Here’s who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster
Erin Snodgrass – March 26, 2024
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The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a container ship collided with it.
Several entities will likely be on the hook to foot the bill in the aftermath of the disaster.
The maritime insurance industry will be saddled with the highest costs.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed on Tuesday after a large container ship ran into it, leading to six presumed deaths and millions of dollars in possible damage.
It’s still too early to estimate the total economic impact of the disaster, but between the cost of rebuilding the decades-old bridge, compensating the victims’ families, and paying out damages for disruptions to the supply chain, the eventual cost of the disaster is expected to be significant.
Who will pay to rebuild the bridge?
President Joe Biden said on Tuesday the federal government should be responsible for paying to reconstruct the damaged Francis Scott Key Bridge.
“It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort,” Biden said.
The bridge was built in the 1970s for about $60 million, but the cost of rebuilding it could be 10 times its original price tag, an engineering expert told Sky News.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, named for Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner.WilliamSherman via Getty Images
Baltimore is among the busiest ports in the nation, seeing more than a million shipping containers pass through each year. The collapse — which closed the port to all maritime and most road traffic until further notice — is already beginning to wreak havoc on the supply chain.
The cost of building the bridge back fast enough to offset diversions as much as possible could saddle the government with a more than $600 million bill, David MacKenzie, chair of engineering and architecture consultancy COWIfonden, told Sky News.
Who will pay for damages to the ship and its cargo?
The container ship, the Dali, is owned by a Singapore-based firm. The ship’s charterer, Maersk, confirmed to Business Insider that vessel company Synergy Group operates the ship.
However, the companies with cargo aboard the Dali will ultimately be responsible for the ship’s damages and cargo costs.
The Dali was carrying 330 containers, which now must be re-routed, according to Ryan Petersen, CEO of supply chain logistics company Flexport, which had two containers on the ship.
An ancient maritime law known as “general average” dictates that companies with even a single container aboard a ship have to split the damages pro rata based on the number of containers, ensuring all the stakeholders benefiting from the voyage are splitting the risk, Petersen said.
Drone footage shows aftermath of the Dali container ship’s collision into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26, 2024.Anadolu Agency via Reuters
The principle dates back hundreds of years and was originally meant to ensure sailors on board a ship weren’t worried about specific cargo if a disaster required them to start throwing containers overboard, according to Petersen.
Who will pay for everything else?
The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry, according to media reports.
Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life.
The collapse could drive “one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,” John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.
He told the outlet that the loss of revenue from tolls while the bridge is being rebuilt will be expensive, as will any liability claims from deaths or injuries.
The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd., known as Britannia P&I Club, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Britannia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider but told FT it was “working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.”
Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover, sources familiar with the matter told Insurance Business.
Britannia itself is liable for the first $10 million in damages, both FT and Insurance Business reported. Whatever remains is dealt with by the wider mutual insurance group and Lloyd’s of London, a reinsurance market in the UK, according to FT.
Mumbai becomes Asian capital with most billionaires, bumping Shanghai: Report
Filip Timotija – March 27, 2024
The city of Mumbai has officially surpassed Shanghai as Asia’s capital with the most billionaires, according to a new Hurun Global Rich List 2024 report.
Mumbai, India’s financial powerhouse, now has 92 billionaires, closely edging out Beijing’s 91 and Shanghai with 87.
This year’s list marked Mumbai’s first time in the world’s top three, according to the report.
Globally, the Big Apple still leads the way. New York City has the most billionaires with 119. London was second with 97. Beijing, which was ranked first last year, dropped to fourth place.
China has the most billionaires out of any country with 814, although it lost 155 of them. The U.S. was second with 800 billionaires. India was third with 271.
“Wealth creation in China has gone through deep changes these last few years, with the wealth of billionaires from real estate and renewables down,” the research firm said in the report.
“Whilst as many as 40% of the Hurun Global Rich List from the high water mark two years ago have lost their billionaires status, China has added a 120 new faces to the list. Despite the large drop in the number of billionaires, China still has more known billionaires than the US.”
Zhong Shanshan, chair of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring, kept his spot as the richest person in China.
Globally, the number of billionaires increased — now at 3,279 billionaires, up 167 from last year, according to the report.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has helped generate new ultra-wealthy individuals.
“AI has been the major driver for wealth growth, generating over half of all the new wealth this year,” the research firm said. “The billionaires behind Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle and Meta have seen significant surges in their wealth as investors bet on the value generated by AI.”
India’s Income Inequality Is Now Worse Than Under British Rule, New Report Says
Astha Rajvanshi – March 27, 2024
A fisherman colony alongside commercial buildings in the Indian city of Mumbai, now Asia’s billionaire capital. Credit – Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg/Getty Images
A new study from the World Inequality Lab finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including the renowned French economist Thomas Piketty.
The current total number of billionaires in India is peaking at 271, with 94 new billionaires added in 2023 alone, according to Hurun Research Institute’s 2024 global rich list published Tuesday. That’s more new billionaires than in any country other than the U.S., with a collective wealth that amounts to nearly $1 trillion—or 7% of the world’s total wealth. A handful of Indian tycoons, such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, and Sajjan Jindal, are now mingling in the same circles as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, some of the world’s richest people.
“The Billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors write.
The observation is particularly stark when considering India is now hailed as an 8% GDP growth economy, according to Barclays Research, with some projecting that India is poised to surpass Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.
