https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxIqTq4y_10
Monday, March 22, 2021
Biden Aides Disclose Their Corporate Ties
Newly released documents show White House staffers were working as consultants for Lyft, billionaire foundations, and an Israeli facial recognition firm.
Andrew Perez
President Joe Biden’s top White House staffers previously consulted for ride-hailing company Lyft, an Israeli facial recognition firm, and billionaires’ philanthropic foundations, according to new financial disclosure forms obtained by The Daily Poster.
While Biden’s cabinet officials have already detailed their extensive corporate consulting work and paid speaking gigs, the Biden administration is just now starting to release the financial disclosure forms filed by senior White House staff, launching a new webpage on Friday where people can request the filings. The new disclosures provide more detail about links between top administration officials and corporations lobbying the Biden administration.
White House deputy chief of staff Jen O'Malley Dillon, a deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama in 2012, listed more than a dozen clients she worked for at the communications consulting firm Precision Strategies, including Lyft and General Electric.
Lyft helped bankroll a successful ballot measure campaign in California last year allowing the company to continue classifying its drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees. Lyft and other gig economy companies are hoping to export the policy nationwide.
O'Malley Dillon also consulted for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic organization, known as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and for Gates Ventures, the private office of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Her other clients included Arkansans for a Fair Wage, a committee that backed a 2018 ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage in Arkansas to $11, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who served as a White House communications director under Obama, wrote that she served as a consultant for Lyft, too. She also disclosed handling crisis communications for AnyVision, a facial recognition firm whose technology has reportedly been used by Israel to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank, according to NBC News.
Olivia Solon @oliviasolonI still can’t really shake Jen Psaki shilling for Israeli facial recognition company AnyVision when she was at WestExec AdvisorsJanuary 22nd 20215 Retweets25 Likes
Microsoft, which had invested in AnyVision, hired former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder and his team at the law firm Covington & Burling to conduct an independent investigation into the reports. While their audit concluded that “AnyVision’s technology has not previously and does not currently power a mass surveillance program in the West Bank that has been alleged in media reports,” Microsoft said it would sell its stakes in AnyVision and other facial recognition companies.
Psaki is one of several Biden administration hires who worked at WestExec Advisors, a corporate consultancy co-founded by Biden’s Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. She did not specifically name her clients at the firm.
She separately disclosed consulting for Jeff Anderson and Associates, a law firm that seeks justice for children who suffer sexual abuse, and the Zero Abuse Project, a charitable organization founded by Jeff Anderson whose mission is to protect children from abuse and sexual assault.
White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, a longtime D.C. deficit hawk and former Bill Clinton aide, disclosed providing policy consulting services to the Walton Family Foundation, the charitable arm of the billionaire family that founded Walmart.
Reed also consulted for Manhattan West LLC. The New York Post reported in 2011 that billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s “longtime accountant set up Manhattan West LLC to pay some city employees over $100,000 each to work for his charity” when he was the mayor of New York. Reed reportedly advised Bloomberg on a potential presidential campaign in early 2019, before joining Biden’s 2020 campaign.
White House counselor Steve Ricchetti reported being paid $280,000 by his eponymous firm, Ricchetti Consulting Group. While Ricchetti did not list any clients, the New York Times reported last year that he had been working for telecom giant AT&T.
Ricchetti’s brother, Jeff, is a lobbyist and has brought in several new clients since Biden’s victory, including Amazon, General Motors, and TC Energy, the company behind the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, which Biden blocked on his first day in office.
The sugar rush economy
by michael roberts
Last week the US Federal Reserve raised its growth forecasts for the US economy for this year and next. Fed officials now reckon the US economy with expand in real terms by 6.5%, the fastest pace since 1984, a few years after the slump of 1980-2. This is a significant rise from the Fed’s previous forecast. Also, the unemployment rate is expected to drop to just 4.5% by year-end, while the inflation rate ticks up to 2.2%, above the official target rate set by the Fed.
