Mediaboss Marketing

Connecting the dots: These three narratives are melding into a gigantic, compound earthquake. When we speak of the race to artificial intelligence and robotization, we mean research dominated by American big tech, along with its Chinese cousins Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. When the workplace is filled with intelligent machines some time in the future, their brains are likely to come from one or more of these companies.

In 2001, Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O'Neill published a paper that coined the term "BRIC." Brazil, Russia, India and China would power the next stage of global growth, O'Neill said. The acronym caught fire. The new powers in global growth are the major U.S. and Chinese tech companies, though they fit less comfortably into an acronym.

For that and other reasons, including the decimation of retail by Amazon, they are core to our unease and alienation, as Axios has reported, and they are facing increasing scrutiny.

Going deep: This week, we look at two forthcoming books and a much-discussed legal paper that explain this evolving mind shift, and point the way forward:

The Four, by NYU professor Scott Galloway; World Without Mind, by Atlantic magazine writer Franklin Foer; and Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, by New America fellow Lina Khan.

We are at the mercy of these companies, with billions of people outside China using Google to search the Internet, Facebook to follow their friends, Apple to talk to them, Amazon to buy stuff, and Microsoft for their office needs. Within China, the same can be said for the BAT companies. But that is more dangerous than seems apparent. Foer notes:

All of this troubles Foer, who delivers a passionate argument for the public to wake up and reconsider its tech idolatry. "Our faith in technology is no longer fully consistent with our belief in liberty," he writes. "We're nearing the moment when we will have to damage one of our revolutions to save the other. Privacy can't survive the present trajectory of technology."

His central message: We are at risk of authoritarianism, and a loss of ourselves "a breaking point, a point at which our nature is no longer really human."

When Foer started this book, "it felt like I was engaging in a quixotic, esoteric venture," he told me. "The tech companies were held in such high esteem that the possibility that there was something fundamentally wrong with them didn't register with people. But the zeitgeist has started to shift, now in a fairly extreme way."

One of Foer's primary targets is Silicon Valley's war on individual genius in favor of the collaborative and populist crowd. This, he says, flies in the face of how big tech views itself, championing "the fearless entrepreneur, the alienated geek working in the garage" Steve Jobs, Jack Ma, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos.

"The titans of technology may be capable of breathtaking originality and solitary genius, but the rest of the world is not," he writes.

Another is tax dodgers: Amazon can offer low prices in large part because for years it paid no taxes, while brick-and-mortar stores forked over both that and rent Walmart paid a 30% tax rate over the last decade and Home Depot 38%. Amazon's effective tax rate is 13%, and Apple and Alphabet's 16%.

Profits left abroad: Far from reaching their station fair and square, big tech squirrels away its profits overseas, and doesn't pay its fair share at home. Amazon dodges taxes by basing much of its operations in Luxembourg. As of 2015, Google had parked $58.3 billion in tax havens abroad including Ireland and Bermuda. In 2012, Facebook earned $1.1 billion in the U.S., on which it paid not a cent of federal or state tax. "The tech companies maintain every shred of data, yet seem to want to purge every bit of taxable earnings," he writes.

What should be done: Foer urges

In January, the Yale Law Journal published a "note" that has since attracted remarkable attention more than 50,000 hits and made Amazon lawyers especially nervous.

They are modern-day railroad barons: Amazon, Khan told me, should be viewed "as an infrastructure company." And as a group, big tech "are utilities on which other companies depend," equating to the 19th century railroads, which their owners exploited to outsized profit advantage because they could.

Khan's intellectual breakthrough: Her big splash is taking explicit and injurious aim at Robert Bork's landmark 1968 book, The Antitrust Paradox, which carved the path to today's casual attitude toward corporate bigness, as Steven Pearlstein writes at the Washington Post.

Galloway takes the theme of bigness the next step into popular philosophy: Big tech's success, he writes, pivots on the human need for God (Google) love (Facebook), sex (Apple) and consumption (Amazon). Galloway has mixed success with carrying out the theme, but it's a showcase for a toughly argued, hard-edged message: Big tech's big success is "dangerous for society, and it shows no sign of slowing down. It hollows out the middle class, which leads to bankrupt towns, feeds the angry politics of those who feel cheated, and underpins the rise of demagogues."

