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data mining
We're Renting Our Lives Away to Enrich Tech Lords and Wall Street Oligarchs
In the new, out-of-control rental economy, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
Dec 30, 2025
On Sunday, both President Donald Trump and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.
It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”
As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.
There was a time when you bought things.
It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”
That America is disappearing.
Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.
Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.
Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.
Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.
Even the means to get a good job—a college education—has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt—the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students—and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.
But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.
The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
That same model has spread everywhere.
Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.
Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone—banking, work, navigation, healthcare—being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.
This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.
And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.
Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.
This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.
The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”
That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.
If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.
As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.
In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy—all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits—America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).
Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
It’s gotten so bad that apps—which also acquire and then sell our data—have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.
None of this was inevitable.
The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.
It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy—not billionaires—sets the rules of the road.
Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.
Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.
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Turning Down the Heat, and the Noise
With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.
Sep 17, 2024
The most pressing environmental crisis of these times, our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world—and it’s not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.
Noise pollution, a longstanding menace, is often ignored. It has, however, been making headlines in recent years, thanks to the booming development of massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise. Such installations, known by the innocuous term “data centers,” are making growing numbers of people miserable.
Residents of Loudoun County, Virginia, the nation’s data-center epicenter, have filed dozens of complaints about an especially loud facility located in the town of Leesburg. People living as much as three miles from the center compared the noise from its giant cooling fans to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter hovering overhead, day and night.
The data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.
Attorneys representing a group of Williston, North Dakota, homeowners argued last December that noise pollution from the nearby Atlas Power Data Center “is a continual invasion of their homes, their health, and their North Dakota way of life. They are now virtually shut-ins in the slice of North Dakota they once called their own.” In April, Gladys Anderson of Bono, Arkansas, told reporters that a nearby cryptocurrency-mining data center was “like torture, like a form of military-grade torture.” Her neighbor complained, “It’s caused problems for me with my hearing, my blood pressure, with the sweetheart where she gets migraine headaches.”
Chicago-based airline pilot Joshua Zhang—someone who (I’m betting) knows a thing or two about loud noise—told CBS News in 2021 that a new data center in his Printers’ Row neighborhood whined like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that never shuts off. “I try to fly as much as I can to stay away from here,” he said. “I can’t really sleep well… and I have to operate a flight.” In other words, the data center’s ear-splitting noise was so bad that it drove Mr. Zhang to seek refuge at… O’Hare Airport.
Noise Makes Us Sick and We’re Sick of Noise
The recent, rapid proliferation of data centers has been due, at least in part, to the similarly rapid growth of two types of enterprises: cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI). Those voracious wasters of electricity were unasked-for inventions that filled largely nonexistent human needs. And they’re amplifying the very real problem of noise pollution.
Crypto and AI illustrate a larger issue. An all-out effort to curb climate change will require deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, which will, in turn, require more frugal use of all forms of energy. And if that happens (as it should), it will have profound repercussions throughout society. As one of the more welcome consequences, our now-cacophonous world is likely to become easier on the ears.
With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.
The severe impact of noise pollution on both mental and physical health is well documented. Hearing impairment is the most obvious malady it causes. The World Health Organization (WHO) finds that noise pollution severely disrupts our quality of life in other ways, too, raising the risk of heart disease, childhood cognitive impairment, sleep disturbance, and general annoyance. WHO notes that while
...annoyance is not normally classified as a health effect, it certainly affects well-being and therefore is considered to fall within the WHO definition of health as being “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” More importantly, however, it is the effect of noise that most lay people are aware of and concerned about.
And annoyance can be a gateway to much worse, to “feelings of disturbance, aggravation, dissatisfaction, concern, bother, displeasure, harassment, irritation, nuisance, vexation, exasperation, discomfort, uneasiness, distress, hate, etc.” You might think I got that quote from a thesaurus, but, no, it’s from a study published in the journal Noise and Health. Any person living near a data center or other source of loud, continuous noise can, I expect, attest to having experienced most (or all) of those feelings. And it’s well known that such stresses can lead to physiological health problems.
When it comes to making people miserable, keep in mind that not all noises are created equal. The roar from data centers, vehicle traffic, commercial lawn-care operations, and other notorious disturbers of the peace is rich in low-pitched audible frequencies that travel much further than others and can even pass through walls. Such low tones also irritate us more, even when they aren’t all that loud. Consequently, and unfortunately, people complaining about their exposure to noise from data centers or other sources of low-frequency noise are all too often dismissed as hypochondriacs. In a recent, comprehensive article on noise pollution in The Atlantic magazine, Bianca Bosker told a gripping tale of how people in Chandler, Arizona, suffered for years as their complaints about data center noise were casually dismissed by local authorities.
The Cruelty Is the Point
For those of us not living near a data center, road traffic may be the most pervasive, day-to-day source of unhealthful low-frequency noise. In the European Union, for example, 113 million people, or 20% percent of the population, live with noise pollution from road traffic that’s loud enough to raise risks of heart disease and heart failure. The risk of developing diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, and of course, sleep disturbance also increases as traffic noise gets louder.
Of course, we produce traffic noise collectively and most, but not all, of us hate it. In an April essay entitled “What is Noise?,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross observed that “if you elect to hear something, it is not noise, even if most people might deem it unspeakably horrible. If you are forced to hear something, it is noise, even if most people might deem it ineffably gorgeous.” Extra-loud vehicles, particularly en masse, richly illustrate Ross’s observation.
In recent decades, American pickup trucks and SUVs have grown steadily larger and heavier, with towering front ends and armoring that create a road-ruling mystique. Increasingly, to further satisfy consumer demand for big, intimidating vehicles, automakers equip many of them with high-decibel engines, turbochargers, and thunderous exhaust systems. Drivers all too regularly dial the volume up several more notches with muffler modifications that are often illegal. The automakers’ economic motivation for offering big, loud vehicles is clear ($), but why exactly do their customers want them? The deafening din emanating from those trucks has distinct political undertones, but there may also be something deeper going on.
A 2023 study published in the journal Current Issues in Personality Psychology sheds some light on this. The researcher interviewed 529 people, split almost equally between the sexes, about their attitudes toward noisy vehicles. Then, using questionnaires, she evaluated the subjects for four “dark” personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. It turned out (surprise!) that men liked loud vehicles significantly more than women did. Across both sexes, those who expressed greater fondness for such vehicles also tended to score higher for two dark personality traits: psychopathy and sadism. The researcher drily observed that the results made perfect sense:
Psychopathy reflects an up-close cruelty, whereas sadism includes viewing the harm to others from a distance… Modifying a muffler to make a car louder is disturbing to pedestrians, other drivers, and animals at a distance, meeting the sadism component, as well as startling when [the victim is] up close at intersections, meeting the psychopathy component.
