Head of Cop29 is a fossil fuels guy

As if it wasn't already clear enough that the Cop's are mostly about corporate greenwashing.

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

The campaign group Global Witness posed undercover as a fake oil and gas group asking for deals to be facilitated in exchange for sponsoring the event.

In the calls, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, agreed to this and spoke of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Cop officials also introduced the fake investor to a senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar to discuss investment opportunities. - The Guardian

Big Tech is prostrating itself before Trump

And all of us will probably pay, sooner or later. I'd say the top likelihood is after the AI bros get to create a bubble and it bursts.

Donald Trump was re-elected President of the United States on Tuesday, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris not just in the Electoral College tally but also in the popular vote. And Big Tech leaders wasted no time congratulating Trump on Wednesday, tweeting out messages that make it clear they’re ready to serve his needs however they can. It feels like a preview of the next phase, where so many will go meet Trump in person and kiss the ring of the 47th president, a man who’s promised to become a dictator on day one and deport millions of people in a scheme that’s pretty much guaranteed to devastate the economy. And it’s already making us nauseous. - Gizmodo

Big Finance is having its doubts about AI

For me the noteworthy thing is that even Wall Street, which is generally pretty gullible about The Next Big Thing, is displaying at least a measure of rational skepticism about artificial "intelligence."

For tech’s biggest players, this earnings season is starting to feel like a scene from the movie Jerry Maguire— and the “show me the money” demands aren’t working out any better than they did for Tom Cruise. Some analysts are even dubbing this the “show me the money” quarter, as Wall Street’s patience with massive AI spending begins to wear thin...

Almost two years after ChatGPT kicked off Silicon Valley’s AI gold rush, this week’s tech earnings revealed both the promise and the staggering price tag of the AI revolution. While companies reported significant gains from AI initiatives —Meta’s ad prices up 11%, Google Cloud revenue surging 35% to $11.4 billion, Amazon’s AWS growing 19% to $27.5 billion — their warnings about future spending sparked a broad market retreat…

Tech executives’ unwavering faith in AI’s potential stands in stark contrast to investors’ growing anxiety about the costs. - Quartz

New bank rules should make it easier to switch

I haven't seen anything about court battles over this. Maybe the big banks are more or less OK with it.

It’s about to get harder for banks to hold onto unsatisfied customers — and their money.

It has long been a challenge for people to ditch the banks where they keep their checking accounts. Blame tricky data transfer processes, lengthy and time-consuming requests, and other hurdles. But the first so-called open banking rules in the U.S. aims to change that.

New rules finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Tuesday will require banks to simplify how customers transfer their data from one bank to another without losing their transaction and bill history.

The aim of the regulations, formally known as 1033, is to empower consumers by giving them unprecedented control over their financial data, including who to share it with and when. As a result, customers will be able to direct their bank to move their account to a competing one with ease and use third-party applications with just the click of a button — all without paying a fee.

“Imagine being able to switch banks as easily as switching streaming services,” said James McCarthy, a founding member of the CFPB who is now chairman of financial services solutions firm McCarthy Hatch. “That’s what it’s really going to be like.” - Quartz

The first big US carbon sequestration plant is spouting leaks

People have been warning for years that this was pretty much inevitable.

ADM’s facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country, and it’s on the forefront of a booming, multibillion-dollar carbon capture and storage, or CCS, industry that promises to permanently sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide deep underground.

The emerging technology has become a cornerstone of government strategies to slash fossil fuel emissions and meet climate goals. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, has supercharged industry subsidies and tax credits and set off a CCS gold rush…

In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site after it was reported by E&E News, which covers energy and environmental issues. Additional testing mandated by the EPA turned up a second leak later that month. - Grist

Utilities are doing a pitiful job in clean energy transition

This is unsurprising on the whole, but I admit that I was a little startled to see how little is being done.

