Tag Archives: Breaking News

Climate Solutions, News, Observation

Latest UN Climate Report Delivers ‘Another Thundering Wake-Up Call’

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem,” said the UNEP executive director. “The clock is ticking loudly.”

Countries’ current climate pledges put the world “on track for a catastrophic global temperature rise” of about 2.7°C, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Tuesday, calling a new report released ahead of a key summit “another thundering wake-up call.”

“The era of half-measures and hollow promises must end.”

The Emissions Gap Report 2021, an annual assessment from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), comes as world leaders prepare to meet in Glasgow, Scotland on Sunday for COP 26. They are set to discuss efforts to meet the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise this century “well below” 2°C, preferably limiting it to 1.5°C.

However, countries’ latest Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), along with other commitments made for 2030, suggest the international community will blow past both of those targets without more ambitious action to slash emissions, according to the UNEP report.

“The emissions gap is the result of a leadership gap,” Guterres declared in his Tuesday address, noting that the report “shows that countries are squandering a massive opportunity to invest Covid-19 fiscal and recovery resources in sustainable, cost-saving, planet-saving ways.”

“Scientists are clear on the facts. Now leaders need to be just as clear in their actions,” he said. “They need to come to Glasgow with bold, time-bound, front-loaded plans to reach net-zero.”

“To decarbonize every sector—from power, to transport, farming, and forestry. To phase out coal,” the U.N. chief continued. “To end subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. To put a price on carbon, and to channel that back to creating green jobs. And obviously, to provide at least $100 billion each year to the developing world for climate finance.”

“Leaders can still make this a turning point to a greener future instead of a tipping point to climate catastrophe,” said Guterres. “The era of half-measures and hollow promises must end.”

Various assessments released before the summit in Scotland have underscored the necessity of bold and immediate action, including the latestfrom the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the World Meteorological Organization’s announcement Monday that carbon dioxide concentrations in 2020 hit levels not seen for roughly three million years.

Reflecting “a world of climate promises not yet delivered,” the new UNEP report also serves as a call to action, particularly for rich nations most responsible for the climate emergency.

The report details how parties to the Paris agreement have put forth “insufficient” climate plans. The NDCs for 2030, if continued throughout this century, would still lead to a global temperature rise of 2.7°C beyond pre-industrial levels. Achieving nations’ net-zero pledges “would improve the situation, limiting warming to about 2.2°C” by 2100.

However, Group of 20 (G20) nations—the world’s top economies—”do not have policies in place to achieve even the NDCs,” the report says, and making changes to meet the 2030 commitments would not be enough to put countries on a “clear path towards net-zero.”

Meanwhile, this year “thousands of people have been killed or displaced and economic losses are measured in the trillions,” the report highlights, pointing to “extreme weather events around the world—including flooding, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves.”

As Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, put it: “Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem.”

“To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them and ultimately deliver the cuts,” Andersen said. “The clock is ticking loudly.”

“The world has to wake up to the imminent peril we face as a species,” she added, calling on countries to urgently implement policies to meet existing commitments. “It is also essential to deliver financial and technological support to developing nations—so that they can both adapt to the impacts of climate change already here and set out on a low-emissions growth path.”

The report factors in new or updated NDCs from 121 parties, responsible for just over half of planet-heating emissions, submitted by the end of September as well as pledges from China, Japan, and South Korea—though countries continue to put forward plans in the lead-up to the summit.

Alok Sharma, incoming COP 26 president, noted Tuesday that previous analyses projected “commitments made in Paris would have capped the rise in temperature to below 4°C.”

“So there has been progress, but not enough,” he said, referencing the new report. “That is why we especially need the biggest emitters, the G20 nations, to come forward with stronger commitments to 2030 if we are to keep 1.5°C in reach over this critical decade.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

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Apple, iOS 15, iPhone, iPhone 13 Pro, OS Software

Put Proof of Vaccination ID into your Wallet with iOS 15.1 Upgrade

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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.

  1. Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
  2. Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
  3. Tap Done.

Once the ID is in the health app a button / prompt appears “add to wallet”.

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Breaking News, News, Observation, Politics

Any Lawmaker Involved in Planning Jan. 6 Insurrection ‘Must Be Expelled,’ Says AOC

Organizers of the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol say that several congressional Republicans and White House officials helped plan former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt.

In response to new reporting that several congressional Republicans and White House officials were “intimately involved” in planning the January 6 Capitol attack—part of former President Donald Trump’s far-reaching election subversion plot—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night demanded the expulsion of any lawmaker who aided and abetted the violent assault on U.S. democracy.

“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capitol must be expelled,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) tweeted in response to the Rolling Stone report that her “resolution to investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol,” House Resolution 25, “is just waiting for a vote.”

On Sunday night, the magazine detailed “explosive allegations” about the January 6 riot, wherein a right-wing mob fueled by Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen stormed the halls of Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Amid an ongoing probe led by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Rolling Stone has spoken with two unnamed individuals who were “involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse,” and who are cooperating with the panel’s investigators. According to the magazine:

These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.

Among other things, the magazine reported that prior to January 6:

  • The two sources say they engaged in “dozens” of planning conversations, in which Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) participated or “had top staffers join”;
  • The two sources say they “interacted with members of Trump’s team.” That includes former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence,” as well as Katrina Pierson, a former member of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns whom one organizer called “our go-to girl” and “our primary advocate”;
  • Gosar, “who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters,” allegedly “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.”

Both organizers received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar, one source told Rolling Stone.

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” said the source, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval… in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”

“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.

The magazine has separately obtained documentary evidence that on January 6, both organizers were in contact with Boebert and Gosar, whose office is being investigated by the House select committee.

In addition, Rolling Stone reported, “both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, ‘Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.’ Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the ‘Wild Protest,’ which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.”

One of the leading organizers of the latter event was Ali Alexander, leader of Stop the Steal, a key group promoting efforts to challenge Biden’s victory. In a since-deleted livestream broadcast, Alexander said that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped develop the strategy for the so-called “Wild Protest.”

At a December 2020 Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, Alexander called Gosar, one of the main speakers, “my captain,” and he also heaped praise on Biggs, describing him as “one of the other heroes.”

Both sources maintain that ahead of January 6, “the plan they had discussed with other organizers, Trump allies, and members of Congress was a rally that would solely take place at the Ellipse, where speakers—including the former president—would present ‘evidence’ about issues with the election. This demonstration would take place in conjunction with objections that were being made by Trump allies during the certification on the House floor that day,” Rolling Stonereported.

During his speech at the Ellipse, however, Trump encouraged his supporters to make their way to the Capitol, and before he had finished talking, the barricades were being stormed.

According to the two organizers, Alexander had agreed to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol, but when it appeared that the event may materialize, Meadows—one of four Trump allies subpoenaed by the House select committee—was made aware of concerns about the potential for violence.

Although there were earlier indications that the Trump administration and members of Congress “played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day,” Rolling Stone noted, “the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts.”

“The sources plan to share that information with congressional investigators right away,” according to the magazine. “While both sources say their communications with the House’s Jan. 6 committee thus far have been informal, they are expecting to testify publicly.”

Just hours after the violent right-wing attack they helped foment through baseless allegations of voter fraud was contained, 147 GOP lawmakers—including more than two-thirds of House Republicans plus several Senate Republicans—voted in the early morning of January 7 to overturn election results in key states, attempting to disenfranchise millions of voters in the process.

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Sunday urged people to “never forget” Trump’s failed coup attempt.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, warned that “a failed coup is a trial run for a successful coup.”

