Olúfémi O. Táíwò
Corporations like Amazon have lives of their own—and they control ours.
The post Welcoming Our Robot Overlords appeared first on The Nation.
Archive for category: Class Oppression
A recent analysis led by several Nobel-laureate economists has put concrete numbers to the “emissions inequalities” around the world. The richest individuals, it found — the world’s “10 percent”– collectively emit nearly half of all global emissions. Meanwhile, the poorer half of the global population is responsible for just 12 percent.
The report, produced by the research group World Inequality Lab, based at the Paris School of Economics, maps the differences in global income and wealth across the world, as well as gender and environmental disparities, using data collected by more than 100 researchers over four years.
“There is a fundamental problem in contemporary discussion of climate policy: It rarely acknowledges inequality,” Lucas Chancel, the study’s lead author, wrote in The Guardian.
The United States, it found, is a “super emitter” of carbon dioxide, given its energy mix and consumption habits, with Americans, on average, emitting three times more carbon than the rest of the world. And for some regions, the disparities are even greater: an average American emits 21 tons of CO2 every year, for example, compared to a person in sub-Saharan Africa, who emits just 1.6 tons.
But when the researchers analyzed the emissions created by low-income people versus the middle class and wealthy within various regions, they found that “this is not simply a rich-versus-poor countries divide: There are huge emitters in poor countries, and low emitters in rich countries,” Chancel wrote.
Wealthy people in East Asia and the Middle East, for example, emitted more CO2 (around 39 and 34 tons in 2019, respectively) than the poorest people in Europe, who emitted 5 tons per person that same year. Moreover, the consumption habits of the wealthiest people in those countries have even made them more polluting than the most affluent Europeans, who are responsible for 29 tons of carbon dioxide every year.
Within the U.S., the difference between the upper 10 percent and the lower half is stark. While the richest Americans are the highest emitters on Earth, releasing 75 tons per person each year, a low-income American emits about 10 tons over the same time period.
“An extreme illustration of this is when billionaires decide to do a nine-minute trip to space,” Chancel said in an email to Yahoo News. “Estimates suggest this adds 75 tonnes of carbon per passenger. It takes a lifetime for about a billion people on earth to reach this level of per capita emissions.”
Yet after analyzing the policy decisions that countries have taken to address climate change, the authors found that they have disproportionately affected the middle and lower classes. In that sense, the report “enables a much richer consideration of what socially just climate policies should look like, both within and across countries,” noted Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the report, in an op-ed in Project Syndicate.
Instead of approaches like a generalized carbon tax, that tend to overburden people who already are struggling to make ends meet, the authors propose measures like a wealth tax, with a pollution top-up; or establishing individual carbon rights, similar to water rights in countries or regions where this resource is scarce. The authors also advocate for measures that address the root of the problem: the existing legal and taxation regimes that allow such intense concentrations of wealth.
“[The report] is much more than a valuable compendium of useful data and analysis,” wrote Ghosh. “[It] reflects human choices, which means that it can be changed by making other choices.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The wealthiest people on the planet are responsible for almost half of carbon emissions on Dec 17, 2021.
An “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country, documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.
While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group does not work on voting issues.
Nelson provided the formal welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately after the Academy.
An invite published by CMD in July stated that “13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.
Rather than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, as a key contact for the event.
Nelson tipped her hand about ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.
Honest Elections Project, the group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.
Speakers at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting restrictions.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.
Rokita was one of only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America” coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
Agenda Focused on Election Legislation
Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.
By the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.
The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.
Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.
Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.
Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.
Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.
Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”
Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.
Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrity recently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.
Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”
Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.
Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.
“On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.
All three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.
The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.
ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation
ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.
Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.
Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”
As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.
Training Sessions on “the Left”
Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress.
Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his ill-fated Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, has been a major mouthpiece of the voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.
President of the Capital Research Center Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation to develop an “Online Encyclopedia of the Left,” inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.
Arn Pearson contributed to this report.
The richest people on the planet, representing a small sliver of the total population, are emitting carbon dioxide at a rate that’s imperiling hopes of keeping global heating below 1.5°C, prompting fresh calls for government action to rein in “luxury” pollution and combat the intertwined crises of inequality and climate change.
New research by the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) shows that by 2030, the carbon footprints of the wealthiest 1% of humanity are on track to be 30 times larger than the size compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious temperature target.
If current trends continue, the richest 1% will account for 16% of global CO2 emissions in 2030.
The carbon emissions of the poorest half of the global population, meanwhile, “are set to remain well below the 1.5°C-compatible level,” according to the analysis, which was commissioned by Oxfam International and published Friday. The planet has already warmed by roughly 1.1°C, and scientists have said any heating beyond 1.5°C would have destructive consequences worldwide.
“The emissions from a single billionaire spaceflight would exceed the lifetime emissions of someone in the poorest billion people on Earth,” Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam’s climate policy lead, said in a statement. “A tiny elite appear to have a free pass to pollute. Their oversized emissions are fueling extreme weather around the world and jeopardizing the international goal of limiting global heating.”
