It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 23, 2022
Former PlayStation employee files new gender discrimination lawsuit against company
Igor Bonifacic ·Weekend Editor Mon, May 23, 2022, 3 NurPhoto via Getty Images
Former PlayStation employee Emma Majo has filed a new lawsuit against the company after her previous complaint was dismissed by a federal judge in April. According to Axios, Majo’s new filing includes many of the same gender discrimination allegations found in her original one, but the scope of the lawsuit is more limited.
Rather than seeking to represent all women employed by Sony’s PlayStation unit in the US as was previously her intent, the complaint instead seeks damages for those women who worked for the company in California. When judge Laurel Beeler dismissed the original case, she said Majo could file again with additional details. The new complaint incorporates allegations from the nine women who came forward to support the first suit.
“Sony tolerates and cultivates a work environment that discriminates against female employees, including female employees and those who identify as female,” the complaint reads. We’ve reached out to Sony for comment. In the meantime, we'll note the company previously asserted Majo’s claims were based on “unactionable allegations.”
Proxy advisor urges Exxon shareholders to oust Woods as chairman
Sabrina Valle Mon, May 23, 2022 FILE PHOTO - People walk near the booth of the Exxon Mobil Corp at the Rio Oil and Gas Expo and Conference in Rio de Janeiro
HOUSTON (Reuters) -British proxy adviser PIRC on Monday urged Exxon Mobil Corp shareholders to vote against the re-election of five directors, including Chairman Darren Woods, at an annual general meeting on Wednesday.
PIRC, or Pensions & Investment Research Consultants, is the latest proxy firm to urge investors to oppose proposals by the oil major's board. Other large oil companies have enjoyed an so far in 2022 when compared with last year's meetings.
PIRC said Woods, which also serves as chief executive officer, should be held accountable as chairman for assuring the company's strategy to meet Paris-aligned goals to reduce carbon emissions. It also said his serving in the chairman and CEO roles represents "a concentration of power" potentially detrimental to board balance.
The Wednesday meeting includes a vote only on Woods's role as chairman, not as CEO.
PIRC also suggested a no vote on re-electing Alexander Karsner, one of the directors put up by activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 last year, as well as Michael Angelakis, Susan Avery and Ursula Burns.
In addition, PIRC urged shareholders to vote against the company's executive compensation plan on Wednesday. In a report, PIRC said former top executives are granted benefits not extended to active workers such as reimbursement of personal expenses and travel arrangements after retirement.
Exxon said in a written response that its compensation and benefits programs are designed to support the company's core principles and business strategies and are market competitive for all employees.
Glass Lewis and ISS, firms that also make recommendations to shareholders, have recently backed a shareholder activist proposal on climate at Exxon's meeting. They ask for an audited report assessing the International Energy Agency's net-zero scenario by 2050 and its possible effects on Exxon's strategy.
Exxon, Chevron post big revenues, but Wall Street shrugs
(Reporting by Sabrina Valle; Editing by Marguerita Choy asnd Will Dunham)
DC Attorney General sues Mark Zuckerberg over the Cambridge Analytica scandal Kris Holt ·Contributing Reporter Mon, May 23, 2022, Erin Scott / Reuters
Meta's Cambridge Analytica woes are far from over. Karl Racine, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, has sued Mark Zuckerberg. He accused the Meta CEO of having a direct hand in making the decisions that led to the major data breach.
Racine claims that Zuckerberg "contributed to Facebook’s lax oversight of user data and implementation of misleading privacy agreements." That, according to the suit, allowed consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire personal data on more than 70 million Americans, including more than 340,000 DC residents. The company allegedly used the data to help sway voters in the 2016 presidential election through political ad targeting.
The AG previously sued Meta (then known as Facebook) over the scandal in 2018. That case is still ongoing. This time, Racine is targeting Zuckerberg directly. Under the jurisdiction's Consumer Protection Procedures Act, which bans unfair and deceptive trade practices, individuals are liable for a company's actions that they were aware of, controlled or failed to stop.
Racine is seeking a jury trial against Zuckerberg. He wants Meta's CEO to refrain from future CPPA violations and to pay damages and civil penalties. Engadget has contacted Meta for comment.
“Since filing our landmark lawsuit against Facebook, my office has fought tooth and nail against the company's characteristic efforts to resist producing documents and otherwise thwart our suit. We continue to persist and have followed the evidence right to Mr. Zuckerberg," Racine said in a statement. “This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook's wrongful conduct. This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions.
