Berlin landlords forced to reduce rents

The second stage of the German capital's rent cap law has come into effect, meaning that thousands of Berlin landlords could be forced to reduce their rents. But the legal battle over the law is not yet over.



From November 23, landlords in the German capital must lower excessively high rents — that is, if they exceed a standardized limit by more than 20% — or face heavy fines. The German constitutional court dismissed the landlord associations' attempts to halt the imminent reductions at the end of October.

Read more: How Berlin's rent freeze compares globally

Some 85% of all Berliners rent their apartments, and according to the Berlin Tenants' Association (BMV), some 365,000 apartments in the city are eligible for the imminent rent reduction. But that figure is disputed: A study by the F+B real estate consultancy estimates that over half a million apartments are eligible.

"It's a lucky break for Berlin tenants that we have a rent cap here, in light of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic," the head of the BMV Reiner Wild said in a statement, before adding that the rent reduction was "appropriate, justifiable, and sensible."

The rent reductions are likely to mainly apply to rental contracts that have been signed in the last five or six years, as Berlin's rents have risen sharply in that time: From 2014 to 2019, rents on new contracts rose by an average of 30% — especially if the apartments were renovated, the BMV said. The rent cap does not apply to buildings completed after 2014. The rent for an average 60sqm apartment is around 850€, around a third of the average household income.

Burden on tenants

But many landlords in the city appear to be hoping their tenants might not notice the new rules. A survey released on Monday by the consumer rights platform CONNY found that three-quarters of its customers eligible for a rent reduction had not been informed by the landlords.

Read more: Last orders for Berlin bar at the center of a rent war

That means it's up to the tenants to check their rents themselves, which they can do through a Berlin government website, the BMV, or one of several consultancy services that have sprung up this year. They then have to sue their landlords and claim money back if they have paid too much.

"It's very probably that not all landlords will stick to the law," CONNY CEO Daniel Halmer said in a statement."We are afraid that private providers, in particular, won't lower the rent of their own accord," added Reiner Wild of the BMV, before urging tenants in Berlin to check their rents.=

Burden on landlords

The initial stage of the new cap, introduced in February this year, saw rents frozen for five years on 1.5 million apartments in the city.

Meanwhile, landlords have been busy counting the potential loss to their incomes: According to the F+B consultancy index published on Monday, landlords could lose a total of €250 million per year or €40 per apartment per month.

Read more: Berlin and Dublin — A tale of two cities' housing crisis

Landlords also have their other tools to counter the measures. Local public broadcaster RBB reported last week that a few hundred landlords had applied to a local state investment bank to be allowed to charge higher rents in order to avert economic difficulties — a state instrument for "needy cases" implemented to protect people who depend on rents for their livelihoods. That is a small minority of landlords: The Berlin government says the total number of people who draw income from Berlin rents is around 200,000.

Nevertheless, a crucial constitutional court decision is still outstanding, and due next year: It remains an open legal question whether the Berlin government, as a state government, has the right to impose a blanket rent cap. As a result, many landlords are now including "shadow rents" in their ads for new apartments – with a warning they will demand the extra back-rents if the constitutional court decides in their favor.

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USA

Janet Yellen to be nominated as first female treasury secretary

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

Janet Yellen speaks during her last news conference as Federal Reserve chair, in Washington, D.C., Dec. 13, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Joe Biden is set to nominate Janet Yellen as secretary of the treasury, according to multiple reports on Monday. She would be the first woman in the role and the third Jewish treasury secretary in a row, after President Trump’s choice Steven Mnuchin and President Obama’s second term pick Jack Lew.

Yellen, 74, has already made history as the first woman chair of the Federal Reserve, appointed by Obama in 2013. She assumed the job in early 2014. Read our guide to Yellen’s career and Jewish background here.

Yellen, who attended a Reform synagogue in Berkeley, California, featured in an ad Trump ran during his 2016 presidential campaign that featured Yellen and Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros. Jewish groups denounced the video for juxtaposing them with the “levers of power in Washington” and “global special interests.”

