The post Universities Profit in the Millions from Fossil Fuel Corporations, According to Student Reporting  appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

President Trump has given yet more power to Elon Musk, who is now leading the effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB helps enforce consumer financial laws for mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. We speak to a former CFPB staffer, Julie Margetta Morgan, who says the consumer watchdog has helped recover $21 billion lost to financial fraud and abuse in its decade-plus of existence. She says that Musk, the world’s richest man and a promoter of cryptocurrency, is attempting to eliminate sources of regulatory oversight as he plans to turn the social media company X, which he owns, into a payments platform. “The thing that stands in his way is having strong regulators who will make him play by the same rules as every other bank. … The actions over the last few weeks have been incredibly bad for individual, everyday Americans, but incredibly good for Elon Musk’s pocketbook.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

President Trump has given yet more power to Elon Musk, who is now leading the effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Created in response to the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB helps enforce consumer financial laws for mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. We speak to a former CFPB staffer, Julie Margetta Morgan, who says the consumer watchdog has helped recover $21 billion lost to financial fraud and abuse in its decade-plus of existence. She says that Musk, the world’s richest man and a promoter of cryptocurrency, is attempting to eliminate sources of regulatory oversight as he plans to turn the social media company X, which he owns, into a payments platform. “The thing that stands in his way is having strong regulators who will make him play by the same rules as every other bank. … The actions over the last few weeks have been incredibly bad for individual, everyday Americans, but incredibly good for Elon Musk’s pocketbook.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes. “It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.

The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.

A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News

Tony Incashola Jr., director of tribal Resource management for CSKT, looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands. 

To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations. Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.    

However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.

The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”

Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so. 

Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”

Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said. 

The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.

The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing. 

The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.

Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.

“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”

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In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.

While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands. 

At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.

That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”

Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.

Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.

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Misplaced Trust

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In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.

But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.

Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. 

Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.

By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.

“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights. 

Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.

“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”

Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.

In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.

That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.” 

Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”

Since the 1930s, the CSKT has prioritized reclaiming land, buying private and state trust lands back at market value. Today, the tribe owns more than 60 percent of its reservation.  

While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.

The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.

“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.

On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”

Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”

But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.

In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.

“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,'” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”

Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back. 

This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How schools, hospitals, and prisons in 15 states profit from land and resources on 79 tribal nations on Sep 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anna Smith.

Janine Jackson interviewed the American Economic Liberties Project’s Lee Hepner about the Google monopoly for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Slate (8/6/24)

Janine Jackson: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices.

If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear. If it did nothing else, this ruling changes that.

So what happened? Lee Hepner is an antitrust lawyer and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Lee Hepner.

Lee Hepner: Thanks so much for having me.

JJ: The Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a history lesson. It’s from 1890, but it’s living, meaningful law. How or why exactly did the judge determine that Google was in violation of it?

LH: You said it right there. This law that dates back to the 19th century, that used to be used against railroad barons, has now been applied to this new tech industry. It’s really proof of the durability of one of the foundational laws for ensuring fair markets and competition across our economy.

And Google is ripe for being addressed by this law. The judge found that Google was essentially without competition in the market for search engines, and truth be told, I mean, 80% of overall searches are conducted via Google; on mobile devices, that’s 95%. And Google is able to profit extraordinarily off of not having competition, and by blocking out rivals who threatened to create new and innovative products that actually benefit consumers and move this technology forward. So that was really at the crux of the judge’s decision in this case.

National Post (8/9/24)

JJ: So it isn’t just that Google is the default search engine; it’s that they are doing things, including paying money, to maintain that, and to prevent other companies from being that.

LH: That’s exactly right, and the judge really eloquently, in his opinion, describes how Google maintains its power through that circular system. It pays for exclusive agreements across Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, other device manufacturers, and by virtue of those exclusive agreements, it achieves scale that it then sells to advertisers for extraordinary revenue, and then it reinvests that revenue back at the beginning, in securing those exclusive agreements. So you really see how this is a self-reinforcing monopoly that Google has been able to maintain through anti-competitive conduct.

JJ: And we know it’s not by accident, if anyone were to believe that. There are internal messages, I just read in a piece by Matt Stoller, where Google is saying, “Inertia is the path of least resistance.” They know what they’re doing.

LH: Oh, absolutely. It’s a clear monopoly strategy. And, just to be clear, those are the communications that we were able to see. Google was also criticized by this judge for deleting untold number of records that were relevant to the litigation. And that was a big part of this case, too: what Google didn’t say, because they were training employees to move communications to secret servers and auto-deleted chats. So even in the absence of a smoking gun, there was a very clear sense that Google was intentionally perpetuating an illegal scheme to maintain its market power.

JJ: It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a meta-issue, or inconsequential. There is an impact of the quality of searches. Not everyone’s just looking for “Thai restaurant near me.” It matters if searches are not the best that they could be, yeah?

Lee Hepner: “Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals.”

LH: Yeah. We’ve all heard stories about Google search becoming worse over time. It’s harder to find that thing that you were looking for, because they’re not necessarily investing in the rank of search results, or they’re prioritizing paid ads that look like organic search results. So Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals. And that’s just the core characteristic of monopolies that is as old as time, and we see across a lot of industries.

JJ: Yeah, I was just going to say, Google is not being punished for building a better mousetrap. And news media, I think, play a role here for the anthropomorphizing of, especially, tech companies as scrappy, as game changers: They’re not AT&T.  We’ve been trained to think, these guys–and they are guys–break the rules, but on behalf of all of us. And that’s not what’s happening here.

LH: Sure, and it’s just a radically different industry than it was, say, in the early 2000s, after we broke up the last big monopoly, Microsoft. That was a quarter century ago since the last decision on a case brought by the government against a big monopoly.

And then we were seeing that kind of scrappy innovation. Google was a startup at that point, and I think that right there really lends to the potential of this case, and of this decision, to unlock a new era of innovation, where small tech innovators are able to have a chance at entering the market, and creating something new and cool that maybe we can’t imagine today, but wouldn’t be possible without breaking up Google‘s hold on this industry.

JJ: I was going to ask you, what do you think happens now? We can’t necessarily predict it, but in terms of the case, what do you think will happen as we look to the remedy stage of things?

LH: Just to be clear, this is a case that was bifurcated. We just concluded the liability phase, and now the judge has to decide what to do about it. And what’s good about this stage is that the court has broad latitude, and must be deferential to the government’s request for remedies after that really difficult finding of liability.

And there’s a lot of tools on the table. Certainly we can expect an end to some of the exclusive agreements that have tied up this market for Google. But we also might see structural remedies that deprive Google of some of its ill-gotten gains, and divest certain business lines, or allow other search engines to have access to properties like Google‘s web indexer, or even their large language model.

The future of search is really in artificial intelligence, and the ability of chatbots to really revolutionize how people get information off the internet. And so I think that we’re going to be really clued in to how this court crafts remedies that ensure that that next era of AI innovation is not being controlled by Google, or any other dominant player in this market.

The Nation (11/10/23)

JJ: And then, finally, do you see knock-on effects? It does seem like a paradigm shift in terms of antitrust and the way we think about big companies. Do you see knock-on effects on, not just tech companies, but other big businesses?

LH: I do. And I think that when you have a case of this magnitude, there is going to be a bit of a culture shift. So if I’m a big law firm advising my clients, I’m going to tell them, “Hey, if you are entering into these types of exclusive agreements that are intended to maintain your market power, maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore, because the court is looking at these agreements with fresh eyes, and they’re not passing muster.”

I also think this decision builds momentum behind some of the other cases that the government has brought. There are parallels to the case against Live Nation, which also uses Ticketmaster to enter into exclusive agreements with venues. There are other parallels to the case against Apple or Amazon, which also lock consumers into a single-product ecosystem. So there’s going to be knock-on effects outside of this case, outside of this industry, and also for other pending cases that we’re watching closely.

JJ: All right then; we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. They’re online at EconomicLiberties.us. Thank you so much, Lee Hepner, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LH: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company.

The breach troubled Harris for two reasons. First, it involved the company’s cloud — a virtual storehouse typically containing an organization’s most sensitive data. Second, the attackers had pulled it off in a way that left little trace.

He retreated to his home office to “war game” possible scenarios, stress-testing the various software products that could have been compromised.

Early on, he focused on a Microsoft application that ensured users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs, the cyber equivalent of an officer checking passports at a border. It was there, after months of research, that he found something seriously wrong.

The product, which was used by millions of people to log on to their work computers, contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ “crown jewels” — national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails — all without tripping alarms.

To Harris, who had previously spent nearly seven years working for the Defense Department, it was a security nightmare. Anyone using the software was exposed, regardless of whether they used Microsoft or another cloud provider such as Amazon. But Harris was most concerned about the federal government and the implications of his discovery for national security. He flagged the issue to his colleagues.

They saw it differently, Harris said. The federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him. The financial consequences were enormous. Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.

Harris said he pleaded with the company for several years to address the flaw in the product, a ProPublica investigation has found. But at every turn, Microsoft dismissed his warnings, telling him they would work on a long-term alternative — leaving cloud services around the globe vulnerable to attack in the meantime.

Harris was certain someone would figure out how to exploit the weakness. He’d come up with a temporary solution, but it required customers to turn off one of Microsoft’s most convenient and popular features: the ability to access nearly every program used at work with a single logon.

He scrambled to alert some of the company’s most sensitive customers about the threat and personally oversaw the fix for the New York Police Department. Frustrated by Microsoft’s inaction, he left the company in August 2020.

Within months, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers had carried out SolarWinds, one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history. They used the flaw Harris had identified to vacuum up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica has learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile, and the National Institutes of Health, which at the time was engaged in COVID-19 research and vaccine distribution. The Russians also used the weakness to compromise dozens of email accounts in the Treasury Department, including those of its highest-ranking officials. One federal official described the breach as “an espionage campaign designed for long-term intelligence collection.”

Harris’ account, told here for the first time and supported by interviews with former colleagues and associates as well as social media posts, upends the prevailing public understanding of the SolarWinds hack.

From the moment the hack surfaced, Microsoft insisted it was blameless. Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds.

He also said customers could have done more to protect themselves.

Harris said they were never given the chance.

“The decisions are not based on what’s best for Microsoft’s customers but on what’s best for Microsoft,” said Harris, who now works for CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that competes with Microsoft.

Microsoft declined to make Smith and other top officials available for interviews for this story, but it did not dispute ProPublica’s findings. Instead, the company issued a statement in response to written questions. “Protecting customers is always our highest priority,” a spokesperson said. “Our security response team takes all security issues seriously and gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was aligned with the industry consensus.”

ProPublica’s investigation comes as the Pentagon seeks to expand its use of Microsoft products — a move that has drawn scrutiny from federal lawmakers amid a series of cyberattacks on the government.

Smith is set to testify on Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, which is examining Microsoft’s role in a breach perpetrated last year by hackers connected to the Chinese government. Attackers exploited Microsoft security flaws to gain access to top U.S. officials’ emails. In investigating the attack, the federal Cyber Safety Review Board found that Microsoft’s “security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul.”

For its part, Microsoft has said that work has already begun, declaring that the company’s top priority is security “above all else.” Part of the effort involves adopting the board’s recommendations. “If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, told employees in the wake of the board’s report, which identified a “corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.”

ProPublica’s investigation adds new details and pivotal context about that culture, offering an unsettling look into how the world’s largest software provider handles the security of its own ubiquitous products. It also offers crucial insight into just how much the quest for profits can drive those security decisions, especially as tech behemoths push to dominate the newest — and most lucrative — frontiers, including the cloud market.

“This is part of the problem overall with the industry,” said Nick DiCola, who was one of Harris’ bosses at Microsoft and now works at Zero Networks, a network security firm. Publicly-traded tech giants “are beholden to the share price, not to doing what’s right for the customer all the time. That’s just a reality of capitalism. You’re never going to change that in a public company because at the end of the day, they want the shareholder value to go up.”

Early this year, Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, worth more than $3 trillion. That triumph was almost unimaginable a decade ago. (The two remain in close competition for the top spot.)

In 2014, the same year that Harris joined Microsoft and Nadella became the CEO, Wall Street and consumers alike viewed the company as stuck in the past, clinging to the “shrink-wrapped” software products like Windows that put it on the map in the 1990s. Microsoft’s long-stagnant share price reflected its status as an also-ran in almost every major technological breakthrough since the turn of the century, from its Bing search engine to its Nokia mobile phone division.

As the new CEO, Nadella was determined to reverse the trend and shake off the company’s fuddy-duddy reputation, so he staked Microsoft’s future on the Azure cloud computing division, which then lagged far behind Amazon. In his earliest all-staff memo, Nadella told employees they would need “to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a … cloud-first world.”

Microsoft salespeople pitched business and government customers on a “hybrid cloud” strategy, where they kept some traditional, on-premises servers (typically stored on racks in customers’ own offices) while shifting most of their computing needs to the cloud (hosted on servers in Microsoft data centers).

Security was a key selling point for the cloud. On-site servers were notoriously vulnerable, in part because organizations’ overburdened IT staff often failed to promptly install the required patches and updates. With the cloud, that crucial work was handled by dedicated employees whose job was security.

The dawn of the cloud era at Microsoft was an exciting time to work in the field of cybersecurity for someone like Harris, whose high school yearbook features a photo of him in front of a desktop computer and monitor with a mess of floppy disks beside him. One hand is on the keyboard, the other on a wired mouse. Caption: “Harris the hacker.”

As a sophomore at Pace University in New York, he wrote a white paper titled “How to Hack the Wired Equivalent Protocol,” a network security standard, and was awarded a prestigious Defense Department scholarship, which the government uses to recruit cybersecurity specialists. The National Security Agency paid for three years of his tuition, which included a master’s degree in software engineering, in exchange for a commitment to work for the government for at least that long, he said.

Early in his career, he helped lead the Defense Department’s efforts to protect individual devices. He became an expert in the niche field known as identity and access management, securing how people log in.

As the years wore on, he grew frustrated by the lumbering bureaucracy and craved the innovation of the tech industry. He decided he could make a bigger impact in the private sector, which designed much of the software the government used.

At Microsoft he was assigned to a secretive unit known as the “Ghostbusters” (as in: “Who you gonna call?”), which responded to hacks of the company’s most sensitive customers, especially the federal government. As a member of this team, Harris first investigated the puzzling attack on the tech company and remained obsessed with it, even after switching roles inside Microsoft.

Eventually, he confirmed the weakness within Active Directory Federation Services, or AD FS, a product that allowed users to sign on a single time to access nearly everything they needed. The problem, he discovered, rested in how the application used a computer language known as SAML to authenticate users as they logged in.

To understand how a SAML attack would unfold, let’s imagine a robber who wants to gain access to all of the apartment buildings owned by a landlord.

The robber finds an open window in a single apartment and climbs in, similar to how a hacker could use a phishing email to log on to a single user’s account.

Once inside, the robber roams the halls looking for the landlord’s office, where keys to all the building’s units are kept. Likewise, a hacker moves through an organization’s on-premises servers. Their first target is Microsoft’s equivalent of the landlord’s office, a directory that stores information such as usernames and passwords.

The robber, however, wants to break into all the landlord’s buildings, just as a hacker wants to breach the cloud. The robber unlocks the office safe, which contains a master key. In a cyber break-in, the safe is AD FS, the weak link that Harris identified.

The robber makes a copy of the master key, which provides access to all of the landlord’s buildings and apartments. In a SAML attack, a hacker extracts the private key from the AD FS server and forges “tokens” that allow the intruder to masquerade as a user with the highest levels of access.

Now the robber can access any apartment in any building with little trace. And because the landlord’s keys are still in the office, no one suspects anything is amiss. Likewise, in a SAML attack, the hacker goes unnoticed because their sign-in information looks legitimate.

This is what makes a SAML attack unique. Typically, hackers leave what cybersecurity specialists call a “noisy” digital trail. Network administrators monitoring the so-called “audit logs” might see unknown or foreign IP addresses attempting to gain access to their cloud services. But SAML attacks are much harder to detect. The forged token is the equivalent of a robber using a copied master key. There was little trail to track, just the activities of what appear to be legitimate users.

Harris and a colleague who consulted for the Department of Defense spent hours in front of both real and virtual whiteboards as they mapped out how such an attack would work, the colleague told ProPublica. The “token theft” risk, as Harris referred to it, became a regular topic of discussion for them.

Before long, Harris alerted his supervisors about his SAML finding. Nick DiCola, his boss at the time, told ProPublica he referred Harris to the Microsoft Security Response Center, which fields reports of security vulnerabilities and determines which need to be addressed. Given its central role in improving Microsoft product security, the team once considered itself the “conscience of the company,” urging colleagues to improve security without regard to profit. In a meeting room, someone hung a framed photo of Winston “the Wolf,” the charismatic fixer in Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Pulp Fiction” who is summoned to clean up the aftermath of bloody hits.

Members of the team were not always popular within the company. Plugging security holes is a cost center, and making new products is a profit center, former employees told ProPublica. In 2002, the company’s founder, Bill Gates, tried to settle the issue, sending a memo that turned out to be eerily prescient. “Flaws in a single Microsoft product, service or policy not only affect the quality of our platform and services overall, but also our customers’ view of us as a company,” Gates wrote, adding: “So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.”

At first, Gates’ memo was transformational and the company’s product divisions were more responsive to the center’s concerns. But over time, the center’s influence waned.

Its members were stuck between cultural forces. Security researchers — often characterized as having outsized egos — believed their findings should be immediately addressed, underestimating the business challenges of developing fixes quickly, former MSRC employees told ProPublica.

Product managers had little motivation to act fast, if at all, since compensation was tied to the release of new, revenue-generating products and features. That attitude was particularly pronounced in Azure product groups, former MSRC members said, because they were under pressure from Nadella to catch up to Amazon.

“Azure was the Wild West, just this constant race for features and functionality,” said Nate Warfield, who worked in the MSRC for four years beginning in 2016. “You will get a promotion because you released the next new shiny thing in Azure. You are not going to get a promotion because you fixed a bunch of security bugs.”

Former employees told ProPublica that the center fielded hundreds or even thousands of reports a month, pushing the perennially understaffed group to its limits. The magazine Popular Science noted that volume as one of the reasons why working in the MSRC was one of the 10 “worst jobs in science,” between whale feces researchers and elephant vasectomists.

“They’re trained, because they’re so resource constrained, to think of these cases in terms of: ‘How can I get to ‘won’t fix,’” said Dustin Childs, who worked in the MSRC in the years leading up to Harris’ saga. Staff would often punt on fixes by telling researchers they would be handled in “v-next,” the next product version, he said. Those launches, however, could be years away, leaving customers vulnerable in the interim, he said.

The center also routinely rejected researchers’ reports of weaknesses by saying they didn’t cross what its staff called a “security boundary.” But when Harris discovered the SAML flaw, it was a term with no formal definition, former employees said.

By 2017, the lack of clarity had become the “butt of jokes,” Warfield said. Several prominent security researchers who regularly interacted with the MSRC made T-shirts and stickers that said “____ [fill in the blank] is not a security boundary.”

“Any time Microsoft didn’t want to fix something, they’d just say, ‘That’s not a security boundary, we’re not going to fix it,’” Warfield recalled.

Unaware of the inauspicious climate, Harris met virtually with MSRC representatives and sketched out how a hacker could jump from an on-premises server to the cloud without being detected. The MSRC declined to address the problem. Its staff argued that hackers attempting to exploit the SAML flaw would first have to gain access to an on-premises server. As they saw it, Harris said, that was the security boundary — not the subsequent hop to the cloud.

“WTF,” Harris recalled thinking when he got the news. “This makes no sense.”

Microsoft had told customers the cloud was the safest place to put their most precious data. His discovery proved that, for the millions of users whose systems included AD FS, their cloud was only as secure as their on-premises servers. In other words, all the buildings owned by the landlord are only as secure as the most careless tenant who forgot to lock their window.

Harris pushed back, but he said the MSRC held firm.

Harris had a reputation for going outside the chain of command to air his concerns, and he took his case to the team managing the products that verified user identities.

He had some clout, his former colleagues said. He had already established himself as a known expert in the field, had pioneered a cybersecurity threat detection method and later was listed as the named inventor on a Microsoft patent. Harris said he “went kind of crazy” and fired off an email to product manager Mark Morowczynski and director Alex Simons requesting a meeting.

He understood that developing a long-term fix would take time, but he had an interim solution that could eliminate the threat. One of the main practical functions of AD FS was to allow users to access both on-premises servers and a variety of cloud-based services after entering credentials only once, a Microsoft feature known as “seamless” single sign-on. Harris proposed that Microsoft tell its customers to turn off that function so the SAML weakness would no longer matter.

According to Harris, Morowczynski quickly jumped on a videoconference and said he had discussed the concerns with Simons.

“Everyone violently agreed with me that this is a huge issue,” Harris said. “Everyone violently disagreed with me that we should move quickly to fix it.”

Morowczynski, Harris said, had two primary objections.

First, a public acknowledgement of the SAML flaw would alert adversaries who could then exploit it. Harris waved off the concern, believing it was a risk worth taking so that customers wouldn’t be ignorant to the threat. Plus, he believed Microsoft could warn customers without betraying any specifics that could be co-opted by hackers.

According to Harris, Morowczynski’s second objection revolved around the business fallout for Microsoft. Harris said Morowczynski told him that his proposed fix could alienate one of Microsoft’s largest and most important customers: the federal government, which used AD FS. Disabling seamless SSO would have widespread and unique consequences for government employees, who relied on physical “smart cards” to log onto their devices. Required by federal rules, the cards generated random passwords each time employees signed on. Due to the configuration of the underlying technology, though, removing seamless SSO would mean users could not access the cloud through their smart cards. To access services or data on the cloud, they would have to sign in a second time and would not be able to use the mandated smart cards.

Harris said Morowczynski rejected his idea, saying it wasn’t a viable option.

Morowczynski told Harris that his approach could also undermine the company’s chances of getting one of the largest government computing contracts in U.S. history, which would be formally announced the next year. Internally, Nadella had made clear that Microsoft needed a piece of this multibillion-dollar deal with the Pentagon if it wanted to have a future in selling cloud services, Harris and other former employees said.

By Harris’ account, the team was also concerned about the potential business impact on the products sold by Microsoft to sign into the cloud. At the time, Microsoft was in a fierce rivalry with a company called Okta.

Microsoft customers had been sold on seamless SSO, which was one of the competitive advantages — or, in Microsoft parlance, “kill points” — that the company then had over Okta, whose users had to sign on twice, Harris said.

Harris’ proposed fix would undermine the company’s strategy to marginalize Okta and would “add friction” to the user experience, whereas the “No. 1 priority was to remove friction,” Harris recalled Morowczynski telling him. Moreover, it would have cascading consequences for the cloud business because the sale of identity products often led to demand for other cloud services.

“That little speed bump of you authenticating twice was unacceptable by Microsoft’s standards,” Harris said. He recalled Morowczynski telling him that the product group’s call “was a business decision, not a technical one.”

“What they were telling me was counterintuitive to everything I’d heard at Microsoft about ‘customer first,’” Harris said. “Now they’re telling me it’s not ‘customer first,’ it’s actually ‘business first.’”

DiCola, Harris’ then-supervisor, told ProPublica the race to dominate the market for new and high-growth areas like the cloud drove the decisions of Microsoft’s product teams. “That is always like, ‘Do whatever it frickin’ takes to win because you have to win.’ Because if you don’t win, it’s much harder to win it back in the future. Customers tend to buy that product forever.”

According to Harris, Morowczynski said his team had “on the road map” a product that could replace AD FS altogether. But it was unclear when it would be available to customers.

In the months that followed, Harris vented to his colleagues about the product group’s decision. ProPublica talked to three people who worked with Harris at the time and recalled these conversations. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions. The three said Harris was enraged and frustrated over what he described to them as the product group’s unwillingness to address the weakness.

Neither Morowczynski nor Simons returned calls seeking comment, and Microsoft declined to make them available for interviews. The company did not dispute the details of Harris’ account. In its statement, Microsoft said it weighs a number of factors when it evaluates potential threats. “We prioritize our security response work by considering potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to listen to the security research community and evolve our approach to ensure we are meeting customer expectations and protecting them from emerging threats.”

Following the conversation with Morowczynski, Harris wrote a reminder to himself on the whiteboard in his home office: “SAML follow-up.” He wanted to keep the pressure on the product team.

Soon after, the Massachusetts- and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post describing the flaw, which it dubbed “Golden SAML,” along with a proof of concept, essentially a road map that showed how hackers could exploit the weakness.

Years later, in his written testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Microsoft’s Brad Smith said this was the moment the company learned of the issue. “The Golden SAML theory became known to cybersecurity professionals at Microsoft and across the U.S. government and the tech sector at precisely the same time, when it was published in a public paper in 2017,” Smith wrote.

Lavi Lazarovitz of CyberArk said the firm mentioned the weakness — before the post was published — in a private WhatsApp chat of about 10 security researchers from various companies, a forum members used to compare notes on emerging threats. When they raised the discovery to the group, which included at least one researcher from Microsoft, the other members were dismissive, Lazarovitz said.

“Many in the security research community — I don’t want to say mocked — but asked, ‘Well, what’s the big deal?’” Lazarovitz said.

Nevertheless, CyberArk believed it was worth taking seriously, given that AD FS represented the gateway to users’ most sensitive information, including email. “Threat actors operate in between the cracks,” Lazarovitz said. “So obviously, we understood the feedback that we got, but we still believed that this technique will be eventually leveled by threat actors.”

The Israel-based team also reached out to contacts at Microsoft’s Israeli headquarters and were met with a response similar to the one they got in the WhatsApp group, Lazarovitz said.

The published report was CyberArk’s way of warning the public about the threat. Disclosing the weakness also had a business benefit for the company. In the blog post, it pitched its own security product, which it said “will be extremely beneficial in blocking attackers from getting their hands on important assets like the token-signing certificate in the first place.”

The report initially received little attention. Harris, however, seized on it. He said he alerted Morowczynski and Simons from the product group as well as the MSRC. The situation was more urgent than before, Harris argued to them, because CyberArk included the proof of concept that could be used by hackers to carry out a real attack. For Harris, it harkened back to Morowczynski’s worry that flagging the weakness could give hackers an advantage.

“I was more energetic than ever to have us actually finally figure out what we’re going to do about this,” Harris said.

But the MSRC reiterated its “security boundary” stance, while Morowczynski reaffirmed the product group’s earlier decision, Harris said.

Harris said he then returned to his supervisors, including Hayden Hainsworth and Bharat Shah, who, as corporate vice president of the Azure cloud security division, also oversaw the MSRC. “I said, ‘Can you guys please listen to me,’” Harris recalled. “‘This is probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career.’”

Harris said they were unmoved and told him to take the problem back to the MSRC.

Microsoft did not publicly comment on the CyberArk blog post at the time. Years later, in written responses to Congress, Smith said the company’s security researchers reviewed the information but decided to focus on other priorities. Neither Hainsworth nor Shah returned calls seeking comment.

Harris said he was deeply frustrated. On a personal level, his ego was bruised. Identifying major weaknesses is considered an achievement for cybersecurity professionals, and, despite his internal discovery, CyberArk had claimed Golden SAML.

More broadly, he said he was more worried than ever, believing the weakness was a ticking bomb. “It’s out in the open now,” he said.

Publicly, Microsoft continued to promote the safety of its products, even boasting of its relationship with the federal government in sales pitches. “To protect your organization, Azure embeds security, privacy, and compliance into its development methodology,” the company said in late 2017, “and has been recognized as the most trusted cloud for U.S. government institutions.”

Internally, Harris complained to colleagues that customers were being left vulnerable.

“He was definitely having issues” with the product team, said Harris’ former Microsoft colleague who consulted for the Defense Department. “He vented that it was a problem that they just wanted to ignore.”

Harris typically pivoted from venting to discussing how to protect customers, the former colleague said. “I asked him to show me what I’m going to have to do to make sure the customers were aware and could take corrective action to mitigate the risk,” he said.

Harris also took his message to LinkedIn, where he posted a discreet warning and an offer.

“I hope all my friends and followers on here realize by now the security relationship” involved in authenticating users in AD FS, he wrote in 2019. “If not, reach out and let’s fix that!”

Separately, he realized he could help customers with whom he had existing relationships, including the NYPD, the nation’s largest police force.

“Knowing this exploit is actually possible, why would I not architect around it, especially for my critical customers?” Harris said.

On a visit to the NYPD, Harris told a top IT official, Matthew Fraser, about the AD FS weakness and recommended disabling seamless SSO. Fraser was in disbelief at the severity of the issue, Harris recalled, and he agreed to disable seamless SSO.

In an interview, Fraser confirmed the meeting.

“This was identified as one of those areas that was prime, ripe,” Fraser said of the SAML weakness. “From there, we figured out what’s the best path to insulate and secure.”

It was over beers at a conference in Orlando in 2018 that Harris learned the weakness was even worse than he’d initially realized. A colleague sketched out on a napkin how hackers could also bypass a common security feature called multifactor authentication, which requires users to perform one or more additional steps to verify their identity, such as entering a code sent via text message.

They realized that, no matter how many additional security steps a company puts in place, a hacker with a forged token can bypass them all. When they brought the new information to the MSRC, “it was a nonstarter,” Harris said. While the center had published a formal definition of “security boundary” by that point, Harris’ issues still didn’t meet it.

