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07 May 21
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Facebook Is Pretending It Cares How Its Platform Affects the World
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Guardian UK
Vaidhyanathan writes: "The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool, not as a platform for 'posting.'"
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New Study Estimates More Than 900,000 People Have Died of COVID-19 in US
Becky Sullivan, NPR
Sullivan writes: "A new study estimates that the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is more than 900,000, a number 57% higher than official figures."
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'We're Terrorized': LA Sheriffs Frequently Harass Families of People They Kill, Says Report
Sam Levin, Guardian UK
Levin writes: "Los Angeles sheriff deputies frequently harass the families of people they have killed, including taunting them at vigils, parking outside their homes and following them and pulling them over for no reason, according to a new report from the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union."
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Warren Pushes Biden to Forgive Student Debt as White House Considers His Legal Authority
Jacob Pramuk, CNBC News
Pramuk writes: "Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not easing up on her campaign to get President Joe Biden to forgive student debt."
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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Yellen: A 'Shocking' $7 Trillion in Taxes Is Going Uncollected From Wealthiest Americans
Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Juliana Kaplan, Business Insider
Excerpt: "Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said a 'shocking' amount of taxes was going uncollected by the federal government and urged additional action to fetch this money from the wealthiest Americans."
"It's really shocking and distressing to see estimates suggesting that the gap between what we're collecting in taxes on current tax and what we should be collecting — if everybody were paying for taxes that are due — that amounts to over $7 trillion over a decade," Yellen said in an interview with The Atlantic published on Tuesday.
She added: "We're trying to make meaningful steps to close that gap."
Yellen's remarks emphasize the Biden administration's efforts to collect tax revenue from the wealthiest Americans and multinational companies to finance $4 trillion in spending programs to overhaul the economy. President Joe Biden is also increasingly saying he does not want his plans to swell the federal deficit.
At the center of Biden's planned revenue raisers is a provision to increase funding for IRS enforcement. He also wants to slap investors earning above $1 million with a hike in the capital-gains tax and raise the top marginal income-tax rate to 39.6% from 37%.
The IRS's official estimate is that there is a tax gap of $441 billion a year. But Charles Rettig, the agency's commissioner, recently told Congress that number could be over $1 trillion.
A recent study from IRS researchers and academics found that the top 1% of Americans failed to report about one-quarter of their income to the IRS. The research found income underreporting was nearly twice as high for the top 0.1%, which could account for billions in uncollected taxes.
The gap between taxes owed and taxes paid could grow if there's no intervention, according to the Treasury Department. The department estimated that Biden's proposed $80 billion investment in the IRS could bring in an additional $700 billion over 10 years.
That figure wouldn't include hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes going uncollected each year, Insider's Ayelet Sheffey reported, citing Insider calculations based on numbers reported by The New York Times and comments from the IRS chief to Congress.
Biden's funding would ramp up enforcement on the wealthiest. On the whole, the number of agents devoted to working on sophisticated tax-evasion enforcement dropped by 35% over the past decade, according to the Treasury. The IRS's budget fell by 20% between 2010 and 2018, while audits decreased by 42% from 2010 to 2017. According to a White House fact sheet, there was an 80% decline from 2011 to 2018 in the audit rate for those making over $1 million a year.
Earlier on Tuesday, Yellen suggested the Federal Reserve may need to make "modest" increases to interest rates to prevent the economy from overheating if Biden's plans were enacted. That would step up the cost of federal borrowing and lead to a slower rate of economic growth, a move usually taken to curb inflation.
The decision to raise rates is under the Fed's jurisdiction, not the Treasury's. Yellen later clarified her remarks and said she was not concerned about inflation.
"It's not something I'm predicting or recommending," the Treasury secretary said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit. "If anybody appreciates the independence of the Fed, I think that person is me."
Palestinian protesters with flags confront Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against Jewish settlements in the town of Asira ash-Shamaliya in the illegally occupied West Bank near Nablus, in October 2020. (photo: Abbas Momani/AFP)
In Washington, a Debate Grows Over Conditioning Aid to Israel
Jillian Kestler-D'Amours and Joseph Stepansky, Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Progressive lawmakers and Palestine advocates say the discourse is shifting around $3.8 billion in annual US assistance to Israel."
or decades, US military aid to Israel has been a sacred cow, with Republicans and Democrats in the United States shielding it from criticism, scrutiny and especially, any calls for restraint.
But after years of campaigning, Palestinian rights advocates and progressive lawmakers say the discourse is shifting – and what was once a solid, bipartisan wall of support for unconditional US support for Israel is slowly cracking.
“In the grand scheme of American politics, we are still sort of situated on the fringe… but a few years ago, there wasn’t even space to be on the fringe,” said Brad Parker of Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), which supports efforts in Congress to condition US funds for Israel.
In April, US Congresswoman Betty McCollum introduced a bill that aims to ensure the $3.8bn that the US gives to Israel every year is not used in rights abuses against Palestinian children, the destruction of Palestinian property, the removal of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank, or Israel’s attempts to further annex Palestinian land.
