A report out Monday sheds light on how big U.S. banks' underwriting of bonds and equities for polluting corporations constitutes a "hidden pipeline" for fossil fuel financing.

It's no secret that financial institutions play a leading role in driving the climate emergency. Since 2016, the year the Paris agreement took effect, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided more than $5.5 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel industry, flouting their pledges to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as the window to avert the worst consequences of the intensifying climate crisis rapidly closes.

But banks' underwriting activities receive far less attention than their direct lending practices, even though both are instrumental in enabling fossil fuel expansion and must be reformed to rein in the industry most responsible for imperiling the planet's livability.

That's the key takeaway from a new analysis of Wall Street's participation in capital markets published by the Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign.

"Banks play a vital role in capital markets," the report explains. "Acting as underwriters, they are the gatekeepers of fossil fuel companies: they advise companies issuing bonds and equities, hold the vital information on the issuer, and help market the instruments to investors disclosing only the necessary risk."

Since 2016, the six largest U.S. banks—JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs—have provided more than $433 billion in lending and underwriting to 30 of the companies doing the most to increase fossil fuel extraction and combustion worldwide, the report notes. More than three-fifths (61%) of that financing comes from underwriting, with those half-dozen banking giants issuing $266 billion in new bonds and equities for the world's top 30 fossil fuel expansion firms.

Climate justice advocates have long criticized the concept of "net-zero" because, they argue, allowing planet-heating pollution to be "canceled out" via dubious carbon offset programs or risky carbon removal technologies is an accounting trick that doesn't guarantee the significant emissions cuts needed to avoid the climate emergency's most destructive impacts.

But even if one accepts the premise of net-zero, big U.S. banks' policies on the topic are misleading.

"Despite the importance of capital markets activities in helping fossil fuel companies secure new funding, banks focus primarily on lending, while downplaying the importance of underwriting, when setting their emissions reduction targets," the report says. "Banks are performing sleight of hand, distracting investors and regulators with net-zero transition plans that are half-finished, while continuing to funnel money to fossil fuel companies via capital markets with limited scrutiny."

In a statement, Adele Shraiman, senior campaign strategist with the Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said that "without banks, fossil fuel companies cannot raise money through capital markets."

"By downplaying their role in capital markets and refusing to include facilitated emissions in their climate targets, big U.S. banks are intentionally sidestepping a major source of real-world emissions and making it impossible to meet their own net-zero commitments," said Shraiman.

According to the report: "Only three of the six major Wall Street banks include bond and equity underwriting in their sectoral emissions reduction targets—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. The remaining three banks have so far chosen to only apply emissions reduction targets to lending activities."

However, "even among those who have set emissions reduction targets that include underwriting, insufficient disclosures and lack of standardization make it difficult to understand how robust banks' facilitated emissions accounting methodologies are, and what progress they are making toward achieving their emissions reduction targets," the report adds.

In a blog post, Shraiman wrote that "banks don't want us to know all of the ways they help fossil fuel companies raise funds to continue building the pipelines, oil rigs, fracking wells, and coal mines that are destroying the climate and hurting communities."

"But investors, regulators, and customers around the world see through their duplicity," she continued. "We are demanding complete, robust, and transparent net-zero plans that cover all types of financing activities and will lead to real-world emissions reductions in line with our global climate goals."

Monday's report comes at a key moment in the fight to stop Wall Street from continuing to fund climate chaos.

As the Sierra Club observed, "Banks currently point to a lack of industry standards on underwriting to justify why they do not disclose or set targets for facilitated emissions." However, the industry-led Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials is expected to release its updated methodology on accounting for and reducing facilitated emissions in the near future.

"Underwriting is a huge missing piece of net-zero transition plans, allowing big U.S. banks to continue to help fossil fuel companies raise billions of dollars with limited scrutiny," Shraiman said. "By only focusing on emissions reduction targets for their lending activities, banks are conveniently excluding half of their fossil fuel financing from their climate commitments."

"It's time," she added, "for the major Wall Street banks to adopt a robust and consistent methodology for accounting facilitated emissions, and take full responsibility for the climate impacts of their underwriting decisions."

The International Energy Agency has stated unequivocally that there is "no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net-zero pathway."

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment in March, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C is possible, "but it will take a quantum leap in climate action," including a ban on approving and financing new coal, oil, and gas projects as well as a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.

"There are growing risks of simultaneous major crop losses in different regions in the world," said one scientist. "This is not what we're seeing right now, but in the coming decades that's one of the things I'm really scared of."

Climate scientists warned Friday that worsening atmospheric and marine heatwaves threaten food security around the world.

Large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere have been pummeled in recent weeks by serial heatwaves exacerbated by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Last month was the hottest June on record, and July—which saw the hottest day and week in modern history—is expected to surpass all previous monthly records. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that heatwaves will increase in frequency, duration, and intensity with each additional degree of temperature rise.

While extreme heat has long been recognized as a lethal health hazard that preys upon preexisting patterns of inequality and vulnerability, experts are trying to alert the public to another deadly dimension of the climate emergency: Soaring temperatures jeopardize the stability of the world's agricultural land and its oceans, putting potentially billions of people at heightened risk of hunger and conflict.

"Our food system is global," John Marsham, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Leeds in England, toldThe Guardian. "There are growing risks of simultaneous major crop losses in different regions in the world, which will really affect food availability and prices. This is not what we're seeing right now, but in the coming decades that's one of the things I'm really scared of."

"As a human being, if you're wealthy enough, you can get inside and put the air conditioning on," said Marsham. "But natural ecosystems and farmed ecosystems can't do that."

Extreme heat and droughts are already having a discernibly negative impact on food production. In 2022, the heatwaves that killed more than 61,000 people in Europe also reduced the continent's agricultural output, hastening a decadeslong trend. Also last year, a historic drought in China resulted in crop losses, while a heatwave in India undermined wheat exports. In addition, famine is looming in the Horn of Africa due in large part to an ongoing climate-intensified drought.

These catastrophes—combined with Russia's war on Ukraine, which has damaged one of the world's key breadbaskets—have contributed to a yearslong spike in global hunger.

As a result of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution, heatwaves are projected to become increasingly common, longer-lasting, and more severe in the coming years—providing even less time for recovery between events and leading to greater cumulative harm.

"People are generally isolated from the effects of the weather on which we all depend. We go to shops to buy food—we don't grow it ourselves," Marsham continued. "But if you talk to farmers anywhere in the world, they are extremely aware of what the weather is doing, and the impacts on their farming."

Meanwhile, as carbon dioxide and methane emissions continue to propel global warming, oceans absorb an estimated 90% of the excess heat trapped in the planet's atmosphere. This is accelerating ocean warming at a ferocious pace, especially in 2023, frightening experts in the field.

Not only do higher ocean temperatures put millions of people at risk of accelerated sea-level rise and turbocharged extreme weather, but they also disrupt the marine ecosystems that supply one-fifth of the world's protein. Just two years ago, a heatwave in British Columbia killed more than 1 billion intertidal animals.

Daniela Schmidt, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Bristol in England, told The Guardian on Friday: "We often think about impacts on ecosystems on land because it's easy to see—the plants wilt and animals get too hot. But people generally don't think about marine heatwaves. That's what really worries me—that unseen, silent dying."

As the newspaper noted:

Some of the most vulnerable ecosystems are the ones used to having a stable temperature year-round, such as species in the tropical oceans. Warming of 2°C is expected to essentially wipe out tropical coral reefs. They have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem globally, and support more than 500 million people worldwide, most of whom are in poor countries.

"I've got young kids," Marsham said. "Whenever you watch Finding Nemo or read a book about coral reefs, you can't help but feel that, on some level, you're selling them a lie. Unless we act fast, those systems are going to disappear. Some people might not care about coral reefs, but there's no part of the globe that is immune to the impacts of climate change."

Schmidt added: "Not everything has to have a financial value. You need plants for every breath you take. It's the oxygen you breathe—we tend to forget that."

Friday's warnings echo recent peer-reviewed research about the specter of concurrent crop losses in the world's top food-growing zones due to climate breakdown. According to a paper published in Nature Communications earlier this month, most existing climate models tend to underestimate the mortal danger posed by "simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions."

It is far from the only study published recently to sound the alarm about the relationship between heatwaves and hunger. Research released in June assessed "a worst-case scenario in which extreme weather hits two breadbasket regions in the same year," as NBC News reported at the time.

Another paper from last August noted that "extreme heat not only damages agricultural yields and leads to supply drops and food insecurity in the long-term but also affects people's short-term ability to generate income from labor and purchase food."

Scientists said Thursday that newly arrived El Niño conditions are projected to make 2024 even hotter than this year.

"Without global action to address climate change, we will see unprecedented levels of hunger," the U.K. arm of the United Nations World Food Program tweeted Friday, noting The Guardian's report.

Despite mounting evidence of the climate emergency's disastrous consequences, fossil fuel giants—which raked in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits last year after knowingly suppressing warnings about the climate crisis for decades—plan to expand drilling operations in the coming years. Policymakers have shown little willingness to stop them, as COP27 ended in November with no commitment to phase out coal, oil, and gas.

Referring to the study published earlier this month in Nature Communications, journalist George Monbiot argued last week that "the struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy."

"It always has been," he added, "but the stakes are now higher than ever."

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Amazon for its "yearslong effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions."

The agency's lawsuit accuses Amazon of violating the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act and seeks a permanent injunction, civil penalties, and monetary relief. It was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, which is located in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered.

"Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime," the FTC said in a statement. "Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions."

In addition, the e-commerce giant "knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership," the agency continued. "The primary purpose of its Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but to stop them. Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would've made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon's bottom line."

The number of Prime members worldwide surged from 100 million in 2017 to more than 200 million in 2020, according to annual shareholder letters written by the company's megabillionaire founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos.

A membership currently costs $139 a year or $14.99 a month in the United States and provides access to Amazon's video streaming service as well as faster shipping on products purchased through the online retailer. According to the FTC's legal complaint, Prime subscription fees alone account for $25 billion of the corporation's annual revenue, and subscribers spend more money on the site, on average, than non-Prime shoppers.

"Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money," said FTC Chair Lina Khan. "These manipulative tactics harm consumers and law-abiding businesses alike."

The complaint remains heavily redacted, though the FTC told the court it does not see a compelling reason to maintain secrecy moving forward. In a statement, regulators summarized their allegations of how Amazon intentionally uses so-called "dark patterns" to deceive consumers into joining Prime and to deter them from quitting:

During Amazon's online checkout process, consumers were faced with numerous opportunities to subscribe to Amazon Prime at $14.99/month. In many cases, the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult for consumers to locate. In some cases, the button presented to consumers to complete their transaction did not clearly state that in choosing that option they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription.

The FTC charges that Amazon put in place a cancellation process designed to deter consumers from successfully unsubscribing from Prime. Previous reporting about the process in the media has noted that Amazon used the term "Iliad" to describe the process, which the reporting cites as an allusion to Homer's epic poem set over 24 books and nearly 16,000 lines about the decadelong Trojan War.

Consumers who attempted to cancel Prime were faced with multiple steps to actually accomplish the task of canceling, according to the complaint. Consumers had to first locate the cancellation flow, which Amazon made difficult. Once they located the cancellation flow, they were redirected to multiple pages that presented several offers to continue the subscription at a discounted price, to simply turn off the auto-renew feature, or to decide not to cancel. Only after clicking through these pages could consumers finally cancel the service.

"Amazon was aware of consumers being nonconsensually enrolled and the complex and confusing process to cancel Prime," the agency added. "The company's executives failed to take any meaningful steps to address the issues until they were aware of the FTC investigation."

On social media, Khan said that "Amazon's counsel stonewalled the FTC's investigation through misdirection and delay. The extent of Amazon's obstruction became clear after an insider leaked documents to Business Insider."

"This lawsuit builds on our ongoing work to protect Americans from firms who trick people into subscriptions and then trap them by making it hard to cancel," said Khan. "Our proposed 'click to cancel' rule would require that firms make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one."

The FTC is collecting public comments on the proposal through Thursday. Feedback can be submitted here.

Progressives welcomed the agency's lawsuit against Amazon.

"We applaud the FTC for suing Amazon to stop it from trapping people in Amazon Prime and sabotaging consumers' efforts to cancel it," Demand Progress communications director Maria Langholz said in a statement. "We urge the commission to take further steps to rein in the proliferation of abusive tactics utilized by Amazon and other Big Tech companies, particularly 'dark patterns' online that manipulate customers into subscription traps."

"Amazon should not be allowed to continue tricking or scamming people in order to maintain its grip on consumers and control the market," said Langholz. "We call on the FTC, as well as other federal agencies and Congress, to investigate and bring accountability to the full range of abuses of power by Amazon and other Big Tech giants."

In addition to allegedly taking advantage of consumers, Amazon is also notorious for abusing its warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

The FTC's complaint comes one day after U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched a probe into what he called Amazon's "dangerous and illegal" working conditions.

Right-wing lawmakers' preferred method for dealing with the United States' looming retirement crisis—telling older workers to keep toiling until they've saved enough to stop—is "not a viable solution," says a report published Wednesday.

"Millions of people are entering their retirement years with insufficient savings to cover basic expenses and medical bills," the new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes. "In response, some policymakers have proposed that older Americans could delay retirement to increase their savings."

But this ostensible fix "overlooks the large group of older Americans who work in difficult conditions—ranging from the physically demanding to the outright dangerous," EPI points out. "If older Americans endure difficult conditions that often force earlier exits from the workplace, proposals to delay retirement make little sense."

"Americans should... be fighting for more leisure."

Rather than forcing aging employees to postpone retirement, lawmakers should implement full-employment macroeconomic policies to ensure that workers have "access to jobs that pay fair wages and provide solid benefits during their prime working years," says the report, calling the latter approach "a more effective way to close the retirement savings gap."