DC attorney general sues Mark Zuckerberg, claims CEO was 'personally involved' in privacy failures
The attorney general for Washington, D.C. filed a lawsuit against Meta (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, accusing him of being personally responsible for the massive Cambridge Analytica data breach.
In the suit, Attorney General Karl Racine alleges that Zuckerberg's failure to oversee consumers' data privacy led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm used millions of Facebook users' data, without their knowledge, in an attempt to sway the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.
"The evidence shows Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in Facebook’s failure to protect the privacy and data of its users leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident," Racine said in a statement.
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, U.S., October 23, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott
"This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook's wrongful conduct. This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions,” Racine said.
Meta has been at the center of a maelstrom of controversy since news of Cambridge Analytica first broke. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Facebook to pay a $5 billion fine related to the scandal. Governments and regulators across the globe, including the FTC, are also cracking down on the social media giant via antitrust suits and legislation.
According to Racine, the latest suit against Zuckerberg comes as a result of an existing investigation and lawsuit his office filed against Facebook in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.
Racine claims that because Zuckerberg holds the largest number of shares of Meta and has final say over everything that happens at the company, he is ultimately responsible for Facebook's day-to-day operations. As a result, Racine claims, Zuckerberg is also responsible for the events that led to the scandal.
According to University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor, Peter Oh, it's unclear how strong the case against Zuckerberg may be.
“One clear possibility here is that this may be a lawsuit that could be politically motivated by the attorney general. On the other hand, there’s potentially a very legitimate reason why the attorney general may be deciding to do this,” Oh told Yahoo Finance.
If Racine’s complaint survives, Oh explained, it has the potential to be a wake-up call for the Meta CEO, as he could be personally liable.
And there’s real risk that the case will move forward, Oh said, given that Zuckerberg has a history of vouching for the actions of the company.
“Zuckerberg has publicly stated, effectively, that the buck stops with him — that he runs the company, he owns the company, and therefore, he should be held accountable for what the company does. I think what you can say is that with this particular lawsuit the attorney general is calling his bluff,” Oh said.
A spokesperson for Meta told Yahoo Finance that the company had no comment.
This isn't the first time Racine has gone after Zuckerberg personally. He previously attempted to name the CEO personally responsible for the user data leak in a 2018 suit related to Cambridge Analytica. The judge in that case, however, dismissed the move, saying that Racine waited too long to name Zuckerberg in the case.
Since the 2018 suit filed by Racine, Facebook has changed its name. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta with the goal of focusing the company on the metaverse, though some commentators suspect the name change was a means for Facebook to distance itself from its ongoing legal troubles.
Coinbase’s $51 Billion Nosedive Isn’t Only About Crypto Winter
Olga Kharif and Yueqi Yang Mon, May 23, 2022,
(Bloomberg) -- Coinbase Global Inc. has gone from one of the stock market’s most hotly anticipated debuts to one of its most spectacular crashes in a little more than a year, leaving some analysts and investors bewildered by poor execution at the largest US cryptocurrency exchange.
The firm’s market value has shrunk by about $51 billion since the end of its first day of trading last April. Coinbase shares fell to an all-time low earlier in May, and even after recovering somewhat are still down about 80% from their debut. That’s a steeper drop than Bitcoin’s 53% slump in the same period.
The recent bear market and regulatory pressure in crypto have played a big role. Last year, a promising yield-account product called Lend drew ire from the Securities and Exchange Commission, leading the company to scrap it and prompting a public rant by Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong. And as crypto prices crashed in the past six months, trading volumes dropped across most exchanges.
But poor execution played a part as well. Coinbase’s new nonfungible-token marketplace took months to launch -- then fizzled. The company missed analysts’ revenue projections in the first three months of the year and guided for sequentially declining trading volume this quarter -- in part because it has lost ground to rivals. Coinbase’s market share slipped to 4.8% of monthly crypto trading volume currently from 7.1% in November, as some users went to rivals such as DigiFinex and FTX US, according to researcher CryptoCompare.
Coinbase is expected to lose about $1.4 billion this year, according to analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Financial performance at some rivals has held up better, and competition from other exchanges is heating up.
“FTX’s revenues have not declined,” Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the exchange, said in an email. “Partially this is because of longstanding market-share growth, partially FTX has been more conservative on expenses, and will remain strongly net profitable this year.”
Some analysts believe Coinbase’s costs are too high. The company recently said it will slow down its hiring, and it could perhaps pause its expansion of sales and support staffs, John Todaro, an analyst at Needham & Co., said in an interview. Coinbase has ballooned to 4,948 full-time employees, from about 1,700 just a year ago. Hiring helped drive the company’s total operating costs to $1.7 billion in the first quarter, up 9% from the previous three months.
