If there’s one thing you can say for sure about Elon Musk, it’s that he has a huge number of opinions and loves to share them at high volume with the world. The problem here is that his opinions are often stunningly wrong.

Generally, these stunningly wrong opinions are the conventional wisdom among the ultra-right and ultra-rich.

In particular, like most of the ultra-right ultra-rich, Musk is desperately concerned that the U.S. is about to be overwhelmed by the costs of Social Security and Medicare.

He’s previously tweeted — in response to the Christian evangelical humor site Babylon Bee — that “True national debt, including unfunded entitlements, is at least $60 trillion.” On the one hand, this is arguably true. On the other hand, you will understand it’s not a problem if you are familiar with 1) this subject and 2) basic math.

More recently, Musk favored us with this perspective on Social Security:

Big reckoning coming due to low birth rate. Japan is a leading indicator.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 31, 2023

There’s so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to know where to start explaining, but let’s try.

First of all, Musk is saying that the U.S. will have difficulty paying Social Security benefits in the future due to a low U.S. birth rate. People who believe this generally point to the falling ratio of U.S. workers to Social Security beneficiaries. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, founded by another billionaire, is happy to give you the numbers : In 1960, there were 5.1 workers per beneficiary, and now there are only 2.8. Moreover, the ratio is projected to fall to 2.3 by 2035.

This does sound intuitively like it must be a big problem — until you think about it for five seconds. As in many other cases, this is the five seconds of thinking that Musk has failed to do.

You don’t need to know anything about the intricacies of how Social Security works to understand it. Just use your little noggin. The obvious reality is that if a falling ratio of workers to beneficiaries is an enormous problem, this problem would already have manifested itself.

Again, look at those numbers. In 1960, 5.1. Now, 2.8. The ratio has dropped by almost half. (In fact, it’s dropped by more than that in Social Security’s history . In 1950 the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was 16.5.) And yet despite a plunge in the worker-retiree ratio that has already happened, the Social Security checks today go out every month like clockwork. There is no mayhem in the streets. There’s no reason to expect disaster if the ratio goes down a little more, to 2.3.

The reason this is possible is the same reason the U.S. overall is a far richer country than it was in the past: an increase in worker productivity. Productivity is the measure of how much the U.S. economy produces per worker , and probably the most important statistic regarding economic well being. We invent bulldozers, and suddenly one person can do the work of 30 people with shovels. We invent computer printers, and suddenly one person can do the work of 100 typists. We invent E-ZPass, and suddenly zero people can do the work of thousands of tollbooth operators.

This matters because, when you strip away the complexity, retirement income of any kind is simply money generated by present-day workers being taken from them and given to people who aren’t working. This is true with Social Security, where the money is taken in the form of taxes. But it’s also true with any kind of private savings. The transfer there just uses different mechanisms — say, Dick Cheney, 82, getting dividends from all the stock he owns.

So it’s all about how much present day workers can produce. And if productivity goes up fast enough, it will swamp any fall in the worker-beneficiary ratio — and the income of both present day workers and retirees can rise indefinitely. This is exactly what happened in the past. And we can see that there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue, again using the concept of math.

The economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, has done this math . U.S. productivity has grown at more than 1 percent per year — sometimes much more — over every 15-year period since World War II. If it grows at 1 percent for the next 15 years, it will be possible for both workers and retirees to see their income increase by almost 9 percent. If it grows at 2 percent — about the average since World War II — the income of both workers and retirees can grow by 20 percent during the next 15 years. This does not seem like the “reckoning” predicted by Musk.

What Musk is essentially saying is that technology in general, and his car company in particular, are going to fail.

What’s even funnier about Musk’s fretting is that it contradicts literally everything about his life. He’s promised for years that Tesla’s cars will soon achieve “full self-driving.” If indeed humans can invent vehicles that can drive without people, this will generate a huge increase in productivity — so much so that some people worry about what millions of truck drivers would do if their jobs are shortly eliminated. Meanwhile, if low birth rates mean there are fewer workers available, the cost of labor will rise, meaning that it will be worth it for Tesla to invest more in creating self-driving trucks. So what Musk is essentially saying is that technology in general, and his car company in particular, are going to fail.

Finally, there’s Musk’s characterization of Japan as a “leading indictor.” Here’s a picture of Tokyo, depicting what a poverty-stricken hellscape Japan has now become due to its low birthrate:

That is a joke. Japan is an extremely rich country by world standards, and the aging of its population has not changed that. The statistic to pay attention here is a country’s per capita income. Aging might be a problem if so many people were old and out of the workforce that per capita income fell, but, as the World Bank will tell you, that hasn’t happened in Japan . In fact, thanks to the magic of productivity, per capita income has continued to rise, albeit more slowly than in Japan’s years of fastest growth.

So if you’re tempted by Musk’s words to be concerned about what a low birth rate means for Social Security, you don’t need to sweat it. A much bigger problem, for Social Security and the U.S. in general, are the low-functioning brains of our billionaires.

The post Elon Musk Wants to Cut Your Social Security Because He Doesn’t Understand Math appeared first on The Intercept .

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government’s attempt to radically overhaul the Israeli legal and judicial system has sparked widespread protests in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets under the banner of defending Israeli democracy.

Very early on in the protests, billboard signs began popping up across Israel that said, “The High Court of Justice is our soldiers’ body armor.” The notion persisted as protests spread. And, likely driven by the fear of losing the court’s protections, a wave of reserve soldiers are declaring their refusal to serve, arguably the protests’ most significant element .

The “body armor” sentiment is largely correct. The perceived independence of the Israeli judiciary is a key factor in preventing international accountability for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians — in the occupation and beyond. Most international court systems will only take up foreign cases if it can be shown that a country’s own system was unable to impartially adjudicate allegations of war crimes.

The situation, however, raises a question that few in Israel have dared to ask: Even without Netanyahu’s reforms, has the judiciary done enough to deal with violations of intranational law? Beyond its work upholding civil rights, have the courts’ rulings on international law merely given Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians a patina of legitimacy, as some progressive Israelis and many Palestinians contend?

A former attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, was quite blunt in explaining why the country needs its courts to be independent: “The moment that the justice system in Israel isn’t perceived as such,” he warned , “Israel will lose international legitimacy for its military operations and will no longer be shielded from accusations of war crimes.”

Mendelblit’s prediction could soon be put to the test, with Palestinian appeals to the International Criminal Court in The Hague already pending. Losing the appearance of independence may expose Israeli soldiers, military commanders, leaders of the security forces, and even Israeli ministers, past and present, to prosecutions in foreign countries.

Such cases could rise to the level of holding Israel accountable for grave crimes such as torture: Last June, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, in collaboration with the International Federation for Human Rights, requested the ICC’s prosecutors to include the crime of torture in their investigation into the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The question of torture in Israel is just one of several potential grounds for international juridical intervention relating to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Israel’s prolonged occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, its sustaining of an apartheid regime , and the war crimes it has been committing in Gaza would also come to the fore.

Israeli courts’ treatment of torture and other crimes offer some answers as to how impartial the judiciary has really been on crimes against Palestinians — and the Israeli claims of democracy on display in the recent protests.

The Case of Torture

Taking a closer look at how the Israeli judiciary has been addressing allegations of torture reveals what is — and what is not — at stake in the recent legislation in Israel.

In 1999 , Israel’s High Court of Justice rendered a ruling which was hailed as putting an end to the use of torture in Israel. Yet, according to data collected by Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and other human rights organizations, Israel still regularly subjects Palestinian detainees to interrogation methods that constitute torture and inhumane and degrading treatment, in clear violation of international law.

Complaints submitted by Palestinians who were interrogated by the Shabak, Israel’s general security service, to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel since 2000 show the persistence of methods that were explicitly forbidden by the High Court in 1999.

