25 March 21
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25 March 21
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Robert Reich | Bessemer and the Power Shift
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes:
he most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the simultaneous shrinkage of organized labor. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.
Next week, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first U.S.-based union in its nearly 27-year history.
Conditions in Amazon’s warehouses would please Kim Jong un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings, “and they track our every move,” Jennifer Bates, a warehouse worker at Bessemer, told the Senate Budget Committee last week.
To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a so-called “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.
Why is Amazon abusing its workers?
The company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39 percent of Americans put together.
Amazon is abusing workers because it can.
Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying around $15 an hour and treating their workers like cattle.
The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them, summoning the collective bargaining power of over a third of the entire American workforce.
By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4 percent of America’s private-sector workers are now unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.
Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.
Today, organized labor’s political clout is miniscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged state “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections, and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.
They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations like itself to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.
Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.
This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1 of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together.
Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.
The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals, and a renewed commitment to antitrust.
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor law reforms in over a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises that trade deals will protect the interests of American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.
I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some hundred twenty years ago when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.
Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same.
Sen. Mitch McConnell and Sen. Chuck Schumer. (photo: Getty)
Senate Democrats Take First Steps on Bill to Expand Voting Rights
The New York Times
The Senate Rules Committee held a hearing on a sweeping bill that would overhaul federal elections and expand voting rights. President Biden announced Vice President Kamala Harris would lead efforts to stem the flow of migrants by working with Central American countries.
he Senate took its first steps on Wednesday to advance one of Democrats’ top legislative priorities, convening an opening hearing on a sweeping elections bill that would expand voting rights and blunt some Republican state legislators’ efforts to restrict access to the ballot box.
Chock-full of liberal priorities, the bill, called the For the People Act, would usher in landmark changes making it easier to vote, enact new campaign finance laws and end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. The legislation passed the House along party lines earlier this month. It faces solid opposition from Republicans who are working to clamp down on ballot access, and who argue that the bill is a power grab by Democrats.
Democrats on the Senate Rules Committee hope that testimony from former Attorney General Eric Holder, prominent voting experts and anti-corruption advocates will help build on a rising drumbeat of support from liberals.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. (photo: Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
Georgia Prosecutors Eye 'False Statement' Charges for Rudy Giuliani and Team Trump
Jose Pagliery and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Charging the ex-president’s lawyer with lying to officials would be unusual. But so were Rudy Giuliani’s antics after the election.
ocal prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are actively researching whether they can apply “false statement” charges against Rudy Giuliani and other members of Donald Trump’s team for their mendacity-packed attempts to meddle with the state’s 2020 election results, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a former New York City mayor, twice presented Georgia state legislators withfake evidence and wild allegations of a conspiracy theory to commit widespread election fraud. Separately, on two recorded phone calls to state election officials, then-President Trump made specific false claims that votes for him were discarded and suitcases full of votes for Joe Biden were trucked in.
In a Feb. 10 letter to state officials that was first made public by The New York Times, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did note that her investigation includes—among other crimes—potential violations of Georgia laws prohibiting “the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies.”
But, until now, there has been no focus on the legal team’s efforts to explore that specific criminal charge. Instead, news stories have touched on the district attorney’s potential use of election fraud or racketeering charges against Trump’s inner circle. The latter would require that prosecutors prove a pattern of corruption—similar to the way law enforcement finds that mafia bosses direct underlings. The idea here would be to prove that Trump and his lieutenants conspired in a “criminal enterprise” to undermine a legitimate election.
Several former Georgia district attorneys told The Daily Beast that investigators are likely relying on a state law that makes it a felony to “knowingly and willfully” make a false statement on “any matter within the jurisdiction” of the state government. The criminal charge carries a punishment of one to five years in prison.
Applying this state law to the former president's attorney would be a beyond-rare strategy, former prosecutors say. But then again, so was Team Trump’s conduct after the election.
