ALBERTA ELECTION

Why prominent Alberta conservatives are supporting Rachel Notley’s NDP

A combination photo of Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley, left, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith as they speak at an economic forum in Calgary, Alta., Tuesday, April 18, 2023.   (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh)

Moderate Alberta conservatives don’t recognize the party they were once so proud of under Danielle Smith’s leadership.

By Gillian Steward

Contributing Columnist
Tue., May 16, 2023

TORONTO STAR

I have lived in Alberta for a long time, through many elections — most of them easy conservative wins.

Conservatives were so sure of themselves they barely paid attention to opposition parties nipping at their heels. But this election is different. So different that some of those once confident conservatives are denouncing United Conservative Party (UPC) Leader Danielle Smith’s version of right-wing politics; some are even urging Albertans to vote for Rachel Notley’s NDP.

Take for example former Progressive Conservative MP Lee Richardson, a true blue conservative for decades. Before being elected as a Progressive Conservative MP he worked in Premier Peter Lougheed’s office. He was principal secretary to PC premier Alison Redford. But this year he organized a fundraiser for the NDP candidate in his constituency. Among those attending was Ron Ghitter, former Lougheed cabinet minister and PC Senator appointed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Tom Lukaszuk, another former PC cabinet minister, has been urging Albertans to vote NDP for months.

Ken Boessenkool, a well known Conservative strategist — he has worked with Preston Manning, Ralph Klein, Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day — told a Calgary Herald columnist that Smith “represents things that are not conservative. She represents things that will ultimately harm the party.”

Last week, Jeromy Farkas, a well-known Calgary conservative, former city councillor and a mayoralty candidate in 2021, levelled a blistering attack on Smith’s brand of conservatism: “What we are seeing right now, it’s serious and its dangerous,” he said on CBC Radio.

Farkas pointed out that even though conservatives are supposed to believe in the rule of law Smith has been picking and choosing what laws apply and shown that it’s OK for politicians to “meddle with prosecutors to help insider friends beat the rap.”

The UCP is a merger, engineered by Jason Kenney, of Alberta Progressive Conservatives and the more right-wing Wildrose Party. But many moderate conservatives were leery of the deal from the beginning because the Wildrosers seemed to have the upper hand.

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With Smith at the helm, the Wildrose faction is not only in control but has veered off into extremely radical territory.

What else do you call it when Smith proclaims that anti-vaxxers faced more discrimination than anyone in her lifetime?

Or when she says that the 75 per cent of Albertans who got vaccinated were akin to those who were swayed by Adolph Hitler?

Or when she says the Freedom Convoy’s blockade of the Alberta/U.S border was a win for Alberta?

Or when she takes a call from one of the most notorious blockaders and offers to talk to prosecutors about his upcoming court case?

And then there is her clueless babbling about health care when she was a talk show radio host. Such as physicians would provide better care if they knew the patient had personally paid for his or her services; hospitals should be contracted out; people shouldn’t need treatment for late stage cancer because there are so many ways to cure yourself at earlier stages of the disease.

Her ties to an activist group called Take Back Alberta (TBA) are also raising alarm. TBA was instrumental to her UCP leadership win and has taken over many UCP constituency associations. Its leader, David Parker, is anti-abortion and believes women should forgo careers in favour of raising children.

“You can vote your way into socialism,” Parker told a gathering in Grande Prairie recently. “You almost always have to shoot your way out.”

No wonder moderate conservatives don’t recognize the party they were once so proud of.

How many of them will stay home rather than vote, or vote NDP, is another question. But this election is so close, especially in Calgary where the NDP needs close to a sweep if they are to take up the reins of government.

In the end it may be these lifelong conservatives who tilt the election in the NDP’s favour.


Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based writer and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @GillianSteward

NDP’s Rachel Notley has to woo the same Conservative voters who chose her rival

ALANNA SMITH

GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED MAY 13, 2023

Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley campaigns in the election battleground of Calgary, on May 5

.TODD KOROL/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Hours before votes were tallied in the last two provincial elections, New Democratic Leader Rachel Notley stole a moment of calm on her best friend’s porch. In the neighbourhood of Old Strathcona, with hot tea in their hands, they sat in comfortable quiet or gossiped about the neighbours.

There was no talk of politics or what might happen that night – in 2015, a roaring victory; four years later, crushing defeat. Now, Ms. Notley is fighting to return to Alberta’s highest office, and she knows the odds aren’t on her side.

While polls for the May 29 election have the NDP and the United Conservative Party, led by Danielle Smith, within a razor-thin margin of one another, it’s almost unheard of, in any province, to be re-elected as premier after serving as the Official Opposition leader.Open this photo in gallery:

Rachel Notley on May 12.

TODD KOROL/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Political experts, however, say this election will not be won on policy but on a question of leadership. And Ms. Notley is the NDP’s best asset, often polling more popular than her party. She bites back at rivals who label her anti-pipeline or a puppet of her federal counterpart Jagmeet Singh and Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “Look at my record,” she says time and time again – a record that includes accomplishing what no other Alberta leader has done since Ralph Klein resigned in 2006: serve a full term.

“The NDP’s capacity to offer up a leader who people have seen in government, who people have seen in Opposition, who people have seen in political life for 15 years – it does offer that predictability and stability that I think a lot of people are looking for,” she said.

Reflecting on past elections, Ms. Notley said the 2015 race against the Progressive Conservatives led by Jim Prentice focused on how each leader would shelter Alberta from a nosediving economy. After winning that election and governing through a tough four years in which the province experienced a prolonged dip on the resource roller coaster, the NDP was forced to, in her words, “play defence” in 2019. That contest was a sharp clash of personalities between the steady and likeable Ms. Notley and the political machine that was Jason Kenney.

But the contrast between leaders is even more profound this time, said Ms. Notley, who calls Ms. Smith a risky and unpredictable choice.

There’s also an intensity to this election that hasn’t been felt before, brought on by the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, a health care system in collapse and an increasingly divisive society, said Michele Jackson, who has been friends with Ms. Notley for 20 years and has served in a variety of roles for the provincial NDP for just as long.

She said it weighs on Ms. Notley – but is also the fuel that keeps the leader going.

A campaigner at heart, Ms. Notley knows how to stay grounded during the gruelling 28-day election crusade. She goes on a daily run – a habit that replaced smoking cigarettes in her 30s – listens to music or flips through pages of a book during her downtime (there’s not much)

“Head down. Get it done,” is how Ms. Notley tackles each day. “When you finally pull your head up again and look around, you’ll be very surprised by what you’ve been able to achieve.”

