“Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable.”
Democratic leaders on the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee sent letters Thursday inviting the heads of key fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups to testify before the panel about the industry’s contributions to climate disinformation in recent decades.
Applauded by advocates of holding polluters and their business partners accountable for fueling the worsening climate emergency, the letters come amid concerns about how corporate lobbyists may influence a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better package—especially in the wake of a damning exposé on ExxonMobil earlier this summer.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who respectively chair the House panel and its Environment Subcommittee, wrote that “we are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world.”
“We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change,” the pair continued.
They also expressed concern that such “strategies of obfuscation and distraction continue today,” noting that “fossil fuel companies increasingly outsource lobbying to trade groups, obscuring their own roles in disinformation efforts.”
“One of Congress’s top legislative priorities is combating the increasingly urgent crisis of a changing climate,” the lawmakers added. “To do this, Congress must address pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry and curb troubling business practices that lead to disinformation on these issues.”
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell president Gretchen Watkins, American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark (pdfs) now have a week to inform Democrats if they plan to willingly testify at the panel’s October 28 hearing.
This is a historic opportunity to do something about the damage the fossil fuel industry has done to our planet and our health and I intend to make the most of it.
Pointing to industry leaders’ past behavior, Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig said that “these polluters have long proven they’re more concerned with boosting their executives’ bottom lines than with protecting the climate. The only question is: will they defend their harmful actions before Congress? Or will they again refuse to answer to the American people?”
The Democrats also requested information from the firms, including internal communications and memos about climate science and related marketing as well as plans to reduce planet-heating emissions across the industry. If the letter recipients refuse to participate or turn over those materials, the panel’s leaders may issue subpoenas.
Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, celebrated the letters in a statement that acknowledged other efforts to hold the industry accountable, including more than two dozen lawsuits filed by state and local governments in recent years.
“We applaud Chairs Maloney and Khanna for demanding that these executives answer for their history of climate deception,” he said. “Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable. If the executives refuse to testify voluntarily, they should be subpoenaed.”
In a video released earlier this month, Khanna vowed that the panel’s probe of the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation “will be like the Big Tobacco hearings” of the 1990s.
Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran—whose academic publications include the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate communications—said at the time that “it’s no surprise that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have used the same propaganda playbook to confuse the public and undermine political action, because they rely on many of the same PR firms and advertising agencies to do their dirty work.”
Ad and PR agencies are under mounting pressure to ditch fossil fuel clients for good, thanks in part to the Clean Creatives campaign supported by Fossil Free Media, both of which welcomed the letters.
YES! I think this is a landmark day in the climate fight.
These sorts of hearings ended Big Tobacco's stranglehold over our political process. They need to do the same for Big Oil.
“This is a landmark day in the climate fight,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, noting the impact of the tobacco hearings. “For decades, the fossil fuel industry has polluted our political process along with polluting our atmosphere. Exposing the industry’s disinformation is a critical step in holding it accountable for the damage it has done and clearing the way for meaningful change.”
Clean Creatives campaign director Duncan Meisel suggested that “this investigation is the beginning of the end of misleading fossil fuel advertising and PR in the United States.”
“For too long, this industry has used fake front groups, advanced greenwashing, and straight up deception to delay climate action, every time with the willing help of some of the biggest ad and PR firms in the world,” he said. “Reps. Khanna and Maloney are following in the footsteps of congressional investigations that devastated the reputations of tobacco companies and their advertisers. Fossil fuel companies and their agencies are now on notice that they are next.”
Small businesses and individuals say that in order to sell their products online in the U.S., they have to be on Amazon and—given the millions of products on its virtual shelves at any moment—they have to get a high ranking from Amazon’s product search engine or buy sponsored listings.
Amazon transitioned from digital retailer to sales platform in 2000, when it took a page from eBay and started allowing individuals and companies to sell through its website. This led to explosive sales growth (though the company reported only small profits overall, choosing to reinvest its profits for most of its existence). Amazon encouraged these “third-party sellers” with add-on services like storage, shipping, and advertising. Third-party sellers now account for 58 percent of sales on Amazon.
Even as sellers saw their revenues grow, they started to suspect that Amazon was using their nonpublic sales information to stock and sell similar products, often for less money.
Indeed, Amazon has been investing in creating products sold under its own brand names since at least 2007. Since 2017, it has dramatically expanded its catalog of private-label brands (which are trademarked by Amazon and its partners) and its list of exclusive products (developed by third-party companies who agree to sell them only on Amazon). The company refers to both as “our brands” in various parts of its website.
We found that Amazon has now registered trademarks for more than 150 private-label brands, and market research firm TJI Research estimated the number of brands developed by others but sold exclusively on Amazon.com at 598 in 2019. Some of its house brand names signal to buyers that they are part of the company—such as Amazon Basics, Amazon Essentials, and Amazon Commercial.
But hundreds of others carry labels that do not clearly indicate that they belong to the online retail giant—including Goodthreads, Lark & Ro, Austin Mill, Whole Paws, Afterthought, Truity, find., Fetch, Mr. Beams, Happy Belly, Mama Bear, Wag, Solimo, and The Portland Plaid Co.
Amazon says it sold $3 billion in private-label goods in 2019, representing just one percent of sales on the platform, but does not specify which brands are included in that estimate. Analysts with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey estimated that Amazon sold five times as much, $15.6 billion of private-label goods in 2019, including brands owned by Whole Foods, and that the figure will reach $31 billion by 2022.
The result is that sellers now not only compete against each other for placement in Amazon search results but also increasingly against Amazon’s own in-house brands and exclusives. According to a to a 2021 report by JungleScout, 50 percent of sellers say Amazon’s products directly compete with theirs.
We sought to investigate how Amazon treats its own products in search results. These are proprietary devices, private labels, and exclusive-to-Amazon brands it considers “our brands.”
To do so, we started by developing a list of 3,492 popular product searches, ran those searches on desktop (without logging in), and analyzed the first page of results.
We found that in searches that contained Amazon brand and exclusive products, the company routinely put them first, above those from competing brands with better ratings and more reviews on Amazon.
Furthermore, we trained supervised machine learning classifiers and found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was a significantly more important factor in being selected by Amazon for the number one spot than star ratings (a proxy for quality), review quantity (a proxy for sales volume), and any of the other four factors we tested. We did not analyze the potential effect of price on ranking because unit sizes were not standard, affecting price. In addition, similar products can vary by factors that affect price, such as materials and workmanship, for which we also could not control.
Importantly, we found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or not could predict whether the product got the top spot 70 percent of the time.
In a nationally representative survey we commissioned, only 17 percent of respondents said they expect the determining factor behind whether Amazon places a product first is whether it owns the brand. About half (49 percent) said they thought the products Amazon placed in the number one spot were the best-selling, best-rated, or had the lowest price. The remaining 33 percent said they didn’t know how Amazon ranked products.
We found that Amazon disproportionately placed its own products in the top search result. Despite making up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample, Amazon gave its own products and exclusives the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time overall. By comparison, competing brands (those that are not Amazon brands or exclusive products) were given the number one spot at a nearly identical rate but comprised more than 13 times as many products at 76.9 percent.
Most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that the company put in the number one spot, but not all—83.9 percent—were labeled “featured from our brands” and carried the phrase “sponsored result” in the source code (as well as being part of a grid labeled “search results” in the source code). They were not marked “sponsored” to shoppers.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favor its brands in search results and that it considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. Rona said these listings are not advertisements, and declined to answer dozens of other questions.
Overall, 37.4 percent of Amazon brand or exclusive products in search results in our sample were neither labeled as “our brands” nor carried a name widely associated with the company, such as AmazonBasics or Whole Foods. That left buyers unaware that they were buying an Amazon brand or exclusive-to-Amazon product.
Nearly nine-in-10 U.S. adults who responded to our survey were unable to identify Amazon’s highest-selling private label brands (Pinzon, Solimo, and Goodthreads), and only 51 percent were aware that Whole Foods is an Amazon-owned brand.
Rona said Amazon identifies its products by including the words “Amazon brand” on the products page, among a list of the item’s features, and sometimes in the listing title. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands.
Comparing product pages three months apart, we found that they were less dynamic than they used to be. The default seller among products with multiple merchants only changed in 23.5 percent of products in our data. This was significantly less often than a comparable study from five years ago.
Background
Amazon and third-party sellers have a tense symbiosis. Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has acknowledged the importance of sellers to the company’s bottom line but also calls them competitors. Amazon provides shipping, inventory management, and other services, he wrote, that “helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business” to begin with. Sellers say Amazon’s fees cut deep into their margins but they can’t get the same volume of sales anywhere else.
Antitrust regulators in Europe, Asia, and North America have been examining Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers.
The European Commission announced an antitrust investigation in 2019, alleging Amazon used third-party seller data to inform its own sales decisions. The commission also announced a separate investigation in 2020 into whether Amazon gives preference to its own listings and to third-party sellers that use its shipping services over other sellers. Last year, India’s antitrust regulator announced an investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices by Amazon, including preferential treatment for some sellers. And in June 2021, U.S. lawmakers introduced the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, which prohibits large platforms from advantaging themselves in their own marketplaces or using nonpublic data generated by business conducted on their platform. Authorities in Germany and Canada are investigating Amazon’s selling conditions for third-party sellers, and the attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit in May 2021 that accuses Amazon of overly restrictive requirements for third-party sellers.
Also last year, U.S. lawmakers pressed Bezos on his treatment of third-party sellers during a congressional hearing that was part of an antitrust investigation into the four major tech companies. Rep. Lucy McBath, a Democrat from Georgia, told Bezos, “We’ve interviewed many small businesses, and they use the words like ‘bullying,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘panic’ to describe their relationship with Amazon.” The resulting report produced by the subcommittee indicated Amazon was well aware of its power over third-party sellers, citing an internal Amazon document that “suggests the company can increase fees to third-party sellers without concern for them switching to another marketplace.”
Journalists and researchers have documented instances of Amazon promoting its house brands over competitors’. In 2016, Capitol Forum, a subscription news service focused on antitrust issues, examined hundreds of listings and found that Amazon “prioritizes its own clothing brands on the promotional carousel labeled ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ ” on product pages. Capitol Forum said Amazon did not respond to its request for comment.
A study titled “When the Umpire is also a Player: Bias in Private Label Product Recommendations on E-commerce Marketplaces,” presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in March 2021, examined how Amazon’s private-label brands performed in “related products” recommendations on product pages for backpacks and batteries. The researchers said they found that “sponsored recommendations are significantly more biased toward Amazon private label products compared to organic recommendations.”
In June 2020, ProPublica reported that Amazon was reserving the top spot in search results for its own brands across dozens of search terms, labeling it “featured from our brands” and shutting others out. An Amazon spokesperson told ProPublica at the time that the move was a “normal part of retail that’s happened for decades.”
Our investigation is the first study to use thousands of search queries to test how Amazon’s house brands rank in search results—and to use machine learning classifiers to determine whether sales or quality appeared to be predictive of which products Amazon placed first in search results.
In addition, we used a multipronged approach to identify Amazon house brands and exclusives, building a data set of 137,428 unique products on Amazon, which is available in our GitHub. We were unable to find any such publicly accessible dataset when we began our investigation.
Methodology: Data Collection
Sourcing Product Search Queries
To measure how Amazon’s search engine ranked Amazon’s own products relative to competing brands, we needed a list of common queries that reflect what real people search. We built the dataset from top searches from U.S. e-commerce retailers, using two sources.
The first was autocomplete queries on Amazon.com’s and Walmart.com’s product search bars. We cycled through each letter of the alphabet (A–Z) as well as numbers ranging from 0 to 19 and saved the suggested search queries presented by the autocomplete algorithm. This process yielded 7,696 queries from Amazon.com and 3,806 queries from Walmart.com.
We then gathered the most popular searches reported by Amazon via its Seller Central hub. We collected the top 300 searches between Q1 and Q3 2020 for the Amazon categories “Softlines,” “Grocery,” “Automotive,” “Toys,” “Office Products,” “Beauty,” “Baby,” “Electronics,” and “Amazon.com.” This provided 2,700 unique searches.
Combining the autocomplete queries and seller-central queries resulted in 11,342 unique “top search” queries.
Collecting Search Results
We created a Firefox desktop emulator using Selenium. The emulator visited Amazon.com and made each of the 11,342 searches on Jan. 21, 2021. The search emulator was forwarded through IP addresses in a single location, Washington, D.C., in order to reduce variation in search results (which typically vary by location).
We saved a screenshot of the first page of search results as well as the HTML source code. (Examples of screenshots and source code for search results are available on GitHub.)
In the source code of product search result pages, Amazon titles some listings with the data field “s-search-result.” This is what we are calling search results in our data. Amazon does serve other products on the search results page in advertising and other promotional carousels, including “editorial picks” and “top rated from our brands,” but those do not appear in every result (at most a third of our sample), and they are not part of the grid that Amazon labels search results.
On desktop, the majority of Amazon-labeled “search results” in our data were delivered in uniform 60-product positions (four per column for 15 rows, though Amazon narrows the width to three columns on smaller screens). Some searches returned fewer than 60 products, but none returned more. A minority (about one in 10) of searches in our data returned 22 products or fewer, delivered in a single column, one item per row. This happened for some electronics searches but never in other search categories.
Because we were seeking to analyze how Amazon ranks its own products relative to competing brands’ products, we further limited our analysis to search results that contained Amazon brands and exclusives on the first page. Of the 11,342 top searches, slightly less than three in 10 (30.8 percent) contained this type of product on the first page. We used the resulting 3,492 top searches for our analysis.
Identifying Amazon’s Brands and Exclusives
We were unable to find a public database of Amazon brand and exclusive products, so we had to build one.
We started with the search pages themselves. On many (but not all), Amazon provides a filter on the left-hand side, allowing shoppers to limit the search to “our brands,” which Amazon says lists only its private label products and “a curated selection of brands exclusively sold on Amazon.”
We collected each of those “our brand” results for each query, saving a screenshot and the source code, also on Jan. 21, 2021.
We then discovered an undocumented API that yields all Amazon “our brands” products for any given search. We ran all 11,342 search terms through this API and saved those responses as well. (API responses are available on GitHub.)
Both the search emulator and API requests were forwarded through IP addresses in Washington, D.C.
Strangely, Amazon does not identify proprietary electronics, including Kindle readers and Ring doorbells, when a shopper filters a search result to list only Amazon’s “our brands.” To identify those, we also gathered products Amazon listed as best sellers in the category “Amazon Devices & Accessories.”
Together, all three sources yielded a dataset of 137,428 unique products, identified by their 10-character ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). This dataset of Amazon’s proprietary devices, private label, and exclusive products is available on GitHub.
It is the largest and most comprehensive open access dataset of Amazon brand and Amazon-exclusive products we’ve seen, and yet we know it is not complete. Amazon told Congress in July 2019 that at that time it sold approximately 158,000 products from its own brands.
Collecting Product Pages
In addition to the above, we collected the individual product pages for the 125,769 products that appeared in the first page of our 3,492 top searches in order to analyze the buy box information. The buy box displays the price, return policy, default seller, and default shipper for a product.
To gather the product pages, we used Amazon Web Services and the same Selenium emulator we made for collecting the search result pages. The emulator visited the hyperlink for each product and saved a screenshot and the source code.
We collected these pages on Feb. 3–6 and Feb. 17–18, a few weeks after we scraped the search result pages. To determine the effects of the delay, we analyzed how often a subsample of buy boxes’ default sellers and shippers flipped between Amazon and third parties after a similar lag and found they remained largely unchanged (see more in Limitations).
Product Characteristics
We asked up to four questions of every product listing in order to identify certain characteristics and used this to produce the categories we used in our analysis.
is_sponsored: Is the listing a paid placement?
is_amazon: Is the listing for an Amazon brand or exclusive?
is_shipped_by_amazon: Does the default seller of the product (the “buy box”) use Amazon to ship the listed product?
is_sold_by_amazon: Is the default seller of the product Amazon?
Sponsored products (is_sponsored) are the most straightforward: Amazon labels them “sponsored.” If a product in the Amazon-labeled search results is not sponsored, we consider it “organic.” We only identified products with subsequent features if they were organic.