The Fulton DA’s public integrity team is said to be zeroing in on the wild claims Giuliani made to Georgia’s state legislators—an integral part of Trump’s multi-faceted attempt to overturn the 2020 election results by pressuring lawmakers and making court challenges. Also under review: Trump’s numerous erroneous assertions in his direct phone calls to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (first reported by The Washington Post) and his six-minute phone chat with an elections investigator (whose audio was made public by The Wall Street Journal).
On Tuesday, The Daily Beast reached attorney Cleta Mitchell, a member of Trump’s legal team who played a key role on the phone call with Raffensperger.
“I have nothing to say about it. I’ll deal with it at the appropriate time,” Mitchell said. She and all others on that call are expected to be approached by Georgia investigators.
Trump advisers did not provide comment on this story, and neither did Giuliani; the former New York City mayor’s attorney Joseph Sibley declined to comment on Tuesday evening. However, a person familiar with the matter said that the former president’s legal strategy to counter any false statement charges would likely involve a free-speech defense, though such discussions are preliminary at the moment.
This effort by a Georgia prosecutor is one of several government cases that Trump is now facing. New York state Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are both investigating the Trump Organization over potential insurance and bank fraud involving lucrative real estate properties all over the country. Trump is also up against several individual lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct.
In recent weeks, Trump has remained, for the most part, publicly mum about this criminal probe. Shortly after the investigation launched, his senior adviser Jason Miller alleged that “this is simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it.”
Giuliani, acting on Trump’s behalf, went before the Georgia state Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Dec. 3, 2020 and laid out the bogus details of his election conspiracy claim.
Among his worst blatant lies: that the state counted 96,600 “phantom votes.” That’s the same bonkers claim that fueled Sidney Powell’s attempt to overturn Georgia’s election results with her so-called “Kraken” lawsuit—one that was promptly tossed out by a federal judge.
Giuliani also paraded several widely discredited witnesses, including a little-known cybersecurity consultant (and Republican congressional candidate) who wrongly asserted that voting machines across the country in 2020 were technologically flawed. Russ Ramsland’s claims were debunked by top election security experts who made clear that his Texas firm, Allied Security Operations Group, completely misunderstood the technology inside voting machines.
In addition, Giuliani played an edited clip of surveillance video from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which he claimed proved ballot-counting irregularities. That video was later analyzed by state election officials, who went frame-by-frame with journalists to prove that there were no “mystery ballot boxes.”
Giuliani repeated the effort one week later on Dec. 10, when he presented his case before the state’s House Governmental Affairs Committee.
Former Georgia prosecutors told The Daily Beast that any use of false statement charges would be a novel—and difficult—undertaking.
“I think it's clearly going to be an uphill climb,” said Kenneth W. Mauldin, who retired last year after 20 years as the district attorney in the area covering the city of Athens.
If Fulton prosecutors pursue false statement charges, Mauldin said, they will have to contend with jurors who mistakenly believe these election conspiracies—and wouldn’t think such statements are actually false. He said defense attorneys could also attempt to bring in conservative Georgia legislators who don’t believe they were lied to.
Charging someone with false statements for lying to legislators would also be unheard of, said Alan Cook, a former district attorney who served as the director of the University of Georgia law school’s prosecutorial justice program for almost two decades.
“It would be highly unusual to use the false statement statutes in a circumstance like this,” he said. “In 13 years as a prosecutor, I probably only used the statute a half dozen times. It's typically used when state or local investigators are investigating a crime and they interview a witness who willfully and knowingly gives false information that misleads the investigators.”
As in: pointing cops in the wrong direction when they’re looking for a fugitive.
However, Titus T. Nichols, a former violent crimes prosecutor in Augusta, said that hitting Trump’s conspiracy theory-spewing team in Georgia with false statements charges is right in line with the spirit of the law.
“This is precisely to stop people from doing this stupid thing—it wastes the government's time,” said Nichols, who now teaches as an adjunct law professor at the University of Georgia. “When you start going deep into ridiculous theories, you cross that line from ‘I'm giving my opinion,’ to ‘I'm purposely giving false information.’”
