Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious
Earlier this month, the European Union Parliament passed sweeping new rules aimed at limiting how companies and websites can track people online to target them with advertisements.
Targeted advertising based on people’s online behavior has long been the business model that underwrites the internet. It allows advertisers to use the mass of personal data collected by Meta, Google, and other tech companies as people browse the web to serve ads to users by sorting them into tens of thousands of hyperspecific categories.
But behavioral advertising is also controversial. Critics argue that the practice enables discrimination, potentially only offering certain groups of people economic opportunities. They also say serving people ads based on what big tech companies assume they’re interested in potentially leaves people vulnerable to scams, fraud, and disinformation. Notoriously, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data gleaned from Facebook profiles to target certain Americans with pro-Trump messages and certain Britons with pro-Brexit ads.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at European digital rights group EDRi, were “wake-up calls” to the Europe Union to crack down. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also looking into ways to regulate behavioral advertising.
What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?
There’s been a long back and forth about how much to crack down on targeted advertising in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s big legislative package aimed at regulating Big Tech.
Everything from a total ban on behavioral advertising to more modest changes around ad transparency has at some point been on the table.
The bill also includes a ban on so-called dark patterns —“design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions—such as the endless clicks it takes to opt out of being tracked by cookies on many websites.”
That measure is critical, according to Alexandre de Streel, the academic director of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe, because of how tech companies responded to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s 2016 tech regulation.
In a study on online advertising for the Parliament’s crucial Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, de Streel and nearly a dozen other experts documented how “dark patterns” had become a major tool used by websites and platforms to persuade users to provide consent for sharing their data. Their recommendations for the DSA—which included more robust enforcement of the GDPR, stricter rules about obtaining consent, and the dark patterns ban—were included in the final bill.
“We are going in the right direction if we better enforce the GDPR and add these amendments on ‘dark patterns,’ ” De Streel told The Markup.
German member of European Parliament Patrick Breyer joined with more than 20 other MEPs and more than 50 public and private organizations last year to form the Tracking Free Ads Coalition. Though its push for a total ban on targeted advertising failed, the coalition was behind many of the more stringent restrictions. Breyer told The Markup the new rules were “a major achievement.”
“The Parliament stopped short of prohibiting surveillance advertising, but giving people a true choice [of whether to be targeted] is a major step forward, and I think the vast majority of people will use this option,” he said.
Despite passing the European Parliament, the DSA is far from settled. Due to the EU’s unique law-making process, the legislation must now be negotiated with the European Commission and the bloc’s 27 countries. The member states, as represented by the European Council, have adopted an official position considerably less aggressive—opting for only improved transparency on targeted advertising—and, according to Breyer, are “traditionally very open to [industry] lobbying.”
Whether the DSA’s wins against targeted advertising survive this process “will depend to a large degree on public pressure,” said Breyer.
How Has Big Tech Responded?
So far, Big Tech companies have publicly tread lightly in response to the European push to limit targeted advertising.
In response to The Markup’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Karl Ryan said that Google supports the DSA and that it shares “the goal of MEPs to continue to make the internet safer for everyone….”
“We will now take some time to analyze the final Parliament text to understand how it could impact us and our different users,” he said.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
But privately, over the last two years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have ramped up lobbying efforts in Brussels, spending more than $20 million in 2020.
The advertising industry, meanwhile, has been public in its opposition. In a statement on the recent vote, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe director of public policy Greg Mroczkowski urged policymakers to reconsider.
“The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”
On Wednesday, the Belgian Data Protection Authority found IAB Europe–which developed and administered the system for companies to obtain consent for behavioral advertising while complying with GDPR—in violation of that law. In particular, the authority found that the pop-ups that ask for people’s consent to process their data as they visit websites failed to meet GDPR’s standards for transparency and consent. The pop-up posed “great risks to the fundamental rights” of Europeans, the ruling said. The authority ordered IAB to delete data collected under its Transparency and Consent Framework and has six months to comply.
“This decision is momentous,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The Markup. “It means that digital rights are real. And there is a significance for the United States, too, because the IAB has introduced the same consent spam for the CCPA and CPRA [California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act].”
In a statement to Tech Crunch, IAB Europe said it “reject[s] the finding that we are a data controller” in the context of its consent framework and is “considering all options with respect to a legal challenge.” Further, it said it is working on an “action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months” to bring it within GDPR compliance.
Google and Meta may be preparing for whichever way the wind is blowing.
A handful of European companies like internet security company Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo (which is a contributor to The Markup), and publisher Axel Springer see tighter rules around data privacy as a means to push the industry toward contextual ads or tech that matches ads based on a website’s content, and to therefore break the Google-Meta duopoly over online advertising.
What’s Happening in the U.S.?
On Jan. 18, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to Congress to prohibit advertisers from using personal data to target advertisements—particularly using data about a person’s race, gender, and religion. Exceptions would be made for “broad” location information and contextual advertising.
“The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” Booker said in a statement announcing the bill in January.
While there is bipartisan desire to rein in Big Tech, there is no consensus on how to do it. The bill most likely to pass the divided Congress is designed to stop Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants from privileging their own products. Congressional action on targeted advertising does not appear likely.
Still, it is possible the Federal Trade Commission will take action.
Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to use its rulemaking authority to curtail “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.” In December, the FTC sought public comment for a petition by nonprofit Accountable Tech to develop new data privacy rules.
Meanwhile, many U.S. digital rights activists, such as nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, are hopeful that new rules in Europe will force changes globally, as occurred after the GDPR. “The EU Parliament’s position, if it becomes law, could change the rules of the game for all platforms,” wrote EFF’s international policy director Christopher Schmon.
It’s still early days, but many see the tide turning against targeted advertising. These types of conversations, according to Penfrat at EDRi, were unthinkable a few years ago.
“The fact that a ban on surveillance-based advertising has been brought into the mainstream is a huge success,” he said.
A 2020 Markup investigation found the company pursuing similar goals in other states
A pair of newly public documents filed with a California administrative law judge show experts accusing the company of systematically overcharging customers it believed to be the most loyal around $1 billion over the past decade.
This practice of charging higher premiums to customers an insurance company suspects are unlikely to defect to a competitor is termed “price optimization” and was the subject of a 2020 Markup investigation that found Allstate was attempting to use a new pricing algorithm for auto insurance in Maryland that would have unfairly targeted its highest-paying customers—and that the algorithm had been approved in several other states.
Nearly every state, including California, bars insurers from setting car insurance rates on factors apart from the actual risk the drivers pose. Insurance regulators in 18 states and Washington, D.C., have explicitly declared price optimization illegal.
The new documents, which were initially filed in late October by the California Department of Insurance and Consumer Watchdog, a consumer advocacy group allowed by the state to intervene in the case and provide expertise, consist of written testimony from insurance industry experts who examined how Allstate set its prices.
They allege that Allstate was engaging in price optimization by giving smaller than appropriate discounts to the least-price-sensitive among its customers with clean driving records who held multiple policies with the company or who had several decades of driving experience.
Edward Cimini Jr., a senior casualty actuary with the California Department of Insurance, said he reviewed internal Allstate documents, documents the company submitted to the state describing its auto insurance pricing plan, and depositions of company employees and found that Allstate gave smaller discounts to drivers with more than 39 years of experience, a group he said is unlikely to shop around. “Since Allstate’s selections were not based on underlying costs, the final rates that Allstate charged these policyholders were actuarily unsound and unfairly discriminatory,” he said.
Allan Schwartz, an actuarial consultant hired by Consumer Watchdog to review Allstate’s pricing practices, estimated that Allstate overcharged California drivers who were owed discounts “about $1 billion.”
“Those policyholders were known by Allstate to have a lower elasticity of demand and were more likely to renew with Allstate even though they were charged premiums in excess of those based upon an actuarially sound estimate of the cost of risk transfer,” he said.
The company denies the allegations. “Allstate does not employ, and has never employed, price optimization in determining premiums in California because Allstate does not take into account an individual’s or class’s willingness to pay a higher premium relative to other individuals or classes,” Allstate spokesperson Ben Corey wrote in an email to The Markup.
In its court filings, Allstate points out that in 2011 the California Department of Insurance reviewed and approved the 2011 plan without highlighting the issues now raised in the long-running class action that triggered this hearing.
The company was sued in 2015 over alleged price optimization practices in California. Allstate moved to have the case thrown out, arguing in part that it wasn’t a matter for civil courts but rather for the state department of insurance. In 2016, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California put the case on hold and referred it to the authority of the Commissioner of the California Department of Insurance for its opinion, which triggered the administrative law proceeding. Last week, the parties agreed to enter voluntary mediation.
Two years ago, The Markup published an investigation revealing that a new method of calculating rates for car insurance customers that Allstate was trying to implement across the country attempted to charge higher rates to customers who were already paying a lot for their car insurance—essentially creating a “suckers list” of big spenders and squeezing even more money out of them.
The investigation was based on details the insurer provided to regulators in Maryland as part of its 2014 filing there that revealed the current and proposed rate for policyholders in the state. Using statistical regressions, we found that the rating factor, called CGR, would charge more—and severely limit discounts—to big spenders. Maryland regulators rejected Allstate’s plan over price optimization concerns. We found Allstate was using similar algorithms in 10 other states, but we were not able to determine if they worked exactly the same way in those states because we lacked the data we had in Maryland. Allstate did not answer our questions about the algorithms.
Consumer Watchdog founder Harvey Rosenfield, who has long been critical of Allstate’s pricing practices, said that the company found a different method of achieving the same goals in California, which only allows insurers to use a limited number of approved factors—like driving record, type of car, or number of years behind the wheel—to determine how much customers have to pay in premiums.
“What we’re contending is they took their knowledge of price elasticity and figured out a pretty straightforward way of doing it without saying so,” Rosenfield said. “Their actuaries selected relativities to set people’s premiums that punished people who Allstate knew were inelastic, who fit the profile of being less sensitive to price changes. They charged those people more.”
California isn’t the only place where Allstate has faced litigation over its use of price optimization. Shortly after the publication of The Markup’s Maryland investigation, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit in Texas that directly referenced The Markup’s reporting. That suit alleges that the company was “charging higher premiums to its more tenured policyholders than it charges otherwise identically-situated newer policyholders for the same or materially the same coverages.”
A new legal filing by New York’s attorney general this week accused former President Donald Trump’s company of misleading lenders about the financial health of its landmark downtown Manhattan skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, while seeking to renew the building’s mortgage.
Though the Trump Organization called 40 Wall Street “one of the great success stories post 2008,” lender Capital One found the company’s estimates of the building’s worth so unbelievable that the bank declined to refinance the tower’s loan in 2015, the filing alleges.
“Capital One harbored great skepticism regarding the Trump Organization’s valuations,” says the filing, which was submitted by Attorney General Letitia James in response to Trump’s efforts to block her from questioning him and his children as part of an ongoing investigation by her office.
The new accusations offer startling details about possible financial fraud involving 40 Wall Street — one of the subjects of a 2019 ProPublica story that highlighted conflicting financial documents the Trump Organization had filed for the building.
ProPublica’s story documented how income, expense and occupancy numbers cited in the eventual refinance for 40 Wall Street and another Manhattan building sometimes didn’t match those the company had filed with city tax authorities. A lower valuation for the city would produce a lower tax bill, while a higher valuation for lenders would make it easier to get a new mortgage.
One expert said it appeared like the Trump Organization was keeping “two sets of books.”
“It feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, at the time.
In her filing, James asserts that Trump Organization employees, including Trump’s children, took part in a pattern of deception in which they misled lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service by vastly overstating values for 40 Wall Street and a host of other Trump properties, including golf courses in Scotland, Los Angeles and Westchester and his buildings on Fifth and Park avenues.
The Trump Organization on Thursday lashed out at James, a Democrat, via a statement emailed by a spokesperson, saying, “The only one misleading the public is Letitia James.
“She defrauded New Yorkers by basing her entire candidacy on a promise to get Trump at all costs without having seen a shred of evidence and in violation of every conceivable ethical rule,” the organization’s statement said. It asserted that James “has no case” and that the “allegations are baseless and will be vigorously defended.”
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, also criticized James, accusing her of making “repeated threats to target the Trump family” and ignoring legal protections for “the very people she is investigating.”
James is seeking to compel testimony and obtain documents from Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who she said have not cooperated with her investigation.
The filing says that property valuations formed the heart of statements of financial condition that the Trump Organization used to demonstrate its net worth. The statements, which James said contained inaccuracies, were compiled by an outside accounting agency from a data spreadsheet and backup material provided by the Trump Organization.
Trump’s personal guarantees to some banks and insurers required him to certify that his financial statements were correct, according to James’ filing. The documents say her office has evidence Trump was “personally involved in reviewing and approving” the statements.
If the company or its employees are found to have deliberately provided misleading valuations, they could face civil or criminal penalties. The company is under investigation by both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
With its classic Gothic Revival style and signature green spire, 40 Wall Street gave Trump a presence in the most famous financial district in the world. His company doesn’t own it, but rather purchased in 1995 the right to act as the landlord for its office and retail space. Finding tenants for that space, however, particularly in the building’s narrow tower, proved a challenge, especially after 9/11, when occupancy sagged and the entire financial district struggled, the ProPublica investigation found.
