Editor’s note: The Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map is a crowdsourced effort by Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and the wider open source community to map, document and verify significant incidents during the conflict in Ukraine. Its aim is to provide reliable information for policymakers, journalists as well as justice and accountability bodies about the evolving situations both on-the-ground and online. Bellingcat, Mnemonic and the Conflict Intelligence Team have also begun to contribute to the map in recent days.

Here, Benjamin Strick of the CIR team details the map and how it can be used.

Sean Hannity has informed the congressional committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection that swearing to tell the truth would be a violation of his contract with Fox News.

In a written statement, Hannity said that taking an oath “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” would be “a betrayal of the solemn vow I made to Fox.”

Ivanka Trump begged Vladimir Putin to command her father to call off the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, new reports indicate.

According to evidence collected by the House subcommittee investigating the insurrection, when Trump witnessed the rioting on television, she immediately placed a call to the Russian President.

“You’ve got to talk sense to my dad,” Trump reportedly pleaded. “You’re the only one he listens to.”

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A Woman and Her Chimpanzees Heal Together After Trauma

“Not Jared?” the Russian leader inquired.

“He thinks Jared’s a joke,” she replied.

According to the report, Putin politely declined her request. “If it got out that I was helping save American democracy, that would make me look bad,” he explained.

Trump reportedly said that she “understood,” and then placed a call to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un.

graham firchlis says:
December 23, 2021 at 8:41 pm

“The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”

Alexander Pushkin, as quoted in ‘Gooseberries’ by Anton Chekov

Why do otherwise apparently rational people get caught up in movements that are objectively fraudulent? What drives the Radical Reactionary mass movement? How has it sustained from the 1860s Confederacy through to the present Republican Party?

It is tempting to lay it all on bigotry, of all types, a unifying Other that provides a common ground for conversation and self-affirmation. But the aggregating factors are more complex, an evil brew of victimization, martyrdom, religiosity and abject fear of a coming oppressive force against which they feel individually helpless but collectively powerful.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is as relevant as ever. His application of principles focused on anti-establishment movements, but the same apply to the Radical Reactionary movement we face today. As useful as he is in understanding extant movements, Hoffer’s contentions can be beneficial for building a sustainable progressive movement. If you haven’t read True Believer in a while, or at all, couldn’t be more timely.

Drilling down, what is inherent in each of that leaves us susceptible to seduction by fabulists? What could drive human beings to view others so hatefully, to behave so cruelly? Another former prof asserted it stems from our inherent psychological isolation and inability to come to terms with the inevitability of death. I highly recommend Ernest Becker’s first book, Beyond Alienation, for a start.

Also worth reconsideration is Prof. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Experiment. Empowered with absolute authority, inhumane cruelty quickly came to dominate the behaviors of not just the study subjects but Zimbardo himself. His intellect and stature as an esteemed psychologist did not shield him from the corruption of absolute power.

Which leads us by bend of bay and sweep of shore to the story of Matthew Greene, a combat vet with PTSD and a life in two worlds, at once a mild-mannered, respected creative artist and businessman as well as a violent insurrectionist. As terrifying as they are in aggregate, on an individual basis I find thier stories to be predominantly sad.

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2021/04/the-matthew-greene-no-one-knew-proud-boy-fought-for-his-country-then-turned-against-it.html

There are three stories in the news today that seem to me to add up to a larger picture.

First is the story of money laundering, which seems suddenly to be all over the news. Today we learned that federal prosecutors in Detroit have broken into a massive money-laundering operation between the United States and the United Arab Emirates called “The Shadow Exchange.” They confiscated $12 million and suggest this is the tip of the iceberg.

This story comes just weeks after the release of the Pandora Papers, which detailed the ways in which the world’s wealthy hide money. The United States is one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, and the consequences of our lax financial legislation are coming home to roost. Experts say that because of the lack of transparency required in our financial transactions, hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the U.S. every year.

This commentary is by Narain Batra, a resident of Hartford, professor of communications and corporate diplomacy at Norwich University, and author of “The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation” and the forthcoming “India in a New Key.”

Fascinated by how the political football of raising the debt ceiling ($28.43 trillion) is being played between Democrats and Republicans, a recurrent annual issue that eventually gets resolved, I wondered how the economic power of Corporate America generates political power, and how it’s being used.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives bemoan that Big Business does not pay its fair share of taxes, which of course is true, but they don’t question its political power.

Consider this: Bloomberg reported recently that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appealed to the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, “to enlist their help in her campaign to pressure Republicans to support raising or suspending the debt ceiling.”

One might say that Yellen is using all the available means of political persuasion; nonetheless, it seems that Corporate America has become an autonomous center of political power, an unelected fourth branch of government, the role earlier played by the press.

Yellen would know that, although Wall Street and Corporate America fund both political parties, ideologically it has greater affinity with Republicans than Democrats.

It’s also true that Corporate America cannot afford to be content to feed only the stockholders’ bellies. that its responsibilities go beyond profitmaking, and that it is a political actor.

Hardly anyone, and rightfully so, pays heed to what Chicago economist Milton Friedman argued in 1970: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” which Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in the 1987 movie “Wall Street” took to the extreme: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. … (Greed) captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

Gekko might have foreshadowed the ascent of Donald Trump. Addressing his stockholders, Gekko likened the United States to a “malfunctioning corporation. … America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions.”

Gekko did not foresee the rise to power of Corporate China, but President Xi Jinping did, and he soon realized that the growing might of Chinese tech giants — including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi and others — could be a challenge to his absolute power. So he plucked growing feathers from their wings to keep them grounded.