“They’ve grown expenses quite a bit,” Todaro said. “And I think the market was giving a little bit of an unfavorable reaction. If we are in a crypto winter, you don’t want to be going into that doubling, tripling the headcount. I think Coinbase management understood that.” ‘Slowing Down’
While Coinbase “may be slowing down our hiring, we have no intention of slowing our pace of product development,” a spokesperson said in an email.
In a memo to employees on May 17, Coinbase’s chief product officer, Surojit Chatterjee, said the company will be increasing its focus “on critical revenue-generating products” -- a possible indication it’s backpedaling from its strategy of diversifying away from trading fees. Coinbase will double down on core products while seeking improvements in developer productivity, he said.
“This does not mean we plan to stop investing in strategic and venture projects,” Chatterjee said in a tweet about the memo. “We believe the down market is a great time to build for the longer term.” Coinbase is continuing to support at least one part of its diversification strategy, staking, which lets people earn yields on their digital coins.
The company’s new NFT marketplace -- which was supposed to fuel growth through a new revenue stream -- hasn’t gained traction. After attracting $75,000 in trading volume when it opened to all users on May 4, activity has since dropped, with volume of just $17,000 on May 19, according to tracker Dune. (All major NFT marketplaces have seen a decline in trading volume, however.) Coinbase’s marketplace has about 2,900 active unique users, according to Dune.
“Very little” of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace activity can be captured by tools like Dune, a company executive said during its latest earnings call.
Nick Tomaino, an early Coinbase employee who is now founder of venture fund 1confirmation, said on Twitter this month that he would consider selling his Coinbase shares if the company doesn’t make a strong move in NFTs in the coming year.
In a recent filing, the company said that customers could be treated as “general unsecured creditors” in the event of a bankruptcy, prompting concern from investors that the topic was even raised. CEO Armstrong said on Twitter that his company included the language in response to new regulatory requirements, and that “we have no risk of bankruptcy.”
Coinbase, in trying to come back from its stock slump, has two big strikes against it, said Chris Brendler, an analyst at D.A. Davidson Cos. “It has the dual problem of being not profitable on a consistent basis, and it’s also in crypto, which is also an area the market doesn’t like today,” he said.
Still, the company may be able to bounce back -- as long as the rest of the market does as well.
“If it’s just a mild crypto winter, they could probably weather the storm,” said Mizuho Securities analyst Dan Dolev. “It really depends on how low crypto and Bitcoin goes.”
First Canadian rare earth mine starts shipping concentrate from N.W.T.
Yesterday The Canadian Press
Canada has begun supplying the world with minerals critical to a greener economy with the country's first rare earth mine delivering concentrated ore. "Canada and its allies are gaining independence from the rare earth supply chain from China," said David Connelly of Cheetah Resources, which owns the Nechalacho Mine southwest of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories.
Rare earths are a series of exotically named elements such as ytterbium, lanthanum and gadolinium. They are crucial to computers, LED displays, wind turbines, electric cars and many other products essential to a low-carbon world.
Some industry analysts predict the rare earth market will grow from $6.8 billion in 2021 to more than $12 billion by 2026.
Almost 60 per cent of the world's supply of these vital materials is produced in China and much of the rest is owned by Chinese companies. Until now. "(Nechalacho) is the only rare earths mine in North America that doesn't supply China," Connelly said. The deposit, which holds 15 different rare earth elements, was discovered in 1983. A proposal to develop the mine went before regulators more than a decade ago.
That project involved extensive water use and would have generated large tailings ponds. The N.W.T.'s environmental regulator approved the plan, but noted it would have created significant impacts requiring mitigation.
The new mine uses no water. Instead, raw ore is crushed to gravel-sized pieces and run past a sensor.
"It's a big X-ray machine on a conveyor belt and it separates the white quartz from the much heavier and denser rare earth ore," Connelly said.
That concentrate is then barged down Great Slave Lake to Hay River, N.W.T. From there, rail links take it to Saskatoon, where Vital Metals, the company that owns Cheetah, has built a facility to refine the concentrate for market.It's also where the provincial government is developing a rare earth refining and research hub. The first shipments are on their way and expected in June.
Nechalacho's refined product is going to a customer in Norway, where the individual minerals will be separated from each other and processed into metallic bars.
By 2025, Nechalacho hopes to be producing 25,000 tonnes of concentrate a year. There's enough ore there for decades to come, Connelly said. "It's multiple generations."
