Gunman in Parkland school shooting pleads guilty to murdering 17 people

Judge to Parkland shooter on guilty plea: ‘You will not be able to change your mind’
Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer asked Nikolas Cruz on Oct. 20 if he understood that his decision
would be irreversible as he plead guilty to killing 17 people. (Reuters)
By Derek Hawkins and Mark Berman
Today at 2:44 p.m. EDT
Nikolas Cruz, the former student who killed 17 people at a South Florida high school in 2018,
pleaded guilty Wednesday to 17 counts each of murder and attempted murder, paving the way
for a jury to decide whether to sentence him to death or life without parole.
Appearing in Broward County court in a mask and dark-colored shirt, Cruz listened as Circuit
Judge Elizabeth Scherer guided him through the charges and potential punishment for the
massacre that killed 14 students and three faculty members.
“These are capital felonies, and they’re punishable one of two ways, either life in prison or the
death penalty,” Scherer said. “Do you understand that you are facing a minimum, best-case
scenario of life in prison?”
“Yes ma’am,” Cruz responded.
Before accepting the plea, Scherer emphasized that Cruz’s decision would be irreversible, even if
he ended up on death row. “You will not be able to change your mind,” she told him.
The judge then read the 34 charges and asked how he wished to plead. “Guilty,” Cruz said after
each.
The plea by Cruz, 23, came more than 3½ years after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School in Parkland. His change of plea from not guilty was an abrupt reversal in the case.
His attorneys had long acknowledged Cruz’s guilt but said he would formally plead guilty only if
prosecutors agreed to let him be sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors had refused, calling this
the type of case that demanded the death penalty.

The lives lost in the Parkland shooting

Cruz spoke in the courtroom Wednesday morning, making his first public remarks about the
massacre since he was arrested. “I am very sorry for what I did,” he said during a brief, rambling
statement. “I have to live with it every day. … It brings me nightmares, and I can’t live with
myself.” Cruz also said he wanted the victims and their relatives to decide his sentence.

Debbie Hixon, left, and Annika Dworet embrace during a court recess following Cruz's guilty
plea. (Amy Beth Bennett/pool/EPA/Shutterstock)
The parents of several of the victims attended the hearing via Zoom, and other relatives were in
the courtroom. Some shook their heads as Cruz spoke.

Watching the hearing was painful, said Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa Alhadeff, a 14-
year-old freshman at Douglas, was killed in the attack.

Alhadeff said it was difficult to hear the attacker speak and to listen to prosecutors recounting in
painful detail what happened Feb. 14, 2018.

“It was really challenging and traumatic,” said Alhadeff, who became a school safety proponent
and was elected to the Broward school board after the massacre. “But I know it's necessary in
this process, for us to ultimately get to the penalty phase.”

Alhadeff said her family wants Cruz to receive the death penalty. She watched the hearing
Wednesday on Zoom, along with other victims’ relatives, some of whom appeared visibly
anguished during the proceedings.

“I’m lucky I was not there” in person, she said after it concluded. “It was very hard to control
myself once I heard the shooter speak. I just got really enraged and upset.”

Ahead of the hearing, Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed by Cruz,
said he planned to spend the day working on a fundraiser in her name. “Today, the murderer will
plead guilty. The news will be about that, we will focus on Jaime’s life,” he tweeted Wednesday.

Other parents said Cruz’s plea of guilty offered a small measure of relief.
“We’re all okay with the idea that this will definitely move forward, something that has been
very slow,” Manuel Oliver, the father of 17-year-old victim Joaquin Oliver, told WSVN 7News
before Cruz appeared in court.

“Joaquin is not here, but we are still here,” Manuel said. “So we’ve got to do things for Joaquin,
with Joaquin, along with Joaquin. We can save tons of kids.”

Cruz’s plea suggests that his attorneys made “a tactical decision” after looking at the facts and
evaluating potential defenses, said George Brauchler, who led the prosecution of the gunman
who killed 12 people inside an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012.

The Aurora prosecution, like Parkland, marked an unusual case in which a mass killer survived
to stand trial. Jurors in the Aurora case convicted the gunman in 2015 but said he should be
sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

“The only potential out for a mass murderer is mental health,” Brauchler said in a telephone
interview about the Parkland case.

Cruz’s defense team probably decided a mental health argument would not work for them,
Brauchler said. With his guilty pleas, they are instead able to stand in front of the jury to say
their client “did something evil” and owned that, hoping it might sway them to spare him a death
sentence, Brauchler said.

A day before Cruz’s plea, the families of those whom Cruz killed and dozens whom he injured or
traumatized reached a $25 million settlement with the school district, according to a lawyer
representing some of the families.

Attorney David Brill said the largest chunk of the settlement with Broward County Public
Schools would be split among the families of the 14 students and three faculty members killed.
The agreement settles 52 of the 53 negligence lawsuits filed against the school district over the
shooting. The settlement includes 16 of the 17 people injured in the attack and 19 suffering from
PTSD or other conditions years later.

Tony Montalto wears a button bearing an image of his daughter Gina Montalto, 14, who was
killed by Cruz. (Amy Beth Bennett/Pool/South Florida Sun Sentinel/AP)
The 2018 shooting devastated the community, horrified the country and spurred a nationwide,
student-led push for greater gun-control legislation. It also led to other fallout for pivotal figures
in the case, including then-Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who was forced out of office,
and Scot Peterson, at the time a sheriff’s deputy and school resource officer who did not confront
the attacker and was later charged with neglect.

A state commission investigating the shooting found numerous lapses on the part of the Parkland
high school as well as responding law enforcement officers, and local and federal authorities
have been criticized as failing to act on numerous red flags related to Cruz, including explicit
warnings that he could carry out a gun attack at a school.

