“Ever notice how ‘deficit hawks’ vote for record-high defense spending, yet claim bills that help people and challenge lobbyists are ‘too much?'” asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday derided his own party’s plan to spend $3.5 trillion over the next decade to combat the climate crisis, invest in child care, and expand Medicare as “fiscal insanity.”
“All this operatic moaning about $3.5 trillion is ridiculous hypocrisy. Manchin has casually voted for nearly three times that for defense spending.”
But progressive lawmakers and commentators were quick to point out that Manchin (D-W.Va.)—along with other conservative Democrats who are currently standing in the way of Democrats’ reconciliation package—have had no problem greenlighting the Pentagon’s increasingly bloated budget year after year after year.
“Ever notice how ‘deficit hawks’ vote for record-high defense spending, yet claim bills that help people and challenge lobbyists are ‘too much?'” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) asked in a tweet Thursday evening.
“All this operatic moaning about $3.5 trillion is ridiculous hypocrisy. Manchin has casually voted for nearly three times that for defense spending”
Noting that the reconciliation package includes yearly spending of $350 billion while the proposed military budget for Fiscal Year 2022 is $770 billion, the New York Democrat wrote: “Guess which got rubber stamped and which gets deemed a ‘spending problem.'”
Last week, the House of Representatives passed the $770 billion military policy bill—which includes $740 billion for the Pentagon alone–by a vote of 316-113, with just 38 Democrats voting no. The Senate is expected to pass its version of the National Defense Authorization Act in the coming days.
In a column published late Thursday, The Week‘s Ryan Cooper observed that Manchin “voted for every single one of the military budgets over the last decade—in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.”
“He voted for all $9.1 trillion,” Cooper wrote. “While he occasionally complained about wasteful military programs and asked for an audit of the Pentagon, these quibbles were never enough to get him to vote differently. He helped inflate the already-bloated war budget and regularly boasted about thus ‘supporting’ the troops. This year, he did it again.”
“So on one level, all this operatic moaning about $3.5 trillion is ridiculous hypocrisy,” Cooper continued. “Manchin has casually voted for nearly three times that for defense spending—money that killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned half the Middle East into a smoking crater. A modest fraction of that total to help parents pay their bills, give seniors dental coverage, fight climate change, and so forth is not some intolerable burden on the economy.”
West Virginia activists in kayaks presented that critique directly to Manchin on Thursday as the Democratic senator listened from his yacht:
In ongoing talks over the reconciliation package, Manchin is pushing for a top-line spending level of $1.5 trillion. That figure is at least $2 trillion less over 10 years than Democrats’ current plan, which would spend $3.5 trillion over the next decade.
As Win Without War executive director Stephen Miles noted Thursday, Manchin’s preferred $1.5 trillion number is “less than we’ll spend at the Pentagon over the next two years.”
“And Manchin’s talking about a DECADE of spending across the entire rest of the government,” Miles wrote on Twitter. “During that time we’ll spend somewhere north of $8 trillion, possibly closer to $10 trillion. Just. at. the. Pentagon.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“We continue to bankroll the very fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis, then wonder why our planet is on fire.”
A new report released Wednesday identifies $86 billion worth of offshore tax loopholes that a dozen U.S.-based oil and gas companies exploit each year as part of a “tax bonanza,” a finding that comes as climate justice advocates push Congress to eliminate subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
“Our government cannot continue to bankroll climate destruction,” Friends of the Earth tweeted Wednesday.
NEW REPORT: Exxon Mobil currently relies on a tax loophole worth nearly one BILLION dollars. Enough is enough — time to gut all $121 billion in fossil fuel subsidies. Our government cannot continue to bankroll climate destruction.#EndFossilFuelSubsidieshttps://t.co/1gdN6oEgQt
The report (pdf), compiled by Friends of the Earth, Oxfam America, and BailoutWatch, reveals the consequences of “two esoteric provisions in the tax code worth tens of billions of dollars to Big Oil’s multinational majors,” including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and other polluters most responsible for the climate emergency.
As a result of the GOP’s 2017 tax law, corporations that drill overseas benefit from special treatment under the Global Intangible Low-Tax (GILTI) framework, which covers Foreign Oil and Gas Extraction Income (FOGEI).
The Treasury Department estimates that repealing the Trump-era exemption for FOGEI would raise $84.8 billion in revenue from just 12 companies that are currently eligible for the carveout, the report notes.
“It is unfortunate but not surprising that the handful of companies benefitting from these loopholes are lobbying to protect their special treatment.” —Chrive Kuveke, BailoutWatch
Another corporate handout, the so-called dual capacity loophole, is “a longstanding gimmick” wherein fossil fuel giants “artificially inflat[e] their foreign tax bills” to evade U.S. taxes.
Although they are permitted to claim tax credits for taxes paid to foreign governments, U.S. companies are not allowed to do so for non-tax payments such as royalties.
“In practice, however, the categories often are commingled—particularly when companies make a single combined payment including both taxes and fees,” the report explains. “A foreign country may even try to disguise non-tax payments as a tax, knowing that in many cases a multinational company may receive a foreign tax credit from its home country. Existing regulation gives dual capacity taxpayers vast latitude to assert what portions of their payments are taxes eligible to offset U.S. tax bills.”
Eliminating the dual capacity loophole would raise at least an additional $1.4 billion, according to the Biden administration, while the Joint Committee on Taxation puts the figure somewhere between $5.6 billion and $13.1 billion. The report points out that “the estimates vary so widely in part because we have precious little visibility into Big Oil’s payments to governments—and that’s just how the companies want it.”
“As Democrats propose closing loopholes to help cover the cost of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package,” the report states, “these obscure subsidies present a rare chance to act on climate, fund infrastructure, and promote tax fairness in a single stroke.”
While the House Ways and Means Committee’s markup of the Build Back Better Act includes a tax reform proposal that would reverse the FOGEI carveout and the dual capacity loophole, it would leave intact at least $35 billion in federal subsidies for domestic fossil fuel production—despite President Joe Biden’s call to phase out polluter giveaways over a decade.
House Democrats’ failure to stop showering Big Oil with public money—a move supported by a majority of people in the U.S. and many, though not all, Democratic lawmakers—has drawn progressives’ ire.
“The House bill made a decent start by targeting Big Oil’s international tax loopholes, but it went nowhere near far enough,” Lukas Ross, Climate and Energy Justice program manager at Friends of the Earth, said Wednesday in a statement.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “needs to lead on climate and ensure that all $121 billion in fossil fuel subsidies are repealed in the final package,” Ross added.
According to Daniel Mulé, policy lead for Oxfam’s Extractive Industries Tax and Transparency project, “U.S. Big Oil companies like Exxon and Chevron have fought tooth and nail to keep the payments they make to governments around the world a secret, while paying lip service to the global movement for payment transparency.”
“This secrecy,” said Mulé, “has a potential tax impact in the U.S. as well, as it makes it all the more difficult to discern if U.S. oil and gas companies are illegitimately inflating their foreign tax credits.”
The report draws attention to several legislative proposals that would do away with subsidies for domestic fossil fuel production as well as tax exemptions for foreign extraction, including:
The No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act from Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas);
The Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act from Sens. Van Hollen, Sanders, Whitehouse, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowski (D-Ill.);
The End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act from Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Sean Casten (D-Ill.), Donald McEachin (D-Va.), and Katie Porter (D-Calif.).
The report was released the same day members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus urged House leaders to include a repeal of domestic fossil fuel subsidies in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act.
“Instead of creating jobs,” the progressive lawmakers wrote, the subsidies “widen the profit margin of fossil fuel companies.”
We continue to bankroll the very fossil fuel companies responsible for the climate crisis, then wonder why our planet is on fire.
Thank you to the reps calling for an end to Big Oil’s $86 billion in offshore tax loopholes — as well as their $35 billion in domestic handouts! pic.twitter.com/hY0EVsOMK4
The report emphasizes that fossil fuel champions—including the Exxon lobbyist who was caught on camera discussing how the company benefits from offshore tax loopholes and intends to further undermine climate action—are fighting hard to preserve billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded handouts.
“Big Oil isn’t going quietly,” said Chrive Kuveke, an analyst at BailoutWatch. “Since Biden became president, it is unfortunate but not surprising that the handful of companies benefitting from these loopholes are lobbying to protect their special treatment.”
Photo by Extinction Rebellion NYC / Twitter @XR_NYC
At least 40 climate activists were arrested Friday at the New York City offices of JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America, organizers said, as campaigners across the United States demanded financial institutions stop supporting the destruction of the planet.
“People are in denial about the mess we’re in,” said Kerith Creo of Extinction Rebellion (XR) NYC. “We’re sending a message loud and clear that the little action that politicians and greenwashing CEOs have taken so far does not begin to deal with the magnitude of this crisis.”
The protest actions included delivering 150,000 petition signatures as part of the Stop the Money Pipeline (STMP) coalition‘s “Deadline Glasgow: Defund Climate Chaos” campaign to pressure banks ahead of COP 26, a United Nations summit set to start on October 31.
Despite financial institutions’ net-zero emissions by 2050 pledges, the petition highlights, “they are providing loans, insurance, and billions in investment capital to corporations expanding the fossil fuel industry and deforesting the Amazon and other tropical forests―companies that are guilty of human rights abuses and violations of Indigenous sovereignty.”
The petition calls out some specific projects—such as Line 3—and urges banks, insurers, asset managers, and the Biden administration to “end their support for companies engaged in climate destruction and human rights abuses” before the two-week U.N. summit in Scotland.
@XR_NYC is staging a boat outside @Chase HQ, who is the biggest fossil fuel funder in the world.
They poured $317 billion poured into fossil fuels since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Who pays the price for Hurricane Ida? We do.https://t.co/1pZUyDyRLD
The upcoming negotiations in Glasgow “are the most important international climate talks since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015,” STMP said in a statement Friday. “It is also supposed to be ‘the climate finance COP.'”
In New York City, climate activists set up a boat outside the office of JPMorgan Chase, urging the bank to “stop the greenwashing,” and draped a banner that read “#1 Funder of Climate Death” over the building’s entrance.
At Bank of America’s Manhattan office, “half a dozen women blockaded the entrance and a seventh woman sat in a hammock supported by a large tripod on the sidewalk,” according to XR. Outside Citibank’s building, “activists set up a camp on the lawn near the entrance and put up a tripod to which they locked themselves down.”
And thank you to these activists at @Citibank HQ this morning for also risking arrest to bring attention to the SECOND worst fossil fuel funder @XR_NYChttps://t.co/4bLjmuPgff
“We’ve reached the breaking point,” said Christina See of XR NYC. “We need our government leaders to take action immediately. The New York City area saw over 40 deaths due to record breaking floods just a few weeks ago. The climate crisis is here, now.”
The remnants of Hurricane Ida—which initially made landfall in Louisiana on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina—caused fatal flooding across the Northeast, sparking warnings from not only climate activists but also political leaders about what the future holds.
While touring damage in New York and New Jersey, President Joe Biden said that “we got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red; the nation and the world are in peril. And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact.”
Climate campaigners responded to Biden’s comments by urging him to declare a national climate emergency and stop all fossil fuel projects, highlighting his refusal to block the Line 3 tar sands pipeline opposed by Indigenous leaders and environmentalists in Minnesota.
The protests came as the U.S. president held a climate meeting with leaders of major economies and confirmed a new global pledge to reduce methane pollution at least 30% by 2030. Biden’s event followed his leadership summit in April, during which he pledged to cut the nation’s overall planet-heating emissions in half within this decade.
Activists on Friday “shut down 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle, and disrupted business at the Canadian Consulate, Chase, and Bank of America,” according to the Washington city’s arm of 350.org.
STMP explained that “they’re targeting the world’s biggest financers of climate chaos, as well as the Canadian government, who bought the troubled Trans Mountain oil pipeline in 2018.”
The demonstrations in New York City, Seattle, and beyond came as a new U.N. analysis revealed that recent emissions reduction pledges governments have made in anticipation of COP 26 are nowhere near ambitious enough to meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target.
According the new report, the world is on track for 2.7°C or warming by 2100—a revelation that prompted U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to warn that a failure to meet the Paris temperature goal “will be measured in the massive loss of lives and livelihoods.”
Ahead of a national vote this month, Citizen Browser data shows that posts promoting the AfD party appeared more than three times as often as rivals’
Earlier this month, Germany’s far-right nationalist political party Alternative für Deutschland, or the AfD, posted on Facebook. Widespread support for Sharia law among Muslims in Afghanistan, the group claimed, illustrated the danger “wenn sich Massen von Afghanen auf den Weg nach Deutschland und Europa machen” (“when masses of Afghans make their way to Germany and Europe”).
The post was soon shared by thousands of users and commented on by thousands more. It was one of many posts by AfD-related pages over the past couple of months that railed against immigration or, another popular topic, disparaged COVID-19 restrictions as unnecessary.
Despite its modest size in Germany, the AfD has been remarkably successful on Facebook. Data obtained through The Markup’s Citizen Browser project, in partnership with Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, shows how the AfD has gained tremendous traction on Facebook in the run-up to a historically contentious national election to replace Angela Merkel, the long-serving chancellor, later this month.
The Citizen Browser project, which collects data from a diverse panel of 473 German Facebook users, shows the party and its supporters have peppered Facebook with pages promoting its ideology, with posts on those pages appearing in our panelists’ news feeds at least three times as often as those from any rival party.
Fewer unique panelists had posts from AfD-related pages appear in their news feeds than posts from the sister parties of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU), which led in this count, and from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Alliance 90/The Greens). But the data shows AfD deeply engaged with its core audience: The users who did see content from the AfD tended to see it repeatedly, and the AfD was especially good at reaching its own supporters.
