BeckyDem
BeckyDem's JournalThe Fed Invested Public Money in Fossil Fuel Firms Driving Environmental Racism
In April, the price of oil fell so far so fast that oil futures contracts went negative. Oil prices have recovered somewhat, but not enough to ever return the industry to its prior state. Analysts predict the U.S. has reached peak oil production and will never again return to the record 13 million barrels of oil per day reached in November 2019. ExxonMobil, which has been a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average market index for 92 years, was removed last week and replaced with the software firm Salesforce. But while financial analysts sound the alarm about this dying industry, the Federal Reserve has been buying up the debt of fossil fuel companies through a pandemic emergency program. We the public, together with the Fed, now own over $315 million in bonds of fossil fuel firms, including those with a track record of environmental racism.
Among the many Fed rescue programs is the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), which buys corporate debt of companies. The program is supporting fossil fuel corporations in notably disproportionate numbers: More than 10 percent of the Feds bond purchases are fossil fuel companies, even though fossil fuel firms only employ 2 percent of all workers employed by firms in the S&P 1500 stock market index.
These bonds are effectively a public investment because the Fed is leveraging $25 billion from the CARES Act as a down payment for the SMCCFs bond purchases. Together with the Fed, the public now holds the corporate bonds of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Phillips 66 and Noble Energy. And it seems likely the Fed will be holding these fossil fuel bonds until they mature up to five years into the future for some of them based on comments Fed Chair Jerome Powell made to Congress.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-fed-invested-public-money-in-fossil-fuel-firms-driving-environmental-racism/
Why did the US justice department let Purdue off the hook for the opioid crisis?
Prosecutors believed Purdue was implicated in mail and wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. Yet the firm got a slap on the wrist
The opioid epidemic is not over. Even as Covid-19 rages, opioid-related deaths continue to devastate communities across our states. In New Hampshire, overdose deaths rose in April and May over last years levels. In the first four months of 2020, Rhode Island overdose deaths jumped 29% from the same period last year and 38% from the same period in 2018. Opioid addiction remains a persistent, lethal menace.
We just learned a big reason why the opioid crisis was allowed to get so bad. The Guardian recently unearthed new details in the origin story of the opioid crisis. In 2006, career prosecutors at the US Department of Justice drafted a memo summarizing alleged criminal behavior by the major opioid maker Purdue Pharma. The memo, the culmination of a four-year investigation of Purdues opioid marketing and other business practices, was based on a review of millions of internal documents. The memo concluded that Purdue and its executives participated in mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy in pushing opioids, and recommended indictment.
But we still dont know the whole story, and we need to in order to avoid a repeat of the deceptive marketing practices and corporate greed thats cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives.
Action in 2006 could have made an enormous difference. Bringing felony charges could have brought real accountability to executives who ran the scheme. More importantly, it might have forced the company to end its deceptive marketing practices, which contributed to millions of people becoming addicted to opioids. It could have saved the lives of an untold number of Americans.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/us-justice-department-opioid-crisis-purdue?CMP=share_btn_tw
Public Citizen @Public_Citizen: Ivanka Trump's products were made exclusively overseas.
https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1302959842475364352BIDEN/HARRIS 2020
Hopes fading for coronavirus relief bill as Congress returns
By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press SEPTEMBER 7, 2020 7:59AM
WASHINGTON At least there won't be a government shutdown.
But as lawmakers straggle back to Washington for an abbreviated preelection session, hopes are dimming for another coronavirus relief bill or much else.
Talks between top Democrats and the Trump administration broke off last month and remain off track, with the bipartisan unity that drove almost $3 trillion in COVID-19 rescue legislation into law this spring replaced by toxic partisanship and a return to Washington dysfunction.
Expectations in July and August that a fifth bipartisan pandemic response bill would eventually be birthed despite increased obstacles has been replaced by genuine pessimism. Recent COVID-related conversations among key players have led to nothing.
Democrats seem secure in their political position, with President Donald Trump and several Senate GOP incumbents lagging in the polls. Trump is seeking to sideline the pandemic as a campaign issue, and Republicans aren't interested in a deal on Democratic terms even as needs like school aid enjoy widespread support.
https://www.startribune.com/hopes-fading-for-coronavirus-deal-as-congress-returns/572340112/
Unsanitized: Republicans Working on the Least They Can Possibly Do
Plus, the politicization of vaccines. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for September 4, 2020.
