The ICJ’s Provisional Orders: The Genocide Convention Applies to Gaza

by Binoy Kampmark / January 27th, 2024

On January 26, legal experts, policy wonks, activists and the plain curious waited for the order of the International Court of Justice, sitting in The Hague. The topic was that gravest of crimes, considered most reprehensible in the canon of international law: genocide. The main participants: the accused party, the State of Israel, and the accuser, the Republic of South Africa.

Filed on December 29 last year, the South African case focused on its obligations arising under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and those of Israel. Pretoria, in its case, wished that the ICJ adjudicate and declare that Israel had breached its obligations under the Convention, and “cease forthwith any acts and measures in breach of those obligations, including such acts or measures which would be capable of killing or continuing to kill Palestinians, or causing or continuing to cause serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians or deliberately inflicting on their group, or continuing to inflict on their group, conditions of life calculated to bring out its physical destruction in whole or in part, and fully respect its obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

The latter words derive from Article II of the Convention, which stipulate four genocidal actions: the killing of the group’s members; the causing of serious bodily or mental harm to those group’s members; the deliberate infliction of conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction, in whole or in part, of that group and imposing measures to prevent births within the group.

The sheer extent of devastation being wrought by Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza, justified by the Netanyahu government as necessary self-defence in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7, led the South African team to also seek immediate provisional measures under Article 41 of the Court’s statute. (The review on the case’s merits promises to take much longer.) They included the immediate suspension of the IDF’s military operations in and against Gaza, the taking of all reasonable measures to prevent genocide, and desisting from committing acts within Article II of the Convention. The expulsion and forced displacement of Palestinians should also stop, likewise the deprivation of adequate food, water and access to humanitarian assistance and medical supplies and “the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.”

By 15-2, the court accepted that “the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.” (Over 26,000 Palestinians have been killed, extensive tracts of land in Gaza pummelled into oblivion, and 85% of its 2.3 million residents expelled from their homes.) Measures were therefore required to prevent “real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible, before it gives its final decision.”

The grant of provisional measures was, however, more conservative than that sought by Pretoria. Conspicuously missing was any explicit demand that Israel pause its military operations. That said, the judgment did little to afford Israel’s leaders and the IDF comfort from the obligatory reach of the Genocide Convention, an instrument they had argued was irrelevant and inapplicable to the conduct of “innovative” military operations.

To that end, Israel was obligated to take all possible measures to prevent the commission of acts under Article II of the Genocide Convention, including by its military; prevent and punish “the direct and public incitement to genocide” against the Palestinian populace in Gaza; permit basic services and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip; ensure the preservation of, and prevent destruction of, evidence related to acts committed against Gaza’s Palestinians within Articles II and III of the Convention; and submit a report to the ICJ on how Israel was abiding by such provisional measures within one month.

As is very much the form, the justice from the country in the dock, in this case, Israel’s Aharon Barak, could see nothing inferentially genocidal in his country’s campaign. South Africa, he insisted, had intentionally ignored the role played by Hamas in its October 7 attacks, and “wrongly sought to impute the crime of Cain to Abel.”

Inevitably, the singular experience of the Holocaust survivor, the sui generis Jewish view of trauma, used as solid armour against any possibility that Israel might ever commit genocide, became a point of contention. Genocide “is the gravest possible accusation and is deeply intertwined with my personal life experience.” Israel had a firm commitment to the rule of law, and to accept that it was committing genocide “is very hard for me personally”. Tellingly, he suggested that Israel’s campaign in Gaza be examined, not from the viewpoint of the Genocide Convention but international humanitarian law.

With classic casuistry, Barak did vote for the measure requiring Israel to do everything “within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza strip”. But having identified nothing in the way of such intent, the issue became a moot one. With some relief, Barak could state that certain measures sought by South Africa, including an immediate suspension of military operations, were rejected by the ICJ, which preferred “a significantly narrower scope”.

From the other side of the legal aisle, the South African foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, wished that the ICJ had grasped the nettle to order a halt in military operations. But, with some deft reasoning, she was satisfied that the only way Israel could implement the provisional measures would be through a ceasefire. Much the same view was expressed by the Associated Press: “The court’s half-dozen orders will be difficult to achieve without some sort of cease-fire or pause in the fighting.” That logic is clear enough, but the actions, given the various statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his officials alleging slander and a blood libel against their country, are unlikely to follow.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Watching the Watchdogs: Law, Propaganda, and the Media Walk into a Bar

Or what happens when legal proceedings at the ICJ expose Western media bias and Israeli state propaganda

by Rami G Khouri / January 27th, 2024

This month, the world watched South Africa initiate International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings on the genocidal acts Israel committed in Gaza. In a two-day session on January 11 and 12, the court heard the extensive evidence the South African legal team had gathered to support their case against Israel, and the rebuttal by the Israeli team.

The hearings were historic for two reasons. First, this was the first time that Israel’s decades-long aggression against the Palestinians was articulated in detail for the world to hear, without having to pass through the distorting lens of Western media or politicians. Second, this was the first time that Israel was substantively held to account in public under international law, without being shielded from such accountability by its Western backers, as it has been for the past century.

The unprecedented nature of the hearings drew international attention. The media around the world covered the proceedings extensively, often with live feeds of both presentations. But in the West, once again an anti-Palestinian media bias became apparent.

Channels like the BBC were accused of not fully showing the South African presentation, while broadcasting more of the Israeli one. American, Canadian and British newspapers were chastised for not featuring the ICJ case on their front pages.

The bias was clearest in the glaring parallels between the main points in Israel’s presentations to the court – which reflected the longstanding main themes of Israeli propaganda – and the reporting of Western mainstream media, with some exceptions. Indeed, Western coverage of the war has been skewed since day one.

The US progressive publication The Intercept did its own analysis of three leading US newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times – and found that their reporting “heavily favoured Israel”. It said that they “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”

According to the Intercept’s analysis, the word “slaughter” was used in reference to Israeli deaths vs Palestinian deaths in a ratio of 125 to 2; the word “massacre” in a ratio of 60 to 1. Anti-Semitism was mentioned 549 times, while Islamophobia just 79 times.

This anti-Palestinian bias in print media “tracks with a similar survey of US cable news that the authors conducted last month that found an even wider disparity,” it concluded.

Many other such studies and examples of Western media bias towards Israel are now available.

