CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Diamond tycoon convicted in Swiss corruption trial

January 24, 2021

GENEVA (AP) — A Geneva court  convicted Israeli Diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz on charges of corrupting foreign public officials and forging documents, in a trial over his successful bid to reap lavish iron ore resources in the Guinea.

Steinmetz was sentenced to five years in prison, after facing a maximum of 10 years in the case.

Steinmetz, who was on trial with two other defendants who received lesser penalties, was ordered to pay a CHF50-million fine.

His defence lawyer Marc Bonnant said he would “immediately” appeal the court ruling.

The case centred on alleged payouts of millions to a former wife of late president Lansana Conte, and exposed the shady and complex world of deal-making and cutthroat competition in the lucrative mining business.

Before the proceedings, Bonnant said his client had not given “a single dollar” to any official of the Guinea regime under Conte — but the court was not convinced by the top-drawer Geneva lawyer’s arguments.

Geneva prosecutor Yves Bertossa told reporters he was “satisfied” with the verdict, and Swiss transparency group Public Eye hailed a “landmark ruling”.

 Israeli businessman and diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz 

“This conviction of a high-profile business figure not only sends a strong signal to the commodities sector as a whole, but also demonstrates the vital need for Switzerland to finally remedy the legal loopholes that allow such predatory practices,” it said.

“Public Eye commends the determination of the Geneva court, which refused to be fooled by the smoke and mirrors and evasion tactics of the defence team, no matter how slick,” it added.

Steinmetz, 64, denied the charges. The plot, dating to the mid-2000s, involved Steinmetz’s BSGR Group squeezing out a rival for mining rights for vast iron ore deposits in Guinea’s southeastern Simandou region.

Wearing a mask and flanked by his lawyers, Steinmetz — who has French and Israeli citizenship — calmly listened and jotted down notes as Judge Alexandra Banna read the facts of the case and the verdict over two hours. Attendance in the Geneva courtroom was limited due to COVID-19 concerns.

The Geneva prosecutor’s office alleged that Steinmetz and two other defendants engaged in corruption of foreign officials and falsification of documents to hide from authorities and banks the paying of bribes. Some of the funds allegedly transited through Switzerland — and the case has been investigated in Europe, Africa and the United States (US).

The prosecutor’s office said Steinmetz, starting in 2005, crafted a pact of corruption with Conte, who ruled the West African country from 1984 until his death in 2008, and his fourth wife Mamadie Toure, involving the payment of nearly USD10 million.

In its court filing, the prosecutor’s office said BSGR won exploration and exploitation licences in Guinea between 2006 and 2010 in the Simandou region, and its competitor — Anglo-Australian mining group Rio Tinto — was “deprived between July and December 2008 of concessions it had up to then held in the Simandou North blocs 1 and 2.”

Public Eye, the transparency group, said Steinmetz employed “opaque structures” to hide the allegedly corrupt schemes that were managed from Geneva, where he lived until 2016.

The group said the case showed how tax havens can be used to conceal questionable, “even illegal” activities in countries with weak governance and regulation.

THE(c)REAL DEEP STATE

Without warrants, intelligence agency buys location data on US residents

The Defense Intelligence Agency separates information on US residents, according to The New York Times, but can search the data with permission.

Laura Hautala CNET
Jan. 22, 2021 

A US intelligence agency is buying phone location information from data brokers, skipping the warrant process.

Getty Images

The US Defense Intelligence Agency collects location information that includes data on US residents without a warrant, according to a memo reported by The New York Times on Friday. The DIA buys the information from data brokers, who often get it from third-party apps running on users' phones. The memo, written to Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, says the agency applies some restrictions to the use of location information of US residents.

The practice underscores how intelligence agencies collect location data on US resident without warrants despite a 2018 US Supreme Court decision that ruled warrants are necessary for the practice. Known as the Carpenter decision, the ruling held that the Fourth Amendment requires investigators to clear a higher bar before accessing data that can create a timeline of a person's every movement.

"The DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes," the agency said in its memo. The DIA, which exists to collect intelligence on foreign militaries for US defense efforts, didn't respond to a request for comment.

According to the memo, US and foreign data are mixed together in the location information the agency purchases. The agency said it puts data from US residents in a separate database that requires special permission to access. It's been accessed five times in the past two and a half years.

In November, Vice reported that US Special Operations Command had purchased location data collected by a third-party data broker from an Islamic prayer app called Muslim Pro. The app maker later said it would stop selling its users' location data. The same month, the US Department of Homeland Security came under investigation by its inspector general after Buzzfeed reported an internal memo showed it was collecting phone location data without warrants for immigration enforcement.

