Would Donald Trump Pull U.S. Troops from South Korea? President Moon has already been biting his nails for months over the cost-sharing talks. One can imagine his fingers turning into nubs after hearing about Washington’s force plans for Germany. by Daniel R. DePetris

The Trump administration’s supposed decision to cut the U.S. military presence in Germany by roughly one-third produced a catacomb of outrage that is becoming all too familiar for the White House. The news of the impending departure—the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the 9,500 troop reduction will be completed by September—caught German officials in Berlin by surprise and elicited a fury of panic inside Washington, D.C. Former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns, an adviser to the Biden campaign, referred to the cut as "a significant political and symbolic blow” to U.S.-German relations. Peter Meyer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coordinator for transatlantic issues, blasted the move as “completely unacceptable.”

On the surface, what happens in Berlin may not matter for the Republic of Korea. Officials in the Moon Jae-in administration, however, don’t have the luxury of ignoring what happens tens of thousands of miles away. The South Korean government has always had concerns about what Donald Trump may or may not do. The news about an imminent U.S. drawdown in Germany won’t do much to level out the anxiety. 

Could a U.S. redeployment from Germany be a preview to a similar redeployment in South Korea, which hosts a contingent of 28,500 U.S. military personnel on a permanent basis?

It would seem to be a ludicrous proposition on its face. In addition to Japan and Australia, South Korea is the closest treaty ally the United States has in Asia—a partner whose own troops and doctrine have been heavily intertwined with the U.S. military for decades. Unlike Germany, a master at excuse-making for failing to meet its 2% GDP threshold on defense spending and whose air force is unprepared for combat, Seoul has been pouring money into procurement for years. The South Koreans have ordered 60 F-35’s since 2014, with the latest purchase just last year. The Moon government plans to spend an additional $239 billion on military modernization over the next 5 years, an influx that will include everything from more destroyers and anti-missile systems to submarine-based cruise missiles and reconnaissance satellites.

Trump, however, is an unpredictable leader with a short-fuse and little time for gruff. South Korean officials have never been able to get a handle on the mercurial U.S. president and remain mystified about why the former real-estate magnate seeks to monetize the bilateral relationship. 

What they do understand is that the current occupant of the Oval Office is a long-time skeptic about South Korea generally; enjoys poking the South Korean government in the eye, and at one point ordered the Pentagon to withdraw the family members of U.S. military personnel from the country. South Koreans also have access to the internet, which means they are able to find Trump’s 1990 interview in Playboy where he specifically called out South Korea by name for being a “so-called” U.S. ally who rose to the top of the pack on America’s back. 

The Moon administration is also fully aware that this particular White House is obsessed with the cost-sharing issue and is focused like a laser-beam on forcing the South Koreans to pay a larger share for sustaining the U.S. troop presence—so much so that there were rumors last November of the Trump administration possibly reducing the number of U.S. troops by 4,000 in order to pressure Seoul to accept Washington’s position. While U.S. officials quickly squashed the reports as unsubstantiated grist for the rumor mill, it’s highly likely the thought crossed more than a few minds in the corridors of power. With Trump’s rejection last April of Moon's last offer and Small Measures Agreement talks at a standstill, one should not be surprised if South Korean officials responsible for relations with the U.S. remain jittery.   

The last time a U.S. president sought to downsize the U.S. military presence in South Korea, the year was 1977 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The newly-inaugurated commander in chief had grand ideas of withdrawing U.S. forces from the Korean Peninsula in phases throughout his term to make it more politically palpable at home and to provide Seoul with more time to prepare. Carter’s initiative, as we now know, was strongly opposed and debated under the weight of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Were Trump to take a page out of the Carter playbook, he would run into a similar wall of congressional obstruction, extreme panic in the Pentagon, and a bevy of anonymous, senior national security officials telling the media about how such a withdrawal would kill the 70 year-old U.S.-South Korea alliance. As a shot against the bow, Congress included a provision in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act preventing the U.S. troop presence in the South from falling below the current 28,500 unless Trump himself justified the decision to lawmakers on national security grounds.

