27 April 21
Switching to Emergency Mode on Donations
April is coming to an end quickly and we are far from making our budget. We are going to have to stop the train and focus solely on bringing in the relatively few donations we need to function.
April is coming to an end quickly and we are far from making our budget. We are going to have to stop the train and focus solely on bringing in the relatively few donations we need to function.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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27 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
RSN: Jeff Cohen | Media Evasions on Racism and the Role of Derek Chauvin
Jeff Cohen, Reader Supported News
Cohen writes: "Let's acknowledge at the outset that corporate liberal media - owned and sponsored by the mightiest economic forces in our society - have increased their talk about race and racism in recent years, especially since the rise of Trump."
et’s acknowledge at the outset that corporate liberal media – owned and sponsored by the mightiest economic forces in our society – have increased their talk about race and racism in recent years, especially since the rise of Trump.
They’ve even learned to throw around the phrase “systemic racism” – while avoiding scrutiny of the corporate systems that propel and reinforce racism.
The view of the world projected by such coverage is typically that of victims without victimizers. Although it’s acknowledged that Black people and other people of color are consistently at the bottom of the caste system, there’s no examination of the powerful interests that put them there – the profiteers who, for so many generations, have had their knees on the necks of poor people of color.
Enter killer-in-uniform Derek Chauvin.
Let me be clear that I’m heartened by the media coverage of George Floyd’s murder, and even more heartened by the mass protests that erupted in the wake of that murder. But Chauvin’s willful, sadistic, public execution of a handcuffed Black man ended the beloved life of a single individual.
At the same time, Chauvin has played a useful role for corporate media – a rare villain who could be identified and named, a symbol of deadly racism in news outlets that are structured to refrain from identifying the economic forces responsible for far more hardship and death in communities of color than Chauvin could ever inflict.
Even before COVID, for example, we knew that the profit-driven U.S. healthcare system was causing the premature deaths of people of color, with substandard care leading to 260 premature African-American deaths every day by one estimate. Mainstream media will occasionally show us the victims of inadequate healthcare, but they never identify the villains – those powerful corporate interests that have lobbied so hard for so long to ensure that we live in the only “advanced” country on earth without universal health coverage.
If you watch the network newscasts on ABC/NBC/CBS and count the commercials, you’ll notice that the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry is the number 1 sponsor.
Let’s turn from healthcare to housing. We have a homeless crisis far worse than any other advanced industrial country.
Gentrification in major cities disproportionately causes the evictions of people of color. Our longstanding housing crisis was made worse by the “Great Recession” begun in 2007, which most affected homeowners of color and African Americans in particular – a disaster sparked by a handful of greedy Wall Street firms and their allies in Washington.
Unlike Chauvin, not one of these Wall Street criminals was given a televised trial. Corporate media sometimes showed us the victims of the housing crisis, but hardly ever their victimizers – and the policymakers behind the Great Recession, like Robert Rubin, are still served up as media experts today.
Wall Street banks aren’t just major sponsors of news media. They’re also major donors to politicians of both parties, heavily to Democrats. So are big urban real estate interests responsible for gentrification – donating to Democratic officials who might criticize “systemic racism” while consistently enabling it.
Black, Latinx and Native American communities are the ones hit hardest by pollution, cancer-causing refineries, and extraction. Death and disease have flourished, but the polluting corporations responsible don’t go on trial – and mainstream media rarely name the politically-connected perpetrators. Indeed, oil and gas companies have long been major sponsors of media, including “public broadcasting,” and coverage often reflects that coziness.
With his knee on George Floyd’s neck, Derek Chauvin became a symbol of racism for mainstream media, but he’s a mere symptom of the deadly problem of systemic racism.
The main perpetrators and beneficiaries of systemic racism – whether in healthcare, housing, environmental pollution, employment, education or criminal justice – include powerful corporations that sponsor news outlets that have aimed a bright spotlight at this killer cop.
It’s no surprise those corporations don’t get the mainstream media spotlight they deserve.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
U.S. President Joe Biden prepares to sign a series of executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Biden Will Seek $80 Billion for the IRS to Claw Back $780 Billion in Unpaid Taxes From the Rich, Reports Say
Tom Porter, Business Insider
Porter writes: "President Joe Biden hopes to boost IRS funding by $80 billion as part of a plan to increase tax revenue from rich people and corporations, The New York Times reported on Tuesday."
resident Joe Biden hopes to boost IRS funding by $80 billion as part of a plan to increase tax revenue from rich people and corporations, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The 10-year funding boost would be accompanied by new powers for the IRS to rake in tax dollars it's owed, The Times said.
The newspaper cited projections that the plan could raise $780 billion over 10 years to narrow the gap between what the US is owed and what it collects.
The head of the IRS has estimated that the tax gap is $1 trillion a year. Reclaiming $780 billion over 10 years would close roughly 8% of that gap.
Officials told The Washington Post that the IRS would use the funding to hire more agents and introduce technology to pursue tax dodgers.
