20 January 20
A Steep Decline in Donations and Funding
We are reacting to a substantial drop-off in the number and size of donations. That equates to a significant slashing of RSN’s budget. Yes we have to address that. No choice.
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20 January 20
The events are not unrelated. Trump is charged with abusing his power. Capitalism’s global elite is under assault for abusing its power as well: fueling inequality, fostering corruption and doing squat about climate change.
Chief executives of the largest global corporations are raking in more money and at a larger multiple of their workers’ pay than at any time in history. The world’s leading financiers are pocketing even more. The 26 richest people on Earth now own as much as the 3.8 billion who form the poorer half of the planet’s population.
Concentrated wealth on this scale invites corruption. Across the world, big money is buying off politicians to procure favors that further enlarge the wealth of those at the top, while siphoning off resources from everyone else.
Corruption makes it impossible to fight stagnant wages, climate change or any other problem facing the vast majority of the world’s population that would require some sacrifice by the rich.
Popular anger is boiling over against elites seen as irredeemably greedy, corrupt and indifferent to the plight of most people struggling to get by. The anger has fueled uprisings in Chile, Spain, Ecuador, Lebanon, Egypt and Bolivia; environmental protests in the UK, Germany, Austria, France and New Zealand; and xenophobic politics in the US, the UK, Brazil and Hungary.
Trump’s support comes largely from America’s working class whose wages haven’t risen in decades, whose jobs are less secure than ever and whose political voice has been drowned out by big money.
Although Trump has given corporations and Wall Street everything they’ve wanted and nothing has trickled down to his supporters, he has convinced those supporters he’s on their side by channeling their rage on to foreigners, immigrants, minorities and “deep state” bureaucrats.
It seems strangely appropriate, therefore, that the theme of this year’s Davos conclave is “stakeholder capitalism” – the idea that corporations have a responsibility to their workers, communities and the environment as well as to their shareholders.
Expect endless speeches touting the “long-term” benefits of stakeholder capitalism to corporate bottom lines: happy workers are more productive. A growing middle class can buy more goods and services. Climate change is beginning to cost a bundle in terms of environmental calamities and insurance, so it must be stopped.
All true, but the assembled CEOs know they’ll get richer far quicker if they boost equity values in the short term by buying back their shares of stock, suppressing wages, fighting unions, resisting environmental regulations and buying off politicians for tax cuts and subsidies.
This has been their strategy for three decades, and it’s about to get worse. Three researchers – Daniel Greenwald at MIT’s Sloan School, Martin Lettau at Berkeley and Sydney Ludvigson at NYU – found that between 1952 and 1988, economic growth accounted for 92% of the rise in equity values. But since 1989 most of the increase has come from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation”. In other words, from workers.
What this means is that in order for the stock market to do as well in coming years, either economic growth has to accelerate markedly (highly unlikely), or chief executives will have to siphon off even more of the gains from growth from workers and other stakeholders to their shareholders.
This is likely to require even more downward pressure on wages, more payoffs to politicians for tax cuts and subsidies and further rollbacks of environmental regulations. All of which will worsen the prevailing discontent.
There will be no mention at Davos of any of this, nor of the increasing political and economic power of these elites and the diminishing power of average workers and citizens around the world.
Nothing will be achieved in the Swiss Alps because the growing global discontent has yet to affect the bottom lines of the corporations and financial institutions whose leaders are assembling to congratulate themselves on their wealth, influence and benevolence.
Trump, meanwhile, is likely to be acquitted by Senate Republicans who are so cowardly and unprincipled that they will ignore his flagrantly unconstitutional acts.
Trump plans to speak at Davos, by the way: an impeached president addressing world economic leaders while being tried in the Senate. He’ll probably boast about the stock market, bully and lie, as usual.
One thing he won’t say is that the whatever-it-takes abuses of economic and political power such as he and much of his audience are engaged in threaten to destroy capitalism, democracy and the planet.
American civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta, both wearing garlands, are received by admirers after landing at the airport in New Delhi on Feb. 10, 1959. (photo: Rangaswamy Satakopan/AP)
The Women's March. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
First Lady Michelle Obama visits a Maryland school given a 2009 USDA prize for promoting health. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Demonstrators hold banners and placards as they attend the 2020 Women's March in Washington, DC. (photo: Mary F Calvert/Reuters)
'A Rapist in Your Path' Anthem Sets Defiant Tone at Women's MarchLaurin-Whitney Gottbrath, Al JazeeraGottbrath writes: "The performance gave a defiant, powerful tone to the fourth annual Women's March, which saw thousands from across the country and world brave light snow and freezing rain to march in Washington, DC. Thousands of others rallied in cities and countries worldwide."
EXCERPT:
"I want everyone to know that women deserve rights too," said Mariam Meite, who travelled from North Carolina for the march.
"We're not making this stuff up," the 21-year-old told Al Jazeera. "We're actually being assaulted every day. We're not getting paid equally. We're dying all the time. We deserve to be heard."
Protesters held signs that included a variety of demands, from climate action to reproductive rights.
"My particular concern is the planet, climate and how [President Donald] Trump and his cronies and his associates are doing everything wrong," said Laura, who only gave her first name.
"They aren't concerned, it seems, with the survival of the planet and the people," the 67-year-old from Pennsylvania told Al Jazeera. "Hopefully we have not gone so far that our planet is doomed."
