Bungling Villainy with a Transparent Motive -- paraphrase of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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| REPUBLICAN PARTY |
THE MODERN GOP was born, in large measure, around confronting the
"evil empire" of Russia. In defying traditional Republican thought on
trade and budget, Trump was doing so in the context of looking strong and
flexible. In his sidling up to Putin -- and the subsequent clean-up -- he has
almost universally been seen as looking weak. [POLITICO
Playbook, July 20, 2018]
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| POLITICS |
LAWMAKERS BICKER OVER ONLINE BIAS — The
second House Judiciary Committee hearing over allegations of an
anti-conservative bias on social media went the way of the first — marred by
public feuding split along party lines. Republican legislators pressed
officials from Twitter, Facebook and Google to explain a series of incidents
they described as troubling, including a Google search naming Nazism as an ideology of the
California Republican Party and Twitter's move to block Rep. Marsha Blackburn
(R-Tenn) from promoting a campaign video that used "inflammatory"
anti-abortion language. (Google called the "Nazism" incident an
inadvertent error caused by scraping a public information source like Wikipedia
that may have been vandalized; Twitter later reversed its decision on
Blackburn's video.) But Democratic officials brushed off the claims.
— A "conservative fantasy": That's
how Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) described conservative claims about a liberal
bias by the tech giants. After the hearing, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), whose
district includes large swaths of Silicon Valley, suggested lawmakers would be
better served investigating bias on cable TV. "I am waiting for
Republicans to hold anti-bias hearings for cable news," Khanna tweeted. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed
editor-in-chief Ben Smith told The Wall Street Journal that
Facebook may instead be too deferential to conservatives. Smith, who attended a
contentious media meeting last week with the social network, said the large
number of conservative publications in attendance showed Facebook had bought
into the idea of a liberal bias among mainstream news outlets.
— A competition issue? One noteworthy aspect
of the hearing was how Republicans raised the spectre of antitrust enforcement.
"All three of you represent companies that have very strong, in many cases
dominant market shares in the sectors that you provide services,"
Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said at one point. He then pressed
Facebook's vice president of global policy management, Monika Bickert, on
whether a "lack of competition" made the company more or less likely
to respond to consumer concerns over content filtering. Bickert argued that
consumers have other choices. "Clearly people have a choice in the United
States when they go online, and Facebook is one service they can use," she
said.
MEDIA DEAL FRENZY: Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo writes: "In
the media business, this past year has been something like the summer of '68 -
a tumultuous, chaotic collision of personalities and companies. It has felt
like the vanishing of one world order, where consumers were reliant on a cable
provider, and the emergence of a brave new one, where everything is accessed on
the phone, and traditional players must join forces in a fight for survival
against incipient challengers." [Morning Media, July 20, 2018]
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| RUSSIAN AGENT |
Who’s Behind This Six-Figure
Donation to a Leading Trump PAC?
We
end today’s edition with a mystery. Leading pro-Trump super PAC America First
Action disclosed nearly $5 million in second-quarter contributions this
week. Among
its donors was a company called Global Energy Producers LLC (GEP). It
donated $375,000 in May, putting the company among the deep-pocketed group’s
top 20 donors. But there’s very little indication of what the company does or
who’s behind it.
It
appears that GEP was incorporated in April in
Delaware, a notorious black hole for corporate disclosure. But FEC filings
listed its address as a Boca Raton, Florida, property owned by someone named
Victor Imber. The FEC has no record of the Russian-born Imber or GEP
making any previous federal political contributions. Additional public
records indicate that Imber may
have rented the property to someone named Michael Braid, who likewise has no
other apparent connections to the company or history of political
contributions. Braid did not respond to questions about GEP. Numerous calls to
Imber went unanswered.
A
company by the same name did
donate $50,000 in June to a PAC supporting the Florida gubernatorial
campaign of GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis. But that disclosure listed a different
address in Woodmere, New York.
Around
the time of GEP’s formation, someone hailing from Woodmere solicited
logo and website designs for the company on the website Design Contest. That user
said GEP “was founded by a group of business leaders, representing several
complimentary [sic] industries.” The company’s goal, the user added, “is to
capitalize on opportunities around the world by leveraging both domestic and
international relationships. We are a United States based company transacting
in LNG, oil and gas and solar energy energy, amongst others.”
That’s
all we know about the company at the moment. If you have a lead or suggestions
for additional digging, please drop me an email at lachlan.markay@thedailybeast.com.
Get the data:
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| TRUMP |
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| U.S. AGRICULTURE |
NATIONAL ACADEMIES OUTLINES KEY AG RESEARCH PRIORITIES: Scientists
and nonprofit organizations are ready to make a big lobbying push for ag
research now that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
on published a major report identifying five priorities for food and
agriculture, per Pro's Maria Curi and Liz Crampton . The
report said the U.S. is need of robust investment to investigate: microbiomes,
gene editing, data analysis, sensors and biosensors, as well as a "team
science" approach that integrates various disciplines.
