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Mexican president AMLO has launched ambitious efforts to strengthen Mexico’s sovereignty over its energy, mining, and agriculture sectors. It’s provoked challenges to AMLO’s democratic mandate not only from the US, but also Canadian premier Justin Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau (L) shakes hands with Andres Manuel López Obrador (R) during the welcome ceremony for Canadian prime minister on January 11, 2023 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)

The MORENA party of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is in a strong position going into the 2024 general election. According to one polling aggregator, AMLO’s party has the support of 48 percent of respondents, while the two major opposition parties, the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — whose monopoly over Mexican politics AMLO broke when he won the 2018 election — sit at 18 percent and 14 percent, respectively. AMLO’s personal approval rating, meanwhile, is even better: almost 70 percent.

The contest to nominate AMLO’s successor in MORENA will occur on September 6, and there are currently two front-runners: Claudia Sheinbaum, the former head of government for Mexico City, and Marcelo Ebrard, the former secretary of foreign affairs. Both resigned from their positions earlier in June to contest the party’s leadership.

In the meantime, AMLO is pursuing several major policies that he hopes the next legislature will approve, including lowering the pension age from sixty-eight to sixty-five and reforming the Supreme Court so that justices are elected by popular vote. MORENA’s recent victory in the election for governor of Mexico’s most populous state, the State of Mexico, is another indication that, going forward, AMLO’s agenda can rely on a significant mandate from the Mexican people.

AMLO’s Fight for Mexican Resource Sovereignty

Whoever succeeds AMLO, however, will also inherit his foreign policy, an international approach promoting nonalignment and Mexican sovereignty. This approach allowed him to achieve largely cordial relations with everyone from Donald Trump to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and has meant remaining neutral in the Russia-Ukraine war and the new cold war between the United States and China. In recent years, however, AMLO’s effort to increase state sovereignty in Mexico’s energy, mining, and agriculture sectors has tested his relations with the other North American powers, leading to legal challenges and diplomatic pressures not only from Joe Biden’s administration, but from Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as well.

The foundation of AMLO’s “fourth transformation” project is the reclaiming of Mexican sovereignty over key elements of the country’s economy. AMLO has taken efforts to increase the state’s role in oil and gas production, electricity plants, mineral extraction (including much-sought critical minerals like lithium), and more.

These policies represent an about-face from the resource liberalization enacted under his predecessors, like Enrique Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto’s 2014 energy reforms weakened the role of state energy company Pemex in oil and gas production while opening the sector to international investment. Analysts deemed the reforms transformational for the Mexican economy, while energy investors praised them for prioritizing international investment over state sovereignty.

AMLO has enacted another transformation, this one aiming to reconstruct Mexican resource sovereignty. His administration has given Pemex a controlling interest in major energy projects like the Zama oil field, and he has nationalized Mexico’s lithium reserves. He has built and rehabilitated refineries for the purpose of processing the oil extracted in Mexico rather than shipping it to the United States to be refined. He has announced that Pemex will stop exporting oil altogether in 2023 so that Mexico’s domestic energy market can become self-sufficient.

There are of course contradictions in AMLO’s development model that the Left must honestly contend with. Mexico’s challenge is one faced by many historically underdeveloped nations today: How can a country raise social and economic indicators without contributing to the climate crisis? While AMLO’s government has pledged to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 35 percent by 2030, Mexico remains the world’s twelfth-largest crude oil exporter and the fourteenth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. It is true that Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions are slowly decreasing, but the tension between development and sustainability has no doubt been a feature of his presidency and will be a challenge for his successor as well.

Still, AMLO has halted new mining permits, over sixty-five thousand of which had been granted between 1988 and 2018, mostly to Canadian and US companies. He has launched a series of major mining reforms aimed at strengthening environmental protections and increasing the participation of local communities in the extractive decision-making process. AMLO is also planning to phase out imports of genetically modified (GMO) corn products from the United States and Canada (which includes “yellow corn,” used for animal feed, and “white corn,” used for human consumption), which will strengthen Mexico’s domestic, non–genetically modified corn markets.

Despite AMLO’s democratic mandate far surpassing that of either Joe Biden’s or Justin Trudeau’s, the US and Canadian governments are trying to stop the Mexican president from implementing his popular reform agenda. Complaining that his efforts to secure Mexico’s resource sovereignty are marginalizing the interests of US and Canadian companies, Biden and Trudeau have legally challenged AMLO under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) and sent officials to Mexico City to apply diplomatic pressure on his government.

Confronting Canadian Mining

Canadian interference in Mexico warrants special attention, especially given the increasing global scrutiny faced by Canada’s ecologically and socially destructive mining industry, which accounts for 75 percent of all the world’s mining companies. Canadian companies are disproportionately represented in the Mexican mining industry, representing two-thirds of all foreign mining investment. This number exploded in the 1990s following the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and no previous Mexican president had ever fundamentally questioned the predominant role that Canadian companies play in the country’s mining sector.