Tweeting the Intercept report, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, asked a pertinent question: “After months of western media misrepresenting or not reporting the unfolding genocide in Gaza and all sort of int’l law violations against Palestinians: I have a question. Don’t journalists have codes of conducts and professional ethics to abide by and be held accountable to?”

To answer her question: They do, in principle. But in practice, journalists and their media managers and owners operate in the context of most Western media playing a central role in the continuing legacies of Western-Israeli settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinians.

Consequently, the majority of citizens and politicians are convinced that they must support Israeli policies, even if these include settler-colonial brutality and apartheid.

It is no surprise that American, and most other Western, public opinion in the last half-century or so heavily sided with Israel over the Palestinians – because citizens mainly heard Israeli perspectives that dominated the news media and the statements and policies of their governments.

Over the past three months, however, the war in Gaza has revealed just how much Israeli state propaganda shapes US policy and the media’s dominant narrative of events. As Norman Solomon, media critic and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, put it in a January 18 Common Dreams article:

What is most profoundly important about the war in Gaza – what actually happens to people being terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized – has remained close to invisible for the U.S. public … With enormous help from US media and political power structures, the ongoing mass murder – by any other name  – has become normalized, mainly reduced to standard buzz phrases, weaselly diplomat-speak, and euphemistic rhetoric about the Gaza war. Which is exactly what the top leadership of Israel’s government wants.

This dual legacy of the US’s distorted reporting and dysfunctional state policies is no longer as potent as it used to be, as the global public reactions to the ICJ genocide hearing have shown.

The global protests in solidarity with Palestine revealed that Israel and its Western protectors and media parrots, who repeat largely discredited Israeli propaganda arguments, can no longer convince global audiences to the same extent they did in the past. This is due to Israel’s own brutal actions, but also the changed global information system.

The world now sees daily on social media and some alternative media Israel’s genocidal actions and apartheid policies. The ICJ presentations and thousands of associated articles, commentaries, webinars, public talks and other events across the world exposed these Israel-Palestine realities.

Changed information flows have caused serious concern in Washington, as well as Tel Aviv, because decent, justice-loving citizens reject the US’s fervent support for Israel’s military brutality – and many say they are likely to reject voting for “Genocide Joe” Biden in the presidential election this November. This is what happens when ordinary citizens see the full story of events in Palestine – for the first time in modern history.

A new US opinion poll confirms that likely voters are more inclined to vote for candidates who supported a ceasefire in Gaza, by a 2-to-1 margin (51-23 percent). Among young and non-white voters, who are crucial for a Democratic win, between 56 and 60 percent said they would back ceasefire supporters.

But the growing awareness of what is going on in Israel-Palestine has had an impact well beyond US politics. As South African journalist Tony Karon noted in an article in The Nation on January 11: “So Israel is waging a classic colonial war of pacification of a native population resisting colonization – at a moment when much of the global citizenry is producing the receipts of centuries of Western violence and enslavement, demanding justice and a reordering of global power relations. Standing up for Palestine has become shorthand for that global struggle to change how the world is ruled.”

Indeed, the intense global support for Palestine, which peaked during the ICJ hearing, represents the Global South challenging the political and economic hegemony of the North. People across the world are saying they support justice and will continue to resist Western colonial forces that have ravaged scores of societies for half a millennium.

First published at Al Jazeera which notes that the views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Rami G Khouri is a Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. Read other articles by Rami.

The Reasonings by the 2 Dissenting Judges on the ICJ’s Genocide Case by South Africa against Israel

by Eric Zuesse / January 27th, 2024

There were 17 judges ruling on this case, including one from South Africa and one from Israel. Both of those two judges were not regular members of the Court but were included only because this ‘International Court of Justice’ was treating this matter as-if not “justice” (in criminal law — which this case was supposed to be about) but instead equity (in civil law — which is irrelevant to this criminal case) were at-issue (and therefore needing to be ‘balanced’, instead of to be concerned only to determine in the case “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” as being the SOLE basis for valid judgment on the matter.

Page 26 of the 29-page ruling has paragraph 85: “The Court deems it necessary to emphasize that all parties to the conflict in the Gaza Strip are bound by international humanitarian law. It is gravely concerned about the fate of the hostages abducted during the attack in Israel on 7 October 2023 and held since then by Hamas and other armed groups, and calls for their immediate and unconditional release.”

The 84-page South African document that had brought criminal charges against Israel, titled “Applications Instituting Proceedings,” said in the opening paragraph of its Introduction:

South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’ or ‘Convention’),1 whether as a matter of law or morality. The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’).

So: the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks against Israelis was not an issue or topic in the case that South Africa had brought to the Court.

Nonetheless — and appealing to public sentiments instead of to the actual case that was supposed to be at hand — paragraph 85 of its decision on the case pandered by essentially accepting as true there what both South Africa and Israel agree upon — as-if it were even pertinent (relevant) to this case (which it is not). One isn’t supposed to bring up in a criminal trial — or any trial — a matter about which both the prosecution and the defense are in agreement. It distracts from the case-at-hand and can serve only to distort judgments.

So: right there, in the paragraph that comes immediately before the Court’s judgment in the case, which is paragraph 86, the Court makes clear that the decision isn’t entirely excluding pandering. That is pandering to Israel’s side of this dispute. But South Africa had already accepted that detail of Israel’s side. It was irrelevant and was brought up by the judges purely pandering to public opinion — in Israel’s favor. It had nothing to do with whether or not Israel is, in fact, genociding Gazans.

To what extent did the ruling pander, and was it fairly balanced in its (irrelevant but popular — among supporters of Israel) panderings?

The next paragraph (86) is the one that everybody talks about, and so it is merely linked-to here as being on pages 26-29 of the pdf if you want to read it.

As is indicated there, the two dissenting ‘Justices’ in the Court’s 6-part order to Israel were Julia Sebutinde (Uganda) and Aharon Barak (Israel), and Sebutinde dissented on all 6 whereas Barak dissented only on 3 out of those 6. In each of those two instances, the jurist summarized up-front in the decision what the supposed ‘reasoning’ for the dissent was. Here both of those two summaries are shown:

DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE SEBUTINDE

[T]he dispute between the State of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political one, calling for a diplomatic or negotiated settlement, and for the implementation in good faith of all relevant Security Council resolutions by all parties concerned, with a view to finding a permanent solution whereby the Israeli and Palestinian peoples can peacefully coexist — It is not a legal dispute susceptible of judicial settlement by the Court — Some of the preconditions for the indication of provisional measures have not been met — South Africa has not demonstrated, even on a prima facie basis, that the acts allegedly committed by Israel and of which the Applicant complains, were committed with the necessary genocidal intent, and that as a result, they are capable of falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention — Similarly, since the acts allegedly committed by Israel were not accompanied by a genocidal intent, the  Applicant has not demonstrated that the rights it asserts and for which it seeks protection through the indication of  provisional measures are plausible under the Genocide Convention — The provisional measures indicated by the Court in this Order are not warranted.

SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE AD HOC BARAK

1. South Africa came to the Court seeking the immediate suspension of the military operations in the Gaza Strip. It has wrongly sought to impute the crime of Cain to Abel. The Court rejected South Africa’s main contention and, instead, adopted measures that recall Israel’s existing obligations under the Genocide Convention. The Court has reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend its citizens and emphasized the importance of providing humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza. The provisional measures indicated by the Court are thus of a significantly narrower scope than those requested by South Africa.

2. Notably, the Court has emphasized that “all parties to the conflict in the Gaza Strip are bound by international humanitarian law”, which certainly includes Hamas.

Sebutinde was treating this matter as-if it were a civil trial over something such as whether an international contract had been fulfilled according to its terms by both sides, only one side, or no side. Is that type of reasoning appropriate in a case that had been brought by a third party against one party in a war against the other party in that war — specifically by South Africa against Israel as allegedly perpetrating genocide against (not “Palestinians” but instead) the residents in Gaza? If not, then Sebutinde is a dangerously unqualified person to be sitting on this Court. Furthermore: her factual allegations (such as “the acts allegedly committed by Israel were not accompanied by a genocidal intent”) are either demonstrably false or almost certainly false, such as by this evidence cited in South Africa’s case, which evidence she entirely ignored:

The Israeli Prime Minister also returned to the theme in his ‘Christmas message’, stating: “we’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents … This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism”.445 On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember”.446 The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxens and sheep, camels and asses”.448

— President of Israel: On 12 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel was not distinguishing between militants and civilians in Gaza, stating in a press conference to foreign media — in relation Palestinians in Gaza, over one million of whom are children: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”449 On 15 October 2023, echoing the words of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the President told foreign media that “we will uproot evil so that there will be good for the entire region and the world.”450 The Israeli President is one of many Israelis to have handwritten ‘messages’ on bombs to be dropped on Gaza.451

— Israeli Minister of Defence: On 9 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in an Israeli Army ‘situation update’ advised that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”452 He also informed troops on the Gaza border that he had released all the restraints”,453 stating in terms that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”454 …:

— Israeli Minister for National Security: On 10 November 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir clarified the government’s position in a televised address, stating: “[t]o be clear, when we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means … those who support … — they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”456

— Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure: ‘Tweeting’ on 13 October 2023, Israel Katz stated: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”457 On 12 October 2023, he ‘tweeted’: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. … And no one will preach us morality.”458

— Israeli Minister of Finance: On 8 October 2023, Bezalel Smotrich stated at a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet that “[w]e need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza.”459

— Israeli Minister of Heritage: On 1 November 2023, Amichai Eliyahu posted on Facebook: “The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes … We must talk about the day after. In my mind, we will hand over lots to all those who fought for Gaza over the years and to those evicted from Gush Katif” [a former Israeli settlement].460 He later argued against humanitarian aid as “[w]e wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid”, and “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”.461 He also posited a nuclear attack on the Gaza Strip.462

— Israeli Minister of Agriculture: On 11 November 2023, Avi Dichter in a television interview recalled the Nakba of 1948, in which over 80 percent of the Palestinian population of the new Israeli State was forced from or fled their homes, stating that “[w]e are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba”.463 …

She ignored every one of those quotations — yet each one of them was core to South Africa’s case. It was core to the motivation for this genocide that is occurring in Gaza.

And the case isn’t merely about intention; it is very much also about what Israel is actually doing. For example: see this on that, which displays not the intent but instead the results of that genocidal intent.

Barak’s reasoning was different but almost as scandalously bad: blaming South Africa for having even brought the case. Furthermore: since this ‘judge’ in the trial was actually serving instead as a defense attorney for his country Israel, he can be expected to have been serving atrociously as a judge — the ICJ had brought in as judges both a South African and an Israeli jurist so as to get a ‘balanced’ instead of a fair verdict in it. They were, at least to a large extent, treating this criminal case as-if it were instead a civil one.

By contrast to Barack: Sebutinde, who is one of the 15 regular judges on that Court, is so scandalously inadequate that she ought to be fired post-haste. But clearly, the Court itself, from the top on down, simply cannot rationally be trusted. Its problems are deep and severe. The genocide case against Israel will drag on for years and yet even at its outset, South Africa had presented a more trustworthy verdict (its case) regarding Israel than the ICJ ever will be able to, unless the entire institution becomes radically changed so as to become decent.

Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.

The secret sex lives of harbor porpoises in the San Francisco strait

2024/01/22

Ultimately, scientists say an acute understanding of harbor porpoises and identifying key components of social hotspots like San Francisco Bay may also help foster marine conservation areas — and ideal mating conditions — for similar cetaceans they don't know as much about, such as the vaquita, a species native to Baja California that's nearly extinct, with only 10 individuals left.

 Sea Shepherd Conservation Society/dpa

Bill Keener's eyes widened as he peered through his binoculars and spotted the dark, shiny dorsal fins swiftly bobbing along the surface of San Francisco Bay. "There's three of them coming right at us," he said.

It was a drizzly Tuesday morning in winter, and the Marine Mammal Center field researcher and I had been wandering along the pedestrian walkway on the Golden Gate Bridge for about an hour. Cars whooshed past us as we dodged bicyclists and paused at lookout points, keenly peering over the steel railing toward the murky turquoise water about 200 feet below. We were hoping to catch a glimpse of the species he's been closely tracking for decades: the harbor porpoise, a shy yet charismatic creature that nearly disappeared from the bay altogether.

The trio of small cetaceans briefly surfaced once or twice, drawing closer to the eddies that rippled like a shiny ooze over the bay as the porpoises hunted for schooling fish. Clusters of gulls were never too far away, squawking overhead as they waited to make away with a snack of their own.

By the time high tide approached, the harbor porpoises appeared by the dozen, swimming in perfect sync, blowing bubbles and charging through the water at speeds of up to 15 mph. Suddenly, one of the porpoises darted toward another one like a bat out of hell, leaving a frothy white swell in its wake. The interaction didn't last for more than a second.