Citizen Browser captures up to 50 posts from a panelist’s Facebook news feed one to three times a day. The Markup catalogued every time a post from a page named for a German political party appeared in our panelists’ feeds over the past two months, from July 20 to Sept. 16, 2021. We included any pages that mentioned “AfD” or one of its political rivals (“SPD,” “CDU,” or “FDP,” for example) in its name. We did not determine whether the page was officially sanctioned by the party itself. We removed any pages meant to disparage a party.
Posts from more than 200 different pages promoting the AfD party—the most pages of any party we looked at—appeared in our panelists’ feeds. While the quantity of pages promoting the center-left Social Democratic Party, the SPD, followed closely behind with 175 pages, posts from AfD pages appeared four times as often in our panelists’ news feeds. Our panelists were shown posts from the AfD more than 3,200 times, while they were shown SPD posts only about 760 times.
The other major political party in Germany, the center-right Christian democratic political alliance, or the CDU/CSU, fared slightly better. Posts by pages related to those parties appeared in panelists’ news feeds around 850 times. But the AfD’s posts still appeared more than three times as often.
The AfD’s dominance of our panelists’ news feeds is especially stark considering the makeup of our Citizen Browser panel in Germany. Our panel consists of more people who identified themselves as SPD and CDU/CSU supporters—62 and 82, respectively—than the 44 who identified themselves as AfD supporters.
Those who did report aligning with the far-right party had an average of 55 posts from AfD-related pages appear in their news feeds in the eight weeks of data we examined. By comparison, supporters of the CDU/CSU had an average of just six CDU- or CSU-affiliated posts appear in their feeds.
“Given its very limited number of participants, data from The Markup’s ‘Citizen Browser’ is simply not an accurate reflection of the content people see on Facebook,” Facebook spokesperson Basak Tezcan said in an emailed statement. “We actively reduce the distribution of content that is sensational, misleading, or are found to be false by our independent fact-checking partners. Our approach goes beyond addressing the issue post-by-post, so when Pages or Groups repeatedly share this kind of content, we reduce the distribution of all the posts from those Pages and Groups.”
The AfD did not respond to a request for comment.
Our analysis has limitations. Citizen Browser tracks a small percentage of Facebook users in Germany compared to the tens of millions of Germans on the platform and is unlikely to perfectly mirror what Facebook shows all of its users in Germany. On Sept. 1, Facebook introduced a new interface that affected captures for 3 percent of the panel across all parties. Some captures for this small subgroup of panelists could not be included in this study.
But the panelists represent a diverse set of party affiliations across the political spectrum in the country, from AfD supporters to centrists to far more liberal users.
And AfD’s savvy on Facebook has been documented in past elections.
The AfD’s Rise on Social Media
The AfD launched in 2013, initially as a conservative party harnessing skepticism of the European Union. Though it failed to reach the vote threshold for representation in the German Bundestag in the federal election that year, the group’s facility with social media quickly became evident.
“Directly in their beginning, in 2013, they began to install a very strong network of interconnected Facebook accounts for nearly all local branches of the party,” said Isabelle Borucki, an interim professor at the University of Siegen who studies German political parties online. The AfD operates on many platforms, but Borucki said it was clear the party “understood especially how this network works.”
It isn’t just Facebook where the AfD has performed well, either. This year, a report from Süddeutsche Zeitung and AlgorithmWatch that relied on data from hundreds of users showed how Facebook-owned Instagram seemed to favor right-wing content, with posts from the AfD tending to appear higher up in users’ feeds.
While it’s difficult to say how social media popularity translates to votes, many observers have attributed the AfD’s growth, at least partially, to its social media strategy.
“They managed to use social media to explode and find people and citizens that weren’t interested in politics before,” said Juan Carlos Medina Serrano, a Ph.D. student at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the AfD’s use of social media and is now heading data operations for Germany’s Christian Social Union party.
In past elections, researchers and journalists have tried to measure how well the AfD has reached users on Facebook compared to other political parties. Like The Markup, they also found that the AfD has been able to use Facebook to find a large online audience.
After the 2017 national election, a Washington Post analysis noted that AfD posts had been shared more than 800,000 times that year, far outpacing all other major parties put together.
In 2019, one report found that AfD posts on Facebook accounted for about 85 percent of shared content from German political parties, according to Der Spiegel. A researcher told the outlet at the time that the AfD had become “the country’s first Facebook party.”
Facebook has highlighted its efforts to combat misinformation in past German elections. In 2017, after the last German federal election, the company said it had removed tens of thousands of suspicious accounts to clamp down on the spread of false information.
Facebook also announced earlier this month that it had removed a network of pages associated with Germany’s anti-lockdown Querdenken movement that promoted violent content and health misinformation. The movement is not directly aligned with a political party, although it shares its COVID-skeptical perspective with the AfD.
This month’s vote may present new challenges for the social network. In June, Politico reported that there had been a spike in election-related misinformation as far-right social media users appeared to be laying the groundwork to make claims of election fraud after the vote.
What’s Driving the AfD’s Success on Facebook?
Experts point to several factors that have contributed to the AfD’s Facebook presence.
As the Citizen Browser data shows, the AfD and its supporters tend to run more active pages in general than their rivals, setting up relatively small, localized pages that garner support across the country.
The AfD, researchers say, also relies more on sensational, aggravating content, which is a perspective Facebook rewards with greater reach. “They trigger anger, fear—I would say anarchic or basic emotions,” Borucki said. “Those trigger people and affect people more than bare facts.” One recent AfD post found in our dataset bemoaning “climate hysteria,” for example, led to more than 5,000 “angry” reactions on Facebook.
This strategy seems to be catching on with other political groups. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that some European parties had shifted policy positions to align with what performs well on Facebook, including more negative content.
The CDU didn’t respond to The Markup’s requests for comment, and the SPD declined to comment.
Like many conservative politicians in the United States, the AfD has been eager to court voters skeptical of COVID-19 restrictions and vaccines, leaning into a populist stance against preventative COVID-19 measures.
Facebook says it attempts to automatically tag any content related to COVID-19 with a flag sending users to reliable information. The Citizen Browser data shows that, of the posts shown to our panelists, posts from the AfD were by far the most likely to be tagged by Facebook as being related to COVID-19. Our panelists were shown AfD posts tagged by Facebook for being COVID-related more than 250 times. In contrast, our panelists were shown posts from the SPD with tags related to COVID-19 fewer than 15 times, and this was the second most tagged in our dataset.
Many of the AfD posts inveigh against lockdown measures and suggest that the vaccines may not be as effective as health officials claim. A post about infections spread in a club that required proof of vaccination, for example, called vaccine-related restrictions quatsch, or nonsense.
The group’s posts remain popular, but it’s also not clear whether those posts are leading to new votes. The party is projected to end up in fourth or fifth place in the upcoming election.
Since the 2017 election, Medina Serrano said, the AfD’s explosive growth on Facebook seems to have leveled off. Now, he said, the party has gone from a strategy of looking to pull in new voters to one of cementing its base in German politics through Facebook.
“It’s more about maintaining the base than growing—it’s already capped, in my opinion,” Medina Serrano said. “But we’ll see the results on election night.”
“The climate crisis has not disappeared,” said Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before.”
Young people by the hundreds of thousands took to the streets across the globe on Friday to deliver a resounding message to world leaders: The climate crisis is getting worse, and only radical action will be enough to avert catastrophe and secure a just, sustainable future for all.
“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice.”
From Pakistan to Italy to Germany to the Philippines, the worldwide “Uproot the System” actions marked the largest climate demonstrations since the coronavirus pandemic forced campaigners to take their protests online last year. Climate activists in developing countries—where access to vaccines is limited due to artificial supply constraints and hoarding by rich nations—were still forced to limit the size of their demonstrations Friday as a public health precaution.
“Last time it was digital and nobody was paying attention to us,” Yusuf Baluch, a 17-year-old activist from the Pakistani province of Balochistan, toldReuters. “In the global north, people are getting vaccinated so they might be out in huge quantities. But in the global south, we are still limited.”
The Global Climate Strike continues! Balochistan is predominantly agriculture-based. They have been affected by drought due to climate change and the problems faced by people are increasing alarmingly.
Above: Photo Collage / Great Thunberg – via Instagram / Lynxotic
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, whose solitary sit-down strike outside her home country’s parliament in 2018 helped spark the global Fridays for Future movement, said that “it has been a very strange year and a half with this pandemic.”
“But of course, the climate crisis has not disappeared. It’s the opposite—it’s even more urgent now than it was before,” said Thunberg, who on Friday joined a large demonstration in Berlin, which was hammered by massive, climate-linked floods in July.
Watch Thunberg’s full speech in front of the Reichstag building:
Organizers said that more than 1400 climate strikes are set to take place in at least 70 countries Friday, with hundreds of thousands expected to attend demonstrations in Germany alone.
“As emissions and inequalities increase, we rise up and demand climate justice,” saidBerlin-based climate activist Luisa Neubauer.
The latest youth-led global action kicked off just weeks ahead of the pivotal COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, which many civil society organizations want to be postponed over fears that inequities in coronavirus vaccine access could prevent delegates from developing nations—those most vulnerable to the climate crisis—from attending.
Equalizing global vaccine distribution is one of the six demands that climate campaigners are aiming to put before world leaders during Friday’s mass demonstrations. The full list is as follows:
The Global North needs to cut emissions drastically by divesting from fossil fuels and ending its extraction, burning, and use. We need concrete plans and detailed annual carbon budgets with roadmaps and milestones to ensure we get to net-zero with justice and equity in the time needed to address climate change.
The colonizers of the north have a climate debt to pay for their disproportionate amount of historic emissions and that starts with the increase of climate finance to implement anti-racist climate reparations, the cancellation of debts especially for damage caused by extreme weather events, and providing adaptation funds that serve the communities.
Work towards a genuinely global recovery from Covid-19 by ensuring equitable vaccine distribution worldwide and suspending intellectual property restrictions on Covid-19 technologies. This is an essential step towards a global, green, and just recovery.
Recognize the tangibility of the climate crisis as a risk to human safety and secure the rights of climate refugees in international law.
Recognize the invaluable impact of biodiversity on indigenous communities’ lives and culture, and commit to make ecocide an international punishable crime.
Stop the violence and criminalization against indigenous peoples, small farmers, small fisherfolk, and other environmental and land defenders. Support the work they do. Respect and listen to our defenders.
The worldwide demonstrations came a week after the United Nations warned that even if the 191 parties to the Paris Agreement meet their current climate targets, global greenhouse gas emissions will still rise 16% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. The U.N. also estimated that the planet is on track for 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, a level of heating that experts say would be cataclysmic—particularly for developing nations.
At the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, the leaders of vulnerable countries pushed wealthy nations—the largest contributors to the climate emergency—to stop shirking their responsibilities to confront the planetary crisis.
“We simply have no higher ground to cede,” Marshall Islands President David Kabua said Wednesday. “The world simply cannot delay climate ambition any further.”
Participants in Friday’s global action pointedly amplified that message. Valentina Ruas, a Brazilian activist, toldThe Guardian that “the global north should be developing climate policies that have at their core climate justice and accountability to the most affected people and areas.”
“Instead,” she added, “they continue to exploit vulnerable communities and recklessly extract fossil fuel, while bragging about their insignificant emission reduction plans.”
The tweak, which targets the code in accessibility features for visually impaired users, drew ire from researchers and those who monitor the platform
Facebook has begun rolling out an update that is interfering with watchdogs monitoring the platform.
The Markup has found evidence that Facebook is adding changes to its website code that foils automated data collection of news feed posts—a technique that groups like NYU’s Ad Observatory, The Markup, and other researchers and journalists use to audit what’s happening on the platform on a large scale.
The changes, which attach junk code to HTML features meant to improve accessibility for visually impaired users, also impact browser-based ad blocking services on the platform. The new code risks damaging the user experience for people who are visually impaired, a group that has struggled to use the platform in the past.
The updates add superfluous text to news feed posts in the form of ARIA tags, an element of HTML code that is not rendered visually by a standard web browser but is used by screen reader software to map the structure and read aloud the contents of a page. Such code is also used by organizations like NYU’s Ad Observatory to identify sponsored posts on the platform and weed them out for further scrutiny.
“We constantly make code changes across our services, but we did not make any code changes to block these research projects,” Lindy Wagner, communications manager at Facebook, said in an email to The Markup.
Following the changes, the Citizen Browser project experienced a drop in data collection rates from early September, prompting the investigation that uncovered these changes to the code. At around the same time, users of certain ad blockers noticed a decrease in their effectiveness.
Laura Edelson, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and founder of the Ad Observatory project, expressed dismay at Facebook’s latest move impacting data collection. The website update had at first caused a sharp drop in the amount of data collected by the Ad Observatory, she said, but a fix was found that allowed the team to collect data at normal levels.
“I think it’s unfortunate that Facebook is continuing to fight with researchers rather than work with them,” she said.
Facebook has used similar tweaks to attempt to frustrate researchers and ad blockers in the past, often with the result of making the platform less accessible to visually impaired users.
In 2019, the company made changes to obfuscate its code in a way that blocked ad collection efforts by ProPublica, Mozilla, and British ad transparency group WhoTargetsMe. And in 2020, Quartz reported that visually impaired users had been unable to hear a legible label distinguishing between sponsored and nonsponsored posts for the previous two years because the platform had added numerous junk characters to the text to reduce the efficiency of ad blocking software.
In its latest update, Facebook seems to have implemented the code in a way that prevents screen readers from reading the new tags. As the update has not yet been rolled out to all users, it’s unclear what, if any, impact the change may have on visually impaired users. In at least one circumstance, a developer from The Markup who was testing the new code found that the Microsoft Narrator screen reader read aloud a string of junk characters as an unintelligible word when accessing the site through the Google Chrome browser.
“Our accessibility features largely appear to be working as normal, however we are investigating the claim,” Facebook’s Wagner said.
Jared Smith, associate director of accessibility research and training nonprofit WebAIM, expressed concerns about the code in Facebook’s web update after reviewing it for The Markup.
