Georgia's GOP governor rejects calls to remove DA Fani Willis

 

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday rejected calls from several far-right state lawmakers for a special legislative session to potentially impeach Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola sentenced to 10 years in prison in Jan. 6 case

 

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in his January 6 seditious conspiracy case. NBC News' Ryan Reilly reports on the judge's ruling and how it compares to the sentence prosecutors sought.

AL Republican Lawmaker Arrested For Voter Fraud

 

Alabama state lawmaker, David Cole has been arrested and charged with voter fraud.

Unimaginable

 

Today, my campaign is launching a new TV ad, and I want to tell you why we’re running it. In it, Erin White, a Kentucky prosecutor, says that Daniel Cameron’s view that survivors of rape or incest – sometimes girls as young as nine – should be forced to give birth is “extreme, and it’s dangerous.” She's right.

She says, “Nobody – no child – should ever have to go through that.”

Cameron has repeatedly been clear that he supports Kentucky’s extreme law that does not include exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. And his running mate – Robby Mills – even voted against an amendment that would provide these exceptions under Kentucky law.

As attorney general, I worked to get justice for survivors of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. Kentuckians need to know how extreme and dangerous Daniel Cameron’s views are.

Please watch; it’s important.

Thank you,

Andy

 

PAID FOR BY ANDY BESHEAR FOR GOVERNOR

Andy Beshear for Governor PO Box 4278 Louisville, KY 40204 United States

Steven joins Actor and Writer Michael Imperioli in NYC to discuss the global fight for justice.

 

We write to invite each of you to a talk Steven is giving on the historic Ecuador pollution case, climate justice and corporate power on September 12 at 7 p.m. at the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. The event is being hosted by the actor, writer, and activist Michael Imperioli who has starred in The Sopranos and White Lotus. Rock legend and humanitarian Roger Waters and the legendary civil rights lawyer Marty Garbus will also join Steven on stage to comment on the larger implications of these issues for society. The address of the event is 2 West 64th Street. You can get tickets (free with a donation of any amount) here. Please RSVP today →     CLICK HERE TO RESERVE YOUR TICKET The New York Society for Ethical Culture was founded in Manhattan in 1876 and has been a passionate defender of social justice and democracy ever since. The event will be in the historic 800-seat Adler Hall, which was built in 1910 and has hosted numerous musical acts and speakers over the years. Our goal is to fill all the seats. As background, in 2013 Steven helped Amazon communities in Ecuador vanquish Chevron with the largest environmental judgment ever in a court of law – $9.5 billion. Rather than pay the Indigenous peoples it poisoned, Chevron targeted Steven with a massive retaliation campaign in New York using 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers. After Steven refused to turn over his computer to Chevron – an act that would have put the lives of his clients in danger – a judge allowed the company to prosecute him privately. Chevron then had Steven detained for almost three years at home and in prison. Steven is the only person in U.S. history ever to be prosecuted directly by a private corporation. Most importantly, Chevron’s strategy failed to silence Steven and it did not stop the battle for justice being waged by the Amazon communities in Ecuador. In fact, we are growing in strength. Again, please join Steven, Michael Imperioli, Marty Garbus and other distinguished guests at 7 p.m. on the evening of September 12 in New York City at the Society for Ethical Culture. Please RSVP today. →   CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS! We hope to see you there and please spread the word by sending the link to your friends and collaborators. Together, The Free Donziger Team P.S. Not able to attend? Steven still needs your help. Please support his fight for freedom by donating now → Steven Donziger is a U.S. human rights attorney who helped communities in Ecuador’s Amazon win a historic multibillion-dollar pollution judgment against Chevron for the dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste onto Indigenous ancestral lands. Since the judgment issued in 2013, Chevron has used dozens of law firms and 2000 lawyers to carry out a demonization campaign targeting Steven to send a message of intimidation to all environmental advocates. Steven served 993 days of detention at home and in prison after being prosecuted directly by a Chevron law firm in the nation's first corporate prosecution; he still faces the threat of additional jail time after he appealed an order to turn over confidential information held by his Indigenous clients. Donate NOW to help support Steven as he and the Ecuadorian communities continue their fight for corporate accountability, environmental justice, Indigenous rights, and Free Speech. All funds are administered by the Friedman Rubin law firm in Seattle. Funds are used to pay legal fees and Steven’s basic household and work expenses given that Chevron has taken his law license. DONATE NOW

