Apple has been making an effort to conquer India to boost its declining iPhone sales, but things aren’t going too well for the company. According to Reuters, the Indian government has rejected Cupertino’s request to allow it to open official Apple St…
Sometimes you have to do things the old fashioned way.
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Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that helped bring climate change to worldwide attention. Director Davis Guggenheim, then an executive at Participant Media, left the company to film former Vice President Al Gore as he traveled around the country giving a slide show on global warming and calling for action to save the planet.
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Georgina Spies, Stellenbosch University
HIV-positive women who have endured a trauma such as emotional, physical or sexual abuse, or neglect earlier in their lives are more likely to have trouble remembering, paying attention or multitasking. Parts of their brains are also smaller than women who are only affected by HIV.
In the first study to assess the combined impact of HIV and trauma on women we found that women who have both childhood trauma and HIV are more likely to have more trouble with their cognitive functions.
It has been known for some time that HIV affects the brain. People living with the virus have trouble paying attention, remembering and switching between tasks. Their movement, coordination and dexterity may also be impaired.
Studies assessing victims of early life trauma have shown that these children undergo changes in their brain structures that affect their everyday functioning. These include difficulty learning and remembering, paying attention and executing an instruction. This results in academic underachievement or them developing mental disorders in childhood or later in life.
But the impact that early life stress may have on the brain in the context of HIV infection has received very little attention. Our study aimed to address this.
The research may provide clues to potential therapeutic targets in affected women and therefore contribute to reducing the burden of HIV. This is important because sub-Saharan Africa has one of the most serious HIV epidemics in the world. With 59% of women on the continent being HIV positive, women account for more than half of HIV infections in Africa. Many of have also been subjected to trauma growing up.
We conducted a longitudinal study at the Department of Psychiatry at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University that compared HIV-positive and HIV-negative women, both with a history of early life trauma and without one.
Participants were recruited through community health-care facilities in a metropole in the Western Cape province. They underwent two neurocognitive and neuroimaging assessments to measure their brain function and structure.
The first assessment, conducted at the beginning of the study, measured their attention span, and their capacity to remember and multitask. It also measured the volumes of parts of the brain known to be affected by HIV. The second assessment measured the same variables a year later.
Neurocognition was assessed using an international neuropsychological battery sensitive to the effects of HIV. This involves a series of pencil and paper and computerised tests to measure aspects of cognitive function such as memory, speed of information processing, motor skills, verbal fluency and executive function.
Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging measured the size of certain regions of the brain. This was done to ascertain whether HIV infection and childhood trauma or the combination caused alterations in brain structures in our sample.
The most commonly reported childhood trauma type was emotional abuse followed by emotional neglect, physical neglect, physical abuse and lastly sexual abuse.
The preliminary data revealed that the size (volume) of certain brain regions was significantly smaller in HIV-positive women with childhood trauma compared with the other three groups.
Findings also suggested that alterations in these brain regions may be associated with poorer cognitive performance in the domains of processing speed, working memory, executive function, motor skills, learning and verbal fluency, with these effects more pronounced in women living with both HIV and childhood trauma.
Though previous research has shown that there could be an improvement in these functions when HIV-positive people were put on antiretrovirals, preliminary analyses of follow-up data in our study showed the effects of HIV and childhood trauma remained evident a year later. This was despite greater antiretroviral uptake and improved HIV disease status among these women.
At both baseline and follow-up points, scores for most neuropsychological tasks suggested poorer performance in the dually affected group compared with all other groups, suggesting that the “double hit” of HIV infection and early life stress may be more detrimental to the brain.
These findings highlight the need for trauma screening and for the integration of trauma-focused interventions in HIV care to improve outcomes in affected individuals. The experience of early life trauma deserves more attention in the clinical care of HIV-positive individuals.
Cognitive impairments should be addressed in the treatment of victims of childhood trauma. Keeping in mind that the brain is developing in childhood and adolescence, early intervention is crucial and may prevent long-term brain alterations as identified in our study.
Georgina Spies, Postdoctoral Scientist and Researcher in the Department of Psychiatry, Stellenbosch University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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There’s new hope for the Tasmanian devil, the endangered marsupial that’s been decimated by a deadly disease. Scientists have found a hidden colony that could add much-needed diversity to the animal’s gene pool.