At full production, Connelly said the mine is to employ about 150 people in the N.W.T. and another 40 in Saskatoon. Those aren't huge numbers in mining, but Connelly said they will make a big difference to the northern economy because most of the workers will be based there.
More than 40 of the mine's current 50 employees live in the North, said Connelly. About 70 per cent are Indigenous and Cheetah has contracted with the Yellowknives Dene First Nation to conduct the actual mining on the site.
Eventually, said Connelly, Cheetah hopes to work out an equity share for Indigenous groups in the area.
But Nechalacho isn't just important to the N.W.T., Connelly said.
A domestic source for minerals vital to electric motors would help preserve the country's auto sector, he said. It would make it easier for Canada to achieve its climate goals and increase national security by providing a secure source of crucial materials, he added.
Canada has 13 active rare earth projects, the federal government says. Most are in Saskatchewan and Quebec, where the only other mine near production — the Kipawa project, owned by the same Australian company that owns Cheetah — is located.
"Canada has some of the largest known reserves and resources (measured and indicated) of rare earths in the world," says a document from Natural Resources Canada.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 22, 2022.
— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960
Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
WHITE PRIVILEGE PROTESTS
'Freedom' protesters return to Calgary's Beltline
After weeks of relative weekend afternoon peace for residents and businesses, so-called freedom protesters again marched through Calgary’s Beltline area on Saturday.
The protests — held to publicly oppose COVID-19 public health orders and the governments that made them — had largely ceased in the Beltline area over the last two months, stymied by a city injunction issued in March that bolstered police enforcement. A handful of demonstrators had continued gathering after the injunction was issued and after it was rescinded in April, though they moved to city hall with diminished numbers compared to the boisterous Beltline rallies through the first few months of the year.
But in a video posted to Twitter by I Love You Coffee Shop, located at the corner of 4th Street and 14th Avenue S.W., dozens of people brandishing signs and Canadian flags appeared to have returned Saturday, marching their typical path toward 17th Avenue S.W. from Central Memorial Park.
“Am I in a time machine?” the cafe remarked in a tweet .
Peter Oliver, president of the Beltline Neighbourhoods Association, said despite the break, the protests remain unwelcome by the community, and he’s calling on the police to do more if it becomes a regular occurrence again.
“It shows great disrespect from those people who participated, who I think have some very disturbing views and hope that police and bylaw do everything within their powers to bring this nonsense to an end again,” he said.
“I think it would be good to see the police show a little bit more leadership this time around and use the tools that they have available to them with respect to noise and disruption that these people are causing. That they can do whether there’s an injunction or not.” A “World Wide Rally for Freedom” also occurred at Courthouse Park on 6th Avenue S.W. in downtown Calgary on Saturday afternoon. In a video of that rally posted to Facebook, an organizer encouraged the crowd to meet up with the group at Central Memorial Park and “walk the freedom mile one last time, for now.”
Calgary police confirmed to Postmedia they were aware protesters marched through the Beltline on Saturday but did not comment on whether any enforcement action was necessary.
The Calgary Flames’ playoff run continues, and with that comes raucous Red Mile celebrations in the same area. Oliver said there’s a difference between excited fans enjoying themselves and what he called the “hate marches” that strangled Beltline businesses and disrupted the lives of residents for several months.
“There are bars and restaurants and cafes and sports fans, and I mean, that’s part of what makes this neighbourhood great,” he said. “But weekly hate marches is a whole other story, and there’s no patience left for that.”
Trader Joe’s workers push to unionize amid wave of organizing efforts
Michael Sainato - The Guardian
Organizers have begun a unionization campaign at the upscale supermarket chain Trader Joe’s after workers at a branch in Hadley, Massachusetts, announced they were forming a union and intend to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election.
It would be the first unionized Trader Joe’s store out of more than 530 locations in the US. Workers are organizing independently, citing the similar framework of the Amazon Labor Union, which is not affiliated with traditional, established labor unions.
“We organized ourselves. With the same instinctive teamwork we use every day to break pallets, work the load, bag groceries, and care for our customers, we joined together to look out for each other and improve our workplace together,” workers wrote in an announcement letter to Trader Joe’s CEO, Dan Bane.
The union organizing announcement is the latest among a wave of union campaigns at corporations that have previously staved off unionization, including at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, and union elections filed at Target and Apple.
Trader Joe’s was one of several employers that pushed back on organizing efforts and complaints from workers about its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and calls for hazard pay.
