Alex Gibney - Uncovering “Dirty Money” Crimes | The Daily Show
Published on Apr 8, 2018 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Filmmaker Alex Gibney talks about exposing Volkswagen's horrifying animal testing, HSBC's money laundering and other corporate crimes in his docuseries "Dirty Money." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uSf5ZOeqxQ [with comments]
Gibney says, it's all about keeping big businessmen-campaign contributors content.
'This is a dangerous period': Trump is finally calling out Putin by name, and experts are anxiously watching what he'll do next President Donald Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin out on Twitter Sunday after a suspected chemical attack in Syria killed at least 40 people. Ian Bremmer told Business Insider on Sunday that the US will probably soon strike Syrian forces if it can confirm that chemical weapons were indeed used. Lawmakers are encouraging Trump to act, and hold Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accountable for his actions. Bremmer also said he agrees with the potential strikes, but also says there are downsides to the proposition. http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-calls-out-putin-syria-chemical-attack-what-happens-next-2018-4
Add: So Alex Jones takes Russia's side more consistently than Trump does. Ok, that works, as Jones (see video above) is not under as much public or political pressure to be rational as Trump is.
Facebook suspends another data analytics firm after CNBC discovers it was using tactics like Cambridge Analytica Data analytics firm CubeYou used personality quizzes clearly labeled for "non-profit academic research" to help marketers find customers. One of its quizzes, "You Are What You Like" which also goes by "Apply Magic Sauce," states it is only for "non-profit academic research that has no connection whatsoever to any commercial or profit-making purpose or entity." When CNBC showed Facebook the quizzes and terms, which are similar to the methods used by Cambridge Analytica, Facebook said it was going to suspend CubeYou from the platform to investigate. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/08/cubeyou-cambridge-like-app-collected-data-on-millions-from-facebook.html
A ‘Faustian bargain’: PBS documentary dissects Trump’s takeover of the GOP In the flurry of all-news cable coverage of the whirlwind that is the Trump presidency, the details get lost. It’s hard to tell what’s really going on when Fox News is busy claiming there’s a caravan of immigrants about to storm the U.S. border, or is busy attacking Jimmy Kimmel for some wisecrack he made. And CNN is busy trying to help viewers connect the colourful, shady players who turn up in the Mueller investigation. Every now and then, somebody will assert that the Republican Party is a disgrace, a bunch of wusses intimidated by a braying bully of a know-nothing. Or somebody will simply acknowledge that Trump put the party in his pocket and will then look puzzled about why it happened. The bigger, better picture can be found in the excellent, plays-like-a thriller Frontline: Trump’s Takeover (Tuesday [4-10-18], PBS, 10 p.m.). It’s essential viewing for anyone trying to follow the twisted tale of Donald Trump’s appropriation of the GOP, and how everything turned upside-down. [...] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/article-a-faustian-bargain-pbs-documentary-dissects-trumps-takeover-of-the/
‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook Christopher Deason stumbled upon the psychological questionnaire on June 9, 2014. He was taking a lot of online surveys back then, each one earning him a few dollars to help pay the bills. Nothing about this one, which he saw on an online job platform, struck him as “creepy or weird,” he said later. So at 6:37 that evening, Mr. Deason completed the first step of the survey: He granted access to his Facebook account. Less than a second later, a Facebook app had harvested not only Mr. Deason’s profile data, but also data from the profiles of 205 of his Facebook friends. Their names, birth dates and location data, as well as lists of every Facebook page they had ever liked, were downloaded — without their knowledge or express consent — before Mr. Deason could even begin reading the first survey question. The information was added to a huge database being compiled for Cambridge Analytica, the political data firm with links to Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. None of the people whose data was collected knew it had happened, not even Mr. Deason. “I don’t think I would have gone forward with it if I had,” Mr. Deason, 27, said in a recent interview. Mr. Deason and his Facebook friends became early entries in a database that would ultimately encompass tens of millions of Facebook profiles and is now at the center of a crisis facing the social media giant. News of Cambridge Analytica’s data collection, first reported last month by The New York Times and The Observer of London, has spurred a #DeleteFacebook movement and brought the social network under intensifying scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the United States and Britain. Still, few of the roughly 214 million Americans