What Happened Today: May 26, 2022
Reveal of hacked Xinjiang Police Files; 50,000 stranded at southern border; The Big Money in Greenwashing
The Big Story
The Xinjiang Police Files, a newly published cache of files hacked from law enforcement servers in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, reveal new and startling detail about the so-called “re-education” camps and high-security prisons Chinese officials have used to illegally detain and perpetuate crimes against humanity against upwards of 1.2 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. The BBC says it spent several months authenticating some 5,000 photographs, speech transcripts, and internal documents that shed a light on both the camps and prisons where more than a million people have been detained, some for “crimes” that stretch back decades. Retroactive punishments include a 10-year sentence given to one man in 2017 because he had spent time in 2010 studying “Islamic scripture with his grandmother,” while one woman was detained after her son was sent to prison for a decade because he neither smoked nor drank, which was grounds for charges of terrorism. While Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has described the education camps as “schools that help people free themselves from extremism,” the camps appear to be as restrictive and coercive as a prison, with internal documents indicating a shoot-to-kill policy for students attempting an escape and mandatory shackles and blindfolds for students who are being moved between facilities. Transcripts of speeches of Chinese officials speaking to camp and prison staff refer frequently and in deferential terms to China’s President Xi Jinping for his funding and “important instructions” to deprogram Xinjiang’s roughly 2 million residents suffering from “extremist thought.” One 2017 speech by Communist Party secretary, Chen Quanguo, outlines the need for camps that detain students well beyond the standard five-year period. “Once they are let out, problems will reappear,” he said. “That is the reality in Xinjiang.”
Read more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chinas-uyghur-detention-camps
In the Back Pages: The Big Money in Greenwashing The Rest
The Rest
→ Tens of thousands of migrants are waiting at the United States’ southern border—in detention camps, in Mexican shelters—hoping for the opportunity to present themselves to an immigration judge and be granted asylum.
The number of people waiting, estimated at 50,000, is double what analysts had previously predicted would be arriving to the United States as part of a “mass migration event,” triggered by the annulment of Title 42, the pandemic-era emergency policy instituted by former president Donald Trump’s White House that empowered the Department of Homeland Security to deport migrants without first providing them an immigration hearing, as U.S. law would otherwise require.
Migrants from as far afield as Peru and Colombia are now arriving to the border each day—an astonishing 8,000 people daily—in the hopes that Title 42 will lapse and they will be admitted to the United States.
The Biden administration had hoped to end Title 42 last week, but a federal judge had blocked that decision, siding with border states that were worried about what might happen if the tens of thousands of people waiting in Mexico were granted entry.
→ Gathering on Wednesday for its annual shareholder meeting, Amazon’s investors approved a $212 million compensation package for CEO Andy Jassy while voting against 15 proposals that would improve worker safety, worker pay, and worker rights to organize, as well as environmental and customer privacy policy. Investors were unmoved by the four warehouse workers who attended the meeting and pitched some of these proposals directly, including one who suggested doing away with the warehouse quota system, which tracks workers’ productivity and activity rates—a practice the worker called “exploitative and dangerous” and that, according to Washington state regulators, is the direct cause of many injuries in the factories.
→ Touted as an innovative technology of convenience despite the potential risks of invasive surveillance and identity security, the digital driver’s licenses rolled out three years ago by New South Wales officials in Australia (and under consideration by some U.S. states) have been found to be incredibly easy to hack, requiring about an hour and the simple use of a freely available piece of software. Initially touted by Australian officials as a highly secure alternative to plastic licenses that would grant people a quick and safe way to verify their age and identity to get into bars, check into hotels, and provide information to police during traffic stops, the digital driver’s licenses have a mess of security holes, according to a new report by security researchers, that allow “malicious users to generate [a] fraudulent Digital Driver’s Licence with minimal effort.”
→ In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, as “Defund the Police” became a plank of Black Lives Matters protests nationwide, Los Angeles’ Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that he would cut his city’s $1.7 billion police budget by $150 million. Two years later, as L.A. suffers through rising homicide and crime rates, candidates to replace Garcetti as mayor are competing over who can speak most favorably about re-funding the police. Karen Bass, a Democratic congresswoman who is expected to win the Democratic primary, wants to put 200 more cops on the street; Rick Caruso, a Republican real estate magnate who once served as L.A. police commissioner and is currently leading in the polls, believes 200 officers to be 1,300 too few. The race remains a toss-up, but the fate of “Defund the Police” in Los Angeles is all but assured.