By March 2019, concerns over Golden SAML were spilling out into the wider tech world. That month, at a conference in Germany, two researchers from the cybersecurity company Mandiant delivered a presentation demonstrating how hackers could infiltrate AD FS to gain access to organizations’ cloud accounts and applications. They also released the tools they used to do so.

Mandiant said it notified Microsoft before the presentation, making it the second time in roughly 16 months that an outside firm had flagged the SAML issue to the company.

In August 2020, Harris left Microsoft to work for CrowdStrike. In his exit interview with Shah, Harris said he raised the SAML weakness one last time. Shah listened but offered no feedback, he said.

“There is no inspector general-type thing” within Microsoft, Harris said. “If something egregious is happening, where the hell do you go? There’s no place to go.”

Four months later, news of the SolarWinds attack broke. Federal officials soon announced that beginning in 2019 Russian hackers had breached and exploited the network management software offered by a Texas-based company called SolarWinds, which had the misfortune of lending its name to the attack. The hackers covertly inserted malware into the firm’s software updates, gaining “backdoor” access to the networks of companies and government agencies that installed them. The ongoing access allowed hackers to take advantage of “post-exploit” vulnerabilities, including Golden SAML, to steal sensitive data and emails from the cloud.

Despite the name, nearly a third of victims of the attack never used SolarWinds software at all, Brandon Wales, then acting director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in the aftermath. In March 2021, Wales told a Senate panel that hackers were able to “gain broad access to data stores that they wanted, largely in Microsoft Office 365 Cloud … and it was all because they compromised those systems that manage trust and identity on networks.”

Microsoft itself was also breached.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Microsoft advised customers of Microsoft 365 to disable seamless SSO in AD FS and similar products — the solution that Harris proposed three years earlier.

As the world dealt with the consequences, Harris took his long simmering frustration public in a series of posts on social media and on his personal blog. Challenging Brad Smith by name, and criticizing the MSRC’s decisions — which he referred to as “utter BS” — Harris lambasted Microsoft for failing to publicly warn customers about Golden SAML.

Microsoft “was not transparent about these risks, forced customers to use ADFS knowing these risks, and put many customers and especially US Gov’t in a bad place,” Harris wrote on LinkedIn in December 2020. A long-term fix was “never a priority” for the company, he wrote. “Customers are boned and sadly it’s been that way for years (which again, sickens me),” Harris said in the post.

In the months and years following the SolarWinds attack, Microsoft took a number of actions to mitigate the SAML risk. One of them was a way to efficiently detect fallout from such a hack. The advancement, however, was available only as part of a paid add-on product known as Sentinel.

The lack of such a detection, the company said in a blog post, had been a “blind spot.”

In early 2021, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called Brad Smith to testify about SolarWinds.

Although Microsoft’s product had played a central role in the attack, Smith seemed unflappable, his easy and conversational tone a reflection of the relationships he had spent decades building on Capitol Hill. Without referencing notes or reading from a script, as some of his counterparts did, he confidently deflected questions about Microsoft’s role. Laying the responsibility with the government, he said that in the lead-up to the attack, the authentication flaw “was not prioritized by the intelligence community as a risk, nor was it flagged by civilian agencies or other entities in the security community as a risk that should be elevated” over other cybersecurity priorities.

Smith also downplayed the significance of the Golden SAML weakness, saying it was used in just 15% of the 60 cases that Microsoft had identified by that point. At the same time, he acknowledged that, “without question, these are not the only victims who had data observed or taken.”

When Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida pointedly asked him what Microsoft had done to address Golden SAML in the years before the attack, Smith responded by listing a handful of steps that customers could have taken to protect themselves. His suggestions included purchasing an antivirus product like Microsoft Defender and securing devices with another Microsoft product called Intune.

“The reality is any organization that did all five of those things, if it was breached, it in all likelihood suffered almost no damage,” Smith said.

Neither Rubio nor any other senator pressed further.

Ultimately, Microsoft won a piece of the Defense Department’s multibillion-dollar cloud business, sharing it with Amazon, Google and Oracle.

Since December 2020, when the SolarWinds attack was made public, Microsoft’s stock has soared 106%, largely on the runaway success of Azure and artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT, where the company is the largest investor. “Microsoft Is Back on Top,” proclaimed Fortune, which featured Nadella on the cover of its most recent issue.

In September 2021, just 10 months after the discovery of SolarWinds, the paperback edition of Smith’s book, “Tools and Weapons,” was published. In it, Smith praised Microsoft’s response to the attack. The MSRC, Smith wrote, “quickly activated its incident response plan” and the company at large “mobilized more than 500 employees to work full time on every aspect of the attack.”

In the new edition, Smith also reflected on his congressional testimony on SolarWinds. The hearings, he wrote, “examined not only what had happened but also what steps needed to be taken to prevent such attacks in the future.” He didn’t mention it in the book, but that certainly would include the long-term alternative that Morowczynski first promised to Harris in 2017. The company began offering it in 2022.

Development by Lucas Waldron.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke.

The collusion between Big Pharma and its distributors (i.e., doctors), with its obviously huge profit-incentives, might also (generously) be called a folie-a-deux.  Within their shared “medical model,” physiological anomalies detected by high-radiation(!) CT body-scans may suggest certain lurking diseases (or even “pre-diseases”).  “Early Detection” may offer the option of preventive surgery–what physician Nortin Hadler has called Medical Malpractice Type 2 (the procedure was done perfectly but was unnecessary in the first place).  In terms of the likelihood that one may “get” a certain cancer or cardiac disease, one needs only to consult CDC statistics, keeping in mind that it is the absolute, not relative, risk that matters.

As to behavior and its non-conformist or eccentric irregularities, an oppressively unequal, even unlivable socio-economic system requires authoritarian sanctions to enforce compliance with assigned and mandated role-demands.  In the former Soviet Union, outspoken dissidents like the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov were “mentally ill” and therefore hospitalized for “treatment.”  In the U.S. today, an angry, rebellious adolescent is obviously suffering from “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” and must be therefore treated without delay.  Or perhaps he/she, somewhat confused by the kaleidoscope of “gender-bending” on social media, may be suffering from “gender dysphoria”–which, if impatient parents want a quick-fix, can be “cured” by “gender-reassignment surgery” (and the post-operative, prolonged hormonal treatment required).

In recent decades, the brazenly dramatic increase in these and other diagnoses of children such as “autism spectrum” and “bipolar disorder,” should have caused decibel-deafening alarm bells at the FDA, ACLU, and children’s rights NGOs.  The rationale–that diagnostic criteria and acumen are simply more fine-tuned nowadays–seems all-too-transparent.  Of course, the for-profit medical industry, like others, seeks to maximize demand and profit, what anthropologist Howard F. Stein has termed “the sacred shrine of the bottom-line.”

Authoritarian control functions to reinforce the existing socio-economic system, in which individuals must conform to various role-obligations.  At work, “performance reviews” enforce obedience to the arbitrary demands of the owners of the workplace, who define the output required of one’s position.  Using surveillance tools, the corporation can detect and weed out signs of dissatisfaction or insubordination–thereby labeling and eliminating those who question the mandated role-obligation.

At home, one is a “husband” (etym. “house bondsman”?), whose role-obligations include certain “conjugal responsibilities.”  Medicalization of sexual “performance” was successfully achieved by the laboratory study Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), written by Masters and Johnson, who also introduced the lucrative new occupation of “sex therapist.”  This celebrated team medicalized the female orgasm as the peak-resolution of arousability, which must be regularly discharged (for “hygienic” reasons).

The hapless male, possibly confronted with a grossly overweight, even unsightly female who has gone to seed because she has hubby “under contract,” finds himself suffering from a distressing condition termed Erectile Dysfunction Disorder (traditionally called impotence).  Nonetheless, such dysfunction may be partially ameliorated by couples-therapy and, of course, hazardous drugs such as Viagra.

In sum: In a system in which spouses (and children) are, to a significant degree, property, those who choose to enforce such role-obligations may have the power to do so.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by William Manson.

“The Biden administration deserves our thanks for holding accountable the companies who have gotten a sweetheart deal to drill public property for far too long. Anyone who wants to profit from resources that belong to all American taxpayers should pay their fair share. This is an important step toward fixing a wildly irresponsible system that has given so much to massive corporations at the expense of everyone who enjoys the great outdoors.” —Chris Marshall spokesperson for Accountable.US

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Hong Kong’s television stations, crimped by declining earnings, have looked to fill air time with mainland Chinese-related content to attract advertising dollars from China, in a shift that feeds into a vicious cycle that could further alienate the city’s own viewers.

The gradual erosion of press and civil society freedoms in Hong Kong with the Beijing-imposed National Security Law in 2020 and the recent enactment of the second national security law, have all but turned Hong Kong viewers away from the TV stations’ increasingly self-censored news content, which only worsened their credibility and draw as a media.

i-Cable Communications, which runs the Cable News station that was once regarded for its insights and reports on China, saw net losses of HK$589.2 million (US$76.3 million) for 2023, even though the scale had narrowed by a third. 

The company said it was collaborating with the Hong Kong government as part of its commitment to society, to develop programs aimed at fostering a deeper understanding of the government among a public that has been increasingly distrustful of the authorities since the 2019 protests and the subsequent crackdown on democratic figures. The programs included one that raises awareness of national security in schools. 

Collaborations with the Guangdong Radio and Television Station to produce a series of programs were also underway to tap new viewers in the Greater Bay Area, a Beijing-designed regional bloc to integrate the once freewheeling Hong Kong into the mainland Chinese fold.

Public credibility of Cable News is seen to have hit a snag at the end of 2020, after i-Cable fired scores of journalists, among which its best investigative reporters for China news who had reported on issues that would have struck Beijing’s raw nerves, like human rights abuses and the initial outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan city.

Morale and credibility have yet to regain, according to a current Cable News reporter who went by the pseudonym Wendy, evidenced by the current high turnover rate in the news department and difficulty to recruit journalists.

“Some reporters left for another TV station because their pay didn’t increase. But it’s also because the degree of freedom now is much lower than before. For example, [in the past] the China team would fly to Beijing to report in-depth. But now most of the reporters in the China team stay in the company to see what’s trending on Weibo,” Wendy said.

Picking up story ideas for China news reports from Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat has become a staple in newsroom operations. They are relatively safe as the posts would have been scrutinized by Chinese censors within the Great Firewall.

On the other hand, the risks of enterprise news reporting in Hong Kong have risen with last month’s swift passage of Article 23 – the second national security law – which expanded the scope of what constitutes a breach of national security by creating new offenses and increased punishment for offenders. 

But the vague language in the latest legislation also increased uncertainties and fear among local media practitioners on what is lawful to report and what isn’t. Journalists say the propensity to self censor or even not report is a new normal.

Survival of the biggest

In the past era of cable TV pay channels, Cable News was seen as Cable TV’s “trump card” to attract subscribers. However, in recent years, viewers have turned to other free online platforms for more balanced content, in part because broadcasters are under pressure to self censor in a relatively more controlling regime where company management intervenes to avoid offending Beijing. 

The broadcast of Cable News content has since transferred to i-Cable’s free HOY Information Channel.

i-Cable’s plight is not isolated. Losses also clouded Television Broadcasts (TVB), the city’s big brother in broadcasting, which reported a 5.5% drop in net loss to  HK$762.7 million for 2023. 

TVB, in which Chinese private equity firm CMC has a controlling stake, said it is also banking on the Greater Bay Area market to boost viewership. Its mainland China operations revenue is increasing, driven by sales from dramas co-produced with the Chinese companies.

To Yiu-ming, a former journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, pointed out that once a TV station loses credibility for its news coverage, it also loses public support, and will have to rely more on mainland advertisers for profitability.

“You have all the power, but you have lost the masses. You can definitely decide who will head the news department, but you cannot decide how many viewers will watch your content. Now that the economy is growing slower, there will be less substantial pieces of advertisement available. And if there were, they’d go to television stations with higher ratings such as TVB. Which means, TVB, without the support of Hong Kong viewers, can still survive.”

Last month, the Hong Kong government swiftly passed Article 23, which expanded the scope of what constitutes a breach of national security by creating new offenses and increased punishment for offenders.

To Yiu-ming observed that since July last year, TVB's “Jade” and “Pearl” channels have successfully landed in the Greater Bay Area, directly obtaining advertising broadcast rights and revenue in the southern Guangdong province. This gave them an edge that others lack.

Translated with additional reporting by RFA Staff. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sam Yuen for RFA Cantonese.

This story was published in partnership with High Country News.

Before Jon Eagle Sr. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families, and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land, and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains, and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of that land didn’t belong to the tribe. Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries. 

“They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t even aware that there were lands like that here.”

On the North Dakota side, nearly 23,500 acres of Standing Rock are managed by the state, along with another 70,000 of subsurface acres, a land classification that refers to underground resources, including oil and gas. The combined 93,500 acres, known as trust lands, are held and managed by the state and produce revenue for its public schools and the Bank of North Dakota. The amount of reservation land South Dakota controls is unknown; the state does not make public its trust land data and did not supply it after a public records request.

And Standing Rock isn’t alone.

Data analyzed by Grist and High Country News reveals that a combined 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands lie within the borders of 83 federal Indian reservations in 10 states.

State trust lands, which are managed by state agencies, generate millions of dollars for public schools, universities, penitentiaries, hospitals, and other state institutions, typically through grazing, logging, mining, and oil and gas production. Although federal Indian reservations were established for the use and governance of Indigenous nations and their citizens, the existence of state trust lands reveals a truth: States rely on Indigenous land and resources to support non-Indigenous institutions and offset state taxpayer dollars for non-Indigenous people. Tribal nations have no control over this land, and many states do not consult with tribes about how it’s used.  

Even in the obscure world of trust lands, states’ holdings within reservations have been almost completely unknown until now. Many of the experts Grist and High Country News reached out to, including longtime policymakers and leaders on Indigenous issues, were unfamiliar with state trust lands’ history and acreage. However, what sources did make clear is that the presence of state lands on reservations complicates issues of tribal jurisdiction in regards to land use and management and undercuts tribal sovereignty. According to Rob Williams, University of Arizona law professor and citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, this has broad implications for everything from the handling of missing and murdered Indigenous people to tribal nations’ ability to confront climate change. 

“When there’s clarity about jurisdiction over Indian lands, it is easier for tribes to work with others to protect public safety, public health, and the natural environment,” said Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of Interior and citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “It’s been the longstanding policy of the department to reduce ‘checkerboard’ jurisdiction within reservations by consolidating tribal lands and strengthening the ability of tribes to exercise their sovereign authorities over their own lands.”

The creation of Indian reservations was followed closely by states entering the union, as were successful attempts by state governments to carve up and dissolve those tribal lands.

Once states became part of the U.S., they received millions of acres of recently ceded tribal lands, many of which became trust lands. But as more settlers moved west, states pushed for more land. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government responded by carving up Indian reservations, parceling out small amounts of land to individual tribal members, then handing over “surplus” lands for states, settlers, and federal projects. Known as the Allotment Era, the federal policy moved approximately 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide from tribal hands to non-Native ownership.

According to Monte Mills, professor of law at the University of Washington and director of the Native American Law Center, allotment served a dual purpose: It broke up tribal power and gave non-Native citizens access to tribal lands and natural resources. 

The allotment system, Mills explained, provided “a whole other set of opportunities for non-Indian settlers to get access to surplus lands and for the states to come in and get more state trust lands on lands that had been expressly off-limits.”

As Rob Williams put it, “The conquest was by law.”

“The implications of that policy are just devastating,” Williams said. “It’s hard to think of a single problem in Indian law that you can’t blame it in part on.”

For example, nearly 512,000 acres of surface and subsurface acres on the Ute Tribe’s Uintah and Ouray Reservation came into Utah’s possession after a series of murky state and federal policies and land transfers. In 1898, just two years after Utah became a state, Congress began allotting land to individual tribal members without the tribe’s consent. A quarter of the tribe’s 4 million-acre reservation was taken by President Theodore Roosevelt for a national forest, while other land went to provide townsites and establish trust lands. By 1933, 91 percent of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation had been allotted.

In other cases, as with the Yakama Nation, states acquired parcels when reservation boundaries were redrawn. Shortly after the tribe ceded over 12 million acres in central Washington, the agreed-upon map of its new reservation simply disappeared, sparking nearly a century of border disputes between the Yakama Nation, the state, and the federal government, specifically over a 121,000-acre section known as Tract D. In the 1930s, the map was rediscovered by an employee in the federal Office of Indian Affairs — apparently misfiled under “M” for Montana. In 2021, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the land was still a part of the original reservation. But in the meantime, Washington state had established trust lands inside Tract D. Today, 108,000 surface, subsurface, and timber acres inside the recently recognized borders of the Yakama Nation are still providing revenue for the state’s K-12 schools, scientific schools, and penal and reform institutions. This makes up 78 percent of all state trust lands on the Yakama Reservation.

Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, is responsible for managing these lands. An agency spokesperson said, “The Yakama Treaty retained many rights for tribal members on public lands throughout the ceded territory of the Yakama, and DNR’s management of these trust lands continues to be done with much input from the Yakama Nation.”

​​Within the lines

In at least 10 states, trust lands are present within the reservation boundaries of 40 tribal nations.

State trust lands

Federal Indian reservations

Yakama

Standing Rock

Uintah and Ouray

Flathead

Grist / Maria Parazo Rose / Clayton Aldern

Michael Dolson has spent most of his life on the western side of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Flathead Reservation on his family’s ranch, started by his great-grandparents before allotment. Today, a map of the reservation shows large squares of state trust land parcels located not far from his family’s land: a total of 108,000 surface and subsurface acres that fund Montana’s K-12 schools and the University of Montana. 

Dolson — now the tribe’s chairman — says that the state lands on the reservation are managed separately; the tribe has no input over how or whether Montana decides to log or lease them. Since different groups have different objectives, Dolson says, this complicates the tribe’s ability to manage its own reservation.

“I think we’ve gotten used to lands on the rez being owned by others, and they make use of those lands the way they want to,” Dolson said. “Do we appreciate that? Well, no. Especially when it’s parcels that have some sort of cultural significance to us, and we have no control over it, even though they’re on our own reservation.”

For more than a decade, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have carefully planned for climate change, documenting and developing tools, like drought-resiliency plans, to limit the impacts it could have. Meanwhile, Montana continues to prioritize oil and gas and coal production, making extraction one of the biggest sources of its trust land revenue.

Like many other tribes, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes has had to buy back its own land, at or above market value. After allotment, less than a third of the reservation — about 30 percent — remained in tribal ownership. According to Dolson, about 60 percent of the Flathead Reservation, or 791,000 acres, is currently back in tribal ownership, following decades of strategic work. Yet Montana still controls 8 percent of the reservation as state trust land. 

States are legally obliged to make money from state trust lands to benefit state institutions, so they are unlikely to return any land without getting something in exchange. But the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes may have created a model for how tribes can negotiate for large-scale transfers of land back to tribal ownership. In 2020, Congress passed a water-rights settlement that cleared the way for a transfer of nearly 30,000 acres of Montana state trust land back to the tribe. In exchange, the state will receive federal lands elsewhere; the acreage is currently in the process of being selected over the next five years. It’s a creative and unique arrangement, but one that presents opportunities — if states are willing to work with tribes.

Read Next

California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far.

Joseph Lee

Jon Eagle Sr. believes that systematic land theft has hampered tribes’ ability to manage the environment and protect their communities. The checkerboard parcels that allotment created are hard to manage; land-use policy is more effective over large, cohesive swaths of land. And returning land to tribal control gets complicated when state trust lands are involved: States don’t want to lose out on tax revenue. 

The Biden administration’s policy is to assist tribes in reacquiring tribal homelands. But the policy is silent on the issue of state trust lands on reservations. There is currently no clear mechanism to return those lands to tribes. That means tribal nations have to work with states or else buy land outright — something the Ute Tribe tried unsuccessfully to do in 2019.

In 1969, Utah received 28,000 acres of land from the federal government inside the Ute’s reservation. Much of this land, known as Tabby Mountain, was converted to trust lands, and over the next 60 years it produced nearly $3.2 million in hunting and leasing revenue for state institutions, including Utah State University. In 2018, when the state put Tabby Mountain up for sale, the tribe was the highest bidder, offering nearly $47 million. 

But shortly afterward, the state suspended the sale indefinitely, leaving the tribe unable to buy back its own land. Based on complaints filed by a whistleblower, the Utes allege that the state agencies responsible for the sale rigged the bidding process in order to prevent the tribe from reacquiring the land. The case is still in court. 

According to Rob Williams at the University of Arizona, “The big issue now — and this is the burden on the tribes — is land back.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At least 10 states quietly own land within Indian reservations — and profit from them on Feb 28, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maria Parazo Rose.

Members of the business community told RFA Lao that the government needs to review its approach to foreign investment while improving its agricultural output to avoid a deepening trade deficit and improve the living standards of farmers in Laos.

The Lao Ministry of Industry and Trade recently reported that last year Laos exported 9.5 million tons of agricultural products worth US$1.4 billion – an increase of just over 20% from 2022.

However, the ministry acknowledged that most of the exported goods were produced by Chinese investors who leased land and grew vegetables and fruit in Laos to sell to China.

Produce exports from Laos are largely cassava, potatoes, coffee, bananas and sugar. The country exports most of its products to China, Vietnam and Thailand, respectively.

Chinese nationals run 933 projects in the agricultural sector in Laos, and their investments in the country are on the rise. Most of the projects adhere to what the Lao government refers to as the “2+3 System,” in which Laos provides land and labor, while foreign investors supply capital, expertise and a market for goods.

An official with the Ministry of Industry and Trade confirmed to RFA that most agricultural products in Laos – including cattle, vegetables and fruit – are produced by Chinese nationals for export to China, rather than by Lao farmers.

“China won’t allow goods produced by Lao farmers to enter China,” said the official who, like other sources interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns. “They only accept goods produced by Chinese factories and investors that meet their quality standards.”

The Lao government will only receive a small portion of the US$1.4 billion in exports last year through taxes, tariffs, land concession fees and transportation fees, he added.

Real value of foreign investment?

A Lao businessman in Luang Prabang province said the government and the people of Laos “will only get 10% of [the export value] because most goods were produced by the Chinese.”

He questioned whether the Lao government – and by extension, the people – gains more than it loses from foreign investment.

“The government must be more competitive by improving the quality and increasing the quantity [of agricultural products]; if not, Laos can expect to face a large trade deficit every year,” the businessman said. “To do that, the country must increase its knowledge, budget and access to modern technology.”

The Lao Ministry of Industry and Trade reported that in 2023, Laos imported US$6 billion worth of products and exported $5.3 billion, resulting in a trade deficit of US$700 million.

Laos can export 33 agricultural products to China – most of them fruits, vegetables and cattle – 15 products to Vietnam and 15 products to Thailand. China is the main market for Lao exports and the market is growing annually.

An official with the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, told RFA that in order to grow its exports, Laos must produce more of its own goods and improve their quality.

“China has opened up its market for Lao products – particularly bananas, cassava, corn and fruit,” the ADB official said. “Laos exported about 300 million tons of bananas last year. These export can boost the Lao economy.”

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

Less than a month before a door plug on a Boeing aircraft blew off midflight, employees at Spirit AeroSystems, a subcontractor for Boeing, had tried to warn corporate officials about serious safety problems with parts for 737 MAX jets. But those warnings went unheeded, and the employees were told to falsify records, according to a new investigation by The Lever on a federal complaint filed by workers at Spirit. “In some cases, workers were retaliated against for trying to raise those alarms,” says journalist David Sirota. “These workers in this federal complaint are alleging essentially a culture of defects, a culture of fraud, a culture of retaliation.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Judging by numerous Hollywood movies and most public opinion polls, you’d have to conclude that banks are not very popular in America. Yet, politically, bankers and other financiers are very powerful. Why the disconnect?

The answer is: “The Bankers’ Club”.

The Bankers’ Club is the collection of politicians, public officials, CEOs of non-financial companies, financial regulators such as the Federal Reserve, lawyers, and, even, economists who provide the political muscle, legal advice, and legitimizing arguments for deregulation, that sustain the financial industry’s profits and power. The “Club” is also the threat that bankers hold over our head, threatening to restrict credit, raise interest rates, or even create financial instability if we don’t treat the bankers right.

How can we bust this club and reform finance to make it work for everyday members of society?

Help the Bank Busters.

For decades, some politicians, consumer advocates, civil rights activists, labor union leaders, lawyers, and economists, have organized to hold powerful banks accountable, strengthen financial regulations, and push for publicly oriented financial institutions such as public banks. I refer to these reformers as “Club Busters”. In Busting the Bankers’ Club I profile some of these activists and leaders. I show that even though the struggle between the Bankers’ Club and the Club Busters is not an even one, the Busters have won victories and can win many more if more of us get involved on their side.

You say that the Federal Reserve is the chairman of the Bankers’ Club? What do you mean by that?

The Federal Reserve and the Wall Street banks scratch each other’s backs.

The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, the government institution that sets short term interest rates and supervises and regulates many banks, turns out to be a major friend and ally of the banks it regulates. This longer-term structural characteristic of the Fed became most obvious when Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve between 1987 and 2006, led the charge to deregulate the big banks in the 1990’s, and kept interest rates exceedingly low in the 2000’s which fueled the credit-induced housing bubble and crash of 2007. The circle was completed when Ben Bernanke, the Fed Chair who succeeded Greenspan, along with Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who had been President of the New York Federal Reserve when the 2007-2009 crisis struck, spent trillions of dollars to rescue the banks that had caused the crisis.

The Federal Reserve fights inflation by raising interest rates. But this makes financial services like mortgages and credit card borrowing cost more. So, the Fed is trying to lower prices by increasing prices.  Does that make sense?

Not always. The Fed says it has no other choice, but, in fact, the Fed has options.

One reason the Fed raises interest rates to try to quell inflation is that the Fed has the tools to influence and even control some short-term interest rates. So, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But this is not the only reason. The Federal Reserve is reluctant to use a bunch of other tools at its disposal such as limits on the supply of credit to certain sectors (credit controls) or the ability to provide MORE credit to areas where there are supply shortages which could limit price increases in the cases where lack of supply is driving up inflation. This is surprising, because the Fed engaged in billions of dollars in credit distributions during the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid Crisis to help promote the stability of the financial system.

But understanding the Fed as an important member of the Bankers’ Club also gives insight in why the Fed chooses to raise interest rates to fight inflation. Increasing interest rates help the banks increase their interest rates in inflationary periods. This helps the banks sustain their profits on loans when prices are rising. Unfortunately, that hurts the borrowers who are facing increases in prices for goods and services and who now have to pay more for credit too.

In short: by raising interest rates to fight inflation, the Fed is fighting fire with fire, risking that many of us will get burned.

How can we get the Federal Reserve to serve us all?

Promote transparency, accountability, and representation: in other words, have more democracy at the Fed.

The Federal Reserve is our public Central Bank. But, during most of its history, it has placed the interests of the private banks that it regulates above the interests of the public – of us. Supporters of the current system call for a continuation of Central Bank Independence – an arms-length relationship between the Fed and the government and us. But this arrangement leads to a fingers’ length (if any) distance between the Fed and the big banks.

What is the solution?

The Fed needs more transparency, accountability and representation vis a vis the public. In Busting the Bankers’ Club, I describe what this means and how it can be achieved.

Income and wealth inequality in the United States have hit record levels. You say that the Bankers’ Club has been a major source of this inequality? Can you explain?

CEO pay in the United States is now almost 400 times as high as the incomes of the typical worker. A big driver is the huge incomes made by financial executives which then set a standard for executives in other industries. Another major driver is the form of compensation: a significant portion of CEO pay is in financial products such as stock options and other forms of pay that have lax tax treatment and are conducive to speculative income gains. Finally, some financial institutions’ practices, such as private equity firms, are built on a business model of loading firms up with high levels of debt and then squeezing workers’ and suppliers’ incomes to allow them to service the debt or go bankrupt.

You argue that our current financial system contributes to racial wealth inequality and fails to serve the poorer members of our society? What kinds of changes do we need to fix these problems? Specifically, what can banks do?

Numerous scholars, including for example Mehrsa Barardaran, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,and Richard Rothstein have identified ways in which banks have contributed to disinvestment from African American communities and failed to provide financial services to poor households, especially those from black and Hispanic backgrounds. The most famous example of this behavior is “red-lining.” In the Post-World War II period, banks—in connection with US government policies—excluded predominantly African American areas from receiving government-subsidized home mortgages. Busting the Bankers’ Club discusses policies and institutions that can reduce these problems, including public banks that are oriented toward providing credit in these neighborhoods, the broader and stricter enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and stronger support by the Federal Reserve System for credit provision in these communities.

In Busting the Bankers’ Club you say that new financial regulations are not enough. You say we need publicly oriented financial institutions, what you call banks without bankers. What are these? What can they accomplish that private banks or better regulation cannot?

Private, profit-oriented banks focus on one thing and one thing only: their bottom line. But most capitalist economies have a variety of financial institutions – private and public – that make banking decisions based on a broader set of considerations: their contributions to community development, promoting small businesses, providing access to better banking services in communities of color, helping to underwrite affordable housing, and promoting green energy.