Ms. Notley, 59, was born in Edmonton but grew up in rural Alberta near Fairview, and worked as a labour lawyer before entering politics. Her dad, the late Grant Notley, was NDP leader for 16 years – a role she would take on in October, 2014, during her second term as an MLA.

During her rookie term, she was one of only two sitting members of the NDP. Ms. Notley told the Edmonton Journal that she drove then-leader Brian Mason “bananas” with questions on her first day. “He finally had to kick me out of the office to calm me down.”

Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley is hitting the campaign trail hard in the last two weeks before the provincial election.

TODD KOROL/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Ms. Notley was a natural at politics from the moment she was elected, said Ms. Jackson, who dismisses any notion that her adeptness was the product of growing up in a political household. “It was innate.”

Still, 15 years after Ms. Notley first took her seat in the Alberta Legislature, she says those nerves of the early days sometimes creep back in when she steps up to a podium to give a speech.

So what’s the trick to getting rid of those butterflies? Practice. And that is something she learned from her father.

“My dad, who was widely known as an exceptionally eloquent speaker, actually suffered from the same challenges and used to have to practise, practise, practise, practise for hours in front of a mirror,” Ms. Notley said.

“Get used to something, push yourself past your comfort zone, and then ultimately you can become comfortable.”

During Ms. Notley’s victory speech after becoming NDP Leader, she told Albertans they would need to choose between the past and the future in the next election. “Let’s not repeat history. Let’s make history,” she said. The NDP had just four seats going into the 2015 provincial race.

In the final week of that campaign, it became clear the party needed to plan a victory celebration, Ms. Jackson said. “Everyone’s flying in a million different directions trying to organize an event with all these people and Rachel’s going, ‘Holy crap – I’m going to be premier.’”

The NDP won a majority government with 53 seats, ending a 44-year Progressive Conservative dynasty and putting into power a left-leaning party for the first time in nearly 80 years.

Ms. Notley governed through a recession, roadblocks to pipeline development and slumping oil prices that wiped out tens of thousands of jobs. The NDP created a carbon tax, raised corporate income taxes and introduced farm safety legislation that brought tractor-led protests to the legislature. It also raised the minimum wage, piloted a $25-a-day daycare program and played an integral role in getting Ottawa to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

But then came the 2019 election against the newly formed UCP. The NDP lost in a landslide, reduced to just 24 seats.

It was then that Ms. Notley contemplated hanging up her orange Fluevogs and leaving politics. It was Mr. Kenney that pulled her back, she said.

“If he hadn’t decided to demonize everybody who disagreed with him, then I may not have felt the need to stay. He got my back up.”

After four years in opposition, Ms. Notley now faces a tough task. In order to secure victory this time, she must attract not only undecided voters but conservatives who once supported her old rival.

She argues that Ms. Smith has abandoned the values of progressive conservatives and is deeply connected to the fringe elements of the conservative movement. And with a parade of old videos resurfacing – and Ms. Smith’s past statements haunting her campaign – it’s a message Ms. Notley hammers home whenever she can.

With a little more than two weeks left until election day, Ms. Notley said the focus is getting the word out to as many voters as possible.

Then, with the flurry of campaigning behind her once again, she will steal a few moments before polls close on her best friend’s porch, to await what’s to come.

Naheed Nenshi: In Alberta, will 'good

 enough' be good enough for Rachel Notley

 and the NDP?


Private health care fears

Naheed Nenshi
CTV
May 12, 2023

It must be hard to be a New Democrat in Alberta these days. With an election three weeks away, they have raised a historic amount of money. Their leader, Rachel Notley, is popular and widely admired. They have solid policy, including an economic plan written by the most well-known and respected economist in the province.

On the other side of the aisle, the premier, Danielle Smith, presides over a government that could be politely described as a train wreck. She was elected with barely half of the votes cast in her party’s selection. Even her most ardent supporters struggle to name any of her accomplishments, and her opponents have no end of scandals and failures to list. Smith struggles to form coherent answers on the questions on the minds of Albertans, and when she speaks off the cuff, she invariably has to apologize for her “imprecise language” (the less charitable might call it “lying”).

For example, at a recent Calgary Economic Development event, both Smith and Notley were asked what their plans were for the revitalization of downtown Calgary. Notley responded with her plans to create a new post-secondary campus, highlighted what her government did when they were in power, and pledged to match the City of Calgary’s funding for office conversions – long the largest ask from the mayor and council.

Smith, for her part, started by talking about highways and rural Wheatland County, before eventually circling back to her government’s plan on addiction recovery (which is admittedly quite good, though it’s not clear whether they will force unwilling people into mandatory addiction treatment).

She finally achieved some applause from the business crowd when she scooped herself and pledged government support to a new arena, which she announced to great fanfare the following week (though it’s far from clear this is a slam dunk -- support for public funding remains tenuous, and Smith again spoke too much when she implied that this was all the funding Calgary would get for downtown revitalization).

Given all of this, one would expect that the NDP would be far ahead in the race, and that Notley would be wondering how much Jason Kenney and Smith have renovated her old office.

Instead, every poll has the NDP only slightly ahead, but their vote is relatively inefficient and there is a bit of historical gerrymandering in favour of rural and small-city Alberta (this isn’t as bad as city-dwellers sometimes believe – Calgary and Edmonton account for about 58% of the population and 52% of the seats, but this could make a difference in a very close election). Most commentators, therefore, give Smith and her United Conservatives a small edge as the election kicks into high gear.

How is this possible?

Some credit goes to Smith herself. For all her faults, she is an appealing communicator with an effortless style, honed through many years in front of microphones and cameras. She has tried for a Ralph Klein vibe, admitting she’s not perfect and that she’s learning on the job.

Part of it has to do with the increasing hardening of Conservative parties across Canada and around the world. They have been able to activate a group of people who didn’t traditionally vote in large numbers: those who are skeptical of government and who welcome angry attacks on institutions. In short, they are happy to burn it down rather than build it up. Since 2015 or so, activists have done a great job turning on people who are typically skeptical of all government and never vote, turning them into dedicated voters. Any glance at political Twitter shows that these folks, while a minority, speak with a loud voice.

  Full coverage of the Alberta 2023 election

Part of this is the NDP’s own fault. While they have worked very hard to court Calgary voters, it’s not clear what, if anything, they have done since their defeat in 2019 (some would argue since their victory in 2015) to work with rural voters or those in the mid-sized cities. For example, they won both seats in Red Deer in 2015 on a vote split, and the two current UCP MLAs are the widely disliked minister of education -- and a maverick MLA from the party’s right flank with a habit of saying strange things and travelling when he shouldn’t. Nonetheless, if the NDP has been doing ground-level work to shore up their support there, I haven’t seen it and every commentator puts those seats out of reach for them.