Wyden, a Democrat who advocates for privacy rights, decried the practice in remarks at the Capitol on Thursday. Calling the data brokers "sleazy and unregulated," Wyden pressed Avril Haines, President Joe Biden's nominee for director of national security, on the issue.

"It's especially important that the American people are being told if the government is using legal loopholes in the law and in the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment," Wyden said.

ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Ashley Gorski said in a statement the DIA memo reveals that more and more government agencies are ignoring the law. The ACLU argued the Carpenter case in the Supreme Court.

"The government cannot simply buy our private data in order to bypass bedrock constitutional protections," Gorski said. "Congress must end this lawless practice and require the government to get a warrant for our location data, regardless of its source."

If Biden Is Serious About Saving the Planet, He Should End US Military Domination Across the Globe

It would save American taxpayers billions of dollars and diminish the threat to the American people—and to the world.

by Lora Lumpe

Published on Friday, January 29, 2021
by Responsible Statecraft

While Austin did not pledge to halve or radically reduce the Pentagon’s massive carbon bootprint, he did note that “the Department can also be a platform for positive change, spurring the development of climate-friendly technologies at scale.”

 (Photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

At yesterday’s “Climate Day” at the White House, President Biden announced a whole-of-government approach to combating what he called “the existential threat of climate change.” He signed three executive orders, one of which, he said, “makes it official that climate change will be at the center of our national security and foreign policy.”

That’s terrific news. The Quincy Institute has been saying all along that the threat from climate chaos poses a much more direct threat to the American public than does any nation state. Specifically, we have been arguing that Washington needs to refrain from backing itself into a cold or hot war with China. The former would divert massive resources away from the climate-friendly infrastructure plans Biden outlined yesterday, and the latter would most likely sink efforts to stabilize and reverse global warming. 

Support came swiftly for Biden’s elevation of climate. “It changes defense posture, it changes foreign policy posture,” John Podesta, who served among other top posts in the Obama administration as counselor on climate policy and initiatives, told the New York Times.

Over at the Pentagon, however, the depth and breadth of change were not clear. Newly minted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he fully supports the decision to “include climate considerations as an essential element of our national security and to assess the impacts of climate change on our security strategies, operations, and infrastructure.”

The issue is not new to the military. For more than a decade, the Department of Defense has acknowledged the implications of climate change and rising seas on its own installations and as a driver of conflict around the world. What it has not yet done is connect the dots regarding how the current strategy of global military primacy contributes directly to the existential threat fueled by CO2 emissions.



With respect to national security, Washington’s guiding imperative since World War II has demanded that its military have the wherewithal to respond to instability and conflict anywhere around the world at any time. That self-imposed responsibility today rests on having 800-plus foreign military bases and a whole lot of jet fuel. As Heidi Peltier wrote in an essay for QI’s “Greening U.S. – China Relations” symposium back in September, the U.S. military is the world’s single biggest institutional consumer of petroleum. While the military’s emissions account for only one percent of the overall U.S. total, the DoD’s impact still exceeds the total emissions of many small and medium-size countries.

While Austin did not pledge to halve or radically reduce the Pentagon’s massive carbon bootprint, he did note that “the Department can also be a platform for positive change, spurring the development of climate-friendly technologies at scale.” The DoD is probably not the most cost-effective innovator of climate-friendly technologies, but it is currently where the money is. A transfer of funds from DARPA, the Pentagon’s very well- funded weapons technology incubator, to E-ARPA, the Energy Department’s cash- starved green technology incubator, could help. Similarly, supporting export promotion and assistance funds for green technology, modeled on U.S. arms export programs, would be a constructive contribution.

An important area needing clarification is whether and how the White House will prioritize efforts to save the planet in relation to its efforts to contain the rise of China. As the world’s top two emitters of greenhouse gases, the United States and China are both vital to reining in emissions on the scale needed to limit warming. But John Kerry, the administration’s special envoy for climate, was far from crystal clear at the White House press briefing yesterday:




“The issues of theft of intellectual property and access to markets, South China Sea. Run the list. We all know them. Those issues will never be traded for anything that has to do with climate. That’s not going to happen,” he said. But he did add that “climate is a critical stand-alone issue that we have to deal on … So it’s urgent that we find a way to compartmentalize, to move forward.” Exploring and promoting environment-related confidence-building measures with China, including green technology policy and projects, would be a real sign of commitment to work through the challenges in the bilateral relationship for the good of the American people and the planet.