An analysis we have conducted of more than 1,500 of these complains, which was funded by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, shows that physical violence — such as beating, violent shaking, and strangling — is still regularly used in interrogations. Other frequently used interrogation techniques include forcing people into painful stress positions, tight handcuffing, severe sleep deprivation, incommunicado detention, use of family members, threats, humiliations, and prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures.

This is not merely a de facto breach of the ruling: As several recent decision s by the justices make clear, the High Court itself is willing to tolerate and even explicitly approve the use of torture in violation of Israel’s obligations under international law — and, some would argue, the court’s own decision.

Israel has further put in place several judicial mechanisms to address complaints of torture in recent decades. Yet these, too, constantly fail to offer legal remedy to torture victims.

More than 1,300 complaints of torture have been submitted on behalf of Palestinians to the Ministry of Justice between 2001 and June 2021. Only three criminal investigations have been launched. None have resulted in an indictment.

Yet as long as Israel can claim it has robust mechanisms for investigating complaints and independent judicial oversight over its security forces, it can fend against calls for international intervention.

War Crimes Launderer

On Monday night, as Netanyahu was deliberating in his chamber whether to stop the new legislation following the protests and a general strike , right-wing demonstrators assembled in Jerusalem for the first rally in favor of the legislation.

Many of the slogans shouted in this rally were not directly supporting the government, but instead targeting Palestinians . Some were explicit — and, unfortunately, too familiar — calls demanding “death to all Arabs.” Several Palestinian passersby (as well as journalists and other Israelis perceived as “leftist” ) were attacked by demonstrators.

It is clear that at least as far as the nationalistic right is concerned, enshrining Jewish supremacy is the goal of this constitutional revolution. This is not an unfounded supposition; it is the professed plan of some of the most senior members in the government, including the national security minister and the minister of finance, who recently openly called for the complete erasure of a Palestinian town .

This legislation must not be passed. Resisting it, though, cannot also be about the freedom of Israeli soldiers and security apparatuses to continue operating — and even killing — with impunity.

Whatever the results of the current constitutional upheaval may be, the world must no longer ignore what is now irrefutable: Israel’s judiciary has served as a war crimes launderer.

When calling to “protect democracy,” we must bear in mind that the High Court of Justice has indeed served as the body armor not just for soldiers, but also for Israel’s anti-democratic practices. For years, the court has condoned Israeli human rights abuses , including settlement expansion , extrajudicial killings , and torture of Palestinian detainees.

Whatever the results of the current constitutional upheaval may be, the world must no longer ignore what is now irrefutable: Israel’s judiciary has served as a war crimes launderer. The international community must intervene to hold Israel accountable for its continued violations of Palestinian rights — an accountability Israel evidently fails to uphold itself.

At the same time, those in Israel protesting in the streets should realize that there is no such thing as a democracy for Jews alone. A true democracy will only be achieved when Israel ends its long-lasting occupation, recognizes the national rights of the Palestinians, and offers protections and equality under the law for all its citizens.

The post Protect the Israeli Judiciary — but Don’t Let It Launder War Crimes Against Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept .

For everyone who’s fought and bled for years to get Medicare for All in the United States, I’ve got some great news: The government just created it on Sunday!

Yes, this is Medicare for All Bank Deposits, rather than Medicare for All People. But if we think this through, we’ll see that both these things are great ideas and make sense for the same reasons — and there’s no reason that if we have one, we can’t have the other.

First of all, it’s important to understand what happened yesterday. Banks are intrinsically vulnerable to runs. They accept deposits from regular people and businesses, which is good, so we don’t have to keep sacks full of cash in our closet and pay armed men to guard them.

The problem is that we want to be able to come get our money out of the bank at any time. However, banks don’t keep sacks of all our cash in their vaults waiting for us. They loan deposits out and make other investments with them, leaving just a fraction of their deposits available to be withdrawn at any time. In the past, in the U.S., this meant that if rumors got going that a bank was insolvent, it didn’t actually matter whether or not the bank was healthy or not. Everyone would show up and try to get their money out first, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: The very fact that people were scared a bank was insolvent could make it insolvent. (In fact, Silicon Valley Bank, whose failure led to Sunday’s swift government action, may have been accidentally destroyed by its own clients telling each other scary stories in a group chat .)

As a company called American Deposit Management cheerily informs us on its website , “The history of bank failures in the U.S. begins just over 40 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.” From then until the Great Depression, America saw constant, catastrophic bank panics that destroyed individual fortunes and the economy overall.

Until the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, Wall Street had been able to fend off most democratic oversight. Partly, they did this by overtly arguing that the government would stifle crucial financial innovations and partly by covertly engaging in every form of corruption imaginable. But by 1933, there was enough popular anger at a recent cascade of bank runs and failures to overwhelm the industry’s power. The government was forced to do something about it, and part of the something was the creation of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

One of the main things the FDIC has done ever since is insure deposits, mostly savings and checking accounts , up to a certain limit. Originally, the limit was the equivalent of about $50,000 today. The idea was that this would cover most Americans, and people with more money were big boys and girls able to take care of themselves. It was last raised in 2008 to $250,000. Crucially, the funding for the insurance comes from an assessment on the banks themselves.

But the insurance created a new problem: With deposits insured by the government, depositors would naturally be tempted to place their money with banks making risky investments that promised high returns, knowing that if the bank lost their money, the government would step in and make them whole. Roosevelt was concerned about this at the time, telling reporters off the record , “We do not wish to make the United States Government liable for the mistakes and errors of individual banks, and put a premium on unsound banking in the future.” The only solution was what banks hated most: regulation, government oversight of what they were doing with their depositors’ money.

This was the basic background to what happened last week, when Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, previously the 16th-largest bank in America and the favorite bank of the valley’s venture capitalists, experienced a bank run. This was alarming to many of its largest depositors, given that they apparently have the financial sophistication of a chicken. For instance, Roku revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was holding “approximately $487 million” at SVB. This suggests that $486,750,000 of Roku’s money was uninsured — and as the filing said, “the Company does not know to what extent the Company will be able to recover its cash on deposit at SVB.”

It is not, in fact, impossible for corporations to manage their money safely. Indeed, some do it every day. But apparently, it can be a challenge for chickens, which have brains the size of two shelled peanuts.

The mass financial incompetence by SVB’s depositors set off shrieking and caterwauling from the valley’s venture capitalists and angel investors that could be heard on Neptune:

YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW — THAT IS THE PROPER REACTION TO A BANK RUN & CONTAGION @POTUS & @SecYellen MUST GET ON TV TOMORROW AND GUARANTEE ALL DEPOSITS UP TO $10M OR THIS WILL SPIRAL INTO CHAOS

— @jason (@Jason) March 12, 2023

On the one hand, this is hilarious. Silicon Valley’s libertarianism is apparently based on one clear, firm principle: It’s illegal for them and their friends to lose money.

But on the other hand, the financial system is so complex that literally no one on Earth can say for sure how it will behave under stress. Again, remember that banks can experience runs not because they’re insolvent, but because people come to believe they are or just that other people will believe that they are, perhaps because someone prominent is SCREAMING AT THEM IN ALL CAPS TO PANIC.

And society at large has a genuine interest in preventing bank runs. So the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC jointly announced on Sunday that the government would guarantee all deposits at SVB (and another big bank called Signature), no matter the size. In other words, it turns out Roku will be getting back all of its $487 million.

This might be the right call overall. But then again, it’s gratingly unfair. SVB’s big depositors are suddenly getting financial backing from the government — i.e., everyone else in America.

Most importantly, the entire financial system now understands that, if push comes to shove, the government will guarantee all deposits of any amount. The $250,000 limit turns out to be no limit at all.

