O plano de recuperação de Biden é MAIOR que o PIB do Brasil: US$ 1,9 trillion - James Hohmann (WP)

From The Washington Post, January 15, 2021 

By James Hohmann with Mariana Alfaro  Email  Biden throws Obama-era caution to the wind with a big ask for coronavirus stimulus During the Great Recession 12 years ago, nervous about sticker shock, President Barack Obama sought to keep the price tag for his Recovery Act under $1 trillion. On Thursday night, undeterred by Republicans rediscovering their allergy to deficit spending, President-elect Joe Biden unveiled an “American Rescue Plan” that would cost just under $2 trillion.  Then he announced that he will appear before a joint session of Congress next month to ask for even more. “I know what I just described will not come cheaply,” Biden said during a Thursday night speech in Wilmington, Del. “But failure to do so will cost us dearly.” Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal includes $400 billion for provisions to fight the coronavirus with more vaccines and testing, while reopening schools; more than $1 trillion in direct relief to families, including stimulus payments and increased unemployment insurance benefits; and $440 billion for aid to communities and businesses, including $350 billion in emergency funding to state and local governments. The incoming president used his prime-time address to unabashedly make the case for deficit spending. “In this moment of crisis, with interest rates at historic lows, we cannot afford inaction,” Biden said. “It’s not just that smart fiscal investments, including deficit spending, are more urgent than ever. It’s that the return on these investments — in jobs, in racial equity — will prevent long-term economic damage and the benefits will far surpass the costs. A growing number of top economists has shown even our debt situation will be more stable — not less stable — if we seize this moment with vision and purpose.” This week’s body count and jobs report make the case better than Biden ever could for going big. Nearly 1 million Americans filed new unemployment claims last week. This was up by 181,000 from the week before, the largest increase since the beginning of the pandemic and the highest number of new unemployment claims since August. An additional 284,000 claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the insurance program for gig and self-employed workers. After 140,000 people lost their jobs in December, the first decline in months, the total number of Americans enrolled in unemployment programs at the start of this year was 18.4 million. For more than 40 weeks now, the number of new jobless claims has been higher than the worst week of the Great Recession.  The United States may surpass 400,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus before Biden takes office. At least 387,299 fatalities have been reported, including 3,856 on Thursday. More than 4,000 deaths were reported on Tuesday and Wednesday. About a million new cases a day are being reported. The vaccine rollout continues to be plagued by problems. While 30.6 million doses have been distributed, only 9.7 million people have received shots, according to the CDC, far below what President Trump had promised by the end of the year. Biden called these numbers a “dismal failure” and reitered his goal to distribute 100 million shots by the end of his first 100 days in office. “This will be one of the most challenging operational efforts we’ve undertaken as a nation,” he said. “We’ll have to move heaven and Earth.” Nevertheless, Biden’s big ask is remarkable considering how little breathing room he has on Capitol Hill.  For a stretch in 2009, Democrats controlled 60 seats in the Senate and 256 seats in the House. After Georgia’s results are certified, Democrats will hold 50 seats in the Senate – with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris available to break ties – and 222 seats in the House. After the Recovery Act passed, Democrats moved on to health care and climate change, though cap-and-trade never passed the Senate. In the 2010 midterms, though, they lost control of the House. This happened, in part, because many voters felt that the Obama administration was not sufficiently focused on the struggling economy. Even as the Senate prepares for a second impeachment trial of Trump, Biden aides say he is determined to convey that he is focused primarily on the pocketbook and public health issues that preoccupy most Americans. Biden allies see demonstrating this to voters as key to holding their narrow majorities in the 2022 midterms. This week, he is not giving voice to the anger at Trump. He has been letting other Democrats, and some Republicans, do that. He will give another covid-related speech this afternoon. “We know how to multitask there,” Harris told NPR in an interview that aired Friday morning. “We have to multitask, which means, as with anyone, we have a lot of priorities and we need to see them through.” Biden faces pressure from his left to do even more on coronavirus relief. But the president-elect is holding out hope to woo at least 10 Senate Republicans to back his bill with a filibuster-proof majority. This could prove difficult with such a large price tag. “Incoming Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had urged Biden to consider a higher price tag than what he was initially eyeing for the proposal,” Erica Werner and Jeff Stein report. “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who will chair the Budget Committee, has said he is working to put together a massive stimulus bill that could pass under special budget rules with a simple majority vote in the Senate, instead of the 60-vote margin normally required. Biden, however, wants to try for a bipartisan majority on his first bill — although his team appears to have conducted little outreach to congressional Republicans on the plan.  “Democratic aides say that if Republicans do not appear willing to cooperate, they can shift gears quickly and move to ‘budget reconciliation,’ the procedure that would allow them to pass legislation without GOP votes. That’s how Republicans passed their big tax-cut bill … Even holding enough Democrats together to pass legislation along party lines could prove a challenge. The most conservative Senate Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), has already expressed skepticism about the need for a new round of stimulus checks, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that Biden isn’t going far enough by proposing $1,400 checks, even though Biden’s approach means most people will end up with $2,000 given the earlier batch of $600 checks.” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said additional stimulus is needed in the United States as the pandemic is “moving from bad to worse.” She characterizes this period as an “unprecedented race" between the virus and the vaccines. “We are still faced with tremendous uncertainties about the exit from the health crisis and we do have a difficult period ahead,” Georgieva told Heather Long, adding that “there is scarring” we have yet to fully understand.

