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.
“The U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist said in a new interview.
In an interview published in TheWashington PostMagazine on Monday, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said it is “strange” that some consider U.S. President Joe Biden a climate leader even as his administration fails to take the ambitious steps necessary to tackle the intensifying planetary crisis.
When asked whether she is “inspired” by Biden or other world leaders, Thunberg pointed out that “the U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure” under the current administration.
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things.”
“Why is the U.S. doing that?” she asked. “It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency.”
“People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?'” added Thunberg, who helped spark a global, youth-led climate protest movement with a solo strike outside of the Swedish Parliament building in 2018. “And we say, first of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.”
“We are trying to find a solution of a crisis that we don’t understand,” she continued. “For example, in Sweden, we ignore—we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative.”
While Biden has touted his decision to bring the U.S. back into the Paris agreement, his pledge to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and other initiatives as a show of leadership in the face of an existential threat to humanity, his administration has also approved oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than former President Donald Trump’s did.
During Biden’s presidency, according to a report released earlier this month by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has approved an average of 333 oil and gas drilling permits per month this year alone—40% more than it did over the first three years of Trump’s White House tenure.
“When it comes to climate change policy, President Biden is saying the right things. But we need more than just promises,” Alan Zibel, the lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The reality is that in the battle between the oil industry and Biden, the industry is winning. Despite Biden’s campaign commitments to stop drilling on public lands and waters, the industry still has the upper hand. Without aggressive government action, the fossil fuel industry will continue creating enormous amounts of climate-destroying pollution exploiting lands owned by the public.”
Thunberg’s interview with the Post came at the end of a year that saw planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions quickly rebound to pre-pandemic levels as the U.S. and other major nations continued to burn fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
As Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research noted Tuesday, “2021 saw the second-biggest absolute increase in fossil CO2 emissions ever recorded.”
Despite the failure of world leaders to act with sufficient urgency as the climate crisis fuels devastating extreme weather events across the globe, Thunberg said she is “more hopeful now” than she was when she kicked off her lonely school strike in 2018.
“In one sense, we’re in a much worse place than we were then because the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher and the global emissions are still rising at almost record speed. And we have wasted several years of blah, blah, blah,” said Thunberg. “But then, on another note, we have seen what people can do when we actually come together.”
“I’ve met so many people who give me very much hope and just the possibility that we can actually change things,” she added. “That we can treat a crisis like a crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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
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Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
A jury has found all three men charged in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery guilty of murder. Arbery was a 25- year old Black man killed last year while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia, and the murder sparked a heated national debate.
Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and Willian Bryan Jr. had all been charged. All three men had pleaded not guilty and and faced charges in addition to murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
All men faced varying felony counts for Arbery’s murder. Gregory McMichael and Willian Bryan Jr. were found guilty on felony murder, while only Travis McMichael was found guilty on all charges, Travis being the man pulling the trigger.
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”
Fossil fuel executives who testified Thursday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing focused on decades of coordinated industry misinformation refused to pledge that their companies will stop lobbying against efforts to combat the climate emergency driven largely by their businesses.
That joint refusal came in response to a challenge from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—who at the end of the hearing announced subpoenas for documents the fossil fuel companies have failed to provide.
Earlier in the hearing, Maloney had asked if the Big Oil CEOs would affirm that their organizations “will no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change.”
Big Oil CEOs unanimously refuse to pledge to Congress to "no longer spend any money directly or indirectly to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change".
Advocates for climate action pointed to the moment as yet another example of major polluters impeding planet-saving policy.
“The silence, non-answers, and repeated deflections from Big Oil’s Slippery Six exposed once and for all that the fossil fuel industry won’t back off its commitment to spreading climate disinformation and lobbying against climate action in order to protect their bottom line,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.
“For the first time ever, fossil fuel executives were confronted under oath with the evidence of their industry’s decadeslong efforts to deceive the American people about climate change,” Wiles continued. “They not only refused to accept responsibility for lying about the catastrophic effects of their fossil fuels—they refused to stop funding efforts to spread disinformation and oppose climate action.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable,” he added. “Today’s hearing and the committee’s ongoing investigation are important steps in those efforts.”
The only real backdrop to today's hearing with Big Oil CEOS is: These companies knew all about climate change in the 1980s and chose to lie about it systematically for decades, which is why we're in our current hideous political fix.
Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, had threatened to subpoena the industry leaders—collectively dubbed the #SlipperySix—if they declined to join the hearing, entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action.”
The historic event included testimony from four industry executives—ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell Oil president Gretchen Watkins—and leaders from industry trade groups: American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark.
Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, warned that “lawmakers should be wary of testimony from executives who have consistently put their industry’s bottom line over the health of the climate and the American people, no matter their rhetoric.”
Yep. We are seeing the fossil fuel savior framework all over the place. We need them, we have always needed them, and we will always need them. https://t.co/SltC52FPoy
Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a pair of climate misinformation scholars at Harvard University, have warned of a “fossil fuel savior frame” that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.”
Both Oreskes and Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn observed the presence of such framing during the hearing. Henn said that “it’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage-takers: ‘You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.”
It’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage takers: “You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.” #SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/mT8bPZJu8j
The fossil fuel witnesses’ initial remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions were full of industry talking points. They advocated for “market-based solutions” like carbon taxes while failing to offer specifics. They also highlighted carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology and hydrogen—both of which progressive green groups have denounced as “false solutions”—as key to reaching a “lower-carbon future.”
FACT CHECK: Exxon's CEO just said the International Energy Agency says the world will continue relying on fossil fuels.
That is false.
Earlier this year, the IEA said: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
While suggesting a long-term need for oil and gas, the executives claimed to believe in anthropogenic climate change and said fossil fuel emissions “contribute” to global heating. Some critics called them out for using that term, rather than “cause” or “drive.”
First misleading ExxonMobil statement: GHG "can contribute to climate change." No, not "can contribute." They DRIVE climate change, and they come primarily from @exxonmobil 's primary product: oil and gas.https://t.co/BO6oAofbeA
Using the the word “contribute” rather than cause, saidHuffPost environment reporter Chris D’Angelo, “downplays/dismisses the science, which shows they are the primary driver… Frankly, it’s climate denial—the very topic of this hearing.”
After inquiring about how long all four executives had been in their current roles, the panel’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), asked whether they had ever signed off on a climate disinformation campaign. They all said no—which experts and activists promptly disputed.
While progressives on the panel grilled the executives, Republicans repeatedly apologized to the CEOs for Democrats’ supposed “intimidation” efforts. Blasting the GOP lawmakers’ actions as “pathetic,” Henn said that “they really do see themselves as servants to Big Oil.”