Under the plan, the IRS would increase its tax take by more aggressively auditing people who may be underpaying and by requiring additional information so that it's harder to conceal taxable income and assets, the reports said.
The plan is separate from Biden's push to raise tax rates for corporations and wealthy people. Both would help pay for Biden's infrastructure and childcare programs.
The IRS's ability to secure taxes from wealthy Americans has been eroded by a decade of budget cuts, Bloomberg reported in late March. The outlet said the IRS had 20,000 fewer staffers than it did in 2010.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an IRS watchdog, said in a report in March that high earners, defined as those with an income of $1.5 million or above, were paying only 39% of the taxes they owed the IRS, on average. It also found that unpaid back taxes of high-income individuals were not being collected.
"High-income taxpayer noncompliance can have a significant corrosive effect on overall tax administration as well as add to the belief that the nation's tax system favors the wealthy," the report said.
The Times reported that the extra tax revenue from the IRS plan would help fund the $1.5 trillion American Families Plan, which aims to make childcare more accessible and affordable and to tackle child poverty.
The American Families Plan follows the president's announcement of a $2 trillion infrastructure plan to rebuild roads and bridges and to address the climate emergency through investment in green energy.
Karen Garner in this undated photo. Garner's family has filed a federal lawsuit against the city and three officers over the violent arrest. (photo: AP)
Police Video Shows Officers Joking About Violent Arrest of Colorado Woman, 73
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "New footage has been released that shows the disturbing aftermath of the violent arrest of a 73-year-old woman, believed to suffer from dementia, after she left a Walmart store in Colorado last June."
Karen Garner, who has dementia, reportedly fractured arm during arrest outside Walmart in Loveland last year
ew footage has been released that shows the disturbing aftermath of the violent arrest of a 73-year-old woman, believed to suffer from dementia, after she left a Walmart store in Colorado last June.
In police station surveillance video released on Monday by an attorney for Karen Garner’s family, three Loveland police officers can be seen reviewing body-cam film of the arrest – footage which was released two weeks ago.
Austin Hopp, the arresting officer who bent Garner’s arm behind her back as she bent over a patrol car, can be heard to tell fellow officers: “Ready for the pop?”
Two officers are seen to exchange a fist bump. As another joins them, they are heard to say the arrest “went great”. Earlier in the video, Hopp says Garner was “flexible”.
“We crushed it,” one of the officers says, in the nearly hour-long footage.
Near the end of the footage, Hopp says Garner is the first person on whom he has used a hobble restraint.
“I was super excited,” he says. “I was like, ‘All right, let’s wrestle, girl. Let’s wreck it!’ I got her on the ground and all that stuff. I got her cuffed up … threw her on the ground a couple of times.”
He adds: “I can’t believe I threw a 73-year-old on the ground.”
Speaking to the Washington Post, Sarah Schielke, the attorney representing Garner’s family, described the film as “heart-wrenching” and “unseeable” and said it took six hours before Garner, who was handcuffed to a bench in a holding cell, was seen by a doctor.
According to a family lawsuit, police were called after Garner left the Walmart store without paying for items worth $13.88 and allegedly attempted to pull off an employee’s mask. The slight and frail woman, whom family members say suffers from dementia and sensory aphasia, was arrested as she was picking wildflowers.
In the arrest film, Garner can be heard telling officers she is “going home”, as she walks along a grass verge by a highway. Officers respond by throwing her to the ground, allegedly fracturing her arm and dislocating a shoulder.
After the arrest film was released, Garner’s family filed a federal lawsuit against the city and three officers. The complaint has been amended to include two more officers, for allegedly failing to intervene or provide medical care.
Colorado’s eighth judicial district attorney, Gordon McLaughlin, said there would be an investigation into “any potential criminal behavior”.
“The statements on the videos are very concerning,” he said. “I will consider those statements along with all relevant evidence … in making a charging decision.”
Last week, a police spokesman said four officers had been suspended. Loveland police declined to comment on the new video footage, citing the investigation.
“LPD has faith in the due process that this investigation allows for,” it said.
The Loveland Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing city officers, did not immediately comment.
Schielke said of the new footage: “If I didn’t release this, the Loveland police’s toxic culture of arrogance and entitlement, along with their horrific abuse of the vulnerable and powerless, would carry on, business as usual. I won’t be a part of that.”
John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
John Feffer | The Cold War Has Already Turned Hot - on the Internet
John Feffer, TomDispatch
Feffer writes: "America has a serious infrastructure problem. Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that's so twentieth century of you."