Yellen lasted one term as Federal Reserve chairwoman before Trump replaced her in 2018.

She believes in an activist role for government in combating market volatility, and sees unemployment as more destabilizing than inflation.

There have also been three short-term interim Treasury secretaries over the last 12 years — all, as it happens, Jewish: Stuart Levey in 2009, Neal Wolin in 2013 and Adam Szubin in 2017.

RELATED: What to know about Janet Yellen

BY RON KAMPEAS

Biden nominates Alejandro Mayorkas, Latino Jew who has said Jews face heightened threat, as Homeland Security secretary

NOVEMBER 23, 2020 


Alejandro Mayorkas, then deputy secretary of Homeland Security, addresses the Orthodox Union at a conference in Washington, Sept. 21, 2016. (Orthodox Union)


WASHINGTON (JTA) — President-elect Joe Biden announced the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas, a Latino Jew who has emphasized the heightened threat facing American Jews, as his Homeland Security secretary on Monday.

Mayorkas, 60, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama, was born in Cuba to a Cuban Jewish father and Romanian Jewish mother. His mother survived the Holocaust.

As deputy secretary, Mayorkas worked closely with Jewish groups and spoke often about the specific threats facing American Jews.

Speaking in 2016 to the annual Washington conference of the Orthodox Union about nonprofit security grants, Mayorkas said, “The need is most acute in the Jewish community because of the ascension of anti-Semitism and hate crimes we see.”

Mayorkas grounded his concern in his background and his upbringing. Among the things that “keep me up at night,” he said at the time, was the threat to “my community,” the Jewish community.

“I come from a tradition of a lack of security instilled in me as a very young person,” said Mayorkas, whose parents had moved to Cuba after marrying, then the United States following the revolution there.

Mayorkas is a board member of HIAS, the Jewish immigration advocacy group.

“Ali has consistently demonstrated that he is not only a strong and highly respected leader, but an empathetic one who knows the heart of the stranger, as the child of a Holocaust survivor, as a Latino, and as a refugee and immigrant himself,” said Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, in a statement.

The Biden transition team in its news release naming Mayorkas emphasized the precedent he will set.

“Alejandro Mayorkas is the first Latino and immigrant nominated to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security,” it said. “He has led a distinguished 30-year career as a law enforcement official and a nationally-recognized lawyer in the private sector.”

BY RON KAMPEAS

Dutch right-wing politician resigns following party’s anti-Semitism scandal
NOVEMBER 23, 2020 5:26 PM

Dutch right-wing leader Thierry Baudet speaks to reporters at the Dutch Senate in the Hague, Feb. 5, 2020. (Sem Van Der Wal/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)


AMSTERDAM (JTA) — The leader of the Dutch right-wing Forum for Democracy party resigned Monday following reports that members of its youth movement had engaged in anti-Semitic behavior.

Thierry Baudet, a colorful politician who in 2018 published a nude self-portrait on Instagram, said that assuming responsibility for the anti-Semitism scandal was not the immediate reason for stepping down. Rather the trigger was demands within the party that the guilty members be kicked out before the completion of an internal disciplinary review of their actions.

The review is of members of the party’s section for young members who in a WhatsApp group shared Nazi songs. One of them called “Der Untermensch,” or “Subhuman,” a 1942 Nazi propaganda book inciting hatred of Jews and Slavs, a “masterpiece,” the Het Parool newspaper reported last week.

Some party members seek to “skip the process and throw people under the bus before we know what’s happened,” Baudet said in video he shared on social media announcing his resignation as party leader. He warned against a “trial by the media, which isn’t trustworthy.”

If the accused engaged in anti-Semitism, he said, “they should leave the party, and my resignation will be an act of assuming responsibility for what happened.”

Forum for Democracy seeks a Dutch exit from the European Union and stricter immigration policies. It’s also consistently pro-Israel.

It won only two seats out of 150 in parliament in the 2017 elections but three of the 26 in the 2019 Dutch elections for the European Parliament.

BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ

Marijuana plants seized from Argentine synagogue’s courtyard

NOVEMBER 23, 2020 

A plaque on the Sinagoga Medanos. (Screenshot from YouTube)


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — Police seized two pots of marijuana plants from the courtyard of a historic synagogue in Medanos, a small village in the Buenos Aires province.

Medanos, once the rural home of about 100 Argentine Jews, is in the Villarino district. Villarino Mayor Carlos Bevillacua said the synagogue was not responsible in any way for the marijuana seized last week and that people took advantage of the empty space, which was closed during the coronavirus pandemic.

The synagogue, built between 1913 and 1915, is designated a heritage site and was in the process of being turned into a museum before the pandemic struck earlier this year.

A local Argentine TV station made a video report about the synagogue in January.

President Trump is a religious leader

Trumpism, like other bad religions, denies science, identifies dark forces and denies reality.

November 17, 2020
By Jeffrey Salkin

(RNS) — This isn’t about Democrat versus Republican. As a lifelong Democrat, I believe in the two party system. To quote the old cliché: Some of my best friends vote Republican.

Neither is this about whether you voted for President Donald Trump, or whether you voted for former Vice President Joe Biden.

There were many reasons why millions of people voted for Trump. We Biden voters need to understand some of those reasons. I invite you to hear me in dialogue with Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson at American Jewish University on how we maintain American unity in the wake of this election.

The truth is: I am so over this election.

But, Trump is not.

Trumpism is no longer an electoral choice, nor a political ideology.

It is a religion — an overarching worldview, with a high priest and prophet at its head. A worldview that creates an “us versus them” mentality, a dualistic battle between the children of light and the children of darkness. A worldview that allows no disagreement. A worldview that persecutes heretics.

OPINION: Why Trump’s electoral crisis is really a moral crisis

In short, the “bad” kind of religion.

(Memo to my friends on the left: This defines many of us as well. Consider Monty Python’s famous line: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Call-out culture is a new Spanish Inquisition that uses not the tools of torture, but of intellectual reductionism and exclusion).

How has Trumpism become a bad religion?

President Donald Trump speaks from the South Lawn of the White House on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

First, a bad religion denies science.

Trumpism denies climate science. It denies and ignores medical science. Promoting bogus miraculous cures. Almost demanding of its followers that they laugh at science through their refusal to wear masks in public.

And, in the days after the election, a total denial of the mathematics of the electoral system.

Second, bad religion believes in invisible forces in the world that are responsible for evil.

The elitists, Hollywood and intellectuals. The chimera of election fraud. Long before the election, Trump said that the only way that he would accept the results of the 2020 election would be if he won.

There are dark forces — the darker-skinned forces, right on our borders, whose children must be consigned to the cages, who must not be admitted to this country. Darker-skinned people, especially Middle Eastern Muslims and those from “s—hole countries” in Africa.

QAnon — the most bizarre, irrational conspiracy theory that you could ever imagine. A Georgia congresswoman-elect, Marjorie Taylor Greene, espouses this theory. No less than 40% of Republicans agree that the QAnon theory is good for this country.

And, of course, that leftover obsession from the 1950s: “socialism.”

Third, bad religion denies reality.

Consider Chabad Judaism — the expectation, on the part of many of its adherents, that the Lubovicher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, will arise from his grave in Queens and become the true Messiah.

The Trumpists and their enablers will not accept defeat. They could never have accepted defeat. Long before the first vote was mailed in or cast, their religious leader told them not to accept the possibility of defeat.

Consider one of the most bizarre incidents in Jewish history — the story of the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.

Sabbatai Zevi was a Turkish Jew in the 1600s. He convinced himself, and numerous Jewish and gentile followers, that he was the Messiah. Zevi advocated the abolishing of the mitzvot — God’s commandments — as the path to redemption.

It was a cult of nihilism.