.@RepGarretGraves (R-$759,995 oil and gas) literally explains that his state of Louisiana is completely screwed by fossil-fueled global warming but he can't and won't do anything about it because oil & gas is so profitable. "Why would we stop?"#SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/uXzf23E3a9
— Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.NEWS (@climatebrad) October 28, 2021
The panel’s GOP members also tried to redirect attention to planet-heating activities of other countries, particularly China, and complained about President Joe Biden’s move to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, even inviting Neal Crabtree, a welder who lost his job when the project was canceled, to testify.
Republicans trotting out as a political prop a witness who supposedly lost his job due to climate policy, as if they or Big Oil ever cared about workers. Meanwhile real labor voices are speaking the truth, thank you @steelworkers: https://t.co/Fz0pk6q3wr
“The GOP’s strategy at this hearing is clear: It will not attempt to claim Big Oil *didn’t* mislead on climate,” tweeted climate reporter Emily Atkin of the HEATED newsletter. “Instead, the GOP is claiming Democrats are wasting time by focusing on climate change, and that it isn’t important to ‘everyday Americans.'”
Thanking Atkin for spotlighting the Republicans’ strategy, ClimateVoice noted that new polling shows the U.S. public does care about the issue. According to survey results released this week, a majority of Americans see climate as a problem of high importance to them and support Congress passing legislation to increase reliance on clean electricity sources.
Maloney, in her closing remarks Thursday, lamented that the hearing featured “much of the denial and deflection” seen in recent decades. She also called out the companies for not turning over requested documents, refusing to “take responsibility” for their contributions to the climate crisis, and continuing to fund groups like API. The chair vowed that her committee will continue its investigation.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation
Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.
The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.
The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.
The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.
That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.
When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.
Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.
“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.
As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.
Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.
“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”
Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.
“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”
Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.
More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.
The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.
On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.
In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.
But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.
From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
“No,” said Sen Bernie Sanders. “Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.”
Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a “giveaway of galactic proportions” in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands.”
According toDefense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year’s NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That’s $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump’s final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden. The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos’ Blue Origin space exploration company.
“Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.
STATEMENT on Blue Origin subsidy in #NDAA: “Until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects” –@sappelbaumhttps://t.co/LOppvCfXdcpic.twitter.com/t30afGKQzc
“Jeff Bezos shouldn’t receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,” he continued. “In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that’s already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris.”
“Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet,” Appelbaum said.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands,” he added. “Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects.”
No. Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in “corporate welfare” for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that “combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny.”
“Meanwhile,” he added, “the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right.”
Originally published in Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“We can either intensify the crisis to the point of no return, or lay the foundations for a just world where everyone’s needs are met.”
As diplomats from wealthy countries continue to say “blah, blah, blah” at COP26, over 100,000 people growing increasingly impatient with empty promises and inaction marched through Glasgow on Saturday, with thousands more hitting the streets in cities around the world during roughly 300 simultaneous demonstrations on a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.
“Many thousands of people took to the streets today on every continent demanding that governments move from climate inaction to climate justice,” Asad Rehman, a spokesperson for the COP26 Coalition, said in a statement. “We won’t tolerate warm words and long-term targets anymore, we want action now.”
Activists from all over the globe are mobilising to demand a future that works for all of us.
“Today, the people who have been locked out of this climate summit had their voices heard,” Rehman continued, “and those voices will be ringing in the ears of world leaders as we enter the second week of negotiations.”
Rehman added that “the climate crisis has resulted from our broken, unequal societies and economies. We must transform our global economies into ones that protect both people and our planet instead of profit for a few.”
Today, 100,000 activists marched to Glasgow Green to rally for #climatejustice and the system change necessary to achieve this.
The COP26 Coalition is a United Kingdom-based alliance of civil society groups and trade unions mobilizing around climate justice during the ongoing United Nations climate summit in Scotland. That’s where governments “will decide who is to be sacrificed, who will escape, and who will make a profit,” the coalition said. “We can either intensify the crisis to the point of no return, or lay the foundations for a just world where everyone’s needs are met.”
Saturday’s actions in every corner of the globe came one day before the start of the People’s Summit for Climate Justice, where ordinary individuals can “discuss, learn, and strategize for system change.” From Sunday through Wednesday, participants can attend workshops in Glasgow or join online events.
“Across the world, the poorest people and communities of color are too often those bearing the brunt of the climate crisis,” the coalition continued. “From coastal villages in Norfolk whose sea-defenses are eroding faster than ever, to people living by the Niger Delta rivers blackened by oil spillage.”
“Only we can imagine and build the future that works for all of us… through collective action, solidarity, and coordination.”
Global crises of economic exploitation, racial oppression, and environmental degradation “not only overlap,” the coalition added, “but share the same cause.”
“We got to this crisis point,” the coalition said, “because our political and economic system is built on inequality and injustice. For centuries, rich governments and corporations have been exploiting people and the planet for profit, no matter how much it harms the rest of us.”
The solution, said the coalition, is “system change that comes from the ground up.” Remedies that “not only reduce carbon emissions but create a fairer and more just world in the process… already exist and are being practiced, but our leaders lack the political will” to pursue “climate action based on justice, redistribution of resources, and decentralization of power.”
“Justice won’t be handed to us by world leaders or delivered by corporations,” the coalition added. “Only we can imagine and build the future that works for all of us… through collective action, solidarity, and coordination” in local communities and at the international level.
That message was echoed by COP26 Coalition member War on Want, a U.K.-based organization that fights the causes of poverty and defends human rights.
In a video arguing that the dominant political-economic order is not broken, but rather “rigged,” War on Want explains how the capitalist system “generates increasing wealth for the already rich and powerful at the expense of the majority of people on this Earth” and advocates for a Global Green New Deal to achieve climate justice.
“Billionaires, corporations, and oligarchs don’t measure failure in lives lost, houses flooded, communities destroyed, forests burned, or people locked into poverty,” the video continues. “They measure success by their bank balance, by share prices, and by holidays in space.”
“Where we see climate breakdown, poverty, and injustice, they see nothing but profit,” states the video. “The climate crisis is a crisis of justice.”
Echoing recent research highlighting the extent to which the Global North extracts resources from the Global South, War on Want notes that “from the shackles of slavery to the gunboats of colonialism, from imperialist interventions to the neoliberal rigging of the global economy,” wealthy countries, and especially the elites within them, have drained trillions of dollars from impoverished nations, and that is reflected in their disproportionate share of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.K., the United States, and the European Union, for instance, have been responsible for nearly half of the world’s carbon pollution, despite making up just 10% of its population.
“The multiple crises we face are not going to be solved with more exploitation of people and the planet, and cooking the books.”
Meanwhile, a new study shows that the world’s wealthiest countries and worst polluters are spending over twice as much on border militarization to exclude growing numbers of refugees as they are on decarbonization.
