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If We Want to Help Migrants, It's Time to Move From Outrage to Action

By Francine Prose, Guardian UK

03 July 19

We need to undo the spell of weird enchantment that allows us to ignore children locked in cages in front of our eyes

aving grown up just after the second world war, I’ve always wondered what I would have done if I’d known that Jews were being herded into (let’s call them) mass detention centers. What if I’d been aware that this was happening in my country?

Now that people are being herded into mass detention centers in my country, now that children are being kept in cages, I have – like it or not – been given a chance to find out what I would have done. If there had been Facebook in the early 1940s, I would have posted on Facebook. I would have written opinion pieces from the safe distance of my study. I would have donated to humanitarian and legal aid organizations. I would even have traveled to Texas to hear the stories of asylum seekers and witness a trial in which 40 immigrants, some of whom had lived here for years, were all deported at once. I would have felt haunted, continually. Haunted and obsessed. And none of these things would have stopped the mass incarceration of children.

Of course it’s important to encourage the like-minded, to assure those repelled by our government’s cruelty that they are not alone. But every day I read eloquent essays and informative dispatches from the border. Every day I have outraged or heartbroken conversations. Yet the locking up of children, the family separations continue. The photo of the young father drowned with his little daughter goes viral and enters the gallery of atrocity photos, along with the image of the dead Emmett Till. But that image will no more stop the brutal mistreatment of migrants than Emmett Till’s battered body has stopped the senseless killing of young black men.

Meanwhile the criminal prosecution of people arrested for supplying basic humanitarian aid – food and water for human beings starving or dying of thirst –seems to have had the desired chilling effect on simple, low-tech gestures of decency and protest. What I can’t help wondering is how different the situation would be if a million Americans were leaving water bottles and sandwiches in the desert – or if thousands of Americans were camped outside detention centers.

Something is happening – or beginning. This week hundreds of employees of Wayfair, an online home goods company, walked out in protest over their firm’s sale of furniture to migrant shelters. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet: “This is what solidarity looks like.” It’s unclear what effect this has had on company policy, though the fact that Donald Trump lashed out at the “left” for “bullying” Wayfair seems like a positive sign. Even he must realize what might happen if this sort of thing grew more widespread. Bank of America has stopped funding the owners of private detention centers and prisons, but it may be a little early to hail the big banks as beacons of moral clarity.

I came of age during the Vietnam war, and though the atrocities of that conflict were much further away than those now being committed in Texas, Arizona and Florida, we took to the streets – by the hundreds of thousands. I know it’s still being debated, how much those demonstrations contributed to the ending of the war. And I agree with those who argue that the protests might never have happened if young Americans hadn’t felt threatened by the specter of the draft. But they happened, and many of us can look back on that era with a more or less clear conscience. We tried. We did our best. That will not be possible for us to say in the future, if things continue as they are now, and we continue to stay home and discuss new restaurants, read the papers, preach to the choir.

Anyone who doubts the efficacy of mass public protest might consider Hong Kong, where enormous crowds recently thronged the streets to protest a bill that would allow the extradition of criminals to mainland China. Presumably, few protesters expected to be in that situation, but they registered the threat to their basic freedoms. Under pressure, the government suspended the bill and the opposition has vowed to continue the demonstrations until the bill is revoked.

We need activists and organizers to take this on, to shake us out of our paralysis and undo the spell of weird enchantment that allows us to look at the sweet faces of children who died under unspeakable conditions, on our watch. Not everyone will agree. If you don’t think that brown children are human children, if you believe that they and their families should be punished (with death, if need be) because their home countries were so dangerous that they had no choice but to leave, you won’t want to join those who want to save their lives.

We have to do something besides talking, writing, lamenting, consoling one another, hoping that the problem will be solved if Donald Trump is defeated in 2020. By then it will be too late for many kids and their families. With every day that passes, more children are cold, hungry, terrified, alone, separated from their parents. Even as I write this, children go on dying, and it is – or should be – harder for us to live with ourselves.

Only a Fool Would Trust Facebook With Their Financial Wellbeing

By Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

03 July 19

Only a fool would trust Facebook with his or her financial wellbeing. But maybe that’s the point: with so much personal data on some 2.4 billion monthly active users, who knows better than Facebook just how many suckers are born every minute?

acebook and some of its corporate allies have decided that what the world really needs is another cryptocurrency, and that launching one is the best way to use the vast talents at their disposal. The fact that Facebook thinks so reveals much about what is wrong with twenty-first-century American capitalism. 

