Notices by Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im), page 20

Despite the fact that the Middle East has experienced hellish heat waves and epic floods,
Middle Eastern regimes get failing grades on climate action

https://portside.org/2024-04-19/dead-last-emphasis-dead

Robert Reich:

Protesting against slaughter – as students in the US are doing – isn’t antisemitism

The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them.
That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions and values.
And what better place to test ideas, assumptions and values than at a university?

Apparently, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, does not share my view.

Last week she prostrated herself before House Republicans, promising that she would discipline professors and students for protesting against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza in which some 34,000 people have died, most of them women and children.
The following day she summoned the New York police department to arrest more than 100 students who were engaging in a peaceful protest.

Can we be clear about a few things?
Protesting against this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism.
It is not engaging in hate speech.
It is not endangering Jewish students.
It is doing what should be done on a college campus – taking a stand against a perceived wrong, thereby provoking discussion and debate

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/23/israel-gaza-campus-protests?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

“If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,”

“It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort

Irish Green Party deputy leader tells conference coming year is ‘pivotal’ and she is
‘absolutely committed’ to a new public broadcasting funding model
Catherine Martin signals ‘ground breaking’🔸 basic income scheme for artists 🔸to be expanded

Ms Martin said that the €105 million pilot scheme, which 💥guarantees artists enrolled on it an income of €325 a week, 💥was “ground breaking”.

https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/04/20/catherine-martin-signals-ground-breaking-basic-income-scheme-for-artists-to-be-expanded/

New Hampshire’s GOP Is Taking a Stand
—Against the Polio Vaccine

The Granite State could be the first to ditch polio and measles requirements for childcare

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/

According to new reporting from Reuters,
👉Donald Trump is contemplating slashing Social Security’s dedicated funding, colloquially known as the payroll tax.

The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works:
 
“Donald Trump recently received pushback when he said that
‘there is a lot you can do’ to cut Social Security. .

So he is dusting off the old Republican playbook and bringing back the strategy known informally as ‘Starve the Beast.’

In this case, Social Security is the beast.
 
Social Security can only pay benefits if it has sufficient dedicated revenue to pay its costs.

That is why it doesn’t contribute even a penny to the deficit.

If Trump succeeds in slashing that dedicated revenue so that it is no longer sufficient to fully cover the cost, it will result in an automatic benefit reduction.

This would happen without any Republicans having to vote for the cuts, or Trump having to sign them into law.

https://socialsecurityworks.org/2024/04/18/donald-trump-plans-to-starve-social-security/

‘Water is more valuable than oil’:

Corporations cashing in on America’s drought

One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves:
Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt.
Nearly a decade ago, 💥Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, 💥
a private company backed by global investors,
bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land here in Cibola.

In a first-of-its-kind deal,
👉the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek,
a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit.

More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.
Greenstone strategically purchased land and influence to advance the deal. -- The company was able to do so by exploiting the arcane water policies governing the Colorado River.
Experts expect that such transfers will become more common as thirsty towns across the west seek increasingly scarce water.
The climate crisis and chronic overuse have sapped the Colorado River watershed,
leaving cities and farmers alike to contend with shortages.
Amid a deepening drought and declines in the river’s reservoirs,
Greenstone and firms like it have been discreetly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/arizona-colorado-river-water-rights-drought?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The #Iranian #drones will not arrive at their targets for several hours, Daniel #Hagari, the #Israeli military spokesperson said.
U.S. officials confirmed that an attack is underway, and National Security Council spokesperson ranian Adrienne #Watson said in a statement that “our support for Israel’s security is ironclad,” adding “The United States will stand with the people of Israel and support their defense against these threats from Iran.”

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/13/2024/iran-drone-strikes-israel-us

Biden calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza

Joe Biden has called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, telling Benjamin Netanyahu that future US support for Israel will depend on it taking concrete action to protect civilians and aid workers.

As the two leaders held their first phone call since Israeli airstrikes killed seven employees of the international food charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), Biden issued the strongest US rebuke toward Israel since the start of the conflict.

In Thursday’s call, which lasted less than 30 minutes, the US president “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers”, the White House said in a statement.

“He made clear that US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/israel-us-gaza-joe-biden-benjamin-netanyahu-phone-call?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Nobel Laureate economist #Angus #Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying economists have failed to understand that ⭐️capitalism is about power.⭐️

Deaton lobs a series of truth bombs at his own profession, the result, he says, of “changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practising economist for more than half a century”.

These include:

🔸“We have largely stopped thinking about #ethics and about what constitutes human #well-#being”.

🔸If “economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators… 🔹the others regularly fail to materialise🔹, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution
— frequently though not inevitably
— our recommendations become little more than a #license for #plunder”.

🔸“#Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms…”

🔸Far from being “a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency”, #unions “once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments.

🔸Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening #gap between executives and workers, to community #destruction, and to rising #populism.”

🔸“I am much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even sceptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalisation was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years”.

🔸Immigration contributes to inequality.

But Deaton’s main point is a recognition of how #power distorts #policy:
“Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.”