To address the climate crisis, utilities must transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. We published the first Dirty Truth Report in 2021, evaluating utility plans to transition to clean energy based on their commitments to retire coal, build clean energy, and not build new gas through 2030. In 2021, these utilities failed to plan for the clean energy transition, scoring an aggregate of 17 out of 100.1. Unfortunately, instead of correcting course, many utilities continue to fail to appropriately prepare for a clean energy future, wasting time as the clean energy transition becomes more urgent. This failure has led to the timing and cost challenges that these companies are now trying to use as excuses to remain reliant on fossil fuels.

The solutions to move away from fossil fuels exist today. Utilities are well positioned to take action with cost reductions in clean energy, strong public support for the clean energy transition, and government support for climate solutions... - Sierra Club

Tech bros hype military AI

That anyone regards this with terminology like "promise" and "game-changing" is despicable.

Since the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, scholars have speculated about the technology’s implications for the character, if not nature, of war. The promise of AI on battlefields and in war rooms has beguiled scholars. They characterize AI as “game-changing,” “revolutionary,” and “perilous,” especially given the potential of great power war involving the United States and China or Russia...

While experts caution that militaries are confronting a “eureka” or “Oppenheimer” moment, harkening back to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, this characterization distorts the merits and limits of AI for warfighting. It encourages policymakers and defense officials to follow what can be called a “primrose path of AI-enabled warfare,” which is codified in the US military’s “third offset” strategy. This vision of AI-enabled warfare is fueled by gross prognostications and over-determination of emerging capabilities enhanced with some form of AI, rather than rigorous empirical analysis of its implications across all (tactical, operational, and strategic) levels of war.

The current debate on military AI is largely driven by “tech bros” and other entrepreneurs who stand to profit immensely from militaries’ uptake of AI-enabled capabilities. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Do online lie-spreaders always believe themselves?

No, they don't. This is a good discussion. I personally believe, though, that in the bigger picture it's the true believers who are most effective.

There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.

They are opportunists. These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.

There are several types of this sort of conspiracy-spreader trying to influence you. - The Conversation

Apparently antimicrobial resistance isn't that big a deal

Talk about Big Ag capture

Last May, the United Nations (U.N.) released the first draft of a global plan to tackle antibiotic resistance that aligned with a call from world leaders’ expert advisors to take “bold and specific action.” That included a commitment to reduce the use of antibiotics used in the food and agriculture system by 30 percent by 2030.

But when those leaders (met at the U.N. in September) to adopt the Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance, that concrete goal and others (were) missing from the latest draft.

After months of negotiations and edits to the proposal, these ambitious—and likely effective—commitments have been replaced with a toothless target: to “strive to meaningfully reduce” antibiotic use in agriculture. Now, experts and advocates are concerned that this new, vague provision, among other weakened commitments, will be included in the final declaration…

U.S. officials were at least partially responsible for weakening the U.N. declaration’s commitments on animal agriculture. - Civil Eats

Chicago public school teachers have great ideas

But they still face massive opposition from, among others, corporate Dems.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption. - Nation of Change

U.S. still brings up the rear on healthcare

Among "developed" nations. I have yet to see a more apt phrase than "profits over people" to descibe what's wrong.

A report out Thursday shows that the United States' for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.

The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.

"Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents," the report states. "Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier." - Common Dreams

New Orleans finally starts moving away from its failed all-charter approach

On a related note, believe it or not the Minnesota Star Tribune, of all outlets, has been publishing articles about how the charter industry/grifting con is failing this state.

In August, more than 300 students started the school year in the first traditional school run directly by the New Orleans school district since 2019. It’s the first time the district has opened its own school since Hurricane Katrina swept through the city nearly two decades ago.

The pre-K-8 school, named after New Orleans cultural and civil rights icon Leah Chase, came together in just a handful of months. Its opening ends the city’s five-year run as the only all-charter school district in the nation. Charter schools receive public funding, but are independently run…

(Superintendent Avis) Williams said the decision to open the school was what the board, and community, wanted.