Keener and I both looked at each other. Did we just see what we thought we did?

As docile and elusive as they may be, it turns out harbor porpoises have a surprisingly active sex life — right underneath San Francisco's most well-known landmark — and we had just witnessed one of the most unique mating rituals in the animal kingdom. Prior to recent studies conducted here by the Marine Mammal Center's cetacean field research program, harbor porpoise mating activity was rarely reported or documented, and the bridge provides the only setting of its kind in the world where the noise-sensitive animals can be observed by biologists without boats or other vessels scaring them off.

"We jokingly refer to it as the 'funnel of love' for porpoises," Keener said of the mile-wide strait, where hundreds of porpoises from as far north as the Russian River down to Pigeon Point in San Mateo County congregate as often as twice a day. "Imagine living in a rural area and you don't have a lot of social contact with your neighbors, but you go to a barn dance on Saturday night, and that's where all the locals are. That's kind of what it is."

A new book published by Springer late last year, "Sex in Cetaceans," reveals groundbreaking findings regarding the species' unusual mating behavior — specifically that it's not exclusive to harbor porpoises in the bay, and is in fact demonstrated by populations all over the globe, from Alaska to the East Coast, Greenland to Japan and down to West Africa. This kind of knowledge is crucial because it not only helps conservationists' work to maintain the species' strong numbers throughout most of their range, but also come up with strategies for subpopulations living in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, where they are classified as critically endangered and endangered, respectively, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

"You have to follow the science where it goes, but the point for us is there is a conservation link here," Keener said.

A disappearance from San Francisco Bay

Harbor porpoise bones uncovered in shell mounds from prehistoric Native American populations around the bay revealed that the animals — which are often mistaken for dolphins but have a distinct family of their own — were commonly found and hunted throughout the region for centuries, Keener explained. But at the onset of World War II in the 1930s, dozens of ships began to crowd the Golden Gate, and underwater nets were cast out to keep enemy submarines away as hundreds of mines dotted the waters beneath the shoals.

All of these factors were exacerbated by an increase of environmental contaminants in the water that likely drove away the porpoises. Keener grew up in San Francisco, and remembers going across the Bay Bridge in the '50s when he was young and taking in the pungent odor that always seemed to emanate from below.

"It would stink like a cesspool because there were no laws preventing industrial discharge and sewage from flowing in," he said. "I had been interested in harbor porpoises for a long time, but I never expected to see them in San Francisco Bay."

More than 60 years would pass from their disappearance until they came back.

The introduction of the Clean Water Act in 1972 helped generate more favorable conditions for harbor porpoises, as well as other marine mammals in the bay, such as whales, sea lions and harbor seals. Experts also theorize that the harbor porpoises lost their institutional memory of the bay as a habitat and new generations had to rediscover it again.

By 2008, one of Keener's late colleagues, Jonathan Stern, a marine ecologist and adjunct professor in San Francisco State University's department of biology, was conducting a study on minke whales when he made the notable discovery that harbor porpoises were reoccupying the bay again on a daily basis after their yearslong absence. As the population boomed, a team of scientists founded Golden Gate Cetacean Research (now the Marine Mammal Center's cetacean field research program) and secured a first-of-its-kind permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service in order to paint a clearer picture of the animals' numbers, survival rates and social lives.

"We got to see things we've never seen before and gain an understanding of these creatures we had never had," Marc Webber, another research biologist for the Marine Mammal Center, said during a recent conversation over Zoom. "They're sneaky little guys and have more interesting behaviors than we ever gave them credit for."

'Life in the fast lane'

Researchers had initially observed the harbor porpoises from Cavallo Point near the Marine Mammal Center's headquarters in Sausalito but quickly learned that with the right timing and the right gear, the Golden Gate Bridge was where they needed to be if they wanted to see some action. In the days before drones, the landmark provided a rare window into the harbor porpoises' day-to-day activity. As researchers spent hours crisscrossing the pedestrian walkway with cameras in hand, adjusting their shutter speed and trading tips on lenses, they documented one new discovery after another.

Harbor porpoises are known to "live life in the fast lane," Webber said, using a term coined by porpoise expert Andrew Read. They mature and bear young early on in life because of their brief life expectancy, which is one of the the shortest out of any cetacean at just 10 to 12 years. They have a high metabolic demand and are constantly on the move, swimming as far as 40 miles in a single day.

Yet, biologists learned that porpoise calves remained close to their mothers for at least a year before venturing off on their own. The animals also engaged in unexpected activities that appeared to be just for fun, such as wake riding off the stern of a large merchant ship. But there was one photo in particular that made all of the researchers do a double take.

It was a male harbor porpoise mid-air, having leapt clear out of the water. At first, they assumed he must have been trying to feed. But upon closer inspection, they noticed something, um, peculiar going on with his anatomy.

"I mean, quite literally for a moment, we thought, 'Is this animal hurt? Is that something coming out of its body?'" Webber said. "It took a moment because it was so unanticipated. We kind of had to zoom in and study the image for a little bit, and lo and behold: This male was in mating mode, and he was out in the air for all to see, you might say."

Up until that photo was taken, harbor porpoises were not known to jump out of the water, or make much of a show of themselves at all. But this one was making a pass by a female in an attempt to copulate with her, and he was doing it so quickly and energetically that the momentum was enough to carry him above the surface of the bay. (The resulting splash can be intensified by the response of the female, which is usually not expecting the surprise encounter and will aggressively throw her flukes at the male.)

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"The male will fly into the air — he'll actually get airborne — and he misses 99% of the time," Keener said.

Once again, scientists knew nothing about the sex lives of harbor porpoises. What they did know was that most marine mammals, like dolphins and whales, partook in mating activity belly-to-belly. So they did what they had to do: try to take as many photos of harbor porpoises in the act as possible.

But their findings raised more questions than answers.

'These animals are locked into a sexual arms race'

Researchers learned that male harbor porpoises are slightly smaller than female harbor porpoises, which is uncommon in most species because it means the males aren't competing with each other for mates. Instead, they have to use their nimble nature to their advantage, going from female to female and trying to get as much of their own semen into as many harbor porpoises as quickly as possible in order to beat out any other potential suitors.

The resulting ritual is rather short-lived and not very romantic, lasting only about one to two seconds. "Blink and you'll miss it," Webber joked.