On June 1st, Songlands, the final volume of TomDispatch regular John Feffer’s three Splinterlands dystopian novels, will be published by Haymarket Books. It’s the latest in our Dispatch book series and a must-read for those of you who have already gobbled up his two previous, all-too-far-sighted and riveting novels, Splinterlands (Mike Davis: “John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London, and, like the latter’s Iron Heel, Splinterlands is a vivid, suspenseful warning about the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and human survival”) and Frostlands (Ariel Dorfman: “By taking us on a cautionary journey into a future planetary collapse where the term ‘one per cent’ is redefined in a terrifying way, John Feffer forces us to look deeply at our own society’s blindness to ecological apocalypse and greed. But the novel’s enchantment goes beyond dystopia: the quest for salvation depends on a crusty female octogenarian who would make Wonder Woman salivate with envy”). My suggestion: order Songlands in advance to make sure you have a copy the moment it hits our world. If you haven’t read Feffer’s two previous novels on this shattering, endangered planet of ours, get them before Songlands comes out! Tom]
Let me try to put this in context: it was just months ago that I gave up my old flip phone and reluctantly got an iPhone. And though I can indeed make calls on it and use it to check how far I’ve walked each day, footstep by footstep, it’s remarkable how much I can’t do. Don’t ask me to send you a photo of anything or check my email on it or hail an Uber with it. In other words, call me a relic of another age, of a world in which telephones were significant-sized objects that sat somewhere in your house and that you hustled over to pick up when they rang. No one was capable of carrying them around in their pockets or checking the news on them, no less using them to text friends.
I’ve been introducing articles at TomDispatch for 18 years now — a strange form that developed because, once upon a time in another age, it was a listserv in which I gathered pieces from publications around the world and introduced them to my readers, email by email. And let me say that, in more than 18 years of writing such introductions for original articles at this website, I’ve never felt quite as inadequate or unprepared as I do for today’s remarkable piece by John Feffer.
Yes, in those years when I was growing up, our duck-and-cover thoughts often turned apocalyptic, given the looming threat of nuclear destruction then. But if, as I crouched under my school desk then waiting for a Russian nuclear bomb to explode, someone had told me that someday life could essentially be brought to a raging stand-still by a “cyber-apocalypse” (and you had explained to me what that was), I would have thought you the most inventive science-fiction writer of our times. And yet here we are. This is us, as John Feffer, author of the Dispatch novel Songlands (to be published June 1st), the final volume of his Splinterlands trilogy, makes clear today. Sci-fi is, it seems, now the essence of our lives. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Waiting for the Cyber-Apocalypse
The Cold War Has Already Turned Hot — on the Internet
merica has a serious infrastructure problem.
Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that’s so twentieth century of you.
America’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer), and even your pocket (your phone). Like those devices of yours, all connected to the Internet and so hackable, American businesses, hospitals, and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. And don’t think that the U.S. military and even cybersecurity agencies and firms aren’t seriously at risk, too.
Such vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the programs — and sometimes even the hardware — that run our increasingly wired society. Beware “zero-day” exploits — so named because you have zero days to fix them once they’re discovered — that can attract top-dollar investments from corporations, governments, and even black-market operators. Zero days allow backdoor access to iPhones, personal email programs, corporate personnel files, even the computers that run dams, voting systems, and nuclear power plants.
It’s as if all of America were now protected by nothing but a few old padlocks, the keys to which have been made available to anyone with enough money to buy them (or enough ingenuity to make a set for themselves). And as if that weren’t bad enough, it was America that inadvertently made these keys available to allies, adversaries, and potential blackmailers alike.
The recent SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, as well as companies like Microsoft, for which the Biden administration recently sanctioned Russia and expelled several of its embassy staff, is only the latest example of how other countries have been able to hack basic U.S. infrastructure. Such intrusions, which actually date back to the early 2000s, are often still little more than tests, ways of getting a sense of how easy it might be to break into that infrastructure in more serious ways later. Occasionally, however, the intruders do damage by vacuuming up data or wiping out systems, especially if the targets fail to pay cyber-ransoms. More insidiously, hackers can also plant “timebombs” capable of going off at some future moment.
Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have all hacked into this country’s infrastructure to steal corporate secrets, pilfer personal information, embarrass federal agencies, make money, or influence elections. For its part, the American government is anything but an innocent victim of such acts. In fact, it was an early pioneer in the field and continues to lead the way in cyberoperations overseas.
This country has a long history of making weapons that have later been used against it. When allies suddenly turn into adversaries like the Iranian government after the Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution or the mujahideen in Afghanistan after their war against the Red Army ended in 1989, the weapons switch sides, too. In other cases, like the atomic bomb or unmanned aerial vehicles, the know-how behind the latest technological advances inevitably leaks out, triggering an arms race.
In all these years, however, none of those weapons has been used with such devastating effect against the U.S. homeland as the technology of cyberwarfare.
The Worm That Turned
In 2009, the centrifuges capable of refining Iranian uranium to weapons-grade level began to malfunction. At first, the engineers there didn’t pay much attention to the problem. Notoriously finicky, such high-speed centrifuges were subject to frequent breakdowns. The Iranians regularly had to replace as many as one of every 10 of them. This time, however, the number of malfunctions began to multiply and then multiply again, while the computers that controlled the centrifuges started to behave strangely, too.