The author of that study is not a medical professional (nor am I); still, it’s not exactly illogical to consider guys who alter their trucks to produce brain-rattling noise psychopaths. I’m not a lawyer either, but it still seems to me that labeling such practices a form of reckless indifference to human well-being is anything but unreasonable.
Quietness Should Be a Right, Not a Privilege
For decades, the environmental justice movement has been fighting a longstanding American tradition of locating dirty, dangerous industries and activities in low-income, racialized communities. This is a problem that arises with every environmental issue, and noise is no exception. Alex Ross recognized that in his “What Is Noise?” essay when he observed, “Silence is a luxury of the rich… For the rest of society, noise is an index of struggle.”
In neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and/or large Indigenous, Asian, Black, or Latino populations, residents endure greater exposure to noise pollution, especially in areas where informal racial segregation is more severe. Not surprisingly, a separate study found that the same demographic groups experience highly disproportionate levels of annoyance from noise caused by road traffic or aircraft.
Consider it a certain irony then that, despite being exposed to less noise pollution, white Americans are subject to significantly higher rates of hearing loss than Black Americans—and it’s unclear why. Andrew Van Dam of The Washington Post complicated matters further when he noted that there’s also a political disparity: The higher the share of Republicans in a state or county, the greater the rate of hearing loss. He couldn’t fully explain this as a result of populations in redder states being generally whiter and older. There had to be some other factor. When Van Dam looked further, he found one that made a big difference in the prevalence of hearing loss: Politically redder areas have higher rates of recreational firearm ownership than bluer areas, with lots more hunting and gun-range target practice—another kind of noise pollution entirely.
No Peace, No Quiet
The U.S. military also has lots of guns, as well as an enormous climate footprint. A dramatic downsizing of our war-making capacity (and the staggering Pentagon budgets that go with it)—badly needed for both humanitarian and ecological reasons—would have the salutary side-effect of shrinking one of our major sources of noise pollution and hearing loss.
It should come as no surprise that researchers in a wide range of countries have found that hearing loss is more common among military personnel than in the general population. Among American service members, almost 15% suffer hearing impairment. Hearing loss is one of the most common health problems of veterans, especially those who served in special forces units (where it’s twice as prevalent as elsewhere in the armed forces). The exposure of those in such units to large-caliber weapon fire, urban combat training, and the like clearly has a lot to do with that.
In military operations, jet aircraft are the most intense source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and noise pollution. Jets account for almost 80% of the military’s fuel consumption. Their noise output is not as precisely quantified, but recent research in a study on civilian impacts around Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State found that, in the county where the base is located, two-thirds of the resident population were exposed to noise levels that could have negative health effects. One-fifth suffered high levels of annoyance and 9% were “highly sleep disturbed.” Worse yet, according to that study, “the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of the Swinomish Reservation [located northeast of the airfield] was extremely vulnerable to health risks, with nearly 85% of residents being exposed.”
In Salina, Kansas, where Priti Gulati Cox and I live, we have less frequent but highly immersive experiences with military noise pollution every time the curiously named “Jaded Thunder joint exercise” comes to town. In part of that “exercise,” pilots from the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy take off from a nearby airfield in fighter jets and fly low over our city of 50,000. The noise hits you suddenly, like a roundhouse punch. It’s like nothing I’ve heard or felt elsewhere. My own reaction to such overwhelming noise levels is similar to those found in survey responses from several residents of Madison, Wisconsin, who hear fighter jet noise much more routinely than we Salinans do. As one of them put it: “Everything I’m doing comes to a halt… my entire body tenses up and my heart starts racing… utterly jarring… impossible to make out dialogue… impossible to just continue any activity… reminds me of every innocent soul killed in a bombing by my home country.” Finally, there was simply this: “Annoyed.”
Cooler Means Quieter
America was getting louder before the rise of data centers, but now it’s getting louder faster. Unfortunately, the research on that is sparse, but it’s still a reasonable conclusion to draw. In her article, Bianca Bosker pointed out another intriguing indicator of our rising noise problem. Fire-engine sirens today are designed to be more than twice as loud as those of the 1970s, just so they’ll be audible above the rising din of our cities and suburbs. And keep in mind that they’re eight times as loud as the sirens of 1912.
Climate mitigation is also noise mitigation. To avoid baking the Earth, governments must quickly phase out the use of oil, gas, and coal. With a slimmed-down energy supply, economies will need to direct fuels and electricity toward uses that meet more essential needs. Crypto and AI are not among such uses, nor can we afford to keep streets and highways crammed with gas- and diesel-guzzling private vehicles. For those and many other reasons, count on one thing: Strong efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will also have striking beneficial side effects, including more peace and quiet. And that should be music to our ears.
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What the Pro-Nuclear Bros Don’t Want You to Know About Their Mini Reactors
SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure; for that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks.
May 06, 2024
Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
What Are SMRs?
SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites. Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors. SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built. Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.
To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders. The only SMR currently under construction is in China. And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).
The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected. The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.
Regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features.
Developers in the industry and the U.S. Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand. They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.
1. SMRs Are Not More Economical Than Large Reactors.
In theory, small reactors should have lower capital costs and construction times than large reactors of similar design so that utilities (or other users) can get financing more cheaply and deploy them more flexibly. But that doesn’t mean small reactors will be more economical than large ones. In fact, the opposite usually will be true. What matters more when comparing the economics of different power sources is the cost to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity, and that depends on the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity, as well as the costs of operations, maintenance, fuel, and other factors.
According to the economies of scale principle, smaller reactors will in general produce more expensive electricity than larger ones. For example, the now-cancelled project by NuScale to build a 460-megawatt, 6-unit SMR in Idaho was estimated to cost over $20,000 per kilowatt, which is greater than the actual cost of the Vogtle large reactor project of over $15,000 per kilowatt. This cost penalty can be offset only by radical changes in the way reactors are designed, built, and operated.