According to Smith, the new updates break many basic rules of accessibility design. Rather than presenting a clear and simplified structure, he said, the accessibility code was hugely complex, potentially heralding problems down the road.
“When you see thousands and thousands of patterns of ARIA attributes—code that could be used for accessibility but doesn’t seem to support accessibility—it poses a scenario where things could jump the rails and really negatively impact accessibility,” said Smith.
“We’ve seen misuse of technologies like this for things like search engine optimization, but this is on an entirely different scale,” he added.
In July 2020, a blog post from the Facebook engineering team trumpeted an extensive rebuild of the site that was apparently made with accessibility in mind. This included requirements for Facebook developers to use a code linting plugin (similar to a spelling autocorrect) that would highlight violations of ARIA standards.
“I suspect that the Facebook team implementing these apparent anti-transparency mechanisms does not realize that there are potential accessibility consequences to what they’re doing,” said Blake E. Reid, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School who focuses on accessibility and technology policy.
Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been critical of the company in the past, told The Markup in an emailed statement that Facebook’s latest move showed a disregard for visually impaired users.
“It is contemptible that Facebook would misuse accessibility features for users with disabilities just to foil legitimate research and journalism,” he said.
Facebook has long claimed that it wants to share data with researchers, Edelson said, but in practice numerous social scientists have faced obstacles when trying to work with the platform.
In August of this year, Facebook disabled the accounts of NYU Ad Observatory researchers for alleged violations of its terms of service with the researchers’ own ad collector. (At the time, The Markup’s senior executives published a press release critical of Facebook’s actions.)
And reporting by The New York Times brought to light the fact that Facebook had given incomplete data to misinformation researchers from the high profile Social Science One research group, potentially undermining the findings of years of academic studies. The error was first uncovered by a university professor who found discrepancies between numbers in the Social Science One data and Facebook’s recently published Widely Viewed Content Report.
“At what point does the research community stop thinking of Facebook as a positive actor in this space?” Edelson said.
House Bill Would Blow Up the Massive IRAs of the Superwealthy
Legislation currently making its way through Congress would take a sledgehammer to the massive individual retirement accounts built up tax-free by a select group of the ultrawealthy.
The proposal, which is part of the infrastructure and tax package advancing in the House, targets the jaw-dropping IRAs accumulated by multimillionaires and billionaires such as tech investor Peter Thiel, which were first reported by ProPublica earlier this year. Those accounts — Thiel’s alone was worth $5 billion in 2019 — have allowed some super-wealthy Americans to turn their Roth IRAs, tools meant to incentivize middle-class retirement saving, into supersized tax shelters.
The proposed reform, put forward by House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would effectively cap the total amount someone could hold in a Roth at $20 million and compel the holders of the giant accounts to withdraw anything over that limit. Separately, individuals would have to add up the balances of their retirement accounts — including Roths, traditional IRAs, 401(k)s and 403(b)s — and every year withdraw half of any amount over $10 million. The provisions would only apply to individuals with taxable income of over $400,000 or couples making over $450,000.
The reform wouldn’t affect the overwhelming majority of Americans, whose retirement savings (if they have any) are far more modest — the average Roth was worth just $39,108 at the end of 2018.
“Incentives in our tax code that help Americans save for retirement were never intended to enable a tax shelter for the ultra-wealthy,” Neal said earlier this year. “We must shut down these practices.”
Should the bill pass, it could have profound implications for PayPal founder Thiel, whose gargantuan Roth stunned lawmakers, spurring Neal to vow a crackdown. Thiel wouldn’t owe any tax up front and no early withdrawal penalties would apply, but he’d be required to move billions out of the tax-advantaged account. And any gains on investments made with that money would no longer be sheltered from taxes, potentially creating hundreds of millions of dollars in future tax liabilities.
Above: “I’ll Take Your Questions” book on inside secrets of the Trump final days, by Stephanie Grisham for aide to both Trump and Melania
The great appeal of the Roth IRA is that once money is inside it, any income generated — such as capital gains from selling a stock, investment interest or dividends — is tax-free, as long as the holder waits until he or she is 59 and a half to withdraw it. (Thiel hits that mark in 2027.) In a traditional IRA, by contrast, money that’s withdrawn counts as income and is taxed.
The IRA reforms are part of a slate of proposals designed to eliminate loopholes and boost tax rates on rich individuals and corporations.
Several of the changes address revelations contained in The Secret IRS Files, a series of ProPublica stories published this year that are exploring the ways the very richest Americans avoid paying taxes. Usually such efforts remain secret, but ProPublica has obtained a trove of tax records covering thousands of the country’s richest people. The records reveal not only the diverse array of tax-avoidance techniques used by the rich, but also that some of the very richest have consistently found ways to avoid taking income, so they pay little or no taxes, even as their wealth multiplied to historic levels.
The current House plan falls short of President Joe Biden’s more ambitious proposals to combat wealth inequality through the tax code. But experts say it would significantly increase the taxes paid by high-income Americans. Among other things, it would all but eliminate a major deduction created by President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law that, as ProPublica recently reported, showered massive tax breaks on some of the richest families in the country.
Given the stakes for a small group of wealthy and powerful Americans, it’s unclear whether the IRA proposal, along with the rest of the package, will become law. It must pass the House and make it through the Senate, where it will likely need the votes of all 50 Democratic senators to pass. Capitol Hill staffers say the bill remains fluid and provisions could still be cut, added or modified.
For now, however, the proposal has alarmed those who stand to lose the most. Three tax lawyers told ProPublica that clients with giant IRAs have reached out to them, worried about the potential reforms. Already a lawyer and an accountant are offering a paid webinar that pitches strategies to help owners of large IRAs get around the proposed rules.
A spokesman for Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The tax proposals have drawn opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill. “This is very bad news for the U.S. economy,” said Ways and Means Committee ranking member Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, in an interview this week.
A budget analyst at the anti-tax Heritage Foundation specifically criticized the IRA reform proposals as “stifling retirement savings and decreasing the economy-wide investment in future productivity.”
Neal announced his plans to curb the size of mega IRAs in July following ProPublica’s story revealing how Thiel and other billionaires had amassed giant retirement accounts using techniques largely unavailable to most taxpayers. Other wealthy investors with giant retirement accounts included financier Michael Milken, Warren Buffett and executives from investment giant Bain Capital.
Neal joined his Senate counterpart, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who had been pushing for reform of mega IRAs for years without much support from his peers.
With a multibillion-dollar tax-free account on the line, a wealthy investor might try to keep his income below the $400,000 threshold set by the proposal. In Thiel’s case, it’s not clear if that would be possible, given that he’s long reported tens of millions of dollars on his tax returns from capital gains, interest and dividends on investments he holds outside of his Roth IRA. And even if he has to withdraw billions from his Roth, he will never have to pay taxes on years of growth inside the account.
ProPublica has previously reported that several billionaires have had very little taxable income in certain years, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Musk did not respond to questions for that story and Bezos’ representatives would not designate someone to accept questions related to that story.
The proposal would also add restrictions in areas that congressional investigators have said are ripe for abuse by the wealthy: The owners of IRAs would be barred from using the accounts to either purchase certain nonpublic investments or buy stakes in companies in which they are an officer.
Thiel launched his Roth IRA by purchasing so-called founder’s shares of PayPal in 1999 when he was chairman and CEO of the company, according to tax records and a financial statement Thiel included in his application for residency in New Zealand. Securities and Exchange Commission records show he bought 1.7 million shares for $1,700, or a tenth of a penny per share. (The maximum contribution to a Roth that year was $2,000.) PayPal later told the SEC the shares were sold “below market value.”
The practice has become popular among the founders of Silicon Valley companies, who tuck shares of their startups into IRAs, often after buying them at bargain prices. This can sidestep IRA contribution limits and generate massive tax-free growth if the value of their companies explodes.
The proposal would also shut down the so-called backdoor Roth. ProPublica found that billionaires like Buffett had taken advantage of a maneuver, known as a conversion, that allows the wealthy to sidestep existing income caps to create a Roth IRA. In a conversion, the owner of a traditional IRA can transform it into a Roth by paying one-time tax on the money. Once the account is converted into a Roth, no additional income taxes are ever due. The new provision would bar conversions for individuals with income over $400,000, though the ban would not go into effect until 2031 for budgetary reasons. (Buffett previously didn’t respond to questions about his IRA.)
The proposal also has implications for the holders of giant traditional IRAs, who could suddenly owe a hefty tax bill. Money withdrawn from a traditional IRA counts as taxable income. Milken, the 1980s junk bond king who went to prison for fraud and was later pardoned by Trump, had traditional IRAs valued at $509 million at the end of 2018, according to tax records. If the law passed, Milken could face a tax bill of roughly $100 million, depending on the current size of his account. A spokesperson for Milken declined to comment.
Separately, another part of the bill would tackle the generous business income deductions granted by Trump’s 2017 tax law.
As ProPublica previously reported, the drafting of the deduction was marked by last-minute changes and a rush of lobbying dollars from corporations and the superrich. The result of its passage, confidential tax records show, was a windfall for billionaires such as media mogul Michael Bloomberg, packaging tycoons Dick and Liz Uihlein, and the Bechtel family, owners of a global engineering and construction firm.
Bloomberg received a deduction of roughly $183 million in 2018 alone as a result of the provision, while the Uihleins netted around $118 million.
Under the House proposal, the deduction would be capped at $400,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a couple, virtually wiping it out for the very rich. If such a cap had been in place in 2018, for example, the Uihleins would have gotten a deduction worth just $500,000 instead of $118 million. A competing Senate proposal unveiled by Wyden in July would go even further. A spokesperson for the Uihleins declined to comment on the proposed reforms.
On a broader level, the House plan would spell a significant tax hike on Americans earning more than $400,000, raising their individual income tax rates as well as bumping up the corporate tax rate, the first such hikes in a decade.
But despite the proposal’s ambition, critics say it misses a rare opportunity to capture the massive untaxed wealth of some of the richest individuals in history, including Bezos and Musk, who have often found ways to keep their income low.
As ProPublica reported, they and other billionaires have managed to pay little to no taxes in the past. Some have done so by pursuing the so-called buy, borrow, die strategy. By holding on to his Tesla stock but borrowing money to finance his lifestyle, Musk, for example, can avoid income that is taxable under current law. If he sticks to this strategy till death, the income tax liability on his fortune will evaporate for his heirs.
Some Democrats and policymakers had aspired to even bolder tax code changes that would have targeted the stratospheric increases in the ultrawealthy’s riches. One idea, championed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would be to levy a so-called wealth tax on billionaires’ overall holdings. Another, pushed by Wyden, would tax the annual gains billionaires logged, even if they hadn’t sold the assets. Both ideas foundered, with concerted opposition from billionaires and skittishness from Democratic centrists. Some critics point out that wealth taxes have often failed in other countries. And many policymakers believe it would be too logistically difficult to measure assets properly and enforce such a sweeping rule on gains.
Originally published on ProPublica by Justin Elliott, Patricia Callahan and James Bandler and republished under Creative Commons.
International survey reveals ‘shocking’ rise of eco-anxiety and hopelessness. “If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?”
Amidst a sharp increase in deadly wildfires and flooding, increasingly violent storms, and extreme heat, new research published Tuesday found that refusal by governments to act on the climate emergency is causing a widespread sense of hopelessness and eco-anxiety in teenagers and young adults worldwide.
The global advocacy group Avaaz joined researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and five other universities to survey 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25—the first large-scale eco-anxiety survey of its kind—and discovered that majorities of the respondents were fearful for the lives and livelihoods of their families and the future of the planet.
“If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?” —AvaazAs Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old leader of the global Fridays for Future movement in Germany, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, while the climate extremes caused by the planetary emergency are frightening, inaction by world leaders “is too much to handle, too much to accept.””Government is pushing us in front of a bus,” Neubauer told the outlet.
The mental health professionals who conducted the study spoke with young people in 10 countries including Nigeria, the Philippines, India, the U.K., and the U.S., finding that respondents in both wealthy countries and the Global South are facing “feelings of anger, fear, and powerlessness” as the climate crisis directly causes at least one famine, deadly flash flooding, and wildfires in multiple regions.
Nearly half of respondents said their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily life and their ability to function, and more than half told the experts they feel humanity is “doomed.”
Four in 10 said they would hesitate to have children in the future due to the state of the planet, while three-quarters of respondents described their futures as “frightening.”
Avaaz reported that one of the most “shocking” findings was how respondents described their feelings about government inaction, including more than half who said they feel policymakers “are betraying them.”
A shocking 58% of the children and young people surveyed say that governments are betraying them. If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is? #WeFeelThisToopic.twitter.com/D1EPwjaHEJ
Young people in the cyclone-ravages Philippines and Brazil, where deforestation—driven by President Jair Bolsonaro’s government—has become increasingly destructive in recent years, showed the most anxiety of the countries surveyed. More than nine in 10 respondents said they were frightened about the future.
Caroline Hickman, lead author of the study, which was published in The Lanceton Tuesday, cautioned adults against telling young people it is up to them to save the future of the planet.”Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isn’t right,” Hickman toldThomson Reuters, adding that what will solve the climate crisis is decisive action by world governments.
The survey “shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments,” Hickman told the BBC. “Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious.”
The survey results were released less than two months ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where policymakers will meet in Glasgow to discuss commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, provide climate mitigation support for frontline communities across the globe, and rapidly transition to an emissions-free energy system.
Young people are “doing everything we can” to push for climate action, Neubauer told Thomson Reuters, “but that won’t be enough.”
“We won’t fix it” through the Fridays for Future movement, she added. “We need everyone there.”