→ College enrollment dropped precipitously this past spring, with 662,000 fewer students enrolling in bachelor’s degree programs than in Spring 2021—a 4.7% decline that suggests students are rethinking the benefits of getting a diploma. The numbers come from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center and suggest “it’s more than just the pandemic” and “more than just low-income communities that are primarily served by community colleges,” the center’s executive director, Doug Shapiro, told reporters. “It suggests that there’s a broader question about the value of college and particularly concerns about student debt and paying for college and potential labor market returns.” Last year’s losses—which brought the enrollment rate since the start of the pandemic to a 9.4% decrease—were especially bad in public programs. Top-ranked private programs are still seeing surges in applications, and community colleges serving lower-income students have seen their application pools go down and their enrollment drop 7.8%. One possible explanation for this is that we’re observing yet another product of wealth inequality in the United States: With the labor market tight, lower-income Americans who would typically enroll in community colleges are opting to join the job market. Those well-off enough to do so, meanwhile, are enrolling in colleges, improving their chances of becoming high earners down the road.
→ Traveling in Asia this week, President Biden introduced (albeit vaguely) the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), his version of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, which brings together 12 countries in Asia in an economic pact to counter China’s power in the region. Beyond escalating the economic rivalry with China, the IPEF also marks a win for U.S. tech companies. “Let’s start with new rules governing trade in digital goods and services so companies don’t have to hand over the proprietary technology to do business in a country,” Biden said at the opening of his speech introducing the IPEF, making clear his intention to keep tech monopolies shielded from foreign rivals. Biden also appointed Gina Raimondo as the lead negotiator for the new IPEF. Raimondo, or “Big Tech’s Favorite Biden Official,” as Politico put it, previously impressed lawmakers with her work lobbying against E.U. anti-trust regulations.
→ Buried beneath the dense foliage of the Amazon jungle are the ruins of vast and complex earthen cities constructed by the indigenous Casarabe people between 500 and 1,500 years ago. These findings, made by helicopters equipped with lidar equipment that maps densely covered terrain using lasers, were published in Nature on Wednesday and indicate that, contrary to the narratives that frame Amazonia prior to Hispanic colonization as sparsely populated with simple settlements, there were flourishing cities lined with sewage and irrigation systems that were linked to other such cities by an interurban highway. Researchers discovered that these 11 settlements, some of which are almost a thousand acres in size, once bustled with almost 1 million inhabitants.
→ The Parthenon Marbles, an ancient series of sculptures created in the fifth century B.C. in Athens, remained in that city until the early 19th century, when Lord Elgin, a British nobleman, had them removed and brought to the British Museum where they can be found still—until, that is, England and Greece meet to work out the details of their repatriation. But the lead-up to those meetings has caused something of a diplomatic row between the two countries, with UNESCO struggling to ease the tensions. Greece has sought to repatriate these works—which include a 250-foot piece of a frieze from the Parthenon depicting Athena in parade—since 1983, while the British Museum has long claimed that Lord Elgin acquired these works legally during the period when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed the British argue that they saved these wondrous sculptures from the trash bin of history—or the rubble surrounding the Parthenon, anyway—a claim that Greek officials dismiss. “Over the years, Greek authorities and the international scientific community have demonstrated with unshakeable arguments the true events surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures,” Lina Mendoni, Greece’s culture minister, said to The Guardian. “Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft.” Many prominent members of England’s art establishment, meanwhile, dismiss the suggestion that the British government has any say over the sculptures at all. “It is not for the U.K. government to enter into discussions on the future of the Parthenon sculptures with the Greek government,” said Helen Whitehouse, a director of Britain’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The sculptures, she argued, are the sole property of the British Museum, which is not beholden to British or U.N. diplomats.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
The Big Money in Greenwashing
This week’s World Economic Forum gathered the world’s best and brightest in Davos, Switzerland, to tackle the thorniest issues of the day. While intoning mantras about climate change and globalization, executives of billion-dollar businesses took to the Swiss Alps to ideate how they might continue business as usual while honoring the difficult environmental commitments they have made over the past few years to reduce their carbon footprints.