Despite repeated warnings that limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century requires keeping fossil fuels in the ground and ramping up the worldwide production of clean energy, U.S. President Joe Biden has been approving extraction on public lands and waters at a dangerous clip, and he and the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell have both pushed for boosting the supply of oil.
Globally, fossil fuel use is projected to increase this decade even as annual reductions in coal, oil, and gas production are necessary to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis.
The planet is currently on pace for a “catastrophic” 2.7°C of heating this century if countries—starting with the rich polluters most responsible for exacerbating extreme weather—fail to rapidly and drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions, accelerate the transition to renewable energy, and enact transformative changes.
Like Bolivian President Luis Arce, the COP26 Coalition stressed that “the multiple crises we face are not going to be solved with more exploitation of people and the planet, and cooking the books.”
“Current government and corporation targets of ‘Net Zero’ do not mean zero emissions,” the coalition explained. “Instead, they want to continue polluting while covering it up with crafty ‘carbon offsets.’ We need commitments and action to achieve Real Zero. That also means no new fossil fuel investments and infrastructure at home or abroad, and saying no to carbon markets, and banking on risky unproven technologies that allow countries and corporations to continue polluting.”
In addition, the coalition said, “climate action must be based on who has historically profited and those who have suffered.”
The alliance continued:
Indigenous peoples have been at the frontline of the root causes of climate change for centuries. Indigenous peoples, frontline communities, and the Global South cannot continue to pay the price for the climate crisis while the Global North profits.
Each country’s carbon emission reduction must be proportional to their fair share: how much they have contributed to the climate crisis through past emissions. We must cancel debts of Global South by all creditors and the rich countries must provide adequate grant-based climate finance for those on the frontline of the climate crisis to survive. We must address the loss of lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems already occurring across the world, through a collective commitment to providing reparations for the loss and damage in the Global South.
In its video, War on Want stresses that “poverty, the climate crisis, inequality, and racism aren’t accidental. They’re political.”
“The answer is people power,” the group adds. “All across the world—from peasants sowing solidarity, workers fighting for a living wage, people resisting occupation, Indigenous communities defending communal lands, to climate activists taking to the streets—we are all coming together to challenge the system, uproot injustice, and fight for people and our planet.”
Speaking at Saturday’s rally in Glasgow, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Marshall Islands Climate Envoy to the United Nations, said that “we need the biggest emitters to be held responsible. We need financing to implement the solutions we are currently developing ourselves through our national adaptation plan.”
“We contribute 0.00005% of the world’s global emissions,” Jetnil-Kijiner added. “We did nothing to contribute to this crisis, and we should not have to pay the consequences. We need to keep up the pressure [so] that COP26 doesn’t allow offsets or endanger human rights and the rights of Indigenous people.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
In wake of what she calls “failed” Cop26 in Glasgow, a fitting gesture of truth
In the video above the real story of NetZero by 2050 is told, without window dressing and in total honesty. Frustration with government responses to global warming are on the rise, as well they should be. The video is a light hearted and yet deadly serious take on the situation and how it is going to affect all of us who live on this planet.
Though delivered in the trademark style of TheJuiceMedia the facts that are contained in the colorful and grimly entertaining clip are 100% accurate. And that is why it is so important to watch, like and retweet.
It has always been the case, sadly, that no Government will take action against the carbon emitting and producing infrastructure that they are beholden to, until that action is demanded by million upon millions of world citizens, in other words the people that are being affected most by the negative effects of climate change that are already surrounding us.
The underlying plea of both activists like Greta and TheJuiceMedia is that we all have to step up and get loud – now, as the plan for NetZero 2050 is more of the same blah blah blah that Governments have been spewing for more than 30 years.
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
At a rally in Denver in 2017, he warned the crowd that Trump “might have something to hide.” That same year, on the floor of the House, he introduced a resolution to force the president to release the records, calling them an “important baseline disclosure.”
But during Polis’ successful run for governor of Colorado in 2018, his calls for transparency faded. The dot-com tycoon turned investor broke with recent precedent and refused to disclose his returns, blaming his Republican opponent, who wasn’t disclosing his.
Polis may have had other reasons for denying requests to release the records.
Despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, Polis paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2013, 2014 and 2015. From 2010 to 2018, his overall rate was just 8.2% — less than half of the 19% paid by a worker making $45,000 in 2018.
The revelations about Polis are contained in a trove of tax information obtained by ProPublica covering thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. The Colorado governor is one of several ultrarich politicians who, the data shows, have paid little or no federal income taxes in multiple years, exploited loopholes to dodge estate taxes or used their public offices to fight reforms that would increase their tax bills.
The records show that rich Democrats and Republicans alike have slashed their taxes using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents. Among them are governors, members of Congress and a cabinet secretary.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said the tax avoidance of these top politicians is “very, very worrisome” since both parties “spend like crazy” and depend on taxes to fund their priorities, from the military to Medicare to Social Security.
“They have the power to decide how much the rest of us pay and the power to spend the money, and then they’re not paying their fair share?” Painter said. “That should be troubling to voters, both conservative and liberal. It should be troubling for everyone.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, for example, is a Republican coal magnate who has made the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. Yet he’s paid very little or no federal income taxes for almost every year since 2000.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the richest people in Congress, was one of the few Republicans to break with his party during the 2017 tax overhaul to fight for a deduction that — unbeknownst to the public — helped him avoid millions in taxes.
And the tax records of Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, showed that both employed a loophole, which was accidentally created by Congress, to escape estate and gift taxes.
As ProPublica has revealed in a series of articles this year, these tactics, if sometimes aggressive, are completely legal. And they’re not universal among wealthy politicians. ProPublica reviewed tax data for a couple dozen wealthy current and former government officials. Their data shows that many of them paid relatively high tax rates while employing more modest use of the fairly standard deductions of the rich.
The politicians who paid little or exploited loopholes either defended their practices as completely proper or declined to comment.
“The Governor has paid every cent of taxes he owes, he has championed tax reform and tax fairness to fix this broken system for everybody, to report otherwise would be inaccurate,” Polis’ spokesperson wrote in an email.
During the late 1990s dot-com era, Polis earned a reputation as a boy wonder. He turned his parents’ small greeting card company into a website, bluemountain.com, which was among the first to enable users to send free virtual cards. He and his family sold the site in 1999 for $780 million.
With the windfall from the sale, Polis continued to start new ventures and invest, but he also began laying the groundwork for a career in politics. He landed in the governor’s office in 2019 when he was just 43.
One of his tools for raising his profile was philanthropy. His generous donations to charity became a theme of both his 2008 run for Congress and his 2018 run for Colorado’s highest office.