James’ filing says that as early as 2009, Capital One, which held the mortgage on the property, “raised substantial concerns about cash flow” at 40 Wall Street, prompting in-person meetings with Trump, longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and others. Donald Trump Jr. was also involved in the discussions, the filing says.
The conversations led to a loan modification in 2010, with bank personnel harboring doubts about the Trump Organization’s representations of the building’s financial standing. During those discussions, the Trump Organization provided the bank with profit numbers for 2010 of $12.3 million, which bank personnel described as “very optimistic.”
More startling were the differences between valuations that appeared on Trump’s statements of financial condition and those prepared by appraisers for Capital One. The Trump Organization set the value of the building at $601.8 million in 2010, while the appraisals for Capital One done by Cushman & Wakefield set it at just less than one-third of that, $200 million.
Weisselberg shared one of the company’s higher valuations for the building with the bank in early 2015, boasting of “considerable capital investment” and “a much improved cash flow.” He wanted Capital One to restructure its loan and waive a principal payment of $5 million due in November.
But Capital One declined to refinance the mortgage, referencing its own internal estimate that the building was only worth $257 million a few months before.
That year, 40 Wall Street’s $160 million mortgage was a thorn in Trump’s side, representing his then-largest single debt as he launched his campaign for the presidency.
After Capital One’s rejection, the Trump Organization turned to Ladder Capital Finance, where Weisselberg’s son Jack was a director. Ladder commissioned its own appraisal. Though Ladder used the same Cushman & Wakefield team that had estimated the building was worth $220 million in 2012, the team this time more than doubled the value to $540 million, legal filings said. Ladder approved the refinance.
James’ filing said that evidence her office obtained suggests the 2015 Cushman valuation “appears to have used demonstrably incorrect facts and aggressive assumptions” to arrive at the higher estimate, which the document said “did not reflect a good faith assessment of value.”
On Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield defended its practices, saying it took “great issue with mischaracterizations concerning the work performed and believe they are not supported by the evidence.
“The referenced Cushman & Wakefield appraisals were undertaken and completed in good faith based upon the material information made available,” the company said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “We stand behind the appraisers and the referenced appraisals which reflect fair valuations based upon the underlying facts and market dynamics.”
In 2015, the Trump Organization’s statement of financial condition listed the value of the building as $735.4 million.
Ladder Capital and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Allen Weisselberg and Jack Weisselberg could not immediately be reached.
ProPublica’s 2019 story found several instances of the Trump Organization reporting much lower expenses to its lender, Ladder Capital, than to city tax authorities — including 40 Wall Street’s insurance costs and ground lease. Jack Weisselberg declined to comment at the time on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization. Executives with Ladder also declined to be quoted for the story then.
In 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the Trump Organization inflated valuations at times to appear more profitable and deflated them to achieve a lower real estate tax bill.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Jan. 19, 2022, that he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine, and cautioned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he “will regret having done it,” following months of building tension.
Russia has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine over the past several months.
In mid-January, Russia began moving troops into Belarus, a country bordering both Russia and Ukraine, in preparation for joint military exercises in February.
Putin has issued various security demands to the U.S. before he draws his military forces back. Putin’s list includes a ban on Ukraine from entering NATO, and agreement that NATO will remove troops and weapons across much of Eastern Europe.
Ukraine’s layered history offers a window into the complex nation it is today — and why it is continuously under threat. As an Eastern Europe expert, I highlight five key points to keep in mind.
What should we know about Ukrainians’ relationship with Russia?
Ukraine gained independence 30 years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has since struggled to combat corruption and bridge deep internal divisions.
Ukraine’s western region generally supported integration with Western Europe. The country’s eastern side, meanwhile, favored closer ties with Russia.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine peaked in February 2014, when violent protesters ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in what is now known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Around the same time, Russia forcibly annexed Crimea. Ukraine was in a vulnerable position for self-defense, with a temporary government and unprepared military.
Putin immediately moved to strike in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed over 14,000 people.
Unlike its response to Crimea, Russia continues to officially deny its involvement in the Donbas conflict.
What do Ukrainians want?
Russia’s military aggression in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea have galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Western leanings.
Ukraine’s government has said it will apply for European Union membership in 2024, and also has ambitions to join NATO.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who came to power in 2019, campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption, economic renewal and peace in the Donbas region.
In September 2021, 81% of Ukrainians said they have a negative attitude about Putin, according to the Ukrainian news site RBC-Ukraine. Just 15% of surveyed Ukrainians reported a positive attitude towards the Russian leader.
Why is Putin threatening to invade Ukraine?
Putin’s decision to engage in a military buildup along Ukraine is connected to a sense of impunity. Putin also has experience dealing with Western politicians who champion Russian interests and become engaged with Russian companies once they leave office.
Western countries have imposed mostly symbolic sanctions against Russia over interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and a huge cyberattack against about 18,000 people who work for companies and the U.S. government, among other transgressions.
Without repercussions, Putin has backed Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on mass protests in the capital city, Minsk.
In several instances, Putin has seen that some leading Western politicians align with Russia. These alliances can prevent Western countries from forging a unified front to Putin.
Other senior European politicians promoting a soft position toward Russia while in office include former French Prime Minister François Fillon and former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl. Both joined the boards of Russian state-owned companies after leaving office.
What is Putin’s end game?
Putin views Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence” – a territory, rather than an independent state. This sense of ownership has driven the Kremlin to try to block Ukraine from joining the EU and NATO.
In January 2021, Russia experienced one of its largest anti-government demonstrations in years. Tens of thousands of Russians protested in support of political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, following his detention in Russia. Navalny had recently returned from Germany, where he was treated for being poisoned by the Russian government.
Putin is also using Ukraine as leverage for Western powers lifting their sanctions. Currently, the U.S. has various political and financial sanctions in place against Russia, as well as potential allies and business partners to Russia.
A Russian attack on Ukraine could prompt more diplomatic conversations that could lead to concessions on these sanctions.
The costs to Russia of attacking Ukraine would significantly outweigh the benefits.
While a full scale invasion of Ukraine is unlikely, Putin might renew fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Why would the US want to get involved in this conflict?
With its annexation of Crimea and support for the Donbas conflict, Russia has violated the Budapest Memorandum Security Assurances for Ukraine, a 1994 agreement between the U.S., United Kingdom and Russia that aims to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its commitment to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Putin’s threats against Ukraine occur as he is moving Russian forces into Belarus, which also raises questions about the Kremlin’s plans for invading other neighboring countries.
Military support for Ukraine and political and economic sanctions are ways the U.S. can make clear to Moscow that there will be consequences for its encroachment on an independent country. The risk, otherwise, is that the Kremlin might undertake other military and political actions that would further threaten European security and stability.
Governments increasingly use algorithms to do everything from assign benefits to dole out punishment—but attempts to regulate them have been unsuccessful
In 2018, the New York City Council created a task force to study the city’s use of automated decision systems (ADS). The concern: Algorithms, not just in New York but around the country, were increasingly being employed by government agencies to do everything from informing criminal sentencing and detecting unemployment fraud to prioritizing child abuse cases and distributing health benefits. And lawmakers, let alone the people governed by the automated decisions, knew little about how the calculations were being made.
Rare glimpses into how these algorithms were performing were not comforting: In several states, algorithms used to determine how much help residents will receive from home health aides have automatically cut benefits for thousands. Police departments across the country use the PredPol software to predict where future crimes will occur, but the program disproportionately sends police to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. And in Michigan, an algorithm designed to detect fraudulent unemployment claims famously improperly flagged thousands of applicants, forcing residents who should have received assistance to lose their homes and file for bankruptcy.
New York City’s was the first legislation in the country aimed at shedding light on how government agencies use artificial intelligence to make decisions about people and policies.
At the time, the creation of the task force was heralded as a “watershed” moment that would usher in a new era of oversight. And indeed, in the four years since, a steady stream of reporting about the harms caused by high-stakes algorithms has prompted lawmakers across the country to introduce nearly 40 bills designed to study or regulate government agencies’ use of ADS, according to The Markup’s review of state legislation.
The bills range from proposals to create study groups to requiring agencies to audit algorithms for bias before purchasing systems from vendors. But the dozens of reforms proposed have shared a common fate: They have largely either died immediately upon introduction or expired in committees after brief hearings, according to The Markup’s review.
In New York City, that initial working group took two years to make a set of broad, nonbinding recommendations for further research and oversight. One task force member described the endeavor as a “waste.” The group could not even agree on a definition for automated decision systems, and several of its members, at the time and since, have said they did not believe city agencies and officials had bought into the process.
Elsewhere, nearly all proposals to study or regulate algorithms have failed to pass. Bills to create study groups to examine the use of algorithms failed in Massachusetts, New York state, California, Hawaii, and Virginia. Bills requiring audits of algorithms or prohibiting algorithmic discrimination have died in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington state. In several cases—California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Vermont—ADS oversight or study bills remain pending in the legislature, but their prospects this session are slim, according to sponsors and advocates in those states.
The only state bill to pass so far, Vermont’s, created a task force whose recommendations—to form a permanent AI commission and adopt regulations—have so far been ignored, state representative Brian Cina told The Markup.
The Markup interviewed lawmakers and lobbyists and reviewed written and oral testimony on dozens of ADS bills to examine why legislatures have failed to regulate these tools.
We found two key through lines: Lawmakers and the public lack fundamental access to information about what algorithms their agencies are using, how they’re designed, and how significantly they influence decisions. In many of the states The Markup examined, lawmakers and activists said state agencies had rebuffed their attempts to gather basic information, such as the names of tools being used.
Meanwhile, Big Tech and government contractors have successfully derailed legislation by arguing that proposals are too broad—in some cases claiming they would prevent public officials from using calculators and spreadsheets—and that requiring agencies to examine whether an ADS system is discriminatory would kill innovation and increase the price of government procurement.
Lawmakers Struggled to Figure Out What Algorithms Were Even in Use
One of the biggest challenges lawmakers have faced when seeking to regulate ADS tools is simply knowing what they are and what they do.
Following its task force’s landmark report, New York City conducted a subsequent survey of city agencies. It resulted in a list of only 16 automated decision systems across nine agencies, which members of the task force told The Markup they suspect is a severe underestimation.
“We don’t actually know where government entities or businesses use these systems, so it’s hard to make [regulations] more concrete,” said Julia Stoyanovich, a New York University computer science professor and task force member.
In 2018, Vermont became the first state to create its own ADS study group. At the conclusion of its work in 2020, the group reported that “there are examples of where state and local governments have used artificial intelligence applications, but in general the Task Force has not identified many of these applications.”
“Just because nothing popped up in a few weeks of testimony doesn’t mean that they don’t exist,” said Cina. “It’s not like we asked every single state agency to look at every single thing they use.”
In February, he introduced a bill that would have required the state to develop basic standards for agency use of ADS systems. It has sat in committee without a hearing since then.
In 2019, the Hawaii Senate passed a resolution requesting that the state convene a task force to study agency use of artificial intelligence systems, but the resolution was nonbinding and no task force convened, according to the Hawaii Legislative Reference Bureau. Legislators tried to pass a binding resolution again the next year, but it failed.
Legislators and advocacy groups who authored ADS bills in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Washington told The Markup that they have no clear understanding of the extent to which their state agencies use ADS tools.
Advocacy groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that have attempted to survey government agencies regarding their use of ADS systems say they routinely receive incomplete information.
“The results we’re getting are straight-up non-responses or truly pulling teeth about every little thing,” said Ben Winters, who leads EPIC’s AI and Human Rights Project.
In Washington, after an ADS regulation bill failed in 2020, the legislature created a study group tasked with making recommendations for future legislation. The ACLU of Washington proposed that the group should survey state agencies to gather more information about the tools they were using, but the study group rejected the idea, according to public minutes from the group’s meetings.
“We thought it was a simple ask,” said Jennifer Lee, the technology and liberty project manager for the ACLU of Washington. “One of the barriers we kept getting when talking to lawmakers about regulating ADS is they didn’t have an understanding of how prevalent the issue was. They kept asking, ‘What kind of systems are being used across Washington state?’ ”
Ben Winters, who leads EPIC’s AI and Human Rights Project
Lawmakers Say Corporate Influence a Hurdle
Washington’s most recent bill has stalled in committee, but an updated version will likely be reintroduced this year now that the study group has completed its final report, said state senator Bob Hasegawa, the bill’s sponsor
The legislation would have required any state agency seeking to implement an ADS system to produce an algorithmic accountability report disclosing the name and purpose of the system, what data it would use, and whether the system had been independently tested for biases, among other requirements.
The bill would also have banned the use of ADS tools that are discriminatory and required that anyone affected by an algorithmic decision be notified and have a right to appeal that decision.
“The big obstacle is corporate influence in our governmental processes,” said Hasegawa. “Washington is a pretty high-tech state and so corporate high tech has a lot of influence in our systems here. That’s where most of the pushback has been coming from because the impacted communities are pretty much unanimous that this needs to be fixed.”
California’s bill, which is similar, is still pending in committee. It encourages, but does not require, vendors seeking to sell ADS tools to government agencies to submit an ADS impact report along with their bid, which would include similar disclosures to those required by Washington’s bill.
It would also require the state’s Department of Technology to post the impact reports for active systems on its website.
