March 21, 2023

Tuesday,March 21,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

Yesterday, from the White House - Happy First Day of Spring.

Joe’s First Veto.

Message to the House of Representatives — President’s Veto of H.J. Res 30.

TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:

     I am returning herewith without my approval H.J. Res. 30, a resolution that would disapprove of the Department of Labor’s final rule titled “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights.”

     The Department of Labor’s final rule protects the hard‑earned life savings and pensions of tens of millions of workers and retirees across the country.  It allows retirement plan fiduciaries to make fully informed investment decisions by considering all relevant factors that might impact a prospective investment, while ensuring that investment decisions made by retirement plan fiduciaries maximize financial returns for retirees.

     There is extensive evidence showing that environmental, social, and governance factors can have a material impact on markets, industries, and businesses.  But the Republican-led resolution would force retirement managers to ignore these relevant risk factors, disregarding the principles of free markets and jeopardizing the life savings of working families and retirees.  In fact, this resolution would prevent retirement plan fiduciaries from taking into account factors, such as the physical risks of climate change and poor corporate governance, that could affect investment returns. 

     Retirement plan fiduciaries should be able to consider any factor that maximizes financial returns for retirees across the country.  That is not controversial — that is common sense.

     Therefore, I am vetoing this resolution.

                             JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

THE WHITE HOUSE,
    March 20, 2023.

Here is the statement by US SIF - The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment - on the veto:

 "The veto will allow retirement marketplace actors to continue fulfilling their fiduciary duty to plan participants and meet the growing demand for sustainable offerings. The Department of Labor's ESG rule is a sensible policy allowing retirement plan fiduciaries to consider all financially relevant information when making investment decisions. This is good for plan participants and beneficiaries." - Bryan McGannon, Acting CEO and Managing Director, US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

Touch to watch the President speak on this issue. 👇

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Kamala is always busy.

To watch the Vice President in action, touch either of the tweets below.👇

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Proud Boys left bloodied in clash outside Letitia James’ NYC Drag Story Hour.

Anti-LGBTQ+ protesters, including some wearing Proud Boys colors, clashed with supporters outside a Drag Story Hour event in Manhattan hosted by New York Attorney General Letitia James on Sunday. One man was arrested while another’s face appeared to have been bloodied. (MSN).

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Right wing madness in the White House Press room today.

Much was happening including special guests. Touch to watch. 👇

Then there was a heckler. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was defended by other reporters, and defended herself well too. Touch to watch this too.👇

The heckling was by Simon Ateba, a Trump provocateur from Cameroon, with a troubling past. On August 28, 2015, he was arrested by Cameroonian authorities and accused of spying for Boko Haram. He has attracted attention for his disputes with Karine Jean-Pierre.

Last night he undoubtedly got what he wants - attention from Right Wing media. See his tweet.👇

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The Roundup included Trump investigation #6, but this article from the Bulwark puts Trump criminality all in one place.

The Trump Investigation You Probably Haven’t Heard About.

This photo illustration shows an image of former President Donald Trump next to a phone screen that is displaying the Truth Social app, in Washington, DC, on February 21, 2022.

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Even among the especially well informed, five has been the magic number of criminally tinged investigations implicating former President Donald J. Trump:

First, there is the investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

Second, there is DOJ’s investigation of the effort to stymie the transfer of power following the 2020 election, including the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Both of the first two investigations are now led by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed last November; there is little publicly available information about how they are proceeding.

Third is the investigation—led by Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia—into election fraud in that state, arising from Trump’s having asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes to hand him an Electoral College win there. A “special grand jury” hearing the evidence wrapped up its work earlier this year, and Willis said in late January that a decision on whether to press charges was “imminent.”

Fourth is the set of investigations (some criminal, some civil) into Trump’s various corporate enterprises. The attorney general of New York state, Letitia James, and the district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, have each been leading probes. Their efforts have already seen results—including the closure of the foundation whose funds Trump admitted misusing and the criminal conviction of both the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg for tax fraud—and are still ongoing.

Fifth is the long-running investigation Bragg is leading into the alleged campaign hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. This is the case that could dominate the headlines this week: Trump himself said on Saturday that he expects to be “ARRESTED ON TUESDAY” and called on his followers to “PROTEST.”

But as it turns out, there’s a sixth—this one involves both DOJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and it implicates conduct since Trump left office and after he was expelled from Twitter and launched his own social media platform, Truth Social.

The matter involves a so-called “blank check company” called Digital World Acquisition. Blank check companies have no established business plan but gather funds and sell shares to investors with the intention of merging with or acquiring another company in the future. The investors have no idea what they will ultimately be investing in. Under SEC rules, after an initial public offering (IPO), a blank check company’s funds must be deposited in escrow prior to a transaction and held there until shareholders officially approve a merger. As of 2020, a particular form of blank check company known as “special purpose acquisition companies,” or “SPACs,” made up 50 percent of the market for IPOs. This figure represents a huge spike prompted by the SEC’s temporary inability to approve traditional IPOs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump took advantage of it to launch Truth Social.