with Facebook profiles know whether their data was among the information swept up for Cambridge Analytica. Facebook, which learned of the data misuse in December 2015, plans to begin telling affected users on Monday, a day before its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is to testify before Congress. Records reviewed by The Times show that roughly 300,000 people took the survey, but because of the access to friends’ information allowed at the time, Facebook said that as many as 87 million users could have been affected. But The Times, which has viewed a set of raw data from the profiles that Cambridge Analytica paid an academic researcher to obtain, contacted nearly two dozen affected Facebook users in recent weeks. Some were angry — one woman compared it to being robbed — while others were annoyed but unsurprised, having grown cynical about tech giants’ use of the data they collect. They are some of the first known affected Facebook users to be publicly identified. And nearly all said the misuse of their data had given them second thoughts about staying on Facebook. “I’ve come to grips with the fact that you are the product on the internet,” said Mark Snyder, 32, who lives in Pompano Beach, Fla., and was among Mr. Deason’s friends whose data was collected. “If you sign up for anything and it isn’t immediately obvious how they’re making money, they’re making money off of you,” said Mr. Snyder, who maintains computer networks for a living. Mr. Zuckerberg has said the misuse of data represented a “breach of trust” by the company. But even he has suggested that other app developers could have done the same. Until April 2015, Facebook allowed some app developers to collect some private information from the profiles of users who downloaded apps, and from those of their friends. Facebook has said it allowed this kind of data collection to help developers improve the “in-app” experience for users. But Facebook appears to have done little to verify how developers were using the data or whether they were providing any kind of experience on Facebook at all. The questionnaire used to collect data for Cambridge Analytica was not actually on Facebook. It was hosted by a company called Qualtrics, which provides a platform for online surveys. It consisted of dozens of questions often used by psychology researchers to assess personality, such as whether the respondent prefers to be alone, tries to lead others and loves large parties (the answer choices range from “disagree strongly” to “agree strongly”). The questionnaire took about 10 to 20 minutes to complete. When respondents authorized access to their Facebook profiles, the app performed its sole function: to take the users’ data and that of their friends. There was no “in-app” experience to speak of; this was not intended to be the sort of cute online quiz that tells users which “Friends” character they most resemble or how their brunch preferences reveal their inner Disney princess. Facebook has said that people who took the quiz were told that their data would be used only for academic purposes, claiming that it and its users were misled by Cambridge Analytica and the researcher it hired, Aleksandr Kogan, a 28-year-old Russian-American academic. But the fine print that accompanied the questionnaire may have told users that their data could be used for commercial purposes, according to a draft of the survey’s terms of service that was reviewed by The Times. Selling users’ Facebook data would have been an outright violation of the company’s rules at the time. Yet the company does not appear to have regularly checked to make sure that apps complied with its rules. And the final wording of the survey’s terms of service is now most likely unknowable: Facebook executives said they deleted the app in December 2015 when they found out about the data harvesting. Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook data to help build tools that it claimed could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. The firm has said that its so-called psychographic modeling techniques underpinned its work for Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, setting off a still-unsettled debate about whether the firm’s technology worked. The uproar over Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of the data has added to questions Facebook was already confronting over the use of its platform by those seeking to spread Russian propaganda and fake news. “Cambridge Analytica is the big story on the topic, but there have been numerous stories about Facebook either selling user data or giving third parties access and using it to help advertising,” Mr. Deason said. He was especially irked by the ways Facebook and other social media directed advertisements based on what users posted or viewed online. If he recommends, say, a Dell laptop to a friend, he said, “I go to the next page on Facebook and there’s a Dell ad.” “That bothers me,” he said. Mr. Deason, who runs a computer business in Roanoke, Va., is probably among Facebook’s more tech-savvy users. He is keeping his account open for now because his business has its own page and he moderates Facebook groups dedicated to computers. “But if I were just working my 9-to-5 