Led by the California Chamber of Commerce, 26 industry groups—from big tech representatives like the Internet Association and TechNet to organizations representing banks, insurance companies, and medical device makers—signed on to a letter opposing the bill.
“There are a lot of business interests here, and they have the ears of a lot of legislators,” said Vinhcent Le, legal counsel at the nonprofit Greenlining Institute, who helped author the bill.
Originally, the Greenlining Institute and other supporters sought to regulate ADS in the private sector as well as the public but quickly encountered pushback.
“When we narrowed it to just government AI systems we thought it would make it easier,” Le said. “The argument [from industry] switched to ‘This is going to cost California taxpayers millions more.’ That cost angle, that innovation angle, that anti-business angle is something that legislators are concerned about.”
The California Chamber of Commerce declined an interview request for this story but provided a copy of the letter signed by dozens of industry groups opposing the bill. The letter states that the bill would “discourage participation in the state procurement process” because the bill encourages vendors to complete an impact assessment for their tools. The letter said the suggestion, which is not a requirement, was too burdensome. The chamber also argued that the bill’s definition of automated decision systems was too broad.
Industry lobbyists have repeatedly criticized legislation in recent years for overly broad definitions of automated decision systems despite the fact that the definitions mirror those used in internationally recognized AI ethics frameworks, regulations in Canada, and proposed regulations in the European Union.
During a committee hearing on Washington’s bill, James McMahan, policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, told legislators he believed the bill would apply to “most if not all” of the state crime lab’s operations, including DNA, fingerprint, and firearm analysis.
Internet Association lobbyist Vicki Christophersen, testifying at the same hearing, suggested that the bill would prohibit the use of red light cameras. The Internet Association did not respond to an interview request.
“It’s a funny talking point,” Le said. “We actually had to put in language to say this doesn’t include a calculator or spreadsheet.”
Maryland’s bill, which died in committee, would also have required agencies to produce reports detailing the basic purpose and functions of ADS tools and would have prohibited the use of discriminatory systems.
“We’re not telling you you can’t do it [use ADS],” said Delegate Terri Hill, who sponsored the Maryland bill. “We’re just saying identify what your biases are up front and identify if they’re consistent with the state’s overarching goals and with this purpose.”
The Maryland Tech Council, an industry group representing small and large technology firms in the state, opposed the bill, arguing that the prohibitions against discrimination were premature and would hurt innovation in the state, according to written and oral testimony the group provided.
“The ability to adequately evaluate whether or not there is bias is an emerging area, and we would say that, on behalf of the tech council, putting in place this at this time is jumping ahead of where we are,” Pam Kasemeyer, the council’s lobbyist, said during a March committee hearing on the bill. “It almost stops the desire for companies to continue to try to develop and refine these out of fear that they’re going to be viewed as discriminatory.”
Limited Success in the Private Sector
There have been fewer attempts by state and local legislatures to regulate private companies’ use of ADS systems—such as those The Markup has exposed in the tenant screening and car insurance industries—but in recent years, those measures have been marginally more successful.
The New York City Council passed a bill that would require private companies to conduct bias audits of algorithmic hiring tools before using them. The tools are used by many employers to screen job candidates without the use of a human interviewer.
Illinois also enacted a state law in 2019 that requires private employers to notify job candidates when they’re being evaluated by algorithmic hiring tools. And in 2021, the legislature amended the law to require employers who use such tools to report demographic data about job candidates to a state agency to be analyzed for evidence of biased decisions.
This year the Colorado legislature also passed a law, which will take effect in 2023, that will create a framework for evaluating insurance underwriting algorithms and ban the use of discriminatory algorithms in the industry.
“It makes you want to cherish the Earth and protect it, the more you see it from space,” says a French astronaut calling for global cooperation to fight the climate crisis.
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet says the impacts of the climate emergency are clear from space—and worsening on his watch—and has expressed optimism that the kind of global cooperation that built the International Space Station can also be channeled to protect the planet he calls “an oasis in the cosmos.”
“Through the portholes of the space station, we distinctly see Earth’s fragility.”
Pesquet, a European Space Agency astronaut, made to the remarks in an interview published Monday at CNN.
In November, Pesquet, completed a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. It was his second tour at the ISS, following an earlier mission in 2016 and 2017.
From space, an astronaut has a unique view of “the fragility of planet Earth,” he told the outlet.
There’s simply “emptiness,” he said, “apart from this blue ball with everything we need to sustain human life, and life in general, which is absolutely fragile.”
“It makes you want to cherish the Earth and protect it,” he said, “the more you see it from space.”
According to Pesquet, the view from space also reveals the impacts of humanity’s destruction of nature such as river pollution. But the “most visual visible effect” of the climate crisis, he said, is the retreat of glaciers.
Compared to his earlier mission, Pesquet told CNN that on his 2021 tour he “could see a net increase in the frequency and the strength of extreme weather phenomena like hurricanes, like wildfires.”
He also likened the “peaceful cooperation between countries that were not always friends” in maintaining the space station, and suggested that transferring “that model to the way we deal with the environment on Earth” could lead to planetary protection.
“If we can make a space station fly,” said Pesquet, “then we can save the planet.”
On Instagram, Pesquet has captured many remarkable images from the station, documenting both Earth’s beauty and the impacts of the climate crisis.
In October, Pesquet described viewing the climate crisis from space and the increasing prevalence of destructive events viewable from above. “Definitely, the hurricanes, seen from space, and the forest fires, I had never seen that before, especially on my previous mission.”
He conveyed his space view of the planetary crisis to French President Emmanuel Macron last year. “Through the portholes of the space station, we distinctly see Earth’s fragility,” he said. “We see the damaging effects of human activity, pollution of rivers and air pollution.”
He and the other astronauts on the 2021 mission also witnessed wildfires ravaging various regions including California, which was “covered in a cloud of smoke, we saw the flames with our naked eyes.”
Worsening impacts of the climate crisis from his tour five years earlier were clear, he said: “The weather phenomena are accelerating at an alarming rate.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The CDC currently recommends that you “wear the most protective mask you can that fits well and that you will wear consistently.” The question, then, is what type of mask offers the best protection for you – by filtering the air you breathe in – and for those around you – by filtering the air you breathe out?
The CDC’s updated guidelines clearly lay out the hierarchy of protection: “Loosely woven cloth products provide the least protection, layered finely woven products offer more protection, well-fitting disposable surgical masks and KN95s offer even more protection, and well-fitting NIOSH-approved respirators (including N95s) offer the highest level of protection.”
From a performance standpoint, the N95 and KN95 masks are the best option. While supply chain limitations led to the CDC recommending people not wear N95s early in the pandemic, today they are easily obtainable and should be your first choice if you want the most protection.
The biggest change in the new guidelines has to do with cloth masks. Previous guidance from the CDC had said that some cloth masks could offer acceptable levels of protection. The new guidance still acknowledges that cloth masks can offer a small amount of protection but places them at the very bottom of the bunch.
2. What’s the difference between N95, surgical and cloth mask materials?
The effectiveness of a mask – how much protection a mask provides the wearer – is a combination of two major elements. First, there’s the ability of the material to capture particles. The second factor is the fraction of inhaled or exhaled air leaking out from around the mask – essentially, how well a mask fits.
Most mask materials can be thought of as a tangled net of small fibers. Particles passing through a mask are stopped when they physically touch one of those fibers. N95s, KN95s and surgical masks are purpose-built to be effective at removing particles from air. Their fibers are typically made from melt-blown plastics, often polypropylene, and the strands are tiny – often less than four thousandths of an inch (10 micrometers) in diameter – or approximately one third the width of a human hair. These small fibers create a large amount of surface area within the mask for filtering and collecting particles. Although the specific construction and thickness of the materials used in N95, KN95 and surgical masks can vary, the filter media used are often quite similar.
These fibers are very tightly packed together so the gaps a particle must navigate through are very small. This results in a high probability that particles will end up touching and sticking to a fiber as they pass through a mask. These polypropylene materials also often have a static charge that can help attract and catch particles.
Cloth masks are typically made of common woven materials such as cotton or polyester. The fibers are often large and less densely packed together, meaning particles can easily pass through the material. Adding more layers can help, but stacking layers has a diminishing return and the performance of a cloth mask, even with multiple layers, will still typically not match that of surgical mask or N95.
3. How much does fit matter for masks?
Fit is the other major component in how effective a mask is. Even if the materials used in a mask were perfect and it removed all particles from the air that passed through it, a mask can offer protection only if it doesn’t leak.
When you breathe in and out, air will always take the path of least resistance. If there are any gaps between a mask and someone’s face, a substantial fraction of every breath will seep out through those gaps and the mask will provide relatively little protection.
Many cloth mask designs simply do not seal well. They are not stiff enough to push against the face, there are gaps where the mask doesn’t even come in contact with the face and it is not possible to cinch them tightly enough against the skin to form a decent seal.
But leaking is a concern for all masks. Although the materials used in surgical masks are quite effective, they often bunch and fold on the sides. These gaps provide an easy route for air and particles to leak out. Knotting and tucking surgical masks or wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask can both significantly reduce leakage.
N95 masks aren’t immune to this problem either; if the nose clip isn’t securely pushed against your face, the mask is leaking. What makes N95s unique is that a specific requirement of the N95 certification process is making sure the masks can form a good seal.
4. What is different about omicron?
The mechanics of how masks function is likely no different for omicron than any other variant. The difference is that the omicron variant is more easily transmitted than previous variants. This high level of infectiousness makes wearing good-quality masks and wearing them correctly to limit the chances of catching or spreading the coronavirus that much more critical.
Unfortunately, the attributes that make for a good mask are the very things that make masks uncomfortable and not very stylish. If your cloth mask is comfy and light and feels like you are wearing nothing at all, it probably isn’t doing much to keep you and others safe from the coronavirus. The protection offered by a high-quality, well-fitting N95 or KN95 is the best. Surgical masks can be very effective at filtering out particles, but getting them to fit correctly can be tricky and makes the overall protection they will provide you questionable. If you have other options, cloth masks should be a last choice.
Originally published on The Conversation by Christian L’Orange and republished under a Creative Commons License
“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.
In an interview published in TheWashington PostMagazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.
When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”
“Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”
“People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?'” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”
“We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”
While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.
During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.
“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”
Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”
Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.
“In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Early in 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto and credit card payments. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sounded sympathetic about a year later as he offered broader reflections on what was ailing the country. “Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Many of our citizens are unsettled, and the fault line for all this discord is a fraying American dream — the enormous wealth of our country is accruing to the very few. In other words, the fault line is inequality.”
But even as those words were published, the bank had quietly begun to unleash a lawsuit blitz against many of its struggling customers. Starting in early 2020 and continuing to today, Chase has filed thousands of lawsuits against credit card customers who have fallen behind on their payments.
Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits in 2011, in the wake of the last major economic downturn, after regulators found that the company was filing tens of thousands of flimsy suits, sometimes overstating what customers owed. Rather than being backed by extensive billing records to document the debts, according to the regulators, the suits were typically filed with a short affidavit from one of a half-dozen Chase employees in one office in San Antonio who vouched for the accuracy of the bank’s information in thousands of suits.
Chase “filed lawsuits and obtained judgments against consumers using deceptive affidavits and other documents that were prepared without following required procedures,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in 2015. At times, Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing.’” According to the CFPB’s findings, there were mistakes in about 10% of cases Chase won and the judgments “contained erroneous amounts that were greater than what the consumers legally owed.”
Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings, but it agreed, as part of a consent order, to provide significant evidence to make its cases in the future. The company also agreed it would provide “relevant information and documentation maintained by [Chase] to support their claims” in cases — the vast majority of those it filed — in which customers did not respond to the lawsuit.
But that provision expired on New Year’s Day 2020. And since then the bank has gone back to bringing lawsuits much as it did before 2011, according to lawyers who have defended Chase customers.
“From what I can see, nothing has changed,” said Cliff Dorsen, a consumer-rights attorney in Georgia who represents Chase credit card customers.
Chase declined to make executives available for interviews. It said in a statement that the timing of the resumption of its credit card lawsuits was just a coincidence. “We have engaged with our regulators throughout this process,” said Tom Kelly, a bank spokesperson. “We continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.” (Kelly said Chase also filed some credit card lawsuits in 2019.)
Kelly declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. Chase sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Westchester County, in New York’s suburbs, court records show that Chase has sued more than 400 customers over credit card debt since 2020; a year earlier, the equivalent figure was one.
A similar surge is occurring in Texas, according to January Advisors, a data-science firm. Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits around Houston last year after filing only seven in 2020, the analytics firm’s review of court records in Harris County shows. Chase instigated 141 consumer debt cases in Austin last year after filing only one such case in 2020, according to January Advisors, which is conducting research for a nationwide study ofdebt collection cases.
Today, just as it did before running afoul of the CFPB, Chase is mass-producing affidavits from the same San Antonio office where low-level employees generated hundreds of thousands of affidavits in the past, according to defense attorneys and court documents. Those affidavits are often the main piece of evidence that Chase uses to win its case while detailed customer records — and any errors they may contain — remain out of sight.
“Our clients deserve to see everything that Chase has in its files,” Dorsen said. “Instead, Chase gives us these affidavits and says: ‘You can trust us about the rest.’”
