 10 November 19 “Reasonable” Doesn’t Get Us a Damn Thing
Reasonable fundraising approaches, the kind that have worked for decades no longer stimulate any meaningful donations at all. People are fully prepared to fly through here and completely ignore funding, without the slightest concern for how all this gets paid for.
This never used to happen. It is forcing us to adopt far more stringent fundraising measures. Completely wrong, completely unnecessary. This works on reader donations. It always has.
Stop. Donate. Please.
Marc Ash
Sure, I'll make a donation!Founder, Reader Supported News Update My Monthly Donation
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts CA 95611 |
10 November 19
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "History is littered with bad political systems. They are not hard to identify. They all, in some way, apportion political power to a small group that does not fairly represent the interests of all the people."
Seattle is home to Amazon, one of the world’s most powerful corporations, as well as to a city council that has tended to have troublesome ideas like “the trillion-dollar corporation led by America’s richest man that is headquartered in our city should pay a tax to help house the 11,000 homeless people here”. When the city council passed such a tax on Seattle’s biggest businesses last year, it took Amazon less than a month to get it repealed, using economic threats and political spending. But that wasn’t enough. For the city council elections this year, Amazon poured $1.5m into a business-backed effort to elect a slate of friendly candidates. Though vote counting is still going on, it looks like Bezos and co fell short of their goal – the business slate picked up a seat, and the final tally may still show they’ve defeated their greatest enemy, socialist Kshama Sawant, but they did not succeed in seizing full control of the council.
Still, any crowing by progressives about this minor speed bump in the path of capital is a bit too pat. The head tax that Amazon defeated would have cost the company more than $10m per year. They spent $1.5m on this election to pick up one or two seats. That is not a meaningful defeat for a company this powerful – it is a data point. At these prices, Amazon could happily spend, say, $7.5m on the next election and still come out ahead in terms of the financial risk they face from the left. The corporate thought process does not dictate that the company should now slink away chastened. It dictates that the company should spend more next time. Elections happen all the time, but the system remains stacked in Amazon’s favor. Progressives will always have to expend vast amounts of energy organizing thousands and thousands of people to act in concert to maintain their tenuous hold on power. All corporations have to do is write a check. At this unequal work rate, one side is bound to get tired before the other.
Presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders attends a rally at the Chicago Teachers Union headquarters on Sept. 24, 2019. (photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Bernie Sanders Is the Most Progressive Politician in the 2020 Race. Why Aren't More People Talking About Him?
Emma Specter, Vogue
Specter writes: "Bernie Sanders announced his immigration platform on Thursday, becoming the first and only 2020 Democratic candidate to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. (There's probably little need to remind you where President Trump stands on the issue.)"
READ MORE
Emma Specter, Vogue
Specter writes: "Bernie Sanders announced his immigration platform on Thursday, becoming the first and only 2020 Democratic candidate to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. (There's probably little need to remind you where President Trump stands on the issue.)"
READ MORE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. (photo: AP)
State Department Freed Ukraine Money Before Trump Says He Did
Nick Wadhams and Saleha Mohsin, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump says he lifted his freeze on aid to Ukraine on Sept. 11, but the State Department had quietly authorized releasing $141 million of the money several days earlier, according to five people familiar with the matter."
READ MORE
Nick Wadhams and Saleha Mohsin, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump says he lifted his freeze on aid to Ukraine on Sept. 11, but the State Department had quietly authorized releasing $141 million of the money several days earlier, according to five people familiar with the matter."
READ MORE
F. and E. were sexually abused as children. A digital trail of the crimes continues to haunt the sisters a decade later. (photo: Kholood Eid/NYT)
Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way
Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The two sisters live in fear of being recognized. One grew out her bangs and took to wearing hoodies. The other dyed her hair black. Both avoid looking the way they did as children."
READ MORE
Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The two sisters live in fear of being recognized. One grew out her bangs and took to wearing hoodies. The other dyed her hair black. Both avoid looking the way they did as children."