Sabbateanism swept through Europe. Ultimately, Zevi was arrested by the sultan of Turkey and forced to accept Islam. Many of his followers said that in order to perfect the world, the Messiah had to enter the realm of the impure, to redeem the sparks of goodness.

“Sabbatai Zevi enthroned” Image from the Amsterdam/Jewish publication Tikkun, Amsterdam, 1666. Image courtesy of Creative Commons

Zevi was, by all accounts, mentally ill — delusional, grandiose, perhaps manic-depressive. The movement gradually disappeared.

What does this fascinating and disturbing chapter of Jewish and European history have to do with the religion of Trumpism?

First: As Sabbateanism was nihilistic, so, too, is Trumpism. It seeks redemption through the abolishment of the American mitzvot — any sense of statesmanship or civic responsibility.

Second: Zevi did massive damage to Jews, Judaism and Europe because of his inner demons.

Trump has done massive damage to the United States of America, democracy and human beings.

Competent professionals have seen in Trump’s behavior signs of malignant narcissism, grandiosity and delusional behavior, among other factors. As with the Sabbatean movement, such behaviors have become both seductive and contagious.

What we are seeing in the United States right now is one man’s delusional behavior. His delusion has become metastatic in the American body politic. It has many enablers.

That metastatic delusion prevents our nation from moving on. It prevents a new president from having an appropriate transition. This is the first time in our nation’s history that this has happened. As such, it threatens this country’s security and well-being.

What happened after Zevi’s conversion to Islam? Sabbateanism reemerged as the Jacob Frank movement. Frank was another false Messiah, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Zevi.

It is within the realm of possibility that another prophet of the religion of Trumpism will arise.

Gulp.

Opinion: Nazi resistance fighters, Holocaust victims and the nonsense of COVID-19 denial

When coronavirus deniers pose as victims of alleged Nazi methods to justify their actions, it's all about the prerogative of interpretation. We have to stand up to such nonsense, says Martin Muno.


Last week, a few politicians from the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party referred to government-planned infection protection legislation as an "enabling law." A reminder: in March 1933, the Nazi-led government won the right to enact laws without the consent of the German Reichstag with that very law. The AfD was comparing regulations providing for contact restrictions to protect against a pandemic with a law that symbolized the end of parliamentary democracy and the beginning of Nazi tyranny.

Read more: Can Germany's infection protection law be compared to the Nazis' 'Enabling Act?'

Unanimously condemned by historians and political scientists as historical nonsense, the remarks, nevertheless, have motivated coronavirus deniers. Over the weekend, they took to the streets in several German cities to demonstrate against the alleged seizure of power. An 11-year-old girl in the western city of Karlsruhe compared herself to Anne Frank, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, and a 22-year-old in the central city of Kassel compared herself to Nazi resistance fighter Sophie Scholl. Their bizarre performances were met with worldwide media interest.

Read more: German foreign minister slams COVID protester's Nazi resistance comparison

It should be clear to everyone that there is a difference between being fined for possible violations of coronavirus protection decrees (and being able to take legal action against the fines) and being killed either for being Jewish or for being committed to freedom and justice. But the far-right populists and radicals who throng around the coronavirus deniers don't care. They care about something else. To them, it is all about freedom of interpretation or cultural hegemony. Oftentimes, it is more a question of emotions than of intellect.
The powerless exert power

Throughout history, elected rulers who acted as dictators, as well as members of the opposition, have used the role of victim to legitimize their own actions.


DW editor Martin Muno

The Nazis used a — non-existing — Jewish world conspiracy to justify their extermination policy. The East German leadership called the borders it secured with walls and barbed wire, virtually imprisoning people in their own country, an "anti-fascist protective wall" — GDR citizens were made to believe there was a threat from the outside, and East Germany was merely trying to keep them safe.

Alleged powerlessness is used to exercise power. Struggling to stay in control, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has resorted to a similar pattern of argumentation, as has the China-led leadership in Hong Kong.