The Treasury Department doesn’t want to admit this, of course, but they also can’t deny it. So when Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein asked about it yesterday, a Treasury official responded, “Well, you see, mmfrrffm rmmm blrf.”

I asked Treasury this question on a call with reporters this evening. This was their response pic.twitter.com/LeM9clLzmT

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 12, 2023

But whatever cloud of words is emitted by the government, depositors will be incentivized to put their money in banks taking wild swings, knowing that if there’s an upside, they’ll pocket some of it, while if things go wrong, the government will step in.

Now that this Rubicon has been crossed, there’s only one rational path forward: If the government is going to guarantee all bank deposits, then much of the banking industry is parasitical and should be euthanized.

The logic here is largely the same as with health care, where logic likewise inexorably points to universal insurance funded and supervised by the government.

Individuals have a strong interest in both their health costs and their basic banking deposits being covered by insurance. The conservative perspective is that everyone should buy private insurance based on a constant, never-ending series of Monte Carlo simulations about what your individual future holds.

But this is impossible for human beings. The future is unknowable. You may live your entire life with few health care costs, or you might suddenly face $1 million in costs next year. Your bank might putter along indefinitely, or it might explode tomorrow.

Likewise, society has a powerful interest in everyone being covered by these kinds of insurance. In the case of SVB, we don’t want the depositors to go without insurance but then be able to blackmail everyone else into bailing them out because we’re scared their miscalculations will infect the rest of the system. Analogously, we don’t want people, especially powerful ones, to avoid health insurance and then demand we pay for their treatment if they get a dangerous infectious disease.

In both cases, universal insurance is also necessary for more subtle reasons. Everyone knows that both the U.S. health insurance system and the banking system are unbearably unjust. If they’re not dealt with in an equitable way, the anger Americans rightfully feel about both will continue to be harvested by reactionary politicians.

The clear answer for health care is Medicare for All. With banking, it may plausibly be something like Banking for All — i.e., the Federal Reserve giving every person and corporation an account that no bank run could ever take away. In both cases, the solution is simple and obvious, with the only obstacle being the extraordinary power of wealthy corporations that serve no purpose whatsoever.

The post Hooray, We Now Have Medicare for All (Bank Deposits)! appeared first on The Intercept .

Wednesday’s peculiar YouTube remarks by “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams about Black Americans being a “hate group” have certainly received a lot of attention. Hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. have now dropped Adams’s strip .

What’s gotten almost no notice, however, is how Adams went on at length about his efforts to be “helpful to Black America.” But my ears perked up when I heard this, since the most berserk racial ultraviolence in U.S. history has always been accompanied by this kind of rhetoric from white Americans — i.e., we’ve done our best to help others, only for them to turn around and loathe us rather than respond with the gratitude we deserve for our openhearted kindness.

Here’s some of what Adams said on this subject:

As you know, I’ve been identifying as Black for a while. Years now, because I like to be on the winning team.

And I like to help. And I thought, if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you can find the biggest benefit. … So I like to focus a lot of my life resources on helping Black Americans. So much so that I started identifying as Black, just to be on the team I was helping. …

I think it makes no sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. … That’s no longer a rational impulse. I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. I’ve been doing it all my life, and the only outcome is that I’ve been called a racist. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. … Don’t even think it’s worth trying.

Now here’s what white Americans have been saying for the past 400 years about Native Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese people, Iraqis, and many, many other people. See if you can spot a pattern.

The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, created after King Charles I granted the colony a charter in 1629, portrayed a Native American saying, “Come Over and Help Us.” Just eight years later, during the Pequot massacre , the men of Massachusetts helped about 500 women, children, and other civilians become dead.

By the early 1800s, white America had decided that we had to separate ourselves from the ungrateful wretches surrounding us. President Andrew Jackson began his famous 1830 speech to Congress with the happy news that “the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly 30 years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.” This was all thanks to how nice we were. “The policy of the general government toward the red man,” said Jackson, “is not only liberal, but generous.”

The government’s benevolent policy had already been enacted by Jackson’s soldiers during the Creek War in 1814, when they removed strips of skin from their defeated enemies and made bridles for their horses out of them. Then, after Jackson’s speech, the government helped about 60,000 Native Americans experience the Trail of Tears.

It wasn’t too much later that President Teddy Roosevelt explained in his book “The Winning of the West” that “no other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”

You might ask what the reaction of Indigenous people was to all this help. Sadly, there was just a total lack of appreciation. As the Rocky Mountain News pointed out , they were an “ungrateful race” that “ought to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

And what about slavery? You guessed it: It was also the product of white America’s sincere efforts to help others. One well-known elucidation of this concept was written before the Civil War by William Gilmore Simms, a popular novelist and member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. As he put it , slavery was “not simply within the sanctions of justice and propriety, but constituting one of the most essential agencies … for elevating, to a condition of humanity, a people otherwise barbarous, easily depraved, and needing the help of a superior condition.”

Another South Carolinian, John Calhoun, had similar insights. Slavery, he argued , was a “positive good” for enslaved people and demonstrated the lengths slave owners would go to in their efforts to help others. “In few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer,” Calhoun said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, “and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age.”

This led to a lot of white people getting their feelings hurt when their benevolence wasn’t recognized. Harriet Jacobs escaped a plantation in North Carolina and later wrote about her attempts to persuade her owner — who raped many of the women he enslaved — to sell her to someone else:

On such occasions he would assume the air of a very injured individual, and reproach me for my ingratitude. “Did I not take you into the house, and make you the companion of my own children?” he would say. “And this is the recompense I get, you ungrateful girl!”

U.S. history just goes on from there in exactly the same way. In 1966, the editor of U.S. News & World Report told the publication’s readers that “what the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.” When challenged, he responded that “primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence.” A recent book on Vietnam records that “in the oral and written accounts, the [American soldiers] in Vietnam constantly register bitter complains about what they consider Vietnamese ingratitude.”

The Iraq War was, of course, all about helping Iraqis. In a speech just before the U.S. and its allies invaded, President George W. Bush proclaimed , “The United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq.” Trent Lott of Mississippi, then the top Senate Republican, agreed after the war had started, saying, “We went in there to free those people.”

It was a beautiful moment, but America soon ran into the same problem we’d faced so often before. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard took a trip to Iraq and reported that “Iraqis want help. Indeed, they demand it and are angry and frustrated when they don’t get it instantly. But they appear to hate being helped.” Barnes said he’d like to see “an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Instead, Iraqis were “sullen and suspicious and conspiracy-minded. … Papers obsess on the subject of brutal treatment of innocent Iraqis by American soldiers.” For Lott’s part, by this time, he was musing that “if we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”

That brings us up to today and the genuine distress of Scott Adams. People like him have been helping so many others, so vigorously, for so many centuries. It’s no wonder that he’s tired of not getting the least bit of thanks.

The post Scott Adams Echoes White America’s Resentful History of “Helping” Others appeared first on The Intercept .

By now you probably know about the filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. It includes a vast trove of communications to and from various Fox hosts — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — as well as Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch, chair of the parent corporation of Fox News.

The most wonderful part of the filing is Carlson’s inspiring, principled stand against telling the truth. On November 12, 2020, nine days after the election, Carlson flagged a tweet for Hannity and Ingraham by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich. In it Heinrich had accurately pointed out that there was “no evidence” for then-President Donald Trump’s preposterous claims about the election being stolen by Dominion’s voting machines.

Heinrich’s reference to reality understandably enraged Carlson. He texted his fellow hosts: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Heinrich didn’t lose her job, but her tweet soon disappeared.