Meanwhile, taking on a more restrained global military posture, reducing America’s forward presence, overflights, and overseas bases would dramatically reduce the Pentagon’s overall CO2 impact and would signal the seriousness of Washington’s commitment to combating this existential threat. It would save American taxpayers billions of dollars and diminish the threat to the American people—and to the world.

Lora Lumpe is the CEO of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Prior to joining Qi, she was an advocacy director at the Open Society Foundations, combatting the corrosive effects of militarism on democracy in the United States and abroad. In her nine years at OSF she helped build and lead a field of groups working to challenge reckless US arms sales, military assistance, use of force, and military spending. She worked with dozens of partners from across a range of approaches to grow and direct their power to achieve coordinated wins on Capitol Hill.

#TheWorldIsWatching: 

Youth Activists Direct Ire Over Climate Inaction at WEF Elite

"If only leaders were as good [at] taking real action as they were giving speeches," said Greta Thunberg.

Published onFriday, January 29, 2021

Swedish climate activists Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Isabelle Axelsson, and Vanessa Nakate take part in a "Friday for Future" youth demonstration in a street of Davos on January 24, 2020 on the sideline of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

Young activists on Friday issued fresh warnings about the climate crisis and directed demands for bold action to address the planetary emergency to the global leaders attending the virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum—The Davos Agenda—telling them that "the time for excuses is over."

Using the hashtag #TheWorldIsWatching, supporters of the Fridays for Future movement engaged in a "tweetstorm" to highlight what they say is the WEF's responsibility in addressing the crisis.

Among those taking part was Swedish climate leader Greta Thunberg, who wrote: "Every single day leaders have the possibility to act, and yet they actively choose not to. Instead they set up vague hypothetical pledges and commitments way into the future. No more excuses. @WEF #TheWorldIsWatching."



A 2C hotter world is a death sentence for countries like mine
We have our eyes on you @WEF #TheWorldIsWatching— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) January 29, 2021


people to collectively demand justice, action, and change! Do not prioritize the profit of the few over the lives of the many under the guise of protecting the economy.— Mitzi Jonelle Tan#FightClimateInjustice (@mitzijonelle) January 29, 2021


If only leaders were as good as taking real action as they were giving speeches... then we would be way out of danger by now.@WEF #TheWorldIsWatching— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) January 29, 2021


@wef We are watching you,

We are watching everything.#TheWorldIsWatching pic.twitter.com/seZVxXFkX7— Nakabuye Hilda F. (@NakabuyeHildaF) January 29, 2021


The @WEF and its members have an enormous responsibility towards humanity and all future generations. They must start to act on the climate crisis and know that #TheWorldIsWatching— erik (@vikingcson) January 29, 2021


In its call-to-action, Fridays for Future referenced last year's in-person WEF summit in Davos, Switzerland which had as its theme "stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world." A number of youth climate leaders were at the 2020 Swiss gathering, where they expressed frustration over what they saw as continued empty promises to address the warming planet from world leaders.

Unfortunately, says Fridays for Future, "action should have followed" the 2020 summit, "but far too little happened this year." The group adds:


It was not an easy year, in many ways a foretaste of things to come. It was one of the hottest years on record and its disasters destroyed and took the homes and lives of hundreds of thousands. To make it through this unusual year, it was necessary to show global solidarity. However, this cannot stop with the pandemic. Especially in order to slow down human-caused global warming, this solidarity is absolutely crucial. Only if we all pull together, all pursue the same goal, all stand up for a future worth living, we can make a difference.

With the publication of the Davos Agenda 2021, the WEF aims to deliver solutions to 7 key areas—climate change being one of them. As a key player in international cooperation, the WEF and its members have an enormous responsibility towards the entire world population.

The global players can no longer hide behind empty words and greenwashed solutions. They must act according to their responsibilities and know that the world is watching each and every of their moves.

In a virtual address to this year's attendees, Thunberg said, "I'm only here to once again remind you of the emergency we are in... The crisis that you continue to ignore."

"We understand that the world is complex and that change doesn't happen overnight," she said, speaking for the youth movement for climate action. "But you've now had more than three decades of blah blah blah. How many more do you need? Because when it comes to facing the climate emergency, the world is still in a state of complete denial. The justice for the most affected people in the most affected areas is being systematically denied."

She added that "we can have as many summits and meetings as we want, but unless we treat the climate and ecological emergency like an emergency, no sufficient changes will be achieved."

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Indigenous Leaders and Environmental Activists Are Standing Firm on Their Demands of President Biden

Indigenous groups and environmental activists are also calling on President Biden to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and Enbridge Line 3.


by Tina Gerhardt
Published on Friday, January 29, 2021
by The Progressive


Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline.