Before the robo-signing scandal a decade ago, Chase recovered about a billion dollars a year with its credit card collections business, according to the CFPB. Why would Chase stop suing customers for years, forgoing billions of dollars, only to ramp up its suits once key provisions of the CFPB settlement had expired?
Craig Cowie thinks he has an answer. “Chase did not think it could make money if it had to sue customers and abide by the CFPB settlement,” said Cowie, who worked as an enforcement attorney at the CFPB during the Obama administration and now teaches at the University of Montana Law School. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense for why the bank would have held back.”
Cowie, who did not work on the CFPB’s case against Chase, said he doesn’t know why the agency agreed to a time limit on some settlement provisions. He pointed out that such agreements are negotiated and the CFPB cannot just dictate the terms. The agency may have felt it had to let some provisions of the settlement expire to get Chase to agree to the deal, Cowie said.
The CFPB declined to comment.
For its part, Chase said it waited years to restart its lawsuits because it took that long to get the system working right. “We rebuilt the litigation program slowly and methodically to make sure we had the right controls in place,” said its spokesperson, Kelly.
At the time, the CFPB had found numerous flaws in Chase’s suits. The agency concluded that Chase used “unfair” legal tactics when it promised that its credit card account information was reliable and mistake-free. It wasn’t simply a matter of errors in calculating how much was owed; in some cases the company even got the customer’s name wrong. Chase would sometimes pass accounts with errors — including instances where customers had been victims of credit card fraud, others who had tried to settle their debts and even some who had died — on to outside debt collectors, who might then take action based on that information.
Once Chase won a victory in court, the bank could seek to garnish a customer’s wages or raid their bank accounts, and those customers would pay a further price: a stain on their credit report that could make it harder to “obtain credit, employment, housing, and insurance,” the CFPB wrote.
Those sued by Chase, then and now, might spot errors if the company provided full records in its court filings, consumer advocates say. Instead, Chase typically submits copies of a few credit card statements along with a two-page affidavit attesting that the bank’s records were accurate and complete.
Consumer advocates say they do not expect that the majority of Chase’s credit card records are tainted with errors. But if today’s error rate is the same 10% that the CFPB estimated in the past and the Chase lawsuit push continues, thousands of customers may be sued for money they don’t owe. And there is no easy way to check when Chase keeps so many of its records out of sight.
Chase said that its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the company said in a statement.
Credit card customers do not respond to collections lawsuits in roughly 70% of cases, according to research from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In those instances, the customer typically loses by default.
In the small percentage of cases where a customer gets a lawyer or otherwise fights back, Chase still has the advantage because it can access all of the customer’s account records easily, according to consumer lawyers. (The bank typically closes accounts of customers who have failed to pay their debts, leaving them unable to access their records online.) Chase usually shares the complete credit card account file only after a legal fight, according to attorneys and pleadings from across the country. “Chase has all the evidence and we have to beg to get it,” said Jerry Jarzombek, a consumer-rights attorney in Fort Worth, Texas, who is defending several Chase customers.
The result leaves many defendants in a bind: They don’t have enough information to know whether they should dispute the company’s claims. “Chase wants us to believe its records are reliable so we don’t need to see them,” Jarzombek said. “Well, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with Chase for decades. I’d prefer to see what evidence they’ve actually got.”
The robo-signing scandal exposed Chase’s affidavit-signing assembly line. Before the settlement, Chase had about a half-dozen employees churning through affidavits stacked a foot high or taller, according to the former Chase executive who brought the practices to light at the time. Kamala Harris, who was then California’s attorney general and is now vice president, likened the process to anaffidavit mill.
The current operation involves roughly a dozen “signing officers” working from the same San Antonio offices as before and performing many of the same tasks, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.
Chase used to prepare affidavits “in bulk using stock templates,” according to the 2015 CFPB findings. That is again happening today, according to two of Chase’s outside lawyers who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
The lawyers said they typically send their affidavit requests in batches. The requests already contain the basic details of the customer’s account when they arrive in Chase’s San Antonio office, they said. An affidavit request that is sent one day can typically be processed and returned the next business day, the lawyers said.
Chase affidavits contain stock language that the “signing officer” has “personal knowledge of and access to [Chase’s] books and records.” That “personal knowledge” is limited, said one signing officer who declined to be named. Chase does not expect signing officers to perform a forensic review of an account but rather to follow computer prompts to complete the affidavit, said the employee. “We just work with what’s on the screen.”
Chase declined to discuss its process for creating affidavits, but the bank said it satisfies the rules set by courts in the places where it operates. “Judges, clerks and other judiciary staff are well versed in the court rules and laws in their jurisdictions,” said the statement by the bank’s spokesperson, Kelly. “Through our counsel, we provide the information those parties require in matters before them.”
Courts around the country have grown too accepting of what big banks and debt collectors say, according to consumer advocates. And the justice they dispense can feel as cursory and hurried as the suits that Chase files.
In Texas a decade ago, lawmakers pushed most credit card cases into the state’s version of small claims courts, known as justice courts. The rules of evidence are more lax there and the judge might not even be a lawyer. A retired basketball player presides over one suchcourtroom in Houston. “One of these judges said to me: ‘What’s the point of seeing a bunch of evidence? We already know these people borrowed the money,’” said Jarzombek, the Fort Worth attorney. “I said: ‘Why even have a trial, then? Let the banks take whatever they want.’”
In Houston, where Chase has more than 1,000 consumer credit suits on the docket, only one defendant in those cases has fought to a trial on her own, according to court records.
That person’s experience is instructive. Like many, Melissa Razo struggled financially during the early pandemic. A former restaurant manager, the 42-year-old Razo had gone back to school, the University of Houston, to study psychology, and she supported herself by doing typing for an online transcription service. That work suddenly dried up when the pandemic hit, and Razo began missing credit card payments. Her debt escalated. Chase sued her in January 2021, claiming she owed a total of about $8,500 on two credit cards.
Razo had a previous court experience stemming from an acrimonious divorce, where she had learned that a plaintiff needs facts and evidence to win. “Nothing I presented was good enough,” she recalled of the divorce case.
Using what she’d learned, Razo prepared for her day in court against Chase. She could not access her account anymore, she said, because the bank had shut it down. So in late June, as her hearing date approached, Razo pulled together as many of her credit card statements as she could find. They told a story of grocery runs and shopping at Target and Goodwill, along with missed payments and penalties.
Razo presumed Chase would have to back up its claims just as she had been expected to do in divorce court. She expected the company’s lawyers would have five years of statements and documents to show that she owed exactly what they said she owed. This was a trial, after all.
The trial lasted perhaps a minute, according to Razo. It boiled down to two questions. Was Razo present? the judge asked over Zoom. When she announced herself, the judge asked if she had a Chase credit card. Yes, Razo said, that was true. Then, she said, the judge ruled in favor of Chase.
Chase declined to comment on the case. The judge was not authorized to speak about the matter, according to a court clerk. And the justice courts do not transcribe their hearings, so ProPublica could not verify what was said. (The court’s docket did confirm that a judgment was entered in Chase’s favor after a judge trial.)
Razo’s courtroom experience, though, sounds typical, according to Rich Tomlinson, a lawyer with Lone Star Legal Aid. “I can’t recall ever seeing a live witness in a debt case,” said Tomlinson, who has represented hundreds of debtors in his career. “These trials are not like Perry Mason. They’re not even Judge Judy.”
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From ‘metaverse’ to ‘NFT’ – here’s a wrap-up of the key buzzwords that shaped 2021 in the tech industry.
These subjects were the talk of the town in 2021, as the tech industry transitions into a new age.
A DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, whilst NFTs took the art world by storm.
This year, tech CEOs drew inspiration from a 1990s sci-fi novel, Reddit investors’ lexicon seeped into the mainstream as “diamond hands” and “apes” shook Wall Street, and something called a DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.
If you’re still drawing a blank as 2021 wraps up, here’s a short glossary:
Metaverse
The metaverse broadly refers to shared, immersive digital environments which people can move between and may access via virtual reality or augmented reality headsets or computer screens. read more
Some tech CEOs are betting it will be the successor to the mobile internet. The term was coined in the dystopian novel “Snow Crash” three decades ago. This year CEOs of tech companies from Microsoft to Match Group have discussed their roles in building the metaverse. In October, Facebook renamed itself Meta to reflect its new metaverse focus.
Web3
Web3 is used to describe a potential next phase of the internet: a decentralized internet run on the record-keeping technology blockchain.
This model, where users would have ownership stakes in platforms and applications, would differ from today’s internet, known as Web2, where a few major tech giants like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google control the platforms.
Social audio
Tech companies waxed lyrical this year about tools for live audio conversations, rushing to release features after the buzzy, once invite-only app Clubhouse saw an initial surge amid COVID-19 lockdowns. read more
NFT
Non-fungible tokens, which exploded in popularity this year, are a type of digital asset that exists on a blockchain, a record of transactions kept on networked computers. read more
In March, a work by American artist Beeple sold for nearly $70 million at Christie’s, the first ever sale by a major auction house of art that does not exist in physical form.
Decentralization
Decentralizing, or the transfer of power and operations from central authorities like companies or governments to the hands of users, emerged as a key theme in the tech industry.
Such shifts could affect everything from how industries and markets are organized to functions like content moderation of platforms. Twitter, for example, is investing in a project to build a decentralized common standard for social networks, dubbed Bluesky.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is generally an internet community owned by its members and run on blockchain technology. DAOs use smart contracts, pieces of code that establish the group’s rules and automatically execute decisions.
In recent months, crowd-funded crypto-group ConstitutionDAO tried and failed to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution in an auction held by Sotheby’s.
Stonks
This deliberate misspelling of “stocks,” which originated with an internet meme, made headlines as online traders congregating in forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets drove up stocks including GameStop and AMC. The lingo of these traders, calling themselves “apes” or praising the “diamond hands” who held positions during big market swings, became mainstream.
GameFi
GameFi is a broad term referring to the trend of gamers earning cryptocurrency through playing video games, where players can make money through mechanisms like getting financial tokens for winning battles in the popular game Axie Infinity.
Altcoin
The term covers all cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin, ranging from ethereum, which aims to be the backbone of a future financial system, to Dogecoin, a digital currency originally created as a joke and popularized by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
FSD BETA
Tesla released a test version of its upgraded Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, a system of driving-assistance features – like automatically changing lanes and make turns – to the wider public this year.
The name of the much-scrutinized software has itself been contentious, with regulators and users saying it misrepresents its capabilities as it still requires driver attention.
Fabs
“Fabs,” short for a semiconductor fabrication plant, entered the mainstream lexicon this year as a shortage of chips from fabs were blamed for the global shortage of everything from cars to gadgets.
Net zero
A term, popularized this year thanks to the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, for saying a country, company, or product does not contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s usually accomplished by cutting emissions, such as use of fossil fuels, and balancing any remaining emissions with efforts to soak up carbon, like planting trees. Critics say any emissions are unacceptable.
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo by Unsplash
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”
Fueling fresh calls for swift, sweeping action by President Joe Biden and financial regulators, a report published Tuesday reveals that if the planet-heating pollution of the 18 largest U.S. asset managers and banks is compared to that of high-emissions countries, Wall Street is a top-five emitter.
“Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The new report—entitled Wall Street’s Carbon Bubble: The global emissions of the U.S. financial sector—was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Sierra Club. The analysis was done by South Pole, which replicated an approach it used earlier this year for a U.K.-focused effort commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Though likely a “gross underestimate,” as Sierra Club put it, because the analysis relies on public disclosures that exclude key data, the researchers found that “just the portions of the portfolios of the eight banks and 10 asset managers studied in this report financed an estimated total of 1.968 billion tons CO2e based on year-end disclosures from 2020.”
Putting that CO2e—or carbon dioxide equivalent, which is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases—figure into context, the report notes:
If the financial institutions (FIs) in this study were a country, they would have the fifth largest emissions in the world, falling just short of Russia;
Financed emissions from the 18 institutions covered in this report are equivalent to 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year;
Financed emissions from the eight banks studied in this report are equivalent to 80 million homes’ energy use for one year; and
Financed emissions from the 10 asset managers studied in this report are equivalent to three billion barrels of oil consumed.
The banks analyzed are Bank of America, Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo.
The asset managers included are BNY Mellon Investment Management, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, and the Vanguard Group.
When Wall Street is factored into the list of the world’s top 10 countries responsible for the most annual greenhouse gas emissions, it falls after China, the United States, India, and Russia but ranks ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Germany, according to Climate Watch data.
As the new publication warns:
The findings of this report make clear that the U.S. financial sector is a major contributor to climate change. Given that the indirect emissions of the U.S. financial sector are just below the total emissions of Russia, it should be considered a high-carbon sector and treated as such. Therefore, if President Biden and his administration do not put in place measures to mitigate U.S.-financed emissions, the United States will almost certainly fall far short of its targets to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction from 2005 levels in 2030 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
The implications of falling short would be dire. Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry would mean that the deadly wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events that Americans and communities around the world are already experiencing will only become worse, and efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly.
Representatives from the groups behind the report echoed its call to action in a statement Tuesday.
“Climate change poses a large systemic risk to the world economy. If left unaddressed, climate change could lead to a financial crisis larger than any in living memory,” said Andres Vinelli, vice president of economic policy at CAP. “The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
Vinelli added that “because the industry has proven itself to be unwilling to govern itself,” regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “must urgently develop a framework to reduce banks’ contributions to climate change.”