Philanthropy also helped keep his tax rate enviably low. In many years, the deductions he claimed for his charitable giving were large enough to wipe out half the income he would have owed taxes on. His giving allowed him, in essence, to take some of the money he would have paid into the public coffers and donate it instead to causes of his choosing.
But an examination of Polis’ philanthropy shows that while he has given to a wide variety of causes, some of his donations served to promote him, blurring the lines between charity and campaigning.
According to the tax filings of his charity, the Jared Polis Foundation, the organization spent more than $2 million from 2001 to 2008 on a semiannual mailer sent to “hundreds of thousands of households throughout Colorado” that was intended to build “on a foundation of familiarity with Jared Polis’ name and his support of public education.” It was one of the charity’s largest expenditures.
A 2005 edition of the mailer reviewed by ProPublica had the feel of a campaign ad. It was emblazoned with the title “Jared Polis Education Report,” included his name six times on the cover and featured photos of Polis, a former state board of education member, surrounded by smiling school children.
The newsletters were discontinued just as he was elected. Because the mailers did not explicitly advocate for his election, they would have been legally allowed as a charitable expenditure.
A decade later, when he ran for governor in a race that he personally poured more than $20 million into, Polis featured his philanthropy in his campaign. In one ad, he used testimonials from an employee and a graduate of a business training charity he founded for military veterans.
Polis’ spokesperson, Victoria Graham, defended the mailers, saying they were intended “to promote innovations and successful models in public education and to raise awareness for the challenges facing public education.” She also pointed to a range of other philanthropy Polis was involved in, from founding charter schools, which she noted were not named after him, to distributing computers to organizations in need.
“His philanthropy is not and has never been motivated by receiving a tax write-off, and to state otherwise is not only inaccurate but fabricating motives and intent and cynical in its view of charity,” Graham said.
While Polis’ charitable giving has helped keep the percentage of his income he pays in taxes low, he has also been able to keep his total taxable income relatively small by using another strategy common among the wealthy: investing in businesses that grow in value but produce minimal income.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s a basic principle of the U.S. tax system — one that typically benefits wealthy people who can afford not to take income. Investments only trigger income taxes when they produce “realized” gains, such as dividends from a stock holding, the sale of an asset or profits from a company. But an investment’s growth in value, while it makes its owner richer, is not taxable.
Polis acknowledged his use of the strategy in 2008 after he released tax information during his first run for Congress and faced criticism for paying so little in taxes. “I founded several high-growth companies, and we would manage those for growth rather than for profit,” he said. “When I make money, I pay taxes. When I don’t make money, I don’t.”
In one of the recent years Polis paid no income taxes, his losses were larger than his income. In two of the years, it was about a million dollars. From 2010 to 2018, when he paid an overall rate of just 8.2%, including payroll taxes, his income averaged $1.5 million.
During that period of low taxes and relatively low income, Polis’ estimated net worth rose sharply. Members of Congress only have to report the value of each of their assets in ranges, so assigning a precise number is impossible. But the nonprofit data site OpenSecrets, which makes estimates by taking the midpoint of the ranges, shows Polis’ wealth growing from $143 million in 2010 to $306 million in 2017, making him the third richest-member of the House at the time. (Graham said congressional disclosure forms are confusingly formatted, potentially causing certain assets to be counted more than once, “so these numbers are likely wildly off.” She did not provide alternative net worth figures.)
One of Polis’ primary vehicles for building his fortune, while avoiding taxable income, appears to have been a family office, Jovian Holdings. The board of directors included his father, sister and a rather surprising outsider: Arthur Laffer. The famed conservative economist’s Laffer Curve provided the Reagan administration with the intellectual basis for arguing that cutting taxes would increase tax revenue. (Polis’ sister is a ProPublica donor.)
The term family office has a mom-and-pop feel, but it is actually part of the infrastructure of protecting the fortunes of the ultrawealthy, from crafting investment and tax strategy to succession and estate planning to concierge services. Depending on how they’re organized, for instance as a business, their costs — the salaries of the staff, rent — can be deductible.
One of the executives at Polis’ family office, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a seasoned tax expert who specializes in “maximizing cost savings both operationally and with all taxing authorities.” She removed that detail around the time ProPublica approached Polis about his taxes.
Unlike ordinary investors, Polis was able to claim millions in deductions for some of the costs of his money management, specifically his family office, which contributed to lowering his tax burden. Ironically, the investment apparatus that helped Polis avoid taxable income became a tax break.
ProPublica discussed the scenario, without naming Polis, with Bob Lord, tax counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness. He said the public appears to be essentially subsidizing Polis’ investing while getting little in return. With a typical business, he said, you get the tax break but also relatively quickly make taxable income.
The costs of a family office are “being taken even though the income may be way out in the future. It’s just a giveaway,” Lord said. “What is the public getting from it? This really, really rich politician gets to shelter his income while his investments grow and doesn’t pay tax on it until he sells.”
Deferring paying taxes is a valuable perk. But the strategy, Lord said, may allow Polis an even more lucrative outcome. Now that Polis has made his fortune, he may be able to largely dodge the tax system forever. Should he die before selling his investments, his heirs would never owe income taxes on the growth.
Graham acknowledged that the tax system unfairly benefits the wealthy but said Polis is not purposely avoiding income that would result in taxes.
“The Governor has long championed tax reforms precisely because the income tax is inadequate and a mismatched way to tax most wealthy people who do not have a regular income but who make money in other ways and should be taxed,” she said. “Since 2006, Governor Polis has paid over $20 million in taxes on the money he earned on his gains and he has championed tax reforms that would lower the tax burden on middle-income earners and eliminate loopholes to ensure higher earners pay their share.”
ProPublica’s data shows that at least two federal officials have already taken steps to preserve their family fortunes for their heirs, exploiting loopholes that divert revenue from the federal government.
Scott, the Florida senator who ran one of the world’s largest health care companies, and DeVos, Trump’s education secretary and believed to be the richest member of his cabinet, have both stored assets in grantor retained annuity trusts — a form of trust used to avoid gift and estate taxes.
GRATs, as they’re commonly known, were accidentally created by Congress in 1990. Lawmakers were trying to close another estate tax loophole and in doing so unintentionally paved the way for another one. The lawyer who pioneered the trusts estimated in 2013 that they had cost the federal government about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
To use this tax-avoidance technique, you put an asset, like stocks or real estate, into a trust assigned to your heirs. The trust pays you back the starting value of the asset (plus some interest). If the original asset rises in value, the gains can go to your heirs tax-free.
GRATs have become widely used among the superrich. A ProPublica investigation found that more than half of the nation’s richest individuals have employed them and other trusts to avoid estate taxes.