“Instead of just a person who makes a disorganized attempt,” said the expert on authoritarianism, “we now have that person, plus institutional machinery, time to plan, and the Big Lie.”

Since last year’s election, GOP lawmakers at the state level have weaponized lies about electoral fraud to legitimize anti-democratic electoral review mechanisms and a nationwide campaign of voter suppression, prompting University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. to declare in a recent essay that maintaining Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress is necessary to prevent 2022 or 2024 from marking “the end of the proceduralist democracy to which we’ve been accustomed.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Profits Before People: ‘The Facebook Papers’ Expose Tech Giant Greed

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”

Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.

“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”

The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.

According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Post concluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.

From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:

The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.

These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.

One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.

CNN warned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.

On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”

“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”

While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”

“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”

With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.

Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.

While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.

“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”

“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”

Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.

Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Hot-Lynx

Rolling Stone: Jan. 6 Protest Organizers Say They Participated in ‘Dozens’ of Planning Meetings With Members of Congress and White House Staff

Above: Collage by Lynxotic, from photos by various sources

Stunning allegations as revealed to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office…

The Jan. 6th congressional investigations are beginning to yield more explosive results, according to statements made by some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies, who have communicated with house investigators and have shared new details about the Jan. 6 attacks and what took place when the Trump supporting crowds stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Rolling Stone reports that two of the planners spoke with them extensively in recent weeks and that “explosive allegations” were detailed, stating that multiple members of Congress were “intimately involved” in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss, as well as the violent events at the U.S. Captol on January 6th.

“Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses.”

Read More at:

Rolling Stone

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Apple, Entertainment, M1 Max, MacBook Pro

Apple Unleashes the Beasts with M1 Pro and M1 Max Powered Laptops

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Photo / Video Still / Apple

If you can grub up the cash you will want these insanely great machines

Better sell some Crypto, perhaps all your Shiba and Dogecoin, cause the beasts are loose, beefy and pricy.

In the scheduled “unleashed” event today, broadcast virtually from Cupertino, Tim, Craig and the gang managed to surprise, not with the fully expected hardware items unveiled, but with the specs and otherworldly power of what they so aptly dubbed the Beasts.

The event was billed as being about music and creativity, and yes there were new AirPods and HomePod Minis, but without any doubt it was the incredible mac upgrades, in the form of 14” and 16” MacBook Pros that stole the show.

The format was no different than previous recent virtual events, but the details that exposed the extent and depth of the technological leap forward blew the format off it’s own hinges.

Although every spec was touted, from the screen upgrades, to endless new ports, to upgraded battery life, still the focus and excitement returned, again and again, to the Beasts: the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and the system architecture built for them.

The animal analogy is no flight of zoological fantasy, with, at the high end, the M1 Max having 6x the speed and power of the current M1 – which already blew away reviewers and users with it’s own shocking ability to best what came before.

photo credit / apple

The party is on, but without a doubt, it is also exclusive

There are only two “downside” caveats, both kind of interrelated reverse compliments: There was no Mac Mini announcement, which is extremely sad for the great unwashed (like me!) and the prices are almost more beastly than the machines themselves.

A fully Maxxed out 16” MacBook Pro comes in at a hefty $6099, though that is with 8TB of SSD storage and 64GB of unified memory). Even a more modest configuration, dropping the SSD storage down to 4TB, while retaining the exalted 64GB unified, the toll is still $4299.

These are no everyday machines, but truly in the realm of Pro, in both specs and financial exclusivity.

And, hey, Apple has been here before, so an M1 Max based Mac Mini is likely to be delayed, if for no other reason, than to make sure that as many Pro users drop in for the whole mobile package – rather than building a budget system with money saved on 3rd party monitors and other practical cost cutting tricks.

All in all there’s an excitement in Today’s unleashing that slams into the core of any creative professional’s very being. Beastly power is tantalizingly within reach, all for a mere four to six thousand dollars… Or 1/10th of a BitCoin.

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Climate Solutions, News, Politics

In World First, New Zealand Law Will Force Banks to Disclose Climate Impacts of Investments

Above: Photo / Unsplash

“This is a landmark day.”

New Zealand officials on Thursday heralded passage of a groundbreaking law requiring financial institutions to disclose climate-related risks.

“This is a landmark day,” Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark said in a speech to Parliament.

At issue is the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, which had its third reading Thursday.

A summary of the measure from the Business Ministry touts the bill as a step toward making the country’s “financial system more resilient” and reaching New Zealand’s goal of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. According to the ministry, the goals of the bill are to:

  • ensure that the effects of climate change are routinely considered in business, investment, lending, and insurance underwriting decisions;
  • help climate reporting entities better demonstrate responsibility and foresight in their consideration of climate issues; and
  • lead to more efficient allocation of capital, and help smooth the transition to a more sustainable, low emissions economy.

A joint statement Thursday from Clark and Climate Change Minister James Shaw frames the bill, which will require the annual disclosures starting in 2023, as the first of its kind across the globe.

“This bill will require around 200 of the largest financial market participants in New Zealand to disclose clear, comparable, and consistent information about the risks, and opportunities, climate change presents to their business,” Clark said in the statement. “In doing so, it will promote business certainty, raise expectations, accelerate progress and create a level playing field.”

Shaw, for his part, said the measure would “encourage entities to become more sustainable by factoring the short, medium, and long-term effects of climate change into their business decisions.”

“New Zealand is a world-leader in this area and the first country in the world to introduce mandatory climate-related reporting for the financial sector,” added Shaw. “We have an opportunity to pave the way for other countries to make climate-related disclosures mandatory.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Business, Coronavirus, News, Observation, Politics

Jobs Report Confirms Ending Unemployment Aid for 8 Million People Was a ‘Complete Disaster’

Image by Tayeb MEZAHDIA from Pixabay

The latest federal data, said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, should put “an end to the false myth that unemployment insurance benefits keep people from working.”

Republican lawmakers argued, and many of their Democratic counterparts accepted, that slashing federal jobless aid would lead to robust growth in employment. However, data released Friday shows that while eight million people were booted from expanded unemployment insurance programs last month, employers added just 194,000 jobs—the weakest monthly increase this year.

“194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September.”

“I hope this puts an end to the false myth that UI benefits keep people from working,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). “They don’t.”

“We can’t build back better by adopting GOP talking points and putting them into policy,” she added. “This was the wrong call a month ago and it’s the wrong call today.”

According to the right-wing theory, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) benefits introduced in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis were keeping people from taking jobs, so removing a key source of income from millions of people would force them to return to the labor market in droves.

This “starve people back to work” strategy, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the UI cuts, “did not work to say the least,” said policy analyst Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.

The September jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Bruenig noted in a Friday blog post, showed “the worst month of job growth since [Joe] Biden became president and the second-worst since May of last year when the pandemic labor market recovery began.”

Citing the BLS data, Bruenig wrote that “194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September. At this rate, it would take 3.5 years for jobs added to equal the number of people who lost their pandemic UI benefits.”

“The management of UI in the last six months,” he stressed, “has been a complete disaster.”

Last month’s nationwide assault on unemployed workers was preceded by state-level attacks on jobless benefits. Over the summer, 26 states—all but Louisiana led by Republican governors—prematurely ended federally expanded UI programs in a coercive bid to boost employment.

In a sign of things to come, the right-wing plan failed then as well. August job growth, Bruenig pointed out in an earlier blog post, was more than twice as fast in states that retained unemployment benefits.

Despite mounting evidence against cuts, the Democratic-controlled federal government refused to intervene to preservepandemic-era UI before it expired on September 6, although Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently unveiled a bill to extend the benefits until next February.