The most important factor, though, is electoral history and the electorate’s tolerance for many shenanigans from Conservative politicians. Conservative parties of one stripe or another have ruled Alberta for all but four of the last 72 years, and the 44-year reign of the Progressive Conservatives is instructive. Peter Lougheed built a giant tent, and most issues were settled behind closed doors, within the party caucus. To put it in modern national terms, the PC party would have included both Pierre Poilievre and Chrystia Freeland, with Lougheed himself firmly on the party’s progressive side.

In the early 2000s, the more right-wing members of the party formed the Wildrose Alliance, which was led in its heyday by Danielle Smith. Rather than accept this and attempt to target the majority of Albertans, who identify as centrists, the PC party longed to bring its erstwhile relatives home, despite much advice telling them that the Wildrose was a handy closet in which to keep their more extreme cousins. Former Premier Jim Prentice, although well ahead in the polls at the time, convinced Smith and the majority of her caucus to cross the floor, with disastrous results and an election loss to the NDP.

Jason Kenney then returned from Ottawa to orchestrate a grand family reunion, which turned out to be a de facto takeover of the PC party by the more radical Wildrose elements. One would think Lougheed would not be comfortable, and maybe not be welcome, in this version of his party.

Through all of this, Albertans remained forgiving. Successive PC governments, with all their foibles and quirks, were generally pretty competent, and the wealth of the province covered up a lot of errors. Alberta was by far the wealthiest province, with the lowest taxes (albeit with the highest provincial spending per capita, thanks to oil and gas revenues). Quality of life remains extraordinarily high, and public services are as good as anywhere else in Canada for the most part.

So, Albertans have been very tolerant of foibles and missteps, as long as they received competent government. Smith, despite showing few signs of competence, benefits from this halo of history. Even when a recording surfaced of her making odious comparisons of vaccinated people with Hitler supporters, and saying she was boycotting wearing a poppy as a result (no, it makes no sense; just bear with me), the national B’nai Brith and Royal Canadian Legion strongly condemned her comments. The local Calgary Jewish community, for its part, issued only a mild statement suggesting they didn’t want to become a political wedge.

Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley attends a campaign rally in Calgary, Alta., 

Thursday, May 11, 2023. Albertans go to the polls on May 29. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

And that’s Notley’s problem, and likely her largest frustration. She must be perfect. She must run the table in every competitive riding to have a chance of winning government. She can’t afford a single stumble. Smith, on the other hand, merely has to be good enough. She doesn’t have to talk about how she’ll make things better, only that she won’t make them worse.

Albertans have a chance on May 29 to break a habit, to tell the Conservatives that they have to earn their votes, that they have to stop speaking only to the radical fringe. A number of prominent conservatives, including a former deputy premier, have called upon Albertans to put their party in the penalty box for a while, even to “lend” their vote to Notley and the NDP. We’ll see if citizens take on that challenge or if they settle for good enough.

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Explainer

The Guardian and slavery: what did the research find and what happens next?

The Scott Trust has apologised and announced a programme of restorative justice after identifying the Guardian founders’ links to transatlantic slavery

The Scott Trust commissioned the research in 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images/Hubbard & Mix, photographer

Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery

Aamna Mohdin 

Community affairs correspondent
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 28 Mar 2023 

What is the Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report?

It is the result of independent academic research commissioned by the Scott Trust, the Guardian’s owners.

The research began by investigating historical links between John Edward Taylor, the journalist who founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821, and transatlantic slavery – as well as researching the investments and business activities of the 11 other men who loaned money to start the newspaper.

What did the research discover about John Edward Taylor?

The review found that Taylor had links to slavery through partnerships in cotton manufacturing and merchant firms that imported raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.

How did they find this?

Researchers identified links to plantations in the coastal islands and Lowcountry regions of South Carolina and Georgia after reviewing an invoice book showing that his firm, Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, had received cotton from the Sea Islands region of the US, which included the initials and names of plantation owners and enslavers.

What about the Guardian’s early financial backers?

Nine of the 11 men who loaned Taylor money to found the Manchester Guardian had similar economic links to transatlantic slavery through their commercial interests in Manchester’s cotton and textiles industry.

One of these men, Sir George Philips, was an enslaver of people as co-owner of a sugar plantation in Hanover, Jamaica. In 1835, Philips unsuccessfully attempted to claim compensation from the British government for the loss of his human “property”. However, his business partner’s claim for 108 people enslaved on the plantation was successful.

Researchers were unable to find more information in the stipulated timeframe on two of the backers, although they are likely to have been cotton merchants.

Did the research identify the enslaved Africans whose labour enriched the Guardian’s founders?

The third stage of research focused in part on investigating links with plantations in the south-eastern US and Jamaica, and identified some of the enslaved people connected to the Guardian founders.

Researchers were able to find records from 1862 with the names of people enslaved on a Sea Islands plantation that had sold cotton to Taylor’s firm. They include 90-year-old Toby, 50-year-old Clarinda, 36-year-old Billy and seven-year-old Nancy, who were enslaved on the Spanish Wells Plantation on Hilton Head Island.

Records from the Success plantation in Jamaica, partly owned by George Philips, had slightly more information on enslaved Africans, including details about the incredible life of one resistance fighter. Granville, who was enslaved on the Success plantation, was a freedom fighter who was persecuted for his involvement in Jamaica’s Baptist war from 1831 to 1832. He was one of 60,000 enslaved Jamaicans to take part in the uprising.

The uprising, also known as the Christmas rebellion, is considered the largest slave rebellion in the West Indies and played an important role in the abolition of British slavery.

Why did the Scott Trust commission this research?

The review came in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, during which a record-breaking number of people protested in the US, UK and around the world after the murder of George Floyd.

In the UK, the tearing down of Bristol’s Edward Colston statue prompted many organisations to examine their own histories regarding transatlantic slavery and colonialism. The Guardian was at the forefront of reporting on this extraordinary movement, but it could not do so without looking at itself as well.
Who were the researchers involved?

The research was carried out in three stages, first by Dr Sheryllynne Haggerty and Dr Cassandra Gooptar, then of the University of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery, and later by Gooptar and Prof Trevor Burnard of the University of Hull’s Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation.

How did the Guardian respond to the research findings?

The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice. The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m, with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders.

What is restorative justice?

The term “restorative justice”, which is often used interchangeably with “reparations”, is a process that focuses on repairing harm. The practice seeks to facilitate an acknowledgement of the harm caused, collaboration on how to make things right, which can include compensation, and healing.

What will this programme do in the regions identified?