Thomas Grumbly, president of the Supporters of Agricultural
Research Foundation, which commissioned the report, said his and other groups
will be pushing for more money in the fiscal 2020 budget and beyond. A key
rallying point may be that China outspends the U.S. by a 2-to-1 margin and the
USDA has received less than 4 percent of the federal research budget since
2009.
Sally Rockey, executive director of the Foundation for Food and
Agriculture Research, a co-funder of the study, said the priorities identified
by the National Academies' report will help the food and agricultural research
community focus on areas with the greatest impact on American farmers in the
next decade.
Challenges ahead: The report — the result of
work by 146 scientists representing more than 20 organizations — noted that
world food production must increase significantly to meet the needs of a global
population that's expected to reach 8.6 billion by 2030. At the same time,
ecosystems are stressed by water scarcity and regional impacts in a changing
climate, such as increased weather variability, floods and droughts.
Research goals highlighted include: increasing efficiency, such
as nutrient and water use; improving sustainability, like reducing soil loss
and degradation, as well as food waste throughout the supply chain; and
increasing the resiliency of agricultural systems so they can adapt to extreme
conditions. The report also noted the importance of improving genetic diversity
for crop movement and developing precision livestock production. [POLITICO's
Morning Agriculture, July 19, 2018]
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| TRADE |
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| READ |
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| TECHNOLOGY |
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| SCREEN |
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| Russian interference in the 2016 election |
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In trying to answer the question of whether Russian meddling in the 2016 election had an impact on the final outcome, a good place to start is the February 2018 indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller of 13 Internet trolls who worked at the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). During the 2016 campaign, these individuals engaged in a wide-ranging propaganda campaign to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump and diminish support, among left-leaning voters, for Hillary Clinton. At the same, they worked to bolster Bernie Sanders candidacy and undermine Trump’s key GOP primary rival, Ted Cruz. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, those indicted “allegedly conducted what they called ‘information warfare against the United States,’ with the stated goal of spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.” According to Mueller’s indictment, the defendants, posing as US citizens (and hiding their Russian identity), bought “political advertisements on social media … staged political rallies inside the United States … solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates … and communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.” Some of their actions were highly specific, including encouraging Muslim-American and African-American voters to either not vote or to cast a ballot for third-party candidate, Jill Stein. That’s a fairly wide-ranging set of political activities and they are ones that would have been seen by countless number of Americans. But there’s more. According to Mueller’s more recent indictment, Russian hackers “successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test applications related to the DNC’s analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators gathered data by creating backups, or ‘snapshots,’ of the DNC’s cloud-based systems using the cloud provider’s own technology.” So why does this matter? Not long after this data was stolen the Trump campaign made a surprising shift in their advertising spending. The candidate, himself, began traveling to states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which most political observers assumed were in the bag for Clinton. Did the Russian theft of the DNC’s analytics find itself in the hands of Trump’s team? Did Trump’s campaign team use the purloined information to shift their campaign strategy and target states that, without it, they would not have? Forget the conspiracy theories for a moment: did the Russians use the DNC’s analytics to change their own ad targeting to ensure that their interference efforts had the maximum impact on voters? At this point, we don’t know the answer to these questions, but if any of this is true, then can anyone seriously argue that Russian meddling didn’t matter? Then there's also the leaked emails from the DNC and from Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta. The steady drip of stories from that trove of stolen information drove anti-Clinton press coverage for weeks in the Fall of 2016. In the run-up to Democratic National Convention, leaks from the DNC played into the grievances of Bernie Sanders supporters and almost certainly undermined Clinton's support among some of his backers. And as the most recent Mueller indictment points out, those emails were hacked and disseminated by the Russians. It seems impossible to argue that these leaks, which were weaponized against Clinton and played into the already damaging "email narrative" about her, didn't influence at least a few voters, perhaps even enough to change the final outcome. To be sure, people like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Paul Ryan will still make the argument that none of this mattered. Their enablers in the Congress and conservative media will join them. But there is simply no reason to believe them. It might be impossible to fully quantify (yet) but it appears rather clear that Russia's interference likely cost Clinton the election. [Michael A. Cohen, Boston Globe, Newsletter, July 19, 2018] |
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| NATIONAL SECURITY |
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| CYBERSECURITY |
"The United States is failing on
cybersecurity because our Congress has been captured by corporations who have
successfully killed any effort to impose meaningful cyber standards," Sen.
Ron Wyden, a leading congressional voice on cyber issues, told Eric in an
email. "Until lawmakers decide to put consumers ahead of corporations,
Americans will continue to face more cyber threats, with less recourse, than
people elsewhere in the world." If Beijing or Brussels dominated this
space, experts said, that could slow the internet's growth, reduce innovation
and produce new market barriers for American businesses. "Other countries
are doing things legislatively that affect the U.S., and the U.S. is on the
back foot," said Christopher Painter, who was America's top cyber diplomat
from 2011 to 2017.
State Department officials have repeatedly pushed
back when authoritarian countries like Russia and China have tried to use
global venues like the International Telecommunications Union to push their
restrictive cyber agendas. But the Trump administration closed Painter's
high-level cyber office, and a deputy assistant secretary now oversees this
work, leading experts to fear that the U.S. is poorly suited to contain its
adversaries. Meanwhile, China has spent vast sums of money developing nations'
digital capabilities, earning goodwill throughout Africa and Asia that it can
convert into support for its agenda. "China's influence is second to
none" there, explained a former veteran State and Commerce Department official.