Ben Cushing, Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager, agreed that “regulators can no longer ignore Wall Street’s staggering contribution to the climate crisis.”
“The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk,” he said. “Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The report comes as financial institutions worldwide face mounting criticism for their contributions to the climate emergency—including at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland last month—and as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing model legislation that opposes fossil fuel divestment.
More than three dozen climate advocacy groups argued Monday that “what ALEC claims to be discriminatory action”—referring to divestment from major polluters—”is instead prudent action to ensure the stability of our financial system and economy.”
“We know from the Great Recession that the financial sector won’t take responsibility,” the organizations noted. “It’s up to regulators to protect people from the impact on climate and financial risk of fossil fuel investment.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photos by various
What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?
“Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun…” is the title of an article in the Atlantic, just out, by Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of many groundbreaking exposés. He describes the various maneuvers that Trump-driven Republican operatives and state legislators are developing to overturn elections whose voters elected Democrats from states with Republican governors and state legislatures. Georgia fit that profile in 2020—electing two Democratic senators in a state with a Republican legislature and governor.
Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic.
Getting ready for 2024, the Georgia GOP legislature has stripped the election-certifying Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, of his authority to oversee future election certifications. The legislature has also given itself the unbridled authority to fire county election officials. With Trump howling his lies and backing his minion candidates, they created a climate that is intimidating scores of terrified election-precinct volunteers to quit.
Added to this are GOP-passed voter suppression laws and selectively drawn election districts that discriminate against minorities—both before the vote (purges, arbitrary disqualifications), during the vote (diminishing absentee voting, and narrowing dates for their delivery), and after the election in miscounting and falsely declaring fraud.
The ultimate lethal blow to democratic elections, should the GOP lose, is simply to have the partisan GOP majority legislators benefiting from demonically-drawn gerrymandered electoral districts, declare by fiat the elections a fraud, and replace the Democratic Party’s voter chosen electors with GOP chosen electors in the legislature.
Now take this as a pattern demolishing majority voters’ choice to 14 other GOP-controlled states, greased by Trumpian lies and routing money to his chosen candidate’s intent on overturning majority rule, add Fox News bullhorns and talk radio Trumpsters and you have the apparatus for fascistic takeovers. Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic. All this and more micro-repression is broadcast by zillions of ugly, vicious, and anonymous rants over the Internet enabled by the profiteering social media corporations like Facebook.
Anonymous, vicious, violent email and Twitter traffic is the most underreported cause of anxiety, fear, and dread undermining honest Americans working, mostly as volunteers, the machinery of local, state, and national elections, with dedicated public servants. These people are not allowed to know the names behind the anonymous cowardly, vitriol slamming against them, their families, and children.
What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?
1. First is the Congress. Democrats impeached Trump over the Ukraine extortion but left on the table eleven other impeachable counts, including those with kitchen-table impacts (See Congressional Record, December 18, 2019).
All that is going on to deal with Trump’s abuses in any focused way on Capitol Hill, controlled by Democrats, is the House’s January 6th investigation. So far as is known, this Select Committee is NOT going to subpoena the star witnesses—Donald Trump and Mike Pence. So far, the Congress is feeble, not a Rock of Gibraltar thwarting the Trumpian dictators.
2. The federal courts? Apart from their terminal delays, it’s Trump’s Supreme Court and his nominees fill many chairs in the federal circuit courts of appeals. The federal judiciary—historically the last resort for constitutional justice—is now lost to such causes.
3. The Democratic Party? We’re still waiting for a grand strategy, with sufficient staff, to counter, at every intersection, the GOP. The Dems do moan and groan well. But where is their big-time ground game for getting out the non-voters in the swing states? Are they provoking recall campaigns of despotic GOP state legislators in GOP states having such citizen-voter power? Why aren’t they adopting the litigation arguments of Harvard Law School’s constitutional expert, Professor Larry Tribe? Where are their messages to appeal to the majority of eligible American voters who believe that the majority rules in elections? Why aren’t they urgently reminding voters of the crimes and other criminogenic behavior by the well-funded Trump and his political terrorists?
Bear in mind, the Democrats are well-funded too.
4. The Legal Profession and their Bar Associations. Aren’t they supposed to represent the rule of law, protect the integrity of elections, and insist on peaceful transitions of power? They are after all, not just private citizens; they are “officers of the court.” Forget it. There are few exceptions, but don’t expect the American Bar Association and its state bar counterparts to be the sentinels and watchdogs against sinister coup d’états under cover of delusional strongarming ideologies.
5. Well, how about the Universities, the faculties, and the students? Weren’t they the hotbeds of action against past illegal wars and violations of civil rights in the Sixties and Seventies? Sure. But that was before the Draft was eliminated, before the non-stop gazing at screens, and before the focus on identity politics absorbed the energy that fueled mobilizations about fundamental pursuits of peace, justice, and equality.
6. How about some enlightened corporate executives of influential companies? Having been given large tax reductions, sleepy law enforcement regulators, and a corporatist-minded federal judiciary, while the war contracts and taxpayer bailouts proliferate, why should they make waves to save the Republic? The union of plutocratic big business with the autocratic government is one classical definition of fascism.
7. The Mass Media. Taken together, they’ve done a much better job exposing Trumpism than has the Congress or litigation and the judiciary. However, their digging up the dirt does not come with the obvious follow-ups from their reporting and editorializing.
Covering the Ukraine impeachment, but not covering at least eleven other documented impeachable offenses, handed to them by credible voices, left them with digging hard but never hitting pay dirt. Trump has escaped all their muckraking as he has escaped all attempts by law enforcers who have their own unexplained hesitancies. If reporters do not dig intensely into just how Trump and his chief cohorts have escaped jail time and other penalties, their usual revelations of wrongdoings appear banal, eliciting “what else is new?” yawns by their public.
What’s left to trust and rely upon? Unorganized people organizing. What else! That’s what the farmers did peacefully in western Massachusetts in 1774 (See: The Revolution Came Early—1774—to the Berkshires) against the tyrant King George III and his Boston-based Redcoats? By foot or by horse, they showed up together in huge numbers at key places. These farmers collectively stopped the takeover of local governments and courts by King George’s wealthier Tories. Their actions can teach us the awesome lessons of moral, democratic, and tactical grit—all the while having to deal with nature and their endangered crops.
What are our excuses?
Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet.
Above: Photo credit, NASA
Last month’s COP26 climate summit at Glasgow ended as a complete flop. While some have hailed as success the mere inclusion of the phrase “unabated coal should be phased down” in the final agreement, the fact of the matter is that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy remains a distant dream. It should also be obvious to all that the climate deal reached at COP26 in no way prevents planetary temperature from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.
But let’s be blunt about rising global temperatures. Thanks to the failure of politics with regard to global warming, the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius will be reached or exceeded within the next couple of decades under all emissions scenarios considered, according to IPCCS’ latest findings. The only question is whether we can prevent the planet from getting even hotter—potentially passing 2 degrees or even 3 degrees Celsius.
Indeed, our national leaders have failed us on climate change, and we know the reasons why.
I explained this in a recent Op-Ed for Al Jazeera English.
“First, leaders sit on climate negotiating tables with the intent to advance an agenda that serves above all their own national interests rather than the health of our planet. Their mindset is still guided by the principles of “political realism” and political short-termism. This is why their words are not matching up with their actions.
Thus, Joe Biden can make a moral pronouncement to world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow that the US will lead the fight against the climate crisis “by example”, but, less than two weeks later, his administration auctions oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, the nation-state remains the primary actor in world affairs, so there are no international enforcement mechanisms with regard to pledges about cutting emissions. International cooperation, let alone solidarity, is extremely difficult to attain under the existing political order, and as leading international affairs scholar Richard Falk has argued, “Only a transnational ethos of human solidarity based on the genuine search for win/win solutions at home and transnationally can respond effectively to the magnitude and diversity of growing climate change challenges.”Third, “the logic of capitalism” guides the world economy. With profit-maximization as the ultimate motive, capitalism is toxic for the environment, especially in its neoliberal version, with a strong emphasis on deregulation and privatization.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.” But all is not yet lost. Climate activism is now a global movement, and it is surely our only way out of the climate conundrum. An estimated 100,000 people marched in Glasgow, and tens of thousands in other cities around the world, demanding bold action at the COP26 climate conference. Global warming demonstrations are filled with people of all ages and walks of life. Scores of scientists were arrested during the COP26 summit for carrying out various acts of civil disobedience.
To be sure, real leadership at the Glasgow summit was on display by the thousands of activists who took to the streets—not by the diplomats inside the halls of the Scottish Event Campus.
Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that some progress has indeed been made in the fight against global warming. The European Union is trying to make more than 100 cities carbon neutral by 2030. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in Asia and the Pacific, hundreds of climate projects have been introduced to combat fight the climate crisis.
Progressive economists, like those at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, are taking real steps to help us combat global warming by producing highly detailed climate stabilization programs that drive sustainability while boosting employment. Indeed, Robert Pollin and some of his co-workers at PERI have brought the Green New Deal project to the forefront of public consciousness in scores of U.S. states. They are also hard at work now to spread it to other countries of the world.
Within the same context, organizations such as ReImagine Appalachia in the Ohio River Valley are laying the groundwork for a post-fossil fuel economy. Through both grassroots and grasstops initiatives, ReImagine Appalachia has engaged a wide variety of stakeholders in a shared vision of building a sustainable future based on clean and renewable energy sources and investments in the natural infrastructure to support “carbon farming,” but also through the creation of good union jobs for low-wage workers and by ensuring a just transition for all towards an environmentally sustainable economy, including of course workers in the extractive industries. As Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia likes to say, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In the state with the largest economy in the United States, a detailed project of building a clean-energy infrastructure and reducing emissions by 50 percent as of 2030 and achieving a zero-emissions economy by 2045 has received strong support by more than 20 major unions across the state, including the United Steel Workers Locals 5, 675 and 1945 (who represent workers in the fossil fuel supply chain). The latest union to endorse the California Climate Jobs Plan, outlined in Program for Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Transition in California by Robert Pollin and his co-workers at PERI, is the San Fransisco Region of the Inland Boatman’s Union.
Indeed, labor activism in California is in the midst of a dramatic resurgence, with key labor union leaders and organizers such as, among others, Tracey Brieger, Dave Campbell, Norman Rogers, and Veronica Wilson, keen to continue the legacy of Tony Mazzocchi of the Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. Mazzocchi was one of the earliest environmental activist leaders who advocated the idea of just transition for workers in carbon-intensive industries. His view, which is at the core of “Just Transition,” was that helping displaced workers should not be seen as philanthropy or welfare. According to Mazzocchi, those who had worked to “provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”
There is no shortage of activism in today’s world. The Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 15 progressive organizations working together with the explicit aim of mobilizing grassroot power in order to advance the vision of the Green New Deal across key states, while also applying pressure at the federal level, is yet another case emblematic of the important shift taking place in a world where the conditions for the transition to a sustainable and just future are being so blatantly ignored by the political establishment.
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet. They know that they have a world to win.
Originally published on Common Dreams by C.J. POLYCHRONIOU and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Real life Stephen Ross, who founded Related Companies, a global firm best known for developing the Time Warner Center and Hudson Yards in Manhattan, was a massive winner between 2008 and 2017. He became the second-wealthiest real estate titan in America, almost doubling his net worth over those years, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual list, by adding $3 billion to his fortune. His assets included a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and the Miami Dolphins football team.
Then there’s the other Stephen Ross, the big loser. That’s the one depicted on his tax returns. Though the developer brought in some $1.5 billion in income from 2008 to 2017, he reported even more — nearly $2 billion — in losses. And because he reported negative income, he didn’t pay a nickel in federal income taxes over those 10 years.
What enables this dual identity? The upside-down tax world of the ultrawealthy.
ProPublica’s analysis of more than 15 years of secret tax data for thousands of the wealthiest Americans shows that Ross is one of a special breed.
He is among a subset of the ultrarich who take advantage of owning businesses that generate enormous tax deductions that then flow through to their personal tax returns. Many of them are in commercial real estate or oil and gas, industries that have been granted unusual advantages in the American tax code, which allow the ultrawealthy to take tax losses even on profitable enterprises. Manhattan apartment towers that are soaring in value can be turned into sinkholes for tax purposes. A massively profitable natural gas pipeline company can churn out Texas-sized write-offs for its billionaire owner.
By being able to generate losses — effectively, by being the biggest losers — these Americans are the most effective income-tax avoiders among the ultrawealthy, ProPublica’s analysis of tax data found. While ProPublica has shown that some of the country’s absolute wealthiest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, occasionally sidestep federal income tax entirely, this group does it year in and year out.
Take Silicon Valley real estate mogul Jay Paul, who hauled in $354 million between 2007 and 2018. According to Forbes, he vaulted into the ranks of the multibillionaires in those years. Yet Paul paid taxes in only one of those years, thanks to losses of over $700 million.
Then there’s Texas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, who built Chief Oil & Gas into a major natural gas producer over the past two decades. The multibillionaire reported a total of $1.4 billion in income from 2013 to 2018, but offset that with even greater losses. He paid no federal income taxes in four of those six years.
