Monday, November 21, 2016

Difference between white supremacy & white nationalism in USA - New York Times

A question has been posed in a puzzled whisper in many of the nation’s living rooms and newsrooms ever since Donald J. Trump’s triumph in this month’s presidential election: What, exactly, is white nationalism?
Self-proclaimed white nationalists have happily embraced Mr. Trump’s victory and, particularly, his choice of Stephen K. Bannon as chief strategist, as a win for their agenda. A barrage of groups that fight discrimination and hate speech have, in turn, criticized Mr. Bannon’s appointment, warning that his embrace of the “alt-right” movement was little more than an attempt to rebrand racism and white nationalism into something palatable enough for mass consumption.
And much of the rest of the country has been left to wonder what this unfamiliar term actually means.
While white nationalism certainly overlaps with white supremacy and racism, many political scientists say it is a distinct phenomenon — one that was a powerful but often-unseen force during the presidential election and will most likely remain a potent factor in American and European politics in coming years.
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London, has spent years studying the ways that ethnicity intersects with politics. While most researchers in that field focus on ethnic minorities, Professor Kaufmann does the opposite: He studies the behavior of ethnic majorities, particularly whites in the United States and Britain.
White nationalism, he said, is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life.
So, like white supremacy, white nationalism places the interests of white people over those of other racial groups. White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy.
Some will see the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy as a semantic sleight of hand. But although many white supremacists are also white nationalists, and vice versa, Professor Kaufmann says the terms are not synonyms: White supremacy is based on a racist belief that white people are innately superior to people of other races; white nationalism is about maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical majority or cultural hegemony.
For a long time, he said, white nationalism was less an ideology than the default presumption of American life. Until quite recently, white Americans could easily see the nation as essentially an extension of their own ethnic group.
But the country’s changing demographics, the civil rights movement and a push for multiculturalism in many quarters mean that white Americans are now confronting the prospect of a nation that is no longer built solely around their own identity.
For many white people, of course, the growing diversity is something to celebrate. But for others it is a source of stress. The white nationalist movement has drawn support from that latter group. Its supporters argue that the United States should protect its white majority by sharply limiting immigration, and perhaps even by compelling nonwhite citizens to leave.
Mr. Trump’s appointment of Mr. Bannon as his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist has, more than anything, brought white nationalism to the forefront of conversation. He is the former editor of Breitbart News, a site he described in August to Mother Jones as “the platform of the alt-right.” Although the alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls — white nationalism makes up a significant part of its appeal.
For instance, Richard Spencer, who runs the website AlternativeRight.com, is also the director of the National Policy Institute, an organization that says it is devoted to protecting the “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”
Mr. Spencer argues that immigration and multiculturalism are threats to America’s white population, and has said his ideal is a white “ethno-state.” He has avoided discussing the details of how this might be achieved, saying it is still just a “dream,” but has called for“peaceful ethnic cleansing” to remove nonwhite people from American soil.
Mr. Bannon, the Trump adviser, told The Times upon his appointment that he does not share those ethno-nationalist views. But under his leadership, Breitbart News has gone to considerable lengths to cater to an audience that does. And in a 2015 radio interview that was resurfaced this week by The Washington Post, Mr. Bannon opposed even highly skilled immigration, implying he believed it was a threat to American culture.
“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think...” he said, trailing off midsentence before continuing a moment later, “a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
White nationalists, including Mr. Spencer, have rejoiced at Mr. Bannon’s appointment to such a senior position in the Trump White House. But focusing on high-profile figures like Mr. Bannon may obscure the more significant way that white nationalist ideas are affecting politics — and fueling the rise of politicians like Mr. Trump in the United States as well as anti-immigrant populist movements in Britain and continental Europe.
Several studies of other countries have found that a desire to protect traditional values and culture is the strongest predictor of support for the sort of populism that propelled Mr. Trump to power in the United States.
Many of those voters would not think of themselves as white nationalists, and the cultural values and traditions they seek to protect are not necessarily explicitly racial. However, those traditions formed when national identity and culture were essentially synonymous with whiteness. So the impulse to protect them from social and demographic change is essentially an attempt to turn back the clock to a less-diverse time.
A recent working paper by Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, concluded, based on an analysis of wide-ranging survey data, that populists have succeeded by appealing to the cultural anxiety of groups like older white men, who once formed the cultural majority in Western societies, “but have recently seen their predominance and privilege eroded.”
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a professor of politics at the University of Bergen in Norway, came to a similar conclusion after studying anti-immigrant policies in Europe. Their supporters, she found, were motivated by a desire to protect their national culture — suggesting they believed that immigrants posed a threat to it.
Mr. Trump’s criticism of immigrants and promise to “make America great again” may have tapped into those same cultural anxieties, fueling his success with older and less-educated white voters. (Over all, he won white voters by 21 percentage points.
Professor Kaufmann argues that anxiety over white identity and anti-immigrant populist politicians can have a symbiotic relationship, each strengthening the other. When populist politicians gain mainstream success, that can make white nationalist ideas more socially acceptable.
“It’s not just a question of ethnic change and people being alarmed over it,” he said. “It’s also a question of what people see as the boundaries of acceptable opposition. It’s about what counts as racism, and whether it’s racist to vote for a far-right party.”
“This is all about the anti-racist norm,” Professor Kaufmann continued. “If it’s weakening or eroding because people think the boundaries have shifted.”