No previous Mexican president had ever fundamentally questioned the predominant role that Canadian companies play in the country’s mining sector.

Officials in the Trudeau government have been highly active in advocating on behalf of the Canadian mining industry, which is critical of the Mexican president’s efforts to increase state sovereignty and implement greater social and environmental protections for local communities. In November 2022, Canada’s international trade minister, Mary Ng, visited Mexico City and spoke with representatives from large Canadian companies involved in energy, mining, and manufacturing. At the meeting, Ng “reaffirmed Canada’s commitment to engage with Mexico to resolve [Canadian companies’] concerns, particularly regarding the rule of law, permit issues, and changes to Mexico’s energy sector.”

Two months later, Ng returned to Mexico City, this time to meet with AMLO’s secretary of economy, Raquel Buenrostro. In their meeting, Ng “expressed concerns regarding the treatment of Canadian mining companies in Mexico and the need for transparent processes for mining sector permits.” She also claimed, without evidence, that “Canadian companies, including those in the mining sector, are leaders in establishing inclusive and sustainable workplace practices.”

Ng again sought to pressure Buenrostro in April 2023. On a call with the Mexican official, Ng “expressed concern” with AMLO’s mining reforms and accused Mexico of not “upholding the spirit” of the CUSMA. She also urged the Mexican government once again to take the interests of Canadian companies into account, calling for AMLO’s administration to consult with “all stakeholders regarding the proposed reforms, including with Canadian companies, which represent the largest group of foreign investors in Mexico’s mining sector.”

The US-Canadian Legal Challenge to AMLO’s Reforms

If Ottawa continues to be dissatisfied with AMLO’s mining policies, the Canadian government may launch an overt legal challenge against the reforms under the CUSMA, as Biden and Trudeau are currently doing in their efforts to halt AMLO’s reforms in the energy and agriculture sectors.

The Biden administration has been spearheading the challenge to AMLO’s oil and gas reforms, with Canada at its side. In July 2022, US trade representative Katherine Tai accused AMLO of violating the CUSMA and stated that Washington had “repeatedly expressed serious concerns about a series of changes in Mexico’s energy policies.” Ng joined Tai in expressing alarm, releasing a statement the next day that criticized “Mexico’s change in energy policy [that is] inconsistent with Mexico’s CUSMA obligations.” Meanwhile, the website of the Canadian trade commissioner claimed with extreme condescension that AMLO’s energy policies are “not necessarily based on economic or market principles, but on ideological assumptions, as well as a nationalistic approach that restrict[s] private participation in the Mexican energy market.”

While Canada’s investments in the energy sector are not as significant as in mining, Canadian companies are deeply embedded in Mexican energy, with investments totaling $13 billion (compared to $27 billion in mining). Export Development Canada labels Mexico a “priority market” and notes oil and gas as among the “key industries” for Canadian investment in the country.

Canada is also promoting agribusiness attempts to stop AMLO from establishing a more sovereign agricultural sector. In March 2023, the Biden administration expressed “grave concerns” with AMLO’s anti-GMO policies, as well as his plans to phase out glyphosate herbicides, and requested trade consultations on Mexico’s agriculture policies. Once again, Ottawa sided with Washington.

As AMLO has taken steps toward increasing Mexican resource sovereignty, the Canadian press has become more vocal in demonizing him, painting him as a would-be autocrat.

That April, Canada also claimed to be “deeply concerned” with AMLO’s efforts to phase out glyphosate and GMO corn imports. Shanti Cosentino, press secretary for Ng, revealed that the Canadian government was working in Mexico to secure the interests of Canadian agribusiness companies, particularly “trade predictability for biotechnology approvals” and “market access for genetically modified products.”

On June 2, the US government announced that it would be launching a trade-dispute panel to challenge Mexico’s policy on GMO corn imports, and Canada joined the panel as a third party. Canada’s Ministry of Agriculture and Agri-Food stated, “Canada shares the concerns of the U.S. that Mexico’s measures . . . have the potential to unnecessarily disrupt trade in the North American market.” Nevertheless, on June 19, AMLO signed an agreement ensuring that only non–genetically modified white corn will be used in the making of tortillas. He also imposed 50 percent tariffs on white corn imports as part of his efforts to make Mexico self-sufficient in the production of white corn for human consumption.

While Canada does not export much corn to Mexico, it does export a large amount of canola to the country ($1.6 billion in 2022), most of which is genetically modified. Chris Davison of the Canola Council of Canada explains: “Mexico is very important for Canadian canola. And so that’s definitely the point of entry for us into this discussion. . . . That’s really where the interest in this file comes from for Canada.” In other words, Canada wants to ensure that Mexico’s limits on genetically modified corn imports don’t eventually extend to genetically modified canola as well.