Twitter Instagram Facebook Paid for by Donziger Defense Fund Our mailing address is: Frente de la Defensa de la Amazonía 245 W 104th St Apt 7D New York, NY 10025-4280

 

The Cost of Extremes There is a growing need to address the expanding number and scale of weather disasters STEVEN BESCHLOSS SEP 1 Wading through flood waters in Tarpon Springs after Hurricane Idalia hit Florida’s Gulf Coast. (Photo by Joe Raedle via Getty Images) Let’s cast our minds back exactly 18 years ago to August of 2005 and the deadly devastation of Hurricane Katrina—the biblical-level disaster that overwhelmed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, led to the loss of 1,833 lives, left millions homeless, damaged or destroyed some 300,000 homes, and caused well over $100 billion in damages. The tragic event—a Category 3 storm which made landfall in Louisiana on August 29—gripped the nation for days with images of residents standing on their roofs in hopes of rescue, people and pets struggling to swim to safety, and later thousands of the disproportionately poor and African American people hunkered down in chaotic conditions inside the New Orleans Superdome. The failure to adequately prepare and respond after the storm had passed—made evident by the stunning, disheartening images of fellow Americans stranded and suffering for days on end—made one of the nation’s costliest and deadliest disasters a tragic harbinger of what the future could look like. Was it any wonder that President George W. Bush was roundly attacked for his reluctant, incompetent response, forever memorialized by his embarrassing comment to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) head Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”? Was it any wonder that the federal government ultimately coughed up tens of billions to rebuild the levees and other efforts to sustain the fabled city of New Orleans, even as the population dropped a year later by more than 50 percent and has never fully recovered? That event has been on my mind this week after Hurricane Hilary (downgraded to a tropical storm) and its record-breaking rainfall attacked Southern California and Hurricane Idalia has raged through Florida and other points north. Hilary is estimated to have caused some $600 million in damages, while early assessments of Idalia suggest the impact could yield as much as $20 billion in damage and lost output. That follows Hurricane Ian, which hit western Florida last year at an estimated cost of $112.9 billion. We are still learning the human and economic costs of the deadliest wildfire in American history in Hawaii, where hundreds of souls in Maui are still missing and the financial toll ranges as high as $6 billion. And while these most recent events illustrate the increasingly frequent consequences of climate change—as rising carbon emissions and CO2 levels are warming oceans, spurring hotter temperatures and intensifying storms—the data makes clear that the reality is becoming both more extreme and more normal. This year there have already been 18 “weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States,” reports the National Centers for Environmental Information (including New England flooding in July, Maui and Idalia). This compares with an annual average of 8.1 such events between 1980 and 2022 and 18 such events on average from 2018 to 2022. We can be sure there will be more to come before 2023 is over as the Atlantic hurricane season has not yet reached its zenith. Taken together, this increasingly predictable reality—which has caused major insurance companies to drop property and casualty coverage in Florida and California—provokes myriad questions: Will this Congress pass a $12 billion supplemental funding bill for FEMA which is running out of money? Can and should the federal government continue to fund the reconstruction of communities that are increasingly under attack due to climate change? Will people living in at-risk areas be increasingly forced to relocate, despite the painful disruption to their lives? How many times can a precarious city or town be rebuilt before taxpayers say “no more”? Will relocating soon become a commonly accepted reality of the climate crisis? Consider the case of Virginia’s Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. My good friend, journalist and narrative writer Earl Swift, spent over a year on the island documenting the lives of residents. Their centuries-old home is sinking, experiencing rising water levels—and facing eventual extinction without major investment in sustaining infrastructure. Author of the bestselling Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, Earl of course hopes the island will be saved. But he frames the quandary like this: Whether it should be saved is a far more difficult matter, because it requires some national consensus on how we address the changes wrought by sea-level rise in the coming decades. Those changes are already happening…and as they accelerate they will affect thousands of American communities. We will not have the money, the physical means, or the time to save them all. So we as a people will have to develop a rubric for deciding which towns and properties we save and which we surrender to the sea. Should we restrict our efforts to the places with the greatest populations?…Assuming we’re unwilling to sacrifice smaller places we hold dear, we’ll have to come up with other measure of value. We must devise means to quantify the intangibles that makes a place special. Note the words “national consensus” and “we as a people.” Earl couldn’t be more right about the need to come together, but it’s hard to understate the scale of trouble in making such decisions in these deeply divided and often painfully misdirected times. Let’s not doubt that these extreme events must compel us to a better place. Yesterday President Joe Biden visited the FEMA headquarters along with Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to thank the hard-working people there. He noted that he’s spoken more than once to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to approve his emergency disaster declaration (that activates federal programs to assist the response). That’s not all he said: “I’m calling on Congress to make sure you’re able to have the funds to be able to continue to show up and meet the needs of the American people to deal with immediate crises that we’re facing right now, as well as the long-term commitments we have to make to finish the job in Maui and elsewhere.” But he also underscored the fact that some elected Republicans are determined to ignore reality: “How can I say it? There are still some deniers out there in terms of whether or not climate change has anything to do with any of this. And we’re going to need a whole hell of a lot more money to deal with emergency appropriations, to deal with all that you’re taking care of.” Tomorrow the president will travel to Florida and visit some of the most hard-hit areas and the people living there. We can expect to see him meeting DeSantis, who only seems to show interest in the role of federal government when it involves securing funding every time a major storm strikes. Too bad the cost of extremes is exacerbated by such leaders who’d rather score points with an extremist base than meaningfully confront an existential danger that will touch every American.