President Moon has already been biting his nails for months over the cost-sharing talks. One can imagine his fingers turning into nubs after hearing about Washington’s force plans for Germany.

How Coronavirus Could Lead to Even More Racism Pandemics are not only biological phenomena but also social phenomena. by Mark Honigsbaum

Pandemics are not only biological phenomena but also social phenomena. Throughout history, pandemics have been powerful engines of social change, exposing inequalities in the distribution of health and wealth, and prompting calls for the reform of social institutions.

In this respect, the mass protests sweeping the US in the wake of the death of George Floyd can be seen as a symptom of a deeper social pathology, one that has been brought to the fore by the coronavirus pandemic and President Trump’s blundering response to the health crisis sparked by COVID-19.

When Derek Chauvin was caught on video pinning George Floyd to the ground as he pleaded “I can’t breathe”, the image could not help but resonate with the way coronavirus has also been disproportionately choking the life out of African-Americans. As the Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri told the BBC: “The pandemic itself is about the very issue of breathing. I think that helped to strike a chord in people.”

Figures from the non-partisan APM Research Lab show that, on average, black Americans have been dying of coronavirus at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. In the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, blacks are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people.

The disparity may be due to several factors, including lower levels of vitamin D in BAME groups. But there is little doubt that poverty and job insecurity, coupled with the stressful living conditions of black people, who are overwhelmingly concentrated in decrepit inner-city areas, also plays a role. (In Washington DC, for instance, the death rate among blacks is six times as high as for whites.)

Harvard philosopher and activist Cornel West has said that the racial health disparities revealed by COVID is a demonstration of America’s “failed social experiment”. Whether or not you accept this verdict, these disparities are prompting questions about the fitness of the US public health system and America’s ability to protect its most vulnerable and disadvantaged citizens from contagious diseases.

Not the first time

Something very similar happened in 1849 when America was swept by cholera. Then, as today, the epidemic fell most heavily on the inhabitants of impoverished inner-city areas. In downtown Philadelphia, as Charles Rosenberg recalls in The Cholera Years, “a free couple of color” were found dead of cholera in a room measuring just four and a half by seven foot.

It was the same in the Five Points area of New York, where Irish immigrants were packed into rudimentary timber dwellings lacking running water and sanitation. The Irish bore 40% of the mortality. By contrast, wealthy New Yorkers from Protestant backgrounds generally escaped the ravages of cholera by fleeing to the country.

In 1832, when “Asiatic cholera” first arrived in the US, Americans assumed that religious virtue and the rustic simplicity of American life would protect them from this scourge from the east. But after 1849, New Yorkers could no longer ignore the connection between cholera and poverty.

And when in 1854 the English physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera was transmitted in water, the case for sanitary reform became overwhelming. Recognising that cholera was linked to overcrowding, unhygienic housing, and poor sewerage disposal, American sanitarians pressured boards of health to provide cities with safe water systems. Later, these boards became the models for local and state public health agencies.

More often, though, epidemics are occasions for discrimination against ethnic and social groups. When New York was struck by typhus in 1892, the city’s sanitary authorities blamed the outbreak on recent Jewish immigrants from Russia who had travelled in steerage and quarantined them on North Brother Island in the East River. By contrast, passengers who had travelled in the first-class sections of ships were not quarantined.

Discrimination was also the response in 1916 when cases of “infantile paralysis” erupted in New York. As I describe in my book, The Pandemic Century, the initial outbreaks of polio were centred on “Pig Town”, an Italian neighbourhood in South Brooklyn. Here, recent immigrants from Naples lived in tenements surrounded by piles of stinking garbage and free-roaming pigs.

As cases of polio multiplied and the papers filled with heartbreaking accounts of dead or paralysed infants, the publicity sparked a wave of anti-Italian prejudice. While Upper East Siders fled to their homes on Long Island, heavily armed policemen patrolled roads and rail stations to prevent Italians leaving the city. Health officers went door to door in Brooklyn to enforce isolation measures and hospitalisations.

In fact, non-paralytic cases of polio had most likely been circulating under the radar in the US since 1890. According to Yale historian Naomi Rodgers, only its appearance in epidemic form in New York was “new”.