A bill headed to the governor’s desk aims to curb injuries in warehouse distribution centers run by a broad spectrum of employers and outlaw punishment for bathroom breaks
Yesenia Barrera was just finishing up her 10-hour shift at an Amazon fulfillment center in Rialto, Calif., she recalled, when a manager approached her. She said he was concerned that throughout the day she’d racked up about 60 minutes of “time off task,” Amazon parlance for when someone is not directly working on the assignment at hand or taking too long to complete it. He told her he was writing her up and asked what happened, she said.
“I used the restroom today,” Barrera said she told him.
“How many times did you use it?” she remembered he asked.
“Three times,” she said she responded, thinking about how it took five minutes to walk each way across the warehouse floor to get to the bathroom.
When Barrera returned to Amazon for her next scheduled shift two days later, her badge wouldn’t let her into the building. She later learned she’d been terminated. Barrera has since become an organizer with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of warehouse workers.
The California Senate passed legislation last week that, if signed by the governor, would prohibit a spectrum of employers, including Amazon, from firing warehouse workers like Barrera for policies such as “time off task.” The bill, AB 701, would be the first law in the country to address productivity quotas and strict algometric metrics used to manage warehouse employees. (Governor Newsom’s office did not reply to a request for comment.)
Under AB 701, employers wouldn’t be able to punish workers for failing to meet quotas when health and safety issues come into play, such as a worker’s need to take bathroom and water breaks. And it would prohibit retaliation against workers who complain. The law would also require companies that run warehouses to report to the government—and their own employees—the quotas and speed metrics they mandate for workers.
“Right now, it’s very secretive,” said Christian Castro, communications director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which sponsored the bill. “E-commerce has been growing exponentially, it’s gotten even more popular during the pandemic…. Workers are telling us about an increase in quotas, not even knowing their quotas.”
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty declined to comment on AB 701 and Barrera’s allegations but said in an email, “The health and safety of our employees is our number one priority—and has been since day one,” adding, “We’re committed to giving our employees the resources they need to be successful, creating time for regular breaks and a comfortable pace.”
In opposition to AB 701 is a coalition of about two dozen business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, California Farm Bureau, and California Retailers Association. They say the law could raise costs for companies that run warehouses and effectively drive employers from the state.
AB 701 is “burdensome and needlessly overbroad,” Steve McCarthy, vice president of public policy for the California Retailers Association, wrote in an Aug. 30 letter to all state senators. He said the bill could lead to increased litigation “by establishing potentially open-ended employee access to bathroom facilities which will make employers’ ability to enforce production standards even more complex.”
AB 701 would cover all warehouse distribution centers, such as those run by Walmart, Target, and UPS, but the bill’s supporters say Amazon is the main target. The company, they say, is leading the charge to automate workforces, increase the speed of work, and use surveillance technologies to monitor worker productivity.
Advocates who support the bill say they hope it will cause a ripple effect to other states. They say California’s labor laws have often served as a model for policymakers and worker organizations nationwide.
“Chart Topping” Injury Rates
Amazon is the largest private employer in California, with more than 150,000 employees in the state, and the second largest employer in the U.S. Over the years, several Californian cities have welcomed the influx of warehouses, which they say have brought in thousands of well-paying jobs to regions historically plagued by unemployment.
But it’s been well documented that warehouse work can be dangerous. Several studies point to injury rates that exceed those of other industries.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cites data that shows warehouse workers are injured nearly twice as often as other workers in the private sector. And when employers, like Amazon, add in productivity quotas, those injuries tend to increase, other studies show. A December 2019 report by the Athena coalition looked at data and internal documents that Amazon provided to OSHA and found the injury rate at the company’s warehouses was nearly three times the combined rate of all other private employers that submitted data to OSHA.
“Primed for Pain,” a report by a coalition of four labor unions called the Strategic Organizing Center, found that not only are injury rates higher at Amazon warehouses, but the injuries also tend to be more severe—with a “serious injury rate” nearly 80 percent higher than that of all other employers in the warehousing industry.
“The rate of injuries at Amazon is astronomical…. It’s chart topping by all measures,” said Irene Tung, senior researcher at the workers’ rights group National Employment Law Project, who co-wrote a report about injury and churn rate at Amazon’s California warehouses. “I don’t think people understand just how different Amazon is as an employer and how they’re ushering in this new paradigm.”
When asked about injury rates at Amazon’s warehouses, spokesperson Lighty said the company has more than 6,200 “safety professionals” throughout its facilities. “We also invest billions of dollars in new operations safety measures, technologies and other innovative solutions that protect our employees, work closely with health and safety experts and scientists, conduct thousands of safety inspections each day in our buildings, and have made hundreds of changes as a result of employee feedback on how we can improve their well-being at work,” she said.
Lighty added that the data on musculoskeletal injuries, such as sprains, strained muscles, and torn ligaments, at Amazon’s warehouses “is skewed.” She said that’s because the company’s workforce has many people in the 18 to 24 age range, which she said is more likely than other age groups to claim work-related musculoskeletal injuries.
In April, Amazon’s executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the company “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”
Along with injuries, Amazon has also been accused of not allowing workers enough time for bathroom breaks. In a 2020 letter to Bezos, a group of 15 U.S. senators wrote, “Pressure to meet their quotas is so great that workers report urinating in plastic bottles on the warehouse floor.” Amazon responded, saying workers are “allowed and encouraged to take breaks as needed.”
Last December, Amazon settled a class-action lawsuit in California brought by 27 warehouse workers who said the company violated the state’s labor codes by denying them adequate bathroom and rest breaks. Amazon’s “production clock does not stop when employees need to use the restroom facilities,” the lawsuit said, which meant workers “have been forced to forego bathroom breaks completely, simply out of fear of termination.”
Lighty declined to comment on the lawsuit or settlement.
While California law mandates that employers must allow breaks, warehouses with production quotas can make it difficult for workers to use the bathroom while still being able to meet their tasks. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, AB 701’s author, said the bill aims to strengthen state law by creating standards around these quota systems.
“To make next-day delivery possible, corporations like Amazon have forced warehouse employees to work faster, service more customers with more orders in record amounts of time, and risk their own bodies in the process,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “No worker should be forced to sacrifice their basic human needs, or accept such undignified conditions for a paycheck.”
When Barrera was working at Amazon’s Rialto warehouse, one of her jobs was scanning boxes on a conveyor belt.
“The conveyor doesn’t stop,” she said. “Time is against you.”
She remembers at one point, she fell behind and boxes started piling up. She set down her scan gun to move some boxes aside, and it got buried in the pile. She said when she tried to pry it free, she pulled too hard, and it bounced back and smacked her in the eye. She said she went to the onsite clinic, where she was given ibuprofen and told to hold a wet paper towel on her eye. Barrera said she asked to sit down, and after about five minutes, both her manager and the clinic medic said she should be good to go back to work.
“You’re being tracked the moment you clock in,” Barrera said. “Unrealistic quotas are why workers are getting injured.”
Amazon’s Lighty did not respond when asked about the incident.
Protecting Workers vs. Increasing Bureaucracy
AB 701 has two major components: creating more transparency around work quotas and banning policies that negatively affect worker health and safety, including “time off task” policies.
For the transparency piece, employers that run warehouse distribution centers would be compelled to tell government agencies the quotas and speed metrics they require of employees and also disclose that information to workers.
“This policy provides the tools that are needed to keep workers safe in a growing industry plagued with widespread injuries and labor violations,” said Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 396, both of which are sponsors of AB 701.
“This kind of speed-up on workers is breaking their bodies and churning them out,” Shadix said. “It undermines the argument that these are good stable jobs.”
While AB 701 would require transparency from companies around quotas, it would not create specific rules on worker surveillance and metrics.
Several Republican lawmakers in California have opposed AB 701, saying it would lead to more lawsuits, higher prices for consumer goods, and that the bill is part of an organized labor strategy to unionize warehouses.
“This bill is sponsored by union leaders as part of a campaign to tip the scales to coerce employees to unionize,” Sen. Brian Jones said in an email, adding that he doesn’t have confidence in Democratic legislators to run the state efficiently. “So now we’re supposed to trust them to micro-manage private warehouses throughout the state? No thanks.”
Jones is one of 11 senators who voted no on AB 701 (26 voted yes, and three had no vote recorded).
At least four senators, including Jones, received campaign donations of $2,500 from Amazon, according to public records from the California secretary of state. Amazon also made payments of $2,500 and $4,900 to various state assembly members, including to nearly half of those who voted no on the bill in May. The company additionally made several donations to senators and assembly members who voted yes (though not to any authors or co-authors of the bill).
When asked about the donations, Jones’s chief of staff, Craig Wilson, said, “Campaign contributions are irrelevant when it comes to how Senator Jones votes on legislation.”
Amazon has hired at least four lobbying firms in California during this year’s legislative session, according to the public records. For comparison, in 2019 and 2020, it hired just two firms per year. And the company spent more than $425,000 on lobbying in the state from January to June. More recent lobbying expenditures aren’t yet publicly available. Amazon’s Lighty didn’t respond to questions about the company’s lobbying activity.
While Amazon hasn’t publicly commented on AB 701, the coalition of business organizations and its members, including the California Retailers Association and California Chamber of Commerce, have spoken out against the bill.
Initially, the California Chamber of Commerce listed AB 701 on its “job killer” list—a label that often leads to dead bills—but then removed it in July after certain provisions around litigation and regulations were amended. The chamber still opposes the bill, however. When asked for comment, spokesperson Denise Davis referred The Markup to the letter McCarthy sent to state senators on behalf of the business coalition.
This bill “establishes anti-retaliation provisions that will make it more costly and difficult to take job actions against underperforming employees,” McCarthy wrote in the letter. He added that AB 701 could “have a chilling effect on production at distribution centers that will ripple through the rest of the supply chain.”
Amazon is on the California Retailers Association’s board of directors. McCarthy didn’t respond to a request for comment.
If AB 701 is signed by California governor Gavin Newsom, it would be slated to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022. Newsom faces a recall election on Tuesday, but regardless of the outcome, he will determine the bill’s fate. Should Newsom lose Tuesday’s recall election, he would have 38 days to sign or veto all pending legislation before leaving office, according to California law.
“It’s important to address the fact that billionaire heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, warned Tuesday that House Democrats’ newly released tax plan would let U.S. billionaires off the hook by omitting key reforms that progressive lawmakers, advocacy organizations, and President Joe Biden have embraced.
“It would be a monumental mistake for Congress to pass a bill that really exempts billionaires,” Wyden (D-Ore.) told the New York Times in response to the House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal, which was spearheaded by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.).
While the House plan (pdf) would hike taxes on large corporations and the top 1% of earners in the U.S., analysts and Democratic lawmakers have voiced concerns that it doesn’t go nearly as far as it should to raise revenue for policy priorities and tackle the nation’s runaway income inequality, which the coronavirus crisis has made even worse. According to one recent analysis, the collective wealth of U.S. billionaires has risen by $1.8 trillion—62%—during the pandemic.
Wyden’s committee is in the process of crafting a tax plan of its own as Democrats race to compile their sprawling budget reconciliation package, which is expected to include major investments in green energy, healthcare, housing, and other key areas.
Specifically, Wyden and progressive organizations criticized the House Ways and Means Committee for failing to tackle a loophole that allows the ultra-wealthy to pass on massive fortunes to their heirs tax-free. Earlier this year, Biden released a tax plan that would close the loophole.
“It’s important to address the fact that billionaire heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains,” Wyden toldHuffPost on Monday. “The nurses, firefighters, and teachers who pay their taxes with every paycheck know the system is broken when billionaire heirs never pay tax on billions in stock gains.”
Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), echoed Wyden’s concern, noting in an interview with the Washington Post that “if the Ways and Means plan was enacted as is, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would still pay an effective rate of $0 on most of their income if they pass their assets on to their heirs.”
“It’s obviously a big improvement over the tax code we have now,” Wamhoff said of the House plan, “but there are a lot of things Biden suggested that would go a lot further.”
I agree with Chairman @RonWyden: we need to pass a bill that ensures that billionaires and corporations are finally paying their fair share. A wealth tax and my Real Corporate Profits Tax are two ways to get that done. https://t.co/xTtTQ8PGx2
On Tuesday, the progressive advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires made the House plan’s shortcomings the focus of a new mobile billboard campaign that features an image of Bezos—the richest man in the world—accompanied by the caption, “Oops! Missed me! (Thanks, Richie Neal!)”
“Richard Neal and the House Ways and Means Committee failed the president, failed the country, and failed history. It’s that simple,” Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. “This is not what the American people voted for when they elected Joe Biden as president.”
To remedy the proposal, the Patriotic Millionaires urged the House Democratic leadership to make several changes, including:
End the preferential tax rate for capital gains income over $1 million as President Biden requested. There is no intellectual or economic justification for working people in America to pay a higher tax rate than investors.
Eliminate the “stepped up basis” that allows the heirs of billionaires to avoid capital gains taxes on inherited assets (provide a reasonable exemption for family farms and small businesses). The committee’s failure to address this problem at all is particularly troubling.
End the Carried Interest Loophole which allows fund managers to mischaracterize their “ordinary” income as capital gain income for tax purposes. The Ways and Means proposal extends the hold time for investments to five years. Given that most private equity firms hold investments for six years, this change will have essentially zero effect. The loophole should be eliminated entirely.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose “Tax the Rich” dress at the lavish 2021 Met Gala made waves on social media, said Tuesday that “members of both parties have tried to halt taxing the wealthiest in our society” even after billionaires made enormous wealth gains during the pandemic.
“It’s unacceptable,” the New York Democrat added. “We must tax the rich.”
According to a June survey released by Americans for Tax Fairness, 72% of U.S. voters support closing “loopholes that let the wealthy avoid paying taxes on the profits from assets they transfer to heirs.” The poll also found that 62% of voters support raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
The House Ways and Means Committee proposal would only raise the corporate rate to 26.5%.
As Chuck Collins and Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies argued in a blog post on Monday, “The public has a tremendous appetite to do much more to address the grotesque concentrations of democracy-distorting wealth and power—and to shut down the ways that billionaires and a few hundred global corporations manipulate our tax system.”