We identified an organic product as an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) when it matched one of the 137,428 Amazon ASINs we collected. If it didn’t match, we considered it a “competing brand.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_sold if the “sold by” text in the buy box contained “Amazon,” “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t, we identified the product as “Third-Party Sold.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_shipped if the buy box shipper information contained “Amazon” (including “Amazon Prime,” “Amazon Fresh,” and “Fulfilled by Amazon”), “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t contain Amazon, we identified products as “Third-Party Shipped.”
We use these features to train and evaluate predictive classifiers (see Random Forest Analysis) as well as produce product categories in our ranking analysis (see the following section).
Most of the categories have a direct relationship with the features they are named after.
We categorized products as “Sponsored” if we identified them as is_sponsored. Similarly, we categorized products as “Amazon Brands” and exclusives if they are organic and is_amazon, and “Competing Brands” if the products are organic and not is_amazon.
We categorized organic products as entirely “Unaffiliated” if they did not meet the criteria for is_amazon, is_amazon_sold, and is_amazon_shipped. In other words, these are competing brands that are sold and shipped by third-party sellers.
The features and categories we identified are hierarchical and overlap. Their relationships are summarized in the diagram below.
Data Analysis
Ranking Analysis: Who Comes Out on Top?
We analyzed the rate of products that received the top search result relative to the proportion of products of the same category that appeared in our sample. We found that Amazon brands and exclusives were disproportionately given the number one search result relative to their small proportion among all products.
We used two straightforward measures for our analysis. First, we calculated a population metric using the percentage of products belonging to each category among products from all the search pages. To do this, we divided the number of products per category that occupy search result slots compared to all product slots in our sample. This included duplicates.
We then calculated an incidence rate for how frequently Amazon gave products in each category the coveted first spot in search results. We did this by dividing the number of searches in each category in the top spot by the total number of searches in our sample (with at least one product). (A table of each of these metrics by category appears in our GitHub and in “Supplementary datasets.”)
We chose to focus on that top left spot because Amazon changes the number of items across the first row based on screen size, and some searches return only a single item per row, so the top left spot is the only one to remain the same across all search results in our data.
In a majority of the searches in our data, 59.7 percent, Amazon sold the top spot to a sponsored product (17.3 percent of all product slots). The bulk of our analysis concerns the remaining 40.3 percent.
When we looked at all searches, Amazon gave its own products the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time even though this category made up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample.
Amazon gave competing brands the number one spot at a nearly identical rate (20.8 percent of the time), but these cover more than 13 times the proportion of products in our sample (76.9 percent).
Amazon gave entirely unaffiliated products (competing brands that were sold and shipped by third-party sellers) the top spot 4.2 percent of the time, but these products made up 5.8 percent of all products in our sample.
The only organic (nonsponsored) category that Amazon placed in the number one spot at a rate that was greater than the proportion of its products in the sample was its own brands and exclusives.
About eight in 10 (83.9 percent) of the Amazon brands or exclusives that Amazon placed in the top spot were labeled “featured from our brands.” These are identified as part of Amazon’s “search results” and are not marked “sponsored.” However, the source code for those labeled results contained information that was the same as sponsored product listings (data-component-type=”sp-sponsored-result”). These Amazon brand and exclusive brand products were not labeled as “sponsored” for shoppers.
Where Are Products Placed?
In addition to the top spot, we calculated how often Amazon placed each type of product in each search result position down the page (1–60). All searches have a number one spot but do not always return 60 results, so we always calculated this rate using the number of searches with that product spot as the denominator. Sponsored results that are part of search results are counted in the denominator of the rates.
(As mentioned earlier, we did not include promotional and advertising carousels and modules because these are not part of the grid labeled “search results” in the metadata and none appeared in the same place in a majority of search results.)
Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the number one spot 3.5 times more frequently than in any other position on the search page.
It placed competing brands (including those it sells itself) everywhere except the top (1) and bottom (15) rows of the search page. Competing brands appeared only sparsely where sponsored products were common in search results (rows 4–5 and 8–9). The company placed entirely unaffiliated products—meaning a competitor’s brand that was both sold and shipped by a third party—primarily in the lower rows (9–13).
In 59.7 percent of searches in our sample, Amazon gave the number one spot to sponsored products. When Amazon returned a 15th row, it always listed sponsored products there, too.
Not Always Labeled
Amazon only identified 42 percent of its brands and exclusives to the shopper with a disclosure label (e.g., “featured from our brands,” “Amazon brand,” or “Amazon exclusive”). Of the Amazon brand and exclusive products in our sample, 28.8 percent were from a brand many people (but not all) would understand to be a private Amazon label, such as “Whole Foods,” “Amazon Basics,” or “Amazon Essentials.” Some were both labeled and from a better-known Amazon brand. For the remaining 37.4 percent, we found that buyers were not informed that they would be purchasing an Amazon brand or exclusive.
When the same product that is an Amazon brand or exclusive appeared more than once in the same search, we considered it labeled if any of the listings were labeled. This gives Amazon the benefit of the doubt by assuming that a customer will understand that the disclaimer applies to duplicate listings. Therefore, our metrics for disclosure are the lower bound.
Duplicates
Amazon gave its own products more than one spot in search results in roughly one in 10 (9.2 percent of) searches, not including other potential duplicates in promotional carousels. It did not give competing brands’ products more than one spot for organic search results.
Survey Results
We commissioned the market research group YouGov to conduct a nationally representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults on the internet, to contextualize our findings. It revealed that 76 percent of respondents correctly identified Amazon Basics as being owned by Amazon and 51 percent correctly identified Whole Foods.
The vast majority of respondents, however, could not identify the company’s top-selling house brands that did not contain the words “Amazon” or “Whole Foods” in their name. Ninety percent did not recognize Solimo as an Amazon brand, and 89 percent did not know Goodthreads is owned by Amazon. Other top-selling brands, like Daily Ritual, Lark & Ro, and Pinzon were not recognized by 94 percent of respondents as Amazon brands.
We also asked respondents what trait defines the top-ranked products in Amazon search results. Few expected it to be based solely on being an Amazon brand. More than 21 percent of respondents thought the top-ranked product would be “the best seller,” 17 percent thought it was “the best rated,” 11 percent thought it was “the lowest price,” and 33 percent of respondents were “not sure.” Only 17 percent thought the number one listed item was “a product from one of Amazon’s brands.”
Quality and Sales Factors
We compared the star ratings (a rough proxy for quality) and number of reviews (a rough proxy for sales volume) of the Amazon Brands that the company placed in the number one spot on the product search results page with other products on the same page.
We found that in two-thirds (65.3 percent) of the instances where Amazon placed its own products before competitor brands, the products that were Amazon brands and exclusives had lower star ratings than competing brands placed lower in the search results. Half of the time (51.7 percent) that the company placed its own products first, these items had fewer reviews than competing products the company chose to place lower on the search results page.
One in four (28.0 percent of) top-placed Amazon brands had both lower star ratings and fewer reviews than products from competing brands on the same page.
When we evaluated several predictive models, we found that features like star ratings and the number of reviews were not the most predictive features among products Amazon placed in the number one spot.
Random Forest Analysis
We tried to determine which features differentiate the first organic product on search results from the second organic product on the same page.
To do this, we created a categorical dataset of product comparisons and used it to train and evaluate several random forest models.
The product comparisons looked at differences in features that we had access to, and that seemed relevant to product rankings (like stars and reviews). We found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was by far the most important feature, of the seven we tested, in Amazon’s decision to place a product in the number one versus number two spot in product search results.
How We Created Product Comparisons
We took our original dataset of 3,492 search results with at least one Amazon brand or exclusive, filtered out sponsored products, and generated a dataset of product comparisons. Each product comparison is between the number one product and number two product on the same search page. The random forest used these attributes to predict a yes or no (boolean) category: which product among the pair was given the top search result (placed_higher).
The product comparisons encode the differences in star ratings (stars_delta) and number of reviews (reviews_delta); whether the product appeared among the top three clicked products from one million popular searches in 2020 from Amazon Seller Central (is_top_clicked); and whether the product was sold by Amazon (is_amazon_sold), shipped by Amazon (is_amazon_shipped), or was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon). We also used a randomly generated number as a control (random_noise). Distributions of each of these features is available on GitHub.
While we had access to price information, we did not analyze its potential effect on ranking because price was not standardized per unit. We also had access to each product’s “best sellers rank” for the time period we collected product pages, but the same product could have various different rankings in different Amazon categories (e.g., #214 in Beauty & Personal Care and #3 in Bath Salts), making consistent comparisons impossible.
This produced a dataset of 1,415 product comparisons. (To see exactly how we created our training and validation dataset, see our GitHub.)
By creating this dataset of product comparisons, we were able to compare two products with one model and control for which features led to higher placement.
Why Random Forest?
A random forest combines many decision tree models, a technique we used in a previous Markup investigation into Allstate’s price increases. Decision trees work well at predicting categories with mixed data types, like those from our product comparisons.
Decision trees can, however, memorize or “overfit” the training data. When this happens, models can’t make good predictions on new data. Random forests are robust against overfitting and work by training a forest full of decision trees with random subsets of the data. The forest makes predictions by having each tree vote.
We used grid search with five-fold cross-validation to determine optimal hyperparameters (parameters we control versus those that arise from learning cycles): 500 decision trees in each forest, and a maximum of three questions each decision tree can ask the data. By asking more questions, each tree becomes deeper. But that also means that the trees are more likely to memorize the data. The more trees we train, the more resources it takes to run our experiment. Grid search trains and evaluates models with an exhaustive list of combinations of these hyperparameters to determine the best configuration.
Evaluating the Models
Our model correctly picked Amazon’s number-one-ranked product 73.2 percent of the time when all seven features were considered.
We systematically removed each feature and retrained and reevaluated the model (called an ablation study) in order to isolate the importance of each individual feature. We used the accuracy of the model trained on all seven features as a baseline to compare each newly evaluated model (see results in Change of Accuracy in table above).
When we did this, we saw that removing information about whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) reduced the model’s ability to pick the right product by 9.7 percentage points (to 63.5 percent). This drop in performance was far greater than any other individual feature, suggesting that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most predictive feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon placed in the first organic spot of search results.
To demonstrate the influence of Amazon brands and exclusives in another way, we trained a model with only is_amazon, and it correctly predicted the number one product 70.7 percent of the time. Every other standalone feature performed significantly worse, only picking the correct product between 49.3 (random_noise) and 61.5 (is_sold_by_amazon) percent of the time.
To a lesser extent, the number of reviews (reviews_delta) were also predictive of a product getting the number one spot. Removing this feature reduced the model’s performance by 3.3 percentage points.
The other six features were less informative when it came to getting the number one spot versus the number two spot. Performance of the random forest for every possible permutation of features is available in our GitHub.
These findings were consistent with ranking the feature importance from the random forest model trained on all features. This third approach also suggests that is_amazon is the most predictive feature for the random forest.
When we compared additional product pairs with the number one spot and those of lower-ranked products beyond just the number two spot, is_amazon remained the most predictive feature out of those we tested (results in our GitHub).
We used predictive models to show that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most influential feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon chose to place at the top of search results.
Limitations
Search Data Limitations
The two datasets we created are small in comparison to the full catalog of products for sale on Amazon.com, for which there are no reliable estimates. However, we sought to examine searches and products that generate significant sales, not every product or every search.
We collected search data on desktop, so our analysis only applies to desktop searches. Amazon’s search results may differ on mobile, desktop, and the Amazon app.
Amazon’s search results can also vary by location. One example is the distance of the closest Whole Foods store and its inventory, which would affect any given person’s search for certain items. We collected the data using I.P. addresses in Washington, D.C., so our results are specific to that city.
And, according to an Amazon-authored report for IEEE Internet Computing, a journal published by a division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Amazon personalizes offerings to buyers according to similar items they have already purchased or rated (called item-to-item collaborative filtering). Our searches were not made in the same session nor were we logged into an Amazon account with user history, so our results were not personalized. In the absence of personalization, Amazon defaults to “generally popular items.” This also means that we did not capture search results or product pages for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Product Page Data Limitations
Some products that compete with Amazon brand and exclusive products are sold by numerous sellers, including Amazon itself. A 2016 ProPublica investigation revealed that of a sample of 250 products, Amazon took the buy box for itself or gave it to vendors that paid for the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program in 75 percent of cases. The same year, researchers at Northeastern University tracked 1,000 best-selling products over six weeks and found that buy box winners changed for seven out of 10 products in their study.
For our main analysis, we did not seek to analyze which specific seller won the buy box but rather whether the seller or shipper during our snapshot was Amazon or a third party.
We captured product pages and their subsequent buy boxes in a snapshot of time between Feb. 3–6 and 17–18. Due to a technical problem, there was a two- to four-week delay between when we collected the searches and when we collected the product pages. This means that the seller and shipper of those products are only representative of searches made during that time and could have changed from the time we collected the searches to when we collected the product pages.
When we collected product pages in February, about 3.9 percent of them were no longer available or the product had been removed from the Amazon Marketplace altogether since we gathered the search pages in January. We removed these products from any calculations involving the seller or shipper.
To test the reliability of our product page data, we took a random sample, on May 13, 2021, of 2,500 of the 125,769 products we had collected in February 2021 and reran the product page scraper.
Some of the product pages were missing data: 6.1 percent were sold out, 1.6 percent were removed from Amazon’s marketplace, and another 3.4 percent no longer displayed a default seller who won the buy box. In these latter cases, Amazon provided a button to “See All Buying Options.” The missing data did not overall favor or disfavor Amazon but rather was consistent with the proportion of Amazon-sold products (30.2 compared to 27.1 percent) from the sample of products we recollected.
The remaining 2,103 products that had legible buy boxes (the vast majority) were largely unchanged. Only 16.1 percent of products changed default sellers. This included changes between Amazon and third-party sellers.
Product sellers changed from a third party to Amazon in 1.6 ± 0.5 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 3.1 ± 0.7 percent of products (margins of error calculated with 95 percent confidence).
When it came to who shipped the product, the shipper went from a third party to Amazon in 2.9 ± 0.7 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 6.6 ± 1.1 percent of products.
Because the buy box remained largely unchanged during a 12-week gap in this representative subsample of our data, we find that our buy box findings are reliable, despite the three- to four-week gap between when we gathered search results and product pages.
This seemed to signal a change from previous research. So we went further to determine whether the buy box had become more stable since the 2016 Northeastern University study. That study was limited to products with multiple sellers. When we did the same, it brought the sample size down to 1,209. Looking only at products with multiple sellers, we found Amazon changed the buy box seller for only 23.5 percent of products. In addition, among products with multiple sellers, Amazon gave itself the buy box for 40.0 percent of them.
For products with multiple sellers, the winning sellers changed from Amazon to a third party in 2.1 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 4.4 ± 1.1 percent of products. Third-party sellers changed among themselves in 31.4 percent of products sold by third-party sellers. No individual third-party seller won more than 0.06 percent of the products with more than one seller.
Shippers changed from Amazon to a third-party in 2.3 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 7.8 ± 1.5 percent of products.
Reviewing the product pages three months apart, we found that the default seller Amazon chose for the buy box when multiple merchants were available has become significantly less likely to change from five years ago.
Limitations Identifying Amazon Brands and Exclusive Products
Amazon’s “our brands” filter is incomplete. For instance, it listed only 70.3 percent of products that were tagged “featured from our brands” on the search page. In addition, Amazon did not include its proprietary electronics in the “our brands” filtered results when we gathered the data. The company declined to answer questions about why these were not included.
Because of this, we had to use three methods to collect our product database of Amazon brands and exclusives, and it’s possible we missed some products, particularly proprietary electronics.
Black Box Audit
Our investigation is a black box audit. We do not have access to Amazon’s source code or the data that powers Amazon’s search engine. There are likely factors Amazon uses in its ranking algorithm to which we do not have access, including return rates, click-through rates, and sales. We have some data from Amazon’s Seller Central hub about popular products and clicks, but this data is itself limited and did not cover all of the products in our searches.
For these reasons, our investigation focuses on available and clear metrics: how high categories of products are placed compared to their proportion of results, how well users review highly ranked products relative to other products, and how many reviews a product has garnered, which is a crude indication of sales.
Amazon’s Response
Amazon did not take issue with our analysis or data collection and declined to answer dozens of specific questions.
