Linkage

Washington, D.C., June 10, 2024 – Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization, the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), that was responsible for major human rights atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s. The weeks-long trial featured testimony from the families of the nine victims in the case, the recollections of Colombian military officials and Chiquita executives, expert reports, and a summary of key documentary evidence produced by Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia documentation project.

“This historic ruling marks the first time that an American jury has held a major U.S. corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses in another country,” according to a press release from EarthRights International, which represents victims in the case.

In 2007, Chiquita reached a sentencing agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which it admitted to $1.7 million in payments to the AUC, which was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 2001. Chiquita paid a $25 million fine for violating a U.S. anti-terrorism statute but has never before had to answer to victims of the paramilitary group it financed. In 2018, Chiquita settled separate claims brought by the families of six victims of the FARC insurgent group, which was also paid by Chiquita for many years.

Today, the fine-graining of data and the isolation of consumers has changed the game. The old idiom is that every man has his price. But that’s literally true now, much more than you know, and it’s certainly the plan for the future.

“The idea of being able to charge every individual person based on their individual willingness to pay has for the most part been a thought experiment,” said Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission. “And now … through the enormous amount of behavioral and individualized data that these data brokers and other firms have been collecting, we’re now in an environment that technologically it actually is much more possible to be serving every individual person an individual price based on everything they know about you.”

Economists soft-pedal this emerging trend by calling it “personalized” pricing, which reflects their view that tying price to individual characteristics adds value for consumers. But Zephyr Teachout, who helped write anti-price-gouging rules in the New York attorney general’s office, has a different name for it: surveillance pricing.

“I think public pricing is foundational to economic liberty,” said Teachout, now a law professor at Fordham University. “Now we need to lock it down with rules.”

Last month, the FBI reportedly conducted an unannounced raid of Cortland Management, a major corporate landlord based in Atlanta. The surprise search appears to be part of a Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported by Politico in March, into an alleged scheme among many corporate landlords to artificially increase rents through collusion.

The investigation centers around the use of RealPage, advanced property management software used by many corporate landlords. Following a 2022 exposé by ProPublica, RealPage and landlords that use the software have been named defendants in multiple class action lawsuits, as well as actions filed by the Attorneys General of Arizona and Washington, DC.

According to the lawsuit filed by the State of Arizona in February, landlords that are supposed to be in competition with each other "outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight" to RealPage. The company allegedly facilitates and encourages landlords to work cooperatively to increase rents. An e-book produced by RealPage says that the company allows corporate landlords who are “technically competitors” to "work together . . . to make us all more successful in our pricing." RealPage bragged that landlords that use its software “continually outpace the market in good times and bad.” In other words, RealPage helps landlords charge higher rates than they would in a truly competitive market. An executive for Camden Property Trust, a corporate landlord based in Houston, said deploying RealPage's software resulted in "pushing people out" with higher rents but ultimately increased revenue by $10 million. 

As always with a Galbraith at the keyboard, this is a delight. Taken almost verbatim from the lecture mentioned below:

Twenty-five years ago, on a brilliant winter day at Alta, I skied off the top of the Sugarloaf lift and heard a familiar voice asking for directions. It was William F. Buckley Jr. I pulled off my hat and went over to say hello.  Buckley greeted me, then turned to a small man at his side wrapped in a quilted green parka topped with a matching forest green stocking cap and wraparound sunglasses in the punk style. “Of course,” Buckley said, “you know Milton Friedman.”

Last fall, when I received an invitation to deliver the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture at Marietta College, my first act was to notify Buckley, already then quite ill. I warned that he couldn’t publish on it or the invitation might be revoked. The e-mail came back instantly, full of exclamation points, block caps, and misspellings. “Congratulations! What a wonderful opportunity to REPENT!”

Developing social workers’ capacity and engagement in collaborative community-based innovations to climate-driven and other environmental hazards better ensures progress on the Grand Challenges. Such inclusive solutions value community leadership and are culturally responsive and justice-centered. Multisolving, pioneered by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, offers a framework to pair social work goals from the Grand Challenges with climate-responsive interdisciplinary solutions by tackling multiple problems simultaneously with a single investment of resources. Exploring multisolving case studies that align closely with the Grand Challenge to create social responses to a changing environment, the authors consider collaborations and share experiences teaching courses and workshops that integrate multisolving into the social work curriculum and align with professional ethics to achieve these goals.

It's the RBA. It's statistics.

It all began with the new world of aviation that followed the Airline Deregulation Act, signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. By gutting the Civil Aeronautics Board, which had tightly managed airlines, Carter did away with a slew of regulations, including price controls capping airfares.

[…]

The airlines reorganized an existing quasi-independent service they owned called the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO), headquartered near Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. By today’s standards, ATPCO wasn’t especially high-tech, but it essentially functioned as a clearinghouse to share information across the industry, helping airlines to set airfares. Weeks in advance, airlines would send ATPCO scheduled airfares along with detailed route information, seat numbers, and discount loyalty offers. None of this was public information. ATPCO in turn compiled this data and made it available to other airlines, so they could respond accordingly.