Examples in the United States include Postal Banking services, which existed from 1911 – 1967; Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI’s) which have special bank charters that require them to make investments that promote community development; state-level public banks, like the Bank of North Dakota; and municipal public banks, like those being established in California. On top of these smaller institutions, municipal, state, and Federal public development banks, such as the Green Development Bank established by the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) promote specific sectors such as, in this case, green energy.

You’re an economist. But you write that many economists are members of the Bankers’ Club, that is, they develop theories and promote ideas that purport to show that Wall Street serves society and that more financial regulation is inefficient and bad for economic growth. Are these economic ideas and these economists still on top?

I would say no. In recent years, the Club Busters in the economics profession have made significant headway in making their points and getting a hearing.

When the great financial crisis hit in 2008, Queen Elizabeth of England famously asked a group of economists, how did they miss this most important economic event of the last 80 years? They had no good answer, but the question was a bit misplaced: a good number of critical economists outside of the mainstream had, in fact, long warned that the financial sector was hurtling toward a crisis. In Busting the Bankers’ Club, I describe the forces that led mainstream economists to get it so wrong and to make it more difficult for critical voices among the Economics profession to be heard. Since then, these critical voices have had a much bigger impact on economic policy, including inside the Biden Administration. This plurality of economic voices being heard has had a positive impact on the quality of economic advice and economic policy.

This interview originally appeared on the University of California Press blog.

The post How Bankers Profit From Our Broken Economic System appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gerald Epstein.

Photo by Joe Allen.

Many people are aware that I spent eleven days in Ireland in early October. I was invited by the organizers of the People Before Profit (PBP) to speak at their Think Left conference in Derry and was later added to their All That’s Left conference in Belfast. I did workshops on the U.S. labor movement, the far right, and a night time welcoming panel in Belfast with other speakers, including TD Paul Murphy. Here’s a report on my impressions of the PBP and some comments on the general political situation in Ireland, which is potentially on the cusp of major political changes. Talk of a new Ireland is in the air, including the possibility of a united Ireland, despite the huge obstacles that remain in the way. The Gaza crisis also broke while I was there.

People Before Profit

People Before Profit (PBP) is an all-Ireland party, an alliance of several socialist organizations, though people can join individually. Comrades in the Socialist Workers Network, an affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency (IST) are the heart of the PBP. Its media outlet is Rebel and its theoretical magazine is the Irish Marxist Review (IMR). The late John Molyneux explained the history and the political strategy of PBP in the IMR, available here. Though PBP had suffered some electoral reversals on the local level last year, it still retains four Teachta Dála (TDs) or deputies, including such nationally known figures as Richard Boy Barrett and Bríd Smith, in the Irish Parliament or the Dáil Éireann. There is rarely a week that goes by where either one of them is not quoted, interviewed by a major media outlet or gives a major speech in the Dáil.

I can’t think of any other group associated in the past or present with the IST that has achieved the electoral successes of the PBP, while maintaining their revolutionary socialist principles, including what had been its largest affiliate, the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). A few IST affiliates and former groups have done some electoral work, but none have achieved what PBP has, so far. The only thing comparable in the U.S. is Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant, who is not running for reelection, during her decade-long tenure as a Seattle City Councilwoman. I can’t think of any DSAer that can compete with her record.

Ireland is a country where the long legacy of British imperialism still shapes the politics of the country. It remains a partitioned country where the six counties of the north remain part of the UK, while the twenty-six counties of the south made up the Republic. While it is still an island where two currencies prevail, the border that divides the country is nearly non-existent due to the Good Friday Agreement. Travelling north by bus to Derry from Dublin airport, the only way you know that you’ve entered Northern Ireland is the Union Jacks and Loyalist paraphernalia put up by Loyalist gangs at the former border checkpoints, that are now all gone from what I could tell.

The countryside was in many ways what you would expect it to be, a lot of sheep farming because of meat and wool exports. It was incredibly lush given the wet climate but climate change has begun to have an impact. The weakening of the Gulf Stream may mean harsher winters in Ireland. I was struck by the effort by the Loyalist gangs to display their flags and banners throughout the countryside. I was told by comrades these were clearing meant to signal who was welcome in these villages and who was not. It was very common to see Presbyterian churches, Orange Order lodges, along with well-kept up Presbyterian cemeteries all along the way until you got to the outskirts of Derry.

Derry

I spent most of my time in Derry, where the PBP has a vibrant presence. Long time ISO member Shaun Harkin, for example, is the PBP councilor for the Foyleside on the forty-member Derry City/Strabane District  Council. There are few campaigns that go on without some PBP participation. Derry is the most political city I’ve ever been to. I’m not a global trotter by any measure but I’ve lived in several American cities with radical histories, visited London, Barcelona, and Melbourne. None compare to Derry.

It has gained worldwide attention in recent years due to the Derry Girls series streamed on Netflix, which has proved to be a boon to its tourist trade. Despite its small size, roughly the same size as Waukegan, Illinois, it has played a huge role in Irish politics. Derry was the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, where the Battle of Bogside and Bloody Sunday took place. Its proud history is memorialized everywhere with murals, monuments, and museums. Our longstanding comrade and lifelong Derry resident, Eamonn McCann, chronicled its history in his classic book War and an Irish Town.

The Think Left conference began on October 5^th with a memorial walk for the late Dermie McClenaghan, one the founding activists of the civil rights movement in Derry. Eamonn McCann spoke movingly about his friend Dermie that he had known since he was eleven years old. The walk began with about one hundred people at the Waterside Train Station, proceeded across the Peace Bridge to the Free Derry Monument and finished at the ornate Guild Hall. The walk drove home to me that Derry felt like our city, a Catholic/Nationalist city with a long history of labor and socialist politics. The Loyalist section is fairly small and has little impact on the politics of Derry.

Later that night the PBP organized ‘Liquid Gold, the true cost of water privatisation‘. It was chaired by former PBP Derry City and Strabane District Councillor, Maeve O’Neill and featured Feargal Sharkey, the former front man for the Undertones, Derry’s famed home town, post-punk band, in conversation with Eamonn McCann. Sharkey, a long time record executive, has made a name for himself as a campaigner for clean rivers and against water privatization. Lough Neough (pronounced “Lock Nay”) is the largest lake in Ireland and supplies over 40% of the water supply across the island, and was the center of the discussion The Lough is under duress from many angles. I’d say over 200 people attended the lively meeting.

To get an idea of what Feargal Sharkey is like, here’s the link to  a short interview he did from three weeks ago. The Undertones, despite the acrimonious breakup of the band, are the only real cultural rivals to the Derry Girls. When Fergal’s father Jim died in 2014, hundreds attended his funeral, including Dermie  McClenaghan, who told those gathered that, “Jim was a Labour man, was a member of the ETU (Electrical Trades Union) and the Old Derry Labour Party. He supported Labour politics all his life and also marched with the Civil Rights movement in the city in the late sixties.” The continued popularity of the Undertones can be seen here with 700 Derry school kids singing “Teenage Kicks.”

The rest of the conference was held at St. Columbs Hall, an important meeting place since it was built in 1886. Many of the conference workshops would be familiar to us: growing inequality, gender based violence, attacks on immigrants, the growth of the far right, and Palestine. But, there were others that are very specific to Ireland, not surprisingly. The Why the Irish language Belongs to All was really interesting, the panel included people from a broad range of backgrounds, including speakers who come from a Unionist family and PBP member and former council candidate Darragh Taiwo Adelaide. The PBP position on the Irish language movement is available here.

Overall, I’d say about 500 people attended the entire Think Left conference. I could help but notice that there was very little overlap between workshops. It was like they drew from different audiences, except for the jam packed meeting with Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd soon after Hamas launched their attack. I spoke on the struggle against the Far Right and what’s happening with the U.S. labor movement with Niall McCarroll, the current chair of the Derry Trades Council, and Nuala Crilly, both are members of the PBP. I was surprised at the extensive and favorable reporting of the workshop by The Derry Journal, available here.

One small disappointment was that Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement, tested positive for Covid and couldn’t participate in a panel called, “Can A New Ireland Be A Socialist Ireland.” The rest of the panelists did a good job. For those who haven’t read her autobiography The Price of My Soul, please make time to read it, you won’t be disappointed. It was written when she was a 22 year old member of the British Parliament. She’s a real hero of Derry with her image featured throughout the city.

Gaza Crisis

The Gaza crisis broke during the Derry Conference and has provided a big opportunity for PBP throughout Ireland. I was at a demonstration in Derry that began at the world famous “You are now entering Free Derry” monument and marched to the beautiful Guild Hall. Cosponsored by the PBP and the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), it was an overwhelming working class demonstration that brought out the small Arab and Muslim community, a relatively new community of immigrants in Derry. There were about three hundred people on the first Gaza march, with speakers from the PBP, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), and contributions from individual Arab and Muslim speakers.

The history of Ireland and continued colonial status of the north deeply inform how people view the Palestinian struggle. After all, Ireland was England’s first colony and the model of settler colonialism pioneered there was carried throughout the world by them. The Ulster and Derry Plantations were models for Plymouth and Jamestown, as well as the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Remember the Balfour’s declaration purpose was to create a “loyal Jewish Ulster” on the Suez Canal? This means Palestinian flags are proudly displayed in Nationalist working class neighborhoods, while Israeli flags are flown in Loyalist Neighborhoods.

Familiar and different

For many Americans travelling to Ireland it is simultaneously a very different country from the U.S. and a familiar one. While Ireland has a strong connection to the United States due to two centuries of emigration, there are more direct links. Until it closed in 1977, the U.S. Navy had a base on the Foyle River in Derry where two generations of Irish women met their future husbands. Probably, the most famous was Brigid Sheils Makowski, who met her husband stationed there and moved to the U.S., but she returned to Ireland after the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. Makowski rose eventually into the leadership of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). Her life was recounted in Daughter of Derry: The Story of Brigid Sheils Makowski, available here.

Here are a few examples I encountered. One of the first comrades I first met off the bus in Derry told me that her sister married an American sailor and moved to Rockford, Illinois. Another comrade I met at Sandinos pub after a meeting asked me, “What that’s accent?” I told him I’m from Boston, and he rattled off where his uncle owned a pub in Quincy, and all the cities on the South Shore he’d worked in. I asked him, if that was an U.S. Army Airborne tattoo on his arm? He said, yes. “I joined up in 20002 when I was really broke.” It was like talking to a younger version of someone I went to high school with. Ordering a coffee one day, a Barista asked me where I was from? I said Boston. “Oh, my husband is from Boston.”

I was prepared for the American connection to Ireland to be a bit older and more frayed, yet it was young and alive. Outside of the Loyalist community, where at least the older generation thought all Americans were IRA supporters, Americans are viewed quite favorably in Ireland. Walking Derry’s City Walls one day, I looked at the landscape and it struck me how it reminded me of the New England mill towns of my youth. It was like looking into the past. But, Derry is very rooted in the present. Despite being in the far northwest corner of Europe, you never for a moment feel remote from the world.

Belfast

Travelling from Derry to Belfast was an unexpected treat. The two hour train trip took me through the lush countryside of small farms and villages, but then shot north along the coastline for some dramatic ocean vistas. Yet, there was one incident that reminded me that, despite the low to nearly non-existent visible police presence in Derry, the Orange state is never far away.  About an hour into the trip, four heavily armed cops marched through the carriage. It was very jarring. My first thought was, Who are they looking for? Apparently, no one in particular. A patch on their uniforms called them something like the “Traffic Safety Team” or something equally Orwellian. I felt pretty safe until they showed up.

Cruising along we stopped at Coleraine, which is the location of Northern Ireland’s second university campus built in the 1960s. It was another example of the historic discrimination against Derry. Stormont chose Loyalist Colerain not Derry, the North’s second largest city. Entering Belfast we passed by the giant cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyards. They built the ill-fated Titanic. It was a reminder of Belfast’s past era as a world class shipbuilding center. The Derry-Belfast train dead-ended at Great Victoria Street, and you immediately felt you were in the big city. I was met by Brian Kelly, one of my oldest friends and a longstanding member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) member. Brian’s been living and teaching in Northern Ireland for several decades and is a well-regarded historian.

Belfast is the Capital city where the dysfunctional Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, is located and looms over the city center. The PBP’s Gerry Carroll is a Member of the Legislative Assembly or MLA. After putting my luggage away we walked through the city center to meet Brian’s daughter for lunch and we stumbled across a statue of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I wasn’t expecting this. The statue was unveiled in July, and as BBC NI reported, “The city has become the first in Europe to honor Mr. Douglass with a statue. It is located at Rosemary Street, close to where he addressed crowds in 1845.” It’s a reminder that Belfast was not always a center of Orange/Loyalist reaction.

I was in Belfast for only a few days but I got a good feel for the city. Leaving the city center, you immediately feel that Belfast is a much tougher place than Derry. While the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was welcomed by large majorities of the Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Loyalist communities because it largely ended the military conflict, the scars left by the war years, for me, meant that Belfast had a more mournful feel to large parts of it. I never felt “down” in Derry, but Belfast made me reflective of the cost of the struggle, despite Derry being the site of the Bloody Sunday Massacre. It’s also a funny thing how “The Troubles” have become a tourist attraction for Northern Ireland.

Traveling up and down the Falls Road in West Belfast, you still have “peace walls” or military grade fencing that separate Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, though it has come down in many places. Murals adore the Falls Road where the Nationalist murals prominently display its heroes and martyrs, along with identifying with the historic figures of the African and African-American Freedom movements. Like in Derry, Palestinian flags are flown in Catholic/ Nationalist neighborhoods, including from apartment towers. While in the Protestant neighborhoods, Israeli flags and murals are prominent, along with displays of loyalty to the British Empire.

The struggle in Belfast had a more civil war like feeling, where the Loyalist violence was up close and personal. Memorial gardens were constructed by residents in Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast in the years following the GFA. I found them very moving. Here’s a few pics, available here and here. Brian introduced me to his friend Mike McCann, author of Burnt Out: How the Troubles’ Began. Mike works as an auto mechanic. In his student days at Queens he was told early on that he would never get a degree. They didn’t appreciate him challenging his professors who tried to blame the Troubles on the Catholic population and the Civil Rights Movement. I read a good chunk of his book on the flight home. It was fascinating and terrifying at the same time.

The first night I was  in Belfast, Gerry Carroll was on The Nolan Show, the highest rated program on BBC Northern Ireland, and known for its pro-Unionist slant, it is the equivalent of a Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson show for an American audience. Gerry squared-off against Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) leader Edwin Poots. The DUP was founded by and led for decades by internationally known bigot, the late Ian Paisley. The Gaza crisis had just broken and the atmosphere was thick with hatred for anyone supportive of Palestine. I thought Gerry did a great job. A snippet of his appearance is available here. Shaun Harkin also had a successful appearance on The Nolan Show a week later.

Gerry’s appearance sparked one of  the Loyalist gangs to threaten to shut down All that’s Left conference, most comrades thought it was less that a gang would show up than the police and the Queen University administration would use it as an excuse to shut it down. Luckily, nothing came of it. I was able to squeeze in a visit Milltown cemetery, where many well-known Republican leaders and martyrs are buried, and the Connolly museum, which was great. Ironically, the Connolly Museum that has many American union benefactors, including the former head of the Laborers’ Union and Clinton family ally Terry O’Sullivan.

The All that’s Left conference was held at Queen’s University. The campus reminded me of a leafy New England college town with older brick buildings and lots of green spaces. I was only able to participate in the Friday opening night of the conference, the turnout was much more made up of students, a setting familiar to former members of the ISO, who did political work around campuses. I did a workshop  on the U.S. labor movement and a welcoming panel. I was originally paired with Eddie Conlon, one of the PBP’s long standing trade unionists, but he tested positive for Covid. Eddie’s article on the Irish working class today is well worth reading and later posted in Jacobin.

Many of the workshops were similar to the Derry  conference. It was good to see Mike Gonzalez, historian and author. Mike was a longstanding member of the SWP, who these days is a RS21 member. He spoke on Frida Kahlo. At the opening panel PBP TD Paul Murphy spoke on the ecological crisis and Catherine Curran Vigier spoke on the struggles in France. When it was my turn, I spoke in support of the Palestinian struggle, how the social crisis in the U.S. could break in either direction politically, and that the UAW strike was the most significant labor struggle in decades. Paul Murphy asked me later who I was affiliated with, and I said, I was a member of the ISO for four decades and Tempest, which I thought was clear but maybe not.  Murphy said he was affiliated with Reform and Revolution. I said we disagree about the future of DSA.

PBP and Tempest

The Gaza crisis has provided an opportunity for PBP to expand its national presence in Irish politics. They successfully shamed Sinn Fein into calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, and have reinvigorated the BDS movement across the country. The PBP strikes me as having a more ecumenical attitude towards relations with other revolutionary socialist groups across the globe than the IST they are formally affiliated with. The prospect for big political changes in Ireland are great but not certain. The PBP’s pamphlet The Case for a Left Government:  Getting Rid of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael was given an unexpected boost when the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar denounced it in the Dáil. I think we would benefit from a further exchange of speakers, articles, and discussions on the future of the revolutionary left.

The post Politics and Travel in Northern Ireland with People Before Profit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joe Allen.

No one expects the economy to sustain anything like this rate of growth going forward. Most likely the growth rate will fall back somewhere close to the 2.0 percent pace that is generally viewed as the sustainable rate, but many economists were projecting a recession this year. It’s clear the economy was not listening to these projections.

Most aspects of the economy look very good right now. Job growth is continuing at a healthy pace. Wage growth has moderated, but it is outpacing inflation. And, we are seeing an extraordinary boom in factory construction as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, laying the basis for a future surge in manufacturing.

However, one aspect remains troubling. The profit share of national income rose sharply in the pandemic, and it continues to be elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels, which were already considerably higher than the profit shares at the start of the century.

We can argue about the cause of the rise in the profit share, but the fact that it has risen is not really in dispute. Here’s the picture since 2018.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis and author’s calculations (see text).

These data are taken from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). There are always difficulties in measurement, and the shares will be revised when the BEA does comprehensive revisions next summer, but for now, these are the best data available.

The profit share jumped early in the pandemic recovery, going from an average of 24.1 percent of income in the corporate sector to 26.8 percent in the third quarter of 2020.[1] It peaked at 27.0 percent in the second quarter of 2022. The rise in profit shares is clearly what drove inflation, just as an accounting matter. It doesn’t make sense to say that wages are driving inflation if they are not even keeping pace with prices, which was true in most of 2022.

I had hoped that as the impact of the Covid pandemic lessened, and supply chains normalized, that we would see the profit share return to its pre-pandemic level. I was not alone in this hope, the Congressional Budget Office projected that profits would fall by 6.7 percent from fiscal year 2022 to fiscal year 2023.

That proved not to be the case. Instead, profits increased by 13.1 percent, and the profit share rose from 26.1 percent to 26.8 percent. This is both surprising and disturbing. It means that whatever factors allowed corporations to increase their profit margins during the pandemic were still allowing them to maintain elevated profit margins even as the impact of the pandemic subsided.

Again, the reasons for why profit margins have increased can be debated, but not the fact that they have increased. The Biden administration has been calling attention to this with recent comments by President Biden and other members of his administration.

While it’s not clear that his haranguing of corporations for excessive margins will affect their behavior, it is still worth calling attention to the issue. First, everyone should be clear (especially Jerome Powell and the Fed) that inflation is not a problem of excessive wage growth.

In fact, we should expect wage growth to exceed inflation by a larger than normal amount for a period of time to at least restore profit margins to their pre-pandemic level. It would not be unreasonable to think that we could get margins back to their 2000 level, but getting back to the pre-pandemic level would at least be a good start.

Second, workers should understand that they can demand higher pay because companies have the money. We saw this story clearly with the UAW strike. The Big Three automakers started with stingy offers, claiming that their backs were against the wall. The UAW held out and insisted that they get a decent contract restoring wage cuts they had accepted in hard times. This resulted in a contract where they got pay increases of close to 30 percent, with larger increases for lower-paid workers.

Third, it is important that the public be clear on the cause of the problem. They can blame or not blame politicians as they like, but what has changed over the last four years since the pandemic is that companies have increased their profit margins. It is understandable they would do this, corporations are in business to make a profit, but this is where the money went. We should all be clear on that fact.

Corporate Tax Rates Have Risen Sharply

While the high profit share can be seen as bad news, there is a positive part of the story that has not gotten the attention it deserves. For reasons that I don’t understand, the share of corporate profits going to pay taxes has risen under the Biden administration.

Trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent in his 2017 tax cut. This led to a drop in the share of corporate profits going to taxes from around 18 percent to just over 13 percent. The share began to rise in the second half of 2021 and has averaged 17.7 percent over the last four quarters.

This is not obviously attributable to legislated increases in tax rates. There was a 1.0 percent tax on share buybacks included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which took effect at the start of this year. While this is great policy, it cannot plausibly explain much of the rise in corporate taxes over the last two years.

It is possible that greater enforcement has played an important role here. The Trump administration seemed to view tax evasion as a sport that was all fun and games. If a Biden I.R.S. decided that laws actually should be enforced, and taxes are not voluntary, that may have had a big impact on tax collections.

I’m sure there are people that have more insight into the causes of the increase in corporate tax payments, who can give a fuller picture. In any case, it is a big deal and the Biden administration deserves some serious credit here.

Notes.

[1] This calculation takes the net operating surplus (Table 1.14, Line 8) minus the profits of Federal Reserve Banks (Table 6.16D, Line 11) over the combination of compensation of employees (Table 1.14, Line 4) plus net operating surplus. The after-tax line subtracts out taxes from this sum (Table 1.14, Line 12).

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

Worldwide protests calling for a ceasefire are drawing attention to the role of weapons manufacturers and distributors supplying machinery to Israel’s assault on Gaza, with demonstrators blocking shipping tankers and entrances to weapons factories, and unionized workers refusing to handle military materiel over the war in Gaza. There is “a growing public awareness and anger” about the global connection between Western powers and the Israeli military industry, says Antony Loewenstein, who has investigated how Israeli weaponry and surveillance technology are used on Palestinians and exported around the world. “Israel is already, as we speak … live-testing new weapons in Gaza,” says Loewenstein. He also discusses what he characterizes as the “intelligence” and “political” failures of the October 7 Hamas incursion.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

New York Times (4/11/20)

Janine Jackson: Listeners may remember the images from the spring of 2020: farmers dumping milk, smashing eggs and plowing produce under, even as people were lining up at food pantries.

CounterSpin spoke with scientist Ricardo Salvador, who explained that it wasn’t perversity so much as a result of the structure of our systems of food production and distribution, that don’t work exactly the way we might think.

While more complex than it first appears, that imagery still reflects a difficult reality: the paradox of want amidst plenty that is at the core of our next guest’s new book.

The book is called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program. It’s out now from University of California Press. We’re joined by author Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Christopher Bosso.

Christopher Bosso: Glad to be here.

JJ: The reauthorization for the 2023 Farm Bill is underway, and every time the Farm Bill comes up, folks are puzzled to see that SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is in there, alongside agricultural research and forestry. But this situation—this marriage, as you put it—has been central from the beginning.

(USDA, 1939)

CB: Yeah, and in two ways. First is the conceptual origins of SNAP, food stamps, and why they started in the first place, and that lies at the very intersection that you spoke about, this intersection of want amidst plenty, back in the Depression.

And, in fact, the original food stamp program was essentially a program designed to get rid of crop surpluses, or in some cases animal surpluses, as much as anything else. It really was designed initially that you would get, for every dollar in orange stamps you bought, if you were qualified to do so, you would get 50 cents in free blue stamps, and those blue stamps could be used at any retailer to buy any food declared in surplus by the US Department of Agriculture.

Now, this was during the Depression. When they’re brought back later on in the 1960s, that’s not as center, but it’s to boost food consumption for low-income households.

But then the politics of it takes over, that you still have SNAP food stamps, and then SNAP in the Farm Bill, first informally and now formally since the 1970s, to seal that deal between, essentially, the conservative rural representatives, who otherwise might not support what they might see as welfare for low-income residents, and for urban legislators, who would not otherwise vote for commodity program supports.

So that deal has been locked in since the 1970s, and lies at the heart of the Farm Bill Coalition, and especially for Democrats. That’s the reason that most Democrats will vote for the Farm Bill—not the only, but the primary reason.

JJ: To be clear, not being designed specifically as an anti-poverty program doesn’t mean that SNAP hasn’t had anti-poverty effects. But I just want to draw you out on the linking of it to farmer support, to commodity support.

You’ve just indicated this; it shielded it politically for years. So even though we know that these programs have been attacked—we see them being attacked all the time—they still survive, in some shape or form.

CB: They do. And in part because, and this is the part that a lot of people don’t want to really talk about, is that it’s essentially, before the pandemic, it was a $60 billion–a–year subsidy to the food system. That’s what it is. I mean, you’re basically priming low-income Americans to buy more food.

And that’s $60 billion, more now; since the pandemic, it doubled, and now it’s coming back down again, but still, pretty significant; I haven’t looked at the latest numbers. But at the end of the day, it’s as much a subsidy to Walmart as it is to low-income Americans, in a perverse sense.

JJ: Right. It’s interesting. It’s kind of a hidden aspect, in terms of the coverage. The coverage might be the farm aspects on one page, and then on another page, a story about SNAP. But it’s not connected, in the way that the policy itself is connected.

CB: That’s correct.

Wall Street Journal (5/30/23)

JJ: While the linking with agricultural policy has allowed SNAP to survive multiple efforts to gut it, all of that politicking, and you indicated in the book, it has interfered—it has led to things like work requirements, for instance, situations where, as you put it, the programmatically suboptimal is the politically necessary.

And you ask what I think is often an overlooked question, which is, “Compared to what?” Because, for sure, this book is not saying that SNAP is perfect, and it’s not saying, even more deeply, that SNAP would necessarily have a place in a truly healthy, just society, but it’s, “What else are we going to do?”

CB: I guess my “what else” is the political reality part of me. Given our strong anti-welfare ethos in this country, at least at the abstract level, most of our social welfare system is in-kind support, not cash.

JJ: I’m going to ask you, finally, about media. We were talking about work requirements; the Wall Street Journal complained this past May that veterans and the homeless were being exempted from work requirements for food vouchers, because, they said, “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.” OK.

News media have often played a fairly inglorious role, punching down with the sensational shaming stories about people buying lobster with EBT, and then also just, if I could say, laziness.

In 1996, it seemed to us that a lot of reporters didn’t necessarily read the Personal Responsibility Act, because the preamble begins, “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” So it could have been obvious that this was going to be about behavior modification.

But then again, it was journalists, and writers like Michael Harrington, who have brought hunger to the foreground as a US issue, at a time when it wasn’t seen that way. Any thoughts, in general, about the role of the press, in the past or going forward on this set of issues?

Christopher Bosso: “Most SNAP families have somebody who’s working; they just don’t make enough money.” (photo: Matthew Modoono)

CB: I think it’s been far too easy for some in the press to just repeat the lazy narratives about poor people being poor because it’s their own fault. Poverty in America has some strong structural roots that, in fact, some people profit from, and I think we don’t really look closely at the complicated lives of poor people. That would be my one thing I would like to see.

Now, obviously, there’s a fair number of people—Wall Street Journal being one of them—where their view of poor people is this undifferentiated mass of not very morally strong people who basically should be out there working more. Yeah, most SNAP families have somebody who’s working; they just don’t make enough money.

So I think there’s a real consideration in what we might call the mainstream media to look more closely at these dynamics, and not take these facile arguments about poor people not wanting to work at face value.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Christopher Bosso from Northeastern University. Why SNAP Works is out now from the University of California Press. Thanks, Christopher Bosso, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CB: Well, thank you for having me.

The post ‘Poverty in America Has Strong Structural Roots That Some People Profit From’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Much of the modern food system has been shaped by big agribusiness concerns like Monsanto (now Bayer) and Cargill, giant food companies like Nestle, Pepsico and Kellog’s and, more recently, institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.  

For the likes of BlackRock, which invests in both food and pharma, fuelling a system increasingly based on ultra processed food (UPF) with its cheap and unhealthy ingredients is a sure-fire money spinner.   

Toxic junk 

Consider that fast food is consumed by 85 million US citizens each day. Several chains are the primary suppliers of many school lunches. Some 30 million school meals are served to children each day. For millions of underprivileged children in the US, these meals are their only access to nutrition. 

In 2022, Moms Across America (MAA) and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) commissioned the testing of school lunches and found that 5.3 per cent contained carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting and liver disease-causing glyphosate; 74 per cent contained at least one of 29 harmful pesticides; four veterinary drugs and hormones were found in nine of the 43 meals tested; and all of the lunches contained heavy metals at levels up to 6,293 times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum levels allowed in drinking water. Moreover, the majority of the meals were abysmally low in nutrients. 

As a follow up, MAA, a non-profit organisation, with support from CHD and the Centner Academy, recently decided to have the top ten most popular fast-food brand meals extensively tested for 104 of the most commonly used veterinary drugs and hormones.  

The Health Research Institute tested 42 fast-food meals from 21 locations nationwide. The top ten brands tested were McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, TacoBell, Wendy’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, Subway, Domino’s and Chipotle. 