Big money, small work force: Google employs 72,000 people, Galloway notes, about 40% of the 185,000 who work for Disney, which has a quarter of Google's $650 billion market cap.

In other words, says Galloway, the spoils of America's old corporate oligarchy was carved out more fairly among many more workers. "Investors and executives got rich, though not billionaires; and workers, many of them unionized, could buy homes and motorboats and send their kids to college," he writes.

Visit link:
Trump to announce Afghanistan plan Monday in TV address - Axios

Follow @bpolitics for all the latest news, and sign up for our daily Balance of Power newsletter.

Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office on Monday in danger of becoming increasingly isolated from the Republican establishment he needs to enact his agenda and the grassroots activists inspired by just-departed chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

The president will look to turn the page after a tumultuous working vacation capped by ousting the firebrand Bannon, who many in the White House blamed for the chaos and public infighting that has beset the administration. The move followed the departure of Trumps first chief of staff, press secretary, and communications director in quick succession.

A week of stinging denouncements from corporate executives, lawmakers and even some conservative activists highlights the challenge Trump faces in rebounding from his roundly criticized response to an Aug. 13 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended with the death of a counter-protester in a car-ramming incident.

Starting on Monday, when Trump is scheduled to address the nation at 9:00 pm New York time about Afghanistan in a prime-time address, the presidents moves will be watched for a sense of whether the presidency, seven months in, can rebound from perhaps its lowest point yet.Trumps defense secretary, James Mattis, who favors adding troops to a fight that has become Americas longest-running war, hinted Sunday that Trump may decide to do just that.

A campaign rally Tuesday in Phoenix, Arizona, less than 200 miles from the Mexican border, will provide a glimpse into whether Trump plans to pivot from the pugilistic approach thats left him with a shrinking number of allies.

As we look to the future its going to be very difficult for this president to lead if, in fact, that moral authority remains compromised, Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, said Sunday on CBSs Face The Nation.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and regular Trump critic, wrote on Facebook Friday that I doubt that Donald Trump will be able to calm and comfort the nation after the next national tragedy.

With members of his own party openly criticizing him for his insistence that both sides were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, Trumps choice of whether to lash out or reach out from this point could be pivotal. Saturday, on Twitter, he seemed for the first time to extend an olive branch to protesters whove denounced him.

Back in Washington, the recent firing of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former head of the Republican National Committee, has helped widen a rift with House Speaker Paul Ryan and other GOP lawmakers whom Trump has blamed for not achieving legislative wins on his behalf.

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

At the same time, Bannons exit risks alienating some of Trumps grassroots supporters.

The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over, Bannon told the conservative Weekly Standard on Friday after his White House departure. We will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.

The struggle between White House advisers calling for Trump to embrace the role of a more traditional president, and those who have pushed for him to be a force for disruption, has shifted after Bannon -- firmly in the latter camp -- was removed by Chief of Staff John Kelly.

A senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill said that while Kelly has brought more discipline to the West Wing, having an untethered Bannon outside the White House could cause more headaches for the party. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. A White House spokeswoman didnt respond to a request for comment.

Officials pushing Trump in a more moderate direction, including National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, will remain in their roles despite public pressure after Trumps Charlottesville comments equating neo-Nazis to those opposed to the far-right agenda.

The president in no way, shape or form, believes that neo-Nazi and other hate groups who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways, Mnuchin, who is Jewish, said in a statement Saturday that outlined why he planned to continue in his role.

Cohn and Mnuchin will be key players in whats shaping up as an epic September, with the White House and Congress needing to craft a spending plan and avoid a government shutdown by raising the debt ceiling, while at the same time trying to make progress on Trumps tax overhaul.

Bannon, who clashed at times with Mnuchin and Cohn, has returned to the conservative website Breitbart, and is pledging to take on establishment Republicans and some of his former colleagues, which could seriously complicate those efforts.

Im leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents -- on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in corporate America, Bannon said in an interview with Bloomberg after his departure.

Get the latest on global politics in your inbox, every day.

Get our newsletter daily.