Many comments at Davos about charting new paths forward have lit up social media this week, but one of the more provocative came from Michael Evans, the president of the $260 billion Alibaba Group, who described a green social credit score for consumers. “We’re developing, through technology, an ability for consumers to measure their whole carbon footprint,” he said, explaining that the new social rating could allow consumers to earn credits in exchange for the data about where they go and what they eat, with careful monitoring of their “traveling. How they are traveling. What are they eating. What they are consuming on the platform.”
That video snippet was part of a panel with industry titans such as the head of JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier, and the top executive of beauty product giant L'Oréal. Touting his company’s plans for carbon neutrality, Evans’ scheme to do right by the environment stood apart from the rest in that Alibaba, an Amazon-like Chinese platform, wasn’t talking about how his company would change the way it made and sold its wares. In fact, even though it ships 80 million packages a day, it doesn’t really make products—it’s a platform that makes its money as a gatekeeper between a billion consumers, 250,000 brands, and 10 million small businesses. But just like Amazon, the software that Alibaba used to build itself into one of the world’s most powerful corporations has itself become a profitable business, part of which extends to the Green Travel social credits it will trade to consumers in exchange for their surveillance data profile—or what Evans referred to as the “bonus points that they can redeem elsewhere on the platform so that they’re incentivized to do the right thing even if they were provided the opportunity to do the wrong thing.”
“This is not about making money. The purpose of this is not to make money for Alibaba. It’s about how we can contribute to our commitments” to the environment, Evans assured the audience of fellow corporate humanitarians at Davos.
Of course, a campaign to turn the surveillance of upwards of a billion consumers into a tradeable commodity is very much about making money, no matter how much Evans might say otherwise. Indeed, the carbon tracking of consumers and vendors alike is an existential need for many companies, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced in March that it would begin requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and “carbon price” for doing business. For now, at least, the measurement of those emissions and environmental impacts is largely left up to the companies and to the explosively popular firms who help them satisfy these vaguely defined requirements, which provides giants like Alibaba a terrific opportunity for new lines of business, just as unstable supply chains and vulnerable trade alliances threaten their established forms of revenue.
Indeed, carbon credits for vaguely defined “green products” are essentially unregulated—just like the many surveillance technologies baked into the platforms we now all use everyday for daily tasks—and allow those who get into them first the chance to define the standards of engagement that are most favorable for their own monopoly position.
Yesterday, the Bank of England marked how significant the shift to surveillance and carbon credit monitoring will be when it published its Climate Biennial Exploratory Scenario, urging the biggest banks and insurance companies in the United Kingdom to make sure their portfolios “prioritise investment in their climate risk assessment capabilities” using the same type of climate stress testing and surveillance analytics that Alibaba sees as the future of environmentally responsible e-commerce operations.
And all this year, the carbon credit market has been one of the hottest plays for crypto entrepreneurs—which is convenient, as the established crypto sphere has turned into a giant cesspool of fraud and volatility. In the aviation sector, investors have plowed into the AirCarbon Exchange, “a blockchain-based Voluntary Carbon market” that allows airline industry companies to offset their environmental harm with CORSIA tokens, entirely unregulated financial instruments that 130 corporate clients have used to claim as offsetting the equivalent of 3.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, launched this month a new futures contract that will “measure the carbon sequestration and storage capabilities of nature,” said Gordon Bennett, an ICE managing director. The contract “will be an important valuation tool to conserve and grow the world’s natural capital base.”
Earlier this week, Adam Neumann, the founder and former CEO of WeWork, announced his pivot from selling distributed work as a cult to selling tokens of carbon credits on a blockchain. His new company, Flowcarbon, took in $70 million of venture capital funds (led by Andreessen Horowitz), with a business model that allows companies to turn their good carbon deeds into crypto coins. Though many others have entered into the so-called crypto regenerative finance space, Flowcarbon is trying to make its name by selling its Goddess Nature Token that’s pegged, apparently, to companies that take on nature-based projects, itself a new and entirely unregulated industry of “nature-based solutions” like tree-planting projects and peatlands that environmental researchers have found often destroy biodiversity and do much more harm than good to mitigate carbon emissions.
“Just because it has ‘carbon’ in its name doesn’t mean you’re doing something good,” wrote David Riester, an executive of a renewable energy company, about the news of the massive round of funding for Flowcarbon. “In many cases, it just means you’re getting played by an opportunistic grifter.”