It was deep into 2010, however, before computer security specialists from Belarus examined the Iranian computers and discovered the explanation for all the malfunctioning. The culprit responsible was a virus, a worm that had managed to burrow deep into the innards of those computers through an astonishing series of zero-day exploits.
That worm, nicknamed Stuxnet, was the first of its kind. Admittedly, computer viruses had been creating havoc almost since the dawn of the information age, but this was something different. Stuxnet could damage not only computers but the machines that they controlled, in this case destroying about 1,000 centrifuges. Developed by U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their Israeli counterparts, Stuxnet would prove to be but the first salvo in a cyberwar that continues to this day.
It didn’t take long before other countries developed their own versions of Stuxnet to exploit the same kind of zero-day vulnerabilities. In her book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth describes in horrifying detail how the new cyber arms race has escalated. It took Iran only three years to retaliate for Stuxnet by introducing malware into Aramco, the Saudi oil company, destroying 30,000 of its computers. In 2014, North Korea executed a similar attack against Sony Pictures in response to a film that imagined the assassination of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Meanwhile, Pelroth reports, Chinese hackers have targeted U.S. firms to harvest intellectual property, ranging from laser technology and high-efficiency gas turbines to the plans for “the next F-35 fighter” and “the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint.”
Over the years, Russia has become especially adept at the new technology. Kremlin-directed hackers interfered in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2014 in an effort to advance a far-right fringe candidate. The next year, they shut down Ukraine’s power grid for six hours. In the freezing cold of December 2016, they turned off the heat and power in Kyiv, that country’s capital. And it wasn’t just Ukraine either. Russian hackers paralyzed Estonia, interfered in England’s Brexit referendum, and nearly shut down the safety controls of a Saudi oil company.
Then Russia started to apply everything it learned from these efforts to the task of penetrating U.S. networks. In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, Russian hackers weaponized information stolen from Democratic Party operative John Podesta and wormed their way into state-level electoral systems. Later, they launched ransomware attacks against U.S. towns and cities, hacked into American hospitals, and even got inside the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. “The Russians,” Pelroth writes, “were mapping out the plant’s networks for a future attack.”
The United States did not sit idly by watching such incursions. The National Security Agency (NSA) broke into Chinese companies like Huawei, as well as their customers in countries like Cuba and Syria. With a plan nicknamed Nitro Zeus, the U.S. was prepared to take down key elements of Iran’s infrastructure if the negotiations around a nuclear deal failed. In response to the Sony hack, Washington orchestrated a 10-hour Internet outage in North Korea.
As the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the NSA had set up full-spectrum surveillance through various communications networks, even hacking into the private phones of leaders around the world like Germany’s Angela Merkel. By 2019, having boosted its annual budget to nearly $10 billion and created 133 Cyber Mission teams with a staff of 6,000, the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was planting malware in Russia’s energy grid and plotting other mischief.
Unbeknownst to Snowden or anyone else at the time, the NSA was also stockpiling a treasure trove of zero-day exploits for potential use against a range of targets. At first glance, this might seem like the cyber-equivalent of setting up a network of silos filled with ICBMs to maintain a rough system of deterrence. The best defense, according to the hawk’s catechism, is always an arsenal of offensive weapons.
But then the NSA got hacked.
In 2017, an outfit called the Shadow Brokers leaked 20 of the agency’s most powerful zero-day exploits. That May, WannaCry ransomware attacks suddenly began to strike targets as varied as British hospitals, Indian airlines, Chinese gas stations, and electrical utilities around the United States. The perpetrators were likely North Korean, but the code, as it happened, originated with the NSA, and the bill for the damages came to $4 billion.
Not to be outdone, Russian hackers turned two of the NSA zero-day exploits into a virus called NotPetya, which caused even more damage. Initially intended to devastate Ukraine, that malware spread quickly around the world, causing at least $10 billion in damages by briefly shutting down companies like Merck, Maersk, FedEx, and in an example of second-order blowback, the Russian oil giant Rosneft as well.
Sadly enough, in 2021, as Kim Zetter has written in Countdown to Zero Day, “[C]yberweapons can be easily obtained on underground markets or, depending on the complexity of the system being targeted, custom-built from scratch by a skilled teenage coder.” Such weapons then ricochet around the world before, more often than not, they return to sender.
Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.
Trump Makes Things Worse
Donald Trump notoriously dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 elections. His aides didn’t even bother bringing up additional examples of Russian cyber-meddling because the president just wasn’t interested. In 2018, he even eliminated the position of national cybersecurity coordinator, which helped National Security Advisor John Bolton consolidate his own power within the administration. Later, Trump would fire Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of protecting elections from cyberattacks, for validating the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections.
The SolarWinds attack at the end of last year highlighted the continued weakness of this country’s cybersecurity policy and Trump’s own denialism. Confronted with evidence from his intelligence agencies of Russian involvement, the president continued to insist that the perpetrators were Chinese.
