21 February 22
“Good is Not as Well Financed as Bad”
Good is not as well financed as the bad, and good is always at a huge thanks to the devils agents like Murdock and the Koch-head brothers millions. If I had the money this 67 year old veteran would back your entire operation.
The voice of the fourth estate is all but dread, the whistle-blower a threatened species, what you do is only noble and the most democratic service. You will never be rewarded or spoken of kindly in the fix-news but those of us that read for ourselves can tell the difference and know the extinction of the press is days away.
You have this veterans respect, most don't think much of that truth be told, as we are the furthest down the food chain, but we at least participate in the system! More power to you folks!
Joe, RSN Reader
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21 February 22
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Think how differently the world might be reacting now if the United States put as much energy into responding to the science of climate change as it publicly puts into supporting the fantasy of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here is what American propaganda sounds like, coming from the mouth of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the United Nations on February 18:
We don’t know precisely how things will play out, but here’s what the world can expect to see unfold. In fact, it’s unfolding right now, today, as Russia takes steps down the path to war and reissued the threat of military action. First, Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack. This could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine, or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian government. We don’t know exactly the form it will take. It could be a fabricated so-called terrorist bombing inside Russia, the invented discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians or a fake — even a real — attack using chemical weapons.
Blinken says we don’t know how things will play out – true – and then poisons the air with speculation and falsehood. He speculates on non-specific “steps down the path to war,” which assumes he knows the future.
Blinken lies about Russia reissuing “the threat of military action,” when no such actual threat has been made. Even the propaganda-compliant NPR won’t go there. In a story headlined in part “Russia threatens Ukraine,” the network reports deep in the story: “Putin and other top Russian officials have insisted that Russia is just conducting military exercises and has no plans to invade Ukraine.” That is not a “threat” by English definition. (More on this “threat” thing below).
Blinken speculates that “Russia plans to fabricate a pretext for its attack.” He doesn’t say how he “knows” this and keeps alleged intelligence secret. Even if Russia had such a plan, it would mean no more than all the contingency plans the US has for warfare all over the world. Blinken also refers to former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lies to the UN about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, so he knows what a pretest for war looks like.
Blinken speculates about a menu of imaginary events, any of which could be executed against Russia as well as by Russia. Blaming something mistakenly on Ukraine is just as likely/unlikely as Ukraine actually doing something. Blinken ignores the real war already eight years old in the Donbas, even though it presents fertile ground for a false flag operation by just about anyone short of the Jamaicans.
Blinken offers other speculations – a terrorist bombing in Russia, discovery of a mass grave, a drone attack against civilians, or a chemical weapons attack. Interesting choices. Terrorist bombing in Russia, that’s happened, no war. Discovery of a mass grave in a region where mass graves are not uncommon, but where Ukraine already stands accused of mass killings in Donbas – we’ll see. A drone attack against civilians, easy enough, we just did one in Kabul awhile back. Chemical weapons, for practical purposes, are universally available, and reportedly the Donetsk People’s Republic has evidence that the US has delivered a “batch of botulinum toxin” to Ukraine. In any event, botulism was widespread in Ukraine in 2021 – 98 cases, 10 deaths – with the Luhansk People’s Republic one of the few regions spared.
All these possibilities are as much real threats against Russia as the Russian “threat of military action” is a real threat to Ukraine. These are all veiled threats, not actual threats. They’re all possible, but none are very credible at the moment. The only credibly independent third party in the region, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE, with 57 members including Ukraine and Russia) does not offer support for Blinken’s speculations. OSCE observers have recently reported an increase in artillery shelling along the roughly 300-mile conflict line, but no other engagement. The present level of fighting has not yet risen close to the level of earlier years in this civil war that began in 2014 and has killed an estimated 14,000-plus people, thanks in part to earlier US provocations of Russia.
Insofar as the positioning of Russian troops inside Russian territory can be considered any kind of threat, it would be an implied threat. The question then would be whether it was intended as a threat. Could well be. But the best that can be said about those Russian troops in Russia so far is that they represent an inferred threat – the US/NATO choose to infer that they are a threat. In this sense they are the same level of threat as the NATO troops deployed in NATO countries facing Russia. These may or may not be real threats. History supports Russian fears more than Ukraine’s, but everyone involved is doing a lot of self-serving mind-reading and very little constructive engagement.
After referring to Colin Powell’s act of lying the US into war in Iraq, Blinken has the unmitigated chutzpah to assure the UN:
I am here today not to start a war but to prevent one.
And the evidence for that would be? It’s not credible evidence for President Biden to run around promising that the Russians will start the war on Wednesday before lunch.
Running around crying “The sky is falling! The Sky is falling” may feel like an appropriate response to Russian troops within its own borders. It’s not. It’s an appropriate response to climate change, which involves the sky actually falling (and heading in other directions). But for that actually real crisis, our government still prefers to keep its head in the sand – and our military-industrial complex churning.
William Boardman has over 40 years' experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary and a stint with Captain Kangaroo. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll, published September 2019, is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto or Amazon.
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.
Malcolm X speaks at a rally in Harlem, New York in 1963. (photo: Bettmann/Getty Imges)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
It was 57 years ago today, February 21st, 1965, when Malcolm X was assassinated on the stage at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, not far from where we are. Malcolm’s family is now calling for a federal probe into his murder. In November, a New York judge exonerated two men who spent decades in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the assassination: 83-year-old Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, who died in 2009. This came after the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Innocence Project conducted a nearly two-year investigation that uncovered key evidence, which was withheld at the trial of the two men. Speaking in November, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance apologized in court to Aziz and the family of Islam. Vance also called out former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
CYRUS VANCE JR.: We have obtained dozens and dozens of reports from the FBI and the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations. These records include FBI reports of witnesses who failed to identify Mr. Islam and who implicated other subjects and suspects. And significantly, we now have reports revealing that on orders from Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were in fact FBI informants. Many of those documents were exculpatory. None of them were disclosed to the defense.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the former Manhattan DA Cy Vance. He was muffled because he was wearing a mask. Muhammad Aziz, who was jailed for almost two decades, was recently interviewed by ABC News.