Conspiracy theories

Minority groups have, for the most part, gone along with restrictions on their liberty for the sake of the health of all. Yet when the freedoms of the majority are threatened, protest and violence often ensue. During the 1832 Russian cholera epidemic, for instance, the citizens of St Petersburg gathered in Sennaya square in protest at quarantines and cordons, which they considered a plot by the educated classes to repress the poor.

Accusing sanitary inspectors of spreading the disease, they sacked the city’s main cholera hospital and called for the death of doctors, who they suspected of poisoning their wells. It was only when Czar Nicholas I appeared in the square and ordered the crowd to fall to their knees, that the rioting stopped.

Conspiracy theories about the role of the medical profession in spreading cholera also fuelled riots in Britain. According to the historian of medicine Samuel Cohn, Britain saw 72 such riots between 1831 and 1832 with crowds “in the thousands that threatened the lives of physicians”.

The difference was that in Britain doctors were accused of using cholera as a ruse to perform dissections. This practice was known in Britain as “burking” after the 1828 scandal in Edinburgh in which William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen people and supplied the bodies to a lecturer in anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons.

In the case of COVID-19, similar conspiracy theories have sparked protests by right-wing militias and anti-vaxxers convinced that coronavirus is a ruse to rob Americans of their liberties through the enforcement of social distancing measures. Perhaps the most striking feature of these protests is that the demonstrators are overwhelmingly white and unmasked. In the case of the storming of Michigan state capital in April, the militias also carried arms.

The protests now sweeping cities across the US and in other countries have seen a similar disregard for social distancing. But by contrast, many of these protesters have been wearing masks bearing the words “I can’t breathe” out of respect for the threat that coronavirus poses to their and other people’s health.

None have openly brandished guns. Despite this, they have been met with national guardsman armed with rubber bullets and egged on by a president seemingly determined to inflame the situation.

Little wonder that in Minnesota, where black people account for a third of COVID cases despite making up 6% of the state’s population, Minneapolis city council vice-president Andrea Jenkins drew a direct analogy between the violence visited on black communities by COVID and the death of George Floyd. “Until we name this virus [of racism],” she said, “we will never, ever resolve this issue.”

Unfortunately, the tragedy is that the anger being directed at police forces across the US now risks unleashing a second wave of COVID infections that could prove as destructive as the first.

How One Nation Beat Coronavirus (But for Good?) It remains important that good science supports governments' risk assessment and management. by Michael Baker and Nick Wilson

Today, for the first time since February 28, New Zealand has no active cases of COVID-19.

According to our modelling, it is now very likely (well above a 95% chance) New Zealand has completely eliminated the virus. This is in line with our Te Pūnaha Matatini colleagues’ modelling.

Today is also the 17th day since the last new case was reported. New Zealand has a total of 1,154 confirmed cases (combined total of confirmed and probable cases is 1,504) and 22 people have died.

This is an important milestone and a time to celebrate. But as we continue to rebuild the economy, there are several challenges ahead if New Zealand wants to retain its COVID-19-free status while the pandemic continues elsewhere.

It remains important that good science supports the government’s risk assessment and management. Below, we recommend several ways people can protect themselves. But we also argue New Zealand needs an urgent overhaul of the health system, including the establishment of a new national public health agency for disease prevention and control.

What elimination means

Elimination is defined as the absence of a disease at a national or regional level. Eradication refers to its global extinction (as with smallpox).

Elimination requires a high-performing surveillance system to provide assurance that, should border control fail, any new cases would be quickly found. Agreed definitions are important for public reassurance and as a basis for expanding travel links with other countries that have also achieved elimination.

It is important to remind ourselves that active cases are not the ones we need to worry about. By definition, they have all been identified and placed in isolation and are very unlikely to infect others. The real target of elimination is to stop the unseen cases silently spreading in the community. This is why we need mathematical modelling to tell us that elimination is likely.

Avoiding complacency – and new outbreaks

New Zealand’s decisive elimination strategy appears to have succeeded, but it is easy to become complacent. Many other countries pursuing a containment approach have had new outbreaks, notably Singapore, Korea and Australia.