"Gunboat diplomacy is out. ‘Gumbo diplomacy’ is in" - Joe Biden presidente, Linda Thomas-Greenfield at UN - James Hohmann (WP)

 

By James Hohmann with Mariana Alfaro  Email  Gunboat diplomacy is out. ‘Gumbo diplomacy’ is in, says Biden’s nominee for U.N. ambassador. WILMINGTON, Del. – To build trust, bridge disagreements and find common ground during the 35 years she served as a foreign service officer on four continents, Linda Thomas-Greenfield turned to cooking. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations grew up as an African American amid the suffocating segregation in Louisiana. The eldest of eight, her dad could neither read nor write. She was the first in her family to graduate from high school, let alone go to college. Future Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke was a classmate at Louisiana State University.  As a diplomat in Switzerland, Pakistan, Kenya, Gambia, Nigeria, Jamaica and Liberia, Thomas-Greenfield taught a lot of foreigners how to make gumbo. She would invite her local counterparts over to the American embassy show them how to make a roux. They would chop onions to go with the celery and green peppers that make up the holy trinity. “I put a Cajun spin on it. I called it ‘gumbo diplomacy,” the 68-year-old said here Tuesday after Biden introduced her and five other members of his national security team. “It was my way of breaking down barriers, connecting with people and starting to see each other on a human level. A bit of lagniappe is what we say in Louisiana!” Biden said he came to admire Thomas-Greenfield when he was vice president and she was the top State Department official in charge of Africa policy during the Ebola outbreak. He announced that he will give her Cabinet-level status to make sure she has a voice in all major foreign policy discussions. The current U.N. ambassador, Kelly Craft, is not a member of President Trump’s Cabinet. Nor is she a career diplomat. She is a GOP megadonor who is married to a billionaire coal baron, her third husband. She also happens to be friends with Elaine Chao, Trump’s Transportation secretary and the wife of the Senate majority leader, someone she has also contributed generously to over the years. Talk about a contrast. LTG – as she is known at Foggy Bottom – was part of the mass exodus of career diplomats who left the State Department during the Trump era. Speaking at the Queen theater here, she declared that she wanted to send a message to diplomats around the world who have been marginalized, disparaged and otherwise dispirited over the past years.  “America is back,” she said. “Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is back.” This comment angered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who attacked her on Fox News. “I couldn’t tell exactly from her statement,” he said, “but multilateralism for the sake of hanging out with your buddies at a cool cocktail party? That’s not in the best interest of the United States of America.” Pompeo, whose mishandling of the Ukraine imbroglio deeply soured his relationship with the foreign service, said the Trump administration has developed “coalitions that actually deliver real results and reflect the reality on the ground.” “I know some of these folks,” Pompeo told Bret Baier of Biden’s picks. “They took a very different view. They lived in a bit of a fantasy world. They led from behind. They appeased. I hope they will choose a different course.” As ballots continue to be counted, Biden’s vote total has just crossed 80 million. This is 10 million more votes than the previous record set by Barack Obama – and him – in 2008.  All six of Biden’s first round of nominees worked for the Obama administration. NBC’s Lester Holt asked the president-elect during an interview that aired morning on the “Today” show what he says to people wondering if he is trying to create a third Obama term. “This is not a third Obama term because we face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration,” he replied. “President Trump has changed the landscape. It's become America first. It's been America alone.” President-elect Joe Biden listens as his nominees speak on Tuesday at the Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