To make sure "older workers can afford to retire when they need to," EPI also urges policymakers to bolster "support for workers with caregiving responsibilities, expand Social Security coverage and benefits," and improve "conditions for all workers through collective bargaining, stronger labor standards, and more effective health and safety protections."

Those who portray working longer as a legitimate solution for people who cannot afford to retire assume that "as workers age and gain more work experience, they are able to transition into jobs that are less physically demanding, less onerous, and less hazardous—making it possible to extend their working lives," the report notes. But as it goes on to show, "many workers in fact see little or no improvement in working conditions as they age."

Based on her analysis of data from the American Working Conditions Survey conducted by the RAND Corporation in 2015 and 2018, EPI researcher and report author Monique Morrissey found that:

• 50.3% of older workers have physically demanding jobs;
• 54.2% of older workers are exposed to unhealthy or hazardous conditions;
• 46.1% of older workers have high-pressure jobs; and
• 53.7% of older workers have difficult schedules.

Making matters worse, these tough jobs that roughly half of the nation's workers between the ages of 50 and 70 put up with don't pay enough to make retirement a possibility.

"Quantifying the large share of older workers with difficult jobs serves as a reality check for policymakers and researchers who view later retirement as an easy way for workers to close retirement income gaps," the report states.

"It misguided and unrealistic to expect older workers with onerous or hazardous jobs to keep working into advanced old age," the report continues. "A better way to close the retirement income gap is to support workers' ability to be fully employed during their prime working years and ensure that all jobs come with benefits that lead to a secure retirement."

On Wednesday afternoon, Morrissey was joined by U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Siavash Radpour, associate research director of the ReLab at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, for a discussion moderated by Schwartz Center director and economic professor Teresa Ghilarducci.

No Way Out: Older workers are increasingly trapped in crummy jobs and still unable to ever retire www.youtube.com

Beyer brought up legislation he introduced last year that would establish an Older Workers Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor aimed at improving aging employees' working conditions through targeted research.

Radpour, meanwhile, stressed that the nation's lack of retirement security results in lower job quality for all employees, which in turn decreases workers' ability to fight for a better future.

Workers need more leverage to negotiate for higher pay and better conditions, Radpour emphasized. But due to inadequate retirement funding, many aging employees have no choice but to keep toiling away at low-paying, onerous jobs. The inability of many workers to retire comfortably currently empowers employers, but reversing the present situation would have an inverse effect.

Notably, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which seeks to push U.S. labor law in a more worker-friendly direction and increase workers' collective bargaining power, has languished in Congress for the past several years.

In February, progressive U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) unveiled the Social Security Expansion Act, which would increase benefits by at least $200 per month and prolong the program's solvency for decades by finally requiring wealthy Americans to pay their fair share. The bill, which is overwhelmingly popular among voters of all persuasions, stands in stark contrast to Republican lawmakers' proposals to slash Social Security benefits and postpone eligibility.

Morrissey, for her part, observed that the lack of affordable healthcare—a widespread problem thanks to the for-profit model that plagues the U.S.—also hurts the nation's entire workforce, especially older employees who may be passed over for jobs by employers looking to avoid higher insurance costs.

On Wednesday, Sanders, joined by U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) in the House, introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2023, which would guarantee universal healthcare without copays, deductibles, or high out-of-pocket costs. Its sponsors argue the bill would not only save lives but also empower the U.S. working class as a whole.

When asked during the roundtable about French workers' fight to protect their world-class pension system, Morrissey thanked them and said that "Americans should also be fighting for more leisure."

"These findings fly in the face of Biden's preferred framing of international politics as a 'battle between democracies and autocracies,'" says the author of a new report.

President Joe Biden claims that the United States is leading "democracies" in a fight against "autocracies" to establish a peaceful international order, but his administration approved weapons sales to nearly three-fifths of the world's authoritarian countries in 2022.

That's according to a new analysis conducted by Security Policy Reform Institute co-founder Stephen Semler and published Thursday in The Intercept.

The U.S. has been the world's largest arms dealer since the end of the Cold War. Data released in March showed that the U.S. accounted for 40% of global weapons exports from 2018 to 2022.

As Semler explained:

In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They're the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government's approval.

Country-level data for last year's DCS authorizations was released in late April through the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. FMS figures for fiscal year 2022 were released earlier this year through the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. According to their data, a total of 142 countries and territories bought weapons from the U.S. in 2022, for a total of $85 billion in bilateral sales.

To determine how many of those governments were democratic and how many were autocratic, Semler relied on data from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which uses a classification system called Regimes of the World.

"Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57%, of them," Semler wrote. "The 'at least' qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department's report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of 'various' in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed."

"The Regimes of the World system is just one of the several indices that measure democracy worldwide, but running the same analysis with other popular indices produces similar results," Semler observed. "For example, Freedom House listed 195 countries and for each one labeled whether it qualified as an electoral democracy in its annual Freedom in the World report. Of the 85 countries Freedom House did not designate as an electoral democracy, the United States sold weapons to 49, or 58%, of them in fiscal year 2022."

Despite the White House's lofty rhetoric, it is actively bolstering the military power of a majority of the world's authoritarian countries, from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to dozens of others, including some overlooked by researchers at the University of Gothenburg.

For instance, the Varieties of Democracy project characterizes Israel as a "liberal democracy" even though human rights groups around the world have condemned it as a decidedly anti-democratic apartheid state. Washington, meanwhile, showers Israel with $3.8 billion in military support each year, resources that the government uses to violently dispossess and frequently kill Palestinians at will.

As Semler put it Saturday in his "Speaking Security" newsletter, "These findings fly in the face of Biden's preferred framing of international politics as a "battle between democracies and autocracies."

The president's narrative "lends itself more to a self-righteous foreign policy than an honest or productive one," Semler argued. "Dividing the world between democratic and autocratic countries—in the spirit of 'with us or against us'—makes conflict more likely and has had a chilling effect on calls for diplomacy and détente. It's also harder to cooperate with the international community while insisting you're locked in an existential fight with roughly half of them."

One advocate called the ruling a "victory for sustainable, humane farming against giant corporations that prioritize cost-cutting and profit margins over the environment, food safety, and animal welfare."

In what sustainable agriculture, public health, and animal rights champions celebrated as a major victory, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a California law prohibiting the in-state sale of pork, eggs, and veal derived from creatures "confined in a cruel manner."

The law, known as Proposition 12, was challenged by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The organizations claimed that "because of California's huge market share... pork producers elsewhere would be required to abide by" its rules, and they argued unsuccessfully that this would violate the U.S. Constitution's "restraints on the authority of states to regulate industry beyond their borders," The Washington Post reported.

Writing the majority opinion for the 5-4 decision in National Pork Producers v. Ross, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected what he described as the plaintiffs' request for the court to "fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of states to regulate goods sold within their borders."

"While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list," Gorsuch wrote on behalf of himself and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett.

"A major victory for animal welfare and a more regenerative, healthful, and humane future of our food."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson "would have kept the case involving California's humane pork production laws alive but sent it back to a lower court for more work," the Post noted.

Food & Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen called the ruling "a rightful victory for sustainable, humane farming against giant corporations that prioritize cost-cutting and profit margins over the environment, food safety, and animal welfare."

"It is also a critical victory for the rights of states that seek to do better on those issues than some of their neighbors, or the country at large," she added.

George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, which filed a brief in support of California last year, also welcomed Thursday's decision as "a major victory for animal welfare and a more regenerative, healthful, and humane future of our food."

"The Supreme Court rejected industrial agriculture's far-reaching efforts to curtail states' rights to enact laws governing farming to prevent animal cruelty and to protect the public health. Instead, the court properly recognized the value and benefits of such laws," said Kimbrell. "Intensive confinement of pigs poses profound danger to food safety and the public health such as foodborne illness and disease and pathogen transmission, and important laws like Prop 12 mitigate those risks."

As the advocacy group Animal Outlook explained in a statement:

Proposition 12 sets minimum space requirements for egg-laying hens, mother pigs, and baby cows raised for veal in California, such that these animals cannot be confined in the industry-standard cages, which are barely bigger than their bodies. Prop 12 also requires that any eggs, pork, or veal sold in the state comply with these space requirements, regardless of where those products were produced.

After Prop 12 was approved by nearly two-thirds of California voters in 2018, the meat industry proceeded to challenge the law in four separate lawsuits.

"Every court to consider each of the cases, at both the trial and appellate level, has ruled against the industry," Animal Outlook pointed out. "Today's Supreme Court ruling is the industry's latest in that string of losses."

"No matter how cruel or painful a practice is, the animal agriculture industry has fought against laws to prohibit it—in this case, all the way to the Supreme Court," said Cheryl Leahy, the group's executive director. "When a powerful industry will stop at nothing to make complicity in cruelty mandatory, it's a clear sign that the cruelty is part and parcel of that industry, and the only way to refuse to be a part of it is to not eat animals altogether."

Florida Republicans on Thursday approved a draconian bill that, among other things, would enable the state to take trans children away from their parents if they are receiving gender-affirming healthcare, even though such care is consistent with the guidance of every major medical organization in the United States.

In addition to trying to authorize kidnapping, Senate Bill 254 also seeks to limit the ability of trans adults to start or continue receiving gender-affirming care and threatens to put doctors who violate the new restrictions behind bars.

The legislation—condemned by civil rights advocates as the Criminalizing Gender-Affirming Care Bill—passed the state Senate in a 26-13 vote and the House by a margin of 83-28. It now heads to the desk of far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis. The presumptive candidate for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination has previously voiced support for the measure and is expected to sign it into law, upon which it would take immediate effect.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation."

Seven Florida parents who are currently challenging state boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine rules prohibiting gender-affirming care for their children and other trans youth plan to ask a federal court to block provisions in S.B. 254 that would codify the existing boards' bans and create additional barriers for families with trans children.

They are represented by Southern Legal Counsel, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The groups issued a joint statement denouncing Florida for "doubl[ing] down on denying science, intruding on family privacy and parental decision-making, and trampling on the rights and well-being of transgender adolescents."

"The bill passed by the Legislature today interferes even further with families, deliberately provoking conflict by inviting challenges to established custody orders. This exacerbates the state of emergency for parents who are already being forced to watch their kids suffer rather than get them the effective healthcare they need and that will allow them to thrive," says the statement. "We will take swift action to ask the federal court to block the ban on access to essential healthcare in S.B. 254, as well as the boards of medicine bans, to stop further harm to transgender youth and their families while the plaintiffs' case continues."

Similar bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth have been blocked by federal judges in Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Under S.B. 254, the state could take custody of a child who "has been subjected to or is threatened with being subjected to" gender-affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers.

As The New Republic reported:

Florida courts could modify custody agreements from a different state if the minor is likely to receive gender-affirming care in that second state. The text refers to gender-affirming care as "sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures" and qualifies this care as a form of "physical harm."

Medical facilities would have to give the state Department of Health a signed attestation that they neither provide gender-affirming care to any patients under the age of 18 nor refer people to providers that do. Their medical license renewal is contingent upon sending in this attestation.

[...]

Minors who have already begun transitioning will be allowed to continue to do so, but they are no longer allowed to receive care via telehealth, including for prescriptions. Their doctors have to tell them about the "risks" of gender-affirming care, and patients will have to sign an informed consent form, which the ACLU has pointed out often contains misinformation. Doctors who violate any of these new rules could be charged with a felony.

Equality Florida, the state's largest LGBTQ+ rights group, noted that "while much of the bill proponents' rhetoric focused on transgender youth, multiple bill provisions impact consenting transgender adults."

As the organization explained, "The bill bans government entities from offering them gender-affirming healthcare insurance, restricts their ability to access telehealth for care in the way nearly all other healthcare can be delivered, and denies their ability to receive care from highly trained nurses that provide a large portion of the gender-affirming care in the state." Anyone who violates these provisions could face misdemeanor charges.

As repressive as S.B. 254 is, opponents successfully narrowed the bill from the "much more extreme" House companion filed by state Rep. Randy Fine (R-33), the group pointed out. "Provisions previously approved by the House majority would have banned private health insurance providers from covering care for transgender adults and barred transgender Floridians from updating the gender on their birth certificates. The bill as passed also allows certain transgender youth already receiving gender-affirming treatments to continue doing so, whereas the House provisions would have terminated all care by the end of the year."

Equality Florida public policy director Jon Harris Maurer said that S.B. 254 "painfully shows Gov. DeSantis' 'Florida freedom' farce."

"It's an assault on medical freedom and the freedom to parent," Maurer lamented. "After weaponizing the state's Medicaid agency and Board of Medicine against the transgender community, the governor's surrogates have now rammed through legislation to override parental decision-making, jail Florida doctors following best practices, and force adults to jump through government hoops to access their daily medication. This crusade is about political aspirations, but it has real-world consequences for Florida families."

Maurer's critical assessment was echoed by Cathryn Oakley, HRC's state legislative director and senior counsel.

"S.B. 254 is extraordinarily dangerous and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation," said Oakley. "This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare simply because those people are transgender; it prevents parents from being able to access best-practice, potentially lifesaving healthcare supported by the entire American medical establishment on behalf of their children; it prevents healthcare providers from delivering best-practice medical care; and it even threatens to overturn out-of-state custody determinations."

"This bill doesn't even pretend to be responsible public policy—instead, it attacks the ability of people of all ages to access medically necessary healthcare."

Oakley warned that "if Gov. DeSantis signs this bill, he will be disrespecting the United States Constitution as well as the rule of law, not to mention transgender Floridians, their families, and their medical care providers."

"Many families are making plans to leave the state to protect their children and get them the care they need to stay alive," she added. "The Human Rights Campaign is committed to doing everything in our power to fight back against these discriminatory bills and give LGBTQ+ children the futures they deserve."

S.B. 254, The New Republic observed, is "one of the cruelest" anti-trans bills yet passed in the country. "State Republicans have openly admitted they 'hate' LGBTQ people and are comfortable with 'erasing' the community from existence."

