Fossil fuels greedheads target climate divestment

Because of course they do. What does the future of humanity matter, when profits are at stake?

Harvard University’s September decision to stop investing in fossil fuel companies, and to let its current investments in the sector expire without renewal, was widely hailed as one of the biggest climate victories in recent history. And for good reason—it was the most significant win yet for the climate divestment movement, a decade-old initiative that’s applied a popular anti-apartheid activist tactic to get colleges, banks, charitable foundations, and religious organizations to stop funding oil and gas firms. Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the world—totaling $53 billion—meaning a deep pool of money is now out of Big Oil’s reach. This mission was also primarily driven by Harvard’s students; campus group Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard employed moves from meeting directly with administrators to storming the field during the annual football game against Yale. It’s all quite literally paid off.

Yet, as is the case with any successful social initiative, there’s now an institutional backlash. As Kate Aronoff has reported in the New Republic, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a Koch-linked nonprofit that helps state legislators craft right-wing policy—is writing model bills to protect fossil fuel investments, in essence making divestments like Harvard’s illegal. - Mother Jones

About that "crime surge"

This article is from a California-based blog. I'm passing it along because it also very much applies in Minnesota. Especially the parts about corporate "news" media and Party of Trump politicians.

Unfortunately, the reporting about crime is generally distorted, too. The FBI's published crime stats do not include “white collar” crime like wage theft and violations of the Clean Water Act. Despite recent protests from the Chamber of Commerce about pursuit of corporate criminals, "white-collar crime likely costs the American economy between $300 and $800 billion per year, while street crimes like burglary and theft cost around $16 billion."

...How bad is U.S. incarceration? With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. is the world’s "champion" incarcerator, jailing 25% of the world's inmates--more in absolute or per-capita numbers than any other nation. The demographically-identical Canadians cage one-seventh as many people, per capita.

So is Canadian crime greater than in the U.S.? No, it's about the same. - It's Simpler Than It Looks

Calling out crap polling

Or more to the point, the misuse of it. There certainly is a lot of that out there.

Admitting that their polls may not be the best measure of public opinion, and in some cases may in fact be seriously flawed, would undermine the credibility, not just of the generic ballot measure or Biden’s approval rating, but of all the other questions in the poll as well.

In short, there is a financial/corporate incentive for media poll reports not to tell the whole truth about the state of public opinion. As far as the news organization is concerned, regardless of what other polls show, public opinion is what their new poll says it is.

This is, of course, a reason not to put too much weight on any single report about an outlets’ polling results. - FAIR

For what it's worth, I provided my own take on the overall state of contemporary political polling, in the U.S., here.

Here's a way pandemics could be handled a lot better

Pretty obvious, actually, though not noted in corporate "news" media.

State and federal officials have called the expiration and similar moves necessary to keep hospitals staffed amid the Omicron surge, but many RNs are calling this argument a distraction, noting that the for-profit health care system artificially deflates staffing levels to protect hospital employers’ bottom lines. They are renewing calls to end the for-profit health care system altogether and move to a single-payer system. Under a single-payer system, NNU argues, hospitals could, and likely would, have been staffed-up such that facilities could safely weather the temporary loss of employees who were out sick.

Profit-driven hospitals’ continual failure to invest in safe staffing is what’s creating the kind of dangerous working conditions driving nurses away from the profession at a time when they are needed most, unionized RNs say. “Nurses will tell you we are failing because we have let the interests of corporations and our hospital employers dictate our country’s response to this virus. Their goal is profit, not saving lives,” (National Nurses United President Zenei) Triunfo-Cortez said during a press conference last week. - Truthout

A different take on contemporary political journalism

Different from mine, that is. I typically explain corporate media's failures in terms of their need to stay afloat financially, along with the owners' political agendas. This points out some other plausible factors.

But we also would do well to think about why that might be the case. What’s driving the media’s current failures?