“The emissions of the wealthiest 10% alone could send us beyond the agreed limit in the next nine years,” Dabi added. “This would have catastrophic results for some of the most vulnerable people on Earth who are already facing deadly storms, hunger, and destitution.”
Authored by Tim Gore, head of the Low Carbon and Circular Economy program at IEEP, the new research paper notes that “while carbon inequality is often most stark at the global level, inequalities within countries are also very significant.”
“They increasingly drive the extent of global inequality, and likely have a greater impact on the political and social acceptability of national emissions reduction efforts,” the paper reads. “It is therefore notable that in all of the major emitting countries, the richest 10% and 1% nationally are set to have per capita consumption footprints substantially above the 1.5⁰C global per capita level.”
To slash the outsized planet-warming emissions of the global rich, the study calls on policymakers to pursue restrictions on mega-yachts, private jets, and recreational space travel. In a paper published last month, French economist Lucas Chancel estimated that “an 11-minute [space] flight emits no fewer than 75 tonnes of carbon per passenger once indirect emissions are taken into account (and more likely, in the 250-1,000 tonnes range).”
“At the other end of the distribution, about one billion individuals emit less than one tonne per person per year,” Chancel observed. “Over their lifetime, this group of one billion individuals does not emit more than 75 tonnes of carbon per person. It therefore takes a few minutes in space travel to emit at least as much carbon as an individual from the bottom billion will emit in her entire lifetime.”
In addition to targeting sources of “luxury carbon consumption,” the analysis by IEEP and SEI also proposes restrictions on “climate-intensive investments like stock-holdings in fossil fuel industries.”
“The global emissions gap to keep the 1.5°C Paris goal alive is not the result of the consumption of most of the world’s people: it reflects instead the excessive emissions of just the richest citizens on the planet,” Gore said in a statement. “It is necessary for governments to target measures at their richest, highest emitters ― the climate and inequality crises should be tackled together.”
Emily Ghosh, a scientist at SEI, agreed, arguing that “carbon inequality must urgently be put at the center of governments efforts to reduce emissions.”
“Our research highlights the challenge of ensuring a more equitable distribution of the remaining and rapidly diminishing global carbon budget,” said Ghosh. “If we continue on the same trajectory as today, the stark inequalities in income and emissions across the global population will remain, challenging the equity principle at the very heart of the Paris Agreement.”
“The more sway mega-corporations have over our economy, the more power they have to gouge customers, squeeze Main Street, and exploit workers.”
Both the Republicans and the Democrats vote as if the nation’s middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker.
Bloomberg believes that Amazon (yes, Amazon) has the solution to the problem of the ‘lower class’. Apparently, “the campaign against economic inequality has put a bullseye on cities” because local governments are being encouraged to raise minimum wages in the US and build more housing – what rotters! Raising wages and building houses is the real problem, according to Bloomberg, which is why cities have an overflow of ‘lower classes’.
The post Amazon’s ‘Factory Towns’ Will Be Satanic Mills For The Working Class appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
The number of gig workers in the US grew an unprecedented 34 percent this year. | Getty Images
An astonishing one in three US workers does gig work now.
More people are turning to gig work than ever before, but since these jobs usually don’t come with employer benefits, their proliferation could worsen inequality for millions of Americans.
The number of people employed in nontraditional ways in the US rose to a record 51 million this year, an unprecedented 34 percent jump compared to 2020, according to new data from MBO Partners, a company that provides business solutions to the independent workforce and has conducted a long-running study of the group. These types of workers — which include contract workers, people who are self-employed, temporary and on-call workers, and those who get short-term jobs through online apps or marketplaces — are now equivalent to a third of US employment.
Gig work shifts the risk from employers to employees and can lead to financial volatility for those who do it, resulting in more economic and psychological stress than regular work. Most obviously, independent work doesn’t include many of the protections afforded by traditional employment. That includes things like minimum wage, overtime, paid parental leave, and employer-subsidized health care. If people’s gig work doesn’t compensate enough to pay for those extras independently, it can put people at a severe economic disadvantage compared to regular employees.
Independent work, though, has its perks. It offers workers the flexibility of being able to choose, to some extent, what, when, and where their work is.
While advocates and some policymakers are actively trying to secure the benefits of full-time employment for independent workers, progress has been piecemeal and nonlinear. California’s landmark bill AB 5 made many contractors into employees and afforded them the same benefits — but soon after it was signed into law, Proposition 22, a ballot measure sponsored by gig companies, passed and exempted many gig companies from having to consider their workers employees. The battle in California isn’t over; in August, California’s Superior Court invalidated Prop 22 and made it unenforceable, but gig companies say they are going to appeal.
In the meantime, the march toward independent work is happening nonetheless.
Growth in business registrations for companies without employees (say, an individual selling products on eBay or freelancers finding graphic design work through Upwork) has outpaced wage employment. Average weekly signups to the Freelance Union, a nonprofit that advocates for and provides resources to the growing independent workforce, grew 300 percent since the pandemic began.