Cruz, then 19, was arrested after the shooting and indicted on 17 counts of murder in the first
degree and 17 counts of attempted murder. With his guilt effectively unchallenged, the main
question surrounding the pending trial was whether jurors would think he should be sentenced to
death.

Death penalty trials have two phases. The first determines whether the person on trial is found
guilty; if they are, a second phase decides what penalty they face.Cruz’s plea now means the trial
will more quickly reach the penalty phase. For Cruz to be sentenced to death, the jurors must be
unanimous in their vote for death.

Despite the defense’s previous contention that he would plead guilty only in exchange for a life
sentence, prosecutors said last week that they had not reached any deal in the case and that the
matter still would proceed to the penalty phase.
Before the shooting, Cruz had repeatedly drawn the attention of local, state and federal officials.
But the numerous calls to authorities, warnings about him as a potential school shooter and
recognition that he planned to buy a gun did not prevent the attack, during which terrified
children hid under desks and were gunned down inside classrooms.

Cruz last week also changed his plea in a separate case. He was charged about nine months after
the school shooting with assaulting a law enforcement officer working as a guard in his jail. Jury
selection had begun this month, but on Friday, Cruz reversed course and pleaded guilty on all
counts in that case. Cruz and his defense attorney said he was competent when entering the plea.

After the massacre, Marjory Stoneman Douglas students organized the March for Our Lives
demonstration in Washington, which drew hundreds of thousands of people from around the
country demanding action against gun violence. The rally in March 2018 gave rise to a student-
led gun-violence-prevention group of the same name with hundreds of chapters around the
country.

Timothy Bella contributed to this report.

References:
Article title
Gunman in Parkland school shooting pleads guilty to murdering 17 people
URL
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/20/nikolas-cruz-guilty-plea-parkland/
Website title
The Washington Post
Date accessed
October 20, 2021
Date published
October 20, 2021
Opinion: Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin take it to the wire in Virginia

Virginia gubernatorial candidates Democrat Terry McAuliffe, left, and Republican Glenn
Youngkin at the Virginia FREE leadership luncheon in McLean on Sept. 1. (Cliff
Owen/Associated Press)
Opinion by Norman Leahy
Contributing columnist
Today at 11:25 a.m. EDT

As the 2021 Virginia political season slouches toward its end, the nervous questions and hand-
wringing about who will win and what it all means fill the air.

In other words, it’s a typical late October in a statewide election year. But let’s dive in to the
speculative swamp before the water gets too cold.

Who will win the state’s top three races and control of the House of Delegates? Voting and
population trends generically favor Democrats, just as they have for most of the 21st century.
Remember: Republicans have elected just one governor in this century: Robert F. McDonnell in
2009. The party has been shut out of statewide office since the 2013 elections and last elected a
Republican U.S. senator in 2002: the late John W. Warner. The GOP’s collapse was complete in
2019, when an anti-Trump wave finished the job and swept Republicans from control of the
General Assembly.

Democrats benefited up and down the ballot thanks to former president Donald Trump. But their
gains were building long before Trump. There’s no reason to believe the trends that made
Democrats so dominant in statewide elections this century have suddenly ended in 2021.

That does not mean Democrats are invincible in statewide races. In their gubernatorial nominee,
Terry McAuliffe, Democrats chose a known quantity. That’s great in a primary, where money,
personnel and message advantage what is effectively a reelection. But it’s a problematic sell in a
Virginia general election.

The only other ex-governor to seek a second term was Mills Godwin. The Democrat-turned-
Republican ran against Henry Howell in 1973 and won by just 15,000 votes out of more than 1
million cast. Want a second term? Great. Just don’t count on voters being eager to go along.

McAuliffe has yet to show he’s a crowd favorite in a general election. Yes, he won in 2013,
defeating Ken Cuccinelli II 47.5-45.2 percent, with Libertarian nominee Robert Sarvis winning
6.5 percent of the vote. As The Post’s Marc Fisher wrote, the 2013 contest featured “acidly
negative campaigns by both candidates.”

And the McAuliffe playbook now looks a great deal like the McAuliffe playbook then, when
McAuliffe painted Cuccinelli as “driven by faith and political philosophy to absolutist positions
against abortion rights, same-sex marriage, higher taxes and a larger government role in health
care.”

That won the party faithful, just as the relentless linkage of current GOP nominee Glenn
Youngkin to Trump will on Nov. 2. Will it be enough?

Recent trends and voting patterns give McAuliffe the edge over Youngkin. But voters are going
to make McAuliffe sweat this one out — and voters are reserving the right to reject him in favor
of the new guy as a way to shake things up in Richmond.

What does this election mean for 2022 and beyond? If McAuliffe outperforms everything —
polling, expectation, his own electoral history — and puts up Ralph Northam-like numbers on
Glenn Youngkin, that would mean Democrats have retained trifecta control in Richmond. The
GOP would have to go back to the drawing board, utterly bereft of answers.

A 2013-like McAuliffe win? That would be a Pyrrhic victory, with the Democratic ticket
struggling (see Attorney General Mark R. Herring’s 2013 nail-biter race with Mark Obenshain),
with Republicans clawing back some of the suburban House of Delegates districts they lost in
2017.

Should Youngkin win, the immediate headlines will be that the GOP is back and national
Democrats had best start updating their resumes.