Giuliani’s decision to present an edited video as fake evidence of a fake crime crosses that threshold, Nichols explained.
“He knows that he's lying when he says that. There are no secret ballots. That's him presenting false information. And with him being an attorney, it's even more clear that he's lying. As a lawyer, you can't just make up ridiculous theories,” he said.
Nichols said Giuliani will be held to a higher standard because he’s a lawyer—albeit one whose professional status is under threat, given that New York is now considering disbarring the man who was once Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney.
As difficult as it might be to make false statement charges stick in Georgia, that approach has proved to be a reliable tool against Trump’s allies at the federal level. Ex-campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements in connection with the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference. London lawyer Alex Van der Zwaan paid the price for lying to federal agents about communicating with Trump campaign deputy chair Rick Gates. And one-time Trump confidant Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to making false statements to a federally insured bank.
There’s no indication that Giuliani committed what would be an entirely different crime: perjury. Prosecutors could go after someone who lies while testifying under oath, as witnesses are forced to do in state court. But that’s not the case here. In Georgia, people who testify before state Senate and House committees are not placed under oath, staff in both chambers told The Daily Beast.
Former prosecutors said it would be much harder for investigators to slap false statement charges against Trump, because his long ramblings were not formally presented before a governmental body and mostly made up of misplaced opinions that he, in fact, won the election.
“It’s almost like when someone is selling you a car. They're gonna say it's a great car,” Cook said.
Instead, in her letters to officials, the Fulton County district attorney has indicated that Trump and his team could be facing even more serious charges: solicitation of election fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering. As part of that effort, Willis has even hired the attorney who literally wrote the book on state RICO charges, John E. Floyd.
And at the core of that inquiry is Trump’s appeal to the state’s top elections official on his Jan. 2 call.
“So look,” Trump told Raffensperger. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
Biden beat Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes. The ex-president’s comment could be plainly understood to mean that he asked a Georgia state official to change the results of an election—which is specifically listed as a first-degree crime. The very last elections-related offense listed in the Georgia state code makes it illegal to solicit someone to engage in fraud. The punishment is up to three years in prison.
Then again, that kind of behavior also breaks federal law—as former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder quickly pointed out when that call went public. That one’s five years.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (photo: Michael Kappeler/Getty)
'Basically in a New Pandemic,' Says Merkel, as Germany Extends Lockdown
Scott Neuman, NPR
Neuman writes:
erman Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday announced an intensified coronavirus lockdown going into Easter, warning that new mutations raised the specter of a potentially deadly "third wave" of COVID-19 as Europe struggles in its vaccination campaign.
Speaking early Tuesday, Merkel said restrictions would be extended until April 18. She called on citizens to stay home and for shops to close for five days over the Easter holiday.
"We are now basically in a new pandemic. The British mutation has become dominant," Merkel said after late-night videoconference sessions with leaders of Germany's 16 states.
"Fundamentally, we face a new virus of the same kind but with very different characteristics," she said. "More deadly, more infectious, and infectious for longer."
The move marks an about-face for Germany, where leaders earlier this month had set in motion a gradual easing of restrictions.
However, last week, German Health Minister Jens Spahn warned that vaccines won't arrive quickly enough to prevent a third wave of the pandemic. He said new infections in Germany were rising at an "exponential rate" and that there wasn't enough vaccine to stop it.
A recent uptick in infections in Germany has once again threatened to overwhelm hospitals, with 107 cases per 100,000 people reported for the week until Monday, according to Reuters. More than 3,000 people with COVID-19 are in intensive care, the news agency said.
The intensified lockdown means that Germany's churches will be asked to hold Easter services online, that no more than five adults from two households will be allowed to meet over the holiday, and that most shops will be closed, according to Deutsche Welle.
About 9% of Germans have received at least one dose of vaccine so far, Reuters says.