Trumps shift toward more traditional voices in his orbit could be heard Monday when he addresses the nation about Afghanistan. While its unclear what Trump will announce, the position favored by Bannon and others leery of once again ramping up Americas longest war appears to have been marginalized. At the time Bannons departure was announced, Trump was huddled with his national security team at Camp David to discuss the way forward in Afghanistan.

Mattis said Trump engaged in a rigorous process to come to a decision, and hinted that the decision could include sending more troops.

I was not willing to make significant troop lifts until we made certain we knew what was the strategy, Mattis told reporters on Sunday. In that regard, the president has made a decision.

On Tuesday, Trump travels to Phoenix, Arizona, for a rally -- events that tend to be freewheeling and fraught with drama. Trump has criticized both of the states Republican senators and has used the campaign-style events to attack opponents with little regard for political norms.

On Twitter last week, Trump called Arizona Senator Jeff Flake toxic and said he was glad to see former state Senator Kelli Ward preparing for a primary challenge in 2018.

Trump has also lashed out recently against Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- all at a time when a massive legislative agenda awaits in September, with no time to waste on Twitter wars and other distractions.

The senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill said that while Bannon created friction between Trump and congressional Republicans, his ouster might not change much in the relationship.

Former Representative Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican whos now a partner at Mercury Public Affairs, a government relations consulting firm, said last weeks drama will merely widen the gap between Trump and congressional Republicans.

The party, it seems to me, is detaching itself from Trump, he said before Bannons ouster. Theyve got to forge their own way.

With assistance by Ben Brody, Chris Strohm, and Mark Niquette

See more here:
Trump Struggles to Move Past Bannon, Starting With Afghanistan - Bloomberg

CAMP MOREHEAD, Afghanistan Signaling that the U.S. military expects its mission to continue, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Sunday hailed the launch of the Afghan Army's new special operations corps, declaring that "we are with you and we will stay with you."

Gen. John Nicholson's exhortation of continued support for the Afghans suggested the Pentagon may have won its argument that America's military must stay engaged in the conflict in order to insure terrorists don't once again threaten the U.S. from safe havens in Afghanistan.

The White House announced that President Donald Trump would address the nation's troops and the American people Monday night to update the path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Nicholson, speaking prior to the White House announcement, said the commandos and a plan to double the size of the Afghan's special operations forces are critical to winning the war.

"I assure you we are with you in this fight. We are with you and we will stay with you," he said during a ceremony at Camp Morehead, a training base for Afghan commandos southeast of Kabul.

The Pentagon was awaiting a final announcement by Trump on a proposal to send nearly 4,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The added forces would increase training and advising of the Afghan forces and bolster counterterrorism operations against the Taliban and an Islamic State group affiliate trying to gain a foothold in the country.

The administration has been at odds for months over how to craft a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan amid frustrations that 16 years after 9/11 the conflict is stalemated.

The Afghan government only controls half of the country and is beset by endemic corruption and infighting. The Islamic State group has been hit hard but continues to attempt major attacks, insurgents still find safe harbor in Pakistan, and Russia, Iran and others are increasingly trying to shape the outcome. At this point, everything the U.S. military has proposed points to keeping the Afghan government in place and struggling to turn a dismal quagmire around.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he is satisfied with how the administration formulated its new Afghanistan war strategy. But he refused to talk about the new policy until it was disclosed by Trump.

He said the deliberations, including talks at the Camp David presidential retreat on Friday, were done properly.

"I am very comfortable that the strategic process was sufficiently rigorous," Mattis said, speaking aboard a military aircraft on an overnight flight from Washington to Amman, Jordan.

Months ago, Trump gave Mattis authority to set U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, but Mattis said he has not yet sent significant additional forces to the fight. He has said he would wait for Trump to set the strategic direction first.

Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday that he had made decisions at Camp David, "including on Afghanistan," but he did not say more about it. The expectation had been that he would agree to a modest boost in the U.S. war effort, while also addressing broader political, economic and regional issues.

Mattis said Trump had been presented with multiple options. He did not name them, but others have said one option was to pull out of Afghanistan entirely. Another, which Mattis had mentioned recently in Washington, was to hire private contractors to perform some of the U.S. military's duties.

