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)
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
MORE SHOCKING REVELATIONS FROM DAVOS Billionaire Salesforce founder: 'Capitalism as we know it is dead'
The billionaire founder of Silicon Valley company Salesforce (CRM) declared on Tuesday modern capitalism is “dead”, saying business leaders now have a “responsibility” to think beyond just shareholders.
“Capitalism as we have known it is dead,” Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, said at Davos. “This obsession that we have with maximising profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency.”
Benioff, who is worth $7.7bn (£6bn) according to Forbes, made the comments during a panel on ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ — the idea that companies should work to maximise the value for all ‘stakeholders’ such as employees and society, rather than just maximising shareholder value.
“Stakeholder capitalism is finally hitting a tipping point,” Benioff said.
“Does it mean I have to fight for my employees? Yes. If they’re being discriminated against and if they’re LGBT employees, yes, we will fight for them. Chairman and Co-CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff attends a session at the 50th World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on 21 January. Photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters
“Does it mean I have to fight for our customers? Of course. Or even our local stakeholders in our community like our homeless? Yes. Every CEO has a responsibility to think about all stakeholders.
“And yes ... The planet is a key stakeholder. We’re in a planetary emergency.”
The idea of stakeholder capitalism has been gaining ground in recent years and last August the US Business Roundtable, which represents some of the country’s top CEOs, said it was abandoning the idea of shareholder primacy and instead defining the purpose of a corporation as “improving our society”.
The idea of stakeholder capitalism has been gaining ground in recent years and last August the US Business Roundtable, which represents some of the country’s top CEOs, said it was abandoning the idea of shareholder primacy and instead defining the purpose of a corporation as “improving our society”.
Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan appeared alongside Benioff on the panel and discussed how international business leaders are working on a data measurements for corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Moynihan said data was key to enabling stakeholder capitalism to evolve. Moynihan and his team are developing 22 datapoints.
“We are very good at measuring shareholder value,” Jim Snabe, chairman of industrial giant Siemens, said on the same panel.
“We’ve done that for many years. As CEOs and chairmen, we think that is an important role. If we want to go to stakeholder capitalism, we do need to measure the value that we can create for all stakeholders.”
Snabe said Siemens was “putting our remuneration system for the CEO and the executive team on an ESG base”.
Davos 2020's 'dirty little secret' is that the rich need Trump to get re-elected: Hoover's Ferguson
Don't bet against Bernie: Niall Ferguson on election BOURGEOIS FINANCIAL HISTORIAN AND APOLOGIST FOR CAPITALISM NIALL FERGUSON ADMITS ITS DIRTY PUBLIC SECRET AND IT'S FEAR
A concentration of billionaires who descended this week on Davos, Switzerland for The World Economic Forum’s 50th annual meeting are harboring a “dirty little secret” about the U.S. presidential election in November, says the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson.
“The dirty little secret of Davos 2020 is they all need him to get re-elected,” Ferguson, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, told Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christophorus, when asked if wealthy attendees are begrudgingly rooting for President Donald Trump. “Nobody wants to say that out loud.”
On Tuesday, Trump addressed the forum in a speech that was criticized for a lackluster delivery during which he took credit for the U.S. economy and launching what he characterized as a “great American comeback.” Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington negotiated over final rules that will govern the president’s impending impeachment trial.
“I rather relish the deadpan delivery. This was well-behaved Trump,” Ferguson said of the address. “I also thought it was right that he emphasized the economic successes of his administration, which I think significant even if he was guilty of a little hyperbole.”
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a speech during the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Ferguson said the attitude marks an about-face since the last time he attended Davos in 2016.
“Almost nobody gave him a chance of winning the nomination, much less the presidency. And then the following year, they were all in a state of trauma because he won against their expectations, and they thought that was going to be a great disaster as a result, and they’re all a great deal richer than they were back then.”
For the ultra wealthy, Ferguson said Trump remains the obvious favorite if faced with a choice between Trump and Democratic front-runners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The markets might be underestimating Sanders
If the markets begin to suspect that Sanders has a shot, he predicts significant volatility this spring. Ferguson added that investors are seeking four more years of “easy money” by way of low interest rates.
Seven of the Democratic US Presidential candidates including U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, walk arm-in-arm with local African-American leaders during the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day Parade in Columbia, South Carolina, U.S. January 20, 2020. REUTERS/Randall HillMore
“I think if Mike Bloomberg were listening in he'd say, ‘What about me?’ But it's still not clear that he really has a strong chance of getting the Democratic nomination, and if you take him out of contention, then what are you left with? Joe Biden, who is not exactly been impressive on the campaign trail,” he said.