For example, SMR developers claim they can slash capital cost per kilowatt by achieving efficiency through the mass production of identical units in factories. However, studies find that such cost reductions typically would not exceed about 30%. In addition, dozens of units would have to be produced before manufacturers could learn how to make their processes more efficient and achieve those capital cost reductions, meaning that the first reactors of a given design will be unavoidably expensive and will require large government or ratepayer subsidies to get built. Getting past this obstacle has proven to be one of the main impediments to SMR deployment.
The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.
Another way that SMR developers try to reduce capital cost is by reducing or eliminating many of the safety features required for operating reactors that provide multiple layers of protection, such as a robust, reinforced concrete containment structure, motor-driven emergency pumps, and rigorous quality assurance standards for backup safety equipment such as power supplies. But these changes so far haven’t had much of an impact on the overall cost—just look at NuScale.
In addition to capital cost, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs will also have to be significantly reduced to improve the competitiveness of SMRs. However, some operating expenses, such as the security needed to protect against terrorist attacks, would not normally be sensitive to reactor size. The relative contribution of O&M and fuel costs to the price per megawatt-hour varies a lot among designs and project details, but could be 50% or more, depending on factors such as interest rates that influence the total capital cost.
Economies of scale considerations have already led some SMR vendors, such as NuScale and Holtec, to roughly double module sizes from their original designs. The Oklo, Inc. Aurora microreactor has increased from 1.5 MW to 15 MW and may even go to 50 MW. And the General Electric-Hitachi BWRX-300 and Westinghouse AP300 are both starting out at the upper limit of what is considered an SMR.
Overall, these changes might be sufficient to make some SMRs cost-competitive with large reactors, but they would still have a long way to go to compete with renewable technologies. The levelized cost of electricity for the now-cancelled NuScale project was estimated at around $119 per megawatt-hour (without federal subsidies), whereas land-based wind and utility-scale solar now cost below $40/MWh.
Microreactors, however, are likely to remain expensive under any realistic scenario, with projected levelized electricity costs two to three times that of larger SMRs.
2. SMRs Are Not Generally Safer or More Secure Than Large Light-Water Reactors.
Because of their size, you might think that small nuclear reactors pose lower risks to public health and the environment than large reactors. After all, the amount of radioactive material in the core and available to be released in an accident is smaller. And smaller reactors produce heat at lower rates than large reactors, which could make them easier to cool during an accident, perhaps even by passive means—that is, without the need for electrically powered coolant pumps or operator actions.
However, the so-called passive safety features that SMR proponents like to cite may not always work, especially during extreme events such as large earthquakes, major flooding, or wildfires that can degrade the environmental conditions under which they are designed to operate. And in some cases, passive features can actually make accidents worse: For example, the NRC’s review of the NuScale design revealed that passive emergency systems could deplete cooling water of boron, which is needed to keep the reactor safely shut down after an accident.
In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.
Considering the cumulative impact of all these changes, SMRs could be as—or even more— dangerous than large reactors. For example, if a containment structure at a large reactor reliably prevented 90% of the radioactive material from being released from the core of the reactor during a meltdown, then a reactor five times smaller without such a containment structure could conceivably release more radioactive material into the environment, even though the total amount of material in the core would be smaller. And if the SMR were located closer to populated areas with no offsite emergency planning, more people could be exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.
But even if one could show that the overall safety risk of a small reactor was lower than that of a large reactor, that still wouldn’t automatically imply the overall risk per unit of electricity that it generates is lower, since smaller plants generate less electricity. If an accident caused a 250-megawatt SMR to release only 25% of the radioactive material that a 1,000-megawatt plant would release, the ratio of risk to benefit would be the same. And a site with four such reactors could have four times the annual risk of a single unit, or an even greater risk if an accident at one reactor were to damage the others, as happened during the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan.
3. SMRs Will Not Reduce the Problem of What to Do With Radioactive Waste.
The industry makes highly misleading claims that certain SMRs will reduce the intractable problem of long-lived radioactive waste management by generating less waste, or even by “recycling” their own wastes or those generated by other reactors.
First, it’s necessary to define what “less” waste really means. In terms of the quantity of highly radioactive isotopes that result when atomic nuclei are fissioned and release energy, small reactors will produce just as much as large reactors per unit of heat generated. (Non-light-water reactors that more efficiently convert heat to electricity than light-water reactors will produce somewhat smaller quantities of fission products per unit of electricity generated—perhaps 10 to 30%—but this is a relatively small effect in the scheme of things.) And for reactors with denser fuels, the volume and mass of the spent fuel generated may be smaller, but the concentration of fission products in the spent fuel, and the heat generated by the decay products—factors that really matter to safety—will be proportionately greater.
Therefore, entities that hope to acquire SMRs, like data centers that lack the necessary waste infrastructure, will have to safely manage the storage of significant quantities of spent nuclear fuel on site for the long term, just like any other nuclear power plant does. Claims by vendors such as Westinghouse that they will take away the reactors after the fuel is no longer usable are simply not credible, as there are no realistic prospects for licensing centralized sites where the used reactors could be taken for the foreseeable future. Any community with an SMR will have to plan to be a de facto long-term nuclear waste disposal site.
4. SMRs Cannot Be Counted on to Provide Reliable and Resilient Off-the-Grid Power for Facilities, Such as Data Centers, Bitcoin Mining, Hydrogen, or Petrochemical production.
Despite the claims of developers, it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems. Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down. In such situations a user such as a data center operator would have to provide backup power, likely from diesel generators, for both the data center AND the reactor. And since there is virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box and require little monitoring and maintenance.
It very likely will take decades of operating experience for any new reactor design to achieve the level of reliability characteristic of the operating light-water reactor fleet. Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.
5. SMRs Do Not Use Fuel More Efficiently Than Large Reactors.
Some advocates misleadingly claim that SMRs are more efficient than large ones because they use less fuel. In terms of the amount of heat generated, the amount of uranium fuel that must undergo nuclear fission is the same whether a reactor is large or small. And although reactors that use coolants other than water typically operate at higher temperatures, which can increase the efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity, this is not a big enough effect to outweigh other factors that decrease efficiency of fuel use.
Some SMRs designs require a type of uranium fuel called “high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU),” which contains higher concentrations of the isotope uranium-235 than conventional light-water reactor fuel. Although this reduces the total mass of fuel the reactor needs, that doesn’t mean it uses less uranium nor results in less waste from “front-end” mining and milling activities: In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.