“House Democratic tax writers do not go far enough to raise revenue or reduce extreme wealth inequality,” Collins and Anderson wrote. “The tax reforms would generate an estimated $2.2 trillion—just barely more than the revenue lost due to the 2017 Republican tax cuts.”
Experts say the privacy promise—ubiquitous in online services and apps—obscures the truth about how companies use personal data
You’ve likely run into this claim from tech giants before: “We do not sell your personal data.”
Companies from Facebook to Google to Twitter repeat versions of this statement in their privacy policies, public statements, and congressional testimony. And when taken very literally, the promise is true: Despite gathering masses of personal data on their users and converting that data into billions of dollars in profits, these tech giants do not directly sell their users’ information the same way data brokers directly sell data in bulk to advertisers.
But the disclaimers are also a distraction from all the other ways tech giants use personal data for profit and, in the process, put users’ privacy at risk, experts say.
Lawmakers, watchdog organizations, and privacy advocates have all pointed out ways that advertisers can still pay for access to data from companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter without directly purchasing it. (Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez declined to comment and Twitter spokesperson Laura Pacas referred us to Twitter’s privacy policy. Google did not respond to requests for comment.)
And focusing on the term “sell” is essentially a sleight of hand by tech giants, said Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
“[Their] saying that they don’t sell data to third parties is like a yogurt company saying they’re gluten-free. Yogurt is naturally gluten-free,” Waldman said. “It’s a misdirection from all the other ways that may be more subtle but still are deep and profound invasions of privacy.”
Those other ways include everything from data collected from real-time bidding streams (more on that later), to targeted ads directing traffic to websites that collect data, to companies using the data internally.
How Is My Data at Risk if It’s Not Being Sold?
Even though companies like Facebook and Google aren’t directly selling your data, they are using it for targeted advertising, which creates plenty of opportunities for advertisers to pay and get your personal information in return.
The simplest way is through an ad that links to a website with its own trackers embedded, which can gather information on visitors including their IP address and their device IDs.
Advertising companies are quick to point out that they sell ads, not data, but don’t disclose that clicking on these ads often results in a website collecting personal data. In other words, you can easily give away your information to companies that have paid to get an ad in front of you.
If the ad is targeted toward a certain demographic, then advertisers would also be able to infer personal information about visitors who came from that ad, Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
For example, if there’s an ad targeted at expectant mothers on Facebook, the advertiser can infer that everyone who came from that link is someone Facebook believes is expecting a child. Once a person clicks on that link, the website could collect device IDs and an IP address, which can be used to identify a person. Personal information like “expecting parent” could become associated with that IP address.
“You can say, ‘Hey, Google, I want a list of people ages 18–35 who watched the Super Bowl last year.’ They won’t give you that list, but they will let you serve ads to all those people,” Cyphers said. “Some of those people will click on those ads, and you can pretty easily figure out who those people are. You can buy data, in a sense, that way.”
Then there’s the complicated but much more common way that advertisers can pay for data without it being considered a sale, through a process known as “real-time bidding.”
Often, when an ad appears on your screen, it wasn’t already there waiting for you to show up. Digital auctions are happening in milliseconds before the ads load, where websites are selling screen real estate to the highest bidder in an automated process.
Visiting a page kicks off a bidding process where hundreds of advertisers are simultaneously sent data like an IP address, a device ID, the visitor’s interests, demographics, and location. The advertisers use this data to determine how much they’d like to pay to show an ad to that visitor, but even if they don’t make the winning bid, they have already captured what may be a lot of personal information.
With Google ads, for instance, the Google Ad Exchange sends data associated with your Google account during this ad auction process, which can include information like your age, location, and interests.
The advertisers aren’t paying for that data, per se; they’re paying for the right to show an advertisement on a page you visited. But they still get the data as part of the bidding process, and some advertisers compile that information and sell it, privacy advocates said.
In May, a group of Google users filed a federal class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleging the company is violating its claims to not sell personal information by operating its real-time bidding service.
The lawsuit argues that even though Google wasn’t directly handing over your personal data in exchange for money, its advertising services allowed hundreds of third parties to essentially pay and get access to information on millions of people. The case is ongoing.
“We never sell people’s personal information and we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda told the San Francisco Chronicle in May.
Real-time bidding has also drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and watchdog organizations for its privacy implications.
In January, Simon McDougall, deputy commissioner of the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, announced in a statement that the agency was continuing its investigation of real-time bidding (RTB), which if not properly disclosed, may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“The complex system of RTB can use people’s sensitive personal data to serve adverts and requires people’s explicit consent, which is not happening right now,” McDougall said. “Sharing people’s data with potentially hundreds of companies, without properly assessing and addressing the risk of these counterparties, also raises questions around the security and retention of this data.”
And in April, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators sent a letter to ad tech companies involved in real-time bidding, including Google. Their main concern: foreign companies and governments potentially capturing massive amounts of personal data about Americans.
“Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them,” the letter said. “In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments.”
On May 4, Google responded to the letter, telling lawmakers that it doesn’t share personally identifiable information in bid requests and doesn’t share demographic information during the process.
“We never sell people’s personal information and all ad buyers using our systems are subject to stringent policies and standards, including restrictions on the use and retention of information they receive,” Mark Isakowitz, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, said in the letter.
What Does It Mean to “Sell” Data?
Advocates have been trying to expand the definition of “sell” beyond a straightforward transaction.
The California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect in January 2020, attempted to cast a wide net when defining “sale,” beyond just exchanging data for money. The law considers it a sale if personal information is sold, rented, released, shared, transferred, or communicated (either orally or in writing) from one business to another for “monetary or other valuable consideration.”
And companies that sell such data are required to disclose that they’re doing so and allow consumers to opt out.
“We wrote the law trying to reflect how the data economy actually works, where most of the time, unless you’re a data broker, you’re not actually selling a person’s personal information,” said Mary Stone Ross, chief privacy officer at OSOM Products and a co-author of the law. “But you essentially are. If you are a social media company and you’re providing advertising and people pay you a lot of money, you are selling access to them.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s always obvious what sorts of personal data a company collects and sells.
In T-Mobile’s privacy policy, for instance, the company says it sells compiled data in bulk, which it calls “audience segments.” The policy states that audience segment data for sale doesn’t contain identifiers like your name and address but does include your mobile advertising ID.
Nevertheless, T-Mobile’s privacy policy says the company does “not sell information that directly identifies customers.”
T-Mobile spokesperson Taylor Prewitt didn’t provide an answer to why the company doesn’t consider advertising IDs to be personal information but said customers have the right to opt out of that data being sold.
So What Should I Be Looking for in a Privacy Policy?
The next time you look at a privacy policy, which few people ever really do, don’t just focus on whether or not the company says it sells your data. That’s not necessarily the best way to assess how your information is traveling and being used.
And even if a privacy policy says that it doesn’t share private information beyond company walls, the data collected can still be used for purposes you might feel uncomfortable with, like training internal algorithms and machine learning models. (See Facebook’s use of one billion pictures from Instagram, which it owns, to improve its image recognition capability.)
Consumers should look for deletion and retention policies instead, said Lindsey Barrett, a privacy expert and until recently a fellow at Georgetown Law. These are policies that spell out how long companies keep data, and how to get it removed.
She noted that these statements hold a lot more weight than companies promising not to sell your data.
“People don’t have any meaningful transparency into what companies are doing with their data, and too often, there are too few limits on what they can do with it,” Barrett said. “The whole ‘We don’t sell your data’ doesn’t say anything about what the company is doing behind closed doors.”
After Steve Bannon urged his followers to take over local-level GOP positions, the plan went viral across far-right media.
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
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The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.
“We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.
ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”
Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
While party officials largely credited Bannon’s podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it’s impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.
The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama’s election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate’s faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.
What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”
It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what’s already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.
In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that’s now in court.
In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia’s sweeping new voting restrictions.
And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible” misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona’s top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.
When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you’re going to see to it this doesn’t happen again is if you get involved,” Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman.”
Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.
“They’re not going to be welcomed with open arms,” Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?” he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?”
Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon’s far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.
That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon’s podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz said. “I can’t guarantee you that we’ll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We’ll lose it if we conservatives don’t take over the Republican Party.”
Bannon endorsed Schultz’s plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables” to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.
Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.
The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win,” Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him.”
Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke.” Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this,” host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.
Schultz’s strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun” the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level.”
Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission” for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization’s website. The group’s parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history.” Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.
Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”
By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian” that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade’s deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
“Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat,” Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”
The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman,” quoting the term used on Bannon’s podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas’s term for the position is “precinct chair.” Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off,” Barnes said.
For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We’re trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process,” Albert said.
Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real,” county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest.”
Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy’s pick, citing an “extraordinary” public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee” that’s lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We’re all about voter and election integrity,” Swain said in an interview.
In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon’s podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district’s member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.
“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That’s right,” the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”
After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages,” someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one.”
Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. The “audit,” conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.
“Because we’ve got the audit, there’s very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened,” said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn’t. “I don’t care,” she said.
One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” Petsas said. “That attitude can’t prevail.”
As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP’s audit.
“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what’s going on, and they get lambasted by our own party,” Petsas said. “That’s a problem.”
This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz’s precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives’ goal was to secure enough delegates to the party’s state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.
Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon’s podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776.” On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole,” but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your ‘facts’ are either false or misrepresent the truth.” He declined to cite specifics.
Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner,” according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood’s faction captured the county’s other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county’s votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover,” Connett told ProPublica.
In Greenville, the state’s most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood’s faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina’s biggest delegations.
Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.
“It’s a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse,” Bannon said on his podcast.
Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood’s challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump’s endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.
Wood’s rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump’s stolen election myth. Some said they’d resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.
Wood’s campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood’s supporters “a fringe, rogue group” and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony” by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.
But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.
Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county’s longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.
In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP’s few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?” Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve.”
Stutts’ group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.
The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone’s attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs’ first meeting as the county’s party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house” in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs’ courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.
In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today,” Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair.” After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.
Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP’s devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn’t know what to expect.
“There’s so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia.”
Of the field’s two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia’s new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud,” he wrote in response to a local newspaper’s candidate questionnaire.
Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing,” she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county.”
Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon’s podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers’ candidacies, saying they weren’t officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.
The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.
“You can’t build a movement on a lie,” Smith said.
In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump’s loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They’re directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.
Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First” and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.
“We are reclaiming our party,” Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We’re building an ‘America First’ army.”
Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That’s because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.
Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.
Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor’s veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can’t be vetoed.
State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.
“This empowers them,” Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It’s important to get them focused on change that can actually impact” future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020.”
Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law’s evidence did not meet “any standard of proof,” and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.
This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state’s largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts’ team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.
In Law’s case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.
Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no,” Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I’m going to take the presidential stance.”
The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren’t allowed to vote.
Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!” some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.
At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I’m done covering for you awful people,” he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He’d had enough.
“They want to create mayhem,” Sajdak said.
Soon after, Law’s faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump’s futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law’s “fraudulent, rogue election.” The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.
To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there’s no mechanism for overturning an election.” Asked if Law’s allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It’s a scary thought, isn’t it.”
This article was originally published by ProPublica via Creative Commons and written by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon
One of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, the latest victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, 3-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40% full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.
Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow. But it also sounded an alarm: one of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, another victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from and which small towns cannot afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of water may turn out to be the first among those choices.
The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner. The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming.
The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado.
Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next?
Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.
California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again. The Imperial Irrigation District there is the largest single water rights holder from the entire basin and has been especially resistant to compromise over the river. It did not sign the drought contingency plan laying out cuts that other big players on the Colorado system agreed to in 2019.
New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — states in the river’s Upper Basin — will most likely also face pressure to use less water. Should that happen, places like Utah that hoped to one day support faster development and economic growth with their share of the river may have to surrender their ambition.
The negotiations that led to the region being even minimally prepared for this latest shortage were agonizing, but they were merely a warm-up for the pain-inflicting cuts and sacrifices that almost certainly will be required if the water shortages persist over the coming decades. The region’s leaders, for all their efforts to compromise, have long avoided these more difficult conversations. One way or another, farms will have to surrender their water, and cities will have to live with less of it. Time has run out for other options.
Western states arrived at this crucible in large part because of their own doing. The original multistate compact that governs the use of the Colorado, which was signed in 1922, was exuberantly optimistic: The states agreed to divide up an estimated total amount of water that turned out to be much more than what would actually flow. Nevertheless, with the building of the Hoover Dam to collect and store river water, and the development of the Colorado’s plumbing system of canals and pipelines to deliver it, the West was able to open a savings account to fund its extraordinary economic growth. Over the years since, those states have overdrawn the river’s average deposits. It should be no surprise that even without the pressures of climate change, such a plan would lead to bankruptcy.
Making a bad situation worse, leaders in Western states have allowed wasteful practices to continue that add to the material threat facing the region. A majority of the water used by farms — and thus much of the river — goes to growing nonessential crops like alfalfa and other grasses that feed cattle for meat production. Much of those grasses are also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia. Short of regulating which types of crops are allowed, which state authorities may not even have the authority to do, it may fall to consumers to drive change. Water usage data suggests that if Americans avoid meat one day each week they could save an amount of water equivalent to the entire flow of the Colorado each year, more than enough water to alleviate the region’s shortages.
Water is also being wasted because of flaws in the laws. The rights to take water from the river are generally distributed — like deeds to property — based on seniority. It is very difficult to take rights away from existing stakeholders, whether cities or individual ranchers, so long as they use the water allocated to them. That system creates a perverse incentive: Across the basin, ranchers often take their maximum allocation each year, even if just to spill it on the ground, for fear that, if they don’t, they could lose the right to take that water in the future. Changes in the laws that remove the threat of penalties for not exercising water rights, or that expand rewards for ranchers who conserve water, could be an easy remedy.
