The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.
Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates his version of the history?
Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine.
Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland.
It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.
The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?
During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea.
Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.
Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?
When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable.
A New York Times story on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?
Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and even in puffy pants permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.
History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.
This article has been updated to reflect the correct ethnic and linguistic character of the villages in the Donbas during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They were Ukrainian.
Sergiy Kyslytsya also denounced the Russian president’s decision to put nuclear forces on special alert as “madness.”
Amid rapidly escalating fears of global nuclear war, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin should follow in the footsteps of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Echoing the condemnation of anti-war activists worldwide, the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called Putin’s Sunday decision to put Russian nuclear forces on special alert “madness.”
“If he wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use [a] nuclear arsenal. He has to do what… the guy in Berlin did, in a bunker,” the ambassador said.
During his U.N. speech, Kyslytsya did not name the notorious German leader, who consumed cyanide and shot himself in the head on April 30, 1945, just days before Germany surrendered to Allied forces.
‘This war was not provoked. It was chosen by someone right now that is sitting in the bunker. We know what happened to the person who sat in the bunker in Berlin, in May, 1945,’ said Ukraine’s U.N. envoy Sirgiy Kyslytsya https://t.co/gyYHI0BslXpic.twitter.com/C5ZQTysdcV
Kyslytsya also gained global attention last week for his remarks during a U.N. Security Council meeting chaired by his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya.
“There is no purgatory for war criminals; they go straight to hell, ambassador,” the Ukrainian told Nebenzya.
In response, the Russian ambassador claimed that “we are not carrying out aggression against the Ukrainian people—this is against that junta, that seized power in Kyiv.”
Following several war crime allegations against Russia over the past week, Karim A.A. Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced Monday that he has “decided to proceed with opening an investigation into the situation in Ukraine, as rapidly as possible.”
More than 5,500 peace advocates have been detained across the country since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine, according to a human rights group.
Above: Photo collage – Times / Lynxotic
Russian police arrested 2,114 people at anti-war protests in 48 cities across the country on Sunday, the fourth consecutive day that demonstrators have risked their personal safety to hit the streets in opposition to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
That’s according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights group that has long documented crackdowns on civil liberties in the country. A total of 5,500 anti-war protesters have now been detained since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military assault on Ukraine, said the independent monitor.
Many held posters that read “No to war,” “Russians go home,” and “Peace to Ukraine.”
“It is a shame that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of us and not millions,” said 35-year-old engineer Vladimir Vilokhonov, who took part in the protest.
Another protester, Alyona Stepanova, 25, came to the protest with a packed bag in case “we get taken away.”
“We believe it is our duty to come here,” she said.
More than 350 civilians, including 14 children, have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Putin’s attack, according to the country’s health ministry. In addition, it said that 1,684 people, including 116 children, have been wounded. According to the World Health Organization, Ukraine’s hospitals are quickly running out of oxygen supplies.
United Nations officials have said that more than 368,000 people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries, and they estimate the war could produce four million refugees. European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic, meanwhile, has said that the number of people displaced from Ukraine could reach seven million.
While Kyiv has agreed to attend talks with Moscow at the Ukraine-Belarus border—negotiations are reportedly set to begin Monday morning—Russia’s former deputy foreign minister Andrei Fedorov toldAl Jazeera on Sunday that Putin is seeking a complete victory by Wednesday.
“Everything will depend frankly speaking on the coming two days because, according to my knowledge, Putin orders for complete military operation with a victory by March 2,” said Fedorov, who added that the Kremlin has been surprised by the strength of Ukrainian resistance and by European governments’ unified decision to impose far-reaching sanctions despite their reliance on Russian gas.
Western sanctions have “caused a lot of problems over here now,” said Federov. Some commentators argued Sunday that an economic collapse in Russia could make Putin more likely to escalate his threat to use nuclear weapons.
In a rare move, the U.N. Security Council voted for the 193-member General Assembly to hold an emergency session Monday on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As the BBCexplained, “the resolution, called ‘Uniting for Peace,’ allows members of the Security Council to call a special session with the General Assembly if the five permanent members (Russia, U.S., U.K., France, and China) cannot agree how to act together to maintain peace.”
Sunday’s vote to authorize an emergency meeting was supported by 11 of the Security Council’s 15 members. Russia opposed the measure while China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstained. Even though Russia, China, and other permanent members can typically exercise veto power, is was a procedural vote and therefore only required nine votes in favor.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that an emergency session had been called for the first time in decades because “this is no ordinary moment.”
“We need to take extraordinary action to meet this threat to our international system,” said Thomas-Greenfield. “So let us do everything we can to help the people of Ukraine.”
The Security Council is holding another meeting on Monday at 3:00 p.m. ET to discuss Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis. On Tuesday, France and Mexico are expected to submit a Security Council resolution that calls for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, the protection of civilians, and a guarantee that aid can be delivered.
Russia, which on Friday blocked a Security Council resolution condemning Moscow’s “premeditated aggression” in Ukraine, is expected to prevent the passage of France and Mexico’s planned resolution.
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
There must be “an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon,” said the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition.
Allegations on Friday that Russian forces have used cluster munitions in its ongoing assault on Ukraine elicited sharp condemnation Friday from critics of the indiscriminate weapons.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munition Coalition (ICBL-CMC) expressed alarm in a statement about “the threat of further harm to civilians including humanitarian mine action partners.”
“We call for an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon, and urge all parties to guarantee protection of civilians, respect for international humanitarian law, and the international norm banning use of cluster munitions and landmines,” the group said.
One hundred twenty-three nations have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions, committing states to ban the use, production, stockpiling, or transfer of the weapons, which disperse bomblets over a widespread area and pose lasting threats as unexploded fragments become de facto landmines.
The international treaty also obligates signatories to destroy their stockpiles of the weapons. Neither Ukraine, Russia, nor the United States are signatories to the international treaty.
ICBL-CMC’s statement came after the New York Timesreported Thursday that remnants left by a likely Russian strike near a hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Vuhledar “suggest the possible use of cluster munitions.”
The Times referenced a tweet by Mark Hiznay, associate arms director at Human Rights Watch, in which he shared photos from the Ukraine Weapons Tracker account purportedly showing the aftermath of the attack:
An attack using a cluster munition, specifically a 9M79-series ballistic missile with 9N123K warhead containing 50 9N24 HE-FRAG submunitions. Same type used in Syria. @banclusterbombs@MineMonitorhttps://t.co/5rp6amCVKa
The Washington Post also reported Thursday that “as it encircled Ukraine in recent weeks, the Russian military brought forward an array of aircraft capable of firing guided air-to-ground missiles or dropping ‘dumb’ munitions such as cluster or fragmentation bombs.”
Further evidence suggesting Russia has used the pernicious weapons came Friday from independent and open source investigative outlet Bellingcat, which shared in Twitter posts photos of a cluster munition canister in the eastern Ukraine city of Okhtyrka and said the canister’s location just a short distance from a school means it “may be connected” to an alleged attack on a local kindergarten.
Currently there is not enough information to establish if the two are linked, but the location of the canister remains, and that it appears to have landed from the direction of the school, suggests this Russian cluster munition may be connected to the kindergarten attack.
Russia’s alleged attack on a kindgergarten as well as an orphanage in Okhtyrka prompted Ukraine to call for a war crimes investigation.
In a Friday tweet, Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote: “Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute. Together with the general prosecutor’s office we are collecting this and other facts, which we will immediately send to the Hague. Responsibility is inevitable.”
Human rights groups have expressed concern about harm to civilians, including through the potential use of cluster munition, since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on Thursday.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, accused the Russian military of having displayed “a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide area effects in densely populated areas.”
“Some of these attacks may be war crimes,” she said in a Friday statement. “The Russian government, which falsely claims to use only precision-guided weapons, should take responsibility for these acts.”
Advocacy group CIVIC also lamented Friday that “the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is rising” and called on “warring actors” to “avoid using weapons that result in indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects.”
“Some of these weapons,” the group said, “include unguided munitions, multiple launch rocket systems, banned cluster munitions, and other explosive weapons with wide-area effect.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOSand republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The ICC prosecutor, who is following the invasion “with increasing concern,” signals the court may launch an investigation.
Amnesty International declared Friday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has been marked by indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas and strikes on protected objects such as hospitals” that may amount to war crimes.
“The Russian military has shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives.”
The human rights group’s Crisis Evidence Lab analyzed photos, videos, and satellite imagery of three attacks—in the Ukrainian cities Vuhledar, Kharkiv, and Uman—carried out in the early hours of the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin announcedbefore dawn on Thursday.
“The Russian military has shown a blatant disregard for civilian lives by using ballistic missiles and other explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, in a statement.
“Some of these attacks may be war crimes,” she continued. “The Russian government, which falsely claims to use only precision-guided weapons, should take responsibility for these acts.”
Callamard added that “the Russian troops should immediately stop carrying out indiscriminate attacks in violation of the laws of war. The continuation of the use of ballistic missiles and other inaccurate explosive weapons causing civilian deaths and injuries is inexcusable.”
Amnesty’s researchers believe the trio of analyzed attacks killed at least six civilians and injured at least a dozen others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Thursday that the overall death toll had topped 130 and more than 300 people were wounded on the first day of the assault.
Though the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss Putin’s widely condemned invasion, Russia is one of the five permanent members—along with China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—meaning it has veto power over resolutions.
Russia also currently leads the 15-member UNSC—though Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, suggested during a meeting earlier this week that his Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzya, should relinquish the rotating presidency, which is set to shift to the United Arab Emirates in March.
That meeting concluded with Kyslytsya telling Nebenzya that “there is no purgatory for war criminals; they go straight to hell, ambassador,” to which the Russian responded that “we are not carrying out aggression against the Ukrainian people—this is against that junta, that seized power in Kyiv.”
'There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell' — As the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in full force, Ukraine's UN ambassador called out his Russian counterpart in a fiery speech pic.twitter.com/CYqOtUsnxN
Given the current limitations of the UNSC, Amnesty International is calling for an emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly. As Callamard put it: “If the Security Council is paralyzed through veto, it is up to the entire membership to step up.”
Warning that the “lives, safety, and well-being” of millions of Ukrainians are at stake, she urged the General Assembly to adopt a resolution denouncing Russia’s “unlawful attack and calling for an end to all violations of humanitarian law and human rights.”
Amnesty was far from alone in sounding the alarm about Russia violating international law.
A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said Friday that “we are gravely concerned about developments” in Ukraine and “we are receiving increasing reports of civilian casualties.”
“Civilians are terrified of further escalation, with many attempting to flee their homes and others taking shelter where possible,” added the spokesperson. “As the high commissioner has warned, the military action by the Russian Federation clearly violates international law. It puts at risk countless lives and it must be immediately halted.”
International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan similarly said Friday that “I have been closely following recent developments in and around Ukraine with increasing concern.”
The International Criminal Court prosecutor reminds the warring parties in Ukraine (including Russian forces) that the court has jurisdiction over any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed there, pursuant to a declaration filed by the Ukrainian government in 2015. https://t.co/Spn1SyTjvH
Though neither Ukraine nor Russia is a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC, Khan pointed out that due to a 2015 declaration following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, “my office may exercise its jurisdiction over and investigate any act of genocide, crime against humanity, or war crime committed within the territory of Ukraine” since February 20, 2014.
“Any person who commits such crimes, including by ordering, inciting, or contributing in another manner to the commission of these crimes, may be liable to prosecution before the court, with full respect for the principle of complementarity,” he said. “It is imperative that all parties to the conflict respect their obligations under international humanitarian law.”
The ICC also investigates crimes of aggression, but Khan explained that because neither involved nation is party to the Rome Statute, “the court cannot exercise jurisdiction over this alleged crime in this situation.”
