Earth has lost one-fifth of its wetlands since 1700 – but most could still be saved

The Conversation
February 11, 2023

Capybaras (Shutterstock)

Like so many of the planet’s natural habitats, wetlands have been systematically destroyed over the past 300 years. Bogs, fens, marshes and swamps have disappeared from maps and memory, having been drained, dug up and built on.

Being close to a reliable source of water and generally flat, wetlands were always prime targets for building towns and farms. Draining their waterlogged soils has produced some of the most fertile farmland available.

But wetlands also offer some of the best natural solutions to modern crises. They can clean water by removing and filtering pollutants, displace floodwater, shelter wildlife, improve our mental and physical wellbeing and capture climate-changing amounts of carbon.

Peatlands, a particular type of wetland, store at least twice the carbon of all the world’s forests.

How much of the Earth’s precious wetlands have been lost since 1700 was recently addressed by a major new study published in Nature. Previously, it was feared that as much as 50% of our wetlands might have been wiped out. However, the latest research suggests that the figure is actually closer to 21% - an area the size of India.

Some countries have seen much higher losses, with Ireland losing more than 90% of its wetlands. The main reason for these global losses has been the drainage of wetlands for growing crops.


A wetland is, like this peat bog, a terrestrial habitat where water is held on the land.

Kuttelvaserova Stuchelova/Shutterstock

Wetlands are not wastelands

This is the most thorough investigation of its kind. The researchers used historical records and the latest maps to monitor land use on a global scale.


Despite this, the new paper highlights some of the scientific and cultural barriers to studying and managing wetlands. For instance, even identifying what is and isn’t a wetland is harder than for other habitats.

The defining characteristic of a wetland – being wet – is not always easily identified in each region and season. How much is the right amount of wetness? Some classification systems list coral reefs as wetlands, while others argue this is too wet.

And for centuries, wetlands were seen as unproductive wastelands ripe for converting to cropland. This makes records of where these ecosystems used to be sketchy at best.


The report shows clearly that the removal of wetlands is not spread evenly around the globe. Some regions have lost more than average. Around half of the wetlands in Europe have gone, with the UK losing 75% of its original area.

The US, central Asia, India, China, Japan and south-east Asia are also reported to have lost 50% of their original wetlands. It is these regional differences which promoted the idea that half of all the world’s wetlands had disappeared.


Farming has driven the destruction of wetlands globally. 

Tridsanu Thopet/Shutterstock

This disparity is somewhat hopeful, as it suggests there are still plenty of wetlands which haven’t been destroyed – particularly the vast northern peatlands of Siberia and Canada.
An ecological tonic

Losing a wetland a few acres in size may not sound much on a global or even national scale, but it’s very serious for the nearby town that now floods when it rains and is catastrophic for the specialised animals and plants, like curlews and swallowtail butterflies, living there.


Wetlands offer food and habitat for a diverse range of species. 

Aleksandra Tokarz/Shutterstock

Fortunately, countries and international organisations are beginning to understand how important wetlands are locally and globally, with some adopting “no-net-loss” policies that oblige developers to restore any habitats they destroy. The UK has promised to ban the sale of peat-based composts for amateur growers by 2024.

Wetland habitats are being conserved around the world, often at huge expense. Over US$10 billion (£8.2 billion) has been spent on a 35-year plan to restore the Florida Everglades, a unique network of subtropical wetlands, making it the largest and most expensive ecological restoration project in the world.

The creation of new wetlands is also underway in many places. The reintroduction of beavers to enclosures across Britain is expected to increase the nation’s wetland coverage, bringing with it all the advantages of these habitats.


Beaver dams and the wetlands they create reduce the effects of flooding by up to 60% and can boost the area’s wildlife. One study showed the number of local mammal species shot up by 86% thanks to these furry engineers.


Wetlands hold and slowly release water, helping to ease flooding and stall drought. Steved_np3/Shutterstock


Even the sustainable drainage system ponds developers create on the fringes of new housing estates could see pocket wetlands appearing in towns and cities across the UK. By mimicking natural drainage regimes instead of removing surface water with pipes and sewers, sustainable drainage systems can create areas of plants and water that have been shown to increase biodiversity, especially invertebrates.

Whether the total global loss of wetlands is 20% or 50% doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that people stop looking at wetlands as wastelands, there for us to drain and turn into “useful” land.

As the UN recently pointed out, an estimated 40% of Earth’s species live and breed in wetlands and a billion people depend on them for their livelihoods. Conserving and restoring these vital habitats is key to achieving a sustainable future.

Christian Dunn, Senior Lecturer in Natural Sciences, Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ron DeSantis' culture war benches baseball great Roberto Clemente biography

Ray Hartmann
February 11, 2023



One of the most inspiring baseball stories ever told might not be suitable for Florida public school libraries under the rule of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The book, “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates,” is among the more than 1 million titles that “have been covered or stored and paused for student use” in Florida, NBC News reported. The freeze follows the Florida “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” that DeSantis signed in 2022.

The book about Clemente’s life by Jonah Winter and Raul Colon is not alone. Other books about Latino figures, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the late Afro-Cuban salsa single Celia Cruz, have the same frozen status, NBC reported.

Clemente, an Afro-Puerto Rican widely regarded as among the top tier of all-time baseball greats, died at the age of 38 in 1972, when his plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico as he was delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

Clemente was among the greatest Latino heroes in history, not only as an athlete but as a humanitarian and outspoken foe of injustice.

“Clemente often denounced racism and discrimination in his native Spanish language, and he spoke publicly about his experiences as a Black Latino climbing the baseball ranks during the civil rights movement,” NBC News noted. “He even spoke about political and social issues alongside Martin Luther King Jr.”

Apparently, that might not comport with what children in Florida are allowed to learn now. Here’s how NBC described that:

“School officials are in the process of determining if such books comply with state laws and can be included in school libraries.

“DeSantis signed laws last year that require schools to rely on certified media specialists to approve which books can be integrated into classrooms. Guidance on how that would be implemented was provided to schools in December.

Books must align with state standards such as not teach K-3 students about gender identity and sexual orientation; not teach critical race theory, which examines systemic racism in American society, in public grade schools; and not include references to pornography and discrimination, according to the school district.”


Ray Hartmann is a St. Louis-based journalist with nearly 50 years experience as a publisher, TV show panelist, radio host, daily newspaper reporter and columnist. He founded St. Louis alt weekly, The Riverfront Times, at the age of 24.

11 stranded pilot whales saved in Sri Lanka
Agence France-Presse
February 11, 2023

A Sri Lankan fisherman tries to push the pilot whales into deeper water off Kudawa

 © STR / AFP

Eleven pilot whales were saved on Saturday after they became stranded near the shore on Sri Lanka's west coast in the early hours, wildlife officials told AFP.

A navy team aided the rescue effort alongside local fishermen who raised the alarm when they spotted the pod after midnight near the resort village of Kudawa.

"There were 14 of them and three were dead on coming ashore," wildlife officer Eranda Gamage told AFP.

"They had to be taken into the deeper seas to drop them there so that they would not come back to the shore. The navy took them in their boats and dropped them."

Pilot whales -- which can grow up to six metres (20 feet) long and weigh a tonne -- are highly social.

The causes of mass strandings remain unknown despite scientists studying the phenomenon for decades.

In November 2020, Sri Lankan rescuers managed to save 120 pilot whales in a gruelling overnight effort that also involved the country's navy.
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Three pilot whales and one dolphin died of injuries following the mass beaching on the country's western coast at Panadura, south of the capital Colombo.