The restorative justice fund will support community projects and programmes in the south-eastern US Sea Islands and Jamaica over the next 10 years. The plans will be subject to consultation with reparations experts and representatives of communities in the Sea Islands region and Jamaica and will be overseen by a programme director.

What else will it do?

The fund will increase the scope and ambition of Guardian reporting on the Caribbean, South America and Africa, and on Black communities in the UK and US (up to 12 new editorial roles within the Guardian).

It will also expand the Guardian Foundation’s industry-leading journalism training bursary scheme. The Scott Trust bursary currently funds three journalism masters courses and paid training placements at GNM each year for aspiring journalists in the UK from underrepresented backgrounds. The additional funding will create three new places each year for Black prospective journalists in the UK, and create equivalent schemes in the Guardian’s offices in the US and Australia.

The programme will also explore and fund a new global news sector fellowship programme for mid-career Black journalists.

Will the restorative justice programme focus on increasing awareness of transatlantic slavery?

As part of the programme, the Scott Trust has also committed to helping improve public understanding of transatlantic slavery’s history and legacies in Manchester and Britain – and of the debates around reparations and restorative justice, through partnerships and community programmes, with a strong focus on Manchester, the city in which we were founded.

The Trust has announced it will also continue to fund research of these histories, through a three-year partnership with the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull.
How much money has the Guardian committed to this programme?

The Scott Trust expects to commit more than £10m to this programme of work over the next 10 years. The Scott Trust said it will announce a precise figure after consulting experts and community groups in the Sea Islands and Jamaica over the next 12 months.

What is Cotton Capital?

Cotton Capital is a new Guardian journalism project that will explore the findings of the research, as well as reporting on how transatlantic slavery shaped Manchester, Britain and the rest of the world. This continuing series will explore the history and its enduring legacies today.

A special Cotton Capital magazine will be published on Saturday 1 April. To order copies from the Guardian bookshop visit guardianbookshop.com/cotton-capital

SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for COTTON 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SLAVERY 

Greece’s general election: centre-right party far ahead as votes are counted

 

 

The New Democracy leader and PM, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, arrives at the party's headquarters in Athens on 21 May after the general election. Photograph: Louiza Vradi/Reuters

Prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s party on 41% share against Syriza on 20%, with more than 70% of votes counted

Helena Smith in Athens

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 21 May 2023

Greece’s general election has failed to produce a winner despite the centre-right party of incumbent prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis clinching 41% of the vote with more than 70% of ballots counted.

New Democracy was leading with a 20-point margin over the leftist main opposition Syriza party trailing at just over 20.07% – a difference rarely seen since the collapse in 1974 of military rule. Even in Crete, a socialist bastion, the rightwing party had fared unexpectedly well.

“It appears that New Democracy will have a very important victory,” said Giorgos Geropetritis, a former state minister and one of Mitsotakis’ closest colleagues. “The Greek people took stock of the past and voted for the future … it voted for future generations.” Other government officials described the result as a “spectacular victory”.


As Greece goes to the polls, scandal, disaster and apathy eat into PM’s lead

Under a new electoral system of proportional representation introduced under the former prime minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras, the victor had to secure about 46% of the vote to win an outright majority of 151 seats in the 300-member parliament. That, for any party, had been an impossible feat.

With more than 76% of the vote counted, smaller parties including MeRa 25, headed by the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, failed to pass the 3% threshold to get into parliament.

The inconclusive result will lay the ground for a fresh ballot in July if, as expected, efforts to form a coalition government break down. The second-round poll, expected to happen on 2 July, will take place under a semi-proportional representation system that would grant the first party 50 bonus seats if it won 40% of the vote.

On Monday, as protocol demands, Greece’s president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, will hand Mitsotakis a three-day mandate to explore the options of forming a coalition. Aides said the 55-year-old leader, who appeared in ebullient mood as he arrived at New Democracy’s headquarters in Athens, would prefer a repeat poll with Sunday’s result hardening his view that a single-party government was “more than possible”.

Throughout the electoral campaign he had insisted the country’s interests could only be served with “a strong majority” government that would enable him to press ahead with his reform programme during a second four-year term. If, as looks likely, Mitsotakis hands the mandate back to Sakellaropoulou, Syriza will follow suit although the exit poll results did not point to a coalition government being feasible, arithmetically, even if there was consensus among leftist parties to create such an administration.

It had been thought that the governing party’s popularity had been severely dented by a wiretapping scandal and devastating train crash – events that cast a pall over Mitsotakis, a former banker, personally.

But Syriza’s unexpectedly poor performance appeared to uphold the view that Greeks had voted for stability – despite many being perturbed by what has been perceived as democratic backsliding under the centre-right government, with the spy scandal highlighting those concerns.

In an election dominated by anxiety over the cost of living crisis, Greeks singled out the economy, citing memories of the nation’s debt drama a decade ago and punishing austerity meted out in return for emergency funds to keep the country afloat. Sunday’s ballot was the first since the EU and IMF, which orchestrated the biggest bailout in global financial history to avert a Greek default, ceased supervising the country’s finances.

But trauma still lingers. The cuts demanded in exchange for rescue exacted a heavy price: the Greek economy contracted by more than 25%m fuelling a recession from which the nation has only begun to recover. “The idea of more adventures after everything we have been through swayed my vote,” said Maria Lygera, echoing a common refrain.

The 48-year-old mother of three was among a sizable cohort of undecided voters estimated at close to 13% before polls opened.

“Right up until I walked into the ballot booth I wasn’t sure which way I would go,” she said.

“I wanted to punish New Democracy because of the wiretapping scandal but equally I also wanted to ensure there is a centre-left party that is present and strong. Because that is definitely not Syriza, I voted Pasok.”

The Pasok party came in third with just under 12%, a result its jubilant leadership said placed it on course to replace Syriza as the main centre-left opposition.

Mitsotakis has promised to further cut taxes, bring down unemployment – hovering about 11% from an all-time high of 30% during the crisis – and stimulate the economy by attracting more foreign direct investment. His election campaign motto has been “stability”, with the politician evoking the turbulence of Syriza’s time in office when Tsipras, its firebrand leader, was catapulted into power in 2015.

Alexis Tsipras arrives at his party headquarters in Athens on 21 May, 2023

Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

Tsipras, 48, has toned down the radical rhetoric that first appealed to his base but throughout the election campaign vowed to raise public sector wages to help assuage the effects of the cost of living crisis and upgrade state facilities including the public health system. Senior Syriza cadres described the outcome as deeply disappointing and a far cry from what the leftwing party had hoped to achieve.

More than 9 million Greeks were eligible to cast ballots in a vote held under a rarely used proportional representation system.