The lockdown extension comes as the European Union squares off with the U.K. over a limited supply of a vaccine produced by pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca. The EU and Britain have been at loggerheads over who gets priority for vaccine deliveries.
Meanwhile, after AstraZeneca announced preliminary results for trials of the vaccine that showed a 79% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 symptoms, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Tuesday added a dose of caution to the findings, saying its Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) had "expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data."
In response, the pharmaceutical maker said in a statement on Tuesday that its interim analysis had been based on data collected only until Feb. 17, and that it had "reviewed the preliminary assessment of the primary analysis and the results were consistent with the interim analysis."
The drugmaker said it expected to release results of its primary analysis within 48 hours.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. (photo: Al Drago/Getty)
DeJoy Announces 10-Year Reorganization of US Postal Service
Brian Naylor, WBUR
Naylor writes:
ostmaster General Louis DeJoy is calling for longer delivery times for some first-class mail, shorter hours for some post offices and more expensive postal rates — all part of a 10-year reorganization plan for the U.S. Postal Service he unveiled Tuesday.
DeJoy outlined the changes at a news conference with other Postal Service officials.
"This is a very positive vision," DeJoy said. If the Postal Service's long-term financial woes are not addressed, he said, the USPS will "run out of cash and require a government bailout."
Under the plan, "a small percentage" of post offices would have their hours reduced, and "a small percentage" of city stations could be closed.
DeJoy said he "was not in a position right now" to say how much the price of a first-class stamp would rise, but that the service is counting on $44 billion in new pricing authority.
Kristin Seaver, the Postal Service's executive vice president, said the change in delivery times would affect only "the fringes of our network." She said 70% of first-class mail will still be delivered in two or three days under the proposal. Twenty percent of what she identified as coast-to-coast mail "might not arrive for five days."
According to the Postal Service's own standards, first-class mail is expected to be delivered on time 96% of the time, a goal it has not reached for some five years.
In the December holiday rush, the on-time rate plummeted to as low as 38% for some mail, but it has since rebounded to 83% in early March, according to Postal Service statistics.
Consumers have been complaining about delayed birthday cards, bills and prescriptions, and those complaints have reached Congress.
DeJoy told a congressional panel last month that the Postal Service lost more than $9 billion last year and owes some $80 billion in unfunded liabilities because of a congressionally imposed mandate that it prepay the health care costs of its future retirees.
DeJoy is working with lawmakers on legislation that would end that requirement and place retirees within the Medicare program.
He told lawmakers the postal system is "in a death spiral" and needs legislation to help restore it to financial stability.
"My message is that the status quo should be acceptable to no one," he said then.
DeJoy's reorganization plan received a mixed reaction. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate committee with oversight of the Postal Service, said in a statement he was "concerned that several of the initiatives in this plan will harm service for folks across the country who rely on the Postal Service for prescription drugs, financial documents, running their small businesses, and more."
"Cuts to service standards for first-class mail, limiting hours at local post offices, and making it more difficult for people to access postal products would adversely impact USPS customers across the nation, including in rural and underserved communities."
The American Postal Workers Union, which represents some 200,000 USPS employees, said the plan "contains both positive attributes as well as some proposals that should be of concern to postal workers and customers."
On the plus side, the union cited the plan's "long overdue proposals for upgrading local post offices and enhancing products and services."
But the union said it had "deep concerns" with other elements of the plan. "Any proposals that would either slow the mail, reduce access to post offices, or further pursue the failed strategy of plant consolidation will need to be addressed," its statement said.
The Save the Post Office coalition, a group of labor and progressive organizations, said in a statement, "Asking Louis DeJoy to make a ten year plan for the post office is like asking the fox to build a better henhouse. After his record of destruction, incompetence and self-dealing over the last nine months, the only plans he's qualified to make at this point are his own retirement plans."
President Biden recently announced three nominees to the postal board of governors, which has the authority to replace the postmaster general if it chooses. Biden's nominees include a former lawyer for the American Postal Workers Union, an elections expert and advocate for voting by mail, and a former deputy postmaster general.
