“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States,” said an Afghan protest organizer in Kabul over the weekend.
With the people of Afghanistan facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, U.S.-based peace activists—who largely blame the policies of their own government for inflicting pain on millions of innocent Afghans—are using Valentine’s Day on Monday to demand the Biden administration return billions of dollars of seized assets to the war-torn country before more lasting harm and “cruelty” is done.
Under the banner of “Love to Afghanistan,” nationwide actions were scheduled for the weekend and localized vigils organized set for Monday (Feb. 14) by Peace Action, World Beyond War, and other humanitarian groups who argue that $7 billion frozen by the U.S. government and subsequently seized by an executive order issued Friday by President Joe Biden rightfully belongs to the Afghan people, who without it face an economy on the brink of collapse and a healthcare system and federal infrastructure without adequate support amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening food crisis.
The Biden plan to confiscate $7 Billion of the Afghan people’s assets is unjust. Afghans need food & a functioning economy. Urge #Congress to reverse this policy.#LoveToAfghanistan#UnFreezeAfghanistan Call Congress from Congress Square Park . Noon. Portland, ME. Valentine's Day! pic.twitter.com/9tXwxrmKOe
After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Peace Action welcomed the withdrawal of troops from the country and an end to the war.
Yet when the United States military pulled out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration also responded by choking off assets to Afghan banks and the economy by freezing the reserves of the Afghan Central Bank held in the U.S. They also imposed sanctions on those doing business with Afghanistan and cut aid. Jobs and income disappeared, people cannot afford to buy food and mass starvation is now occurring.
The Afghan people are suffering now more than ever. Hunger could kill more now than in two decades of war. This humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is in the words of the International Red Cross a “human-made catastrophe.” “Human-made” largely by coercive U.S. economic policies.
In Decemebr, 46 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding the U.S. unfreeze assets that had been locked following the U.S. military withdrawal earlier in 2021. But instead of heeding that call, Biden on Friday took the step of more permanently seizing the funds that otherwise would be under control of Afghanistan’s central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which now operates under the authority of the Taliban government.
Biden’s executive order includes setting aside half of the funds, $3.5 billion, for possible settlement claims by families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, but critics have said the Afghan people—who had nothing to do with the crimes of that day twenty years ago—should not be punished for the acts of Al Qaeda jihadists, most them Saudis and Egyptians.
Millions of Afghans are starving, due to US crimes, and now instead of getting back what is their’s, their money is being used as reparations for a crime they never committed & have been punished for for 20 years.
Promoting the “Love to Afghanistan” events in an op-ed for Common Dreamslast week, peace activist Jean Athey, coordinator of the Montgomery County Peace Action group in Maryland, said the economic war against the Afghan has the potential to be just as deadly as the 20 years of war and occupation they have just endured. Explaining the current situation and the “liquidity crisis” gripping the country, she wrote:
The government has almost no money and cannot pay workers, who cannot buy food for their families. Most have received no payment for months. In addition, Afghans have limited access to their own funds in banks. International commerce has halted.
Given U.S. sanctions and the liquidity crisis, even international humanitarian relief organizations have great difficulty operating in Afghanistan, despite U.S. government assurances. Relief efforts designed to stave off starvation—although critically important right now—cannot endure for long since no one is willing to provide assistance indefinitely to a country of almost 40 million people. The country needs a functioning government and economy, and needs access to the international financial system.
“Political backbone” is now required of the Biden administration, argued Athey, who said the president should not be scared of predictable GOP attacks or media hit pieces about somehow appeasing the Taliban by giving the everyday people back money the money that rightfully belongs to them. “The lives of one million children are more important than a negative headline in a tabloid. The U.S. should unfreeze Afghan government assets and lift sanctions hindering the recovery of the Afghan economy and humanitarian relief efforts. We must end the U.S. economic war on Afghanistan.”
On Saturday, the DAB demanded the funds ostensibly stolen by the U.S. government be returned and called the move by Biden an “injustice against the people of Afghanistan.”
Also in Saturday, protests in Kabul decried the theft of the money.
“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States. This is the right of Afghans,” Abdul Rahman, a civil society activist and the demonstration’s organizer, told the Dawn newsaper.
A spokesperson for the Taliban government, Mohammad Naeem, also decriedthe move in a post on social media Saturday.
“The theft and seizure of money held by the United States of the Afghan people represent the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation,” Naeem tweeted, added that while victory and defeat are evident throughout history, “the greatest and most shameful defeat is when moral defeat combines with military defeat.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
As the U.S. Federal Reserve mulls hiking interest rates in the coming weeks in an effort to curb inflation, progressive economists are warning against such a move—arguing that it will hurt workers and fail to address the real source of rising prices: unmitigated corporate power.
“The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further.”
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and Columbia University professor, wrote Monday in Project Syndicate. “We should not attack a supply-side problem by lowering demand and increasing unemployment. That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, echoed Stiglitz’s message, writing Monday: “The inflation spike of 2021 has been bad for typical families and is a real policy challenge. But it remains the case that an overreaction to it could end up causing the most damage of all.”
Stiglitz and Bivens’ essays came three days after Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, made a similar warning.
Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices—and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.
It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.
Although Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell “has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices,” Reich wrote, “there’s no ‘wage-price spiral.'”
“To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation,” he added. “Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases—making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.”
Reich conceded that “wage-price spirals used to be a problem” but argued that’s no longer the case “because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.”
Declining union membership and corporations’ increased mobility—both key pillars in the ruling class’ highly effective assault on workers that has been carried out on a bipartisan basis for more than four decades—”have shifted power from labor to capital,” wrote Reich. “Increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages… ended wage-price spirals.”
It is “totally wrong” to contend that inflation is being fueled by rising wages stemming from a so-called “tight” labor market, Reich argued. He continued:
The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the U.S. population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.
Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6% in December, the first decrease since last February.
“Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further,” Reich added. “The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.”
When it comes to what is causing inflation, Reich blamed “continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.”
Corporate greed has played a large role in why people are paying higher prices for food and gas, as Common Dreams has reported and a majority of the public appears to understand, based on recent polling. Amid a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 900,000 people in the U.S. and 5.7 million people globally, price-gouging corporations are enjoying mega-profits not seen since 1950.
While pandemic profiteering is evident, the question remains as to what made global supply chains so fragile to disruption in the first place—leading to prolonged shortages of key inputs and increased shipping costs that have been accompanied by price hikes.
According to Rakken Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, the answer lies in offshoring, financialization, deregulation, just-in-time logistics, and other profit-maximizing policies associated with neoliberalization and globalization.
Mabud made that case last week when testifying at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. She and David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, expanded on that argument in a recent essay introducing a new series on the supply chain crisis.
As a number of economists have warned recently, policymakers on the verge of making life-altering decisions with respect to interest rates may be doing so based on faulty data or misconceptions.
“Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing),” Reich cautioned. “This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ‘seasonal adjustment,’ cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as ‘adding lots of jobs.'”
Stiglitz, meanwhile, noted that “the inflation rate has been volatile. Last month, the media made a big deal out of the 7% annual inflation rate in the United States, while failing to note that the December rate was little more than half that of the October rate.”
“Moreover, given that a large proportion of today’s inflation stems from global issues—like chip shortages and the behavior of oil cartels—it is a gross exaggeration to blame inflation on excessive fiscal support in the U.S.,” Stiglitz continued.
While “the U.S. has slightly higher inflation than Europe,” he added, “it also has enjoyed stronger growth. U.S. policies prevented a massive increase in poverty that might have occurred otherwise. Recognizing that the cost of doing too little would be huge, U.S. policymakers did the right thing.”
Stiglitz wrote that his “biggest concern is that central banks will overreact, raising interest rates excessively and hampering the nascent recovery. As always, those at the bottom of the income scale would suffer the most in this scenario.”
“What we need instead,” he argued, “are targeted structural and fiscal policies aimed at unblocking supply bottlenecks and helping people confront today’s realities.”
For instance, wrote Stiglitz, “food stamps for the needy should be indexed to the price of food, and energy (fuel) subsidies to the price of energy.”
“Beyond that, a one-time ‘inflation adjustment’ tax cut for lower- and middle-income households would help them through the post-pandemic transition,” he added. “It could be financed by taxing the monopoly rents of the oil, technology, pharmaceutical, and other corporate giants that made a killing from the crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Bloomberg’s Lorcan Roche Kelly called Bitcoin “the first true religion of the 21st century.” Bitcoin promoter Hass McCook has taken to calling himself “The Friar” and wrote a series of Medium pieces comparing Bitcoin to a religion. There is a Church of Bitcoin, founded in 2017, that explicitly calls legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto its “prophet.”
The dirty secret of religious studies is that there is no universal definition of what religion is. Traditions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism certainly exist and have similarities, but the idea that these are all examples of religion is relatively new.