Echoing Bruenig and Tlaib, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Friday said that “back in June I led my colleagues sounding the alarm on Republican governors terminating unemployment aid early. We feared their cruelty would hurt job growth and sadly our fears were right.”

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Friday attributed September’s weak job growth to the impact of the ultra-contagious Delta variant and encouraged widespread vaccination to support economic recovery amid the ongoing pandemic.

Experts at the progressive think tank also urged policymakers to pursue changes that would permanently increase the bargaining power of workers.

“This is yet another sign that the strong wage growth we have seen in some industries this year is not a permanent shift in worker bargaining power, but a temporary result of the (very) unique circumstances of this recovery,” tweeted EPI president Heidi Shierholz. “For sustained strong job growth for working people, we need things like the PRO Act, minimum wage increases, etc.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics

The Trump Administration Used Its Food Aid Program for Political Gain, Congressional Investigators Find

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

The Food to Families program, touted by Ivanka Trump, gave tens of millions of dollars to unqualified firms and was also used to promote then-President Trump.

A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found.

As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released its report last week, found that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not adequately screen contractor applications or identify red flags in bid proposals.

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One company that received a $39 million contract was CRE8AD8 LLC (pronounced “Create a Date”), a wedding and event planning firm. The owner compared the contract to his usual work of “putting tchotchkes in a bag.”

In response to the report, the firm’s CEO said in a statement, “We delivered far more boxes/pounds than many other contractors and as a for-profit company, we’re allowed to make a profit.”

The congressional report also highlighted the application of an avocado grower who was initially awarded a $40 million contract before it was canceled after a review. Under the section of the application that required applicants to list references, the farmer wrote, “I don’t have any.”

The Food to Families program was created by the Department of Agriculture in the early days of the pandemic to give away produce that might have otherwise gone to waste as a result of disruptions in distribution chains. The boxes included produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats — and many also included a signed letter from then-President Trump.

The program was unveiled in May 2020 by Ivanka Trump. “I’m not shy about asking people to step up to the plate,” the president’s older daughter said in an interview to promote the initiative.

According to congressional investigators, Ivanka Trump was involved in getting the letter from her father added to the boxes. The USDA told contractors that including the letter was mandatory. Food bank operators told the investigators the letter concerned them because it didn’t appear to be politically neutral.

On the first day of the Republican National Convention in August 2020, President Trump and his daughter headlined a nearby event to announce an additional $1 billion for the food box program. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to reelect the president.

A federal ethics office later found that Perdue’s speech violated a federal law that prohibits officials from using their office for campaign purposes. The USDA at the time disputed the notion that Perdue was electioneering, saying that Perdue’s comments merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people.’”

The yearlong congressional investigation also identified problems with the deliveries themselves, including food safety issues, failed deliveries and uneven food distribution. Some contractors also forced recipient organizations to accept more food than they could distribute or store.

Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a statement that the mismanagement of the program is another example of the previous administration’s failures.

“The Program was marred by a structure that prioritized industry over families, by contracting practices that prioritized cutting corners over competence, and by decisions that prioritized politics over the public good,” he said.

ProPublica also found that the Trump administration hired a lobbyist to counter the criticism that contracts were going to unqualified contractors.

President Joe Biden ended the program in May.

Representatives of the former president did not respond to a request for comment.

Originally published on ProPublica by Bianca Fortis and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Business, Coronavirus, News, Observation

Exposed: How Pfizer Exploits Secretive Vaccine Contracts to Strong-Arm Governments

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“Pfizer has used its monopoly on a lifesaving vaccine to extract concessions from desperate governments,” said the report’s author, urging action from the Biden administration.

Pfizer has used its position as a producer of one of the leading Covid-19 vaccines to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk, and maximize profits” through secret contracts with countries around the world, according to a Public Citizen report published Tuesday.

“The contracts consistently place Pfizer’s interests before public health imperatives.”

“Behind closed doors, Pfizer wields its power to extract a series of concerning concessions from governments,” report author Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, said in a statement. “The global community cannot allow pharmaceutical corporations to keep calling the shots.”

The new report begins by noting February reporting about accusations of Pfizer—an American pharmaceutical giant that developed its mRNA vaccine with the German firm BioNTech—”bullying” Latin American governments during contract negotiations for doses.

Public Citizen obtained unredacted term sheets, drafts, or final agreements between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the European Commission, and Peru. The consumer rights advocacy group also examined redacted contracts with Chile, the U.S., and the U.K.

Based on those contracts, the report identifies six tactics Pfizer is using to serve the company rather than public health in the midst of a deadly pandemic:

1. Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments

The Brazilian government complained earlier this year that the company insisted on “unfair and abusive” terms but ultimately accepted a contract that “waived sovereign immunity; imposed no penalties on Pfizer for late deliveries; agreed to resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York; and broadly indemnified Pfizer for civil claims.”

Brazil also agreed to a nondisclosure provision similar to those found in contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government.

2. Pfizer Controls Donations

Again using Brazil as an example, the report points out that the South American nation must first get a go-ahead from Pfizer to accept donations or buy its vaccines from others. The country is also barred from “donating, distributing, exporting, or otherwise transporting the vaccine outside Brazil without Pfizer’s permission.”

3. Pfizer Secured an “IP Waiver” for Itself

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla “has emerged as a strident defender of intellectual property in the pandemic,” the report says, noting his opposition to a proposal that members of the World Trade Organization who signed on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waive IP protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments during the crisis.

“But, in several contracts, Pfizer seems to recognize the risk posed by intellectual property to vaccine development, manufacturing, and sale,” Public Citizen explains. “The contracts shift responsibility for any intellectual property infringement that Pfizer might commit to the government purchasers. As a result, under the contract, Pfizer can use anyone’s intellectual property it pleases—largely without consequence.”

4. Private Arbitrators, Not Public Courts, Decide Disputes in Secret

While the U.K. contract requires that disputes are settled by secret panel of three private arbitrators under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, the report says, “the Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law.”

5. Pfizer Can Go After State Assets

“Pfizer required Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive sovereign immunity,” the report highlights, detailing that the doctrine can sometimes protect states from companies trying to enforce decisions reached by the previously noted secret arbitral panels. Some of the contracts enable the company to “request that courts use state assets as a guarantee that Pfizer will be paid an arbitral award and/or use the assets to compensate Pfizer if the government does not pay,” according to Public Citizen.

6. Pfizer Calls the Shots on Key Decisions

“What happens if there are vaccine supply shortages? In the Albania draft contract and the Brazil and Colombia agreement, Pfizer will decide adjustments to the delivery schedule based on principles the corporation will decide” the report notes, concluding that “under the vast majority of contracts, Pfizer’s interests come first.”

Public Citizen calls on world leaders, especially U.S. President Joe Biden, to “push back” against Pfizer’s negotiating tactics and “rein in” its monopoly power.

According to the group, the Biden administration can “call on Pfizer to renegotiate existing commitments and pursue a fairer approach in the future” as well as “further rectify the power imbalance by sharing the vaccine recipe, under the Defense Production Act, to allow multiple producers to expand vaccine supplies.”

The U.S. administration “can also work to rapidly secure a broad waiver of intellectual property rules,” the report adds, declaring that “a wartime response against the virus demands nothing less.”

https://twitter.com/zainrizvi/status/1450499674436214784?s=20

In response to Public Citizen’s report, Sharon Castillo, a spokesperson for Pfizer, told The Washington Post that confidentiality clauses were “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.”

Castillo also said that “Pfizer has not interfered and has absolutely no intention of interfering with any country’s diplomatic, military, or culturally significant assets,” adding that “to suggest anything to the contrary is irresponsible and misleading.”