The far right, for partisan reasons, abetted his denialism. Strangely enough, commentators on the left similarly attempted to debunk the idea that Russians were involved in the Podesta hack, 2016 election interference, and other intrusions, despite overwhelming evidence presented in the Mueller report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings, and even from Russian sources.
But this denialism of the right and the left obscures a more important Trump administration failure. It made no attempt to work with Russia and China to orchestrate a truce in escalating global cyber-tensions.
Chastened by the original Stuxnet attack on Iran, the Putin government had actually proposed on several occasions that the international community should draw up a treaty to ban computer warfare and that Moscow and Washington should also sort out something similar bilaterally. The Obama administration ignored such overtures, not wanting to constrain the national security state’s ability to launch offensive cyber-operations, which the Pentagon euphemistically likes to label a “defend forward” strategy.
In the Trump years, even as he was pulling the U.S. out of one arms control deal after another with the Russians, The Donald was emphasizing his superb rapport with Putin. Instead of repeatedly covering for the Russian president — whatever his mix of personal, financial, and political reasons for doing so — Trump could have deployed his over-hyped art-of-the-deal skills to revive Putin’s own proposals for a cyber-truce.
With China, the Trump administration committed a more serious error.
Stung by a series of Chinese cyber-thefts, not just of intellectual property but of millions of the security-clearance files of federal employees, the Obama administration reached an agreement with Beijing in 2015 to stop mutual espionage in cyberspace. “We have agreed that neither the U.S. [n]or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” Obama said then. “We’ll work together and with other nations to promote other rules of the road.”
In the wake of that agreement, Chinese intrusions in U.S. infrastructure dropped by an astonishing 90%. Then Trump took office and began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. That trade war with Beijing would devastate American farmers and manufacturers, while padding the bills of American consumers, even as the president made it ever more difficult for Chinese firms to buy American products and technology. Not surprisingly, China once again turned to its hackers to acquire the know-how it could no longer get legitimately. In 2017, those hackers also siphoned off the personal information of nearly half of all Americans through a breach in the Equifax credit reporting agency.
As part of his determination to destroy everything that Obama achieved, of course, Trump completely ignored that administration’s 2015 agreement with Beijing.
Head for the Bunkers?
Larry Hall once worked for the Defense Department. Now, he’s selling luxury apartments in a former nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas. It burrows 15 stories into the ground and he calls it Survival Condo. The smallest units go for $1.5 million and the complex features a gym, swimming pool, and shooting range in its deep underground communal space.
When asked why he’d built Survival Condo, Hall replied, “You don’t want to know.”
Perhaps he was worried about a future nuclear exchange, another even more devastating pandemic, or the steady ratcheting up of the climate crisis. Those, however, are well-known doomsday scenarios and he was evidently alluding to a threat to which most Americans remain oblivious. What the Survival Condo website emphasizes is living through five years “completely off-grid,” suggesting a fear that the whole U.S. infrastructure could be taken down via a massive hack.
And it’s true that modern life as most of us know it has become increasingly tied up with the so-called Internet of Things, or IoT. By 2023, it’s estimated that every person on Earth will have, on average, 3.6 networked devices. Short of moving to a big hole in the ground in Kansas and living completely off the grid, it will be difficult indeed to extricate yourself from the consequences of a truly coordinated attack on such an IoT.
A mixture of short-sighted government action — as well as inaction — and a laissez-faire approach to markets have led to the present impasse. The U.S. government has refused to put anything but the most minimal controls on the development of spyware, has done little to engage the rest of the world in regulating hostile activities in cyberspace, and continues to believe that its “defend forward” strategy will be capable of protecting U.S. assets. (Dream on, national security state!)
Plugging the holes in the IoT dike is guaranteed to be an inadequate solution. Building a better dike might be a marginally better approach, but a truly more sensible option would be to address the underlying problem of the surging threat. Like the current efforts to control the spread of nuclear material, a non-proliferation approach to cyberweapons requires international cooperation across ideological lines.
It’s not too late. But to prevent a rush to the bunkers will take a concerted effort by the major players — the United States, Russia, and China — to recognize that cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories. If they don’t work together to protect the cyber-commons, the digital highway will, at the very least, continue to be plagued by potholes, broken guardrails, and improvised explosive devices whose detonations threaten to disrupt all our lives.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series and the final novel, Songlands, will be published in June. He has also written The Pandemic Pivot.
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, Chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, arrives for a House Democratic caucus meeting on the potential impeachment of President Donald Trump in Washington, May 22, 2019. (photo: Getty Images)
Congress Looks to Judicial Overrides to Strengthen Consumer Protections
Rachel M. Cohen, The Intercept
Cohen writes: "In a unanimous decision last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that would limit the ability of the Federal Trade Commission to seek monetary relief for borrowers who have been defrauded by corporate lenders."