Bailey Nickoloff, a 26-year-old law student in Washington, DC, said she also attended the march to call for climate action, as well as to demand respect for Indigenous rights and to take a stand against Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Getty Images)
The Antarctic ozone hole on Sept. 24, 2006. (image: NASA)
he global response to the “ozone hole,” as it came to be known in the 1970s, has long been held up as a model for environmental problem-solving — and the hope that we might yet be able to fix the climate crisis. After scientists realized that chemicals used for cooling and in aerosol sprays were causing the Earth’s protective ozone layer to thin, threatening to cause vast increases in cancers and other diseases, countries around the world came together to fix it. Even the companies that made and sold the chemical culprits — chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — participated in the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty that began phasing them out in 1989. Since then, the ozone layer has partially recovered.
The international commitment to eliminating ozone-depleting chemicals has held so firm that in 2018, when some Chinese factories were discovered to be using a substance banned by the treaty known as CFC-11, they were met with condemnation from the U.S. and other countries. Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations Environment Program, which oversees the Montreal Protocol, called the release of the ozone-depleting substance “nothing short of an environment crime which demands decisive action.” China quickly addressed the problem.
Yet evidence has recently emerged that U.S. companies are also releasing ozone-depleting chemicals. While the ozone layer is rebounding overall, scientists have observed decreasing levels of the gas in certain areas. Chemicals used for everything from fracking to cooling appear to be the culprits, according to comments the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in December. The chemical pollution, some of which is coming from the U.S., EPA records show, has already delayed progress on the ozone layer. The resulting setback appears to be worse in highly populated southern latitudes, where it could cause the most damage. Continued emissions of the chemicals could delay the healing of the ozone layer by up to 30 years, according to a 2017 article published in Nature Communications.
Despite the threat, the EPA has not considered impacts on ozone in initial phases of its assessment of 14 chemicals with ozone-depleting potential now being conducted under the Toxic Substances Control Act. Asked about the decision, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email that “because ozone depletion risks are adequately assessed and effectively managed under the Clean Air Act, EPA does not expect to include ozone-depletion potential in risk evaluations” of three of the chemicals. The agency response did not address the other 11 chemicals under scrutiny.
Loopholes and Untracked Emissions
Both the Clean Air Act and the Montreal Protocol do regulate some of these short-lived chemicals that erode the ozone layer. But they make an exception when the chemicals are byproducts or used as feedstock for making other products, a loophole that may explain why some of them are still accumulating in the atmosphere more than 30 years after the treaty took effect.
Carbon tetrachloride, for instance, a potent ozone-depleting chemical that was used to make CFCs, is tightly regulated under the treaty. Nevertheless, the amount of the chemical in the atmosphere has been rising. While the exact sources of the pollution have been treated as a mystery, some of the discrepancy appears to be due to the increasing use of carbon tetrachloride as a feedstock for other chemicals, which the EPA has acknowledged is its main use. Between 2012 and 2018, U.S. companies released 1.3 million pounds of the chemical into the air. Among the biggest emitters are a Dover Chemical plant in Ohio and two plants in Geismar, Louisiana — one owned by Rubicon and the other by Occidental — according to an analysis of EPA data by the consulting firm Material Research.
Asked about Rubicon’s emission of carbon tetrachloride, Mark Dearman, the company’s general manager, said that “We’re currently operating under our air permits under the EPA and the Department of Environmental Quality of the state of Louisiana and we’re constantly working year on year to reduce our emissions and be good environmental stewards.” Occidental and Dover Chemical did not respond to requests for comment.
Levels of another ozone-depleting chemical, methylene chloride, are also on the rise, climbing 8 percent per year between 2000 and 2012, according to the most recent analysis. Methylene chloride was not regulated under the treaty because it lasts for only a short time in the atmosphere and so was once thought to have a minimal impact on ozone. But its release is responsible for much of the delay in the recovery of the ozone layer, according to the Nature Communications article.
U.S. companies, including the SI Group, 3V Sigma, and CR Bard, all of which are based in South Carolina, released 19.8 million pounds of methylene chloride into the air between 2012 and 2018, according to company reports to the EPA. In an emailed statement, SI Group spokesperson Melissa Quesnel wrote, “When methylene chloride is in use, we have engineering controls in place to recover and recycle as much as possible to limit our emissions, complying with all emission regulations.” 3V Sigma and CR Bard did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries for this article.
But the key to understanding the chemical’s increasing levels may be what’s not tracked by the agency, since the industrial emissions of methylene chloride reported by the EPA are dwarfed by the amounts scientists estimate is in the atmosphere.
The gap may be partially explained by the chemical’s use in oil and gas production, one of the sectors whose emissions of these substances aren’t disclosed in publicly available EPA data. In addition to being used to make pesticides and plastic, methylene chloride is used in the “oil and gas drilling, extraction, and support activities sector,” according to a 2017 EPA report, and has been found in the air near fracking wells. As the number of fracking wells has increased, so have methylene chloride levels in the atmosphere.
Ironically, both chemicals are also used as feedstocks to make the next generation of coolants, which were introduced to replace CFCs and other coolants because they won’t destroy the ozone layer.
Nevertheless, the U.S. companies that release the chemicals undermining one of the world’s biggest environmental achievements have so far faced little pressure to stop. “China was bashed internationally for the production of CFC-11,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, who leads the Environmental Investigation Agency’s climate campaign. The U.S. and other countries pushed hard on China to stop releasing substances like CFC-11, which erode ozone, Mahapatra continued. “But even in America substances that damage the ozone layer are being released.”
hina is stepping up restrictions on the production, sale and use of single-use plastic products, according to the state planner, as it seeks to tackle one of the country’s biggest environmental problems.