“That was just something the community has impressed upon our board members, and they did vote unanimously for us to direct-run the Leah Chase School and for us to direct-run more schools,” Williams said.

Both the Recovery School District – a special statewide district created to manage underperforming schools – and New Orleans Public Schools had poured money into renovating and abating asbestos in the building that housed Lafayette Academy that is now the site of the Leah Chase School. That was one factor in wanting to keep this particular building open. But more than anything, the decision stemmed from a growing sentiment in the community, and among newer board members, that it’s time for the district to have a traditional school again, said Carlos Zervigon, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board whose district includes the Leah Chase School. - The Hechinger Report

The Border Patrol's rescue program is being run by the wrong people

It should be turned over to people without massive conflicts of interest, and who lack a very spotty record in general.

Many local officials and residents believe that the Border Patrol should bear primary responsibility for migrant rescues and recoveries. The agency is part of CBP, which is itself part of the Department of Homeland Security, and its resources dwarf those of local emergency teams and nonprofits. But some aid workers and border researchers see a conflict of interest between the agency’s primary mandate, which is to detain and deport migrants, and the humanitarian goal of saving lives. Both outside critics and Border Patrol agents acknowledge that the two goals are intertwined, but only the former see this as a problem.

Type Investigations and High Country News looked into the complicated relationship between the Border Patrol’s law enforcement and rescue operations, using internal documents, data logs, congressional reports, migrant accounts and the testimony of agents. These records reveal how the agency’s dogged pursuit of migrants can increase the danger for those same migrants, occasionally ending in tragedy. Migrants drown or fall off cliffs; they die in car crashes and from the direct use of force by Border Patrol agents. While the agency does appear to pick up thousands of migrant callers alive, those rescues often end in arrest and deportation. So far, there has been little public accountability for the program’s failures, while the data shows that hundreds of migrants who reach out for help fall through the cracks and are never seen again. - High Country News

Agriculture commissioners are sticking their noses where they don't belong

Sone state ag commissioners are OK. Some aren't. This is from an article that goes into depth on the matter.

America’s 50 state agriculture commissioners receive far less attention and news coverage than most other statewide officials, such as governors and attorneys general.

However, these individuals hold significant influence over local farming policies, oversee state agencies dedicated to food safety and often set the tone for how environmental regulations are enforced within the local agriculture sector…

“The work is so broad with regards to fuel production, with regards to clothing (production), food safety, natural disaster response, forest management,” said RJ Karney, senior director of public policy for the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. “It’s not just about rural communities and their farms.”

…“It is often hard to tell who has an R or has a D next to their name,” said Karney, referring to Republican or Democratic officials.

But many of the elected commissioners have increasingly latched onto partisan issues, including some that would not appear to have much of a connection to agriculture policies. - Investigate Midwest

Medicare Advantage could have been partly fixed a while ago

And an awful lot of money could have been saved.

A decade ago, federal officials drafted a plan to discourage Medicare Advantage health insurers from overcharging the government by billions of dollars — only to abruptly back off amid an “uproar” from the industry, newly released court filings show.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published the draft regulation in January 2014. The rule would have required health plans, when examining patient’s medical records, to identify overpayments by CMS and refund them to the government.

But in May 2014, CMS dropped the idea without any public explanation. Newly released court depositions show that agency officials repeatedly cited concern about pressure from the industry. - Truthout

Over half of world's people don't have clean drinking water

And it's getting worse, fast.

More than half of people on Earth — approximately 4 billion— lack access to safe drinking water, which is double the number estimated in 2020, a new study by REACH global research program has found...