In a short, prepared statement sent via email, spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements,” and as such, the company does not consider them “search results.” Rona said these listings are not advertisements, which by law would need to be disclosed to shoppers. We found these listings were identified as “sponsored” in the source code and also part of a grid marked “search results” in the source code.
“We do not favor our store brand products through search,” Rona wrote.
“These merchandising placements are optimized for a customer’s experience and are shown based on a variety of signals,” Rona said. None of these were explained beyond “relevance to the customer’s shopping query.”
Regarding disclosing to customers about Amazon brands, Rona said they are identified as “Amazon brand” on the products page, and some carry that wording in the listing. We found this to be the case in only 23 percent of products that were Amazon-owned brands.
She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry that wording since they are not owned by Amazon.
Rona supplied a link to an Amazon blog post that mentions that its branded products made up about one percent of sales volume for physical goods and $3 billion of sales revenue in 2019. It is unclear whether brands exclusive to Amazon are included in those figures.
Conclusion
Our investigation revealed that Amazon gives its own products preference in the number one spot in search results even when competitors have more reviews and better star ratings. We also found that reviews and ratings were significantly less predictive of whether a product would get the number one spot than being an Amazon brand or exclusive.
In addition, we found that Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the top spot in higher proportion than it appeared in the sample, a preference that did not exist for any other category. In fact, it placed its own brands and exclusives in the top spot as often as competing brands—about 20 percent of the time—although the former made up only six percent of the sample and the latter 77 percent.
Almost four in 10 products that we identified as Amazon brands and exclusives in our sample were neither clearly labeled as an Amazon brand nor carried a name that most people recognize as an Amazon-owned brand, such as Whole Foods. In our survey, almost nine-in-10 U.S. adults did not recognize five of Amazon’s largest brands.
We also found that the default seller among products with multiple merchants changed for just three in 10 products over three months, a significantly lower rate of change than a similar study found five years ago.
Amazon’s dominance in online sales—40 percent in the United States—means the effect of giving its own products preference on the search results page is potentially massive, both for its own business as well as the small businesses that seek to earn a living on its platform.
Appendix
Supplementary Search Dataset and Analysis
When first exploring this topic and before hitting on our top searches dataset, we had created a generic dataset that returned similar findings. We replaced it as the main dataset because our top searches dataset was closer to real searches made by users. We include it here as a secondary dataset.
Generic Searches
We created a search dataset from products listed in each of the 18 departments found on Amazon’s “Explore Our Brands” page.
Three annotators looked through 1,626 products listed on those pages and generated between one and three search queries a person might use if searching for that product. These were meant to represent generic searches for which we know Amazon brands are competing against others.
We generated 2,558 search terms. We randomly sampled 1,600 and collected these searches using the same method and during the same time period we used to collect top searches. A quarter of the search results (24 percent) did not contain Amazon Brands, so we discarded them, leaving 1,217 generic searches, our supplementary dataset.
Generic Search Findings
In the generic searches, Amazon Brands constituted a slightly larger percentage of the overall product sample (8.2) than our top searches database (5.8). The percentage of the time Amazon gave its own products the number one spot also increased, to roughly one in four of our generic searches from one in five for our top searches.
Competing brands constituted a similar proportion of products in both of our datasets. However, Amazon placed competing brands in the number one spot even less often (10.8) in these generic searches than it had for top searches (20.8).
Entirely unaffiliated products made up even less of the pool of products in our generic searches (3.0) than top searches (5.8), and Amazon also gave them the top spot even less frequently, 1.5 percent of the time compared to 4.2 percent for top searches.
The results from this additional dataset show a similar pattern to our main dataset, whereby Amazon prioritizes its own products at the top of search results.
Counting Carousels
As mentioned earlier, we did not include sponsored or promotional carousels in our analysis.
If we were to consider sponsored or promotional carousels, the percentage of organic products from top searches would drop from 87 to 68 percent. This also means that sponsored products would increase from 17 percent to 32 percent. There were a total of 49,686 products in these carousels.
Acknowledgements
We thank Christo Wilson of Northeastern University, Juozas “Joe” Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse, Rebecca Goldin of Sense About Science and George Mason University, Kyunghyun Cho of New York University, and Michael Ekstrand of Boise State University for reviewing all or parts of our methodology. We also thank Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College for reviewing our survey design.
Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People’s Identities
It has become a ubiquitous internet ad, with versions popping up everywhere from Facebook and LinkedIn to smaller sites like Jobvertise: Airport shuttle driver wanted, it says, offering a job that involves picking up passengers for 35 hours a week at an appealing weekly pay rate that works out to more than $100,000 a year.
But airports aren’t really dangling six-figure salaries for shuttle drivers amid some sudden resurgence in air travel. Instead, the ads are cybercriminals’ latest attempt to steal people’s identities and use them to commit fraud, according to recent warnings from the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and cybersecurity firms that monitor such threats. The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes, also confirmed that it has seen a “marked increase” in sham job ads seeking to steal people’s personal data, often with the aim of filing bogus unemployment insurance claims.
“These fraudsters, they’re like a virus. They continue to mutate,” said Haywood Talcove, chief executive of the government division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of several contractors helping state and federal agencies combat identity theft. (ProPublica subscribes to public records databases provided by LexisNexis.)
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
This particular mutation is an emerging threat, Talcove and others said. The numbers are small so far, but they’re rapidly increasing. In March, LexisNexis detected around 2,900 ads touting unusually generous pay, using suspicious email domains and requiring that one verify one’s identity upfront. The total had grown to 18,400 by July, and then to 36,350 as of this month. Talcove said these figures are based on a small sample of job ads and that the real number is likely much higher.
This form of scam is surging at a moment when targets for job application fraud abound. Millions of Americans are quitting jobs and looking for new ones. An all-time high percentage of workers — 2.9% — quit their jobs in August, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Meanwhile, huge numbers of laid-off workers are still looking for work, making for a historic churn in the labor market.
The ads reflect a tactical adjustment by cybercriminals. A massive wave of unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic prompted authorities to heighten identity verification requirements. In most U.S. states, cybercriminals can no longer simply input stolen identity information into government websites and frequently collect unemployment insurance aid. Now, applicants whose names are used to apply for unemployment benefits often need to verify on their phones that they’re the ones seeking assistance, a process similar to two-factor authentication.
That means scammers may need help from their victims — and sometimes they go to elaborate lengths to mislead them. Some fraudsters recreate companies’ hiring websites. One fake job application site uses Spirit Airlines’ photos, text, font and color code. The phony site asks applicants to upload a copy of both sides of their driver’s license at the outset of the process and sends them an email seeking more information from a web address that resembles Spirit’s, with an extra “i” (spiiritairline.com). Spirit Airlines did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Other job scams are less elaborate and have more visible signs of inauthenticity. One fake ad for airport shuttle drivers on Facebook was posted by a woman who purported to be working at Denver International Airport. Diligent readers may have noticed that the only location linked from the woman’s Facebook profile was a Nigerian city called Owerri. (A spokesperson for the Denver airport reported the profile to Facebook after an inquiry by ProPublica, and the ad is no longer active.)
In other instances, unsolicited job offers simply land in applicants’ inboxes after they’ve uploaded their résumés to real job search sites, which scammers can access if they pose as potential employers. Jeri-Sue Barron has received a slew of emails since the start of the pandemic informing her that she was preapproved for a variety of jobs she hadn’t even applied for. Barron, a retiree in suburban Dallas, had uploaded her résumé to several job hunting sites in hope of finding some part-time work to supplement her Social Security income. She then received multiple job offers with nary a request for an interview. One email originated from a school in India’s Kerala state; another came from a Croatian website she’d never heard of. “They started coming in from places that were weird,” said Barron. “You almost don’t want to find out the next stage.” She ignored the offers.
As with fake unemployment claims more broadly, the fraud is being facilitated by an underground infrastructure, including online forums where cybercriminals share advice on how to perfect their techniques. A person using the handle “cleverinformation” on a U.K. forum called Carder put together a how-to video that recommends posting fake job ads using a generic job application that can be modified to collect personal data. In September, someone going by “mrdudemanguy” on another forum, known as Dread, offered this advice to a person seeking stolen identities: “Pretend to be a local business and post some job ads. When they send in their résumé, call them and ask some basic job application questions. Make them think they’ve got the job as long as they can do a background check. For the background check request they send you photos or scans of ID documents.”
In response to a query from ProPublica, mrdudemanguy did not answer questions about sharing fake ads and instead focused on explaining the source of his recommended technique and its success. “I have not tried this method myself,” he wrote. “It’s just a method that I know other people do and it does work. It can be done in any part of the world, the country does not matter. As long as the job ad looks legitimate, a person looking for a job will be likely to apply.” Questions sent to cleverinformation yielded a similar response. “It’s effective,” the person said, noting that it’s an underused technique. The person added: “Trying to start a group chat where we share our knowledge.”
The ubiquitous ad for airport shuttle drivers was discussed in a similar forum. One version of it was posted in a Telegram channel of a Nigerian scam group called Yahoo Boys Community, along with instructions on what to tell applicants to get them to share their Social Security number, photographs of their driver’s license and other personal details. The post urged the group’s 5,000 members to ask applicants generic questions via email and offer them the gig — but only if they first shared their personal documents to land the plum job. “Once the client gives you the details, buzz me on WhatsApp and let start work on it Asap,” read the July message, whose initiator could not be identified.
Job application scams have been around in various forms for years. Some entice applicants to buy equipment or software from the scammers in preparation for a nonexistent job. Others try to trick victims into working for free or reshipping goods bought with stolen credit cards. But, according to law enforcement agencies, using fake job ads to steal identities and using them to cash in on government benefits is a new wrinkle.
Alexandra Mateus Vásquez fell for one such scam in December 2020. An aspiring painter, Vásquez was thinking of quitting her sales job at a suburban mall near New York City. She applied for a graphic designer position at the restaurant chain Steak ‘n Shake via the widely used job website Indeed. She was elated when what appeared to be a Steak ‘n Shake representative invited her via Gmail to participate in an email screening test for the job.
Conducting an interview via email initially struck Vásquez as odd, but she proceeded because the questions seemed standard. They included queries like “How do you meet tough deadlines?” according to emails she shared with ProPublica, and she provided earnest answers. Hours later she received an email offering her the job and asking for her address and phone number so a formal offer letter could be dispatched. The offered pay was attractive: $30 per hour. When the letter arrived, it sought her Social Security number, too. Vásquez provided all the requested information.
Soon Vásquez was invited for a background check, via online chat, with a supposed hiring manager. She found herself trading messages with an account that had a blurry photograph of an old man and the name “Iran Coleman” attached to it. (Several other applicants described similar experiences in a discussion about the Steak ‘n Shake job on the hiring site Glassdoor.)
The person claiming to be the Steak ‘n Shake’s hiring manager requested copies of Vásquez’s personal records to verify her identity. She shared photographs of her New York state ID and her green card but grew suspicious when the person asked for her credit card number, too. As Vásquez hesitated, she got a call from ID.me, an identity verification vendor used by 27 states to safeguard their unemployment insurance programs. The company asked if she was applying for jobless aid in California. That’s when she realized she was being scammed. “I was so disappointed,” Vásquez said. “I really believed that that position was real.”
Steak ‘n Shake did not respond to messages seeking comment. (ProPublica was able to reach Iran Coleman, the purported Steak ‘n Shake manager cited in the scam. He said the Louisville Steak ‘n Shake he used to manage is closed and he hasn’t worked there since at least 2014. He said he hadn’t updated his cursory LinkedIn profile, which lists him as a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant manager, in years. Coleman said he now manages three Waffle House restaurants. “I feel for that person,” he said of Vásquez when informed of her experience.)
Vásquez reported the incident to the police and contacted the Social Security Administration, which informed her that it had denied multiple requests to create an account in her name. (A spokesperson for the agency said privacy laws preclude it from discussing individual cases.) She then gave up on her job search. “I started doubting if all the jobs I’m applying for are real,” she said. Vásquez recently launched a website to begin selling paintings online and still hopes to become a design professional.
Blake Hall, chief executive of ID.me, said the company has rolled out language on its systems that informs users when their identities are being used to apply for unemployment insurance benefits and warns them not to proceed if they are being offered a job. Hall said it’s ultimately up to users to heed such warnings. “We will do as much as we can to make it clear that they’ve been scammed,” he said, “but ultimately protecting somebody from themself is a really tall order.” He compared his company to a goalkeeper who also needs help from other members of the team, in this case the job websites where criminals post fake ads.
The Better Business Bureau said in an alert last month that Indeed, LinkedIn and Facebook topped the list of online platforms where users reported spotting fraudulent job advertisements that duped them.
Indeed removes tens of millions of job listings that do not meet its quality guidelines each month, according to a company spokesperson, and it declines to list employers’ jobs if they do not pass those guidelines. In July, the site published a blog post detailing how to spot scam job ads. “Indeed puts job seekers at the heart of everything we do,” the spokesperson said.
LinkedIn removed 10 fake airport shuttle job postings after they were pointed out by ProPublica. A spokesperson said that posting bogus job ads is a “clear violation” of LinkedIn’s terms of service and said the company is investing in new ways of spotting them, such as hiring more human reviewers and expanding a work-email verification system for potential employers.
Facebook took down some of the airport shuttle posts after ProPublica alerted the service, but the company did not respond to questions about its processes for spotting and removing fake ads.
In recent months, the social media platform has also been plagued with fraudulent pages masquerading as state unemployment agencies. Some states complained to the U.S. Department of Labor that Facebook was slow to act on their requests to remove such pages, according to a March email from the department to state workforce agencies disclosed under a public records request. A Department of Labor official said that in March the agency set up a new process for states to report fake unemployment insurance websites to Facebook and that “to date, Facebook has been responsive in taking down fraudulent pages” reported by states.
New ones, however, keep popping up: A fake version of California’s Employment Development Department Facebook page was live as of Oct. 12. The agency confirmed the page was not its own, and it was removed from Facebook shortly after ProPublica’s inquiry.
Even if online platforms clean up their job postings, other identity theft scams are proliferating. On Oct. 15, the FBI issued an alert warning about fake websites that cybercriminals created to resemble the state unemployment websites of Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Criminals use the sites to steal victims’ sensitive personal information, according to the FBI.
The new report has “a stark, scientific message for climate change negotiators at COP 26,” said the head of the World Meteorological Organization.
Carbon dioxide concentrations reached a new record high in 2020, with comparable levels not seen for roughly 3 million years, the United Nations weather agency said Monday.
“There is no time to lose.”
The findings came in the latest edition of the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released a week before COP 26—the U.N. climate summit—kicks off in Glasgow.
According to WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas, the report holds “a stark, scientific message for climate change negotiators” headed to the summit.
The bulletin said globally averaged levels of CO2, as well as two other potent greenhouse gases—methane and nitrous oxide—were all up from the previous year.
CO2 reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2020—149% of the pre-industrial level. The increase from 2019 levels came despite pandemic-triggered lockdowns triggering an approximately 5.6% drop in fossil fuel CO2.
Methane stood at 262% and nitrous oxide at 123% of pre-industrial levels, the report said.
“At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” he said in a statement, warning, “We are way off track.”
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere breached the milestone of 400 parts per million in 2015. And just five years later, it exceeded 413 ppm,” Taalas added. “This is more than just a chemical formula and figures on a graph. It has major negative repercussions for our daily lives and well-being, for the state of our planet, and for the future of our children and grandchildren.”
Greenhouse gas levels are at new records. Again Concentration of CO2 in 2020 was 149% of pre-industrial times Economic slowdown from COVID-19 had no real impact We are set for a 🌡️ increase much higher than #ParisAgreement target of 1.5°C-2°C.https://t.co/LQ5sVilzcE#COP26pic.twitter.com/S0NHxa5jg9
“Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer,” said Taalas. “The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now.”
The report also warned that land and oceans’ ability to continue serving as carbon sinks, sucking up about half of CO2 emissions, could be negatively affected by climate crisis-related changes such as wildfires.
Urging countries to turn “commitment into action,” Taalas said, “There is no time to lose.”
Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, also tied the bulletin’s findings to the upcoming U.N climate summit.