That’s plausible if Republicans also win races down the ballot — for lieutenant governor,
attorney general and the House of Delegates. If it’s Youngkin alone in the winner’s circle, then
the story will be how Democrats blew a race they should have won and gave the Virginia GOP a
lifeline right when it looked like it was done for good.
References:
Article title
Opinion | Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin take it to the wire in Virginia
URL
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/20/terry-mcauliffe-glenn-youngkin-
take-it-wire-virginia/
Website title
The Washington Post
Date accessed
October 20, 2021
Date published
October 20, 2021
right wing. Where might it go? What could it mean for the future of this nation and the future of
labor?

Well, today we talk with Alex Han. He spent 20 years as a labor organizer, as a former union
leader, and currently, he’s the Bargaining for the Common Good fellow at the Kalmanovitz
Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University.

Well, Alex, it’s great to have you with us. Welcome, glad you could join us.

Alex Han: All right. Thanks for having me, Marc.

Marc Steiner: Besides the introduction, this is a way of quick background for people
listening to us right now. You’ve been involved in the union movement for a long time, and with
different unions. Talk a bit about yourself for just a second.

Alex Han: Yeah. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years as an organizer, a staffer, and officer of
the union. The bulk of it is with SEIU Healthcare, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas. My
former local union, which I served as a vice president for many years, but have organized in a lot
of different industries all across the country, and continue to do work with unions and groups of
workers that are organizing and fighting. Right now, through my role with Bargaining for the
Common Good Network, really working with unions and community organizations to figure out
strategies to, just like the name says, to bargain for the common good. To talk about both
campaigns that can, I think, take the leverage that unions have, particularly in contract
negotiations, and win demands that are much broader than just for their membership.

Marc Steiner: So when you look at this moment we’re in, John Deere and Kellogg’s on strike,
and steel workers in West Virginia are on strike, and Alabama coal miners, nurses in
Massachusetts, whiskey makers in Kentucky, bus drivers in Reno, and the stuff that’s happening
now with the vote in the UAW to directly elect their leaders. There’s a lot that is tumbling out at
the moment, and some really important labor struggles at the moment. What do you think we’re
in the midst of? I mean, I know some people have said part of this is COVID-driven. I read that
this morning again, and it’s the workers leaving their jobs. But tell me what you think is going
on? What’s your analysis about why this eruption, at this moment?

Alex Han: I mean, I think there’s a confluence, there’s a convergence of a lot of different
factors. And I think part of the question in front of us is whether this is a moment, or whether this
is in some ways a return to the amount of labor unrest that has existed at different points over the
last 40 or 50 years. One of our challenges is that collectively, our memories are so short, and so
we think of the last 10, 15, 20 years, and those have really been the nadir of big labor action and
labor unrest around the country.

watch and help support workers develop new organizations. Things like an effort at Amazon
warehouses around the country called Amazonians United, a very bottom-up workers in those
warehouses developing committees in the shop.

And I think that none of us, we understand that none of the organizations or institutions are ideas
we have right now is sufficient. If they were, then we would be in a more powerful position right
now. But a lot of this is, how do we orient ourselves to a moment where big growth is possible?
Number one, millions of people are willing to take action together at the same time.

strikes, the formation of the UAW, but there were decades of different organizing attempts
before that, that failed. There was a [cadre] leadership developed. There were people who were
fired. There was all sorts of different attempts to organize from different perspectives, from a
trade union craft union perspective. There was organizing that was happening with a much more
political context, a sharper socialist context. And I think all of those efforts helped lead up to
building an ability and a resonance with workers to be able to advance that organizing in ’36, ’37
and beyond.

And so I think Amazon and a lot of these giants are no different. There are a lot of different
efforts, and I don’t think that we can close the door to any of those efforts as long as they’re not
working against each other. So you’ve had these broad community fights against the relocation
of their headquarters, or the HQ2, several years ago. One of those big victories was in New York
City, where community organizations, elected officials, some of labor, were able to band
together to prevent Amazon’s HQ2 from landing with an enormous amount of taxpayer funding
in New York City. So you have a lot of these different efforts. And I looked at Bessemer. Hey,
look, I’m an organizer who has spent a lot of time working with workers who want to organize.
It’s an extremely difficult task to organize a union in the workplace—

Marc Steiner: It is.

Alex Han: …Even in the best of circumstances. From my perspective, as I watched that
campaign, in support of it in various different ways, are there critiques that you can lay on the
campaign? Of course, there are. There are critiques I can make of anything that I’ve ever worked
on. But you had a group of workers and a union that was really rooted in that community that
were willing to take a big risk, and understand that they hadn’t figured out how to do it. I think
one of the phrases I heard at the time was they felt like they’d grabbed a tiger by the tail, and part
of that is you have to play out the string. You have to give workers who are involved and
engaged the agency to push that, and I actually give those workers credit in this moment for
helping to build a path toward where the John Deere workers are willing to walk off the job now,
where you had this big push and we’ll see what happens with the theatrical and stage employees,
around that potential Hollywood strike and that contract.

But I give those Bessemer workers a ton of credit for being willing to stand up and take a risk.
That also was in the belly of the beast in the most… There was a New York Times live ticker
during the vote count of that Amazon Bessemer union vote, and to have that amount of media
attention laid onto the union organizing effort. And really starkly, I think, laying out the
challenges of that effort I think are really, really important in the longer term.

Marc Steiner: So let me stay with Bessemer for just a minute. I mean, it was in Alabama.
From the Times to the book Hammer and Hoe, that I’m sure you know.

Alex Han: Yes.

Marc Steiner: And other books about organizing in Alabama, it’s not the easiest place for a
union to organize.

Alex Han: No.

Marc Steiner: It’s one of the hardest places in the country. And the vote was lopsided in
terms of killing the union effort at that moment, right.

Alex Han: Right.