Early in the pandemic, Bane sent a company-wide memo to all employees expressing opposition for unionization within the company. In their announcement, workers cited the company-wide letter, arguing that the company has slashed wages and benefits for workers since then, and they see unionizing as the only way to protect themselves from further cuts.
“We’re organizing because it feels more and more like we don’t have a say in decisions that the company makes, decisions that directly impact our day-to-day lives, and the health and wellbeing of us and our families,” said Tony Falco, a worker at the Trader Joe’s store in Hadley, Massachusetts.
Jamie Edwards, a crew member at the Trader Joe’s in Hadley, explained they became interested in organizing a union in the beginning of the pandemic, when workers were not allowed to wear protective equipment initially because of concerns from management that it would scare customers, and other safety concerns expressed by workers were dismissed. Edwards said when CDC guidelines changed, mask policies and caps on the number of customers permitted in the store were not enforced.
Edwards, who is non-binary, also noted they had to show legal paperwork to change their nametags from their dead name.
“I want customers to know this is an effort to give the crew members a say in the way the store is run and to make this company live up to the image that attracts them to the store in the first place,” said Edwards.
Maeg Yosef, an employee at the Trader Joe’s Hadley location for 18 years, said when she first started then, she didn’t think workers at the store needed a union, but that has changed overtime as benefits have been chipped away, pay has stagnated, and safety issues have gone unaddressed.
“I’ve watched so many crew deal with work related injuries and chronic pain, and have been hurt myself. I’ve seen crew members lose their health insurance during cancer treatment,” said Yosef. “Over time it became clear to me that the company was not taking care of us in the same way it once had, and it was time to do something about it. That something is a union.”
She argued that Trader Joe’s reputation as an amazing place to work no longer reflects reality. Yosef noted that Trader Joe’s corporate has yet to respond to the union organizing announcement, but their store manager has promised not to delay the election process in any way.
Trader Joe’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Putin's 'de-Nazify' claims in Ukraine obscure his Nazi problem at home
Anna Nemtsova and Kim Hjelmgaard Mon, May 23, 2022,
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed he invaded Ukraine to "de-Nazify" the county, whose democratically elected leader is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.
Experts say it's an absurd allegation, not least because although Ukraine has attracted radicals of all stripes, it highlights the activities of a politically marginal group no more representative of Ukraine than of the United States or Western Europe.
In fact, while extremist groups in Russia have expressed a range of views about Putin's invasion of Ukraine, his biggest Nazi problem may be at home where some far-right hate groups sympathize with Ukrainians and threats to their independence, and are having trouble squaring the reality of Putin's assault on Ukraine with their racist beliefs.
"Putin’s war in Ukraine makes no sense. He is not building 'Russkiy Mir,' said Dmitry Demushkin, the former leader of an outlawed skinhead gang called Slavic Union that champions white nationalist, racist and extreme-right neo-Nazi views.
Russkiy Mir is a quasi-ideology that Putin has over the years used in his speeches to evoke the concept of a "Russian World" united by language, culture and the Russian Orthodox Church. Demushkin spent two years in Russia's notoriously brutal prison colony system after being convicted in 2017 of organizing a banned extremist group and inciting racial hatred online. After his release, Demushkin was elected mayor of a wealthy Moscow suburb, a role in which he lasted just a few months. He now organizes body-building contests. Many participants have far-right tattoos that feature Nazi symbols or refer to anti-Semitic, homophobic and white supremacist slogans.
"Putin’s failure (in Ukraine) is close," Demushkin predicted. "Russian people are like dirt for him. ... He failed at all his goals. ... (Ukraine President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy is now the world’s most popular leader who speaks to parliaments, political leaders visit him, the West gives Ukraine billions of dollars, Finland and Sweden are applying to join NATO. ... Pretty soon the majority of Russians will realize Putin is not fighting against fascists or drug addicts in Ukraine, but with cities who were supposed to embrace us."
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization at the Kremlin in Moscow, on May 16, 2022.
Alexander Verkhovsky, the director of the Moscow-based SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, an organization that monitors ultra-nationalist activities, hate crimes and hate speech, said that the majority of neo-Nazi groups and their supporters in Russia are now opposed to Putin and the Kremlin because the Russian government is sending Russian men who they consider their "white Slavic brothers" to die in Ukraine.
Members of these groups also object, he said, "to how much Putin promotes Chechen (fighters)" – volunteer militia units deployed alongside Russian troops in Ukraine who are from the troubled Russian republic of Chechnya. These fighters have a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness honed from years of guerrilla warfare against Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s. Chechnya is home to a majority-Muslim population.