Tests on samples of devil poo found in a remote part of Tasmania revealed nine new genetic variants, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
“For us this is massive,” Sydney University geneticist Kathy Belov told the newspaper. “For years we have been calling devils clones because there’s so little diversity and now we find that there is diversity out there, it’s just in remote areas.”
That diversity could prove key to the survival of the species, which is being wiped out by devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), a cancer that develops around the face and neck and kills the animal within three to five months.
While cancer is not usually passed between animals, this case is different and the lack of genetic diversity in the population may be the reason.
“When a healthy devil is infected with DFTD from another animal, the infected devil’s immune system assumes that the new cancer cells are the same as its own cells and fails to reject them,” the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program explained on its website.
(Story continues below image.)
Belov told ABC Australia that new genetic variants could add diversity to the animals in captivity, which were being carefully bred to act as an insurance population to protect the devils from extinction.
The Tasmanian devil was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List after the population dropped from between 130,000 and 150,000 in the 1990s to an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 mature animals today.
Although small, devils are known for their powerful jaws and sour disposition. When fighting or eating, they make growling and snarling noises not unlike the cartoon character that bears their name.
San Diego Zoo, which has been working with the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, said the area where the samples were found could only be reached by a long hike, helicopter or chartered boat.
Although scientists asked for funding to study the devil population and were turned down, a collaborator was able to collect the poo samples while on a hike through the region.
Since the animals themselves haven’t been seen yet, researchers aren’t sure if this hidden population has been affected by the cancer.
Belov hopes scientists will eventually travel to the area and see for themselves.
“We want to capture all the variants that are out there and make sure that we maintain them in the captive population,” Belov said. “And then we can release them into the wild.”
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In late April, Colombian diplomat Andrés Flórez sent two tense letters to leaders in Bogotá. If his government proceeded with plans to lower the price of an important leukemia treatment, it risked losing U.S. support for a major peace initiative intended to resolve decades of violent conflict in the South American nation.
Communications with both the Obama administration and a key Senate Republican staffer had convinced Flórez that the United States government vehemently opposed Colombia’s plan to allow a generic copy of the cancer drug Gleevec. Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that has a monopoly on the drug in Colombia, charges more than double the nation’s per-capita income to treat a patient with Gleevec for one year. By issuing a so-called compulsory license to a generic drugmaker, Colombia could dramatically reduce those costs.
But Flórez was convinced that doing so would anger top U.S. officials. He wrote that the Obama administration may rescind its support for Paz Colombia — a peace initiative to end a half-century of war between Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — a Marxist rebel group known as FARC. In February, Obama committed $450 million to help the Colombian government fight the illegal drug trade and retrain FARC members.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has not publicly denied pressuring the Colombian government over Gleevec prices, nor has it disavowed invoking the Paz Colombia project during talks.
On Thursday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called on Michael Froman — the top trade official in the Obama administration — to acknowledge Colombia’s right to permit generic drugs under international law.
“As you know, compulsory licenses are expressly permitted under Colombia’s international trade obligations and can be an effective means to make medicines available and affordable,” Brown wrote, urging Froman to “publicly clarify that issuing a compulsory license for a pharmaceutical product and promoting access to medicines are consistent with Colombia’s international trade obligations.”
Brown is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade policy. Flórez mentioned meeting with a top staffer for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs that committee. Hatch’s office has refused to deny pressuring Colombian diplomats over Gleevec, which is sold as Glivec in South America.
In his letter to Froman, Brown blasted “any efforts to intimidate and discourage Colombia’s government from taking measures to protect the public health of Colombians in a way that is appropriate, effective, and consistent with the country’s trade and public health obligations.” Brown said it was “unconscionable that any representatives of the U.S. government would threaten to rescind funding for Colombia’s peace initiative if a compulsory license for Glivec were issued.”
U.S. trade policy has prioritized the profits of pharmaceutical companies for decades, drawing ire from humanitarian groups, including Doctors Without Borders. Both the U.S. trade agreement with Colombia and World Trade Organization treaties protect a country’s right to issue generic drugs, however.