Fed Chair Janet Yellen Says Interest Rate Hike Could Come ‘Relatively Soon’ - TIME Business

Posted: 17 Nov 2016 05:26 AM PST

(WASHINGTON) — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen sketched a picture Thursday of a U.S. economy that’s still not at full health but is showing enough gains in hiring and growth to raise expectations that the Fed will raise interest rates in December.
In prepared testimony to a congressional committee, Yellen notes that the Fed concluded at its meeting early this month that the case for boosting its benchmark rate had strengthened and that an increase “could well become appropriate relatively soon.”
Yellen, in her testimony, points out that the job market has made further improvement this year and that inflation, while still below the Fed’s 2 percent target, has started to pick up. With investors and economists expecting the Fed to boost rates, Yellen notes that further delaying a rate increase would present its own risks.

The Fed chair’s answers later Thursday to questions from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee will be scrutinized for any hints of what action the central bank will announce at its meeting in mid-December.
Yellen is also sure to be asked about President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for tax cuts and infrastructure spending — and their likely effects on government deficits. Since Trump’s election victory last week, investors have driven up long-term bond yields in anticipation that his economic proposals would increase federal debt and elevate inflation.
The president-elect’s idea to spend more to upgrade roads, bridges and airports, though, in general mirrors Yellen’s frequent point that Congress should act to supplement what the Fed has done through low rates to encourage spending and spur growth.
Trump’s election could affect Yellen’s Fed in other ways, too. The president-elect will be able to fill two vacant seats on the Fed’s seven-member board, which wields outsize power on the panel that sets rate policy. The board has, like Yellen herself, long favored a go-slow approach to rate increases. Trump’s new appointees potentially could affect that consensus.
Next month, if it the Fed raises rates as expected, it will be its first move since December of last year, when it raised its key rate from a record low near zero, where it had been for seven years. The December meeting will include a news conference by Yellen, when she will be able to explain the Fed’s action and perhaps provide guidance on how many further rate increases it foresees in 2017.
As measured by the gross domestic product, the economy grew at a 2.9 percent annual rate in the July-September quarter, the government has estimated, more than twice the rate in the April-June quarter. The unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, around the level typical of a healthy economy, down from 10 percent in 2009.
The housing market, whose meltdown triggered the 2008 financial crisis and the recession, has largely recovered, though. Still, the sharply higher bond yields that have followed Trump’s election, if they continue, would mean higher mortgage rates that could depress home purchases.
Even so, stronger economic growth and a recent uptick in inflation have bolstered the argument of Fed officials who have been pushing for a rate hike.