Collectively, these companies’ annual gross sales are $134,308,000,000. 

Three veterinary drugs and hormones were found in ten fast food samples tested. One sample from Chick-fil-A contained a contraceptive and antiparasitic called Nicarbazin, which has been prohibited. 

Some 60 per cent of the samples contained the antibiotic Monesin, which is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for human use and has been shown to cause severe harm when consumed by humans. 

40 per cent contained the antibiotic Narasin. MAA says that animal studies show this substance causes anorexia, diarrhoea, dyspnea, depression, ataxia, recumbency and death, among other things. 

Monensin and Narasin are antibiotic ionophores, toxic to horses and dogs at extremely low levels, leaving their hind legs dysfunctional. Ionophores cause weight gain in beef and dairy cattle and are therefore widely used but also “cause acute cardiac rhabdomyocyte degeneration and necrosis”, according to a 2017 paper published in Reproductive and Developmental Toxicology (Second Edition). 

For many years, ionophores have also been used to control coccidiosis in poultry. However, misuse of ionophores can cause toxicity with significant clinical symptoms. Studies show that ionophore toxicity mainly affects myocardial and skeletal muscle cells. 

Only Chipotle and Subway had no detectable levels of veterinary drugs and hormones. 

Following these findings, MAA has expressed grave concern about the dangers faced by people, especially children, who are unknowingly eating unprescribed antibiotic ionophores. The non-profit asks: are the side effects of these ionophores in dogs and horses, leaving their hind legs dysfunctional, related to millions of US citizens presenting with restless leg syndrome and neuropathy? These conditions were unknown in most humans just a generation or two ago. 

A concerning contraceptive (for geese and pigeons), an antiparasitic called Nicarbazin, prohibited after many years of use, was found in Chick fil-A sandwich samples.  

The executive director of MAA, Zen Honeycutt, concludes:  

“The impact of millions of Americans, especially children and young adults, consuming a known animal contraceptive daily is concerning. With infertility problems on the rise, the reproductive health of this generation is front and center for us, in light of these results.” 

MAA says that it is not uncommon for millions of US citizens to consume fast food for breakfast, lunch or dinner, or all three meals, every day. School lunches are often provided by fast-food suppliers and typically are the only meals underprivileged children receive and a major component of the food consumed by most children.  

Exposure to hormones from consuming ​​concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) livestock could be linked to the early onset of puberty, miscarriages, increasing incidence of twin births and reproductive problems. These hormones have been linked to cancers, such as breast and uterine, reproductive issues and developmental problems in children.  

So, how can it be that food – something that is supposed to nourish and sustain life – has now become so toxic? 

Corporate influence 

One answer lies in the influence of a relative handful of food conglomerates, which shape food policy and dominate the market.   

For instance, recent studies have linked UPFs such as ice-cream, fizzy drinks and ready meals to poor health, including an increased risk of cancer, weight gain and heart disease. Global consumption of the products is soaring and UPFs now make up more than half the average diet in the UK and US. 

In late September, however, a media briefing in London suggested consumers should not be too concerned about UPFs. After the event, The Guardian newspaper reported that three out of five scientists on the expert panel for the briefing who suggested UPFs are being unfairly demonised had ties to the world’s largest manufacturers of the products. 

The briefing generated various positive media headlines on UPFs, including “Ultra-processed foods as good as homemade fare, say experts” and “Ultra-processed foods can sometimes be better for you, experts claim”. 

It was reported by the Guardian that three of the five scientific experts on the panel had either received financial support for research from UPF manufacturers or hold key positions with organisations that are funded by them. The manufacturers include Nestlé, Mondelēz, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Unilever and General Mills. 

Professor Janet Cade (University of Leeds) told the briefing that most research suggesting a link between UPFs and poor health cannot show cause and effect, adding that processing can help to preserve nutrients. Cade is the chair of the advisory committee of the British Nutrition Foundation, whose corporate members include McDonald’s, British Sugar and Mars. It is funded by companies including Nestlé, Mondelēz and Coca-Cola.

Professor Pete Wilde (Quadram Institute) also defended UPFs, comparing then favourably with homemade items. Wilde has received support for his research from Unilever, Mondelēz and Nestlé.  

Professor Ciarán Forde (Wageningen University in the Netherlands) told the briefing that advice to avoid UPF “risks demonising foods that are nutritionally beneficial”. Forde was previously employed by Nestlé and has received financial support for research from companies including PepsiCo and General Mills. 

Despite what industry-backed scientists may say, increased consumption of UPFs was associated with more than 10 per cent of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019, according to a 2022 published peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.  

In high-income countries, such as the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake. Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the impact would be even higher in richer nations.   

In a 2016 report by the research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), it was noted that obesity rates were rising fastest among lowest socio-economic groups. That is because energy-dense foods of poor nutritional value are cheaper than more nutritious foods. 

At the time, key trade associations, companies and lobby groups related to sugary food and drinks were together spending an estimated €21.3 million annually to lobby the EU. 

One of the best-known industry front groups with global influence is the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). In January 2019, two papers by Harvard Professor Susan Greenhalgh in the BMJ and in the Journal of Public Health Policy revealed ILSI’s influence on the Chinese government concerning issues related to obesity. 

A 2017 media report noted that ILSI-India was being actively consulted by India’s apex policy-formulating body – Niti Aayog. ILSI-India’s board of trustees was dominated by food and beverage companies. ILSI’s expanding influence coincides with India’s mounting rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. 

In 2020, a study published in Public Health Nutrition revealed details about which companies fund the group. ILSI North America’s draft 2016 IRS form 990 shows a $317,827 contribution from PepsiCo, contributions greater than $200,000 from Mars, Coca-Cola and Mondelez and contributions greater than $100,000 from General Mills, Nestle, Kellogg, Hershey, Kraft, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Starbucks Coffee, Cargill, Unilever and Campbell Soup. 

Professor Janet Cade told the recent media briefing in London that people rely on processed foods for a wide number of reasons; if they were removed, this would require a huge change in the food supply. She added that this would be unachievable for most people and potentially result in further stigmatisation and guilt for those who rely on processed foods, promoting further inequalities in disadvantaged groups.  

While part of the solution lies in tackling poverty and reliance on junk food, the focus must be on challenging the power wielded by a small group of food corporations and redirecting the massive subsidies poured into the agrifood system that ensure massive corporate profit while fuelling bad food, poor health and food insecurity.  

A healthier food regime centred on human need rather than corporate profit is required. This would entail strengthening local markets, prioritising short supply chains from farm to fork and supporting independent smallholder organic agriculturalists (incentivised to grow a more diverse range of nutrient-dense crops) and small-scale retailers.  

Saying that eradicating UPFs would result in denying the poor access to cheap, affordable food is like saying let them eat poison.   

Given the scale of the problem, change cannot be achieved overnight. However, a long food movement (leading up to 2045) could transform the food system, a strategy set out in a 2021 report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and ETC Group.  

More people should be getting on board with this and promoting it at media briefings. But that might result in biting the hand that feeds.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

Pay no heed to the circus politics coming out of Washington DC. It’s just more of the same grandstanding by tone-deaf politicians oblivious to the plight of the citizenry.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted by the competing news headlines cataloging the antics of the ruling classes. While they are full of sound and fury, they are utterly lacking in substance.

Tune out the blaring noise of meaningless babble. It is intended to drown out the very real menace of a government which is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population.

Focus instead on the steady march of the police state at both the national, state and local levels, and the essential freedoms that are being trampled underfoot in its single-minded pursuit of power.

While the overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us—warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling—you rarely hear anything about them from the politicians, the corporations or the news media.

So what’s behind the blackout of real news?

Surely, if properly disclosed and consistently reported on, the sheer volume of the government’s activities, which undermine the Constitution and dance close to the edge of outright illegality, would give rise to a sea change in how business is conducted in our seats of power.

Yet when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

Not only are Americans forced to spend more on taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, education and clothing combined, but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and speeding and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has one of the largest prison populations in the world.

In the schools: The public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053. Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police have actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not freedom, America.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The post AI: Profit vs. Freedom appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

13-year-old plantation, in Taubaté, São Paulo. Photograph Source: Themium – CC0

Valued for its termite-resistant wood for building purposes, pulp to create products like writing and toilet paper, and its oil, which has numerous health and household benefits, the eucalyptus tree generates big business worldwide. Native to Australia and Tasmania, the prehistoric tree has been planted in such volumes that eucalyptus plantations cover some 25 million hectares around the globe—larger than the entire land area of the United Kingdom. By 2028, according to forecasts, the global eucalyptus oil market is projected to exceed $213 million, while the worldwide market for eucalyptus pulp will expand to nearly $17 billion.

But the eucalyptus industry has a dark side. Eucalyptus plantations growing in regions spanning South America, southern Africa, southern Europe, and Australia have significant detrimental impacts on local communities and biodiversity. Communities located near eucalyptus plantations are likely to face water shortages—as these plantations utilize huge amounts of water—and pollution from agrochemicals, including exposure to glyphosate, which has been linked to various health problems, including increased cancer risk.

In addition, the presence of eucalyptus trees’ leaves and roots hinders the growth of other plants beneath them because they contain a biocidal oil that inhibits the survival and decomposition of most soil bacteria that come into contact with them.

Brazil is the world’s largest eucalyptus producer. With an estimated 7.6 million hectares of eucalyptus plantations, Brazil maintains 30 percent of the world’s total eucalyptus trees. In eastern Brazil, particularly in the states of Bahia and Espírito Santo, these plantations have replaced the diverse and endemic Atlantic Forest ecosystem, with some municipalities seeing nearly three-quarters of their land area being covered by eucalyptus plantations. Large corporations such as Suzano, Fibria, and Veracel dominate this industry, exporting eucalyptus as pulp for manufacturing products like toilet paper.

New Forest Threat: Genetically Engineered Eucalyptus

Genetically engineered (GE) varieties of eucalyptus trees are poised to exacerbate a new wave of ecological and social destruction. Brazil has approved seven varieties of genetically engineered trees. Current plantations rob regions of water, destroy wildlife habitat, and transform large swaths of land within the Cerrado—an expansive, biodiverse tropical biome situated in eastern Brazil—into unnatural, destructive monoculture farms: rows upon rows of non-native eucalyptus trees without vegetation in their understory. Many traditional communities and Indigenous people have opposed the spread of these plantations in the country.

Varieties of GE eucalyptus are pesticide-resistant and are likely to increase the use of toxic chemicals such as Roundup, the glyphosate-based weedkiller developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, which is the world’s most used herbicide—and was acquired by Bayer in 2018. Other engineered traits, such as increased growth rates, could make the trees more profitable for the pulp and paper industry but significantly more harmful to the environment.

International Opposition to GE Eucalyptus

The Campaign to STOP GE Trees is an international alliance of organizations working to halt the introduction of genetically engineered trees into the natural environment to prevent ecological destruction and harm to local communities. It is an initiative of our U.S.-based organization, Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP), with support from the Uruguay-based World Rainforest Movement, which advances the cause of social justice in the forests.

An international delegation of the campaign, which was organized by GJEP, traveled to Brazil in July 2023 to meet with Indigenous and quilombola communities (descendants of escaped Afro-Brazilian enslaved people), members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST, in Portuguese), government ministries, and academics. The delegation’s goal was to learn about the history of resistance against the pulp and paper industry in the country and discuss how herbicide-resistant genetically engineered varieties of eucalyptus trees could increase the use of toxic herbicides and amplify ecological degradation, health impacts, and social injustice.

FASE (Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional), a group that has been supporting communities opposing eucalyptus plantations for a decade, organized the logistics of the delegation, which included representatives from Argentina, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. Local representatives joined the delegation as it visited several Brazilian ministries to register official demands and testimonies from quilombola and MST community members from northern Espírito Santo and southern Bahia about the devastating impacts of eucalyptus plantations as well as new threats posed by GE eucalyptus trees.

“The demands that we recorded were from several MST communities that we met with that are doing important agroecological work and have a whole agroecological school training people in the region about how to grow organically,” said Anne Petermann, international coordinator of the Campaign to STOP GE Trees. She noted that “there were also statements from members of traditional quilombola communities in that region who are suffering, very directly, the impacts of eucalyptus plantations.”

The delegation also officially presented petitions from Rainforest Rescue, an environmental nonprofit based in Hamburg, Germany, signed by more than 100,000 people opposing the release of GE eucalyptus in Brazil to the ministries and Brazilian National Technical Commission on Biosafety.

During the delegation’s official meeting, Moisés Savian, secretary of Brazil’s Ministry of Agrarian Development, identified corporate interests driving the push for GE eucalyptus.

“It makes no sense in my vision to have a transgenic [eucalyptus] associated with glyphosate,” stated Savian. His comments highlighted the increasingly ubiquitous and dangerous as well as probable cancer-causing herbicide Roundup. “It is much more linked to market interests of the corporations that want to sell herbicide,” the secretary noted.

The Kafkaesque Incentive of Carbon Credits

Another motivation behind the push for GE eucalyptus is the Kafkaesque incentive of receiving carbon credits for planting trees. Corporations like Suzano—which has been called the “world’s largest pulp exporter”—can be rewarded for planting enormous industrial tree monocultures—since they are technically planting trees, they are eligible for carbon credits—even though they first clear-cut and remove the carbon-dense native forests, which release vast amounts of carbon from the forest and the soil.

The pulp industry in Brazil has accelerated the growth rate of their eucalyptus trees. This is increasing the already enormous demands on water resources. So problematic is the expansion of eucalyptus monocultures on the hydrology and biodiversity of regions that they are often called “green deserts.”

“They look green from a distance but are extremely fast-growing trees planted in perfect rows and columns optimal for mechanical harvesting. The huge plantations do not harbor wildlife, and the only biodiversity you find in them is ants and termites,” explained Petermann, who led the delegation that traveled to Brazil.

One of the most insidious trends in false solutions to climate change is the idea that living or biological carbon can offset fossil fuel carbon. An expanding landscape of monoculture industrial tree plantations in Brazil—which rob the forests of biodiversity, displace communities and wildlife, and deplete regions of water resources—epitomizes the eco-swindle of carbon credits.

João, a member of a quilombola community, told the delegation that when eucalyptus started being planted in Espírito Santo and Bahia, “they removed the native plant cover and all the nutrients from the soil. People [here] used to do agroforestry, would use cover crops, [and would] let the land rest—but now, with eucalyptus, there is no rest for the soil.” The total eucalyptus plantation area in Bahia is estimated to be about 658,000 hectares, positioning it as the country’s third-largest contributor to industrially cultivated eucalyptus.

Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, a biologist from the University of London who attended a forum hosted by the delegation, warned of unintended consequences of genetically engineered trees, stating that “the risks of GE trees is extremely high in terms of the impact on biodiversity, the people living around it, and the global ecosystem and climate.”

Not only are current eucalyptus plantations destructive, but the premise that they are superior to natural forests for capturing carbon is also unsound. In 2020, experts published a letter with the Institute of Physics stating that “forests are superior to, and irreplaceable by, plantations as agents of terrestrial C [carbon] sequestration.” They are harvested with incredibly short growing cycles for pulp and paper production, which releases the carbon back into the atmosphere. But the scheme is profitable for Suzano and other pulp companies since they profit from the production of pulp and paper as well as carbon credits for planting trees.

Belém Declaration

Brazil is home to numerous biomes, the most famous of which is the Amazon forest. Known as “the lungs of the Earth” for the massive amounts of carbon dioxide the forest inhales and the oxygen it exhales, the Amazon is the focus of many conservation initiatives and agreements.

In early August 2023, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hosted the Amazon Summit in Belém, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pará, during which another conservation agreement was launched. The eight nations party to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (ACT) released the Belém Declaration, a document aimed to unify the shared objectives of the signatory nations, which are focused on preserving the Amazon and the rights of Indigenous people who live in it. The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30 ) is slated to meet in Belém in 2025.

In a press release, however, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) stated that the Belém Declaration fell short of commitments to end deforestation in the Amazon and failed to address the issues related to the continued use of fossil fuels.

Nikki Reisch, director of CIEL’s Climate and Energy Program, stated:

“The Belém Declaration does not commit… to ending deforestation by 2030, or to addressing the primary, intersecting drivers of rainforest loss—industrial agriculture and the extractive and destructive industries that expose primary forests to land conversion.”

“Glaringly absent from the declaration is any mention of the threat that continued production and use of oil and gas poses to the Amazon and the ecosystems, communities, and climate that depend on it. Instead, exploration and development of new oil and gas projects continue—even at the mouth of the Amazon itself—directly undercutting leaders’ pledges to prevent the region from reaching the point of no return. Allowing expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon is incompatible with human rights, including Indigenous Peoples’ rights, biodiversity protection, and climate goals.”

Similar deference to industry interests plagues the Cerrado, where eucalyptus plantations and agribusiness continue to run roughshod over Indigenous and traditional communities and destroy a lesser-known but equally precarious natural ecological system regardless of ostensible ecological concerns and overtures.

The Demand for Paper Pulp

As the global demand for paper pulp continues to climb, Brazil is expected to be the site of the most significant expansion of these production facilities in South America.

Two regions that the Campaign to STOP GE Trees’ delegation are likely to face the negative impacts of the tremendous growth of eucalyptus plantations to feed the pulp and paper industry.

Quilombola communities the delegation visited stated that in Espírito Santo, most of the municipal land has been turned into plantations by Suzano. They also explained that tax incentives and infrastructure investment in the Três Lagoas region by local and federal governments seek to attract investments by the pulp and paper industry to the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where much of the native Cerrado forest has been converted to eucalyptus plantation in the past decade.

It is so lucrative that Suzano is building the world’s largest pulp and paper mill in Mato Grosso do Sul. The enormous facility is being built by 10,000 workers, most of whom are stacked in nearby man camps. The mill is expected to employ 10,000 people when completed. The Cerrado Project, as Suzano has deemed it, is in a rural town that has a population of nearly 25,000. The project threatens grave environmental damage to natural habitat and biodiversity, water and air, and a devastatingly precipitous population influx.

Additionally, the Chilean corporation Arauco is planning an even larger mill in Mato Grosso do Sul after the scheduled completion of Suzano’s behemoth.

Robbing Land From Indigenous Communities

Land sovereignty of traditional communities has been a politically charged issue in Brazil, and the encroachment on lands belonging to traditional and Indigenous communities by agribusiness was a theme that the delegation heard repeated during its travels through Brazil, including in the affected areas of Espírito Santo, southern Bahia, and Mato Grosso do Sul. Born out of Brazil’s colonial past and decades of military dictatorship, land distributions in the country are highly inequitable. Agribusiness interests have been incredibly aggressive in the past and continue with this trend currently.

“What made us lose our land, our culture, was all those persecutions by agribusiness,” stated José De Souza, an instructor at the Indigenous Ofaié school in Mato Grosso do Sul. The Ofaié was “once a large people,” he said, noting that such agribusiness pressures almost made “them extinct.” Once having a population of tens of thousands, the Ofaié now live on a mere 45 hectares after being forcibly relocated twice. “It’s not an ended thing,” said Souza. “They destroyed our forests and water.” The school where Souza teaches emphasizes Ofaié culture and language in classes often taught outside in the open. The Ofaié land is small but is an oasis of native forest hemmed in by vast stretches of industrial monoculture plantations.

The Struggle for Land: The MST

Eucalyptus is as central to the Ofaié land struggle as it is to the MST, one of the most significant movements in South America. The group has nearly 2 million members, with hundreds of thousands of Brazil’s poor living in MST camps as farmers. The MST seeks to reverse Brazil’s profound inequality of land distribution by occupying land for communal farms.

The movement is a lightning rod of controversy in Brasilia, with lawmakers aligned with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro trying to outlaw the movement. Still, judges have often accepted the MST’s interpretation of Brazilian law that allows unproductive land to be taken. The MST has occasionally included eucalyptus plantations as meeting the definition of “unproductive” and has occupied and repurposed them for communal farms.

The movement has been so successful in its occupation strategy that it is estimated that 460,000 families now live in encampments started by the campaign. The MST is forward-leaning with an eye to the future with agroecology schools that teach how to grow crops and food using agroecological methods. They are now the largest exporters of organic rice in Latin America.

Biden Administration Funding Eucalyptus Expansion

As the MST, Indigenous people, and traditional communities in Brazil struggle against the spread of industrial eucalyptus plantations, the Biden administration is reportedly funding its expansion.

According to a June 2023 article on Mongabay, “Biden promised funds from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to conserve the Amazon and other critical Latin American biomes.” Yet according to findings published by Mongabay, the debt investment, if approved by Congress, will primarily “be funneled into mass-produced eucalyptus in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna.”

Mongabay reported that $50 million of the funding would go to Timberland Investment Group’s (TIG) plan to expand its “planted forest operations,” which located its newest office near Suzano’s Cerrado Project in Mato Grosso do Sul.

PL 490: Curtailing Indigenous Land Rights

During the delegation’s visit to Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, to meet with ministers and lawmakers, Indigenous peoples held a large demonstration to oppose a proposal, PL 490, a law its supporters claim would bring certainty and fairness to land disputes in Brazil. Opponents, however, argue that the proposal would actually reverse hard-fought gains by Indigenous communities to have their land rights officially recognized.

Proposed by Bolsonaro-aligned lawmakers, PL 490 would reset Indigenous land claims to October 1988—when the current Brazilian Constitution was adopted after the military dictatorship. Since the lands were taken during the dictatorship, this is a land-grabbing ruse by extractive industries seeking to deny claims of land rights by Indigenous groups and even to erase gains they had made in the past. The Lower House of Congress gave its approval to this bill in May 2023.

The push for PL 490 underscores how land sovereignty is a fundamental issue in Brazilian politics and is inextricably linked to the country’s environment and the rights of traditional communities. Monoculture eucalyptus plantations play a central role in the contest over land rights, an issue central to Brazilian politics and ultimately connected to the rights of traditional communities and the world’s environmental health. With the specter of eucalyptus trees engineered for pesticide resistance and the Biden administration’s embrace of false solutions to climate change, the balance is being further tipped in favor of the pulp and paper industry in that fight.

“As Brazil goes, so does the world when it comes to the use of GE-engineered eucalyptus,” said Petermann. “The significance of the loss of the Cerrado to GE eucalyptus plantations cannot be overstated.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Steve Taylor – Orin Langelle.

[NOTE: This review contains plot spoilers.]

J’ACCUSE: IN HER FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS

In the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, producer/director Rory Kennedy accuses the aircraft manufacturer with the same meticulousness and zeal that her late father, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brought to bear when he prosecuted organized crime in the early 1960s. But instead of deploying the Justice Department to crack down on Boeing, with an Émile Zola-like passion and skill, Ms. Kennedy admirably utilizes the motion picture medium to lay bare what can arguably be called “mass murder” committed by the U.S.-based multinational corporation, with the complicity of the federal government.

JAKARTA/ADDIS ABABA, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

On Oct. 29, 2018, shortly after Lion Air Flight 610 took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Jakarta, the 737 MAX airline crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 passengers and crew. As Downfall shows, standing on its much-vaunted safety record, despite the fact that according to his wife the pilot was U.S.-trained, Boeing’s then-CEO Dennis Muilenberg blamed “the Indonesian crew,” claiming “this would never happen to an American crew.” But was pilot error the culprit – or capitalist greed?

Boeing’s racial passing of the buck was given the lie only four months later when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, another 737 MAX aircraft, similarly crashed only six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport on March 10, 2019. The plane was, like the doomed Lion Air aircraft, only around four months old. All of the flight’s 157 passengers and crew died.

The fact that two such disasters took place almost back-to-back led people to suspect that the fault for these catastrophes did not lay in the Third World, but right back in the heart of the First World, in the USA, where Boeing designed, manufactured and sold the 737 MAX. Downfall proceeds to interview and cover relatives of the crash victims, journalists (the Wall Street Journal’s former aerospace reporter Andy Pasztor is a recurring onscreen presence), pilots, politicians, government and aviation authorities, Boeing employees and executives, plus others. Ms. Kennedy unravels her story like a whodunit, investigating who is culpable for the deaths of 346 human beings?

SAFETY LAST

To make her eponymous Case Against Boeing, Ms. Kennedy’s 90-minute nonfiction film takes the long view and covers lots of ground. Using archival footage, she traces the rise of Boeing, which was founded 1916 in Seattle and became the so-called “Emerald City’s” “biggest employer” for decades. Onscreen, employees describe the well-paying company as a “family” they felt pride working for. Engineers and quality control personnel state that the firm was “engineering led” and “safety” was a top priority for the enterprise that designed, built and sold military and commercial aircraft and spacecraft.

According to Downfall, all this changed during the mergers and acquisitions mania of the 1990s, when Boeing merged with the aerospace corporation and defense contractor McDonnell Douglas by 1997, and the latter’s CEO, Harry Stonecipher, became the President and Chief Operating Officer of the reconfigured multinational. Under the new regime the most important thing became creating value on Wall Street and “driving the stock price higher,” according to onscreen interviewee John Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current, which analyzes and reports on the global aerospace and aviation industry. Introduction of the highly competitive, France-based Airbus in 2003 complicated the increasingly complex economic dynamic for Boeing, as did rising fuel costs.

Most significantly for Downfall’s story, the corporation’s heightened emphasis on maximizing profit comes at the expense of and compromises Boeing’s traditional “laser focus on safety.” In what appears to be an original interview for the film, quality manager John Barnett contends that the revamped Boeing “ignored the message and attacked the messenger,” contending that “pay was docked for putting complaints in writing. Boeing didn’t want anything documented.”

Although Boeing executives refused to be interviewed for this documentary, they did eventually answer questions in – ironically – writing, and via titles at the end of Ms. Kennedy’s expose, the company denies Barnett’s assertion. However, a vignette of hidden camera footage shot by Al Jazeera appears to lend support to Barnett’s contention that Boeing started to downplay safety concerns. In the surreptitiously lensed scene inside of what seems to be a Boeing plant, an unidentified blue collar worker who has white hair and a white beard expresses sheer disbelief when told that management ruled there was no time for a basic safety precaution. I mention the stunned man’s white hair and beard because the implication is that he is a longtime employee and the scuttled safety practices in question appear to have previously been routine.

“I’M SORRY DAVE”: A CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT AI

The downplaying of safety measures and aversion to documentation dovetail and come to light after the two 737 MAX crashes from October 2018 to March 2019. As chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Democrat Peter DeFazio, who represented Oregon’s 4^th congressional district from 1987 to 2023, investigated Boeing for 18 months and held five hearings, which bereaved relatives of international backgrounds valiantly brought pressure to bear to take place. Onscreen, this co-founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus expresses frustration with Boeing’s repeated stonewalling regarding turning documents over to his committee.

Why doesn’t the corporation want a written record? As the Beatles sang: “Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey.” What exactly did Boeing have to hide? Instead of redesigning and reengineering a new aircraft to replace the decades’-old 737 in order to better compete with Airbus, Boeing “tweaks” (as the film puts it) the fleet by modifying it to be more gas efficient – and to avoid undergoing the expense of pilot retraining that a completely new model aircraft would have required by law. In addition to implementing cost cutting at the expense of safety, the aircraft manufacturer added a Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, a flight stabilizing feature.

In essence, MCAS is an AI program that Boeing intended to compensate an excessive nose up angle of the aircraft by adjusting the horizontal stabilizer. However, under certain circumstances such as sensor failure, the Artificial Intelligence apparently could literally commandeer the aircraft, wresting control away from the human pilot. This seems to be what erroneously pointed the planes downwards on its deadly trajectories shortly after takeoff in Indonesia and Ethiopia. It reminds me of the iconic scene of man-versus-machine in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. When a human astronaut returns to the mother ship from outer space, he orders the super-computer to “open the pod bay doors, HAL.” It chillingly responds: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” locking him out of the spaceship.

For a variety of shady reasons, pilots were not properly briefed on the MCAS system by Boeing. On June 19, 2019, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger – the pilot who heroically, adroitly landed his damaged plane safely on the Hudson River in 2009 – testified at a hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, insisting on investigation of the crashes, simulator and other forms of pilot training plus enhanced safety measures. Sully told Congress: “In adding MCAS, Boeing added a computer-controlled feature to a human-controlled airplane but without also adding to it the integrity, reliability and redundancy that a computer-controlled system requires… Boeing designers also gave MCAS too much authority, meaning that they allowed it to autonomously move the horizontal stabilizer to the full nose-down limit.”

In Downfall Sully argues: “The way MCAS pushed the nose down [on the 737 MAX Indonesia and Ethiopia flights] was maniacal. Pilots never understood it was trying to kill them.” Regarding the incredibly brief amount of time properly trained pilots would have to correct the situation, DeFazio comments onscreen: “Basically, in 10 seconds you’re dead.” To paraphrase Ralph Nader, Boeing’s 737 MAX was “unsafe at any height.”

CAPITALISM KILLS

After the first crash Boeing rested on its laurels, trading on its previously earned, pre-merger reputation as a standard bearer of safety, and resisted having its 737 MAXs grounded, insisting that the planes just needed “a software fix,” which the Federal Aviation Agency, under Pres. Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao (Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife), accepted. Boeing stood to lose a fortune if what one of its executives calls onscreen the top selling plane in the company’s history was deep sixed. FAA connivance, which is part of the whole neoliberal agenda of limiting and eliminating regulations, is exposed and excoriated in Downfall. In any case, after the second crash, on March 13, 2019, even the notoriously anti-regulatory Pres. Trump grounds the airline (although not stated in the film, the U.S. is almost the last nation to do so).