It’s unclear from ProPublica’s data how much DeVos, 63, and Scott, 68, were able to transfer tax-free.
DeVos and her husband employed a GRAT from at least 2000 to 2003. DeVos’ father was a wealthy industrialist. Her husband was the president of Amway, a multilevel marketing company that focuses on health, beauty and home products. Her family is believed to be worth billions.
Her causes both before and during her time in government depended on tax dollars. As a donor and fundraiser for Republican causes, she pushed for charter schools and government subsidies to allow parents to send their kids to private schools. As education secretary, she pushed to send millions of federal dollars intended for public schools to private and religious schools instead.
Scott, one of the wealthiest senators, with a net worth likely in the hundreds of millions, used a GRAT for much longer, from at least 2001 through 2009. His tax data shows the assets in the trust — stakes of a private investment fund and family partnership he and his wife created — receiving millions in income.
When he was in the private sector, Scott benefited from federal programs like Medicare, which are funded by taxes. He built and ran Columbia/HCA, a massive chain of for-profit hospitals. After a fraud investigation became public, he resigned and the company paid $1.7 billion to settle allegations it overbilled government health programs. Scott has previously emphasized that he was never charged, though he acknowledged the company made mistakes.
Scott declined to comment. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for DeVos, said she “pays her taxes in full as required by law. Your ‘reporting’ is not only factually wrong but also doubles-down on the criminal actions that underpin ProPublica’s political campaign to prop up the Biden Administration’s failing agenda.”
California Congressman Darrell Issa was one of a handful of Republicans who bucked his party in 2017 and voted against Trump’s tax overhaul.
Issa said he opposed the legislation because it all but eliminated the deduction taxpayers could take on their federal returns for state and local taxes. That provision was particularly contentious in high tax blue states like California, but most Republicans from his state still fell in line. The other GOP congressman in the San Diego area, for example, voted yes.
Limiting the write-off, known as the SALT deduction, was one of the few progressive changes in the Trump tax law. The deduction had long disproportionately benefited the wealthiest because they pay the most in state and local taxes. According to one projection, if the cap were removed from the deduction, households with income in the top 1% would reap the most benefit, paying $31,000 less a year on average — amounting to more than half of the total taxes avoided through the write-off. The top 25% of households would average less than $3,000 in savings a year, and the savings drop precipitously from there, with most households deriving no benefit.
In interviews and public statements, Issa said in fighting to preserve the deduction, he was defending the interests of middle-class taxpayers. “I didn’t come to Washington to raise taxes on my constituents,” he said at the time, “and I do not plan to start today.”
It’s true that more than 40% of taxpayers in Issa’s former district, a relatively affluent swath of Southern California, were able to make at least some use of the deduction.
But the 68-year-old congressman, who made a fortune in the car alarm business, was in the top echelon of its beneficiaries. Between 2003 and 2017, his tax data shows, Issa generally paid a relatively high tax rate but was able to claim more than $51 million in write-offs thanks to the SALT deduction, an average of more than $3 million a year.
By contrast, households in his district that made between $100,000 and $200,000 and took the SALT deduction claimed an average of $14,843 in 2017.
Issa’s spokesman, Jonathan Wilcox, declined to say if the SALT deduction’s impact on the congressman’s taxes factored into his decision to advocate for it.
“So much stupid,” Wilcox said. “Be sure to write back if you ever do better than trolling for garbage.”
Gov. Jim Justice is believed to be the richest person in West Virginia, controlling vast reserves of valuable steelmaking coal and owning The Greenbrier luxury resort. He made an appearance in 2014 on the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Estimates of his net worth have ranged from the hundreds of millions to well over a billion.
Nonetheless, he’s paid little or no federal income taxes for almost every year between 2000 and 2018, ProPublica’s trove of tax records shows. In 12 of those years he paid nothing, and in all but two of those years, his rate didn’t exceed 4%.
His largest tax payment came in 2009, when his family sold off much of its mining holdings to a Russian company for more than half a billion dollars. That year, after deductions, his tax rate rose to a modest 13.4%.
In more recent years, Justice, 70, has reported tens of millions in losses each year. That not only helped him to minimize his federal income taxes, it also allowed him to apply those losses to his profits from previous years — and get refunds for the taxes he initially paid in those years.
Justice’s income was low enough in 2018 for his family to qualify for and receive a $2,400 coronavirus stimulus check, aid meant for low- and middle-income Americans.
The recent years of large losses reported on Justice’s tax returns have coincided with real signs of financial problems. The coal industry’s fortunes have rapidly declined. He’s been hounded for unpaid bills and loans. The Russian company that bought much of his coal empire sued him and got him to buy back the assets — at a much discounted price but attached to significant debt. Forbes knocked him off its wealth ranking, citing escalating battles with two major lenders over unpaid debt. Justice’s representatives have said he pays what he owes, and his business empire is in good shape.
But even before his empire began showing significant cracks, Justice was reporting losses or little income for a man so wealthy. From 1996 to 2008, Justice, who received a coal and farming fortune from his father, who died in 1993, either reported losses to the IRS or just a few hundred thousand dollars in income.
The disconnect could be explained by the generous deductions afforded to coal business owners.
For example, owners are allowed a depletion deduction, which allows them to take 10% of the revenue from coal they extract and write it off against their profit. This spin on depreciation can have outsized benefits because unlike normal depreciation — in which the write-offs are based on how much you paid for an asset — the write-off amount here faces no such limit, and can therefore exceed the initial investment. The deduction has been criticized by environmentalists and congressional Democrats as an overly generous giveaway.
Another benefit coal owners get is the ability to immediately expense much of their mine development costs on their taxes instead of being forced to stretch such deductions over a longer period of time. Justice has said that in the 15 years after his father’s death, he oversaw “a massive expansion of multiple businesses which included significant coal reserve expansion” — development that could have provided him with a significant stockpile of such write-offs. (ProPublica has previously reported on other generous write-offs. Sports team owners, for example, are allowed to deduct the value of their intangible assets — such as media deals and franchise rights — as wasting assets, even as they rise in value.)
Experts said this could explain how Justice could have reported negative income of $15 million in 2008, a year in which Mechel, the Russian company that subsequently bought much of his family’s coal empire, said that business alone produced about $94 million in EBITDA — a common measure of a business’ profitability before taxes and some other expenses.
Justice declined to answer a list of specific questions about his taxes. In a statement, his lawyer, Steve Ruby, said Justice “has paid millions upon millions of dollars in state and federal income taxes and has always followed the law. In many years, his businesses have suffered losses as the result of weak coal prices combined with substantial outlays to save jobs at local businesses that other companies were abandoning.