New Zealand has spent months expanding its capacities to eliminate COVID-19. But maintaining elimination will be challenging. Airports, seaports and quarantine facilities remain potential sites of transmission from overseas, particularly given the pressure to increase numbers of arrivals.

New Zealand’s move to alert level 1 will end all physical distancing restrictions. If the virus is reintroduced, this creates the potential for outbreaks arising from indoor social gatherings. New Zealand is also moving into winter when respiratory viruses can spread more easily, as is seen with the highly seasonal coronaviruses which cause the common cold.

5 key ways to protect New Zealand’s long-term health

Just as New Zealand prepared for the pandemic, the post-elimination period requires “maximum proactivity”. Here are five key risk management approaches to achieve lasting protection for New Zealand against COVID-19 and other serious public health threats.

1. Establish public use of fabric face masks in specific settings

Health protection relies on multiple barriers to infection or contamination. This is the cornerstone of protecting drinking water, food safety and borders from incursions by biological agents.

With the end of physical distancing, we recommend the government seriously considers making mask wearing mandatory on public transport, on aircraft and at border control and quarantine facilities. Other personal hygiene measures (staying home if sick, washing hands, coughing into elbows) are insufficient when transmission is often from people who appear well and can spread the virus simply by breathing and talking.

The evidence base for the effectiveness of even simple fabric face masks is now strong, according to a recent systematic review published in the Lancet. The World Health Organization has also updated its guidelines to recommend that everyone wear fabric face masks in public areas where there is a risk of transmission. Establishing a culture of using face masks in specific settings in New Zealand will make it easier to expand their use if required in future outbreaks.

2. Improve contact tracing effectiveness with suitable digital tools

New Zealand’s national system for contact tracing remains a critical back-stop measure to control outbreaks, should border controls fail. But there is significant potential for new digital tools to enhance current processes, albeit with appropriate privacy safeguards built in. To be effective, such digital solutions must have high uptake and support very rapid contact tracing. Downloadable apps appear insufficient and both New Zealand and Singapore are investigating bluetooth-enabled devices which appear to perform better and could be distributed to all residents.

3. Apply a science-based approach to border management

A cautious return to higher levels of inbound and outbound travel is important for economic and humanitarian reasons, but we need to assess the risk carefully. This opening up includes two very different processes. One is a broadening of the current categories of people permitted to enter New Zealand beyond residents, their families and a small number of others. This will typically require the continuation of routine 14-day quarantine, until improved methods are developed.

The other potential expansion is quarantine-free entry, which will be safest from countries that meet similar elimination targets. This process could begin with Pacific Island nations free of COVID-19, notably Samoa and Tonga. It should be possible to extend this arrangement to various Australian states and other jurisdictions such as Fiji and Taiwan when they confirm their elimination status.

4. Establish a dedicated national public health agency

Even before COVID-19 hit New Zealand, it was clear our national public health infrastructure was failing after decades of neglect, fragmentation and erosion. Prominent examples of system failure include the Havelock North campylobacter outbreak in 2016 and the prolonged measles epidemic in 2019. The comprehensive health and disability system review report was delivered to the Minister of Health in March and was widely expected to recommend significant upgrading of public health capacity. This report and its recommendations should now be released.

We also recommend an interim evaluation of the public health response to COVID-19 now, rather than after the pandemic. These reviews would inform the needed upgrade of New Zealand’s public health capacity to manage the ongoing pandemic response and to prepare the country for other serious health threats. A key improvement would be a dedicated national public health agency to lead disease control and prevention. Such an agency could help avoid the need for lockdowns by early detection and action in response to emerging infectious disease threats, as achieved by Taiwan during the current pandemic.

5. Commit to transformational change to avoid major global threats

COVID-19 is having devastating health and social impacts globally. Even if it is brought under control with a vaccine or antivirals, other major health threats remain, including climate change, loss of biological diversity and existential threats (for example, pandemics arising from developments in synthetic biology). These threats need urgent attention. The recovery from lockdown provides an opportunity for a sustained transformation of our economy that addresses wider health, environmental and social goals.