“[A]n estimated 4.4 billion people lack safe drinking water across 135 low- and middle- income countries, which is more than double the global estimate made in 2020,” the study, published in the journal Science, said. “According to the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation resolution declared by the United Nations, water services must ensure sufficient quantity, safety, reliability, physical proximity, affordability, and nondiscrimination. These goals are challenging in rural areas of Africa and Asia and in sparsely populated regions where safe drinking water services on premises are costly and complicated to maintain.” - EcoWatch

Plastics industry seeks approval for another con

Actually, a lot of people still don’t know about the realities of plastics recycling in general.

Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?

They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.

But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators. - ProPublica

A new Biden effort at consumer protections

This looks great, but whether it can survive opposition, especially from right-wing federal "judges," is another matter. Well worth pushing hard for, in any case.

The Biden administration has launched a sweeping consumer protection campaign titled “Time Is Money,” targeting corporate practices that exploit consumers through deliberately poor customer service, hard-to-cancel services, and other manipulative tactics. This initiative is part of a broader effort by the administration to hold corporations accountable and protect consumers from unfair business practices.

The “Time Is Money” initiative is the latest in a series of consumer protection efforts under President Joe Biden’s administration. The White House has made it clear that improving customer experience and protecting consumers from corporate exploitation are key priorities. This campaign builds on previous initiatives, including a 2021 executive order aimed at streamlining federal services and recent efforts to crack down on junk fees.

Neera Tanden, the White House domestic policy adviser, emphasized the administration’s commitment to these issues, stating, “The administration is cracking down on all the ways that companies—through paperwork, hold times, and general aggravation—waste people’s money, waste people’s time.” - Nation of Change

Some realities about generative AI seem to be setting in

While the stock market "crash" turned out to be not much to worry about, this story contains a good deal of worthy, trenchant analysis.

This is it. Generative AI, as a commercial tech phenomenon, has reached its apex. The hype is evaporating. The tech is too unreliable, too often. The vibes are terrible. The air is escaping from the bubble. To me, the question is more about whether the air will rush out all at once, sending the tech sector careening downward like a balloon that someone blew up, failed to tie off properly, and let go—or more slowly, shrinking down to size in gradual sputters, while emitting embarrassing fart sounds, like a balloon being deliberately pinched around the opening by a smirking teenager.

But come on. The jig is up. The technology that was at this time last year being somberly touted as so powerful that it posed an existential threat to humanity is now worrying investors because it is apparently incapable of generating passable marketing emails reliably enough. We’ve had at least a year of companies shelling out for business-grade generative AI, and the results—painted as shinily as possible from a banking and investment sector that would love nothing more than a new technology that can automate office work and creative labor—are one big “meh.” - Blood in the Machine

Facts show how badly the red state South lags

This wouldn't have anything to do with generations of right-wing state governance, would it? And it's fundamentally up to the region's residents to change that.

- For over four decades, the typical worker in the South has been paid less than their counterparts in every other region of the country.

- The share of workers in the South who are paid less than $15 per hour—22% in 2021—is substantially higher than that of any other region.

- Workers across the South are the least likely to receive employer-provided health insurance or a pension compared with workers in other regions. They are also least likely to have paid sick leave.

- The South has by far the lowest rates of union coverage; the states with the lowest rates in 2023 are South Carolina (3%), North Carolina (3.3%), and Louisiana (5.1%)—compared with 11.2% nationally. - EPI

Big Filthy Fossil Fuels often gets paid no matter what

This is part of an in-depth sries.

Before the sun set on his inauguration day, Joe Biden reversed a raft of his predecessor’s deregulation policies with the stroke of a pen. Among them was an order revoking the permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Canceling the project was a campaign pledge to address the climate crisis. But looming over that decision was the risk that an obscure but powerful international legal system could force the United States to pay billions of dollars to Keystone XL’s Canadian developer, TC Energy.

That system—embedded in thousands of trade and investment treaties—allows corporations to drag governments before panels of arbitrators, usually behind closed doors. Governments have been ordered to pay billions of dollars in damages to oil and mining companies for violating those treaties. While the system was intended to protect foreign investors from unfair treatment or asset seizure, many environmental advocates, lawyers and politicians say it is now being used to win awards from governments that enact new environmental regulations or raise taxes on polluting industries.