Many critics point the finger at traditional journalistic norms, and with good reason: Some of the problems are baked into the professional values and habits of U.S. journalism. Newsroom ethnographers as far back as the 1970s observed that journalists wrote with two aims in mind: to avoid being accused of political bias and to impress other journalists. Both tendencies persist today. Skittishness about being seen as biased resulted in the both-sidesism that too often characterized coverage of Trump. Meanwhile, coverage of the Build Back Better bill exemplified journalism’s insular tendencies, providing a play-by-play of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s objections rather than explaining the legislation’s actual content and its implications for Americans.

Looking at journalists’ professional values and habits of mind can help explain why the news so often falls short of what democracy needs. But it is not enough. We also need to remember that journalism is a job, and journalists are workers. In their book on creative labor, cultural sociologists David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker argue that “bad work”—that is, work that is boring, insecure, isolating, excessive, or poorly compensated—is more likely to produce poor-quality cultural products. Unsurprisingly, the opposite is true of “good work”—work that is fairly compensated, secure, autonomous, and interesting. If we want to understand why journalists are creating so much news that is of so little civic value, we need to look closely at the conditions under which they labor. - The American Prospect

Deconstructing Biden's wretched foreign policy

Wretched, exceedingly hypocritical, and arguably quite dangerous. This gets into quite a bit of detail, in making its compelling case.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order.

This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest.

This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO.

The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice. - Toward Freedom

Labor in 2021, and right now

A good overview.

For the labor movement in the United States, 2021 was a year defined by the opening of new fronts. Though embattled and widely disempowered, U.S. workers and union organizers have taken up new mantles. Labor militancy has flared in response to both novel pressures and age-old antagonisms. The unique stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized already-fractious arrangements — the grievances of the U.S. working class were mounting long before March 2020, a function of the decades of stagnation and austerity that have been imposed by concentrated private power.

Waves of protests and resignations signaled widespread disenchantment with the exploitative and authoritarian world of work, in a year that was regularly punctuated by organized action...

That said, advances remain tentative. It’s true that this year’s labor struggles played out across an unusually broad array of industries, but this variety belied the comparatively small scope of the 2021 “strike wave,” as it was deemed by many. The number of workers engaged in collective action fell short of the highs of recent years, as did the number of new union election filings. Recalcitrant energies are building, but they have yet to be organized, structured and channeled by a labor movement in which membership rates have long been in precipitous decline. - Truthout

How about holding military bosses accountable?

The suggestions broached in this article, by Andrew Bacevich, are obviously unlikely to become reality any time soon. But they're still well worth knowing about.

Is it impolite, then, to ask if the nation is getting an adequate return on its investment in military power? Simply put, are we getting our money’s worth? And what standard should we use in answering that question?

Let me suggest using the military’s own standard...

A similar purge is needed now. Commander-in-chief Biden should remove certain active-duty senior officers from their posts without further ado. General Mark Milley, the discredited chair of the Joint Chiefs, would be an obvious example. General Kenneth McKenzie, who oversaw the embarrassing conclusion of the Afghanistan War as head of Central Command, is another. Requiring both of those prominent officers to retire would signal that unsatisfactory performance does indeed have consequences, a principle from which neither the private who loses a rifle nor the four stars who lose wars should be exempt...

Which brings us to the case of retired four-star general Lloyd Austin, former Iraq War and CENTCOM commander. As a freshly minted civilian, Austin presides as the first Black defense secretary, a notable distinction given that senior Pentagon officials have tended to be white or male (and usually both). And while, by all reports, General Austin is an upright citizen and decent human being, it’s become increasingly clear that he lacks qualities the nation needs when critically examining this country’s less-than-awesome military performance, which should be the order of the day. Whatever suit he may wear to the office, he remains a general — and that is a problem. - TomDispatch

States are sitting on federal funds while people practically starve

The failures of Clinton-era "welfare reform" have been well-documented. But there's always new data.

When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.

Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.

According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.

States have held on to more of this welfare money amid rising poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.1% of children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, up from 14.4% the year before. The poverty rate also ticked up for people aged 18 to 64, from 9.4% to 10.4%. As unused TANF dollars have accumulated, applications to the cash assistance program have waned, though it’s not for a lack of need, say experts and people who have applied to the program. - ProPublica