America's Criminal Justice System Is the Dumpster Fire That Won't Stop Burning If America is burning, it is fair to say that America’s criminal justice system—which is itself a raging dumpster fire of injustice—lit the fuse. by Clark Neily

Before you can fairly assess the legitimacy of the ongoing protests or the quality of the government’s response, you must understand the relevant facts. And the most relevant fact is that America’s criminal justice system is rotten to its core. Though that certainly does not justify the violence and wanton destruction of property perpetrated by far too many protesters, it does provide useful context for comprehending the intensity of their anger and the fecklessness of the government’s response. If America is burning, it is fair to say that America’s criminal justice system—which is itself a raging dumpster fire of injustice—lit the fuse.

I feel moved to write these words because it appears from some of the commentary I’ve been reading—including even from libertarian circles—that many people who consider themselves to be generally skeptical of government and supportive of individual rights have no idea just how fundamentally broken our criminal justice system is and how wildly antithetical it has become to our core constitutional values.

Within days or weeks, most protesters will renounce the use of lawless violence as a tool of politics; but the state will not. That’s the key takeaway and the thing you really need to understand about this moment in time.

As I will explain below, I see three fundamental pathologies in America’s criminal justice system that completely undermine its moral and political legitimacy and render it a menace to the very concept of constitutionally limited government. Those three pathologies are: (1) unconstitutional overcriminalization; (2) point‐​and‐​convict adjudication; and (3) near‐​zero accountability for police and prosecutors.

1. Unconstitutional overcriminalization. What is the proper role of a criminal justice system in a liberal democracy? Simply put, it is to employ state‐​sanctioned violence to discourage and punish conduct that threatens the very fabric of civil society—things like murder, violent assault, theft, and fraud. So the first and most basic pathology of America’s criminal justice system is that it vastly exceeds the scope of what a criminal justice system may legitimately seek to address while routinely using force against peaceful people in morally indefensible ways.

Take, for example, the Shreveport, LA, ordinance that made it illegal to wear saggy pants. There were 726 arrests for violating that law during the 12 years it was on the books—96 percent involving black men—and it wasn’t until police shot and killed a man named Anthony Childs while trying to arrest him for wearing saggy pants that the law was finally repealed.

Similarly, of the three most‐​preferred drugs in America—alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana—marijuana is by far the safest in terms of consumption‐​related deaths. But despite that fact and the massive push towards decriminalization, the number of arrests for marijuana offenses has been rising, not falling. For example, in Virginia, where I live, there were nearly 29,000 arrests for marijuana offenses—triple the number from 1999. All of those arrests, by definition, involved the actual or threatened use of state‐​sanctioned violence for conduct that appears to be no more harmful (and indeed, may well be considerably less harmful) to society than the purchase and consumption of the alcoholic beverages sold at any of the 370 stores operated for profit by the government of Virginia.

It is immoral to use force against another person without sufficient justification, and that is true even when the perpetrator is acting at the behest of the state. At the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that a person prefers the “wrong” not‐​particularly‐​harmful intoxicant is not a sufficient moral justification for doing violence to that person. Nor should it represent a sufficient constitutional justification for employing state violence, but unfortunately—and to its immense discredit—our judiciary says otherwise.

I have written a whole book about the judiciary’s failure to properly enforce constitutional limits on government power, and I will not repeat the arguments here. Suffice it to say, a baseline constitutional limit on government is that it may not arbitrarily interfere with people’s liberty—including how to worship, where to travel, or what to ingest. Working together, however, the three branches have essentially hacked that limitation using what amounts to a constitutional magic trick whereby the legislative and executive branches simply lie in court about their true justification for enforcing various laws and the judiciary pretends to credit those fraudulent explanations for restricting people’s freedom.

Combining the powerful public‐​choice dynamics that motivate legislators to constantly and indiscriminately expand the scope of the criminal law with the judiciary’s feckless refusal to enforce the Constitution’s prohibition against unjustified restrictions of liberty results in a criminal justice system that routinely does violence to perfectly decent people for non‐​morally‐​wrongful conduct that presents no real threat to other people or to society. That is the essence of “unconstitutional overcriminalization,” and it does incalculable damage to the moral and political legitimacy of our criminal justice system.