Asked about his belief that Bernie Sanders has a shot at winning November’s election, Ferguson said markets are underestimating Sanders given that polling, fundraising, and the strength of his campaign’s ground game show he’s a formidable contender.
“And remember, there's a substantial proportion of Democratic activists, especially young ones, who feel that he was robbed of the nomination for years back, and that was a calamitous mistake,” he said. “I think it's conceivable that if things play out in his favor in the early primaries, we'll get a sudden sort of shock awakening.”
“It is as unlikely-seeming now in January 2020 that Bernie Sanders becomes president of the United States, as it was unlikely in January 2016 that Donald Trump would be president of the United States.”
MBS AND THE SAUDI STATE AID TRUMP IN HIS WAR ON THE WASHINGTON POST AND JEFF BEZOS
U.N. officials press Saudi Arabia on hack of Jeff Bezos's phone
WASHINGTON — United Nations officials have asked the government of Saudi Arabia to explain the apparent hack of a cellphone belonging to Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, a source familiar with the matter told Yahoo News.
On Wednesday, special rapporteurs, investigators working for the U.N., will release a statement announcing the findings of a forensic investigation conducted by an outside firm that concludes the hack of Bezos’s phone was likely the result of a Saudi scheme. Naked photos sent by Bezos to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair were likely obtained in the hack. While the findings of the investigation aren’t conclusive, the U.N. officials are concerned that the attack on privacy is part of a broader campaign to intimidate critics of Saudi Arabia.
Shortly after the October 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos skipped a planned appearance at an investment conference that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also referred to as “MBS”) was hosting in Saudi Arabia. A few months later, Bezos announced that the National Enquirer had obtained naked pictures of him. While news reports at the time suggested that Michael Sanchez, the brother of the woman with whom Bezos was having an affair, may have been responsible, last March Bezos’s longtime security consultant, Gavin de Becker, announced he believed the Saudis were responsible for the hack.
U.N. Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and David Kaye have sent an “allegation letter” to the Saudi ambassador in Geneva, the source said, asking questions about the Bezos hack, which U.N. officials believe to be significant in part because “it connects to both the killing [of Khashoggi] and the use of spyware in general,” the source added.
Spyware similar to the type that is believed to have been used to infect Bezos’s phone was previously deployed by the Saudis to hack into the phone of Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, who is suing NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware. Abdulaziz has alleged that the Saudis hacked into his phone using Pegasus weeks before Khashoggi was killed. Abdulaziz had been working with Khashoggi on sensitive projects targeting Saudi disinformation campaigns in the months before the killing.
The Saudi government denies the allegations.
“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a Tuesday tweet. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”
The forensic investigation of the Bezos hack was conducted by FTI Consulting’s Anthony Ferrante, who declined to comment for this article. But the source familiar with the matter said bin Salman and Bezos had dinner in Los Angeles and “exchanged numbers” during the crown prince’s tour of the U.S. in March 2018. A video clip was sent to Bezos’s phone by a WhatsApp number linked to bin Salman, the source said, adding that Ferrante determined with a “medium to high degree of confidence” that the Saudis are behind the Bezos hack. It is unclear who paid Ferrante to investigate. Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP)
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is suing NSO for having “violated both U.S. and California laws as well as the WhatsApp Terms of Service, which prohibit this type of abuse,” according to a statement from WhatsApp. Last May, WhatsApp discovered a security flaw that allowed hackers to infect victims’ phones with Pegasus spyware even when they didn’t click on a link.
The Facebook allegations bolster the claim that the Saudis are behind the hack of Bezos’s phone, the source said. “The allegation is that a video file was sent from an account controlled by, at least partially controlled by, MBS and was received by the intended recipient, Bezos,” the source said. “If you line it up with what Facebook alleged in October and November of this past year there was an exploit that didn’t require ... the target to actually click on the link if it was sent by WhatsApp.”
Analysis Said to Tie Hacking of Bezos’ Phone to Saudi Leader’s Account
SEATTLE — A forensic analysis of Jeff Bezos’ cellphone found with “medium to high confidence” that the Amazon chief’s device was hacked after he received a video from a WhatsApp account reportedly belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, according to people familiar with the Bezos-ordered investigation.
After Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, got the video over the WhatsApp messaging platform in 2018, his phone began sending unusually large volumes of data, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.