The word “religion” as it’s used today – a vague category that includes certain cultural ideas and practices related to God, the afterlife or morality – arose in Europe around the 16th century. Before this, many Europeans understood that there were only three types of people in the world: Christians, Jews and heathens.
Above: Photo / Collage / Lynxotic
This model shifted after the Protestant Reformation when a long series of wars began between Catholics and Protestants. These became known as “wars of religion,” and religion became a way of talking about differences between Christians. At the same time, Europeans were encountering other cultures through exploration and colonialism. Some of the traditions they encountered shared certain similarities to Christianity and were also deemed religions.
Non-European languages have historically not had a direct equivalent to the word “religion.” What has counted as religion has changed over the centuries, and there are always political interests at stake in determining whether or not something is a religion.
As religion scholar Russell McCutcheon argues, “The interesting thing to study, then, is not what religion is or is not, but ‘the making of it’ process itself – whether that manufacturing activity takes place in a courtroom or is a claim made by a group about their own behaviors and institutions.”
Critics highlight irrationality
With this in mind, why would anyone claim that Bitcoin is a religion?
Some commentators seem to be making this claim to steer investors away from Bitcoin. Emerging market fund manager Mark Mobius, in an attempt to tamp down enthusiasm about cryptocurrency, said that “crypto is a religion, not an investment.”
His statement, however, is an example of a false dichotomy fallacy, or the assumption that if something is one thing, it cannot be another. There is no reason that a religion cannot also be an investment, a political system or nearly anything else.
Mobius’ point, though, is that “religion,” like cryptocurrency, is irrational. This criticism of religion has been around since the Enlightenment, when Voltaire wrote, “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.”
In this case, labeling Bitcoin a “religion” suggests that bitcoin investors are fanatics and not making rational choices.
Bitcoin as good and wholesome
On the other hand, some Bitcoin proponents have leaned into the religion label. McCook’s articles use the language of religion to highlight certain aspects of Bitcoin culture and to normalize them.
For example, “stacking sats” – the practice of regularly buying small fractions of bitcoins – sounds weird. But McCook refers to this practice as a religious ritual, and more specifically as “tithing.” Many churches practice tithing, in which members make regular donations to support their church. So this comparison makes sat stacking seem more familiar.
While for some people religion may be associated with the irrational, it is also associated with what religion scholar Doug Cowan calls “the good, moral and decent fallacy.” That is, some people often assume if something is really a religion, it must represent something good. People who “stack sats” might sound weird. But people who “tithe” could sound principled and wholesome.
Using religion as a framework
For religion scholars, categorizing something as a religion can pave the way for new insights.
As religion scholar J.Z. Smith writes, “‘Religion’ is not a native term; it is created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define.” For Smith, categorizing certain traditions or cultural institutions as religions creates a comparative framework that will hopefully result in some new understanding. With this in mind, comparing Bitcoin to a tradition like Christianity may cause people to notice things that they didn’t before.
For example, many religions were founded by charismatic leaders. Charismatic authority does not come from any government office or tradition but solely from the relationship between a leader and their followers. Charismatic leaders are seen by their followers as superhuman or at least extraordinary. Because this relationship is precarious, leaders often remain aloof to keep followers from seeing them as ordinary human beings.
Several commentators have noted that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto resembles a sort of prophet. Nakamoto’s true identity – or whether Nakamoto is actually a team of people – remains a mystery. But the intrigue surrounding this figure is a source of charisma with consequences for bitcoin’s economic value. Many who invest in bitcoin do so in part because they regard Nakamoto as a genius and an economic rebel. In Budapest, artists even erected a bronze statue as a tribute to Nakamoto.
There’s also a connection between Bitcoin and millennialism, or the belief in a coming collective salvation for a select group of people.
In Christianity, millennial expectations involve the return of Jesus and the final judgment of the living and the dead. Some Bitcoiners believe in an inevitable coming “hyperbitcoinization” in which bitcoin will be the only valid currency. When this happens, the “Bitcoin believers” who invested will be justified, while the “no coiners” who shunned cryptocurrency will lose everything.
A path to salvation
Finally, some Bitcoiners view bitcoin as not just a way to make money, but as the answer to all of humanity’s problems.
“Because the root cause of all of our problems is basically money printing and capital misallocation as a result of that,” McCook argues, “the only way the whales are going to be saved, or the trees are going to be saved, or the kids are going to be saved, is if we just stop the degeneracy.”
This attitude may be the most significant point of comparison with religious traditions. In his book “God Is Not One,” religion professor Stephen Prothero highlights the distinctiveness of world religions using a four-point model, in which each tradition identifies a unique problem with the human condition, posits a solution, offers specific practices to achieve the solution and puts forth exemplars to model that path.
This model can be applied to Bitcoin: The problem is fiat currency, the solution is Bitcoin, and the practices include encouraging others to invest, “stacking sats” and “hodling” – refusing to sell bitcoin to keep its value up. The exemplars include Satoshi and other figures involved in the creation of blockchain technology.
So does this comparison prove that Bitcoin is a religion?
Not necessarily, because theologians, sociologists and legal theorists have many different definitions of religion, all of which are more or less useful depending on what the definition is being used for.
However, this comparison may help people understand why Bitcoin has become so attractive to so many people, in ways that would not be possible if Bitcoin were approached as a purely economic phenomenon.
The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans
Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.
“We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system… or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”
“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.
Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.
The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren’t planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:
The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.
The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn’t reached President Joe Biden’s desk—said Tuesday that it is “dead.”
However, Americans for Tax Fairness still uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.
“The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place,” the report states. “That’s the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years.”
The report adds that “about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year.”
There's no denying our economy and democracy are rigged in favor of the ultra-wealthy.
When the richest 100 Americans have 60,000 times more political power than the bottom 90% of people— it's time to get dynastic wealth under control. https://t.co/U1s6HmY1XC
“This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable,” declared the report’s principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.
“The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America’s wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax,” he asserted. “Effective reforms have already been developed—all that’s needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now.”
The group’s new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.
“As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years,” the report says, “the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small.”
Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would “curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts.” Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket “on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals.”
Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to “impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust’s holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion.”
“The choice is clear,” according to the report. “We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America’s wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
“Fortunately, we know what needs to be done,” the report concludes. “The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further hike prices this year, drawing outrage from critics who say the company is pushing higher costs onto consumers to pad its bottom line.
“Corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson—who saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021—told investors during the company’s earnings call Tuesday that “supply-chain disruptions” and rising labor costs are to blame for the coming price increases, of which he suggested there will be several.
“We have additional pricing actions planned through the balance of this year, which play an important role to mitigate cost pressures including inflation,” said Johnson, who also touted the company’s “strong revenue growth” in the quarter.
Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.
To progressive observers, Starbucks’ announcement of price hikes fits a pattern of U.S. corporations—in sectors across the economy—raising costs for consumers while raking in record profits, boosting executive pay, and squeezing regular employees. Starbucks employees nationwide are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.
Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, for its part, responded with outrage to Starbucks increasing prices for customers after giving its CEO a nearly 40% raise last year.
During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, Rakeen Mabud of the Groundwork Collaborative noted that “in sector after sector, in company after company, corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
“We see that in Kimberly-Clark taking advantage of the pandemic to raise prices on masks,” the economist said. “We see Proctor & Gamble using the fact that they sell essential goods that families depend on like diapers to raise prices in this moment of crisis. And we even see companies like McDonald’s raising prices on consumers even as they enjoy massive increases in sales.”
“So in short,” Mabud added, “this is a really broad-based problem—it’s unfortunately not limited to a specific sector of the economy.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
A new legal filing by New York’s attorney general this week accused former President Donald Trump’s company of misleading lenders about the financial health of its landmark downtown Manhattan skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, while seeking to renew the building’s mortgage.
Though the Trump Organization called 40 Wall Street “one of the great success stories post 2008,” lender Capital One found the company’s estimates of the building’s worth so unbelievable that the bank declined to refinance the tower’s loan in 2015, the filing alleges.
“Capital One harbored great skepticism regarding the Trump Organization’s valuations,” says the filing, which was submitted by Attorney General Letitia James in response to Trump’s efforts to block her from questioning him and his children as part of an ongoing investigation by her office.
The new accusations offer startling details about possible financial fraud involving 40 Wall Street — one of the subjects of a 2019 ProPublica story that highlighted conflicting financial documents the Trump Organization had filed for the building.
ProPublica’s story documented how income, expense and occupancy numbers cited in the eventual refinance for 40 Wall Street and another Manhattan building sometimes didn’t match those the company had filed with city tax authorities. A lower valuation for the city would produce a lower tax bill, while a higher valuation for lenders would make it easier to get a new mortgage.
One expert said it appeared like the Trump Organization was keeping “two sets of books.”
“It feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, at the time.
