The President's Not Surprising 2020 Campaign Strategy

An article in the New York Times analyzes the president’s campaign strategy for 2020. The assessment so far indicates that the campaign is likely to be much like that used for the 2016 election. That election consisted of an endless barrage of false and misleading assertions of facts and unfounded attacks on the president’s political rivals. His tactics included touting false conspiracy theories and playing on social divisions to foment unwarranted distrust in both political opposition and government itself.

The NYT writes:

“Even by President Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistle-blower who was telling Congress that the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael T. Flynn. 

And Mr. Trump lashed out at Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a sympathetic columnist, Mr. Trump smeared him as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Mr. Trump’s campaign mocking Mr. Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline. 

That was all on Thursday. 

Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Mr. Trump back to ​​the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power. 

His attacks over the last week on Mr. Obama have showcased Mr. Trump’s persistent determination to weaponize those tools to bolster a favorite political narrative, one that distorts the facts about Mr. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, in order to spin sinister implications about the previous administration. 

But Mr. Trump also appears to genuinely believe many of the conspiratorial claims he makes, people close to him say, and his anger at Mr. Obama is informed less by political strategy than by an unbending — and unsubstantiated — belief that the former president was personally involved in a plot against him. 

Over the last week, the Trump campaign has spent at least $880,000 on Facebook ads attacking Mr. Biden. 

Mr. Trump has also been warned by Republican veterans that his efforts to define Mr. Biden in negative terms so far have been slow or ineffective. At a meeting with political advisers this week that included Karl Rove, the top strategist for former President George W. Bush, Mr. Rove warned Mr. Trump that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging Mr. Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.”

Apparently, the top campaign priority is damaging Biden with a massive barrage of lies, smears and fabricated conspiracy theories. Another priority is fabricating baeless conspiracy theories about President Obama in an effort to discredit (i) the Mueller investigation, and (ii) the role that Russia played in getting the president to win the electoral college.

Facebook is not innocent

Lies and crackpot conspiracies will flow copiously from Facebook in the coming months. One can see why Facebook refuses to block lies and unfounded conspiracies in political ads that politicians buy. There is just too much money to pass up. Maybe as importantly, blocking the president’s political lies runs the risk of crossing a viciously vindictive, thin-skinned president. Facebook’s lack of moral courage in defense of profits will help the president further disinform, confuse, distract and polarize Americans. That damage is on Zuckerberg.

Commercial Loan Shenanigans: A Looming Financial Disaster is on the Horizon

ProPublica reports that a whistleblower complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that fraud in loans on commercial properties is increasing. This echoes the fraud in financial residential real estate that lead to the 2008 housing market collapse. Back then, residential home values were often inflated and the borrower's ability to repay the loan was also frequently overstated. Those home loan were bundled into securities and sold. The securities collapsed leading to tens of billions in losses for investors who bought the fraudulent securities.

ProPublica writes:

“Twelve years later, there’s evidence something similar is happening again. 

Some of the world’s biggest banks — including Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank — as well as other lenders have engaged in a systematic fraud that allowed them to award borrowers bigger loans than were supported by their true financials, according to a previously unreported whistleblower complaint submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission last year. 

Whereas the fraud during the last crisis was in residential mortgages, the complaint claims this time it’s happening in commercial properties like office buildings, apartment complexes and retail centers. The complaint focuses on the loans that are gathered into pools whose worth can exceed $1 billion and turned into bonds sold to investors, known as CMBS (for commercial mortgage-backed securities).”

ProPublica looked at six loans in CMBS packages and found the whistleblower complaint to be accurate. In particular, past profits reported for some buildings were listed as much as 30% higher than the profits previously reported for the same buildings and same years. That is not supposed to happen. Regulators are supposed to flag anomalies like that and find out if fraudulent loans are being made. Given the virulently anti-government and anti-regulation attitude of the president and his appointees, one can reasonably believe that honest regulators have been ordered to allow fraud like this.

The shenanigans include wiping out of some expenses for a commercial building that were listed in earlier loan documents. No explanation is given for disappeared expenses. By falsely claiming lower expenses to operate a building, a fraudulent loan, the loan is more profitable for the lender. The problem is that the risk of default on the loan increases. If too many defaults happen, that can lead to another financial meltdown similar to that in 2008.