Increasingly, these critics warn the system threatens climate action by punishing governments that phase out fossil fuels. - Inside Climate News

Big Meat and Big Dairy spend pittances on cutting emissions

They actually spend considerably more on greenwashing.

Global meat and dairy giants are investing just a fraction of their revenues into cutting emissions despite being among the world’s largest polluters, according to new estimates.

Company spending on advertising outstripped that on low-carbon solutions, the report by campaign group Changing Markets Foundation found, as corporations ramped up attempts to win consumers over with their green credentials.

The meat and dairy sector – responsible for over 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – has come under increasing pressure in recent years to tackle major climate harms...

None of the companies in the report had targets to cut emissions that aligned with guidance from UN experts.

The report found that the sector failed to take action on tackling emissions, while also spending millions on marketing sustainability claims. Companies have seen a spate of greenwashing allegations in recent years, with multiple firms forced to pull misleading ads – including Brazilian meat giant JBS, which last year was ordered by the U.S. advertising watchdog to stop making “net zero” claims. - DeSmog

Drug-based deportations up, even when the drug is no longer illegal

You can click to the actual report from the linked webpage.

A new joint report from Human Rights Watch and the Drug Policy Alliance shows thousands of people are being deported every year for drug offenses that in many cases no longer exist under state laws, harming and separating immigrant families.

Punitive federal immigration laws separate families, destabilize communities, and terrorize noncitizens, all while overdose deaths have risen and drugs have become more potent and available. - Drug Policy Alliance

Hawai'i bans seabed mining

Would-be miners will of course scurry, shrieking, to the courts. But ultimately this SCOTUS is more or less partial to states' rights, so we'll see.

On July 9, Governor Josh Green signed the Hawai’i Seabed Mining Prevention Act (SB 2575) into law, following the bill’s successful passage in the Hawaii Senate and Assembly. The new law prohibits the mining, extraction, and removal of minerals from the seabed in Hawai‘i’s marine waters while allowing exceptions for beach replenishment and scientific research – aligning with precautionary principles and protecting Native Hawaiian rights. Surfrider’s Hawai’i chapters supported the bill through public education and grassroots advocacy.

While the ban only covers waters out to three miles from shore from Hawaiʻi, it reflects a growing opposition to deep-sea mining across the globe. Industry interest in seabed mining is exploding, but government oversight in international waters remains severely lacking. The United Nations has designated the International Seabed Authority to govern activities, but they have limited authority and have yet to establish regulations or a scientific review process. The passage of the Hawaii bill is indicative of increasing pushback from U.S. states, countries, Indigenous peoples, and the public to seabed mining proposals in the world’s ocean. - Surfrider

The IRA isn't perfect, but it's doing plenty of good

They had to throw a lot of crap, like nuclear and pipelines, into it to get it passed. But the good stuff is working.

The Inflation Reduction Act turns two in August, and the potential impact of the legislation is increasingly coming into view as federal guidance is issued on the law’s provisions and its tax incentives increasingly spur private investment.

So far this year, 41 major clean energy projects and $12.6 billion in private investment have been announced, according to business group E2, and 2024 has seen the IRS issue final guidance for the IRA’s prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements as well as its tax credit transferability mechanism. - Utility Dive

Community solar is getting it done

Now if Big Energy would quit trying to hinder it.

Community solar allows customers to reap electric bill savings by subscribing to a share of a local solar project, rather than installing their own array. It’s an arrangement that ideally makes the benefits of solar more accessible to people who live in rental or multifamily housing and those who just can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop systems. Forty-two states have community solar projects in place — but the precise nature of who has benefited remained unclear. Until now.

A June study by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that analyzed data from 11 states found that people who adopt community solar are 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings, are 4.4 times more likely to rent, and earn 23 percent less annual income than rooftop solar adopters, who skew wealthy.