But the authors of the World Inequality Lab study reached this conclusion by tracking how much of India’s total income, as well as wealth, is held by the country’s top 1%. While income refers to the sum of earnings, interest on savings, investments and other sources, wealth (or net worth) is the total value of assets owned by an individual or group. The authors combined national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth to present the study’s findings.
For income, the economists looked at annual tax tabulations released by both the British and Indian governments since 1922. They found that even during the highest recorded period of inequality in India, which occurred during the inter-war colonial period from the 1930s until India’s independence in 1947, the top 1% held around 20 to 21% of the country’s national income. Today, the 1% holds 22.6% of the country’s income.
Similarly, the economists also tracked the dynamics of wealth inequality, beginning in 1961, when the Indian government first began conducting large-scale household surveys on wealth, debt and assets. By combining this research with information from the Forbes Billionaire Index, the authors found that India’s top 1% had access to a staggering 40.1% of national wealth.
Because the number of Indian billionaires shot up from one in 1991 to 162 in 2022, the total net wealth of these individuals over this period as a share of India’s net national income “boomed from under 1% in 1991 to a whopping 25% in 2022,” the authors said.
The report also found that the rise in inequality had been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. Over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government,” the report states. This, they say, was likely to “facilitate disproportionate influence” on society and government.
They added that average Indians, and not just the Indian elite, could still stand to gain from globalization if the government made more public investments in health, education, and nutrition. Moreover, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest Indian families in 2022-23 would result in 0.5% of national income in revenues, and “create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the authors argued.
Until the government makes such investments, however, the authors caution against the possibility of India’s slide toward plutocracy. The country was once a role model among post-colonial nations for upholding the integrity of various key institutions, the authors say, and they point out that even the standard of economic data in India to study inequality has declined recently.
“If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” the authors say.
It is an overcast, unseasonably warm morning on Wednesday, Nov. 6, and the world has woken up in shock as Donald Trump has emerged as the winner of the U.S. presidential election. America’s cities are once again full of mute, stunned liberals avoiding eye contact with one another on the morning commute, as the grim reality of what Trump might do with this power begins to set in. At his victory speech just after 2 a.m., when the networks called Wisconsin, and thus the election for him, Trump took the stage and declared, “Judgment Day is coming for America’s enemies, and no Marxist, Harvard leftist, gender-radical, illegal, or criminal thug in our great country will be safe come January.” And in some ways that bleak morning might represent the high point of the next four—or 40—years, given what Trump and his allies have in store for us.
This is a worst-case scenario. But it’s far from impossible. A Trump restoration is in the works—and it should feel like an existential threat to everyone who cares about liberal democracy and the incomplete but tangible social, racial, and economic progress that has been made since the New Deal era.
And yet, President Joe Biden’s manifest flaws are dangerously obscuring the scale of the threat of a second Trump term. There is no sense in denying it: Biden looks and sounds very old, and his speaking style, never particularly inspirational, has deteriorated to the point that he is a clear political liability. While he brought what passes for his A-game to the State of the Union, he will need to sustain that level of energy and coherence through an eight-month-long slog to the election to improve his chances of winning.
His decision to run for a second term has not only jeopardized his many achievements but put the very existence of U.S. democracy at much more serious risk. His administration’s staunch support of Israel, a defensible posture in the aftermath of the unconscionable Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, has become a genuinely baffling study in Biden’s inability to pivot or use America’s considerable leverage to do the right thing. The White House hasn’t settled on a winning strategy to address the lingering consequences of post-pandemic inflation, preferring to boast about the very real low unemployment numbers and robust GDP growth that simply have not moved the needle politically. And the Biden administration has remained curiously inert in the face of growing public frustration with the migrant crisis, preferring to blame Congress for refusing to fix it.
Nevertheless, allowing Donald Trump and his friends to plunge our country into a dystopian nightmare of authoritarianism will not help anyone in Gaza, in the grocery store, or at the border. It will worsen, not rectify, America’s history of writing blank checks to far-right governments in Israel. It will not lead to humane policy options for asylum-seekers but instead deliver them into the hands of morally bankrupt demagogues. Electing Trump would merely add more considerable suffering and trauma to theirs, and deprive us all of the ability to do anything about it.
Much has been made of the far-right Project 2025—a blueprint for radically restructuring and reorienting executive-branch policymaking, created by a network of right-wing think tanks and pressure groups—and its terrifying implications for U.S. democracy. But that document concerns only the threats Trump’s reelection poses to executive-branch agencies (and contains many unresolvable contradictions between dismantling and wielding the “administrative state”). Myriad public dangers emanating from the Trump and GOP legislative agenda, as well as the possibility of an even harder-right Supreme Court, are getting far less attention. That needs to change.
Let’s start with the court. That Sonia Sotomayor, who will turn 70 this year, is still sitting on the Supreme Court means that Democrats have yet to grasp how strategic retirements work in the new hyperpartisan political order. Unlike Democrats, who still seem to view a Supreme Court seat as a personal sinecure bestowed upon the righteous for a lifetime of achievement, the leaders of the far-right judicial movement understand the stakes and will place enormous pressure on the oldest Republican appointees to retire under a second Trump term. Clarence Thomas, who has been on the court since 1991, turns 76 this year, and Samuel Alito turns 74. Even John Roberts, who would turn 70 just after Trump’s inauguration, might go.
Think about it this way: If Republicans replace this trio with three early-middle-age ideologues like Amy Coney Barrett, the court will be in the GOP’s hands until everyone reading this article is dead or nearing retirement. If Trump gets to replace Sotomayor, who suffers from a health problem (Type 1 diabetes) that significantly reduces life expectancy, the far right would have an unassailable 7–2 majority with which to remake American society for a generation.