(Photo via Creative Commons)


On his first day in office, President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, which has been a pendulum swinging back and forth since Obama denied a key permit for the pipeline in 2015 and Trump reversed that decision in 2017. Now, Sioux tribes are calling on Biden to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and Anishinaabe tribes are calling on him to stop the Enbridge Line 3, thereby taking the next steps to ensure justice for future generations.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of the Interior nominee Deb Haaland, and Congress members Cory Booker, Raul Grijalva, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, have all called for DAPL to be shut down.

Since it was proposed in 2008, Keystone XL has faced a decade of protest and legal action led by Indigenous communities and involving farmers and ranchers, environmental activists and groups.

The $8 billion pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of the United States, running 1,700 miles and crossing rivers and aquifers, including the Ogallala Aquifer. Tar sands oil is acidic and corrosive, leading to a greater risk that the pipelines carrying it will leak and contaminate surrounding communities.

The oil industry argues that Keystone XL would create 20,000 direct jobs and 118,000 indirect jobs, but the U.S. Department of State’s Environmental Impact Statement found that the project would only generate about 3,900 temporary construction jobs for a two-year building period, which drops to thirty-five permanent positions once the pipeline is complete.

The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172-mile pipeline that transports crude oil from the shale oil fields in the Bakken formation of North Dakota, through the neighboring states of South Dakota and Iowa, to an oil terminal in Illinois. It runs through the territories of the Lakota Oyate, passing by the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
Indigenous protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The pipeline, owned by Energy Transfer Partners, MarEn Bakken Company, and Phillips 66, was announced in 2014 and began operation on June 1, 2017. MarEn Bakken is owned by MPLX LP and Enbridge Energy Partners, which also runs Enbridge Line 3.

In his book, Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes presents two centuries of the region’s history, struggles for land and water, and how they inform the present. He discusses how the pipeline was rerouted to move away from white communities and run closer to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, a move that has been decried for its environmental racism.

"Keystone and Line 3 reflect the twilight of the fossil fuel era."

In April 2016, Joye Braun Wanbli Wiyan Ka’win or Eagle Feather Woman (of the Cheyenne River Sioux) camped out in protest of the pipeline. The small encampment at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation grew into a large Indigenous protest movement and brought international attention to the pipeline.

The day before Biden was inaugurated, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe released a video in the Lakota language calling for the Dakota Access Pipeline to be shut down.

On the heels of Biden’s decision to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, leaders of four Sioux tribes—the Cheyenne River Sioux, Oglala Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux, and Yankton Sioux—sent a letter to Biden, asking him to stop operation of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

On Tuesday, January 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a ruling against the Dakota Access Pipeline, upholding a federal court’s decision that revoked a key pipeline permit, finding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated key environmental laws, and it required a full environmental impact statement (EIS) to study the risks it posed to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. While the ruling does not require a shutdown, the 2020 revocation of the permit affirms that the pipeline is operating illegally.

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith said in a statement issued January 26: “We are pleased that the D.C. Circuit affirmed the necessity of a full environmental review, and we look forward to showing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers why this pipeline is too dangerous to operate.”

Jan Hasselman, attorney with Earthjustice, representing the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in litigation since 2016, declared: “Today we’ve reached another milestone in our four-year legal battle on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux to shut down this pipeline. This decision affirms what the Tribe has been saying from the start—this pipeline is a threat to clean water and Indigenous sovereignty, and we must examine the consequences it brings for the future.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of the Interior nominee Deb Haaland, and Congress members Cory Booker, Raul Grijalva, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, have all called for DAPL to be shut down.

Hasselman tells The Progressive, “A federal court has declared that the pipeline is operating illegally, and never should have been built without a full environmental review. If President Biden is going to keep his commitments to Indian Country, closing down DAPL must be a priority.”

The 1,097 mile-long Enbridge Line 3 crude oil pipeline runs from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin. The original line has been operating since 1968. According to the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, “Line 3 is old and has integrity problems. Built in 1962 and 1963, Line 3 has corroded and cracked over time ... necessitating more than 950 excavations in the last 16 years.” It added: “Line 3 has had 10 times as many anomalies per mile as any other pipeline in the Mainline corridor.”
Protesters against Enbridge Line 3.

Due to risks from the aged infrastructure, Enbridge says it has reduced the amount of oil it transports and announced plans in 2014 to build the new pipeline. The project was approved in 2016 in Canada, and by the U.S. states of North Dakota and Wisconsin.

In Minnesota, opposition has been fierce and widespread. The pipeline would cross several tribal territories, including that of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Chippewa). It would cut across 200 bodies of water and 800 wetlands, crucial for fishing and growing rice, including the Mississippi River headwaters heading into Lake Superior.