But scientists noticed a curious thing: that male harbor porpoises were only approaching the females from the left side, which had never been documented in marine mammals before. At first, they thought it might have something to do with echolocation, but Dara Orbach, a researcher at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi who specializes in mammalian reproductive behavior and anatomy, took a closer look.

Using silicon molds of reproductive tracts from stranded harbor porpoises, she encountered something truly bizarre within their already complex anatomy, which she described as the "most complicated" out of all 14 sea mammals she had been studying. The muscular spirals of the female's corkscrew-like vagina twisted in the opposite direction of the male's penis and had a series of up to 13 folds, suggesting the possibility that the females had evolved to elude the males, control paternity, and possibly even expel their sperm from their bodies. The harbor porpoise penis, in turn, was shaped like a meaty hook that bent to the left and appeared to be trying to poke through the intricate chambers of the female's reproductive tract to reach her cervix. It would make sense, then, that males would have the best chance of fertilizing females if they approached them from a specific angle.

"That was the answer to the mystery," Keener said. "These animals are locked into a sexual arms race, and what we're seeing here is evolution in action."

Researchers now knew that harbor porpoises were the only species in the world to have sexual asymmetry coupled with this distinctive lateralized behavior. "It's extraordinarily rare to see both both behavior and sexual anatomy co-evolve in this way," Orbach said.

But they started to scratch their heads once again. Were harbor porpoises only doing this in San Francisco Bay, or was it happening everywhere?

A global phenomenon

The team of Bay Area biologists connected with marine mammal experts all over the world, collecting data from eight different countries, including Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Romania. Together, they determined the unique mating activity was universal across all harbor porpoises, but also observed new behaviors altogether. In one instance in the U.K., researchers found evidence of a male harbor porpoise sexually approaching another male by hooking its penis around the other porpoise's tail stock. And in Denmark, drone footage was captured of a young male calf no more than 10 months old that sexually interacted with its mother by rushing toward her from the left side. Such behavior has been seen before in other species, such as bottlenose dolphins, but poses new questions for researchers like Orbach, who is still working to determine whether these actions are genetically built into the animals or learned by witnessing similar behavior from other individuals in the wild.

"I have a lot of questions about nature versus nurture that I think would be interesting to answer, and we can do so by looking at animals that aren't in the wild," Orbach said, noting that a facility in Denmark that raises captive harbor porpoises has been increasing its observations of mating patterns so they can learn more. "I think that there's been so little research on the sex lives of harbor porpoises in general because it's such a challenging field — they're often submerged beneath the water and not always visible — so it's exciting to me that we're exploring this topic that hasn't been covered for a long time."

The ongoing research is critical, Orbach added, because of the social stigma around discussing concepts of mating in the science world, especially with female genitalia. "This is still anatomy, and we need to be discussing this," she said. "Pointing out deficits in our knowledge and showing alternative ways to answer these questions has been really rewarding and offers potential to future researchers."

Ultimately, Keener and Webber believe that having an acute understanding of harbor porpoises and identifying key components of social hotspots like San Francisco Bay may also help scientists hoping to foster marine conservation areas — and ideal mating conditions — for similar cetaceans they don't know as much about, such as the extremely rare Burmeister's porpoise in South America, and the vaquita, a species native to Baja California that's nearly extinct, with only 10 individuals left. Notably, the vaquita's reproductive anatomy bears "a remarkable resemblance" to that of the harbor porpoise's, Orbach said, and more knowledge about vaquita breeding behavior could save the species.

"What we've learned from San Francisco Bay is literally trying to inform what these other researchers can look out for and see," Keener said.

And while harbor porpoises currently have a healthy population throughout the Bay Area, Keener said it's important to note risks like entanglement from fishing gear, tidal energy generators and electricity from underwater turbines that are currently harming porpoises in the Baltic Sea as similar wind farms could head toward California'sCentral Coast.

"Our coast will be developed too," Keener said. "So understanding why porpoises chose to come back into a very noisy San Francisco Bay — perhaps because there's food and these mating opportunities — proves that if you clean an area and make it habitable for them, they will use it again. They will come back and we've seen that."

The harbor porpoise is a shy animal, most often seen in groups of two or three, mostly in cold temperate to sub-polar waters of the Northern Hemisphere. picture alliance / dpa

At the onset of World War II in the 1930s, dozens of ships began to crowd the Golden Gate, and underwater nets were cast out to keep enemy submarines away as hundreds of mines dotted the waters beneath the shoals. 

Barbara Munker/dpa


DPA International

Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas challenges ban before CAS

Agence France-Presse
January 27, 2024 

Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, swims for the University of Pennsylvania at an Ivy League swim meet against Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 22, 2022 

Joseph Prezioso AFP/File

American swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first transgender athlete to win a US national college title, is taking legal action in a bid to be allowed compete again in elite female competition, including the Paris Olympics.

Thomas has not swum since World Aquatics introduced new rules in 2022, which prohibit anyone who has undergone any part of male puberty from competing in the female category.

On Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) confirmed "the registration of the request for arbitration filed by US transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, aimed at challenging certain parts of World Aquatics' Policy on the eligibility for the men's and women's competition categories".

"Ms Thomas accepts that fair competition is a legitimate sporting objective and that some regulation of transgender women in swimming is appropriate," the statement read.

"However, Ms Thomas submits that the challenged provisions are invalid and unlawful as they discriminate against her contrary to the Olympic Charter, the World Aquatics Constitution, and Swiss law."

"Such discrimination cannot be justified as necessary, reasonable, or proportionate to achieve a legitimate sporting objective," the 25-year-old said in her submission to CAS.

CAS said that Thomas was seeking "an order from the CAS declaring that the challenged provisions are unlawful, invalid, and of no force and effect".

CAS said the proceedings had begun in September 2023, but had been "subject to strict confidentiality rules", adding "at this point, no hearing date has been fixed yet".

Two years ago, governing body World Aquatics voted to stop transgender female athletes from competing in women's elite races.

In February 2022, USA Swimming decided to revise its rules, limiting testosterone levels for a period of at least 36 months for any transgender athletes wanting to compete at the elite level.

The change was prompted by the controversy surrounding Thomas' performance in the university championship.

Born male and having begun transition in 2019, Thomas was adjudged by detractors to be physiologically advantaged.

Barely a month later, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer won the women's 500-yard freestyle final.

It was an historic victory, made possible by the refusal of the NCAA, which governs college sports, to apply the new USA federation rules.

In June 2022, World Aquatics announced that it wanted to create an open category for transgender athletes. But it limited entry to its women's categories to swimmers who "became women before puberty".