The prosecutor—who is on mission in Bangladesh but plans to release a fuller statement upon returning to The Hague—vowed that his office “will continue to closely monitor the situation” and “remains fully committed to the prevention of atrocity crimes and to ensuring that anyone responsible for such crimes is held accountable.”
After reports that Russia attacked a kindergarten and orphanage in the city of Okhtyrka, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Friday that officials are collecting evidence of “war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute” that will be sent to The Hague.
Today’s Russian attacks on a kindergarten and an orphanage are war crimes and violations of the Rome Statute. Together with the General Prosecutor’s Office we are collecting this and other facts, which we will immediately send to the Hague. Responsibility is inevitable.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Friday, Russian forces also have been accused of using cluster munitions in the ongoing assault of Ukraine, leading an international coalition to call for “an immediate halt to use of the internationally banned weapon.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Above: Photo Collage – Rolling Stone / Lynxotic / Various
The U.S. senator from Vermont called for “serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs” in response to the Kremlin’s latest moves.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called for the U.S. and its allies to impose heavy sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other oligarchs in the country as he condemned Moscow’s escalating military aggression toward Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine The U.S. senator from Vermont called for “serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs” in response to the Kremlin’s latest moves.is an indefensible violation of international law, regardless of whatever false pretext he offers,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “There has always been a diplomatic solution to this situation. Tragically, Putin appears intent on rejecting it.”
In addition to backing sanctions, Sanders said preparations must be made to accommodate refugees displaced by the conflict and called for investments in a global clean energy transition to fight the climate crisis and disempower “authoritarian petrostates” worldwide.
Sanders’ remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden—in concert with officials in the United Kingdom and the European Union—moved to impose new economic sanctions on Russia following the Kremlin’s deployment of troops into two breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine, which Putin on Monday formally recognized as independent.
To prevent Putin’s effort to expand his country’s presence in the Donbas region from descending into a broader military conflict, peace advocates in the U.S. and abroad continue to urge the Biden administration to double-down on diplomatic efforts, as Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday.
“The United States,” said Sanders, “must now work with our allies and the international community to impose serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs, including denying them access to the billions of dollars that they have stashed in European and American banks.”
“The U.S. and our partners must also prepare for a worse scenario by helping Ukraine’s neighbors care for refugees fleeing this conflict,” Sanders continued, alluding to the possibility that Russian lawmakers’ approval of the use of military force outside the country could lead to a full-fledged war.
In the wake of recent developments in Ukraine, oil prices surged to nearly $100 per barrel on Tuesday, the highest in more than seven years, and European gas futures spiked by as much as 13.8%.
While the U.S. fossil fuel industry is expected to benefit from Germany halting approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline due to Russia’s recent actions, people in Europe—already struggling with skyrocketing energy bills—are bracing for even higher costs in the case that Moscow restricts gas exports.
“In the longer term,” said Sanders, “we must invest in a global green energy transition away from fossil fuels, not only to combat climate change, but to deny authoritarian petrostates the revenues they require to survive.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in broad daylight,” said the NAACP’s president, “and today’s verdict brings us one step closer to justice.”
This is a developing story… Please check back for possible updates…
A jury on Tuesday found three white men who murdered unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery guilty of federal hate crimes.
Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. “are accused of interfering with Arbery’s right to use a public street because of his race as well as attempted kidnapping,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreports. “The McMichaels are also accused of using weapons during a crime of violence because both were armed during the deadly chase.”
The verdict came about three months after the trio was found guilty of murdering the 25-year-old Black man in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia on February 23, 2020. They were each sentenced to life in prison last month and only Bryan was given the possibility of parole.
Ben Crump, a nationally recognized civil rights attorney who represented the Arbery family, has said that the murder was “so reminiscent of the motivations for lynchings.” Crump on Tuesday welcomed the development, joined by Ahmaud Arbery’s parents, Wanda Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery.
"You all did that."
Benjamin Crump speaks after three men found guilty on federal hate crime charges for killing Ahmaud Arbery.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Cooper-Jones called out the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for proposed plea deals with the McMichaels that were ultimately rejected by U.S. District Judge Lisa Wood.
“They ignored my cry,” Cooper-Jones said of members of the Justice Department directly involved in the case. “I begged them.”
“That’s not justice for Ahmaud,” she said of the DOJ’s attempted plea deals. “What we got today, we wouldn’t have gotten today if it wasn’t for the fight that the family put up.”
"That's not justice for Ahmaud."
Ahmaud Arbery's mother called out the DOJ for attempting a plea deal with his murderers: "They were made to do their job today … They didn't have a son that was lying in a cold grave, and they still didn't hear my cry." pic.twitter.com/E8MBOjMkyJ
“The guilty verdict of the three murderers of Ahmaud Arbery of hate crimes is a precedent-setting verdict,” Rev. Al Sharpton tweeted Tuesday. “Even in the Deep South the feds will convict you of hate actions. I salute Ahmaud’s parents for forcing the trial.”
NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement that “two years ago today, none of us knew of Ahmaud Arbery. But two years ago tomorrow, his story shook the conscience of our nation and world. Ahmaud Arbery was lynched in broad daylight, and today’s verdict brings us one step closer to justice.”
Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way, declared that “this is a just verdict for three men that chased, cornered, and killed Ahmaud Arbery.”
“This is the kind of accountability we must have to address the ongoing terror of white supremacy that’s reigned in our country for hundreds of years, where Black people can be killed with impunity,” Jealous added. “We must continue to fight for justice for every American who has been the victim of white domestic terrorism and the injustice it fosters.”
Others also recognized the fight ahead. As the advocacy group NARAL Pro-choice America put it: “This shred of justice only points to a larger problem, how insidious white supremacy and white supremacist violence is within this country.”
We must continue our work towards true justice and anti-racism. We’re holding in our hearts the family of Ahmaud Arbery. Every parent should have the freedom to watch their child grow up without the threat or fear of racist violence. That’s the world we’re working toward. 3/3
The jury in the case consisted of eight white members, three Black people, and one Hispanic person, according to the Journal. They deliberated for less than four hours.
“I, as a mom, will never heal,” said Cooper-Jones. “We got a victory today, but there’s so many families who don’t get victories.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
artist’s version of the Reichstag fire, which Hitler blamed on the communists. COLLAGE CREDIT: Lynxotic / DEZAIN UNKIE/ ALAMY
In the past few weeks, U.S. officials have warned severaltimes that Russia plans to create the appearance of an attack on its own forces and broadcast those images to the world. Such a “false flag” operation, they alleged, would give Russia the pretext to invade Ukraine by provoking shock and outrage.
By exposing this plan, the Biden administration sought to undermine its emotional power and stop the Kremlin from manufacturing a casus belli, or justification for war.
But false flag attacks aren’t what they used to be. With satellite photos and live video on the ground shared widely and instantly on the internet – and with journalists and armchair sleuths joining intelligence professionals in analyzing the information – it’s difficult to get away with false flag attacks today. And with the prevalence of disinformation campaigns, manufacturing a justification for war doesn’t require the expense or risk of a false flag – let alone an actual attack.
The long history of false flag attacks
Both false flag attacks and allegations that states engage in them have a long history. The term originated to describe pirates’ wielding of friendly (and false) flags to lure merchant ships close enough to attack. It was later used as a label for any attack – real or simulated – that the instigators inflict against “friendly” forces to incriminate an adversary and create the basis for retaliation.
In the 20th century, there were several prominent episodes involving false flag operations. In 1939, agents from Nazi Germany broadcast anti-German messages from a German radio station near the Polish border. They also murdered several civilians whom they dressed in Polish military uniforms to create a pretext for Germany’s planned invasion of Poland.
That same year, the Soviet Union detonated shells in Soviet territory near the Finnish border and blamed Finland, which it then proceeded to invade.
The U.S. has also been implicated in similar plots. Operation Northwoods was a proposal to kill Americans and blame the attack on Castro, thereby granting the military the pretext to invade Cuba. The Kennedy administration ultimately rejected the plan.
In addition to these actual plots, there have been numerous alleged false flag attacks involving the U.S. government. The sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 – each of which was a critical part of a casus belli – have been claimed as possible false flag attacks, though the evidence supporting these allegations is weak.
Global visibility, disinformation and cynicism
More recent and even less fact-based is the “9/11 Truth” movement, which alleged that the Bush administration engineered the destruction of the twin towers to justify restrictions on civil liberties and lay the foundation for invading Iraq. Right-wing pundits and politicians have promoted the conspiracy theory that Democrats have staged mass shootings, such as the one at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, in order to push for gun control laws.
Furthermore, governments operate in relative secrecy and have recourse to tools of coercion such as intelligence, well-trained agents and weapons to implement their agenda. It is not a huge leap to imagine that leaders deliberately cause the high-impact events that they later exploit for political gain, notwithstanding the logistical complexities, large number of people who would have to be involved and moral qualms leaders might have about murdering their own citizens.
For example, it is not controversial to note that the Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks to build support for its invasion of Iraq. Yet this led some people to conclude that, since the Bush administration benefited politically from 9/11, it therefore must have caused the attacks, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The challenge of credibility
The willingness to believe that leaders are capable of such atrocities reflects a broader trend of rising distrust toward governments worldwide, which, incidentally, complicates matters for leaders who intend to carry out false flag attacks. If the impact of such attacks has historically come from their ability to rally citizens around their leader, false flag attacks staged today may not only fail to provoke outrage against the purported aggressor, but they can also backfire by casting suspicion on the leaders who stand to benefit.
Furthermore, investigators using open source intelligence, such as the Bellingcat collective of citizen internet sleuths, make it more difficult for governments to get away with egregious violations of laws and international norms.
Even as the Biden administration attempts to blunt Russia’s ability to seize the initiative, it too faces credibility challenges. Reporters were justifiably skeptical of State Department spokesman Ned Price’s warning about Russia’s false flag plans, especially since he did not provide evidence for the claim.
Skeptics pointed to the August 2021 drone strike during the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, which the military initially asserted was a “righteous strike” to kill a suicide bomber but that later turned out to be a mistaken attack on an innocent man and his family. It took overwhelming and undeniable evidence from media investigations before the U.S. government admitted the mistake.
Insofar as the Kremlin might expect to benefit from executing a false flag attack, it would be to manufacture a casus belli among Russian citizens rather than to persuade audiences abroad. Surveys have shown that the vast majority of Russians are opposed to invading Ukraine, yet they also harbor negative attitudes toward NATO.
The spectacle of a provocation aimed against Russia on state-run television might provide a jolt of support for an invasion, at least initially. At the same time, Russians are cynical about their own leaders and might harbor the suspicion that a purported attack was manufactured for political gain.
False flag alternatives
In any event, Russia has other options to facilitate an invasion. At the start of its incursion into Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin used “active measures,” including disinformation and deception, to prevent Ukrainian resistance and secure domestic approval. Russia and other post-Soviet states are also prone to claim a “provocation,” which frames any military action as a justified response rather than a first move.
By contrast, false flag operations are complex and perhaps overly theatrical in a way that invites unwanted scrutiny. Governments seeking to sway public opinion face far greater challenges today than they did in the 20th century. False flag attacks are risky, while leaders seeking to manufacture a casus belli can select from a range of subtler and less costly alternatives.
As the U.S. and other NATO member governments monitor Russia’s activities and determine appropriate policy responses, the timely intelligence they rely on no longer comes solely from multimillion-dollar spy satellites and spies on the ground.
Social media, big data, smartphones and low-cost satellites have taken center stage, and scraping Twitter has become as important as anything else in the intelligence analyst toolkit. These technologies have also allowed news organizations and armchair sleuths to follow the action and contribute analysis.