 

Jack Welch and the End of Stakeholder Capitalism Chapter 6 of The Common Good ROBERT REICH SEP 1 Friends, Between 1981, when Jack Welch took the helm at GE, and 2001, when he retired, GE’s stock value soared from $14 billion to $400 billion. Welch accomplished this largely by slashing American jobs. I want to focus on Jack Welch today because Welch represents a stunning change that occurred in American capitalism in the 1980s, whose repercussions lead all the way to Donald Trump. If we really want to understand the decline of the common good over the last four or five decades, we need to understand this change — and no one better illustrates it than Welch. Before Welch became CEO of GE, most GE employees had spent their entire careers with the company, typically at one of its facilities in upstate New York. But between 1981 and 1985, a quarter of these GE workers — 100,000 in all — lost their jobs, earning Welch the moniker “Neutron Jack,” along with the glowing admiration of the business community. Welch encouraged his senior managers to replace 10 percent of their subordinates every year in order to keep GE competitive. As GE opened facilities abroad, staffed by foreign workers costing a small fraction of what GE had paid its American employees, the corporation all but abandoned upstate New York. Between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, GE slashed its American workforce by half (to about 160,000) while nearly doubling its foreign workforce (to 130,000). JACK WELSH became the most admired CEO in America — at least in the business press, on Wall Street, and within rarified precincts like Harvard Business School. His reign epitomized a chain reaction that started in the 1980s, when “corporate raiders” mounted hostile takeovers of corporations, financed by risky bonds. The raiders made fortunes, Wall Street became the most powerful force in the economy, and CEOs began to devote themselves entirely and obsessively to maximizing the short-term value of shares of stock — whatever it took. Before then, it was assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their “stakeholders”— not just their shareholders, but also their employees, the communities where their operations were located, their customers, and the public at large. In the 1940s and 1950s, CEOs of major corporations like GE, General Motors, Coca-Cola, and Eastman Kodak joined together in the Committee for Economic Development, to lobby for measures to expand jobs. They even argued that unions “serve the common good.” In the 1960s, many of these CEOs lobbied for stronger environmental protections and for passage of the Environmental Protection Act. Starting in the 1980s, though, as a result of the corporate takeovers mounted by raiders such as Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and Carl Icahn, a wholly different understanding of the corporation emerged. The raiders targeted companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders if they abandoned their other stakeholders — by fighting unions, cutting workers’ pay or firing them, automating as many jobs as possible, outsourcing other jobs, and abandoning their original communities by shuttering factories and moving jobs to states with lower labor costs or abroad. The raiders pushed shareholders to vote out directors who wouldn’t make these sorts of changes and vote in directors who would (or else sell their shares to the raiders, who’d do the dirty work). During the whole of the 1970s, there were only 13 hostile takeovers of big companies valued at $1 billion or more. During the 1980s, there were 150. Between 1979 and 1989, financial entrepreneurs mounted more than 2,000 leveraged buyouts, in which they bought out shareholders with borrowed money, each buyout exceeding $250 million. As a result, CEOs across America, facing the possibility of being replaced by a CEO who would maximize shareholder value, began to view their responsibilities differently. Few events change minds more profoundly than the imminent possibility of being sacked. The corporate statesmen of previous decades, who prided themselves on representing all their stakeholders, were supplanted by the corporate butchers of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, whose nearly exclusive focus was — in the meat-ax parlance that suddenly became fashionable — to “cut out the fat,” “cut to the bone,” and make their companies “lean and mean.” SINCE THEN, corporate raiders have morphed into more respectable “private equity managers” and “activist investors.” Hostile takeovers have