Face recognition technology follows a long analog history of surveillance and control

The Conversation
January 21, 2024 

Facial Recognition (Shutterstock)

American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited.

In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects.

Face recognition technology is the latest and most sophisticated version of biometric surveillance: using unique physical characteristics to identify individual people. It stands in a long line of technologies – from the fingerprint to the passport photo to iris scans – designed to monitor people and determine who has the right to move freely within and across borders and boundaries.

In my book, “Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition,” I explore how the story of face surveillance lies not just in the history of computing but in the history of medicine, of race, of psychology and neuroscience, and in the health humanities and politics.

Viewed as a part of the long history of people-tracking, face recognition techology’s incursions into privacy and limitations on free movement are carrying out exactly what biometric surveillance was always meant to do.

The system works by converting captured faces – either static from photographs or moving from video – into a series of unique data points, which it then compares against the data points drawn from images of faces already in the system. As face recognition technology improves in accuracy and speed, its effectiveness as a means of surveillance becomes ever more pronounced.


Paired with AI, face recognition technology scans the crowd at a conference. 

David McNew/AFP 

Accuracy improves, but biases persist

Surveillance is predicated on the idea that people need to be tracked and their movements limited and controlled in a trade-off between privacy and security. The assumption that less privacy leads to more security is built in.

That may be the case for some, but not for the people disproportionately targeted by face recognition technology. Surveillance has always been designed to identify the people whom those in power wish to most closely track.

On a global scale, there are caste cameras in India, face surveillance of Uyghurs in China and even attendance surveillance in U.S. schools, often with low-income and majority-Black populations. Some people are tracked more closely than others.

In addition, the cases of Amara Majeed, Robert Williams and Randal Reid aren’t anomalies. As of 2019, face recognition technology misidentified Black and Asian people at up to 100 times the rate of white people, including, in 2018, a disproportionate number of the 28 members of the U.S. Congress who were falsely matched with mug shots on file using Amazon’s Rekognition tool.

When the database against which captured images were compared had only a limited number of mostly white faces upon which to draw, face recognition technology would offer matches based on the closest alignment available, leading to a pattern of highly racialized – and racist – false positives.

With the expansion of images in the database and increased sophistication of the software, the number of false positives – incorrect matches between specific individuals and images of wanted people on file – has declined dramatically. Improvements in pixelation and mapping static images into moving ones, along with increased social media tagging and ever more sophisticated scraping tools like those developed by Clearview AI, have helped decrease the error rates.

The biases, however, remain deeply embedded into the systems and their purpose, explicitly or implicitly targeting already targeted communities. The technology is not neutral, nor is the surveillance it is used to carry out.


Physiognomy went beyond recognition of an individual and tried to connect physical features with other characteristics.

clu/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

Latest technique in a long history

Face recognition software is only the most recent manifestation of global systems of tracking and sorting. Precursors are rooted in the now-debunked belief that bodily features offer a unique index to character and identity. This pseudoscience was formalized in the late 18th century under the rubric of the ancient practice of physiognomy.

Early systemic applications included anthropometry (body measurement), fingerprinting and iris or retinal scans. They all offered unique identifiers. None of these could be done without the participation – willing or otherwise – of the person being tracked.

The framework of bodily identification was adopted in the 19th century for use in criminal justice detection, prosecution and record-keeping to allow governmental control of its populace. The intimate relationship between face recognition and border patrol was galvanized by the introduction of photos into passports in some countries including Great Britain and the United States in 1914, a practice that became widespread by 1920.

Face recognition technology provided a way to go stealth on human biometric surveillance. Much early research into face recognition software was funded by the CIA for the purposes of border surveillance.

It tried to develop a standardized framework for face segmentation: mapping the distance between a person’s facial features, including eyes, nose, mouth and hairline. Inputting that data into computers let a user search stored photographs for a match. These early scans and maps were limited, and the attempts to match them were not successful.


A customer pays via facial recognition at a smart store in China.

Huang Zongzhi/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

More recently, private companies have adopted data harvesting techniques, including face recognition, as part of a long practice of leveraging personal data for profit.

Face recognition technology works not only to unlock your phone or help you board your plane more quickly, but also in promotional store kiosks and, essentially, in any photo taken and shared by anyone, with anyone, anywhere around the world. These photos are stored in a database, creating ever more comprehensive systems of surveillance and tracking.

And while that means that today it is unlikely that Amara Majeed, Robert Williams, Randal Reid and Black members of Congress would be ensnared by a false positive, face recognition technology has invaded everyone’s privacy. It – and the governmental and private systems that design, run, use and capitalize upon it – is watching, and paying particular attention to those whom society and its structural biases deem to be the greatest risk.

Sharrona Pearl, Associate Professor of Bioethics and History, Drexel University


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

‘Emergency’ or Not, Covid Is Still Killing People. Here’s What Doctors Advise to Stay Safe.

2024/01/18



With around 20,000 people dying of covid in the United States since the start of October, and tens of thousands more abroad, the covid pandemic clearly isn’t over. However, the crisis response is, since the World Health Organization and the Biden administration ended their declared health emergencies last year.

Let’s not confuse the terms “pandemic” and “emergency.” As Abraar Karan, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Stanford University, said, “The pandemic is over until you are scrunched in bed, feeling terrible.”

Pandemics are defined by neither time nor severity, but rather by large numbers of ongoing infections worldwide. Emergencies are acute and declared to trigger an urgent response. Ending the official emergency shifted the responsibility for curbing covid from leaders to the public. In the United States, it meant, for example, that the government largely stopped covering the cost of covid tests and vaccines.

But the virus is still infecting people; indeed, it is surging right now.

With changes in the nature of the pandemic and the response, KFF Health News spoke with doctors and researchers about how to best handle covid, influenza, and other respiratory ailments spreading this season.

A holiday wave of sickness has ensued as expected. Covid infections have escalated nationwide in the past few weeks, with analyses of virus traces in wastewater suggesting infection rates as high as last year. More than 73,000 people died of covid in the U.S. in 2023, meaning the virus remains deadlier than car accidents and influenza. Still, compared with last year’s seasonal surge, this winter’s wave of covid hospitalizations has been lower and death rates less than half.

“We’re seeing outbreaks in homeless shelters and in nursing homes, but hospitals aren’t overwhelmed like they have been in the past,” said Salvador Sandoval, a doctor and health officer at the Merced County public health department in California. He attributes that welcome fact to vaccination, covid treatments like Paxlovid, and a degree of immunity from prior infections.