In her filing, James asserts that Trump Organization employees, including Trump’s children, took part in a pattern of deception in which they misled lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service by vastly overstating values for 40 Wall Street and a host of other Trump properties, including golf courses in Scotland, Los Angeles and Westchester and his buildings on Fifth and Park avenues.
The Trump Organization on Thursday lashed out at James, a Democrat, via a statement emailed by a spokesperson, saying, “The only one misleading the public is Letitia James.
“She defrauded New Yorkers by basing her entire candidacy on a promise to get Trump at all costs without having seen a shred of evidence and in violation of every conceivable ethical rule,” the organization’s statement said. It asserted that James “has no case” and that the “allegations are baseless and will be vigorously defended.”
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, also criticized James, accusing her of making “repeated threats to target the Trump family” and ignoring legal protections for “the very people she is investigating.”
James is seeking to compel testimony and obtain documents from Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who she said have not cooperated with her investigation.
The filing says that property valuations formed the heart of statements of financial condition that the Trump Organization used to demonstrate its net worth. The statements, which James said contained inaccuracies, were compiled by an outside accounting agency from a data spreadsheet and backup material provided by the Trump Organization.
Trump’s personal guarantees to some banks and insurers required him to certify that his financial statements were correct, according to James’ filing. The documents say her office has evidence Trump was “personally involved in reviewing and approving” the statements.
If the company or its employees are found to have deliberately provided misleading valuations, they could face civil or criminal penalties. The company is under investigation by both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
With its classic Gothic Revival style and signature green spire, 40 Wall Street gave Trump a presence in the most famous financial district in the world. His company doesn’t own it, but rather purchased in 1995 the right to act as the landlord for its office and retail space. Finding tenants for that space, however, particularly in the building’s narrow tower, proved a challenge, especially after 9/11, when occupancy sagged and the entire financial district struggled, the ProPublica investigation found.
James’ filing says that as early as 2009, Capital One, which held the mortgage on the property, “raised substantial concerns about cash flow” at 40 Wall Street, prompting in-person meetings with Trump, longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and others. Donald Trump Jr. was also involved in the discussions, the filing says.
The conversations led to a loan modification in 2010, with bank personnel harboring doubts about the Trump Organization’s representations of the building’s financial standing. During those discussions, the Trump Organization provided the bank with profit numbers for 2010 of $12.3 million, which bank personnel described as “very optimistic.”
More startling were the differences between valuations that appeared on Trump’s statements of financial condition and those prepared by appraisers for Capital One. The Trump Organization set the value of the building at $601.8 million in 2010, while the appraisals for Capital One done by Cushman & Wakefield set it at just less than one-third of that, $200 million.
Weisselberg shared one of the company’s higher valuations for the building with the bank in early 2015, boasting of “considerable capital investment” and “a much improved cash flow.” He wanted Capital One to restructure its loan and waive a principal payment of $5 million due in November.
But Capital One declined to refinance the mortgage, referencing its own internal estimate that the building was only worth $257 million a few months before.
That year, 40 Wall Street’s $160 million mortgage was a thorn in Trump’s side, representing his then-largest single debt as he launched his campaign for the presidency.
After Capital One’s rejection, the Trump Organization turned to Ladder Capital Finance, where Weisselberg’s son Jack was a director. Ladder commissioned its own appraisal. Though Ladder used the same Cushman & Wakefield team that had estimated the building was worth $220 million in 2012, the team this time more than doubled the value to $540 million, legal filings said. Ladder approved the refinance.
James’ filing said that evidence her office obtained suggests the 2015 Cushman valuation “appears to have used demonstrably incorrect facts and aggressive assumptions” to arrive at the higher estimate, which the document said “did not reflect a good faith assessment of value.”
On Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield defended its practices, saying it took “great issue with mischaracterizations concerning the work performed and believe they are not supported by the evidence.
“The referenced Cushman & Wakefield appraisals were undertaken and completed in good faith based upon the material information made available,” the company said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “We stand behind the appraisers and the referenced appraisals which reflect fair valuations based upon the underlying facts and market dynamics.”
In 2015, the Trump Organization’s statement of financial condition listed the value of the building as $735.4 million.
Ladder Capital and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Allen Weisselberg and Jack Weisselberg could not immediately be reached.
ProPublica’s 2019 story found several instances of the Trump Organization reporting much lower expenses to its lender, Ladder Capital, than to city tax authorities — including 40 Wall Street’s insurance costs and ground lease. Jack Weisselberg declined to comment at the time on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization. Executives with Ladder also declined to be quoted for the story then.
In 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the Trump Organization inflated valuations at times to appear more profitable and deflated them to achieve a lower real estate tax bill.
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo by Unsplash
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”
Fueling fresh calls for swift, sweeping action by President Joe Biden and financial regulators, a report published Tuesday reveals that if the planet-heating pollution of the 18 largest U.S. asset managers and banks is compared to that of high-emissions countries, Wall Street is a top-five emitter.
“Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The new report—entitled Wall Street’s Carbon Bubble: The global emissions of the U.S. financial sector—was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Sierra Club. The analysis was done by South Pole, which replicated an approach it used earlier this year for a U.K.-focused effort commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Though likely a “gross underestimate,” as Sierra Club put it, because the analysis relies on public disclosures that exclude key data, the researchers found that “just the portions of the portfolios of the eight banks and 10 asset managers studied in this report financed an estimated total of 1.968 billion tons CO2e based on year-end disclosures from 2020.”
Putting that CO2e—or carbon dioxide equivalent, which is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases—figure into context, the report notes:
If the financial institutions (FIs) in this study were a country, they would have the fifth largest emissions in the world, falling just short of Russia;
Financed emissions from the 18 institutions covered in this report are equivalent to 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year;
Financed emissions from the eight banks studied in this report are equivalent to 80 million homes’ energy use for one year; and
Financed emissions from the 10 asset managers studied in this report are equivalent to three billion barrels of oil consumed.
The banks analyzed are Bank of America, Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo.
The asset managers included are BNY Mellon Investment Management, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, and the Vanguard Group.
When Wall Street is factored into the list of the world’s top 10 countries responsible for the most annual greenhouse gas emissions, it falls after China, the United States, India, and Russia but ranks ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Germany, according to Climate Watch data.
As the new publication warns:
The findings of this report make clear that the U.S. financial sector is a major contributor to climate change. Given that the indirect emissions of the U.S. financial sector are just below the total emissions of Russia, it should be considered a high-carbon sector and treated as such. Therefore, if President Biden and his administration do not put in place measures to mitigate U.S.-financed emissions, the United States will almost certainly fall far short of its targets to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction from 2005 levels in 2030 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
The implications of falling short would be dire. Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry would mean that the deadly wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events that Americans and communities around the world are already experiencing will only become worse, and efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly.
Representatives from the groups behind the report echoed its call to action in a statement Tuesday.
“Climate change poses a large systemic risk to the world economy. If left unaddressed, climate change could lead to a financial crisis larger than any in living memory,” said Andres Vinelli, vice president of economic policy at CAP. “The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
Vinelli added that “because the industry has proven itself to be unwilling to govern itself,” regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “must urgently develop a framework to reduce banks’ contributions to climate change.”
Ben Cushing, Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager, agreed that “regulators can no longer ignore Wall Street’s staggering contribution to the climate crisis.”
“The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk,” he said. “Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The report comes as financial institutions worldwide face mounting criticism for their contributions to the climate emergency—including at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland last month—and as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing model legislation that opposes fossil fuel divestment.
More than three dozen climate advocacy groups argued Monday that “what ALEC claims to be discriminatory action”—referring to divestment from major polluters—”is instead prudent action to ensure the stability of our financial system and economy.”
“We know from the Great Recession that the financial sector won’t take responsibility,” the organizations noted. “It’s up to regulators to protect people from the impact on climate and financial risk of fossil fuel investment.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
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Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”
Fossil fuel executives who testified Thursday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing focused on decades of coordinated industry misinformation refused to pledge that their companies will stop lobbying against efforts to combat the climate emergency driven largely by their businesses.
That joint refusal came in response to a challenge from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—who at the end of the hearing announced subpoenas for documents the fossil fuel companies have failed to provide.
Earlier in the hearing, Maloney had asked if the Big Oil CEOs would affirm that their organizations “will no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change.”
Big Oil CEOs unanimously refuse to pledge to Congress to "no longer spend any money directly or indirectly to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change".
Advocates for climate action pointed to the moment as yet another example of major polluters impeding planet-saving policy.
“The silence, non-answers, and repeated deflections from Big Oil’s Slippery Six exposed once and for all that the fossil fuel industry won’t back off its commitment to spreading climate disinformation and lobbying against climate action in order to protect their bottom line,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.