BY DAVID DAYEN SEPTEMBER 4, 2020
First Response
The second-to-last jobs report before the election would sound really great if you were airlifted in from the International Space Station after a year of isolation. The economy added 1.37 million jobs and dropped the topline unemployment rate to 8.4 percent. This is down from 1.7 million added in July, and remains 11.5 million jobs under the number in February, a 7.5 percent loss since the beginning of the pandemic. Permanent job loss is actually falling more quickly than it did during the Great Recession, at 3.4 million. In all 19 million workers are either unemployed or have lost their jobs, based on this report. And it includes 237,000 Census hires, who will lose their jobs shortly.
The report is indicative of a country where the rich have completely cleaved themselves off from the rest of society. As Tim Noah writes, the prediction that we were living in a plutonomy, a nation of, by, and for the 1 percent, has now come to pass. You can have an economy without caring about the welfare of an exceedingly large section of the population, if you just shut your eyes. Food bank participation and the stock market are nearing record highs, simultaneously. Threat of eviction and rental debt has never been this elevated, and neither have bank profits from investments and trading. You either have it or you dont.
So expecting a bunch of haves in the Senate Republican caucus to figure out how to prevent disaster for the have-nots might be a foolish enterprise. Senate Republicans can enable a Federal Reserve bailout (The Fed created a bubble where life could go onnot unlike the NBA bubble, is one great quote from that above-linked Wall Street Journal piece), but helping invisible people they never come into contact with in a typical day? Come on, theyre not miracle workers!
So its not surprising, then, that Senate Republicans cant decide on what to do, or whether to do anything, about the continuing economic crisis. Mitch McConnell first announced a $1 trillion legislative effort, mostly as a coat rack for his scheme to give a liability release to corporations, hospitals, and schools for wrongful infections or deaths from COVID-19. That split the caucus almost in half.
https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-republicans-least-they-can-do-stimulus-relief-bill/
GREYSTONE NURSING HOMES, WHOSE EXECUTIVES GAVE $800,000 TO TRUMP, ARE EPICENTERS OF COVID-19 DEATHS
Nursing homes operated by Greystone have some of the nations highest reported death counts, federal data shows.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook
September 4 2020, 7:00 a.m.
IN AUGUST OF 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development faced the biggest default in its history. Rosewood Homes, which operated a chain of nursing homes in Illinois, defaulted on a $146 million mortgage that was backed by HUD. The Greystone-backed owner had to pay over $3 million in fines to HUD and the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to file financial statements and defrauding investors. The mortgage on the homes had been serviced by Greystone, the No. 1 lender in HUD-backed nursing homes.
Then HUD took them over and spent $30 million maintaining and upgrading the facilities, and appointed a receiver to administer the homes. When the homes were ready to go back on the market, the buyer was Greystone, which had already managed over 30 nursing homes in Florida. HUD has refused to disclose the asking price, according to the New York Times.
Greystone also apparently maintained close ties to President Donald Trump. On the same day that bids were due in a federal government auction of the troubled $95 million Rosewood nursing home chain May 31, 2019 Greystones CEO donated $360,600 to the presidents reelection fund, Trump Victory, using a shell company that omitted his name. Over the next few weeks, a Greystone managing director and his wife followed up with another $360,000 to the Trump Victory Fund, and in November, a Greystone executive donated $100,000 to the presidents Super PAC, America First Action, for a total of over $820,000.
Greystones nursing homes have now become epicenters of death in the coronavirus crisis. Federal data shows that 51 deaths have occurred at University Rehab at Northmoor in Peoria, Illinois, while 16 deaths have occurred at Greystones Apollo Health and Rehab in Saint Petersburg, Florida, putting both homes among the worst in the country for Covid-19 deaths. The Rockledge Health and Rehab Center in Florida has 24 deaths, the Lake Cook Rehab and Healthcare Center in suburban Chicago has 20 deaths, and the Riverside Rehab and Healthcare Center in Alton, Illinois, has 21 deaths. Despite the deaths, money from the federal government has flowed, as Greystone facilities have received at minimum $15 million in Covid-19 grants and loans since the pandemic began.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committees Subcommittee on Health, described the donations from Greystone executives to Trump funds as another tale from Trumps corruption playbook. He again puts special-interest wealth over public health."