America grows more divided amid coronavirus crisis, as a distracted Trump sows discord - James Hohmann (WP)

America grows more divided amid coronavirus crisis, as a distracted Trump sows discord   By James Hohmann with Mariana AlfaroThe Washington Post, May 28, 2020  Email  More than 40 million Americans have filed claims for jobless benefits in the past 10 weeks, including 2.1 million new claims last week, according to Labor Department data released this morning. The novel coronavirus has now killed more than 100,000 people in the United States, and fresh polling from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the cascading societal fallout of the contagion: 48 percent of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household have postponed or skipped medical care; 39 percent say worry or stress related to the virus has had a negative impact on their mental health; 31 percent say they have fallen behind in paying bills or had problems affording household expenses like food or health insurance coverage; and 26 percent say they or someone in their household have skipped meals or relied on charity or government food programs since February. Another survey released last week showed that 14 percent of Americans say they know someone who has succumbed to the virus. “It’s as if every person in Edison, N.J., or Kenosha, Wis., died. It’s half the population of Salt Lake City or Grand Rapids, Mich. It’s about 20 times the number of people killed in homicides in that length of time, about twice the number who die of strokes,” Marc Fisher observes on the front page of our newspaper today. “There has been as yet no national requiem, no moment that captured the collective sense of loss, no president standing atop the ruins, rallying the nation through a bullhorn. …  “Denial has always been part of how people cope with death, and the early spread of the virus was accompanied by [President] Trump’s persistent assurances that the coronavirus wouldn’t amount to much. As late as mid-April, he said that the country’s coronavirus deaths would end up ‘substantially below the 100,000’ level, maybe as little as half that number. More recently, he has questioned the death tallies. … Most health officials agree that 100,000 is likely an undercount.” Trump tweeted this morning to acknowledge the grim milestone, but his public schedule this week contains no special commemoration, no moment of silence and no collective sharing of grief. “The president has fashioned himself as the nation’s cheerleader, without also taking on the traditional leadership role of consoler in chief,” Ashley Parker reports. Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer contrasts Trump’s handling of such a staggering loss of life to Franklin Roosevelt on D-Day in 1944, Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Barack Obama after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. “Where is the expression of sorrow that we all feel? No one is articulating that for the nation,” said Balmer, who was written for decades about American religion and the presidency. “Other presidents have simply understood that as part of their job. … For it to work, you’d have to draw on some internal reservoir of, if not piety, at least empathy. I’m not trying to be political, but I just don’t see it in the current president.” Instead, Trump is poised to sign an executive order today that could roll back the immunity that tech giants have for the content on their sites. “Trump’s directive chiefly seeks to embolden federal regulators to rethink a portion of law known as Section 230,” per Tony Romm and Josh Dawsey. “The order would also seek to channel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, which would be encouraged to probe whether tech companies’ content-moderation policies are in keeping with their pledges of neutrality. It would also require federal agencies to review their spending on social media advertising … The wide-ranging order comes two days after Twitter took the rare step of labeling one of the president’s tweets and linking viewers to news articles that fact-checked his claims. The move infuriatedTrump.” This will save no lives and create no jobs, although perhaps it will generate more billable hours for white-shoe law firms with First Amendment practices. Why does Trump care so much about not being filtered on social media? Our Fact Checker team analyzed thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube posts and ads from Trump, his campaign and its surrogates. Doing so paints a picture of the alternative reality that the president’s reelection effort is trying to create for low-information voters who don’t follow traditional news organizations. “The data revealed the backbone of a five-point strategy to tell their version of the coronavirus story: rewriting mistakes, highlighting achievements, deflecting blame, declaring victory and creating distraction,” Meg Kelly and Elyse Samuels write this morning. “All presidential campaigns try to portray their candidate in the best possible light, but what is notable about the Trump campaign is that its social media reach allows the campaign to rewrite even the most recent history.”  With no evidence, Trump has suggested five times – this month alone – that individuals and entities may have committed treason against the United States. Over the past three years, JM Rieger notes, the president has accused the following people of committing a crime punishable by death that fewer than 30 people have been prosecuted for in American history: congressional Democrats, the news media, the Justice Department under Obama, Lisa Page, Jim Comey, Andy McCabe, Adam Schiff, the anonymous author of an op-ed and the attorney for the intelligence community official who blew the whistle on his Ukraine call. Attorney General Bill Barr, who career prosecutors say has politicized the Justice Department for Trump’s benefit, continues his push to investigate the president’s investigators.The latest news is that Barr has deputized John Bash, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, to review “unmasking” requests made by Obama administration officials. This is an offshoot of the investigation that’s underway by John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, into the origins of the 2016 probe into Russian election interference, per Devlin Barrett. Meanwhile, another Trump tweet plunged Congress into chaos – and thwarted the renewal of vital authorities needed by law enforcement to keep tabs on potential spies and terrorists. An effort to pass a significant surveillance overhaul package collapsed in the 9 p.m. hour on Wednesday after the president unexpectedly urged Republicans to vote no, via Twitter of course, thereby fracturing a fragile coalition. The underlying law, called the USA Freedom Act, expired on March 15. The House had previously voted to reauthorize it, but the Senate amended the House version earlier this month to add civil liberties protections. House Democratic leaders abandoned the scheduled vote a few hours after Trump issued a veto threat on Twitter. “They have not determined when — or whether — the legislation might be revived,” Ellen Nakashima and Mike DeBonis report. “The pulling of the bill to reauthorize a number of national security powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act came a day after the president tweeted his disfavor, ostensibly on grounds that it fails to address what he calls ‘the greatest political, criminal, and subversive scandal in USA history.’ While he has never explicitly spelled out what he means, Trump has blasted the FBI for its flawed surveillance of a former campaign aide, Carter Page, and accused the government without evidence of spying on Trump Tower during the campaign. None of the now-expired authorities the bill sought to revive were at issue in Page’s surveillance.” Earlier in the day, House lawmakers cast the first remote congressional floor votes in history –over noisy objections from GOP leaders, who filed a federal lawsuit that calls proxy voting unconstitutional. “The new system of voting by proxy was pushed forward by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and fellow Democratic leaders this month as a temporary measure,” DeBonis reports. “The House passed the resolution — calling for sanctions against Chinese officials for harsh treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority in the Xinjiang region — on a 413-to-1 vote, with 69 yes votes cast by proxy. Republican leaders criticized the change as a breach of 231 years of House custom …  “The clause in Article I of the Constitution that mandates a majority quorum for the House to do business, they said, implies that such a majority must be present in Washington. Multiple legal scholars told the Rules Committee last month that the proxy voting system passed constitutional muster, noting that courts have long been reluctant to challenge the legislative branch’s ability to set its own rules. Those precedents are rooted in a pair of 1892 Supreme Court decisions, in Field v. Clark and United States v. Ballin, in which the court declined to overturn federal laws that were passed under new methods of determining a House quorum.” At a news conference in which he accused Democrats of dereliction of duty, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) refused to speak out against Trump’s baseless conspiracy theory about former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough, whom the president has linked to the death of a staff member. “I was not here with Joe Scarborough. I don’t quite know about the subject itself,” said McCarthy, ducking when asked whether he agreed with the Wall Street Journal editorial that said Trump was “debasing his office” with claims that have caused more pain for an innocent family, including the woman’s widower. Trump has also, almost single-handedly, transformed the simple act of wearing a facial covering into the latest battle in the culture wars, dividing his own party in the process. Overnight, the president again mocked his Democratic challenger for complying with guidelines released by public health officials in his own government: Some businesses around the country are now kicking outcustomers who wear face masks. A Kentucky gas station and a Los Angeles flooring store are among the businesses that are banning mask-wearers. “If we’re only allowed to be at 25 percent capacity, I want them to be 25 percent of people that aren’t p-----, that aren’t sheep,” Kevin Smith, the owner of Liberty Tree Tavern in Elgin, Tex., told Teo Armus. “Being scared all the time isn’t good for your health. It suppresses your immune system.”