“Attempts to dissuade Colombia from using these authorities — especially by threatening unrelated streams of financial support — would be inconsistent with the goals of these agreements and would signal that the United States is not committed to living up to the standards of our free trade agreements when it does not suit corporate interests,” Brown wrote. “Moreover, they would give the appearance that the United States is elevating corporate profits over public health priorities.”
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WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was right. Big banks really did want President Barack Obama to sign a trade deal making it easier for them to challenge regulations they don’t like. And they got what they wanted.
Goldman Sachs believed that any trade pact that did not include terms to help it challenge rules would not be “a meaningful agreement for our industry,” according to a private email from the bank’s managing director, Faryar Shirzad, to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.
The note is one of a handful of emails obtained by the progressive group Rootstrikers through a Freedom Of Information Act request and provided to The Huffington Post. Rootstrikers sought direct communications between Froman — formerly a high-paid Citigroup employee — and big banks.
The emails do not demonstrate any legally damning coordination between Froman and Wall Street, but they do reveal new details about bank lobbying on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a major trade pact between the United States and 11 other countries.
Froman was so irked by a November Politico Pro article detailing big bank objections to the pact that he forwarded the article to a JPMorgan Chase staffer with an admonishment: “This is really not helpful.” The name of the JPMorgan Chase employee was redacted from the email.
Although Congress has yet to approve TPP, Obama has already signed the agreement. Last year, Congress passed so-called “fast track” legislation, making it easier for Obama and the next U.S. president to move trade pacts through the legislature.
The TPP deal grants corporations broad powers to challenge government regulations before an international tribunal, a process known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. Under the pact, if a U.S. company doesn’t like rules in Vietnam, Chile or other countries involved in the deal, it can challenge that country’s policies before an ISDS panel. Foreign corporations are free to challenge U.S. laws before the same court.
ISDS is not new, but it has become an increasingly popular venue for corporate challenges to regulatory standards. As Warren noted in a Washington Post op-ed last year, corporations initiated fewer than 100 ISDS cases between 1959 and 2002, but filed 58 in 2012 alone.
Goldman Sachs was particularly keen on securing the right for banks to challenge regulations before ISDS courts on the grounds that they don’t meet a “minimum standard of treatment.” This metric is extremely flexible and not explicitly defined — what exactly constitutes a “minimum standard of treatment” is essentially left up to ISDS courts to determine on a case-by-case basis.
“I wanted to underscore how important it is for the financial services industry to get robust commitments on the ISDS in the agreement — including on pre-establishment and the full range of fair treatment (MST, NT, MFN) provisions,” Shirzad wrote Froman in a November 2013 email. “These measures are critical to making the TPP a meaningful agreement for our industry and, as importantly, they set a powerful precedent for the US -China BIT [Bilateral Investment Treaty].”
Prior to TPP, the financial services sector never had so much leeway to file ISDS cases. And while TPP is unlikely to affect domestic financial standards, the precedent it sets could prove more troubling to financial reform advocates, particularly if similar terms are adopted under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP — a deal between the United States and the European Union that focuses on regulatory policies. Multiple E.U. governments have been hostile to financial reform standards the United States implemented in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Robust ISDS terms in TTIP could ultimately allow foreign banks like HSBC, Deutsche Bank or Credit Suisse to undermine American banking rules.
“For banking issues, based on everything we’ve seen, TTIP is the place where we are going to be worried,” former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson told HuffPost. “Any effort to put financial services into TTIP along the lines of what’s been proposed — that would be a mistake.”
Shirzad’s email to Froman reflects the high priority Goldman Sachs places on trade issues. Shirzad is the bank’s top government liaison in the nation’s capital. He references “Esta’s earlier call” to Froman in the note — an apparent reference to Esta Stecher, a longtime Goldman Sachs executive who carries significant clout with the bank.
“There is nothing surprising or controversial about seeking basic protections of transparency and fair treatment for U.S. investors abroad so that American exporters of goods and services operate on a level playing field,” Goldman Sachs spokesman Andrew Williams said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “These are the same protections that the United States provides foreign investors here at home so it is common sense that American companies would want the same treatment abroad.