The person said the investigators believed Prince Mohammed was used as a conduit because the message would not raise suspicions if it came from him.
The findings of the forensics investigation, completed on behalf of Mr. Bezos by Anthony Ferrante at the business advisory firm FTI Consulting, could not be independently verified by The New York Times.
After the findings were reported by The Guardian and The Financial Times, the Saudi Embassy denied that the Saudi government was involved.
“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy said on Twitter. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”
Mr. Bezos’ security consultant, Gavin de Becker, had previously accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’ phone, saying Saudi authorities targeted him because he owned The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively reported on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, one of its columnists, who was a critic of the Saudi government. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Prince Mohammed ordered the killing.
Two United Nations experts plan to release a public statement Wednesday morning “addressing serious allegations” that Mr. Bezos was hacked by receiving a WhatsApp message “reportedly from an account belonging to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,” one of the experts, Agnes Callamard, said in an email.
Ms. Callamard, a specialist in extrajudicial killings, has been investigating Mr. Khashoggi’s murder, and David Kaye, an expert in human rights law, has been gathering information about violations of freedom of the press.
In its statement, the United Nations plans to say that it is raising concerns over the hacking of Mr. Bezos’s phone directly with the Saudi government, said a person familiar with the statement. The United Nations did not conduct its own investigation into the hack and is basing its statement on the FTI report, the person said.
The United Nations began looking into the situation in June 2019 when someone close to Mr. Bezos shared the forensic analysis with them, the person added.
Amazon and Mr. de Becker declined to comment. William Isaacson, Mr. Bezos’ lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner, declined to comment beyond saying that Mr. Bezos was cooperating with continuing investigations. Mr. Ferrante declined to comment through a FTI spokesman.
“All FTI Consulting client work is confidential,” Matt Bashalany, a spokesman for FTI, said in a statement. “We do not comment on, confirm or deny client engagements or potential engagements.”
The questions about who has had access to Mr. Bezos’ phone erupted a year ago, after The National Enquirer reported that the tech executive was romantically involved with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor. At the time, The Enquirer published photos of the couple together, as well as intimate text messages.
Mr. Bezos later published emails from American Media, the parent company of The National Enquirer, which he said amounted to “extortion and blackmail.” He suggested that the leaks of photos and details of his private life could have been politically motivated to harm him because of his ownership of The Post.
In March, Mr. de Becker accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’s phone. In an opinion article in The Daily Beast, Mr. de Becker wrote that his “investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence” that the Saudis got private information from Mr. Bezos’ phone and that he turned the evidence they had uncovered over to law enforcement authorities.
Mr. de Becker did not detail specific evidence they uncovered, nor did he detail whether the leaked information was published by The Enquirer. American Media denied any Saudi involvement, saying Ms. Sanchez’s brother was the tabloid’s sole source.
Karen Weise reported from Seattle, Matthew Rosenberg from Washington and Sheera Frenkel from San Francisco. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.
Earth's oldest asteroid impact 'may have ended ice age'
Image copyrightINTERNATIONAL SPACE STATIONImage captionAn image of the Yarrabubba area taken from the International Space Station
Scientists have identified the world's oldest asteroid crater in Australia, adding it may explain how the planet was lifted from an ice age.
The asteroid hit Yarrabubba in Western Australia about 2.2 billion years ago - making the crater about half the age of Earth, researchers say.
Their conclusion was reached by testing minerals found in rocks at the site.
The scientists say the find is exciting because it could account for a warming event during that era.
Due to billions of years of erosion, the crater is not visible to the eye. Scientists mapped scars in the area's magnetic field to determine its 70km (43 miles) diameter.
Image copyrightCURTIN UNIVERSITYImage captionYarrabubba is located about 600km north-east of the city of Perth
"The landscape is actually very flat because it's so old, but the rocks there are distinctive," researcher Prof Chris Kirkland told the BBC.
To determine when the asteroid hit Earth, the team examined tiny zircon and monazite crystals in the rocks. They were "shocked" in the strike and now can be read like "tree rings", Prof Kirkland said.
These crystals hold tiny amounts of uranium. Because uranium decays into lead at a consistent pace, the researchers were able to calculate how much time had passed.
Image copyrightCURTIN UNIVERSITYImage captionA zircon crystal used to date the impact Yarrabubba
It is at least 200 million years older than the next most ancient impact structure - the Vredefort Dome in South Africa.
"We were interested in the area because the Western Australian landscape is very old but we didn't expected [the crater] to be as old as this," Prof Kirkland said.