Quote of the day “There’s no stigma attached to wearing a mask," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a polio survivor who is up for reelection. (Politico)  Civil unrest is a real danger. A second night of protests over the death of George Floyd turned deadly.  The protests “turned chaotic as police fired rubber bullets from a rooftop,” Holly Bailey, Brittany Shammas and Kim Bellware report. “A peaceful protest earlier in the evening descended into disarray and looting. A group of officers stood in front of a nearby precinct and tried to disrupt the crowd with flash bang grenades and rubber bullets. At times, the tear gas was so thick, it wafted down neighborhood streets where people standing in their front yards were coughing and wiping at their eyes. … One person was shot by a pawn shop owner and died at a hospital, police told the Star Tribune, as looters ransacked a Target, Foot Locker and nearby small businesses. Mayor Jacob Frey (D) requested help from the state’s National Guard as local leaders pleaded for a peaceful resolution. … The scene followed the death of 46-year-old George Floyd on Monday …  "In the suburb of Oakdale, hundreds of protesters on Wednesday gathered outside the home of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who was captured on the video with his knee on Floyd’s neck. According to the Star Tribune, red paint was poured onto Chauvin’s driveway, and the word ‘killer’ was written on the garage door. … As demands for accountability rang out from Floyd’s family, politicians on both sides of the aisle, celebrities and other high-profile figures, [the mayor] called on the county prosecutor to arrest [Chauvin]. … Yet with several high-profile, fatal police encounters in recent years — along with efforts at reform — some activists couldn’t help but feel hopeless. … Benjamin Crump, an attorney for the Floyd family, said that without public pressure, he feared authorities would try to sweep the incident under the rug. But he said that with the video, ‘you can’t deny truth that you witness with your own eyes.’” Police chiefs around the nation responded with disgust to the news of Floyd’s death, seeking to reassure their cities. Police executives, including the heads of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the National Police Foundation, as well as police chiefs in Miami, Houston and Los Angeles denounced the officer's actions. (Tom Jackman) Floyd’s death sparked protests in at least three other major cities. In Los Angeles, protesters blocked the 101 freeway and clashed with officers, leaving at least one demonstrator injured, per the Los Angeles Times. In Chicago, protesters led by Chance the Rapper peacefully organized outside the city's public safety headquarters. “I’m sure there’s some black men and women officers, and white officers in this building that woke up sick to their stomach when they saw this video as well, and we’re standing in solidarity with all those people, and we’re just letting you all know that this s---’s not going to keep happening,” the singer said, according to CBS Chicago. And in Memphis, a silent demonstration turned into separate verbal confrontations between protesters, police and counterprotesters, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported. The University of Minnesota announced that it will reduce ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. “University President Joan Gabel said in a letter to the university community that the school would no longer contract with the police department to provide additional law enforcement support for football games, concerts and other large events, or for specialized services — such as K-9 explosive-detection units — at university events,” per Valerie Strauss. Joe Biden called for a federal civil rights investigation into Floyd’s death. Biden commended the Minneapolis Police Department’s swift firing of Chauvin but said more needs to be done. “They have to be held more fully accountable,” he said. (Sean Sullivan) Trump tweeted last night that he asked the FBI to expedite its investigation. “My heart goes out to George’s family and friends,” he tweeted. “Justice will be served!” Flashback to July 2017: “Trump tells police not to worry about injuring suspects during arrests.”

