Day: February 3, 2024

NPR News: 02-03-2024 1PM EST

Torture in Azerbaijan: How European funds flow to Baku’s prisons  Le Monde

The World Bank has presented a disturbing report on Iran’s economy, indicating that each sector is currently in a critical state and facing a potential disaster soon. On January 26, the state-run Rouydad 24 news website covered the contents of this report and indirectly warned the regime, with a prediction of a grim future. The article asked: “How has Iran’s economy come to the brink of a precipice?”

While international economic institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have long been criticized for appeasing the ruling regime in Iran and turning a blind eye to the blatant realities of the country’s economic situation by relying on manipulated statistics and the regime’s engineered narratives to downplay crises, they have gradually distanced themselves from this flawed approach in recent times.

The World Bank considers Iran’s statistics unreliable

On November 13, the Fardaye Eghtesad news website wrote,

“The World Bank has been comparing the statistical performance of governments by collecting a large set of indicators for several years. According to the evaluation of this international institution, Iran has a weaker statistical performance (SPI) compared to over 60% of countries worldwide. It is common in Iran’s economic space to witness protests the non-disclosure of statistics by the government or the provision of low-quality data. Recently, we have seen longer and more irregular statistical cover up and the presentation of certain national data.”

The precipice

On March 4, 2023, Tejarat News website wrote, “Iran’s economy is currently in an extremely critical state. We live in a country where chronic and escalating inflation, chronic unemployment, the normalization of budget deficits, and continuous currency depreciation are distinctive features of its economy. What we are experiencing today is unprecedented in the world, and this situation has made it unpredictable and insecure. Among the less discussed aspects are the disturbing psychological effects of these conditions. The increase in stress levels, the rise in anxiety, and depression among individuals living in Iranian society are concerning.”

How Iran’s economy deteriorated

According to the World Bank’s report on Iran’s current economy, over 60% of it is being managed in a centralized and command-driven manner, with a significant portion of exports relying on oil and gas. The analysis in this report highlights several key issues.

On January 26, ‌‌‌‌Bahar news website, wrote, “The economic crisis refers to a widespread occurrence, not a managerial or personal crisis. It is a condition in which the value of the currency decreases, income declines, gross domestic product (GDP) decreases, and companies and financial institutions face bankruptcy. The difference between an economic crisis and a recession is that a recession involves consecutive negative economic growth for two quarters or more, lasting for one or several years.”

Furthermore, the first impact of the economic crisis has been rampant inflation. In contrast, during a recession, inflation tends to stabilize to some extent, and its rate of change slows down.

‌‌‌‌Bahar news continued, “The international sanctions resulting from the regime’s fundamentalism, terrorism, and warmongering have further contributed to the causes. Within the country, the increasing authoritarianism and the narrowing of the domestic space have led many elites to leave the country. As a result, the country has fallen into the hands of individuals who lack any experience or expertise in governing, even under normal circumstances.”

The World Bank acknowledges that the recent economic growth in Iran has been dependent on the export of oil and other semi-processed derivatives, but it has not contributed to job growth or improving the well-being of Iranians.

It added that according to estimates, 28.1% of Iranians are considered poor, and two-thirds of Iranian households are at risk of falling into poverty. The combination of these factors has led the World Bank to describe the outlook for Iran’s economy as constrained due to sanctions, affected by climate change, facing electricity and gas shortages, and impacted by reduced global demand. The cumulative effect of these economic challenges has led to social and economic discontent in the long run.

Urgent need of economic reforms

On January 26, Rouydad 24 news website wrote, “The World Bank, in its report, recommends immediate economic reforms to address both stated and unstated issues. It acknowledges that Iran has faced a continuous phenomenon of capital flight for the seventh consecutive year.

The detailed sections of the World Bank report reflect the economic crisis and its recommendations to the current regime in Iran regarding optimization measures to prevent the hindering of growth and development, and to improve the livelihoods of millions of Iranians. The report further warns that Iran’s economic outlook is facing serious risks, including intensified social tensions, geopolitical tension”.

Following these intolerable tensions, the only solution, in the opinion of the masses under pressure in Iran, is the overthrow of this oppressive and criminal regime to end this horrendous dilemma.

By Umar Farooq

Over the last decade, police departments across the U.S. have spent millions of dollars equipping their officers with body-worn cameras that record what happens as they go about their work. Everything from traffic stops to welfare checks to responses to active shooters is now documented on video.