Marc Steiner: So, A, I’m just curious, very quickly, what do you think happened, and what
do you learn from that? How do you build on that to make a stronger union effort in organizing
workers at Amazon, no matter where they are?

Alex Han: Well, I mean, one thing that you saw, and I can’t remember exactly the number
of ballots that Amazon challenged. But I will say that while the result looked lopsided from a
pure numbers perspective, I believe they had challenged something on the order of 700 or 800
ballots. When the employer challenges a ballot, you can be pretty sure that that was going to be a
vote for the union. And so the actual numbers, given who voted, are going to be significantly still
lopsided but significantly less so than what was reported on. So that’s one of those… In any
election you look at the employer’s challenge ballots. I mean, what it says for that effort inside
that warehouse, I can’t say, and part of that is because of the enormous turnover that happens. I
can say that I think it surfaced a level of organizing at Amazon warehouses around the country
that was not visible. It allowed for linkages for others in the movement to try to figure out what
was going on with Amazon organizing in their area, and I think it’s just leveled up and put a
bigger spotlight on that.

I think Alabama is… And I think this is also somewhat of a misconception in progressive circles.
This is the question of the South is an enormously complicated question that can never be
reduced to, this is a place that’s hard for this and this is a place that’s easy for this. It works in so
many dimensions. Because I think Alabama has also been historically the site of an enormous
amount of labor militancy, and enormous amount of Black leadership expressed [through] labor
militancy. It has been, at various points, a stronghold of the steel workers. It has been a
stronghold of textile unionization, and really a battleground in a lot of those big fights, really
until relatively recently. So, it’s an area that is where I think that possibility exists, that history
exists, of really fighting militant unionism. I think in a different way, frankly, maybe than some
non-right to work states where the tradition of unionism has veered much more clearly into
complacency, and developing the status quo that leadership thinks works. [crosstalk ]

Marc Steiner: So do you think a cohesive national movement can be built, and do you think
that’s important to have that built?

Alex Han: Around Amazon specifically or –

Marc Steiner: Around Amazon or any other union movement in general but I was just talking
about Amazon.

Alex Han: I think so.

Marc Steiner: Yeah.

Alex Han: Yeah. I think so, and I think it requires workers who are in motion and in action
and building power to be at the center of building that, which is really what industrial unionism
was. It was what the rise of public sector unionism during and in the wake of the civil rights
movement. Those were expressions of a set of workers who really needed to take the lead.

So when we look at the labor movement, we say, the labor movement should do this or that, a lot
of those arguments, there’s a lot of truth. The labor movement should be thinking about X, Y or
Z. But really I think one of the things we need to be thinking about is, how do we grow the labor
movement? Because those people who are engaged in militant fights for organizing, who are
engaged in those struggles, need to be in a position to take leadership in these organizations or in
these national efforts to really shift the direction that they’re in. I say that having, again, been an
organizer for a couple of decades. And in a lot of ways understanding very clearly what I don’t
know, and being willing to take the leadership and the lead of people who are in motion and in
those fights and living them day-to-day.

Marc Steiner: And inside the labor unions as well. I mean, you’re seeing, whether it’s the vote
taking place in the UAW, allowing for direct vote by workers to elect leadership, or the battle
inside the Teamsters at the moment with these two battling slates. With a very progressive left
slate that has a lot of power, battling the old Hoffa slate I think for leadership of the Teamsters.
These are also critical to what happens next.

Alex Han: They are, and I think the Teamsters example is so interesting because I think to a
degree you also have… You’ve moved the Overton window inside that union has shifted, so that
even what people think of as the old guard slate, they have to at the very least be running a
message in the narrative that says, we want to go after Amazon. We want to do X, Y and Z, all of
these things too. And I think that those things show where that conversation has moved.

We’ll see how the UAW referendum turns out. A lot of challenges ahead for the UAW,
regardless. One thing I would say is, how does that question of democracy articulate itself in the
need to organize manufacturers of electric vehicles? Which I think the UAW has attempted to
some degree, but no success thus far.

And so, I think it’s interesting to think of that Teamsters election. It’s certainly not dominated by
Amazon, but Amazon’s an undercurrent for so many Teamster members over those campaigns.
And it would be interesting for me, hopefully with a successful conclusion of this strike at John
Deere in the UAW. It would be really interesting to see that internal debate played out through
the lens of, how are we going to organize in this industry which we know is growing, this piece
of the industry that’s growing? What’s the competing vision to give agency and leadership to
workers in the electric vehicle industry?

Marc Steiner: So I’m curious where you think this moment we see ourselves in with 4.7
million workers leaving their jobs, with, I think it was, the last I read, 169 strikes that have
happened this year, with this, some very spontaneous, everything from IATSE in Hollywood to
the stuff in Bessemer. What do you think this is indicative of? Where do you think this is
leading, in terms of unions that really have to build their power? Which in many ways, as you
know, will be built on organizing and the ability to organize.

Alex Han: Right. Right.

Marc Steiner: So talk about where you think this moment is and what is actually happening
now? I know you’re not prescient. You have no crystal ball. But you’ve been in this business,
you’ve been doing this a long time, so what do you think?

Alex Han: Yeah, I mean, I’m hopeful that what it’s leading toward is again a leveling up of
the amount of day-to-day labor unrest that exists right now. A lot of people did a lot of work in
my old union, the SEIU Healthcare, essentially to come to a place several years ago that said,
we’re always going to have a strike on the table as an option. When we want to go talk about our
bargaining or about this fight that’s happening in any place in the healthcare industry and the
childcare industry, we’re going to start that conversation with the knowledge that a strike is on
the table as one of our weapons. Which is something that, frankly, in a lot of labor had been set
aside for a long time. There are things that we need to relearn and muscle memory that we need
to learn.