In an historic step Greeks abroad were also able to participate at polling stations set up in the UK and major cities across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. Voter turnout was said to be high among the more than 22,000 diaspora Greeks registered on the electoral roll.

But from the outset the new electoral procedure had made it practically impossible for any candidate to win the 46% required to form a single-party government. Not since 1981, when Andreas Papandreou charged to victory on the slogan of allagi or “change”, has that feat been pulled off.

With such high probability of the result being inconclusive, Mitsotakis had raised the spectre of a follow-up election in July even before Greeks began to cast their ballots.

ZIONIST COLONIALISM IS PROVOCATION

Far-right minister says Israel ‘in charge’ on visit to Jerusalem holy site

Comments by Itamar Ben-Gvir draw condemnation from Palestinians amid escalating tensions

Itamar Ben-Gvir (centre) greets supporters at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem on Thursday. 

Photograph: Eyal Warshavsky/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem and agencies

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 21 May 2023 14.32 BST

Israel’s far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, visited a site in Jerusalem holy to both Muslims and Jews and declared Israel was “in charge”, drawing condemnation from Palestinians after months of escalating tension and violence.

The early morning visit to the site, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the compound housing al-Aqsa mosque, also drew denunciations from two of Israel’s Arab peace partners, Jordan and Egypt.

It came days after groups of Jewish youths clashed with Palestinians and chanted racist slogans during a nationalist march through the Old City.

“I am glad to ascend the Temple Mount, the most important place for the nation of Israel,” Ben-Gvir said during his visit to the compound, the most sensitive point between Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem and the scene of repeated confrontations. Police are doing wonderful work here and again giving a reminder of who the master of the house is in Jerusalem. All of Hamas’s threats won’t help. We are the masters of Jerusalem and all of the land of Israel.”

According to arrangements in place since Israel occupied the site along with the rest of East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, Jews are allowed to visit but only Muslims can pray there. To Jews, it is revered as the site of the ancient temples, while Muslims consider it as the place from which the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

In recent years, Jewish visits and calls for Jewish prayer have increased, fuelling Muslim fears of a takeover. At the same time, police have grown increasingly lax in enforcing the ban on Jewish worship and often have not stopped Jews from praying in the eastern corner of the compound. They do this by reading from their mobile phones, rather than prayer books – which is what Ben-Gvir did on Sunday. The moment was captured on video.

Ben-Gvir, who was elected last November promising to push for Jewish prayer at the site, is considered by many to be the most extremist Israeli politician and has a long history of Arab baiting. For many years, he displayed prominently in his home a picture of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli gunman who killed 29 Palestinians during mosque prayers in Hebron in 1994.

Ben-Gvir also called for more funding to enable a ministry controlled by his Jewish Power party to increase the number of Jews in parts of Israel with large Arab populations, the Negev and the Galilee. “We have to act there, we have to be the masters also of the Negev and the Galilee,” he said.

Ahmad Majdalani, a member of the PLO executive committee, said the visit offended Muslims worldwide and predicted it could destabilise the region by boosting Islamic fundamentalists.

Majdalani, who is also Palestinian minister of social development, called Ben-Gvir’s visit “a provocative expression by the Israeli government as a whole, not just an individual expression by Ben-Gvir. It is official policy to harm the feelings of Muslims worldwide, particularly Palestinians. We warn that if this continues, then it changes the situation from a political conflict to a religious one that cannot be controlled. The danger of this to the region cannot be overestimated.”

Jordan, which was granted a special role atIslamic sites in Jerusalem in its 1994 peace treaty with Israel was fierce in its condemnation. “The storming of al-Aqsa mosque and the violation of its sanctity by an Israeli cabinet minister are condemned and provocative acts,” said the ministry of foreign and expatriate affairs spokesperson Sinan Majali. “They represent a blatant violation of international law, as well as the historical and legal status quo in Jerusalem and its holy sites.”

Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem, which includes al-Aqsa and the adjacent Western Wall, a sacred place of prayer for Jews, during the 1967 Middle Eastern war.

Israel has since annexed East Jerusalem, in a move not recognised by the international community, and regards the entire city as its eternal and undivided capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M IS THE SYSTEM

Facebook to be fined £648m for mishandling user information

Decision by Ireland’s privacy regulator will set record for breach of EU’s data protection rules

Dan Milmo

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 21 May 2023 

Facebook is to be fined more than €746m (£648m) and ordered to suspend data transfers to the US as an Irish regulator prepares to punish the social media network for its handling of user information.

The fine, first reported by Bloomberg and expected to be confirmed as soon as Monday, will set a record for a breach of the EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR), beating the €746m levied on Amazon by Luxembourg in 2021.

The decision by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is the lead privacy regulator for Facebook and its owner Meta across the EU, is also expected to pause transfers of data from Facebook’s European users to the US.

The ruling is unlikely to take effect immediately. Meta is expected to be given a grace period to comply with the decision, which could push any suspension into the autumn, and the company is expected to appeal against the decision.

The ruling relates to a legal challenge brought by an Austrian privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, over concerns resulting from the Edward Snowden revelations that European users’ data is not sufficiently protected from US intelligence agencies when it is transferred across the Atlantic.


It’s a tough time for Meta. Can AI help make the company relevant again?

Writing in 2020, Meta’s policy chief, Nick Clegg, said suspending data transfers on the basis of standard contractual clauses (SCCs) – a mechanism used by Facebook and others – could have “a far-reaching effect on businesses that rely on SCCs and on the online services many people and businesses rely on”.

In Meta’s most recent quarterly results, the company said that without SCCs or “other alternative means of data transfers” it would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe”.

Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a campaigner for stronger protection of internet users’ data, said a financial punishment exceeding €746m would not be enough if Facebook did not fundamentally change its user data-reliant business model.

“A billion-euro parking ticket is of no consequence to a company that earns many more billions by parking illegally,” he said.

The Irish data watchdog has fined Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, a total of nearly €1bn since September 2021. It also regulates Apple, Google, TikTok and other technology platforms whose EU headquarters are in Ireland.

In November last year, Meta was fined €265m (£230m) by the watchdog after a breach that resulted in the details of more than 500 million users being published online.

That came weeks after a €405m fine for letting teenagers set up Instagram accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses.

Any suspension would be rendered meaningless if the US and EU implement a new data transfer agreement, which has been agreed at a political level.

A Meta spokesperson said: “This case relates to a historic conflict of EU and US law, which is in the process of being resolved via the new EU-US Data Privacy Framework. We welcome the progress that policymakers have made towards ensuring the continued transfer of data across borders and await the regulator’s final decision on this matter.”

The latest problems for Meta emerged after the group reported better-than-expected first-quarter revenue last month of $28bn.

Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has been attempting to shift away from social media and develop the metaverse – its virtual reality program. The billions spent on those efforts caused concern among investors as Meta has also struggled to compete with the rise of TikTok, which has proved particularly popular among younger people.

The company, meanwhile, has made mass layoffs as part of a planned “year of efficiency” that its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced in February.

Rome climate protesters turn Trevi fountain water black

Members of Ultima Generazione fossil fuel group climbed in and poured diluted charcoal into water

Reuters

Sun 21 May 2023

Seven activists protesting against climate change climbed into the Trevi fountain in Rome and poured diluted charcoal into the water to turn it black.

Rome: climate activists turn Trevi fountain water black – video

The protesters from the Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) group held up banners saying “We won’t pay for fossil [fuels]” and shouted “Our country is dying.”

Uniformed police waded into the water to take away the activists, with many tourists filming the stunt and a few of the onlookers shouting insults at the protesters, video footage showed.

Italy’s disasters suggest the climate crisis is at the gates of Europe

In a statement, Ultima Generazione called for an end to public subsidies for fossil fuels and linked the protests to deadly floods in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in recent days. The group said one in four houses in Italy were at risk from flooding.

Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, condemned the protest, the latest in a series of acts targeting works of art in Italy. “Enough of these absurd attacks on our artistic heritage,” he wrote on Twitter.

The tradition is for visitors to toss coins into the famous 18th-century fountain to ensure that they will return to Rome one day.

SECRET SOCIETY FOR REAL

At Bilderberg’s bigwig bash two things are guaranteed: Kissinger and secrecy
DAVOS IS THE FALSE FRONT
The annual elite networking, diplomatic and lobbying event took place in splendid seclusion behind closed doors in Lisbon

Charlie Skelton in Lisbon

THE GUARDIAN

Sat 20 May 2023 13.00 BST

The Portuguese sun was doing its cheery best to make this year’s Bilderberg meeting seem warm and welcoming, but nothing could take the deathly chill out of the official agenda of the secretive shindig for some of the world’s most powerful people.

Ukraine, Russia and Nato weighed heavy on the schedule, with “Fiscal Challenges” and “Transnational Threats” seeming like light relief. “Today,” said the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, arriving in Lisbon to attend the talks, “our security environment is more dangerous than it has been since the cold war.”


Bilderberg reconvenes in person after two-year pandemic gap

This annual three-day conference is many things – an elite networking event, a diplomatic summit, a lobbying opportunity for transnational financial interests, an intense focus of conspiracy theory gossip – but above all, the 69th Bilderberg conference, at the glorious Pestana Palace, appeared like a council of war.

Ukraine’s foreign minister hadn’t come to Lisbon because he loves the happy clatter of trams, and the supreme allied commander Europe wasn’t here for the custard tarts. Which was a shame, because they’re excellent. I guess they can’t risk dusting them with cinnamon in Henry Kissinger’s presence, because one sneeze might be enough to carry him off to his reward.

On the eve of Kissinger’s centenary, the former US secretary of state and longtime Bilderberg kingpin will be delighted, or whatever dull ache he feels instead of delight, to see so many US intelligence officials at this year’s meeting.

They’re Kissinger’s kind of people.

Biden sent his director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, and his senior director for strategic planning at the national security council, Thomas Wright, plus a shadowy gaggle of White House strategists and spooks. Among them, Jen Easterly – the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who said recently that the western world faces two “epoch-defining threats and challenges” – artificial intelligence and China, both of which feature on this year’s agenda.

Aside from Ukraine, it was these issues which dominated thinking in Lisbon.

China’s overarching aim is “to rearrange the world order” said Lisbon attendee Elizabeth Economy, who’s participating in her second Bilderberg as Biden’s senior adviser for China at the Department of Commerce.

The rise of what she called “a China-centric order with its own norms and values” is a gauntlet thrown down at Bilderberg, the elite forum which has helped frame and foster the western world order for nearly seven decades. They don’t mind a new world order, but they want it to be manufactured at Bilderberg, not made in China.

The twin threats of China and technology are intertwined in the thinking of Bilderberg board member Eric Schmidt. Just a few days ago the former boss of Google told a congressional hearing that AI “is very much at the center” of the competition between China and the US. And that “China is now dedicating enormous resources to outpace the US in technologies, in particular AI.”

Schmidt acknowledges the existential risks of AI, even warning that “things could be worse than people are saying”, but rejects the call made by some AI experts, including Elon Musk, for a six-month pause in AI development, because any delay “will simply benefit China”. There seemed a darkly ironic logic at play: we have to push ahead with developing something which might destroy us before China develops it into something that might destroy us.

Another of the Silicon Valley luminaries in Lisbon was Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.

Earlier this week, Altman shared his concerns about AI at a US Senate hearing, and warned of the growing capacity for AI to bamboozle the voting public with plausible fakery – a particular worry for Altman “given that we’re going to face an election next year and these models are getting better”.

Interestingly, the question of “US Leadership” is on the conference agenda here at Bilderberg, although with the looming release of OpenAI’s next generation ChatGPT-5, the 2024 presidential debates might well be won by a witty and charismatic chatbot.

Altman is in favour of “regulatory intervention by governments” which he says “will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models”. But not everyone here at Bilderberg agrees.

Schmidt says that AI needs “appropriate guardrails” but caused a stir last week for suggesting, rather snootily, that AI companies should be self-regulating, because “there’s no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible.”

The more than two dozen politicians at this year’s Bilderberg might take issue with that argument. But we’ll never know, because the entire conference takes place behind closed doors, with zero press oversight. Nothing’s leaking out from behind the luxuriant bougainvilleas of the Pestana Palace.

Henry Kissinger, pictured in 2020. The former US secretary of state has been attending Bilderberg conferences since 1957. 

Photograph: Adam Berry/Getty Images

Incredibly, Kissinger has been attending Bilderberg conferences on and off since 1957. His “preoccupation with secrecy and personal diplomacy”, as a 1975 profile of the controversial statesman put it, fits perfectly with Bilderberg’s ferocious desire to keep the annual talks private.

But it’s a desire that sometimes tumbles over into paranoia. On Thursday the Guardian met the European head of Bilderberg, Victor Halberstadt, coming out of a pharmacy in Lisbon, clutching a packet of barrier skin cream. Halberstadt didn’t just ignore a polite media approach he flat-out denied that he was Victor Halberstadt and then hopped into a Mercedes which whisked him off through the security cordon.

This kind of cold war cloak-and-daggerism seems oddly anachronistic for a conference that is hosting a cutting-edge conversation about artificial intelligence with the CEOs of DeepMind and Microsoft. That said, all the ducking and weaving seems to work, if the endgame is inattention by the press.