At Camp Morehead, lines of Afghan commandos stood at attention as Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani and a host of proud dignitaries sat under flag-draped canopies and welcomed the advancement in their nation's long-struggling military.

In short remarks to the force, Nicholson said a defeat in Afghanistan would erode safety in the U.S. and "embolden jihadists around the world."

That's why, he said, the U.S. is helping to double the size of the Afghan commando force, adding that the ceremony "marks the beginning of the end of the Taliban."

Maj. Gen. James Linder, the head of U.S. and NATO special operations forces in Afghanistan, said the nearly 4,000 troops requested by the Pentagon for Afghanistan includes about 460 trainers for his staff to help increase the size of the special operations forces.

He said he'd be able expand training locations and insure they have advisers at all the right levels, including on the new Afghan special operations corps staff.

According to a senior U.S. military officer in Kabul, increasing the number of American troops would allow the military to quickly send additional advisers or airstrike support to two simultaneous operations. Right now, the official said, they can only do so for one.

The officer said it would allow the U.S. to send fighter aircraft, refueling aircraft and surveillance aircraft to multiple locations for missions.

The officer was not authorized to discuss the details publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Afghan military commanders have been clear that they want and expect continued U.S. military help.

Pulling out American forces "would be a total failure," Col. Abdul Mahfuz, the Afghan intelligence agency chief for Qarahbagh, north of Kabul, said Saturday. And he said that substituting paid contractors for U.S. troops would be a formula for continuing the war, rather than completing it.

Mahfuz and other Afghan commanders spoke at a shura council meeting at Bagram air base attended also by U.S. military officers and Afghan intelligence officials.

Col. Abdul Mobin, who commands an Afghan mechanized battalion in the 111th Division, said any reduction in the U.S. military presence "leads to total failure."

Speaking through an interpreter, he added that operations by Afghan and U.S. special operations forces have been very effective, and that "the presence of U.S. military personnel is felt and considered a positive step for peace."

He said he'd like to see an additional 10,000 American troops in the country.

Follow this link:
Trump will address path forward on Afghanistan - 10TV

Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire financier who owns the military contractor DynCorp International, is informally advising Trump on Afghanistan, according to a report in The New York Times, which said the company may potentially play a role in safeguarding American mining operations.

"We have no expectation of supporting commercial mining programs, but continue to work at the direction of the U.S. government," a DynCorp representative told CNBC. DynCorp has operated in Afghanistan since 2003, providing aviation, logistics, training, intelligence and operational solutions where needed.

Yet while Trump is looking at the possibility of the U.S. cashing in on the poor war-torn country, others have already started. Northern Afghanistan is rich with natural gas reserves and has attracted Russia's attention for decades.

During the Soviet invasion, Russia laid the framework to control Afghanistan's natural gas but abandoned the effort after the Taliban seized control of the country.

Last month, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani spoke with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier about lithium deposits in Helmand province, which could be put to work by European companies. The element is a key ingredient in rechargeable batteries used in smartphones and electric cars, and for its part Germany is eyeing Afghan lithium for its automobile industry.

Elsewhere, China has taken the lead in exploring its neighboring country's natural resources. In February, CNBC reported that China's Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) is planning to extract $100 billion worth of copper from Afghanistan. Back in 2007, the company leased land near Kabul for $3 billion.

At one point, the Taliban had given the project a green light. However, the project has been delayed because archaeologists discovered a 5,000-year-old Buddhist city in the exact location that holds the world's second-largest copper deposit.

Read more:
At stake in US military efforts to stabilize Afghanistan: At least $3 trillion in natural resources - CNBC

Recent terror attacks claimed by the Islamic State militant group in Afghanistan indicate an increase in the atrocities it's committing against civilians and a deliberate attempt to wreak havoc and spread fear among noncombatants in the country.

Since its emergence in 2015, the extremist group has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks across Afghanistan and has been accused of indiscriminately attacking civilians in general and the Shi'ite minority in particular.

On Monday, the terror group claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that occurred last week in Afghanistan's northern Sar-e-Pul province, killing about 54 Shi'ite Muslims, including children and elderly, in the Mirza Olang region.

Afghan officials said Wednesday that local police had discovered several mass graves in Sar-e-Pul province, containing the bodies of the Mirza Olang massacre.