© 2023 AFP

How a laughably bad sci-fi flick embarrassed Hollywood into doing better science

Matthew Rozsa, Salon
February 09, 2023

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

No matter how much you might hate a movie, it is doubtful you loathe it as much as scientists despise this one infamous flick.

There is a motion picture so scientifically irresponsible that merely mentioning its title instantly arouses ire in countless otherwise stolid academic personalities. When first released in 2003, it badly bombed at the box office, prompting one physicist to speculate that the public stayed away because it could smell garbage. It "did not make money because people understood the science was so out to lunch," Emory University Professor Sidney Perkowitz proclaimed at the time. Indeed, Perkowitz was so bothered by the movie's misinformation that he crafted a set of guidelines to help Hollywood studios avoid future embarrassments. Hundreds of fellow scientists expressed support for Perkowitz's position; today this movie is best remembered for helping inspire the creation of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, which promotes the use of better science in movies, television and other media.

"I got a call from the director who was in Hollywood and was upset at me because I had said these things. That's the point at which I realized that he thought that it was scientifically accurate!"

The film in question, in case you have not yet figured it out, is "The Core," an entry in the venerable science fiction genre by director Jon Amiel and starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci, DJ Qualls, Richard Jenkins and Bruce Greenwood. The premise of "The Core" is both simple and ridiculous: The Earth's core has stopped rotating and a team of "terranauts" must journey to the center of the Earth with nuclear weapons to explode that pesky core into rotating again. Until the terranauts can succeed, though, all hell breaks loose on the surface, leading to the movie's most memorable scenes. Pacemakers instantly stop working, causing hundreds to drop dead in a single second; electronic devices start breaking down and zapping their owners; birds are unable to navigate and crash into people and buildings; apocalyptic lightning storms destroy iconic landmarks like Rome's Colosseum and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge; and, amidst the devastation, a lone hacker controls the Internet to cover up the truth from an otherwise-panicky public.

In theory this could be entertaining in a campy, so-dumb-it's-fun way; in reality, although the acting is top notch, the rest of "The Core" is too cliché and bloated to be enjoyable. Yet as Perkowitz observed 20 years ago, the bigger problem with "The Core" is that the information that it presents to audiences as legitimate science is, quite simply, bunk.

"The premise behind it is not quite right," Perkowitz told Salon. "The scientists involved describe the Earth as being surrounded by an 'electromagnetic field' which is disrupted when the core stops spinning. That's a misnomer. It is actually a 'magnetic field.' That's the main scientific error in this whole discussion. It's the magnetic field that gives us poles and all the rest of it."

Of course, as Perkowitz emphasized when speaking with Salon, it is not unreasonable for a sci-fi film to take some creative liberties with scientific fact. "The Core," however, plays so fast and loose with the truth that it becomes difficult to keep track of all of its mistakes. Among other things, the problem proposed would not suddenly cause any of the electronic malfunctions seen in the plot.

"I have a pacemaker myself and I would not drop dead if the Earth's magnetic field stopped working because the pacemaker is an electronic device," Perkowitz remarked. "Turning off the surrounding very weak magnetic field that comes from the Earth wouldn't have the slightest effect on it and shouldn't stop it." The technological errors don't stop there. At one point in the film a teenage hacker (Qualls) is able to control the entire Internet single-handedly to make sure no information is released about the planetary crisis.

"I have a pacemaker myself and I would not drop dead if the Earth's magnetic field stopped working."

"We've come to the point where we think that teenage hackers can do absolutely anything on the Internet," Perkowitz remarked. This is ludicrous, to be sure, but not necessarily more outlandish than the moment when Lindo's character explains that his ship can travel to the core with ultrasonic waves by using the same principles applied to breaking up kidney stones. "The sound waves can hit something solid and break it into pieces, but the amount of energy you would need to keep the lasers and the ultrasonics going through several thousand miles of solid rock is so immense that I just can't see how any kind of portable ship could carry it," Perkowitz noted.

The coup de grâce, however, is the terranauts' plan to restart the core by setting off nuclear weapons around its perimeter. "The last item about setting off nuclear weapons near the core to nudge the core to start rotating again is just a crazy idea," Perkowitz explained. "I don't know how you would focus nuclear explosions."

In short, "The Core" is more accurately categorized as fantasy than sci-fi — but apparently, this was news to the filmmakers. David J. Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Salon that he was asked to look at the script of "The Core" before it was released "but at a point where most of the movie had already been put together, so this was roughly six months before it was actually released to theaters." Although he was not an official scientific consultant, Stevenson was treated as someone who could react to the movie's merits and perhaps even comment positively on its science.

"The scientific content I thought was poor and I said that to other journalists and people," Stevenson recalled. "I even said that to Scientific American. Then I got a call from the director [Jon Amiel] who was in Hollywood and was upset at me because I had said these things. That's the point at which I realized that he thought that it was scientifically accurate!

Amiel may not have had that problem if he had had access to the resources provided by the Science & Entertainment Exchange. Launched by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2008, its director today is science writer Rick Loverd, who described how popular entertainment like movies can be "hugely impactful" in people's lives. To illustrate his point, Loverd pointed to the many scientists who say they were inspired by the 1966 TV show "Star Trek," Air Force personnel who enlisted after seeing the 1986 movie "Top Gun" and forensic science students who compelled universities to create new departments after they were motivated by the 2000 TV show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Even something as simple as the Fonz getting a library card in the 1974 TV show "Happy Days" can have an effect; after that episode, legend has it that libraries were swarming with teenagers hoping to get library cards of their own (although these accounts have techically been unsubstantiated).

"There is a connection between what people see on screen and [their behavior], and the hardest thing to do is to influence people's behavior, much less their thinking and understanding." 

 

"There is a connection between what people see on screen and [their behavior], and the hardest thing to do is to influence people's behavior, much less their thinking and understanding," Loverd told Salon. "But to change someone's behavior: that's the gold standard in communication. If you can go get somebody to get a library card, to get them to pursue a career . . . these are huge things." For instance, the Science & Entertainment Exchange has encouraged filmmakers to meet scientists who are women of color and from other under-represented groups, so that way they do not reinforce assumptions about science being the exclusive province of white men.

"I really do believe that people are going to be talking about films like 'Hidden Figures' soon and seeing measurable effects in enrollments in astrophysics classes as a result from women of color," Loverd predicted. "I'm way out on a limb here. There is nothing to support what I'm saying — except the past and history. I do think that it's a reasonable assumption on which our program operates that the characters of the past have influenced the STEM professionals of the present. When you look at that pattern and you look forward, it makes sense for an institution like the National Academy of Sciences to be reaching out to those storytellers to try to bring more characters like that to the screen to influence kids today."

In contrast to the positive impact of a film like 2016's "Hidden Figures" — which told the true story of three NASA scientists who faced discrimination for being Black American women — "The Core" is "one of those movies that is sort of widely cited by scientists, particularly if you're talking to scientists of a particular discipline like geophysicists, when they talk about how this is the worst example of what Hollywood does to science," explained Ann Merchant, Deputy Executive Director at the Office of Communications at NAS. "It's that kind of film."

"If you make that one assumption and then try to develop what the logical outcome would be, I think that makes a great story that is scientifically satisfying."

Merchant added that "The Core" was not directly responsible for the creation of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, but rather a prominent catalyst for convincing scientific professionals that such an organization needed to exist. In a sense, "The Core" epitomized the kind of factual sloppiness that many scientists find worrying.

"We were certainly aware of its role in the minds of many scientists as having done damage to science in what they felt was the public consumption of science in entertainment," Merchant told Salon. "It was from that point of view that we thought about movies like that. 'How does the public respond to science in a movie like 'The Core'"?