2. Point‐​and‐​convict adjudication. Unconstitutional overcriminalization could never have become the menace it is today if all criminal charges were adjudicated using the constitutionally prescribed mechanism of a jury trial. That’s because jury trials are expensive and require twelve people to take time away from their jobs, families, and personal lives in order to decide whether to condemn a fellow human being and authorize the often quite vicious punishment the state seeks to inflict. If people are constantly being asked to put their lives on hold in order to help adjudicate trivial “crimes” such as low‐​level marijuana distribution, it will not be long before they send a clear message to prosecutors to stop wasting their time—and taxpayer money—on the enforcement of mickey‐​mouse laws that don’t make people’s lives any better or the community any safer.

But the government has hacked yet another key constraint against the abuse of criminal law by replacing expensive, inefficient, and uncertain jury trials with a method of adjudicating criminal charges that is cheap, efficient, and certain: coercive plea bargaining. Indeed, so proficient have prosecutors become at inducing people to condemn themselves that more than 95 percent of all criminal convictions today come from guilty pleas rather than jury trials. As the Supreme Court itself has observed, “[American] criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”

Inducing people to condemn themselves is an inherently squalid business, particularly in a system that purports to guarantee something as precious—from the standpoint of the accused—as a jury trial. Think of it this way: How on earth would you get someone to choose the certainty of conviction and punishment if they plead guilty over the possibility of acquittal and freedom if they exercise their constitutional right to require the government to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of a unanimous jury? The answer is pressure—and lots of it.

Again, I have written extensively about the various coercive levers routinely employed by prosecutors to elicit guilty pleas from the guilty and innocent alike. Those levers include pretrial detention, charge‐​stacking, mandatory minimums, the notorious “trial penalty,” and even gratuitous threats to indict a recalcitrant defendant’s family members.

Coercing criminal defendants into waiving their constitutional right to a jury trial is of course patently unconstitutional. But if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess where the story goes next. That’s right: Straight to the doorstep of our feckless judiciary, which has made itself complicit in this point‐​and‐​convict style of coercive adjudication by systematically turning a blind eye. Thus, for example, in a 1978 case called Bordenkircher v. Hayes, the Supreme Court rejected a due process challenge to a prosecutor’s nakedly coercive threat to increase a defendant’s exposure from a maximum of ten years to life imprisonment if he refused the prosecutor’s invitation to accept a five‐​year plea offer. And in a 1992 case involving the spy Jonanthan Pollard, the D.C. Circuit held that it is categorically non‐​coercive to threaten to indict a defendant’s relatives in order to exert plea leverage.

The judiciary’s collective indifference to the use of coercion in plea bargaining has resulted in the practical elimination of jury trials and enables the government to obtain convictions without the expense and inconvenience of that constitutionally prescribed procedure. As a matter of simple economics, when the cost of a particular good—whether it be automobiles or criminal convictions—comes down, consumption will rise, which appears to be precisely what has happened in America’s hypercarceral criminal justice system. 

Thus, if you think of the criminal justice system as a massive woodchipper that sucks in people and spits out convicts, the jury trial was meant to be a kind of aperture‐​restrictor over the maw of that ravenous machine. Again, trial by jury is a relatively expensive and inefficient mechanism for adjudicating criminal charges, and it ensures that neither the government nor society at large takes lightly the act of condemning human beings and putting them in cages. Coercive plea bargaining represents the government’s success in prying off that aperture‐​restrictor to enable the criminal‐​justice woodchipper to operate at full capacity and ensure that America continues to have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

3. Near‐​zero accountability for police and prosecutors. The third and final pathology of America’s criminal justice system that I will discuss here is our near‐​zero accountability policy for members of law enforcement, including particularly police and prosecutors. Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice has written extensively about the cornerstone of that policy, qualified immunity, in recent days, so I will cut to the chase.

