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The news broke over the weekend, confirming everyone’s worst fears. The 2016 election of Trump and the Brexit vote were indeed engineered by one firm, Cambridge Analytica, which used millions of facebook profiles to build, then manipulate, psychological profiles of voters ready to be led like sheep.
It’s terrifying. It’s everything George Orwell warned us about. And it may be completely legal.
We have in front of us a big week. This may determine the course of the next year or so in the stock market, the economy, and in politics.
A lot is about to happen. Let’s run it down, day by day.
Over the weekend, financial markets were sleeping. They awoke on Monday as if the weekend was a bad dream, filled with chatter about a trade war and how it was actually a good idea.
It’s not a dream, it’s reality. But is this all a stupid attempt to promote a candidate in a tariff-loving industrial district that should be winning a lot bigger? Nevermind the unreality of it, including the fact that the Pennsylvania 18th is certainly going to go away with court-ordered redistricting. There’s a special election on 13 March, and losing it would be very embarrassing.
This might all be a show to avoid losing a place where Trump should be winning bigly.
Should the Democrats push hard on the Dream Act, fighting hard for those who need them and never giving up? Or should they bide their time, crafting whatever small deals they can to save as many people as possible?
There is nothing more repugnant than to put the words “play” and “DACA” in the same sentence, yet that is where we are. We have to know how to play DACA in order to do as much of the right thing as we can. There’s nothing new about this, given that all legislation has to be “played” through the system in Washington. The problem with DACA is that it has become an oversized issue full of pointless symbolism, stripped of its real essence.
This is about the lives of hundreds of thousands of good, decent, and innocent people.
How many articles will you read about the annual conference at Davos? How many will miss the point?
If you are a news junkie, the answer to the first question is “A lot.” The answer to the second question, sadly, is about the same. In a polarized world where everyone is more enthralled with their own opinion than any sense of objective truth most of what will be written on this conference will be colored.
And that’s a damned shame, because Davos has evolved into Ted-talk-o-rama. It’s really accessible and interesting – and worth reading up on whether you agree with the presenters or not.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 