The White House currently harbors the champion of the playing the victim, however: President Donald Trump, one of the most powerful people on the planet, uses his favorite medium Twitter on a daily basis to tell the world how unfairly he is being treated. Be it investigations concerning outstanding taxes or conceivably illegal agreements with foreign governments — he perceives a "witch hunt" everywhere. He also feels cheated out of his "overwhelming election victory."
Sounding board for populists

On a factual level, this is as ridiculous as the public performance by the 22-year-old protester who compared herself to a Nazi resistance fighter and who achieved temporary fame as "Jana from Kassel." It is not, however, a matter of truth. It is about keeping like-minded people together and legitimizing legal as well as illegal protests. Even if Trump's efforts to overturn the US presidential election using legal means fail again and again, the number of supporters who believe the 2020 election was rigged is on the rise. He has skillfully pointed the ax right at the foundation of democracy.

Germans can be thankful that the sounding board for populists is so much smaller, the reason being a much greater common understanding in society of what is true and what is false. But, if you look at the situation in the US and the history books, its naive to believe that this will continue to be the case in the future. That's why it is important to nip things in the bud and to oppose the mixing of truth and lies, of perpetrator and victim.

This article was translated from German by Dagmar Breitenbach.

German protester of COVID restrictions compares herself to Nazi resistance fighter

NOVEMBER 23, 2020 

Sophie Scholl (Screen shot from YouTube)

(JTA) — A woman protesting coronavirus restrictions in Germany likened herself to a resistance fighter killed in a Holocaust uprising.

Speaking at a demonstration Saturday, a woman who identified herself as “Jana from Kassel” compared herself to Sophie Scholl, who was an organizer of the White Rose resistance movement in 1943 at the University of Munich.

The woman said she “feels like Sophie Scholl, because for months I have been active in the resistance here, giving speeches, going to demos, giving out flyers,” according to the German publication Deutsche Welle. “I’m 22 years old, just like Sophie Scholl when she fell victim to National Socialism.”

The following day, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas tweeted that such comparisons are unacceptable.

“Anyone who compares themselves to Sophie Scholl or Anne Frank today is mocking the courage it took to take a stand against the Nazis,” he wrote. “That trivializes the Holocaust and shows an unacceptable historical ignorance. Nothing connects the coronavirus protests with resistance fighters. Nothing!”

Some protesters in the United States have also made comparisons between Nazism and COVID-19 restrictions. In July, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted, “To compare COVID-19 rules to the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust is disgusting, wrong and has no place in our society.” He was responding to an editorial cartoon comparing a mask mandate to the Holocaust.

The German woman encountered criticism at the protest, too. After she made the Scholl comparison, a security guard interrupted her, took off his vest and said, “I’m not going to be a security guard for bullshit like this,” according to Deutsche Welle.

BY BEN SALES

Extinction Rebellion launches campaign of financial disobedience

Group stages debt and tax strikes to expose ‘political economy’s complicity’ in ecological crisis

Activists from Extinction Rebellion gather by the Bank of England before marching through central London in September. Photograph: Barcroft Media/Getty Images


Matthew Taylor
Mon 23 Nov 2020 THE GUARDIAN

Extinction Rebellion is launching a campaign of financial civil disobedience aimed at exposing the “political economy’s complicity” in the unfolding ecological crisis.

The group – which has staged some of the UK’s biggest civil disobedience protests over the past two years – is turning its attention to what it says will be a sustained campaign of debt and tax strikes. It is also asking people to “redirect” loans from banks that finance fossil fuel projects to frontline organisations fighting for climate justice.

Gail Bradbrook, a co-founder of XR, which was set up two years ago, said: “It’s time to tell the politicians who prop up this way of living: no more. We want an economy that grows health and wellbeing, not debt and carbon emissions. An economy that prepares and protects us from shocks to come, rather than making them worse. An economy that shares resources to meet all our needs, regardless of background. An economy that lets us live.”

Organisers hope that in the coming months the “Money Rebellion” will involve thousands of people in the “redistributing debt” scheme and the debt strikes.