In April 2021, Trump’s representatives had a videoconference with Patrick Orlando, Digital World’s chief executive. A month later, Digital World advised the federal government in securities filings that it had notidentified or had discussions with any potential merger targets.

In October, Trump Media & Technology Group merged with Digital World, which provided $293 million in funding it raised in its IPO on September 8, 2021, mostly from big investors who pitched in as much as $30 million apiece. The series of events drew the attention of the SEC, which opened an investigation in December 2021, presumably out of a concern that Trump and Digital World might have secretly planned the merger before going public and failed to disclose their communications to the SEC. According to reporting by the New York Times, the average time for public blank check companies to find a target to merge with and complete a deal is 17 months. Digital World did it within a month of going public. The SEC probe has delayed the Trump Media-Digital World merger indefinitely.

Trump, who reportedly knew Orlando beforehand, launched his lumbering social media site, Truth Social, through Trump Media in February 2022. The delayed merger, if completed, would provide the company with up to an additional $1.3 billion in capital. As of April 2022(more current data is not readily available), there were 513,000 active daily users and 2 million monthly users on the site, as compared to Twitter’s 368 million active monthly users.

In June 2022, it was revealed that a federal grand jury—which issued subpoenas to Digital World board members—is also involved. Last week, the Guardian reported that federal prosecutors have expanded their criminal investigation to examine two loans totaling $8 million that were wired to Trump Media through the Caribbean from entities connected to an ally of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.

The first payment of $2 million came in December 2021, around the same time the SEC opened its initial investigation. Orlando, who is a licensed SEC broker, reportedly sourced the payment from Paxum Bank, which is registered in the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic). A promissory note identified another entity, ES Family Trust, as the lender. Two months later, ES Family Trust sent Trump Media another $6 million.

A trustee of ES Family Trust, Angel Pacheco, is reportedly also a director of Paxum Bank, which has a history of providing banking services for the sex worker industry, purportedly putting it at a higher risk of engaging in money-laundering activity. Paxum Bank is also partly owned by Anton Postolnikov, an apparent relation of Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov. Smirnov, in turn, heads the maritime company Rosmorport, which is controlled by the Russian Federation. Smirnov worked for Putin in a variety of posts in the Russian government—in the office of the president, in the Ministry of Justice as first deputy minister, and elsewhere.

Will Wilkerson, a former Trump Media executive who was fired from his post, reportedly filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC alleging that the Trump Media-Digital World merger was rife with “fraudulent misrepresentations . . . in violation of federal securities laws.” Also according to Wilkerson, in the spring of 2022, Trump Media’s then-chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, considered returning the $8 million cash infusion but decided not to because, with only $12 million total in its accounts at the time, the company was already financially vulnerable.

There is some indication that Donald Trump Jr. was aware of the $2 million payment. The Guardian reports that he sent an email acknowledging a message that the payment was pending.

As a SEC licensed broker, Orlando’s liability includes due diligence mandates under SEC anti–money laundering rules. Federal anti–money laundering statutes apply more generally, although prosecutors must show, among other things, that the individuals in question knew that the transaction involved proceeds of some other criminal activity, such as a felony, and that the transaction was designed to disguise its source. Wilkerson has reportedly said that, although Trump was the chairman of Trump Media at the time, he didn’t seem particularly interested in the day-to-day running of the company. He was, however, interested in the conclusion of the merger, as he owned 99 percent of the shares without investing any of his own money.

So, to sum up: Donald Trump is involved in yet another probe that could potentially result in criminal charges against him or his associates, this one a yearslong federal investigation by the SEC and DOJ relating to the creation and funding of his Truth Social platform.

A final twist in the criminal probe involving Trump Media involves the former president’s use of social media. He was banned from Facebook and Instagram following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but Meta (which owns those platforms) announced in January that he would be reinstated, and on Friday of last week, he resumed posting on Facebook.

Yet he has not yet returned to what was once his favorite mode of communicating with the public—tweeting—even though Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account last November. Trump’s Truth Social platform has, again, a total of 2 million monthly users; his dormant Twitter account is vastly larger, with 87.4 million followers as of today. So why has he stayed away from Twitter?

The reasons no doubt include the stalled merger. If Trump gets back on Twitter, he will devalue his own platform and disappoint investors. Shareholders could then sue him. Columbia University law professor Eric Talley told Semafor: “If it’s going to look, later on, that he never had that intention” of staying off Twitter “but he just wanted to convince people that they should go ahead and close [the SPAC deal] that’s kind of a textbook securities fraud lawsuit.”

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Lawrence Summers, past President of Harvard, and others, urge Russian money frozen by U.S. be sent to Ukraine.

The moral and legal case for sending Russia’s frozen $300 billion to Ukraine

Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.


Russia’s assault on Ukraine has become a brutal war of attrition — militarily but also economically and socially. Russian President Vladimir Putin recognizes the nature of this struggle. Ukraine, having lost one-third of its GDP, with one-third of its population already displaced and the lights flickering on and off, could win battles and still lose the war.