De Gutenberg e Lutero a Zuckerberg e Putin - James Hohmann

How Zuckerberg’s Facebook is like Gutenberg’s printing press

A statue of Martin Luther holding his translation of the New Testament into German sits in front of the city hall in Wittenberg, Germany. (Hendrik Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images) BY JAMES HOHMANN, with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve |

THE BIG IDEA:

PALO ALTO, Calif.—When historian Niall Ferguson moved from Harvard to Stanford two years ago, he was struck by Silicon Valley’s indifference to history. The hubris he saw reminded him of what he encountered on Wall Street as he researched a book about the history of banking during the years before the financial crisis. He became convinced the technology sector was careening toward its own crisis and decided to write about it.

The crisis has finally arrived, thanks to Cambridge Analytica, conveniently timed to coincide with the publication of Ferguson’s new book on the history of social networks, from the Freemasons to Facebook. “The Square and the Tower” is a cautionary tale that challenges the conventional wisdom that growing interconnectedness is inherently good for society. “Our networked world is fundamentally vulnerable, and two-factor authentication won’t save us,” Ferguson said at the Hoover Institution, where he is a senior fellow.

Since President Trump’s victory, much has been written about parallels between the present and the rise of authoritarian leaders in the 1930s. Ferguson thinks that’s lazy analysis. For most of the 20th century, communications systems were amenable to central control. This was a fluke of the Industrial Revolution, which produced telegraphs and then telephones. These technologies had an architecture that allowed whoever controlled the hub to dominate the spokes, which led to more hierarchical power structures.