Meanwhile, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, accused Pfizer of “taking advantage of countries’ desperation” with the far-reaching contracts.

“Most of us have sacrificed during the pandemic; staying distant to protect family and friends,” Maybarduk said Tuesday. “Pfizer went the other way, using its control of scarce vaccines to win special privileges, from people that have little choice.”

This article was originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT was republished under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics

Trump Won the County in a Landslide. His Supporters Still Hounded the Elections Administrator Until She Resigned.

Michele Carew, an elections administrator with 14 years of experience, has resigned after a monthslong campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said.

An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.

Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.

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Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.

“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”

Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.

Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.

“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”

Though experts say it is difficult to determine how many elections officials have left their positions nationally, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have seen numerous departures. According to the AP, about a third of Pennsylvania’s county election officials have left in the last year and a half; in Ohio, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections have left in the southwestern part of the state, according to The New York Times.

Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state. Across the country, partisans’ demands for audits have mostly focused on counties and states carried by President Joe Biden, particularly those that went for Trump four years earlier.

But Texas, despite going for Trump by 6 percentage points, has seen its fair share of blowback. Last month, the Texas secretary of state announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of four of the state’s largest counties hours after Trump issued a public letter demanding audits of the state’s results.

Before that, in July, Texas passed sweeping voting legislation that critics say disenfranchises vulnerable voters and unfairly targets administrators and other elections officials. Among the law’s provisions are new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with expanded powers given to poll watchers.

On Saturday, after blasting the four-county audit plan as “weak,” Trump threatened the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives with a primary challenge if the speaker didn’t advance a bill that would allow audits in more counties.

In Hood County, the local GOP executive committee likewise issued warnings to Republican officials who defended Carew. In July, the committee threatened County Judge Ron Massingill with a social media campaign that would tell voters he was “incapable of providing them with free and fair elections” if he didn’t convene the county’s elections commission to discuss Carew’s termination.

Massingill refused, arguing that no political party should be able to direct the activities of the independent elections administrator. Katie Lang, the county clerk and vice chair of the county’s election commission, convened the meeting and moved to fire Carew. Carew survived the vote by a 3-2 margin, with Massingill and the county tax assessor, both Republicans, joining the Hood County Democratic chair.

Republican County Chair David Fischer called on county commissioners to dissolve the independent office of elections administrator and transfer election duties to Lang, which he said would make the election administration process more accountable to the county’s Republican majority.

Counties in Texas can choose between hiring an independent elections administrator, who is meant to be insulated from political pressures, or letting a county official, often an elected county clerk, run elections. County clerks, who manage functions like property records and birth certificates, run elections in many of the state’s smallest counties.

Fischer has declined to speak with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

On social media, Lang has shared “Stop the Steal” and “Impeach Biden” memes and videos. Lang made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Lang did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, but she previously told the Hood County News she wished Carew “the best in her future endeavors.”

Over the last year, Carew has come under fire for everything from her connection with the League of Women Voters, which critics say is anti-Trump, to her interest in a $29,000 grant, funded in part by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that would have been used to pay for costs related to the pandemic.

She was also accused of harboring a hidden agenda after refusing to allow a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump One America News Network into a private training for election professionals in March when she headed the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.

The most sustained criticism of Carew came from critics who accused her of violating the law by not adhering to an obscure election law that requires ballots to be consecutively numbered.

But seven election experts and administrators told ProPublica and the Tribune that consecutively numbering ballots is out of step with best practices in election security and voter privacy, and that consecutive numbering is not required to conduct effective election audits.

Despite the toll the last year has taken on her, Carew on Monday remained defiant. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said. “I’m the one who wins in the end.”

Originally published on ProPublica by Jeremy Schwartz and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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Hot-Lynx

Congress want Amazon to Prove Bezos didn’t give perjured Testimony

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While still CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos testified in Congress by video conference on July 29, 2020. Now, there are at least Five members of a congressional committee alleging that he and other executives may have lied under oath andmisled lawmakers.

In a press release by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee the lawmakers state that they are giving Amazon a “Final Chance to Correct the Record Following a Series of Misleading Testimony and Statements”.

CurrentAmazon CEO Andy Jassy, who, in July, succeeded Bezos is being asked to respond to the discrepancies, including information found by The Markup published in a recent article

Read More at:

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Business, News, Observation, Politics

After Docs ‘Show What We Feared’ About Amazon’s Monopoly Power, Warren Says ‘Break It Up’

Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reuters revealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.

“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”

Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.

Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”

“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”

As Reuters notes:

In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.

But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.

While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.

“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”

“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”

Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.

“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”

“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”

Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Ahead of UK-Hosted Climate Summit, Oil Critics Arrested for Blockade Outside Downing Street

Above: Photo / Lynxotic Collage / Images from Twitter @parents_4future

“Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”

The Metropolitan Police arrested at least seven Greenpeace activists in London on Monday for disrupting traffic outside Downing Street by locking themselves to barrels and a 12-foot oil-splattered statue of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks.”

Though Johnson is not currently at his London residence—he is vacationing with family in Spain—the action comes less than three weeks before the United Kingdom is set to host a global climate summit known as COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland.

Some demonstrators toted posters and banners that read “Stop Cambo,” referring to a new oil field near Shetland that Greenpeace expects the government to approve “any day now,” spokesperson James Hanson told Agence France-Presse.

A sign protesters propped up by the statue of Johnson declared the oil field his “monumental climate failure.” The Conservative prime minister, Greenpeace U.K. highlighted Monday, “has said he backs 16 new North Sea oil and gas projects going ahead.”

Greenpeace U.K. also pointed to recent comments from a fellow Tory. Secretary of State for Business Kwasi Kwarteng said last month that “the U.K. is still too reliant on fossil fuels. Our exposure to volatile global gas prices underscores the importance of our plan to build a strong, home-grown renewable energy sector to strengthen our energy security into the future.”

The advocacy group explained Monday that “when it comes to Cambo, 80% of oil extracted is likely to be exported, and production won’t start for a few years—so the project would do very little to shore up the U.K.’s energy supply and won’t fix the current gas price crisis.”

In a statement, Greenpeace U.K. oil campaigner Philip Evans also noted the current prices.

“People across the U.K. are feeling the stresses of a gas price crisis as well as a climate crisis,” he said, “and the government acknowledges that our reliance on fossil fuels has left the U.K. vulnerable and exposed. People are right to feel angry and upset.”

Evans asserted that “Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”

“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks,” the campaigner declared. “If he doesn’t, he will be remembered as a monumental climate failure.”

The protest in London came just days after Greenpeace lost a court case challenging the U.K. government’s decision to grant a permit to BP for another North Sea drilling operation.

After the loss, Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven pointed out that “now the prime minister is poised to sign off even more oil if he approves a new oil field at Cambo—against official guidance from climate experts.”

“In just a few weeks’ time Boris Johnson will be opening global climate talks where his actions, not his words, will be what counts,” said Sauven. “And right now his actions are covered in oil. We will not give up the fight for the climate. Our intention is to appeal this ruling before the Supreme Court.”

The U.K. government announced in April a new climate target of cutting planet-heating emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels, which would bring the nation more than three-quarters of the way to its goal of net-zero by 2050.

Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace U.K., said at the time that “in order to actually deliver on this commitment, new measures to slash emissions from homes and transport should already be well underway.”

“So unless the government’s policies and spending commitments urgently fall in line with its ambitions,” she added, “there will still be awkward questions for Boris Johnson at the global climate talks in the autumn.”

