10 March 20
If we are to have any chance of finishing the May funding drive we must focus all of our attention that task.
We sincerely wish we did not have to.
This is really about what amounts to a few donations.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
09 March 20
John Oliver Gleefully Mocks Noted Liar (and MSNBC Host) Brian Williams
Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 'Last Week Tonight' host couldn't believe Williams, who's been caught telling a number of lies on-air, is also unable to do simple math."
READ MORE
Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 'Last Week Tonight' host couldn't believe Williams, who's been caught telling a number of lies on-air, is also unable to do simple math."
READ MORE
Supporters react as President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
John Feffer | The President as Political Hit Man: Trump's Perpetual Reelection Machine
John Feffer, TomDispatch
Feffer writes: "Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements."
EXCERPT:
READ MORE
John Feffer, TomDispatch
Feffer writes: "Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements."
EXCERPT:
Donald Trump has also been hard at work stripping politics of its content, a longer-term trend for which he’s anything but the sole culprit. Still, more than any other candidate in memory, he’s boiled elections down to pissing contests and personality clashes. In addition, his nonstop barrage of lies has thoroughly confused voters about what his administration has and hasn’t done. In the process, he’s delegitimized the mainstream media, placed himself above the law, and reduced American politics to a litmus test of loyalty.
It’s not yet possible to predict the winner of the 2020 election, but the loser is already clear: the American public. Trump has sabotaged in a significant way the normal give-and-take, compromise, and negotiation once at the heart of everyday politics. He believes only in power, the more naked the better. He long ago gave up on elite opinion. Now, he doesn’t want to take any chances on the vagaries of popular choice either.
Trump believes that he already owns the island, that he’s now the survivor-in-chief. To maintain that illusion, he’ll do anything in his power to ensure that he’s never voted off the island, certainly not by something beyond his control like actual democracy.
READ MORE
Google employees walk off the job to protest the company's handling of sexual misconduct claims, on November 1, 2018, in Mountain View, California. (photo: Mason Trinca/Getty Images)
Tech Workers for Bernie
Nicole Aschoff, Jacobin
Aschoff writes: "Bernie Sanders wants to rein in Big Tech, but tech workers love him anyway. Why? Because tech workers, like all workers, recognize the impact that policies such as Medicare for All and student loan debt relief could have on their well-being."
EXCERPT:
READ MORE
Nicole Aschoff, Jacobin
Aschoff writes: "Bernie Sanders wants to rein in Big Tech, but tech workers love him anyway. Why? Because tech workers, like all workers, recognize the impact that policies such as Medicare for All and student loan debt relief could have on their well-being."
EXCERPT:
Amazon workers, for example, recently formed Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ). After Jeff Bezos’s pledge to donate $10 billion to his new “Bezos Earth Fund,” AECJ pushed back against the initiative (which some environmental groups have dubbed “hypocritical”), demanding to know: “When is Amazon going to stop helping oil and gas companies ravage Earth with still more oil and gas wells? When is Amazon going to stop funding climate-denying think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and climate-delaying policy? When will Amazon take responsibility for the lungs of children near its warehouses by moving from diesel to all-electric trucking?”
Amazon has threatened to fire employees for speaking out against its environmental practices, but its workers are willing to take the risk.
Tech workers also recognize the role that their employers, and by extension they themselves, play in a host of other problems associated with Big Tech, such as the use of digital technology to surveil and oppress ordinary Americans, and the long-standing partnership between tech companies and US imperialism.
Google workers began organizing after they learned about a secret company program called Maven to provide artificial intelligence to the military to improve the speed and accuracy of sorting drone footage and photographs. The successful pressure campaign forced Google to back out of the contract. Meanwhile, Amazon employees have lobbied executives to stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement, while tech workers at Microsoft and Salesforce have called for their companies to cancel contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Actions like these make it obvious why tech workers support candidates who want to rein in Big Tech, defund militarism, and lay the foundation for a just transition to sustainable energy.
More and more, tech workers recognize both the need to take on Big Tech and their own power to change how these companies operate. They are organizing together, building coalitions with other members of their communities, and, not surprisingly, supporting large-scale, progressive political change at the ballot box.
READ MORE
A reproductive rights protest. (photo: Getty Images)
My Abortion Before Roe v. Wade
Elizabeth Stone, The Atlantic
Stone writes: "The restrictions on abortion have flung me back to a terrifying time in my own life half a century ago, one I never expected women today would have to face."
READ MORE
Elizabeth Stone, The Atlantic
Stone writes: "The restrictions on abortion have flung me back to a terrifying time in my own life half a century ago, one I never expected women today would have to face."