BYRON PITTS: People knew why you were there, that you were one of the men —
MUHAMMAD ABDUL AZIZ: Yeah.
BYRON PITTS: — convicted of killing Malcolm. Were there threats because of that?
MUHAMMAD ABDUL AZIZ: To me?
BYRON PITTS: Yes, sir.
MUHAMMAD ABDUL AZIZ: No. No. The people know I didn’t do it. Nobody ever thought I did it. Just white people. Our people never thought I did it.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, a community organizer, motivational speaker, activist and award-winning author of many books. Still with us, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is working with Malcolm X’s family.
Ilyasah, first I want to say condolences on the recent death of your sister. Your family has gone through so much pain over the years. And now you’re calling for a federal probe into your dad’s assassination. It’s 57 years ago today. Talk about what you want to see.
ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Well, you used a great word, “animus.” We do want a federal probe. You know, my father exposed police brutality across America to the world in the late ‘50s and ’60s. And, you know, I think that enough is enough. We want to know who killed our father, who ordered the assassination. And we want to set the record straight.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of these two men, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, who is still alive, and Khalil Islam, who died years ago, both serving decades in prison, falsely convicted of the assassination of your father?
ILYASAH SHABAZZ: That’s right. You know, again, we want to know who killed our father, and we want to make sure that it is properly recorded in history.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ben Crump, talk specifically about what you want Congress to do.
BENJAMIN CRUMP: Well, as Ilyasah said, we want Congress to help document the truth, just as they did with the JFK commission, the MLK commission and the RFK commission. We want them to have a congressional panel empowered to do an investigation, a complete investigation, and tell who is responsible for planning the conspiracy to assassinate Malcolm X. We understand that based on these recent exonerations, that you had not only the NYPD Bureau of Special Investigations involved, but you also had, with NYPD BOSSI, the FBI involved to the very top, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Finally, the family deserves the truth of who killed their father. The names need to be named. And the American society and the world deserve the truth, as well. And we are prepared, attorney Ray Hamlin and our legal team, to go through every legal avenue possible to get to the truth for Malcolm X’s family and to finally give them some measure of justice.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we end, I want to get your comments on Malcolm X himself speaking in 1964. He was speaking in the Audubon Ballroom. This was like six months before he was assassinated.
MALCOLM X: One of the first things that the independent African nations did was to form an organization called the Organization of African Unity. The purpose of our Organization of Afro-American Unity, which has the same aim and objective, to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first, here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. That’s our motto. The purpose of our organization is to start right here in Harlem, which has the largest concentration of people of African descent that exists anywhere on this Earth. There are more Africans here in Harlem than exist in any city on the African continent — because that’s what you and I are, Africans.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Malcolm X, six months before he was assassinated in the very same place, in the Audubon Ballroom. Ilyasah, you were just 2, but you were there with your mother and sisters when your father was gunned down. And every February 21st and May 19th, his birthday, at WBAI, where we began Democracy Now! and where I worked for decades, we would play your dad’s speeches and talk to your mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, and she talked about how the sound of his voice on the radio would echo through the rooms. Can you end by talking about the significance of your mother and your father together in raising you and the message they felt was most important, and how they’d feel about what’s happening today?
ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Yes, I have to say, Amy, it warms my heart, and, you know, again, it’s the reason that no matter where I am, when you ask me to come on your show, I don’t think I’d ever say “no” to you.
You know, my father provided the biggest critique of America with his insistence that America lives up to her promise of liberty and justice for all. I’m grateful that my parents had the love and support that they had in one another. My mother safeguarded her husband’s legacy. Her home would be firebombed on February 14th. One week later, he would invite my mother and the babies to see him deliver his federation on the Organization of Afro-American Unity as an extension of the Organization of African Unity, for liberty and justice. And my mother would watch this horrific assassination, and my sisters and I. She was pregnant with twins. And she safeguarded her husband’s legacy, not so that he could be famous, but for the benefit of future generations.
He did extensive work, and we know the enormous threat that he posed. And I think when we address what really happened, then young people will be able to benefit from his work. He said that it would be this generation of young people who would recognize that those in power have misused it, and that they would demand change, and they would be willing to roll up their sleeves and do the necessary work. My father spoke truth. Truth is timeless. And so, we are very happy that we will soon get the truth on who organized his assassination.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Ilyasah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s six daughters, professor now at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, community organizer, activist, award-winning author of many books, and Ben Crump, civil rights attorney who’s working with Malcolm X’s family.
That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe.
Newspapers. (photo: InTheseTimes)
Note for TomDispatch Readers: On the weekend that precedes Presidents Day, consider this my way of saying goodbye to an old friend. Todd Gitlin died this month at age 79. He had indeed once briefly been a president — of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He (like me) was involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement of that era and later became a critical scholar with a special focus on the media. I edited five of his books, including two novels and his penetrating study of television, Inside Prime Time, when I worked at Pantheon Books. In that context, I can’t resist quoting Susan Sontag’s classic blurb for that book: “From this resolute non-watcher of TV, it may seem a small compliment to say I’d rather read Todd Gitlin’s book than watch what it recounts, but Inside Prime Time is a remarkable enterprise of description. I was instructed, entertained and properly disheartened by it.”
In the last piece he did for TomDispatch back in 2013, he caught the essence of the then-fading press (that is, for those of you who no longer know, the news on actual paper) in a way that remains memorable. He noted that the factors likely to determine our fate on this planet, whether in economic or climate terms, had been desperately ignored by the media of that moment — as, to a large extent, they still are today. I’ve kept my own 2013 introduction to the piece as well.