TPP remains controversial in Congress. Obama and Congressional Republicans had enough votes to pass the deal when the fast-track vote succeeded last year, but lawmakers have blocked a vote to approve it since negotiations concluded. TPP supporters hope the legislature will approve the pact in a lame-duck session after the November elections.
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WASHINGTON — The GOP’s imminent nomination of Donald Trump has inspired Democrats to suggest they could retake the House in November. But civic engagement organizations that work with Latinos are warning Democrats that they need to do more to secure their votes to win down-ballot races, even with a nominee at the top of the ticket who frequently says nasty things about them.
Latinos are the fastest-growing group of voters in the country, according to the Pew Research Center. The number of eligible Hispanic voters has grown 17 percent since 2012, to 27.3 million eligible voters in 2016. While Trump said at a rally Wednesday that “the Hispanics are liking Donald Trump,” polling has shown the opposite. Just 9 percent of those polled had a “very” or “somewhat” favorable opinion of Trump in a recent poll of voters in battleground states.
But Latino civic engagement groups warn that voters won’t automatically link the reality television star to other GOP candidates who are on the ballot.
“Trump has the potential of being a motivating factor,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the NALEO Education Fund, but “people need to be informed that there’s more than just the presidency on the ballot.”
“This is where voter mobilization, voter education, is so key,” he added. “If you want to get people to vote in down ballot races you have to invest resources in making sure people understand that, and what their choices are, and not just thinking that if they’re going to vote against Trump they’re going to get to the end of the ballot,” past the presidential candidates.
Rafael Collazo, the national political director for the National Council of La Raza’s Action Fund, echoed Vargas’ concerns.
“As much energy as there is, and as much commitment as there is in the work that we do around electoral organizing, there still is going to need to be investments made,” he said. “Rhetoric, and headlines, and the initial energy we’ve seen around naturalization and voter registration in the beginning of this year doesn’t mean anybody can take the Latino vote for granted.”
Democrats would need to capture 30 additional seats to gain a majority in the House, which is a tall order considering they gained just 21 seats when now-President Barack Obama beat Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) by seven points in 2008. (And that was before Republicans captured a slew of state legislatures in 2010, helping them dominate the redistricting process that year, which in turn made it easier for them to win elections.)
There are 32 districts with Republican incumbents listed on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” program, which identifies promising candidates in districts the committee believes can flip in November. But “there are no new districts that magically came on our battlefield because of Donald Trump,” cautioned Meredith Kelly, the national press secretary for the DCCC.
“The 2010 redistricting created a limit to districts that are at all competitive for Democrats,” she added. “It is just not an ever-expanding battlefield. There are certainly districts where we have known that we had the potential to be successful and that had some core Democratic elements, and Trump has allowed us to land some high-level, exciting recruits in those districts. But he’s by no means the only factor.”
Those sorts of recruits include former Colorado state Sen. Gail Schwartz, who got into the race to unseat Republican Rep. Scott Tipton relatively late. Tipton, whose district is roughly a quarter Latino but who hasn’t faced a strong challenge in past election cycles, has said he would support Trump (though he “has not supported everything Donald Trump has said or done.”)
“We’ve talked to Gail Schwartz in the past and local Democrats have urged her to run before,” Kelly said. “She sensed that opportunity and there’s a reason she got in this year, but it doesn’t mean Colorado’s 3rd didn’t always have some of those important elements that make them competitive for us.”
Democrats hadn’t mounted as strong a challenge to Tipton in the past, even with its high proportion of Latinos, but that is changing this year, with the potential for his oppenent to go hard on Tipton’s Trump association. House Majority PAC, the super PAC backing Democrats, has reserved more than $130,000 worth of television ads in Grand Junction, and upped its investment in the Denver television market, to target Tipton and boost Schwartz.
Other House Republicans who may be vulnerable have done more to distance themselves from Trump. Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who has said he will not support the presumptive nominee, told CNN he was “grateful” that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has so far refrained from endorsing Trump. (Registered voters who are Latino make up 60 percent of Curbelo’s district.)
California Reps. Steve Knight and David Valadao — whose districts have 24 percent of registered voters who are Latino and 58 percent, respectively — have so far held off on endorsing Trump. (Knight seems to be in denial that Trump is going to be his party’s nominee.)