Very little that liberals or progressives care about is likely to survive another 20 or 30 years of reactionary control of the Supreme Court. Although much of the focus has justifiably been on Dobbs, and the looming threat to Obergefell, birth control, and IVF, a conservative supermajority would also likely gut a century of jurisprudence around taken-for-granted features of the American political and economic order, including bargaining rights for organized labor, the constitutionality of federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, and—it nearly goes without saying—the Affordable Care Act. We will effectively return to the early 20th century’s Lochner era, when the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down worker protections and rights for more than 30 years until FDR threatened it with court packing.
Sure, “Vote for Biden so the conservative supermajority can’t get younger and larger” is tough to fit on a bumper sticker, and no one in the party from Biden on down seems to have the stomach for the necessary escalation or a political vision for the court that can be communicated to voters. But unless you want to spend the rest of your lives watching Brett Kavanaugh and his friends upend your lives one right and benefit at a time, you have to hold the line here.
SCOTUS is, of course, also right now at the very center of Trump’s threat to American democracy. The court’s galling decision to repeatedly delay Trump’s trial for the 2020 post-election coup attempt and the Jan. 6 insurrection means that he probably won’t face justice until after he could conceivably win reelection. Most concerningly, this off-the-rails Supreme Court has bafflingly decided to take up the question of a president’s absolute immunity after Trump’s team argued that he should be free from any consequences of anything he did as president. Though cooler heads may in the end prevail over the Thomas-Alito wing, the fact that this is up for debate at all is incredibly alarming.
Much has been made of reports that Trump plans to deploy the military to quell post-election protests under the Insurrection Act. But a Trump unchained from any conceivable repercussions for his decisions in his office is a far worse threat than just that. Imagine for a moment what would happen if the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor: First of all, the effort to hold him accountable for trying to overthrow the American system of government would be over—instantly. Even more problematically, what conceivable limits would there be on a President Trump beginning in 2025 if SCOTUS has just ruled that his efforts to perpetrate a coup in broad daylight were well within the ambit of his presidential authority?
Who or what exactly would stop Trump from, say, creating a new security apparatus, abducting leftists and political enemies—as he has pledged—and dropping them out of helicopters over the Pacific like the Latin American dictators the far right still worshipsonce did? He could order the hits, then preemptively pardon the people who carry out his orders. That might seem melodramatic and far-fetched. But if the Supreme Court grants him immunity as president, no one could touch him for it legally. And if Republicans simultaneously controlled both chambers of Congress, there would be no impeachment option either. We’ve learned the hard way, far too many times, that a critical mass of elected Republicans will do Trump’s bidding no matter how grotesque his actions.
Maybe he’ll stop short of creating an American Stasi. But a president who is unbound by the law could order the DOJ to gin up investigations of leading journalists, prominent Democrats, professors, activists, and nonprofit leaders. Independent media outlets could be “acquired” by allies or buried under lawsuits and government harassment, as they have been in Trump’s favorite quasi-authoritarian regime in Hungary. Troops could be deployed to garrison blue cities, to not only find and deport immigrants but also chill and repress any dissident fervor that develops in the aftermath of his takeover. He would say he’s merely fighting crime, “illegals,” and election fraud, but Trump could conceivably place the cities he fears and despises, where his political adversaries wield most of their power and influence, under what amounts to an open-ended military occupation.
It gets worse. If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, he is highly likely to do so while bringing Republican control of the House and Senate with him. With Mitch McConnell out of the way as party leader, there is a very good chance that the new GOP Senate leadership will nuke the filibuster and govern with a simple majority. And that means that the toxic, vengeful politics of Texas and Florida will go national. Trump showed time and again during his first term that he was not just willing but eager to subcontract his domestic policymaking to the right-wing think tanks that write most state-level legislation for Republicans. National Republicans no longer pretend to have a written or informal platform, but Trump has a campaign website with policy plans called “Agenda 47” that can be read alongside Project 2025, as well as the actual policy record of state Republicans, to give us a pretty clear sense of what they have planned.
Trump continues to spin and deflect, but under unified Republican control, Congress could obviously try to pass a national abortion ban, and he would sign it. House Republicans are already gunning for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care, and electing a Republican trifecta this November will mean that, practically speaking, it could soon be either illegal or impossible to be transgender in the United States. The proof is in the hundreds of red-state anti-trans bills introduced and the dozens passed just since 2023, including Florida’s ban on gender reassignment surgery for minors, which also gives the state the right to kidnap children from parents who pursue gender-affirming care. Agenda 47 claims that the Trump administration will “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side-effects of ‘sex transitions’ in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.” As Masha Gessen once said, “Believe the autocrat.”
The enemies list doesn’t stop there. Trump’s promised militarized mass-deportation effort could be just the beginning of the crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration; we could also see an effort to end birthright citizenship, a move that, if it succeeds, would result in millions being suddenly stripped of their status as Americans. You will find this not in Project 2025 but in Trump’s online platform and the ugly words that frequently spill out of his mouth, like in May 2023, when he posted a video in which he argued, “I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.” Whether you believe the “going forward” part of that promise is up to you.
And get ready for a flurry of moves against the remaining redoubts of liberalism and democracy, particularly in secondary and higher education. Radicalized Republicans in Congress will try to bar federal loans and grants from being used at any universities with policies that support inclusion and diversity. This is not speculation: Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced a bill in the House last year to prevent public funds from being used at schools with DEI policies, based on existing Texas legislation.