So long, Todd, I’ll miss you.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
In the previous century, there was a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel. Then came regression to the mean. Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built. When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising and the shriveled newsrooms — there were fewer newsroom employees in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept — also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.
Deserting readers mean broken business models. Per household circulation of daily American newspapers has been declining steadily for 60 years, since long before the Internet arrived. It’s gone from 1.24 papers per household in 1950 to 0.37 per household in 2010. To get the sports scores, your horoscope, or the crossword puzzle, the casual reader no longer needs even to glance at a whole paper, and so is less likely to brush up against actual — even superficial — news. Never mind that the small-r republican model on which the United States was founded presupposed that some critical mass of citizens would spend a critical mass of their time figuring out what’s what and forming judgments accordingly.
Don’t be fooled, though, by any inflated talk about the early days of American journalism. In the beginning, there was no Golden Age. To be sure, a remark Thomas Jefferson made in 1787 is often quoted admiringly (especially in newspapers): “If it were left to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”
Protected by the First Amendment, however, the press of the early republic was unbridled, scurrilous, vicious, and flagrantly partisan. In 1807, then-President Jefferson, with much more experience under his belt, wrote, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Two Golden Decades
If there was a Golden Age for the American press, it came in a two-decade period during the Cold War, when total per capita daily newspaper circulation kept rising, even as television scooped up eyeballs and eardrums. Admittedly, most of the time, even then, elites in Washington or elsewhere enjoyed the journalistic glad hand. Still, from 1954 to 1974, some watchdogs did bark. Civil rights coverage, for example, did help bring down white supremacy, while Vietnam and Watergate reportage helped topple two sitting presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Of course, press watchdogs also licked the hands of the perpetrators when Washington overthrew democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and when it helped out in Chile in 1973. As for Vietnam, it wasn’t as simple a tale of journalistic triumph as we now imagine. For years, in manifold ways, reporters deferred to official positions on the war’s “progress,” so much so that today their reports read like sheaves of Pentagon press releases. Typically, all but one source quoted in New York Times coverage of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incidents, which precipitated a major U.S. escalation of the war, were White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials (and they were lying). In the war’s early years, at least one network, NBC, even asked the Pentagon to institute censorship.
Nonetheless, the sense that the war was an unjustifiable grind grew, especially after the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968, startling the U.S. military, Washington officials, and journalists alike. When, in 1969, Seymour Hersh reported for the tiny Dispatch News Service that a unit from the Americal Division had slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a village named My Lai, his story went mainstream.
Still, the long bombing campaign that President Nixon ordered in Cambodia and Laos did not feature on television, and barely made the newspapers. And even when, in a remarkable feat of reporting, it finally did in a major way, there was no journalistic sequel. The “secret” bombing of Cambodia — secret from Americans, that is — was reported on page one of the New York Times on May 9, 1969, and 37 years later, the reporter, William Beecher, said this about his story: “We’re not talking of some small covert operation here, but a massive saturation bombing campaign, with a false set of coordinates to mislead the Congress and the public… You would have thought that such a story would have caused a firestorm. It did not.”
After Watergate, whatever hard-won, truth-bound independence the mainstream press had wrested from its own history failed to hold. In the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, most Washington journalism once again collapsed into deference, and so, too, did the financial press on its own front. Washington’s war-making might and Wall Street’s financial maneuvers were both deemed too mighty, too smart, too hypermodern to fail.
Although the New York Times and the Washington Post later acknowledged flaws in their Iraq reporting, neither paper nor other major outlets have owned up to the negligence that led up to the great global economic meltdown of 2007-2008. We are far from grasping how fully business journalism played cheerleader and pedestal-builder for the titans of finance as they erected a fantastical Tower of Derivatives, which grew way too tall to fail without wrecking the global economy.
Start to finish, financial journalism was breathless about the market thrills that led to the 2007-2008 crash: the financialization of the global economy, the metastasis of derivatives, and especially the deregulation underway since the late 1970s that culminated in the 1999 congressional repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (with President Bill Clinton blithely signing off on it). That repeal paved the way for commercial and investment banks, as well as insurance companies, to merge into “too-big-to-fail” corporations, unleashed with low capital requirements and soon enough piled high with the potential for collapse.
A Proquest database search of all American newspapers during the calendar year 1999 reveals a grand total of two pieces warning that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake. The first appeared in the Bangor Daily News of Maine, the second in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida. Count ’em: two.
On February 24, 2002, as the scandal of the derivative-soaked Enron Corporation unfolded, the New York Times’s Daniel Altman did distinguish himself with a page-one business section report headlined “Contracts So Complex They Imperil The System.” He wrote: “The veil of complexity, whose weave is tightening as sophisticated derivatives evolve and proliferate, poses subtle risks to the financial system — risks that are impossible to quantify, sometimes even to identify.” He stood almost alone in those years in such coverage. Most financial journalists preferred then to cite the grand Yoda of American quotables, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. And he was just the first and foremost among a range of giddy authorities on whom those reporters repeatedly relied for reassurance that derivatives were the great stabilizers of the economy.
On March 23, 2008, as the bubble was finally bursting, Times reporters Nelson Schwartz and Julie Creswell noted that “during the late 1990s, Wall Street fought bitterly against any attempt to regulate the emerging derivatives market.” They went on:
“A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.”
“Little-noticed” indeed. According to Lexis-Nexis, not a single substantive mention of this law appeared in the Times that year. On October 1, 2000, Washington Post writer Jerry Knight did note ruefully, “What’s fascinating about the policy debate is the agreement on the guiding principle: The government should not stand in the way of financial innovation.”