In the case of "The Core," many scientists expressed concern that it was the equivalent of taking a science class with a teacher who knows nothing about science. Yet scientists do not always agree on how "bad" the science has to be in a film before it goes against the public interest. Take director Roland Emmerich's 2004 disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow," which warns humanity about the real-world threat of climate change with very shaky science.

"With a movie like 'The Day After Tomorrow' on climate change, many scientists saw that as being not the way to communicate 'accurately," Merchant explained, as the film's plot is riddled with errors. "On the other hand, if you have audience members that go into that movie and they say, 'Oh, climate change, is that a thing?' . . . the movie itself is not meant to be the primary mechanism for communicating accurate messaging around climate change. It's meant to stimulate somebody's thinking about the topic so that maybe they go learn more from more accurate sources."

By contrast, there are some popular sci-fi films that scientifically hold up, even with allowances made for poetic license.

"I do think that it's a reasonable assumption on which our program operates that the characters of the past have influenced the STEM professionals of the present."

"'2001: A Space Odyssey' is wonderful," Stevenson told Salon about the classic 1968 film about the human species' cosmic destiny. "It is a fantasy, of course, so I have no problem with '2001.' I talked to ["2001" author] Arthur C. Clarke once. A very talented person — obviously [director] Stanley Kubrick also falls in that category — can make something like '2001' achieve the goal of getting across the wonder" of the scientific subjects contained in its story. While "2001" is legendary for diligently attempting to be as scientifically accurate as its fantastical premise would allow, director James Cameron's 2009 movie "Avatar" passes Stevenson's smell test for a somewhat opposite reason.

"The way I see it is the following: If you are presenting something that is so obviously different from the environment in which we live, it's permissible to present things that seem to be difficult scientifically," Stevenson explained. In the case of "Avatar," "the whole idea is of a planet where there is a material called 'unobtanium.' That is almost a joke, meaning people who are watching it would I hope realize its status of that kind of fantasy, so I don't have a problem with that." By contrast, when "The Core" introduces its own substance called "unobtanium," it is presented not as a MacGuffin but as a potentially viable scientific material.

For his part, Perkowitz praised director Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fi film "Interstellar." While developing it, Nolan worked closely with Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to ground the story in as much reliable science as possible.

"He worked very hard to come up with things that made scientific sense, or at least could make scientific sense, and yet told a dramatic story," Perkowitz explained. "Yes, there has to be some creative license" — for instance, Perkowitz pointed out that most movies about outer space travel include ships that travel faster than the speed of light, which right now appears to be "completely out of the question" — but he argued that audiences can accept one big suspension of disbelief, as long as the rest of the story is told in good faith.

"If you make that one assumption and then try to develop what the logical outcome would be, I think that makes a great story that is scientifically satisfying," Perkowitz told Salon.

Perfecting that blend — "great story" and "scientifically satisfying" — has bedeviled sci-fi writers since Mary Shelley invented the genre with the 1818 novel "Frankenstein." It is likely that no sci-fi writer will ever find a combination that is absolutely flawless, but if "The Core" has any positive legacy, it is illustrating that this goal should always be sought. And for what it is worth, Perkowitz admitted that not all of the seemingly silly moments in "The Core" fail to hold up scientifically.

"It's believed that many birds know to navigate over thousands of miles because they have an organic sensor that tells which way the Earth's magnetic field is pointing, so if you turn off the magnetic field, it's possible that birds would lose their sense of navigation and maybe crash into windows. That one would be OK . . ." Perkowitz trailed off, and then the frustration returned to his voice. ". . . But again, they're ascribing it to an 'electromagnetic field,' and that's not what's going on! It is a magnetic field!"

OF MICE AND MEN
Make it so: Mouse named after Patrick Stewart is world's oldest
AFP
February 09, 2023

Pat, a Pacific pocket mouse fondly named after actor Patrick Stewart, is seen in an undated handout image courtesy of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - A mouse named after "Star Trek" actor Patrick Stewart is officially the world's oldest in captivity, a US zoo has announced.

Pat the Pacific pocket mouse — the smallest species of mouse in North America — bagged the title when he hit nine years and 209 days on Wednesday.

Officials from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance confirmed Pat was still going strong on Thursday.

The tiny creature — whose longevity was recognized by Guinness World Records — weighs less than six grams (a fifth of an ounce).

And unlike his namesake, who as Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanded the Starship Enterprise, Pat the Pacific pocket mouse is covered in hair.

The species got its name because of pouches in its cheeks, which are used to carry food and nesting materials.

The animals are found in coastal scrublands, dunes and riverbanks close to the Pacific Ocean.

Human encroachment left the species struggling and it was thought to be extinct until a tiny population was discovered in 1994.

Experts at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, whose breeding program has helped bring the Pacific pocket mouse back from the brink, said the little animals are vital to ecosystems because they distribute seeds and encourage plant growth through their digging.

"This acknowledgement is also a symbol of appreciation for species that people don't know much about because they're not charismatic megafauna, but are just as critical for ecosystem function," said Debra Shier of the wildlife alliance.

"These overlooked species can often be found in our own backyards — like the Pacific pocket mouse."

GUACAMOLE ANYONE
Super Bowl snack hurting Colombian farmers, environment

Agence France-Presse
February 11, 2023

Teen Girls Watching TV (Shutterstock)


During the Super Bowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, millions of armchair fans will tuck into a tasty snack of tortilla chips and guacamole.

But unbeknown to them, in far away Colombia, local farmers are paying the price for their gastronomic pleasure, while environmentalists are warning of water pollution.

The explosion of avocado plantations in central-western Colombia resulted in changing land-use patterns that, in turn, left Jose Hernandez's coffee crops flooded.

Unlike his neighbors in the Pijao municipality in Quindio department, Hernandez refused to switch to growing the lucrative "green-gold."
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But rivers of water came cascading down from higher up in the mountains surrounding his farm and scouring out ditches up to two meters deep.

The 64-year-old lost 4,000 coffee plants and he points the finger at avocado multinationals who use copious amounts of water and even divert natural streams to satiate their thirsty crops.

"I lost 20 years of work with those waters that fell on me," Hernandez told AFP.

'More important than oil'

The Colombian countryside is rapidly being overtaken by crops of the Hass avocado that is mainly exported to the United States, the Netherlands, Spain and Britain.

It is the main ingredient in guacamole.

And demand peaks in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl -- American football's annual showpiece.

According to Colombia's agriculture ministry, the country will send more than 1,400 tons of avocados to the United States for consumption specifically during Sunday's match.

In 2021, total avocado exports were 97,000 tons with 55,000 hectares of planted crops.

Colombia is the third-largest producer of avocados after Mexico (2.3 million tons) and Chile (186,000 tons).

But while leftist President Gustavo Petro has embraced this crop, saying "avocados are more important than oil," environmentalists warn that the crop can pollute water sources and lead farmers to intrude on protected areas. They add that multinationals have bullied villagers into selling their land on the cheap.

In 2021, the state body charged with protecting the environment in Quindio accused avocado producers of "illegal water harvesting," "pollution of water sources" and "illegal logging."

Soil erosion

Pijao was once coffee-growing country but now has 789 hectares of avocado crops, a 245 percent increase in seven years, according to the local mayor's office.

Initially, foreign companies were "unaware" of environmental rules, admits Diego Aristizabal, president of the avocado producers federation, although he claims they now follow them to the letter.

Some from the industry complain of being "demonized" and point to the creation of 26,000 jobs.

But an agro-industrial engineer, speaking to AFP under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the number of farmers like Hernandez being negatively impacted is mushrooming.

Avocado producers "have not only covered the drains on their own properties but have also allowed water to flow onto their neighbors' properties ... which causes (soil) erosion" and harms other crops.