GOP Rep. Will Hurd (Texas) has said he won’t endorse Trump until he “shows he can respect women and minorities.” (Fifty-seven percent of registered voters in his district are Latino.) And Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado, who represents a district where Latinos comprise 20 percent of registered voters, has said Trump “needs to change his tone” toward women, minorities and veterans to earn his support. This gives the candidates wiggle room to eventually endorse Trump if he starts to talk about people of color and women in a less hostile manner, but it won’t help them win over Latinos who fear Trump’s policy positions.
Other incumbents in potentially competitive districts haven’t been as hesitant about Trump. Jeff Denham, who represents a California district where over 27 percent of registered voters are Latino, has said he would support the Republican nominee. And Rep. Cresent Hardy (Nevada) has said that the businessman’s tone toward people of color doesn’t bother him. (Fifteen percent of registered voters in Hardy’s district are Latino.)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is already setting up a shadow general election campaign infrastructure in states like Nevada, Florida and Colorado. But Latino-oriented organizations are frustrated that resources for their voter engagement efforts are scarce outside those states, though only a quarter of the Latino electorate lives in the traditional presidential battleground states.
“I’ve been asked by funders, ‘Why are you spending your time in Texas and California? You should be working in Florida and Colorado and Nevada,’” said Vargas. “That’s where all the money is going, but half of my electorate lives in California and Texas,” he said.
“One of the reasons why we have such a challenge in Latino voter turnout is because those people are consistently ignored,” he continued. “We’re doing all we can on a shoestring budget, because we have virtually been abandoned by the funding community for our voter engagement work.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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WASHINGTON — Congress this week is poised to pass legislation overhauling chemical safety for the first time in 40 years — with strong bipartisan support, no less.
It would be the first major new environmental law in two decades. One might expect the feat would be a happy moment for those who have advocated change for years.
Except, they aren’t all exactly happy.
The environmental and public health community is fairly tepid about the final version of the measure, a negotiated text released last week that combines elements of previously passed Senate and House bills. Some groups have endorsed it. Others are opposed. Many simply point out the bill’s strengths and flaws, without taking a position for or against its passage. The consensus is that the bill is good, but not good enough, and probably the best Congress could do.
The bill, called the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, would reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1976 law guiding the regulation of thousands of chemicals used in goods in the U.S. The current law is widely maligned as ineffective and out of date, incapable of assessing the safety of all the chemicals in consumer goods today.
“There is a widespread acknowledgement and understanding that nobody is well-served by the current law,” said Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) on the House floor Tuesday, as members voted 403 to 12 to pass the bill. Shimkus was a lead sponsor in the House.
A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Senate would likely vote on the bill this week. It is expected to pass there, and the White House has said President Barack Obama will sign it.
The law would give the Environmental Protection Agency new authority to evaluate the safety of a chemical before it enters the marketplace (which may seem intuitive, but it’s not the case under current law). It would also allow EPA to start evaluating the safety of chemicals already known to be risks — including chemicals found to persist in the human body and in the environment. It also limits companies’ ability to claim information about what’s in their products as confidential business information — which means regulators, health providers and the general public will have more access to information.
The law would be especially beneficial for regulating new chemicals — which are introduced at a rate of roughly 700 a year, according to Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “They will be required to make a safety finding to get on market, which gets away from the passive system we have now,” Denison said. “EPA no longer has to prove evidence of risk before it can require testing.”
Public health and environmental advocates are less enthusiastic about other parts of the bill. They have concerns whether EPA funding is adequate for all this new work, and whether the agency can work fast enough to meet the bill’s requirements.
The bill would prevent states from regulating a chemical while EPA is assessing whether it should be controlled at the federal level, but it would allow existing state laws to stand. There’s also language in the legislation that says EPA must consider the “cost-effectiveness” of any proposed rule — a requirement vague enough to concern advocates.
“We don’t know what it means for a regulation to be ‘cost-effective,'” said Melanie Benesh, legislative attorney at the Environmental Working Group. “There’s a concern that it’s another way of saying its going to be the least-burdensome on industry, which makes it hard for EPA to make good regulations.”
The Environmental Working Group said the final bill falls short of what’s needed to really reform chemical regulation, and is too friendly to the chemical industry. Groups like the Breast Cancer Fund outright oppose it.
