Global insurance losses from extreme weather fueled by climate change topped $100 billion in 2021, according to a new report, the fourth time that threshold has been crossed in the last five years.
“The top ten most expensive events financially all cost over 1.5 billion dollars of damage with Hurricane Ida in the U.S. topping the list at $65 billion,” stated a report released Monday by the British nonprofit Christian Aid. “The floods in Europe came second at $43 billion.”
Along with Hurricane Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on Aug. 29 before cutting a path of destruction across much of the eastern United States, the July floods that struck much of Western Europe in July resulted in $43 billion in insurance losses. The Texas winter storm in February that disabled much of the state’s electrical grid caused $23 billion in losses, while July’s catastrophic flooding in China’s Henan province accounted for $17.6 billion in losses. Rounding out the five-biggest extreme weather insurance losses of 2021 was the flooding that resulted from record-setting rainfall in British Columbia, Canada, in November that tallied $7.5 billion in losses.
The remnants of Hurricane Ida brought torrential rain and flooding to Passaic, N.J., and the surrounding area in September. (Thomas P. Costello/USA Today)
Climate scientists have linked the rising intensity of hurricanes and speed at which they develop to warmer ocean and air temperatures caused by climate change. Research has shown that climate change is destabilizing the jet stream, unleashing polar vortexes like the one that hit Texas. Studies have also shown that for every degree Celsius of warming, the planet’s atmosphere holds an additional 7 percent more moisture, making extreme rainfall events more likely.
In its own analysis released earlier this month, Swiss Re, an insurance firm based in Zurich, noted that massive extreme weather losses have become commonplace.
“In 2021, insured losses from natural disasters again exceeded the previous ten-year average, continuing the trend of an annual 5–6% rise in losses seen in recent decades. It seems to have become the norm that at least one secondary peril event such as a severe flooding, winter storm or wildfire, each year results in losses of more than USD 10 billion,” Martin Bertogg, an executive at Swiss Re, said in a statement. “At the same time, Hurricane Ida is a stark reminder of the threat and loss potential of peak perils. Just one such event hitting densely populated areas can strongly impact the annual losses.”
A flooded road in Zhengzhou, China, July 2021. (Aly Song/Reuters)
In 2021, extreme weather events once again struck densely populated areas with alarming frequency. Those effects will continue as humankind continues to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to creep higher each year, scientists warn.
As a result, future annual insurance losses exceeding $100 billion are all but guaranteed if the world continues on its current warming trajectory, the Christian Aid report warns.
“Unless the world acts rapidly to cut emissions these kinds of disasters are likely to worsen. Steve Bowen, meteorologist and head of catastrophe insight at insurers Aon has noted that 2021 is expected to be the sixth time global natural catastrophes have crossed the $100 billion insured loss threshold,” the report stated. “All six have happened since 2011 and 2021 will be the fourth in five years.”
Virginia family gets keys to Habitat for Humanity’s first 3D-printed home in the US
By Sara Smart, CNN December 27, 2021
(CNN)One Virginia family received the keys to their new 3D-printed home in time for Christmas. The home is Habitat for Humanity’s first 3D-printed home in the nation, according to a Habitat news release. Janet V. Green, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg, told CNN it partnered with Alquist, a 3D printing company, earlier this year to begin the process. Alquist’s crew printed the house.
The technology allowed the home to be built in just 12 hours, which saves about four weeks of construction time for a typical home.
April Stringfield purchased the home through the Habitat Homebuyer Program. She will move in with her 13-year-old son just in time for the holidays. “My son and I are so thankful,” Stringfield said in a live feed streamed on Habitat’s Facebook page. “I always wanted to be a homeowner. It’s like a dream come true.”The concrete exterior of the new Habitat for Humanity 3D printed house. To purchase the home, Stringfield logged hundreds of hours of sweat equity, Green told CNN, which is one of the requirements for homebuyers through the program. “Every Habitat affiliate in the nation and worldwide sells home to partner families who have low to moderate incomes,” Green said. “They must have and maintain good credit and be willing to partner with us. “”I’m excited to make new memories in Williamsburg and especially in a house, a home,” Stringfield told CNN affiliate WTKR. “Some place I can call home and give my son that backyard that he can play in and also for my puppy to run around the yard.”Janet V. Green, right, welcomes April Stringfield, left, to her new home. The concrete used in the house’s 3D construction has many long-term benefits, such as the ability to retain temperature and withstand natural disasters, like tornadoes and hurricanes. Stringfield’s home also includes a personal 3D printer that will allow her to reprint anything she may need, “everything from electrical outlet to trim to cabinet knobs,” Green told CNN.
While this is the first 3D home for Habitat for Humanity in the US, it certainly won’t be the last. Green told CNN it hopes to continue partnering and developing the technology used with the printing. “We would love to build more with this technology, especially because it’s got that long-term savings for the homeowners,” Green said.
Biden may face midterm reckoning on Supreme Court reform
Samuel Moyn, American Historian December 25, 2021
President Joe Biden
President Biden has largely managed to avoid the fray of the Supreme Court reform debate in his first year in office by outsourcing the issue to an expert study group. But his time on the sidelines may be running out.
Now that his court commission has wrapped up its work, and with a potentially explosive Supreme Court ruling on abortion expected this summer just months ahead of the midterms, Biden could soon find himself facing intense pressure from the left to take a bolder stance on reforming the 6-3 conservative majority court.
According to Samuel Moyn, a professor of jurisprudence and history at Yale University, the proposal that ranks as the current favorite among progressives involves expanding, or “packing,” the court with additional members. And if the justices curtail abortion access this term as many expect they will, he said, calls for court expansion may grow too loud for Biden to ignore.
“The growing support for court expansion – with more than 10 times as many lawmakers signing on as when the commission started its work – may begin to create a new political reality that Biden will have a hard time ignoring altogether,” Moyn said. “And everyone knows that if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, Biden’s own party or a popular outcry may force him to act.”
As a candidate, Biden deflected the court reform discussion by pledging to establish a study commission. The move succeeded in buying him political cover at a moment of Democratic furor as the court shifted rightward amid what the party viewed as Republican duplicity.