Driving this new optimism on growth is the fast roll-out of vaccines to protect Americans from COVID-19 plus the huge fiscal stimulus package put through Congress that most mainstream forecasters expect to add at least 1% point to economic growth and bring down unemployment.
But Fed chair Jay Powell made it clear that the Fed had no intention of raising its target interest rate until 2023 at the earliest even if inflation accelerates. He wants to see the unemployment rate drop to 3.5% and inflation averaging 2% or so. He would tolerate the economy “running hot” until that happens because he reckons that any rise in inflation would be transitory.
The implication of Powell’s view was that the US economy was going to have a ‘sugar rush’ from the fiscal stimulus and from the ‘pent-up’ demand of consumers with cash savings ready to spend on restaurants, leisure, travel etc once the pandemic restrictions were relaxed. But as every parent knows, giving a child too much sugar leads to a rush of energy. And then comes the letdown and sleep. That is what Powell worries about, namely that after this burst of energy on the 'sugar high' of government paychecks and restaurants meals, the US economy will slip back into the low growth trajectory that applied before the pandemic slump.
Powell is also concerned about a potential relapse in the fight against the virus and expects fiscal support from the stimulus starting to fade next year and worries that the labour market will continue to struggle. So he expects 'core inflation' (excluding food and energy prices) will fall back to 2 per cent next year and 2.1 per cent in 2023. So no inflationary spiral.
It is significant that the long-term growth forecast by the Fed is just 1.8% a year, which is hardly any higher than average real GDP growth of 1.7% since the end of the Great Recession and before the pandemic.
This implies that the Fed reckons the US economy is going to drop back to the rate of growth experienced in the Long Depression since 2009, and the ‘sugar rush’ is just that.
What this also implies is that contrary to the views of the Keynesians, the multiplier effect of the fiscal stimulus will soon dissipate and then the US economy will depend, not on consumers’ pent-up demand but on the willingness and ability of the capitalist sector to invest. It’s investment not consumer demand that will matter in sustaining any significant recovery; not sugar treats but on new energy in the form of new surplus value (to use Marx’s term for profits).
Financial investors are less convinced that Powell is right. After all, getting the US economy to achieve a 3.5% unemployment rate and 2% inflation has been achieved only twice since 1960! So ‘inflation expectations’ among investors have been rising, suggesting an inflation rate of 2.6% on a five-year view. As a result, US government bond yields have also risen significantly, as bond yields suffer in real terms if inflation rises.
The view that the US economy may ‘overheat’ has been argued by Larry Summers, the arch-Keynesian of several administrations. He fears that the fiscal and monetary stimulus will lead to ‘excess demand’ and so drive up prices across the board, eventually forcing the Fed to raise interest rates. Summers argues this, because this time last year, he was telling the world that the COVID pandemic would have little long-lasting impact and the economy would bounce back once it was over, just like seaside towns go to sleep in the winter and then wake up when the tourist season starts. He seems to think that the US economy will revive of its own accord and fiscal stimulus is unnecessary. But the experience of the last year has been much longer and more damaging than a ‘winter break’.
At the other end of the argument, Summers has been scathingly attacked by post-Keynesians and leftists who reckon there is no danger of ‘overheating’ and rising inflation, because there is plenty of ‘slack’ in the economy ie workers needing jobs and businesses needing to start up. But what this view ignores is the ‘hysteresis’ effect on the economy from the pandemic slump; namely that many workers have been forced to leave the workforce for good over the last year and many small to medium businesses will never return. The Long Depression has seen a steady reduction in estimates of US productive capacity.
That means the room for economic recovery is reduced unless investment in new means of production and employment rises significantly. So there could be ‘overheating’ and higher inflation, not because of pent-up consumer demand but because of weak productive capacity – not ‘too much demand’ but ‘not enough supply’.
What the last ten years has shown is that business investment growth has slowed as the profitability of productive capital has fallen in the US. Cash-rich companies and investors, borrowing at record-low interest rates, have preferred to speculate in financial assets. The huge tally of bailouts by central banks and cuts in corporate taxation have been spent on driving the stock and bond markets to all-time highs while the ‘real economy’ has stagnated. The bottom 80% of American households, who drive the bulk of personal consumption expenditures (PCE), continue to struggle to make ends meet.