Governments still carry out sensitive intelligence-gathering operations with the help of extensive resources like the U.S. intelligence budget. But massive amounts of valuable information are publicly available, and not all of it is collected by governments. Satellites and drones are much cheaper than they were even a decade ago, allowing private companies to operate them, and nearly everyone has a smartphone with advanced photo and video capabilities.
Through information captured by commercial companies and individuals, the realities of Russia’s military posturing are accessible to anyone via internet search or news feed. Commercial imaging companies are posting up-to-the-minute, geographically precise images of Russia’s military forces. Several news agencies are regularly monitoring and reporting on the situation. TikTok users are posting video of Russian military equipment on rail cars allegedly on their way to augment forces already in position around Ukraine. And internet sleuths are tracking this flow of information. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F6uiXdAiIig?wmode=transparent&start=0 Popular social media platforms like TikTok have become valuable sources of intelligence.
This democratization of intelligence collection in most cases is a boon for intelligence professionals. Government analysts are filling the need for intelligence assessments using information sourced from across the internet instead of primarily relying on classified systems or expensive sensors high in the sky or arrayed on the planet.
However, sifting through terabytes of publicly available data for relevant information is difficult. Knowing that much of the data could be intentionally manipulated to deceive complicates the task.
Enter the practice of open-source intelligence. The U.S. director of national intelligence defines Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT, as the collection, evaluation and analysis of publicly available information. The information sources include news reports, social media posts, YouTube videos and satellite imagery from commercial satellite operators.
OSINT communities and government agencies have developed best practices for OSINT, and there are numerous free tools. Analysts can use the tools to develop network charts of, for example, criminal organizations by scouring publicly available financial records for criminal activity.
Private investigators are using OSINT methods to support law enforcement, corporate and government needs. Armchair sleuths have used OSINT to expose corruption and criminal activity to authorities. In short, the majority of intelligence needs can be met through OSINT.
Machine learning for intelligence
Even with OSINT best practices and tools, OSINT contributes to the information overload intelligence analysts have to contend with. The intelligence analyst is typically in a reactive mode trying to make sense of a constant stream of ambiguous raw data and information.
Machine learning, a set of techniques that allows computers to identify patterns in large amounts of data, is proving invaluable for processing OSINT information, particularly photos and videos. Computers are much faster at sifting through large datasets, so adopting machine learning tools and techniques to optimize the OSINT process is a necessity.
Identifying patterns makes it possible for computers to evaluate information for deception and credibility and predict future trends. For example, machine learning can be used to help determine whether information was produced by a human or by a bot or other computer program and whether a piece of data is authentic or fraudulent.
And while machine learning is by no means a crystal ball, it can be used – if it’s trained with the right data and has enough current information – to assess the probabilities of certain outcomes. No one is going to be able to use the combination of OSINT and machine learning to read Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, but the tools could help analysts assess how, for example, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might play out.
Technology has produced a flood of intelligence data, but technology is also making it easier to extract meaningful information from the data to help human intelligence analysts put together the big picture.
[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.Weekly on Wednesdays.]
“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States,” said an Afghan protest organizer in Kabul over the weekend.
With the people of Afghanistan facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, U.S.-based peace activists—who largely blame the policies of their own government for inflicting pain on millions of innocent Afghans—are using Valentine’s Day on Monday to demand the Biden administration return billions of dollars of seized assets to the war-torn country before more lasting harm and “cruelty” is done.
Under the banner of “Love to Afghanistan,” nationwide actions were scheduled for the weekend and localized vigils organized set for Monday (Feb. 14) by Peace Action, World Beyond War, and other humanitarian groups who argue that $7 billion frozen by the U.S. government and subsequently seized by an executive order issued Friday by President Joe Biden rightfully belongs to the Afghan people, who without it face an economy on the brink of collapse and a healthcare system and federal infrastructure without adequate support amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening food crisis.
The Biden plan to confiscate $7 Billion of the Afghan people’s assets is unjust. Afghans need food & a functioning economy. Urge #Congress to reverse this policy.#LoveToAfghanistan#UnFreezeAfghanistan Call Congress from Congress Square Park . Noon. Portland, ME. Valentine's Day! pic.twitter.com/9tXwxrmKOe
After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Peace Action welcomed the withdrawal of troops from the country and an end to the war.
Yet when the United States military pulled out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration also responded by choking off assets to Afghan banks and the economy by freezing the reserves of the Afghan Central Bank held in the U.S. They also imposed sanctions on those doing business with Afghanistan and cut aid. Jobs and income disappeared, people cannot afford to buy food and mass starvation is now occurring.
The Afghan people are suffering now more than ever. Hunger could kill more now than in two decades of war. This humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is in the words of the International Red Cross a “human-made catastrophe.” “Human-made” largely by coercive U.S. economic policies.
In Decemebr, 46 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding the U.S. unfreeze assets that had been locked following the U.S. military withdrawal earlier in 2021. But instead of heeding that call, Biden on Friday took the step of more permanently seizing the funds that otherwise would be under control of Afghanistan’s central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which now operates under the authority of the Taliban government.
Biden’s executive order includes setting aside half of the funds, $3.5 billion, for possible settlement claims by families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, but critics have said the Afghan people—who had nothing to do with the crimes of that day twenty years ago—should not be punished for the acts of Al Qaeda jihadists, most them Saudis and Egyptians.
Millions of Afghans are starving, due to US crimes, and now instead of getting back what is their’s, their money is being used as reparations for a crime they never committed & have been punished for for 20 years.
Promoting the “Love to Afghanistan” events in an op-ed for Common Dreamslast week, peace activist Jean Athey, coordinator of the Montgomery County Peace Action group in Maryland, said the economic war against the Afghan has the potential to be just as deadly as the 20 years of war and occupation they have just endured. Explaining the current situation and the “liquidity crisis” gripping the country, she wrote:
The government has almost no money and cannot pay workers, who cannot buy food for their families. Most have received no payment for months. In addition, Afghans have limited access to their own funds in banks. International commerce has halted.
Given U.S. sanctions and the liquidity crisis, even international humanitarian relief organizations have great difficulty operating in Afghanistan, despite U.S. government assurances. Relief efforts designed to stave off starvation—although critically important right now—cannot endure for long since no one is willing to provide assistance indefinitely to a country of almost 40 million people. The country needs a functioning government and economy, and needs access to the international financial system.
“Political backbone” is now required of the Biden administration, argued Athey, who said the president should not be scared of predictable GOP attacks or media hit pieces about somehow appeasing the Taliban by giving the everyday people back money the money that rightfully belongs to them. “The lives of one million children are more important than a negative headline in a tabloid. The U.S. should unfreeze Afghan government assets and lift sanctions hindering the recovery of the Afghan economy and humanitarian relief efforts. We must end the U.S. economic war on Afghanistan.”
On Saturday, the DAB demanded the funds ostensibly stolen by the U.S. government be returned and called the move by Biden an “injustice against the people of Afghanistan.”
Also in Saturday, protests in Kabul decried the theft of the money.
“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States. This is the right of Afghans,” Abdul Rahman, a civil society activist and the demonstration’s organizer, told the Dawn newsaper.
A spokesperson for the Taliban government, Mohammad Naeem, also decriedthe move in a post on social media Saturday.
“The theft and seizure of money held by the United States of the Afghan people represent the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation,” Naeem tweeted, added that while victory and defeat are evident throughout history, “the greatest and most shameful defeat is when moral defeat combines with military defeat.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“Climate change is here and now,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn’t enough to make people realize that, I don’t know what is.”
The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.
Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.
“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years.”
The authors of the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, followed up on research they had conducted in 2020, when they found the current drought was the second-worst on record in the region after the one that lasted for several years in the 16th century.
Since that study was published, the American West has seen a heatwave so extreme it sparked dozens of wildfires and killed hundreds of people and droughtconditions which affected more than 90% of the area as of last summer, pushing the region’s conditions past “that extreme mark,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
The scientists examined wood cores extracted from thousands of trees at about 1,600 sites across the West, using the data from growth rings in ancient trees to determine soil moisture levels going back to the 800s.
They then compared current conditions to seven other megadroughts—which are defined as droughts that are both severe and generally last a number of decades—that happened between the 800s and 1500s.
The researchers estimated that the extreme dry conditions facing tens of millions of people across the western U.S. have been made about 42% more severe by the climate crisis being driven by fossil fuel extraction and emissions.
“The results are really concerning, because it’s showing that the drought conditions we are facing now are substantially worse because of climate change,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA and the study’s lead author, told the Los Angeles Times.
In the region Williams and his colleagues examined, the average temperature since the drought began in 2000 was 1.6° Fahrenheit warmer than the average in the previous 50 years. Without the climate crisis driving global temperatures up, the West would still have faced drought conditions, but based on climate models studied by the researchers, there would have been a reprieve from the drought in 2005 and 2006.
“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s, or 1100s.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the new research must push the U.S. Congress to take far-reaching action to mitigate the climate crisis, as legislation containing measures to shift away from fossil fuel extraction and toward renewable energy is stalled largely due to objections from Republicans and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
“It’s time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action—before it’s too late,” she said.
Climate change is here and now.
If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn't enough to make people realize that, I don't know what is. It's time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action — before it's too late.https://t.co/jExzMKUXxr
The drought has had a variety of effects on the West, including declining water supplies in the largest reservoirs of the Colorado River—Lake Mead and Lake Powell— as well as reservoirs across California and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 96% of the Western U.S. is now “abnormally dry” and 88% of the region is in a drought.
“We’re experiencing this variability now within this long-term aridification due to anthropogenic climate change, which is going to make the events more severe,” Isla Simpson, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the study released Monday, told the Los Angeles Times.
The researchers also created simulations of other droughts they examined between 800 and 1500, superimposing the same amount of drying driven by climate change. In 94% of the simulations, the drought persisted for at least 23 years, and in 75% of the simulations, it lasted for at least three decades—suggesting that the current drought will continue for a number of years.
Williams said it is “extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year.”
“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years,” Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license
Without more regulation, this will continue,” said one critic. “We need governments and regulatory bodies to step up and put an end to this greenwashing trend.”
A new study out Monday evaluates the public climate pledges made by 25 of the world’s biggest corporations and concludes they “cannot be taken at face value” because the vast majority of firms analyzed are exaggerating the nature of and progress toward their goals—a greenwashing trend that critics say will continue in the absence of stronger regulation.
“Setting vague targets will get us nowhere without real action, and can be worse than doing nothing if it misleads the public.”
Providing further evidence of the fallacies of “net-zero,”the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022 finds that net-zero pledges made by several of the world’s largest companies aim to reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions across their full value chains by only 40%, at most, from 2019 levels—a far cry from the 100% implied when they claim to be pursuing “carbon neutrality.”
According to the assessment conducted by NewClimate Insitute in collaboration with Carbon Market Watch, just one company’s net-zero pledge was determined to have “reasonable integrity.” Three were deemed to have “moderate integrity,” 10 “low integrity,” and the remaining 11 “very low integrity.”
“We set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims,” lead author Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute said in a statement.
“As pressure on companies to act on climate change rises, their ambitious-sounding headline claims all too often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction,” said Day. “Even companies that are doing relatively well exaggerate their actions.”
The analysis turned up zero pledges with “high integrity.” Maersk came out on top, with “reasonable integrity,” followed by Apple, Sony, and Vodafone with “moderate integrity.”
Meanwhile, the headline pledges of Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Enel, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Hitachi, IKEA, Vale, Volkswagen, and Walmart were rated as having “low integrity.” Those of Accenture, BMW Group, Carrefour, CVS Health, Deutsche Post DHL, E.ON SE, JBS, Nestlé, Novartis, Saint-Gobain, and Unilever were considered to have “very low integrity.”