A broad coalition in Minnesota opposes the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, including Indigenous groups and environmental organizations. Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) held sixteen public hearings in eight communities, inviting input at the public hearings or via written comment. Of 72,249 comments submitted, 68,244 of them, that is more than 94 percent, were opposed. Nonetheless, in 2018, the PUC approved the proposed route and the first permits.

A coalition of environmental groups known as Oil Change International argues that Line 3 would be equivalent to adding fifty new coal-fired power plants and would “wipe out any gains our state [of Minnesota] plans to make to reverse climate change, setting us back further in the transition away from burning fossil fuels.”

Ojibwe oppose the project as it runs through lands they ceded to the United States with the understanding that, as the 1837 Treaty states: “The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians.”

Winona LaDuke, executive director and co-founder of Honor the Earth, a national Native-led environmental organization, tells The Progressive: “Keystone and Line 3 reflect the twilight of the fossil fuel era. As investors flee oil for renewables, Governor Walz picked the wrong time to jam through a massive new pipeline opposed by tribal governments, Minnesotans, his own Commerce Department, and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flannagan, who is also a member of the White Earth reservation. We hope President Biden will nullify the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for Line 3 to prevent any further destruction of our lands and end the tar sands oil threat to Minnesota’s drinking water and climate. It’s time to make the just transition.”

Pressure is sure to continue. In December, two Ojibwe bands, together with Honor the Earth and the Sierra Club, filed a federal lawsuit to stop construction on Enbridge Line 3. Two weeks ago, more than seventy-five Indigenous female leaders from across the country called for President Biden to stop all fossil fuel projects on their lands.

With their sights set on a fossil-free and more equitable future, Indigenous leaders and environmental activists are standing firm on their demands of the new President.

Tina Gerhardt is an environmental journalist who covers climate change, UN climate negotiations and energy policy. Her work has been published by Common Dreams, Grist, The Nation, The Progressive, Sierra and the Washington Monthly.

Critical Dakota Access Pipeline Bond Cancelled in Iowa

For Immediate Release

Friday, January 29, 2021

Organization Profile: 

Indigenous Environmental Network

Contact: 

Jennifer K. Falcon, 218-760- 9958,
jennifer@ienearth.org

WASHINGTON - On January 7th, 2021 the Westchester Fire Insurance Company, a subsidiary of international insurance corporation Chubb, notified Energy Transfer Partners that it was cancelling a crucial $250,000 bond for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) segment in Iowa. Publication of this bond cancellation comes just days after a federal appeals court largely sided with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe upholding lower court decisions that revoked a key permit for the line and required a federal agency to conduct a lengthy environmental review.
 
Surety bonds are used to protect the public from having to pay for any damages or pollution created by existing projects.
 
The following is a statement from Indigenous Environmental Network: 
 
“Dakota Access Pipeline has no federal easement. It's now losing insurance coverage on the state-level which is a requirement for Iowa's state permit. It is time for President Biden to take action and shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline. This project is a danger to all communities along its path, including the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Nations. It’s time to end this saga and do what’s right. Shut down DAPL.”

###

'How About a Counter-Argument Based on Fact?': Warren Destroys CNBC Host Over Two-Cent Wealth Tax Criticism

"The wealthiest in this country are paying less in taxes than everyone else," said the Democratic senator. "If they added a two-cent wealth tax, they'd still be paying less than most of the people in this entire nation."

by Kenny Stancil, staff writer
Published on Friday, January 29, 2021
by Common Dreams

"You're telling me that they would forfeit their American citizenship if they had to... step up and pay a little more?" Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked on Thursday, January 28, 2021. "I'm just calling your bluff on that. That's not going to happen."(Photo: Screengrab from CNBC)


"There is no evidence that anyone is going to leave this country because of a two-cent wealth tax."

That's the two cents Sen. Elizabeth Warren shared on Thursday in response to CNBC host Sara Eisen's fear-mongering about the alleged consequences of requiring the super-rich to pay their fair share in taxes.

After Eisen asserted that a wealth tax "might... chase wealthy people out of this country as we've seen has happened with...other wealth taxes," the Democratic senator from Massachusetts asked: "Can we just keep in mind, right now, in America, who's paying taxes?"

"You know the bottom 99% last year paid about 7.5% of their total wealth in taxes," said Warren. "The top 0.001%, you know how much they paid? They paid about 3.2%."

