Donald Trump did not create the atmosphere of neglect that blew him to the White House on the same loft that Russia exploited: Big Business and Congress did. More specifically responsible, the founders and top shareholders of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other digital/ social media platforms.
These goliaths may be Democrat-leaning or Republican; it's irrelevant. They either vastly underestimated or allowed their profit models to help deform the outcome of the 2016 election.
This week Twitter will testify to the Senate that in the period from September through November 2016, 36,000 Russia linked accounts generated more than 1.4 automated, election-related tweets. The analysis pointedly OMITS re-tweets; how the echo chamber is created by compounding the impact of tweets in the first place.
A hostile foreign power waltzes through the carnage of Congressional indifference: indifference to corporate power and dark money in politics, indifference to the way new technologies have surpassed the imagination and craft of the Founding Fathers, indifference to the collapse of journalism into the morass of social media.
With daily revelations how many tens and hundreds of millions were exposed to Russian disinformation through Facebook and Twitter primarily, it becomes more and more clear how Congress was asleep and how Russia exploited that fact, driving its tech bot tanks into American territory as though straight through a porous, digital Maginot Line.
The result is awful and sickening.
We already know that Donald Trump pushed the same themes during his campaign as the Russians. Stirring fears and resentments is hardly new in American politics, but the shameless appeals to racism, nationalism, against diversity, foreigners and "the other" is straight out of a playbook cribbed by the Russians from the Nazis. These are signposts of Trump territory that the Republican Party refused to disavow.
The reason the Republican Party meekly accepted virulent anti-Americanism is thanks to the unfettered power of large corporations and the corruption of the US campaign finance system.
Russia and Putin understand this flaw perfectly. Power and greed. After the collapse of communism, Putin secured his reign by favoring oligarchs with ownership of key industries. In the warped Trump White House, "transactional nationalism" reinforced by our own oligarchs is where US interests meet Russia's: "Peace through strength and private wealth".
The Mueller investigation is the only barrier to a virtual coup, but its outcome depends on Congress -- a Congress unwilling to assess the gravity of transgressions by Russia and by the Trump campaign. There is enough in the public record to impeach Trump and possibly Pence right now and would have happened already but for the Republican Congress.
The parallel issue is what to do about corporate power and campaign finance in the United States. The tech giants left the doors to American democracy wide open to Russian infiltration because federal laws and regulations aren't powerful enough to prevent a hostile foreign power from corrupting democratic, free society.
One is constantly reminded of this by the Fox Network -- the Rupert Murdoch money machine that parrots the Trump White House like Pravda during the Soviet era. Fox exists because President Reagan cancelled the Fairness Doctrine: a provision in federal regulation of licensed broadcasters that laid out a standard for balance and equity.
In the decades that Congress -- primarily but not exclusively Republican -- shit on campaign finance reform, things went from bad to worse. Russia didn't have to load a weapon or point a gun: all it had to do was waltz into democracy on strands of fiber optic cable.
That's where we are today in short, as the Mueller investigation aims to launch more indictments based on a large-scale criminal conspiracy. The American public will have ONE CHANCE to get this right: November 2018.
These goliaths may be Democrat-leaning or Republican; it's irrelevant. They either vastly underestimated or allowed their profit models to help deform the outcome of the 2016 election.
This week Twitter will testify to the Senate that in the period from September through November 2016, 36,000 Russia linked accounts generated more than 1.4 automated, election-related tweets. The analysis pointedly OMITS re-tweets; how the echo chamber is created by compounding the impact of tweets in the first place.
A hostile foreign power waltzes through the carnage of Congressional indifference: indifference to corporate power and dark money in politics, indifference to the way new technologies have surpassed the imagination and craft of the Founding Fathers, indifference to the collapse of journalism into the morass of social media.
With daily revelations how many tens and hundreds of millions were exposed to Russian disinformation through Facebook and Twitter primarily, it becomes more and more clear how Congress was asleep and how Russia exploited that fact, driving its tech bot tanks into American territory as though straight through a porous, digital Maginot Line.
The result is awful and sickening.
We already know that Donald Trump pushed the same themes during his campaign as the Russians. Stirring fears and resentments is hardly new in American politics, but the shameless appeals to racism, nationalism, against diversity, foreigners and "the other" is straight out of a playbook cribbed by the Russians from the Nazis. These are signposts of Trump territory that the Republican Party refused to disavow.
The reason the Republican Party meekly accepted virulent anti-Americanism is thanks to the unfettered power of large corporations and the corruption of the US campaign finance system.
Russia and Putin understand this flaw perfectly. Power and greed. After the collapse of communism, Putin secured his reign by favoring oligarchs with ownership of key industries. In the warped Trump White House, "transactional nationalism" reinforced by our own oligarchs is where US interests meet Russia's: "Peace through strength and private wealth".
The Mueller investigation is the only barrier to a virtual coup, but its outcome depends on Congress -- a Congress unwilling to assess the gravity of transgressions by Russia and by the Trump campaign. There is enough in the public record to impeach Trump and possibly Pence right now and would have happened already but for the Republican Congress.
The parallel issue is what to do about corporate power and campaign finance in the United States. The tech giants left the doors to American democracy wide open to Russian infiltration because federal laws and regulations aren't powerful enough to prevent a hostile foreign power from corrupting democratic, free society.
One is constantly reminded of this by the Fox Network -- the Rupert Murdoch money machine that parrots the Trump White House like Pravda during the Soviet era. Fox exists because President Reagan cancelled the Fairness Doctrine: a provision in federal regulation of licensed broadcasters that laid out a standard for balance and equity.
In the decades that Congress -- primarily but not exclusively Republican -- shit on campaign finance reform, things went from bad to worse. Russia didn't have to load a weapon or point a gun: all it had to do was waltz into democracy on strands of fiber optic cable.
That's where we are today in short, as the Mueller investigation aims to launch more indictments based on a large-scale criminal conspiracy. The American public will have ONE CHANCE to get this right: November 2018.
No comments:
Post a Comment