The Climate Change Committee—an independent body that advises the U.K. on emissions targets and provides progress reports to Parliament—noted in June that a large share of reductions has come from decarbonizing the power sector and warned if progress does not extend beyond that sector going forward, the new targets “will be missed by a huge margin.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Over 70,000 March in Brussels to Demand Green New Deal, Urgent Climate Action

Video

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

“What do we do when we destroy the planet?” asked one demonstrator. “We have nothing else.”

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Brussels on Sunday to demand Belgium’s elected leaders and others from around the world finally dispense with proclamations, broken promises, and half-measures and instead “act” on the climate emergency.

“We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”

With U.N. climate conference (COP26) set for next month in Glasgow, the estimated 70,000 or more people who took part in the march offered a dramatic show of force for the nation’s climate movement.

Zanna Vanrenterghem of Greenpeace Belgium told The Brussels Times on Sunday that her government’s climate pledges so far “are not ambitious enough,” but that words are no longer enough. “It is one thing to talk about climate,” she said, “and another to take concrete action.”

Ahead of the march, Vanrenterghem said the message from the Klimaatcoalitie (Climate Coalition), which she co-chairs and that organized the march, was a simple one: “We demand ambitious, solidarity-based and coherent measures. We need a Belgian Green New Deal and we propose more than 100 concrete solutions to make it happen.”

According to the Associated Press:

Thousands of people and 80 organizations took part in the protest, aiming for the biggest such event in the European Union’s capital since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which stopped the climate movement’s weekly marches in its tracks.

Cyclists, families with children and white-haired demonstrators filled city streets, chanting slogans demanding climate justice and waving banners in English, French and Dutch. One carried a stuffed polar bear on her head, and others were dressed as animals endangered by human-caused climate change.

The crowds was large—with the march often stretching further than the eye could see—and participants each sharing their various reasons for attending. Signs and banners said things like “Destroy the System/Not the Planet”; “Walk the Talk”; and “Protect What You Love.”

Lucien Dewanaga, a marcher who spoke with AP, asked the question: “What do we do when we destroy the planet? We have nothing else. Human beings have to live in this world. And there is only one world.”

According to Vanrenterghem, extreme weather within Belgium and elsewhere in the world over the past year have offered only more reasons for leaders to turn lofty rhetoric into the concrete policies that scientists say are necessary to stave off the worst impacts. 

“The tough climate actions of the past few years have put the climate crisis high on the political agenda,” she said. “Now is the time for politicians to turn their promises into concrete action.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by COMMON DREAMS STAFF and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

A Quarter of All ‘Critical’ US Infrastructure at Risk From Flooding: Report

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“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said one expert.

Underscoring the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions and invest in public goods to better prepare communities across the United States for escalating extreme weather, a new report released Monday finds that one-quarter of the nation’s “critical” infrastructure is already susceptible to flooding that renders it inaccessible, with risks projected to increase in the coming decades.

Described as the first-ever nationwide evaluation of community-level vulnerability to flooding, the report—Infrastructure on the Brink, compiled by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group that specializes in environmental risk assessment—highlights localities where housing, commercial real estate, transportation networks, schools, hospitals, power plants, and other pieces of infrastructure face operational flood risk in 2021.

The analysis also explores how spatial patterns of flood risk are expected to change over the next 30 years, as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency exacerbates sea-level rise and extreme rainfall events, which pose direct and indirect threats to the safety and well-being of people throughout the U.S.

“It is clear, now more than ever,” the report states, “that the ways and places in which we live are likely to continue to be impacted by our changing environment. One of the most important implications in this development is the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.”

Using a unique national database that contains parcel-level flood risk information—combining hazards, exposure, and vulnerability—as well as over 20,000 flood adaptation measures, the report maps Americans’ current and future flood risks based on their proximity to coasts and flood plains plus the estimated impacts of flood-damaged infrastructure at the broader scales of neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, and counties.

As the authors note, “Individuals whose homes were spared the impact of a particular flood event are increasingly likely to find their local roads, businesses, critical infrastructure, utilities, or emergency services affected.”

The report assesses risk to (1) residential properties; (2) roads; (3) commercial properties; (4) critical infrastructure (airports, fire stations, hospitals, police stations, ports, power stations, superfund/hazardous waste sites, water outfalls, and wastewater treatment facilities); and (5) social infrastructure (government buildings, historic buildings, houses of worship, museums, and schools).

Defining risk as “the unique level of flooding for each infrastructure type relative to operational thresholds,” the report finds:

  • Risk to residential properties is expected to increase by 10% over the next 30 years with 12.4 million properties at risk today (14%) and 13.6 million at risk of flooding in 2051 (16%);
  • Two million miles of road (25%) are at risk today and that is expected to increase to 2.2 million miles of road (26%) over the next 30 years (a 3% increase over the next 30 years);
  • Commercial properties are expected to see a 7% increase in risk of flooding from 2021 to 2051, with 918,540 at risk today (20%) and 984,591 at risk of flooding in 30 years (21%);
  • Currently, 35,776 critical infrastructure facilities are at risk today (25%), increasing to 37,786 facilities by 2051 (26%), a 6% increase in risk; and
  • Compounding that risk, 71,717 pieces of social infrastructure facilities are at risk today (17%), increasing to 77,843 by 2051 (19%), an increase of 9% over that time period.

The report comes in the wake of several highly destructive flooding events that affected various parts of the U.S. this summer, including one in Tennessee in August as well as the inundation of New York City’s subway system in July and again in September during Hurricane Ida—deadly and costly disasters that exposed how ill-prepared the country is to reduce extreme weather-related infrastructure damage and the ensuing consequences.

The new analysis also points to earlier catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy, which hit the New York City metropolitan area in 2012 and “flooded hospitals, crippled electrical substations, overwhelmed wastewater treatment centers, and shut down power and water to tens of millions of people.”

“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, said in a statement.

“This report highlights the cities and counties whose vital infrastructure are most at risk today and will help inform where investment dollars should flow in order to best mitigate against that risk,” Edy added.

According to the report:

There are significant differences at the county and city level in the amount of risk that exists today and into the future. Most importantly, there are a group of counties and cities that have persistent patterns of vulnerability across multiple dimensions of physical risk from flooding. These areas tend to be in regions with well-established flood risk, such as coastal flood plains along the Gulf and Southeastern coasts of the U.S., but also in less well-known flood zones, such as in the Appalachian Mountain regions of West Virginia and Kentucky.

To that point, 17 of the top 20 counties in the U.S. which are most at risk (85%) are in the states of Louisiana, Florida, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Additionally, the top cities at risk of flooding persistently show up in the states of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. The analysis further uncovered a high degree of vulnerability in some of the major population centers in the U.S., including New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Even as extreme storms and material insecurity become more common and severe—rendering continued inaction far more expensive than prevention—congressional Republicans and a handful of conservative Democratic lawmakers swimming in corporate cash continue to fight against the Build Back Better Act, a President Joe Biden-endorsed proposal to invest trillions in strengthening climate action and expanding the nation’s relatively underdeveloped welfare state.

Opposition to greening the nation’s physical infrastructure and improving its social infrastructure increases disaster vulnerabilities and worsens impacts, particularly in marginalized communities, experts say, although the inverse—simultaneously addressing the intensifying crises of climate and inequality—is also possible.

“The decarbonization question, the infrastructure question, and the inequalities question are the same question,” Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted last week. “Only an epic struggle from the left, combining mass organization, mobilization, and technical expertise—across borders—can provide a good answer in the 2020s.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics

While Americans Sleep, Our Corporate Overlords Make Progress Impossible

Both the Republicans and the Democrats vote as if the nation’s middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker.

by Ralph Nader

“Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.

Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.

The quiet harmony between the two parties created by the omnipresent power of Big Business and other powerful single-issue lobbyists is often the status quo. That’s why there are so few changes in this country’s politics.

In many cases, the similarities of both major parties are tied to the fundamental concentration of power by the few over the many. In short, the two parties regularly agree on anti-democratic abuses of power. Granted, there are always a few exceptions among the rank & file. Here are some areas of Republican and Democrat concurrence:

1. The Duopoly shares the same stage on a militaristic, imperial foreign policy and massive unaudited military budgets. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Pentagon budget was voted out of a House committee by the Democrats and the GOP with $24 billion MORE than what President Biden asked for from Congress. Neither party does much of anything to curtail the huge waste, fraud, and abuse of corporate military contractors, or the Pentagon’s violation of federal law since 1992 requiring annual auditable data on DOD spending be provided to Congress, the president, and the public.

2. Both Parties allow unconstitutional wars violating federal laws and international treaties that we signed onto long ago, including restrictions on the use of force under the United Nations Charter.

3. Both Parties ignore the burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts turning oceans of inefficient, mismanaged, and coddled profit-glutted companies into tenured corporate welfare Kings.

4. Both Parties decline to crack down on the nationwide corporate crime spree. They don’t even like to use the phrase “corporate crime” or “corporate crime wave.” They prefer to delicately allude to “white-collar crime.”

Trillions of dollars are at stake every year, yet neither party holds corporate crime hearings nor proposes an update of the obsolete, weak federal corporate criminal laws.

In some instances, there is no criminal penalty at all for willful and knowing violations of safety regulatory laws (e.g., the auto safety and aviation safety laws). Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is trying to find just one Republican Senator to co-sponsor the “Hide No Harm Act” that would make it a crime for a corporate officer to knowingly conceal information about a corporate action or product that poses the danger of death or serious physical injury to consumers or workers.

5. Both Parties allow Wall Street’s inexhaustibly greedy CEOs to prey on innocents, including small investors. They also do nothing to curb hundreds of billions of dollars in computerized billing fraud, especially in the health care industry. (See, License to Steal by Malcolm K. Sparrow and a GAO Report about thirty years ago).

6. The third leading cause of death in the U.S. is fatalities from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics. According to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine study in 2015, a conservative estimate is that 250,000 people yearly are dying from preventable conditions. Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has an effort remotely up to the scale required to reduce this staggering level of mortality and morbidity. Nor is the American Medical Association (AMA) engaging with this avoidable epidemic.

7. Both Parties sped bailout of over $50 billion to the airline industry during Covid-19, after the companies had spent about $45 billion on unproductive stock buybacks over the last few years to raise the metrics used to boost executive pay.

8. Both Parties starve corporate law enforcement budgets in the Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and such departments as Labor, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, and Health and Human Services. The Duopoly’s view is that there be no additional federal cops on the corporate crime beat.

9. Both Parties prostrate themselves before the bank-funded Federal Reserve. There are no congressional audits, no congressional oversight of the Fed’s secret, murky operations, and massive printing of money to juice up Wall Street, while keeping interest rates near zero for trillions of dollars held by over one hundred million small to midsize savers in America.

10. Both Parties are wedded to constant and huge bailouts of the risky declining, uncompetitive (with solar and wind energy) nuclear power industry. This is corporate socialism at its worst. Without your taxpayer and ratepayer dollars, nuclear plants would be closing down faster than is now the case. Bipartisan proposals for more nukes come with large subsidies and guarantees by Uncle Sam.

11. Both Parties hate Third Parties and engage in the political bigotry of obstructing their ballot access (See: Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News), with hurdles, harassing lawsuits, and exclusions from public debates. The goal of both parties is to stop a competitive democracy.

12. Both Parties overwhelmingly rubber-stamp whatever the Israeli government wants in the latest U.S. military weaponry, the suppression of Palestinians and illegal occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands, and the periodic slaughter of Gazans with U.S. weapons. The Duopoly also supports the use of the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to insulate Israel from UN sanctions.

13. Continuing Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s debilitating internal deforms of congressional infrastructures, the Democrats have gone along with the GOP’s shrinking of committee and staff budgets, abolition of the crucial Office of Technology Assessment’s (OTA) budget, and concentration of excessive power in the hands of the Speaker and Senate leader. This little noticed immolation reduces further the legislature’s ability to oversee the huge sprawling Executive Branch. The erosion of congressional power is furthered by the three-day work week Congress has reserved for itself.

14. Even on what might seem to be healthy partisan differences, the Democrats and the GOP agree not to replace or ease out Trump’s Director of the Internal Revenue Service, a former corporate loophole tax lawyer, or the head of the U.S. Postal Service, a former profiteer off the Post Office who will shortly curtail service even more than he did in 2020 (See: First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, by Christopher W Shaw).

Right now, both Parties are readying to give over $50 billion of your tax money to the very profitable under-taxed computer chip industry companies like Intel and Nvidia, so they can make more profit-building plants in the U.S. These companies are loaded with cash. They should invest their own money and stop the stock buyback craze. Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?

Both Parties vote as if the American middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker. Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.

Sleep on America, you have nothing to lose but your dreams.

Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation

To Avert ‘Uncontrollable Climate Chaos,’ Scientists Tell Biden to Stop Backing Fossil Fuels

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“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels, it’s time to listen.”

With an open letter expressing “the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system,” over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.

“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels,” said Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “it’s time to listen.”

The letter—an effort organized by biologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber and climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus along with advocacy groups Center for Biological Diversity and Food & Water Watch—frames the current moment as a “time of peril” that must be met with “emergency action.”

Other initial signatories include Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, and climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

A three-step action plan is presented in the letter, beginning with a full ban on any new fossil fuel leasing and extraction on public lands and waters; no future permits for related infrastructure; and ending fossil fuel exports and subsidies.

Biden must also declare a climate emergency, the letter says, through which a chunk of the nation’s vast military spending would instead be directed to fund renewable energy projects and the crude oil export ban would be reinstated.

As a third key step, the president needs to reject fossil fuel industry schemes, such as carbon capture and storage, that the scientists frame as “delay tactics” that ultimately “impede the rapid transition to renewable energy.”

The first two in the trio of demands mirror those set out by the People Vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization, which is set to kick off next week.

“U.S. scientists are done speaking calmly in the face of inaction,” Steingraber said in a statement in which she expressed solidarity with the upcoming mobilization.

She also urged the president to follow through on a key campaign vow that his support for pipelines like the Dakota Access and Line 3 has betrayed.

“President Biden,” said Steingraber, “listening to science means acting on science. It means stopping new fossil fuel projects, opposing industry delay tactics, and declaring a national climate emergency.”

The scientists warned that “our chances for avoiding irreversible and uncontrollable climate chaos diminish daily.”

“We implore you, on behalf of and for the love of all life on Earth,” they added, “to respond to the greatest threat ever to face our species and lead the transition away from fossil fuels that humanity desperately needs.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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News, Observation, Politics

5 Key Things to Know About the Pandora Papers

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These disclosures about the how the world’s wealthy and powerful hide their vast fortunes will hopefully turn up the heat on the politicians that maintain the wealth-hiding status quo.

This week we are closely watching the disclosures emerge from the Pandora Papers, a massive leak of secret data about the illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries. In the days to come, we will learn more about the tax avoidance of billionaires and the ways states like South Dakota and Florida have become U.S. tax havens.