"It's absolutely possible that there's an older crater out there just waiting to be discovered, but the difficulty is in finding the crust before it erodes and you lose that early Earth history".
Could it have ended an ice age?
The timing of the impact could also explain why the world warmed around this time, according to the researchers.
Scientists believe the planet was previously in one of its "Snowball Earth" periods, when it was largely covered in ice. At some point, the ice sheets melted and the planet began to rapidly warm.
"The age of the [crater] corresponds pretty precisely with the end of a potential global glacial period," Prof Kirkland said.
"So the impact may have had significant changes to our planetary climate."
Using computer modelling, the team calculated that the asteroid struck a kilometres-thick ice sheet covering the Earth. The event would have released huge volumes of water vapour, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
This could have helped the planet's warming during the Proterozoic era - a stage when oxygen had just appeared in the atmosphere and complex life had not yet formed.
Image copyrightTIMMONS ERICKSONImage captionThe crater as seen from Barlangi Rock, with an outcrop in its centre
"Obviously we were very excited just with the age itself," Prof Kirkland said. "But placing that right with the context of Earth's other events makes it become really very interesting."
There is not enough modelling from the time to comprehensively test the theory, but "the rocks tell a story about the massive impact into the planet".
Another theory for the warming event is that volcanic eruptions may have pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Red States Brace for Disasters Of Climate, but Won't Name It Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times•January 21, 2020
Billy Ezzell takes down boards covering windows after Hurricane Florence in Carolina Beach, N.C., Sept. 17, 2018. (Eric Thayer/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is about to distribute billions of dollars to coastal states mainly in the South to help steel them against natural disasters worsened by climate change.
But states that qualify must first explain why they need the money. That has triggered linguistic acrobatics as some conservative states submit lengthy, detailed proposals on how they will use the money, while mostly not mentioning climate change.
A 306-page draft proposal from Texas doesn’t use the terms “climate change” or “global warming,” nor does South Carolina’s proposal. Instead, Texas refers to “changing coastal conditions” and South Carolina talks about the “destabilizing effects and unpredictability” of being hit by three major storms in four years, while being barely missed by three other hurricanes.
Louisiana, a state taking some of the most aggressive steps in the nation to prepare for climate change, does include the phrase “climate change” in its proposal in one place, an appendix on the final page.
The federal funding program, devised after the devastating hurricanes and wildfires of 2017, reflects the complicated politics of global warming in the United States, even as the toll of that warming has become difficult to ignore. While officials from both political parties are increasingly forced to confront the effects of climate change, including worsening floods, more powerful storms and greater economic damage, many remain reluctant to talk about the cause.
The $16 billion program, created by Congress and overseen by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is meant to help states better prepare for future natural disasters. It is the first time such funds have been used to prepare for disasters like these that haven’t yet happened, rather than responding to or repairing damage that has already occurred.
The money is distributed according to a formula benefiting states most affected by disasters in 2015, 2016 and 2017. That formula favors Republican-leaning states along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, which were hit particularly hard during that period.
Texas is in line for more than $4 billion, the most of any state. The next largest sums go to Louisiana ($1.2 billion), Florida ($633 million), North Carolina ($168 million) and South Carolina ($158 million), all of which voted Republican in the 2016 presidential election.
The other states getting funding are West Virginia, Missouri, Georgia and California, the only state getting money that voted Democratic in the presidential race of 2016. California hasn’t yet submitted its proposal, but in the past the state has spoken forcefully about the threat of climate change, in addition to fighting with the Trump administration to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars.
Half the money, $8.3 billion, was set aside for Puerto Rico, as well as $774 million for the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Trump administration has delayed that funding, citing concerns over corruption and fiscal management.
Not every state has felt compelled to tiptoe around climate change. Florida’s proposal calls it “a key overarching challenge,” while North Carolina pledges to anticipate “how a changing climate, extreme events, ecological degradation and their cascading effects” will affect state residents.
The housing department has itself been careful about how it described the program’s goals. When HUD in August released the rules governing the money, it didn’t use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” but referred to “changing environmental conditions.”
Still, the rule required states that received money to describe their “current and future risks.” And when those risks included flooding — the most costly type of disaster nationwide — states were instructed to account for “continued sea level rise,” which is one consequence of global warming.
A spokeswoman for the housing department did not respond to requests for comment.
Stan Gimont, who as deputy assistant secretary for grant programs at HUD was responsible for the program until he left the department last summer, said the decision not to cite climate change was “a case of picking your battles.”