As AMLO has taken steps toward increasing Mexican resource sovereignty, the Canadian press (much like the US media) has become more vocal in demonizing him, painting him as a would-be autocrat who is undermining Mexican democracy — much like the North American characterization of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Such is the fate of any left-of-center leader in Latin America who puts the interests of their own nation before those of Canadian and US capital.

Since MORENA is likely to triumph in 2024, consolidating AMLO’s sovereignty project, there probably won’t be an end any time soon to the demonization of the Mexican left, to the legal challenges and diplomatic pressures, or to Canada’s efforts to prevent Mexico from taking control of its own resources. The Left in the United States and Canada should vocally oppose these attempts to undermine Mexico’s democratic sovereignty.

On June 13, Anthony Fauci spoke at a conference held by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a well-known lobbying group for health insurers. Fauci has joined the lucrative racket of former public officials taking cash for paid corporate speaking gigs.

Anthony Fauci attends an event with First Lady Jill Biden to urge Americans to get vaccinated ahead of the holiday season, during a COVID-19 virtual event with AARP in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, December 9, 2022. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

When politicians or public officials leave office, it’s customary to hit the paid speakers circuit, where they join journalists and pundits in putting on special, personalized Sunday show–style discussions for corporations and their lobbying groups.

The lucky speakers and panelists get paid tens and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars to briefly entertain powerful corporate executives, whose jobs involve influencing policy so that it serves their own financial interests, at the expense of everyone else.

Bill and Hillary Clinton’s six-figure speaking gigs with big banks and Wall Street firms were major 2016 campaign fodder, but lots of Washington insiders end up doing this — from Barack Obama and George W. Bush, to faux-populist conservative Tucker Carlson, and even famed Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward. For the most part, no one cares about all this “buckraking.”

It’s easy to dismiss these speeches as trivial, given the content — speakers typically provide canned commentary, rehash their accomplishments, and recount details from their books on sale. If you listen closely, though, you can occasionally hear something incredibly revealing.

By that measure, Anthony Fauci’s recent speech to Washington’s top health insurance lobbying group takes the cake. What was and wasn’t said spoke volumes about why buckraking is such an inherently gross practice — laying bare the problems with the country’s health care system and those charged with regulating it.

Regarded as the country’s top infectious disease expert, Fauci has advised seven presidents and helped oversee the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic on behalf of presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden before he stepped down at the end of 2022.

On June 13, Fauci spoke at a conference in Portland, Oregon, held by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) as part of a discussion entitled: “Building Back Public Trust in Health Care.”

The premise was seriously flawed. After all, AHIP is a well-known lobbying group for incredibly powerful and profitable health insurers, businesses whose very existence is a fundamental reason why American health care services are so expensive and outcomes are so bad. How can Americans have any trust in health care at all when they know that if they need pills or a surgical procedure, or experience a medical emergency, their insurer can and likely will stick them with a big bill?

As Neema Stephens, national medical director for health equity at the insurance giant Cigna, admitted during another panel at the conference, “People don’t trust the insurance companies.”

Fauci, who reportedly charges between $50,000 and $100,000 for speeches, started his talk by thanking the audience of insurance lobbyists and health care marketing companies for being “devoted to making sure that we get good health care in an equitable way.”

In truth, the US health care system is the only one in the world built primarily around private health insurance, and that’s precisely why it is not equitable. Health insurers create financial barriers to care and administrative hurdles to limit utilization.

Compared to other high-income countries, the United States ranks “last overall in providing equitably accessible, affordable, high-quality health care,” according to research by the Commonwealth Fund. That’s despite the fact that the United States spends far more on health care than other wealthy countries.

This spending and care mismatch is deliberate: the system is designed so that corporate CEOs get obscenely rich, while Americans get saddled with medical debt — a fact of life in the United States that basically does not exist in other countries.

Talking about disinformation campaigns against public health officials in the COVID-era, Fauci said that “organizations like the AHIP and others can really play a major role in countering it — not by putting down the people who are spreading misinformation, but by countering it with correct information.”

AHIP, of course, secretly funded a successful $100 million advocacy campaign against a public health insurance option in 2010, which claimed that a government-run health insurance plan would mean “expanded government control over your health.” As it stands, our insurance-based health care system gives profit-seeking businesses a financial incentive to wrongly deny care and services, and an extreme level of control over whether people get the help they need.

AHIP has also worked closely with pharmaceutical and hospital lobbyists on a deceptive, yearslong PR and lobbying campaign opposing any and all health care reform proposals floated by Democrats — including Medicare for All favored by progressives, a separate idea to allow people to buy into Medicare, and the public option compromise that Biden promised and abandoned.

Their campaign, called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, has routinely pushed lies about how Americans are actually really happy with their insurance coverage. One 2020 ad warned of mass hospital closures, claiming: “Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, and the public option — you’d pay more to wait longer for worse care.”