“The true success, or failure, of COP 26 will be written in our skies in the form of greenhouse gas concentrations,” he said in a statement. “This new report from the WMO provides a brutally frank assessment of what’s been written there to date.”
“So far,” he said, “it’s an epic fail.”
“Will this 26th COP find success where the previous 25 have fallen short?” Reay asked. “Our atmosphere will bear witness.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Organizers of the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol say that several congressional Republicans and White House officials helped plan former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt.
In response to new reporting that several congressional Republicans and White House officials were “intimately involved” in planning the January 6 Capitol attack—part of former President Donald Trump’s far-reaching election subversion plot—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night demanded the expulsion of any lawmaker who aided and abetted the violent assault on U.S. democracy.
“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capitol must be expelled,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”
Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s capitol must be expelled.
This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond. https://t.co/D0qLlaFjTh
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) tweeted in response to the Rolling Stone report that her “resolution to investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol,” House Resolution 25, “is just waiting for a vote.”
My resolution to investigate and expel the Members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol is just waiting for a vote.
On Sunday night, the magazine detailed “explosive allegations” about the January 6 riot, wherein a right-wing mob fueled by Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen stormed the halls of Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Amid an ongoing probe led by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Rolling Stone has spoken with two unnamed individuals who were “involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse,” and who are cooperating with the panel’s investigators. According to the magazine:
These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.
Among other things, the magazine reported that prior to January 6:
The two sources say they engaged in “dozens” of planning conversations, in which Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) participated or “had top staffers join”;
The two sources say they “interacted with members of Trump’s team.” That includes former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence,” as well as Katrina Pierson, a former member of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns whom one organizer called “our go-to girl” and “our primary advocate”;
Gosar, “who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters,” allegedly “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.”
Both organizers received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar, one source told Rolling Stone.
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” said the source, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval… in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.
The magazine has separately obtained documentary evidence that on January 6, both organizers were in contact with Boebert and Gosar, whose office is being investigated by the House select committee.
In addition, Rolling Stone reported, “both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, ‘Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.’ Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the ‘Wild Protest,’ which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.”
One of the leading organizers of the latter event was Ali Alexander, leader of Stop the Steal, a key group promoting efforts to challenge Biden’s victory. In a since-deleted livestream broadcast, Alexander said that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped develop the strategy for the so-called “Wild Protest.”
At a December 2020 Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, Alexander called Gosar, one of the main speakers, “my captain,” and he also heaped praise on Biggs, describing him as “one of the other heroes.”
Both sources maintain that ahead of January 6, “the plan they had discussed with other organizers, Trump allies, and members of Congress was a rally that would solely take place at the Ellipse, where speakers—including the former president—would present ‘evidence’ about issues with the election. This demonstration would take place in conjunction with objections that were being made by Trump allies during the certification on the House floor that day,” Rolling Stonereported.
During his speech at the Ellipse, however, Trump encouraged his supporters to make their way to the Capitol, and before he had finished talking, the barricades were being stormed.
According to the two organizers, Alexander had agreed to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol, but when it appeared that the event may materialize, Meadows—one of four Trump allies subpoenaed by the House select committee—was made aware of concerns about the potential for violence.
Although there were earlier indications that the Trump administration and members of Congress “played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day,” Rolling Stone noted, “the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts.”
“The sources plan to share that information with congressional investigators right away,” according to the magazine. “While both sources say their communications with the House’s Jan. 6 committee thus far have been informal, they are expecting to testify publicly.”
Just hours after the violent right-wing attack they helped foment through baseless allegations of voter fraud was contained, 147 GOP lawmakers—including more than two-thirds of House Republicans plus several Senate Republicans—voted in the early morning of January 7 to overturn election results in key states, attempting to disenfranchise millions of voters in the process.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Sunday urged people to “never forget” Trump’s failed coup attempt.
291 days ago terrorists ransacked the US Capitol and *hours later* 138-of-202 (68%) House republicans voted to make trump a dictator. They tried to finish the rioters’ job and end democracy. Never forget it.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, warned that “a failed coup is a trial run for a successful coup.”
“Instead of just a person who makes a disorganized attempt,” said the expert on authoritarianism, “we now have that person, plus institutional machinery, time to plan, and the Big Lie.”
Since last year’s election, GOP lawmakers at the state level have weaponized lies about electoral fraud to legitimize anti-democratic electoral review mechanisms and a nationwide campaign of voter suppression, prompting University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. to declare in a recent essay that maintaining Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress is necessary to prevent 2022 or 2024 from marking “the end of the proceduralist democracy to which we’ve been accustomed.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”
Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.
According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Postconcluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.
From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.
CNNwarned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.
On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”
“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”
While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”
With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.
Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”
Happening now: we are outside UK parliament with a visual protest against Facebook’s treatment of children and its business model which puts profit before public safety. (1/7) #PeopleVsBigTechpic.twitter.com/37UA18PL3r
“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Many merchants sell the exact same item, including Amazon, which picks a winner–often itself
When you shop on Amazon for a widely available product—a pair of Crocs, say, or Greenies dog treats—Amazon will pick among the merchants that offer the item and give one of them the sale when you hit “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now.”
In e-commerce, this is called winning the buy box. Amazon said its “featured merchant algorithm” picks the winner, instantly weighing available sellers’ past performance, price, delivery speed, and other factors.
Researchers at Northeastern University studying price changes on Amazon found that the merchant that won the buy box—which Amazon calls its “featured offer”—changed for seven in 10 products over a six-week period in 2016.
Five years later, we found that’s no longer the case.
When The Markup compared snapshots of 1,200 popular products 12 weeks apart, we found that the buy box was much less dynamic. The seller changed for fewer than three in 10 products in our sample.
The products we analyzed all appeared on Amazon’s first search results page of popular searches, meaning they receive prominent exposure to customers. We collected the data from an I.P. address in Washington, D.C.
Among the competing sellers for commonly available goods is Amazon itself. And when Amazon gave itself the buy box on products that other merchants also sold, it remained the buy box seller 12 weeks later for 98 percent of those products.
Overall, Amazon dominated the buy box when multiple sellers were available. We found that Amazon chose itself as the winning merchant of the “featured offer” for about 40 percent of products, while the next highest seller got the buy box in just half of one percent of popular products in our sample.
It’s hard to say why Amazon is changing the buy box winner less frequently than five years ago, said Christo Wilson, an associate computer science professor and one of the Northeastern University researchers who completed the 2016 study.
“The negative take,” he said, would be that “the market is becoming less competitive or that it’s easier for an incumbent to just sort of squat and remain stable.”
Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona declined to answer questions for this story. During congressional inquiry Amazon officials said the company doesn’t favor itself in the buy box or consider its profits in that decision.
They did acknowledge, however, that whether a product could be delivered quickly for free to Prime members is a factor in picking the seller for the buy box. Merchants typically pay extra fees for Amazon’s shipping service—Fulfillment by Amazon—to get that designation.
We found that the merchant Amazon selected for the buy box for almost every product—nine-in-10 of them—used Amazon’s shipping service. When we checked again three months later, less than 8 percent of products had changed shippers from Amazon to a third-party or vice versa.
The European Commission announced an investigation last November into whether Amazon’s criteria for the buy box results in preferential treatment for Amazon’s retail offers or sellers that use Amazon’s shipping service, which the commission said would be an abuse of Amazon’s dominant market position under E.U. antitrust rules.
In a May 2021 lawsuit, the Washington, D.C., attorney general wrote that “Amazon’s selection methods for the Buy Box winner consider factors that further reinforce Amazon’s online retail sales market dominance,” such as whether the seller uses Fulfillment by Amazon. In a court filing, Amazon responded that the lawsuit “fails to allege essential elements of an antitrust claim and, in any event, the conduct it attacks has been held by courts to be procompetitive.” The suit is ongoing.
Wilson said automated pricing algorithms may be playing a role in what The Markup found. It may also be a broader shift on the marketplace away from sellers competing to sell the same product to sellers developing their own branded products that only they are allowed to sell.
That shifts the competition away from the buy box to the search rankings, he said.
The Markup also found that Amazon gave its house brands and exclusive products a leg up in search results, above competitors with higher star ratings and more reviews, which are an indication of sales. Wilson reviewed our methodology for this investigation.
It was while testing the accuracy of findings for our main investigation that we discovered the stability of the buy box. There was a two- to four-week delay between when The Markup gathered search results and product pages. We gathered a sub-sample of listings a second time 12 weeks later to examine the effects of the delay and found they were minuscule.
“I would have thought that given that these [are] identical products and given that they are competing with similar costs, that there would be a little bit more turnover,” said Florian Ederer, an associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management.
Shoppers can click on a link that will allow them to see more offers for a product, in addition to the one featured in the buy box. But e-commerce experts say most don’t bother: They estimate that more than 80 percent of sales on Amazon go through the buy box.
“Amazon talks about its marketplace as though it were a market,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has been critical of Amazon’s size and effect on retail competition in the U.S.
“This is not a market,” she added. “This is an artificial environment that Amazon controls, and it’s set up certain parameters that lead to certain outcomes.”
The latest federal data, said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, should put “an end to the false myth that unemployment insurance benefits keep people from working.”
Republican lawmakers argued, and many of their Democratic counterparts accepted, that slashing federal jobless aid would lead to robust growth in employment. However, data released Friday shows that while eight million people were booted from expanded unemployment insurance programs last month, employers added just 194,000 jobs—the weakest monthly increase this year.
“194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September.”
“I hope this puts an end to the false myth that UI benefits keep people from working,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). “They don’t.”
“We can’t build back better by adopting GOP talking points and putting them into policy,” she added. “This was the wrong call a month ago and it’s the wrong call today.”
According to the right-wing theory, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) benefits introduced in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis were keeping people from taking jobs, so removing a key source of income from millions of people would force them to return to the labor market in droves.
This “starve people back to work” strategy, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the UI cuts, “did not work to say the least,” said policy analyst Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.
The September jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Bruenig noted in a Friday blog post, showed “the worst month of job growth since [Joe] Biden became president and the second-worst since May of last year when the pandemic labor market recovery began.”
Citing the BLS data, Bruenig wrote that “194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September. At this rate, it would take 3.5 years for jobs added to equal the number of people who lost their pandemic UI benefits.”
“The management of UI in the last six months,” he stressed, “has been a complete disaster.”
Last month’s nationwide assault on unemployed workers was preceded by state-level attacks on jobless benefits. Over the summer, 26 states—all but Louisiana led by Republican governors—prematurely ended federally expanded UI programs in a coercive bid to boost employment.
In a sign of things to come, the right-wing plan failed then as well. August job growth, Bruenig pointed out in an earlier blog post, was more than twice as fast in states that retained unemployment benefits.
Despite mounting evidence against cuts, the Democratic-controlled federal government refused to intervene to preservepandemic-era UI before it expired on September 6, although Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently unveiled a bill to extend the benefits until next February.
Echoing Bruenig and Tlaib, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Friday said that “back in June I led my colleagues sounding the alarm on Republican governors terminating unemployment aid early. We feared their cruelty would hurt job growth and sadly our fears were right.”
Back in June I led my colleagues sounding the alarm on republican governors terminating unemployment aid early. We feared their cruelty would hurt job growth and sadly our fears were right. https://t.co/VKR1qVjsVlpic.twitter.com/HOkgDNc2ah
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Friday attributed September’s weak job growth to the impact of the ultra-contagious Delta variant and encouraged widespread vaccination to support economic recovery amid the ongoing pandemic.
Experts at the progressive think tank also urged policymakers to pursue changes that would permanently increase the bargaining power of workers.
“This is yet another sign that the strong wage growth we have seen in some industries this year is not a permanent shift in worker bargaining power, but a temporary result of the (very) unique circumstances of this recovery,” tweeted EPI president Heidi Shierholz. “For sustained strong job growth for working people, we need things like the PRO Act, minimum wage increases, etc.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The Food to Families program, touted by Ivanka Trump, gave tens of millions of dollars to unqualified firms and was also used to promote then-President Trump.
A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found.
As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released its report last week, found that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not adequately screen contractor applications or identify red flags in bid proposals.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
One company that received a $39 million contract was CRE8AD8 LLC (pronounced “Create a Date”), a wedding and event planning firm. The owner compared the contract to his usual work of “putting tchotchkes in a bag.”
In response to the report, the firm’s CEO said in a statement, “We delivered far more boxes/pounds than many other contractors and as a for-profit company, we’re allowed to make a profit.”
The congressional report also highlighted the application of an avocado grower who was initially awarded a $40 million contract before it was canceled after a review. Under the section of the application that required applicants to list references, the farmer wrote, “I don’t have any.”
The Food to Families program was created by the Department of Agriculture in the early days of the pandemic to give away produce that might have otherwise gone to waste as a result of disruptions in distribution chains. The boxes included produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats — and many also included a signed letter from then-President Trump.
The program was unveiled in May 2020 by Ivanka Trump. “I’m not shy about asking people to step up to the plate,” the president’s older daughter said in an interview to promote the initiative.
According to congressional investigators, Ivanka Trump was involved in getting the letter from her father added to the boxes. The USDA told contractors that including the letter was mandatory. Food bank operators told the investigators the letter concerned them because it didn’t appear to be politically neutral.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention in August 2020, President Trump and his daughter headlined a nearby event to announce an additional $1 billion for the food box program. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to reelect the president.
A federal ethics office later found that Perdue’s speech violated a federal law that prohibits officials from using their office for campaign purposes. The USDA at the time disputed the notion that Perdue was electioneering, saying that Perdue’s comments merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people.’”
The yearlong congressional investigation also identified problems with the deliveries themselves, including food safety issues, failed deliveries and uneven food distribution. Some contractors also forced recipient organizations to accept more food than they could distribute or store.
Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a statement that the mismanagement of the program is another example of the previous administration’s failures.
“The Program was marred by a structure that prioritized industry over families, by contracting practices that prioritized cutting corners over competence, and by decisions that prioritized politics over the public good,” he said.
“Pfizer has used its monopoly on a lifesaving vaccine to extract concessions from desperate governments,” said the report’s author, urging action from the Biden administration.
Pfizer has used its position as a producer of one of the leading Covid-19 vaccines to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk, and maximize profits” through secret contracts with countries around the world, according to a Public Citizen report published Tuesday.
“The contracts consistently place Pfizer’s interests before public health imperatives.”
“Behind closed doors, Pfizer wields its power to extract a series of concerning concessions from governments,” report author Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, said in a statement. “The global community cannot allow pharmaceutical corporations to keep calling the shots.”
The new report begins by noting February reporting about accusations of Pfizer—an American pharmaceutical giant that developed its mRNA vaccine with the German firm BioNTech—”bullying” Latin American governments during contract negotiations for doses.
Public Citizen obtained unredacted term sheets, drafts, or final agreements between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the European Commission, and Peru. The consumer rights advocacy group also examined redacted contracts with Chile, the U.S., and the U.K.
You can read our first story on Pfizer’s vaccine contracts in Latin America here. We found Pfizer had asked some countries to put up sovereign assets as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases. (Published February.)https://t.co/c0Y8qDIW4z
Based on those contracts, the report identifies six tactics Pfizer is using to serve the company rather than public health in the midst of a deadly pandemic:
1. Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments
The Brazilian government complained earlier this year that the company insisted on “unfair and abusive” terms but ultimately accepted a contract that “waived sovereign immunity; imposed no penalties on Pfizer for late deliveries; agreed to resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York; and broadly indemnified Pfizer for civil claims.”
Brazil also agreed to a nondisclosure provision similar to those found in contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government.
2. Pfizer Controls Donations
Again using Brazil as an example, the report points out that the South American nation must first get a go-ahead from Pfizer to accept donations or buy its vaccines from others. The country is also barred from “donating, distributing, exporting, or otherwise transporting the vaccine outside Brazil without Pfizer’s permission.”
3. Pfizer Secured an “IP Waiver” for Itself
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla “has emerged as a strident defender of intellectual property in the pandemic,” the report says, noting his opposition to a proposal that members of the World Trade Organization who signed on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waive IP protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments during the crisis.
“But, in several contracts, Pfizer seems to recognize the risk posed by intellectual property to vaccine development, manufacturing, and sale,” Public Citizen explains. “The contracts shift responsibility for any intellectual property infringement that Pfizer might commit to the government purchasers. As a result, under the contract, Pfizer can use anyone’s intellectual property it pleases—largely without consequence.”
