corruption – Page 17 – Desdemona Despair

Caribou and geese at Teshekpuk Lake in North Slope Borough, Alaska in 2019. The Trump administration, in its final days, decided to open millions more acres of land in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling, including the wetlands around Teshekpuk Lake, which are a crucial breeding area for migratory birds and calving grounds for roaming caribou. Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post

January 9, 2021

Trump administration opens millions more acres of Alaska to drilling – “A last-minute and irresponsible effort to open an enormous amount of land in a sensitive area”

By Dino Grandoni 5 January 2021 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration, in its final days, decided to open millions more acres of land in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling. The decision from the Bureau of Land Management on Monday, finalized just two weeks before President Trump is set to leave office, will […]

Trump refers to a map, modified using a Sharpie, while talking to reporters following a briefing from officials about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House on 4 September 2019. Trump has dismissed scientific evidence and fact numerous times, including 2019 when he displayed a map inaccurately modified to show Hurricane Dorian’s likely path. Photo: Erin Schaff / The New York Times

January 4, 2021

How Trump tried, but largely failed, to derail America’s top climate report – “Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government”

By Christopher Flavelle 1 January 2021 (The New York Times) – The National Climate Assessment, America’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists across the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best insights available on climate change. The results, released just twice a decade or so, […]

Protesters shout outside the Ohio Statehouse Atrium where reporters listen during state officials’ coronavirus update Monday, 13 April 2020. About 100 demonstrators assembled outside the building, upset that the state remains under a stay-at-home order and that non-essential businesses remain closed. Photo: Joshua A. Bickel / Dispatch

December 31, 2020

Doomiest images of 2020

31 December 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – In 2020, the long campaign by conservatives to squelch scientific decision-making in government reached its goal: the complete sidelining of evidence-based expertise in favor of arbitrary political whim. Last year’s Doomiest Graph presaged this development, but even Desdemona couldn’t have imagined the mass death that would result as government […]

Distribution of major tax cuts for the rich across OECD nations, 1965-2015. This figure visualizes the resulting binary variable that picks out years in which taxes on the rich were reduced substantially. In total, we identify 30 country-year observations where taxes on the rich were significantly reduced. Governments enacted major tax reforms in all countries in our sample and across the whole observation period. Many countries implemented major tax cuts for the rich in the late 1980s. Furthermore, the identification of tax cuts is also in line with previous studies that have focused on income tax progressivity (Rubolino and Waldenström, 2020) or on overall tax progressivity single specific countries (Saez and Zucman, 2019). For instance, echoing these authors’ findings, we find two major reforms that reduced taxes on the rich in the US: 1982 (First Reagan Tax Cut) and 1986/1987 (Second Reagan Tax Cut). Graphic: Hope and Limberg, 2020 / LSE

December 25, 2020

Tax breaks for the rich don’t boost the economy – “Our research shows that the economic case for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak”

16 December 2020 (LSE) – Major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality but do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment, according to new research by LSE and King’s College London. Researchers say governments seeking to restore public finances following the COVID-19 crisis should therefore not be […]

Screenshot from “Honest Government Ad: Kyoto Carryover Credits” by The Juice Media. Photo: The Juice Media

December 13, 2020

Honest Government Ad: Australia’s Kyoto Carryover Credits

By Giordano Nanni 11 December 2020 (The Juice Media) – This is a special double-length Honest Government Ad, featuring our first-ever time-travel historical sequence, because there’s just so much shitfuckery to cover. Hence why it took us a little longer than usual to research, write, and make this one. I had of course heard about […]

Income inequality in the United States, 1913-2019. The U.S. shows a rise in the concentration of incomes unseen in other rich nations. The top 10% increase from 34% to 45% between 1980 and 2019. Half of the American population was shut from pretax economic growth. Graphic: World Inequality Database

December 11, 2020

Global inequality data update shows rise in concentration of U.S. incomes unseen in other rich nations – Latin America and the Middle East stand as the world’s most unequal regions

10 November 2020 (WIL) – The World Inequality Lab releases today a major update of global inequality data for 173 countries, making up 97% of the world population and 7.5 billion people. The data published distributes economic growth within each country making it possible to track inequality and poverty over time, countries and regions. These […]

August 2, 2020

Honest Government Ad: A message from the White House

30 July 2020 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the U.S. government, with an update on our pandemic response. In the space of a few months, our “Don’t worry, bro, it’s just the flu” policy has gotten a shit-ton of you killed. Some say this tragedy was inevitable, but actually, if we’d simply responded […]

A Brazilian Indigenous leader of the Guajajara tribe attends a meeting calling on EU lawmakers to exert pressure on the Brazilian government to protect the rights of indigenous communities, 12 November 2019. Photo: Thomas Samson / AFP

August 1, 2020

Highest number of land and environmental activists murdered in one year – In 2019, 212 people were killed for peacefully defending their homes and standing up to the destruction of nature

29 July 2020 (Global Witness) – Global Witness today revealed the highest number of land and environmental defenders murdered on record in a single year, with 212 people killed in 2019 for peacefully defending their homes and standing up to the destruction of nature. The NGO’s annual report also shed a light on the urgent role […]

Climate scientist Prof. Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. Facebook has placed restrictions on Prof. Hayhoe and blocked her from promoting videos related to climate research, a move that has limited her efforts to refute false claims. Photo: Katharine Hayhoe

July 12, 2020

Climate denial spreads on Facebook as scientists face restrictions – Company overrules scientific fact-checking group, which had flagged information as misleading

By Scott Waldman 6 July 2020 (E&E News) – A climate scientist says Facebook is restricting her ability to share research and fact-check posts containing climate misinformation. Those constraints are occuring as groups that reject climate science increasingly use the platform to promote misleading theories about global warming. The groups are using Facebook to mischaracterize […]

Map showing the most commonly used opioid, 2018 or latest available data. Data: UNODC, responses to the annual report questionnaire. Graphic: UNODC

June 26, 2020

UN World Drug Report 2020: Global drug use increased 30 percent from 2009 – COVID-19 has far reaching impact on global drug markets

VIENNA, 25 June 2020 (UNODC) – Around 269 million people used drugs worldwide in 2018, which is 30 per cent more than in 2009, while over 35 million people suffer from drug use disorders, according to the latest World Drug Report, released today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The Report […]