Maybe folks should cut Fauci some slack for talking blithely about trust and equity to people whose very business is antithetical to these concepts in health care. And maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that when Fauci was asked what the AHIP audience should do to help prepare for the next public health crisis, his tone-deaf response to these corporate lobbyists was to “do what you do, and continue to do it.”

That’s because apparently Fauci took this gig without knowing much, if anything, about it.

“I wasn’t totally familiar with AHIP,” he told the group.

In other words, Fauci accepted a speaking assignment from a group he knew very little about, and he didn’t bother to ask any questions. What makes this apparently unwitting cash grab especially egregious is that as one of the country’s longtime top health care officials, Fauci should be well acquainted with the role that AHIP and its member companies play in preserving the United States’ unique health care hell.

Fauci, however, apparently wasn’t aware of any of this.

“So I went to the Internet,” he said, before reading aloud from the about page on AHIP’s website: “It says here AHIP is the national association whose members provide health care coverage and services, solutions, to hundreds of millions of Americans — committed to market-based solutions, public-private partnerships, and making health care better, to create space where coverage is affordable and accessible to everyone.”

“Do what’s in your — ” Fauci started to say, as he was interrupted by a ballroom full of health insurance leaders erupting with laughter.

With that, the panel was over. There was nothing else left to say.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Landlords are increasingly turning to AI programs to screen prospective tenants. The prevalence of incorrect, outdated, or misleading information in such reports is increasing costs and barriers to housing, especially among people of color.

As faceless mega-landlords and proprietary algorithms gain greater control over access to housing, advocates are calling on regulators to crack down. (Grand Warszawski / Getty Images)

When Chris Robinson applied to move into a California senior living community five years ago, the property manager ran his name through an automated screening program that reportedly used artificial intelligence to detect “higher-risk renters.” Robinson, then seventy-five, was denied after the program assigned him a low score — one that he later learned was based on a past conviction for littering.

Not only did the crime have little bearing on whether Robinson would be a good tenant, it wasn’t even one that he’d committed. The program had turned up the case of a thirty-three-year-old man with the same name in Texas — where Robinson had never lived. He eventually corrected the error but lost the apartment and his application fee nonetheless, according to a federal class-action lawsuit that moved toward settlement this month. The credit bureau TransUnion, one of the largest actors in the multibillion-dollar tenant screening industry, agreed to pay $11.5 million to resolve claims that its programs violated fair credit reporting laws.

Landlords are increasingly turning to private equity–backed artificial intelligence (AI) screening programs to help them select tenants, and resulting cases like Robinson’s are just the tip of the iceberg. The prevalence of incorrect, outdated, or misleading information in such reports is increasing costs and barriers to housing, according to a recent report from federal consumer regulators.

Even when screening programs turn up real data, housing and privacy advocates warn that opaque algorithms are enshrining high-tech discrimination in an already unequal housing market — the latest example of how AI can end up amplifying existing biases.

Alongside the TransUnion lawsuit, at least four other tenant screening companies, many of which purport to predict “rental risk” through the use of AI, are currently facing more than ninety federal civil rights and consumer lawsuits, according to our review of court records. The outcomes of those cases, along with potential new rules from federal agencies, could help set the tone for coming regulatory battles over AI, as concerns mount over its proliferating uses.

Last month, fifteen state attorneys general submitted a letter urging regulators to ensure that “applicants for housing have access to all the data that is being used to make determinations of their tenant ‘worthiness’” — and that screening companies are complying with civil rights law. Federal regulators are currently considering additional regulations on tenant screening programs.

But such measures are staunchly opposed by lobbyists for the real estate, property management, and consumer data industries — the latter of which have also fought state legislation to rein in the use of Big Data in housing, employment, and other high-stakes decisions.

The Consumer Data Industry Association, a lobbying group for screening and credit reporting companies, has reported spending more than $400,000 so far this year lobbying in states considering legislation to increase transparency in the development and use of AI.

In a June 2021 letter to federal consumer regulators, the industry group argued against the need for additional oversight of AI in financial technologies. By incentivizing accurate and predictive tools that create profit-making opportunities, the letter said, “the marketplace itself inherently regulates AI system.”

“They’re Not Neutral at All”

The explosion of automated tenant screening programs has gone hand in hand with the consolidation of housing in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis. The average American now spends more than a third of their income on housing, a trend driven in part by Wall Street landlords that hike rents, collect fees, and increasingly turn to automated systems to manage their sprawling, nationwide portfolios.

An estimated two thousand third-party screening companies offer mega-landlords, who often lack staff on the ground, a faster alternative to traditional background checks.

The technology has also attracted the interest of private equity and venture capital, with billions of dollars pouring into companies with names like TurboTenant, RentSpree, and LandlordStation — the latter of which proclaims, “We work hard to make your life a little bit easier!”