Although all 25 companies examined in the report establish “some form of zero-emission, net-zero, or carbon-neutral target,” the authors note, just three companies—Maersk, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom—make clear commitments to decarbonizing 90% of their entire value chains.
By contrast, at least five companies would effectively decrease their emissions by less than 15%, often by excluding “upstream or downstream emissions”—pollution generated by activities indirectly linked to a company.
Day toldThe Guardian that “it’s short-term action that’s the most important thing, in the climate crisis.”
Nevertheless, noted the British newspaper, “the report show[s] that the companies surveyed would only cut their emissions by about 23% on average by 2030, falling far short of the figure of nearly halving in the next decade that scientists say is needed to limit global heating to 1.5ºC.”
Despite the damning findings, some companies doubled down on their claims of progress. In a statement shared with BBC, Amazon said: “We set these ambitious targets because we know that climate change is a serious problem, and action is needed now more than ever. As part of our goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, Amazon is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.”
However, Amazon is one of several companies that have donated to right-wing Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who teamed up with the GOP to torpedo the Build Back Better Act—a piece of legislation that, among other things, would have accelerated the clean energy transition.
According to climate justice advocates, net-zero pledges are inadequate because they are “premised on the notion of canceling out emissions in the atmosphere rather than eliminating their causes.” Because the practice enables powerful entities to continue with business as usual in some places as long as they fund projects that purportedly slash pollution in other places, there is little to no evidence that overall emissions will be sufficiently reduced.
The new study shows how several corporations are inflating the extent of their ambition and progress by taking advantage of ambiguous terms like net-zero and carbon-neutral and by disregarding upstream or downstream emissions.
“Many company pledges are undermined by contentious plans to reduce emissions elsewhere, hidden critical information, and accounting tricks,” states a summary of the report. It continues:
The exclusion of emission sources or market segments is a common issue that reduces the meaning of targets. Eight companies exclude upstream or downstream emissions in their value chain, which usually account for over 90% of the emissions under their control. E.ON may exclude market segments that account for more than 40% of its energy sales; Carrefour appears to exclude locations that account for over 80% of Carrefour branded stores.
24 of 25 companies will likely rely on offsetting credits, of varying quality. At least two-thirds of the companies rely on removals from forests and other biological activities, which can easily be reversed by, for example, a forest fire. Nestlé and Unilever distance themselves from the practice of offsetting at the level of the parent company, but allow and encourage their individual brands to pursue offsetting to sell carbon-neutral labeled products.
Some apparently ambitious targets may lead to very little short-term action. It may be possible for CVS Health to achieve their 2030 emission reduction target with limited additional action, since the target is compared to a base year with extraordinarily high emissions. GlaxoSmithKline may delay the implementation of key emission reduction measures until 2028/2029, ahead of its 2030 target.
As The Guardian reported, “Day said using offsetting tended to obscure whether companies were making genuine progress on cutting their own emissions, or hiding behind offsets to achieve a notional net-zero.”
“It’s better practice not to offset—it’s more transparent and constructive,” said the researcher. “Companies should not be claiming they are net-zero by 2030 unless they are reducing their emissions by 90% by then.”
The failure of so-called “corporate social responsibility” initiatives to deliver on promises to improve the well-being of workers and ecosystems is a longstanding pattern, which is why many progressive critics have called them public relations gimmicks.
According to the new report: “The rapid acceleration of corporate climate pledges, combined with the fragmentation of approaches means that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated greenwashing. This is compounded by a general lack of regulatory oversight at national and sectoral levels. Identifying and promoting real climate leadership is a key challenge that, where addressed, has the potential to unlock greater global climate change mitigation.”
Gilles Dufrasne from Carbon Market Watch said that “misleading advertisements by companies have real impacts on consumers and policymakers.”
“We’re fooled into believing that these companies are taking sufficient action, when the reality is far from it,” said Dufrasne. “Without more regulation, this will continue. We need governments and regulatory bodies to step up and put an end to this greenwashing trend.”
“Companies must face the reality of a changing planet,” he added. “What seemed acceptable a decade ago is no longer enough. Setting vague targets will get us nowhere without real action, and can be worse than doing nothing if it misleads the public.”
In a Monday op-ed, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann and Climate Communication director Susan Joy Hassol drew attention to the devastation wrought by corporations that have denied facts to delay necessary political-economic transformations—pointing specifically to a 40-year-long disinformation campaign bankrolled by fossil fuel interests.
Much of the damage caused by extreme weather disasters “could have been avoided had we acted decades ago when the scientific community—and indeed fossil fuel industry’s own scientists—recognized we had a problem,” the pair wrote in The Hill. “While the best time to act boldly to prevent climate catastrophe was decades ago, the second-best time is now.”
Given that the 25 firms analyzed account for roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, researchers stressed how important it is for them to quickly adopt and scale up best practices.
“If we are to meet this monumental challenge, we will need to use all the arrows in the quiver,” wrote Mann and Hassol. “We must incentivize the energy industry to move aggressively toward clean, renewable energy.”
They concluded, “There is no time left to waste, and failure is not an option.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
As the U.S. Federal Reserve mulls hiking interest rates in the coming weeks in an effort to curb inflation, progressive economists are warning against such a move—arguing that it will hurt workers and fail to address the real source of rising prices: unmitigated corporate power.
“The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further.”
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and Columbia University professor, wrote Monday in Project Syndicate. “We should not attack a supply-side problem by lowering demand and increasing unemployment. That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, echoed Stiglitz’s message, writing Monday: “The inflation spike of 2021 has been bad for typical families and is a real policy challenge. But it remains the case that an overreaction to it could end up causing the most damage of all.”
Stiglitz and Bivens’ essays came three days after Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, made a similar warning.
Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices—and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.
It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.
Although Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell “has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices,” Reich wrote, “there’s no ‘wage-price spiral.'”
“To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation,” he added. “Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases—making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.”
Reich conceded that “wage-price spirals used to be a problem” but argued that’s no longer the case “because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.”
Declining union membership and corporations’ increased mobility—both key pillars in the ruling class’ highly effective assault on workers that has been carried out on a bipartisan basis for more than four decades—”have shifted power from labor to capital,” wrote Reich. “Increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages… ended wage-price spirals.”
It is “totally wrong” to contend that inflation is being fueled by rising wages stemming from a so-called “tight” labor market, Reich argued. He continued:
The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the U.S. population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.
Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6% in December, the first decrease since last February.
“Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further,” Reich added. “The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.”
When it comes to what is causing inflation, Reich blamed “continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.”
Corporate greed has played a large role in why people are paying higher prices for food and gas, as Common Dreams has reported and a majority of the public appears to understand, based on recent polling. Amid a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 900,000 people in the U.S. and 5.7 million people globally, price-gouging corporations are enjoying mega-profits not seen since 1950.
While pandemic profiteering is evident, the question remains as to what made global supply chains so fragile to disruption in the first place—leading to prolonged shortages of key inputs and increased shipping costs that have been accompanied by price hikes.
According to Rakken Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, the answer lies in offshoring, financialization, deregulation, just-in-time logistics, and other profit-maximizing policies associated with neoliberalization and globalization.
Mabud made that case last week when testifying at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. She and David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, expanded on that argument in a recent essay introducing a new series on the supply chain crisis.
As a number of economists have warned recently, policymakers on the verge of making life-altering decisions with respect to interest rates may be doing so based on faulty data or misconceptions.
“Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing),” Reich cautioned. “This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ‘seasonal adjustment,’ cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as ‘adding lots of jobs.'”
Stiglitz, meanwhile, noted that “the inflation rate has been volatile. Last month, the media made a big deal out of the 7% annual inflation rate in the United States, while failing to note that the December rate was little more than half that of the October rate.”
“Moreover, given that a large proportion of today’s inflation stems from global issues—like chip shortages and the behavior of oil cartels—it is a gross exaggeration to blame inflation on excessive fiscal support in the U.S.,” Stiglitz continued.
While “the U.S. has slightly higher inflation than Europe,” he added, “it also has enjoyed stronger growth. U.S. policies prevented a massive increase in poverty that might have occurred otherwise. Recognizing that the cost of doing too little would be huge, U.S. policymakers did the right thing.”
Stiglitz wrote that his “biggest concern is that central banks will overreact, raising interest rates excessively and hampering the nascent recovery. As always, those at the bottom of the income scale would suffer the most in this scenario.”
“What we need instead,” he argued, “are targeted structural and fiscal policies aimed at unblocking supply bottlenecks and helping people confront today’s realities.”
For instance, wrote Stiglitz, “food stamps for the needy should be indexed to the price of food, and energy (fuel) subsidies to the price of energy.”
“Beyond that, a one-time ‘inflation adjustment’ tax cut for lower- and middle-income households would help them through the post-pandemic transition,” he added. “It could be financed by taxing the monopoly rents of the oil, technology, pharmaceutical, and other corporate giants that made a killing from the crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.
The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.
This line of reasoning is totally wrong.
Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises.
Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing). This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “seasonal adjustment,” cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as “adding lots of jobs.”
Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices—and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.
It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.
There’s no “wage-price spiral,” either (even though Fed chief Jerome Powell has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices). To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation. Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases – making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.
Wage-price spirals used to be a problem. Remember when John F. Kennedy “jawboned” steel executives and the United Steel Workers to keep a lid on wages and prices? But such spirals are no longer a problem. That’s because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.
Only 6 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized. A half-century ago, more than a third were. Today, corporations can increase output by outsourcing just about anything anywhere because capital is global. A half-century ago, corporations needing more output had to bargain with their own workers to get it.
These changes have shifted power from labor to capital—increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages. This power shift ended wage-price spirals.
Slowing the economy won’t remedy either of the two real causes of today’s inflation – continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.
Supply bottlenecks are all around us. (Just take a look at all the ships with billions of dollars of cargo idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through which 40 percent of all U.S. seaborne imports flow.)
Big corporations have no incentive to absorb the rising costs of such supplies—even with profit margins at their highest level in 70 years. They have enough market power to pass these costs on to consumers, sometimes using inflation to justify even bigger price hikes. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the CEO of Kroger said last June. “What we are very good at is pricing,” the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive added in October.
In fact, the Fed’s plan to slow the economy is the opposite of what’s needed now or in the foreseeable future. COVID is still with us. Even in its wake, we’ll be dealing with its damaging consequences for years—everything from long-term COVID, to school children months or years behind.
The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the US population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.
Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6 percent in December, the first decrease since last February.
Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.
The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans
Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.
“We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system… or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”
“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.
Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.
The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren’t planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:
The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.
The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn’t reached President Joe Biden’s desk—said Tuesday that it is “dead.”
However, Americans for Tax Fairness still uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.
“The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place,” the report states. “That’s the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years.”
The report adds that “about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year.”
There's no denying our economy and democracy are rigged in favor of the ultra-wealthy.
When the richest 100 Americans have 60,000 times more political power than the bottom 90% of people— it's time to get dynastic wealth under control. https://t.co/U1s6HmY1XC
“This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable,” declared the report’s principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.
“The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America’s wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax,” he asserted. “Effective reforms have already been developed—all that’s needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now.”
The group’s new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.
“As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years,” the report says, “the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small.”
Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would “curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts.” Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket “on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals.”
Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to “impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust’s holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion.”
“The choice is clear,” according to the report. “We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America’s wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
“Fortunately, we know what needs to be done,” the report concludes. “The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further hike prices this year, drawing outrage from critics who say the company is pushing higher costs onto consumers to pad its bottom line.
“Corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson—who saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021—told investors during the company’s earnings call Tuesday that “supply-chain disruptions” and rising labor costs are to blame for the coming price increases, of which he suggested there will be several.
“We have additional pricing actions planned through the balance of this year, which play an important role to mitigate cost pressures including inflation,” said Johnson, who also touted the company’s “strong revenue growth” in the quarter.
Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.
To progressive observers, Starbucks’ announcement of price hikes fits a pattern of U.S. corporations—in sectors across the economy—raising costs for consumers while raking in record profits, boosting executive pay, and squeezing regular employees. Starbucks employees nationwide are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.
Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, for its part, responded with outrage to Starbucks increasing prices for customers after giving its CEO a nearly 40% raise last year.
During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, Rakeen Mabud of the Groundwork Collaborative noted that “in sector after sector, in company after company, corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
“We see that in Kimberly-Clark taking advantage of the pandemic to raise prices on masks,” the economist said. “We see Proctor & Gamble using the fact that they sell essential goods that families depend on like diapers to raise prices in this moment of crisis. And we even see companies like McDonald’s raising prices on consumers even as they enjoy massive increases in sales.”
“So in short,” Mabud added, “this is a really broad-based problem—it’s unfortunately not limited to a specific sector of the economy.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
A new legal filing by New York’s attorney general this week accused former President Donald Trump’s company of misleading lenders about the financial health of its landmark downtown Manhattan skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, while seeking to renew the building’s mortgage.
Though the Trump Organization called 40 Wall Street “one of the great success stories post 2008,” lender Capital One found the company’s estimates of the building’s worth so unbelievable that the bank declined to refinance the tower’s loan in 2015, the filing alleges.
“Capital One harbored great skepticism regarding the Trump Organization’s valuations,” says the filing, which was submitted by Attorney General Letitia James in response to Trump’s efforts to block her from questioning him and his children as part of an ongoing investigation by her office.
The new accusations offer startling details about possible financial fraud involving 40 Wall Street — one of the subjects of a 2019 ProPublica story that highlighted conflicting financial documents the Trump Organization had filed for the building.
ProPublica’s story documented how income, expense and occupancy numbers cited in the eventual refinance for 40 Wall Street and another Manhattan building sometimes didn’t match those the company had filed with city tax authorities. A lower valuation for the city would produce a lower tax bill, while a higher valuation for lenders would make it easier to get a new mortgage.
One expert said it appeared like the Trump Organization was keeping “two sets of books.”
“It feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, at the time.
In her filing, James asserts that Trump Organization employees, including Trump’s children, took part in a pattern of deception in which they misled lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service by vastly overstating values for 40 Wall Street and a host of other Trump properties, including golf courses in Scotland, Los Angeles and Westchester and his buildings on Fifth and Park avenues.
The Trump Organization on Thursday lashed out at James, a Democrat, via a statement emailed by a spokesperson, saying, “The only one misleading the public is Letitia James.
“She defrauded New Yorkers by basing her entire candidacy on a promise to get Trump at all costs without having seen a shred of evidence and in violation of every conceivable ethical rule,” the organization’s statement said. It asserted that James “has no case” and that the “allegations are baseless and will be vigorously defended.”
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, also criticized James, accusing her of making “repeated threats to target the Trump family” and ignoring legal protections for “the very people she is investigating.”
James is seeking to compel testimony and obtain documents from Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who she said have not cooperated with her investigation.
The filing says that property valuations formed the heart of statements of financial condition that the Trump Organization used to demonstrate its net worth. The statements, which James said contained inaccuracies, were compiled by an outside accounting agency from a data spreadsheet and backup material provided by the Trump Organization.
Trump’s personal guarantees to some banks and insurers required him to certify that his financial statements were correct, according to James’ filing. The documents say her office has evidence Trump was “personally involved in reviewing and approving” the statements.
If the company or its employees are found to have deliberately provided misleading valuations, they could face civil or criminal penalties. The company is under investigation by both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
With its classic Gothic Revival style and signature green spire, 40 Wall Street gave Trump a presence in the most famous financial district in the world. His company doesn’t own it, but rather purchased in 1995 the right to act as the landlord for its office and retail space. Finding tenants for that space, however, particularly in the building’s narrow tower, proved a challenge, especially after 9/11, when occupancy sagged and the entire financial district struggled, the ProPublica investigation found.
James’ filing says that as early as 2009, Capital One, which held the mortgage on the property, “raised substantial concerns about cash flow” at 40 Wall Street, prompting in-person meetings with Trump, longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and others. Donald Trump Jr. was also involved in the discussions, the filing says.
The conversations led to a loan modification in 2010, with bank personnel harboring doubts about the Trump Organization’s representations of the building’s financial standing. During those discussions, the Trump Organization provided the bank with profit numbers for 2010 of $12.3 million, which bank personnel described as “very optimistic.”
More startling were the differences between valuations that appeared on Trump’s statements of financial condition and those prepared by appraisers for Capital One. The Trump Organization set the value of the building at $601.8 million in 2010, while the appraisals for Capital One done by Cushman & Wakefield set it at just less than one-third of that, $200 million.
Weisselberg shared one of the company’s higher valuations for the building with the bank in early 2015, boasting of “considerable capital investment” and “a much improved cash flow.” He wanted Capital One to restructure its loan and waive a principal payment of $5 million due in November.
But Capital One declined to refinance the mortgage, referencing its own internal estimate that the building was only worth $257 million a few months before.
That year, 40 Wall Street’s $160 million mortgage was a thorn in Trump’s side, representing his then-largest single debt as he launched his campaign for the presidency.
After Capital One’s rejection, the Trump Organization turned to Ladder Capital Finance, where Weisselberg’s son Jack was a director. Ladder commissioned its own appraisal. Though Ladder used the same Cushman & Wakefield team that had estimated the building was worth $220 million in 2012, the team this time more than doubled the value to $540 million, legal filings said. Ladder approved the refinance.
James’ filing said that evidence her office obtained suggests the 2015 Cushman valuation “appears to have used demonstrably incorrect facts and aggressive assumptions” to arrive at the higher estimate, which the document said “did not reflect a good faith assessment of value.”
On Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield defended its practices, saying it took “great issue with mischaracterizations concerning the work performed and believe they are not supported by the evidence.
“The referenced Cushman & Wakefield appraisals were undertaken and completed in good faith based upon the material information made available,” the company said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “We stand behind the appraisers and the referenced appraisals which reflect fair valuations based upon the underlying facts and market dynamics.”
In 2015, the Trump Organization’s statement of financial condition listed the value of the building as $735.4 million.
Ladder Capital and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Allen Weisselberg and Jack Weisselberg could not immediately be reached.
ProPublica’s 2019 story found several instances of the Trump Organization reporting much lower expenses to its lender, Ladder Capital, than to city tax authorities — including 40 Wall Street’s insurance costs and ground lease. Jack Weisselberg declined to comment at the time on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization. Executives with Ladder also declined to be quoted for the story then.
In 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the Trump Organization inflated valuations at times to appear more profitable and deflated them to achieve a lower real estate tax bill.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Jan. 19, 2022, that he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine, and cautioned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he “will regret having done it,” following months of building tension.
Russia has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine over the past several months.
In mid-January, Russia began moving troops into Belarus, a country bordering both Russia and Ukraine, in preparation for joint military exercises in February.
Putin has issued various security demands to the U.S. before he draws his military forces back. Putin’s list includes a ban on Ukraine from entering NATO, and agreement that NATO will remove troops and weapons across much of Eastern Europe.
Ukraine’s layered history offers a window into the complex nation it is today — and why it is continuously under threat. As an Eastern Europe expert, I highlight five key points to keep in mind.
What should we know about Ukrainians’ relationship with Russia?
Ukraine gained independence 30 years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has since struggled to combat corruption and bridge deep internal divisions.
Ukraine’s western region generally supported integration with Western Europe. The country’s eastern side, meanwhile, favored closer ties with Russia.
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine peaked in February 2014, when violent protesters ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in what is now known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Around the same time, Russia forcibly annexed Crimea. Ukraine was in a vulnerable position for self-defense, with a temporary government and unprepared military.
Putin immediately moved to strike in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The armed conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists has killed over 14,000 people.
Unlike its response to Crimea, Russia continues to officially deny its involvement in the Donbas conflict.
What do Ukrainians want?
Russia’s military aggression in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea have galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Western leanings.
Ukraine’s government has said it will apply for European Union membership in 2024, and also has ambitions to join NATO.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who came to power in 2019, campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption, economic renewal and peace in the Donbas region.
In September 2021, 81% of Ukrainians said they have a negative attitude about Putin, according to the Ukrainian news site RBC-Ukraine. Just 15% of surveyed Ukrainians reported a positive attitude towards the Russian leader.
Why is Putin threatening to invade Ukraine?
Putin’s decision to engage in a military buildup along Ukraine is connected to a sense of impunity. Putin also has experience dealing with Western politicians who champion Russian interests and become engaged with Russian companies once they leave office.
Western countries have imposed mostly symbolic sanctions against Russia over interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and a huge cyberattack against about 18,000 people who work for companies and the U.S. government, among other transgressions.
Without repercussions, Putin has backed Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on mass protests in the capital city, Minsk.
In several instances, Putin has seen that some leading Western politicians align with Russia. These alliances can prevent Western countries from forging a unified front to Putin.
Other senior European politicians promoting a soft position toward Russia while in office include former French Prime Minister François Fillon and former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl. Both joined the boards of Russian state-owned companies after leaving office.
What is Putin’s end game?
Putin views Ukraine as part of Russia’s “sphere of influence” – a territory, rather than an independent state. This sense of ownership has driven the Kremlin to try to block Ukraine from joining the EU and NATO.
In January 2021, Russia experienced one of its largest anti-government demonstrations in years. Tens of thousands of Russians protested in support of political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, following his detention in Russia. Navalny had recently returned from Germany, where he was treated for being poisoned by the Russian government.
Putin is also using Ukraine as leverage for Western powers lifting their sanctions. Currently, the U.S. has various political and financial sanctions in place against Russia, as well as potential allies and business partners to Russia.
A Russian attack on Ukraine could prompt more diplomatic conversations that could lead to concessions on these sanctions.
The costs to Russia of attacking Ukraine would significantly outweigh the benefits.
While a full scale invasion of Ukraine is unlikely, Putin might renew fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Why would the US want to get involved in this conflict?
With its annexation of Crimea and support for the Donbas conflict, Russia has violated the Budapest Memorandum Security Assurances for Ukraine, a 1994 agreement between the U.S., United Kingdom and Russia that aims to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for its commitment to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Putin’s threats against Ukraine occur as he is moving Russian forces into Belarus, which also raises questions about the Kremlin’s plans for invading other neighboring countries.
Military support for Ukraine and political and economic sanctions are ways the U.S. can make clear to Moscow that there will be consequences for its encroachment on an independent country. The risk, otherwise, is that the Kremlin might undertake other military and political actions that would further threaten European security and stability.
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo by Unsplash
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”
Fueling fresh calls for swift, sweeping action by President Joe Biden and financial regulators, a report published Tuesday reveals that if the planet-heating pollution of the 18 largest U.S. asset managers and banks is compared to that of high-emissions countries, Wall Street is a top-five emitter.
“Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The new report—entitled Wall Street’s Carbon Bubble: The global emissions of the U.S. financial sector—was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Sierra Club. The analysis was done by South Pole, which replicated an approach it used earlier this year for a U.K.-focused effort commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Though likely a “gross underestimate,” as Sierra Club put it, because the analysis relies on public disclosures that exclude key data, the researchers found that “just the portions of the portfolios of the eight banks and 10 asset managers studied in this report financed an estimated total of 1.968 billion tons CO2e based on year-end disclosures from 2020.”
Putting that CO2e—or carbon dioxide equivalent, which is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases—figure into context, the report notes:
If the financial institutions (FIs) in this study were a country, they would have the fifth largest emissions in the world, falling just short of Russia;
Financed emissions from the 18 institutions covered in this report are equivalent to 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year;
Financed emissions from the eight banks studied in this report are equivalent to 80 million homes’ energy use for one year; and
Financed emissions from the 10 asset managers studied in this report are equivalent to three billion barrels of oil consumed.
