July, 21 2023, 10:55am EDT
Harlan Crow's Minions Are Keeping Your Rent High
New RDP project will track ties between Thomas benefactor’s real estate empire and landlord lobby group NMHC
The Revolving Door Project today announced a new blog project tracking the close ties between Harlan Crow – the infamous billionaire benefactor of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – and the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), a landlord lobby group led by Crow Holdings executive Ken Valach. Read the blog here.
NMHC – which represents nearly 2,000 abusive corporate landlords, developers, big banks, and scandal-plagued tech companies like RealPage – has organized the apartment industry’s opposition to federal and state-level tenant protections and rent affordability laws, and was one of the top lobbying spenders against the CDC’s pandemic eviction moratorium. All the while, it has lobbied to secure billions in lucrative corporate tax breaks for wealthy developers and investors.
Crow, heir to one of the biggest real estate fortunes in American history, has personally given tens of thousands of dollars to NMHC’s political operations and has held NMHC PAC fundraisers in his own Dallas mansion.
Revolving Door Project Senior ResearcherVishal Shankar, who co-authored the report, released the following statement:
“Harlan Crow isn’t just corrupting our judiciary – he is actively fuelling the rental housing crisis through his support for one of America’s biggest corporate landlord lobby groups. For too long, the slick landlord propagandists at NMHC have falsely portrayed themselves as the only “experts” who can solve the housing crisis. It’s time the public sees NMHC for what they truly are – a greedy and predatory band of rent-gougers who exist only to make elites like Harlan Crow even richer.”
Revolving Door Project Research Director Andrea Beaty released the following statement:
“Tenant organizers in communities across the country are working together to push for government policies that keep people in their homes on safer, more affordable and more accessible terms. Unfortunately, these grassroots organizers face an uphill battle going up against corporate profiteers whose financial power allows them to influence policy from behind the scenes. Policymakers should listen to the millions of renters who need relief from housing insecurity, rather than cater to the corporate landlords and their lobbyists who put renters into precarious positions in the first place.”
The Revolving Door Project (RDP) scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they use their office to serve the broad public interest, rather than to entrench corporate power or seek personal advancement.
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'Jail Time Should Seriously Be Considered,' Pocan Says of Big Oil Price Fixing
"I would recommend 'Orange Is the New Black,'" said the Wisconsin Democrat. "We're feeling it at the pumps and clearly this kind of behavior, we know, isn't isolated."
May 15, 2024
As Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan appeared before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Wednesday, Congressman Mark Pocan highlighted recent FTC action against fossil fuel industry price fixing and urged criminal consequences.
"I just did a little napkin math," Pocan (D-Wis.) said. If collusion led to a $0.40-0.60 increase in the price for a gallon of gas for a vehicle, "for the average person filling their tank, that's $8 or $10 a week," he explained. "That's $500 a year of added cost."
If half of the residents in Pocan's congressional district have a car, "that's $175 million a year," he said. If that figure is applied across all 435 districts, it translates to billions of dollars "that we're being gouged because of someone like this who's trying to price collude," he continued, referring to Scott Sheffield, the founder and longtime CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources.
The FTC earlier this month barred Sheffield from serving on the board of directors of or as an adviser to ExxonMobil, which just acquired Pioneer, due to his alleged collusion with the representatives of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and OPEC+.
While welcoming the FTC's move, Pocan noted that "if you commit theft, the average sentence... in the United States is 23 months" and the multibillion-dollar profit that fossil fuel giants make from price gouging "is more than grand larceny theft."
🚨BIG: @RepMarkPocan applauds @FTC for revealing an oil price-fixing scheme that cost Americans billions from 2021-2023.
"I just did a little napkin math ... That's $175 million a year—just for people in my district—that we're being gouged." pic.twitter.com/maM8Uk6usY
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) May 15, 2024
"What else can we do to these oil companies that are ripping us off?" the congressman asked Khan, an appointee of President Joe Biden with "a pro-working families record."
The FTC chair responded that "price fixing and output reduction in a coordinated way can be criminal violations of the antitrust laws. As enforcers we can't specifically speak to what we're referring and what we're not, but as a general matter, it's been a priority of mine to make sure we are referring more criminal candidates to the Justice Department, because we need to make sure companies and executives aren't just treating fines as a cost of doing business and that they take seriously the rule of law."