The underutilized tool would allow Congress to void SCOTUS rulings that insulate lenders from regulation.
n a unanimous decision last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that would limit the ability of the Federal Trade Commission to seek monetary relief for borrowers who have been defrauded by corporate lenders. Under the new ruling, the FTC would only be allowed to pursue restitution in the form of injunctions, not cash payments, for customers who have fallen victim to deceptive practices like short-term or payday loans.
“An uncertain impending Supreme Court decision on the FTC’s 13(b) authorities has given scammers new opportunities to take advantage of people, including those who are isolated at home due to the pandemic,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone Jr. and Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee Chair Jan Schakowsky in a joint statement two days earlier. Lawmakers announced that they planned to amend the FTC’s founding legislation, which would preserve its ability to seek financial redress under section 13(b), regardless of what the court decided.
By clarifying its intent in the FTC statute through the proposed amendment, called the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act, Congress would effectively override the Supreme Court’s more limited interpretation. With a simple tweak to the legislative text — which can pass on an individual basis or as part of an omnibus package — a so-called judicial override can address or eliminate whatever ambiguity the Supreme Court found within the law, thereby nullifying the court’s decision. As The Intercept and The American Prospect wrote last year, this congressional option has the potential to counteract a conservative-leaning court and toss out dozens of harmful rulings.
And the proposed FTC legislative fix is not the only judicial override Democratic lawmakers are pursuing. Last week, the House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters, marked up an omnibus package known as the “Comprehensive Debt Collection Improvement Act.” The legislation beefs up a number of consumer protections, ranging from limits on how debt collectors can harass consumers electronically (sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.) to new restrictions on entities that collect medical debt (sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.).
A seemingly obscure bill included in the package, introduced by first-term Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., seeks to challenge a 2019 Supreme Court case that limited the rights of consumers in nonjudicial foreclosure states. (Nonjudicial foreclosure means lenders do not have to go to court to repossess your home. According to the legal blog Nolo, 30 states and the District of Columbia use nonjudicial foreclosure, including Auchincloss’s home state of Massachusetts.) The bill would classify any business involved in foreclosure in a nonjudicial foreclosure state as a debt collector, thereby subjecting it to the rules and protections of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, or FDCPA. It’s Auchincloss’s first bill in Congress.
The bill would override a decision the Supreme Court reached in 2019, when it heard a dispute between a man named Dennis Obduskey and a law firm that declared it was foreclosing on his Colorado home. Obduskey challenged the proceedings under the FDCPA, alleging the firm failed to verify his debt, as required of debt collectors under federal law.
In Obduskey v. McCarthy and Holthus LLP, the nation’s high court sided unanimously with the law firm, affirming that in a nonjudicial state the firm would not qualify as a “debt collector” under the FDCPA. But in her concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she felt this was a “close case.” She explicitly noted that “today’s opinion does not prevent Congress from clarifying this statute if we have gotten it wrong.”
Auchincloss, a former Republican who succeeded Joe Kennedy’s seat in Congress, took her up on that invitation. His bill proposes that Congress simply strike language from the FDCPA that currently, at least in the eyes of the Supreme Court, limits the definition of “debt collector.”
“The bill is extremely important to help curb harassment and abuse,” said Andrea Bopp Stark, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. She noted that judicial foreclosure states are already better for consumers “by giving them due process rights to either defend the foreclosure or bring affirmative claims [about the foreclosure] in court.” In nonjudicial foreclosure states, individuals have fewer rights to begin with — which makes protecting them under the FDCPA all the more crucial.
While foreclosure defense lawyers have insisted there are workarounds to Obduskey, reinterpreting the statute would be the simplest way to restore protections for people on the brink of foreclosure. And with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposing to ban foreclosures until 2022, the timing would allow months for borrowers and foreclosing attorneys alike to adapt to the bill’s intended changes.
The Comprehensive Debt Collection Improvement Act — the omnibus package that contains the bills from Auchincloss, Pressley, and Tlaib — has been moved out of committee and will now proceed to consideration by the full House. The House hearing on the Consumer Protection and Recovery Act, the FTC Act amendment, is scheduled for Tuesday at 11 a.m. And last week, four FTC commissioners urged Congress to pass a legislative fix and reaffirm their agency’s power to provide consumer redress.
Despite being relatively easy to use and representing an important check on judicial power, these statutory overrides have fallen by the wayside in recent years. In November, The Intercept and The American Prospect identified dozens of statutory rulings that Congress could address with a simple tweak to the law and encouraged lawmakers to take advantage. They may at last be getting the message.
“The Supreme Court’s decision last week strikes at the very heart of the FTC’s mission to protect and provide relief to consumers,” Pallone said in a statement to The Intercept. “Now it is up to Congress to come together to restore these critical authorities so that the FTC can continue its vital work protecting American consumers, and that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
A civilian house in Myothit, Momauk Township that was destroyed in a regime airstrike on April 25. (photo: Bhamo Platform)
Thousands Flee as Myanmar Junta Planes Bomb Kachin Villages
The Irrawaddy
Excerpt: "The Myanmar military has been conducting frequent airstrikes on villages in Momauk Township, Kachin State for the past several days, forcing thousands of local residents to flee their homes. The air raids follow fierce fighting between regime troops and a local ethnic armed group, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), in the area."
