Links for Friday August 30th

Today is an election-themed left-wing party — America, Ecuador, and France. Plus notes on AI and Google. There’s a terrible consistency to some of this messaging.

• Harris explains why she changed her stance on key issues in an exclusive CNN interview (CNN)

I recently wrote that the race Harris loses.

It’s Harris’s race to lose

Good…

Vice President Kamala Harris offered her the most extended explanation so far on why she changed some of her positions on fracking and immigration, CNN’s Dana Bash shares her values haven’t changed, but her time as vice president offered a fresh perspective on some of the country’s most pressing issues.

In the exclusive CNN broadcast During an interview, Harris also said that if elected, she would appoint a Republican to serve in her Cabinet.

And this:

Harris said her values ​​had not changed despite the shifts in her views.

“I think the most important and significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is that my values ​​have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed — and I have worked to believe — that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent issue to which we need to apply metrics that mean we hold ourselves to deadlines.”

Her campaign team later said Harris no longer supports the Green New Deal, a broad proposal to address climate change first introduced in 2019.

At a September 2019 CNN-hosted event on the climate crisis, Harris was asked whether she would push for a federal ban on fracking on her first day in office.

“There’s no question that I support a ban on fracking, and we start doing what we can do on public lands on Day 1,” Harris said at the time. By the time she became Biden’s running mate, she had backed away from that position and even cast the deciding vote to expand fracking leases, as she noted to Bash.

Transcription here.

“The climate crisis is real,” but “as president, I will not ban fracking.” Interesting. Also note the comments about continued support for Israel. That might work against you.

Filed under “Alignments Matter; It’s Still a Change Election.”

• Leaked chats reveal US prosecutor behind attack 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 country and parts of Washington, D.C., into turmoil. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had surged in the polls in snap elections in August 2023 by promising to tackle the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked to his car amid cheering crowds at a campaign event, he was attacked by a hitman. shot him dead.

The brazen murder shocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the country’s elections. Villavicencio’s supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s murder, without evidence.

Then the U.S. government got involved: first, the State Department offered a reward of millions of dollars for information leading to the perpetrators of the murder. Later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the murder.

Now, leaked private messages said to have been sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar and examined by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil reveal why the U.S. has invested so many resources into investigating the candidate’s assassination: According to the reports, 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 blamed the left for the assassination — a maneuver that successfully prevented the Correaistas from coming to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state’s dizzying decline.

The sensitive revelation is one of many from a series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian parliamentarian and an account he calls Salazar.

Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to gain full access to the explosive chat logs that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated attack on the leading left-wing political party, all with the blessing of the US.

There is a concise series of bulleted revelations after the sentence: “Among the allegations arising from the leaked messages.” An informative read-in and read-out.

Filed under “The US, Right vs. Left.”

• We are witnessing nothing less than a coup by Macron (Arnaud Bertrand, Twitter thread)

What’s happening in France is a bit complicated, but not all that much. A coalition of left-wing parties (NPF in English, NFP in French) won a majority of seats in the new Assembly, but the split between the left, center-right and far-right parties is enough that if Macron and the far right wanted to, they could block the left.

The distribution of Assembly seats is as follows: 31% for NPF, 26% for Macron’s centre-right party and 25% for the far-right RN and allies. The picture looks like this:

Please note that all of the electoral losses are suffered by the centre-right (Macron’s Ensemble, the Gaullist Republicans), and that all of the profits are by those further left and right. The electorate rejected centrism.

Yet Macron uses his power as president to refuse to allow the NPF, the national winner of the majority, to form a new government, in a breach of long French tradition. In effect, he refuses to surrender. (Sound familiar?) His excuse is that an NPF-led government would fall immediately, because (ready?) his own party would join the far-right to overthrow it.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Filed under “The ‘center’, aligned right versus left.”