Carlson’s concern was that Fox’s viewers simply wouldn’t accept the facts and, if presented with them, would flock to competitors who would tell them the comforting lies for which they yearned. At about the same time, Carlson texted his producer that “we’re playing with fire, for real … an alternative like newsmax could be devastating for us.”

It’s easy and fun to jeer at Carlson for his hilarious deceit, and I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from doing so. It’s especially enjoyable to find out Carlson believes Trump is “a demonic force” (page 43 of the filing), yet has never told his audience this. In fact, Carlson still enjoys sharing a hearty guffaw with the demonic force at Saudi golf tournaments.

But once we’re done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about this if we’d like to have a society that’s based — at least a little bit — on rationality and evidence. Because in the society we have now, Carlson should logically be rewarded for everything he’s done.

Fox Corporation has shareholders who expect it to make as much profit as possible. According to one of Fox Corporation’s recent fillings , its “competitive strengths” include “premium brands that resonate deeply with viewers.” In particular, “FOX News is among the most influential and recognized news brands in the world.”

You’ll note that Fox does not claim that one of its strengths is, say, “exposing its viewers to the cold, pitiless light of reality.” That’s because its viewers don’t want that. Imagine you’ve created an extremely profitable business by getting 5-year-olds to tune in every night to hear about how much Santa Claus loves them, and also that the world is full of terrible people trying to assassinate Santa Claus. You wouldn’t switch things up all of a sudden and tell your 5-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus. They’d immediately switch channels to Santamax.

This fact about television “news” was explained cogently in a 1970 memo produced by the Nixon White House that illuminates the thinking behind Fox in embryonic form. Titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News,” the memo explains that television news was popular because “People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” (Emphasis in original.) The last thing you want to do is drive viewers away by forcing them to think.

Viewer loyalty is especially important to Fox because of the structure of its revenue stream. According to the New York Times , Fox Corporation’s cable segment, which mostly consists of Fox News, took in $283 million in ad revenue in the first three quarters of 2021. But licensing fees — what cable and satellite companies pay to carry Fox News — were $1.07 billion. This explains why Fox’s top concern must naturally be its viewers. Non-cable “free” news makes essentially all its money from advertising, meaning it wants to keep advertisers happy above all else. But Fox needs the specific audience it’s cultivated — i.e., not just any group of affluent watchers who will appeal to advertisers, but the people who are addicted to Fox’s comforting worldview. This is especially true since only a small fraction of cable subscribers actually watch Fox News, even as it commands much higher fees per subscriber than other news outlets. Fox depends on maintaining an audience who will complain vociferously if their cable providers drop their favorite network – which leads us to yet another way in which our corporate overlords cater to the right-wing mob, because Verizon, AT&T and other cable companies don’t have the backbone to tell Fox they won’t continue to overpay the network.

In other words, Tucker Carlson & Co. were simply doing their actual jobs — that is, protecting the profitability of Fox News. Meanwhile, by focusing on the facts, Heinrich was genuinely damaging the company and therefore not doing her actual job. You can hope that corporate employees somehow will act in ways that damage their company’s profitability in defense of journalistic ethics, because it’s the “right” thing to do. This kind of hope will be fulfilled as much as 2 percent of the time.

In fact, seen from this perspective, the only thing Carlson did wrong was foolishly expressing his views in forms that were discoverable in a lawsuit. On Wall Street the smarter executives are sophisticated enough not to do this, and message each other “f2f” — i.e., face-to-face — to indicate to their co-workers when they need to discuss something that wouldn’t look good if written out and cited in court.

Telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it’s also actively anti-profit.

So in the end, the problem with Fox News is the problem of all for-profit news organizations. Fox may present it in an especially distilled, enraging, shameless form. But neither advertisers nor, unfortunately, most people want to hear things that conflict with their treasured illusions about the world. For-profit news outlets can do great investigative reporting, but that reporting is itself generally not profitable and is subsidized by their cooking apps or sports coverage that actually do make money. By itself, telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it’s also actively anti-profit. The lesson of the Dominion lawsuit isn’t that Fox is extremely bad, although it is. It’s that to have a news system that works, we have to take profit out of the equation.

The post Tucker Carlson Deserves a Raise for His Shameless Lies appeared first on The Intercept .

Your liver or your liberty? Choose one.

This is the proposition that a bill in the Massachusetts House of Representatives puts to people locked up in the commonwealth: Donate bone marrow or an organ or two, says HD 3822, and the Department of Correction will cut 60 to 365 days off your sentence. The bill is sponsored by four Democrats.

Everything is wrong with this proposal except its intentions: to shorten transplant waiting lists and reduce state prison populations. Or so I assume. The 370-word text does little more than establish a Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program within the Department of Correction and a committee to work out the details. There is not even a perfunctory assurance of informed consent. With any luck, the bill will flutter to the bottom of some committee’s docket.

But HD 3822 is more than a piece of legislative slapdashery. It hints at the ways policymakers think about people and bodies and the calculus that determines which bodies deserve respect and care and which do not.

Legislators of both parties have deemed an organs-for-time swap a win-win. The sponsors of HD 3822, all legislators of color who have supported health equity and prison reform, told CBS Boston they were concerned with the shortage of donors of color compared with the preponderance of people of color waiting for organs (matching racial or ethnic backgrounds can improve the success of an organ or bone marrow transplant). They also said the program would “restore bodily autonomy to incarcerated folks.”

Conservatives like the trade-off for their own reasons. In January 2011, then-Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour released (but did not pardon) two sisters serving life sentences for an $11 armed robbery, on the condition that one donate a kidney to the other. Barbour was apparently not troubled by the disproportionality of the sentence, the sisters’ protestations of innocence, or the NAACP campaign to free them. He was moved by other concerns: The ill sister’s dialysis was costing the state $200,000 a year.

Politicians may warm to the Massachusetts bill. But it’s hard to find an ethicist to defend it. Franklin G. Miller, a retired bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health writing in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum, is one (maybe the one) who tries. But even applying maximum sophistry — the “important … distinction between taking advantage of unfairness (or misfortune) and taking unfair advantage of unfairness (or misfortune)” — he musters only tepid approval.

More representative is the opinion of Brendan Parent, director of transplant ethics and policy research at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “My initial reaction?” he said in an interview. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The idea of reducing the organ shortage — currently over 100,000 patients are waiting for transplants in the U.S. — with the body parts of the incarcerated has been considered before, as far back as the 1990s. Much of the debate has circled around the cadavers of the executed. Some doctors have argued in favor. So have some condemned prisoners.

In 2011, for instance, an Oregon man sentenced to death for murdering his family petitioned the state to allow him to donate his organs. After the request was denied, the man wrote a New York Times op-ed . “I am seeking nothing but the right to determine what happens to my body once the state has carried out its sentence,” he said. Polling the 35 other men on death row, he found that almost half would do the same.

Last year, a Texas death row inmate asked to have his execution stayed long enough to make a living donation of his kidneys. Because of a rare blood type, he was a coveted donor, and the matched recipient wrote Gov. Greg Abbott pleading her case. But the state’s criminal justice department, true to its mission, declined . The procedure would be too expensive, it said, and might delay “the court-ordered execution date.”

For ethicists, mixing state-sanctioned murder with state-aided preservation of life confounds both questions. On one hand, the social benefit of organ donation might lend legitimacy to the death penalty; the ethics committee of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network suggests that judges or juries could be inspired to sentence more people to death. On the other, notes ethicist Arthur Caplan, proponents of the death penalty could argue that the good deed and good press might undermine the retributive aim of capital punishment by heroizing people who’ve committed heinous crimes. It is hard not to infer this attitude from the authorities’ refusal of these last requests: “Don’t come begging us for redemption, bud.”