As the whole world watched in horror the Jan. 6 Trump-guided catastrophic — but nonetheless spectacular — assault on the Capitol to overturn the presidential election that the Senate had met to certify, Americans also saw the immense political power of Big Business and Silicon Valley, which soon went into political action and not only shut off the financial spigot to Trump and the politicians who voted against the certification, but also choked their voices. Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook; Apple and Google removed the conservative Paler platform app; and Amazon refused to host Paler anymore. BigTech de-platformed the once mighty Trump.

Without Twitter — which Trump had brilliantly weaponized to advance his political agenda and browbeat his political opponents — he sounded like a village idiot.  Which, however, has raised serious First Amendment issues — whether BigTech, which controls channels of information, could, without due process, deny access to social media platforms and apps through which we exercise our free speech rights as citizens in a democracy.

The European Union might seem to be a congeries of sovereign states, but when it comes to dealing with global corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, for example, or a technological juggernaut like China’s Huawei, the EU does not underestimate their politic-economic power and takes a united stand.

Nonetheless, EU countries cannot ignore the political power of their own domestic corporations. Consider this, for example: Germany’s politically powerful automobile and precision machine industries, as William Galston commented in The Wall Street Journal, exercised tremendous influence on Angela Merkel’s trade and foreign policy with China. So does Big Business in the United States in its dealing with China

Instead of depending upon Washington, major corporations have their own political affairs experts who use the same tools and talents as diplomats do in dealing with national and international affairs. Many of them are retired ambassadors, state department officials and military officers; they know how to negotiate with global and national stakeholders, including Senate and House members, Republicans and Democrats.

Building social and political capital is sine qua non because Corporate America in distressing times would need help, as happened in 2008, when the Obama administration bailed out some Wall Street firms euphemistically dubbed as “too big to fail.” Therefore, to help a powerful politician in need — Treasury Secretary Yellen’s debt ceiling conundrum, for example — it makes political sense for Wall Street financial firms to use their political influence with Republicans.

But we cannot ignore what Professor Jerry Davis of Michigan Ross School of Business said — whether “the exercise of such overt political influence on the workings of U.S. democracy — with almost no room for oversight, by shareholders or anyone else — requires a new set of regulatory tools for a new form of corporate power.”

No one can possibly argue that modern political journalism has fulfilled its essential mission of creating an informed electorate.

So it’s long past time for a reset.

Let’s start with the overarching problem: Misinformation, disinformation and gaslighting have become rampant in our political discourse, turning citizens against each other, choking the legislative process, eroding confidence in elections, and, in the age of Covid, literally getting people killed. A striking number of voters are laboring under a series of delusions that make them incapable of rational decision-making. The country is still reeling from a violent attempted coup in the name of a Big Lie – a lie that has essentially become doctrine for one of our two major political parties.

Despite all this, our elite political media recognizes no need for a course change.

Indeed, even after four years of Trump — and his continued domination of the party — there has been essentially no self-reflection from the reporters and editors who set the tone for national news coverage. They just keep doing what they’ve done for decades: remain aloof and detached from the urgent and crucial political issues that underly the partisan divide, so intent on covering the play-by-play and “not taking sides” that they have refused to scream out the truth. As a result, they’re being drowned out by the lies.

The 2022 midterms, as Esquire political blogger Charles Pierce has noted, “are going to be a conflict between what is actually happening and what people believe is happening.”

We can’t sit this one out.

My goal here is to challenge business as usual and spur some self-reflection – ideally from the elite political reporters and editors themselves, but if not, then from the people who employ them and the people who keep them in business.

It’s also to call attention to excellent political journalism that can define best practices going forward.

And, I admit, it’s also to put into words the often inchoate fury that readers of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite, influential news organizations so often feel after reading or watching a work of political journalism that does not acknowledge the urgency of the moment, lacks historical context, offers a megaphone to liars and provocateurs, normalizes radical extremist white Christian nativism, and projects a white male right-of-center gaze under the guise of objectivity.

Adjusting to Asymmetry

It’s been nine years since political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein justifiably scolded the press for whiffing on the biggest story of the 2012 election: the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

And that was nothing compared to today.

Post-Trump, any hint of a coherent governing philosophy has vanished. There is no Republican agenda, just culture warfare and obstruction. The party’s most defining principle right now is the Big Lie. Practically speaking, it reliably serves only the ultra-rich. It is inflamed with racism and nativism.

And yet the incremental, day-in-day-out political coverage still casts the GOP as a reasonable and viable alternative to Democrats. It goes beyond both-sides coverage: Political reporters consistently predict Republicans will retake at least one chamber in 2022, and quite possibly the White House in 2024.

What that does, however, is normalize the decision to vote for an extremist, nativist, anti-governance party. It presumes that there will be zero accountability for lying and extremism. When mainstream-media reporters say the next elections are going to be squeakers, it reassures non-delusional people that voting Republican would not be such a crazy and dangerous thing, which it would be.

And to the extent that it’s true — and that Republicans could in fact win again — it’s incumbent on reporters to further explore the tribalism that attaches people to the party apparently regardless of what it does.

Any political journalist who is not addled knows full well that this GOP winning a chamber of Congress would effectively shut down any attempts at governance, and that a second Trump term would cause profound, potentially irrecoverable damage to the country and its institutions.

For that reason, every news story about the two parties, especially about elections, should openly address the imbalance between the two parties when it comes to speaking the truth and wanting every vote to be counted.

Yet political reporters are more comfortable speculating about who’s winning.

I should be clear that I am in no way suggesting that political journalists endorse the Democratic Party. Political reporters shouldn’t be partisans. Partisanship distorts reality. Partisans are willing to twist facts to suit their goals, which is profoundly anti-journalistic. The Democratic Party is terribly flawed in its own way. And political news reporters should, in fact, not take sides on issues where there are reasonable, fact-based, but contradictory solutions.

What I am calling for is an endorsement of reality. A hearty one.