And down the road, rising debt cannot be ignored. And it is not so much public sector debt, which in the US is now well above 100% of GDP; more important is corporate debt. If interest rates for firms do start to rise because of increased inflation, then debt servicing costs for a whole swathe of so-called ‘zombie’ companies will become an excessive burden and bankruptcies will ensue.
According to Bloomberg, In the US, almost 200 big corporations have joined the ranks of so-called zombie firms since the onset of the pandemic and now account for 20% of top 3000 largest publicly-traded companies. With debts of $1.36 trillion. That's 527 of the 3000 companies didn’t earn enough to meet their interest payments!
As before, the Fed is caught. If it does not end the monetary largesse at some point, then inflation could rise which will eat into real incomes and drive up corporate debt costs. But if it acts to curb inflation, it could provoke a stock market crash and corporate bankruptcies. That is what happens when an economy is in ‘stagflation’: namely rising inflation and low growth.
A stock market crash caused by rising interest rates does not always lead to an economic recession. Mainstream economist Paul Samuelson used to joke that the stock market has predicted 12 out of the last 9 recessions. Indeed, as Marx argued, financial crashes have a law of their own and do not always coincide with ‘commercial crises’.
For example, the very sharp fall in stock prices in 1987 did not lead to economic recession and prices recovered quickly. The reason then was that the profitability of capital in the major economies had been rising for over five years and was at a relatively high level in 1987 and profitability continued to rise for another decade. But that is not the situation now. The profitability of capital is near all-time lows and even a recovery in 2021 and 2022 will not put levels back to that before 1997 or 2006. And corporate debt has never been higher historically.
These underlying forces suggest that the ‘sugar rush’ will be just that – a short burst followed by slumber at best.
Forget the fatigue: Why Israel's fourth elections matter
+972 Magazine
Haggai Matar | Executive Director
On Tuesday, Israeli citizens will cast their votes for the fourth (!) time in two years. At this point, it is completely understandable to feel numb, indifferent, or simply bored with what feels like a never-ending story of Israeli elections. All of this has happened before and quite possibly will happen again in a few months’ time.
Yet despite the cynicism and apathy, the stakes are immense and these elections deserve our close attention. The final polls published over the weekend show Netanyahu’s extremist right wing coalition taking 60 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. If these polls are to be trusted, Netanyahu is just one seat shy of a ruling majority, and he could get that one seat either by persuading more voters in the final days of the campaign, or by getting members of Knesset in the anti-Netanyahu bloc to desert and join him, as he has done in the past.
If one of these likely scenarios comes to pass, Israel will be governed by the most far right coalition in its history. Such a government would likely remove the final checks and balances still in place in the halls of power; cancel Netanyahu’s corruption trial; and totally defang the judiciary.
The alternatives are not too promising either. As right wing parties — including those in the anti-Bibi bloc — are likely to win a total of 100 out of 120 Knesset seats, any other government would likely be just as bad for Palestinians, the struggling and growing poorer classes, the climate, etc. In that sense, a fifth round of elections may still be the best thing we can hope for at the moment.
A Netanyahu government will dismantle all the mechanisms that still allow for some internal opposition within Israeli society. Without those, fighting for a better future for everyone living in Israel-Palestine will become much harder and more perilous. That should concern all of us.
THERE’S ONLY ONE STATE WHERE FALLING BEHIND ON RENT COULD MEAN JAIL TIME
By Maya Miller, Ellis Simani and Benjamin Hardy, ProPublica.March 21, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/theres-only-one-state-where-falling-behind-on-rent-could-mean-jail-time/
Only Arkansas permits criminal consequences for nonpayment of rent — and it has enforced the law during the pandemic. Now, after ProPublica investigated the practice, some legislators want to revoke the statute.