So one thing I’m hopeful of is that we’ve again, leveled up the level of strike activity and
[sharper] activity around the boss. But I do think some of it, again, it all goes to… And I say this
about our work in Bargaining for the Common Good too. If we’re not leading to organizing for
the common good, bargaining for the 9% or 10% of people who are left in unions, and that
number may fluctuate. That’s a dead end regardless of how skilled that bargaining is, regardless
of how big the fight is. If we don’t have the ability to take those fights and express them into new
industries and new organizing, then I’m not sure where it leads us. I would actually, and if you’ll
allow me the liberty to go back to 2012 again –

References:
Article title
What could this moment of labor strife become if workers get more organized?
URL
https://therealnews.com/what-could-this-moment-of-labor-strife-become-if-workers-get-
more-organized
Website title
The Real News Network
Date accessed
October 20, 2021
Date published
October 20, 2021

FACEBOOK’S GLOBAL OUTAGE IS THE REAL SUPPLY CHAIN THREAT

While consumers are freaking out about disruptions in the global supply chain, last week’s
outage at Facebook revealed the global population’s vulnerable dependence on a digital
infrastructure system that is dominated by private companies.
BY MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ
OCTOBER 14, 2021
Stock photo via Getty Images

Facebook had a very bad week last week. First, Frances Haugen, a former product manager at
Facebook assigned to the Civic Integrity group, blew the whistle on her past employer, leaking a
cache of internal company documents and testifying in front of Congress that the social media
giant is knowingly and repeatedly “paying for its profits with our safety.” Then things got
significantly worse when Facebook basically disappeared from the internet for 6 hours on
Monday, Oct. 4. This was the biggest outage Facebook had experienced since a 2019 crash that
took the site offline for over 24 hours. Facebook has said that last week’s outage was unrelated to
news about the leaks and that it was the result of a routine software update gone horribly wrong.
The outage, however, affected billions of people who depend on the suite of applications and
services owned by Facebook that went offline, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

While Facebook is back online and the news cycle has largely moved on, it’s important to take a
step back and examine what these outages tell us about the precariously assembled infrastructure
of our digital world, our global dependence on that infrastructure, and the implications of having
that infrastructure controlled by private, incredibly powerful, and voraciously profit-seeking
entities like Facebook. In this interview for The Real News podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief
Maximillian Alvarez speaks with writer, commentator, and legal services attorney Sparky
Abraham, who wrote a 2020 article for Current Affairs titled “A Series of Tubes: Reclaiming the
Physical Internet.”

TRANSCRIPT
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome, everyone, to The Real News Network podcast. My name is
Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you
all with us. So, let’s take a few minutes to talk about Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good, very
bad week. So last week, things started off pretty bad for the social media giant when Frances
Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook who was assigned to the civic integrity group,
publicly revealed her identity and blew the whistle on her past employer.

As Alex Cranz and Russell Brandom at the Verge reported, “The whistleblower behind the leak
of an enormous cache of Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal, Frances Haugen, went
public on 60 Minutes on Sunday, revealing more of the inner workings of the most powerful
social media platform in the world. Revealing her identity on national television, Haugen
described a company so committed to product optimization that it embraced algorithms that
amplify hate speech. ‘It’s paying for its profits with our safety,’ Haugen told 60 Minutes host
Scott Pelley.
According to a since-deleted LinkedIn profile, Haugen was a product manager at Facebook
assigned to the civic integrity group. She chose to leave the company in 2021 after the dissolving
of the group. She said she didn’t ‘trust that they’re willing to invest what actually needs to be
invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’’” All right. So then Haugen testified in front
of Congress about the content and the implications of the information that she leaked to the press
and to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now, in case you haven’t read it, here’s the opening to the blockbuster report based on Haugen’s
leaks that has been published by the Wall Street Journal. It’s actually a series of reports, but this
is the opening paragraphs on the main page of the Wall Street Journal. “Facebook, Inc. knows in
acute detail that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm often in ways only the
company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series based on a
review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions,
and drafts of presentations to senior management.

Time and again, the documents show Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill
effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges, and numerous media
exposés, the company didn’t fix them. The documents offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far
of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company up to the chief executive
himself.”

So, that’s how Facebook’s week started. Then things got significantly worse when Facebook
basically disappeared from the internet for six hours on Monday, Oct. 4.

This was the biggest outage Facebook had experienced since a 2019 crash that took the site
offline for over 24 hours. Facebook has said that last week’s outage was unrelated to news about
the leaks, and that it was the result of a routine software update gone horribly wrong. Frankly, I
don’t have the expertise to walk us through the specifics of that update and what went wrong and
what it took to fix it, but we will be posting some explanatory sources in the show notes for
listeners.
For today’s special conversation, though, we thought it was more important to take a step back,
zoom out, and talk about what these outages really tell us about the precariously assembled
infrastructure of our digital world, our global dependence on that infrastructure, and the
implications of having that infrastructure by and large controlled by private, incredibly powerful,
and voraciously profit-seeking entities like Facebook. And I could not think of a better person to
help us navigate all of this than the brilliant Sparky Abraham.

Now, by day, Sparky is a legal services attorney in California, and he does exceedingly
important work providing those legal services to working people who desperately need them. But
Sparky is also an amazing writer and commentator. Listeners probably know of Sparky’s great
past work at the magazine Current Affairs, including a fantastic 2020 article called “A Series of
Tubes: Reclaiming the Physical Internet.” And I will never get over how much I love that title,
but anyway, I’m honored to be joined on The Real News Network podcast by the one and only
Sparky Abraham. Sparky, thank you so much for joining us today, man.