They won’t stop there. Republicans would eventually try to block funding for schools with any kind of race or gender studies programs, as the state of Florida tried to do last year, and before long every syllabus in the country could be scrutinized for evidence of anti-patriotic crimes, until anyone who isn’t a right-wing ideologue is driven from the academy altogether. Trump’s Agenda 47 promises to establish a new national “American Academy” by “by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments”—i.e., strip-mining them for cash. A Trump administration, in other words, would effectively end American higher education as we know it.
That’s to say nothing of how, under GOP rule, every public school librarian and schoolteacher in America could suddenly find themselves under siege by cranks and culture warriors like their counterparts today in Texas and Florida. Agenda 47 threatens to create a new “credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” to eliminate teacher tenure, and to rescind funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” And like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Trump would surely relish the opportunity to sign legislation banning public school teachers from going on strike.
This radical agenda would surely be accompanied by an assault on Democrats’ ability to ever win another free and fair election. Congress would pursue a national voter ID law, a ban on ballot harvesting, harsh new restrictions on mail-in balloting, the elimination of same-day voter registration, and new ways to purge Democrats from voter lists—all plans that are already in the “American Confidence in Elections Act,” which has been introduced in the House. What’s left of the Voting Rights Act would be set aside or perhaps repealed. Maniacs exercising their “constitutional carry” rights would patrol outside polling stations across the country with AR-15s, and Democratic voters would be subjected to endless legal challenges. Any Democratic effort to retake a chamber of Congress in 2026 or win the presidency in 2028 would have to run through President Trump’s formidable election conspiracy machine, the army of aspiring petty autocrats who will be put in charge of the nation’s election machinery, and the elected leaders who will come under enormous pressure not to turn power over to Democrats should those Democrats win.
At that point, the vaunted separation of powers that some analysts still cling to as our last great hope won’t be of much help. With as many as seven Trump judges on the Supreme Court and a federal judiciary that will once again be stocked with his allies and true believers, even many of the brazenly unconstitutional orders and laws that are in the works will have a good chance of standing up in court. And all the while, demoralized Democrats will be pointing fingers at one another for their catastrophic loss, which—knowing Dems—could easily be pinned on Biden’s more progressive policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, whose historic climate provisions would also be reversed almost immediately. Efforts to highlight the contributions of his age and Gaza policies to this disaster would run straight into the same narrative-makers who pinned the disappointing scale of Democrats’ 2020 victory on progressive activists chanting “Defund the Police” rather than on Biden’s overcautious campaign and reliance on appealing to disenchanted Republicans.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the America that a second Trump term would create might be an almost unrecognizable realm of economic insecurity, political persecution, racist hatred, and gender tyranny, a Christian nationalist hellscape that would be virtually impossible to dismantle once it is put into place.
Joe Biden may not be the ideal man standing between us and this horror show, but he is a seasoned politician with a strong track record and a plenty competent team. (Plus, he’s all there is unless he decides to step aside.) He and every Democrat in the White House and Congress must do everything they can to shift the focus from Biden’s age and unpopularity to Trump’s very public laundry list of malevolent plans, and national media organizations must continue to do the relatively easy work of telling readers and viewers about Trump’s reactionary agenda. Readers may be completely burned out on learning about Trump’s crimes, but the alternative—that Trump gets into office and perpetrates more of them—is truly unthinkable.
Column: Trump wants to round up over a million undocumented migrants from California. Here’s how he might do it
Doyle McManus – March 25, 2024
Former President Trump speaks near a section of border wall in Texas in 2021. His plans for a prospective second term include using National Guard troops in mass deportation operations to seize undocumented migrants, transport them to camps in Texas and expel them. (Associated Press )
Former President Trump has focused relentlessly on illegal immigration as a centerpiece of his campaign for the White House, just as when he first ran in 2016.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he has said of undocumented migrants, using language redolent of the racist doctrines of Adolf Hitler.
He promises to launch “the biggest domestic deportation campaign in American history” on Day One of his new presidency.
His chief immigration advisor, Santa Monica-born Stephen Miller, has spelled out what that would mean: Trump would assemble “a giant force” including National Guard troops to seize undocumented migrants, transport them to camps in Texas and expel them.
“A very conservative estimate would say about 10 million,” Miller told pro-Trump talk show host Charlie Kirk.
If “unfriendly states” — like California — don’t want to cooperate, Miller said, Trump could order Guard units from red states like Texas to cross their borders to enforce the law.
The operation would be “as daring and ambitious … as building the Panama Canal,” Miller promised.
That’s a pretty bloodless way to describe a process that would uproot thousands of families, separate children from their parents and disrupt communities. But before we get to that, a preliminary question:
If he wins in November, could Trump really do that?
From a legal standpoint, the answer is yes.
If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and declares that the National Guard is needed to enforce federal immigration law, he could send Texas troops into California whether Gov. Gavin Newsom agrees or not, legal scholars said.
“We normally don’t want the military enforcing the law inside the country; law enforcement is supposed to be provided by police forces that are local — and locally accountable,” said William Banks, an emeritus professor of law at Syracuse University. “But the Insurrection Act gives the president sweeping authority. You could drive a lot of trucks through that law.”
Newsom would presumably file a lawsuit against Trump to try to block the move, but it would almost certainly fail.
“No state has ever sued successfully to stop a deployment of the Guard under the Insurrection Act,” warned Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
There are also practical concerns. Most National Guard units are neither trained nor equipped for law enforcement missions.