Equality Florida urged people to call DeSantis' office at 850-717-9337 to assert that "hate has no place" in the state.

As the organization noted, "S.B. 254's passage comes amidst an unprecedented barrage of anti-LGBTQ, anti-freedom bills in the final week of the 2023 legislative session," all of which DeSantis is expected to sign into law. It elaborated:

On Tuesday, the Legislature passed S.B. 1580, known as the License to Discriminate in Healthcare bill, which creates a broad license for healthcare providers and insurance companies to refuse services based on a "religious, moral, or ethical belief." Despite fears from LGBTQ advocates that this could open the door for discrimination in healthcare services, the bill passed on a party-line vote.

On Wednesday, three bills on the Slate of Hate were sent to the governor. H.B. 1069, the Don't Say LGBTQ Expansion Bill... extends last year's censorship of classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity now up to eighth grade and overrides a parent's right to ensure that school personnel address their transgender child with the correct title and pronouns. The bill also dramatically accelerates book-banning efforts in Florida, allowing any person in a county to automatically remove a book from school shelves pending a lengthy review on the grounds of certain objections. The Legislature then passed H.B. 1521, the Anti-Transgender Bathroom Ban, that imposes new restrictions mandating that bathroom use be separated by sex assigned at birth in schools, universities, public stadiums, regional convention centers, airports, and all government buildings. And finally, H.B. 999, which included language banning public funding for LGBTQ-inclusive diversity and inclusion programs in our state colleges and universities.

Florida's hateful offensive is part of a broader nationwide attack carried out by Republican lawmakers and officials. The GOP claims to be "protecting children," but in reality, it is criminalizing LGBTQ+ people of all ages, putting them at increased risk of violence and self-harm.

HRC said it is opposing more than 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in statehouses across the country so far in 2023. According to the group, "More than 220 of those bills would specifically restrict the rights of transgender people, the highest number of bills targeting transgender people in a single year to date."

HRC is currently tracking:

• More than 125 bills that would prevent transgender youth from being able to access age-appropriate, medically necessary, best-practice healthcare; this year, 13 have already become law in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Montana;
• More than 30 bathroom ban bills; and
• More than 100 curriculum censorship bills and 45 anti-drag performance bills.

"In a coordinated push led by national anti-LGBTQ+ groups, which deployed vintage discriminatory tropes, politicians in statehouses across the country introduced 315 discriminatory anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2022," HRC noted. "Despite this, fewer than 10% of these efforts [29] succeeded. The majority of the discriminatory bills—149 bills—targeted the transgender and nonbinary community, with the majority targeting children... By the end of the 2022 legislative session, a record 17 bills attacking transgender and nonbinary children passed into law."

"Support for LGBTQ+ rights is on the rise in Florida and nationwide," the group pointed out, citing recent survey data showing that 80% of Florida residents back anti-discrimination protections and 66% oppose refusal of service on religious groups. According to the same poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, roughly 80% of U.S. adults favor laws that would protect LGBTQ+ people against discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations, up from 71% in 2015.

Research published Monday details how the working class is paying the price, in more ways than one, for the "jet-owning oligarchy" to hop around the globe in their personal luxury planes.

It's well-established that private jet travel by the super-rich is worsening the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Adding insult to injury, this conspicuously carbon-intensive consumption is being subsidized by ordinary taxpayers, as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Patriotic Millionaires make clear in their new analysis.

Entitled High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up Our Planet, the report catalogs alarming facts about the private jet industry and makes recommendations about how to rein in this potent symbol and manifestation of escalating inequality.

To begin with, "private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger," the report notes. "Unsurprisingly, approximately 1% of people are believed to be responsible for about half of all aviation carbon emissions."

Amid a surge in wealth inequality since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, "private jet use has increased by about a fifth, and private jet emissions have increased more than 23%," the report points out. "The private jet sector set industry records with regards to transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022."

While a coronavirus-era boom is evident, the industry has been growing steadily alongside wealth inequality since the turn of the century. As the report states: "The size of the global fleet has increased 133% in the last two decades from 9,895 in 2000 to 23,133 in mid-2022. This bonanza was accompanied by an unprecedented number of business jet operations, 5.3 million in 2022."

According to the report, "The median net worth of a full and fractional private jet owner is $190 million and $140 million respectively." A minuscule 0.0008% of the global population belongs to the jet-owning class, which consists mostly of financial and real estate tycoons.

Last year, billionaire Elon Musk, "the most active high flyer in the United States," bought a new jet and took 171 private flights, or about one every other day, the report notes.

In so doing, he single-handedly "contributed to the consumption of 837,934 liters of jet fuel," states the report, and he "was responsible for 2,112 tons of carbon emissions"—132 times more than the entire carbon footprint of an average person in the United States.

In a statement, report co-author Kalena Thomhave, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, called private jets "a microcosm of our system of wealth inequality even beyond their image of extravagance."

"Private flyers pay just 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the Federal Aviation Administration, yet nearly 17% of flights handled by the FAA are private," said Thomhave. "Meanwhile, private jets contribute disproportionately to carbon emissions while often representing significant tax savings for their wealthy owners."

As the report observes: "Thousands of municipal airports in the U.S. are funded by the public, but many primarily serve private and corporate jets. These airports may not offer scheduled passenger service, but they still offer airport runways subsidized by taxes."

Such regressive taxation is the product of industry lobbying, the report explains:

As wealth inequality soars, so too does the value of the private jet market, which grew from $32.3 billion in 2021 to $34.1 billion in 2022, the report notes. With wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and little to no downward redistribution on the horizon, the private jet industry is projected to expand further in the coming years.

Report co-author Omar Ocampo, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said that the private jet industry's expected growth this decade "provides us with a great opportunity to levy a luxury transfer tax on private jet sales." He added that "the revenue raised from this tax can be invested towards developing a green transportation system."

According to the report, "A 10% and 5% transfer fee on pre-owned and new private aircraft would have raised $2.4 billion in 2021 and $2.6 billion in 2022."

In addition to imposing a transfer tax on all private jet sales, IPS and Patriotic Millionaires recommend the following steps be taken:

• Levy a private jet fuel tax;
• Institute a "short hop" surcharge;
• Resist efforts to increase passenger facility charges until private jet owners pay their fair share;
• Create a sustainable transportation equity trust fund;
• Increase TSA security oversight of private jets; and
• Pass the Aircraft Ownership Transparency Act.

According to the report, Musk would have paid nearly $4 million in additional taxes last year if a transfer fee and jet fuel tax had been in place.

"Private jet travel by billionaires and the ultra-wealthy imposes a tremendous cost on the rest of us," said Chuck Collins, another co-author of the report.

"Not only do ordinary travelers and taxpayers subsidize the air space for private jets, but the high flyers also contribute considerably more pollution than other passengers," said Collins. "If we can't ban private jets, we should at least tax them and require them to pay to offset their environmental damage and subsidies."

Editor's note Sept. 24, 2023: The New York Times on Sunday reported it "found no evidence" to back up the claim that Ron DeSantis played a role in force-feeding Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to the Times, "An examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims."

"Instead, nearly all of those interviewed dismissed the story as highly improbable."

During an event at Israel's Museum of Tolerance, DeSantis was asked about allegations that he was present on at least one occasion when a former Guantánamo detainee was force-fed by guards to quash a hunger strike. The United Nations has deemed force-feeding a form of torture.

Before the reporter could finish his question, DeSantis, who is believed to be preparing a bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, snapped, "No, no... all that's BS, totally BS."

After the journalist completed his question, DeSantis angrily responded: "Who said that? How would they know me? Okay, think about that. Do you honestly believe that's credible?... This is 2006, I'm a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would have remembered me from Adam? Of course not!"

In response, Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen who was incarcerated without charges at Guantánamo for 14 years, tweeted, "I will never forget his face, he was laughing and smiling watching me being tortured on the force-feeding chair."

While chastising the reporter, DeSantis, who is trying to crack down on press freedom in Florida, accused Adayfi of "trying to get into the news because they know people like you will consume it because it fits your preordained narrative that you're trying to spin."

"Focus on the facts and stop worrying about the narrative," DeSantis said.

Adayfi, who was finally released from Guantánamo in 2016 without ever being charged with a crime, first told Mike Prysner's Eyes Left podcast in November that guards brutally force-fed him and other prisoners cans of Ensure in 2006 to break a hunger strike and that DeSantis was there for at least one torture session.

"Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming," said Adayfi. "We were tied to the feeding chair. And that guy was watching that. He was laughing."

Unable to handle the amount of Ensure being crammed into his body through his nostrils, "I threw up on his face," Adayfi said. "Literally. On his face."

"When I was screaming, I look at him [Ron DeSantis] and he was actually smiling. Like someone who enjoyed it," Adayfi added. "It shocked us all."

In March, Adayfi toldThe Independent that he doesn't "remember exactly when DeSantis came because we had no watch, no calendar, nothing."

According to Adayfi, DeSantis feigned concern for the detainees' welfare before watching them endure torture: "He came to talk to us along [with] others—medical staff and interpreters. And we explained to him why we were on hunger strike. And he told us, 'I'm here to ensure that you get treated humanely and properly.' We were talking about our problems with the brothers, the torture, the abuses, the no healthcare."

An investigation by The Independent confirmed that DeSantis' role as an attorney at Guantánamo was to field complaints of illegal treatment. A second former prisoner has claimed the Florida governor witnessed forced feeding. Following his stint at Guantánamo, DeSantis advocated for its continued operation and against the release of detainees.

In an Al Jazeera opinion piece published earlier this month, Adayfi explained how he came to recognize DeSantis:

In 2021, just as my memoir—Don't Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantánamo—was about to be published, I was on Twitter and saw a photo of a handsome man in a white navy uniform. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I do not remember what the post was about—probably something about him clashing with President Joe Biden over Covid policies. But I remembered his face. It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantánamo, in 2006—one of the camp's darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages.

After finding a Miami Heraldarticle in which DeSantis bragged about his service at Guantánamo and confirming that my memory is correct, I sent his photo to a group chat of former detainees. Several replied that they too remembered his face from Guantánamo. Some said seeing his face again triggered painful memories of the trauma they suffered during their imprisonment. I understood. Even after spending the previous few years working on my memoir, which meant reliving everything I had been through at Guantánamo, seeing his face again triggered a lot of pain in me too.

As Adayfi pointed out, "DeSantis still calls Guantánamo a 'terrorist detention facility,' even though back in 2006, the year he was there, an analysis of official documents found that the great majority of the Guantánamo prisoners were innocent men, imprisoned only because of mistaken identity or because they had been sold to the U.S. for bounty money."

"Regardless of these facts, DeSantis advocated keeping Guantánamo open in his 2016 testimony before the Subcommittee on National Security, in which he claimed that all detainees were 'hardened and unrepentant terrorist[s],' whose release 'risks harming America's national security,'" Adayfi wrote.

"At the time of DeSantis' speech, 80 prisoners remained at Guantánamo. I was one of them," he continued. "Of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since it opened in 2002, only 12 have been charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted. I wonder who DeSantis was talking about."

Adayfi, who was just 18 years old when he was sent to Guantánamo in 2002, is one of several people released in recent years. But as human rights defenders made clear on January 11, the 21st anniversary of Guantánamo's opening, they won't stop fighting until the notorious military prison is shut down for good.

The World Health Organization's draft drinking water guidelines for two "forever chemicals" reveal a "striking and inappropriate disregard of the best available science" and must be "extensively revised" to adequately protect public health.

So wrote former U.S. government scientists Betsy Southerland and Linda Birnbaum in an article published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The stakes are extremely high, according to Southerland, the former director of science and technology at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Water, and Birnbaum, the former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

That's because once finalized, the WHO's regulatory framework for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water is likely to be adopted by many countries. The United Nations agency's draft guidelines are much weaker than rules imposed in Denmark and advanced in Canada, and they could facilitate legal challenges to the U.S. EPA's proposed standards, which are much more stringent albeit still insufficient according to many public health advocates.

PFAS are a class of hazardous synthetic compounds widely called "forever chemicals" because they persist in people's bodies and the environment for years on end. Scientists have linked long-term PFAS exposure to numerous adverse health outcomes, including cancer, reproductive and developmental harms, immune system damage, and other negative effects. The substances—used in dozens of everyday household products, including ostensibly "green" and "nontoxic" children's items, as well as firefighting foam—have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans and in 100% of breast milk samples.

The WHO's draft guidance recommends drinking water limits of 100 parts per trillion (ppt) individually for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)—two of the most well-studied PFAS—and 500 ppt total for the 29 PFAS compounds that can be reliably measured, though this is a fraught topic. The WHO's proposed limits on PFOS and PFOA are 25 times higher than those put forth last month by the U.S. EPA, and such a significant gap could hinder federal and state efforts to better regulate the nation's drinking water.

What accounts for the glaring discrepancy between the two agencies? According to the new article, the WHO has proposed relatively weak PFAS limits because its working group contends that "there is significant uncertainty and lack of consensus on whether PFOA and PFOS can be linked to adverse health effects."

Southerland and Birnbaum condemned the WHO's conclusion as "a striking and inappropriate disregard for the best available science." As the authors noted, numerous studies "link exposure to PFOA, PFOS, and other PFAS with multiple health effects, including immune effects, increased cholesterol, liver, and thyroid problems, reproductive and developmental harm, and multiple types of cancer."

In addition to failing to "take into account the overwhelming global scientific evidence of serious health effects in epidemiological studies," the WHO's guidelines "misrepresent the effectiveness of affordable, readily available treatment technology," Southerland and Birnbaum argued. "At the same time that the European Chemicals Agency is considering restrictions on the manufacture and use of all PFAS on the basis of the scientific evidence, it is stunning that the WHO maintains no health-based guidance values can be developed. To support the work of public health agencies worldwide providing people with safe drinking water, the WHO guidance levels need to be extensively revised."

The new article comes almost six months after more than 100 scientists sent a letter calling on the WHO to completely overhaul or withdraw its draft guidance and to disclose authorship and potential conflicts of interest.