It's not clear when the Senate will take up the nominations. Some Democrats have called for Biden to replace all of the board members, each of whom was nominated by former President Donald Trump. DeJoy, a former logistics company executive and major donor to Republicans, including Trump, was made postmaster general last year by the board.
A man walks past a graffiti denouncing attacks by US drones in Sanaa, Yemen. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
Yemeni Men Appeal US Drone Attack Case to Highest German Court
Al Jazeera
The appeal again seeks to hold Germany accountable for US drone attacks launched involving airbases on its soil.
wo Yemeni men who allege their relatives were killed in an American drone attack have appealed their case to Germany’s highest court, urging a ban on the US military’s use of a base in the country to help control such attacks, their lawyers have said.
Two members of the bin Ali Jaber family, Salem and Waleed bin Ali Jaber, were allegedly killed in a US drone attack in Khashamir, Yemen, in 2012, according to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which filed the case on behalf of the family members, Ahmed and Khalid bin Ali Jaber, in the Federal Constitutional Court.
The attack has not been acknowledged by the United States, according to the organisation.
The ECCHR and the family have since sought to compel the German government to ban drone attacks involving the US Ramstein Air Base, located to the southwest of Frankfurt, arguing that Germany has a responsibility “to protect the bin Ali Jaber family from further” such attacks.
The appeal announced on Tuesday, which seeks to overturn a 2020 court ruling on the matter, argues that the court should have “obliged the German government to do more to protect the plaintiffs’ right to life”, according to an ECCHR statement.
For its part, the US military has said Ramstein is used to “conduct operational level planning, monitoring and assessment of assigned airpower missions throughout Europe and Africa”, but not to launch or operate drones involved in “counterterrorism activities”.
However, the appeal argues that “Ramstein’s significance for US drone attacks in Yemen is much greater than the court assumes”.
The appeal filed on Tuesday also the court did not “sufficiently assess” the extent of the allegation that the attacks violate international law.
“Germany must do more to protect the right to life of the Jaber family,” Andreas Schuller, head of ECCHR’s International Crimes and Accountability team, said in a statement.
“The danger posed by drone attacks via Ramstein has not been averted, which is why we are turning to the Federal Constitutional Court today.”
Decades-long legal fight
In 2015, a lower court had determined that Germany had not failed to meet legal requirements related to the US drone attacks.
However, in 2019, the Muenster administrative court ruled that the German government had partial responsibility to ensure that drone raids involving the Ramstein Air Base were carried out in line with international law.
In its ruling, the Muenster administrative court said available evidence suggested the base still played “a central role” for the relay of flight control data used for drone attacks in Yemen.
The ruling, however, stopped short of calling for a complete ban on the attacks launched from the US base.
In a 2020 appeal, a federal court in Leipzig upheld the 2015 decision, ruling that German diplomatic outreach to the US over the attacks was sufficient, regardless of international law.
The ruling concluded that there was no direct link to Germany in the case and said the base’s relay of flight control data did not sufficiently establish its role in the raids.
It was not immediately clear when the Federal Constitutional Court would consider the latest appeal.
A coal-fired power station in China. (photo: Wang Meng/Getty)
Coal, Oil and Gas Firms Have Received $3.8 Trillion in Finance Since the Paris Climate Deal in 2015
Damian Carrington, Guardian UK
Carrington writes:
Coal, oil and gas firms have received $3.8tn in finance since the Paris climate deal in 2015
he world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to a report by a coalition of NGOs.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was higher than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others described as “shocking”.
Oil, gas and coal will need to be burned for some years to come. But it has been known since at least 2015 that a significant proportion of existing reserves must remain in the ground if global heating is to remain below 2C, the main Paris target. Financing for new reserves is therefore the “exact opposite” of what is required to tackle the climate crisis, the report’s authors said.