“Tracking down undocumented migrants is complicated and time-consuming,” Nunn noted. “You need people who know how to do it, like ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents.
“The Guard would resist that kind of mission mightily,” added Banks. “They hate this kind of stuff. They would be better suited to patrol the border — to stand next to the wall, the fence or the river and discourage people from coming across.”
So if Trump listens to his generals — not a sure thing — he’d be more likely to use Guard units to bolster weak spots on the border and manage those newly built transit camps for deportees.
That would free up ICE agents for raids on Central Valley farms and Los Angeles sweatshops — which is what immigration agents did in earlier crackdowns, including the offensively named Operation Wetback, which expelled more than a million Mexican migrants (and some U.S. citizens) in 1954.
So legally, there may not be that much California can do. But the fallout in a state home to an estimated 1.9 million undocumented people — roughly 5% of the population — would be difficult to imagine.
The human impact of uprooting most or all of these California residents would be gigantic. Many undocumented migrants are members of families that include legal residents and U.S. citizens, including children.
Many are deeply rooted in their communities; more than two-thirds have lived in the state longer than 10 years, according to one estimate.
“When you harm the undocumented, you harm U.S. citizens too,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles.
“I’ve seen families devastated by the deportation of their loved ones. I’ve seen families, when the father is deported, go right into economic ruin,” Salas said. “The trauma for children, especially small children, is enormous.”
The economic impact of mass deportations would be huge, too. An estimated 1.5 million California workers, more than 7% of the state’s workforce, are undocumented. About half work in agriculture, construction, hospitality and retail, industries that already suffer from severe labor shortages.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said this month that the growth of immigrants in the workforce had strengthened economic growth. “It’s just arithmetic,” said Powell, a Trump appointee. “If you add a couple of million people to an economy … there will be more output.” Abruptly subtracting a million or more would have the opposite effect.
Trump advisors aren’t planning to stop at removing undocumented people from the country.
Miller wants to go after some people in the country legally too.
He has proposed expanding the criteria for deportation to include people with valid visas “whose views, attitudes and beliefs make them ineligible to stay” in the eyes of the new Trump administration.
“The obvious example here would be all of the Hamas supporters who are rallying across the country,” he said.
An immigration task force organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation and led by a former Trump administration official proposed blocking Federal Emergency Management Agency grants to state and local agencies that refuse to cooperate with ICE enforcement operations, a standard that would presumably disqualify most or all California agencies.
The task force also proposed denying federal loans and grants to students at universities that allow undocumented migrants to pay in-state tuition, a rule that would affect UC and the Cal State systems.
It adds up to a recipe for a major collision with California, the state most out of step with Trump’s determination to rid the country of undocumented migrants.
None of this constitutes a defense of the Biden administration’s policies, which have failed to deter thousands of migrants from crossing the border and applying for asylum on often-dubious grounds.
But it’s worth remembering that only a few weeks ago, Trump ordered Republicans in Congress to kill a bipartisan bill that would have increased funding for immigration enforcement and raised the bar for asylum claims — because, as he admitted, he didn’t want to allow President Biden to appear as if he was fixing the problem.
Taliban leader says women will be stoned to death in public
Akhtar Makoii – March 25, 2024
The Taliban has quickly returned to harsh public punishments in Afghanistan – Ebrahim Noroozi/AP
The Taliban’s Supreme Leader has vowed to start stoning women to death in public as he declared the fight against Western democracy will continue.
“You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” said Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada in a voice message, aired on state television over the weekend, addressing Western officials.
“But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public,” he declared in his harshest comments since taking over Kabul in August 2021.
“These are all against your democracy but we will continue doing it. We both say we defend human rights – we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”
Afghanistan’s state TV, now under Taliban control, broadcasts voice messages purporting to be from Akhundzada, who has never been seen in public aside from a few old portraits.
He is believed to be based in southern Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban.
Akhundzada has never been seen in public – Xinhua/Shutterstock
Despite promising a more moderate government, the Taliban quickly returned to harsh public punishments like public executions and floggings, similar to those from their previous rule in the late 1990s.
The United Nations has strongly criticised the Taliban and has called on the country’s rulers to halt such practices.
In his voice message, Akhundzada said that the women’s rights that the international community had been advocating for were against the Taliban’s harsh interpretation of Islamic Sharia.
“Do women want the rights that Westerners are talking about? They are against Sharia and clerics’ opinions, the clerics who toppled Western democracy,” he said.
“I told the Mujahedin that we tell the Westerners that we fought against you for 20 years and we will fight 20 and even more years against you,” he said, emphasising the need for resilience in opposing women’s rights among Taliban foot soldiers.
“It did not finish [when you left]. It does not mean we would now just sit and drink tea. We will bring Sharia to this land,” he added. “It did finish after we took over Kabul. No, we will now bring Sharia into action.”
Women ‘living in prison’
His remarks have incited outrage among Afghans, with some calling on the international community to increase pressure on the Taliban.
“The money that they receive from the international community as humanitarian aid is just feeding them against women,” Tala, a former civil servant, told The Telegraph from the capital Kabul.
“As a woman, I don’t feel safe and secure in Afghanistan. Each morning starts with a barrage of notices and orders imposing restrictions and stringent rules on women, stripping away even the smallest joys and extinguishing hope for a brighter future,” she added.
“We, the women, are living in prison,” Tala said, “And the Taliban are making it smaller for us every passing day.”