The costs of screening reports vary, but they’re often paid for by tenants, and those who receive scores low enough for a “conditional acceptance” are often forced to pay higher deposits, according to reporting by ProPublica.

Most screening companies say that their algorithms rely on the same types of records that many landlords would otherwise check themselves, including credit score reports and criminal histories. That longtime practice has already increased barriers to high-quality housing for many people of color. Available research has found that criminal records are generally not a good predictor of how someone will behave as a tenant, whereas housing instability is closely associated with recidivism.

Many cities already limit landlords’ use of background checks in housing applications. But when those decisions are outsourced to unregulated algorithms, “It moves existing problems with access to housing even further out of reach of accountability and transparency,” said Hannah Holloway, director of policy and research at the TechEquity Collaborative, a nonprofit surveying the impact of tenant screening programs.

Holloway gives the example of the screening company Naborly, which says it compares “a tenant’s unique characteristics” to the characteristics of the landlord’s rental property. A sample report available online evaluates applicants in categories such as “income and employment stability” and “consumer behavior analysis,” which are used to produce a series of ratings indicating the predicted likelihood of a tenant paying late, moving out early, or a range of other outcomes.

“We don’t know what their data sources are, or how often they’re scrubbing that information and updating it,” Holloway said. And while some characteristics may be fairly objective, she noted, “If I’m a tenant, I have no idea how they’re using that information to come up with a prediction about whether I’ll damage the property or miss a payment.”

Naborly did not respond to a request for comment.

Screening companies argue that the decision about whether to accept a tenant ultimately lies with the landlord. But a recent behavioral study using simulated screening reports found that landlords relied primarily on the scores returned, rather than the underlying data — even though the underlying data often contained critical context, such as when a criminal charge or eviction lawsuit had ultimately been dismissed.

Wonyoung So, the author of the study and a doctoral candidate in MIT’s department of urban studies and planning, calls this “automation bias.” According to So, “Automated decision-making systems seem to offer these neutral recommendations, but they’re not neutral at all.”

“Not an Excuse for Lawbreaking Behavior”

In April, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and three other federal agencies released a joint statement asserting that automated systems are “not an excuse for lawbreaking behavior” — and that they would enforce civil rights, consumer protection, and fair competition laws in relation to these technologies.

The CFPB has received thousands of consumer complaints about screening reports, and along with the Federal Trade Commission, recently concluded collecting public input about the programs — a possible first step toward further rulemaking.

While consumer groups and data analytics experts weighed in to urge greater oversight and algorithmic audits from federal agencies, some industry lobbying groups painted the move as regulatory overreach.

The National Multifamily Housing Council, which represents large landlords and screening companies, cautioned against “reporting measures that unduly interrupt necessary operational and property management practices.”

The Consumer Data Industry Association, which earlier warned federal regulators against “allowing states free rein to restrict use of AI,” has also repeatedly opposed states’ initial efforts at reining in AI — including a California bill that would have required landlords and property management companies to conduct and submit to state regulators annual impact assessments of the tools. The bill died in committee earlier this year.

In response to our questions, a spokesperson for the group provided a statement that said, “To preserve the existing housing stock and continue to build up supply, property owners must be able to assess the reliability of a prospective resident to pay rent.”

“The Statutes Just Aren’t Keeping Up”

Ironically, screening companies have long marketed their services as helping landlords reduce the risk of lawsuits by basing decisions on objective data.

For more than a decade, industry groups have argued that algorithms don’t discriminate. In 2013, the Consumer Data Industry Association submitted an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case pertaining to the so-called disparate impact standard under fair housing law — which holds that apparently neutral policies can still have discriminatory effects.

The lobbying group argued in the brief that making companies liable for disparate impact would negatively impact its members, who provide “race-neutral predictive information,” and end up forcing landlords into “a Hobson’s choice” between foregoing that information or facing lawsuits.

That case settled, but a subsequent Supreme Court case, which the industry group also weighed in on, upheld that proof of intentional discrimination isn’t required to bring fair housing claims — the impact of an action or policy is what matters.

Now, screening companies themselves are subject to a host of federal lawsuits alleging that far from being race-neutral, they are flouting civil rights law through criteria that disproportionately deny people of color from housing.

According to one suit filed in 2018, a Connecticut man unable to walk or care for himself following an accident had his housing application denied due to a screening report from CoreLogic Rental Solutions, now known as SafeRent Solutions. The man, Mikhail Arroyo, had sought to move in with his mother, who was told only that he had “disqualifying” criminal records. She could get no further information about what those records were — an alleged violation of federal fair credit reporting laws.

Arroyo’s record consists of a single charge for retail theft when he was twenty years old, and it was ultimately withdrawn, according to the complaint. His attorneys also argue that disqualifying applicants based on an arrest record is a violation of fair housing law, because people of color are more likely to be arrested in Connecticut and nationwide.