Verkhovsky said Putin has attempted to crackdown on neo-Nazi groups and that over the last few months Russia's Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the Soviet Union's KGB, has been arresting far-right extremists all over the country.
One of the most significant, he said, was the arrest of activists from the so-called Nationalist Socialism or White Power group who the Kremlin accused of planning to assassinate Vladimir Solovyov, an anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian TV anchor who peddles propaganda and inflammatory rumors on state media. Solovyov has been sanctioned by the European Union for spreading propaganda. Italian authorities recently seized Solovyov's property – two villas – on Lake Como.
"Putin can't allow Nazis in Russia, when he claims he's fighting them in Ukraine," said Verkhovsky. "The FSB conducts constant special operations against them."
Still, some neo-Nazi groups have pushed back against Putin's war in Ukraine.
Members of Russian ultra-nationalist hate groups discuss potential unrest and actions against authorities on social media channels such as Telegram, a popular platform in the Russian-speaking world that has offered a more accurate view of the war.
Earlier this month, a Telegram channel called "White Color," popular among Russian neo-Nazi activists, claimed credit for a purported arson attack on a military recruitment office that appeared to be in the central Russian city of Nizhnevartovsk. The text in the post reads: "We are starting the fire of revolt. It's brighter. You won't catch everybody."
SOVA, the monitoring group, says the number of violent attacks by Russian far-right extremists is on the rise despite the increased scrutiny from the Kremlin. There were no recorded murders by ultra-nationalist groups in 2020, for example. But in 2021, there were three murders and more than 70 attacks on homeless people, drug users, anti-fascist activists and anybody who they believe "spoils the white race," said Verkhovsky.
David Fishman, a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York who has done extensive field research in Ukraine, said that Putin's attempt to link Ukraine with Nazis is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the Zelenskyy government. He said that it was important not to dismiss Ukraine's extreme far-right groups because, like extremists everywhere, they tend to be "armed and prone to violence." But he said that Ukraine's ultra-nationalists have not attacked Jews or Jewish institutions in the country and that "it's not a bigger problem in Ukraine than elsewhere in Europe. It's a problem everywhere in Europe."
Fishman noted a 2018 survey from the Washington-based Pew Research Center "fact tank" that found that in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, roughly one-in-five adults or more said that they would not be willing to accept Jews as fellow citizens.
In Poland, which has been widely praised for accepting millions of Ukrainian refugees in recent months, the figure was 18%. In Russia, it was 14%. In Ukraine, 5%. Nearly a third of Polish adults say they would not accept a Jewish person as a member of their family.
Russia has accused Ukraine's Azov Regiment, whose injured fighters recently surrendered from a besieged final stronghold in Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, of being
"Nazi criminals" who should not be included in prisoner exchanges.
It's true the Azov regiment was created in 2014 by far-right activists who wore insignia reminiscent of symbols used by SS units in Nazi Germany. The volunteer battalion was initially deployed against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula. The Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation describes Azov as an "extreme-right nationalist paramilitary organization."
However, it has since been fully integrated into Ukraine's National Guard, a military wing of the interior ministry, and Zelenskyy says the unit has entirely shed its radical past. Today, Azov acknowledges its founder was Andriy Biletsky, a political figure who holds racist and white supremacist views. But it denies allegations of racism or Nazism and points out that Ukrainians and foreigners of various backgrounds, including Greeks, Jews, Crimean Tatars and Russians, all serve in the battalion.
"When there's a foreign enemy, it has a unifying effect," said Fishman, who added that many right-wing personalities and officials in Russia appear to eagerly support Putin's war in Ukraine and don't think he's gone far enough militarily.
Still, Putin's baseless claims that his invasion is aimed at clearing Ukraine of Nazis is difficult to fathom given that Russia has established "filtration" camps where Ukrainian citizens are being forcibly sent for interrogation. Some people who have passed through these camps have been allowed to return to Ukrainian-held territory, but others have been shipped off to remote parts of Russia after facing arbitrary threats and violence, strip searches, family separation and harsh questioning.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainians who have experienced these camps have compared them to Nazi concentration camps.
Galina Odnorog, a volunteer at the Epicenter refugee center in Zaporizhzhia, in south-eastern Ukraine, said that civilians are asked if they have ever supported the Ukrainian army or publicly spoken in support of Ukraine's language, culture and heritage.
Epicenter began to receive hundreds of internally displaced Ukrainians every day in the first week of March. Many shared their stories of "filtration." Ukraine's Commissioner for Human Rights Lyudmila Denisova says that almost two million Ukrainians, including 200,000 children, have been forced to go to Russia. The “filtration camps” are holding up to 20,000 Ukrainians, Denisova told reporters in a recent briefing.