Debate over the Supreme Court reached a fever pitch in the closing days of the 2020 presidential election as Senate Republicans scrambled to confirm then-President Trump’s third nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, ahead of the November vote.
The move infuriated Democrats, who in 2016 were denied a hearing for then-President Obama’s pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Merrick Garland, when Republicans claimed that election year confirmations are improper – before appearing to violate that claim four years later.
Biden made good on his campaign pledge once he entered the White House, tapping a bipartisan group of some three dozen of the nation’s foremost constitutional thinkers and court watchers. The move once again allowed him to keep an arm’s length distance from an issue that ranks as a top priority among many liberals but has turned off some of his party’s more moderate members.
When the Biden-appointed court commission published in early December its nearly 300-page report, which weighed various proposals such as court expansion and term limits for justices, the endeavor drew a mixed response.
Rather than make specific recommendations, the 34-member group maintained a posture of neutrality, hewing to an accounting of pros and cons instead of advocating for a specific course of change.
To critics, it was confirmation of their suspicions that Biden’s commission was conceived of as a political dodge. Organizations pushing for bolder reforms expressed displeasure at what some derided as the commission’s uninspired result.
“It was clear from the moment President Joe Biden failed to ask the commission for recommendations that the group was not intended to meaningfully confront the Supreme Court legitimacy crisis,” wrote the Project On Government Oversight. “The commission worked diligently and thoughtfully, but its deliberations made painfully apparent that it would only give Biden what he asked for: a book report.”
Even some of the commission’s more progressive members felt it necessary to make clear that their endorsement of the final report carried the caveat that it was not an embrace of the high court’s status quo.
But others say the commission’s work, which included public hearings that drew attention to issues like the court’s flagging perception among the public, may yet deliver a shot in the arm for reform proponents.
“The commission’s public deliberations plausibly increased pressure for reform by giving visibility to individuals speaking up in favor of reform,” said Ryan Doerfler, a law professor at the University of Chicago.
Many experts believe the justices themselves could breathe new life into the court reform movement this term.
The justices are currently weighing decisions on a number of hot-button topics, from issues of church-state separation to the Second Amendment. But one case looms largest: a clash over a Mississippi abortion law that directly challenges Roe v. Wade.
Nothing could galvanize the reform push quite like a decision undermining or overturning the landmark 1973 decision in Roe that first recognized a constitutional right to abortion, according to experts.
Under Roe and the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states may regulate abortion up to the point of fetal viability, typically around 24 weeks, so long as the restriction does not pose an “undue burden” on abortion access. Mississippi’s law, which bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and makes exceptions only for medical emergencies or “severe fetal abnormality,” is a clear-cut violation of this framework, critics say.
Yet despite nearly five decades of precedent, many court watchers believe justices are poised to set tighter limits on the right to abortion. Experts say that could put the court in Democrats’ crosshairs just as Biden and Democratic leaders make their final pitch to midterm voters in hopes of clinging onto their now-tenuous control over Congress.
“I think if Roe and Casey are overruled, Court packing will be a major issue in the midterm elections,” said Scott Douglas Gerber, a law professor at Ohio Northern University.
Letters: Guys not taking the ‘jab’ may want to rethink it
Anne Hammock December 26, 2021
Although many understand that COVID-19 is a serious disease, others continue to downplay preventive measures. Despite the deaths of more than 700,000 Americans and the agony endured by survivors, many eligible people in Duval County have rejected vaccination.
Over time, information about the long-term health impact on survivors has identified new risks. The “long-haulers,” as they have been dubbed, suffer from a wide range of neurologic, muscular and heart-related problems. Many are chronically disabled which has not moved the nay-sayers to change their minds.
Recently, a panel of urologists examined the data and identified another long-term disability. It is well known that the virus damages blood vessels in the lung, heart, kidneys and brain. Not surprisingly, it also affects the blood vessels of the male genitalia.
Older men fully understand how much their organs depend on healthy blood flow. The panel predicts that as infected younger men have vessel damage, there may be a new and different epidemic of erectile dysfunction.
Men who are rejecting COVID-19 vaccinations, for whatever reason, may want to seriously consider the price they may pay.
‘We’re failing terribly’: Colorado’s revered slopes face a major threat
Vicky Collins December 25, 2021
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — During the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony at Breckenridge Ski Resort in early December, thousands of people crowded onto Main Street under a bluebird sky.
The event was preceded by a dog parade featuring hundreds of Bernese mountain dogs and a foot race with runners dressed as Santas and elves. When the sun finally set, the countdown began as a massive evergreen in the square was bathed in golden light.
The festive scene stood in stark contrast to what could be coming for Colorado and the Rocky Mountains: a severely shortened ski season by 2050, with some areas closing permanently by the end of the century.
Few industries in Colorado are experiencing the effects of climate change more than the once-robust ski industry, which experts say could fall victim in coming decades to rising temperatures, extreme drought and huge wildfires.
Home to some of the most iconic names in world-class downhill skiing — such as Vail, Aspen and Snowmass — Colorado collects $5 billion a year in revenue from the outdoor sport. But many wonder whether the industry can withstand its greatest challenge.
Denver, which lies at the foot of the Rockies, blew away records this year when measurable snow didn’t fall until Dec. 10, making for 232 straight days with no snow. Pitkin County, home to Aspen and Snowmass, had 30 more frost-free days this year than in 1980. And warming temperatures, even at night, prevent early snowmaking, which is essential to a profitable holiday season.
A typical downhill ski season in the Rockies starts in early November and ends in early April, but a 2017 study in the journal Global Environmental Change found that virtually all winter recreation areas in the U.S. could see the lengths of their seasons decline by 50 percent by 2050, and by 80 percent in 2090 for some downhill skiing locations.
The authors estimated that changes in season lengths under extreme emissions conditions could result in a loss of more than $2 billion for downhill skiing in the U.S.
Ideas vary among managers at Colorado’s 32 main ski areas on how to battle the crisis, but most acknowledge that what they’re doing now isn’t working.
“We’re failing terribly,” said Auden Schendler, senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and a 30-year mountain resident who is alarmed by the increasing lateness of snow and its early departure, which he called the “March meltdown.”
