Will Big Tech be held to account?

I don't consider the likes of Facebook and Twitter to be intrinsically bad things. But those currently running them need some attitude adjustments. Or to be replaced.

With the CEOs of Twitter, Google, and Facebook (having testified) Thursday on the role social media plays in promoting the kinds of misinformation and far-right extremism that sparked the deadly Capitol attack, anti-monopoly experts are urging members of Congress not to allow the executives to divert attention away from their fundamentally nefarious business model that thrives on the spread of dangerous lies...

"It's no shocker that Facebook failed to tell us about how its technology is being used to manipulate voters and spread harmful misinformation. How many times are we going to be fooled by these profit-hungry monopolies before Congress finally acts?" said Ruby-Sachs. "Letting Facebook decide how it should be regulated is like letting a criminal decide their own sentence." - Common Dreams

Make the rich man pay up, for infrastructure

Makes perfect sense. It's most unfortunate, that the bulk of our elected "representatives" at the federal level are nothing but the rich man's whimpering, groveling curs.

If this sounds drearily familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it all before. Republicans are always frantic about spending unless they are the ones doing the spending (see: the massive 2017 tax cut for rich folks). The lines are being drawn for yet another bottomless gibberish festival from the right, designed only to impede if not destroy the progress promised by a full-fledged infrastructure bill with its eye on sustainability and the threat of climate disruption.

Before we get lost in that bog, I have an idea. The papers were awash yesterday with reports that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has all but gotten out of the business of taxing the wealthy, resulting in uncollected taxes estimated to add up to $1.4 trillion over 10 years. - Truthout

Many "nonprofit" charter schools are no such thing

This needs a much stronger response. Like ending the charter movement.

A new report by the Network for Public Education (NPE) explains why charter schools are often nonprofit in name only when they are associated with a for-profit management group.

NPE's report, titled "Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain," reveals that many charter schools have contracts with for-profit management groups, commonly called education management organizations (EMOs), which use the nonprofit status of charter schools to hide their business dealings. (Charter schools are defined as nonprofit entities in all states except Arizona.)

The Network for Public Education—an organization co-founded by education historian Diane Ravitch that advocates for public schools—states in the report that between September 2020 and February 2021, NPE identified more than 1,000 charter schools contracted with for-profit EMOs, including "directing schools to their related real estate and service corporations" more often than not.

The NPE report covers an astonishing range of enterprises that make up the for-profit charter school industry, and their array of profit-yielding business methods. - Jeff Bryant/AlterNet

A key point regarding the immigration situation

This is not about Biden-bashing. He inherited a terrible mess. Even if near-perfect measures are taken, it's going to be a while. And certainly corporate "news" media is back to pandering to the conservative-leaning older people that are its shrinking base. But this is important information.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order Trump invoked, known as Title 42 after the section of U.S. Code dealing with public health, allows for temporary entry suspensions, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used to expel any migrant, without screening for human trafficking or fear of return. An agreement with Mexico’s government allows the U.S. to expel Mexicans and Central Americans across the border, but other nationals are immediately deported to their country of origin. Those with humanitarian visas or residency in Mexico are also sent to Mexico.

Biden has kept the Title 42 order in place...

Most public-health experts say that Title 42 is a bogus health order that does little to stop the spread of COVID-19...

The main difference in Biden’s implementation is that border officials are no longer deporting unaccompanied children under Title 42. That decision, combined with confusion about Biden’s border policies among migrants, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied children taken into custody, transferred to the refugee office, and placed with a sponsor. In February, shelters received more than 7,000 unaccompanied children, double the number accepted in February 2020. - The American Prospect

Look who's saying raising the minimum wage would be good

This may be a sign that it's pretty much inevitable, if people keep plugging away. May be.

Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would deliver sizable benefits to low-wage workers and lift millions of people in the U.S. out of poverty while having little impact—positive or negative—on employment levels.

So says a new report assembled not by a progressive advocacy organization or a left-leaning think tank, but Wall Street titan Morgan Stanley, which found in a 75-page analysis that—contrary to the GOP's branding of the proposed $15-an-hour federal minimum wage as a job-killer—"the wealth of research points to no definitive conclusion on the impact higher wages have on employment."