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/12/nobel-laureate-economist-angus-deaton-capitalism-power/

From 2017:

Before Trump was sworn in, he and six of his aides said there were no contacts between the campaign and Russians. ZERO. Turned out 15+ Trump people had 100+ contacts with Russian officials, known spies, cutouts and oligarchs. This massive lie has defined Trump's presidency.

https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/the-russia-connection/

Mark Twain once said: “golf is a good walk spoiled.”
Some American communities are realizing that a golf course is a good outdoor space spoiled.

A small number of shuttered #golf #courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into #nature preserves, #parks and #wetlands.

Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit 🔹Trust for Public Land, 🔹which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

https://kottke.org/24/02/the-fledgling-movement-to-rewild-golf-courses

Ahead of a significant meeting next month for members of the federal judiciary, a watchdog group hoisted another red flag over U.S. Supreme Court Justice 🔸Clarence Thomas 🔸for what it says is a
👉 “30 year pattern” of cherry-picking his financial disclosures once he is raked in the press.

The renewed call for review of the long-embroiled justice comes exactly a month before the "Judicial Conference of the United States" convenes for its first of only two meetings this year.

The group of federal judges, which is led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, acts as a policymaking body for federal courts across the land and can also make recommendations to Congress.
It is, as ProPublica has reported at length, a powerful but largely opaque body that polices itself.

On Wednesday, the Campaign Legal Center raised the alarm again, this time in a letter to Lee Ann Bennett, the conference’s acting secretary, urging the group to weigh findings of a troubling pattern that has gone on since 1996.

Using a flowchart to clarify, the watchdog group contends that each time Thomas complied with financial disclosure rules and then received negative media attention, he responded in kind.

When he was first asked to disclose his spouse’s employer between 1987 and 1996 and media reporting exploded on the controversy surrounding his spouse’s employment with the Republican Majority Leader at the time and her role investigating a sitting president, Thomas stopped formally reporting his spouse’s employment until the media caught on in 2011.

When he first complied with disclosing his travel expenses from a friend in 1997, and then media reporting emerged a year later that he traveled on a private jet and had expensed a “wealthy real estate magnate,” the justice spent the next 24 years omitting any disclosures on travel expenses from his friends until reports surfaced in 2023.

The same thing happened in 2002 when he initially disclosed tuition he had gifted to a grandnephew.

Two years later, he was outed in the press about the tuition gift, and by 2009, Thomas again stopped disclosing tuition gifts entirely.

In 2011, Thomas initially complied with a disclosure for assets he had sold off, including those assets sold without capital gains.

That same year, reporting emerged on the role he played in having Harlan Crow purchase real estate in Georgia from a third party.

That too appears to have prompted the justice not to fully disclose those details for at least three years until the press unearthed the omission, the CLC contends.

This all goes toward proving Thomas knowingly and willfully violating the Ethics in Government Act, the center argues. Extensive details about the omissions can be found in the CLC’s 161-page letter

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/watchdog-group-raises-red-flag-about-clarence-thomas-again-claims-new-research-shows-pattern-of-omission-when-under-fire/

Air Canada must honor refund policy 🔥invented by the airline’s chatbot

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/

Opinion by Tristan Snell:

Congress has already disqualified Trump from the ballot

This may come as a shock. 
When, one might ask, did Congress ever hold such votes?

Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”

This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense
— and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court.

Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/08/opinions/trump-supreme-court-oral-arguments-election-snell/index.html

Why the Hur report triggers bad 2016 flashbacks

Last week, Robert Hur, the special counsel charged with investigating whether President Biden mishandled classified documents, dropped a 388-page report concluding that Biden did, but not enough to warrant prosecution. If this feels an awful lot like James Comey’s July 2016 statement about then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, that’s because it is.

Now, thanks to Hur and the credulous mainstream media, we’re living through a variation of “but her emails,” and it could have similarly disastrous consequences.

Hur’s report has given the media what they crave — a chance to engage in both-sidesism about Biden and Trump, allowing for breathless horse race political coverage rather than a solemn reckoning with the magnitude of the threat of another Trump presidency.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. called out media false equivalencies last month in the Washington Post: “It's time for everyone, the media especially, to face up to the actual choice: Between constitutional democracy and authoritarianism. Between a normal human being and a self-involved, spiteful madman https://www.publicnotice.co/p/hur-report-biden-classified-docs-comey-flashback

How Leonard Leo Weaponized the Courts Against Democracy | The Nation

The Federalist Society, formed in 1982, was the perfect vehicle for forging a right-wing legal cadre and funneling it into the legal system.

Leonard Leo joined the Federalist Society in 1986, forming a chapter of the group at Cornell where he was studying law.

As he rose in the ranks, Leo was an important player in the political campaigns to win Senate approval for Supreme Court justices such as Clarence #Thomas, John #Roberts, and Samuel #Alito.

During the Bush administration, when the Department of Justice wanted to “launder and distribute” a white paper in support of a contentious nominee, they turned to Leo.