Ten years ago, their father did the unthinkable: He posted explicit photos and videos on the internet of them, just 7 and 11 at the time. Many captured violent assaults in their Midwestern home, including him and another man drugging and raping the 7-year-old.
The men are now in prison, but in a cruel consequence of the digital era, their crimes are finding new audiences. The two sisters are among the first generation of child sexual abuse victims whose anguish has been preserved on the internet, seemingly forever.
This year alone, photos and videos of the sisters were found in over 130 child sexual abuse investigations involving mobile phones, computers and cloud storage accounts.
The digital trail of abuse — often stored on Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive — haunts the sisters relentlessly, they say, as does the fear of a predator recognizing them from the images.
“That’s in my head all the time — knowing those pictures are out there,” said E., the older sister, who is being identified only by her first initial to protect her privacy. “Because of the way the internet works, that’s not something that’s going to go away.”
[Read an interview with the two sisters.]
Horrific experiences like theirs are being recirculated across the internet because search engines, social networks and cloud storage are rife with opportunities for criminals to exploit.
The scope of the problem is only starting to be understood because the tech industry has been more diligent in recent years in identifying online child sexual abuse material, with a record 45 million photos and videos flagged last year.
But the same industry has consistently failed to take aggressive steps to shut it down, an investigation by The New York Times found. Approaches by tech companies are inconsistent, largely unilateral and pursued in secret, often leaving pedophiles and other criminals who traffic in the material with the upper hand.
The companies have the technical tools to stop the recirculation of abuse imagery by matching newly detected images against databases of the material. Yet the industry does not take full advantage of the tools.
Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft’s consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded.
And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a “top priority.” On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.)
The largest social network in the world, Facebook, thoroughly scans its platforms, accounting for over 90 percent of the imagery flagged by tech companies last year, but the company is not using all available databases to detect the material. And Facebook has announced that the main source of the imagery, Facebook Messenger, will eventually be encrypted, vastly limiting detection.
“Each company is coming up with their own balance of privacy versus safety, and they don’t want to do so in public,” said Alex Stamos, who served as chief of information security at both Facebook and Yahoo. “These decisions actually have a humongous impact on children’s safety.”
Tech companies are far more likely to review photos and videos and other files on their platforms for facial recognition, malware detection and copyright enforcement. But some businesses say looking for abuse content is different because it can raise significant privacy concerns.
Tech companies are loath to be seen going through someone’s photos and videos, and imagery flagged in automated scans is almost always reviewed by a person later.
“On the one hand, there is an important imperative to protect personal information,” said Sujit Raman, an associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department. “On the other hand, there is so much stuff on the internet that is very damaging.”
The main method for detecting the illegal imagery was created in 2009 by Microsoft and Hany Farid, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The software, known as PhotoDNA, can use computers to recognize photos, even altered ones, and compare them against databases of known illegal images. Almost none of the photos and videos detected last year would have been caught without systems like PhotoDNA.
But this technique is limited because no single authoritative list of known illegal material exists, allowing countless images to slip through the cracks. The most commonly used database is kept by a federally designated clearinghouse, which compiles digital fingerprints of images reported by American tech companies. Other organizations around the world maintain their own.
Even if there were a single list, however, it would not solve the problems of newly created imagery flooding the internet, or the surge in live-streaming abuse.
To report online child sexual abuse or find resources for those in need of help, contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678.
READ MORE
Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour, and other investors will be allowed to claim what could amount to millions in tax breaks for the development project Port Covington, in Baltimore. (Matt Roth for ProPublica)
Billionaires Keep Benefiting From a Tax Break to Help the Poor. Now, Congress Wants to Investigate.
Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Congress is calling for investigations of and changes to a Trump tax break aimed at helping poor areas of the country in response to reporting by ProPublica and The New York Times showing the program has been exploited by the wealthy and politically connected."
Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Congress is calling for investigations of and changes to a Trump tax break aimed at helping poor areas of the country in response to reporting by ProPublica and The New York Times showing the program has been exploited by the wealthy and politically connected."
The opportunity zone program, which was part of the 2017 tax law overhaul, was supposed to drive investment toward specially designated low-income neighborhoods. But numerous reports have highlighted ways in which politically connected individuals have landed opportunity zone designations for areas in which they have a financial stake, sometimes at the expense of poorer areas.
ProPublica’s reporting uncovered instances in Baltimore and Detroit in which billionaires stand to benefit from the break in areas that shouldn’t have qualified for the program in the first place. The Times reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had intervened to get a tract added to the program that included land owned by a billionaire investor.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill this week that would significantly narrow the scope of the program. It would remove hundreds of areas that the original legislation allowed to benefit from the break even though they were not poor, including the two areas of Detroit and Baltimore that ProPublica identified. It would also vastly increase the reporting requirements for those taking advantage of the break and narrow the kinds of investments that would be eligible to receive it.
“The Opportunity Zone program has been troubled from the start,” Wyden said in a statement. “The Treasury Department has been steering potentially billions in tax breaks to Donald Trump’s friends, and there are no safeguards to ensure taxpayers are not simply subsidizing handouts for billionaires with no benefit to the low-income communities this program was supposed to help.”
In recent days, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker, a vocal backer of the program since its inception, and Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and Ron Kind also called on the Treasury’s inspector general to review the program, citing the ProPublica and New York Times stories. Their letter requests a review of all opportunity zones to ensure they comply with the eligibility requirements of the program.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently announced that, if elected president, he would seek to scrap the opportunity zone program altogether. “This is corruption and corporate greed, and it is unacceptable,” he said, citing ProPublica’s Detroit story and other reporting.
Other lawmakers, including House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, requested the Government Accountability Office review the program and “identify any Opportunity Zones that do not meet the statutory criteria and explain how and why they were designated.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But this year at an event in Washington, President Donald Trump praised the program. “Across the country, our tax cuts have kicked off a race to invest in Opportunity Zones beyond anything that anybody in this room even thought,” he said.
In June, ProPublica and WNYC reported on an opportunity zone in Baltimore largely owned by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank’s private development company. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan picked the area for the program after a meeting with Plank’s lobbyists, despite a member of his own staff noting that it was too wealthy to qualify for the program. Both Hogan and Plank’s team have said the development will benefit a neglected part of the city and help the surrounding communities.
Last month, ProPublica published a report showing that Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert stands to benefit from the program in wealthy areas of downtown Detroit, including one area that shouldn’t have qualified for the program. Internal emails showed that Gilbert’s representatives communicated with officials at the local, state and federal levels about the program prior to the areas being designated as opportunity zones. Quicken denies that the company lobbied the Treasury Department to make any particular areas eligible for the program.
The New York Times reported last month on how Mnuchin personally intervened in the Treasury’s implementation of the law to include the Nevada tract where billionaire Michael Milken owns land. The Times published an internal IRS memo objecting to the move. Mnuchin has said he didn’t know about Milken’s investments when he got involved in the case.
Experts have raised significant issues with the program since it was included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. The program offers a break to investors on their capital gains taxes if they plow that money into poor neighborhoods.
Some public policy experts argue that tax breaks that target geographic areas, rather than the people living in them, are fundamentally flawed. Money can too easily flow into investments with no tangible benefit for existing residents, such as luxury housing, they say.
“What we are seeing is big high-end investment in real estate, and that is not going to benefit poor people in poor places,” said Timothy Weaver, a professor of political science at SUNY Albany who has studied past place-based tax incentives. Instead, Weaver said, the foregone revenue would be better spent on things like parks, libraries and schools that improve the lives of current residents.