“For the first time ever, fossil fuel executives were confronted under oath with the evidence of their industry’s decadeslong efforts to deceive the American people about climate change,” Wiles continued. “They not only refused to accept responsibility for lying about the catastrophic effects of their fossil fuels—they refused to stop funding efforts to spread disinformation and oppose climate action.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable,” he added. “Today’s hearing and the committee’s ongoing investigation are important steps in those efforts.”
The only real backdrop to today's hearing with Big Oil CEOS is: These companies knew all about climate change in the 1980s and chose to lie about it systematically for decades, which is why we're in our current hideous political fix.
Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, had threatened to subpoena the industry leaders—collectively dubbed the #SlipperySix—if they declined to join the hearing, entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action.”
The historic event included testimony from four industry executives—ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell Oil president Gretchen Watkins—and leaders from industry trade groups: American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark.
Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, warned that “lawmakers should be wary of testimony from executives who have consistently put their industry’s bottom line over the health of the climate and the American people, no matter their rhetoric.”
Yep. We are seeing the fossil fuel savior framework all over the place. We need them, we have always needed them, and we will always need them. https://t.co/SltC52FPoy
Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a pair of climate misinformation scholars at Harvard University, have warned of a “fossil fuel savior frame” that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.”
Both Oreskes and Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn observed the presence of such framing during the hearing. Henn said that “it’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage-takers: ‘You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.”
It’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage takers: “You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.” #SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/mT8bPZJu8j
The fossil fuel witnesses’ initial remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions were full of industry talking points. They advocated for “market-based solutions” like carbon taxes while failing to offer specifics. They also highlighted carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology and hydrogen—both of which progressive green groups have denounced as “false solutions”—as key to reaching a “lower-carbon future.”
FACT CHECK: Exxon's CEO just said the International Energy Agency says the world will continue relying on fossil fuels.
That is false.
Earlier this year, the IEA said: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
While suggesting a long-term need for oil and gas, the executives claimed to believe in anthropogenic climate change and said fossil fuel emissions “contribute” to global heating. Some critics called them out for using that term, rather than “cause” or “drive.”
First misleading ExxonMobil statement: GHG "can contribute to climate change." No, not "can contribute." They DRIVE climate change, and they come primarily from @exxonmobil 's primary product: oil and gas.https://t.co/BO6oAofbeA
Using the the word “contribute” rather than cause, saidHuffPost environment reporter Chris D’Angelo, “downplays/dismisses the science, which shows they are the primary driver… Frankly, it’s climate denial—the very topic of this hearing.”
After inquiring about how long all four executives had been in their current roles, the panel’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), asked whether they had ever signed off on a climate disinformation campaign. They all said no—which experts and activists promptly disputed.
While progressives on the panel grilled the executives, Republicans repeatedly apologized to the CEOs for Democrats’ supposed “intimidation” efforts. Blasting the GOP lawmakers’ actions as “pathetic,” Henn said that “they really do see themselves as servants to Big Oil.”
.@RepGarretGraves (R-$759,995 oil and gas) literally explains that his state of Louisiana is completely screwed by fossil-fueled global warming but he can't and won't do anything about it because oil & gas is so profitable. "Why would we stop?"#SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/uXzf23E3a9
— Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.NEWS (@climatebrad) October 28, 2021
The panel’s GOP members also tried to redirect attention to planet-heating activities of other countries, particularly China, and complained about President Joe Biden’s move to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, even inviting Neal Crabtree, a welder who lost his job when the project was canceled, to testify.
Republicans trotting out as a political prop a witness who supposedly lost his job due to climate policy, as if they or Big Oil ever cared about workers. Meanwhile real labor voices are speaking the truth, thank you @steelworkers: https://t.co/Fz0pk6q3wr
“The GOP’s strategy at this hearing is clear: It will not attempt to claim Big Oil *didn’t* mislead on climate,” tweeted climate reporter Emily Atkin of the HEATED newsletter. “Instead, the GOP is claiming Democrats are wasting time by focusing on climate change, and that it isn’t important to ‘everyday Americans.'”
Thanking Atkin for spotlighting the Republicans’ strategy, ClimateVoice noted that new polling shows the U.S. public does care about the issue. According to survey results released this week, a majority of Americans see climate as a problem of high importance to them and support Congress passing legislation to increase reliance on clean electricity sources.
Maloney, in her closing remarks Thursday, lamented that the hearing featured “much of the denial and deflection” seen in recent decades. She also called out the companies for not turning over requested documents, refusing to “take responsibility” for their contributions to the climate crisis, and continuing to fund groups like API. The chair vowed that her committee will continue its investigation.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation
Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.
The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.
The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.
The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.
That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.
When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.
Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.
“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.
As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.
Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.
“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”
Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.
“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”
Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.
More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.
The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.
On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.
In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.
But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.
From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
At a rally in Denver in 2017, he warned the crowd that Trump “might have something to hide.” That same year, on the floor of the House, he introduced a resolution to force the president to release the records, calling them an “important baseline disclosure.”
But during Polis’ successful run for governor of Colorado in 2018, his calls for transparency faded. The dot-com tycoon turned investor broke with recent precedent and refused to disclose his returns, blaming his Republican opponent, who wasn’t disclosing his.
Polis may have had other reasons for denying requests to release the records.
Despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, Polis paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2013, 2014 and 2015. From 2010 to 2018, his overall rate was just 8.2% — less than half of the 19% paid by a worker making $45,000 in 2018.
The revelations about Polis are contained in a trove of tax information obtained by ProPublica covering thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. The Colorado governor is one of several ultrarich politicians who, the data shows, have paid little or no federal income taxes in multiple years, exploited loopholes to dodge estate taxes or used their public offices to fight reforms that would increase their tax bills.
The records show that rich Democrats and Republicans alike have slashed their taxes using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents. Among them are governors, members of Congress and a cabinet secretary.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said the tax avoidance of these top politicians is “very, very worrisome” since both parties “spend like crazy” and depend on taxes to fund their priorities, from the military to Medicare to Social Security.
“They have the power to decide how much the rest of us pay and the power to spend the money, and then they’re not paying their fair share?” Painter said. “That should be troubling to voters, both conservative and liberal. It should be troubling for everyone.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, for example, is a Republican coal magnate who has made the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. Yet he’s paid very little or no federal income taxes for almost every year since 2000.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the richest people in Congress, was one of the few Republicans to break with his party during the 2017 tax overhaul to fight for a deduction that — unbeknownst to the public — helped him avoid millions in taxes.
And the tax records of Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, showed that both employed a loophole, which was accidentally created by Congress, to escape estate and gift taxes.
As ProPublica has revealed in a series of articles this year, these tactics, if sometimes aggressive, are completely legal. And they’re not universal among wealthy politicians. ProPublica reviewed tax data for a couple dozen wealthy current and former government officials. Their data shows that many of them paid relatively high tax rates while employing more modest use of the fairly standard deductions of the rich.
The politicians who paid little or exploited loopholes either defended their practices as completely proper or declined to comment.
“The Governor has paid every cent of taxes he owes, he has championed tax reform and tax fairness to fix this broken system for everybody, to report otherwise would be inaccurate,” Polis’ spokesperson wrote in an email.
During the late 1990s dot-com era, Polis earned a reputation as a boy wonder. He turned his parents’ small greeting card company into a website, bluemountain.com, which was among the first to enable users to send free virtual cards. He and his family sold the site in 1999 for $780 million.
With the windfall from the sale, Polis continued to start new ventures and invest, but he also began laying the groundwork for a career in politics. He landed in the governor’s office in 2019 when he was just 43.
One of his tools for raising his profile was philanthropy. His generous donations to charity became a theme of both his 2008 run for Congress and his 2018 run for Colorado’s highest office.
Philanthropy also helped keep his tax rate enviably low. In many years, the deductions he claimed for his charitable giving were large enough to wipe out half the income he would have owed taxes on. His giving allowed him, in essence, to take some of the money he would have paid into the public coffers and donate it instead to causes of his choosing.
But an examination of Polis’ philanthropy shows that while he has given to a wide variety of causes, some of his donations served to promote him, blurring the lines between charity and campaigning.
According to the tax filings of his charity, the Jared Polis Foundation, the organization spent more than $2 million from 2001 to 2008 on a semiannual mailer sent to “hundreds of thousands of households throughout Colorado” that was intended to build “on a foundation of familiarity with Jared Polis’ name and his support of public education.” It was one of the charity’s largest expenditures.
A 2005 edition of the mailer reviewed by ProPublica had the feel of a campaign ad. It was emblazoned with the title “Jared Polis Education Report,” included his name six times on the cover and featured photos of Polis, a former state board of education member, surrounded by smiling school children.
The newsletters were discontinued just as he was elected. Because the mailers did not explicitly advocate for his election, they would have been legally allowed as a charitable expenditure.
A decade later, when he ran for governor in a race that he personally poured more than $20 million into, Polis featured his philanthropy in his campaign. In one ad, he used testimonials from an employee and a graduate of a business training charity he founded for military veterans.