The bottom line is this: American police and prosecutors wield extraordinary power over the lives of others—including even the power of life and death—and yet they are among among the least accountable people on the planet. And just because the killers of George Floyd are being prosecuted for murder, no one should be fooled into supposing that that would have happened without a viral video of the incident, or if the officers’ violent assault had merely injured Floyd instead of killing him. The reality is that police are almost never prosecuted for the crimes they commit under color of law, and the judiciary (starting to see a theme here?) has helped ensure that other avenues of accountability, including particularly the ability to bring civil‐​damages claims, are largely toothless.

Notably, what makes that fundamental lack of accountability particularly galling is that police and prosecutors are in the accountability business—for other people. Just listen to the closing argument of any prosecutor (if you can manage to find a criminal jury trial), and you will hear it dripping with sanctimony as the prosecutor recounts the details of the defendant’s transgressions and imprecates the jury to hold him or her responsible. But when the shoe is on the other foot and a fellow prosecutor stands credibly accused of committing crimes in the course of his or her official duties, then suddenly all concern for responsibility, accountability, and preserving the delicate fabric of civil society goes right out the window as the milk of human kindness flows freely from judges and other prosecutors alike. 

In short, we have a massive double standard between the level of accountability to which members of law enforcement hold the rest of us and the level of accountability to which they permit themselves to be held—which again, is very close to zero. 

A final point bears mentioning. America’s criminal justice system is fundamentally rotten, but the effects of its dysfunction are not felt equally by all Americans. Instead, it is the marginalized and politically disenfranchised who bear the brunt of that injustice, including particularly communities of color. Although both the root causes and the significance of racial disparities in our criminal justice system are debatable, the existence of those disparities is not. And when people perceive—correctly in my judgment—that some lives are counted by the system as less sacred than others, they are going to be angry about it. And they damn well should be.

Back At It Again? Tech Censorship Returns to the Agenda After Coronavirus President Donald Trump signed an executive order that could seriously curb Twitter’s business model after the company censored him, and Amazon is facing calls for CEO Jeff Bezos to testify in front of lawmakers over reports the company violated antitrust laws. by Chris White

Amazon, Twitter, and other major tech companies are facing intense criticism on antitrust issues and censorship claims in the months since government officials reportedly began asking for help from Silicon Valley on ways to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

The president and lawmakers have turned their sights on Twitter and Amazon, respectively, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other attorneys general are reportedly ratcheting up their antitrust investigation targeting Google’s business model. The White House asked them in March to fight coronavirus disinformation while also assisting the government in its virus response.

Amazon tried to stop sellers from drastically raising prices on hand sanitizers as Google fleshed out ways of tracking the virus. Twitter and Facebook developed policies designed around nixing virus-related misinformation while providing users with accurate information about coronavirus, or COVID-19.

COVID-19 has so far killed a reported 110,000 people in the U.S. and led several states to enact lockdowns to slow the spread. States and local officials have begun easing up on stay-at-home orders, which resulted in double-digit unemployment rates.

Here are some of the problems Silicon Valley giants are facing as citizens and government officials focus on other priorities.

A bipartisan group of 50 attorneys general across 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, began probing Google in September well before the coronavirus pandemic began.

Reports from The Wall Street Journal in May 2020 and CNBC Friday suggest the Department of Justice and Paxton are well into the planning stages of litigation targeting Google, but those reports rely on unnamed “people familiar with the matter” and do not explicitly state when to expect a lawsuit. The DOJ and state attorneys general are collaborating on the probes.

The bulk of the attorneys general’s investigation has been focused on Google’s online advertising, as the company owns the largest and most powerful tool in the link between online publishers and advertisers, according to the WSJ report. The DOJ has reportedly homed in on the tech titan’s ad technology while also focusing more broadly on concerns that Google is stifling competition through its search business.

DOJ’s investigation could end soon, according to the WSJ’s May report.

Other reports suggest the DOJ and state attorneys general are soliciting advice from one of Google’s competitors, search engine DuckDuckGo.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to several Republican attorneys general involved in the probe, including Mark Brnovich of Arizona, Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Sean Reyes of Utah, and Doug Peterson of Nebraska, but none of them have responded to repeated requests for comment about a potential lawsuit.

Florida AG Ashley Moody’s spokeswoman Lauren Cassedy told the DCNF that, “it would not be appropriate to comment (about a lawsuit) at this time.”