The doc follows the fallout of the crashes and Boeing’s legal wranglings to their conclusion.

Instead of serving time behind bars, the cashiered Muilenberg lands safely with a $60 million golden parachute, and not a single Boeing executive does prison time for the deaths of 346 humans. Instead, Boeing pays a $2.5 billion fine; although Downfall doesn’t disclose this, it would be interesting to know how this sanction compares to the amount of money and profit it made from the faulty 747 MAX doomsday machines? Does the maxim “crime doesn’t pay” hold true here? Inquiring minds would like to know.

A TOP DOCUMENTARIAN

Nor does Rory Kennedy’s film ever mention that some leading Democrats in the House and Senate own a substantial number of shares of Boeing stock, including Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who, according to the summer 2023 issue of Jacobin, owns $650,000 in Boeing stock. Of course, as the niece of JFK, daughter of RFK, and charter member of the capitalist class and what may well be the Democratic Party’s first family, perhaps Rory doesn’t want to shine a light on some of her fellow Dems…

Be that as it may, Ms. Kennedy is a talented filmmaker. She painstakingly puts the pieces of her cinematic puzzle together skillfully, to render the big picture in Downfall of Boeing’s rise and fall, aided and abetted by the logic of capitalist greed, in collusion with government, which as Marx and Engels remarked in a certain 1848 Manifesto, is: “The executive of the modern state… but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Rory’s straightforward nonfiction production doesn’t have the flashy filmic verve of documentaries by envelope-pushing filmmakers, such as Michael Moore and Errol Morris. There is no charismatic, photogenic narrator or host seen and/or heard onscreen, and Ms. Kennedy’s use of what I assume are recreations is limited to brief cockpit and similar scenes, unlike extensive direction of reenactments in Steve James’ The Compassionate Spy. Instead of motion picture panache, Rory relies on the tried-and-true techniques of the documentary, patiently wearing out the shoe leather, comprehensively compiling the evidence to make her devastating case against Boeing – and by implication, corporate capitalism and governmental malfeasance, as well. Actor-turned-helmer Ron Howard shares executive producer credit for Downfall.

Ms. Kennedy has produced and/or directed a number of reliably liberal-leaning documentaries in the past, including 2004’s Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, 2005’s Street Fight, 2006’s The Homestead Strike and 2007’s Ghost of Abu Ghraib, for which she won an Emmy Award. However, she also helmed 2014’s reactionary propaganda picture Last Days in Vietnam, a remarkably one-sided screed that attempted to justify aspects of the U.S. role in Indochina. (In a similar anti-communist vein, although known as a fighting liberal, Bobby Kennedy served as the Assistant Counsel on Investigations on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953.)

All in all, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing makes a powerful case against Boeing, the FAA and the capitalist and governmental systems that allowed the manufacturer to unleash the 737 MAX killing machine on an unsuspecting flying public. It may not be ironic that a 2004 Oscar-nommed German feature about Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker starring Bruno Ganz is also named Downfall. After watching Rory Kennedy’s compelling Downfall, the viewer is likely to reach a number of conclusions – not only about capitalism, but that the wrong Kennedy sibling is currently running for president.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing can be seen on Netflix.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

The post Why Capitalism is Leaving the US, in Search of Profit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard D. Wolff.

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In 2019, hackers launched one of the largest cybersecurity attacks in U.S. history, eventually infiltrating various government agencies, as well as scores of private sector companies. The White House later attributed the attack, known as the SolarWinds hack, to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. But as U.S. officials scrambled to respond to this spying, they realized they were missing key information: critical log files, the digital records of activity on users' computers.

The feature, which allows users to detect and investigate suspicious activity in their networks, is included in high-end Microsoft 365 plans but not in the basic version then used by some government agencies. Other agencies didn't retain sufficient log data over a long enough time frame. Had logging been more widely deployed, it might have tipped off officials to the intrusion sooner and enabled them to better investigate after it had been discovered.

Against this backdrop, President Biden nominated Chris Inglis to become the country’s first National Cyber Director. Inglis, a former National Security Agency official who began his career as a computer scientist, would go on to oversee the development of the administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy. And as he and his team at the White House drafted that document, he kept returning to the SolarWinds hack. Known as a supply chain attack, this far-reaching breach started with compromised software that was used by many high-profile customers. “Everyone along that supply chain assumed that security was built in at the factory and sustained along the supply chain,” Inglis said of the SolarWinds attack. “We now know that wasn’t the case.”

The issue emerged again this month when some victims of a cyberattack linked to China were unable to detect the intrusion because they held basic Microsoft licenses rather than the premium ones that include logging. Hackers had exploited a flaw in Microsoft’s cloud computing service to break into about two dozen organizations globally, including the U.S. State Department.

These types of incidents reflect a larger trend, Inglis said: Computer users find themselves bearing a disproportionately large share of the burden of defending against cyberattacks. In response, the new strategy proposes shifting more of that burden to software makers themselves. Indeed, following the most recent cyberattack by Chinese hackers, Biden administration officials called on Microsoft last week to make security features like logging standard for all users.

Microsoft said it is engaging with the administration on the issue. “We are evaluating feedback and are open to other models,” a company spokesman said in a statement.

Although the Biden strategy, which was announced in March, is not binding, it represents a significant change in the government’s approach. Among its proposals: advancing legislation that would hold tech firms liable for data losses and harm caused by insecure products. Inglis, who stepped down from his role as director earlier this year, recently spoke with ProPublica about the national strategy document and the administration’s push to make technology providers do more to protect users from cyberattacks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

If you look at regulation of cyberspace at the moment, it’s mostly focused on operators. It’s not focused on those who build the cloud or major pieces of software. Governments need to consult with the private sector to understand what’s critical in those systems. We can use regulatory authorities that exist already, whether it’s the Department of Commerce, the FCC, the Treasury Department. When something is life- or safety-critical, you get to a place where you have to actually specify those things that you say are not discretionary. We did this with drugs and therapeutics. We did this with transportation systems. We need to do the same thing in cyberspace.

Well, I think it’s been brought up, but two things prevented it. First, we’ve thought about the idea that security is something that the technologists, the innovators, would actually take care of. They’ve always been of the mind that they would take care of it when they get around to it. But they’re always on to the next new innovation. So they never get around to it. We never double back to essentially build something in that wasn’t there at the start.

Two, we worried that too much regulation will actually suppress innovation and deny us the full benefit of technology. We still need to think about that. But it turns out that innovation is not a free lunch. I won’t cite any particular sources, but if you’re a good business person, you want to avoid any unnecessary cost. And so you’re always going to point out the downside of regulation.

It’s pretty straightforward: Are the software or hardware systems meeting security expectations under reasonably foreseeable conditions? We’ve done that with automobiles. We have airbags, we have seat belts, we have anti-lock brakes. So what are the basic cybersecurity features that should be there at the get-go? Multifactor authentication or some reasonable equivalent to that. Some degree of segmentation so that if something gets into your system, it doesn’t rapidly race across. An easy way to patch vulnerabilities. The magic in the middle of that is that the vendor actually says, ‘I will take that responsibility.’ As opposed to saying, ‘Let the buyer beware. I’ll sell you the basic version. But if you want security features, then I’ll sell you a package on top of that.’ That’s nonsense.

That’s right. Now, if you have an extraordinary security situation — you’re in the darknet, or you’re doing business in places where there’s very little jurisdictional authority exercised by the local police forces or the diplomatic cadre — then you ought to expect to pay more. But if you’re just an ordinary consumer, security ought to come along, built in.

So is Ford Motor Co. So is Tesla. It’s a pretty simple formulation, which is: At what point does profit trump safety? And the answer is, there is some reasonable alignment of the two. You can’t have all of one and none of the other. The businesses have to be able to sustain themselves; profit needs to be in the bargain. But they cannot deploy technologies that they know to be injurious to the welfare, health and safety of their customers. That is simply not the way this society works. I just think that companies that deploy products that have a detrimental effect on their customers either will find themselves [improving security] through self-enlightenment or market forces, or they should expect that they will be compelled to do that.

We should be pro-business. But business over the interest of the customers that it serves is essentially a graveyard spiral. It’s a race to the bottom. And so this is yet another moment where you have to align the interest of business with the interest of consumers that they will serve.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Renee Dudley.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yves Engler.

The post War for Profit: A Short History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brad Wolf.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

“The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oaths swearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

Children's advocacy and government watchdog groups on Wednesday welcomed the Federal Trade Commission's push to implement new protections for youth users of Meta products including Facebook in response to the company allegedly violating a 2020 privacy order.

Calling the agency's action "long overdue," Fairplay executive director Josh Golin said that "for years, Meta has flouted the law and exploited millions of children and teens in their efforts to maximize profits, with little care as to the harms faced by young users on their platforms."

"The FTC has rightly recognized Meta simply cannot be trusted with young people's sensitive data and proposed a remedy in line with Meta's long history of abuse of children," Golin added.

"The FTC has rightly recognized Meta simply cannot be trusted with young people's sensitive data and proposed a remedy in line with Meta's long history of abuse of children."

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, similarly said that the FTC's move "is a long-overdue intervention into what has become a huge national crisis for young people."

"Meta and its platforms are at the center of a powerful commercialized social media system that has spiraled out of control, threatening the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents," he asserted. "The company has not done enough to address the problems caused by its unaccountable data-driven commercial platforms."

The FTC said in a statement that the tech giant, which changed its parent company name from Facebook to Meta in 2021, "has failed to fully comply with the order, misled parents about their ability to control with whom their children communicated through its Messenger Kids app, and misrepresented the access it provided some app developers to private user data."

The 2020 order, which the social media company agreed to the previous year, came out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It involved a $5 billion fine—which critics condemned as far too low—and followed a 2012 order also related to privacy practices.

"Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises," Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, declared Wednesday. "The company's recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures."

The commission specifically accuses Meta of violating both the 2012 and 2020 orders as well as the FTC Act and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. Commissioners are proposing a blanket ban against monetizing the data of minors, pausing the launch of new products and services, extending compliance to merged companies, limiting future uses of facial recognition technology, and strengthening privacy requirements.

The changes would apply to not only Facebook but also other Meta platforms such as Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp.

The commission voted 3-0 to issue an order to show cause—though Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya also put out a statement questioning whether the agency has the authority to implement some of the proposals. Meta now has 30 days to respond, after which the FTC will make a final decision on whether to move forward with the changes.

In a statement Wednesday, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone took aim at the commission leader specifically, saying that "FTC Chair Lina Khan's insistence on using any measure—however baseless—to antagonize American business has reached a new low."

Stone also claimed that the FTC's attempt to modify the 2020 order "is a political stunt," accused the commission of trying to "usurp the authority of Congress to set industrywide standards," and vowed to "vigorously fight this action."

While praising the FTC effort and blasting Meta, advocates for children concurred with the company's spokesperson on one point: the need for broader U.S. governmental action to address industry practices.

"Amid a continuing rise in shocking incidents of suicide, self-harm, and online abuse, as well as exposés from industry 'whistleblowers,' Meta is unleashing even more powerful data gathering and targeting tactics fueled by immersive content, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, while pushing youth further into the metaverse with no meaningful safeguards," said Chester. "Parents and children urgently need the government to institute protections for the 'digital generation' before it is too late."

"Today's action by the FTC limiting how Meta can use the data it gathers will bring critical protections to both children and teens," he continued. "It will require Meta/Facebook to engage in a proper 'due diligence' process when launching new products targeting young people—rather than its current method of 'release first and address problems later approach.' The FTC deserves the thanks of U.S parents and others concerned about the privacy and welfare of our 'digital generation.'"

After also applauding the FTC "for its efforts to hold Meta accountable," Golin called on Congress to pass the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0, "because all companies should be prohibited from misusing young people's sensitive data, not just those operating under a consent decree."

"Until Congress acts on its promise to ensure privacy for kids and adults online, it's critical that the agency boldly enforces the law."

Public Citizen executive vice president Lisa Gilbert said in a statement that "kids should never have been used as an engine of profit for Meta, and it's great that the FTC is continuing to act aggressively. Until Congress acts on its promise to ensure privacy for kids and adults online, it's critical that the agency boldly enforces the law."

Though backed by some child advocacy groups, a few legislative proposals intended to protect children online—including the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act and Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)—have alarmed organizations that warn about endangering digital privacy and free expression, as Common Dreamsreported Tuesday.

As Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Wednesday reintroduced COPPA 2.0, Fight for the Future director Evan Greer—who has openly criticized the other measures—said that "we think federal data privacy protections should cover EVERYONE, not just kids, but overall this is a bill that would do some good and it does not have the same censorship concerns as bills like KOSA."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Activists on Tuesday lamented their failure of various climate and Indigenous rights resolutions at the annual shareholder meetings of some of the nation's biggest banks, with one campaigner accusing the financial institutions of prioritizing "profit over people and our planet."

Just 10% of Citigroup shareholders and 7% of those owning Bank of America stock voted for resolutions urging banks to adopt a phaseout of financing for new fossil fuel projects. An unknown percentage of Wells Fargo shareholders voted for the resolution. Similar resolutions proposed last year garnered 13% of the vote at Citi and 11% at Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Those three banks combined have financed nearly $1 trillion in fossil fuel projects since the Paris climate agreement was implemented in 2016, according to a report published earlier this month by a coalition of green groups.

The resolutions were filed by Trillium Asset Management at Bank of America, Harrington Investments at Citigroup, and Sierra Club Foundation at Wells Fargo.

Nearly 30% of Bank of America shareholders also backed forcing the institution to release a 2030 climate transition plan, while 31% Citi investors endorsed a resolution requiring the company to publish a report on the effects of its policies and actions on Indigenous peoples' human rights.

As Sierra Club noted:

Investor filers made several amendments to the fossil fuel financing proposals at the banks this year, including asking banks to adopt a policy to phase out financing for projects and companies engaging in new fossil fuel exploration and development, which is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and encouraging banks to provide financing for energy sector clients to credibly transition to cleaner technologies, which could safeguard against greenwashing and accelerate the clean energy transition.

Tuesday's shareholder votes followed protests the previous day outside the headquarters of Bank of America in Charlotte, Citigroup in New York, and Wells Fargo in San Francisco. Dozens of activists slept overnight outside Citi's headquarters.

"While... Citi shareholders continue to support evaluating its policies and impacts on Indigenous peoples, it's saddening and maddening to see the numbers drop a few points as our homelands are destroyed across the globe," said Tara Houska, a member of the Couchiching First Nation and founder of the Giniw Collective.

"These are not uninformed people, they are folks who hold an incredible amount of influence on social discourse and outcomes that impact all life," she added. "Hiding behind jargon and polite rooms are actions they choose as the world's finite freshwater is irreparably harmed."

Stephone M. Coward II, who runs the economic justice and Paid in Full campaigns at the Hip Hop Caucus, argued that "once again, these financial institutions prioritize profit over people and our planet."

"Pollution from fossil fuels worsens the effects of climate change, and together they create a destructive loop that disproportionately impacts the well-being of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people," Coward added. "We must continue to use all the financial levers of power to shift financial capital away from industries causing harm and toward communities that hold the solutions."

Jessye Waxman, the senior campaign representative for Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said in a statement that "investors have once again failed to align their voting with their stated positions on climate-related financial risk."

"Stewardship is central to many investors' own net-zero commitments, so it's alarming that investors—including the biggest institutional investors like BlackRock and Vanguard—continue to choose a hands-off approach to climate risk mitigation," Waxman added.

Vanguard recently surpassed BlackRock as the world's leading institutional investor in fossil fuels, with the former holding $269 billion in coal, oil, and gas investments and the latter $263 billion.

"Big investors are ignoring science and the needs of frontline communities, protecting the status quo over the changes needed to protect people and planet from climate disaster," Alec Connon, coordinator of the Stop the Money Pipeline, said in a statement. "A transition is coming one way or another: Banks and their investors can help make it orderly and just, or they can pretend they don't see what's coming as they drive the planet off a cliff."

"Investors who voted against these resolutions should expect to have a hard time sleeping at night with the knowledge that their misplaced greed will lead to climate destruction and chaos," Connon added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by A. Kayum Ahmed.

The chief executive of UnitedHealth Group told investors Friday that he "appreciates" the Biden administration's decision to more slowly implement its crackdown on overbilling in Medicare Advantage, a privately run, government-funded program that the Minnesota-based insurance behemoth touted as a key profit driver in its newly released first quarter earnings report.

UnitedHealth, one of the largest Medicare Advantage providers in the U.S., reported $91.9 billion in revenue for the first three months of 2023—15% growth year-over-year—and more than $8 billion in earnings from operations, exceeding analysts' expectations.

UnitedHealthcare, UnitedHealth Group's insurance business, "is pacing strongly to its outlook for another year of market-leading growth in serving more people through its Medicare Advantage offerings," the company said in its earnings release. The company said Friday that it added 655,000 new Medicare Advantage members in the first quarter of the year.

UnitedHealth's earnings report came after the company helped lead an aggressive lobbying campaign against new Biden administration rules aimed at limiting Medicare Advantage insurers' ability to overcharge the federal government by making patients appear sicker than they actually are.

According to The New York Times, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty appeared on Capitol Hill in person to lobby against the proposed changes, which the lucrative Medicare Advantage industry falsely characterized as cuts to the program that now provides insurance to nearly half of the overall Medicare population.

Late last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offered a number of concessions to the industry, agreeing to impose its policy changes over a period of three years instead of all at once and boosting Medicare Advantage payment rates by more than expected.

As STATreported last week, Wall Street investors were "overjoyed" by the Biden administration's move, which drew criticism from progressive lawmakers and healthcare analysts who warned the slow phase-in will allow Medicare Advantage plans to continue their abusive practices. UnitedHealth, like other Medicare Advantage insurers, has been accused of wrongfully denying or attempting to deny patients necessary care, in some cases utilizing artificial intelligence to determine when to end coverage.

When it comes to excess billing, CMS recently estimated that overpayments to Medicare Advantage totaled $11.4 billion in fiscal year 2022—a significant drain on the Medicare trust fund.

Citing one industry analyst, STAT noted that UnitedHealth could reap $900 million in additional profit next year alone thanks to the administration's decision to delay full implementation of the reforms.

In an analysis published in February, former insurance executive Wendell Potter noted that UnitedHealth is one of just seven large for-profit insurance companies that now control 70% of the Medicare Advantage market, which is dependent on taxpayer money.

According to Potter, who now heads the Center for Health and Democracy, insurance giants UnitedHealth, Cigna, CVS/Aetna, Elevance, Humana, Centene, and Molina saw their combined revenues from taxpayer-supported programs grow 500% between 2012 and 2022.

"They've essentially been bailed out by taxpayers," Potter said of for-profit insurance giants like UnitedHealth in a recent interview with The American Prospect. "And members of Congress, and various administrations, have been just standing on the sidelines, not paying attention to what's been going on."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders this weekend renewed his call to break up agricultural monopolies after the nation's largest egg producer reported that its quarterly profits soared more than 700%.

Cal-Maine Foods, which controls about 20% of the U.S. egg market, announced last week that its revenue for the quarter ending February 25 rose 109% to $997.5 million, while profit for the same period skyrocketed 718% to $323.2 million.

In a statement, Cal-Maine president and CEO Sherman Miller attributed the company's soaring profits to "the ongoing epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza which has significantly reduced the nation's egg-laying capacity."

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, "U.S. egg inventories were 29% lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year," while "more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to the disease itself or to depopulation since the outbreak began in February 2022."

Sanders (I-Vt.)—who took on agricultural monopolies while campaigning for president in 2016 and 2020—questioned Cal-Maine's narrative in a tweet arguing that "we must break up Big Ag and enact a windfall profits tax."

Sanders wasn't the only congressional critic of Cal-Maine's latest profits.

"While working families paid record prices for eggs, Cal-Maine raked over 700% more in profits—without reporting a single case of avian flu," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted on Thursday. "We need to crack down on corporate price gouging to provide Americans with relief at the grocery store."

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), who is running for U.S. Senate, wrote on Twitter last week that "corporate greed is driving inflation."

"We need more competition to drive down prices," she added. "In the meantime, I'm demanding answers from Cal-Maine directly."

In February, Warren and Porter wrote letters to the heads of the five biggest U.S. egg producers expressing their concern over the "massive spike" in prices and "the extent to which egg producers may be using fears about avian flu and supply shocks as a cover to pad their own profits at the expense of American families."

The advocacy group Farm Action earlier this year implored the Federal Trade Commission to investigate "apparent price gouging, price coordination, and other unfair or deceptive acts or practices by dominant producers of eggs such as Cal-Maine Foods."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Saudi Aramco, an oil giant almost entirely owned by the government of Saudi Arabia, announced Sunday that it brought in a staggering $161.1 billion in profits last year as it joined other fossil fuel companies in capitalizing on energy market turmoil sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The company's profit figure for 2022 is the largest ever recorded by an oil corporation. Amin Nasser, Aramco's CEO, declared on an earnings call that "this is probably the highest net income ever recorded in the corporate world."

For comparison, ExxonMobil—the second-largest oil company in the world behind Aramco—reported $56 billion in net income last year, a record for the U.S. firm but nowhere close to the Saudi corporation's haul.

"It is shocking for a company to make a profit of more than $161.1 billion in a single year through the sale of fossil fuel—the single largest driver of the climate crisis," Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said in a statement. "It is all the more shocking because this surplus was amassed during a global cost-of-living crisis and aided by the increase in energy prices resulting from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine."

Aramco said its banner profits—driven by "stronger crude oil prices, higher volumes sold, and improved margins for refined products"—were up nearly 47% compared to 2021, a windfall the company has used to reward investors.

"Aramco declared a dividend of $19.5 billion for the fourth quarter, to be paid in Q1 2023," the oil firm said in a press release. "This represents a 4.0% increase compared to the previous quarter, aligned with the company's dividend policy aiming to deliver a sustainable and progressive dividend. Additionally, the Board of Directors also recommended the distribution of bonus shares to eligible shareholders in the amount of one share for every 10 shares held."

While Aramco said it intends to devote resources to "lower-carbon technologies" and carbon-capture initiatives that climate campaigners have dismissed as false solutions, the company made clear that it has no intention of shifting aggressively away from fossil fuel production—a transition scientists say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe.

In its earnings announcement, Aramco said it is committed to "expanding oil, gas, and chemicals production."

Saudi Arabia is the second-largest oil producer in the world behind the United States. Late last year, the Saudi-led Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed to slash oil production by 2 million barrels a day in a bid to keep prices high—benefiting companies like Aramco, Exxon, and other fossil fuel majors that have posted record-shattering 2022 profits as households struggle to heat their homes.

"It is past time that Saudi Arabia acted in humanity's interest and supported the phasing out of the fossil fuel industry, which is essential for preventing further climate harm," Callamard said Sunday. "These extraordinary profits, and any future income derived from Aramco, should not be deployed to finance human rights abuses, cover them up, or try and gloss over them."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Health Care is Sick and Profit is the Disease appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jim Hightower.

BP, a London-based oil giant that has attempted to style itself as a leader of the renewable energy transition, announced Tuesday that it is slashing its emission-reduction goals and planning more fossil fuel output than previously expected after reporting a record $28 billion in profits for 2022—more than double what it made the year before.

Compared to its earlier plan to curtail fossil fuel production by 40% below 2019 levels, the company said it now intends to cut output by just 25% by 2030.

"BP correspondingly now aims for a fall of 20% to 30% in emissions from the carbon in its oil and gas production in 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline, lower than the previous aim of 35-40%," the company said in a press release.

The oil giant also said it plans to pour just as much money—up to $8 billion—into its fossil fuel businesses as its so-called "transition growth engines," which include renewables, by 2030.

BP's announcement came a day after the head of the United Nations said fossil fuel companies that can't establish credible plans to sharply reduce carbon emissions "should not be in business."

"We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

BP's decision to scale down its climate goals drew the ire of campaigners and scientists, who stressed that growing fossil fuel production is imperiling global hopes of staving off even more catastrophic warming.

"Just when we need to be rolling back oil and gas production, BP is rolling back its climate commitments," said Doug Parr, Greenpeace U.K.'s chief scientist. "Don't let the spin disguise it. This looks like BP edging back to being a traditional oil company."

Climate scientist Bill McGuire argued BP's announcement further demonstrates that fossil fuel companies can't be trusted to voluntarily cut production and potentially sacrifice short-term profits for the sake of the climate, no matter how splashy their pledges and rebrands.

"BP cuts its emissions pledge and plans a greater production of oil and gas over the next seven years compared with previous targets," McGuire tweeted. "This is criminal. [Fossil fuel] corps must be forced to stop drilling. It is our only chance now."

"These companies are not serious about climate action or transitioning away from oil and gas."

BP is the latest oil and gas behemoth to report record-shattering profits for 2022, a banner year for fossil fuel companies thanks in large part to the ongoing energy market impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine.

In its fourth quarter earnings announcement, BP said it would boost its dividend and buy back an additional $2.75 billion worth of its own shares. The company repurchased $11.25 billion of its stock last year.

"Importantly, we are delivering for our shareholders—with buybacks and a growing dividend," BP CEO Bernard Looney said in a statement. "This is exactly what we said we would do and will continue to do—performing while transforming."

Freya Aitchison, oil and gas campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, called BP's profits "sickening" and said fossil fuel giants "are being allowed to bank billions in profits whilst millions of ordinary people struggle to pay their bills."

"Bosses and shareholders at these big polluters are being allowed to get even richer by profiteering from one of our most basic needs. The harm caused by the fossil fuel energy system couldn't be clearer," Aitchison added. "These companies are not serious about climate action or transitioning away from oil and gas. The evidence shows they are spending just a tiny fraction of their profits into truly green projects."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

BP, a London-based oil giant that has attempted to style itself as a leader of the renewable energy transition, announced Tuesday that it is slashing its emission-reduction goals and planning more fossil fuel output than previously expected after reporting a record $28 billion in profits for 2022—more than double what it made the year before.

Compared to its earlier plan to curtail fossil fuel production by 40% below 2019 levels, the company said it now intends to cut output by just 25% by 2030.

"BP correspondingly now aims for a fall of 20% to 30% in emissions from the carbon in its oil and gas production in 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline, lower than the previous aim of 35-40%," the company said in a press release.

The oil giant also said it plans to pour just as much money—up to $8 billion—into its fossil fuel businesses as its so-called "transition growth engines," which include renewables, by 2030.

BP's announcement came a day after the head of the United Nations said fossil fuel companies that can't establish credible plans to sharply reduce carbon emissions "should not be in business."

"We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

BP's decision to scale down its climate goals drew the ire of campaigners and scientists, who stressed that growing fossil fuel production is imperiling global hopes of staving off even more catastrophic warming.

"Just when we need to be rolling back oil and gas production, BP is rolling back its climate commitments," said Doug Parr, Greenpeace U.K.'s chief scientist. "Don't let the spin disguise it. This looks like BP edging back to being a traditional oil company."

Climate scientist Bill McGuire argued BP's announcement further demonstrates that fossil fuel companies can't be trusted to voluntarily cut production and potentially sacrifice short-term profits for the sake of the climate, no matter how splashy their pledges and rebrands.

"BP cuts its emissions pledge and plans a greater production of oil and gas over the next seven years compared with previous targets," McGuire tweeted. "This is criminal. [Fossil fuel] corps must be forced to stop drilling. It is our only chance now."

"These companies are not serious about climate action or transitioning away from oil and gas."

BP is the latest oil and gas behemoth to report record-shattering profits for 2022, a banner year for fossil fuel companies thanks in large part to the ongoing energy market impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine.

In its fourth quarter earnings announcement, BP said it would boost its dividend and buy back an additional $2.75 billion worth of its own shares. The company repurchased $11.25 billion of its stock last year.

"Importantly, we are delivering for our shareholders—with buybacks and a growing dividend," BP CEO Bernard Looney said in a statement. "This is exactly what we said we would do and will continue to do—performing while transforming."

Freya Aitchison, oil and gas campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, called BP's profits "sickening" and said fossil fuel giants "are being allowed to bank billions in profits whilst millions of ordinary people struggle to pay their bills."

"Bosses and shareholders at these big polluters are being allowed to get even richer by profiteering from one of our most basic needs. The harm caused by the fossil fuel energy system couldn't be clearer," Aitchison added. "These companies are not serious about climate action or transitioning away from oil and gas. The evidence shows they are spending just a tiny fraction of their profits into truly green projects."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The London-based oil giant Shell reported Thursday that its profits more than doubled in 2022 to a record $40 billion as households across Europe struggled to heat their homes, a crisis that campaigners blamed on the fossil fuel industry's price gouging.

Global Witness estimated that Shell's full-year profits for 2022 would be enough to cover the annual energy bills of nearly half of all U.K. households. The group also calculated that Shell's profits could fund "the £28 billion that the U.K. government estimates would be needed to give all public sector workers—including nurses, teachers, police and firefighters—raises in line with inflation."