None of the people mentioned in this article would discuss their taxes or tax-avoidance techniques with ProPublica.
A spokesperson for Ross declined to accept questions. In a statement, he said, “Stephen Ross has always followed the tax law. His returns — which were illegally obtained and descriptions of which were released by ProPublica — are reflective of and in accordance with federal tax policy. It should terrify every American that their information is not safe with the government and that media will act illegally in disseminating it. We will have no further correspondence with you as we believe this is an illegal act.” (As ProPublica has explained, the organization believes its actions are legal and protected by the Constitution.)
A spokesman for Rees-Jones declined to comment. Paul did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The techniques used by these billionaires to generate losses are generally legal. Loopholes for fossil-fuel businesses date back practically to the income tax’s birth in the early 20th century. Carve-outs for real estate and oil and gas have withstood sporadic efforts at reform by Congress in part because there has been widespread support for investment in housing and energy.
The commercial real estate and fossil fuel breaks have enabled some of the wealthiest Americans to escape federal income taxes for long stretches of time. Sometimes they amass such large losses that they cannot use all of them in a given year. When that happens, they fill up reservoirs of deductions that they then draw down bit by bit to wipe away taxes in future years. Before ProPublica’s analysis of its trove of tax data, the extent of this type of avoidance among the nation’s wealthiest was not known.
Typical working Americans do not generate these kinds of business losses and thus can’t use them to offset income or reduce income tax.
As long as there have been income taxes, there have been schemes to manufacture illusory losses that reduce taxes, and there have likewise been counterefforts by Congress and the IRS to rein them in. But ProPublica’s findings show these measures to prevent deduction abuses “aren’t doing what they are supposed to do,” said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School. “The system isn’t working right.”
For decades, One Columbus Place, a 51-story apartment complex in midtown Manhattan, has looked like an excellent investment. Located a block off the southwest corner of Central Park, it’s adjacent to the Columbus Circle mall for shopping at Coach or Swarovski or for dining at the Michelin three-star restaurant Per Se.
Its 729 rental units have churned out millions of dollars in rental income every year for its owners, among them Stephen Ross. Mortgage records show its value has skyrocketed, jumping from $250 million in the early 2000s to almost $550 million in 2016.
Yet, for more than a decade, this prime piece of New York real estate was a surefire money-loser for tax purposes. Since Ross acquired a share in the property in 2007, he has recorded $32 million in tax losses from his stake in a partnership that owns it, his tax records show.
Tax losses from properties owned through a host of such partnerships are central to Ross’ ability, and that of other real estate moguls, to continue to grow their wealth while reporting negative income year after year to the IRS.
Their down-is-up, up-is-down tax life comes in large part from provisions in the code that amplify developers’ ability to exploit write-offs from what’s known as depreciation, or the presumed decline in the value of assets over time. Some of these rules apply only to the real estate business, letting developers take outsize deductions today to reduce their taxable income while delaying their tax bill for decades — and potentially forever.
Depreciation itself is a widely accepted concept. In most businesses, the depreciation write-offs come from assets, like machinery, that reliably lose their value over time; eventually, a machine becomes outmoded or breaks down.
When it comes to real estate, a common justification for depreciation relies on the idea that space in older buildings will tend to command lower rents than space in newer ones, eventually making it worthwhile for an owner to knock down a building and construct a new one. So, if a building initially cost investors $100 million, the tax code allows them, over a period of years, to deduct that $100 million.
But rather than losing value, real estate properties often rise in value over time, much like One Columbus Place has done for Ross and his business partners. (That value includes the cost of the land, which doesn’t generate depreciation write-offs.)
These depreciation write-offs, along with deductions for interest and other expenses, have helped many of the nation’s wealthiest real estate developers largely avoid income taxes in recent years, even as their empires have grown more valuable.
Former President Donald Trump, for whom Ross hosted a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser in 2019, is perhaps the best-known example of commercial real estate’s tax beneficiaries. As The New York Times reported last year, Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and nothing at all in 10 of the years between 2001 and 2015. According to ProPublica’s data, Trump took in $2.3 billion from 2008 to 2017, but his massive losses were more than enough to wipe that out and keep his overall income below zero every year. In 2008, Trump reported a negative income of over $650 million, one of the largest single-year losses in the tax trove obtained by ProPublica.
New York-area real estate developer Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also avoided federal income taxes for long stretches of time. Though he reported making some $330 million between 2008 and 2018, Charles Kushner paid income taxes only twice in that decade ($1.8 million in total) thanks to deductions. (Kushner went to prison in 2005 after being convicted of tax fraud and other charges. Trump pardoned him last year.)
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to questions about his taxes. (The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer told The New York Times last year that Trump “has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government” over the past decade, an apparent reference to taxes other than income tax.) Representatives for Kushner did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Even relative to fellow real estate developers, though, Stephen Ross is exceptional. He didn’t start out in commercial real estate. He began his career as a tax attorney.
Ross, 81, grew up on the outskirts of Detroit, the son of an inventor with little business savvy. After getting a business degree from the University of Michigan, Ross decided to go to law school to avoid the Vietnam war draft. He then extended his education, earning a master’s degree in tax law at New York University.
He saw the tax code as a puzzle to solve. “Most people, when you say you’re a tax lawyer, they think you’re filling out forms for the IRS,” Ross once told a group of NYU students. “But I look at it as probably the most creative aspect of law because you’re given a set of facts and you’re saying, ‘How do you really reduce or eliminate the tax consequences from those facts?’”
After graduating, Ross went to work, first at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, and later at a Wall Street investment bank, which fired him. Then, with a $10,000 loan from his mother, Ross went into business for himself, selling tax shelters.
In its early years, Ross’ Related Companies solicited investments in affordable-housing projects from affluent professionals like doctors and dentists with the promise that the deals would generate deductions they could use on their taxes to offset the income from their day jobs.
By the mid-1970s, such shelters had become big business on Wall Street. The losses frequently subsidized economically dubious investments in a range of industries. It wasn’t uncommon for firms to offer investors the chance to get $2 or $3 worth of tax savings for every $1 they put in.
As the decade wore on, regulators increasingly took notice. The IRS started programs to scrutinize loss-making businesses. Ross and some of his real estate partnerships were audited, according to a company prospectus, and in some cases, the IRS determined that the firm had been too aggressive in taking write-offs from the projects.
Lawmakers began to crack down, too. In 1976, Congress limited the tax losses investors could take if they borrowed money to invest in industries like oil and gas or motion pictures. But the change didn’t apply to the real estate industry, which successfully argued that without such tax shelters, investors wouldn’t back new low-income housing.
In 1986, Congress sought to rein in tax shelters once more as part of a major tax overhaul. This time the changes included rules to prevent affluent people from using the kind of investments Ross had been offering. The rules shrank who could offset their other income using business losses to only those who had important roles in the business, such as those who spent a certain number of hours on it; so-called passive investors were out of luck.
Several tough years followed for Ross and others in the industry, but the real estate lobby mounted a pressure campaign that yielded results in 1993, when Congress allowed real estate professionals once again to use losses generated from their rental properties to wipe out taxable income from things like wages.
After being pounded by the real estate crash of the early 1990s, the Related Companies reorganized itself with an infusion of cash from new investors. Related made use of new federal housing tax credits, as well as local tax breaks and tax-exempt public financing offered by New York City to propel development of affordable housing units. The firm also continued to branch out into more traditional office and luxury apartment deals.
In 2003, the $1.7 billion development of Time Warner Center catapulted Ross indisputably into the upper echelon of New York developers. Then the most expensive real estate project in the history of the city, the two shining glass towers beside Columbus Circle also helped elevate Ross into the the Forbes 400 for the first time in 2006.
Despite his growing fortune, Ross often owed no federal income tax. In the 22 years from 1996 to 2017, he paid no federal income taxes 12 times. His largest tax bill came in 2006, when he owed $12.6 million after reporting just over $100 million in income.
In the years since, Ross has used a combination of business losses, tax credits and other deductions to sidestep such bills. In 2016, for example, Ross reported $306 million in income, including $219 million in capital gains, $51 million in interest income and $5 million in wages from his role at Related Companies. But he was able to offset that income entirely with losses, including by claiming $271 million in losses through his business activities that year and by tapping his reserve of losses from prior years.
ProPublica’s records don’t offer a complete picture of the sources of each taxpayer’s losses, but they do provide some insight. That year, for example, in addition to losses from One Columbus Place, Ross recorded a loss of $31 million from a partnership associated with the Miami Dolphins. As ProPublica previously reported, professional sports teams provide a stream of tax losses for their wealthy owners. Ross also had a loss of $16.9 million from RSE Ventures, his investment company, which has owned stakes in restaurants, a chickpea pasta maker and a drone racing league.
After taking all of his losses, his records show that he would have owed a small amount of alternative minimum tax, which is designed to ensure that taxpayers with high income and huge deductions pay at least some taxes. But Ross was able to eliminate that bill, too, by using tax credits, which he’d also built up a store of over the years. That left him with a federal income tax bill of zero dollars for the year.
Since the early 2000s, when he had significant taxable income, Ross has turned to a conventional technique for creating tax deductions: charitable donations. He has made a series of multimillion-dollar contributions to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, which have earned him naming rights to its business school and some of its sports facilities. In 2003, a partnership owned by Ross and his business partners donated part of a stake in a southern California property to the school, taking a $33 million tax deduction in exchange. But when the university sold the stake two years later, it got only $1.9 million for it.
In 2008, the IRS rejected the claimed tax deduction. In court, the agency argued that the transaction was “a sham for tax purposes” and that Ross and his partners had grossly overvalued the gift. After almost a decade of legal wrangling, a federal judge sided with the IRS, disallowing the deduction, including Ross’ personal share of $5.4 million. The judge also upheld millions of dollars in penalties that the IRS imposed on the partnership for engaging in the maneuver. Both the tax attorney and the accountant who advised Ross on the deal pleaded guilty to tax evasion in an unrelated case. (In a 2017 article on the case, a spokesperson said Ross “was surprised and extremely disappointed by the actions of the two individuals, who have pled guilty, and has severed all dealings with them.”)
Ross’ core business, real estate, remains almost unmatched as a way to avoid taxes.
For most investors, losses are limited by how much money they stand to lose if the enterprise goes belly up, or how much money they have “at risk.” But not real estate investors. They can deduct the depreciation of a property from their taxable income even if the money they used to buy the place was borrowed from a bank and the property is the only asset on the line for the loan. If they buy a building worth $50 million, putting $10 million down and borrowing the rest, they can still deduct $50 million from their personal taxes over time, even though they’ve put much less of their own money into the project.
Savings related to depreciation and similar write-offs are supposed to be temporary; when you sell the assets, you owe taxes not only on your profits from the sale, but on whatever depreciation you’ve taken on the property as well. In tax lingo, this is known as “depreciation recapture.”
But two big gifts in the tax code, working together, can allow real estate moguls to push off those taxes forever.
First, commercial real estate investors can avoid paying taxes on their gains by rolling sale proceeds into similar investments within six months. This provision of the tax code, called the “like-kind exchange,” goes back to the years following the end of World War I and used to apply to other kinds of property owners. Now it’s available only to real estate investors, a provision that’s expected to cost the U.S. Treasury $40 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. Real estate moguls can “swap till they drop,” as the industry saying has it.
Then, there are even more tax benefits that can be used when they do meet their demise — at least to benefit their heirs. For starters, all the gains in the value of the moguls’ properties are wiped out for tax purposes (a process known by the wonky phrase “step-up in basis”). The tax slate is similarly wiped clean when it comes to the depreciation write-offs that were taken on the properties. The heirs don’t have to pay depreciation recapture taxes.
Real estate heirs then get another quirky benefit: They can depreciate the same buildings all over again as if they’d just bought them, using the piggy bank of write-offs to shield their own income from taxes.
As for Ross, after filing his taxes for 2017, he still had a storehouse of tax losses that ProPublica estimates exceeded $440 million. It was entirely possible that he’d never pay federal income taxes again.
If you’re looking to get richer while telling the tax man you’re getting poorer, it’s hard to beat real estate development. But the oil and gas industry provides stiff competition.
Privileged as the lifeblood of the economy, the energy sector has long been lavished with tax breaks. Provisions dating to the 1910s allow drillers to immediately write off a large portion of their investments, essentially subsidizing oil and gas exploration.
One special gift from U.S. taxpayers to oil drillers is called depletion. The idea is grounded in common sense: As oil (or gas or coal) is taken out of the ground, there’s less left to collect later. That bit-by-bit depletion — analogous to depreciation — becomes a tax write-off. Each year, oil investors get to deduct a set percentage of the revenue from the property.
But investors can keep on deducting that set amount indefinitely, even after they’ve recouped their investment, a benefit that had its critics almost from the beginning. The idea was “based on no sound economic principle,” groused the Joint Committee on Taxation in 1926. Yet only in the 1970s was the depletion provision meaningfully curtailed, and then mainly for the largest oil producers. Congress left it in place for independent operators like wildcatters, long venerated as a cross between plucky entrepreneurs and cowboys.
Today the ranks of billionaires are filled with these independent operators. They get the best of both worlds: legacy tax breaks from the days when oil exploration was a crapshoot and current technology that makes the business much less speculative.
