RSN: Robert Reich | America's Billionaires Are Giving to Charity - but Much of It Is Self-Serving Rubbish

14 April 20

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14 April 20

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WHY WE FEAR VERY BAD FUNDRAISING DAYS - It doesn’t take many good days of fundraising to pay all of RSN’s bills for the entire month. But a really bad day of fundraising just frays everyone’s nerves and kicks the can down the road towards the end of the month. Today is starting out looking like a very bad day of fundraising. Why? Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Robert Reich | America's Billionaires Are Giving to Charity - but Much of It Is Self-Serving Rubbish

Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "Well-publicized philanthropy conveniently distracts attention from how several of these billionaires are endangering their workers and, by extension, the public."

Well-publicized philanthropy shows how afraid the super-rich are of a larger social safety net – and higher taxes

s millions of jobless Americans line up for food or risk their lives delivering essential services, the nation’s billionaires are making conspicuous donations – $100m from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for food banks, billions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a coronavirus vaccine, thousands of ventilators and N95 masks from Elon Musk, $25m from the Walton family and its Walmart foundation. The list goes on.

On Wednesday, Forbes released its annual billionaires list, happily noting that “the planet’s wealthiest are helping the global effort to combat the Covid-19 outbreak”.

I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but much of this is self-serving rubbish.

First off, the amounts involved are tiny relative to the fortunes behind them. Bezos’s $100m, for example, amounts to about 11 days of his income.

Well-publicized philanthropy also conveniently distracts attention from how several of these billionaires are endangering their workers and, by extension, the public.

With online sales surging, Amazon is on a hiring binge. But Bezos still doesn’t provide sick leave for workers unless they test positive for Covid-19, in which case they get just two weeks. On 20 March, four senators sent him a letter expressing concern that the company wasn’t doing enough to protect its warehouse workers.

Walmart’s booming sales have caused it to hire more than 100,000 workers over the past three weeks. But the firm failed to implement social distancing for two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced guidelines on 16 March. Several workers have died. Most still don’t have access to gloves, masks or hand sanitizer. They don’t get paid sick leave, not even at stores where employees have contracted the virus.

Musk initially dismissed sheltering as “dumb” and defied a sheriff’s order to shelter-in-place by keeping open Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, telling employees the factory was an “essential” business.

The third way conspicuous philanthropy is self-serving is by suggesting that government shouldn’t demand more from the super-rich, even in a national emergency. As Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page put it, if we had a wealth tax like Elizabeth Warren proposed, “it’s unlikely [Bill Gates] would have the capacity to act this boldly.”

That’s absurd. Warren’s tax would have cost Gates about $6bn a year, roughly his annual income from his $100bn.

Besides, all the billionaire charity combined is a tiny fraction of the trillions the government has already spent on the coronavirus crisis. How does the Journal believe we’re going to pay down this added national debt if the wealthiest among us don’t pay more taxes? Even when this nightmare is over, most Americans will be hard pressed.

And why should we believe that Gates or any other billionaire’s “boldness” necessarily reflects society’s values and needs? Oligarchies aren’t the same as democracies.

The worst fear of the billionaire class is that the government’s response to the pandemic will lead to a permanently larger social safety net.

“Once the virus is conquered – and it will be – the biggest risk will be the political campaign to expand government control over far more of American economic life,” warns Murdoch’s Journal.

After all, the Great Depression of the 1930s spawned social security and the minimum wage, as well as a widespread conviction that government should guarantee a minimum standard of living. The second world war yielded the GI Bill and then the National Defense Education Act, enshrining the government’s role as a financier of higher education.

Even programs that don’t enjoy wide popularity when first introduced, such as the Affordable Care Act, enlarge the nation’s sense of what is reasonable for the government to do for its citizens. The ACA lives on, more popular than ever, notwithstanding the GOP’s determination to repeal it and Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine it.

As the pandemic challenges the security and safety of all Americans, some conservative politicians are proposing things that would have been unthinkable – certainly unspeakable – only months ago.

The Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley is calling for the federal government to “cover 80% of wages for workers at any US business, up to the national median wage” until the crisis is over.

“Workers will benefit from the steady paycheck and the knowledge their jobs are safe,” he says.

Indeed. Hawley’s logic would as easily justify national paid sick leave and universal basic income, permanently.

If the pandemic has revealed anything, it’s that America’s current social safety net and healthcare system does not protect the majority of Americans in a national emergency. We are the outlier among the world’s advanced nations in subjecting our citizens to perpetual insecurity.

We are also the outlier in possessing a billionaire class that, in controlling much of our politics, has kept such proposals off the public agenda.