Environmental activist Monica Florez says multinationals -- mostly from Chile, Mexico and Peru -- began arriving in Pijao in 2017, at the exact time that FARC guerrillas were disarming following their December 2016 peace deal with the state.

"There was a change in the use of the land, in economic terms and in the environmental impacts left by the companies," said Florez, director of the Pijao Cittaslow NGO.

On the highest peak in the municipality is a moor that is home to a fragile ecosystem comprising the region's water source and the Quindio wax palm, a native species to Andean forests that is in danger of extinction.

Discarded packets of pesticides bear witness to the harmful practices that "interrupt the cycle" of the moor, from where two rivers flow, the engineer says.

- Sent packing -

In Mexico, the avocado industry is mired in some of the country's worst vices: violence, drug trafficking and deforestation.

In Michoacan, Mexico's largest avocado-growing region, organized criminal gangs subject growers to robbery, kidnappings and extortion.

Chile is enjoying an avocado boom in arid areas that is exacerbating an already serious water shortage.

Mexican avocados begin a journey that will end in bowls of guacamole and tummies of those dipping their chips in the 'guac' © ULISES RUIZ / AFP

Researchers from King's College London and the University of Wisconsin have linked the expansion of avocado plantations in Colombia to the flight of small-scale farmers from their farms.

And this in a country where unequal land distribution is at the heart of a half-century-long conflict.

Hernandez never heard again from his old neighbors.

The powerful avocado multinationals want "to send them packing," he said.

Florez says very few "resist the industrial pressures" while those that stay are effectively "locked up" by larger surrounding farms.

Meanwhile, the coffee landscape is changing and in 2022, the world's third-largest coffee producer recorded its worst harvest in almost a decade.

© 2023 AFP

THE CHURCH OF THE SUPER BOWL

The truth behind the ‘He Gets Us’ ads for Jesus airing during the Super Bowl

By AJ Willingham, CNN
Sat February 11, 2023

CNN —

In between star-studded advertisements and a whole lot of football, this year’s Super Bowl watchers are being taken to church.

“He Gets Us,” a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, is running two ads during the game as part of a staggering $100 million media investment. To many, the spots will be nothing new: “He Gets Us” content has been peppering TV screens, billboards and social media feeds since a national launch in 2022.

The campaign is arresting, portraying the pivotal figure of Christianity as an immigrant, a refugee, a radical, an activist for women’s rights and a bulwark against racial injustice and political corruption. The “He Gets Us” website features content about of-the-moment topics, like artificial intelligence and social justice.

“Whatever you are facing, Jesus faced it too,” the campaign claims.

It’s getting noticed. One of the campaign’s videos, titled “The Rebel,” has netted 122 million views on YouTube in 11 months. Google searches for “He Gets Us” have spiked since the beginning of the year.

The campaign is a natural fit with the NFL, whose games have long contained symbols of religion. Players often pray on the field and point to the heavens after touchdowns.

The NFL and religion have been closely linked. Here, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes prays before the AFC Championship game against the Cincinnati Bengals on January 29, 2023.Charlie Riedel/AP

But certain details about the “He Gets Us” ads have set off alarm bells among young people and those skeptical of religion, two groups the campaign is specifically to attract.

Some of the campaign’s major donors, and its holding company, have ties to conservative political aims and far-right ideologies that appear at odds with the campaign’s inclusive messaging.
The campaign has connections to anti-LGBT and anti-abortion laws

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

CNN has reached out to the Servant Foundation for comment.

While donors who support “He Gets Us” can choose to remain anonymous, Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

David Green, founder of Hobby Lobby, speaks at a campaign rally for then- presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio on February 29, 2016, in Oklahoma City.Sue Ogrocki/AP

Green discussed his involvement in the campaign, and the Super Bowl ad spots, during a November 2022 interview with conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

“We are wanting to say — ‘we’ being a lot of different people — that he gets us,” Green said. “[Jesus] understands us. He loves who we hate. I think we have to let the public know and create a movement.”

“He Gets Us” does not list donors on its website. “Funding for He Gets Us comes from a diverse group of individuals and entities with a common goal of sharing Jesus’ story authentically,” the site’s funding information page reads. “Most of the people driving He Gets Us, including our donors, choose to remain anonymous because the story isn’t about them, and they don’t want the credit.”

Jason Vanderground, spokesperson for He Gets Us and president of creative marketing firm HAVEN, told CNN that The Servant Foundation uses a fund which “unites donors to provide pooled support for organizations while ensuring the organizations can operate without donors impacting specific messages.”

“Funding for the campaign comes from a diverse group of individuals and entities with a common goal of sharing Jesus’ story authentically,” he said.
The campaign is tied to evangelical churches

“Be assured … we’re not ‘left’ or ‘right’ or a political organization of any kind,” the “He Gets Us” site reads. “We’re also not affiliated with any particular church or denomination.”

While “He Gets Us” says it is not intended to be connected to any particular Christian ideology, it has theological ties to evangelical practices as well as financial ones. In general, Christian evangelism is closely tied to conservatism and is an extremely influential force in American politics.

On the “He Gets Us” outreach site, which is meant for churches and marketers who wish to interact with the campaign, the organization outlines its beliefs:

“He Gets Us has chosen to not have our own separate statement of beliefs. Each participating church/ministry will typically have its own language. Meanwhile, we generally recognize the Lausanne Covenant as reflective of the spirit and intent of this movement and churches that partner with explorers from He Gets Us affirm the Lausanne Covenant.”

This information does not appear to be listed anywhere on the main “He Gets Us” site intended for the public.

The 1974 Lausanne Covenant is an important unifying document in evangelical Christian churches, while the Lausanne movement itself was started by the prominent evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham. Documents and decisions that have come out of the movement’s summits have decried the “idolatry of disordered sexuality” and focused heavily on the impact of the devil and sin on national cultures.

The late evangelist Billy Graham at his home in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, on July 25, 2006.Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

The influence of Graham, a founder of modern American evangelism, is also evident in speakers and partners for “He Gets Us.” Some of them are affiliated with groups bearing Graham’s name, including the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a liberal arts institution in Illinois.

Though Wheaton College has a deep history of abolitionism and racial justice, Campus Pride also ranked it as one of the worst campuses for LGBTQ youth. Students are required to sign a Community Covenant stating Christianity condemns “sexual immorality,” including homosexuality and adultery.

CNN asked Vanderground, the representative for He Gets Us, if the campaign supports and affirms LGBTQ Christians.

“The debate over LGBTQ+ issues is a great example of how the real Jesus too often gets lost, overlooked or distorted in debates over political and social issues,” he said. “Our focus is on helping people see and consider Jesus as he is shown in the Bible … He gets us and he loves us, and that includes people on all sides of these issues.”
Some critics say the campaign is not authentic

The minds behind “He Gets Us” say the campaign’s message is intended to appeal to younger people and those who may see Christianity as “toxic” and divisive.

“A lot of times when people look at Christianity, unfortunately they see it as much more hypocritical, judgmental, discriminatory,” Vanderground told CNN’s Tom Foreman.

“We’re trying to unify the American people around the confounding love and forgiveness [of Jesus].”

The first of the "He Gets Us" campaign billboards appeared along the Strip in Las Vegas on March 14, 2022.Eric Jamison/AP

“By design, our media messages focus on his humanity—since we’ve learned these resonate with the widest possible audience,” the “He Gets Us” partner site reads. “We also provide open opportunities, for anyone willing, to connect with our partners to learn more about Jesus.”

Word of the campaign has sparked enthusiasm among Christian groups and influencers online. But other Christians, including those in the growing deconstruction movement who are reevaluating their relationship with religion, aren’t buying it.