Polis’ spokesperson, Victoria Graham, defended the mailers, saying they were intended “to promote innovations and successful models in public education and to raise awareness for the challenges facing public education.” She also pointed to a range of other philanthropy Polis was involved in, from founding charter schools, which she noted were not named after him, to distributing computers to organizations in need.
“His philanthropy is not and has never been motivated by receiving a tax write-off, and to state otherwise is not only inaccurate but fabricating motives and intent and cynical in its view of charity,” Graham said.
While Polis’ charitable giving has helped keep the percentage of his income he pays in taxes low, he has also been able to keep his total taxable income relatively small by using another strategy common among the wealthy: investing in businesses that grow in value but produce minimal income.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s a basic principle of the U.S. tax system — one that typically benefits wealthy people who can afford not to take income. Investments only trigger income taxes when they produce “realized” gains, such as dividends from a stock holding, the sale of an asset or profits from a company. But an investment’s growth in value, while it makes its owner richer, is not taxable.
Polis acknowledged his use of the strategy in 2008 after he released tax information during his first run for Congress and faced criticism for paying so little in taxes. “I founded several high-growth companies, and we would manage those for growth rather than for profit,” he said. “When I make money, I pay taxes. When I don’t make money, I don’t.”
In one of the recent years Polis paid no income taxes, his losses were larger than his income. In two of the years, it was about a million dollars. From 2010 to 2018, when he paid an overall rate of just 8.2%, including payroll taxes, his income averaged $1.5 million.
During that period of low taxes and relatively low income, Polis’ estimated net worth rose sharply. Members of Congress only have to report the value of each of their assets in ranges, so assigning a precise number is impossible. But the nonprofit data site OpenSecrets, which makes estimates by taking the midpoint of the ranges, shows Polis’ wealth growing from $143 million in 2010 to $306 million in 2017, making him the third richest-member of the House at the time. (Graham said congressional disclosure forms are confusingly formatted, potentially causing certain assets to be counted more than once, “so these numbers are likely wildly off.” She did not provide alternative net worth figures.)
One of Polis’ primary vehicles for building his fortune, while avoiding taxable income, appears to have been a family office, Jovian Holdings. The board of directors included his father, sister and a rather surprising outsider: Arthur Laffer. The famed conservative economist’s Laffer Curve provided the Reagan administration with the intellectual basis for arguing that cutting taxes would increase tax revenue. (Polis’ sister is a ProPublica donor.)
The term family office has a mom-and-pop feel, but it is actually part of the infrastructure of protecting the fortunes of the ultrawealthy, from crafting investment and tax strategy to succession and estate planning to concierge services. Depending on how they’re organized, for instance as a business, their costs — the salaries of the staff, rent — can be deductible.
One of the executives at Polis’ family office, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a seasoned tax expert who specializes in “maximizing cost savings both operationally and with all taxing authorities.” She removed that detail around the time ProPublica approached Polis about his taxes.
Unlike ordinary investors, Polis was able to claim millions in deductions for some of the costs of his money management, specifically his family office, which contributed to lowering his tax burden. Ironically, the investment apparatus that helped Polis avoid taxable income became a tax break.
ProPublica discussed the scenario, without naming Polis, with Bob Lord, tax counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness. He said the public appears to be essentially subsidizing Polis’ investing while getting little in return. With a typical business, he said, you get the tax break but also relatively quickly make taxable income.
The costs of a family office are “being taken even though the income may be way out in the future. It’s just a giveaway,” Lord said. “What is the public getting from it? This really, really rich politician gets to shelter his income while his investments grow and doesn’t pay tax on it until he sells.”
Deferring paying taxes is a valuable perk. But the strategy, Lord said, may allow Polis an even more lucrative outcome. Now that Polis has made his fortune, he may be able to largely dodge the tax system forever. Should he die before selling his investments, his heirs would never owe income taxes on the growth.
Graham acknowledged that the tax system unfairly benefits the wealthy but said Polis is not purposely avoiding income that would result in taxes.
“The Governor has long championed tax reforms precisely because the income tax is inadequate and a mismatched way to tax most wealthy people who do not have a regular income but who make money in other ways and should be taxed,” she said. “Since 2006, Governor Polis has paid over $20 million in taxes on the money he earned on his gains and he has championed tax reforms that would lower the tax burden on middle-income earners and eliminate loopholes to ensure higher earners pay their share.”
ProPublica’s data shows that at least two federal officials have already taken steps to preserve their family fortunes for their heirs, exploiting loopholes that divert revenue from the federal government.
Scott, the Florida senator who ran one of the world’s largest health care companies, and DeVos, Trump’s education secretary and believed to be the richest member of his cabinet, have both stored assets in grantor retained annuity trusts — a form of trust used to avoid gift and estate taxes.
GRATs, as they’re commonly known, were accidentally created by Congress in 1990. Lawmakers were trying to close another estate tax loophole and in doing so unintentionally paved the way for another one. The lawyer who pioneered the trusts estimated in 2013 that they had cost the federal government about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
To use this tax-avoidance technique, you put an asset, like stocks or real estate, into a trust assigned to your heirs. The trust pays you back the starting value of the asset (plus some interest). If the original asset rises in value, the gains can go to your heirs tax-free.
GRATs have become widely used among the superrich. A ProPublica investigation found that more than half of the nation’s richest individuals have employed them and other trusts to avoid estate taxes.
It’s unclear from ProPublica’s data how much DeVos, 63, and Scott, 68, were able to transfer tax-free.
DeVos and her husband employed a GRAT from at least 2000 to 2003. DeVos’ father was a wealthy industrialist. Her husband was the president of Amway, a multilevel marketing company that focuses on health, beauty and home products. Her family is believed to be worth billions.
Her causes both before and during her time in government depended on tax dollars. As a donor and fundraiser for Republican causes, she pushed for charter schools and government subsidies to allow parents to send their kids to private schools. As education secretary, she pushed to send millions of federal dollars intended for public schools to private and religious schools instead.
Scott, one of the wealthiest senators, with a net worth likely in the hundreds of millions, used a GRAT for much longer, from at least 2001 through 2009. His tax data shows the assets in the trust — stakes of a private investment fund and family partnership he and his wife created — receiving millions in income.
When he was in the private sector, Scott benefited from federal programs like Medicare, which are funded by taxes. He built and ran Columbia/HCA, a massive chain of for-profit hospitals. After a fraud investigation became public, he resigned and the company paid $1.7 billion to settle allegations it overbilled government health programs. Scott has previously emphasized that he was never charged, though he acknowledged the company made mistakes.
Scott declined to comment. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for DeVos, said she “pays her taxes in full as required by law. Your ‘reporting’ is not only factually wrong but also doubles-down on the criminal actions that underpin ProPublica’s political campaign to prop up the Biden Administration’s failing agenda.”
California Congressman Darrell Issa was one of a handful of Republicans who bucked his party in 2017 and voted against Trump’s tax overhaul.
Issa said he opposed the legislation because it all but eliminated the deduction taxpayers could take on their federal returns for state and local taxes. That provision was particularly contentious in high tax blue states like California, but most Republicans from his state still fell in line. The other GOP congressman in the San Diego area, for example, voted yes.
Limiting the write-off, known as the SALT deduction, was one of the few progressive changes in the Trump tax law. The deduction had long disproportionately benefited the wealthiest because they pay the most in state and local taxes. According to one projection, if the cap were removed from the deduction, households with income in the top 1% would reap the most benefit, paying $31,000 less a year on average — amounting to more than half of the total taxes avoided through the write-off. The top 25% of households would average less than $3,000 in savings a year, and the savings drop precipitously from there, with most households deriving no benefit.
In interviews and public statements, Issa said in fighting to preserve the deduction, he was defending the interests of middle-class taxpayers. “I didn’t come to Washington to raise taxes on my constituents,” he said at the time, “and I do not plan to start today.”
It’s true that more than 40% of taxpayers in Issa’s former district, a relatively affluent swath of Southern California, were able to make at least some use of the deduction.
But the 68-year-old congressman, who made a fortune in the car alarm business, was in the top echelon of its beneficiaries. Between 2003 and 2017, his tax data shows, Issa generally paid a relatively high tax rate but was able to claim more than $51 million in write-offs thanks to the SALT deduction, an average of more than $3 million a year.
By contrast, households in his district that made between $100,000 and $200,000 and took the SALT deduction claimed an average of $14,843 in 2017.
Issa’s spokesman, Jonathan Wilcox, declined to say if the SALT deduction’s impact on the congressman’s taxes factored into his decision to advocate for it.
“So much stupid,” Wilcox said. “Be sure to write back if you ever do better than trolling for garbage.”
Gov. Jim Justice is believed to be the richest person in West Virginia, controlling vast reserves of valuable steelmaking coal and owning The Greenbrier luxury resort. He made an appearance in 2014 on the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Estimates of his net worth have ranged from the hundreds of millions to well over a billion.