In a syndicated column on Christmas Eve, way-out-of-the-mainstream columnist Molly Ivins was not so poker-faced. She called the new law “a little horror.” And in that she stood alone. That was it outside of financial journals like the American Banker and HedgeWorld Daily News, which, of course, were thrilled by the act. That magic word “modernization” in its title evidently froze the collective journalistic brain.
Or in those years consider how the New York Times covered the exotic derivatives called “collateralized debt obligations,” among the principal cards of which the era’s entire international financial house was built. These tricky arcana, marketed as little miracles of risk management, multiplied from an estimated $20 billion in 2004 to more than $180 billion by 2007. The Times’s Floyd Norris drily mentioned them in a 2001 front-page business section article about American Express headlined “They Sold the Derivative, but They Didn’t Understand It.” He quoted the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank this way: “There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn’t understand it.” From then on, no substantial Times front-page business section article so much as mentioned collateralized debt obligations for almost four years.
In 2009, in an enlightening article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, looked at the nine most influential business press outlets from January 1, 2000, through June 30, 2007 — that is, for the entire period of the housing bubble. A total of 730 articles contained what Starkman judged to be significant warnings that the bubble could burst. That’s 730 out of more than one million articles these journals published.
The formula was simple and straightforward: the business press served the market movers and shakers. It was a reputation-making machine, a publicity apparatus for the industry. In other words, the job of financial reporters in those years was to remain fast asleep as the most flagrantly abusive part of the mortgage industry, subprime mortgages, was integrated into routine banking.
Meanwhile, thanks to that same financial press, a culture of celebrity enveloped the big names of finance: CEOs of major banks, Wall Street investors, operators of hedge funds. They were repeatedly portrayed not just as fabulously successful tycoons doing their best for the society, but as fabulously giving philanthropists, their names engraved into the walls of university buildings, museums, symphony halls, and opera houses. They weren’t just bringers of liquidity to markets, but wise men, too. In an all-enveloping media atmosphere in which the press indulged without a blink, they were held to be not only creators of wealth but moral exemplars. Indeed, the two were essentially interchangeable: they were moral exemplars because they were creators of wealth.
The Desertification of the News
Oh, and in case you think that the coverage from hell of the events leading up to the financial meltdown was uniquely poor, think again. On an even greater meltdown that lies ahead, the press is barely, finally, still haphazardly coming around to addressing convulsive climate change with the seriousness it deserves. At least it is now an intermittent story, though rarely linked to endemic drought and starvation. Still, as Wen Stephenson, formerly editor of the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section and TheAtlantic.com and senior producer of National Public Radio’s “On Point,” summed up the situation in a striking online piece in the alternative Boston Phoenix: the subject is seldom treated as urgent and is frequently covered as a topic for special interests, a “problem,” not an “existential threat.” (Another note on vanishing news: Since publishing Stephenson’s article, the Phoenix has ceased to exist.)
Even now, when it comes to climate change, our gasping journalism does not “flood the zone.” It also has a remarkable record of bending over backward to prove its “objectivity” by turning piece after piece into a debate between a vast majority of scientists knowledgeable on the subject and a fringe of climate-change deniers and doubters.
When it came to our financial titans, in all those years the press rarely felt the need for a dissenting voice. Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment. Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.
And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace. Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute. The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites — those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public — were otherwise occupied.
All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,
“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change… ABC’s This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC’s Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC’s This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”
The mounting financial troubles of journalism only tighten the muzzle on a somnolent watchdog. It’s unlikely that serious business coverage will be beefed up by media companies counting their pennies on their way down the slippery circulation slope. Why invest in scrutiny of government regulators when the cost is lower for celebrity-spotting and the circulation benefits so much greater? Meanwhile, the nation’s best daily environmental coverage takes a big hit. In January, the New York Times’s management decided to close down its environmental desk, scratching two environmental editor positions and reassigning five reporters. How could such a move not discourage young journalists from aiming to make careers on the environmental beat?
The rolling default in climate-change coverage cries out for the most serious professional self-scrutiny. Will it do for journalists and editors to remain thoroughly tangled up in their own remarkably unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes news? It’s long past time to reconsider some journalistic conventions: that to be newsworthy, events must be singular and dramatic (melting glaciers are held to be boring), must feature newsworthy figures (Al Gore is old news), and must be treated with balance (as in: some say the earth is spherical, others say it’s flat).
But don’t let anyone off the hook. Norms can be bent. Consider this apt headline on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek after Hurricane Sandy drowned large sections of New York City and the surrounding area: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” Come on, people: Can you really find no way to dramatize the extinction of species, the spread of starvation, the accelerating droughts, desertification, floods, and violent storms? With all the dots you already report, even with shrunken staffs, can you really find no way to connect them?
If it is held unfair, or naïve, or both, to ask faltering news organizations to take up the slack left by our corrupt, self-dealing, shortsighted institutions, then it remains for start-up efforts to embarrass the established journals.
Online efforts matter. It’s a good sign that the dot-connecting site InsideClimateNews.org was just honored with a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
But tens of millions of readers still rely on the old media, either directly or via the snippets that stream through Google, Yahoo, and other aggregator sites. Given the stakes, we dare not settle for nostalgia or restoration, or pray that the remedy is new technology. Polishing up the old medals will not avail. Reruns of His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men, and Broadcast News may be entertaining, but it’s more important to keep in mind that the good old days were not so good after all. The press was never too great to fail. Missing the story is a tradition. So now the question is: Who is going to bring us the news of all the institutions, from City Hall to Congress, from Wall Street to the White House, that fail us?
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his 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.
North Dakota's Republican governor, Doug Burgum, quickly signed the disputed map into law. (photo: Dan Koeck/Reuters)
The suit charges that diluting Native power violates their voting rights and will handicap tribe members who run for office
“All citizens deserve to have their voices heard and to be treated fairly and equally under the law,” they wrote, arguing that the proposed map was illegal, diluting the strength of their communities’ voice.