"There was one 4-year-old girl who ended up in our shelter after a filtration camp because she was separated from her mother who was in the army," said Odnorog.
In late April, a bus driver named Alexander Nesterenko said that "Russians filtrated us at every check point on the way from Energodar to Zaporizhzhia, made us take off our shirts to make sure we did not have any swastika tattoos or bruises from shooting weapons ... Even simple expression of love for Ukrainian nation could cause us serious trouble."
Alexander Etkind, a Russian-born historian who teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said that regardless of whether neo-Nazi groups and other extremists in Russia back or object to Putin's aggressions in Ukraine, there is no one in the current context who is farther to the right or more extreme than Putin himself.
"He's been willing to kill a lot people in Ukraine. Everyone is a moderate by comparison."
How the CIA's Hunt for a Russian Mole Blinded It To Putin's Rise
Robert Baer
TIME Sat, May 21, 2022, 4:30 AM·6 min read Russian President Vladimir Putin walks along St.George's Hall to take part in an inauguaration ceremony in Moscow's Kremlin, 07 May 2004. Putin is starting his second term with a solemn ceremony in an ornate Kremlin hall, nearly two months after easily winning re-election as leader of what he called a "vast, great power."
Credit - ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO-AFP Images)
War, by nature, tends to have winners and losers. The war in Ukraine, a universal disaster, seems to have more losers than winners, though. But before this conflict, few might have expected one of its few winners to be a much tarnished organization thousands of miles away.
The CIA, along with other American intelligence agencies, has dazzled the world over the past several months. First, in the months leading up to the invasion, the U.S. used satellite imagery to continually insist Putin was planning an invasion, even when he denied it. Now, stories are emerging of Ukraine using U.S. intelligence to target Russian generals and warships. There are even suggestions that the U.S. has flexed its muscles by intentionally leaking its involvement.
But we shouldn’t let our pride over what we do know drown out of concern for what we don’t know. For example, we had we had no idea how weak Russia’s military actually was, that it had become a Potemkin village that couldn’t fight its way out of a Ukrainian paper bag. Consider General Milley’s prediction that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours. We didn’t know just for example, that thanks to corruption the Russian army relied on faulty Chinese tires.
And yet, what we don’t know about Putin and Russia goes so much deeper than that. In the 90s, the CIA completely missed KGB hardliners plotting against Gorbachev, then Yeltsin. And then, most importantly, it missed the rise of Putin.
Although Putin has become one of the most powerful men in the world, to this day we still don’t have an authoritative, firsthand account of how he got to where he did. We don’t know, for example, who in the KGB backed Putin and what was expected of him after he got to the Kremlin. Without even these most basic facts, how can we expect to have any sense of whether his fascist rhetoric about nuclear weapons or further territorial expansions is real or just bluster?
For all the flashy successes of American intelligence of late, we lack the deeper understanding of the Russia and Putin required to calculate his next move. There’s a few explanations for this. For one, the CIA, in line with the post-Cold War view that Russia was America’s best friend, completely rolled back its spying on Russia, letting go of some of the CIA’s best Russian spies. Things got worse after 9/11, as few case officers wanted to work in Moscow during the War on Terror. But above all was a problem few Americans wanted to admit: moles.
In the 80s and 90s, America clearly had a mole problem. Russian agents around the world were disappearing. Sensitive information was showing up in Russia. But with the Berlin Wall coming down, there was little appetite for mole hunting at Langley.
Nevertheless, a small group of the CIA’s veteran counterintelligence persisted, understanding what was at stake. Eventually, with the help of a Russian asset called “Max,” they brought down Aldrich Ames, now known as one of the most notorious traitors in U.S. history. But Ames’ treason could reasonably account for only a fraction of the losses.
So they kept hunting. Called the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), three counterintelligence veterans—Laine Bannerman, Diana Worthen, and Maryann Hough—and one FBI agent, Jim Milburn, were tasked with reviewing all the available evidence. After months of painstaking work (in which they also raised the first suspicions about an FBI mole, who turned out to be Robert Hanssen), it was clear to them that the evidence all pointed at one suspect: their own boss, the head of CIA counterintelligence, the very man in charge of making sure American intelligence wasn’t penetrated by foreign government. He was the very man who caught Ames, which seems counterintuitive, until you enter the so-called “wilderness of mirrors” and consider the level at which the KGB plays the game. If he really was a mole, there was no telling how much damage someone with his access could have caused. What SIU couldn’t have been sure of is whether the Russians had planted the evidence against him, with the intention of sending the FBI and CIA off on a damaging ghost hunt.