XR says it also has a growing number of small businesses that are planning to divert a portion of their taxes to help fund investment into green, sustainable business models and initiatives rather than pay them to the government.

Bradbrook said: “We need a grownup conversation about why our political economy is killing life on Earth.”

XR says the Money Rebellion is the latest stage of its campaign centred around three demands – that the UK government tells the truth about the scale of the climate and ecological emergency, that if commits to zero carbon emissions by 2025 and that it agrees to a binding citizens’ assembly to devise policies to address the crisis.

The group has held three major events since its launch, bringing motor traffic in parts of central London to a standstill. Organisers say that despite its success in raising awareness of the escalating climate crisis, the government has failed to respond appropriately.

MOON BASE
SCIENTISTS WANT TO BUILD A LUNAR HABITAT INSPIRED BY ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE

A Pantheon for a new age.
Allan Baxter/Photodisc/Getty Images
PASSANT RABIE 15 HOURS AGO


IT'S BEEN MORE THAN 50 YEARS since humans first landed on the Moon, and humanity is preparing for a lunar comeback within the next four years with the upcoming NASA Artemis mission.

This time around, NASA plans to make camp. But to establish a lunar settlement, NASA needs to build a permanent habitat for astronauts to live and work on the Moon. To do it, they are taking inspiration from an ancient people who have gone down in history for their building prowess: The Romans.

In a new study, scientists lay the groundwork for building a habitat on the Moon inspired by a Roman temple but which uses only material found on the lunar surface.

The study was published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

As the date for sending astronauts back to the Moon creeps closer, scientists have been trying to come up with different ways to build a lasting lunar settlement. So far, their ideas range from building a habitat made from mushrooms to suggesting that astronauts use their own pee to create a mixture of concrete to build on the Moon.

Key to any lunar construction is that it require as little packing from Earth as possible. It costs as much as $10,000 to put one pound of material into orbit. So the less construction material imported from Earth, the better.


These large, ancient structures inspired the scientists with an idea for a sustainable lunar habitat. Woolf et. al

In the new study, the scientists suggest using building material found on the Moon — lunar regolith and rock. The lunar material would provide for protection from exposure to cosmic rays while on the Moon, and from atmospheric pressure, they say.

To build the habitat, the regolith would have to be cast into blocks, which would then be piled on top of each other to keep the building in a state of compression. For this design, the only material that would need to be transported from Earth is a thin plastic film — to help seal the small gaps between the regolith blocks so that the air doesn't leak out.

The structure of the habitat itself would be built like the ancient Roman Pantheon. This Roman temple still stands as the most well preserved and influential building from its time.


The lunar habitat would have an oculus similar to that of the Romans' Pantheon.Francesco Riccardo Iacomino/Moment/Getty Images

Like the Pantheon, the lunar building would feature a top circular oculus — or opening in the center of the dome — to allow in sunlight to grow crops. The oculus has to be small enough to let in a beam of focused sunlight, and would be sealed with a transparent pressure window, according to the study design.

The sunlight would then be collected over a circular aperture, and reflected down to a focus in a 60° symmetric cone.


A diagram shows how the sunlight capture would work in the habitat.Woolf et al.

At 50 meters in diameter, the lunar habitat is fit to house around 40 people and visitors, the researchers say. And while the entire construction process may take up to three years, the habitat itself can last up to a millennia, according to the paper.

Location will be everything. The authors suggest the structure be built near the Moon's polar region, where traces of water deposits have been found. Doing so would let astronauts have easy access to critical lunar resources when needed, they say.

The habitat attempts to solve two of our biggest hurdles to establishing a permanent Moon population — safety from the harsh space environment and a place to grow the plants humans will need to survive. Perhaps future humans will one day look out on the heavens from these habitats' oculi — much like the Romans once did thousands of years ago on Earth.