Nonetheless, he’s paid little or no federal income taxes for almost every year between 2000 and 2018, ProPublica’s trove of tax records shows. In 12 of those years he paid nothing, and in all but two of those years, his rate didn’t exceed 4%.
His largest tax payment came in 2009, when his family sold off much of its mining holdings to a Russian company for more than half a billion dollars. That year, after deductions, his tax rate rose to a modest 13.4%.
In more recent years, Justice, 70, has reported tens of millions in losses each year. That not only helped him to minimize his federal income taxes, it also allowed him to apply those losses to his profits from previous years — and get refunds for the taxes he initially paid in those years.
Justice’s income was low enough in 2018 for his family to qualify for and receive a $2,400 coronavirus stimulus check, aid meant for low- and middle-income Americans.
The recent years of large losses reported on Justice’s tax returns have coincided with real signs of financial problems. The coal industry’s fortunes have rapidly declined. He’s been hounded for unpaid bills and loans. The Russian company that bought much of his coal empire sued him and got him to buy back the assets — at a much discounted price but attached to significant debt. Forbes knocked him off its wealth ranking, citing escalating battles with two major lenders over unpaid debt. Justice’s representatives have said he pays what he owes, and his business empire is in good shape.
But even before his empire began showing significant cracks, Justice was reporting losses or little income for a man so wealthy. From 1996 to 2008, Justice, who received a coal and farming fortune from his father, who died in 1993, either reported losses to the IRS or just a few hundred thousand dollars in income.
The disconnect could be explained by the generous deductions afforded to coal business owners.
For example, owners are allowed a depletion deduction, which allows them to take 10% of the revenue from coal they extract and write it off against their profit. This spin on depreciation can have outsized benefits because unlike normal depreciation — in which the write-offs are based on how much you paid for an asset — the write-off amount here faces no such limit, and can therefore exceed the initial investment. The deduction has been criticized by environmentalists and congressional Democrats as an overly generous giveaway.
Another benefit coal owners get is the ability to immediately expense much of their mine development costs on their taxes instead of being forced to stretch such deductions over a longer period of time. Justice has said that in the 15 years after his father’s death, he oversaw “a massive expansion of multiple businesses which included significant coal reserve expansion” — development that could have provided him with a significant stockpile of such write-offs. (ProPublica has previously reported on other generous write-offs. Sports team owners, for example, are allowed to deduct the value of their intangible assets — such as media deals and franchise rights — as wasting assets, even as they rise in value.)
Experts said this could explain how Justice could have reported negative income of $15 million in 2008, a year in which Mechel, the Russian company that subsequently bought much of his family’s coal empire, said that business alone produced about $94 million in EBITDA — a common measure of a business’ profitability before taxes and some other expenses.
Justice declined to answer a list of specific questions about his taxes. In a statement, his lawyer, Steve Ruby, said Justice “has paid millions upon millions of dollars in state and federal income taxes and has always followed the law. In many years, his businesses have suffered losses as the result of weak coal prices combined with substantial outlays to save jobs at local businesses that other companies were abandoning.
“When many other coal producers were filing for bankruptcy, the Justice companies persevered and refused to take the easy way out through a bankruptcy proceeding, a decision that contributed to those losses. Like any other taxpayer, Gov. Justice does not owe income taxes in years in which his income is negative,” the statement read.
Ruby confirmed that Justice received coronavirus stimulus checks but said he did not cash them.
Like Scott and DeVos, Justice has used GRATs to sidestep estate and gift taxes, his returns and court records suggest.
In 2008, the year before he sold much of his coal empire to the Russian company, two GRATs appeared on his returns for the first time. And when the Russian company sued Justice, it also sued him in his capacity as the trustee for those GRATs. Justice had placed at least some of the coal assets into the trusts before the sale, according to the lawsuit.
Ruby’s statement did not address Justice’s use of GRATs.
Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform.
Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources.
As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances of misinformation found on a social media platform leaves two key questions unanswered: How likely are users to encounter misinformation, and are certain users especially likely to be affected by misinformation? These questions are the denominator problem and the distribution problem.
The COVID-19 misinformation study, “Facebook’s Algorithm: a Major Threat to Public Health”, published by public interest advocacy group Avaaz in August 2020, reported that sources that frequently shared health misinformation — 82 websites and 42 Facebook pages — had an estimated total reach of 3.8 billion views in a year.
At first glance, that’s a stunningly large number. But it’s important to remember that this is the numerator. To understand what 3.8 billion views in a year means, you also have to calculate the denominator. The numerator is the part of a fraction above the line, which is divided by the part of the fraction below line, the denominator.
Getting some perspective
One possible denominator is 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook users, in which case, on average, every Facebook user has been exposed to at least one piece of information from these health misinformation sources. But these are 3.8 billion content views, not discrete users. How many pieces of information does the average Facebook user encounter in a year? Facebook does not disclose that information.
Without knowing the denominator, a numerator doesn’t tell you very much. The Conversation U.S., CC BY-ND
Market researchers estimate that Facebook users spend from 19 minutes a day to 38 minutes a day on the platform. If the 1.93 billion daily active users of Facebook see an average of 10 posts in their daily sessions – a very conservative estimate – the denominator for that 3.8 billion pieces of information per year is 7.044 trillion (1.93 billion daily users times 10 daily posts times 365 days in a year). This means roughly 0.05% of content on Facebook is posts by these suspect Facebook pages.
The 3.8 billion views figure encompasses all content published on these pages, including innocuous health content, so the proportion of Facebook posts that are health misinformation is smaller than one-twentieth of a percent.
Is it worrying that there’s enough misinformation on Facebook that everyone has likely encountered at least one instance? Or is it reassuring that 99.95% of what’s shared on Facebook is not from the sites Avaaz warns about? Neither.
Misinformation distribution
In addition to estimating a denominator, it’s also important to consider the distribution of this information. Is everyone on Facebook equally likely to encounter health misinformation? Or are people who identify as anti-vaccine or who seek out “alternative health” information more likely to encounter this type of misinformation?
Another social media study focusing on extremist content on YouTube offers a method for understanding the distribution of misinformation. Using browser data from 915 web users, an Anti-Defamation League team recruited a large, demographically diverse sample of U.S. web users and oversampled two groups: heavy users of YouTube, and individuals who showed strong negative racial or gender biases in a set of questions asked by the investigators. Oversampling is surveying a small subset of a population more than its proportion of the population to better record data about the subset.
The researchers found that 9.2% of participants viewed at least one video from an extremist channel, and 22.1% viewed at least one video from an alternative channel, during the months covered by the study. An important piece of context to note: A small group of people were responsible for most views of these videos. And more than 90% of views of extremist or “alternative” videos were by people who reported a high level of racial or gender resentment on the pre-study survey.
While roughly 1 in 10 people found extremist content on YouTube and 2 in 10 found content from right-wing provocateurs, most people who encountered such content “bounced off” it and went elsewhere. The group that found extremist content and sought more of it were people who presumably had an interest: people with strong racist and sexist attitudes.
The authors concluded that “consumption of this potentially harmful content is instead concentrated among Americans who are already high in racial resentment,” and that YouTube’s algorithms may reinforce this pattern. In other words, just knowing the fraction of users who encounter extreme content doesn’t tell you how many people are consuming it. For that, you need to know the distribution as well.
Superspreaders or whack-a-mole?
A widely publicized study from the anti-hate speech advocacy group Center for Countering Digital Hate titled Pandemic Profiteers showed that of 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups examined, 12 anti-vaccine celebrities were responsible for 70% of the content circulated in these groups, and the three most prominent were responsible for nearly half. But again, it’s critical to ask about denominators: How many anti-vaccine groups are hosted on Facebook? And what percent of Facebook users encounter the sort of information shared in these groups?
Without information about denominators and distribution, the study reveals something interesting about these 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups, but nothing about medical misinformation on Facebook as a whole.
These types of studies raise the question, “If researchers can find this content, why can’t the social media platforms identify it and remove it?” The Pandemic Profiteers study, which implies that Facebook could solve 70% of the medical misinformation problem by deleting only a dozen accounts, explicitly advocates for the deplatforming of these dealers of disinformation. However, I found that 10 of the 12 anti-vaccine influencers featured in the study have already been removed by Facebook.
Consider Del Bigtree, one of the three most prominent spreaders of vaccination disinformation on Facebook. The problem is not that Bigtree is recruiting new anti-vaccine followers on Facebook; it’s that Facebook users follow Bigtree on other websites and bring his content into their Facebook communities. It’s not 12 individuals and groups posting health misinformation online – it’s likely thousands of individual Facebook users sharing misinformation found elsewhere on the web, featuring these dozen people. It’s much harder to ban thousands of Facebook users than it is to ban 12 anti-vaccine celebrities.