The banks analyzed are Bank of America, Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo.
The asset managers included are BNY Mellon Investment Management, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, and the Vanguard Group.
When Wall Street is factored into the list of the world’s top 10 countries responsible for the most annual greenhouse gas emissions, it falls after China, the United States, India, and Russia but ranks ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Germany, according to Climate Watch data.
As the new publication warns:
The findings of this report make clear that the U.S. financial sector is a major contributor to climate change. Given that the indirect emissions of the U.S. financial sector are just below the total emissions of Russia, it should be considered a high-carbon sector and treated as such. Therefore, if President Biden and his administration do not put in place measures to mitigate U.S.-financed emissions, the United States will almost certainly fall far short of its targets to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction from 2005 levels in 2030 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
The implications of falling short would be dire. Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry would mean that the deadly wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events that Americans and communities around the world are already experiencing will only become worse, and efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly.
Representatives from the groups behind the report echoed its call to action in a statement Tuesday.
“Climate change poses a large systemic risk to the world economy. If left unaddressed, climate change could lead to a financial crisis larger than any in living memory,” said Andres Vinelli, vice president of economic policy at CAP. “The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
Vinelli added that “because the industry has proven itself to be unwilling to govern itself,” regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “must urgently develop a framework to reduce banks’ contributions to climate change.”
Ben Cushing, Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager, agreed that “regulators can no longer ignore Wall Street’s staggering contribution to the climate crisis.”
“The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk,” he said. “Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The report comes as financial institutions worldwide face mounting criticism for their contributions to the climate emergency—including at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland last month—and as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing model legislation that opposes fossil fuel divestment.
More than three dozen climate advocacy groups argued Monday that “what ALEC claims to be discriminatory action”—referring to divestment from major polluters—”is instead prudent action to ensure the stability of our financial system and economy.”
“We know from the Great Recession that the financial sector won’t take responsibility,” the organizations noted. “It’s up to regulators to protect people from the impact on climate and financial risk of fossil fuel investment.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photos by various
What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?
“Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun…” is the title of an article in the Atlantic, just out, by Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of many groundbreaking exposés. He describes the various maneuvers that Trump-driven Republican operatives and state legislators are developing to overturn elections whose voters elected Democrats from states with Republican governors and state legislatures. Georgia fit that profile in 2020—electing two Democratic senators in a state with a Republican legislature and governor.
Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic.
Getting ready for 2024, the Georgia GOP legislature has stripped the election-certifying Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, of his authority to oversee future election certifications. The legislature has also given itself the unbridled authority to fire county election officials. With Trump howling his lies and backing his minion candidates, they created a climate that is intimidating scores of terrified election-precinct volunteers to quit.
Added to this are GOP-passed voter suppression laws and selectively drawn election districts that discriminate against minorities—both before the vote (purges, arbitrary disqualifications), during the vote (diminishing absentee voting, and narrowing dates for their delivery), and after the election in miscounting and falsely declaring fraud.
The ultimate lethal blow to democratic elections, should the GOP lose, is simply to have the partisan GOP majority legislators benefiting from demonically-drawn gerrymandered electoral districts, declare by fiat the elections a fraud, and replace the Democratic Party’s voter chosen electors with GOP chosen electors in the legislature.
Now take this as a pattern demolishing majority voters’ choice to 14 other GOP-controlled states, greased by Trumpian lies and routing money to his chosen candidate’s intent on overturning majority rule, add Fox News bullhorns and talk radio Trumpsters and you have the apparatus for fascistic takeovers. Tragically, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court Justices—three selected by Trump—has no problem with his usurpation of the American Republic. All this and more micro-repression is broadcast by zillions of ugly, vicious, and anonymous rants over the Internet enabled by the profiteering social media corporations like Facebook.
Anonymous, vicious, violent email and Twitter traffic is the most underreported cause of anxiety, fear, and dread undermining honest Americans working, mostly as volunteers, the machinery of local, state, and national elections, with dedicated public servants. These people are not allowed to know the names behind the anonymous cowardly, vitriol slamming against them, their families, and children.
What are the institutions—public and civic—that could roll back this fast-approaching U.S.-style fascism with the snarling visage of serial criminal and constitutional violator, Donald J. Trump?
1. First is the Congress. Democrats impeached Trump over the Ukraine extortion but left on the table eleven other impeachable counts, including those with kitchen-table impacts (See Congressional Record, December 18, 2019).
All that is going on to deal with Trump’s abuses in any focused way on Capitol Hill, controlled by Democrats, is the House’s January 6th investigation. So far as is known, this Select Committee is NOT going to subpoena the star witnesses—Donald Trump and Mike Pence. So far, the Congress is feeble, not a Rock of Gibraltar thwarting the Trumpian dictators.
2. The federal courts? Apart from their terminal delays, it’s Trump’s Supreme Court and his nominees fill many chairs in the federal circuit courts of appeals. The federal judiciary—historically the last resort for constitutional justice—is now lost to such causes.
3. The Democratic Party? We’re still waiting for a grand strategy, with sufficient staff, to counter, at every intersection, the GOP. The Dems do moan and groan well. But where is their big-time ground game for getting out the non-voters in the swing states? Are they provoking recall campaigns of despotic GOP state legislators in GOP states having such citizen-voter power? Why aren’t they adopting the litigation arguments of Harvard Law School’s constitutional expert, Professor Larry Tribe? Where are their messages to appeal to the majority of eligible American voters who believe that the majority rules in elections? Why aren’t they urgently reminding voters of the crimes and other criminogenic behavior by the well-funded Trump and his political terrorists?
Bear in mind, the Democrats are well-funded too.
4. The Legal Profession and their Bar Associations. Aren’t they supposed to represent the rule of law, protect the integrity of elections, and insist on peaceful transitions of power? They are after all, not just private citizens; they are “officers of the court.” Forget it. There are few exceptions, but don’t expect the American Bar Association and its state bar counterparts to be the sentinels and watchdogs against sinister coup d’états under cover of delusional strongarming ideologies.
5. Well, how about the Universities, the faculties, and the students? Weren’t they the hotbeds of action against past illegal wars and violations of civil rights in the Sixties and Seventies? Sure. But that was before the Draft was eliminated, before the non-stop gazing at screens, and before the focus on identity politics absorbed the energy that fueled mobilizations about fundamental pursuits of peace, justice, and equality.
6. How about some enlightened corporate executives of influential companies? Having been given large tax reductions, sleepy law enforcement regulators, and a corporatist-minded federal judiciary, while the war contracts and taxpayer bailouts proliferate, why should they make waves to save the Republic? The union of plutocratic big business with the autocratic government is one classical definition of fascism.
7. The Mass Media. Taken together, they’ve done a much better job exposing Trumpism than has the Congress or litigation and the judiciary. However, their digging up the dirt does not come with the obvious follow-ups from their reporting and editorializing.
Covering the Ukraine impeachment, but not covering at least eleven other documented impeachable offenses, handed to them by credible voices, left them with digging hard but never hitting pay dirt. Trump has escaped all their muckraking as he has escaped all attempts by law enforcers who have their own unexplained hesitancies. If reporters do not dig intensely into just how Trump and his chief cohorts have escaped jail time and other penalties, their usual revelations of wrongdoings appear banal, eliciting “what else is new?” yawns by their public.
What’s left to trust and rely upon? Unorganized people organizing. What else! That’s what the farmers did peacefully in western Massachusetts in 1774 (See: The Revolution Came Early—1774—to the Berkshires) against the tyrant King George III and his Boston-based Redcoats? By foot or by horse, they showed up together in huge numbers at key places. These farmers collectively stopped the takeover of local governments and courts by King George’s wealthier Tories. Their actions can teach us the awesome lessons of moral, democratic, and tactical grit—all the while having to deal with nature and their endangered crops.
What are our excuses?
Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet.
Above: Photo credit, NASA
Last month’s COP26 climate summit at Glasgow ended as a complete flop. While some have hailed as success the mere inclusion of the phrase “unabated coal should be phased down” in the final agreement, the fact of the matter is that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy remains a distant dream. It should also be obvious to all that the climate deal reached at COP26 in no way prevents planetary temperature from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.
But let’s be blunt about rising global temperatures. Thanks to the failure of politics with regard to global warming, the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius will be reached or exceeded within the next couple of decades under all emissions scenarios considered, according to IPCCS’ latest findings. The only question is whether we can prevent the planet from getting even hotter—potentially passing 2 degrees or even 3 degrees Celsius.
Indeed, our national leaders have failed us on climate change, and we know the reasons why.
I explained this in a recent Op-Ed for Al Jazeera English.
“First, leaders sit on climate negotiating tables with the intent to advance an agenda that serves above all their own national interests rather than the health of our planet. Their mindset is still guided by the principles of “political realism” and political short-termism. This is why their words are not matching up with their actions.
Thus, Joe Biden can make a moral pronouncement to world leaders at COP26 in Glasgow that the US will lead the fight against the climate crisis “by example”, but, less than two weeks later, his administration auctions oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, the nation-state remains the primary actor in world affairs, so there are no international enforcement mechanisms with regard to pledges about cutting emissions. International cooperation, let alone solidarity, is extremely difficult to attain under the existing political order, and as leading international affairs scholar Richard Falk has argued, “Only a transnational ethos of human solidarity based on the genuine search for win/win solutions at home and transnationally can respond effectively to the magnitude and diversity of growing climate change challenges.”Third, “the logic of capitalism” guides the world economy. With profit-maximization as the ultimate motive, capitalism is toxic for the environment, especially in its neoliberal version, with a strong emphasis on deregulation and privatization.
Under such a socioeconomic system, it is highly unlikely that the political establishment will dare to embark on a climate action course that might prove detrimental to powerful economic interests.” But all is not yet lost. Climate activism is now a global movement, and it is surely our only way out of the climate conundrum. An estimated 100,000 people marched in Glasgow, and tens of thousands in other cities around the world, demanding bold action at the COP26 climate conference. Global warming demonstrations are filled with people of all ages and walks of life. Scores of scientists were arrested during the COP26 summit for carrying out various acts of civil disobedience.
To be sure, real leadership at the Glasgow summit was on display by the thousands of activists who took to the streets—not by the diplomats inside the halls of the Scottish Event Campus.
Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that some progress has indeed been made in the fight against global warming. The European Union is trying to make more than 100 cities carbon neutral by 2030. In Latin America and the Caribbean, in Asia and the Pacific, hundreds of climate projects have been introduced to combat fight the climate crisis.
Progressive economists, like those at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, are taking real steps to help us combat global warming by producing highly detailed climate stabilization programs that drive sustainability while boosting employment. Indeed, Robert Pollin and some of his co-workers at PERI have brought the Green New Deal project to the forefront of public consciousness in scores of U.S. states. They are also hard at work now to spread it to other countries of the world.
Within the same context, organizations such as ReImagine Appalachia in the Ohio River Valley are laying the groundwork for a post-fossil fuel economy. Through both grassroots and grasstops initiatives, ReImagine Appalachia has engaged a wide variety of stakeholders in a shared vision of building a sustainable future based on clean and renewable energy sources and investments in the natural infrastructure to support “carbon farming,” but also through the creation of good union jobs for low-wage workers and by ensuring a just transition for all towards an environmentally sustainable economy, including of course workers in the extractive industries. As Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia likes to say, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In the state with the largest economy in the United States, a detailed project of building a clean-energy infrastructure and reducing emissions by 50 percent as of 2030 and achieving a zero-emissions economy by 2045 has received strong support by more than 20 major unions across the state, including the United Steel Workers Locals 5, 675 and 1945 (who represent workers in the fossil fuel supply chain). The latest union to endorse the California Climate Jobs Plan, outlined in Program for Economic Recovery and Clean Energy Transition in California by Robert Pollin and his co-workers at PERI, is the San Fransisco Region of the Inland Boatman’s Union.