If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
One reason for this is that HALEU production requires a relatively large amount of natural uranium to be fed into the enrichment process that increases the uranium-235 concentration. For example, the TerraPower Natrium reactor which would use HALEU enriched to around 19% uranium-235, will require 2.5 to 3 times as much natural uranium to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity than a light-water reactor. Smaller reactors, such as the 15-megawatt Oklo Aurora, are even more inefficient. Improving the efficiency of these reactors can occur only with significant advances in fuel performance, which could take decades of development to achieve.
Reactors that use uranium inefficiently have disproportionate impacts on the environment from polluting uranium mining and processing activities. They also are less effective in mitigating carbon emissions, because uranium mining and milling are relatively carbon-intensive activities compared to other parts of the uranium fuel cycle.
SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure. For that to happen, it is essential to have a realistic understanding of their costs and risks. By painting an overly rosy picture of these technologies with often misleading information, the nuclear bros are distracting attention from the need to confront the many challenges that must be resolved to make SMRs a reality—and ultimately doing a disservice to their cause.
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Tim Berners-Lee Wants to Enable Internet Users to Own Their Personal Data
"You need to get back to a situation where you have autonomy, you have control of all your data," says the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Dec 19, 2022
The creator of the World Wide Web is on a mission to reinvent it and protect personal data from Big Tech.
"I think the public has been concerned about privacy--the fact that these platforms have a huge amount of data, and they abuse it," Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the concept of the web in 1989, told CNN on Friday. "But I think what they're missing sometimes is the lack of empowerment. You need to get back to a situation where you have autonomy, you have control of all your data."
As the news outlet reported:
Through their startup Inrupt, Berners-Lee and CEO John Bruce have created the "Solid Pod"--or Personal Online Data Store. It allows people to keep their data in one central place and control which people and applications can access it, rather than having it stored by apps or sites all over the web.
Users can get a pod from a handful of providers, hosted by web services such as Amazon, or run their own server, if they have they the technical know-how. The main attraction to self-hosting is control and privacy, says Berners-Lee.
Thirty-three years after he invented the web, Berners-Lee--a longtime advocate of giving people power over their personal data online--believes that tech giants currently "control the world and manipulate people by providing information."
In an interview with Euronews Next at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon last month, Berners-Lee said that "some people thought that tech people would save the world then. Now, we're in a situation where there are a lot of things wrong with the web."
He has proposed "a mid-course correction to take it back," which he calls Web3.0.
The earliest iteration of the internet already existed in the 1970s, but few people knew how to access it. Everything changed when Berners-Lee, then a consultant at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), wrote the code for a web server that allows browsers to view hypertext documents. CERN put the software for the World Wide Web into the public domain in 1993.
As Euronews Next explained:
We then saw the emergence of the first stage of the internet, Web1.0. Despite it being available to everyone, it was a read-only type of web and only the few who knew the ins and outs of coding could publish anything.
This led to the development of Web2.0, which now allows us to interact more with the web and become creators so we can publish what we like under big platforms such as Google, Facebook, and so on.
But it does not come for free. In return, many of these companies can take our data which can be used for targeted advertising.
Berners-Lee's "solution to the dysfunctions of Web2.0 is the third layer of protocols, giving a person the ability to log into something with their own personal ID," the news outlet reported.
While working in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berners-Lee came up with the "Solid Pod" idea and launched Inrupt in 2017. The company reportedly raised $30 million last December, which Berners-Lee says will help bring the project to fruition.
"Berners-Lee's platform can be accessed from your browser," Euronews Next noted. "But it is not an app; he calls it a 'pod,' where you can store your private data and access it very easily. In simpler terms, it can be thought of as your key or a digital ID that is kept secure."
"He said this is his vision for Web3.0, emphasizing that it is not Web3 which uses the Ethereum blockchain system and promises to be decentralized," the news outlet added. "Many cryptocurrency and metaverse companies wave the word Web3 around as the future of the internet. But Inrupt disagrees."
Bruce, the co-founder and CEO of Inrupt, said that "we're talking Web3.0 which is the real thing... not a marketing hijack if you like."
"Tim explained to me over dinner one night that the web as it's rolling out isn't the web we imagined," Bruce continued. "But we could get it to a place as long as we bumped it in the right way."
According to CNN, Inrupt's platform is being tested by the United Kingdom's National Health Service and by the government of Flanders, the Flemish-speaking northern region of Belgium. The latter intends to use pods to provide social services while allowing people to choose how to share their personal data. Berners-Lee said Flanders' 6.5 million citizens will be able to use the technology by the end of 2022.
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Mining Lawsuit in Guatemala Shows System Prioritizes Big Corporations Over People
Local resisters are calling for a different economic model--one that prioritizes clean water and soil, healthy communities, peace, dignity, and self-determination.
Dec 06, 2022
A Nevada-based mining firm is suing Guatemala for more than $400 million, the first suit of its kind for the impoverished Central American country.
Guatemala doesn't need mining projects or international agreements that uphold corporate impunity and greed.
The company complains that the Guatemalan government didn't do enough to protect its investments in the country. But that's news to my community and others who faced violent police repression when we nonviolently demonstrated to keep these mining operations from poisoning our health and water.
The firm, Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA), filed its case at a little-known branch of the World Bank called the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
The Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, which Guatemala entered into with the United States in 2006, enables U.S. corporations to sue governments in this forum not only for the alleged loss of company investments, but also for the loss of supposed future profits. Some 80 percent of the $400 million KCA claims to have lost is based on estimates of future earnings from exploration activities that it never carried out.
Investment tribunal lawsuits undermine the rule of law.
My recently published analysis of this case lays out how supranational arbitration cases like this, which are uniquely available to transnational companies through trade and investment agreements, ignore community resistance and the violence we face.
The option to simply sue governments provides a perverse disincentive for companies to respect the law--and encourages wild speculation on future lost profits even when investments fail. If the suit succeeds, it will also deprive Guatemalans of millions of dollars in scarce funds that could be much better used to attend to basic needs of the population, disasters provoked by the climate crisis, and to stem the flow of forced out-migration.
These suits show no regard for the concerns of the people most directly affected by company operations.
Our movement at La Puya has presented extensive evidence over the years of how KCA's gold project would lead to water depletion and contamination putting our health at risk. From the outset, the mine faced stiff opposition from our communities living near the project just north of Guatemala City. Since then, our communities have maintained a round-the-clock protest camp in front of the road to the mine site for over 10 years.