In response to that letter and other demands for transparency, the WHO published a list of contributors in January. However, it remains unclear if the list is comprehensive.

Moreover, the WHO has not yet disclosed the feedback it received during the public comment period, nor has the agency announced when it plans to finalize its proposed rules.

"It is critically important for the safety of drinking water worldwide," wrote Southerland and Birnbaum, "that WHO recommendations are based on the best available science on the health effects of PFAS and the effectiveness of drinking water treatment technology."

"Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause."

So says a report on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) published Tuesday by Public Citizen. Titled Sorry in Advance! Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative AI Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms, the analysis by researchers Rick Claypool and Cheyenne Hunt aims to "reframe the conversation around generative AI to ensure that the public and policymakers have a say in how these new technologies might upend our lives."

Following the November release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, generative AI tools have been receiving "a huge amount of buzz—especially among the Big Tech corporations best positioned to profit from them," the report notes. "The most enthusiastic boosters say AI will change the world in ways that make everyone rich—and some detractors say it could kill us all. Separate from frightening threats that may materialize as the technology evolves are real-world harms the rush to release and monetize these tools can cause—and, in many cases, is already causing."

Claypool and Hunt categorized these harms into "five broad areas of concern":

• Damaging Democracy: Misinformation-spreading spambots aren't new, but generative AI tools easily allow bad actors to mass produce deceptive political content. Increasingly powerful audio and video production AI tools are making authentic content harder to distinguish [from] synthetic content.
• Consumer Concerns: Businesses trying to maximize profits using generative AI are using these tools to gobble up user data, manipulate consumers, and concentrate advantages among the biggest corporations. Scammers are using them to engage in increasingly sophisticated rip-off schemes.
• Worsening Inequality: Generative AI tools risk perpetuating and exacerbating systemic biases such [as] racism [and] sexism. They give bullies and abusers new ways to harm victims, and, if their widespread deployment proves consequential, risk significantly accelerating economic inequality.
• Undermining Worker Rights: Companies developing AI tools use texts and images created by humans to train their models—and employ low-wage workers abroad to help filter out disturbing and offensive content. Automating media creation, as some AI does, risks deskilling and replacing media production work performed by humans.
• Environmental Concerns: Training and maintaining generative AI tools requires significant expansions in computing power—expansions in computing power that are increasing faster than technology developers' ability to absorb the demands with efficiency advances. Mass deployment is expected to require that some of the biggest tech companies increase their computing power—and, thus, their carbon footprints—by four or five times.

In a statement, Public Citizen warned that "businesses are deploying potentially dangerous AI tools faster than their harms can be understood or mitigated."

"History offers no reason to believe that corporations can self-regulate away the known risks—especially since many of these risks are as much a part of generative AI as they are of corporate greed," the statement continues. "Businesses rushing to introduce these new technologies are gambling with peoples' lives and livelihoods, and arguably with the very foundations of a free society and livable world."

On Thursday, April 27, Public Citizen is hosting a hybrid in-person/Zoom conference in Washington, D.C., during which U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and 10 other panelists will discuss the threats posed by AI and how to rein in the rapidly growing yet virtually unregulated industry. People interested in participating must register by this Friday.

Demands to regulate AI are mounting. Last month, Geoffrey Hinton, considered the "godfather of artificial intelligence," compared the quickly advancing technology's potential impacts to "the Industrial Revolution, or electricity, or maybe the wheel."

Asked by CBS News' Brook Silva-Braga about the possibility of the technology "wiping out humanity," Hinton warned that "it's not inconceivable."

That frightening potential doesn't necessarily lie with existing AI tools such as ChatGPT, but rather with what is called "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), through which computers develop and act on their own ideas.

"Until quite recently, I thought it was going to be like 20 to 50 years before we have general-purpose AI," Hinton told CBS News. "Now I think it may be 20 years or less." Eventually, Hinton admitted that he wouldn't rule out the possibility of AGI arriving within five years—a major departure from a few years ago when he "would have said, 'No way.'"

"We have to think hard about how to control that," said Hinton. Asked by Silva-Braga if that's possible, Hinton said, "We don't know, we haven't been there yet, but we can try."

The AI pioneer is far from alone. In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a company blog post: "The risks could be extraordinary. A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world."

More than 26,000 people have signed a recently published open letter that calls for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems beyond the level of OpenAI's latest chatbot, GPT-4, although Altman is not among them.

"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," says the letter.

While AGI may still be a few years away, Public Citizen's new report makes clear that existing AI tools—including chatbots spewing lies, face-swapping apps generating fake videos, and cloned voices committing fraud—are already causing or threatening to cause serious harm, including intensifying inequality, undermining democracy, displacing workers, preying on consumers, and exacerbating the climate crisis.

These threats "are all very real and highly likely to occur if corporations are permitted to deploy generative AI without enforceable guardrails," Claypool and Hunt wrote. "But there is nothing inevitable about them."

They continued:

Government regulation can block companies from deploying the technologies too quickly (or block them altogether if they prove unsafe). It can set standards to protect people from the risks. It can impose duties on companies using generative AI to avoid identifiable harms, respect the interests of communities and creators, pretest their technologies, take responsibility, and accept liability if things go wrong. It can demand equity be built into the technologies. It can insist that if generative AI does, in fact, increase productivity and displace workers, or that the economic benefits be shared with those harmed and not be concentrated among a small circle of companies, executives, and investors.

Amid "growing regulatory interest" in an AI "accountability mechanism," the Biden administration announced last week that it is seeking public input on measures that could be implemented to ensure that "AI systems are legal, effective, ethical, safe, and otherwise trustworthy."

According toAxios, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is "taking early steps toward legislation to regulate artificial intelligence technology."

In the words of Claypool and Hunt: "We need strong safeguards and government regulation—and we need them in place before corporations disseminate AI technology widely. Until then, we need a pause."

As the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis continues to wreak havoc around the globe, more than 1,300 scientists and researchers on Monday published a letter imploring JPMorgan Chase shareholders to support a resolution that asks the financial giant's board of directors to "adopt a policy for a time-bound phaseout" of bankrolling new coal, oil, and gas projects.

The resolution in question is being proposed at the bank's annual meeting on May 16. If passed, "this resolution would encourage JPMorgan Chase to stop providing financing, including loans, bonds, and underwriting, to companies engaged in fossil fuel expansion," states the letter, which was led by prominent climate experts in partnership with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Stop the Money Pipeline (STMP). "By making this commitment, JPMorgan Chase could signal its intention to advance the clean energy transition and help ensure a safer future for people and our planet."

Arielle Swernoff, U.S. Banks Campaign Manager at STMP, said in a statement that "the science is clear: in order to reduce emissions in line with the Paris agreement, fossil fuel expansion must stop now, yet JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America continue to pour money into new oil, gas, and coal."

Despite pledging to put themselves and their clients on a path to "net-zero" greenhouse gas emissions, the world's 60 largest private banks pumped $4.6 trillion into coal, oil, and gas projects from 2016 to 2021. The four U.S. financial behemoths mentioned by Swernoff are responsible for a quarter of all fossil fuel financing identified since the Paris agreement entered into force. JPMorgan Chase alone provided more than $382 billion to coal, oil, and gas firms during the aforementioned six-year period, including $65.4 billion to the 20 corporations doing the most to ramp up the extraction of planet-heating fossil fuels.

"Over 1,300 scientists have come together to say: enough is enough," said Swernoff. "It's time for big banks to listen to the science and stop funding climate destruction."

Kathy Mulvey, director of the Climate Accountability Campaign at UCS, stressed that "as people around the world face climate-related extreme weather disasters, threats to public health, and systemic economic risk, big banks are choosing to ignore climate science by providing billions of dollars in financing to fossil fuel companies that continue to expand their production of oil and gas."

"JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions are continuing to mislead shareholders about what is needed to reach global climate goals and instead seeking to maintain a dangerous status quo that prioritizes profit over people and the environment," said Mulvey. "To safeguard communities, investors, and the global economy, shareholders should insist that banks incentivize swift and deep cuts in heat-trapping emissions to limit climate change harms and facilitate a just transition to a clean energy economy."

Mulvey was echoed by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and a lead signatory of the letter.

"To avoid the most dangerous levels of planetary warming, we must rapidly end our reliance on fossil fuels and transition to a clean energy economy that meets the needs of all communities," said Johnson. "Meanwhile, financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase are funding continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry, even as all the warning signs for our planet are flashing red."

Last week, data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that annual emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide increased again in 2022, pushing atmospheric concentrations of the three main heat-trapping gases to all-time highs.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency have made clear that increasing fossil fuel supply is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, beyond which the planetary emergency's consequences will grow worse.

Roughly 1.1°C of warming since the late 1800s is already fueling increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather across the globe. In 2022, the U.S. alone experienced 18 separate billion-dollar disasters turbocharged by climate change, including droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes. Together, these events killed 474 people and cost an estimated $172 billion. Such catastrophes disproportionately hurt low-income populations in the U.S., and the deleterious public health and economic impacts of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution are even more severe in poor nations that bear the least responsibility for the crisis.

After the IPCC released its latest assessment report last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is possible, "but it will take a quantum leap in climate action," including a prohibition on approving and financing new coal, oil, and gas projects as well as a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.

Despite ample evidence that burning more coal, oil, and gas will exacerbate the deadly effects of the climate crisis, profit-hungry fossil fuel corporations—supported by trillions of dollars in annual subsidies and industry-friendly public policies—are moving ahead with plans to expand drilling.

A pair of scholars recently introduced the novel legal theory of "climate homicide," which aims to hold fossil fuel corporations criminally liable for deaths caused by the disasters they are knowingly unleashing.

Johnson insisted Monday that like Big Oil, "big banks must be held accountable for their role in causing the climate crisis."

"Shareholders," she added, "should insist that banks accelerate and deepen investment in a just, clean energy future."

According to the letter: "JPMorgan Chase is an internationally known and respected bank. By ending support for fossil fuel expansion, it could help set the global stage for a just transition to a more sustainable and livable future while acting decisively to protect its shareholders and the wider economy from the financial shocks associated with worsening climate change."

"This is no less than what science requires to keep our planet a livable place for current and future generations, including our children and grandchildren," the letter continues. "Please use your vote at this year's shareholder meeting to help protect people and our planet from climate chaos."

As French workers intensify their fight against President Emmanuel Macron's deeply unpopular plan to raise the nation's retirement age from 62 to 64, the stakes couldn't be higher.

A poll released Wednesday shows that reactionary lawmaker Marine Le Pen—leader of the far-right National Rally party, the largest opposition force in Parliament—would beat Macron by a margin of 55% to 45% in a head-to-head rematch. The neoliberal incumbent defeated Le Pen in a runoff election last April, but the openly xenophobic and Islamophobic challenger has gained significant ground since their first matchup in 2017.

The new survey was conducted after Macron advanced his planned retirement age hike through executive order on March 16. The president bypassed the National Assembly once it became clear that his legislative proposal did not have enough support to pass France's lower house.

"We're in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis."

Macron's blatantly anti-democratic move provoked an uproar. The labor movement had already been staging weekly nationwide strikes and peaceful marches since mid-January. But the president's decision to circumvent a vote last month has brought more people to the streets, with heightened participation from high school and university students, some of whom have set up barricades on campus.

Progressive lawmakers and union leaders have urged the working class to keep up the pressure, portraying the left's struggle against Macron's pension attack as a struggle for democracy in France.

"Either trade unions win this, or it will be the far right," Fabien Villedieu, a representative of a railway trade union, told France Info radio on Thursday. "If you sicken people—and that is what's happening—the danger is the arrival of the far right."

Laurent Berger, head of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, told RTL radio that "we're still asking for the reform to be revoked."

"We're in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis," he added.

Macron has so far refused to withdraw his proposed pension overhaul, which includes raising the minimum eligible retirement age and increasing the number of years one must work to qualify for full benefits. France's constitutional council is evaluating the legality of the government's plans and is set to issue a decision next Friday.

According toThe Guardian:

The constitutional council, which has the power to strike out some or even all of the legislation, will assess the pension changes based on a strict interpretation of the law. Constitutional experts say the council is unlikely to strike the legislation down fully.

The government is playing for time, hoping protests and strikes will fizzle out. Unions want to show that the protest movement still has momentum, whatever the council's decision.

Hundreds of thousands of people have continued to rally across France in recent weeks. The government has responded with an increasingly repressive crackdown.

An 11th round of strikes on Thursday caused further disruption to schools, public transit, and energy production. In addition, clashes broke out "between demonstrators and police on the edges of protests in cities including Lyon, Nantes, and Paris," The Guardian reported.

Workers' anger is palpable and mounting.

"In the capital, protesters briefly set fire to the awning of the Left Bank brasserie La Rotonde, well known for hosting Macron's controversial evening of celebrations when he led the first-round vote in the 2017 presidential election," The Guardian noted.

Meanwhile, rat catchers threw dead vermin at city hall.

Also on Thursday, striking workers "forced their way into the building that houses BlackRock's office in Paris Thursday, taking their protest against the government's pension reforms to the world's biggest money manager," CNNreported. "About 100 people, including representatives of several labor unions, were on the ground floor of the building for about 10 minutes, chanting anti-reform slogans. BlackRock's office is located on the third floor."

Jerome Schmitt, a spokesperson for the French labor confederation SUD, told reporters: "The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it."

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with a nearly $9 trillion portfolio, has not been involved in Macron's assault on France's public pension system. But workers targeted the financial institution due to its role in overseeing the private pension funds that they may be forced to rely on.

"The government wants to throw away pensions, it wants to force people to fund their own retirement with private pension funds," one teacher toldReuters. "But what we know is that only the rich will be able to benefit from such a setup."

Le Pen, for her part, "has kept a low profile, hoping to increase her support among low-income workers, many of whom began their careers earlier and will be more greatly affected by the pension changes," The Guardian reported.