Sparky Abraham: Thanks, Max. That was far too kind, but good to be here.

Maximillian Alvarez: I’m going to make it a running tradition to embarrass the hell out of all
of our great guests, but–

Sparky Abraham: Consider yourself having succeeded.

Maximillian Alvarez: Okay, good. Well, I’m not blowing smoke up anyone’s ass, right? If
you haven’t read that article by Sparky, you definitely should. I think it is something that we’re
really going to dig into here. I think it was one of the first things I thought of when all this news
about Facebook’s horrible week started coming out. And I think it’s important to also add, as we
get rolling here, that it’s important to start off from the fact that this is much bigger than I think a
lot of people, especially in North America, are thinking about.

Just to throw in one more quote from Yulia Talmazan at NBC News, Yulia writes: “More than 2
billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp, while Facebook has more than 3 billion users
worldwide, according to WhatsApp and Facebook (Facebook owns WhatsApp. It also owns
Facebook, Facebook messenger, and Instagram). A recent GlobalWebIndex report on worldwide
social media users showed that in countries like Kenya, Argentina, Malaysia, Columbia, and
Brazil, more than 90% of those aged 16 to 54 used WhatsApp.” So, before we get really into the
meat and bones here, Sparky, I’m curious what your sort of initial impressions were last week as
this was all unfolding?

Sparky Abraham: I think that my initial initial impression, before I really thought of it, was a
little bit of humor. It was kind of funny. I think that upon some further reflection and if folks
haven’t seen, Max, your appearance on, was it, Rising on the Hill, talking particularly about sort
of this WhatsApp issue, I think that it does turn the humor into a sort of horror. On the one hand,
I think that a lot of people around our age are mostly off of Facebook as a social media platform
at this point, or many are at least in…

Sparky Abraham: It’s kind of got its own characteristics, but it really is hard to overstate the
extent to which WhatsApp in particular is basically a central communications infrastructure now
in a lot of the world. And so, I think that Facebook going down has consequences for people and
things within the United States, but it’s very easy to adopt a sort of myopic view of how big of a
deal it is and how many people are dependent in how many areas of their lives on this one
particular company.

Maximillian Alvarez: Right. And I guess we’ll link to that as well in the show notes, but for
folks who didn’t see, I went back on the show Rising over at the Hill last week, and the
Facebook outage was one of the subjects of one of our two panels. And that panel got pretty
heated, because I eventually blew my fuse when it was clear that the discussion was really
getting incredibly myopic as we were talking about, oh, what are Frances Haugen’s political or
financial motivations for making this leak? What is she trying to get out of it? And then even one
of the co-panelists had the audacity to say, oh, Facebook went down for a few hours. Was
anyone actually negatively impacted by that?
That’s when I blew my gasket because I was like, we are talking about a suite of services that
aren’t just the kind of Facebook social media platform that we’re all kind of accustomed to here
in the United States. But we are talking about a company whose services and applications have
such a deep reach into the basic infrastructure of social and economic life in countries around the
world. Like I just said, the users of Facebook is in the billions. And we can’t talk about this just
as a United States or North American problem and kind of slough it off as like, oh yeah, our
crazy uncles couldn’t post some conspiracy theory bullshit for six hours, how bad is that?

But when you’re talking about doctors in India saying that they couldn’t communicate with their
staff because they use WhatsApp, or business owners saying that they couldn’t process anything
because in a lot of countries, Facebook is the internet, or WhatsApp is the primary mode of
communication. It really did signal this outage, and the 2019 outage, really did signal how deep
Facebook’s control over that essential infrastructure across the globe really is.

And this is again why I really wanted to bring you on Sparky, because I think that in order for us
to wrap our heads around that central question, of, like, what that infrastructure is, what
Facebook and other private companies’ control over it means for our daily lives, we have to first
stop and think about infrastructure as such. And this is what you do so beautifully in that article
that we mentioned, “A Series of Tubes.” So I was wondering if we could start there and try to
give listeners, I guess, a sense of the enormity of this infrastructure’s place in our lives. Like
what it actually is, and how deep Facebook’s tentacles are in it.

Sparky Abraham: Yeah. So, I think there are a number of different ways to talk about this,
and a number of different places to start. I do think that oftentimes when you hear these
discussions, they tend to focus on a few important, but not whole-picture, aspects. So people,
when they talk and think about the internet, they often think of their experiences of the internet.
So they’re often talking about the user-facing features and websites, how they function, what
their features are. Or maybe sometimes they think in terms of the major companies that they
know and have interactions with. And so that’s going to be Facebook, Google, Netflix.
It might also be companies that provide their home internet service, internet service providers
like Comcast or Verizon. I think what all of that misses is the sort of vast universe of companies
and processes and actual physical things that exist beneath, within, between, all of those
interacting pieces. When you are looking at Facebook, you are not just interacting with
Facebook.

You are interacting with a myriad of different pieces of technology, and different companies, and
different owners that all run between you and wherever the information that you’re accessing
lives, like, physically lives. And that itself is a worldwide, almost exclusively privately owned,
network that has become completely essential to the way that we live our lives, but more or less
has completely divorced itself from the ability to be controlled or regulated or democratic in any
meaningful sense.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is where the “Series of Tubes” line comes from, right?

Sparky Abraham: Yeah. I mean, just to kind of put a point on this. So, Max, you’re in
Baltimore right now?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes, sir.