As a result, we have faced threats, targeted violence, legal persecution, police repression, and acts of intimidation. In fact, the project was only able to operate after harsh police repression against the movement cleared the way for equipment on several occasions, even injuring people. However, the gold mine only operated for two years, until the courts suspended the project in late 2015 over failure to adequately consult with us.
In response to KCA's claim, the Guatemalan government has argued that the company relied on government favors to obtain its environmental license. It cites communications between KCA President Daniel Kappes and then Director General of Mining Selvyn Morales in 2011, in which Kappes wrote, "I am much more comfortable that you are involved and can help us to keep the permitting process moving forward so that we can get the permits before politics intrudes too heavily." Shortly after this exchange, Morales left the government to work for a mining services company, which KCA immediately hired.
Guatemala built much of its legal defense on the documentation, arguments, and studies that we developed over years of struggle with support from allied technicians, lawyers, and organizations. For example, Guatemala's legal defense points to KCA's woefully deficient environmental impact study that even the government concedes should have never been approved. It also highlights the company's violation of environmental norms and its failure to obtain a construction license to build the mine.
The government's lawyers even called community members to testify before the arbitration tribunal.
The mining industry thought they could steamroll local opposition. But the government isn't much better.
The government's defense effectively legitimizes the reasons underpinning our decade-long struggle. However, although it uses our arguments and evidence to try to avoid paying the company, it has still not shown a willingness to respect our rights to decide over a project that so profoundly affects our land and lives.
In June of this year, the consultation process ordered by the Constitutional Court began under the management of the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM). So far, the government has demonstrated little interest in involving the most directly affected communities living in the immediate vicinity of the mine.
The ministry's actions run contrary to the government's own arguments presented to the arbitration tribunal, in which it underscores local discontent over the project. It criticizes KCA's for only ever achieving 6 percent credibility with the population as of 2014 when it entered into operation, according to a survey commissioned by KCA.
Rather than seek to consult our communities, the Guatemalan government alleges in the arbitration proceedings that the company tried to buy off key people to gain a local foothold: "They made direct payments to community and municipal leaders" and "paid people them to participate in capacity building sessions," the government says.
Furthermore, Guatemalan authorities criticize KCA's claim that it "consulted" with communities through interviews with municipal and village-level public councils, which cannot be presumed to be representative of Indigenous peoples.
Nonetheless, the Ministry of Energy and Mines is now repeating some similar tactics to exclude the Indigenous population closest to the mine from the consultation by focusing on communities located further from the site. Just as KCA did before, the government is favoring the participation of public agencies and municipal councils rather than directly affected people.
Arbitration encourages both states and corporations to marginalize opposition. We need a new model.
This further demonstrates the absurdity of the supranational arbitration system: companies and governments can argue whatever they like in arbitration proceedings, regardless of the facts on the ground.
KCA acted with impunity to obtain permits and never demonstrated any intention to respect Guatemalan law. The government, for its part, relied on the communities' arguments to build its defense and now seems to be turning its back on local residents again.
Meanwhile, it is our communities and the Guatemalan people more broadly that will pay a tremendous price if the arbitration tribunal orders Guatemala to pay KCA even a part of its claim or if the consultation is manipulated in order to restart its project.
Guatemala doesn't need mining projects or international agreements that uphold corporate impunity and greed. Rather, we must address the false notion that Guatemala will develop through natural resource extraction, which adversely affects the social fabric of communities and contributes to our further impoverishment.
The Peaceful Resistance La Puya, along with other organized communities in Guatemala, has reiterated for over 10 years that what's needed is a different economic model--one that prioritizes clean water and soil, healthy communities, peace, dignity, and self-determination.
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How Big Tech Is Undermining Abortion Rights
Pending "Digital Trade" rules could end up hurting reproductive freedom.
Aug 02, 2022
The Supreme Court's attack on long-standing privacy rights via the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade comes at the same moment corporate lobby groups are pushing to restrict data privacy protections through a slate of new international trade agreements. If Big Tech gets their way in these pacts, many who seek and provide abortion services will be at increased risk of surveillance and criminal prosecution.
Even before Dobbs, civil rights, consumer, labor and other civil society organizations were starting to sound the alarm about digital trade agreements' likely adverse effects on data privacy and discrimination.
Post-Dobbs, numerous politicians and government officials have promised to track down and prosecute people who receive, provide, fund or otherwise assist with abortion services--even those conducted across state lines. In this hostile climate, some pro-choice organizations are, by necessity, encouraging individuals to take prudential measures to protect their privacy. Nobody who supports reproductive justice wants online paper trails such as medical records, financial statements, search histories, messaging, geolocation and more to be used to build a legal case against those who receive or provide abortions.
At the same time, unequal access to technology and information, coupled with the flat-out unreasonableness of expecting people to engage in perfect "spy craft" both pre- and post-abortion, point to the urgent need for municipalities, states and the federal government to adopt binding measures that better protect privacy for the long haul.
For this reason, and many others, it is crucial that the "digital trade" provisions proposed for upcoming pacts like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity and more not be allowed to restrict governments' ability to enact new data privacy measures, including those related to the collection, storage, transmission, trade and sale of people's personal information.
In recent years, as the U.S. and the world have begun grappling with how to best regulate Big Tech in areas such as consumer privacy, gig economy worker protections, antitrust and more, corporations have been quietly pushing for the adoption of rules in trade agreements that lock-in retrograde domestic digital governance policies and restrict new forms of regulation.
Such digital trade provisions undermine our privacy and data security by prohibiting limits on data flows and rules on the location of computing facilities. Today, our every move on the internet and via our cell phones is increasingly tracked, stored, bought and sold--as are interactions with the growing "internet of things" that we might not even know are tracking us nor have any feasible way of opting out from. To ensure privacy is better protected moving forward, upcoming trade pacts must not restrict governments from establishing rules that set conditions on how individuals' personal data may be collected, where it can be transmitted and where and how it is stored.
Insofar as state governments and other bad actors eventually turn to private corporations for aid in data tracking and analysis--using AI-based surveillance tools already used for predictive policing, sentencing recommendations and other law enforcement functions--pending trade rules that enable corporations to hide their sources codes and algorithms as so-called "trade secrets" are also potentially dangerous.