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/04/nursing-homes-coronavirus-deaths-greystone/
"THERE IS NO MERCY"
As the Coronavirus Descended on the Border, the Trump Administration Escalated Its Crackdown on Asylum
for The Intercept
Ryan Devereaux
September 5 2020, 7:00 a.m.
SHORT WALK from the border, in the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora, sits a modest building packed with long, cafeteria-style tables. The comedor, as its known locally, is clean and inviting, with space for up to 60 guests. The walls are decorated with hand-painted images of Christ and his apostles, done in the style of a childrens book. Tucked away in one corner of the room are medical supplies, stacked and organized in plastic bins. Sister María Engracia Robles Robles, a nun with the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, floats from the kitchen into the common area, serving hot breakfast and lunch to anyone who needs it.
The comedor was born out of work Robles and two other nuns began in 2006. At the time, Arizona was the epicenter of migration along the border and the site of a major humanitarian crisis. While people headed north were dying in the desert in record numbers, a growing deportation machine was sending a steady flow of survivors to Nogales. The nuns began feeding the deportees out of the trunks of their cars. In 2008, they secured the property where the comedor now stands. Officially run by a coalition of organizations known as the Kino Border Initiative, its first iteration had no walls. There was no relief from the desert heat. When the monsoons came, the nuns walked through standing water to serve food.
In years past, the guests were almost all recently deported Mexican men. Thats no longer the case. Sitting in the corner of the comedor on a bright, clear morning in late February, I watched as a long line of families from Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries in Latin America and across the world walked through the front door. They filled the benches, packed shoulder to shoulder. Many came by bus from Ciudad Juarez, crossing contested cartel territory where a Mormon family was massacred just a few months prior.
Once the parents and kids were settled in, Sister Robles went around the room asking them what they were thankful for. As I scribbled a mans answer in my notebook to be with his daughter a little girl in a pink jumper handed me an empty tube of Chapstick, then a tiny figurine of a woman in a green dress, then a broken blue crayon. She smiled as she shared her treasures one by one. The girl and her sister were from Chilpancingo, her mother later told me, a Mexican city in the state of Guerrero, not far from the town where 43 students were disappeared by police in 2014. It was the violence, the mother said, that caused them to leave.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/05/us-mexico-border-coronavirus/
Ben Crump @AttorneyCrump Police brutality has been normalized in America for far too long.
We must all remember: this pattern is NOT NORMAL. We must STOP justifying this behavior, and hold ALL of these officers accountable!
https://twitter.com/AttorneyCrump/status/1300492050161373185
White privilege
Teen charged in Kenosha killings stalls return to Wisconsin
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/teen-charged-in-kenosha-killings-stalls-return-to-wisconsin-08-28-2020
Facebook Employees Slammed Zuckerberg Over Militia Groups And QAnon After Kenosha
Following days of violence and civil unrest, Facebook employees wonder if their company is doing enough to stifle militia and QAnon groups stoking violence on the social network.
Ryan Mac
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Frustrated Facebook employees slammed CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday during a companywide meeting, questioning his leadership and decision-making, following a week in which the platform promoted violent conspiracy theories and gave safe harbor to militia groups. The billionaire chief executive was speaking via webcast at the companys weekly all-hands meeting, attempting to address questions about violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the QAnon conspiracy that has proliferated across Facebook.
The meeting came one day after the Verge reported that a self-proclaimed militia group calling itself Kenosha Guard had used its Facebook page to issue a call to arms violating Facebook's own policies and remained online even though at least two people reported it before the shooting. It also followed weeks of employee unrest, in which the companys rank and file have urged the CEO to combat the spread of QAnon-related content on its platform.
All of Facebooks more than 50,000 employees can watch and comment on the stream during the meeting, or view a recording after its conclusion and as Zuckerberg spoke, angry comments poured in.
At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? wrote one employee. [A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employees-slam-zuckerberg-kenosha-militia-shooting
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