Andy Igrejas, director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition of 450 health and environmental groups, falls somewhere in the middle. Some members of the coalition are against the bill, while others decline to endorse it.
“It’s definitely a mixed bag,” said Igrejas. “The idea that they had to have elements that go backward and that’s their price for allowing limited reform — I think that’s what sticks in the craw of people who work on these issues.”
Denison and the Environmental Defense Fund support the bill, along with groups like the March of Dimes and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “None of [the bill’s components] are perfect. All have elements of compromise,” Denison said. “But they are, I think, unequivocally improvements over the status quo.”
The bill was a collaboration between Republican Sen. David Vitter (La.) and Democratic Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.), who took up a years-long effort from the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to reform the law.
“This landmark reform is a major improvement over current law,” Udall said in announcing the negotiated House-Senate version. “It will overhaul a law that has been broken from the beginning and do what TSCA should have done in the first place — ensure there is a cop on the beat keeping us safe.”
The bill’s likely passage is a rare departure from partisan deadlock in Congress. There are several reasons for its apparent success. For one, more consumers are demanding products free of suspect chemicals — leading big box retailers like WalMart and Target to stop selling goods that contain them. And states like California, for example, have passed much stricter laws on things like carcinogenic flame retardants and bisphenol-A, a likely endocrine disruptor, which have in turn compelled more retailers to bar potentially harmful chemicals.
Meanwhile, Europe has passed tough chemical regulations, so companies that sell products there are already complying with stricter standards. The industries that produce these chemicals and products are seeing the value of a more straightforward federal system in the U.S., as do their allies in Congress.
The bill has support from major industry groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Chemistry Council, whose CEO Cal Dooley called it “a major win for America’s economy and American consumers.”
Environmental Working Group’s Benesh said it remains to be seen whether the bill will live up to promises of meaningfully changing the chemical safety system.
“I think we will know how effective this new law is after the first lawsuits are filed and have been settled,” Benesh said. “Then we will know how much power EPA has, and how fully they will be able to exercise it.”
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When North Carolina passed a law in March effectively sanctioning LGBT discrimination, corporate America turned up the heat on the Tar Heel State.
More than 90 CEOs and other top business executives signed a letter to North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) denouncing the law and warning that it would “diminish the state’s draw as a destination for tourism, new businesses, and economic activity.”
Some major companies, including PayPal, Google Venture, Braeburn Pharmaceuticals and Lionsgate Entertainment, put their money where their mouths were, canceling existing plans for projects in the state or vowing a boycott on future investments.
But many of the same companies are moving forward with their plans to sponsor this summer’s Republican National Convention, where the GOP is expected to nominate Donald Trump, a noted bigot, for president.
Those companies appear to have a higher tolerance for Trump’s outrageous statements and policy proposals regarding Latino immigrants, Muslims, women and President Barack Obama than they do for North Carolina’s anti-LGBT discrimination.
The apparent inconsistency is not lost on the progressive and civil rights organizations pushing corporations to disown a Republican convention that will nominate a racist demagogue for the presidency.
“It is surprising that we have companies showing up very vocally for certain types of people, but unwilling to let go of access when it comes to supporting a convention for a candidate who has said horrible things about multiple communities of color,” said Arisha Hatch, managing director of campaigns at ColorOfChange Political Action Committee, which has led the charge against corporate backing for the GOP convention.
CREDO Action, which is allied with ColorOfChange PAC in its efforts, blasted a video ad to hundreds of thousands of members earlier this month calling on Google in particular to back out of its plans to sponsor the convention. (Google will be the official live-stream provider of the RNC through YouTube, and says it will contribute other associated services.)
Since that video went out, CREDO members have left more than 1,400 voice mail messages with Google employees asking the company to reconsider its participation. But they have not received responses, according to CREDO.
CREDO singled out Google in part because of the company’s reputation for promoting the “values of diversity and inclusion,” Heidi Hess, a campaign leader for CREDO, said at the time of the video’s release.
Speaking to The Huffington Post this week, Hess called the companies’ willingness to sponsor the Republican convention, despite their opposition to the North Carolina law, “ironic and troubling.”