[…]

In hindsight, by not enforcing major penalties or banning ATPCO entirely, the DOJ effectively greenlit conduct that its own legal team deemed unlawful. Other actors across the economy took the hint and a proliferation of third-party price-fixing schemes sprung up, now seen in housing, agriculture, hospitality, and even health care.

These new pricing intermediaries are similar to ATPCO, but don’t just act as information exchanges between competitors. They actually set the prices for an entire industry by using machine-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, which are programmed to maximize profits. To arrive at optimal prices, these software applications aggregate vast amounts of relevant market data, some of which is public and much of which is competitively sensitive information given to them by their clients.

Each algorithmic scheme has its own distinct features, but they all share the same underlying philosophy: Competing on price in an open market is a race to the bottom, so why not instead coordinate together to grow industry’s profits? In other words, it’s another version of the notorious Peter Thiel adage that “competition is for losers.”

For decades, the most ruthless form of American capitalism centered on cost-cutting. […] The results can be seen in ruined industrial ghost towns across the Midwest, and businesses strip-mined by leveraged buyouts. But there is a tipping point to all this cost-cutting. There’s only so much fat to cut before you hit bone. The strategy eventually had diminishing returns, and without a new strategy, profits would hit a plateau. That wouldn’t cut it on Wall Street.

Enter the age of recoupment. Instead of cutting costs, the new mantra is raising prices.

Price hikes are old as dirt. But today’s companies have reinvented them. They’re using a dizzying array of sophisticated and deceitful tricks to do something pretty darn simple: rip you off.

The new tricks have fancy new names. Charging you more for less is a corporate practice known as “shrinkflation.” Revealing part of the total price up front, only to tack on all manner of ridiculous-sounding fees and service charges: Industry insiders call that one “drip pricing.” Stealing your online shopping data to predict the maximum price you would be willing to pay for your next e-commerce purchase: That’s personalized pricing. Using software to coordinate pricing with other companies to make sure they don’t undercut each other: That’s algorithmic price-fixing (or plain old-fashioned collusion). And charging you more for an item when supply is limited: That’s Jay Powell’s favorite, dynamic pricing.

[…]

With prices rising everywhere they turned, nobody could discern which were justified by companies’ own rising costs, and which were truly excessive. Highly engineered “dark patterns,” where people are tricked into signing up or paying more, were chalked up to the way things are now, rather than something more insidious. If a price surges, if a fee is tacked onto the bill, the culprit is the economy, not the company shoving their hands into your wallet.

CEOs hardly contain their delight on calls with investors. From the CFO of the international conglomerate 3M patting their team on the back for doing a “marvelous job in driving price,” to the CFO of the largest beer importer in the United States, Constellation Brands, who promised investors the company would “make sure we’re not leaving any pricing on the table” and “take as much as we can,” to the tech CEO who copped to “praying for inflation” and doing his “inflation dance,” these corporate executives were clear on one thing: Inflation was very good for business.

When a heat dome shattered temperature records across the Western U.S. and Canada in June 2021, the resulting fatalities exposed a pattern. In Portland, Oregon, and surrounding Multnomah County, 56 of the 72 people who died were age 60 and up. In British Columbia, people 60 or older accounted for 555 of the 619 fatalities.

Just over a year later, a sizzling June, July and August in England caused roughly 2,800 excess deaths among people 65 and older. More than 1,000 of them occurred over four days in late July.

Intense heat waves in recent years offer a stark warning of what’s at stake for humanity. The planet just endured its 12 hottest consecutive months on record, and this summer threatens to be hotter than ever. But those stakes are not experienced equally across age groups. Older adults are more at risk of experiencing dangerous health impacts during periods of intense heat.

In 2015, when I first started learning about the health and well-being of trans people, I knew very little. I went on a journey of discovery, and what I discovered wasn’t good. I was shocked, appalled, and disgusted by what I was reading, hearing, and later, experiencing. Trans people – including youth – in the UK were being harassed, bullied, victimised, shunned, picked on, and discriminated against. That was by people working in my profession – healthcare workers, nurses, doctors, and psychologists – who had formed an unhealthy relationship with these patients and this significant patient group.

In 2016, the Women and Equalities Commission found, and I quote, “The NHS is letting down trans people, with too much evidence of an approach that can be said to be discriminatory and in breach of the Equality Act.”

Back then, it was so bad I assumed that once we recognised the real issues that were present that things could and would start to get better. But they haven’t.

[…] 

It’s confounding to see individuals who have historically fought for equal rights, including people of colour, individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and women, now participating in denying trans people their rights to recognition, acceptance, and healthcare.

But the final blow came when the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Minister for Health, acting jointly, made an emergency order to start on June 3, 2024 to restrict the prescribing and supply of puberty blockers to under 18s. The order was made to “avoid serious danger to health”.

So, while experts across the world publish evidence-based guidelines to make puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones more accessible to trans youth, the UK government ignores medics and imposes bans. This will not avoid serious danger to health, it will cause serious danger to health, and it will cause death.