Schendler said he grew especially worried when the Grizzly Creek Fire chewed through 33,000 acres near Aspen in 2020. It threatened the town and led to mudslides along Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon, temporarily cutting off access to Aspen.
“My concern initially was that the industry would be taken out by warmth and lack of snow. But in the last four years, we’ve had two giant, catastrophic fires that basically shut the town down,” he said, referring to Grizzly Creek and the Lake Christine Fire in 2018.
Greg Hanson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boulder, said Colorado is experiencing shortened winter seasons with first snows coming late and final ones falling earlier.
“We need below-freezing temperatures to get that snowfall, and with the temperatures going up, that is what shortens the winter season,” he said
Melanie Mills, president and CEO of Colorado Ski Country USA, a trade group, said snow is becoming more unpredictable.
“Business doesn’t like unpredictability,” she said. “It’s a major existential issue for the ski industry.”
Skiing is the largest economic engine for western Colorado and drives its second-largest revenue generator, tourism, according to Colorado Ski Country USA.
Ski areas have been working aggressively to switch to renewable energy to generate electricity, conducting energy audits to track their progress and using water more judiciously because most of Colorado’s water comes from mountain snowpack.
Despite efforts by ski resorts to reach zero emissions, zero waste and zero net operating impacts, Mills said it’s not enough.
“We can all be carbon-free, and we still won’t make a dent in the problem,” she said.
To that end, the industry is shifting its focus to advocacy by pushing policymakers to do more to fight climate change.
“This is not a problem that we’re going to solve locally,” Mills said. “And it’s not a problem that the ski industry is going to solve. We want to be part of the solution, but we need action at the national level and the international level.”
Schendler had hoped President Joe Biden’s all-but-doomed Build Back Better plan would be successful because it included some $550 billion in climate-related programs that would have put the U.S economy on track to zero emissions by 2050.
Scientists say that without that kind of action globally, nations will be unable to limit climate change to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius, and avoid its most catastrophic effects.
Lisa Whitaker, who lives in Summit County and serves on the volunteer safety patrol at Copper Mountain, worries the late start to the season is putting too many people on too little terrain, increasing the risk of accidents.
“I would be sad not to be able to ski again,” she said. “I would be devastated if a whole community is wiped out. But when I think about hundreds of thousands of acres burning and the loss of wildlife, that’s much more sad to me than not being able to ski.”
Schendler said it will take a national effort to save not only skiing but other outdoor industries that rely on the weather for survival.
“We have to be noisy,” Schendler said, “and the bulk of the United States business community is not doing what’s required on a problem that costs more to leave alone than to solve.”
California man gets 3 years over threats to lawmakers, journalists who said Trump lost
Phil Helsel December 22, 2021
A California man who threatened dozens of people, including politicians, journalists and their families, who said that then-President Donald Trump lost the November election has been sentenced to three years, prosecutors said.
Robert Lemke, 36, of Bay Point in the San Francisco Bay Area, was sentenced Monday by a federal judge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said.
The targets included U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., whose brother was sent a text on Jan. 6 that read: “Your brother is putting your entire family at risk with his lies and other words. We are armed and nearby your house,” according to court documents.
When Lemke was arrested, a criminal complaint did not name Jeffries, but the congressman has said he was targeted.
Two journalists for CNN were also threatened. The network’s Brian Stelter said he spoke at Lemke’s sentencing and wrote about the experience Monday.
Stelter said that anchor Don Lemon told the judge, “I am tired of looking over my shoulder” and “I am tired of being called ‘fake news’ and even more horrendous names,” including racial and anti-gay slurs.
Stelter said Lemon also rejected arguments that Lemke was misled by social media after Trump’s loss. “For people like him, it is never their fault,” Lemon said, according to Stelter.
Lemke sent threats to about 50 people from November through early January, prosecutors said. Some said “Stop telling lies; Biden did not win, he will not be president,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors called it “a concerted campaign, sustained over more than two months, to terrify and intimidate dozens of journalists, members of Congress and their families in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.”
The threats contained personal information, including addresses and in some cases, photos of homes interiors, according to court documents. Text messages were sent Jan. 6 during the riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
One threat sent Jan. 9 read: “You do understand not only your life, but your families” are at risk. “We know everything.”
Lemke, who was arrested in late January, pleaded guilty to making threatening interstate communications in October.
His federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night.
Lemke’s attorney wrote ahead of sentencing that Lemke was isolated and fell down a social media rabbit hole, where he’d been convinced the election was fraudulent and he lost sense of himself. Lemke in a letter to the judge wrote that he was ashamed of his conduct.
Prosecutors wrote Lemke had shown a lack of remorse. They wrote in a sentencing memorandum that he wrote his mother on Dec. 1 that “I’m the victim here,” and that in November, he described himself as a “political prisoner.”
5 Ice Age Mammoths Discovered Near Busy Road in England
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes December 21, 2021
An illustration of a family of woolly mammoths grazing on what is left of the grasses as winter approaches in an Ice Age scene. Aunt_Spray / iStock / Getty Images PlusNear a busy road in Britain’s Cotswolds, Sally and Neville Hollingworth, a couple who spends part of their time hunting fossils, made an extraordinary find: The skeletons of five prehistoric mammoths that are about 220,000 years old.
The mammoths are in a remarkable state of preservation, with Neanderthal tools — including an axe — and the remains of elk, beetles and snails nearby. Some of the pollen and plant fossils found at the site are extinct.
Once the enormity of the discovery was realized, DigVentures, a team of archeologists who lead crowdfunded archeological excavations, were called in to dig the site.
“Exciting doesn’t cover it,” Lisa Westcott Wilkins of DigVentures told The Observer, as The Guardian reported. “Other mammoths have been found in the UK but not in this state of preservation. They’re in near-pristine condition. You can’t take it in.”ADVERTISING
“Archaeological sites from this period are rare, and critical for understanding Neanderthal behaviour across Britain and Europe. Why did so many mammoths die here? Could Neanderthals have killed them? What can they tell us about life in ice-age Britain? The range of evidence at this site gives us a unique chance to address these questions,” Wilkins added.