"If they added a two-cent wealth tax," Warren noted, "they'd still be paying less than most of the people in this entire nation... Someone has to pay to keep this nation going. And right now, what the 0.001%, the wealthiest people in this country, have said is: 'Let's let everyone else pay for it.'"

The reason for that, Warren explained, is because the mega-rich want to continue to increase their wealth as much and as quickly as possible.

"Can we have just a little fairness here?" the senator pleaded.

After Eisen chimed in to say she was simply playing devil's advocate, Warren retorted: "How about a counter-argument... that's based on fact?"

The fact is, Warren said, "The wealthiest in this country are paying less in taxes than everyone else."

"You're telling me that they would forfeit their American citizenship if they had to... step up and pay a little more?" the senator asked. "I'm just calling your bluff on that. That's not going to happen."

Well, this is incredible. pic.twitter.com/o4uIFuQLQF— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) January 28, 2021




Warren's defense of a wealth tax comes as the ongoing GameStop saga has provoked renewed scrutiny of Wall Street's role in intensifying inequality, leading to calls for greater financial regulation and redistributive policies such as a financial transactions tax.

In her appearance on CNBC, Warren pointed out the stark disconnect between the stock market and the real economy. The apparent rigging of the rules to favor hedge funds over ordinary people has been exposed not only by trading app Robinhood's heavy-handed and widely-condemned crackdown on Redditors who tried to out-maneuver the masters of casino capitalism, but also by the fact that 660 billionaires have added $1.1 trillion to their collective wealth since mid-March 2020, in the midst of immense working-class suffering.

While millions of U.S. households have been devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic meltdown, "the stock market, which has become the giant casino and the playground for the billionaires, just keeps spinning upward," said Warren.



The stock market isn’t our economy – it’s a giant casino and playground for billionaires. The SEC needs to clean it up – and Congress needs to do more for working families barely hanging on by their fingernails. pic.twitter.com/3dR7CaktNr— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 29, 2021

Echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who on Thursday lambasted a billionaire investor for complaining about the prospect of the uber-wealthy having to pay their fair share in taxes while millions go hungry, Warren commented on the "K-shaped" nature of the anemic recovery.

"The people at the top are getting richer and richer and richer," Warren said. "And people who make less than $40,000 a year are now suffering through 20% unemployment. They're getting poorer and poorer and poorer."

Chastising Republicans for their refusal to deploy adequate funding for vaccine distribution, nutrition assistance, and the safe re-opening of child care centers and schools, Warren added that the coronavirus crisis could accelerate wealth inequality "at a rate that we had never even imagined in our worst nightmares."

Warren continued: "Tens of millions of people across this country are out of work. Tens of millions more are on the threshold of losing either their homes or their apartments. Tens of millions more have depleted their savings and don't have enough money to put food on the table."

"That is a core part of the American economy," Warren added, "and that's where Congress needs to respond and we need to respond quickly and forcefully."

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'Cry Me a River': Sanders Hits Back as Billionaire Investor Whines About Potential Tax Hikes Amid GameStop Fiasco

"Oh look, another billionaire is mad that he might have to pay more taxes while children in America go hungry and veterans sleep on the street."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

Published on Friday, January 29, 2021
byCommon Dreams

Billionaire investor Leon Cooperman speaks during an interview on CNBC on January 28, 2021. (Photo: CNBC/YouTube Screengrab)

As the ongoing GameStop saga sparked renewed calls for a financial transactions tax and other commonsense redistributive measures to tackle soaring inequality and Wall Street abuses, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman took to the airwaves Thursday to fume that the idea of compelling the mega-rich to pay their fair share is a "bullshit concept" and merely "a way of attacking wealthy people."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime proponent of raising taxes on billionaires like Cooperman, was not impressed.

"Yes. We will make Wall Street billionaires pay their fair share of taxes and create an economy that works for all of us."

—Sen. Bernie Sanders

"Oh look, another billionaire is mad that he might have to pay more taxes while children in America go hungry and veterans sleep on the street. Cry me a river," the Vermont senator tweeted late Thursday. "Yes. We will make Wall Street billionaires pay their fair share of taxes and create an economy that works for all of us."

A hedge fund manager who was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016, Cooperman is one of several industry big-wigs who has appeared on financial networks like CNBC in recent days to complain about the retail investors who banded together to send GameStop shares into the stratosphere, blowing up a ploy by short-selling hedge funds to cash in on the company's seemingly imminent demise.

Cooperman, whose net worth is estimated to be around $3 billion, sniffed that "the reason the market is doing what it's doing is, people are sitting at home, getting their checks from the government, basically trading for no commissions and no interest rates."