Another pending federal lawsuit against SafeRent claims that the company is discriminating against black and Hispanic rental applicants who use federally funded housing vouchers.

SafeRent’s algorithm is proprietary, but the company says that it relies on factors including bankruptcy records, eviction histories, and credit scores. The complaint notes that about 45 percent of black consumers and 32 percent of Hispanic consumers have subprime credit scores, compared to 18 percent of white consumers.

In its marketing, the company asserts that applicants awarded high scores generally “pay on time, treat the property with care, and stay for longer periods, all of which help management maximize net operating income.”

But SafeRent does not consider whether applicants have housing vouchers, according to the lawsuit — even though those vouchers typically cover most of tenants’ rent, dramatically increasing their ability to meet payments.

Attorneys for SafeRent and CoreLogic did not respond to a request for comment on the litigation.

Eric Dunn, litigation director at the National Housing Law Project and one of the attorneys representing Arroyo, said these scenarios underscore the need for updated regulation and enforcement.

Federal fair credit reporting law, which governs the information collected by credit reporting agencies and provides consumers with periodic free access, “still talks about going into an office and looking through a manila folder,” he said. “The statutes just aren’t keeping up with the way that the industry operates.”

As faceless mega-landlords and proprietary algorithms gain greater control over access to housing, Dunn and other advocates are calling on regulators to crack down on predatory fees, ensure tenants have the right to review and correct their files, or even pause use of the programs until they can be evaluated.

“It cannot be overstated that much of the technology fueling this rise of digitized tenant screening services is a black box,” wrote MIT’s So and four colleagues in a comment to regulators last month. “We recommend that regulators establish a federal moratorium on tenant screening services until such services can be proven safe, fair, and non-discriminatory.”

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

“The people of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, people from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah who are involved in cyber operations against Israel ,know exactly what I’m talking about.”

By Pesach Benson, TPS

Today’s Palestinian terrorists are “born on smartphones and not in a mosque,” said Ronen Bar, head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) at the Tel Aviv Cyber Week Conference on Monday.

The annual conference organized by Tel Aviv University brings together leading international cyber figures from the government, tech and academic sectors. Among notable figures addressing the gathering included Gabi Portnoy, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, Kimba Walden, the US Acting National Cyber Director, and Dr. Mohammed Al-Kuwaiti, who heads cybersecurity for the United Arab Emirates.

In exclusive comments to the Tazpit Press Service, Al-Kuwaiti said that artificial intelligence is being increasingly used by hackers and states need to match that with AI for protection.

“Today, AI is actually taking on many of those attacks,” Al-Kuwaiti told TPS. “Many of the attacks are now done automatically, and this is where we need AI to help us detect and deter those attacks.”

Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, addressing the gathering, described the Lion’s Den terror group, based in northern Samaria, as “a new type of terrorism” bearing closer study for its use of technology and social media platforms such as TikTok and Telegram to recruit a new generation of members.

“You can learn about the way countries and terrorist organizations exploit the young generation. The organization recruits online and receives its support from the public in the form of likes,” Bar said.

He described one Lion’s Den terrorist killed by Israeli security forces as “born from the smartphone camera, not inside a mosque.”

Explaining the security establishment’s response, Bar said, “The Iron Dome that the Shin Bet is developing in cyberspace is already taking its first steps, the array of alliances is emerging and it has already come into action. We are already cooperating with a number of significant countries in the field and we see the global cyber Iron Dome beginning to take shape.”

He also called on lawmakers and social media companies to take stronger measures.

“A democratic, liberal society with a desire for life must produce a binding regulation – a code of ethics, relevant TTM for removing offensive content, refining the algorithm and exposing people to different opinions and lowering the threshold of incitement,” Bar said. “I am happy to say that recently, we are seeing Tiktok’s steps in the right direction, as far as incitement is concerned. Unfortunately, I cannot say similar things about Twitter and Telegram.”

Iranian hackers

Gabi Portnoy, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate pointed a finger at Muddywater, a group of hackers associated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence for numerous Middle East cyber attacks.

“The group works not only against Israel, but attacks civilian targets in many countries including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, India, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and more,” though most of the attacks were unsuccessful. “The people of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, people from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah who are involved in cyber operations against Israel ,know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Portnoy also praised US sanctions against certain Iranian intelligence figures taking a leading a role in Tehran’s cyber attacks. Portnoy cited Farzin Karimi and Mojtaba Mostafavi, who founded the Ravin Academy to train hackers. Karimi and Mostafavi were among a number of Iranian leaders sanctioned by the US Treasury in October 2022.

“Also, Ali Khedri, who lives in Beirut and coordinates cooperation between Iran and Hezbollah in order to cause damage to Lebanese citizens in cyber space. For some people in the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, harming ordinary citizens of the world is part of the routine,” Portnoy added.