The mammoth fossils are thought to be from a time when the region was between two glacial periods and experiencing mild weather. Neanderthals traveled south to the area seeking warmer temperatures, The Guardian reported.
The type of extinct prehistoric elephant discovered by the Nevilles, the Steppe mammoth, is the largest of its species, and originated in Africa around five million years earlier. This type of mammoth weighed two or three times as much as an African elephant. Not much is known about how the Neanderthals existed in ice-age Britain, but clues are hoped to be gained from the well-preserved site.
“We have evidence of what the landscape was like. We know what plants were growing there. The little things are really revealing the context of these big, iconic giants. It’s a glimpse back in time. That’s incredibly important in terms of us understanding how climate change especially impacts environments, ecosystems and species,” Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of East Anglia, told The Observer, The Guardian reported. Garrod will join Sir David Attenborough and archeologists from DigVentures in a BBC One documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, airing on December 30.
Garrod hypothesized that the Neanderthals could have made camp at the site and may have actually chased the mammoths into the mud, or perhaps just happened upon them. “Maybe they found them there already and got a free meal,” he said to the Telegraph, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Garrod told The Observer that finding such intact skeletons is a rare find in England, The Guardian reported. DigVentures, who raised funds for the digging, analysis and research of the artifacts, hopes to raise more funds for further excavations at the site. Natural flooding is currently keeping the site safe from fossil hunters.
The ‘Cowboy Cocktail’: How Wyoming became one of the world’s top tax havens
Debbie Cenziper and Will Fitzgibbon December 20, 2021
JACKSON, Wyo. – The honky-tonk bar under neon lights on the town square serves Grand Teton Amber Ale and Yellowstone Lemonade. The Cowboy Coffee Co. offers bison chili, and the Five & Dime General Store sells Stetson hats and souvenirs made from bullets.
In this tourist-friendly Western town, home to four celebrated arches fashioned from elk antlers, lawyers and estate planners draw customers with something far more exclusive.
It’s called the “Cowboy Cocktail,” and in recent years the coveted financial arrangement has attracted a new set of outsiders to the least populated state in America.
The cocktail and variations of it – consisting of a Wyoming trust and layers of private companies with concealed ownership – allow the world’s wealthy to move and spend money in extraordinary secrecy, protected by some of the strongest privacy laws in the country and, in some cases, without even the cursory oversight performed by regulators in other states.
Millionaires and billionaires around the world have taken note. In recent years, families from India to Italy to Venezuela have abandoned international financial centers for law firms in Wyoming’s ski resorts and mining towns, helping to turn the state into one of the world’s top tax havens.
A dozen international clients who created Wyoming trusts were identified in the Pandora Papers, a trove of more than 11.9 million records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with The Washington Post that expose the movement of wealth around the world. The documents offer a rare look at Wyoming’s discreet financial sector and the people who rely on its services.
One was Moscow billionaire Igor Makarov, named under a 2017 law requiring the U.S. Treasury Department to list oligarchs and political figures close to the Russian government. Makarov’s company faced questions in the past about controversial transactions with Russia’s state-owned gas giant and about possible influence peddling involving the daughter of a U.S. congressman.
The matriarch of Argentina’s Baggio family, whose beverage company was accused by local officials of dumping industrial waste and whose son is embroiled in an investigation into money laundering, also moved the management of its wealth to Wyoming.
So did the late Kalil Haché Malkún of the Dominican Republic. The polo player and army officer managed the private estates of reviled Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ordered the deaths of political enemies and thousands of Haitians.
For years, anti-money-laundering experts and law enforcement have warned federal and state lawmakers that suspect money was flowing into U.S. tax havens, eluding taxing authorities, creditors and criminal investigators. In Wyoming, with the support of state lawmakers, the industry charged ahead, promoting a suite of financial arrangements to potential customers around the world.
At the heart of those arrangements are trusts, legal agreements that allow people to stash away money and other assets so they are protected from creditors and incur few or no tax obligations for themselves or their heirs. In exchange for these benefits, trust owners appoint an independent manager – typically a relative, friend or financial adviser – to determine when and how money is invested and spent.
Wyoming is one of a small number of states that allow customers to place a private company – often controlled by family members – at the helm of their trust, ensuring complete control of the assets and an additional layer of financial secrecy.
Some of the companies are unregulated, exempt from periodic examinations and other state scrutiny.
Customers can also establish a second company inside their trusts to hold the assets, such as property and bank accounts, concealing wealth behind yet another corporate layer.
Using this approach – the Cowboy Cocktail – wealthy people can move money into the United States and invest and spend it with a level of anonymity found in few other tax havens.
“Wyoming is advertising itself as the new onshore offshore [financial center] – it’s going to get the clientele,” said University of Richmond law professor Allison Tait, a trust and estate expert who has studied the state’s layered financial instruments, including the cocktail.
“It’s like a wrapped gift inside a wrapped gift,” she said. “The more wrapping you put on, the harder it is to figure out if there has been tax avoidance or evasion or even financial crime. Very few people know what you’re doing, basically.”
The Haché family did not respond to requests for comment. Through his attorney, Makarov said the Treasury Department list was copied from a public source and “widely discredited,” that he has no personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that he has never been charged with criminal wrongdoing. The attorney said Makarov’s Wyoming trust was properly disclosed.
A representative for the Baggio family declined to comment. The family has previously said it reported the Wyoming trust to officials in Argentina.
There is no evidence in the Pandora Papers documents that the trusts in Wyoming sheltered criminal proceeds.
In a competitive global market, Wyoming’s financial incentives have stood out. One trust company 8,700 miles away in Singapore recommended Wyoming on its website as a go-to tax haven that would “completely shield” clients’ names and assets. “Offshore Wyoming, USA,” noted another firm, this one in Ukraine’s bustling capital, Kyiv.
Trust companies in Wyoming now manage at least $31.5 billion in assets, according to the state.
Time and again, Wyoming lawmakers suggested the industry would bring jobs and other economic benefits to a state that has long depended on special taxes imposed on coal, oil and other natural resources.
“It’s friendly for business is the bottom line,” said former Republican House member Bunky Loucks, who spent 10 years in the state legislature. “We were hopeful . . . just to be on the cutting edge.”