Fighting has intensified near Myothit and Sihark villages in Momauk Township since the KIA attacked two police outposts and a military base at the Tarpein Bridge on April 11.
“The military has been bombing our villages for four days. Usually they carry out three or four airstrikes a day,” said a local staying near Myothit Village.
“There is shooting all day and night. No one dares to stay in the villages,” he said.
As of Monday, more than 5,000 villagers had fled to churches and monasteries in Momauk from their homes in Sihike, Kone Law, Myo Haung, Myo Thit, Shwe Myaung, Namt Lan, Mone Khat, Naung Kon and Nant Ngoe villages.
Local residents said many homes in Myothit were destroyed in the airstrikes.
“We did not have time to take our belongings when we fled. Now, most of our homes have been burned down and destroyed in the bombing by the military. Everything is gone,” a resident of Kone Law Village said.
On Monday, the KIA also attacked a convoy of military vehicles that was reinforcing regime troops in Momauk Township. KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu was unable to confirm whether there were any casualties, however.
Fighting has also been reported at Alaw Bum base near the Chinese border after the military made efforts to recapture it. The KIA seized the base from the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw), on March 25. The KIA currently occupies the base. More than 100 junta soldiers, including a battalion commander, are believed to have been killed during heavy fighting in the area in early April.
Clashes between the KIA and regime troops were also reported in Waimaw, Hpakant and Tanai townships on Tuesday morning.
On Tuesday, the KIA warned junta troops not to establish bases in restricted areas including in religious buildings and schools in Bhamo and Momauk townships. The armed group also asked locals not to allow the Tatmadaw to use their vehicles to transport troops or food supplies or travel to combat zones.
Hereford beef cattle. (photo: Farm Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
Biden's Fake Burger Ban and the Rising Culture War Over Meat
Zach Beauchamp, Vox
Beauchamp writes: "Over the weekend, Republicans accused Joe Biden of trying to ban meat."
Biden’s not taking away your meat, as Republicans claimed this weekend. But partisan conflict over eating animals is just getting started.
The claim, which you’ve heard from the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, is that Biden’s climate plan will prohibit Americans from chowing down on burgers in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions associated with industrial agriculture.
On Fox News this Friday, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow warned of a Fourth of July where “you can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts” (Kudlow doesn’t seem to be aware of what beer is made from). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) dubbed Biden “The Hamburglar.”
Of course, Biden’s climate change plan does not limit meat-eating in any way. A Washington Post fact-check traced the burger-banning Biden myth back to a misleading article in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid known for sensationalist coverage and right-wing politics. Biden’s actual climate policies so far have focused on reducing emissions from cars and power plants, with no effort to block meat production or consumption.
At first blush, this is yet another instance of a fake outrage cycle in the right-wing echo chamber pegged to a lie. But there’s something more distressing here too — it’s the latest example of how efforts to curb the climate crisis and our reliance on meat are becoming just the latest flashpoints in our all-consuming culture wars.
The grain of truth in the Republican claims (agri-pun intended) is that any serious climate change plan needs to do something about meat production. A recent paper in Science, a leading academic journal, found that food-related emissions alone put the Paris climate agreement’s warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius out of reach. The most effective way to address these emissions, according to the paper’s authors, is a global shift away from meat consumption.
Biden’s climate policies so far have not advanced this goal, so those conservative potshots over the weekend were lies. But here’s the thing: Biden’s plan absolutely should do something about industrial farming. Any plan to tackle climate change should do something to decrease America’s reliance on the meat industry — moonshot subsidies for lab-grown meat, for example.
But everything nowadays is bound up in our political identities, and meat has a cultural and economic significance few other things can match. Anything Democrats propose to address the problem of animal agriculture’s emissions will be — is already being — met by major backlash from the right.
Increasingly, America’s meat-eating ways are being subsumed into our culture wars. It’s yet another sign of how polarized our country is and how hard this polarization makes tackling a catastrophic threat like climate change.
The anatomy of a meat smear
On Thursday, the Daily Mail published an article with a characteristically inflammatory headline: “How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.”
The use of the word “could” there is crucial, as the article’s content is entirely speculative. It takes Biden’s recently announced climate change targets — cutting 50-52 percent of America’s emissions per month — and attempts to make projections about what policy changes might be needed to reach that target. Though Mail reporter Emily Crane admits that Biden “has yet to release any firm details on exactly how such a plan will affect the daily lives of ordinary Americans,” she goes ahead and makes some sketchy guesses.
“Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut their consumption of other animal based foods in half,” Crane writes. “To do that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day. It equates to consuming roughly one average sized burger per month.”