at the local bank or whatever, and coming home and getting on Facebook to check on my friends and whatnot, yeah, I would delete Facebook,” he said. Many people who took the survey do not have a background in technology, including Jim Symbouras, 56, a municipal worker in New York City. His data was collected dozens of times after 52 of his Facebook friends were directed to the psychological questionnaire, many by a site called Swagbucks. The site lets people earn gift cards to Amazon and other retailers in exchange for taking surveys or watching video advertisements. Mr. Symbouras does not personally know any of the Facebook friends who granted the app access to his data. He met them in Facebook groups where Swagbucks users traded tips for finding good deals. Amy Risner, 52, of Collinwood, Tenn., was one of those Facebook friends. Ms. Risner, who does not work full time, vaguely recalled the questionnaire — “It was real long, that’s what I remember” — but was certain she never saw any notice that her data or that of her friends would be collected. “If it would have said anything like that about taking my information — my personal information — I would have backed out of it and not done it,” Ms. Risner said. Facebook, though, is a tough habit to kick. Asked if she was thinking about deleting her account, Ms. Risner said, “I’m just too nosy to stay off it.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/us/facebook-users-data-harvested-cambridge-analytica.html
In an age of Trump and Stormy Daniels, evangelical leaders face sex scandals of their own As white evangelicals have been some of President Trump’s staunchest defenders, a handful of their leaders find themselves contending with a problem all too familiar to the commander in chief: a sex scandal. As the allegations by Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress who says she had an affair with President Trump, captures the nation’s attention, and as the #MeToo movement highlights sexual abuse, harassment and impropriety in the workplace, at least four leaders in the evangelical movement have been accused of violating the tenets of their faith, from adultery to sexual abuse. Now some observers wonder whether evangelicals are experiencing a repeat of the scandals that led to the downfall of several well-known televangelists in the 1980s. “There’s a reckoning taking place across evangelicalism right now,” said Russell Moore, who leads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and compared recent events to those scandals of the 1980s. Moore said the #MeToo movement has ushered a “welcome development in American culture toward believing women who have been harmed. I also think there’s a growing — but not fast enough — realization in church life of the way that power can easily be abused in predatory ways, especially spiritual power.” Most recently, Frank Page, president and chief executive of the SBC’s executive committee, announced his resignation because of an “inappropriate relationship.” Page did not divulge the details of his relationship on Tuesday, but in a statement he called it a “personal failing” that has “embarrassed my family, my Lord, myself, and the Kingdom.” In his role, Page oversaw the nearly $200 million budget of the SBC’s cooperative program, which Southern Baptist churches contribute to and which funds the convention’s ministries. Page was among a group of evangelical leaders who last September met with and praised Trump in the Oval Office. In another case, Bill Hybels, who co-founded Willow Creek, one of the nation’s largest churches, came under the spotlight last week after the Chicago Tribune published a series of allegations that he made suggestive comments, extended hugs, an unwanted kiss, invitations to a staff member to hotel rooms and had a consensual affair with a married woman. The woman who said she had an affair later retracted her allegations. Hybels denied all of the allegations in an interview with the Tribune. The church conducted its own internal review, and an outside attorney who investigated the allegations told the Tribune his work led to no findings of misconduct by Hybels. In the Tribune’s report, other high-profile evangelical leaders, including John and Nancy Ortberg, suggested that the church’s internal review of the allegations was inadequate. But after Hybels responded to the allegations to his congregation, calling them “flat-out lies,” he received standing ovations. Hybels, who was a spiritual adviser to then-President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said he will stick to his earlier plan to retire in October. Some fear that women are still being discredited in a climate in which a high majority of white evangelicals support Trump despite the multiple sexual harassment and misconduct allegations he has faced. Nearly 8 in 10 white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with 39 percent of all Americans, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. “[Trump’s supporters] seem enthralled to his approach to life. They seem completely untroubled by the … women who accused Trump of harassment or assault,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “For some large number of white evangelical men, there