In addition, the program currently lacks transparency or a mechanism for determining its effectiveness. Opportunity zone funds self-certify on their private tax forms that they are in compliance with the program. There is no mechanism for informing the public in any detail about who is using the tax break or for what purpose. The Treasury Department is working on final regulations, but there is no clear sign it will include sufficient transparency and reporting requirements.
The Wyden bill takes aim at many of these issues, though it leaves the overall tax break intact. It seeks to eliminate the break for overly wealthy areas and to exclude certain kinds of investments — such as residential projects that don’t include affordable housing — from the program. It also would amp up the reporting process by requiring opportunity zone funds to post information about their investments publicly, and it directs the Government Accountability Office to evaluate the program’s effects after a period of time.
The proposal stops short of empowering a government agency to direct investments to projects that fit the objectives of the program, as is the case with some other place-based initiatives. It also doesn’t ensure the community must benefit from opportunity zone investments by imposing any requirements that projects employ or house local residents.
READ MORE
Rep.-elect Andy Levin, D-Mich, arrives for member-elect briefings on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Jewish Democratic Congressman Visiting West Bank Blasts Treatment of Palestinians
The Times of Israel
Excerpt: "Andy Levin says he was enraged at sight of water supply to illegal Jewish outpost, as Palestinian villagers remain without access."
The Times of Israel
Excerpt: "Andy Levin says he was enraged at sight of water supply to illegal Jewish outpost, as Palestinian villagers remain without access."
Rep. Andy Levin said Wednesday he was enraged by the situation in Susya, where Palestinian villagers are denied water access, while Jewish settlers nearby are granted government-supplied amenities.
“Yesterday, I traveled to the southern West Bank, including the Palestinian village of Susya, which the Israeli government has destroyed twice and currently denies access to water,” he wrote. “Yet we watched the government utility, right before our eyes, lay in pipes right across the village’s land to deliver tap water to an illegal Israeli outpost nearby.” He did not name the outpost.
Israel has several times in the past demolished Palestinian buildings in Susya, saying they were built without permits.
“It was simply incredible. As angry as the situation made me, the resilience of the Palestinian villagers left an even stronger impression,” wrote Levin, a former synagogue president and chair of the steering committee of Detroit Jews for Justice.
In August, Levin was among numerous members of Congress to condemn Israel’s decision to ban congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, also a representative from Michigan, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from visiting Israel. The two left-wing Democrats ,who have voiced support for a boycott of Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians, planned a visit in August that would have taken them to areas claimed by the Palestinians for a future state.
They became the first members of the US Congress to be banned by Israel, with US President Donald Trump, a Republican, saying the Jewish state would show “great weakness” if it let them in. Tlaib, whose family is from the West Bank, was later offered entry for a private visit, but declined.
“This is a completely misguided decision that reeks of political motivation,” Levin said at the time.
“This decision pulls at the seams of our two countries’ important relationship and endangers Israel by attempting to politicize American support for the country. The Israeli government should reject the bigoted, wedge-driving political tactics of President Trump, who recently said that both congresswomen should ‘go back’ to their countries, and grant Reps. Tlaib and Omar entry into the country to do their jobs,” he said.
In June, Levin tweeted that he supports “a Jewish, democratic Israel, a two-state solution and Palestinian human rights. I was an anti-apartheid activist; Israel is not an apartheid state.”
READ MORE
According to Key West's mayor, Teri Johnston: 'The reef is the centre of our economy and tourist trade and a source of enjoyment for all of Florida and the world.' (photo: Seaphotoart/Alamy)
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "When city leaders in the Florida resort town of Key West voted earlier this year to ban the sale of sunscreens that scientists say are harmful to coral reefs, it was, in the words of mayor Teri Johnston, 'a black and white issue.'"
Fearful of accelerating the decline of the fragile Great Florida reef – the 360-mile band of living coral stretching from west of the Florida Keys to the state’s Atlantic coast – commissioners believed they were taking an important step for environmental preservation.