“When many other coal producers were filing for bankruptcy, the Justice companies persevered and refused to take the easy way out through a bankruptcy proceeding, a decision that contributed to those losses. Like any other taxpayer, Gov. Justice does not owe income taxes in years in which his income is negative,” the statement read.
Ruby confirmed that Justice received coronavirus stimulus checks but said he did not cash them.
Like Scott and DeVos, Justice has used GRATs to sidestep estate and gift taxes, his returns and court records suggest.
In 2008, the year before he sold much of his coal empire to the Russian company, two GRATs appeared on his returns for the first time. And when the Russian company sued Justice, it also sued him in his capacity as the trustee for those GRATs. Justice had placed at least some of the coal assets into the trusts before the sale, according to the lawsuit.
Ruby’s statement did not address Justice’s use of GRATs.
Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform.
Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources.
As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances of misinformation found on a social media platform leaves two key questions unanswered: How likely are users to encounter misinformation, and are certain users especially likely to be affected by misinformation? These questions are the denominator problem and the distribution problem.
The COVID-19 misinformation study, “Facebook’s Algorithm: a Major Threat to Public Health”, published by public interest advocacy group Avaaz in August 2020, reported that sources that frequently shared health misinformation — 82 websites and 42 Facebook pages — had an estimated total reach of 3.8 billion views in a year.
At first glance, that’s a stunningly large number. But it’s important to remember that this is the numerator. To understand what 3.8 billion views in a year means, you also have to calculate the denominator. The numerator is the part of a fraction above the line, which is divided by the part of the fraction below line, the denominator.
Getting some perspective
One possible denominator is 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook users, in which case, on average, every Facebook user has been exposed to at least one piece of information from these health misinformation sources. But these are 3.8 billion content views, not discrete users. How many pieces of information does the average Facebook user encounter in a year? Facebook does not disclose that information.
Without knowing the denominator, a numerator doesn’t tell you very much. The Conversation U.S., CC BY-ND
Market researchers estimate that Facebook users spend from 19 minutes a day to 38 minutes a day on the platform. If the 1.93 billion daily active users of Facebook see an average of 10 posts in their daily sessions – a very conservative estimate – the denominator for that 3.8 billion pieces of information per year is 7.044 trillion (1.93 billion daily users times 10 daily posts times 365 days in a year). This means roughly 0.05% of content on Facebook is posts by these suspect Facebook pages.
The 3.8 billion views figure encompasses all content published on these pages, including innocuous health content, so the proportion of Facebook posts that are health misinformation is smaller than one-twentieth of a percent.
Is it worrying that there’s enough misinformation on Facebook that everyone has likely encountered at least one instance? Or is it reassuring that 99.95% of what’s shared on Facebook is not from the sites Avaaz warns about? Neither.
Misinformation distribution
In addition to estimating a denominator, it’s also important to consider the distribution of this information. Is everyone on Facebook equally likely to encounter health misinformation? Or are people who identify as anti-vaccine or who seek out “alternative health” information more likely to encounter this type of misinformation?
Another social media study focusing on extremist content on YouTube offers a method for understanding the distribution of misinformation. Using browser data from 915 web users, an Anti-Defamation League team recruited a large, demographically diverse sample of U.S. web users and oversampled two groups: heavy users of YouTube, and individuals who showed strong negative racial or gender biases in a set of questions asked by the investigators. Oversampling is surveying a small subset of a population more than its proportion of the population to better record data about the subset.
The researchers found that 9.2% of participants viewed at least one video from an extremist channel, and 22.1% viewed at least one video from an alternative channel, during the months covered by the study. An important piece of context to note: A small group of people were responsible for most views of these videos. And more than 90% of views of extremist or “alternative” videos were by people who reported a high level of racial or gender resentment on the pre-study survey.
While roughly 1 in 10 people found extremist content on YouTube and 2 in 10 found content from right-wing provocateurs, most people who encountered such content “bounced off” it and went elsewhere. The group that found extremist content and sought more of it were people who presumably had an interest: people with strong racist and sexist attitudes.
The authors concluded that “consumption of this potentially harmful content is instead concentrated among Americans who are already high in racial resentment,” and that YouTube’s algorithms may reinforce this pattern. In other words, just knowing the fraction of users who encounter extreme content doesn’t tell you how many people are consuming it. For that, you need to know the distribution as well.
Superspreaders or whack-a-mole?
A widely publicized study from the anti-hate speech advocacy group Center for Countering Digital Hate titled Pandemic Profiteers showed that of 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups examined, 12 anti-vaccine celebrities were responsible for 70% of the content circulated in these groups, and the three most prominent were responsible for nearly half. But again, it’s critical to ask about denominators: How many anti-vaccine groups are hosted on Facebook? And what percent of Facebook users encounter the sort of information shared in these groups?
Without information about denominators and distribution, the study reveals something interesting about these 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups, but nothing about medical misinformation on Facebook as a whole.
These types of studies raise the question, “If researchers can find this content, why can’t the social media platforms identify it and remove it?” The Pandemic Profiteers study, which implies that Facebook could solve 70% of the medical misinformation problem by deleting only a dozen accounts, explicitly advocates for the deplatforming of these dealers of disinformation. However, I found that 10 of the 12 anti-vaccine influencers featured in the study have already been removed by Facebook.
Consider Del Bigtree, one of the three most prominent spreaders of vaccination disinformation on Facebook. The problem is not that Bigtree is recruiting new anti-vaccine followers on Facebook; it’s that Facebook users follow Bigtree on other websites and bring his content into their Facebook communities. It’s not 12 individuals and groups posting health misinformation online – it’s likely thousands of individual Facebook users sharing misinformation found elsewhere on the web, featuring these dozen people. It’s much harder to ban thousands of Facebook users than it is to ban 12 anti-vaccine celebrities.
This is why questions of denominator and distribution are critical to understanding misinformation online. Denominator and distribution allow researchers to ask how common or rare behaviors are online, and who engages in those behaviors. If millions of users are each encountering occasional bits of medical misinformation, warning labels might be an effective intervention. But if medical misinformation is consumed mostly by a smaller group that’s actively seeking out and sharing this content, those warning labels are most likely useless.
Trying to understand misinformation by counting it, without considering denominators or distribution, is what happens when good intentions collide with poor tools. No social media platform makes it possible for researchers to accurately calculate how prominent a particular piece of content is across its platform.
Facebook restricts most researchers to its Crowdtangle tool, which shares information about content engagement, but this is not the same as content views. Twitter explicitly prohibits researchers from calculating a denominator, either the number of Twitter users or the number of tweets shared in a day. YouTube makes it so difficult to find out how many videos are hosted on their service that Google routinely asks interview candidates to estimate the number of YouTube videos hosted to evaluate their quantitative skills.