These tax breaks have long outlived their initial purpose of encouraging drilling, said Joseph Aldy, a professor of the practice of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Now “we’re just giving money to rich people.”
Billionaires in the industry collect enough deductions to dwarf even vast incomes. Of the 18 billionaires ProPublica previously identified as having received COVID-19 stimulus checks last year — they were eligible because their huge tax write-offs resulted in reported incomes that fell below the middle-class cutoffs for receiving payments — six made their fortunes in the oil and gas industry.
One was Trevor Rees-Jones, who rode the shale fracking boom to build a fortune of over $4 billion while shrinking his federal income taxes to nothing.
His tax returns show huge income, over a billion dollars in total from 2013 to 2018, but even more enormous deductions. In 2013, for instance, Rees-Jones’ company, Chief Oil & Gas, made a major move, acquiring 40 natural gas wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale for $500 million. Hundreds of millions in write-offs for that acquisition flowed to Rees-Jones’ taxes.
A spokesman for Rees-Jones declined to comment.
Another Texan, Kelcy Warren of the pipeline giant Energy Transfer, shows how the industry’s tax breaks, when blended with others that are more broadly available, can turn a wildly profitable company into a tax write-off for its owner, even as he reaps billions of dollars in income.
Warren, who co-founded Energy Transfer in the 1990s, is worth about $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. He built the company on a plan of aggressive expansion, through both acquisitions and building pipelines. “You must grow until you die,” he has said.
Warren’s aggressive strategy has allowed him to amass billions of dollars in income, only a small portion of which is taxed. (Representatives for Warren did not respond to requests for comment.)
Energy Transfer is publicly traded, but it’s structured as a special kind of partnership, called a master limited partnership. Only public companies in oil and gas, as well as a few other industries, can take this form.
Partnerships work differently than corporations. A corporation is a separate entity from its investors: The corporation pays taxes on its profits, and the investors pay taxes on the dividends they receive. By contrast, partnerships, including master limited partnerships, don’t generally pay taxes. Only the investors (the partners) pay taxes on their share of the partnership’s profits.
But when Energy Transfer sends regular cash distributions to its partners, these payments are, in most cases, considered a “return of capital” rather than a profit. They come tax free.
Warren’s stake in Energy Transfer — he is the primary general partner and holds hundreds of millions of units of the publicly traded limited partnership — has long entitled him to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in distributions every year, which have helped fund an outsize lifestyle. In addition to a 23,000-square-foot home in Dallas, which boasts a 200-seat theater, a bowling alley and a baseball field, he also has a fleet of private planes, an entire Honduran island, and an 11,000-acre ranch near Austin that has giraffes, javelinas and Asian oxen.
From 2010 to 2018, Warren was entitled to receive more than $1.5 billion in cash distributions, according to ProPublica’s analysis of company filings. During that time, Warren also disclosed an additional $500 million in income from other sources on his tax returns.
But in six of the nine years, he told the IRS he’d lost more money than he’d made. In four of them, he paid nothing.
Warren was able to wipe out his income tax liabilities because Energy Transfer provided him with huge deductions, not only from depletion and other tax breaks specific to oil and gas, but also from the way his company is allowed to account for depreciation.
After Energy Transfer builds a new pipeline, its value becomes an asset, one that will degrade over time, and thus produces depreciation deductions. All of that is standard. What’s unusual is that the tax code has long allowed Energy Transfer and its peers to treat the pipeline as if it lost more than half its value immediately. This “bonus depreciation” can wipe out billions in profits; indeed, in 2018, Energy Transfer reported $3.4 billion in profits in its annual public filing while simultaneously delivering big tax losses to its partners.
Lawmakers from both parties have supported bonus depreciation on the theory that the tax break, which is available across many industries, boosts spending on new equipment and juices the economy. But Trump and Republicans took the idea to its extreme in 2017 with two key changes that benefited aggressive companies like Energy Transfer in particular.
Under the new tax law, the “bonus” rose from 50% to 100%. In other words, for tax purposes, a shiny new pipeline becomes worthless upon completion. Second, the new law contained an even greater perk: It extended to the purchase of used equipment. This means that when a big company like Energy Transfer buys the assets of a smaller one, the value of all the smaller company’s equipment can be written off immediately.
Warren’s tax data reflects the benefits of this to individual owners. He entered 2018 already having built up an $82 million store of losses, and by the end of the year, he had increased it to over $130 million, ProPublica estimates.
Warren is a major Republican donor, having given $18 million to federal and state Republicans since 2015. Most of that went to supporting Trump, who was once an Energy Transfer investor.
Warren’s closeness to the Trump administration seemed to pay off. Days after taking office in 2017, Trump ordered the Army to reconsider a decision to block Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline, whose planned path under a reservoir and near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation had sparked strong opposition. Two weeks later, the pipeline was approved. Energy Transfer boasted record profits in the years that followed.
The company’s biggest quarter ever came last year. The reason? A $2.4 billion windfall from the worst winter storm to hit Texas in decades. Hundreds of Texans died. Utilities scrambled and prices for natural gas soared. San Antonio’s largest utility later accused Energy Transfer of “egregious” price gouging and sued to recoup some payments. The city’s mayor called Energy Transfer’s actions “the most massive wealth transfer in Texas history.” No company profited more, reported Bloomberg. (A spokesperson for Energy Transfer responded that the company had merely sold gas “at prevailing market prices.”)
It was a characteristic victory for Warren, who once said, “The most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.”
Nobody knows just how many of the ultrawealthy are able to completely wipe out their income tax bills using business losses. The IRS publishes all sorts of reports analyzing the traits of taxpayers at different income levels, but its analysis typically starts with people who report $0 or more in income, thus excluding anyone who reported negative income.
But while the scope of the problem isn’t known, policymakers are well aware of techniques taxpayers use to game the system. Congress periodically seeks to tighten tax loopholes (often when it has ambitious spending initiatives it needs to pay for). For his part, President Joe Biden put forward plans this spring that would have axed a variety of oil and gas tax breaks, including percentage depletion. Master limited partnerships, the corporate form that Energy Transfer uses, were on the chopping block. In real estate, the special like-kind exchange carve-out was slated for elimination. The plans would have killed even the step-up in basis, the crucial provision that enables titans in both industries to reap huge deductions without worrying about a future income tax bill.
But as in the past, lobbyists for these industries rallied to preserve their privileged status, and these proposals were dropped.
A novel reform proposal still survives. Recent versions of Biden’s Build Back Better plan have contained a provision that would prevent wealthy taxpayers from using outsize losses from their businesses to wipe out other income in the future.
However, even if this proposal makes it into law, older losses that predate the legislation would still have a privileged status, immune to the new limitations. The biggest losers, it appears, will once again emerge unscathed.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”
Fossil fuel executives who testified Thursday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing focused on decades of coordinated industry misinformation refused to pledge that their companies will stop lobbying against efforts to combat the climate emergency driven largely by their businesses.
That joint refusal came in response to a challenge from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—who at the end of the hearing announced subpoenas for documents the fossil fuel companies have failed to provide.
Earlier in the hearing, Maloney had asked if the Big Oil CEOs would affirm that their organizations “will no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change.”
Big Oil CEOs unanimously refuse to pledge to Congress to "no longer spend any money directly or indirectly to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change".
Advocates for climate action pointed to the moment as yet another example of major polluters impeding planet-saving policy.
“The silence, non-answers, and repeated deflections from Big Oil’s Slippery Six exposed once and for all that the fossil fuel industry won’t back off its commitment to spreading climate disinformation and lobbying against climate action in order to protect their bottom line,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.
“For the first time ever, fossil fuel executives were confronted under oath with the evidence of their industry’s decadeslong efforts to deceive the American people about climate change,” Wiles continued. “They not only refused to accept responsibility for lying about the catastrophic effects of their fossil fuels—they refused to stop funding efforts to spread disinformation and oppose climate action.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable,” he added. “Today’s hearing and the committee’s ongoing investigation are important steps in those efforts.”
The only real backdrop to today's hearing with Big Oil CEOS is: These companies knew all about climate change in the 1980s and chose to lie about it systematically for decades, which is why we're in our current hideous political fix.
Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, had threatened to subpoena the industry leaders—collectively dubbed the #SlipperySix—if they declined to join the hearing, entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action.”
The historic event included testimony from four industry executives—ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell Oil president Gretchen Watkins—and leaders from industry trade groups: American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark.
Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, warned that “lawmakers should be wary of testimony from executives who have consistently put their industry’s bottom line over the health of the climate and the American people, no matter their rhetoric.”
Yep. We are seeing the fossil fuel savior framework all over the place. We need them, we have always needed them, and we will always need them. https://t.co/SltC52FPoy
Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a pair of climate misinformation scholars at Harvard University, have warned of a “fossil fuel savior frame” that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.”
Both Oreskes and Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn observed the presence of such framing during the hearing. Henn said that “it’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage-takers: ‘You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.”
It’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage takers: “You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.” #SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/mT8bPZJu8j
The fossil fuel witnesses’ initial remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions were full of industry talking points. They advocated for “market-based solutions” like carbon taxes while failing to offer specifics. They also highlighted carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology and hydrogen—both of which progressive green groups have denounced as “false solutions”—as key to reaching a “lower-carbon future.”
FACT CHECK: Exxon's CEO just said the International Energy Agency says the world will continue relying on fossil fuels.
That is false.
Earlier this year, the IEA said: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
While suggesting a long-term need for oil and gas, the executives claimed to believe in anthropogenic climate change and said fossil fuel emissions “contribute” to global heating. Some critics called them out for using that term, rather than “cause” or “drive.”
First misleading ExxonMobil statement: GHG "can contribute to climate change." No, not "can contribute." They DRIVE climate change, and they come primarily from @exxonmobil 's primary product: oil and gas.https://t.co/BO6oAofbeA
Using the the word “contribute” rather than cause, saidHuffPost environment reporter Chris D’Angelo, “downplays/dismisses the science, which shows they are the primary driver… Frankly, it’s climate denial—the very topic of this hearing.”
After inquiring about how long all four executives had been in their current roles, the panel’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), asked whether they had ever signed off on a climate disinformation campaign. They all said no—which experts and activists promptly disputed.
While progressives on the panel grilled the executives, Republicans repeatedly apologized to the CEOs for Democrats’ supposed “intimidation” efforts. Blasting the GOP lawmakers’ actions as “pathetic,” Henn said that “they really do see themselves as servants to Big Oil.”
.@RepGarretGraves (R-$759,995 oil and gas) literally explains that his state of Louisiana is completely screwed by fossil-fueled global warming but he can't and won't do anything about it because oil & gas is so profitable. "Why would we stop?"#SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/uXzf23E3a9
— Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.NEWS (@climatebrad) October 28, 2021
The panel’s GOP members also tried to redirect attention to planet-heating activities of other countries, particularly China, and complained about President Joe Biden’s move to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, even inviting Neal Crabtree, a welder who lost his job when the project was canceled, to testify.
Republicans trotting out as a political prop a witness who supposedly lost his job due to climate policy, as if they or Big Oil ever cared about workers. Meanwhile real labor voices are speaking the truth, thank you @steelworkers: https://t.co/Fz0pk6q3wr
“The GOP’s strategy at this hearing is clear: It will not attempt to claim Big Oil *didn’t* mislead on climate,” tweeted climate reporter Emily Atkin of the HEATED newsletter. “Instead, the GOP is claiming Democrats are wasting time by focusing on climate change, and that it isn’t important to ‘everyday Americans.'”
Thanking Atkin for spotlighting the Republicans’ strategy, ClimateVoice noted that new polling shows the U.S. public does care about the issue. According to survey results released this week, a majority of Americans see climate as a problem of high importance to them and support Congress passing legislation to increase reliance on clean electricity sources.
Maloney, in her closing remarks Thursday, lamented that the hearing featured “much of the denial and deflection” seen in recent decades. She also called out the companies for not turning over requested documents, refusing to “take responsibility” for their contributions to the climate crisis, and continuing to fund groups like API. The chair vowed that her committee will continue its investigation.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
“There are steps we can take to prevent this dire outcome,” 58 advocacy groups write in an open letter, “but we must take swift action.”
Citing “unprecedented and coordinated” Republican efforts to undermine public trust in the U.S. electoral system, nearly 60 advocacy groups warned Monday of the need defend democracy ahead of the 2022 midterm elections—including by passing the Freedom to Vote Act.
“We have already seen tragic consequences in the form of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.”
“Our democracy faces an existential threat—the very real possibility that the outcome of an election could be ignored and the will of the people overturned by hyperpartisan actors,” 58 groups including MoveOn.org, Protect Democracy, Public Citizen, SEIU, and the Sierra Club assert in an open letter.
“Since the 2020 election, we have seen unprecedented and coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the U.S. election system,” the letter states.
“These efforts have taken many forms,” the authors explain, including “widespread disinformation campaigns and baseless claims of election fraud,… intimidation of election officials and administrators just for doing their jobs, new state laws to make election administration more partisan and more susceptible to manipulation or sabotage, and outright violence.”
Disinformation campaigns Baseless claims of fraud Intimidation of officials Laws sabotaging election administration Outright violence
This is an unprecedented attack on the U.S. election system.
Noting that “exaggerated and unsubstantiated fears about voter fraud have been a vote suppression tool for some time,” the letter argues that “these efforts took on entirely new ferocity with the advent of former President [Donald] Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ regarding the 2020 presidential election.”