Dr. Kevin M. Young, a pastor and biblical scholar who discusses Christianity on social media, says the campaign won’t do much to assuage people’s criticisms of the church.

“Young people are digital natives who understand the difference between slick marketing and authenticity,” he says. “Megachurches, mega-events, and mega spending on marketing is seen as money that could have been used funding community programs and advocacy for the oppressed – such as refugees, LGBTQ+ individuals and abortion rights – and the poor.”

Instead, Young says, they’d prefer to see action and accountability.

“Young people want a church that will put shoe leather to their faith and do something for those in harm’s way; those who the church itself has harmed.”

Some “He Gets Us” messaging makes oblique references to “cancel culture,” which raises a red flag for some who see the term as highly political and a staple of conservative rhetoric. One message uses the slogan, “Jesus was canceled.”

“When it comes to crucifixion and “cancel culture,” I don’t see much to compare,” writes Josiah R. Daniels for Sojourner, a Christian publication. “Furthermore, imagining Jesus as apolitical is itself a political decision — and it is a decision that aligns with politically and financially powerful interests.”

Other Christians have criticized the campaign for a different reason altogether: for being too vague and apparently de-emphasizing Biblical teachings and Jesus’ holiness.

Conservative pundit Charlie Kirk took aim at the campaign, saying those involved have been “taken for a ride by these woke tricksters.”

Vanderground says the campaign is “committed to being scripturally accurate.”

“[W]e believe it’s more important now than ever for the real, authentic Jesus to be represented in the public marketplace as he is in the Bible,” he told CNN.

Workers cover the field with a tarp ahead of a rehearsal for the Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.Caitlin O'Hara/Reuters

The ad campaign comes as Christian identity has waned in the US in recent decades. According to Pew Research data, about 63% of American adults identified as Christian in 2022, down from about 90% in the 1990s. Younger adults in particular are driving this downturn.

“Jesus doesn’t have an image problem, but Christians and their churches do,” Young says. “These campaigns end up being PR for the wrong problem. Young people are savvy. One of their primary issues with evangelicalism, and the modern church in America, is the amount of money spent on itself.”

The two new Super Bowl ads alone are a hefty spend, with 30-second spots for the game running a record-high $7 million in 2023. Vanderground told “Christianity Today” the campaign plans to invest a billion dollars on spreading their message.

It’s exactly that investment, and the people behind it, that have led some Christians to wonder if “He Gets Us” will actually lead people to Jesus – and if it does, what path they will ultimately be encouraged to take.

How the U$ wealthy save billions in taxes by skirting a century-old law

Pro Publica
February 11, 2023

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (AFP/File / Jim WATSON)

At first glance, July 24, 2015, seems to have been a brutal trading day for Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO. He dumped hundreds of stocks, losing at least $28 million.

But this was no panicked sell-off. Among the stocks Ballmer sold were those of the Australian mining company BHP and the global oil giant Shell. Had Ballmer lost confidence in BHP’s management? Was he betting that the price of oil would not soon recover? Not at all. That very day, Ballmer also bought thousands of shares in BHP and Shell.

Why would he sell and buy shares in the same companies on the same day? The answer is counterintuitive to the average person but obvious to a sophisticated investor: A loss, for tax purposes, is valuable; a big one can wipe out millions in potential taxes. Ballmer’s two-step process allowed him to use the loss to lower his taxes, while the near-simultaneous purchase meant he effectively hadn’t changed his investment.

Since 1921, claiming tax losses from so-called wash sales — selling shares of a company then buying them again within a short period — has been forbidden. But Ballmer collected his losses anyway because, technically, the types of shares he bought and sold weren’t the same.

Both Shell and BHP offered two different versions of their common stock. For each company, the two stocks were legally distinct, but they performed very similarly because, after all, they were shares in the same company.

Ballmer’s not-so-bad day, in fact, was carefully planned, part of a strategy by Goldman Sachs, which conducted the trades on Ballmer’s behalf, to wield the stock market’s natural volatility to the billionaire’s advantage. At Goldman, the hundreds of stocks in Ballmer’s “Tax Advantaged Loss Harvesting” accounts were selected to follow the movement of the broader markets. Over time, the markets, as they had historically, would buoy Ballmer’s investments upward. When, inevitably, some of the stocks underperformed or the whole market dipped, Goldman was ready to pounce, selling off the losers and replacing them with equivalents.

Sometimes, the replacements were nearly identical securities, as with Shell and BHP. More often, they were not. But well-tuned software could easily find the right stocks to keep the accounts tracking the market. His losses secured, Ballmer was ready to catch the bounce back.

Over and over, Ballmer sold and bought stocks in roughly equivalent amounts, as on that July day, when he swapped around $200 million worth. A month later, he did it again, landing at least $23 million in tax-reducing losses. Similar efforts that December brought $26 million more.

ProPublica estimates that from 2014 through 2018, Ballmer was able to generate tax losses totaling $579 million without changing his investment portfolio in a meaningful way. The tax savings from these losses amount to at least $138 million.

The scale of Goldman’s feat was remarkable, but Ballmer was just one client pursuing such a strategy. And Goldman was just part of an industry that helps the ultrawealthy report billions in losses — and save billions in potential taxes — even as their fortunes rise.

ProPublica was able to reconstruct the tax-loss strategies of scores of the nation’s wealthiest people, including Ballmer and Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, using a trove of IRS data that has been the basis for “The Secret IRS Files” series. This trove includes not only some two decades of tax returns for thousands of the nation’s wealthiest citizens but also voluminous records of their trading.

After inquiries by ProPublica, Goldman said it would halt transactions like Ballmer’s Shell and BHP trades. Goldman conducted a review, according to a statement by the bank, and found that a “very small percentage” of its “tax investment solutions” trades were “inadvertently made in a manner inconsistent with our strategy.” The bank said it strives “to provide best-in-class investment advice to clients, consistent with both the letter and the spirit of all applicable tax laws and regulations.”

A Ballmer spokesperson said: “Steve takes his responsibility to pay taxes very seriously. Goldman Sachs has just provided Steve with corrected loss reporting information for prior years. Steve will amend his filings and pay any associated tax, interest or penalty promptly.”

But, by Goldman’s own description, it is halting only a narrow slice of its loss-generating trades — the ones involving two kinds of stock from the same company. The bank will continue its broader practice of finding similar stocks that achieve the same effect.

Goldman’s ability to deliver tax losses to its clients won’t be significantly curtailed. That’s because over the past 25 years, investing has undergone a transformation that’s made the law against wash sales toothless. Improved computing, new financial products, cheaper trading costs and a shift away from picking stocks to passively tracking the broader market are the main ingredients of the change.

Asset managers have used these advances to forge loss-harvesting accounts that boast hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. What the law sought to prevent — generating a tax loss without a substantial change in the investment — is now commonplace.

That ability is available even for small-time investors, who can mimic the sorts of techniques used by Goldman on their own or opt for products offered by mass-market brokerages such as Vanguard and Charles Schwab. But relatively few Americans have stocks or mutual funds outside of tax-protected retirement accounts, meaning most can’t employ the strategy.

It is the wealthiest who benefit most. The losses can be used to erase an unlimited amount of investment gains. Someone like Ballmer can easily deploy $100 million in losses to cancel out a $100 million gain from selling some of his vast Microsoft holdings. It’s a very different story when it comes to wages and other forms of income, of which only $3,000 can be offset. On average, only the top 0.001% of taxpayers made a majority of their income through investment gains in 2018, according to public IRS data.

Those gains, like many aspects of wealthy Americans’ tax returns, are usually the result of careful planning. Since, in the U.S. system, gains aren’t taxed until they’re sold, even the richest Americans can have years where they owe no tax at all.