As the societal impacts of social media become more prominent, pressure on the big tech platforms to release more data about their users and their content is likely to increase. If those companies respond by increasing the amount of information that researchers can access, look very closely: Will they let researchers study the denominator and the distribution of content online? And if not, are they afraid of what researchers will find?
Federal judge quashes Bezos’ lawsuit against NASA over SpaceX contract In the ongoing and ever escalating feud between worlds 1st & 2nd biggest billionaires things just got meme-ier Sad, bad loser Bezos turned to the courts when his dick-rocket compensation company was passed over for the 2.9 billion $ manned lunar lander contract that was awarded exclusively to Musk’s SpaceX.
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Tesla / Various Sources
Musk’s Twitter Feud with Bezos goes back to the early days of Blue Origin, when Musk dubbed the future penile manufacturer a “copy cat” and proceeded by lambasting his “blue balls” marketing campaign and then turning the focus to his full time career as a litigant in sour-grapes lawsuits…
The complaint was brought against NASA by Blue Origin via the government watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the decision, which NASA said was made for reasons of budget, was “anticompetitive”.
Let that sink in, Bezos, the man behind amazon’s well known and all pervasive anticompetitive marketplace practices, which are currently under siege by the FTC and multiple governments around the globe, feels that it’s “unfair” that his “rocket-looks-like-a-xxx” manufacturing company was not picked to get a multibillion dollar contract.
“Anticompetitive” is a concept not unfamiliar to the ex-Amazon CEO
Above: Screenshot of Reuters Article
A recent Reuters Special report outlined how a treasure trove of internal documents exposed a pattern that nails just what “anticompetitive” looks like: at Amazon.
Though accusations were denied by the company, Reuters research into the voluminous documentation revealed that ” the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results” when customers were shopping…”
Boo hoo? Musk, ever the master of meme generation, celebrated the news with a meme-tweet of Sly Stallone’s Judge Dredd with the caption “You have been Judged”. What Bezos will not be participating in is The Human Landing System program, a NASA initiative to design a lunar landing system that could return humans to the moon in 2024.
Finally: the whole package – and a convenient way to prove vaccination status
Now that the iOS 15.1 update is available for the general public featuring the ability to add your proof of vaccination status to the Health app and then create a vaccination ID card in Apple Wallet, it’s time to jump right in and make it happen
Many businesses, venues, restaurants, and more are requiring proof of vaccination for entry. For example California is the first state where proof of COVID vaccination or negative test is mandatory for indoor events over 1,000 people.
The new feature in iOS 15.1 is made possible by the support Smart Health Cards which are valid for California, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, Hawaii, and some Maryland counties, as do Walmart, Sam’s Club, and CVS Health.
Above: ID in iPhone Wallet
Therefore, using this system you would be able to to look up the information in state databases, if you are in any of the states listed above, but if you were vaccinated through at Walmart or CVS it will also be feasible retrieve your data from them to add your information to the Health and Wallet.
Once you have gone to the web site for your state, for example in California it would be found at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov where you can type in personal information such as name and date of birth to get access to your records and status.
Though iOS 15 already had the ability to download the information to your Health app, and you could do that since the official launch of iOS 15, the last step, adding an ID to your wallet from the health app has not been possible until the new upgrade to iOS 15.1.
The record is locked to your name and can only be used by you. There will be a QR code that you will first download to your health app on the iPhone, then, once it is in the health app there will be a prompt to allow you to “add to wallet”. By clicking that link, a vaccination ID card, with the QR code will be generated and added to your wallet. See video above for more detailed, step-by-step explanation.
iOS 15.1 is available under > General > software update in your phone’s Settings app starting today.
Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
Tap Done.
Once the ID is in the health app a button / prompt appears “add to wallet”.
Digital rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed Facebook’s announcement that it plans to jettison its facial recognition system, which critics contend is dangerous and often inaccurate technology abused by governments and corporations to violate people’s privacy and other rights.
“Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who last month called facial recognition technology “a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security,” commended the new Facebook policy.
“Facebook getting out of the face recognition business is a pivotal moment in the growing national discomfort with this technology,” he said. “Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
The social networking giant first introduced facial recognition software in late 2010 as a feature to help users identify and “tag” friends without the need to comb through photos. The company subsequently amassed one of the world’s largest digital photo archives, which was largely compiled through the system. Facebook says over one billion of those photos will be deleted, although the company will keep DeepFace, the advanced algorithm that powers the facial recognition system.
Facebook has announced they will be deleting over a billion face recognition templates as they shut down their entire face recognition system. This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology. https://t.co/0ErdCBhkCT
In a blog post, Jerome Presenti, the vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—the new name of Facebook’s parent company following a rebranding last week that was widely condemned as a ploy to distract from recent damning whistleblower revelations—described the policy change as “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history.”
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” he wrote.
Facial recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement, and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests.
Concerns over actual and potential misuse of facial recognition systems have prompted bans on the technology in over a dozen U.S. locales, beginning with San Francisco in 2019 and subsequently proliferating from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director at Fight for the Future, was among the online privacy campaigners who welcomed Facebook’s move. In a statement, she said that “facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that.”
"Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that," @caitlinseeley of @fightfortheftr told ABC News, "and even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous." https://t.co/XBZGfyE6mp
— Evan Greer is on Mastodon and Bluesky (@evan_greer) November 2, 2021
Seeley George continued:
From misidentifying Black and Brown people (which has already led to wrongful arrests) to making it impossible to move through our lives without being constantly surveilled, we cannot trust governments, law enforcement, or private companies with this kind of invasive surveillance.
“Even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous,” she argued. “This technology will enable authoritarian governments to target and crack down on religious minorities and political dissent; it will automate the funneling of people into prisons without making us safer; it will create new tools for stalking, abuse, and identity theft.”
Seeley George says the “only logical action” for lawmakers and companies to take is banning facial recognition.
So Facebook is deleting one billion facial recognition scans, but it's keeping DeepFace, the model that is trained on all those faces. Note that "the company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition into future products." Very meta. 👀 https://t.co/8ntPg5Hyf9
Amid applause for the company’s announcement, some critics took exception to Facebook’s retention of DeepFace, as well as its consideration of “potential future applications” for facial recognition technology.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Finally: the whole package – and a convenient way to prove vaccination status
Now that the iOS 15.1 update is available for the general public featuring the ability to add your proof of vaccination status to the Health app and then create a vaccination ID card in Apple Wallet.
Many businesses, venues, restaurants, and more are requiring proof of vaccination for entry. For example California is the first state where proof of COVID vaccination or negative test for indoor events over 1,000 people.
The new feature in iOS 15.1 is made possible by the support Smart Health Cards which are valid for California, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, Hawaii, and some Maryland counties, as do Walmart, Sam’s Club, and CVS Health.