This is why questions of denominator and distribution are critical to understanding misinformation online. Denominator and distribution allow researchers to ask how common or rare behaviors are online, and who engages in those behaviors. If millions of users are each encountering occasional bits of medical misinformation, warning labels might be an effective intervention. But if medical misinformation is consumed mostly by a smaller group that’s actively seeking out and sharing this content, those warning labels are most likely useless.
Trying to understand misinformation by counting it, without considering denominators or distribution, is what happens when good intentions collide with poor tools. No social media platform makes it possible for researchers to accurately calculate how prominent a particular piece of content is across its platform.
Facebook restricts most researchers to its Crowdtangle tool, which shares information about content engagement, but this is not the same as content views. Twitter explicitly prohibits researchers from calculating a denominator, either the number of Twitter users or the number of tweets shared in a day. YouTube makes it so difficult to find out how many videos are hosted on their service that Google routinely asks interview candidates to estimate the number of YouTube videos hosted to evaluate their quantitative skills.
As the societal impacts of social media become more prominent, pressure on the big tech platforms to release more data about their users and their content is likely to increase. If those companies respond by increasing the amount of information that researchers can access, look very closely: Will they let researchers study the denominator and the distribution of content online? And if not, are they afraid of what researchers will find?
“Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable.”
Democratic leaders on the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee sent letters Thursday inviting the heads of key fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups to testify before the panel about the industry’s contributions to climate disinformation in recent decades.
Applauded by advocates of holding polluters and their business partners accountable for fueling the worsening climate emergency, the letters come amid concerns about how corporate lobbyists may influence a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better package—especially in the wake of a damning exposé on ExxonMobil earlier this summer.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who respectively chair the House panel and its Environment Subcommittee, wrote that “we are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world.”
“We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change,” the pair continued.
They also expressed concern that such “strategies of obfuscation and distraction continue today,” noting that “fossil fuel companies increasingly outsource lobbying to trade groups, obscuring their own roles in disinformation efforts.”
“One of Congress’s top legislative priorities is combating the increasingly urgent crisis of a changing climate,” the lawmakers added. “To do this, Congress must address pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry and curb troubling business practices that lead to disinformation on these issues.”
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell president Gretchen Watkins, American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark (pdfs) now have a week to inform Democrats if they plan to willingly testify at the panel’s October 28 hearing.
This is a historic opportunity to do something about the damage the fossil fuel industry has done to our planet and our health and I intend to make the most of it.
Pointing to industry leaders’ past behavior, Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig said that “these polluters have long proven they’re more concerned with boosting their executives’ bottom lines than with protecting the climate. The only question is: will they defend their harmful actions before Congress? Or will they again refuse to answer to the American people?”
The Democrats also requested information from the firms, including internal communications and memos about climate science and related marketing as well as plans to reduce planet-heating emissions across the industry. If the letter recipients refuse to participate or turn over those materials, the panel’s leaders may issue subpoenas.
Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, celebrated the letters in a statement that acknowledged other efforts to hold the industry accountable, including more than two dozen lawsuits filed by state and local governments in recent years.
“We applaud Chairs Maloney and Khanna for demanding that these executives answer for their history of climate deception,” he said. “Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable. If the executives refuse to testify voluntarily, they should be subpoenaed.”
In a video released earlier this month, Khanna vowed that the panel’s probe of the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation “will be like the Big Tobacco hearings” of the 1990s.
Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran—whose academic publications include the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate communications—said at the time that “it’s no surprise that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have used the same propaganda playbook to confuse the public and undermine political action, because they rely on many of the same PR firms and advertising agencies to do their dirty work.”
Ad and PR agencies are under mounting pressure to ditch fossil fuel clients for good, thanks in part to the Clean Creatives campaign supported by Fossil Free Media, both of which welcomed the letters.
YES! I think this is a landmark day in the climate fight.
These sorts of hearings ended Big Tobacco's stranglehold over our political process. They need to do the same for Big Oil.
“This is a landmark day in the climate fight,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, noting the impact of the tobacco hearings. “For decades, the fossil fuel industry has polluted our political process along with polluting our atmosphere. Exposing the industry’s disinformation is a critical step in holding it accountable for the damage it has done and clearing the way for meaningful change.”
Clean Creatives campaign director Duncan Meisel suggested that “this investigation is the beginning of the end of misleading fossil fuel advertising and PR in the United States.”
“For too long, this industry has used fake front groups, advanced greenwashing, and straight up deception to delay climate action, every time with the willing help of some of the biggest ad and PR firms in the world,” he said. “Reps. Khanna and Maloney are following in the footsteps of congressional investigations that devastated the reputations of tobacco companies and their advertisers. Fossil fuel companies and their agencies are now on notice that they are next.”
“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”
Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.
According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Postconcluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.
From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.
CNNwarned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.
On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”
“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”
While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”
With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.
Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”
Happening now: we are outside UK parliament with a visual protest against Facebook’s treatment of children and its business model which puts profit before public safety. (1/7) #PeopleVsBigTechpic.twitter.com/37UA18PL3r
“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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).
“Pfizer has used its monopoly on a lifesaving vaccine to extract concessions from desperate governments,” said the report’s author, urging action from the Biden administration.
Pfizer has used its position as a producer of one of the leading Covid-19 vaccines to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk, and maximize profits” through secret contracts with countries around the world, according to a Public Citizen report published Tuesday.
“The contracts consistently place Pfizer’s interests before public health imperatives.”
“Behind closed doors, Pfizer wields its power to extract a series of concerning concessions from governments,” report author Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, said in a statement. “The global community cannot allow pharmaceutical corporations to keep calling the shots.”
The new report begins by noting February reporting about accusations of Pfizer—an American pharmaceutical giant that developed its mRNA vaccine with the German firm BioNTech—”bullying” Latin American governments during contract negotiations for doses.
Public Citizen obtained unredacted term sheets, drafts, or final agreements between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the European Commission, and Peru. The consumer rights advocacy group also examined redacted contracts with Chile, the U.S., and the U.K.
You can read our first story on Pfizer’s vaccine contracts in Latin America here. We found Pfizer had asked some countries to put up sovereign assets as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases. (Published February.)https://t.co/c0Y8qDIW4z
Based on those contracts, the report identifies six tactics Pfizer is using to serve the company rather than public health in the midst of a deadly pandemic:
1. Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments
The Brazilian government complained earlier this year that the company insisted on “unfair and abusive” terms but ultimately accepted a contract that “waived sovereign immunity; imposed no penalties on Pfizer for late deliveries; agreed to resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York; and broadly indemnified Pfizer for civil claims.”
Brazil also agreed to a nondisclosure provision similar to those found in contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government.
2. Pfizer Controls Donations
Again using Brazil as an example, the report points out that the South American nation must first get a go-ahead from Pfizer to accept donations or buy its vaccines from others. The country is also barred from “donating, distributing, exporting, or otherwise transporting the vaccine outside Brazil without Pfizer’s permission.”
3. Pfizer Secured an “IP Waiver” for Itself
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla “has emerged as a strident defender of intellectual property in the pandemic,” the report says, noting his opposition to a proposal that members of the World Trade Organization who signed on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waive IP protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments during the crisis.
“But, in several contracts, Pfizer seems to recognize the risk posed by intellectual property to vaccine development, manufacturing, and sale,” Public Citizen explains. “The contracts shift responsibility for any intellectual property infringement that Pfizer might commit to the government purchasers. As a result, under the contract, Pfizer can use anyone’s intellectual property it pleases—largely without consequence.”
4. Private Arbitrators, Not Public Courts, Decide Disputes in Secret
While the U.K. contract requires that disputes are settled by secret panel of three private arbitrators under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, the report says, “the Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law.”
5. Pfizer Can Go After State Assets
“Pfizer required Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive sovereign immunity,” the report highlights, detailing that the doctrine can sometimes protect states from companies trying to enforce decisions reached by the previously noted secret arbitral panels. Some of the contracts enable the company to “request that courts use state assets as a guarantee that Pfizer will be paid an arbitral award and/or use the assets to compensate Pfizer if the government does not pay,” according to Public Citizen.
6. Pfizer Calls the Shots on Key Decisions
“What happens if there are vaccine supply shortages? In the Albania draft contract and the Brazil and Colombia agreement, Pfizer will decide adjustments to the delivery schedule based on principles the corporation will decide” the report notes, concluding that “under the vast majority of contracts, Pfizer’s interests come first.”
Public Citizen calls on world leaders, especially U.S. President Joe Biden, to “push back” against Pfizer’s negotiating tactics and “rein in” its monopoly power.
According to the group, the Biden administration can “call on Pfizer to renegotiate existing commitments and pursue a fairer approach in the future” as well as “further rectify the power imbalance by sharing the vaccine recipe, under the Defense Production Act, to allow multiple producers to expand vaccine supplies.”