The story is exactly the opposite with investment losses. From 2014 to 2018, Ballmer grew $22 billion richer, a fact that doesn’t appear on his tax returns. Meanwhile, Goldman made sure that even momentary losses were listed by the thousands.

For the rich, the “tax system is sort of like a rigged coin,” said David Schizer, a tax expert and professor at Columbia Law School: “If you win, you get to keep all of it, but if you lose, you can pass some of those losses on to the government.” The wash sale rule, he said, is easily skirted by “well-advised taxpayers.”

IRS data shows how widespread the use of investment losses is among the richest Americans. In the U.S., short-term gains, those sold less than a year after buying, are taxed at about twice the rate (around 40% for the top bracket) as long-term gains. That makes short-term losses more valuable since they reduce this higher tax rate income. In 2018, almost two-thirds of Americans with income over $10 million reported net short-term losses. That was the highest share of any income slice; with more income, counterintuitively, came more losses — at least, on their taxes. Meanwhile, long-term losses were rare for them.

Take a look at the taxes of Jim Walton, the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and the 10th-wealthiest American, and you’ll see years of short-term losses, thanks to a tax-loss harvesting account at Northern Trust, a bank that specializes in managing the assets of the rich. (A representative for Walton declined to comment.) From 2014 to 2018, Walton grew $10 billion richer, according to Forbes, but reported only $111 million in long-term gains on his taxes. Since his losses easily overwhelmed those gains, he paid no taxes on them at all.

In November 1920, a reader of The Wall Street Journal identified as R.H.T. wrote in with a question. It was a time with parallels to today: The stock market, after reaching highs amid a pandemic (then the Spanish flu), had plummeted. R.H.T.’s portfolio had fallen about $50,000 ($750,000 in current dollars).

“I do not want to sell these stocks at the present market,” wrote R.H.T. “Would it be legal for me to sell these stocks and deduct the loss from this year’s income, even though I bought them in again the same day?” Yes, the Journal responded, the transaction was permitted under the law.

“Basically, the strategy went viral,” said Lawrence Zelenak, a law professor at Duke Law School, and author of a history of the early income tax.

Lawmakers decided to do something about “evasion through the medium of wash sales,” as a 1921 Senate conference report put it. They passed a law that barred taking a tax deduction if, within either 30 days before or 30 days after a sale, an investor bought a security that was “substantially identical” to the one sold.

In the following decades, investors still found ways to collect losses that would reduce their taxes. Often, the volume of selling at year-end was enough to temporarily depress stock prices.

But with the wash sale rule in effect, there were real risks to what was often known as “tax-loss selling.” Investors could sell their losers and try to pick stocks with better prospects. That, as The New York Times reported in 1983, often led to “regret” when an abandoned stock went to the moon. If investors wanted to stick with a stock, they’d have to work around the 60-day limitation. That meant either buying the same stock 30 days before they sold (called “doubling up”) or after. Both options carried danger. If the stock continued to tank while they were doubled up, their losses were compounded, and if the stock boomed before they could buy back in, they missed out.

In the mid-1990s, amid a historic market ascent, new strategies were forged to serve a new generation of superrich Americans. Asset managers began to emphasize post-tax returns. “Tax-aware investing is the challenge of the moment,” wrote Jean Brunel, the chief investment officer of JP Morgan’s global private bank, in the journal Trusts and Estates in 1997. The “tax-sheltering volatility” of stock movements, he explained, presented a “free option” to investment managers, who should “make a greater effort to identify ‘harvestable’ tax losses.”

Enabling this new “tax-loss harvesting” was a shift away from stock picking and toward passive products, such as funds that track the S&P 500. The wash sale rule still foreclosed easy solutions to the problem of replacing a specific stock. But replacing an investment in something as broad as the S&P 500 with another similar product became increasingly simple. As the Times reported in 1998, “it is getting easier for investors to find a close double for almost any portfolio.”

Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which emerged in the ’90s, fit this purpose perfectly. Unlike mutual funds, they could be traded like stocks, making them easier to use in loss-harvesting transactions.

Consider a trade by one billionaire in the summer of 2015. Markets had dropped after troubles in the Chinese economy, providing a loss-harvesting opportunity for investors with exposure to Asia.

Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, which a year before had been sold to Facebook for $19 billion, was one of those investors. He owned shares of Vanguard’s emerging markets ETF, which tracks an index of companies in China and elsewhere.

At the end of August 2015, according to ProPublica’s IRS data, Acton sold $17 million in shares, resulting in a loss of $2.9 million. The same day, he bought $17 million worth of the emerging markets ETF offered by Blackrock.

The two funds have only minor differences, with large holdings in many of the same Chinese companies. Unsurprisingly, the two funds perform similarly.

When emerging markets fell even further toward the end of the year, Acton did the same deal in reverse: He sold Blackrock and bought back into Vanguard. That allowed him to bank another $600,000 in tax losses.

In 2015, well over 100 wealthy Americans in ProPublica’s database switched from one company’s emerging markets ETF to another to collect tax losses.

Asked about loss-harvesting transactions, Acton told ProPublica, “To be honest I’m not really aware of any events like that.”

“Broadly my wealth is managed by a wealth management firm and they manage all the day to day transactions,” Acton, who has donated to ProPublica, added in a brief exchange over the messaging app Signal, where he is now interim CEO. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Why was Acton’s trade, and the many others like it, not a wash sale?

In theory, the stocks inside two different funds could overlap so much that the IRS might deem them “substantially identical” and thus disallow any tax loss on such a trade.

In practice, however, there is only one scenario in which the wash sale rule is consistently enforced. IRS regulations require brokerages to mark a trade as a wash sale if, in the 60-day period around the sale, the investor buys, in the exact same account, the exact same security (with the same ID, called a CUSIP number). The amount of the forbidden loss is then noted on a form, called a 1099-B, that brokerages send to the IRS each year to detail stock trades.

Beyond that, the IRS has provided no clear guidelines. Instead, the agency has commented on only a few little-used scenarios, while directing taxpayers to “consider all the facts and circumstances” of a trade. Is it OK to swap Vanguard’s ETF tracking the S&P 500 for Blackrock’s version of the same index? Some tax experts say yes, some say no. Besides the IRS’ vague guidance, there are few relevant court cases, and all are decades old. (The IRS declined to comment.)

ProPublica’s analysis of its IRS data found dozens of examples of taxpayers switching between funds with the exact same holdings. More common were switches like Acton’s between funds with significant, but incomplete, overlap.

The clearest sign that these sorts of trades do not, in the IRS’ eyes, violate the wash sale rule is that ProPublica could find no example of the agency challenging one.

In fact, audits very rarely target wash sales at all, attorneys who’ve represented wealthy taxpayers in IRS disputes told ProPublica. “I have had only one audit on this,” said Bryan Skarlatos, a partner with Kostelanetz & Fink, and it was “for a trader who totally screwed up.”

As popular as ETFs are for harvesting losses, the premier vehicle for delivering tax losses to wealthy clients is another innovation of the 1990s: the separately managed account.

In these accounts, managers make decisions about what to buy as they would for a fund, but the investor owns the stocks directly. When the account mimics an index like the S&P 500, it’s called direct indexing. Such products have boomed in recent years. A 2021 report by the consulting firm Cerulli Associates estimated that $362 billion was invested in direct-indexing accounts, most for “high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients.” The main use of such accounts are for “tax optimization,” the report said.

The advantage, as Goldman Sachs explained in a recent promotional document, is that “with an ETF, an investor may only harvest a loss when the entire index is down.” But if you own the components of an index, now you have hundreds of stocks that might dip.