While a new coronavirus variant, JN.1, has spread around the world, the current vaccines and covid tests remain effective.

Other seasonal illnesses are surging, too, but rates are consistent with previous years. Between 9,400 and 28,000 people died from influenza between Oct. 1 and Jan. 6, estimates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and millions felt so ill from the flu that they sought medical care. Cases of pneumonia — a serious condition marked by inflamed lungs that can be triggered by the flu, covid, or other infections — also predictably rose as winter set in. Researchers are now less concerned about flare-ups of pneumonia in China, Denmark, and France in November and December, because they fit cyclical patterns of the pneumonia-causing bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae rather than outbreaks of a dangerous new bug.

Public health researchers recommend following the CDC guidance on getting the latest covid and influenza vaccines to ward off hospitalization and death from the diseases and reduce chances of getting sick. A recent review of studies that included 614,000 people found that those who received two covid vaccines were also less likely to develop long covid; often involving fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, and joint pain, the condition is marked by the development or continuation of symptoms a few months after an infection and has been debilitating for millions of people. Another analysis found that people who had three doses of covid vaccines were much less likely to have long covid than those who were unvaccinated. (A caveat, however, is that those with three doses might have taken additional measures to avoid infections than those who chose to go without.)

It’s not too late for an influenza vaccine, either, said Helen Chu, a doctor and epidemiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Influenza continues to rise into the new year, especially in Southern states and California. Last season’s shot appeared to reduce adults’ risk of visits to the emergency room and urgent care by almost half and hospitalization by more than a third. Meanwhile, another seasonal illness with a fresh set of vaccines released last year, respiratory syncytial virus, appears to be waning this month.

Another powerful way to prevent covid, influenza, common colds, and other airborne infections is by wearing an N95 mask. Many researchers say they’ve returned to socializing without one but opt for the masks in crowded, indoor places when wearing one would not be particularly burdensome. Karan, for example, wears his favorite N95 masks on airplanes. And don’t forget good, old-fashioned hand-washing, which helps prevent infections as well.

If you do all that and still feel sick? Researchers say they reach for rapid covid tests. While they’ve never been perfect, they’re often quite helpful in guiding a person’s next steps.

When President Joe Biden declared the end of the public health emergency last year, many federally funded testing sites that sent samples to laboratories shut their doors. As a result, people now mainly turn to home covid tests that signal an infection within 15 minutes and cost around $6 to $8 each at many pharmacies. The trick is to use these tests correctly by taking more than one when there’s reason for concern. They miss early infections more often than tests processed in a lab, because higher levels of the coronavirus are required for detection — and the virus takes time to multiply in the body. For this reason, Karan considers other information. “If I ran into someone who turned out to be sick, and then I get symptoms a few days later,” he said, “the chance is high that I have whatever they had, even if a test is negative.”

A negative result with a rapid test might mean simply that an infection hasn’t progressed enough to be detected, that the test had expired, or that it was conducted wrong. To be sure the culprit behind symptoms like a sore throat isn’t covid, researchers suggest testing again in a day or two. It often takes about three days after symptoms start for a test to register as positive, said Karan, adding that such time estimates are based on averages and that individuals may deviate from the norm.

If a person feels healthy and wants to know their status because they were around someone with covid, Karan recommends testing two to four days after the exposure. To protect others during those uncertain days, the person can wear an N95 mask that blocks the spread of the virus. If tests remain negative five days after an exposure and the person still feels fine, Chu said, they’re unlikely to be infected — and if they are, viral levels would be so low that they would be unlikely to pass the disease to others.

Positive tests, on the other hand, reliably flag an infection. In this case, people can ask a doctor whether they qualify for the antiviral drug Paxlovid. The pills work best when taken immediately after symptoms begin so that they slash levels of the virus before it damages the body. Some studies suggest the medicine reduces a person’s risk of long covid, too, but the evidence is mixed. Another note on tests: Don’t worry if they continue to turn out positive for longer than symptoms last; the virus may linger even if it’s no longer replicating. After roughly a week since a positive test or symptoms, studies suggest, a person is unlikely to pass the virus to others.

If covid is ruled out, Karan recommends tests for influenza because they can guide doctors on whether to prescribe an antiviral to fight it — or if instead it’s a bacterial infection, in which case antibiotics may be in order. (One new home test diagnoses covid and influenza at the same time.) Whereas antivirals and antibiotics target the source of the ailment, over-the-counter medications may soothe congestion, coughs, fevers, and other symptoms. That said, the FDA recently determined that a main ingredient in versions of Sudafed, NyQuil, and other decongestants, called phenylephrine, is ineffective.

Jobs complicate a personal approach to staying healthy. Emergency-era business closures have ended, and mandates on vaccination and wearing masks have receded across the country. Some managers take precautions to protect their staff. Chu, for example, keeps air-purifying devices around her lab, and she asks researchers to stay home when they feel sick and to test themselves for covid before returning to work after a trip.

However, occupational safety experts note that many employees face risks they cannot control because decisions on if and how to protect against outbreaks, such as through ventilation, testing, and masking, are left to employers. Notably, people with low-wage and part-time jobs — occupations disproportionately held by people of color — are often least able to control their workplace environments.

Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, said the lack of national occupational standards around airborne disease protection represents a fatal flaw in the Biden administration’s decision to relinquish its control of the pandemic.

“Every workplace needs to have a plan for reducing the threat of infectious disease,” she said. “If you only focus on the individual, you fail workers.”

© Kaiser Health News

Reports Expose Deep Harms of Corporate Tax Cuts and 'Trickle Down' Ideology

"Failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy."

JAKE JOHNSON
Jan 23, 2024
COMMONDREAMS

Two new reports published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute argue that robust corporate taxation is key to creating a strong economy and improving the well-being of families and children—objectives that have been undermined in the decades since the Reagan era by regressive tax cuts enacted on the false premise that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of society.

The first report, A Mapping of the Full Potential of U.S. Corporate Taxation to Enhance Child and Family Well-Being, examines what the authors describe as the understudied notion that "increasing corporate taxation will necessarily help children and families by providing additional revenue for essential public services."