The U.S. administration “can also work to rapidly secure a broad waiver of intellectual property rules,” the report adds, declaring that “a wartime response against the virus demands nothing less.”
In response to Public Citizen’s report, Sharon Castillo, a spokesperson for Pfizer, toldThe Washington Post that confidentiality clauses were “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.”
Castillo also said that “Pfizer has not interfered and has absolutely no intention of interfering with any country’s diplomatic, military, or culturally significant assets,” adding that “to suggest anything to the contrary is irresponsible and misleading.”
Meanwhile, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, accused Pfizer of “taking advantage of countries’ desperation” with the far-reaching contracts.
“Most of us have sacrificed during the pandemic; staying distant to protect family and friends,” Maybarduk said Tuesday. “Pfizer went the other way, using its control of scarce vaccines to win special privileges, from people that have little choice.”
This article was originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT was republished under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Michele Carew, an elections administrator with 14 years of experience, has resigned after a monthslong campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said.
An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.
Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.
Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.
“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”
Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.
Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.
“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”
Though experts say it is difficult to determine how many elections officials have left their positions nationally, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have seen numerous departures. According to the AP, about a third of Pennsylvania’s county election officials have left in the last year and a half; in Ohio, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections have left in the southwestern part of the state, according to The New York Times.
Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state. Across the country, partisans’ demands for audits have mostly focused on counties and states carried by President Joe Biden, particularly those that went for Trump four years earlier.
But Texas, despite going for Trump by 6 percentage points, has seen its fair share of blowback. Last month, the Texas secretary of state announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of four of the state’s largest counties hours after Trump issued a public letter demanding audits of the state’s results.
Before that, in July, Texas passed sweeping voting legislation that critics say disenfranchises vulnerable voters and unfairly targets administrators and other elections officials. Among the law’s provisions are new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with expanded powers given to poll watchers.
On Saturday, after blasting the four-county audit plan as “weak,” Trump threatened the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives with a primary challenge if the speaker didn’t advance a bill that would allow audits in more counties.
In Hood County, the local GOP executive committee likewise issued warnings to Republican officials who defended Carew. In July, the committee threatened County Judge Ron Massingill with a social media campaign that would tell voters he was “incapable of providing them with free and fair elections” if he didn’t convene the county’s elections commission to discuss Carew’s termination.
Massingill refused, arguing that no political party should be able to direct the activities of the independent elections administrator. Katie Lang, the county clerk and vice chair of the county’s election commission, convened the meeting and moved to fire Carew. Carew survived the vote by a 3-2 margin, with Massingill and the county tax assessor, both Republicans, joining the Hood County Democratic chair.
Republican County Chair David Fischer called on county commissioners to dissolve the independent office of elections administrator and transfer election duties to Lang, which he said would make the election administration process more accountable to the county’s Republican majority.
Counties in Texas can choose between hiring an independent elections administrator, who is meant to be insulated from political pressures, or letting a county official, often an elected county clerk, run elections. County clerks, who manage functions like property records and birth certificates, run elections in many of the state’s smallest counties.
Fischer has declined to speak with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
On social media, Lang has shared “Stop the Steal” and “Impeach Biden” memes and videos. Lang made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Lang did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, but she previously told the Hood County News she wished Carew “the best in her future endeavors.”
Over the last year, Carew has come under fire for everything from her connection with the League of Women Voters, which critics say is anti-Trump, to her interest in a $29,000 grant, funded in part by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that would have been used to pay for costs related to the pandemic.
She was also accused of harboring a hidden agenda after refusing to allow a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump One America News Network into a private training for election professionals in March when she headed the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
The most sustained criticism of Carew came from critics who accused her of violating the law by not adhering to an obscure election law that requires ballots to be consecutively numbered.
But seven election experts and administrators told ProPublica and the Tribune that consecutively numbering ballots is out of step with best practices in election security and voter privacy, and that consecutive numbering is not required to conduct effective election audits.
Despite the toll the last year has taken on her, Carew on Monday remained defiant. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said. “I’m the one who wins in the end.”
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 committeealleging 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
Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reutersrevealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.
“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.
Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”
In India, Amazon stoked sales of private-brand products by manipulating its search results so that the products would appear ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on https://t.co/OA0tY09fhk, an internal document shows https://t.co/1FMsAX0pza
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.
But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.
“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”
“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”
Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.
“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”
4/ Months later, in April 2020, @WSJ revealed that Amazon had been stealing from independent businesses to create competing products.https://t.co/ZgsNmtExIJ
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) October 13, 2021
“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”
Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“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).
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” one group asked after whistleblower Frances Haugen said the corporation is unwilling to confront hate speech and disinformation.
Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.
Haugen, who copied a “trove of private Facebook research” before she resigned from the social media company in May, toldCBS‘s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview that the tech giant took some steps to limit misinformation ahead of the 2020 election because it understood that then-President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about voter fraud posed a serious threat. Many of the safety measures that Facebook implemented, however, were temporary, she added.
“As soon as the election was over,” Haugen said, “they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”
Facebook officials claim that some of the anti-misinformation systems remained in place, but in the interregnum between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration, far-right extremists used the social networking site to organize the deadly January 6 coup attempt—something acknowledged by an internal task force’s report on Facebook’s failure to neutralize “Stop the Steal” activity on its platforms.
There is, according to Haugen, a simple explanation for why executives at the company refuse to do more to mitigate harmful social media behavior: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen—who first revealed her identity on Sunday after having secretly shared internal documents with federal regulators, reported on in the Wall Street Journal‘s series, “The Facebook Files”—also said the corporation is lying to the public about how effective it is at curbing hate speech and disinformation, arguing that “Facebook has demonstrated it cannot operate independently.”
In the wake of Haugen’s bombshell interview, social media experts condemned Facebook for prioritizing “profits above all else.”
“Facebook runs on a hate-and-lie-for-profit business model that amplifies all sorts of toxicity on its platforms,” Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, said Monday in a statement. “Thanks to this brave whistleblower, we now have further proof that Facebook’s executives—all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—routinely chose profits over public safety.”
González, co-founder of Ya Basta Facebook and the Change the Terms coalition, added that Facebook executives “designed the company’s algorithms to put engagement, growth, and profits above all else, even allowing lies about the 2020 election results to spread to millions in advance of the white-nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
Longtime critics of Facebook argued that the “new revelations” about the company demand immediate federal intervention.
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of civil rights leaders and academics, asked in a statement released after Haugen’s interview aired. “The system is blinking red, and without real, meaningful, independent, and robust oversight and investigation of Facebook, more lives will be lost.”
“The goal,” added the group, “is no longer to save Facebook—Facebook is beyond hope. The goal now is to save democracy.”
Free Press summarized the Journal‘s key findings on Facebook, which we now know stem from internal documents provided by Haugen:
Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules; Instagram is harmful to millions of young users; Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change promotes objectionable or harmful content; Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about Covid-19 vaccines; and globally, Facebook is used to incite violence against ethnic minorities and facilitat[e] action against political dissent.
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, praised Haugen for exposing Facebook’s “amplification and use of hate to keep users on the platform engaged.”
Facebook has “weaponized… data in harmful ways against users,” Mitchell continued, and failed to consider the negative effects of “hate-filled rhetoric” even after the Myanmar military used Facebook to launch a genocide in 2018.
González argued that Haugen “turned evidence of this gross negligence over to the government at great personal risk, and now we need the government to respond with decisive action to hold the company responsible for protecting public safety.”
“The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model,” said González.
“Facebook must also act swiftly to remedy the harms it is continuing to inflict on the public at large,” she added. “It must end special protections for powerful politicians, ban white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists, and institute wholesale changes to strengthen content moderation in English and other languages—and we need this all now.”
According to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at The Guardian and co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, “Facebook is a rogue state, lying to regulators, investors, and its own oversight board.”
“What we are seeing today is a market failure with profound, devastating global consequences,” she said. “Executives and board members must be held to account. There is evidence to suggest that their behavior was not just immoral but also criminal.”
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that “even as we feel outrage toward Mr. Zuckerberg and his corporation, the cause of this crisis is not a single company, not even one as powerful as Facebook.”
“The cause is the economic institution of surveillance capitalism,” said Zuboff. “The economic logic of these systems, the data operations that feed them, and the markets that support them are not limited to Facebook.”
“The imperatives of surveillance economics determine the engineering of these operations—their products, objectives, and financial incentives—along with those of the other tech empires, their extensive ecosystems, and thousands of companies in diverse sectors far from Silicon Valley,” she continued. “The damage already done is intolerable. The damage that most certainly lies ahead is unthinkable.”
Zuboff added that the only “durable solution to this crisis” is to “undertake the work of interrupting and outlawing the dangerous operations of surveillance capitalism and its predictable social harms that assault human autonomy, splinter society, and undermine democracy.”
Haugen is scheduled to testify on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Protecting Kids Online.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