The proposed legislation has the support of more than a dozen members of Congress, including Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and dozens of Palestinian, human rights and liberal Jewish organisations, including J Street. It is not the first time McCollum has spearheaded such an effort, as the Minnesota legislator introduced similar bills before.
“My bill prohibits U.S. funds from supporting or enabling human rights abuses,” McCollum told Al Jazeera in an email. “Not $1 of U.S. taxpayer funds should be used to violate the human rights of the Palestinian people living under Israel’s military occupation.”
Parker at DCI-P, which has supported the creation and introduction of the bills, told Al Jazeera he has no illusions that the latest one will pass in Congress; the legislation does not have the votes. Nevertheless, the reaction it has garnered shows the discourse is shifting, Parker said, while the bill also opens up a long-overdue debate about how Israel uses US funding.
“It’s a massive success because these are conversations that just were not happening. It was either 100 percent unconditional support for the $3.8bn, or you’re completely anti-Semitic and you want Israel to disappear. That was the conversation just weeks ago.”
History of US support
In 2016, only months before the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the US and Israel reached a landmark agreement under which Washington agreed to provide the Israeli government with $38bn over 10 years, an increase of $700m annually from a previous bilateral deal.
The two countries had been allies for decades, going back to US support for the 1948 creation of the Israeli state itself, and the relationship has transcended all forms of government in Washington and Jerusalem. But observers pointed out that the pledge of support from Obama, who had a chilly relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, showed just how unequivocal US support for Israel really was.
The early years of the US-Israel relationship involved modest development aid, explained Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
But the 1960s saw an increase in sales of military equipment and some forms of assistance, with an aid “ramp-up” following the Six-Day War of 1967 and into the 1970s, as Washington pledged “that if Israel would withdraw from the Sinai and sign the peace treaty with Egypt, that [it] would basically guarantee a certain level of military aid every year”, Walt told Al Jazeera.
That aid has remained at roughly $3bn a year since, but it was not until the early 1980s that aid to Israel became pretty much “unconditional”, Walt explained, a phenomenon he attributed to the “political influence of AIPAC and other organisations in the Israel lobby”.
“For almost all senators and almost all congressmen, it’s been just easier to go ahead and vote [for] this aid package than to question it, because they would face criticism from AIPAC and others,” Walt said. “They might suddenly discover that they had a primary challenger going after them and getting campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals, et cetera. So, it was just politically convenient.”
But in recent years, the cracks have grown as more Americans, and notably Democrats, have come to believe Israel is not genuinely interested in a two-state solution, Walt said, and as Netanyahu has increasingly aligned with the Republican Party.
A recent Gallup poll found that while Americans still overwhelmingly favour Israel, a quarter of respondents said they are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, up six percent since 2018. The survey also reported that a majority of Democrats (53 percent) supported the US putting more pressure on Israel to resolve the conflict, a 10 percent increase from 2018.
The shift has been aided notably by Senator Bernie Sanders, a two-time leader of the Democratic presidential primary field, who brought the issue to the campaign trail in 2016 and 2020. “That suggests that there isn’t the same kind of orthodoxy imposed on or constraining the debate – and once you can have open discussions, there’s no telling exactly where things go over time,” Walt added.
‘Ridiculous discussion’
Still, the wall of bipartisan support for unconditional US aid to Israel remains formidable.
On April 22, more than 300 US legislators signed a letter urging continued unconditional support for Israel. The funding, they said, is “a vital and cost-effective expenditure which advances important U.S. national security interests” and stressing that both Republican and Democratic presidents “have understood the strategic importance of providing Israel with security assistance”.
AIPAC came out against McCollum’s proposal, tweeting: “No cuts. No new conditions. No political restrictions on aid to Israel.” Democratic Majority for Israel, a group that bills itself as “the voice of pro-Israel Democrats”, also slammed McCollum’s proposal as “another in a series of one-sided, demagogic anti-Israel bills” and “a contrived effort to stir up hostility toward Israel”.
Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said those reactions to McCollum’s proposal demonstrate that the US-Israel relationship has been “so exceptionalised … that we can’t have a normal, healthy conversation about US assistance”.
“When you’re sending $3.8bn per year, how can you say you don’t want to have any knowledge of how that money’s being spent? It becomes sort of a really ridiculous discussion because it becomes clear that any questioning of US assistance to Israel – any kind of tracking, tracing, monitoring or accountability – is going to be fought tooth and nail,” Hassan told Al Jazeera.
She added that it will be interesting to see how President Joe Biden’s administration squares its pledge to take a rights-based approach to US foreign policy, with unequivocal support for Israel, which Human Rights Watch recently said is using apartheid to subjugate Palestinians.
On the campaign trail as a Democratic presidential nominee in 2019, Biden said the idea of withholding US aid to Israel over its rights record was “bizarre” and he has since reiterated his continued commitment to Israel.