There are logistical snags too. Just one: Lethal injection can contaminate the tissue. A lower-tech method of execution might be the solution. In 1977, murderer Gary Gilmore donated his eyes, kidneys, liver, and pituitary gland to medicine before facing a Utah firing squad. Only the kidneys were too perforated to salvage.

Fortunately for those interested in incarcerated people as a source of organs, there is a much larger pool: the nearly 2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons, jails, immigrant detention, military prisons, civil commitment facilities, and state psychiatric hospitals. How many kidneys and livers (the most common live donations) might be gleaned from these bodies?

The paramount issue is coercion. Prison is a coercive institution. Its surveillance is panoptic and its regimentation complete. At the same time, its punishments and rewards are meted out irrationally by those in power, and extralegal threats, bribery, and every form of barter both beneficent and nefarious pervade its culture. Would a parole board look kindly on an organ donor years down the road? Would there be retribution against someone who opted out? How is any prisoner to know?

“Organ donation is a unique area of medicine where one person signs up to take a risk, and the clinician imposes that risk, for the benefit of another person,” says Parent. Before taking what could be a fatal decision, several criteria must be met. “First, there has to be a strong justification.” Saving lives that can be saved no other way is such a justification.

“The person who is agreeing to the risk must have full autonomy,” he continues. “Autonomy requires the ability to rationally consider the options in light of one’s values and make a decision free from undue influence.” That influence does not come solely in the form of coercion. Ethicists also want to rule out “undue inducement,” an incentive so great that a person feels compelled to do something they otherwise would not do — an offer they can’t refuse. Says Parent: “I cannot imagine any person in prison having the ability to rationally consider these risks in comparison to the possibility of a reduced sentence.”

The risks are not trivial: major surgery, unforeseen complications immediately or down the road. What if the donor’s one remaining kidney fails? The odds aren’t good that he’d get a transplant organ. Nor, for that matter, are the odds good that a given incarcerated person will be cleared to donate one.

Prisoners are sicker than the rest of the population. Health care behind bars is almost universally execrable. It makes the sick sicker. The conditions that lead to failure of the kidneys, liver, or heart — diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, hepatitis C, untreated HIV — are more prevalent among the poor and people of color, and even more prevalent than that among the incarcerated, who are disproportionately poor and of color. Of the 100,000 people on transplant waiting lists, over 60 percent are ethnic and racial minorities.

But the same health problems that put people on waiting lists for organs also reduce their likelihood of surviving — and thus being approved for — a transplant. And those same factors weigh against their qualifying to donate an organ or coming through the procedure in decent shape. In Mississippi, that sister-to-sister kidney transplant never happened. Doctors deemed the healthier sister too obese to donate safely. The “net transplant benefit calculation” is one of the metrics of triage that penalize the victims of racist health care policies and generational trauma for the damage inflicted on their bodies.

Although the prison doctors would not perform the surgery on either end (only specialized hospital units do that), the donor would be back in his cell within days. And any Massachusetts inmate contemplating organ donation has scant reason to expect the Department of Correction to ensure post-op health. The state’s prison health services contractor is Wellpath Recovery Solutions, formerly Correct Care Solutions, the largest and one of the worst actors in the field. Owned by the private equity firm HIG Capital, with $1.7 billion in revenue annually, “Wellpath continues to be mired in regulatory and reputational risk related to conditions that have endangered and harmed inmates under its care,” according to a November 2022 report by Michael Fenne at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Wellpath has not responded to Fenne’s report.

By 2018, nearly 1,400 federal lawsuits had been filed against Correct Care Solutions and companies it acquired, according to the Project on Government Oversight. The company’s practices were linked to 70 inmate deaths between 2014 and 2018 — with more suits in numerous states since. Last year, the Disability Law Center in Massachusetts found evidence of Wellpath’s excessive use of solitary confinement and drugs as “chemical restraints” for patients at Bridgewater State Hospital correctional facility, as well as neglect of people with disabilities at two state prisons during the pandemic. While the state Department of Correction disputed DLC’s findings, in December 2022 it signed a decree from the federal government specifying staffing, training, and treatment of prisoners in mental health crises.

The Massachusetts abolitionist organization DeeperThanWater Coalition has collected testimony on severe medical mistreatment and neglect by Wellpath at the state’s prisons, sometimes ending in death. Both DLC and DeeperThanWater have called on the state not to renew the company’s contract when it expires this June. But at the time of this writing, Massachusetts has posted no request for bids.

I personally find the deal on the table in the Massachusetts bill — two to 12 months for a slice of your living body — a not-due-enough inducement. But then I am not living in a cage. Still, whatever price a given incarcerated person might find fair, including none, the bill induces them, and the bright-blue commonwealth of Massachusetts, to consider the trade-in value of a secondhand kidney.

Call it utilitarianism, neoliberalism, or enlightened self-interest, HD 3822 reveals that the commodification of everything seems reasonable to pretty much everyone.

It also suggests that the bodies of the incarcerated are cheap. Every discussion of organs-for-time that I have read begins with the lives — 17 a day — lost to the transplant organ shortage. None mentions the waste of life that begins 600,000 times a year — an average of more than 1,600 a day — when the prison gates slam behind another new inmate somewhere in the U.S. In Massachusetts — a comparatively progressive incarcerator in a nation where the bar is so low a weasel couldn’t squeeze under it — the lives of the incarcerated are so negligible that the “health care” provider can kill its patients and (apparently) not be penalized by so much as a review of its contract.

The proposed swap may be illegal anyway. The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits organ donation in return for “valuable consideration,” which includes nonmonetary reward. Except for some biological materials including eggs, sperm, and entire corpses, body parts must be donated without recompense. The Federal Bureau of Prisons allows inmates to donate organs to family members. But the sole motive must be altruism. For this reason, when a bill similar to Massachusetts’s was enacted into law in South Carolina in 2007, the quid pro quo was stripped out.

It creates an opportunity for selflessness superintended by an administration that takes every opportunity to diminish the selves of its subjects.

Even without the inducement, however, HD 3822 would create a policy that is both unworkable and unintentionally cruel. It preconditions participation on free will and bodily autonomy inside an institution whose purpose is to seize freedom and control bodies and minds. It creates an opportunity for selflessness superintended by an administration that takes every opportunity to diminish the selves of its subjects. That the bill’s authors believe it would restore bodily autonomy to incarcerated people is, at the least, clueless.

The incarcerated are hardly incapable of altruism. It is a testament to moral resilience — and resistance — that in places where mutual aid is not just discouraged but also potentially dangerous, kindness lives. But demanding altruism and also a pound of flesh in return for your stolen liberty is extortion. If, that is, you’re cleared to hand over the flesh.

The United Network for Organ Sharing ethics committee “opposes any strategy or proposed statute regarding organ donation from condemned prisoners until all of the potential ethical concerns have been satisfactorily addressed.”

But these ethical concerns cannot be satisfactorily addressed within the carceral system because carceral values are the antithesis of medical ethics, or any ethics. Medicine pledges to do no harm. Prison is designed to harm.

The post No, Trading Flesh for Prison Time Is Not “Bodily Autonomy” appeared first on The Intercept .

In the early days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, alleviating the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban was a major part of the campaign to sell the conflict to the American public — and eventually to justify an open-ended military occupation. Whether the United States did much to help Afghan women is a debatable point, largely dependent on which women you ask .

Yet there is no question that today, under the Taliban, a young, educated, and urbanized generation of Afghan women who enjoyed a period of opportunity over the past 20 years is experiencing a catastrophic attack on their basic rights.

The Taliban’s recent decision to ban girls’ education past the sixth grade is only the latest outrage to be inflicted on Afghan women, and another step in a campaign to drag Afghan society back to the climate of medieval repression that reigned during the last Taliban government of the 1990s.

