HIGHTOWER: All In The Family

Jim Hightower
April 26, 2000

Ah, family values!Washington politicians love to wrap themselves in warm images of concern about the family, so let me express my concern about one issue of family togetherness on Capitol Hill that is a bit much. I'm talking about members of congress whose spouses or other close relatives are lobbyists.Take Patricia McKeon who's VP of a Washington lobbying outfit. Her husband is Republican congressman Buck McKeon of California. The Hill, a newspaper covering congress, reports that Patricia lobbies for such firms as AT&T, but she promises she never lobbies her husband. Even if you believe that, Patricia McKeon acknowledges that being a lobbyist and a congressional spouse means you always have easy access to members of congress! Isn't that handy?On the Democratic side, Ruth Harkin now heads the lobbying arm of United Technologies, a major Pentagon contractor. Guess who serves on the Senate appropriations committee, which doles-out billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts? Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, her husband! It's OK, though, because Ruth promises she never lobbies her husband.Michelle Clay is the daughter of St. Louis Democratic congressman William Clay, and guess who she lobbies for? The City of St. Louis. Not to worry, though, she promises she never lobbies her father.On the other hand, Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, readily admits that his lobbyist son Ben visits him all the time on behalf of his corporate clients. We shouldn't worry though, because -- hey -- Senator Stevens promises he treats his son like any other lobbyist.Apparently corporations can buy anything and everything in Washington -- including a lawmaker's familial connections.This is Jim Hightower saying ... Remember -- on Capitol Hill, a family that lobbies together, stays together.Source:"For Hill spouses, lobbying begins at home" by Jock Friedly. The Hill: September 17, 1997.

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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

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