Hoped-for tax revenue, however, did not materialize. The Republican-controlled legislature rebuffed sporadic calls for even a small tax on the profits of companies that create trusts.
Former Republican lawmaker Michael Von Flatern, who unsuccessfully pushed to tax the industry, said lawmakers did not consider all the possible sources of money that could flow into the state.
“We never thought about the oligarchs or the dictator’s friends,” he said.
In 1977, lawyers and accountants for an out-of-state oil company helped persuade Wyoming to authorize a financial arrangement found nowhere else in America.
State lawmakers approved the formation of limited liability companies, now widely used across the country to help conceal the identities of owners and protect their assets from creditors.
The idea had failed twice in Alaska, but supporters found a willing home in Wyoming, which in the 1960s skirted bankruptcy and by the ’70s was heavily dependent on tax revenue generated by fossil fuels.
“We’re sort of at the whim of what happens with market prices worldwide,” said Phil Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wyoming. “There was a good deal of consensus in those days that we have to diversify our economy. . . . [Lawmakers] would try every angle.”
Over the next three decades, lawmakers modified the groundbreaking law, including changes that made it easier for company owners to obscure their identities. “Wyoming home cooking,” industry representatives, lawmakers and legislative advisers called the changes.
Lawmakers also encouraged the growth of the trust industry, adopting more than 100 changes to the state’s trust laws by 2011. Around the same time, the Cowboy Cocktail and its variations took off.
“It’s not the latest trendy cocktail on the club scene,” one trust and estate planner from Georgia noted on his website. “A Cowboy Cocktail is a double-barreled approach to asset protection that may be the best thing since sliced bread.”
“ALAKAZAM! Ultimate Cowboy Cocktail!” wrote two attorneys, one from Wyoming and the other from Tennessee, in a presentation about the novel setup to tax planners.
The addition of private trust companies, a critical component of the cocktail, was particularly appealing to customers seeking higher levels of control and privacy.
“Keep it in the family,” Frontier Administrative Services in Jackson posted on its website, which noted that it serves dozens of private trust companies.
Wyoming offers two types of private trust companies, both generally recommended for those with trust assets of $100 million or more. One is reported to the state; regulators with the Division of Banking review company operations. Attorneys say that the regulated option can help families avoid unexpected tax bills and other inquiries.
The other option is an unregulated company, allowed under Wyoming law. Unregulated private trust companies operate outside the supervision of the state and provide an even higher degree of secrecy.
Wyoming has seven regulated private trust companies. Officials say they do not know how many unregulated companies exist. A committee of lawmakers in 2018 estimated that lawyers were creating as many as 100 unregulated companies a year.
The financial tools found broad support among state lawmakers, who over nearly two decades backed almost 20 laws to bolster the industry, with few dissenting votes, state records show.
Wyoming is now among the 10 least restrictive, most customer-friendly trust jurisdictions in the world, according to a study last year by Adam Hofri-Winogradow, a law professor and trust expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The study ranked Wyoming ahead of South Dakota, an international tax haven featured in the Pandora Papers investigation published by The Post and the ICIJ in October.
Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware and Nevada were named in October by the European Parliament as hubs of “financial and corporate secrecy.”
Citing the Pandora Papers, the group urged the United States to better police the industry and join a coalition of more than 100 countries that automatically share information about the financial transactions of noncitizens.
“For some time now, the U.S. has been the weak link in the international anti-money-laundering regime,” said Josh Rudolph, a member of the National Security Council staff in the Obama and Trump administrations. “The European Parliament is absolutely right – we are the enablers.”
The Pandora Papers records, while not comprehensive, reveal a series of Wyoming transactions mostly between 2016 and 2019 as well as the clients behind them. Some moved the management of their wealth from traditional tax havens in Europe and the Caribbean, capitalizing on key ingredients of the Cowboy Cocktail.
Makarov, the Russian billionaire, turned to Wyoming in late 2016, setting up a Wyoming trust and an unregulated private trust company to manage it, Pandora Papers documents show. Makarov put a twist on the cocktail: placing into the trust three companies established in the tight-lipped British Virgin Islands, including one that owned a 13-seat private jet.
“Like a ‘Cowboy on the Beach Cocktail’ or something,” Tait, the Virginia professor, said of the arrangement.
Makarov and the oil-and-gas company he founded, Itera, faced scrutiny in Europe and the United States. In the early 2000s, media reports raised questions about whether the company had improperly received loan guarantees and other aid from Russia’s state-controlled gas company, Gazprom. Shortly after, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency suspended a $868,000 grant to Itera.
In 2006, the FBI searched Itera’s Florida office in connection with an influence-peddling investigation involving a U.S. congressman. In 2009, Italian media reported that Makarov was investigated for potential ties to Mafia figures and that the investigation was at risk of being closed because of a lack of cooperation by foreign authorities.
In an unclassified report in 2018, the Treasury Department included Makarov on a list of dozens of Russian oligarchs.
Through his lawyer, Makarov said he has no ties to organized crime and called the Italian media report “completely false.” The U.S. influence-peddling investigation did not result in arrests or charges against Makarov or anyone associated with the company, said his lawyer, Brian Wolf. Gazprom never provided resources or clients to Itera and together they operated in accordance with Russian law, Wolf said.
Makarov established the trust in Wyoming based on professional advice, the attorney said. “All required disclosures have been made and transparency laws have been followed,” he said.
Celia María Agueda Munilla, the 83-year-old matriarch of the Baggio family in Argentina, also set up a trust overseen by an unregulated private trust company in Wyoming. The trust, established in 2018, held a company in the British Virgin Islands with a $7 million account at a bank in Miami, the Pandora Papers show.
Munilla and her late husband founded RPB, one of Argentina’s largest producers of boxed fruit juice and wine. Munilla remains a director of the company, according to the family company website.
For years, media reports show, government officials and local residents have accused the company of polluting land and waterways. The company agreed to stop dumping waste in 2016, according to a public statement by local authorities.
Last year, Argentine authorities filed a criminal complaint against a number of businessmen, including one of Munilla’s sons, a majority shareholder, accusing them of burning grasslands for economic gain. The Pandora Papers do not list him as a beneficiary of the Wyoming trust.