There is one thing that could easily be done to ease the suffering of Afghans under Taliban rule: giving a home to Afghan refugees.

This unhappy situation was not inevitable. There are ideological divisions inside the Taliban, particularly between its leaders who spent the war years abroad mingling in foreign capitals, and those who spent it fighting a grueling insurgency inside the country.

While the Taliban government showed initial hints of pragmatism upon coming to power, today it has become clear that the extremist faction of its leadership is in control and willing to sacrifice the well-being of Afghans and the goodwill of the international community to fulfill its ideological mission.

The United States has scant leverage left to change the calculus of an organization so dead set on its goals. If the words about human rights and women’s empowerment that justified the war for 20 years had any meaning at all, there is one thing that could easily be done to ease the suffering of Afghans under Taliban rule, without risking more harm in the process: giving a home to Afghan refugees.

Last week, Congress failed to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a measure that would have given the tens of thousands of Afghans who escaped to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul a path to permanent legal residency. The measure had been supported by everyone from former senior U.S. military officials, who issued a letter calling protection of the refugees a “moral imperative,” to human rights organizations. The Afghan Adjustment Act, however, was left out of the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of the year, reportedly due to opposition from 89-year-old Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

These Afghans arrived in the U.S. on flights hastily arranged by the U.S. military as the Taliban marched on Kabul last summer. They remain in the U.S. on a precarious legal status known as temporary humanitarian parole that places them at risk of deportation.

Many of these refugee families include those who fought with the U.S. during the war or supported the U.S.-backed government — making them and their families prime targets of the new Taliban regime.

The failure to pass the law also leaves Afghans who worked with the U.S. military but remain trapped in Afghanistan today out in the cold, denying them eligibility for Special Immigrant Visas that could provide a legal hope of immigrating to the U.S. if they escape the country.

Many former Afghan allies of the U.S. continue to be hunted down by the Taliban as the group consolidates a regime that is prioritizing taking revenge for the past 20 years above rebuilding their shattered country.

If they are not provided a path to permanent status and are thus left to their fate, the ex-U.S. military officials warned in their letter, in future conflicts, “potential allies will remember what happens now with our Afghan allies.”

The Taliban’s recent decision to kick women out of school has been met with outrage by the international community and international Muslim religious figures , but most of all from ordinary Afghans. Many Afghans, including many men, have staged inspiring walkout protests from their classes to denounce the measure.

Having done more than anyone to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the U.S. presence in their country, these are the people who deserve whatever support can be provided to them and their families. In the absence of that support, their future is likely to be grim.

Donald Trump’s recent anti-immigrant presidency and the general tenor of Republican politics means that any effort to resettle refugees — those here today and those who may arrive in the future — is inevitably going to be a political fight. That said, a Democratic president will be in office for at least the next two years and will have an opportunity to use their political capital to right an obvious wrong that was done to Afghans by the U.S. — particularly if, as seems likely, the Taliban continue down a course of provocative repression against Afghan women and minorities.

Amid the terrible events now unfolding, it is worth remembering that, for a few months last year, when they appeared to send the world’s most powerful military into a scrambling retreat, the Afghan Taliban enjoyed a strange kind of recognition — maybe even popularity — around the world. Everyone loves a winner, and the triumphant march of the Taliban into Kabul was greeted warmly by everyone from former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who said that the group was “breaking the shackles of slavery,” to the American alt-right who projected their own idealized vision of hypermasculinity onto the new social-media-savvy militants.

Even mainstream conservative politicians like Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., claimed at the time that the Taliban was “more legitimate than the last government in Afghanistan or the current government here” — a statement made with apparent relish at the humiliation of a sitting Democratic president who presided over the final defeat.

Today, that bizarre honeymoon is over. It’s time to deal with the harsh reality of Afghanistan under Taliban rule and its consequences for Afghans.

The U.S. has done a great deal of harm to the Afghan people, using their country as a proxy battlefield, subjecting them to sanctions, and killing them in huge numbers during the war. The least it can do today is give safe haven to those, particularly women, fleeing the collapse of the shoddy government in Kabul that the U.S. government had propped up , and who are now suffering a harrowing attack on their basic freedoms by a Taliban regime that grows more draconian with each passing day.

The post What the United States Owes Afghan Women appeared first on The Intercept .

It’s remarkable how little some industries’ strategies change over the decades. How little they need to change, given how effective they are. That holds especially true for the fossil fuel industry, which has revealed itself via documents submitted to Congress to be hopelessly, permanently trapped in the 1990s.

As part of its investigation into climate disinformation , the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed documents in November 2021 from four of the world’s largest oil companies; their U.S. trade association, the American Petroleum Institute; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The chamber did not comply with the subpoena, but the rest submitted a variety of responsive documents, the most salient of which have been published by the Oversight Committee in two batches . The more than 1,500 pages include internal communications about media relations, advertising, and marketing campaigns from 2015 to 2021.

Taken together, they reveal that the industry’s approach on climate really hasn’t changed since scientists first started warning that the burning of fossil fuels was becoming a problem: push “solutions” that keep fossil fuels profitable, downplay climate impacts, overstate the industry’s commitments, and bully the media if they don’t stay on message. It’s the same five-step plan, deployed to the same end: preserving power, subsidies, and social license.

Step One: Set the Terms

The fossil fuel industry is exceedingly good at seizing the narrative before anyone else even thinks about it. It was doing polling, market research , and focus groups before most industries knew what those things were. So when it sets up the idea of gas as a “bridge fuel” to cleaner sources of energy, it knows how to make it so fundamental that it can come back to it again and again. The “low-carbon” (another winner!) strategies laid out in these documents could have been from the 1990s or even the 1980s when oil companies described “ natural gas ” (another one!) as an “ alternative fuel .”

They’re once again pushing the idea that methane gas — a fossil fuel that emits a greenhouse gas some 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide — is somehow an alternative to fossil fuels. The plan for extending the life of the industry as long as possible appears to lean on “low-carbon solutions”: gas, a reduction in operational emissions and what they call “carbon intensity” — the CO2 emissions associated with each barrel of oil — and carbon capture and storage, or CSS, which they’re banking on as a way to sell business-as-usual as “low carbon.”

And despite the industry’s frequent assertions that it’s not subsidized by the federal government, various internal emails from the oil majors tell a different story.

In 2021 emails in which Shell is mulling whether to join a major carbon capture project with Exxon Mobil, one executive states that the project moving forward is entirely dependent on dramatically expanding 45Q — the tax credit for carbon capture — from what the government has proposed ($35 to $50 per ton of carbon sequestered) to $100 per ton of carbon sequestered. That price tag — $100 per ton of carbon — is one the industry fought against for decades when the shoe was on the other foot, and folks were talking about taxing carbon as opposed to storing it. Now, being able to store carbon and get the right price for it is critical to the industry, as is the government’s support of that paradigm. “If the government funding and regulations don’t happen, Exxon’s management team will not move forward,” the Shell executive writes.

The industry wants to see so much government funding for carbon capture locked in that there’s no choice but to continue down that path.

Throughout the documents, there’s a real sense of urgency around securing a future for gas and scaling up carbon capture (because it magically turns oil into “low-carbon” fuel). Exxon, for example, seems positively jubilant that “IPCC models predict need for CCS as part of future energy mix to reach 2C!”

The documents also make clear that the industry is intent on maximizing a small window of opportunity for CCS — getting the government to invest heavily in this “solution” before everyone figures out it’s not a solution so much as an enabler of the status quo. In a 2017 document outlining the potential for CCS on the Gulf Coast, Shell notes that “the window for CCS to remain relevant with governments and society is closing quickly and action needs to occur within the next decade.”