There’s a reason you’ve never heard about any of this, from the mole hunt to the dramatic aftermath at Langley. Until the key participants, including the man at the center of the allegations, decided to talk to me on the record for my book, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia, it was buried. The rumors have persisted, and the FBI continues to investigate to this day, but most agree that the CIA never got to the bottom of its mole problem.
We don’t know for sure the damage done by the Fourth Man or other undiscovered moles in American intelligence. We know about lost agents and sensitive information that has turned up in Moscow. We know that moles betrayed our taps and microwave on Russian military communications.
Most of all, we know this: in 1998, tipped off a friendly intelligence that all four of the CIA’s remaining Russian agents had been compromised to the Russians, the CIA whisked them away to safety. The CIA did not have a single source of any value in Moscow, leaving it entirely blind to the rise of the KGB’s own Vladimir Putin in 1999. When the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1999 told me that Moscow taxi drivers were better informed about Putin’s rise than the CIA, I finally understood just how bad it was.
The moles of the 80s and 90s may seem like old news, and yet they are a clear sign that the KGB has been outplaying the U.S. for years. And with Russia once again an emergent enemy, the CIA has scrambled to catch up. But we are more than a step behind, continuing to guess at Putin’s motives and calculus, frantically imagining what he might or might not do next.
As I, and others like Douglas London, have argued for years, technology is not a substitute for human intelligence. There is clear, public evidence that the CIA is doubling down on its efforts to recruit Russian spies. This is crucial: hopefully now we’ll see the flood of high-level defectors we didn’t see after the Cold War (in hindsight, a clear sign the KGB was lying in wait).
This might be an opportunity, for example, to land a well-placed spy in the FSB, the successor to the KGB’s infamous Second Chief Directorate, which the CIA never managed to penetrate. Putin got his start in the Second, went on to run the FSB, and then eventually believed the agency’s flawed intelligence that conquering Ukraine would be easy. With an FSB chief recently imprisoned, morale is likely low, and it should be easy pickings for the CIA. There, the CIA might finally get its elusive answers about how Putin came to power.
But recruiting spies isn’t just about getting information about our enemies. It’s also the only way to clear our own house of moles, past or present. Even if the moles of the Cold War are retired or buried, the CIA might now be able to figure out to resolve mysteries like the Fourth Man, clearing the path towards a better understanding of how Putin and his KGB colleagues operate.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Can't Figure Out Why People Are Picking On Murderous White Supremacists
Mary Papenfuss
HUFFPOST Sun, May 22, 2022
Extremist GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) wondered in a weekend interview why people are picking on homicidal white supremacists.
She said that there are so many other criminals to complain about instead — like undocumented immigrants. She also said people should be talking about the “Asian man” who killed a member of a California church last week, and the “Black man” who drove his car into Wisconsin shoppers last year.
She added, incongruously, that it “shouldn’t be about race.”
Greene made the comments as she attacked Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) for railing last week in the House against the avowed white supremacist suspected in the horrific assault at a Buffalo supermarket targeting Black people last week that killed ten people.
Why is there a “target” on white supremacists? she asked in an interview from her car (below) with the right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice.
“White supremacy shouldn’t be the main target,” the lawmaker argued. “We should be more concerned about the illegal invasion at the border, the crime happening every single day on our streets, especially in cities like Chicago. We should go after criminals that break the law and not pursue people based on their skin color.”
But race clearly is critically important in hate crimes. The FBI reported last year that the number of hate crimes in the U.S. in 2020 was the highest in two decades, triggered by a surge in assaults largely by white men on Black and Asian Americans, Hispanics and Jews.
There were 51 hate-crime murders in America in 2019, the highestat that time since the FBI began tracking the toll in the 1990s. Most murder victims were Blacks, Hispanics and Jews.
“Preventing racial hate crimes means tackling white supremacist ideology,” said a position paper posted last week by the Brookings Institution. Over the past 20 years, the number of hate groups in the U.S. has jumped 100%, it noted.
Nadler’s reference to the Buffalo shootings that so incensed Greene was part of his argument to pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to crack down on the problem. The bill is supported by Democrats, but Republicans are lukewarm.
The killings all involved white shooters inspired by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which baselessly claims there’s a plot to replace whites with people of color, immigrants and Jews. Greene’s reference to an immigrant “invasion” was a clear dog whistle to believers in the imagined plot.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