The cameras were pitched by national and local law enforcement authorities as a tool for building public trust between police and their communities in the wake of police killings of civilians like Michael Brown, an 18 year old black teenager killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Video has the potential not only to get to the truth when someone is injured or killed by police, but also to allow systematic reviews of officer behavior to prevent deaths by flagging troublesome officers for supervisors or helping identify real-world examples of effective and destructive behaviors to use for training.

But a series of ProPublica stories has shown that a decade on, those promises of transparency and accountability have not been realized.

One challenge: The sheer amount of video captured using body-worn cameras means few agencies have the resources to fully examine it. Most of what is recorded is simply stored away, never seen by anyone.

Axon, the nation’s largest provider of police cameras and of cloud storage for the video they capture, has a database of footage that has grown from around 6 terabytes in 2016 to more than 100 petabytes today. That’s enough to hold more than 5,000 years of high definition video, or 25million copies of last year’s blockbuster movie “Barbie.”

“In any community, body-worn camera footage is the largest source of data on police-community interactions. Almost nothing is done with it,” said Jonathan Wender, a former police officer who heads Polis Solutions, one of a growing group of companies and researchers offering analytic tools powered by artificial intelligence to help tackle that data problem.

The Paterson, New Jersey, police department has made such an analytic tool a major part of its plan to overhaul its force.

In March 2023, the state’s attorney general took over the department after police shot and killed Najee Seabrooks, a community activist experiencing a mental health crisis who had called 911 for help. The killing sparked protests and calls for a federal investigation of the department.

The attorney general appointed Isa Abbassi, formerly the New York Police Department’s chief of strategic initiatives, to develop a plan for how to win back public trust.

“Changes in Paterson are led through the use of technology,” Abbassi said at a press conference announcing his reform plan in September, “Perhaps one of the most exciting technology announcements today is a real game changer when it comes to police accountability and professionalism.”

The department, Abassi said, had contracted with Truleo, a Chicago-based software company that examines audio from bodycam videos to identify problematic officers and patterns of behavior.

For around $50,000 a year, Truleo’s software allows supervisors to select from a set of specific behaviors to flag, such as when officers interrupt civilians, use profanity, use force or mute their cameras. The flags are based on data Truleo has collected on which officer behaviors result in violent escalation. Among the conclusions from Truleo’s research: Officers need to explain what they are doing.

“There are certain officers who don’t introduce themselves, they interrupt people, and they don’t give explanations. They just do a lot of command, command, command, command, command,” said Anthony Tassone, Truleo’s co-founder. “That officer’s headed down the wrong path.”

For Paterson police, Truleo allows the department to “review 100% of body worn camera footage to identify risky behaviors and increase professionalism,” according to its strategic overhaul plan. The software, the department said in its plan, will detect events like uses of force, pursuits, frisks and non-compliance incidents and allow supervisors to screen for both “professional and unprofessional officer language.”

Paterson police officials declined to be interviewed for this story.

Around 30 police departments currently use Truleo, according to the company. In October, the NYPD signed on to a pilot program for Truleo to review the millions of hours of footage it produces annually, according to Tassone.

Amid a crisis in police recruiting, Tassone said some departments are using Truleo because they believe it can help ensure new officers are meeting professional standards. Others, like the department in Aurora, Colorado, are using the software to bolster their case for emerging from external oversight. In March 2023, city attorneys successfully lobbied the City Council to approve a contract with Truleo, saying it would help the police department more quickly comply with a consent decree that calls for better training and recruitment and collection of data on things like use of force and racial disparities in policing.

Truleo is just one of a growing number of such analytics providers.

In August 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would partnerwith a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and several other universities to develop a new AI-powered tool to examine footage from around 1,000 traffic stops and determine which officer behaviors keep interactions from escalating. In 2021, Microsoft awarded $250,000 to a team from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop software that can organize video into timelines that allow easier review by supervisors.

Dallas-based Polis Solutions has contracted with police in its hometown, as well as departments in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kinston, North Carolina, and Alliance, Nebraska, to deploy its own software, called TrustStat, to identify videos supervisors should review. “What we’re saying is, look, here’s an interaction which is statistically significant for both positive and negative reasons. A human being needs to look,” said Wender, the company’s founder.

TrustStat grew out of a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the U.S. Defense Department, where Wender previously worked. It was called the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program, nicknamed “Good Stranger,” and it sought to understand how soldiers in potentially hostile environments, say a crowded market in Baghdad, could keep interactions with civilians from escalating. The program brought in law enforcement experts and collected a large database of videos. After it ended, Wender founded Polis Solutions, and used the “Good Stranger” video database to train the TrustStat software. TrustStat is entirely automated: Large language models analyze speech, and image processing algorithms identify physical movements and facial expressions captured on video.