But instead, in early November, the Republican-controlled legislature approved the map, with only minor changes. And the Republican governor, Doug Burgum, quickly signed it.
“Our voice is going to be muffled once again,” the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa chairman, Jamie Azure, told the Guardian. “It’s getting a little sickening, tell you the truth.”
The tribes have sued the state, alleging that the map, which was meant to account for population changes identified in the 2020 census, doesn’t comply with section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuit, filed earlier this month, claims the map packs some Native voters into one House subdistrict, while putting other “nearby Native American voters into two other districts dominated by white voters who bloc vote against Native Americans’ preferred candidates”. It adds that complying with the Voting Rights Act would mean placing the two tribes in a single district, where they would “comprise an effective, geographically compact majority”.
Azure said: “We never want to enter into lawsuits; we never want to do these things. But, you know, at a certain point, the goodwill just goes out the window. And, you know, we’re tired of being disrespected. And that’s how we feel with this lawsuit.”
North Dakota’s secretary of state, Al Jaeger, the top election official for the state, told the Guardian in an email that they do not comment on ongoing legal cases.
Indigenous people in the US have faced generations of voting restrictions. Although Indigenous people were granted citizenship in 1924, it took more than three decades before they were considered eligible to vote in every state.
Since then, they have continued to face a host of roadblocks in the form of scarce polling locations, lack of access to the internet and language barriers. The National Congress of American Indians reported that they have the lowest voter turnout in the country, with 34% of Indigenous people not registered to vote.
In North Dakota, the state only recently reached a settlement with two tribes over a law requiring voters to have a valid identification card with a home address (many homes on reservations don’t have a street address). The state ultimately agreed to allow Indigenous people to vote without a residential address.
In this new case, the legislative map divides District 9, which includes Turtle Mountain, whose members tend to favor candidates on the political left, into two subdistricts. Since they have a majority in one subdistrict, but not the other, the result is the tribe has one less House seat in which to elect their candidate of choice, explained Michael Carter, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
It also moved the Spirit Lake Reservation to District 15, grouping it with counties farther north. Spirit Lake tribal members are also known for favoring progressive candidates, while this area tends to be more conservative, Carter explained. The result, he said, would be a Native candidate of choice winning about 5% of the time.
“This is just another one of those loopholes that they’re throwing around at us. But we have remedies for it. The remedy that is proposed would work for us and the state,” said the Spirit Lake Tribal chairman, Douglas Yankton, Sr, referring to the proposal to put both tribes into a single district.
Jean Schroedel, political science professor at Claremont Graduate University and author of Voting in Indian Country: The View from the Trenches, described the redistricting as a “violation in what has previously been the interpretations of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act”.
But, she added, “the court seems to be moving very much away from that.” She cited the recent supreme court decision stating Alabama did not have to redraw its congressional map before the 2022 midterm elections despite a lower court ruling the map discriminated against Black people.
North Dakota is home to five federally recognized tribes, with American Indian and Alaska Native people making up about 6% of the state’s population. Some tribal members in the state do support the new map, as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in western North Dakota was placed in a subdistrict, as it requested.
But for Yankton, who said committee members never came to the Spirit Lake or Turtle Mountain reservations during the redistricting process despite requests, the map is the latest voting rights injustice for Native people:
“It’s violating our democratic right, as citizens of North Dakota, to participate and support people who choose to run for whatever offices. And it hinders us from even having a chance as Native Americans to run for offices.”
A customer pumps gasoline as the fuel price is displayed above $6 a gallon at a Chevron gas station in downtown Los Angeles, on February 17. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Corporations pass more than increased costs on to consumers.
For example, Starbucks celebrated a 31 percent increase in profits at the end of 2021 — but it still plans to hike prices this year, the New York Times reported earlier this month. Tyson Foods, the meat processing behemoth, raised its prices 19.6 percent overall, driving record stock prices for the company.
Inflation, meanwhile, hit a four-decade high in January, with the consumer price index increasing 7.5 percent over the past year, before seasonal adjustment. Although prices dropped in the energy sector for goods like gasoline and fuel oil, every other sector — including medical care, apparel, transportation, food, and shelter — saw increases, resulting in the largest overall 12-month increase since 1982.
Some of that’s to be expected: With Covid-19 still throwing kinks into the global supply chain, the challenge of getting goods and materials where they need to be translates into increased prices for both companies and consumers. Meanwhile, consumers have increased purchasing power due to wage increases and stimulus benefits like checks, child tax credits, and low interest rates — and at least in the US, they’ve proven willing to pay higher prices. At its core, those are the necessary ingredients for inflation — demand outstripping supply.
But some economists and politicians say that corporations are using inflation as an excuse to jack up prices beyond what’s necessary to account for their increased costs. More than just passing those costs onto consumers, they say, corporations are taking advantage of the unprecedented global economic circumstances to increase their profits, simply because they can.
Politicians like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have recently drawn attention to what they say are outsized price increases made worse by anticompetitive corporate behavior.
Economists like Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz see it too; in a recent column, Stiglitz pointed to the oil industry as a particularly acute example.
“What we are seeing today is a naked exercise of oil producers’ market power,” Stiglitz wrote of rising energy prices earlier in February. “Knowing that their days are numbered, oil companies are reaping whatever returns they still can.”
But there’s plenty of pushback, both political and economic, to this perspective. A survey of a number of leading economists by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business showed that a majority of those surveyed — 67 percent — disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement, “A significant factor behind today’s higher US inflation is dominant corporations in uncompetitive markets taking advantage of their market power to raise prices in order to increase their profit margins.” Only 7 percent of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.
“I don’t see the logic: U.S. markets have been concentrating for decades but high inflation is [less than] one year old,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor wrote in response to the survey.