Earlier this week, left-wing luminaries alarmed by France's escalating repression of pension defenders as well as environmentalists campaigning against water privatization signed a Progressive International petition.

"We stand with the French people in the face of violent crackdowns on popular protest and the criminalization of dissent by Emmanuel Macron's government," it states. "The extreme violence of the police and the criminalization by the interior minister are clearly aimed at suppressing the movement against the pension cuts. This is an unacceptable attack on the democratic freedoms and human rights of French citizens."

As House Republicans prepare to vote on H.R. 1 this week, environmental advocates warned Monday that the sprawling package of fossil fuel-friendly legislation would worsen the climate emergency and biodiversity destruction while saddling U.S. households with higher energy bills.

H.R. 1, misleadingly titled the "Lower Energy Costs Act" and dubbed the "Polluters Over People Act" by opponents, consists of 15 separate bills and a pair of resolutions. As GOP lawmakers made clear at a legislative hearing held last month and through recent amendments, they're seeking to dismantle a wide range of regulations to boost fossil fuel production and exports despite scientists' unequivocal warnings about the need to prohibit new coal, oil, and gas projects to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis.

Environment America explained Monday that if approved, the sweeping proposal introduced earlier this month by Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) would, among other things:

• Expand oil and gas drilling on public lands and in the ocean;
• Speed the construction of polluting projects, including gas pipelines, while limiting the ability of the public, private landowners, and states to weigh in;
• Expand mining without requiring companies to clean up or compensate communities for toxic mining waste;
• Exempt many sources of pollution, including petroleum refineries, from some Clean Air Act and hazardous waste requirements;
• Undo bipartisan reforms to the Toxic Substances Control Act;
• Lower the rates companies must pay for extraction on public lands and allow non-competitive lease sales; and
• Repeal programs that cut energy waste, including the Methane Emissions Reduction Program and rebates for energy-efficient and electric home appliances.

"This bill leads America in so many wrong directions at once, it's making me dizzy," said Lisa Frank, executive director of Environment America's Washington, D.C. legislative office.

"Instead of protecting the great American outdoors, it gives our public lands away to oil, mining, and gas companies," Frank pointed out. "Instead of cleaning up toxic pollution, it guarantees more drilling and more spilling, on land and in our oceans. And instead of slowing climate change or helping Americans save energy, it increases our dependence on dirty, expensive fuels."

"It's 2023. We have so many better options available to us, from the sun shining down on our roofs to the wind blowing off our shores and across our plains," she added. "Congress should reject this outdated and unnecessary push to sacrifice our lands, waters, and health in the name of energy production."

Included in the package is a resolution "expressing the sense of Congress that the federal government should not impose any restrictions on the export of crude oil or other petroleum products" and a bill that would "repeal all restrictions on the import and export of natural gas."

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.)—chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security—argued last month that such measures are necessary because President Joe Biden and Democrats on the panel "have advocated for reinstating the crude oil export ban" that was originally enacted in 1975 and rescinded by congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama in 2015.

Last year, the Biden administration suggested—but never followed through on—resurrecting the federal ban on crude exports, a move that progressive advocacy groups urged the White House to make to bring down U.S. fuel prices.

While Duncan insisted that "lifting the export ban... has lowered prices," research demonstrates that precisely the opposite has occurred.

Since 2015, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin has surged while domestic consumption has remained steady, triggering a huge build-out of pipelines and other infrastructure that has turned the U.S. into the world's top exporter of fracked gas—intensifying planet-heating emissions, harming vulnerable Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, and exacerbating pain at the pump.

Matt Casale of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) said Monday that H.R. 1 "hands taxpayers the bill for expanded fossil fuel extraction and toxic waste clean-up, takes resources away from global warming solutions, and limits Americans' freedom to save energy in their own homes."

"Given how unpopular its provisions are, it's not surprising H.R. 1's authors also seek to limit public input and legal challenges to wrongheaded energy projects," said Casale, who directs PIRG's environmental campaigns.

"Our over-reliance on fossil fuels continues to hold us all over a barrel," he continued. "This bill looks for short-term fixes by doubling down on the energy sources of the past but contains more hidden costs that we can count, including more energy waste, more pollution, and a more dangerous future for our kids and grandkids. To protect ourselves now and in the future, we need to think beyond short-term solutions and take steps to end our fossil fuel dependence once and for all."

"To protect ourselves now and in the future, we need to think beyond short-term solutions and take steps to end our fossil fuel dependence once and for all."

Much to the chagrin of voters who put him in office, Biden has not been an enemy of the fossil fuel industry. His administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018. Just two weeks ago, the White House ignored the scientists it claims to respect and rubber-stamped ConocoPhillips' massive Willow oil project.

Nevertheless, H.R. 1 even includes a resolution expressing disapproval of Biden's 2021 decision to revoke the presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline―part of the GOP's push to blame what they deride as "rush-to-green energy policies" for skyrocketing gas prices, a narrative that obscures Big Oil's profiteering amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, as the GOP's deficit hawks threaten to withhold their support for raising the nation's debt limit unless Biden agrees to devastating social spending cuts, the Congressional Budget Office found that H.R. 1 would increase the federal deficit by $2.4 billion from 2023 to 2033.

Given that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has described H.R. 1 as "dead-on-arrival," it's unlikely the legislation will reach Biden's desk. If it does, however, Biden vowed Monday to veto it.

The GOP's energy package would replace "pro-consumer policies with a thinly veiled license to pollute," the White House said in a statement. "It would raise costs for American families by repealing household energy rebates and rolling back historic investments to increase access to cost-lowering clean energy technologies. Instead of protecting American consumers, it would pad oil and gas company profits—already at record levels—and undercut our public health and environment."

"H.R. 1," the White House added, "would take us backward."

Minnesota on Thursday scored a significant procedural win in a lawsuit seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for lying to consumers about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and thus worsening the deadly climate crisis.

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with a lower court that the state's climate fraud lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries can proceed in state court, where it was filed.

"This ruling is a major victory for Minnesota's efforts to hold oil giants accountable for their climate lies, and a major defeat for fossil fuel companies' attempt to escape justice," Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.

"Big Oil companies have fought relentlessly to avoid facing the evidence of their climate fraud in state court, but once again judges have unanimously rejected their arguments," said Wiles. "After years of Big Oil's delay tactics, it's time for the people of Minnesota to have their day in court."

Fossil fuel corporations have known for decades that burning coal, oil, and gas generates planet-heating pollution that damages the environment and public health. But to prolong extraction and maximize profits, the industry launched a disinformation campaign to downplay the life-threatening consequences of fossil fuel combustion.

Dozens of state and local governments have filed lawsuits arguing that Big Oil's longstanding effort to sow doubt about the reality of anthropogenic climate change—and to minimize the fossil fuel industry's leading role in causing it—has delayed decarbonization of the economy, resulting in widespread harm.

Since 2017, the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia, along with 35 municipalities in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Washington, and Puerto Rico, have sued fossil fuel giants in an attempt to hold them financially liable for misleading the public about the destructive effects of greenhouse gas emissions from their products.

"Minnesota is not the first state or local government to file this type of climate change litigation," the Eighth Circuit declared Thursday. "Nor is this the first time" that fossil fuel producers have sought to shift jurisdiction over such suits from state courts to federal court, where they believe they will be more likely to avoid punishment.

"But our sister circuits rejected them in each case," the federal appeals court continued. "Today, we join them."

According to the Center for Climate Integrity, "Six federal appeals courts and 13 federal district courts have now unanimously ruled against the fossil fuel industry's arguments to avoid climate accountability trials in state courts."

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice moved for the first time to support communities suing Big Oil by urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject Exxon and Suncor Energy's request to review lower court rulings allowing a lawsuit from three Colorado communities to go forward in state court.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren this weekend called on federal officials to investigate the causes of recent bank failures and urged President Joe Biden to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom she has criticized for intensifying financial deregulation and imposing job- and wage-destroying interest rate hikes.

Asked on Sunday by Chuck Todd of NBC's "Meet the Press" about the possibility of Powell imposing yet another interest rate hike despite ongoing market turmoil, Warren (D-Mass.) said, "I've been in the camp for a long time that these extraordinary rate increases that he has taken on, these extreme rate increases, are something that he should not be doing."

Powell "has a dual mandate," said Warren. "Yes, he is responsible for dealing with inflation, but he is also responsible for employment. And what Chair Powell is trying to do, and he has said fairly explicitly, is that they are trying to, in effect, slow down the economy so that, this is by the Fed's own estimate, two million people will lose their jobs. And I believe that is not what the chair of the Federal Reserve should be doing."

Since the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted international supply chains—rendered fragile by decades of neoliberal globalization—powerful corporations in highly consolidated industries have taken advantage of these and other crises such as the bird flu outbreak to justify profit-boosting price hikes that far outpacethe increased costs of doing business.

"Raising interest rates doesn't do anything to solve" a cost-of-living crisis driven primarily by "price gouging, supply chain kinks, [and] the war in Ukraine," Warren said Sunday. "All it does is put millions of people out of work."

Powell, an ex-investment banker, was first appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018 and reappointed by Biden in 2021. Warren noted that she opposed Powell's nomination in both cases "because of his views on regulation and what he was already doing to weaken regulation."

"But I think he's failing in both jobs, both as the oversight and manager of these big banks, which is his job, and also what he's doing with inflation," said Warren.

Asked by Todd if Biden should fire Powell, Warren said: "My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both."

"Would you advise President Biden to replace him?" Todd inquired.

"I don't think he should be Chairman of the Federal Reserve," the Massachusetts Democrat responded. "I have said it as publicly as I know how to say it. I've said it to everyone."

Meanwhile, in a Saturday letter, Warren asked Richard Delmar, Tyler Smith, and Mark Bialek—respectively the deputy inspector general of the Treasury Department, acting inspector general of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and inspector general of the Fed's board of governors—to "immediately open a thorough, independent investigation of the causes of the bank management and regulatory and supervisory problems that resulted in this month's failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank (Signature) and deliver preliminary results within 30 days."

Until the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the FDIC "intervened to guarantee billions of dollars of deposits," the second- and third-biggest bank failures in U.S. history "threatened economic contagion and severe damage to the banking and financial systems," Warren noted. "The bank's executives, who took unnecessary risks or failed to hedge against entirely foreseeable threats, must be held accountable for these failures."

"But this mismanagement was allowed to occur because of a series of failures by lawmakers and regulators," Warren continued.

In 2018, several Democrats joined Republicans in approving Sen. Mike Crapo's (R-Idaho) Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which weakened the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Crapo's deregulatory measure, signed into law by Trump, loosened federal oversight of banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets—a category that includes SVB and Signature.

Moreover, the Fed under Powell's leadership "initiated key regulatory rollbacks," Warren wrote Saturday, echoing criticisms that she and financial industry watchdogs voiced earlier in the week. "And the banks' supervisors—particularly the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw SVB—missed or ignored key signals about their impending failure."

It is "critical that your investigation be completely independent and free of influence from the bank executives or regulators that were responsible for action that led to these bank failures," Warren stressed. "I am particularly concerned that you avoid any interference from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who bears direct responsibility for—and has a long record of failure involving—regulatory and supervisory matters involving these two banks."

"I have already asked Chair Powell to recuse himself from the Fed's internal investigation of this matter, but he has not yet responded to this request," wrote Warren. The progressive lawmaker said "this silence is troubling" in light of recent reporting that "as officials sought to develop a plan responding to SVB's failure, Chair Powell muzzled regulators from any public mention of the regulatory failures that occurred under his watch."

"Bank regulators and Congress must move quickly to close the gaps that allowed these bank failures to happen, and your investigation will provide us important insight as we take steps to do so," added Warren, who has introduced legislation to repeal a vital provision of the Trump-era bank deregulation law enacted five years ago with bipartisan support.

In appearances on three Sunday morning talk shows, Warren doubled down on her demands for an independent investigation into recent bank failures, stronger financial regulations, and punishing those responsible.

After lawmakers from both parties helped Trump fulfill his campaign promise to weaken federal oversight of the banking system, Powell "took a flamethrower to the regulations, saying, 'I'm doing this because Congress let me do it,'" Warren toldABC's "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl. "And what happened was exactly what we should have predicted, and that is the banks, these big, multi-billion-dollar banks, loaded up on risk; they boosted their short-term profits; they gave themselves huge bonuses and big salaries; and they exploded their banks."

"When you explode a bank, you ought to be banned from banking forever," said Warren, who acknowledged that criminal charges could be coming. "The Department of Justice has opened an investigation. I think that's appropriate for them to do. We'll see where the facts take them. But we've got to take a close look at this."

Not only did former SVB chief executive officer Greg Becker, who lobbied aggressively for the 2018 bank deregulation law, sell millions of dollars of shares as recently as late last month, but until federal regulators took control of the failed bank on March 10, he was on the board of directors at the San Francisco Fed—the institution responsible for overseeing SVB.

On Saturday, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced that he plans to introduce legislation "to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards."

"We've got to say overall that we can't keep repeating this approach of weakening the regulation over the banks, then stepping in when these giant banks get into trouble," Warren said Sunday, arguing for stronger federal oversight to prevent the need for bailouts.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday greenlighted a massive oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska, eliciting outrage from climate advocates who say the administration's accompanying restrictions on oil and gas leasing in the region cannot make up for the destruction set to be unleashed by the approved Willow project.

Progressives sought for months to dissuade Biden from approving ConocoPhillips' $8 billion Willow project, noting that it could enable the production of more than 600 million barrels of crude over 30 years. If all of that oil is burned, roughly 280 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions will be spewed into the atmosphere at a time when United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warns that the planet is reaching a "point of no return."

"There is simply no justification for President Biden's decision to approve a massive new oil drilling scheme that will lead to decades of air and climate pollution," Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement.

