Links for Friday, August 30
Election-themed links from the U.S., Ecuador, and France. Plus Google manipulation and AI thoughts.
It’s an election-themed links fest today — America, Ecuador, and France. Plus notes on AI and Google. There’s an awful consistency to some of these posts.
Links
• Harris explains in exclusive CNN interview why she’s shifted her position on key issues (CNN)
I recently wrote that the race is Harris’s to lose.
Well…
Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday offered her most expansive explanation to date on why she’s changed some of her positions on fracking and immigration, telling CNN’s Dana Bash her values haven’t shifted but that her time as vice president provided new perspective on some of the country’s most pressing issues.
In the CNN exclusive sit-down interview, Harris also said she would name a Republican to serve in her Cabinet if elected.
And this:
Harris said despite the shifts in position, her values had not changed.
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Her campaign later said Harris does not continue to support the Green New Deal, a wide-ranging proposal to address climate change first introduced in 2019.
During a September 2019 climate crisis town hall hosted by CNN, Harris was asked if she would commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on her first day in office.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, and starting with what we can do on Day 1 around public lands,” Harris said at the time. By the time she had become Biden’s running mate, she had moved away from that stance and even cast the tie breaking vote to expand fracking leases, as she noted to Bash.
Transcript here.
“The climate crisis is real,” but “as president, I will not ban fracking.” Interesting. Note also the comments on continued support for Israel. That could bite back.
File under “Alignments matter; it’s still a change election.”
• Leaked Chats Reveal a U.S.-Linked Prosecutor Is Behind the Assault on Ecuador’s Social Democratic Movement (Ryan Grim & Jose Olivares, Drop Site News)
From Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill’s new news site (emphasis mine):
Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.
The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.
Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.
Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.
The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.
Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S.
There’s a concise set of bulleted revelations following the sentence, “Among the allegations emerging from the leaked messages”. An informative in-and-out read.
File under “The U.S, aligned with the right against the left.”
• We’re ‘witnessing nothing less than a coup by Macron’ (Arnaud Bertrand, Twitter thread)
What’s happening in France is a little complicated, but not that much. A coalition of leftist parties (NPF in English, NFP in French) won a plurality of seats in the new Assembly, but the split between the left, center-right, and far-right parties is even enough that if Macron and the far-right wanted to, they could block the left.
The split in Assembly seats is this: 31% for NPF, 26% for Macron’s center-right party, and 25% for the far-right RN and allies. The picture looks like this:
Notice that all of the electoral losses are by the center-right (Macron’s Ensemble, the Gaullist Republicans), and that all of the gains are by those further left and right. The electorate rejected centrism.
Yet Macron is using his power as President to refuse to allow the NPF, the national plurality winner, to form a new government, violating long French tradition. In effect, he’s refusing to surrender. (Sound familiar?) His excuse is that an NPF-led government would immediately fall, since (ready?) his own party would align the the far-right to topple it.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
File under “The ‘center’, aligned with the right against the left.”