Considering the number and seniority of public figures and policymakers who attend, Bilderberg, there is eerie lack of coverage in the world’s mainstream press. This year the roster reads just in part: three prime ministers, two deputy PMs, the president of the European parliament, the president of Eurogroup, the vice-president of the European Commission, two EU commissioners, an MEP, any number of European ministers and a member of the House of Lords, Dambisa Moyo – who, besides being a baroness, is also on the board of giant oil company, Chevron.

As ever, big oil was a powerful presence at Bilderberg, with the heads of Total, BP and Galp getting a seat at the table. Big pharma had a healthy presence, with the heads of Merck and Pfizer and a director of AstraZeneca on the list. And the international chemicals industry is represented by the CEO of BASF and a board member of Coca-Cola.

Naturally enough, the likely primary interest of these chairmen, directors and CEOs is their bottom line, to which end they’re always keen to ensure industry regulations are bent in their favour. Luckily, many of them are senior members of trade federations and commercial lobbying groups.

A good example is the International Institute of Finance, a major force in global financial governance. It’s chaired by the head of Banco Santander and Bilderberg steering committee member, Ana Botín. John Waldron, president of Goldman Sachs, is also on the board. These are two of the most powerful financial lobbyists in the world, and yet they get three luxurious days to chew the fat with the policymakers.

This is the dark heart of Bilderberg’s accountability problem. Just because the conference plays out in private doesn’t mean the talks take place in some kind of sanctified orb, in which the commercial concerns of a Luxembourg-based hedge fund boss like Rolly van Rappard, the co-chair of CVC Capital Partners, are somehow temporarily suspended.

When the Spanish foreign minister is mulling over Ukraine with the head of Nato, he’s doing so within earshot of some of the world’s most rapacious investors, like Henry Kravis, or hedge fund boss Kenneth Griffin, the 21st richest man in America.

These are people whose billions depend upon having the informational edge over their competitors, and it’s hard to know what the Griffins and Van Rappards are even doing there, except to pick up geostrategic tidbits to help make a quick buck.

Yet that doesn’t seem to raise any ethical red flags with any of the politicians who trot along to the talks. They’re quite happy to talk turkey behind the bougainvilleas with a bunch of billionaires and profiteers.

But heaven forbid there’s a press conference at the end of it.

Thousands of Amazon staffers are pouring into its Seattle offices. Will it restore the downtown’s fortunes?

Experts say the economic balance is more complex than one business and that the revitalization should be equitable

Andrew Buncombe

THE GUARDIAN

Sat 20 May 2023 

Tony Wang was beaming.

Sales at Yumbit, the lunchtime food truck he works at in downtown Seattle, had been doing well in recent days, so much so they may need more staff.

Wang’s truck is located on the corner of 6th Avenue and Lenora Street, the shiny heart of what some here playfully call “Amazonia”, after Amazon, the largest employer in the downtown area. And the extra customers that he and similar outlets are scrambling to serve are some of the 55,000 employees Amazon ordered to return to the office to work at least three days a week starting in May.

“It’s been a 20 to 30% increase with people coming back to work,” Wang said about sales at the truck. “It’s made a big difference.”

Nearly three years after the pandemic shut down much of downtown Seattle, Amazon’s move was eyed intensely in the city. CEO Andy Jassy told staff in February he hoped their return could be a “boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations”.

It’s a hope the city’s mayor, Bruce Harrell, shared days later in his state of the city address: “I’m very pleased employers like Amazon recently announced and recognise that coming back to work downtown is a great thing.”

It’s been several challenging years for Seattle, parts of which have struggled for decades with problems including drugs, the great recession and homelessness.

The pandemic posed new challenges. Without the thousands of office workers pouring into high rises each weekday, once busy streets in the city’s downtown became empty. Stores had few customers; millions of dollars in potential sales taxes were lost. The buzz and bustle associated with a large group of commuters disappeared. In parts of the city, reports of crime increased as well. Seattle’s sales tax revenue in 2020 was down more than $46m, a decline of 13% from 2019, according to a Washington state report.

During the pandemic, downtown Seattle was empty. Sales tax revenue in 2020 was down more than $46m. Photograph: Ted S Warren/AP

That year also saw many demonstrations in support of racial justice, and a month-long occupation of one neighborhood, known as the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), that forced shops ranging from “mom and pop” shops to department stores such as Nordstrom to board over their windows.

Pandemic-era restrictions lasted longer in Washington state than in many places. And even as Covid-related regulations eased, business did not fully pick up again. The Downtown Seattle Association, comprising businesses, nonprofits and residents, said only 43% of all office workers have returned to their desks. In the first quarter of this year, a quarter of downtown offices were either vacant or had been sublet, the Seattle Times has reported.

Recent layoffs in the tech industry have added fresh challenges. In March, Amazon laid off more than 2,300 employees in the Seattle area. Microsoft has cut about 1,000 staffers in the region.

Harrell, 64, a Democrat who took office in January 2022, campaigned as a business friendly candidate ready to help the economy, and address controversies with the police force, which for a decade had operated under federal supervision.

“I’m bullish on the future of downtown,” he said in his address. “It’s the time for bold action. That’s why our long-term plan center around downtown as a sort of a laboratory for the future.”

Harrel has floated changing zoning codes to convert empty office space in the neighborhood to housing. He envisions new hotels and restaurants in the area where several sports stadiums are located.

Although he has said recovery has to involve everyone, he thinks flagship firms such as Amazon can kickstart a return to a more vibrant city.

“From the remote work revolution to ever-evolving retail landscape, the issues facing our downtown are not unique to Seattle,” Harrell said. “But what is unique is the resources we have.”

The Day 1 building is part of the Amazon campus in downtown Seattle.

 Photograph: David Ryder/Getty Images


Amazon shares Harrell’s vision that it can be a force in the revitalization. John Schoettler, Amazon VP Corporate Real Estate, said in a statement that the company’s downtown campus supports an “additional 300,000 indirect jobs across the region”.

“We know we have an important role to play in the recovery of Seattle’s downtown,” he said. “We’ve always been committed to the economic vibrancy of the city and the entire Puget Sound region. That’s why we’ve invested in urban, downtown campuses that create new opportunities for both our employees and the local community.”

The company has fervent critics here, too. They have blamed it for pushing up housing and business rents. A 2017 report by real estate company Zillow estimated that since Amazon moved its headquarters to the South Lake Union area in 2010, the associated boom saw the cost of renting a 650-square foot one-bedroom apartment increase by $44 a month.