become rare because corporate norms have changed: It’s now assumed that corporations exist only to maximize shareholder returns. Corporations have used their profits to give shareholders dividends and to buy back their shares of stock — thereby reducing the number of shares outstanding and giving stock prices short-term boosts. All of this has meant more money for the top executives of big companies, whose pay started to be linked to share prices in the early 1990s. CEO pay soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker in the 1960s to almost 380 times by 2023. Are we better off now? Some say shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, enabling the economy to grow faster. Stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations employed workers they didn’t need and paid them too much and were too tied to their communities. But shareholders are not the only ones who invest in corporations and bear some of the risk that the value of their investments might drop. Workers who have been with a company for years often develop skills and knowledge unique to it. Others may have moved their families to take a job with the company, buying homes in the community. The community itself may have invested in roads and other infrastructure to accommodate the corporation. When a firm abandons those workers and those communities, these stakeholders lose the value of their investments. Why should no account be taken of their stakes? In standard microeconomics, the costs to workers and communities abandoned by profit-maximizing corporations are termed “externalities” — social costs lying outside the deals struck between corporate managers and investors. But why should these costs not be included in assessing whether the deals are good? Over the last four decades, these “externalities” have grown so large as to swamp internal efficiencies. Entire regions of the country have been denuded of good jobs. Legions of (mostly) men without college degrees have become stranded. The bottom half of the American workforce has been left with stagnant pay and decreasing job security. The results: rising rates of drug addiction, family violence, child abuse, deaths of despair, and an increasingly angry working class susceptible to demagogues like Trump. EXECUTIVES CLAIM THEY HAVE NO CHOICE. They have a “fiduciary obligation” to maximize investors’ returns. Rubbish. The argument is tautological. It assumes that investors are the only people worthy of consideration. What about the common good? After Jared Kushner’s real estate company sued one of its tenants for moving out of her apartment without giving the company two months’ notice (she claimed she had done so), the company won an almost $5,000 judgment against her and then garnished her wages as a home health worker and her bank account. When asked to justify such Mr. Potter-like tactics, the Kushner Companies’ chief financial officer told The New York Times that the company had a “fiduciary obligation” to its shareholders to collect as much revenue as possible (the firm’s major shareholders were Jared Kushner and his family). Maximizing profits and investor returns, whatever it takes, has leached into sectors of the economy that had once been based on the common good, such as health care. A century ago, hospitals and health insurers had public responsibilities. The original purpose of health insurance plans, devised in the 1920s at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, was not to generate profits. It was to cover as many people as possible. The nonprofits Blue Cross and Blue Shield accepted everyone who wanted to become members, and all members paid the same rate regardless of age or health. By the 1960s, Blue Cross provided hospital coverage to more than 50 million Americans. In the 1970s and 1980s, though, entrepreneurs saw ways to make big money by exploiting this common good. They founded for-profit insurance companies like Aetna and Cigna that, unhampered by the Blues’ charitable mission, accepted only younger and healthier patients. This reduced their costs, enabling them to charge lower premiums than the Blues while still pocketing big profits. The Blues couldn’t possibly compete. So in 1994, Blue Cross and Blue Shield succumbed and became for-profits — marking the end of nonprofit health insurance — turning the American health care system into one that eagerly insured healthy people while trying to avoid sick people, or charging people with chronic health problems a fortune for coverage. Big financial houses, meanwhile, went from small