A breathtaking amount of the water from the Colorado — about 10% of the river’s recent total flow — simply evaporates off the sprawling surfaces of large reservoirs as they bake in the sun. Last year, evaporative losses from Lake Mead and Lake Powell alone added up to almost a million acre feet of water — or nearly twice what Arizona will be forced to give up now as a result of this month’s shortage declaration. These losses are increasing as the climate warms. Yet federal officials have so far discounted technological fixes — like covering the water surface to reduce the losses — and they continue to maintain both reservoirs, even though both of them are only around a third full. If the two were combined, some experts argue, much of those losses could be avoided.
For all the hard-won progress made at the negotiating table, it remains to be seen whether the stakeholders can tackle the looming challenges that come next. Over the years, Western states and tribes have agreed on voluntary cuts, which defused much of the political chaos that would otherwise have resulted from this month’s shortage declaration, but they remain disparate and self-interested parties hoping they can miraculously agree on a way to manage the river without truly changing their ways. For all their wishful thinking, climate science suggests there is no future in the region that does not include serious disruptions to its economy, growth trajectory and perhaps even quality of life.
The uncomfortable truth is that difficult and unpopular decisions are now unavoidable. Prohibiting some water uses as unacceptable — long eschewed as antithetical to personal freedoms and the rules of capitalism — is now what’s needed most.
The laws that determine who gets water in the West, and how much of it, are based on the principle of “beneficial use” — generally the idea that resources should further economic advancement. But whose economic advancement? Do we support the farmers in Arizona who grow alfalfa to feed cows in the United Arab Emirates? Or do we ensure the survival of the Colorado River, which supports some 8% of the nation’s GDP?
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Reclamation released lesser-noticed projections for water levels, and they are sobering. The figures include an estimate for what the bureau calls “minimum probable in flow” — or the low end of expectations. Water levels in Lake Mead could drop by another 40 vertical feet by the middle 2023, ultimately reaching just 1,026 feet above sea level — an elevation that further threatens Lake Mead’s hydroelectric power generation for about 1.3 million people in Arizona, California and Nevada. At 895 feet, the reservoir would become what’s called a “dead pool”; water would no longer be able to flow downstream.
The bureau’s projections mean we are close to uncharted territory. The current shortage agreement, negotiated between the states in 2007, only addresses shortages down to a lake elevation of 1,025 feet. After that, the rules become murky, and there is greater potential for fraught legal conflicts. Northern states in the region, for example, are likely to ask why the vast evaporation losses from Lake Mead, which stores water for the southern states, have never been counted as a part of the water those southern states use. Fantastical and expensive solutions that have previously been dismissed by the federal government — like the desalinization of seawater, towing icebergs from the Arctic or pumping water from the Mississippi River through a pipeline — are likely to be seriously considered. None of this, however, will be enough to solve the problem unless it’s accompanied by serious efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions, which are ultimately responsible for driving changes to the climate.
Meanwhile, population growth in Arizona and elsewhere in the basin is likely to continue, at least for now, because short-term fixes so far have obscured the seriousness of the risks to the region. Water is still cheap, thanks to the federal subsidies for all those dams and canals that make it seem plentiful. The myth persists that technology can always outrun nature, that the American West holds endless possibility. It may be the region’s undoing. As the author Wallace Stegner once wrote: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope.”
Originally published on ProPublica by Abrahm Lustgarten via Creative Commons. This article is co-published with The New York Times.
That’s the first line of an open letter released Tuesday by 71 young professionals and students in the advertising and public relations industry calling for an end to contracts with fossil fuel companies, given their significant contributions to the climate emergency.
“The biggest threat to our future is climate change,” they write. “The world’s 20 biggest polluters are fossil fuel companies, with the entire energy sector responsible for creating 75% of carbon emissions. They are blocking necessary and urgently needed climate action.”
“And our industry is helping them do it,” the young professionals continue. “We’re angry. We’re afraid. And we refuse to sit back and watch it happen.”
The letter is clear in its demand:
“We, tomorrow’s leaders, call on all agencies, from the holding companies to the independent shops, to stop working with fossil fuel clients. This means oil giants as well as the alphabet soup of trade associations and front groups.”
– 71 Young Professionals
“No more marketing climate denial and disinformation” or “setting up fake front groups,” the letter adds, further calling for an end to “amplifying lies about how action will hurt the economy” and “greenwashing oil, gas, and coal companies, aiding them in their attempts to dodge pollution safeguards and block meaningful change.”
BREAKING: Today 71 professionals under 30, junior executives, and students in the advertising and PR industry released an open letter calling for advertising and PR executives to end contracts with fossil fuel companies. https://t.co/b3l47m45S0
The signatories urge everyone in the industry—especially agency heads, founders, and leadership teams—to take a stand against continuing to work with polluters, emphasizing that the climate emergency is already taking a toll.
“We won’t be able to reduce, reuse, recycle our way out of tomorrow’s catastrophe—because it is already happening today,” says the letter, which is open for new signatories through the end of the week. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen the devastating impacts of climate-related disasters, like record-breaking wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes. Bold action is needed, at all levels and segments of society. The time has come for our industry to do its part.”
Fires are devouring swaths of the Western United States, forcing evacuations and shutting down every national forest in California. On Sunday, Hurricane Ida, a “poster child for a climate change-driven disaster,” slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, killing at least four people, leaving more than a million without power amid widespread destruction, and sparking calls for President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
“At some point in the recent past, climate change was something that was happening in some distant future, and maybe of little concern to most people. Well, that distant future is now today—everyone will experience climate change as a series of horrific front-page photos and videos until they themselves are taking those photos and videos. It’s no longer some abstract threat,” letter leader Joe Cole toldCommon Dreams.
Cole is strategist working with Clean Creatives, a campaign supported by Fossil Free Media that pressures ad and PR agencies to drop fossil fuel accounts.
The letter comes as the New York Times is under fire for allowing fossil fuel industry advertising, thanks to a new campaign and reporting by climate journalist Emily Atkin in her newsletter HEATED.
As Atkin reported Monday:
[A] new activist campaign to pressure the Times to stop creating and running fossil fuel ads is launching today. Called Ads Not Fit to Print, the campaign argues that fossil fuel advertisements endanger Times readers’ health in the same way now-banned cigarette ads did—and likely, even more.
“What the Times is doing right now is shameful,” said Genevieve Guenther, whose group End Climate Silence is spearheading the campaign. “On one hand, they’re trying to seem like part of the reality-based community who acknowledges the climate crisis and wants to solve it. On the other, they’re doing everything they can to keep the fossil fuel economy going because it is one of the sources of their own power and they believe in it.”
Activists aren’t the only ones taking issue with this practice, either. In conversations with HEATED over the last week, several current and former Times newsroom employees expressed concerns about the paper’s practice of creating and running fossil fuel ads. Their concerns ranged from undermining the Times‘ own climate reporting, to harming Times readers’ health, to aiding industry attempts to mislead the public about the deadly effects of fossil fuels.
Cole highlighted energy giants’ contributions to planet-heating pollution and told Common Dreams that “these clients are represented by some of the most storied ad agencies in the world like BBDO, Edelman, Ogilvy, and WundermanThompson.”
“These ads go on to be featured in some of the most prominent real estate around the world, from billboards to the NYT,” he said. “Although the tobacco industry was and is responsible for a personal health crisis, the fossil fuel industry is killing the entire planet.”
Praising Times journalists’ work on the climate emergency, Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted that “the paper should stop doing them—and all of us—a disservice by continuing to make and run ads for fossil fuel corporations.”
NYT reporters do great reporting on the climate crisis.
The paper should stop doing them — and all of us — a disservice by continuing to make and run ads for fossil fuel corporations. https://t.co/4wspKFp3eY
In a statement about the letter Tuesday, Cole said that “any time our industry starts to change for the better, it is through a combination of outside and internal pressure. I believe in the power of young professionals in our industry—the leaders of tomorrow—to hasten the necessary transition away from fossil fuel clients.”
The strategist pointed to recent findings that July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded and asserted that “it’s no longer acceptable for agency executives to ignore the damage their work with fossil fuel clients is doing to the planet.”
He argued that “even a single contract with a client like BP, Shell, or Exxon can wipe out the impact of an agency’s sustainability pledge. If agencies are serious about not only protecting the future of their young staff, but recruiting them in the first place they need to begin by transitioning away from fossil fuel work and rejecting new contracts.”
“The people signing this letter truly are the leaders of tomorrow,” Cole added, “and if agencies want to remain relevant, and attractive places to work for top young talent, they need to end their work for the worst polluters on the planet.”
President Donald Trump’s ban on the visa lottery was ruled to be illegal, but the government says it can’t help hundreds of Afghans who won it for at least another year.
Fakhruddin Akbari is allowing his full name to be published because he is certain he is going to die. Akbari, his wife and his 3-year-old daughter fled their home in Kabul, Afghanistan, two weeks ago. They’ve been hiding with friends in the city, living on bread and water.
He should be among the lucky ones.
Instead, Akbari fears the very thing he was hoping would be his salvation will now make him a target.
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Two years ago, Akbari won a rare spot in the United States’ “visa lottery.” He was chosen at random from a pool of 23 million to get the chance to apply for one of 55,000 visas to immigrate to the U.S. The U.S. was supposed to have finished his case by last fall. The instructions when he registered promised as much. Either he would be safely en route to the U.S., or he would lose his chance and move on.
But with the final U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan just days away — and as Thursday’s bombings have added even more chaos at Kabul’s airport — Akbari has almost certainly lost his chance to get out.
He has already burned the letters of commendation his relatives received for their work with American contractors or allied militaries. The Taliban already know, he says, that he’s part of a pro-American family. His neighbors have told him they’ve been visited by strangers asking about him.
A March 2020 ban signed by President Donald Trump, citing a need to protect the American economy, prevented Akbari and visa lottery winners from entering the U.S. In response to a lawsuit by immigration lawyers, a federal judge ruled earlier this month that the government has to move ahead on processing thousands of last year’s lottery winners. But the U.S. has told the judge it can’t even start until fall 2022 at the earliest.
Several hundred Afghans are in the group. They may be the unluckiest winners in the visa lottery’s 30-year history.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
The lottery isn’t open to everyone. Winners must come from a country that hasn’t had much recent immigration to the U.S. Applicants for the visas must also submit biometric information, pass an interview and medical screening, and complete several security checks.
Nouman, an Afghan lottery winner who asked that his full name not be used over fear of the Taliban, spent months tracking down police documents from the Chinese town where he’d worked for a few years, to prove he had a clean record.
Those requirements are still far less restrictive than other ways to legally immigrate to the U.S., which generally require being closely related to a citizen or green-card holder or having a job offer from an American company. In Afghanistan, interest in the lottery is so great that Nouman said it took him two days to successfully log onto the swamped website where lottery results were posted.
But unlike other visas, diversity visas — the type lottery winners become eligible to receive — are on a tight and unvarying schedule.
Lottery winners are notified in the early summer. After submitting their full application, they can only be interviewed at the nearest U.S. consulate once the federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. Then the whole process has to be completed within a year. Eligibility for the visa doesn’t roll over.
Usually, most of the annual 55,000 visas have been handed out by that time. But last year, two things happened. First, in mid-March, consulates around the world shut down because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, Trump declared that letting in immigrants would hamper the recovery of the economy, and he signed the order barring most types of immigrants — including diversity visa holders.
When U.S. embassies and consulates began to reopen last summer, a State Department cable disclosed as part of the lawsuit shows they were instructed to handle diversity visas last, even if they met the narrow exemptions to the ban.
Giving someone a visa is legally distinct from letting them enter the U.S., and critics of Trump’s actions — including a group of lawyers who filed lawsuits over the bans — argued that even if the ban were legal, consulates could still prepare visas so that recipients could come after the ban was rescinded, which President Joe Biden did this February.
In early September last year, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the argument and ordered the government to make up for lost time, prioritizing diversity visa applicants ahead of everyone else for the last 26 days of the fiscal year.
The State Department’s bureaucracy took a few days to get into gear. Then it began a process that turned out to be far from efficient.
Officials compiled a spreadsheet of applicants who had joined the now-consolidated suit and were supposed to be prioritized, but it was riddled with misspelled names and incorrect case numbers. In a court declaration, a State Department official from a different office said the spreadsheet took “many queries” from his team to fix.
Once consulates and embassies got the correct names, they rushed appointments, often giving applicants little notice. The Kabul embassy wasn’t participating at all, so any Afghan appointments were set up in different countries — or continents.
At least three Afghan immigrants, including Nouman, were scheduled for interviews in Cameroon. All three were given one day’s notice to get there. (Nouman, at least, was able to get a later appointment in Islamabad, Pakistan.)
Many more weren’t given interviews at all. According to court filings, some State Department employees told applicants who called the office handling the cases that if they hadn’t officially joined the lawsuit, “you lost your chance” — which wasn’t true. When a COVID-19 outbreak hit the office and workers went remote, the help line shut down entirely.
When the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, 2020, more than 40,000 of the 55,000 diversity visas were still unused — and several hundred Afghans were still waiting. Less than 20% of the Afghan lottery winners had gotten visas by the deadline.
That day, Mehta had ordered the State Department to reserve 9,505 slots, based on his estimate of how many diversity visas could have been processed if COVID-19 had existed but the ban didn’t. When the case finally concluded this month, he declared that the government would indeed have to process those visas.
That opinion came down on Aug. 17, two days after Kabul fell.
In a response filed to Mehta on Thursday, the government offered to start processing last year’s visas in October 2022. One reason given for the proposed delay was that processing older visas is “an unprecedented computing demand that will require the Department to implement wide-ranging hardware and software modifications.” Another was that processing diversity visas would take resources away from dealing with the crisis in Afghanistan.
It went unmentioned that some people are affected by both.