Ukraine’s allies have rallied to its aid with armaments, but they have faltered on the decisive economic front. Using the approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank assets that were frozen by Western governments at the war’s onset would show Putin he cannot outlast Ukraine and the West economically. There is elegant justice in using Russia’s state funds, now lying idle, to counter the costs of Moscow’s destruction. Plans have been prepared, with ways to avoid corruption and linked to the European Union. That would be a strategy of hope.

European leaders have stepped up. The Biden administration has not yet followed suit. It should use Russia’s frozen funds and its diplomatic leverage now, while it can decide the outcome of the war. The time has arrived for President Biden to tell his advisers what FDR would have told them: This is the right thing to do. Find a way. (Washington Post).

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Prepping in NYC.

Touch 👇 to watch.

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A worthwhile post found on Twitter. 👇 Feel free to copy, and paste or edit.

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Unions remain a primary issue at Starbucks.

Howard Schultz Is Officially Out as Starbucks CEO.


He’s being replaced by Laxman Narasimhan just days before Schultz is supposed to testify before a Senate committee.

Howard Schultz, center, with Laxman Narasimhan, left, at a Starbucks event in September 2022.

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On Monday morning, Starbucks announced that interim CEO Howard Schultz was being replaced by Laxman Narasimhan, a move that had been in the works for months but came sooner than outside observers expected, and less than two weeks before Schultz’s appearance at a high-profile Senate committee hearing, where he’s expected to be grilled about the company’s anti-union practices.

This marks the end of Schultz’s third stint as CEO. He was hired by Starbucks in 1982 to be its marketing director and bought the company in 1987 before turning it into a global chain. He stepped down as CEO in 2000 but stayed on as the company’s chairman, and in 2008, when Starbucks sales were falling, he fired the CEO and returned to the role, overseeing a wave of changes and expansions into Asia. He vacated the CEO post for the second time in 2017 before returning again in 2022.

Under his leadership Starbucks often portrayed itself as a friendly corporate giant; it calls its employees “partners,” provides health insurance and other benefits to full-time workers, and occasionally dips its toe into support for progressive causes — sometimes awkwardly, like when it encouraged its partners to start conversations about race with customers.

But Schultz also has a long history of opposing labor unions and has called the recent explosion of labor organizing in the U.S. a “manifestation of a much bigger problem” in society. His second return to the CEO position coincided with a growing wave of unionization efforts at Starbucks stores. The highest-profile of these early union drives were in Buffalo, New York, and before Schultz came back as CEO he toured those stores and penned an open letter to Starbucks workers that avoided using the word “union.” Wrote Schultz: “No partner has ever needed to have a representative seek to obtain things we all have as partners at Starbucks.”

Starbucks Workers United, the union working to organize the company’s stores, has claimed that Starbucks engaged in aggressive anti-union practices, firing employees involved in organizing and closing pro-union stores. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that Starbucks had violated labor laws “hundreds of times.” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who chairs the U.S. Senate committee in charge of labor issues, spent weeks demanding that Schultz appear at a public hearing to answer questions about these practices, which the company agreed to only just before Sanders prepared to formally subpoena the interim CEO. (That hearing is scheduled for March 29.)

Now Laxman Narasimhan, formerly an executive at Pepsi and CEO of British consumer goods company Reckitt, is officially Starbucks CEO. He was announced as Schultz’s successor in September and was to take the top spot starting this April. But on Monday the company said that Schultz will step down now, and Narasimhan will lead the annual shareholder meeting on Thursday. (Eater, Seattle).

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Speaker Pelosi was honored in Ireland.

Last night, I proudly... - Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi | Facebook

Last night, I proudly received an Honorary Degree from Ulster University: an esteemed academic institution shaping the peacemakers of tomorrow. As we mark the anniversary of the Good Friday...

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Yes, Birds we don’t recognize are now seen in Central Park, Riverside Park and on the trees outside our living room windows.

What Does a Black Vulture Over Manhattan Mean for Climate Change?

Milder winters, shrinking habitats and new migratory patterns have changed the birds of the city.

If you need proof that climate change has altered the wildlife of the city, look no further than the black vultures soaring above Midtown Manhattan. These hulking, baldheaded scavengers have a wingspan that measures nearly five feet and have traditionally inhabited South America, Central America and the southern United States.

But the black vulture seems to be here for the foreseeable future, along with 20 or 30 species that have recently expanded their ranges into New York City. As weather patterns have warped, and habitats have shrunk and food supplies diminished, the migratory patterns of birds have also changed. (New York Times)

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Al Franken alert.

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What makes the Finns so damn happy?

Finland Is the Happiest Country in the World for Sixth Year Running.

Finland ranks as the world’s happiest country for the sixth consecutive year, an unprecedented feat in a list that’s now been published for more than a decade.

The World Happiness Report unveiled on Monday by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network showed Finland scores “significantly ahead of all other countries” in the ranking, followed by Denmark in the second place and Iceland in third.

“Income, health, having someone to count on, having a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity, and the absence of corruption all play strong roles in supporting life evaluations,” the report said. (Bloomberg via SwissInfo).

New face on the wall at the Harvard Club, NYC.

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