With trillions of dollars committed to bailouts, overvaluations in commercial real estate now constitute a much larger risk than before the pandemic slammed the economy. In fact, data from early April showed a sharp spike in missed payments to bondholders for CMBS that hold loans from hotels and retail stores. ProPublica comments that the default rate is expected to increase because of Covid-19 economic lockdowns.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is moving after lobbying by commercial real estate organizations to prop these loans up. Commercial real estate groups lobbied for federal support after warning about a possible commercial mortgage crash. In response, the Federal Reserve pledged to prop up CMBS by loaning money to investors and letting them use their CMBS as collateral. Once again, taxpayers could be on the hook for tens or hundreds of billions in bad loans.

Also not surprisingly, the Mortgage Bankers Association, representing institutions who make money on bad loans backed by taxpayers, claims they are unaware of any such fraudulent activities and have no other comments to make. Their comment: “We aren’t aware of this occurring and really don’t have anything to add.” So much for concern among financial institutions. Why should they care if bad loan risk is on taxpayers and not themselves? What have they got to lose? Under current political conditions, they have little or nothing to lose, but a lot of profit to gain.

After the 2008 disaster, this kind of corruption wasn't supposed to be able to happen again. Regulators were supposed to stop this kind of criminal activity before it became widespread. Regardless, it appears to be happening again. Coupled with corruption and incompetence, financial disaster is what a anti-government and anti-regulation mindset can allow. 

AN ETHICAL DILEMMA: In Israel, Modern Medicine Grapples With Ghosts of the Third Reich

A Palestinian surgeon, a Jewish patient, a Nazi medical text — and an unlikely bond.

FOR THE FULL STORY:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/world/middleeast/nazi-medical-text-israel.html

I AM MORE INTERESTED in addressing the moral dilemma a case like this presents.

SO - given that the best way to save a 13 year old Jewish boy's life, was to use a guide through the intricate nerve pathways produced by the Nazis, who did so by dissecting bodies of prisoners  "many experts believe that most of the prisoners were Austrians condemned in the courts."

SO - is it ethical to use medical practices perfected by unethical means to save a life?

Would YOUR feelings be different if looking in from the outside  or if the child was YOUR child?

Please weigh in.

The Covid-19 Vaccine Disinformation War is Heating Up

The New York Times reports that social media is being flooded with lies and misinformation about non-existent Covid-19 vaccines. The situation is characterized by a combination of crackpot conspiracy theories, flat out lies, pseudoscience and some things that are of legitimate political and social concern. The mixing of some truth with a toxic message indicates that the anti-vaxx community has become much more sophisticated and organized in its use of dark free speech to. Propaganda that contains at least some truth tends to be more persuasive because the truth tends to deflect from lies, deceptions and motivated reasoning by making them appear more plausible. The goal is, among other things, to deceive, confuse, misinform and foment unwarranted distrust and fear among Americans.

A crackpot video

On May 4, a 26-minute video taken from a longer video entitled “Plandemic” was posted on YouTube. In it, a discredited scientist, Dr. Judy Mikovits, 62, claimed that global elites including Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci are using the coronavirus pandemic to shield a plot to expand their wealth and political power. As is usual for crackpot conspiracy theories, the theory is not accompanied by any evidence of a conspiracy. What Mikovits alleged was that existing vaccines have damaged people's immune systems, making them susceptible to diseases including Covid-19.

In 2011, Mikovits was fired from the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, NV, after her research into chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited.
The anti-vaxx community seized immediately on the crackpot science video and elevated Mikovits to what the NYT calls “a new star of virus disinformation.” The NYT writes:

“Her ascent was powered not only by the YouTube video but also by a book that she published in April, “Plague of Corruption,” which frames Dr. Mikovits as a truth-teller fighting deception in science. In recent weeks, she has become a darling of far-right publications like The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit. Mentions of her on social media and television have spiked to as high as 14,000 a day, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs.  

The rise of Dr. Mikovits is the latest twist in the virus disinformation wars, which have swelled throughout the pandemic. Conspiracy theorists have used the uncertainty and fear around the disease to mint many villains. Those include Dr. Fauci after he appeared to slight President Trump and Mr. Gates, a co-founder of Microsoft, as someone who started the disease. They have also pushed the baseless idea that 5G wireless waves can help cause the disease.”