The estimate is based on a University of Michigan paper on how much hypothetical diet changes could reduce American climate emissions, which found that the US could achieve a 51 percent reduction in food-related emissions by reducing beef consumption by 90 percent and all other animal-based foods by 50 percent. But there is no evidence presented that the Michigan estimate is informing Biden’s climate policy.
We cannot assume that, in order to hit a 50 percent reduction overall, Biden would attempt to reduce emissions in each sector of the economy by exactly 50 percent. The plans for the agricultural sector may end up being more or less than that, and they may aim to accomplish them by means other than reducing domestic meat consumption (like reducing the use of nitrogen in plant agriculture). As the Mail itself admits, we genuinely have no idea.
Despite these flaws, the Mail’s article took off in the right-wing media world, with many interpreting it as an actual summary of Biden’s policy aims. According to the Post’s fact-check, the most influential vector was Fox News, which made an easily shareable infographic about “Biden’s climate requirements” that launders the Mail’s misinformation as an authoritative claim about Biden’s plan stemming from the University of Michigan itself.
On Monday, Fox News’ John Roberts admitted the error on-air: “a graphic and the script incorrectly implied it [the Michigan study] was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change. That is not the case.” But it was too late: the graphic had already motivated of the more prominent false claims on social media, with prominent conservatives retweeting it as though it were accurate:
As we’ve seen in the past, lies that circulate unchallenged in the right-wing media ecosystem can sometimes harden into myths. Birtherism and the Obamacare “death panel” rumors began as fringe claims pushed with little to no factual basis; once amplified by conservative media, they became widely embraced by the GOP base and elements of the official Republican Party. The notion that the 2020 election was somehow stolen, while similarly factually challenged, spread even faster (largely because its progenitor was also the incumbent president and party leader).
Because so many conservatives distrust the mainstream media, fact-checks like the Post’s are not going to change the Fox-Republican narrative. As Biden continues to roll out his climate change policies, expect some conservatives to say it bans beef — even if it does nothing of the kind.
The culture war over meat begins
Here’s the problem, though: If Biden’s climate plan doesn’t do something about meat, it’s probably going to fail.
Globally speaking, livestock production represents a significant portion of overall greenhouse gas emissions. The reasons for this are intrinsic to meat production itself; there is no way for humans to consume meat in the way we do without abetting catastrophic warming.
Ruminant animals like cows, kept in numbers much larger due to meat and dairy demand, emit methane gas through their bodily functions — a pollutant more potent than carbon dioxide. Raising allegedly more climate-friendly meats, like chicken, also emits significantly more greenhouse gases than plant-based protein productions. Animal agriculture necessitates clearing huge amounts of land, a significant cause of deforestation in places like Brazil’s Amazon. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), factory farms where animals are crowded into tiny cages and kept in horrific conditions, create massive feces lagoons that intensify the methane problem.
There is, in short, no way around the problem: If we want to keep climate change at a manageable level, we need to change the way we produce and consume animal products.
The Biden administration may or may not eventually take steps to deal with this problem. But the hysterical reaction to a falsehood that it is going to be doing so suggests just how explosive the reaction will be if Biden actually moves in this direction.
Both in the United States and globally, meat’s cultural significance is hard to overstate. Humans have eaten animals for millennia, and it’s become deeply ingrained in our cultural rituals and self-understanding. In America, meat is linked with masculinity and ideals about the virtuous traditional American farmer — central concepts in a Republican Party dominated by culturally conservative rural whites.
To make matters worse, animal agriculture is also a huge business, meaning that billions of dollars would likely line up behind pro-meat Republicans. A new study reported by my colleague Sigal Samuel found that animal agriculture industries have already spent millions trying to undermine climate policy, when there’s been no federal effort to intentionally reduce American meat consumption. Imagine how hard they’d fight if there was one.
This conjunction of forces — the cultural power of meat and the interests of Big Agriculture — make the issue of reducing meat consumption politically challenging.
When a draft FAQ about the Green New Deal mentioned the problem of animal methane emissions, conservatives responded by falsely claiming the policy would ban cow production — seeing this as a potent attack line. There’s a reason Biden’s team responded to the current rumors by tweeting a picture of Biden grilling patties: This is a fight they don’t want to have directly.
Even the most palatable meat alternatives, like lab-grown meat and Impossible-style plant proteins, threaten both conservative self-images of America and the bottom line of the agriculture industry. When current Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) ate at a plant-based vegan restaurant in Atlanta during the 2020 campaign, his opponent David Purdue mocked him by tweeting a picture of himself eating bacon. The caption? “Pick your side, America.”
The unstoppable force of climate change advocacy on the left is about to hit the immovable object of attachment to meat on the right. The resulting fight will implicate issues at the very core of American identity, a country where animal agriculture is a major part of our mythologized cowboy past and economic present.
With the stakes so high, there’s every reason to believe that meat could be the next big fight in our all-consuming culture war. “Biden bans burgers” isn’t a one-off lie; we may look back on it as the meat wars’ Fort Sumter.
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