The Financial Intelligence Unit in Argentina stepped in as a plaintiff in the ongoing case, which it called the “Baggio file,” alleging possible money laundering.
A representative for the family previously said that it declared the Wyoming trust and its assets to Argentina’s revenue authority. Neither the family nor its company responded to questions about the criminal investigation.
One of the more recent transactions described in the Pandora Papers was made by the late Haché, who once served as estate manager to brutal Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo.
The regime ordered the murders of tens of thousands of Haitians, along with three prominent sisters who had protested Trujillo, according to historical accounts.
The regime is also believed to have abducted a Columbia University graduate student and lecturer in New York City before transporting him to the Dominican Republic in a case described by the U.S. Justice Department as a “political murder.” One prominent Trujillo historian suggested the body could have been fed to sharks.
After Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, his son Ramfis took control of the country and rounded up the assassins, most of whom were killed.
Haché allegedly witnessed torture in a notorious Dominican prison but refused to join and fainted, according to two public accounts, one by a foundation that commemorates the men who killed Trujillo and the other by one of the men’s sons. Ramfis Trujillo, living in exile, was convicted of murder.
Haché later described himself as a businessman; family interests included an oil and lubricant company, records show. In 2019, Haché, his wife and two daughters set up a Wyoming trust and an unregulated private trust company to own two British Virgin Islands companies with bank accounts in Miami, the Pandora Papers records show.
Haché and his wife died of covid-19 last year. His family did not respond to a request for comment.
In a 2013 interview with a Dominican Republic journalist, Haché described his connection to the Trujillo regime. “How could I be disloyal to a family that distinguished me with all their affection?” he said.
He added that his loyalty was “to the person who distinguished me, not to . . . the dictatorship.”
Current and former state lawmakers said they always intended to build a clean industry that protected the privacy of reputable clients.
“There are countries out there that want to protect the criminals because they believe it’s of economic benefit to have bad actors fund their state,” said state Sen. Chris Rothfuss, the Democratic minority leader. “We don’t have that interest. We will throw them under the bus as quickly as we can.”
However, Rothfuss acknowledged that regulators are often kept in the dark by the state’s own privacy laws, left dependent on occasional tips or media accounts for information about trust industry clients.
In October, U.S. lawmakers called for the most significant overhaul of anti-money-laundering regulations since 9/11. If approved, the changes would require lawyers and trust companies to investigate their clients and sources of wealth to ensure that suspicious money does not breach the U.S. financial system.
Even with more transparency, Rothfuss said, the state banking division doesn’t have enough staff to monitor industry compliance. “We don’t necessarily have the resources to be proactive,” he said.
The Division of Banking has three employees who examine the state’s regulated trust companies. “We are probably slightly overstaffed in this area, but we are anticipating continued growth in this area and want to ensure appropriate resources,” said Albert Forkner, the state’s banking commissioner.
In a statement, the Wyoming Trust Association said it “supports effective and meaningful regulatory oversight of the trust industry.” The association also said the industry would support increases in the fees paid to the state by regulated trust companies.
Von Flatern, the former lawmaker, said in an interview at his home in Gillette that the scant financial contributions by the trust sector over the years have contributed to Wyoming’s fragile economy, undercut by the coal industry’s years-long decline.
In the eastern Wyoming mining town, a rotary drill, an oversize coal shovel and a 411,580-pound engine are displayed in a local park. Coal mines rumble with the sound of earthmovers. Trains with dozens of cars haul coal through the city, winding past Lula Belle’s Cafe, where miners gather for coffee before their shifts start.
“If you come in as a trust company or a banker, you don’t pay your way,” Von Flatern said. “We didn’t gain anything.”
About this story:
Will Fitzgibbon is with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Design and development by Jake Crump and Frank Hulley-Jones.
Brenda Medina and Delphine Reuter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Mika Velikovskiy at iStories (Russia), Alicia Ortega Hasbún at Noticias SIN (Dominican Republic), Paolo Biondani at L’Espresso (Italy), and Sandra Crucianelli and Mariel Fitz Patrick at Infobae (Argentina) contributed to this report.
The Pandora Papers is an investigation based on more than 11.9 million documents revealing the flows of money, property and other assets concealed in the offshore financial system. The Washington Post and other news organizations exposed the involvement of political leaders, examined the growth of the industry within the United States and demonstrated how secrecy shields assets from governments, creditors and those abused or exploited by the wealthy and powerful. The trove of confidential information, the largest of its kind, was obtained by the ICIJ, which organized the investigation. Read more about this project.
On Dec. 19, 2021, the West Virginia Democrat said in an interview that he couldn’t support the bill in its current form because of the impact he says it would have on increasing consumer prices and the national debt. The decision effectively killed one of Biden’s top economic priorities.
The most recent statistics show inflation, as measured by the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index, was 6.8% in November 2021. This is the highest level since 1982 – yet still a long way from the double-digit inflation experienced back then.
The question, then, is: Could an additional large spending increase cause inflation to accelerate further?
To answer this, it’s useful to put the numbers in some context.
The price tag of the Build Back Better plan passed by the House of Representatives is about $2 trillion, to be spent over a 10-year period. If the spending is spread out evenly, that would amount to about $200 billion a year. That’s only about 3% of how much the government planned to spend in 2021.
Another comparison is to gross domestic product, which is the value of all goods and services produced in a country. U.S. GDP is projected to be $22.3 trillion in 2022. This means that the first year of the bill’s spending would be about 0.8% of the GDP.
While that doesn’t sound like much either, it’s not insignificant. Goldman Sachs had estimated U.S. economic growth at 3.8% in 2022. If the increased spending translated into economic activity on a dollar-for-dollar basis, that could lift growth by over one-fifth.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would increase the deficit by $150.7 billion over a decade, or about $15 billion a year. Again assuming this is spread evenly over the 10 years, it would amount to less than one-tenth of 1% of GDP. Even if elements of the bill are front-loaded, it does not seem that this increase in the government debt would contribute much to inflation.
Some proponents of the bill – including the White House and some economists – have gone further. They have argued that the proposed spending package would actually reduce inflation by increasing the productive capacity of the economy – or its maximum potential output.