"For those facing exorbitant energy bills, and for all of our nurses, firefighters, and teachers on the picket line this week, Shell's profits are an insult. Shell is richer because we're poorer," Jonathan Noronha-Gant, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said Thursday. "If oil and gas companies were properly taxed, and if our government stopped handing them billions of pounds in the form of tax breaks and other subsidies—then that would free up the money that's desperately needed to give Brits long-term support with the cost of their energy bills, and to give our key workers the financial recognition they deserve. But so far that hasn't happened."

"So we have to ask ourselves—whose side is our government on?" Noronha-Gant continued. "Are they on the side of those of us living in cold, draughty homes, or are they on the side of an industry that is riding the wave of the energy crisis in Europe and the war in Ukraine, and is wrecking the planet in the process? All in the name of enriching its shareholders."

With its new earnings report, Shell joined ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other major oil companies in posting record-shattering profits for 2022, a year that saw massive energy market disruptions stemming from Russia's war on Ukraine.

"The announcement of yet another obscene profit for Shell shows the scale of the harm that these companies are inflicting on households and businesses."

Shell announced Thursday that it returned a total of $26 billion to shareholders last year through dividends and share buybacks. The company said last month that it expects to pay just $2.4 billion in windfall taxes in the U.K. and E.U. for 2022.

"Our results in Q4 and across the full year demonstrate the strength of Shell's differentiated portfolio, as well as our capacity to deliver vital energy to our customers in a volatile world," Shell CEO Wael Sawan said in a statement. "We believe that Shell is well positioned to be the trusted partner through the energy transition."

Climate advocates countered that far from helping alleviate Europe's energy crisis, Shell—which has been accused of overstating its renewable energy spending—is a big part of the problem.

"The announcement of yet another obscene profit for Shell shows the scale of the harm that these companies are inflicting on households and businesses," said Freya Aitchison, an oil and gas campaigner with Friends of the Earth Scotland. "Oil company bosses and shareholders are being allowed to get even richer by banking huge profits, while normal people are facing enormous energy bills and millions are being forced into fuel poverty."

"Shell is worsening climate breakdown and extreme weather by continuing to invest and lock us into new oil and gas projects for decades to come," Aitchison added, pointing to the company's Jackdaw gas project. "These profit figures are further evidence that our current fossil-fueled energy system is seriously harming people and the climate."

Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported, four Greenpeace campaigners boarded and occupied a Shell-contracted platform in the Atlantic Ocean to call attention to the company's contributions to global climate chaos. The Shell platform is headed toward a major oil and gas field in the U.K. North Sea.

On Thursday, Greenpeace activists set up a mock gas station price board outside of Shell's London headquarters to spotlight the firm's record-shattering profits.

\u201cNo more excuses. Stop Drilling, Start Paying. #MakeShellPay\u201d

— Greenpeace UK (@Greenpeace UK) 1675346085

Elena Polisano, a senior climate justice campaigner for Greenpeace U.K., said in a statement Thursday that "Shell is profiteering from climate destruction and immense human suffering."

"While Shell counts their record-breaking billions, people across the globe count the damage from the record-breaking droughts, heatwaves, and floods this oil giant is fueling," said Polisano. "This is the stark reality of climate injustice, and we must end it."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

As ExxonMobil on Tuesday joined other U.S. oil companies in reporting record 2022 earnings amid rising gas prices, consumer and climate advocates renewed calls for a Big Oil windfall profits tax.

Texas-based ExxonMobil posted a $55.7 billion profit last year, breaking not only its own previous company record—$45 billion in 2008—but setting a historic high for the Western oil industry, according toReuters. The company's profit is a 144% increase from 2021 and, as Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn noted, "enough money to send every person in the U.S. $178 to help offset the costs of high fossil fuel costs and gas bills."

Marathon Petroleum—the top U.S. refiner—said Tuesday that it raked in $16.4 billion last year while approving a $5 billion stock buyback, and Phillips 66 reported $8.9 billion in adjusted 2022 profit, a 253% increase from 2021.

Tuesday's earnings reports came just days after Chevron announced $35.5 billion 2022 profit, also a company record, and days before Shell, BP, and Total are all expected to follow suit on the strength of profits related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the European energy crisis.

Meanwhile, the average U.S. price of a gallon of gasoline crept up to over $3.50 on Tuesday, with average prices by state ranging from $3.40 in Nebraska to $4.93 in Hawaii, according to the American Automobile Association.

Last year, "familiesacross Pennsylvania paid $5 a gallon for gas while Exxon made profits that 'smashed earnings records' and Chevron posted 'record earnings," said U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), responding to recent Big Oil profit reports. "This price gouging is simply disgusting, and I'm going to get to the bottom of it."

Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for Stop the Oil Profiteering, lamented that "while we're getting robbed at the pump, Big Oil's obscene profits are out of control and billionaire fossil fuel CEOs are getting richer and richer."

DiPaola continued:

Big Oil is shattering records precisely because of the pain the public is feeling at the pump. We're paying more for gas and electricity because Big Oil companies are gouging Americans and benefiting from a rigged system that keeps prices high in times of war and crisis. And on top of that, Big Oil CEOs are making massive bonuses and rewarding big Wall Street investors while families are having to decide between filling up their gas tanks or paying for medication and childcare.

"Enough is enough," she added. "It's time to fight back against the politicians and Big Oil CEOs who put their billions before the health and safety of our families, our communities, and our climate. We need to hold them accountable now with solutions like a windfall profits tax, and invest in clean energy solutions that can free us from expensive fossil fuels."

Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said that "Big Oil has imposed a private tax on the American people—to the tune of more than $90 billion from just two companies alone."

"It's past time for the American people to take that money back," he added. "A windfall profits tax would tax Big Oil on its inflated revenues—due only to the rising global price of oil and having nothing to do with Big Oil's costs or investments—and return the money to American consumers."

Last March, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to tax excess oil company profits and use the proceeds to pay American households a quarterly refund. That same month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the Ending Corporate Greed Act, which would tax windfall profits of major corporations at a rate of 95%.

While President Joe Biden has threatened to support a windfall profits tax on oil companies if they don't ramp up production, he has not yet done so.

Responding to the increasing calls for taxing excess Big Oil earnings, ExxonMobil chief financial officer Kathryn Mikells toldReuters that windfall profits taxes are "unlawful and bad policy," and would have "the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve."

In a Reutersopinion piece published Tuesday, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, co-president of the Club of Rome and project lead for Earth4All initiative, wrote that "oil and gas companies are perhaps the most flagrant example of our upside-down world."

"Despite being responsible for the majority of the emissions that cause climate change, they continue to make higher and higher profits," she explained. "At the same time, vulnerable people in the lowest-income countries, who have done the least to cause climate change and are most impacted by the extreme weather events caused by a warming world, are getting poorer."

"There is absolutely no reason not to tax windfall profits in all sectors, in particular when they have been made during periods of scarcity and speculation when the rest of the world is worse off," Dixson-Declève added. "Ending tax incentives and subsidies for fossil fuels is simply a no-brainer in a world where climate change is already costing untold financial and human losses every year."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Exxon posted $56 billion in earnings for the full year 2022, breaking its 2008 record and setting a new high for Western oil majors. Combined with Chevron’s $35.5 billion 2022 profits reported last week, the two giants totaled more than $91 billion in earnings – another record.

Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, released the following statement:

“Big Oil has imposed a private tax on the American people – to the tune of more than $90 billion from just two companies alone.

“It’s past time for the American people to take that money back. A windfall profits tax would tax Big Oil on its inflated revenues – due only to the rising global price of oil and having nothing to do with Big Oil’s costs or investments – and return the money to American consumers.

“This industry is out of control. Big Oil is price gouging us to record profits while destroying the ability of future generations to live on our planet. Meanwhile, consumers spent last year paying high prices to put fuel in their cars and are spending more to heat and power their homes this winter. It is long past time to crack down on this out-of-control industry.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Delegates resolved to focus their initial efforts on strengthening the development and dissemination of lifesaving technologies in low-income nations.

"Delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty."

This decision comes one year after Cuban officials announced, at a press conference convened by the Progressive International (PI), their plan to deliver 200 million homegrown Covid-19 vaccine doses to impoverished countries abandoned by their wealthy counterparts and Big Pharma—along with tools to enable domestic production and expert support to improve distribution.

It also comes as Cuba assumes the presidency of the Group of 77 (G77), a bloc of 134 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America where "the combined crises of food, energy, and environment" are escalating, PI noted.

"What is the common vision to guide the Global South out of this crisis?" the coalition asked. "What is the plan to win it? What is the New International Economic Order for the 21st century?"

"After two days of detailed discussions about how to transform our shared world, delegates agreed that a key priority must be to secure science and technology sovereignty," PI general coordinator David Adler said Sunday at the conclusion of the Havana Congress. "From pharmaceuticals to green tech, from digital currencies to microchips, too much of humanity is locked out of both benefiting from scientific advances and contributing to new ones. We will, as today's declaration calls for, work to build 'a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North' to liberate knowledge and peoples."

Speaking at the January 12 ceremony during which Cuba ascended to the G77 presidency, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the need for coordinated action across the Global South on science and tech, arguing that "scientific-technical development is today monopolized by a club of countries that monopolize most of the patents, technologies, research centers, and promote the drain of talent from our countries."

The G77 Summit on Science, Technology, and Innovation, scheduled for September in Havana, seeks to "unite, complement each other, integrate our national capacities so as not to be relegated to future pandemics," said Parrilla.

During his speech on the first day of the Havana Congress, meanwhile, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called for a new non-aligned movement to "end the legalized robbery of people and Earth fueling climate catastrophe."

Read the full Havana Declaration on the New International Economic Order:

The Havana Congress,

Recalling the role of the Cuban Revolution in the struggle to unite the Southern nations of the world, and the spirit of the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference that convened peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to chart a path to collective liberation in the face of severe global crises and sustained imperial subjugation;

Hearing the echoes of that history today, as crises of hunger, disease, and war once again overwhelm the world, compounded by a rapidly changing climate and the droughts, floods, and hurricanes that not only threaten to inflame conflicts between peoples, but also risk the extinction of humanity at large;

Celebrating the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle, and the victories won by combining a program of sovereign development at home, solidarity for national liberation abroad, and a strong Southern bloc to force concessions to its interests, culminating in the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO);

Acknowledging that the project of decolonization remains incomplete, disrupted by concerted attacks on the unity of the South in the form of wars, coups, sanctions, structural adjustment, and the false promise that sovereign development might be won through integration into a hierarchical world system;

Emphasizing that the result has been the sustained divergence between North and South, characterized by the same dynamics that defined the international economic order five decades prior: the extraction of natural resources, the enclosure of 'intellectual property,' the plunder of structural adjustment, and the exclusion of the multilateral system;

Recognizing that despite these setbacks, the flame of Southern resistance did not die; that the pursuit of sovereign development has yielded unprecedented achievements—from mass literacy and universal healthcare to poverty alleviation and medical innovation—that enable a renewed campaign of Southern cooperation today;

Stressing that this potential for Southern unity is perceived as a threat to Northern powers, which seek once again to preserve their position in the hierarchy of the world system through mechanisms of economic exclusion, political coercion, and military aggression;

Seizing the opportunity of the present historical juncture, when the crisis of the existing world system can either entrench inequalities or embolden the call to reclaim Southern protagonism in the construction of a new world order based on justice, equity, and peace;

The Havana Congress calls to:

• Renew the Non-Aligned Movement: In the face of increasing geopolitical tensions born from a decisive shift in the global balance of power, the Congress calls to resist the siren song of the new Cold War and to renew the project of non-alignment, grounded in the principles of sovereignty, peace, and cooperation articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference, 1961 Non-Aligned Conference, 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and beyond.
• Renovate the NIEO: To accompany the renewed non-aligned movement, the Congress calls to renovate the vision for a New International Economic Order fit for the 21st century; a vision that must draw inspiration from the original Declaration, but also account for the key issues—from digital technology to environmental breakdown—that define the present conditions for sovereign development; and to enshrine this vision in a new U.N. Declaration on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
• Assert Southern Power: The Congress recognizes that economic liberation will not be granted, but must be seized. As the original call for a New International Economic Order was won through the exercise of collective power in the coordinated production of petroleum, so our vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources.
• Accompany Cuba in the G77: The Congress recognizes the critical opportunity afforded by Cuba's presidency of the Group of 77 plus China to lead the South out of the present crisis and channel the lessons of its Revolution toward concrete proposals and ambitious initiatives to transform the broader international system.
• Build a Planetary Bloc: The Congress calls on all peoples and nations of the world to join in this struggle to definitively achieve the New International Economic Order; to build a planetary bloc led by the South and reinforced by the solidarities of the North, whose peoples recognize their obligation to resist the crimes committed in their names; and to bring the spirit of this Havana Congress into the communities that we call home.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Chevron announced Friday that it brought in a record-shattering $35.5 billion in profits in 2022, a sum that campaigners said highlights just how much the company benefited from global energy market chaos spurred by Russia's war on Ukraine.

“What Big Oil has done over the last year is the definition of war profiteering," said Jamie Henn, a spokesperson for the Stop The Oil Profiteering (STOP) campaign. "After working with Russia for decades, companies like Chevron have used the war in Ukraine as cover to jack up prices and suck billions directly out of the pocket of American families."

"Big Oil is rolling in cash while families are struggling to heat their homes or fill their gas tanks," Henn added. "Congress could provide people with immediate relief by returning some of the money Big Oil has pulled from our pockets over the last year. If Chevron has $75 billion to lavish on its wealthy shareholders and CEO, then it can certainly afford a windfall profits tax to provide much-needed relief to hard-working Americans."

Henn was referring to the massive stock buyback program that Chevron announced earlier this week, making clear the company's plan to reward shareholders with its 2022 windfall—which Chevron CEO Mike Wirth has defended as a "modest return."

Chevron, which reported $6.4 billion in profits for the fourth quarter of 2022, also raised its quarterly dividend by around 6%.

"That Chevron feels free to spend $75 billion of its windfall profits on stock buybacks signals its belief that it is immune from accountability," Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Friday. "It has price gouged consumers in plain sight and it's going to get away with it."

"Once oil prices spiked after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a government not compromised and captured by Big Oil would have done the commonsense thing of taxing Big Oil's windfall profits and returning the proceeds to consumers," said Weissman. "The failure to impose a windfall profits tax reflects Big Oil's raw political power, not any principled policy dispute."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called Chevron's buyback program "corporate greed at its worst."

"Chevron spent the last year raking in cash by price gouging consumers," Jayapal wrote on Twitter. "And now they're announcing $75 billion in stock buybacks as poor and working families continue to struggle."

"The failure to impose a windfall profits tax reflects Big Oil's raw political power, not any principled policy dispute."

Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced windfall profits tax legislation last year and President Joe Biden belatedly floated his support for the idea, but the proposal never moved in either chamber—which were both narrowly controlled by Democrats at the time.

Currently, the prospects of a windfall profits tax passing Congress are zero with the House controlled by Republicans, who have wasted no time placing oil and gas industry allies on key committees. The progressive watchdog group Accountable.US noted Friday that the chief of staff for Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), the new chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, "is a longtime oil lobbyist."

"She'll be joining eight other former oil industry lobbyists in high-ranking staff positions on the Natural Resources Committee and in conference leadership," the group said in a new report.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received more oil and gas PAC money in the most recent election cycle than any other House Republican, Sludge reported last month.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Martin Williams.

In a significant departure from its postwar national security strategy—nominally limited to self-defense along with hosting U.S. troops—Japan on Friday announced its plan to embark on a five-year, $320 billion military buildup to secure offensive strike capacity amid growing regional tensions.

Japan "faces the severest and most complicated national security environment" since the end of World War II, according to the new blueprint unveiled by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's conservative government, which named China as its "biggest strategic challenge," followed by North Korea.

Acknowledging that the pursuit of cruise missiles represents "a major change to Japan's postwar security policy," Kishida told reporters that obtaining them is "indispensable" to preempting foreign aggression.

As Al Jazeera reported, Japan worries that Russia's invasion of Ukraine "has set a precedent that will encourage China to attack Taiwan, threatening nearby Japanese islands, disrupting supplies of advanced semiconductors, and putting a potential stranglehold on sea lanes that supply Middle East oil."

In response to those concerns, Japan plans to buy long-range weapons capable of striking China, including hundreds of Lockheed Martin's Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles—a boon for one of the biggest players in the powerful U.S. arms industry, which is already poised to rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in public money following Congress' passage of an $858 billion military budget for next fiscal year.

As NPR reported, "Japan also plans to develop its own weapons, including advanced fighter jets, hypersonic missiles, and armed drones."

According to Al Jazeera, Japan is also preparing to "stockpile spare parts and other munitions, reinforce logistics, develop cyber-warfare capabilities, and cooperate more closely with the United States and other like-minded nations" in a purported attempt to "deter threats to the established international order."

"Unthinkable under past administrations, the rapid arming of Japan... will double defense outlays to about 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) over the next five years, and increase the defense ministry's share to about one-tenth of all public spending," the news outlet noted. "It will also make Japan the world's third-biggest military spender after the U.S. and China, based on current budgets."

Kishida contends that Japan's existing missile defense systems are no longer up to the task of intercepting missiles fired by its neighbors. According to The Associated Press: "North Korea fired more than 30 ballistic missiles this year, including one that flew over Japan. China fired five ballistic missiles into waters near Japanese southern islands including Okinawa."

"When threats become reality, can the Self-Defense Force fully protect our country? " the prime minister asked Friday. "Frankly speaking, the current (SDF capability) is insufficient."

The five-year military spending proposal approved by his cabinet asserts that "counterstrike capacity is necessary," though it won't be implemented prior to 2026, when the deployment of U.S.-built cruise missiles is set to begin.

Although successive Japanese governments have intimated that counterstrikes to neutralize foreign attacks would be permissible under the country's long-standing military restrictions, there had previously been little appetite for ensuring such capability.

As AP noted: "Because of its wartime past as an aggressor and national devastation after its defeat, Japan's postwar policy prioritized the economic growth while keeping its security light by relying on American troops stationed in Japan under their bilateral security agreement. Japan's defense buildup has long been considered a sensitive issue at home and in the region, especially for Asian victims of Japanese wartime atrocities."

However, the growing military might of China, a record number of North Korean missile launches in recent months, and escalating fears that China could emulate Russia by invading nearby Taiwan have provoked a shift in public opinion, with surveys finding that roughly two-thirds of Japanese voters now support bolstering the country's military.

"Still, in a nod to the sensitivity of the issue, the documents rule out preemptive strikes, and insist Japan is committed to 'an exclusively defense-oriented policy,'" Al Jazeera reported.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday warned Japan that "hyping up the so-called China threat to find an excuse for its military build-up is doomed to fail" and urged the country to "reflect on its policies."

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, meanwhile, called Japan's shift "a bold and historic step to strengthen and defend the free and open Indo-Pacific."

Japan's beefed-up military roadmap comes just weeks after the U.S. announced its plans to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.

Relations between the U.S. and China have deteriorated since August, when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress visited Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) despite opposition from Beijing, which—along with most of the international community, including Washington since the 1970s—considers the breakaway province to be part of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Deviating from more than four decades of "One China" policy—in which the U.S. recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China and maintains informal relations with the ROC while adopting a position of "strategic ambiguity" to obscure how far it would go to protect Taiwan—U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly threatened to use military force in response to a Chinese invasion of the island.

Although Biden warned earlier this year that Russia's assault on Ukraine has brought the world closer to "Armageddon" than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis, his move to station B-52 bombers in Australia further increases the global risk of nuclear war. Japan's new stance could escalate the prospects of war in the Indo-Pacific as well.

"After elevating its defense cooperation with Australia to semi-ally levels in recent years, Japan hopes to practice [its] new capability in joint exercises hosted by Australia and including U.S. militaries as well," AP reported. "Last month, Japan and the United States held a major joint military exercise in southern Japan to step up the allies' readiness."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Bychawski.

The findings are significant not only for Brazil but also for high income countries such as the U S, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake.

Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.

UPFs are ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesised in laboratories. These have gradually been replacing traditional foods and meals made from fresh and minimally processed ingredients in many countries.

The study found that approximately 57,000 deaths in one year could be attributed to the consumption of UPFs – 10.5% of all premature deaths and 21.8% of all deaths from preventable noncommunicable diseases in adults aged 30 to 69.

The study’s lead investigator Eduardo AF Nilson states:

To our knowledge, no study to date has estimated the potential impact of UPFs on premature deaths.

Across all age groups and sex strata, consumption of UPFs ranged from 13% to 21% of total food intake in Brazil during the period studied.

UPFs have steadily replaced the consumption of traditional whole foods, such as rice and beans, in Brazil.

Reducing consumption of UPFs by 10% to 50% could potentially prevent approximately 5,900 to 29,300 premature deaths in Brazil each year. Based on this, hundreds of thousands of premature deaths could be prevented globally annually. And many millions more could be prevented from acquiring long-term, debiltating conditions.

Nilson adds:

Consumption of UPFs is associated with many disease outcomes, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers and other diseases, and it represents a significant cause of preventable and premature deaths among Brazilian adults.

Examples of UPFs are prepackaged soups, sauces, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, hot dogs, sausages, sodas, ice cream, and store-bought cookies, cakes, candies and doughnuts.

And yet, due to trade deals, government support and WTO influence, transnational food retail and food processing companies continue to colonise markets around the world and push UPFs.

In Mexico, for instance, these companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.

Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition in 2012. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of overweight women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 25 to 35% and the number of obese women in this age group increased from 9 to 37%. Some 29% of Mexican children between the ages of 5 and 11 were found to be overweight, as were 35% of the youngsters between 11 and 19, while one in ten school age children experienced anaemia.

The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to the direct investment in food processing and a change in Mexico’s retail structure (towards supermarkets and convenience stores) as well as the emergence of global agribusiness and transnational food companies in the country.

NAFTA eliminated rules preventing foreign investors from owning more than 49% of a company. It also prohibited minimum amounts of domestic content in production and increased rights for foreign investors to retain profits and returns from initial investments.

By 1999, US companies had invested 5.3 billion dollars in Mexico’s food processing industry, a 25-fold increase in just 12 years.

US food corporations began to colonise the dominant food distribution networks of small-scale vendors, known as tiendas (corner shops). This helped spread nutritionally poor food as they allowed these corporations to sell and promote their foods to poorer populations in small towns and communities. By 2012, retail chains had displaced tiendas as Mexico’s main source of food sales.

A spoonful of deceit

Turning to Europe, more than half the population of the European Union (EU) is overweight or obese. Without effective action, this number will grow substantially by 2026.

That warning was issued in 2016 and was based on the report A Spoonful of Sugar: How the Food Lobby Fights Sugar Regulation in the EU by the research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO).

CEO noted that obesity rates were rising fastest among lowest socio-economic groups. That is because energy-dense foods of poor nutritional value are cheaper than more nutritious foods, such as vegetables and fruit, and relatively poor families with children purchase food primarily to satisfy their hunger.

The report argued that more people than ever before are eating processed foods as a large part of their diet. And the easiest way to make industrial, processed food cheap, long-lasting and enhance the taste is to add extra sugar as well as salt and fat to products.

In the United Kingdom, the cost of obesity was estimated at £27 billion per year in 2016, and approximately 7% of national health spending in EU member states as a whole is due to obesity in adults.

The food industry has vigorously mobilised to stop vital public health legislation in this area by pushing free trade agreements and deregulation drives, exercising undue influence over regulatory bodies, capturing scientific expertise, championing weak voluntary schemes and outmaneuvering consumer groups by spending billions on aggressive lobbying.

The leverage which food industry giants have over EU decision-making has helped the sugar lobby to see off many of the threats to its profit margins.

CEO argued that key trade associations, companies and lobby groups related to sugary food and drinks together spend an estimated €21.3 million (2016) annually to lobby the EU.

While industry-funded studies influence European Food Standards Authority decisions, Coca Cola, Nestlé and other food giants engage in corporate propaganda by sponsoring sporting events and major exercise programmes to divert attention from the impacts of their products and give the false impression that exercise and lifestyle choices are the major factors in preventing poor health.

Katharine Ainger, freelance journalist and co-author of CEO’s report, said:

Sound scientific advice is being sidelined by the billions of euros backing the sugar lobby. In its dishonesty and its disregard for people’s health, the food and drink industry rivals the tactics we’ve seen from the tobacco lobby for decades.

ILSI industry front group

One of the best known industry front groups with global influence is what a September 2019 report in the New York Times (NYT) called a “shadowy industry group” – the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI).

The institute was founded in 1978 by Alex Malaspina, a Coca-Cola scientific and regulatory affairs leader. It started with an endowment of $22 million with the support of Coca Cola.

Since then, ILSI has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies around the globe and has more than 17 branches that influence food safety and nutrition science in various regions.

Little more than a front group for its 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, ILSI’s members include Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone.

The NYT says ILSI has received more than $2 million from chemical companies, among them Monsanto. In 2016, a UN committee issued a ruling that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup, was “probably not carcinogenic,” contradicting an earlier report by the WHO’s cancer agency. The committee was led by two ILSI officials.

From India to China, whether it has involved warning labels on unhealthy packaged food or shaping anti-obesity education campaigns that stress physical activity and divert attention from the food system itself, prominent figures with close ties to the corridors of power have been co-opted to influence policy in order to boost the interests of agri-food corporations.

As far back as 2003, it was reported by The Guardian newspaper that ILSI had spread its influence across the national and global food policy arena. The report talked about undue influence exerted on specific WHO/FAO food policies dealing with dietary guidelines, pesticide use, additives, trans-fatty acids and sugar.

In January 2019, two papers by Harvard Professor Susan Greenhalgh, in the BMJ and the Journal of Public Health Policy, revealed ILSI’s influence on the Chinese government regarding issues related to obesity. And in April 2019,  Corporate Accountability released a report on ILSI titled Partnership for an Unhealthy Planet.

A 2017 report in the Times of India noted that ILSI-India was being actively consulted by India’s apex policy-formulating body – Niti Aayog. ILSI-India’s board of trustees was dominated by food and beverage companies – seven of 13 members were from the industry or linked to it (Mondelez, Mars, Abbott, Ajinomoto, Hindustan Unilever and Nestle) and the treasurer was Sunil Adsule of Coca-Cola India.

In India, ILSI’s expanding influence coincides with mounting rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

In 2020, US Right to Know (USRTK) referred to a study published in Public Health Nutrition that helped to further confirm ILSI as little more than an industry propaganda arm.

The study, based on documents obtained by USRTK, uncovered “a pattern of activity in which ILSI sought to exploit the credibility of scientists and academics to bolster industry positions and promote industry-devised content in its meetings, journal, and other activities.”

Gary Ruskin, executive director of USRTK, a consumer and public health group, said:

ILSI is insidious… Across the world, ILSI is central to the food industry’s product defence, to keep consumers buying the ultra-processed food, sugary beverages and other junk food that promotes obesity, type 2 diabetes and other ills.

The study also revealed new details about which companies fund ILSI and its branches.

ILSI North America’s draft 2016 IRS form 990 shows a $317,827 contribution from PepsiCo, contributions greater than $200,000 from Mars, Coca-Cola and Mondelez and contributions greater than $100,000 from General Mills, Nestle, Kellogg, Hershey, Kraft, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Starbucks Coffee, Cargill, Unilever and Campbell Soup.

ILSI’s draft 2013 Internal Revenue Service form 990 shows that it received $337,000 from Coca-Cola, and more than $100,000 each from Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Bayer Crop Science and BASF.

Global institutions, like the WTO, and governments continue to act as the adminstrative arm of industry, boosting corporate profits while destroying public health and cutting short human life.

Part of the solution lies in challenging a policy agenda that privileges global markets, highly processed food and the needs of ‘the modern food system’ – meaning the bottom line of dominant industrial food conglomerates.

It also involves protecting and strengthening local markets, short supply chains and independent small-scale enterprises, including traditional food processing concerns and small retailers.

And, of course, we need to protect and strengthen agroecological, smallholder farming that bolsters nutrient-dense diets – more family farms and healthy food instead of more disease and allopathic family doctors.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

A new Oxfam analysis finds the investments of the world’s richest people are emitting 3 million tons a year — more than a million times the average person’s output. The report, titled “Carbon Billionaires,” suggests a wealth tax could help fund urgent climate action in developing countries. The analysis shows “how much power and control a few people have over our economic system and, beyond that, our way of life, our survival as humanity,” says Ashfaq Khalfan, climate justice director at Oxfam America. Khalfan also responds to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s new carbon offset proposal, which he calls a “distraction” that will delay action on public financing of climate action.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The post Elon Musk Plans to Profit From Twitter, Not Create a Town Square for Global Democracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

A question: can you declare that you are for freedom of speech/expression and ban, or maintain a ban, on a person from expressing himself in a purportedly public forum and preserve your integrity? Whether the new owner of Twitter, Musk, steadfastly stands on the principle of freedom of expression looks like it is about to be revealed.

One question is whether the former president Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the Twitter platform.

When Elon Musk met Donald Trump (Image credit: Mashable)

Musk was critical of Twitter’s ban of Trump. He called it a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”

A section of the corporate sector (obviously, the corporate sector is not a monolith, as Trump and Musk both belong to this sector) is threatening a boycott of its advertising dollar if Musk allows Trump back on Twitter. This has set the stage for what could turn out to be a showcase of corporate infighting.