seems to be an attitude toward women that’s disturbing and not biblical.” Wehner says he fears the “circling of the wagons” approach toward protecting leaders instead of victims. “A lot of people are going to think it’s laced with hypocrisy,” he said. “They say one thing and do another. And that the faith is not transformative, faith is just a proxy for political tribalism. It doesn’t transform lives in the way it should.” Scott Thumma, a professor of sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary who studies megachurches, said he doesn’t believe that scandals take place in bigger churches more than they do in smaller ones, but that we hear about them more. In a recent piece for the Gospel Coalition, evangelical author and speaker Andy Crouch wrote about the danger of evangelicals’ attraction to celebrity power. Thumma noted how the recent allegations come on the heels of the death of evangelist Billy Graham, who would avoid being alone with any woman besides his spouse, a practice that became known as “the Billy Graham Rule,” which Vice President Pence reportedly follows and many high-profile evangelical leaders have adopted. “Megachurch pastors have the temptation of being a celebrity of sorts and have an aura around them,” Thumma said. Earlier this year, a woman said Andy Savage, a megachurch pastor in Memphis, sexually assaulted her 20 years ago, when she was a high school student and Savage was a youth pastor in Texas. After he addressed his congregation, apologized and asked for forgiveness, it applauded him. He has since resigned. In another case, late last year, Paul Pressler, who helped lead a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was accused of sexually abusing a young man for several decades, starting when the alleged victim was 14. A pending lawsuit against Pressler, who is a former justice on the Texas 14th Circuit Court of Appeals and who served in the Texas legislature, also names Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and its president, Paige Patterson, as defendants. Baptist News Global, an independent Baptist news outlet, reported that Southern Baptist leaders were mostly silent about the allegations. Sex-abuse scandals in evangelical churches have been highlighted recently by Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to make allegations against sports physician Larry Nassar. Denhollander has since focused on speaking out about sexual-abuse allegations in Sovereign Grace Churches, a network of congregations mostly based across the United States. The network’s leadership team wrote in a blog post that her allegations “have profoundly damaged the reputations and gospel ministries of innocent pastors and churches.” Christianity Today magazine has called for an independent investigation of the group. When the Catholic sex-abuse scandals emerged in the United States, part of the larger outcry was how the church hierarchy was involved in covering up cases. In evangelical circles, where churches are often nondenominational or loosely connected to each other, the lack of hierarchy can cause a different set of problems, said Heath Carter, a professor of history at Valparaiso University. “In the evangelical world, the independence of evangelical leaders and … lack of authority structure mean they can go on for a while and then explode when they come to light,” Carter said. Some high-profile evangelical leaders who have been accused of misconduct continue their work. Ted Haggard, who was once a megachurch pastor and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned in 2006 after a male prostitute said Haggard had paid him for sex. Haggard now leads a church in Colorado Springs. In the 1980s, sexual and financial scandals involving televangelists Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Paul Crouch sent shock waves through the evangelical world. All three continued in smaller versions of their ministries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/30/in-an-age-of-trump-and-stormy-daniels-evangelical-leaders-face-sex-scandals-of-their-own/ also at https://www.chron.com/life/article/In-an-age-of-Trump-and-Stormy-Daniels-12815178.php
Trump’s politics of outrage is failing him By E.J. Dionne Jr. President Trump doubled down last week on his repulsive charge that immigrants from south of our border are “rapists.” It was another sign of what an appalling man he is but also an indication of how much political trouble he faces. Trump is a demagogue who relies on the angry energy of his supporters. But he finds himself in an untenable position: No matter how many hot buttons he pushes, he cannot arouse the passion he needs on his own side to counter the determination and engagement of those who loathe him. The upshot is a vicious cycle that could be disastrous for the Republican Party this fall. So far, Trump has failed to stir his base, but he has become, unintentionally, one of the most effective organizers of progressive activism and commitment in the country’s history. [...] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-politics-of-outrage-is-failing-him/2018/04/08/cd1f2c52-39f8-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html
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