Abstract: 

We describe a polar Moon base habitat using direct solar energy for construction, food production and atmospheric revitalization. With a growing area as large as 2000 m2, it could provide for 40 or more people. The habitat is built like the ancient Roman Pantheon, a stone structure with a top circular oculus, bringing in focused sunlight that is spread out to crops below. The conical, corbelled structure is built from cast regolith blocks, held in compression despite the large internal atmospheric pressure by a regolith overlayer 20–30 m thick. It is sealed on the inside against leaks with thin plastic. 

A solar mirror concentrator used initially to cast the building blocks is later used to illuminate the habitat through a small pressure window at the oculus. Three years of robotic preparation of the building blocks does not seem excessive for a habitat which can be expected to last for millennia, as has the Treasury of Atreus made by similar dry-stone construction. 

One goal of returning to the Moon is to demonstrate the practicality of long-term human habitation off the Earth. The off-axis, paraboloidal reflecting mirror is rotated about the vertical polar axis in order to direct horizontal sunlight downward to a focus. 

In this way, the heavy materials needed from Earth to build and power the habitat are largely limited to the solar concentrator and regolith moving and moulding equipment. By illuminating with a reflector rather than with electricity, the solar collection area is 20 times smaller than would be needed for PV cells.

GIZ ASKS
What Is the Biggest Scientific Fraud of the Past 50 Years?


Daniel Kolitz
Yesterday 2:06PM
Illustration: Chelsea Beck/Gizmodo

Giz Asks

In this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything and get answers from a variety of experts.

When you’re a journalist or club promoter or financier, fraud is always a gamble—you might be publicly disgraced and have your venal misdeeds replayed over and over in Netflix documentaries and prestige podcasts, but you might also get away with it. When you’re a scientist—working in a field whose bedrock principle is replicability—fraud is pointless: you are likely going to be found out. Incredibly, some have still taken those odds, like Elizabeth Holmes, for instance, whose endeavor thrills/mystifies precisely because it was so obviously doomed, at least in retrospect. But Holmes is far from the first fraudster to plague the annals of science. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of historians of science for their take on the biggest scientific fraud of the last half-century.


Robert N. Proctor
Professor of the History of Science and Professor by courtesy of Pulmonary Medicine at Stanford University

The “world’s greatest scientific fraud” would have to be the Council for Tobacco Research, the cigarette industry’s chief instrument for denying that cigarettes cause cancer. That began in 1954, as part of Big Tobacco’s effort to distract from the evidence that cigarettes cause death. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into this effort, with the money going to top scholars at the world’s leading universities. Basically anyone willing to say that something other than cigarettes was causing cancer.

Twenty-seven Nobel laureates took money from Big Tobacco, and every major university was showered with cash. The University of Michigan recently stripped the name of CTR’s chief scientist Clarence Cook Little from its buildings, recognizing his nefarious role in promoting cigarette-friendly science. And some rather nasty ideas about eugenics.

Tobacco’s deception is “the greatest” because it paved the way for other kinds of scientific fraud. If Big Carbon today claims that “we need more research” to find out whether the climate is warming, that’s a trick learned from Big Tobacco. Countless other polluters have learned these tricks: hire scholars to deny, delay, and distract, and then call for “more research” to explore “both sides” of a purported “controversy.” Big Tobacco knew that their day of reckoning would come, but they cannot have known how widely their fraud would be imitated. It would be hard to name a more deadly scientific fraud, and for that reason we can rank it “the greatest.”“If Big Carbon today claims that “we need more research” to find out whether the climate is warming, that’s a trick learned from Big Tobacco.”

Katherine A. Pandora
Associate Professor, History of Science, The University of Oklahoma

I would nominate the opportunistic 1998 and 2002 research articles by Andrew Wakefield and his twelve co-authors that claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was linked with the development of autism as the biggest fraud of the last 50 years. The disregard of scientific authorities and the media for strict scrutiny of Wakefield’s claim that was short-handed to “vaccines cause autism” had severe international consequences in terms of vaccine hesitation for childhood illnesses over the last two decades, and still presents ramifications today for the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine research.