Mark Zuckerberg Continues to Miss the Point on Facebook as a Media Entity - Fortune


Posted: 17 Nov 2016 10:49 AM PST

As critics slam Facebook for the role they believe it—and in particular its penchant for fake news stories—played in the election of Donald Trump, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to resist any attempt to pin some of the blame on his company. But in doing so, he misses the point.
Over the weekend, the Facebook co-founder took to the site to respond to some of those criticisms. He said he “cares deeply” about the fake news problem and wants to get it right. But he also said that he doesn’t believe fake news contributed to the election’s outcome.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” Zuckerberg wrote. And since only a very small amount of those hoaxes relate to politics, and an even smaller number related to Clinton specifically, he argued that “this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”
The Facebook CEO also scoffed at the suggestion that the company is actually a media entity, or that it should behave like one, something many have argued for some time.
“Facebook is mostly about helping people stay connected with friends and family. News and media are not the primary things people do on Facebook, so I find it odd when people insist we call ourselves a news or media company,” Zuckerberg said. “We are serious about building planes to beam internet access, but we don’t call ourselves an aerospace company.”
Zuckerberg responded to the “filter bubble” argument by saying the company’s research shows that people “are exposed to more diverse content on Facebook and social media than on traditional media like newspapers and TV.” In other words, filter bubbles used to be worse.
All of these arguments are true to some extent, but they still miss the larger point. And if anything, they reinforce the idea that Zuckerberg is desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the way Facebook influences the media consumption of its users. Even some of his own staffers are wrestling with this problem, according to a New York Times report.
As a number of people have pointed out, the social network can’t have it both ways. It can’t argue that Facebook is hugely influential for advertisers, or that it plays a key role in social movements like the Arab Spring, and yet also argue that fake news has no effect on users.
To borrow Zuckerberg’s aerospace analogy, if Facebook flew planes and 1% of them crashed and killed all passengers on impact, most people probably wouldn’t accept the argument that this is a small number, and that in any case it isn’t really an airplane company because its real focus is the technology that keeps them from crashing most of the time.
In a sense, debating whether Facebook should call itself a media company or not is a red herring. Whatever it calls itself, it is one of the largest distributors of news that has ever existed.
This problem doesn’t just affect Facebook either. Google has also come under fire for pointing to fake news sites in Google News, including one site that topped its election results but had the wrong numbers. The company said it is “looking into” what happened.
In today’s news environment, traditional outlets have lost control over the distribution of their content, and platforms like Facebook and Google have taken over. In the process, they have become the most powerful media companies in history. And that brings with it certain responsibilities.
It’s obvious why Facebook doesn’t want to admit that it has these responsibilities, of course. As a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Facebook investor told my colleague Jeff Roberts recently, admitting this would open the company up to an avalanche of criticism for being biased on one side or the other. And that would be a recipe for disaster.
That’s exactly what happened during the Trending Topics fiasco, when editors responsible for weeding out bad sites were accused of bias against conservative sites. Facebook’s response was to fire them all and sweep the problem under the rug by pretending it could all be done algorithmically.
According to a report from Gizmodo, Facebook’s engineers actually developed a way of using its algorithms to detect and block fake news, but a test of the feature found that a disproportionate number of these stories were from right-wing sites.
Because the social network was afraid of more backlash over allegations of bias, Gizmodo says the feature was never released (Facebook has since denied that this occurred).
In his post, Zuckerberg said the company is working on ways for users to flag fake news. But are users who see fake articles that reinforce their beliefs going to flag them? That seems unlikely.
The core problem for Facebook is that what it wants more than anything else is engagement, and as a former Facebook staffer argued recently, “bullshit is highly engaging.” That means despite Zuckerberg’s protest that he cares deeply about the problem, finding a solution is never going to be as economically advantageous as not finding a solution.
One other point: The Facebook CEO says he doesn’t want his company to become “arbiters of truth.” But the reality is—as technology publishers Tim O’Reilly pointed out in a recent blog post—that the social network is already doing this on a regular basis by deleting posts and censoring content it deems unacceptable.
Figuring out what “fake news” consists of and flagging it in some way, or even down-ranking it in the news feed, may be a difficult technological challenge. And it may expose Facebook to charges of being biased in one direction or another. But the status quo is not going to work.
Regardless of whether he personally wants to grapple with this thorny problem or not, Zuckerberg will have to admit that Facebook is a large and increasingly powerful player in the news business, and that certain duties and responsibilities come along with that. And the sooner he does so, the better.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com