“Community solar is delivering on its promise,” said Eric O’Shaughnessy, the lead author of the peer-reviewed study, an affiliate at LBNL, and a renewable energy research analyst at Clean Kilowatts. - Canary Media

The Gulf dead zone is still big and dead

There's been no real progress. Big Ag, among others, has seen to that.

The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force, a collaboration of state, federal and tribal agencies charged with controlling fertilizer pollution, told Congress last fall that nitrogen loads in the Mississippi River basin decreased 23% from the baseline period to 2021.

But the five-year running average – which accounts for extremely wet and dry years more common with climate change – tells a different story. By that measure, nitrogen is only slightly below baseline and well above the 20% target. Phosphorus loads worsened since the baseline period.

The oxygen-deprived ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf is predicted to be 5,827 square miles this summer, 5% larger than average, according to a forecast last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two long-time Gulf researchers predict a smaller ‘dead zone’, but only because of warming ocean temperatures, not because of progress reducing nutrients in the Mississippi River basin. - Investigate Midwest

Anti-protest bills tell of the growing right-wing freakout

I get how people whose nature + nurture led them into their mindsets. Not that that excuses this.

Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, 21 states have passed nearly 50 laws to restrict protest. In many ways, the origins of this assault can be traced to a single event nearly 10 years ago: the police killing of a Black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His death and the protests that followed birthed the Black Lives Matter movement, a global reckoning with racism, policing, and surveillance.

State legislatures, many dominated by Republicans, have introduced over 250 anti-protest bills since the Ferguson Uprising often supported by the many of the same forces united against student protesters today: law enforcement, Republican leadership, pro-Israel lobbyists and right wing operatives.

“Americans seem to increasingly believe that protests are only legitimate and deserving of protection if they advance a message that we agree with,” says Elly Page, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). “If the right to protest isn’t protected for everyone, it isn’t protected for anyone.” - Mother Jones

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

The SEC has given crypto a bright green light, and that's bad

A facile, fraught, and above all just plain stupid decision.

Over the past several decades, there have been rapid and fundamental changes in the finance and banking sectors. The banking reforms of the New Deal, which endured up until about 1980 and provided a relative degree of banking and financial stability, were reversed by the neoliberal counterrevolution with an eye toward increasing profits and shredding social responsibility. A new book by world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein, Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us, shows us the result: a financial system dominated by megabanks and shadow financial institutions prone to instability and crises that at the same time rely on government bailouts.

The neoliberal financial system, controlled by what Epstein calls “The Bankers’ Club,” benefits exclusively powerful people and institutions, is linked to the growing inequality of wealth and income, and is a net drain to the U.S. economy. Nonetheless, bankers not only see themselves as “essential workers,” a view that Epstein shreds into pieces, but as former Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein claimed, many think they do “God’s work.”

The latest development in the evolution of the modern financial system is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of bitcoin exchange-traded funds last month, concluding a decade-long fight and marking a turning point for cryptocurrency. This may be a game changer for the global money system but could also very well lead us to another financial crisis. - Truthout

Don't count on the ultra-privileged for anything

There's still a lot of propaganda out there regarding the ultra-wealthy. Everyone should know better.

Billionaires have been minted at a dizzying pace in the last few decades — in 1987 Forbes counted 140, while in 2023 the tally was 2,640 — and we’ve now returned to the point in the cycle where enormous piles of wealth are passed on to the next generation. “This is how wealth dynasties are formed,” says Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the left-leaning think tank Institute for Policy Studies. The only thing that’s new in 2024 is that the piles of money are bigger than ever.

Not only are there more billionaires today, their average wealth keeps ticking up too, thanks to historic stock market returns. On top of that, heirs are receiving wealth transfers earlier in life, rather than waiting for the death or near death of a family member. All this underscores the truth that having money remains the best way to get more money. Perhaps there’s nowhere that’s truer than in the US, home to the most billionaires, despite the pervasive myth of hardscrabble, self-made entrepreneurs climbing to the top of the socioeconomic ladder. If you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay poor; if you’re born super rich, you’ll probably get even richer...