Does one section of the corpocracy predominate? Politically, the answer would seem to be no. In the United States, the Democrats and Republicans represent two wings of the corpocracy that alternate between them in forming the government, with, what many would contend, is minimal separation politically.

USA Today, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the US, pointed the finger at Trump as the instigator behind the riot on Capitol Hill that led to him being banned from Twitter. This is an allegation — borne out by the panoply of media takes on the Capitol Hill riot and who is to blame. Allegations, however, do not carry the imprimatur of certitude.

While supporting the principle of freedom of speech/expression is fine in the abstract, it should not be an absolute. For instance, the 2004 Halifax Symposium on Media and Disinformation participants unanimously held disinformation to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. In a moral world, lies that cause death and suffering must not be condoned or given a deceitful, argumentative free pass.

So the billionaire Musk seemingly finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: losing money or losing face. Musk has a choice. He can give in to corporate blackmail and uphold the ban on Trump and preserve advertising revenue for Twitter or he can reinstate Trump and, at least on this measure, maintain his integrity.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Our story “How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World” found that, despite Google’s public commitments to fight disinformation, it continues to allow websites to use Google’s ad systems to profit from false and misleading content. Our reporting identified websites that were allowed to continue to collect revenue from Google ads, even on stories that appeared to be in violation of the company’s policies against unreliable and harmful claims related to COVID-19, health, elections and climate change. We also found that websites containing misinformation in languages other than English and smaller markets were more likely to be allowed to continue to profit from Google ads than similar English-language websites.

We analyzed datasets of articles and websites containing false claims to determine what proportion of them made money using Google’s ad platforms. We obtained these datasets from organizations that track online disinformation around the world and wrote software to determine whether a web address was currently earning money from Google ads. Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 13, 2022, we ran the datasets through this software system to calculate the proportion of web addresses monetizing with Google ads for each dataset. We include our detailed findings in Appendix A.

We analyzed 17 article and website datasets, totaling more than 13,000 active articles and over 8,000 domains, obtained from nine fact-checking and news quality monitoring organizations. Some of the datasets cover articles and websites from a particular country or region, while others cover subject matter, such as COVID-19 misinformation or climate change misinformation. In Appendix B we include a description of each dataset and the organizations that provided them.

The datasets varied in size, types of content and level of curation. We filtered all URL datasets to include only articles published after 2019 to keep the datasets recent and roughly within the same time frame. If the dataset provided information on the type of fact-checked content, we limited it to the most serious forms of disinformation or disinformation purveyors. For example, Brazil’s Netlab provided a column distinguishing between suspected and confirmed purveyors of disinformation, allowing us to select confirmed purveyors.

Some datasets included links to social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. We excluded these links from our analysis. Some datasets also had links to images or pdfs, which we similarly excluded. See Appendix C for a full list of exclusions.

The datasets from the International Fact-Checking Network and Raskrinkavanje included articles that had been archived using a webpage archiving service such as archive.today. In these cases, we wrote programs to extract the original web addresses of the false or misleading articles. For the IFCN dataset, we extracted by hand any addresses that we could not extract by code. For Raskrinkavanje, we excluded from our final analysis any remaining links that could not be extracted. Links that could not be extracted accounted for less than 1% of the total webpages from the datasets. We do not have reason to believe these excluded links biased our results. See Appendix C for more detailed information.

Our system to determine whether a web address was currently earning money with Google’s ad systems consists of two components: a web scraper and a data analysis script.

A web scraper is software that can systematically extract and save data from a visited web page. ProPublica’s scraper uses a library called Playwright, which can mimic human behavior when visiting a site and is often used for automated website testing.

When our web scraper visits any web address, URL or base domain, it collects and saves the following information:

1. All network requests initiated by the webpage. Network requests are used to retrieve web content such as images, text and ads or to provide information such as user actions or profile information back to the web servers.
2. The response for each network request, if those requests went out to Google servers (a handful of servers we identified as serving or related to Google’s ad content). When successful, these responses contain ad content that the website loads onto the page.
3. The webpage content. Once the webpage loads, the scraper captures its HTML, the code that defines what a visitor to that page would see.

4. The ads.txt file: The ads.txt file lists all of a website’s advertising partners. Not all websites make this file available to visitors, but it is highly recommended by Google and the IAB Tech Lab as a web advertising transparency best practice.
5. A random subpage: When visiting a website, the scraper will select an arbitrary subpage link found on the base domain (e.g. for test.com, test.com/morecontent) and also scrape the same information for that page. This is done to capture cases where the homepage for a website does not run ads, but sections of the website do.

Our analysis tool processes the above data from each URL to determine whether the address is valid, and if so whether it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.

We manually identified 10 separate network request and response pairs that indicate a webpage is making a request to a Google server for one or multiple ads. If the response did not contain advertising content, then we did not count the website as monetizing with Google. (This may occur, for example, if the webpage makes an ad request, but Google has demonetized the specific page or website.) We then wrote software that would look for these request-response pairs in the data collected by our web scraper.

We also identified scenarios where a scraper visit did not result in valid webpage content. These invalid visits can mean the scraper was redirected to a different page from the original page, the content at the web address is no longer available, or the server is no longer reachable.

Thus, for a single web address, there are three possible outcomes of the analysis:

1. The web address is valid, and it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
2. The web address is valid, but it is not monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
3. The web address is not valid or the content has been removed.

We scraped and analyzed each web address in our 17 datasets to determine which of the three categories it fell under. We then compiled the results in a spreadsheet. Appendix A provides the detailed results of this analysis.

We hand-checked the results of all of the smaller domain datasets by visiting each page and determining the validity of its web address and whether the webpage was monetizing via Google’s ad systems. For the larger datasets containing individual webpages, we extracted and checked a random sample of web addresses by hand, using a 90% confidence level and 10% margin of error.

The scraper and analysis tools were designed to make false positives (where we falsely flag a web address as monetizing with Google) very rare. In fact, we never identified a false positive during our audit. There were some instances where ads were displayed at the time of the scrape but not when we manually visited the page later on (or vice versa). In these cases, we manually examined the scraped data to confirm ad content was served at the time of the scrape. There were a few rare instances where content returned from the ad server was never loaded on the page, possibly because of coding errors on the webpage. We still counted these cases as positives, since they are indications of an active monetization relationship with Google.

False negatives (where the scraper did not find ads on the page but ads were present) were more common due to several scenarios: For example, the scraper was sometimes blocked from accessing a page or failed to bypass page pop-ups such as consent forms. In our audits we saw false negative rates of between 0% and 13%.

Because we found false negatives more often than false positives, the true proportion of these web addresses monetizing with Google’s ad systems is likely slightly higher than what we reported.

Dataset name

Data source

Languages covered

Regions covered

Domains or Web Pages

Number of valid web addresses analyzed

Number of valid web addresses monetizing Google ads

% of valid web addresses monetizing Google  ads

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Africa Check

English

Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya

Web pages

66

38

57.6

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Senegal

Africa Check

French

Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon

Web pages

44

29

65.9

Balkans

MisinformationWeb Pages

Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Web pages

9,973

6,216

62.3

Balkans Publishers

​​Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Domains

30

26

86.7

Brazil Publishers

Netlab

Portuguese

Brazil

Domains

30

24

80

Latin American Publishers

Chequeado

Spanish, Portuguese

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico

Domains

49

19

38.8

Covid Disinformation Pages

International Fact-Checking Network

Various

Global

Web pages

814

338

41.5

NewsGuard Publisher list

NewsGuard

Various

Global

Domains

7,739

4,186

54.1

Turkey Disinformation Pages

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Web pages

1,035

756

73

Turkey Publishers

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Domains

50

45

90

Spanish Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

Spanish

Spain

Domains

32

14

43.8

German Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

German

Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Domains

30

10

33.3

EU

Disinformation Pages

EU DisinfoLab

Various

EU

Web pages

235

57

24.3

Climate

Disinformation Pages

Science Feedback

Various

Global

Web pages

427

86

20.1

All datasets were filtered to remove duplicates, archived URLs that could not be successfully unarchived, data before 2019 and URLs from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Pinterest, Telegram and WhatsApp (see full list in Appendix C).

Website: https://africacheck.org/

Description: Africa Check is an African nonprofit fact-checking organization founded in South Africa in 2012.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles in French from Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.
• Articles in English from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.Raskrinkavanje

Website: https://raskrinkavanje.ba/

Description: Raskrinkavanje is a fact-checking program for media organizations in the Balkans. It was founded in 2017 by Zašto ne, a civil society organization based in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and July 2022 that were fact-checked by Raskrinkavanje and determined to be misinformation.
• Thirty websites that were most frequently identified as publishing misinformation by Raskrinkavanje in the region from 2019 to July 2022.Netlab

Website: http://www.netlab.eco.ufrj.br/

Description: Netlab is a research laboratory of the School of Communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) that uses network analysis to study online misinformation.

Datasets analyzed:

• A list of websites shared within Brazilian right wing and left wing WhatsApp and Telegram groups and channels in August 2022 and flagged by researchers as a source of disinformation in Portuguese.Chequeado

Website: https://chequeado.com/

Description: Chequeado is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news monitoring and fact-checking organization founded in Argentina in 2010.

Datasets analyzed:

• Websites determined by LatamChequea, Chequado’s fact-checking partners in Latin America, to be spreading false information.International Fact-Checking Network

Website: https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/

Description: The International Fact-Checking Network is a network of 100 fact-checking organizations around the world. It was launched in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism institute based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Datasets analyzed:

• COVID: links to social media and news content spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.NewsGuard

Website: https://www.newsguardtech.com/

Description: NewsGuard is a company that provides trust ratings for the most visited websites in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Italy.

Datasets analyzed:

• Domains for news websites around the world rated by NewGuard. Reliability ratings range from 0 to 100 (0 being completely untrustworthy).Teyit

Website: https://teyit.org/

Description: Teyit is a Turkish nonprofit fact-checking and media literacy social enterprise founded in 2016.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles that were published in 2019 or later that contained claims categorized as “incorrect association,” “manipulation,” or “distortion” and which the fact-checkers had not seen subsequently corrected. (Fact-checkers provided access to a database containing a wide range of thousands of fact-checks which ProPublica filtered based on the previous criteria.)EU DisinfoLab

Website: https://www.disinfo.eu/

Description: EU DisinfoLab is a Brussels-based nonprofit organization that studies misinformation in the EU.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and present that were fact-checked by EU DisinfoLab and determined to be misinformation.
• Websites from Spain and German-speaking countries that were identified as sources of false and misleading claims in the regions.Science Feedback

Website: https://sciencefeedback.co/

Description: Science Feedback is a nonprofit based in France that produces scientist-expert fact-checks for health and climate news articles.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles related to climate and climate change published in 2019 or later that Science Feedback rated their lowest rating, “False.”

All datasets were cleaned with the intention of removing invalid links, social media traffic, archived content and images/PDFs.

Any links originating from the below social media or content hosting sites were removed from the final analysis.

• Google Drive
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Telegram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Weibo
• WhatsApp
• YouTube

Any links ending in any of the below were automatically excluded from the final analysis:

• .png
• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .pdf
• ?type=image

Any of the archiving sites below were visited and an attempt was made to extract the archived URL. If the extraction failed or the extracted link was of a type that should be excluded from the final analysis anyway, the URL was discarded.

• Web.archive.org
• Webcache.googleusercontent.com
• Archive.today
• google.com/url?
• perma.cc

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao, Craig Silverman and Anna Klühspies.

Just weeks away from the COP27 summit in Egypt, a report released Wednesday called out major online advertising networks for "actively funding and actively profiting from climate disinformation in the United States."

"Google must stop amplifying and enabling advertising on disinformation sites that pollute conversations on the climate crisis."

The analysis from the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, Friends of the Earth (FOE), and Dewey Square Group involved a review of 113 "climate disinformation sites," such as Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Wire, Gateway Pundit, The Epoch Times, Western Journal, TheBlaze, Daily Caller, RedState, and PJ Media.

Researchers found that of the websites reviewed from October 2021 to September 2022, nearly 80% "were displaying some kind of advertising from one or more of the major ad networks," including those owned by the tech giants Amazon and Google.

"Google's various display ad networks (DoubleClick, AdWords, and AdSense) were by far the most widely used on these websites, monetizing 49.6% of all sites and accounting for 97.7% of the projected weekly visits," according to the analysis.

Other key findings include:

• Of the 50 top sites in estimated weekly traffic, 39 of them (78%) were displaying ads from the Google Display network;
• 68 of the 113 sites (60%) of the websites contain code that would enable them to display Google ads (AdSense, AdWords, or Doubleclick); and
• 83 of the 113 sites (69.75%) show that they have Google as an authorized seller of ads in their ad.txt files.

"To give a sense of scale: If advertisers bought ads on these climate disinformation sites at an industry median price cost-per-click, then Google would potentially have pulled in $7.67 million in display advertising revenue over the past year from these sites," the report explains.

This despite a company policy announced last October for Google advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators prohibiting "ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change," including "content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."

Given Google's outsized role in online advertising, Erika Seiber, a climate disinformation spokesperson for coalition member FOE, stressed the importance of action related to its ad practices.

"We can't solve the climate crisis if Google continues to enable and fund the sites that expose millions of people to climate denial," she asserted. "Google must stop amplifying and enabling advertising on disinformation sites that pollute conversations on the climate crisis."

"We have to stop this industry of opaque ad networks from propping up the dark corners of the internet," Seiber also said, calling the study "further proof that tech companies can't be trusted to self-regulate."

Along with Google and Amazon, the other top ad networks targeted in the report are MGID, Criteo, AdSupply, RTB House, Outbrain, Taboola, Yahoo, Infolinks, Adroll, AdMedia, and Skimlinks.

"Notably, Yahoo is responsible for almost 50% of total outgoing ad visits over the last 12 months, but this is almost entirely due to a single website, Fox News," the report states, adding that the site "appears to have heavily de-emphasized Yahoo advertising since sometime in July 2022."

The analysis highlights that besides Google, "advertising platforms' policies do not explicitly mention climate misinformation but do restrict the display of their advertising on sites that publish 'fake news' or other kinds of false or intentionally misleading content."

• Taboola: "Ads must not promote or disseminate anything that qualifies as fake news or any information that is at high risk of being false."
• Outbrain: "Content on websites must not include: [...] Fake News [...] Extreme political views."
• Criteo: Prohibits ads on any site that "shares mistruths and falsehoods" or "shares or propagates false information or fabricated information designed to deceptively imitate news media content."

The report suggests that "insofar as these platforms and advertisers purport to be good corporate citizens who are having a positive influence on the world, public pressure may lead them to reconsider their brand association with climate denialism, doomerism, and conspiracy theories."

The analysis—just the latest effort by campaigners pressuring Big Tech to use its power to limit climate disinformation—comes not only in the lead-up to COP27 but also during Advertising Week New York.

The group SumOfUs demonstrated outside the industry event in New York City on Tuesday to highlight how "advertisers are unknowingly funding websites spreading disinformation about elections, climate change, and the LGBTQ+ community."

SumOfUs also specifically took aim at Google, calling on the ad giant to fix its "toxic" model.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The post India’s Media at 75: Shackled by Profit, Politically Imprisoned appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by P. Sainath.

The post Chile’s Lithium Provides Profit to the Billionaires But Exhausts the Land and the People appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vijay Prashad – Taroa Zúñiga Silva.

As fossil fuel giants this week reported record profits for the second quarter, an analysis out Friday highlighted how eight oil companies have raked in nearly $52 billion over the past three months "while Americans continue to struggle at the pump."

The review by the watchdog group Accountable.US revealed that from April through June, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, Phillips 66, Shell, and TechnipFMC "saw their profits skyrocket from the same time period last year, with income shooting up 235%."

The analysis also pointed out that leaders at Equinor, Halliburton, Hess Corp, and TechnipFMC have boasted "about excellent quarters while dismissing high prices for consumers."

Jordan Schreiber of Accountable.US called the companies' collective profit boost "eye-popping" but also unsurprising "after spending the past three months price gouging consumers by raising gas prices to unprecedentedly high levels."

"Make no mistake; these profits mark a large transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy oil executives and shareholders," she said. "While many consumers were feeling the heavy burden of a life necessity suddenly doubling in price, oil executives were keeping prices high to maximize their profits."

The Q2 profits of U.S. energy giants Chevron and Exxon—$11.62 billion and $17.85 billion, respectively—along with that of Europe's largest oil company, Shell—$11.47 billion—drew widespread criticism along with calls for action by lawmakers and President Joe Biden.

"Big Oil companies are making a killing and pouring fuel on the climate fire while communities pay for more and deadlier climate disasters. It's outrageous," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement Friday.

"Exxon and other oil and gas corporations lobbied and lied for decades to keep the world addicted to fossil fuels, making billions while hardworking families pay for higher gas prices and costlier heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods," he continued. "Now Exxon is once again using its record profits to line the pockets of executives and shareholders."

Wiles asserted that "elected officials cannot remain silent in the face of this injustice. Whether it's taxing these companies' record profits, or taking them to court to make polluters pay for climate damages they knowingly caused, it's time to stand up to Big Oil."

Public Citizen president Robert Weissman declared that "Big Oil is laughing all the way to the bank—and the joke's on us."

"We don't have to be suckers," he argued. "A windfall profits tax with rebates to taxpayers would offset the pain at the pump and end Big Oil's profiteering. Banning U.S. oil exports would actually lower prices for American consumers."

According to Weissman, "It's time for Congress and the Biden administration to stop complaining about Big Oil's rip-off and start doing something about it."

Some lawmakers agree. While Republicans "will continue to play politics and blame Biden for gas prices," Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said of the fossil fuel giants' quarterly profits, "we need to crack down on Big Oil."

Sen. Bernie Sanders concurred, tweeting that "it's time for a windfall profits tax."

While some of his colleagues have introduced legislation focused on Big Oil, Sanders has put forth a broader tax proposal that would target price gouging by a range of companies.

Amid rising fears of recession in recent weeks, calls have been mounting for federal lawmakers to more forcefully take on corporate greed. The Inflation Reduction Act unveiled Wednesday features some related policies, but climate activists have also sounded the alarm about its energy provisions. The bill—negotiated with fossil fuel ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—contains major handouts that are reportedly "delighting" the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry has not only used its record profits to enrich shareholders; it's also dumped money into influencing officials on Capitol Hill. As Common Dreams reported exclusively on Thursday, an analysis from Climate Power shows that since last year, the sector has poured over $200 million into sabotaging climate action.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Sure, Gabor has a way with trauma, and his own life as a Jew in Hungary, young, and his mother giving him to a neighbor for a few weeks to protect the young Gabor from the Nazis, that is what Gabor sees as both early childhood trauma and epigentic trauma.

The documentary focusing on the Canadian is good. Alas, he is also part of a group attempting to heal, but for a fee. All sorts of access to Gabor, extended conversations, and ways to work with trauma.

Here’s a list on the resources link/drop down: The Wisdom of Trauma.

• Adverse Childhood Experience short video explaining toxic stress (by KPJR Films)
• ACE Study (by Academy on Violence and Abuse)
• Breakthrough: The Trauma Chaser
• Cormac Russell on Asset Based Community Development (Podcast)
• CRACKED UP
• Former Jail Warden Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia | We Are Witnesses
• Gabor Mate & Adyashanti: Emotional and Spiritual Maturity
• Hannah Beach, trauma work with students using movement and stories, Each of Us Has a Story
• Higher Practice (Podcast)
• How childhood trauma effects health across a lifetime (TED talk with Nadine Burke Harris)
• Is Your Story Making You Sick?
• Oprah reports on Childhood Trauma’s long term effects
• Paper Tigers: One High School’s Unlikely Success Story
• PBS Newshour: Childhood Trauma
• Professor Julianne Holt Lunstad on the the amazing impact of social relationships on health and longevity (Podcast)
• Professor Steve Cole on human social genomics amongst many others with fantastic insight into the power of community (Podcast)
• Reasons I Drink (Alanis Morrissette)
• Reclaiming Our Students, 12-session online educational series for educators
• Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope
• Step Inside the Circle
• Surgical Empathy
• Tashi and The Monk (Film)
• This Might Hurt (Film)
• Trauma and The Nervous System: A Polyvagal Perspective

There are other ways to also see how the world works, how people in both the West and the Global South are dealing with microaggression and macroaggression after aggression. Of course, patriarchy, capitalism and many variations on that theme are killing the human soul, the human body, from pre-birth to seven generations out. Trauma is also the synergy of chemical x mixed with chemials a,b,c onward. Imagine that, a world where we barely talk about Rachel Carson, why the eagle egg thins out and why the sperm counts drop, but then, we are in a world of constant organic chemistry alchemy. The countless science experiments on humanity and ecology focused on products to make them sleeker, thinner, cooler, softer, harder, bigger, smaller, less flammable, more flammable, more slippery, less stinky, more glowing, better looking, easier to digest, more aromatic, less shiny.

That is the Faustian Bargain we all have engaged in, for our new species, Homo Consumopithecus, Erectus Plasticus. That bargain also involved a world of more complicated diodes and self-replicating genetically engineered stuff, one where computing and virtual reality and augmented reality and artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of that, has colonized us daily . . . . We have accepted that stuff in our toys and our mundane jobs, but we sometimes shudder (as in a Philip K Dick book-movie) to think of the truly monsterous matrix and biopiracy we have allowed the data hogs and the surveillance soldiers to deploy in order to control our lives.

So, yes, adverse childhood experiences make sense, and it is a scale, a way to look at children who are struggling in school, and sometimes as a predictor of what might befall a student who has seen daddy put in jail, mommy hooked on booze, seen the repo man come into the home, found the beat up Ford Taurus hooked up to a tow truck for lack of payment. You know, just what happens in a home with chaos, violence between parents, and then add up homelessness, and their own abuse; i.e., physical and sexual. The reality, though, no looking at the cause of those terrible events, Cause-effect/effect-turned-to-cause/ cause-the-effect of another cause and effect. The daisy chain!

The devil, though, is in the details of what ACEs really mean to the titans of finance, to the masters of social impact investing to the Fourth Industrial Revolutionaires:

“Factors associated with adverse childhood experiences in Scottish children: a prospective cohort study” (source)

Pay for success or social impact partnership: Return on investment for social impact, as in the cost of special education, or what is the cost of depression. All that money attached to human issues, but they (money hoarders) want to tie in money and making money to those profiles — pre-crime — to preemptively fix you when you ARE not even broken! Investing on disaster (disaster capitalism) or investing on your childhood or household or prison sentence. Scary stuff.

Beware of Kaiser and Silicon Valley and Futures Markets and Hedge Funds and Human Capital Markets. Making money on trauma? Prenatal shit, too.

These are nefarious human beings. These are the Inquisition’s offspring, in skinny jeans and fancy pant suits. The human capital market is contradictory in terms of health and mental care. Making money, man. No healing comes from making money!

Here, Alison:

What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.”

Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve?

Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated?

And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation?

I believe it will.

A September-October, 2017 article for Academic Pediatrics, “Financing Mechanisms for Reducing Adversity and Enhancing Resilience Through Primary Prevention,” shows why ACE interventions will be an extremely attractive investment option for predatory social entrepreneurs. The authors note interventions that “prevent or mitigate the effects of ACEs can have impact across multiple sectors including: behavioral health, general health, child welfare, and “future criminal justice.” Every sector represents potential profit for investors. It appears there’s a lot of money in trauma remediation.

The paper references work done by the Washington State Institute on Public Policy (WSIPP) in which sophisticated cost/benefit models were created that estimate future cost savings across sectors so that the savings can be used to repay investors. WSIPP is one of eight data labs, operating under the purview of the NYU Gov Lab. Among the policy recommendations presented in this paper were: 1) setting “a conceptual framework to understand and account for outcomes across a broad range of public and private investment” 2) “validating metrics to estimate society costs and benefits” 3) adopting integrated budgets that combine health and social welfare finance and 4) disseminating information about innovative policies and finance mechanisms like “pay for success.”

The bottom line is that investors see children who have been harmed as potential sources of vast quantities of “impact” data, since the damage inflicted upon them extends across so many domains. The fact that the harm is so pervasive is, sickeningly, what makes so profitable. Interoperable databases are key to the program. All the data must be pooled in data lakes to claim the future cost offsets that enable the profit taking. WSIPP and its counterparts have been key collaborators in developing a national data architecture upon which impact investment markets will be built. More details in my post “Interoperable Data To Fuel Human Capital Hedge Funds.” (Adverse Childhood Experience Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan?)

More on this in a later article. But for now, it comes back to MY ground truthing. The father-in-law tipped over at home, had a headache, slurred speech, so 911 was called, EMT’s came out, and the idea was maybe a stroke. He’s been captive in a hospital bed for a month.

He already had ambulatory issues with a genetic disease tied to his feet’s weakness and curling and bad legs (he’s 79, was a truck driver, and he is in his Seventh Day Adventist world); and he had a hip replacement that went south six years ago, both because of that traumatic sawing of bone event, and I suppose because he didn’t “do” the hard end rehab program. He is in constant leg and hip pain.

He is also a military veteran, so he loves the VA since just four years ago, at my urging and assistance, got on that welfare-socialist gravy train. Good resources for equipment, rehab, and a listening nurse or PA.

That EMT call was a month ago, and they found the 2 inch mass in his frontal right lob, and he went under the knife a week ago, and the glioblastoma was the result. Stuck in a Kaiser hospital, and alas, he “tested” positive for the Bioweapon Covid19, so did his wife and his visiting son (from American Somoa) and grandson (from Texas).

Stuck in a hospital, and no visitors, and there you have it. Now, he has been shifted to a rehab place, and he again, tested positive for Bioweapon Covid19, and so, two days barely there, and now no visitors because he is in a “Covid19 wing” of the national for-profit rehabilitation unit (Regency).

My wife and I live three hours from Portland area, and we wanted to visit her mother and this husband, but the lockdown is in effect (he’s been jabbed four times, his wife three but is Jonesing for the 4th one).

My fear is the reality of 2020 and 2021. The horror stories of families separated from loved ones who ended up dying alone in a hospital. This is the madness of these mandates and these rotten dictatorial systems. ALL of it.

The trauma (mental) of this fellow in a rehab clinic, locked down, and he has opted for chemo therapy and radio therapy, big time issues without the support of a wife by his side some part of a day. The predicted lifespan for this 79 year old, according to surgeon and cancer specialists and his primacy care doctor is a year. That’s optimistic.

One year lifespan. Do not return to sender. Do not expect a refund. And, the radiation, and the poison pills or IVs, those treatments (they will have to be at the VA, so transportation is an issue, as in $), what will those medical interventions do to his mind, to his mental capacity, to his neuro net? What about the gut and the pain and confusion and amazing body’s complete aches and heaves from head to toe?

Yeah, we all say we would not do this, go through this hell, for another 12 months on planet Blackrock? Or, really, the diagnosis is one year without the poisons? I am not sure they have had that conversation — you have a choice NOT to poison and irradiate yourself —  since I am not a lynchpin in their lives.

Of course, the father-in-law is looking toward getting back to his small apartment with his fragile wife helping with the catheter and comode and transfering from chair to toilet to shower to bed.

It aint going to happen. He thinks he’ll be back on his scooter and tooling around Costco, etc. He believes he’ll be back dragging his legs and feet using a walker, to the curb, to the family handicap van, etc.

This is trauma, for me and for my wife and for his wife and for the grandson who had never met the granddaddy for his 24 years of life until the cancer diagnosis and his father footing the bill to have him come out to Sandy, OR. The son, 53, did not spend much time with this father, who is now ailing and has an expiration date, AKA medical diagnosis.

I get why people who read my stuff all over the internet, including at Dissident Voice, might not get into the nitty-gritty of personal lives, my own vagaries of living, or the ground truthing I attempt to traverse while still tying into that truthing with my belief that we as a nation and globe have to throw off the chains and do some hard hard work about getting back to our tribal selves, the neo-tribal selves. Oh, yes, eco-socialism, retrenchment, global thinking, global cooperation, true human to human work. Away from the elites, the rich (there shall be no billionaires or multimillionaires).

It’s getting complicated, though, not going along with the so-called progressives who want mandates, forced vaccinations, and, of course, these social impact bonds, these systems of holding poor people and struggling people accountable vis-a-vis the investors and the social impact pogroms. On Dissdient Voice, we have those who think carbon dioxide that we spew has no effect on climate, and then we have others talking about the climate emergency.

We have so many emergencies, and these medical issues will be hitting more and more people, not just indirectly with the aging Baby Boomers, but with the anxiety, self-harm, the childhood trauma leading to destructive behavior, addiction, obesity, workaholic behavior. The constant stream of negative news, the war drums, the incompetent Western governments, the Nazis and right wing conservative anti-human, anti-ecology movements, the openly dumb censoring and cognitive dissonance of the fake progressives wanting control, mandates, and pushing techno fascism of the Google Types onto everyone, but themselves!

We will not see the revolution televised:

Poverty, sickness, community decay, environmental disaster will not be solved by the billionaires, the investors, the bloody idiots investing in “the developing child.”

And, more people moving to Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona will not solve a bloody thing: Imagine that, one generation’s damming of the river, flooding the desert for unchecked growth is another generation’s major- major problem. Water, baby, water, and Lake Mead! The largest reservoir in the United States, is a critical source of water for 25 million people across seven states as well as some of the country’s largest agricultural valleys.