At least until now.

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'The collaborative approach by governors on both coasts underscored the massive and complex calculations that the nation is facing as it looks at steps to reopen the economy at both the federal and state levels.' (photo: Apu Gomes/Getty Images)

Governors on East and West Coasts Form Pacts to Decide When to Reopen Economies
Maeve Reston, Kristina Sgueglia and Cheri Mossburg, CNN
Excerpt: "States on the country's East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus."
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The White House at night. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)

Trump PR Stunt Falls Flat, as White House Video Exposes His Failure to Prepare for Pandemic
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "Donald Trump Grinned broadly on Monday as he tricked the news networks into broadcasting a taxpayer-funded testimonial to his own leadership."

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Michelle Obama in Las Vegas on 23 September 2018. (photo: John Locher/AP)

Michelle Obama Announces New Vote-by-Mail Push
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "Michelle Obama has announced a new attempt to make it easier to vote by mail, register online and expand early voting, as states race to figure out how they can hold elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic."
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Companies that added protections, such as enhanced cleaning or spacing out workers, say the moves are further slowing meat production. (photo: Agri-Pulse)

'Elbow to Elbow:' North America Meat Plant Workers Fall Ill, Walk Off Jobs
Tom Polansek and Rod Nickel, Reuters
Excerpt: "According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and Canadian plant workers, union leaders and industry analysts, a lack of protective equipment and the nature of 'elbow to elbow' work required to debone chickens, chop beef and slice hams are highlighting risks for employees."
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'Colombian officers are intimidating citizens who are seen outside of their homes.' (photo: Políticos Colombia)

Colombia: Police Abuse Becomes Common During COVID-19 Outbreak
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombian citizens denounced the police brutality and misuse of power during quarantine enforcement due COVID-19 outbreak inside the South American nation, a new report revealed."
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Doctors test hospital staff with flu-like symptoms for Covid-19 in set-up tents before they enter the main emergency department area at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx on March 24. (photo: Misha Friedman/Getty Images)

Decades of Science Denial Related to Climate Change Has Led to Denial of the Coronavirus Pandemic
Neela Banerjee and David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News

Excerpt: "After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it's easy to see how epidemiology came next."

merican science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.  

When a Cal-Tech biochemist fingered nitrogen oxide emissions and uncombusted hydrocarbons from automobiles and refineries as the cause of the thick smog that often blanketed the city, the American Petroleum Institute counter-attacked by highlighting the alleged uncertainty of his science. The tactic was a test run for the fossil fuel industry's assault 40 years later on climate science. 

Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn't hard to understand how that happened. 

President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19's seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China.   

Climate deniers have long attacked climate scientists, and Covid-19 deniers recently launched a smear campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in part because he corrected the President's inaccurate statements about the pandemic.

The radio host and staunch Trump supporter Bill Mitchell offered a glimpse of how some conservatives see the pandemic as part of a continuum of dubious science when he tweeted that the novel coronavirus is "a minor infection" and the worries about it were  "climate change 2.0." 

"It's this sense of deja vu. This is what climate denialism looked like," said Jerry Taylor, president of the bipartisan, pro-climate action think tank Niskanen Center and himself a former skeptic of climate science. "The peril here is the reality of what's about to follow. You can't gaslight it. You're not going to be able to deny the reality of the deaths. That will be the wages of dismissing what the technocratic and scientific elites have been telling us for months."

An Echo Chamber of Denial

After he was hired by the City of Los Angeles, Arie Haagen-Smit, a Cal-Tech scientist specializing in airborne microscopic chemicals, quickly figured out that the city's smog came from burning oil. Industry executives immediately hired their own scientists to attack his work. When those scientists came back and said Haagen-Smit was right, the industry hired new ones to sow doubt and home in on small uncertainties that remained.

By 1956, when Haagen-Smit's conclusion had been confirmed by others, oil industry executives pivoted and employed a new tactic: they blamed the auto industry for tailpipe emissions. 

Throughout the fight, the oil industry's use of science denial provided a preview of what was to come in the 1980s, as the fight to deny climate change began. "Through it all," Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Law, told InsideClimate News in a 2016 interview, "you see the creation of an echo chamber of doubt that takes the small unknowns and uncertainties and magnifies it until all we have is unknowns, when in fact the actual science isn't that way at all."

Exxon was told unambiguously in 1977 by James Black, its own senior scientist, that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet and endanger humanity. His warning was echoed publicly 11 years later, when NASA's James Hansen sounded the alarm about climate change in landmark congressional testimony. 