The year 2017, for example, was great for investors, with the U.S. market up around 20% and world markets up even more. There were no obvious, broad dips to exploit — but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs from delivering big tax losses to its clients.

That year, Ballmer’s direct indexing accounts, which tracked both U.S. and world indexes, posted over $100 million in tax losses through 15 loss-harvesting transactions. At the same time, the performance of those indexes in 2017 meant that, overall, Ballmer’s accounts were actually way up.

In a direct indexing account, you don’t need to own all the stocks that compose the index, and it doesn’t really matter which specific stocks they are. Instead, what matters is that the collection of stocks closely tracks the index’s movements. This is achieved via a “thoughtful sampling of the underlying positions,” as a team of Morgan Stanley wealth managers put it in a recent issue of an investment journal. When it comes time to harvest tax losses, the manager sells off the losing stocks and then chooses replacements with the aim of continuing to match the index.

Tax records show that Goldman Sachs routinely made trades for direct-indexing clients like Ballmer that included the sale and purchase of the same company’s stock. These companies offered two classes of common stock, and when Goldman traded from one class to another, it was not required to flag them as wash sales.

Often, these two classes of common stock were distinguished only by the right to vote on things like directors and shareholder initiatives. The sports apparel company Under Armour, for instance, offers a Class A voting stock and Class C nonvoting stock. The two classes command a slightly different price, with the Class A shares usually trading at a premium of around 10%. But the prices move in sync, making them nearly perfect loss-harvesting replacements.

As part of larger rebalancing trades, Goldman clients also swapped other voting-nonvoting pairs from companies like Discovery, Twenty-First Century Fox and Liberty Global.

Shell and BHP, both part of Ballmer’s loss-harvesting trade in 2015, each offered shares based in two different countries. Each company viewed these two versions as interchangeable in value. In fact, in 2022, both companies chose to merge their two classes into a single stock on a 1:1 basis.

ProPublica’s IRS data contained several hundred examples of these kinds of trades by Goldman clients dating back as long as 10 years ago. The records show instances of these sorts of trades through other brokerages, but the overwhelming majority were made through Goldman.

Goldman said that the impact of the now-halted trades on its clients would be “minimal,” and that it would “cover any costs they incur” as a result of disallowed losses. “We have also initiated a discussion with the IRS and will address any questions they may have on this matter,” the statement said. Generally, only returns filed within the past three years would be subject to possible audit.

At wealth management firms, loss harvesting accounts are often designed to work in tandem with other services, as a kind of knob to turn up or down, depending on the need.

At Iconiq Capital, this is part of an approach that goes far beyond investing to things like managing personal staff. In 2007, the firm’s co-founder, a former Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley banker named Divesh Makan, told a wealth management magazine that he’d even organized clients’ parties and helped find possible marriage partners. Clients, he said, “want us to look after them these days.”

The San Francisco-based firm manages about $13.2 billion for its 337 high-net-worth clients, according to a regulatory filing. Among them is Facebook co-founder Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s old roommate at Harvard. Since the mid-2000s, when Moscovitz’s six-figure Facebook salary made up almost all his income — he’s now worth more than $7 billion — his financial life has grown considerably more complicated. After leaving Facebook, Moskovitz co-founded Asana, a software company, in 2009, but his stake in Facebook still accounted for the vast majority of his wealth. He set about changing that. From 2012 through 2018, he sold $3.6 billion worth of his stock, funds that he, with Iconiq’s help, could then use for other investments.

One of those new ventures was a tax-loss generating account. In late 2012, Moskovitz harvested his first tax losses, according to ProPublica’s analysis. It was a tiny haul by the standards of a billionaire, just $309,000, but it was a start. By 2013, he’d put over $100 million into the account, and his tax losses began to swell. In December of that year, he sold off 153 stocks to produce his first million-dollar loss.

Asset managers recommend adding to a direct indexing account over time, since it ensures there are always new losses to harvest. That’s the strategy Moskovitz followed, every few months seeding $13 million here, $25 million there. As the account grew, so did the tax losses.

Although ProPublica could not determine which index Moskovitz’s account tracked, the transactions followed the telltale pattern of direct indexing. In March 2016, for instance, Moskovitz sold off a basket of 85 stocks worth $27 million and bought a collection worth about the same amount. The two baskets were stuffed with stocks that had performed very similarly in the previous year, according to ProPublica’s analysis. The trade delivered $6.2 million in losses.

Meanwhile, Iconiq arranged other investments for Moskovitz, and the point of these was simply to make money. Most of the money Iconiq manages is in the form of venture capital, private equity and hedge funds, and Moskovitz bought large shares of partnerships run by the firm with names like Iconiq Strategic Partners and Iconiq Access. From 2014 to 2018, Iconiq entities sent over $200 million to Moskovitz.

The two types of investments were complementary, with the direct indexing account helping to blunt the tax sting from that income. Over the same period, Moskovitz’s dozens of loss-harvesting trades resulted in $84 million in tax losses. That saved him at least $20 million in taxes, ProPublica estimates.

For Zuckerberg, too, Iconiq provided the same twin services of providing and erasing income. His Iconiq investments earned him $88 million during the five-year period, while his tax-loss harvesting trades produced losses of $34 million.

Representatives for Iconiq and Moskovitz, who has tweeted that he’s “in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy,” did not respond to written questions. A representative for Zuckerberg said, “Mark has always paid the taxes he is required to pay.”

To prevent the wealthy from easily skirting the wash sale rule, Congress would need to change the law, experts said. One fundamental, but long-shot, reform would be to automatically tax the annual fluctuations of investments’ value (called “marking to market”). That would prevent the wealthy from being able to defer taxes on gains forever — and also render tax-loss harvesting unnecessary.

But even narrower changes could have an impact. Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center suggested a law aimed at how products like direct-indexing accounts are marketed: If an asset manager touted the ability to replace securities with positions that were economically the same, then those losses could be deemed wash sales. This, he said, wouldn’t be a major change, “but it might slow people down.”

Schizer, of Columbia Law School, suggested a more comprehensive reform: Congress should replace “substantially identical” with “substantially similar,” a phrase that is used in some other areas of tax law. That could rule out some of the most common harvesting moves, he said. The rule, he said, “ought to be updated to reflect how people invest today instead of how they invested 100 years ago.”
Methodology
Total Tax Losses Harvested

To calculate the total tax losses harvested for each taxpayer, we limited our analysis of 1099-B forms to days in which all the following conditions were true:At least 10 positions were sold that day.
Of those positions, at least 90% resulted in a loss.
The total losses from sales that day exceeded the total gains by a factor of 10 or more.

The purpose of these limitations was to exclude days that did not appear to be motivated by harvesting losses. The method effectively identified sales from direct-indexing accounts, which tend to involve dozens or even hundreds of positions, but did exclude some loss-harvesting transactions that involved only a few positions — for instance, selling a couple large ETF holdings. As a result, these are conservative estimates that likely understate total losses. The totals shown in the story represent the net losses accumulated from loss-harvesting days in 2014-18.

Steve Ballmer’s estimate uses a different methodology to calculate his total losses. For an unknown reason, ProPublica’s IRS database did not have information about Ballmer’s 2018 trades, so we based his totals for 2014-18 on the Schedule D forms from his tax returns. Our analysis of his 1099-Bs from other years showed that his direct-indexing accounts at Goldman Sachs dominated his short-term trading results, as represented on his tax returns. These he noted on his Schedule D, in the field reserved for trades that had been reported on a 1099-B form that included the basis. As a result, Ballmer’s total is the sum over 2014-18 for short-term trades that included a 1099-B form with the basis reported.