READ MORE
Wells Fargo Chief Executive Charles Scharf speaks during a 2019 conference in California. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Wells Fargo Board Members Resign After Scathing House Report
Renae Merle, The Washington Post
Merle writes: "Wells Fargo announced Monday two of its board members, including its chairwoman, Elizabeth A. Duke, resigned following a scathing House report found the bank's leaders were slow to address consumer abuse scandals."
READ MORE
Renae Merle, The Washington Post
Merle writes: "Wells Fargo announced Monday two of its board members, including its chairwoman, Elizabeth A. Duke, resigned following a scathing House report found the bank's leaders were slow to address consumer abuse scandals."
Elizabeth Duke, James Quigley were part of lackluster reform efforts after consumer abuses, report says
Duke and board member James Quigley were featured in a more than 100-page report by the House Financial Services Committee that cited thousands of pages of documents, emails and internal notes to conclude the San Francisco-based bank had not properly addressed its problems.
Duke had served on the board since 2016 and was elected chair in January 2018, making her among the highest ranking women in banking. Quigley had been a board member since 2013 and is CEO emeritus at Deloitte, the consulting firm.
Charles H. Noski, the former chief financial officer of Bank of America, will become chair of the company’s board.
In 2017, Duke, then vice chair of Wells Fargo’s board, questioned why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included her on communications about actions the bank needed to take, according to the report. “Why are you sending it to me, the board, rather than the department manager?” she asked, according to notes taken by a bureau official that were cited in the report.
A bureau official later said Duke’s response came as a “surprise,” given board members “would not typically object to receiving communication from a regulator,” according to the report.
In another exchange, Quigley resisted attending a meeting with one of the bank’s regulators because he was overseas on vacation. “I am currently scheduled to be in the Galápagos Islands on these dates,” he said in a 2019 email, according to the report. “The sense of urgency is surprising, are they politically trying to put an enforcement action in place in front of the hearing? ”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the committee, called on Duke and Quigley to resign last week.
Duke and Quigley were scheduled to appear before Waters’s committee Wednesday. Their resignations were effective Sunday.
They said in a statement their resignations would allow the bank’s new CEO, Charles Scharf, to “turn the page” and “avoid distraction that could impede the bank’s future progress.”
“Out of continued loyalty to Wells Fargo and ongoing commitment to serve our customers and employees, we recommended to our colleagues on the Board that we step down from our leadership roles,” the statement said.
Among the country’s largest and most profitable banks, Wells Fargo has struggled to overcome a fake-accounts scandal, which ballooned as the bank admitted to other consumer abuses, including mistakenly foreclosing on hundreds of clients and repossessing the cars of thousands of others.
Last month, the bank reached a $3 billion settlement with the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, acknowledging that for more than a decade, thousands of employees falsified records, forged signatures and misused customers’ personal information to meet unrealistic sales goals, opening millions of accounts consumers didn’t want in the process.
The committee’s report threatens to deepen the bank’s problems. The report found the bank repeatedly failed to live up to regulators’ demands that it repay consumers and weren’t aggressive about addressing its cultural problems, despite public promises.
Scharf, the new CEO, is scheduled to appear before the Financial Services Committee Tuesday, a potential turning point in the bank’s efforts to repair its relationship with lawmakers and regulators.
Duke’s and Quigley’s quick resignations are surprising, Ian Katz, a financial policy analyst with the research firm Capital Alpha Partners, said in a research note. “Apparently Wells figured that offering the heads of Duke and Quigley was the only thing that would satisfy Waters,” he said. “This does help Wells’ case that it’s trying to get its house in order.”
READ MORE
Italian prison. (photo: Salvatore Laporta/KONTROLAB/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Italy Prison in Flames in Coronavirus Lockdown Riot Among Cut-Off Inmates
Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast
Nadeau writes: "At least six inmates have died and at least 50 others have escaped from an Italian prison in the southern region of Puglia on Monday amid extensive rioting in 27 prisons across the country after visitation rights were curtailed due to the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus."
READ MORE
Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast
Nadeau writes: "At least six inmates have died and at least 50 others have escaped from an Italian prison in the southern region of Puglia on Monday amid extensive rioting in 27 prisons across the country after visitation rights were curtailed due to the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus."
READ MORE
Electricity generation from coal fell 3% in 2019, which led to a 2% fall in carbon dioxide emissions. (photo: John Giles/PA)
Carbon Emissions Fall as Electricity Producers Move Away From Coal
Jillian Ambrose and Simon Goodley, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Carbon emissions from the global electricity system fell by 2% last year, the biggest drop in almost 30 years, as countries began to turn their backs on coal-fired power plants."
READ MORE
Jillian Ambrose and Simon Goodley, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Carbon emissions from the global electricity system fell by 2% last year, the biggest drop in almost 30 years, as countries began to turn their backs on coal-fired power plants."
READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.