“When you go out and talk to local officials, there are some who will very actively discuss climate change and sea-level rise, and then there are those who will not,” Gimont said. “You’ve got to work with both ends of the spectrum. And I think in a lot of ways it’s best to draw a middle road on these things.”
Texas released a draft version of its plan in November. That draft said the state faced “changing coastal conditions,” as well as a future in which both wildfires and extreme heat were expected to increase. In response, the state proposes better flood control, buying and demolishing homes in high-risk areas and giving counties money for their own projects.
But state officials in Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Legislature, were silent on what is causing the changes. The report does not cite climate change or global warming, though “climate change” pops up in footnotes citing articles and papers with that phrase in their titles.
Brittany Eck, a spokeswoman for the Texas General Land Office, which produced the proposal, did not respond to questions about the choice of language or the role of climate change in making disasters worse. In an email, she said Texas would distribute the funding based on “accepted scientific research, evidence and historical data to determine projects that provide the greatest value to benefit ratio to protect affected communities from future events.”
Some local politicians in hard-hit areas of Texas are outspoken. Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat and the top elected official in Harris County, which includes Houston and which suffered some of the worst effects of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, said that addressing the effects of climate change was a top issue for her constituents.
“Harris County is Exhibit A for how the climate crisis is impacting the daily lives of residents in Texas,” Hidalgo said in a statement. “If we’re serious about breaking the cycle of flooding and recovery we have to shift the paradigm on how we do things, and that means putting science above politics.”
In South Carolina, which like Texas is controlled by Republicans in both legislative chambers and the governor’s office, the state’s proposal likewise makes no mention of climate change. It cites sea-level rise once, and only to say that it won’t be addressed.
The state’s flood-reduction efforts “will only address riverine and surface flooding, not storm surge or sea-level rise issues,” according to its proposal.
That is despite the fact that sea levels and storm surges are increasing across the coastal southeastern United States because of climate change, federal scientists wrote in a sweeping 2018 report. The report’s authors noted that Charleston, South Carolina, broke its record for flooding in 2016, at 50 days, and that “this increase in high-tide flooding is directly tied to sea-level rise.”
Megan Moore, a spokeswoman for South Carolina’s Department of Administration, said by email that the proposal “is designed to increase resilience to and reduce or eliminate long-term risk of loss of life or property based on the repetitive losses sustained in this state.” She did not respond to questions about why the proposal did not address climate change.
One of the states acknowledged that weather conditions were changing and seas were rising, but still mostly avoided the term climate change. Louisiana, whose location at the mouth of the Mississippi River makes it one of the states most threatened by climate change, intends to use the $1.2 billion it will receive to better map and prepare for future flooding — a major peril for countless low-lying areas — said Pat Forbes, executive director of the state’s Office of Community Development, which is managing the money.
“We realize we’ve got to get better, because it’s going to get worse,” Forbes said.
The state, where both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans but the governor is a Democrat, submitted a proposal that makes references to climate change, noting that the risks of flooding “will continue to escalate in a warming world.”
Still, the 91-page report uses the phrase “climate change” only once, at the end of an appendix on its final page.
Forbes called climate change “not that important a thing for an action plan,” and said that mostly leaving the phrase out of the document was not intentional. He said the purpose of the proposal was to demonstrate to the federal government that Louisiana knows what it wants to do with the money.
“Our governor has acknowledged on multiple occasions that we expect the flooding to be more frequent and worse in the future, not better,” Forbes said. “So we’ve got to have an adaptive process here that constantly makes us safer.”
Other states used their proposals to emphasize the centrality of climate change to the risks they face. “Climate change is a key overarching challenge which threatens to compound the extent and effects of hazards,” wrote officials in Florida, where Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office.
In North Carolina, which has a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled Legislature, the proposal argued that the state was trying to anticipate “how a changing climate, extreme events, ecological degradation and their cascading effects will impact the needs of North Carolina’s vulnerable populations.”
Shana Udvardy, a climate resilience analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the failure to confront global warming made it more important for governments to at least call the problem by its name.
“We really need every single state, local and federal official to speak clearly,” Udvardy said. “The polls indicate that the majority of Americans understand that climate change is happening here and now.”
Others were more sympathetic. Marion McFadden, who preceded Gimont as head of disaster-recovery grants at HUD during the Obama administration, said the department was responding to the political realities in conservative states. She described the $16 billion grant program as “all about climate change,” but said some states would sooner refuse the money than admit that global warming is real.
