Busting the despicable propaganda about an "immigrant crime wave"

I know that for plenty of people facts really don't matter. At least when it comes to their politics and worldviews they don't. For most it's fundamentally because they were raised that way, and don't even realize it. But for the large majority overall for whom facts do matter, albeit to varying degrees, it's good to have them ready to hand.

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent "crime wave," driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.

In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.

The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year. - Popular Information

Big Meat buys off academics

This has been well-known for a while, but there's new documentation out there.

Due to limited public funding for academic research, industry-funded studies on food and agriculture are common. And while researchers often strive to avoid bias and funding does not always impact research quality, evidence suggests industry-funded studies are more likely to produce results that reflect well on the funder.

In the paper, Viveca Morris and Dr. Jennifer Jacquet reveal a broader pattern of how the livestock industry, which has long had close affiliations with land-grant universities, has infiltrated universities to block climate scrutiny. The researchers trace the origins, funding, and political function of the “corporate capture of academic institutions”—especially focusing on the CLEAR Center, founded in 2018, and AgNext at Colorado State University, founded in 2020. As the authors argue, these leading academic centers wield their academic credibility to “maintain the livestock industry’s social license to operate.”

“They’re conducting industry-funded public relations and communications campaigns on climate change issues that benefit their agribusiness donors,” said Morris, the executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School. This effort extends far beyond industry-funded research to more actively shape policy, effectively acting like a lobbyist through frequent testimonies and meetings with policymakers, among other strategies.

Even if this is legal, “having a university—without transparency, without even telling the public that an industry donor is involved—acting as a PR arm of an industry group is impossible to justify with the university’s mission,” added Morris. - Civil Eats

Congress cowers to thieving parasites on antitrust funding

This is rather appalling, though there's still time for it to be corrected.

Heading into the State of the Union address, the White House is placing a big bet on competition policy to tackle some of the biggest challenges in the economy. (On Monday), the administration announced the creation of an interagency Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing, co-chaired by Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Justice Department Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter. Together, Khan and Kanter will coordinate efforts across the government to target companies engaged in pricing activities that violate laws around fraudulent and deceptive practices, or unfair methods of competition. The goal is to reduce prices in sectors where tricks and traps are prominent, from health care to housing to financial services.

“Competition delivers real results to real people, that’s precisely what we are doing,” said Kanter on a press call on Monday. “And we’re doing it with fewer people than we had in 1979.”

That last bit was a tell, a flash of frustration at a development over the weekend, pushed by a bipartisan group of appropriators, that could lead to a dramatic cut in the Antitrust Division’s budget, precisely at the time when the Biden administration is elevating its work—relying on it, even—in advance of the election. While some members of Congress are furious about it, the White House seems to be resigned to the outcome. - The American Prospect

Insane levels of military spending are not justified by "jobs!"

Not even if those claims were legitimate.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources. - TomDispatch

A massive shortfall for cleaning up after Big Oil

We need strong, progressive governance, or we will get stuck with these kinds of bills.

There are more than 2 million unplugged oil and gas wells that will need to be cleaned up, and the current production boom and windfall profits for industry giants have obscured the bill’s imminent arrival. More than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells either produce little oil and gas or are already dormant.

By law, companies are responsible for plugging and cleaning up wells. Oil drillers set aside funds called bonds, similar to the security deposit on a rental property, that are refunded once they decommission their wells or, if they walk away without doing that work, are taken by the government to cover the cost.

But an analysis by ProPublica and Capital & Main has found that the money set aside for this cleanup work in the 15 states accounting for nearly all the nation’s oil and gas production covers less than 2% of the projected cost. That shortfall puts taxpayers at risk of picking up the rest of the massive tab to avoid the environmental, economic and public health consequences of aging oil fields. - ProPublica

Big Oil suddenly has issues with methane emissions penalties

This article gets into the complications. I personally don't see a need to back off on anything when it comes to holding Big Energy accountable.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 U.S. climate law abbreviated IRA, primarily reduces emissions through financial incentives, rather than binding rules. But in addition to all its well-known carrots, lawmakers quietly included a smaller number of sticks — particularly when it comes to the potent greenhouse gas methane, which has proven to be a pesky source of increasing climate pollution with each passing year. New research suggests that those sticks could soon batter the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for a third of all methane emissions in the U.S.

An IRA provision directs the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, to charge $900 for every metric ton of methane above a certain threshold released into the atmosphere in 2024. The issue is particularly challenging to tackle in oil and gas fields because methane is the primary component in natural gas, and it leaks from hundreds of thousands of devices scattered across the country. In 2022, oil and gas facilities emitted more than 2.5 million metric tons of methane. - Grist

Another methane greenwashing scheme

I hadn't known about this one, which has apparently been around for a while.

Certified natural gas – or methane gas that is purportedly produced in a low-emissions manner – is a “dangerous greenwashing scheme”, a group of progressive senators wrote in a letter to federal regulators on Monday…

Amid increasing public concern about gas usage and the climate crisis, a new industry of third-party gas “certifiers” has cropped up. These companies develop standards that they use to proclaim that certain producers are reducing emissions from their fracking wells, pipelines and storage facilities, and therefore generating gas sustainably.

The companies can then deem certain gas “certified”, “responsibly produced” or “differentiated”, allowing producers to sell it at a premium. Utilities in New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Michigan and Virginia have purchased certified natural gas and plan to pass on the additional costs to customers, the non-profit watchdog organization Revolving Door Project found last year. - The Guardian