4. Private Arbitrators, Not Public Courts, Decide Disputes in Secret
While the U.K. contract requires that disputes are settled by secret panel of three private arbitrators under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, the report says, “the Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law.”
5. Pfizer Can Go After State Assets
“Pfizer required Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive sovereign immunity,” the report highlights, detailing that the doctrine can sometimes protect states from companies trying to enforce decisions reached by the previously noted secret arbitral panels. Some of the contracts enable the company to “request that courts use state assets as a guarantee that Pfizer will be paid an arbitral award and/or use the assets to compensate Pfizer if the government does not pay,” according to Public Citizen.
6. Pfizer Calls the Shots on Key Decisions
“What happens if there are vaccine supply shortages? In the Albania draft contract and the Brazil and Colombia agreement, Pfizer will decide adjustments to the delivery schedule based on principles the corporation will decide” the report notes, concluding that “under the vast majority of contracts, Pfizer’s interests come first.”
Public Citizen calls on world leaders, especially U.S. President Joe Biden, to “push back” against Pfizer’s negotiating tactics and “rein in” its monopoly power.
According to the group, the Biden administration can “call on Pfizer to renegotiate existing commitments and pursue a fairer approach in the future” as well as “further rectify the power imbalance by sharing the vaccine recipe, under the Defense Production Act, to allow multiple producers to expand vaccine supplies.”
The U.S. administration “can also work to rapidly secure a broad waiver of intellectual property rules,” the report adds, declaring that “a wartime response against the virus demands nothing less.”
In response to Public Citizen’s report, Sharon Castillo, a spokesperson for Pfizer, toldThe Washington Post that confidentiality clauses were “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.”
Castillo also said that “Pfizer has not interfered and has absolutely no intention of interfering with any country’s diplomatic, military, or culturally significant assets,” adding that “to suggest anything to the contrary is irresponsible and misleading.”
Meanwhile, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, accused Pfizer of “taking advantage of countries’ desperation” with the far-reaching contracts.
“Most of us have sacrificed during the pandemic; staying distant to protect family and friends,” Maybarduk said Tuesday. “Pfizer went the other way, using its control of scarce vaccines to win special privileges, from people that have little choice.”
This article was originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT was republished under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Michele Carew, an elections administrator with 14 years of experience, has resigned after a monthslong campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said.
An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.
Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.
Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.
“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”
Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.
Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.
“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”
Though experts say it is difficult to determine how many elections officials have left their positions nationally, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have seen numerous departures. According to the AP, about a third of Pennsylvania’s county election officials have left in the last year and a half; in Ohio, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections have left in the southwestern part of the state, according to The New York Times.
Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state. Across the country, partisans’ demands for audits have mostly focused on counties and states carried by President Joe Biden, particularly those that went for Trump four years earlier.
But Texas, despite going for Trump by 6 percentage points, has seen its fair share of blowback. Last month, the Texas secretary of state announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of four of the state’s largest counties hours after Trump issued a public letter demanding audits of the state’s results.
Before that, in July, Texas passed sweeping voting legislation that critics say disenfranchises vulnerable voters and unfairly targets administrators and other elections officials. Among the law’s provisions are new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with expanded powers given to poll watchers.
On Saturday, after blasting the four-county audit plan as “weak,” Trump threatened the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives with a primary challenge if the speaker didn’t advance a bill that would allow audits in more counties.
In Hood County, the local GOP executive committee likewise issued warnings to Republican officials who defended Carew. In July, the committee threatened County Judge Ron Massingill with a social media campaign that would tell voters he was “incapable of providing them with free and fair elections” if he didn’t convene the county’s elections commission to discuss Carew’s termination.
Massingill refused, arguing that no political party should be able to direct the activities of the independent elections administrator. Katie Lang, the county clerk and vice chair of the county’s election commission, convened the meeting and moved to fire Carew. Carew survived the vote by a 3-2 margin, with Massingill and the county tax assessor, both Republicans, joining the Hood County Democratic chair.
Republican County Chair David Fischer called on county commissioners to dissolve the independent office of elections administrator and transfer election duties to Lang, which he said would make the election administration process more accountable to the county’s Republican majority.
Counties in Texas can choose between hiring an independent elections administrator, who is meant to be insulated from political pressures, or letting a county official, often an elected county clerk, run elections. County clerks, who manage functions like property records and birth certificates, run elections in many of the state’s smallest counties.
Fischer has declined to speak with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
On social media, Lang has shared “Stop the Steal” and “Impeach Biden” memes and videos. Lang made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Lang did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, but she previously told the Hood County News she wished Carew “the best in her future endeavors.”
Over the last year, Carew has come under fire for everything from her connection with the League of Women Voters, which critics say is anti-Trump, to her interest in a $29,000 grant, funded in part by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that would have been used to pay for costs related to the pandemic.
She was also accused of harboring a hidden agenda after refusing to allow a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump One America News Network into a private training for election professionals in March when she headed the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
The most sustained criticism of Carew came from critics who accused her of violating the law by not adhering to an obscure election law that requires ballots to be consecutively numbered.
But seven election experts and administrators told ProPublica and the Tribune that consecutively numbering ballots is out of step with best practices in election security and voter privacy, and that consecutive numbering is not required to conduct effective election audits.
Despite the toll the last year has taken on her, Carew on Monday remained defiant. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said. “I’m the one who wins in the end.”
Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reutersrevealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.
“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.
Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”
In India, Amazon stoked sales of private-brand products by manipulating its search results so that the products would appear ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on https://t.co/OA0tY09fhk, an internal document shows https://t.co/1FMsAX0pza
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.
But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.
“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”
“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”
Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.
“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”
4/ Months later, in April 2020, @WSJ revealed that Amazon had been stealing from independent businesses to create competing products.https://t.co/ZgsNmtExIJ
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) October 13, 2021
“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”
Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The online giant gives a leg up to hundreds of house brand and exclusive products that most people don’t know are connected to Amazon
It took Robert Gomez about five months to get his Kaffe coffee grinder to the big leagues in e-commerce: among the first three search results for “coffee grinder” on Amazon.com.
Gomez, founder of Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands, said he obsessively refined his photos and description, amassed reviews from happy customers, and paid Amazon $40,000 a month on advertising to boost sales, one of the elements Amazon tells sellers will increase search ranking.
Then Amazon introduced a competitor from house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills.
“They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.”
An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors—even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews.
We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analyzed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)
When we analyzed star ratings and number of reviews, neither could predict much better than a coin toss which product Amazon placed first in search results.
Amazon told Congress in 2019 that its search results do not take into account whether a product is an Amazon-owned brand.
Sellers say it doesn’t seem that way to them. Gomez said Amazon’s brands have “unfair advantages” that make it harder for small merchants like him to compete” on its open marketplace. “Who bears the cost are those entrepreneurs and small businesses that don’t have the means to fight.”
The Markup found Amazon placed its Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal, with four stars and 1,010 reviews, in the number one spot ahead of cereals with better and more reviews including Cap’n Crunch (five stars, 14,069 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (five stars, 5,205 reviews), and Honey Nut Cheerios (five stars, 11,702 reviews). A vacuum cleaner from Amazon’s exclusive Noisz brand was placed on top, ahead of models from Bissell, Eureka, and Hoover with higher ratings and more reviews. And the Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker from Skechers placed number one, four spots ahead of a similar but not exclusive to Amazon Skechers sneaker with the same star rating but 77 times more reviews.
A former Amazon employee told The Markup that the company used to give its new house brand products an unearned place at the top of search rankings when they first launched. He said the practice has since stopped.
However, we found that Amazon brands and exclusive products overall received an outsized portion of the top spot on search results, one that was far out of line with their proportion of the sample.
That’s not what shoppers expect.
In a national survey we commissioned from YouGov, only 17 percent of respondents said they assumed Amazon put its own products first. Half said they expected the first nonsponsored product on Amazon’s search results page to be the cheapest, highest rated, or bestselling.
By giving its brands top billing, Amazon is giving itself a significant leg up in sales. The first three items on the search results page get 64 percent of clicks, according to one ex-Amazon-employee-turned-consultant.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favor its brands in search results and declined to answer any of the dozens of specific questions posed by The Markup.
She said the company identified its brands to shoppers by adding “Amazon brand” to the list of product features on the product page and sometimes to the listing title as well. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands. She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry the disclosure because they are not owned by the company.
Invisible Tags
A signal, invisible to the public but coded into the listings, suggests that most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that were listed first were ads. In 87 percent of cases, the listing’s source code identified them as “sponsored”—though that label isn’t shown to the public. Instead, Amazon labels the products “featured from our brands.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company considers “featured from our brands” listings “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. She also said they are not ads, despite the “sponsored” label in the source code. Rona said they are “clearly labeled to distinguish them from search results” but did not respond to questions about whether the company believes such disclosures were clear enough under Federal Trade Commission requirements.
Mary Engle, who retired as the FTC advertising practices associate director last year, said that what Amazon calls “merchandising” is actually advertising.
“Amazon’s placement of its own products on its own site is advertising, whether or not money changes hands,” she said. She said it would require an investigation to determine whether “featured from our brands” is sufficient disclosure under the FTC’s rules.
Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and former director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, said if consumers expect Amazon’s product search results to be neutral, but they are not, and the site is essentially a monopoly, that could be a violation of the FTC Act of 1914, which prohibits unfair competition and unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, or the U.S. Sherman Antirust Act, which prohibits monopolies from using their market power to harm competition.
“If basically you’ve got somebody with market power that is restraining competition both in terms of site access or where things appear on the site,” he said, “that is potentially problematic.”
Amazon’s online marketplace garners more than five times more sales than its closest online competitor, Walmart, which also allows third-party sales.
Congress is considering a package of anti-monopoly bills aimed at big tech, including the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which would make the practice of platforms giving their brands a leg up explicitly illegal.
Amazon refers to its own brands and brands developed by others that sell exclusively on Amazon as “our brands.” They peddle everything from snack chips and vitamins to fashion and furniture.
Using public records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Amazon’s own statements, we identified more than 150 brands registered by or owned by Amazon. These include both brands with an obvious connection, such as Amazon Basics and Amazon Commercial, and those that are generally known to be owned by the company, including Kindle and Zappos. But they also include dozens more, such as Happy Belly, Daily Ritual, and Society New York, where the connection to the company is not obvious. Those are in addition to the estimated hundreds of third-party brands that are exclusive to the site.
We analyzed search results on Amazon for 3,492 popular internet product queries in January 2021 and looked closely at what Amazon placed in the first spot. In 60 percent of cases, Amazon sold this spot to an advertiser and added a public label indicating the listing was “sponsored.” Of the rest, Amazon gave half to its own brands and brands exclusive to the site, and the other half to competing brands. But Amazon brands and exclusives made up only 6 percent of all products in the sample, and competitors made up 77 percent. In short, Amazon was hogging the top spot.
In more than a quarter of searches in which Amazon gave its brands the top spot, it placed its products above competitors that had both better ratings and more reviews than the Amazon brand or exclusive product.
‘They Would Shut Us Down’
Sellers said there’s no mistaking the effect on sales of Amazon’s choices in search results.
“If the customers are not seeing [our products] in the top five offers, then it makes it really hard for us to reach customers,” said Gabriela Mekler, a Miami mom who co-founded the organizational products company Mumi in 2014.
Mumi’s top product—a set of color-coded packing cubes—struggles for visibility on Amazon, even after more than two years on the site. She said the coronavirus pandemic decimated her sales—they dropped by more than 68 percent—costing the company a hard-won “Amazon’s Choice” badge on its packing cubes.
Mumi has not placed on the first page of our search results for “packing cubes” for months. At the time of this writing, Amazon Basics took up eight spots on the first page; one was labeled “featured from our brands.” None were visibly marked “sponsored.”
“Their product will always show before yours,” Mekler said.
One Mumi product has still been selling well despite the pandemic, she said: reusable pill pouches. For now, there is no Amazon Basics pill pouch, and Mekler hopes there won’t be anytime soon.
“We’re a small company,” she said. “They would shut us down.”
The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, which represents more than 30,000 distributors, submitted a letter to members of Congress in July 2020, complaining that Amazon “abuses its position” to give preferential treatment to its house brands.
But when The Markup asked to speak to some of the sellers the group had quoted anonymously, NAW’s vice president of government relations, Blake Adami, demurred.
“Our members are still very hesitant to speak out against Amazon for fear of retaliation,” he said in an email, “even anonymously.”
Many sellers whose products we found were placed below Amazon products with fewer sales or ratings also declined a reporter’s request to be interviewed for this article, saying they were concerned it would negatively affect their livelihoods.
“Everybody’s so scared of Amazon,” said Paul Rafelson, executive director of the Online Merchants Guild, which represents Amazon sellers. “Their whole livelihood relies on them.”
‘This Was a Knockoff’
Some of Amazon’s competitors have accused the company of knocking off their products to sell under its house brands.
Williams Sonoma settled a lawsuit that included the claim that Amazon was copying West Elm furniture and selling it under the Amazon house brand Rivet. Allbirds co-CEO Joey Zwillinger wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos when Amazon’s 206 Collective brand copied his company’s wool sneaker, urging Amazon to adopt Allbirds’ sustainability practices in addition to its design.
In March, Amazon Basics started selling the Everyday Sling, a camera bag with a similar design, the same name but a much lower price than a product from Peak Design.
“It wasn’t like they took some styling cues from it. This was a knockoff,” CEO Peter Dering said in an interview. The smaller company produced a parody video that now has 4.6 million views on YouTube. Within hours, Amazon changed the product’s name.
Dering said he wasn’t worried about losing sales because Peak Design mainly targets wholesalers and customers who want a high-end brand. Still, he said he found the move “highly distasteful.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company “did not infringe” on Allbirds’ or Peak Design’s “design rights” and “strictly prohibit[s] our employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data to determine which store brand products to launch.”
Hard to Spot
Identifying all of Amazon’s brands and brand exclusives to the site for this investigation was cumbersome. The company does not provide a complete list. The Markup’s reporting team used various filters on the site, reviewed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records, and reviewed Amazon bestseller lists—but even then we likely missed some.
Consumers would have an even harder time. We found Amazon does not consistently label its brands and exclusives.
Of the products in our sample that Amazon considered “our brands,” about two in five were not labeled as such in search results nor did they carry a name that many people would understand was connected to the company, such as Amazon Basics, Kindle, or Whole Foods.
Inconsistent labeling, combined with an almost endless stream of its own private brands, leaves customers in the dark to decide whether Amazon highly ranked a particular product because it was a good buy or because it benefited the company’s bottom line.
Nine in 10 respondents to the national survey The Markup commissioned in July didn’t know that Amazon’s highest-selling house brands, apart from Amazon Basics, were owned by the company.
Even there, 24 percent of respondents could not identify Amazon Basics as an Amazon brand, and half didn’t know Amazon owned Whole Foods.
Alex Harman, competition policy advocate at Public Citizen who has studied Amazon’s marketplace, said that to him, the strategy of creating a stream of brands without a clear affiliation to Amazon feels “deceptive.”
Large brick-and-mortar retailers also have house brands. Costco has Kirkland Signature. Target has Up&Up, among others. Historically, he said, when large stores create brands they have been clearly affiliated with the store.
And Amazon’s search results are different from a store shelf.
“Unlike a retail store where you see everything on the shelf, the platform may be in a position to elevate its goods in a way that is harder to do in a retail outlet,” said Baer, the former FTC official and assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
By creating more than a hundred trademarked brands, most without an obvious connection to the company, Amazon can preserve its reputation if one of its homegrown products flops. This happened in 2015 when customer reviews for its newly launched Amazon Elements diapers included complaints about leaks and “sagginess.” Amazon pulled the products after just seven weeks to make “design improvements.”
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and a frequent Amazon critic, said that as Amazon’s brands squeeze competitors, those competitors have less money to spend on innovation—and consumers lose.
“Consumers don’t even know what’s missing,” she said.
Case in point: Brandon Fuhrmann, who runs the New York Amazon Seller Meetup. He was considering expanding his kitchenware brand into a new type of dishware. While checking trademark registrations and U.S. import logs for sellers with similar products, he realized that the majority of his competition would come from Amazon brands.