"I'm not damning them. I'm just saying from my experience, this will end in tears," Cooperman said as the investing app Robinhood abruptly restricted trading on GameStock and other shares, prompting members of Congress such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to demand hearings and an investigation.

Listen to this incredible crybaby pic.twitter.com/KmJvZpBQ59

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) January 28, 2021

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Sanders proposed a Wall Street transaction tax aimed at both curbing reckless financial speculation and raising revenue that could be used to fund progressive agenda items, including tuition-free public colleges and universities.

Warren Gunnels, Sanders' staff director, noted in a tweet Thursday that Sanders' transaction tax would raise $2.4 trillion over the next decade—"enough to make public colleges tuition free and cancel student debt."

"If the working class could bail out Wall Street," Gunnels said, "Wall Street can bail out working families in America during a damn pandemic."

HuffPost's Zach Carter argued Wednesday that a financial transactions tax would be the "simplest solution" to an untenable status quo in which Wall Street titans are handsomely rewarded for engaging in "what is a mostly economically wasteful activity."

"We have plenty of roads and bridges to repair and a vastly outdated transportation system," Carter wrote. "Redistributing money from hedge funders in the Hamptons to a high-speed rail network or a national public housing program would do more for growth and productivity than all the shorts and put options in New York."

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The Gamestop Bubble Reveals a

Financial System Totally Out of Touch With Economic Reality

The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the absurdity of the stock market.

by

Doug Henwood

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Published on

Friday, January 29, 2021

by

In These Times

A view of the Wall Street street sign with the New York Stock Exchange during the coronavirus pandemic on May 25, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images)

First published at Jacobin.

Who knew GameStop would itself become such a game?

Last summer, the video game retailer was seen as a fading brick-and-mortar operation. It was losing money, sales had been shrinking for years, and the stock was trading for around $4 a share. As I’m writing this on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 27, its stock is trading at $339 a share. At the close of trading on Tuesday, it was a mere $148. Not a bad overnight return, 129 percent. Three days earlier, it was at $38. It was up nearly tenfold in less than a week. Why?

To answer that requires explaining the concept of short selling, which most civilians find nearly incomprehensible. A short sale is a bet that a stock (or any other speculative asset, like bonds or gold) is going to decline in price. But to make that bet, you have to sell something you don’t already own, which is not normal behavior. To accomplish this, you have to borrow the stock from somebody who does own it. As with any loan, you have to pay interest on the borrowed asset. And you also have to keep some collateral on deposit with your broker as an assurance you’re good for the money. The hope is that the price will fall, and you can buy the shares—cover the short, in the jargon—at a lower price. Your profit would be the difference between the original sale price and the closing purchase price, minus any interest paid on the borrowed asset.

But what if you’re wrong, and the price rises? Then you’re in trouble. When you buy a stock, your risk is that you could lose the entire purchase price — but no more. With short selling, if you’re wrong, there’s no predetermined limit to how much you can lose if the price keeps rising. And if the price keeps rising, your broker will demand more collateral in the form of real money. You have a choice between giving up—covering the short and taking the loss—or keep pouring more collateral into a losing position in the hope that things will finally turn your way.

Back to GameStop. Last August, the investor Ryan Cohen, who founded the online pet food merchant Chewy and sold it for a handsome profit, started buying GameStop shares. He told the company that it needed to get with the digital age, close a lot of stores, and move online. Investors, expecting a better future for the flailing retailer, snapped up shares, tripling their price by the end of November. That was unjustified optimism, perhaps, but not outlandish. But some hedge funds, notably Melvin Capital Management, began shorting GameStop, believing the tales of recovery were delusional.

Cue the habitués of the subreddit Wall Street Bets, with a user known as DeepFuckingValue among the ringleaders, who began talking up the stock and buying shares. They were motivated not merely by the prospect of making money, but also for the lulz of bankrupting some hedgies. They began buying the stock in size, as they say on Wall Street. The ensuing price rise forced the shorts like Melvin to cover. Their demand for the stock, plus the Redditors’, launched the share price on a moon shot.

GameStop has turned into one of the great bubbles of our time. On Tuesday, January 26, more stock in GameStop was traded than in Apple, the biggest stock of all, with a total market value 108 times the retailer’s. As James Mackintosh of the Wall Street Journal put it, the price action and trading volume together suggest ​“widespread disturbance to people’s judgment.”