The industry wants to see so much government funding for CCS locked in that there’s no choice but to continue down that path. And the purpose is clear: enabling the continued burning of fossil fuels. “The value of CCS to Shell is the ability to decarbonize our products,” the document explains. CCS will also help Shell to “retain a larger market share for our products in the energy transition, in addition to reputational value.”

Step Two: Move the Goalposts

That 2 C thing is another persistent trend. While the rest of the world has only just begun to acknowledge that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is unlikely to happen, it turns out that the oil companies — all of which supposedly support the Paris climate agreement and its 1.5 C limit — were always shooting for 2. BP was talking about 2 C warming as the goal as early as 2017.

Chevron had officially skipped past 1.5 C as of 2020. The company also seems pretty cynical about the viability of the industry reaching net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, a commitment the United Nations sees as fundamental to keeping warming to 1.5 degrees or less. Fossil fuel companies, the aviation industry, utilities, and the U.S. government have signed onto this commitment.

Chevron has hedged a bit more, committing to net zero by 2050 only in its operations, which leaves out the emissions associated with the use of its oil and gas. And now we know why. A 2020 presentation to the company’s board of directors titled “Chevron’s Approach to Net Zero” points out that a 2050 goal will be much more expensive than, say, 2070. In a 2019 document put out by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative — a project that brings the global oil majors together to collaborate on climate solutions — Chevron suggests changing “net zero emissions” as a goal to “reduced emissions.”

Step Three: Social License

For all the eye-rolling and snark about their critics and how they just don’t understand the industry, oil executives remain deeply concerned about maintaining a social license to operate: tacit approval from the public to keep on keeping on, an acknowledgement that the benefits they deliver still outweigh the costs, even as the risks are increasing. Shell, the company that seems to be putting the most effort into actually transitioning — although still not what experts say is needed; none of the oil majors invest more than 5 percent of their capital in anything that’s not oil or gas — seems particularly concerned about this.

In a note to Shell’s executive committee, the company’s U.S. president, Gretchen Watkins, and VP of U.S. energy strategy, Jason Klein, explain that in the absence of federal policy on climate, states and cities have filled the void with policies that are often more aggressive than federal policy would be. “While this patchwork of policies and markets creates challenges for a coordinated U.S. energy transition,” they write, “it also creates opportunities for an integrated, respected and credible energy company like Shell to take on an increased leadership role to shape effective policy at multiple levels in the transition, while maintaining a strong societal license to operate.”

In a 2019 energy transition plan, Shell directors also lay out a U.S. reputation strategy , noting that while Shell is a leader among its U.S. peers, “our industry continues to have low credibility and trust with specific stakeholder groups (energy engaged audiences), amidst rising societal expectations on climate action.”

To address this problem, according to the directors, Shell must “secure partnerships with credible external influencers and commercial entities that support and strengthen societal license to operate and grow at country and asset level.”

Step Four: Campus Control

Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon Mobil today) was one of the first companies to invest heavily in university research. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, when U.S. companies were just starting to increase campus donations because they came with some appealing tax write-offs, Standard Oil Chair Frank Abrams saw the real value: shaping the minds of tomorrow’s leaders. He encouraged his fellow executives to focus on the “indirect value” of university donations, for example, reducing the number of people who think every problem can be solved by the government. Since Abrams’s day, corporate investing in universities has exploded. Fossil fuel companies fund not only science and technology research, but also public policy, economics, and law centers at campuses across the country, the more prestigious the better.

When students organized through Fossil-Free Research last year to demand that their universities stop taking these research funds, campus spokespeople lined up to defend the practice, saying that it didn’t influence the research. The first peer-reviewed study on the topic , which came out in Nature, told a different story. Researchers Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, and Anna Papp at Columbia University found that the funding sources of various university energy centers played a major role in those centers’ positions on fossil gas.

Fossil-funded centers “are more favorable in their reports towards natural gas than towards renewable energy,” the study found. Meanwhile, centers less dependent on fossil funding “show a reversed pattern with more neutral sentiment towards gas, and favor solar and hydro power.”

Documents BP submitted to Congress back this up. In a 2019 email exchange about the company’s partnership with Princeton, Bob Stout, BP’s former vice president and head of regulatory advocacy and policy, wrote: “These relationships (along with those we have with Harvard, Tufts and Columbia) are key parts of our long-term relationship-building and outreach to policy makers and influencers in the U.S. and globally. … We do not always agree on matters of policy, but we do get valuable intel on the evolving perspectives and priorities of the environmental community and are able to tell the story of what we are doing and why in a more personal and compelling way.”

Step Five: Creative Confrontation

Back in the 1970s, legendary Mobil VP Herb Schmertz pioneered the art of bullying journalists or, as he called it, “ creative confrontation .” If journalists weren’t covering Mobil’s point of view, or he thought they were being too critical of Mobil, he called them up and let them know. And he let their bosses and their bosses’ bosses know too. Sometimes he threatened to pull advertising. Once, he cut off the Wall Street Journal from any information whatsoever: press releases, comments from executives, even quarterly earnings reports.

It’s similar to what the American Petroleum Institute and Shell tried to do to Hiroko Tabuchi, the New York Times’s climate accountability reporter. Publicists for the two entities followed Schmertz’s playbook in response to a tweet (now deleted) in which Tabuchi referenced the shared history of the fossil fuel industry and white supremacy, and again in response to a story about the American Chemistry Council, which counts several oil majors as members, lobbying against regulations that would limit the ability to sell single-use disposable plastic. Accusing Tabuchi of bias, inaccuracy, and misunderstanding the industry, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute reached out to her bosses, asking them to “do the right thing.”

If it were only a group of smug flaks congratulating themselves for sending “nastygrams” and saying things like “Let’s work on taking away their birthdays next,” it would be easy to dismiss as clownish theatrics. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that it works. Not just in the ’70s and ’80s, but also today.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who co-chairs the Oversight Committee and helped spearhead the investigation, says he thinks it worked to pull Tabuchi off certain types of climate stories. The Times did not respond to a request for comment on this assertion, and Tabuchi declined to comment. But after covering the committee’s hearings on climate disinformation for a year, Khanna said, “Hiroko’s not covering it anymore. She’s been taken off. So, you know, unfortunately Big Oil succeeds sometimes when they engage in this kind of bullying.”

The House Oversight Committee seems to be susceptible to pressure of some kind itself. Khanna previously told The Intercept that before Republicans take control of the House, the committee would release all the subpoenaed documents to the Senate to continue the investigation or at least finish reviewing them for pertinent information — a task the committee has not had the time or staff resources to complete. But the decision to release the documents has since been reversed, according to Khanna’s press secretary. The committee also decided not to send letters to the Department of Justice or the White House requesting that the investigation continue, Khanna staffers said.

Asked what might stop the fossil fuel industry from continuing to run this same strategy on repeat for the foreseeable future, Khanna said “accountability.” If the House Oversight Committee takes no action by January 2 to either release the documents to the Senate or recommend that the Biden administration pick up the inquiry, that goal will die alongside the unfinished investigation.

The post Subpoenaed Fossil Fuel Documents Reveal an Industry Stuck in the Past appeared first on The Intercept .

Here at The Intercept, our internal motto is “More Bad News for You, the Bad News Consumer.” We also sometimes refer to ourselves as “Your Daily Death March of Sorrow.”

That’s why, as you celebrate the holidays with your family, snuggling your loved ones close and putting out the cookies for Santa Claus, it’s on brand for us to remind you that capitalism is killing us all.

So let’s get going. (If you’re not ready to dive in immediately, you can limber up by reading our previous yuletide bummer, “ Merry Christmas! Remember the Children Who Live in Fear of Our Killer Drones .”)