“When that happened, we realized we couldn’t even compete,” he said. He decided not to launch the product.
Rise of Amazon Brands
Amazon has continually set its sights on dizzying growth.
It launched in 1995, with the goal of becoming “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Four years later, it declared its intention to become “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”
To reach this point, it took a page from rival eBay’s playbook, inviting individuals and business owners to list rare, used, and collectible items—which quickly transitioned to third parties selling mainstream, new wares on Amazon.
In 2003, Jason Boyce got a call from Amazon asking him to list his company’s basketball products on the nascent marketplace.
“We’re like, what are you talking about? You guys sell books,” he said. “What do you mean you’re selling sporting goods?”
Boyce took the plunge and his company’s basketball sales took off on Amazon.
By 2018, third-party sellers like Boyce were responsible for 58 percent of physical goods sales on Amazon. They helped boost Amazon’s North American sales by more than an order of magnitude, from $24.5 billion in 2009 to $386.1 billion in 2018.
The volume created fortunes for small businesses across the world. It also created a deep reliance on Amazon. A 2021 report by JungleScout, which provides software for Amazon sellers, found that Amazon was the only source of income for 22 percent of Amazon’s third-party sellers.
“Within two years of getting on Amazon, most of my clients, whether they want to or not, it becomes their single biggest sales channel,” said James Thomson, who was a manager at Amazon from 2007 to 2012 and now works at the e-commerce consulting firm Buy Box Experts.
And these new third-party sellers had lots of competition, eventually from Amazon itself.
Boyce said Amazon started undercutting his business, selling the same sporting goods—Spalding basketballs, for example—for less.
Unable to compete with Amazon on price for brand-name products, Boyce and his brothers launched their own brand, Harvil, in 2007, to sell sporting goods and home recreation equipment on Amazon. They figured Amazon couldn’t undercut their prices if he and his brothers owned the brand.
They had no idea Amazon was also beginning to launch its own brands and to enter into deals with companies to develop brands exclusive to the platform.
Among the first Amazon brands was Pinzon (a likely nod to the first conquistador to stumble across the Amazon River), which Amazon registered as a trademark in 2007 to sell bedding. Then came Denali for tools, and Amazon Basics for a slew of products, including household appliances and office supplies.
Sometime in 2017, Boyce was searching keywords related to his products on Amazon—”bocce ball,” “air hockey table”—when he noticed a new brand, Rally and Roar, peddling very similar products to his own. They showed up at the top of search results.
Rally and Roar is exclusive to Amazon, labeled as “our brands.” The company was moving in on his territory, again.
The speed of Amazon’s expansion of its own brands has been accelerating, according to several e-commerce and retail research firms. TJI Research counted 598 Amazon-exclusive brands in 2019. Coresight Research said Amazon brand products on the site tripled in the two years between 2018 and 2020 alone.
Amazon invites companies and individuals to join its “our brands” family through programs like Amazon Accelerator, which promises increased exposure for products sold exclusively on Amazon in exchange for extra fees, and sets a sales price if Amazon chooses to later buy the brand.
Boyce and his brothers had already been talking about getting off Amazon’s platform when they noticed Rally and Roar pop up. That settled it.
“We’re like, we’re not going to sit around and wait for Amazon to knock off the rest of our private-label products as well,” he said.
They sold the business.
A Leg Up
For years, Amazon gave items from its own brands multiple advantages when they first launched, said JT Meng, a former house brand manager at Amazon—though he said the practice has since stopped.
Employees manually applied the Amazon’s Choice label to a new Amazon brand product, even if it didn’t meet the usual criteria, he said.
And instead of starting from scratch in search results with zero reviews, sales, and stars, Meng said employees used a tactic called “search seeding” for new products, “cloning” a competing product’s search ranking and allowing the new Amazon product to appear immediately below that competitor in search results.
“We would use that for all of our products from the get-go for the first six months or longer,” he said.
Meng worked on the launch for Amazon Elements baby wipes, which he said were seeded against similar products from Huggies, Pampers, and others.
Sales spiked so quickly that his team had to stop promoting the Amazon Elements wipes so they didn’t take too much market share, he said.
Once a new house brand product was established, Meng said employees would turn off search seeding. “Without fail, your product would drop in ranking,” he said, “but the hope was that it would drop a small amount.”
By the time Meng left Amazon in 2016, he said search seeding and adding the Amazon’s Choice label to new Amazon brand products were no longer allowed.
Sellers who do try to compete with Amazon brands today said they feel compelled to pay for sponsored listings in order to get a higher result for nonsponsored listings on Amazon. On its Seller Central site, Amazon underlines to sellers how important sales are, stating that “better-selling products tend to list towards the beginning of search” and that as sales increase “so does your placement.”
“You can’t not advertise anymore,” said Boyce, who after selling his sporting goods line founded a consulting firm, Avenue7Media, which advises companies and individuals who want to sell on Amazon.
“You turn off the ads and you lose organic rank within days,” Boyce said. “It’s pay to play.”
Lots of companies are paying.
We found that inside the search results alone, 17 percent of products were paid listings. That doesn’t include entire rows of sponsored products that appear as special modules on about a third of search result pages. (Including those would roughly double the ad percentage on the first results page.)
Amazon is the third-largest seller of online advertising in the U.S., after Google and Facebook, and is growing fast. “Other” revenue, which the company says “primarily includes sales of advertising services,” jumped 52 percent from 2019 to 2020, to $21.4 billion a year.
Struggling for Visibility
“If you’re willing to spend a ton of money, you can sell a ton of product,” said Evan Patterson, vice president of business development at California-based Linco, which is one of Boyce’s clients.
The 47-year-old family-owned institution makes casters, the small wheels that attach to office chairs and industrial gear—and has a solid reputation in the offline world for premium products. It competes against a product from Amazon Commercial, among others.
It’s so well known in industrial circles that Linco’s competitors advertise against its name within Amazon’s search results, Patterson said.
Still, Linco hasn’t consistently listed on the first page of search results for “caster wheels,” despite selling on Amazon for years. It will appear on the first page for Patterson, but did not in repeated searches by The Markup.
The only thing that seems to help Linco’s search ranking, Patterson said, is to spend more money for paid listings on Amazon. The company now pays about $10,000 a month for advertising.
“Our search ranking has improved dramatically,” Patterson said.
But it still has a ways to go. When The Markup searched for “caster wheels” at the time of writing, Linco appeared in the middle of the fifth page.
Above: Photo / Lynxotic Collage / Images from Twitter @parents_4future
“Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”
The Metropolitan Police arrested at least seven Greenpeace activists in London on Monday for disrupting traffic outside Downing Street by locking themselves to barrels and a 12-foot oil-splattered statue of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks.”
Though Johnson is not currently at his London residence—he is vacationing with family in Spain—the action comes less than three weeks before the United Kingdom is set to host a global climate summit known as COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Some demonstrators toted posters and banners that read “Stop Cambo,” referring to a new oil field near Shetland that Greenpeace expects the government to approve “any day now,” spokesperson James Hanson toldAgence France-Presse.
A sign protesters propped up by the statue of Johnson declared the oil field his “monumental climate failure.” The Conservative prime minister, Greenpeace U.K. highlighted Monday, “has said he backs 16 new North Sea oil and gas projects going ahead.”
Greenpeace U.K. also pointed to recent comments from a fellow Tory. Secretary of State for Business Kwasi Kwarteng said last month that “the U.K. is still too reliant on fossil fuels. Our exposure to volatile global gas prices underscores the importance of our plan to build a strong, home-grown renewable energy sector to strengthen our energy security into the future.”
The advocacy group explained Monday that “when it comes to Cambo, 80% of oil extracted is likely to be exported, and production won’t start for a few years—so the project would do very little to shore up the U.K.’s energy supply and won’t fix the current gas price crisis.”
In a statement, Greenpeace U.K. oil campaigner Philip Evans also noted the current prices.
“People across the U.K. are feeling the stresses of a gas price crisis as well as a climate crisis,” he said, “and the government acknowledges that our reliance on fossil fuels has left the U.K. vulnerable and exposed. People are right to feel angry and upset.”
Evans asserted that “Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”
“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks,” the campaigner declared. “If he doesn’t, he will be remembered as a monumental climate failure.”
Early start to support the @GreenpeaceUK protest against the Cambo oil field this morning.
On the same morning Peter Capaldi writes in the @guardian 'Johnson's backing for the Cambo oilfield is unscientific and potentially disastrous'.#StopCambopic.twitter.com/TXVRTEiGXT
The protest in London came just days after Greenpeace lost a court case challenging the U.K. government’s decision to grant a permit to BP for another North Sea drilling operation.
After the loss, Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven pointed out that “now the prime minister is poised to sign off even more oil if he approves a new oil field at Cambo—against official guidance from climate experts.”
“In just a few weeks’ time Boris Johnson will be opening global climate talks where his actions, not his words, will be what counts,” said Sauven. “And right now his actions are covered in oil. We will not give up the fight for the climate. Our intention is to appeal this ruling before the Supreme Court.”
The U.K. government announced in April a new climate target of cutting planet-heating emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels, which would bring the nation more than three-quarters of the way to its goal of net-zero by 2050.
Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace U.K., said at the time that “in order to actually deliver on this commitment, new measures to slash emissions from homes and transport should already be well underway.”
“So unless the government’s policies and spending commitments urgently fall in line with its ambitions,” she added, “there will still be awkward questions for Boris Johnson at the global climate talks in the autumn.”
The Climate Change Committee—an independent body that advises the U.K. on emissions targets and provides progress reports to Parliament—noted in June that a large share of reductions has come from decarbonizing the power sector and warned if progress does not extend beyond that sector going forward, the new targets “will be missed by a huge margin.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“What do we do when we destroy the planet?” asked one demonstrator. “We have nothing else.”
Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Brussels on Sunday to demand Belgium’s elected leaders and others from around the world finally dispense with proclamations, broken promises, and half-measures and instead “act” on the climate emergency.
“We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”
With U.N. climate conference (COP26) set for next month in Glasgow, the estimated 70,000 or more people who took part in the march offered a dramatic show of force for the nation’s climate movement.
Zanna Vanrenterghem of Greenpeace Belgium toldThe Brussels Times on Sunday that her government’s climate pledges so far “are not ambitious enough,” but that words are no longer enough. “It is one thing to talk about climate,” she said, “and another to take concrete action.”
Ahead of the march, Vanrenterghem said the message from the Klimaatcoalitie (Climate Coalition), which she co-chairs and that organized the march, was a simple one: “We demand ambitious, solidarity-based and coherent measures. We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”
Up to 70 000 people took on the streets of #Brussels today for the #climate strike.
The first mobilization since the pandemic exceeded all expectations and sent a strong message to leaders ahead of #COP26 🌍
Thousands of people and 80 organizations took part in the protest, aiming for the biggest such event in the European Union’s capital since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which stopped the climate movement’s weekly marches in its tracks.
Cyclists, families with children and white-haired demonstrators filled city streets, chanting slogans demanding climate justice and waving banners in English, French and Dutch. One carried a stuffed polar bear on her head, and others were dressed as animals endangered by human-caused climate change.
The crowds was large—with the march often stretching further than the eye could see—and participants each sharing their various reasons for attending. Signs and banners said things like “Destroy the System/Not the Planet”; “Walk the Talk”; and “Protect What You Love.”
Lucien Dewanaga, a marcher who spoke with AP, asked the question: “What do we do when we destroy the planet? We have nothing else. Human beings have to live in this world. And there is only one world.”
According to Vanrenterghem, extreme weather within Belgium and elsewhere in the world over the past year have offered only more reasons for leaders to turn lofty rhetoric into the concrete policies that scientists say are necessary to stave off the worst impacts.
“The tough climate actions of the past few years have put the climate crisis high on the political agenda,” she said. “Now is the time for politicians to turn their promises into concrete action.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by COMMON DREAMS STAFF and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said one expert.
Underscoring the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions and invest in public goods to better prepare communities across the United States for escalating extreme weather, a new report released Monday finds that one-quarter of the nation’s “critical” infrastructure is already susceptible to flooding that renders it inaccessible, with risks projected to increase in the coming decades.
Described as the first-ever nationwide evaluation of community-level vulnerability to flooding, the report—Infrastructure on the Brink, compiled by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group that specializes in environmental risk assessment—highlights localities where housing, commercial real estate, transportation networks, schools, hospitals, power plants, and other pieces of infrastructure face operational flood risk in 2021.
The analysis also explores how spatial patterns of flood risk are expected to change over the next 30 years, as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency exacerbates sea-level rise and extreme rainfall events, which pose direct and indirect threats to the safety and well-being of people throughout the U.S.
“It is clear, now more than ever,” the report states, “that the ways and places in which we live are likely to continue to be impacted by our changing environment. One of the most important implications in this development is the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.”
Using a unique national database that contains parcel-level flood risk information—combining hazards, exposure, and vulnerability—as well as over 20,000 flood adaptation measures, the report maps Americans’ current and future flood risks based on their proximity to coasts and flood plains plus the estimated impacts of flood-damaged infrastructure at the broader scales of neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, and counties.
As the authors note, “Individuals whose homes were spared the impact of a particular flood event are increasingly likely to find their local roads, businesses, critical infrastructure, utilities, or emergency services affected.”
The report assesses risk to (1) residential properties; (2) roads; (3) commercial properties; (4) critical infrastructure (airports, fire stations, hospitals, police stations, ports, power stations, superfund/hazardous waste sites, water outfalls, and wastewater treatment facilities); and (5) social infrastructure (government buildings, historic buildings, houses of worship, museums, and schools).
Defining risk as “the unique level of flooding for each infrastructure type relative to operational thresholds,” the report finds:
Risk to residential properties is expected to increase by 10% over the next 30 years with 12.4 million properties at risk today (14%) and 13.6 million at risk of flooding in 2051 (16%);
Two million miles of road (25%) are at risk today and that is expected to increase to 2.2 million miles of road (26%) over the next 30 years (a 3% increase over the next 30 years);
Commercial properties are expected to see a 7% increase in risk of flooding from 2021 to 2051, with 918,540 at risk today (20%) and 984,591 at risk of flooding in 30 years (21%);
Currently, 35,776 critical infrastructure facilities are at risk today (25%), increasing to 37,786 facilities by 2051 (26%), a 6% increase in risk; and
Compounding that risk, 71,717 pieces of social infrastructure facilities are at risk today (17%), increasing to 77,843 by 2051 (19%), an increase of 9% over that time period.
The report comes in the wake of several highly destructive flooding events that affected various parts of the U.S. this summer, including one in Tennessee in August as well as the inundation of New York City’s subway system in July and again in September during Hurricane Ida—deadly and costly disasters that exposed how ill-prepared the country is to reduce extreme weather-related infrastructure damage and the ensuing consequences.
The new analysis also points to earlier catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy, which hit the New York City metropolitan area in 2012 and “flooded hospitals, crippled electrical substations, overwhelmed wastewater treatment centers, and shut down power and water to tens of millions of people.”
“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, said in a statement.
“This report highlights the cities and counties whose vital infrastructure are most at risk today and will help inform where investment dollars should flow in order to best mitigate against that risk,” Edy added.
According to the report:
There are significant differences at the county and city level in the amount of risk that exists today and into the future. Most importantly, there are a group of counties and cities that have persistent patterns of vulnerability across multiple dimensions of physical risk from flooding. These areas tend to be in regions with well-established flood risk, such as coastal flood plains along the Gulf and Southeastern coasts of the U.S., but also in less well-known flood zones, such as in the Appalachian Mountain regions of West Virginia and Kentucky.
To that point, 17 of the top 20 counties in the U.S. which are most at risk (85%) are in the states of Louisiana, Florida, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Additionally, the top cities at risk of flooding persistently show up in the states of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. The analysis further uncovered a high degree of vulnerability in some of the major population centers in the U.S., including New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Even as extreme storms and material insecurity become more common and severe—rendering continued inaction far more expensive than prevention—congressional Republicans and a handful of conservative Democratic lawmakers swimming in corporate cash continue to fight against the Build Back Better Act, a President Joe Biden-endorsed proposal to invest trillions in strengthening climate action and expanding the nation’s relatively underdeveloped welfare state.