In early August, the group attacked a Shi'ite mosque in western Herat province, killing and injuring dozens of worshippers.

In July 2016, IS claimed responsibility for attacking a rally of peaceful protesters in Kabul, killing more than 80 and injuring dozens more.

IS weakening?

Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy forum in Washington, said the increase in IS attacks in Afghanistan and the terror group's targeting of civilians illustrate weakness rather than strength.

"[IS] is intent to show that it's still relevant and dangerous in Afghanistan, even as its fighters are targeted by airstrikes, and even as its brutalities discredit it in the eyes of Afghans," Kugleman said. "On the contrary, we should read it as an effort on the part of an insecure IS to show that it still has clout."

Farooq Bashar, an Afghan analyst in Kabul, agreed with Kugleman's analysis and added that part of the increase in IS attacks is related to continuing White House deliberations about what course of action the U.S. will take in Afghanistan.

Bashar said he thought IS wanted to pose itself as a relevant group with which to to be reckoned.

"Islamic State is a new phenomenon in Afghanistan and by targeting Afghan civilians, it wants to demonstrate to the U.S. and the world that it has a strong presence in Afghanistan and the region," Bashar said.

Increasing pressure

Initially based in southern parts of eastern Nangarhar province, IS's Khorasan branch, also known as ISIS-K, emerged in early 2015 in the mountainous areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan to cover those nations and "other nearby territories." The group is trying to expand to mountainous parts of the adjacent Kunar and Nuristan provinces, which share a border with Pakistan.

In addition, the terror group recently has made inroads in the country's northern Jawzjan and Sar-e-Pul provinces.

Most of the IS fighters are former members of the Pakistani Taliban group (TTP), many of whom belong to the Orokzai tribe in Pakistan, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

A number of Central Asian militants in Afghanistan, who previously were associated with al-Qaida and Taliban, have joined the IS cause. Some Afghan militants also have joined the terror group for financial incentives.

In recent months, U.S. and Afghan forces have been engaged in joint counterterrorism operations against IS in eastern Afghanistan, killing hundreds of its fighters, including several of its senior commanders.

American and Afghan military forces have promised to eliminate IS in Afghanistan in 2017.

Atrocities in Nangarhar

Initially emerging in the Achin district of eastern Nangarhar province, IS has attacked villages in several other districts there, targeting local residents and elders deemed repugnant to its extremist ideology, local Afghan officials told VOA.

An IS video in 2015 showed horrific killing of a dozen local men from the Shinwari tribe in Nangarhar, who were blindfolded by IS fighters before being blown up by bombs buried underneath them.

Last summer, IS militants launched a massive assault on various parts of Kot district in Nangarhar province, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of villagers.

Niaz Bibi, a mother of 12 in the remote village of Qalajaat, watched as IS fighters invaded her home and killed five of her nine sons because they were affiliated with the local police force.

"They first shot my sons and then beheaded them in front of me," Bibi told VOA in a telephone interview at the time.

In October 2016, the group overran several checkpoints operated by militias in Nangarhar's Pachiragam district, killing dozens of local militia members and civilians in the region, local tribesmen and authorities told VOA.

The terror group on many occasions also has abducted local villagers.

A group of women who were captured by IS fighters in Nangarhar in early 2016 they were held captive for more than four months before they were released as part of a prisoner-swap deal negotiated by tribal elders in the region told VOA that IS starved them in dark cells.

"They kept beating us and telling us that they would kill us because we had become Kaafir [non-Muslim]," one of the women told VOA.

Keeping schools shuttered

The group also has forbidden state-run and private schools from operating in areas under its control, depriving tens of thousands of students from school.

The terror group reportedly has warned girls in northern Jawzjan province, who make up 40 percent of the 18,000 enrolled students, not to attend schools. It requires schools in areas under its control to adopt IS curriculum, and it forces parents to send their children to a growing network of religious seminaries run by IS.

"IS fighters use local madrassas [seminaries] as military centers where they teach militancy, conduct military training and plan their activities," Abdul Zahir Haqqani, director of religious affairs in Nangarhar, told VOA in November 2016.

Read the rest here:
IS Atrocities Spike in North, East Afghanistan - Voice of America