Lawyers for the affected immigrants made an emergency filing this week, with testimony from several Afghans worried that they would be targeted by the Taliban precisely because they had sought to immigrate to the U.S. They’re hoping the court will order expedited consideration for Afghan lottery winners.
The lawyers are moving to appeal for the court to order that Afghans get priority in the visa process. The plaintiffs’ lawyers had asked the government to consent to their filing the request. The government’s response — after several days of silence, delaying the filing — was to call it an “unnecessary distraction.”
In a meeting by phone on Monday, according to two people on the call, another government attorney complained that he’d been getting emails from applicants “all over the world” and blamed their lawyers for posting his address online. One of those emails was a desperate cry for help from Akbari. “We are totally hopeless and every knock of the door seems like a call to death for us,” Akbari wrote. “Please help us.”
In the time since sending that email, Akbari and his family have made two attempts to get to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. The first time, he says, they were beaten back by the Taliban. The second time he was stopped by the United States. The Marines guarding the airport said they couldn’t enter. The reason? They did not have visas.
Originally published on ProPublica by Dara Lind via Creative Commons
We do have socialism in this country—but it’s not Democrats’ policies. The real socialism is corporate welfare.
You may have heard Republicans in Congress rail about how the Democrats’ agenda is chock-full of scary “socialist” policies.
We do have socialism in this country—but it’s not Democrats’ policies. The real socialism is corporate welfare.
Thousands of big American corporations rake in billions each year in government subsidies, bailouts, and tax loopholes—all funded on the taxpayer dime, and all contributing to higher stock prices for the richest 1 percent who own half of the stock market, as well as CEOs and other top executives who are paid largely in shares of stock.
Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and big banks are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare.
How? Follow the money. These corporations and their trade groups spend hundreds of millions each year on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their influence-peddling pays off. The return on these political investments is huge. It’s institutionalized bribery.
An even more insidious example is corporations that don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, their workers have to rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets. Which means you and I and other taxpayers indirectly subsidize these corporations, allowing them to enjoy even higher profits and share prices for their wealthy investors and executives.
Not only does corporate welfare take money away from us as taxpayers. It also harms smaller businesses that have a harder time competing with big businesses that get these subsidies. Everyone loses except those at the top.
It’s more socialism for the rich, harsh capitalism for the rest.
It should be ended.
I’m as sensitive as anyone to the sufferings of Afghans now, but I’ve had it with the sanctimony of journalists and pundits who haven’t thought about Afghanistan for 20 years—many of whom urged we get out—but who are now filling the August news hole with overwrought stories about Biden’s botched exit and Taliban atrocities.
Yes, the exit could have been better planned and executed. Yes, it’s all horribly sad. But can we get a grip? The sudden all-consuming focus on Afghanistan is distracting us from hugely important stuff that’s coming to a head at home:
(1) Republican politicians and right-wing media worsening the surging Delta variant of COVID by fighting masks and vaccinations, as cities and school systems struggle to decide what to do;
(2) wildfires and floods consuming much of America, as House Democrats absurdly threaten to oppose Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint containing important measures to slow climate change;
(3) Texas on the verge of passing the nation’s most anti-democracy voting restrictions, adding to voter suppression measures in 24 other states, at the same time the “For the People Act” and the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act”—which would remedy these horrendous laws—languish in the Senate because Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema refuse to do anything about the filibuster.
Enough sanctimony over Afghanistan. Enough about Biden’s falling approval ratings. We’ve had enough wall-to-wall coverage of the Olympics and then Andrew Cuomo and now the airport in Kabul. Can we please focus on the biggest things that need and deserve our attention right now? The window of opportunity to do anything about them will close sooner than we expect.
If we don’t take action now on COVID and the critical importance of vaccinations and masks, on climate change and Biden’s $3.5 trillion package, and on voter suppression and the necessity of the For the People and the John Lewis Voting Rights Acts, we may never.
Above: A Climate Change Concept Image: Adobe Stock
More than two dozen advocacy groups launched “extreme weather ads” in five state newspapers on Monday to pressure right-wing Senate Democrats to stop giving taxpayer money to the oil, gas, and coal companies most responsible for the climate emergency.
“It’s time for Congress to stop taking over $15 billion from hardworking Americans and giving it to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs.”
—Anusha Narayanan, Greenpeace
Full page ads—featuring artwork from Hannah Rothstein’s 50 States of Change Collection, which depicts some of the detrimental effects U.S. residents can expect if lawmakers refuse to swiftly enact robust climate mitigation measures—have been placed in The Arizona Republic, The Dover Post, The Billings Gazette, The Union Leader, and The Charleston Gazette-Mail, to mark the beginning of a week of action against fossil fuel subsidies.
Those five publications were chosen because they are the home-state newspapers of Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Chris Coons (Del.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.).
The coalition is targeting the six senators because of their close ties with Big Oil, which were exposed in late June when Greenpeace U.K. and the British Channel 4 Newsteamed up to release secretly recorded videos, wherein ExxonMobil lobbyists admitted that the company deliberately sowed doubt about climate science to protect fossil fuel profits and worked with several GOP lawmakers as well as conservative Democrats to undermine climate legislation.
According to the investigation, Coons, Manchin, Sinema, and Tester, along with Republican Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), John Cornyn (Texas), Steve Daines (Mont.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.), have taken tens of thousands of dollars from Exxon.
Photo Credit / Hannah Rothstein
The 25 groups behind the ad campaign—including Greenpeace USA, Our Revolution, Public Citizen, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Food & Water Watch, and the Sunrise Movement—noted that the federal government gives more than $15 billion in public funding to fossil fuel corporations every year.
The ad campaign comes just weeks after the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report, which, in the words of Greenpeace USA climate campaign manager Anusha Narayanan, “showed the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels will kill us all.”
“Everyone saw the video where a Big Oil lobbyist named these six Democratic senators as key to their plan to delay climate action,” Narayanan said Monday in a statement. “Members of Congress like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have the fossil fuel industry on speed dial, while they keep the rest of us on hold. That’s a disaster for the future of the planet and its people.”
“It’s time for Congress to stop taking over $15 billion from hardworking Americans and giving it to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs,” she continued. “Despite what these companies say, subsidies don’t actually lead to jobs and most subsidies go to profits.”
Narayanan added that an amended infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution, which Democratic Party leaders hope to pass through the reconciliation process, present a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Sens. Kelly, Sinema, Coons, Tester, Hassan, and Manchin “to invest in a just transition to renewable energy, racial and economic justice, and working-class communities.”
That lawmakers continue to collaborate with oil, gas, and coal companies despite dire warnings from scientists and glaring real-time evidence that fossil fuel emissions are exacerbating extreme weather events prompted Rothstein to ask: “What is wrong with our politicians?”
“Why do they continue to support Big Oil and coal when it’s clear these industries are causing natural disasters that harm everyday Americans?” Rothstein asked Monday in a statement. “California’s increasingly rampant wildfires, Texas’ unprecedented February 2021 snowstorm, and the current water shortages in Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico are only a few examples of the unshakably clear evidence that we need urgent climate action ASAP.”
“We can lessen, reverse, and prevent many of the issues depicted in 50 States of Change, but we need to act now, starting with an immediate and expedited shift away from burning fossil fuels,” she added. “This can’t be done solely on a consumer level. We need our elected officials on our side.”
In addition to being featured in the ad campaign, Rothstein’s artwork is also being used in an interactive story map, which will “underscore a state-by-state breakdown of current and future state-level impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.” It is set to be published on Greenpeace USA’s website on Wednesday.
“The stench of corruption wafting up from Louis DeJoy’s office is so thick seagulls are flying in from the Jersey Shore and circling overhead.”
A leading government ethics watchdog on Wednesday cheered a federal judge’s ruling ordering the United States Postal Service to hand over documents concerning potential conflicts of interest involving embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Tuesday granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) a full summary judgment (pdf) and orderedthe United States Postal Service (USPS) to give the advocacy group seven documents it requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
USPS claimed the documents were FOIA-exempt. According toLaw & Crime, “Four of the documents concerned a request for a certificate of divestiture from DeJoy and the remaining three concern his recusal from matters where he may have a conflict of interest.”
Over the past seven years, the USPS has reportedly paid approximately $286 million to XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s ex-employer, and has “ramped up its business” with the company since DeJoy’s appointment as postmaster general. After his appointment, DeJoy continued to hold financial interests in XPO totaling between $30 and $75 million. DeJoy also held a significant amount of stock in Amazon, a major USPS competitor.
Earlier this month, Common Dreamsreported on growing calls to fire DeJoy following the revelation by The Washington Post that USPS will pay XPO Logistics $120 million over the next five years. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) responded to the Post report by calling DeJoy a “walking conflict of interest.”
Last Friday, a Postreport that DeJoy had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of publicly traded bonds from Brookfield Asset Management—where USPS Board of Governors Chair Ron Bloom is a managing partner—fueled further calls for DeJoy’s termination, with Connolly calling Bloom and the postmaster general “bandits” whose “conflicts of interest do nothing but harm the Postal Service and the American people.”
CREW communications director Jordan Libowitz called Bates’ order “a big win not just for CREW, but for transparency advocates everywhere.”
“DeJoy’s decision-making as postmaster general has raised some serious ethical questions—now we should finally get some answers,” Libowitz added.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Monday sent President Joe Biden a letter urging him to sack everyone former President Donald Trump appointed to the USPS board. Pascrell welcomed the Tuesday court order and reiterated his call for Biden to fire Trump appointees and “show DeJoy the door now before it’s too late.”
DeJoy and six of the nine USPS governors, including Bloom, were appointed by Trump; the rest are Biden appointees.
In addition to the alleged conflicts of interest in connection with XPO Logistics and Brookfield Asset Management, CREW, in advocating DeJoy’s ouster, notes that:
DeJoy and his wife, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada, got their jobs after contributing $2 million to Trump’s campaign coffers;
DeJoy is the first person in decades to lead the USPS without any previous experience in the agency;
DeJoy is under federal investigation for allegedly operating a scheme where he asked employees of his former company to make campaign contributions, then arranged for bonus payments to reimburse the employees; and
DeJoy apparently violated federal criminal laws by commanding the USPS to make policy changes at the agency that would depress or delay voting by mail in the 2020 election.
“Bottom line: Louis DeJoy has overseen an attack on the Postal Service and on American democracy itself,” CREW tweeted Wednesday. “The USPS Board of Governors must fire him before it’s too late.”
“The president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters,” said Greenpeace, “and the American people expect him to keep it.”
Climate groups are expressing deep concern following an Interior Department announcement Monday that the Biden administration will resume oil and gas drilling leases on public lands and waters—a practice President Joe Biden vowed to ban during his 2020 run for the White House—in response to a federal court ruling.
“The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
—Nicole Ghio, Friends of the Earth
While the Biden administration confirmed in its announcement that an appeal has been filed with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in a legal battle with the state of Louisiana—which sued the federal government over the pause in the oil and gas leasing program ordered by Biden earlier this year—the Interior Department said leasing would resume while the process plays out.
“Federal onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing will continue as required by the district court while the government’s appeal is pending,” the DOI stated.
According to Bloomberg, the moves by the administration “mark the beginning of an open-ended analysis of the federal oil, gas and coal leasing programs that could span years—and lead to higher fees as well as new limits on development in sensitive areas.”
While environmental advocacy groups commended the administration for appealing the lower court ruling—handed down by a Trump-appointed U.S. district court judge in June—they also said the threat of resuming the leasing program on federal lands and for offshore drilling cannot be overstated.
“Our planet can’t afford any more new fossil fuel extraction,” said Taylor McKinnon, a senior campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re out of time. The world’s existing oil and gas fields will already push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius if they’re fully developed.”
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in respsonse that with “the climate crisis smacking us in the face at every turn, it’s hard to imagine a worse idea than resuming oil and gas drilling on federal lands. As has been documented in long and excruciating detail, oil and gas drillers have trashed public lands and failed to clean up their mess—while siphoning public resources for a relative pittance.”
As the appeals process plays out, the Biden administration said it will perform a new analysis of the regulatory framework that governs leasing and extraction operations on federal lands as well as hold oil and gas companies to account under existing authorities and guidelines.
“We’re out of time. The world’s existing oil and gas fields will already push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius if they’re fully developed.”
—Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity
“It’s encouraging that the Biden administration is appealing this wrongful decision,” said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth. “However, the president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, and the American people expect him to keep it. The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
Mary Greene, public lands attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, urged the Interior Department to act aggressively but also said that Congress must get off the sidelines on the issue.
“While the Biden administration responds to the court, we urge the Department of Interior to issue its reform initiatives so that the outdated leasing system is modernized for the benefit of our public lands, wildlife, and all Americans,” Greene said. “But administrative actions alone cannot solve this problem. Congress must also swiftly take action to update our hundred-year-old leasing law so that our nation can transition to the clean energy economy that we all need and deserve.”
Given the recent IPCC report which argues that global emissions must be urgently reduced, climate action advocates said the administration cannot be allowed to walk away from its commitment to end oil and gas development on federal lands.
“Last week’s IPCC report outlined the grisly risks that fossil fuels pose to people and the planet,” said Tim Donaghy, senior research specialist with Greenpeace USA. “The International Energy Agency (IEA) has clearly said there can be no new fossil fuel projects if we are to stand any chance at limiting the climate chaos.”
A complete and final end of drilling on U.S. public lands and in offshore waters, said Donaghy, “is an essential part of any effective climate plan.” Along with others in the climate just movement, he said there remain many avenues for Biden “to consider in reforming leasing and we urge him to do everything he can to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
“We’ve spent billions on war. Now, let’s spend to bring Afghans to safety.”
As the Biden administration faces criticism for not doing enough to assist those fleeing Afghanistan, an analysis released Monday showed that the roughly $19 billion the Pentagon budgeted for the U.S. occupation of the country in 2020 alone could cover initial resettlement costs for 1.2 million refugees.