Biden administration economic advisers, too, are disputing that message; as the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported on Thursday, messaging about corporate concentration leading to higher prices is currently a live debate within the administration.
President Joe Biden himself, under immense pressure to address inflation, has pointed out market consolidation in a few industries, but hasn’t gone so far as to blame it for the longer-term inflation the US is experiencing. “This isn’t a new issue,” Biden said last month. “It’s not been the reason we’ve had high inflation today. It’s not the only reason. But, over time, it has reduced competition, squeezed out small businesses and farmers, ranchers, and increased the price for consumers.”
But critics of major corporate price increases aren’t arguing that the consolidation is the only force driving inflation; rather, that because these conglomerates hold so much of the market share, they are able to raise prices out of step with the actual price increases they’re incurring and passing on to consumers — essentially, that they’re using the current inflationary environment as an excuse to raise prices more than necessary because they don’t have competitors to drive them to keep prices down, in turn contributing to the problem of inflation.
Corporations have high pricing power, driving higher costs and contributing to inflation
What is clear is that, “we’re in a highly unusual context,” Gregory Daco, the chief economist at EY-Parthenon, a global strategy consulting firm, told Vox. According to Daco, companies are currently being rewarded for price hikes with higher valuations and stronger revenues, so there’s little incentive for them to stop doing so, even if the prices aren’t justified by increasing costs to corporations.
Some price raises are to be expected; there are increasing costs to supplies, transportation, and labor, but consumers don’t have a way of knowing how those increased costs factor into price rises — and that’s something we’ll likely never figure out, Daco said.
“I think it’s nearly impossible to disentangle what is considered a natural, if we can put that word here, a natural outcome from the Covid crisis, from the massive injection of fiscal stimulus that led to very strong demand, or very strong demand and recovery, and the fact that supply was slower to come back,” Daco told Vox, “versus an environment where market concentration is exacerbating these price pressures, because a few dominating firms have the ability to do so.”
The inability to dismantle those two phenomena, though, is integral to the ability of certain businesses to continue increasing prices, according to Lindsay Owens, the executive director of progressive economic policy organization the Groundwork Collaborative and a former senior economic policy adviser to Warren.
“The preconditions for the price hikes we’re seeing today long predate the pandemic,” Owens told Vox via email. “Companies are able to take advantage of a crisis like the pandemic precisely because these foundations were set in place long before the crisis itself. And in corporate earnings call after corporate earnings call, executives are using inflation as a cover for egregious price hikes to boost their own profits.”
Daco echoed that sentiment, saying, “We are, I think, in a situation where market concentration is exacerbating inflationary dynamics.”
Warren has highlighted the meat industry as an egregious culprit, calling for a Justice Department investigation into the industry’s practices. “Tyson is abusing their corporate market power and raking in record profits by jacking up meat prices,” she tweeted earlier this month. “I’ve long argued that we need to enforce our antitrust laws to break up monopolies and promote competition, and now it’s more vital than ever as a tool to fight inflation.”
The Biden administration has also planned to inject $1 billion into smaller, independent meat processors to drive “meaningful competition” in the meat market, after a White House Economic Council analysis found gross profits of the top four meat processors soared 120 percent over the course of the pandemic.
“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” Biden said during the January unveiling of the plan. “That’s what we’re seeing in meat and poultry industries now.”
The only thing that will stop corporate price increases in the short term is if people buy less — one way or another
In the short term, corporate price hikes aren’t going anywhere so long as people are still willing to pay higher prices, Daco told Vox. “It’ll last and be sustainable as long as there is no pushback from consumers,” he said. “Essentially, if the price increases that are being passed on to consumers don’t weigh on demand, then businesses will continue to push up on prices.”
For the time being, that likely means the Federal Reserve will have to act to address inflation. Over the past year, the Fed has repeatedly signaled that the stimulus measures it put into place to aid in the recovery from the pandemic — buying up government bonds and keeping interest rates low — would have to be reversed to counter inflation and get it back to the central bank’s target rate, 2 percent.
Now, starting in March, the Fed is widely expected to start raising interest rates, with two more potential hikes coming later in the year, and even more by March of next year. That move tamps down on inflation by making credit — everything from mortgage payments to gigantic corporate loans — more expensive, thus decreasing purchasing power and demand. Slackening demand caused by a tightened monetary supply would send a fairly immediate signal to corporations that it’s time to arrest ongoing price hikes.
Other central banks, such as the UK’s Bank of England, have already begun to raise interest rates; Daco says the Fed is lagging because it was caught a bit off guard by just how much the Covid-19 pandemic affected the economy.
“I think the Fed was working under the impression that the pre-Covid world would return very rapidly — that we would very rapidly return to a world where the inflation dynamics would be fairly soft, therefore inflation would come back down toward 2 percent, where you would have ongoing labor market gains, where those would not stoke major inflationary pressures,” he told Vox. It’s clear now, he said, that the Fed needs to act — but very carefully.
“An excessively rapid or disorderly tightening of monetary policy could have more negative effects than desired,” Daco said. “In the end, what the Fed wants to do is essentially proceed to the so-called ‘soft landing’ of monetary policy, where it brings inflation back in line with its mandate; it needs to allow the labor market to grow, and the economy to move toward maximum employment — and [do] so without creating recession.”
Some Fed officials have echoed this sentiment recently, saying that a major initial rate increase isn’t warranted. And however interest rate increases proceed, Fed officials will have to weigh making a move that tightens the money supply across the board and decreases demand, without tightening so far and so fast that, for example, businesses decide they can’t afford to hire or keep workers on, leading to a recession.
That doesn’t completely negate concern about what Stiglitz calls the “supply-side” problems contributing to inflation — both in terms of fixing the supply chain and in terms of addressing corporate consolidation.