At Washington State University’s Complex Social Interactions Lab, researchers use a combination of human reviewers and AI to analyze video. The lab began its work seven years ago, teaming up with the Pullman, Washington, police department. Like many departments, Pullman had adopted body cameras but lacked the personnel to examine what the video was capturing and train officers accordingly.

The lab has a team of around 50 reviewers — drawn from the university’s own students — who comb through video to track things like the race of officers and civilians, the time of day, and whether officers gave explanations for their actions, such as why they pulled someone over. The reviewers note when an officer uses force, if officers and civilians interrupt each other and whether an officer explains that the interaction is being recorded. They also note how agitated officers and civilians are at each point in the video.

Machine learning algorithms are then used to look for correlations between these features and the outcome of each police encounter.

“From that labeled data, you’re able to apply machine learning so that we’re able to get to predictions so we can start to isolate and figure out, well, when these kind of confluences of events happen, this actually minimizes the likelihood of this outcome,” said David Makin, who heads the lab and also serves on the Pullman Police Advisory Committee.

One lesson has come through: Interactions that don’t end in violence are more likely to start with officers explaining what is happening, not interrupting civilians and making clear that cameras are rolling and the video is available to the public.

The lab, which does not charge clients, has examined more than 30,000 hours of footage and is working with 10 law enforcement agencies, though Makin said confidentiality agreements keep him from naming all of them.

Much of the data compiled by these analyses and the lessons learned from it remains confidential, with findings often bound up in nondisclosure agreements. This echoes the same problem with body camera video itself: Police departments continue to be the ones to decide how to use a technology originally meant to make their activities more transparent and hold them accountable for their actions.

Under pressure from police unions and department management, Tassone said, the vast majority of departments using Truleo are not willing to make public what the software is finding. One department using the software — Alameda, California — has allowed some findings to be publicly released. At the same time, at least two departments — Seattle and Vallejo, California — have canceled their Truleo contracts after backlash from police unions.

The Pullman Police Department cited Washington State University’s analysis of 4,600 hours of video to claim that officers do not use force more often, or at higher levels, when dealing with a minority suspect, but did not provide details on the study.

At some police departments, including Philadelphia’s, policy expressly bars disciplining officers based on spot-check reviews of video. That policy was pushed for by the city’s police union, according to Hans Menos, the former head of thePolice Advisory Committee, Philadelphia’s civilian oversight body. The Police Advisory Committee has called on the department to drop the restriction.

“We’re getting these cameras because we’ve heard the call to have more oversight,” Menos said in an interview. “However, we’re limiting how a supervisor can use them, which is worse than not even requiring them to use it.”

Philadelphia’s police department and police union did not respond to requests for comment.

Christopher J. Schneider, a professor at Canada’s Brandon University who studies the impact of emerging technology on social perceptions of police, said the lack of disclosure makes him skeptical that AI tools will fix the problems in modern policing.

Even if police departments buy the software and find problematic officers or patterns of behavior, those findings might be kept from the public just as many internal investigations are.

Because it’s confidential,” he said, “the public are not going to know which officers are bad or have been disciplined or not been disciplined.”

• About the author: Umar Farooq was an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica.
• Source: This article was published by ProPublica

As reported by Reason, a group including about 250 million- and billionaires calling themselves Proud to Pay More (P2PM) advocated the imposition of wealth taxes in an open letter to the “luminaries” meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Its core is apparent from the following excerpt:

“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society. This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.

“The solution to this cannot be found in one-off donations or in philanthropy; individual action cannot redress the current colossal imbalance. We need our governments and our leaders to lead. And so we come to you again with the urgent request that you act—unilaterally at the national level, and together on the international stage.“

The open letter is full of self-righteousness disguised as reasonableness. But you don’t need to look very hard to find serious questions that seem to escape their notice.

The letter represents the views of a minuscule fraction of “the rich,” so that what they are really advocating is forcing far larger numbers of those who disagree with them about that “need” to pay most of the bill for what they want governments to do. In other words, the coerced charity its signatories want to impose means a more accurate name for their group would be Proud to Make Others Pay Most of the Tab. But that does not send a very virtuous virtue signal.