Referencing a television show that takes place in federal prison, Pocan told her that "I would recommend 'Orange Is the New Black,' if we need to, to make a point. It would be helpful because we're feeling it at the pumps and clearly this kind of behavior, we know, isn't isolated."
Sharing a video of his remarks on social media, Pocan declared: "Unacceptable! A slap on the wrist isn't enough. I think jail time should seriously be considered."
As the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) pointed out, Pocan wasn't the only lawmaker to reference the recent price fixing revelations during the Wednesday hearing; he was joined by Reps. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).
"Finally it's being noticed!" said AELP's Matt Stoller, who has written about the alleged collusion. "Dem House members get it!"
Stoller wasn't alone in welcoming the discussion in Congress—after days of limited attention on the issue among national figures.
"This illegal oil corporation price fixing conspiracy cost Americans as much as $2,100. Per year," saidMore Perfect Union, sharing a video of Pocan and citingThe American Prospect.
The Ohio AFL-CIO stressed: "Greedflation is not inflation. Pass it on."
Noting that Sheffield is getting a $68 million "golden parachute on his way out," former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich argued Wednesday: "That money (and more) should be refunded to the American people. Not sent to his bank account."
Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens similarly said last week that "the Department of Justice should criminally prosecute Scott Sheffield and Congress should tax back the industry's windfall profits and issue every American a refund."
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1st Jewish Biden Appointee to Resign Over Gaza Quits on Nakba Day
"I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amid President Biden's disastrous, continued support for Israel's genocide in Gaza," Interior assistant Lily Greenberg Call wrote.
May 15, 2024
Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Department of the Interior, became the first Jewish political appointee to resign her post in protest of U.S. President Joe Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Call announced her resignation on Wednesday, which is also the 76th anniversary of the Nakba—or the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 as part of the process of creating the current state of Israel.
"Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe," Call wrote in her letter. "I reject the premise that one people's salvation must come at another's destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen—and this cannot be done from within the Biden administration."
"What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly un-Jewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors."
In her letter, addressed to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Call said that she had worked for both Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign in 2019 and Biden's in 2020 and was "thrilled" to accept a position at DOI.
"I joined the Biden administration because I believe in fighting for a better America, for a future where Americans can thrive: one with economic prosperity, a healthy planet, and equal rights for all people," she wrote.
However, that changed with Biden's financial, military, and political backing of Israel's war on Gaza.
"I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amid President Biden's disastrous, continued support for Israel's genocide in Gaza," she wrote.
Call spoke of her Jewish immigrant heritage and how her family story—moving from grandparents without college degrees to a granddaughter with a presidential appointment—represented the American dream.
"And yet, I have asked myself many times over the last eight months: What is the point of having power if you will not use it to stop crimes against humanity?" she wrote.
"President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands."
Call also spoke of how her Jewish faith and lifelong experience in the Jewish community informed her decision.
"What I have learned from my Jewish tradition is that every life is precious. That we are obligated to stand up for those facing violence and oppression, and to question authority in the face of injustice," she said.
In a separate interview with The Associated Press, she criticized Biden for "making Jews the face of the American war machine," adding that this was "deeply wrong."
For example, the AP wrote:
Call pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said, "Were there no Israel, there wouldn't be a Jew in the world who was safe" and at an event at Washington's Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that triggered the war were driven by an "ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people."
Call's own views on Israel have altered dramatically in the last few years. As The Washington Post reported:
Greenberg Call, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 2019, was president of Bears for Israel, an affiliate group of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and said she grew up going to student events hosted by the group. In a piece for Teen Vogue two years ago, she said she began to question AIPAC and its mission of ensuring unconditional American support for Israel as she got to know more Palestinians and after AIPAC endorsed Republican candidates who supported Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Call told the Post that it had been a struggle to make the decision she did because of her deep roots in the Jewish community, but that Jewish values were ultimately what led her to go through with it.
"What Israel is doing to people in Gaza and to Palestinians across the land is incredibly un-Jewish to me and such a disgrace to our ancestors," she said.
Call wrote in the letter that while she knew people who lost family in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel that killed around 1,100 people and was "terrified" by rising antisemitism, she was "certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine, and ethnic cleansing."