ProPublica provided detailed descriptions of our loss calculations to all the individuals named in this article, and none contested our totals or methodology.
Tax Savings

Since both Ballmer and Moskovitz did not have extensive net capital gains from short-term trading during the periods we studied, we opted for a simple method for calculating their tax savings: 23.8% of losses, representing the long-term capital gains rate plus the net investment income tax. The tax benefit of a harvested loss can be diminished if stock is sold in the future (given the lower basis). But Ballmer, Moskovitz and other billionaires we analyzed held on to their gains, and there’s good reason to think they will hold on to them indefinitely.

Survey identifies a new disturbing trend in the Republican Party's base

Maya Boddie, Alternet
February 10, 2023

Washington, DC - January 6, 2021: Pro-Trump protester with Christian Cross seen during rally around at Capitol building (Photo: Lev Radin/Shutterstock)

A new national survey conducted by the Public Research Institute and Brookings Institution found that a majority of Republicans in the U.S. "are sympathetic to" Christian nationalism, The Guardian reports.

The survey finds more than 50 percent of Republicans identify as one of two groups, showing that 29 percent “of white evangelical Protestants qualify as Christian nationalism adherents,” and 35 percent “qualify as sympathizers.”

The Guardian reports:

The survey comes as the US experiences an increasing number of Americans shifting away from religious affiliations, as well as a declining number of churches across the country. Data released last year by the Pew Research Center found that Christians in the US could be a minority group by 2070.

Additionally, the survey shows that 50 percent of Christian nationalism supporters and 38 percent of sympathizers favor the “idea of an authoritarian leader ‘who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.’”

Last year, NBC aired a clip of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voicing her stance on the ideology.

"We need to be the party of nationalism," she said. "I'm a Christian and I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists."

Around the same time, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and potential 2024 GOP presidential nominee urged a private Christian college audience to "put on the full armor of God. The Tampa Bay Times reports DeSantis "is increasingly using biblical references in speeches that cater to those who see policy fights through a morality lens."

Futhermore, in the same year, Politico and The University of Maryland also conducted a survey raising questions around Christian nationalism to U.S. Republicans. The survey found 61 percent of Republicans would be in "favor" of "the United States officially declaring the United States to be a Christian nation."

Building on that data, PRRI and Brookings Institution's survey now finds 57 percent "of Christian nationalism adherents disagree that white supremacy is a major problem in the country," while 70 percent "reject the idea that historical discrimination contributes to current challenges faced by Black Americans."

Additionally, 23 percent of Christian nationalism supporters "believe the stereotype that Jewish people in the United States hold too many positions of power," while 67 percent "say that people from some Muslim-majority countries should be banned from entering the U.S."

As political violence increases in the U.S., supporters of Christian nationalism “are nearly seven times more likely than” non-supporters to believe “true patriots might have to resort to violence to save our country."

The Southern Poverty Law Center asserts "the [white nationalist] movement’s energy has shifted into more mainstream spaces in the aftermath of Jan. 6."


Of the population who agrees with resorting to said violence, the survey finds 12 percent “personally threatened to use or actually used a gun, knife or other weapon on someone in the past few years.”

White nationalism gets a hearing in the Republican House
Quentin Young, Colorado Newsline
February 11, 2023

Lauren Boebert (R-CO) walks to the House Chamber during the third day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Xenophobia is the original offense of the Trump era.

The former president launched his campaign in 2015 by saying of Mexican migrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” It was a gross mischaracterization of facts, but the nativist message resonated with a Republican base primed by far-right media figures to despise non-white immigrants.

When President Joe Biden came to office and Democrats took majorities in Congress, the excesses of xenophobia in high office ebbed, even as they flowed apace on Tucker Carlson’s show and other conservative hubs of hate.

But with Republicans back in the majority in the U.S. House, the anti-immigrant movement has found new outlets of expression in the federal government. And this week it got ugly.

The U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing Tuesday at times sounded more like a bile-brimming Unite the Right rally than a congressional proceeding. Republican committee members were at pains to dispel the notion that the hearing was anything but an honest examination of the “border crisis,” given that it was preceded by justified protests — not least from the ranking Democrat — that the event was really a white nationalist promotional appearance.

But the Republicans couldn’t conceal their true intent. In practiced Trumpist fashion, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s question time with a pair of U.S. Customs and Border Protection chiefs, who were hauled in as witnesses, was filthy with xenophobic rhetoric. She cast migrants as “convicted criminals, terrorists, drug traffickers or even gang members.” And she asserted that Democrats intended it this way as a policy choice.

Yes, there is definitely a ‘replacement theory’ that’s going on right now.

– Rep. Lauren Boebert

This is the language of “replacement theory.” The racist conspiracy theory holds that accommodating immigration policies are part of a plot to replace white people in positions of power and culture. “The theory often uses martial and violent rhetoric of a migrant ‘invasion,'” the National Immigration Forum says.

Observe how that tracks with Boebert’s remarks.

“The truth is there is an invasion happening at our southern border … and it’s happening because Joe Biden invoked amnesty and changed the secure border policies that were working for our country,” she said, adding, referring to Democrats, “This is intentional. In fact their policy is a success, it’s not a failure because this is their intent.”

Quintessential replacement theory. And Boebert was hardly alone.

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia suggested that unaccompanied minors, the most vulnerable and desperate of migrants, were in fact budding violent gang members destined to murder Americans, and she referred to “the illegal invasion into our country that’s occurring every single day.”

“Joe Biden does have a plan. His plan is to deliberately open our borders and cede power to the cartels,” said Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. “Now why would Biden do this? Create chaos? Sow discord? … More Big Brother? More control? Even changing our culture?” He also made sure to refer to immigration at the southern border as an “invasion.”

Replacement theory can be traced back decades and even has antecedents in Hitler’s Germany and other hotbeds of false “white extinction” fears. But popularization of the modern American strain is often credited to Carlson and his daily white nationalist propaganda hour on Fox News known as “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

This once-fringe form of racist extremism is now taken for granted on the MAGA right. Sometimes its proponents dispense with dog whistles and are explicit in calling immigration a “replacement.”

“Yes, there is definitely a ‘replacement theory’ that’s going on right now,” Boebert said in one of several of her social media posts that discuss replacement or the “invasion.”

The nonprofit immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice has documented how numerous Republicans on the Oversight Committee have voiced white nationalist rhetoric. These include Chairman James Comer of Kentucky. The Biden administration has turned “the border patrol into the welcoming committee. They want more people to roll into the United States,” Comer said in December on Fox, according to the Daily Beast. “They believe this is part of their social equality campaign to fundamentally change America.”

Such replacement theory rhetoric kills people.

The mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas, was committed by a suspect who cited “great replacement” and a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The mass shooting in May in Buffalo, New York, was carried out by a suspect who wrote a 180-word document that rehearsed “great replacement” talking points. The racist conspiracy theory has inspired other mass shootings and other forms of violence.

Many observers, including migrant advocates, agree America’s immigration system is in crisis.

“What we are seeing on the southern border is a crisis, but it is not a crisis as our friends across the aisle would have us believe,” said Democratic Oversight Committee member Rep. Melanie Stansbury of border-state New Mexico. “It is truly a humanitarian crisis. And it is a crisis that has been manufactured, reproduced, over and over again, decade after decade, by inaction by this body.”

Immigration reform could include improved border security. But it should also increase resources for U.S. handling of vulnerable people who flee dangerous homelands to seek refuge in America, better serve the U.S. labor market, and do right by the undocumented children known as Dreamers. The one quality U.S. immigration policy should forswear is xenophobia.

When members of Congress amplify white nationalist goals, they put lives at risk, further polarize American society, and dishonor the country’s proud legacy as a beacon of freedom.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.