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Joe Biden can inspire young people - if he listens to them - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...oung-people-if-he-listens-them Biden Politics policy election
shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden faces a crucial conundrum in his quest to win the presidency: How can he energize young voters, even as at 77, even though he is of a decidedly different generation and was not their candidate of choice during the Democratic primaries?
  • One possible answer: trusting and embracing young voters and their opinions.
  • children are builders of humanity, each the forger of their own character, physical health and intelligence. Youth, Montessori insisted, is the cornerstone of society.
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  • In her view, a universal scientific, social and political commitment to liberating and focusing the power of children would prevent the formation of stunted, dysfunctional adults.
  • Nonetheless, it took decades to fully implement them. The 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child was built on the premise that humankind owes children the best it can give.
  • Childhood was valuable in and of itself, not as a transitional phase that predates adulthood or simply as a “training period” for life.
  • Despite all of this apparent progress, children and young adults remain politicized but unable to be political. Mostly this is because politics remains an old person’s game, seldom open to direct representation of young people and adolescents even in issues that directly concern them, such as the presence of armed security officers in school.
  • The latest protests to end racism and police violence have shown how a new generation of activists is willing to take on vexing, seemingly intractable issues, the very same problems that adults may deny even exist.
  • It is now up to organized political parties to harness the power of youth organizations, to galvanize them and inspire young people to believe that the existing political machinery is receptive to their demands and that politics can indeed change the system it represents.
  • Joe Biden has struggled to speak to younger voters, evidenced by the results of the Democratic Party’s primary elections
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Trump Says He's Beaten Covid-19. Doctors Aren't So Sure. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-virus-doctors.html trump pandemic crisis
shared by kaylynfreeman on 07 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • no fever, only slightly elevated blood pressure and a blood oxygen level in the healthy range.
  • But when reporters asked him for results of Mr. Trump’s chest X-rays and lung scans — crucial measures of how severely the president has been sickened by Covid-19 — Dr. Conley refused to answer, citing a federal law that restricts what doctors can share about patients.
  • it was premature to declare victory over an unpredictable, poorly understood virus that has killed more than 210,000 people in the United States.
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  • Far from having vanquished Covid-19, the outside doctors said, Mr. Trump is most likely still struggling with it and entering a pivotal phase — seven to 10 days after the onset of symptoms — in which he could rapidly take a turn for the worse. He’s 74, male and moderately obese, factors that put him at risk for severe disease.
  • For many, it was a political stunt. For Dr. King of UCSF, who was watching on C-SPAN, the return to the White House was an opportunity to observe how the president breathed.
  • Some experts said that the decision to give Mr. Trump dexamethasone could be a sign that he was struggling with more serious Covid-19 than his doctors were revealing, or that his doctors had inappropriately prescribed him the drug.
  • severe form of Covid-19, with impairment of the lungs and a blood oxygen level below 94 percent, which is a cutoff for severe disease.
  • paused twice while walking across the lawn — whether to wave to cameras or to catch his breath, he said was not clear — and then appeared to be gasping for breath at the top of the stairs. He and others said Mr. Trump used his neck muscles to help him breathe, a classic sign that someone’s lungs are not taking in enough oxygen.
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Trump's Captain Queeg Crackup - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/trumps-captain-queeg-crackup trump 25th amendment deranged crisis 2020
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The situation in Washington grows dire. For Trump’s most recent ravings make Queeg look like a model of sanity and restraint.
  • He attacked his own cabinet members for not prosecuting or persecuting his political adversaries. Attorney General William Barr, Trump proclaimed, will go down in history as “a very, sad, sad situation” if he did not indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama:
  • Of Kamala Harris, Trump said, “she’s a communist,” calling her “this monster that was on stage with Mike Pence.” He claimed that Biden “wouldn’t be president for two months” because “he’s not mentally capable.”
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  • He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.
  • After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.
  • All this in but a few hours.
  • Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy
  • Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.
  • What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.
  • For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.
  • Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president
  • That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.
  • So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran
  • The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”
  • But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling
  • He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.
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17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...xas-supreme-court-lawsuit.html politics US Trump
shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The move is an attempt to bolster a baseless legal effort by Texas that seeks to delay certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost.
  • and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt.Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case.
  • The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court
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  • Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to pressure Republican state legislators and elections officials — who have the most influence over declaring the formal winner and allocating electoral votes — to deny victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. They have largely resisted him.