This seems implausible to me, at least given the current level of inflation. Historical evidence shows a more productive economy can grow more quickly with relatively little upward pressure on prices. That’s what happened in the U.S. in the 1990s, when the economy grew strongly with little inflation. But it takes time for investments like those in the bill to translate into gains in productivity and economic growth – meaning many of these impacts will be slow to materialize.
And current inflation is likely an acute problem reflecting supply chain disruptions and pent-up demand, challenges that won’t be resolved by expanding the economy’s productive capacity five or more years down the road.
While the $2 trillion in spending would be unlikely to worsen inflation if it were to become law, I believe it could do a lot to materially address these challenges America faces.
I Joined A Far-Right Group Of Moms. What I Witnessed Was Frightening.
Phoebe Cohen December 21, 2021
“Look out for the trigger words,” the woman says. She’s perched on a chair in front of the room. She’s well-dressed yet funky with elegant boots, a demure sweater and some colorful jewelry. “‘Equality,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘marginalization,’… These words are CRT. If you see these words in your kids’ homework, you need to speak out.”
I am in a meeting held by a local right-wing mom’s group. It’s an organization catering to mothers who are bent on protesting at school board meetings to stop the supposedly evil critical race theory agenda from being taught in public schools and address other typically conservative concerns.
There are about 20 of us. We are all maskless, all (apparently) white, mostly women and all on the younger side. I’m in my early 40s and I seem to be the oldest person in the room. A group of children, including my son, the only one in a mask, are scampering merrily in a play area down the hall while a young woman with a baby in her front carrier keeps an eye on them. On the wall by the door of our seminar room is a sign. It says: “Children should be: Heard. Respected. Encouraged. Loved. Appreciated. Guided with Compassion. Given Freedom to Learn Without Coercion.”
What exactly that last phrase means is ominously vague.
For several years now I have been worried about the increasing right-wing views that I have noticed in my demographic (white suburban women). Before 2016, I always thought of Nazis as mainly historical villains that belonged in Indiana Jones movies or old news reels or the sad stories my grandfather told me. Now, however, as the last Holocaust survivors are dying, I am aware that fascism is creeping back into the world at large in terrifying ways.
I wanted to know how I could fight against the appallingly stupid yet dangerously widespread disinformation that is entrancing many of my friends and neighbors. Basic facts about COVID-19 are being dismissed by whole states as part of the “liberal mainstream corporate media.” Bodies from COVID victims were stacking up in ICUs and filling the morgues back in 2020, yet I was still called a “child abuser” by people on the street because I made my son wear a mask. Why are people going nuts? Why are people dismissing science and history in favor of conspiracy theories? And, most importantly, how could we nudge the nation in a saner direction?
I was especially curious about activist groups that specifically target suburban women. These groups seemed intent on making life more dangerous for my child. According to my local right-wing women’s group, masks should not be allowed in school. They told us to stop worrying about kids dying of COVID. They were also vocal about not wanting racism and its deep, formative history in the United States to be taught. Some of these people literally do not believe white privilege exists because, according to them, the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War were overwhelmingly white. (No, I don’t understand that argument either.) Others feel parts of our country’s history shouldn’t be included in curriculums if it makes people ― namely white people ― uncomfortable.
Every teacher I knew was struggling with COVID restrictions and dealing with students venting their post-pandemic trauma through increasingly disruptive behavior. School districts across the country were dealing with staffing shortages due to teachers burning out from stress. Why add to teachers’ difficulties by threatening school instructors who dared to teach topics like Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement and the repercussions of slavery in America?
Some of these people literally do not believe white privilege exists because, according to them, the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War were overwhelmingly white. (No, I don’t understand that argument either.)
To learn more, I joined a local right-wing Facebook group for moms. It’s a private group that requires aspiring members to answer some questions before they’re granted entry. One question was “Why do you want to join?” I replied, “I want to be more involved with my kids’ school.” A week passed and then a moderator for the group contacted me privately. “Can you be more specific about what issue most concerns you?”
Yikes. Security was apparently very tight with this group. They weren’t going to let just any mom glide in using a few generic answers.
“I’m mostly interested in issues that involve keeping kids physically in school,” I messaged back. “Zoom school was devastating for my kid and I don’t want that to happen again.” I wasn’t lying about any of that. It’s one of the few opinions I share with many conservative parents.
The moderator sent me a thumbs-up emoji and let me into the group.
Once inside, I found the members were all stripes of Republican and I was pleasantly surprised to see opinion was not monolithic in the group. Several moms argued against the more far-right posters. One woman posted an objection to children reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” in class. “Divisive Concepts,” she wrote with a broken heart emoji. Underneath was a screenshot of a direct message from someone who appeared to be a student that read, “I’m in English right now. We’re currently reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ There’s a part where Calpurnia brings the kids to church with her and another black woman is being extremely racist towards Scout and Jem. My teacher was saying it was not racism because white people have a higher power over black people in society and that black people can’t be racist.”
There were several indignant emoji reactions in response to this post. One mom, however, pushed back. “Well,” she commented, “the woman at the church complained that Calpurnia had brought white children to the Black church, possibly one of the few places Black people felt any sense of freedom and safety. It’s a little absurd to call the woman racist, given the context.” This comment got a couple “likes” and no pushback.
Another surprise I found in the Facebook group was that some huge media outlets were giving them a platform. One of the founders of the group posted that she had done an interview with The New York Times as part of a story on parental rights.
The New York Times! I was dumbfounded. None of the women who ran the pro-Democrat “Indivisible” groups in my town had even managed to get an interview with the local paper!
I scanned the comments and my eyes nearly popped out of my head.
“It’ll be fine,” another mom wrote after the initial poster expressed concern about The New York Times possibly misquoting her. “It’s a lesson I learned the hard way after the BBC screwed me.”
The BBC! The BBC was talking to these women?
I had to know more.
Unfortunately a few of the moms may have become suspicious of me. Perhaps I had “liked” too many comments by moms pushing back against the anti-CRT posts. Perhaps some moderators had found the very liberal comments that I had posted on other public news articles. In any case, when I expressed interest in joining an in-person roundtable discussion event, I saw that the location of the event suddenly disappeared. I messaged the group moderator about the event location.