For example, Robert Reich, a former US Labor secretary, warned in a Guardian opinion piece on Sunday that, absent addressing anticompetitive behavior and other supply-side issues, “responsibility for controlling inflation falls entirely to the Federal Reserve, which has only one weapon at its disposal — higher interest rates,” Reich wrote. “Higher interest rates will slow the economy and likely cause millions of lower-wage workers to lose their jobs and forfeit long-overdue wage increases.”
Such fixes, however, would likely be a long-term project, while the Fed has the power to act now. And absent some action, corporations will likely continue to hike prices, because they have the ability and the desire to do so. As New York University economist Thomas Philippon told the New York Times last month, that’s because the current, unprecedented moment is just a manifestation of an underlying reality: “The firms were always greedy,” he said.
US funding for Colombian civilian organizations is always accompanied by funding for violent military and police authorities. (photo: Daniel Munoz/AFP/Getty Images)
With Cold War divisions once again rising to the fore, the US is returning to its old ways in Latin America: trying to exert influence in its “backyard” to enlist the region in the ongoing project of US global domination.
Earlier this week, influential US Congress members proposed a new bill titled the Western Hemisphere Strategic Security Act with the view to increase military cooperation with friendly Latin American nations. This, according to US politicians, will help to address the threat of Chinese and Russian interference in the region.
But while China and Russia are indeed deepening diplomatic and trade relations across Latin America, it is the United States whose history of undemocratic meddling continues through to the present. In a recent document circulating out of the US embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, promises are made of large- and small-scale grants to local organizations that promote affinity to the US government’s political stance.
The embassy notice states that they will fund groups that support the “embassy’s strategic objectives” and that “increase . . . affinity for the US’s policies and priorities through strategic cultural and educational programming in the media and digital platforms.” The grant project has a yearly fund allocation of $250,000, just short of $1 billion Colombian pesos.
With the Colombian congressional and presidential elections looming, and a leftist coalition leading the polls, it’s no surprise that the Western superpower is spending big. The United States has more spending power than all the country’s political parties, and is attempting to secure the population’s political loyalty traditionally tied to the declining right.
This effort is of course only the latest tactic used by the United States to maintain a friendly government in the conflict-ridden nation. The US government has spent billions over the decades, cooperating with consecutive violent right-wing administrations.
Apart from the effort to spread an affinity for the US government’s political positions, the embassy’s guidance for funding also purports to prioritize applicants with entrepreneurial projects that include “women, Afro-Colombian people, diasporic Venezuelans, indigenous communities, LGBTQ+, and other vulnerable communities.” This effort to appear to empower neglected and vulnerable communities is not just hypocritical considering the United States’ weighty role in empowering political forces that abandon and oppress those communities; US funding for civilian organizations has always gone alongside funding the violent military and police authorities.
Research shows that the US government (and the European Union) have used civilian organizations in Colombia to combat possible threats to the established political and economic order since the 1990s. One program, known as the Peace Laboratories, began as a grassroots effort to diffuse the violent conflict in the most affected regions. After tens of millions of dollars were funneled into it by Western nations, it became known as the social arm of Plan Colombia — a US-backed military operation known for its violent counterinsurgency tactics.
Today, a turn to the left in Colombia, historically the United States’ closest strategic ally in the region, poses a threat to US dominance — even while the movement is led by center-left Gustavo Petro, who has shied away from openly criticizing the United States. The broad left coalition Petro heads, Pacto Histórico, is making waves across the country, and looks the likely winner in the May elections, which could mark a break with over two hundred years of liberal-conservative party hegemony. And although the figureheads of the coalition appear to be radical (and are portrayed as such in the media), their proposed policies are moderate.
Petro is hardly the Russian or Chinese agent or communist threat he’s reputed to be. Influenced and advised by thinkers like Thomas Piketty, Petro’s threat to Colombia’s ruling class and the United States is his insistence on a modest redistribution of the country’s vast wealth, a far stretch from the castrochavista the US-backed corporate media characterize him as.
The embassy’s attempt to influence the coming elections in Colombia is only the most recent. At a time when the West so loosely cries “meddling,” let’s not forget that it was the United States that deployed warships, threatened invasion, and forced the split of Panama from Colombia. The United States also pressured the Colombian government to send in troops to defend the United Fruit Company from striking workers, ultimately instigating the massacre of thousands. The United States advised and then trained the Colombian military and paramilitary in their violent counterinsurgency tactics with legacies that persist in the present, and it is the United States and the West more broadly that consistently, over decades, supported and upheld a nefarious state to protect their economic and geopolitical interests in the region.
Let’s be clear. The battle for Colombia, and for Latin America more broadly, is not between the world’s superpowers, but between the US government and US-friendly ruling classes and the oppressed and exploited masses who yearn for change — change that makes us not anybody’s front or backyard but an independent region capable of helping to lead the world away from neoliberal capitalism, a system that has done nothing for us, and only leads to further destruction and doom.
A dead fish on the banks of Lake Powell, Utah, on June 24. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Climate change is ravaging the American West. Lawmakers in those states, meanwhile, want to punish any bank that pulls money from the fossil fuel companies contributing to that climate change.
At a meeting of its the Energy, Environment and Agricultural Task Force in San Diego last December, members of the fossil fuel industry–backed American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, voted in support of draft model legislation that punishes financial institutions for divesting from or choosing not to invest in fossil fuels. Specifically, the legislation would require state fiduciaries to pull investments or contracts from financial institutions that, according to the charged language of the ALEC draft, “boycott energy companies.” ALEC has not responded to multiple requests for comment as to the nature of the vote in San Diego or on whether it’s supporting state-level efforts to pass similar bills, though in a recent blog post, it stated that the policy—the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act—“failed to become an official ALEC model policy” and that “discussion may continue” on it in the future.