Bubbles like this always end in a crash, and those Redditors who haven’t sold their shares will be left holding a very depleted bag. (Surprisingly, news that Melvin closed out its short position late on Tuesday seems not to have dampened the party. A bubble usually goes on far longer than mere rationalists can predict.) In the meanwhile, it’s funny to see some Wall Streeters complain that there’s something unfair about this action, since these are the sorts of games they play with each other and the general public all the time. They talk up stocks or talk them down, depending on their interests, and plot against what they see as weak or vulnerable players all the time. It’s just that the speculators with names like DeepFuckingValue who are savaging them for now are the wrong kind of people. They don’t live in Greenwich in houses with twenty-car garages.

Even more amusing are the earnest sorts who think these games somehow pervert the function of the stock market. As Business Insider columnist Josh Barro declared on Twitter: ​“I know people think this is fun but — why do we have a stock market? So productive firms can raise capital to do useful things. Detaching stock price from fundamental value (Gamestop is now worth almost as much as Best Buy) makes the markets serve the real economy worse.”

What’s funny about these comments, aside from their earnestness in the midst of low comedy, is that the stock market has almost nothing to do with raising money for productive investment. Almost all the stock that trades on the market, including GameStock, was issued years ago, meaning that companies don’t see a dime of the daily action. Firms do issue stock now and then, in so-called initial public offerings (IPOs), but over the last twenty years, according to finance professor Jay Ritter’s data, IPOs have raised a cumulative total of $657 billion, well under 2 percent of total business investment in things like buildings and equipment over the same period. In the real world, as opposed to Barro’s imagination, firms raise almost all their investment funds internally, through profits. Rather than raising money from shareholders, businesses shovel out vast buckets of money to them. Since 2000, the five hundred large companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index have spent $8.3 trillion buying their own stock to boost its price — over half their profits over the period, and equal to almost 20 percent of business investment over the two decades. Stock buybacks not only make the shareholders happy, but they also fatten CEOs’ paychecks, since bosses these days are paid mainly in stock.

Lulz aside, this drama, like the seemingly endless rise in stock prices since 2009, interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 scare last March, is a sign of a financial system totally out of touch with economic reality. Trillions in government aid to business and Federal Reserve infusions into the financial markets have created a monstrous gusher of money with nowhere to go but speculative assets, at a time when ICUs are at capacity and 24 million people tell Census Bureau interviewers that they’re having trouble getting enough to eat. Barro would do better to worry about that.

Doug Henwood edits the  Left Business Observer, a newsletter he founded in 1986, He also hosts Behind the News, a weekly radio show covering economics and politics on KPFA, Berkeley, that is rebroadcast on several other stations across the U.S., and has a worldwide audience via its Internet archive. 

© 2020 In These Times

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF BIG PHARMA NOW!

Oxfam Reaction to 

Johnson & Johnson and Novovax COVID Vaccine Results

WASHINGTON - In response to Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)’s and Novovax release of Phase 3 Trial results of their respective COVID-19 vaccines, Niko Lusiani, Senior Advisor with Oxfam America, made the following statement:

“Today marks yet another hopeful achievement in the fight against the coronavirus. Thanks to tireless scientific efforts, and funding from taxpayers like you and me, these two new vaccines could help turn the corner in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. The speed that the virus is mutating is only reinforcing the need for mass-produced vaccines available to everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.

“As a single-dose, lower-cost vaccine, with corporate commitments to ensure access to all countries, rich and poor alike, the JNJ vaccine candidate could especially provide just the boost the world needs to save lives, rebuild livelihoods and prevent people from falling even deeper into poverty and despair. 

“But no one company alone can produce enough vaccines to bend the curve completely. That’s why every COVID-19 vaccine must be a People’s Vaccine: patent-free, mass produced, distributed fairly based on need, and made available free of charge, to everyone, everywhere.

“A People’s Vaccine, mass produced by qualified manufacturers around the world, is the only way we can make the greatest number of doses in the shortest amount of time and ensure access for everyone. There’s not a minute to waste.

“From development to production to procurement, JNJ’s vaccine was funded largely by the public, so it must be a public good. JNJ’s commitments to more equitable distribution and a non-profit single pandemic price are encouraging steps forward. Next up, the corporation can stake out a position of global leadership in the struggle against COVID by committing to keep its vaccine price at-cost after the pandemic, and sharing its vaccine knowledge, technology, intellectual property, data and know-how to boost supply, reduce price and enhance equity.”

“President Biden has a special opportunity to replace the narrow vaccine nationalism of the recent past with the global vaccine solidarity of the future. That’s why more than 100 high-level leaders from public health, faith-based, racial justice, and labor organizations, joined former members of Congress, economists and artists in a public letter calling on President Biden to make every COVID-19 vaccine a People’s Vaccine: a global public good, freely and fairly available to all, prioritizing those most in need here at home and around the world.”

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