  • The 17 states behind the amicus brief represent a majority of the 25 Republican attorneys general across the country, and include Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and South Dakota. Notably, the two Republican attorneys general in the battleground states that Mr. Trump lost — Arizona and Georgia — are not part of the brief.
  • Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former attorney general of the state, seemed baffled by the legal maneuver, calling it “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”“I’ve never seen something like this, so I don’t know what the Supreme Court’s going to do,” he said in Washington on Wednesday.
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A malaria vaccine is approved by the World Health Organisation | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21805361 health history
shared by woodlu on 07 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • But so far only one, a jab called RTS,S, made by GlaxoSmithKline, has proved effective in the final stages of clinical trials. On October 6th the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended RTS,S for use in childhood vaccination in places with transmission of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest of the five parasites that cause malaria, and the most common in Africa.
  • The WHO reached its decision after reviewing results from Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, where more than 800,000 infants were vaccinated with a four-dose regimen.
  • RTS,S was included among the routine childhood vaccines distributed by primary health-care centres. This implementation programme, in which RTS,S reduced by 30% the number of cases of severe malaria which led to hospital admissions, therefore measured what kind of efficacy can be expected if the vaccine is rolled out widely across Africa.
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  • in parts of sub-Saharan Africa children contract malaria six times a year on average. Each year more than 260,000 African children die of it before their fifth birthdays.
  • Those who survive often suffer lifelong harm, including stunting, a form of impaired growth that affects the ability to learn.
  • the WHO says that the vaccine was found to be safe after more than 2.3m doses had been administered—clearing the air on three “safety signals” that had popped up in an earlier trial.
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Opinion | How AI is transforming education at the University of Mississippi - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-chatgpt-universities-learning chatbot writing thinking education evaluation
shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.
  • Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.
  • What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.
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  • “Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.
  • Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.
  • the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.
  • Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.
  • ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be so long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.
  • The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.
  • This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.
  • These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own
  • But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.
  • Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”
  • maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.
  • All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?
  • Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.
  • If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.
  • more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.
  • Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.
  • This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.
  • While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.
  • One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.
  • Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.
  • Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”
  • Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”
  • Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.
  • Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.
  • The central theme of the course was empathy.
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Most 'Transgender' Kids Turn Out to Be Gay - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...re-conversion-therapy-58111b2e transgender homosexual conversion culture history
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I’ll be celebrating Dec. 15, the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The longstanding designation was based on prejudice, not medical research, and the revision marked the beginning of the end for so-called conversion therapy, which sought to “cure” gays and lesbians of a nonexistent malady.
  • Half a century later, the medical establishment is pushing a new kind of conversion therapy under the guise of transgender identity. No one is suffering more than gay kids
  • In Canada, where I practice, and in the U.S., physicians provide what’s euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” to patients as young as 8, and the leading transgender health association has opened the door to interventions at even earlier ages. Under this framework, those who feel uncomfortable with their bodies may receive a medical regimen including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. These interventions typically stunt, remove or irreversibly modify a patient’s sexual development, genitals and secondary sex characteristics
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  • Any endocrinologist or other physician who rejects this approach is alleged to be endangering the health and even the life of his patients.
  • Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention
  • But are these patients really “transgender”
  • Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys
  • This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”
  • In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy.
  • Now it takes the form of rendering teenagers sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life.
  • linicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”
  • Consistent with conversion therapy, physicians are telling young gays and lesbians that something is wrong with them, based on a regressive view of what it is to be male or female
  • The resulting interventions often create lifelong medical problems, both physical and mental. Contrary to advocates’ claims, there’s no evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries reduce the risk of suicide.
  • Children who take this road face a lifetime of pain, infertility and anguish
  • society has been told that accepting transgender identity is the same as accepting gays and lesbians. But it isn’t. Even well-intentioned acceptance of transgender identity disproportionately harms them
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A Hotter World - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...te-change-heat-wave-india.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • India has contributed little to climate change: Home to 18 percent of the world’s population, it has emitted just 3 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
  • It is happening right now: Over the past three months, a heat wave has devastated North India and neighboring Pakistan. Temperatures surpassed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so hot that overheated birds fell out of the sky in Gurgaon, India, and a historic bridge in northern Pakistan collapsed after melting snow and ice at a glacial lake released a torrent of water.
  • Indians have responded by staying indoors as much as possible, particularly during the afternoon hours. The government has encouraged this, pushing schools to close early and businesses to shift work schedules. The measures have kept down deaths — with fewer than 100 recorded so far, an improvement from heat waves years ago that killed thousands.