Exxon and the API responded by dusting off the uncertainty playbook and pivoting to a new narrative throughout the 1990s that focused on all that remained unknown about climate change. Exxon helped set up the pro-industry Global Climate Coalition and the Global Climate Science Team to sow doubt and assert that it wasn't even clear that climate change was occurring. 

The coalition disbanded, its work completed, after the administration of George W. Bush, scion of a Texas oil family, rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The industry also recommended its own contrarian scientists to review the administration's submissions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  

The oil industry's ties to the administration were revealed in 2005 when a whistleblower disclosed that Philip Cooney, a former API lobbyist working in the White House, had been rewriting government research papers to create doubt about climate change. He left the administration and went to work for ExxonMobil. 

Between 2003 and 2010, 91 climate denialist groups received more than half a billion dollars. They recreated the echo chamber from the long-ago war on smog, increasing its size and upping the volume enough to shape the narrative on climate change for Congress, the media and the American public.

Under pressure from shareholders, Exxon promised to stop funding climate deniers in 2007. But by then, climate change denialism had become a force so extreme in its attacks on mainstream science that even giant oil companies had become suspect. In 2012, the Heartland Institute, one of the country's leading climate denialist organizations, launched a billboard comparing those who believed in climate change to the Unabomber, Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden. The backlash was severe.

But by 2017, Heartland's chief executive, Joseph Bast, was a guest at the White House when Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. "We are winning in the global warming war," Bast said in an email to supporters.

A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans understood that the vast majority of climate scientists and peer-reviewed studies support the conclusion that climate change is a human created threat. 

Polls Reveal a Partisan Divide over Climate Change and Covid-19

Today, there's an overlap between communities that have played down the coronavirus pandemic and those that deny man-made climate change. Concern about global warming has risen in recent years in the United States, but conservatives, especially older Republicans, remain holdouts. 

Similar disparities between Republicans and Democrats have emerged in recent polling on the coronavirus pandemic. A survey released March 26 by the Pew Research Center showed that while 78 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of total respondents said the pandemic was a major threat to public health, only 52 percent of Republicans said it was. Surveys earlier in March by Quinnipiac College and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago also indicated that majorities of Republicans doubted the seriousness of the pandemic. And while older Americans have been generally more worried about the virus, older Republicans weren't for weeks, even as the pandemic spread.  

In the most recent polling, partisan differences remain: The Associated Press-NORC Center survey released this week showed that 35 percent of Republicans are extremely worried or very worried about being infected by the coronavirus, compared to 61 percent of Democrats.

These partisan disparities also surface in the way states and territories have reacted to the Center for Disease Control's recommendations on social distancing as the best means to limit the spread of the virus. Those that have been most diligent about implementing social distancing are largely Democratic strongholds, and those most lax have been red states, according to a Covid-19 social distancing scoreboard created by Unacast, a technology company that studies human mobility. 

Alabama had been among states doing the least to establish social distancing, according to the Unacast scorecard, a resistance that continued until early April, when Gov. Kay Ivey announced a stay-at-home order to take effect on April 4. The virus has now spread throughout the state, with 2,229 cases and 48 deaths reported by the state Department of Public Health on Wednesday.  

Ashley Lucier is a 30-year-old middle school English teacher who lives with her husband and two young boys in Prattville, Alabama. Lucier's small family and close friends have taken the pandemic seriously and are staying home, she said. But some co-workers think, "'This is a hoax,' and that people are trying to make Trump look bad. They think this will all blow over and we'll be back to work soon," Lucier said.

Lucier's parents, both Republicans, live about 10 minutes away in Montgomery. As Lucier began to lock down in her own home, her mother, Cheryl, 59, was still going out to eat with friends and to church, until the restaurants and churches closed. She was taken aback when her daughter refused to send the grandchildren over to visit, Lucier said. Now, her mother's views on the pandemic have started to shift toward greater worry and caution. But Lucier's father, Anthony, 62, remains less concerned about the pandemic and less convinced of the recommendations of public health. He asked that his family's surname be withheld because he said he feared retaliation over his climate views.

"If Trump doesn't worry about it," Lucier said, "then my parents don't worry about it."

Affable and with an easy laugh, Anthony calls himself a conservative Republican and jokingly describes his liberal daughter, and only child, as a "leftist guerilla jungle fighter." A Fox News fan, he refers to Covid-19 as "the flu," echoing the president. The novel coronavirus is not like the seasonal flu, and its mortality rate is 10 times higher. Anthony also thinks global warming is a hoax and considers the urgent narrative about the pandemic as "climate change 2.0."