Brazilian police launch investigation into Bolsonaro’s 2-night sleepover at Hungarian embassy
Mauricio Savarese – March 25, 2024
FILE – Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro prepares to speak to the press in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, June 30, 2023, the day that judges ruled him ineligible to run for any political office again until 2030 after concluding that he abused his power and cast unfounded doubts on the country’s electronic voting system. According to a Federal Police indictment unveiled Tuesday, March 19, 2024, Bolsonaro turned to an aide-de-camp and asked him to insert false data into the public health system to make it appear as though he and his daughter had received the COVID-19 vaccine, in order to have the necessary vaccination certificate required by U.S. authorities for their 2023 trip to Florida. (AP Photo/Thomas Santos, File)
SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s Federal Police on Monday launched an investigation into former President Jair Bolsonaro‘s two-night stay last month at the Hungarian embassy in Brasilia, amid widespread speculation from his opponents that he may have been attempting to evade arrest.
A Federal Police source with knowledge of the investigation confirmed to The Associated Press that it was undertaken in response to a report from The New York Times, which featured security camera video of the Hungarian ambassador welcoming Bolsonaro on Feb. 12 and footage of Bolsonaro from the rest of his stay. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one of the leaders of a global far-right movement, is a key international ally of his.
The visit took place just days after Federal Police seized Bolsonaro’s Brazilian and Italian passports and raided the homes of his top aides as part of a probe into whether they plotted to ignore 2022 election results and stage an uprising to keep the defeated leader in power.
Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing regarding this investigation, and multiple others targeting him.
Were the Federal Police to obtain an arrest warrant for the former president, officers would not have jurisdiction to enter the Hungarian embassy due to diplomatic conventions restricting access.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers said in a statement on Monday that there was nothing amiss about his embassy stay.
“In the days he was at the Hungarian embassy, by invitation, the former Brazilian president spoke to countless authorities from the friendly country for updates on the political scenarios of both nations,” his lawyers said in the statement. “Any other interpretations … constitute an evidently fictional work, with no connection to the reality of the facts.”
Speaking at his party’s headquarters in Sao Paulo, Bolsonaro told supporters he gets many calls from Orbán to discuss politics.
“To this day I have a relationship with some heads of state around the world,” Bolsonaro said. “If I had my passport, I would have traveled to Israel.”
Brazil’s foreign ministry said in a short statement that it had summoned Hungary’s ambassador Miklos Halmai to explain why Bolsonaro was his guest at the embassy.
Bolsonaro flew to the U.S. in the final days of his term, in December 2022, just days before his supporters stormed the capital in a failed bid to oust President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from power. He remained in South Florida for three months.
Some of Bolsonaro’s political rivals seized on the news Monday to call for his arrest, alleging that he once again is signaling plans to escape.
“These images just reinforce that Bolsonaro is a confessed fugitive,” Alexandre Padilha, Lula’s minister of institutional relations, told reporters in Brasilia, citing Bolsonaro’s stint in the U.S. last year. “But what the courts and the Federal Police will do with these images (published by The New York Times) isn’t for me to say.”
Augusto de Arruda Botelho, a criminal lawyer who has been an outspoken critic of the former president, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “Bolsonaro’s act of hiding in the embassy is a classic motive for decreeing preventive detention.”
“It is one of those situations used as an example in books and classrooms,” he added.
Former Hungarian insider releases audio he says is proof of corruption in embattled Orbán government
Justin Spike – March 26, 2024
Former Hungarian government insider Peter Magyar arrives at Public Prosecutor’s office in Budapest, Hungary on Tuesday March 26, 2024. Magyar published an audio recording on Tuesday that he says is proof of official misconduct within high levels of the government of populist Minister Viktor Orbán. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)
Former Hungarian government insider Peter Magyar arrives at Public Prosecutor’s office in Budapest, Hungary on Tuesday March 26, 2024. Magyar published an audio recording on Tuesday that he says is proof of official misconduct within high levels of the government of populist Minister Viktor Orbán. (AP Photo/Denes Erdos)ASSOCIATED PRESSMore
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — A former Hungarian government insider turned oppositionist released an audio recording on Tuesday that he says is proof that top officials conspired to cover up corruption, the latest twist in a scandal that’s shaken Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s domination of the country’s politics.
The country’s largest protests in years erupted in early February, when it was revealed that the president had issued a pardon to a man imprisoned for covering up a string of child sexual abuse by the director of a state-run orphanage.
Close Orbán allies, including the president and Justice Minister Judit Varga, were forced to resign in the face of public outrage.
The latest allegations come from Varga’s ex-husband, Peter Magyar, a former political insider who says he has turned whistleblower to reveal the extent of the scandal.
He published a recording on Facebook and YouTube on Tuesday morning featuring Varga’s voice describing how other government officials caused evidence to be removed from court records to cover up their roles in corrupt business dealings.
“They suggested to the prosecutors what should be removed,” Varga says in the recording, which Magyar says he made during a conversation in the former couple’s apartment.
He gave the tape to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Budapest Tuesday morning to be used as evidence.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Varga accused Magyar of domestic violence during their marriage and claimed she had made the statements under duress.
“I said what he wanted to hear so I could get away as soon as possible. In a situation like this, any person can say things they don’t mean in a state of intimidation,” Varga wrote. Magyar later denied the claims in a separate post on Facebook.
Once a senior but little-known member of Orbán’s political circle, Magyar shot to prominence when he gave an interview in February to popular YouTube channel Partizan, where he accused Orbán’s government of widespread corruption and using smear campaigns to discredit its opponents.