"This decision is part of a disturbing and disappointing trend with this White House," Hauter continued. "President Biden refuses to take the necessary actions to rein in climate catastrophe while issuing rhetoric that professes concern for the existential threat that we all face. He cannot have it both ways. Promoting clean energy development is meaningless if we continue to allow corporations to plunder and pollute as they wish."

In what The New York Times described as a bid "to temper criticism over the Willow decision and, as one administration official put it, to form a 'firewall' to limit future" fossil fuel development in the region, Biden announced restrictions on offshore oil lease sales in the Arctic Ocean and across Alaska's North Slope, while the U.S. Department of the Interior "said it would issue new rules to block oil and gas leasing in more than 13 million of the 23 million acres that form the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska," where the Willow project is located.

But given the overwhelming scientific evidence—and warnings from even the relatively conservative International Energy Agency—that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with averting the worst consequences of the planetary emergency, climate justice campaigners rejected the president's attempt to soften the blow of his Willow approval by announcing new protections for areas surrounding the extraction site.

"It's insulting that Biden thinks this will change our minds about the Willow project," Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. "Protecting one area of the Arctic so you can destroy another doesn't make sense, and it won't help the people and wildlife who will be upended by the Willow project. We need to protect the entire Arctic and stop building massive oil and gas developments that will contribute to greenhouse gas emissions for years to come."

"Biden approved Willow knowing full well that it'll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is appalling," said Monsell. "People and wildlife will suffer, and extracting and burning more fossil fuel will warm the climate even faster. Biden has no excuse for letting this project go forward in any form. New Arctic drilling makes no sense, and we'll fight hard to keep ConocoPhillips from breaking ground."

"Even one new oil well in the Arctic is one well too many," Monsell added. "If Biden wants to protect the Arctic, he needs to protect all of it. The president has left us in the cold and missed a major opportunity to live up to his climate commitments. This project is on weak legal ground, and we’re gearing up for action."

Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen echoed that sentiment, telling the Times that the Biden administration's "tinkering at the margins... won't remedy legal failures to address this project's outside harms and we expect to see them in court."

Ahead of former President Donald Trump's Wednesday visit to East Palestine, Ohio—where a Norfolk Southern-owned train transporting carcinogenic chemicals derailed on February 3, prompting a mass evacuation and release of pollutants—progressive critics highlighted the key role his administration played in making the fiery crash and its toxic aftermath more likely.

During his speech, Trump—considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 despite spearheading a deadly coup attempt following his 2020 loss—criticized how President Joe Biden's administration has responded to the environmental and public health disaster unfolding in East Palestine, a poor rural town of about 4,700 people located a few miles west of the Pennsylvania border.

But as critics noted beforehand, the Trump administration's gutting of train safety rules at the behest of railroad industry lobbyists was instrumental in creating the conditions for the derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff, which has provoked fears of groundwater contamination and air pollution.

"He should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations," progressive stalwart Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, tweeted prior to Trump's address.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar point in an opinion piece published earlier this week.

"If residents of East Palestine—a modern news desert of downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester—truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with tiki torches and pitchforks," Bunch wrote, comparing the former president's visit to "the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime."

Bunch noted that "Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effort to protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped, and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine."

"Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to kill the 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technology that was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems," wrote Bunch, who pointed out that this came after Norfolk Southern and other rail carriers donated more than $6 million to Republican candidates in 2016 and spent millions more on lobbying.

"With the investigation into the East Palestine wreck still in its early phases, it's not clear if the modern brakes—originally required for installation by 2021—could have prevented the toxic derailment or whether the specific Obama rule would have applied," Bunch continued. "But experts do believe the new brakes could have mitigated the wreckage—and thus the release of so many hazardous chemicals."

"The rule reversal wasn't the only time that Team Trump sided with Big Rail over the forgotten Americans who live on the wrong side of their tracks," he added. "In 2019, for example, the Trump administration moved to not strengthen but relax regulations on shipping fracked natural gas through communities like East Palestine. The same year, Trump's White House also killed an Obama-era proposal that would have required two crew members in freight-train locomotives."

Ahead of Trump's visit, More Perfect Union also argued on social media that the ex-president's "attempt to portray himself as a friend of the town and as someone who would have stood up to Norfolk Southern... couldn't be further from the truth."

As the progressive media outlet observed, the Trump administration "withdrew multiple rail safety recommendations and moved toward a 'self-regulatory approach' where rail companies could do as they pleased."

"It's no surprise that the Trump years were filled with dangerous deregulation," More Perfect Union asserted, describing his decision to nominate top rail industry executives to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration as "a prime example of the revolving door between business and government."

"The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit," the outlet continued. "This approach, and rail companies' greed, has led to over 1,000 derailments each year. Some are massive catastrophes like East Palestine. But every single one is harmful. And if the industry isn't regulated and forced to change, we'll soon be seeing more disasters."

When Trump "pretends to care about rail workers, or the people of East Palestine, we can't believe him," More Perfect Union added. "His record tells a very different story, the story of his own role in creating this problem in the first place."

Even some conservative critics of Trump have questioned the sincerity of his visit.

"It's clear that it's a political stunt," Ray LaHood, a Republican ex-member of Congress who led the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) during former President Barack Obama's first term, told Politico on Wednesday. "If he wants to visit, he's a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted little time in doing exactly that, calling the GOP's indignation "fake" soon after Trump announced his travel plans.

Bunch acknowledged that "it's beyond hypocritical for Trump to bring his Harold Hill-huckster shtick to East Palestine when residents are still experiencing headaches and breathing foul air from the kind of catastrophe he didn't lift a finger to stop from the Resolute Desk."

"But also it's a bit baffling why Biden or his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who seems to be channeling his inner McKinsey & Co. these days—haven't gone to Ohio," he argued. "Especially when Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine's misery are coming to town empty-handed."

"None of the anti-Biden critics on this issue have offered a solution, because they can't," wrote Bunch. "The only fix for the kind of runaway abuses of modern capitalism that cause these environmental catastrophes is government regulation, aided by empowering worker safety with strong unions—two things that the Trump-led GOP has opposed at every turn."

Even in the wake of the disaster, Republican lawmakers have refused to demand stronger regulations, as HuffPost reported:

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), a vocal Biden critic who represents East Palestine, on Tuesday dismissed immediate calls for stricter rail regulations, saying actions toward accountability will hinge on the findings of a National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] investigation into the derailment.

'That will dictate whether there are laws, regulations that need to be changed, whether there were rules that were violated,' he said during a news conference in East Palestine. 'We don't know any of that yet, and we won't know that until NTSB releases its report.'

Hours before Trump spoke, Buttigieg announced that he plans to travel to East Palestine on Thursday. His visit is expected to coincide with the publication of the NTSB's preliminary report about its ongoing probe into the crash.

On Tuesday, Buttigieg unveiled DOT's recommendations for improving the safety of the nation's rail system, though an inter-union alliance of rail workers immediately criticized the plan as inadequate.

Given the scale of the problems—and in light of the transportation secretary's ongoing refusal to exercise his authority to reinstate previously gutted rules along with his consideration of an industry-backed proposal to further weaken the regulation of train braking systems—union leaders have called for nationalizing the railways and implementing their proposed solutions.

Turner, for her part, emphasized that she has "been outspoken about the two years the Biden administration had [to] fix these problems."

"The Trump administration is at fault, as is the Obama administration," Turner contended, referring to the fact that the latter's regulations were also watered down in response to industry pressure.

"The Ohio GOP is to blame as well," she added, echoing recent reporting on Norfolk Southern's campaign to influence state-level lawmakers and officials. "Failure at every level of government and multiple administrations led to this."

More than 330 animal species around the world are at risk of harm from exposure to toxic "forever chemicals," according to an Environmental Working Group analysis published Wednesday.

EWG's examination of data from dozens of recent peer-reviewed studies shows that more than 120 unique per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been detected in a wide range of wildlife. This includes many types of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals large, small, and aquatic—from pandas and tigers to squirrels and cats to otters and dolphins—as well as plankton, oysters, and scorpions. Some of the affected creatures are already endangered or threatened.

"When species are tested for PFAS, these chemicals are detected," senior EWG scientist David Andrews said in a statement. "This is not an exhaustive catalog of all animal studies, but predominantly those published from the past few years."

"PFAS pollution is not just a problem for humans," he added. "It's a problem for species across the globe."

PFAS are a class of hazardous synthetic compounds used in dozens of everyday household products, including purportedly "green" and "nontoxic" children's items, as well as firefighting foam. They are called forever chemicals because they persist for years in the environment as well as the bodies of humans and animals.

EWG's analysis does not seek to quantify the impacts of PFAS on wildlife, but the detrimental effects of forever chemicals on human health have been well-documented, and some of the research reviewed by the group includes evidence indicating that these substances are impairing animal health.

"It has taken six decades of research on humans to really understand how these chemicals impact our biology in so many different ways," Andrews toldThe Guardian. "There's no reason to believe those same impacts are not also occurring in wildlife."

EWG developed an interactive map detailing for the first time the global extent of "the contamination crisis facing wildlife–and suggesting PFAS likely pose a risk to wildlife everywhere."

"Polluted animals were found on every continent except Antarctica," EWG noted. "The absence of PFAS in species in Antarctica is not due to a lack of contamination but instead because of the absence of recent test results in the research we studied."

Moreover, "the lack of a point on the map does not indicate that the location is free from PFAS contamination," the progressive advocacy group stressed. "Wherever testing is done for these forever chemicals, they are found."

As senior EWG scientist Tasha Stoiber put it, "The map tells a story about these chemicals—that they're global, they're persistent and toxic, and they're being spread to animals and humans through the air, water, and soil."

According to EWG:

One study included in the... analysis suggests that cardinals are being exposed to PFAS from soil, groundwater, and air, with 12 different PFAS compounds found in their blood serum. Another study, on sea turtles in the north Pacific, finds PFAS can affect the development of these animals at every stage, from their eggs to immune systems.

Tests of animals were conducted most often on blood serum and plasma; on organs like the liver, kidney, and muscle, where PFAS are most likely to bioaccumulate; and eggs and other tissue samples.

"There are still countless locations and species across the globe that are likely contaminated but have not yet been tested," said EWG president Ken Cook. "This map is just the beginning."

Dr. Patricia Fair of the Medical University of South Carolina said that "as the map becomes more comprehensive, it will continue to serve as guidance to close knowledge gaps and identify research needs for the harmful persistent chemicals found throughout our environment."

According to Stoiber, EWG's analysis "found that the most common methods we have for getting rid of PFAS may end up leading to further pollution."

"We can expect that contamination to ripple through the food chain, potentially affecting even more species, including humans," she warned.

EWG has long been at the forefront of publicizing the adverse health consequences associated with forever chemicals and demanding federal action to prevent polluting industries from recklessly discharging the substances into the environment. The group said that its new compilation of the widespread ecological risks posed by forever chemicals underscores the need for government intervention.

"We need to accelerate—not delay—efforts to turn off the tap of PFAS pollution from industrial sources," said Scott Farber, the group's senior vice president for government affairs.

“For decades, polluters have with impunity dumped as much PFAS as they wanted into our air, rivers, streams, lakes, and bays," said Faber.

Referring to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recently unveiled plan for regulating wastewater pollution, criticized as inadequate last month by EWG, Farber said that the agency "would let many PFAS polluters off the hook and rely instead on cash-strapped state regulators to turn off the tap. That's unacceptable."

Researchers have identified more than 57,000 sites across the United States contaminated by PFAS. Solid waste landfills, wastewater treatment plants, electroplaters and metal finishers, petroleum refiners, current or former military facilities, and airports are the most common sources of forever chemical pollution. Industrial discharges of PFAS are a key reason why 83% of the nation's waterways contain forever chemicals.

The Clean Water Standards for PFAS Act, introduced in 2022 by Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), would require the EPA to establish PFAS wastewater limitation guidelines and water standards for PFAS in nine distinct industry categories by the end of 2026.

"From the polar bear in the far reaches of the Arctic to the hawksbill turtle in the tropics of the Pacific Ocean, the world's most critically imperiled species have yet another danger to contend with: PFAS chemical pollution," Nathan Donley, director of environmental health science at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday.

"Our choice," he added, "is either to keep enabling extinction with widespread chemical contamination or take action to prevent it."

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her progressive allies are denouncing the Republican effort to oust her from a key House panel as early as Thursday.

House Republicans on Wednesday advanced a resolution to remove Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). In a party-line 218-209 vote, GOP lawmakers approved a rule that sets the parameters for debate on the chamber floor prior to a final vote.

"It remains unclear when House Republicans will bring the Omar resolution to the floor for debate and a final vote," The Hill reported. "Democrats still need to formally submit a separate resolution with their roster for the Foreign Affairs Committee." That is expected to happen by Thursday.

The GOP has sought for years to remove Omar, a principled critic of Israeli apartheid and Washington's role in perpetuating it, from the HFAC. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has unilateral authority to boot any lawmaker from a select committee, but because the HFAC is a standing committee, removing a member from it requires a full House vote.

On Tuesday night, after Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) introduced the measure to remove Omar from the HFAC over supposedly "antisemitic" remarks, the progressive lawmaker tweeted that "there is nothing objectively true in this resolution."

In response to Miller's argument that "Omar clearly cannot be an objective decision-maker on the Foreign Affairs Committee given her biases against Israel and against the Jewish people"—a contention that wrongfully equates criticism of Israel's colonization of Palestine with criticism of Jewish people—the Minnesota Democrat said that "if not being objective is a reason to not serve on committees, no one would be on committees."

In a Wednesday statement, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the House GOP's pending vote against Omar "the latest racist attack by the far-right to silence progressives in Congress who speak up for a human rights-centered foreign policy, including Palestinian human rights."

"Anti-Palestinian politicians and organizations" have long tried "to censor the Congresswoman's consistent calls for accountability for the Israeli government's apartheid and human rights violations against Palestinians," said JVP. "Sadly, these Republican attempts to attack Congresswoman Omar have been buoyed in the past by attacks on Palestinian rights advocates within the Democratic party."