Don’t hold your breath for an onslaught of billionaire heirs suddenly giving their inheritances away for the betterment of society. One insight from the UBS report is that heirs tend to be much less interested in philanthropy than first-gen billionaires. A theory as to why, according to Collins, is that “the first generation has some confidence in their ability to create wealth,” while the second generation doesn’t. “We know that the second generation, third generation are more concerned about protecting wealth than creating it,” he continues. “They invest a lot in wealth defense; they invest a lot in lobbying.” That means opposing any wealth tax or income tax hikes on the rich, or fighting regulations that would close loopholes that have long allowed billionaires to minimize what they owe to the government. It’s a sign that “the tax system on wealth has become more optional,” says Collins. - Vox

Return-to-office is corporate BS

I've worked in places where one or more managers were, it would be fair to say, rather on the neurotic and controlling side. So I can relate. Perhaps you can as well.

Your manager may suggest that returning to the office is imperative for the company’s success, workplace culture, and overall productivity. However, there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that’s bullshit. New research out of the University of Pittsburgh examined 137 of America’s largest corporations and found that return-to-office mandates did not result in significant improvements to firm performance.

“Using a sample of S&P 500 firms, we examine determinants and consequences of U.S. firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates,” said researchers from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. The study found that managers use RTO mandates “to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat,” and concluded that “we do not find significant changes in firm performance in terms of profitability and stock market valuation after the RTO mandates.” - Gizmodo

Mixed numbers for unions in 2023

More, and more effective, pro-worker legislation would help.

In 2023, 16.2 million workers were represented by a union—an increase of 191,000. At the same time, the percentage of workers represented by a union decreased from 11.3% to 11.2%, as unionization efforts were unable to keep pace with 2023’s strong job growth.

By sector, private-sector unionization rose to 6.9% in 2023, while public-sector unionization declined to 36.0%...
 
These statistics don’t capture the number of workers who want to join unions. Evidence suggests that in 2023, more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union but couldn’t do so. - EPI

Options for regulating AI

I remain an AI skeptic. When has anything from Big Tech ever ultimately come anywhere near living up to the hype? But it is time to put strict regulation on AI. This article discusses some aspects.

Concern about generative artificial intelligence technologies seems to be growing almost as fast as the spread of the technologies themselves. These worries are driven by unease about the possible spread of disinformation at a scale never seen before, and fears of loss of employment, loss of control over creative works and, more futuristically, AI becoming so powerful that it causes extinction of the human species...

In light of the drive to regulate AI, it is important to consider which approaches to regulation are feasible. There are two aspects to this question: what is technologically feasible today and what is economically feasible. It’s also important to look at both the training data that goes into an AI model and the model’s output. - The Conversation

Private equity is going after life insurance

I am so sick of seeing shit like this about private equity. But it is the inescapable present reality.

Private equity firms continue to stalk insurance company takeovers and critics say the potential for a financial disaster grows along with that trend.

Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that advocates for stronger regulation of Wall Street firms, is the latest group to raise alarm bells on what it deems to be risky private equity investment of policyholder funds.

AFR's new study grew out of its analysis of the relationship between private equity and public pension funds, said Andrew Park, senior policy analyst for the group. The PE impact on pensions is now understood, he explained.

"What has been less understood is how much of this new capital that private equity is getting is coming from the acquisition of insurance companies, and then in turn, insurance companies buying up a lot of the assets that private equity tends to originate," he added. "It's almost like you have this circular financing scheme that has been created now with private equity and insurance."

By the second half of 2023, private equity firms owned $774 billion in life insurance assets, or 9% percent of the life insurance industry, according to the AM Best insurance analyst. Likewise, PE firms are estimated to manage $5.7 trillion in global assets, giving these firms ample ability to buy up even more insurance companies, AFR noted.