The best way to push back, experts
said, is to realize that voluntary standards aren't a substitute for smart
regulations. "These voluntary frameworks," said Council on Foreign
Relations cyber expert Adam Segal, "have not really, as far as we can
tell, improved U.S. security significantly." In addition to exploring
regulations, the U.S. must "provide a clear roadmap of the type of
approach we want to see other countries adopting," said the former State
Department official. James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who recently returned from meetings in Europe and Asia, said other
countries "would prefer us to lead" but are "not going to
wait." [POLITICO's Morning Cybersecurity, July 19,
2018]
“The burgeoning innovation crisis. We have
seen new company starts flatten out, small business loans drop, and 76% of VC
money concentrate in California, NY and Massachusetts. The average white guy
startup founder can raise about $1.3 million in VC funds while a black woman
raises about $36,000 on average. We have to democratize entrepreneurship and
investment if we hope to maintain our lead in innovation.” [BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Jamal
Simmons, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/20/birthday-of-the-day-734931]
PBMs have more to fear than pharma
Pharmacy benefit managers took a beating
yesterday on Wall Street as the world remembered/realized they are the prime
target of the Trump administration's plan to curb prescription drug prices, and
that plan is moving forward.
Threat
level: We know enough about the Trump
administration's next big health care regulation to know what's at stake, even
if a lot of the specific details still need to be filled in.
- We know it
will go after PBMs' rebates, and we know it will do so via the "safe
harbor" that says those rebates aren't considered kickbacks.
- There are
still plenty of unanswered questions within that framework, but they are
questions about scale — about how bad this will be for the industry.
What they're
saying: The existing structure “is the soft-underbelly
of the PBM alligator. This proposal seemingly guts it. If not replaced with
some other scheme, their current business model evaporates and they become what
they were—low-margin claims processors," drug industry lobbyist Barrett
Thornhill told the Wall Street Journal.
The
administration is still talking tough with pharma, while nevertheless positioning itself on the
same side of the issue substantively.
- “When this
president talks about fundamental change to drug markets, he follows
through," HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan told the board of PhRMA, the industry's leading trade group, according to
Bloomberg's Anna Edney.
- HHS also
praised Merck yesterday for agreeing to lower the price of some drugs — a step that appeared to go
further than pledges by Pfizer and Novartis to delay price increases.
Yes,
but: As the New York Times notes, Merck's price cuts aren't as impressive if you look
closer at which products they cover.
- One is a
hepatitis C drug that, after accounting for rebates, did $0 in sales in
the first quarter of this year.
- Six more
are drugs that have already lost their patent protections — meaning
they've already lost market share to cheaper generics.
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| BUDGET |
SHOWTIME AT RAYBURN: The House
Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee is slated to mark up a $51.4 billion DHS spending bill
today. The bill would lay out a $7.3 billion budget for TSA that includes money
for the agency to purchase 240 new machines for screening carry-on
baggage and to deploy 50 additional canine teams for passenger screening. Also
included in the bill:
— $100 million for public transportation, railroad and
over-the-road bus security assistance, including $10 million specifically
directed to Amtrak;
— $100 million for port security grants;
— $223 million to help Customs and Border Protection deploy more
"non-intrusive" X-Ray scanners to inspect vehicles at the U.S.-Mexico
border. CBP is already using the technology at some ports of entry and at
public events, such as this year's Super Bowl; and
— $1.4 billion to help the Coast Guard modernize its fleet and
purchase new vessels, including six fast response cutters and an offshore
patrol cutter.
What to expect: Though there are lots
of juicy morsels in the bill for us transportation nerds to chew on, we expect
that much of the debate will focus elsewhere. And by elsewhere, we mean on the
southern border. Shortly after Republicans released the bill Wednesday, full
committee ranking member Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Homeland Security
Subcommittee ranking member Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) issued a
statement criticizing the inclusion of $5 billion for President Donald Trump's
border wall construction plan and calling it an example of "wasteful
spending." [POLITICO's Morning
Transportation, July 19, 2018]
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| BORDER WALL |
What to expect: Though there are lots of juicy morsels in the bill for
us transportation nerds to chew on, we expect that much of the debate will
focus elsewhere. And by elsewhere, we mean on the southern border. Shortly
after Republicans released the bill Wednesday, full committee ranking
member Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.)
and Homeland Security Subcommittee ranking member Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) issued a statement criticizing the inclusion of $5
billion for President Donald Trump's border wall construction plan and calling
it an example of "wasteful spending." [POLITICO's Morning
Transportation, July 19, 2018]
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| WHIMSEY |
NOTE: I have no official connection to any organization from which information is shared.. Occasionally, I post informational material and/or an opportunity to donate or join as a "community service" announcement. These again are shared for their varying perspectives.
Any commercial or business interest information shared is purely informational, not an endorsement. I have no connection with any such commercial or business interest.
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