At the same time, she argued, “it is not surprising that they are able to get over the cognitive dissonance in order to think about their bottom line.”
Indeed, it’s particularly notable that so many Silicon Valley firms and other tech giants are supporting the Republican convention, because many of them enjoy a socially liberal reputation, and virtually all of them spoke out against the North Carolina law.
Executives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Cisco Systems and Microsoft all signed the letter condemning H.B. 2, North Carolina’s anti-LGBT law. All of those companies plan to sponsor the GOP’s convention in Cleveland this July.
Aside from Google, it’s not exactly clear what the companies will be doing for the convention, but in various statements to HuffPost they characterized their contributions as in-kind donations of technology and other services.
They also justified their participation on the grounds that they plan to contribute similarly to the Democratic National Convention, which will be held this July in Philadelphia. Several companies argued that contributing to both conventions helps promote democracy. The language in the various statements is remarkably similar.
“Twitter works with both major political parties and we will support both national conventions, in order to promote civic engagement and democratic participation,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.
“Facebook is supporting both the Republican and Democratic conventions in a similar manner and without endorsing any one candidate, issue, or political party,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We believe encouraging this ongoing conversation is important because an informed debate about the candidates and the issues is essential to the democratic process.”
One of the things I have found in my activism work … is that there is an extreme amount of discomfort around race in Silicon Valley.
Arisha Hatch, ColorOfChange PAC
“As a company, we have provided in-kind contributions equally to both the Democratic and Republican convention since 2000,” Nigel Glennie, a Cisco Systems spokesman, said in a statement. “Our support is not for a specific policy, candidate, or party, and is driven by our belief that these are historic moments in the selection of the next President of the United States.”
Microsoft referred HuffPost to an April 29 blog post on the topic by Fred Humphries, the company’s corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs.
“First, we act in a bipartisan manner and provide similar levels of support to both conventions,” Humphries wrote. “Second, we make a special effort, as do many companies in our industry, to provide the conventions with technology tools to help enable this part of the American democratic process to operate efficiently and accurately. And third, we do not endorse either political party or its nominee.”
While Google did not provide any new comments for this article, it offered an explanation earlier this month that resembles the other companies’ statements. A spokesperson described Google’s role in the Republican convention as simply expanding access to the event for people who can’t attend in person.
Google has not yet announced sponsorship plans for the Democratic National Convention, but it has supported both party gatherings in previous years.
PayPal, which canceled plans to build an operations center in Charlotte, North Carolina, in response to the passage of H.B. 2, did not immediately respond to a request for information about its participation in the convention.
Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, whose executives signed the letter condemning the North Carolina law, also did not respond to requests for comment. LinkedIn, another signatory, declined to comment for this story.
A law passed in 2014 eliminated federal funding for the party-run convention committees, increasing pressure on the parties to raise funds elsewhere. Although the party-run committees cannot receive direct cash contributions from corporations, they can receive in-kind contributions of the type being provided by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Cisco and Microsoft.
Contrary to those companies’ professed goal of promoting democracy, however, the in-kind gifts are technically only legal if the companies view their contributions as ordinary business deals in which the promotional value or other benefit of providing a free service offsets or outweighs the financial cost.
Twitter works with both major political parties and we will support both national conventions, in order to promote civic engagement and democratic participation.
Twitter spokesperson
The progressive organizations pressuring companies not to participate in the Republican convention are not accepting the companies’ explanations.
Hatch said the corporations’ pleas that they support both parties’ conventions are just “an excuse being used by companies attempting to buy influence and access at any cost.”
“What we have been saying to companies we talk to is that this is not just business as usual,” Hatch said. “It is not ordinary politics. We disagreed with Mitt Romney’s policies, but we were not knocking on Silicon Valley’s door asking them not to give money to a convention that nominated him.”
Hatch suggested that Silicon Valley’s reluctance to take a stand may reflect a larger problem with racial sensitivity in the industry, whose workers are overwhelmingly white and Asian.
“One of the things I have found in my activism work, whether it is a campaign about increasing diversity on the staff of tech companies or against the use of algorithms targeting race in inappropriate ways, is that there is an extreme amount of discomfort around race in Silicon Valley,” Hatch said.