To understand the current era, Ferguson believes we need to look more at what happened after Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press. Like the Web, the use of these presses was difficult to centrally control. “At the beginning of the Reformation 501 years ago, Martin Luther thought naively that if everybody could read the Bible in the vernacular, they’d have a direct relationship with God, it would create ‘the priesthood of all believers’ and everything would be awesome,” said Ferguson.

“We’ve said the same things about the Internet,” he added. “We think that's obviously a good idea. Except it's not obviously a good idea, any more than it was in the 16th century. Because what the Europeans had was not ‘the priesthood of all believers.’ They had 130 years of escalating religious conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years War – one of the most destructive conflicts ever.”

The more he studies that period, the more echoes Ferguson sees in the 21st century. “What one can see in the 16th and 17th centuries is polarization, fake news-type stories, the world getting smaller and therefore contagion is capable of spreading much faster,” Ferguson said. “These big shifts in network structure led to revolutions against hierarchical institutions.”

Ferguson points to recent studies showing that fake news can spread faster and farther than real news when it’s especially sensational. “The crazy stuff is more likely to go viral because we're kind of interested in crazy stuff, but this is not surprising historically,” he said. “The idea that witches live amongst us and should be burned went as viral as anything that Martin Luther said ... Indeed, it turned out that witch burning was more likely to happen in places where there were more printing presses.”

In a sobering 90-minute conversation, the author said he’s driven to sleeplessness when he thinks about how some of the dynamics on social media will play out in the future. “I'm much more worried than a non-historian by what I see because history tells me that the polarization process keeps going, and it doesn't just stop at verbal violence because at a certain point that's not satisfying,” said Ferguson.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg meets with a group of entrepreneurs in St. Louis last November. (Jeff Roberson/AP)

Enter Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is worth around $64 billion as a 33-year-old because of his brilliance at creating an addictive social network that capitalized on the human desire for connection. The site was already embattled for allowing the Kremlin to use its platform to sow domestic discord. The Russians were literally buying political ads to target American voters with rubles. Now Zuckerberg is under growing scrutiny for the firm’s failure to safeguard data in the wake of damning whistleblower revelations about Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling firm which harvested the personal information of as many as 50 million users and earned $6 million from President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook broke the law or violated a 2011 settlement agreement. A bipartisan chorus in Congress is demanding that Zuckerberg testify under oath. His lobbyists are negotiating the details of an appearance. Recognizing the political risk, Facebook executives have even begun saying publicly that they’re receptive to being more heavily regulated.

“I don’t think they have thought deeply at all about the historical significance of their predicament, and I blame Mark Zuckerberg for dropping out of Harvard before he took any of my classes,” Ferguson quipped. “If he had taken my course in western civilization, he'd know that he's become a strange amalgam of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst all at once. When you look back on the experience of these figures, what's the common characteristic? They went through a phase of deep unpopularity.”

Niall Ferguson speaks Monday at the Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus. (Rod Searcey/For The Hoover Institution)

Ferguson, who like Carnegie is a native of Scotland, believes that the American government must move aggressively to rein in the power of companies like Facebook. “If we don't act, the next phase of the process will be even uglier than the current Cambridge Analytica phase -- which is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Think of how many other people have downloaded the data. The window was open for years.”

He believes Facebook should be treated under the law more like a content publisher than a technology company. Amending the Telecommunications Act of 1996 could increase their liability and make them more accountable for damaging information trafficked on their platforms. “It is an untenable state of affairs that a few private companies know more about the citizens of a country than the citizens themselves, much less the government,” said Ferguson. “And it is untenable that the companies concerned are … so easily instrumentalized by hostile foreign governments that as many people saw Russian-originated content in 2016 as voted in the presidential election. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, you cannot possibly think this is okay.”

Despite all the attention paid to the ongoing Russia probes, Ferguson thinks media coverage of the midterms needs to emphasize how vulnerable the Internet remains to manipulation by the forces of darkness. “It's as if people who work professionally in politics just want to pretend that it's still pre-2008, whereas the entire system of politics has completely changed,” he said. “Facebook advertising is the most powerful tool in politics. I don't think we're doing nearly enough to avoid another legitimacy crisis around this.”