Trade deals like President Biden's signature IPEF initiative must not be allowed to repurpose "trade secrets" rules, or establish any other rules, that limit the ability of regulators, researchers, civil society and the public to review the underlying technology used by state and local governments to surveil people seeking and providing abortions. Nor should trade pacts in any way help shield corporations for liability from discriminatory conduct and civil rights violations.
Even before Dobbs, civil rights, consumer, labor and other civil society organizations were starting to sound the alarm about digital trade agreements' likely adverse effects on data privacy and discrimination. The recent Supreme Court decision further highlights the dangers of allowing international trade rules to restrict privacy protections.
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Demanding Users Fight for Data and Privacy Protections, Wikipedia Co-Founder Calls for #SocialMediaStrike
Actions slated for July 4 and 5 would highlight call for user-controlled data and a more decentralized system
Jul 01, 2019
A Wikipedia co-founder called for a social media strike on July 4 and 5 to "demand that giant, manipulative corporations give us back control over our data, privacy, and user experience."
Larry Sanger outlined the proposal a post on his personal web site last week.
A large number of people taking part in the strike, Sanger wrote, would send a message of strong support for individually-owned data--which users can choose to keep private or public--and for social media services using a "use a common, universal set of standards and protocols."
Sanger also encouraged people to sign on to his "Declaration of Digital Independence."
That manifesto says, in part,
We declare that we have unalienable digital rights, rights that define how information that we individually own may or may not be treated by others, and that among these rights are free speech, privacy, and security. Since the proprietary, centralized architecture of the Internet at present has induced most of us to abandon these rights, however reluctantly or cynically, we ought to demand a new system that respects them properly. The difficulty and divisiveness of wholesale reform means that this task is not to be undertaken lightly. For years we have approved of and even celebrated enterprise as it has profited from our communication and labor without compensation to us. But it has become abundantly clear more recently that a callous, secretive, controlling, and exploitative animus guides the centralized networks of the internet and the corporations behind them.
The declaration also accuses big tech companies of requiring "agreement to terms of service that are impossible for ordinary users to understand, and which are objectionably vague in ways that permit them to legally defend their exploitative practices."
Corporations have "marketed private data to advertisers in ways that no one would specifically assent to," wrote Sanger, and have "data-mined user content and behavior in sophisticated and disturbing ways."
"The vast power wielded by social networks of the early 21st century, putting our digital rights in serious jeopardy," Sanger wrote, "demonstrates that we must engineer new--but old-fashioned--decentralized networks that make such clearly dangerous concentrations of power impossible."
Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002, and has gone on to criticize the site of being a "broken system" that "never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule."
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Trump Can't Escape Having Called Nazis "Very Fine People" by SOTU Spectacle
Trump’s assiduous attempts to get the Nazi vote by making endless racist slurs did not pass unnoticed among the various American minorities, including Jews
Feb 05, 2019
So this is the story of how Donald Trump tried to use misdirection at his State of the Union address to take the spotlight off his Neonazi tendencies, which underlie his hatred of African-Americans (against whom he was found to discriminate as a landlord), of Mexicans, of Muslims, and other peoples not coded as "white" in his warped little brain. Trump tried to appropriate the fight against the supremacist who killed Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, but the effort came across and calculating and staged.
Trump cares so little for minority rights that he actually said "Islam hates us" and urged a ban on all Muslim immigration to the US.
Trump cares so little for minority rights that he actually said "Islam hates us" and urged a ban on all Muslim immigration to the US.
Cambridge Analytica, the data mining firm founded by billionaire and part-time neo-fascist Robert Mercer, illicitly used 50 million voter profiles from Facebook on Trump's behalf. Cambridge Analytica also met with the Russians. Mercer was also behind building up white supremacist rag Breitbart, and appears, despite denials, to have been close to Steve Bannon, who was a vice president at Cambridge Analytica and the editor of Breitbart. Bannon, for a while White House chief strategist, has recently been in Europe urging French fascists to own their racism and boast of it, and praising Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose troops killed or wounded 300,000 American and British soldiers. That is what Trumpism, which Bannon championed, stands for.
Trump appointed Bannon to run his campaign after Paul Manafort was forced out over rumors that he took $12.7 in off the books money to lobby for pro-Russian Ukrainian pooh-bah Viktor Yanukovych, and Trump then made Bannon his chief White House strategist.
This point must be underlined. Bannon was Breitbart. He was supremacism. He was a Boston Irish Catholic reworking of whiteness to include northern European Catholics but to exclude Latin American ones. It was the ultimate revenge for white people having viewed the Irish who immigrated in the 19th century as "black."
Bannon praises Benito Mussolini, who is not as widely vilified in today's America as he should be. His armies slaughtered 330,000 Allied troops during World War II, including large numbers of Americans. Of 45,000 Italian Jews, 8,000 were delivered to Nazi death camps and a similar number were forced to flee abroad. Some $1 billion was stolen from them as a community.
I mean, Ezra Pound, the great poet who went insane in his old age, haunted by his paranoia about Jewish banking conspiracies, and did radio broadcasts for Mussolini- Ezra Pound was consigned to an insane asylum for holding views that have a family resemblance to Bannon's own. In contrast, Bannon is running around free in the wild.
And Trump made Bannon his chief strategist in the White House.
George C. Patton has turned in his grave so much he is digging a tunnel straight through to China.
Then in August of 2017, Neonazis showed up in the small college town of Charlottesville, Va., to intimidate that community with thuggish violence over their determination to take down a Confederate statue to a slaver. The Neonazis and various other horrid creatures had been emboldened by Trump's embrace of Bannon and Breitbart, of a New New Right wherein pampered and effete white suburbanites were finally allowed to play out their fantasies of racial superiority and to engage in berserker rage against the minorities who were keeping them down.
One of the targets of the Neonazis was the synagogue in Charlottesville. They chanted "Jews will not replace us."
This is a reference to their insane conspiracy theory that globalism is a plot of Jewish bankers who are making money by sending the jobs of the white working class to China and elsewhere, replacing American workers with Chinese or Mexican ones.
My friend Sam Seder explains:
Majority Report with Sam Seder: "White Men March & Chant: 'You Will Not Replace Us'"
The Neonazi thugs terrorized the whole town of Charlottesville, killing one counter-protester and beating others viciously. Less reported was the deliberate scare they tried to throw into Charlottesville Jews:
Newsy: "Jews in Charlottesville face anti-Semitism"
And when Trump was asked about the Neonazi riot, he said that among the marchers were "very fine people."