Since the conference, though, like-minded bills featuring shared language have been introduced by Republican state legislators around the country. According to a registration list obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD is also the institution that first reported on the December ALEC meeting), several state lawmakers from drought-affected areas attended the meeting. Some have now gone on to sponsor legislation back home.
The Energy Discrimination Elimination bills, per the ALEC draft model legislation title, originated in Texas as the brainchild of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Jason Isaac, director of the foundation’s “Life:Powered” initiative, helped lead the push to pass the only such legislation currently on the books, Texas Senate Bill 13, and to bring ALEC fully on board. In an email to ALEC task force members during the San Diego meeting, obtained by CMD’s Alex Kotch, Isaac framed the draft model legislation as an “opportunity to push back against woke financial institutions that are colluding against American energy producers.” As Politico reported, the Heartland Institute—long a bastion of so-called climate “skepticism”—has been involved in state-level pushes for separate, but similar, anti–sustainable investment bills.
Though Governor Greg Abbott signed S.B. 13 into law last summer, no state divestments appear to have been made as of yet. S.B. 13 and the copycat measures being proposed in other states were modeled on “anti-BDS” legislation that requires states to divest from companies critical of the Israeli government’s apartheid policies; last March, Arkansas’s anti-BDS bill was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit as being unconstitutional.
Typically, these new bills attempting to pressure banks to keep investing in fossil fuels require state treasurers or comptrollers to create and maintain a list of banks and asset managers that are suspected of “boycotting energy companies”—i.e., that are shifting their portfolios away from fossil fuels “without an ordinary business purpose.” State officials are supposed to seek clarification from financial institutions about their policies and then pull state money from those deemed guilty of boycotting.
Nearly 84 percent of Texas is currently affected by an expanding drought, made worse by a very dry January. Thirty-two percent of the state is suffering “extreme” drought (as opposed to “severe” or “exceptional,” on the lower and higher ends, respectively), leaving big stretches of the Lone Star State vulnerable to fires. Of the state’s 245 counties, 105 have implemented burn bans. Eighty-eight percent of registered voters in Texas worry about water access amid worsening heat, drought, and violent storms.
According to a poll of 815 people conducted by the Deseret News and Hinckley Institute of Politics, 82 percent of registered voters in Utah are concerned about the persistent drought there. Amid record dryness in 2020, the Great Salt Lake dropped below its 1963 historic low, leading to water restrictions for farmers, homeowners, and cities, the Deseret News reported.
Yet Utah, too, is considering legislation to force banks to keep investing in fossil fuels. Introduced earlier this month, Utah’s H.B. 312 would prevent public entities from entering into contracts of over $100,000 for financial services with a financial company that has a policy of refusing to finance fossil fuel companies. Companies would need either to provide “written certification” they they don’t have a policy to refuse to finance fossil fuel companies or to agree “not to adopt a policy of refusing to finance fossil fuel companies for the duration of the contract.”
Much of Oklahoma is engulfed by drought. It’s particularly severe in the western panhandle, and has raised concerns among the state’s wheat and cattle producers. The Enid area, in the northern part of the state, has received less than an inch of rain in the last three months. “Recent conditions stand in stark contrast to drought conditions for the same time frame last year, when most of the state was drought free,” the Enid News … Eagle reports. State Senator Michael Bergstrom—who attended the December task force meeting in San Diego—introduced S.B. 1572 (the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act of 2022) earlier this month. It has yet to come up for a vote.
Beyond the West, other states where legislators have introduced energy-discrimination elimination legislation face severe effects from climate change. Louisiana—racked by hurricanes over the last decade—is home to the country’s first climate refugees and is losing roughly 25 square miles of land per year. Notoriously hot and humid New Orleans has the greatest urban heat island effect in the country due to its abundance of dark, heat-retaining surfaces like asphalt and concrete—a problem that, nationwide, disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities. House Bill 25—a measure that prohibits “retirement systems from investing in companies that boycott energy companies”—was introduced in late January and has yet to have a hearing in Baton Rouge.
Mountainous West Virginia, where coal-backed legislators have reintroduced energy-discrimination elimination legislation for the second year in a row, is more vulnerable to flood damage over the coming decade than any state in the union, recent data shows. Indiana experienced intense floods over the last week; which will only grow more common as temperatures rise. House Bill 1224, prohibiting the state government from investing in or contracting with companies that “boycott” energy companies, was introduced late last month there, though it has since floundered.
The irony of these preemptive anti-divestment bills is that banks aren’t currently making any real move away from fossil fuel investments. In January, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick requested that Blackrock be “at the top of the list” mandated by the bill, for allegedly “turning its back on our flourishing oil and gas industry and the millions of Texans who rely upon it.” BlackRock, meanwhile, has not shown any signs of abandoning fossil fuels. Research from the German watchdog group Urgeweld revealed that BlackRock has over $100 billion invested in companies that represent 90 percent of the world’s thermal coal production and coal-fired power-generation capacity. Vanguard—another “Big Three” asset manager—has a comparable amount invested in coal, Urgeweld found. The other, State Street, is investing $36 billion in coal. All three are members of the private sector–led, U.N.-convened Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ, having pledged to reach net-zero emissions across their portfolios by 2050. But BlackRock has reaffirmed its commitment to investing in fossil fuels and had $259 billion in fossil fuel investments as of June. “We will continue to invest in and support fossil fuel companies, including Texas fossil fuel companies,” read a memo signed by BlackRock head of external affairs Dalia Blass and sent to state officials in January.
A recent report from the Center for American Progress and Sierra Club found that, if they were a single country, just 18 U.S.-based banks and asset managers—nearly all of which are GFANZ—would be the fifth-largest polluter on the planet. The American West may well fry before either banks or Republican lawmakers agree to reconsider their fossil fuel allegiance.
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