Portnoy addressed the senior representatives of the international cyber community who were sitting in the hall and said that “the international community needs to work together to stop people like Karimi, Metzatpoi and Hadari from their malicious activities against the world.”

Portnoy also cited a joint project with the United Arab Emirates and Microsoft to build a platform for cooperation in cyber investigations and building knowledge between about 40 countries. The initiative is part of a White House forum to combat ransomware attacks.

Israeli State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, who is also participating in the Cyber Week conference, reported in May that Israeli hospitals were hit with 13 major cyberattacks in 2021, making the health care sector one of the most targeted by hackers.

To test the preparedness of the hospitals, a team of hackers overseen by the Comptroller’s Office staged a controlled penetration of one major one identified as Medical Center A. The attack revealed deficiencies in its security precautions and responses to the “hack.” Engelman called on the Health Ministry to examine the findings of the penetration test on Medical Center A to develop and implement recommendations for other medical institutions.

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Plans for EU-wide regulation of digital platforms could finally enshrine labor rights for workers for firms like Uber. Neoliberals from Emmanuel Macron to the far right are resisting the move.

A protest by delivery riders for employment protections in the gig economy, Rome, Italy, March 26, 2021. (Marco Ravagli / Future Publishing via Getty Images)

On June 2, the CEOs of Deliveroo, Uber, Delivery Hero, Wolt, and Bolt joined forces in a show of unity among gig-economy bosses. Their aim: to sabotage European Union attempts at regulating platform work.

In an open letter in the Financial Times, the CEOs sought to defend business as usual. Naturally, they prioritized not the recognition of workers’ labor rights, but what they called “protecting the flexibility of genuine self-employment while encouraging measures that improve working conditions in a manner that is compatible with on-demand work.” They argued that in “focus[ing] almost exclusively on who is an employee and who is not,” the planned EU directive on the issue “does little to improve the rights of the self-employed.”

The dispute took a fresh step forward little over a week later, as the Council of the European Union approved its negotiating position on the directive, in view of its so-called trialogue with the European Parliament and the European Commission. Sadly, the result is a downward compromise that represents a brake on platform workers’ ambitions for proper labor rights. Yet, even with this complication, this struggle is far from over — and will have far-reaching consequences for precarious workers around Europe.

What’s Happened So Far?

Last December, French left-wing member of the European Parliament Leila Chaibi was interviewed for Jacobin about her role in supporting EU-wide regulation over such firms. These moves to create a directive, proceeding through different EU institutions, came against the backdrop of both struggles by platform workers and sentences passed by labor courts in individual member states, which have often upheld workers’ claims.

In December 2021, the European Commission published its proposals to improve working conditions within the gig economy. After over a year, the European Parliament approved its position for the negotiations, significantly improving the initial text from the European Commission.

The commission had indicated five criteria for what counts as employment. To trigger the presumption of employment (thus handing the digital platform the responsibility to prove that the worker is not a real employee, rather than vice versa) two of five criteria would need to be met. These were: a) the employer effectively setting upper limits for remuneration; b) requirements for the worker to respect specific binding rules (e.g. appearance, conduct toward clients, work performance); c) supervision of the work performance by electronic means; d) the effective restriction of freedom in work organization, absences, and choice of shifts, e.g. by imposing sanctions; and e) the effective restriction on the worker’s possibility of building their own client base. According to a test by the European Trade Union Institute, workers at all the main platforms would have fulfilled most of these criteria: those at food delivery firms Glovo and Deliveroo would have met all of them.

Nevertheless, the European Parliament chose another route, making recognition of workers’ employment status easier. As the EU-wide trade unions had proposed, it set a general and less rigid presumption of employment, more effectively curbing bogus self-employment. Moreover, it amended an important passage of the European Commission’s proposal: the freedom to refuse tasks, choose one’s own working hours or absence periods, and use subcontractors or substitutes, although characteristic of self-employment, does not prove that one is not an employee, per se. This thus meant strengthening the initial text in the direction of greater recognition for workers. This also happened thanks to a split within the largest EU-level party (the center-right European People’s Party), divided into a more market-oriented wing and more socially embedded positions (as in the case of Dennis Radtke, a member of the German Christian-Democrats and an ex–trade unionist).

The major digital platforms fiercely attacked the European Parliament’s position, focusing on lobbying the Council of the EU (the other institution involved in the legislative process), as highlighted by the abovementioned letter in the Financial Times.

Yet, there is also a divergence among national governments, including those that take over the EU’s presidency, which rotates between member states each six months. During the Czech presidency of the EU in the second half of 2022, an attempt to water down the directive was rejected. Among member states, there has generally been a group of countries supporting a prolabor position, led by Spain, and a front pushing in the other direction, led by French president Emmanuel Macron. Progressive forces within the European institutions thus looked forward to Spain taking over the EU presidency, this July 1. Spain’s broad-left government has, after all, already approved a national bill based on the presumption of employment, thanks to the reforming impetus of its labor minister, Yolanda Díaz. However, one recent development radically changed this picture.