The letter claims hefty wealth taxes, in addition to the host of current taxes, will not harm economic growth. Where is the defensible evidence? It is in fact on the other side. Wealth taxes have been tried before, to little success, and often abandoned for ineffectiveness. That is not surprising, either, since they rely on the claim that incentives don’t matter, not just to the taxed productive efforts, but those of others. Who really believes that? Being able to keep more of the gains produced gives even rich people more incentive to use their sizable assets to benefit others. If you ignore the rich, and focus on the wellbeing of everyone else (which takes envy out of consideration) you’ll find that the wealthy do more for others when they face lower taxes. Further, we must remember that wealth taxes don’t only fall on the currently wealthy, but reduce the productive incentives of those seeking to become wealthy by doing better for others.

In addition, the imposition of a wealth tax would be far more burdensome, reducing productive incentives more than it appears. Someone with $100 million in taxable wealth would pay $2 million in taxes each year with a 2-percent rate, which would total $20 million—20 percent of that $100 million, not 2 percent—over a decade.

That hefty burden is on top of all other taxes, as well. And the disincentive effects of taxation result from the cumulative marginal tax rates of all the different taxes put together. In fact, a standard result of the public finance literature is that the welfare cost of taxation (the joint gains from trade eliminated when higher taxes eliminate more of those trades) in the simplest case is proportional to the square of the cumulative marginal tax rate.

P2PM calls private wealth “unproductive,” but implies that if such wealth were put under government control, it would be transformed into “an investment.” But people don’t build or maintain their wealth by swimming in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. They do it by continuing to use that wealth to produce goods and services others value enough to pay for (or providing the resources to finance others who do so). Calling the extraction of resources from one group to give to others an investment, rather than wealth redistribution that reduces others claims on their own property, is a massive misrepresentation. P2PM’s complete lack of serious consideration of the other end of that redistribution—real world government operations and effects, including the costs of fraud, waste, inefficiency and corruption—also shows their utopian view as fantasy.

The wealthy are free to use their resources to advance the general welfare in any way that doesn’t violate others’ rights. Many are even subsidized in doing so by the tax deductibility of charity. They can also work together toward common goals as they wish. Given that a wealth tax is impossible to administer effectively, efficiently, or equitably, P2PM members could do a lot more good (and less bad) by giving their own money themselves, without giving government massive new taxing powers and creating more avenues for unfair treatment of taxpayers. They invite trouble not only for themselves, but others, as once a wealth tax is in place, nothing precludes our financially irresponsible government from jacking up the rate, nor indeed from extending it to the middle class, given bank robber Slick Willie Sutton’s insight that “that’s where the money is.”

P2PM’s letter excuses its signatories from dealing with such issues by defining the projects they have in mind as “too big” for individual action, and thus requiring government action (read: the application of coercive power to citizens to make them do what they would not choose for themselves). While the application of coercive power is government’s comparative advantage—its only one to my mind, given that we know ourselves better and care about our own wellbeing more than government can—it is hard to imagine how we all gain from coercively making us do what few would choose to do for themselves.

These letter-writers’ claim seems to be more of an excuse than a real reason. It is like saying “I really care about eliminating poverty. But the problem of poverty exceeds my resources to eliminate it. That’s why I don’t give to those I could help with the resources at my disposal,” but with more zeroes at the end of that rationalization than would be the case for you or me. It seems to require that they care about “poverty” in an abstract way, but not enough about poor people to help them when they could. It seems that for P2PM members’ assertions of how much they care to be credible, they must already be giving more to good causes than the amount they are volunteering to raise their own taxes.

We should also consider how many times over how many years members of the “tax me more” crowd have repeated the same claims, and basked in their own and others’ approval for their selflessness, without actually giving up their wealth to do so. It may be that what many are actually doing is “buying” more self- and mutual-approval on the cheap, by proclaiming to support something they have not and likely never will have to make good on.

Perhaps they are aiming even higher, intending to eliminate scarcity. But that is insufficient to justify their proposals, because as anyone who has sat in a credible principles of economics course for a week knows, that is just as impossible for government to do as for anyone else.

A careful reading of P2PM’s manifesto turns up far more problems and issues than just the two short paragraphs discussed here. But these are more than enough to place a very heavy burden of proof on those advocates before they are taken seriously. Simply asserting questionable and false things and ignoring real problems does not justify acceptance by others, much less plaudits.

We must also remember that, as F.A. Harper put it in his Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery over a half-century ago, “The virtue of compassion and charity cannot be sired by the vice of thievery.” Consequently, “‘Political charity’ violates the essentials of charity…taken by force from the pockets of others…All told, the process of ‘political charity’ is about as complete a violation of the requisites of charity as can be conceived.”

This article was also published in American Institute for Economic Research