privately held investment banks to giant corporations whose shares were traded on stock exchanges. This has also had unfortunate consequences. When investment bankers made all the profits and also suffered all the losses from their bets, they tended to be cautious. In order to understand the risks they were taking on, partners kept their banks small and their transactions relatively simple. By 2000, because Washington deregulated Wall Street (at the behest of financiers who saw they could make vast fortunes from making risky bets with other people’s money), Wall Street morphed into megabanks with hundreds of thousands of employees, spanning the globe. There were no longer any constraints on risky trades. Shareholders bore the costs, while those who made the bets got the upside gains in the form of giant bonuses. Bankers had every incentive to grab the cheapest funding to make the riskiest bets with the highest payoffs. This led to the crash of 2008. When they’re not claiming a “fiduciary obligation” to maximize investor returns, CEOs argue that capital markets force their hand. To raise money for their businesses, they must attend solely to the interests of investors, or else competitive forces will wipe them out. More rubbish. As I’ve emphasized, markets are human creations. How they’re organized depends on political decisions. Big corporations and the CEOs who head them have outsized political influence. They have enough power to change the rules. CEOs could use their political clout to push for laws that resurrect stakeholder capitalism: making it harder for private equity and other activist investors to take over a company, for example. Giving workers greater voice in management decisions, as in Germany. Requiring companies to make “severance payments” to communities they abandon, to compensate for the disruption. Prohibiting mandatory arbitration in contracts with customers and employees. Limiting the tax deductibility of CEO pay. Rather than reflexively seek tax cuts, CEOs could push to raise taxes on corporations and on wealthy Americans like themselves — and dedicate the funds to, say, better schools for all American kids. They could seek a higher minimum wage, bigger wage subsidies (in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit), more portable pensions, universal health care, and other measures that would raise pay and make American workers more economically secure. Rather than fight for laws that make it harder for workers to unionize, they could fight for laws that made it easier. They could reduce the needs of candidates to raise vast sums of campaign money by supporting public financing of campaigns. They could back stricter limits on the “revolving door” between industry and government personnel and laws requiring full disclosure of the sources of all campaign funding. If all this sounds far-fetched, that’s only because of how far we’ve come from the era when the heads of American business viewed themselves as “corporate statesmen” with responsibilities for the common good. Most Americans now believe the system is rigged in favor of big corporations and Wall Street, and in many respects, it is. But nothing is stopping CEOs and top executives on Wall Street from putting an end to the rigging — except their own self-serving notion of Jack Welch-style corporate leadership as maximizing profits and shareholder value, whatever it takes. This is not a matter of “corporate ethics.” As now routinely taught in graduate schools of business and as required for obtaining many professional licenses, corporate ethics involves fulfilling legal responsibilities, avoiding obvious conflicts of interest, and behaving in a transparent manner. It’s about avoiding legal troubles and public relations disasters. Corporate ethics is about how to be more like Jack Welch. This is a matter of the common good. THE SUCCESS OF THE MODERN CEO should not be measured solely by how much money they or their corporations make, how much power they accumulate, or how much influence they wield. They must be judged by the well-being they confer on everyone affected by the corporation, and by the legacy of trust (or distrust) they pass onward. By this measure, Jack Welch has left America worse than it was before. Next week, I’ll summarize where we’ve come so far in understanding what happened to the common good by examining why so many Americans have succumbed to Trumpism. Then, in the last three weeks of these essays, I’ll suggest what we can do to resurrect the common good. Thanks again for joining me on this journey.