Others have argued that no single company can reverse the fortunes of a town. “Downtown runs on people. Bringing more people back downtown is a multifaceted endeavor and no single action will solve it,” said Markham McIntyre, director of the Seattle office of economic development.

There are also demands that the development Harrell envisions benefits everyone. Here, as in many American cities, Black-owned businesses suffered the most during the pandemic, the result, according to experts, of historical structures that has made it more difficult to access credit and capital, among other challenges.

Some local businesses in recent years made a point to advertise themselves as “Black-owned” in an attempt to encourage loyalty or earn new customers. A study by the University of Washington found any boost was short lived. “In the long run, especially the last months of 2020, the Black-owned businesses declined faster than those restaurants that didn’t reveal their ownership,” said Bo Zhao, associate professor of geography at the University of Washington, who carried out the study using data gathered by companies such as Yelp.

The wealth gap between Black and white families in the city is one of the biggest in the country, said Ernest Kelly, the founder of Seattle Black Businesses, a nonprofit that helps people network.

Data from King county, where Seattle is located, shows the median net worth of a Black family was $23,000 in 2019, or 5% of that of white households at $456,000. Nationally, in 2019, the median white family had a net worth of $188,200, almost eight times that of the median Black family at $24,100.

Black and Latino people make up 15 % of Seattle’s population, yet they run fewer than 5% of businesses, Kelly said. “All we want to be able to do as Black businesses is compete.”

Kelly said the city has made some strides. He welcomed the Seattle Restored project, supported in part by the city, which has helped put Black and minority business in previously vacant buildings to give them a presence in the downtown.

Groups such as the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, which has more than 2,200 members, including Amazon, are hopeful about the benefits of the return to work. CEO Rachel Smith said the downtown generated half of the city’s tax revenues and was crucial to the funding of all services.

“We applaud the private sector for playing its part in supporting downtown’s recovery – and encourage more of it,” she said.

Black-owned businesses in Seattle suffered the most during the pandemic. 

Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP

In and around the Amazon hub, things have certainly become busier. On a recent morning, Capelli’s barber shop located next to Amazon appeared to be packed.

“It was slow [during the pandemic] but since then it’s been busy,” says stylist Nick Anselmo. Why does he think that is? “We’re busy, because [getting your haircut is] a necessity”.

Dylan Simpson, a 23-year-old bike courier who also delivers for restaurants, says there’s been a lot more buzz since workers came back.

Sashe Vanchovski, general manager at the Potbelly Sandwich Shop, next to the Amazon offices, said many of the Amazon employees he serves would “rather work from home”. But he’s been pleased by the return to work, as it led to a boost in sales. He does not know precisely how much, but he knows sales are up: “The impact is positive.”

What remains unclear, is though the city will bag the extra sales tax from workers now having to buy their lunches or coffees three days a week, how much benefit will ripple beyond the few city blocks surrounding Amazon’s headquarters.

Harrell’s office said the mayor was not available for an interview. A city spokesperson said there is no precise estimate as to how much extra revenue may be generated. The spokesperson also said Amazon had not received a change to its tax status as part of the return to work, as some had speculated it might.

Mayet Dalila helps young entrepreneurs. She and her son, Olu Dixon, head It’s Never 2 Early 2 Create & Innovate, a project showing off products and services offered by Black residents ranging from the ages of 4 to 24.

Their project is located in a previously empty building in the city’s Belltown neighborhood, a space it found through the Seattle Restored project.

“Being Black and being in business is an uphill battle,” Dalila said.

The building next door has been taken over by Erica Vasquez Jun and Jessica Ghyvoronsky. Their project, River, has hosted art shows and performances.

They are located just a few blocks from Amazon’s main Seattle campus. So far they’ve not seen a “lot of foot traffic” said Vasquez Jun, but they’d love it if some Amazon workers used it to host an event.

She added: “We want to see downtown Seattle come back to life. So I think having people come back downtown is a good thing.”

Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s magnificent period epic is an instant American classic

Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in a sinuous, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won

Xan Brooks
THE OBSERVER

Sun 21 May 2023 06.00 BST

Fate has smiled on the Osage Indian nation, out in Oklahoma. The reservation sits on an oasis of black gold; the First Nation people have become oil multimillionaires. They bump along the dirt roads in chauffeur-driven Buicks, play golf on the grassland and take private planes for a spin.

But this newfound fortune brings danger; they want to watch out they’re not killed. The history of the west, after all, is one of exploitation and slaughter.

The 1920s Osage murders provided the spark for David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction bestseller, which lifted the lid on hundreds of unexplained deaths. Now Grann’s book forms the basis for Martin Scorsese’s magnificent period epic, a saga of industrialised gangsterism in America’s wide open spaces, forcefully played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone.

This is Scorsese’s first picture at the Cannes film festival since 1985’s After Hours. It’s also the richest, strongest movie he’s made in nearly 30 years.

Back from the war, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) needs money, a fresh start and perhaps a young wife. His uncle, William Hale (De Niro), furnishes him with all three. Hale is a cattle baron and therefore already rich.

But one fortune’s not enough – perhaps it never quite is – and so he steers Ernest towards Mollie (Lily Gladstone), who holds the “headrights” to the oil deposits on her land. If Ernest marries Mollie, then he and Hale promptly gain control of the estate. What Mollie gets from the arrangement is more open to question.

“Coyote wants money,” smiles Mollie, rumbling Ernest’s game right away. But Scorsese effectively shows that her position is tenuous and how, despite their riches, the Osage know that they need to keep their white patrons on side. Also, Mollie is diabetic and needs regular doses of insulin. Osage women, Hale explains kindly, never seem to live to a ripe old age.

De Niro’s on powerhouse form as big Uncle Bill Hale, a man who combines the folksy authority of Lyndon Johnson with the steely twinkle of Bill Cosby. It’s a performance so potent that it might have unbalanced a lesser movie.

Scorsese, though, simply makes it part of the mix, another instrument in a mighty orchestra, complemented by DiCaprio, Gladstone and Jesse Plemons as a foursquare federal investigator. Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.

No man, obviously, regards himself as a monster. Even those who play God claim to do it out of love. And so it is with Bill Hale, who purports to care deeply for the Osage, even as they struggle with alcoholism and depression and the theft of their tribal lands; even as the bodies appear to be piling up by the day.

“I love them, but in the turning of the earth, they’re gone,” he sighs, at the point in the film when the storm clouds start massing. Their time is over, he believes, while his is just beginning.

The realisation that the fossil fuel underfoot is made of so much rotting matter only adds to the sense that Scorsese is weaving an alternative American creation myth here.

Killers of the Flower Moon plays out as a muscular, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won, recasting Eden as a barren grassland where the only fruit is crude oil and the blood on the ground plants the seeds for the future.