Opposition to greening the nation’s physical infrastructure and improving its social infrastructure increases disaster vulnerabilities and worsens impacts, particularly in marginalized communities, experts say, although the inverse—simultaneously addressing the intensifying crises of climate and inequality—is also possible.
“The decarbonization question, the infrastructure question, and the inequalities question are the same question,” Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted last week. “Only an epic struggle from the left, combining mass organization, mobilization, and technical expertise—across borders—can provide a good answer in the 2020s.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Both the Republicans and the Democrats vote as if the nation’s middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker.
by Ralph Nader
“Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.
Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.
The quiet harmony between the two parties created by the omnipresent power of Big Business and other powerful single-issue lobbyists is often the status quo. That’s why there are so few changes in this country’s politics.
In many cases, the similarities of both major parties are tied to the fundamental concentration of power by the few over the many. In short, the two parties regularly agree on anti-democratic abuses of power. Granted, there are always a few exceptions among the rank & file. Here are some areas of Republican and Democrat concurrence:
1. The Duopoly shares the same stage on a militaristic, imperial foreign policy and massive unaudited military budgets. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Pentagon budget was voted out of a House committee by the Democrats and the GOP with $24 billion MORE than what President Biden asked for from Congress. Neither party does much of anything to curtail the huge waste, fraud, and abuse of corporate military contractors, or the Pentagon’s violation of federal law since 1992 requiring annual auditable data on DOD spending be provided to Congress, the president, and the public.
2. Both Parties allow unconstitutional wars violating federal laws and international treaties that we signed onto long ago, including restrictions on the use of force under the United Nations Charter.
3. Both Parties ignore the burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts turning oceans of inefficient, mismanaged, and coddled profit-glutted companies into tenured corporate welfare Kings.
4. Both Parties decline to crack down on the nationwide corporate crime spree. They don’t even like to use the phrase “corporate crime” or “corporate crime wave.” They prefer to delicately allude to “white-collar crime.”
Trillions of dollars are at stake every year, yet neither party holds corporate crime hearings nor proposes an update of the obsolete, weak federal corporate criminal laws.
In some instances, there is no criminal penalty at all for willful and knowing violations of safety regulatory laws (e.g., the auto safety and aviation safety laws). Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is trying to find just one Republican Senator to co-sponsor the “Hide No Harm Act” that would make it a crime for a corporate officer to knowingly conceal information about a corporate action or product that poses the danger of death or serious physical injury to consumers or workers.
5. Both Parties allow Wall Street’s inexhaustibly greedy CEOs to prey on innocents, including small investors. They also do nothing to curb hundreds of billions of dollars in computerized billing fraud, especially in the health care industry. (See, License to Steal by Malcolm K. Sparrow and a GAO Report about thirty years ago).
6. The third leading cause of death in the U.S. is fatalities from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics. According to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine study in 2015, a conservative estimate is that 250,000 people yearly are dying from preventable conditions. Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has an effort remotely up to the scale required to reduce this staggering level of mortality and morbidity. Nor is the American Medical Association (AMA) engaging with this avoidable epidemic.
7. Both Parties sped bailout of over $50 billion to the airline industry during Covid-19, after the companies had spent about $45 billion on unproductive stock buybacks over the last few years to raise the metrics used to boost executive pay.
8. Both Parties starve corporate law enforcement budgets in the Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and such departments as Labor, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, and Health and Human Services. The Duopoly’s view is that there be no additional federal cops on the corporate crime beat.
9. Both Parties prostrate themselves before the bank-funded Federal Reserve. There are no congressional audits, no congressional oversight of the Fed’s secret, murky operations, and massive printing of money to juice up Wall Street, while keeping interest rates near zero for trillions of dollars held by over one hundred million small to midsize savers in America.
10. Both Parties are wedded to constant and huge bailouts of the risky declining, uncompetitive (with solar and wind energy) nuclear power industry. This is corporate socialism at its worst. Without your taxpayer and ratepayer dollars, nuclear plants would be closing down faster than is now the case. Bipartisan proposals for more nukes come with large subsidies and guarantees by Uncle Sam.
11. Both Parties hate Third Parties and engage in the political bigotry of obstructing their ballot access (See: Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News), with hurdles, harassing lawsuits, and exclusions from public debates. The goal of both parties is to stop a competitive democracy.
12. Both Parties overwhelmingly rubber-stamp whatever the Israeli government wants in the latest U.S. military weaponry, the suppression of Palestinians and illegal occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands, and the periodic slaughter of Gazans with U.S. weapons. The Duopoly also supports the use of the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to insulate Israel from UN sanctions.
13. Continuing Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s debilitating internal deforms of congressional infrastructures, the Democrats have gone along with the GOP’s shrinking of committee and staff budgets, abolition of the crucial Office of Technology Assessment’s (OTA) budget, and concentration of excessive power in the hands of the Speaker and Senate leader. This little noticed immolation reduces further the legislature’s ability to oversee the huge sprawling Executive Branch. The erosion of congressional power is furthered by the three-day work week Congress has reserved for itself.
14. Even on what might seem to be healthy partisan differences, the Democrats and the GOP agree not to replace or ease out Trump’s Director of the Internal Revenue Service, a former corporate loophole tax lawyer, or the head of the U.S. Postal Service, a former profiteer off the Post Office who will shortly curtail service even more than he did in 2020 (See: First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, by Christopher W Shaw).
Right now, both Parties are readying to give over $50 billion of your tax money to the very profitable under-taxed computer chip industry companies like Intel and Nvidia, so they can make more profit-building plants in the U.S. These companies are loaded with cash. They should invest their own money and stop the stock buyback craze. Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?
Both Parties vote as if the American middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker. Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.
Sleep on America, you have nothing to lose but your dreams.
Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels, it’s time to listen.”
With an open letter expressing “the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system,” over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.
“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels,” said Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “it’s time to listen.”
The letter—an effort organized by biologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber and climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus along with advocacy groups Center for Biological Diversity and Food & Water Watch—frames the current moment as a “time of peril” that must be met with “emergency action.”
Other initial signatories include Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, and climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
A three-step action plan is presented in the letter, beginning with a full ban on any new fossil fuel leasing and extraction on public lands and waters; no future permits for related infrastructure; and ending fossil fuel exports and subsidies.
Biden must also declare a climate emergency, the letter says, through which a chunk of the nation’s vast military spending would instead be directed to fund renewable energy projects and the crude oil export ban would be reinstated.
As a third key step, the president needs to reject fossil fuel industry schemes, such as carbon capture and storage, that the scientists frame as “delay tactics” that ultimately “impede the rapid transition to renewable energy.”
The first two in the trio of demands mirror those set out by the People Vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization, which is set to kick off next week.
“U.S. scientists are done speaking calmly in the face of inaction,” Steingraber said in a statement in which she expressed solidarity with the upcoming mobilization.
She also urged the president to follow through on a key campaign vow that his support for pipelines like the Dakota Access and Line 3 has betrayed.
“President Biden,” said Steingraber, “listening to science means acting on science. It means stopping new fossil fuel projects, opposing industry delay tactics, and declaring a national climate emergency.”
The scientists warned that “our chances for avoiding irreversible and uncontrollable climate chaos diminish daily.”
“We implore you, on behalf of and for the love of all life on Earth,” they added, “to respond to the greatest threat ever to face our species and lead the transition away from fossil fuels that humanity desperately needs.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo on Unsplash
Kurt Thigpen clenched his hands around the edge of the table because if he couldn’t feel the sharp edges digging into his palms, he would have to think about how hard his heart was beating. He was grateful that his mask hid his expression. He hoped that no one could see him sweat.
A woman approached the lectern in the center aisle, a thick American flag scarf looped around her neck.
“Do you realize the mask, the CDC said it’s only 2% effective?” she demanded. “You’re failing our children, you’re failing our country, you’re failing our students’ future ….”
Thigpen fixed his eyes on a spot in the back of the blue-and-green auditorium. He let the person speaking at the lectern fade. It will be over soon, he told himself.
A dark-haired woman in a red vest removed her face shield as she moved to take her turn at the mic. As she began to speak, the school board employee responsible for queuing up public commenters interrupted: “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to please keep your shield on —”
“No, you’re not the boss of me, you work for us, I can’t breathe with it on —”
“Ma’am —”
“Don’t you dare cut my microphone —”
The crowd cheered. Thigpen focused on his breathing.
It will end soon, he told himself. It must. His sweat turned cold under his suit.
“The science isn’t there, take the kids outta the masks and let’s move on.”
It was March 2021, Thigpen’s second month as a school board trustee in Washoe County, Nevada. He had planned his campaign around local issues like improving the district’s diversity and equity policies and fixing an intersection where 20 students had been injured in traffic.
Public comment periods at school board meetings felt endless. Parents’ angers — over masking, over politics, over the “LGBTQ agenda” — fed off each other.
“I came here to speak about your fascist propaganda and ideology …”
He concentrated on making it to the next break period. His thoughts had begun to turn toxic. Why am I not good enough? Why am I the one struggling? They would turn darker. I don’t want to be here anymore. If something happened to me today, that would be fine.
“We will work tirelessly to remove you if you don’t focus on what’s important ….”
When the eight-hour meeting finally ended, he would drive home and pull off the suit and rip off his shirt. He would only take care with his rainbow tie, resting it gently in the closet. It still hangs there today. He would close the door, lay down on his bed, and let himself cry.
The stories of cruel, seemingly irrational and sometimes-violent conflicts over coronavirus regulations have become lingering symptoms of the pandemic as it drags through its second year. Two men on a Mesa-to-Provo flight got into a cross-aisle fight after one refused to wear a mask. A Tennessee teenager asking his school board to impose a mask mandate in honor of his grandmother who died of COVID-19 got jeered by the crowd. A California parent angered by the requirement that his child wear a mask allegedly beat up a teacher so badly that the teacher had to go to the emergency room. An Arizona father showed up to an elementary school with zip ties, allegedly intending to make a “citizen’s arrest” over COVID-19 rules. A Missouri medical center has distributed panic buttons to about 400 employees after an increase in assaults on health care workers by people frustrated over coronavirus-induced visitation restrictions and long wait times.
Many of the altercations have begun over masking because, unlike your vaccination status, a mask is right there on your face. Depending on your point of view, the mask can symbolize an erosion of personal freedoms or a willingness to protect others, a society that accepts tyranny or one that embraces science. A person’s reaction to a mask — or the absence of one — can be driven by an entire network of beliefs and emotions that have little to do with the face covering itself.
“What the hell is happening?” said Rachel Patterson, who owns a hair salon in Huntsville, Alabama, and who has been screamed at, cussed out and walked out on for asking clients to don a mask. “Like, I feel like we are living on another planet. Like I don’t — I don’t recognize anyone anymore.”
On Julie Simanksi’s first day of teaching for the fall 2021 semester, she tried to get her students to wear masks using the only method she was allowed: an emotional appeal. Simanski teaches at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. By state university policy, she can’t instruct her students to wear masks. Almost none did.
Simanksi told her students about her 20-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has a neuromuscular condition and requires 24-hour care. She didn’t know how Olivia’s body would cope with the virus. She was scared.
That night she sent an all-class email. She attached a picture of Olivia, smiling to her gums in blue sunglasses.
“I cannot mandate you to wear a mask in my class,” she wrote. “However, for the sake of my daughter and potentially others, I will make a continual plea to wear one.”
Simanksi brought a box of paper masks and put them in the back of the room. Some students took them. In each of her two sections, she has a group of four or five students who will not put one on.
“I’m surprised and I’m disappointed and a little bit angry that they just didn’t have the compassion to wear a mask for 55 minutes,” she said.
People’s pandemic views aren’t just preferences. They’ve evolved to fundamental beliefs. And when that happens, social psychologists say, people are more likely to accept incivility to achieve what they want.
“When people feel that their attitudes reflect strong moral convictions, that gives them permission to dehumanize those who oppose them,” said Linda Skitka, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s researching ideological divides. “And it doesn’t take a lot for the shift into perceptions of good and evil. So if the other side is basically evil, it’s not a far stretch to say it’s OK to yell at them.”
Courtney, a 29-year-old office worker living in Virginia who has asked that her last name not be shared for fear that she might lose her job if she’s identified, sat up on a medical bed surrounded by portraits of expectant mothers and their babies. In one, a brown-haired woman smiled at her 32-week mark, hands cupping her round belly. In another, the woman’s 6-day-old baby lay swaddled in a blue-and-white quilt, eyes closed. Courtney had just listened to her unborn child’s heartbeat. It was Aug. 17, two months out from her due date, and she had never before gotten so far along in a pregnancy without a miscarriage.
Courtney said her doctor went through the standard questions about her physical condition. Then the doctor asked if Courtney was working from home. No, she said. She had to go in twice a week.
Courtney looked at the pictures of the happy mothers. She’d undergone fertility treatment and had two miscarriages in less than a year. Both times, she’d asked herself: Was it my fault?
She knew that, even though she’d been fully vaccinated since May, a severe breakthrough infection could mean a ventilator for her and premature birth or death for her baby. She walked out of the office with a doctor’s note: Either everyone had to wear a mask around her, or she needed to work from home.
She saved a copy of the note on her phone and brought it with her the next time she went to the office. She recalls that as she sat at her desk, a colleague she considered a friend walked through her open door and sat down across from her. The colleague had just returned from a weeklong vacation and hoped Courtney could catch her up on what she’d missed.
The woman wasn’t wearing a mask.
“I actually have this note,” Courtney recalls saying. She pulled it up on her phone and held it out. “Do you mind wearing a mask?”
Her colleague didn’t look at the phone. She didn’t need to mask, the woman said. She had antibodies.
Courtney tried again. She told her colleague she was worried about what the virus could do to her baby. Even if there was no damage, she said, they might have to take the baby after birth to isolate her.
Courtney said that her colleague looked at her across the desk and said: “I’m not worried about it.”
She sat across from Courtney unmasked for the next 30 minutes.
Two weeks later, Courtney’s doctor wrote her another, sterner note: “It is my professional opinion that due to the lack of support for CDC recommended mask wearing indoors, please allow Courtney to work from home for the remainder of her pregnancy.”
Courtney forwarded it to her boss. He replied that he would remind the colleague who had sat in her office unmasked to follow the policy. But she still had to come in to work. They needed staff consistency.
She is due within the month.
If it looks like we’ve forgotten each other’s humanity, it’s because we’ve evolved to do so.
Humans are tribal creatures, and our responses to the pandemic have been tribalized almost since the beginning: A Pew Research poll from June 2020 found support for masking divided along partisan lines. Almost a year after the Pew poll, Fox News host Tucker Carlson urged his supporters toconfront people wearing masks.
Because the mask has become so polarizing, the extreme reactions aren’t really about being asked to wear one for an hour. It’s about communicating what side you’re on.
David Chester, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies aggression, puts it this way: If you see members of the opposing group as human like you, you’ve failed as a tribalist.
“It really makes adaptive sense to treat out-group members not like people, because then it’s much easier to hurt them and to act against them,” he said. “One central piece of intergroup conflict is a switch in viewing your enemies from full-blown humans to dehumanized entities that you do not ascribe all the things that you typically ascribe to a person. That makes conflict so much easier.”
Seeing someone else wear a mask in a grocery store becomes what Chester calls “a threatening proposition from an out-group member.” It triggers anger. And giving in to anger can feel good — especially after months of frustration.
In a viral incident from June 2020, a woman who has cancer was shopping in a Florida Pier 1 when she had a confrontation with another shopper, later identified as Debra Jo Hunter. The incident culminated in Hunter, maskless,coughing in the woman’s face. In a virtual sentencing hearing nine months later, as Jacksonville’s First Coast News reported, Hunter submitted 23 pages of threats that she and her family had received. Hog from hell. I hope your whole family gets COVID and suffers immensely, then dies. Kill yourself.
Hunter’s husband testified on her behalf. It had been a hard couple months leading up to the incident, he said. They’d had a house fire and lost most of their possessions. A family member had been in a boating accident.
No one from the family responded to requests for comment.
“It was like air being inflated into a balloon, and it finally got to the point where she couldn’t handle any more air,” Hunter’s husband testified. “And then she finally rubbed up against something and just popped.”