The crackpots get organized and become sophisticated

In an analysis article for the NYT entitled, Get Ready for a Vaccine Information War, Kevin Roose discusses the growing sophistication of the anti-vaxx movement. Roose has been following the anti-vaxx movement for years. His concern is that, due to anti-vaxx conspiracy lies and pseudoscience, a significant number of Americans will refuse to take an effective Covid-19 vaccine if one can be successfully developed. Roose writes:

“I’ve been following the anti-vaccine community on and off for years, watching its members operate in private Facebook groups and Instagram accounts, and have found that they are much more organized and strategic than many of their critics believe. They are savvy media manipulators, effective communicators and experienced at exploiting the weaknesses of social media platforms. (Just one example: Shortly after Facebook and YouTube began taking down copies of “Plandemic” for violating their rules, I saw people in anti-vaccine groups editing it in subtle ways to evade the platforms’ automated enforcement software and reposting it.) 

First, because of the pandemic’s urgency, any promising Covid-19 vaccine is likely to be fast-tracked through the testing and approval process. It may not go through years of clinical trials and careful studies of possible long-term side effects, the way other drugs do. That could create an opening for anti-vaccine activists to claim that it is untested and dangerous, and to spin reasonable concerns about the vaccine into widespread, unfounded fears about its safety.”

Roose goes on to point out that if a vaccine is developed, it is possible that the Gates Foundation or the World Health Organization could have played a role. That would play into the conspiracy theories about what Gates or the WHO is really doing and why. Also, if a vaccine is developed, people may be required to take it, e.g., before flying on an airplane or going to a public school. That too would play into conspiracies the anti-vaxx community has voiced about mandatory vaccinations.

Finally, Roose checked with academics who study the anti-vaxx movement to see if there is empirical data to support his concerns about a rise in anti-vaxx propaganda. There is. A paper in Nature that published yesterday, The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, reported that anti-vaxx propaganda and fake conspiracies “will dominate in a decade.”[1] The paper did not report how many people might turn against a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed. The modeling data projects that although the number of people who are undecided about vaccines is huge, anti-vaxx messaging is predicted by one model to be dominant by about 2033. Time will tell if that modeling turns out to be correct or not.

The Vaxx, Anti-Vaxx and Undecided Online Ecosystem

A dark big picture

Arguably, a broader disturbing message can be taken from this situation. The new normal in American politics is a coalescence of the armies of dark free speech. They are unifying in their tactics and goals as they fight for what appears to be a generally anti-democratic, authoritarian, society and central government. Given the similarity in their tactics and generally anti-government tone, it appears that the anti-vaxx community can cooperate with most other conservative populist movement and groups or even formally unite with them. The similarities of the main conservative political movements, e.g., gun rights, abortion, free speech, anti-government, etc., appear to share a mindset that strongly rejects expertise, inconvenient facts and truths and rationality. This mindset, the 'irrationalist mind', has a strong affinity for fake truth, fake conspiracy theories and an intolerance of enemies (real or perceived) or disfavored groups. The out-people and groups are perceived, judged and attacked in intolerant moralistic, often bigoted terms.

If that analysis is basically correct, America's political and social situations are getting uglier, more reality- and science-detached and more intolerant. America is definitely going in the wrong direction.


Footnote:
1. The paper’s abstract: “Distrust in scientific expertise1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 is dangerous. Opposition to vaccination with a future vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent of COVID-19, for example, could amplify outbreaks2,3,4, as happened for measles in 20195,6. Homemade remedies7,8 and falsehoods are being shared widely on the Internet, as well as dismissals of expert advice9,10,11. There is a lack of understanding about how this distrust evolves at the system level13,14. Here we provide a map of the contention surrounding vaccines that has emerged from the global pool of around three billion Facebook users. Its core reveals a multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages. Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral. Our theoretical framework reproduces the recent explosive growth in anti-vaccination views, and predicts that these views will dominate in a decade. Insights provided by this framework can inform new policies and approaches to interrupt this shift to negative views. Our results challenge the conventional thinking about undecided individuals in issues of contention surrounding health, shed light on other issues of contention such as climate change11, and highlight the key role of network cluster dynamics in multi-species ecologies15.”

The researchers analogize the situation with warfare: “Support and potential recruitment of these green clusters (crowds) [undecided people] is akin to a battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of individuals in insurgent warfare.”