Indeed, labor activism in California is in the midst of a dramatic resurgence, with key labor union leaders and organizers such as, among others, Tracey Brieger, Dave Campbell, Norman Rogers, and Veronica Wilson, keen to continue the legacy of Tony Mazzocchi of the Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. Mazzocchi was one of the earliest environmental activist leaders who advocated the idea of just transition for workers in carbon-intensive industries. His view, which is at the core of “Just Transition,” was that helping displaced workers should not be seen as philanthropy or welfare. According to Mazzocchi, those who had worked to “provide the world with the energy and the materials it needs deserve a helping hand to make a new start in life.”
There is no shortage of activism in today’s world. The Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 15 progressive organizations working together with the explicit aim of mobilizing grassroot power in order to advance the vision of the Green New Deal across key states, while also applying pressure at the federal level, is yet another case emblematic of the important shift taking place in a world where the conditions for the transition to a sustainable and just future are being so blatantly ignored by the political establishment.
People everywhere are waking up to the realization that they must fight to organize the world in such a way that there is a sustainable future for humanity and the planet. They know that they have a world to win.
Originally published on Common Dreams by C.J. POLYCHRONIOU and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Real life Stephen Ross, who founded Related Companies, a global firm best known for developing the Time Warner Center and Hudson Yards in Manhattan, was a massive winner between 2008 and 2017. He became the second-wealthiest real estate titan in America, almost doubling his net worth over those years, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual list, by adding $3 billion to his fortune. His assets included a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and the Miami Dolphins football team.
Then there’s the other Stephen Ross, the big loser. That’s the one depicted on his tax returns. Though the developer brought in some $1.5 billion in income from 2008 to 2017, he reported even more — nearly $2 billion — in losses. And because he reported negative income, he didn’t pay a nickel in federal income taxes over those 10 years.
What enables this dual identity? The upside-down tax world of the ultrawealthy.
ProPublica’s analysis of more than 15 years of secret tax data for thousands of the wealthiest Americans shows that Ross is one of a special breed.
He is among a subset of the ultrarich who take advantage of owning businesses that generate enormous tax deductions that then flow through to their personal tax returns. Many of them are in commercial real estate or oil and gas, industries that have been granted unusual advantages in the American tax code, which allow the ultrawealthy to take tax losses even on profitable enterprises. Manhattan apartment towers that are soaring in value can be turned into sinkholes for tax purposes. A massively profitable natural gas pipeline company can churn out Texas-sized write-offs for its billionaire owner.
By being able to generate losses — effectively, by being the biggest losers — these Americans are the most effective income-tax avoiders among the ultrawealthy, ProPublica’s analysis of tax data found. While ProPublica has shown that some of the country’s absolute wealthiest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, occasionally sidestep federal income tax entirely, this group does it year in and year out.
Take Silicon Valley real estate mogul Jay Paul, who hauled in $354 million between 2007 and 2018. According to Forbes, he vaulted into the ranks of the multibillionaires in those years. Yet Paul paid taxes in only one of those years, thanks to losses of over $700 million.
Then there’s Texas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, who built Chief Oil & Gas into a major natural gas producer over the past two decades. The multibillionaire reported a total of $1.4 billion in income from 2013 to 2018, but offset that with even greater losses. He paid no federal income taxes in four of those six years.
None of the people mentioned in this article would discuss their taxes or tax-avoidance techniques with ProPublica.
A spokesperson for Ross declined to accept questions. In a statement, he said, “Stephen Ross has always followed the tax law. His returns — which were illegally obtained and descriptions of which were released by ProPublica — are reflective of and in accordance with federal tax policy. It should terrify every American that their information is not safe with the government and that media will act illegally in disseminating it. We will have no further correspondence with you as we believe this is an illegal act.” (As ProPublica has explained, the organization believes its actions are legal and protected by the Constitution.)
A spokesman for Rees-Jones declined to comment. Paul did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The techniques used by these billionaires to generate losses are generally legal. Loopholes for fossil-fuel businesses date back practically to the income tax’s birth in the early 20th century. Carve-outs for real estate and oil and gas have withstood sporadic efforts at reform by Congress in part because there has been widespread support for investment in housing and energy.
The commercial real estate and fossil fuel breaks have enabled some of the wealthiest Americans to escape federal income taxes for long stretches of time. Sometimes they amass such large losses that they cannot use all of them in a given year. When that happens, they fill up reservoirs of deductions that they then draw down bit by bit to wipe away taxes in future years. Before ProPublica’s analysis of its trove of tax data, the extent of this type of avoidance among the nation’s wealthiest was not known.
Typical working Americans do not generate these kinds of business losses and thus can’t use them to offset income or reduce income tax.
As long as there have been income taxes, there have been schemes to manufacture illusory losses that reduce taxes, and there have likewise been counterefforts by Congress and the IRS to rein them in. But ProPublica’s findings show these measures to prevent deduction abuses “aren’t doing what they are supposed to do,” said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School. “The system isn’t working right.”
For decades, One Columbus Place, a 51-story apartment complex in midtown Manhattan, has looked like an excellent investment. Located a block off the southwest corner of Central Park, it’s adjacent to the Columbus Circle mall for shopping at Coach or Swarovski or for dining at the Michelin three-star restaurant Per Se.
Its 729 rental units have churned out millions of dollars in rental income every year for its owners, among them Stephen Ross. Mortgage records show its value has skyrocketed, jumping from $250 million in the early 2000s to almost $550 million in 2016.
Yet, for more than a decade, this prime piece of New York real estate was a surefire money-loser for tax purposes. Since Ross acquired a share in the property in 2007, he has recorded $32 million in tax losses from his stake in a partnership that owns it, his tax records show.
Tax losses from properties owned through a host of such partnerships are central to Ross’ ability, and that of other real estate moguls, to continue to grow their wealth while reporting negative income year after year to the IRS.
Their down-is-up, up-is-down tax life comes in large part from provisions in the code that amplify developers’ ability to exploit write-offs from what’s known as depreciation, or the presumed decline in the value of assets over time. Some of these rules apply only to the real estate business, letting developers take outsize deductions today to reduce their taxable income while delaying their tax bill for decades — and potentially forever.
Depreciation itself is a widely accepted concept. In most businesses, the depreciation write-offs come from assets, like machinery, that reliably lose their value over time; eventually, a machine becomes outmoded or breaks down.
When it comes to real estate, a common justification for depreciation relies on the idea that space in older buildings will tend to command lower rents than space in newer ones, eventually making it worthwhile for an owner to knock down a building and construct a new one. So, if a building initially cost investors $100 million, the tax code allows them, over a period of years, to deduct that $100 million.
But rather than losing value, real estate properties often rise in value over time, much like One Columbus Place has done for Ross and his business partners. (That value includes the cost of the land, which doesn’t generate depreciation write-offs.)
These depreciation write-offs, along with deductions for interest and other expenses, have helped many of the nation’s wealthiest real estate developers largely avoid income taxes in recent years, even as their empires have grown more valuable.
Former President Donald Trump, for whom Ross hosted a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser in 2019, is perhaps the best-known example of commercial real estate’s tax beneficiaries. As The New York Times reported last year, Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and nothing at all in 10 of the years between 2001 and 2015. According to ProPublica’s data, Trump took in $2.3 billion from 2008 to 2017, but his massive losses were more than enough to wipe that out and keep his overall income below zero every year. In 2008, Trump reported a negative income of over $650 million, one of the largest single-year losses in the tax trove obtained by ProPublica.
New York-area real estate developer Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also avoided federal income taxes for long stretches of time. Though he reported making some $330 million between 2008 and 2018, Charles Kushner paid income taxes only twice in that decade ($1.8 million in total) thanks to deductions. (Kushner went to prison in 2005 after being convicted of tax fraud and other charges. Trump pardoned him last year.)
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to questions about his taxes. (The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer told The New York Times last year that Trump “has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government” over the past decade, an apparent reference to taxes other than income tax.) Representatives for Kushner did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Even relative to fellow real estate developers, though, Stephen Ross is exceptional. He didn’t start out in commercial real estate. He began his career as a tax attorney.
Ross, 81, grew up on the outskirts of Detroit, the son of an inventor with little business savvy. After getting a business degree from the University of Michigan, Ross decided to go to law school to avoid the Vietnam war draft. He then extended his education, earning a master’s degree in tax law at New York University.
He saw the tax code as a puzzle to solve. “Most people, when you say you’re a tax lawyer, they think you’re filling out forms for the IRS,” Ross once told a group of NYU students. “But I look at it as probably the most creative aspect of law because you’re given a set of facts and you’re saying, ‘How do you really reduce or eliminate the tax consequences from those facts?’”
After graduating, Ross went to work, first at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, and later at a Wall Street investment bank, which fired him. Then, with a $10,000 loan from his mother, Ross went into business for himself, selling tax shelters.
In its early years, Ross’ Related Companies solicited investments in affordable-housing projects from affluent professionals like doctors and dentists with the promise that the deals would generate deductions they could use on their taxes to offset the income from their day jobs.
By the mid-1970s, such shelters had become big business on Wall Street. The losses frequently subsidized economically dubious investments in a range of industries. It wasn’t uncommon for firms to offer investors the chance to get $2 or $3 worth of tax savings for every $1 they put in.
As the decade wore on, regulators increasingly took notice. The IRS started programs to scrutinize loss-making businesses. Ross and some of his real estate partnerships were audited, according to a company prospectus, and in some cases, the IRS determined that the firm had been too aggressive in taking write-offs from the projects.
Lawmakers began to crack down, too. In 1976, Congress limited the tax losses investors could take if they borrowed money to invest in industries like oil and gas or motion pictures. But the change didn’t apply to the real estate industry, which successfully argued that without such tax shelters, investors wouldn’t back new low-income housing.
In 1986, Congress sought to rein in tax shelters once more as part of a major tax overhaul. This time the changes included rules to prevent affluent people from using the kind of investments Ross had been offering. The rules shrank who could offset their other income using business losses to only those who had important roles in the business, such as those who spent a certain number of hours on it; so-called passive investors were out of luck.
Several tough years followed for Ross and others in the industry, but the real estate lobby mounted a pressure campaign that yielded results in 1993, when Congress allowed real estate professionals once again to use losses generated from their rental properties to wipe out taxable income from things like wages.
After being pounded by the real estate crash of the early 1990s, the Related Companies reorganized itself with an infusion of cash from new investors. Related made use of new federal housing tax credits, as well as local tax breaks and tax-exempt public financing offered by New York City to propel development of affordable housing units. The firm also continued to branch out into more traditional office and luxury apartment deals.
In 2003, the $1.7 billion development of Time Warner Center catapulted Ross indisputably into the upper echelon of New York developers. Then the most expensive real estate project in the history of the city, the two shining glass towers beside Columbus Circle also helped elevate Ross into the the Forbes 400 for the first time in 2006.
Despite his growing fortune, Ross often owed no federal income tax. In the 22 years from 1996 to 2017, he paid no federal income taxes 12 times. His largest tax bill came in 2006, when he owed $12.6 million after reporting just over $100 million in income.
In the years since, Ross has used a combination of business losses, tax credits and other deductions to sidestep such bills. In 2016, for example, Ross reported $306 million in income, including $219 million in capital gains, $51 million in interest income and $5 million in wages from his role at Related Companies. But he was able to offset that income entirely with losses, including by claiming $271 million in losses through his business activities that year and by tapping his reserve of losses from prior years.