According to Beth Miller, political director of JVP Action: "These attacks are happening because Congresswoman Omar is effective. Because she is a progressive. Because she is a Black Muslim woman. Because her values are universal and include fighting for Palestinians."

"The GOP is riddled with white nationalists and antisemites," said Miller. "It is infuriating and absurd that they are trying to distract from the bigoted hatred in their own party by attacking a progressive woman of color. Congresswoman Omar consistently calls for the Israeli government to be held accountable for its crimes—crimes the GOP would rather cover up."

Meanwhile, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Monday that the CPC "stands fully behind our deputy chair."

"Omar is a valued member of the Democratic caucus and of this Congress," said Jayapal. "Throughout her service in Congress and on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she has brought her essential and unique voice and lived experience to bear: as a refugee, war survivor, and soon, as the first African-born ranking member on the Africa Subcommittee."

"You cannot remove a member of Congress from a committee simply because you do not agree with their views," Jayapal continued. "This is both ludicrous and dangerous. In the last Congress, Republican members were moved from committees with a bipartisan vote for endangering the safety of their colleagues. Speaker McCarthy is attempting to take revenge and draw false comparisons."

Jayapal praised the few Republicans "who have already rejected this idea" and expressed hope that "more will join them to state their opposition so it is not brought to the floor, or vote against it should it be brought to the floor."

As The Washington Post reported Wednesday:

Republican leaders have worked for weeks to ensure that there were enough votes to pass a resolution removing Omar from the committee through their razor-thin majority margin, which stands at three as Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) remains away from Washington recuperating from a traumatic fall. Opposition to the effort emerged last month as four lawmakers signaled that they wouldn't support the measure, citing concerns that it would continue a precedent set by former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

But the inclusion of a provision in the four-page resolution, that Republicans argue provides due process to Omar, seems to have appeased at least one crucial voter, as Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) announced Tuesday that she would now support the measure. Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have publicly suggested that they would vote against it before the resolution's text was released Tuesday, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has said he remained undecided. Republican leadership aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to outline private whip counts, said they have the votes to pass the measure whenever Democrats formally appoint Omar to her committee.

Jayapal affirmed earlier this week that Democrats "will stand strongly with Rep. Omar: an esteemed and invaluable legislator, a respectful and kind colleague, and a courageous progressive leader."

On Sunday, Omar argued that House Republicans are trying to oust her from the HFAC because they disapprove of having a Muslim refugee from Somalia on the panel, as Common Dreams reported.

Omar has been the frequent target of Islamophobic bigotry, including from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which paid Facebook to host attack ads that endangered the lawmaker's life. Due to credible death threats, the Minnesota Democrat is often assigned security by the U.S. Capitol Police.

In her Sunday conversation with CNN's Dana Bash, Omar acknowledged that she apologized for the wording of her February 2019 tweets tying U.S. lawmakers' support for Israel to money from lobbyists—at the time, she specifically called out AIPAC, which has given millions of dollars to members of Congress.

The GOP's campaign to expel her from the HFAC "is politically motivated," Omar said. "In some cases, it's motivated by the fact that many of these members don't believe a Muslim, a refugee, an African should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee."

On Monday, Omar asserted that her work on the HFAC has contributed positively to "advancing human rights, holding government officials accountable for past harms, and advancing a more just and peaceful foreign policy."

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) concurred, tweeting Monday that Omar's work on the panel "matters deeply and Republicans' cowardly efforts to remove and silence her are a disgrace."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) echoed Pressley, writing on social media: "It's shameful that Republicans are trying to remove her [from the HFAC] after smearing her for years. We need her voice, values, and expertise on the committee."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, noted that "Omar is once again facing ugly personal and political attacks with incredible courage and dignity."

"It is outrageous that the House leadership wants to boot her off the Foreign Affairs Committee," Sanders tweeted. "Fair-minded Republicans must join Democrats in preventing that from happening."

This article has been updated to include a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace.

Although President Joe Biden vowed on the campaign trail to phase out federal leasing for fossil fuel extraction, his administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity's analysis of federal data released Wednesday, the Biden White House greenlit 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in 2021 and 2022—a 4.2% increase over former President Donald Trump's administration, which rubber-stamped 6,172 drilling permits in its first two years.

“Two years of runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership by President Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires phasing out fossil fuel extraction, but instead we're still racing in the opposite direction."

Of the drilling authorized so far by the Biden administration, nearly 4,000 permits have been approved for public lands in New Mexico, followed by 1,223 in Wyoming and several hundred each in Utah, Colorado, California, Montana, and North Dakota.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, these "Biden-approved drilling permits will result in more than 800 million tons of estimated equivalent greenhouse gas pollution, or the annual climate pollution from about 217 coal-fired power plants."

Just last week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told the elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos that "fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival."

Reams of scientific evidence show that pollution from the world's existing fossil fuel developments is enough to push temperature rise well beyond 1.5°C above the preindustrial baseline. Averting calamitous levels of global heating necessitates ending investment in new oil and gas projects and phasing out extraction to keep 40% of the fossil fuel reserves at currently operational sites underground.

As a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to ban new oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters and to require federal permitting decisions to weigh the social costs of additional planet-heating pollution. Although Biden issued an executive order suspending new fossil fuel leasing during his first week in office, his administration's actions since then have run roughshod over earlier promises, worsening the deadly climate crisis that the White House claims to be serious about mitigating.

The U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) argued on August 24, 2021 that it was required to resume lease auctions because of a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee who ruled in favor of a group of Big Oil-funded Republican attorneys general that sued Biden over his moratorium. In a memorandum of opposition filed on the same day, however, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that while Doughty's decision prevented the Biden administration from implementing its pause, it did not compel the DOI to hold new lease sales, "let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs' contempt motion."

Just days after Biden called global warming "an existential threat to human existence" and declared Washington's ostensible commitment to decarbonization at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the DOI ignored the DOJ's legal advice and proceeded with Lease Sale 257. The nation's largest-ever offshore auction, which saw more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico offered to the highest-bidding oil and gas giants, was blocked in January 2022 by a federal judge who wrote that the Biden administration violated environmental laws by not adequately accounting for the likely consequences of resulting emissions.

Despite Biden's pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas pollution in half by the end of this decade, the DOI's Bureau of Land Management held lease sales in several Western states in 2022, opening up tens of thousands of acres of public land to fossil fuel production. The DOI has so far announced plans for three new onshore oil and gas lease sales in 2023. The first will offer more than 261,200 acres of public land in Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming to the highest-bidding drillers. The second and third will put a total of 95,411 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah on the auction block.

In addition, the Biden administration published a draft proposal last summer that, if implemented, would permit up to 11 new oil and gas lease sales for drilling off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico over a five-year period.

The president's 2021 freeze on new lease auctions was meant to give the DOI time to analyze the "potential climate and other impacts associated with oil and gas activities on public lands or in offshore waters." Nevertheless, the agency's long-awaited review of the federal leasing program effectively ignored the climate crisis, instead proposing adjustments to royalties, bids, and bonding in what environmental justice campaigners described as a "shocking capitulation to the needs of corporate polluters."

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that roughly 25% of the country's total carbon dioxide emissions and 7% of its overall methane emissions can be attributed to fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters. According to peer-reviewed research, a nationwide prohibition on federal oil and gas leasing would slash carbon dioxide emissions by 280 million tons per year.

The Biden administration "has not enacted any policies to significantly limit drilling permits or manage a decline of production to avoid 1.5°C degrees of warming," the Center for Biological Diversity lamented. The White House even supported the demands of right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.)—Congress' leading recipient of fossil fuel industry cash and a long-time coal profiteer—to "add provisions to the Inflation Reduction Act that will lock in fossil fuel leasing for the next decade."

On numerous occasions, including earlier this month, progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups have implored the Biden administration to use its executive authority to phase out oil and gas production on public lands and in offshore waters. A petition submitted last year came equipped with a regulatory framework to wind down oil and gas production by 98% by 2035. According to the coalition that drafted it, the White House can achieve this goal by using long-dormant provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the National Emergencies Act.

"The president and interior secretary have the power to avoid a climate catastrophe, but they need to change course rapidly," McKinnon said Wednesday. "Strong executive action can meet the climate emergency with the urgency it demands, starting with phasing out fossil fuel production on public lands and waters."

Nearly 40% of people in the United States said they or a family member delayed medical care last year due to the prohibitively high cost of treatment under the nation's for-profit healthcare model, according to a Gallup survey published Tuesday.

As U.S. residents faced soaring prices for private insurance, the percentage of them forgoing medical services as a result of the costs climbed 12 points in one year, from 26% in 2021 to 38% in 2022. Of those who reported postponing treatment last year, 27% said they or a family member did so "for a very or somewhat serious condition," up nine points from the previous year.

"After health insurance companies raised prices 24% last year and made nearly $12 billion in profits last quarter, 38% of Americans now report they or a family member put off needed medical care because it was too expensive," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted in response to the new findings. "We must end this corporate greed. We need Medicare for All."

Gallup has been collecting self-reported data on this issue since 2001. The firm's latest annual healthcare poll, conducted from November 9 to December 2, found the highest level of cost-related delays in seeking medical care on record, topping the previous high of 33% (2019 and 2014) by five points and marking the sharpest annual increase to date. The proportion of people who said they or a family member postponed treatment for a serious condition in 2022 (27%) also surpassed the previous all-time high of 25% (2019).

Lower-income households, young adults, and women in the U.S. are especially likely to have postponed medical care due to high costs.

According to Gallup:

In 2022, Americans with an annual household income under $40,000 were nearly twice as likely as those with an income of $100,000 or more to say someone in their family delayed medical care for a serious condition (34% vs. 18%, respectively). Those with an income between $40,000 and less than $100,000 were similar to those in the lowest income group when it comes to postponing care, with 29% doing so.

Reports of putting off care for a serious condition are up 12 points among lower-income U.S. adults, up 11 points among those in the middle-income group, and up seven points among those with a higher income. The latest readings for the middle- and upper-income groups are the highest on record or tied with the highest.

Another recent survey found that just 12% of Americans think healthcare in the U.S. is handled "extremely" or "very" well. Such data provides further evidence of the unpopularity of a profit-maximizing system that has left 43 million people inadequately insured, kicked millions off of their employer-based plans when the coronavirus caused a spike in unemployment, and contributed to the country's startling decline in life expectancy.

Last week, prior to the publication of Gallup's poll, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on social media: "If you don’t believe corporate greed has deadly consequences, take a look at the decline in American life expectancy. We need Medicare for All, and we must raise the minimum wage."

While the current, profit-driven U.S. healthcare system—which forces millions to skip treatments to avoid financial ruin and allows the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to rake in massive profits—is deeply inefficient and unpopular, polling has consistently shown that voters want the federal government to play a more active role in healthcare provision, with a majority expressing support for a publicly run insurance plan.

Recent research shows that a single-payer system of the kind proposed in Medicare for All legislation introduced by Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) could have prevented hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. over the past two and a half years.

Not only would a single-payer insurance program guarantee coverage for every person in the country, but it would also reduce overall healthcare spending nationwide by an estimated $650 billion per year.

"Millions of Americans across this country are avoiding seeking lifesaving medical care because they're afraid it will bankrupt them," Khanna, a universal healthcare advocate, tweeted last week. "In many cases, their fears are well-founded. We need Medicare for All."

Progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers celebrated Thursday after the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule that, if finalized, would prohibit employers from including noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which the agency described as "a widespread and often exploitative practice that suppresses wages, hampers innovation, and blocks entrepreneurs from starting new businesses."

Given the prevalence of noncompete agreements, which prevent roughly one in five U.S. workers from freely changing jobs, the FTC estimates that "the new proposed rule could increase wages by nearly $300 billion per year and expand career opportunities for about 30 million Americans."

The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) called the FTC's 3-1 vote to initiate a rulemaking process to ban the use of noncompete clauses "a victory for American workers and fair, competitive markets."

“Millions of workers, future new business owners, everyday consumers, and the American economy overall will be better off because of the FTC's vote today," AELP executive director Sarah Miller said in a statement. "For too long, coercive noncompete agreements have unfairly denied millions of working people the freedom to change jobs, negotiate for better pay, and start new businesses."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted that "noncompete clauses give companies unfair power over workers" and commended the FTC for moving to ban them.

Miller, meanwhile, said that Thursday's proposed rule "makes clear that the use of noncompetes to undermine fair competition for workers and prevent new businesses from entering the market is also an illegal practice under the antitrust laws."

"Yesterday's enforcement actions under Section 5 of the FTC Act make clear the FTC means business," she added, referring to the lawsuit the FTC—led by "antitrust trailblazer" Lina Khan—filed Wednesday to force three corporations and two individuals to lift noncompete restrictions they imposed on thousands of workers.

Wednesday's crackdown—which marked the first time the FTC has sued to halt unlawful noncompete clauses—came just weeks after the agency voted 3-1 to issue a new policy statement restoring its commitment to "rigorously enforcing" the long-neglected Section 5 ban on "unfair methods of competition."

Thursday's proposal to prohibit noncompete agreements altogether comes less than three weeks after AELP, Demand Progress, Public Citizen, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), and more than 20 other groups urged the FTC to immediately begin a rulemaking process to eliminate noncompete provisions they described as unjustifiable and "anti-worker."

"Today's vote from the FTC is a step forward toward banning this unfair practice that hurts millions of workers and prevents new businesses from being able to compete on equal ground," Demand Progress Education Fund executive director David Segal said Thursday in a statement. "In a time when millions of Americans are struggling to afford their basic needs, we should be providing more opportunity—not less."

Matt Kent, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, called the FTC's Thursday move "thrilling."

"The rule was long in the making but the strength of this proposal makes the wait worthwhile," said Kent. "If finalized in this form, the rule would be wide-ranging, applying to independent contractors and requiring an employer to actively inform workers that existing noncompete clauses are no longer in effect."