On March 15, he addressed a crowd of tens of thousands in Budapest, where he announced plans to form a new political party to challenge Fidesz’s 14-year grip on power as an alternative to Hungary’s fragmented opposition.
The scandal caused an unprecedented political crisis within Orbán’s government, which has led Hungary since 2010. Magyar’s followers hope his position as a former insider can help to disrupt Hungary’s political system, which many see as a deeply entrenched autocracy.
The government has dismissed him as an opportunist seeking to forge a new career after his divorce with Varga and his loss of positions in several state companies. But Magyar’s rise has compounded political headaches for Orbán that have included the resignation of members of his government and a painful economic crisis.
Magyar has railed against official corruption in Hungary, accusing Orbán of overseeing a nepotistic system of oligarchs that enrich themselves through unfairly awarded government contracts.
He has particularly targeted Antal Rogan, a close Orbán ally who is responsible for the government’s communications as well as the country’s secret services. The recording released Tuesday purports to show that Rogan led the effort to alter evidence.
Varga served as Hungary’s Justice Minister until February when she resigned amid political scandal after it was revealed that the then-president, Katalin Novák, issued a pardon to a convicted accomplice in a case of child sexual abuse.
Wealthy Corporations Are Paying Their CEOs More Than They Pay in Taxes
Tesla, Ford, Netflix and T-Mobile are among scores of profitable U.S. firms that pay their top executives more than they pay in federal taxes. It’s a system that rewards the super rich and punishes the rest of us.
Sarah Anderson, William Rice and Zachary Tashman – March 26, 2024
Elon Musk is very happy about the current tax structure—it’s making him incredibly rich.(GETTY IMAGES)
In his State of the Union address, President Biden called out “massive executive pay” and vowed to “make big corporations and the very wealthy finally pay their share” of taxes.
Corporate tax dodging and CEO pay have gotten so out of control that many major U.S. companies are paying their top executives more than they’re paying the American government.
Tesla is perhaps the most dramatic example. Over the period from 2018 to 2022, the electric car maker raked in $4.4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, already among the incredibly wealthy, saw his fortune skyrocket and became one of the world’s richest men with an estimated net worth of more than $190 billion.
When it comes to fleecing taxpayers while overpaying executives, Tesla is hardly alone. A new report we co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness analyzes executive pay data for some of the country’s most notorious corporate tax dodgers.
What did we find? In addition to Tesla, 34 other large and profitable U.S. firms — including household names like Ford, Netflix and T-Mobile — paid less in federal income taxes between 2018 and 2022 than they paid their top five executives.
Another 29 profitable corporations paid their top executives more than they paid in taxes in at least two of the five years of the study period.
One company on our list stands out for the infamous role its executives played in the 2008 financial crisis: American International Group (AIG). Back then, the insurance giant ignited a firestorm by pocketing a more than $180 billion taxpayer bailout and then announcing plans to hand out $165 million in bonuses to the very same executives responsible for pushing the company — and the nation — to the brink of collapse.
Today, AIG is playing the same greedy game of overpaying its top brass and sticking taxpayers with the bill. Between 2018 and 2022, the company paid its top five executives more than it paid in federal income taxes, despite collecting $17.7 billion in profits. In 2022, CEO Peter Zaffino alone made more than $75 million.
Lavish executive compensation packages and skimpy corporate tax payments are not unrelated. Executives have a huge personal incentive to hire armies of lobbyists to push for corporate tax cuts because the windfalls from these cuts often wind up in their own pockets.
The 2017 Republican tax law slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and failed to close loopholes that whittle down IRS bills even further. As a result, many large, profitable corporations ended up paying no federal taxes at all.
Over the following year, corporations took the savings from those tax cuts and spent a record-breaking $1 trillion on stock buybacks, a financial maneuver that artificially inflates the value of executives’ stock-based pay.
Wealthy executives became even wealthier while the nation lost billions of dollars in corporate revenue that could have been used to lower costs and improve services for ordinary people (not to mention healthcare, housing and other vital areas). Until this self-reinforcing cycle is broken, we’ll have a corporate tax and compensation system that works for top executives — and no one else.
What can we do to break this cycle?
Congress can tackle the entwined problems of inadequate corporate tax payments and excess executive pay on several fronts. Raising the corporate tax rate to 28% (just halfway back to Obama-era levels) would generate $1.3 trillion in new revenue over the next decade.
Congress can also close loopholes and eliminate wasteful tax breaks, for instance by removing the incentives for American firms to shift profits and production offshore. Both of these proposals have been pushed by the White House.
Policymakers also have a wealth of tools to curb excessive executive pay, from tax and contracting reforms to stronger regulations to rein in stock buybacks and banker bonuses.
Under our current system corporations are rewarding a handful of top executives more than they are contributing to the cost of public services needed for our economy to thrive. That needs to change, now.
This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
SARAH ANDERSON directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.
WILLIAM RICE is a senior writer at Americans for Tax Fairness.
ZACHARY TASHMAN is a Senior Research and Policy Associate at Americans for Tax Fairness.