The Wakefield studies were examples of fraud committed out in the open, which makes the freedom with which they flourished especially unnerving. They had basic design flaws, such as the lack of a control group and reliance on non-blinded data. Baseline factors such as small sample size and the use of case studies resulted in flawed interpretations—data derived from such configurations can be suggestive but are not robust enough to bear the weight of strong causal claims. Ethical lapses went unacknowledged and financial conflicts of interest were left unaddressed. And, given the absence of replicable findings, subsequent discussions of the results were, literally, unsupportable. These kinds of methodological weaknesses—the kind that are addressed in introductory courses on research design at the undergraduate level—should have disqualified the study from publication without major revisions if not outright rejection.

Upon being published in such a prestigious journal as Lancet, the purported research findings spread like an opportunistic infection, exploiting environmental vulnerabilities: the lack of knowledge about autism; the fears of (often novice) parents responsible for making judgments about risks to their young children; problematic journalistic practices fostered by media hype; and public suspicion about the profit-driven practices of the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry. Remove these conditions, and a second bulwark against fraud exists—and yet these remain areas of concern.

Wakefield’s malfeasance was necessary but not sufficient for fraud to be committed. The disregard for scientific and journalistic safeguards was also required, for safeguards are only effective when enacted. The retraction of the papers by Lancet and the sanctioning of Wakefield along with the post-mortem analyses of what went wrong have been crucial to trying to remediate the deleterious consequences of this breach of trust. But an even larger issue is embedded within this particular research failure that needs to be given serious consideration: studies that have the potential to have an outsize negative influence across millions of lives due to deceit or error should not only meet basic standards of good research, but also be subjected to, and be able to stand up to, an even more careful level of scrutiny. Good enough isn’t.

“I would nominate the opportunistic 1998 and 2002 research articles by Andrew Wakefield and his twelve co-authors that claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was linked with the development of autism as the biggest fraud of the last 50 years.”

Felicitas Hesselmann
Research Assistant, Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin

On the one hand, all cases (and even allegations) of scientific fraud or misconduct are big in their own way: They are very serious and stressful events that can feel extremely disruptive and distressing for the people involved, they can result in grave personal consequences not just for the accused, but for many researchers and students that have worked with them in the past, trusted them and relied on them. Many researchers who were accused of impropriety, even if they were later acquitted, report suffering adverse health effects in the process.

On the other hand, no fraud case I can think of has been so big as to fundamentally change the course of research. Many researchers have a strong belief that science has a way of working itself out: Fraudulent claims, even if they are never explicitly detected, will simply not be replicated or corroborated in subsequent research, they will not lead to productive follow-up questions and eventually just be drowned out. What is more, many fraudulent claims aren’t even particularly outlandish or groundbreaking; they often are somewhat middle of the road, reflecting the overall state of research; or they are things that everybody expects to become possible before long, and fraudsters just claim to be a little faster. There are cases where fraudulent “findings” have been found to be actually reliable by subsequent research, because they were mirroring the state of research and possible outcomes so well. (This of course also begs that larger question of: what is fraudulent research anyway?) It is rare that cases involve claims that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the world if they were true. That also makes intuitive sense: If you are faking banknotes, for example, you mostly also want to make it look as much alike to the original as possible, although you might occasionally also get away with putting Princess Diana on a ten pound note.

In addition, misconduct cases are big, i.e. consequential, only in relation to particular academic communities and their field-specific knowledge. A cancer biologist, hypothetically, will not be very affected by the revelation that almost everything musicology claimed to know about Beethoven’s compositional style was fraudulent, even if that would shake musicologists to the core of their very being. Claiming that some cases are “bigger” than others, in that sense, would also mean to prioritize some types of knowledge and research over others, which is a fight I would prefer not to pick.“...many fraudulent claims aren’t even particularly outlandish or groundbreaking; they often are somewhat middle of the road, reflecting the overall state of research; or they are things that everybody expects to become possible before long, and fraudsters just claim to be a little faster.”