"The legal backing for the rule is also an exciting and overdue use of the FTC's power to police unfair methods of competition using authority granted by Congress in Section 5 of the FTC Act," he added.

EPI president Heidi Shierholz also praised the FTC's regulatory initiative.

"Why do we need this rule?" Shierholz asked on Twitter. "The only source of power nonunionized workers have vis-à-vis their employers is their ability to quit and take a job elsewhere. So, SURPRISE, employers are using noncompete agreements to cut that source of worker power off at knees."

"Noncompetes are about reducing competition, fullstop," said Shierholz. "That's bad for workers and bad for consumers. This rule would be an important step in creating an economy that works for everyone."

The public has 60 days after the Federal Register publishes the proposed rule to submit comments. The FTC will review the comments and possibly make changes based on citizen input and the agency's further analysis.

After applauding the FTC for "once again taking bold action where necessary to protect competition in the labor markets," Kent urged the agency to "issue a final rule that mirrors the quality of this initial effort."

Progressive advocacy groups and economic analysts on Tuesday denounced retirement savings-related tax changes embedded in Congress' end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package, characterizing the pending reforms taken directly from the SECURE 2.0 Act as a "giveaway to the rich."

According to Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy tax fairness champions, the must-pass omnibus bill includes "some minor provisions to help low-income earners save for retirement, but the vast majority are designed to allow high earners to avoid paying more taxes."

Morris Pearl, the group's chair and a former managing director at BlackRock, said: "I'm tired of tax cuts for the rich being sold as help for the poor. The retirement changes in the omnibus package overwhelmingly benefit wealthy people like me while doing almost nothing for the people who truly struggle to save for retirement. This bill does not make it easier for workers to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes."

"This law will make my heirs hundreds of thousands of dollars wealthier," said Pearl. "It will do virtually nothing for the worker who toasted my bagel this morning. This may be good for the children of some rich people, but in the long run, the increased inequality it creates is bad for everyone, including my own family."

"This legislation is not what America needs to help workers save for retirement," he added. "Congress should scrap SECURE 2.0 and start from scratch with something that would help all Americans, not just the rich, save for a comfortable, well-deserved retirement. A multibillion-dollar tax cut for the rich should not be the last act of a Democratic Congress."

Pearl was not alone in criticizing the retirement savings-related tax provisions included in the fiscal year 2023 appropriations bill.

Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that some of the changes "are laudatory, such as creating a savings match for low-income savers and allowing certain kinds of savings to be tapped for emergency purposes and not just retirement."

"But others expand existing unnecessary and regressive tax subsidies for people nearing or deep into retirement," she continued. "For example, affluent people will now be able to wait until age 75 before they are required to touch their tax-favored 'retirement' account."

Parrott added that "it is particularly unfortunate that these tax cuts are in the package while a provision to allow very low-income seniors and people with disabilities to have modest savings and still qualify for income assistance through the Supplemental Security Income program was excluded, despite bipartisan efforts to include it."

In an email to Common Dreams, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also lamented the omnibus package's inclusion of bipartisan retirement legislation that "would mainly help the well-off."

The reforms in question "will exacerbate inequality that is already pervasive in tax benefits for retirement savings," ITEP warned. "Currently, the wealthiest 40% of taxpayers receive 87% of those benefits."

Peace advocates responded with disgust to the Navy's decision to name its new warship after the two battles of Fallujah, during which U.S. troops massacred Iraqi civilians.

"The future America-class amphibious ship will be named the USS Fallujah, LHA-9," Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced Tuesday in a speech at Marine Barracks Washington, D.C. "The future USS Fallujah will commemorate the first and second battles of Fallujah, American-led offenses during the Iraq War."

Del Toro called it "an honor for me, and for our nation, to memorialize the Marines, the soldiers, and coalition forces that fought valiantly and those that sacrificed their lives during both battles of Fallujah."

U.S. troops slaughtered approximately 600 Iraqi civilians—including more than 300 women and children—along with 200 insurgents during the First Battle of Fallujah. Code-named Operation Vigilant Resolve, the battle was launched in April 2004 to avenge the deaths of four Blackwater contractors. Twenty-seven U.S. soldiers were killed during the retaliatory siege.

The Second Battle of Fallujah, known as Operation Phantom Fury, was fought

✎ EditSign from November to December 2004 to recapture the city from insurgent forces. In the process, U.S.-led occupation forces killed between 581 and 670 civilians across nine neighborhoods, according to Iraq Body Count.

"With over 100 coalition forces killed and 600 wounded, Operation Phantom Fury is considered to be the bloodiest engagement to the Iraq War and the fiercest serving combat involving U.S. Marines since the Vietnam War's battle of Hue City," said Del Toro. "This namesake deserves to be in the pantheon of iconic Marine Corps battles, and the LHA's unique capabilities will serve as a stark reminder to everyone around the world of the bravery, the courage, and commitment to freedom displayed by those who fought in those battles."

Critics called the Navy's commemoration of the battles of Fallujah "shameful."

"Some of the most heinous U.S. war crimes committed during the Iraq War took place in the city of Fallujah," The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, who reported from Iraq during the U.S. invasion, wrote Wednesday on social media.

In a 2007 appearance on the Bill Moyers show, Scahill described the siege of Fallujah as "one of the most brutal and sustained U.S. operations of the occupation," telling Moyers that the Pentagon's murderous response to the killing of Blackwater contractors set a dangerous precedent.

In 2016, journalist Hope Hodge Seck wrote about what she called "the whisper campaign for a USS Fallujah."

"At the time, it seemed unlikely to ever happen," she tweeted Tuesday. "But now it has."

Construction on the 45,000 metric-ton vessel, the first U.S. warship named after a post-9/11 battle, is set to begin this month at the Mississippi-based Ingalls Shipbuilding, which secured a $2.4 billion contract in October.

Civilians in Fallujah, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a sharp rise in birth defects that has occurred in the wake of the 2003 invasion.

Global health campaigners denounced U.S. President Joe Biden's administration for refusing to support a temporary suspension of patents for Covid-19 tests and treatments this year, a move that further delays the possibility of securing a World Trade Organization intellectual property waiver aimed at increasing access to lifesaving medical tools in developing nations.

In a statement released on Tuesday morning, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that "over the past five months, USTR officials held robust and constructive consultations with Congress, government experts, a wide range of stakeholders, multilateral institutions, and WTO members."

Tai continued:

Real questions remain on a range of issues, and the additional time, coupled with information from the USITC [United States International Trade Commission], will help the world make a more informed decision on whether extending the ministerial decision to Covid-19 therapeutics and diagnostics would result in increased access to those products. Transparency is critical and USTR will continue to consult with Congress, stakeholders, and others as we continue working to end the pandemic and support the global economic recovery.

As Bloomberg reported, investigations of the sort that Tai wants the USITC to pursue "can take nine months to a year to complete," pushing the prospects for a comprehensive waiver of the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) well into 2023 or beyond.

Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said in response that "it is heartbreaking to see the Biden administration succumb to pressure from pharmaceutical company lobbyists and their henchmen in Congress."

"This moment of weakness will cost countless lives in low- and middle-income countries, leading to continued economic devastation," said Kamal-Yanni, "while a handful of pharmaceutical CEOs and shareholders will get even richer."

"The U.S. has had more than two years to meaningfully engage in WTO negotiations over access to lifesaving tests and treatments," she added. "Kicking the issue further into the long grass, just as the negotiating deadline approaches, is pathetic."

This sentiment was echoed by Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Trade Justice Education Fund.

"There have been at least 290,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the WTO punted on the question of global access to tests and treatments back in June," said Stamoulis. "How many more need to die before the U.S. joins the right side of history?"

"We're in the third year of the pandemic and billions of people worldwide still don't have access to Covid tests, vaccines, and medicines," Stamoulis continued.

Large swaths of the Global South have been deprived of lifesaving Covid-19 medical tools and remain completely unprotected, with less than 25% of people in low-income countries having received at least one vaccine dose to date.

Experts have long argued that pausing enforcement of the corporate-friendly TRIPS Agreement for the duration of the pandemic would remove the intellectual property barriers standing in the way of increased generic manufacturing. However, in June, Big Pharma-aligned policymakers—most of them from highly vaccinated rich countries—defeated a popular proposal to waive coronavirus-related patents to boost the global supply of jabs, diagnostics, and therapeutics.

Instead, the WTO, which operates on the consensus of its 164 members, adopted a watered-down alternative pertaining only to vaccines—described by critics as worse than the status quo—and vowed to decide whether to extend the decision to cover tests and treatments within six months. The Biden White House's new demand for a delay—in which they joined the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Switzerland—comes just days before the December 17 deadline.

As Knowledge Ecology International director James Love pointed out on social media, the U.S. government blocked the proposed TRIPS waiver for tests and treatments after telling the World Health Organization that it is opposed to including intellectual property flexibilities in an emerging WHO pandemic treaty "because that's a conversation for the WTO."

Meanwhile, the need for improved access to tests and treatments is particularly acute in poor countries, given the ongoing severity of global vaccine apartheid.

The WHO estimates that just one in every 50 tests is administered in low- and middle-income nations home to 84% of the global population. While publicly available data on treatment access is sparse, a recent analysis from Oxfam and the People's Vaccine Alliance shows that just a quarter of Pfizer's Paxlovid pill orders are destined for developing countries.

Pfizer's licensing agreement with the United Nations-backed Medicines Patent Pool enables other drugmakers to produce its pill for generic consumption in just 95 countries representing 53% of the global population. As a result, excluded countries, many of which are not wealthy, may be forced to pay $250 per course rather than $25.

Globally, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has caused more than 15 million deaths directly and indirectly, and the disease alone continues to kill roughly 1,500 people per day.

The profoundly inequitable allocation of medicines—fueled by high-income nations snatching up a disproportionate share of vaccines, tests, and treatments and pharmaceutical corporations refusing to share knowledge and technology—has exacerbated avoidable suffering. Artificially imposed scarcity and uneven distribution also enables the coronavirus to continue circulating and mutating, increasing the likelihood of a vaccine-resistant variant emerging.

A recent investigation revealed the extent to which Big Pharma has lobbied against a robust intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 jabs, diagnostics, and therapeutics—and worsened deadly inequality in the process.

Tai's "call for 'more information' cannot be an excuse for inaction," Stamoulis said Tuesday. "While pharmaceutical monopolies make billions, people are still dying, others are getting long Covid, the economy is suffering, and new variants remain a constant threat."

"It's long past time," he added, "for the Biden administration to support the modest changes to WTO pharmaceutical monopoly protections standing in the way of Covid test and treatment access around the world."

Repeating his thoroughly disproven lie that the 2020 election was stolen, former President Donald Trump called Saturday for discarding the U.S. Constitution to overturn his loss.

In response, pro-democracy advocates argued that Trump's comments, other recent actions, and the refusal of GOP lawmakers to denounce them are reflective of the Republican Party's growing support for right-wing authoritarianism.

In a viral post on his so-called Truth Social platform, Trump wrote:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great "Founders" did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

As CNN reported, "Trump's post came after the release of internal Twitter emails showing deliberation in 2020 over a New York Post story about material found on Hunter Biden's laptop."

"Employees on Twitter's legal, policy, and communications teams debated—and at times disagreed—over whether to restrict the article under the company's hacked materials policy," the news outlet noted. "The debate took place weeks before the 2020 election, when Joe Biden, Hunter Biden's father, was running against then-President Trump."

The administration of President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than seven million votes and 74 Electoral College votes, quickly responded. In a statement rebuking Trump, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said:

The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It's the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.

By contrast, Republican Rep. Dave Joyce (Ohio) told ABC's "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that Trump's post conveying his support for overthrowing the Constitution is not a deal-breaker. The twice-impeached president officially launched his 2024 campaign last month.

"I will support whoever the Republican nominee is," said Joyce, chair of the influential Republican Governance Group.

When Stephanopoulos expressed disbelief that he would "support a candidate who's come out for suspending the Constitution," Joyce said: "He says a lot of things... I can't be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out about from any of these candidates at the moment."

Pushing back again, Stephanopoulos asked, "You can't come out against someone who's for suspending the Constitution?"

Joyce responded: "He says a lot of things... but that doesn't mean that it's ever going to happen. So you got to [separate] fact from fantasy—and fantasy is that we're going to suspend the Constitution and go backward."

Joyce's remarks are symptomatic of Republican lawmakers' refusal to censure Trump, who remains the de facto leader of the party even after his backing of election deniers weakened the GOP's midterm performance and despite his increasingly open penchant for autocracy and bigotry.

"Last week the leader of the Republican Party had dinner with a Nazi leader and a man who called Adolf Hitler 'great,'" Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell (N.J.) tweeted Sunday, referring to Trump's recent meeting with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and antisemitic rapper Kanye West.

"Yesterday Trump called for throwing out the Constitution and making himself dictator," Pascrell added. "Republicans' full embrace of fascism is the story."

Just days ago, Trump reiterated his support for the far-right insurrectionists who participated in the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying in a video played during a fundraiser that "people have been treated unconstitutionally in my opinion and very, very unfairly, and we're going to get to the bottom of it."

Trump claimed earlier this year that he was "financially supporting" some January 6 defendants and said that if reelected, he would "look very, very favorably" at full pardons for those being prosecuted. More than 950 people have been charged so far, including two leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who were convicted last week of seditious conspiracy. In the immediate aftermath of Trump's failed coup, 147 congressional Republicans voted to reverse Biden's victory.

In an essay published Saturday, U.S. historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote that Trump's social media post "seems to reflect desperation from the former president as his political star fades and the many legal suits proceeding against him get closer and closer to their end dates."

"But the real story here is not Trump's panic about his fading relevance and his legal exposure," the Boston College professor argued. "It's that Trump remains the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2024. The leader of the Republican Party has just called for the overthrow of our fundamental law and the installation of a dictator."

"Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump's profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government," she added. "That is the story, and it is Earth-shattering."