ColorOfChange PAC launched a petition in March demanding that corporations withdraw from the Republican National Convention. The petition ultimately garnered more than 830,000 signatures.
CREDO and other like-minded national groups joined ColorOfChange PAC, either as part of the petition drive or in complementary efforts, forming a coalition of 32 groups with the shared goal of depriving the convention of corporate America’s implicit blessing.
Some of the groups, including the Arab American Institute, Muslim Advocates and the National Iranian American Council, were unable to participate in ColorOfChange’s explicitly political petition due to their nonprofit status. Instead, they signed on to a letter to corporations that uses vaguer language. The letter asks companies to refrain from supporting “any political party conventions that engage in bigoted, xenophobic and racist rhetoric that encourages violence.”
The convention host committees, in contrast with the party-run committees, can receive direct cash contributions from corporations. Originally conceived as a way for local businesses to support the conventions, they have gradually morphed into a major backdoor channel for corporate financing of the lavish gatherings.
Emily Lauer, senior director of communications for the Cleveland 2016 host committee, suggested that Trump’s presence on the ticket has had little impact on fundraising thus far.
“Regarding corporate support, we have more than 100 sponsors at this time, and we have received a variety of comments from those who have chosen not to support the Cleveland host committee,” Lauer said. “A very small number have specifically noted the candidate landscape as the reason.”
Lauer acknowledged that one company has withdrawn a pledged contribution since Trump secured the nomination, but she declined to say which one.
The host committees are not required to disclose their donors until 60 days after the convention occurs.
Despite the hesitation of many top companies to buck the GOP, representatives of the progressive coalition argue that their efforts are beginning to yield fruit.
What happens when you write off that share of the market? It is a risk to the business.
Alyssa Katz, corporate political activism expert
The groups claim credit, for example, for declines in contributions by Microsoft and Coca-Cola. (Coca-Cola’s president also signed the letter condemning North Carolina’s law.)
Although Microsoft decided not to make direct cash contributions this year, the company in 2012 made donations worth $1.5 million, half of them in cash.
Microsoft’s Humphries claimed in the April 29 blog post that the decision about the donations was made in the fall, months before Trump secured the nomination.
Coca-Cola, which was among the companies ColorOfChange specifically targeted in its petition, has reduced its contribution to the host committee for the GOP convention to $75,000 this year, after giving $660,000 in 2012.
Jennifer Amundsen, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola, noted that the company would be contributing an identical amount to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. She ignored the suggestion that outside groups had played any role in the company’s decision.
“Our support helps the host committees run these large events and contributes to local economic development but does not represent an endorsement of any specific party or candidate,” Amundsen said in a statement.
ColorOfChange PAC’s Evan Feeney, though, maintains that activism did influence the two companies, saying their denials don’t “really pass the smell test.”
“If either Coke or Microsoft had made a decision and was moving on they could have said that the minute our campaign started,” Feeney told HuffPost in an email. “Yet they took time to have multiple senior level [officials] on the phone multiple times… to explain what they were deciding and how they were dealing with our campaign.”
It’s not hard to see why companies would be reluctant to pull, or even just reduce, their support for one of the two parties’ conventions. Even if Trump is not elected president, there is a good chance Republicans will maintain control of at least one house of Congress.
Stiffing the GOP at one of its most extravagant fundraisers would likely have consequences for a company’s public policy agenda.
“A lot of members of Congress are affiliated with the convention,” said Lawrence Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit. “It becomes a great lobbying opportunity for these companies.”
Alyssa Katz, author of The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life, argues that it’s probably Trump supporters, more so than politicians, whom the corporations are afraid of alienating.
“What happens when you write off that share of the market?” Katz said. “It is a risk to the business.”
Facebook, in particular, may be sensitive to backlash, Katz noted, with the company “still reeling” from accusations that its “Trending” topics feature is biased against conservative news.
The movement to boycott North Carolina was so successful because the LGBT community is “so well organized and the issue is so specific,” according to Katz, who is also a member of the New York Daily News’ editorial board.
A boycott movement of the kind Trump critics are now launching “may soon catch fire,” she said. “But it is not yet where we are in terms of LGBT rights.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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