That perspective runs counter to what the Roosevelt Institute's second report calls "a 'cut-to-grow' mentality" that rose to prominence in the 1970s and was enthusiastically embraced by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

"Under this view, the thinking went, it was necessary to reduce the corporate tax rate to grow the economy—and that this growth would allow gains to eventually 'trickle down' from the rich shareholders to the middle class," the report states. "During this time, the corporate tax rate was gradually reduced to 35% before it was dramatically cut to 21% in 2017. These cuts resulted in corporate tax revenues falling to less than 10% of total federal revenues."

"Perhaps more than any other, President Ronald Reagan leveraged mounting backlash to taxation and government spending to dramatically reduce both, regardless of the consequences to American families," the report observes.

"Corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."

The decades-long decline in corporate tax rates has severely undermined the federal government's ability to finance critical public goods, from education to childcare.

"Since regressive corporate tax cuts don't significantly increase earnings for working families (through either wage or employment increases), but they do reduce the government's ability to fund family income and care supports, childcare costs—which are already rising—can become a relatively more expensive line item in working parents' household budgets," reads the Roosevelt Institute's first report, authored by Emily DiVito and Niko Lusiani.

"When they can't afford childcare," they added, "parents face the difficult choice of having to cut costs in other places—often on the basic necessities that allow children to thrive, like food, clothing, and enrichment activities—or taking on additional caregiving duties themselves."

At the state and local levels, DiVito and Lusiani noted, "corporations' successful efforts to avoid their full property tax liability devastate public school budgets."

  

DiVito, deputy director for the corporate power program at the Roosevelt Institute, said Tuesday that "we have a false idea in the U.S. that corporate tax policy is unrelated to equitable social reforms."

"However, strong corporate tax policy is vital to all aspects of a thriving economy," she argued. "And the failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy and society for all families."

The new reports come a week after a bipartisan pair of House and Senate negotiators announced a deal to expand the child tax credit (CTC) for three years in exchange for a series of corporate tax cuts. The American Prospect's David Dayen estimated that "in the time period when all the tax credits are actually in place, the business tax changes are five times more costly than the CTC changes."

"Who knows if this deal can pass in time to take effect in the upcoming 2023 tax season, if ever. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is already asking for changes to make it even more generous to businesses. That's in part a function of the dissembling that there is 'parity' in the deal. The truth is that this is not an equal trade. And it may extend that inequity well into the future."

That warning is in line with the Roosevelt Institute's new research, which argues that a corporate tax code generous to big business fuels inequality by "benefiting capital interests (i.e., business owners, partners, and shareholders) at the expense of workers and their families."

"When corporations enjoy low taxes on their profits, they face a trade-off for how to otherwise disperse them: make investments in the workforce and productive capacity (e.g., raise wages, hire more workers, and/or upgrade buildings, equipment, or technology) or distribute them to shareholders (i.e., pay out dividends and buy back stock to inflate prices). Data shows that executives typically choose the latter."

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new report on "cut to grow" ideology, said in a statement that "corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."

"Such an idea is often offered in tandem with the notion that this is the only way tax
policy can help American families," said Avi-Yonah. "But this just isn't true. In fact, this false 'cut-to-grow' narrative has made it very difficult to argue for a more expansive, progressive vision of corporate tax reform—contributing to a decades-long stalemate in efforts toward real comprehensive corporate tax reform."

"Now is the time," he added, "to reverse this trend with a more historically grounded support of the corporate tax."

Air Pollution From Canadian Tar Sands Up to 6,300% Worse Than Industry Reports


"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels," said a Greenpeace campaigner, "these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades."

A large oil refinery is shown along the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada.
(Photo: dan_prat/Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT

COMMONDREAMS
Jan 26, 2024

Aircraft measurements of pollutants over the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada show levels exceeding industry reports by 1,900% to more than 6,300%, scientists revealed Thursday, underscoring the need for humanity to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.

While the Canadian government requires air quality monitoring around oil sands operations, industry figures focus on certain compounds. For this research, published Thursday in the journal Science, experts from Yale University and Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government, accounted for a wider range of emissions.

After collecting data from 30 flights around 17 tar sands operations in 2018, "what we saw were very large emissions of total gas-phase organic carbon from these facilities," said co-author and Yale professor Drew Gentner in a statement. "On average, the majority of the total gas-phase organic carbon was from often overlooked compounds, which are typically outside of the scope of routine monitoring."

"This report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."

Co-author John Liggio of Environment and Climate Change Canada noted that "the magnitude of the observed emissions from oil sands operations was larger than expected, considering that it was roughly equivalent to the sum of all other anthropogenic sources across Canada when including all the motor vehicles, all the solvents, all the other oil and gas sources, and everything else reported to the inventory."

Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, a University of British Columbia atmospheric chemist who has worked with Liggio but was not involved with this study, toldNature that "I'm concerned by how big this number is."

"You want to be measuring all this carbon. For air quality, for health, but also for climate," she said, explaining that some of the molecules are oxidized to planet-heating carbon dioxide.

Thanks to the tar sands deposits across northern Alberta, which are estimated to contain 1.7-2.5 trillion barrels of oil, Canada trails only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in terms of total known reserves.

As Inside Climate Newsdetailed Thursday:
The deposits do not technically hold crude oil, but instead a heavier hydrocarbon called bitumen, which must be heated and treated in order to form a liquid that can be piped and refined like oil. That process requires sprawling industrial operations of open pit mines, ever-growing waste ponds, and refinery-like "upgraders." The waste ponds have leached toxic chemicals into groundwater, and a heavy, sulfurous stench often settles over the region. The mines have stripped away an area larger than New York City, lands that had long been occupied by people from several Indigenous First Nations. One of those First Nations, Fort McKay, is now surrounded by mines.

Jean L'Hommecourt, an enrolled member of the Fort McKay First Nation, told Inside Climate Newsshe wasn't shocked by the new findings.


"I was just like, eh, I knew all along," said L'Hommecourt, who has worked to clean up nearby operations. "We feel the physical effects here."

Jesse Cardinal of the Indigenous-led group Keepers of the Water similarly said to The Guardian, "We are told this is all within the limits and OK but this report backs up what the communities living in these areas experience—it is so bad they cannot open their windows because it hurts their lungs to breathe—especially at night."




Asked to comment on the research, Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada, wrote in an email to The Independent, "I suppose 'Holy s***' isn't printable."

"In quantifying the astonishing and largely unreported levels of health-damaging air pollution coming out of oil sands operations, these scientists have validated what downwind Indigenous communities have been saying for decades," Stewart added. "This is making people sick, so our governments can and should require these companies to use some of their record-breaking profits to clean up the mess they've made."