Hopes Riding on Spain

Spain is due to take over the EU presidency from Sweden later this week. Yet the Spanish political situation was shaken by the results of the local elections held on May 28. Center-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez took note of the defeat and called for early general elections, which will be held on July 23. The specter of a right-wing victory represents a serious threat. Although not a foregone conclusion, there is a very concrete possibility of a coalition between the conservative Partido Popular and the far-right Vox.

What consequences would this change of government have for issues related to platform work? Sadly they are not hard to imagine. The Partido Popular and Vox opposed the national bill (known as the “Ley Rider,” or “Rider Law”) that recognized the employment status of food delivery platforms’ couriers. Both parties have even evoked the alleged unconstitutionality of this law. The Partido Popular would like to cancel all labor-related reforms of Sánchez’s government, including both the “Rider Law” and the “Labor Reform” that placed constraints on temporary contracts, limited precariousness, and strengthened the centralized collective bargaining system. Is a new climate of deregulation approaching? Moreover, Vox is directly connected to the yellow union Solidaridad, which openly opposed the “Rider Law,” and defended bogus self-employment within the food delivery sector.

This electoral uncertainty makes it difficult to know which government will in fact lead Spain’s presidency of the EU. There is the risk that Spain will go from being the most favorable country for the presumption of employment for platform workers to the least favorable. This would drastically change the balance of power within the EU institutions. As argued by one local commentator, the Spanish left — starting with Sumar (the coalition led by Díaz herself) — must defend the achievements in the field of labor rights that have been made during this government. The difficult pathway of the EU Platform Work Directive illustrates how this is not only a national issue, but a European struggle. Consciously or not, Spanish citizens are also voting on the rights of all European platform workers.

The Council Decision

The weakness of the Spanish coalition after Sánchez’s call for fresh elections was immediately felt within the Council of the EU. With the last act of the Swedish presidency, the council approved its position on the directive. The text undermines the position of the European Parliament and the starting proposal from the European Commission. In particular, the European trade unions complain about two mechanisms: a) the criteria that need to be met for the presumption of the employment have gone up to three out of seven, making the recognition of workers’ rights more difficult; and b) the national derogations requested by member states, offering a possible loophole for the digital platforms.

The Left and Green parliamentary groups labeled this new text ineffective for defending platform workers. Yet, some governments that had obstructed the previous attempts at watering down the directive within the European Council did approve the new document, especially out of fear of what might happen after Spain’s elections. The existing Spanish government itself abstained. However, member states with a prolabor orientation on this question (Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Malta, Spain, and Portugal) wrote a joint statement. They insisted that

establishing a rebuttable presumption of employment is an important step for the protection of platform workers. Nevertheless, in its current design the rebuttable legal presumption of the employment relationship in today’s General Approach is less ambitious and effective than the one proposed by the Commission. The rebuttable legal presumption should be activated under clear and transparent norms and mechanisms. . . . Moreover, it is necessary to establish a legal presumption without restrictions or derogations.

These governments’ position thus remains critical in defending the substance of the directive. On the other side, the French government approved the position of the European Council, albeit with reservations: Macron’s neoliberal extremism wanted an even weaker position.

The game is now shifting to three-way negotiations. Will the European Parliament be able to defend its ambitious proposal? Which Spanish government will manage the negotiations? Will corporate or union lobbying be more prominent? These questions remain to be answered.

Workplace Pressures

While the complicated European legislative process rolls on, the situation within platform workplaces themselves continues to be problematic. This is happening, it must be said, also within the digital platforms that have already recognized their couriers as employees, given the race to the bottom fueled by the absence of a guaranteed framework of labor rights. In Germany, unlike in Italy, Takeaway’s subsidiary is refusing to sign a collective agreement with the Food, Beverages and Catering Union (NGG), despite widespread strikes and struggles. Where the self-employment model is continuing to rule, things are obviously even worse. UberEats announced that it will leave the Italian food delivery market as of July 15. In September 2020, the company signed a collective agreement with a right-wing yellow union in order to keep bogus self-employment and a piece-wage system. Had Uber recognized its workers as employees, this industrial crisis could have been managed through social dialogue and state-supported social shock absorbers, as also stressed by the Italian General Confederation of Labor, the country’s biggest union.

The gig economy model shows all its limits in terms of social protection precisely when it becomes apparent that all the corporate risks are offloaded onto the bogus independent contractors. Strengthened labor laws are increasingly necessary even to recognize workers as full employees and guarantee rights they were meant to have already. Unions, workers’ collectives, social movements, civil society organizations, and progressive political forces must not lose sight of the need for the EU Platform Work Directive — and pressure European institutions accordingly.

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