Here are the 10 states with the fastest growth rates:

1. Utah (1.53%)
2. Idaho (1.45%)
3. Texas (1.35%)
4. North Dakota (1.35%)
5. Nevada (1.28%)
6. Colorado (1.27%)
7. Washington (1.26%)
8. Florida (1.25%)
9. Arizona (1.05%)
10. South Carolina (0.95%)

And, the Gates Formula is for land grabbing. These are real struggles: “This website [Farmland Grab] contains news about the global rush to buy or lease farmlands by agribusiness, governments and financial investors — and people’s resistance against it. Its purpose is to serve as a resource for those monitoring, researching or organising around the issue, particularly activists, non-government organisations and journalists. It was initially set up by GRAIN, to share evidence of the new global farmland grab documented in Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security.”

It all comes down to family, no, the battered family, the epigenetic trauma, the cities and towns flagging, the infrastructure crumbling, the fires and droughts, the heat waves, the inflation, and, of course, broken medicine, and the for-profit model of everything. And the question: Who will undergo the chemo and radiation and bed-riddennes and non-ambulatory life stuck in a hospital bed and rehab clinic or hospice center for that one year lifespan?

The costs, man, mental, familial, the community impact. And, just the bills, man, the hospital bills.

How much? How much money does a brain tumor surgery cost? For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of brain tumor treatment can range from less than $50,000 for a small benign tumor in an accessible location that can be treated with surgery alone up to $700,000 or more for a malignant tumor that must be treated with some combination of surgery, radiation ….The median total direct cost of patient care was $91,000, with radiotherapy and imaging costs being the most expensive (approximately $14,000 each). The majority of direct costs were incurred in the first four months of treatment with a plateau in costs beyond 1 year, reflecting the poor survival of this disease.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

The last time prices rose this fast was 41 years ago. The last time the UK got through prime ministers this fast was the mid-1970s. The last time there was open war between major European powers was in 1945. The last time the Northern Hemisphere was this hot was probably 125,000 years ago.

Yet the FTSE 100 is worth more than ever, corporate profits are higher than ever, there are more British billionaires than ever. And oil companies are richer than ever.

If we took climate change seriously, the petroleum industry would be bankrupt. These firms borrow billions against the future value of reserves they are yet to drill, but atmospheric physics demands we can’t burn that carbon if we wish civilization to survive.

"If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognizable form, oil companies' assets are worthless."

If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognizable form, oil companies’ assets are worthless. And if we aren’t, they are still worthless.

But in reality, fossil fuel giants are doing better than ever. Last week, Shell said it expected to revise upwards the value of oil and gas assets it had previously written down, causing its share prices to leap for joy.

Saudi Arabia, which has struggled for investment ever since it allegedly hung a bunch of businessmen by their feet and beat them until they coughed up their bank details, has been welcomed in from the cold.

In May, oil exporter Saudi Aramco overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world – the most valuable in human history. This week, just months after pretending to take the climate emergency seriously at COP26, Joe Biden has gone to fist bump Saudi’s narco-in-chief and beg him to pump more death into capitalism’s veins.

Meanwhile, as temperatures across England rise above levels with which human homeostasis can cope, the climate crisis collides with the health crisis.

Crushed by a dozen years of Tory austerity and the government’s incompetent response to COVID, NHS waiting lists are already at an all-time high. Accident and Emergency units are “on the fringe of collapse”, with ambulances queueing up outside hospitals, unable to hand over their patients. This means that over the next few days – when experts predict we will see up to ten thousand excess deaths as a result of the heatwave – vast numbers of people will likely spend time cooking in ambulances.

And with world food supplies already shaken by the war in Ukraine, the heatwave also means worsening global hunger.

Italian farmers are expected to lose a third of summer crops like rice and corn, while Sardinia’s fields have been scoffed by a plague of locusts. In China, soaring temperatures are drying out soil, devastating agriculture of all kinds. East Africa is experiencing one of its driest rainy seasons in 40 years, which, combined with the fact that 40% of Africa’s wheat usually comes from Russia or Ukraine, leaves tens of millions facing hunger.

Food and agriculture billionaires, on the other hand, raised their collective wealth by 45% over the past two years, while global food giant Cargill posted a 63% increase in its profits for last year, the best haul in its nearly 160-year history.

As the world moves out of pandemic mode (if not actually out of the pandemic), we’re entering a new phase of global capitalism.

For big businesses and billionaires, the ‘omnicrisis’ presents a perfect opportunity for disaster capitalism: use the overwhelming sense that everything is on fire to plunder: wrack up prices while keeping wages down, extract, extract, extract, extract.

But this isn’t the inevitable future. The faint echo of promises to ‘build back better’ may have disappeared, and, with politics in crisis, people are increasingly realizing that they are going to have to fight for that future.

In Britain, more and more unions are voting to strike against the plunder. As concern about the climate crisis grows, so will action against those driving it. Distrust of our broken politics has deepened, creating a deep volatility.

A vast political fight over what comes next has arrived, just as the Labour Party has abandoned the field and, in the coming months, we can expect something else to rush into that space.

What? That’s up to you.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

The last time prices rose this fast was 41 years ago. The last time the UK got through prime ministers this fast was the mid-1970s. The last time there was open war between major European powers was in 1945. The last time the Northern Hemisphere was this hot was probably 125,000 years ago.

Yet the FTSE 100 is worth more than ever, corporate profits are higher than ever, there are more British billionaires than ever. And oil companies are richer than ever.

If we took climate change seriously, the petroleum industry would be bankrupt. These firms borrow billions against the future value of reserves they are yet to drill, but atmospheric physics demands we can’t burn that carbon if we wish civilization to survive.

"If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognizable form, oil companies' assets are worthless."

If our modern societies are to continue to exist in recognizable form, oil companies’ assets are worthless. And if we aren’t, they are still worthless.

But in reality, fossil fuel giants are doing better than ever. Last week, Shell said it expected to revise upwards the value of oil and gas assets it had previously written down, causing its share prices to leap for joy.

Saudi Arabia, which has struggled for investment ever since it allegedly hung a bunch of businessmen by their feet and beat them until they coughed up their bank details, has been welcomed in from the cold.

In May, oil exporter Saudi Aramco overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world – the most valuable in human history. This week, just months after pretending to take the climate emergency seriously at COP26, Joe Biden has gone to fist bump Saudi’s narco-in-chief and beg him to pump more death into capitalism’s veins.

Meanwhile, as temperatures across England rise above levels with which human homeostasis can cope, the climate crisis collides with the health crisis.

Crushed by a dozen years of Tory austerity and the government’s incompetent response to COVID, NHS waiting lists are already at an all-time high. Accident and Emergency units are “on the fringe of collapse”, with ambulances queueing up outside hospitals, unable to hand over their patients. This means that over the next few days – when experts predict we will see up to ten thousand excess deaths as a result of the heatwave – vast numbers of people will likely spend time cooking in ambulances.

And with world food supplies already shaken by the war in Ukraine, the heatwave also means worsening global hunger.

Italian farmers are expected to lose a third of summer crops like rice and corn, while Sardinia’s fields have been scoffed by a plague of locusts. In China, soaring temperatures are drying out soil, devastating agriculture of all kinds. East Africa is experiencing one of its driest rainy seasons in 40 years, which, combined with the fact that 40% of Africa’s wheat usually comes from Russia or Ukraine, leaves tens of millions facing hunger.

Food and agriculture billionaires, on the other hand, raised their collective wealth by 45% over the past two years, while global food giant Cargill posted a 63% increase in its profits for last year, the best haul in its nearly 160-year history.

As the world moves out of pandemic mode (if not actually out of the pandemic), we’re entering a new phase of global capitalism.

For big businesses and billionaires, the ‘omnicrisis’ presents a perfect opportunity for disaster capitalism: use the overwhelming sense that everything is on fire to plunder: wrack up prices while keeping wages down, extract, extract, extract, extract.

But this isn’t the inevitable future. The faint echo of promises to ‘build back better’ may have disappeared, and, with politics in crisis, people are increasingly realizing that they are going to have to fight for that future.

In Britain, more and more unions are voting to strike against the plunder. As concern about the climate crisis grows, so will action against those driving it. Distrust of our broken politics has deepened, creating a deep volatility.

A vast political fight over what comes next has arrived, just as the Labour Party has abandoned the field and, in the coming months, we can expect something else to rush into that space.

What? That’s up to you.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

On Wednesday, Jewish World Watch (JWW), a nonprofit humanitarian organization dedicated to helping survivors of genocide and mass atrocities around the world, launched an online database listing Western companies in the automotive, energy, fashion, food and technology sectors that have been implicated as benefiting from Uyghur forced labor, so concerned consumers can avoid purchasing their products. Serena Oberstein, JWW’s executive director, spoke with RFA Uyghur reporter Nuriman Abdureshid about the Uyghur Forced Labor Database and what the group hopes to accomplish with it. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: What motivated JWW to create the Uyghur Forced Labor Database?

Oberstein: What we’re hearing coming out of East Turkestan [Xinjiang] about Uyghurs being taken in the night, having their heads shaved, being put on trains, and especially the companies that are using Uyghur forced labor, also has direct ties to the Holocaust. I remember mentioning one of them and someone said, ‘Oh, what have they said? Do they know?’ And I said, ‘Yes, they know. They have a factory. They signed a contract with the Chinese Communist Party.’ And they’ve made a public statement where they’ve said that as long as there’s a profit to be made, essentially they’re going to be there. Having this type of database where you can see that companies know exactly what they’re doing or they know where in their supply chain they’re using Uyghur forced labor and have chosen not to stop and chosen to be complicit. It’s really important information for consumers. 

RFA: Tell us more about the database.

Oberstein: The Uyghur Forced Labor Database is a project detailing how global companies are complicit in Uyghur forced labor, and it’s the most extensive [database] to date. It brings to light more than 600 national and international companies and their reported links to Uyghur forced labor in the ongoing genocide against the Uyghur people in East Turkestan. We highlight a number of companies by industry, but you can also go in and search if there’s information available. It’s something that we launched in the days immediately after the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. What we know is that the [U.S.] entity list that’s being utilized is not extensive enough. Not only do we really want individuals and consumers to use this database to make more ethical decisions about the companies they support, but also we’re really hoping to share this with the U.S. government and that they utilize it and understand that this information is available. We will link to all of the studies and investigative reports that have thoroughly mapped how these companies are complicit in genocide. We hope that first and foremost, it’s an educational tool, but that it becomes a tool that empowers people to stop using products made with Uyghur slaves and by Uyghur slaves. 

RFA: Have any companies contacted you about the database?

Oberstein: No, not yet. We just released it Wednesday afternoon, so we definitely haven’t heard from anybody yet. We hope that with the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that companies will start to come off of this database and we’ll update people. We want to support companies [in making] more ethical decisions. The purpose of this isn’t to necessarily tell [consumers] not to buy a product; it’s to say that they have an obligation to do the right thing. They have an obligation to be ethical in their decision making, and here is information so that you can make the right decision. 

RFA: What do you want to say to companies that have supply chains related to Uyghur forced labor?

Oberstein: We feel like you always have to put people over profit. … When I talk to companies and they say, ‘Well, we don't want to lose our market share in China,’ it’s horrific to me. What about the millions of people who are being interned? What about the people who are dying? What about the children who are growing up without parents who are being ‘reeducated’ and indoctrinated? That’s what we care about. That’s what should be our priority. We worked with someone a few months ago, whose family helped start the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and he had a factory in East Turkestan and went to go visit it a few years ago. When he saw what was happening, he said to himself, ‘I can’t ethically do that,’ and he closed his factory and reopened one in Mexico. So, we know that it’s possible, that you don’t need to rely on forced labor in your supply chain and that you can ethically source your labor. You have to act. You have to put people over profit. 

RFA: Is there anything else you want to add? 

Oberstein: I hope that people use [the database] and share it with their friends. If people have questions about it, if they think that there is information missing, they should definitely feel free to reach out to us and say, ‘We know this company is doing it.’ We know that there is knowledge of this involved in [a] company that maybe we missed. We would welcome that kind of feedback. We hope that what comes of it is that this is a first step. Now that people have the information, they can start to make educated decisions. But this is [also] so that companies know that we’re watching, and we see what they’re doing, and that we expect more from them. 

Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nuriman Abdureshid for RFA Uyghur.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Adam Ramsay.

The post Does the Future Belong to People Who Profit Off Our ‘Excessive Wealth Disorder’? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

With G7 leaders meeting in Germany for their annual summit, Oxfam International is demanding a global windfall profits tax on the massive financial gains made by large corporations over the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic—a tax that could fund major international initiatives to address the spiraling crises of hunger, poverty, and the climate emergency.

With billions of people around the world struggling to afford food and millions "facing acute hunger and famine-like conditions," the group said in a communique released Friday that G7 leaders must drive straight into the unique and dire circumstances triggered by the pandemic—during which many major companies profited mightily—to "set out a properly funded plan" that would tackle the food crisis, end vaccine apartheid, and provide people of developing nations the resources needed to fend off the worst impacts of a rapidly heating planet.

New Oxfam research, the group says, shows that a 90% windfall tax on the "excess profits made by G7's largest corporations during the pandemic could generate almost $430 billion."

This money, the group argues, "could fully fund the shortfalls on all existing humanitarian appeals and a 10-year plan to end hunger, while also raising enough for a one-off payment of over $3,000 to the poorest 10 percent of the population of the G7 countries, to help cover the rising cost of living."

According to Oxfam:

The G7 need to double the amount of aid they provide for agriculture, food security and nutrition, amounting to $15 billio per year. At the same time, they need to fully fund the $46 billion United Nations global humanitarian appeal, which is only 21 percent funded today.  

Oxfam research shows that corporations in the energy, food and pharmaceutical sectors—where monopolies are especially common—are posting record-high profits, even as wages have barely budged and workers struggle with decades-high prices and Covid-19. The fortunes of food and energy billionaires have risen by $453 billion in the last two years, equivalent to $1 billion every two days. Five of the largest energy companies (BP, Shell, Total Energies, Exxon and Chevron) are together making $2,600 profit every second. There are now 62 new food billionaires.

The Ukraine crisis has had a huge impact on food prices but these are fueled by long-standing inequalities and failures in the global food system. Equally the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have deeply harmed the ability of poor people and poor nations to cope. Between April 2020 and December 2021, wheat prices had increased by 80 percent.

In Munich over the weekend, thousands marched to demand the G7 nations meet their obligations to the world.

With fears growing of an already dire food crisis that experts warn will only intensify due to the ongoing war in Ukraine and climate-driven droughts that have pushed regions of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia into famine-like conditions, Oxfam warns that even the announcement from the G7 to forge a new "Global Alliance for Food Security" will not be enough.

"This global hunger crisis, coming on top of the pandemic, is catastrophic," said Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam International's executive director, on Friday.

"The G7 have a chance to show ordinary people that they are on their side, and not that of the corporates and creditors making huge excessive profits from these multiple crises," Bucher added. "The G7 must implement a coordinated initiative of windfall taxes and debt cancellation to fully fund an action plan to end world hunger."

"Across all countries—as food and energy costs spiral," she said, "it is the poorest and most marginalized people who are faced with the most desperate choices."

Because hunger—like the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic—thrives on "inaction," Bucher said world leaders must be ambitious with concrete initiatives, including the institution of the windfall tax on corporate profits.

"We know that large corporations are making very significant profits, and have been making them during the pandemic,” Bucher told the Guardian over the weekend, as she singled out the fossil fuel industry as well as food giants and pharmaceutical companies.

"We've calculated how much excess profit there has been during the pandemic and taxing excess profits as a windfall tax would generate resources both for the most affected populations in the richer countries," she said, "and to be able to fulfill commitments in terms of aid, and responding to the worst suffering in the world."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jon Queally.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by The Mapping Project.

Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Lindsey Graham had a debate on Fox Nation. Sanders asked:

"In the United States, Lindsey, we spend twice as much per capita on health care compared to the people of any other country, while major countries like Canada, the U.K., Germany manage to supply health care to all their people. Why is that?"

The simple answer is the same reason we have an ongoing climate crisis and a student loan crisis that Republicans refuse to let Congress address: the legal bribery of politicians like Lindsey Graham.

A national single-payer healthcare system would save us trillions of dollars and millions of lives every decade.

How much money would it take to bribe you to help kill 212,000 Americans in a single year?

What size incentive would cause you to assist in the theft of $543.6 billion?

It's a serious question. These are real numbers. The bribery is real, the deaths are real, the thefts from the American people—most extracted from individual families—are real.

There are real people—American lobbyists—offering the bribes, and real people—American legislators—taking the bribes to make choices that killed 212,000 Americans in 2020 while picking over $543 billion from our pockets.

According to Open Secrets, the amount spent just last year bribing Congress to keep our healthcare system in place was $689,466,798.00. Almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.

In exchange, the health insurance industry took home $19 billion in profits last year, hospitals took home over $70 billion in profits, and the pharmaceutical industry made similarly huge profits last year: at least $100 billion.

And that was after each of these three industries—that have a stake in keeping our healthcare system as broken and dysfunctional as possible—had handed out billions in compensation to their senior executives and board members. Not to mention stockholder dividends.

So the healthcare industry made out well. Its executives are buying third and fourth mansions in the Swiss alps. It's lobbyists are enjoying $3000 bottles of wine with dinner. And the politicians it owns are becoming multimillionaires.

In every other developed country in the world, a national healthcare system helps keep costs in line, be they hospital or pharmaceutical.

Health insurance in other nations is a marginal business around the edges used almost exclusively by the very wealthy to get private air ambulances and luxury suites in hospitals.

Drugs cost as little as a tenth of what they do here, and everybody in the other developed nations has health coverage.

Last year over 500,000 families were destroyed by bankruptcies caused by a family member getting sick: every single one was in the USA. This is an unknown "problem" in every other developed nation on planet Earth.

But how are Americans doing?

A new peer-reviewed study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a damning picture of the damage caused by the roughly $700 million a year the healthcare industry uses to bribe American legislators.

"[W]e estimated," the study's authors say in the study's abstract, "that a single-payer universal healthcare system would have saved about 212,000 lives in 2020 alone.

"We also calculated that US$105.6 billion of medical expenses associated with COVID-19 hospitalization could have been averted by a single-payer universal healthcare system over the course of the pandemic.

"These economic benefits are in addition to US$438 billion expected to be saved by single-payer universal healthcare during a non-pandemic year."

Since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of politicians in a shocking series of decisions with no parallel anywhere else in the developed world, Democrats have tried repeatedly to end this deadly rip-off.

In April of 1976—the year of the Supreme Court's first decision legalizing bribery of politicians (and only of politicians)—Presidential front-runner Jimmy Carter proposed a national health insurance system. As president, he faced fierce resistance from paid-off politicians—most but not all Republicans—and ended up settling for small changes around the edges.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton tried again to extend health coverage to all Americans and rein in costs with a national system. He, too, failed to overcome opposition from the industry and their bribed politicians.

President Barack Obama campaigned on a single-payer universal system like Canada has but had to settle for the Affordable Care Act because of the $1,182,070 the health insurance industry had given Senator Joe Lieberman (in addition to millions to virtually all the Republicans). Obamacare, particularly after 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted its Medicaid expansion provision, turned out to be a trillion-dollar gift to the insurance and drug industries.

The bribes are so extensive, so widespread, so lavish that President Biden hasn't yet even seriously brought up the topic of Medicare For All or something like it.

Our healthcare system let over 200,000 Americans die in 2020 just to preserve its profits. It handed part of those profits to politicians to keep the system in place. And, somehow, those politicians sleep at night and can look themselves in the mirror.

A national single-payer healthcare system would save us trillions of dollars and millions of lives every decade. It's opposed by every single elected Republican and a handful of Democrats: every one of them on the take to keep things the way they are.

If saving trillions of dollars and millions of lives lives isn't enough to end political bribery in America, what will it take?

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

As an example, of market consolidation and the illusion of consumer choice, the Guardian noted that three companies own 93 percent of carbonated soft drink brands; 55 percent of the market share of canned corn is owned by four firms; and PepsiCo owns five of the most popular dip brands, including Tostitos, Lay’s and Fritos, thus controlling 88 percent of the dip market. Despite supermarket aisles full of shelves stacked with different breakfast cereals, just three companies—General Mills, Kellogg, and Post—own 73 percent of the cereals on offer. Between 2011 and 2020, the Belgian-based conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired 17 formerly independent craft breweries; it now owns more than 600 beer brands.

The food monopolies lurking beneath the appearance of consumer choices are one consequence of “political lobbying and weak regulation which enabled a wave of unchecked mergers and acquisitions,” the Guardian reported. As the food giants gets bigger, farmers and consumers lose power. The people who “harvest, pack and sell us our food have the least power,” the Guardian reported. Just 15 cents of every dollar spent in US supermarkets goes to farmers, the study found, and “at least half of the 10 lowest-paid jobs in the US are in the food industry.” Corporate consolidation drives up food prices and reduces consumers access to food.  Starbuck, the Food and Water analyst noted that supermarket mergers have driven out smaller grocers and regional chains. “We have roughly one-third fewer grocery stores today than we did 25 years ago, according to the US census bureau,” she told the Guardian.

As of April 2022, a search using ProQuest’s U.S. Major News Dailies suggests that none of the major US newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, or the Washington Post, have covered the joint Food and Water Watch/Guardian report on US food monopolies and their economic consequences.

Source: Nina Lakhani, Aliya Uteuova, and Alvin Chang,  “Revealed: The True Extent of America’s Food Monopolies, and Who Pays the Price,” The Guardian, July 14, 2021.

Student Researcher: Ethan Reiderer (Saint Michael’s College)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (Saint Michael’s College)

The post Handful of “Food Giants” Profit from Illusion of Consumer Choice appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

From Dhaka, Bangladesh to Turin, Italy and beyond, youth climate strikers took to the streets across the globe Friday to demand that political leaders stop ignoring the scientific community's deafening alarm bells and take action to slash carbon emissions before it's too late.

"The current system is widening the inequality gap—it has no place in our society."

Organized by the international Fridays For Future movement, the latest mass demonstrations stressed that worsening global class inequities and the climate emergency are deeply intertwined and must be tackled together—a message encapsulated in strikers' rallying cry of "People Not Profit."

"We live in a broken system, one where the richest 1% of the world population are responsible for more than twice the pollution as the poorest 50%," Iris Zhan, campaign coordinator for Fridays For Future Digital, said in a statement. "That's why we strike today to demand climate reparations to kickstart a transformative justice process in which political power returns to the people."

As Fridays For Future organizers put it in their preview of the new global strikes, "Climate struggle is class struggle."

On top of the in-person demonstrations worldwide, youth climate leaders on Friday also launched online campaigns urging ordinary people and political leaders to take three actions:

1. Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty: As the main driver of the climate crisis, fossil fuels are threatening our ability to protect livelihoods, security, and the planet.
2. Demand #PeopleNotProfit locally: Colonizers and capitalists are at the core of every system of oppression that has caused the climate crisis. We need people in every corner of the world to stand with local fights to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure and financing.
3. Support climate disaster relief: The most vulnerable bear the cost of the damages to homes and communities, as well as the incalculable tool on life, culture, and connection to land.

"The wealthier countries that have had the greatest impact on climate change need to provide the necessary funding and aid," Chukwama Paul, communications lead for the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition, said Friday. "The estimated cost of loss and damage in developing countries will be 290 USD and 580 USD billion per year by 2030 and the current financial commitment to support developing countries is 100 billion USD annually."

"We are amplifying the need for the redistribution of wealth to help victims of loss and damage," said Paul.

The worldwide strikes come nearly a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report warning that the continued burning of fossil fuels is driving a "dangerous and widespread disruption in nature," doing "irreversible" damage to marine and coastal ecosystems, and threatening the prospect of a livable planet for future generations.

"The facts are undeniable. This abdication of leadership is criminal," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to the report. "The world's biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home."

A separate analysis published earlier this week by the United Kingdom-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research estimated that rich countries must cut off their oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century.

The report emphasized that "an equitable transition will require wealthy high-emitting nations make substantial and ongoing financial transfers to poorer nations to facilitate their low-carbon development, against a backdrop of dangerous and increasing climate impacts."

Farzana Faruk Jhumu, a climate activist with Fridays for Future in Bangladesh, wrote in an op-ed Friday that young people across the globe "are asking world leaders to put #PeopleNotProfit at the center of the planet's future."

"Bangladesh, where I am from, contributes to only 0.21% of global carbon emissions, but we are facing cyclones, floods, and droughts every year caused by global warming," Jhumu continued. "To ensure justice for the Global South, world leaders must understand their responsibility. The current system is widening the inequality gap—it has no place in our society."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Putin’s tanks had barely crossed the border into Ukraine before the American Petroleum Institute (API) was out on Twitter attempting to exploit the crisis. Without even a word of solidarity for the people of Ukraine, API launched into a set of four demands for the White House, all of which would benefit the industry while providing no help to Europe or Ukraine. 

All of API, the fossil fuel industry, and the GOP's talking points during this crisis are based on the idea that they can fool the public into thinking that more U.S. fossil fuel production will help Ukraine and harm Putin. In fact, it's the opposite.

We saw API and their allies in the GOP use the same playbook during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when they issued a long list of demands for the Trump administration, who was all too happy to turn the pandemic relief package into a multi-billion dollar handout to Big Oil. 

This time, we can’t let them get away with it. That starts with loudly and publicly debunking their arguments, and then pivoting to our own, real solutions to the energy issues surrounding the conflict and the ongoing climate emergency. 

First, API called on the White House to release permits for more drilling on federal lands. This is absurd. Nearly 13 million acres of public lands are already leased for oil and gas development and the industry has stockpiled thousands of unused leases they bought at rock bottom prices. The reason the industry wants more land isn’t to rush oil and gas to Ukraine, but so they can claim more reserves and inflate their perceived value. It’s a land grab pure and simple. 

Second, since polluting on land isn’t enough when you can also pollute on water, API called on the White House to issue a new five-year offshore leasing plan. The Biden administration already made the mistake of holding the largest offshore lease sale in U.S. history, but a judge threw it out because it lacked any meaningful climate analysis. Either way, it’s never enough for Big Oil: they want a guarantee that they’ll keep being able to expand in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. How a five-year plan could possibly have any relevance to an immediate conflict is a mystery, but of course that isn’t really the point. 

Third, API demanded that the administration accelerate energy infrastructure permitting. This, of course, is the industry’s answer to everything: when in doubt, build more pipelines. The energy infrastructure API is talking about isn’t the solar panels and wind turbines that could help free us from our dependence on fossil fuels, but the pipelines, refineries, and export facilities that will only deepen our addiction. API likes to pretend that more infrastructure will allow the U.S. to somehow flood the global market with enough oil and gas that Putin won’t sell any of his, but that’s not how markets work. As long as the world is still reliant on fossil fuels, money will be flowing into the Putin regime. 

Finally, API threw in the catch-all “reduce legal and regulatory uncertainty,” a fancy way of saying, “make sure the rules don’t apply to us.” Big Oil doesn’t like the idea of following the law, let alone being held accountable in court for the damage they’ve done to the climate. They’re equally dismissive of regulations, also known as environmental and public protections, like the clean air and clean water acts. At this point, the industry can be pretty confident that their donations to Senators Manchin, Sinema, and the GOP have killed the most ambitious parts of Biden’s Build Back Better Act, but one can never be too sure. 

What's needed right now is an all-out mobilization to break our global addiction to fossil fuels.

All of API, the fossil fuel industry, and the GOP’s talking points during this crisis are based on the idea that they can fool the public into thinking that more U.S. fossil fuel production will help Ukraine and harm Putin. In fact, it’s the opposite. Current exports of U.S. LNG to Europe are an important temporary measure since Europe is still hooked on gas, but it will never be a long-term solution. That’s because as long as there’s a European and global demand for fossil fuels, there will be a market for Putin’s poison. 

What’s needed right now is an all-out mobilization to break our global addiction to fossil fuels. Instead of building more fossil fuel infrastructure, the U.S. should be collaborating with Europe and the rest of the world to supercharge the adoption of clean energy technologies. After all, that’s what the European Union itself is calling for: early statements from the E.U. suggest that in part due to the crisis in Ukraine they’re looking to embark on a major energy security plan based on efficiency and renewables. 

What if oil and gas prices go up in the meantime? Instead of letting Big Oil continue to gouge consumers at the pump, the Biden administration should take up an idea that’s been gaining steam in the United Kingdom: implement a windfall profits tax on the oil industry and use the profits to offset the costs for consumers while investing in long-term solutions. The U.S. already has programs like the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that could distribute the money in a progressive fashion that helped those most in need. 

Big Oil made record profits last quarter not through any innovation of their own, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic and now the crisis in Ukraine. Many would argue that none of Big Oil’s profits are legitimate considering the damage they’re doing to the climate, but profits made off these global crises are especially ill-deserved. 

And what better way for Democrats and the Biden administration to respond to Big Oil’s attempts to profit from this crisis than by making them help offset costs and pay for the transition away from fossil fuels? That would be a meaningful contribution from an industry that has long been a driver of conflict rather than an agent of peace. 

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jamie Henn.

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