Ukraine ramps up spending on homemade weapons to help repel Russia
Hanna Arhirova – March 25, 2024
A worker assembles mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A mortar shell on a lathe at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers check 82mm mortars at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers weld reinforced steel for artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer installs components in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer assembles parts on a combat drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Monday, February 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A worker stores mortar shells at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers moving by crane an armored artillery vehicle hood at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Armored vehicles are worked on at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)An engineer assembles an antenna for guiding an exploding drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Saturday, February 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A sea drone cruises on the water during a presentation by Ukraine’s Security Service in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)Engineers install components on exploding drones in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Exploding drones are ready to be shipped to the battlefield in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)A worker walks past artillery vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Engineers install antennas on a land drone in Kyiv region, Ukraine, on Wednesday, February 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Workers weld reinforced steel for armored vehicles at a factory in Ukraine, on Friday, December 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine needs any edge it can get to repel Russia from its territory. One emerging bright spot is its small but fast-growing defense industry, which the government is flooding with money in hopes that a surge of homemade weapons and ammunition can help turn the tide.
The Ukrainian government budgeted nearly $1.4 billion in 2024 to buy and develop weapons at home — 20 times more than before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
And in another major shift, a huge portion of weapons are now being bought from privately owned factories. They are sprouting up across the country and rapidly taking over an industry that had been dominated by state-owned companies.
A privately owned mortar factory that launched in western Ukraine last year is making roughly 20,000 shells a month. “I feel that we are bringing our country closer to victory,” said Anatolli Kuzmin, the factory’s 64-year-old owner, who used to make farm equipment and fled his home in southern Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.
Yet like many aspects of Ukraine’s war apparatus, its defense sector has been constrained by a lack of money and manpower – and, according to executives and generals, too much government red tape. A more robust private sector could help root out inefficiencies and enable factories to churn out weapons and ammunition even faster.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Russia controls nearly a quarter of Ukraine and has gained momentum along the 1,000 kilometer (620 mile) front line by showing a willingness to expend large numbers of troops to make even the smallest of advances. Ukrainian troops regularly find themselves outmanned and outgunned, and this has contributed to falling morale.
“You need a mortar not in three years, you need it now, preferably yesterday,” said Taras Chmut, director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, an organization that has raised more than $260 million over the past decade to equip Ukrainian troops with machine guns, armored vehicles and more.
WARTIME ENTREPRENEURS
Kuzmin, the owner of the mortar factory, fled the southern city of Melitopol in 2022 after Russia invaded and seized his factory that mostly made spare parts for farm equipment. He had begun developing a prototype for mortar shells shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when it illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula.
Kuzmin took over a sprawling warehouse in western Ukraine last winter. His long-term goals include boosting production to 100,000 shells per month and developing engines and explosives for drones.
He is just one of many entrepreneurs transforming Ukraine’s weapons industry, which was dominated by state-owned enterprises after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Today, about 80 percent of the defense industry is in private hands — a mirror image of where things stood a year ago and a stark contrast with Russia’s state-controlled defense industry.
Each newly made projectile is wrapped in craft paper and carefully packed into wooden crates to be shipped to Romania or Bulgaria, where are loaded with explosives. Several weeks later, they’re shipped back and sent to the front.
“Our dream is to establish a plant for explosives,” said Kuzmin, who is seeking a partner to make that happen.
OBSTACLES TO GROWTH
Ukraine’s surge in military spending has occurred against a backdrop of $60 billion in U.S. aid being held up by Congress and with European countries struggling to deliver enough ammunition.
As impressive as Ukraine’s defense sector transformation has been, the country stands no chance of defeating Russia without massive support from the West, said Trevor Taylor, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
“Ukraine is not capable of producing all the munitions that it needs for this fight,” Taylor said. “The hold up of $60 billion of American help is really proving to be a significant hindrance.”
Russia is also pumping more money into its defense industry, whose growth has helped buffer its economy from the full brunt of Western sanctions. The country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, recently boasted of huge increases in the manufacture of tanks, drones and ammunition.
“The entire country has risen and is working for our victory,” he said.
Compared with last year, Ukraine’s output of mortar shells is about 40 times higher and its production of ammunition for artillery has nearly tripled, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries. There has also been a boom in drone startups, with the government committing roughly $1 billion on the technology — on top of its defense budget.
“We now produce in a month what we used to produce in a year,” said Vladislav Belbas, the director general of Ukrainian Armor, which makes a wide array of military vehicles.
For the Ukrainian army’s 28th brigade, which is fighting near Bakhmut, delays in foreign weapon supplies haven’t yet posed any problems for troops “because we are able to cover our need from our own domestic production,” said Major Artem Kholodkevych.
Still, domestic weapons factories face a range of challenges — from keeping up with changing needs of battlefield commanders, to their own vulnerability to long-range Russian missile strikes.
But perhaps the greatest immediate hindrance is a lack of manpower.
Yaroslav Dzera, who manages one of Ukrainian Armor’s factories, said he struggles to recruit and keep qualified workers, not least because many of them have been mobilized to fight.
CUTTING THROUGH RED TAPE
Weapons companies say another roadblock to growth is bureaucracy.
The government has tried to become more efficient since the war began, including by making its process for awarding contracts more transparent. But officials say the country has a long way to go.
Shortly before he was replaced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s former top general, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, highlighted the problem in an essay he wrote for CNN, saying Ukraine’s defense sector remained “hamstrung” by too many regulations and a lack of competition.
In spite of the challenges, one success story has been Ukraine’s drone industry. Ukrainian-made sea drones have proven to be an effective weapon against the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.
There are around 200 companies in Ukraine now focused on drones and output has soared — with 50 times more deliveries in December compared with a year earlier, according to Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s minister of digital transformation.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a standoff over whose got better drones or missiles, said Serhii Pashynskyi, head of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries trade group.
“We have a war of only two resources with Russia — manpower and money,” he said. “And if we learn to use these two basic resources, we will win. If not, we will have big problems.”
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Associated Press reporter Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.
