to trust, he writes. (William Davies / The Guardian)
⭐ YouTube announced it would remove verification badges for a large number of channels as part of a confusing overhaul of the program.Until recently, the company was verifying any account that hit 100,000 subscribers — even if it had never verified the account holder’s identity. But instead of asking those accounts to provide documentation about their creators, the company is instead proactively un-verifying thousands of accounts and then asking them to appeal YouTube’s automated decision. Coupled with the transition away from a highly recognizable checkmark symbol to a muted gray parallelogram flag gizmo, YouTube has handled a hugely consequential decision in one of the strangest ways imaginable. Julia Alexander for The Verge:
Verification is an extremely important feature for creators. It affects which creators get top recommendations when people search for something on YouTube. Channels that no longer meet the criteria and may have their badge removed will be notified today, YouTube confirmed to The Verge. Creators will have the option to appeal the decision before the change takes place in late October.
Being verified also represents status for creators. Having the checkmark beside their channel name is a sign of being one of the most prominent members of the community. Losing that checkmark is going to leave creators feeling upset — especially at a time when many people have already voiced their concerns with YouTube’s treatment of their community.
⭐ Facebook’s NPE Team, which works to develop new products and market, recently released two efforts to court teens in Canada. Bump, an app that connects students who go to the same school, launched in August and is still available for download. Aux, a music app that integrates with Spotify and Apple Music to let people virtually listen to songs with friends, has already been pulled from the App Store. Ime Archibong, a respected Facebook veteran, is leading the team, Alex Heath reports in The Information:
The new group behind the teen-oriented apps—known inside Facebook as NPE—could play an important role in helping Facebook draw a younger user base that is increasingly fleeing to social media rivals like Snapchat and TikTok. The group could also help Facebook retain talent eager to work on more longshot projects that don’t fit into what employees internally refer to as the company’s core “family of apps”: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
At the same time, regulatory scrutiny of big tech companies could make future acquisitions of startups more hazardous, pressuring them to invent the next big thing in-house. The selection of Archibong, a media-savvy executive who is known to be close to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suggests the company believes the effort will receive wide attention.
People in emerging markets like India can now speak to Google’s virtual assistant, Google Assistant, on the phone. The project, a partnership between Google and Vodafone Idea, allows people to ask about the weather, game scores, or traffic, in Hindi and English. (Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed)
Google started testing Incognito Mode for Maps to let users navigate without their search history or location being tracked. (Jules Wang / Android Police)
Twitter’s head of public policy quit after eight years at the company.
Facebook introduced some novel new ad formats, including video poll ads and AR ads. (Facebook)
Disney CEO Bob Iger speculated that Apple and Disney might have merged if Steve Jobs had not died in 2011. Iger recently resigned from Apple’s board amid Apple’s plans to invest heavily in original content. (Bob Iger / Vanity Fair)
Instagram warned users who manage their profiles with Buffer and Hootsuite that their accounts have been “compromised” and they need to stop using these services. It could be a bug, though the company has been reviewing third-party apps that have this level of access to its APIs for abuses. (Rob Price / Business Insider)
People are successfully using Instagram hashtags meant to bring awareness to the opioid crisis, like #opioidcrisis and #opioidaddiction, to sell drugs on the platform. (Joseph Bernstein / BuzzFeed)
An Instagram influencer famous for provocative photos of her extra-long tongue nets almost $100,000 a year. She has 2 million followers and makes money from ads and merchandise.
The “straight man Instagram aesthetic” is fixated on nighttime skylines, fast food, and photos of other people’s dogs, this piece argues. (Madeleine Holden / MEL)
Digital media publishers are often guilty of the same data-harvesting practices as the NSA and other spy agencies they report on, a computer scientist argues. (Timothy Libert / The New York Times)
Emma Grey Ellis tells us why everyone is excited about “Keke Palmer’s accidental roast, ‘sorry to this man.’”
Here’s what happened. The Hustlers actress did a video interview with Vanity Fair while hooked up to a lie detector. The interviewer asks if her character True Jackson, of True Jackson, VP, was a better VP than US vice president Dick Cheney, showing Palmer a photo of Cheney on an airplane. The hope, clearly, was to make her nervous and send the polygraph needle jumping all over the page. Palmer was nonplussed. “I hate to say it, I hope I don’t sound ridiculous,” Palmer says after a beat. “I don’t know who this man is. I mean, he could be walking down the street, I wouldn’t know a thing. Sorry to this man.” People on Twitter found this pure and innocent gaffe delicious.
The memes, they are good:
Send us tips, comments, questions, and questions to shout at Zuckerberg from the press scrum: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has met with the president at the White House, as well as with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to talk about the future of internet regulation. According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg met with his biggest critics in an effort to pacify lawmakers looking to conjure up tighter internet regulations and to compel platforms like Facebook to have stricter moderation practices. He also reportedly used the chance to pitch his vision for moderate internet regulation.
The social network has been under scrutiny for many, many things over the past years, including consumer privacy, election security and high-profile acquisitions. Just over a month ago, the FTC reportedly started looking into the company's Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions as part of an antitrust investigation. That happened shortly after the agency reached a record-high $5 billion settlement agreement with the company over various privacy violations, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The President, who previously accused Facebook of being anti-conservative, tweeted a photo of the meeting in the Oval Office:
Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today. https://t.co/k5ofQREfOc pic.twitter.com/jNt93F2BsG
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2019
It's not clear what went on in the White House, but the company said Zuckerberg "had a good, constructive meeting" with the President. The lawmakers he met with didn't hold back, though, with Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley challenging him to sell Instagram and WhatsApp to prove that he's serious. There's been an increasing pressure on authorities and regulators to break up "big tech" companies, which are being accused of snapping up competition to dominate the industry.
Another lawmaker, Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said they talked about the tech industry's repeated failures to protect election security and consumer privacy. Both Blumenthal and Hawley questioned the FTC over its $5 billion settlement with the company over concerns that the amount is "woefully inadequate" considering Facebook's size and the magnitude of its privacy mishaps.
Zuckerberg's Capitol Hill tour isn't done yet: he's meeting with the House Judiciary Committee, which grilled Google and Facebook over online hate speech and racially motivated violence earlier this year, later today.