Pressure on Google  eased somewhat after the company lent government officials access to some of the company’s technology in pursuit of tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

The company CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a March 6 blog post that it would develop a system helping medical researchers understand “how the virus functions and experimental work in developing future treatments.”

Google did not responded to the DCNF’s request for comment about whether the company is preparing for a lawsuit, and the DOJ has not confirmed to the DCNF that a lawsuit is forthcoming.

Amazon Faces Serious Heat

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman Rep. David Cicilline said in May that he wants Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to testify as part of his committee’s antitrust investigation into the company. Amazon is facing a DOJ antitrust probe as well, which is unrelated to the state attorneys general probe into Google.

“It is our hope and expectation that [Bezos] will come voluntarily,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a May 7 interview with Politico. “But if he elects not to do it voluntarily then we are prepared to use compulsory process to compel his attendance.”

Cicilline’s comments came after House Judiciary Committee lawmakers threatened to subpoena Bezos on May 1, after the Wall Street Journal reported in April that the company used data from independent sellers to develop competing products. The House panel is engaged in an antitrust investigation targeting Amazon and other major tech companies.

Amazon has not replied to the DCNF’s request for comment about whether Bezos will testify.

Meanwhile, the online shopping giant revenue rose 26% to $75.5 billion during the pandemic after economic lock downs all but shuttered many of the company’s brick-and-mortar competitors. The company announced in April that it would also hire an additional 75,000 people for jobs ranging from warehouse staff to delivery drivers.

Twitter And Trump Face Off

President Donald Trump announced an executive order on May 28 calling for Twitter and other social media platforms to lose their protection from legal liability if they engage in censorship. The president and other conservatives frequently claim that Twitter is biased against them and often censors their content for political reasons.

Twitter fact checked the president’s May 26 tweet claiming that mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

The company also concealed a May 29 tweet from Trump in which he suggested that the “THUGS” rioting in Minneapolis are “dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” a black man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes, video of the incident shows.

Twitter argued that the historical relevance of the term “looting starts, shooting starts” violated the company’s policy against inciting violence.

In 1967, Miami police Chief Walter Headley used the phrase during hearings about crime in the Florida city, according to NPR. Headley preferred using dogs and shotguns, among other tough tactics, to stamp down looting and violent protests, the Miami Herald reported May 29.

Trump, for his part, later clarified what the tweet was meant to convey, telling his Twitter followers May 29 that looting often leads to gun violence, something the president said he hoped to avoid.

Facebook Creates A ‘Supreme Court’

Facebook announced a plan Sept. 17 , 2019 to create an oversight board designed to remove the politics from moderating decisions. The company rolled out the plan a week after Paxton’s announced his intention to take on Google Sept. 9.

Facebook’s independent oversight is body meant to impartially protect free speech and create an arbitration system, Axios reported in May. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new board is made up of a bipartisan crew of conservative and liberal board members who will help judge whether specific comments, posts or links comply with Facebook’s terms of service.

The oversight board named 20 of the 40 expected board members during its May 6 rollout. Under this system, Facebook users who believe moderators unfairly targeted them can file an appeal with the board, which will choose to take a handful of cases each year, a setup which Zuckerberg has likened to the Supreme Court.

The 15-year-old social media giant hit some speed bumps over the past few weeks.

Some Facebook employees recently criticized Zuckerberg’s decision not to remove a Trump Facebook post mentioning the term “looting starts, shooting starts.” Many of the employees conducted a virtual walkout on June 1 to voice their displeasure. Facebook did not nix the post because the company prefers to lean on free speech principles, Zuckerberg explained during a company meeting on June 2.

Since Trump’s Facebook and Instagram posts quoting the tweet have not been removed, they’ve collected a monstrous amount of engagements. It’s been shared on Facebook more than 70,000 times as of Tuesday and has accumulated more than 255,000 reactions. The Instagram post, meanwhile, had more than 500,000 likes.

Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook post Friday that the company will revisit some of its policies against violent threats.

“We’re going to review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions,” he wrote. “I know many of you think we should have labeled the President’s posts in some way last week.”

Facebook did not immediately reply to the DCNF’s request for comment.