Here are Five Things You Need to Know:

1. The Largest-Ever Journalistic Collaborative, More Significant Than the Panama Papers 

The Pandora papers are a massive expose about the secret shell games and tax avoidance schemes of the world’s ultra-wealthy, from over 200 countries. This massive undertaking involved 600 journalists from 117 countries and was coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ICIJ) in what they describe as the “largest-ever journalistic collaborative.”   See initial coverage here in The Washington Post and The Guardian, two of the key media outlets part of the consortium.

Five and a half years ago, the ICIJ released the Panama Papers, which focused on a leak from a single law firm, Mossack Fonseca. According to Gerald Ryle, director of the ICIJ, the Pandora Papers are the “Panama Papers on steroids.” See a summary prepared by the ICIJ here.

The Pandora papers draws on leaks from confidential records at 14 different offshore wealth service firms in Switzerland, Singapore, Cyprus, Samoa, Vietnam, Hong Kong, as well as firms in well-known tax havens such as Belize, Seychelles, Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands (BVI).  These firms help wealthy individuals and corporations to form trusts, foundations, incorporate companies, and establish other entities in low- or no-tax jurisdictions.

The Pandora Papers analyzed 12 million files from these firms including leaked emails, memos, tax declarations, bank statements, passport scans, diagrams of corporate structures, secret spreadsheets and clandestine real estate contracts. Some reveal the real owners of opaque shell companies for the first time.

2. The Global Implications Are Huge and Politicians Will Be Embarrassed 

The Pandora Papers are truly a global story, with major implications for many countries.  Some of the largest revelations involve Russian nationals with connections to Vladimir Putin and elites from Latin America. For example, journalists from the Spanish daily El Pais, exposed the “Secret Vault of Mexican Billionaires.” In Mexico they found over 3,000 wealthy and powerful Mexicans in the 11.9 million leaked files, with connections to current and previous presidents.  They discovered a common pattern of wealthy Mexican elites using a single Panamanian law firm, Alcogal (Aleman, Cordero, Galindo & Lee), along with shell companies and trusts in the British Virgin Islands, and real estate purchases in Miami and around the US. 

The Pandora Papers will hopefully turn up the heat on the politicians that maintain the wealth-hiding status quo. The files list over 330 current and former politicians and world leaders from 91 countries that are implicated in transactions. This is twice the number implicated in the 2016 Panama Papers.

Political leaders include King Abdullah II from Jordan and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (according to The Guardian, Jordan blocked the ICIJ web site hours before the Pandora papers release). This explains why existing political bodies seem incapable of closing down systems that enable wealth hiding and tax dodging. 

“It demonstrates that the people that could end the secrecy of offshore systems… are themselves benefiting from it,” said Gerald Ryle, director of the ICIJ. “So there’s no incentive for them to end it.”

3. The US is Exposed as a Global Tax Haven 

U.S. citizens are under-represented in these leaks, largely due to where the service providers are located. No U.S. wealth-advisory firms were part of the leaks. Nonetheless over 700 companies revealed in the Pandora papers have ties to beneficial owners connected to the United States.

The Pandora Papers do, however, expose how the U.S. has become a global destination for global wealth, some of it ill-gotten. The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers (Bermuda and Singapore) and Luanda Leaks (Angola) all reinforced the misperception that most of these financial shell games take place “off shore,” in secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens in small countries with weak banking laws.

But the Pandora Papers show that the U.S. and states like South Dakota now rival notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. The states with the most active trusts revealed in the files were South Dakota (81), Florida (37), Delaware (35), Texas (24), and Nevada (14). 

4. Shady Billionaires from Around the World Are Going to South Dakota 

Findings suggest that South Dakota has sheltered billions in wealth linked to wealthy individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes and labor violations.  Two examples: Brazilian orange juice baron, Horst Happel, was fined $88 million in 2016 for underpaying his workers. In 2017, he moved substantial wealth to a trust in South Dakota.  Carlos Morales Troncoso was the former vice-president of the Dominican Republic. He ran a sugar company called Central Romana sugar company that was accused of human rights violations. He set up trusts for his daughters in the Bahamas that were moved, after his death, to South Dakota. The reason global money is flowing to the “Mount Rushmore State” is because of their low taxes and advantageous dynasty trusts.

5. The Pandora Papers Will Boost the Case for US Tax Reform

The Pandora Papers will hopefully give a boost to the US Congress in passing a progressive tax plan to fund the Build Back Better program—and that includes money for IRS enforcement to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share. 

As The Guardian reports: “The Pandora papers also place a revealing spotlight on the offshore system itself. In a development likely to prove embarrassing for US President, Joe Biden, who has pledged to lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global finance system, the US emerges from the leak as a leading tax haven.  The files suggest the state of South Dakota, in particular, is shelter billions of dollars in wealth linked to individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by CHUCK COLLINS and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Breaking News, News, Observation, Politics

US Denounced as ‘Biggest Peddler of Financial Secrecy’ After Pandora Papers Leak

Above:Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Original Image by ICIJ

“U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”

The leak of an enormous trove of tax haven files over the weekend offered a further glimpse into the secretive world of offshore finance—a system facilitated by the U.S. and other rich nations—and prompted calls for immediate changes to global rules that let the powerful hide their wealth, skirt their obligations, and starve governments of crucial revenue.

“This is where our missing hospitals are,” Susana Ruiz, the tax policy lead at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-Covid recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.”

“Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year,” Ruiz added. “That is the equivalent of a nurse’s yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are out-competing those who don’t. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish.”

Like the 2016 Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) Pandora Papers shine additional light on the functioning of a “shadow economy” that world leaders, celebrities, and billionaire business moguls—including some accused of egregious crimes—are exploiting to shield trillions of dollars in assets from transparency and taxation.

The 11.9 million files obtained, analyzed, and leaked by the ICIJ reveal the closely-guarded financial maneuverings of more than 330 politicians and top public officials from nearly 100 countries and territories, including dozens of current national leaders.

“The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya, and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair,” ICIJ notes in a summary of its sprawling cache of documents. “The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘unofficial minister of propaganda’ and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey, and other nations.”

The trove also links prominent athletes, models, and artists to offshore assets, including India’s famous cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, pop music star Shakira, and supermodel Claudia Schiffer.

But Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, cautioned that a narrow focus on the individuals who have made use of an international tax system rigged in their favor diverts attention from the institutions and countries that have done the rigging.

“These personal actions are shameful and will no doubt come under great scrutiny in the coming days, but it’s important that we don’t lose sight of one crucial fact: few of the individuals had any role in turning the global tax system into an ATM for the superrich,” Cobham wrote in a blog post on Sunday. “That honor goes to the professional enablers—banks, law firms, and accountants—and the countries that facilitate them.”

Cobham observed that the Pandora Papers—the product of a nearly two-year investigation by more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories—confirm that the United States is “the world’s biggest peddler of financial secrecy.”

“The biggest blockers to transparency are the U.S. … and the U.K., the leader of the world’s biggest tax haven network,” Cobham wrote. “We need full transparency so we can hold tax abusers accountable, especially when our politicians are among them. U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country.”

As the ICIJ notes, the new files show in some detail “how the United States, in particular, has become an increasingly attractive destination for hidden wealth, although the U.S. and its Western allies condemn smaller countries for allowing the flow of money and assets tied to corruption and crime.”

“The Pandora Papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 states and Washington, D.C., and 22 U.S. trustee companies,” the ICIJ points out. “The documents provide details about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign money.”

“We in the U.S. should be embarrassed that we’ve become a magnet for kleptocratic funds,” said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Conspicuously absent from the Pandora Papers is any mention of the wealthiest people in the U.S., including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world. But as the Washington Post explains, that could be because “the uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens.”