"However," the report adds, "it is evident that the impact to employment... would be minimal, while the social benefits to lifting real wages of lower-income earners and millions out of poverty are substantial." - Common Dreams

There is a lot of PPP money left

And time is getting short.

One of the areas where the American Rescue Plan actually pulls back from previous coronavirus relief bills is on small business grants. There’s a roughly $25 billion fund for independent restaurants in there, and $15 billion in grants for businesses in low-income areas. And it funds a Community Navigator program to help smaller businesses access relief. But there’s nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars that has funneled through the Paycheck Protection Program so far. That means the Biden team can turn its attention to implementation, which could be better at this stage.

The current round of forgivable loans ends March 31—again, I still do not understand why there’s an end date on these programs—and to date, PPP has furnished $687 billion in loans to 7.5 million recipients. Another 250,000 applications are under review.

Most of the loans in this round have been “second draws,” from businesses that previously got a loan and seen serious drops in income. About $164 billion has gone out since the reauthorization in the December relief bill. That’s out of $284 billion available. So a little more than two months after reauthorization, about 56 percent of the available funds have been used. That takeup seems kind of low, especially considering that there are only three weeks left to apply. For context, in the previous three-week stretch, only $40 billion was approved, one-third of what’s available. - The American Prospect

Brutal long-term financial impacts of the pandemic

A lot of this could have been avoided, with better leadership and policy from the start. Maybe someday more voters will finally learn.

Still, about half of non-retired adults say the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will make it harder for them to achieve their long-term financial goals, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Among those who say their financial situation has gotten worse during the pandemic, 44% think it will take them three years or more to get back to where they were a year ago – including about one-in-ten who don’t think their finances will ever recover.

The economic fallout from COVID-19 continues to hit some segments of the population harder than others. Lower-income adults, as well as Hispanic and Asian Americans and adults younger than 30, are among the most likely to say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut since the outbreak began in February 2020.1 Among those who’ve had these experiences, lower-income and Black adults are particularly likely to say they have taken on debt or put off paying their bills in order to cover lost wages or salary. - Pew Research

Big Oil is bringing the greenwashing

This article covers a bunch of aspects of that. I found these paragraphs most notable.

Meanwhile, Hollub announced at her panel that Occidental doesn’t “expect to be an oil company in the next 15-20 years. We’ll be a carbon management company.”

What, exactly, does a “carbon management company” do? Based on Hollub’s answers, it seems the task involves mostly wrapping fossil fuels in a nicer-looking package. In January, Occidental completed its first shipment of what the company is calling “carbon-neutral oil,” which seems to be just normal oil that comes bundled with a bunch of carbon offsets for both the production and usage sides. Next, Occidental is apparently looking to start producing “net-zero oil,” which will be oil made with carbon capture and sequestration technologies attached to its production. (No fancy labels can do away with the fact that that oil, eventually, gets burned, and that downstream burning is the biggest source of emissions.)

The idea of simply stopping emissions at the source or even more wildly, sucking carbon out of the air, is the great white whale for oil companies who want, above all else, to keep producing their product while telling us they’re doing good and cutting emissions. Since emissions come from the production, transport, and burning of fossil fuels, there are two avenues the industry wants to deploy. The first is capturing carbon at the source of fossil fuel production, to either be stored permanently or used in a different way later. The other is a larger idea of simply removing carbon from the air more generally. Unfortunately, the former technology is tricky, expensive, and tough to implement; the latter has never been proven at scale. - Earther

Hopefully Pres. Biden won't be a war pig

This is about an airstrike that was ordered last week. I consider that to have been a negative, unnerving early indicator.

Members of the hoary foreign policy “blob” inside the Beltway told the Washington Post that the strike was intended to let the Iranians know that the US could not be pushed around, in advance of the opening of negotiations over the US return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

That’s the most damn fool thing I’ve ever heard.

The US tore up the nuclear deal in 2018 and never had abided by its part of the bargain, to lift economic sanctions on Iran. President Biden should concentrate on nuclear issues if he wants a nuclear accord, and avoid extraneous distractions like militias. - Informed Comment