Above: ID in iPhone Wallet
Therefore, using this system you would be able to to look up their information in state databases, if you are in any of the states listed above, but if you were vaccinated through at Walmart or CVS it will also be feasible to add your information to the Health and Wallet.
Once you have gone to the web site for your state, for example in California it would be found at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov where you can type in personal information such as name and date of birth to get access to your records and status.
Though iOS 15 already had the ability to download the information to your Health app, and you could do that since the official launch of iOS 15, the last step, adding an ID to your wallet from the health app has not been possible until the new upgrade to iOS 15.1.
The record is locked to your name and can only be used by you. There will be a QR code that you will first download to your health app on the iPhone, then, once it is in the health app there will be a prompt to allow you to “add to wallet”. By clicking that link a vaccination ID car, with the QR code will be generated and added to your wallet.
iOS 15.1 is available under > General > software update in your phone’s Settings app starting today.
Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
Tap Done.
Once the ID is in the health app a button / prompt appears “add to wallet”.
“Changing their name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate.”
Tech ethicists and branding professionals on Thursday said consumers should not be hoodwinked by Facebook’s name change, which numerous observers compared to earlier efforts by tobacco and fossil fuel companies to distract attention from their societal harms.
“Don’t be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook’s PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms.”
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Meta rechristening during Facebook Connect, the company’s annual virtual and augmented reality conference, explaining that “we are a company that builds technology to connect people and the metaverse is the next frontier, just like social networking was when we got started.”
“Some of you might be wondering why we’re doing this right now,” he added. “The answer is that I believe that we’re put on this Earth to create. I believe that technology can make our lives better.”
Many critics found Zuckerberg’s explanation unconvincing at best and, at worst, disingenuous.
“Changing their name doesn’t change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world’s leading peddler of disinformation and hate,” the watchdog group Real Facebook Oversight Board said in a statement. “Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation, and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable.”
Us: Please stop destroying society
Facebook: Okay what if you just call us Meta now 😉
Vahid Razavi, founder of the advocacy group Ethics in Tech, told Common Dreams: “Don’t be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook’s PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms” over the negative press from recent whistleblower revelations.
Former Facebook employees-turned whistleblowers say the company’s profit-seeking algorithms—and its executives who know their insidious impacts—are responsible for the mass dissemination of harmful content, including hate speech and political, climate, and Covid-19 misinformation.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Antisocial Media, told Time that “the Facebook of today has never been the end game for Zuckerberg.”
“He’s always wanted his company to be the operating system of our lives that can socially engineer how we live and what we know,” Vaidhyanathan continued, adding that the new name is “not going to change his vision for his company—he’s never let anybody on the outside change his mind.”
Zuckerberg, he said, “wants to take the dynamic of algorithmic guidance out of our phones and off of our computers and build that system into our lives and our consciousness, so our eyeglasses become our screens, and our hands become the mouse.”
Some observers compared Facebook’s attempt to rebrand itself to what they called similar efforts by Big Tobacco and fossil fuel corporations.
“It didn’t do anything,” Laurel Sutton, co-founder of the branding agency Catchword, toldTime. “People still knew that Altria was Philip Morris and they didn’t rehabilitate their reputation simply because they changed the name.”
“There’s no name that’s going to rehabilitate the behavior that they’ve displayed so far,” Sutton said of the social media giant. “Maybe put that time and energy into rehabilitating their morals and ethics and business decisions rather than just trying to slap a new name on something.”
Originally published on Creative Commons by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Facebook Inc. has rebranded itself, now, as Meta, most likely as a means to separate the corporate identity of the social network that has been tied to a myriad of ugly controversies. The name change is meant to highlight the company’s shift to virtual reality and the metaverse.
CEO Zuckerberg spoke at the Facebook’s Connect virtual conference and commented on the name change, “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The new name change does not affect the company’s share data or corporate structure, however the company will start trading under the new ticker, MVRS starting December 1.
Needless to say, Twitter comments and memes instantly rolled in after the rebrand announcement:
Facebook has named itself Meta, a word that means "please forget about all the leaked internal documents that are currently showing all the horrors of social media"
According to the SEC, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had material nonpublic information about coronavirus impact. He and his brother-in-law dumped stock before the market dropped in March 2020.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
They talked for 50 seconds.
Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.
The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
ProPublica previously reported that Fauth, a member of the National Mediation Board, had dumped stock the same day Burr did. But it was previously unknown that Burr and Fauth spoke that day, and that their contact came just before Fauth began the process of dumping stock himself.
The revelations come as part of an effort by the SEC to force Fauth to comply with a subpoena that the agency said he has stonewalled for more than a year, and which was filed not long after ProPublica’s story.
In the filings, the SEC also revealed that there is an ongoing insider trading investigation into both Burr and Fauth’s trades.
It had previously been reported that federal prosecutors had decided not to charge Burr.
Burr’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions. Fauth’s lawyer and the SEC did not respond to questions. Fauth hung up on a ProPublica reporter.
According to the SEC, Fauth has cited a medical condition for why he cannot comply with the subpoena, even as he has been healthy enough to continue his duties at the National Mediation Board. In its filings, the SEC accuses Fauth of engaging in “a relentless battle” to dodge the subpoena.
In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. President Joe Biden reappointed him to the board.
On the day he received the call from Burr, Fauth sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that were hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn. According to the SEC, the first broker he called after hearing from Burr was out of the office, so he immediately called another broker to execute the trades.
In its filings, the SEC also alleges, for the first time, that Burr had material nonpublic information about the economic impact of the coming coronavirus crisis, based on his role at the time as chairman of the intelligence committee, as a member of the health committee and through former staffers who were directing key aspects of the government response to the virus.
The week after the trades, the market began its crash, falling by more than 30% in the subsequent month.
Burr came under scrutiny after ProPublica reported that he sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market tanked, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. The precise amount of his stock sales, more than $1.6 million, is also a new detail from this week’s SEC filings. In his roles on the intelligence and health committees, Burr had access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security and public health concerns.
Before his sell-off, Burr had assured the public that the federal government was well prepared to handle the virus. In a Feb. 7 op-ed that he co-authored with another senator, he said “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.”
That month, however, according to a recording obtained by NPR, Burr had given a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus, warning it could curtail business travel, cause schools to be closed and result in the military mobilizing to compensate for overwhelmed hospitals.
Burr defended his actions, saying he relied solely on public information, including CNBC reports, to inform his trades and did not rely on information he obtained as a senator.
Alice Fisher, Burr’s attorney, told ProPublica at the time that “Sen. Burr participated in the stock market based on public information and he did not coordinate his decision to trade on Feb. 13 with Mr. Fauth.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