Call outlined the horrors of Israel's war on Gaza: more than 35,000 people and 15,000 children killed, attacks on hospitals, mass graves, the destruction of every university in Gaza, and the targeting of journalists.
"These are all violations of international law, none of which would be possible without American weapons, and none of which have been condemned by President Biden," she wrote.
She continued:
The president has the power to call for a lasting cease-fire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The United States has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable. Quite the opposite, we have enabled and legitimized Israel's actions with vetoes of United Nations resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable. President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands.
Call's resignation comes one day after Biden announced another $1 billion weapons shipment to Israel, even as it continues an assault on Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah. Biden had previously called a ground offensive on Rafah a "red line" that Israel should not cross, yet critics point out that Israel's current operations in Rafah should certainly qualify.
"There's been many moments in the last eight months that I have thought about it," Call toldMiddle East Eye of her decision to resign, "and I think everything that has happened in the last few weeks in particular, made me feel like the time is right."
Her letter also comes days after polling indicated that around 13% of 2020 Biden voters in six key swing states would not vote for him in 2024 because of his Gaza policy.
"I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous," Call told AP. "Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects."
Call is at least the fifth Biden official to resign over his Gaza policy and the second political appointee, according to AP. While she is the first known Jewish Biden staffer to resign, Army Maj. Harrison Mann also cited his Jewish background when announcing his resignation decision on Monday.
"As the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing—my grandfather refused to ever purchase products manufactured in Germany—where the paramount importance of 'never again' and the inadequacy of 'just following orders' were oft repeated," he wrote.
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'Most Thorough Legal Analysis' Yet Concludes Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza
The University Network for Human Rights report also stresses that other nations are legally obligated to "refrain from recognizing Israel's breaches as legal or taking any actions that may amount to complicity."
May 15, 2024
The University Network for Human Rights on Wednesday released and sent to United Nations offices a 105-page report that it called "the most thorough legal analysis" yet to find "Israel is committing genocide" against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The network partnered with the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School for the analysis, which draws from "a diverse range of credible sources" and the territory's history.
"After reviewing the facts established by independent human rights monitors, journalists, and United Nations agencies, we conclude that Israel's actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention," the report states. "Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people."
As of May 1, Israel's assault had killed "more than 5% of Gaza's population, with over 2% of Gaza's children killed or injured," the analysis notes. In recent days, Israeli forces have ramped up their attack on Rafah—where over a million people from other parts of the besieged enclave sought refuge—and the total death toll has risen to 35,233, according to Gaza health officials, with another 79,141 Palestinians injured.
"Israel's military operation has destroyed up to 70% of homes in Gaza, and has decimated civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, universities, U.N. facilities, and cultural and religious heritage sites," the document says, noting the "staggering" number of forced displacements. "Civilians in Gaza face catastrophic levels of hunger and deprivation due to Israel's restriction on, and failure to ensure adequate access to, basic essentials of life, including food, water, medicine, and fuel."
"Israel's genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent, as evidenced in this report by the statements of Israeli leaders, the character of the state and its military forces' conduct against and relating to Palestinians in Gaza, and the direct nexus between them," the publication continues, pointing to comments from "officials at all levels of Israeli government, up to and including" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has faced mounting allegations of genocide since launching its retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attack—including an ongoing South Africa-led case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found in January that the country is "plausibly" committing genocide.
Bolstering the ICJ's conclusion, the Wednesday report declares that "Israel's violations of the international legal prohibition of genocide amount to grave breaches of peremptory norms of international law that must cease immediately."
"These violations give rise to obligations by all other states: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may amount to complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza," the document adds.
The United States has long provided Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic support—which have soared since October 7, despite growing pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden to cut off such assistance. The Democrat has incrementally increased his criticism of the Israeli assault in recent weeks, angering far-right leaders in both countries.
The new legal analysis—which was sent to the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel—came on the same day that 20 human rights groups issued a joint statement.
The rights organizations—including Amnesty International, Mercy Corps, and Oxfam—called on world leaders "to urgently act in bringing to an end, and pursue accountability for," Israel's grave breaches of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
Both documents were released on Nakba Day, which commemorates the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Some experts and campaigners contend that the Nakba—Arabic for catastrophe—continues today.
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