In response to the Pandora Papers revelations, Oxfam called on world governments to crack down on tax havens by taking a number of steps, including:

  1. Ending tax secrecy on individuals, offshores, and multinational corporations. Set up a public register on the real owners of bank accounts, trusts, shell companies, and assets. Require multinational corporations to publicly report their accounts where they do business, country-by-country.
  2. Increasing the use of automatic exchange, allowing revenue authorities access to information they need to track the money.
  3. Ending corporate profit shifting to tax havens via new rules, and by setting a global minimum tax under the OECD’s BEPS deal, ideally of around 25%.
  4. Agreeing a global blacklist of tax havens and taking counter measures, including sanctions, to limit their use.
  5. Setting a new global agenda on taxing wealth and capital fairly; addressing tax competition between countries on high-net-worth-individuals, either on income or wealth, against agreed standards.

“Governments’ promises to end tax havens are still a long way from being realized,” said Ruiz. “We cannot allow tax havens to continue to stretch global inequality to breaking point while the world experiences the largest increase in extreme poverty in decades.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Apps, Business, Observation, Social Media, Tech

‘System Is Blinking Red’: Experts Condemn Facebook’s Profit-Seeking Algorithms

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“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” one group asked after whistleblower Frances Haugen said the corporation is unwilling to confront hate speech and disinformation.

Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.

Haugen, who copied a “trove of private Facebook research” before she resigned from the social media company in May, told CBS‘s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview that the tech giant took some steps to limit misinformation ahead of the 2020 election because it understood that then-President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about voter fraud posed a serious threat. Many of the safety measures that Facebook implemented, however, were temporary, she added.

“As soon as the election was over,” Haugen said, “they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”

Facebook officials claim that some of the anti-misinformation systems remained in place, but in the interregnum between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration, far-right extremists used the social networking site to organize the deadly January 6 coup attempt—something acknowledged by an internal task force’s report on Facebook’s failure to neutralize “Stop the Steal” activity on its platforms.

There is, according to Haugen, a simple explanation for why executives at the company refuse to do more to mitigate harmful social media behavior: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

Haugen—who first revealed her identity on Sunday after having secretly shared internal documents with federal regulators, reported on in the Wall Street Journal‘s series, “The Facebook Files”—also said the corporation is lying to the public about how effective it is at curbing hate speech and disinformation, arguing that “Facebook has demonstrated it cannot operate independently.”

In the wake of Haugen’s bombshell interview, social media experts condemned Facebook for prioritizing “profits above all else.”

“Facebook runs on a hate-and-lie-for-profit business model that amplifies all sorts of toxicity on its platforms,” Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, said Monday in a statement. “Thanks to this brave whistleblower, we now have further proof that Facebook’s executives—all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—routinely chose profits over public safety.”

González, co-founder of Ya Basta Facebook and the Change the Terms coalition, added that Facebook executives “designed the company’s algorithms to put engagement, growth, and profits above all else, even allowing lies about the 2020 election results to spread to millions in advance of the white-nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol.”

Longtime critics of Facebook argued that the “new revelations” about the company demand immediate federal intervention.

“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of civil rights leaders and academics, asked in a statement released after Haugen’s interview aired. “The system is blinking red, and without real, meaningful, independent, and robust oversight and investigation of Facebook, more lives will be lost.”

“The goal,” added the group, “is no longer to save Facebook—Facebook is beyond hope. The goal now is to save democracy.”

Free Press summarized the Journal‘s key findings on Facebook, which we now know stem from internal documents provided by Haugen:

Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules; Instagram is harmful to millions of young users; Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change promotes objectionable or harmful content; Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about Covid-19 vaccines; and globally, Facebook is used to incite violence against ethnic minorities and facilitat[e] action against political dissent. 

Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, praised Haugen for exposing Facebook’s “amplification and use of hate to keep users on the platform engaged.”

Facebook has “weaponized… data in harmful ways against users,” Mitchell continued, and failed to consider the negative effects of “hate-filled rhetoric” even after the Myanmar military used Facebook to launch a genocide in 2018.

González argued that Haugen “turned evidence of this gross negligence over to the government at great personal risk, and now we need the government to respond with decisive action to hold the company responsible for protecting public safety.”

“The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model,” said González.

“Facebook must also act swiftly to remedy the harms it is continuing to inflict on the public at large,” she added. “It must end special protections for powerful politicians, ban white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists, and institute wholesale changes to strengthen content moderation in English and other languages—and we need this all now.”

According to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at The Guardian and co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, “Facebook is a rogue state, lying to regulators, investors, and its own oversight board.”

“What we are seeing today is a market failure with profound, devastating global consequences,” she said. “Executives and board members must be held to account. There is evidence to suggest that their behavior was not just immoral but also criminal.”

Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that “even as we feel outrage toward Mr. Zuckerberg and his corporation, the cause of this crisis is not a single company, not even one as powerful as Facebook.”

“The cause is the economic institution of surveillance capitalism,” said Zuboff. “The economic logic of these systems, the data operations that feed them, and the markets that support them are not limited to Facebook.”

“The imperatives of surveillance economics determine the engineering of these operations—their products, objectives, and financial incentives—along with those of the other tech empires, their extensive ecosystems, and thousands of companies in diverse sectors far from Silicon Valley,” she continued. “The damage already done is intolerable. The damage that most certainly lies ahead is unthinkable.”

Zuboff added that the only “durable solution to this crisis” is to “undertake the work of interrupting and outlawing the dangerous operations of surveillance capitalism and its predictable social harms that assault human autonomy, splinter society, and undermine democracy.”

Haugen is scheduled to testify on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Protecting Kids Online.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license  (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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In Scathing Senate Testimony, Whistleblower Warns Facebook a Threat to Children and Democracy

Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic

Frances Haugen said the company’s leaders know how to make their platforms safer, “but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.

Two days after a bombshell “60 Minutes” interview in which she accused Facebook of knowingly failing to stop the spread of dangerous lies andhateful content, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified Tuesday before U.S. senators, imploring Congress to hold the company and its CEO accountable for the many harms they cause.

Haugen—a former Facebook product manager—told the senators she went to work at the social media giant because she believed in its “potential to bring out the best in us.”

“But I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said during her opening testimony. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”

“The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages,” she continued. “I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of truth.”

“I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety,” Haugen added. “Facebook consistently resolved its conflicts in favor of its own profits.”

“In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” she said.

Addressing Monday’s worldwide Facebook outage, Haugen said that “for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”

“It also means that millions of small businesses weren’t able to reach potential customers, and countless photos of new babies weren’t joyously celebrated by family and friends around the world,” she added. “I believe in the potential of Facebook. We can have social media we enjoy that connects us without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”

Doing better will require Congress to act, because Facebook “won’t solve this crisis without your help,” Haugen told the senators, echoing experts and activists who continue to call for breaking up tech giants, banning the surveillance capitalist business model, and protecting rights and democracy online.

She added that “there is nobody currently holding Zuckerberg accountable but himself,” referring to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—chair of the Senate Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security Subcommittee—called on Zuckerberg to testify before the panel.

“Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror today and yet rather than taking responsibility, and showing leadership, Mr. Zuckerberg is going sailing,” he said.

“Big Tech now faces a Big Tobacco, jaw-dropping moment of truth. It is documented proof that Facebook knows its products can be addictive and toxic to children,” Blumenthal continued.

“The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation,” he added. “Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, rejection, and self-hatred will impact this generation for years to come. Our children are the ones who are victims.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINSand republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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