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  • But these measures have costs. Schooling time is cut short, so students learn less. People do not travel to their jobs, so work is less productive. The heat kept some farmers inside and stunted harvests, so crop yields fell and global food prices increased. Social life is disrupted.
  • The geography of poor countries — many are close to the Equator — is not the only reason climate change is such a burden for them. Their poverty is another factor, leaving them with fewer resources to adapt.
  • “Climate change is one of the most profound inequities of the modern era,”
  • There is a paradox to the climate crisis. Because India never fully industrialized, it has not released as many greenhouse gases as the U.S., European nations and other rich countries. But because it has not industrialized, it also has fewer resources to adapt than the richer, polluting nations.
  • Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have air-conditioning at home.
  • The rush for clean energy technologies, like solar and wind power, is an effort to break that tension — to give countries a way to industrialize without the planet-warming pollution. With climate disasters already hitting much of the world, that effort is in a race against time to prevent more crises like India’s.
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Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians | Cr... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fraudsters-corrupt-politicians switzerland bank secrecy corruption tax evasion whistleblower
shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
  • Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
  • It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
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  • his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
  • Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
  • A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
  • Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
  • One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.
  • Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
  • The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
  • After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
  • However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
  • The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
  • A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
  • One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
  • Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
  • The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
  • One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
  • The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
  • Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
  • The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
  • By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
  • Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
  • Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
  • More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
  • This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
  • “This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
  • “I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
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Unconscious bias training is 'nonsense', says outgoing race relations chair | Race | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-outgoing-race-relations-chair unconscious bias training institutional systemic racism racism UK history
shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The outgoing chair of the Institute of Race Relations has decried the widespread use of “nonsense” unconscious bias training, claiming it is an obvious sidestepping of tackling racial injustice.
  • In a wide-ranging interview, the sociologist and cultural activist said he was proud of the role that his institute had played in putting institutional racism on the national agenda several decades ago, but was dismayed at the rise of terms such as unconscious bias.
  • “We made arguments to the state even when we’re on platforms alongside them saying this was nonsense. It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about, not unconscious bias or racial awareness,”
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  • “It’s the stuff that kills that we want to talk about, the stuff that stunts lives that we want to talk about, the stuff that deforms lives that we want to talk about.”
  • The outgoing chair pointed to the increasing concern of a school-to-prison pipeline in the UK, where young minority ethnic children excluded from schools are forced into pupil referral units where they are groomed by criminal gangs – a clear example of systemic racism, he claims.
  • “To talk about unconscious biases is an obvious sidestepping of the matter. And it’s also wanting to let people off,” Prescod said.
  • The institute “insistently” talked about institutional racism then, but was in the minority and faced significant opposition, Prescod said. “In the end, it stuck because we then had the Macpherson report amongst others using a term which was not invented by them, but by communities of resistance.”
  • : “Ambalavaner Sivanandan [former director of IRR] and we at the institute were taking our cue from what the communities of resistance were saying. Institutionalised racism was not invented in the academy. It’s not invented by the politicians, it comes off the ground.
  • “It comes out of slow realisation where you start with one case that shows you injustice and after a while you pull that out and you realise that you’re looking at a whole string of things that tell you there’s something more than simply a wrongdoer in this situation.”
  • Prescod was not surprised at the government’s recent decision to drop crucial reform commitments made after the Windrush scandal. “This is not unlike what happened after the Macpherson report, which says very clearly institutionalised racism exists. And this is not just in the police. Any number of institutions have been looked at in this kind of way
  • When asked what he felt was the most significant change in Britain in terms of race, Prescod turned to a lyric from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet: “Don’t wanna take my country back, mate. I wanna take my country forward.” He said he finds it powerful black youth have claimed the country as their own.
  • “We now have populations here who are not thinking of themselves from some other place or going to some other place, but here, and are aware of their history of struggle. When Sons of Kemet says something like ‘we want to take our country forward’, notice all the words in the phrase.” He believes it shows a significant cultural shift of “new generations [of black Britons] born here, belonging here, speaking with a different kind of authority”.
  • Prescod said while there was no room for “triumphalism” when looking at racial progress, he was leaving his position with some hope. “There is always resistance. It’s only too clear. If you look at any situation in which somebody starts to be down-pressed, you will realise that there is somebody who is saying: get off my back, get off my throat. We don’t simply curl up.”
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