Ho Ho Ho for Capitalism

Instead of the good news of Jesus, let’s start with the good news of capitalism. Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, not known as capitalism’s biggest fans, acknowledged it in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848:

The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

The writer William Greider takes the same perspective in “Secrets of the Temple,” his gigantic tome about the Federal Reserve. Capitalism, he contends, was “a Faustian bargain. People surrendered control over their own lives and accepted a smaller role for themselves as cogs in the vast and complicated economic machinery, in exchange for mere material goods.” Nevertheless, you have to admit that “the devil certainly kept his half of the bargain.”

Take a look around where you’re sitting now and consider the huge quantities of crap just in your eyesight that you’ve accumulated, all thanks to capitalism. One of us (Jon) can see his iPad, which helps him understand the amount of grease his thumbs apparently exude. There’s his smoke detector, which is beeping in a vain plea to get him to replace its battery. And there’s the huge bag of chipotle powder that he bought in a burst of misguided enthusiasm in 2018, still four-fifths full. The other one of us (Elise) is sitting in fast-fashion polyurethane pants, made in Vietnam, that are already ruined and will eventually end up in the Great Pacific Trash Vortex. She’ll be spending her Christmas alone, traveling Italy, contributing to the tourist economy of a deeply neofascist government which hates journalists by buying large amounts of burrata, Aperol spritz, and whatever readily available substances she finds from the global market to numb the pain of living in such a society.

OK, those are the good parts of capitalism. Now let’s move on to the ones that risk the obliteration of Homo sapiens.

Covid-19 and Its Sequels

Our response to Covid-19 should make us dubious about our chances if we go up against something even deadlier. Only 5.5 billion people have gotten even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, leaving billions more to host a constantly proliferating assortment of mutations. Already vaccines and therapeutics are less effective against new variants.

With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse. This scenario is increasingly likely considering climate change and globalization. Another accurate point in “The Communist Manifesto” is that “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse.

Sure, we could have decided to vaccinate everyone. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated this would cost $50 billion, or 0.05 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product. But we didn’t do it for very good reason: This would have hurt the “intellectual” “property” — and hence the profits — of Moderna and Pfizer.

So the downside here is our unending Covid nightmare. The upside is we now have 10 vaccine billionaires ! We’d like to believe they’re spending this Christmas Eve together, downing negroni sbagliatos somewhere on the Amalfi coast, toasting the freedom that is capitalism. (If you violate their vaccine patents, the government will crush you like a bug.)

Death Is Profitable

Capitalism also means the proliferation of weapons with no purpose — not that they ever, really, have a purpose. One key reason the U.S. advocated the expansion of NATO was that it would open up new markets for American arms dealers. A little-known but significant figure named Bruce Jackson cofounded an NGO called the Committee to Expand NATO in 1996 — all the while serving as vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin. He was also co-chair of the finance committee for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Jackson was still at Lockheed in 2002, the year he became chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

This had led to many merry Christmases, indeed. With dividends reinvested, Lockheed’s stock is up over 1,600 percent since the liberation of Iraq commenced on March 19, 2003, It’s up 25 percent just since Russia’s attack on Ukraine last February. Jackson currently owns a chateau and vineyard in the Bordeaux region of France.

Moreover, it’s a fervently held belief at the top of American society that they are doing good by doing well. George W. Bush once told Argentina’s president that “all of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars.” Way to say the quiet part out loud, again and again .

And it’s not just conventional arms that are profitable. Building nuclear weapons systems is also quite lucrative . With these kinds of financial incentives in place, it’s incredible that human civilization still exists.

But of course, we could go at any moment. The U.S. military is likely to secure $858 billion for its budget next year. At $150,000 apiece, this is enough to fire 57 million Hellfire missiles at Santa’s sleigh as he speeds in terror across the winter sky.

Global Warming, Plus Bigger Problems

This is the one problem of capitalism where we’d really like to beg the Gods — Christian/Jewish/Muslim, Hindu, Norse, Mesopotamian, miscellaneous — for a Christmas miracle. The Earth, as we know it, is fucked . We’re currently at 417 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up from 280 ppm pre-capitalism. And that’s still not enough to satiate the shrieking, sucking mouth of the market.

Russia sees the melting Arctic and has decided this is a wonderful opportunity to extract the region’s hitherto inaccessible oil. Burning this will melt the Arctic further, making more oil available, in a virtuous circle of suicide. While making false promises in the fight against the climate crisis, America took the lead in crude oil production last year. Right behind us are the world’s other oil producers, from the despots of Saudi Arabia to the bland democracy of Canada. It’s like a “Murder on the Orient Express”-style mystery, where humanity is killed by every passenger.

It’s getting pretty close to night-night time for ocean life , most of the insects on Earth, half of the birds , too. Oh, and a third of the trees . When this will take out people is hard to predict, just as you never know which piece you have to remove to cause everything to collapse in a game of Jenga.

If you find this distressing, consider the more distressing fact that even if we develop massive amounts of green energy and stop global warming, capitalism will still probably destroy a livable biosphere .

The Terrifying Politics of Wanting, Wanting, Wanting

You probably don’t fantasize about how to decorate your mansion on Mars. This is because owning a Mars mansion has never seemed like a possibility in your life. But what if you were constantly bombarded with ads showing Matthew McConaughey in his luxurious nine-bedroom Mars home, living it up with all the Powerball winners who also live on the fourth planet from the sun?

While we Americans have spent our entire lives marinating in advertising tempting us with luscious products to consume, the truth is that humans do not have strong inherent desires for material goods. Let’s imagine humans in a world devoid of induced craving: We would probably work enough to have food to eat, live off the land, and spend the rest of the time futzing around (aka leisure).

Capitalism has truly perfected the creation of wants.

How, then, could capitalists get people to work hard at extremely unpleasant jobs? For a long time, the answer was simple: slavery. But then, in the 19th century, slavery was driven to extinction in the Western hemisphere. During this time, there was surprisingly frank planning among capitalists about this aspect of human nature. Given this problem, how could they motivate people to do the same awful work enriching others without the threat of force? They decided one important tactic should be to “create wants.”

As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1833:

They [people formerly enslaved by the British Empire] must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came, among all classes and conditions of men, to be necessaries. … This was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject.

A United Fruit staffer made the same point in the 1920s about Central Americans:

The mozos or working people have laboured only when forced to and that was not often, for the land would give them what little they needed. … The desire for goods, it may be remarked, is something that has to be cultivated. … Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States … All of this is having its effect in awakening desires.

By now capitalism has truly perfected the creation of wants. They’re as much a part of those of us in rich countries as our arms or legs. We will resist anyone telling us we should give up these wants, as much as we’d resist someone trying to cut off our limbs.

This is surely a part of the recent rightward lurch in politics in the U.S. and elsewhere. Progressive politics necessarily makes the case that there’s more to life than the money in your individual bank account. It’s inevitable that many people will experience this as psychological violence and respond in kind, or with real violence.

Stay tuned to find out how this dynamic will interact with all the capitalistic crises heading our way.

Now Dasher, Now Prancer, Now Insoluble Dilemma

Traditionally this is the part of the article where we describe the uplifting solution to the aforementioned problem. Here’s what we’ve got for you:

…

…

[faint sound of coughing]

…

The literary critic Fredric Jameson has famously said, “I t is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Capitalism isn’t just outside of us, it’s inside too. It’s grown in us like an aggressive tumor, twining around our organs until it’s hard to know where it stops and we begin. It’s killing us, but cutting it out might kill us too.

So, uh, Merry Christmas. No need to thank us for this atrocious conclusion. Here at The Intercept, we don’t need thanks for getting up every day and doing our job. But that Jameson quote reminds us that a big bottle of Jameson whiskey can be ordered online for $56.92 (if you’ve got the money).

The post Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism. appeared first on The Intercept .