“HUD is requiring them to be explicit about everything other than the concept that climate change is responsible,” said McFadden, who is now senior vice president for public policy at Enterprise Community Partners, which worked with states to meet the program’s requirements. Insistence on saying the words raises the risk “that they may walk away.”
KEEP THEM RELIGIOUS KEEP THEM IGNORANT LOW EDUCATION INCREASED ANTI SCIENCE DEMAGOGUERY AND CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL IN THE POOREST WHITE RIGHT WING STATES OF THE OLD SLAVE CONFEDERACY
The most educated states in America, mapped Image: WalletHub
For many people, an expensive education can be the ticket to better career opportunities and higher pay – but it isn’t attainable for all.
Website WalletHub have compiled a set of handy maps and charts that show how educated different states in America are.
Their methodology was pretty intensive, examining what they call “key factors” of a well-educated population: educational attainment, school quality, and achievement gaps between genders and races. Comparing all 50 states, the data set ranges across adults aged 25 and older with at least a high school diploma.
In order to determine the “most” and “least” educated states, they compared them across two key dimensions: educational attainment and quality of education, examined using 18 relevant metrics on a 100-point scale.
It’s pretty complex, and their findings were fascinating. WalletHub found that the top five states were: Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, Vermont and Connecticut. The lowest ranking state was Mississippi, which scored just 21.01 on their scale.
The study showed some other pretty interesting findings: despite ranking at number 25 on the scale generally, California ranked highest for university quality. Meanwhile, Massachusetts had the highest number of graduate degree holders.
'I was sexually abused by a shaman at an ayahuasca retreat'
By Simon Maybin and Josephine CasserlyBBC News, Peru
16 January 2020Share this with FacebShare this with MessengeShare this with Twitter
Share this w
Image captionRebekah was the only single woman at her ayahuasca retreat
The psychedelic powers of a traditional Amazonian plant medicine called ayahuasca are attracting more and more tourists. It's said to bring spiritual enlightenment and to help with addiction, depression and trauma. But a string of allegations suggests there's a darker side to the ayahuasca scene.
Warning: this article contains details of alleged sexual assaults
Rebekah first tried ayahuasca on a "complete whim" when she was travelling in Peru in 2015.
"I thought it sounded interesting and I thought I might as well give it a try," says Rebekah, a New Zealander in her 20s who asked the BBC not to use her surname. "So I found a retreat centre that I felt was good and I just went for it and it was amazing."
Ayahuasca can induce visions of things like serpents, palaces, and alien beings - and bring up long-forgotten memories. Like many who've drunk the brew, Rebekah has a wide-eyed distant look as she reminisces about the experience.
"It was like being guided very gently and very kindly through some really awful experiences that I'd had in the past," Rebekah says. "And returning back home after that, I felt like my relationships were a lot stronger. I felt it was a lot easier to share and receive love.
"They do say that ayahuasca is like 20 years of psychotherapy. And I completely believe that."
Image copyrightALAMYImage captionAyahuasca and chakruna leaves being cooked ahead of a ceremony in Peru
Ayahuasca is usually taken in ceremonies at night, led by a healer - sometimes called a shaman. He or she will drink the sticky brown liquid - a brew of two Amazonian plants - then dole out helpings to the participants.
It's been used by tribes in the Amazon region for centuries but now there's a boom in what's become known as "ayahuasca tourism", with ever more specialist retreat centres opening. Travellers often come for help dealing with mental health problems - and a growing body of scientific research suggests ayahuasca could be an effective treatment.
About half an hour or so into a ceremony, the medicine takes its effect and the healer will start singing sacred chants, known as icaros, which guide the participants through their visions. Drinkers usually "purge" during ceremonies too, vomiting and sometimes getting diarrhoea as well.
When Rebekah went on her first ayahuasca retreat, she was the only single woman there and noticed that the male healer was paying her special attention.
"How he treated me was very different, which I didn't find suspicious at the time. But upon reflection, now I do."
A year later, by now a more experienced ayahuasca drinker, Rebekah returned to the same retreat in Peru. The same healer was leading the ceremonies.
Once again, she says, she was treated differently from everyone else. There was a lot of flattery. Then the healer began confiding in Rebekah.
"He constantly told me that he had a lot of troubles," she says, "and he said he was having problems with his wife, that he wasn't sexually fulfilled, and that I was the one who was able to cure him of that."
Rebekah was 20 at the time; the healer in his 50s.