"It does feel like that because so many things are thrown in people's faces that are absolutely not true, that you think the next thing down the line is a hoax," Anthony said. "There's so much that's based on nothing, that when the wolf does come along to your door, everyone is surprised."

Anthony acknowledges that the virus could be a real threat, a "wolf." But his small manufacturing firm is open, and he still goes to work. Anthony thinks that people can do little to avoid catching such a contagious illness, so the social distancing and the lengthy lockdowns he has heard of but not seen yet in Alabama feel like overkill. 

"We can do this for a certain amount of time before it becomes more of a problem than the flu itself and does serious economic damage," Anthony said, repeating objections Trump voiced last week to widespread social distancing. "People gotta keep on working, they gotta keep on making things, gotta keep on living."

Like Anthony, a plurality of Republicans in the recent Pew poll—nearly 4 in 10—said they felt the country was overreacting to the pandemic. Pluralities of Democrats and others said they thought Americans were not taking the threat seriously enough. 

"My father still shrugs most of it off as a media bias or an overreaction of the public, even when I tell him the information is from reputable sources," Lucier said. "I don't know if it will really hit him unless someone close to us gets seriously sick."

That person who could get seriously sick is Lucier herself. Always outdoorsy and healthy, Lucier developed a blood clot in her lungs as a complication of donating a kidney in July 2018. She is on an inhaler and blood thinner for the clots. Her lung function is greatly reduced, and when she had the flu last year, Lucier landed in the hospital. Her parents say they understand she's at risk now, Lucier said, but given how they lead their lives still, she isn't convinced.

Continuing ambivalence about social distancing will only prolong the crisis, said Gretchen Goldman, research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy. "When you have a big segment of the population that's dismissive about social distancing, you will have spread and you'll keep overloading the hospital system," Goldman said. "The longer there are mixed messages, the longer people don't take it seriously, the worse it will get."

Will Covid-19 Deaths Lead Skeptics to Rethink Views on Climate Change?

Why don't many Americans like Lucier's parents take the pandemic seriously, even when it poses a risk to loved ones? Beyond the nearly 30 years of climate denial that have given conservatives the arguments and social acceptance to dismiss scientific expertise, some of the resistance is driven by "solution aversion," said Taylor of the Niskanen Center. If people think the remedies to a problem will be painful or require sacrifice, they're more reluctant to accept the reality of the threat. With both climate change and Covid-19, skeptics think they will have to surrender economic prosperity, so they dismiss the looming risks.

Conservatives have also been encouraged to doubt the objectivity of scientists, Taylor said. Ideological champions on the right such as Rush Limbaugh have described scientists as part of a liberal cabal to deceive the American people on issues like climate change. 

In 2009, thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists were leaked, in a scandal known as Climategate. Climate deniers seized upon excerpts from the emails to cast doubt on the scientific consensus about global warming before international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Multiple reviews of the scientists' emails exonerated them of tampering with data, but to deniers, Climategate remains proof of the dishonesty of climate researchers. 

"There's a hostility toward the messengers," Taylor said. "Technocratic elites and scientists are for the most part Democrats, and that's one thing the Republican base knows really well. They're not trustworthy. They're not part of the tribe. And Republicans have been hearing for 30 years that they have an agenda they want to advance."

Michael Nelson, a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy at Oregon State University, said that feeling part of a bigger community, such as a political party or movement, can become "more important than accepting the truth."  

Opening people's eyes to that truth isn't a matter of pointing more often to science because that's already an impediment, he said. A more useful approach to changing minds might be to acknowledge that the resistance people offer is reasonable to them, if not completely sound to others, Nelson said. 

Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed. "One of the things we've learned from communicating climate science is that if you communicate something that triggers someone's worldview, it makes them more resistant to the science," she said. "We saw the same triggering of political worldviews with the coronavirus because the primary messengers like the president and his allies were denying it. And you didn't see as many scientific experts who should have been leading the messaging at the beginning of the pandemic."

As the death toll from the pandemic climbs, conservatives are likely to set aside their continued skepticism of science, including the facts underpinning climate change, Taylor said. "The distrust of expertise and the medical profession will wither away," he said, "because we'll see the consequences of that distrust."

But Goldman is less optimistic that the impact of Covid-19 can lead doubters to reconsider anything other than Covid-19. 

"I'm skeptical that this situation is enough to change people's minds on climate change," she said. "There will never be an event that you can point to and say that it's climate. You won't have a 'gotcha moment' as you would with this virus because you have a more definite link to deaths when you have a virus. If coronavirus changes people's science denial ways here, I wouldn't put money on it changing their views on other scientific issues."

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