In some ways, it’s a curious time to be launching an alternative currency. In the past, the main complaint about traditional currencies was their instability, with rapid and uncertain inflation making them a poor store of value. But the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the renminbi have all been remarkably stable. If anything, the worry today is about deflation, not inflation.

The world has also made progress on financial transparency, making it more difficult for the banking system to be used to launder money and for other nefarious activities. And technology has enabled us to complete transactions efficiently, moving money from customers’ accounts into those of retailers in nanoseconds, with remarkably good fraud protection. The last thing we need is a new vehicle for nurturing illicit activities and laundering the proceeds, which another cryptocurrency will almost certainly turn out to be.

The real problem with our existing currencies and financial arrangements, which serve as a means of payment as well as a store of value, is the lack of competition among and regulation of the companies that control transactions. As a result, consumers – especially in the United States – pay a multiple of what payments should cost, lining the pockets of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and banks with tens of billions of dollars of “rents” – excessive profits – every year. The Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation curbs the excessive fees charged for debit cards only to a very limited extent, and it did nothing about the much bigger problem of excessive fees associated with credit cards.

Other countries, like Australia, have done a much better job, including by forbidding credit card companies from using contractual provisions to restrain competition, whereas the US Supreme Court, in another of its 5-4 decisions, seemed to turn a blind eye to such provisions’ anti-competitive effects. But even if the US decides to have a non-competitive second-rate financial system, Europe and the rest of the world should say no: it is not anti-American to be pro-competition, as Trump seems to have recently suggested in his criticism of European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager.

One might well ask: What is Facebook’s business model, and why do so many seem so interested in its new venture? It could be that they want a cut of the rents accruing to the platforms through which transactions are processed. The fact that they believe that more competition won’t drive down profits to near zero attests to the corporate sector’s confidence in its ability to wield market power – and in its political power to ensure that government won’t intervene to curb these excesses.

With the US Supreme Court’s renewed commitment to undermining American democracy, Facebook and its friends might think they have little to fear. But regulators, entrusted not just with maintaining stability, but also with ensuring competition in the financial sector, should step in. And elsewhere in the world, there is less enthusiasm for America’s tech dominance with its anticompetitive practices.

Supposedly, the new Libra currency’s value will be fixed in terms of a global basket of currencies and 100% backed – presumably by a mix of government treasuries. So here’s another possible source of revenue: paying no interest on “deposits” (traditional currencies exchanged for Libra), Facebook can reap an arbitrage profit from the interest it receives on those “deposits.” But why would anyone give Facebook a zero-interest deposit, when they could put their money in an even safer US Treasury bill, or in a money-market fund? (The recording of capital gains and losses each time a transaction occurs, as the Libra is converted back into local currency, and the taxes due seem to be an important impediment, unless Facebook believes it can ride roughshod over our tax system, as it has over privacy and competition concerns.)

There are two obvious answers to the question of the business model: one is that people who engage in nefarious activities (possibly including America’s current president) are willing to pay a pretty penny to have their nefarious activities – corruption, tax avoidance, drug dealing, or terrorism – go undetected. But, having made so much progress in impeding the use of the financial system to facilitate crime, why would anyone – let alone the government or financial regulators – condone such a tool simply because it bears the label “tech”?

If this is Libra’s business model, governments should shut it down immediately. At the very least, Libra should be subject to the same transparency regulations that apply to the rest of the financial sector. But then it wouldn’t be a cryptocurrency.

Alternatively, the data Libra transactions provide could be mined, like all the other data that’s come into Facebook’s possession – reinforcing its market power and profits, and further undermining our security and privacy. Facebook (or Libra) might promise not to do that, but who would believe it?

Then there is the broader question of trust. Every currency is based on confidence that the hard-earned dollars “deposited” into it will be redeemable on demand. The private banking sector has long shown that it is untrustworthy in this respect, which is why new prudential regulations have been necessary.

But, in just a few short years, Facebook has earned a level of distrust that took the banking sector much longer to achieve. Time and again, Facebook’s leaders, faced with a choice between money and honoring their promises, have grabbed the money. And nothing could be more about money than creating a new currency. Only a fool would trust Facebook with his or her financial wellbeing. But maybe that’s the point: with so much personal data on some 2.4 billion monthly active users, who knows better than Facebook just how many suckers are born every minute?