“We’re still seeing a reluctance to take on the Israel-Palestine issue in a way that also centres values,” said Hassan, who has urged the Biden administration to take a rights-based approach to the conflict. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how the current administration navigates its reset of US policy abroad, its reimagining of US global leadership and of multilateralism at the same time as it maintains this policy of no daylight between it and Israel.”
A sign warns of the application of the pesticide Lorsban, a trade name for chlorpyrifos, in an orange grove in Woodlake, California, June 26, 2012. (photo: Jim West/Alamy)
Court Rules That EPA's Delay "Exposed a Generation of American Children" to Brain-Damaging Pesticide Chlorpyrifos
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "The ruling represents a stark repudiation of the Trump EPA's refusal to ban chlorpyrifos."
fter 14 years of legal battles, a federal court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take actions that will likely force the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market. The federal agency has for years been considering mounting evidence that links the pesticide to brain damage in children — including loss of IQ, learning difficulties, ADHD, and autism — but, as the court acknowledged, has repeatedly delayed taking action.
“Rather than ban the pesticide or reduce the tolerances to levels that the EPA could find were reasonably certain to cause no harm, the EPA sought to evade through delay tactics its plain statutory duty,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in his decision, which was released today by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. “During that time, the EPA’s egregious delay exposed a generation of American children to unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos,” he wrote, and ordered the EPA to issue a final regulation within 60 days.
While Rakoff stopped short of requiring the EPA to immediately ban the pesticide, he gave the agency little choice in how to respond. “The EPA’s obligation is clear: it must modify or revoke chlorpyrifos tolerances and modify or cancel chlorpyrifos registrations,” Rakoff wrote in his ruling in the case, which was filed by Earthjustice on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Pesticide Action Network, United Farm Workers, and other groups.
The decision marks the culmination of a prolonged and bitter legal battle over one of the most widely used and dangerous pesticides in U.S. agriculture. More than 5 million pounds of chlorpyrifos were applied to crops in 2017, according to the most recent data. Exposure to the pesticide through residue on food and drift near fields where it was applied has wreaked devastation on developing children. According to a team of researchers led by Leonardo Trasande, organophosphate pesticides, of which chlorpyrifos is the most widely used, accounted for an estimated $594 billion in societal costs, including added health care and education, between 2001 and 2016.
The EPA was poised to ban chlorpyrifos in 2016, but the Trump EPA changed course the next year without providing any scientific justification for its decision. The reversal, made under EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, has been tied to a $1 million contribution to President Donald Trump’s inaugural fund from Dow Chemical Company, now known as Corteva, which was the primary producer of chlorpyrifos.
But the EPA had come close to, and retreated from, banning chlorpyrifos well before the Trump administration. After concerns began to mount in the late 1980s about the harms chlorpyrifos posed to children, environmental groups pushed to get chlorpyrifos banned. Dow and agricultural groups fought back aggressively against the EPA’s regulatory scrutiny, arguing that its removal would lead to shortages of fruits and vegetables. Ultimately, instead of forcing the pesticide off the market, the agency struck a deal in 2000 in which Dow voluntarily withdrew a product containing chlorpyrifos that was used to kill cockroaches and other insects in the home, while the company’s agricultural product, Lorsban, remained on the market.
Dow continued to fight hard to be able to sell chlorpyrifos well after there was overwhelming evidence that it was causing brain damage in children who were exposed in their early years or born to women who came into contact with the chemical while pregnant. “The reason it’s taken the agency this long is that Dow refused to give an inch and decided to fight to the last man or woman standing,” said Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist and executive director of the Heartland Health Research Alliance. “Inside these chemical companies, it’s almost a religious fervor in defending pesticide registrations.”
Benbrook, an expert witness in ongoing litigation against Corteva over chlorpyrifos, said that the company’s supporters helped prolong the process of banning chlorpyrifos. “It was the political pressure brought on the agency from the farm state senators,” he said. “Scientists within the agency had made the case. And the court agreed with the agency. But at the end of the day, the agency didn’t have the political support from the White House and Congress that it needed.”
Patti Goldman, an attorney at Earthjustice who has been overseeing the chlorpyrifos litigation since 2014, said the disparity between the science and the EPA’s refusal to act reached new heights during the Trump years. “It became particularly depraved once EPA was finding that chlorpyrifos was causing learning disabilities and lifelong harms to children’s brains and not acting to protect them,” she said.
Upon entering office, Biden issued an executive order that called for a reexamination of the Trump administration’s chlorpyrifos decision. Last year, Corteva announced that it would stop making chlorpyrifos. But other companies still make the pesticide, and the EPA continues to allow its use.
“EPA is reviewing the decision as it considers its options,” agency spokesperson Nick Conger said in response to an inquiry from The Intercept.
While the agency weighs those options, Goldman expressed guarded optimism. “The court is saying what we’ve been saying all along,” she said. “But we still need EPA to do the right thing.”