Sparky Abraham: Okay. So you’re in Baltimore and I’m in Oxnard in California, and we’re
talking to each other. And the thing that allows us to talk to each other is that there is actually,
like, a physical wire that runs from my house out to a telephone pole outside the back of my
house. And then that wire runs to, basically, a switching box down the block, and that switching
box has wires that run to a switching center. And then those wires run to a larger switching
center, and then those run to another large switching center. And there’s a continuous string that
leapfrogs from place to place all the way across the country, and ends with a wire that runs to
your house, to where you live.

And so what we’re talking about when we’re talking about interacting on Facebook is kind of
this very surface layer of the appearance of the information that we’re sending back and forth as
it manifests on our screen. And that’s obviously very important. There have to be ways for me
and you to be able to interact with our devices, such that we’re sending information to each other
that’s readable. It’s also the case that there’s a lot more going on there, and so many places
where something can go wrong.

And so many places where it often does go wrong, and [these are] very delicate systems, and
companies that own these things go bankrupt and have problems and they lobby for legislation,
and it’s all a very large, very contingent system that I think we take for granted in ways that are
really weird. It’s weird the extent to which we take Facebook for granted such that somebody
can go on TV and be like, oh, Facebook goes down, what’s the big deal, and like you said,
meanwhile, is actually potentially causing people to die, or to lose their livelihoods in other
places that we just happen to be able to not think about.

Maximillian Alvarez: And I mean, that’s why I really wanted to bring you on and sort of
unpack this. Because I think that in so many ways, the task at hand of first kind of understanding
the scope, and scale, and intricacy of that infrastructure, it’s such a large task. Because it is by
definition the thing that is designed to be out of sight. It is designed to be the thing that we don’t
think about, all of that physical infrastructure that makes the appearance of seamless
communication and commerce like you were just describing.

The fact that we’re talking here, you sound clear as day, but you are thousands of miles away,
that seamlessness is part of the product. That’s what it’s designed to do and we don’t think about
all of those cables, all of those switch boxes, all of those servers, all of that energy and genuine
physical material, to say nothing of the labor that is involved in keeping that thing running.

And then we also scale that out to think about not only satellites in space, but the fact that this is
a global network. It’s almost as hard to compute as the size of the universe itself. But every now
and then we get these little reminders, some more ridiculous than others. The one I’m thinking
about, which I was reminded of by our great managing editor, Jocelyn Dombroski, is that–
Sparky Abraham: Tell me you are going to the sharks. Tell me you are going to talk on the
sharks.

Maximillian Alvarez: I’m going to the sharks.

Sparky Abraham: Yes!

Maximillian Alvarez: In 2014, we had sharks attacking the internet. There are fiber optic
cables between the United States and Europe, the United States and Japan, that sharks were
literally biting and attacking on the ocean floor. And it seemed like such a dumb problem to have
where we were like, look at the human race at the pinnacle of civilization, we have created the
means for communicating instantaneously across the globe on these sleek computers and
smartphones. Oh shit, here comes a shark biting the very thing that makes that happen. What do
we do? But we got that reminder of actually how fragile and interconnected that the physical
infrastructure is, and how dependent we are upon it.

Sparky Abraham: Yeah. Let me ask you, so, one thing that’s got me thinking about is the
little that I know about the history of electricity generation in the United States. And one of the
things that I’ve been reading about is the way that electricity, when electricity generation started,
it started more or less as a novelty. And there were private companies that started generating
electricity and then distributing that out very, very locally on a block by block basis.

But as the use picked up, the public policy debate emerged of, oh wait, this might be something
that’s very important, that’s very useful. How are we going to deal with it? And a large part of
that debate basically shuffled down to, well, we can have kind of two models. One of them is a
public ownership and electricity generation model, and one of them is a private ownership and
electricity generation model, but in a way that is heavily regulated to ensure that its sort of public
central nature is continued and it’s reasonably priced, et cetera, et cetera.

And those were the two camps and that was the big fight, and it played out in different ways in
different places, which is why some places have municipally owned or otherwise publicly owned
electricity companies, and other ways have investor-owned utilities, and it all ends up with this
big messy mishmash. It’s kind of interesting to me that now with internet companies, companies
like Facebook, or companies that actually own wires like AT&T, we’ve kind of gotten to the
point with the internet where the argument isn’t even that.

We’re not even arguing about whether we should have highly regulated internet services or
publicly owned internet services. It’s both way bigger than power was when we were having that
argument, and the radical position that gets any traction at all is just regulation. And we haven’t
even been able to get that. It’s crazy to look at it in the historical context of how we’ve dealt
with, essentially, very similar if not identical problems before, and see just how limited our
imagination and options are in terms of dealing with this stuff.

Maximillian Alvarez: Right. And I mean, I think that bringing up the kind of rise of
electricity in the electrified world is really instructive here. In a past life, I was a media scholar
and media history scholar. And so as you were talking, I flipped around and pulled a book off my
shelf that I would encourage folks to check out. It’s a book by Carolyn Marvin called, When Old
Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth
Century. And Marvin, I think, does a really beautiful job.

It does get a little academic and jargony at certain points, but I think once you get into the meat
of the main chapters you really get some great historical analysis that proves the point that you
were just making. Marvin goes back into the 19th century, looks at not only how the invention of
electricity, how the creation of that infrastructure to electrify homes and businesses across the
United States, developed, but she also looks at how people around the country were thinking
about this, because there were a lot of fears about this.

I think we’ve all seen the old cartoon about the dangers of electricity lines in neighborhoods and
people even thinking about the systems of control, the ways that we could communicate better
with the spiritual world. There’s a whole interesting history there in the 19th century of what
futures people imagined with the unlocked technology of electricity.
Sparky Abraham: Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez: Then you kind of zoom forward, and so much of what that imagined
future has become in reality is, like you said, the result, not of the potential of this technology,
but in fact eliminating of that potential and a corralling of that potential into a social and
economic system that serves the needs of the rich and the powerful.