US and Canadian banks make up 13 of the 60 banks analysed, but account for almost half of global fossil fuel financing over the last five years, the report found. JPMorgan Chase provided more finance than any other bank. UK bank Barclays provided the most fossil fuel financing among all European banks and French bank BNP Paribas was the biggest in the EU.
Overall financing dipped by 9% in pandemic-hit 2020, but funding for the 100 fossil fuel companies with the biggest expansion plans actually rose by 10%. Citi was the biggest financier of these 100 companies in 2020.
A commitment to be net zero by 2050 has been made by 17 of the 60 banks, but the report describes the pledges as “dangerously weak, half-baked, or vague”, arguing that action is needed today. Some banks have policies that block finance for coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, but almost two-thirds of funding is for oil and gas companies.
The report’s authors said targeting of banks by campaigners and activist shareholders could help change bank policies but that action by governments was also needed.
“When we look at the five years overall, the trend is still going in the wrong direction, which is obviously the exact opposite of where we need to be going to live up to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Alison Kirsch, at Rainforest Action Network and an author of the report. “None of these 60 banks have made, without loopholes, a plan to exit fossil fuels.”
“We have seen progress in restricting financing for special places like the Arctic or greenhouse-gas-intensive forms of oil, like tar sands, but these are such a small piece of the pie,” she said.
“One bank after another is making solemn promises to become ‘net zero by 2050’,” said Johan Frijns, at BankTrack, part of the coalition behind the report. “But there exists no pathway towards this laudable goal that does not require dealing with bank finance for the fossil fuel industry right here and now.”
“Banks provide the financial oxygen that allows the fossil fuel industry to breathe,” said Mark Campanale, at financial thinktank Carbon Tracker, which was not involved in the report. “It reveals the shocking fact that lending has grown since the Paris Agreement, [which] should concern everyone, not least policymakers and shareholders of the banks themselves.
“The cost of carbon in terms of extreme weather events, lost lives and livelihoods will be borne by society and sadly not the banks, nor the fossil fuel companies,” said Campanale. “Next time the banks come looking to taxpayers for a bailout, they shouldn’t be surprised to find backs are turned.”
The report was produced by six NGOs and is endorsed by over 300 organisations from 50 countries. It used Bloomberg data to analyse both direct loans by banks to fossil fuel companies and funding from other investors that the banks arrange via bond and debt sales.
“A surprising result from the 2020 data is that BNP Paribas, a bank that never loses an opportunity to boast of its clean, green credentials, and those of its US subsidiary Bank of the West, came in as the fourth-worst fossil bank in 2020,” the report said, with the $41bn provided by far the biggest sum in last five years.
BNP Paribas has some of the strongest policies on unconventional oil and gas, such as fracking and tar sands, Kirsch said: “But it’s a relatively small part of their overall funding and the bank hasn’t reined in its financing to the oil and gas supermajors, which get really big deals.”
A spokesperson for BNP Paribas said the report has ranked the bank second for the strength of its restrictions on financing coal, fracking and tar sands. “During the Covid-19 crisis, all sectors of the economy needed support and BNP Paribas, like other banks, played an important stabilising role for the economy. However, BNP Paribas supported the oil and gas sector to a lower extent than other sectors of activity.”
JPMorgan Chase launched a “Paris-aligned financing strategy” in October, pledging to set intermediate emission targets for 2030 for its financing portfolio. It declined to comment on the report.
A Barclays spokeswoman said: “We have made a commitment to align our entire financing portfolio to the goals of the Paris Agreement, with specific targets and transparent reporting, on the way to achieving our ambition to be a net zero bank by 2050.” Citi did not respond to requests for comment.
A separate report last Thursday from the International Energy Agency and Imperial College London found that investments in renewable energy have seen a 367% greater return than fossil fuels since 2010.
ne night in the spring of 2017, Michelle Campbell was in her kitchen, cooking hot dogs for a few friends, when she heard the boom of her front door breaking. It was the narcotics unit of the Mount Vernon, New York, police. They carried a search warrant and a battering ram. They swarmed in, guns drawn.