The AFR report, Risky Business: Private Equity’s Life Insurance Gambit, comes amid growing pressure on private equity firms to submit to stronger oversight. Over the past month, the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the International Monetary Fund both released their own reports questioning private-equity control of insurers. - Insurance News Net

COP28 sucked when it came to food systems

And, many would argue, everything else. I'm highlighting this:

Despite the spotlight on food systems at COP28, the final decisions said little about the urgent need for transformative shifts toward agroecology to address the climate crisis.

The Global Stocktake decision, designed to inform governments as they ramp up their national-level climate plans, failed to strengthen climate finance commitments. The final report contains only high-level principles about food systems without concrete guidance on reducing or preventing food system emissions or strengthening their adaptive capacity. Left without strong guidance, countries now must ambitiously push beyond the COP28 stocktake recommendations to reform climate policies and transition food systems to avoid the loss and damage from a worsening climate. Countries in the Global North, home to the highest-emitting agriculture systems and with access to the most resources, must spearhead climate action independent of the UNFCCC. - IATP

The SEC may save crypto

Which they absolutely should not do.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has done a decent job of protecting the public from cryptocurrency scams, is on the verge of making a disastrous decision to allow financial companies to offer the equivalent of exchange-traded funds comprised of Bitcoins.

The sponsors include BlackRock, Fidelity, and 11 other firms.

In anticipation of a favorable SEC ruling, the price of Bitcoin, which had languished around $25,000 as recently as last September, has been bid up to over $45,000. The financial press has reported that BlackRock alone has at least $2 billion lined up for this play and that the first-quarter trading volume could be $40 billion. With crypto mercifully dying of its own weight, the SEC could throw it a lifeline.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who once taught a course on crypto at MIT, has long warned that creations like Bitcoin, backed by nothing other than speculative expectations of investors, are dubious investments lacking the safeguards that the securities laws impose on stocks and bonds. Exchange-traded funds made up of Bitcoins operate at one further remove from scrutiny. The main beneficiaries are the financial companies that propose to offer them. - The American Prospect

Child labor to the rescue!

Plenty of people apparently do want a return to the time and place of, say, Charles Dickens. Do they ever listen to themselves at all?

One would never have thought that a “Year in Review” — almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century — would be discussing the growing scourge of child labor. The 19th century, maybe. But 2023? Really?

Yes, really.

Not only that, but some of the discussion around child labor is not focused on how to eliminate it, but how to increase it.

Yes, really...

The combination of a tight labor market, an abundant supply of kids — especially immigrant kids — needing jobs, low penalties and lack of enforcement resources are fueling the rise of child labor. - DC Report

Clean energy money goes to greenwash CAFOs

This is just one example of the sort of thing that's happening too often in too many ways. Corn-based ethanol fuel is the biggest example, overall.

Now, a controversial energy source claims a larger share of these federal dollars in Wisconsin than systems like solar and wind. Biogas, a fuel created from livestock waste, has become increasingly popular on farms nationwide in the past two decades, and in Wisconsin, biogas projects are receiving a growing portion of REAP funding.

Analysis of the national program funding for rural clean energy in Wisconsin since 2012 found biogas digester projects have received more money in the past two years than every solar project combined since 2012. Wisconsin biogas projects funded by REAP receive $1.3 million on average, roughly 18 times the average amount REAP gave to upgrade outdated machinery and energy-hogging equipment on farms and rural businesses. Wisconsin biogas projects funded by REAP receive 50 times the average funding compared to their solar counterparts...

Critics of biogas say the technology only exists because of the massive amount of waste created on farms with thousands of heads of livestock. These Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, have been linked to various cancers and public health risks caused by waste runoff. Some research suggests that the climate benefits of digesters aren’t as great as the industry claims. - Barn Raiser