“The danger posed by the concerted effort to spread disinformation and undermine confidence in our elections is not hypothetical or speculative,” the authors assert. “We have already seen tragic consequences in the form of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.”
“Despite the fact that experts across the political spectrum—including Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security—have confirmed that the 2020 election was as free, fair, and secure as any in American history, Trump and his supporters have done all they can to cast doubt on the integrity of the process,” the letter says.
While warning that the GOP could work to overturn future elections, the signatories assure that “there are steps we can take to prevent this dire outcome, but we must take swift action.”
A year out from Election Day 2022, we're 1 of 50+ groups warning that we must remain vigilant against efforts to sabotage that election.
Voters decide, and it's up to all of us to make sure our decision is respected. Congress, do your part w/ the Freedom to Vote Act. pic.twitter.com/xkYsI6xeAG
“We must push back on dangerous state initiatives that endanger democracy; Congress must enact critical provisions to protect federal elections and elections officials from partisan attacks and subversion, such as those included in the Freedom to Vote Act; and legal remedies must be brought to bear as needed,” the coalition says.
“Further, elected officials and public servants at all levels must condemn attacks on the processes that allow for free and fair democratic election, free of partisanship,” the signers add.
Many of the groups that signed the letter also support abolishing the Senate filibuster, a procedure historically used to block civil rights legislation—including the Freedom to Vote Act late last month.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation
Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.
The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.
The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.
The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.
That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.
When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.
Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.
“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.
As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.
Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.
“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”
Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.
“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”
Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.
More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.
The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.
On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.
In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.
But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.
From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
If we are failing to meet our commitments, it is because of a handful of the richest people on the planet refuse to pay their taxes.
2021 will perhaps be remembered as the year when the great powers demonstrated their inability to assume their responsibilities to prevent the world from sinking into the abyss. I am thinking of course of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. After having used up the available atmospheric space to develop, the industrialized countries reaffirmed their refusal to honour this climate debt, even though global warming has become an existential issue.
And this is not all. I also refer to the calamitous management of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rich countries have monopolized and hoarded vaccines, and then locked themselves in surreal debates about third doses or the comparative merits of this or that vaccine. This strategy sows death and hinders economic recovery in vaccine-deprived countries, while making them fabulous playgrounds for the proliferation of more contagious, more deadly and more resistant variants that do not care about borders.
If we add the tax evasion of the ultra-rich using tax havens, we arrive at a total loss of US $483 billion.
Finally, I also want to talk about another agreement imposed by the Northern capitals, apparently more technical, but which symbolizes their selfishness and blindness: the one on the taxation of multinationals. Concluded in October, it is a gigantic undertaking, the first reform of the international tax system born in the 1920s, totally obsolete in a globalized economy. Thanks to its loopholes, multinationals cause States to lose some US $312 billion in tax revenue each year, according to the “State of Tax Justice in 2021” just published by the Tax Justice Network, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and Public Services International.
If we add the tax evasion of the ultra-rich using tax havens, we arrive at a total loss of US $483 billion. This is enough, the report reminds us, to cover more than three times the cost of a complete vaccination programme against Covid-19 for the entire world population. In absolute terms, rich countries lose the most tax resources. But this loss of revenue weighs more heavily on the accounts of the less privileged: it represents 10% of the annual health budget in industrialized countries, compared to 48% in developing ones. And make no mistake, the people responsible for this plundering are not the tropical islands lined with palm trees. They are mostly in Europe, first and foremost in the United Kingdom, which, with its network of overseas territories and “Crown Dependencies”, is responsible for 39% of global losses.
In this context, the agreement signed in October is a missed opportunity. Rich countries, convinced that complying with the demands of their multinationals was the best way to serve the national interest, put themselves behind the adoption of a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. The objective, in theory, is to put an end to the devastating tax competition between countries. Multinationals would no longer have an interest in declaring their profits in tax havens, since they would have to pay the difference with the global minimum tax.
In reality, at 15%, the rate is so low that a reform aimed at forcing multinationals to pay their fair share of taxes risks having the opposite effect, by forcing developing countries, where tax levels are higher, to lower them to match the rest of the world, causing a further drop in their revenues. It is no coincidence that Ireland, the European tax haven par excellence, has graciously complied with this new regulation.
Taxation is the very expression of solidarity. In this case, the absence of solidarity. A global tax of 15% on the profits of multinationals will only generate US $150 billion, which, according to the distribution criteria adopted, will go, as a priority, to rich countries. If ambition had prevailed, with a rate of 21% for example, we would have obtained an increase in tax revenues of US $250 billion. With a rate of 25%, tax revenues would have jumped by US $500 billion, as recommended by ICRICT, the Independent Commission on the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, of which I am a member, along with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman and Jayati Ghosh.
Making multinationals pay their fair share of taxes, fighting climate change, dealing with Covid-19 and future pandemics: in reality, everything is linked. While the virus is on the rise again with the arrival of winter in the northern hemisphere, the boomerang effect of the vaccine monopolies no longer needs to be shown or explained. As for the climate emergency, we know from a recent study by the World Inequality Lab that the map of carbon pollution is perfectly in line with that of economic disparities. The richest 10% of the world’s population emit nearly 48% of the world’s emissions—the richest 1% produce 17% of the total!—while the poorest half of the world’s population is responsible for only 12%.
This gap is obvious between countries, but also within them. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, the emissions levels of the poorest half of the population are already approaching the per capita targets for 2030. If we are failing to meet our commitments, it is because of a handful of the richest people, the same people who do not pay their taxes. It is time for our elites to realize that fighting inequality on all fronts—health, climate and tax—is our only way out. Otherwise, there is no salvation for humanity—and it is no longer a hyperbole.
Originally published on Common Dreams by EVA JOLY and republished under under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
“No,” said Sen Bernie Sanders. “Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.”
Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a “giveaway of galactic proportions” in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands.”
According toDefense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year’s NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That’s $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump’s final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden. The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos’ Blue Origin space exploration company.
“Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.
STATEMENT on Blue Origin subsidy in #NDAA: “Until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects” –@sappelbaumhttps://t.co/LOppvCfXdcpic.twitter.com/t30afGKQzc
“Jeff Bezos shouldn’t receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,” he continued. “In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that’s already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris.”
“Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet,” Appelbaum said.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands,” he added. “Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects.”
No. Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in “corporate welfare” for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that “combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny.”
“Meanwhile,” he added, “the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right.”
Originally published in Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“We can either intensify the crisis to the point of no return, or lay the foundations for a just world where everyone’s needs are met.”
As diplomats from wealthy countries continue to say “blah, blah, blah” at COP26, over 100,000 people growing increasingly impatient with empty promises and inaction marched through Glasgow on Saturday, with thousands more hitting the streets in cities around the world during roughly 300 simultaneous demonstrations on a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.
“Many thousands of people took to the streets today on every continent demanding that governments move from climate inaction to climate justice,” Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, said in a statement. “We won’t tolerate warm words and long-term targets anymore, we want action now.”
Activists from all over the globe are mobilising to demand a future that works for all of us.
“Today, the people who have been locked out of this climate summit had their voices heard,” Rehman continued, “and those voices will be ringing in the ears of world leaders as we enter the second week of negotiations.”
Rehman added that “the climate crisis has resulted from our broken, unequal societies and economies. We must transform our global economies into ones that protect both people and our planet instead of profit for a few.”
Today, 100,000 activists marched to Glasgow Green to rally for #climatejustice and the system change necessary to achieve this.
The COP26 Coalition is a United Kingdom-based alliance of civil society groups and trade unions mobilizing around climate justice during the ongoing United Nations climate summit in Scotland. That’s where governments “will decide who is to be sacrificed, who will escape, and who will make a profit,” the coalition said. “We can either intensify the crisis to the point of no return, or lay the foundations for a just world where everyone’s needs are met.”
Saturday’s actions in every corner of the globe came one day before the start of the People’s Summit for Climate Justice, where ordinary individuals can “discuss, learn, and strategize for system change.” From Sunday through Wednesday, participants can attend workshops in Glasgow or join online events.
“Across the world, the poorest people and communities of color are too often those bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,” the coalition continued. “From coastal villages in Norfolk whose sea-defenses are eroding faster than ever, to people living by the Niger Delta rivers blackened by oil spillage.”
“Only we can imagine and build the future that works for all of us… through collective action, solidarity, and coordination.”
Global crises of economic exploitation, racial oppression, and environmental degradation “not only overlap,” the coalition added, “but share the same cause.”
“We got to this crisis point,” the coalition said, “because our political and economic system is built on inequality and injustice. For centuries, rich governments and corporations have been exploiting people and the planet for profit, no matter how much it harms the rest of us.”
The solution, said the coalition, is “system change that comes from the ground up.” Remedies that “not only reduce carbon emissions but create a fairer and more just world in the process… already exist and are being practiced, but our leaders lack the political will” to pursue “climate action based on justice, redistribution of resources, and decentralization of power.”
“Justice won’t be handed to us by world leaders or delivered by corporations,” the coalition added. “Only we can imagine and build the future that works for all of us… through collective action, solidarity, and coordination” in local communities and at the international level.
That message was echoed by COP26 Coalition member War on Want, a U.K.-based organization that fights the causes of poverty and defends human rights.
In a video arguing that the dominant political-economic order is not broken, but rather “rigged,” War on Want explains how the capitalist system “generates increasing wealth for the already rich and powerful at the expense of the majority of people on this Earth” and advocates for a Global Green New Deal to achieve climate justice.
“Billionaires, corporations, and oligarchs don’t measure failure in lives lost, houses flooded, communities destroyed, forests burned, or people locked into poverty,” the video continues. “They measure success by their bank balance, by share prices, and by holidays in space.”
“Where we see climate breakdown, poverty, and injustice, they see nothing but profit,” states the video. “The climate crisis is a crisis of justice.”
Echoing recent research highlighting the extent to which the Global North extracts resources from the Global South, War on Want notes that “from the shackles of slavery to the gunboats of colonialism, from imperialist interventions to the neoliberal rigging of the global economy,” wealthy countries, and especially the elites within them, have drained trillions of dollars from impoverished nations, and that is reflected in their disproportionate share of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.K., the United States, and the European Union, for instance, have been responsible for nearly half of the world’s carbon pollution, despite making up just 10% of its population.
“The multiple crises we face are not going to be solved with more exploitation of people and the planet, and cooking the books.”
Meanwhile, a new study shows that the world’s wealthiest countries and worst polluters are spending over twice as much on border militarization to exclude growing numbers of refugees as they are on decarbonization.
Despite repeated warnings that limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century requires keeping fossil fuels in the ground and ramping up the worldwide production of clean energy, U.S. President Joe Biden has been approving extraction on public lands and waters at a dangerous clip, and he and the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell have both pushed for boosting the supply of oil.
Globally, fossil fuel use is projected to increase this decade even as annual reductions in coal, oil, and gas production are necessary to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis.
The planet is currently on pace for a “catastrophic” 2.7°C of heating this century if countries—starting with the rich polluters most responsible for exacerbating extreme weather—fail to rapidly and drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions, accelerate the transition to renewable energy, and enact transformative changes.
Like Bolivian President Luis Arce, the COP26 Coalition stressed that “the multiple crises we face are not going to be solved with more exploitation of people and the planet, and cooking the books.”
“Current government and corporation targets of ‘Net Zero’ do not mean zero emissions,” the coalition explained. “Instead, they want to continue polluting while covering it up with crafty ‘carbon offsets.’ We need commitments and action to achieve Real Zero. That also means no new fossil fuel investments and infrastructure at home or abroad, and saying no to carbon markets, and banking on risky unproven technologies that allow countries and corporations to continue polluting.”
In addition, the coalition said, “climate action must be based on who has historically profited and those who have suffered.”
The alliance continued:
Indigenous peoples have been at the frontline of the root causes of climate change for centuries. Indigenous peoples, frontline communities, and the Global South cannot continue to pay the price for the climate crisis while the Global North profits.
Each country’s carbon emission reduction must be proportional to their fair share: how much they have contributed to the climate crisis through past emissions. We must cancel debts of Global South by all creditors and the rich countries must provide adequate grant-based climate finance for those on the frontline of the climate crisis to survive. We must address the loss of lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems already occurring across the world, through a collective commitment to providing reparations for the loss and damage in the Global South.
In its video, War on Want stresses that “poverty, the climate crisis, inequality, and racism aren’t accidental. They’re political.”
“The answer is people power,” the group adds. “All across the world—from peasants sowing solidarity, workers fighting for a living wage, people resisting occupation, Indigenous communities defending communal lands, to climate activists taking to the streets—we are all coming together to challenge the system, uproot injustice, and fight for people and our planet.”
Speaking at Saturday’s rally in Glasgow, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Marshall Islands Climate Envoy to the United Nations, said that “we need the biggest emitters to be held responsible. We need financing to implement the solutions we are currently developing ourselves through our national adaptation plan.”
“We contribute 0.00005% of the world’s global emissions,” Jetnil-Kijiner added. “We did nothing to contribute to this crisis, and we should not have to pay the consequences. We need to keep up the pressure [so] that COP26 doesn’t allow offsets or endanger human rights and the rights of Indigenous people.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
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