“Just a heads up,” she messaged back, “I think most people will not be masking. Is that something you’ll be comfortable with?”
I wondered if she was trying to frighten me off. “Yes, that’s fine,” I replied.
I never received the location, but luckily I had written it down before it disappeared from the event post.
I drove to the meeting with my son. The group moderator had been right. When I joined the meeting, I saw that nobody in the packed room was masked. I gritted my teeth and sat down anyway. I was fully vaccinated and my son wore a mask. He was the only one.
I listened to the speakers at the meeting while they discussed how to run for, campaign and pressure school boards. Many parents bemoaned how they had to pull their kids from public schools over mask mandates and instead enroll them in private schools. It was a common story. I got the impression that most of these families had income levels that allowed them to pay thousands in private school fees because they wanted to take a stand on masks. I was probably the poorest person there.
There was a lot of anger directed at teachers. “Rat out these teachers,” one mother instructed. “Find a lawyer who can challenge these teachers.” Another woman disdainfully noted that teachers “don’t even know what they’re doing half the time. They just pull it off the internet.” A third woman said, “There is no discipline for teachers outside of taking away their credentials.” The battle lines were clearly drawn.
I could see several women visibly flinch at the word “bounty.” One woman said she disliked the term “bounty” but she could see the need for “monetary compensation” for those who turn in teachers that were doing things parents found unacceptable. “There are no repercussions for teachers who break the law,” she said. “If we have to offer monetary compensation for people to report teachers, I see no problem with that. It’s an incentive for people to wake up.”
It wasn’t clear what laws these teachers were supposedly breaking. As far as I could tell, teachers ― like everyone else ― got punished if they broke laws.
Another woman raised her hand. “Look, I know we want to change school boards,” she said, “but elections aren’t until 2023. What do we do until then? We just can’t sit around and let them attack our kids. We have to do SOMETHING.”
I caught a gleam in the woman’s eye I didn’t like. Was there some flirtation with insurrection being suggested here? What, exactly, was she saying?
Another woman nodded. “Listen, we’ve tried playing nice. But they just dig in their heels and dig in their heels. We have to start being not so nice.”
One woman said she disliked the term ‘bounty’ but she could see the need for ‘monetary compensation’ for those who turn in teachers that were doing things parents found unacceptable. … ‘If we have to offer monetary compensation for people to report teachers, I see no problem with that. It’s an incentive for people to wake up.’
I didn’t like where the discussion was going. The moderator guided the topic back to safer ground. “Be pleasantly persistent,” she smiled. “Be annoying. Be the woman at the school board meetings who always shows up. Be the person who, when the meeting organizers see you, say, ‘Oh, God, her again.’ Be that person. And please try to get people to vote in municipal elections.”
Fair enough. A lot of the roundtable debate felt like a Republican version of a Run for Something meeting. Run for Something was a movement started after Donald Trump won the presidency that was meant to encourage young progressives to start their own campaigns for local political office. This right-wing women’s group seemed to be following the same model, but there was an undercurrent of rage among the group members that I had never seen in a Run for Something meeting.
Despite my uneasiness, I couldn’t help but find myself liking the women in the room. They were charismatic. They were energetic. They had no problem letting my low-functioning autistic son play with their children, which is unfortunately rare among a lot of the other mothers I’ve encountered. But this made me even more uneasy. I realized these women were dangerous precisely because they were so friendly. Their condemnation of history lessons about Ruby Bridges and Jim Crow laws and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was repulsive. They were trying to suppress the truth by labeling the unassailable facts of racism in the U.S. as “divisive.” “Equality,” “diversity” and “inclusion” were not virtues to be celebrated but “trigger words” with a poisonous intent. This nefariously clever bit of relabeling disgusted me. There was a very clear far-right agenda at work here.
Groups like the one I joined often appeal to mothers. The pandemic has hit moms especially hard. Lack of child care has resulted in a “she-cession” with thousands of women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Lonely, frustrated, financially stressed people tend to be prime targets for radical groups. These right-wing women’s groups offer a sense of community and friendship to women who are isolated at home with their kids. It can be frighteningly easy for some people to start nodding along with all the rhetoric about the evils of critical race theory and COVID conspiracy theories if the women espousing them are also offering you coffee and friendship and child care ― and making you feel seen and heard.
I am currently still a member of this local right-wing women’s Facebook group. It has helped me to understand where these people are coming from ― and just how motivated they are. My membership could end up being rescinded, however, as I plan to attend a few upcoming school board meetings to defend the accurate and honest teaching of all parts of American history, especially in regard to racism and what it has meant and means to be Black in this country.
I can’t stop thinking about the gleam in that woman’s eye as she said, “We just can’t sit around and let them attack our kids. We have to do something.” Though some people think merely tweeting our outrage or frustration is productive (it’s not), those of us fighting against the far right need to be more aware of how energetic and organized they’re becoming and the lengths they’re willing to go to in order to get their way. Right-wing activists are attending school board meetings in hopes of transforming our children’s education, and, ultimately, their lives and the future of the United States. It’s time for us to be just as active to ensure this doesn’t happen. We must fight for our children’s safety and their right to learn our nation’s history ― even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts.
After all, when ugly history gets ignored, it tends to get repeated.
Phoebe Cohen has walked many paths in life, including living in the Gobi Desert as a Peace Corps volunteer and working as a paramedic in several states. Cohen’s work has been featured in Graphic Medicine, Mutha Magazine and BorderX. She regularly posts on her website Merry Misandrist. Cohen is a part-time cartoonist, writer and nursing student. She has been known to go up to five hours without coffee.
The concrete exterior of the new Habitat for Humanity 3D printed house. To purchase the home, Stringfield logged hundreds of hours of sweat equity, Green told CNN, which is one of the requirements for homebuyers through the program. “Every Habitat affiliate in the nation and worldwide sells home to partner families who have 
Janet V. Green, right, welcomes April Stringfield, left, to her new home. The concrete used in the house’s 3D construction has many long-term benefits, such as the ability to retain temperature and withstand natural disasters, like tornadoes and