Arkansas state Rep. Nicole Clowney, D-Fayetteville, introduced a bill Thursday that would repeal the state’s criminal “failure to vacate” statute. First enacted in 1901, the law allows landlords to seek criminal charges, which can result in jail time, for tenants who fall even a single day behind on rent and do not vacate a property within 10 days. Everywhere else in the U.S., evictions are exclusively a civil matter.
The legislation comes after a ProPublica and Arkansas Nonprofit News Network article in October revealed how criminal charges brought under the statute can snowball into arrest warrants and jail time for tenants. A deputy county prosecutor who criticized the law, saying it essentially criminalizes poverty, was fired for his remarks.
ProPublica and ANNN found women make up a disproportionate share of Arkansas residents who’ve had charges filed against them during the pandemic, a trend that mirrors past research. A review of the statute’s application in Little Rock revealed 62% of cases in 2012 were filed against Black women (who make up about 20% of the city’s population).
Wilma Young, who was arrested under the statute more than two decades ago and was featured in the October article, said she’s excited about the prospects of the law being repealed. “Nobody else should have to go through that experience ever again,” she said.
Clowney’s bill faces considerable resistance. Defenders of the existing law, which include the Arkansas Realtors Association, have argued the criminal eviction process benefits both landlords and tenants. Since cases are pursued by local prosecutors, landlords avoid the cost of hiring private attorneys. Tenants, the real estate association told ProPublica, are spared civil judgments that can harm their credit scores and overall records. The association declined to comment on the bill because it has not reviewed it with its clients.
In the months after the article was published, Clowney and Rep. Jimmy Gazaway, R-Paragould, sent Gov. Asa Hutchinson a letter, accompanied by a copy of ProPublica’s investigation. They requested the governor use his executive power to suspend the statute for the duration of the state’s COVID-19 public health emergency. The representatives called the statute “excessively punitive” and “morally unacceptable.”
Hutchinson responded two weeks later, outlining the steps his administration had taken to mitigate evictions statewide and deferring any action to the legislature. “I expect the issues you have raised will be debated in this upcoming Session,” Hutchinson wrote. “Given the timing of your request, I find that it would be best addressed by legislative action from your Chamber and the Arkansas Senate.”
Many of the state’s legislators, including Gazaway, are rental property owners themselves. In 2019, Clowney co-sponsored legislation that would have enabled tenants who had recently suffered from domestic abuse to break leases without financial penalties. Before a vote, the Senate president asked that all senators who owned rental property and would like to disclose it step forward. Fifteen of the 35 senators raised their hands; the bill was subsequently defeated.
The full criminal eviction statute has likewise survived multiple legal and legislative challenges. In 2015, a bill to repeal the statute failed to get out of committee. The same year, an Arkansas judge ruled the law unconstitutional. But in 2017, the legislature amended the statute by reverting to an earlier version of the law that had previously withstood legal challenges. (Courts in some parts of the state still refuse to hear these cases.)
Since 2018, Arkansas courts have heard at least 1,050 criminal eviction cases and authorities have issued more than 200 eviction-related warrants, which either instruct tenants to appear in court or call for their arrest. The state’s criminal database has logged at least 45 arrests since 2018 exclusively for failing to pay rent and not leaving.
Landlords have continued pursuing criminal eviction filings throughout the pandemic, even as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a national moratorium on evictions for nonpayment of rent to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. At least three dozen people have been charged under the statute since the beginning of 2021, according to online court records.
Clowney’s bill has been assigned to a House committee, and, if passed, will go to the full House and then the Senate for a vote. Senate leader Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, who is a rental property owner himself, acknowledged last year that he used to invoke the criminal statute against tenants but told ProPublica he no longer does. Hickey said he did not have any comments on the new bill.
Lynn Foster, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock law professor emerita, said the criminal eviction statute is one of two unique features of Arkansas law that harm tenants. The other, she said, is the absence of any law requiring landlords to ensure their rental units meet minimum habitability standards, such as having running water and doors that lock.
Gazaway has sponsored a bill this legislative session that would create a basic set of habitability standards, but it too faces steep odds: Similar proposals in 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019 failed in the face of opposition from landlords.
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