There are even, like, great anecdotes here about how electricity really developed as something
that only rich people had available to them. A lot of what came to be central functions of our
electric infrastructure were developed because rich people wanted to use electricity to better
safeguard their homes against the unwashed masses, and creating electric fences and lighting to
keep vagrants and working class people away from their properties and stuff like that, but there
is this sort of way that when we take stock of what our technologies are today, we just kind of
assume that this is the only form that they can take and in fact, this is the best form that those
technologies can take. But, in fact, every technology is sort of socially constructed.

Everything is the result of decisions that are made and not made, potentials that are encouraged
and/or disincentivized. I don’t want to get too abstract here, but I guess to maybe bring it back
down to the question about Facebook and social media and the internet, think about all the
promises that were made 20 years ago, or 25, 30 years ago, about what the internet age would be,
what it would allow us to do. Some of those have come true. As we were saying, it is now
possible for us to communicate this seamlessly across thousands of miles and then publish that
and present it to people all around the world. That’s really cool.

But at the same time, a company like Facebook really shows that we don’t have all that much
control over what these technologies look like and the changes that are made to those
technologies, those platforms, those things that impact us, whether those be changes to the
algorithm, whether that be Apple taking out the goddamn headphone jack in its phones. There
are so many decisions that are made about the technologies that we depend on that we are not
really making ourselves, but we kind of take for granted. There’s this sort of conceit that, well,
this is just what progress looks like. We entrust the direction of progress to the people who have
historically had a vested interest in taking these technologies and using them for their profit-
seeking and power-hungry ends.

Sparky Abraham: I think that when this stuff emerges you often have people with a lot of
very imaginative creative ideas for what might happen. You immediately get, like, an explosion
of future utopia. I expect this is what happened with electricity, and certainly it happened with
the internet. The early internet gave rise to so many utopian sort of cultures and subcultures in
terms of the open source community, and there was this idea that we were going to create this
sort of, like, frictionless, beautiful world of understanding.

So my dad had a bunch of weird stuff, among which was, like, the electricity pain healing
machines, which were basically just tubes with a little bit of gas in them such that if you run a
current through it, like not neon, but it gives you, like, a little purple electricity effect, like a little
purple arc. And so you basically turn the thing, and this is like some magical concoction from the
1890s that’s going to solve your pain, or get rid of your double chin and make your hair grow
back. Or when people were kind of first turned on to radiation as a thing, radiation was going to
be a miracle cure for a bunch of stuff.

And they had radium-lined water jugs, so you could leave your highly radioactive water jug
overnight and then drink it in the morning for health. And similarly you kind of see, like you
were talking about with electricity and electric fences, and then, where does nuclear technology
take us? Well, it takes us first and foremost to nuclear weapons. It seems very clearly true that
the first and most prominent uses of most technology does manifest within the class and imperial
struggle.

And to say that as obviously, also, not to lose sight of the fact that the first instance of the
internet was ARPANET, which was a defense advanced research project. Kind of interesting, but
I guess the question, and maybe this might be a question you have for me but it’s also a question
I have for you is, if we find ourselves in this situation, here we are. We have a global system that
is essential for many aspects of life for billions of people around the world. Mostly in terms of
communication, but in terms of all kinds of stuff, a lot of our very essential other infrastructure is
also necessarily connected to the internet at this point.

And it is essentially privately run for profit by companies, including Facebook. And I think that
part of the conflict that you had and that you got rightfully frustrated about on that Rising clip
that we mentioned is this idea that, well, it kind of must be good and let’s not mess with it. Let’s
not mess with those companies. We need to be real nice to them [laughs] because they’re now
sort of in control of us. What’s the path out? What can we do here and how can we get people to
do it?

Maximillian Alvarez: Right. And I mean, this was I think a question that Ryan Grim at the
Hill posed to me. He was like, so Facebook has said in response to Frances Haugen’s leaks that
it’s like, hey, at least we are a company that cares. At least we conducted internal research into
the harm that our products are doing to people. Other companies don’t even do that. And now
because of these leaks making us look bad, other companies may be disincentivized from doing
this kind of research.
References:
Article title
Facebook's global outage is the real supply chain threat
URL
https://therealnews.com/facebooks-global-outage-is-the-real-supply-chain-threat
Website title
The Real News Network
Date accessed
October 20, 2021
Date published
October 14, 2021
Akash and Aishwarya sit on the pot that took them to their wedding.Gopan Velu Photo

Kunjumon admitted the scale of the flooding had surprised him.

“We didn’t know there would be so much water,” he said. “We tried to arrange for a boat but
couldn’t get one.”

The ceremony took place with less than 10 guests. Video from the wedding shows the couple
sitting with garlands around their neck, after which Kunjumon places a chain, known as Mangal
Sutra, around his bride's neck and vermillion on her head.

Heavy rain triggered flash floods and landslides across the state of Kerala over the
weekend, killing at least 22 people. Residents were rescued by the Indian Army and Navy.

Video footage from the state shows houses being uprooted and submerged in water, villages
filled with mud and debris and roads flooded with muddy water.

Heavy rains also triggered flash floods and landslides in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand
leaving more than 40 people dead, according to local reports.

References:
Alvarez, M. (2021, October 14). Facebook’s global outage is the real supply chain threat. The
Real News Network. https://therealnews.com/facebooks-global-outage-is-the-real-supply-chain-
threat