“We have a duty to save lives—and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”
—Rep. Cori Bush
Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project estimated that the $18.6 billion the Pentagon allocated for its 2020 operations in Afghanistan—where the Taliban is in the process of retaking powerafter two decades of deadly U.S. occupation—could pay up-front refugee relocation costs of $15,148 for the more than “250,000 Afghans displaced since the end of May (and growing)” and “a significant chunk of the 3.5 million Afghans who were internally displaced as of July.”
“Refugees typically receive some assistance after their arrival, but even if we expanded to cover an additional four years of the approximately $4,600 in annualized social service aid that refugees typically receive, we could still resettle more than half a million people, for just one year’s worth of the cost of fighting,” Koshgarian noted. “We’d face even lower costs to help resettle Afghans in countries closer to home—all the more reason after 20 years of war to step up with some serious resources and get it done.”
“After twenty years,” she added, “we owe the Afghan people at least that much.”
Resettling 1.2 million Afghan refugees in the U.S. would cost less than one year of war in Afghanistan.
We've spent billions on war. Now, let's spend to bring Afghans to safety.
The analysis came as progressive lawmakers in the U.S. and global humanitarian organizations implored the Biden administration to open the U.S. to vulnerable Afghans attempting to escape a growing humanitarian crisis and Taliban rule. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 80% of those currently trying to flee Afghanistan are women and children.
In a speech on Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden said that “in the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more [Special Immigrant Visa]-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.” The Pentagon confirmedMonday that it is planning to house up to 22,000 Afghans at two U.S. bases—Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.
“We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy: U.S. non-governmental agencies—or the U.S. non-governmental organizations; and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk; and U.S. news agencies,” the president added.
Following his remarks, Biden directed the U.S. State Department to use up to $500 million from the nation’s Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund to meet “unexpected urgent refugee and migration needs of refugees, victims of conflict, and other persons at risk as a result of the situation in Afghanistan, including applicants for Special Immigrant Visas.”
But critics have accused the Biden administration of failing to adequately plan for the rapid collapse of the Afghan government that followed the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country—a still-deteriorating situation that has left countless people in limbo as they seek safety for themselves and their families.
In his speech Monday, Biden claimed the administration didn’t begin evacuating at-risk civilians sooner “because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.'”
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department expanded eligibility for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, opening it to tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for U.S. government contractors, U.S.-based media outlets, and U.S.-based non-governmental organizations. The families of eligible Afghans also have access to the program, whose application process consists of an arduous 14 steps.
And as the Wall Street Journalobserved on Monday, the program excludes the poorest Afghans by design. “To claim refugee status,” the Journal noted, “the Afghans must enter through a third country and cover the costs of travel and lodging on their own—a hurdle that is nearly impossible to surmount under the current, chaotic circumstances.”
In a letter to Biden on Monday, the advocacy organization Refugees International called on the administration to “express its willingness initially to resettle up to 200,000 Afghan refugees, as part of an international responsibility-sharing effort to rescue and resettle Afghans at risk.”
“While most would be resettled from countries of asylum,” the group wrote, “a program ultimately could involve direct resettlement from Afghanistan, akin to the Orderly Departure program that resulted in the resettlement of many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese directly from their country of origin.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), part of a chorus of progressive lawmakers pushing Biden to do more to welcome refugees—in addition to ending the interventionist foreign policy approach that creates such humanitarian crises—noted in a tweetMonday that the U.S. “welcomed 120,000 refugees in a single year” in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
“Yet the United States has only taken in ~2,000 Afghan refugees thus far,” Bush wrote. “We have a duty to save lives—and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”
The FEC’s inspector general has called for the agency to review its policies and internal controls after ProPublica revealed a key employee’s undisclosed ties to Trump.
The inspector general for the Federal Election Commission is calling on the agency to review its ethics policies and internal controls after a ProPublica investigation last year revealed that a senior manager openly supported Donald Trump and maintained a close relationship with a Republican attorney who went on to serve as the 2016 Trump campaign’s top lawyer.
The report by ProPublica raised questions about the impartiality of the FEC official, Debbie Chacona, a civil servant who oversees the unit responsible for keeping unlawful contributions out of U.S. political campaigns. The division’s staffers are supposed to adhere to a strict ethics code and forgo any public partisan activities because such actions could imply preferential treatment for a candidate or party and jeopardize the commission’s credibility.
In its findings, the inspector general said Chacona, head of the FEC’s Reports Analysis Division, or RAD, did not improperly intervene in a review of the Trump inaugural committee’s fundraising and acted “consistent with relevant law and policy” by allowing career analysts to handle the filings.
But the inspector general said “it is important to address the ethical principle that federal employees should avoid even the appearance of impropriety.” It added that the FEC’s “unique mission raises heightened concerns when allegations of personal or political bias are raised against FEC senior personnel that could undermine the public’s confidence in the agency” and recommended the commission “evaluate the current agency policies on ethical behavior and update them, as may be appropriate.”
Chacona displayed her support for Trump in Facebook posts, including one in which she posed with her family around a “Make America Great Again” sign at Trump’s January 2017 inaugural. Separately, emails obtained by ProPublica showed that she also consulted regularly on matters personal and professional with the Republican lawyer, Donald McGahn, when he was an FEC commissioner from 2008 to September 2013.
After Trump’s election, the fundraising practices of his inaugural committee prompted complaints that the FEC failed to properly examine contributions. As head of RAD, Chacona signed off on amended filings by the committee intended to address some of those complaints even though the revised reports continued to list problematic donations, including ones from donors whose addresses didn’t exist in public records.
The 300-employee FEC is an independent regulatory agency that was created by Congress to enforce campaign finance law. It is headed by six presidentially appointed commissioners, four of whom must vote together for the agency to take any official action, a requirement that was meant to bolster nonpartisan compromise but has resulted in chronic gridlock.
The inspector general also took issue with the way the FEC regulates presidential inaugural committees, which are nonprofit entities separate from campaign committees. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a record-breaking $107 million from more than 1,000 contributors. Its initial disclosure report was 510 pages.
The inspector general found that unlike with campaign committees, FEC policy confers “broad, subjective discretion to the RAD senior manager to determine what potential violations of law warrant further inquiry” when it comes to inaugural committees. It called such a standard “ill-defined and subjective,” cautioning that it could create “a reasonable likelihood of inconsistent results and arbitrary or capricious application (in fact or appearance).”
The inspector general also said that unlike political committees, which file their reports to the FEC electronically, inaugural committee disclosure reports are filed on paper to the commission and then manually reviewed by agency staffers — a system the inspector general said was “antiquated and lacks adequate internal controls.”
Asked what the agency has done to address the appearance of a conflict of interest at RAD and whether the agency planned on adopting any of the inspector general recommendations, an FEC spokesperson declined to comment.
McGahn, who was appointed White House counsel after serving as the Trump campaign’s top lawyer, now heads the government regulations group at the law firm Jones Day. He did not respond to messages seeking comment; in a response for the earlier ProPublica story, he said he doesn’t comment on “nonsense.” Chacona did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s inaugural committee didn’t return a message seeking comment.
The inspector general said that it interviewed FEC lawyers and RAD staffers, and that it obtained and reviewed agency records to conduct its inquiry. Commissioners were notified of the investigators’ findings at the end of July.
With its unprecedented haul and its questionable outlays, Trump’s inaugural committee drew swift attention from journalists and regulators. The Washington, D.C., attorney general has sued the committee, accusing it of enriching the Trump family business by spending lavishly at Trump-owned properties, claims the committee has denied in court papers. Separately, federal prosecutors subpoenaed the committee’s donor records as part of an inquiry into illegal contributions made by foreign nationals.
Both inaugural and political committees are prohibited from accepting contributions from foreign nationals. But Trump’s inaugural committee included in its disclosure reports donations from contributors outside the U.S., and RAD relied on the word of the committee that the donors were indeed U.S. citizens, the inspector general report found. Investigators took issue with that practice. They noted that RAD’s policy of accepting a committee’s “self-certification” wasn’t memorialized in any policy, and they recommended that the division set a threshold when such a contribution would trigger further inquiry to independently verify the source of the money.
Fred Wertheimer, whose advocacy group Democracy 21 helped file a 2017 FEC complaint against Trump’s inaugural committee, which the agency’s general counsel later dismissed, said the head of RAD should have recused herself from overseeing the committee’s filings.
“In my view Ms. Chacona had a clear appearance of conflict and never should’ve gone anywhere near the inaugural committee’s report,” said Wertheimer, who was derided by Chacona and McGahn in the email exchanges obtained by ProPublica.
The social media giant’s powerful targeting tools appear to be part of Ben Shapiro’s success in growing his audience on the platform
Ben Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, a conservative media company, has mastered Facebook’s complex algorithms like no one else, posting links to stories from his publication that rank among the top 10 best performing posts on Facebook day after day after day.
What’s the key to his success?
As a recent NPR analysis shows, The Daily Wire’s sensationalist headlines garner a ton of engagement on a platform that rewards explosive content. But The Daily Wire is also a sophisticated user of Facebook’s advertising targeting tools to pinpoint users likely to be receptive to its outrage-driven brand of conservative content, The Markup has found.
Using data from our Citizen Browser project, we pulled targeting information from 241 Daily Wire ads that ran on Facebook between April 15 and July 15, 2021. We found that The Daily Wire largely chose to target people whom Facebook had pegged as interested in Fox News, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative mainstays, as well as individuals Facebook determined were characteristically or demographically similar to The Daily Wire’s existing audience members. (See our data here.)
Citizen Browser consists of a panel of roughly 1,800 Facebook users across the country who voluntarily share their Facebook news feed data with The Markup—providing a rare, albeit relatively small, window into what different people see on the platform.
By contrast, The New York Times—one of the largest legacy media publications in the U.S.—took a different tack in its Facebook advertising, targeting users according to the topics of the articles. So, for instance, an article about a band could be targeted to Facebook users with “music” listed in their ad interests. (Facebook says it determines users’ interests based on their past activities on the platform but has been somewhat cagey about how exactly this is done.)
Of the two publications, The Daily Wire used interest targeting more frequently than The New York Times did: 39.3 percent of Daily Wire ads versus 23.5 percent of ads from the Times were targeted in this way.
The table below shows the top 10 interests targeted in sponsored posts from both outlets:
While the Times mostly targets topical interests, of the top 20 interests targeted by The Daily Wire, only one (“American Football”) was not directly tied to conservative media or politics.
The Daily Wire also frequently made use of Facebook’s “lookalike audiences” feature to show content to new audiences of users who do not follow the page but share characteristics with those who do. In our dataset, 37.9 percent of Daily Wire posts used this type of targeting. The New York Times also used this targeting type, albeit rarely: Only 3.6 percent of its sponsored posts in our dataset targeted lookalike audiences.
“As you’re looking at this dataset, to me it shows that mainstream media outlets like The New York Times are still approaching the internet as a collective space in which you could potentially learn about anything, from ‘research’ or ‘science’ to ‘family and relationships,’ ” Francesca Tripodi, an assistant professor at UNC School of Information and Library Science at Chapel Hill, said. “But Daily Wire, if you’re saying, ‘We only want to target people who are interested in conservatism in America,’ that creates this bifurcated or dual internet, and that allows for information to circulate unchecked.”
Facebook advertising is designed to use personal data points about its users to guess what sorts of products they might like, she said, but there’s a fundamental difference between a food brand serving ads to people who like potato chips and a news brand serving information to people who like conservatism.
“[Daily Wire] is using the same tactics that these corporate entities are using but to create siloed interests around information,” Tripodi said.
Neither The Daily Wire nor Facebook responded to multiple requests for comment.
Beyond Facebook’s powerful data-gathering system, The Daily Wire amasses its own information on readers and potential readers.
The Markup also scanned Daily Wire ads in the Facebook ad library, which contains a broader range of ads than those seen by Citizen Browser panelists but does not disclose targeting information. Over a three-month period, from May through July, the ad library displayed 47 unique ads from The Daily Wire. Of these, 22 were survey-style ads prompting users to respond to emotive political questions.
Clicking the ad takes users away from Facebook and onto the dailywire.com domain, where they are asked to enter an email address in order to respond.
Over the same time period, no New York Times ads available in the ad library used this technique.
The Daily Wire’s website also contains an unusually high number of data-gathering trackers.
A scan from Blacklight, a website privacy inspector built by The Markup, on Aug. 4, 2021, turned up 41 ad trackers and 117 third-party cookies on the homepage. By contrast, The Markup’s scan of 100,000 of the most popular websites in September 2020 found an average of seven ad trackers and only three third-party cookies per site.
The site also uses Facebook’s bespoke Pixel tracking code to send data back to the social platform about users who have visited the site, which The Daily Wire can use to further tweak ad targeting and build new lookalike audiences.
“What you’ve shown here is clear evidence of the way in which the radicalization of our society is built on many facets of the algorithm, including the tools provided for ad targeting,” said Cameron Hickey, project director for algorithmic transparency at the National Conference on Citizenship.
Questions about the ethics of using data-driven profiling to target political messages are not new. Perhaps most famously, the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica purported to create detailed psychological profiles of Facebook users and shared those with the campaign of former president Donald Trump. While profiling has been a part of politics for decades to some extent, figures ranging from former Facebook insiders to Federal Election Commission officials have raised alarms over the kind of microtargeting that social media allows. (The European Commission is also considering including a ban on microtargeting in its landmark Digital Services Act package, which is making its way through the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.)
That said, The Daily Wire’s targeting choices are widely accepted as routine, its success on Facebook more of a feature of the platform’s workings than a bug in the system, said Katie Joseff, a research fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin.
“These platforms, when you look at Facebook and YouTube in particular, they want people on there who are engaging their users because then there’s more users and user time overall,” Joseff said. “So [The Daily Wire] is definitely playing into the structure as it was created and doing it well.”