Viet Dinh, a Department of Justice official who was also a prominent member of the Federalist Society, e-mailed, ”Tell len leo [sic] I need this distributed asap.”

The Federalist Society was thus organically tied to the Republican Party:
When nominees ran into headwinds, Leo would lead the charge with media campaigns to rally support.

By 2016, the role of the Federalist Society as the essential gatekeeper of Republican judicial nominees was recognized by presidential candidate #Trump, who promised the right-wing base, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”

The network Leo brought together comprises three cords:
♦️the GOP (which needed conservative judges),
♦️the legal profession (where young lawyers were hungry for a pathway to judges),
♦️and plutocratic donors (eager for judges that supported plutocracy and right-wing politics).

💰Money was a crucial component of this network.
George Conway, a former Republican who had been active in the Federalist Society, told ProPublica,
“There was always a concern that Scalia or Thomas would say, ‘Fuck it,’ and quit the job and go make way more money at Jones Day [a big law firm] or somewhere else.
Part of what Leonard does is he tries to keep them happy so they stay on the job.”

This explains the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by right-wing judges as they vacation and cavort with robber barons such as Harlan #Crow and Paul #Singer.
The judges get to enjoy the lifestyle of the 1 percent despite earning a government salary.

While the Supreme Court is the big prize, the conservative legal movement that Leo forged worked to reshape lower courts as well as state courts, helping to promote not just right-wing judges but also district attorneys.

Sometimes the lobbying was demagogic. Politico reports,
Leo became interested in Wisconsin in 2008.
An incumbent state Supreme Court justice, Louis #Butler, had angered the state’s largest business group with his ruling in a lead paint case.

The ensuing ad campaign was contentious and expensive, featuring commercials showing Butler, who is Black, next to the picture of a sex offender who was also Black.

The #racist demagoguery of that judicial race is of a piece with the way Republican jurists have so often worked to curtail voting rights.

The whole claim that #originalism was meant to enhance democracy has been revealed as a fraud.

The same #antidemocratic tendency can be seen in the way the court is working to limit president Biden’s agenda, as in the recent decision in
👉Biden v. Nebraska overturning student debt relief—a measure that was in the Democratic Party platform when Biden won the election.

The goal was to create an ideologically committed faction that could dominate the courts and advance its agenda without democratic check.

That’s the system Leonard Leo created—and it deserves to be recognized as equal to Trumpism in posing one of the greatest threats to American democracy
#darkmoney #LeonardLeo #federalistsociety @darkmoney
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/leonard-leo-federalist-society-courts/

A cyberattack in Fulton County, Georgia, crippled several crucial systems over a recent weekend. The incident was disclosed on Monday, January 29.

Signs greeted Atlanta residents at county buildings telling them that issues were ongoing, but that still left many upset.
"I'm really frustrated," said Mark Blackmon.
Blackmon is one of the many residents who were turned away from the county’s government offices Monday after the cyberattack.

"I tried to get a tag today, they told me the computer's down, come back whenever," he said.

For most of the day Monday, Fulton County officials would only say they were dealing with an IT outage, but late in the afternoon, Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts said it was not just technology trouble, but an attack. 

"A number of our primary technology platforms are affected by this incident," he said. "Three notable examples include our #phone system, our #court system, and our #tax system."
#political #cyberterrorism is likely to become more common
@north

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/person/f/tyler-fingert

Louisiana governor accused of using public records law to intimidate EPA and ‘Cancer Alley’ community

Louisiana’s far-right government has quietly obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the Environmental Protection Agency and journalists, legal advocates and community groups focused on environmental justice.

The rare use of public records law to target citizens is a new escalation in the state’s battle with the EPA over its examination of alleged civil rights violations in the heavily polluted region known as “Cancer Alley”.

Louisiana sued the EPA on 19 December, alleging that the federal agency had failed to properly respond to the state’s sprawling Freedom of Information Act, or Foia, request sent by the former state attorney general Jeff Landry.

Court filings note that the public records case is related to another, ongoing lawsuit brought against the EPA by Landry, a staunch advocate for the oil and gas industry who now serves as Louisiana’s governor.

Shortly after Landry’s suit was filed, the EPA dropped its investigation into the Louisiana department of environmental quality’s permitting practices, which advocates say disproportionately affect Black residents in Cancer Alley.

News that the state has sought to obtain such an array of communications as part of its efforts prompted allegations of intimidation from many of the Black residents who were targeted.

It has also raised press freedom concerns for media organizations included in the request, described by Foia experts as extremely unusual.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/02/louisiana-sues-epa-emails-journalists-cancer-alley-residents?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Google News is boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content

#Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News.

The presence of AI-generated content on Google News signals two things:
first, the black box nature of Google News, with entry into Google News’ rankings in the first place an opaque, but apparently gameable, system.
Second, is how Google may not be ready for moderating its News service in the age of consumer-access AI, where essentially anyone is able to churn out a mass of content with little to no regard for its quality or originality.

https://www.404media.co/google-news-is-boosting-garbage-ai-generated-articles/