ProPublica’s records don’t offer a complete picture of the sources of each taxpayer’s losses, but they do provide some insight. That year, for example, in addition to losses from One Columbus Place, Ross recorded a loss of $31 million from a partnership associated with the Miami Dolphins. As ProPublica previously reported, professional sports teams provide a stream of tax losses for their wealthy owners. Ross also had a loss of $16.9 million from RSE Ventures, his investment company, which has owned stakes in restaurants, a chickpea pasta maker and a drone racing league.
After taking all of his losses, his records show that he would have owed a small amount of alternative minimum tax, which is designed to ensure that taxpayers with high income and huge deductions pay at least some taxes. But Ross was able to eliminate that bill, too, by using tax credits, which he’d also built up a store of over the years. That left him with a federal income tax bill of zero dollars for the year.
Since the early 2000s, when he had significant taxable income, Ross has turned to a conventional technique for creating tax deductions: charitable donations. He has made a series of multimillion-dollar contributions to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, which have earned him naming rights to its business school and some of its sports facilities. In 2003, a partnership owned by Ross and his business partners donated part of a stake in a southern California property to the school, taking a $33 million tax deduction in exchange. But when the university sold the stake two years later, it got only $1.9 million for it.
In 2008, the IRS rejected the claimed tax deduction. In court, the agency argued that the transaction was “a sham for tax purposes” and that Ross and his partners had grossly overvalued the gift. After almost a decade of legal wrangling, a federal judge sided with the IRS, disallowing the deduction, including Ross’ personal share of $5.4 million. The judge also upheld millions of dollars in penalties that the IRS imposed on the partnership for engaging in the maneuver. Both the tax attorney and the accountant who advised Ross on the deal pleaded guilty to tax evasion in an unrelated case. (In a 2017 article on the case, a spokesperson said Ross “was surprised and extremely disappointed by the actions of the two individuals, who have pled guilty, and has severed all dealings with them.”)
Ross’ core business, real estate, remains almost unmatched as a way to avoid taxes.
For most investors, losses are limited by how much money they stand to lose if the enterprise goes belly up, or how much money they have “at risk.” But not real estate investors. They can deduct the depreciation of a property from their taxable income even if the money they used to buy the place was borrowed from a bank and the property is the only asset on the line for the loan. If they buy a building worth $50 million, putting $10 million down and borrowing the rest, they can still deduct $50 million from their personal taxes over time, even though they’ve put much less of their own money into the project.
Savings related to depreciation and similar write-offs are supposed to be temporary; when you sell the assets, you owe taxes not only on your profits from the sale, but on whatever depreciation you’ve taken on the property as well. In tax lingo, this is known as “depreciation recapture.”
But two big gifts in the tax code, working together, can allow real estate moguls to push off those taxes forever.
First, commercial real estate investors can avoid paying taxes on their gains by rolling sale proceeds into similar investments within six months. This provision of the tax code, called the “like-kind exchange,” goes back to the years following the end of World War I and used to apply to other kinds of property owners. Now it’s available only to real estate investors, a provision that’s expected to cost the U.S. Treasury $40 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. Real estate moguls can “swap till they drop,” as the industry saying has it.
Then, there are even more tax benefits that can be used when they do meet their demise — at least to benefit their heirs. For starters, all the gains in the value of the moguls’ properties are wiped out for tax purposes (a process known by the wonky phrase “step-up in basis”). The tax slate is similarly wiped clean when it comes to the depreciation write-offs that were taken on the properties. The heirs don’t have to pay depreciation recapture taxes.
Real estate heirs then get another quirky benefit: They can depreciate the same buildings all over again as if they’d just bought them, using the piggy bank of write-offs to shield their own income from taxes.
As for Ross, after filing his taxes for 2017, he still had a storehouse of tax losses that ProPublica estimates exceeded $440 million. It was entirely possible that he’d never pay federal income taxes again.
If you’re looking to get richer while telling the tax man you’re getting poorer, it’s hard to beat real estate development. But the oil and gas industry provides stiff competition.
Privileged as the lifeblood of the economy, the energy sector has long been lavished with tax breaks. Provisions dating to the 1910s allow drillers to immediately write off a large portion of their investments, essentially subsidizing oil and gas exploration.
One special gift from U.S. taxpayers to oil drillers is called depletion. The idea is grounded in common sense: As oil (or gas or coal) is taken out of the ground, there’s less left to collect later. That bit-by-bit depletion — analogous to depreciation — becomes a tax write-off. Each year, oil investors get to deduct a set percentage of the revenue from the property.
But investors can keep on deducting that set amount indefinitely, even after they’ve recouped their investment, a benefit that had its critics almost from the beginning. The idea was “based on no sound economic principle,” groused the Joint Committee on Taxation in 1926. Yet only in the 1970s was the depletion provision meaningfully curtailed, and then mainly for the largest oil producers. Congress left it in place for independent operators like wildcatters, long venerated as a cross between plucky entrepreneurs and cowboys.
Today the ranks of billionaires are filled with these independent operators. They get the best of both worlds: legacy tax breaks from the days when oil exploration was a crapshoot and current technology that makes the business much less speculative.
These tax breaks have long outlived their initial purpose of encouraging drilling, said Joseph Aldy, a professor of the practice of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Now “we’re just giving money to rich people.”
Billionaires in the industry collect enough deductions to dwarf even vast incomes. Of the 18 billionaires ProPublica previously identified as having received COVID-19 stimulus checks last year — they were eligible because their huge tax write-offs resulted in reported incomes that fell below the middle-class cutoffs for receiving payments — six made their fortunes in the oil and gas industry.
One was Trevor Rees-Jones, who rode the shale fracking boom to build a fortune of over $4 billion while shrinking his federal income taxes to nothing.
His tax returns show huge income, over a billion dollars in total from 2013 to 2018, but even more enormous deductions. In 2013, for instance, Rees-Jones’ company, Chief Oil & Gas, made a major move, acquiring 40 natural gas wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale for $500 million. Hundreds of millions in write-offs for that acquisition flowed to Rees-Jones’ taxes.
A spokesman for Rees-Jones declined to comment.
Another Texan, Kelcy Warren of the pipeline giant Energy Transfer, shows how the industry’s tax breaks, when blended with others that are more broadly available, can turn a wildly profitable company into a tax write-off for its owner, even as he reaps billions of dollars in income.
Warren, who co-founded Energy Transfer in the 1990s, is worth about $3.5 billion, according to Forbes. He built the company on a plan of aggressive expansion, through both acquisitions and building pipelines. “You must grow until you die,” he has said.
Warren’s aggressive strategy has allowed him to amass billions of dollars in income, only a small portion of which is taxed. (Representatives for Warren did not respond to requests for comment.)
Energy Transfer is publicly traded, but it’s structured as a special kind of partnership, called a master limited partnership. Only public companies in oil and gas, as well as a few other industries, can take this form.
Partnerships work differently than corporations. A corporation is a separate entity from its investors: The corporation pays taxes on its profits, and the investors pay taxes on the dividends they receive. By contrast, partnerships, including master limited partnerships, don’t generally pay taxes. Only the investors (the partners) pay taxes on their share of the partnership’s profits.
But when Energy Transfer sends regular cash distributions to its partners, these payments are, in most cases, considered a “return of capital” rather than a profit. They come tax free.
Warren’s stake in Energy Transfer — he is the primary general partner and holds hundreds of millions of units of the publicly traded limited partnership — has long entitled him to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in distributions every year, which have helped fund an outsize lifestyle. In addition to a 23,000-square-foot home in Dallas, which boasts a 200-seat theater, a bowling alley and a baseball field, he also has a fleet of private planes, an entire Honduran island, and an 11,000-acre ranch near Austin that has giraffes, javelinas and Asian oxen.
From 2010 to 2018, Warren was entitled to receive more than $1.5 billion in cash distributions, according to ProPublica’s analysis of company filings. During that time, Warren also disclosed an additional $500 million in income from other sources on his tax returns.
But in six of the nine years, he told the IRS he’d lost more money than he’d made. In four of them, he paid nothing.
Warren was able to wipe out his income tax liabilities because Energy Transfer provided him with huge deductions, not only from depletion and other tax breaks specific to oil and gas, but also from the way his company is allowed to account for depreciation.
After Energy Transfer builds a new pipeline, its value becomes an asset, one that will degrade over time, and thus produces depreciation deductions. All of that is standard. What’s unusual is that the tax code has long allowed Energy Transfer and its peers to treat the pipeline as if it lost more than half its value immediately. This “bonus depreciation” can wipe out billions in profits; indeed, in 2018, Energy Transfer reported $3.4 billion in profits in its annual public filing while simultaneously delivering big tax losses to its partners.
Lawmakers from both parties have supported bonus depreciation on the theory that the tax break, which is available across many industries, boosts spending on new equipment and juices the economy. But Trump and Republicans took the idea to its extreme in 2017 with two key changes that benefited aggressive companies like Energy Transfer in particular.
Under the new tax law, the “bonus” rose from 50% to 100%. In other words, for tax purposes, a shiny new pipeline becomes worthless upon completion. Second, the new law contained an even greater perk: It extended to the purchase of used equipment. This means that when a big company like Energy Transfer buys the assets of a smaller one, the value of all the smaller company’s equipment can be written off immediately.
Warren’s tax data reflects the benefits of this to individual owners. He entered 2018 already having built up an $82 million store of losses, and by the end of the year, he had increased it to over $130 million, ProPublica estimates.
Warren is a major Republican donor, having given $18 million to federal and state Republicans since 2015. Most of that went to supporting Trump, who was once an Energy Transfer investor.
Warren’s closeness to the Trump administration seemed to pay off. Days after taking office in 2017, Trump ordered the Army to reconsider a decision to block Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline, whose planned path under a reservoir and near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation had sparked strong opposition. Two weeks later, the pipeline was approved. Energy Transfer boasted record profits in the years that followed.
The company’s biggest quarter ever came last year. The reason? A $2.4 billion windfall from the worst winter storm to hit Texas in decades. Hundreds of Texans died. Utilities scrambled and prices for natural gas soared. San Antonio’s largest utility later accused Energy Transfer of “egregious” price gouging and sued to recoup some payments. The city’s mayor called Energy Transfer’s actions “the most massive wealth transfer in Texas history.” No company profited more, reported Bloomberg. (A spokesperson for Energy Transfer responded that the company had merely sold gas “at prevailing market prices.”)
It was a characteristic victory for Warren, who once said, “The most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.”
Nobody knows just how many of the ultrawealthy are able to completely wipe out their income tax bills using business losses. The IRS publishes all sorts of reports analyzing the traits of taxpayers at different income levels, but its analysis typically starts with people who report $0 or more in income, thus excluding anyone who reported negative income.
But while the scope of the problem isn’t known, policymakers are well aware of techniques taxpayers use to game the system. Congress periodically seeks to tighten tax loopholes (often when it has ambitious spending initiatives it needs to pay for). For his part, President Joe Biden put forward plans this spring that would have axed a variety of oil and gas tax breaks, including percentage depletion. Master limited partnerships, the corporate form that Energy Transfer uses, were on the chopping block. In real estate, the special like-kind exchange carve-out was slated for elimination. The plans would have killed even the step-up in basis, the crucial provision that enables titans in both industries to reap huge deductions without worrying about a future income tax bill.
But as in the past, lobbyists for these industries rallied to preserve their privileged status, and these proposals were dropped.
A novel reform proposal still survives. Recent versions of Biden’s Build Back Better plan have contained a provision that would prevent wealthy taxpayers from using outsize losses from their businesses to wipe out other income in the future.
However, even if this proposal makes it into law, older losses that predate the legislation would still have a privileged status, immune to the new limitations. The biggest losers, it appears, will once again emerge unscathed.