Then at last night's State of the Union address Trump tried to coopt the murder of 7 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the whole Holocaust for his political purposes.
But guess what. In an opinion poll, 72% of Jewish respondents said they hold that Trump is at least somewhat responsible for the synagogue massacre.
Trump's assiduous attempts to get the Nazi vote by making endless racist slurs did not pass unnoticed among the various American minorities, including Jews.
Trump isn't giving people orders to commit violence. But fringe violent racists clearly are taking encouragement from Trump's outrageous bigotry. White supremacists who bombed a mosque in Minnesota had also volunteered to help build Trump's wall. Trump delights in his MAGA crowds and his arch one-liners and in whipping people up.
His SOTU spectacle cannot cover up that he helped galvanize those Nazis who invaded Charlottesville.
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'Breathtaking and Terrifying': UN Food Relief Agency Partners With CIA-Funded Software Firm Palantir
Data privacy advocates decried the $45 million deal as "horribly irresponsible and potentially incredibly harmful."
Feb 05, 2019
The CIA-funded California software firm Palantir Technologies and the World Food Program (WFP) have announced a five-year $45 million partnership that data privacy and human rights advocates are describing as "breathtaking and terrifying" as well as "horribly irresponsible and potentially incredibly harmful."
"The recipients of WFP aid are already in extremely vulnerable situations; they should not be put at additional risk of harm or exploitation."
--Privacy International
The partnership, according to a joint statement released Tuesday, builds on a pilot project that allowed the United Nations agency to analyze aid decisions using a Palantir application that pulls together data on nutritional values, sourcing locations, delivery times, and food costs.
While WFP executive director David Beasley claimed that "our work with Palantir will save time and money so we can more effectively and efficiently feed 90 million people on any given day across the globe," critics raised alarm about the company's record and warned the deal threatens the rights of people already living in precarious conditions.
Nooooo..... https://t.co/At2bubw1Vm
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) February 6, 2019
"This data is highly sensitive, and it is essential that proper protections are put in place, to limit the data gathered, transferred, and processed," noted Privacy International. "The recipients of WFP aid are already in extremely vulnerable situations; they should not be put at additional risk of harm or exploitation."
WFP's chief information officer Enrica Porcari insisted at a press conference that personal information won't be at risk because "there is no data-sharing" with Palantir under the deal--but Privacy International warned that with its research, "we've seen examples of systems that are produced in agreements such as the one between WFP and Palantir increasing risks to the people the systems are aiming to benefit."
A humanitarian data analyst, who requested anonymity due to work relationships, told the news outlet IRIN: "WFP is jumping headlong into something they don't understand, without thinking through the consequences, and the U.N. has put no frameworks in place to regulate it."
Palantir was co-founded by billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel--a supporter of President Donald Trump--with seed money from the CIA's venture capital arm. It has, among other things, provided software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help the agency deport migrants.
"It is the height of irony that the very company that faced direct criticism in its role facilitating U.S. immigration authorities' human rights abuses is now promoting itself as trustworthy of working in humanitarian aid," a Privacy International spokesperson told IRIN.
Tom Fisher, a Privacy International researcher, added on Twitter: "The scale of this WFP/Palantir partnership... It's breathtaking, and terrifying."
Daniel Scarnecchia, a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's Signal Program on Human Security and Technology, pointed out in a series of tweets that the news "raises a fundamental question of why we collect data as a sector. What are our values, and to what ends are we seeking to make people legible, and to whom?"
Scarnecchia was also critical of WFP's decision to work with Palantir, and suggested the agreement could lay the groundwork for the data-mining firm to expand its footprint in the humanitarian aid sector.
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Democrats in Congress Unveil Ambitious Plan to Fix Our Election System
The new House Democratic majority will introduce H.R. 1, the most comprehensive democracy reform legislation seen this century
Jan 03, 2019
On the second day of the 116th Congress, the new House Democratic majority will introduce H.R. 1, the most comprehensive democracy reform legislation seen this century. It addresses voting rights and electoral procedures, campaign finance rules and loopholes, and seeks to institute higher ethical standards for federal officeholders and more.
One can look at the For The People Act as a wish list of inclusive, transparent and publicly accountable solutions and best practices that seek to come to grips with today's world of voting, election advocacy and voter engagement--or suppression. Or one can look at its dozens of focal points as a catalog of everything that has broken down in a system that vainly labels itself the world's greatest democracy.
"When they trust you on this issue, they trust you on other issues as well," said Rep. John Sarbanes, D-MD, chair of the House Democrats' Democracy Reform Task Force and a longtime public financing advocate, describing H.R. 1. "That confidence is what democracy is all about."
The bill's overall framing is to counter systemic corruption that blocks some citizens--but not others--from voting; or allows large donors to hide their identity while funding attacks they wouldn't publicly want to be associated with; or enables current and recent officeholders to personally profit from serving in the highest levels of the federal government.
"The anti-corruption stuff isn't new," said Miles Rapoport, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard Kennedy School, who previously led the government reform groups Common Cause and Demos. "People always say it's rigged. It's corrupt, etc. I think what's new now is people say our democracy itself, our elections themselves, are screwed up, rigged, incompetently run--one thing or another."
"What I am excited about is these things [specific anti-democratic facets and remedies] are having real resonance," Rapoport continued. "It's not just 'Drain the Swamp,' which everyone can say, right and left, and means different things to different people."
The bill is a compendium of 22 previously introduced political reform bills and some new provisions. Most of the reforms have been proposed by Democratic lawmakers to counter abuses pioneered or deployed this century by Republicans--whether extreme gerrymanders, voter suppression, or stealth financing--or rulings from the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that have deregulated campaigning.
"Throughout the last two years, we have heard people say they didn't just want to be part of a resistance, they wanted to insist on a set of values," Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN, one of the newly elected freshmen from 2018's blue wave, in a press conference about the bill late last year. "I think, for us, it's really important to remember that accessibility, transparency and the trust of the public is the cornerstone of our democracy... They didn't want to send us here to resist [President Trump] and only work on oversight. They want to make sure we are insisting on furthering a set of values."
The Reform Agenda
Broadly speaking, H.R. 1 has three main sections: voting, campaign finance and ethics. Many of these reforms are to counter barriers erected by the GOP in recent years following the Supreme Court's 2013 gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act.