Florida’s Republican politicians, however, are framing the issue as a matter of public health as they pursue legislation at the state level seeking to overturn the ban, using the same arguments that failed to stop Hawaii enacting a similar measure in 2018. In effect, the debate has become one of protecting coral reefs versus preventing skin cancer.
Backed by dermatologists who cite Florida’s soaring rates of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, they say it would be dangerous to ban the sale of sunscreens containing the chemicals oxybenzone and octinoxate, which filter ultraviolet rays.
“Unfortunately, with all the wonderful things that come with our beaches and sunshine, we also rank second in the nation for the highest rate of new melanoma cases,” state senator Rob Bradley, sponsor of the bill, told the senate’s industry committee.
He said the Key West ban, set to take effect in January 2021, would remove many of the leading brands of sunscreen from the shelves, including products by Hawaiian Tropic, Banana Boat and Coppertone that use the chemicals, and eliminate the public’s “first line of defense” against skin cancer.
Bradley’s bill gathered momentum in Tallahassee this week, setting up a likely battle in the senate early next year that will pit the expert testimony of doctors against that of environmentalists.
Johnston, meanwhile, said Bradley was wrong to portray the ordinance as downplaying the importance of sunscreen and pointed out that there were many sunscreen brands – often made by smaller firms – that could still be used. “You should use sunscreen [but] we would like you to use a safe sunscreen for our coral reef when you’re in the Keys,” she said. “There are literally hundreds of alternative sunscreens that do not include these two ingredients.
“We have enough scientific information that says they are harmful to our last remaining coral reef and it’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to protect it. The reef is the centre of our economy and tourist trade and a source of enjoyment for all of Florida and the world.”
Awareness of the impact of chemicals on coral reefs appears to have grown since Hawaii’s 2018 decision. Coppertone, a leading sunscreen manufacturer, said its scientists were working on new formulas without oxybenzone or octinoxate, and in August the pharmacy chain CVS announced it would remove the chemicals from store-branded varieties of its sunscreens by the end of 2020.
Additionally, the federal food and drug administration (FDA) issued proposed changes to sunscreen regulations in February, with a final ruling imminent, and sought information from manufacturers about the safety and effectiveness of 12 active sunscreen ingredients. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, published information based on scientific studies blaming chemicals in sunscreens for harm to marine life and coral reefs.
“Studies have shown that just a tiny drop of sunscreen can kill coral five to 20 miles offshore,” said Justin Willig, conservation travel programs coordinator of the Oceanic Society, which recommends alternative “reef-safe” sunscreens containing zinc oxide or titanium oxide.
“It causes coral bleaching at lower temperatures, can damage the DNA which leaves the coral unable to reproduce, and some of the chemicals can become endocrine disruptors which leads to abnormal skeleton growth and eventually causes the junior corals to die.”
However, some dermatologists in Florida remain skeptical of the science used to promote sunscreen bans and question claims that there are suitable alternative products.
“I was born and raised in south Florida and have seen the skin cancer epidemic blossom to the point where one person dies every hour of melanoma in the US and another person dies of squamous cell carcinoma,” said Dr Andrew Weinstein, immediate past-president of the Florida society of dermatology and dermatological surgery.
“There’s excellent data that shows that people who use sunscreen get fewer cutaneous tumors and also data that shows people will avoid using sunscreens they don’t like. Mineral sunscreens feel chalky and sticky, and people will use less.
“Key West acted extremely irresponsibly. It will lead to increased cancer risks anywhere where sunscreen is not available.”
Deborah Foote, director of government affairs for the Sierra Club of Florida, sees evidence of a power grab in state politicians’ efforts to reverse the ban.
“The bigger picture is the continuing pre-emption of local jurisdictions from being able to regulate issues that are important and unique to their community,” she said. “Particularly with the environment there are aspects in Florida more appropriate to local decision-making.
“Everyone should take a deep breath and wait for the FDA outcome which is supposedly at the end of this month. If these chemicals are removed from the approved list they’re going to be going away anyway.”
Comments
Post a Comment