The paper was written sometime around the turn of the third century. The author was philosopher-slash-medical writer Claudius Galenus, known today as Galen.
Two millennia later, the fundamental idea holds true. It’s one of the main tools in modern-day cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn how to pull yourself back from getting swept away by strong feelings, and then evaluate the situation with your rational side.
“There’s a lot of research that says that if people think about injustice from a first-person perspective, they’re more likely to respond aggressively,” said Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in children’s mental health and violence prevention. “If they think about injustice from a third-person perspective, they’re less likely to be aggressive. And it’s because, in a sense, now they pulled back and are able to take the perspective of both parties that are involved.”
On a societal scale, one of the fastest ways for two deeply entrenched, opposing groups to start seeing each other as fellow humans again is to give them something bigger to fight against together. It’s an “Independence Day” sort of scenario, Chester, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor, said: If aliens invaded, countries who hate each other in normal times would suddenly work together against an external threat.
But the external threat with the potential to unite a deeply polarized country, he said, should have been the pandemic. And it didn’t happen.
“I think fundamentally, it’s because we have different perceptions of this pandemic,” he said. “It’s really hard now that it’s so entrenched, that masks are viewed as this group symbol. It’s really hard to get people out of that.”
It’s possible that signals from authority figures — at least the ones you already trust — could sway individual behavior, Chester said. Then again, former President Donald Trump got booed at an August rally in Alabama after suggesting that his followers get vaccinated.
When Skitka, with the University of Illinois at Chicago, saw Trump get booed, she thought it might be too late for even political leaders to temper their constituents’ passions. “We’re still trying to figure out what will work,” she said.
Kurt Thigpen resigned from the Washoe County School District on May 24, citing medical reasons. Later, he wrote an op-ed explaining what he really meant. The anxiety and the panic that had been triggered by the school board meetings had mutated into passive suicidal ideation. Even when the board transitioned to virtual meetings, he could barely get out of bed and make himself presentable for Zoom. He wished he could stop existing. No job was worth that.
“I thought I had things handled,” he wrote, “but my coping skills were no match for the events of the last seven months.”
He had sought therapy and worked with a psychiatrist to find medication. He got diagnosed with ADHD. He learned new coping mechanisms.
The initial reaction was positive. People were angry on his behalf. They wished him well. They thanked him for his openness.
And then the op-ed was mentioned in anAssociated Press article on toxic school board meetings around the country. Thigpen had no idea until a friend on the city council texted him. His original op-ed got reshared on Facebook. The commenters rushed in.
“What a whiney person,” someone wrote.
“Where do these woke zombies come from?”
“I have a lot to say to this young fragile individual.”
“Perfect example of a PACB= Professional Adult Cry Baby”
“You have no idea how badly I wanted to stop reading that article, but he is such a trainwreck of an individual I couldn’t stop,” one woman posted. She added: “You know, upon re-reading my post, I apologize for being so cruel. Clearly this man is severely mentally disabled and belongs in an institution.”
No one, Thigpen said, has reached out to apologize.
These disclosures about the how the world’s wealthy and powerful hide their vast fortunes will hopefully turn up the heat on the politicians that maintain the wealth-hiding status quo.
This week we are closely watching the disclosures emerge from the Pandora Papers, a massive leak of secret data about the illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries. In the days to come, we will learn more about the tax avoidance of billionaires and the ways states like South Dakota and Florida have become U.S. tax havens.
Here are Five Things You Need to Know:
1. The Largest-Ever Journalistic Collaborative, More Significant Than the Panama Papers
The Pandora papers are a massive expose about the secret shell games and tax avoidance schemes of the world’s ultra-wealthy, from over 200 countries. This massive undertaking involved 600 journalists from 117 countries and was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ICIJ) in what they describe as the “largest-ever journalistic collaborative.” See initial coverage here in The Washington Post and The Guardian, two of the key media outlets part of the consortium.
Five and a half years ago, the ICIJ released the Panama Papers, which focused on a leak from a single law firm, Mossack Fonseca. According to Gerald Ryle, director of the ICIJ, the Pandora Papers are the “Panama Papers on steroids.” See a summary prepared by the ICIJ here.
The Pandora papers draws on leaks from confidential records at 14 different offshore wealth service firms in Switzerland, Singapore, Cyprus, Samoa, Vietnam, Hong Kong, as well as firms in well-known tax havens such as Belize, Seychelles, Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands (BVI). These firms help wealthy individuals and corporations to form trusts, foundations, incorporate companies, and establish other entities in low- or no-tax jurisdictions.
The Pandora Papers analyzed 12 million files from these firms including leaked emails, memos, tax declarations, bank statements, passport scans, diagrams of corporate structures, secret spreadsheets and clandestine real estate contracts. Some reveal the real owners of opaque shell companies for the first time.
2. The Global Implications Are Huge and Politicians Will Be Embarrassed
The Pandora Papers are truly a global story, with major implications for many countries. Some of the largest revelations involve Russian nationals with connections to Vladimir Putin and elites from Latin America. For example, journalists from the Spanish dailyEl Pais, exposed the “Secret Vault of Mexican Billionaires.” In Mexico they found over 3,000 wealthy and powerful Mexicans in the 11.9 million leaked files, with connections to current and previous presidents. They discovered a common pattern of wealthy Mexican elites using a single Panamanian law firm, Alcogal (Aleman, Cordero, Galindo & Lee), along with shell companies and trusts in the British Virgin Islands, and real estate purchases in Miami and around the US.
The Pandora Papers will hopefully turn up the heat on the politicians that maintain the wealth-hiding status quo. The files list over 330 current and former politicians and world leaders from 91 countries that are implicated in transactions. This is twice the number implicated in the 2016 Panama Papers.
Political leaders include King Abdullah II from Jordan and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (according to The Guardian, Jordan blocked the ICIJ web site hours before the Pandora papers release). This explains why existing political bodies seem incapable of closing down systems that enable wealth hiding and tax dodging.
“It demonstrates that the people that could end the secrecy of offshore systems… are themselves benefiting from it,” said Gerald Ryle, director of the ICIJ. “So there’s no incentive for them to end it.”
3. The US is Exposed as a Global Tax Haven
U.S. citizens are under-represented in these leaks, largely due to where the service providers are located. No U.S. wealth-advisory firms were part of the leaks. Nonetheless over 700 companies revealed in the Pandora papers have ties to beneficial owners connected to the United States.
The Pandora Papers do, however, expose how the U.S. has become a global destination for global wealth, some of it ill-gotten. The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers (Bermuda and Singapore) and Luanda Leaks (Angola) all reinforced the misperception that most of these financial shell games take place “off shore,” in secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens in small countries with weak banking laws.
But the Pandora Papers show that the U.S. and states like South Dakota now rival notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. The states with the most active trusts revealed in the files were South Dakota (81), Florida (37), Delaware (35), Texas (24), and Nevada (14).
4. Shady Billionaires from Around the World Are Going to South Dakota
Findings suggest that South Dakota has sheltered billions in wealth linked to wealthy individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes and labor violations. Two examples: Brazilian orange juice baron, Horst Happel, was fined $88 million in 2016 for underpaying his workers. In 2017, he moved substantial wealth to a trust in South Dakota. Carlos Morales Troncoso was the former vice-president of the Dominican Republic. He ran a sugar company called Central Romana sugar company that was accused of human rights violations. He set up trusts for his daughters in the Bahamas that were moved, after his death, to South Dakota. The reason global money is flowing to the “Mount Rushmore State” is because of their low taxes and advantageous dynasty trusts.
5. The Pandora Papers Will Boost the Case for US Tax Reform
The Pandora Papers will hopefully give a boost to the US Congress in passing a progressive tax plan to fund the Build Back Better program—and that includes money for IRS enforcement to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share.
As The Guardian reports: “The Pandora papers also place a revealing spotlight on the offshore system itself. In a development likely to prove embarrassing for US President, Joe Biden, who has pledged to lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global finance system, the US emerges from the leak as a leading tax haven. The files suggest the state of South Dakota, in particular, is shelter billions of dollars in wealth linked to individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by CHUCK COLLINS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Above:Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Original Image by ICIJ
“U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”
The leak of an enormous trove of tax haven files over the weekend offered a further glimpse into the secretive world of offshore finance—a system facilitated by the U.S. and other rich nations—and prompted calls for immediate changes to global rules that let the powerful hide their wealth, skirt their obligations, and starve governments of crucial revenue.
“This is where our missing hospitals are,” Susana Ruiz, the tax policy lead at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-Covid recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.”
“Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year,” Ruiz added. “That is the equivalent of a nurse’s yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are out-competing those who don’t. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish.”
Like the 2016 Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) Pandora Papers shine additional light on the functioning of a “shadow economy” that world leaders, celebrities, and billionaire business moguls—including some accused of egregious crimes—are exploiting to shield trillions of dollars in assets from transparency and taxation.
The 11.9 million files obtained, analyzed, and leaked by the ICIJ reveal the closely-guarded financial maneuverings of more than 330 politicians and top public officials from nearly 100 countries and territories, including dozens of current national leaders.
“The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya, and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair,” ICIJ notes in a summary of its sprawling cache of documents. “The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘unofficial minister of propaganda’ and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey, and other nations.”
The trove also links prominent athletes, models, and artists to offshore assets, including India’s famous cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, pop music star Shakira, and supermodel Claudia Schiffer.
But Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, cautioned that a narrow focus on the individuals who have made use of an international tax system rigged in their favor diverts attention from the institutions and countries that have done the rigging.
“These personal actions are shameful and will no doubt come under great scrutiny in the coming days, but it’s important that we don’t lose sight of one crucial fact: few of the individuals had any role in turning the global tax system into an ATM for the superrich,” Cobham wrote in a blog post on Sunday. “That honor goes to the professional enablers—banks, law firms, and accountants—and the countries that facilitate them.”
Cobham observed that the Pandora Papers—the product of a nearly two-year investigation by more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories—confirm that the United States is “the world’s biggest peddler of financial secrecy.”
“The biggest blockers to transparency are the U.S. … and the U.K., the leader of the world’s biggest tax haven network,” Cobham wrote. “We need full transparency so we can hold tax abusers accountable, especially when our politicians are among them. U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”
This is fundamental – every government leader should match this commitment, and then hold themselves publicly accountable by publishing results of each investigation https://t.co/2MiospKxuR
— Alex Cobham @alexcobham@mastodon.social (@alexcobham) October 3, 2021
As the ICIJ notes, the new files show in some detail “how the United States, in particular, has become an increasingly attractive destination for hidden wealth, although the U.S. and its Western allies condemn smaller countries for allowing the flow of money and assets tied to corruption and crime.”
“The Pandora Papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 states and Washington, D.C., and 22 U.S. trustee companies,” the ICIJ points out. “The documents provide details about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign money.”
“We in the U.S. should be embarrassed that we’ve become a magnet for kleptocratic funds,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Conspicuously absent from the Pandora Papers is any mention of the wealthiest people in the U.S., including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world. But as the Washington Postexplains, that could be because “the uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens.”
In response to the Pandora Papers revelations, Oxfam called on world governments to crack down on tax havens by taking a number of steps, including:
Ending tax secrecy on individuals, offshores, and multinational corporations. Set up a public register on the real owners of bank accounts, trusts, shell companies, and assets. Require multinational corporations to publicly report their accounts where they do business, country-by-country.
Increasing the use of automatic exchange, allowing revenue authorities access to information they need to track the money.
Ending corporate profit shifting to tax havens via new rules, and by setting a global minimum tax under the OECD’s BEPS deal, ideally of around 25%.
Agreeing a global blacklist of tax havens and taking counter measures, including sanctions, to limit their use.
Setting a new global agenda on taxing wealth and capital fairly; addressing tax competition between countries on high-net-worth-individuals, either on income or wealth, against agreed standards.
“Governments’ promises to end tax havens are still a long way from being realized,” said Ruiz. “We cannot allow tax havens to continue to stretch global inequality to breaking point while the world experiences the largest increase in extreme poverty in decades.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” one group asked after whistleblower Frances Haugen said the corporation is unwilling to confront hate speech and disinformation.
Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.
Haugen, who copied a “trove of private Facebook research” before she resigned from the social media company in May, toldCBS‘s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview that the tech giant took some steps to limit misinformation ahead of the 2020 election because it understood that then-President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about voter fraud posed a serious threat. Many of the safety measures that Facebook implemented, however, were temporary, she added.
“As soon as the election was over,” Haugen said, “they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”
Facebook officials claim that some of the anti-misinformation systems remained in place, but in the interregnum between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration, far-right extremists used the social networking site to organize the deadly January 6 coup attempt—something acknowledged by an internal task force’s report on Facebook’s failure to neutralize “Stop the Steal” activity on its platforms.
There is, according to Haugen, a simple explanation for why executives at the company refuse to do more to mitigate harmful social media behavior: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen—who first revealed her identity on Sunday after having secretly shared internal documents with federal regulators, reported on in the Wall Street Journal‘s series, “The Facebook Files”—also said the corporation is lying to the public about how effective it is at curbing hate speech and disinformation, arguing that “Facebook has demonstrated it cannot operate independently.”
In the wake of Haugen’s bombshell interview, social media experts condemned Facebook for prioritizing “profits above all else.”
“Facebook runs on a hate-and-lie-for-profit business model that amplifies all sorts of toxicity on its platforms,” Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, said Monday in a statement. “Thanks to this brave whistleblower, we now have further proof that Facebook’s executives—all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—routinely chose profits over public safety.”
González, co-founder of Ya Basta Facebook and the Change the Terms coalition, added that Facebook executives “designed the company’s algorithms to put engagement, growth, and profits above all else, even allowing lies about the 2020 election results to spread to millions in advance of the white-nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
Longtime critics of Facebook argued that the “new revelations” about the company demand immediate federal intervention.
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of civil rights leaders and academics, asked in a statement released after Haugen’s interview aired. “The system is blinking red, and without real, meaningful, independent, and robust oversight and investigation of Facebook, more lives will be lost.”
“The goal,” added the group, “is no longer to save Facebook—Facebook is beyond hope. The goal now is to save democracy.”
Free Press summarized the Journal‘s key findings on Facebook, which we now know stem from internal documents provided by Haugen:
Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules; Instagram is harmful to millions of young users; Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change promotes objectionable or harmful content; Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about Covid-19 vaccines; and globally, Facebook is used to incite violence against ethnic minorities and facilitat[e] action against political dissent.
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, praised Haugen for exposing Facebook’s “amplification and use of hate to keep users on the platform engaged.”
Facebook has “weaponized… data in harmful ways against users,” Mitchell continued, and failed to consider the negative effects of “hate-filled rhetoric” even after the Myanmar military used Facebook to launch a genocide in 2018.
González argued that Haugen “turned evidence of this gross negligence over to the government at great personal risk, and now we need the government to respond with decisive action to hold the company responsible for protecting public safety.”
“The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model,” said González.
“Facebook must also act swiftly to remedy the harms it is continuing to inflict on the public at large,” she added. “It must end special protections for powerful politicians, ban white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists, and institute wholesale changes to strengthen content moderation in English and other languages—and we need this all now.”
According to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at The Guardian and co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, “Facebook is a rogue state, lying to regulators, investors, and its own oversight board.”
“What we are seeing today is a market failure with profound, devastating global consequences,” she said. “Executives and board members must be held to account. There is evidence to suggest that their behavior was not just immoral but also criminal.”
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that “even as we feel outrage toward Mr. Zuckerberg and his corporation, the cause of this crisis is not a single company, not even one as powerful as Facebook.”
“The cause is the economic institution of surveillance capitalism,” said Zuboff. “The economic logic of these systems, the data operations that feed them, and the markets that support them are not limited to Facebook.”
“The imperatives of surveillance economics determine the engineering of these operations—their products, objectives, and financial incentives—along with those of the other tech empires, their extensive ecosystems, and thousands of companies in diverse sectors far from Silicon Valley,” she continued. “The damage already done is intolerable. The damage that most certainly lies ahead is unthinkable.”
Zuboff added that the only “durable solution to this crisis” is to “undertake the work of interrupting and outlawing the dangerous operations of surveillance capitalism and its predictable social harms that assault human autonomy, splinter society, and undermine democracy.”
Haugen is scheduled to testify on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Protecting Kids Online.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