"He also promised me a lot of spiritual advancement or a lot of spiritual power, if we had a relationship - while his wife was down the road."
Find out more
Listn to Simon Maybin and Josephine Casserly's documentary Ayahuasca: Fear and Healing in the Amazon on BBC Sounds
Rebekah says the healer sexually abused her, coercing her into sexual acts.
"It's disgusting," she says. "Because he was a shaman, I thought he had moral superiority in a sense and I trusted him."
After she was abused, Rebekah left the centre - and the country: "I booked a flight and got the hell out of there."
She was left with a tangle of painful emotions: "Disgust, repulsion, betrayal - confusion, as well as to why a guide would do this, why a teacher would do this and why they would exploit their power like that."
Rebekah's alleged abuser is still the head shaman at his centre - which gets five-star ratings on review sites.
"He is still there," Rebekah says, clearly deeply angered by the situation. Her hands are visibly shaking. "There are other centres that I know of as well that are still operating. There've been multiple women that have been sexually abused in these centres."
Experiences of sexual abuse seem to be widespread in this world. We've heard numerous allegations against numerous healers and read many testimonies of sexual abuse on online forums.
One name that comes up repeatedly is Guillermo Arévalo, a well-known healer who's been honoured by the Peruvian Congress for his work on sustainable development.
"He came to Canada many times," says a woman in her 40s whom we're calling Anna.
"It was quite lucrative - big ceremonies. They'd fill up fast, people paying C$300 (£175) to come and sit with Guillermo. He had kind of a status. It was an honour to sit in ceremony with him."
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Anna, who had long been interested in alternative medicine, hoped ayahuasca might help her deal with her addiction to heroin.
At first, she was impressed by Arévalo.
"Like a lot of people, you're flabbergasted by the man's presence and power and ability to lead the ceremony - it's quite profound," she says. "The chanting. He is a good healer."
But a ceremony about seven years ago dramatically changed Anna's opinion.
"It was completely pitch black, the room had no windows. There were a lot of people.
"I was under the effects of the medicine. When you're under the effects there's lots of different sounds. People are crying, verbalising things that make no sense at all, purging or moaning.
"Even if I had been able to say something, nobody would respond."
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Anna was having a difficult time. She recalls lying down, moaning and groaning. "Guillermo came and he sat with me and at first it was a sense of relief because I think I'm going to get some help," she says.
"He started to chant to me and put his hands on my stomach over my clothing which is normal. And then he put his hands down my pants. And there's this sense of feeling frozen. I lay there in fear and then he put his hands up my shirt and felt around my breasts."
She remembers thinking: "'What the heck was that all about?' Just a sense of disbelief and confusion."
It's taken six years for Anna to feel able to speak out about what happened to her.
"Women are conditioned to accept this behaviour. For myself, coming from a history of addiction - and I've had abusive relationships with men that I've tolerated in my life - and a history of childhood sexual abuse, there's a sense of familiarity there, of normalcy.
"And also this weird co-dependent relationship for me where the medicine was helping me so I didn't want to speak up because I was afraid I would be ostracised from the community and then I would be kind of cut off from the medicine."
Risks and benefits?
While preliminary scientific studies have suggested that ayahuasca could have therapeutic benefits, it contains DMT, which is illegal in the UK, and there are potential risks.
A 2015 report found six volunteers with depression showed a decrease in symptoms after taking it. A separate study two years later indicated that it held promise as a treatment for eating disorders. Psychologists have also speculated that it could help those with PTSD.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office warns that some people have "suffered serious illnesses and in some cases death" after taking part in ayahuasca ceremonies. It points out that retreats are typically some distance from populated areas and that while some have basic medical facilities, others do not.
Around the same time, a group calling themselves Ayahuasca Community Awareness Canada - which included senior academics - put their names to a letter about Arévalo's behaviour and circulated it within the ayahuasca scene. The letter-writers say they took action because of the number of complaints made against the healer, citing reports of non-consensual or inappropriate sexual behaviour.
When further named signatories were added to the letter in 2015 and it was made public, Arévalo stopped visiting Canada to lead ayahuasca ceremonies.
But when we track him down it seems he's been active all around the world in the intervening years and is now based at a retreat centre in Peru. The place used to be called Anaconda but when we're there has its first group of foreign guests under a new name, Bena Shinan.
They're milling around in a dining room behind us when we put the allegations of sexual abuse to Arévalo, a slight 71-year-old with silver hair and gold teeth.
Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionGuillermo Arévalo in 2004
"I don't accept the allegations because they're not true," he says firmly. "Because sometimes people just imagine these things."
He says he's heard about the letter by members of the Canadian ayahuasca community, but has never read it.
"It doesn't interest me because the allegations aren't true," he says. "It doesn't bother me because I don't think an allegation's going to kill me."
The claims against him, he says, are "the imaginings of the unwell person".
"When you touch someone who's been abused or raped, they think you're the same. That's what happens. That's how I make sense of it."
When we put Anna's specific allegation to him, he says he doesn't remember ever touching a patient during a ceremony in Canada, saying she too must have imagined it.
"What else is he going to do other than just lie and deny it," Anna responds. "Otherwise he would have to step up and take responsibility and be accountable for the way he has acted."
What about his claim that she just imagined the sexual assault?
"It sounds like gaslighting to me, really," she says. "That's what it feels like."
Although Arévalo denies having sexually abused anyone, he does admit that healers working under him have had sex with "unwell people".
He says he no longer works with those healers, but that in some cases it was the patients who initiated the relationships.
"Western women, when they come, they're also seeking out healers," he says.
Image captionAyahuasca on sale at Belén Market in Iquitos, Peru
Anna's experience with ayahuasca and abuse doesn't end with Guillermo Arévalo. Despite her experiences with him, she didn't want to give up the benefits she received from the brew and continued taking it under the guidance of other healers.
She says that in 2014 she was raped in ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru by a healer who is a member of Arévalo's extended family.
She says again she "just froze" and "let him do whatever he wanted to me".
"I think he probably raped me four or five times and I noticed he was doing it to other people."
Afterwards, Anna says she was in shock. She doesn't remember much about that period of her life.
"I started to develop symptoms of psychosis and ended up relapsing and becoming addicted to fentanyl and overdosed and almost died. I think I really blamed myself for a long time - why I couldn't say no, why I couldn't move, why I let him do those things. Those were the things that were going through my mind."
We've spoken to another guest who was at the same retreat as Anna, who says the healer was later sacked from the centre, because of allegations made by other clients. We're not naming him because, despite our best efforts, we haven't been able to reach him to give him the chance to respond to the allegations.
Emily Sinclair, a British doctoral student researching ayahuasca, is part of a group trying to raise awareness about the problem of sexual abuse in the ayahuasca world.
Working with the Chacruna Institute, an organisation set up to share research on plant medicines and psychedelics, Sinclair helped put together the Ayahuasca Community Guide for the Awareness of Sexual Abuse.
The guidelines highlight typical scenarios in which abuse happens. They also encourage people to drink with trusted companions and to research retreats by checking out review websites before they visit.
Sinclair has been distributing the little green booklet to cafes, tourism offices and ayahuasca centres in the Iquitos area of Peru, known as the hub of ayahuasca tourism.
Image copyrightEMILY SINCLAIR
"A lot of abuse we've found occurs in the context of individual healings where a woman might be asked to remove her clothes unnecessarily," she says. "And when she's in this unfamiliar context, she doesn't know if that's normal or not."
Sinclair points out that it's not just indigenous healers abusing Westerners. "Abuse happens across cultures and within them," she says.
"But one of the big problems is that a lot of people who come here romanticise shamans. So we put them on a pedestal. And it's very easy for that image to be taken advantage of.
"There's also assumptions that some of the people here may have about Western women and culture."
Some of the red flags Sinclair warns people to watch out for echo Rebekah's experience.
"If he's overly touchy with you, he tells you his wife doesn't mind him having sex with other women, he encourages pacts of silence and secrecy between you, he says he wants to teach you 'love magic'. This kind of thing. And also that having sex with them will increase their power and energy. These are all things that have been reported to us as being said to women in this context."
Those affected by sexual abuse understandably find it difficult to talk about openly. On top of that, there's a strong sense within the ayahuasca world that any kind of negative publicity could result in government intervention, which creates an additional pressure to stay silent.
But Rebekah and Anna are speaking out because they hope it will prevent other women being abused.
"I think the only thing we can do is just speak out about it and talk about it," Rebekah says, "make sure people know that it's happening."
Rebekah says that after she was abused there's been "a lot of sadness and a lot of therapy".
It's been hard work for her to trust a healer again, but now she's back in Peru, taking ayahuasca and researching her master's thesis on indigenous medicine.
"Regardless of everything that happened, obviously ayahuasca's great," Rebekah laughs, "because I keep going back to it."