The voting section seeks to remove barriers to participation by:
- Requiring every state to offer online voter registration;
- Requiring all states to automatically register every eligible voter;
- Allowing voter registration at more state and federal government offices;
- Allowing same-day registration during early voting and on Election Day;
- Preventing states from using sloppy data mining to purge voters from rolls;
- Preventing states from using returned mail as the basis to purge voters;
- Limiting who can challenge a voter's credentials at polling places;
- Outlawing distributing deceptive information about the process;
- Restoring voting rights to felons after serving their sentences.
It seeks to fortify the integrity of the voting and counting process by:
- Requiring all states use paper ballots where votes are counted by hand or scanners;
- Requiring provisional ballots will be counted--no matter where they are turned in;
- Requiring at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections;
- Requiring early voting locations be near public transportation;
- Preventing states from imposing restrictions on voting by mail;
- Making colleges and universities voter registration centers;
- Requiring the Post Office deliver mail-in ballots for free;
- Making Election Day a federal holiday;
- Paying for modernized voting systems.
It seeks to restore federal oversight of voting rights by:
- Affirming Congress's right to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which granted the Justice Department veto power over jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination;
- Affirming the federal government's power to protect Native American voting;
- Declaring that being an infrequent voter is insufficient ground to be purged.
The bill would also counter extreme partisan gerrymanders--which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to do in several recent major cases--by requiring states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts after the 2021 Census. Last fall, a handful of states passed ballot measures to create such commissions after seeing the GOP's domination of that process in 2011.
The bill's campaign finance reform sections are a mix of new disclosure requirements and procedural improvements to revive the presidential public financing system and expand public financing as an option in the states. Those provisions, which are designed to close current loopholes, include:
- Banning the use of shell companies that funnel foreign money into U.S. campaigns;
- Banning campaign contributions from corporations with significant foreign ownership;
- Requiring super PACs and other vehicles to disclose donors giving more than $10,000;
- Requiring large digital platforms to maintain a public archive of all political ads, and prevent foreigners from directly or indirectly buying ads;
- Calling for the IRS to create new rules for non-profit political spending;
- Requiring government contractors disclose their political spending;
- Requiring presidential inaugural committees disclose their spending.
The bill also seeks to restore and expand public financing of campaigns, where small donations are matched by public funds--a means of lessening the reliance on larger donations and special interests. It does this by:
- Asserting Citizens United was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court and Congress has authority to regulate campaign contributions and expenditures;
- Creating a six-to-one match for donations up to $200 to congressional and presidential candidates;
- Allowing lower-income candidates to use campaign funds for expenses like rent, childcare and elder services;
- Defining what is and isn't a "coordinated" expense among political allies.
The bill's ethics section calls for a "code of ethics" for the U.S. Supreme Court, spends additional money on policing activities by foreign agents in domestic campaigns, and expands who is required to register as a lobbyist. It seeks to prevent conflicts of interest by requiring presidential appointees to recuse themselves in issues where the executive branch or their spouses have a stake in the outcome.
There are other provisions targeting the executive branch, including:
- Barring payments from corporations to people entering government service;
- Barring former employees from being a federal contractor for two years;
- Barring ex-executive branch employees from lobbying former colleagues;
- Requiring the president and vice-president file financial disclosure reports;
- Reviving the oversight powers of the branch's Office of Government Ethics;
- Instituting rules barring personal enrichment or gifts to executive branch employees;
- Requiring the president and vice-president release their income tax returns.
A To-Do List or Catalog of Broken Government?
Longtime democracy reformers like Public Citizen's Craig Holman note that each of these focal points is itself a microcosm needing checks and balances.
"Some of the more significant reforms, to me, are elements that I helped write," he said Thursday. "For example, we would apply the conflict of interest code, 18 USC 208, to the White House, to the president in particular. And then enforce it by changing the Office of Government Ethics, which is the executive branch ethics agency, and make it the actual ethics cop. Currently, it's just an advisory body. It can't do anything. It can't make anyone do anything they don't want to. We've seen Trump just refuse to abide by the ethics rules, because OGE has no authority to make him do so. So we'd change OGE from an advisory agency to an actual ethics cop with the enforcement authority over the White House."
Holman points to other conflicts of interest that are as serious as they are unresolved.
"There's a provision that would require full disclosure and no personal use of funds that have been raised for the inauguration," he said. "As you may know, Trump is now under investigation for some $50 million missing from his inaugural financing."
Erin Chlopak, director of campaign finance strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, said H.R. 1 "on the campaign finance side really addresses a number of different issues in our current system. They include trying to bring in more people into the process through public financing programs, both at the congressional and presidential levels."
"It's addressing some of the disclosure loopholes that exist with our current system," she continued. "The current laws really don't address all of the advertising that's happening in the online space. The current regime was really created when most of the advertising was taking place on radio and TV. So this would incorporate the Honest Ads Act-type provisions to extend the requirements that exist for those other media to the digital space, and also require a public database for ads purchased on those platforms. So even when the ads become ephemeral and disappear, there would still be a place to locate them."
Chlopak also said the bill would outlaw the current game of hide-and-seek that many big donors play--anonymously funding campaigns but not lending their names to the effort.
"It would address the lack of disclosure issue created using super PACs and C4 and LLCs and other ways to essentially hide their identity by transferring money from one entity to another to avoid being disclosed as the original source of financing of a particular campaign activity," she said. "Another way this addresses current problems is post-Citizens United and other cases that led to the emergence of super PACs, the FEC has failed to clarify or to create any rules defining what it means to coordinate with a super PAC. So now we have these ostensibly independent organizations that exist solely to promote a single candidate. The new legislation would define what sorts of activities amount to coordination between a campaign and a super PAC."
Republican Resistance Expected
In short, H.R. 1 is designed to rebalance the rules governing the current world of election advocacy and voting. While it can be seen as a statement of best practices, or even a pro-democracy political platform, it attests to the depth of intentional dysfunctions that are imposed on the political system, culture of campaigns, and voting process by those who stand to gain money, power or influence by tilting the process.
None of the experts interviewed Thursday thought Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, would take up the House's massive political reform agenda. But they also expressed some optimism that the public was seeing the depths of the distortions undermining American democracy and a need for serious systemic remedies.
"Adopting all of these things addresses distinct problems," Chlopak said. "They work in tandem with each other to address flaws in the system. Broadly speaking, we think any of them independently would certainly be an improvement on what we currently have. But none of them [the various planks] independently address all of the problems that we are currently dealing with. We think that they are all important."
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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