While independent work grew among all employment situations, it grew fastest for people performing occasional (regularly, but without set hours per week) independent work. Those ranks grew 51 percent, to 24 million people. Many of them are doing what is commonly thought of as gig work: on-demand jobs from platforms like Uber Eats or freelance job sites.
Work found through online marketplaces was important for part-timers and full-timers as well. Some 40 percent of all independent workers reported finding jobs using online marketplaces, up from 27 percent in 2020.
The rise of independent work has been happening for decades and for a variety of reasons, from the dissolution of traditional employment to the proliferation of online platforms that connect people with this kind of work. Like many trends, it was accelerated by the pandemic — economic instability historically increases independent work — but it shows no signs of going away when the pandemic is over. And so the jump in gig workers in the US is something we should all be paying attention to.
Why are people choosing gig work?
Despite a rapid economic recovery, there are still 6 million fewer employed Americans than there were pre-pandemic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Many of those have had to turn to independent work — which often gets missed by the BLS data — to compensate.
Other independent workers do have regular jobs, but those jobs just don’t provide enough money. Nearly three-quarters of new part-time independents in the MBO survey said they took on independent work to supplement their incomes.
“Making ends meet has just gotten harder and harder,” Steve King, a board member at MBO and a future of work expert, told Recode. “In our world, it’s very challenging for a lot of people to hit their monthly target.”
Low wages aren’t the only shortcomings of traditional employment.
“By and large, what we’ve seen over the last four and a half decades is just huge erosion of worker leverage in a way that’s led to just incredibly low job quality for huge swaths of our labor market: low wages, low benefits, bad hours, bad working conditions,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at Economic Policy Institute think tank and former chief economist at the US Labor Department, told Recode.
Most independent workers (63 percent) consider working independently to be their own choice completely. But Shierholz says the choice isn’t because independent work is especially good.
“We know that the quality of these [independent] jobs they say they’re choosing are often just incredibly bad,” Shierholz said. “And that means their other choices are also really, really bad.”
The quality of these [independent] jobs … are often just incredibly bad. And that means their other [traditional] choices are also really, really bad.
Still, some 77 percent of independent workers in the MBO study said they were highly satisfied with their arrangements, 10 percentage points higher than traditional jobholders.
Gig work is a way for people to have more control over what their jobs entail, more flexibility in when and where they work, and a better work-life balance. Perks like the ability to work remotely have become increasingly in-demand during the pandemic, which jarred people into rethinking the primacy of work in general in their lives. Such work is especially important to people with child care or elder care responsibilities, or for people with disabilities where regular employment is difficult.
“I think one of the big things is that online platform work is really enabling people who are looking for greater flexibility,” Adam Ozimek, chief economist at freelancing platform Upwork, told Recode. “A lot of people had a taste of working remotely this year and they see the flexibility that comes with that, and they want even more.”
An increasing share of traditional employees (29 percent) even views independent work as less risky than theirs, according to MBO. Two-thirds of independent workers think so.
Independent work is also sometimes just easier to get. The rise of apps or platforms like TaskRabbit and Fiverr has made the process of finding independent work a lot less arduous by centralizing and simplifying the process of attaining it.
Then there’s the issue of misclassification driving the growth in independent workers. Industries as far afield as construction and ride-hailing are increasingly calling their workers contractors rather than employees. The distinction, while sometimes legally dubious, is economically advantageous. Employers can save about 25 percent by switching employees to contract workers, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. The savings come from employers not having to pay things like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid leave.
How do you protect the growing ranks of independent workers?
Not having protections like unemployment insurance or employer-subsidized health care means events like an accident, a new child, or a global pandemic could negatively affect independent workers more than traditional ones.
“Freelancers don’t have the social safety net to rely on to get them through the weeks or months that they’re out of work,” Rafael Espinal, executive director of the Freelancers Union, told Recode.
The union is one of many advocates working to create something called portable benefits so that independent workers get things like paid leave, unemployment insurance, retirement plans, and affordable health care, regardless of their employment status.
So far, fewer than 10 states have guaranteed paid employment leave for new parents that would include gig workers. Biden’s proposed American Families Plan would create a “national comprehensive” paid family leave plan that the Freelancers Union is hoping will include freelancers. The proposal is still being fought out in Congress, so even if it passes, what it will ultimately include is up in the air. Independent workers are not included in the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives workers job protection during unpaid leave.
“When the budget passes, we will have to ensure independent workers are included in the implementation of the program,” Espinal said. “It shouldn’t be a hard lift given that a handful of states were able to successfully implement a similar program.”
And paid leave is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to benefits. It’s not enough to deal with all the needs of the rapidly growing number of freelance and independent workers, who represent a substantial share of the US workforce.
Espinal believes the onus lies with the government to protect independent workers.
“If it becomes unsustainable, it’s because the federal government failed to react,” Espinal said. “I do believe that the silver lining to this pandemic is that it shocks the federal and state governments to the point where they have to react and look at how they create a safety net for millions of people who traditionally have gone without one.”
“Monopoly is a threat to representative democracy—and that protecting our democracy requires effective antitrust.”
Directors generally view their jobs as primarily supporting managers, not monitoring them.